Defending Democracy
Rep. Dan Goldman on Project 2025, Fixing the Supreme Court and GOP Extremism
New York Congressman Dan Goldman (D) joins Marc Elias to discuss why he’s made voting rights a top issue, the major concerns he has about Project 2025, efforts to fix the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican voter suppression.
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This video was produced by Allie Rothenberg, Gabrielle Corporal and Paige Moskowitz. It was edited by Gabrielle Corporal.
- Broadcast on:
- 20 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
New York Congressman Dan Goldman is here to discuss the threat of Project 2025, the SAVE Act, Voting Rights legislation, and the Supreme Court. Welcome back to Defending Democracy. I'm Mark Elias. Let's get started. Welcome Congressman Dan Goldman. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Great to be with you. So I interview a lot of members of Congress and elected officials on this podcast, and many of them are lawyers, but you were really a lawyer lawyer. Not to disparage the others, but you actually practice law. You were a federal prosecutor, and you had a very interesting background, and I'm just curious why you decided, given that you were a successful lawyer, that you wanted to run for Congress? Well, it's a very good question that I ask myself quite often. I have been committed to public service for my entire career and trying to figure out a way to make our country better, and there are lots of different ways of doing it, lots of different pathways. It morphed from me being a prosecutor to starting to do some legal analysis during the Mueller investigation on TV and elsewhere that eventually led me to meeting Adam Schiff, and we struck up a relationship, and ultimately he asked me to come down when he became chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and head up an investigations unit that he wanted to start. That was end of 2018, and given what we had seen of Donald Trump for the first two years, I was very interested in using my skills as a prosecutor to provide some checks and balances against Trump. I made that trip down as a staff member, it evolved into the impeachment investigation, which I led, but after that I came back to New York City and thought, "Okay, we were able to, what I thought proved the case, even if we didn't get a conviction, many of the Republican senators said, acknowledge that we really did prove the case, but they wanted the electorate to decide," and I thought that would happen, and President Biden would win, and Donald Trump would ride his golf cart off into the sunset, and obviously we know that did not happen. So 2022 the seat became open and redistricting in New York, which I know you're well familiar with, and all of a sudden I lived in what was now an open seat in New York City, which happens about once a generation, and so given that Trump was still commanding the Republican Party and getting worse and worse, I thought, or out now if there's any time to jump in the arena or back in the arena to try to use whatever skills and expertise I have to be a bulwark against him and the House Republicans, who I knew very well from impeachment, this was the opportunity, and so I jumped at it. So we're going to get into the current time period in a second, but I have to ask you, one of the things that I have commented on has been how much the Republican House has shifted over time, that people, we've always thought of the Republican House as a pretty right-wing institution, and for good reason it has been, but even if you look at sort of where the median House Republican was in 2018, it shifted to 2020, and when you look at where they were in 2020 and you compare them today, it seems like they are just getting more and more extreme, and there seems to be no countervailing force, and I'm just wondering if your experience, you know, anecdotal as a staffer and now as a member, kind of accords with that, and if so, if you have any explanation. I agree with you. I do, as with most things, think a lot of it traces back to Donald Trump, and Donald Trump in part has moved to the Republican Party, and there are maybe 15 to 20 percent of people who would consider themselves to be moderate or form, you know, traditional Republicans who have left the party or, you know, no longer support the party, but there are about 15 to 20 percent of new members of the Republican Party from this MAGA wing that Donald Trump has cultivated, and it has forced the House in particular, and the Senate is now following as it usually it is slower, but it has forced the House to move with Trump, and the base that he controls is very powerful within the Republican Party, and I have many of my colleagues who I talk to who are clearly not fans of Donald Trump, I think they secretly hope that he will not win in November, but he commands the party, and so those who are able to manipulate him a little bit, as most people can, but with flattery and excessive support, get in his good graces, and they become amplified, and they become more important, and they become more relevant, and they become more powerful, and that is what has happened over the last eight years, to the point where you now have people who are in safe seats in the Republican conference that they call it, who I genuinely think would rather be in the minority than be in the majority and have to govern, they do not believe in governing, and they do not care if they hang their other colleagues out to dry in the Republican Party and force them or cause them in some ways to potentially lose and therefore lose the majority, and if you want to tear the house down, as many of them do, there's no bargaining, there's no negotiating, and so we are now in a situation that we've seen in this Congress where that extreme right wing of the Republican Party has total control because their majority is only four seats, and therefore the Speaker of the House needs them on board if they are to do anything along party lines, and that's why we've been in the stalemate for this entire Congress, and absolutely nothing has gotten done. Okay, I want to talk about the sort of legislation and democracy issues that you've been involved in. The first bill you introduced in Congress was a very important bill, actually, it is something that I think has not received the amount of attention or credit to you, frankly, that you deserve, which is you introduced the Early Vote Act in February 2023, which would require states to offer at least 14 days of early voting in federal elections and begin the pre-processing of ballots before election day, and I'm just curious, you know, give people a window into when you are deciding what bill you want to introduce, particularly as one of your first bills or your first bill, like what's that thinking look like? Because I assume you have a whole range of things you could say, well, I could start with housing, I could start with congestion and traffic, maybe not Congress, but how did you decide that this is where you were going to start? Well, part of it is that I recognize as I came into Congress not only a new member but a new elected official, that there were a few areas that I had a lot of expertise on, and the vast majority of areas of policy I had very little expertise on. So I wanted initially to focus on the things that I was most familiar with and most comfortable, and I had a bunch of ideas. Democracy was the thrust of my campaign. Separation of powers, rule of law, voting rights has always been an interest of mind dating back to law school 25 years ago, and I truly believe that the most foundational right that we have in our country is the right to vote, and from the right to vote, all of the rights flow. And ultimately, the right to vote is our democratic trump card. If literally every American voted, we would have what you might call a perfect democracy. Now that's not going to happen, but the idea that we could do that always keeps democracy alive, and always gives the people something, some control over what can happen. And I saw efforts from many years, I actually wrote my law review note in law school on how felon disenfranchisement was the modern day literacy test as a different way of keeping people of color from voting. And so this has been an area that's been an interest of mind for 25 years, and I think a lot about different ways that we can make it easier to vote, because I truly believe that we can defeat any fascist dictator with the right to vote. And you notice, of course, the Republicans, because you litigate this every day, their strategy for elections is voter suppression, because their ideas are losers. And so my view of it is this is not partisan. I just think every person should be able to vote and should be able to vote as easily as possible. And so we brainstormed about different ways, the different types of things that we could do, that would be complementary to what exists already and might be helpful and effective in moving the needle just a little bit forward. And that's how we settled on this. And there were a number of, when you see what Georgia did last time, where they banned giving water to people in line, and you see, you'll know Kansas, wherever it was, where there was, you know, they got rid of all these polling places and made it impossible for people to use public transportation to get there. So we not only included 14 days of early voting required for every federal election, but we also included some text about where voting booths have to be and near university campuses and near public transportation, so that these efforts to just make it much more difficult for people who don't have cars to vote around the country are harder. Yeah, so I want to pick up on a strand of your answer, because it is something that baffles me as someone who, you know, I'm, I do a lot of work with with members of Congress, and I try to pay attention to Republicans are up to, but you said something that rings exactly right, which is that this shouldn't be a partisan issue, but it is. And you know, it has been well recited by many people that, you know, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized 98 to zero in the Senate in 2006 under a conservative president. By the way, it passed the House overwhelmingly in that same year with only 33 no votes. The Business Roundtable was actually involved in lobbying for the passage, the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006. It had been reauthorized in 1982 under Ronald Reagan with similar bipartisan majorities. And, you know, I've marveled that there are actually more Republicans in the House who have an F rating with the NRA than voted for any voting bill. I mean, and by the way, that was a relatively low bar to cross because there were no Republican votes in favor of the Freedom to Vote Act. There were no Republican votes in favor of the for the People Act. There were no Republican votes in the House to support the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And I am curious because there are some, as you say, safe seat Republicans who are presumably, you know, wouldn't, you know, would think it would burnish their image, maybe, you know, in for some reason, to support some provision, whether it is, you know, the bill you introduced, you know, which is pretty common sense. I mean, it's not, it's not a radical act, or you also introduced the prove act, which allows 16 and 17 year olds to pre register to vote again, a very sort of, you know, moderate, common sense provision. Why is it that this issue seems to be an absolute no go for your Republican colleagues? First of all, there's the special interests that have the most influence on them are disfavored by the majority of Americans. And generally, their policies are disfavored by the majority of the Americans. So if they are, if they would take an objective view of voting, it would be against their self interest, whether they are in safe seats or not. And they are all about self preservation and self-flagellation and self advancement. And that's what the, you know, especially, I think the Republican Party, which is focused on power and power alone and not democracy, because they want, especially now, you look at Project 2025 in this Christian nationalist strain and overturning Roe and IVF and controlling women's bodies and moving against the right to marry whoever you want to. They are trying to take us back to the 1950s because of this sort of extreme religious nationalism. And voting is their kryptonite because if everyone voted, Democrats would win. And so then the question becomes, to your point, what would have happened if Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema were willing to get rid of the filibuster for voting rights in the Senate? Let's say that kills the filibuster permanently. And there are obviously what goes around comes around in this business. So you do have to be careful about what that you make. But if we are going to, in a nonpartisan way, open up voting to more and more Americans, I think the net effect and certainly Republicans think the net effect is that Democrats will win a lot more. Yeah. I mean, two reactions. The first is, you know, the point I often time to make is that the Republican Party is no longer a majoritarian party. They don't even aspire to be a majoritarian party. And it's ahistorical. I mean, usually the one thing that political parties want to say, and politicians want to say, is that they have a mandate that the people are with them. And if you look at the presidential election, they don't seek to command a majority of the popular vote. They want to rely on the Electoral College. In the House of Representatives, as you know, they rely, to a great extent, on gerrymandering, to prevent majoritarian impulses from prevailing. The Senate is fundamentally an anti-majoritarian institution, right? It is set up to benefit their interests. So in many respects, they have sort of structured themselves to not care about majority sentiment, because they don't, that's just not where they're at. I have to ask you, because this is very timely. We're in the midst of, you know, a back and forth about the budget or continuum resolutions. Maybe you can elucidate exactly for the American people what it is. But they, they seem to want to attach an anti-voting bill to this. So maybe you could just do a little schoolhouse rock one-on-one, one-on-one on what it is that is going on right now. And how this anti-voting bill sort of fits into what seems to not be related, you know, a budget thing that doesn't seem to have anything to do with voting. Yeah, sure. And I'm happy to. And I would just add one extra thing on your anti-majoritarian comment. There is nothing that compares to gun safety legislation, which some... Why don't you explain that? Let's talk about background checks, for example, are, depending on the poll, are preferred by about 85% of Americans. Red flag laws, safe storage laws, are overwhelmingly supported, more than three and four Americans support those laws. And yet no Republican will support those laws. And to your point, we are representatives of the people. That's what our job is supposed to be. And while we don't necessarily operate based on every poll in whichever way the wind blows, when you don't see such support, overwhelming support, for any issue that is not then acted upon by Congress, except in this case for gun safety, abortion now is another one where there's a vast majority of Americans who support a right to choose. But in just in the way of this conversation about trying to continue down this anti-majoritarian path and restrict and suppress the right to vote, the fiscal year ends on September 30th. So the budget runs out unless... That means that just to be clear, that means the government runs out of money on September 30th. Well, no, that means there is no money. There's some money, but for a variety of different things, there would be no money available on October 1st for the federal government to operate unless Congress does something to fund the government, because our job is appropriations. We could pass another appropriations bill that would extend it for a year until next September 30th. That's not going to happen. So what's on the table right now is what's called a continuing resolution, which essentially keeps the status quo of funding available until whatever date that continuing resolution goes until. So what the Republicans did at the urging of Donald Trump is not... They attached to this continuing resolution the notion, this bill, that is called the SAVE Act, which basically requires anyone who's registering to vote to show proof of citizenship. Now, you may say, oh, that seems reasonable. Only US citizens should vote. Well, first of all, that's correct, and that is the law. It is a crime if you are a non-US citizen and you vote. But that's not what this is about, because as we know, it's already the law. This is, I think, part politics, which is to say that Donald Trump and the Republicans, as part of their politicization of immigration, which led to them killing a bipartisan border security bill that would have significantly addressed the situation at the border. They killed it because they wanted to run on it, they wanted to be a political issue. And as part of that, they are making all these bogus allegations that non-citizens vote in the United States. There are a few examples of that. There are some criminal prosecutions related to that, but it is so small and infinitesimal that it has absolutely no impact on any election. And yet they think that what we need to do is have a stricter enforcement process. The problem with that, of course, as you know all too well, Mark, is certainly not everybody has a passport, nor ready access to a birth certificate. And so there are requirements already when you register to vote to show some form of identification, but if you have to show proof of citizenship, you are going to make it much, much harder for everyone to vote, especially the poor and underserved who often just statistically have fewer identification materials. And so this is really a devious effort to use a bogus claim of voter fraud to continue to suppress the vote, especially to suppress traditionally democratic voters. Yeah, and this is a very, very important point that I want everyone to understand. The fact is that in order to prove citizenship in this country, you essentially need a passport or an original or certified copy of a birth certificate. Most people don't have a passport, and particularly young voters who are the ones who are most impacted. Why? Because they're first-time registrants, right? The people who are registering for the first time are disproportionately young. You point out this also disproportionately impacts the underserved communities, but this is a direct line of voter suppression against young voters, because this is going to affect the ability of first-time people to register. And by the way, for all the Republicans listening, your driver's license does not prove citizenship. Those other IDs that you've required to vote do not prove citizenship. So if you don't have a passport and most people, congressmen don't have ready access to an original or certified copy of their birth certificate. Like, yeah, their parents has their birth certificate someplace in a lockbox someplace, and so it is an unnecessary thing that would dramatically burden and suppress the ability of first-time registrants to register who are going to be disproportionately young. They're going to be disproportionately poor underserved communities, and that is all that this law would do. That is the only thing it would do. And to your political point, congressmen, as someone who's litigating these cases around the country, Republicans are throwing the citizenship issue into random cases that have nothing to do with citizenship. And I'll give you an example. There is a case that was followed by the Republican National Committee against the University of North Carolina over their digital voter ID. So the student IDs are lawful to prove for voting in North Carolina. It's got one of the strictest ID laws, but state issued IDs, and the University of North Carolina is a state institution, so it is a state issued ID. The University of North Carolina is the only school in the state that went to the trouble to get their digital IDs certified for voting. Well, what if the Republican National Committee, they've sued to say that these IDs should not be allowed to be used? What's their argument, congressmen? Their argument is that non-citizens will have access to these IDs and or will fake these digital IDs in order to vote as non-citizens. Well, here's the deal. Number one, these people have already proved, these people are already registered, right? This is just the ID to literally show up and vote. Number one, so it's not even a, it doesn't even deal with registration. But number two, what's the chances, congressmen, that a student in the University of North Carolina is going to fake an ID, not for other purposes, but is going to fake an ID to vote who is a non-citizen, and that they're going to particularly choose a digital ID as opposed to any of the physical IDs. I mean, it is literally they are throwing this into demagogues issue, congressmen, on unrelated litigation. Absolutely, and it goes even further. It's ironic that it's in North Carolina, because the other thing that does not exist is voter fraud, generally. That is not a thing, and whether it's Americans or non-Americans, people do not, in any significant numbers, commit voter fraud that would affect an election, except at least in one case, which happened to be in the state of North Carolina, where there was a massive Republican conspiracy to harvest and doctor ballots, I think, in order to cheat and win the election, and they actually had to nullify the election and redo it, but that was Republicans engaging in voter fraud, it was not Democrats. So this is the bogeyman that they use for all of their voter suppression laws, and they have done a very good job of convincing their ecosphere that this is a real issue when it's just not. And there are real world consequences for these voter suppression laws, which would suppress access to the ballot, which should be the exact opposite of what everyone in Congress should want. What is the problem? Explain to me why it is bad to have more people vote in a democracy. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with New York Congressman Dan Goldman, but I want to take a minute to tell you about democracy dockets membership program. This is an opportunity to not just receive our free daily and weekly newsletters, but also get additional insights. You will get a weekly summary of news you missed. You will get a monthly update on the state of democracy and my litigation look ahead. So please make sure that you are not only subscribed to our free products, but also if you want to become a paying member, you sign up as well in the links in the show notes below. So the case in North Carolina, you referred to place in Bladen County in North Carolina 9. I was actually the lawyer for the Democratic candidate that we got that election thrown out and redone. And it is exactly, as you said, it was Republicans who were engaged in absentee ballot collection fraud. They were essentially stealing ballots from black voters. It was a tragic situation and you're exactly right. So speaking of difficult and tragic situations, I say this is one lawyer to another. It is very difficult. You go through legal education, you come to revere the courts, you particularly come to revere the US Supreme Court. And you have stood before judges and known the weight that judges carry and the seriousness with which you hope that judges consider every case and every ruling in every case. And as a lawyer, you have to buy into that system. You embrace that as part of what makes American democracy great. Yet we have a US Supreme Court that is, frankly, has lost a lot of trust of the American people and for good reasons. I mean, they have worked hard in some respects to lose the trust of the American people. And I'm just curious, you know, you are in a very unique circumstance because like I said, you have been at the, you've been at council table where you need people to trust the judicial system. You're an elected representative who, you know, needs people to understand the importance of institutions of democracy. But you also have your eyes open to what's going on. So, you know, what's your take on the Supreme Court? I think that the Supreme Court in the last several years has done irreparable damage to its credibility. And I don't take that lightly. And frankly, I'm not even talking as much, although somewhat about the Dobbs decision or, you know, other really egregious decisions. I think we have to separate out a couple of these things. First of all, this Supreme Court has really undermined the notion and concept of starry decisive, which has governed our legal system for, you know, 230 years and basically says that more or less, you know, precedent should be adhered to unless there's some intervening or a very different circumstance. This Supreme Court ignores precedence with no meaningful rationale at all. And that, it does real damage to the continuity of court cases and of case law, as well as sort of settled expectations for everyone to operate in. That is a problem. And if that were the only thing we were dealing with, you know, I think that would be something that we would object to. And we might say, well, look, that's wrong. But as what goes around comes around and, you know, there will be new Supreme Court justices and there will be ways to potentially correct it. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, because what is really at the heart of the credibility and reputational problems of the Supreme Court are the most egregious ethics scandals that we have seen in the history of the court, most likely, I mean, other than, you know, Abe Fortis, maybe who took a bribe, but we, you know, that seems small compared to $500,000. I was going to say Abe Fortis may want his reputation back. Exactly. What's going on now? No, and just the notion. And I, by the way, I put some of these ethics issues as well into two different buckets. Okay. One is the clear violations of accepting or, you know, clear appearance of a conflict of interest by accepting gifts from individuals who have some involvement, either currently or in the future with cases before the court. So, you know, Harlan Crow, who takes Clarence Thomas on all these exorbitant extravagant vacations, you know, has had some business in front of the Supreme Court. Obviously, Leonard Leo has funded a lot of cases that go before the Supreme Court and has, you know, been a significant benefactor for Alito and Thomas. I think it's, you know, I'm not allowed to take a gift as a member of Congress more than $50. And these guys are not only going on $500,000 vacations, but they're not even disclosing it as is required. So I don't mean to interrupt, but that's my question. I asked this as Sheldon Whitehouse Center from Rhode Island, and I want to ask it of you, which is I understand the outrage over the disclosure piece. Like, I get that. But as you just pointed out, if I, if you and I went to dinner and, and the tab was for your portion was more than $50, I couldn't buy you dinner. I have no business before you. And I couldn't buy you dinner. What on earth are Supreme Court justices accepting thousands and thousands of dollars of debt? Like, how is that happening? Not only that, every other judge in America cannot do that. I mean, every other federal judge cannot do it because there is a binding code of ethics on all judges, other than Supreme Court judges, which prohibits those, those kind of gifts. So I agree with you that it is the gifting itself that is far worse than the lack of disclosure. The lack of disclosure is consciousness of guilt. Right. The lack of disclosure is saying, I know this is dirty, and I don't want people to know that I have accepted these luxury gifts from people who will have cases before the court. Now, that's one category, but we have another more egregious category. As shocking as it is, where two of the justices have now ruled on cases related to Donald Trump in September 6, where the underlying fact pattern implicates either them or their spouses. That is not an appearance of a conflict of interest. That is an actual conflict of interest. And let me tell you, and you know this, as a former litigator, it was so rare to encounter an actual conflict of interest. There were many times where judges would recuse themselves because they're an appearance of a conflict of interest, but actual conflicts of interest are so rare. But the fact that Alito and Thomas ruled on the January 6 cases related to Trump, related to obstruction of justice, when Ginny Thomas, Clarence Thomas's wife, was caught up in texting about the effort to overturn the election. And Alito's wife was hanging. Let's give Alito the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't hanging the flag, but his flag hung in support of the effort to overturn the election from his home. And Alito's response gave up the game. I mean, I wrote a letter asking for him to recuse. And he responded, I think it was proven ultimately to be likely factually incorrect. But it was also legally completely incorrect. His analysis was wrong. And yet he still ruled on the case. Now, that is just absolutely outrageous. And the fact that my Republican colleagues continue to defend these guys, when again, this should not be a partisan issue, I would say the same thing if that if this involved any of the democratically appointed justices. You know, so I'm glad you got Senator White House is the foremost expert on this and is absolutely brilliant with it. I've introduced a bill called the SCOTUS Ethics and Investigations Act, which would create a office of ethics counsel, which is would be required to give ethics training, would be required to review ethics disclosures, and would be somewhat of a an arbiter of some of these ethical issues. And it would also create an office of independent investigations that would be an actual enforcement body on the Supreme Court, independent that would have ability to do independent investigations to determine whether or not there are actual conflicts of interest or appearances of conflicts of interest, etc. And then they would report to Congress. This would be on top of a binding code of ethics, which is really needed and desperately in the Supreme Court, but it would be a way of actually enforcing that code of ethics. And I have no Republican co-sponsors. It's going nowhere right now. Senator White House's disclose act, you know, which also would his bills on on the Supreme Court are not are going nowhere. And it's it's become a partisan football. And that is really bad for the Supreme Court. Okay, the big question I have to ask you is you have been a federal prosecutor. You were the lead counsel for Donald Trump's first impeachment. You are a member of the Stop Project 2025 task force. Project 2025 has 900 pages. Donald Trump says he isn't read it. I believe that I don't believe Donald Trump has read 900 pages in his entire life. So it doesn't surprise me that he has not read 900 pages in one document. But among the provisions that I am most concerned about that I think people should be most concerned about is Donald is what it basically says is that Donald Trump as the president could direct individual prosecutions into individual agency actions that essentially there is the career civil service fades away from either is replaced or is intimidated into doing his bidding. How concerned should people be like how strong are the guardrails against this when you when we look out to the stakes of the 2024 election. I'm I agree with you and I'm glad you brought this up. I think I mean there are some really awful parts of project 2025 but I think perhaps the most damaging is one that seems more innocuous than most which is this notion of regulation schedule F which would eliminate tens of thousands of career appointed officials at will who otherwise have protections right now and they are nonpartisan experts who run our government. Let me just be really clear. The government has to run day to day. We have to have conversations in the state department with every country around the world. Our intelligence community is cooperating with intelligence communities around the world of our allies gathering information and doing it apolitically and using it apolitically. The list goes on the FDA the Department of Defense the Department of Justice all of these people who are experts in their field and make our government run make our democracy run are career appointed officials who have some protections and they are supposed to be nonpartisan schedule F would allow Donald Trump to remove them and install political loyalists to him which would then essentially mean that we have no one with any expertise or meaningful expertise running the day to day operations of our government and we would have Trump's sycophants in those positions ready willing and able to do whatever Donald Trump wants and that includes prosecuting his political adversaries for no reason whatsoever. It includes misusing intelligence for political gain. It includes you know, closing up to Vladimir Putin because that's what Donald Trump wants to do and the net effect of this would eviscerate our day to day democracy. What a lot of what we talk about is sort of the Supreme Court and the judiciary separation of powers more broad strokes issues but the day to day operation of our democracy and our government would be absolutely eliminated by the schedule F. It is going to be crushing to our democracy if it were to be implemented. All right my last question to you is there are people who watch or watching this they see you they are inspired as they should be because of your leadership on democracy but they're also overwhelmed by it and I'm sure you have constituents who probably come up to you and say I don't know you know I'm not a member of Congress I'm not on TV I don't have an audience like what can I do you know like I'll vote I'll vote for you but like I'm in Manhattan like what what you know what do you what do you tell people to do to keep hope or to just take action like what what is it that people can do well it's a great question and the good news is that you don't have to run for office to do something but let's go back I think to what are the beginning of our conversation and talk a little bit about how powerful the right to vote is if similarly if every single person who cares about our democracy does one or two things more in support of our democracy than they've ever done before that collective action would make a huge difference if we had a hundred million people who drove a friend to the polling booth who would otherwise not vote or who wrote a postcard about a candidate or who made a phone call or who gave a little money or who helped a you know voter get out the vote operation or a helped fight voter suppression through you know support or volunteering there are so many relatively small steps that people can take to participate in our democracy and my true belief is that the more of us who lean in just a little bit is the best way for us to protect and preserve our democracy because ultimately we are a country of the people by the people and for the people and if the people arise up and make their voices heard and do a little bit more then we will have a permanent and courageous and solid democracy. Well Congressman you are a hero of mine I wanted I've been wanting to talk to you for some time on his podcast because number one you're a lawyer who made good which is let's let's not sell that short but also for everything you've done for democracy I mean you know we didn't go into a lot of detail about your incredibly courageous work around the impeachment so I just want to thank you on behalf of myself and the American people and as a native New Yorker from New York you know on behalf of the people of New York thank you for everything you've done. Well thank you Mark for all that you do and making sure that we are doing everything we can to let people vote maybe that should be our new call let people vote. Yeah well thank you. Thanks for listening to Defending Democracy. Make sure you're subscribed to our free daily and weekly newsletters. We'll see you next time. Defending Democracy is a production of democracy docket LLC. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)