Bill Scher on Kamala Harris, the Midterms, and Abortion 56:25

Welcome to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of the studio this week on vacation. And somehow we managed to even repress the irrepressible Kylie Kipper. She is gone as well.

But joining me, and I thank him very much for sticking with us through some technical glitches, got off to a little bit of a late start here this morning, Bill Scheer. Bill is an American pundit, political analyst, contributing editor to Politico magazine, contributor to Real Clear Politics, and co-host the DMZ, which if you haven't seen, folks, definitely check that out. It's an online TV show with conservative pundit Matt Lewis on bloggingheads.tv. Bill, thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Great to be with you. I should also add, I'm also running a lot for the Washington Monthly these days. I did see some pieces there, and actually it was one of those that I wanted to talk about a little bit, or a couple of those. One of them you had pretty recently. Vice presidents, all of them, get no respect. Kamala Harris is no exception.

Can you tell us a little bit about, I thought that was a really fascinating piece as I read it, because I think you were exactly on point, but.

because it's not a given that Biden will run for reelection, although he has said to people that he will. It's not being accepted at face value. He is up there in age. And so you're getting a undercurrent of concern amongst Democrats. Hey, if Biden doesn't run, is Kamala really ready for primetime? And

I think it puts Common in this very awkward position because, number one, it's very unusual for...

a vice president particularly in modern times to have less washington experience than the president we've been doing the reverse a lot lately you have kind of quasi outsider president and then the old washington hand as your number two uh so you know she's got she has a weird contrast with biden in that respect but

But she's expected or is hoped to be presidential material right away because now he could have a health crisis, but he might not run in three years. Right. And she's the first African-American woman vice president. And when you were first, there's this unfair expectation that you're going to be the next Jackie Robinson. You're going to be amazing at everything. Right.

Right away. And vice president just doesn't give you the opportunity to be amazing. You're the number two. You don't get to grandstand. You don't give the I have a dream speech. No, you you have no inherent powers. Generally, you're Mike Pence and you're there to keep people calm.

Well, you're supposed to be a loyalist. I mean, the best VPs are loyalists. But, I mean, the only vice president since Martin Van Buren, the only sitting vice president to win the presidency as a sitting vice president is George H.W. Bush, who was the consummate loyalist to Ronald Reagan. He jettisoned a lot of his moderate positions to get in line with Reagan and the conservative trend of the Republican Party. But when he first...

was beginning his run in 1988, he was tagged as the wimp. The Newsweek had the famous cover, Fighting the Wimp Factor, which burned on him so much it was a Simpsons joke eight years later. This guy actually won. Even the best case scenario, you're never beloved as vice president. I'm not saying that Kamala doesn't have the things to think through and figure out how to navigate these waters, but I just think she should be judged

compared to other vice presidents, not compared to, say, Jackie Robinson. Well, or necessarily judged as the frontrunner for the nomination if Biden should sit aside. I mean, I would tend to think that people like Transportation Secretary Buttigieg and others would be in that race regardless if it turned out that Biden did step down. Well, she probably wouldn't clear the field.

But again, what vice president has? You know, George Bush rang. It's Bob Dole and Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp. You know, Gore was the closest, but he still had Bill Bradley. Bill Bradley almost caught him in New Hampshire. Joe Biden didn't clear the field. Walter Mondale didn't clear the field. So it's not unusual for someone to say, hey, I think this person is beatable and I'm going to give it my best shot.

So I assume she would have opponents. But now Buttigieg is getting the most alternative buzz. But let's think through that for a little bit. You're Pete Buttigieg.

You're transportation secretary. You're not in a position that's normally considered a stepping stone to the presidency. You ran for president previously, as did Kamala. And what was your Achilles heel? You could not win African-American votes. You had no credibility as someone who had delivered for the African-American community and had built those bonds. And look, he's very young. He's got a lot of years on him. He's got time to develop those relationships.

Should his next big thing to be running against the first African-American vice president? Because, I mean, maybe it could work. I'm not saying it's impossible. But if that bet is wrong and he further angers, I mean, you can't win the Democratic nomination without African-American voters. You just can't.

It's a huge mountain without them, right? The last guy to essentially pull that off, to win the nomination, was Mike Dukakis. And that happened because you had Jesse Jackson in the race, who was able to win some African-American majority states in the South, but...

But he couldn't Jackson couldn't dominate the South because you had a lot more white moderate Southerners in the Democratic Party back then. And Al Gore was in that race. And so Gore and Jackson split the South. In fact, Dukakis was able to sneak in and pick off Texas and pick off Florida because the South wasn't united around one candidate against Dukakis.

So he wins, but he wins in kind of a tenuous way and arguably doesn't easily get as much of the African-American vote as Democrats normally get because there are some residual hard feelings. So it is technically possible to win without the black vote, but it is incredibly hard. And if you burn that relationship badly, it can really damage your long-term prospects. So if I'm Pete Buttigieg...

I'm going to say to myself, why risk antagonizing this incredibly important constituency when I got a lot of years on me? I'm going to wait, maybe be secretary of state or U.N. ambassador in the next Democratic presidency and then jump from there and not piss anybody off. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, I think for him, he would have a lot of I mean, just being honest about it, I think he would have a lot of one on one work to do with African-American leaders to, you

to provide a bulwark for him because let's be real about it, there is still a lingering anti-LGBTQ sentiment in parts of the African-American community. So you would be battling that. It's going away, but it's still there. Well, I don't want to, I haven't seen data on it, so I don't want to just speak confidently about that kind of thing. But anyone who's going to be a barrier breaker,

has a certain burden, fair or unfair,

to prove to the electorate this is not going to be electoral dead weight. You know, Barack Obama had to prove himself. Hillary Clinton had to prove herself. If Kamala Ren, she'll have to prove herself and Buttigieg have to prove himself. I mean, this this camp to some degree in 2020. But what was Obama's big moment? I mean, he he was he was gutted out a win over Hillary in 2016. I'm sorry, 2008.

And then he's hit with the whole Jeremiah Wright thing somewhat late in the in the in the primary. And there's this collective, you know, you know, heart palpitation. The Democratic Party is just going to is Obama, not the golden boy that I thought I thought he was. How is he going to get out of this pickle? And then he gives the more perfect union speech and all Democrats like, well, that was amazing. You showed me.

You know what you're going to do when you're hit with this stuff. And in fact, he was with some of that stuff along the way and he navigated. He had done the legwork ahead of time to think through how to deal with those kinds of pitfalls, which is why he was such a good politician. So, you know, Buttigieg would inevitably come with those sorts of challenges, as would Kamala or anybody else who's a first.

And it's not fair, but there's no fair in politics. You have to prove to voters you can get the 50 percent plus one in a state or with the Electoral College. That's that's that's the ultimate challenge. When I think for Buttigieg, part of part of that challenge is growing from a fairly small role. I mean, granted, as as mayor, but of a very small city.

he's got a lot to learn on the national political stage still, right? I mean, he has a lot to learn as far as, you know, politics in terms of governing. I mean, you know, Transparency Secretary is a step up from mayor of a small city. I mean, being mayor of South Bend was always ridiculous as a qualification to be president. It's half the size of the council district I live in. But to his credit, like he...

I mean, not every person who runs for president is,

improves their career prospect afterwards. There are people whose career prospects are harmed. Julian Castro is in a worse place after running point, but people who did just not people who judge had a better than average run, got a lot of fans, a lot of supporters and was able to pick off me. I think he wants, he wants secretary of state. I think couldn't get, couldn't get that much, but got something. And now he's in a better place than he was, but it's still going to be hard to argue that that's enough.

qualification to be president. And I'd be probably better off getting one more plum position that that's higher up on the ladder before making that, that final job. Talking about Biden's legislative agenda, 2021, because that was another piece you wrote on recently. Could it have been better? I'm not sure it could have been. I'm curious as to your take, but I think for whether it's Kamala or any of these other hopefuls or Biden himself, I,

This next piece of legislation coming through is probably more critical, at least that's my take, than the infrastructure bill, because this is the one that feeds your base. Well, I think Build Back Better is necessary but not sufficient for Democrats to have a good 2022, let alone 2024. The base has extraordinarily high expectations for it.

And so if you fail, that's going to just shatter your coalition. Now, to pull back for a second, you know, most presidential presence parties have bad midterms. It's not just, you know, it's every president, especially that almost midterm, almost almost every president. And I think that's important. So we've had 36 midterms since the end of the Civil War.

And the president's party loses House seats in 33 of the 36. And now a lot of those times the margins are so big that if you lose some House seats, it's no big thing. But Democrats have a five seat margin of error in the House and only in a zero seat margin of error in the Senate. So they can have an above average midterm and still lose both houses of Congress. So you really got to pitch a perfect game.

pitch a no hitter if you're going to avoid this problem. So that means why does it normally go the other way? Well, normally you're governing, you're compromising their tradeoffs. There's imperfections. Good ideas don't work out as well as you thought they were or didn't kick into gear as quick as you would like them to be. And so some part of your coalition is disappointed and either goes to the other side or doesn't show up on election day. Bill, I'm going to cut you off there. Broken potholes will be coming right back.

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Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host, Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of the studio this week, but on the line with us, Bill Scheer. Bill, a contributing editor to Politico magazine, has been doing some really good work lately for the Washington Monthly. And when we went to break, we were talking about Build Back Better and what Biden, the Democrats need from Biden.

from this next piece of legislation to really have a chance to hold a very, very slim margin in Congress. Right. So if they're going to beat the odds on the midterms, you got to reverse the normal pattern. You can't have your coalition splinter because they're frustrated with governing realities while the opposition remains united, putting their differences aside to focus on hatred of you. You got to flip that script. So you have to pass some stuff that unites your party while

while also retaining appeal to the swing and you have to cross your fingers that your opponent's going to be in some disarray. And there are a few times where this has happened. You look at 1934, FDR is coming out of the Great Depression or starting to. 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis is right before the midterms.

2002 post 9-11 national security fears are uniting the Republican Party. You know, those are times where the president's party has beaten the odds. So if Biden is managing the pandemic well, let's say the variants were getting past these variants and we got more vaccines in kids' arms and the mask mandates are lifting, let's say inflation is starting to lift because of that.

That might help with the middle. And if you got Build Back Better done, that's going to get your basics cited. So I think all those pieces have to come together. And so this is one piece of the puzzle. Again, it's final build done, but it probably doesn't get you the swing because so much in that bill is long term. It's not solving immediate problems. Inflation is an immediate problem. And Biden can say all day long it's not going to make things worse, but it's not designed to make things better.

better today. He needs things to be better today or like literally tomorrow for people to reward their governing. So I think it's important, but it's not going to be the whole it's not the entire puzzle. I think that's a good point. And I think

You know, COVID obviously will have such a big impact on that. But that and inflation. I think if you look at Biden's poll numbers right now and same thing for Harris, who we were just talking about, a lot of that has to do with people who are out Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and getting a bit of a sticker shock. But if that recedes and we're nine months past that point, Americans tend to have a very short memory on these things. Right. If things are going well next year in November, right.

that's really what what he needs to be going for right uh true but but just to reiterate i mean things could be better right your inflation could go from six to two which is a very reasonable amount of inflation and the mass pennies could be lifting and maybe they'll lose only eight house seats which would be really good historically speaking but you would still lose the house uh and they may lose only one senate seat but that would still mean losing the senate so

So they need things to go wrong for Republicans, too. And look, if you've got Trump and McConnell fighting, if you have Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace still in the sandbox, and maybe we have a ruling by the Supreme Court on abortion in late June, early July,

that undoes Roe, which you might think, well, you know, well, the blue states will do their thing, the red states will do their thing, and, you know, we'll go our separate ways, and that'll be hunky-dory. There's some purple states in there, you know? And there are going to be some very, very fierce battles. I mean, a lot of governor's races in 2022. Yeah, I mean, here in Arizona, for instance, the way our law is set up, if Roe was overturned, abortions would be instantly banned here in Arizona. And so...

And there are a number of states like that. And particularly, there are a number of purple, blue trending states, sunbelt type states.

where that is the case. And I think that's where Republicans are the dog that caught the car. They would go over this for such a long time and they haven't won the argument with the public on this subject. Roe still polls very well. Some restrictions poll well. It's not like abortion on demand polls well, but Roe polls well. And

Places like Texas where young tech workers are pouring into Austin. College-educated voters are more pro-choice than not. And those are the people that are pouring into places like Texas and Arizona and North Carolina. That's where I think Republicans might

find themselves in a very difficult position come 2022. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And because I think if you look at the numbers, I mean, here in Arizona, I think having some legal right to abortion, if I remember the last time I saw numbers was about a 63 percent winner, 60, 63 percent. Likewise, people are not for unlimited abortion on demand. I think there's some middle ground here. But to me, this is the most dangerous thing Republicans have

have caught for this upcoming election cycle, because the amount of money, the energy that would be poured into the Democrat base after Roe was overturned would be enormous. Yeah, I there's definitely a sleeping giant there on the Democratic base. I think a lot of money is going to be poured in. Now, having said all this, there are political tripwires for Democrats as well.

because this is going to produce a huge part of that backlash is going to be pressure on Democrats to abolish the filibuster and pack the court. And there's not unanimity amongst Democrats for that. So in every Senate race,

There's going to be pressure on that Democrat to say, yes, I'm going to pack the court. Maybe that's not going to do well with swing voters in those states. Or there'll be frustration that Democrats in the Senate aren't already doing that. Why isn't Joe Manchin abolishing the filibuster and packing the court right now? Why isn't Chris Sinema doing that right now? And that could depress Democrats.

Democratic based turnout. So it's not it's not all one sided. Yeah, but it's a it's a huge wild card to go into 2022 with when you have both parties that are essentially being run by their most extreme wings, their most adamant wings on Twitter. Essentially, it's really hard to govern for the middle and build any kind of lasting coalition. Right.

I mean, that's I think that's a challenge. It's balancing base and swing is always a challenge. It's more and more of a challenge in a polarized country, a social media fueled country. I think Republicans in the Trump era did not walk that line well. They Trump had a base only strategy that was not good for 2018 or 2020. Now, I think Biden is trying to

to keep people united. I mean, the Biden agenda, American Rescue Plan, infrastructure, Build Back Better, that's not an extreme left base only strategy. That's bread and butter stuff. I mean, there's big money involved. There's a lot of spending involved, but it's not pursuing every cultural war battle that one can get their hands on. It's meant to deliver bread and butter stuff for middle class families. Yeah, look, I mean, big government, big spending has always been kind of a core Democrat position. That's

that's not something that the public really objects to. The public is often, you know, they want their freedom. They don't, they don't being told what to do, but they're happy if you give them money. So, um,

So that's always the tension in any kind of governing coalition. So I think Biden's trying pretty hard to not get sucked into a lot of culture war stuff and to focus on bread and butter. But once abortion's in the mix, that's a hard thing to just sort of close your eyes and wish away. Both parties are going to have to engage on the subject. Yeah, absolutely. You know, before we go to break, and I've told this story to plenty and plenty of candidates,

Republicans have a problem with abortion that I don't think we fully recognize a lot of times is that when you have a mother with her 15, 16 year old daughter who gets pregnant, they might be the most anti-abortion religious person in the world. But chances are pretty good she's going to try to sneak the daughter off to the clinic anyway. I mean, that just is. And in the voting booth that that tells. And I think one of the questions is how easy is that going to be?

How easy can you cross state lines? How easy can you get your hands on an abortion pill? Texas has now banned sending abortion pills into Texas. Is there going to be a black market of pill smuggling going on? And how prosecutable is it going to be? We'll answer that when Broken Potholes comes back. It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start. Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain.

This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from GoDaddy.com today. Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host, Sam Stone. On the line with us today, Bill Shearer. Bill, where can people find you if they want to learn more, hear more of what you've got to say? Because I tell you, I think it is something everyone needs to do. You've been fantastic today.

I appreciate it. Well, you can find me on Twitter, Bill Scher, B-I-L-L-S-C-H-E-R, and I plug all my material there. But I'm generally found at the Washington Monthly, Real Clear Politics, and at Politico, and also the DMZ show with Matt Lewis. I co-host, and that's at bloggingheads.tv. Fantastic. You know, right when we went to break, we were talking abortion, but I want to switch gears a little bit here.

and talk about someone I enjoy quite a bit. Don't always agree, obviously, Bill Maher, because you just had a fantastic piece on the Washington Monthly about Bill. So tell us about that piece real quick.

Well, you know, Bill Maher is someone who has recently been leading the crusade against, you know, quote, stupid wokeness. And as said, the Democrats are destined to be destroyed in 2022 and 2024 because they've been, you know, they've been pursuing all these woke culture war type policies. And

And he basically said, you know, Democrats knew no one likes a snob. You're alienating the white working class. And that's that stupid politics. And my gut reaction was, Bill Maher, you are the quintessential condescending Hollywood liberal. Yeah.

You did a whole documentary insulting people who believe in God. How did you become the person criticizing Democrats for this? But look, he could be a hypocrite and be right. I think he is right to a significant extent, but I think you were right also in that piece that he's got some blind spots there. A lot of this country is very religious and believes in God deeply and believes in their church.

And he once said, not too long ago, did a whole thing about how obese people are the cause of the healthcare crisis and why can't we be like Europe and eat less fried food? I mean, how more anti-American can you be? How snobby can you be? But I think the critique he has of Democrats is wrong on a couple of fronts, in my opinion. One, at least the specific case that he was making, he was criticizing the Democrats for...

He criticized the six Democrats that vote against the infrastructure bill because they didn't do enough on climate change. And my reaction was, yeah, and 265 Democrats voted for that bill. So why are you harping on the six? I mean, if you're worried that Democrats are being defined by their fringe, then

While you're on HBO, don't say that the fringe is dictating the party line because it's the opposite in that case. And as someone who who works in a local government where we're the minority in a, you know, two, two Republicans out of eight seats, sometimes a protest vote has value. And if you've got something that's going to pass anyway, like that was.

Sometimes it makes sense to dissent, right? Well, sure. I mean, if there's a point you want to make, you're not you're not ruining the bill. You know, they're still going to pass. But you want to get this one point into the into the conversation. Plenty of people on the left and the right over the course of history. But you don't take that protest vote and say this defines the Democratic Party when they just got the bill passed. Right.

doesn't make any sense um and i think he he's so prone to complain about political correctness and there's there's certainly examples that one can point to uh whether you put them to the democrats or not things you can point to but he took a bunch of examples on cnn not too long ago that were factually wrong he said that the he said that illinois canceled lincoln and

And that's not true. He said they tore down something of Lincoln's when in fact they have a Chicago has a review commission where they're looking at various statues, but they haven't committed to tearing down anything. And the mayor said, we're always going to be the land of Lincoln.

He said that Seattle voted to decriminalize crime when one city councilor proposed making it easier to get out of misdemeanor charges by claiming poverty. But it never became a bill and it was never voted on. It was opposed by the mayor.

And they complained that people were saying that babies should have the right to vote when the person who pushed that were an op-ed in New York Times. And he's from a conservative think tank, two conservative think tanks, American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. Just because it's in the New York Times doesn't mean it's part of the Democratic Party platform. You know, look at who wrote the thing. So it's that kind of stuff where I feel like he's making it sound much, much worse than

than it actually is for Democrats. But he's entertaining when he does it, right? I mean, joke, it's one thing to say, well, he's a comedian, you know, but number one, what I'm quoting here aren't jokes. He's making substantive points. Right. And it may be framed with a joke here and there, and he can be very funny. I've liked a lot of Bill Maher's jokes, but he's still trying to make a point of substance, and that point is subject to critique.

Absolutely. Bill, thank you so much for being on with us today. We really, really appreciated having you. And thank you for I really enjoy your work. So just thank you for that. I appreciate it. And any last words before you go? Just check me out on Twitter and at the Washington Monthly, Real Clear and Politico and hope I can talk to you again soon. There it is. We'd love to have you back. Bill Shearer, thank you so much. Broken Potholes coming back in just a moment.

The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it. Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of the studio and out of, well, he's not even on the line for us today, folks. You're getting gypped. All you get is me.

But you also get some fantastic guests. I want to thank Bill Shearer, fantastic guest. Don't agree with him on everything, but our next guest is someone I agree with far more often.

So looking forward to talking with her. Kaylee McGee-White, commentary writer for The Washington Examiner, focusing on religion, politics and culture. Her work has appeared in Real Clear Politics, The Weekly Standard, The Detroit News, Orange County Register and more. And she's a graduate of Hillsdale College with a degree in politics and journalism.

Folks, I'm going to ask Kaylee to tell you how to follow along on her work, but if you're not, you really need to. She writes really great, short, often short, pithy, but right to the point little columns, which I absolutely love. Kaylee, welcome to Broken Potholes. Thank you so much for having me. So first off, let's get the good stuff out of the way. How do people follow you if they're not already?

Well, I'm on basically every social media account there is. I'm on Twitter, Kaylee D. McGee, Facebook. I have a page there too, Kaylee McGee White. And I'm on Instagram too. And I'll regularly post the most, I think, on Twitter, especially with what I'm writing about on a daily basis.

So that's probably the best way to keep up with my work, I would say. Perfect. Well, talk about keeping up. It seems like the current administration isn't doing much of that. They seem to be behind the curve on just about everything. You had a piece recently, Biden shocked to learn high gas prices are his fault. Personally, I thought this was fairly obvious. But what is that about? Tell us what's going on there.

Yes. So obviously, you know, anyone who has a car and has to fill up at the pump regularly has noticed that gas prices are much more expensive than they were this time last year. And they just keep getting even more expensive. And obviously, the White House does not have direct control over gas.

the prices of gas. A lot of it is very much so dependent on the market. But the White House does have direct control over the environmental policies that can increase supply of oil and gas and thereby drive down the prices a little bit. And the problem with the Biden administration is that they have

policies that basically, you know, cut off most U.S. oil production internally. They're fighting against several pipeline developments, which a lot of

industry experts have, they warned against that and they said that is going to hurt long-term oil production if the U.S. is not able to pipe down oil from Canada or from other places. So those are policies that are affecting prices now and they're going to continue to affect prices in the long term. And instead of doing what a

Biden is instead just basically begging OPEC to produce more oil for him so that he doesn't have to. Isn't that sort of, though, the motto of the environmentalist movement in the U.S. is we're going to try to stop everything domestically, but we actually don't care if you're doing these things overseas in a much dirtier fashion than you would be doing it here? Yeah, which is the hypocrisy of it all, right? I mean, it doesn't make any

any sense for us to cut back on our own oil production if another country just has to increase its own production, if the point is to stop all production whatsoever. And the other thing that I find so ironic about the energy debate is that environmentalists, a lot of them are also very opposed to alternative means of energy like nuclear energy.

that could be invested in to produce alternative forms if you don't want to rely so heavily on oil and gas. And they're completely opposed to that. So it is, it's just, there is so much hypocrisy in the debate and it's really ironic that Biden doesn't see any problem with it whatsoever. Yeah. I feel like when I'm trying to talk to environmentalists about this, that they are the most adamantly uneducated people I deal with because they're

You know, they're adamant in their ideas, but they never look beyond the eight-word mantra or the five-word mantra that they're being told to spew. And so, like, I lived in Oklahoma. When you don't have a pipeline, what happens? You put that oil in a truck. There's spillage in the transfer process. The truck takes it to a train. There's spillage in the transfer process.

If you're bringing oil from overseas, you're running, you know, you have spillage at the ports. You have potential risk of the carriers, the tankers. So pipeline is environmentally the most beneficial way to transport oil. And we still need oil. Every one of these people objecting to, you know, our use of oil runs around with cell phones. They drive cars. They do all this stuff too, right? Oh, absolutely. But that's, you know,

so many of the people i think you're right so many of the people who endorse um really leftist policies on the environment are oftentimes the people who never actually change anything about their own everyday lives to match up with what they're arguing and you

even if they do, like let's say like I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drives a Tesla. People found this out like several months ago. That's great. She wants to invest in an electric vehicle. Do you know the average cost of a Tesla? And do you know how Teslas are produced? Because they're produced by using oil and gas. So that's the thing. It's like you get all of this from something and it's not just like, oh,

oh, let's use clean energy. Boom. Let's create an electric vehicle out of thin air. Like that's not how it works. Everything uses some sort of fossil fuel production. And I don't think that, I don't know if like environmentalists just don't realize that if they haven't taken the time to actually do the research. But a lot of it is just talk. I got to say, because we dealt with climate strike protests here in Phoenix a couple of years ago, starting a couple of years ago. And I went out to go talk to them.

And the first thing I realized was that they don't let anyone talk to the average person out at these protests. They have some leaders who really will hustle their people away from anybody who tries to ask them any questions. If your movement is built on that level of ignorance, I have a really hard time buying into it.

Yeah. And as anyone should, I mean, people who can't be bothered to actually think through the policies that they're proposing to think about the long term consequences of those policies don't actually deserve the right to be heard seriously. No, I don't have to write the policies. Absolutely not. I want to turn to a couple other things, because obviously these are kind of in the news right now. But you had a piece. Anthony Fauci is just another partisan pundit now.

which I fully agree with. I'm not even sure I'd give him that much credit at this point. But his track record in COVID is amazingly awful. Yeah, he's been wrong about, I think, everything that he's said. I mean, starting way back towards the beginning of the pandemic, when he came out and said, don't wear masks. They're not effective. We don't need you to wear them.

Whatever. And then he basically admitted that that was a lie and that the only reason that he said that was because they wanted to reserve, you know, personal protective equipment for health care workers, which is fine, but it was still a lie. Right. Still wrong about that. Well, one of the basics of public health is that you've got to give people consistent, clear advice. Right.

Yeah. And he's been all over the map with everything. I mean, you even just, you know, this the past couple of weeks when he was talking about holiday travel and whether people should get together with their family members for the holidays. At first he was like, well, vaccinated adults should be able to do that.

And then he pivoted to, oh, yeah, I don't actually care if you get together with all the family members. And oh, yeah, well, maybe you should be cautious when you travel to. Oh, no, we don't actually care if you travel at all. You know what I mean? It's just total mixed messaging. And I honestly wonder how many people outside of.

you know, the liberal blue check Twitter sphere actually listen to him still? Because I don't think that many people do unless you're regularly watching MSNBC, which is, you know, one of the only channels that he'll go on nowadays. But I agree with you. But I think the danger to that is that the people who run a lot of state health departments and a lot of state institutions do listen. Right.

They do listen to him, especially because he is still on the White House's coronavirus team. And they also listen to the CDC, even though you don't necessarily see the CDC director appearing on TV to say outlandish things as much as Fauci does. But

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that he still has a very strong influence over the Biden administration's coronavirus policy, which is then passed down to the states, which is why I think in large part, you know, blue states like California, New York, even to a certain extent here in Washington, D.C., where I live, some of these policies might never go away. Like they might just not go away. And it's because you have

This kind of panic that Fauci and other people have are constantly driving into the minds of liberal policymakers. So, yeah, I don't know what what the next step is. No, I would not be surprised at all. I think one of the things that at least to me on the outside, it seems like a lot of his proclamations are poll driven. So whatever whatever the Democrat base is kind of driving at that day or that week becomes policy.

Yeah, but it's interesting because I don't even know if it's the Democratic base that supports COVID policies anymore. Because over here in Virginia, we just had an election last month in which I think that COVID was a very big part of that election. Same thing over in New Jersey. New Jersey was not supposed to be a close election at all.

The governor, Phil Murphy, who has been a very strict COVID person, almost got ran out of his seat when no one was expecting that, in large part because so many people were angry with his COVID policies. The candidate who ran against him, that was literally like his main platform was this guy almost destroyed our state by sending us all into lockdown for like a year. And that's the thing is, you know, these are both states, Virginia and New Jersey,

that are not red states by any means, which means that it's not just Republican voters who are feeling this. It's also Democratic voters and moderate voters, independent voters who are really sick of being told, oh, just a few more weeks, just a few more months. Oh, we have to do this, you know, and then maybe. Like they want a final solution to this now, and they're really sick of seeing the goalposts shifted constantly.

It seems like there's sort of an isolated blue check Twitter class, you know, academia in the media, these things which have a very different perspective on COVID than the average American who red state, blue state. You've been out there dealing with it for two years.

Absolutely. And, you know, most of the people who are the most paranoid about COVID still, I found, are people who work in media, people who have the ability to work from home, people who never lost their jobs during COVID, who got cushy paychecks throughout the entire pandemic, who are able to afford grocery delivery, who never have to leave their homes for anything because they can pay other people to do it all for them. I mean, these are like, we're talking about some of the most privileged people in America. Mm-hmm.

who have the privilege to worry about COVID. And that's the thing is, you know, I don't know how you get people out of that mindset. If like, it just seems like it's a, it's a hysteria at this point. No, I agree fully. My part of my family is in upstate New York. My parents are there. My mother, who's always been a bit of a germaphobe has taken this and they are in a position where they can get everything delivered. They have a very, very small circle they exist in.

And, you know, as far as I can tell, she will maintain these level of restrictions forever. Yeah. And that's because, like, again, if you don't own a business, if you don't have to go out in the real world and interact with people on a daily basis, then, of course, maybe you will have the inclination to be more worried about these things. But other people cannot afford to let it consume their lives because they have jobs to do and they have things to see. And it's

And it just seems like it's such a small fraction of the population at this point that wants to hold everyone else back, especially in blue areas. You know, my in-laws are from Ohio and my family lives in Michigan. COVID hasn't been a thing there for like...

The past year and a half. I mean, people in Ohio stopped paying attention probably like in the summer of 2020. So which is when they stopped paying attention here in Arizona. Yeah. So that's the thing. It's so interesting to see the geographic breakdown, um,

You know, I think it's obviously been a much bigger deal here in D.C. than, you know, in a lot of other places. Yeah, no, I'm shocked. We've got just about less than one minute, 30 seconds before we go to break here. We're going to come back.

on podcast only with Kaylee McGee-White. Kaylee, thank you so much for being on the program with us today. Folks, definitely check her out on social media. Check out her Twitter. But stay tuned. Check out our, you know, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all those kinds of things. You can download it there and get the final segment, which Kaylee has graciously agreed to stay for, Broken Potholes. We'll be back on air next week. Darkness goes.

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Welcome back to Broken Potholes with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of the studio this week. If you're listening now, you are listening on our podcast and thank you for downloading. Be sure to subscribe. Make sure you get Broken Potholes in your mailbox every single week. And still on the line with us, and thank you so much, Kaylee McGee-White, commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. She's done some very interesting work recently, but I want to talk about

kind of the big news of the whole country today, abortion in front of the Supreme Court with a real chance that Roe might get overturned. Kayleigh, is that really a possibility? And what happens then?

I definitely think it's a real possibility, you know, based on how the oral arguments went and the line of questioning from the different justices. I think that it looks pretty likely that we might have a five to four vote to overturn Roe. But, you know, I guess I try not to

get my hopes up too much because everyone thought this about the Obamacare case as well. And, you know, Chief Justice John Roberts found a way to... He found some novel reasoning. ...come up with a middle-of-the-road solution that didn't actually do anything. Well, it has made a lot of money for insurance companies since that time. Yes. You know, one of the things about this, if you overturn Roe and, you know, hand it back to the 50 states, which I've always believed legally was the right thing...

I think there are a lot of states that need to be addressing this ahead of time, right? And I do think that most states, a lot of Republican states in particular have what are referred to as trigger laws, where if Roe is overturned, their laws either restricting or banning abortion are

would go into effect then immediately. So that is one thing that a lot of states have already prepared for in that sense. But, you know, then there are other there are other policies that need to be taken into consideration as well. I wrote about this actually earlier this week about how, you know, Republican states, if you are going to restrict and ban abortion,

then you should also pair those laws with policies that support families and women and make it as financially easy as possible to have children in that sense. You know, if we're going to be pro-life in that sense, then we have to be pro-life. And so, you know, probably means putting some money into your adoption services agency and things like that, too. Right. I mean, you really have to look at

every possible outcome at that point. Absolutely. And, you know, increased child tax credits, a voluntary paid leave plan similar to one that Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney introduced. There are so many different ways that Republican states can prop up families and make their lives easier that will help states become pro-life in a long-term way as well. You know, and I've... This is one of those issues I think has...

potentially a huge, I think 2022 was heading on a fairly predictable course where Democrats would lose the House and Senate. I still think that's the case, but I do think this is maybe the one issue that could throw the most chaos into that, where it really is going to energize the Democratic base, but also will energize the pro-life base, right? Absolutely. And I do think, though, that a little bit of

concern about, you know, overturning Roe and how it might energize the Democratic base specifically. I think it's a bit overstated because so many polls nowadays show that the vast majority of Americans support some sort of abortion restriction. Like we're not talking about like the abortion activists who are out here calling for, you know, abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy are such a small minority of people.

who would definitely be upset about the decision and who would absolutely try and, you know, get everyone else on board with different levels of activism at that point. But the vast majority of Americans who have been polled about this issue actually agree that some restrictions are a good thing. And so I just don't know if

radicalized the voter base would actually be on this issue when most people agree that restrictions are at least somewhat necessary. So, yeah, I mean, if the Democrat Party and they may have a really hard time, you know, kind of separating from their own extremists on this. But if they're out there pushing laws that are basically like the Roman rule for abortion, where you take the baby that that night and put it out on the doorstep to die, that's not going to fly. Right.

No, not at all. And yeah, I think that's, I don't know. And it's interesting too, because I was reading an article by a Washington Post columnist actually earlier today, and she was pointing out the breakdown in polls between the two genders and

and how women actually aren't nearly, like there's not a huge difference in opinion between men and women on this issue either. So, you know, something that everyone's saying is you're gonna have huge female backlash, like more females are gonna become Democrats if you overturn Roe. All of these polls are suggesting that that's not the case at all.

So, you know, it'll be interesting to see. Obviously, it's something that even with polls, it's so hard to determine what's true and what's not and, you know, read into the future that way. But definitely will be interesting to see. The other possible outcome I see or is most likely is that they allow the Mississippi law to stand 15 weeks. They say states can have restrictions beyond the 24 week limitation limit.

And that's going to generate a whole lot of additional cases in the future, right? There's going to be cases from state after state after state. So in that sense, this issue stays front and center going forward regardless.

Yes. And I mean, to be honest, I think that even if the court does overturn Roe, this issue still remains front and center, maybe not before the Supreme Court, but certainly at a political level, because, you know, maybe it's a politically smart decision to allow the states to decide for themselves what to do about abortion. But if you're looking at this from a moral perspective, just because Mississippi bans abortion or restricts it,

You still have New York and California allowing abortion into the second trimester, even into the third trimester. Right. Like that's still going to be a moral issue for hundreds of thousands of voters. And I don't think that it resolves the question. No, I think it's a really hard issue for a lot of Democrats, because if you're trying to say, you know, we just had a baby at 21 weeks survived, you know, premature. Right.

you're going to have a really tough argument to make about 24 weeks. Yeah. And that, you know, that's another important point is that the more that medicine advances and, um,

it's impossible to deny that science is on the pro-life side. You can't look at a child that's born at 21 or 24 weeks and claim that that is not a viable human being when it is fully capable of surviving outside the womb with medical intervention. - Right. - So then like the ethical question, like, okay, if a 21 week year old infant is capable of surviving outside the womb only with medical intervention, can you then deny medical intervention to that child?

Like that's like the logic here that Democrats and abortion advocates don't want to wrestle with. They don't want to acknowledge that this is the taking of a life. And that's a point that Justice Clarence Thomas was trying to make during the oral argument. He brought up a case in which a mother was being held criminally responsible for ingesting drugs while she was pregnant. And then the child died.

you know, suffered after the pregnancy as a result. And he was trying to ask the council, he was like, is it okay that the state was able to hold that woman criminally responsible? Right. And we're like, oh, you know, it's just like getting to the heart of the issue here, which is that can another person determine, you know, the dignity and the personhood of another? Like, yeah, no, that's, I think it's a great question. It's a really difficult one for Democrats. And

And pro-abortion activists answer. Clearly, they don't have an answer. Yeah, no, which is why almost every single defense that you're going to read from abortion advocates, specifically who are making a legal argument against overturning Roe, the argument always comes back to, well, this is precedent.

This has been precedent for 50 years. This is, you know, this has been the law of the land. I have not. You're right. And actually, thank you for kind of bringing that into focus. But I haven't seen one argument on any kind of moral basis of any type. Right. I mean, it's precedent. And then aside to that, it's, you know, some claim of this being an attack on women. But as you point out there, that dichotomy doesn't really exist. Right.

I think they have a much tougher political position on this than they think.

They do. And, you know, one of the reasons why I feel pretty good about the court potentially overturning Roe is because the defense's argument is completely dependent upon the fact that Roe is precedent. And one of the points that the justices were making over and over again is that just because something is precedent does not mean that it cannot be overturned.

And we've had bad precedents overturned before. Exactly. And what's so interesting is that Justice Alito actually got the U.S. Solicitor General to admit that.

That actually she doesn't think that it was such a bad thing that we had Plessy versus Ferguson in place for so many years because they had to wait for the right time to overturn Preston. Like, you know, it's just ridiculous, like even legal arguments that don't make any sense. That is that is possibly the worst argument I can imagine on this subject. I mean, come on.

Kaylee, thank you so much for being on the program with us today. We really appreciate having you. We'd love to have you back in the future and hopefully when Chuck's here because I know he was looking forward to talking with you and then he got scooped up by business. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Kaylee McGee-White, fantastic interview today. Broken Potholes will be coming back next week with hopefully another great guest. I don't even know who that is at this point. We're

Producer Kylie is not here, which means I know nothing. I have no knowledge of any kind. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in. Be sure to download, subscribe, all that good stuff. Follow us on Twitter. You know, I don't know. Something like that. Broken Potholes, back next week.

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