Here Comes the Slow-Rolling Coup
S1: Just think of your daughter, your sister, your cousin, the relative, your friend was murdered by the police and there was no charging decision held, no one accountable for her death. And those who have been on the sidelines maintaining a dignified silence, who have served in the administration in the past, you cannot maintain your silence any longer.
S2: Hello and welcome to Chromecast, I’m Virginia Heffernan. So today I’m just going to take a tiny step to the side trying to skirt the red dwarf black hole combo. The whole thing filled with tahiri buggy sceptic world obliterating dark matter, creating an extermination vortex for our democracy. I’m just taking a small step to the side. That’s because the only person who can bring light to a dark democracy exterminating whole against the laws of physics is Dahlia Lithwick share. Dahlia writes about courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus. She’s also a long time friend to me and to many. But most importantly, Dahlia is now the ranking expert on all things American jurisprudence. You may have seen her recently on Rachel Maddow and Trevor Noah’s show. That’s because no one can survive the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Brianna Taylor and democracy itself without her. I know I can’t. Dahlia, welcome back to Dreamcast.
S3: There’s no one I’d rather be with during the rolling coup.
S2: Virginia, it’s really true now. OK, there’s too many parts of things to talk to. And you’re so in demand right now that I just want to quickly quote to you something that Jeffrey Rosen said in your interview with him about RBG, that she knew she had to get over unproductive emotions to get work done. I am not over my unproductive emotions, so I am just not I know you urged us with Ginsburg not to weep and just to spring into action. But I just I want to confess to you, I have not done that. And instead, I have been with many unproductive emotions and I don’t know what to do about that.
S3: You know, it’s so interesting because I’ve been obsessed with this story of Aaberg and anger for like five years. And I think I’ve written about it a couple of times that what really struck me, Virginia, when I watched the movie on the basis of sex was this simmering anger underneath the character that she’s blowing up at her husband on the sidewalk. She’s blowing up at her daughter Jane, that she’s blowing up at the folks who are moving her from the ACLU when she’s preparing to argue at the 10th Circuit that this is a person who sort of like a fiery ball of rage, the young RB in the nineteen seventies, because I, I just have never imagined her that way. And I don’t know if that was sort of a choice. I should ask her nephew who wrote the screenplay, but I just don’t believe it. I always felt that she had these kind of twin directives that her mother gave her as a child. She revered her mother. Her mother was like her loadstar and her mother died right as she was graduating high school. And her mother always said two things. One, be a lady to be independent and be a lady meant hold your emotions in check. Do not waste your time like you’re saying on unproductive displays of emotion. And she just didn’t she really you know, when I interviewed her in January and I tried to ask her about different parts of law school and all sorts of fronts that were heaped on her as a woman, she just was like she literally said, like, I just don’t have time for those emotions. So I’ve always wondered, did she sort of toggle back and forth between simmering under the surface, seething rage and then her public performance? And I think in some sense, when she became this iconic Notorious RBG and we started telling the story of her as this gangster Brooklyn, you know. Yeah, feminised. It was a story of anger that was so weirdly misplaced because anger just was not at least it may have been her fuel, but it was not her performance ever. And I think her performance was for almost her entire career, these deep ally ships. You know, when she was on the DC Circuit, she most frequently aligned her votes with Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia. Scalia was her dear lifelong friend. She always talked about the ways in which she would pick off a vote from Rehnquist, pick off a vote from Kennedy because Ally Ship, with people that you disagree with fundamentally is the only way to make change. So I feel like this is a bit orthogonal to your question, but I’m not.
S2: Yes. I mean, however and especially now, because of this promised coup and the notable gaping absence of justice for Brianna Taylor, I’m not sure that I want to act like a lady right now and that that the Democrats should act like ladies and that anyone should act like ladies. And I also think the consequences of acting like a lady and at the end of her life. RBG didn’t know, as you point out in the in the piece you wrote the night she died, she didn’t know what, you know, what Colin Kaepernick was doing. She didn’t know what that kind of resistance was. And, yes, these these alliances. But then the anger, then you end up at war with yourself. I think Democrats have tried very much to paper over all this for four years, beginning when Obama wouldn’t stand up to McConnell and say that the Russians were intervening on Trump’s behalf in a letter to the public and all the way to now, when, in spite of McConnell’s effort to steal this seat and his usual, you know, reassuring the nation in a time of grief that he has no intention of acting decently or anything but sadistically and and the rest of the Senate Republican leadership the same in the midst of all that. I’m not sure that this is the right time to act like a lady. They’re not acting like ladies 100 percent.
S3: I mean, this is the sort of Rebecca Traister, you know, like, I’m mad, I’m crazy mad, and I don’t feel like, you know, working working the levers in tiny, incremental ways to get to pick up an ally here and there. I’m very much with you. We weren’t even allowed to grieve right before this seat was stolen. In fact, Mitch McConnell was like dancing on her grave months before she died. Yes, I heard that. And so I am with you, I think, and I don’t want to in any way be lashed to the idea that we should all, including men, behave like ladies. I just think I want to be really clear on the norms that she embodied her entire life, including when she was writing those fiery dissents were the norms of, I believe in institutions. First, I believe that, you know, the law serves as a guardrail. I believe that anger is ultimately going to sort of burn a hole through, you know, the judicial branch and the rule of law. I mean, I’m not necessarily lashing myself to those ideas, but I am saying she was firmly lashed to those ideas. Right. And I agree with you, Virginia.
S4: I think, you know, you and I have been talking about this for four years when when Merrick Garland was all but erased and then again after the cabinet hearing, when there was no meaningful FBI investigation into Christine Blassie Ford’s claims. I think that the idea that, you know, we just sit here timidly and protect our institutions at all costs is what got us into this situation. And I am not advocating, you know, we at the risk of losing absolutely everything, we protect these values of comity and respect and institutional norms because they’re gone.
S2: I want to say that Alicia Montgomery, you know, who’s our new boss as executive producer of podcast at Slate, she came in during, I think, the official lockdown. So we haven’t had all that much time with her. But she was telling me a story about how one of the Confederate statues that came down was one she she’d written she’d really written a lot of letters about and had meetings about. And then all of a sudden during the George Floyd protests, it was pulled down. And there’s sort of a feeling that those of us who inherited from RBG and from others, an idea of kind of writing the letters, marching, agitating for our candidate, trying to educate that there’s a more expedient, more expedient way. And it’s just it’s a way with more muscle in it. And, you know, when you read Alemi style, even when you read Michelle Goldberg, you know, the case for fighting fire with fire seems to be alive, but not just because they’re dicks, not just because we hate McConnell, not just because we hate Lindsey Graham, because we don’t want to lie down and take it, but because, as you say, the people, the public watched as the travesty with Cavnar happened and there’s a foot on our necks and we just need someone to stand up for us to get to stop that kind of gaslighting that we’re here. And that’s the only place we can be and that we’ve managed to, like, tell ourselves that this is being institutionalised or this is being non neurotic, like, you know, like Obama. I mean, there there’s always someone there to tease you when you say, you know, we need to impeach again or, you know, we need to abolish the Electoral College or abolish the Senate. Now, you know, there’s always someone to say, oh, well, let’s not get too crazy, but this seems to be a time to get too crazy.
S4: Again, you’re not going to get me to disagree. And I really am in a way. And this is where I’m different, I think, from Ellie and Michelle and Jeff Toobin, who are basically saying, you know, it’s time to just. Fire with fire. Yeah, I’m still mindful, I’m sure you saw the piece in the Times yesterday about the just huge amount of environmental cases that the Trump administration has lost in the courts. I’m so mindful of the fact that, you know, we can sit here and say, screw the court, burn it all down. It was always revanchist, backward looking white supremacist machine with like a few good hours in the 60s and screw it, it’s done. But then I think, like, you know, of the LGBTQ workers who got protection under Title seven this year because of this revanchist, backward looking court. And I think of, you know, the fact that unbelievably, there’s still abortion clinics in Texas and Louisiana because of this revanchist court. And I’ve talked to a lot of people who do civil rights litigation and do environmental litigation who say stipulated burn it all down.
S3: It sucks. But also understand we don’t have a plan B, we don’t have another institution to protect us. The world is literally going to be on fire. And there, you know, the think very carefully before you say the courts are utterly useless to me because the place that has acted as a backstop and a bulwark for most of Donald Trump’s worst stupid, malevolent impulses have been the courts where he has resoundingly lost time after time after time for four years. And that is having packed right a quarter of the federal bench. He loses those environmental cases. The Times was quick to point out those were Republican appointed judges who were handing him losses. And so I don’t in any way want to be standing up for some misty eyed, sentimental idea that we still have the Warren Court. But I just think we have to be really, really careful. And I know this is such a lawyerly, cautious, quote unquote ladylike answer, but I really do think that we have to understand that in the absence of the rule of law and the court system as it is currently structured, we have nothing. And the nothing that we have is not going to help when the slow rolling coup starts to roll faster. So I just you know, that’s the line I’m on Virginia. It’s not a very satisfying line, but I think that it’s worth remembering the court was designed by the framers to protect minority interests. Right now it is doing precisely that because it is protecting the oligarchs and the, you know, big dark, the minority president, the minority president, the minority Senate and the like. Just scads and scads of like oily, dark money that are, you know, the Koch brothers are pumping through our system. So in a very weird way, the court is doing exactly what it is designed to do for the wrong people. But it sucks.
S4: But I just feel like I think in this one way, I’m way too susceptible to John Roberts twinkly charm. But I think when he worries about the legitimacy of the courts and the continued legitimacy of the courts, it’s not just because he wants Donald Trump to be president and he wants like the entire regulatory regime to collapse. It’s in part because I think if we don’t have some kind of notion of protectors of the rule of law, then we’re in even worse trouble. So that’s, I guess, a long winded way of saying, I think we’re as we have been from the beginning in these conversations, Virginia trapped because one side or other nihilists, Mitch McConnell doesn’t care that the Senate has blown up, that the court has blown up. He doesn’t care. I think that on our side, it’s not that we are these careful, pristine Obama people. It is that we really, really feel like we have to both fight the institution and fight for the institution all the time. And that’s a two fronted war.
S2: I don’t know if you saw. Well, it’s been a lot of big days for you, so you can be forgiven if you missed Adam Schiff’s announcement of the plan in Congress for election reform and more even sweeping ethical reforms akin to the ones that happened after Watergate. I don’t know if you saw that, but that seems to be the Democrats response to not the news of the coup, because that hadn’t even rolled out yet, but just the punches in the face over and over again to democratic norms and to ethics. And I wonder what you think of political remedies as we try to shore up institutions. So I think Schiff asked for, you know, subpoena power needs to be strengthened or there have to be fines or to follow scofflaws, subpoena scofflaws. I’m not talking quite about picking up a brick. I can’t go quite Alemi Styles move to muscle, but there have to be some aggressive reforms.
S3: You know, it’s so funny because I was just. Laughing Because a whole bunch of senators with very good intentions released this massive policy paper yesterday about the implications for health care of the new Supreme Court. And I felt like this is how democracy dies, right. With like carefully worded statements and programmatic reforms and deeply researched policy papers. And like the other side is like we smash and grab, smash and grab. Yes, yes. Yes.
S2: And so I I initially was ready to read this SIFF op ed that way. But I don’t know, it’s aggressive the way I wanted it to be. Of course, I want other things like, you know, an impeachment inquiry opened into Barak on Trump this week. What do we have Friday? So there’s plenty of time for Pelosi to get on that. But just for now, even just hearing a lawyer in and out of shifts like beautiful rhetorical style, describe what democracy reforms might look like. There was something heartening in those lines. You may say that they’re they’re just strong. It’s a strongly worded letter, but it seemed like something more than that. Or at least it it made some space for the future.
S3: And, you know, it’s funny because we we did this Q&A at Slate the other day. That was a sort of despairing what is to be done. You know, as soon as the seat was stolen and it was sort of different iterations of, you know, Slate editors sort of being like, what great performative act of like nihilist despair would move voters to the polls because there’s actually no muscular thing to be done about a still in seats. There isn’t there’s no pick up a brick, I guess pick up a brick is telling Democrats in the Senate to to just boycott. But that’s insane. And so there’s nothing there’s no equivalent of picking up a brick. And it’s interesting because in some sense, all of the answers we came up with are process answers. And, you know, when you talk to Rick Hasen or to Nate Persily about, you know, how do we fix voting? There’s nothing exciting about it. It’s just boring. Dorcy process and. Right. We got to fund local precincts. We’ve got to pay for broken machines to be like it’s just process. And the real truth of it, Virginia, is that, like Adam Schiff is right, like democracy is made up of a big elaborate machine of which every single, like worrying cog and wheel is a boring process, that that’s what it is. And if you look at the framers like they built a boring process thing, they just made it look really exciting. And so I think that’s a paradox, too, is that when Mitch McConnell does his chest thumping, you know, power maximalists power move, it looks really exciting. There’s no he doesn’t have a process argument because there is no process argument. The argument is I bought it. It’s mine. And the answer to that is always going to be some iteration of we have to do reforms. We have to make sure that, you know, the post office is appropriately funded. We have to make sure that, you know, we know that when we’re counting postmarks that that postmark is legible, like that’s all processed stuff. But I think that part of the problem we’re having right now is this asymmetry between how salient all of those process things are for a country that is just like watching everything go poof. And so my heart is 100 percent with the Adam Schiff lawyerly like, no, we’re just going to keep bolstering democracy because there’s no plan B, but that is no plan B ever sexy. It’s just a bunch of worrying, boring process machinery that needs to be tweaked and repaired.
S2: Absolutely. That’s my answer. Absolutely. You know, I love this idea that the Constitution, the preamble makes it seem like rebellion and exciting. And really it’s just setting into place all these checks and balances. But he does a nice job. And I’m just going to recommend this op ed to listeners in yesterday’s L.A. Times, because he does a nice job really in this very simple, measured way, spelling out how well measured ambition must be made to counteract ambition. And the checks and balances are necessary. And this is how this thing got so out of whack. And this is how it must be strenuously brought back into equilibrium. And there’s something in this tenuousness. There’s something in his aspiring screenwriters language that makes this seem something other than boring. It doesn’t even seem pristine, like like an Obama document. It seems pissed off, like a shift speech. And again, that’s small compared to just a bulldozer of scrupulousness, McConnell or Graham. But it’s something. And then I want to move into what what there might be next.
S3: It was. Very interesting because I think everybody is kind of shattered by the Bart Gellman piece in the Atlantic. Yeah, the you know, which is in some sense the flip of that. Right. It’s just a description of broken processes. It’s kind of funny because in a way, you know, I read it and I was like, oh, come on, Josh Guelzo wrote this a year ago. You know, Rickerson wrote this 10 months ago. Why is this new? But it’s new because in a sense, like Bart Gellman just got under the car, pulled out all the bolts, pulled out all the nuts, you know, said here, well, look at look at what’s happened to your you know, the wires are strip. I mean, all he basically did was say at this point. This point, this point in this point, in this point, the machinery can break. And in a sense, it’s just the flip of that. Right. It’s not it’s a highly, highly technical piece in some sense about if you wanted to steal an election. These are all the places that you think the process is just humming along. But, you know, states can pick their own electors, like the Republican dominated states can just say it’s too close, we’re picking our own electors. And so I think, again, one of the things that’s so interesting about the piece is exactly what you’re describing, which is in some sense, it’s just like the IKEA instructions of, you know, if you wanted to take apart this shelving unit, here are the places where you think it’s superstrong, but it’s really weak. And it’s interesting because the responses I’ve seen to the Galman piece all say the point of Donald Trump and his like unnamed lawyers leaking to Bart Gellman statements like, of course, we’re going to you know, we’re talking in the States about stealing electors. You know, of course, we’re talking about sending out thousands of people to polling places to terrorize electors. The reason they’re saying that isn’t just because, you know, the IKEA shelving unit was never all that solid. It’s because they want us to believe that it’s not for the purpose here. This is classic Putin, right? Like, oh, yes, crap. There’s no point in my voting. All of the machinery of voting is buckling. You know, Donald Trump can steal the election. Here’s how he’s going to do it. So I should just stay home. And I think that part of what you’re describing, part of what Schiff is trying to do is say, look, we all had a lot of magical thinking around the rule of law in the Constitution and checks and balances. And it turns out a lot of that was just magical thinking because the stuff is vulnerable to somebody who just wants to do what they want. That’s what McConnell is doing around the court. That’s what Trump is saying when he says he’s not going to accept a loss. And I think that the answer to that can either be, holy crap, the IKEA shelf was like, never real to begin with or to just tighten the screws. I think that those are the choices. But I think that the if the object of the game, Virginia, is to have us all give up, then. Pieces like that are going to scare your face off if the object of the game is to say, as Schiff is saying, here are things we can do right here, right now, but you have to believe then that’s the only like I say, that’s all we got.
S2: OK. As usual, you’ve completely shifted my perspective. And just that shift feels promising just because I, like, got into Iraq on the day that Ginsberg died. And this is helping me get out of it. So thank you. The metaphors of machinery. I mean, I’m noticing that in a Q&A with Barton Gellman in The Atlantic that they did right after they published this piece yesterday. And for listeners who didn’t see it, this is the piece called The Election that could break America with the question that, you know, if Donald Trump doesn’t concede and works a few levers at the level of the states to shift states where it’s too close to call for him, this would amount to a coup. There’s no reason not to call it that. So this is kind of the you know, the thing that breaks you into a cold sweat at night, which is maybe Donald Trump will just never leave the Oval Office as he’s been telegraphing that he’ll do anyway. So here’s the piece. Dahlia has an excellent point, that once you establish this level of cynicism about the results, I think that Romney called it unacceptable and unthinkable. Right. Which are like two kind of weak words for this idea. But if it’s unthinkable and unacceptable, you might just roll over. That’s like a recipe for defeatism. So maybe this piece won’t inspire people to get out and vote, but will end up discouraging them anyway. I’m just trying to recap, but you mentioned the IKEA furniture and I noticed that the Q&A piece in the Atlantic has a picture of a mail truck, U.S. mail truck without wheels. So, you know, obviously, about Trump’s effort to subvert the postal system. And then Shift says our reforms are built on three pillars and they’re built to last. So there is a kind of idea that we’re rebuilding, shoring up the sort of edifice of state, the ship of state, whatever it is to make these this machinery work better. When we’ve seen it be sabotaged, we’ve seen vulnerabilities be exploited. You know, when those secretaries of state at state level say, of course, we’re thinking of doing this, you know, of course we’re thinking of cheating this way that you recognize that they think Gustafer and and cozy and fair and fancy bear, they just are looking for vulnerabilities that they can exploit to win. And also those vulnerabilities spitefully make our system look feeble. You know, it’s just it’s a kind of it’s a nexus of existential doubt about the American project that they have managed to kindle in me. You know, a republic, if you can keep it. People keep quoting that. Schiff keeps quoting it, and that if really is present to us, it’s possible we’ve officially passed into not having kept it. At least that’s what it can feel like when you read a terrifying piece like this one about the coup.
S3: I read that piece yesterday. I had no sleep. I was eating like cold leftover brisket at 4:00 in the morning and belting scotch. And it was like a bad, bad day when, you know, right on the wake of that reading, Bart Gellman and just getting back into bed and saying like it’s true. But I think one thing to think about again. Well, two things. One is that none of this is new. Right? Donald Trump told us in 2016 he was not going to accede to an orderly transition of power if he lost. None of this is new. And, you know, Bill Barr has been stomping around the country since since April, telling us that any mail in ballots were fraudulent and that this is inherently going to be a fraudulent election. If Donald Trump I mean, he’s got right. It’s none of this is new. And so what Bart Gellman did so ably is, first of all, got people inside the campaign to tell us that, OK, so now we’re all in agreement. They’re telling us we’re going to send people out to terrorize minority voters in, you know, in urban precincts. Good. Thank you for letting us know. This consent decree that has prevented that is this is the first election since the consent decree is gone. So there’s nothing stopping the RNC from doing that. OK, now they’ve said it. Now they’ve said we’re actually having conversations in states about not, you know, submitting the slate of electors if Democrats win. So I think what was new about it was just that he got people to say it. And I think it’s really useful to just acknowledge that if programmatically you plan to steal the election, it doesn’t matter how you do it. There are a thousand other points in this decision tree right in this interregnum period that he’s describing, where if you want to do what Mitch McConnell has done with the court and just say, I’m going to. Take it, because maximal power, it almost doesn’t matter which piece of the car you’re yanking out, he pulled out some good things. You know, there are a lot of folks today that are like, oh, my God, it’s utterly implausible, you know, that that state electric thing is going to happen is it is not utterly implausible. In fact, it is happening in these Pennsylvania lawsuits that they’re just going to say start checking all the ballots, all the mail in ballots. So it doesn’t matter, almost like, I think, hyper focusing on how they plan to break the machine we do at our peril. And I think what we do that is useful is say there are, as it turns out, going to be thousands of tiny little elections. Right. There’s not one big election. And every one of them is at the mercy of rickety broken voting machines and workers who are either not going to show up because they’re elderly or, you know, don’t don’t fully know what’s coming. I mean, there are a million break points. And the whole point just to just keep going back to my machinery isn’t to hyper focus on each and every place that they can break it. There are a hundred places that they can break it and they’ve telegraphed that the intention is to break it. The question is whether, like I said, we are going to say, OK, you know, it was always broken, right? It’s like this, the Zen bull story where you, like, check it against the wall because it was always broken. And why bother? Or we just say it was always fragile. Democracy was not constructed to withstand, you know, a sort of willful, tyrannical coup. It was never going to withstand that. And so we’re either going to sort of fight for it and figure out what that looks like. And this is where we come back to Adam Schiff. Right. We can vote in order to put people into office who will fix voting or we cannot vote. And just like, you know, go move to Switzerland. But I think that that’s the choice or say, Canada. I mean, just say Canada or any country. I think Justice Ginsburg says that Marty always wanted to move to Australia if if Trump won. But I think, you know, I guess the larger point is, you know, stipulated this thing is made of steel, stipulated it’s in fact made of a Filion rickety parts that can be manipulated and then, you know, good. Now we’re all seeing it and saying it out loud, because you and I, Virginia, have been saying this for a long time, for a long and sounding like crazy people. So like, let’s say it out loud and then let’s make a decision.
S2: I want to talk to you for a minute about women, because one of the things that as you talk comes to mind is I probably told you told you that my brother is a personal trainer and a really big, strong guy. And he also writes about fitness, very articulate on this. So I asked him if he agreed with something I’d read that most men look around at, say, a subway car and just automatically think of who they could beat up and who they, you know, who they’d have to really fight and who they’d have to concede to. And he said, yes, as as disappointing as it might be for us to learn that that kind of animal thing is going on in people’s minds, it’s there now. Maybe he’s alone in this, maybe the rest, maybe most people are more civilized, but let’s just consider that. So I said, really, because I on a subway, never think of it. I assume that everyone could beat me up. Maybe not, you know, maybe not one or two people I could probably probably defend myself against. But but that they just don’t want to. But we’re this isn’t we’re not in a time of barbarism and that most people will keep hands off because there’s rules about how you behave in public spaces and subways and so on. I think part of the existential terror of this time is that it seems lots of people from Cabinet to Bill Barr to Clarence Thomas to Donald Trump, who are actual sexual abusers, do want to and are scanning the subway to find out who’s vulnerable. And it’s you know, a lot of the women on the on the subway car are vulnerable and they are, you know, backing up the cops that killed Brianna Taylor and giving her no justice. And I think that there’s like a fear of actually bodily violation in all this, that somebody is scanning every, you know, ordinary good person to find out where their weaknesses are and how they could be undone. And I somehow the the news about no one being prosecuted for her murder. On top of the news about the coup, on top of the idea that, you know, everyone from Mitt Romney to Lindsey Graham is all on board with this steamrolling of a new justice ramming. New justice onto the court who will, you know, do all the things you talked about, repeal civil rights or help to repeal civil rights, give the court a huge conservative majority in the courts that all that stuff wants to happen? Really? It makes me think that they really have been there have been a group of people just like looking to exploit vulnerabilities. And I feel like physically afraid.
S3: Yeah. I mean, I think I was saying to you right before we started taping, you know, I’ve never quite bounced back from living in Charlottesville in 2017. Like, I think when actual Nazis are parking on your streets and marching around you saying blood and soil and, you know, threatening to burn down your your synagogue and your, you know, your city and you’re relying on a antifa, you’re relying on alliances with people whose tactics are not yours and also relying on the cops. Right. Like, I think that was part of the paradox. You’re relying on antifa and you’re relying on the cops. You’re sort of realizing that at the end of the day, you know, you and your children are utterly vulnerable in like, you know, Paleozoic era ways to the biggest dinosaur in the pack. And I think that one of the reasons I’m sorry to toggle back to our B.G., but I think, you know, one of the things that always interested me about her was the sort of lack of physicality of her career. Right. Like I think I said on one of the shows, she, you know, wasn’t marching with the feminists on the streets. She was too old for that. She was you know, by the time women were out burning their bras and marching, she was already, you know, a very, very tiny, tiny and tidy legal architect and thinker. But her, you know, she was weighed less than one hundred pounds. She was five feet tall, you know, at her maximal fighting weight. And I think that in a way and it goes back to your picking up a brick thing, I think she was very aware of being Jewish, you know, kind of post Holocaust. She was completely informed by, you know, both the Holocaust and the Red Scare and the complete vulnerability, physical, I think, vulnerability. And so she turned to, again, the machinery of law, the machinery of law and the machinery of civilization.
S2: I mean, you remind me of blood and soil. You know, we remember the Nazis for their clinical precision and Mengele and awful allegiance with science. But of course, they believed, you know, in the that that like Teutons in the forest and that we all ought to be Apache warriors, Allwyn, like tribes warring with each other and that Jews and avatars of civilization, including, you know, educated people and and and gays and and and all the systems of law were a kind of we’re kind of trivial and sat on top of this manly order. You can see some of us on the right now. And Trump certainly expresses it. And I think that is where literally the the the smaller people whose strength is in words are coming down to this sort of terrifying brass tacks moment where it could be that brute force is kind of winning the day, a kind of barbarism, and at least just for raising that spectre for so many things, but for raising that specter of that kind of fascist, hypermasculine, all muscle, all ID ideal. I will just I just will never forgive these people because we can’t see civilization itself threatened. Not one more time. And we’ve already lost two hundred thousand people or more to the denial of the mechanisms of civilization that keep you from putting kids in cages and keep you from actively spreading a virus. Those losses just seem inestimable to me. But you’re right, civilization is all we have shoring up. And it’s not just institutions, but sort of shoring up the case for why, you know, why this death cult is, you know what? Why this death cult is itself rickety, why it’s counter adaptive. I mean, it takes saying that it’s counter adaptive to show up at a yet another Nuremberg rally for Donald Trump without a mask in the midst of a pandemic. Right. Like this might all look very crafty and exciting, but it also looks like a dying people. And sometimes I reassure myself that at least the arc of history bends toward survival. And this is a group of old men who, you know, don’t seem all that long for this world. So that is one way of saying it’s like liberal democracy is not yet the Etruscans, it’s still it’s there. It’s still there. And there’s a little bit of hope in that. What do you think about impeachment, impeachment of bar, impeachment of Trump, an impeachment inquiry into these things, an impeachment inquiry into Kavanaugh, just moving paper and issuing subpoenas and convening committees in an effort to sort of run out the clock on this McConnell play, but also expose, aggressively expose all the crimes we’re dealing with going into the election.
S3: I’m of two minds. One is, yeah, go ahead, do it, because do anything in your arsenal. The other is I think it’s a process again. And I think that spending time with another incredibly intricate set of processes trying to defend those processes maybe isn’t the best play. Because, you know, as I’ve said, I just don’t think we win national cultural process arguments. And, you know, if anyone could have it was Adam Schiff in that impeachment trial. And it’s just doesn’t seem to move the needle. And so my instinct is to use this time to just explain clearly the following thing to the American people. Donald Trump has pledged to put on the Supreme Court someone who is going to take away your health care in the midst of a pandemic. He has said he will not appoint someone who does not vote to take away your reproductive rights and freedoms. And by the way, that doesn’t end at ROE. That goes to contraception, which, you know, is also on the table. He has pledged to put someone on the court who will decide the election in favor of him and to sort of just say and Judge Holly, by the way, Senator Holly has said, I will not vote for somebody who doesn’t do those things. And so instead of getting dragged into a fight about whether Amy CONI Barrett or John Larson or Barbara Lagoa is going to be more likely to do those things, let’s take them at face value. That is what they want to do. Seventy five percent of Americans don’t want Roe to be overturned. Americans don’t want their health care to be taken away in an argument the week after the election. And I think that the thing to do now is to do what they do really well, which is not engage in an elaborate fight over process, but instead to simply say and Nancy Pelosi’s been saying this and Chuck Schumer’s been saying this, this is what they are promising to do. They have kept every one of their promises. If you want the United States Supreme Court to be an accessory in the murder of a couple hundred thousand more Americans, then go ahead. I think that it is not a hard argument to make. It is very much in the key of the sky is falling, which is the kinds of arguments that Republicans have been making for 40 years. And I’m just not 100 percent sure that taking the time to gear up for another lengthy process discussion is the best use of our time. I think the best use of our time is to say this is not aligned with your interests or your wants or your preference, and it is 100 percent guaranteed what you are going to get. OK, I like the educate.
S2: I’m still for a level of agitate. I think it would be extremely agitating to open a few more committees and just try to score a few more documents along some of these lines. I just want some more headaches. I want more headaches for Lindsey Graham. That’s my poster. I just I want him not to be able to campaign and I want him have to to have to respond to all kinds of documentation and red tape. That’s the agitate part. We’ve got the educate part, which is sort of continue to teach the American people. And Biden Harris will do this, too, that this is extremely bad, if not fatal, for Americans to have this new justice. And then, of course, there’s organized. So as of today, there are some very heated marches going on across the country and Louisville and Los Angeles. That’s another move here. It just seems there have to be lots of prongs in this response and especially to take advantage of the SIFF like desire and Lithwick need to kind of rebuild and sodor the joints of our system so they can’t be demolished again.
S3: I think I would conclude on, you know, the great improv directive. Yes. And you know that we should not be spending our time now criticizing each other for our mode of activism. And every minute we spend trashing a Democrat because they’re not on the record for court reform or trashing a Democrat because. They’re not doing it the way we want to is a minute wasted and we should this is, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, let the lawyers lawyer, let the brick throwers throw bricks, let you know, I think it is just utterly futile to tell other people how to do resistance when you are truly, I think, standing in the brisk wind of like tyrannical forces. And so I agree 100 percent nothing that you and I are saying should preclude anyone from doing what they feel they need to do to get people to the polls in November. I absolutely agree. And I think for me, one of the reasons I harp on the Ladylike and Loyalest Lee solutions is because those work for me. But I don’t by any means want to suggest that going to a march or sitting at home sending postcards is of lesser value. I think, you know, if again, RBG taught me anything, it’s that somebody who was essentially just a tiny little brain in a VAT could move the world in the most improbable way than any one of us could do the same.
S5: I just love you. Thank you for being here again, Facture. Dahlia Lithwick is a writer for Slate, the host of Amicus. And she’s the goddamn national treasure. That’s it for today’s show. What do you think? Give us a healthy rating on your podcast app and then come at us on Twitter. I’m at page 88. The show is at Comcast. Comcast is the only show with no complaints about cancel culture, cancel us away by registering to vote for Joe Biden. Our show today was produced by Melissa Kaplan and engineered by Richard Stanislaw. I’m Virginia Heffernan. Thanks for listening to Trump cast.
