Harry Litman [00:00:00]: Hey everybody, Harry here with a quick note on what’s new on our Patreon site. Continuing with our summer book club series, we have my discussion with Jeff Toobin, author of True Crimes and Misdemeanors, an examination of the Mueller probe, but also the impeachment and Covid. And, soon to come, a 1-on-1 with Elie Honig about the whole post office debacle. Okay, here’s our episode, hope you like it.
Harry Litman [00:00:36]: Welcome to Talking Feds, a round table 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. It's game on: after a prolonged process involving up to a dozen candidates, the Biden campaign settled on the candidate to share the ticket — who had been the betting favorite throughout — Senator Kamala Harris of California. Early returns were upbeat. Harris seemed to excite the faithful and generated a spike in contributions. She used her first speech as nominee to excoriate president Trump as a “guy who just isn’t up for the job” close quote.
The president countered by calling Harris nasty and then sticking her with a patented Trump nickname, “phony Kamala”. Over the course of the week, Trump and his allies signaled some of the tactics they intend to employ in the campaign. First, the president has identified as public enemy number one, mail in voting, which he insists with scant or no evidence will perpetrate one of the greatest frauds in history.
So, he's resisting any measure that facilitates it, including a bailout for his own broken post office. Former president Obama accused Trump at week’s end of trying to kneecap the post office to suppress the vote. Trump also appeared to give some credence to the half-baked idea, floated by a former Harris opponent, that Harris ,who was born in Oakland, California is ineligible to be president because of her parents' immigration status when she was born.
That notion quickly picked up considerable steam among the darker recesses of the internet. And Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was preparing to dive anew into the allegations involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, and others that were at the core of the impeachment of the president. Johnson let slip in a local radio interview that his investigation “would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection.”
So, this was the week when the country took a strong pivot toward November and the competing tickets started to establish the themes they will be running on over the next 85 or so days. And to unpack both the Harris selection and the emerging themes that will dominate the news between now and November, we have a stellar panel.
First, Jonathan Alter joins Talking Feds for the first time. Jonathan's a columnist at the daily beast and a contributor at NBC News. He's written for basically every major publication in the country and authored four books, including The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope and The Promise: President Obama, Year One.
He is currently just about finished with his next book, Jimmy Carter: A Life, which will be available this fall and which you can now already preorder on Amazon. Jonathan cohosts the Alter Family Politics radio show with his wife and children. Jon, welcome to talking Feds.
Jonathan Alter [00:03:43]: Thanks very much, Harry. Good to be here.
Harry Litman [00:03:45]: Next, returning to Talking Feds, Joe Lockhart, Joe is a CNN political analyst, a communications consultant, and a host himself of the Words Matter podcast.
He was the Press Secretary for President Clinton from 1998 to 2000, a fairly active and challenging juncture. And he was a founder of the communications consulting firm Glover park group thereafter also worked for Facebook from 2011 to 2012 and was Executive Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs for the NFL from 2016 to 2018. Thanks for being here, Joe.
Joe Lockhart [00:04:23]: Glad to be here, Harry,
Harry Litman [00:04:24]: And finally, a well-known figure to all Talking Feds fans and much of the country, Asha Rangappa. Asha is a senior lecturer at the Yale University Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and a CNN contributor. She was an FBI agent previously in New York city, specializing in counterintelligence investigations. Asha, thanks so much, always a pleasure to have you on Talking Feds.
Asha Rangappa [00:04:48]: It's good to be back. Harry
Harry Litman [00:04:49]: Alright, let’s start a little bit with the Harris selection itself. So, she was the frontrunner in a lot of ways, yet there were recurrent signs of opposition in the Biden camp and a sense that she couldn't quite close the deal and Biden kept circling back to other possibilities.
What was that about? What was the sort of resistance to Harris until the very end, anybody?
Jonathan Alter [00:05:16]: Well, my sense was that it was because there were a lot of California Democrats who were telling the Biden search team that they didn't like her very much. And, you know, it's hard to know how much of that is the normal cut and thrust of politics in a big state, and how much of it was something that Biden needed to take seriously. And then arguably that the chief person in charge of the selection process, former Senator Chris Dodd, it came out that he was clearly opposed to selecting Harris and he pushed Karen Bass, who made a, kind of a late bid for this.
And, you know, for a while it seemed like she might get it. But then all these trips she made to Cuba and nice things she said about Fidel Castro and the church of Scientology surfaced. And then Susan Rice also came on pretty strong because she had such a good relationship with Biden and she and he could have hit the deck running and, she would help him restore America's global standing because of her experience in government, but when it came down to it, Harris checked the most boxes and Rice had not run for office before. Bass had those problems with what she had said, and the other candidates had one shortcoming or another. So, they circled back to Harris, which is where they had essentially begun.
Harry Litman [00:06:34]: It's true in California where I live, there was this definite sense of tepidness, maybe some opposition among the progressive wing, but what was the nature if you know of the raps against her, if anybody like Dodd was putting concrete reasons to the opposition. What was it at one point, just as John says, Biden turned to his staff and said, ‘do people not like her in California? What is sort of going on?’ And he, of course, hadn’t had the greatest relationship with her in the campaign when she trashed him pretty good on stage, but what was the actual concrete nature of the opposing arguments?
Jonathan Alter [00:07:12]: Well first, when, when she said, ‘and that little girl was me’ and, you know, it was a very personal attack on Biden early on, which when Chris Dodd, questioned her about it, according to published reports, she did not answer the question in a way that he found satisfactory. She said, well, it was just politics.
And I think Dodd was looking for more of an apology or, ‘I'm sorry that I did that to Joe’ and Joe's sister, uh, Valerie Biden — who everybody's going to know, if he's elected — very important figure in his life, very powerful figure. She and Jill Biden, his wife, were not thrilled about the way Harris had taken down their guy.
And, but Biden, I think really showed something by looking past that. It's a generosity of spirit that he has, that a lot of people really appreciate. And that compensates for some of his shortcomings is that, you know, he is a good guy who can look beyond that. I think inside California, it was a combination of her just having kind of sharp elbows on the way up.
In her first campaign for DA, she ran against her boss. And so she, over a period of time, especially if you're moving fast, and I don't think this really has anything to do with race, you're just going to offend a certain number of people and pretty much everyone that she offended called somebody in the Biden campaign
Harry Litman [00:08:32]: I mean I can report, just as a prosecutor, you know, prosecutors talk and there's a sense among them of which bosses are there to do right and only right, and which are there in part to feather their own nest. And you heard whispers of that regard.
Joe, what do you think about, early on the rap was you heard about her supposedly over harsh, um, record as a DA in particular. Well, both DA and AG, but she seemed to try to inoculate herself against that charge with her extremely strong identification with the Black Lives Matter movement and the aftermath of Minneapolis.
Do you think she's kind of shaken that charge off of her, for permanent?
Joe Lockhart [00:09:17]: Yeah. Let me, I want to make one comment first about California Democrats. I think you can describe their hostility towards her in one word, which is envy. These are people who have been in the trenches for a very long time and she's made a meteoric rise, and you know, has never lost and, has just gone by people that feel like they should have been in front of that line, and I think that it was a lot of it. And I also think, she started as the front runner and I don't ever think she was not the front runner. I think the Biden people, uh, were smart to throw a bunch of names out there and see what people said and see how it was covered. Because the worst thing you can do is have surprises after you've made the pick.
So they, they were okay with people going after her, and I think they're very satisfied with the pick. On the second question, I mean, it's very tough for Donald Trump, who's running a law and order campaign, to criticize her for being too tough on crime. So I don't think that it's an issue that the president will be able to take advantage of.
And among Democrats, I really feel like it's forgotten. You know, I watched the announcement and I watched it as a former campaign staffer, nervous that everything would come off all right. And, would the mic work and how would it look? How would it feel?
The speech seemed good. I went back and watched it a second time, not worried and the speech seemed historic and powerful, and I think that's what Democrats wanted. I think there was a collective sigh of relief among Democrats all across this country that Biden had gotten it right, that Harris is the right choice. And I don't think Democrats by and large are going to worry much about that criticism and the Republicans are going to have a really hard time making it themselves.
Harry Litman [00:10:54]: Yeah, I'm anticipating what it already looks like. Biden himself, but then Trump and Pence, they look like dottering dinosaurs from another era. And here you have this candidate who seems to just embody. Modern America and all its diversity, right. The whole tableau seemed to come when she hit the stage with him and I think that will contrast pretty markedly with Trump and Pence who just suddenly seem out of the 1950s or something. Asha, did you see her speech? And did you have, the same impression of vitality that, my sense is Democrats in general had?
Asha Rangappa [00:11:34]: I saw clips of it and I completely agree with Joe.
I mean, she just exudes an energy. I mean, she, she glows. It's also partly the contrast, right? I mean, next to, you know, Humpty Dumpty over here, Trump and Pence...
Harry Litman [00:11:47]: Wait, Humpty Dumpty is Trump and Pence?
Joe Lockhart [00:11:49]: Pence is the wall. Trump is Humpty Dumpty,
Asha Rangappa [00:11:51]: I think Biden's cool, but he's like kind of cool in the way that boomers are sometimes try to be cool driving their old car or whatever, but she's like
Joe Lockhart [00:12:02]: Careful, Asha!
Harry Litman [00:12:03]: We all resemble that remark.
Asha Rangappa [00:12:04]: I know, we’re the wrong group on this. She has that gen X kind of hip vibe, you have clips of her dancing, you know, and then also being able to be tough for questioning in committees and stuff. As we get closer to the election, because I think this was, I wouldn't say it was downplayed, it was just kind of secondary, her being half Indian, I think is significant. I mean, my parents are Indian and my dad was a lifelong Republican. He is a doctor, there's an organization called American Association of Physicians from India. And this is like a huge group that Republicans go every year to this huge conference and give speeches and stuff, because this is like a major, I guess, voting block, donor block,
I don't know, Joe probably has a better sense of that. They're going to claim her. I mean, it doesn't really matter whether she identifies yes, strongly and I, you know, I think she's acknowledged it, but they are going to claim her. And I think it's a part of the immigrant story that you see success when somebody from your group makes it.
Jonathan Alter [00:13:06]: It's a really interesting question I've been looking for in some of the stories I should have searched for it, but it could be that it is a new voting block. My understanding is that in the past, it has not been reliably for one party or the other. And we might look back on this election as a time when a pretty significant voting block, uh, I mean, not as large as blacks or Latinos, but, but considerable, moved into the democratic column. That would be a big thing.
Asha Rangappa [00:13:33]: One thing to note is it was the demographic that Trump actively courted in 2016. I don't know if he did for other groups, but he definitely did. He went to some big ‘Hindus for Trump’ event, gave a big speech. “I love the Hindu.” Literally. He said, ‘I love the Hindu’, made a campaign, ad where he tried to speak Hindi. I don't know if he was doing that across the board. I don't think so. So there is at least some part of that demographic and I think that there are some synergies there, right?
Modi in India is basically the Indian Trump. And so some of these trans-national policies, maybe older generation Indians have some sympathy with, and I think that probably the younger generations lean Democratic would be my sense. I don't know that that's necessarily taken for granted.
Jonathan Alter [00:14:20]: I was just going to say in 2016, Trump was going for the anti Muslim vote. So that's why he was cozying up to, uh, Hindus. Modi has been very hard on Muslims but, so that might not work for him this time. That's one less constituency that he can go after. It's just interesting. And in some ways, a new demographic group, I mean, you saw her, at least in terms of voting analysis, you saw her described as an Asian American candidate, which I think was confusing in the last few days for a lot of Americans, they don't see her as Asian.
So this is not very smart, people on a news desk somewhere kind of melding South Asian with Asian and throwing her in, lumping her in.
Asha Rangappa [00:15:04]: Which the census and government check boxes have done for years.
Jonathan Alter [00:15:11]: Right. Which is why it's harder to dis-aggregate how big a voting block this is. But I'm certain Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans don't consider her the, not that they’re hostile to her, but they don't consider her one of them.
So this is a different group and we don't know. It is really pretty historic. I mean, so far we've had Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sarah Palin in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket in 2016. But we're just into this realm of women on national tickets and women have had the votes is 1919
Harry Litman [00:15:43]: The hundredth anniversary is in a couple of days, yeah.
Jonathan Alter [00:15:45]: Kind of amazing that it has taken us this long. And so I do think that some of what's going on, and Joe knows this much better than I do, these elections tend to be about the future. Which candidate is best capturing the future that you want for you and your family? And even when Trump ran a restorationist candidate — “Make America Great Again” — in some ways it was, ‘I want the future to be more like the past’, it was still a message about the future. And Trump and Pence haven't laid out any kind of agenda for a second term. They have no vision at all about where they want to take the country. So, I think just on the freshness focus on the future front, this was a very good choice.
Harry Litman [00:16:27]: Especially with the president who's going to be 78. Oldest president ever on the first day, but let's stick with Trump for one more second. She has been the front runner all this time, presumably they'd been sharpening their knives as sharp as they can make them. And what he comes out of the box with is “Phony Kamala.” Now, it's not even clear to me what he's trying to get at, but what is he signaling? If anything, with that little nickname about how he's going to try to position that ticket to run against her.
Joe Lockhart [00:16:58]: Well, I think it's been remarkable how uncoordinated the Republicans have been going after it. If you believe published reports, the campaign wanted to paint her as an ultra liberal socialist and were undermined by the president himself who painted her as a nasty woman.
She's been called a Marxist, she’s been called...a couple of people tried the too tough on crime, won't fly in the black community, but you haven't had a coherent attack on her. I expect they'll get there eventually, but coming out of the box, they've reacted very poorly only because you could probably ask all of us, what do you think the attack is?
And we'd give you three different answers. So that means it's failed. I want to come back just for a minute though, to the point Asha was making about Indian voters. Historically, Indian voters have been more Republican than Democrats. Democratic voters have been more within the Pakistani community cause that reflected our foreign policy priorities. That has changed over the last five to 10 years with some of the problems we've had with Pakistan. But what's really interesting as someone who worked for Michael Dukakis, for quite a long time, ethnic or religious based groups can serve an oversized role, not just in their votes, but with their money.
Anyone who covered Michael Dukakis went to every Greek diner in America, I can tell you the menu in every city and it became like a fundraising base for him. And it's a new source of money for Biden and the Democrats. And I think it might be a very significant source of money because as Asha was saying, there's an identification that wasn't there before.
It hasn't been talked about much, but when we look back on this, I think that might be a significant factor in where we turn out in November.
Jonathan Alter [00:18:36]: Well, the money thing was very interesting. They raised $48 million in the first 48 hours for the democratic ticket, which is a lot of money.
And there's more where that came from, a lot of those people didn't max out. So what this means is that, it indicates that the Democrats might be able to, really direct some of their resources to getting the Senate back because Biden won't get anything done as president, unless the Democrats win the Senate.
So, I think some of those folks will also recognize that and, and you're going to see these races in these, uh, battleground Senate States be even more competitive than they are now.
Joe Lockhart [00:19:15]: I think one of the things that you have to look at and take one step back from the excitement of the VP announcement is VPs generally don't have that big of a factor in the general election.
The last time one was a significant factor was 1960 with John Kennedy and LBJ, but they do have a couple of things they need to do. One is pull off if the announcement properly, don't stumble in the days afterwards by saying something silly or wrong, and Harris so far has been perfect.
Second, you need to use that as an inflection point for raising money and they've blown it out of the park on that. And then third is the debate, and that's the one thing we have ahead of us. But my guess is, by the time the Democratic Convention is over and we get to the Republican Convention, we're not going to be talking about Pence and Harris that much, this election is about Donald Trump and only Donald Trump.
It's important to get this right. They got it right, but we're going to be fighting about other things I think in September and October.
Harry Litman [00:20:11]: That’s a good point. Although a lot of people, including me already circled October 7th and are going to eagerly tune in to see Kamala take it to Pence.
Joe Lockhart [00:20:20]: The example I'll give you is, Lloyd Bentsen made Dan Quayle look like a stuttering child, Lloyd Benson never became vice president. So we should take all of this with a little bit of perspective about what it does mean and, and what it doesn't mean.
Jonathan Alter [00:20:35]: Tell people, Joe, what he said. Cause it was pretty, pretty amusing. I was covering politics for Newsweek in those days.
I was at that debate. And Quayle had made some reference to John F. Kennedy.
Joe Lockhart [00:20:45]: He had compared himself to John Kennedy.
Jonathan Alter [00:20:46]: Yeah. And so when, when he compared himself to Kennedy, Lloyd Benson said, ‘I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.’ Y’know it was just like, whoa. Knock-out punch.
Harry Litman [00:21:04]: He was just, he was so ready for it.
Alright well, speaking of Newsweek magazine, that's a good pivot, John, for the kinds of possible in lieu of whatever attacks on Kamala they could otherwise make, we are seeing aspects of I think what you could loosely call disinformation campaign that are maybe going to get purchase or maybe not. But let's, let's give at least a couple minutes to this new kerfuffle about, uh, the article in Newsweek.
It was written by an actual law professor, although also a former opponent of Kamala Harris and Newsweek neglected to mention it. But the argument is, Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, and the constitution says that anyone who is a natural born US citizen can be president. But, this professor had a kind of convoluted argument having to do with whether or not she was subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States at the time.
When Kamala Harris was a, would she have been subjected to the full jurisdiction of the United States? Even if that was the test, of course she would have, she applied for a Social Security Card, or if she committed a federal crime she would have been. And that, and that little loophole really is for like children of diplomats or Indian tribes.
Legally speaking, it's a nonstarter. But it immediately spread all over the internet. New groups that no one had heard of sprung up to call her I think, an anchor baby, because she is a child of immigrants and Trump himself coyly suggested maybe it had credence.
So I first wanted to ask John about it as a matter of the media coverage. How did this kind of make it to Newsweek? And what do you think about their response to the blow back, which has been pretty unapologetic, right?
Jonathan Alter [00:22:58]: Well, I think it was horrible. And you know, it made me ashamed of my longtime associates with Newsweek.
I worked there for 28 years. I wrote a column and I was a senior editor in 2010. The Graham family, which had owned Newsweek since 1962 owners of the Washington post. They sold Newsweek. And at that time, when I was working there, we had 3 million paid circulation and a readership of 25 to 30 million.
This is way larger than any cable network. This is, we were part of the national conversation. Now I believe their circulation is a hundred thousand. So I mean, as Anderson Cooper said on CNN, he didn't even know the magazine was still in existence. It was bought by these sketchy folks from overseas a couple of years ago, they raided the offices of Newsweek as part of some kind of criminal investigation into money laundering.
So this has become a really disreputable magazine. And I was especially upset because one of my old colleagues is now the editor of the magazine. And she wrote an editor's note after this that was frankly, it was pathetic. It was a pathetic defense of this just awful piece that she ran. It wasn't just that it was legally ridiculous, specious, fallacious, it's that it was racist at its core because basically what the intent of the article was, was to say that Kamala Harris was the other, that child of immigrants has no place on a national ticket. And it was an attempt to try to kind of nuke her right out of the gate. It's not going to work because even if it gets retweeted 5 million times, 10 million, 30 million times, it's still the same Trumpsters who will feast on it. So I don't think it's going to be electorally decisive, but it's really a sad day, it's not that they should have fact checked it, they just shouldn't have run it. It was a hit job, and it had no place in Newsweek and it's just sad.
Asha Rangappa [00:24:52]: It's actually not just about Kamala, right? This is ‘go back to your country’, disguised as a legal argument, but what is especially dangerous about it is that it is not specific to Kamala, this argument.
So when we compare it to the Obama conspiracy theory, that he was born in Kenya. That was a made up lie about Obama. Here what you have is a very dangerous legal argument, which is laying the premise for not just that Kamala isn't eligible to run for president. It's the idea that millions of people currently in the United States, if this legal theory were true, who are born to immigrant parents who were not citizens at the time of their birth. This argument would mean that they are not citizens now.
That would mean that there are millions of people here in the United States who would not be eligible to vote, who could be subject to deportation or rounded up and put in detention camps. I mean, you can see the echoes of where this kind of argument goes. So it's, I think the fact that it is clothed in legality makes it actually even more dangerous than just the racist birther conspiracy leveled against Obama. And for that alone, I would have thought that, you know, an outlet would take great pains to not publish something like that without a basis.
Jonathan Alter [00:26:18]: They just didn’t think it through, they hired a guy who was a right winger, you know, to be their opinion editor and they reap what they sowed.
Joe Lockhart [00:26:28]: I don't think they got snuckered at all. I think they did this and this is a reflection of the way the media works now, because Anderson Cooper didn't know two days ago, that Newsweek was still around and now he knows, right. The way you make money in media right now is finding a niche audience.
And the Trump audience is a great big audience. It was served up for Trump and Trump reacted the way Trump always reacts, which is he speaks from his heart, his racist heart and did exactly what everyone thought. Now that is going to be music to the ears of his base, they're going to love that.
In every chat room there's going to be talk about whether she's really eligible or not, and by the time this is over, she will have been born also in Indonesia or Kenya. Now, the fact of the matter is, if you look at the race though, and the reason that this is not going to work for Trump, like it did in 2016, is the country has fundamentally changed since 2016. We saw it in 2018 where suburban women in record numbers, blacks got out and voted in record numbers in a midterm to send a message that they didn't like what they were seeing. Before Trump, racism was, was spoken in soft tones.
Trump says it out loud. He brings the ugliness and the horrible stench of a racist and puts it in the middle of the white house. And you know, 35% of the country cheers and says, somebody finally hears us. That's great. But 65% of the country, I believe, and maybe it's wishful thinking, has been moved by the idea that that's not what America is.
That's not who we are. Even people who have these latent racist feelings, looked at Trump and said, I don't want to be like that. And you know, you couple that with the changes around the Black Lives movement, and the police brutality and Trump is trying to run his 2016 campaign in 2020. And he's running in a completely different country than he ran in in 2016.
Jonathan Alter [00:28:28]: Joe, I basically agree with you. And I think that Trump is in a world of political hurt. He doesn't really have a path to reelection, but what concerns me is that you mentioned that 35%. He's at 41-42%. And I was expecting that after all of this, he would be down at 35%.
You know, Harry mentioned that I've got this book coming out next month about Jimmy Carter and Jimmy Carter, the electorate was much more fluid then, I mean, he went as high as seven, over 70% approval. And Trump has never been over 50, but he also went as low as 26%. I find it really depressing that Trump is not down in the mid to low thirties at this point, because he's so unfit and so many Republicans know that he's unfit. Know that he's tearing the fabric of the country. And yet they still say that they approve of him in office. So, I think you're right. And I would bet on Biden, but after 2016, it's really hard to be completely confident in our fellow countrymen and women.
Joe Lockhart [00:29:29]: No, I, I don't disagree with caution. I wrote a piece recently for CNN that said Donald Trump has no path to victory. He can't win. Joe Biden can lose. He can do things that depress our own turnout. He can not engage properly in the campaign.
So he still has to win this, but Donald Trump, uh, being Donald Trump, having a record now for three and a half years, you know, again, he’s at 39% job approval in a poll that came out this morning. But if you look at this campaign, it's defined by COVID and he’s at 31 and 32% approval there. So his, his real approval is somewhere in between.
He needs to be at 47-48% job approval to win on election day. It's historically possible. And I don't, I, I just don't see unless Biden's self combusts, you know, Trump having a path.
Jonathan Alter [00:30:20]: You don't think he can steal it by shutting down the post office?
Joe Lockhart [00:30:21]: Well, that's a whole other question.
Harry Litman [00:30:23]: That’s a whole other point. Let me offer one more comment on this. Just to zero in a little bit more, I mean, it strikes me that roughly what's been happening with Trump and his base. It's not just the 65% to the extent he was ever at 44-45 that comprise the very hardcore 30, whatever it's gonna going to be, who will never desert him. But also a whole cohort that he has is specifically losing.
And it strikes me that those folks may be, they're largely suburban women, but however you would define them are the ones who are most likely to recoil from some of these dog whistle tactics that we've identified.
Joe Lockhart [00:31:06]: I think you're right. I think you said it better than me.
Harry Litman [00:31:09]: Well more of that to come for now, we are moving to our sidebar feature, which normally consists of having a well known figure explain an important concept in the law. In light of Kamala Harris's announcement, we thought we'd do something a little bit different and speak with someone who would tell us some personal experience that maybe illuminates what she's going to be like as a candidate.
So we're very fortunate that former Senator Barbara Boxer is with us, she served 34 years in the Congress, 10 in the house, and then from 1992 to 2016 in the Senate. And since leaving the Senate, she's written a book on her years in Congress, The Art of Tough: Fearlessly Facing Politics and Life. In any event, she's gonna give an anecdote from her experience with Senator Harris that gives some insight into the kind of Vice Presidential candidate that she may be.
Barbara Boxer [00:32:09]: In 2010, I found myself on the campaign trail with Kamala. She was running in a very tough race for Attorney General, and I was running in a very tough race for reelection to the Senate. We saw each other quite a bit during that campaign year, and I was really rooting for her. Her race was so close, and it was not called for a couple of weeks, so during that time, I kept nervously phoning Kamala, I kept asking her, “how’s it going? Give me the news.” I was really nervous. She would calm me down, she was cool as a cucumber, so that’s a great trait. It had a happy ending, she won and I won. This is Barbara Boxer for Talking Feds.
Harry Litman [00:32:50]: Thanks very much for that story, Senator Boxer.
All right. Picking up then, on where I think it was Joe, just before mentioning the post office. It's by all accounts, a mess. it's barely staying afloat, and yet it is absolutely critical to full and expanded mail-in voting in November. And it just recently sent detailed letters to 46 States saying that it cannot guarantee that all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted.
And you put that up against the laws in many States that require ballots — mail in ballots to arrive by the election in order to be counted. And it seems like, like a train wreck of historic proportions in the offing. So, President Obama in pretty forceful language came out and said that the President is trying to kneecap and starve his own US Postal Service.
So are we, aren't we looking at a total disaster in the making?
Jonathan Alter [00:33:57]: We are, and it's frightening, with 46 States at, at risk. And at the same time that they're looking to be overwhelmed, they're removing sorting machines under orders from, uh, Louis DeJoy, who I think, if Biden wins, should go to jail, which I'll get to in a second, changing from First-class to bulk rates, which slows everything down, laying people off, laying off managers, workers. He just met with Trump.
Trump denied having met with him, another one of his tens of thousands of lies. And they clearly were plotting how to use the US Postal Service to steal the election for the Republicans. So that's not an overstatement of what's going on. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on Friday issued a statement saying they were trying to cheat to win the election.
They're absolutely right. It seems that one of the things that can be done, and the hand-wringing about it is not enough, not enough to write columns about it and expect somebody else do something.
So all 50 States have laws that prohibit the interference in an election. You can't like, line up 10 trucks to prevent people from getting to a polling place and put up a barricade. So people can't go to the polling place. If you do that under state law, you can be prosecuted because remember there are state candidates on all of these mail-in ballots. So, the concern that people had in the last week is well, of course, the DOJ is not going to prosecute Louis DeJoy, the head of the post office, Barr's not going to do anything. And, you know, Congress has no real jurisdiction because there's a board of governors.
Instead, what should happen is the manager of all of these postal sorting centers in every state, start with the battleground States, should be indicted If they removed a single sorting machine from their premises in the 90 days before the election, they should be indicted for interfering in an election.
Asha Rangappa [00:35:46]: You’d be better off with an AG bringing a civil suit, asking for a temporary injunction that, that would not only have a lower burden of proof, but the irreparable harm standard that you would have there, you could then try to order, and you could do this in federal court because there would be federal jurisdiction since this is the US Post Office, to get them to stop taking these actions. That would be the fastest way to pursue this without taking criminal cases off the table.
Harry Litman [00:36:13]: I have brought such cases. They're really tough.
Jonathan Alter [00:36:16]: So what's the larger picture here. This is the toughness gap between Democrats and Republicans, and I'm afraid it's extended to the bar. So there are 16 lawsuits that Republicans are bringing. Trying to make it harder to vote in different parts of the country. How will Democratic lawyers feel if Trump manages to steal this election, and the margin of his victory is that they got out lawyered cause they were wringing their hands saying it's somebody else's problem, while the Republican lawyers were in court, suppressing the vote. So democratic lawyers, and look, as I said, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a journalist. If they want to prevent this slow motion coup d'etat, they better get cracking.
I don't know what the legal theory is. I don't know what the impediments are. There's always a way to say no, you know, this won't happen for reasons XYZ. The Republican lawyers don't say that, they bring impossible, frivolous cases, hoping that they get the right judge. The Democrats all like, censor themselves and say ‘oh no, we can’t do this, we’re’, you know, I'm being too sweeping in this cause there are some Democratic lawyers who are looking very closely at this, but not enough. And time is short.
Harry Litman [00:37:18]: All true, so let me just quickly respond on the legal front. They are cracking and, in my hometown of Pittsburgh today, a federal judge has responded at the behest of the Democratic opponents to the Republican plaintiffs to show me the proof. They, the Republicans have to come in now, and I really can't wait to see this submission showing why mail and voting is so ripe for fraud. But let's just also switch gears briefly and ask, are there, in addition to legal battles, other kinds of solutions that may be pursued to augment delivery of mail in ballots, which by the way, Trump applied for his this week, but are there other ways to augment mail in ballots to at least ameliorate the train wreck.
Joe Lockhart [00:38:06]: First off it's a, it's an absolute fiction that the post office is going broke. The post office is, on paper, going broke because Republicans 15 or 20 years ago passed a law that said they had to pre-fund their pensions, no other company, no other government agency has to do that. So, on paper, they are running a deficit.
They are a profitable organization, but the Republicans want to privatize and get rid of the postal office. So that's one thing. The second thing is this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the thing we're talking about. There are efforts going on in every state to suppress the vote, whether it be voter ID laws, whether it be things they're doing in Florida on signatures.
I disagree a little bit with Jonathan about Democrats on the sidelines. Marko Liias, I don't think has lost a case in about six years.
Jonathan Alter [00:38:54]: He's great. He’s great, but there should be 50 of ‘em.
Joe Lockhart [00:38:577]: It's, it's not just Mark, there's a well-funded group that Eric Holder’s pushing, so Democrats are ready for this. Now, you know, it's like, whack-a-mole, you solve one thing, one place.
I actually think that there may be a sting in the tail for this for Republicans for a couple of reasons. One is I’ve been talking to democratic organizers over the last week or so, and their main effort is COVID related, but some of this has to do with the post office and voter suppression. You're going to see Democrats voting in record numbers early.
And I mean very early, and they won't trust the post office. They'll walk it down the Board of Elections, or mail it a month in advance. The second issue is, and I think Republicans in states are very worried about this, Republicans have always done better on mail-in voting.
So I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done. A lot of work is being done. The Republicans have become an anti-democratic party. And I don't mean Democrat. I mean, they're against democracy, Donald Trump being their authoritarian leader.
And that goes for all of them. 52-53 Republican senators, who haven't said a word about this, who will, are just blindly saying it's okay to suppress the vote. There are Secretaries of State around the country who were Republicans who have stolen elections over the last decade. You go into Ohio, and you go into a suburb and there's no lines and there's 40 polling places.
And then you go into the inner city and there's two polling places, and the line is six, seven hours. This is all anti-democratic. This issue used to get surfaced after the election. It's being surfaced right now before the election, that has the potential to be a very big deal for Democrats, and a very big driver of turnout.
Asha Rangappa [00:40:41]: Yeah. I just wanted to emphasize Joe's point about the anti-democratic — small d — strategies here. And it kind of goes back to some of our initial comments about Kamala Harris and what she represents in terms of the future. The Republican party cannot sustain the demographic changes that are happening in this country, given where they are right now, and especially as they move farther and farther to the right, with the explicit racism with the anti-immigration stances.
Over 50% of this country is going to be minority by 2025, I believe. It's just not a sustainable strategy for them, and they use the fear and outrage machines. Whether it they're coming after your guns, they're coming after your values, they’re coming after your neighborhoods, they’re coming after your meat, or whatever it is that Pence said the other day. And that does get their kind of solid 30% out, but to quote from Hamilton, they don't have the votes. They cannot manage it. So these anti-democratic strategies, the reason that you're not hearing anything from the Republicans is, this is the only way they can win. They have to mobilize their own base, but they have to suppress some portion of the democratic base, otherwise they simply cannot sustain winning these.
And I think the very sad part of it is that the anti-democratic strategies by definition, will have to continue to escalate. The more extreme that the GOP becomes — we now know there's QAnon people in the party — that base is going to get even more extreme and, and shrink, and not appeal to the masses.
Would you agree with that, Joe? It's just, it is, it is a part of their strategy. This is how they have to win.
Joe Lockhart [00:42:21]: It is their entire strategy. And this was a strategy in 2016, it was a strategy in 2018, but I think the, the optimist in me looks at 2018 and despite efforts all over the country to keep people from voting, Democrats swept through. Now in 2016, Trump won Wisconsin I believe by 17,000 votes, 300,000 voters were denied the ability to vote. And I don't think these were white people making $500,000 a year. And so, I think just the very fact that we're talking about this now, and the media is very focused on this and it's becoming an issue in the campaign.
Like I said before, voter suppression always happened. The debate always happened after elections. And it's very important now that we're talking about this now and putting it in the forefront.
Jonathan Alter [00:43:09]: I agree with all of that, but I'm more focused on what to do in the short term between now and November, and according to the Brennan Center for Justice — which is a great clearinghouse of information on all of this — the single most important thing that can be done is to allow either boxes that you can deposit your mail-in ballot in, which the states that are heavily mail in like Oregon, Washington, Colorado, which is all vote by mail, put it home. But you know, many other States have these boxes, but in many key states, including Pennsylvania, they’re trying to prevent them.
So the legal fight has to go there. If that doesn't work, a fallback position, which I've heard very little discussion of, is to get Secretary of States, and other election officials, to allow people to drop their mail-in ballots at polling places. So, my first reaction to that was, well, then won't the election judges there who are often Republicans who were in on it, who are trying to deny Democrats the right to vote, won't they then open them there. And they're not allowed to under any, apparently under any state law, they have to take them from the polling place directly to the board sealed directly to the board of elections. So part of this practical struggle in the next few weeks should be to make sure that every voter, if they forget to vote until a couple of days before the election and they're voting by mail, they should be able to drop their mail-in ballot at any holding station.
Otherwise they're going to be, you know, trying to figure out where do I go to get my vote in? And this issue has not surfaced enough. The other thing is, as Jim Cliburn says, just stop talking about election day and start talking about election month. That the entire month of October should be about the election and it should be seen as election month, everybody, all the networks.
This is a responsibility of journalism. The television networks need to tell everybody in every state, you know, when their absentee ballots are due, when early voting is allowed two weeks before the election, but not three days before the election, everybody's got different rules and the voters have to be informed.
That's a public education campaign that has to take place. And I think some donors need to figure out whether they want to buy some ads that just educate voters in battleground States about when they have to get their ballots in.
Harry Litman [00:45:20]: All really good points, and just to stitch it up with what Joe was saying, many of these require changes in state law. Now to date, when there have been efforts to do it, Republicans have automatically, you know, the why Rick Vue has taken hold have automatically oppose, but they've been tied up in committee or, treated in a somewhat obscure way.
Joe Lockhart [00:45:41]: I think you're also going to see, I mean, we're definitely going to see a different kind of campaigning in the COVID era. You're not going to see, you know, 50,000 people.
And what's really interesting is, I was on a call with some state legislators the other day and they were recounting, you know, the Republicans are, their field operations are acting like it's, we're not in this COVID crisis. They're out knocking on doors. Democrats to a person are not doing that this time. Their focus and where their money's going to be spent is on exactly what Jonathan just talked about: educating voters on how to vote early.
And if you look at the States by the time I think the second debate is done, I think there's a prediction that two thirds of the country will have already voted, based on the states. So I'm just underscoring what Jonathan said is this election is going to be decided in September, not October.
Harry Litman [00:46:29]: Alright. Well much more to come on the election and the general efforts to suppress the vote. It's all we have time for today, and we have just a couple minutes for a Five Words or Fewer.
Our final feature, which we're going to change up today as well. Usually, we have a listener question, but, as a way of at least touching on the important argument that took place in the DC circuit this week involving Michael Flynn, I wanted to change our five words or fewer question to the following:
The DC circuit heard argument on bonk, about whether the mandamus effort by Michael Flynn should succeed, or whether the judge in the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan, has a right to have a hearing. So, most observers thought that the court was going to say that a hearing is fine. But it sets up the really bigger question there about what happens next.
So, Feds, the Five Words or Fewer question is: will Judge Sullivan grant the government's dismissal motion on remand? Five words or fewer, please.
Asha Rangappa [00:47:37]: Yes, but without prejudice.
Joe Lockhart [00:47:40]: I hope not.
Harry Litman [00:47:42]: John?
Jonathan Alter [00:47:44]: No, he won't.
Harry Litman [00:47:45]: Unfortunately, yes. Writing on wall.
Thank you very much to John, Joe, and Asha. 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.
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Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Low Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Don Griffin are our contributing writers. Production Assistance by Ayo Osobamiro, who is leaving us after this week to go off to law school. Thanks very much Ayo for all of your great contributions to Talking Feds, and good luck in law school. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla Michaels. Thanks very much to Senator Barbara Boxer, for her funny and illuminating account of Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Kamala Harris. Our gratitude, as always, to the amazing Philip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds is a production of Delito, LLC. I'm Harry Litman. See you next time.
