How to Disempower the Extremists

Welcome to Bank to differ, the Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right I’m Mona Charn, syndicated columnist and policy adviser of the Board, and I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal. Linda Chavez of the Miss Cannon Center and Damon Linger who writes the Substack newsletter eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Catherine Gail, founder of the Institute for Political Innovation. Welcome, one and all, We are going to get to the Zelensky visit and the other big news of the week, but I’d like to begin today with a discussion about alternatives to our current two party and closed primary system because Katherine Gail She’s a political entrepreneur who has identified a flaw in our system and attempted to correct it.

And so welcome, Katherine. I’m so glad you could join us to talk about ranked choice voting or what you prefer to call final five voting. And so a lot of people are very enthusiastic about this. Let’s just quickly review the victories that you’ve already achieved. You’ve gotten this passed into law in Alaska and Nevada.

Right? And it’s currently being considered in a number

of other states? Yes, we are super happy with our victories. Where we really have one and a half victories, Mona. And that is that it’s in law in Alaska. The citizens passed it there in November of two thousand twenty, and then they used it in their midterm elections this year.

And we passed the first of two required votes in Nevada. So we have to win again in Nevada in two thousand twenty four, and then it would be in effect for the elections of two thousand twenty six.

Okay. And it’s my understanding that Maine has this system or do they just have it for local elections? Because I know in Virginia, for example, where I live, the Republican Party chose to use a similar system for choosing its gubernatorial nominee.

Yes, final fiboting, which I do call what I propose, is different than ranked choice voting used on its own, and Maine has ranked choice voting used on its own. Virginia has used ring choice voting to nominate their candidates as you’re referring to. So, ranked choice voting, what I call instant runoffs, has different purposes and can be used in different ways. When it is a case of final five voting, it has a different effect than what it’s being deployed for in some of these other cases.

Howard Bauchner:

Okay. Let’s set the stage, which I really didn’t do before. So let’s do that You have identified that about ten percent of the electorate, that is those people who vote in primaries determine the outcome in eighty three percent of congressional races. So our current two party system where primaries dominate are having the effect of handcuffing the Democrats and Republicans because they are beholden to the most extreme members of their own base. Right?

That is right. And here, I think to set the stage, if I could, for a moment, just step back to say, The best way, I think, to understand, final fibrosis, and ultimately, choose whether you know, your listeners are, approve a bit or not, is to just start with the question, what are we solving for? Because reform can solve for a lot of different problems. So what I’m solving for with my work and now there are allies throughout the country, we’re solving for the likelihood that Congress solves problems in a sustainable way in the general public interest. So we’re not solving for making elections more fair or more democratic or more representative, although we actually certainly think those things are super important and it has beneficial effects there as well.

But we asked ourselves what would it take for Congress to get things done in a way that we can all see every day they don’t right now. And so because of that, we have this combination of final fight voting. We looked at the root cause of why they don’t get things done. And it is, as you just noted, that the people in congress are doing what their bosses want them to do. And since eighty five percent essentially the house and sixty five percent of the senate is elected in low turnout party primaries.

When most voters, you know, haven’t even started to pay attention yet. Those are the people who are the bosses of our representatives. And while you might think that the, you know, eight percent on the left that shows this year’s house and the eight percent on the right that shows year’s house and senate couldn’t be more different. They’re actually the same in one wildly consequential way, and that is that they’re characterized by what political scientists call negative partisanship. They hate the other party more than they have an affinity for the ideals, the positive affirmative ideals of their own party.

And so what they want more than anything is for the other side to fail, which means that when our legislators are doing their jobs. They actually are forbidden to engage in the behaviors that it would take to solve complex problems with trade offs, which is you would have to be able to work across the aisle and, you know, with everybody in the left sided body, you would have to be able to negotiate, innovate, make deals. And then you’d have to be able to vote yes on that consensus solution. And all the people who are elected in party primaries are pretty much forbidden to do any of those things. Or they’ll lose their job in their next primary.

Howard Bauchner:

Okay, so is it working in Alaska?

Yeah, we think it’s working great. I’ll be interested to hear what your fellow host thing. So there’s two questions about it’s working. And one is a gateway question, and then the other is the one I’ve ultimately and I think voters and citizens will ultimately care the most of us. So the first is, does it work?

Can you manage the election? Do citizens feel that they’re fine voting in this method, which is a little bit different. And it certainly works there, and we’ve run not us, but some others in the allied organizations have run polls that say, yeah, this is working. There haven’t been any fights over it, and people have accepted the results, and the voters themselves have found it easy. So that’s just a necessary sort of table stakes for any system.

And then the second is, does it help with results, which is can people have different behaviors? And I’ll call out a couple of things. One is in the legislature in Alaska, which is one hundred percent under this system, they have, for example, just recently in their senate formed a bipartisan cautious to control the chamber. So the Republicans could have controlled the chamber all on their own. They were the majority.

But instead, a group of Republicans chose to align with Democrats to control the chamber in its agenda in a bipartisan way. And they left out of the caucus the more intransigent members of their own party. Because they want to be able to deal with action there. So that is certainly very compelling. Now, this isn’t something that’s never happened in Alaska before, but we see its incentives at work and very much likely to continue.

We also saw several people win reelection in this year who had been primary out in previous years, including the former speaker of their house. So she had lost when she got primary further to her right And the criticism was that she was too much seeking consensus. And so she lost her primary. But now that November voters decide she was able to win and she’s back in the chamber. So we think that’s working.

We also see a lot of individuality in the federal delegation. Your listeners may know that Sarah Palin lost a race to return to government when she was running for the US house, and she lost to a Democrat, a moderate, Alaska native woman. And Lisa Murkowski got reelected over a Trump supported candidate, even

though Lisa Murkowski voted to impeach Donald Trump.

Correct. Exactly. And so she was able to get reelected by November voters because that’s what Final Five Voting does, is make sure November voters choose. Whereas she likely would have been defeated in a Republican party primary. And at the same time, know, the governor who was endorsed by Trump, he won reelection.

Okay. So the way it would work is there would be no party primaries there would be one big primary. Right? That’s

correct.

Okay. And then the top five vote getters would go on to the November general election. Right?

Absolutely.

And then there would be a ranked choice voting process so that the winner would be chosen from among those five based on getting the most votes based on not just first choice, but second choice or third choice if it came to that. Right? Yeah. I

think the easiest way for everybody to understand it is just to call it an instant runoff system. K. So you use runoffs to go from five candidates to the final two. And at that point, obviously, the person with the true majority wins. Right.

So you wouldn’t have a situation where if there were five candidates that the winner would be somebody who got twenty one percent.

Right. One of the things we need in this country is to have real choices in November and we need real competition. So when you’re five candidates, you’ll get the benefits of that competition and diversity of you and thought and the ability to hold people accountable. But, yeah, you wouldn’t want to accidentally elect one of them with twenty one percent of the vote. So that’s why we need to use the instant runoffs to find out which one of these five candidates has that broadest support in the district.

Okay.

So I have a question, let’s say, a potential problem area, and then I’m gonna open it up to the others on the panel. So you say that things don’t get done and arguably a lot of things have gotten done in the last Congress despite having the current system. Got a huge infrastructure bill passed, and there was the Inflation Reduction Act. Whatever you think about it was huge piece of legislation. There’s been tremendous aid to Ukraine.

Some of the harder things have not been done, like guns or immigration or portion, but the Congress has been able to get things done. Howard Bauchner:

Yeah, you correctly tell me that my language, my description is far too simple for what’s really happening. So here’s what we can think about. So yes, you’re right. Congress gets lots of things done. And here is when they get things done.

Just let’s think of a Venn diagram. And on one circle, we put crisis, and it’s either a national security crisis, a national disaster crisis, or a shutdown or debt ceiling crisis. Okay? So we’re seeing that play out right now. And so you have to have the existence of a crisis and then the collusion between both parties to put the cost of what they are passing on the credit card shall we say even though it doesn’t exist, which is to say add it to the national debt and not tell on each other.

Mhmm.

So

you know, it’s much easier for them to come to agreement when they make it free. Mhmm. Although, of course, we know long term it’s not free to any of us. And those are the conditions that get deals done. And that’s partly why we see deals done on things like infrastructure inflation reduction or aid to Ukraine.

Versus deals done on things that can’t just be solved by putting more money at it, the disagreements on guns immigration, etcetera.

Okay? Bill Galston, what do you make of this? I’m

glad Katherine’s doing it. And I say that because Innovation in principle requires experimentation. Katherine is making appropriate use of our system of federalism in order to demonstrate that certain kinds of innovations can work in certain circumstances. We’ll see how generalizable this is, but I think we’ve learned something from it or maybe two things. First of all, despite the fears of some professional analysts, the system is not too complicated.

For ordinary voters to understand. It needs to be explained more than once, but once it has been, it is operational. And secondly, the early evidence does suggest

that

the results are in line with the hopes. For the new system. I am inclined to thank Mona with you that more has gotten done then some of the arguments about legislative gridlock would indicate, as a matter of fact, this year, there was really a separation of party polarization on the one hand and legislative gridlock on the other. I am not convinced that ranked choice voting or final five plus ranked choice voting, let’s call it the Gail System, for sure. Will really change the incentives to put the fiscal consequences.

Of legislative agreement as far off into the future as possible. I don’t think any voting system in the short term is going to create additional incentives for austerity and fiscal prudence. I think that’s beyond the power of any system to modify. At this point. And so I guess my part company with Catherine there to some extent, but I’d say for the most part, it is working as advertised.

And I think that’s a good thing for the country.

Katherine,

did you want to respond to that? You know,

I would really love to engage on that. And, Bill, it’s great to be here again with you. Nice to hear your voice. So we actually have a real life example that demonstrates exactly how final five voting could change incentives for being physically responsible. So here’s how it works.

It’s not in the voting system It isn’t what the voters do there. It’s what it enables, which is now we’re gonna have five candidates making their case in the general election. So you get candidates bringing up issues which don’t now get brought up, like neither party right now can really run on fiscal responsibility because none of them are fiscally responsible. Once you have five, someone can be the Ross Perot candidate in the final five system or one of the three Republicans who make it to the general can be the one who talks about fiscal responsibility, which is we once again have a voice telling everybody how bad the system is. And what we saw, what’s the last time we had balanced budgets in this country?

It was in the latter years of the Clinton administration. And that was a result in no small measure to pros entry into the nineteen ninety two race. When he got nineteen percent of the vote, even though he got no electoral votes, he demonstrated to both sides that people were willing to stay a vote on the debt deficit. He also ran on NAFTA, but the the debt deficit was a huge issue for him. And neither party wanted to seed that growing sort of part of the electorate to a nascent third party.

So both new Kingrich and Clinton were then incented to solve this so that they didn’t face a third threat. And that is what competition does. It does it in every industry. A startup creates a new technology, Even if that startup doesn’t win, as in they just get copied, the innovation and the advance that comes from competition makes its way to the customers. I agree.

They’ll always be incentives to make things free. I mean, that’s great. But now we’ll have accountability, visibility, transparency that could never exist, so we will make some headway there. Linda,

what do you think? Well,

count me a skeptic. I’ve been skeptic on this for quite a while. Regular listeners know,

I do think

it is more complicated. I think when you are looking in a state like Alaska, which has many fewer voters than our big populous states do, and also has a kind of Maverick

streak.

So that something like this might be more amenable to the voters of a state like

Alaska. But

I also think that if you look back in time and you try and figure out where we had divided government and quite separate ideologies governing one party and another. I, you know, look back on the Reagan administration, for example.

Things got done

and compromises got made even under our current system. I would like to think you could wave a magic wand and you come up with a kind of bureaucratic solution that would solve all of our problems and get us being able to speak together and to arrive, it compromise, and to make the perfect not the enemy of the good. But I’m not sure that simply changing the way in which we pick our candidates is going to do that. I think that the problems we have are more systemic. I think they are much more deep rooted and have to do with huge changes in our population, huge cultural shifts, and changes just in morays, the acceptability now of saying horrible things.

In public and horrible things about one’s opponent, I think are things that have kind of broken down civility in our politics. So it’s not that I, you know, don’t think that Katherine has landed on an interesting idea and happy for the entrepreneurship. I agree with Bill that in most areas, trying to have experiments with new ideas is a good thing in general. I’m glad that we are seeing this sort of move slowly through the states. And again, with states.

I mean, I know New York City and the mayor of race, they used a similar system, ran not quite as smoothly, but it did end up producing a mayor who was much more centrist than many people expected to be elected in a city like New York. So Maybe it will work out. Maybe it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it solves the kinds of deep rooted problems that we have in our politics today. That have to do with a real breakdown in society and a breakdown in terms of the way in which we deal with each other in the public square.

Okay, Katherine,

I’m gonna ask you to hold off responding so I can bring Damon into this. Damon, you could argue in contrast to what Linda is. Saying that some of the reason that our politics has become so polarized is because of the existing system, because the incentives for politicians are to appeal to the most extreme members of their own party because of the primary system, it aggravates all of those tendencies that Linda mentioned, because as we know, like on a contentious issue like immigration, for example, most Americans are somewhere in the mission middle. Wanna give citizenship to the dreamers, and they want border security, and we’ll come to that in a little while. But if the structure were different, maybe it would be possible to come to some middle ground on an issue like immigration.

Certainly,

I mean, I think anytime you kind of dip into debates on the right, for instance, about who might run for president, the kind of very first thing anyone will say is, well, but of course, a Larry Hogan Liz Cheney, Sunudu, anyone who’s a little bit more center right has no chance whatsoever and why? Because it’s presumed that such a person could never make it through the Republican primaries because the Republican primaries, as Katherine explained, are kind of controlled by the most extreme engaged negative partisanship driven faction of the party. So to the extent that this kind of a system could short circuit that and enable central to have a fighting chance. I think that it would be a very positive development. It’s always a mixture of kind of the incentives created by the institutions in an underlying public opinion and they interact in interesting ways.

And I don’t think it’s entirely an institutional cause, so it’s a mix. But I think it could be very helpful, and I’m encouraged by a lot of this, but I do have one question. Because I have a concern. I admit that it hasn’t shown up yet in the places where this has been tried. But I’m still worried about it.

And that is the fact that I think a lot of what is driving what’s worse than our politics is a function of distrust in institutions. People increasingly don’t believe that institutions and the people who run them that they can have confidence in them to run the system fairly and not use them to take advantage for their side, whichever side that might be.

And then

you also have the added factor that now a lot of people, especially on the right, have realized that, oh, we can gain electoral advantage by trying to enhance and augment and intensify that very distrust if we portray ourselves the conservatives of the right. As being on the side of the people against those distrusted institutions. My problem with, especially the rank choice voting. Part of this plan is that as a system of vote counting, it is less transparent and requires more trust in vote counters to reallocate votes when people rank their choices. And so my question for you is instead of doing instant runoff, why not just do run off.

In other words, the kind of thing that we just saw again in the Georgia situation where you had a race as we saw two years ago, where there was a Republican and a Democrat and a libertarian and the libertarian get like two percent of the vote, which is just enough in a very divided electorate, so that neither candidate gets quite to fifty percent so then you hold a runoff a month or so later. And then one of them inevitably gets above fifty percent because there are only two candidates left. I mean, I realize it’s more expensive to hold another round of voting. But if we are adequately concerned about this issue of distrust in institutions. I think that might be a price worth paying.

What do you think about that?

Damon, you’re right. That’s a problem as well as all of the problems in the larger society that Linda mentioned here’s what I’ll tell you about why we can’t do instant runoffs and then I’ll come to the bigger problems or why we need to do instant runoffs instead of the Georgia system. Because the point of the final five voting is not to change Who wins elections? It’s to change what those winners do when they’re governing. Sometimes it changes who wins also, but the real point is to change what winners can do.

And because of that, you need to have the decision for who wins be made in November. Because once the bosses are a majority of November voters, the behaviors that it takes to solve problems that I mentioned before, you know, negotiating reaching across the aisle, looking for a consensus, voting yes on those deals. Those behaviors are acceptable and there’s a path to victory when you’re appealing to November voters. But they’re not acceptable and you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose your job or you’re threatened to lose your job. If you only have to appeal to primary voters.

So if you do the Georgia system, that doesn’t change the fact that whoever wins is accountable to primary voters. They’re not accountable to the general electorate. So that’s a good distinction to make, why should we do instant runoffs versus doing RCB if it stands alone, but not when you put it together with final five. Because there is a little learning curve for how instant run offs get counted but it really doesn’t turn out to be complicated for people to understand once they, you know, know about it. I mean, you can hand count these races.

You know, it is not a secret algorithm. You can make post it note piles and one candidate’s eliminated to just move their post it notes. Which were their voters to those voters second choice. And people will understand that when we educate them about that, which we do in the states where we pass it.

But to do

a large voter education campaign right now is beyond our fundraising ability, shall we say? How many states are currently considering this either by referendum or the state legislatures? There’s a pipeline of locally led campaigns in about ten states, and I say about because some are so nascent that it’s hard to say they should make it in the ten, and others are much further along. For example, there are active campaigns in Georgia, Wisconsin and in New York City for the mayor’s race. And then there’s about eight other states that are looking at valid initiatives for two thousand twenty four.

So our stated goal is five states with final five voting by two thousand twenty five so that we would have ten senators who are freed from that hear any of the party primary as I like to call it, and they can serve as a fulcrum for some problem solving center even if they’re not centrist themselves, they can serve as a fulcrum to work through a deal. There are a number

of organizations out there, yours, But there’s also, on your website, there are a bunch of other local organizations that you link to who are working on this, including fair vote and some others. So if there’s anything you wanna say about that, where people can get involved if they’re interested in this? Yes.

Look, this is going to happen when more and more people get involved organizationally and individually. So we have great allies. Once you mentioned, fair vote, United America, in particular, I would call out. And if listeners are familiar with any of those organizations, they can go ahead and work with them if they want to see this move forward and they want to stay focused solely on final five, they can get in touch with us, but we collaborate. So For example, we started and were the lead national funders in Nevada, but we wouldn’t have gotten across that finish line.

Without the partnership with United America and other organizations to make that happen, not in a million years.

Alright.

Let’s now consider the historic moment that happened in Washington this week. Volodymyr Zelensky, visited Washington and spoke to the Congress It was a very churchillian speech, I may say. He referred many times not to his seeking peace, but victory. And it was fantastic. Now, of course, we live in an age when people on the right who just a few short years ago would have been four square behind someone like Zelensky who is standing up for democracy and independence and human dignity and human rights against a rapacious dictatorship that is trying to take over his country, but that’s not the world we live in anymore.

Now a number of people on the right are highly critical of Zlotsky and of our funding for the struggle of Ukraine. Bill Galston, Did you see the speech? And what did you what do you make of the events this

week? I wouldn’t have

missed the speech for anything. It was indeed an historic moment. And as you say, it’s the sort of moment that two out of the past three Republican presidents. Would have celebrated. Right.

Right? Ronald Reagan, whose speech at Westminster, led to the formation of the national endowment for democracy. Certainly, George w Bush, whatever excess as he may have committed in the name of fostering democracy around the world, he had the right idea —

Yeah. — perhaps the

means were imprudent to me advised, but he was pushing in the right direction. And what troubles me about the reaction of what I’ll call the new right. I think it’s

a mistake to

call them conservatives. I don’t think they’re in favor of conserving anything. But they are viscerally opposed to the idea of values that are applicable and valid universally. They are not in favor of the United States doing much of anything as far as I can tell to promote the cause of democracy around world, and they have fully embraced Donald Trump’s transactional view of the world. What’s it worth to me?

What does it do for us right now? And several of the critics have gone so far as to say that the United States has no stake of its own in the outcome of the war between a Russian aggressor a Ukrainian defender. I find this very hard to understand, but it’s a fact, and it’s a fact I think will not go away soon even if Donald Trump passes from the scene as he richly deserves to do because he is left behind him a transformed political landscape on the right, and democracy is one of the first and most important victims of this transformation.

Bill, we’ve talked about this a few times on this podcast, and I’m just curious about one thing. Because we’re in a hundred percent agreement that the right has changed dramatically. And I could give chapter in verse, I won’t, you know, just look up the comments of Trump Junior or Matt Gates or even Steve Skalise or Tucker Carlson. Okay, we agree on that. But would you also agree that the left has changed the Democratic Party, which has now become much more full throated in its support for democracy promotion and standing up to Russia and being a leader around the world for these values, whereas in the past, they were a little bit more skeptical.

I think what’s going

on now reflects the mainstream of the Democratic Party as it has been for quite some time. It is certainly the case that in the wake of the Vietnam War, there were

many

Democrats who argued for a policy of strength, which made more sense in some cases than in others. You certainly had

a great

deal of confusion about this during Carter administration, president Carter after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, finally had to confess that the Russians had changed his mind about all sorts of things. The anti

communism into office decrying our inordinate fear of communism.

Well, in fairness, that was a speech that he gave after he attained office. I don’t recall it’s being one of the key talking points in his campaign. As a matter of fact, as you’ll recall, it was Darryl Ford’s premature liberation of Poland, Georgia. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. You’re getting very

part in here, Bill. Let’s keep it keep it fraud here. Like,

it just started, but I can’t talk about it before.

Before you misspoke. That was the slip of the tongue. But Carter really did mean it, and his policies reflected that. And then after the invasion of Afghanistan, he said that the scales fell from his eyes, and it was and it it

showed him the error of his ways. I mean, he admitted that. So Not only did he admit it, but I said so myself just two minutes ago. So if I’m being a partisan, I’m glad that you joined people.

Alright. So there were always voices within the Democratic Party who were for an energetic American role in the world. But Bill, for a long time, those were off in one corner, the Democratic leadership council, or the coalition for a Democratic majority. They were a minority. Now there, I would argue, more of the majority.

Well,

actually, we could tear on this conversation. Okay. Alright. Okay.

I think it’s fair

to say that the Democratic Party temporarily deviated from its own genetic code in the wake of Vietnam. That was a deeply disturbing event for the Democratic Party. It split the Democratic Party in two, as we saw in nineteen sixty eight, and they began in seventy two. And there was a lot of retrudism on both sides of the aisle during the nineteen seventies, including someone who, at one point, occupied simultaneously the roles of Secretary of State and National Security of Pfizer who was all in favor of an accommodation with the Soviet Union during that period. So the nineteen seventies were a troubled period for both political parties.

Unfortunately, they both regained their international equilibrium in the eighties and nineties. Okay. I don’t

completely agree with that analysis, but let’s move on. Linda, we may have just dodged a bullet because the Congress had reached an impasse about the border. There was a move by senator Mike Lee to hold up this one point seven trillion dollar spending bill unless Title forty two was extended. And actually, at the last minute, Kirsten Cinema came forward with a compromise, a different amendment that people like her and Joe Manchin and others can vote on. So it looks like they divided this impasse over Title forty two, but this really is the kind of issue where you do wish that we could find that middle because the American people are in the middle Nobody wants to see a huge crush of asylum seekers really abusing the asylum system, let’s be frank, coming across the border in an uncontrolled fashion.

But on the other hand, we definitely need immigration. Absolutely.

And as long as we have the Republican Party, so wedded to this sort of xenophobic approach to immigration, we’re not going to get it. You know, the

whole issue

of Title forty two, there’s a lot of focus on it now because it was due to be lifted, the appeals court said that, and I think rightly as a matter of law,

that there

was no long rate public health reason to be sending people back. This was

sorry, I shouldn’t have explained. This is the emergency deportation — Correct. — because of COVID. Right. Because of COVID.

And the appeals

court said, you know, there is no public health emergency right now got lifted. Then the Supreme Court intervened and said, wait, we’re gonna put it on hold of the appeals court decision. We’ll

go to

the

Supreme Court. And so

there’s a

lot of focus on that. But there’s a much bigger problem

here. The

humanitarian crisis that is ongoing at the border gets worse and worse. And we are doing absolutely nothing about it. I’ve spoken recently to people who have been right there at the border some of the ports and some of the areas between the ports of entry because if you want a clean asylum, you’re now supposed to go through a port of entry in order to do that. The problem is the cartels control access to the border, in the border areas outside of the actual port entries. And it is in their interest to see maximum chaos, maximum

number of

people trying to come in because along with some people, some of whom I think are legitimate asylum seekers and some who are not. But nonetheless are people who could contribute to our society, along with people, there are also drugs that float. And so we have this enormous crisis going on. Wait,

why is it in the interests of the For travelers? Yeah. Why is

it because if you have only a limited number of border patrol people who are able to apprehend what’s coming across and they have to focus on thousands of people trying to get in all at

once. Oh, oh, I see. It makes it much easier. Yeah. Makes it

much easier. Okay. So and by the way, they also controlled smuggling of people. And they’re ripping off people, they’re charging them thousands of dollars. But what we’re seeing at the border is a real crisis and we are ignoring it at our peril.

And this refusal of congress to deal with this issue, this is an issue of national interest. It’s an issue of our security and their failure to deal with it in any kind of reasonable responsible way is just the worst dereliction of duty in terms of a public policy that I can remember in my lifetime. Yeah, I

agree, but can you just respond to the very, very recent reports and tell me what you think of this? Apparently, according to the cinema proposal that apparently was agreed to, provides eighty five million for immigration judges eighty million for US attorneys to prosecute border crimes, hundred and forty million for increased detention capacity to hold smugglers and other criminals, one hundred million for increased drug enforcement at the border, two hundred million to fill gaps in the border wall, and one billion to increase US immigration and customs enforcement detention capacity.

Mona, all of what you have described is wonderful, and I would have supported it. Unfortunately, I think while we have actually been taping, it went to a vote. There wasn’t a vote on the cinema amendment, and it failed. Typical. Okay.

Thank you, Linda.

Katherine, I would just note that this in pass, which has lasted now for, you know, a few decades in Congress over a rational solution to this crisis of immigration really is a perfect poster child for why we need November voters to choose who wins elections. Because right now, since so many people are chosen by primary voters, that’s the reason they can’t enact legislation that’s in line with what most Americans want. You’ve been referring to, which is most Americans are willing to make this compromised deal, but most Americans votes don’t matter. Most Americans vote in November, and their votes are meaningless to what the people in Congress actually are incented and feel the need to do. So if we change the incentives for how you keep your job in reelection, we’ll change the ability to solve a problem like this.

Complex trade offs. I

think that’s well said. Okay. Damon Linker, You’ve been following the adventures of Elon Musk at Twitter, and so I would just like to check-in with you and see where we are. Is he destroying it? Is he going to step aside as he promised in his Twitter poll that he ran saying, Do you want me to stay in charge or not?

What’s happening?

Well, it’s impossible to know what the guys actually gonna do, but he has said that he’s looking for a replacement to service CEO of the company and that he will step aside. As CEO, when he finds such a person, now we don’t know who that’s gonna be, we don’t know how long this is gonna take, If he isn’t the CEO but continues tweeting all the time and continues to be the owner of the company, then it might be a distinction without difference. Mhmm. It also depends, of course, who the person is. Is the person gonna be independent and have a free hand to make decisions about changing things in the company or not.

It would be sort of like Donald Trump agreeing to step aside and let Mike Pence take over, but Trump will stay on Twitter and keep a little apartment in the White House and, you know, make his life miserable. As our colleague Bill Galston has said to be in a chat, Elon Musk’s successor will have the worst job in America, which very well be true. Other than Kevin McCarthy.

Yeah. Exactly. You know, you know,

we don’t know yet if for sure if he has a job. No. That’s true. About Twitter more generally, I mean, I assume it will survive the question over the last several weeks since Musk took over his whether it would be turned into parlor or gab or some other kind of alt right chatroom, basically, like, social. Yeah.

I mean, people often refer to it as a health site, but they really had no idea. I mean, Musk tweets, you know, far right, memes regularly. He clearly, you know, has positioned himself on the kind of populist right and loves to be a troll. And the more serious problem is that he’s been just instituting all of these kind of sweeping policy changes and continually reversing within twenty four hours as soon as people grow fit about them. And often, the fit is quite justified and rational.

He announced over the last weekend that you wouldn’t be allowed to keep your account on Twitter if anywhere in your Twitter biography you link to another social media network. And this wasn’t even all of them. It was only some of them, so that didn’t make any sense. Now, this was announced while he was jetting off to the World Cup and getting his picture taken standing next to Jared Kushner and among, you know, senior members of Saudi Arabia family. It was really kind of a pretty sleazy, gross photo a happy head going on there.

And at the very moment, while that was happening, his company is announcing all these big changes that really made no sense and made lots of people very upset. And then, again, he just reverses course twenty four hours later or twelve hours later. Oh, no. No. We won’t do that.

I mean, that’s not how you run

a business. So if

you’re an advertiser looking at this, you have to kind of cock an eyebrow. If you’re an investor in or stock colder in Tesla watching its stock price go down and down and down. And this was a stock that was up around or above four hundred per share within the last calendar year and it’s now, as of earlier today, about a hundred and thirty two. This is a stock pretty close to in free fall, and I some of that has to do with problems. In Tesla, it being overvalued as many tech stocks have been and are suffering collapses recently.

But I think a lot of the decline since September has been a result of this just kind of haphazard scatter shot. Rule of Twitter that’s happening in real time and full light of the click lights

because it’s

all happening on Twitter and the guide just won’t shut up. So it’s been like a bumper car of that tier going on. And so you asked at the beginning, is Twitter gonna survive? I mean, I assume it’ll survive in some form, but the chance of that happening probably goes down every day that Musk remains in the driver’s seat.

Alright. Let us now turn to another topic, which is this week, the House Ways and Means Committee obtained Donald Trump’s tax returns since twenty fifteen, and

they

made the immediate decision to

release them.

And so people who flipped them over found unsurprisingly it’s unsurprisingly because a couple of years ago, the New York Times got access to more of his tax return records than that, and they published them. So nothing that I’ve seen so far is all that surprising. We kinda knew about this. Like he would loan money to his children and they paid him back yearly interest. Which is probably a disguised gift.

And the kids get to duck the interest and he doesn’t have to pay the gift tax and yeah. Okay. He took deductions for not developing land, twenty one million dollars worth that may have relied on a false appraisal. There’s a shock. And, you know, we took personal deductions that we know are not allowed, like seventy thousand dollars for hair styling.

But my question for the whole panel is was it a mistake to release his tax returns? Was there a sound purpose behind this? Bill Galston, I’m gonna start with you. I was afraid you

were gonna start with you. But I’ve gone back and forth on this. On the one hand, it turns out that there was a legitimate, legislative purpose to the inquiry, namely the discovery that contrary to the IRS’s own stated policy that mister Trump had not been audited. My understanding is that the IRS quite some time ago laid down a rule for itself that it would audit on an annual basis the tax returns of sitting presidents, it failed to do so. And I’ve been quite startled by the disclaimer of responsibility to do that from people who are in a position of responsibility to enforce that rule.

So clearly something needs to be done. There is a genuine problem.

It is, I

think, in the public interest to make sure that a president of the United staged to quote the late Fisher Nixon is not a crook, close quote. On the other

hand, while we

failed in that, you know, well, We

did, but,

you know, at least we tried. We stopped trying. But is it in the public interest to establish a norm that the IRS will or the Congress in the United States will disclose the president’s tax returns if the president has chosen not to do so. My fear and here I think ranking member on ways means the outgoing Kevin Brady had a point When he said that this establishes a bad precedent, whether it’s unprecedented or not, I don’t know, but it is certainly a pretty conspicuous act that could lead to the intensification or further intensification of partisan warfare over tax returns. So On balance, I guess, I wish that the committee had focused on the problems that are actually susceptible of the like a solution and had not gone down this road.

Is it the road to disaster? No. But It is one more step down the road to total partisan warfare.

Linda John

Koskinen, who was appointed as IRS commissioner by Barack Obama, said it

seems to me

they ought to have pretty good reason for why it would be in the public interest to disclose these. And he said it sets a dangerous precedent. What do you think? Well, first of

all, I didn’t know this until this controversy, but apparently, people’s tax returns at one time, you know, shortly after I guess the amendment that made federal taxes possible most people’s tax returns were a matter of public record. These were not super secret documents. So I think that given the history and given the law

that it

would be a good thing to release the return. And I think this whole question about why it was that Donald Trump’s text returns were not in fact audited. I mean, they apparently began an audit with a single agent going over these very complex documents. Trump’s income flows through various LLC’s limited liability corporations, hundreds of them that he has set up for that purpose. It’s just a disgrace that this wasn’t done.

But also just the notion that if the six years that they looked at, only really paid any kind of real tax in a couple of those years. And one

of the reasons

he paid tax, the biggest bill to be

paid was because

he sold a property that he had inherited from his father. One of the things that this release of this information does is exposes what a failure this man has been as a businessman. He’s never really been successful. He’s constantly losing money. Either that or he is, you know, out the phone like in his lying to the IRS and and ought to go to jail as outcompounded on tax evasion.

So I think it is in the public interest that these be released. I’m glad that we were able to get them to the right hands at the

proper time. And

I think most average taxpayers whom I think the average family in the United States pays over four thousand dollars a year in federal income tax. That was at least one figure that I came up with when I tried to do some research on this. And if that’s the

case, the

fact that this multi millionaire pays zero zero seven hundred and fifty dollars seven hundred and fifty dollars zero and then a couple of years in which he pays actual taxes. It’s just a disgrace. Katherine

Boyd, I mean, it’s

kind of great what

a country, you know, to be a failure and constantly losing money and flying around in your own private jet and not paying any taxes. It’s quite

a country. And when I look at these kind of situations, I think the right answer is more competition. So we don’t have so many lesser of two evil selections, which I think is what many people feel when they show up in November now. Fair

enough. Okay. Damon, what about the fact that this will be portrayed and maybe even justifiably so by Republicans as pure partisanship on the part of Democrats. They used their power to taint his records supposedly for a legislative purpose. But by releasing them immediately, they betrayed that this was actually a political purpose.

They just want to

embarrass him. Well,

that is true. And, you know, I’ll guess I’ll go on. The record is saying this probably wasn’t a prudent move but it’s also to my mind pretty darn trivial in the scheme of things. Mhmm. Given, you know, a lot of things, others already talked about I mean, the New York Times already ran a big long deep dive into his taxes.

We are now getting to see some of the details for ourselves, but it’s not like it was big news. And then also, you know, the Republicans play this game just as much as the Democrats do. And what’s disheartening about it is that it is Democrats kind of scooping to the same level, which just gives more ammunition for the right when it wants to make its latest round of what about argument. Like anytime Democrats wanna sit up in a noble position and say, we’re just trying to do what’s right. We’re just abiding by the law, your, the rank partisan who’s a tribalist.

And then the Republicans and say, yeah. But what about when you release Trump’s tax returns for no good reason? And so it just muddies the water further, but we’re already about eighty seven rounds into those kinds of accusations by this point. So again, like, I think in the most trivial way. I think that it was a bad move, but I can’t get two up in arms about it given the more ass of our politics.

These days. So it’s just one more data point in a pretty messy chart of where we are.

Okay. With that, we will now turn to our final segment, highlight or low light of the week. And Linda Chavez, I’m starting with you this week. I think really

the low life for me, not just of this week, but maybe the year was the failure of the United States Congress to do right by our Afghan allies, seventy some thousand of whom were given temporary parole when they came to the United States after the collapse of Kaboul. There was a bill, the Afghan Adjustment Act. There were several attempts to get it passed, including putting it onto this omnibus bending bill, and it was killed, and it was killed by Republicans, and it was killed by senator Grassley of Iowa. In particular, he has been a huge opponent of these Afghan refugees. So he claims are here many of them he thinks have gotten through without scrutiny.

He’s wrong about that. I think this is not just a disgrace. It is a tragedy.

Okay. Katherine Gail. Well, I’m

like a broken

record here. Hold out, but I’ll say the low light of the week is what is happening right now, which is that Congress is about to pass a spending bill at the last minute because there’s a crisis, and they will not do the responsible thing in figuring out how to make any trade offs so we don’t just add to our national debt and handicap ourselves down the road. So it’s a low light. It’s a predictable one, and that makes it all the more of a lower light. Okay.

Damon Linker

Is this a

highlight or a low light? Well, it’s probably a mild low light for once again the state of Republican Party today, but it definitely was a highlight of my week. And that was following the story of one George Santos. Candidate who won his race. He had a congressional district in New York, straddling parts of Long Island in Queens.

And if you’ve been following the political news this week, you know that as the week has gone on, various aspects if not all aspects of Santos’s biography have come in for some scrutiny this week. I will very briefly list the things that have now been revealed about this gentleman. He said when running that he used to work at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. That apparently is not true. He said he attended Brooke College in NYU.

That apparently is not true. He said that four employees who worked for him at these places had died in the Pulse club shooting Apparently, there’s no record that any of those people worked for him. He said that he was Jewish, at least part Jewish because his mother’s parents came from Ukraine. In fact, all of his parents came from Brazil and there’s no evidence that many of them were Jewish. And finally, just most recently, the latest story on Thursday morning came out that he claimed that he was gay.

And it’s kind of interesting that this guy, if this isn’t true, he he ran as a Republican and claimed to be Jewish and gay. And that turned out to not to be true either. We don’t know if he’s really gay, but he was married to a woman and only announced apparently, that he was gay two weeks before his campaign began, and there’s no further evidence that this is the case prior to that fact. So that’s a kind of other big question mark floating over this guy’s head, which has inspired me to wonder if maybe if If any of our listeners have seen the movie, men in black, I suspect the next step in the revelations might show that one George Santos is actually a giant space bug in a human skin suit. It’s really quite amazing.

Story. It is an amazing story. Everything he says is

a lie, and it reminded me of what the writer Mary McCarthy said in a famous interview many years ago with Joan Didion. Speaking of Lillian Hellman, she said every word that Lillian Hellman writes is a lie, including and and the. Exactly. So

George Sanders. Yes.

Alright. Bill Galston.

Moving right along from the talented mister Santos. For me,

the

low light of the week

was the reaction

of one Tucker Carlson to

Zelensky’s

visit. You really

have to

read the transcript of his eight minute and fourteen second diatribe, to believe it, but Let me just give you a brief excerpt from it. He begins by accusing Zelensky of showing up dressed like a strip club manager. And he then moves on to say this. The point of today’s visit to Washington was not to make the world more stable or make widest decisions much less to help America. That’s always at the bottom of the list.

The point was to fawn over the Ukrainian strip club manager and hand him billions more dollars from our own crumbling economy.

It is

hard, in fact, it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario of the greatest country on Earth. And the other seven minutes and forty five seconds are no better than what I just read. This man is morally obtuse. He’s a national disgrace an ongoing running sore in the body politic. And next week I’m sorry.

The week after, I’ll tell you what I really think about.

Well, Bill,

I would have to say, you know, one hundred percent agreement. I agree with you so much that that was going to be Milo

Lake. No.

That’s okay. I I have one in reserve because I had a feeling somebody else might have been equally offended. So, I would like to mention a piece by Russ Roberts who does the podcast Econ Talk and is now the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, but he was a longtime economics professor here. It’s not new, but he recently linked to it again. It’s an evergreen.

It’s called The Economist as scape coat and it is a long rebuttal to the argument that is very popular on the left these days and even in some precincts on the right, that our current problems are all attributable to the fact that in the last twenty five years or so we have been in the grips of a libertarian moment and that libertarianism, specifically generated by Milton Friedman, is responsible for all of our income inequality and other problems in America. So, rest goes through and looks at the record with facts and figures and says, you know, if there’s been a libertarian moment he missed it and he gives a very, very good accounting for why that is not true and why milk treatment is, of course, also being very radically misrepresented. So I thought I would bring that to everybody’s attention. It appeared in medium, and it’s called The Economist’s scapegoat, and we will link to it. And with that, I would like to thank everyone.

I want to thank Katherine Gail for joining us this week. And of course, our regular panel, our producer is Katie Cooper, and our sound engineer today is Joe Armstrong. And we will not be doing a podcast next week. We’re going to be off. So until next time, I want to wish everybody a happy Hanukkah, a Merry Christmas.

And a very happy New Year, and we will return in twenty

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