Hi, I'm Molly john Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Republicans have turned against the dumbest member of the Senate, Tommy Tuberville on his military personnel holes. We have a fascinating show for you today. Axios Is Alex Thompson joins us to talk mega Mike Johnson Speakership's rough launch. Then we'll talk to Skyler van Volkenberg, who is a candidate for the critical Virginia State Senate's sixteenth district.
But first we have former Senator and close personal friend of mine, host of the Al Franken podcast, the one the Only Al Franken. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Al Franken. Mollie, Hi, I'm so happy to have you today. Let's start by talking about this incredibly strange moment in American politics. It feels like we're about to see Mitch mcconnall v maga Mike Johnson.
Right, did you ever think you.
Would see a world like this?
No?
Why didn't envision a world with Mike Johnson?
And neither did he?
No, that's true, but you're talking about on say Ukraine well.
I think first on Israel, maybe because this is unprecedented emergency Israel aid. He says, Okay, we'll do it, but we want paid furs. But our paid fors are going to be things that actually grow the deficit.
We're going to cut the IRS.
We're not going to have a CBO score it.
This has been the pet peeve of mine. Biden and the Democrats voted for a lot of funding for the IRS because the IRS has been defunded for years and years by Repubblicans to protect their you know, rich people, because they're not enough auditors right right, and skill orders and high level orderers, and the CBO, the Grecial Budget Office has scored this new funding for auditors as increasing our treasury more than pays for itself, more than pays
you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and increased revenue of tax money that is owed by people that don't pay it. And of course it's their people, it's Republicans people, right.
Nothing says maga like not paying your taxes.
Yeah, well maga And also just maybe people aren't even maga in the sense of they don't buy a lot of Trump, but they buy a lot of other stuff with all this money they don't pay to the IRS. And this is something this has been a Republican project for a long long time to defund the IRS, and finally Democratic Congress the president voted to do it. And literally what they want to do is cut this funding,
which will increase the depthsit. I don't know how the works out in terms of just to keep the government open, right right. Bush has got to come to shove, and I'm not sure how this will work.
So the foreign aid stuff, though, it is interesting. It strikes me that Republicans are very divided on Ukraine aid.
Do you think that's true?
And do you think that this is sort of a proxy war for Maga versus more traditional Republicans.
Yeah, certainly on the Ukraine issue. And I don't understand it either. You can't be pro putin in this, can you.
I mean Trump is but.
Well, Trump of course has said that when he's elected he'll end this in a day.
Why does he give himself so much time?
If you're saying I'm going to resolve this in a day, it sounds like you're handing it to putin.
It certainly does.
And also the fact that he loves Putin and thinks Putin is great.
That also makes me think.
That he tends to like dictators and just likes anybody who likes him.
Yeah, nothing wrong with having low self esteem. But over the last couple of weeks, Trump has been on the stump and he's shown some real cognitive decline. But he's mused about shooting people who commit robberies, that you should have a right to shoot someone who robs your store on the way out, executing General Milly. Does it seem like he's getting worse to.
You or executing General Milly. That's a bad one. Well was that for? What was Millie's crime on that going against him? Yes? It was after the election when Trump lost, Milly called his Chinese counterparge right yeah, and said, look, I'll give you a heads up in the case, my guy. When Trump lost, I put out a tweet saying, now is not the time to take the nuclear code away from Trump. Now is the time to give him the wrong code. And I think Milly was thinking along the
same lines. And so, according to a couple of books, BELOWSI was. He called Millie and said, I'm worried that he's going to start a war and so Milly I think called yes and one of those I think the Woodward Book or something he called his Chinese counterpoints. I'm just giving stuff that I'm on this so that we don't have we're not really going to war with you, or in case we are, I'll tell you and do everything I can. I guess, and that's why he said Millie should be executed.
Is he getting worse?
I don't know. I mean what's interesting is to see this guy just go out there and riff, which is very akin to stand up comedy. I mean, he just goes out there and can talk forever. And that's the talent. I mean, he had a talent. That's part of the talent that got I'm elected in the first place.
Yeah, it is, but it's also pretty intense.
I haven't tracked the cognitive decline in terms of I know there have been a few things he said that people have remarked on that. Do you recall which ones they are?
My favorite was that he conflated w with Jeb and said that he was running against the guy who started the Iraq War.
He isn't running against either anybody.
In twenty fifteen. He was running against the guy who started the Iraq War, right, Okay, on the stump, which was a sort.
Of that sounds more cognitive than a slip, I mean.
Right, But I mean Republicans are allowed to have crazy cognitive moments and it's treated like a speed bump. Case in point, Mitch.
McConnell, that was a physical freeze, right, I mean.
Right, if that had happened to Joe Biden.
It'll be all over, haven'taid it's been He's all right now here. That's my McConnell.
That's it's a good one.
And look, it does seem to me. And we were talking about this a second ago. There's this war between the McConnell Republicans who again steal Supreme Court seats but don't want to completely destroy the federal government, versus the JD Vance Republicans who do.
Yeah, McConnell just wanted you know, obviously I was there when he wouldn't take up Garland. He's the reason we have the court that we have. His mission is really for rich Republicans, right, that's what he's for. But he wants to saint I think he wants some sanity in the government.
Yeah, do with that what you willed.
But it's corrupt. I mean it's a corrupt venture. And also I mean so as a result of Mitch McConnell, where because that court, the EPA won't be able to control CO two and that works for his fossil fuel people, And then that's part of Mitch McConnell's evil side.
We're in this Supreme Court fight right now, and part of it is that I think Biden is anxious about the idea of fundamentally the court, but we are seeing the Court fundamentally change the country. There is a lot of support though for term limits. We see Sheldon white House pursuing this. Do you think there's an appetite for this and do you or do you think this just gets kicked down the.
Camp Well, it's been talked about doing eighteen year term limits and having each president have two choices. The thing is, I don't know when that happens. Who can make that happen. That happens if I think one party controls both houses and the presidency at the same time, and at that time they're going to be the one who want to be able to appoint a Supreme Court justice for a
life term. I don't see that eighteen year thing happening, and when it happens, because whoever does it will be the first to ever do it, right, I mean, right now there are the lifetime appointments, so it would have to be aligned where I've thought this through a little bit about because obviously we have a problem of the Supreme Court and with these lifetime appointments, but I don't see the reality of it happen fortunately.
Yeah, no, I mean it is. That's right.
You know, if you have the power to change the court, why wouldn't you just change it for your side versus make it more fair? Though I do feel like democrats I would want them to change it for their side.
Let's say mine wins and we have the Senate. Right at that point, we'll say, okay, now, finally the net Supreme Court justice will only have eighteen years. And I get to a point that person just the reality of of of politics makes me think that's highly unlikely.
I think that's right. It's a fascinating I don't know if it's a fascinating conundrum, but it's a conundrum.
What Sheldon is trying to do is some kind of ethics reform, which I think which I think is and that might actually come to something if Clarence Thomas was actually required to submit where he got his money, and that he withheld information deliberately and was being given things by people who had business for the court, that might hasten a retirement or something like that.
It's interesting because they do see these trustices are irritated. I'm not sure they want it enough to do it, but even these conservative justices are somewhat irritated that their polling is so bad and that people are so horrified by some of their ethics gaffes.
Are they I don't think Alito is that cares about his polling.
Right, Alito doesn't care.
But the younger justices, I think they don't like not being popular.
I guess so, But then they should probably speak up to do something about it, and they don't seem to be. And Robert certainly isn't. And he is the one who is A judicial conference that has something to say about this, which is the digital Conference is made up of I leave the Chief Justice and then the chiefs of all the different circuits and chiefs of the different district courts.
They can enforce some rules here that would require some embarrassing things to come out, and I think maybe some enforcement. This is exactly what Roberts refused to testify before the Judiciary Committee.
Yeah, looking forward, it seems like a real possibility that Democrats could theoretically at least take back the House.
We got a year left, so a lot can happen in a year, including the whole world economy going down if there's another huge war in a regional war in Mid Eastern.
But the economic news so far has been actually really positive so far.
But I mean, if you have another oil crisis because of a regional conflictation there, you know that is going to change that pretty fast. We're a tense situation right now, or a tragic situation.
I'm going to pull back here for a second. For less dependent on oil than we were in the Gulf War period.
We've had a crisis because of the war in Ukraine, and I think that if we see something happen in a regional war in the Mid East, I think we're going to see prices go way up.
Again, right, and that could hurt.
But so far, again, like this GDP number last Friday was incredible, and the Fed has sort of been able to thread the needle on interest rates in a sort of amazing way. Now, that doesn't mean that people are happy with the economy. In fact, the cognitive dissonance there is kind of striking.
It takes a long time to forget inflation the rate we had it, and Americans aren't necessarily good at following the good news, certainly late. And there has been a lot of good news in terms of job growth. And look at the successes that the the auto workers are having and the other labor stuff, and Americans are now more pro labor than they've been in a long time, and they're all kind of good economic indicators. Now, I just again am worried about this, this what's going on in the Mideast.
Oh, Franken, thank you so much for joining us.
I hope you'll come back.
Yes, I will be coming back, and I hope I must. When I come back, I have more jovial stuff to talk about.
We can just talk about. Alex Thompson is a reporter an apsios. Welcome too fast politics.
Alex, thanks so much for having me delighted so you were here with us to talk about and I know you're not partisan, so we won't try to get you to say partisan things because we're classy like that over here. But the House of Representatives is this disarray.
Oh, objectively it's worse than disarray.
Like I have no qualms saying that it is objectively true. I think even if you put every Republican on truth serum in the House, they would feel a tremendous amount of embarrassment over what just transpired where you had no Speaker of the House. So basically like no you know, speak of the House, third in line for the presidency.
There was no Speaker of the House for quite a while, and you had several votes in which they just couldn't decide until they finally found the guy that was, I guess, the least objectionable to everybody, in part because he is the least experienced Speaker of the House in over one hundred years in terms of how long he has been in the House. He's never let a committee, he doesn't
do much, you know, outside fundraising. But you know, he's a much nicer, less version of Jim jordan Is, who is the new speaker.
Yeah, so let's talk about that for a second. Because the thing I was struck by, and that's full disclosure, I have been writing about this endlessly. So this is one of the things where I really feel read. And the thing I was the most struck by was it was almost like there was a realization somewhere that the reason why Jim Jordan could not make it to speaker was because too many people hated him.
And he had made too many people mad.
Right, he had refused to vote for bills that people had believed it, you know, he had sort of stepped on people's toes in a way you're not supposed to do, and a way Steve SCUOLIAFS had not. And so then there was like this quick calculus that was like, let's find someone who no one knows.
Yes, And to Mike Johnson's credit, you don't become speaker by accent. I think he had played his cards very intelligently in which he had basically you made a lot of the Freedom Caucus feel like he was one of them, you know, agreed with a lot of them, didn't castigate them like love the other colleagues said. But he wasn't part of them either. And I think it's actually more interesting that Jim Jordan got so close to being Speaker
than the fact that he didn't get there. Like if you told anyone five years ago that he was going to be very close to being speaker, they would have been astonished, disbelief.
But aren't you surprised?
There was this moment? Again, I'm like working through my PTSD on this, I think as we all are.
Because it happened so quickly, and it happened. And again I'm not making light of PTSD. I'm trying to explain that it was actually quite major. But there was a moment here where we saw Scalice get more votes and then Republicans went after him in this really craven way, and you saw Marjorie Taylor Green and Donald Trump bo say he can't be speaker because he has cancer.
Yeah.
I mean it's the latest example that, especially on the right, there is nothing that is off limits.
Were you surprised by that?
I mean, I don't like Scalice's politics, but the man's been shot, he had blood cancer. I mean, like, if you're going to be sympathetic towards.
Anyone, I have to say I wasn't surprised at all.
The fact is that in this political environment they're especially on the right, there are no limits.
And I wasn't surprised at all.
And I think where they came down was Sclee didn't have enough people in the right, Jordan didn't have enough people in the middle, and so you got Mike Johnson, who is not like anyone's first choice, but I guess was enough people's fourth choice.
In some ways, they're the warshack quality to him, the way in which because he is unknown he can be anything.
Helps him get speaker.
But I also think it's been hurting him these first two weeks because you've seen I mean, this is a guy that has been writing right wing columns for decades and has a podcast with his wife about Bible study, and Democrats have been able to seize upon all these things. I mean, he is a blank canvas, but he doesn't have the infrastructure around him, and it's been really interesting.
I feel like he the coverage he's been getting because he's a blank canvas is like almost like he's a presidential candidate because he's so unknown on the national stage. I mean, even this, you know, one of the most interesting stories was in The Times the other day by Adam mcgurney, which is about Mike Johnson's adopted black son, who we don't know who he is. He has asked
to remain private. His name is Michael, so also Mike, but he lives in California and doesn't want to be part of the public spotlight.
So we actually don't even know his name.
But the Speaker invokes him a lot when he's talking about racism and he's talking about America.
So I don't know.
It's just sort of this odd thing where you have this adopted black son who you talk about all the time, but we actually don't have a picture of him or don't know who he is.
Yeah, I feel like there are so many weird parts this story, and I'm struck by how incredibly strange the speakership battle is. I mean, normal speakership battles are like people in leadership quietly jockeying, and this has just been so out there. So I think of the speakership as a sort of two part job fundraising and whipping votes. I mean, am I missing something? And also doesn't he seem uniquely unqualified for both.
He is certainly has little experience in either of those things, and it is striking. I was actually said this breakfast with Nancy Pelosi, and her comment was the Republicans in the House wanted Donald Trump as speaker and they got him. And it was a good line too, because I think he really is just a proxy for the ideological battle and the party. He was not elected speaker to whip votes. I don't think anyone expects him to really be that.
He is there as sort of a compromise speaker between these ideological factions.
I mean, I think some of the interesting things.
You know, Cenn has done a lot of reporting about his early columns and his anti gay therapy and anti LGBTQ politics going back decades, and the thing that was interesting about it to me was, you know a lot of those things were pretty mainstream Republican and in the early two thousands or early w Bush, like the born again right really rising and very anti gay marriage, anti LGBTQ rights, and I thought it was interesting that, you know, he is sort of the combining of those two wings
of the Trump wing and that wing, which is what I think. Some people have even brought up the Christian nationalism part of him, and that's who he is. And he's going to get help on whipping and fundraising from other parts.
I mean, he has to.
Yeah, he certainly does.
When you think about Nancy Pelosi, who was probably like a kind of genius vote whipper. One of the things she did, which I think, you know, she sort of knew everybody in their district. And one of the things that like seems very absent in this House is that Nancy Pelosi would never make and she would always sort of brag about this, and you know, she made sure that no one in a swing district had to vote
for something crazy. She was always sort of talking about how she'd let people take you know, she knew where the votes were and where they weren't, and she would let people who where the vote might hurt them not vote for it, right.
I mean, that was sort of what she was known for. And so I wonder with.
This speakership vote, I mean, just voting for Johnson, doesn't that hurt these swing state Republicans. He's eighteen and Biden Republicans.
I'm forgetting which one. But when he voted for Mike.
Johnson, some of the Democrats literally laughed at him and basically were saying, you're going to lose your district now because given all the positions that this guy has on abortion rights, on everything else, just by voting for him, for Speaker was a unpopular vote in his district, almost certainly in a lot of these Biden districts, and we don't even know some of the other votes to your point, because he does not And this is not to actually like say that he couldn't get there, but the fact
is that Nancy Pelosi, through just like sheer grit termination and like lots of hard work over decades, knew all of those details about all those districts and the members, and Mike Johnson just has not been in Congress long enough to have done any of that sort of work. So I think your point is really smart, which is there's going to be some pretty significant growing pains I imagine about what he allows his votes, and you know, you're going to have freedom of Coccus pulling him one
way and Trump pulling him one way too. You're going to see Trump continue to push them to vote on this, vote,
on this, impeach Biden, all these things. That one of the reasons Kevi McCarthy is no longer Speakers because he compromised with Democrats sometimes and decided it was not worth the blowback of shutting down the government, and so he got Democratic votes and essentially this is a coup from the right wing of the party, which overthrew one speaker and installed a more conservative one that's more Trump blned.
Kevin McCarthy was like trying to cause play Trump is right. Maybe he wasn't completely a Trumpist, but he was trying to sort of like make the best kind of facsimile of the case because he knew that's where his party is now. The cr to cut thirty percent, that's a big cut and it couldn't ever have passed the Senate, and then also the impeachment hearing. I mean, do you wonder if Kevin McCarthy, cause playing Matt is actually more conservative than a Maga Cause playing Kevin McCarthy.
I sort of wonder if Mike Johnson is going to be costplaying Kevin McCarthy. Mike Johnson, from all the reporting of done like, he's a true believer, and I think he knows that he was not elected a speaker to cosplay Kevin McCarthy. He's there because of the dissass section
with Kevi McCarthy. So I mean, I guess, like I agree, it'll be interesting to see what he does if he sort of pivots the center because he has more goodwill with the right and feels more free to move to the center, which I think is sort of what you're saying is that you know, he has that credit built in credibility and so maybe.
He actually won't be as conservative.
But the first interview you do is speaker is Sean Hannity, and you say, you say that Biden is obviously mentally declining and there's obvious cause for impeachment, at least to me at first. You know, maybe he's moving to the center on Israel, Ukraine. Yeah, I don't see a pivot to the middle so far.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
Though if they were strategically smarter, they would do that.
You can make a very good argument Kevin McCarthy did the politically smart thing and avoiding a shutdown at the last second because the party was going to get blamed for it. And the thing is, can Mike Johnson do the same thing and avoid being overthrown for doing it? And I think to your point, he might be able to because he has that built some credibility with the right right, and he.
Might not be and that I think we're going to have to stay tuned. I'm going to read you a tweethot off the press here. You vote to kick me out of the Freedom Caucus, but keep CNN want to be ken buck and vaping, groping Lord Bobert. You voted with the Democrats to protect terrorist to leave you hate. Trump certified Biden's election and could care less about January sixth defendants being persecuted.
She's talking about Chip Roy. What is happening?
Mike Colleigue was joking that it's like increasingly WWE.
It's a fight for entertainment.
It's like a fight for clout, and it just gets bigger and bigger, and it's like this whole the performance aspect of these jobs becomes so important and like I'm a fighter. I'm like fighting all the rhinos is just an increasingly public I mean, I guess it's better than you know, in like pre Civil War when people were like fighting it out, you know, and caning people and stuff.
By the way, you're the second person to say this to me. Yesterday, someone said to me, do you know they used to kill each other in the Senate?
And I was like, Okay, I mean I guess I'm setting the bar pretty low. I mean, you have to go pretty far back to see some of this stuff.
But I do think that's a really good point as we are tell me, like in your slack channel and your work slack, do people think that the government is going to be shut in?
No?
And this sort of gets to your point too of is he going to be a little bit able to costplay?
Kem McCarthy.
It seems that the Freedom Caucus, realizing that they have given Mike Johnson the worst job in the world with the government shutting down two weeks, that they're gonna swallow a CR and continuing resolution and fund the government for a few months. But you're going to be right back in the same situation in it's January February.
And that's so I.
Think we're going to avoid to shut down this time. I don't know if we're going to be able to avoid a shutdown next time.
And the thing that Mike Johnson put on the floor, which is connecting Israel Aid to cutting the IRS.
I talked to.
Somebody, a staffer in the Senate who told me that it goes nowhere in the Senate, redoes it, and then it comes back to the House and they get a bipartisan support. You think that's right or no.
I think eventually they will get there because the vast majority on both sides of the Aisle want to send the funding to Israel and realize that they're going to have to concede, and it's going to end up being like one of those sort of bipartisan Frankenstein monsters of a bill.
They'll get it through because.
There is urgency and support for Israel in a bipartisan basis.
Do you think that Republicans will not be able to cut the IRS?
I don't know.
I think it will be interesting to see how that one plays out.
I know that obviously the Democrats have a compelling argument from the Congressional Budget Office, which is that if you cut the IRS, it actually increases the deficit because you're
not enforcing collection. So I do think it's unlikely. But things are so fluid, and again the urgency to send money to Israel and the Ukraine for that matter, given how the war is going, I think, who knows what's going to slip in here, but I don't think it's going to be anywhere near the cuts that Mike Johnson is calling for.
Thank you so much, this is really great.
Appreciate you are the best, Skyler van Vaulkenberg. He's a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and he's running for the Virginia State Senate's crucial sixteenth district.
Welcome too fast politics.
Skyler, Thank you, thank you for having me.
We are deep in to this Virginia election. Voting has already started. Next Tuesday is election day. Tell us what you're running for and also the story of your life.
Yeah, well, thanks for having me.
My name is Scalarman Wolgenberg, and I have been in the Virginia House of Delegates for the last sex years, representing part of a suburb outside of Richmond City. I'm a teacher public school teacher. I teach government in Henrico County, which is the area I represent. This year, I am running for one of the two or three Senate seats that's going to determine if Democrats can keep our majority
in the state Senate. I didn't plan on getting involved in politics, but in twenty seventeen, after the Trump election, I started to kind of think about what I could do to be more involved. And at the state level, we had had a legislature that was refusing to expand medicaid.
We had a state legislature that had a neglective public education for over a decade, and we had a state legislature that I think, which is kind of mean, that was voted down a judge because he was gay, and so they said he couldn't be objective, and they to transmis ultrasound bill that made us a national laughing stock. And so I got into the race in twenty seventeen because I thought we should expand medicaid.
I thought we.
Should focus on public education, and I thought we should be a welcoming state to everybody. And you know, six years later, we've been able to do a lot of work kind of on all those issues and more. But this year, this Senate seat was vital to making sure that we can continue forward and not kind of go backwards, not go backwards to that state legislature that was mean, or that state legislature that just said no, or that
state legislature that focused on taking away women's rights. And so we entered the race last November and feeling really good about it, and I think people are responding to the fact that we need to keep moving forward, we need to focus on things that impact people in their day to day life, and we need to not focus on taking away women's rights, which is what Republicans have been running on here all year. My opponent launched your campaign with an ad pledging to ban abortion at fifteen weeks.
They've been running on that throughout the campaign. Just yesterday, Glenn Youngkin, Governor was in Henryko County pledging to pass that fifteen week abortion ban on Fox News on Laura Ingram. And so we think Virginia would rather focus on schools and lower on healthcare costs. And that's why we got in the race, and we need to win this seat to ensure we can.
Keep moving forward.
Yeah. Right now, Democrats hold the House of Delegates, but not the Senate.
Right the other way around, we controlled but not the House.
And if Democrats lose the Senate, which is what you're running for, then Glenn Youngkin can really make Virginia Florida.
Yeah.
You know, Democrats had a trifecta. We controlled the legislature and the governorship for two years and twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, and.
We were really able to do a lot of great things.
You know, we were the first southern state to pass comprehensive anti discrimination laws for the LGBTQ community. With the first southern state to try to get to one hundred percent clean energy, we went from being the second hardest state to vote in to the eleventh easiest state to vote in. We invested in public schools, We expanded medicaid,
We did a ton of great stuff. Unfortunately, in the twenty twenty one election, we lost the House of Delegates, and you know, Glen you Elkin won the governorship, and they instantly tried to repeal all that work. And so we know that if we don't keep control of the Senate, all that great work we've done on voting, all that great work we've done on the environment, all that great work we've done in healthcare is really on the line,
and it's not abstract. They have put the bills in in the last two years to do all these things. And so being in the minority in the House of Delegates, I've had to vote on bill after bill that tries to repeal the good work that we've done. And so, yeah, this election very much is about ken Virginia continue to be that leader. You know, I think for the country. I mean, I think a lot of our for example,
our election law. A lot of the laws we passed are what other states are looking to, you know, a lot of our environmental law and what other states are looking to. And so I want to keep moving forward on that path. But yeah, if it goes the wrong way, we really could become like a Florida or Texas where we see Republicans past cultural war issue after cultural war issue, and where they really continue to pass more and more restrictive and more and more cruel abortion band loss.
Yeah, it's funny because it's like we are in a moment in the Republican party where they have decided that if you can pass these laws that appeal to their base, I mean it's funny. Like think about a world where Democrats decide they're going to like do stuff that appeals their base, right, like free.
Lunches, you know.
I mean a great example is Minnesota, right where they've done all this really progressive legislation.
But Republicans have decided.
They are going to act for their base, and they're going to do things that are like quite crazy. I mean, stuff like just you know, anti tran stuff, being anti free lunch is just insane to me. And you know, book banning and that kind of thing. So what does the election look like so far with the early voting and what are you seeing.
Yeah, we're feeling really good. I mean the in Henrico County. You know, there's the Senate seat that I'm running for, and then there's a couple of House of Delegate seats that are also very competitive. And early vote is very robust. People are showing up, people are mailing in their ballots. You know, here in Virginia, you can vote early in person, you can be a permanent mail voter, you can vote on an election day, so there's really a lot of choices.
We're seeing very robust returns of vote by mail. We're seeing a lot of people voting every day. This is actually the first election cycle where Republicans have decided to also early vote, so you know, their numbers are ticking
up too. But when we talk to folks on the doors or when we see folks in the community, you know, they're responding to our message, they're responding to our positive vision, and they're responding against a lot of the craziness that they're seeing both from Republicans in Virginia, but also of course, you know we're right close to DC the craziness that we're seeing in DC as well, and so we're feeling
really good about it. Obviously, Tuesday's can to be very important that turnout gets as high as it can get. You know, this is an off off yr election that most states don't have on the top of the ticket as a state senator. You know, we don't have congressional races, we don't have a governor on the ballot. Obviously there's not a president on the ballot, and so it really
is a turnout game. But we're feeling really good. I mean, we've got a lot of volunteers on the ground and when you talk to folks on the door, if they haven't voted yet, they know there's an election, they're going to vote, they're excited to vote, and so you know it's going to be a close day across the state. I think these districts are on a knife's edge. They're going to be close. We really need to ensure that everybody possible knows why it's important to vote, which is
why doing interviews like this is important as well. But if people show up to vote confident that it's going to be a good day, for Democrats, which means it's going to be a good day for the average working family, it's going to be a good day for women when their rights are protected, and it's going to be a good day for sanity.
Yeah, we heard Young Can say on television that he's going to do an abortion ban. I think it's important when we talk about abortion bands to realize that part of why these abortion bands don't work is because first of all, the whole lie that this was about states rights, we're seeing they didn't.
Even really mean that.
But then the other thing, which I think is really striking, is that abortion bands make it very hard for doctors to treat, even if they're not even doing abortions.
They're just trying to treat. I mean, can you.
Talk a little bit about the strain on maternal fetal health that abortion bands put on doctors.
And that's all very true, And there's a lot of doctors and nurses, certainly in our community, and I would imagine across Virginia that are very very worried about it because they do understand how complicated this is and how much a ban would really negatively impact their ability to care for patients. I think it's also really important too to note that it's not just about the ban in itself. It's also about all the restrictions that come with it.
And so when you look at a state like North Carolina where they just passed a more restrictive ban, they also put in place, you know, a series of policies that even if you were underneath that ban limit, you still had to jump through so many hoops that it made it impossible to get access to healthcare. I think the North Carolina bill, for example, said you had to go to like three doctors over the course of seventy
two hours or something like that. The youngin administration and Republicans have really been silent on that part of it, and we just know because we see it happening across states and we've seen it happen in Virginia in the past, that they're going to increasingly turn up the pressure on those types of restrictions as well. So it's not just going to be about the ban by week. It's also going to be about the restrictions that get in the way of access that prevent doctors from caring for patients.
And it's also going to be on the penalty side, where we just saw the first state try to prosecute somebody for helping a woman cross state lines. And so we know that those components are also going to be a part of a ban. They're also going to intimidate doctors and nurses, going to make it impossible for them to provide the adequate care that they are had their
mission supposed to provide. And so, you know, I think a lot of people know that, right, And I think that's why a lot of people are going to go to the ballot box on Tuesday, because I think a lot of people either know it because it's part of their profession, whether they're a doctor or nurse, or they know it because they've seen somebody go through it. These bands are awful onto themselves, right, but they also have this kind of inherent logic where we know Republicans want
to go further. We've seen it in other states and we've seen it just when Republicans talk privately here. You know, the last thing I'll say is, you know, we just saw a Senate Canada up in Fredericksburg talk about how she wants to go further in fifteen weeks when she thought she was at a private party and it got publicized, and so I think the ban onto itself is bad for the reasons you stated. It's even worse when you consider what else will be a part of that band.
Yeah, exactly, that is for sure.
What we're seeing is this kind of one opmanship in the Republican sort of primary world. One of the things I wanted to ask you was you're seeing now in Florida, because I think of Florida is sort of the worst case scenario for Virginia, right, a out of control governor trying to win national appeal by punishing the people of his state with far right kind of legislation. One of the things that's happened in Florida, happened in Texas, have
and other red states is book banning. Now, I am the daughter of a feminist author and who wrote a book that was banned everywhere, including in Italy, and also the granddaughter of book communist author who went to jail for the blacklist. So I think a lot about book banning because it was such like a fundamental trope in my childhood. I mean, are you seeing efforts there on the Republican side. It is one of the scary things that happens on the road to fascism too.
We've already seen it.
My opponent passed a bill two years ago that is now being used by localities across Virginia to band books and schools. We already had a process where parents could challenge books, you know, every locality has that, probably in the country, but definitely in Virginia. She passed a bill that was sloppily written that allowed kind of mega extremists to weaponize the bill in the name of banning books.
And so in places like Spotsobania County and Hanover County, we're seeing them explicitly use her bill to pull dozens upon dozens of books out of school life buries and out of schools. And so it's already kind of started here, and it was because of my opponent. Now there have been even more explicit book banning bills that have been put in the legislature that we've been able to stop
because of the Senate. But outside of this attempt at a worship band, I think where the Youngkin administration has been the most dangerous has been in public schools. Their first executive order, you know, was about banning quote unquote CRT. It was about intimidating teachers. They put out a tip line for people to call and try to rat out their teachers that they got a lot of criticism for. They've attacked LGBTQ kids, they tried to rewrite the history
standards to make them very right wing. All of this time, you know, we could have been focused on test scores. We could have been focused on investing in our public schools. We could have been focused on getting rid of our teacher shortage. We could have been focused on creating world class education for kids. And instead we've spent two years in the gutter of cultural war politics because the governor in Republicans Virginia think that that's what won them election
the election in twenty twenty one. And I really think it's been to the detriment of our students that we've had to constantly try to fight these fires. And you know, mostly we've been able to defeat these attempts because of Democrats in the Senate. But you know, this bill that allowed for book banning as an example of one that got through and we're seeing the impact of it because we're seeing local school boards use it to ban books. And yeah, I think banning books is about the most
anti American thing you can think of. When you talk about the freedom of speech constitutional values, you're talking about the ability of an individual to be who they are, to think how they want to think, to get ideas that they want to read about. And I agree that book banning is one of the most dangerous things we can engage at. Unfortunately, that, along with a bunch of other right wing culture war issues, have kind of been at the forefront of the UK and administration.
Yeah, the education stuff is kind of crazy to me because we're seeing a lot of regressive policies when it comes to education.
You were a teacher, Can you talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, we know, I still am a teacher of the legislature park time, and so, you know, that's what got me into the race in twenty seventeen, because the state is the main player when it comes to education across the country. States matter. Over the four years of the Northam administration, we did a lot of work to try to get our education system back on the right track. We expanded pre K, you know, we started investing in schools again and in teachers again. We did a lot
of things to get the ball rolling. Was it perfect.
No, was it enough?
No, But we were attempting to make up for ten to fifteen years of neglect, and you know, the last two years we've gone backwards in that respect, and I think for teachers and educators there's a lot of frustration, not just in Virginia but across the country because you know,
I don't think anybody thinks the system is perfect. But you're not going to make it better by politicizing everything about it, right, You're going to make it better really focusing in on these challenging and complex policies that bring up achievement. You know, you're going to really make it better by doing the hard work of investing in schools and making sure that schools have the resources and the
staff and teachers they need. That's one of the things that still has me most engaged about politics is that I see a lot of structural work we still need to do. You know, Virginia is fortunate. We have one of the best public education systems in the country, but that doesn't mean we don't have things we need to fix we do. How we fund schools is broken, how we test students is broken. We need to fix those things,
and I wish we were prioritizing those. One place where I'll give the Young administration some credit is they have worked with me on trying to reform testing. And I'm hopeful that if I went on Tuesday, we might be able to get some bipartisan legislation through that will fix
how we test students. But those are the things that we need to be working on, and you know, those are the perspectives I've had as a teacher and things that have kind of motivated me in politics because you know, I mean, look in, a good education system brings so many benefits. It makes your community safer, it makes your economy more dynamic. You know, it strengthens your democracy. So it really should be one of the things that we focus on as a state.
Yeah, really good point.
Just tell us if you're in Virginia, give us this sort.
Of tld R.
Yeah, So final crutch Thursday through Saturday, we have early vote here in Virginia and then election is Tuesday. And as election really does come down to, do you want to protect women's rights and the Roe Vwight framework or will Virginia go backwards like every other Southern state and start banning abortion. Do you want to invest in public education and make sure all kids have a world class education. Or do you want to see attempts to privatize education?
You know, do you want to continue to have an economy that works for everybody. We've been the number one state for business many times over the last ten years, but until Democrats got control, we were one of the worst states for workers, where now one of the better states for workers. You can do both, or do you want to go backwards and see a legislature right that doesn't stand up for working families. I think these are all the types of issues that are on the line
this Tuesday. The stakes really couldn't be higher, and I'm hopeful and I think we're going to have a good day because I think people in Virginia want to have a legislature that is working for the issues that they actually face day to day. They don't want a legislature and that's going to take away their rights.
Such a good point.
They don't want a legislature that's going to take away their rights. Thank you so much, Skyler, Thank.
You for having me. I really enjoyed it, no moment pfectly.
Jesse Cannon oh Man, you know, one of the funnest parts of the GOP these days is they are fighting.
What are you seeing here, Molly.
An incredible bit of lunacy.
We have Marjorie Taylor Green fighting with Lauren Baubert. This is a tweet that she threaded from Chip Roy, Texas, Chip Roy, who used to work for the least likable person in the Senate, Ted Cruz. This is what she says to Chip Roy. This is from Representative Marjorie Taylor Green. You voted to kick me out of the Freedom Caucus, but you kept CNN wannabe Ken Buck and vaping groping Lauren Baubert. You voted with the Democrats to protect terrorists to leave. I just want to se say, vaping groping
Lauren Beaupert. That's probably not the Moniker she was hoping for. This is some real disarray and I don't hate to see it. In fact, I like to see it. And that is where we are. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going, and again thanks for listening.