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Unknown A
Has happened fully now. And now we're in the doomsday is.
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Unknown B
A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals. Npc. Short for non player character, non playable.
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Unknown A
Character, non player character.
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Unknown B
What you don't know about this? Do I get to tell you?
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Unknown C
The NPC memes.
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Unknown B
This is the most important meme of our lifetime. The term was lifted from video games where an NPC refers to the computer controlled characters that populate the game while you, the live player, make actual decisions. NPCs don't have minds of their own. They don't have agency. They're a automatons. You might have seen these memes. Featureless gray faces, sometimes surrounded by liberal icons. Elon Musk loved posting them. Liberals in this story thought what they were allowed to think, said what they were allowed to say. And once you identify, it's like the Matrix, like you see Agent Smith everywhere.
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Unknown D
Believe all women refugees welcome.
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Unknown B
I anticipate that's gonna be the new NPC download. Like any good insult, the NPC meme served a dual purpose. It contains a kernel of truth about its target. We liberals can be conformist. We can be too afraid to offend, we can be overly deferential to institutions. We can be cowed by the angry policing that we inflict on ourselves and a little quick to take up whatever the cause of the moment is. But the real purpose of the NPC insult was self congratulation. The right was full of live players. You can see it in their willingness to offend.
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Unknown D
What is a woman? Can you tell me that?
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Unknown A
I'll say what I want to say.
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Unknown D
And if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.
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Unknown B
Their mistrust of institutions.
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Unknown D
Are you a conspiracy theorist? That is a pejorative, Senator.
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Unknown E
That's applied to me mainly to keep.
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Unknown A
Me from asking difficult questions of powerful interest.
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Unknown D
I'll say.
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Unknown B
Say it again.
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Unknown D
Do your own research.
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Unknown B
They're eagerness to debate what liberals will not even say out loud.
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Unknown D
It depends on what you mean by equality. You know, to shut up and obey.
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Unknown B
I just, I just reject that completely. This became part of the trumpist rights self definition. They were the non conformists. We are now the party of freedom and the party of speech. The coalition that wasn't made of Atomicons. In fact, we are just the party. And that's what America needed. Live players. And here we are in 2025. And at this point I'm willing to concede at least half the argument. American politics does have an NPC problem. Possibly A lethal one, but it's not on the left. I can make a generous case for a lot of what the Trump administration is on some level trying to do, or at least saying they're trying to do. Government is too gummed up by process and protocol. It is too hard to hire and fire in the civil service. Even if I agree with the goals of many DEI programs, and I do, many of them don't achieve those goals.
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Unknown B
Some of them make the problems they seek to fix worse. There hasn't been rigor at looking at which is which and getting rid of the bad ones. There is actually a good argument for auditing usaid. We probably should convert more of what that agency spends to cash grants and direct public health support. And yes, how the government manages software procurement and builds and maintains digital services is hopelessly cumbersome. I was saying all this before the election too. All of it is well known, including among liberals. Many liberals have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to fix these problems. And so it is a genuine failure of Democrats that they did not put more energy into making the government faster and better and more responsive when they were in charge. How the hell did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021?
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Unknown A
Let us agree, in the 21st century in America, high speed Internet is not a luxury, it is a necessity and.
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Unknown B
Have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024.
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Unknown D
That is a Wawa station. They recently got $733,000 to build an EV charging station.
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Unknown B
Unfortunately all you see right now are gas pumps though. How did they get 7.5 billion?
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Unknown A
If I go and look up these things, are these all like 10 year plus projects or dollars for electric vehicle.
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Unknown B
Chargers but only build a few hundred of them by the end of their term? It seems that everything is going a little slower than anybody thought. Why is it all so slow? Democrats became champions of a government that often didn't work. And that's part of the reason Trump won. Not the only reason, not the biggest reason. It's not as important as the price of eggs. But when people feel the government isn't working, the party promising change beats a party rallying in defense. When Elon Musk says that the election gave Republicans a mandate for reform, he's not totally wrong.
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Unknown D
You couldn't ask for a stronger mandate.
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Unknown B
From the public to have a majority.
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Unknown D
Of the public vote voting for President Trump won the House.
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Unknown A
The broadband stuff is huge infrastructure projects. Not only that, but like I feel like doesn't most of America, at least all the cities don't they all have access to, like, really fast Internet now. Like, isn't that like a thing that's been largely solved and we just don't talk about it anymore? I'm kind of curious, like, are there any. Are there any major cities where the majority of the city doesn't have access to at least like, 50 down? 50 up, or did you have fiber in Nebraska? No, but I don't. But not to be an elitist, but, like, actually, this even applies to me. Well, actually, no, it doesn't just. Well, no, now it does. Yeah. Most consumers don't need fiber Internet. I think coax does 600 down now. At least 300 down. But the main issue with coax is latency. No, it's not off. You still run fiber to the plant for sure sometimes, I think even to the nodes.
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Unknown A
And then they do coax to the House. Coax does two gigabits down now. Is that true?
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Unknown D
On the Senate, the people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that.
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Unknown B
But look at how Musk justifies that mandate. The proof is that Republicans control the House and the Senate, so why not write some bills? Sure, Republican majorities are narrow, but bipartisanship here, it wasn't out of the question. Democrats were defeated and ready to deal. Their own voters wanted them to deal. A January poll by CBS and Yuga found that 54% of Democrats wanted their congressional representatives to work with the Trump administration. One month later, February, and now 65% want all out opposition. That is a lot of political capital the Trump administration burnt in just one month. And for what? I covered Washington for decades. Now there's gray in the spirit. If this was about policy, Trump and his team would have gone through Congress. They could have crafted much larger reforms using a wider set of powers, and they wouldn't be facing down the courts in the way they are now.
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Unknown B
What they wanted wasn't policy. They didn't want to go line by line through USAID and figure out what worked and what didn't. They didn't want to think through new civil service regulations, balancing ethics and independence and responsiveness. What they wanted was power. What Donald Trump wanted was power. And so they were trying to remake our system of government, not our laws. And they've identified a weak point in the system, and now they're trying to drive a flaming cybertruck for it. That weak point is Congress. And the reason the Trump administration might succeed in taking Congress's power is that they have turned congressional Republicans into NPCs. The vulnerability in the system here goes. Way back in Federalist 51, James Madison set out the challenge he and his colleagues faced in writing the Constitution. He said, in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
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Unknown B
You must first enable the government to control the governed, and the next place obliges it to control itself. So how does a government control itself? The founder's idea was it controls itself through internal competition between independent branches, each of which wants to protect its own power. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, Madison wrote. But one branch was unquestionably designed to be stronger than the others. Congress controls the money. Congress can overturn presidential vetoes. Congress can impeach federal judges, cabinet officers, and the president. Why was Congress made so strong? Because Congress reflects a second and in some ways the more important and enduring form of fracture the founders imagined. Our political system was designed to fracture power by place. Senators are elected by states. The House is sliced up into geographically bound districts. That ultimately is what members of Congress are supposed to represent, the particular needs of a particular group of voters in a particular place.
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Unknown B
And so power would be fractured. It can never nationalize into just one force. The framers of the Constitution got a lot right, but they got a lot wrong. And one of the big things they got wrong was visible almost immediately. The Founders imagined a political system free of political parties. But for much of American history, their second assumption held geography kept American politics fractured. It kept power fractured because it kept America's political parties fractured. Yes, we've had Republicans and Democrats for a long time, but in the 20th century, that two party system was really a four party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Southern Dixiecrats, a sort of internal party whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives as we know them today, and Northern liberals. It is astonishing from our vantage point to really wrap your mind around this, but it's true for much of the 20th century to say you were Republican or Democrat didn't reveal whether you were liberal or conservative in 1973.
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Unknown B
Sen.
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Unknown A
I want to say this was almost true up through like the early mid-2000s, maybe even where, like, you could still be kind of a conservative ish, socially Democrat, or like a liberal ish, Republican, maybe at least more so than it is today. Somebody saying Reagan changed it maybe with, I mean, I wouldn't know what it was like before then because I wasn't alive.
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Unknown B
But Senator Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision. Around that same time, President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Time has come for man to make.
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Unknown D
His peace with nature.
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Unknown B
Politics was different.
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Unknown A
Can you explain this a bit more? That seems so impossible now. I don't know if he'll say it directly. He might, because he's obviously a big fan of mine because everybody copies my points. No, I'm just kidding. One of the things that I used to say before, or I still say this, I still think it's happening or it has happened fully now, and now we're in the doomsday is people are naturally drawn to political groups or social groups. You kind of have a homogeneity of opinions, right? People will get drawn to these groups and then they'll have their opinions and they will be relatively uniform in their opinions. And that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. It's just the. It's just how people work. It's not going to change the color of this. Fuck you. The thing that made this okay before, I think, was you have 50 different states and you even have like different cities in these states where you have all of these different groups of people.
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Unknown A
A Republican who lives in a Republican over here from central California isn't going to be the same as a Republican over here from Georgia or Louisiana or Alabama. And a Democrat from up here in New York City probably isn't going to be quite the same as a Democrat from Nebraska, where I'm from, or Iowa. Right. So you have people drawn into their groups, but there's a lot of different groups that people can be a part of. And so even though we're kind of homogenous, it's within like a. It's localized to some extent. You know, you've got your neighborhood or your local community, then maybe your school community, maybe up to your city, then your state, and then your. Your country, unfortunately. But now, yeah, now I would say the issue is, as the Internet has existed, all of these people are now expected to be the exact same.
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Unknown A
If you're a Democrat from Maine, you're supposed to be the exact same as a Democrat from Georgia. This is where you get when AOC won her election and then the Justice Dem started bombing all of the moderate Dems, or you get people like Hassan shitting all over Ossoff and Warnock from Georgia, it's because they have this national group of Democrats and they're all supposed to be the same. But the problem is that's unworkable. Democrats from every area probably shouldn't think the same thing, same thing with Republicans from every area. So you end up with this huge, like these huge groups on both sides that are massive, they span the entire country. But they're also relatively homogenous in opinion, which is, I think, unhealthy. I think it's not good. And it makes it so there's way less room for disagreement. And then with disagreement and tension comes, I think, a moderating effect kind of.
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Unknown A
So you just end up with a society that's way more polarized. There's two people on both sides. And then those polls are getting pushed further and further apart because all the moderating factors are being cut away from both groups. I think this is a big problem. I think it's been the story, a big story of US Politics over the past at least eight years. But it's not necessarily like a Trump thing or a Republican Democrat thing. I think it's majorly a. It's an Internet thing.
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Unknown B
Then the parties were different then because parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lockstep. And so bipartisanship was common. There's warm oppos from members of both parties as the President sets to work. The Civil Rights act of 19, yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president, but Congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage.
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Unknown D
Souvenirs go to Republican leader Edward Dirksen and Democratic Humphrey.
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Unknown B
When Nixon was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated, a policy known as impoundment, Congress acted to protect its power, Republicans and Democrats alike. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment control act of 1974 passed the House with only six no votes. Only six. It passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition. When Watergate began coming to light.
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Unknown A
Good evening.
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Unknown B
I want to talk to you tonight from my heart.
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Unknown A
It was ultimately, wait, who is getting their career destroyed for not agreeing with the majority opinion in the Dems? This shit happens in the Republican Party only for the one. I feel like the problem is the Democratic governing majority has to follow a culture that they don't control. They have to follow kind of like the progressive culture, but the republic. So the elected body of lawmakers is chasing a culture that isn't necessarily congruent with the lawmaker body. It doesn't care about law making body. Whereas for the Republicans it is the lawmakers, Donald Trump or MAGA that are setting the culture. So the culture is keeping with the lawmakers. I think that that dynamic spoken about this, that dynamic is just so much better for maintaining political power because on the MAGA side, because the lawmakers and the governing are setting the culture, and the culture is trying to chase the lawmakers.
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Unknown A
You end up in this world where all of the culture is doing their best to appease the party, whereas on the Democrat side, the Democrats have this impossible game where they're trying to both appease their party, the governing part, but they're also chasing a culture that is. That is intrinsically alienating to the majority of the party. Right. So that's why you get into these weird scenarios where the really easy comparison is BLM to J6. Like. BLM, for all of its problems, had a more noble goal on paper than January six did. But BLM was an event that caused so many people to lose elections, to lose popular support. It had to be disavowed by Biden and Kamala. And look at what happened with. Look at what happened with. Kamala tweeted out one time, she retweeted a link to a bail fund for Minnesota. Just a bail fund, just for bail.
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Unknown A
Not even to fund people's legal teams or to try to fucking bust people out or ship them. Just a bail fund. And she was excoriated that even to this day, you'll find people who bring that argument up. Meanwhile, Trump pardons every single J6 offender. And it's perfectly fine, right? That. That. Yeah, there's just them. Trump getting to set the culture and having people follow him is so much more effective for unifying the political power with the cultural power. Whereas on the left, the cultural power doesn't care about political power. If anything, they prefer not to be in power because it lets them endlessly critique power and complain and do nothing. And because of who they are demographically, a lot of them are insulated from power. It doesn't really matter one way or another. People like, you know, the Majority Report or, you know, Hasan, or, you know, any of these people, these people aren't affected at the end of the day by what the policy is.
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Unknown A
So it doesn't really matter to them. It doesn't affect them on a personal level.
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Unknown B
The delegation of congressional Republicans that persuaded Nixon to resign.
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Unknown D
Senator Scott and I have just concluded a visit with the President. He invited us down this afternoon to.
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Unknown A
Sorry, just real quick, when you. I'm just rereading the question. Who's getting their career destroyed for not agreeing with the majority opinion? And the dumps, like, even Bernie Sanders is getting, like, shouted down at places. I remember, even in 2020, in 2020, I think when he was speeching, giving stump speeches for Biden, I think there were. Was it 2020? Black woman takes over, Mike. Bernie Sanders. And even Bernie is, like, so cucked, he can't say anything. Was it this? Does anybody remember when this happened? Oh, was it nine years ago? Oh, so he was still even running for president, I think. Right? He wasn't out of the nomination thing yet.
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Unknown F
With your presence, this is as far as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders got into his Social Security speech at Westlake Park.
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Unknown B
Thank you, Seattle, for being one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America.
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Unknown F
Moments later, Black Lives Matter activists rush the stage. We are crashed.
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Unknown D
We're gonna get you.
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Unknown F
We're gonna let you on the mic. Activists who last year shut down a holiday tree lighting in the same park today prevented the most progressive candidate for president from speaking to thousands of people who came to hear him.
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Unknown A
I came here to join this rally, watch what was going on, not to listen to somebody take up the stage.
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Unknown F
As the crowd called for activists to step aside, Sanders waited patiently. We are shutting down.
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Unknown A
We will. We will shut it down.
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Unknown F
After about 20 minutes, Sanders wife Jane appeared to give the signal it was time to go. Soon after they left the stage.
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Unknown A
It was just disrespectful.
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Unknown B
I think it's unfortunate because among other things, among other things, I wanted to talk about the issues of black lives. The fact that the American people are tired of seeing unarmed African Americans shot and killed. But there are other issues as well.
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Unknown D
That we have to talk about.
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Unknown A
This audio. Hell yeah. Destiny. Is the me of coastal elites true, or is that a right wing bastardization of demographics of liberals? No, it's absolutely true. But, like, that's like a result of, like, there's. There's coastal elites and there's, you know, farmer dipshits, whatever you want to call. Like, everybody has their. Has their thing where Democrats, the coastal elites, people that live in cities, probably view people that live in rural communities, like, way too unfavorably, like, oh, this, you know, white trash, redneck dipshit. They assume that, like, oh, you're a farmer. What, you go out with your. With your hoe and pickaxe and mine and do crops and can you even drive? And how stupid is this guy? Like, they might not know about all the technology utilized on farms. They might think that their children are uneducated, that they're all missing teeth or whatever.
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Unknown A
But I mean, it's the same the other way around, you know, where people that live in rural areas are like, oh, city people. Like, what do you do? Like, indoctrinate your children into satanic gay Cults when they're four years old. And then you, you know, you get, I don't even know. Because all the old stereotypes are going to be a lot different now. Like, everybody has bad. When you don't hang out with another group of people ever, then you start to have caricatures of them exist in your mind. And so that was true of liberals who thought of conservatives, and it was true of conservatives who thought of liberals. You know, somebody said, I would imagine you're also heavily insulated from the political climate. What is your motivation to fix the system rather than feeling it? I don't know. I just have a different value system, I guess.
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Unknown A
Or I think there are aspects of this country that I really like that I appreciate more than just like personal enrichment or, I don't know, stems from my philosophy, I guess. Or maybe I am trying to be an agent of chaos. Who knows? Just kidding.
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Unknown B
From my heart. It was ultimately a delegation of Congressional Republicans that persuaded Nixon to resign.
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Unknown D
Senator Scott and I have just concluded a visit with the President. He invited us down this afternoon to disclose to him what we feel the actual conditions in the House and the Senate are relative to his situation.
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Unknown B
But that was then here in 2025. President Trump is impounding money that Congress has appropriated in clear defiance of that impoundment bill that passed nearly unanimously. He's trying to erase agencies that Congress created. And while the courts are standing in his way, Congress is doing nothing while Trump takes away their power. The reason USAID is going to cease to exist as it did before is because it should.
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Unknown D
At the end of the day, though, he's got to freeze everything in order to get his arms around it. Just give him a little time. We don't see this as a threat to Article 1 at all. We see this as an active, engaged.
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Unknown A
Committed executive branch authority doing what the.
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Unknown B
Executive branch should do. It's astonishing. Republicans in Congress could demand that Trump cut them in. They won this election too. This is their job. It is their job to write these bills. Agreeing with Trump's policy aims need not mean agreeing with his power grab. The most powerful branch of government, the branch with the power to check the others, is supine. It is not that it can't act to protect its power, it's that it will not act to protect its power. This is a non player Congress. What we are seeing is a collapse of the constitutional structure and the nationalization of the two parties. If Democrats controlled Congress right now, yeah, Congress would be a check on Donald Trump. Since Republicans control it, it is not what matters is which party controls it and how that party acts. It is parties that now compete with each other, not branches.
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Unknown B
Parties are institutions. They can be more or less responsible. They can themselves be a check on abuses, even on their own side. I already talked about how Republicans were a check on Nixon. In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court.
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Unknown D
I asked the Senate to review her qualifications thoroughly and fairly and to vote on her nomination promptly.
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Unknown B
And she had to withdraw because the Republican controlled Senate found her unqualified and ideologically unreliable. The fact that Bush wanted her on the court, that wasn't enough. Congressional Republicans had their own views. In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Tom Daschle to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Tom Daschle is one of America's foremost health care experts.
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Unknown A
Apparently, Mitch McConnell is one of the only Republicans with something that resembles a spine. By voting against Trump's candidates, etc. I'm so sorry, but it doesn't count if you're doing this on your way out when you're already done with your whole career. Like McConnell voted against convicting Trump in the Senate on a bullshit reason because he said, oh, you can't impeach a guy who isn't president anymore. So, I mean, like, no, it's. No.
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Unknown E
January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business. They did not like fellow Americans, beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they'd been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth because he was angry he lost an election. There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president, only to see Daschle withdraw.
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Unknown B
Daschle, who was a former majority leader of the U.S. senate, was found to owe back taxes and he thought his own nomination might fail to make it through a Senate filled with his former colleagues. But this Republican Party is no check on Trump. That's been the message of Trump's nominations. Arkin junior Kelsey Gabbard, Cash Patel, Pete Hegseth. These were tests. Senate Republicans know these nominees were unqualified. You could see it in the hearings. Again, let's make it very clear for Everyone here today, as Secretary of Defense, will you support women continuing to have the opportunity to serve in combat roles.
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Unknown D
As the leader of the intelligence community? How would you think you would be received based on some of these past actions, to support or even to pardon?
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Unknown B
Edward Snowden, I'm a doc.
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Unknown D
Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn old information so that there's never a conclusion.
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Unknown B
Senate Republicans don't want to vote for these nominees. Not one of them got into politics to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Who ran for president in 2023, two years ago as a pro choice Democrat, as Secretary of Health and Human Services. But Trump knows what he's doing. You force people into submission early and soon it becomes a habit. Congressional Republicans have their reasons for bowing to him. Washington is aflame with talk of the primary challenges that Elon Musk will fund against any Republican who makes trouble for Trump. All of them fear the trouble personally weighing against them in a primary. What an unbelievably strange life to rise as far as they have in politics, to wield as much power as they could and to be as afraid as they are. The NBC critique got something right. There are real dangers to conformity. Political parties, even presidential administrations, are stronger when they can hear contrary voices.
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Unknown A
A multi party system would be, would be far more preferable in this situation. Right. Even if it leads to majority rule, at least some parties could rebel. I don't know, I don't want to overplay just knowing select histories or whatever, but there's actually one. Okay, well, for whoever's here for reading hour, there's one huge thing, I think in Weimar Republic Germany that seemed to be a big issue with their parties. They had a multi party system. But I don't think the multi party system helped that much. And in some ways it almost hurts a little bit. I can see pros and cons for both. So for instance, multi party systems might keep your parliament less radical maybe, but it makes the parties maybe more radical because there's a multi party system. Whereas in the United States, having only two parties can, could help moderate the parties a bit.
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Unknown A
Maybe because you have a single party trying to appeal to so many different voters. Right. And you're not gonna be able to form a coalition government in the US you literally have one party on each side. Like I can see there being like pros and cons both ways. Someone said it's that the parties created their own institutions. I think one of the interesting things that Evans does in his book is he analyzes each of the parties, and he talks about each of the. He talks about each of the party's commitments to the idea of the Democratic Weimar Republic. And I think that's an interesting way to look at it. So of the parties that exist, I think there were three that he identified. I'm not gonna remember their names, but it was like of the. He called it the Weimar. The three Weimar parties was the center party, Was it the Social Democrats?
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Unknown A
And then was it the one other one? I don't remember. There were three parties that he identified. But then he went through. He goes through each of the other parties, and he talks about how, you know, most of these people. And I think by the end of the. I think by the end of the 20s, even most of the people who were voting in Germany were not voting for political parties that were actually supportive of the institution of the Weimar Republic. The Democratic establishment of the Weimar Republic, regardless of what they were voting for politically, ideologically, most just weren't for that institution of the Weimar Republic existing. And I think when you go back and you look at our modern. When you look at what's existing politically today, I think there's a big issue in that none of the Republicans right now support the United States, I guess, as it was founded constitutionally.
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Unknown A
But there is a. There isn't like a huge defense on the left, and there hasn't been of the US as well. So when you look at the people that exist in government, it seems like everybody for a long time has been calling the government completely corrupt, bought and paid for by lobbyists and donors. Citizens United destroyed it. Everything is ruined, and billionaires run everything. And when you have both sides constantly attacking the system, well, if you're on the right or even if you're on the left or if you're undecided and you're looking at the government, and now Democrats are saying, hold on, Republicans are trying to destroy the government. And it's like trying to destroy the government. I thought you said the government has been bought and paid for and owned by billionaires and destroyed by lobbyists and corruption for decades anyway, so what does it matter?
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Unknown A
Right? Like, I think that's a big issue. You don't really have any big defenders of the. The system of the United States right now. At least they're not vocal. So I think. I think that's a huge problem.
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Unknown B
Excusing his billions to scare congressional Republicans into supporting everything Trump does. Yeah, it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country a whole lot weaker later. If Those same nominees fail and he is blamed for the disaster. Or if the treasury payment system breaks and he is blamed for the chaos. In the short term, having unanimity makes you look strong. In long term, success is what makes you strong. It would be good right now. Good for the party, good for the country, if Republicans display the values he once claimed to prize.
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Unknown A
Wait, somebody said in chat, proportional representation, as we have in Europe, tends to favor the right as the left is more prone to fragmentation. This is of course a generalization. I thought it was the opposite, or what you're saying is true, but it's because the left isn't prone to fragmentation. It's that the left is prone to high population areas and they're more centered. If there was an easy map to show this, I would appreciate it. But like, I think in the United States, if you look at the distribution of Democrats and conservatives throughout the United States, when a conservative lives in a conservative district, that district is like 60, 40 or whatever. But when a liberal lives in a liberal district, that district is like 80, 20, and they're high population. So what happens is, this is why I don't fight against gerrymandering that much.
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Unknown A
Why I believe it's kind of a lost cause. So you kind of have to gerrymander on either side to give anything fair. Because if you just drew ordinary natural districts, liberals would be at a disadvantage every time. Because I think liberals tend to live in higher concentration liberal areas just by virtue of how cities and populations work. So conservatives always have a natural advantage when it comes to drawing districts because the populations tend to be more spread out and it's not quite as conservative as the liberal areas are. Liberal, I believe.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country. Political parties, even presidential administrations, are stronger when they can hear conjuring voices. Musk using his billions to scare congressional Republicans into supporting everything Trump does. Yeah, it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country a whole lot weaker later if those same nominees fail and he is blamed for the disaster.
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Unknown A
Oh, this guy's just talking about the parties. In Germany, we have more left wing parties than right wing parties. Oh, that might be true too, maybe, I don't know.
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Unknown B
Or if the treasury payment system breaks and he is blamed for the chaos. In the short term, having unanimity makes you look strong. In the long term, success is what makes you strong. It would be good right now. Good for the party, good for the country, if Republicans displayed the values they once claimed to prize. A willingness to offend their own side. A mistrust of institutional authority, an eagerness to debate the questions that those in power do not wish to see debated. But we are seeing none of that. This is the NBC problem. We actually face a non player Congress driven by Republicans who serve Trump's ambitions. 1st Congressional Republicans who have gone quiet. We are left relying on the courts. And yeah, that may work, but this is not the system working, it's a system failing.
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Unknown A
I thought districts took population into account. Are they solely geographic? Well, they try to draw them geographically, but that doesn't work. But I'm just saying that you guys all know how gerrymandering works, right? Gerrymandering isn't supposed to give you unbeatable districts. Gerrymandering is supposed to give the other side unbeatable districts. That's the, that's the goal. If you gerrymander, well, then that means that the other side has districts that they'll never lose because they have like 80% of the population in those districts and their districts are all like 55, 45. There's got to be like a CGP grey. I know. We've watched these before. I think. I feel like people don't know what gerrymandering is supposed to do. It's not supposed to give you massive, huge districts that can never be lost. It's supposed to give the other side like one or two, basically. Fuck. There was like a cute little graph.
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Unknown A
Is it gonna be here? No. Is it? Was it in this video? Maybe.
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Unknown C
Queen lion of the animal kingdom is giving more democracy to her citizens by adding a legislative branch to the government. The citizens each get one vote and are divided into ranges. Each range will elect one representative to send to the newly created Jungle Council. To best understand how the system works, let's take a look at a small colony where there are just two political parties. The buffalo and jackalope. This colony is divided into four ranges. In the first election, jackalope candidates win two of them. And buffalo.
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Unknown A
Oh, fuck. This was the image. I'm thinking of 50 precincts. So let's see, I have 50 precincts here. 60% of them are blue, 40% of them are red. So you'd think in an ideal world if there were no districts, it would just BE, okay, well, 60% of the representatives would go to the blue, 40% go to the red. But then depending on how you geographically draw the districts, like if you were to draw them this way, well, now you have five districts from €50 precincts, right? You've got five districts that are drawn and now blue wins every single time, Right. This would be a good gerrymander for blue if you go the other way and you draw the districts geographically like this. Well, now we've given blue some districts that they'll never lose, right? They look at how. Look we've. How many precincts we have.
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Unknown A
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 blue precincts and one red precinct, right? And then. Same thing over here, but then the red ones have enough of a majority to win in these districts. So now with five districts here, three red wins and two blue wins, right? But the issue with gerrymandering is, like, well, what is a fair district? How do you even draw a fair district? It's challenging. You know, what is the Northern Star for drawing maps, ideally? I don't know. I almost think it's just a system that shouldn't exist. They should just do it, like, by state or something. It's like. It seems very. I don't know what it means to fairly draw any of these maps. Why do we have districts? Well, because I think the idea is supposed to be that in the federal government, your representative is voting to represent the interests of your district.
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Unknown A
So if I live in a district that does a lot of farming, and I elect my representative when he's in Congress and they're voting on bills having to do with farming, my representative is voting in my interest. That's supposed to be the idea, right? Destiny. But Ezra's point is that because Trump controls the party so much, that that isn't happening. True. That. That is true. However, we have to remember, and this is, like, the hard thing, I would actually really like to talk to Ezra about this. If I ever get to people like Ezra Klein or. He's probably aware of this, I would imagine. I think people keep talking about checks and balances, and people keep talking about how. How do you design the system to make sure that one side can't overrule the other side? It's supposed to be designed with everybody playing more or less within the bounds, maybe a little fuzzy the edges in mind.
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Unknown A
Everybody should be playing by the rules. You cannot design a foolproof system. It's impossible. You can't do that, because if people really want to break a system, then they're gonna break it. It's words on paper at the end of the day. It's words on paper at the end of the day. What was that one? Scalia speech. Does he talk about this? I think I've. We haven't watched this in a while.
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Unknown D
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I'm happy to be back in front of the Judiciary Committee where. Where I started this pilgrimage. I am going to get even more fundamental than my good friend and colleague.
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Unknown A
The courts are meant to enforce the words on papers. No, that's what the executive branch is for. The courts are just meant to interpret the words on paper, basically. Right?
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Unknown D
My good friend and colleague. Like him, I speak to students, especially law students, but also college students and even high school students quite frequently about the Constitution, because I feel that we're not teaching it very well. I speak to law students from the best law schools, people presumably especially interested in the law, and I ask them, how many of you have read the Federalist Papers? Well, a lot of hands. No, not just number 48 and the big ones. How many of you have read the Federal Federalist Papers cover to cover? Never more than about 5%. And that is very sad. I mean, especially if you're interested in the Constitution. Here's a document that says what the framers of it thought they were doing. Those papers especially, I speak to law students from the best law schools, people presumably especially interested in the law.
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Unknown A
And I asked, okay, well, now that we've read, like 20 of them, it takes a decent chunk of time to read the Federalist Papers. Motherfucker. These guys have to study for their classes, okay? They don't have time to recreationally read and opine on historic constitutional law, okay? It's like, isn't con law? That's like one class, okay?
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Unknown D
How many of you have read the Federalist. Read the Federalist Papers, cover, especially if you're interested in the Constitution, here's a document that says what the framers of it thought they were doing. It's such a profound exposition of political science that it is studied in political science courses in Europe, and yet we have raised a generation of Americans who are not familiar with it. So when I speak to these groups, the first point I make, and I think it's even a little more fundamental than the one that Stephen has just put forward, I ask them, what do you think is the reason that America is such a free country? What is it in our Constitution that makes us what we are? And I guarantee you that the response I will get, and you will get this from almost any American, including the woman that he was talking to at the supermarket.
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Unknown D
The answer would be freedom of speech, freedom of the press, no unreasonable searches and seizures, no quartering of troops in hope, those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights. But then I tell Them. If you think that a Bill of Rights is what's.
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Unknown A
Oh, fuck. Now that. Now that we actually have read some of these and everything now, I agree this a trillion times more. I didn't even realize I'd forgotten you even said this, because I was echoing some of this in debates with people where it's like, why do you think America's such a great country? But like the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Like, no. What, what freedom? No. What? That wasn't the revolutionary thing about the United States of America. Freedom of speech. Kill your in a video game of the press. Yeah.
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Unknown D
No unreasonable searches and seizures, no quartering of troops in those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights. But then I tell them, if you think that a Bill of Rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a Bill of Rights. Every president for life has a Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights of the. Of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was much better than ours. I mean it literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of the speaker. Speech of oppressive street demonstrations and protests. And anyone who is. Who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa. That is wonderful stuff. Of course, just words on paper. What. What our framers would have called a parchment guarantee.
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Unknown D
And the reason is that the real constitution of the Soviet Union. You think of the word constitution, it doesn't mean bill. It means structure. Say a person has a sound constitute. Here's a sound structure. The real constitution of the Soviet Union, which is what our framers debated that. That whole summer in Philadelphia in 1780, they didn't talk about the Bill of Rights. That was an afterthought, wasn't it? That Constitution of the Soviet Union did not prevent the centralization of power in one person or in one party. And when that happens, the game is over. The Bill of Rights is just what our framers would call a parchment guarantee. So the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our government. One part of it, of course, is the independence of the judiciary. But there's. There's. There's a lot more. There are very few countries in the world, for example, that have a bicameral legislature.
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Unknown D
Oh, England has a House of Lords for the time being, but the House of Lords has no substantial power. They can just make the Commons pass a bill a second time. France has a Senate. It's honorific. Italy has a Senate, it's honorific. Very few countries have two separate bodies in the legislature, equally powerful. That's a lot of trouble, as you gentlemen doubtless know, to get the same language through two different bodies elected in a different fashion. Very few countries in the world have a separately elected chief executive. Sometimes I go to Europe to talk about separation of powers, and when I get there, I find that all I'm talking about is independence of the judiciary because the Europeans don't even try to divide the two political powers, the two political branches, the legislature and the chief executive. In all of the parliamentary countries, the chief executive is the creature of the legislature.
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Unknown D
There's never any disagreement between them and the prime minister as there is sometimes between you and the president. When there's a disagreement, they just kick him out. They have a no confidence vote, a new election, and they get a prime minister who agrees with the legislature. And you know, the Europeans look at the system and they say, well, it passes one house, it doesn't pass the other house. Sometimes the other house is in the control of a different party, it passes both. And then this president who has a veto power, vetoes it. And they look at this and they say it is, it is gridlock. And I hear Americans saying this nowadays and there's a lot of it going around. They talk about a dysfunctional government because there's disagreement. And they. And the framers would have said, yes, that's exactly the way we set it up.
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Unknown D
We wanted this to be power contradicting power, because the main. The main ill that beset us, as Hamilton said in the Federalist, when he talked about a separate Senate, he said, yes, it seems inconvenient. But in as much as the main ill that besets us is an excess of legislation, it won't be so bad. This is 1787. He didn't know what an excess of legislation was. So unless Americans can appreciate that and learn to love the separation of powers, which means learning to love the gridlock, which the framers believed would be the main protection of minorities. The main protection. If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard on some minority, they think it's terribly unfair. It doesn't take much to throw a monkey wrench into this complex system. So Americans should appreciate that and they should learn to love the gridlock.
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Unknown D
It's there for a reason, so that the legislation that gets out will be good legislation. And thus conclude my opening remarks.