Harry Litman [00:00:01] 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 week began with the country's eyes glued to the closing arguments in the case of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer accused of murdering George Floyd, as captured by a young bystander on a video that horrified and galvanized the nation and the world. After a remarkably brief deliberation, the jury Tuesday returned a verdict of guilty on all counts, and the former police officer was taken into immediate custody to await a sentence that figures to be at least 15 years. The verdict brought a national sense of relief and even exultation, which gave way quickly to a sharp focus on systemic reform of police conduct across the country. Former President Barack Obama declared that true justice requires that we come to terms with the fact that black Americans are treated differently every day.
The Department of Justice immediately announced an investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department under its pattern and practice authority, which Attorney General Merrick Garland recently restored to full strength, rescinding limits imposed by the Trump DOJ. Thursday, President Biden marked Earth Day by hosting a virtual global summit, announcing that the United States intends to cut emissions nearly in half by the end of the decade. The undertaking would change US lives in nearly every way, from manufacturing practices to the way we drive. Finally, the White House endorsed a bill to make the District of Columbia a state which would have dramatic consequences on the power division in the Senate. The bill has passed the House of Representatives and is now up for consideration in the Senate. To break down another barn-burning news week, we have a fantastic panel of guests. They are:.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, who represents the 8th District of Maryland. He presented the House's case in the second impeachment of President Trump before entering Congress. Congressman Raskin was a three term state senator in Maryland and for more than 25 years, a professor of constitutional law at American University's Washington College of Law. He's also author of the bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People. Congressman, thank you very much for returning to Talking Feds.
Jamie Raskin [00:02:43] Well, I'm delighted to be with you and psyched hear what my panelists have to say.
Harry Litman [00:02:48] Starting with Philip Rucker. I'll just say, Phil is the Senior Washington Correspondent at The Washington Post, he's also a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, the New York Times best-selling co-author of A Very Stable Genius, Donald Trump's Testing of America. But not least, and just this week, Phil was named the winner of the extremely prestigious Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House coverage by the White House Correspondents Association. He, too, is a returning guest to Talking Feds, thank you very much for being with us, Phil.
Phil Rucker [00:03:25] So glad to be with you, Harry. Thanks.
Harry Litman [00:03:27] And finally, Bianca Vivian Brooks. Bianca is a writer, artist and designer. She holds a long list of 'youngest ever' distinctions, beginning with the youngest news correspondent to NPR's All Things Considered at Yes 14, heading NPR's Youth News desk at the 2012 DNC convention at 16, and the youngest opinion writer to The New York Times at 18. Now three years out of college and aging quickly, Bianca is a regular contributor to the Times opinion section and hosts a weekly advice and culture podcast called Ask VIV. Bianca, we're especially pleased that you could be with us today, given that some of the topics I think have special significance for younger Americans. Thanks for joining.
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:04:14] Thank you so much for having me Harry, it's always a pleasure to be here.
Harry Litman [00:04:17] All right. Let's start with the Chauvin trial, and before getting to the aftermath, just a couple questions about the trial itself and not legal technical questions, but do you consider that the conviction here was some augury of a change in national culture or just the consequence of very strong evidence in an individual case?
Phil Rucker [00:04:38] I think a lot of Americans would like to think it's a signal of an overall change in this culture and society. But we've got a lot of hurdles to overcome in America first, and having watched some of that trial, you have to conclude that the jury's decision was based on the irrefutable evidence that was presented. I mean, the video showed exactly what happened, the testimony from the experts explained how George Floyd died, and there didn't seem to be a whole lot of doubt about that conclusion. And whether it signals a shift in justice and a shift in how our culture and society views policing, I'm not equipped to answer that. But I suspect there will be some tough days ahead before we really get to a place of real justice overall.
Harry Litman [00:05:19] I mean, it's still the case. There have been only seven murder convictions of officers for fatal shootings since 2005. And it was an overwhelming case, and having done a number of them, I can say a very unusual one, in that the last bit of the nine minutes and 30 seconds were three excruciating minutes where he just continues to have the knee on the neck as opposed to a normal case, which comes about at a flash point, and gives rise to an argument by the police officer of having to make a split second judgment under circumstances of danger. Let me put it this way, so sentencing, I think people are galloping away with real misunderstanding of how Minnesota sentencing law works. Let me just say that under the guideline system in Minnesota, he's looking at 12 and a half to 13 years without aggravating factors, with aggravating factors may be 20 years, but a third of that will be on parole by automatic operation of Minnesota law. Let's say he gets something in the 15-20 range, will it play as too light, as sort of snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory, given all the outsized expectations that he's looking at, 40, 50, 70 years?
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:06:39] Americans love sensationalism, right? And they love a good story and they love a good individualistic story, but this is the issue when you put too much weight on any one individual case and don't focus on larger systemic issues, as Phil was alluding to. You get an instance in when OK, now we have it where the verdict came out favorable to the public, but will the sentencing be favorable? And then what will the consequences of that be? I'm of course, I'm not a legal scholar, and you'd be much more qualified to say what the consequences of any specific sentencing would be, but I would say that this is the exact issue in these very sensationalized cases. And until we really take seriously talking at length about institutional issues with policing, with qualified immunity laws in this country and things of that sort, then you're always going to get this back and forth of are they going to burn down the city or not?
Harry Litman [00:07:30] Jamie, you're a legal scholar and a political official, right? I'll just say, as a former prosecutor, it's quite a burden to try to put on individual cases, which hopefully are decided by the facts and law, the sort of burden of carrying systemic reform or not. So I do think what Bianca says is right. If Chauvin has this outsized symbolic consequence, then are we one acquittal away from a widespread perception that was just a little hiccup in an overall unjust system?
Jamie Raskin [00:08:06] Yeah, we need some systemic legislative reform. What we passed in the last Congress, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which I think would be the most sweeping police reform legislation in the history of the United States. It's got a ban on chokeholds and strangle holds, mandatory use of body cameras and dashboard cameras, abolition of the corrupt judge made doctrine of qualified immunity, a national registry and database of dirty cops and convicted cops and a bunch of other reforms in there. I mean, already the Republicans are trying to water it way, way down in the Senate and call it a compromise. This is ultimately how we're going to get there, because if you look at it in historical terms, as you were saying Harry, it's extremely difficult to get juries to convict cops unless you have the most vivid evidence of the most extreme and egregious behavior like this.
If we can't convict in a case like this, we simply can't convict. But the fact that we can convict in a case like this doesn't mean that you're going to get convictions in a lot of other circumstances where it's easier to claim that it was somehow warranted or was excusable or the evidence is murky or the photograph is grainy or you don't know what happened right before this or you don't know what happened right after it and so on. And juries have overwhelmingly look for a way to let cops go. And so, look, none of us is really looking for a world in which we're just convicting homicidal cops. We want to stop them from getting on the force in the first place and prevent people from getting killed. And that's what the systemic legislative reforms all about.
Harry Litman [00:09:47] Yeah, I mean, I'll say it wasn't the first time. I worked on the retrial in the Rodney King case, and it went in very well, and so it showed that it's possible, as you are suggesting. Let me follow up on your point about the Republicans now seeking to water down the George Floyd Policing Act and put it in the broader terms of the aftermath or the impact of the Chauvin case. And Phil, you might have some thoughts here, the Republicans at first strikingly came out, condemn the murder, seem to have at least moderate support for Black Lives Matter. But that seems to have changed and it seems to be a more of us versus them again, you saw on Fox News the official line being this just happened because people were scared Minnesota would burn. So is this another issue that even if it prompts broad consideration, it's going to be the same old 50 50 Republican Democrat divide in terms of broad legislative solutions?
Phil Rucker [00:10:49] It very well may be, but we're not sure yet. At the moment, the Republican leadership has not said exactly where they stand on this. And there are actually some efforts underway, including Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina, who's doing some kind of quiet negotiating to come up with some sort of a compromise bill. It's unclear how much that would water down the Floyd Act that's already passed the House by Democrats. And I have to think the people in the country should not be terribly optimistic about where the Republicans are going to come through on this, because you look at a similar issue, gun control, universal background checks, hugely popular among the American public. And after shootings, Republicans say they're going to do something and then nothing ever gets done.
They don't actually go forward and pass these bills that the Democrats are ready to sign into law. And so I wonder if it's going to be a similar pattern that plays out here, where currently with the momentum coming out of the Chauvin trial, Republican lawmakers and politicians want to say they're going to take action, but then fast forward a few weeks and the focus in the country shifts to other issues. They don't actually take any action and they're held back. But we'll see, and I actually want to hear what Congressman Raskin has to say about that, because he may have more intelligence than we know as reporters, given that these are his colleagues across the aisle trying to talk about this issue.
Jamie Raskin [00:12:04] I think the analogy to gun safety is apt. I mean, you would think if there's one issue we can move them on, it would be a universal background check on violent criminals accessing firearms. We've got ninety five percent of the public on our side, obviously the mass murderers are equal opportunity destroyers. It's not just Democrats who get killed, it's Republicans and members of their families and independents and people across the board. But still, they are in the thrall of the discredited and humiliated National Rifle Association, which has proven to be basically a conspiracy to take money away from gun owners and rip them off for the people on the inside of the group. They are sticking on a very hard line, absolutist position on gun safety.
And if they're doing it on gun safety, you've got to believe if you read the tea leaves on what they're saying now about Officer Chauvin, basically, that he's the victim of some kind of society wide jury tampering because of Black Lives Matter, they're going to stick with the most extreme elements, and it's really the post January 6th Republican Party that we're seeing. There are no enemies on the right, there is no group too violent, extremist or racist for them to denounce and disassociate themselves from. So I don't hold out a lot of hope. I mean, what they're calling a compromise with Tim Scott is an absolute joke. I mean, it got more than 80 percent of what's in our bill. It's got one or two things, and then it's like a bunch of commissioned studies. And, you know, we know where that leads. So it's time for action on police brutality, it's time for action on gun safety, it's time for action on voting rights, H.R. 1, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and all of this to me, all of the roads lead to a showdown over the filibuster.
Harry Litman [00:13:53] And that's what I was thinking, too. And I think you name the three issues, Congressman. And it does seem to me they're sort of in this order, H.R. 1, then gun reform, the two bills have already passed the House and then this. And what I mean by that is, I would think this would be the least likely of those three issues for the administration anyway to go to the wall on the filibuster. That is, notwithstanding the strong rhetoric. My sense is the Biden administration would sooner push on the filibuster in the other two settings than in this one. Anyone have a different instinct?
Jamie Raskin [00:14:34] That's probably right. I mean, they'll have to round up what the votes are on the Democratic side. The very positive development, from my perspective, having spent a little time over in the Senate now during the impeachment trial, is how unified the Democrats basically are there in the Senate as we are on the House side. But it always comes down to two or maybe three Democrats. It's Manchin, it's...
Harry Litman [00:14:59] Manchin, the most powerful man in America. Yeah, well, let me make one counterpoint or at least proffer one and ask what you think about it. Something that was really significant about this trial, you actually saw the official institutionalized police coming forward and calling him a rogue. The chief of police, use of force folks, so it may signal some kind of cultural change or pressure, whatever, within the ranks of police officers, which I think already was happening. That is my sense, is that the younger police officers are much less likely to be endemic racist, and the biggest problems are at the leadership level and the union level. Is that overly sanguine?
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:15:45] I think that what we have to see, and hopefully what we're seeing is the end of police in this country as a social class. No other career in this country is treated as an independent social class, not firefighters, despite the fact that many could argue that job is more dangerous. In fact, studies saying firefighting, being a garbage man is actually more dangerous than being the average patrolman. But because of police unions, because of these early pensions, because of the qualified immunity laws, you've gotten police as a social class and they're treated as a completely independent class of people that should have these certain social protections rather than just a job that you should have an incredible amount of qualification and oversight for. That it should be difficult — you should be buried under paperwork before you ever decide to grab a weapon. Like it should be something that has a lot more oversight, a lot more thought, a lot more qualification for, and I think that people are agreeing upon that because it's getting harder to make the good cop/bad cop argument, the few bad apples argument.
When you have someone who goes to this length to commit a public atrocity like what happened in this case, it becomes much harder for the good cops to argue, 'no, this person was just doing their job. They were just following procedure.' And so I think that you have that breakdown. Do I think that it's strong enough to completely change the fraternal stronghold police union dynamic that goes on in this country? No, not at all. I don't think that's really started yet. And in fact, I think that in the aftermath, a lot of people are still coming out in support of Officer Chauvin, so no, but I think that it has to happen. Abolish the police. That's extreme, but they have to abolish the police as a social class. It has to be a job like being a doctor where you have extreme amounts of oversight, frequent firing... I mean, it's very difficult to fire a cop. So I think you're going to see more of that for sure.
Harry Litman [00:17:39] Got it. Just to follow up what Bianca said, there are movements now in states in the aftermath. There are certain red states that are actually erecting legislation in the other direction and people who are arguing that there could be unintended consequences from the Chauvin case. But a real concrete test of what you're talking about will be with the three other officers who trial was severed and are charged with aiding and abetting and basically who just stood around. And is that going to be condemned as criminal or will they get a pass? All right, let's close out this discussion. But sort of picking up on what Phil said, and we saw this a year ago with impassioned protests around the country, and then the air did seem to be a little bit out of the tires. From a social perspective, is there a sea change in awareness of and concern about overall excessive force and police brutality? Or is this a sort of short half life driven by the immediate aftermath of the dramatic verdict in Chauvin?
Phil Rucker [00:18:48] I think there's absolutely a sea change in terms of the public awareness of police brutality and the degree to which everyday, ordinary Americans across the country, not just in big cities, see what is happening by police and are outraged by it. And there's a demand for action out in the public, and I think as we approach the one year anniversary of Floyd's death and we get into the summer and people feel much freer to be outside and to organize and to gather, if there's not some action that the leaders in Washington are taking, I think the public's going to be pretty outraged by that. They've had a year to do something, there's been a change in the administration. Biden and Harris were elected for many reasons, but part of their agenda, of course, was that they were going to address these systemic problems. And so I think there's mounting pressure on the administration and on the Congress to try to do something, just as Congressman Raskin was saying, to take action and not just study it and punt the ball.
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:19:44] The social change that I'm seeing, as far as even middle America goes and the awareness of white Americans is that white Americans have a very different relationship to policing in their communities than black Americans do. I think it was something that black Americans, as far back as our intellectual class, as far back as Baldwin or Malcolm X or Maya Angelou or anybody would tell you that there's a huge difference in relationship to police, but it was something that white Americans for a very long time denied pretty much outwardly, or at least they were very skeptical towards it. But seeing the extreme nature of Floyd's death and seeing it undeniably across the world stage that video going viral, it made it impossible to deny that even if you think police are inherently good or good for the neighborhood or you love your local cop and want him to come to career day, black America has a very different relationship to policing. And I think that even the acknowledgment of that social fact will be incredibly important going forward, because it will be harder to deny some of the overhaul and sweeping changes that have to be made among individual police stations across the country.
Jamie Raskin [00:20:49] But I agree with Bianca just said, except I think the counterpart is also true. Having lived through the nightmare of the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, we had a lot of violent white racists, insurrectionists, secessionists and Trump fanatics beating up cops, including a lot of black cops, assaulting them with baseball bats, American flags, Confederate battle flags, Trump flags attacking them. And I think that this episode also, at least around here where I live and all politics is local, but in Maryland and D.C. and Virginia, I think its catalyzed a sense that the police also need to be defended. It is a meaningful and honorable career for a lot of people, and these are people that we just saw besieged, attacked, ruthlessly assaulted. More than one hundred and forty of them ended up wounded and hospitalized. Several have come down with brain damage, one guy lost three fingers, another had his eye gouged. So, you know, the extreme cases we see of racist cops and some of them may indeed be white supremacists who've been sent into police departments to infiltrate because we know that there have been deliberate plans to do that by a lot of racist groups. These episodes also need to be counterbalanced in our minds with other episodes where the police are protecting us against violent white supremacists and domestic terror.
Harry Litman [00:22:24] And by the way, I hadn't realized this before the Chauvin case something like ninety five percent of police encounters don't involve any kind of use of force or any kind of arrest or assertion of authority to arrest. The people are worried about this in part, but it really is cop as a problem solver, domestic disturbance and the like. I want to follow for a second and ask you about a different demographic divide, and that is younger, older. All the victims are overwhelmingly young males, usually young black males. I'm not saying that the cops picked them out for that reason, but it does seem to me possible that these events and the kind of social reaction plays out differently with a younger crowd that you might have something of a sense of.
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:23:10] I do feel like young people just want to see more dynamic solutions towards crime. They want the deep rooted causes of crime addressed, they want mental health addressed, they want wealth inequality addressed. They want all of these places where systemic racism prevails from hospitals and education and job opportunity, they want those things addressed. Where I feel like the militarized police state of pouring more and more money into handling crime through cops has gotten old. And this is across black, white, Asian, Hispanic communities, you see that the infrastructure, your roads aren't fixed. The high schools don't have enough seats for students or books.
And yet you see cops with new Dodge Chargers and AR-15s and you're wondering where is this money that I don't have as a young person, I'm paying my taxes, and it's not going towards these foundational improvements in society. It's just going on a Band-Aid for people who are supposed to protect property or create law and order. And I think that people are very fed up with that because as young people being as broke as millennials are and as broke as Gen Z'ers are, that dollar is just a lot shorter and we don't want to see it go to cops. I think that's really the sentiment, especially if for every Derek Chauvin, you have four by standing cops watching. And I think that is the experience with a lot of people, is this like, for all of the good cops that you have, where are they to denounce this behavior or to directly intervene? And so we just want to see the resources and the energy in this country and the energy amongst our lawmakers spent into really handling foundational problems.
Harry Litman [00:24:49] It's now time to take a moment for our Sidebar feature, which explains some of the issues and relationships that are prominent in the news. Today's topic flows from the Chauvin case, where under Minnesota law, he's looking at maybe 20 years, but with one third served out of jail on probation. How does the system of parole, a.k.a. supervised release in the federal system, compare with that? And to give us the lowdown, we have famed rock critic Ben Fong-Torres, whose coverage of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and many more have made him one of the most prominent rock critics in history.
Ben Fong-Torres [00:25:31] When a prison inmate is granted parole, he or she is released from behind bars and permitted to serve the remainder of their sentence in the community subject to parole supervision. Because parole is still part of a sentence, a parolee's freedom is conditioned on compliance with terms or rules of the parole. For example, parolees may be required to stay within a certain geographic area, comply with a curfew, abstain from gun ownership, submit to random drug testing, or meet frequently with parole officers. A parolee can be sent back to prison if he or she violates any of the terms of the parole. For federal inmates, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 eliminated parole for anyone convicted of federal crimes committed after November 1st, 1987. Instead of parole, judges may, at sentencing, add a period of supervised release to a prison sentence. The U.S. Parole Commission oversees prisoners on supervised release. Supervised release has similar restrictions and terms as parole, but unlike parole, it does not replace a portion of an inmate's prison sentence.
Instead, supervised release is served at the end of a defendant's federal prison sentence. Courts must order supervised release when sentencing individuals for certain federal crimes. These include drug trafficking, sex offenses and crimes involving domestic violence. Sentencing guidelines also suggest that judges impose a supervised release to accompany any prison sentence of more than one year. In practice, federal courts almost always impose supervised release following incarceration. Finally, the same law that eliminated federal parole set up a system to allow inmates to earn reductions in their prison sentences. The program applies to federal prisoners serving more than one year behind bars, but less than life sentences. An inmates exemplary compliance with prison rules can earn him or her a credit of up to 54 days per year of the sentence. The Federal Bureau of Prisons determines whether such credit is awarded. For Talking Feds, I'm Ben Fong-Torres.
Harry Litman [00:27:43] Thank you very much, Ben Fong-Torres. Ben has written several books, including his own memoirs, the best-selling The Rice Room: From Number Two Son to Rock and Roll. He also played himself in Almost Famous, the 2000 film by Cameron Crowe. And finally, over three nights on Wheel of Fortune, he won some $99,000 in cash and fabulous prizes.
Harry Litman [00:29:20] All right, so let's switch gears now and talk about the climate summit. Thursday was a gathering that I think would have been impossible to imagine five years ago on a couple of fronts. 40 world leaders in basically a huge Zoom hosted by the president of the United States who told them that reducing global warming is a moral imperative and an economic imperative. So let's start there, Biden certainly is putting the prestige of the presidency behind the effort and setting more ambitious goals than, say, Obama did. Is he doing what you hoped he would?
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:29:57] I think that one of the things that went above and beyond here with this summit is when he said that climate change will be at the center of foreign policy and national security. It really covered the cares of millennials and Gen Z on two different fronts. One, we wanted to see a shift in foreign policy away from this military industrial complex for the longest, I mean, for literally the last 20 years. I mean, I grew up during all of these conflicts in the Middle East, and so to see him say that that is where they're going to put national security interests and intelligence resources was probably the most impressive thing, bar none. Also, of course, it is a long standing and high level issue for young people, climate change. And it's not just making peace with our grandchildren seeing a polar bear, it's really about how we're going to work, how we're going to feed ourselves, how we're going to function over the course of our lives, where we're going to put our money, all of our interests are aligned with the safety and good of the planet. So I was extremely impressed and I thought it went above and beyond. And it was interesting on more fronts, it really was not this sort of one dimensional picture. You see how much the relationship between the federal government and climate has changed over the last 20 years. He was more Al Gore like than I thought he was going to be, is what I'll say.
Harry Litman [00:31:16] Phil and Congressman, let me ask you, are you surprised a little by how much of his prestige and capital he was willing to put behind this? Is it a function of his overall success in other fields, which, of course, might ebb? What were your reactions to the pretty big emphasis that you saw from the president?
Jamie Raskin [00:31:37] Well, I thought it was sensational. It struck me that Biden probably figures that this is what his legacy will be. We're in a civilizational crisis here, climate change is not an issue like I don't know, you can name almost anything else. Climate change is the prism through which we've got to see every other issue, whether it's infrastructure or foreign policy or trade policy or banking policy or public health or what have you. Climate change has really got to be the organizing principle of the government because we've got to get in a readiness and preparedness and resiliency mode because of the cataclysmic effects that we're experiencing from the loss of millions of acres of forest in wildfire to record droughts, record flooding, sea level rise, all of it is tied to these dramatic changes in the climate.
I think that Joe Biden has remarkably risen to the occasion. The politician who was seen in the primaries as the most fuddy duddy, old fashioned out of date stick in the mud kind of politician has turned out to be the brazen, forward thinking, courageous and tough leader that we need for these times, who is taking us to the max on everything that we're doing from the $1.9 trillion American rescue plan to sweeping infrastructure investment plan to H.R. 1 to statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico and on and on. So I think he did what needs to be done remarkably, and I think he did something that will make his name as famous as Franklin D. Roosevelt one day.
Harry Litman [00:33:24] I mean, Roosevelt — FDR really comes up a lot here in terms of the activism and vigor of these first hundred days. And why does that matter in the overall issue? What's the global impact of the United States coming back to the table to actually assert its authority and take major steps?
Phil Rucker [00:33:47] I agree with the points that Beanca and Congressman Raschein made, and one other thing stood out as we watched that virtual summit take place. And it marks such a sea change from the Trump administration, where for four years America was retreating from the global stage. He had this America first agenda, he was not convening summits. In fact, he complained when he had to go to summits. World leaders didn't take President Trump that seriously, and here all of a sudden was an American president, not only appearing at and speaking at a summit, but convening it. Bringing these dozens of world leaders to the table to talk about this issue and reasserting America's leadership on climate change, but America's leadership overall around the world, and that was a really significant development and I think portends that the months ahead for this new administration, Biden will try to find ways to do that in other areas as well. He's going to be heading in June, I believe, to the United Kingdom for a global leader summit there and then, of course, a visit to the NATO headquarters in Brussels. And I think we can expect to see him try to reestablish the United States as the predominant voice for the Western world in a way it had not been during the Trump years.
Harry Litman [00:34:56] It does seem as if that is the grounding that the administration is providing. It's not just a do good environmental agenda, but actually helpful, even essential for overall middle class economic issues in this country and around the world.
Phil Rucker [00:35:14] It reasserts for the Western world that America is a leader and a convener for developing policy for the future to safeguard the world. That's been America's role, you know, dating back to to the aftermath of World War Two. And, you know, a lot of experts in both political parties believe it's essential that America continue that dominance or else other more adversarial nations like China could fill that gap.
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:35:40] It says to the world that America is going to be accountable for their role in climate change because we have such an outsized role in a lot of the larger catastrophes with deforestation and the capitalistic excess of Americans has caused more than any other industrial country besides China, like such a huge impact on the speed of climate change, the effects of climate change. And so I think it says that we're willing to be accountable, whereas during the Trump era, when we withdrew from the Paris climate accords, it was to say 'not our problem, not our fight.' It's also to say, I think what's impressive about Biden is he's writing a blank check for that effort, whereas before a lot of the question, even during the Obama era, was can we afford it? Can we afford it? I think that in regards to the stimulus plan, in regards to his infrastructure plan and now this climate change shift, it's can we afford not to? And I think that people are very much they feel like that's a refreshing attitude towards — we've spent so much to cause these issues. Let's spend as much, if not more, in order to fix them. And it's not seen as an expense, but an investment in the future.
Harry Litman [00:36:44] All right, we only have a couple of minutes left for our Five Words or Fewer feature. Today, our question comes from Judith Chambers, who asks, 'Will the District of Columbia be a state by 2024?' So everyone has to give their answer in Five Words or Fewer, anybody?
Jamie Raskin [00:37:04] Not D.C., but maybe Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.
Phil Rucker [00:37:09] Highly unlikely,
Bianca Vivion Brooks [00:37:11] I would say, it has to be.
Harry Litman [00:37:13] Odds are about, four to one.
Thank you very much to Congressman Raskin, Phil Rucker and Bianca Vivion Brooks, 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. 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 Dawn Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Matt McArdle. Additional research by Abbie Meyer. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla Michaels. Thanks very much to Ben Fong-Torres for teaching us about the federal system of parole and supervised release. Our gratitude, as always, goes 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.
