Are There Any Grown-Ups in Government?

Welcome to Bags to Beg to Differ. The Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left, center right, I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor, The Bulwark, and I am joined by our regulars. Bill Galston of the bookings in institution in The Wall Street Journal and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter eyes on the right. Linda Chavez is traveling this week Our special guest is Maya McGinnis, President of the Non partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

And so we are going to discuss the Lord’s work that Maya does of trying to be sane about an insane process And then we’re gonna have to say goodbye to Maya after the first segment and we’ll get to some other topics, including Israel’s difficulties But to begin, welcome one and all. President Biden introduced his twenty twenty four budget these budgets themselves are for ten years, maybe Maya can enlighten us about that, why it’s always that way now. But in any event, six point nine trillion dollars, which would include spending on all kinds of things like universal preschool, paid leave and more childcare. As also, he would raise taxes on billionaires and everybody earning more than four hundred thousand dollars a year. So when you’re looking for sanity on this topic, there aren’t too many places to go because if you look at this and you say this is crazy.

This is crazy amount of spending. We are so badly in debt What are the Republicans saying I Ron DeSantis you find out that Republicans are saying that they’re gonna balance the budget over ten years while extending the Trump tax cuts, and they’re gonna do it all by cutting waste fraud and abuse and unnecessary discretionary spending. So, okay, Maya McGinnis, this is your area of

specialization. Did I overstate it? Ugh, you really you you can’t even overstate it. The fiscal situation that we are in is so bad. And if that weren’t bad enough, situation we all talk about so often.

The levels of polarization, which make it impossible for them to even have something resembling an adult conversation on what to do about it is really undermining not just the economic strength of the country But our role in the world, the debt situation that we face has gotten so big and so out of control, and it’s really hard to imagine how we’re going to turn it around. So I am gravely concerned. I’m desperately trying to figure out how we get to some kind of rational fiscal policy. And all of this is in the backdrop that there’s the debt ceiling we have deal with this year. So it’s going to get worse and more frantic before it gets better, I fear.

Yeah. You mentioned the debt ceiling fight, which is coming up. And in addition, we now have one more thing to layer on in case people weren’t concerned enough. And that is the potential of a larger banking crisis. Talk about that for a minute.

Yeah. I mean, we are now really stuck in a three way vise between the risk of inflation. Which came about because of irresponsible fiscal policies, but clearly was exacerbated by supplying chain issues and energy issues war in Ukraine and that has been much worse than we’d anticipated. The risk of recession, because the Fed has to respond to the inflation, because it raises interest rates that could certainly put us in a recession. And now the risk of contagion because of the banking crisis.

And that leaves fiscal policy, which really did a lot of damage hasn’t done anything to make the situation better. In fact, it’s made it worse, exacerbated it by continuing to borrow even once inflation was there. And that combined with monetary policy, well, as the Fed has to look to raise interest rates, it also is going to be making the fiscal situation worse. By putting upwards pressure on interest rates, which leads to higher interest payments, which are already the fastest growing part of the federal budget. And if we see more biking crises and I’m feeling better this week than I was last week, but nobody should be feeling great yet because there’s still a lot of risks out there, the kinds of risks, the duration risk of so many banks owning a lot of treasuries, and then as rates go up, that changes their portfolio.

Those risks are still there. But risks abound. And I guess one of the reasons I worry about fiscal policy so much is you need a strong fiscal policy to weather all the risks that come at you. We live in a world these days where those risks seem to be coming at a faster and faster pace. And we are so ill prepared for what we know is there right now, the weakness in the banking sector and other things, And what we don’t know is in the world but may come up and be the next risk that comes out of nowhere and hits us.

You pointed out in one of your newsletters that president Biden’s budget would spend ten point two trillion dollars with a t on interest payments on the national debt alone more than it will spend on defense or Medicaid over the same period, which is just astounding. Now, you did say that Biden deserves credit for at least making a nod toward deficit reduction. You wanna talk about that for a

second? Yeah. So his budget would save three trillion dollars. That’s out of the over twenty trillion dollars that we’re going to be borrowing over the next decade. It’s clearly not enough.

Even with that three trillion dollars in savings, we would still hit record levels where debt relative to GDP would be the highest it’s ever been in the history of this nation. So it’s nowhere near to enough. However, our political system is broken right now for all intents and purposes and getting these folks to actually agree to anything That’s difficult is a very heavy lift. So at the same time, you’ve got Republicans talking about this just out of reach goal of balancing the budget over ten years. I think this three trillion target that the president has put out completely insufficient for the long term fiscal health but maybe it’s exactly the right start that we need.

And so what I’ve been thinking is that if we take three trillion dollars in savings over ten years as you pointed out, budget math is weird. But three trillion dollars in savings, use that as the goal, but then get there in a very different way than the president has talked about, which is all tax increases. And of course, not gonna work for Republicans who have rightly pointed out that spending has grown astronomically in past years and there’s definitely room to pair it back. Maybe that could be the start of a compromise. Let’s take that three trillion dollar goal and try to come up with more spending cuts that would help fill it out and have that be the beginning of an ongoing process of bringing our debt down rather than up?

So many of the proposals that the Republicans are talking about are completely vague. I mean, they have not presented their own budget know, as the president did. But they are sort of making noises. And one of them though struck me as a couple of these ideas are not terrible, like one of them was permitting reform, which we desperately need, or reclaiming unspent COVID funds I thought those two made sense. Was there anything that leaked out at you?

I

think there are a lot of good ideas that the Republicans have proposed. I think they’re just at odds with balancing the budget over ten years, and we should strike pretending that’s the goal. But I think we should pick up on a lot of the goals. So absolutely, those two make a lot of sense. There are other policies that we could repeal for savings.

I think we’re peeling the student debt forgiveness that the president did through executive Fiat would be a very good start. That was it’s a really huge problem. But the solution that the administration put out there unilaterally is not going to make the situation better. In fact, it’s going to make it worse and in that it’s gonna drive up the cost of higher ed and it’s probably expensive not paid for. I also think the idea of spending caps which were in place for the past decade, but they were unreasonably low.

And so year after year commerce busted through them. Let’s put in place reasonable discretionary spending caps that actually control spending. You can generate a lot of savings from doing that. You just have to pick a level that commerce can stick to, and that’s a goal in fiscal metrics. Pick something that’s actually doable, not some great sounding talking point that you’re never going to achieve.

So I think Republicans have a good list that we could start with. And again, if it could get us to that three trillion dollar goal, that to me seems like the beginning of a compromise. I will also say though, what everybody’s saying they will not do, which is touch benefits for Social Security and Medicare, That might sound good. That might work at, you know, the state of the union or an AARP PeP rally. But the truth is, Both those programs are facing insolvency.

And promising not to do anything to fix them means that beneficiaries of Social Security will face an automatic across the board cut of twenty two percent or more in just over a decade, and that providers will have huge cuts in Medicare, which means there’ll be shortages of services and healthcare that’s provided. So everybody who’s promising not to deal with social security and Medicare, that is reckless and that jeopardizes people who depend on the program. So I wish we could walk back those kind of political benders that we know work really well, but are at odds with good policy.

Will Saletan, let’s hear you on this. And also, what do you think about the president’s posture of saying he won’t negotiate about the debt ceiling increase in particular. Where to begin?

First of all, you know, I definitely share Maya’s dismay about where we are and where we’re headed. It wasn’t so long ago that the organization that my heads put out a plan to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio over the next decade which I thought at the time was a reasonable compromise proposal. And moving the target back to three trillion dollars over ten years reduces the deficit reduction by more than half. Of what would be needed in order to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio. So it may be that Maya and the committee have reached the conclusion that politically speaking, there’s no way of getting to actual stabilization, but I thought it was a reasonable target that could be explained and defended publicly.

And I’d be disappointed if we abandoned that effort without putting it to the test. Granted things don’t look very good right now, but I’m not sure that it’s really the right target to be aiming at. I am very sympathetic to the president’s proposal that the Republicans put their own budget on the table before serious negotiations begin. I think that’s a fair request. The Republicans probably aren’t going to do it because they have no way of squaring the various circles that they’ve drawn.

They have given so many hostages to fiscal fortune. And then one of these speaker Kevin McCarthy made things worse by making promises to the right, which are I think going to make sensible budgeting even more difficult than they would have been otherwise. Whether you like the president’s proposal or not, it’s there. It’s based on reasonably honest numbers. And I don’t see how we can have an adult conversation until the other party states with equal clarity what it’s for and what it’s against.

In addition, I shared the president’s view that the debt ceiling should not be held hostage to other fiscal considerations there’s enough room to have these discussions within the context of the annual and ten year budgeting process and I see no reason to send a signal to the world that there is a possibility of a default on the debt or total physical confusion in the United States. At a time when domestic tremors in the banking system are already having ripple effects and even wave making effects around the world. I’m not sure that there would have been the collapse of a major Swiss bank absent what happened in the United States, and that could be just the beginning. There’s no guarantee as Maya said that we’re through it. I could go on, but I am really worried about where we are right now, frankly.

Damon, just as a little illustration of how crazy and unrealistic the Republican rhetoric on this is, the congressional budget office did an analysis showing that even under a scenario in which Medicare and Social Security as well as military and veteran spendings are protected, and the expiring tax cuts are extended, which is their position. At that point, even if you eliminate one hundred percent of all other non interest federal spending, guess what? You’d still have a deficit.

Well, the idea that we could be balancing the budget at this point is almost beyond imagining we’re so off target that you know, the most I think we can hope to do is at least bring the curve line into alignment so that imagine it like thirty, forty years from now. We might actually come up above water. But of course, then you have to factor in the explosive growth of a lot of these long term entitlement programs as well as unpredictable and higher than anticipated interest payments. So trying to figure this out is really difficult. And I’m worried about it.

I mean, I was even worried about it. You know, to drink the Obama administration is duration when you had a lot of people on the left saying we should basically spend anything and everything as much as possible because effectively We had zero interest rates, and this was like free money, and we had underspent in the initial stimulus after the two thousand and eight financial crisis and resulting deep recession. So there’s a lot of calls to just sort of let her rip and do spending to the health, and then it turned out that later with the pandemic, we effectively did that and more like we spent more in the emergency measures surrounding the pandemic than even the most bullish figures in that previous conversation could have dreamed possible. Trillions here, trillions there, no attempt to any proportion of the revenue set to balance it out, just sort of spending freely. And here we are, couple of years later with interest rates going up sharply.

And so suddenly, it’s not just that we’ve piled up this huge debt load foreign success of anything we could have dreamed of fairly recently, but we also are facing. If this is not simply an in deflation correction on the part of the Fed, but we’re now in a new environment of sort of systemically higher interest rates. We are well and truly in trouble. Because we’re hugely in debt and the portion of the federal budget as Maya could talk about. And far more detail than I, that is gonna be going to these interest payments is just mind boggling.

And the last thing I’ll throw in to make people even more anxious is one reason why no matter how much we worry about the issue of deficits in the debt. We tend not to really worry that, well, we’re gonna have hyperinflation. We’re gonna have some kind of systemic economic crash because we’re so indebted is because the dollar has anchored the worldwide financial system since World War two, which gives us unbelievable flexibility to just sort of spend and assume other countries, economies Will Saletan. The debt, happily. We’re also in a geopolitical situation where you’re seeing very serious moves by Russia and China and India to sort of disadvantage themselves from the dollar system and create an alternative.

Now it’s nowhere near a true rival yet, but as these geopolitical shifts continue over the coming years, the further they go toward making the dollar not the system anchoring worldwide finance and credit. But in fact, one of two and possibly more such systems the more tenuous our situation is gonna become. And that’s what really keeps me up at night, if not for my life so much, but certainly for my kids. So, Maya, there’s always been

polls that show that Americans have very little concept of what we actually do spend money on. So, for example, when you poll this question, people think that we spend twenty five percent of the federal budget on foreign aid. The true number is zero point seven percent and a lot of that is stuff that isn’t even technically foreign aid. And the last time that I can recall in American politics that we actually had someone had unfortunately, he was a very flawed vessel, but Ross Perot made the budget a big issue. And he had a whiteboard and he was showing people where the money was going, and it generated a tremendous political engine for some kind of budgetary control.

And indeed, During the Clinton years, the Republicans and the Democrats cooperated on bringing down the debt we actually had a balanced budget during the Clinton years. But he was really almost the last major American political figure who made it an issue. And let me just give you a few more little bullet points from that recent poll. So sixty percent of Americans do believe that the federal government spends too much, but sixty two percent say it spends too little on social security Ron DeSantis five percent say it spends too little on education and fifty eight percent on Medicare and on and on and on and on. And guess what?

Well, you know the answer. And I’m sure everybody in the audience knows too. The only matter on which Americans firmly believe we spend too much money is foreign aid. So what about this problem of political leadership? Everybody said, isn’t it wonderful?

Both Democrats and Republicans during the state of the union stood up and endorsed not touching entitlements. Well, that means we have two political parties that are run by people who are not grown up enough to be in charge of a very important country.

Yeah. Here’s where we are. So the problem with fiscal policy is that the solutions are really hard. That is just it’s not rocket science. What we have to do is we have to spend less and we have to raise more in taxes.

No politician wants to cut spending and or raise taxes. We have to do both. And the problem with the polarized environment is that politics right now focuses on the short term instead of the long term. Politics instead of policy extremism rather than compromise, and free lunches them rather than trade offs. And that is exactly the opposite of what it will take to put a fiscal deal in place.

So one of the only ways the approaches I see. Actually, you mentioned some of the approaches I see. I think it’d be really important to have a Ross Pro like character who was out there influencing the next presidential campaign to force this issue on the agenda. It’s gonna be a very busy agenda filled with very, very important things. And there are things that are more important than the national debt in and of itself in terms of the risks we face, but we cannot deal with any of them as a fiscally weak and vulnerable nation.

And that’s what we’re doing to ourselves. And so I think it Will Saletan wonderful if there were somebody who actually wasn’t going to win for president but ran a serious enough campaign and put this issue out there that moderators of debates and people at town halls and the other candidates kind of all asked of each other, you know, what is your plan to deal with the debt? How do we make that part of what hopefully will be a mandate? Out of whoever wins. I think that is one goal out there.

The second goal is really educating people to where the budget money goes. There is one fact that I find stunning. There are many facts that I find studying. One in particular is that we spend six dollars per senior. For every one we spend on children under eighteen at the federal budget.

To me, that is a recipe for a failed nation. And it is not that we aren’t able to keep seniors out of poverty, which we have been successful at. In fact, they’re the wealthiest cohort there is. It is that we are failing to make the right kinds of investments in the long term growth of this economy in this country because it is so politically hard to say to tell the truth, which is a lot of people actually get a lot more out of social security than they paid in. Shytelling it to my father.

He does not believe me. But it is the truth. And so we need somebody who instead of at the state of the union whips everybody up into not touching any benefits who uses that bully pulpit and says, I’m gonna level with the American people. This program is going to be insolvent because people are living longer and we paid more in benefits than we were raising in taxes and we are going to have to make adjustments. Now we can all have different preferences and disagreements on how to adjust the program to fix it, but what you can’t do is pretend we don’t have to do it.

And I’m talking to you AARP. Right? Like, you can’t have huge advocacy groups out there smacking down any idea that someone has to fix the program and phone banking in their district or we will not make changes and we will have huge cuts or massive tax increases that go into the program instead of some places that you know, the longer term investments in kids that they might otherwise go into. It’s a very short sighted approach where if we had a political system that allowed for education and truth on the situation. And then a reasonable discussion of that we’re all gonna have different preferences and democracies are supposed to be about compromising those diverse points of views, we could come up with a better budget.

And in fact, we could come up with any budget because as you who have brought up a couple of you, We don’t even pass budgets anymore. And this year, it does look like the House budget committee is gonna try to do a budget, but it’s gonna be late. The senate budget committee haven’t even heard a peep out of them. They have no intention of doing a budget at all. And I just kind of think why run the budget committee if you’re not gonna put out a budget.

And it’s a terrible thing to negotiate on the debt ceiling, but if we don’t negotiate through the budget, we’re not negotiating what we’re supposed to, which is on the budget process, and we are running the single largest economic entity in the world without a budget. That is no way to run a country.

Okay? I’ve got an idea. I wanna hear what you think of it, Maya. Okay. I think what we need is for Maya McGinnis to run for president and that you should be backed.

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

You’re tremendously articulate and brilliant. Plus, you know how to say these things in a way that voters will be able to understand. You could not be clearer and some great billionaires could get together and instead of trying to go to Mars, they should get together and say we’re gonna run this candidate to at least educate the American people on what’s at stake. And what the truth is and what we’re really spending money on and so forth. You would be the best person to do it.

Thank you for the consult Mirona and no way and I wouldn’t at all. It would be I would be so frustrated. I don’t know how these folks are able to work in this environment I mean, I’m a political independent. Right? I look at being part of a team and being silenced and not being able to do what you think is right for your constituents or your conscience and I feel so frustrated for folks who are trying to do things in a right way where the partisanship of this all is keeping anybody from really being able to be creative and out there and kind of acknowledge when somebody else is doing the right thing.

I actually I’m working with a bipartisan group in the house that we’ve built of people are focusing on fiscal policy. And it’s really great. There are really a lot of eagerness to work on these issues together. But the parties, the leadership keeps raining the back and that must be so tough for the people who actually want to get something done. So you know it’s how I duck your entire point on it.

Yes. I I noticed that, but I will tell you something our vast

listening audience will not be deterred. I have a feeling that we’ve just inaugurated a grass roots draft Maya movement and so take it from here, people. Thank you so much for joining us Maya. This was fantastic as usual. It’s a little depressing, but thank you for enlightening us.

Thank

you so much for having me on the podcast. Love

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It has been remarkable and it is a result of a move by prime minister Netanyahu and his right wing coalition to reform the judicial system. In such a way that many people in Israel feel is anti democratic and would destroy something essential about Israel’s system that the supreme court in Israel is the only check on the actions of the Kineset, which is there. Congress, they’re a legislature. This past week, the defense minister in the Netanyahu government came out and made a statement saying that he felt that proposal should be postponed. The disruption and the conflict within the country was actually damaging national security.

A few hours after he made that statement, Netanyahu fired him. And then All Hell broke loose. And people came out onto the streets and even more numbers. And now Netanyahu is finally backing down a bit. But this has been a quite dramatic conflict within the state of Israel, and I’m happy to say that Will Saletan and Damon Linker have both written about this this week.

So Will Saletan, I’m gonna start with you if you wouldn’t mind a little bit of background about why this is a little bit different in the Israeli context, from the US context because their Supreme Court overriding legislation is actually not in the constitution because they don’t actually have a constitution. So why don’t you fill us in? It is not well enough known that the

very first Kineset in Israel in nineteen forty eight was actually a constituent assembly that was supposed to draft a constitution within just a few months. That did not happen. In part because of divisions between secular and religious Israelis, divisions that have not gone away in the intervening seventy five years. And so what the Israeli political system tried to do in stead was to construct a constitution piecemeal with a series of so called basic laws, which in principle was not a terrible idea But in practice was flawed because there were no special mechanisms for adopting basic laws, which could be enacted into law with a simple majority of the parliament and many of them were enacted with a majority of people present in voting, numbers as low as thirty five out of twenty connecticut members in a couple of cases. And so you have basic laws which the supreme court has tried to elevate constitutional status that were not adopted through processes that most of the rest of the world would recognize as truly constitutional processes as distinct from ordinary legislation.

That’s

part of the problem. The Supreme Court has claimed an expansive right of judicial review in circumstances in which the foundations for that claim are not nearly as robust as they would be if Israel had a genuine constitution. But that’s that’s just the beginning of the problem. Another piece of the problem is that there has been a widening split or at least widening up until about twenty fifteen between the composition of the court and the composition of the electorate. The composition of the court was primarily Ashkenazi, that is to say Jews whose families originated in some portions of Europe as opposed to the many millions of Jews from the Middle East to North Africa who came to Israel after the founding of the state in part because of founding of the state.

The court tends to be to the left of the center of gravity of Israeli politics particularly on some cultural and religious issues and also to some extent in defining and enforcing the rights of Palestinians. And you put that all together and you’ve had a mounting grievance on the right that they win elections but cannot translate their victory into actual public policy. At the same time, the arguments of the right are, I think, quite weak because they don’t take into account the special circumstances of the Israeli political system. Unlike in the United States, for example, there is no system of federalism that divides, govern powers among different levels of government. It is all controlled from the center, nor is there an election system that allows specific geographical areas to be represented.

It is all controlled by the party lists. And so where you rank on the party list determines your chances of getting into the parliament And that means that party leaders have an extraordinarily strong hold over their members. Who sometimes break ranks but not very often because it can be political suicide. In addition, because Israel’s a parliamentary system, There is no division between the executive branch and the legislative branch, and the coalition that controls the legislature, also controls the executive. That leaves the supreme court as the only check on a parliamentary majority and the executive created by that parliamentary majority.

And so when people on the right say, well, all they’re doing is making the Israeli system more like the US supreme court. That’s a weak argument because the US Supreme Court doesn’t have to do the job of checking and balancing all by itself. Thank God.

Well, Bill, if you wouldn’t mind, could you just explain one other quick thing and that is the way the justices of the supreme court were chosen because that’s also a real bone of contention.

It is indeed. And in the United States, your supreme court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In Israel, supreme court justices and other justices by the way are selected by a nine person committee made up in part of sitting Supreme Court justices, in part by lawyers designated by the Israeli equivalent of the American Barr Association. And so I think it’s fair to say that sitting justices plus high ranking lawyers have not full power over supreme court appointments, but considerable influence over those appointments. They do not get their way because of a law that was passed some decades ago to the effect that there needs to be a seven member majority.

In order to elect someone to the supreme court. But the right wing forces in Israel without a long standing grievance about what they regard as the self replicating powers of sitting Supreme Court, justices, and I know of at least one case where a highly qualified centrist was black polled by sitting Supreme Court justices because she had the temerity to question the very expansive powers that the then chief justice had claimed for the supreme court. And so that is one of many areas where a reasonable compromise can be struck. And indeed, I’ve written quite consistently that given the fact that Israel is divided down the middle by whatever political measure you use, The only way out of this that maintains the integrity of the state is for the two parties to sit down together and try to reach in a common station, which is an outcome, the president of Israel, who has powers of persuasion, but very few official political hours is striving mightily to bring about.

Damon, for the longest time, Netanyahu refused to way in and try to diffuse the situation. Part of the problem here is just putting fuel to this fire There’s also the fact that Netanyahu himself is facing indictment and has a reason to kind of want to manipulate the judiciary for his own personal benefit that has the effect of making people think that he has corrupt motives possibly and isn’t just concerned about the overweaning power of the supreme court. And some of the legitimate claims that people on one side of the political divide in Israel, some of their legitimate complaints. So that’s also been a problem. But in addition, and we can get into this I’m curious to hear you on that, and then then we should talk about the divides within Israeli society a little further since I used to live there many years ago.

I saw these tendencies even decades ago when I lived there and have seen it on previous visits. So we’ll talk about the divide. We think that in the US, we’re the only ones with these deep seated divisions and be sure are not.

No. Definitely not. There are a lot of parallels that are interesting, although the institutional differences that Bill went through are very true and build it a great job of summarizing them. On the Netanyahu corruption trials, they’re underway at various stages. You’re exactly right.

I mean, as Bill also noted, there is a lot of room for reasonable reform of the supreme court in Israel. The problem is that the right wing government of Netanyahu has proposed a rather extreme version of reform that would effectively give the kineset the power, the majority, and the kineset the power to overrule verdicts of the court, its decisions, which would enable Netanyahu’s own coalition to basically vacate his own trials, which, you know, that sounds pretty corrupt, but it’s an extra thumb in the eye of anyone in Israel who opposes reform of the court because it’s like saying not only we’re gonna reform it, but we’re gonna reform it in a particularly galling way that transparently will benefit the head of the governing coalition in the country. And that I think probably made this a failed effort from the get go. I mean, these protests started immediately, and they only got worse as time went on. And now Netanyahu says that they’re just pausing the more right wing members of the coalition are insisting that they’ll come back to this over the summer and get it through somehow.

I really don’t see how unless they do back away and agree to some kind of a compromise. But the problem again though is that if the compromise doesn’t include that kind of fifty percent plus one override, then Netanyahu won’t get what he personally wants out of it the most. And then that opens the process respect of the whole thing, any kind of negotiated deal to fall apart for that reason. So it’s not good. And as for the other question about the divisions in the Israeli Society.

That’s kind of what I wrote about this week on this issue because I’m really struck. And even in the way Bill described described these tensions and cleavages and Israeli society in its history. It is remarkable to me how similar the argument that the right makes about the Israeli Supreme Court are to the arguments that the kind of Trumpified Republican party makes about the administrative state. In both cases, you have a harder right coalition of forces in the that wants to make more substantial changes to the country at the level of both politics and culture. And it’s barely a majority, if not even quite a majority.

And current Israeli government has over fifty percent of the canasset, but it actually one, slightly less than fifty percent of the votes. And of course, in our country, we had the Trump presidency where he had all the power of the presidency and yet lost the popular vote by three million, and then he came remarkably close to winning. In twenty twenty while losing the popular vote by about seven million. So you have, again, a harder right in both countries that wants to undertake fairly big sweeping reforms and yet does not have the popular mandate to back that up, which then of course provokes all of those on the other side, all the more. It would be much more difficult in this country, for instance, if like Trump or a descent as someone in of that ilk.

Imagine if they want fifty five percent of the popular vote and a sweep in a really a big landslide in the electoral college. Democrats would sure be up unhappy and they would make a big noise about it. There might even be some protests But the whole notion that this was somehow illegitimate couldn’t get traction in the same way that it can when the same kind of right wing government tries to undertake massive reforms and they can’t even say they won the most votes. And you see the same thing taking place in Israel where you have basically a fight between the establishment of Israel that Even though it’s often been, especially in the last couple of decades, a right wing government in charge, it has tended to be still largely institutionally. Coherent with and consistent with the generally liberal democratic or labor socialist tradition going back to the founding of the state and now you have much harder right wing.

Forces rooted in the large hereditary population of ultra orthodox Jews in the country, a faction of which come from Russia, which is makes them also kind of ethnically distinct for much of the rest of the country, plus the Oskonazi versus Separate divide that Bill mentioned. And what you have is basically a tectonic shift where the right wing faction wants to take control sufficient to the extent that they want to actually change in a way the shape of the country’s political and cultural institutions to reflect themselves. Which is understandable enough. However, they can’t accomplish this realistically if they still can’t even win a solid majority of the votes because the other part of the country that has historically had much more of a say and the Supreme Court reflects this. They can say, look, we’re half the country at least.

And so we don’t wanna let you do that. The question that I have that I’ll I’ll shut up on after this point is that You’re seeing versions of this kind of a fight in many of the countries that are dealing with a new resurgent populist. Right? Not only in Israel and United States, but Brazil, Hungary, of course, with Warbonn, Poland, Czech Republic for a while. Oh, they’ve now kind of reversed course on there for now India of course I was gonna come to next.

And then Israel, in all of these places, you’re having the same thing where a kind of generally liberal Democratic establishment is being challenged by an insurgent right that wants to say we wanna have more fundamental kind of architectonic control over the shape of this society and political system than we’ve been given before, and yet they tend not to have quite enough popular support to get it done. What happens when that happens? I mean, in Hungary, it has happened or Bon even with his manipulation through the media of his system, his party consisted all the way back to when he first gained power in the second time when he kind of was reborn as a right wing populist. He won in twenty ten with a little more than half the country’s votes and his party has continued to win by roughly that same margin ever since. But in the other countries, it’s more precarious.

India, perhaps not. But, you know, what happens? Is there going to come up time when Trump, Ron DeSantis, or some successor to them, actually wins like a solid majority of an election. That’s when things really shift in a way that we haven’t seen yet, but it seems to be what they’re grouping toward. And it’s not clear whether they ever will succeed they could end up getting pushed back.

But I do think that’s the kind of deeper dynamic going on here.

Well, Damon, actually, I do think that some of those countries that you mentioned already have experienced what happens when the extremists in the name of the majority sort of roll over the rights of minorities. We’ve seen that in Poland and in Hungary. They are both much less free countries than they were a decade ago,

and it often involves the courts. You know, had this same kind of pattern, big big thing about two or three years ago in Poland where the ruling government reformed the country’s highest court in order to make it easier for the majority government currently in power to appoint just says there wouldn’t be this kind of liberal check on their own power. And again, you see it here, but because the right already controls the court as much as it does, thanks in part to Mitch McConnell, the anger is being directed more toward the administrative state, so it’s not these justices are undemocratically thwarting the will of the right. It’s these career civil servants who we have to have the power to fire as soon as we come in and replace them with loyalists. This shows that the fact whether they’re pointing at one institution or another there is this kind of acting out in frustration at a kind of opposition that’s thwarting their will.

But I would say that the deeper problem is that they don’t have enough popular support to enact what they want if they would win a huge landslide think you get a lot more done. The problem is there’s a big opposition that doesn’t want to see the country’s changed that way.

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Well, I would suggest that there’s another way to look at the events of this week in the glass half full perspective is that we did see a reassertion of something like a vital center in Israel. The people who came out publicly to oppose Netanyahu on this were not just the leftists and the people from the labor unions and the traditional labor party liberal types There were former coalition partners of Netanyahu himself. There were people from the military. You saw members of the military in Israel services universal. Well, except for the ultra orthodox, they don’t serve, which is another source of internal tension in Israel.

But you saw pilots, for example, saying they were not gonna come for their reserve training. And that is not exactly something that Israel can easily tolerate and still maintain its defense in the neighborhood it lives in. And so, you know, you saw people opposing this who were not leftist, who were just kind of centrist and said, this is too far, too fast, not the way to do things, And I think, Bill, in your column, you mentioned that the Netanyahu coalition polling showed a drop in report for them since this thing has come to a head. And that too suggests that public opinion has been moving in the direction away from extremism.

Well, that is certainly what the polls are saying. There were a couple that reached almost identical conclusions last week that if new elections were held tomorrow, the now sixty four vote majority would be reduced by about ten. And the parties of the previous National unity government would have regained their majority. And I do think that that is because people in the center have shifted the defense ministers warning about the threat to Israel’s national security. Was a galvanizing moment.

And Netanyahu’s rash decision, hasty decision to fire him, was one of, I think, the prime minister’s most significant unforced errors of his entire decades long political. Career. Interestingly, the defense minister, although verbally dismissed, has not yet been formally forced to leave office. And there’s now some speculation that the prime minister will allow him to remain after all. Because right now, The prime minister is in the anomalous position of having fired his defense minister for recommending exactly the pause that the prime minister agreed to forty eight hours after firing the defense minister.

Yeah. This is an odd position to defend. Let me let me leave it at Let me leave it at that. But further evidence for your proposition, Mona, is that opposition is growing within mister Netanyahu’s own party, the Likud. Because there are very traditional members of the Likud who from a political standpoint are old fashioned liberals and who do believe in minority rights.

As a matter of fact, You know, the basic law on rights and human dignity in Israel was passed by a Likud led government. And it was for a long time the case that there was more support for political liberalism in the reasonable right than there was in the reasonable left. Which is much more steeped in the majoritarian parliamentary tradition. So at any rate, it is to be hoped that this new coalition which includes the center right will be able to enforce common sense on the rest of the government.

Well, this has been a great discussion. Why don’t we move now to our highlight or low light of the week? And Damon Linker, your first. I just

wanna draw attention to it’s actually not a new sub stack based publication. It’s more of a relaunch of a substatic publication called the Liberal Patriot. The main figure involved in this that our listeners probably know is a Ruich Ducherre who’s been a guest on the podcast before. He’s one of the few, happy few who have long track records as Liberals who have sort of dissented as the Democratic Party has moved a little bit more to the left and embrace the outlook of more progressive activists. He’s a very smart guy, does very good empirical work, often very pulled rich and data oriented.

He also writes very lovely prose. He’s a good writer, and he’s brought together a good team of people John Halpin, Brian Catalysis, Peter Juel. And Will Saletan is involved in this project as well, I believe. So Anyone listening to this podcast who inclines toward the sensible center left, put this in your bookmarks, maybe you subscribe to the Liberal Patreon, I subscribed to the morning. They relaunched earlier this week, and I’ve been getting at least one sometimes two or three items a day from them.

All very good stuff and the kind of thing you’re gonna wanna be following in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Totally

endorsed that. Also, you can sign up to be Bulwark plus member and get all kinds of great stuff, including free stuff which you can get too. Alright. Go golf

then. Well, I wanna highlight not only this week’s column, but also a consistent body of work by the Washington Post columnist Charles Lane who has also been a guest on our program. His piece this week, I think it just appeared today as a matter of fact, today being Thursday was exceptionally interesting because he summarized and analyzed the work of two very very well regarded Economist, Melissa Carney, and Philip Levine, who did their best to apply an economic analysis. And come up with an economic explanation for something Mona has been talking about, namely the declining birth rate in the United States. And at the end of an elaborate analysis, they threw up their hands and said, as far as they could tell, economics doesn’t explain any of the significant in the birth rate and they were forced to conclude that it has been a shift in our culture and in individual preferences away from having and raising children.

I found particularly amusing the hypothesis that they floated that today’s young adults have been so spooked by the amount of energy that the helicopter parent generation put into raising them that they didn’t wanna have to expend that same energy raising their own children and therefore they’re not going to have any. That strike is a rather extreme reaction, but of course if they have no models of parenting that they can remember other than helicopter parenting. It’s quite understandable if they would have reached

that conclusion. Maybe we need an alternative drone parenting. How about that? Yes. How about benign neglect.

I remember when I had little kids and a friend of mine was about to have her sixth child, which believe me, even then, was considered just outlandish by the typical suburban two kid family and other parents were raising their eyebrows and saying how are you gonna manage all those children? And she sort of just flipped her shoulder and you know, the older ones take care of the younger ones. And people were just appalled, but guess what? All of those kids went to Princeton, every single one of them. So they didn’t turn out too badly.

Alright. And by the way, editorializing a little bit here. Look, people. If there are young people listening and they are hesitating to have children for whatever reason and I would say, don’t hesitate. State.

It’s one of the greatest experiences in life, and it’s not always fun. It provides deep meaning to your existence. Ron DeSantis you’ve had a child, you realize and people say this all the time, but you don’t believe it until you actually experience it, you’ve never experienced love like the love you feel for a baby that just given birth to or adopted. It is just an amazing human experience and highly recommended to everyone. Now, you don’t have to have six, but, you know, give it a try.

I would like to draw attention this week to a piece that ran in the New Yorker called the secret joke at the heart of Harvard’s affirmative action case. By Jenny Sukursa, who is a professor at Harvard, actually. But it is a pretty devastating account of something that has only become public recently, which is namely that during the course of this trial, this judge, it’s a judge bench trial, not a jury trial, the judge excluded and also washed and put a gag order basically on a piece of evidence that was sought to be introduced about a joke between an administrator at Harvard and a regulator from the federal government that was full of anti Asian stereotypes. And the fact that they exchanged this joke and that they all thought it was hilarious and basically it entailed Harvard, you know, rejecting an Asian student who had already won the Nobel Peace Prize and was, you know, a fantastic athlete, and on and on and on was like, yes, but doesn’t have the right personality or was a joke along those lines, and everybody thought it was funny. And she didn’t think that was relevant to the whole case, but of course, it’s completely relevant that it’s so common that it’s a source of humor between a regulator from the federal government and the Harvard admissions officer.

Anyway, highly recommend this piece in the New Yorker will put a link in the show notes. And with that, I want to thank Maya McGinnis from the Committee for Responsible federal budget and my two regulars and also want to mention Jonathan Last who is Our sound engineer today and of course our producer Katie Cooper. We will not be here next week, but we will return following week as every week. And thank you very much.