Brad and Dan begin by discussing Trump and why exploring the ongoing revelations of the January 6th is more than just archival mining.
The second major topic is the reclaiming of abortion as a religious right. Brad draws upon the United Church of Christ fight for queer marriage where religious leaders stated that a ban on queer marriage violated the religious liberty and leaders of their church. In this Brad and Dan ask what it means to frame abortion as a religious freedom - a narrative that Evangelicals have used for far too long.
They finish by discussing the raising of the debit limit, Mitch McConnell, COVID-19 variants and reasons for hope.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco this semester, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and I'm back today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Brad, welcome back, and congratulations on changes in your life that have occurred in the last couple weeks.
Thanks, Dan.
Thanks for handling things last week with Blake.
For those of you out there worried about, you know, where's my child while I'm doing this, don't worry.
I'm going to record with Dan.
And we have a great research associate with Swag named Rachel Borthwick, who is helping us with the editing for now.
And so if you haven't checked out Rachel's podcast, Out of the closet and into the pews, you should.
It's amazing.
It's about queer people of faith and how they hold their identities in tandem and in resonance.
So I am going to finish recording here and run back down and attend to my newborn child with my partner.
So don't worry about that.
But we do have important things to talk about, and we're going to jump into those right now.
So Dan, we want to talk about three things today.
One is Trump and the sort of ongoing revelations about the January 6th plan to basically overturn the election, and basically how that affects today.
There's just direct effects today, so it's not just more archival mining of what happened in January.
We're going to talk about abortion in Texas in the Supreme Court and one very promising angle to fight restrictions on abortion, and that is the idea that reproductive rights are religious rights.
And so we'll get into that.
And then we'll finish by talking about the debt limit and McConnell and the nihilism of the GOP.
The extended segment for all you patrons out there is going to be about new data from PRRI that talks about vaccination rates and how white evangelicals are true outliers when it comes to vaccination in this country.
So if you're not a patron, sign up so you can get the extended segments of our weekly roundup.
All right, Dan, let's jump into January 6.
So this week we get a new book called Peril from Woodward.
And one of the revelations there is this sort of six-point plan that was put in place by Trump's lawyer, John Eastman, for January 6.
So in essence, Dan, we now have the kind of blueprint of what they thought was going to happen.
We all knew that Trump is yelling at Mike Pence incessantly to overturn the election.
But we now see the logic behind it, even if the logic is not so on sure ground.
So basically, in the six point plan, here's how it works.
Eastman tells Trump, look, Vice President Pence presides over the joint session of Congress as they certify the election.
OK, great.
Now they start to count the electoral votes, and according to the Electoral Count Act, so they start with Alabama, then they get to Arizona.
When he gets to Arizona, Eastman says, he says that he has multiple slates of electors, and so he's going to defer decision on that until finishing the other states.
So even though Right?
Arizona had certified its electoral votes, even though Arizona had sent in the results of its election and there had been no fraud or anything found.
No issues.
They want Pence to say that he has, quote, multiple slates of electors and he's going to wait on this.
When he gets to the end of all this, he has done this for seven states, including Arizona, and he says, sorry, let me read the verbiage here.
He announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the seven states, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those states.
That means the total number of electors appointed, the language of the 12th Amendment, is 454.
This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe, and Lawrence Tribe has since on Twitter been like, nope, sorry, you got me all wrong there.
Quote, a majority of the electors appointed would therefore be 228.
So if you minus, if you're following along at home, you're keeping score at home everybody, you minus the seven states that supposedly have disputes, you get to 232 votes.
For Trump, 222 votes for Biden, and that means that Trump wins with a minor majority.
Now, this is going to lead to all kinds of chaos.
Eastman knows there's going to be all kinds of objections, and he's basically like, let him figure it out in the court.
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, they can hopefully demand that normal rules be implemented in the Senate, and therefore they'll need 60 votes that this will mean the filibuster, blah blah blah blah blah.
But essentially, Dan, if Pence goes through with this, he appoints Trump president based on this idea that in seven states there are, quote, disputes, and he cannot, in good conscience, count those electoral votes.
This ignores the fact that in all of those states, everything had been certified, everything had been ratified, everything had been sent in by those states.
And so this is essentially a coup attempt, right?
There's a great This is a review of this book in the Washington Post by Eric Rockshway, who's a professor at UC Davis, and this is what he says about this particular matter.
Pence told Trump, I'm not going to do it, right?
So Pence gets wind of the plan and he's like, I'm not going to do it.
His staff had found no respectable lawyer, no matter how impeccably right-wing, who would say he did.
Gesturing at some of his supporters, already gathered and shouting outside the White House, Trump asked, well, what if these people say you do?
The president was willing to find authority in the mob if he lacked it in the law.
Quote, wouldn't it be almost cool to have that power, Trump said.
Pence disagreed.
So Trump shifted from insinuating to berating.
You've betrayed us.
I made you.
You were nothing.
So this goes along, Rushway points out, with what Trump said to Kevin McCarthy, right?
Remember, Kevin McCarthy calls Trump on January 6th when all the violence is happening, and McCarthy's like, can you please tell these people to back off?
And Trump responds, well, Kevin, I guess these people are much more upset about the election than you are.
So, as we know, Congress did not cave, lawmakers counted the votes, and Biden was certified as president.
But Dan, this gives us the inside look at what was going on in terms of the Trump plan.
Dan, I'll just read here.
I have so many thoughts, but I'm just going to read from Steve Bannon, who's the producer of The Rachel Maddow Show.
He wrote this at MSNBC.
This was, in other words, an apparent document written by a lawyer representing the then-president that effectively outlined how Republicans could execute a coup.
Eastman even pushed his vision of January 6th, speaking at the pro-Trump rally ahead of the insurrectionist riot.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, it's been obvious for months that Trump wanted to hold illegitimate power in the wake of his election defeat, but the specific nature of his plan always seemed murky.
What was it exactly that the former president thought would happen?
What was the plan?
Who would implement it and how?
But more than 300 days later, the blueprint continues to come into focus.
We learned last month, for example, that Trump privately urged the Justice Department's top two officials at the time to lie about the election.
Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me, he told Republican members of Congress.
So, Dan, Benen says it better than I can.
He says, this was effectively, right, a plan for a coup.
I have so many thoughts, my mind is racing.
I've had a week off, so many of you can tell I'm like just chomping at the bit here to get back to the mic.
But, Dan, I'll throw it to you.
What do you think about what we're seeing here over the last week?
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