The Insurgents
UNLOCKED: Ep. 291: Will Biden Drop Out? ft. David Sirota
(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Joining me now is David Sarota. David is the founder and editor-in-chief of LeverNews. The Lever, David, thank you so much for joining me, how are you? - I'm good, thanks for having me. - So David, bringing you here because you're uniquely to talk about all of these stories I wanted to get into today. With Biden's terrible debate performance last week. And the conversations around him potentially dropping out or people pushing for him to drop out. So let's start with a debate. We all saw, I thought we all saw a candidate go out there, just totally collapse, just fail to perform, couldn't push back against even the most basic things that Trump was saying and most of that, we're lies. Just, did that leave you feeling crazy? Like the fact that they put him up there and he had such a bad performance, what was going through your mind when you were watching that? - I actually wasn't surprised in that I've been paying attention to this for a while and I actually thought Biden has been in decline frankly since 2019, 2020. I mean, I worked for Bernie Sanders on that race and you could see some of the early decline then and people didn't seem to care about it. He also didn't really run much of a campaign in 2020 or didn't have to, certainly towards the tail end of the primary and then in the general because of COVID. So I've been concerned about this for a long time. So in a sense, I wasn't surprised. I think I might've been surprised had it been any different. I think what I've been more surprised about is the gaslighting. I mean, I think that, you know, I think a lot of people, whether it's at the top of the Democratic Party or even now you see among sort of rank and file people, the defensiveness that you see where effectively people with a straight face are saying don't believe your lying eyes is, I mean, it's both predictable but it's kind of hard to, it's hard to experience 'cause you're like, hey, like you and I, we all saw that and now you're asking me to pretend like I didn't see that which is extremely strange but it's also something I mean, that was essentially predicted. There's that quote that a friend of mine sent and then I posted it on Twitter and apparently it started to trend. This quote from the book "1984" which has just had its 75th anniversary and the quote is the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final most essential command and the brilliance of that line is that you're supposed to read it and kind of laugh at it or maybe laugh with George Orwell in that he's pointing out a truth but now I feel like it's really almost completely on the nose like the party, the Democratic Party is literally telling me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears of what I saw Joe Biden do on the stage and I think that's actually kind of disturbing. I think it's really disturbing that we're now no longer allowed to admit the truth of what's going on, that that unto itself, admitting the truth of what's going on is a form of apostasy and I think now the good news is, I think if you look at polls, what is it, 70, 60, 70, 75% of people say Joe Biden has some serious cognitive and mental health challenges and probably shouldn't run for re-election, probably should step down. That makes me at least feel that, okay, most Americans, most normal, non-political junkie, non-partisan, non have a wild-eyed look in their eyes about politics and the election can admit that there is a serious problem here with the Democratic nominee. So I'm glad to see that most people are normal human beings who can admit the truth of what's going on but I'm not sure what the upshot of that is. I'm not sure what's gonna happen. - So we've seen Democratic Party officials, members of Congress, campaign staff dismiss that debate performance as Biden just having a bad night and I think that ignores two different things. One, the past few years where we've seen time after time Biden stumble over his words, freeze, lock up during speeches, appear incoherent, this is a pattern that we've seen. But also going forward, that bad night, again, not reality, that's not the truth, we'll be replayed over and over and over again in attack ads from up and down the ballot. Every Republican running this cycle is going to tie who they're running against to Biden and to that moment and insinuate that their candidate, this Democratic candidate supports Biden and stands behind them and is lying to their base. Could you talk about from someone who's a veteran of campaigns, someone who understands the realities and consequences of an effective attack at what this means by just dismissing this is a bad night when we know that's not the case? - Yeah, I mean, look, I think that, again, if we're being honest here, anybody who has watched Joe Biden knows this isn't a one-off situation. Joe Biden is in a state of decline. And Joe Biden is not only in a state of decline, I mean, let's just be really honest here. If he's in a state of decline right now, where do you think he's going to be in two or three years? Right, I mean, and this isn't just like an election that happens in November and then it's like the end of a game show, like my kids watch, is it cake, right? This absurd show about where the people make cakes. And like at the end of the show, somebody wins, couple of them lose, and like the show's over, great. Like the election is not a game show, right? It's not like the election happens, hooray, it's over. Like then there's like four years of like running the country, having a nuclear arsenal, running the military, et cetera, et cetera. So my point is is that anybody who looks at this and says this is just a, you know, a one bad night is not being honest about the stakes of this election, not being honest about where this looks like it's going and also this isn't something where like Joe Biden, like Bernie Sanders had a hard attack in the 2020 campaign. That was something that people recover from. John Federman had a stroke, that's something that people recover from. You don't recover from cognitive decline that you age related cognitive decline. And this is not a pleasant conversation and I'm sure there are people who are gonna be listening or say, oh, you're being like so mean. This is, you know, you're being insulting to Joe Biden. It's like, this is so much bigger than Joe Biden, right? Like this is whether Donald Trump is gonna win and all the things that that would entail. And so that's a long way of getting to the question of like, what does this mean politically? I mean, you've already seen the candidate running, the Republican candidate running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania has already launched ads against Bob Casey, the incumbent Democratic Senator, saying that Bob Casey knew that this was going on and helped essentially bury it. I think you're gonna see more of those ads. So now you're talking about not only a situation that makes it easier for Donald Trump to win, now you're talking about a situation that makes it easier for Donald Trump and his whole party to take over all of the government. That's what's at stake here when we're talking about Joe Biden continuing to insist on being the nominee after he and his campaign staff and his White House reportedly tried to hide all of this from Democratic voters. I mean, that's the other part that hasn't really been talked about, which is the potential fraud, the perpetrating of a fraud on Democratic primary voters in this way. If you believe what's been reported in Axios, if you believe what's been reported in the Wall Street Journal in the last few days about White House officials trying to hide all of this, about EU officials being concerned about this, essentially the voting public was defrauded in the primary. I mean, there wasn't much of a primary, but certainly I think if this had come up in the context of a primary, there might have been more candidates getting in. It might have been seen as more of an emergency earlier on. And so I think voters, I think people should be angry here, not, like get over being sad for Joe Biden. I mean, it is sad for him as sort of an individual human being, but you should be mad. Yeah, you were defrauded. You were essentially lied to about what has been going on. And now here we are. And the consequences of being lied to could be a Trump presidency and all of that, that entails. Like if you're sitting there and your main emotion as you feel sad for Joe Biden and not mad on behalf of yourself, your family, your children, your country, your world, your priorities are all screwed up. You mentioned the Wall Street Journal reporting and Axios reporting. I want to remind people of that story a few weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal about Biden's slips. In the outrage among the liberal class, how dare they not talk to any liberals for this story? As you saw a detailed account from all of these different people who just said, - You need the liberal, right? You need the liberal take on someone's cognitive decline. There has to be as we balance the liberal take on that. I mean, it's so ridiculous. - Yeah, and it was coming during this wave of all of these Democratic officials saying behind the scenes Joe Biden is sharp. He's attentive. And of course we knew that was bullshit because we could just see him in front of us on TV, in front of on our screens, not clear, not sharp. But then there's also this reporting from Axios saying they're basically describing him sundowning. They're like, well, he gets really sleepy. He gets really tired after four p.m. That is like, it's very clear he's sundowning. So my question is if you're operating from this assumption where you accept these facts as a reality, you see what you see, you accept it, you see he is in decline, the question is why? Why would they continue to force him through? So for in your opinion and for again, from someone who's worked on campaigns, been in the system, why force it if they know it's a risk? - Well, I think there's two things. I think it's partially that let's put it this way. The charitable view would be that they are, they are the people who have tried to hide this or trying to force this to happen, have made a calculated decision that they believe that while Joe Biden is a risky nominee, the unknown of another nominee, whether it's Kamala Harris or one of the so-called rising star governors or whoever else that they would be, they're an unknown in a general election setting. So they're more of a risk. And so the charitable view is that, is that they're thinking about wanting to beat Donald Trump and they're worried that Joe Biden is more of a risk, excuse me, less of a risk than an unknown. Okay, that's a charitable view. I think the less charitable, more likely, reality, is that the people who are trying to force this through, their financial situation, their job, essentially their employment status, their political status in the party, their social status, their cachet, all of that is wrapped up in Joe Biden. It's all invested in Joe Biden as a stock that all of that in their lives are invested in. That doesn't just include people who work in the White House. I'm talking about people who run groups in Washington, D.C. who work with the administration. I'm talking about all the entire political architecture of the Democratic Party, and by the way, its media organs are in some way tied into the current stock known as Joe Biden. So you can't allow that stock to be revealed for fear of the value of the stock going down or the stock being dumped, and that is sort of chaotic for you. So I guess what I'm saying is there's a, there's kind of a self-preservation here among the people around Biden. And I think of it this way. I mean, there's that famous Upton Sinclair quote. And the quote is, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Right, so it's difficult to get these Democratic power brokers to understand an honest truth about Joe Biden when their salary depends on them not understanding that truth about Joe Biden's current cognitive status. So that's the not charitable view. And then one last thing I would say is that I also think that among the Democratic political class, we are now living in a moment in an era when the priority of the Democratic political class that has been sold, has been created by that political class and sold to rank and file voters is that the highest sin in all of politics, the one thing that is simply not allowed is to tell the truth, tell any inconvenient truths about fellow Democrats. And so I think there's part of this dynamic is that the elected officials of the Democratic Party are, know that there's, I think this is the right word for it. There is an "Omerta." Omerta is a mafia word for the cone of silence that is enforced around essentially illicit behavior. And I think there is a deep Omerta in the Democratic Party that has made every elected official in the entire party afraid to speak honest truths about even a situation as grave as this. And think about it, you saw Dean Phillips, the congressman from Minnesota, he tried to run a campaign, a primary against Joe Biden when nobody else would. He tried to actually recruit other candidates to run in that primary, maybe he didn't run a perfect campaign, but he was the only one who actually stepped up and tried to issue a warning about this. And he was effectively thrown out of the party. I mean, he is not running for re-election, the party ran a primary against him. I mean, he violated the Omerta and he was deeply punished for it, which was designed to send a message to everyone else, to be quiet. And so now here we are. So I want to get your take on some of the media coverage about this push for Biden to drop out. We saw a wave of op-eds and columns, it's even the night of, the night of the debate, pundits on most networks, of course, Fox, but even CNN and MSNBC were flabbergasted, saying maybe it's something the party needs to look into, notably positive America rank old the Biden campaign by just laying it out in plain terms. This is difficult. It's a conversation the party needs to have. Ezra Klein in The New York Times today wrote, "There are plenty of voters "who might want to vote for democracy, "but do not want to vote for Biden." That's why we see Democratic Senate candidates running well ahead of him in key states. And he makes the argument that it's just basically, the choice was not provided to Democrats. And he says, "Rather than act as a check "on Biden's decisions and ambitions, "the party has become an enabler of them "and enforcer of them. "It is giving the American people an option, "they do not want, and then threatening them "with the end of democracy if they do not take it." Overall, this is yet another column calling for Biden to drop out. Do you think any of this is going to make an impact? Do you think this even registers with the campaign, with the party? - I think at some level it must, I look, I certainly think that we live in a country in which there is very little democracy left. I think that neither party really reacts very much to what the voting public wants. You have a situation where 70 plus percent of people say they don't think the current president has the cognitive capacity to be president. And if that can't break through, I think it's interesting to think about an election based on protecting democracy, of an election about the end of democracy. I think when 72% of the country says that they don't believe the current president has the cognitive capacity to be president and the president and his party basically completely ignores that. I think that is part of the democracy crisis, right? The election is supposedly about the democracy crisis, but that's part of the democracy crisis. So I think what we're about to see, whether it matters or not, that question of whether it matters or not is where really are we in the democracy crisis, right? Arguably the democracy crisis is worse than we even think. If the Democratic Party simply cannot respond to this, will not respond to this in any serious way. It would say to me that the democracy crisis is far deeper, far greater, far more advanced than it's even being portrayed right now, that Donald Trump is not the only threat to democracy, that really both parties have become in different ways, a threat to democracy. I'm not saying that the Democrats are worse than Trump. I'm just saying if the democracy crisis presents itself in different ways, trying to prevent any kind of democratic choice in a primary blocking effectively is what the Biden and the DNC did, blocking any kind of real vigorous contested primary, preventing any kind of primary debate even with the long shot candidates who ran, essentially preventing any kind of emergency intervention with a candidate who is in cognitive decline. That is, I mean, look, to put it colloquially, I mean, that's banana republic shit, right? That's like shit from the Eastern Bloc, right? Like that's the stuff that is caricatured in movies about the, you know, the dear leader who's dead or half dead and the hangers on, the apparatrix, are still propping them up to try to cling to power, right? That's what we're living through right now. That is the democracy and it used to be a cliche because we would sort of scoff at these countries where democracy was a sham. But that's what it feels like right now and that's what it will be exposed to be. If the Democratic Party simply tries to just like tweet through this or just ignore it or just pretend it's not happening, that's where we are. Like we're the cliche that America used to kind of scoff at or laugh at, that's us. - So data for progress did a poll comparing Biden to Trump but also Trump to a variety of other Democrats, including some of these rising star governors, like you mentioned, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, just to see how they might fare. And all of them were losing to Trump and Harris, I believe Newsome and Buttigieg, all were within one point of Biden's performance, but Newsome, maybe Buttigieg to some extent, Kamala Harris, don't have the same name ID, name recognition that Biden has. I mean, after the president, few were in such a cell phone. - I mean, it's such a cell phone. - Yeah, and the campaign sent that poll out which was later clarified by data for progress. Whoa, we gotta, we have to recognize campaigning for these people could improve their performance in those polls. So when you see that kind of data, it seems to me there should be a strong case to be made to swap him out, replace him with somebody. If they do, is there anybody you think would have the greatest likelihood of that group of beating Trump or is it somebody else? - Well, I mean, first of all, I mean, let's just talk about them sending out the poll for a second. I think that what I think everybody who cares about the Democratic Party should also be worried about is how much damage will Joe Biden and his hangers on? How much damage are they willing to do? How many things in the party are they willing to set on fire in order to try to cling to power? And what I mean specifically about that is what they're really saying is that despite all of the rising stars, the politicians up and coming politicians across the Democratic Party, somehow nobody can possibly hope to compete as well as an 81 year old man sundowning, right? Like think about what the message that is being sent by the White House about the future leaders of the party. They're basically saying those future leaders are a joke, can't compete, can't possibly compete, are pathetic, right? And then sending out a poll saying, look at how weak these pathetic people are, right? Now, I don't happen to think those people on the list are pathetic. I mean, I don't agree with all of them on every policy, but as sort of political figures, I don't think they are a joke, right? You've got governors, senators, the vice president, you know, the secretary of transportation. I mean, again, I've had my differences with Pete Buttigieg. I don't think that guy's like a political joke, right? But the Biden White House is essentially saying, they're all a joke. They can't, they don't have as many, as much skills as the 81 year old sundowner, right? So they are doing grave damage. The Biden folks are grave damage to the future of the party. Now, I would also say this, I think they're entirely wrong. As I said, those people on the list are, I think some of them could be formidable candidates. And I think it's a self-own for the incumbent president of the United States to be pointing to a poll showing that actually people who aren't even running against Donald Trump, who are not well known nationally, are actually polling pretty well and competitively with the current president of the United States, like you just owned yourself by showing those poll numbers. And look, I think when I look at that list, I mean, look, I think anybody who is one statewide elections in difficult to win swing states, almost inherently have some political skills. So obviously Gretchen Whitmer has political skills in an industrial swing state. Josh Shapiro, who, I mean, I grew up at Josh Shapiro, I've known him for 40 plus years, I mean, he consistently wins elections in Pennsylvania, which I would say is probably the most difficult political swing state in the country, even more so than Michigan, because you've got energy politics there as well on top of everything else, fossil fuel politics and climate. And I mean, that state is, it's incredible that it can even be governed. I grew up there. And so, I think Whitmer, I think Shapiro, I also think, look, I think Gavin Newsom is impressive and formidable. I don't know, again, I don't agree with all these people on their political policies. I'm just saying as political forces, Gavin Newsom can exude real strength. And I think this is the thing that is really underlying everything, which is that after the debate, everyone was like, oh, you know, Trump lied. Like of course Trump lied. Like he's like the human personification of a lie, right? It's like you're not like, of course, like he, yes, a lie is a lie and Donald Trump is a lie in flesh and blood. So you didn't tell me anything I didn't know. I think the thing that we know about politics is first and foremost, part of the question is, are you exuding strength and engagement? Are you like, not just lucid, but are you exuding strength? And I think on that stage, regardless of what was said, you saw Donald Trump come off as strong and you saw Joe Biden come off as kind of like a ghost. And part of it's not his, I mean, a lot of it's not his fault. I mean, he's, he's 81. It's not his fault for being old. It's his fault for being that old and insisting on running that's incredibly selfish and dangerous, but it's not his fault for being old. It's not his fault that his voice is hoarse and he looks like a ghost and, you know, he looks like the guy from Poltergeist 2, who's knocking on the door. I mean, he really does look like the preacher from Poltergeist 2. Everyone can go look it up. So, but my, but my, I digress. But my point is, is that all of the other damage, or I was saying most of the other Democrats on that like list of like who might run, most of them can exude strength. And, and to my mind, that's what the Democratic Party first and foremost above everything else needs at the top of the ticket. Somebody who can exude strength. And I think there's plenty of people to pick, to pick from and to come back to my original point, I think the White House and other Democratic officials insisting that only Joe Biden can win, is an insult and doing grave harm to the future leaders of the party. - It is extremely worrying when we see polling starting to emerge today, especially. It was already showing like post poll focus groups were horrible, surveys were terrible, but now that we're seeing models updated and statewide polling updated, it is bad. Biden is now down in New Hampshire. A double digit decline from last December. Nate Silver updated his model. Whatever weight you wanna give that, Biden is plummeting. It's again almost a double digit decline there as well while Trump is rising. So, I think that underscores the importance to look elsewhere for someone strong who can beat Trump. And I don't think this is shortage of candidates in the Democratic Party. And the urgency was underscored today where the Supreme Court ruled in the immunity case where they said official presidential acts, absolutely of immunity. And maybe there's some for unofficial acts. The court said that that really hasn't been clarified. So it's ambiguous, but it was at least, at the very least, a partial win for Trump who was just convicted of 34 felonies and has a long history of egregious immoral behavior, corrupt behavior, but you were saying before we started recording, it's certainly not just a Trump problem. Could you talk about this decision and the danger this poses across the board for future presidents, including Trump? - Look, let's first admit the reality of where we are. Presidents don't typically get held accountable really for anything in the legal sphere, okay? So, I just, I wanna like not overstate what this ruling does in practice. Like in legal precedent, it's a huge deal, but in practice, let's all admit a truth that nobody likes to admit, which is that presidents are rarely held accountable for anything when it comes to the law. I mean, Donald Trump like put his thumb on the scale of investigations when he was president and Barack Obama went into court and tried to essentially say it was, he was allowed to drone murder American citizens without any trial at all. Richard Nixon said, back in Watergate, if the president does it, it's not illegal. Now, I bring up Nixon because I think that's where the doctrine has changed, which is this. When Nixon said in that interview with David Frost, after Watergate, after he was resigned and he was pardoned, by the way, to keep that in mind, right? Talk about a guy who broke the law and it didn't face any consequence. I mean, he did resign, but even he was pardoned. But when he said, when the president does it, it is not illegal, that was considered outrageous at the time. That was considered, like that's, it's a famous quote because people were like, oh my, holy shit, this is, that's like insane. That, like that, like look how insane Richard Nixon is for saying that, right? Now you fast forward to this and now the Supreme Court is saying that, right? So that's actually the change, right? Like we're now, we're now screaming, not just screaming the quiet part, we're writing the quiet part into the law. And so I think that's, to me, that's why this is so important in that everything is now out in the open and explicit. And I think that's what's really scary in the sense of there's no shame anymore. There's no like, yeah, okay, it may be in practice that like the president doesn't really have to follow the law but like we can't just come out and like kind of, you can't just say that. That can't be the official policy, right? Like I mean, we're gonna be like wink and nod and we have to feel a little bit, we have to kind of like not shove it in people's face. No, no, no, now we're shoving it in people's face. And I think we started to shove it in people's face in 2014. I mentioned that situation with Obama and that some people who, I'm so old I know about it but people who don't remember it didn't pick it up or aren't old enough to remember that. I mean, that's not an exaggeration. Sounds like an exaggeration but it's not. Obama had a kill list in which he was targeting for drone killing alleged terrorists including some American citizens. And there was no judge or jury, he didn't have a warrant, he didn't have a et cetera, et cetera. It was just, it was literally extra judicial murder. And that was challenged in court and the Obama administration went into court to say it was allowed that the president is allowed to murder extra judicially, AKA without a trial, without a due process is allowed to murder American citizens. If the president unilaterally deems them a national security threat. Now maybe people listening to this think that's okay. Maybe people, I don't think it's okay. I mean, like if you're gonna allow that, what are you not gonna allow? And now the Supreme Court is basically enshrining that into law in an expansive way. Saying the president can basically do anything, they forget about just murdering on national security grounds. The president can do essentially whatever they want, whenever they want, forever as long as they can deem it an official act. And so here's all that some context to get to what are the ramifications of this? Because I just said that, listen, in practice, it's been like this. So it doesn't necessarily change what's already been going on, but it does change the doctrine and it does make it more explicit. So here's the thing to fear. If the legal system has now made it explicit that this is allowed, what will Donald Trump do with that power now that it's explicit? What will a Democratic president do with, well, it doesn't matter the party. What will any president do with that power now that they don't have to kind of sneak around or be ashamed of it once in a while? What are they gonna do with that power now that it's in the law that they're allowed to do whatever they want? And not only what is the president gonna do, what are administrations gonna do? All their cabinet secretaries and the like, now knowing that they don't have to feel any shame, they don't have to feel any hesitation to do whatever they want. That's the scary part. And again, I don't think it's just scared, I mean, you can be scared of Donald Trump, but like, you know, you should be scared of any president having that power. And the crazy thing is that, it's not crazy, it's predictable, I guess, but it is crazy. You know, John Roberts in his confirmation hearing, I think I saw a clip go around today about how he said, you know, he was asked about this, like, are there any constraints on the president? And he said, yeah, of course there are legal constraints on the president. And now, you know, now here we are, there aren't. - That sets up two other decisions, a conversation about two other decisions that they released last week that just have huge implications. One, Snyder versus the United States, which is basically bribery is legal, bribery is political bribery, just totally fine, doesn't matter. And the other was the decision where they overturned the Chevron doctrine, which was in place for four decades or so, had been defended by Thomas in decisions, which the lever pointed out last year. After a huge push by his benefactors, like Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, suddenly he changed courts, he wanted to overturn it in the court, did that were basically granted deference to the administrative state to interpret laws and regulations that were ambiguous. Now you have regulations, opaque laws coming out of Congress, going to a judiciary that is overrun with federalist society judges. And again, on the corruption point, bribery is totally legal, totally fine, basically. So you have a basically a president who can never be prosecuted for anything he or she does, well in office as part of an official act, and then just corruption throughout the government and a federalist society judiciary that's going to effectively help gut regulations and the administrative state in this country. Could you explain what is happening here? People should be horrified, unless I'm being hyperbolic. Are you horrified? Should I be worried? - Well, I am horrified and this dovetails with I've been working for two years on a project called Master Plan, which is about to come out in August and I should come back and we should talk about it. But the preview is that we have been working for two years and have surfaced never before seen documents about the fact that there was an actual explicit Master Plan to take over the judiciary and the first season of Master Plan, it's going to be an ongoing show, is about the legalization of corruption, is that they understood that they had to legalize the buying and selling of votes, the buying and selling of judicial seats, the buying and selling of elections in order to get what they want, in order to effectively impose minority rule. Back in the late 60s, early 70s, when this was really hatched, the conservatives, the corporate community, saw that there was essentially, they believe there was too much democracy, that the public will was getting too much of what it wanted. And so the way they worked methodically was to try to overtake the part of the government that can impose minority rule, which is the judiciary. And they had specific goals in legalizing corruption because once you legalize corruption, then you can legalize everything else. Once you can buy the courts, once you can buy the Congress, once you can buy the president, then you can get them to pass the policies that you, the people who did the buying, that you want, even if those policies are unpopular. So I think that's where we are right now. And I think the ruling that you mentioned this week was kind of the most explicit capping off of that. I mean, there was Citizens United, and our master plan when it comes out, it goes over a lot of the different colorful cases. But the last one that passed seemed petty on its face, but the doctrine that it created was incredible. I mean, it was a case about essentially a local mayor who had given out a municipal contract and the recipient of the municipal contract had given the mayor $13,000 after the contract was handed out to the contractor. It was, they called it a gratuity. And what the Supreme Court said was that the federal anti-bribery law did not cover this, that this was fine, that the longstanding existing basic federal anti-corruption anti-bribery law that was used to convict this mayor and the conviction was upheld in the appeals court, the court used this little case to create the doctrine that the federal bribery law, right? The like direct, you can't just pay a government official for a public policy or a contract or a government favor that that law is now essentially gutted. And so I think what people woke up to for a second was in seeing that ruling, wow, like if that's allowed, corruption basically is the government, right? That's where we are now, which is that we're at the point now where bribery and corruption are politics. And what I mean by that is bribery and corruption have always kind of been a part of politics, but they've been an illicit and illegal part of politics. The Supreme Court has now created a situation where bribery and corruption are normal legal politics. And so I think when you put that together with the court being, the judiciary being controlled by the federalist society, the far right, you have a situation where we're entering an era where policies, I mean, again, corruption's been there for a long time, but policies are gonna be openly bought and sold now. Elections are already being openly bought and sold. I mean, everything is for sale. And I think the, I'm sure people are still listening and they're not super depressed and wanting to commit suicide after me saying this is, well, what can be done about it? Well, you could try to expand the court. You could have the fight that FDR had with the Supreme Court and FDR tried to quote, unquote, pack the court. And that's remembered as, oh, he lost 'cause he didn't successfully add judges to the court. That's the wrong view, in my view of what actually happened, that people should go read the book FDR's Gambit, that in just having the fight with the court, he backed the court down from its obstruction to the New Deal, that you can have fights with the court. Congress can pass, can take the rulings and pass new laws and when it comes to Chevron, that doctrine about limiting the power of the agency's Congress can pass laws saying the agencies have this explicit power, but Congress can act, the courts can be expanded, but we have a president right now, Joe Biden, who has said he doesn't support expanding the court. And the campaign to expand the court will have to be a multi-year campaign. You're gonna need a president to wage it. You're gonna need a political party to wage it. And we don't have that right now. So where do we, what happens now? Like, I think things are gonna keep getting worse for a while, unfortunately. - There's one other proposal that I'm curious to get your take on before we wrap up. And that is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted today, "The Supreme Court has become consumed by a corruption crisis beyond its control. Today's ruling represents an assault on American democracy. It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture. I intend on filing articles of impeachment upon our return. She doesn't specify whether it's for all the conservative justices. You could assume it's at least for Thomas and Alito. Do you think this will get anywhere? Do you think this will have an impact? Do you think this will put pressure on justices like threatening to pack the court? - I think it's the start of a process. Look, I think Sheldon Whitehouse has been incredible on this stuff. I think he's been a real hero on this stuff. He's pushed the Disclose Act. He's pushed for real ethics reform. I think he understands this is a long battle. So I think AOC saying that she's gonna do articles of impeachment, this is the way to start pushing back. And I don't think we can fault them when the first steps that they take go, quote unquote, nowhere, right? I mean, this is a multi-year battle. The right has succeeded in turning the courts into super legislatures, right? I mean, that's actually the real travesty of what's gone on here underneath everything, is that the elected part of our government has been usurped by the unelected part of our government. The court has essentially become a super legislature. It just makes laws. It doesn't just take old precedents and apply them to existing laws or bills that passed Congress. It is making law. And so that has been a 50 year project for people like Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, to create that it's going to take a long time to unwind that and fight back against that. And it's terrifying because we don't have a lot of time on certain things like climate change and the like. But I think the short answer is I'm glad to see at least some Democrats doing things like what AOC has done, what Sheldon White House has been doing for years. And I don't see those things only as symbolic. Those are our real legislative efforts that are going to take a long time to keep pounding on. The question I will have for somebody like AOC or, and we've seen it from White House, I think his commitment is unquestioned, is are you just going to introduce it, get the press release and then leave? Or are you going to build and organize around those things, month after month, year after year? 'Cause I think that's the only way to combat this. And I think it's the way, frankly, that's the way the conservative legal movement actually had success. They did it year after year after year. The Federalist Society started as a campus based debate club, essentially, and it built itself up year after year after year. And that's the kind of commitment that's going to be necessary to actually push them back. Keep watching and definitely want to have you back on once Master Plan releases. David Serretta, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people follow you and find more of the levers work? - Just go to levernews.com and sign up for our newsletter. We publish usually once a day, sometimes a little more. We will not inundate your email box and everything we do is original reporting. So go there, sign up and I will see you there. - Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, thanks for having me.