Full Episode - The Full Spectrum of Trump: Chaos Abroad, Division at Home + Will The Supreme Court Reshape The Balance Of Power In D.C.? - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to another episode of the Check podcast. We have

(01:48):
made it to December. First, we are getting close. We
are now the first day of the last month of
twenty twenty five. I have to say this is this
has been a fascinating year for me personally for a
variety of reasons. Major transitions, both for myself professionally, my family,

(02:10):
empty nesting. Right, you put all that together, and let's
just say twenty twenty five has been a very It's
had its share of monumental moments in as far as
my household is concerned and my family is concerned. So here,
let's just say I feel like this year flew by.
I know for some of you it may be trudging along,
it may have taken forever. Politically, we can't say this

(02:33):
hasn't been an inactive year. This has been. It's a
phrase I used quite a bit during the Obama era
that now feels antiquated, because I think in the Trump
era it makes this following phrase more relevant and in
some ways a lot less relevant than Trump. I used
to say every day is a week, and every week
is a day in the Obama era. I think that's

(02:57):
true in the Trump era. At times, you know, times thousand,
if that's possible, right, Months feel like they go by
in weeks. The space time continuum is totally blurred. You
can't remember what's real what isn't. And in many ways
we've got a taste of sort of the entire Trump
experience of the Trump era, one that I do think

(03:18):
is exhausting. The vast but the vast majority of people
pole certainly indicate that, you know, those that are not
ideologically motivated to hate him or love him, right, they're
sort of dominating a lot of this conversation. But I
do think the vast you know, those of us in
the seventy percent here that accept the premise that you know,

(03:38):
you're not always going to get a president alike or
one that wants to unify the country. This has still
been an unusual period in American history. And when I
would say that we've got the full spectrum of Trump,
this week, right, we had a tragedy that happened in
the nation's capital, a Trump response that was not surprising
but still demoralizing in and depressing that an American president is

(04:01):
instinctively so divisive no matter what happens in any given moment.
We've got the president, We've got, we've got sort of
the media, a media firestorm getting created by something the
president says, and very little media firestorm being created by
something the president actually does pardons. And then finally, I

(04:23):
think we're I think Congress finally awoke from its slumber
in all things Venezuela, now that there are reports that
essentially the Secretary of Defense perhaps committed a war crime
when he said no survivors. I mean, it is against
the Geneva Conventions to continue with an order that says
there should be no survivors. And if survivors are sort

(04:45):
of show themselves there to be taken out. So the
fact that Congress is now going to investigate this probably
now starts the clock on Pete hag Seth, because one
thing about the Trump era in general is there's always
got to be a fall person and he will never
accept responsibility. He will, you know, sort of defend everything

(05:06):
that's going on until there's a moment where essentially he
needs to offer up a sacrifice to make sure they
don't come after him. Well, Pete haig Seth, you are
going to be that sacrifice. You probably believe you are
carrying out the exact orders the President of the United
States wants. But I promise you he will not have
your back. He does not care about you, He does

(05:27):
not care about your future, He does not care about
what happens there. And in fact, I do think pick
haik Seth is going to need a lawyer because and
a lot of people who carried out these orders. Look
at some point, the head of southcom who decided to
resign essentially in and around this period where these controversial
orders were given, is a flashing red light that there

(05:51):
are people in the chain of command who thought they
were getting illegal orders and just didn't weren't weren't realized
it is against the law to follow an illegal order,
as these lawmakers said, you know, they We got to
remember why these lawmakers first put this you know, first
put this video together. Yes, are they Are they trolling
a little bit, of course? Are they trying to make

(06:12):
a political point, Yes, But at the same time, it
was a real concern that the Secretary of Defense was
giving illegal orders and what was happening in Venezuela without
any sort of Remember, the administration has not gone to
Congress in order to get legal authority to do this.
They are using authority that previous Congresses gave to presidents

(06:35):
having to do with actual terrorism threats from overseas, the Taliban,
al Qaeda, things like that. This was not about a
manufactured terrorism threat in this sort of designation of narco terrorists,
which do not exist. The closest thing you could call
anybody to a narco terrorist or the essentially or the Taliban,

(06:59):
and that they were growing poppy in order to sell
heroin in order to fund terrorism. So if you're looking
for anybody that fits the definition, you could argue you'd
have to go to Afghanistan to get that to go
meet that definition. There is no place in and around
Venezuela that that meets that definition. And so it is

(07:22):
I think we now see and I have a little
bit more to say on that, but I want to
sort of start with what the tragedy that happened the
night before Thanksgiving, and that was the tragic shooting of
two members of the National Guard that the President ordered
to be deployed into Washington, d C. A deployment that

(07:42):
many people don't believe is necessary. Certainly where they've been
deployed hasn't been very effective. It has been clearly when
you see it, and as trust me, as people come
in to visit for the holidays, they ask us locals
about it, and they're like, how come they're you know,
I said, it's meant for you to notice. It's not
meant to be there for security. It's meant for people

(08:04):
to see see it. It is meant for show. It
is not necessarily meant to help. And when you look
at the what's tragic is the President's decision on the
day before Thanksgiving to be as divisive as possible. Right
he immediately and this goes back to you know my

(08:24):
earlier warning, why Pete Haig Seth is is, you know,
is about to be sacrificed by Donald Trump. Pete Haig
Seth doesn't know it yet, and maybe Trump himself doesn't
realize he's about to do this. But Trump never accepts
the premise that he has any fault at all, and
anything bad that happens, he's got to find somebody else,
got to find a scapeboat. So this happens, and he
immediately Look, when the shooting first happened, I think many

(08:49):
of us had I don't want to put thoughts in
anybody else's head. This could have been a variety. You know,
you don't know the scenario. There's a reason you want
to wait for all the facts. Right when this shooting
first hit with breaking news, I'm going to guess most
of you didn't have a former aff a former Afghan

(09:16):
employee of the CIA. I'm guessing none of you had
that on your bingo card, no matter how much you
follow the news. There perhaps was feared that this was
something was to say misunderstanding, was there was there a
sub suspect, was to say, a crime that was taking
place and they and they helped get involved sadly, it

(09:37):
turned out these National guardsmen were targeted by this gentleman.
And the question is why did he target him? Did
he target him because he's angry at the United States?
Did he target him because he's angry at the US
government who he believes hasn't fulfilled their obligation. Is he
just angry because he has a total mental decline from
all of the war that he participated in. And this

(09:59):
is frankly something that we've seen happen to many of
our own American servicemen and women. War basically damages them
almost permanently in their head. And there's certainly plenty of
reports about their shooter, Ramanala Lakenwal that he since being

(10:20):
placed in Washington state, friends and family. It said he'd
been behaving erradically, going on these cross country trips and disappearing,
So it's quite possible he lost it. And of course,
you know, my thesis on many a many a mass
shooter that we end up finding out about is that
they're all mentally unstable. Something triggered them, right, Maybe it

(10:41):
was bad parenting, Maybe it was bad diagnoses, people not
diagnosing what was wrong. Maybe it was something that happened
that traumatized them, perhaps war, perhaps something else. But the
point is is that it does seem as if, more
times than not, this suspect is triggered into doing this,

(11:05):
triggered for a variety of reasons, and in this case,
there certainly is a lot of hand ringing here, right,
But immediately President Trump went into blame game mode. Like
I said, I don't know what his response would have
been had this been just just sort of typical criminal
situation in DC where a criminal overreacted and shot somebody

(11:29):
and then it became something bigger. Who knows what the
deployments would have looked like in this city or many others.
But instead it turned out to be a different situation
and one that not a lot of people had had
on their Bengo card, but it was. You know, presidents
have a choice to make. They can try to unite
the country or they can actively try to divide the country.

(11:51):
We know this president his entire political currency is division.
It is how he got the Republican nomination, it is
how he sort of took over the Republican Park, and
it's how he governs. It is always divide, divide, divide,
and on this he divided he's trying to blame Biden
for bad vetting of Afghan refugees into this country, whatever
he can do to not take any blame here at all.

(12:14):
He's trying to sort of blame it all, you know,
sort of conflate it with all the immigration issues because
he doesn't want to take any responsibility that maybe his
folks didn't do vetting. Maybe putting the National Guard in
the nation's capital put a target on these young men
and women who didn't sign up for this type of duty.

(12:34):
But it's something that I think everybody needs to ask themselves.
Does the president's actions and how he treats the military,
turning them into political pawns put essentially put a political
target on their back? And I think that this is
a conversation that as adults we should be able to have.

(12:55):
And I think there's you know, I'm sorry his first
reaction was maybe deploying the military wearing fatigues around the
nation's capital is inviting people to target the military in
some way. I just think it's a question. It's a

(13:15):
serious question that needs to be asked and debated, and
we need to have serious answers, not just whimsical bullshit
that comes comes from somebody's social media feed. So there's
one issue there. The second is he had made a promise,
he had questioned whether these folks were vetted very well

(13:36):
or not well. What is his administration done on vetting?
It turns out they don't really vet at all, as
we know they're so they're so trying to have numbers
and just trying to kick everybody out of the country
and come up with all sorts of numbers where they
want to say, hey, look at everybody we're deporting that
there doesn't seem to be any effort to create a

(13:57):
vetting mechanism. We're not interested in in setting the example
for the world about political asylum on things like that.
And then of course there's the question of the blood
on our hands that every American lawmaker has on their
hands when it comes to Afghanistan. Okay, just remember Biden's

(14:17):
horrible withdrawal was due to having his hands tied by
Trump's terrible, a terrible deal that he caught with the
Talibon that essentially gave away every gain that was possible
that the United States attempted to make and Afghanistan. Trump
gave it all away, handing Biden the job of executing

(14:43):
a withdrawal that, yes, could Biden have superseded It could, No,
eadn't politically want. It would extend the time of the
US military occupation in Afghanistan. So I understand the political
motives he had to go ahead and abide by these deadlines.
Does not mean he should be let off the hook
for the terrible and horrendous mismanagement that the State Department,

(15:05):
the military, and the White House collectively made there. Now
there's a lot of finger pointing to this day about it,
but let's not forget the terrible decision that Donald Trump
made in negotiating with the Taliban and doing what he
did to put his successor in the position that he
was in. The point is is that the disaster that
is Afghanistan, that is Afghan refugees who were especially those

(15:27):
who were vital to the US operation in Afghanistan, like
this young man, Ramanala lakanawal Okay. He worked for the
United States military, worked for the government, worked for intelligence services.
In many ways, he's the very definition of somebody that
deserved essentially special status for getting into this country because
guess what, they were going to be targeted by the

(15:48):
Taliban because they were working against the Taliban. He had
no chance to survive in Afghanistan. In theory, he was
supposed to have a better chance here. So the point
is is that this is a tragic situation based on
a bad policy from three to four presidents. We can

(16:10):
basically every president's of the twenty first century is fucked up. Afghanistan,
screwed up the entire situation. And so the point is
there's collective blood on the hands of Republicans and Democrats alike.
There's collective blood on all of us as Americans, since
there are representatives. So the point is when a tragedy

(16:30):
like this happens, there should be a little bit of
shared experience with this, and it's a moment, especially when
we're all gathered together as it is. Wouldn't have been
hard to use this as a unifying moment, but again
it is not. The president has no ability to do this,
and instead he went off on some ridiculous rant something

(16:52):
about the auto pen and Joe Biden, and then he
claimed on social media that he has nullified every executive
order Joe Biden has done. You know, there is no
one executive order he could sign that would do that
if he wants to nullify every executive order that that
Biden signed, either by himself or via autopan, He's got
to sign individual executive orders that essentially pull them back

(17:14):
in one form or another. And I don't think he
can do anything on the pardons if he wants to
try to undo the pardons. But the point is what
was really shocking were how many people covered this as fact.
And this gets that to he sat there trying to
weaponize a tragedy for political gain, trying to create that hey,

(17:36):
this was Democrats soft on border policies that led to
this situation, when actually, now that we know more of
the situation, it has nothing to do with that, and
it has everything to do with the horrendous way that
all of the pre presidents, including Donald Trump, but especially
Donald Trump, since he negotiated the surrender of it whatever

(18:00):
America was trying to do in Afghanistan, he basically just
decided to completely walk away and just left the left
the mess for his successor and Joe Biden, who decided
to just follow the same bad path. So I have
no empathy for Joe Biden's decision making other than more

(18:21):
proof he was not a very good president, but he
was following a situation that was created by a worst president,
in this case in Donald Trump. So we're in this
we're in a moment where he could have brought the
country together and he chose not to do it. And

(18:42):
what was, Like I said, what was really disconcerting was
how focused it seemed much of the world was on
this thing we did with the pardons. And I saw
a few people, probably you know, younger reporters who were
being asked to work over the holiday. Right, This is
if the with some serious attempt. There were headlines that

(19:03):
were breaking news alerts, right, and then you found out
what he actually did, you know? And this this gets
back to sort of one of the larger reminders with
Donald Trump. Stop paying attention to what he says and
continue to only pay attention to what he does. He
says a lot of shit. Most of it isn't true,

(19:25):
most of it isn't going to happen. Most of it
is bullshit, right, And I understand, you know, there's always
this oh take them literally whatever it is. The fact
is what he says versus what he does. Okay, if
you're going to get outraged, get outrage and what he does,
not what he claims he's going to do, because most
of the time he doesn't do what he claims he's
going to do. All right, But while we are talking

(19:49):
about what he says he'll do in nullifying all of
Joe Biden's auto pen executive orders, he was doing something
far more consequential, far more damaging to the United States
long term folks. He used his most absolute power of
his presidency, the pardon, and he, once again, it appears,
did another pay for play, especially because we now know

(20:12):
who is involved in helping facilitate the pardon and getting
the pardon for the presidency. This episode of the Chuck
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the code get the discount. I'm telling you it's excellent,
excellent bread. So let me talk about it. It's a
full pardon for a gentleman by the name of Juan
Orlando Hernandez. He's the former president of Honduras. He was
convicted in a US federal court just last year for
trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaines in the United States

(22:13):
since of forty five years. Now, let's just remember, one
of the reasons that Donald Trump is threatening war on
Venezuela is because he says Moduro is essentially the head
of the one of the largest drug cartels in the
world that is killing Americans, intentionally killing Americans via the

(22:37):
drug trade. So what does he do. He just released
somebody who we in the United States just convicted of
doing just what he claims the head of Venezuela is doing.
But now this guy has been cleared, had his record
white clean, and he's being released back into Central American politics.
In fact, Trump is using the pardon of Wan Orlando

(23:01):
Hernandez to essentially endorse the political party that is on
the ballot right now that Hernandez belongs to, to essentially
get that group of politicians back in power. And he
said if the election doesn't go the way he wants
it to go. He's going to somehow punish Honduras over this,
So he's threatening the voters of Hoduras. This is not

(23:23):
America First. By the way, America First doesn't care what
people do. People are supposedly can do whatever the hell
they want outside of America's borders. Right, we are not
going to involve ourselves in their politics. Obviously, it is
so crystal clear. Donald Trump is not a he's not
an America First. He's a Trump firster. Whoever pays him
the most is going to get. And we now know
Roger Stone is basically the pardon you know, the pardon

(23:47):
whisper to a lot of these Latin American and international crooks,
and they use Roger Stone himself a pardon crook. And
Stone bragged about visiting the president about two weeks ago
on his social media feed, dressed in the absurd zoot
suit that he loves to wear. Claim he's like really

(24:08):
stylistic person, He's stylistic for the nineteen forties. Congratulations, he
would make a great Dick Tracy villain. I probably gave
him a compliment by saying that. But the guys, you know,
the guys tells a great story spins a great yarn.
But he's a crook and he has destroyed political the
political consulting world by making it as crooked as it is.

(24:32):
He and Paul Manifort paved the way to essentially the
corrupt nature that lobbying is today. The godfathers of this
are Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. And of course it's
Roger Stone who's totally connected and was personally urging Trump
to pardon this guy visiting with him two weeks ago,
so we know this was done. So this wasn't a

(24:54):
pardon for diplomatic reasons or for some geopolitical reasons that
we thought would help the security of the United States.
There was no Department of Justice review for this pardon.
It just was a direct result of lobbying from one
of Trump's closest, most controversial confidants, a man himself who

(25:16):
have received clemency from Trump, a man who now's appear
appears to be essentially one of the central nodes in
this pay for pay pardon scheme that it should be
extraordinarily controversial, and yet nobody raises a peep about it.
The lack of outrage over essentially what is almost a

(25:37):
weekly thing. Now Trump has normalized, normalized the pardoning of
convicted felons, and it's always the same. It's either convicted
of some sort of financial scheme, ripping off governments or
ripping off people. Something he has been accused of doing
quite a bit as a developer over the years, and

(26:00):
you know, an unsuccessful casino owner over the years. Anybody
that's ever been accused of something, he's been accused of,
he pardons. And you know, it is now an obvious pattern.
And of course anybody who will pay the price is
obviously willing to be pardoned. It is happening here in
plain sight. Two weeks ago, right I went, I sort

(26:23):
of was trying to surface up some urgency about his
abuse of the pardon. How when he pardoned the form
the head of finance one of those crypto schemes that
are out there, And how did this guy get on
the attention of Trump. Well when he went into business
with Trump's kids in the crypto world, so it became
sort of a part of the family business to get

(26:46):
this done. It's it's it's one of those where you
don't quite understand why there's you know, to quote Bob Dolan,
nineteen ninety six when he was running against Bill Click
and an upset about the lack of you know, there
were all sorts of crazy schemes that Bill Clinton's was
using to raise money, using the White House as a

(27:09):
vehicle to this. By the way, the things that Bob
Gore would be upset about today wouldn't even make Donald
Trump blush. Right. Donald Trump essentially has done whatever the
Clintons did and said I'm going to do it on steroids,
and he's kind of done that. By the way, he
made a second commutation this week, and again it's one
that's all about the Benjamins. Here a guy named David Genteel,

(27:32):
a private equity executive who was convicted in a one
point six billion dollar fraud. Schreen was sentenced to seven years.
He got a sentence commuted after just two weeks. So
while we don't know quite how much money mister Genteel
paid Trump associates in order to get his pardon, I
promise you the pardon is not free. None of these

(27:54):
pardons that Donald Trump makes are free. But again, where
you get so many folks in sort of the political
media get obsessed over the stuff he says, and the
lack of focused or interest in the stuff he does,
whether it is an illegal, unconstitutional war that he's essentially
trying to start in Venezuela. By the way, he's got

(28:16):
political risk here if he doesn't follow through on that.
I'll talk about that in a minute. And then it's
literally almost weekly now he pardons somebody that is that
makes the Bill Clinton, Mark Rich pardons seem just like
another presidential pardon that eh kind of smells. But hey,
they all do it. The fact is they don't all

(28:38):
do it. They've all done one or two really bad
pardons that you're really uncomfortable with, and you're like, God,
damn it, did you really just do this so Roger
Stone could make a couple of bucks, or did you
really just do this because Tony Rodham needed to make
a couple of bucks, because that is what it felt
like was happening with the Clintons, and it felt that,
you know, when Bush sort of commuted the sentence of
Scuber to Libby, you know, yes, he didn't pardon him,

(28:59):
but he was You see this, there are these little
favors that are done, and there's and and you know,
there's honor among thieves, and I think we as a public,
we're kind of grossed out by it that it happens
at all, but we're weirdly forgiving of a couple. We
sort of assume, oh, that's the price of business. But literally,
Donald Trump just peas in our face. He is so

(29:21):
he doesn't even pretend to do anything morally or ethically correct,
and instead he does these things that are so beyond
the pale. But he does it consistently, consistently and regularly,
and he does it on a schedule that we just
barely even shrug a shoulder. And so it's it's one

(29:42):
of these moments where you know, at some point we've
talked about this, and I have a terrific interview coming
up with Sarah Isker, who who is the legal the
legal expert over at The Dispatch, which is one of
my favorite news organizations. She's also a knee deep Bay
Scotus blog recently. So if you want to understand what's

(30:03):
happening at the Supreme Court, try to read the tea
leaves of what Supreme Court justices are thinking. You're going
to want to talk to Sarah Esker, and you'll see
in our conversation there's a couple of things we don't finish,
and we're gonna we're gonna end up getting together again
because there's I think there's there's two issues that this
week alone has triggered as a reminder. First of all,

(30:23):
we have a corrupt Justice Department, right, we do not
have a Justice department that you can feel good, is
honest and fair because we've already seen the way the
way payin BONDI has allowed the Justice Department to be
run it's whatever Donald Trump wants. So now there's real
questions about the rule of law. Judges are throwing cases
out because they're really not. It appears that they're not

(30:44):
following even basic you know, the basic protocols that they're
supposed to make. One. Two, the pardon power is so
corrupt that it's clear we need a constitutional amendment to
amend this. To this day, you've heard me ask this
question a few times, which is is, how the hell
did you know the founding fathers. One of the head
scratchers to me is the fact that they allowed a

(31:06):
pardon power to be given to a president. Because we
were supposedly revolting against a monarchy, so why give any
sort of monarchical powers to the president. Right, everything about
the Founding fathers was to try to create a weak executive.
They didn't want a non existent executive, but they wanted
a fairly weak executive with the power of the law

(31:29):
of actually resting inside of the power to make laws,
not with the executive branch, but with the legislative branch.
The power to decide if the laws are constitutional, not
to the judiciary, and essentially all the executives supposed to
do is execute the laws. But they gave him this
pardon power and the amount of abuse. Now I know
the founders had a lot more faith in the legislative

(31:50):
branch and essentially protecting the constitution and protecting the country
from a runaway executive. That is not the situation we
have now. Right, We do not have a Speaker of
the House. We have a spino, a speaker in name only.
As you know Mike Johnson essentially admitted it the other day,

(32:11):
is that he really isn't a speaker of any you know,
he has at the title, but he doesn't do the
job of running the legislative branch. He does whatever Donald
Trump asked him to do, which really has harmed the
Constitution and he's put his own members. This is why
you're going to see this retirement. We got another retirement
over the weekend. I promise you. I'm going to guess
that we average two to four retirements every day every

(32:33):
week excuse me, between now and the end of the year. Well,
fact check me on this. By the end of the year,
but I'm I'm going to guess that we will have
at least ten more retirements before the end of this calendar,
which would put us on an average of two to
three per week for the rest of the year. So
I think that's going to happen. But the uninterest in

(32:54):
Congress and trying to reign in this executive is shocking
to me. We are finally going to get and I
think it took you. You know, last week I shared
with you how I had an interview with Mike Turner,
republic former. He's a current member of congre Republican member
of Congress, but the former chair of the House Intel Committee.
And you could just if you just watched the conversation

(33:15):
he and I had over Venezuela and whether these orders
were legal or not, and how concerned he was about
the legality of what was happening here. He was basically saying,
without saying directly, that yes, this thing is totally illegal,
and we are totally and Congress is totally out of
the loop. So this report about the shoot to kill

(33:38):
order no survivors are allowed by Hegseth, which appears to
be a violation of the Geneva Conventions, especially when there's
been no declaration of war whatsoever on any of these folks.
Congress is finally awoke from its lumber, and we'll see.
I have some faith in the Senate Armed Services Committee
to do something serious because I think Roger Wicker, the

(34:01):
Republican chairman, and Jack Reid, the ranking member, they seem
to put the country before party, both of them whenever
they've worked together a long time. I think that they're
going to do a really serious inquiry. I don't know
about the House, as we know the House Republicans will see.

(34:22):
I think it depends on who you get. I do
think you have some House Republicans that realize that Donald
Trump treats them like sacrificial lambs and that they're nothing
but pawns. And I think that that is I do
think he is accumulating more and more critics from his
own party for the way he's behaving. As I said,
it's not been very America first. It's always Trump first,

(34:43):
but not America first. That's making some people peel away
getting involved in other people's in more foreign entanglements. That
seems to be an issue. But let me introduce one
more political peril that Trump has created for himself with Venezuela.
Now that he's got Congress's attention with what they're doing,

(35:04):
in theory, it might hamstring him more ironically, what they've
been doing has been raising the hopes of the Venezuelan
and Cuban communities in South Florida that Trump's going to,
you know, go and get Maduro if he doesn't get Madurea.
And this is where I think, unfortunately, he's going to

(35:26):
do something that's likely illegal here, and he's going to
do He's going to make He's going to give an
order that we're going to be debating for years about
whether this was legal or not. And what happens here
with Maduro. Let's see how it's done. But he's more
likely to try something than actually get congressional approval because politically,
if he doesn't follow through in his threat to get

(35:47):
rid of Maduro. This will be the bay of pigs
for Venezuelan's Venezuelan Americans. You know, essentially the Cuban Americans
turned on the Democratic Party because they believe Kennedy didn't
help out those Cuban exiles who were trying to overthrow
Castro and he sort of left them defend for themselves
and he didn't follow through, and it is the initial split,

(36:12):
like why are Cubans Republicans? It's because of that moment,
no other reason. Well, if Trump never gets Maduro, that's
the situation he's setting himself up, and it could trickle
into the Cuban community as well. So because of that fear,
and I know that, and I would suspect that Marco
Rubio color Cementez, many of the long time Cuban American

(36:36):
politicians down in South Florida who understand this issue, understand
what South Florida exiles may expect from President Trump here
are going to end up pushing him and pushing him
and pushing him to do something that, again I think
is going to have enormous constitutional consequences and long term
impact on sort of on the role of converse and

(37:01):
what it plays in war making and potentially on this
fragile coalition that is MAGA that he put together. Because
did any of them, these are all folks that all
are supposedly against the Iraq war, did any of them
vote for this? And I think you could see more
fracturing even as he remember he lives in South Florida,

(37:22):
so he's become an unofficial member of the Cuban in
Venezuelan exile communities down there. He constantly gets that pr
in his ear, so we know where he's going to
end up siding. What he does not fully appreciate is
what that's going to do the rest of his coalition
outside of South Florida. All right, with that, let's sneak

(37:43):
at a break and when we come back, Sarah Eskert
And of course, after that conversation, which I think you'll enjoy,
it's a tremendous one. After that conversation, I have by
todcast time Machine, I got a fun one. This is
a fascinating one. I actually take three moments in history
and combine them into one one time machine moment. And
of course I have a few things to say about

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unless they win. So joining me now to talk a
little bit of uh, what's going on at the Department
of Justice, what Supreme Court ruling should we be over
the next few weeks and a few months. And it's

(39:31):
somebody that I always learn a lot from when I
either hear her or read her. It is Sarah Isker
of The Dispatch. She does a legal podcast, a legal newsletter.
At this point, how involved are you with the SCOTUSblog.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
By the way, I am the editor of Scotus Blog.
We have a lot of new exciting changes coming out.
I also have a new book coming out called The
Last Branch Standing, which will be sort of a fun
deep dive into the Supreme Court and explainer. So yeah,
we're all I think that's cute.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
That you think. I think that's cute you think the
Judiciary branch is standing. I have to accept that premise.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
You have to accept that premise. No, I mean, the
title comes from the idea that it's the last branch
that the founders would recognize that Congress has sort of
disappeared off.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
Of the you know, or what the founders thought it
would be or could be or should be.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
No, And that the presidency, that the sort of enlarged
tyrannical presidency that they were concerned about, actually has come
to fruition, but like to an even larger extent than
they could have imagined because of the administrative state and
all of these agencies, and the branch that they would
recognize for all of its faults and foibles would be

(40:47):
the Supreme Court. That that looks about right in its
current role in American government.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
In isolation, is that good? But in when you in
combination with the strengthening and then weakening of the other
two branches, is that bad.

Speaker 2 (41:05):
So I am very hopeful about this Supreme Court term
because I think the Supreme Court has an unusual opportunity
to rebalance the other two branches. When you think about
the two biggest cases from this term, it's the Tariff
case and the Slaughter case about independent agencies.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Right, And both are about executive overreach or executive authority
depending on your point of view, right.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
And so I think that if you sort of combine
those cases together, what you could have from the Supreme
Court are two rulings saying in the Tariff case, for instance, Congress,
do your job. The President does not have the power
to go find old, vague statutes and read in, you know,
sort of new turbocharged powers like we got, for instance,

(41:51):
even during the Biden administration, eviction moratory and vaccine mandate,
student loan debt forgiveness, all things that Congress can do well.
The Supreme Court said, is the president can't sort of
conjure those powers from old statutes. We expect Congress to
actually say that clearly and explicitly. Same with the tariff
power potentially, and on the flip side, with the slaughter

(42:13):
case of independent agencies, they could say, look, we're going
to give the president. Sorry, look, we're going to limit
the president to the powers that have been explicitly given
to it from Congress. But also the president is in
charge of the executive branch. All of those powers come
directly from him. So we're going to give the president

(42:34):
more power over the people who execute the laws, but
give those people a lot less power and make Congress,
you know, bigger and more accountable to people.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
So he may be able to fire more executive branch employees.
So the authority over the FED, or the authority over
the anaw National Labor Relations Board, but what those entities
can do as regulators will be limited to literally what
the text of the bill that Congress past said exactly.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
So you know, if you think of our sort of
constitutional car and Chief Justice Roberts driving in the front seat,
he is, you know, looking back and saying, you know, Congress,
quit breathing on the president. Mister President, quit poking Congress,
or I'm going to turn this constitution right around, like
really separate the branches. And you know, if you have
to put a pillow in between them, so be it.

(43:29):
But they you know, Congress is legislating, the executive is executing,
and right now we have this muddle where the president
has been legislating a little bit too, executing a little bit.
That's why you have in these independent agencies they are prosecutor, judge,
fact finder, all of those things. And then you have
Congress meddling saying, you know, you can't remove all of

(43:51):
these different people. So that if you, as a voter,
are thinking this is the most important election of my
lifetime to vote for president, you think the president actually
has control over large swaths of the economy that in
reality he doesn't at all. Because Congress has put those
limitations on his ability to put people in who could
actually be accountable.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
So I share your optimism that this Supreme Court is
likely to rule in both of those directions. It's if
you listen to the arguments, it is where you can
see I think a six y three or even seven
to two majority on the terriff authority maybe you know,
maybe probably not eighty one. It does feel like there
are two people there that are pretty loyal to the

(44:33):
president or pretty empathetic to the President's point of view.
But and then on the probably somewhere lower of five
four sixty three on the other one. But let's just contemplate,
what if you and I are wrong right, and what
if this court does give it? How dire do you

(44:57):
believe that is to the future of the equilibrium between
the three branches.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
I think the biggest constitutional threat we face right now
will surprise a lot of people because I actually think
it is the evaporation of Congress.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
I completely agree. Yeah, the weakening of Congress is weakened
the democracy absolutely.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
And it's driving all of the other problems that I
think people seem more in front of their faces. But
the you know, presidency on steroids is driven by the
weakening of Congress because problems pile up and voters are like,
why isn't anyone doing me anything about this? And the
President's like, oh, I'll try something. He gets the press release,

(45:39):
the Rose Garden address. All the activists are like, Yay,
the president helped our side without any compromise, without any
of the stability of legislation, and then either a court
strikes it down a couple years later, not saying that
it can't be done, just saying that Congress has to
do it, that a president acting alone can't do it,
or four years later a new president comes in and

(46:01):
it's gone on day one. And what's shocking to me
is that you have this activist class that I think
are vital to our democracy, totally fine with that, that
they still cheer on when a president does a thing
that they like, without any regard to the fact that
that won't solve the problem long term because it's going
to be gone.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
Sir. That's such an excellent point as how ignorant. Either
they're ignorant, naive, or they've just given up on congressional authority.
But if you're an activist and you care about these things.
The presidency is the least important aspect to your goal.
It is if you can't get legislation paths to support

(46:44):
your what you want to get done, a president, all
they can do is maybe use a tournique, right, maybe
there's a band aid. You know, you can sort of,
you know, keep an open wound from bleeding. But that's
about it. You know you're not going to be able
to actually have surgery be healed any of those things.

(47:05):
And yet activity climate change continue to want these essentially
photo ops with presidents rather than solutions out of Congress.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
You think about climate change, the Obama administration has their
Clean Power Plan that they do again alone, based on
a vague statute from Congress. The Trump administration comes in,
gets rid of it. The Biden administration comes in, doesn't
just reinstitute the Obama one, they have their own. Then
the Trump administration comes in and gets rid of it.
This whole time, it's sitting bogged down in the courts

(47:37):
as well. And if you wanted to actually address climate change,
you cannot do it in four year increments, and you
cannot do it with changing every four year policies. You
have to have congressional legislation, and yes, that means you
will not get everything you want. That's what I think
created this problem in the first place, is that progressive era,

(47:58):
and I don't mean progressive right, the Teddy Roosevelt Wilson era.
This idea that Congress was so slow and compromising, and
these dumb dums getting elected to the health of representatives.
They don't know anything, and there are these answers and
truths if only we had experts involved to do them.

(48:18):
And there's a fundamental failure in that that I think
we've learned over the last hundred years, which is trade offs.
And that's what you need self representative democracy to do,
is to decide those trade offs.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
I get so tired of hearing an activist or do gooder.
Sometimes sometimes they're do gooders and sometimes they you know,
they're out for themselves, but either way they're so dismissive
of Congress or the average member of Congress, right, and
you're just sitting there going, yeah, this is by design,

(48:50):
jack ass, Okay, Like the idea is, yes, the wisdom
of the crowd of Congress actually is helpful. Now, look,
Congress is broken. It is not very representative of the
people that elect them, because frankly, I think, you know,
I'll get on one of my hobby horses. I think
congress is too small. I think it needs to be

(49:11):
twice the size. I think congressional districts are way too big. Right,
the average congressional district is now the size of a
major city. And there is never there isn't that one.
The city of Austin is not a single community of interest,
and yet we are. And that's and they're the fifteenth
largest city in America, which is about eight hundred thousand people,
which is about the size of a congressional district if

(49:34):
you cut it in half, if you went to and
I think we need a constitutional amendment to sort of
guarantee a maximum size of a congressional district. I think
it's point zero zero zero one percent of the population.
That's what one for four hundred we give you right now.
And one p four hundred would you know that's the
size of Arlington, Texas well. Guess what Arlington, a suburb

(49:54):
of Dallas and Fort Worth, strikes me as a community
of interests. And that is ultimately what the goal was
in creating these congressional districts is you create communities of interest.
Sometimes those are by identities, sometimes they are by where
you live. But you know the definition of community of interest.
Obviously as a wide you know, you can sort of

(50:14):
drive a truck through it. But these districts are too big,
so then you only need a faction in order to
in order to represent them, which is why it feels
like Congress itself isn't very representative.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
A thousand times yes, and I know you know this,
but this actually was one of the first amendments that
was proposed for the Bill of Rights and two. There
were twelve amendments proposed. Ten of them obviously get ratified.
One gets ratified later, so actually it's the only one
that didn't make it in the end, which is sort
of sad because I think you're exactly right. I think

(50:49):
there's a few things broken with Congress. One, as you say,
they're too big. They cannot actually be representative government because
you can't meet with your constituents. You can't even represent
your constituents because they're not a community.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
It's interesting said not near it. When you're near a million,
you just can't.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
I would probably even increase the size more than two times.
I think we're probably nearing the three times as large size.
I think we're in like a twelve hundred type vicinity
at this point. And yes, that would change all sorts
of other things about how Congress meets and votes. But
at this point, again you talk about trade offs, I
think we are well aware of what the trade offs are,
and I think the current tradeoff is poor that people

(51:28):
are not actually represented. There's a few other things though,
that have caused this one, as I mentioned, was the
administrative state, this idea that experts are the answer, and
that has let Congress off the hook. They can just say,
like I want the EPA to make clean water law,
but they don't actually have to make any of those
tough decisions themselves. That would be that they could be

(51:51):
held politically accountable for. And so the bureaucrat I'm not
using that termin a pejorative. What I mean by that
is a protected person inside of bureaucracy is making decisions
over what it means to have clean water, and in
the meantime, a member of Congress, then you know, you
can't primary them on that they did this trade off poorly,

(52:12):
that they you know, made it too difficult to build
new housing for instance, which is a problem we definitely
have right now. The third issue I think is campaign
finance reform. I think part of what we saw. I
supported BIKRA in two thousand and two, the bipartisan campaign
reformat that was called McCain Wengeld. I thought that sounded
like a great idea, but I didn't think through the

(52:33):
trade offs, Chuck, which were they large destroyed the.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
Two parties, destroys, It destroyed the parties.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
Large dollar donors weren't representative. But you know who's even
less representative, wall dollar donors. We destroyed the two political parties.
We've replaced political parties that could at least have carrots
and sticks for their members. They could have policy platforms,
they would tend towards moderation, to represent the most media
and voter because they had an interest to get to

(53:00):
fifty one percent. We replaced that with small dollar donors.
Only about two percent of Americans will ever give a
buck to any member of anything to run for office.
They tend to respond to anger and outrage and incendiary stuff,
and more importantly, they tend to respond to like stuff
they see clips of on social media, and so members

(53:21):
of Congress are no longer going to like town halls
and rubber chicken dinners. They're just all day long posting
shit on their reels and watching the money come in.
And the last thing that I know you also care
about is leadership changes in Congress during Gingrich and Pelosi,
they really changed. I mean back in the eighties, it

(53:42):
would be like a household name who the Chairman of
Ways and Means was, because that was a really powerful job.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
Look, we've got Bob Hackwood and Dan Rostenkowski wanted to
do tax reform, and so did the Reagan White House.
The Reagan white House didn't work with Senate Majority Leader
Bob byird and and Speaker Folly at the time, I
believe her Speaker right or back then it might have
been Speaker O'Neil. Even when they did eighty six tax reform.

(54:08):
You know, Packwood and Rossty called the shots, right they
were the Packwood was the big Senate finance. This was
a Republican So this would have been Dole's Senate Republican
leadership period. But they got to call the shot and
it wasn't. In fact, remember there was a small period
during Obama and Obama and Pelosis basically broke it and read.

(54:30):
But remember when Grassley and Bacchus actually tried to sort
of flex the muscles of the Senate Finance Committee during Healthcare,
and Bacchus and Grassley looked like that they were going
to sort of be a bulwark in trying to hey,
let's not let this get partisanized. Let's let's make sure

(54:52):
that you know, we run this as the Senate fire
And they both had their own legacies in mind and
trying to see if they could s healthcare, and then
everything became partisan right the town halls happened. Grassley backs
off because he's afraid of the politics of it. He
was right about that the politics are going to be
bad for him, so he got out of the way

(55:12):
of that freight train which would have come for him.
He wouldn't have won a primary, he'd have gone. I mean,
if he had been the Republican that signed off on Obamacare,
you and I both know it. You know, he'd have
been out of office for the last fifteen years. So he
wasn't wrong about understanding that. But that was when that
was the last time any committee chair and ranking member

(55:32):
ever flexed muscle, And you haven't seen it since and.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
So now you have like three people in the House
who actually can move legislation. I mean, if you want to, I.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
Think it's two. Yeah, I think it's really too I
just think there's four. I think there are four people
that run Congress. It's the two leaders of each of
each chamber. And that's it. Like what committee chair punches
above their weight anymore? Can you name one?

Speaker 2 (56:00):
And so that leaves us with four hundred and thirty
three backbenchers.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Five hundred and thirty one backbenchures. I would argue, I
think the Senate, if you're not in leadership, what are
you doing other than raising money on social media?

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Yeah? I mean I would basically say, you're you're like
puppies chewing the furniture, like we haven't given them a job,
and these are working dogs. And you see the result
of that isn't just that it changes the behavior of
those in Congress. It changes who is in Congress. And
the people who actually were interested in legislating have retired
or left, and the people who.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
You know, I'm Michael Bennett's ready for governor. Yeah, you
know exactly, because the Senate doesn't work. And I've been
I've for I've had a relationship with him for a
long time because I've worked with this brother very closely
at the Atlantic back in the day, and so I
and you know, it frustrated him. He was working with
Bob Corker and some legislation and then he was told

(56:55):
by that Senate Democrats leadership, you shouldn't be working with him.
And he's just like, what the hell am I supposed
to be doing here? You know, he was like, and
Corker got the same lecture. Corker was told stop working
with Warner and Bennett on financial reform. This was back
during Dot Frank Right, and it was like Corker and
Warner were really did into it because they were kind

(57:17):
of their own little experts on this specific topic and
McConnell and Reid were telling them, stop helping the other guy,
stop working with the other guy. It's just crazy what's happened.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
And so, let mean, you think about, like you're running
in a primary, what's the difference between the guy who
spent you know, was up all night for weeks and
weeks writing legislation to solve healthcare, immigration, you name it,
some of our biggest problems. That legislation never saw the
light of day. What's the diff between that guy and
the one who sat on Fox News and complained about
the other side. The guy on Fox News raised more money,

(57:51):
he wins that primary. And so I've talked to members
who are coming in and they're not hiring legislative staff anymore.
They just hire more bookers and more social media pea.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Remember when we laughed at Madison Cawthorne when he said
for his single term in Congress, well, the only thing
that staff that matters is a communication staff. And we
all thought, oh, and you're like, he's not wrong, and
if you're a backbenchure member of the House, all that matters.
I mean Nancy Mace saw that, and she you know,
you know she would she made a b line for

(58:23):
people like me back when I was you know, seen
as as as the way in onto television, and that
was the only reason she had any interest in chatting
with me to get on TV. It was always about
getting on TV. And she she was not wrong. I mean,
she's only considered a viable candidate for governor because she
has such a public presence that she has created for

(58:46):
so we some of us at are a little bit
old school, probably think I don't think you have the
best public persona anymore because of your public presence. And
yet has that been a total has that totally ended
her political career? Doesn't look like.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
It, No, because name idea at this point is so
important for that other reason we mentioned, which is the
death of the political parties. The political parties would have
shut down Nancy Mace's ability to do any of that.
And look, the list is long. Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor
Green AOC. You know, there's endless numbers of people who
would be nothing backbenchers with no power right but for

(59:24):
no political parties anymore. And by the way, for people
listening to that who are thinking that makes no sense.
Everything's really partisan.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Ah huh, it's my favorite riddle.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Yeah, it's very counterintuitive that we killed off the political
parties and that increased negative polarization.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
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(01:01:09):
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relief foul, because if you open that relief foul, you'd
get more ideological, geographic, and ethnic diversity just by by
by just creating a lot, and you'd probably minimize the

(01:01:32):
need to jerry mander, and you'd certainly minimize and you'd
also owe by the way, you'd also fix the electoral college,
or you wouldn't have to worry about the popular vote
in the electoral college split splitting. The reason why we're
getting more right, it's more common now for the electoral
college and the popular vote to not be have the

(01:01:53):
same winner is because of these congressional districts. We haven't
expanded the electoral vote count since I never.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Realized that you're exactly right. The denominator keeps staying the
same even as the population grows, and so we get
closer divides in the numerator that's why it never happened before.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Yeah a lot. Well, it's like and so we're up
to now where a Wyoming voter has six times more
influence on the next president, on the presidential vote than
a California voter. Now, I think the founders did believe
smaller states should have a tiny bit more sort of
station than the larger states, because the larger states just

(01:02:34):
by definition, we're always going to have some advantages. So
you know, if you just used my denominator and went
to you know, one perform a thousand, you'd have about
eight somewhere about eight hundred and seventy five to a
little under nine hundred members of Congress. A Wyoming voter
would still have two and a half times more voting

(01:02:55):
power for president than a California voter. That's a hell
of a lot better than six as Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
Look, I'm actually pretty in favor of the electoral college
and think that the reasons that we have it are
and were important, but we have done everything in our
power to dismantle its.

Speaker 1 (01:03:10):
Main reason for me, I was just going to say,
the whole point of it was in case we the
people elected basically a crook okay elected somebody who was
or or worse right elected somebody who was basically in in,
you know, in cahoots with another with a form power, right,

(01:03:34):
which is which is the real? That's what the founders
worried about. They worried about that. The whole point Electoral College,
I think was about worrying about that that essentially, and
back then the form power we were concerned about were
the British.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
Yeah, I'm still in the I hold a lot of
animosity toward the British and George the Third in particular.
I was giving a speech in London a couple of
months ago and made a joke about that, and I
got no less.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
So we have forgotten about our anger at King George,
haven't we. It's too bad.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
I mean, have you been watching did you watch the
ken Burns American Revolution?

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
I am in I am watching, I am in the
I am in the midst of it. Yeah, it's it's
I think he's doing. Look talk about okay, ken Burns,
you have somehow avoided the culture war polarization. Let's see
you pull this one off. You're going to do the
American Revolution? Good luck, brother, I think he's pulling. It's

(01:04:28):
funny either ken Burns has enough sort of capital right
for what he did with the Civil War. I mean,
by god, he did the Civil War, he did baseball
and Jackie. He's handled some of these cultural hot potatoes
in other times so so well that you know. And
at the same time he's not hidden his own politics,

(01:04:52):
if you will, his own concerns about you know, I
frankly feel like this we have such you know, we're
not just divided left and right. I think we're divided.
Are you a constitutionalist or are you or are you
for something you know different right, a direct democracy or
something you know not familiar to those of us that
are that. Do frankly worship this Constitution And I, I

(01:05:15):
borderline say I do in that. I don't think it's perfect,
but I think we created as good of a system
in a free democratic society as you can come up with.
And the Constitution is a really good ballast if we
know how to amend it and if we know how
to use the tools. But we have these weird divides
in that, and I have to say, boy can good
good luck. But it looks like so far I feel

(01:05:37):
like he is. I feel like he is. If you're
a sixteen nineteen person. You're a seventeen seventy six person.
You can't sit here and say he didn't hear you.
How's that?

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
I think? So it's so funny. You and I went
into the same like, I.

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
Know, I was nervous and shit, go ahead, Oh no,
oh no, I don't know what is it? How's it
gonna look? I mean, you know, even if I agree, like,
are people going to like cancel him? Here we go?

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
And I was obsessed with the Civil War documentary, but
we had the cassette tapes and I would listen to
it on the way to school. I played viola for
a long time, and I learned by ear Ashrikan farewell,
the like main you know theme song that they wrote
for that, Like I'm it was my audition piece for
you know, the Houston Civic Symphony. Okay, So I go

(01:06:26):
into this like loving American history documentaries, thinking Ken Burns
does a great job. I'm scared to death for him
that he has chosen to do this. I totally agree
with you, especially at the beginning where you need to
establish your credibility for the documentary. I thought he nailed it.

(01:06:48):
Not to mention Damian Lewis as George the Third and
Mandy Batankin as Ben Franklin and Claire Danes as Abigail Adams.
It's like the Cast from a Homeland is doing the
American Revolution. I mean there's a lot to love there.
You know, in episodes like as you get later into it,
it gets his biases. Isn't even the right way his passions?

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
Yeah, of what his focus wants to be on.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Yes, But you know what I got to tell you, Like,
I'm I'm very conservative, not in the political dynamic we
have right now, right or left, but as you say,
like sort of constitution worshiping American history.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
I consider myself I call myself a small sea conservatives.
I don't want to be, you know. And I'm also
a small l liberal. I believe in liberal democracy, and
I'm a small sea conservative about how you enact power.
Like I think, if you're going to change the if
you're going to try to get three hundred and fifty
million people to follow a law, yeah, goddamn right, it's
going to take a long time to pass. And I

(01:07:52):
think a lot of people have to look at that
long yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
Yeah, Like I'm a free speech lunatic and a Burkiyan
minimalist who things and Burke like should be worshiped among
our founders.

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
Well we're party, Sarah, I don't have a I mean,
I where is this party? Right? I keep? You know,
I got I'm sure you've been chatty with people that
mess around with The Forward Party has a lot sort
of excommunicated left and right over there, and it's like,
I think they kind of want to be the party
for these people. But at the same time they're also like, well,

(01:08:25):
we can't stand for too much yet you know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:27):
I know they stand. Yeah, I mean we should talk
third parties. But here just on the ken burnstin for
my biases, and they are biases. I've learned a lot
watching it, and I don't think there's any higher compliment
that I can give.

Speaker 1 (01:08:41):
Than that, do you do death by Lightning? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Yes, I did, because that's one of my beat reads
that I recommend to people, which is Destiny of the
Republic by Candice Millard about the assassination of James Garfield
in eighteen eighty four. It's such as better.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
I think there's a better version of the book out there.
I read. That's every Republic I know, but there's one
called dark Horse. It's by a gentleman named Ken Ackerman,
a former Senate staffer, which is what I love about it.
It's a classic sort of one of us. Okay, and
I'll you know, he was a total passion project and
it didn't get It's really well done. He spends a

(01:09:21):
lot more time on some of the politics of the
Republican Party, a lot more on Roscoe Conkling, a lot
more on that. So there's and you get, I mean,
it's two books in one. He tries to do everything.
But look what Candice Millar did was made it a story. Okay,
she told a great story, which makes it I'll be honest,

(01:09:42):
and I have my own I do. I've already expressed
this to my podcast listening, and hear me again. I
felt I felt like we got the cliff notes version
and that there was I'm sorry Netflix only allowed them
to do four episodes. It's worthy of eight to ten
episodes to truly underst dan the era and like it. Really,

(01:10:03):
you know, they just sort of I mean, Roscoe Conkling
is a simpleton in this in the in the way
they paint him, but he was fairly savvy. I mean,
this guy was McConnell and Pelosi of his day. And
you know, he was also absolutely a rabbit abolitionist and
very pro reconstruction. And there's this great scene in a

(01:10:27):
in a book I read about Blanche Bruce who's vaguely
touched on in the in Death by Lightning, where Blanche Bruce,
African American senator from Mississippi, his fellow Mississippi senator won't
walk with him for the opening of Congress, which is
a very wich was the tradition the two senators from
the same state wouldn't do it because Mississippi was starting
to turn on what was happening, turn against reconstruction, right,

(01:10:50):
you know. And anyway, you know who walked with him,
Roscoe Conklic, you know. So, I mean it was just
sort of like Conkling is a complex figure. He is
absolutely a machine boss, all of those things. But they
painted everything was done in a very simplified way of
painting everybody. And I'm just sort of I'm glad it

(01:11:12):
was popular. I hope this encourages Netflix to allow the
creators to have done. My guess is they truncated an
eight to ten episode series into four episodes because they
didn't think Garfield was a draw, and it turns out
now people are digging this and it did really well,
so hopefully they won't do that again.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
Okay, so here's by the way, I said eighteen eighty four,
I meant eighteen eighty one, the eighteen eighty election. He
gets assassinated in eighteen eighty one, because I was anticipating
my next question to you. So, okay, my book, my
reading list starts with Manhunt, which is the Search for
John Wilkes Booth, because I think it shows you quite

(01:11:51):
a bit about Andrew Johnson. Now, they also turned that
into a Netflix series, which is very different than the book.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Very different. But I thought they you know, I thought
it was going to capture it. Well, here's what I
do appreciate that Manhun did is you know, we have
you know, sometimes we overly simplify history as we teach
it right, and we have over time the Lincoln assassination
has just been about Lincoln when it was an actual
conspiracy to get rid of Lincoln, Johnson and the Secretary

(01:12:24):
of State at the time, and the fact that Seward, sorry,
I was blanking, so I was waiting for my brain
to catch up, and so I appreciated that we sort
of It's like my pet peeve about how we teach
World War One. We only teach it through the prism
of Germany. We never teach the fall of the Ottoman Empire,
which is what's created the Middle East mess that we
are still dealing with today. But we don't teach history

(01:12:47):
that way. We only teach it World War One through
the prison of Germany, and we only teach the booth
part of the assassination. Well, he was one part of
a larger conspiracy. This was a large conspiracy of the
Confederacy against the United States, and Andrew Johnson essentially shut
it down, you know, shut down what would have been
a probably a bigger deal investigation had we truly embraced

(01:13:11):
it the way it should have been.

Speaker 2 (01:13:13):
The past is never dead, it's not even pasted. Okay,
So you start with Manhunts. I then think you can
do some Grants autobiography. Then I go to William Rehnquist's
Centennial Crisis about the seventeen seventy how.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Many seven seventy how many? Let me stop you in
eighteen seventy three. First of all, what did you We
just glossed over you, so you could do a Grant memoir.
I hear you on that. What'd you think of.

Speaker 2 (01:13:41):
Tough?

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Oh you haven't done it. I did it last summer.
I finally did it last summer. It's really worth it.
I learned all sorts of stuff that I didn't realize.
How close the Dominican Republic came to being a state,
how close we came to how the Republicans and Congress
we're trying to essentially extract Canada as reparations for the

(01:14:05):
UK helping the South. That was another little interesting story.
And Grant was obsessed with the Dominican because it was
a deep seaport, it was going to be a first
and so there was some thought and in fact, there
was some thought of making it essentially the first black state,
the first non white state. Was there was some thought

(01:14:26):
to that. Anyway, there's just a lot of interesting It's
very sympathetic to Grant that basically he was used by
a lot of people who used him, which I buy
a little bit. But there was a little bit of
celebrity drifter off of him more than it was about him.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Yeah, I mean, Grant's Grant's one of those really interesting figures.
If you want to study the presidency as well. We're
about to go through sort of a well, this is
my point to you, Like the whole end of the
nineteenth century is kind of a weird time for the
office of the presidency.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
I completely look. The fact is it sounds like you
and I are about to geek out on the same thing.
I'm obsessed with this period essentially of grant through really
grant through hearting. I could go all the way through,
because I think it is the case of history rhyming. Right,
we were moving from a grant we were industrializing. It's
essentially as the railroads were beginning, and we're in a

(01:15:22):
similar period. Right. You could probably back it up to
the beginning of the internet, but we've been beginning of
the Internet is essentially the railroads, and then you know
striking oil, and that industrialization is essentially AI and social media. Right,
And we're really experiencing almost a parallel set of challenges

(01:15:44):
from the late twentieth early twenty first late nineteenth early twentieth.

Speaker 2 (01:15:49):
And so my question to you is I drop off
basically with the eighteen eighty election with Garfield of Destiny
of the Republic. By the way, that you should read
Centennial Christ by William Renquist listeners it is the Chief
Justice of the United States.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
Why his book over the others. I've read four different
versions of eighteen seventy. Of the eighteen seventy six, Brett
Behar wrote one, a couple other historians wrote one, there
was the Renquist one. I will just put it this way,
whatever your party bias is today as an author, is
what is applied to the conclusion drawn by those with

(01:16:27):
the eighteen seventy six. It's funny to me, Ultimately everybody
agrees on most of the set of facts. But what's
interesting is I think the bias of the author dictates
whether you believe the vote counts in the South. We're
either unfair to the Republicans or unfair to the Democrats.

Speaker 2 (01:16:46):
What I like about the Renquist book is that you're
getting a two fer, right. You're basically getting him to
talk about Bush by Gore, but he can't talk about
bushb Gore, And so you're doing it through this eighteen
seventy six lens. And it's so short, you know. Yeah,
So it's it's this tiny little book that you can
flip through in a night. And Ranquist also writes the

(01:17:10):
Centennial crisis. After he's written grand inquisitions, he writes grand
inquisitions about impeachment and about the impeachment of Justice Chase,
which I'm totally like. That is my obsession right now
is the eighteen oh five impeachment of Chase. And he
writes about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which is so

(01:17:30):
fun because he writes that before the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
So he's about to be oversee the second impeachment in
the history of the United States of a president and
he doesn't know it when he's writing that book, which
is such a fun read, and so you all.

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
Is a good boy. I have not thought about going
back to that Johnson impeachment book and reading that through
the prism with that in mind.

Speaker 2 (01:17:54):
Oh my god, it's so great.

Speaker 1 (01:17:56):
That's great thought.

Speaker 2 (01:17:58):
But by the way, the impeachment of Samuel Chase. Samuel
Chase was a justice on the Supreme Court during John
Marshall's time. Jefferson decides the Supreme Court isn't voting his
way on a bunch of his pet projects. Chase is.
He's a very partisan justice. There's no question about that.
The Supreme Court's term is delayed because he's out campaigning

(01:18:20):
for John Adams against Thomas Jefferson in that Battle of
eighteen hundred. That's of course in the musical Hamilton. And
so when Jefferson gets into office and Chase is voting
against him, He's like, efat, let's remove this guy, and
so they impeach Chase. And it really would have been
it was this turning point in American history because Jefferson

(01:18:40):
had basically said that if they can remove Chase, John
Marshall is next. And it would have so fundamentally changed
that third branch of government into a rubber stamp that
presidents would have just put in the justices that would
agree with them and agree with their policy proposals, and
you wouldn't have an independent Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 (01:19:07):
We are geeking out here and offering all sorts of
book ideas, and I want to I want to keep
this going because it sounds like you I keep interrupting
you to a certain.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
Now, I just I want to know your books to
the end of the nineteenth century.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
I want to know I see, well, I'll tell you
a book that so what happened? And I'm going to
give you a short version. So for a brief period
of time. I sold a mini series on Garfield and
was in myself and a writing partner, Adam Pearlman. We
wrote a pilot. So let's just say that I had

(01:19:40):
we had thought through all the different ways that we
were going to do this. So I obviously watched Death
by Lightning in a very different way than most people
would have watched it, which is all they chose to do. That. Well,
we were going to do this. One of the things
we were going to do and was make Washington, d C.
The city one of the main characters, because you know,
it was actually the small period of time where DC

(01:20:01):
got Home rule for a period of time, then it
had Home rule taken away. Black political power was concentrated
in the district in a very unique way, and there
was a lot of fascinating stories. And I read this
incredible book and it's it's literally a biography of Washington
the City. And I am sorry, I don't have the
title in front of me, but I am I'm so

(01:20:22):
it it is. I learned more about Jefferson and Washington
and what they were trying to do and designing the
capital city. You know, you realize now the unfinished Canal
in Georgetown you know what that was about. Washington was
determined to get to thought that the Potomac was going
to get that they could connect to the Mississippi, and

(01:20:43):
they were literally though. What Washington's vision was to make Washington,
d C. The most important. He wanted to make it
the biggest port on the East coast. And in order
to do that you had to connect. Obviously, he wanted
to connect all the Well, it didn't take them long
to realize, oh, that ain't gonna work, right, But it's

(01:21:03):
just funny. You know, they didn't have their GPS then, right,
they didn't really have any aerial shots. But it's what
I love about this is it it really is sort
of understanding how the city was formed and then these
interesting periods that the period of laying it out and
all of that, and washing Jefferson actually took it over

(01:21:23):
after a while. He's like, no, very trumpy in way.
I've got an idea of how this city should be
laid out. Let me take care of this. There was
even a little bit of a power struggle between Washington
and Jefferson over over you know, building the city and
laying it out. And then of course you had Grant
and this is where he allowed himself to get corrupted

(01:21:44):
by people who wanted to control of the city, developers
who want to control the city. It is. But this book,
there's an incredible period about d C when it briefly
got home rule after the Civil War. Then then Grant
takes it away, but it leaves this sort of vacuum
of lack political power that's still got a little bit
of juice in it. And it's just a fascinating period

(01:22:05):
in the history of Washington, the city, and it really
sort of helps you understand the we we lived in
such a divisive political time, right if you think about it,
starting with after Grant, we don't re elect the president, okay,
to two consecutive terms until McKinley. We go through this
hill and we shoot McKinley. That's a whole nother you know.

(01:22:28):
And by the way, do you.

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
Know that Carl Rove has the great book on that.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
He's got the great McKinley book, which which what I
haven't discovered, is a good book on Grover Cleveland. And
you would think with the Trump election that somebody would
have would have and you know what, I that's one
of those that that I, you know, I wish I
had been smarter, you know, if I wanted to get
into the history game, that would have been a book
to jump in and do. Do Grover Cleveland, the last

(01:22:52):
non consecutive president, you know, by the.

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Way, on Washington when I you know, I've lived on
and off in DC a lot of my twenties, but
when I sort of finally moved here permanently, Jonathan Carl,
who I know, you know well from ABC News, gave
me the book Revily in Washington eighteen sixty to eighteen
sixty five. So it's pre dating what you're talking about,

(01:23:16):
but also a fascinating time for Washington as the city.
It's sort of like Sex and the City, but instead
of New York City.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
It's well, here's an uncomfortable factoid. The deal where they
cut the where you know, the eighteen seventy six the
deal that basically ended reconstruction was cut in a black
owned hotel in DC.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):
That's ironic, depressing Atlanta Sporth thinks about it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:39):
Yeah, I mean, like, how what a I mean? And
this is to me, what makes Garfield such a great
character is that Garfield. Look, we do this with anybody
who gets gunned down too early in life, what if right?
What if they had lived? If Kennedy had lived? If
you know, my god, Stephen King wrote an entire book
on a portal of what if Kennedy had lived? And
of course the conclusion Stephen King came to as if

(01:24:01):
Kennedy had finished his terms, it would have given us
George Wallace as president. Just sort of think that's the
way that book ends. By the way, did you know
that I.

Speaker 2 (01:24:12):
Have thought about what would have happened if Mitt Romney
had won twenty twelve. You certainly don't get Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 (01:24:17):
If Garfield lives. I think Garfield, you know, garb That's
my point, meaning we put all this, you know, we
had all these hopes, and we think certain things might
have happened if so and so lived, and death by
lightning certainly paints a very virtue a virtue virtuous version
of Garfield. But there's something to it. I mean, if

(01:24:37):
Garfield has two consecutive terms, I think he does. The
goal was to bring back reconstruction. And it's possible if
Garfield lives between Civil service reform and sort of bringing
back reconstruction, we might have gotten the Civil Rights Act
nearly one hundred years sooner.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):
Yeah, I'm total that because, on the one hand, Garfield
comes in as a weak president in the sense that
he is the way he's picked, and Death by Lightning
does a great job of showing how he's the dark horse,
right as the book is entitled the other.

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
Book, the other book being entitled right.

Speaker 2 (01:25:14):
Yeah, but in some ways that makes him quite weak.
He doesn't come in with the normal set of allies
and party machines that everyone else had come in with.
So his death breathes up his vice president. Yeah, because
then buck some of that. If Garfield had stayed in,
would he have needed friends, would he have had to

(01:25:35):
compromise more than he would have wanted to? Would he
have sort of been a very bland president because he
couldn't have actually had the political juice to get much done?
Is my alternative version of that.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
It could be And what you just painted might have
been is the Obama presidency, right, and a presidency that
was filled with you know what I think looking back
on it, you know what did the Obama presidency accomplish?
Obamacare was a big no doubt about it. Other than
that it accomplished more of a breaking a barrier matter.

(01:26:07):
It certainly it certainly accomplished that. And I think breaking
that glass ceiling or I don't know if we want
to call that a glass ceiling or a ceiling, whichever
how you refer to that, but the presidency itself. And
you know, when I realized this is going to become
a talking point, I was at the Texas Tribune Festival.
I was there to interview Wes Moore. I went to

(01:26:28):
see the Tim Walls interview, and Tim Walls talked about
we wasted the Obama presidency, meaning they had these huge
majorities for two years and they didn't do enough with it.
And he said the next time, you know it was
it was an interesting answer. The question was about, you know,
what have you learned from Trump? Some form of that,

(01:26:49):
like what and both and Tim Walls gave one answer,
and Wes Moore gave a similar answer to me, which is,
you know, Trump's always doing something. There's always action with Trump.
And he says, you know, we Democrats spent two much
time trying to get a commission with a committee and
then get an interest group buy in and do this,
and do this and do this, and then he talked
and then Walls turned it into you know this is

(01:27:10):
why we only and then we were too cautious, we
only try one big thing, and oh, we're not going
to do cap and trade. Now now that we made
everybody walk the plank in Obamacare, and it's interesting that
that's the lesson that I think many of the next
generation of Democrats are taking away from the combination of
the Trump era in comparison to the Obama era.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
That's funny because to me, I was at the Republican
National Committee during you know, I was on Romney's twenty
I was on Romney's oeight and twenty twelve campaign, and
then went to the Republican National Committee after the twenty
twelve cycle. And from that vantage point, I would say
the huge mistake they made was dismantling the Democratic Party.
They basically turned the Democratic National Committee into Obamacare or sorry, Obamacare,

(01:27:57):
Obama for America, right.

Speaker 1 (01:27:59):
They called it ofa organizing fro America or something like that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
Yeah, and they lost a thousand state beats over the
course of his presidency. Those that's their field. And so
when you look at you know, people sort of making
fun of the octogenarian bench in Congress right now on
the Democratic side, it is super lopsided. The Democrats are
the ones with all the old people not leaving. But
I would say part of that is because they gutted

(01:28:23):
their bench during the Obama years and they were left
with nobody to.

Speaker 1 (01:28:28):
Run well there and then then and then of course,
I mean just to fast forward that through. I mean
the most the single biggest mistake I think Obama made
for the future of the Democratic Party was was endorsing
Hillary Clinton. He did not understand that the party he
should have He should have opened up that twenty sixteen

(01:28:50):
primary campaign. And when he closed the door to any right,
when he shut that door, I understand why he did it.
He made you know, Bill Clinton was really important to
his campaign reelection in twenty twelve, and Hillary Clinton was
a good soldier and a good partner and all of
those things. Like I think all of that was genuine.
I think I don't dismiss the personal reasons. But when

(01:29:12):
the minute he does that, this is why Amy Klobashow
doesn't run. There's that whole group of Democrats that ended
up running in twenty that run instead in twenty fifteen
and twenty sixteen. And it's more I mean, like I said,
Obama didn't remember that the reason he became the nominee
O eight is that Democrats didn't want Hillary Clinton. And

(01:29:34):
how badly did Democrats not want Hillary Clinton? Twenty sixteen,
they almost nominated Bernie effing Sanders, That's how badly they did.
I've always thought the rise of Sanders is directly a
result of Obama closing the primary door to anybody legitimate
in going against Hillary. It became just like a steam valve. Well,
it was going to go somewhere and won Martin O'Malley,

(01:29:55):
and it wasn't going to be Jim Webb. The only
other person sitting there, you know, was Bernie Sanders. And
so they half the party goes there. But I put
that blame on Obama.

Speaker 2 (01:30:07):
They try not to repeat the mistake the Obamas. I mean,
then in the last summer in twenty four and they
hold off on Harris because they know that she has
no chance of winning. They want the open primary at
the DNC convention, but it's gone, and so they get
on the bandwagon. But you could tell that it was really.

Speaker 1 (01:30:27):
Because he screwed up the first time. Yeah, it's the
same thing, and then this time that you know, it's
always one of these things. It was the nobody wanted
to go through the pain of denying the nomination to
Harris only to potentially have Harris win it anyway, because
the delegates weren't going to feel comfortable denying the sitting
vice president the nomination. So you know, even if you

(01:30:48):
wanted to open up the process, even if you thought
that was there was no guarantee where the delegates were
going to go. I mean, this is what Death by
Lightning teaches us. Right by the way, I always say
this about the Garfield story. If you've ever wondered where
the mythology of the dark horse candidate came from, it
is Garfield is singularly still the only person to come
from nowhere to get the presidency. And he did it.

(01:31:09):
And we have this mythology that somebody can make a
speech at a convention and become the nominee for president.
It only happened once, but it happened once. That's what
I love the story so much.

Speaker 2 (01:31:20):
And Barack Obama because it.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
Didn't happen that year. No, no, it didn't happen that year.

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
Because it is because of a speech he gave it
a convention. You know, on the Republican side, This is
what I mean about Romney losing in twenty twelve. It's
not just that obviously then Republicans had to nominate someone
else in twenty sixteen. It's that they learned that the
nice guy wasn't going to win, and so they wanted
someone who was going to be the opposite of Romney.

(01:31:46):
And if Romney had won in twenty twelve, it would
have been like, Ah, the sort of George W. Bush
character matters, That's what the Republican Party stands for, honor,
and and that that would have been more of the ethos,
and potentially America could have skipped that post two thousand
and eight financial crisis populist movement that then happened worldwide.

Speaker 1 (01:32:07):
I had a relative asked me, did we make a
mistake not electing Romney in twelve because it gave us Trump.
Now I'll give you an alternative theory that actually did.
As I do this at the end of every year,
and my podcast have been doing this since going back
to NBC. I pick out a few you know, a
butterfly effect, like what if, like you know, what if

(01:32:29):
Bill Clinton had resigned in ninety eight and Al Gore
becomes president. I think It really politicizes nine to eleven
in a way that nobody ever believes because it Gore
probably wins in two thousand, for sure, he sort of reelected.
Bush probably doesn't even run against him because he would
have been very cautious and going, oh, you're not going
to defeat a sitting VP. You know, there would have
been it would have been a different Democratic Party. There's
all sorts of but you know, one decision creates these

(01:32:52):
butterfly effects. I'll give you one that I did last
year about this issue of going from Romney to Trump.
If there's no Bridgegate, Chris Christie's the front runner in thirteen,
fourteen and fifteen, and there is no room for Trump
because Christy is enough Trump, right, He's the no more

(01:33:12):
mister nice guy. And it's a more gradual version from
Romney to to you know, it's Trump's a more abrupt
like jump. Right. Christy was sort of the you know,
Jersey version, but sort of with with some empathy in him, right.
And I actually buy that that if bringey Gate doesn't happen,

(01:33:33):
or if he just says, you're goddamn right, I ordered
the code read and you know, I don't care what
you want to do it would have you know, I
think it literally is a two day story. My friend
Bill Baroni doesn't have to go to prison. But that's
a whole nother you know. You know, Christy messed that
up for a variety in a variety of ways. But
if it doesn't happen, or if he handles it differently,

(01:33:54):
is there no Trump and Christy is the then the
more rational move from away from mister Knight's guy.

Speaker 2 (01:34:05):
Interesting, I've always seen Christy as the heir to John
McCain in a lot of ways. I got into politics
because of the piece that was written in Rolling Stone
by David Foster Wallace about the two thousand primary for
John McCain bullshit one and bullshit two, the buses that
he was driving on. And you know, I'm on Sundays

(01:34:26):
with Chris Christy on ABC pretty frequently. Yeah, he is
the most talented guy on TV. It like, I'm the
person who sits there for the next twenty four hours
thinking of all the things I should have said and
how I wasn't right, you know, like, and I just
kicked myself pairing myself to Chris Christie right next to me.
It's so annoying. No, I mean he's the best. I

(01:34:47):
adore him.

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
He again, he just he he mismanaged that period, and
I think he knows it, but he never wants to
admit it, you know. I mean, because we were human beings,
I get it it. You know. Look, I have a
problem with the relationship with him is not great because
of it, and it just because it's very personal. But
I you know, he's still an incredible political Athlete's I

(01:35:13):
love to use that phrase political athlete, and he's an
incredible political athlete, and he you know, it was so
against brand right. The problem with Bridgegate for him was
either he didn't know either he ordered it or he
didn't order it right. And one thing we all knew
about Chris Christy was he was a micromanager. This wasn't
an absent tee leader. So it wasn't believable that he

(01:35:35):
didn't know. And when he tried to feign that he
didn't know, you were just like, well, now you're being
a typical politician. I thought you were the straight shooter.

Speaker 2 (01:35:41):
Like.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
It undermined his entire brand in a way that I
don't think even he appreciated.

Speaker 2 (01:35:47):
The problem with your theory is that you're not really
taking into account the Tea Party movement, piece of the
Republican Party. And the reason that Ted Cruz comes in
as the first runner up to Trump in twenty six
sixteen is because of that specific type of conservatism that
Ted Cruz represented and Chris Christy was not that because

(01:36:09):
he's been a governor and had a record for eight years.

Speaker 1 (01:36:12):
So don't you think it's Christy And but don't you
think there's no room for Trump? And don't you think
Christie's the alpha at that point? Like Trump?

Speaker 2 (01:36:19):
Interesting because it is.

Speaker 1 (01:36:20):
Just a different version. You know, by the time, Christy
was a neuter version of himself. I'm sorry, he just
was by the time. We didn't get to see the
full Chris Christy until a brief period in that, you know,
when he sort of took Rubio out in the New
Hampshire primary. But we didn't see the version of Christie.
You know, imagine that Christy during the earlier part of

(01:36:42):
the primary season. It may have been Christy and Cruz
for the final right, there probably is no room. Casik
probably doesn't catch fire. The Kasik people are with Christy.
Plus Christy also has sort of the Bush wing in
his own way. He's a formidable I think co front runner,
and I agree with you on Cruz and that'd have
been fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
Well, I was running Carly Fiory in this campaign during
that cycle, and I will tell you this is like
the little known thing that you only know if you're
sort of in the deep weeds. You who took us out?
Chris Christy?

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
How did he do that? I'm vaguely yeah, it was
the New Hampshiter.

Speaker 2 (01:37:19):
We got pushed out. He got us out of the
New Hampshire debate.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
He pushed her. That's right. She didn't make it to
the main stage and he barely got in, right.

Speaker 2 (01:37:27):
That's right. And so he had made some calls into
the RNC and had pulled some you know, some carrots
and some sticks. Yeah, he and I have talked about this,
and I think it's pretty funny now. But it shows
I think what you're talking about, which is both he's
a good athlete on the field, but he's a good
athlete off the field too.

Speaker 1 (01:37:46):
No, I think it is. It is. It is a
fascinating what if I think, if Bridgegate doesn't happen, or
if he just handles it in the way that I
think we Chris Christy today would probably have handled it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:58):
So, Chuck Todd, this is my question to you. Does
the next Democratic president who needs to restore the Department
of Justice pick Chris Christy as attorney general to have
that cross partisan appeal?

Speaker 1 (01:38:11):
You know, so you this gets that too. I actually
think we need to have an entirely different way that
we appoint the Justice Department, and I think we need
to figure out how to sort of force a we
need to detach justice from the executive branch and so forth.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
I disagree entirely. I think we're going to have to
do a whole nother podcast on this.

Speaker 1 (01:38:31):
I think we should because I think, you know, I
think I at least would want to set up kind
of like the Federal Reserve, where no one president can
sort of do wholesale changes to sort of the rule
of law just based on, you know, wiping out the
entire political leadership. Like I'd like to see sort of staggering.
I'd like to see five year terms for the DAGs,

(01:38:52):
for various DAGs, and that way you guarantee that no
one president controls I think we've just proven that you
can't the politicizing of the Justice Department. I mean, at
the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the
left doesn't. You know, right now, the left doesn't believe
anything coming out of justice. Before it was the right
didn't believe any But here's the problem. Eventually, if both

(01:39:13):
the left and the right agree that when that justice
is politicized and eventually none of us are going to
believe anything that comes out of it, I think we
have to do. That's an interesting way of trying to restore.
By the way, that's what Biden was trying with Meryk Garland.
In his defense, it turned out Garland just didn't know
how to didn't understand the political side of the job,

(01:39:33):
and there was a political side of the job. But
I would argue, and I know we're getting late. It
sounds like you've got to get going here. And I
know I promised you under an hour and I have
thirty five seconds. So that's my quick argument there. But
pushback quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
We want the Justice Department to focus on the priorities
of the president, so that after the two thousand and
eight financial crisis, Barack Obama moves federal prosecutors off gun
cases and even tear cases to put them on financial crimes,
and then the job starts, crimes starts spiking, and you
have Trump, move aussays, and again, I'm at the Department

(01:40:10):
of Justice at this point. Move aussays, back onto gun crimes.
That is the responsiveness that voters expect from the president.
And I hear you that we've broken it. But we've
broken it by electing bad presidents, not by things that
we need to do to the Department of Justice.

Speaker 1 (01:40:27):
Well, I guess I could argue that, Look, we didn't know. Look,
the Department of Justice was something we didn't fully appreciate
that we needed at the beginning. In fairness, right, the
Founders didn't really have a and I think that's one
of those today it's like i'd loved it. Now, Hey, hey, founders,
here's a challenge. You guys didn't think of here. What
do you think of this? How would you have handled this? Right?
Or Hey founders, Now, by the way, the Founders never

(01:40:48):
told us how many members of the Supreme Court there
should be. Why do you think they didn't?

Speaker 2 (01:40:56):
That's a good question. You know, the original court under
John Jay didn't really do much at all.

Speaker 1 (01:41:03):
John Jay, right, was it five members? Then? The originally
there were five and there.

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
Were six, and they tied quite a bit, and then
we haven't really gone back to the even numbers since then,
and then we've vacillated. We went, you know, down to seven,
we've gone up to ten. We've been at nine for
over one hundred years, well over one hundred years at
this point. Do you have a reason why you think
they didn't set the number.

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
I don't. I mean, that's you know, it's it's i've here,
I've here's I'll tell you why. I've thought about this
more often because I'm I think that we should have
I read Federal seventy eight and the Hamilton on the
judiciary and how we select judges, and I read it
as we need the least partisan people you can find,
and to me, the only way to do that is

(01:41:44):
to make the number three quarters in the Senate. Now,
I had somebody say to me, well, if that is
what they intended, they would have written it in the
you know, they were very specific when they wanted super
majorities and when they didn't want super majorities. And I thought, okay,
I accept that premise, right, because there are specific places
where they said, yeah, you need supermajorities for X. You know,

(01:42:05):
not necessarily for why right, And so they didn't do
it for that, So that's interesting to me, and that's fair.
So I don't you know, it's not as if those
ideas weren't on the table. They just clearly chose for
maybe for compromise reasons whatever, not to do it. Like
I tell you one that I don't get at all.
I have no idea why there's a pardon power other

(01:42:25):
than somebody wanted a pardon. That's why they say. That
is the best explanation I've gotten from a Founding Father historian.

Speaker 2 (01:42:34):
No, you know what, I think the pardon power is
actually incredibly important. I would ratify an amendment to also
put that through the advice and consent process in the Senate.
I think that was doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:42:44):
Definitely think there needs to be a committee of some sort.
But yes, like a partner that you.

Speaker 2 (01:42:48):
Think about is a part of the three most famous pardons.
It's Washington's parton of the Whiskey Rebellion, It's going to
be Johnson's pardon slash amnesty of the Confederates, and then
for Word's pardon of Nixon. All three of those were
not the sort of mercy pardons of the Kings of England.
They were trying to ameliorate political problems that were potentially

(01:43:17):
existential to the country and to move past those, and
those were pretty important actually, So I think, you know,
there's those who want to get rid of the pardon power.
I think that's a huge mistake. But if we had
the advice and consent of the Senate, it would get
rid of the family pardon bullshit that we're seeing now.

Speaker 1 (01:43:35):
Well, look, I boit, I felt this the last time
you and I podcast that were like, well, we're gonna
have to do this again. We're going to have to
do this again because I think the Ford pardon in
hindsight was a huge mistake. Oh okay, I think. And
so it turns out and by the way I was
you know, I always say I was raised to believe it.
I was raised to understand it that way. And then

(01:43:57):
we went through Trump and you realized, oh no, you know,
this set off, This ended up symbolically creating a protected
political class that we never should have created. It. It
just y, I understand the decision in the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:44:14):
What's that I'm open to this argument.

Speaker 1 (01:44:17):
Yeah, I understand the decision in the moment, and I
would argue that Ford did it for his own personal
political reasons. This was not that I know the idea.
It is painted as if it was for the country.
But the fact of the matter is, if he didn't
pardon for it, he is He does not get the
Republican nomination in.

Speaker 2 (01:44:33):
Seventy six, but his presidency is totally focused on that right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:37):
And this is one month after he makes this decision,
one month after he takes office. This is before the
seventy four midterms, Okay, which probably made the seventy four
midterms even worse for the Republicans for.

Speaker 2 (01:44:48):
What it's worth, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
Yeah, but anyway, we've got it. It just feels like
we just have to put a pin in our conversation.
What's thet tell people, how they read more of you,
how they see more of you, all of those things.
So that I'm a people know, I'm a huge advocate
of the Dispatch. It's one of my places I recommend
people to go to all the time. I mean, Scott
Linscombe has educated me more about trade than any individual

(01:45:14):
there is, So I just highly recommend so many of
your newsletters. But you go.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
I have a legal podcast with David French called advisory
opinions where we break down everything the Supreme Court and
the circuit public courts are doing. We'll dabble in some
state supreme courts from now and then. And then I
have a book coming out called Last Branch Standing that'll
be a Supreme Court explainer and with a lot of
you know, a lot of good color for someone like you, Chuck.

Speaker 1 (01:45:40):
Well, I can't wait when's the book come out because
I want to schedule that, but you can order it now.
We will, we will schedule that podcast if you will,
if you humor me again. And and we've got so
we've got to fix the Justice Department, uh huh and
Ford pardon right, like, those are the two big things
we need to you know, how are we going to
our ideas for restore boring the public's belief in the

(01:46:03):
role of law? Is it? Can it be done by
a president? Or does it?

Speaker 2 (01:46:08):
There?

Speaker 1 (01:46:08):
Is this system have to change? And then here's a
third item for the agenda. How do we trigger it?
How should we get people to embrace a constitutional convention?
Because I kind of think we.

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
Need one, at least an amendment to make amending easier.

Speaker 1 (01:46:23):
Oh you would like to do that? I don't mind
that amendments are hard. I just think that we just
need to make the process not seem like it's it's
that it's too much of a slog like may be
speeding up the process in some form, but I think
the idea hard.

Speaker 2 (01:46:41):
But as Justice Scalia said, it shouldn't be this hard.

Speaker 1 (01:46:44):
No interesting. So what does that mean? Give me a
quick teaser on that. What would you get right?

Speaker 2 (01:46:50):
Get rid of? Basically the role of Congress in it?
The states still need to ratify three quarters of the states,
but lower either bypassing Congress or lower the number in Congress.

Speaker 1 (01:47:02):
Would you ever endorse national referenda? No, neither. Would I
actually believe state referenda are unconstitutional.

Speaker 2 (01:47:10):
I think they're a disaster.

Speaker 1 (01:47:11):
Oh, I totally agree that for the most part they've done.
You know, that sets things back, doesn't It doesn't pave
the way forward. It just helps partisans who have who
are in the minority. That's all the referendu process seems
seems to do. But we are not a direct democracy
or a republic, and I assume that that should apply
to the states as well. That's why I don't I

(01:47:32):
don't buy that. I am surprised that referenda haven't been
challenged under that under the idea that that it's not
what the framers intended. All right, all right, my friend,
we got a big agenda. It's going to take us
two hours, so we'll see.

Speaker 2 (01:47:47):
I love it, Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:47:50):
There's a reason results matter more than promises, just like
there's a reason. Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury
law firm. For the last thirty five years, they've recovered
twenty five billion dollars for more than half a million clients.
It includes cases where insurance companies offered next to nothing,
just hoping to get away with paying as little as possible.
Morgan and Morgan fought back ended up winning millions. In fact,

(01:48:13):
in Pennsylvania, one client was awarded twenty six million dollars,
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If you're injured, you need a lawyer. You need somebody

(01:48:34):
to get your back, check out for the People dot Com,
Slash podcast or Dow Pound Law Pound five two nine
law on your cell phone. And remember all law firms
are not the same, So check out Morgan and Morgan.
Their fee is free unless they win. Well, I can't
wait to have Sarah back. We are going to debate

(01:48:56):
whether the single worst presidential decision in the twentieth century
was Ford's partnering of Nixon. I cannot wait to have
that long conversation with Sarah going forward. Let's just say
that she's already a return guest. She's already. If I
can create sort of like the SNL hosting hall of
Fame where you get five or more appearances and you're

(01:49:17):
you're in my hall of fame, Sarah Skar is easily
going to end up being one of the early first
five time guests, right Mark Xandy's already in there, getting
close to that number. Jonathan Martin's getting close to that number.
My friends at Punch Bowler getting there. You know where
I you know where I go. I really you know,
people that know their shit are going to be your

(01:49:38):
five time Toodcast appearances. And Sarah Esker is somebody who
knows her shit. So with that, let's go into the
time machine. So this week on the Toddcast time Machine,
obviously I'm looking. I look, it is hard to ignore

(01:49:58):
December seventh. So I'm not gonna ignore December seventh. I'm
going to lean in to December seventh, but I'm going
to do it in a slightly different way than you
might expect, because what December seventh did is it shifted
us from a nation that listened together. It was the
beginning of something where we were a nation that listened together.
Now we are a nation that listens alone. So I'm

(01:50:19):
kind of starting with December seventh, nineteen forty one, Pearl Harbor.
We at least have read about the shock. We don't
remember the shock, right, We weren't there. Most of us
weren't alive for that moment. That's listening here. Some of
you were, but most of us won't write at this
point in time. Right, If no baby boomer in theory, right,
if you think about the entire baby boomer generation, the

(01:50:41):
first ones were born in nineteen forty five, so in theory,
none of them were alive, Right, That's how few people
it's hard to believe that, But that's how few people.
So we remember the tragedy, and of course it was
a turning point in American history and in world history.
But Pearl Harbor also is the greatest single demonstration of
the past of shared media in America life. What do

(01:51:03):
I mean, Well, in nineteen forty one, more than eighty
percent of American households had a radio, and for many
families that radio was the most valuable object in the house,
the most valuable thing they owned that didn't have four
wheels attached to it, obviously a car. And on the
morning of December seventh, the entire nation turned into that
same medium at the same time. They heard the president,

(01:51:27):
they heard the bulletins, and of course they heard the
war and you heard it with everyone else. It was
a shared experience. Radio wasn't just dominant, it was the
national hearth if you will, I mean literally right those
fireside chats, we were all sitting around the radio to
find out what our president knew. What can you could
tell us? The country had one soundtrack, one voice, one

(01:51:51):
shared experience. This is the height of communal media in America.
But four years later, this week in history, we had
our first crack in communal media. The first crack appeared,
and it comes from a place no one was watching.
On December one, nineteen forty five, the FCC quietly approved

(01:52:14):
a massive expansion of what was called the FM broadcast band.
To most Americans, this meant zip, but it would eventually
change everything about what we listened to and how. A
few things happened Because of this decision one, we ended
up with more choice. At the time of this rule
in the United States had just forty eight FM stations.
Within ten years, that number exploded over five hundred, a

(01:52:36):
tenfold increase. Romber AM radio was the initial radio Suddenly
radio wasn't one monolithic block. We actually had a menu
of options, and there were a whole bunch of new formats.
We had musical formats jazz, classical, album rock, adult, contemporary,
soft rock. FM created the space for niche music programming,
the beginning of fragmentation, something were familiar with. Now, FM

(01:53:01):
sound quality was so much better than AM that listeners
began choosing stations based not on personality, but on clarity
and fidelity. This was true in the car I grew
up in my dad. My dad hated wanted to listen
to some AM radio guys, but hated the sound quality,
so we ended up listening to more FM radio. By

(01:53:21):
nineteen seventy eight, just before our next big milestone, which
I'm going to get to in a minute, FM overtook
AM for the first time. It commanded fifty eight percent
of all listening in the United States. The communal world
that had existed at the time of Pearl Harbor was
already beginning to split. More stations, more formats, more choice.
The era of everyone listening to the same thing was

(01:53:42):
slowly dying. But choice is one thing. Personal choice, boy.
That is something else, and that wouldn't arrive for decades
in the form of a tiny, blue plastic cas set
player with foam headphones. If Pearl Harbor was the height
of shared listening and FM was the beginning of fragmentation,

(01:54:04):
then the moment that truly ended the broadcast era arrived
in the summer of nineteen eighty when Sony quietly introduced
the Walkman into the United States. There wasn't a big
launch event. There was no splashy TV campaign, no Steve
job style reveal if you will. It had been introduced
about a year earlier in Japan, but for one hundred

(01:54:25):
and fifty dollars, you two could have a personal stereo.
It was about five hundred dollars in today's money, by
the way, and it was just slipped onto American shells.
And guess what, it sold out almost instantly. Sony expected
to sell five thousand units a month. Instead, they sold
over thirty thousand units in the first two months, a
number that shocked even Sony's executives. And why because, for
the first time ever, millions of Americans experienced private entertainments.

(01:54:50):
The Walkman wasn't a radio, it wasn't a sterio, it
wasn't a boombox. It was a portable personal bubble, a soundtrack.
You control, songs, you chose, moments, you curated. No DJ
no commercials, no shared listening, no mass experience, just whatever
you wanted to hear, whatever you put together. This was

(01:55:13):
the beginning of a personalization revolution, one that arguably we're
still in the middle of. And I'll tell you this,
once Americans got a taste, that's something about it, right.
The more choices you give us, the more choices we demand.
So that gives us And this is a moment that
I think people need to understand to understand the current
media landscape. If you follow the death of radio, then

(01:55:36):
you will understand what's happening right now at cable news
and broadcast television. So the Walkman, it didn't kill radio overnight,
and no, video didn't kill the radio star. Sorry, I
couldn't help myself. But just like streaming didn't kill cable overnight,
it all starts slowly, then it accelerates, then it becomes irreversible.
So here's what happened. Familiar pattern. And again we're talking

(01:55:59):
about FM radio. Young listeners fled first. Radio listening among
twelve to twenty four year olds fell twenty percent during
the eighties, the exact decade when the Walkman took over.
That's my decade, folks, of when I was that age.
And yep, I I knew what time WSAG one of
three point five in Miami was going to get the

(01:56:20):
let out, which meant I was going to get thirty
minutes of led Zeppelin songs, songs I had not owned yet,
and I wanted to tape them, so I would tape
them and then have them magically for myself, right without
evening to pay a dime. That was the other part
of this, right, that's what. That's the other thing parents mind.
You know, my dad wasn't giving me the money. I

(01:56:41):
had to do the Columbia house crap. And that's how
I sort of built my own, my own music catalog.
So there we were. In the eighties, car listening completely changed.
Cassette listening in cars went from almost nothing in nineteen
eighty to forty percent of all in car listening by
nineteen ninety. Right like, it's like, what how up? And
we first had radio, and then suddenly we had CDs,

(01:57:03):
and then suddenly now your phones connect. When was the
last time? Ask yourself that you used your car installed
car radio to listen to something. I'm gonna guess if
you did, it's probably like me listening to a ballgame
on the way home. Quickly because you've vaguely remembered where
you heard play by play for whatever sports team you remembered.

(01:57:25):
But that might be it. But this is happening. This
is how we lost FM radio. So four and ten
moments spent in the car were suddenly not radio moments.
In nineteen seventy nine, Arbitron track roughly a dozen major
music formats, and by the late nineties there were more
than forty. Radio was trying to adapt to a world
where audiences were no longer captive. They were trying to

(01:57:47):
stave off this revolution, so they tried things like talk radio.
From nineteen eighty to the mid nineties, talk radio's audience
grew three hundred percent. Music abandoned AM entirely, and AM
clung to political talk as its remaining asset. It's exactly
the same way broadcast TV today clings to live sports,
and cable news clings to talking heads. So Walkman, Discman,

(01:58:12):
MP three players, iPod, iPhone. By nineteen eighty six, Sony
had sold almost ten million Walkmans. By the end of
the product line, the Walkman finally had passed two hundred
twenty million units sold worldwide. Radio never recovered from what
started in nineteen eighty. It aged a trank. It fractured,
just like television is doing right now. So the modern
parallel TV is just radio two point zero. Everything we

(01:58:33):
watched happened to radio after nineteen eighty is almost exactly
what we're watching. It happened to cable and broadcast TV
today right when unified, fragmented, personalized, and collapsed.

Speaker 2 (01:58:44):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:58:44):
Let's compare Radio Pearl Harvard unifies, FM creates choice, Walkman
personalizes radio collapses. Okay, nineteen forty one is the unifying moment.
Forty five is the beginning of choice. Nineteen eighty is
the Walkman. Nineties and two thousands radio dies television nine
to eleven unifies. Right, we all were watching the same
news channels in two thousand and one. The DVR creates

(01:59:05):
some choice in the two thousand. Smartphone personalizes TV collapses
in the twenty twenties. Right, let's just go to here,
cable households. In twenty eleven, we had one hundred and
five million households that had access to cable television. Today
it's about sixty million. That's a forty five percent collapse
in a decade, and I promise you more's coming. The
broadcast TV media and viewer age in nineteen ninety three

(01:59:26):
was forty one. Today it is nearly sixty. In cable
news it is now it's seventy. For Americans under thirty,
over sixty percent of all video consumption happens on smartphones. So,
just like the Walkman destroyed the idea of shared listening,
the smartphone has destroyed the idea of shared viewing. We
don't watch the same shows, we don't see the same ads,
we don't get the same news, we don't share the

(01:59:47):
same reality. We're all walking around with our own private feeds.
Just like the Walkman owners walked around with our own
private soundtracks. We now took it to everything else in life.
So this week in history gives us a three step
evolution of American media. You didn't see that. I was
going to start with Pearl Harbor and go to media
route right December seventh, nineteen forty one. The only thing

(02:00:09):
we have to fear is fear itself. It's a peak
of shared communal broadcast experience, Americans united around one broadcast.
Nineteen forty five, we get FM expansion, by the way,
in this same week in history, and that's the beginning
of choice of specialization, if you will, niches fragmentation. In

(02:00:33):
some ways, it is what FM radio was in nineteen
forty five, is what cable TV was in the eighties.
Then the summer of nineteen eighty we get the Walkman,
and it's the birth of full on personalized media. And
once we put those foam headphones on, we've never really
taken them off. We're now always at least got one

(02:00:54):
year with this our personalization eras began. Radio crack, television's cracking,
and the entire media environment is built around the logic
of the walkman, my feed, my soundtrack, my show, my news.
So there you have it. Pearl Harbor. This week in
history is Pearl Harbor and not an insignificant moment. But

(02:01:18):
what is interesting is when you think about the moment
through the lens of media and what nineteen forty one
was and where we are today. It has been one giant,
fast revolution and how we consume content in this in
not just this country, in the world. So there you go.

(02:01:42):
There's your moment in the.

Speaker 2 (02:01:43):
Time of show.

Speaker 1 (02:01:51):
All right, let's get in a few questions. Ask Chuck
it's going to do two or three because I, let's
just say, I do a lot to say about about
college football. This one comes from Aaron from Cincinnati. Hey, check,
I really enjoy the author segments, especially a recent feature
on the Barn. It's one of the most powerful books
I've read in a long time. Thanks for sharing what

(02:02:12):
you're reading, and please keep highlighting your favorites. I also
learn a lot from the sports discussions, even as a
non sports fan. They help me better understand the world
around me. Great job on Election Night special and Happy Thanksgiving. Wow,
there's no question in there, but hey, who doesn't want
to read some like reinforcing mail that, Hey, we at
least have one person in our audience that appreciates what

(02:02:33):
we're doing. My whole goal home, it's about one, one
person at a time. Aaron, in all seriousness, thank you,
And that is something that I'm I'm trying to look
I know I'm always going to have a political focus
is too strong of a word, A sort of a
political you know, I worked in politics or in political

(02:02:57):
media professionally for so long of it, so that's he's
going to be the dominant part of that conversation. But
one of the things that I want to be better
about with this podcast is sort of sharing. You know,
I do, even my pop culture consumption in some ways
I do see sometimes through the prism of politics, and
I know I'm not alone in that, so I will

(02:03:18):
continue to at least share what I'm reading, what I'm watching.
There's a couple of things I'm watching right now that
I'll admit I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
The biggest one is Pluribus. I don't even know how
I would describe this to somebody if they were asking me, well, hey,
what are you watching now while I'm watching this show
on Apple called Pluribus. It's by the guy who did

(02:03:40):
Breaking Bad and Better At Call Saul, and I loved
those shows, so I'm trusting him on this one, mister Gilligan.
But man, this is one of those. It's like, it
feels as if Vince Gilligan took Breaking Bad, Better Call
Saul and ran it through and somehow merged it with

(02:04:10):
merged it with that other Apple show where God, I'm
drawing a blank on that Apple show where we're a
severed sorry Severance. I was about to you caught me
in or you caught the editing process. I was about
to signal that, hey, we better edit this out, but
I won't edit this out anyway. I was drawing a
blank on the name of the show Severance. But it's
I think that's what this feels like. It's like, it's

(02:04:33):
like if you took the plot line of Severance, the
plot line the plot lines with Breaking Bad and Better
Call Solomn, put them all together, you might get this show.
I think I say that I don't think I'm through
it enough to know for sure what the hell I've
gotten into, but I can't wait to watch the next episode,

(02:04:54):
I hopefully admit that. And I am doing a little
stranger things also in the moment. So there's that. And
I did promise that in the substack next week. By
the way, it's going to be some reading recommendations and
podcasts recommendations for all things having to do with the
fall of the Ottoman Empire and World War One through
the prism of the Middle East rather than just through

(02:05:15):
the prism of Germany. All right. Next question comes from
Sarah Kay and Lansing, Michigan. Should I say, Chuck. I'm
a middle school math teacher working to instill values like kindness, respect,
and civil disagreement, but today's political leaders on both sides
often model the opposite, undermining these norms in public. At
least me wondering, it's just how we're expected to lead
and live. Now is our hope will return to respectful
bipartisan discourse? Kind regards Sarah, this sort of I'm kind

(02:05:38):
of talking about this. The President chose this tragic moment
that befell these two young National guardsmen and he turned
it into a political exercise and weaponized it for political purposes.
When the right thing to do in a moment like
this is you set politics aside and you had a
unifying moment. You know, maybe you learn a little bit

(02:05:58):
more about these victims. With a little bit more, you know,
find out what Let's find out what the cause of
the shooting was. Let's let's let's get all of the
facts before we immediately try to assess who gets political
gain and who gets political demerits. And there's no doubt
right this is you know, it's one of those things.

(02:06:19):
Is that Trump's fault or is Trump the result of
an era that is, you know, the coarseness of social
media has become sort of made coarseness more acceptable in
our everyday lives. I don't know quite how to put it,
but but we definitely are in one of these moments
where we don't have empathy anymore. And it goes back

(02:06:41):
to Donald Trump doesn't have empathy. It doesn't mean the
rest of us don't have to have empathy. And you know,
whatever broken childhood issues that Donald Trump's brain has been
messed with shouldn't impact how we raise the next generation
of Americans in this country, and unfortun I do think
that you know, this gets this gets it to something

(02:07:03):
I've been concerned about for some time, that that that
you know, we the first half of the Trump era
was defined by a whole group of people, regardless of ideology,
who said no, no, no, no, characters should count that.
You know, we should have high morals, high ethics, and
good character in our political leaders. And we saw a

(02:07:24):
group of people that were uncomfortable with the with the
the bad character of Trump. I don't know else to
describe it as right, He's just a bad guy. He's
got bad you know, he's amral. I don't know if
he's immoral. I know he's amore. I don't think he
cares what right and wrong is. It's about whether he
benefits or not. He's uber transactional to the point of

(02:07:47):
right it. You know, he puts everybody else second to
his benefit. If that is considered how to succeed in politics,
then you're only going to have people emulate even more
from all political sides, not just the maga side of things.
And you know we've seen right this sort of course rhetoric. Now,

(02:08:09):
at first it's been like, well, let's curse more. If
we just drop the F bomb, we'll show we can
tract real people. But there's this perception that somehow work
in people who are living paycheck to paycheck haven't don't
have morals or ethics, or don't care about morals and ethics.
That's not That wasn't my experience growing up as a

(02:08:29):
working class kid. That wasn't my experience with other working
class families that I spent time with. If anything, there
was more morals and more ethics that you know, Hey,
you've got to that stuff. You know, what you don't
have in wealth, you have in your character. Right, nobody
can buy character. So it's a you know, let's see

(02:08:54):
what we do. In twenty eight I had some hope
that Joe Biden could be a better moral authority for
this country, and he turned out to be a failure. Now,
maybe a younger version of Joe Biden might have been
able to pull this off, but you know, he also
had his own blind spots on morals and ethics when
it comes to his family. So I don't know who
the next you know, but I guess I have some

(02:09:16):
you know, I'll be curious to see what the voters
prioritize right. In seventy six, the voters really wanted somebody
who was moral and ethical, and we went with Jimmy Carter,
who turned out not to be a very good manager.
He was highly moral, highly ethical. To this day, it
is interesting you will have people simultaneously saying that he

(02:09:37):
was a man of high character and he was a
bad president, and look, he was a bit of a micromanager.
And what if I told you he fired his entire
cabinet one day? He'd be like, oh, that's kind of
unhinged too. But because he had to high morals and
high character in some ways, he would get more benefit
of the doubt than others would have given him. I'm
very curious to see in twenty eight whether Democrats stick

(02:10:02):
to wanting to try to find an adult as their
party leader, or whether they want a combatant a la Trump,
but just a liberal version of it. Right, And I
think it's an open question. I would say, right now,
I see a democratic party that's more interested in fighting
fire with fire than I do seeing a democratic party

(02:10:25):
that wants to set a higher bar for morals and ethics. Now, look,
I think we as an electorate are pretty cynical about
morals and ethics right now and assume that nobody has them.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for them, and
it doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to legislate for them. So,

(02:10:45):
you know, I guess I would say this, Sarah, Let's
not give up quite yet on the American electorate for
not sort of demanding better. Let's see what happens in
the primaries, and let's see if we start to hold
other people to higher standards than what we held Donald
Trump to do. Two more questions. This next one comes

(02:11:12):
from Chip from Colora Springs. Hey, check, I'm really enjoying
the long form podcast. Do you think the US presidency
concentrates concentrates too much responsibility into one person serving as
executive Commander in chief, head of state, and party leader.
Should we consider distributing those roles to prevent further power consolidation? Also,
thanks for the boiler Maker shoutouts this season, though I'm
not optimistic about the bucket game. Yeah, the old oaken

(02:11:34):
bucket game to an Indiana and Purdue. I did something
that I've done all year long, and it is nothing
costs me nothing but cash. And that is I have
faded the Hoosiers in some of these football games against
Big ten teams in cold weather, assuming that they wouldn't
pile it on. Sure enough? I thought, for sure, well,

(02:11:56):
they're not covering twenty nine and a half this week,
are they? Man? When am I going to learn?

Speaker 2 (02:12:02):
Right?

Speaker 1 (02:12:02):
There are two things. There are two truths this year
for my betting prowess. One stop betting in any games
involving the Atlanta Falcons and two, stop trying to fade
the Indana Hoosiers. I think I am. I swear to God,
I'm saying it out loud to prevent myself from doing vote.
But let's talk about your more serious question, and that

(02:12:23):
was with presidential power. You know this is it is
not as if we our founders, gave us the tools
to make sure we didn't do this, and it is
a poor management. Two things that have happened, right. You've
had a legislative branch that is been afraid of taking

(02:12:44):
votes and afraid of being specific on legislation for fear
they couldn't get the legislation passed, so they create ambiguity
and the laws that they create. And when you create
ambiguity and essentially allow the administration straight of state to
make these decisions on how to execute a law that
Congress passes. Well, all you've done is empowered the executive

(02:13:06):
branch to essentially accumulate more authority of how laws are executed.
So I go back to that because that is source
one of our problems. Source two is a judiciary branch
that continues to say, well, hey, if Congress doesntlike it,
they can pass a lot to undo it. And until
they do, you do have a judiciary that, at least

(02:13:30):
amongst Republican appointees, has been filled with legal scholars who
are now judges who buy into this unified executive theory
business who want to see a stronger executive branch. So
essentially side anytime there is a dispute between branches of government,

(02:13:51):
essentially give the benefit of the doubt to the executive.
I think one hundred percent we've concentrated too much power
to the executive. It was never the intent. We were
supposed to have a balanced that the legislative branch was
supposed to be equally as powerful as the executive branch,
and there was a real assumption that we would essentially
have a legislative branch that felt almost as powerful as

(02:14:14):
a parliamentary system with a presidency that could serve the
role as commander in chief and sort of how to
execute laws, to essentially be a check to make sure
the legislative branch didn't try to accumulate too much power,
and instead, over nearly two hundred and fifty years, we've
essentially watched the legislative branch hand power over to the presidency. Now,

(02:14:38):
part of that, I could and this goes a little
bit to my toodcast time machine topic, I actually could
blame the media for this a little bit. And when
I say the media, it's just the fact that we
are the mass media in general always is looking for
a singular figure to to solve a problem or a

(02:15:01):
singular figure to execute a solution, and we have just
if you think about it, you know, the presidency. You know,
as soon as mass media got powerful, starting with radio,
our presidents got more powerful. FDR was a powerful president,
but before that, we didn't have a really powerful president

(02:15:23):
really until that went back to Lincoln, and that was
due to essentially powers he had, you know, suspending the
Constitution a couple of times we were in the middle
of a war, but ever since FDR, each president has
has sort of found a way to accumulate more power.
And I just throw it out there as a question.

(02:15:44):
Have we as a society, because we make the president
the singular figure, we certainly set the expectation that the
presidency themselves is more likely to solve problems than the
legislative branch. We don't, and we do a terrible job
collectively in mass media educating the public that actually it's
the legislative branch that is the place that this needs

(02:16:04):
to be happening, and that they're the reason why we
have this problem. And I think that that's I just
would I would throw that out there as one of
one of the reasons of how we got to this
too powerful executive. All right, last question comes from Mark

(02:16:25):
d from Seattle, Washington. Hey, Chuck, never missed the check todcast,
and so glad you went into Pennant. Thank you. In
light of Marjorie Taylor Green's resignation and the question about
her position pension, you mentioned she's only receiving the minimumount,
I began wondering, what are the benefits Congress receets after
five years of service? What is the maximum that can
can receive While we're on the subject, what healthcare coverage
do they get? Are they on Obamacare or something else?
Big fan? All right, Mark, I am giving you the

(02:16:47):
best answer I can give you, and this is for
people elected in nineteen eighty four or later. So this
really now does pretty much handle everybody in Congress, I
think except Chuck Grassley at this point, who was elected
in nineteen eighty But it is a far less generous

(02:17:11):
system than you might agree. So this is the federal
employee's retirement system, and this is what Congress is a
part of. So this is how it works. Okay, members
of Congress accrew one point seven percent of their highest
three years of salary for each of the first twenty years,
and then it's one percent per year for each year
after twenty so, and they also get solid security. There's

(02:17:32):
also a four to one K matching plan of five percent.
I mean, this is where you're saying, they're going, Wow,
they get solid security and a four to one K
and a pension. But there's a bit of a pension cap.
There's no explicit eighty percent statutory cap, but the math
makes the ceiling effectively pretty low. So twenty years at

(02:17:53):
one point seven percent is thirty four percent of the salary.
Twenty more years plus one percent is twenty percent. So essentially,
in any given year, your pension is going to be
no more than fifty four percent of your highest three
year of salary as a member of Congress, and that's
after forty years of service in the government. So let's

(02:18:17):
shall we say very few get there. So for instance,
a member with twelve years of service retiring at age
sixty two, we'll receive thirty to forty thousand dollars per year.
That ain't jump change, but that's about what many people
get on Social Security. A member with twenty years retiring
at or after sixty two would get forty to fifty
five thousand dollars per year. A member with thirty years

(02:18:37):
sixty to seventy five thousand dollars per year, and the
rare member with thirty five to fifty years of experience
could get up to eighty to ninety percent, but not
the full salary. So even the longest serving members do
not get one hundred and seventy four thousand dollars a
year in a pension, okay, which is what the current
salary is, and they're mathematically no way for them to

(02:19:01):
mathematically ever get there. A member has to serve five
years to invest in a pension, and the minimum retirement
age varies somewhere fifty seven to sixty two. So now, look,
there was the old congressional system before it was redone.
There were a handful of longtime members of Congress that
got eighty percent of their pay and a lot of
talk radio and chain emails in the nineties in the

(02:19:23):
two thousands exaggerated many of those benefits. But even since
twenty twelve, members have had to contribute more of their
own money to their pensions and the benefits are smaller.
Look the point of the Marjorie Taylor Green pension issues.
I know that people got all excited about it, but
when you actually dig into the numbers, this is not
trust me, the unpopularity of Congress has already forced previous

(02:19:47):
Congresses to amend this pension situation so that it really
is yes, there's a pension, but it's not a how
to get rich pension. It is arguably reasonable amount of
money and a reasonable pension in exchange for the public service.

(02:20:12):
All right, that was the reasonable, and now to the unreasonable,
and my take on the week that was in college football.
I'm going to start my rant this week not about
the committee and Notre Dame and the whole. Should Notre
Dame be in over Miami? I think no. I think
it's clear they don't they want to. I think Miami

(02:20:33):
only gets in if they decide to take both Notre
Dame and Miami. I could argue that if you're gonna
you know, the issue really is is the the fact
that the SEC is way overrated this year. There is
no doubt the SEC plays the most competitive college football.
But the gap between the SEC and the other conferences
has never been smaller. I mean, just look at the

(02:20:55):
ACC versus the the SEC this year, and really this
year matters more even than last year because you have
more sort of more of a leveling of the nil
playing field across both conferences. Right, the SEC got a
jumpstart and the ACC has been catching up. And what
has that led to the I think they met up

(02:21:16):
ten times, just so you know.

Speaker 2 (02:21:19):
And.

Speaker 1 (02:21:23):
The a SC one four and the SEC one six,
so it is we're not talking about a big difference
between the two. So the point is, I don't think
all these SEC schools should be getting in with and
the aec getting zero, especially the duke. Now let me
get off of my rant here a minute before I

(02:21:45):
get to sort of what we saw this week in
college foot Well, first of all, I got to give
Miami credit. That's the best Miami's ever played in weather
below forty degrees in the history of the University of
Miami football, as far as I'm as far as my
lifetime is concerned. I mean, I can't tell you how
many times we played in Boston or in pitt outdoors
in November and played like garbage. The cold weather games.

(02:22:10):
It's always been an issue with these Miami teams. The
Dolphins most recent last time they were in the playoffs
was in a super cold weather game in Kansas City,
and we all know how that turned out. It's a
it's usually pretty difficult. The Miami played an out standing
game in cold weather, That's that's one thing. And you know,
they played like they needed to that they had something
to say. I think it's pretty clear they're one of

(02:22:32):
the ten best teams. They're one of Realistically, I look
at it this way, who could beat Ohio State. They're
one of a handful of teams at can beat Ohio State.
I think there are only five or six teams at
in beat Ohio State. Miami's one of them. Miami has
the offensive line and defensive line to do it. So
I don't know what more you know. Obviously, Mimi, you
could say they shouldn't have lost two conference games, Well

(02:22:53):
guess what. Notre Dame shouldn't have lost both of those games,
but they did. It just happened. So then you compare
with what you got. I don't get that dead, but
let me go to let me go to something where
I'm really ticked off, and that is at the leadership,
the horrendous leadership of the ACC. First of all, they

(02:23:16):
have a tiebreaker situation for their champion that does not
factor in non conference games. It only factors in conference games.
So I don't know if you are like me, and
you're like, how the f did Duke who was seven
and five overall? Okay, how did Duke at six and
two in the conference but one in three out of conference?

(02:23:41):
Allowed was even allowed to be eligible for the conference
title if you have a losing record out of conference,
when two of your three losses are your teams that
are not in power for conferences, right, So ultimately the
ACC is going to have to fix this. No team
because the possibility that Duke win defeats Virginia and is
it wins the conference, Duke may not be one of

(02:24:05):
the five highest ranked conference champions because the winner of
the American, which may be North Texas or Tulane, I
think that's what we have. I have there on the
American or the winner let me get this right, it'll
be North Texas or Tulane, or the winner of the

(02:24:25):
Sun Belt Okay Conference, which could be James Madison might
both be ranked higher than the winner of the ACC.
And of course then the ACC could be left out

(02:24:46):
completely at this point, because you could have a twelve
and one James Madison team and let's say a twelve
and one North Texas team and an eight and five
Duke team. Remind you two of Duke's lo One of
them was too two lane. One of them was to
that football powerhouse in the Northeast called Yukon, the University
of Connecticut Huskies, who are not a member of any conference.

(02:25:10):
I might argue the a CEC probably should have taken
them a while ago, but I digress. The fact that
the leadership of the ACC created a tiebreaker that take
does not that allows a team that does not play
ten or more power for schools in their schedule is

(02:25:30):
eligible for their conference championship. That is mistake number one
because in case you're wondering, Duke gets the tiebreaker based
on the they had, they have sort of there are
seven uh tie breaking orders, okay, and so what you
had was you had a one, two, three four. You

(02:25:51):
had a five way tie for second in the ACC
between Duke, Miami, Georgia Tech, SMU, and Pitt. They were
all six and two an ACC play. So this is
how the tiebreaker worked, head to hag among all the
TIEDE teams if they all played each other, Unfortunately they
did not. And if they didn't all play each other,
is there a team that beat all the others in
the tie that also didn't happen? Then it was win
percentage versus all common opponents. Wasn't enough to deal with that,

(02:26:14):
Then it was win percentage versus common opponents ordered by
finishing the AEC standings. That couldn't figure out a winner,
So then it became combined win percentage of each team's
ACC opponents, i e. The strength of schedule within the conference.
And that is where Duke ended up ahead of everybody else.

(02:26:34):
Their ACC opponents are combined twenty nine and twenty nine.
Miami's ACC opponents are combined twenty seven and thirty two.
Georgia Techs are combined twenty five and thirty two. Sm
us are combined twenty four and thirty five. Pits are
combined twenty four and thirty six. So Duke who sits
there and loses to two non Power four schools and

(02:26:55):
Yukon and Tulane, those losses do not factor in at
all whether or not they are worthy of the ACC
Championship game. This is on the leadership of the ACC
that there was no role about playing ten power four teams.
I think there's going to be now number one that
you would not get that losing to non Power four

(02:27:17):
teams would actually be a demerit and would actually should
count for more, could count more against you than losing
to a Power four school, because the idea is to
try to strengthen the schedule. So I just find the
leadership of the ACC. They literally were silent when the
ESPN and CFP Invitational Committee denied an undefeated Florida State

(02:27:40):
team a place in the College Football Playoff he sat
there barely in silence when Miami was left out of
the college football playoff last year is the number one
offense in the country and at ten and two with
the number one overall pick. And then this year the
ACC has done slightly better in the pr stance from
the conference. But this is a debacle. And if the

(02:28:02):
ACC only gets one team in the playoff, right, there's
no doubt. And then that's if we're lucky, right, if
we only get one team in the playoff, might end
up being only Miami. But this is on Jim Phillips
and the ACC. The fact is this is a complete
and utter failure. The ACC's largest business partner, ESPN, has
devalued the conference. They have reporters who ridicule the conference.

(02:28:25):
Heather Dinwich ridiculed Georgia Tech schedule and says they have
don't belong on the same field as Georgia. Basically, it took.
It took the last game went to the last second
because it was a one score game. The difference between
the two conferences are this not this anymore because guess what,
everybody's paying and there is no dominance that they all

(02:28:50):
think and so there's a perception about the SEC. And
here's the thing, I wish Greg Sanking were my conference commissioner,
because look, do I blame Greg Sanking for frag men
in college football, for making it harder to make college
football bigger and better. He is trying to turn college
football into a smaller club where only people in the

(02:29:11):
SEC and the Big Ten can succeed. I think that's
but you know what he does. He fights for his members,
He fights for his conference. You know what Jim Phillips does.
None of that. He does not fight publicly. And he's
not a good communicator. Perhaps he is not you. And again,
some of this isn't his fault. Some of this was
the previous administration of the ACC getting into bed and

(02:29:32):
a bad deal with ESPN, desperate for money and extending
the Grannar rights way too long. But they've allowed themselves
to be in a situation where the ACC gets less
say about this college Football committee going forward? Right, The
SEC and the Big Ten get to decide format somehow,
the other power for conferences don't get a say here.

(02:29:56):
The biggest business part in the ACC, which is ESPN,
treats the ACC like shit, like dog excrement. Okay, And
yet there is nothing that is done. So look, this
is a debacle. The fact is the ACC had a
pretty good year, was very competitive, and has no business

(02:30:16):
allowed having Duke in its championship game. But for the
ridiculous and dumb leadership and inability to see how awful
and stupid this tiebreaker was and not fully appreciating that
the entire especially the ACC, which is trying to fight
for relevance. Your non conference schedules should be as important
as your conference schedule, if not more important. Miami goes

(02:30:37):
out there and schedules real opponents, Florida State goes out
there and schedules real opponents, Clemson goes out there and
schedules real opponents, and Duke schedules yukon. Okay, what are
we thinking here? So this is terrible leadership from the ACC.
He should be there should be a total house cleaning.
And because this has cost in the University of Miami millions,

(02:30:59):
this is costing every ACC school millions of dollars due
to this poor leadership. So there needs to be a
real serious meeting of the minds. ACC presidents need to
realize they are not being served very well by this institution.
That if anything, it has made things worse. They should
be in litigation with ESPN over how poorly ESPN has devalued.

(02:31:23):
They have actually devalued the conference in when they schedule games,
how they schedule games, who broadcasts, they're reporting all of
the demeaning things they've done and participating in this nonsense.
I mean, Kirk Kirbstreet is embarrassing himself by essentially doing
commentary that supports ESPN's media deals rather than I kind

(02:31:46):
of think he doesn't believe that he is. He really
going to make the argument that head to head shouldn't count.
He literally And by the way, I'm very curious now
Florida State was not allowed to compete in the playoff
because they lost their starting quarterback. Is Ole Miss going
to be allowed to beat in the playoffs since they
lost their basically half their coaching staff? Again, I promise

(02:32:08):
you if Ole Miss were remember the ACC, one hundred
percent chance they would not be in this thing. But
the SEC will fight for its member with its business partner, ESPN,
something the ACC doesn't know how to do and has
not figured out. And yeah, I get really heated about
this because I spend way too much money. I care
way too much. Yes, it's entertainment, that's what it is.

(02:32:31):
But when you don't follow the basic rules of fairness
and you don't actually fight for what's right and fight
against what is just wrong, yes, it's an energy, but
to literally see pure manipulation be used to punish your
product and you sit there silently and do nothing. Come on, man,

(02:32:55):
this has been You know, the ACC is in a
worse position because of the leadership that it has right now,
not a better precition. Miami's in a better position personally
because they basically had to take matters into their own hands.
Clemson in Florida State tried to take matters in their
own hands with lawsuits. I think they got so focused
on lawsuits they forgot how to build football teams. Mimi

(02:33:15):
at least sat there and said, fine, we're just going
to do what we can to schedule. By the way,
we just had South Carolina cancel a game with Miami
because of these conference scheduling issues. But at least it's
an attempt to try to schedule Power four. But you know,
I understand why South Carolina they are have to do.
You know, if they have to do a ninth SEC game,
plus their annual matchup with Clemson. They don't want to

(02:33:36):
have eleven of their twelve games be against power four.
Now I wouldn't mind that. It'd be kind of nice.
Now as for the weekend, obviously, if Duke had lost
to Wake for US, Miami would be in this ACC
title game and the playoff committee's problems would have been solved.
But now they're not solved, and now they've got to
decide between all these ten and two teams. And you know,

(02:34:00):
I do not think any playoff that includes Notre Dame
but does include Miami is fair. And if it's the
third straight year that it's always the it's the ACC
that gets booted, then the ACC should stop scheduling Notre
Dame completely. Every single school should cancel. If games against
Notre Dame don't count, then why schedule them? Why put

(02:34:22):
your players through that? So I think that's that's got
to be a serious situation that people need to be
thinking about. I find it comical that there's this Texas
contingent that thinks, after losing to Florida the way they
lost to Florida, going to overtime against Kentucky, almost losing

(02:34:42):
to Mississippi State, that there's that a victory over a
Texas A and M team that was not putting one
hundred percent of their focus on this game because it
literally was a meaningless game. Yes, it mattered to the alums,
but I only get mattered to the coaching staff for
the players. And we're supposed to now say Texas is
a part of the playoff. Sorry, guys, don't go to
over time at Kentucky, a team that just got shut

(02:35:05):
up by forty points by Louisville and one of those
lowly acc teams by the way. So look, I think
it's going to come down to Alabama, Ole Miss, Oklahoma,
because I do think this Old Miss coaching situation. Again,
if if Jordan Travis not being available to Florida State

(02:35:28):
was a reason to keep them out of the playoff,
then not having the offensive the offensive mastermind of Old
Miss involved in the playoff. Sorry, guys, you know this
is you know and in fact, this system I think
it sucks for the players, But guess what, this is
what Lane Kiffin put them in. This is the position

(02:35:49):
they got. They got put in. So you have a
choice to make. Either you finish your job with Ole
Miss and let's let lsu Hire somebody else. Yes, do
I think the transfer portal, window, timing and all that
should change, There's no doubt about it. But Ole Miss
is not going to be the same. If they don't
win a game, we're gonna say, well, if Lane Kivin
had been there, right, So I think if you're gonna again,

(02:36:11):
if if Jordan Travis was a precedent center by this
playoff committee, then I suspect ole Miss will get left out.
Now again, I don't think that's fair. I'm you know,
I think that's that that sucks. By the way, ole
Miss be careful of hiring the popular assistant that the
players want. Miami did this in two after the two

(02:36:33):
thousand season with Larry Coker. It worked for you know,
it worked until it didn't. It's it is, it's it
helps you if you really think you're that close to
winning the whole thing. It worked, right, and Miami had
a whole bunch of senior leadership going into that first
year of Coker with Ed Reid and Ken Dorsey, and
they had coaches on the field. But I don't know,

(02:36:57):
but I could also argue that because they win in
a direction that they probably wouldn't have gone under any
other circumstance. The program hit hard times, much quicker, much
faster than it should have or suspected that it should have.
But let's just say the weekend. Look, I was certainly
pulling for LSU, I was pulling for Auburn. There's no

(02:37:19):
doubt it would have been nice to see one of
those teams lose. But ultimately it's going to be this
conversation between Miami Notre Dame. If Alabama loses to Georgia
does a three loss Alabama team, Yes, I know they
made the SEC Final. I'm sorry. If you are going
to compare Miami and Alabama, they have a common opponent.

(02:37:39):
Miami beat the common opponent. Alabama lost to the common opponent.
If you're going to put up Oklahoma and Miami, I
think it's not even a close call when you look
at the two offenses and the defenses are pretty similar. Obviously,
Miami beat Notre Dame had to head, so I don't
think it's it's really that difficult. I think it's it's

(02:38:02):
a lot. You have to come up with more convoluted
reasons to keep Miami out than to put them in.
Right there, there's sort of there are more logical reasons
to include them. Last year it was harder. Okay, Miami
also ended the season poorly this time, Mimi didn't end
the season poorly this year. To leave them out is
to send a message to the ACC and I think

(02:38:25):
should invite a lawsuit, multiple lawsuits, because this is there
is no good explanation other than some sort of of
marketing or media preference which is not supposed to be
in the criteria at all. And this is all that
any of us are begging for. Can you just give

(02:38:46):
us criteria that we know at the beginning of the season,
so that you know there is it's purposely ambiguous so
they can pick and choose what teams that they want,
so that they don't have to include certain teams that
they don't want to include, which, of course sends a
terrible message to our youth in America. Right, are we americatocracy?

(02:39:08):
You know what's supposed to make America different is that
we're a meritocracy and things get Hey, what happened on
the field, right? Did you have it on the field?
What happened on the field, what happened in real life?
Don't tell me what happens in a statistical analysis, tell
me what actually happened. If we are not going to
live in the real world and we are just going

(02:39:29):
to manufacture this, and why isn't all sports become the WWE,
Because we are getting awfully close to getting there with
the way this ridiculous committee works. And we're in a
period of time where we don't trust institutions as it is,
and we're certainly not going to trust this institution. And

(02:39:51):
the thing is is that if anybody else were sitting
in Miami's shoes, they would be just as annoyed at
this injustice, just as and you just sit there going,
you know, why can't we just have fairness? All we're
asking for is fairness? And right now the ACC is
not treated with any fairness whatsoever by ESPN and and
and it's invitational committee, and their behavior here has really

(02:40:15):
been a turn off. I did not watch a single
bit of ESPN commentary because I knew it was going
to be a bunch of horseshit bullshit about Texas and
a bunch of hot you know, especially on Saturday morning,
and and and the planting of the seeds of these
absurd arguments that somehow you have to dismiss an actual
result that took place on the field. It is literally

(02:40:38):
I do think they are participating in the very definition
of gas landing. So ten days obviously, I've got to uh,
you know, I'm I am prepared for what's likely going
to happen, which is that somehow Miami gets screwed out
of this due to the due to poor poor ACC leadership.

(02:40:59):
But if I if you take away one thing from here,
and the one thing that I as much as I
get upset about ESPN and the SEC and what they do,
ACC has terrible leadership and it's got to change the
fact that Duke was a system was created that allowed
a seven and five team that played that lost to
Yukon and Tulane got into the Witch Championship game. That's

(02:41:20):
on you, Jim Phillips and the ACC. This is not
a smart way to do this. This was not in
the best interest of the ACC, and you have hurt
financially every single member school at the ACC. Other than that,
you're doing a terrific job. All right. With that, I'll
see in forty eight hours when we get our first
taste of what the College Football Committee has to say,

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