Justin Wolfers, Jared Huffman & Simon Rosenberg

Think Like an Economist podcast host Professor Justin Wolfers details Trump’s disastrous plan to shift from income taxes to tariffs. Congressman Jared Huffman details the preemptive steps he's taking to stop Trump from having executive power to institute Project 2025 if he is re-elected. The Hopium Chronicles' Simon Rosenberg examines the 2024 election.

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Episode Transcript

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, and the state of Louisiana legally requires
the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms. We have
such a great show for you today. Congressman Jared Hoffman
stops by to talk about the preemptive steps he and

(00:24):
his committee are taking to try to stop Trump from
having executive power and instituting Project twenty twenty five if
he is re elected. Then we'll talk to the Opium
Chronicles Simon Rosenberg about what he's seeing in the twenty
twenty four election. But first we have the host of
the Think Like an Economist podcast, University of Michigan, Professor

(00:48):
Justin Wolfers. Welcome back to Fast Politics. One of my
favorite personal favorite guests, despite the fact that he's having
a much better time than the rest of us.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Justin Wolfers, Molly, being one of your favorite economists is
do you have a second favorite?

Speaker 1 (01:09):
I mean, I love Krugman. We've had him on He's
no terrific. Yeah, you're right, walk Krugman. He's my guy.
But I think we should have a Bollman here of
victory lap because you were right. You were cautiously optimistic
about this economy, and you turned out to be right.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Do you want to spend fifteen minutes on there? So
forty five?

Speaker 1 (01:35):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Look the US economy, it's been just a relentlessly boring story,
which is the economy keeps growing, wages are growing, they're
ahead of prices, inequality keeps falling, unemployments near a fifty
year low. It's just so dull. This is what economists want.

(01:57):
John Maynard Kines famously said he wanted economists to be
is boring as dentists. If you look at the economy
out there, it is wonderfully, splendidly boring. Different families have
different stories. Lots of people are struggling with the cost
of living, but lots of people are finding work, lots
of people are finding new jobs, lots of people are
starting new businesses, lots of people are getting pay rises,

(02:19):
and overall all across the income distribution, people are keeping
up and in fact doing better than keeping up. They're
getting ahead. And this little engine that could, the US
economy is doing things that most economists thought it would
never be able to do. So Look, it's not my
victory lap, it's Joe Biden's and most importantly, it's the
American people's.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Infleetion is why an economy that looks good feels bad.
Explain to us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Look, there's different ways of thinking about it. Let me
start with why it feels bad, and then let me
do that horrible thing that you're not allowed to do
and explain why it shouldn't. So why does it feel bad?
You go to the grocery store and you see the
high prices and they're shocking, and it leads you to
do something like call it a cost of living crisis.

(03:07):
And if prices over the past few years have gone
up by ten percent, you think yourselful if they hadn't
gone up by ten percent able to buy ten percent
more stuff. So it feels like inflation stole from you,
just took away your purchasing power. Now, that's not actually
how economies work. If we hadn't had that, and here's look,

(03:29):
let me try and get to the core of the issue. Mollie.
What I want to do is close your eyes right
now and your listeners to unless they're driving, and imagine
you fall asleep for ten years like sleeping beauty, and
you wake up and everything in the world has an
extra zero on it. Right, So the dollar store is
now the ten dollar store. The ten dollar bill in

(03:50):
your wallet is now one hundred dollar bill. The one
thousand dollars in savings you had is now ten thousand dollars.
An apple isn't a dollar, it's ten dollars. An orange
isn't a dollar, it's ten dollars. And so on. Your
wages went up tenfold, everything's gone up tenfold. What different
choices would you make? How different is that world? And
the answer is it's exactly the same as before you

(04:11):
went asleep. There's just more zeros in it. Right, The
number of hours you have to work to afford an
apple hasn't changed, Right, Your wage is ten times high.
It shows the price of the apple. So how hard
you work, what you'll buy, and what your quality of
life is would be exactly the same. Just that world
would have extra zeros on the end of it. And

(04:31):
so what we see there is that if all prices
and all wages go up at the same time, nothing changes.
And so that's an example of one hundred, sorry, one
thousand percent inflation and no one's any worse off, and
so if you want to get fancy, this is what
economists call neutrality. If everything goes up at the same time,
it's neutral. Nothing changes, the inflation doesn't matter at all.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's sort of what's happened in this country.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
It's kind of mostly what happened. If I try and
look someone in the I that's exactly what happened, and
they'll say not exactly, and I have to agree with them.
But it's actually most of the story, which is, you know,
since the pandemic, wages are roughly up twenty percent, prices
are roughly up twenty percent, Housing prices are roughly up
twenty percent, the price of apples are roughly up twenty percent,
and so on. It just doesn't feel that way.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
We have been living in a country where money has been.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Cheap or free. Yeah, that's such a funny expression. Money
never feels cheap to me, but.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
With low interest rates, it means that money has been
very cheap.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Right, so it's been easy to borrow, to get a
mortgage and so on. But I really want to focus
on inflation. An earlier generation, my parents lived through much
of their lives with inflation in the United States bumping
around five, ten percent, fifteen percent, up and down and
up and down, and they understood the deal. The deal

(05:51):
was when prices rise, eventually your wages will rise and
it will catch up, and it'll be a little bit
like that dream I just described to you. So they
didn't freak out. They just were used to it. They
knew that when inflation happened, everything would eventually sort itself
out and you'll basically be made whole. And then what
happened was we had thirty, maybe even forty years of

(06:13):
basically no inflation. We had inflation at basically two percent,
which is so low you barely notice it. And so
for anyone my age, I'm fifty one or less, they're
not used to the deal that when inflation rises, everything
will sort itself out and you won't actually get ripped off.
And so they feel ripped off.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
And I hear you.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
I know that you feel ripped off, But I also
know enough from studying the US economy and economies all
around the world, you're not going to be ripped off.
And in fact, it's pretty clear that by election day,
and actually probably by today, almost across the entire income distribution,
everyone's wages higher than they were before this inflationary burst.

(06:56):
Once they've risen by more than prices have, things have
mostly but not entirely sorted themselves.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Out right. Talk us through how Trump is going to
fix inflation. Ha ha.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Well, the first thing he's going to do, he said,
is shift from an income tax to tariffs. Tariffs sound
like a really good idea. It sounds like that's a
tax on China, boy, and you know, added a little
xenophobia and stir, but actually a tariff is a tax
on a good that an American buys. And just because

(07:32):
I'm a Chinese manufacturer, if I could sell my goods
to Europe or the US, I'm not going to sell
him any cheaper to the US. That means, if you
make me pay a ten percent tax, I'm going to
pass that along. And in fact, there were very careful
studies of the first Trump tariffs on washing machines and
things like that, and basically every extra dollar in tariffs
were passed along as a dollar higher prices. And so

(07:55):
when we moved to tariffs, that's basically saying he's going
to burst sales taxes on anything you buy from abroad.
Have a look at the label on the T shirt
you're wearing right now. I guarantee you it's not made
in the US, and so it's going to cause an
enormous inflationary burst right there. Secondly, he wants to undermine
the independence of the FED. This is the sort of

(08:17):
wonky stuff that no one cares about, but is the
first step to becoming Argentina. And your listeners might say,
what's Argentina famous for. It's famous for great football, terrific beef,
and the fact that one hundred years ago it was
one of the richest countries in the world, and then
its political leadership took every opportunity it could to fuck

(08:37):
it up. And one of the ways it does that
is by letting loose on inflation and creating a crisis.
And one of the ways it does that is it
allows politically expedient moves in important macro stuff. And so
one of the things we do in the US is
we give the FED J. Powell and his crew, We
tell them go and solve inflation. We'll leave you alone

(08:59):
to do it and don't hussle you around election time.
And that's how, partly how we've avoided being Argentina. Now Trump,
of course, thinks that's terrible. What he wants to do
is centralized power in the Oval office. He wants the
FED to be calling him to say what should we
do about inflation. The thing that he will want to do,
before any election or any moment is try and goose

(09:19):
the economy so he looks good, and that would cause
an inflationary burst, and that is the first step towards
the path of becoming Argentina. I don't know where that
process starts. I don't know where it ends, but I
do know it's a game I don't want to play.
The US has had tremendous economic success because we have
politically stable economic institutions. We have nerds whose job is

(09:41):
to be nerds and not worry about politics, and that
has protected us from the sort of madness you see
in other populist countries. Think about Turkey, think about Argentina,
and then look at our quality of life, and you
realize that being protected from populism has been marvelous for US.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah. I don't know. Wow, you made Trump sound worse,
but you did. I don't think I had completely saw
through the consequences of that. Why do you think rich
people like I mean, some of these people are ideologically
just have brain worms. But why do you think that
Republicans are still thought of by many voters as better

(10:21):
on the economy.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
This has been a puzzle my whole life. So let
me just sort of lay out a few facts. It
used to be that we thought of Republicans as fiscally conservative,
that they take care of the budget, and this basically
hasn't been true in my entire adult life. Reagan famously
busted the budget more than anyone. Clinton then reined it in.

(10:44):
Bush busted the budget, Obama did what he could. You saw,
Trump busted the budget. We haven't had a fiscally conservative
Republican in forty or fifty years. So it used to
be that was a core tenant of conservatives that what
they wanted to do was balance it's the budget that
they wanted to make sure that the government was not
going to create any fiscal risks, and it's simply something

(11:05):
that they gave up. They gave up. There was a
very clear political theory, which is it was behind what
Reagan did, which is, if we spend all the money,
there'll be less money left for Democrats to spend. If
we have the big party. They have to clean up,
and Democrats have played along because if they don't clean up,
then we're really in a mess. So the idea that
Republicans were fiscally conservative, it's an idea that persists. People

(11:27):
still say I vote Republican because I want to balance
the budget. It's simply not been something that they've done
in decades and decades. Then there's this broad a question.
You know, people say I trust Republicans on the economy. Well, really,
if you look at the statistics on this, almost every
Republican administration has ended in recession. But happened under Bush,
it obviously happened under Trump, It's happened all the way back.

(11:49):
And if you look at the statistics, in fact, the
economy does slightly somewhat better, quite a bit better actually
under Democrats and under Republicans. Now, I actually don't want
to trumpet that too much. I know that will disappoint you.
We only change leaders every four years, so we have
a very small sample. But what is absolutely clears there's
absolutely no evidence, none, that the economy is better under

(12:11):
Republicans than under Democrats. Because if anything appears to in
US history be the opposite. So why is it people
think this is good for the economy. I'm puzzled there,
Molly just puzzled.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, I mean, it's just sort of baffling. And we're
thinking about So now, one of the inflationary aspects that
Biden really can't control, and probably the one that is
the most stubborn, is the FED. Talk to us about
what the FED is doing here with interest rates and
if they're going to have a rate cup before the election.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
So the first thing that's important about what you said
is you said that Biden can't do anything about the FED.
That's because he's a grown up and Trump would be
railing against it. Trump at this point was railing against it.
This is a fact that happened through twenty nineteen, screaming
at the FED that despite inflation starting to show up,

(13:07):
he's screaming at them to do nothing about it. That's
an historical fact that happened. Economics nerds like me will
tell you that's very, very bad because all politicians scream
at the FED. And if that happened and the Fed responded,
then the Fed would never do anything to keep inflation down,
and inflation would run away. And so the responsible thing
to do is to tell the FED go away and

(13:28):
do your job, and I'm going to leave you alone.
And that's what Biden is choosing to do. So I
think that it's an investment in the future of our
economy at the cost of his political There's some small
political cost that he's paying now, but he's willing to
make that choice and I respect him for it. Now,
what the FED is trying to do is, you know,
inflation's down from rates as high as nine percent there

(13:50):
was an inflation crisis, down to roughly three percent right now.
The FED wants it down to two. And so this
is the last mile problem, which is we've got it
from high down to almost normal. Now for most people
the difference between normal and almost normal is not much
and it doesn't really affect our lives very much. We
have the memory of a bad inflation through twenty twenty

(14:11):
two and twenty three, but for most of twenty four
inflation's really been pretty normal. But the FED wants it
from almost normal all the way down to normal. That's
what it's worried about. That we're not quite there. It
does look like it's on its way there. We had
literally no inflation last month, none and so it's keeping
interest rates high enough for long enough that it can
be confident that it will get it all the way down.

(14:33):
And partly it's felt okay doing that because the economy,
the real economy, people getting jobs, people making stuff, has
been so strong. So it's managed to this is the
so called soft landing. It's managed to get inflation down
without creating a recession. And so because it appears not
to have inflicted that much pain, it's willing to do
a little more right now.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
So interesting, Thank you so much, justin I hope you'll
come back when you're back in Michigan.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Yeah, mis week, it's fun. Australia's fun. You should all
come and visit.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
Spring us here. And I bet you are trying to
look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all
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(15:28):
Congressman Jared Huffman represents California's second district. Welcome to Fast Politics, Congressmen.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Great to be with you, Mollie, So.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Excited to have you. You know, I would love you to like,
give us a little backstory on how you got involved
in this. You've been in Congress for a while. Give
us a sort of introduction to how you got here
and what you sort of your passions in Congress are,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Absolutely well.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
Look, I came to Congress twelve years ago mainly to
do environmental work. I'm a former our metal lawyer at
the NRDC, did that work for six years in the
state legislature. I find myself now kind of on the
front lines of trying to hang onto our democracy against
this terrible MAGA threat and Christian nationalism and all these
other awful things that I couldn't have foreseen when I

(16:15):
first ran for Congress. But that's the fight that I'm in,
and I'm trying to do my part. I had a
briefing maybe two months ago as part of the Progressive
Caucus on Project twenty twenty five. Thought I knew generally
what it was, but I have to say I was
seriously alarmed after that briefing, after understanding the groups behind it,
the explicitness of the extremism, the sweeping nature of this

(16:38):
authoritarian blueprint for what the Republicans will do, not what
they sort of fantasize about doing, but what they absolutely
will do if they take power in this election, and
I concluded that Democrats need to step up and do
much more to spotlight it and fight against it while
we still have time.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
One of the sort of key jug or not a
project twenty twenty five is the same thing as this
Supreme Court right is to dismantle the administrative state, to
get environmentalists out of the EPA, to strip science from government.
It's a larger gestault, and it really is, I think
one of the few things they believe in at this

(17:17):
point in the Republican Party. Can you say more about that?

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah, if you look through the chapters, and you know,
nobody's going to have time to wade through nine hundred
and twenty pages of by designing manifesto, but you know
our task force and you and others will help to
distill this for people. But if you look through it,
every aspect of government is sort of consolidated into executive power.

(17:41):
And what do they want to do with that? Well,
in almost every single agency, it's about weaponizing it to
advance this authoritarian right wing agenda, including going after their
political opponents. So even even some of the seemingly innocuous
parts of Project twenty twenty five, like bringing the FCC
under jure presidential power, ending the independence that many of

(18:03):
these agencies have typically had.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
What's that about.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Well, it's about President Trump having basically singular power over
which corporate mergers go through and how we control immedia.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
This is like this Russia fantasy air dewan kind of authoritarianism,
the idea that you know, you pick the winners and
the losers. Right.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
Absolutely, this unitary executive theory is all about that, and
it's all over Project twenty twenty five.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Can you say more about unitary executive theory because that
is sort of held up at the heart of the project.

Speaker 4 (18:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
So this is the theory that we've heard espoused, you know,
during the first Trump administration by Bill Barr and others.
It's a theory they've advanced in some of their legal
arguments before the courts, where the president basically can dictate
everything that the executive branch does all of these agencies,
including the Department of Justice, telling them who to prosecute,

(18:57):
how to handle cases, what the FBI should investigate. If
we even have an FBI under these guys, it's just
sweeping and you know, kind of terrifying.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
One of the things about this thesis, and I think
it's Project twenty twenty five, but I also think Project
twenty twenty five just puts on paper, just like Roger
Stone brags about it, the things that the Supreme Court
is quietly trying to do. And so I'm hoping you
could talk about there is a play towards greater regulation

(19:28):
of women's reproduction. Wow, no regulation of oil and gas,
So make that make sense.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
So there's the paradox, right, they want to absolutely control
women in their bodies. They want to tell them, you know,
which babies they have to have and which ones they
can't have because they're coming after IVF.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
When you read that IVF regulation thing, it's just I mean,
you know, they say, well, it's never been regulating. All
you care about is ending regulation. But somehow you're going
to do it on IVF anyway, go on.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Sorry, Yeah, and they're going to bring the FDA under
executive control as well, so get ready for that. No,
you're absolutely right. When it comes to corporate America and
business in the fossil fuel industry, the regulatory state's going
to be gutted. There are no regulations that they like
at all. So it's sort of a libertarian dystopia in
that space. But when it comes to individual liberties and

(20:20):
individual rights, church state separation, LGBTQ, community reproductive choice, the
heavy hand of government is there in a big way.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Absolutely beyond we are now. One of the things that
I'm hoping you could explain to us a little bit
about is where you think this sort of came from.
I mean, obviously this comes from Trump to some extent,
but this clearly has longer tentacles than Trump, and it's
hard to imagine Trump cooking up anything that is more
than just sort of the gut instinct.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
It's a codependency I think. I mean, Trump likes this
because it favors authoritarianism and the kind of things that
he wants. But the far right conservative movement has been
pishing many of these things for a long time as well.
The Christian nationalist movement wants so many of these things,
the culture war elements, and so I think, you know,
there's a great synergy between our aspiring dictator and these

(21:12):
extremist right wing groups that want this agenda.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
I just said David Wallace Wells just interviewing him, and
we're talking about how in every environmental person I talk to,
not everyone, but a lot of them, there's a lot
of optimism because even though the temperature is a rising
too fast and we're not where we need to be
with the Paris Accord, there is a sense in which
renewables are so cheap that fossil fuels really is becoming

(21:37):
so much closer to coal just price wise, that it
will really take a lot of government subsidies to keep
oil and gas going. I mean, I think that is
still what Republicans want. I mean, it's such a paradox
here because we have so many businesses like local news
or even you know, newspapers in general, right, like nonprofit

(22:00):
newsrooms that would desperately could desperately use these subsidies, and
instead they're going to oil and gas, they're going to coal,
They're going to things that kill the planet, and don't
do anything. Talk to us about that.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
Well, there's no question that we continue to subsidize the
fossil fuel industry in a big way. I share your
optimism about clean energy eventually winning out on the economics
if nothing else, but what continues to disturb me is
that we don't have time to wait for the market
to realize all of that. We've got a climate crisis

(22:32):
that is compelling us to speed up. And that's where
Project twenty twenty five in the clean energy and environmental
space isn't necessarily anything new. We've seen this right wing
agenda for years, but the fact that they're proposing to
run out the clock on another four to eight years
could be the endgame for our ability to confront the
climate crisis.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
That is for sure true. The thing that I always
think about is that when the pandemic came, I had
this moment where I thought, Okay, this is it. Science
is going to win. Americans are going to be like
the people telling us to take horse dewormer. They're wrong
because it doesn't treat COVID vaccines work like this is
going to be the moment, and instead none of that happened.

(23:15):
The right just decided that Anthony Fauci needs to go
to jail. I mean, you have been doing environmental law
for a long time, so maybe you were less naive
than I was, but I was shocked.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
I didn't anticipate the degree of backsliding and ignorance and
self destruction really that we saw in some of that conspiracism.
So it was an eye opener, But it wasn't just
here in the United States. We've seen the same kind
of backlash against science and liberalism in these right wing
movements around Europe and in other parts of the world.

(23:49):
So I think we've got a real reckoning here between
science and our ability to live in community with common
sense and this revivalism, in many cases driven and by
extreme right wing Christian nationalism, not just here in the US,
but in Hungary and other places. We got to choose
which century we want to live in.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
So crazy, like when you think about how to get
everybody on the same page, right like right now, we
have a problem which is some percentage of the country
and I'm not willing to say it's forty two percent.
I think it's lower. But some percentage of the country
of America doesn't share the same reality that we do.
And they think that there's a child pedophile ring. They

(24:30):
think that climate change is a hoax made up by
the Chinese to sell cars. I mean, they think a
lot of stuff. They think COVID isn't real, they think
the Sandy Hook kids weren't murdered. These are provable facts, right,
that are not true. So in your mind when you
look at like, you know, part of this is fracturing
of the mainstream media. Part of this is social media.

(24:51):
But what do you think is the thing that the
government can do to sort of try to provide a
coherent reality of things that are true.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
I'm not sure the government can do it. I think
all of us have a role to play. I mean,
you mentioned the fracturing of the media, and I think
that's just a huge part of this. I think our
information ecosystem has just changed. We haven't quite figured out
what to do with this plethora of junk that's out
there and malicious stuff where people are monetizing conflict and

(25:25):
ignorance and disinformation, and it's big business. So we've got
a lot of work to do there. There's pieces of
it that I think we can do through public policy.
But I'll tell you one part of Project twenty twenty
five that is taking us in the wrong direction of this.
To bring it back to that, they're going to get
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
You know, one of the few places.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
Where you can yeah, where you can get trusted you know,
good deep politicized information is PBS, and they don't like it.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
One of the things that it seems to me, could
be a solve Section two thirty.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
There's actually still some space for bipartieship when it comes
to Section two thirty and some of this corporate accountability
in the media space. I don't trust these folks at
the Heritage Foundation and a potential Trump administration for striking
the right balance and getting that right. They say some
up the right things, but I don't trust them.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
But it is interesting to see Josh Holly, who has
been on the wrong side of so many things, be
on the right side of interviewing that Boeing CEO. Right,
I mean there is a groundswell in America. I mean
we're a country where there's such a huge wealth and equity.
There is a sense here in which I think Congress

(26:39):
has an opportunity to let people know they're listening to them.
Will you go with us just for a minute about
what the things you guys are doing to prepare us
for Project twenty twenty five and what you can do
and what that looks like.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
Absolutely so, by far the most important thing that Congress
can do through this task force that all of us
can really do is to bring Project twenty twenty five
out of the shadows of this right wing fever swamp,
spotlight it, make it understood. I saw some polling yesterday
that only twelve percent of Americans have even heard of
Project twenty twenty five. Crazy, and when they just sort

(27:15):
of hear about it generically, you know, it doesn't seem
like that big a deal to them. When we explain
it to them, though, This is where this gets really interesting.
The numbers are off the charts. The negative reaction to
Project twenty twenty five is extreme, and it's especially strong
with independence. You rarely find like overwhelming you unanimity among independents.

(27:35):
The opposition to Project twenty twenty five just with some
basic explanation of it jumps to eighty eight percent among independents.
So this is a winning message for us right now,
simply explaining what they're promising that they're going to do.
It's that straightforward, and I think this should just be
a huge part of our closing argument heading into the election.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
The general idea of Project twenty twenty five is this
idea that you will destroy the federal government in such
a way and then replace those people with cronies. Do
you have ways to protect some of these federal employees.

Speaker 3 (28:10):
Look, if we somehow let these guys have power, you know,
there's no scenario where we roll over and just let
them do all these things. You will use the court system,
you will litigate these things. You know, if we have
one or both houses of Congress, there's oversight and per
string levers that we can use. But the most definitive
way to stop this is to win the election. That's

(28:31):
the point that we're really trying to make here is
the American people have an opportunity to kill this in
its tracks, and we got to do that because, yeah,
we'll keep fighting if we don't win, but there are
no guarantees, no right.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
And I think that what's really important is that things
have gone so much worse. I mean, these guys are
ready to go on day one in a way they
weren't before. And I think you know, one of the
things that Trump able to do, which was really a roarchack,
was he was able to say, like, I'm not as

(29:04):
conservative as all these lunatics because i come from New
York and I've been married ten million times et cetera,
et cetera. But that was that ultimately wasn't true because
he didn't care about policy, so we just let them
do whatever he wanted, whatever they wanted, the sort of
Koch brothers crew and much more conservative than the Kochs. Right,
how do you explain Project twenty twenty five to people

(29:25):
in the quickest possible way?

Speaker 3 (29:27):
So I think you have to start by talking about
the extremism and the attack on democracy, the authoritarianism, the
sweeping away of checks and balances on executive power, and
then you've got to get right into the individual rights
and liberties. There are other parts of Project twenty twenty
five that are also alarming, but those are the ones
that resonate strongest according to the polling with people, and

(29:50):
I think we've got to lead with that.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
You come from environmental law. Quietly, the Biden administration has
done some incredible environmental progressive policies. Can can you talk
about them?

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Vern Minna? Well?

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Look, I'm a climate action guy, I'm a climate hawk.
I'm never going to be satisfied because we're winning slowly
is losing when it comes to the climate crisis. But
I've got to give this administration a lot of credit.
We have taken stronger, bolder, more transformational climate actions than
any presidency in history. We've still got a lot more
work to do. There's still too much fossil fuel business

(30:23):
as usual, but it is very significant, and we've built
a foundation. So look, we had to choke down some
terrible fossil fuel provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act from
Joe Manchin, for example, Joe Mansion's got to be gone.
We can go right to work undoing those Mansion pieces
and continuing to make further progress on the good pieces
of that. And that's the kind of work that I

(30:44):
want to do. You can't do that in a Trump administration.
You can't do that with a Republican the majority in
both houses of Congress. So it brings us right back
to what's at stake in this election.

Speaker 1 (30:55):
I can't tell what's my bubble, my media bubb all
my own fantasy of how the world is and what,
because you know, the reality is all the information we're
getting his polls, and a lot of these polls are broken,
so we really none of us really know what's going
to happen. But it does seem to me that there
aren't a lot of Republican policies that they're shopping here, right.

(31:20):
I mean Trump says crazy stuff to get elected. Right,
He's not going to make people pay taxes on tips.
I don't know how that's going to work. You know,
he's going to cut the Nevada right exactly in a
place where the service industry is the big business. And
then he goes and says, you know that he's going
to cut taxes and just have tariffs. I mean, wildly inflationary,
completely crazy. But it doesn't seem to me like the

(31:42):
Republicans have a ton of policy. Besides this crazy dystopian stuff.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Trump is an empty vessel himself. Policy for Donald Trump
is just power. He just wants power. I would say
it's different with these groups. And it's not just the
Heritage Foundation authoring Project twenty twenty. It's one hundred and
eight I think now leading right wing groups. It's groups
that have been at the front line of the culture war,

(32:08):
like you know this fake church, the Family Research Council,
Oh yeah, yeah, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is this
crazy right wing group that Mike Johnson used to work
for as an attorney. I mean, they want a nationwide
abortion band. They want to get women back in the
kitchen and under their complete control. It is extreme and
that is that's what policy means to these folks, and

(32:31):
they're going to get their way. I am convinced if
Donald Trump becomes the president and they take both houses
of Congress, they're not messing around here. This is really
what they want exactly.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
It's so I mean, it's really scary and really important
to talk about. When you think about climate. Can you
give me like sort of what's on your climate legislation
wish list?

Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah, So we've got to do more in the clean
energy space. You know, the tax incentives we're great from
the Inflation Reduction Act. We've got to clean up things
like the incentives for fake climate solutions that we had
to choke down because of Joe Manchion. So, you know,
some of this blue hydrogen nonsense, the CO two pipelines,
the fiction of carbon capture and sequestration. We do not

(33:18):
have time for fake climate solutions in my opinion. So
we got to undo the damage from Joe Manchion and
keep pressing.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
And that's hydrogen is in there right.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
Jin if it's done wrong, can take us backward, no doubt.
About it, and the fossil fuel industry has every intention
of doing it wrong.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
The minutia of climate seems like, like should Elon Musk
be building chargers? I mean it feels like there are
some of this stuff has gone to people who are
a little bit dicey. Clearly we need more chargers, Like
where are we with that? And can you talk about that?

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Yeah, I'm not as troubled by that. I don't like
Elon Musk, but I do like what Tesla has done
for the electrification of transportation. So you know, I think
that his charging network is now kind of extending out
to other companies. Tesla is not going to have the
kind of dominance that it once had, although it's kind
of standard is going to be the one that probably prevails.

(34:15):
So I think all of that is fine. I'm a
little bit conflicted about these tariffs on Chinese eighties is
I think, frankly, our American car companies are not doing
as much as they should in a little competition to
kick them in the butt would not hurt the bottom
line that I always come back to on this, Molly's
we just don't have time. So anything that moves us

(34:35):
faster and further on decarbonization. You know, I tend to
be four.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah, no, agreed, thank you, thank you, Thank you, Congressman
so important. I really appreciate you. I hope you will
come back.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
I will, and thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
I appreciate it. Simon Rosenberg is a political strategist and
the author of the Opium Chronicles. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Simon.

Speaker 4 (35:04):
Great to be here with you, Molly always.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
It's great to have you. So it's like, you know,
it's funny because it's like I actually was sort of
fighting with someone on the podcast, not really fighting, but
a little bit, and they were saying, well, you know,
it's so crazy that Republicans are doing as well as
they are in the United States when in the UK

(35:28):
the Tories are going to get decimated. And I was
thinking to myself, we don't know how Republicans are doing, right,
all we know are these polls.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:37):
Look, it's not really an analogous situation, right.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
I'm just saying, like, so much of the base of
knowledge that many of us are going on is because
of Poles.

Speaker 4 (35:47):
Right, And I do want to say something now about
this because it's important, because this is going to come
up is that you know, the Tories have been in
power for a long time and have utterly failed. And
the difference between the Labor Party and the UK and
the Democratic in the US is that, you know, we
are the Democratic Party is the most successful center left
left political party in the developed world. There has been

(36:09):
no party that has done as well as we have,
even remotely close to us in Europe, in Japan, I mean,
we've won more votes that seven out of eight presidential elections.
I mean, most of the developed world, the left, the
center left has struggled, and here in the US we've
actually been wildly successful for a long period of time.

(36:30):
And I just want to establish that because I think
that we forget sometimes, you know, we're always sort of
feeling adversity as Democrats, right, And the truth is we're
part of the most successful modern center left party in
the developed world, and we should be proud of that.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
I think.

Speaker 4 (36:44):
In terms of your question about the polling, yeah, look,
I mean the polling right now. My view and where
the election is is that you know, in twenty twenty two,
what happened is that the election up until the spring
of twenty twenty two was largely about inflation and low
approval rating and COVID and then something changed the election.

(37:04):
That was Uvaldi, the January sixth Committee hearings, the Dobs league,
and then the Dobbs decision itself, and all of that
stuff congealed into this sort of big, ugly thing reminding
voters of the ugliness and the extremism of MAGA. And
the question in this cycle was what we have to

(37:25):
bring that ugliness into voters through our campaigns, as we
did in twenty twenty two, you know, with this assist
from events, or would events help us? And I think
that part of what's happened in the last few weeks
is there's some evidence that the verdict guilty, guilty, guilty
thirty four times has started shifting the election. The election
is changing, and I think that where we're entering now

(37:46):
and what everyone should realize that, you know, we're going
to have a debate in a few days, and the
Republican convention comes, and Trump's sentencing happens, and then our
convention and then another debate, and the election is now
hurtling at us with incredible speed. And I think we're
moving the twenty twenty four elections starting to become the
twenty twenty four election. It's starting to develop its own character.
And I think that in the last few weeks there

(38:08):
have been six national polls, credible, serious polls showing Biden
gaining between two and four points. I think the election
has shifted a few points in our direction, but it's
close and competitive, and we have a lot of work
to do. But I in every way imaginable, I would
much rather be less than them. I think it's far
more likely that we win than they do.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
But with the twenty twenty two election and the twenty
twenty three election and all the specials, those were all
low turnet elections, so it was a different electorate, right,
I mean, what's happening here is there is a different electorate.
When we talk about polling, what we see is that
the pollsters are trying to guess about an electorate that

(38:51):
has shown up in twenty twenty and twenty sixteen and
never before and never after. So in some ways, you know,
there are certainly outside issues. But if you look at
every single election since twenty sixteen, Biden and Democrats more broadly,
and Biden wasn't on the ticket in the midterms, but

(39:12):
they have won so in my mind, the question is
what does a high turnout election look like in twenty
twenty four? And I think there's a lot of guessing
going on in the polling.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yeah, let me. You raised some important things. Let me
take them on sequentially, because I think this whole theory
about low turnout and high turnout elections, I basically don't
ascribe to that. And the reason why is because I've
worked in campaigns. I've worked in politics, and every election
is a competition between two teams. And the notion that

(39:43):
somehow you could look at all these victories that we've
had in all sorts of elections all across the country,
ballot initiatives, state rep races, governors races, senate races, where
the two teams lined up and one team kept winning
and the other team kept losing, and that's somehow a
group of analysts looked at all that and said that's
actually bad for the winning team is absurd on its

(40:05):
face in my view. And then I think this is
almost like a Jedi mind trick that's happened to all
of the political commentary, and it could only be by people,
And who are the origins of this? People who haven't
actually worked on campaigns because those of us who've been
in campaigns recognize that every election you have no idea
if you're going to win. It's like a basketball game

(40:26):
and a tournament. You may be the favorite team, but
you got to go out and win the game, right,
and winning is really hard. And so first of all,
I just think this notion that we can look at
this extraordinary performance of the Democratic Party since Dobbs happened,
where parties in power, you know, going back to your
basic premise, right, we've won more votes in seven out

(40:47):
of eight presidential elections the last eight. That's the best
popular vote r out of an American political party in
our history. Second is that from night the last four elections,
we've averaged fifty one percent of the vote. That's the
best showing of the Democratic Party since FDRs for presidency
for presidential elections. Then post Dobbs, we've had the party

(41:08):
in power always loses seats in special elections, off your elections,
mid your midterm elections, and we've gained seats. And so
we've not only been on this extraordinary popular vote run,
we've also been in this extraordinary performance by a party
in power. And I think that it is. I think

(41:29):
it's my view and it's the view of the campaign.
Frankly from listening to them talk that the likely scenario
is that because the reason we've been winning is not
because of low turnout and audience, is that we have
better arguments than they do.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
I agree that they run on nothing except Trump is God.
But I don't want to be like naive here, which
is it is a lower, smaller group of people. That's
why it's called lower turnout. The fact that Democrats have
sort of become the party that goes out at every
election is humongous and is a huge win for Democrats. Right,

(42:05):
they know what the stakes are. Obviously, you can't say
that the turnout is the same because it's not the
turnout for the presidential elections, and the turnout for the
midterms not the same. And I don't think Republicans are
offering anything, right, I mean, tax cuts for billionaires, extra
helping hand for oil companies. I mean, I don't think
as a normal voter, the pitch that Trump is making

(42:28):
is undoable. Right, He's going to lower inflation and he's
going to cut all taxes and then put a you know,
one hundred and ten percent tariff on everything. I mean,
he has no policy. This party has no policy. It
hasn't had a policy since twenty twenty when they got
rid of all the party platform. My theory of the
case is, look, you know, polls are pseudo events, they're

(42:50):
not necessarily real, and that if the numbers are sort
of moving in the right direction, that's a good sign.
I also think the pollsters are so freaked out from
being wrong about Trump in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty,
because remember they underestimated him both times, that there's a
certain kind of conservative bus stuff going on. Yeah, and

(43:11):
then they're flooding the zone with junkie polls too. I mean,
there's all sorts of things going on. But my question
is more like, what's your take at the end of
the day.

Speaker 4 (43:19):
What I always believe to be the case, and I
think what the campaign has always believed to be the case,
is that when we put the choice in front of voters, right,
and we actually run ads, and we have this huge
amount of money that we're raising, which are giving us
the most powerful campaigns that we've ever had, both in
terms of controlling the information environment and also pushing our
performance on the ground. To the upper end of what's possible.

(43:42):
That the reason we keep winning is not because it's
a big electorate or a small electorate. Is that when
we take this this choice of pragmatic, good Democrats who've
made things better in people's lives and then this extremist,
freakish Maga party, that we overperform and win and they
underperform and struggle, And that this has happened again and

(44:03):
again and again, and that it is the likely scenario
for what's going to happen in this election when we
take the choice of the good Democratic Party and the
crazy Republican Party and we put it in front of voters,
funded backed up by all this money that we've been raising.
In the intensity I mean, this intensity that we at
in the Democratic Party, this sort of what has been

(44:24):
described as by analysts as sort of us doing really
well in these low turnout elections. That intensity is not
just translating into electoral victories because of voters. It's because
that intensity is driving unprecedent amounts of money, unprecedented numbers
of volunteers, and it's allowing us to build the most
powerful democratic political machine that we've ever had. And that's
part of the story that is being left out of

(44:46):
this analysis about the high turnout vote out election is
that that intensity and the money is allowing us to
continue to overperform in these elections. And I think it's
the general view that that's the likely scenario election. And yes,
I think that job we have a better candidate, we
have better arguments, we have a far better campaign apparatus,

(45:06):
and we are going to have the biggest political machine
that the Democratic Party has ever built in this election.
And so all of that leads me to be optimistic.
And you're right, no one I never said a good
accuse of saying that playing poll trutherism or saying the
polls were wrong. I never said that. What I said
was that I believe that the polls weren't determinative, and
that when we began our campaign started talking to voters,

(45:29):
that we had confidence that when we had talked to
voters and all of these other elections, we had seen
our numbers improved once the campaign has began, and because
we have a better argument, better candidate, better campaigns, and
that that is the likely scenario this time. And so
I remain deeply optimistic about where we are. And I
also think that what has happened in the last few
weeks is there is evidence that the verdict is acting

(45:53):
like a Dobbs like event in this election, where it
became in your based reminder of the ugliness of Trump
and MAGA that become unavoidable if the whole premise is
that people are starting to check into the election now
and that what they're checking into is that one party
as a serial criminal running and the other party has

(46:14):
a very successful president who's made people's lives better. You know,
I'll take that if that's going to be the way
we can frame this thing. And obviously the Biden campaign
right now is running a very very hard hitting ad
with a huge amount of money behind it, going right
into the felony convictions stuff and a sexual assault, the
fraud that he committed. You know that stuff is going
to hurt Trump. We already know this. I mean, the

(46:35):
political poll out this week showed that twenty one percent
of independent voters view the verdict as something that would
cause them to be less likely to vote for Trump,
and it's a voting issue for them, right and seven
percent of Republicans. I mean, if you add that up,
that's like five percent of the electorate is now saying
openly they're much less likely to vote for Trump, and

(46:56):
it's and it's so significant that it may alter their vote.
That's a lot of voters who have all of a
sudden become loosened from Trump in a very short period
of time, by the way, without any paid advertising or
paid communication to reinforce this, without the kind of what's
going to happen to Trump at the debate if he
shows up, you know, he's clearly going to get a

(47:16):
question at this debate about his misdeeds, and you know
it's going to be a really critical moment in the election.
I think because they're going to be a hell of
a lot of people watching. I think in this debate,
we don't really know. They don't know if it was
a real case and everything else, And you're going to
have credible CNN anchors talking about sexual assault, fraud, thirty
four felon accounts, right, And I think that you know,

(47:38):
we've never seen a politician have to survive something like this,
and I think it just if I can just finish,
is that I think that it reminds all of us
that we've been told that the Democrats took a big
risk backing Joe Biden. The big the far bigger risk
was getting behind a rapist, a fraud stir, you know,
a trader at a felon. No one's ever had to

(48:01):
try to sell a candidate like Trump to the public
and be successful with it. I still think it's unlikely
they will be this time.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
One of the things that I'm struck by when we
talk about Trump, and you know, Biden is old, but
he is the incumbent. Incumbency is an enormous advantage. So
when there was so much, you know, they should kick
him out, drop him off the ticket, replace him with
I mean, the crazy takes that we heard coming out

(48:31):
of that. But I do think it is interesting how
skewed right the media is that that was the conversation
and not should Trump be on the ticket.

Speaker 4 (48:41):
Part of the reason I began a substack and started
writing and sort of moved my work to this kind
of new media environment that we're all operating in. As
somebody who's a former journalist myself and been in this
business for a long time, I became very alarmed by
what happened in twenty twenty two at the Red Wave.
Because the Red Wave, the way that I described it
was that we had two sets of data in the

(49:02):
election in twenty twenty two. We had if you wanted
to see a Republican victory, there was data showing that.
If you wanted to see a close competitive election, there
was data showing that too. And instead of there being
a conversation about the tension in the data and that
there's you know that we don't really know where this
election is going to go. It's got conflicting data. Basically,
everybody sort of defaulted into the Republican narrative in the

(49:24):
final few weeks of the election, even though there was
an enormous amount of data suggesting that was not going
to happen, and ease in which the national media conversation
became red wave when alarmed me into some ways. It
demonstrated the power, I think of the ability of the
right wing media machine to sort of bully their stuff

(49:45):
into the system and overwhelm the resistance right of traditional journalists.
And I think we're in a dangerous place as a country.
I mean, I do think that we are facing an
unprecedented propaganda opparatus on the right that has the ability
to bully and dictate and push narratives into the mainstream

(50:06):
that don't deserve to be there. The challenge is can
the media resist it? And I think this time, going
back to that question you asked me at the very beginning,
like twenty twenty two, right now, the data is not
all pointing in the same direction. Right there's a lot
of data showing Biden being healthy and strong in winning
the election, and there's other data showing Trump. And instead
of us talking about the tension in data, we've defaulted

(50:28):
to the Republican narrative again, which is that Trump is
winning the election.

Speaker 1 (50:32):
Well, I would like to say that I don't think
I've done that.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
No, you have.

Speaker 4 (50:36):
I'm saying the family.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
Yeah, I think that the right has really worked the refs.
I wonder how much when we talk about polls, we
don't have a lot of great information. I mean, that's
the other thing is like, so I think a lot
of these polls are you know, I just said this,
do you see you know fifty to fifty there. I
think there's over corrections on some sides. I think there's

(50:58):
undercryptions on other sides. Here's a question for you and
what we don't know? Right, Like, there are so many
of these doctored videos of Biden going out from even
I mean, we shouldn't be surprised by this, but the
RNC is releasing these doctored videos. You know, they're desperately
trying to paint him as having some kind of problem.
Even Biden's supporters are anxious, you know, that he has

(51:20):
something wrong with him. That really pumped this narrative so
hard that New York Times has run a gazillion pieces
about how he's old and da da dah, da dah.
But I'm curious, do you think, I mean, this is
a enormous country, and you know, we don't really know
where any of these people get their news.

Speaker 4 (51:38):
Well, I think we do know that a couple of things,
And what you just said one is they have made
an enormous investment over many, many years in painting Biden
as old.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
And infirmed, right, because it's all they have.

Speaker 4 (51:51):
Yeah, this is not a new ploy, This is not
a new play in the playbook. This is something they've
been doing to Biden from day one of.

Speaker 1 (51:58):
His presidency Tailory's emails.

Speaker 4 (52:01):
Yeah, and it's had an impact. I mean, I don't
think we can deny that. You know, I have three
gen z kids, and it's amazing how and talking to them,
despite having grown up in Washington and been in a
political family, how much this kind of stuff reaches them.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
Right.

Speaker 4 (52:14):
And I do think though that going forward, you said
something that's really important, right, which is that it's all
they have. Donald Trump has one play in this election,
and the play is I'm winning in the polls, I'm strong.
Joe Biden is losing the polls. He's weak, and then
they use that weakness to go into this age infirmity thing.

(52:35):
The way that we have to understand this and in
the polling and the political business is called strong Leader
week Leader, Right, that they're living entirely in the strong
Leader week leader dimension of the brand architecture here of
the two campaigns, and we need to take that away
from them.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
Right.

Speaker 4 (52:54):
There's an urgency to us understanding that this is how
they're fighting. It's the only thing they have, right, because
he's a diminished candidate. He's crazier as agendas far and
more extreme. He's now a serial criminal. I mean, he's
a far more damaged piece of goods than he was
in twenty twenty, far harder to sell to the public.
And so they're just going to go to this one place,

(53:15):
and we have to get ahead of that and understand that,
which is why I spend so much in my time
communicating about why Joe Biden's been a successful president and
that he's a good president and that because then if
he's a successful president, we can say he's successful because
of his age and his wisdom and experience. Right, we
can turn the age issue into an asset of not

(53:36):
a liability. It's a way of getting ahead of their narrative.
The second thing is one of the reasons I've been
litigating the all stuff so much is that I don't
think Trump has actually been ahead in this election for
a very long time, and that he's been getting away
with murder. And I think this idea that he's winning
is allowing him to force donors into giving him money.
I think this is having a material impact on his

(53:58):
fundraising and that is affecting the election, and it's not correct.
And so we need to take away this idea that
is something other than a close competitive election. I mean,
we know from twenty twenty two that the return of
the red wave scared off millions and millions of dollars
from the d tripleC in the final few weeks, money
that was supposed to go to them that ended up

(54:19):
going to governor's races and state legislative races, and that
we lost the House because of this. They already had
success in manufacturing this kind of strong man Weekman thing,
the Red Wave, which was a version of strongman Weekman, right,
and it worked for them, and they're doing it again
using different terms, the strategies, the saying, the tactics are
a little different, and we need to very much understand

(54:42):
that Trump is literally running as a strong man and
that he's trying to make it seem that it's inevitable
that he's in the White House using whatever tactics he's
going to use to get there, and that it's just
time for people to line up and get on board.
And what you're doing, Molly, and what I'm doing and
what our family is doing, were saying no f and
way to that right, like, we are not obeying in advance,

(55:04):
we're not getting in line, We're fighting with everything we
have and that we have to understand that this is
like a sciops going on with them, and to be
smart about this. I do think they're not running a
traditional campaign to your point. Their agenda's wildly unpopular. Their
candidate is the ugliest political thing we've ever seen. Right,
They're going after Biden everything they're going to do now.

(55:25):
The reason they're faking these videos is that you only
cheat if you're losing, right, And the intensity in which
these media organizations are debasing themselves shows how much pressure
they're under from the Trump campaign to help them. And
it's a sign I think to me reading backwards, is
that I think the Trump campaign was deeply aware that

(55:47):
if a guilty verdict came, it was going to be
very damaging to him. And they are acting like a
campaign that is worried and concerned and like throwing a
lot of shit against the wall because they know that
his brand, the core Trump brand, has been eroded and
damaged by what's happened over the last few weeks. Otherwise,
you know, the Murdoch Empire wouldn't be going into such

(56:08):
hyperdrives right now in defending him. You know, from everything
from those fake videos to the ridiculous polling that Fox
released ten days ago, which was absurd. They are rallying
for their guy, but they rally for their guy because
he's weak, not because he's strong.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
Thank you, Simon.

Speaker 4 (56:25):
Molly, It's always a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
They're no moment o.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Jesse Canon Mai Junk Fast.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
Do you smell something rotten? Because I do. And it's
the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
So they have still like seven thousand opinions to go.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
They had to schedule another day.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
It's the twentieth of June. They're supposed to release the
opinions thround June. But what they're doing here in this
six three super majority, very right wing craziness, is they
are trying to run out the clock so they can
release as many of these very explosive country shaping opinions

(57:10):
as close to vacation as possible and then go on
vacation and not have to deal with people freaking out
or protesting. This is not what a Supreme Court is
supposed to do. Again, like I've said this before and
I unfortunately I think I will say it again. None
of this is normal. That's it for this episode of
Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to

(57:34):
hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all
this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send
it to a friend and keep the conversation going, and
again thanks for listening.