Harry Litman [00:00:07] Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman. The virus has gripped the country and the world more tightly than ever. With winter approaching, the Center for Disease Control has warned that these next few months may be the most difficult time in U.S. public health history. Hospitals are already straining capacity, and the predictions are that by March, the death toll of the nation will stand at twice the 250,000 figure that we passed just last week. But there is also an emerging bright spot visible in the form of an effective vaccine, and there is finally some movement in Congress for at least a stopgap-stimulus to address the worst effects of the virus, which has hit the working poor especially hard.
The president, meanwhile, apparently has taken up full-time residence in a world in which there is no virus, but there is an existential crisis of widespread fraud undermining the entire presidential election, which he is confident he won in a landslide. He gave what he termed, "maybe the most important speech I've ever made," a 46-minute extended hallucination, insisting that the election was rigged, and itemizing a long list of false assertions about voter fraud. Those claims have been scornfully rejected by a long list of state and federal courts, as well as Trump's erstwhile-loyal servant, Attorney General Bill Barr, who conceded that there was no evidence of fraud that would change the election outcome.
A statement that reportedly left Trump livid, and considering sacking, Barr. Barr did provide Trump with an outgoing present in the formal appointment of John Durham as a special assistant, with a wide berth to investigate possible improprieties by law enforcement in its probe of the Trump campaign in 2016, a topic of unending obsession for the president. On both the virus and Trump fronts however, it felt as if this week the country's view began to turn forward from the impact of the waning Trump administration to the coming new day of President-elect Biden. And we will do the same with an absolutely phenomenal panel, starting with:.
Senator Michael Bennet. Michael Bennet is the senior senator from Colorado, whom he has represented in the Senate since 2009. He's widely recognized as a pragmatic and independent thinker in that increasingly paralyzed body. He's worked across party lines to address climate change, education and health care, among other topics. I'm very proud to call him my longtime friend, from our time working together at the Department of Justice in the 1990s. Senator Bennett, thank you so much for joining Talking Feds.
Michael Bennet [00:03:17] Thanks Harry, for having me.
Harry Litman [00:03:18] Natasha Bertrand, a.k.a. 'Scoop,' is the national security correspondent at Politico and a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. She's broken dozens of important stories in the Trump era. Just this week, Forbes magazine named her to its 30 under 30 in the media category. So she is now officially, as we've known her to be on Talking Feds for some time, a phenom. Natasha, thanks as always for joining us on Talking Feds.
Natasha Bertrand [00:03:50] Thank you for having me, Harry.
Harry Litman [00:03:51] And Fareed Zakaria, one of the deans of American letters, he is the host of CNN's Global Public Square, seen twice weekly in over 200 million homes for the last 10 years. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including "The Post American World" and the just published "Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World." He also writes a weekly column for The Washington Post, where he and I were colleagues. Fareed, thank you very much for joining us on Talking Feds.
Fareed Zakaria [00:04:24] It's my pleasure.
Harry Litman [00:04:26] All right, so let's start with the spike in the virus and the challenges that it presents for Biden, I do want in general to be looking forward, but perhaps because of the strange drama in the White House, we're moving to these new grim goalposts every week, but we seem to be getting numb to it. A much-read column in The New York Times this week talked about the dark winter ahead with everyone on the inside. Let's just start there, how dark is the winter ahead? How tough do you see the next few months being in terms of the virus?
Fareed Zakaria [00:05:01] Well, I think that this is something we should have expected, because once you start to see the numbers go up, let's just remember the core issue here is you have exponential growth. One person infects two people, two people infect four people, and so on. And so it's not so surprising that you're seeing these numbers go up, but the hopeful sign here is what we did in the past, which is you can get these numbers to go down. One of the greatest puzzles about the federal government's response to this pandemic, and I talk about this in my book, is that unlike the Asian countries, we have not been able to put in place an intelligent testing, tracing, and isolation system. All three, by the way, are very important.
You have to test, you have to trace, but then you have to quarantine in some way, the infected or the potentially infected, because that's actually a very small number of people. And then the other 99 percent of the population has much greater latitude to go about their business. So, for example, I point out in the book, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore never did lockdowns, because they did such intelligent testing, tracing and isolation. We can still do that, it is still within our capacity, and it puzzles me that we have not yet done it. I'm hoping that the Biden administration will recognize that this is an area where even now, we don't have to wait for vaccines, even now we can have a much better experience with this. So the winter is going to be dark, but it doesn't actually have to be as dark as it looks right now.
Michael Bennet [00:06:30] I'd say also, Harry, that this week I saw two pieces of good news. One was a conversation that the Democratic caucus had with the Biden transition team on the vaccination rollout, and it was just such a pleasure to have on the other end of the phone people who are actually competent to have the conversation that we were having, and were public spirited about the conversation we were having, and were actually developing a plan, a national plan for a vaccination after calls that for months and months and months have all been about, 'we don't have any idea, it's up to the governors.' So that's one big change. And by the way, they were quite optimistic about the vaccines and a sense that maybe by May we're really going to be turning the corner here. And that brings me to the second piece of good news, which is I think that Congress is moving toward an interim package of some kind to help cushion the blow. We've got a number of cliffs like the unemployment insurance cliff coming up on us now. We don't have any assistance for small businesses right now. If we can put a floor underneath families in this country and in underneath our small businesses for another four to six months, that could bridge the gap between where we are today. And where we're going to be when we're coming out of this dark period with the spring and with the vaccine.
The final point I would make is just to agree so strongly with what Fareed has said. Part of this, whether it's now or whether it's when Biden comes in, has got to be a real commitment to strengthen our public health infrastructure. Kirsten Gillibrand from New York and I have a bill that would create something called the Health Force that literally would train hundreds of thousands of people to do the work that Fareed is saying we need to do, and we have to do it. One way or another, we've got to figure out a way to do it. This idea that somehow the choice is between public health and the economy is just the false choice, we've got - we have to do both. And the countries that have had a good public health infrastructure have not had to close their economies. If we want to keep our schools open, we want to keep our businesses open, we're going to have to stand up a public health infrastructure that, that does the job that we need it to do. And Trump has been totally unwilling to do that, obviously.
Fareed Zakaria [00:08:47] Michael, can I ask a quick question on that new stimulus relief bill? Do you think it will be enough? I know there's this absurd debate going on about states and local governments, which seems to me crazy, because whatever you may think about these states, New York or California, they have had a hemorrhaging of tax revenue because of no fault of their own. They may be well-run or badly run, but New York subway ridership is down 65 percent, its sales tax revenues are down 50 percent not because it's badly run, but because there's no business, there are no tourists, nobody's spending money. Surely Mitch McConnell understands that these state governments need relief?
Michael Bennet [00:09:25] Well, to begin with, if you look at the list of states, from ones most dependent on the federal government to least - or that is to say, states with the worst balance of payments with the federal government, the Commonwealth of Kentucky is second on that list. So you have all that federal money that's going to Kentucky is a reflection, I suppose, on how poorly Kentucky is run. Then maybe Mitch should take that up with people governing the Commonwealth. And of course, that's not the case, and you're you're exactly right. I mean, just like there's so many restaurants and other small businesses in Colorado and across the country who are closed due to no fault of their own. We've had states that have had to deal with that as well, so I would hope the four components basically would be extending unemployment insurance, which we need to do, putting a floor under small business, PPP is the likeliest way to do that, that's the program we had before.
I actually have a proposal with my colleague from Indiana called the Restart Act that would provide working capital loans to businesses that have lost 25 percent or more of their revenue. That, I think is a better way, a more targeted way of doing it than PPP. Then there's the health force component of this, and then state and local governments. And the last thing we would want, I would think, would be a bunch of layoffs from state and local governments that are just going to compound the economic problem that we're facing. It is relief. That is what we're talking about here, and just look at my state. The unemployment insurance alone has meant four billion dollars to our economy that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and I can tell you that's made a huge difference to the ability of businesses to stay open, and like grocery stores and others, and we still need it now because as you pointed out, or as Harry pointed out, the numbers are worse now than they've been since the beginning of this crisis.
Harry Litman [00:11:19] Natasha, so just picking up on this, as Senator Bennett says, we're talking about 80 million people hitting a wall December 31st and all the other problems, but they've been apparent for several weeks. And it seemed as if McConnell and the Republicans were adamant against addressing them, they confirmed judges and left town before. Do you have a sense of what has made him - I think it's supposed to be a fairly limited stimulus, but he is now playing ball with the Democrats. What's changed things, if you have any sense of that?
Natasha Bertrand [00:11:53] Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think the senator probably has a first hand window into this, but I think he's recognizing the reality of the cliff that we're facing. With further stimulus legislation just at a standstill, the CARES Act relief provisions are going to expire, more than half of Americans currently receiving unemployment insurance qualify through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program and the emergency unemployment compensation program. So that expiration would leave roughly, something over 10 million Americans without benefits come January, so couple that with the nationwide eviction moratorium that's going to end after the new year. It's just becoming increasingly untenable, I think. And we always face this kind of drama heading into the holidays on the Hill. There are always these last minute scrambles, but it seems like Mitch McConnell is preparing to give a little. That being said, Joe Biden has already said that this is going to be a start. He said earlier this week the 900 billion deal is going to be a good start, but that he is going to try to get more done after he is inaugurated. So I think that it's just a reflection of the realities that we're facing, that if the pandemic continues on the path that it is, and if we are going to be facing more lockdowns, which other countries around the world have been experiencing, then these benefits need to be extended. It's just a matter of maybe Mitch seeing the writing on the wall here.
Fareed Zakaria [00:13:19] There's an irony here, which is that the first phase of this crisis, the United States handled the public health aspect abysmally, but it handled the economic crisis very well with the CARES Act. It was basically the largest stimulus in the world in percent of GDP terms, I think Australia's was larger, but other than that, the US was the largest. And as Michael Bennet pointed out, it really put a floor on how low the US economy could go. Only China and South Korea have done better than the US economically in the last seven or eight months. In phase two of this crisis, it's likely that the public health response will get much better, partly because of the Biden administration, partly because this is now a private sector led response, by which I mean therapeutics and vaccines are becoming the stars of the show. So just at the time when we're finally getting our hands around the public health crisis, we seem in danger of screwing up the economic part, the one piece that we handled well.
Harry Litman [00:14:14] Yeah, although let me push back on you just a little and tie it into something that Senator Bennett said about the PPP, and a big theme in your own book, Fareed, which is so the PPP, as I understand it, something like 25 percent of all the moneys have gone to the top one percent in size of borrowers. And we have a recurrent theme that the virus economically has exacted its greatest cost on the working poor, and especially working poor women, and especially working poor women of color. You note that in the book, and try to turn it around to some kind of almost structural change in American economic policy to address the inequalities that have redoubled in the Trump era. Can we do both those things, can we both staunch the flow of blood from the virus itself, but also fundamentally change economic policy in the country, especially with a close to, or possible Republican majority in the Senate?
Fareed Zakaria [00:15:23] It's a great question. So first, there's no question there was a certain amount of corruption and mismanagement with the PPP program, which, by the way, was not true of the American Recovery Act after 08-09, which Joe Biden administered. That program was remarkable for how clean and efficient it was. This one didn't have that effect, but because it was so much money, Harry, you've just got money out of the door. A lot of the unemployment insurance money got to people, it made a huge difference. So, while the program could have been designed better, and I'd love to hear Senator Bennett on what he might change, I think the fact the sheer size made a big difference. There's a saying in military strategy, 'America always wins because of bigness, not brains.' We just flood the zone, and that ends up winning. That seems to have been one of those cases. But what you're talking about here, the larger issue is a really profound thing that I worry about, because there's no question the single most negative aspect of the pandemic has been the dramatic rise in inequality. We can see it even on this program, we're all doing fine. We're all managing to live our lives, have our careers, generate our income...
Harry Litman [00:16:30] Work at home.
Fareed Zakaria [00:16:31] Right, work at home, basically by living a digital life, by working in the digital zone. But if you work in a restaurant, a hotel, a retail mall, a cruise ship, a theme park, this is the Great Depression. And those people are low-wage workers anyway. So that reality of the way in which this pandemic has really heightened the gap between a digital cognitive elite and a non-digital, non-urban people working with their hands, it's very dramatic. It exacerbates existing trends, there is no good government program I know of that has figured out how to deal with this yet. I think we need something more ambitious, more creative, something on the scale of a GI Bill that does retraining at that scale. And I would be fascinated to hear Senator Bennet on this, but it's probably the thing that has me most gloomy about the pandemic.
Michael Bennet [00:17:20] Also, Fareed, it's what makes me feel like we're going to come out of this with a political imperative to change the outcomes for the American people. And while we still have a close Senate, no matter what happens in Georgia, I still think we're on the cusp of what's going to turn out to be a period of time in the country's history when we've got a much more progressive set of agendas, and much more significant investment in the United States. First, on the pandemic response, I think it's pointing to the reason why we should have so-called automatic stabilizers in place so that when our economy runs into trouble like this, we flood the zone, as you said, with UI benefits, with increases to SNAP and other things that make a difference, so we don't have to sit around and have a political debate about whether we're going to get the money out the door. I will say that one of my Republican colleagues this week said to me in the hallway, 'one dollar spent today is going to be twice as effective as the same dollar spent in March.' And I think actually probably five times more effective today than in March. And that is, I think, slowly catching their attention, and making them more willing to do something than they otherwise would.
Harry Litman [00:18:34] And why is that?
Michael Bennet [00:18:36] Because the carnage that's going to happen if you have a whole bunch of people that don't have access to unemployment benefits but need them, and therefore can't go out and spend their money and keep the economy lifted, the small businesses that otherwise might just make it to the other side of this, if there were a program in place to help them get there, but if there's not then their doors will shut and never reopen again. And then on top of that, if you have state and local layoffs as well, that creates a situation where we're just digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. That's what it can be avoided with an incremental recovery package today, I think. But then on the longer term, if I could just say a word about that, because I think I feel so strongly that this is the central question for our democracy, it's really easy for me to summarize the last 10 years of my town hall meetings. It's people coming in saying, 'Michael, we're working really hard and no matter what we do, we can't afford some combination of housing, health care, higher education or early childhood education.' Think about the parents of the kids that I used to work for the Denver public schools when I was superintendent, what they would say is, 'we're killing ourselves.' And they are, they're working two and three jobs, but no matter what we do, we can't get our kids out of poverty. And that's the anecdotal reflection of an economy that for 50 years hasn't worked well for most people.
The top 10 percent have done fine, but the bottom 90 percent have not seen their incomes rise. We have no economic mobility in the country, and our education system is actually reinforcing the income inequality we have, rather than lifting people out of it. So we need, as Fareed suggested, I think an entirely new approach to upskilling workers at every stage along the way. I wish the Democratic Party weren't standing for free college right now, but instead for making sure that every single kid who graduates from high school graduates with the skills required to earn a living wage, not the minimum wage, that would transform our economy, and we could do that. I also think there are other important tax policies and investments we can make in the country. Take the child tax credit that Sherrod Brown and I have worked on for so long, if Joe Biden, who adopted that as part of his policy during the campaign, if he enacts that, the year that he enacts that, we will cut childhood poverty in America by 40 percent, without adding a single bureaucrat to the federal government, without doing anything except changing the way that works, that could have a transformational effect, and the beginnings of what I think of as a new progressive era.
Harry Litman [00:21:17] On the other side of things, and of course, it's not just the vaccine, it's manufactured distribution, all kinds of issues. But is America permanently changed, will we be wearing masks in the subway in five years, and have the kind of aftershocks from this event? Or will it be kind of sealed off, and for the history books as, say, the Spanish flu appears to have been?
Natasha Bertrand [00:21:42] I think some things will change, perhaps handshakes will be relegated to history, shared water fountains and things like that. I think there's going to be a heightened sensitivity. I mean, I'm sure that listeners will be able to empathize with this. When you're watching a show that was filmed a couple of years ago and you see people hug, you kind of cringe. Or when you see people maskless in a crowd, you're just like, 'oh, I can't believe we ever did that.' So I think that it'll change attitudes, which in some ways can be a very good thing, especially given how many people die from just the flu every year. But with a vaccine, I think that we will probably go back to a fairly normal way of life, in terms of particularly the economy with things opening back up again. There will just be generally a greater amount of caution. Folks I've spoken to pretty much everywhere have said that, that they're now realizing how easy it is to spread a disease, especially an airborne disease, and they're becoming more educated on public health, which is a very good thing. Back in the days of the Spanish flu, there was no Internet, it was obviously much harder to get information to the public. I think that this will be probably a net positive, in terms of educating the public on how to prevent against the spread of a deadly pandemic in the future.
Harry Litman [00:22:59] It is true once you start thinking in these terms of germs and stuff, they are everywhere and it really does change your mindset. All right, so much more to think about but in general, I am buoyed by the notion that we are looking ahead, that the at least, as Fareed says, the medical part of this seems somewhat in hand, and the short term suffering has a light at the end of the tunnel. So much more to come with this on Talking Feds, but not today. It's time now for our sidebar feature, which explains some of the fundamental terms and relationships that are foundational to events that are discussed here in the news generally. The principle is equality of opportunity and the US rule of law, and our reader is Garry Kasparov. Kasparov is widely considered to be the greatest chess player who has ever lived, and that was just his first career. In the last 30 years, he has been a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, and a regular commentator on politics and human rights. He's the author of two acclaimed series of chess books, as well as his 2015 book, "Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped." I give you Garry Kasparov, discussing equality of opportunity and the US rule of law.
Garry Kasparov [00:24:24] Does the US Constitution guarantee equality of opportunity? The United States has a deserved reputation as the land of opportunity. But this was never a promise of riches, of streets paved with gold. What has drawn generations of immigrants like me to America's shores, is freedom. The chance to flourish without discrimination or oppression. And even the economic dreams have always been tied to the law, beginning with the US Constitution. Although equality of opportunity has long been the centerpiece of rhetoric from both major political parties, the US Constitution does not guarantee such a thing to its citizens in those terms. The rights of guarantees can be described as negative liberty. They restrict the government from taking certain actions against citizens, like curtailing free speech, or using unreasonable force to make arrests. That is, the Constitution says not what the government can do for you, it's what the government can't do to you. Having grown up in the totalitarian Soviet Union, and later exiled from Putin's modern Russian dictatorship, I know all too well how much these limitations matter. What matters even more, is that these boundaries are respected and protected by the people and their leaders. After all, the Russian constitution guarantees all the same rights and more, even including a guarantee of equality of opportunity. But this is a dark joke in a dictatorship where the rule of law is really the rule of one man.
I remember how shocked the Russian media was when Donald Trump's first attempt at an immigration ban was halted by a judge in Washington state in 2017. Not only was the president's action halted, but the judge was not arrested. His family was not imprisoned. That resonated very strongly with people in the unfree world, where such things could never occur. In America and other successful democracies, equality of opportunity is intrinsically connected to equality in the eyes of the law. No favoritism, no cronyism, no abuse of power. Equal opportunity means that all citizens, from a new immigrant to the president's own children, stand on an equal footing before the state. The ideal is less about attainment, than about fairness. That everyone has a chance to thrive without being held back unjustly by the government or by anyone else. As President-elect Joe Biden put it, echoing his great predecessors: 'It's about a society that gives every single person a fair shot, and an equal chance to get ahead.' That's a wonderful goal, and as the founders understood, it takes the will of the people, not just the president, and not just a piece of paper, to truly achieve it. For Talking Feds, I'm Garry Kasparov.
Harry Litman [00:27:12] Thank you very much, Garry Kasparov, and thank you very much for the Renewed Democracy Initiative, an American political organization that Kasparov founded in 2017 to promote and defend liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad, which helped us this week connect to Kasparov.
The next big thing I want to talk about, you could call, and it's not my moniker, Trump's disgraceful endgame, and that's from a article in the National Review, not a left-leaning publication. But things have really seemed to edge into the bizarre, and the divide seems less Democrat versus Republican than just real world versus fictional world, in which Trump and his acolytes, including Michael Flynn, who was going to have been the national security adviser, seemed to be calling for armed insurrection and martial law and the like. So it's a crazy period that nevertheless is cabined by the knowledge that in 50-some days he won't be president. Let me just ask about your views of its practical impact, is Trump succeeding in sort of harming the president-elect's legitimacy going forward, or is now the political consensus on both sides of the aisle that this is just noise, and kind of venting that doesn't really change things on the ground?
Fareed Zakaria [00:29:16] I feel very strongly that what Trump is doing is deeply destructive at two levels. The first is, let's remember just how near a miss this has been. What Trump has done, and he got the chairman of the Republican National Committee, he got senior senators, all of them pressuring these state officials to either delay certification or not certify, which would have then created a dilemma, which is where the Electoral College actually met. There would have been some states that might not have reported, which, of course, then throws the issue to the House of Representatives, and we got very close in Michigan. One of the two Republicans who had to certify on the board of canvassers caved in Georgia. Both the sitting senators asked the secretary of state of Georgia to resign, because he had done the terrible thing of actually affirming the truth.
Harry Litman [00:30:04] Asked is a polite way to put it.
Fareed Zakaria [00:30:06] Right, right, and demanding that he resign and all he had done was certify that the elections were free and fair, which they were. So I think my fear is that, by the way, Trump is not going to let up on these people. They may be driven out of Republican politics because of the heresy that they committed. And if that happens, think about the signal that sends to the next batch of Republican state officials, which is the next time there's a close election, and if the president presses you, put party before country, put fiction before fact, and we could go down that path. The second piece is, Trump has now created this extraordinary conspiracy theory about the stolen election. 77 percent of Republicans believe that theory. This is, to my mind, the only historical analogy I can think of is the German stab in the back theory that developed after World War I when the Germans were told by Hitler, among other people, we didn't actually lose World War I, we were cheated of victory because socialists and Jews made us surrender. We are in those kind of waters when you are looking at the numbers you're looking at, and forget about Biden, I think what he's doing is destroying American democracy, just so that he is more viable. I mean, this is the ultimate act of narcissism because it's sort of good for Trump, you know, he stays at the center and he's turned himself into the ultimate victim. The problem is, in order to do that, he really is shredding American democracy.
Natasha Bertrand [00:31:32] I'll just add to that, we were asking this question of Democrats in the summer of 2019. What do you think will happen if Trump refuses to concede the election? What do you think will happen if he just refuses to leave, and mounts a legal challenge after legal challenge? And no one really seemed prepared for that possibility. We kind of got brushed off not only by Republicans, which is expected, but also by some Democrats who said, look, we need to focus on winning this, which is true. But when we were reporting out this story, we got the sense that there was no real anticipation, at least not early enough, that this undermining of democratic norms to such a degree, obviously, we've seen that over the last four years under Trump, but to this degree would be happening in the days after the election. So I think that's one big issue, is that the collective psyche on the Democratic side just wasn't prepared for this, and now we're having trouble figuring out how to beat it back. So, the one thing I will say, though, just in terms of its effectiveness, obviously the rhetoric is extremely damaging, and the fact that Joe Biden will be governing in America, where 77 percent of Republicans believe that the election was rigged and stolen from them, is extremely scary to think about, particularly given the president's unwillingness to disavow violence from his supporters and the violent actions that they have taken over the last month or so, driving Biden supporters and Biden members of the transition team and campaign off the road, for example.
But the courts have largely held, right? I mean, we have seen that he, out of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump's campaign and his allies in different states, more than 30 have been rejected outright or dropped. About a dozen are awaiting action, and Trump has really just notched one victory, which was a case challenging a decision to move the deadline for absentee ballots and mail in ballots in Pennsylvania. So that is one institution, obviously, that has not collapsed under the weight of Trump's authoritarian tendencies. The state legislators that are controlled by Republicans, that is another thing that there's been a lot of pressure. Rudy Giuliani, for example, a ton of pressure by Trump and his allies to try to essentially get these state legislators to overturn the will of the people, and that has not materialized either. There's still - anything's possible before the Electoral College meets this month, and I think that we should obviously be on high alert for any shenanigans in terms of more pressure on these people to try to go rogue and become faithless electors. But for the most part, I think what we're seeing at this moment is just a very petulant, narcissistic person who's doing everything in his power to make it seem like he really won, and preserve his chances of running again in 2024, because our reporting indicates that he is trying to keep his powder dry for that, and his version of keeping his powder dry is to kick and scream all the way out the door.
Harry Litman [00:34:34] Yeah that 46 minute speech, even for Trump I thought was vintage, but maybe it's just me. But I do have the feel that the strong Trump partisanship is passing into a different kind of discourse that most people would have trouble believing and just sounds marginal from the start. Of course there's that 77 percent figure, and if that holds, the implication for the ease of Biden to govern and just the stability of the country are I guess, profound.
Michael Bennet [00:35:09] There's another part of this too Harry, which is that Donald Trump won more votes this time than he did last time. And that's a staggering fact, given the record that he has compiled and the threat that he represents to our democracy is present and will continue. I mean, if he leaves office and decides he wants to run again, or if he goes and buys Newsmax or something like that and engages in creating an alternative reality, he will be achieving things that on their best day, the Russians and the Chinese haven't been able to do in terms of immobilizing our democracy. So, I view Trump very much as a symptom of the problems, not as the cause of all our problems, he's creating a lot of problems, but our democracy is being tested.
All the democracy around the world is being fundamentally tested, and we are so far we're meeting that test, but there's no assurance that we're going to succeed, unless we make this the project for the rest of our lives, in my view. And unless we commit to this project, what it means to live in a pluralistic society that over time has become more democratic, more fair and more free, and what each of us are doing to make sure that happens, we might not survive. The good news is we've seen it, we've seen it. And so far we've held, and then the second piece I'd say is this has a lot of implications for Joe Biden and for Democrats. I mean, I think the truth is, we should have swept the majority of the Senate. We shouldn't have been close, but it was close. And we need to ask ourselves why it was close. I've got some ideas about why it is.
Harry Litman [00:36:47] Why was it close?
Michael Bennet [00:36:48] It was close because the American people need to know that if they vote for Democrats, their economic fortunes are going to be benefited as a result of that. If Mitch McConnell loses, they're going to benefit from that. And we haven't been clear enough about what we want to do, and you put on top of that a general mistrust of government that exists. Actually not something to be understood, but for good reason. Two wars in the Middle East that lasted for 20 years. You know, school systems all over America that aren't delivering for kids. The list is long. And if Democrats are content to be the defenders of bad government, we're going to keep losing these states where we have to win in order to win a majority. Having said all of that, I think Joe Biden has an incredible opportunity because he did win, incredibly, and because Trump and McConnell have colored so far outside the lines of conventional American ideological thought, there is a huge range of things for Joe Biden to pick from that are progressive and incredibly popular. For example, paid family leave, which we had on our ballot today in Colorado, in some of the most conservative counties in Colorado, paid family leave outperformed Donald Trump. So if we could think about what those issues look like, and understand that Joe Biden is in a position to earn the confidence of the American people, that's where he is, and he's got a set of circumstances that can allow him to earn that confidence. If he does what I think is his instinct anyway, we might actually close the chapter on Trumpism more quickly than we might all have thought. That's my optimistic hope.
Harry Litman [00:38:36] That's a great point, and Fareed, your article in the Post this week talked about some concrete ways in which the lessons of Trump could be turned into particular proposals for reforming U.S. democracy.
Fareed Zakaria [00:38:51] Yeah, I mean, my point is that Trump in exactly the way Michael was describing, by being such an outlier, by presenting such a challenge and a threat to American democracy. In a way, it's been a very useful experiment where we have understood where the weaknesses in the system lie, and one of the core weaknesses was a lot of American democracy depends not just on laws and rules and core separations of power, but on norms, on practices, on behavior, on good manners, even. Well, some of that we are going to have to codify, because what Trump makes us realize is, there's a danger right here. So maybe when if you want to run for president, frankly, if you want to run for any high office, maybe you have to reveal your tax returns by law, not as a convention. You have to put your assets and businesses into blind trusts. The transition period between the outgoing administration and the incoming is way too long. In Britain, it's one day, in France, it's 10 days. We have this absurd three month period where the incumbent president has all these powers. Maybe they need to be more tightly reined in. Frankly, I have - I know it's in the Constitution, so we can't do anything about this - but the presidential pardon strikes me as the most bizarre monarchical...
Harry Litman [00:40:06] That's a whole nother episode, isn't it? But yeah.
Fareed Zakaria [00:40:07] Right? It's like, well, where the hell do we get this from? We are a society of laws and rules and institutions, and then, 'oh, but by the way, because Donald Trump likes this guy, he's going to be pardoned, or Bill Clinton likes this guy.' I don't like it at all. I mean, again, I think there would be a way to have a convention around it, saying there is a presidential congressional committee that evaluates these claims and recommends to the president and only when those recommendations are two-thirds majority or something like that, but but I think the key here is we've got to pass some laws to codify some of the things that we were able to get away with by just doing them as norms. Thanks to Trump, they need to be laws.
Natasha Bertrand [00:40:45] There are so many examples of this, I don't even know where to start. I completely agree. I mean, just in terms of oversight, right? I mean, Trump removed or fired five inspectors general this spring alone. He has appointed acting officials across the government because he's just been abusing his appointment power, and he's the first president to, I think, since Reagan to have more acting than confirmed cabinet secretaries. He has just broken so many norms that have made it clear, I mean, not releasing his tax returns, for example. I mean, so much of what the president does relies a lot on good faith, and him tearing up his presidential records. I mean, there's no mechanism to ensure that a president actually preserves these records. Sure, he can get a stern talking to by NARA, but other than that, there's just no real oversight mechanism. So there are just a lot of things, I think, that need to be thought through after he leaves, because there have just been too many of these norms that have been completely broken, that have dramatically weakened the institutions that we thought would hold firm in the face of a president with authoritarian tendencies.
Michael Bennet [00:41:55] You know, I can think of a really good name for a bill that would have all of those things in it, and that would be the Drain the Swamp bill, and I - to your point about authoritarianism, to be able to go to rural parts of my state and say, he said he was going to drain the swamp, he never did. We just passed a bill to drain the swamp that prevents people from pardoning themselves, requires them to put their tax returns out, all those the things that Natasha and Fareed were talking about that's just common sense, that tyrants don't do and tyrants don't need. I think there'd be a lot of appeal to that, and I guess I'd add one other thought to this, which is we now know what it looks like when we have a president who's actively engaged in voter suppression. And I continue to wonder why we accept a system of elections where in Colorado it literally takes you 30 seconds to vote no matter when you vote in the process, and in Georgia, you've got to stand in line for three hours, that doesn't make any sense. There's a national civil rights imperative here that we legislate on this, I think. And if you watched that craziness the other night in the White House, a lot of that was just one complaint after another, a litany of complaints that people hadn't had their votes suppressed adequately, and that that had led to Donald Trump losing. That's not a fraudulent election, that's - it's an election.
Fareed Zakaria [00:43:21] Actually, there was something very fascinating even about the court cases, Michael, as you know, which is traditionally the cases that are brought to courts around election time all have had the following feature: they are efforts to expand the franchise, they are efforts to get people whose votes somehow were missed to be vote. This is the first time I can think of where, as Natasha says, there have been 50 lawsuits, all of which have been designed in some way or the other to disenfranchise voters, to say, 'let's throw out these ballots, let's not count these ballots.' And it's really a kind of new area of law, the law of disenfranchisement.
Harry Litman [00:43:59] Yeah, and it's not just the law, it's the politics of disenfranchisement, because harkening back to what Senator Bennet said about the changing demographics of the country, it's not simply the lawsuits, but even during the spring, pretty much every legislative maneuver or counter maneuver by Republicans was just with that goal of shrinking the base and the opposite for Democrats.
Fareed Zakaria [00:44:23] Well, here's the, here's the reason why that's important, Harry. The Republican Party now, in the last eight presidential elections, the Republican candidate has won the popular vote only one time, in 2004 after 9/11 and in the atmosphere of the Iraq war. So the Republican Party at some level has become a minority party, but because of the Electoral College and states, it is able to gain power. That is a very unhealthy dynamic, I mean even for Republicans, because one of the things elections does is it disciplines you, it makes you understand what ideas of yours are popular and what ideas and not. That signal, that feedback loop has been confused for the Republican Party because this doing unpopular things, but then not losing elections as a consequence of it, which is a very weird place to be.
Harry Litman [00:45:11] I really think that's right. And they're not just there, but they're there by the skin of their teeth, and I think that pushes them to just go forward, not think even about the popular reaction of what is, after all, the majority and just push while they can while the going is good.
Michael Bennet [00:45:27] That also has implications for Democrats as well. Fareed laid it out, Mitch McConnell goes to work every day doing stuff the American people don't want. And yet he's paid no political price for doing that for a decade or more. And actually, it's not mostly doing stuff, it's mostly stopping stuff, because all he cares about is really putting right wing judges on the courts and cutting taxes every now and then for for the wealthiest people in the country. But we have a much harder job than he has, because we have to build a coalition that will create a durable result, like on climate change, for example. I mean, look at our political system today. If you accept Mitch McConnell's world of getting, you know, allowing health care to be passed and then beating it up, beating it up, beating it up, year after year after year, so you actually don't make the progress you need to make, you're never going to solve climate that way. And this is why these guys really have to be overcome in these more purple states in the country if we're going to create a majority that means something and, if they're going to learn a lesson about what's politically viable or not. We're in a really infelicitous place right now on that score, for the reasons that Fareed said.
Harry Litman [00:46:40] All right, we are very sadly just about out of time in what's been a fantastic conversation. We have a couple minutes for our final feature on Talking Feds, which is Five Words or Fewer, where we take a question from a listener and each of us has to answer in five words or fewer. Today, the question comes from Nathan Rifkin, who asks, "Do you think Trump will pardon himself?" So, five words or fewer, everybody.
Natasha Bertrand [00:47:09] Not only himself.
Harry Litman [00:47:11] Are you going to give you two extra words to the senator or Fareed maybe?
Michael Bennet [00:47:16] I'm sure he will try.
Fareed Zakaria [00:47:17] Trump could violate any norm.
Harry Litman [00:47:19] Although I do want to say that has been like the signal lesson to me of the Trump era. I was thinking when you said it before, my head would go around 360 before like everyone else's and then, he just kept doing it.
Michael Bennet [00:47:31] Somebody wrote a piece in The Washington Post the year before Trump got elected about how incredibly important the norm of shame is in a democracy. And I think the one thing that's been demonstrated by Donald Trump is how dangerous it is to this society if you elect somebody president who has no shame of any kind.
Harry Litman [00:47:54] What a great point. All right, my answer to Nathan's question is: yes, but maybe he shouldn't.
All right, that's all we have time for in this fantastic discussion, I wish it could go on for hours more. Thank you very much to Senator Michael Bennet, Natasha Bertrand and Fareed Zakaria. And thank you very much, listeners, for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts, and please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter, @TalkingFedsPod , to find out about future episodes and other Feds-related content. You can check us out on the web, talkingfeds.com , where we have full episode transcripts. And you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon, where we post discussions about special topics exclusively for supporters.
And these aren't just outtakes or ad-free episodes, though we do have those there, but original one-on-one discussions with national experts. Just in the last few days, we've posted discussions with Andrew Weissman on the Flynn pardon and on whether Trump should be prosecuted after he leaves office, with Melissa Murray on the Supreme Court order on free exercise, and coming soon, a discussion debate with Jed Sugarmann about whether it's constitutional for Trump to pardon his children and family members. So there's really a wealth of great stuff there, you can go look at it to see what they are and then decide if you'd like to subscribe, that's patreon.com/talkingfeds . Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com , whether it's for Five Words or Fewer, or general questions about the inner-workings of the legal system for our Sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in, and don't worry: as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking.
Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lowe Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Don Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Matt McArdle. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla-Michaels. Thanks very much to the near-superhuman Garry Kasparov for his explanation of U.S. equality of opportunity through the vantage point of his Russian and Croatian background. Our gratitude, as always, to the amazing Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds is a production of Dalito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman, see you next time.
