Trump's 2nd Term: Military in the Streets, Mike Johnson in the Sheets

But first, the MAGA establishment continues to make it very clear that a second Trump term would be much more extreme than the first. The man who's heading to trial for paying hush money to a porn star he had an affair with spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention on Thursday, just a few days after Politico reported that a Trump-aligned think tank is planning, to, quote, infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power. What are those ideas? Not a lot of details just yet, but based on what we've heard from Russell Vogt, the former senior Trump official and potential White House chief of staff who's spearheading the project, and former Trump official, William Wolf, a Christian nationalist who works with Vogt, they want to ban the following abortion, abortion pills, surrogacy, no-fault divorce, and sex education in schools. They also want to repeal policies that support gay people, trans people, and single mothers, and if people take to the streets to speak out against any of this, they want Trump to use the military against protesters.

Here's a clip of Trump supporter Jack Posobiec speaking at CPAC, where Trump is also scheduled to speak this weekend. I just wanted to say welcome to the end of.

That's right, because all glory, all glory is not.

Wolf even deleted tweets about his policy ideas. What do you think, Dan? What are the chances that this agenda becomes reality?

The right wing learned the lesson of the first Trump term. They view him as, particularly the evangelical Christian nationalist part of the Republican Party, views Trump as this obviously imperfect vessel for their policy agenda. But a useful one. A useful one, a very useful one. Useful but imperfect, yeah.

But they got much less done than they possibly could have during Trump's first term because he just hired a bunch of yahoos. He was just hiring people out of Fox News green rooms left and right. There was no plan. That's what all of this is connected to, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is to ensure that the people at all levels of the Trump administration are people who are going to be smart enough to implement this right wing agenda, that no stone will go unturned. They recognize the missed opportunity of the first term, and they're not going to let that happen again.

As we know, Donald Trump, not a details guy. He's not interviewing the person who is the number three in command at the Health and Human Services Agency. He's not interviewing the people who are on the Domestic Policy Council of the White House who are working on issues related to reproductive health or freedom. This is essentially what Trump did with the Federal Society of Judicial Nominations. He's going to do with his White House and agency staff, with the Heritage Foundation, which means that Russell Vogt and Mr.

Deleted Tweets over here are going to get a chance to put their agenda in place. And we know how the regulatory process works. You can do a lot of really damaging stuff under the radar, and by the time people figure it out, it's way too late.

They will say that themselves. And all these people are going to get positions with real power. Like you said, if he becomes president again, he's not a details guy, but also, all it takes to get Trump to do something that you want is to kiss his ass, which they know all they like. They can go into the Oval. They can tell him he's wonderful.

Oh, sign this bill. It's going to do this. He's going to do it. He's going to do it. So there were three bullets on the document that Politico obtained Christian nationalism.

That was one of the bullets insurrection act and refusing to spend money authorized by Congress. This is a new thing that all these groups, the heritage project, the Christian nationalists, they all want. So this is how the president, this is how a president Trump in a second term, gets around Congress. The Congress passes something they, uh, and then he just ignores what they pass. So, I mean, I think this is like a recipe for a situation that could actually deteriorate quite quickly.

You have a lunatic president, surrounded by right wing Christian nationalists, who ignores Congress, ignores the courts and sends the military out to deal with anyone who opposes him. I mean, it's not, this is, it sounds like dystopian, farfetched shit, but I really don't think it is. when you start reading what these people are saying and you know that these are the people who are going to be in the white house and running.

What I think we also have to do is be able to take it, make it a little more piecemeal and easier for people to understand, right? Which is? how are these things going to affect your life, right? And I think this is where, even if Democrats hold the Senate or we take the house back and Trump does not have the majorities he needs to pass a national abortion ban, every part of that federal government that can do anything possible to make it harder to access an abortion in this country will do that, right? That is what's going to happen.

when you bring up abortion. Focus group, participants among swing voters will tell you that they believe Trump is not only personally pro-choice, they are sure he has paid for abortions. And so he is able to get away with things that other Republicans can't on these issues that have driven democratic turnout in elections where Trump was not on the ballot. And so every opportunity we have to make the case about how his administration, regardless of what he personally believes or doesn't believe, that doesn't matter. What matters is what he does and what he has done.

What he did do was be the person who made it so that Roe v. Wade was overturned. What is going to happen are all these things that are in this agenda. We just have to bring that down to people, because otherwise, if you don't explain it specifically, it's going to sound like partisan noise to people.

These guys aren't letting their dads monitor their porn, like Mike Johnson and his kid.

And you know, some people are like, well, Republicans are saying they're for birth control and contraception. Well, Republicans in Congress just last year blocked a bill that would have enshrined the right to birth control into federal law. Why? Why are they doing that?

This is just like what happened before Dobbs, too, right? Or right after Dobbs, right? Some people say, oh, don't worry. States are going to do their own thing. It's not going to be as bad.

And then, you know, how many years later, we're about to talk about the IVF case in Alabama. We are seeing the downstream effects of what happens when right-wing nationalists, right-wing Christian nationalists, burrow into government, are given power and decide to force their agenda on the rest of the country. And if you don't think that's going to happen when Donald Trump becomes president, right. Could some of it not happen? Yeah.

Yeah. He's lazy. Who knows? But a bunch of it is, it really could happen, this agenda. And I do think it's like incredibly important for Democrats to talk about it a lot from now until November.

We just got another preview of what a Christian nationalist agenda might look like. Week ago, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created in an IVF lab count as children under the state's wrongful death of a minor act. This is a big win for abortion opponents who argue that life begins at conception. Already, three Alabama hospitals, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have hit pause on all IVF care as a result of the ruling. So for people in Alabama who are considering IVF as their best or only shot at having a child, or have frozen embryos awaiting genetic testing, or are going through already the very expensive, uncomfortable, sometimes painful IVF process right now, this is just, it's devastating news.

Dan Playbook also called this a quote, nightmare scenario for the GOP. So one in six Americans have had fertility issues. Pew says that more than 40% of Americans have personally used fertility treatments of some kind. And more than 86% of Americans support IVF, including around 80% of people who consider themselves pro-life or evangelicals, according to polling shared by none other than Kellyanne Conway. How do you think this issue plays out beyond what's happening in Alabama?

Look, I think.

Maybe it becomes a policy that states can do. Either way, access to IVF is under tremendous threat if Donald Trump is elected president. And it doesn't matter what Donald Trump says about this. He might say he doesn't agree with it. He probably doesn't know what it is.

But we should take this threat very seriously. And people will say, well, you know, this is one kind of narrowly written decision, and it's Alabama, and there's a history of that sort of stuff in Alabama. That's how Roe v. Wade got overturned. It was the work of right-wing state-level activists working at a process to get cases to end up before the Supreme Court.

Now, this court case is not yet headed to the Supreme Court, but it very well could be. And if Donald Trump is president of the. I think it's on the side for access to healthcare choices for women, or do you think it's going to be on the side of one of the Christian nationalists whose staff is government one? And so I think we should take it very seriously. We should talk about it.

And this is one of those things that, just like anecdotally in your life, you know, is breaking through. People who, in my life, who follow politics but don't obsess about it like we do, who don't generally bring up politics to me, have brought this up. You see it on social media. People who don't generally post about politics, posting about this because so many people have used IVF, contemplated using it, did research on it to see if they were going to have to use it, know people who used it, and the things that really break through in this era of politics are the things that have a direct impact on people's lives. So not theoretical policy positions taken by the government or tax policy.

It's. I can do one thing today, and if these people get elected, I can't do it tomorrow. And that's why Dobbs was such a consequential moment in politics. And I think.

IVF comes from Dobbs, but is of the same vein. And I think this is one of those moments that.

Yeah. I mean, Republican politicians. right now, as we are recording this, are tripping over themselves to say that they support IVF and they don't agree with this. And, uh, you know, some Republican told Politico, like, I don't know why we're talking about this. No Senate candidates, Republican Senate candidates have, have supported this, have said that they're against IVF, all this kind of stuff.

But it is, like you said, it is an example of the conservative legal system doing whatever the hell it wants and Republican politicians enabling conservative judges to do whatever the hell they want. This is what happens when you legislate religious beliefs that haven't been validated by science or medicine. You are free to believe as Nikki Haley said, she did in response to this news that an embryo is morally equivalent to a newborn baby. But if you turn that religious belief into a law, if you decide that you need, that, you need to make an embryo legally equivalent to a newborn baby, you get a decision like Alabama's, which is currently preventing people from having children through IVF, which Nikki Haley said she supports just today. This is the logical conclusion of what the Supreme court set out in DOPS, because, and all of these Republican politicians, right?

Like they think they had their religious belief that life begins at conception and that, uh, embryos are humans and that fetuses are all human and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, and they want to give them the same legal rights. And once you jump to giving them the same legal rights, you get things like the Alabama Supreme court making a decision on IVF that is now ending the practice in the state of Alabama. You get women who are fighting for their lives because they have a pregnancy that could kill them and not being able to get an abortion because some judge has to figure out whether the doctor can save the life of the mother or not. I mean, this, you can have your religious beliefs.

It is totally fine. But the idea that we now have to enshrine your religious beliefs into law has led to all kinds of pain and suffering in this country and will continue to, if we go down this path. and the Biden campaign just put out a clip of, of Trump announcing his nomination of a judge, uh, in 2020 who was deemed not qualified by the American bar association. She now has a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. He considered her for the Supreme court and she is anti IVF and anti surrogacy.

And do you think Trump knew that when he was saying it? Probably not because he doesn't get, like you say, he doesn't, he's not a details guy. He doesn't give a shit, but the Federalist society wanted the judge. And so Trump said, sure, here's your judge. And then we get decisions like this.

And then you get Republican politicians like what someone has fucking dipshit Tommy Tuberville about this. And he was like, Oh no, you know, I support the Alabama Supreme court. Oh no, no. I want IVF. I like, babies are good.

Oh, let me look at the bill. And the reporter's like, there is no bill. What are you talking about? There's no bill. This is just a decision for the Supreme court.

Like they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, which is why they shouldn't be involved in decisions, healthcare decisions that families are making with their doctors. It's crazy.

They want to send the military into blue states and blue cities. And if you don't agree with their fucking right-wing agenda, they are going to force it, literally force it on you with military, with the United States military. And if that sounds like it sounds dystopian, it is not, it is, is exactly what Trump and the people who are going to serve in second term want to do. Okay. In case Trump's a Christian nationalist government and waiting hasn't freaked you out enough.

The love thy neighbor crew also has some pretty terrifying immigration plans. The Washington post reports that Trump and Stephen Miller, yeah, he's going to be back, uh, want to launch, quote, the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. This would go far beyond migrants who recently crossed the border and would target an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. These are immigrants who've lived here for decades, who came here as kids, who work and pay taxes. The plan involves again, sending the military and law enforcement into cities, rounding up immigrants, putting them in new internment camps, and then deporting them to countries where many of them have never even lived because they've been in this country for so long.

Uh, here's Trump talking about it during his town hall with.

It's going to.

Look, the local police, they're so phenomenal. I love them. They love me. I think I have 97% support. So Trump and, uh, and, and Stephen Miller wanted to carry out this massive deportation operation in the first term.

They couldn't get it done for various reasons. They got some pushback from local law enforcement, particularly in blue States and cities, got some pushback from the bureaucracy, the federal government bureaucracy. This is why they're always railing against the state. They got some pushback from the courts, but they think they have learned some lessons this time and we'll be able to pull it off in a second term. What do you think?

And the lesson of what his failed effort to overturn the election is. he needs true, diehard loyalists who will effectively carry out his agenda. He can't have people like bill Barr. I can't believe I'm just citing bill Barr in this case, but bill Barr stopping him from doing things, or as one of his many defense secretaries, but he also has had people smarter and better than like Jeff Clark to actually get stuff done. You see this in the Trump campaign this time around.

He has hired real people to run a real race. And I think that there will be people who can actually get this shit done in his White House. And so we should take all these things seriously and all the reporting about what a second Trump presidency would look like. We got to take that seriously, because that stuff can and will happen. This is what he wants to do.

And I think he has a much better chance.

He was very open about what they want to do. in the Post story. There's a quote about Trump and Miller's plans in their first term that they didn't completely carry out. Quote, Their ideas were psychotic. You're talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula.

Then what do you do with those families? Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore, and start tugging people out of communities? That's what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk. That quote is from the chief of staff at ICE,

Jason Houser, not exactly a bunch of libs at ICE, the people who carry out the deportations. Here's what David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Ron Brownstein about this in the Atlantic. What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or black, those marginalized communities, are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they themselves are undocumented. What he's describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigrations. Literally, as people are leaving for work or their kids are going to school, they're going to see mass deportation centers, with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.

I've been thinking about this for a while because it is a very.

. I think. when people think about deportations, they think about undocumented immigrants crossing the border. There's this border crisis that's getting all the attention right now. They think people who are just coming over to the border and they get stopped and they figure out what to do with them.

Do they get asylum? Do they not? What Trump and Miller are talking about is undocumented immigrants, the 11 million, most of whom have been here for a long, long time. By the way, a lot of these undocumented immigrants are living in families and in homes with people who are citizens. You're also going to see images of parents being torn away from their children who have citizenship.

Also, by the way, Trump and Miller want to revoke birthright citizenship, which is in the 14th Amendment, so that children who were born in this country to undocumented immigrants don't have their citizenship anymore. There's going to be families torn apart. There's going to be people who are at work, on jobs, taken out of their workplaces, dragged through the streets, in internment camps. What happens if Trump sends National Guard in or the military, local law enforcement doesn't want to cooperate, the governor's National Guard in a blue state doesn't want to cooperate with the red state National Guard? Stephen Miller was talking about Trump sending red state National Guard into blue states that didn't want them.

He said, if there's undocumented immigrants that we want to round up in Maryland, but the Maryland governor, but Wes Moore, doesn't want to use the Maryland National Guard to help round up those immigrants, we'll have Glenn Youngkin send the Virginia National Guard into Maryland. What the fuck are they talking about? This is insane. Can you imagine the clashes between various national...

They picked a very good or very bad year to release it, depending on how you think about it.

You think about the guardrails that have already come off. It might.

We are sleepwalking right into something very, very dangerous. You already see Jamie Dimon and Bill Ackman and these people just already walking themselves towards, we're going to be okay with Trump because we're going to get our tax cuts. Yeah. You see it happening, but at the same time, the voters we need to persuade don't really believe us when we talk about it in this way, in part because they just lived through the Trump presidency, and they didn't send the Virginia National Guard to go fight the Maryland National Guard over taking out some nine-year-old immigrant children. It's a real challenge, but you are correctly identifying the natural conclusion to what the Trump people are telling us they're going to do, and we should take them seriously when they say it.

All right. Believe it or not, Trump still has a primary opponent who says she isn't going anywhere. Nikki Haley is within spitting distance of Trump ahead of Saturday's South Carolina primary, just a margin of error 30 points behind, according to FiveThirtyEight's polling average. But if she's going down, she's going down in flames. Haley gave a speech on Tuesday vowing to stay in the race even if she loses tomorrow.

Let's listen. Some of you,

Well, I'm not afraid to say the hard truth out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring. I have no fear of Trump's retribution.

Just anything's possible.

. Yeah, that's about right. It doesn't change the outcome of this, or even... There are a bunch of polls that came out today, like Trump's, up by like 50 in Vermont, 50 in Maine. We know where this is going.

But just be interested to see if Haley can somehow improve her performance from New Hampshire in a much tougher state, even if it's when she governed for six years.

That's the math of 20 and 40.

. Yep. That's right. That's right. So really, the only suspenseful question here is, what's Nikki Haley's endgame?

After that speech, I think it's getting harder to see her endorse Trump, but who knows? She also just said in an interview with NPR that she has even more concerns about Biden as president than Trump. So I don't know. What's going on? I know we've talked about this before, but just to do a gut check every other pod on Nikki Haley's endgame.

She sounds less than like someone who's going to.

You see me jump into a tweet thread and you.

But then I remembered being myself when I was doing political commentary for CNN at the Republican Convention in 2016, and watching Ted Cruz stand on stage and telling people to vote their conscience while being booed mercilessly, and then endorsing Trump two weeks later. And that famous photo of him sadly making phone calls on Trump's behalf. And I listened to our friends at the Bulwark in their podcast, and they are negative on Nikki. I think Tim Miller has it.

But it's always good to check in with Republicans, because Democrats are the ones who have Aaron Sorkin-like fantasies about Republicans saving them. And then you go listen to the Bulwark or other never-Trump Republicans, and sometimes they can disabuse you of those pretty quickly. So I have no idea what she's doing. I think she likes running for president. I think she's probably pretty personally offended at the way Trump has talked about her and her family.

She probably can't imagine that she is losing by this much to this guy. I imagine she has some money commitments through Super Tuesday from her Super PAC donors, which is why she said that. But she's definitely not voting for Joe Biden. She's not going to be on stage with Chris Christie, Liz Cheney, John Lovett. Mitt Romney.

John Lovett, moderating a panel at the DNC with Liz Cheney, Chris Christie.

John Kasich coming back, for whatever he is. Now that his pal Tim Scott's going to be VP.

I'm not saying anything. And Trump is bad. Biden's bad. And that's it. And I think that would be, I would take that.

I would take that. I mean, what would that get you? I think, I mean, this is back to our friends at the at the Bulwark. But, like, I do think that her her saying all these things about Trump and then endorsing him does give some of these Republican voters a permission structure to go ahead and vote for Trump, even if they don't like him. Yeah, I agree with that.

I agree.

And so I totally agree. And if Nikki Haley were to endorse, I think that makes that not impossible, because I think a lot of her voters would be quite disappointed in that outcome. But I think it makes it a little bit harder. And it gives Trump a weapon to go. bring some of those people back.

Yeah, no, I think that's a good idea.

If you're listening?

Yeah, no, I think that's a great idea. All right, before we get to your interview with Ben wickler, let's talk quickly about our, our elderly president, who just just keeps doing whatever he can to help the American people. Joe Biden's out there, just, just just fighting every day to transform more lives. President Biden announced a new round of student debt relief this week that will benefit 150,000 people enrolled in the save repayment plan. Biden has now canceled the debt of 3.9 million borrowers since he took office.

So Republicans reacted to this news by accusing Biden of violating the law in order to buy votes. should I be paying for these, these student loans? and the Supreme court said no. And now he's a, he's a fascist because he's, he's rejecting the Supreme court's ruling and just doing it anyway. Ridiculous.

And then some lefties are saying, you know, helping 4 million borrowers. Isn't enough, like sure. Of course it's not enough, but this is what he can do, because there is the law. Can this guy catch a break, or what? I don't know.

You gotta feel for Biden. Sometimes I really do.

And he has been pulling every lever of the federal government to help as many people as possible. And it's just, it's just the reminder that Joe Biden is what we want in politicians, right? He is trying to do everything. He can't, he can't fix everything. There is no magic wand.

He can't make the Supreme court go away. He can't, he doesn't have a majority in Congress that could pass a legislative solution to this. What he has is the tools is supposed to, and he's using to help as many people as possible. Is it all the help everyone needs? Absolutely not.

Is it better than nothing? No one's saying it is. Yeah. Joe Biden's not right. Just imagine how many dollars of student debt do you think president Donald Trump will cancel, starting in January of 2025??

So Biden goes back and fixes the law. And that's why all these people got relief. So entirely within the law. And number two is a people who are on income based repayment plans. So, according to that law, after 20 years of payments, if you still have a balance, the government's was to cancel the balance if you've been paying all along, but that actually wasn't happening.

So Biden went back, fix that too. And are now sending people checks, uh, who like overpaid or who still have the outstanding balance, canceling the balance. So again, both of the sets of people who got relief, entirely within the letter of the law, has nothing to do with what the Supreme court said. Idiots.

Uh, I'm spending too much time on Twitter. I know, I know. I got a podcast. I got a podcast.

It's hosted by a previously smart fellow.

I'm getting in fights. I'm going to regress all the way back to 20, 2012, 2013.. Whenever I.

I'm trying to put my phone away for periods of time, but we got an election coming. I got to follow the news. I got to be in there. Just got.

That's more. we go to break a reminder that everyone should check out. vote, save America's anxiety relief program. You set up a recurring monthly donation at the level that feels right for you. VSA will send a hundred percent of it to the grassroots organizations and down-ballot races that need it most.

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I think you talked to Harry Enton on the latest episode about Joe Biden being old. Is that true? We talked about the, what the polling tells us.

We're going to be sad when they're down. And, but if you want to understand what you should worry about, what you shouldn't worry about, why you shouldn't panic about any of it, I highly encourage you to listen to Polar Coaster, subscribe to Friends of the Pod so you can. It is, you'll get access to a whole bunch of stuff, including this podcast, and support this company as it's building out the progressive response to the right-wing noise machine. We try to, you, try to feel that we've ever said episode being a little bit smarter about polling, understanding in context, and maybe even sometimes feeling a little bit better about things.

It's going to be an issue. Just fucking deal with it, everyone. We're going to get through it. Okay.

So come listen. What did he say?

Guy's fucking nuts. He's nuts. Don't make him president. All right. So check out Polar Coaster.

Fantastic podcast, Dan. You have to be a member of Friends of the Pod to listen. So just sign up at crooked.com slash friends. You get Polar Coaster, you get all kinds of other great content from all of us. When we come back, Dan talks to Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, Ben Whickler.

When I saw this news, I was.

. And the topic of that show was gerrymandering and efforts to undo what the Republicans had done there. And so the fact that it's five years later, but you guys got this victory is just absolutely unbelievable. So tell us, I know you worked on it for years,

Republican, the gerrymander held, and even though they lost most of the votes, they still had many, many more than half of the seats. We elected Governor Evers in 2018, by 1.1 percentage points, more than one point is a Wisconsin landslide. So we were all thrilled. This is a huge effort. But you know, at the same time as he won statewide and Democrats swept every single statewide office for the first time since 1982.

And in that same year, Democrats won 54% of the votes for state assembly, Republicans got 63% of the seats. We win more than half, they get almost two thirds of the seats. It was as plain as day for anyone watching what was going on. And in 2020, the battle was to stop Republican supermajorities, which we did not by much, we flipped two assembly seats in a incredibly intensive battle. But that year was the year preceding the next census.

So maybe there was going to be a chance. And in 2021, the governor created a People's Maps Commission to take testimony from people all over the state and, you know, try their hand at drawing maps that would actually be fair. Republicans completely ignored them, drew hyper gerrymandered maps, passed them through the state legislature, the governor vetoed them. Because of the Save the Veto campaign and work by the Assembly and Senate Democrats, the governor's veto survived, and it went to the state Supreme Court. So we get to 2022, or, I guess, the fall of 2021, and the right wing majority in the state Supreme Court announces how they will solve the impasse between the state legislature and the governor.

You have the Republicans in the state legislature pushing for gerrymandered maps, you have a Democratic governor saying he won't sign anything but fair maps. The state Supreme Court decides, or announces, out of whole cloth, there's no legal basis for this, that they will choose the maps that make the least changes to the Republican hyper gerrymander from 2011.. Of course, why wouldn't you? Yes. Right.

Just like the framers intended. So that was the basis that they would choose the maps. The governor's team and the state legislature get to work, the governor proposes a set of maps that makes very small changes, but still doubles the number of competitive districts. And he proposes maps for Congress and for the state legislature. And the Republicans don't really complete the assignment, they propose their hyper gerrymandered maps to the state legislature.

again. The state legislature says, well, we did say we'd choose the maps of the least changes. So they go with the governor's maps in that moment. And then Republicans throw a Hail Mary pass to the US Supreme Court, which, in an unsigned shadow docket opinion, meaning no argumentation from either side, no nothing. The US Supreme Court strikes down the state legislative maps, sends it back to the state Supreme Court.

State Supreme Court says, oh, well, I guess we can't use those, and chooses the Republicans' maps. So suddenly, the maps that the governor vetoed, that were obviously rejected by our political process, that build in a Republican supermajority in the state Senate and almost a Republican supermajority in the state assembly, they're chosen by our Supreme Court, which is supposed to be the neutral arbiter of the law, in the final moments before candidates have to start running in their districts. And Republicans come in for the kill. The Republican plan at this point was to get supermajorities in both legislative chambers. at the same time as they were trying to defeat Governor Evers in 2022, which would allow them to dismantle our democracy.

They were openly throwing around their plans to dismantle the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is a bipartisan body that's at the top of our election administration system. They were coming up with, there was a bill that one legislator proposed that would allow them to cancel the results of an election if the margin of victory was less than the number of absentee ballots in the election. I mean, just unbelievable stuff. That was the situation in 2022. And in that moment, we were chillingly reminded, when we looked through the records, that the last time a Democrat had won a governor's race, when there was a Democratic president, because Wisconsin is a swing state that has the typical thing of the party in power wins the midterms, the last time a Democrat had won a governor's race with a Democratic president was 1962, when JFK, with a 70% approval rating, won by a single percentage point.

So the chance in 2022 that we'd win the governor's race, the odds were against us, and we went for it. I mean, people in every corner of Wisconsin working their hearts out. We reelected Governor Evers by 3.4 percentage points. He ran an extraordinary campaign. that was just absolutely made the case, and for me, is a template for what's possible in the state legislature.

Republicans got their supermajority in the state senate, and they came in, they thought they were going to get the supermajority in the state assembly, but a flood of volunteers, a ton of work, everyone doing everything they could, we held off Republican supermajorities in the state assembly by 2,499 votes. It was 0.01% of all the votes cast in the state. And that meant Republicans could not simply unilaterally impose whatever maps they might want. And at that point, we had six months until a Supreme Court race to determine the majority on the state Supreme Court. So once again, we got everyone together.

We held together the kind of core team from the governor's race, people who now had survived election cycle after election cycle, thousands upon thousands of volunteers, including people listening to this podcast who had volunteered in the Supreme Court race in the spring of 2020, in the presidential race in the fall of 2022, in the superintendent of public instruction race in the spring of 2021, local elections in 22,, the fall elections in 22,. we went back to it. And in the spring of 2023, we won a jaw-dropping double-digit landslide in the state Supreme Court race. Janet Protasewicz became the majority-making justice on our state Supreme Court, sending Dan Kelly, who was a consultant on the fake elector scheme, into the dustbin of political history. And boom, we were in a new day.

And as soon as she took the oath of office in August, an organization, Law Forward, which did amazing work, arguing that these maps were unconstitutional, they brought a case that said that the Republican Supreme Court chosen map didn't meet the constitutional standard, and the Supreme Court reviewed it. But as soon as that case was brought, Republicans started plotting to impeach our newly elected justice, which we all realized they had the votes to do. They just needed a simple majority in the state assembly. If they use their full two-thirds majority in the state senate, they could actually throw her out of office. But if they did that, the governor would appoint a replacement.

So it looked like they might be plotting to impeach her and then sit on their hands, because an impeached justice of the Supreme Court is suspended until the state senate holds a trial. So this was this incredibly devious plot to abuse our constitution in order to stop an actual review of their totally illegitimate power. And the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, our allies, we launched a campaign called Defend Justice, where we organized in Republican legislative districts, voters to tell their legislators, absolutely do not do this. Do not become the first legislators anywhere in the country to impeach a judge before they ruled on something to stop them from making that ruling. And it worked.

The GOP backed down. They realized that they were facing a whirlwind that they could not control. And they backed off. The Supreme Court did look at the maps. They did determine they were unconstitutional.

They struck them down in December. And they told the state legislature and the governor, if you can agree on new maps that meet our constitutional standards, great. And if you can't, we're going to ask people to submit maps to us, and we'll choose the maps. So a bunch of folks submitted maps, all the parties to the lawsuit. They had the gold-plated nonpartisan redistricting experts review them.

Surprise, surprise, the maps submitted by Republicans were partisan gerrymanders. The others were fair. And the consultants said they were virtually indistinguishable from each other. And at that point, as we ticked down the clock, the Republicans in the legislature said, well, I guess we'll pass the maps that the governor actually proposed. First, they tried to change them to protect their incumbents.

The governor vetoed that. Then they actually passed the governor's maps, facing a Supreme Court decision that they couldn't control, and they were afraid of facing accountability in the court system. So they passed the maps. And on Monday, the governor signed them. And Wisconsin's new fair maps are law.

And what happened last time, where the U.

S. Supreme Court overruled the state Supreme Court, that cannot happen now, because this was passed through the traditional process of how a bill becomes a law. These are Wisconsin statute. now. The old maps are null and void, moot history.

And candidates are coming out of the woodwork. At this very moment, I spoke to one just a little while ago who's gearing up to announce a run. It is so, so exciting that democracy is finally here, because people fought and fought and fought in election after election, after election after election, even after everything went wrong over and over again. That resilience, that persistence, that dedication to the idea of.

I think, that Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are not great. And so why did they... Help explain to me why they agreed to these maps and why the governor did not send it, as some have said, to the Supreme Court on the thought that you could get a more favorable map that way.

And there's no.

. These are rock solid legally. They're impregnable from a legal perspective. But if judges go rogue, they do whatever they want. It's Calvin Ball.

And so a lot of folks were worried that the Republicans had some kind of trick up their sleeves, some judges in their pocket who were going to find some ludicrous basis to strike them down. And by the time that could be corrected on appeal, the election cycle would be passed. The other risk, of course, is that the US Supreme Court would do what it did last time. And the governor had to weigh those two risks against each other and determine that in his judgment, the legal risk was much lower if the bills are enacted and signed into law. So that's one piece.

The other is, there were four different maps that the nonpartisan experts reviewed that the Supreme Court was considering. Of those, they're all pretty much fair. The governors make it a little bit harder in the first year to win an assembly Democratic majority than some of the other maps. And then it takes two years to have a chance to win the Senate majority. In one of the other maps, it's a little, I think, harder in the assembly.

But there's, like, different levels in the Senate and the assembly for either side. And there's one map that had different numbered Senate districts where it would have been possible for Democrats to win a majority in the Senate in 2024, as well as the assembly. So from one perspective, maybe the Republicans were doing the thing that could slow down the march of democracy and accountability a little bit.

I think the difference between the maps is much less than the difference between any of these maps and no maps. And so, if there's a legal risk, the number one priority is to prevent the possibility that Republicans will pull a fast one and block any new maps at all, for

They were getting, as you said, two thirds of the seats. What is that breakdown now, post maps? Is it more like the 50-50 of the state?

. Now, if either side wins by three points, by every single analysis, if you win by three points, you win a majority in the legislature. And, you know, in the 2012 and 2018 election cycle, Democrats won by more than that and still lost, you know, almost two thirds of the seats in the state assembly. That is unthinkable now. So Democrats have to, you know, they have to do a little bit better than 50% to be able to win an assembly majority in 2024..

And so that's what we're going to shoot for. I mean, it should be the case that both sides try to win most of the votes and get most of the seats. if they do. And you can see in district after district after district, there's now a realistic shot for Democrats to win seats and for those seats to add up to a majority of the seats in the state assembly. And there's four, at least, state Senate seats where we have a really good shot this election cycle.

If we do that, then 2026, we have a shot at a Senate majority and potentially a Democratic trifecta. And, of course, the Republicans also have a shot. And that's how it's supposed to work. That's all we've been fighting for is an equal level playing field. And that's what we finally.

Talk to me about this person. How much do we have to worry about this?

At the same time, this is Wisconsin. And Eric Hovde runs a bank in California that makes a huge amount of money. He is a centimillionaire, at least. We'll see what his financial disclosure forms say. But he's been saying that he will spend tens of millions of dollars of his own money on this race.

And that means we have to take this very seriously. That's what Ron Johnson did, who actually lived in the state at the time. In 2010,, he announced late, he announced in the election year, he bought a ton of ads portraying himself as Mr. Reasonable Businessman. And he was able to define himself because of the fortune that was spent by him and on his behalf.

And he sailed into a US Senate seat that we haven't been able to win back. So we need to treat this as though it's a 50-50 race. And I'm so glad it's Tammy Baldwin, who's our champion of the Senate, who's up against him, because she genuinely connects with voters in every part of Wisconsin, across every line of difference, across geography, across ideology. There are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who know that they have their jobs because Tammy Baldwin fought for them, that they have health insurance because Tammy Baldwin fought for them. So we're going to make sure that everyone knows about what she's done and what she will do.

She's the lead sponsor of the bill that will restore the protections of Roe v. Wade to this entire country if Democrats get a trifecta in 2024.. Eric Hovde, he, last time he ran for office, he said he was 100% pro-life and thought life begins at conception and all abortions should be banned. So there's a night and day difference between these two candidates. And go to TammyBaldwin.com, chip in, get involved, volunteer for her, go to WisDems.org, help us at the state party.

We're going to be helping Tammy, President Biden. We're going to flip two House seats as our game plan. And we'll be working hand in glove with Greta Neubauer in the state assembly and Diane Hesselbein in our state Senate. These are names that you will come to know of champions who are fighting to make Wisconsin actually work for everybody. This is an all-hands-on-deck election where we're going to try to build reverse coattails, where the local candidates help turn out voters to help us win up and down the ballot and vice versa.

It's all one big fight for freedom and democracy in the.

We have a proven record of success here. And we know, as exhausting as this is for Ben and everyone in Wisconsin, that this election will once again come down to Wisconsin. We will be waiting for you guys to count those votes. Hopefully it happens a little less dramatically than it did in 2020.. But that's when we will find out that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been re-elected.

It'll be because of the work in Wisconsin, the work that everyone has done. So support Ben, support the Wisconsin Democrats. Ben, congratulations on this victory, and I know we're going to talk to you a bunch before this election is over.

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