Join us
this new year for new conversations at the Commonwealth Club. Welcome everyone to our Commonwealth Club program. Proud of the fact that we have such
a thing as the Commonwealth club in our world because we need a venue where all sides of a position
and all points of view can have equal voice and be vetted and scrubbed and evaluated. And that's what the Commonwealth Club does
for us. And today, being January six, it doesn't take much explanation to explain why we have Bart
Gellman on as a guest because to try to evaluate January six,
not just in the rearview mirror, but what its implications have been going forward
and what today we are even thinking about its implications to be is an endless topic and an important topic. So what board? I want to welcome you
to the Commonwealth club? It's a real honor to have you here. And, of course, our viewing audience who. Tend to be way ahead of me in terms of explanations, ah, I'm sure aware of the several pieces
that you've written for The Atlantic discussing January six as an event. And one of them presciently predicting something like January six. No less than peaceful transfer of power. And the other discussing
what we've learned since January six about the future threats to democracy
that this might involve. And that's really the theme
of what we're talking about. We're not talking Partizan politics
or we're not talking about who's right and who's wrong
or who is aggrieved and who shouldn't be What we're talking about is whether
our democracy as a system of government and as a system of decision
making for people can survive right now. And there are legitimate threats to that question, and that's more or less where I'd like to focus
part or our discussion today. But let's start. With. The intuition that you had back in October of 2020 to to foresee
that there was not going to be for the first time in our history
unless you count 1877, there was not going to be
a peaceful transition of power from the former executive
to the recently elected executive. What what were did that intuition
come from? Well, it started
with a pretty simple proposition. It seems obvious to me
and to lots of people, I think that Donald Trump under
no circumstances was going to concede the election. If he lost that he simply doesn't
have it in him. It's it's not in his personality. It's not in his political strategy. He was going to insist that he had won
no matter what. And forever. And once you start with that
proposition and ask yourself. What tools does he have available to him
to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to prevent the election
from being decided against him? It turns out that it's very complicated
and there are a lot of possibilities, and I went through as many of them
as I could think of. And fundamentally, his objective was always going to be
to get the state legislatures in Republican controlled states
that Biden won. And those were the essential swing states to appoint electors for Donald Trump,
even though Biden had won the state election. Let's drill down on that point. It's a little nerdy
to start citing articles in the U.S. Constitution, but in this case, I think it's important that we understand that it's not a baseless notion from outer space to suggest that state legislatures
could, on their own, choose how electors vote,
which leads us to unfortunately, the what we're calling these days,
the independent state legislature theory. Perhaps you could explain that
because it's such a fundamental part of the groundwork
for the rest of our discussion today. So you're right. Article
two of the Constitution states that each state in the union will appoint electors for president in the manner
of the Legislature's own choosing. They have complete autonomy on that. And in the days of the founders, American citizens
did not vote directly for president. They voted for their state representatives
in the state. Representatives voted for president. It's been more than 150 years
since every state transitioned to a popular vote choice. So what we're accustomed to now
and what we think of as pretty fundamenta to democracy is that you
and I each get a vote for president and our votes determine the appointment of electors in our state. The idea that Trump's people had was that the Legislature in a state like Wisconsin or Michigan
or Pennsylvania. Or Arizona,
all of which are Republican controlled and and voted for Biden could take back the power
to appoint electors. Now there's no doubt that. A state legislature. Could pass a law stating that from now on
in Wisconsin, the people don't get to vote anymore,
and we in the Legislature will choose our electors
beginning with the next election. It would not be
a very popular thing to do. I don't think that any politician
would think they could get away with it, but they have
that power under the Constitution. It's much less clear
whether they have the power and actually more than less clear. It's highly dubious
whether they have the power. After an election,
it takes place after the popular votes have been cast to say, never mind,
we're going to fire the voters. We are no longer
interested in their opinion. We're going to appoint electors
by our own lights. There are intermediate positions
that you could take on that, and the independent state Legislature
doctrine states that the power of the Legislature is plenary or unlimited and unbounded to appoint electors. And therefore, if, for example, county
election authorities make any tiny change
in the administration of elections that wasn't explicitly authorized
by the state legislature, then the Legislature can hold that the election did not proceed lawfully
and then take back the power to appoint electors. It is a. Fringe theory, I would say, is being pushed right now by lawyers
affiliated with The Federalist Society. It is taking advantage of the strategic fact that. six or seven of the most important
swing states in the country for presidential elections are governed by Republican state legislatures. And so if you give them the power,
you are tipping the balance
decisively in favor of the Republicans. There are four Supreme Court
justices who have shown some sympathy with the independent state
legislature doctrine. In cases where it wasn't directly on point,
but indicateur or in. In dissent,
they've shown sympathy for the idea. And we don't know what Amy Coney Barrett
thinks. She's never been called upon to opine. So it could be that it comes back to the Supreme Court
and something shifts in that direction. Yeah, just to add a footnote, the Justice Thomas feels that the doctrine is grounded
in the 10th Amendment as opposed to any then in Article two, which basically says that powers not expressly granted to the federal
government are reserved to the states. So that would,
if that were the applicable theory that would give very wide sweep
and credence to the right of the state legislature, whoever they are,
whether they're Democratic or Republican, to just bypass the popular vote and legislate their own set of electors. So I just want to bore in on this because that was at least by my take
and I want to cross-check this with you. one of the underlying theories
that stimulated a group of people around Trump
to feel as though there was a way to bypass what we'll call the Electoral Vote
Count Act and have Pence
basically certify the election for Trump. So. But that took. It took a lot of people to be complicit, and I gather the complicity. Grew up around a very. Some of it was just a right. They just want to stay in power
and keep their job. But a lot of the support
that was external to the US that day of certification one year ago today was the theory the election was stolen. And I'm curious when we say the election was stolen or stopped to steal or whatever
phrase you want to use. What what were the demographics
of the people who actually found the motivation
to go to the Capitol and at least at the minimum protest
and at to maximum sit in Nancy Pelosi's office
with their feet up on the table? Well, it's an interesting group, and you have to distinguish between what? Trump supporters believe
and what their elected leaders, the leaders of the Republican
Party, believe. I am quite convinced
that if you were able to administer truth serum to. Republican senators and members
of Congress and governors and state legislators, the vast
majority of them understand that Joe Biden won the last election and they are either afraid to say so or opportunistically leaping
upon the bandwagon of the stolen election in order to curry favor
with the Trump electorate. But are a great. Many tens and tens of millions of Trump
supporters have been driven honestly to believe that the election was stolen. They are convinced by the floodgates
of propaganda that have come out of their
their leadership and have come out of Fox News and one America news and the social networks
that they're part of. I spent weeks and weeks in conversation
with this one Trump supporter
for my latest magazine piece. When I was trying to plumb
the roots of his belief on this and it was unshakable
no matter how much evidence I brought to him, that
his reasons were incorrect. So the people who came to the Capitol
were No. one true believers. They they were not typical
of the profile of of politically violent people
in the past in U.S. history, including quite recent U.S. history and. Actually, around the world,
according to experts who study this, political violence is committed
largely by young men in their twenties. Disproportionately unemployed,
low educated, poor prospects in society. That is not at all what we saw
on January sixth. What we saw was very much a middle class. Educated employed mean age was 42 years old, which is wildly out of sync with history on this thing and what it. What it shows
is that we have a politically violent mass movement in America
now for the first time since about 100 years ago, with the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. You have tens of millions of Americans
who are prepared to tell pollsters that violence is justified
to restore Trump to power. That is a a terrifying figure to me and one that shows considerable degree of collapse of our governing institutions. What about? They. Where these people live, these people is in a fair way to put it with the committed people
who went to the Capitol that day. I conventionally on a multiple choice
test, I would have there from rural,
predominantly red states. I gather that actually the wrong answer. It is the wrong answer. And it's fascinating that there's a
there's a. Group
at the University of Chicago called C Pos that went through all the records and other public records and. Found the home county
for each of the now more than 700 defendants in the capital cases. They are much more urban and rural. They are not likely to come from heavy Trump voting counties. They're likeliest to come from counties
where the vote was very close. And they're frustrated. Many of them came from Biden counties
where Biden had won. By a small margin, and if you go through all the demographics and characteristics of the counties
that were interested, maybe they come from counties
where unemployment is high. No, not true. Maybe they come from counties where education is low. No, not true. What they come from is counties where the proportion of the white non-Hispanic population is on the decline. I just say if there are fewer white people now in your county than there were five
or ten years ago, you are much more likely to have come
from there and headed to the capital and taking part in the insurgency
on January sixth. And that fits with polling data
that shows that people who share the beliefs of the January six insurgents and there are two key beliefs. one being that Joe Biden
stole the election and the other being that violence is justified
to set that right. They also, by a super majority, believe that black and brown people are replacing white people
in terms of position, power and status in this country,
they're a believer in that religiously. And in a theory called the great
replacement, which has been, for example, pushed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The idea that that in his
his version of it, that Democrats are deliberately trying to increase the number of so-called third World
immigrants to this country to replace white voters
and to change the nature of this country of the of the 21 million people who agree with the January six insurgents, two thirds of them
believe in the great replacement. So there is a significant amount
of racial resentment behind all this. Let's assume that we. Are trying to formulate policies. We being the Democrats, the Republicans,
the independents. Policies that are going to bring some kind of a reconciliation of of these, this polarized world that we live in, similar to the way
not to get too far from the topic, but the way Lincoln approached
the end of the Civil War. It was not to put all of the Confederates in jail
and put make Robert E Lee a criminal. It was to to give them their horse
and their gun and say, Go home and let's let's form a new nation. And, you know, in an optimal, perhaps naive view of
what could be the best future, it would be some kind of a
of a reconciliation like that. But how does the Democratic Party
because they're the only functioning part right now, at least from what I can see, how do they develop a political strategy that can embrace
those people rather than saying, Oh, you're stupid, you believe this,
that's so obviously false. How can you think that? And basically shaming them? In other words, we have to find a policy
that doesn't shame but recalibrate how we look at our social
responsibility to each other. I guess that's a question that calls for an extraordinary
kind of political leadership that. I don't see immediately on the horizon,
but I wonder about your analogy. And I'm making this up on the fly,
so that's probably a mistake. But. Our situation now is is not like the one in which North and south fought about whether slavery was good or bad or acceptable or necessary. It's almost as though right now
we're fighting about whether slavery even existed. And you have half the country
saying what slavery because you have half the country or not that half, but 40%. That says, despite all the evidence that Joe Biden lost the last election and believes
fairy tales that are completely departing
from the empirical world. About what really happened with, you know, Italian satellites and dead Venezuelan
dictators, changing votes and taking over election
machinery and nonsense like that. If you have polarization on the basic foundations of knowledge, it's a very hard thing to see how to bridge those gaps. You know, I agree with your late qualification and my parallel because the Confederacy did not deny
Lincoln was elected. They just didn't like Lincoln's policies. And that's right, I agree. That's a different paradigm when I. But what I'm addressing is and maybe there isn't an answer to this. But we're not going to win back the health of democracy by making one side admit they were wrong and and misled and stupid. We're going to win it back
by having people realize that. Fundamentally, as a nation, we have to live with
the fact that we have disagreement and we have to live with the fact
that some of the problems for democracy is solved, like economic inequality
or the effects of globalization, so forth are challenging, and neither side
really has the answer to it. But that that has to be a common goal to use a
an agreed upon system of government. So what I worry about is
if people are so embedded in the correctness of their position, people like you or Anne Applebaum or George Packer or many of the other authors
at the Atlantic can write very erudite articles describing the problem. But how many people's minds
will you change by describing the problem? Yeah, you know, the political scientists
who study this right now say that
although there are significant difference in policy
among Americans on the two sides, they are not as fundamentally split
on policy questions on what we should be doing. They are split affectively. That is to say they hate each other, the the the the polarization of of hatred
is much stronger than the polarization of policy
to the point where. Many people are convinced that only violence can solve the problem. Of course, the question I would ask is, how does violence solve the problem? Yeah, well, I mean, another civil war is not happening
because we're not divided geographically, there's no north and south
as as we just said the there. The insurrectionists
from January six came from cities and they came from places
where Biden won their living among us. And if us is people
who are not part of that and you know, we. There won't be a civil war, but there could be a lot of chaos. It's always dangerous to quote facts that you read
without cross-checking it, but I quote it anyway
that the more people in New York City voted for Trump than in North Dakota and South Dakota combined. So, you know, that just goes to your point
about geography. It's it's not as though
as with the Civil War, our four arch civil war, it was easy to draw a geographical line across the somewhere between Maryland and New Jersey. But let's go back to the. Fact about ineluctable truth, because. You know what it. It strikes me that if we can't overcome the. Existence of alternative realities. That we we can't stop hating each other
because we can't have a dialog because we're not even starting
from a fact, the same factual premises. So it wouldn't I would like you to expand more
on the individual that you referred to, that you tried to provide every factual
premise you could and got nowhere. What do you have a sense
that you can articulate as to what was in the way of his having an open mind to the possibility
that maybe some what of you were saying
might be partially true? So this guy's a firefighter. He's the same age I am. He's a retired
firefighter, was a captain in the. New York City Fire Department. He lives in the Bronx,
where, by the way of the white population has declined by 2% since the last census. He's had a lot of. Objections over the years
to affirmative action in the fire department
and the arrival of minorities and women in the fire department force, and he showed up wearing his full dress uniform. Which, by the way,
he wasn't supposed to do at a political event. In favor of the January six defendants justice for January six, this what would have been
a completely fringe group which has now been embraced
by many Republican elected officials that says that. At the January six,
defendants are being oppressed. At our Patriots
and need to be released. And. He said he knew the election was stolen. I said, so if you're willing to work with me
here, let's talk about how you do that. And he was open minded, and it seemed and certainly willing
to go through the motions of it. He said, well,
just for example, only 141 million people voted and Donald Trump got. 63 million votes. That doesn't leave enough votes for Biden
to have won. That doesn't leave enough
to get to Biden's alleged 74 million. There's 14 million missing voters. Hear that right away proves
that something went badly wrong with the election and said,
How do you know that? He said, Well,
I don't know, my sister told. And where did she get it and she got it? She doesn't
she doesn't remember where she got it. Actually, I had them go and check,
but I tracked it down that that that those figures originated in an obscure right wing. Website, and they just mixed up the numbers
that it's imaginable that it was a careless error
and not deliberate. But since it was immediately
corrected by lots of people and continued to be sad, it doesn't look
like it was an honest error. They they
were comparing apples and oranges, and the number of people who voted
was much more than honored 41 million. The official counts
there were actually more than enough vote to account for Biden and Trump
because there were a number of spoiled ballots and there were third party
ballots, ballot and so forth. In other words, there's nothing to this
you could show. Look, they they took this figure
from the wrong column. Here's the original source,
here's the page number. Take a look. That made no impression on him. He said, Well, you know, I can't
get into all the facts and figures, but that's what I heard. And anyway, there's so much more proof that the election was stolen. So he he told me that the violence on January six was caused by a combination of antifa and weirdly U.S. special forces
who were coming in there under the under the guidance of. Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell,
by the way, somehow they were in cahoots to get special forces to come in and
and commit violence. And I said, That sounds wild. Where'd that come from? And he said you got to go
look up a general name, so and so on. On Rumble. The right wing YouTube site, and so I find the general on Rumble,
and he does say this. And so I called him up. I called the general. He's a retired general who's
been out of the Air Force for 30 years. He's. Well, into his eighties and. I say to him. How do you know there were? Special forces there. And he said, well,
they look like special forces. He had a witness who was on the scene, saw guys presumably with short haircuts
and looking physically fit and decided
they must be special forces. How do you know it's antifa? He said his witness told him that one of these young men
said, We're playing antifa today. He said that they'd stolen Nancy
Pelosi's laptop, how do you know that? Well, they had something square
looking under their coat. How do you even know it's a computer,
let alone that it was Nancy Pelosi's? In other words,
he didn't even pretend to have evidence for his speculations. And not only that,
but his son called me up afterward and said in as many words,
my dad's lost a few steps. He's getting old. He's starting to say things
that don't make any sense to me, and we wish you wouldn't interview him anymore. I tell all this the firefighter and. He just doesn't believe it, I mean, he he heard an authority, it's he sounded good on the tape and he and. And there's motivated reasoning, right,
I mean, you know, this is a guy who wanted Trump to win. And everybody he knows wanted Trump to win
and when and when he gets on social media, he's surrounded
only by people who want Trump to win. It's actually begins
to become inconceivable that there are any large number of people in the world who don't want Trump to win. And that whole self-reinforcing media ecosystem makes him as far as I can
tell, unreachable. And it's huge. I mean, the self-reinforcing ecosystem. I mean, I live in one myself on different policy issues, but I tend to watch the same television stations
and read the same newspapers and read the same magazine articles
as my friends and we call each other and talk about them. And it seems that one of our fundamental
structural problems is we have created two nations with separate, self-reinforcing ecosystems. My. Gratuitous take on the way it looks to me. So let's talk again, the the basic theme
here is the challenge to our democracy and its ability
to preserve the fun of tell. What is a fundamental
quality of democracy is is the use of elections to choose your representatives
and public confidence that those representatives
have been fairly and honestly selected. So what steps has the
Republican Party been taking starting before January six? In a sense,
but mostly after January six, the 20 to make it so that perhaps the person
with the fewer votes can actually win? What are some of the. Right in front of our face. Steps that are being taken. Well, the first step is a very consistent and powerful and charismatic and demagogic message being transmitted and reinforced
and reinforced that you cannot trust
the institutions of the election to call balls and strikes that the norms we've always. Valued in this country, know that. We cast their ballots and they're counted
cleanly with vanishingly few exceptions. That's all thrown away,
and if you undermine public confidence in in the in the election apparatus, then that's that's job one. And Trump stated many times before the election that the only way he could lose
would be if Biden cheated, that there was no possibility he could lose in a fair election. What's happened is that. Republican operatives around the country have now studied carefully what worked
and what didn't work when Trump tried to overthrow
a free and fair election last time, and they found all the obstacles
that got in Trump's way and they are systematically going
about uprooting those obstacles. And so when you have county clerks or secretaries of state in the different states or election
commissions, election authorities who certify the Biden vote and refused pressure from Trump
to change that, those people are being hounded
out of office. They're subjected to massive numbers
of death threats if they're in elected positions. Then Trump and his people are primary them and trying to make sure
that they won't be elected again. And if they can't do any of those things,
they're changing the law so that those people no longer
have the power to certify elections. Let's take an example in Georgia,
where they're doing all of the above. Brad Raffensperger,
where secretary is secretary of state, famously, and it became public with a recording, Trump called him up
and tried to get him to change the result They counted three times in Georgia and after they counted three times
and found that Biden won. Trump called up Raffensperger and demanded that he find more votes for Trump
and change the result. And Raffensperger refused. What's happened
since then, Trump has endorsed someone to run against Raffensperger
in the coming election. And meanwhile,
the Republican state legislature has turned against Raffensperger,
who is a lifelong Republican. And they have changed the law so that he,
the secretary of state, no longer has the power to certify
elections in the state of Georgia. They've also changed the law
so that they, the Legislature controlled by Republicans,
can fire the county supervisor of elections in any county. In the state of Georgia and substitute
an administrator of their choice, if they believe that the county supervisor
is not doing a good job and what county were they talking about
when they debated this bill ? They were talking about Fulton County, which is Atlanta, which is the Democratic
stronghold of the state of Georgia. And so they're trying to. Bust him out of office
by electing someone else, and the someone else
is running explicitly on a platform that Georgia should not have certified its election for Biden, that the election
should have been overturned . This is an extraordinary thing
for even one person to do. And there are by a recent count
in The Washington Post. I think it was 163 people running for election related offices
around the country right now, who are running explicitly
on the platform of the Big Lie that Trump really won. And if you're running to be in charge
of counting votes and you're announcing that you would have counted the votes
for Trump when they really went to Biden, something is really wrong
with this picture. Or else you have you're counting on the alternative reality that we talked about before that
that will in fact get you votes if you're willing to rectify the crime of a stolen election in 2020. Right. It is a vote getting strategy
that is likely to work very well
with Republican primary electorates. It is a catastrophic fact that two thirds of all Republicans
believe the election was stolen. The more politically active they are,
the more likely they are to believe that. And this is why so many elected politicians are afraid to admit. That Biden won the election, they will be punished. They will be punished electorally. And they worry about their families
because if you are put in the crosshairs of Trump
or of Fox News opinion hosts, you can expect a large number of threats in person on the phone
by email to you and your family. You know there,
and there's no upside to it. I mean, it's not like you gain
something by taking that position. It's just all downside. There was another situation that I remember
at the time involving the Michigan Abortion Certification Board,
where there were four people on it. And to tell us about that,
because that's another that shows how down into the grassroots this movement goes. So in the state of Michigan, each county has a four person commission that. Accepts the reports from all the precincts and gets columns of figures and votes
and says everything looks to be in order, and we're hereby certifying
its two Democrats and two Republicans, and these things have traditionally
operated on a bipartisan basis. And then there's a statewide version
of the same thing and Trump. Was just barely too late to stop the certification of the vote around Detroit, the the county commission Republicans voted to certify the election
and then they got a call from Trump. And then after this
strong arming by the president, they tried to change their vote
and retract their certification. Now it turns out that in Michigan law, there's no such thing
as retracting your certification. And so that didn't work for them. Trump then went to the statewide board,
where there were two Republicans and two Democrats, and one Republican was willing to go along and say
he would refuse to certify the election. So it all came down to the shoulders of a guy
whose name, I think is Vanderbilt. Erin Vanderbilt. And he looked at the facts
and the figures and the circumstances and said there's nothing here to raise
any doubt about the outcome. The people of Michigan have voted for
Biden, for president, and he certified. And then he went into hiding. And since then, he's been hounded
out of office and replaced by a more reliable Republican
who will be available next time to put sand in the machinery. And this is happening all around
the country. Democrats are not paying as much attention to the local election machinery,
and the Republicans are paying a great deal of attention to it
at every level from from sort of the local elections
supervisor, even though sometimes a voluntary job all the way up to Secretary of State
and Attorney General in these states. Yeah, I'd like to. I'd like to go to that point
because when I watch, I sense a tremendous sense of nonemergency in the Democratic Party. Now I have to concede that my information always comes through media
or print or so forth, so I'm not sitting
in the halls of Congress. But Biden, back in July, I believe it was made a speech
about how election integrity is the core democracy,
and it's one of the most important matters that his his government, including the Attorney General's
Office, can be addressing. But then I haven't seen much happen
other than we're now trying to figure out how to get Joe Manchin
to change the filibuster rule. Yeah, you're right about Biden's speech. He went to the National Constitution
Center in Philadelphia, and he stood under this
great big reproduction of the preamble. You know,
we the people in that fancy script, and he said something even stronger. He said that the. Efforts by unnamed persons because he's unwilling to say Trump or Republican
in this context, please, he the efforts to subvert election
machinery is the gravest threat to our democracy
since the Civil War. That is an extraordinarily big thing
for a president of the United States to say,
and you would expect the president sees the greatest threat
to democracy since the Civil War. He's going to be. Marshaling his powers of persuasion and otherwise behind an effort to meet that threat. And that's what
we haven't seen from Biden. He is recently, as the January sixth
anniversary came upon us. I've been talking more about it
and talked again about it today, and he's speaking in very firm tones, and it may be
that he's now prepared to give this. As high a priority as he's given to the infrastructure bill or the build back better act and so forth. And it's true that he's had. A difficult hand to play because federal legislation is part of the answer. And Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema are not willing to change the filibuster
rules so far. And there's not one Republican vote
for those voting voting rights bills that would. Address part of the problem, but I think. Any president of the United States
knows what his powers are. He knows what he can do. He has. He has the ability to give his time
and effort and energy and the resources of the presidency
to a problem. If he's prepared to treat this as
the national emergency that I think it is then we'll be seeing evidence
of that in the months to come. Because without I mean, we have two elections coming up,
and we should differentiate that. 2022 is going to be important
for who controls the House and the Senate,
and then 2024, of course, is for the presidency. But if he cannot get a voting rights bill through, that at least creates the the philosophy of one person,
one vote and fair representation. And you know, a lot of the phrases
we like to talk about when we we praise our system of government on the build back better and infrastructure bills
and all those things don't matter. They're they're gone. They're they're they're toast
because a Republican controlled executive and or legislative are going to cancel it. So I don't understand the triaging. I guess I don't know why the voting rights bill isn't by some exponential factor, the highest priority for the executive branch right now. You know, look, presidents can never do just one thing and fixing the economy addressing COVID. Absolutely huge, huge responsibilities of the president
and he could not have ignored. And they took huge efforts to make progress on. But I do believe he needs
to give comparable degree of effort and first priority going forward to this. The creation
of the machinery of election theft by a significant fraction
of the Republican Party and add to the. The growth of a mass political movement that is tolerant of violence
in this country, which is a cancer. And if he's not addressing those things, then then the risks that our democracy unravels are meaningful. I mean, one thing when you distinguish
between the 2022 election and the 2024. The control of Congress will make an enormous difference,
potentially in the outcome of the presidential election
two years later, when Trump was trying
to overthrow the vote. When he was trying to prevent
the peaceful transfer of power to the victor of the election. He. Targeted at the end,
the reason why January sixth is a big anniversary for us. He targeted the electoral vote
count in Congress. That was the final stage in certifying the the election before inauguration. He was limited in his options because Republicans did not control
both houses of Congress. If Republicans
take control of both houses of Congress, then they will have control over
how the vote is counted. He tried to get Mike Pence
to do something. He had no legal authority to do, do any of several things
that he had no legal authority to do because he didn't have the House
and the Senate in his hands. But if Republicans control which electors? To recognize. Then they can they can control
the outcome of the election. And that's our electoral vote count act that defies and the 12th Amendment that defy reading. I know more people, but
there's another element there too as well And that is the way a by election where nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes
gets decided, it goes to the House and each state gets one vote
and the Republicans control the House. But in terms a number of states
so that you would elect a Republican president
under the system of neither candidate getting 270 votes . That was one of the several strategies that Trump's legal brain
trust came up with for Mike Pence a year ago today that he would simply reject the electoral slate from several states claiming that they were they were
they were fraudulent slates that were. Chosen by a flawed process, send the votes back to the states,
which there's no such thing as under the Constitution,
but that's what they wanted to do, and then neither party would have received 270 votes at that point,
according to the 12th Amendment. As you say, the election goes to the House
of Representatives and the House of Votes
by state delegation. And even though the Democrats
controlled the House, Republicans controlled 26 of the 50. State delegations there because of the way
the arithmetic worked out, and so they would have presumably. Voted for Trump, notwithstanding the Electoral College
voting for Biden. That was that was one of the strategies that Pence refused to carry out. And it's another reason why 2022 matters, and that one of the
one of the observations. We're forced to make about democracy
is how much of it? We have it relies on custom and courtesy, and there are not precise rules
like you find in the Internal Revenue Cod about how elections are held
or what happens. So for example, let's suppose
Pence had chosen to follow Trump's advice
and refused to certify the election. It is a rhetorical question, but who could have done something about that? You know, would it? Somebody would have, and it would have
probably eventually gotten worked out. But there's nothing
that covers that right? Because we never conceive in the way
the Constitution and the Electoral Account Vote
Act is written that that could happen. There are. There are
there are people who've tried to game out every one of those scenarios
and they're all a huge mess. So under one scenario,
I mean, if if Pence had tried to do that. And said the election
now goes to the House, Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House,
would have said no, it doesn't. And she controls the procedures
of the House and controls the floor and would have been able to thwart
that in all likelihood, up up to a certain point. And if no president was selected. And certified by Congress, then the person who would be the acting president of the United States
would be Nancy Pelosi. And so there was that scenario among many
that that that went through this. Yeah, but that's the point. We we found out in the last four years
how much of our government functions
on a rule of social courtesy and respect for the boundaries of the Congress vis-a-vis
the executive and the judiciary, vis-a-vis the Congress and so forth
that a lot of it is unwritten. It's just custom. And all of a sudden,
what we viewed as the accepted procedure we found out is
you can choose not to follow it. Nobody can do much about it. But I mean, by definition, by definition, norms
defined normal behavior. And Trump is a deeply abnormal figure
in our politics and rejected the norms,
and we found out that. We we didn't have one referee
who could say the game's over. Go home. You lost. That's the point.
You know, there's nobody in charge. Ultimately, you know,
the Supreme Court isn't in charge there. They would characterize much of this as political questions. And so it's that it it's a it's a structural defect in our governmental system
that we're not going to fix right now. But I do want to talk about
how we fix the bigger problem of trying to work toward
a single set of facts. And it
it kind of bringing the responsibility back to you and others in your profession as to the role of journalism in essentially the protection of truth and the protection
of our democratic system of government . It's a job that I'm not sure
I know how to do. I've grown up in journalism
with the faith that. I could speak to I could write for people on the fence who added that there were enough
people who who wanted to know the facts and that if I showed my work,
I displayed my evidence. I did my best to tell the truth. I explained how and why I. Uncovered certain facts
that I could reach people and that there would be a critical mass
of people who would. Respond to that. You know? I'm imperfect, and I can get things wrong,
and somebody might prefer another journalist or another news
organization or another account . But I. In the marketplace of ideas, if you
if you look at all these things out there that society would find its way. And there would always be dissidents
and people who disagreed. But. Facts are facts,
and I don't have that faith anymore, and I don't know what to do about it. I write for the Atlantic and is very important
to the mission of the Atlantic since the 19th century that we
we have no part of your clique that we're not on one side or the other, that we're telling it as straight
as we can. But I know that those Trump voters are not by and large
reading The Atlantic, and I don't know how to reach them, right? And which brings us into a. Kind of the iron, as they call it, in sailing
where you can't get any movement because Congress cannot talk to congressional,
cannot talk to each other. The Supreme Court
has its limited view of its role in deciding how our society functions and. The only social media is not the answer,
because that's Balkanized. So really the only answer I can come up with
is is legitimate journalism. In other words, journalism
that is trying to do what you describe,
which is, OK, here are the facts. And here are some counter facts. Perhaps because there's not always
unanimity, but we can all stimulate. The Earth is round and not flat,
and let's start from that premise
and work our way into this discussion. So I I'm wondering whether we have to. Rethink the degree of. I don't like the term aggressiveness, but. And energy that we we use our our journalistic skills to try to bring some narrative into the common market place of ideas
and see if we can change things because if we can't,
I don't see how we get out of this mess. Well, I have changed my approach to some things. I grew up in journalism believing that you have to show all sides
that you have to keep perspective and opinion out of a straight news story and so on. And I never in my life I wrote things the way I've written them in the past
16 months. But the Trump years have showed us that we do have to take sides to one degree. That is to say, as journalists,
we're allowed to be on one side when it comes to the truth. We're allowed
to be on the side of the truth and we're allowed to call a lie a lie. And journalists
have become much more aggressive about that in an era when. Trump told 10,000 documented lies
during his presidency and is incapable of being shamed about it, and he's got a
superpower that way is he's. He's he's remarkably good at it, he's good at it in a way that I haven't seen
any other politician able to duplicate. I mean, anybody would like to be able
to get away with anything
and never apologize, never explain, move on to the next subject. But nobody's pulled it off the way he. And so it becomes the responsibility
of journalists. To identify a lie, and we're also allowed
to be on the side of democracy or allowed to be on the side of the people,
get to vote and get to make a choice and no one gets to overturn their vote. That's a value
that that we're allowed to stand behind. And that's what the journalism I've been doing
in the Atlantic for the past year and a half has been a pro-democratic
in the small d democratic sense, and I've been warning quite sharply that we're in trouble
and need to do something about it. Yeah. I think the way most of us agree that we are willing to accept
losing an election. It's just that we don't want the election
to bring predetermined by a system that has basically it's like,
you know, tipping off, paying the referees off in a basketball game or something. If I could just say you've,
you reminded me, I mean that. There in public opinion polling, there is paradoxically a split between red and blue, which. Republicans, Trump voters believe that there is a significant grave
threat to our democracy because they believe
the election was stolen. Democrats right now
are not especially exercised about it. Much smaller numbers of Democrats
believe there's an existential threat to our democracy
when exactly the reverse is the case. And in fact, the belief of the Republicans
that the election was stolen is itself one of the greatest threats
to our democracy. Yeah, because it energizes the grassroots, and I don't sense
what is energizing grassroots on what we'll call the democratic slash
independent side of the equation. Rather than arguing about. You know what should be
and build back better or it shouldn't be in there
and issues like that? And without that energy, it's it's not a fair fight. I have one more point or two
that I want to get to, and that is. The outcome of the January six commission. How do you
how do you see that playing out? I don't mean what the report is,
I mean the the impact that their report will have on public opinion. Well,
there are a few things to say about it. first of all,
we can be certain that the commission wil where the committee will report not later than November of this year because they are aware, they're aware
that their life as a committee is at risk in the next election,
or that if the Republicans take control of the House, that the committee
will simply be disbanded. And if the reporters at the printer waiting for the machines to start
machines will not start, so they will report
before Congress can change hands. Republicans and Trump are doing their best to delegitimize
the committee. They are going to say it's all a struggle for political advantage,
and I think there is something to say that's in common
between the committee and journalism, which is that startling
facts have a power of their own. The committee is already showing
signs of discovering important evidence about the overall plot
to overthrow the election, not just exactly what happened inside the Capitol
on January six, but what led up to it and how that fit into a larger plan to overthrow the election. And and yes, that preexisted Jan six and and subpoena power is a marvelous thing,
I've often wished for it as a journalist. They they are,
you know, even even in the course of. Not fully cooperating with committee, you know, the former chief of staff,
Meadows has handed over six or 7000 pages of documents. That's an extraordinary cache of material and they're finding out things
that nobody knows and. They will be able to tell
a quite compelling tale. What they're doing. Could equally be done
by the Justice Department in the context of a criminal investigation,
as far as we know, that's not happening. We don't know for sure
because it's possible the Justice Department has grand juries
working in secret. And unannounced investigations, but it's harder and harder to believe
that there is a major Justice Department investigation into the effort
to overthrow the election because. You would expect if there were dead, it would collide with January six commit
and that there would be times when there would be questions about whether, for example,
to immunize a witness for the committee when the Justice Department
might want them immunized because they want them
prosecuted down the road or there could be struggles
to control certain kinds of. Yeah, exactly so. So the committee can make recommendations for criminal prosecution. But. Honestly, Merrick Garland doesn't need the committee
or anyone else to tell him what's out there, if he's not going after
it, he's not going after it. Yeah. Well. I hope that we can hope, and that's I guess, the most
we can wish for, but I want to thank you and congratulate
you and the Atlantic for devoting as much effort and careful thought as you do into these problems. They're not Partizan problems. The issue of a functioning
democracy affects both sides. I'm going to suggest autocracy
does not in the long run benefit any one, and that could be the net outcome
of the declination of our democracy. So what you're doing is important, and I want to thank you
for spending this time with us. And keep on, keep on writing. Thank you very much. It's been a great conversation. Appreciate it very much
and thank you to the audience. With that, the Commonwealth Club is virtually adjourned.
