Weekly Roundup: The Insurrection is Coming From Inside the House
Brad and Dan discuss the ongoing GOP debacle in the House, where a Speaker still has not been elected. They then talk hits and misses from the last year - reproductive rights, voting, Biden's agenda, Russia-Ukraine, J6, and more.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Always nice to see you, Brad.
It's been a while.
So we took last Friday off.
And we've both been carrying on the It's in the Code series.
I've been doing the New Apostolic Reformation series with Matt Taylor.
But anytime we take a week off, it feels like I haven't seen you, on the mic at least, for a long time.
So here we are.
It feels like we're a quarter of the way through 2023 already.
Maybe that's just how much news happens every week now.
Well, so we are a couple things.
I'm always so excited to talk about this stuff that I forget the announcements.
So here's the announcements.
It is Friday, January 6th, and we're going to talk all about January 6th, and we're not going to talk about it necessarily that much.
We will be touching on it today in the weekly roundup, but we're going to save a lot of that for this evening.
We have a January 6, two years later, webinar, and that's with me and Dan and Sarah Mosliner, Matt Taylor, who did the New Apostolic Reformation series, and Lucas Kwong, who did the Monster in the Mirror series.
So, kind of the Swadge players, the Swadge troop will be together.
Check out the show notes for the zoom link.
It's absolutely free.
You can join and hang out and basically hear us talk about, uh, January 6th, uh, two years on, and it happens to be the week my book is launching.
So it's a nice chance to talk about my book and, uh, and to, um, to, uh, discuss a lot of what's going on in our news today as a lot of what I talk about in the book.
So that's happening tonight, January 6th.
We hope you will join us.
Next week, I will be down in Orange County on January 13th.
So if you'd like to come out, you can find tickets in the show notes.
If you don't want to buy a ticket, I honestly don't care.
If you're like, you know, I was thinking about going, but screw you Anisha, I'm not buying a ticket.
Well, guess what?
I don't even care if you buy a ticket, just come hang out.
The next night I'll be in LA, January 14 at Mission Hills Church.
And I would love for you to come hang out there too.
So if you're in LA or you're in Orange County, I hope that you will come out next weekend.
You can find tickets in the show notes.
If you don't want to buy a ticket, just show up and hang out.
And that's all we care about.
Okay.
All right.
Dan, let's talk about, you know, so I don't know about you.
Well, let me, I'm going to put you on the spot, Dan.
Okay.
You ready?
What's your favorite holiday movie?
Go for it.
My favorite holiday movie is probably National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
Yeah.
Solid choice.
That's my wife's favorite.
Solid choice.
My favorite, I think, is Home Alone.
And I really like Home Alone.
But here's something I'm going to reveal to the audience that is going to get me many angry emails.
I have watched Home Alone, the original, like 3,000 times.
I'm not sure I've ever watched Home Alone 2 all the way through.
Have you?
It blows.
I have because I have a kid who insists on watching it.
I've made it through, I think, once.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, Dan, I did not know we were going to get Home Alone 3 this early into January.
Dan just got what I was doing.
He just saw it.
January 2023.
We have Home Alone 3.
Kevin is lost in the house.
It's not that he was left behind.
It's that he's lost in his own house.
And by Kevin, I don't mean The adorable Macaulay Culkin of 30 years ago.
I mean, Kevin McCarthy, Dan, who, as of speaking now, I think you just told me we are 11 rounds into voting in the House of Representatives for Speaker.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I'm keeping up with this as we talk, and CNN has that he appears to have suffered his 11th defeat and is not successfully flipping any of those votes that are holding out.
So this is like the first time in 160 something years that it has gone this far.
And I just, you know, here's what we want to do today.
We're going to talk about what's going on in the House.
And then I think we want to talk about some of the hits and misses from the last year that we saw and didn't see coming.
And let that lead us into tonight when we talk about January 6th.
So let's talk about the House of Representatives first, Dan, and just kind of get that out of the way.
Here's my thesis, and I'm happy for you to kind of expound on it or challenge me on this.
I really think that this fight over the speakership and the 20 or so people that are basically preventing McCarthy from becoming speaker is really exemplary in terms of the ways that the extremists now are in the driver's seat of the Republican Party.
That's one of how, uh, January six has never been fully reckoned with because the people who are in that group of 20 are on the whole Trump supported candidates and candidates who are, uh, Trump acolytes.
I mean, they are basically a Trumpist wing of, of the house in many ways.
Uh, so we have that going on and then number three.
And I think you'll, you'll touch on this.
It really shows how, uh, the kinds of, uh, tests and demands on ideological purity can really test any group, whether that's a church, whether that's a political movement, whether that's your local rec soccer team, whatever it is.
And so I think we're seeing some of that play out.
So those are my three ideas.
Which one do you want to tackle or do you want to add a new one onto that?
I think it's starting with that extremist driving.
So people have known for a long time that this is going to happen.
And all of this goes back to things we'll be talking about, I'm sure, in our hits and misses, the midterms and the red tsunami that didn't develop and all this kind of stuff.
But what the GOP was worried about when they got this very, very slim majority in the House was It's the same thing we've seen in the Senate for the Democrats, right?
When you have a mansion or a cinema or whomever, you have like this really, really tight margin.
You have no room to not have your entire caucus going on something.
And so you can get one or two or a handful, or in this case, like 20 people who are holding an entire body hostage.
And this is what a lot of Republicans were afraid of, is that you would have the Freedom Caucus and especially this like It's now a part of the Freedom Caucus really, really like strangling the House.
And that's exactly what we're seeing.
And you've seen people have been following this.
There are all these really pretty arcane and to most of us boring discussions about the House rules and like what the rules are going to be.
But if you can follow that, basically what McCarthy has done is concede like everything that they said that they wanted to where if he becomes the speaker, he's going to have very, very little authority or power or to be able to move the Freedom Caucus.
And they're still saying no and so forth.
But all of this is like of the GOP's own making.
We go back years and what happens when, I'm going to go all the way back to like John McCain.
I'm going to go all the way back to John McCain tapping Sarah Palin.
We've talked about this for a long time in the show that, you know, for me, you get the entry of the kind of really radical right populist wing of the GOP becoming mainstream and It was with Sarah Palin.
Like, she was like this kind of flashpoint in that.
Why did he do that?
To try to tap into that voting bloc.
Because he was the maverick.
He was the independent, etc, etc, etc.
And for a long time, the GOP tried to court those votes.
And what happens?
They wind up eventually with Donald Trump running for president.
And guess what he can do?
He can tap into that voter block like nobody ever could.
And so we're going to hitch our wagon to that, and we're going to ride it as far as we can.
And you and I have talked about this for a long time, that a lot of people in the GOP would like to turn From Trump and from Trumpism, guess what?
They can't now.
That's who they are.
So when you had, even in the midst of the midterm elections, all these people in the GOP crying about how the House is going to be held hostage, which is exactly what's happening, you're like, Yeah, go back and look a few election cycles ago when you jumped on board with this.
This is exactly what happened.
So they're absolutely being held hostage by this.
You have the extremists driving, even if McCarthy wins, and it's not clear at this point that he can or what's going to go on.
They had stories literally about Democrats eating popcorn and watching and things like this.
It's not clear what's going to happen.
It's the Matt Gaetz's, the Lauren Bovert's, as you say, they are now driving the GOP.
And so for anybody who said, well, that's not really the GOP, sorry, in practical terms, it is.
Yeah, I want to stay on that point and then add on another one.
So we've said this forever, and you just really articulated it really well, that When people say that this is not the real Republican Party or that not all conservatives are like this or that, you know, a couple of outliers aren't whatever.
Just look at what's going on in the house.
You have Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and all of their friends basically trolling Kevin McCarthy.
And not only Dan, is it extremism, but it's, it's pettiness.
It's like, it's like they're only happy.
If they're resentful, you know, have you ever, you ever met somebody who's like really only happy unless they have a reason that they feel like they've been like, you know, looked over or, or somebody's like offended them.
Like they're only kind of happy unless they they're full of spite.
And I think that you can see that here.
Like today, Lauren Boebert voted for Kevin Hearn.
Okay.
In one of the rounds.
And Dan, I honestly think she did that because she wanted a dramatic effect where she was like, I vote for Kevin.
We're supposed to help people flourish.
It was like third grade, not even third grade.
It was like seventh grade mean girl stuff.
It was like Lindsay Lohan in the like classic movie stuff.
You know what I mean?
So I think the pettiness, like Dan, we've talked about this so much on this show.
Governance is not a reality show.
Governance is not middle school.
We're supposed to help people flourish.
We're supposed to help people like have better lives.
And instead you're out here like playing, you know, eighth grade gossip games.
That's number one.
Number two is today in one of the votes, Matt Gaetz nominated Donald Trump to be Speaker of the House.
Okay.
And I just, I want to think about this because Dan, it's one year, it's, it's one day away from the two year anniversary.
I mean, he does this on January 5th.
We're recording this in the, in the evening on January 5th.
It's one day away from the two-year anniversary, okay?
Two years ago, a man incited a riot at the capital of our nation because he felt he should still be president, despite all of the courts and all of the vote tallies saying he wasn't president.
It was one of the worst days in American history.
Dan, he should be in jail.
He should be exiled from politics.
He should have been uniformly condemned by everyone in every political party there is.
And amidst a historic vote and fight for the Speaker of the House, somebody nominated him to be Speaker of that body.
Somebody stood in the very space that the insurrectionist overran two years ago and nominated the man who incited that event to be the leader of that body.
If that doesn't show you that we have not fully reckoned with J6, I don't know what does.
Because that is egregious and it may go overlooked today.
You may not see it on CNN.
It may not be the thing that everybody talks about.
But if we still have history books in like 30 years or 50 years, that's gotta be something that you note as a historian.
Two years from the day he's being nominated to be Speaker of the House.
All right, what else you got on this as we move forward?
Well, I think just leading naturally from that, as you talk about January 6th, you're not being reckoned with, right, of not having a serious reckoning about that.
You mentioned that sort of at the outset.
I think it leads from that, like a piece of it is the ongoing effects of Trumpism.
And we keep kind of talking about this, that Trump is, for those who don't know, or maybe don't understand how things work, Trump can't be the Speaker of the House because he's not, you know, a congressperson.
But Trumpism is alive and well.
And I just want to remind everybody, this is the same McCarthy who what?
Who said that Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol attack in the immediate aftermath of J6, as you say.
And then what did he do?
He eventually went to Mar-a-Lago to basically crawl on the carpet in front of Donald Trump and convince Donald Trump that he was still with him and changed his tune and everything else to try to win over Trump.
Why?
To try to win over the Boeverts and the Getzes and all the other people that the Trump sort of faction.
And it didn't work.
So J6 is still going.
We see it in Getz talking about this.
We see, again, as the saying goes, the chickens coming home to roost with McCarthy, who worked so hard to try to win Trump's favor.
And what has happened?
You now have Trump, who endorses McCarthy, kind of, as far as Trump goes, a fairly half-hearted endorsement, says, you know, he'll be okay, maybe even a very good speaker, you know, whatever.
Guess who's not backing Trump?
The Trumpists in Congress.
You had Boebert standing up on the floor and basically saying that Trump needs to communicate to McCarthy that he doesn't have the votes and so forth.
Just to reiterate this point that Trumpism is something that is in the GOP.
It's going to stay in the GOP.
It is going to stay with all of us.
And it's not gone because Trump can't literally be the Speaker of the House.
It's not gone because he's suffering in GOP polls.
It's not gone because it appears, as one interviewer found, you know, some people in his own campaign say that the magic is gone.
They actually don't think his campaign is going anywhere.
It doesn't matter, because the forces that Trump tapped into pre-existed Trump, they are living on beyond him.
And I think so many things are wrapped up.
J6, everything it represented, everything that brought it about, that is still with us now, and we're seeing it unfold on the floor of the House.
Yeah, I got one more thing on this, and it really ties back to something we've already talked about.
But, you know, you basically led off by saying that this really shows that the extremists in the Republican Party are really in the driver's seat.
And I just want to note that you said, hey, look, the Democrats have Manchin and Sinema, and they're the ones that have been the outliers when it comes to the Senate.
And they're the ones that, you know, have not been willing to play ball or, you know, Sinema is now an independent and all this stuff.
It's worth pointing out, and I haven't thought hard about this, and so I don't have like 20 minutes of thoughts here, but it is worth pointing out that the outliers on the Democratic side are centrist.
And that the outliers in this case, at least in the, the house caucus, uh, in the, in the, uh, Republican party are to the right, like they're the extreme, right.
You know what I mean?
And so I just want to point that out that like the, the folks that would not sort of get on board with the Dems are moving toward the center and the ones that won't get on board with the Republicans are moving the other way.
And I just want to remember that next time somebody talks about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, the Republicans are so far from the aisle that they cannot reach it.
Okay.
Like they're so far in the seat.
You ever walk into an empty stadium where there's like, you can pick any seat.
They pick the seat furthest from the aisle.
There is no reaching that aisle.
And anyway, they, if you got to go to the bathroom at this point, you're Republican.
Good luck.
Cause it's about a 20 minute walk to the aisle to get out.
Okay.
Now, here are the concessions, Dan, that according to the Washington Post, McCarthy has made to this group who are so far from the center and so way to the right.
During late hour negotiations Wednesday, McCarthy agreed to the proposed rule changes, which would do what?
It would lower from five to one the number of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote on ousting the speaker.
So they're like, hey, if we give you the job, we need a rule change so that we only need one person.
To any time Matt Gaetz wants to get rid of Kevin McCarthy, he can try it.
Basically, that's what it is.
OK.
He also expressed a willingness to place more members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee, which debates legislation.
This is making Dan Miller's point.
The extremists are in control.
OK, I could go on.
There's there's more of these, but all that to say.
The Republicans are in disarray.
Trumpism is on full display and we will see what happens.
All right, let's take a break.
Come back and we'll talk about hits and misses from the last year.
All right.
Real quick, and I have not looked this up.
Can you be speaker if you're not a member of the House or no?
Because I remember people saying you could.
Is that?
I mean, this is a genuine question because I have not looked it up.
I haven't looked it up either.
I would have thought not, but I don't know.
Because I remember at one point people were like, well, we're going to make Trump speaker of the house.
And somebody was like explaining an obscure rule about how you could be speaker, but not be a congressperson.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Who knows?
Anyway, we'll look it up.
We'll figure it out.
All right.
Let's go to hit and misses from the year.
So basically we want to talk about things we We saw coming and we didn't see coming.
Maybe more things we didn't see coming just because we want to admit where we were wrong and kind of maybe are a little bit happy about it because good things happened where we weren't expecting them.
So, Dan, what's the first thing on your list?
Yeah, so I, you know, we got this idea.
It's a good idea, but there was a great article.
I encourage people to look it up.
It was on Politico by Zach Stanton.
I think it was, I think it was New Year's Eve that it came out where, you know, they were kind of looking at Broadly speaking, hits and misses.
And it is.
It's a useful exercise, an exercise in humility, and sometimes an exercise to be able to see.
But he makes an interesting distinction between like, you know, when you're just wrong, you know, you make your best effort, make your best guess, do your due diligence.
But he also talks about what he calls wish-casting, which is when something is clearly wrong and it's just sort of wishful thinking that it would happen.
And we'll start with one that I think I started, maybe not this past year, but certainly once upon a time doing, but, you know, sort of got past at some point.
And it's the, this time Trump is going down sort of narrative, right?
Back when Trump, you know, I thought when he talked about, you know, sexual assault, when he was running for president, I thought that would do it.
I thought that would, you know, Crater.
It didn't.
I thought that when he was, you know, doing something that was found to be an impeachable offense, that that would do it.
And it didn't.
And then I was like, OK, this is just for lots of reasons.
This is never going to happen.
But people are still doing it.
Right.
There's still they did it with that.
They did it with Covid.
They did it with New York investigating him.
They did it with the search at Mar-a-Lago.
They've done it sort of on and on and on.
There may be charges at some point filed against Trump, right?
He may be indicted for something.
I think the odds of somebody with Trump's wealth, power, former president, whatever, ever like going to jail or something are slim to none, right?
That's not me wishing that that doesn't happen.
I think that that should, but I don't think it will.
But I think that there is still This wishful thinking that we hear, I hear it from people, right?
People who talk to me about the podcast or talk about, you know, whatever.
And I have to sort of as gently as I can say, I think that's wishful thinking, right?
But the bigger point why it's wishful thinking to just return to this point is let's say that Trump does, let's say that by now an indictment comes down.
Let's say the world somehow shifts and the McCarthy's of the world and the McConnell's of the world come out and clearly say, Trump did something illegal, deserves to be indicted, and so forth.
Where does that get us in terms of what we're describing as Trumpism?
Gets us nowhere, right?
Trump now becomes a martyr because, of course, there's the hardcore constituency of his that nothing could vindicate Trump's righteousness more than for him to be indicted for charges by the Department of Justice or the so-called Deep State or whatever.
But we've already seen Trump is on the outs now.
He is on the outskirts.
People can Google around and look and see that people will describe what's going on in the House as showing The diminished force of Trump in the GOP.
And they're right.
But the irony is that it is Trumpism that is now operating smoothly without Trump.
So that's one that I think early on, it was one of mine.
And I said it for a while.
And then finally, it was like sort of the fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, like it's not happening anymore.
So that one, I guess maybe I'm crowing a bit.
I didn't do it in the last year, but I did it before, but I think that that was one that a lot of people are still missing on.
Um, what about you?
What was, what was a hit or miss from, from the prior year?
Well, and I think just to, just to follow up on what you just said, I think, um, I think you're just making a point that, that is really important, which is that, um, yeah, Trump could go away, but the open question is, is like, In the Trumpism without Trump, still win.
And maybe it can't, Dan.
I don't, maybe Ron DeSantis will just lose to like, you know, Joe Biden or to Kamala Harris or to, you know, whoever is the Democratic nominee, you know, The Rock.
I don't know.
I don't know who's running for Democratic president.
Could be The Rock.
Right?
Could be The Rock with, you know, Tiffany Haddish as vice president at this point.
I have no idea.
Maybe Mark Wahlberg.
Who knows?
Okay.
But Trumpism has not gone away, whether or not it's going to win the presidency in 2024, whether or not it's going to, you know what I mean, shape our politics going forward.
We'll see if the mob comes out to vote.
But you're right.
Trumpism is here, even if Trump is not or will not be for a long time.
All right.
So I want to talk about the January 6th Select Committee.
And I know I promised I'd keep my January 6th stuff to our event.
But what I want to talk about is the fact that I think you and I were both a little hesitant.
You know, what is this going to do?
Is this actually going to Like, push the needle.
Are people going to watch?
Are people going to pay attention?
And I want to say, I did miss something, but I also didn't miss something.
And here's what I missed.
I was a little hesitant to say that this would have an effect, and I think it did.
The January 6th Select Committee did three things.
It showed us the coordinated nature of January 6th, from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to various lieutenants surrounding Trump, and it showed that there was a lot of foresight that went into that day.
It showed us unseen footage and unseen evidence.
I mean, a lot of Americans saw footage that made them sick to their stomach once again.
And it really brought all the emotion and the brutality of that day back.
And it also just kept it in our mind that it just every time you wanted to forget about it, like Dan, let me give you an example.
We're going to go a whole hour today and probably not talk very much about Trump's tax returns.
It's been two weeks and it's kind of like between the McCarthy stuff and January 6th and the new year and we could probably spend an hour on Trump's tax returns, but we're not.
The January 6th Select Committee made it so every time we wanted to stop talking about J6 as a nation, we couldn't.
And it was their front and center.
So I think that was a really important thing.
And I think now there's a real public pressure on the Department of Justice to take action.
You and I have both been wary of Merrick Garland and his DOJ and whether or not they have the audacity to pursue charges in this case.
And I think there's now a different kind of pressure on them in the wake of everything that the J6 Select Committee has found.
The thing that I'm sure we'll talk about tomorrow night, but I want to just mention here, is that the J6 Select Committee did not mention Christian nationalism but one time.
And that's a problem.
Dan, we have spent how many episodes on this show discussing the religious dimensions of J6?
We have pointed to our friends and colleagues who have created amazing resources.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Baptist Joint Committee, the Uncivil Religion Exhibit created by the University of Alabama and the Smithsonian.
We've talked about how Christian nationalism was an integrating force at J6 for hours.
Scholars and journalists have showed us just how deep and wide this goes.
Matt Taylor and I just did this NAR series and Matt has done incredible research showing how charismatic Christianity was at the heart of J6.
And they mentioned it one time, Dan.
And I think people have asked me why, and I'll talk more about this tonight or tomorrow night at the January 6th event that we're doing.
But I'll just say briefly, I think there is still this unwillingness to face the idea that white Christians could actually be the perpetrators of the worst sort of attempted coup in our history.
That yes, Oath keepers?
Sure.
Proud boys?
Totally.
Guys in camo with beards and patches thinking they're paramilitary?
Why not?
Run-of-the-mill white Christians?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not them.
Not here.
They don't do that stuff here.
And I think that's a problem.
What do you think?
Thoughts on J6 or something else from your list from the year?
I think that that's a great point about that, about keeping it in front of people and not letting them sort of forget it.
I'll save some of my J6 stuff for tomorrow night, as you say.
The same theme of keeping things in front of people, I'll shift to one that I missed big on, like really big on.
And I've acknowledged this and talked about it.
And I had people every now and then poke fun at me in an email or something about this.
But that was the one, the notion that the abortion rights issue would not help Democrats.
I said, you know, back in June, whenever the decision officially came out, remember, everyone can remember, it was sort of leaked.
We knew the decision was coming and then you get the official announcement in, you know, early summer.
And I basically, and it wasn't a statement out of ignorance, right?
I read enough about political psychology and voter behaviors and so forth that basically I was like, I don't know if anything that happens before Labor Day is going to matter.
And you had The historical significance of midterm elections and the party that controls the White House losing in the House in particular, and it's as close to a kind of political, you know, destiny, truism as you could have.
I didn't think it would have staying force, and it did for lots of reasons.
It fired lots of people up, lots of organizations of different kinds, lots of people, lots of individuals, lots of candidates did exactly what you're describing with the J6 panel of keeping it in front of people, keeping that memory going.
And more than that, it was a big part of why that so-called red tsunami Didn't take shape.
You've got some in the GOP who say that the reason they lost or didn't win big in the election was that somehow or another they didn't emphasize anti-abortion policies enough.
I think that that's nonsense.
So these things all sort of tie together, right?
This is why you have the issue going on in the house that you have.
It's why they didn't win a lot.
It's a huge, not the only reason the so-called red tsunami didn't happen, but it's arguably the biggest reason, certainly one of the biggest.
And it's one that I was delighted to be wrong about, right?
Every now and then, if you're a catastrophizing person like I am, Who tends to think the bad things are going to happen.
It's really pleasant to be wrong, but that was one that I was wrong on.
And as I've been reading some of these urine analyses, right?
There were a lot of people who did not think that that would have a lasting effect and it did.
I think it's worth reflecting on.
That issue is one that definitely stayed with people for obvious reasons and that many people came out to vote on, especially young people, right?
And I want to remind everybody that there was a huge turnout by Gen Z in the 2022 midterms in ways that are abnormal for a midterm cycle.
Young people, young women, they voted for reproductive rights.
And Dan, I think it's worth just like reflecting on something.
For 60 years, the religious right and American conservatives have kept abortion front of mind.
Like they have just kept it front of mind for six years.
And I recognize that they've done so through tactics that many of us would not want to replicate, but nonetheless, they have just had a consistent message.
Abortion is wrong.
Abortion is the fight for your life.
The abortion is the fight for unborn life.
Abortion, abortion, abortion, right?
And I just wonder if there's not a lesson to learn there about how the Democrats and many people, I just think even apart from the Democrats, just on their own, were able to keep reproductive rights on their mind from, as you say, June all the way to November, which is kind of abnormal in terms of kind of how people vote on political issues.
Is there not a way that Democrats might just sort of stir that anger and that ire consistently?
And I recognize that you don't want to be simply a mirror image of a party that runs on fear and anger all the time.
But I also recognize that Democrats rarely understand how to fight, and they rarely understand how to stir in people the kinds of emotion that comes with fighting for something you actually believe in.
And so I just, you know, I just wanted to say that in dovetail of what you are talking about with the ways that people really did come out to vote for reproductive rights.
And I also think they came to vote for democracy itself.
And so anyway, it's something I'll be thinking about as we go into 2023.
All right.
Any final thoughts on the abortion issue before we come back?
All right.
So let's let's take a break and then we'll come back and I have one at least one more and we'll see if Dan has one more too.
All right, Dan, so I'm not sure this is a last year thing, but it's definitely a consistent thing.
I think you and I were both pretty hesitant to think that the Biden Presidency would be of any significance.
It felt like a safety run after what seemed to be a crash course towards authoritarianism.
Way better than the alternative, but certainly not somebody that you and I were that excited about, or a lot of younger voters, progressive voters, and so on.
Not that you and I are young.
But I think it's worth talking about the things that Biden has accomplished.
And don't get me wrong, this is not a Biden is the best president of my lifetime situation, but it is worth thinking about what has happened.
And I think that'll give us a chance to talk about what could have happened, but nonetheless, let's go through it.
Okay.
So Biden, this is at the Atlantic, signed three really big bills, the 1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the 1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, and the climate and health spending bill.
Okay.
And those alone, Dan, really Kind of made Biden's presidency momentous, uh, just, just on their own.
Um, so the initial pandemic bill known as the American rescue plan was about the size of Barack Obama's two biggest legislative achievements, the economic stimulus package and the affordable care act combined.
Okay.
Think about that.
The pandemic bill was basically Obamacare and the 2008 stimulus, uh, rescue package combined.
All right.
Um, we.
We could talk about all three of these.
I think the the one that, you know, people will be sort of thinking about the most.
Well, I don't know which ones they'll be thinking about the most.
But anyway, I'll I'll I'll leave that there.
We could talk about those for a while.
Let me talk about some of the other ones, though.
OK, smaller legislative wins, a gun safety bill that expanded background checks.
Now, it's not universal background checks, but there are more background checks.
Made it easier to prosecute illegal gun trafficking and provided federal funding for so-called red flag laws.
So there was some progress made on the issue of gun legislation.
He got the CHIPS Act to pass, which is really an act that will boost production of semiconductors and other things that are related to new technology and will create American jobs.
A lot of people see this as a very big deal.
It will help us not rely so much on China to import some of these things and will create jobs here on domestic soil.
He also has provided substantial military aid for Ukraine and just continued to be unwavering in that support.
OK, so there's a bunch there.
I have a bunch of those that I have at least a couple of those I want to kind of talk more about.
But just on the fly here, Dan, any of those you want to comment on quickly?
Just just to reiterate the same thing that you said that, you know, I didn't have high expectations for Biden.
Really, it did, as you say, it felt like I don't know it's like uh I don't know getting to base and time or something like you're just like it you felt like like okay at least it's not going to be catastrophic Trump didn't win you kind of could have had like a potato in the seat and you'd be like as long as Trump didn't win you know so I think it is and I what I think is interesting about it is
For all these other reasons, all these other things going on that you do have, like some of these hugely momentous bills and packages that went through that it's like nobody noticed, right?
And I think that that's really significant.
In some ways, that's good, because even some in the GOP acknowledge this.
They didn't oppose them the way that they, from their perspective, that they should have.
Like, they were wrapped up in having to deal with Trump stuff and Christian nationalism stuff and J6 stuff and things like that.
But I think a lot of people who support those things didn't sort of notice them.
And I think in some ways that's a positive because it helped keep that opposition down.
I think in a lot of ways that's a real negative.
A point that you made You've made it lots of times, but you certainly made it a lot during the last presidential election was passing bills and doing things that will actually help people and that that is what people in governance need to do.
This did this some really direct ways with the COVID relief stuff, some less direct.
I mean, nobody, nobody like gets excited talking about infrastructure, but it has those knock on effects.
So I think that's what stands out for me about that is how just sort of unnoticed some of those big accomplishments are and have been.
Yeah.
And, and I think that again, you, if you're a Democrat, you got to keep these things front of mind, like the infrastructure stuff will help people.
Like it will send money to neighborhoods and to regions and it will help people.
And especially as we see things like winter storms and rain and tornadoes and floods and, uh, and snow really, uh, you know, take its toll.
Infrastructure becomes something you think about.
It becomes something you, you're worried about as a human being, especially in the age of climate change.
So those things can be a front of mind and they can be.
Things that help people, but you kind of have to be willing to keep consistent with that message, I think.
All right.
I want to talk about Ukraine, and then I want to talk about Biden's misses, and some of them are related to, like, Joe Manchin.
So, he has given unwavering support to Ukraine, and he's given billions upon billions, right, in aid, and he's authorized, not given, it's not like he's the king, but he's authorized that aid, and it's been given to the Ukrainians.
One way that I think you can talk about this, if somebody shows up at the barbecue and they're like, look, why would we give money to another country?
And what do we care that happens in Ukraine?
And, you know, why would we support this?
You and I have talked about how the Ukraine issue is a democratic issue.
It's an issue of protecting democracy.
It's an issue of protecting the sovereignty of democratic states.
It's an issue of global cooperation and post-war treaties that have taken place since World War II.
The UN and NATO, the Marshall Plan, these things didn't come out of nowhere.
They came out of a desire to protect the world from totalitarianism, from authoritarianism in the wake of the Holocaust and so on and so forth.
But another way to look at it, Dan, is that A to Ukraine is a way to combat and limit the power of Vladimir Putin.
Without going to war with Vladimir Putin ourselves.
Providing aid to Ukraine, which is defending their country tooth and nail, life and death, is a way as an American foreign policy to indirectly limit The power of perhaps the world's most ambitious despot.
This is American diplomacy at work.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying we should support Ukraine simply for those reasons.
OK, but I'm saying that is one reason that you would do this if you're an American president.
There's no way that we're going to go to war with Russia.
and risk nuclear fallout and World War III.
I mean, the likelihood of that happening, that is a literal nuclear option.
But giving aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for its own sovereignty, is a very clear path to weakening Vladimir Putin, weakening his potential power grab all over the region and weakening his popularity at weakening his potential power grab all over the region and weakening And so that support for Ukraine to me is something that should not be overlooked as just a given or as the throwaway.
I want to say one more thing about all this, but you have thoughts on Russia too, I think.
Yeah, the last miss, and this is one that I think probably everybody made, was that the Russians would just basically wipe the floor with Ukraine, that they would go in, I think it was widely thought that they had one of the top three militaries in the world, probably the US, China, Russia.
I think people debate the kind of the order of those other two.
And we have seen, I mean, obviously lots and lots of aid of the kind that you're talking about and from other nations has helped Ukraine.
But there have also been all these reports about, you know, the lack of resources that the Russian military has, a lack of effective training, bad equipment, bad supply lines, not having the technology and resources to like sort of update and like maintain their vehicles and all this other kind of stuff.
Like a lot of really, in some cases, literally nuts and bolts things.
Why do I think that's significant?
I think it's significant, and I don't know exactly what it will mean, but if And I realize I'm older than some of the people who listen to this, but we think all the way back to the post 9-11 events and the discussion about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
There were obviously those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq and didn't think that that was right or whatever.
But I don't know that there was anybody who really believed that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.
It was like the most well-known kind of thing that of course they have the weapons.
Saddam Hussein had spent decades sort of winking and nodding to make sure that people knew that he had it.
And then it turns out, guess what?
He didn't.
Not only was it a bad pretense for invading Iraq because it had no connection to 9-11, but it turns out that it was completely false and Saddam Hussein had been leading everybody along.
I feel like this is one of those things that you talk about the history books and or websites or whatever media whatever however we record history in the future.
This is something I think will be seen as as significant a kind of miscalculation or misjudgment as that was.
I think one reason it matters is it does show the desperation of Putin, as you talked about.
He's ambitious.
He's also desperate.
They talk about the kind of nuclear saber rattling, and I'm not sure that I know that that's ever going to happen, but There were also a lot of people that said Russia will never actually invade Ukraine.
There were people that said they would not seize Crimea.
There were people, you know, Putin will do anything that Putin needs to do to maintain power.
And I think that that's one of the frightening aspects of this as well, is when it turns out that your conventional military can't do what everybody thought it could, where do you go next?
But I think that that's been a really, really significant kind of storyline that kind of gets missed with everything else going on, especially domestically in the U.S.
Yeah, that's just a great point.
I feel like there's this thing in my brain that's like, well, you said all the good things Biden did, so now we got to talk about the things he didn't do.
So I just feel like I have to go on the record and make sure that everyone knows that I recognize We can't have a too positive, too hopeful Brad Onishi sort of thing.
You posed that question about anybody who's not happy, if they're too happy.
You're not discussing an op-ed piece today, so we've got to make sure we round it out.
So take us there.
Uh, here's what I just want to make sure we remember that.
Uh, I, I really think he messed up on, on student loan forgiveness.
It was just, it was just weak and he promised something else and he didn't do it.
Period.
So he didn't do what he promised and I think he could have helped a lot of people and, and he didn't do that.
So that's one.
The child tax credit is no longer part of, of our, our landscape.
That's largely due to Joe Manchin unwilling to vote for it, but that was bringing millions of children out of poverty.
So the child tax credit was literally providing food and clothes and supplies for children.
And Joe Manchin basically thought that, you know, people were going to use that to buy televisions and drugs and Uh Nintendo 64s or whatever Joe Manchin thinks the kids play these days and so uh it doesn't exist and Biden couldn't get him to budge on that which maybe or maybe not that's not Biden's fault but I think Lyndon Johnson would have gotten him to budge on it.
I'm not going to lie.
Love or hate Lyndon Johnson.
That guy would have broken Joe Manchin's will on this somehow.
I'd love to.
Anyway, no, I was just going to say, Dan, I'd love to see a sketch show where Lyndon Johnson just like totally, you know, gives it to Joe Manchin.
But I realized as I said it, that I would be only one of like 17 people that would want to watch that, you know?
And this is why a lot of my emails to NBC and HBO have gone unanswered, because I have pitched a lot of shows.
And, uh, nonetheless, here we are on our podcast and I'm not on, you know, television making a show for, uh, for Hulu.
All right.
I digress.
So those two, I think are things I just, I want to make sure we mentioned.
And I think Biden messed up on the climate change stuff was good.
Not good enough, perhaps.
So I'll leave it there.
All right.
I got a, I got a pretty good reason for hope this, this week, I think, but what do you got?
Reason for hope?
Yeah, so mine's a little different, and I know it may not matter to everybody, but I think everybody's heard about it by now, but the story of Damar Hamlin, for those who don't know or maybe those who watch, so last Monday night you had a big NFL game.
It was actually the most viewed NFL game since like 2006.
It was the highest viewership ESPN has ever had, and partway through the first quarter, 24 year old player on a completely routine tackle collapses.
Turns out his heart had stopped.
He had cardiac arrest and it's been it's been a story that I know lots of people have followed.
People who don't watch the NFL have followed it.
He is apparently now he's conscious.
He's communicating.
They say that he's cognitively intact.
Still a long road to recovery, but it's been it's been a hopeful story.
But I think what matters to me is Number one, and I know that not everybody watches the NFL, but the NFL, it's one of those things, I know lots of sports leaders are like this.
I'm sure you've got your own aspects of the NBA like this, where you love the sport and the athletes, but there's also that business side of it that's awful.
The NFL has its own history of all kinds of problematic things.
I think with probably every sport, we could get into the misuse of black bodies.
In the NFL, there's a lot of using of black bodies to make a lot of money for primarily white men and all kinds of issues with this.
But it was interesting that a lot of people have noticed that the league, like they stopped the game.
There are no plans to renew it.
People haven't, there's been, I don't know, just a sort of compassion and an awareness of this that has given me sort of a generally hopeful feeling over the last several days of some of the aspects that about sort of corporate America and The kinds of things we talk about that, you know, for millions of Americans, people of color are fine as long as they're in their proper place.
And, and often that's on a football field and that that's where they belong.
And if they get out of line, we don't stand for that and so forth.
So I've, I've really been moved by the outpouring of support.
The league's response and so forth.
So I know it's not a big sort of national political story or something like that, but I did find it very hopeful and just on the micro level of a 24-year-old young man and his family and everything else, like, thrilled that apparently he'll recover from this, we hope.
Mine is related to back to abortion and abortion pills can now be offered at retail pharmacies and the FDA has approved that.
So there are two drugs that are used in medication abortions and the first is now able for pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens and these places to hold and to offer and to sell.
So that seems like a very good thing to me.
I think any ability for more access to reproductive care is a good thing.
Some states, these will not be available simply because the laws won't allow.
There's other states where I think it's ambiguous and they might be available where abortion by other means is not.
But nonetheless, you know, Ellie Mistel, who I really appreciate, said, you know, this is a signal of the United States catching up with many countries in Western Europe that have done this since like the 80s and 90s.
But it is a sign that that this continues to be a fight for reproductive rights and hopefully one that will continue and there'll be more good news.
Just tied in with that, it's also a sign that in some ways the right-wing crusade against abortion is also sort of behind the times.
You have all these heartbeat bills and so forth.
One of the things that concerns them about this is obviously somebody can take a medically-induced option like this long before even some of the most conservative bans kick in.
So I think that that's another, you say, hopeful option to make that a resource that people can use.
And it also I think this is why some of those states are ambiguous.
It bypasses some of those those legislative hurdles.
So yeah, I think it's also tremendously helpful.
No, it does.
And so, you know, we'll see.
And yeah, that we could talk all about the ways that these these pills might be sold.
Now, there is a question just real quick.
There's a question is like, CVS going to carry these?
Are they going to feel like they're going to get picketed?
Are they going to get backlash from all kinds of right-wing family organizations.
Are they going to be protests?
Are they not going to carry them?
So what's going to happen here?
There's a big question.
You and I always talk about corporations and activism and this stuff.
So we will see with that.
All right.
Before we go, tomorrow night, tonight, depending on when you're listening to this, January 6th, 5:00 PM.
Pacific, 8 p.m.
Eastern, join us on Zoom.
Myself, Dan Miller, Sarah Mosliner, Lucas Kwong, and Matthew Taylor from the NAR Series.
We're going to be talking about January 6th, two years later.
So, come hang out.
It's free.
All you got to do is sign on to Zoom.
You can hopefully maybe ask a question, ask Dan Miller where to get the best cargo shorts.
Or, you know, I can give you a guy I know who has a lot of used French novels that he sells for cheap.
So that sounded kind of creepy.
I don't know.
Did that sound creepy to you, Dan?
I didn't mean it that way, but all right.
And January 13th, Costa Mesa, Orange County, California.
Come hang out with me.
I'll be there talking about my book.
January 14, Los Angeles and January 19, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.
So if you're in Seattle or Portland or anywhere near there, come hang out on a Thursday night.
You know, I'm a grown man and so I make my own decisions.
So, all right, that'll do it for us today.
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