Adam Schiff with Jon Meacham, "Midnight in Washington"

this is afternoon east coast um this to say to everyone who is joining us from the various places that you may be and are joining us um on behalf of my colleagues at the la bay book company which is located onto amish land in the city of seattle we are honored to be presenting this program this evening with u.s congressman adam schiff for his extraordinary new book midnight in washington and for which the subtitle is as important and not always this is not always the case with books but midnight in washington how we almost lost our democracy and still could he is joining us from washington he um this is his first book and sometimes books by public figures such as um congressman schiff are you know this sort of chronicle of their lives and well they've you know got various things that have gotten them where they are we hope he will write that book someday um because he's a marvelous and tremendous writer as this book reflects uh but the book this book is not this this book is very important and very timely and very few people have been in a position to write such a book because of the places representative schiff has been in as a chair of the house permanent select committee on intelligence uh especially during the last um period where he was a he was uh in the minority uh for a few years but um as as the chair um of that once the democratic party had the majority in the house um through which but in both sides so he's as the when the minority as well the majority played an invaluable important role in in the congress itself and in conveying to the u.s public um what all has been going on and what is at stake this book amplifies and deepens that and um we're you know it is a and it's it is a book and yet it's got still unfolding stories um as i think this evening's conversation will will um help reveal i mean this is a book to read and i will say the book has been out over a week and it's already getting the reaction where someone has bought it and come back and said they're buying another one to get someone else this said this is the real thing um the book is now made the number one position on the new york times bestseller list which again i don't think it did when it first came out but it's it was it was up there but i think that the reaction um that readers have really been getting which is what really puts books in people's hands and in this case um necessary information in people's hands um and um it's it's heartening to see that being felt and and um taken to heart um so mr chairman of the of the shift will be in conversation tonight with someone else who's we're delighted to have with us john meacham um who is a uh distinguished author a pulitzer prize-winning author of books a long-time journalist um we recounted he had a he had a role in book publishing but he also certainly has been an editor um at time and i believe newsweek before that and he's with us from nashville where he's the rogers chair in the american presidency at vanderbilt university and he's the author of i believe nine books author or editor many of them presidential biographies but his most recent book which came out last year is this beautiful eloquent testimony to the late john lewis representative john lewis this book his truth is marching on john lewis and the power of hope um congressman schiff and and mr meacham will have a conversation we hope you'll put questions in the q a portal in the in the uh on your screen and later in their their conversation uh they will um uh mr meacham will work those questions in adam schiff congressman schiff um represents california's 28th district we won't say too much because there's been he's already been talking about which baseball team he's representing um here in the postseason um i will say this book is very serious in all sorts of ways and as i've said it's his first book but if you read the acknowledgements along with all the acknowledgments to um people other his people he serves with in congress um people who's worked with him in his offices in um washington and in california and his constituents and many others he can say he mentions that this is his first book but like anyone else virtually from los angeles he's taken his hand at screenplays so um maybe maybe there's movies yet to see from his hand um before serving in congress for the 28th district he was a former us attorney which also i think informs this book and as well as a california state senator um so we again thank you all for joining us and i will now disappear and come back at the end so ask you to all give good virtual attention and applause and gratitude to um congressman adam schiff and john meacham thank you both gentlemen thank you uh i'd like to point out that i was called distinguished mr chairman so just so you know that so you guys are expecting your tone um i gotta take what i can get here uh we will not i will pledge to you all uh the congressman all politics is local as speaker o'neill taught us and uh his district abuts dodger stadium uh i will refrain from sharing uh how uh the atlanta braves from down the road are doing tonight for those of you who are toggling between um actual sport and uh this contest we're in for for democracy itself but an honor to be here uh with you i had the pleasure of reading an early copy of this book and as was just noted i think with great delicacy being sent a book by a politician is is not the thing you wake up in the morning and really want to have happen to you for various reasons uh but this was a a great pleasure to read and an important book and i'm delighted to see uh that it's receiving the the hearing that it's clearly getting around the country for those of you who may not have seen it jonathan martin uh my friend and long time colleague uh wrote i think a very uh very positive and very interesting review of the book uh today or yesterday in the new york times which i i commend uh to you mr chairman i'm just gonna uh throw some batting practice your way uh but i'm curious um did you know uh president trump was going to be the threat that he emerged as he emerged that is in 2015 2016 uh a lot of people saw him as a carnival barker uh saw him as something of an aberration you know we can we can buckle our seat belts and get through this uh did you when a did you share that more benign view if i may and then at what point did you begin to see him as a genuine threat to the constitutional order well john first of all thank you so much uh for moderating the discussion tonight uh i'm such an enormous fan it's going to be difficult for me to restrain myself from going all fanboy during the course of the evening but i really so admire your work and uh and and i'm delighted to i feel like i'm in your study tonight anytime anytime um you know i used to tell a joke during the 2015 campaign when i was out on the stump and i was a surrogate for hillary um i would say that there's no way that donald trump is going to become the republican nominee this was before the end of the primaries uh and i said for two reasons uh the first is republicans aren't that suicidal and the second is democrats aren't that lucky um well it turns out they they were that suicidal um and we weren't that lucky um i never imagined that uh that donald trump could get elected um because i did view him as this kind of clownish figure this carnival barker uh and essentially a grifter um and i didn't think the american people would go for that um in terms of when i realized that it was much worse than i expected um it was early in the first year of his presidency so i think just a few months in because he didn't seem to have any parent ideology i thought you know it was entirely possible that he was just being a showman during the campaign and and not having a fixed ideology he might tend to uh not be a partisan figure and maybe all over the map but uh but it it soon became apparent that he either couldn't tell uh fact from fiction um or he was willing to be uh you know engaged in falsehood after falsehood after falsehood uh and uh and i remember uh early in the first year when in our committee we were charged with investigating what the russians had done to interfere in our democracy and what they were doing still reaching what now seems like a self-evident conclusion but at the time was a kind of a startling one which was that the threat to our democracy no longer came predominantly from outside the country it came from within um as we saw him you know batter of democratic norm after democratic norm so i have to say very early in the trump administration but not as early as many who knew that uh from well before his election does that reflect the conversation say within the democratic caucus within the circles in which you moved was that was that a common evolution do you think i think it was with one very notable exception my new york colleagues knew exactly who he was and what he represented uh and indeed uh you know i i couldn't fail but you know we hear from every new yorker frankly not just my colleagues um that uh any new yorker would tell you they would say to me that the man is a complete con um and uh and he's going to be an unmitigated disaster and indeed he was so new yorkers understood him very well uh the rest of the country did not uh and you know of all the arguments that he made um during that 2016 campaign the one that concerned me the most was the one i think that resonated the most which was the argument he made to the ones he called the forgotten people in flyover country who had been you know toiling their whole life i had nothing set aside for retirement they were going to have to work till they dropped their kids if they were lucky enough to go to college um were in debt and had no jobs when they got out and you know he said that he was going to help their lot now he didn't but but nonetheless these folks have had a clinton as president that had a bush as president um their life had not appreciably changed and they were ready to vote for someone who was willing to break everything and that was not an irrational choice so i understood at one level how people voted in 2016 it was much harder for me four years later to understand after seeing what he represented why so many continue to vote for him [Music] so your uh your title is intriguing um and democracy's is you know better than i do as a architect of where we are now uh and someone in the arena democracies often are far more reflective of who we are than formative of who we are uh politicians tend to be mirrors rather than makers uh put another way give us your analysis if you would of how the we got we've come so close to the midnight hour you just alluded to it about uh so many folks over the last 30 or 40 years who have felt that the covenant of america the notion that if you worked hard you would be rewarded tomorrow would be better than today that fundamental uh began with jefferson that politics of optimism turned out not to be as durable uh as as a lot of us would have hoped um but lay out if you would uh 2015 uh trump steps into the race i remember being i think i'm right about this uh the same day or two that he announced at trump tower jeb bush was in new york doing the late night shows uh it looked as though we were heading toward possibly a you know as you alluded to another bush clinton race uh as i kind of establishment game of thrones uh if you will uh what are the forces both in the country and then what's your analysis of trump himself that pushed us to this dark hour well you're exactly right i remember at that time thinking that uh um that bush represented by far jeb bush represented by far the strongest candidate in republican primary he was the one that i was rooting for to fail because he would be so formidable um so why was it that he ended up getting i don't know what was it one two three percent of the vote i i think there were a couple really revolutionary forces operating um that uh you know began their their uh churn decades uh previously but really reached their culmination uh at this time the first were these dramatic changes in the economy akin to another industrial revolution the globalization of the economy the automation of the economy the fact that millions of people at home and and billions of people around the world were suddenly at risk of losing what they had um and i think uh often you see truly kind of revolutionary forces not among those who are most impoverished but among those who who suddenly have something to lose and the fear of losing that can be extraordinarily potent and because of these remarkable changes in the economy suddenly people in the middle class were at risk of falling out at the same time we had a revolution in communication [Music] which uh unlike the printing press we only had uh you know relative minute you know milliseconds to get used to uh a medium in which lies travel far faster than truths and fear and anger go viral uh and you you take these forces and you put them together and i think they produce the kind of xenophobe populism that was already careening around the world uh giving rise to uh orban and hungary and the far-right parties in poland and germany in vienna and france we would see thereafter the rise of autocrats in places like the philippines and brazil we would see turkey's erdogan increasingly autocratic al-sisi in egypt and so i think that this combination of immense economic anxiety and a new information environment in which fear can travel so quickly and find like-minded people produce you know a rare uh and hospitable environment for the kind of ugly nativism uh that is represented by donald trump um it's not i think a mystery why brexit preceded trump it was the same forces you know the same forces actually ironically in russia who were meddling and brexit but but more importantly the same global phenomena now the other point that you make i think though is exactly right also and that is okay given that these were the global forces at play um once he was elected why didn't our elected representatives defend their own institutions um and and here i quote one of your colleagues robert carro who said in an interview that power doesn't corrupt as much as it reveals and it doesn't always reveal us for our best but it reveals a lot about who we are and i would learn that a lot of people i served with who i respected and admired because i believed that they believed what they were saying uh turned out not to believe it at all or if they did none of it was quite so important as maintaining their own position or maybe getting a new position uh in a trump administration yeah put on your philosophical hat for a second um your wizards cap uh if you would about democracy itself um let me give you a uh a statement to uh as on the old phrase of the college exam assess the validity of this statement uh democracy is one of the most counter-intuitive undertakings in human experience it depends on our seeing each other as neighbors and not as reflexive adversaries and puts a premium on the capacity to sacrifice immediate interest for mid-term and long-term gain is that are you on board with that i am i am so are the forces the the the factors you list uh did they just be so what i just said has been true since athens right uh and we could sit here for hours and talk about various points in american history where these forces were unleashed uh xenophobia being mostly of the late 19th century uh and and forward but the alien and sedition acts or the 1790s uh about controlling the press about uh giving a president the power to deport foreigners by fiat um so these forces have been with us for a long time people like me and i let me just don't throw people i won't pull anybody else into it i believed that this was a difference of degree not kind i thought that trump was a difference of degree not kind that he was the fullest manifestation of these darker impulses that we had managed to force into ebbing rather than flowing at various points in our history and that the counterintuitive nature of democracy had managed to prevail at each point i'm not so sure of that now and i know you're not either uh so give us kind of your democratic theory and what do you see as possible sources of resilience well i first of all i agree with the premise uh that it's a counterintuitive idea it's less counterintuitive for us than i think it was for the founders who had every reason to be skeptical but yet took that leap of faith uh uh but i uh i think that uh donald trump was a supremely talented arsonist uh at a time when the world was filled with kindling um and it wasn't just the global situation with the economy it wasn't just the information revolution uh also you add to that a pandemic in which conspiracy theories tend to proliferate um but even through it all um i i never lost hope i don't lose hope now and and even in the midst of losing the trial in the senate um i found myself optimistic and i'll tell you why um you know most people i think that watched the proceedings may have been under the impression that when the senators came uh back to the chamber to deliver their verdicts it was a bit like a criminal uh trial when the judge calls the jury back in and you wait for a slip of paper to tell what the verdict's going to be actually there were about three days that separated the end of closing arguments and the actual vote to convict or acquit and in those three days senators often to an empty chamber came onto the senate floor and delivered their verdict and explained their thinking and by the time mitt romney delivered his verdict in that form all the other senators who were at all in doubt had already uh made their intentions very clear i didn't know what mitt romney was going to do um and i was in the house cloak room which is this little room off the house floor alone and watching the television because i was told that romney was going to speak soon and when when he approached his place in the senate chamber i one of my staff stuck his head in the cloakroom door and said i'm hearing he's going to convict um and i didn't believe him i mean i i'd heard so many things over the few years that preceded it to be just really skeptical of anything that seemed positive and as romney began his oration um which was very condemnatory of the president i kept waiting for the inevitable but um and then it became clear it wasn't coming and he was voting to convict the first senator in history of the vote to convict someone of his own party and he got very emotional in talking about his faith and in talking about his children and his grandchildren and listening to to this you know very decent man um acknowledged that he was going to in you know incur a world of pain for what he was about to do but he was going to do it anyway and even if it meant he was just a footnote in history that in in the greatest country on earth that should be enough for any citizen it was such a beautiful and honest uh and heartfelt um and courageous uh act of faith that i remember thinking you know the founders were right to believe that people possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing that we didn't need to be ruled by a despot um and i and i i believe that still um i i've every confidence we're going to get through this um sometimes in the midst of crisis it's hard to see how it ends or even if it ends but this will end uh and so i i'm in the in the camp that you were in and and may not still be in of thinking this is an aberration um and uh you know like the period of mccarthy um was an aberration uh and and that we move forward uh so uh i i find myself still optimistic it'd be hard for me to get up in the morning if i wasn't tell us about january 6th where were you uh walk us through that day about six months before the election i had suggested to the speaker that we form a rump group of members to try to anticipate all that could go wrong uh on election day and the aftermath and she thought it was a good idea and about four of us came together to be you know once a week or once a month uh to kind of brainstorm um on what could happen what if the electoral college would tie what if the vice president refused to accept the slate of electors what if a state sent two electors uh you know when did the denominator uh change in terms of uh the counting and and uh we consulted with outside attorneys we thought we anticipated everything except of course what happened um we did not anticipate a bloody insurrection but when the day finally came uh for that joint session a lot of the questions that we had wrestled with had already been answered there were still a few outstanding like what would mike pence do um but uh i was uh managing uh along with those three colleagues the debate on the floor uh trying to respond to the efforts to decertify the election and so i wasn't really paying attention to what was going on outside the chamber and the first inkling i had that something was really wrong was i looked up for my notes and i saw that the speaker was gone and i thought that's odd because i knew that she had intended to preside the entire time and then almost immediately two capitol police rushed onto the floor grabbed our number two steny hoyer and whisked him off the floor and i remember thinking to myself i've never seen stenny move that fast so soon there were increasingly severe warnings from the capitol police there were rioters in the building we needed to get out our gas masks we may need to get down on the ground and then finally as the doors were being hammered and glass was shattering we needed to get out um and i hung back in part because there was now a real log jam to get out the doors and i didn't want to add to that scrum um in part because a lot of my republican colleagues were not wearing masks and it was early in the pandemic and i didn't want to be you know shoulder to shoulder trying to get out i also felt reasonably calm for whatever reason and maybe it was disbelief what was really happening but i had a couple of republicans come up to me and say you need to get out you can't let people see you um i know these people i can talk to these people you're in a completely different situation and at first i was you know very touched by their evident concern but uh that feeling soon gave way to another that that if they hadn't been lying about the election uh i wouldn't need to be worried about my security none of us would need to be um and uh i ended up walking out with a republican member i didn't recognize and i asked him how long he had been in congress and his answer really startled me he said 72 hours and i said what he said i was just elected and he was caught he was carrying this wooden post that had hand sanitizer attached to it it was it was uh something that had been erected at the entrances the house floor so people could clean their hands and he was he had ripped it out of the floor and he was holding this post to use it as a club to defend himself and i i said are you really that that worried and he said i think i just heard gunshots and uh i think that was when ashley babbitt was was killed um and i didn't know what to say to him and i looked at him and i said jokingly uh it's not always like this um and uh but uh you know tragically um it is still a lot like that um even after we saw to what end uh that lie brought us and that last president brought us um they're still pushing the same line uh the number two republican in the house last sunday uh was asked repeatedly can you just say the election wasn't stolen couldn't bring himself to do it um and uh you know if we if we don't believe that elections can decide fairly who governs anymore then it really does open it to political violence does mike pence in your view fall in the romney category given what he did and what we now know about the pressure from the president no um for four years he uh acquiescent every every uh immorality of the president um and so that he could position himself to run for that job one day um the fact that he did the bare minimum which was nonetheless very important but the bare minimum of uh not transgressing the constitution and and refusing to count the electors i don't give him that much credit for merely doing the basic minimum of his job and even now he is out downplaying the significance of that insurrection even when they were trying to hang him he is downplaying the significance of what took place so no i don't um there are a lot of other heroic people though dan coats was the head of the intelligence community um he refused to uh change the facts to suit the president's preferred narrative about russia or north korea north korea knowing that it might cost him his job and it did and you know others too um marie ivanovic courageous ambassador to ukraine um defined the president and testified paving the way for others to show the same courage and and those examples are really what would give me a lot of optimism about the future talk about your uh the speech that i think uh i won't say it's going to define your public service but it's certainly going to be a big part of it it continues to be a kind of um touchstone for people who share your concerns about the constitutional threat uh but that closing argument um you were clearly aware of the moment you discussed it in the in the book but what did it feel like to basically tell the united states senate that their very the dna of their institution was at risk the senate is a very small place um and i i remember vividly the feeling of stepping into the senate for the first time in many years i had actually tried an impeachment case 10 years earlier against a federal judge so it was um but nonetheless it's been a long time and i was struck immediately by how intimate it is you can see every senator's face you can see what they're paying attention whether they're moved whether they're bored um and i was you know each day i would try to give a kind of a closing argument about what what was notable that came out that day and i think the one that you're referring to is one uh in which um when my staff approached me before i was going to make the final close of the day to tell me grabbed my arm and he told me they think you've proven him guilty they need to know why he should be removed and it struck me um you know like a like a a a bolt of electricity um because i you know the centers were out you know during breaks telling the press that they believe the president's defense and here i was being told reliably because we had some very good intelligence um that that often came through senator schumer's staff about what they were hearing from the republicans he was being told that uh no what they with republicans of italian press was all wrong they understood how guilty the president was they just needed to be convinced when they should be removed uh which which meant by implication that they accepted the fact that the president united states would held hundreds of millions of dollars from the ally at war in order to coerce that ally into helping him cheat in the election and that wasn't enough um and i i suddenly realized that um what i needed to speak to wasn't you know his literal guilt on what he was charged with but rather something bigger um why his continued presence in the office would pose a danger to the country and um and i had i have been so moved during the house hearings when i had listened to alexander vinman discuss why he felt comfortable telling his father this ukrainian immigrant why he shouldn't worry about his son standing up to the most powerful man in the world um because here right matters and and i remember being so struck with it because it there was a certain innocence to alexander vinman which i wasn't expecting from this you know decorated purple heart but he said it like a prayer and when when i played that video in the senate i remember the reaction it got and i remember you know tim kaine in particular had tears in his eyes he was that move just from seeing a tape of it and and i realized if if those words had such power with me and with others that that was really that was really the heart of what we were talking about and and so i made the argument to the senate that that donald trump was was fundamentally indecent fundamentally untruthful that he couldn't tell right from wrong and i i didn't ask them to to remove him because because he was indecent but because the senators were decent because right mattered to them and and and i i i concluded by saying because if right doesn't matter then we're lost and indeed you know that that is has been my sort of conclusion from all of this which is there's no problem in the drafting of the constitution there's no need to change the remedy of impeachment we don't want to make it a majority vote and turn into a parliament but it all presupposes that we live up to our oath that we we [Music] inform how we take that oath with ideas of right wrong that we apply the truth and principles of civility and decency and if we don't then none of it works um but that's that's how that argument came about and uh um i you know my staff would always tell me that i did better when i didn't have uh something written out for me in advance um and that that may be true but it's really risky because uh you know you never know if you're gonna say the right thing or the really wrong thing right right i find the hardest thing in public speaking is to try to do both to have a text and then try to riff is is just it's almost like the odyssey you get sucked into some mythological hell but it wasn't it was a brilliant performance uh and i say that without acting as if it were theatrical but but it was in fact a lawyerly and principled credit corps and the core was the heart of a constitutional democracy that is inherently fragile and i think that i suspect that part of the remarkable reaction to your book is people understanding that there was a dark and difficult passage but not really being sure it's past and so i want to ask everybody to if you have questions uh shoot them to the q a uh queue so that i can make it as easy technologically as possible and we'll get to those in a second but talk talk to us about the next three years the next four years uh i don't i personally don't think there's any doubt in the world that if he's if he's able that donald trump will run i don't see why on earth he wouldn't he wouldn't people say oh he doesn't want to lose well if he loses he'll say it's stolen so what you know what what are you that that that's not a dispositive argument to me but uh if you would talk about trump and and that threat but also what i think a lot of us think of as the franchise model that is are there potential successors to this movement it is a movement it's taken over the republican party almost entirely um do you worry about the next decade as well as the next half decade yeah well i i think you're right first of all that he is going to run indeed i think he's running already i say that because i think that it would be intolerable to him um to contemplate anyone else getting all that attention uh the idea that mike pence would be the nominee or nikki haley or desantis or any of these people um would be excruciating for him to watch and so i think pathologically he's not capable of not running so he's going to run and i think given the grip he has on that party he's going to be the nominee and so for those in my party i think we just need to take that as uh accepted um and and not underestimate him as we did uh in 2016. um in terms of what if he did right off into the sunset or what if we're successful in defeating him um does this go on um i'm optimistic there there will be imitators as you say there already are but uh you know to give credit where credit is due um he's a uniquely talented grifter um and i don't think these other pretenders to the throne have his talent for grift uh you know it really you know you've got to take off your hat at a certain level uh and consider that here's a guy who campaigns for president on a platform of building a wall that mexico is going to pay for an absurd idea to begin with absurd on its face he becomes president of course mexico doesn't pay for a wall a wall doesn't get built um son of some of his cronies including one who was recently held in criminal contempt decide they're going to raise money from trump's supporters to build the wall and they do and then they steal it and then donald trump's pardons bannon for stealing money from his own people uh and he's still the undeniable nominee of that party that's a really really talented grifter uh i'm not sure anyone could do it quite so well uh so i i am optimist optimistic that when he passes from the political scene it will be much harder to replicate uh whatever it is that that has given him such a grip on people um but until that time comes we're going to be dealing with all of his bio and all of his division and all the new and inventive ways that he will get up in the morning determined to cause grief and consternation i mean the man couldn't even allow colin powell to rest at peace for a single day um and so you know one of the things that i have to say i um really gnaws at me um is that after that insurrection after my republican colleagues saw to what ends he had brought the country there was a moment when they considered casting inside and i think for kev mccarthy that moment of conscience that's what it was lasted about 30 seconds but you could really see mitch mcconnell wrestling with it and um and i think what he decided two weeks after blaming trump for the insurrection that if he were nominated again he would absolutely support him i think when he made that decision we lost the chance as a country to move forward and now we're going to have to endure this trial for another few years until trump is finally repudiated and finally i'll say that when more time passes i don't think there's going to be any question about how history is going to judge this period i think they will be damning of him but i also think they will be damning of a lot of the people i served with who enabled him uh and did so knowing uh what they were doing was tearing at the fabric of our democracy as somebody who's just in the stands watching this uh tell me if you think this is right it seems to me on these points liz cheney's primary is really important because otherwise there's no evidence electorally that standing up is incentivized i think you're right um i think that uh i would like to believe that liz cheney and adam kinzinger represent the future of the republican party uh when the party returns to being a party of conservative ideology and ideas um the question is is that a near future or a distant future and you know the the near-term political challenges they face will tell us a lot about um how long it will take for the republican party to become a party of ideas and not a cult around the former president our system really depends upon at least two functional parties and right now i think we only have one sadly under trump the republican party has become an anti-democratic party and an anti-truth party and uh and so i i really uh admire the courage that liz cheney is demonstrating and adam kinzinger it is so telling and microcosm um that liz cheney said she would not carry the big lie and she was willing to give up her position if that's what it required and elise stefanik said well i'm more than willing um and and and in that illustration you got to see what liz cheney was made of and you got to see what elise stefanik was made of and it wasn't the same stuff yep very good let me add a couple of questions from the folks and then uh we'll see how the dodgers are doing um uh what can the everyday person do every day and not just on voting day to fight for democracy well it's a great question and i think the most debilitating thing for people is to feel powerless to affect their circumstances or what the country is going through and the reality is that none of us are powerless um you know we can't all be marie ivanovic first through the breach but i think we can all figure out in our own sphere in our own circle what we can do at a time when the democracy really depends on us um you know john i i i'm so admiring of you in so many ways your your brilliance your craft your writing your knowledge of history but i also admire that you you were not willing to remain silent um during this period and it would have been very easy for you indeed most of your colleagues um would rather not risk alienating any of their readers and you know each of us i think in our private life have to make very similar decisions they're not all as as weighty as the one you made um but uh you know whether it's uh confronting uh things that we see wrong in our own workplace or our neighborhood um whether it's uh getting involved online to help some of these efforts like what stacey abrams is doing uh to fight back against efforts to disenfranchise people of color uh lawyers who are donating their legal skills to protect the franchise um you know what i suggest to people because it's not the same for every person don't try to do everything just try to figure out the one thing you can do um and and uh it's empowering um just focusing on the one thing you can do um [Music] if i um worried about all the things going wrong uh instead of focusing on the things that i could try to do right um i would be paralyzed and uh and so i think there's a role for all of us right now no i agree totally and thank you for your kind words i i will say um in no way was what i my actions uh commensurate with with those genuine heroic people who fight all the time i'm a boringly heterosexual white southern male episcopalian things work out for me but i will say this uh i don't know i was born in 1969 so i don't know where i would have been on civil rights i do know that if everybody of my age had actually been on the right side hypothetically then we wouldn't have had all the problems uh so i i don't know but i do know now and i do believe the constitution's at risk um and i'm a big believer and i think this has some hopefully resonance for for all of us because we're all incredibly i think we're incredibly fortunate i know you believe this to be in this country and as we're taught to much is given much is expected and so if not now when is the question i think this is you and i've talked about this before this is democracy's hour of maximum danger certainly since fort sumter and the confederates didn't get into the capital during the civil war but they did on january 6th and so in some ways it's even more advanced and i think it's um it's tempting for people like me uh who kind of weaponized being a dork uh to want to say well you know it was mccarthy or it was the second clan or you know the fever breaks i know president obama has said this i i know privately i suspect publicly that he thought the fever would break well it hasn't broken yet yeah and as you say it's really remarkable i was watching president biden before we met tonight and as he put it in a 50-50 senate let me tell you you've got 50 presidents what's so interesting is he didn't have any occasion to say you've got 60 or you've got 65 that is that there there weren't there aren't a dozen senators you know you you have the scars to show for this there aren't a dozen senators on the other side who have any even possibility of crossing the aisle they did vote for the infrastructure bill i think one of the great achievements of the biden's presidency so far and nobody paid much attention to it is he got 68 votes for a bill yeah which is like getting a hundred and twenty in the old days it's just a remarkable thing but i i think i i think what you just said is really important which is to find the one thing um [Music] and maybe it's just feeding somebody who's hungry uh and and acts of acts of character are also acts of citizenship in a democracy because it is in fact the fullest expression of all of us i'll stop preaching one more question um [Music] can i get an amen um judy asked uh how can we fix things so that the few like mansion cinema mcconnell don't have so much power and influence yeah well you know this may not be a very satisfying answer um but it gets to the point john you're making about biden's comments about the 50-50 senate um we can add a couple more democratic senators um and get rid of the filibuster uh you know there was probably a time many years ago where i would have been more sympathetic to the filibuster rule um most people got to know me over the last four years and have one impression of me as this arden partisan um prior to trump most of the criticism i got was for working too much across the aisle and i don't consider myself a partisan i do consider myself to be very much against trump and trumpism but but i think the the reality is that in a majority that is essentially split down the middle then one or two people who are willing to hold up the work of all the rest can succeed in doing it and the only the only answer to that is to elect a couple more and do away with the arcade rule that prevents the majority from getting its work done uh and and you know this raises a broader point that i also make in the book which is so much of uh the way our government works right now is anti-majoritarian um in the house when we have a gerrymander a minority of americans generally control the house um in the senate where 23 of the american people control 60 of the votes it's a minority based institution you layer the filibuster on top of that and its minority rule on top of minority rule with the electoral college the presidency is often occupied by someone who lost the popular vote by millions of people and and the supreme court is the least representative institution of them all now um and and i think it's fair to ask how long can a democracy survive certainly how how long could one thrive if a majority of the people don't control uh the direction of the country and so i think the the midterm plan uh and here i'm not referring to the midterms but the midterm plan if we can't get hr one and the voting rights legislation passed now to eliminate the gerrymander and attack these voter suppression efforts has to be um getting rid of the gerrymander i would like to see us admit the district of columbia into the union uh as john can can tell you all better than i can there's a long tradition of admitting states for the purpose of changing the balance in the senate including splitting the dakotas but in his own right d.c deserves to be a state and puerto rico puerto rico so chooses and we need to finish that multi-state compact that would effectively do away with the electoral college by states committing that whoever gets the popular vote nationally will earn all the electoral votes from their state um those are i think some of the most important um midterm structural changes that we need to bring about so interesting um a final thought um [Music] tell us what you hope people will uh come away from the book with i hope people get a sense uh both of how fragile the democracy is um how uh you know we we grew up in the post post-world war ii era with the expectation that freedom was ever increasing and more people lived in in societies with a free press and able to associate with whom they would or love whom they would and we thought that this was somehow an immutable law of nature well there's nothing immutable about it um and i think the farther we get from um the the memories of fascism uh the more we begin to question whether democracy is the right model um so it's a fragile thing and uh but i also want people to to take away that um we're gonna get through this and we're to get through this because the the number of people in america who love and honor and cherish our democracy vastly outnumber those who at this moment in history want to tear it down um so i'm betting on the future of america okay mr chairman an honor to be with you thank you uh the book is midnight in washington read by often uh and i love uh if you're already getting word of mouth it's you're you're golden it's perfect uh rick will tell you that is that's that's where you want to be is uh people's anyone in in this media climate someone in chairmanship's position can kind of get some astroturf attention uh what really is interesting i always call it the day four problem that is somebody might go out and get it because they saw you on something it's the person who then looks at it reads it and says hey you got to read this and that's the important bounce i think you're already there so thank you rick i'll hand it back over thank you john and i'll just say that's exactly what i think what is happening with um the book i'll hold up the copy which those many of you in attendance are getting copies we actually have signed copies um that the congressman signed so not he didn't come in we i used he lives in dc is pretty close to the warehouse where they with the books however they got to him they're signed um both of you this has been a totally energizing and and riveting conversation and thank you both um for your part in it and certainly mr congressman thank you for again for the book for the time you've given that tonight uh to us and um and for the work you have done and are continuing to do and i think you're it's helping instill the the need to keep paying attention to where things are where they're going um and and again what it takes to read a write a book and read it um is part of all this too to know the ground we're standing on and to say something really important i'll just point out we're in the bottom of the fifth i will share nothing else [Laughter] and is that the the bottom of the fifth of the country or in the game tonight i leave that to the audience for those of you who weren't here at the beginning where there's there's a certain los angeles dodger game being um [Laughter] i think i think that's it correct just so you know uh those who weren't here at the beginning thank you both gentlemen and um you know you're actually it's late for both of you in in terms of the night so we thank you and thank you those of us who joined us there is a recording for this if you missed some of this because i know some of you um weren't here at the beginning so you will get to see and hear all thank you again and take care godspeed both and good luck with everything

Channel: Elliott Bay Book Company

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Length: 56min 51sec (3411 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021