Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Donald Trump has set himself up for Egene Carol to launch a third defamation case. We have such a great show for you today. Congresswoman Laurie Trahan tells us about how she's fighting Republicans war on IVF. Author Maxwell Stearns tells us how we could use a
parliamentary system to fix our democracy. But first we have the host of the enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's owned Rick Wilson. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Rick will Wali Jong Fast.
I know I sound like leftover ass, because I for the last severallys felt Mike leftover ass. But I'm here with you as always to engage in our weekly festivities and frolics and youthful hijinks.
And this is right youthful hygiens. Rick Wilson was a little.
Bit I was. I got a little bit of a there are got a little bit of a flu or something I don't know.
Hugely successful live show, which somehow I did not get whatever Rick Wilson had, despite the fact that I hugged him. The luck of the Jong continues. You know who did not have luck, Kitty Britt, Hey, you know who was So it's the curse of the Scotus rebuttal, right, and that's what it is. It is, Bobby Jindall continue.
Marco Rubio, think about it. There are so few people who come out of Scotis rebuttal space, if you will, are the so too rebuttal space with their pride and dignity intact. Even the people when they go, oh that was really impressive. That really knocked it out of the park. That was a strong case against George W. Bush or against Barack Obama by up and coming young leader. It's
not a partisan thing either. It's just that it's a bad gig to get and especially if you're Katie Britt from like the Yes, I'm a member of my local dinner theater troupe and I know how to engage in what they call acting, and oh my god, it was painful. And look, I was a little bit out of it. I was feverish. I legitimately I was laying on the couch with a fever, and I was like, what the hot fuck am I watching? What the fuck am I is?
This just me, and I swear to you. I went to sleep that night, honestly, I was here by myself, and I honestly went to sleep down and I woke up in the morning thinking, man, I was like tripping on cold medicine, because was that as crazy as I remember? And so first thing I did I watched the clip. I'm like, oh my god, oh my god. And I wasn't an original thought. Everybody else obviously has seen it too, but everyone said, this is snl worthy. This is like she's parodied herself, and she really had.
Just looking up old state of the Union rebottles on Wikipedia. So we had so Katie Britt this year. Last year, Sarah Sanders, we had Sarah Sanders, Kim Rens.
Approaching from three hundred degrees of vision.
Kim Reynolds. So I guess, Tim Scott, so I guess.
It's got work out for you by the state.
I guess a good state of the Union rebottal is one where no one remembers you.
I think that's the best you can know.
Bad one, Yeah, is what happened on Thursday.
Let's just be really let's just be really blunt about it. Katie Britt is a former staffer, she's an inside player in Washington, all that stuff, and someone and I really tried to run down who did it, because they're only a limited number of Republicans speech and debate folks who prepare people for these things, and it's it's one of two or three people. And when I saw it, I was just so blown away by how obscenely over theatrical it was. What a farrago of lies and bullshit it was.
And it didn't even again. And I say this, the first time I watched it, I was feverish and I thought I was hallucinating some of the things. And when I watched the video in the morning, I couldn't believe how much overacted over dramatic, lying liar, who lies to she was willing to engage in with for that.
The top line of that speech was that after the speech, a guy called, hold on, I want to make sure Jonathan kat oh true. Yeah. He used to work at the Associated Press and he has a newsletter called The Racket News. He just did a very simple video where he found the person that Katie Britt was talking about in the speech. Googled where she had found her. Turns out she was sex trafficked this woman, But she was
sex trafficked. This rape story actually happened in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration, So you're about as responsible for this woman's terrible tragedy as Joe Biden is.
Right, listen to and look, once again, it was during the Bush administration, Nanai on twenty years ago, which makes me feel it is a cow then hell, and it was also happening in Mexico now. And the idea that even if you don't like George W. Bush, you thought that he had a personal knowledge of every sex trafficking case going on in Mexico and should deploy the entire federal government to fix is ludicrous. And this is a
it's a horrible crime and it does happen. But once again, what did Katie Brittan not take responsibility for being one of the Republicans in the US Senate blocking the passage of a border bill that would actually do things to address sex trafficking in Mexico and address the security wrestle of the border. Yes, her very carefully crafted, overly dramatic moments in that rebuttal were very Regalan wrote a great
piece about it on his substack this weekend. This was very much on brand for the modern Republican candidate who wants to stay in Trump's good graces. Lie Lie, Lie Lie, make it about some sort of thinly and extremely thinly veiled racial thing, and when you look at it, and when you look at it in total, it was so discredited by the time she got off the set that it just tells you they don't care. All she was doing was trying to punch a ticket on the Trump
World thing. But again, let's also remember she is a Republican hack staffer. She's one of my people. Okay, she's She's the kind of person wid stuff like we do. She was Richard Shelby's chief of staff and became this DC operator type. And this wasn't someone he's act, just some mom from Alabama who just happened to somehow decide to run for office because I love America. No, she's a political hack of the first order. Nobody should be fooled by any of these shenanigans.
And britt Her response was, I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was twelve, So I didn't say a teenager, and I didn't say a young worm. It's just and she actually did say.
The cats report seems to say that she didn't even actually encounter the woman.
I think she met her, but she met her at the border with these two other senators when they went
down too. But the point is, I think the more important point here is when she told the story, she said, this is something you wouldn't even see in a third world country, imply saying that it happened in the United States, which, by the way, besides the fact that we don't use the word, we haven't used the phrase third world country in many years, it is also just a completely it's just not It was implying something that was not true.
The degree to which Katie Britt and any again, any Republican who wants to be in Trump's good stead is going to lie aggressively, particularly on the topic of immigration, cannot be underestimated. There is no limit. There's no upper boundary by which they say I'm going too far, I should turn the bullshit knob down twenty five percent. It doesn't exist. This is definitionally what they are now. And
she's and look, she's raising money off of it. Already, and then the fundraise emails that she's putting out here, like now they're trying to cancel me. Well, yes, because you were. You came across as a lying psychopath. How about that?
But I also think it shows the problem that women have in Trump world, right, the problem of defending a guy who overturned row. And the reason they picked Katie Brett, right, was because Katie Britt was the closest they have Republicans in the Senate to like normal looking. You couldn't have six.
She's the youngest, she's the youngest member of the Senate. She's the youngest Republican ever elected to the Senate or something like that.
Right, and she looks, right, you can't have Cindy Hyde Smith. I don't even know if she talks right, or Marsha Blackburn half the you know, the Republican women largely are not necessarily the kind of people you want out there giving a speech. So you really do see how tough it is. And then this morning on Meet the Bread, not Meet the Press, on ABC, you had Stephanopoulos interviewing
Nancy Mason. Nancy Mace is saying she can't help herself, She's trying she is stocked defending Trump despite the fact that she's presenting herself as a sexual as a rape survivor, which she's saying she's a rape survivor, and then somehow having to defend Donald Trump, which is the nightmare of this where this Republican Party is.
Ask Egen Carroll, this is not a man. This is not a man that lends himself to close defense by any woman inter out of elected office. In my opinion, he is a guy with a at Look, we've now had adjudicated that he engaged in a sexual attack on Egene Smith, that our agen Carroll, that's just not even a question. And yet the defense of him must be brought that way because that's the culture of the Trump universe. You can't acknowledge his faults or his character flaws or
his crimes. You must defend at all times. And the best way for them to defend in their minds is to devise this this lurid sort of this lurid sort of criminal underworld of illegal aliens and sex traffickers. And everything's very dramatic about these accusations, but a lot of them are just made up, and a lot of them are a way to take your eye off the ball.
The other reason, by the way they picked Katie Britt, was that because Republican Party in total is in a state of raw screaming queen horror movies panic, like they're seeing the guy chase them through the house with the sharp knife about IVF, and they're screw up on IVF. Nancy Britt was on there, Nancy Brett, Katie Britt was on there specifically to say one line, but no, Alabama, now we're protecting IVF. Oh are you? Are you now?
Because you weren't when your Supreme Court a few days ago took it apart.
And the other saying about the Katie bred Alabama thing is that I know that nobody cares about this, But the actual language in the bill that was signed out into law by doesn't actually by Governor k Ivy, does not actually protect. It does not say a frozen five celled embryo isn't a person. It just merely says that if you kill a five celled blasticists, you're allowed to do it if you're doing it for IVF, but not for any other reason.
I can murder a guy for taking my parking space, but not for other reasons.
It's this standard ground of fertility, of fertility excuses you thought the guy was coming to your house to steal your stuff. But I do think it is. It shows just how Republicans haven't thought any of this legislation through, so they find themselves continually in these situations where that are unworkable, and you have women in parking lots waiting until their miscarriage is bad enough so that they are the doctor can say definitively that their life is in jeopardy.
None of this needs to happen. Republicans did this to themselves by having no interest in crafting legislation that made any sense.
Right, and you could easily and clearly draft legislation that specifically, even if you were trying to leave the entire Alabama the rest of their even if you were trying to leave the rest of their abortion law in place, which you ought not, but here we are, you could still draft a better piece of legislative language to address IBF. They chose not to, and that was a choice for them not to do so.
I also think that fundamentally will find ourselves in a situation where a lot of these Republicans actually probably couldn't craft that legislation because they're not very smart.
There's always bill drafting, there's always lawyers. They could if they wanted, they.
Could find someone to do it. But the other thing that happened this week is that Joe Biden really killed it with the State of the Union. As I actually have been saying.
All along, well, you're right, we buried the lead today.
Yes, we really did.
We buried the lead Joe Biden. Let's just be absolutely flat out about it. Joe Biden fucking crushed it, killed it. He And the most amazing part of it to me wasn't just that he did very well, which he did very well. The most amazing part to me with it.
In the process of doing so well with this thing, he also lured the Republicans in for the second time on live television to saying or doing something stupid, and this time it was on and not raising or not cutting taxes for multi billionaires and the relic and the rebellion trap for a second time. And I'm thinking, oh wait, and this guy's the slow one. I don't think so.
Yeah. My favorite moment was afterwards seeing Chris Kobac complaining about removing lad pipes, being like, we don't really need to remove led pipes. There were so many moments when Mike Johnson was like sitting there stone faced while Biden was talking about things that Republicans believed.
In five minutes ago.
Now, at one point the beginning of that speech, he talks about Reagan. He doesn't even you'll remember liberal hero Ronald Ray. Ronald Reagan, who's right, who said to mister Gorbachev, please tear down that wall. And then he says, sharp contrast to Trump, who said do whatever the hell you want. And again like it's you don't think Mike Johnson loves Ronald Reagan. It just he really put them in a spot.
Look, this was beautifully crafted, beautifully engineered as a trap. And my son said the other night we were texting about this. He said, you know what it is in part the Republicans sorted they believed their own and they started to set the bar so low. It's like Joe Biden is a drooling, ancient, doddering old coat and he can barely change his own pants in the morning, and he's this and I guess what when when it comes out there and spanks them. The contrast isn't between the
reality of Joe Biden in the performance. It's between their fantasy and what the performance is going to be. And even their own people even because when Fox were like, oh, he's it was energetic, and when when their critique of Biden in the speech is that he was too aggressive and he pushed too hard and he spoke too fast. Oh okay, that you guys have nothing nothing, Yeah, that.
Was really incredible. And he raised ten million dollars right after the speech, which is a pretty good sign. And none of that money will go to retainers.
None of that money will go to paying legal fees for his ninety one criminal charges that are brought to him in four separate cases. And and although their triumph of taking over the RNC this weekend, they're still flushed with Laura Trump for running the interesting.
You have a check, I have a check for one hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah, you rob the bank with the bank's been closed for two days.
That's like how many hours of legal work? Ten hours? No, not one hundred hours. How many hours of legal work is that for the team?
Oh ship, there are so many teams now, it's it it's mathematicians and scientists to calculate.
I don't even know anymore, honestly, but it's that's a retainer for different for our case.
And no, nothing year with the takeover of the RNC is going to improve the life of any Republican candidates anywhere at all. It is going to It is not going to. No Republican woke up this morning and said, wow, this really this changes it. Now. The RNC is going to run like a well honed machine. It's gonna be the smoothest, best fundraising operation we've ever seen in our careers and nothing could go wrong.
Thank you Rick Wilson for joining us.
I'm happy, too, Sorry I sound so bad.
Congresswoman Laurie Trahan represents Massachusetts third District. Welcome too Fast Politics, Laurie Trahan, thank you for having me. We're so excited to have you so talk to us about IVF.
You can't talk about IVF without first talking about fertility. I mean, millions of women like me struggled or struggling with fertility, and the statistics are something like one in eight women receive fertility treatment of some kind to get pregnant or to sustain a pregnant day. This one is obviously personal to me. And you know, no woman ever really wants to talk wants to think about that happening
to them. They don't want to talk about it. They sure as hell don't want politicians inserting themselves into those private conversations and decisions with their partner and their doctor. And that's really what this is about right now, Republican politicians who think they have some divine authority to make the intimate health and reproductive choices that only women can and should be making.
Yeah, so you're a congresswoman. Talk to me a little bit about your trajectory and how you become a real advocate for IVF, and but I want you to first talk us through a little bit about your career in Congress.
Yeah.
So I was elected in twenty eighteen.
So you were in that wave of anti Trump women.
Yes, I mean there were so many women who had the same thought bubble that I had after the twenty sixteen election that we needed more women walking the halls of Congress. And you know, at that infamous picture of so many men sitting around a table talking about healthcare and there was no representation, There are no women around that table, And so really, you know, got off the sidelines at that point and ran for office. And I've lived in the district that I represent. I represent Massachusetts
Third District, which borders on New Hampshire. I grew up in Lowell and working class family. My grandparents came here from Brazil and Portugal. My dad was a union iron worker, and so really it was around we have to make sure that Congress doesn't get sattled with gridlock, because when that happens, families like the one I grew up in
are disproportionately hurt. But then, like anything else, you know, you bring a whole lived experience with you to Congress and you speak out on them because you know better than most people who are making decisions or debating these policies. And that's exactly what IVF is for me. It's a very personal topic. It's something I never mentioned or talked about in terms of my path to motherhood. But you damn right, I'm going to talk about it right now because it's at risk.
You know, it's funny because I had the same exact thought. We shouldn't have to talk about our IVF journeys, right, I mean, that's it's such an insane thing that that is this Alabama Supreme Court has brought us to a place where we have to explain publicly things that really are private things. The first thing I thought about was like, I would not have my twins if I had not
had IVF. And you know, we had IVF because we carried a rare genetic disease, which the kind of testing that we would not have if we lived in this theocracy that Republicans want. So I do think it becomes a time when we have to really come out and talk about our left experiences.
That's exactly right, I mean, like you, like me, So many women who yes, right, they struggled for a long time to get pregnant or to have a healthy pregnancy, they turn routinely to IVF as our last hope. So yes, I mean, look, I underwent five years of treatment to have my two daughters. They were more difficult than I ever could have imagined. But like you, I wake up every day so grateful that IVF gave my husband and I.
Two beautiful daughters. Who are you know, the joys of our lives.
And I just we just want to make sure that other women who are struggling with their own fertility challenges have the same chance.
So Republicans had an opportunity to codify IVF, brought on the floor by Tammy Duckworth, who is an incredible, incredible legislator, but also a woman who has shared her own personal, lived experience with IVF. Now we're in this world where they refused, you know, Republicans refused to take it to the floor. Cindy Hyde Smith. Now there are some like lame messaging bills coming out of the House on this, But will you explain to us this sort of weird way Republicans are trying to obfuscate.
Yeah, I think the level of hypocrisy that we're seeing from Republicans would be laughable if it wasn't so physically and emotionally devastating for women.
Think about it.
Republicans right laws designed to strip women of the right to make their own health care and reproductive decisions. They're told what the consequences could be, and they do it anyway. And then something with overwhelming support because you know, across the political spectrum like IVF gets caught up in their you know, dragnet of an abortion van, and what do they do. They introduce a toothless resolution that expresses the sense of Congress that they support IVF. No law, no
actionable language in the bill. Nothing. I mean, it's the same kind of bill someone introduces when a Little League team in their district wins the championship. That's the level of experiencedness Republicans are applying to this mental attack on our freedom, and so I think women see through this. Right they had an opportunity to protect IVF in the Senate,
and they blocked it there. Right now are one hundred and twenty five Republicans who are co sponsoring legislation right now as we speak that it would effectively ban IVF treatment in every state without exceptions. This is the kind of thing people hate about politicians, and so we have to call them out on this because it's just a level of hypocrisy, and we can't let them get away with saying one thing while they're doing another.
What I'm struck by is the legislative problems that Republicans keep having. So a lot of these bills, abortion bills, and even this IVF bill it was written to relate to this twenty seventeen fetal personhood statue, which in Alabama they've been sort of trying to get going and fetal personhood is this idea that a five cell frosen embryo is exactly the same as a child. It's a person, even though, oh, if you thaw it it dies, it is a person. You know, if you thought it's not
it doesn't even die. If you though it is no longer viable, ergo, it is not a person. So but what I'm struck by is like, this is a leg this is a moral problem, be stupid legislation, but it really is a legislative problem. Like you really see how bad Republicans are legislating? Can you talk to us? You are in Congress so you get to see this firsthand. Are you just shocked at how bad their legislation is?
And by bad, I mean you know, blunt and sort of badly written and not careful and not and they're sort of never playing out scenarios if this legislation ever gets enacted.
Yeah, you know, you bring up a great point.
I mean, I have this crazy approach to this job, and it's one that my colleagues in the Republican Party would benefit from. Where if I'm not an expert on an issue like say, fertility treatments and the development of babies in the womb. I ask the doctors who do this for a living what they think. And when you ask those folks, including reproductive doctors, I'm bringing a reproductive endochronologist with me to the State of the Union as my guests, what they think about life a conception and
what that means for fertility treatments. They either laugh you out of the room or look like they want to rip.
Their hair out.
I mean, it's ridiculous that you have career politicians who think that their religion tells them that they get to override the expertise of doctors who have dedicated their entire careers decades to helping couples like my husband and me have the families of our dreams.
So it's ludicrous to me. But it just goes to.
Show the larger problem how subservient the vast majority of the Republican Party is that they feel like they have to take their marching orders from these folks with such extreme views to support legislation that imperils family creating treatments like IVF.
Yeah, some of the thing I often wonder about is like, did they never think that any of this legislation would be enacted.
They can't square the I'm for IVF, and then you'll readily have members say, oh, but I do believe that a fertilized embryo is a person. It's like they can't square that right, and so they are stuck at the moment. I mean, look, we know that abortion bands have devastating consequences for women, and I think the past two years of Republican state abortions bands have proven that.
Right.
We've seen across the spectrum, women experiencing severe or even life threatening complications have been denied care at hospitals, sometimes until they become septic, others even becoming forced to miscarry at home.
Right.
The stories about the women waiting in the parking lot.
Oh, it's unimaginable. And in states where Republicans banded abortion altogether, including in cases of rape and incest, women have been forced to carry their attacker's child to term. Early data indicates and estimated sixty five thousand pregnancies from rape have occurred in those states.
Those numbers seem cleansy to men.
Oh, all be so alarmed about what's happening. So the fact that IVF treatment is now under threat is something we knew could happen.
We warned it was.
Going to happen with the way these laws were written, and I just refuse to believe that it's unintentional. Right, How could I give those lawmakers the benefit of the doubt when anti abortion activists have already replied to me and messaged me saying that IVF condones murder. That doesn't
even make sense. But it's how some people on the fringes think about this issue, and they're exerting outsized influence over the Republican Party that is looking to make good on their demands to eliminate abortion nationwide and sweep up I VF in the process.
I want to talk to you about your congressional race. First, I want to ask you one other thing, which is it's a bill. I guess what the kivy signed into quote unquote law. It doesn't, in fact say that a five sealved embryo isn't a person, which would be the sort of way to do that if you had a brain, and in fact says it just indemnifies people doing IVF, so it's okay to kill embryonic people. Right. This seems like it's going to open the door for even more problems.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, and imagine the shane that they're placing on couples who are just trying to start a family by framing the journey this way. Look great that Alabama legislators moved to reopen access to IVF treatment in the state, but we also have to acknowledge the damage that's already been done. I mean, first to the women who were in the middle of IVF and had their
treatment delayed or stop. Second to the women who were about to begin their treatment, who now will be scrambling for a second time to figure out what's next for them. And we have to reconcile that with the fact that there is a significant portion of the Republican Party who don't actually support this move in Alabama. Right, people said the Alabama Supreme Court decision was exactly what the had
in mind when the state wors band was passed. So that's not a viewpoint that has not been relegated to the fringes of the GOP anymore. It's very much front and center when you hear their judges, their candidates, their representatives, including many at the federal level, who support the so called life that conception bills and other fertility that would
ban IVF and other fertility treatments nationwide. I mean, at the end of the day, the only thing that will really settle this issue is codifying ROW into federal law.
We didn't have these issues when we had the protection of Roe.
So talk to me about your race and also what it looks like and everything else.
So I'm from Massachusetts, but you know, last year I was elected as co chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, and it's really designed to help the Democratic Caucus with our messaging right as we head into November. And you know this is central, right. I mean, we've obviously had a record of accomplishment to talk about from the last Congress and with the Biden and Harrison demistration. You know, you've heard them all, all the accomplishments before Mali.
But it's the bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, the Chips and Science, the Inflation Reduction Act, which literally capped insolent prices at thirty five dollars, are lowering the cost of premiums for middle class families. All of those things are going to be incredibly important as we head into the election and talk about what kind of path forward we want for this country. More of that, more progress or rolling back the cloth and freedom is at the center of this campaign now.
Right the stakes in this election couldn't be higher.
We've got a Republican nominee for president who was bragging about appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Row, whilst you know, simultaneously working with dark money anti abortion groups to craft even more restrictions on women's reproductive rights.
We have a Speaker of the House who's supported a ban on abortion.
We have Senate Republicans who literally re kept our military in their fight to prevent women service members from being able to travel outside of Republican controlled states with abortion bands to seek the care that they needed elsewhere. And the bottom line is that the Republican Party is controlled by people who are not just content with overturning Row. They want to aband abortion myth of pristone and IVF in every state in the country. And we just can't
let that happen. And I think that starts with re electing President Biden and Vice President Harris. Certainly means maintaining control of the Senate and taking back the House and making a King Jeffrey Speaker every time I'm in a room full of women, I just put it so clearly, like, we have to make sure that our daughters, our granddaughters, our sisters have more rights, not less than we grew up with.
And that's exactly what such stake in the selections.
I will be a messenger for that, you know, sharing my own story, elevating what's happening in these dates today as people look to just have the family of their dreams and are faced with this extreme movement of taking that away.
Yeah, I mean, it's just such an insane thing. In the year twenty twenty four, we are in this very scary moment in American life where Donald Trump could in fact become president again, which is actually quite scary, I think to anyone who has lived through the first Trump presidency, I was wondering if you could talk about how incredibly it is important it is that Democrats went back the house, because the really the only thing that can sort of stop Donald Trump, or at least maybe keep him from
just completely destroying everything we hold dear, would be that having a house, the house is a bulwark.
Yeah, and all you have to do is go back not that far in history to remember that the Democrat majority in the House in twenty eighteen was the only backstop to a destructive administration, right, and you know, to think that, you know, we could be on a on a path where you know, he is the nominee. We are not far from retaking the majority, as you know, like the Republicans have a very slow majority in the House today, so we have to make sure that we're
just making the case. Republicans are lining up behind Donald Trump right now as we speak, and the Senate is you know, they're in a tough map for November, but the House is so within reach and we have to win full stop.
So what I don't take.
For granted is the memory of what those four years were like, right, But I'm reminded today as we're walking into the State of the Union that four years ago, almost of the day, I mean, like our country was in the midst of shutting down because we were literally on the cusp of the COVID pandemic, and how functional and chaotic those years were, how traumatic they were for the one point two million families who lost a loved one, and how we have just recovered right with the Biden presidency,
I mean, getting those shots in arms getting our economy back on its feet. We are now in the strongest economic recovery of any country in the world, and we are continuing to make strides to you know, help folks
from the bottom up in the middle out. As the President likes to say, but I like to say, families like the one I grew up in, right, people who actually needed government to work on their behalf and to make sure that corporate reed wasn't having a detrimental effect on their pocketbooks with through price gouging and increased prices. That is the track that we must remain on if we're going to make sure everybody has equal opportunity in
this country. And it is devastating to think what another four years of Trump would be because not only would we roll back the clock on our on our freedoms and our democracy, but you would also just stop so much of the progress that we've made in terms of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States, you know, making sure that our seniors can afford their medication, making
sure more people had access to high quality healthcare. So this really is I know we say it often, but this really is the election of our lives.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mollie.
Maxwell Sterns is a professor of law at the University of Maryland and author of Parliamentary America, The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy. Welcome to Fast Politics, Maxwell.
Sterns, thank you so much for having me.
So let's talk about this really cool book that you've written, and this more more importantly really cool. Yeah, So, Parliamentary America, The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing our Broken Democracy. Talk about how you got to the parliamentary system as an idea from being a law professor and sort of where you came up with us.
I'm a bit of an unusual constitutional law professor because I use various tools a game theory, economic analysis to study law and lawmaking institutions. And I noticed that a lot of people were saying, we need to have a third party. Somebody should start a third party, we should have multi member districts to allow third parties. And I looked at these proposals and I realize that.
They wouldn't work.
We do in this country phase what I call the third party dilemma, which is that people really want to support a third party candidate, but realize that when they do that candidate, it's likely to operate against their interest. If you vote for a third party candidate to the left of the Democrat or right the Republican, it's a spoiler, or if it's a candidate pulls in from both sides, then you end up randomizing the outcome. But I realized in one of to actually have meaningful third parties, third
parties have to play a role. They actually have to be affirmatively valuable to those who support them, and in order to do that, they have to give something back in return for the support. Coalition systems give them that role. So when a third party joins a governing coalition, even if it's not leading the coalition, the third party will say, you know, we'll join your coalition if you give us these policy concessions, if you give us these appointments to
high offices, or even these appointments on the judiciary. And the question then became, how do we structure a system that worked with in our larger context that allows third parties to emerge and thrive. And that was one of the major motivations of writing this book, was to demonstrate how that works and how we could make that our own.
Let's talk about the countries that have this kind of coalition government.
So one of the things that I convey in the book is that there are two threats to democracy. One is when you have too few parties. The other is when you have too many parties. So one of the reasons I take readers on a world tour in England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil and Venezuela is to show what works and what
doesn't work in terms of overcoming threats to democracy. So the problem that we have in the United States is that a small group of faction can take over one party, as Trump and Maggot did with the GOP, and then take over the government.
Right.
But alternatively, if you've got too many parties, a small faction can get more seats than any other party and then roll over the parliament. Is that like Italy, Like Italy Right and the lead up to Nazi Germany Right, the story of how Adolph Hillery assume power in Brazil
has way too many parties too. So what we want to do is hit that what I call Goldilocks principle, right, not too hot, not too cold, not too few parties, not too many that sweet spot in the middle, which political scientists typically think is between four and eight parties in the system. That is that it's actually designed to achieve. That is called mixed member proportionality, and it was created for Germany after World War Two. It's more complicated there
than it needs to be. But we can make a version of that our own and actually hit that sweet spot and actually encourage third parties to emerge and thrive and reward people for supporting those parties.
I think that Americans are too stupid to follow this, but prove me wrong, so I don't.
But let me explain this in a way that I think will make a lot of sense. Imagine that you're going in every two years to vote for the House of Representatives. You cast one ballot for a district election, just like we do now. Nothing has changed. We have four hundred and thirty five members in the House of Representatives represented by district exactly like they do now. But we're going to add another group of equal size based on parties. So your second ballot is going to be
for a party. So let's say that you are a Progressive Democrat for the district. Ways you're likely to have two major candidates, because what happens when you've got geographical districting and elections is each side realizes that to win, you have to fracture the other side and keep your
side intact. That's on both sides. That's how we end up with two dominant parties, both in house races, Senate races, and even for the presidency, even including with the electoral college in the district race, you'll still have two parties that dominate. But then if you're a progressive Democrat, you'll say, I want the Democrats to form a coalition with the Progresses. I'm going to vote for the Progressive Party.
Or if you're a traditional.
Conservative, you'll vote for the GOP, but you might vote either for the GOP as the party but not the America First Party, which would maybe be the MAGA party, Or you might even vote for the regular Democratic Party but not wanted to form a coalition with the either MAGA or the Progressives. And so you could get a
grand coalition between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans. So what happens in my proposal is that every other election cycle, just like the calendar we have now, every four years, we have a presidential election cycle up to five parties. The leaders of up to five parties will negotiate on a scheduled calendar forming a majority coalition until a majority coalition forms, and then their predesignated slate for president and
vice president assumes those offices. There's a backstop to make sure it happens, so we don't have endless voting like you see in some parliamentary systems. And what will happen in this and just think about this as a voter, Imagine the campaigns and how different did be Right now? We're so dysfunctional in our politics and society, driven by two camps that are growing wider further and further apart, that those campaigns suggest that the other side must lack
basic intelligence or even be evil. We no longer credit the other side with looking at the same information that
we do but coming to a different place. But in this system, the parties would have to campaign on a willingness and even enthusiasm to play well with others, to form coalitions with others, because the only way you could see exceed in this coalition system is to demonstrate that you don't have to agree with everything that another party embraces for you to actually form a government with that
other party. And that's going to change fundamentally the way our campaigns are conducted, the way voters view parties and view campaigns, and it's just going to make for a more functional government. Like you go back to the Kevin McCarthy debucle and everybody thought, well, all we have to do is get the moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans together. But we have to remember the way our system is set up, the goal is always to divide the opposition
and keep your side intact. We had no institutional mechanism for that to occur, and we can't just encourage people to plain isser. We need to create institutional structures that allow third parties to emerge and thrive. And that's why I wrote this book because I could see why other proposals would not do that, but I also saw how we could do that.
Are there a few ways that would be easier? You know, it's a brilliant idea, right because coalition governments are ten times less crazy. But do you think that there are closed primaries or open primaries and rank choice voting? I mean, wouldn't those two things do a lot to curb extremism or not, and why.
It would not for a couple reasons. First, we have to take rank choice voting. Rank choice voting does none of the things that advocates of rank choice voting believe that it does.
Oh interesting, tell us why.
There's a profound misconception about rank choice voting. So rank choice voting operates on a premise, and the premises that we're looking at a standard distribution. If you were a statistician, you might call it a Guissian distribution, but people can picture it like a Bell curve. And so what we have is concentration in the center and then greater dispersion
at the extremes of liberal or conservative. The idea of rank choice vot voting is to allow people to rank the extreme candidates, whether it's on the liberal side or conservative side, gradually towards the center end up with a centrist outcome. The problem is that that's precisely what we
don't have, which is feeding our democratic crisis. We have a bimodal distribution, and if you look at the Pure Research data from nineteen ninety four to twenty seventeen, a of this graph that shows although our parties used to overlap considerably, they are growing further and further apart, and they're doing it as a result of hyperpartisan gerrymandering, issues with the way we receive news and news like information.
But they are growing further and further apart. And if you look at the special congressional election from Alaska that used a rank choice voting system and produce the result of Peltola, this is not against Peltola. But here's the truth. Studies have been done that have demonstrated the centrist candidate was Nick baichic because the way people do the way we do rank choice voting is all also called instant elimination voting. And when you have a bi modal distribution,
as happened in Alaska, nick Baichick got knocked out. It turns out that if a percentage of Sarah Palin conservatives had just stayed home, Palin would not have knocked out Baycheck and Baychick would have had a better chance of defeating Peltala. The point isn't a criticism of pel Tla. Nous voting advocates believe that they're getting a centrist result, but you're not, because in a bimodal distribution, all you're
doing is speeding up getting to an extreme result. In fact, Peltola got ten percent or so of the original vote. The multi member district idea is a similar thing. Think about this problem. A lot of these proposed reforms are designed to replace sitting members of the House and Senate with moderates. But we have yet to have a constitutional convention. Every amendment to the Constitution has come through Congress thus far.
And imagine trying to get on board members of Congress for a set of proposals the purpose of which is to displace them with somebody else. My proposal is the only proposal out there that leaves every sitting member of the House and Senate and incumbent in their district or state and actually gives them additional powers. And I think that's vitally important.
Right, That's the only way you'll ever appeal to them, because they're so obsessed with keeping power too.
Well.
Absolutely, but you know what, Molly, let them become the heroes of democracy. Imaginally, do have a constitutional convention, And imagine the convention proposes all of these things. Suddenly Congress can use these proposals as a pressure release valve and say, hey,
we have a better way to fix our democracy. And you know, we may really dislike these members of Congress, but I'm perfectly happy to let them be the heroes of democracy if they produce a thriving multi party democracy that lets us in future generations actually live in America that truly finally embraces genu and democratic norms.
I want to get back to the rank choice voting for a minute, because this is really interesting. Is there like a sort of come to Jesus' moment on ranked choice voting? Do people get that it is not functioning as intended? Or now?
Dumb people but not most people.
I mean, I would really love Andrew Yang to listen to one of my podcasts that talks about this.
That would be great.
I don't think he's going to have that moment because he's politically committed to rank choice voting. But there have been thoughtful scholars who initially advocated rank choice voting and then realize that it doesn't work, and who have abandoned it and have been pleased to see that evolution, because that's really important. The problem is that voters are getting misinformation about what some of these reforms can and cannot do.
And the two central questions we have to ask ourselves, is will the reforms solve the constitutional crisis that we face? And are the reforms inactable? And ranked choice voting will do neither the same thing with open primaries, right, because the political parties are going to put the kobash on open primaries, because the purpose of open primaries is to rid them of their jobs and replace them with more moderates.
And we have seen examples of the two parties that hate each other agreeing on one thing, which is keeping the two parties together in the right. But what we have to do is create a set of incentives that actually motivate voters to support the third parties and motivate groups within parties to splinter off where individuals can gain greater power than they do in an existing party structure, where it's either Trump's way or the highway.
So I live in New York City, we have rank choice voting. We got this insane mayor that no one likes. What happenspened? I mean, so did he only get like three percent of the vote? Can you talk us through sort of the thinking there?
I can't take you precisely through the New York mayoral election.
I unfortunately don't have to doubt it.
No, it's okay. I just don't have the data in front of me, and I don't want to speculate and run the mistake of making a mistake that somebody will point out that I've missed it. Rather, you know, I'm happy to talk about the Alaska when I actually talk about that one in my book. I do want to be clear about one thing. I don't want to suggest rank choice voting can never have a place, right.
But it's not the solve we thought it was.
But it's not solving our national politics, the very problem of which is that we don't have a standard distribution and that's tearing us apart because the modes for the two parties are pulling us further and further apart.
So nuts, So how would you even start going along with this? Like, what would be the first move?
Well, the first move is this, right, I mean literally, the book came out Today's Thursday, came out two days ago, and I'm doing, you know, quite a number of podcasts, public speaking events, talking to people, getting the word out there, getting people to read it. I want to get it in the hands of people who will read it, who will write about it who will think about it, Because the centerpiece of my book is a virtual world tour.
I take people to seven democracies to shell them that this intuition that we grew up on in high school and middle school, this American exceptionalism, is really a myth. And what we need to recognize is that we can learn from the experience of other nations that have successfully or unsuccessfully face down their own threats to democracy. There are better ways to do democracy in some of those ways are ways that are quite adaptable to our system.
So the first step is education to explain how it is that we can actually improve our system and how it is that we can do it while getting buy in as compared to other proposals with respect to the people that really have the authority to bring these reforms about. I don't know when it will happen, but we are going to hit an inflection point where we are really at the precipice of authoritarianism, which could be very close
or collapse. And what's vitally important is for the American electorate to truly understand what the options are and what options can and cannot achieve particular goals. And that's really why I wrote this book, but the book is only the first step. The second step is getting out there and talking about it. And I'm going to spend as long as I can educating the public about these ideas and talking to people with influence like you. You've got a big audience. And if folks in your audience buy
this book, read this book, talk about this book. That is a huge first step in the direction of reshaping the national conversation on what we must do to produce a thriving multi party democracy.
Thank you so much, Max well Sterns.
It was an absolute pleasure.
No moment, do you have a moment of fuckery or you want me to go first?
You go first.
So my moment of fuckery is going to be the Trump rn C table take up? Or can I do that? Or now Rona again, these are not nobody here, is everyone here. There are no victims, only volunteers. And you don't end up surviving as long in Trump world as Rona did without making a lot of compromises about your values. That said, she found herself having trouble fundraising because people didn't want to give money to Donald Trump's legal fees.
To pay Donald Trump's legal fees. And now she's out replaced by Eric's wife, not even like the not even like the kid that's like's a AIRB parent, but Eric Eric's wife, And now she's got to raise money and all that, and she's already said that most of his money is going to go to legal fees. But the pageantry of standing up there with the check and then refusing to say where the check was from is really peak Donald Trump. And that moment is my moment.
Fuckery goes to Kelly Ann Conway and everybody else around the Trumpet orbits because suddenly, I was told very clearly for the last five years that Crooked Joe CCCP communist Chinese chi coom Joe Biden wasn't blocking TikTok because he wanted the insidious Chinese to brainwash our kids and to
turn them all into trans antifas. And now suddenly, because a mega donor in the Republican super pac space named jeff yass is a major investor in Byte Dance, the parent company of TikTok, gave Donald Trump a ton of money, Suddenly Kelly Ann is lobbying in favor of TikTok and saying, oh, this is this is an essential cornerstone of our democracy, or whatever line they're using this week, whatever line of
bullshit they're using this week. But all these Republicans are out there now suddenly in love with TikTok, and as Mark or as Elon Mussin, Mark zuckerschmuck. Oh really, you're so subtle, Lelan, I can't get the message there. We'll do better if we don't have TikTok. This is an exact, perfect exemplar of the utter corruption of the Maga verse because these people, these people know exactly what TikTok is.
Almost everyone understands there's a degree of social harm happening on TikTok and that something ought to be done about it. But the fact that the Republicans have done a complete one hundred and eighty degreeturn on TikTok, that is my moment.
It's almost like they don't believe it. Almost That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics make 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