This is not necessarily going to be a segment about abortion, but I think it's going to be a segment about one Republican politicians never really have any never really having had any principles. Two, the malleability of people's political beliefs, particularly I guess of elected Republicans beliefs. I have a little pet theory. My pet theory is that there are almost no Republican politicians who are actually pro life.
I think Trump.
I think there are conservatives or pro lifers who hit Trump with that accusation that he's not sincerely pro life, and I agree, I don't think he is, But I also don't think he's very.
I don't think he's unique in that regard.
I think other Republican politicians are equally not pro life. They're just less tied to convention than Trump is. And Trump, I think when he sees an issue that's not doing well, he abandons ship on it right away. Other Republicans are not so nimble. But I think all of them, or at least most of them, don't really care. And in fact, I would venture to guess a lot more Republicans than we care to think of don't really care about most
issues that you care about. What they ultimately seem to care about is getting elected, getting re elected.
And having a job.
And for most of us, at the end of the day, having a job, having some kind of standing, having a source of income will lead us to do a lot of stuff to really go the extra mile. I guess it shouldn't surprise us that Republican politicians, to stay relevant, to stay in their jobs, to keep winning elections, to keep making money, just keep being relevant and respected, would do some real gymnastics when it comes to what they believe. You and I, who are not necessarily as involved in politics.
I mean, I'm only involved.
In politics, and so far as i have this fun hobby where I do a radio show every day, you and I, who are not directly involved in politics, we can literally afford to have consistent, durable beliefs that don't really change day in and day out, or year in and year out, or decade in and decade out. Have I changed some beliefs over time? Yeah, I think I've evolved over time, but it was not in response to sudden spur of the moment things that were obviously to
my economic benefit. Nor do I think I've betrayed my fundamental principles of what I believe. Well, we now come to Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney, former congresswoman from Wyoming, obviously the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who's largely regarded as one of the most influential Vice presidents in American history, and sort of the scion of his kind of brand of Republicanism, very aggressive when it comes to foreign policy,
in America's posture in global affairs. She was also I think of all the Republicans the most horrified by January sixth, but to such an extent that it has sort of shifted. It has shown these these cracks in the facade that she presented to the country during her years as a member of the House. For years, she tried to present
just as a normal Republican member of the House. She was pro life, she voted for all kinds of abortion restrictions, fairly reliable, consistent pro life vote, and all of a sudden, after Trump comes around, she starts shifting. Not as much as a lot of like kind of There were some like conservative commentators like Bill Crystal, Jennifer Ruben, the calumnist from the Washington Post, who all of a sudden, completely flipped, like on a dime, all of their beliefs, on all
of their positions, just to purely become Biden cheerleaders. Chaney wasn't quite at that level, but after January sixth, there was obviously a real change, and she is now endorsing and on the stump for Kamala Harris to such an extent that this pro life member of the House, this person who campaigned as a pro lifer, voted like a pro lifer for years and years and years, is now saying this. Here's a story from Yahoo News. Pro life
Liz Cheney even sides with Kamala Harris on abortion. One of Kamala Harris's top Republican surrogates, pro life former Representative Liz Cheney, has jumped on board with the Democratic presidential
candidate's plan to expand abortion rights. I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro life, but who have watched what's going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislators put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need, Cheney said during a moderated conversation with Harris in Malvern, Pennsylvania on Monday. This is completely bogus. If by the carry they need you mean abortion, then
that's us. None of these state laws prevent people from getting treatment after a miscarriage or anything of the sort. Harrods had just finished saying that even people who were supportive of overturning Rov. Wade did not anticipate the harm that would follow, which we just assumed to be. Cheney,
a longtime conservative, wanted to chime in. This is not an issue that we're seeing breakdown across party lines, the one time House Republican Conference chair said, adding that in places like Texas, where top law enforcement officials were threatening to sue to gain access to women's health records, the situation is quote not sustainable for US as a country, and it has to change. Here's Cheney's tweet about it.
She says, I've always been strongly pro life. Today's oh, well that from twenty twenty two she was happy that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade, But now all of a sudden she's like flipped.
She's like, oh, I'm pro life, but not to actually enact laws to limit abortion, which is the whole point of the pro life movement as a political thing is to have our politics, to have our law respect the dignity of children growing in the womb by affording them protection from violence. That's the whole point of this as
a movement. Now I could go on and on about the abortion related aspect of this, but I just want to focus on this complete one pint eighty by Liz Cheney, and I focus on it with regard to Liz Cheney because it makes me think of local elections. So many people who run for office as a Republican. For so many of them, the abortion issue is.
Maybe the twentieth most.
Important thing, if it makes the list of things that they care about. I'll venture to say that most elected Republicans don't even think about it at all. There are probably a few things that they care about, but for the most part, these are people who want some kind of prominence in public life. They care about certain kinds of political issues, and so they run for office and they have friends who back them. Maybe they're prominent in some way. They have powerful friends who back them, and
that's how they become elected officials. They're very few elected officials who actually care about core like social conservative issues. I think someone like Jim Patterson probably cares about those things in a really sincere fashion, having talked with him about it, having known about for Jim. Jim's talked about
this in public, very very often. How his three children are all adopted, and so the abortion issue and the fact that his children were able to be adopted in the first place, that's something that really directly touches him and something he genuinely cares about. But other than rare political animals like Jim Patterson, other than him and the few people like him, I think most Republicans are much more flexible, willing to be much more flexible about an
issue like abortion. When they proclaim themselves I'm pro life, I firmly believe. I just don't know how firm they are. Liz Cheney voted for nationwide abortion restrictions time and time and time again during her time in the House. And now she's saying that a state voting for statewide abortion restrictions is a bad thing.
What is she talking about? And she's far from the only.
One, and this is far from the only issue. All of a sudden, Mike Johnson, who everyone kind of thought was a Ukraine skeptic becomes a Speaker of the House and he's.
Like, we gotta fund Ukraine.
It's the most important thing, which garnered the response, Wait, weren't there a bunch of people in the House who were mad over Kevin McCarthy about Ukraine?
What are we doing here when people's livelihoods.
Are on the line, when they're pos when their stature as a member of the House of Representatives, a member of the state Assembly, a city councilman, the states, all these jobs that have these titles that people care about and want to retain, the proximity to power that they entail, the stature that they afford these people, these are hugely ambitious people who will do anything. Or let me correct myself, these are hugely ambitious people who have gone to extraordinary
lengths to get the positions that they have. I don't know to how many of them are above changing what they fundamentally purport to believe in order to retain some kind of standing.
The amount of.
Work you have to do to get elected as a member of the House of Representatives, the amount of doors you gotta knock, knock on babies, you gotta get kiss rubber chicken dinners. You gotta attend hands, you gotta shake deals, you gotta cut financial backers, you gotta schmooze. It's a ton of work. It's a hugely that's a ton of work on top of whatever your normal job may have been. And then you finally actually get the gig and you're in a constant state of rerunning for re election every
two years. I mean, you think of someone like David Valadeo, who's in a swing district. I mean, it's got to be exhausting. And so that's why I think when we look out.
At this landscape.
Of Republicans and we wonder, why do these Republicans go to Washington and not be as conservative as we think they are at home? I think that's been the constant gripe of conservative voters throughout the country. Maybe some of that is bad expectations on our part, maybe some of that is being unrealistic, but I think it's job preservation on the part of these guys. They really like having
this job of being an elected official. They like the prestige atifors, they like the pay, they like the perks, they like the everyone calling them a congressman. They like everyone calling them counselor they like whatever their position is,
it gives them prominence and stature. Liz Cheney had all that taken away from her because she did take one position that was in fact unpopular, one position that did in fact cost her stuff, which was she really thought Trump was terrible at January sixth, But now that she's sort of out in the cold, and now was her position on January sixth? Was that something that was easy for her to do or not easy for her to do? On the one hand, not easy because it clearly cost
her her congressional seat. On the other hand, she got tons of praise heaped on her by The Washington Post, the New York Times, every major media outlet, heralded as this great hero of American politics. And now she's campaigning right alongside the Vice President of the United States, a possible future president. Harris has said something about giving a cabinet position to a Republican doesn't strike me as crazy to think that Liz Cheney could be that Republican who
gets that cabinet position. What deal was hatched between Harris and Cheney for Cheney to be this like top surrogate, who's you know, barnstorming the country right alongside Kamala. Was some deal hatched? I don't know, And what were the terms of that deal? Well, you can ride alongside me and maybe I'll give you a cabinet post, but you got to support everything I do.
Ay, I captain. Whatever you say, those are my principles.
And if you don't like them, I have others the famous scroucho Marx line.
But I do think this is what is underlying a lot of this is I want money. I want my position of power.
I want prominence in American public life, and to do that, I'm willing to change what I believe. I think this is true of Republican politicians. I think it's true of Democrat politicians who Democrat politicians are willing to absolutely jump the absolute opposite way and say that, you know, we've always been at war with Eurasia. I mean, they're just a snap of a finger. Kamala Harris has gone from oh I oppose fracking, Oh, of course I support frakting. What are you talking about?
Oh?
What? Just the stuff I said as a senator and candidate for president in twenty nineteen. No, no, no, no, no, those are just youthful indiscretions. No, No, I've evolved over the years. I recognize that I have to win Pennsylvania. So therefore fracking is I mean that fracking is okay. Illegal immigration is a crime. I never did I say illegal immigration wasn't a crime of Oh, I'm tough on immigration,
Kamil of the cop. If someone's willing to do all the conniving, manipulating handshakes, deal backroom deals, et cetera, the Kamala Harris obviously had to do over the course of her life and some of the other things she had to do where I'm not going to go into it, Willie Brown, this is a family program. Then obviously these people, these elected officials in your life who disappoint you, they're willing to change what they believe.
If it means holding onto power.
When we return.
How all this relates to the idea of term limits and why I think term limits don't actually do anything useful next on the John Girardi Show. So this has been a pet peeve of mine relating to this theme of why do politicians change their minds so readily? And my contention is that they are motivated by a lot of financial but also self preservations slash how to phrase it, retaining their standing as prominent and significant people. They are
motivated by all of these things. They want to be significant, they want to be admired, they want to be appreciated. And this results in Republican politicians Allah Liz Cheney stumping for Kamala and all of a sudden pitching overboard Oliver pro Life believes, et cetera. It results in basically this highly motivated reasoning to all of a sudden, do these mental gymnastics to say, oh, I actually don't believe in all these things I used to believe in.
And I think it's in.
Part because these people have very few things deep in their core as far as things they believe in that they're actually willing to sacrifice when it becomes financially difficult. And I think a lot of this has to do with you know, people want jobs. They want their job, They want some kind of job that gives them prominence in society, and they'll do a lot of things to retain it, especially those jobs, these powerful jobs, jobs that are touch power in some way allow you to shape policy.
And you can see this sort of in the life cycle of these people, you know, they go from being a congressman to some other kind of cushy landing spot. And this is why I sort of think term limits don't actually help allow me to explain the California legislature has term limits. We have term limits in California. A lot of people don't know that the California legislature has term limits. We adopted it about decade two decades ago.
The term limit rules within California is twelve years. You're allowed to serve in the state legislature for twelve years. You can divide that time however you want, between the State Assembly and the State Senate, so you can serve four years in the State Senate and eight years in the State Assembly and you're done. That's your twelve years.
Or you can do.
Twelve exclusively in the state Senate, or twelve years exclusively in the State Assembly, or eight and four, you know, six and six, however you want to do it, but you're term limited out after twelve years. This has resulted in politicians who are just as bad as the pre term limits politicians. It has resulted in no discernible improvements whatsoever in California state government. In fact, I would argue it's created a bunch of new, worse, more perverse incentives
for legislator's behavior. Why well, because here's the life cycle of a California legislator. Now you get the job, and for a lot of these people, it's like the best job they've ever had. All Right, some of these people that it's not like they have this great resume of, you know, being titans of industry. Necessarily they get this job, they serve for twelve years, and then what do they do. They become a lobbyist because they know the ins and
outs of Sacramento. They've made so many great connections, and Sacramento is this perfect. I mean, obviously, California is the largest state, so of all states in the Union where lobbyists can make their Hey, Sacramento would make sense just in that sense. But it's not just because California is the biggest state. California is an enormous state with a relatively very small number of state legislators. We only have one hundred and twenty state legislators, eighty in the Assembly,
forty in the state Senate. It's a small number of people to have a huge impact on policy. California has this trend setting tendency, especially for all the Blue states. They copy stuff California does so, and the California State legislature, on top of that, has a year round session. Most state legislators only meet for like a month or two months every year. I think Virginia meets for like forty days more or less. Some state legislators only have a
one month session every other year. It's a part time job in most states, but in California they're there all year round. So you can be a lobbyist all year round. You can lobby in Sacramento all year round and make rate money, more money than you make as a legislator. And being a legislator really ably prepares you to be a lobbyist. So you've got legislators highly motivated to do stuff appealing to the industries that they could lobby for,
that they could work for. Oh you're you know, a member of and then the chair of you know, the the Agriculture Committee or the higher the you know, the Energy Committee. Oh why don't you do something helps out PG and E and then oh me, hey, after you're done with your twelve years in the Assembly, all of a sudden, hey you want to be a lobbyist for PG and E. That's what we call regulatory capture, where your regulation of an industry is tempered by the fact
that you would like to work for that industry. So term limits have done nothing to solve any of our problems. Politicians are just as willing to bend their beliefs and shift their beliefs for the sake of their own self preservation, gratification, and their own financial interest, just as much as they were before term.
Limits existed in California.
So for anyone who says term limits are a silver bullet for anything in American politics, get your head examined. They don't actually do anything that useful. They just create new perverse incentives rather than getting rid of them. When we return, my little field trip to Notre Dame and my discussion with a state election lawyer next on the John Girardi Show. This past weekend, I went on a
little trip. I went on a trip to the University of Notre Dame and I attended a really awesome conference that was thrown by Americans United for Life AUL, which is this great organization that does a lot of work analyzing.
Abortion related legislation.
Both at the federal level and at the state's level, and it was a really great conference talking about sort of legal fundamental.
Principles of what we're doing.
Great discussion with pro life leaders from all over the country about what kinds of stuff they were doing, and golly, it's given me enough fodder for about two years worth of Right to Life radio shows.
I'm actually going.
To be talking with a doctor I met from that conference, doctor Donna Harrison, from the American Academy of Pro Life OPG y NS, on Saturday on Right to Life Radio, So you'll have to give that a listen at nine o'clock. I want to talk though about election stuff and my suspicions,
my suspicions about shenanigans. One of the people I met at this conference one of the attendees, and I felt like it was one of these events where like every single attendee had really interesting background of life experience, professional experience,
could have talked about something interesting. I won't give up too much about I don't want to put her on blast too much, so I'll just say that she's a lawyer from a swing state and one of the things she's been doing is working with her local county elections board, and it's a very large county in a swing state, and the county's local elections. I think it's like an
elections board that she's on. I'm not sure exactly how her state runs things as far as the direct management of this stuff at the local level, but she is basically the voice of reason to try to advocate for fair procedures with regards to elections in this county in this swing state, and the kinds of little things that she points out that Democrats try to do just in
her one county in her one swing state. And I'm trying to think, I believe every single one of the main swing states like Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, all have Democrat governors and so there's sort of oversight.
By Democrats in all these states, which.
By the way, that should make you a little worried the fact that the governors in all of the swing states that Trump kind of needs to win all of them are Democrats. I guess Georgia is Georgia has a Republican governor, but that's it.
Anyway.
But yeah, Pennsylvan, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, all of them have Democrat governors. Now, she was just telling us. When we were discussing this with her, We're like, oh, what do you do. Oh, I'm in North Carolina, I'm working right now, I'm in this state or that state. I'm from here, I'm from there. And we talked to this woman. She says, yes, I'm from state X, work in their elections board, and I'm dealing with this right now.
I'm dealing with this right now. Oh, we're extending timeline to vote for this county because of X, Y and Z. And the elections board said, no, we needed we just need a unanimous vote rather than we need a unanimous vote rather than a majority vote.
Oh, we're wanting to shorten certain.
Kinds of voting times whatever in this part of the county that's more Republican leaning because of all because of this arbitrary reason, all Republican election monitors aren't being allowed to come in over here because of this. Okay, So I filed a brief and I said, you we have to let them come in orright, I did this, that or the other. She's putting out all these fires where Democrats are doing little sneaky things to try to get
an advantage. And it's like little thing, little thing, little thing. And I'm sitting here and I'm like, this woman is
like single handedly saving the Republic. I mean, good lord, the whole election could come down to her state, and here she is making sure the Democrats don't pull a fast one and doing stuff sort of quasi legally under cover of law but sort of violating the law, but having their sort of little violations of the law ratified by state elections officials making decisions that they're not allowed to make or shouldn't be making. And it's not stuff
where it's like and that's the thing. She's not dealing with stuff that's flat out fraud necessarily, Okay, it's not like Democrats just dropped a whole stack of obviously computer filled in ballots signed by nobody. Okay, No, not necessarily, although in some cases she's like, okay, you know, like she's dealing in her stay with all of these absentee ballots and people are sending them in. They're supposed to be either notarized or signed by like I think in
her state was like signed by two witnesses. And she's like, we have no idea who these two witnesses are. How can we authenticate it? It could be signed by Mickey
Mouse and Donald Duck. All these things where she's fighting in a swing state, a state where Democrats don't completely control everything, a highly contested battleground state, where she's like fighting tooth and nail against these little things, these little things, these little advantages Democrats are trying to take care little advantages Democrats are trying to take their little ways that
they're trying to game the system in their favor. And she's like putting out fires left and right the whole conference. She's like on her phone, trying her best, and she feels a sense of obligation. She's like, you know, I've been doing election law stuff like this in my state for X number of years. I didn't want this job to go over to some newbie who's never done it before. I feel this responsibility in my county to do this,
and that just makes me think. I'm not saying California is a red state.
Far from it.
I am not one of these lunatics who in twenty twenty saw like there was a Trump rally with like a bunch of cars parading through somewhere in Orange County, and there were a lot of cars because Orange County just has a lot of people, and there were like Trump sick of people on Twitter are like, look at all these people.
The Trump train is coming to California. We're going to turn California red. Trump's gonna win Califori.
And I'm like, you don't even believe this. You don't believe it. I don't believe it. Nobody believes this. And of course it's not true. Trump loses California, you know, two to one or whatever the breakdown is, it is sixty forty or something like that. So I'm I'm not saying Republicans are secretly the majority in California. What I am saying, though, is that if this woman in this.
Swing state, this lawyer I met.
If she's catching all these little things that Democrats are doing, these sneaky little things that they're trying to do to manipulate things this way, that way, and the other way, how much stuff do you think we miss that Democrats are doing in California, given that they completely run the show in so many La County. La County has its
own you know, county clerk that's running the elections. Every elected official for La County is a Democrat, all right, pretty much every single one the county Board of Supervisors is Democrat, or the county election officials, I'm sure as overwhelmingly Democrats. How much shady stuff do you think is happening? How much ability? What ability to do the La County Republican Party does the La County Republican Party have to really carefully monitor election results and check things and follow
us none. I'm sure Democrats are getting away with so many shady, sly things under cover of law, undercover of Oh this was a decision by.
This group, Bubba.
I bet there's stuff going on in La County that would just make our absolute frickin'head spin. So this isn't to say that I agree with all like the stop the steel stuff. Listen, you've got to prove it in court. And if you can't prove it in court, then there's nothing else to do. If you can't get the evidence, you know, I don't know what to do. You know, doing a January sixth is not exactly a helpful thing.
So I guess I'm just.
You know, I'm not in this sort of stop the steel mode necessarily, and but I also think, boy, there's probably a lot more stuff that happens where you can't necessarily contest it, because it's not like it's flat out fraud. It's not like it's flat out having Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck sign ballots and have those ballots be counted. I don't that's not what's happening. But it is stuff that I think happens under kind of cover of law, cover of kind of quasi legal legal but ratified shady
interpretations of state law. I think a lot of that stuff is happening. A lot of that stuff it's happening, and it might be things that you can't necessarily vindicate. I wouldn't be surprised if Georgia, for example, in twenty twenty, would flip the other way on the basis of could have flipped the other way, possibly on the basis of some of that kind of stuff, stuff that's like almost
impossible to review after the fact in illegal proceeding. That's what I'm afraid of, and it makes me afraid that Republicans have entrusted a lot of their ground game in
some of these states. They've entrusted it to guys like Charlie Kirk, which like, as much as I've appreciated Charlie Kirk having some influence on Donald Trump of a pro life sort, I mean, there have been reports that the only reason Trump is opposing amendment for in Georgia, the horrible I believe it's Amendment for in Georgia, the horrible
state abortion amendment that's on the ballot in Florida. The only reason Trump clearly opposed it was because Charlie Kirk, in a panic, called Donald Trump and basically convinced him, Hey, conservatives are going to jump ship if you do if you don't oppose this, which God bless Charlie Kirk for that.
But there have been all these reports of his organization doing to get out the vote efforts on the part of Republicans and a lot of swing states getting a lot of Elon Musk money that's being frittered away because he's not actually that experienced in get out the vote efforts. I worry that Democrats have a better ground game. I worry that Kamala has way more money than Trump. She does, that's just a fact. She's got way more money for lawyers.
I'm afraid maybe She's got whole teams of lawyers in ways that Trump just does not.
So that's my fear. That's my fear.
Are these little shenanigans, these little shenanigans that you know, this elections could come down just the last two presidential elections have come down to about fifty thousand votes across you know, two or three states. Fifty thousand votes across two or three states, so the other way, and someone else wins two or three you know, fifty thousand votes go a different way across two or three states, and Hillary Clinton wins twenty sixteen or Donald Trump wins twenty twenty.
And that's what worries me, is that maybe we're in another election like that now. Could be that Trump wins in a blowout. I think that's a possibility, but I think in all likelihood, it's a very narrowly divided country and it's going to come down to a lot of little things. And I gotta say, I'm really glad that lawyers like the one I met are doing their work. It could be lawyers like her who are saving the
country from President Kamala Harris. When we return a little love letter to Notre Dame next on the John Gerardy Show, as I was saying, I got to visit my old stomping grounds at the good old University of Notre Dame this past weekend. And I've talked a bit on the show a couple of times. My buddy Jonathan Keller keeps coming back to it. I had a show where I talked about college football as sort of giving us a sense of Aristotelian political belonging.
It's a lot of.
Words Aristotle in his Politics, the great Greek Athenian philosopher from the fourth century BC, wrote in his Politics it was one of the most influential works in the history of politics in the West, that a natural political community is bound together by bonds of commonality, love, and affection. And I made the point that I think that's really kind of how colleges function for a lot of Americans today.
Having gone to the same college, the same university, gives you a shared sense of belonging, a commonality in my case, commonalities of religion, of place of experience, et cetera. I have an instant when I talked to someone who went to Notre Dame, and it was wonderful to get to see that, to see so many friends at Notre Dame. To get to walk around the campus, show my buddy Jonathan Keller all the sights and places where.
I remember, you know, doing this or doing that.
It was wonderful to be at my other home. This is my home, but Notre Dame is my other home. That'll do it, John Jarlady show, see you next time on Power Talk