My Ohio, My Choice

In November, with a turnout of more than three million voters, Issue 1 was defeated 57-43, a huge margin in a state that Trump won by 10 points in the last two elections. Alyssa, This is great news. How are you feeling?

So I am very happy. Also, Pfeiffer Abortion motivates people, reproductive rights is motivating people to the polls, and so I was very excited by this news.

And it's actually not fine to get among some Republicans that, you know here. I think the Republicans are the dog that caught the car and now they don't exactly know what to do. I think that they want some restrictions on abortion, I don't think anybody watching the cases, the case. Rather, that's happening down in Texas, where women who were denied abortions are being asked to testify about what happened to them. Listening to a woman who knew that her fetus was not going to survive and was forced to carry it to term. And then, when she went to the hospital, was told you have to be septic before we can treat you.

I think that when a lot of folks envisioned Roe being overturned, they didn't think that. And so I think that this is, I think that this is much more motivating than people think it will be. I think that candidates who hold extremely severe and extreme positions on abortion are becoming less and less desirable.

One, the number of Americans who say they're pro-choice is at a record. Since Dobbs, the number of Americans who say they're anti-choice or describe themselves as quote unquote pro-life is at a knee-dear since Dobbs. The energy around the issue, the turnout in this election is mind boggling. It's mind boggling that three million people would turn out this is the only thing on the ballot.

There's nothing else, there's no gubernatorial primary, there's no Senate primary. There was just abortion and it was an issue that was disguised to try to make it not be about abortion. Two in the elections, where we have had straight up abortion related ballot initiatives or constitutional referendum on the ballot. So that's Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, California and a couple of other places.

In those places, the pro-abortion side of the argument outperformed Joe Biden's numbers from 2020.

So that means that it's a turnout driver. It means that there are some people who, maybe who did not vote in 2020 but have come out. Because they see their freedoms and their rights being taken away from them, I mean, it's just an absolutely dramatic thing. In Ohio, 20 of Trump counties voted against issue one.

In Ohio is a state. That if you had asked anyone before Dobbs that it would have been a state where an abortion referendum would fail and fail miserably. And that logic was clearly wrong, but it was probably wrong then, but it's obviously wrong now. Dobbs has changed absolutely everything. I think if you want to take a lesson from this. For Democrats, it is that we are more than a year after the decision. Abortion is still clearly a driving, galvanizing issue in politics, but I don't think Democrats should assume that that will still be the case in 2024..

It very well may be, but with every passing day, there's always a chance that something can recede further into the background, it could become less salient. Does it mean that there still won't be huge majorities of people who care passionately about it and are driven by it? The races are also narrow and we're operating on such thin margins that. The argument here is, we have to do everything we can to keep it on the top of the agenda. We have to argue that if you re-elect Sherrod Brown and we expand our Senate majority and keep the White House and take the house, we'll pass a law codifying Roe.

We have to tell people that if Republicans were to do the same thing and to take control of government, that they will pass what they have told us they will do. Which is a federal abortion bill, I think there's an argument, the lesson here is not that abortion is a secret weapon. It is that if we want voters to care about it. And we've got to make sure they still care about it in 2024 to the same extent they do right now.

And I don't think that when Dobbs was overturned that people thought. People who were rooting for this, I don't think they understood that doctors were going to be targeted in the way there were. That there would be like bounty laws in Texas to turn people in and become vigilantes. And I think that it's just it is so far and it's so extreme, and that it is affecting health care in a way that's so profound. I think that that's important to sort of keep talking about, too. Because women who aren't even pregnant can't get health care in a lot of states in this country right now. Or it is at least prohibitively difficult for them to do so.

They're going to be more deceptive and so we're going to have to do everything we possibly can to help. And so for everyone who wants to help Ohioans win in November and fight back against abortion bans happening all over the country. Go to VotesaveAmerica..com. Slash Bans, where you can find opportunities to volunteer organizations to donate to to help fight for reproductive freedom and abortion rights. All in Ohio and across the country. All right, Alyssa, that was it for the good news, let's get to the let's get to the, uh, the more challenging parts of our political hellscape.

All right, so this week, Donald Trump is waiting for a potential court hearing on whether he will face a protective order in the January 6th case. And he seems to be taking this issue with his usual seriousness. Here's the twice impeached, thrice indicted former president at a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Let's take a listen because I'm sweating like a dog up here.

It's a First Amendment case. There was never a second of any day that I didn't believe that that election was rigged. It was a rigged election, it was a rigged election and it was a stolen, disgusting election. And this country should be ashamed. And they go after the people that want to prove that it was rigged and stolen.

And then, on Wednesday, Trump took to truth, social to personally and directly attack Judge Chuck and the judge in the January 6th case. By name, accusing her of an array of bullshit, conflicts of interest and conspiracy theories. Now, Alyssa I have to ask, Yeah, is there a strategy here? is Trump trying to provoke the judge or can he just not help himself? What do you think's going on?

He's in a chaos candidate. Throw everything against the wall, see what sticks. He's trying to find something that further enrages his base, as if they need more rage. But yeah, he has no idea why he's, he is. He will take whatever comes from his, from his chaos and his nonsense.

And he wants to raise questions, he wants to try to make it seem like everyone is crooked, everyone's conflicted. It's not just him. And that generally politically, by, you know, is enough for him to skate by. It gives the people who want to be with them the ability the fig leaf to stick with them right where. It's like, Yeah, sure, what Trump did is terrible, but like, these guys are all out to get him anyway.

They don't really care, and this is an Obama judge, and Jack Smith goes after Republicans or whatever other bullshit, and and it gets. And for the people who are sort of like in the middle, who are pretty cynical about politics, who don't really pay. Engage with the news, like in any great detail. In other words, the people who generally decide elections in this country. It's kind of easy to just like, throw up their arms and be like, Ah, fuck, I don't know, you know?

And then you can move on to another submission. So it is, I'm not saying this is a plan. Like there's no whiteboard that is in his legal strategy war room, that's like, attack the judge and attack Jack Smith. I think there's also an element of this where, and it was just why this what happens with this protective order is so fascinating is, and I remember, many, many years ago. Lovett described Trump's behavior during the 2016 campaign as the raptors testing the fence in Jurassic Park.

And I think that's a little what he's doing here, which is he just he wants to see how far he can go before he gets burnt. And he's going to push and push and push. And he does sort of understand that. The judge can't really throw him in jail, I mean, technically she can throw him in jail, but she's not going to. And so what's she really going to do? And he'll do that until he'll, you know, he'll push and push and push until he gets bit.

And we'll have to sort of see how that goes. And he might, you know, it's hard to see. This is not a good legal strategy, but as a political strategy goes, you could do worse, I think.

He, he gets, he gets fined, he gets fined, like there's a world in which he thinks he had. This is like where he runs into someone who actually, like, like Jack Smith. Essentially, who will will take this seriously enough to do something about it? So we'll see, right?

I mean, it's clear that his, uh. He's not going to up until there's real consequences that matter to him, and maybe those can never come, that he's not going to change his behavior.

But Donald Trump has other legal problems, too. Reports are that Fulton County D.a. Fonny Willis could indict Trump as soon as next week for trying to overturn the election in Georgia. The New York Times reports that Jack Smith is still investigating Trump's Super PAC for potential financial crimes related to raising money based on false election claims. And perhaps most deliciously, we learned from The New York Times that earlier this year, Jack Smith got a subpoena to dig around in Trump's Twitter. DMS What I imagine is a dark and dangerous place.

Well, listen, this is a lot like to date. You could probably argue that none of this stuff has done any real damage to Trump politically. He's still probably gone up in the Republican polls, you know, that New York Times poll from a week or so ago, where he's essentially tied with Biden. But do you think there's a point where all of this becomes too much for voters to stomach?

We are exhausted, we can't take it, it's too much. But the people who support him, I'm not sure that any of this is going to matter. I mean, I think that the people, the 37 percent, you know, that ardently support him. I'm not sure that any of this is something where they're like, you know what? This is the straw that broke the camel's back.

There has been so much else that this just, I mean it all again. It always depends on what they find and what could happen. But I'm just not sure. He has set himself up as a martyr. His base supporters believe that, and I don't know that anything is going to change that.

He could get impeached, he could have an insurrection, he can support Nazis, he can do all of these things. And it sort of stays there. That is that baseline.

And like, that's what our experience tells us. We are scarred from thinking for eight years that this is the thing that's going to bring him down in the campaign. It was attacking the Gold Star families that spoke at Hillary Clinton's convention Access Hollywood, attacking the judge in this racist way. Which is actually very was quite prescient, as we now know. And then everything throughout the course of the presidency, and it stayed the same. But then you also sort of think, like, man, this guy is going to be. And this week is sort of interesting. Model for what the rest of this campaign is going to be like is that the entire conversation is going to be around his upcoming criminal trials.

He's going to be in court, or his lawyers will be in court filing motions, there'll be hearings, they're going to be, he's going to be arraigned again, probably. And it's just like, at some point, for some number of voters, does that change something? And it's more likely to change it in a general election where he's the nominee, because the way the calendar works out is he. If you believe that the primary process will move along on a similar trajectory as 2016, and the polls kind of suggest it might, then he would become the nominee, basically. The week before the Alvin Bragg trial in New York on Hush money is scheduled to start.

We're going to get a, you know, in the January 6th hearing case there is, I think we're going to in the next week or two. Jack Smith is going to propose a trial date and we'll know then just this idea that he is going to be in court for. Like, the seven months of the general election is something that we would like to think would be somewhat damaging. Particularly for people like us who work in campaigns and think campaigns matter. That instead of traveling the country and doing rallies all the time, he'll be sitting in court for what is right now nearly 80 felony charges.

And I think that the big problem that the Republican Party has is that most of the leadership of their party has not come out against him. Like, there is no, there is no one he's really running against in the primary. If any of them who have been so brave now and come out and been like, Oh, what he did was bad, okay?

Why would anyone believe you? You only said he was bad when you became his opponent, not when you could have just actually spoken the truth? If that's what you think, and so I feel like, I don't know, I guess I just, I feel bad. I don't think it's bad for him, I think that he can kind of make these trials work for him.

Like, there's, that's probably a pretty small sliver. Then you got some people who voted Trump. 16 Biden, 2020 Do they flip back? Do they flip third party? What is how much of Biden's 2020 vote?

Does he get back out at 2024?

If there's even the slightest drop, then he loses some of these states if Trump holds his numbers. And so it's just. It is a very interesting thing that Trump has all of these problems. And if he, Biden sort of has the harder job to hold his coalition together than Trump does. Because Trump's is just a more ideologically, demographically, geographically homogenous coalition than Biden's, which is spans from, you know, some former Trump voters, never trump Republicans, to, you know, highly progressive Bernie Sanders supporters under the age of 25, right?

It's a that's a much more, it's a greater challenge.

But if Trump were to lose the person that everyone thought he would lose to in the primary, at least as Ron DeSantis Lol lol is right. On Tuesday, Ron DeSantis fired his campaign manager. This is his third staff shakeup in a month. His campaign has had strategic resets, pivots. He was doing, he was going to be more conservative than more moderate. Do more media, less media.

I've lost track of all the ways in which they're trying to rebrand this campaign.

Alyssa First based on the staff shakeups in this month, the summer loss, the summer of resets with Ron DeSantis. Have you ever seen anyone pull off a band-aid more slowly?

He's not changing, he hasn't come out and been like, like, it's pretty interesting, actually. When you think about it, he hasn't come out and been like. This is my platform. I mean, we kind of know what it is, but it's just he's like, here I am.

I'm just this very not charismatic man from Florida, he's an uncharismatic Florida man.

He doesn't know why he's running, he doesn't have confidence in himself. As a politician or a candidate. There is a way to do campaign shakeups, they happen all the time. A campaign that was supposed to do well hits bottom.

The donors freak out, they tell the candidate that if you don't make changes, we're walking away. And so now, all of a sudden, they don't have the money to pay the staff or to pay for the huge headquarters they bought. When they thought they'd be this front runner. And the rule of campaign shakeups is the Michael Corleone rule from the last scene in Godfather, you handle all of the family's business.

In one day, whatever staff changes, you have to make you fire them and you announce the new person taking the role. On that day. You do a big story where you tell them what the new strategy is going to be, you make a hard pivot, you do not do it like this.

It is just.

Joe Biden ran a tight ship even when his campaign was not performing great. They stuck together, they got it done. Obama famously ran the No Drama Obama campaign that we worked on.

Did incredibly well Donald Trump's campaign, we saw what it looked like, we saw what his White House looked like. And so this would give me great pause if I was one of these mega-adjacent billionaires who are funding Ron DeSantis. This guy does not have what it takes to do it, either behind the scenes or on the stump.

If you asked him, why is he shaking things up? it's like, because I'm losing, but he doesn't know why he's losing, he doesn't understand. Fundamentally, I think, as a baby pundit, that the delta between he and Trump is so large, so vast in the polls that he has to take Trump on. No reset is going to fix the fact that his strategy doesn't work, and that's, I think, what's interesting.

You know, he's like, Oh, it's the campaign manager, it's this, it's that. Yeah, maybe they did spend too much money, but that's like, not the fundamental problem.

He has no charisma, he is a dishrag on the stump. And in order to make up some of the space between he and Trump right now, he has to say what he thinks. If he thinks Trump is fine, why is he running? But all of them, aside from maybe Christie, are parsing their words so much.

Why would you support them over Trump? because they basically say, Trump's like, kind of, OK, he did some things I don't agree with. But none of them are going to break out of the 30 points they're all trailing Trump by.

Bites keep saying what they're saying.

And you worked for John Kerry when he was written off for dead, and there are some parallels here. Kerry was the initial favorite in that race. He was the choice of a lot of donors. Looking for someone who could, because of his military record, could beat Bush. During a war, Kerry fired his campaign manager, a bunch of staff.

Do you see any parallels from what you guys went through in 2004? That could apply to DESantis here, and the answer can be no. I want to be clear, no, no, no, no.

And so I think that was always a little bit on his side, you know, until we got swift boated. But I think that when he, that was a dark day. I think that when his reset came, it was exactly like you said, it was the Corleone. I mean, like, we had many. This is why I think it's interesting, because everything that DESantis is doing right now feels like a mini reset.

It feels like a change in staff. A change in staff isn't necessarily a reset. When John Kerry brought in Mary Beth Cahill to run the campaign, she was fucking law and order like there was. You know, John Kerry had a bad habit of like forum shopping, of asking different staff for different answers. Until he sort of heard what he wanted to hear. And I'm not talking trash.

I love the man, he has said this himself, he was not great at taking the blame for things when he made mistakes. And I think that Mary Beth Cahill came in and was like, she did more of what Plouffe did on our campaign. And was like, this is where we're going to go and this is what we're going to do. And so I think right now what DESantis is doing is like how we were sort of like limping into Iowa.

Like, Favreau and I always joke that the last time we saw each other in December of 2003, before the Iowa caucuses, we were at the Pentagon City Mall buying sheets. Because he was going to Iowa and I was going to New Hampshire, and we were sleeping on the floor of other people's houses. So that we could do GOTV and that by the time we came back, we would be in the unemployment line together, like, things were quite dark. But I think that when you know, like J.K brought in someone who was like, I'm going to make change. And if you listen to me, we may have a chance.

And like, I don't think that DESantis has done that yet, it doesn't feel like he has decided. And I think that part of that is if he brought in someone who is, who had that same kind of point of view, who was going to, like, rule the campaign with law and order. I think it would mean really taking on Trump in a sincere way, and I'm just not sure that he wants to do that.

All new people picked Sarah Palin changed strategy before Sarah Palin.

McCain had real sway with independent, moderate voters in New Hampshire, which has an open primary. So he had that waiting for him. And Biden, even when his campaign hit the skids, remained the dominant candidate with Black voters, and he knew he had South Carolina waiting.

Or even if he were to win Iowa, what's the next place? Where does he have appeal? Because even you would think Florida would be the thing for him, but that's also Trump's state, so it's very....

So who knows?

Okay, you ready?

Well, maybe we'll do something else, you know, see, some people say yes, but they hate to say it because it doesn't make sense to do it if you're leading by so much. But they like it for entertainment value because they're selfish, they're selfish.

All right, Alyssa, do you think Trump really has it in him to see the spotlight to the rest of field? Do you think there's any downsides to him skipping this debate?

So I'm like, I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to do it. And then he's he wants to fold. So he says, you know what? My people want me to do it, and I have to do what they want me to do. And he gives himself cover and he does the debate.

That's what I would do, I think. If he skips the debate, the RNC, like, literally, what is the fucking point of a debate without him in it? I mean, they're like, I don't know.

So when everyone's made that, everyone of consequences has made the debate stage at this point. Even Mike Pence qualified for the debate last week. Right, right, right, so you got Christie Scott, Haley Vivek, Ramaswamy Pence, you get Doug Burgum has made the debate, believe it or not, really.

If he doesn't go, what are all these people going to do? Beat the shit out of Ron DeSantis.

And so you're right.

Last night, in an interview with Newsmax's Eric Bolling, Trump said he would not sign the RNC's loyalty pledge, which requires candidates to do two things support the nominee and commit to not run as a third party candidate. So far, the only people to sign the pledge are Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley. Why do you think Trump wouldn't sign this pledge?

Right, isn't that what you're saying, that ultimately you have enough faith in the people who you're running against? And he would never, ever cop to that, like, that's, that's.

It is him and him alone. There is, there is no other, there is no other a king for the GOP. So I totally understand, even though, even if he though, even if he did say it, everyone would know it was a lie, but I totally understand why he wouldn't.

You know, you have, like the Chris Christie's and the Mike Pence's, and the, you know, these people and people who are, who have somewhat run somewhat explicitly against Trump, saying that they would support him, right or not run as a third party candidate. I mean, none of this really matters.

It's just it's. He just knows he has so much leverage here that he's just using it for shits and giggles, right? Yeah, that's exactly right, because he can.

And he knows that he's already made RNC chairwoman Romna Romney McDaniel, stop using her, get her her, stop using Romney in her name, just out of pain. So why not do this, too?

Do you love Jon Favreau? Are you Emily Favreau? I can't believe I'm reading this, and I can't believe this is in the housekeeping. On the one day, Jon decides not to pod.

But on the latest episode of Offline, Jon Favreau breaks down how Taylor Swift has navigated the internet age to build one of the most successful musical careers of all time. It is a fascinating conversation. Then Max Fisher returns for the tech roundup to unpack Elon's Twitter rebrand and Rhonda Santos's Cruel summer. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday morning, wherever you get your podcasts all right.

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Go to VoteSafe America's No Off Years Fund to support the work of organizers across the country. Check it out at Crooked.com Slash store.

Joining me now to talk about the one year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act and everything else happening on Capitol Hill is the Senate Majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer. Welcome back to Podsafe America.

What is your elevator pitch to someone when you see them about what you guys accomplished a year ago and why it matters?

This bill was the most monumental piece of legislation probably in decades. The whole, you know, the seven bills we passed over the over the summer is. People have said it's the greatest Senate since the Great Society. What did we do? Well, we reduced the amount of carbon. It was the greatest bill on climate change that we have ever done.

We reduced the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere by 40 percent, so people will live longer and cleaner. But at the same time that we did that, we greatly created millions of good new new jobs, good paying jobs. Because people are going to have to build the panels and install the panels, whether they be wind or solar. People are going to have to lay the transmission lines, people are going to have to build the new cars.

So not only did, and these are jobs that have a future. When your son or daughter gets a job in one of these places, you say this industry is going for a long time. It's not going to be one of these things for a short amount of time. But climate is one of the greatest dangers. We face climate change and we did something very real and very strong about it.

I had a North Star. Of course, there were compromises in there on climate. We had a deal with Joe Manchin, but he kept the North Star. 40 percent reduction of carbon into the atmosphere. We also reduced people's costs in other ways.

Prescription drugs for the first time, we went after Big Pharma, and insulin for people on Medicare was over. There will no longer be more than thirty five dollars, and after we did that, a lot of the private sector followed. They'll be for the first time.

Medicare can negotiate with the drug companies to lower costs. Vaccines are free and starting next year, it hasn't started yet. No one will pay more than three thousand dollars out of their pockets for prescription drugs instead of these huge costs.

You have a kid with cancer and the drug costs a thousand dollars a month and you can't afford it. What do I do? That isn't going to happen anymore. Third, we did something Republicans would never do We closed some real tax loopholes.

We made the rich pay every corporation. that makes you all the stories of corporations paying no taxes. That's over. An amendment by Elizabeth Warren got in the bill that said, a corporation has a profit of over a billion dollars.

They're going to pay a minimum of 15 percent, and many of them will pay more. We put a 1 percent tax on the stock buybacks, which so many people dislike. And we put a number of a large number of new agents into the IRS. To go after the very wealthy who hire all these lawyers and everybody else to close loopholes. And at the same time, we did it in a way that was reducing inflation because we put money that, some of that money, not all of it, but some of it into job reduction. So this bill is going to reduce your costs and create a middle class that is permanent and long standing.

It's it's a great bill.

They're cutting a ribbon at a new road or a new bridge, they're going to a pharmacy and talking about lower drug costs and it's sinking in. It's going to take persistence. But we are spending a lot of time on implementation, particularly in the battleground states, but also in other areas as well. I mean, we put in that bill in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, broadband to rural areas. Everywhere. I go in the most rural parts of New York State, and we have the third largest rural population in America.

People don't remember that. Because in New York City, the local officials are amazed that we're getting broadband to people for the first time. So it's going to take a while. We're going to have to persist and persist and persist, but we're spending a huge amount of time on implementation. In fact, Jeff Zients has his as his deputy chief of staff, a woman named Natalie Quillian, whose only job is implementing this. And it's going to sink in. Here's the analogy.

I remember in 2017 and 18, the Republicans passed this big tax break for the wealthy, but it was hard to get through. At the beginning. People said, well, the Republicans said, See, they're against tax cuts. They didn't say they were for the wealthy.

But we crafted a message, Speaker Pelosi and I, and said, we're going to keep at it for six months, we're going to stick with it and guess what, it sunk in. So that by 2018 elections, they weren't even going to use the tax issue. And they had to try to use immigration to try and win, which fortunately failed. So we're going to have to persist.

We're going to have to implement, but it will sink in because this is just what people want. The same polling data says. Do you want your cost of prescription drugs lower? Do you want to do something about climate change? Did you want to do something to rein in the NRA, which we did in the Gun Safety Act? People say, Oh, yeah, I really care about that.

And not to mention the issue of choice abortion, which is going to be a very important issue as well in the 2022 campaigns. Many of our candidates, Catherine Cortez, Masto, Mark Kelly, so many of the others. Used the things we did in the IRA and in the Chips and Science Bill, and in the Infrastructure bill. With great success and picked up a seat in the Senate.

And they said, Schumer, you're related to the senator. This was a nurse, you know? This was a nurse from Queens. And she said, Yeah, it's my father. And she said, You tell that man, I love him. All the other politicians are talking blather, but he's on TV every Sunday talking about something that matters to me.

Talk about things that matter to people, don't get involved in the Washington fighting, et cetera. They want to know that you can do something. And the one other thing I'd say is that, you know, the social media is now much more important and has a much greater reach. And you ignore it at your peril. You know, when I got to the Congress a while back, there were people who didn't believe in television.

They just believed in newspapers. Anyone who gets to the Congress now and says it's just these, the regular media, the TV and the newspapers is missing a point. The social is very important, but it works, and again, it's worked in our campaigns very well. We've spent more than half our campaign dollars. DSCC and Super PAC on the social media side.

But the people whose job it is are not doing a very good job of that. And he continues to have this blockade. We also have other senators holding up State Department appointments and Pentagon appointments, and, frankly, Senator Tuberville seems pretty immune to sort of traditional forms of political pressure. He seems like he really likes being this hero of the MAGA.

Right, if the Republicans cannot get him in line, do you have tools at your disposal or things you can do to break this blockade?

Now the pressure on them is mounting, they know it's a terrible issue for them to be taking women who have volunteered for our armed forces. And saying they can't get health care because they're in a state that doesn't allow them to get proper health care. And then hold up these people who have worked so hard and labored for so long in our military, this is an issue that is their responsibility. The pressure will mount on them and I believe that they will have to come to the conclusion they cannot let Tuberville persist.

But we held the line and that was great. But we also passed a defense bill, you know, if you look at the House, they put all kinds of poison pills in that bill. About things like, you know, anti-choice and what you're allowed to teach in the military, and all that other stuff. We had none of that, none of that in the Senate, and we passed the Defense bill overwhelmingly. But the most amazing thing of all is the one you mentioned.

Under the great leadership of Patty Murray and Susan Collins, all 12 appropriations bills were passed out of the appropriations committee with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. So the bottom line is, and I've told this to Speaker McCarthy, I've said, you've got to follow the Senate. You can only keep the government open if you work in a bipartisan way. And if you're going to insist on doing it in a partisan way, you'll be responsible for shutting down the government. I hope they see that the cooperation between the Senate Democrats and the Senate Republicans as a model and go forward.

Now, you know, that means telling the Tea Party folks, the right-wing MAGA folks, Freedom Caucus, they call them now, that they're not going to be allowed to shut down the government. And there'll have to be a bipartisan bill with Democrats and Republicans in the House, like the Senate. In my history, the party that is demanding things before the government is funded and lets the government pushes the government into default almost always loses.

It's always hard to tell people to not believe what they're feeling. What's your sort of economic messaging strategy heading into 2024??

But the second thing that I would say about the economy is, and I've talked to some of the experts on this, including some of the polling experts. It's often a lagging indicator that people look at the economy six months ago and it's in there, still in their heads today. Well, if the economy continues in the good way, it has inflation, lower, wages up, unemployment, particularly minority unemployment, down to record low levels. Within a while, I think people's view of the economy will improve, but it's not just going to happen like that. And we Democrats have to keep talking about it and talking about it. I read your article or column, or whatever it was that. Calling it Bidenomics is a good idea because it forces people to focus on the differences between the two parties.

I tend to agree with that.

McConnell has said they want a national abortion ban. They can't help themselves because the hard hard right has such power in the Republican Party. Even though it's a real distinct minority of the American people, probably 20 or 25 percent, that they're walking themselves into a cul-de-sac. And this is going to be a very important issue. It helped us in other states, but it's also something we believe. You know, women have a right to make their own decisions.

And if you're a true libertarian, which these people profess to be on economic issues, where they don't want to pay taxes or see anything else, well, if you're a true libertarian, you're pro-choice. Let each woman make her own decision.

But just if you know anything, wink twice. But what led you to introduce that bill? And if you want to just tell us the truth right now, please do.

Well, let them disclose it, and we'll all know the truth and we'll be better off with the truth. And then I think of my dear friend Harry Reid, you know, who would sit together and discuss this? And he had a more view of UFOS and outer space intelligence being more likely than I did, but I love talking to him about it.

And I made sure that it got into the NDAA bill and will allow the White House, the Senate, I mean the president. To put tough sanctions on China and Mexico, which is allowing this evil drug to flow into our shores. So there was a lot we got done.

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