Today in Politics | Explainer

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]So listen, an awful lot going on for sure. And it's always interesting to me to listen to read the way that people ask questions because if there is one big story in the news, people tend to ask a lot of questions about that. But on days like today, what people are really writing about are really very broad questions about our country and what's going on in the country. And in some ways these days are the hardest days because you can't just give you the you know sort of the little details. So let's start if you will by stepping back um and taking a look at the larger political picture in the United States right now. See if that'll help a little bit. But feel free by the way to ask questions. I'll try and keep an eye on them going by. Um what we have seen this week, I said last night, I guess it was just last night I did a a a politics chat. Um what we have seen this week is a really dramatic um escalation of Trump's attacks on the Constitution and on democracy. And what I mean by that is that his Department of Justice uh and his appointees at the Department of Justice came to an agreement with him um stemming from his $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS which in during his first term a contractor working for the IRS had had uh leaked more than 400,000 tax returns to the media And based on that, Trump, his sons, his not all of his sons, his two oldest sons and um the Trump organization sued the IRS and that for $10 billion.

[00:01:51]Many things wrong with that. But what I want to emphasize here is that the judge who was overseeing that case had real doubts about whether it was a case at all because Trump was on both sides of it. And that's that really does not a legal case make if you are both the uh plaintiff and the defendant. There's not um a case there. And it was it seemed there was a very good chance she would say you don't have a case. You you you literally can't do this. Um, but what happened was that Trump, his sons, and the Trump organization withdrew that lawsuit, said, "We're we're we're dropping it. We're not going to bring it back. It's gone."

[00:02:38]And then they announced that they had, and what was in big letters across the top of it, settlement agreement. But the judge is very clear in her order dismissing the case because it had been dropped to she was very clear that this was not a legal settlement that was it was not a settlement of a case. It was an agreement that Trump had come up with with his own appointees at the Department of Justice.

[00:03:06]Um, that is significant because the legal justification for it from the Trump camp was they were saying it was like the class action lawsuit that was settled during the Obama administration.

[00:03:20]Somewhat interesting that Trump's always pointing to things from the Obama administration. Just saying. It was something from the Obama administration called Keeps Eagle V. Vilsac, which provided for I believe it was $760 million pot of money for indigenous farmers who had uh challenged the United States Department of Agriculture of racially uh discriminating against them.

[00:03:47]That was actually a a settlement of a court case and that had been going on for a long time and has had a number of permutations. So it there's a real important distinction between keeps eagle vilsac which was a class action suit that was settled with the the achievement of this pot of money to be paid out and this agreement that Trump came up with with his appointee at the department of justice and that person who signed that first document that established this pot of money was not the acting attorney general. Um he was somebody named Stanley Woodward. He is somebody who has represented a number of figures from around Trump including a number of the January 6 riers who were convicted of crimes relating to their behavior at that January 6, 2021 event. So there was that this and let's be clear the the amount of money that the department of justice and there were three important documents that came out that day but when the department of justice talked about how it was planning to set up this particular fund. Um it said that it was going to devote 1.776 billion dollar to it. And that's a really significant number. Somebody asked in your questions if that was a thumb in the eye of Americans. And I would say it's more than that in that um this is of course the 250th anniversary of 1776 which was the the year in which the founders signed that wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence.

[00:05:33]That was 7 July 1776.

[00:05:36]But it's also the date that those people who supported Trump and wanted to overturn the 2020 election yelled on the day of January 6th. It was what Representative Lauren Boowbert of Colorado typed that morning on social media on X. And by the way, that's still there. I checked just yesterday. She said, "Today is 1776."

[00:06:02]There was clearly this sense that they were starting a new nation. And by the way, I know some of you like my rabbit holes. This is a this is an interesting rabbit hole. Americans in the past have tended at times to believe that they were going through something really important and to take uh make a make it a big point to write letters about it to uh write journals about it to keep diaries around it. And the most dramatic of events of all those was the establishment of the Confederacy. one, you know, if you if you go to the Civil War section of your local library or of even of um big book sellers, you'll see that there's a lot of material based on Civil War diaries. And you might have been like, why were they all writing diaries? And the answer to that is they all thought that they were witnessing the beginning of a new nation and they wanted their diaries to be part of that.

[00:07:01]So there, and if you're interested, there are a number of truly wonderful diaries from the Civil War. And it was largely Civil War women, by the way, who did that. And there are a number of really wonderful diaries available at at a website from the University of North Carolina, UNCC, and it's called Doc South. All one word, DOC South, Doc South. And you can read all these just amazing diaries. Now, now most people gave them up pretty quickly. The same way you and I probably do, we start a diary and we don't carry it on very long. But one of the reasons we know as much as we do about the early days of the Confederacy is because these women were all keeping diaries about it.

[00:07:44]Anyway, the same thing was true with the Trump attempt to do what he and his followers consider starting a new America.

[00:07:56]Don't lose sight of that because a number of MAGA loyalists are quite literally trying to overturn our liberal democracy. And and I've explained that term before and I'll explain it again and replace it with either white nationalism, that is something that re re that rejects our multiculturalism, or with a theocracy. Those aren't always the same thing, by the way. Um, but there is this sense that Trump is and he is certainly trying to write himself into our history as such, into our federal government, for example, and into his painted blue reflecting pool and his triumphal arch and to his attempted remake of the Kennedy Center and everything he's trying to do in Washington.

[00:08:42]He is certainly trying to write himself into our national capital and into our national history as a brand new thing.

[00:08:50]People like me, we we liked the old thing, but that date or imposed on that fund is significant. Little bit of a detour here to explain liberal democracy. All right, the forget anything you know about um what you might have learned about the word liberal and rec and I'm going to talk about what it means as a political philosophy. All right. So, um, liberalism has a long history, goes back to, um, to Europe before America is really running around yet. And liberal refers to the individual. The idea that you want to have um, a government that protects individuals, that enables them to um, have control over their property, that enables them to behave as free agents in certain ways. And a liberal democracy is one that originally people looked at liberalism and they said, "We got to keep the big state away because you don't want to have a big government because pretty soon it's going to have an standing army and you're going it's going to tax you into oblivion and you're never going to be able to be an independent individual."

[00:10:06]In the United States, that changes really dramatically at the turn of the last century. And one of the key people in that change is Theodore Roosevelt, president at um at the the turn of the century um and into the early 20th century. And what he argued was that in and he was not the only one by the way but what people like him argued was that once you got the rise of big corporations like US Steel for example or like JD Rockefeller's oil corporations and so on that you needed to have a strong enough government to regulate those industries so that they didn't crush individuals by not paying them enough money or by polluting their environment or by keeping them working so hard that they never got educations and so on.

[00:10:50]So when I talk about a liberal democracy, it's a democracy that protects the rights of individuals in the and after the beginning of the 20th century by having a big enough government that it regulated business and helped individuals to be able to get educations, for example, or to have equal access to resources. All right, that's what the Trump people are trying to push aside in favor of a new vision.

[00:11:14]And one of the things that that that that slush fund does is it provides this extraordinary pot of money to reward those people who were fighting for Trump on January 6 and other people as well.

[00:11:26]It's not just them, although that's what people are focusing on. It's all the Trumpers who have ended up running a foul of the laws of our country and therefore have borne penalties for that sometimes um sometimes imprisonment.

[00:11:40]So by putting that number on that fund, that's what the president is signaling.

[00:11:47]But but it's also worth really understanding that that pot of money is uh illegal. That's not how you raise money in America. That's not how the government does anything in America. You can in fact have a a courtroom, a a judge and a jury decide as in the case of Keeps uh Keeps Eagle v. Vilsac that in order to to write a wrong money has to be paid and in that case that's part of the system. But the president can't just go to one of his appointees and say I'd like two billion dollars please.

[00:12:22]That's not the way it works. The entity in our system that raises money is our Congress. And just to be just to be really clear remember there's three branches of government. There's the executive branch and that is the president and the people around the president and not I don't mean just his cabinet. There's a whole branch of people who do that and since Washington our first president Congress has established agencies within the executive branch. So that's where things now like the EPA live although that's much more recent of course in George Washington. Um so there's a lot of stuff going on in that executive branch. But then there's a legislative branch and that's actually the one that the fra framers put per f first in the constitution and that's our congress and our congress is divided in two. It's divided between the senate and the house of representatives. And it is only the house of representatives that can originate any bill pertaining to revenue. People forget that only the house of representatives can raise revenue. the Senate has to sign off on it, but the Senate can't say, "Oh, we're going to pass a tax bill." There's a little bit of a workaround nowadays, but that's the way the system works. And then, of course, there is the judicial branch as well. And the judicial branch is one that is much more malleable than the other two. That is, it can be changed much more easily because there's actually very little in the constitution that's in the third article of the constitution about about judges. Uh, and there's a number of reasons for that, but one of the ways I like to think about it, which is completely probably ahistorical, but it's easy to remember, is that Congress spends a ton of I'm sorry, the framers spend a ton of time thinking about what Congress is going to look like because most of them care about that. That's where they've operated and so on. And they're really detailed in that and they're less detailed about the the article one, article two, which is the executive. And by the time they get to article three, I always say, you know, they're like, "We're ready for lunch and we're out of here." That's obviously not what they were saying, but there's much less in article 3.

[00:14:23]Anyway, this fund has nothing to do with any of the way the system is supposed to work.

[00:14:31]All right, so hold that thought right there for a second and let's go to the piece of this agreement that was published the next day on Tuesday.

[00:14:43]That one had it was signed not by Woodward, the the the first guy I talked about, but this one was was signed by acting attorney general Todd Blanch. He doesn't have the job yet. He hasn't been confirmed yet. That's why he's the acting attorney general. and as the acting attorney general um he took over from Pam Bondi who was the attorney general when she stepped down after all the the trouble that she had gotten into. So that's another piece here to be aware of. So if that's what's happening with this this what's happening this week, there's a couple other things that are important happening this week. That's huge. That is the president completely throwing overboard the the idea of the way the constitution is supposed to work. But then there's this other piece of it in which Todd Blanch wrote this document or signed this document that said that according to the document that the president the the the uh Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice were declaring that as of that day, the day it came out that anything that the Trump that President Trump, the older Trump boys or the Trump organization might have done with regard to their taxes that might or might not have been illegal was off limits, that they would not be prosecuted, and that there would be no audits of the president's taxes. Now, again, it's been since the 1970s, it's been the practice of the IRS to audit the president always uh simply because that's the way that um they felt that they would be able to have oversight to make sure that Trump wasn't doing not I'm sorry, the president wasn't doing untoward things. And now of course we have uh evidence that Trump has been deeply involved in stock trading with with um companies that his own policies affect. And also we know that at least as of 2024 he was facing penalties up to of up to hund00 million for double dipping in taxes and I'm sorry in depreciation. And there are many number there are any number of reasons to think that there that Trump so badly wanted immunity for his taxes that he was willing to to have this really extraordinary document out there. And and let's be clear again, it's not a legal settlement. He dropped the case. This is not where the government said, "Oh yeah, we need to do this to write a wrong." There wasn't a case here to argue that there was a wrong. And here's a news flash. You wouldn't be able to do that because the Biden administration did not weaponize the Department of Justice. This is a this is Trump being Trump saying, you know, saying such a thing. He's the one doing that. So, what you have here is a really really major deal about the way um that the administration is is is operating right now. And I just want to throw one more little thing in that and that's that one of the things you suddenly started to see today or or this week was uh Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, uh talking about how Cuba is an exporter of terrorism and the United States uh indicting a former leader of of uh Cuba for an action that happened decades ago.

[00:18:14]And it certainly looks as if the US is beginning to talk about Cuba, not beginning, is talking about Cuba the way it talked about Venezuela before it went into Venezuela. And certainly um it's putting enormous pressure on Cuba to um enormous economic pressure on Cuba trying to force some sort of regime change in Cuba. And at the same time, we've got the war in Iran, the war on Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is important for a number of reasons, but also the fact that it is jacking up both the price of gasoline and the price of uh goods, especially food in the United States of America. And and now I'm going to do a little rabbit hole here. I want to point out and I will write about this in the future that the attempt as it came out today of Iran and perhaps Oman to normalize the the uh the placing tolls on the straight of Hormuz is not just a toll booth. that is there are theories about the way world trade is supposed to work and one of the ones that has been central to global prosperity since World War II but that has a much longer history in the United States of America is freedom of the seas and with the end of freedom of the seas through the straight of hormuz a number of countries that also have straits nearby are starting to say well if you can do it there we can do it here and what you're what we are facing is the end of that concept of freedom of the seas that has enabled us to have free trade since World War II, which has really facilitated global economic growth and has facilitated the the rise of more than a billion people out of poverty in that period. That's a really big deal that sometimes it's a little bit hard to see when you're focusing just on, you know, the the extraordinary cost of that war to the Iranian people, to the American people, to the Gulf countries who are in real trouble and so on. There is a much larger principle at stake there of freedom of the seas. All right, so we got all this stuff going on today, this week. It's only Thursday, going on this week. um this attempt to create the slush fund, the attempt to create uh you a get out of jail free card for Trump, these motions toward uh Cuba. We're also now um pushing hard again in Greenland. Um and you know what how do you look at that as a big picture? You know what's going on when you have at the same time as all this is going on a president whose popularity is continuing to drop. a new poll out of Quinnipiac yesterday and Quinnipiac's quite a good pollster has his job approval rating as at 34%.

[00:21:19]And his approval rating of his handling of the economy at 33%. I mean those are abysmal just abysmal numbers. And so what on earth is going on here? So what I think you are seeing is Trump doubling down on creating a loyalist army for himself. He's really trying to solidify his loyalists and he's trying to make sure that only his loyalists can vote.

[00:21:45]So, you're seeing this uh redistricting of the South, especially to get rid of the ability for Democrats to make their voices heard.

[00:21:54]You are seeing his renewed push this week for the passage of the SAVE Act, which he wants to put in the budget reconciliation bill in front of the Senate, which is a non-starter for a number of reasons. I'll explain that in a minute. But um but you're seeing him really doubling down on this idea that he's going to put his loyalists in place. And you saw this in the primary elections that were held on Tuesday. And you also saw it in his endorsement on Tuesday of Ken Paxton in the Texas race for senator for the seat that Senator John Cornin currently holds in Texas. And you're you're watching Trump's really trying to settle to to solidify a really small group of people who are going to be loyal to him through thick and thin. And and in that context, I will tell you, it's interesting to watch the way he talks about that ballroom, which if you remember, as I said this the other day, he knocked down the ballroom 2 days after the really big no kings rally of last October.

[00:23:09]And it almost seemed like it was simply him trying to hurt the American people the way they had hurt him by turning out against him. Nobody saw that knocking down coming, right?

[00:23:19]And he said, 'Well, we have to do that because we need a big ballroom. We need to be able to entertain. And that has changed into we need it for security.

[00:23:30]And then two days ago, he started to talk about the snipers that he would have on the building and what a good view they would have of all of Washington.

[00:23:40]really interesting change in rhetoric there and in the way he is talking about that building at the same time that he's kind of losing his grip on a lot of stuff, right? I mean, he's if you're listening to him, you know, he's not in really good shape. So, he's really doubling down, man. He's going to going to get his loyalists right around him.

[00:23:57]He's going to pay off the people who fought for him on January 6th. He's going to put himself in a position of strength and so on. That's happening.

[00:24:08]and he's really trying to cement control over the country and in many ways he's managing to do it. He's got the help of the Supreme Court. Lots of there's lots of reason to be watching that. But one of the things to be watching especially this week is Congress because remember the Republicans hold a majority of the House and the Senate. So they really if Trump wanted to do this legally, he could and he doesn't. He He's really acting as if there is no constitution because he doesn't want there to be one. But Trump's slush fund and his get out of jail free card is poisonous. It is absolutely poisonous politically for anybody, but certainly for a party where Trump got into office in 2024, and I kept talking to you all the time about this back then, promising everything to everybody. you know, everybody was going to get whatever it was they wanted. And one of the really strong things he said he was going to do, keep us out of wars, kept saying, "Kla Harris will send your kids to Iran and lower prices." And now inflation is the highest it's been since um at least co and that the rate of inflation and that I'm sorry the the the worst of the COVID pandemic um and I I won't go into more depth than that right now. So, American people are hurting really badly. And at the same time that Trump is talking about taking a billion dollars of taxpayer money for his ballroom and the he is talking about taking $2 billion of taxpayer money to pay off the people who were attacking the capital and he is talking about not having the laws apply to him over his taxes.

[00:26:03]All of those things are happening at the same time.

[00:26:07]So that says a couple of things to me.

[00:26:09]First of all, it says to me that the administration is trying to grab as much as it possibly can right as it as it can right now. And that I think is why they're looking at Cuba. I think Marco Rubio is desperate to make a move on Cuba. And that's kind of why he's gone along for all this stuff. And if it doesn't happen soon, there's no promise that it's going to happen after the midterms. I think this is why they're working so hard to make it harder for people to vote and why Trump is talking again about the SAVE Act, which is the one that um insists that your uh the ID used to vote matches your birth certificate or your passport, which is unusually going to hit women unusually heavily because women are the ones who change their names, right? Usually, most often other people do too. Women and trans people. um both constituencies that vote Democratic overwhelmingly. Um but I think you're seeing sort of a desperation on the part of the administration of the people around Trump in the administration.

[00:27:08]But now look at the bigger picture here.

[00:27:10]So, if you go back to the I hope this isn't too confusing. Um, because there's a lot of pieces moving here, but I think if you go back and you look at what happened on Tuesday with those primaries and with Trump's endorsement of his loyalists, he upset a lot of people, Republicans in Congress. And what do I mean by that?

[00:27:36]Well, by knocking Bill Cassidy, the Senate Republican from Louisiana out of the running and by endorsing Ken Paxton in Texas, especially that latter one, to primary John Cornin for a runoff that's happening next week. What Trump did was a real slap in the face to Senate Republicans above all. I mean you I'm just sort of looking at the mechanics of how the politics work.

[00:28:08]John Cornin is pretty popular in in the Senate and you know just as a colleague and um unlike say the other Texas Senator Ted Cruz who is sort of famously universally hated in the Senate and he waited until Cornin and the Senate Republicans had dumped about a hundred million dollars into fighting off Ken Paxton who's been indicted and whose wife is divorcing him on biblical grounds in Texas and I mean he's a real piece of work and it was just it it just basically said above and he he said Trump literally said this in his post about it. He said um Ken Paxton's MAGA and Cornin didn't wasn't nice enough to me when I needed him and so I'm backing Ken Paxton. All right. So there's that. There's getting rid of Cassidy and there are who who basically um sold his soul to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services in order to make Trump happy. And then Trump turned on him too. And so now what you are seeing I think and and of course in Kentucky in the Kentucky race um that was a primary race and a primary race usually takes between $100,000 or 500 thou and $500,000 to win and what you mean by that you know when people always say that you got it takes this much money to win what they're really talking about is um people to staff people that are going to organize voter drives are going to get the word out Um, they mean advertising is really a a big thing in in um in races. That's what the money's for. It's not it's not bribery. It's that's it. It's it's expensive to run a race. And mind you, I have a lot of stuff to say about that. But that's what they're really talking about. And normally in order to win a race, you need a primary race, you need between for the house, you need to have between $100,000 and $500,000.

[00:30:17]outside money in Kentucky put 35 million dollars behind Massiey's opponent because Massie is one of the guys who was key to insisting on the release of the Epstein files which still have not been released by the way and and yes on uh Tuesday the anniversary of him being primared out was the six-month anniversary of him getting that law through Congress uh to demand the release of the Epstein files. And Trump's really gone after the Epstein people in a really big way. So uh when when Massie lost that race, but the his opponent won the district by 10 points and it was a district that Trump had won by 35 points. So they spent $35 million in in a race that basically the person did significantly worse in than Trump had done, which sh says I think a little bit about the way the popular mood is going. So the larger picture here is um to me is trying to take a look because because here we go. I should probably tell this what I'm really interested in is the larger story of American politics. like we all get absolutely tied up in your local races and all that and that's really important. I'm going to talk more about that in a second, but I'm interested in how the American political system represents the American people and the ideas that they hold. That's my sweet spot. That's what I care about. So, I look in this moment and I'm watching politics changing really quickly. like who's in bed with whom ideologically is a crapshoot, right? Did you ever think that you would be on the same side as some of the people you're on the same side with now? And you're seeing movement in a lot of different ways. And one of the things that I've been watching really closely since Trump, well, first time Trump took office was Senate Republicans because the way the system was supposed to work when the framers set it up. It's actually a really elegant system. Uh, which is kind of astonishing when you read the the journals from the convention because they're it doesn't look very elegant when they're doing it. But one of the things they did was they set up a system that was designed to change but to change slowly first of all and by that I mean the House of Representatives turns over in its entirety every two years.

[00:32:55]The president turns over every four years. And remember at the beginning they did not have term limits on that.

[00:33:00]We're going to get that. um Washington is going to give us the example of a two-term uh presidency and everybody is going to adhere to that until FDR and then after FDR we actually amend the Constitution to say only two terms. So you got the House of Representatives turning over every four years, the president turning over every six years.

[00:33:18]The Senate does not turn over in full except every um every six years. So you've got each senator um the whole Senate can turn over every six years, but each term is six years long, right? So a third of the Senate turns over every six years. And just so you know, the way they did that is they literally made lists at the very beginning and said, "Here's this class of senators. Here's this class of senators. Here's this class of senators." And then after that, um, when a new state was added, uh, you drew straws to see who was going to be the which, you know, the was going to be the longer serving one or the shorter serving one. Um, kind of cool. Anyway, that that I thought was interesting and I'm there's a rabbit hole I'm not going down.

[00:34:06]Anyway, um, and then you had the judges who serve for good the through for their the term of good behavior. So, the idea was the system could change, but it was going to change slowly, right? So they set this system up to do that. But one of the key pieces of it was they established what we always sort of bllyly refer to as checks and balances.

[00:34:27]And what that means is they literally set up a government that depended not on people's good instincts but on people's bad instincts.

[00:34:39]that is they figured that the people in the House of Representatives, but especially in the Senate, would care so much about their own power that they would always check the power of everybody else. That is, they would say, "We're not going to let the president get away with that because the president is out of line."

[00:35:00]Or, "We're not going to let the Senate get away with that because the Senate is out of line." and they would be so protective of their own prerogatives that they would make sure nobody could become a tyrant. And one of the things that is happening in this moment that's very different than than in Watergate is that the Republican party has decided that the party is more important than the country and they are no longer checking the president. And one of the things that I expected to see in Trump's second term was senators stepping up to oppose him. And they have not done so. I mean, in just a a a insanely cowardish, you know, cowardly way, they have not done so. But all this to say that in this week, Trump has gone so far that Republican senators appear to be unhappy.

[00:35:59]And there may be some signs of what that's going to look like going forward.

[00:36:02]So when I say they're unhappy, there was a meeting today between Republican senators and acting attorney general Todd Blanch. And remember, he is not the attorney general. He has not made it through Senate confirmation.

[00:36:18]So, he needs those senators. And all reports suggest it was an extraordinarily angry meeting uh because they're mad about this fund and and they may love Trump or whatever. They know they're going to have a really hard time going in front of their constituents and defending the president of the United States having a slush fund that has no oversight. he can use it however he wants to reward the J6ers.

[00:36:47]And they know that this is not going to play well when they're about to go in front of the American people. Not necessarily as individuals because only a certain number of senators are in play this year, but if the Republicans lose control of the Senate, um it affects all of them. And and and I want to emphasize that that senators care deeply about being in charge of their committees and as you know the committees are chaired by the people who are members of the party in control of the the chamber. So if the Democrats take control of the Senate this year, the Democrats take the chairmanships of all the committees and the Republicans become ranking members. And for people who have worked their whole lives to get into power, they do not want to be second fiddles. They just don't. Similarly, in the House of Representatives, it really looks even still, but it certainly looked before the all the redistricting is if the Democrats really probably were going to take the House of Representatives. And similarly, it's why you're seeing so many retirements from the House of Representatives. These guys don't want to be second fiddle. They don't want to be the the people pushing the paper. They want to be the ones making the decisions. So, senators apparently called Blanch up on the carpet. And there's more than that going on today, though, and that's that a number of you people have called attention to the fact that the House and Senate have somewhat abruptly gone into recess. And they did so they went into recess without passing the um budget reconciliation package.

[00:38:28]And now this is going to be um uh really in the weeds. So, and I I've given you a lot of weeds so far today, so I kind of hate to do it, but that the budget rec reconciliation package was, if you remember, it took forever for the Republicans to pass the appropriations bills. And then the Democrats said, "You ain't passing that that bill to fund um the Department of Homeland Security until you strip out uh Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE and uh Customs and Border Protection, which is the parent agency for Border Patrol, until we have reforms." And so the Republicans finally said, "Okay, okay."

[00:39:10]And they passed it way over. Um Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, did not want to do that. But after a month, he finally did it. And the argument was, well, we will go ahead and we'll pass those funding for those things under budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation is one of the very few measures in the Senate that cannot be filibustered. And as you remember, the filibuster is the um the the fact that nobody ever said senators had to stop talking. So there is a rule that says you have to stop talking, but it takes 60 votes to invoke it. And so it takes 60 votes to shut everybody up and so you can't so you can get past a filibuster.

[00:39:52]The fancy words make it sound a lot more highfulutin than it really is. Um but a number of bills, especially revenue bills, you can't filibuster. So you can just pass them with with 51 votes.

[00:40:05]Budget reconciliation is like that. So what the senator said is we'll just shove through that funding we want through budget reconciliation. And that's when Trump stepped up and said, "Wait, wait, wait. I want my ballroom. I want the funding. I want a billion dollars for my ballroom in that."

[00:40:21]And this is also where he's like, "We got to put in the Save Act." And he kind of wants to use it as a catchall for a whole bunch of stuff the way the Republicans used budget reconciliation last year for everything but the kitchen sink. And that's how we got the one big beautiful bill act. That's what that was. And it's got everything in it. And by the way, those cuts are starting to to bite now, and they're going to keep on biting worse and worse and worse. But the trick to a budget reconciliation bill is that usually it goes to a person called the Senate Parliamentarian. And the Senate Parliamentarian decides whether or not that that measure has um is in agreement with the Constitution and with the laws. And the Senate parliamentarian took one look at this idea of adding in the ballroom and said, "No, you can't do that because you didn't tell the relevant committees that you were going to do it and how you were going to do it. And because you didn't do that, you can't do it now. You don't you don't get back on that. It won't go in."

[00:41:28]Be that as it may, the reason that's significant for what I'm talking about in this larger picture of American politics is that the Senate Republicans didn't argue. They just said, "Okay."

[00:41:38]Now, if they had wanted to please Trump on that, they could have fought it and they didn't. They just said, "Okay, we're not going to put it in."

[00:41:45]Similarly, Trump's not going to get the Save Act through budget reconciliation because one of the rules for budget reconciliation is that needs to be related to the budget and it's going to be hard to put voter restrictions in something related to the budget. So when the Senate adjourned today, sort of everybody went home. And of course, we have a a holiday weekend coming up. But when that that happened, they left without taking up that budget reconciliation.

[00:42:12]They just went home. They just said, "We're not we're not going to deal with this. We're not going to deal with your ballroom and we're not going to um going to we're not going to actually put money right now between uh behind ICE and Border Patrol because we just know how freaking toxic that is and the American people are already freaking beside themselves over what this administration is doing.

[00:42:38]So you see here a president trying to consolidate power and you are beginning to see even Republicans breaking away from doing what Trump demands. And mind you, this is a really low bar because they should be doing stuff on their own.

[00:42:55]I mean, Trump should have been impeached ages ago, but he certainly should have been impeached over the slush fund and they didn't do it. So, I'm not talking we're out of the woods here yet, but they are no longer simply doing what Trump tells them to.

[00:43:11]And that was going to play out, I think, in a number of ways. Um, what I would really watch for is um who votes. um it's going to be possible for senators not to vote and therefore to make it easier for those who are voting to change the course of what the government is doing both Democrats and Republicans.

[00:43:32]That's worth watching for. But one of the things that I would really um emphasize in this moment is that they are not doing this because the Republicans are not doing this because they are suddenly seeing the light about Trump.

[00:43:54]They are doing it because they are concerned about the power that voters wield.

[00:43:59]And now is absolutely the time to make it very clear to your Republican electeds um and to your Democratic ones as well that you care deeply about these issues about the slush fund about uh you know whatever it is that's going on in this administration that you're concerned about because you can see the cracks opening and those cracks are there because you've been speaking up all this time. I mean, people tend to forget that there's been a lot of push back against this administration and it has worked.

[00:44:36]You know, the the um the appropriations measures for this year have much less cutting than than Trump wanted and so on. I'm not going to go into that because I've gone on forever today, but but I guess what I'm going for here is that we're in this really weird moment where it sure feels like the administration is crumbling. Trump is not in good shape and there is increasing recognition among the people in the administration that they might be in real trouble if the Democrats take over control of Congress. Trump certainly seems enough concerned about his taxes that he was willing to make some kind of an arrangement with acting attorney general Todd Blanch to invent this crazy get out of jail free card thing. And people have said, "Is it going to stand?" Um, I'm not a lawyer, but even I can read the statute books. I don't think you can do this. Um, we'll see. That's certainly what I have heard from legal people I have consulted.

[00:45:38]So, people are increasingly concerned about that. And as such, they are going to work really hard to make sure that they stay in power. And I think we're looking at a long hot summer here. But the flip side of that is that they're really concerned about staying in power because the American people are speaking up and they're making a real difference.

[00:45:57]So we're in this weird sense of who's which we've been in for a while, but it feels especially acute now. Who's going to make it across the finish line first?

[00:46:06]And and I would point you to a number of things you asked about. Um, you know, one of the things that's happened recently is Hawaii has recently passed a law that changes the way corporations can uh enact can can fund politics. It looks to me somewhat similar to what Montana has been talking about. Remember, this is our country. We can make these changes.

[00:46:34]But one of the things that I would really like to emphasize tonight is that your efforts first of all matter a lot.

[00:46:42]But one of the places really to focus is at the state level. State Supreme Court races matter a lot. The people who were interested in protecting fair voting maps in Georgia.

[00:46:56]Um, Jen Jordan and um, Miracle um, sorry I'm forgetting her last name because it's been a long day. Um, both lost their races uh, their primary uh, not their primary, their races on Tuesday. It's a real loss for Georgia.

[00:47:14]The the the court is now utterly packed in favor of the MAGA division of districts in that state. And my guess is most people just didn't even know it was on the ballot. We tried to get that word out, but this would be a really good place to work at organizing locally, showing up to make sure people understand what's happening and um and really putting in a lot of muscle on the election of people at the state legislature level because that's where you're going to get stuff like redistricting, especially after the 2030 census coming up. and to to really put some muscle in there as well as at the national level. Just making sure people understand things like the cuts that are coming because of the one big beautiful bill act that are going to come after the um the midterm elections in November that people might think come after you that somebody has passed a law after that.

[00:48:11]that in fact law passed last July, but they put off what the damage was going to be until after the midterms, recognizing how unpopular those cuts were going to be. Now is a time to make sure people really understand what's going on and to recognize that things have always been in flux uh in in since Trump took office. I know it looked like he was doing a ton of stuff and it looked like he was cementing power, but even within that there was always weakness. There was strength and weakness at the same time. So, a lot of what the Department of Government Efficiency did is it scooped up a lot of information about a lot of us. Um, and that's a bad thing that's still out there. But there are definitely cracks in the administration now because of the degree to which people have spoken up and there is room for a lot more of that going forward. So, um, I would I'm here to sort of urge you to keep speaking up and to recognize that this is none of this is going to be solved at the midterms. Like, I hope the midterms go really well for those of us trying to protect democracy. I hope 2028 goes really well for us. But if we're really going to change the trajectory of American democracy for a forever, you got to be in this for the long game. And that's going to mean taking breaks.

[00:49:31]That's going to mean finding ways to do what we do that are fun and that are joyful. I have to say I did an interview last night with Cleave Jones who's the guy who came up with the idea of the AIDS quilt and I found it profoundly inspirational in a way that I didn't expect. I thought we were kind of talking mechanics and he started to talk about why he does what he does and I I didn't know I didn't know any of that stuff that he talked about. I knew about more of the political stuff that he didn't mention at all. Um and and making sure we're doing it in a way that is sustainable over the long haul is going to be really important now and going forward. So um so please uh if you care about this stuff, find as my friend Kate Bar says, find your torch and pick up your torch and carry it because we're going to need all those torches to bring the light that we need going forward into these campaigns. But for all the confusion that you're seeing this week and for all the outrage, the outrage that I hope you feel over that slush fund and over the attempt to get Trump out of jail free, um those are not done deals yet, by the way. The Department of Justice would tell you so, but already members of Congress, including Republicans, are saying that they will stop them through legislation as they can. Uh they should impeach him, but um at least they will do that. Um, now is the time to to step step up and to keep that pressure on because the more Trump doubles down on his MAGA supporters, the harder it's going to be for Republicans to win elections. And that's exactly what Republicans are afraid of. So, um, speak up. Especially if you're a Republican, call call your people and say, "I'm not going to back you if this is the way you're going to be spending my tax dollars." Which, by the way, it's a really big deal to to everybody, I think. But like, you know how I feel about taxes. Stop spending my tax dollars on expletative that doesn't do anything to help the country. And I I bet that people across the political spectrum feel that