October 9, 2025 • 43 mins
The Nation’s Jeet Heer examines the government shutdown and how it’s playing out for Trump.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez details how attorneys general are protecting citizens against Trump.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. New Fanny May. Survey data shows that
nearly seventy percent of Americans believe the economy is headed
in the wrong direction. That is incredible. Seventy threes percent
say it's a bad time to buy a house. That's great,
(00:22):
We have such a great show for you today. The
nation's own GTRE stops by to talk about the shutdown
and how Democrats are winning the messaging wars. Then we'll
talk to New Mexico Attorney General Raoul Torres about how
attorney generals are protecting citizens against Trump. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Soboby, you and I were just talking about something I
thought was really interesting, which is a lot of people
were like, AOC is an idiot for having said Stephen
Miller is shorter than he is. But I think you
and I agree about something, which is this was right
out of the Trump playbook. It was good because instead
of defending the shutdown on for an entire day, those
morons on the five, barring Jessica Tarlov of course, and
(01:05):
all Fox Primetime was discussing how handsome and what a stallion.
Stephen Miller is.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
By the way, I have to say the last shutdown
Stephen Miller, they brought out the hair in a can.
They've like, yeah, with the hair in the cannon. I
think it's a mistake. Let the man have hair, like let.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Him cook with the old halloweed costume hair from our childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's right, Halloween costume hair. This freaking is fascism. And
I think that was incredible. Laura ingram Is, by the way,
just always gives away the game when she gets agitated,
and you know she was like but and she made
him listen to it. That was incredible, and it's a
great example of like, stop being cowards. Just push back.
(01:49):
This is not popular. No one wants this. The polling.
You know what's a ninety ten issue. The Marines rolling
into your city, arresting the people selling you hot dogs,
that is a ninety ten issue, or.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Who just gets caught up in the mess whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Nobody likes this. Nobody wants authoritarianism. And there's a reason why.
Like when they did it in the nineteen thirties and
the nineteen twenties, they did it people on the streets.
They were so poor. That was inflation, you know, in
crazy ways. It wasn't like, you know, just normal American life.
And then they're like, oh, we're going to send in
(02:26):
the troops. No, this is real dumb.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, but particularly like one of the things when we
write this section of the show, we're often looking to
try to not get caught up and when Trump is
doing this and just saying dumb, dumb things and really
trying to think about like, Okay, where are the escalations
and what is the important stuff, and AOC knocking them
off their game with that because they love to talk
about her. I say, keep doing it, keep eating the
white running rod correct.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And like this is it. This is the way you
push back against from But.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
We do have to discuss the important things of when
his rhetoric escalates, which is when he's talking about jailing
Pritzker and Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And by the way, though Pritzker handled it just perfectly.
He said bring it on, and he said if he
wants to arrest my people, he has to come through me.
That said, arresting James call me is a victimless crime.
Debby too Tall, he writes trashy books send him to
the Hague.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
He's going to be just fine because he's not up
against Rutch.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Send him to the Hague. Baby.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Okay, let's get real here, Trump doing this escalation. We
should always cover what he does more than it. But
a lot of times this has been mornings. Chicago feels
like the bone. He's feeling like he can really pick now.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
An interesting thing that happened in that interview with Raoul
Torres from New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Which is at the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What he said was, I said, you know, are you
seeing Trump? Is because New Mexico is a really interesting
state because it's in the middle in the west. It's
a very blue state, but it is a very poor state.
And said this thing which I thought was really interesting,
which is he said, like, he's not coming here because
we don't get attention. And this is all performative. And
so when you think about this through the lens of
(04:10):
this is all performative, then all of this makes sense, right,
Like the reason he's going into Chicago, black mayor, liberal
billionaire governor whose family he's always been jealous of. So
you really see how much this is performative and how
much this is about trying to scare people and trying
to bully people, and that is why you cannot let
(04:33):
it scare or bully you.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, and as usual, they are very, very stupid strategically,
and here we have great evidence of that, which is
Trump's own Labor Department says as immigrant raids are causing
a food crisis, and they're warning that we're gonna have
fucking food shortages because this has been so poorly thought out.
And it's really funny because there's reports that Maloney saw
things like this had said Ooh, I can't do all
(04:57):
the bad things I said I was going to do
to immigrants or we're going to be trouble like this,
and didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, but Maloney is a woman, and we are very
sexist on this podcast and on this seconds now. Women
are better leaders than men. Sorry, Jesse, Listen.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I've worked under women and men at a couple of corporations,
and I will say that I noticed the difference. Could
I try to insult some people who are men that
were my bosses right now?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
By the way, we knew this was going to happen
because it happened in the first Trump administration right where
they had food shortages where you had fruit rotting in
the fields. And also I would like to add this
administration has destroyed millions of dollars of birth control, left
food to rot instead of going to.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
USA, destroyed PPE too.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Like waste, fraud and abuse, it's coming from inside the
administration people, the waste fraud and abusiest administration ever.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
So my I like to look at Google trend, which
is this thing that shows you what people are googling.
Do you want to guess what's the top Google on
the charts today?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Stephen Miller fake.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Care shockingly doll plenary authority.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Glenary authority? Tell us more?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Well, we should listen to this appearance on CNN where
Stephen Miller appears to glitch out legal insurrection.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Does the administration still plan to abide by that ruling? Well,
the administration filed an appeal this morning with the Ninth Circuit.
I would note the administration won an identical case in
the Ninth Circuit just a few months ago with respect
to the federalizing of the California National Guard under Title
ten of the US Code. The president has plenary authority?
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Has Stephen, Hey, Stephen, can you hear me?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
It seems Steve, and I apologize.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It seems like we're having a So what many people
are saying is that when he said this, he was
giving away the head of what they were going to
argue next is that the executive body has this and
so by definition, for those who word familiar since everybody's
Google get.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Today, it's a legal power that effectively means limitless power.
The Trump administration once invoked the term, at least once
before an illegal argument as to why the president should
be allowed to rapidly deport Venezuelan migrants. It didn't work
that time either under the Alien Enemies Act. So it's
just like, I'm god king.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, sounds a lot like unitary executive theory.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yes, i am god king. It sounds like it should
involve planets, but it doesn't. And that's a little disappointed.
Cheet here is a contributor to the nation and the
host of the time of monsters. Welcome too Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Jeet Well get to be on.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I'm like in a particularly annoying mood today because I'm
seeing some good work out of Democrats. So Chuck Schumer
did this video last night with cursing, but it was like,
actually pretty good and pretty clear. Do you see this
video I'm talking about.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
No, I did not see that video, but I mean,
I do actually agree with you on the broader point,
which is that the Democrats, particularly with the budget fight,
have been showing some real moxie. You're a woman, is
like having that inept lever that finally finds your proper spot.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's like, it's so funny because I was really skeptical
of this shutdown. I thought, you know, Trump has this
very big microphone. He had a two line sort of
sum up for the shutdown, which was like Democrats want
to give healthcare to illegals, right, that was the line,
And I thought that's pretty effective, Like maybe people will
(09:00):
And I was really like anxious. I was like, I
don't know that you guys are gonna win the shutdown.
I don't think you have the same pain tolerance that
Republicans have, Like Republicans want to make the government's moll
enough to drown in a bathtub. Trump really is like
a paper tiger, like he really still doesn't want to
disappoint his base. And so while the ideological guys in
(09:21):
the administration like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller want to
like just disassemble the whole federal government. Donald Trump really
wants to be loved by his base, and a lot
of those people, to quote Steve Bannon, you know, Steve
Bennon had a whole thing about how like a lot
of Trump's base is on Medicaid, and so I think
(09:43):
we've gotten to that moment.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah, no, I mean I think this
is the big thing. I mean, like, Trump's whole political
success was based on the fact that he's able to
get people that had normally voulted fit the Democrats, the
sort of fabled white working class to vote for I
think we want to forget those But when Trump first
one in twenty sixteen, the Republican primary, the thing that
set him apart for the rest of the field was
(10:05):
really that he said I'm not going.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
To cut social Security and Medicare, like you.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Know, and that was able to bring in people into
the party that were not normally there, who like, you
know that we're.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
On social Security and Medicare, yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Who are like otherwise you know, like very socially conservative
on immigration and other stuff, but always were wary of
the Republicans, as you know, the party that we're going
to cut at and so like this whole fight really
exposes the contradictions of Trump's coalition.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
And I mean you mentioned Ben and I would also.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
Mentioned Marjorie Taylor Green, who you know, has done now
saying that like, well, you know, of course I don't
like Obamacare, but you know, like.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
A lot of my people, a lot of my people
depend on that.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
But the paper tiger thing that you just had that
is so crucial, And like I've actually been really puzzled
by the fact that going back to Trump's like victory,
he won the election, but like it was like you
you know, he got less than fifty percent of the
vote in one of the smallest margins in recent decades.
Everyone was pretending like this guy is like FDR in
nineteen thirty six, He's like an unbeatable machine, and.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
It's like it was never the case.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I always thought that that by picking a fight with
this guy was the way to go, not just like
the morally right thing to do, but also the politically
right thing to do, because I think that, you know,
he had a lot of vulnerabilities and it took a
long time, you know, like I wouldn't say that's.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Like, yeah, I didn't zip along.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
Yeah, Jeffries have been quick on this, but I mean
the fact that they finally got to the point where
you know, they're comfortable with having a fight is good
and showing up Trump's weaknesses. And also I gotta say, like,
in addition to the fact that he you know, Victor was
a narrow one, it's his support has become smaller and smaller,
you know, like it's just not just the approval rates,
(11:46):
but like a lot of the stuff that he's doing,
including stuff that Democrats from bizarrely aren't fighting him on,
like the immigration raids and you know, bombing these boats
off of Venezuela. A lot of this stuff is hugely unpopular.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
You know, let's talk about the immigration rates, because this
has been a very annoying. Part of this thing is
this staunch refusal. Nobody wants them rolling into their city.
And like, there's a friend of this podcast, Meredith Shinerman,
who I think is very smart, who writes for The
New Republic, and she, you know, was writing a back
(12:22):
like destabilizing it is. And I have a friend, you know,
I have a bunch of friends in DC who say
the same thing. You know, they're scaring all these people
they're deporting them. They have the fucking military. You know,
it's not even it's a National Guard from Texas, right,
come to scare local Chicagoans. This is not popular, it's
(12:43):
not needed, and it is like a winner for Democrats.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
Absolutely, It's just not popular.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I gotta say, like this whole idea of like
sending in the federal troops and making the National Guard
into a police force, like it's not just like you know,
your typical lefty living out in like one of these
cities that I guess it. I mean, there's a long
standing tradition on the right of a kind of libertarian
paranoia about the use of the federal government, and you know,
like it's an issue that like speaks to a lot
(13:10):
of very core American values. And also I mean like
just like the imagery you know, like like this is
ponograph there's out there yesterday of like the ice guys
using gas against like this pastor Presbyterian minister. Also beyond that,
I mean what we haven't talked about is also the
sort of civil war aspect, which is like, you know,
it's one thing to send the National Guard out like
in a fruitless way, you know, like which is not great.
(13:32):
But there's the National Guard of Texas bringing them up
to Chicago, Like you're basically getting into the third territory,
where like, you know, you're setting Americans against Americans. And
I gotta say, like, you know, look at some of
those photos of those I mean, I'm a heavier guy myself,
but look at those photos of those Texans National Guard.
I think it's like even strategically stupid to send them
into the land of deep dish pizza. I think you're
(13:54):
gonna you're gonna take a lot of casualties there.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
First of all, the deep dish pizza is, speaking for
my own experience, takes like an hour. It's very slow.
So I mean, the good news is these guys aren't
going to be so busy, so they will have time
to get the deep dish pizza. But look, federalism is
cracking around us, like and in fact, I interviewed Chris
Murphy this week and we're talking about, like I said,
when does it get to a moment where you're this
(14:20):
rich blue state paying all this federal taxes and the
government won't fund your projects, like won't fund FEMA, Like
why are you paying into something if you can't get out.
And this is the thing I think Trump has not
completely sought through, which is like you may not like
the way blue states vote, but you like their money
(14:41):
and what you're and by targeting them, you are making
a real conversation happen about why they're paying all these
federal taxes just to get fucked by the federal government.
And I think that's real.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
Absolutely, it's real.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
I mean, like I think for a long time you
kind of had a kind of double standard in America.
You're Republican, You're allowed to attack the blue states and
say San Francisco Liberals and whatnot, whereas the you know,
like the Democratic line was, you know, like we want
to be a party of all Americans.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
There's no red state, there's no blue state. There's just
the United States. That's changing, like you know, you see.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Both like pritz Care in Illinois and Newsam in California,
like they're starting to think like, no, I've had to
be like, you know, the governor of this state, and
our interests are not being served by the federal government.
And the more people that start to think like that,
I mean, it's a very dangerous kind of situation. And
it's not just like you know, you're not getting anything.
You're not getting the FEMA protection and you're you're actually
(15:39):
getting a federal government is actively hostile to your own citizens,
setting military groups, it's an invasing, occupying force in your cities.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
The possibilities are sort of like fragmentation.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I mean, like I think anyone who has sort of
studied history, like the Holy Thing other federation, the verse
federation is like always hard and when it's seen, like.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
You know, the Soviet Union in Yugoslavia, how.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
Quickly things can fall apart when everyone decides like I
got to look after my interests.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
It's a dangerous situation.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
And it is like, you know, if California decides this
is not worth their time, the whole experiment no longer
works because they are the fourth largest economy in the world.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
California would be like a superpower but yourself. So the
thing is, like you logically, I think you would get
regional kind of like blocks where like you know, like
it'd be California plus Washington State.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
You know you can bring in some yeah yeah, yeah,
o again yeah. I mean, I don't even know what
the thinking is.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
And I gotta say, like in terms of like trying
to create cracks in the Republican coalition. Like I actually
do think this kind of like federalist tradition is has
like some real hold, Like it's that just a rhetorical thing.
I think there are conservative people, particularly the sort of
legal judicial types, that do actually kind of worry about
federal overreach.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
So I think that this is actually.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Another area where you can kind of you can actually
go on the offensive because you got to see win
allies that are outside the normal Democratic party block.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
So let's talk about the other stuff that's going on.
So Trump is making a lot of threats about this shutdown,
saying he's not going to pay federal workers back pay,
so legal it's bullshit, it's so dumb. Like I do
think there are a lot of places where when the
cracks start to form with Trump's kind of messaging, it
really cracks. So, you know, they have this shutdown. They
(17:28):
thought they would win it, like Russ Vought, pulling back
these infrastructure projects, but there's just not so much they
can do. And also they've already done a lot with
Elon and so you know, they're still in the process
of re hiring people that they recently fired. And I
do think the timing on this actually really did work?
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Yeah, I know, I know absolutely, I and think in
Ter's of other cracks. I mean there's this sort of
division between the sort of ideological White House and the
actual cabinet members. You know, these agencies, oh that you
kept like you know, pissed off these workers, you know,
like you actually.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You want you need them.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
Yeah, yeah, you actually want the air traffic controllers and
people in turn of disease control to like be happy,
to be willing to go to work every day. The
timing of this, the thing was good, and you know,
like I have to, you know, give credit where is
because I mean I have been a critic of Humor
and Jeffries, but I think that they have played this
very well and they've held their party together. I think
(18:28):
that's the main thing. So any situation where you know
you united on your side and you're opening up divisions
on the other side is a winner.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Yeah, you know, it's really important because one of the
things that I always felt like with Jeffries that I've
criticized him about, I've said it to them, has been
like he's so cautious, he's so loyally, but he's also
so good at boat whipping. You're not seeing Democratic congressmen
being like this is bullshit, and you're actually seeing them
(18:56):
stay together, and the Senate is a little bit different
but still pretty good. Then you have Donald Trump being
like this shutdown is about healthcare, true, and like that
is the law of Donald Trump, which is, if you
keep him going, he will ultimately say the quiet part
out loud, much to his detriment. I want to talk
about Delaine Maxwell for a minute and this discharge petition,
(19:20):
because I don't know who she is. I certainly would
think about it. I would not think about it. I
wouldn't not pardon a sex trafficker. Okay, So Mike Johnson
refusing to swear in the newest member of Congress, Okay, fine,
she is the vote needed to get a discharge petition.
(19:41):
The discharge petition will go to the Senate and die.
There's no world in which this discharge petition goes anywhere.
It cannot. It is set up. But at least we'll
see Republicans in the Senate kill another release of the
Epstein files. I personally think that this is a winner
for Democrats, that they should be talking about this, like
(20:02):
Marjorie Taylor Green should be reading the names in the
House of Representatives. It seems kind of show businessy and
like insensitive, but the victims want it right, They wanted justice.
These women have been to how And the other thing
is like Trump's base wants it, Democratic base wants it.
And also it happens to be the right thing to.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
Do absolutely on all sorts of counts. I mean, like, actually,
every the polling on this is like amazing. It's like
ninety percent of the people wanted right.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Of course issue.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yeah, I mean like honestly, like unless like you know,
you're someone who actually went down to Epstein Islands, They're like.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
Yeah, yeah, well well why would you not want it?
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Like the more Trump talks about this and the more,
you know, like the more guilty he kind of seems. Also,
I gotta say, the core position that they are taken
is that Epstein was a trafficker Gallainton Maxwell, but maybe
she's a trafficker. You know, we have to look at
this case see what's happening. But there was no like
John's right. Usually, like if you have a trafficker, like
(21:06):
a sex ring, you know, like you're selling women or
in this case children to some clients, but the serious
thing of a trafficking ring without customers.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Right, it's baffling and also maybe it's bullshit.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
Yes, yeah, and you know, do you know, let's see
this even I think transcend laughter and right because like
you know, your friend of mind exp client like said,
you know this podcast. You know, well, I think Epstein
was a predator and a pedophile, and I think he
had a lot of powerful friends.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
But my best guess is that these two worlds were separate.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
And like I don't know how you can think that
if you have you know, like a hundred birthday cards
from the reaches the most powerful people been in America,
like with all pictures of like you know, Epstein with
little girls.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah, the birthday book was not good.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah, including we went from the current president of the
United States with the heavily lewd dovestage. So it is
this hard just like oh, you know, like this compartmentalization.
You know, like this is the case of two lawyers
working on different sides of the case, but you know
they can keep the personal and private separate.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
I don't think that was the case.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
And to give him credit, did you see the thing
with the Howard Lutnik, but he was like next door
neighbors with Jeffrey Epstein, and he had this story about
how and his wife were like, you know, when they
first moved in, Epstein invite them over and they saw
that he had like in the big dining room a
massage table and he was talking about it and they
were like, I really creeped out and thought like, hey,
(22:32):
you know.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
This is not the guy.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
And then the interviewer says, well, you know, like what
about like all the powerful people that like went there,
like how were they able to ignore that? And and
Lutnick said, oh, they participated in it.
Speaker 5 (22:44):
Ah, So I think.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
That you know, yeah, wow, way to go, Lutnick. Welcome
to the resistance, Howard Lutnik.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Yeah, Howard Luppick, which is like you know, like in
Howard Letneck in this one case, you know, just taking.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
The elementary calm since point of view.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
So so yeah, I mean I think there's a kind
of you know, guy brops because I think that it
transcends parton lines in one particular way that there's a
kind of elite opinion that he really tries to like
thread the needle, and I think a ridiculous way of saying,
you know, Epstein bad the people around him. You know,
we're like partying with them going down to the island,
you know, like whodos You know, I don't think anything
(23:22):
that's being well served by being naive in that way.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, gid here, will you please come back?
Speaker 5 (23:28):
Of course, I'm always happy to be on.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Raoul Torres is the Attorney General of New Mexico. Welcome
to Fast Politics again. Am I supposed to call you
attorney Attorney General General tore Yes.
Speaker 6 (23:44):
No, mom, you just call me Raoul.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
That's fine.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
So you're the attorney general of the state of New Mexico.
New Mexico is an important state to me for any
number of reasons. But it's also really important because it's
like a blue state, but a poor state with a
mix of diverse people. And also I think you guys
are the canary in the coal mine A lot of times.
(24:07):
Before we talk about what's going on with you guys
in Trump two point zero, I want to talk about
the last time we were on this podcast, because the
last time we were on this podcast, after we stopped recording,
we had this conversation and I said, I felt pretty
good about this. I think Harris is going to win,
and you said to me, nope. So in July I
knew that. In July we saw Democratic attorneys general like
(24:29):
starting a plan for what it would look like in
a Trump two point zero. So I knew there was that.
But tell me why you were so confident that Harris
wasn't able to take it over the line and what
you're seeing now and how that relates to what's going
on right now.
Speaker 6 (24:43):
My perspective was mostly informed by my role as the
surrogate for the Harris campaign. And I went to Arizona
because I think they felt confident that they had New
Mexico in hand, and they ended up winning here, although
by a smaller margin than had occurred in the previous cycle.
But I went to Arizona and a few things struck
me in the sort of the grassroots level. I was
(25:05):
shocked by the number of out of state anversers and
volunteers who did not seem to have a close connection
to the community. And frankly, they were going out into
working class Hispanic communities and talking to folks in those
communities that seemed like there was a misalignment between just
the messengers that they had on the ground. But more importantly,
(25:27):
and I remember calling my wife, and I don't know
if I mentioned this last time we talked, but I
saw on repeat the now infamous ad about transwrits and
about the question that was posed to Vice President Harris
and how Donald Trump had framed it as she is
for Davam and is for you. It was one of
those moments where in New Mexico, because at that moment
we weren't a battleground state, I was finally seeing the
(25:48):
full brunt of the messaging war that was going on.
It just occurred to me that there was a real
powerful message that was being delivered, and one that I
think was obscured by the anger that it provoked amongst
a lot of Democrats who I think really took it
at face value as trying to provoke prejudice and bigotry
(26:10):
and those sorts of things. And I'm not going to
deny that that was clearly part of the message, but
a more important part of the message, at least from
my perspective, was this idea that Democrats were focused on
issues that were not central to the day to day
of working people. And so that subtext that catch line
(26:31):
about him being focused on you and what you're going through.
And Vice President Harrison and the Democratic Party written large
focused on other issues that are important to communities who
have been fighting for equality for a long time, but
they were not of central importance to people who were
struggling to pay the rent and get access to healthcare,
(26:53):
who were worried about crime and disorder. And it just
struck me that there was going to be an erosion,
particular clearly among not just working class people generally, but
working class Hispanics. I was seeing that also in New Mexico.
I was seeing that up and down the Rio Grande Valley.
And you know, that was born out with the results,
but it's also born out sort of in the long
(27:13):
term trends. I spoke recently to a group here in Albuquerque,
and we talked about the erosion of support that the
Democratic Party has had over the last forty or fifty years. Here.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
In nineteen eighty, sixty.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
Four percent of registered voters in the state were Democrats.
That numbers now forty two percent. If you look at
the Republican voter registration, it's perfectly flat, right.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
It hasn't gone up, but hasn't gone down.
Speaker 6 (27:34):
It's remained relatively stable when you kind of peel that
back and you try to understand, well, who is no
longer as committed as they once were to the Democratic
Party and has a sense of loyalty to that party.
It's people that, frankly, are very familiar to me. There
are people in my family. They're rural New Mexicans and
folks and families like mine who came into the party
(27:57):
frankly through FDR. They came in through the depth of
the Great Depression. They recognized that there was somebody in
the White House who cared desperately about what they were
confronting in their day to day lives, who cared about them,
who wanted to lift them up and give them jobs
and give them hope and all those things. And for
a number of reasons, the centrality of that argument has
(28:19):
been maybe not replaced, but somewhat obscured by other issues,
and most importantly by cultural issues that don't resonate as
much with more conservative elements of the Democratic Party's sort
of brand.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, so this is true if you were a Democratic
Party running against a normal Republican, if you're trying to
make a case against the Jeb Bush. Yes, affordability, but
that is not what we're seeing. And so I want
you to talk about this because Trump really did make
huge inroads with Latino voters, and now he has turned
(28:57):
around and is arresting them, and Justice Kavanaugh Bread Kavanaugh
has you know, the Kavanaugh stop right. But the Supreme
Court now says if you look like you might be Hispanic,
you are allowed to be racially profiled. So I take
no pleasure in being right because what we're seeing now
(29:18):
is just cataclysmic. But are people threading the needle there?
Are they not? Are they not seeing it? I mean,
how are they making peace with that?
Speaker 6 (29:27):
Yeah? I think this goes to a larger problem, frankly,
within the Democratic Party's understanding of Latino community and how
they are sort of activated and mobilized politically. There has
been an underlying assumption for a very long time that
there was going to be an automatic sense of solidarity
(29:48):
between Hispanic Americans who are in the community and have
been participating in the community for some time and recently
arrived immigrants, and that is I think not true. Right,
A big part of that now, to your point of
all the thing that I have talked about publicly, the
hypocrisy and the blatant racism at the heart of Kavanaugh stops,
(30:09):
which is I think what they should be called is
a shocking sort of development in the Supreme Court. Of
all the things and all the outrages that we've experienced,
you know, this is a court that's said unequivocally that
the best way to end race discrimination is to no
longer discriminate on the basis of race. And they said
that with respect to college admissions in justifying ending affirmative action.
(30:32):
But apparently that only applies to the process of allowing
someone to go to college. It has no application, apparently,
and shouldn't be allowed to inhibit police officers or ice
agents who are randomly racially profiling people. But there is
a problem in the democratic messaging on the issue. What
I focus on is the impact not only on the
(30:53):
Latino community generally, but on citizens specifically. Right and a
lot of times when we talk about the impact of
these raids and these abusive tactics, we focus on the
whole problem without delivering a special message to Hispanics, particularly
Hispanics voted for Donald Trump with the underlying assumption that
(31:15):
when he was talking about doing.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
This right, he wasn't talking about them.
Speaker 6 (31:18):
He wasn't talking about me, he was talking about those
other people. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So trende Aragua gangsters who are ten people?
Speaker 6 (31:26):
Yeah, right, And so there is a disconnect at the
national level because when we focused on how this is
impacting immigrant communities and undocumented peoples, which is unjustifiable and
horrific in its own right, but there needs to be
another message that's delivered to Hispanic citizens people like, you know,
my family has been in this country for a very
(31:47):
long time. There's lots of people who've been in this
country for a very long time. And there are certain
members of our community who voted for Donald Trump thinking
that he meant a totally different thing for a different
group of people. But that's not the reality. And we
as a party, we haven't we haven't talked enough about that.
It's like there's so much outrage and there's so much
brutality that we haven't focused on the fact that there
(32:09):
are American citizens that are now walking around with their passports.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Oh yeah, it's disgusting. There are American citizens who are
getting deported. Just like when years and years ago this
government did this to Mexicans. They did, in fact deport
lots of citizens so from what I understand, Like, for example,
I was talking to someone who does a lot of
reporting in Miami. Cubans are largely Republican, or at least
(32:38):
there's a large group of Cubans in Florida who are Republican.
I was being told stories of like them seeing relatives deported,
and they were like, but that wasn't what we signed
up for. And I agree that Democrats have to message
on this hard, but aren't Republicans also messaging on this
hard By deporting.
Speaker 6 (32:56):
These people, they're leaning into this message that we were
going after our criminals and that's.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
But it's not true. I mean, we see video, it's
not true.
Speaker 6 (33:05):
There are people that have criminal records that are being stopped.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
And it's twenty thirty percent.
Speaker 6 (33:10):
Yeah, the vast majority are people that are, you know,
outside of a home depot, parking lot, trying to find work,
people that have been in the country for a very
long time that have no criminal record.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
But in Chicago, it's like they're going into people's apartments
and they're taking out their children. And I mean, I
think this is what's so problematic about this moment is
that Democrats are sort of forced to message because there
is no mainstream madea anymore. So, like Governor Pritzker, I'm
watching this presser yesterday or two days ago, and he's
talking about how the ice agents killed someone. Had I
(33:42):
seen it on social media, I would have thought it
was not true. But when I heard the governor say that,
and know that he's very legit and I know the
people work in office, you know, I was like, holy shit.
The Havanaugh decision.
Speaker 6 (33:55):
I think it's one of those decisions that people fifty
or one hundred years and now will read sort of
like we read the dread Scott decision, or we read
the Koramatsu decision, or we read one of these decisions
that is so just willfully blind to the reality. I
mean this idea that, oh, these detentions are short, and
you know, someone you know has a brief encounter and
then they are, you know, quickly released. No one thinks
(34:18):
that that is true. No one on the streets of
any of our communities thinks that the encounter they're going
to have with a masked federal agent who doesn't have
to wear a bossy camera, who's armed with the long gun,
and who is going to throw somebody to the ground,
is going to have this sort of respectful interaction with people.
But the idea that in twenty twenty five the United
(34:39):
States Supreme Court would officially sanction racial profiling as an
accepted practice of any law enforcement agency, it's astonishing, but
it puts into sharp relief the consequences frankly, again, and
it's a little bit of what we're talking about before
of losing national elections, right, we cannot afford to lose
(35:00):
use the elections because we cannot afford the opportunity to
appoint justices in lieu of Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Barrett
and Justice Gorsuch because they are enabling this lawlessness on
a daily basis. And I think, frankly, the long term consequences,
which we still don't know yet how it's going to
(35:22):
fall out, is this internal struggle I thought would break
a different way in Chief Justice Roberts. He obviously is
somebody who just sucks. He came from the conservative legal movement.
He was an ardent opponent of the Voting Rights Act.
He was a Reagan lawyer. Like he's very clearly a conservative.
But when he was elevated to be the Chief Justice,
I thought his commitment to securing the independence, and frankly,
(35:47):
the institutional reputation of the judiciary would force him to
draw a sharper line, not on some of these other
cases that you know are around the unitary executive. But
I mean, take birthright citizens but.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Birthright citizenship is not up well even to sanction the
government's policy on the shadow docket. Right, that is inexcusable.
Speaker 6 (36:09):
This is not only playing constitutional text, it is playing
constitutional text that has already been interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Right, Yeah, I just want to get back to sort
of what's happening though right now in New Mexico. I mean,
what are you seeing Trumpism play out? And how you know?
Speaker 6 (36:27):
I think, for for the most part, we have not
seen the kind of widespread immigration enforcement that you've seen
in Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland and DC and
those other places.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 6 (36:41):
I think a lot of this is performative. I think, frankly,
it's you go to where the cameras are, you go
to where you're going to get attention. You go to
those places, and I don't think they'll get as much attention.
I also think that this is a place where they
where they will have pretty substantial pushback.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
You are much more likely to.
Speaker 6 (36:59):
Have an encounter with an American citizen of Hispanic descent
whose family has been here for hundreds of years and
throw one of them to the ground. And it may
actually be a Trump supporter that you throw to the ground.
So you go to a Portland, or you go to
a Chicago, or you go to one of those places.
I think for us, the more dramatic effect has been
(37:20):
felt in the cancelation the cuts right, the cuts to NIH,
which we thankfully were able to restore.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Wait, how were you able to restore the NIH cuts?
Speaker 6 (37:30):
We're actually been winning in court in court, at the
lower court, and a lot of what happens is the
administration tries a whole range of unlawful activity, mostly through
Omb and Russell Vote or other executive agencies, the cancelation
of grants and the conditioning of grants. We have had
(37:50):
a really high record of success at the disport level.
And because none of this is legal right, and that
includes with very conservative judges. The country Right, the birthright
Citizen decision was a conservative judge who ruled on that.
The recent decision in Portland that was a Republican appointee
it's only when it gets up to the shadow docket
that things.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Sort of fall apart.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
But we are actually having success in restoring certain funding.
We got restored funding for Voca, for example, for crime victims,
So we're having some of that success, and there's a
lot more concern that I hear from physicians or people
that are relying on these types of moneies. The latest
was in the context of the budgets shut down. We've
(38:34):
had one hundred and thirty five million dollars of proposed
energy grants that have been shut down. And there are
a number of businesses, and this is an interesting sort
of overlay. There are businesses who have already made investments,
they've already funded the money, expecting matching federal dollars, and
then that's not happening. There is a lot of inbound
(38:54):
traffic into our agency from people who rely on federal dollars,
who've built their business plan around it, or their organizational
and financial structures around it, and then had the rug
pulled out from under them.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
But you know, it's not.
Speaker 6 (39:07):
That front line sort of kinetic conflict that we see
in most of the other cities.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
In Florida, in red states where you have these cuts,
these NIH cuts, I guess that the state government is
not pushing back that same way, and so explain what
happens then.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
Yeah, So one of the most consequential procedural decisions to
come out of the Supreme Court is the elimination of
what are known as universal injunctions. Right, and so what
would happen is this coalition of Democratic ags is twenty
three of us. We would file and we would win,
but we would win nationwide injunctions that would protect people
(39:44):
even in Red states and other jurisdictions. Well, now we
are only able to protect the people in our jurisdictions
or parties that have explicitly, you know, obtained their own
counsel and filed their own national What that means is
before if I prevailed in a court in California or
here in New Mexico, I could get a district court
(40:05):
judge to enjoin that action nationwide. That no longer is true.
And so when in red states with Republican AGS, they
are simply unprotected by these cuts. And so you end
up with this patchwork, disparate enforcement, different rights, and access
to different sources of funding and agency action. And it
creates just a lot of chaos, because especially if you
(40:28):
think about going back to birth right citizenship, think about
that right. That's the problem with allowing the policy to
move forward in those places that are not subject to
the injunction. So now we're developing a system where we
have people who are born in certain red states, they
may move to blue states, or they're in blue states
and may move to red. How are we managing the process,
(40:49):
the administrative process of ensuring proper documentation and access to
passports and all those other things.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Wild stuff. Thank you, thank you, Thank you, General tourist,
thank you. No more perfectly Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
So Mally, you know, one of my favorite subjects is
the made up thing that Antifa is this thing that
exists everywhere. It is plenty abound, and they're hiding all
over the place. One of our most psychotic politicians, Texas
Attorney General Ken Paxton. He's going to get to the
bottom of it. Just you wait and see the best.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
I'm really excited to see what happens with Ken Paxton,
mostly known for adultray.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Right, almost getting impeached.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's right, kit Packs, and he did almost get impeached.
He did also leave his wife for his mistress. The guy.
He's filled with moral turpitude, so he wants to infiltrate
leftist terra cells. His first one. He's going to start
with his Patagonia.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I have a feeling he's going to break into it
a real fucked up yoga studio. That's a hot yoga
studio in Austin.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I'm telling you hot yoga. It's going to be one
of those Bickram studios where you're not allowed to drink
any water for the first ten minutes. And it's going
to be Ken Paxton in the Bickram studio finding the
terrorices and stopping Antifa.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Lucky us, I hope on his way out, in the
little section where they sell Patriadams, he gets some local honey.
It was delicious when I got it there. When you
and I were at Austin last time.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
All I can tell you is that Ken Paxson is
running for Senate and they're basically ruining the state because
Avid things he'll be president one day, which surprise, he's
not going to be, and Paxton thinks he's going to
get John Cornan's seat. So between the two of them,
they will do anything to exercise planetary authority. And make
(42:46):
Trump the mango god king. The Planetara sanitary the best.
It's like Planet Yery, but it's got a planet in it.
It's all happening. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear
(43:09):
the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. New Fanny May. Survey data shows that
nearly seventy percent of Americans believe the economy is headed
in the wrong direction. That is incredible. Seventy threes percent
say it's a bad time to buy a house. That's great,
(00:22):
We have such a great show for you today. The
nation's own GTRE stops by to talk about the shutdown
and how Democrats are winning the messaging wars. Then we'll
talk to New Mexico Attorney General Raoul Torres about how
attorney generals are protecting citizens against Trump. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Soboby, you and I were just talking about something I
thought was really interesting, which is a lot of people
were like, AOC is an idiot for having said Stephen
Miller is shorter than he is. But I think you
and I agree about something, which is this was right
out of the Trump playbook. It was good because instead
of defending the shutdown on for an entire day, those
morons on the five, barring Jessica Tarlov of course, and
(01:05):
all Fox Primetime was discussing how handsome and what a stallion.
Stephen Miller is.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
By the way, I have to say the last shutdown
Stephen Miller, they brought out the hair in a can.
They've like, yeah, with the hair in the cannon. I
think it's a mistake. Let the man have hair, like let.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Him cook with the old halloweed costume hair from our childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
That's right, Halloween costume hair. This freaking is fascism. And
I think that was incredible. Laura ingram Is, by the way,
just always gives away the game when she gets agitated,
and you know she was like but and she made
him listen to it. That was incredible, and it's a
great example of like, stop being cowards. Just push back.
(01:49):
This is not popular. No one wants this. The polling.
You know what's a ninety ten issue. The Marines rolling
into your city, arresting the people selling you hot dogs,
that is a ninety ten issue, or.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Who just gets caught up in the mess whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Nobody likes this. Nobody wants authoritarianism. And there's a reason why.
Like when they did it in the nineteen thirties and
the nineteen twenties, they did it people on the streets.
They were so poor. That was inflation, you know, in
crazy ways. It wasn't like, you know, just normal American life.
And then they're like, oh, we're going to send in
(02:26):
the troops. No, this is real dumb.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, but particularly like one of the things when we
write this section of the show, we're often looking to
try to not get caught up and when Trump is
doing this and just saying dumb, dumb things and really
trying to think about like, Okay, where are the escalations
and what is the important stuff, and AOC knocking them
off their game with that because they love to talk
about her. I say, keep doing it, keep eating the
white running rod correct.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
And like this is it. This is the way you
push back against from But.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
We do have to discuss the important things of when
his rhetoric escalates, which is when he's talking about jailing
Pritzker and Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And by the way, though Pritzker handled it just perfectly.
He said bring it on, and he said if he
wants to arrest my people, he has to come through me.
That said, arresting James call me is a victimless crime.
Debby too Tall, he writes trashy books send him to
the Hague.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
He's going to be just fine because he's not up
against Rutch.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Send him to the Hague. Baby.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Okay, let's get real here, Trump doing this escalation. We
should always cover what he does more than it. But
a lot of times this has been mornings. Chicago feels
like the bone. He's feeling like he can really pick now.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
An interesting thing that happened in that interview with Raoul
Torres from New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Which is at the end of the show.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What he said was, I said, you know, are you
seeing Trump? Is because New Mexico is a really interesting
state because it's in the middle in the west. It's
a very blue state, but it is a very poor state.
And said this thing which I thought was really interesting,
which is he said, like, he's not coming here because
we don't get attention. And this is all performative. And
so when you think about this through the lens of
(04:10):
this is all performative, then all of this makes sense, right,
Like the reason he's going into Chicago, black mayor, liberal
billionaire governor whose family he's always been jealous of. So
you really see how much this is performative and how
much this is about trying to scare people and trying
to bully people, and that is why you cannot let
(04:33):
it scare or bully you.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, and as usual, they are very, very stupid strategically,
and here we have great evidence of that, which is
Trump's own Labor Department says as immigrant raids are causing
a food crisis, and they're warning that we're gonna have
fucking food shortages because this has been so poorly thought out.
And it's really funny because there's reports that Maloney saw
things like this had said Ooh, I can't do all
(04:57):
the bad things I said I was going to do
to immigrants or we're going to be trouble like this,
and didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Yeah, but Maloney is a woman, and we are very
sexist on this podcast and on this seconds now. Women
are better leaders than men. Sorry, Jesse, Listen.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I've worked under women and men at a couple of corporations,
and I will say that I noticed the difference. Could
I try to insult some people who are men that
were my bosses right now?
Speaker 1 (05:23):
By the way, we knew this was going to happen
because it happened in the first Trump administration right where
they had food shortages where you had fruit rotting in
the fields. And also I would like to add this
administration has destroyed millions of dollars of birth control, left
food to rot instead of going to.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
USA, destroyed PPE too.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Like waste, fraud and abuse, it's coming from inside the
administration people, the waste fraud and abusiest administration ever.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
So my I like to look at Google trend, which
is this thing that shows you what people are googling.
Do you want to guess what's the top Google on
the charts today?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Stephen Miller fake.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Care shockingly doll plenary authority.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Glenary authority? Tell us more?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
Well, we should listen to this appearance on CNN where
Stephen Miller appears to glitch out legal insurrection.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Does the administration still plan to abide by that ruling? Well,
the administration filed an appeal this morning with the Ninth Circuit.
I would note the administration won an identical case in
the Ninth Circuit just a few months ago with respect
to the federalizing of the California National Guard under Title
ten of the US Code. The president has plenary authority?
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Has Stephen, Hey, Stephen, can you hear me?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
It seems Steve, and I apologize.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It seems like we're having a So what many people
are saying is that when he said this, he was
giving away the head of what they were going to
argue next is that the executive body has this and
so by definition, for those who word familiar since everybody's
Google get.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Today, it's a legal power that effectively means limitless power.
The Trump administration once invoked the term, at least once
before an illegal argument as to why the president should
be allowed to rapidly deport Venezuelan migrants. It didn't work
that time either under the Alien Enemies Act. So it's
just like, I'm god king.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, sounds a lot like unitary executive theory.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yes, i am god king. It sounds like it should
involve planets, but it doesn't. And that's a little disappointed.
Cheet here is a contributor to the nation and the
host of the time of monsters. Welcome too Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
Jeet Well get to be on.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I'm like in a particularly annoying mood today because I'm
seeing some good work out of Democrats. So Chuck Schumer
did this video last night with cursing, but it was like,
actually pretty good and pretty clear. Do you see this
video I'm talking about.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
No, I did not see that video, but I mean,
I do actually agree with you on the broader point,
which is that the Democrats, particularly with the budget fight,
have been showing some real moxie. You're a woman, is
like having that inept lever that finally finds your proper spot.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
It's like, it's so funny because I was really skeptical
of this shutdown. I thought, you know, Trump has this
very big microphone. He had a two line sort of
sum up for the shutdown, which was like Democrats want
to give healthcare to illegals, right, that was the line,
And I thought that's pretty effective, Like maybe people will
(09:00):
And I was really like anxious. I was like, I
don't know that you guys are gonna win the shutdown.
I don't think you have the same pain tolerance that
Republicans have, Like Republicans want to make the government's moll
enough to drown in a bathtub. Trump really is like
a paper tiger, like he really still doesn't want to
disappoint his base. And so while the ideological guys in
(09:21):
the administration like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller want to
like just disassemble the whole federal government. Donald Trump really
wants to be loved by his base, and a lot
of those people, to quote Steve Bannon, you know, Steve
Bennon had a whole thing about how like a lot
of Trump's base is on Medicaid, and so I think
(09:43):
we've gotten to that moment.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah, no, I mean I think this
is the big thing. I mean, like, Trump's whole political
success was based on the fact that he's able to
get people that had normally voulted fit the Democrats, the
sort of fabled white working class to vote for I
think we want to forget those But when Trump first
one in twenty sixteen, the Republican primary, the thing that
set him apart for the rest of the field was
(10:05):
really that he said I'm not going.
Speaker 5 (10:07):
To cut social Security and Medicare, like you.
Speaker 4 (10:10):
Know, and that was able to bring in people into
the party that were not normally there, who like, you
know that we're.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
On social Security and Medicare, yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Who are like otherwise you know, like very socially conservative
on immigration and other stuff, but always were wary of
the Republicans, as you know, the party that we're going
to cut at and so like this whole fight really
exposes the contradictions of Trump's coalition.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
And I mean you mentioned Ben and I would also.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
Mentioned Marjorie Taylor Green, who you know, has done now
saying that like, well, you know, of course I don't
like Obamacare, but you know, like.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
A lot of my people, a lot of my people
depend on that.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
But the paper tiger thing that you just had that
is so crucial, And like I've actually been really puzzled
by the fact that going back to Trump's like victory,
he won the election, but like it was like you
you know, he got less than fifty percent of the
vote in one of the smallest margins in recent decades.
Everyone was pretending like this guy is like FDR in
nineteen thirty six, He's like an unbeatable machine, and.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
It's like it was never the case.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
I always thought that that by picking a fight with
this guy was the way to go, not just like
the morally right thing to do, but also the politically
right thing to do, because I think that, you know,
he had a lot of vulnerabilities and it took a
long time, you know, like I wouldn't say that's.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Like, yeah, I didn't zip along.
Speaker 4 (11:26):
Yeah, Jeffries have been quick on this, but I mean
the fact that they finally got to the point where
you know, they're comfortable with having a fight is good
and showing up Trump's weaknesses. And also I gotta say, like,
in addition to the fact that he you know, Victor was
a narrow one, it's his support has become smaller and smaller,
you know, like it's just not just the approval rates,
(11:46):
but like a lot of the stuff that he's doing,
including stuff that Democrats from bizarrely aren't fighting him on,
like the immigration raids and you know, bombing these boats
off of Venezuela. A lot of this stuff is hugely unpopular.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
You know, let's talk about the immigration rates, because this
has been a very annoying. Part of this thing is
this staunch refusal. Nobody wants them rolling into their city.
And like, there's a friend of this podcast, Meredith Shinerman,
who I think is very smart, who writes for The
New Republic, and she, you know, was writing a back
(12:22):
like destabilizing it is. And I have a friend, you know,
I have a bunch of friends in DC who say
the same thing. You know, they're scaring all these people
they're deporting them. They have the fucking military. You know,
it's not even it's a National Guard from Texas, right,
come to scare local Chicagoans. This is not popular, it's
(12:43):
not needed, and it is like a winner for Democrats.
Speaker 5 (12:47):
Absolutely, It's just not popular.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And I gotta say, like this whole idea of like
sending in the federal troops and making the National Guard
into a police force, like it's not just like you know,
your typical lefty living out in like one of these
cities that I guess it. I mean, there's a long
standing tradition on the right of a kind of libertarian
paranoia about the use of the federal government, and you know,
like it's an issue that like speaks to a lot
(13:10):
of very core American values. And also I mean like
just like the imagery you know, like like this is
ponograph there's out there yesterday of like the ice guys
using gas against like this pastor Presbyterian minister. Also beyond that,
I mean what we haven't talked about is also the
sort of civil war aspect, which is like, you know,
it's one thing to send the National Guard out like
in a fruitless way, you know, like which is not great.
(13:32):
But there's the National Guard of Texas bringing them up
to Chicago, Like you're basically getting into the third territory,
where like, you know, you're setting Americans against Americans. And
I gotta say, like, you know, look at some of
those photos of those I mean, I'm a heavier guy myself,
but look at those photos of those Texans National Guard.
I think it's like even strategically stupid to send them
into the land of deep dish pizza. I think you're
(13:54):
gonna you're gonna take a lot of casualties there.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
First of all, the deep dish pizza is, speaking for
my own experience, takes like an hour. It's very slow.
So I mean, the good news is these guys aren't
going to be so busy, so they will have time
to get the deep dish pizza. But look, federalism is
cracking around us, like and in fact, I interviewed Chris
Murphy this week and we're talking about, like I said,
when does it get to a moment where you're this
(14:20):
rich blue state paying all this federal taxes and the
government won't fund your projects, like won't fund FEMA, Like
why are you paying into something if you can't get out.
And this is the thing I think Trump has not
completely sought through, which is like you may not like
the way blue states vote, but you like their money
(14:41):
and what you're and by targeting them, you are making
a real conversation happen about why they're paying all these
federal taxes just to get fucked by the federal government.
And I think that's real.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
Absolutely, it's real.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
I mean, like I think for a long time you
kind of had a kind of double standard in America.
You're Republican, You're allowed to attack the blue states and
say San Francisco Liberals and whatnot, whereas the you know,
like the Democratic line was, you know, like we want
to be a party of all Americans.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
There's no red state, there's no blue state. There's just
the United States. That's changing, like you know, you see.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Both like pritz Care in Illinois and Newsam in California,
like they're starting to think like, no, I've had to
be like, you know, the governor of this state, and
our interests are not being served by the federal government.
And the more people that start to think like that,
I mean, it's a very dangerous kind of situation. And
it's not just like you know, you're not getting anything.
You're not getting the FEMA protection and you're you're actually
(15:39):
getting a federal government is actively hostile to your own citizens,
setting military groups, it's an invasing, occupying force in your cities.
Speaker 5 (15:47):
The possibilities are sort of like fragmentation.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I mean, like I think anyone who has sort of
studied history, like the Holy Thing other federation, the verse
federation is like always hard and when it's seen, like.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
You know, the Soviet Union in Yugoslavia, how.
Speaker 4 (16:00):
Quickly things can fall apart when everyone decides like I
got to look after my interests.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
It's a dangerous situation.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
And it is like, you know, if California decides this
is not worth their time, the whole experiment no longer
works because they are the fourth largest economy in the world.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
California would be like a superpower but yourself. So the
thing is, like you logically, I think you would get
regional kind of like blocks where like you know, like
it'd be California plus Washington State.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
You know you can bring in some yeah yeah, yeah,
o again yeah. I mean, I don't even know what
the thinking is.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
And I gotta say, like in terms of like trying
to create cracks in the Republican coalition. Like I actually
do think this kind of like federalist tradition is has
like some real hold, Like it's that just a rhetorical thing.
I think there are conservative people, particularly the sort of
legal judicial types, that do actually kind of worry about
federal overreach.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
So I think that this is actually.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Another area where you can kind of you can actually
go on the offensive because you got to see win
allies that are outside the normal Democratic party block.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
So let's talk about the other stuff that's going on.
So Trump is making a lot of threats about this shutdown,
saying he's not going to pay federal workers back pay,
so legal it's bullshit, it's so dumb. Like I do
think there are a lot of places where when the
cracks start to form with Trump's kind of messaging, it
really cracks. So, you know, they have this shutdown. They
(17:28):
thought they would win it, like Russ Vought, pulling back
these infrastructure projects, but there's just not so much they
can do. And also they've already done a lot with
Elon and so you know, they're still in the process
of re hiring people that they recently fired. And I
do think the timing on this actually really did work?
Speaker 4 (17:48):
Yeah, I know, I know absolutely, I and think in
Ter's of other cracks. I mean there's this sort of
division between the sort of ideological White House and the
actual cabinet members. You know, these agencies, oh that you
kept like you know, pissed off these workers, you know,
like you actually.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
You want you need them.
Speaker 4 (18:06):
Yeah, yeah, you actually want the air traffic controllers and
people in turn of disease control to like be happy,
to be willing to go to work every day. The
timing of this, the thing was good, and you know,
like I have to, you know, give credit where is
because I mean I have been a critic of Humor
and Jeffries, but I think that they have played this
very well and they've held their party together. I think
(18:28):
that's the main thing. So any situation where you know
you united on your side and you're opening up divisions
on the other side is a winner.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Yeah, you know, it's really important because one of the
things that I always felt like with Jeffries that I've
criticized him about, I've said it to them, has been
like he's so cautious, he's so loyally, but he's also
so good at boat whipping. You're not seeing Democratic congressmen
being like this is bullshit, and you're actually seeing them
(18:56):
stay together, and the Senate is a little bit different
but still pretty good. Then you have Donald Trump being
like this shutdown is about healthcare, true, and like that
is the law of Donald Trump, which is, if you
keep him going, he will ultimately say the quiet part
out loud, much to his detriment. I want to talk
about Delaine Maxwell for a minute and this discharge petition,
(19:20):
because I don't know who she is. I certainly would
think about it. I would not think about it. I
wouldn't not pardon a sex trafficker. Okay, So Mike Johnson
refusing to swear in the newest member of Congress, Okay, fine,
she is the vote needed to get a discharge petition.
(19:41):
The discharge petition will go to the Senate and die.
There's no world in which this discharge petition goes anywhere.
It cannot. It is set up. But at least we'll
see Republicans in the Senate kill another release of the
Epstein files. I personally think that this is a winner
for Democrats, that they should be talking about this, like
(20:02):
Marjorie Taylor Green should be reading the names in the
House of Representatives. It seems kind of show businessy and
like insensitive, but the victims want it right, They wanted justice.
These women have been to how And the other thing
is like Trump's base wants it, Democratic base wants it.
And also it happens to be the right thing to.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
Do absolutely on all sorts of counts. I mean, like, actually,
every the polling on this is like amazing. It's like
ninety percent of the people wanted right.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Of course issue.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Yeah, I mean like honestly, like unless like you know,
you're someone who actually went down to Epstein Islands, They're like.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
Yeah, yeah, well well why would you not want it?
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Like the more Trump talks about this and the more,
you know, like the more guilty he kind of seems. Also,
I gotta say, the core position that they are taken
is that Epstein was a trafficker Gallainton Maxwell, but maybe
she's a trafficker. You know, we have to look at
this case see what's happening. But there was no like
John's right. Usually, like if you have a trafficker, like
(21:06):
a sex ring, you know, like you're selling women or
in this case children to some clients, but the serious
thing of a trafficking ring without customers.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Right, it's baffling and also maybe it's bullshit.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
Yes, yeah, and you know, do you know, let's see
this even I think transcend laughter and right because like
you know, your friend of mind exp client like said,
you know this podcast. You know, well, I think Epstein
was a predator and a pedophile, and I think he
had a lot of powerful friends.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
But my best guess is that these two worlds were separate.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
And like I don't know how you can think that
if you have you know, like a hundred birthday cards
from the reaches the most powerful people been in America,
like with all pictures of like you know, Epstein with
little girls.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah, the birthday book was not good.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Yeah, including we went from the current president of the
United States with the heavily lewd dovestage. So it is
this hard just like oh, you know, like this compartmentalization.
You know, like this is the case of two lawyers
working on different sides of the case, but you know
they can keep the personal and private separate.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
I don't think that was the case.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
And to give him credit, did you see the thing
with the Howard Lutnik, but he was like next door
neighbors with Jeffrey Epstein, and he had this story about
how and his wife were like, you know, when they
first moved in, Epstein invite them over and they saw
that he had like in the big dining room a
massage table and he was talking about it and they
were like, I really creeped out and thought like, hey,
(22:32):
you know.
Speaker 5 (22:32):
This is not the guy.
Speaker 4 (22:34):
And then the interviewer says, well, you know, like what
about like all the powerful people that like went there,
like how were they able to ignore that? And and
Lutnick said, oh, they participated in it.
Speaker 5 (22:44):
Ah, So I think.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
That you know, yeah, wow, way to go, Lutnick. Welcome
to the resistance, Howard Lutnik.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
Yeah, Howard Luppick, which is like you know, like in
Howard Letneck in this one case, you know, just taking.
Speaker 5 (22:58):
The elementary calm since point of view.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
So so yeah, I mean I think there's a kind
of you know, guy brops because I think that it
transcends parton lines in one particular way that there's a
kind of elite opinion that he really tries to like
thread the needle, and I think a ridiculous way of saying,
you know, Epstein bad the people around him. You know,
we're like partying with them going down to the island,
you know, like whodos You know, I don't think anything
(23:22):
that's being well served by being naive in that way.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, gid here, will you please come back?
Speaker 5 (23:28):
Of course, I'm always happy to be on.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Raoul Torres is the Attorney General of New Mexico. Welcome
to Fast Politics again. Am I supposed to call you
attorney Attorney General General tore Yes.
Speaker 6 (23:44):
No, mom, you just call me Raoul.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
That's fine.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
So you're the attorney general of the state of New Mexico.
New Mexico is an important state to me for any
number of reasons. But it's also really important because it's
like a blue state, but a poor state with a
mix of diverse people. And also I think you guys
are the canary in the coal mine A lot of times.
(24:07):
Before we talk about what's going on with you guys
in Trump two point zero, I want to talk about
the last time we were on this podcast, because the
last time we were on this podcast, after we stopped recording,
we had this conversation and I said, I felt pretty
good about this. I think Harris is going to win,
and you said to me, nope. So in July I
knew that. In July we saw Democratic attorneys general like
(24:29):
starting a plan for what it would look like in
a Trump two point zero. So I knew there was that.
But tell me why you were so confident that Harris
wasn't able to take it over the line and what
you're seeing now and how that relates to what's going
on right now.
Speaker 6 (24:43):
My perspective was mostly informed by my role as the
surrogate for the Harris campaign. And I went to Arizona
because I think they felt confident that they had New
Mexico in hand, and they ended up winning here, although
by a smaller margin than had occurred in the previous cycle.
But I went to Arizona and a few things struck
me in the sort of the grassroots level. I was
(25:05):
shocked by the number of out of state anversers and
volunteers who did not seem to have a close connection
to the community. And frankly, they were going out into
working class Hispanic communities and talking to folks in those
communities that seemed like there was a misalignment between just
the messengers that they had on the ground. But more importantly,
(25:27):
and I remember calling my wife, and I don't know
if I mentioned this last time we talked, but I
saw on repeat the now infamous ad about transwrits and
about the question that was posed to Vice President Harris
and how Donald Trump had framed it as she is
for Davam and is for you. It was one of
those moments where in New Mexico, because at that moment
we weren't a battleground state, I was finally seeing the
(25:48):
full brunt of the messaging war that was going on.
It just occurred to me that there was a real
powerful message that was being delivered, and one that I
think was obscured by the anger that it provoked amongst
a lot of Democrats who I think really took it
at face value as trying to provoke prejudice and bigotry
(26:10):
and those sorts of things. And I'm not going to
deny that that was clearly part of the message, but
a more important part of the message, at least from
my perspective, was this idea that Democrats were focused on
issues that were not central to the day to day
of working people. And so that subtext that catch line
(26:31):
about him being focused on you and what you're going through.
And Vice President Harrison and the Democratic Party written large
focused on other issues that are important to communities who
have been fighting for equality for a long time, but
they were not of central importance to people who were
struggling to pay the rent and get access to healthcare,
(26:53):
who were worried about crime and disorder. And it just
struck me that there was going to be an erosion,
particular clearly among not just working class people generally, but
working class Hispanics. I was seeing that also in New Mexico.
I was seeing that up and down the Rio Grande Valley.
And you know, that was born out with the results,
but it's also born out sort of in the long
(27:13):
term trends. I spoke recently to a group here in Albuquerque,
and we talked about the erosion of support that the
Democratic Party has had over the last forty or fifty years. Here.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
In nineteen eighty, sixty.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
Four percent of registered voters in the state were Democrats.
That numbers now forty two percent. If you look at
the Republican voter registration, it's perfectly flat, right.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
It hasn't gone up, but hasn't gone down.
Speaker 6 (27:34):
It's remained relatively stable when you kind of peel that
back and you try to understand, well, who is no
longer as committed as they once were to the Democratic
Party and has a sense of loyalty to that party.
It's people that, frankly, are very familiar to me. There
are people in my family. They're rural New Mexicans and
folks and families like mine who came into the party
(27:57):
frankly through FDR. They came in through the depth of
the Great Depression. They recognized that there was somebody in
the White House who cared desperately about what they were
confronting in their day to day lives, who cared about them,
who wanted to lift them up and give them jobs
and give them hope and all those things. And for
a number of reasons, the centrality of that argument has
(28:19):
been maybe not replaced, but somewhat obscured by other issues,
and most importantly by cultural issues that don't resonate as
much with more conservative elements of the Democratic Party's sort
of brand.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, so this is true if you were a Democratic
Party running against a normal Republican, if you're trying to
make a case against the Jeb Bush. Yes, affordability, but
that is not what we're seeing. And so I want
you to talk about this because Trump really did make
huge inroads with Latino voters, and now he has turned
(28:57):
around and is arresting them, and Justice Kavanaugh Bread Kavanaugh
has you know, the Kavanaugh stop right. But the Supreme
Court now says if you look like you might be Hispanic,
you are allowed to be racially profiled. So I take
no pleasure in being right because what we're seeing now
(29:18):
is just cataclysmic. But are people threading the needle there?
Are they not? Are they not seeing it? I mean,
how are they making peace with that?
Speaker 6 (29:27):
Yeah? I think this goes to a larger problem, frankly,
within the Democratic Party's understanding of Latino community and how
they are sort of activated and mobilized politically. There has
been an underlying assumption for a very long time that
there was going to be an automatic sense of solidarity
(29:48):
between Hispanic Americans who are in the community and have
been participating in the community for some time and recently
arrived immigrants, and that is I think not true. Right,
A big part of that now, to your point of
all the thing that I have talked about publicly, the
hypocrisy and the blatant racism at the heart of Kavanaugh stops,
(30:09):
which is I think what they should be called is
a shocking sort of development in the Supreme Court. Of
all the things and all the outrages that we've experienced,
you know, this is a court that's said unequivocally that
the best way to end race discrimination is to no
longer discriminate on the basis of race. And they said
that with respect to college admissions in justifying ending affirmative action.
(30:32):
But apparently that only applies to the process of allowing
someone to go to college. It has no application, apparently,
and shouldn't be allowed to inhibit police officers or ice
agents who are randomly racially profiling people. But there is
a problem in the democratic messaging on the issue. What
I focus on is the impact not only on the
(30:53):
Latino community generally, but on citizens specifically. Right and a
lot of times when we talk about the impact of
these raids and these abusive tactics, we focus on the
whole problem without delivering a special message to Hispanics, particularly
Hispanics voted for Donald Trump with the underlying assumption that
(31:15):
when he was talking about doing.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
This right, he wasn't talking about them.
Speaker 6 (31:18):
He wasn't talking about me, he was talking about those
other people. Right.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So trende Aragua gangsters who are ten people?
Speaker 6 (31:26):
Yeah, right, And so there is a disconnect at the
national level because when we focused on how this is
impacting immigrant communities and undocumented peoples, which is unjustifiable and
horrific in its own right, but there needs to be
another message that's delivered to Hispanic citizens people like, you know,
my family has been in this country for a very
(31:47):
long time. There's lots of people who've been in this
country for a very long time. And there are certain
members of our community who voted for Donald Trump thinking
that he meant a totally different thing for a different
group of people. But that's not the reality. And we
as a party, we haven't we haven't talked enough about that.
It's like there's so much outrage and there's so much
brutality that we haven't focused on the fact that there
(32:09):
are American citizens that are now walking around with their passports.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Oh yeah, it's disgusting. There are American citizens who are
getting deported. Just like when years and years ago this
government did this to Mexicans. They did, in fact deport
lots of citizens so from what I understand, Like, for example,
I was talking to someone who does a lot of
reporting in Miami. Cubans are largely Republican, or at least
(32:38):
there's a large group of Cubans in Florida who are Republican.
I was being told stories of like them seeing relatives deported,
and they were like, but that wasn't what we signed
up for. And I agree that Democrats have to message
on this hard, but aren't Republicans also messaging on this
hard By deporting.
Speaker 6 (32:56):
These people, they're leaning into this message that we were
going after our criminals and that's.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
But it's not true. I mean, we see video, it's
not true.
Speaker 6 (33:05):
There are people that have criminal records that are being stopped.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
And it's twenty thirty percent.
Speaker 6 (33:10):
Yeah, the vast majority are people that are, you know,
outside of a home depot, parking lot, trying to find work,
people that have been in the country for a very
long time that have no criminal record.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
But in Chicago, it's like they're going into people's apartments
and they're taking out their children. And I mean, I
think this is what's so problematic about this moment is
that Democrats are sort of forced to message because there
is no mainstream madea anymore. So, like Governor Pritzker, I'm
watching this presser yesterday or two days ago, and he's
talking about how the ice agents killed someone. Had I
(33:42):
seen it on social media, I would have thought it
was not true. But when I heard the governor say that,
and know that he's very legit and I know the
people work in office, you know, I was like, holy shit.
The Havanaugh decision.
Speaker 6 (33:55):
I think it's one of those decisions that people fifty
or one hundred years and now will read sort of
like we read the dread Scott decision, or we read
the Koramatsu decision, or we read one of these decisions
that is so just willfully blind to the reality. I
mean this idea that, oh, these detentions are short, and
you know, someone you know has a brief encounter and
then they are, you know, quickly released. No one thinks
(34:18):
that that is true. No one on the streets of
any of our communities thinks that the encounter they're going
to have with a masked federal agent who doesn't have
to wear a bossy camera, who's armed with the long gun,
and who is going to throw somebody to the ground,
is going to have this sort of respectful interaction with people.
But the idea that in twenty twenty five the United
(34:39):
States Supreme Court would officially sanction racial profiling as an
accepted practice of any law enforcement agency, it's astonishing, but
it puts into sharp relief the consequences frankly, again, and
it's a little bit of what we're talking about before
of losing national elections, right, we cannot afford to lose
(35:00):
use the elections because we cannot afford the opportunity to
appoint justices in lieu of Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Barrett
and Justice Gorsuch because they are enabling this lawlessness on
a daily basis. And I think, frankly, the long term consequences,
which we still don't know yet how it's going to
(35:22):
fall out, is this internal struggle I thought would break
a different way in Chief Justice Roberts. He obviously is
somebody who just sucks. He came from the conservative legal movement.
He was an ardent opponent of the Voting Rights Act.
He was a Reagan lawyer. Like he's very clearly a conservative.
But when he was elevated to be the Chief Justice,
I thought his commitment to securing the independence, and frankly,
(35:47):
the institutional reputation of the judiciary would force him to
draw a sharper line, not on some of these other
cases that you know are around the unitary executive. But
I mean, take birthright citizens but.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Birthright citizenship is not up well even to sanction the
government's policy on the shadow docket. Right, that is inexcusable.
Speaker 6 (36:09):
This is not only playing constitutional text, it is playing
constitutional text that has already been interpreted by the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Right, Yeah, I just want to get back to sort
of what's happening though right now in New Mexico. I mean,
what are you seeing Trumpism play out? And how you know?
Speaker 6 (36:27):
I think, for for the most part, we have not
seen the kind of widespread immigration enforcement that you've seen
in Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland and DC and
those other places.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Why do you think that is?
Speaker 6 (36:41):
I think a lot of this is performative. I think, frankly,
it's you go to where the cameras are, you go
to where you're going to get attention. You go to
those places, and I don't think they'll get as much attention.
I also think that this is a place where they
where they will have pretty substantial pushback.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
You are much more likely to.
Speaker 6 (36:59):
Have an encounter with an American citizen of Hispanic descent
whose family has been here for hundreds of years and
throw one of them to the ground. And it may
actually be a Trump supporter that you throw to the ground.
So you go to a Portland, or you go to
a Chicago, or you go to one of those places.
I think for us, the more dramatic effect has been
(37:20):
felt in the cancelation the cuts right, the cuts to NIH,
which we thankfully were able to restore.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Wait, how were you able to restore the NIH cuts?
Speaker 6 (37:30):
We're actually been winning in court in court, at the
lower court, and a lot of what happens is the
administration tries a whole range of unlawful activity, mostly through
Omb and Russell Vote or other executive agencies, the cancelation
of grants and the conditioning of grants. We have had
(37:50):
a really high record of success at the disport level.
And because none of this is legal right, and that
includes with very conservative judges. The country Right, the birthright
Citizen decision was a conservative judge who ruled on that.
The recent decision in Portland that was a Republican appointee
it's only when it gets up to the shadow docket
that things.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Sort of fall apart.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
But we are actually having success in restoring certain funding.
We got restored funding for Voca, for example, for crime victims,
So we're having some of that success, and there's a
lot more concern that I hear from physicians or people
that are relying on these types of moneies. The latest
was in the context of the budgets shut down. We've
(38:34):
had one hundred and thirty five million dollars of proposed
energy grants that have been shut down. And there are
a number of businesses, and this is an interesting sort
of overlay. There are businesses who have already made investments,
they've already funded the money, expecting matching federal dollars, and
then that's not happening. There is a lot of inbound
(38:54):
traffic into our agency from people who rely on federal dollars,
who've built their business plan around it, or their organizational
and financial structures around it, and then had the rug
pulled out from under them.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
But you know, it's not.
Speaker 6 (39:07):
That front line sort of kinetic conflict that we see
in most of the other cities.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
In Florida, in red states where you have these cuts,
these NIH cuts, I guess that the state government is
not pushing back that same way, and so explain what
happens then.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
Yeah, So one of the most consequential procedural decisions to
come out of the Supreme Court is the elimination of
what are known as universal injunctions. Right, and so what
would happen is this coalition of Democratic ags is twenty
three of us. We would file and we would win,
but we would win nationwide injunctions that would protect people
(39:44):
even in Red states and other jurisdictions. Well, now we
are only able to protect the people in our jurisdictions
or parties that have explicitly, you know, obtained their own
counsel and filed their own national What that means is
before if I prevailed in a court in California or
here in New Mexico, I could get a district court
(40:05):
judge to enjoin that action nationwide. That no longer is true.
And so when in red states with Republican AGS, they
are simply unprotected by these cuts. And so you end
up with this patchwork, disparate enforcement, different rights, and access
to different sources of funding and agency action. And it
creates just a lot of chaos, because especially if you
(40:28):
think about going back to birth right citizenship, think about
that right. That's the problem with allowing the policy to
move forward in those places that are not subject to
the injunction. So now we're developing a system where we
have people who are born in certain red states, they
may move to blue states, or they're in blue states
and may move to red. How are we managing the process,
(40:49):
the administrative process of ensuring proper documentation and access to
passports and all those other things.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Wild stuff. Thank you, thank you, Thank you, General tourist,
thank you. No more perfectly Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
So Mally, you know, one of my favorite subjects is
the made up thing that Antifa is this thing that
exists everywhere. It is plenty abound, and they're hiding all
over the place. One of our most psychotic politicians, Texas
Attorney General Ken Paxton. He's going to get to the
bottom of it. Just you wait and see the best.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
I'm really excited to see what happens with Ken Paxton,
mostly known for adultray.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
Right, almost getting impeached.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
That's right, kit Packs, and he did almost get impeached.
He did also leave his wife for his mistress. The guy.
He's filled with moral turpitude, so he wants to infiltrate
leftist terra cells. His first one. He's going to start
with his Patagonia.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
I have a feeling he's going to break into it
a real fucked up yoga studio. That's a hot yoga
studio in Austin.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I'm telling you hot yoga. It's going to be one
of those Bickram studios where you're not allowed to drink
any water for the first ten minutes. And it's going
to be Ken Paxton in the Bickram studio finding the
terrorices and stopping Antifa.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Lucky us, I hope on his way out, in the
little section where they sell Patriadams, he gets some local honey.
It was delicious when I got it there. When you
and I were at Austin last time.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
All I can tell you is that Ken Paxson is
running for Senate and they're basically ruining the state because
Avid things he'll be president one day, which surprise, he's
not going to be, and Paxton thinks he's going to
get John Cornan's seat. So between the two of them,
they will do anything to exercise planetary authority. And make
(42:46):
Trump the mango god king. The Planetara sanitary the best.
It's like Planet Yery, but it's got a planet in it.
It's all happening. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear
(43:09):
the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a
friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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