SIO67: Andrew Torrez on The Crime Bill and Broken Window Theory

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:00 Thomas: Today's episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com and enter the promo code, this is very important, SeriousPod30. I gave you the wrong one last week. It was wrong, it's not SeriousPod, it's SeriousPod30. Go to HelloFresh.com and enter promo code SeriousPod30 to get 30% off your first week.

0:00:47 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 67. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and today we've got the Opening Arguments crossover for you. This is part one, and tomorrow, over on Opening Arguments, we'll feature part two, but that means I've got Andrew Torrez with me today. Can't wait to get over to that. Andrew is here to talk about the 1994 crime bill, the background, what went into it, why it turned out the way it did, really fascinating stuff, especially when people are making potentially erroneous claims about history and political history, so gives us some perspective going forward. With that said, here's Andrew Torrez for part one of our little crossover, series inquiries only and opening arguments.

0:01:42 Thomas: Joining me now is Andrew Torrez. How are you doing? Do I get your name right? Oh, all

0:01:49 Andrew: Yeah, thanks, you, you pronounced that mostly correctly, I appreciate the opportunity to be on your main show, Knight

0:01:52 Thomas: Right., oh, it is so cool, we are doing a crossover episode, this is like when, I don't know, the A-team is appearing on some other terrible show from that same time era that I don't know, yeah, okay, there we go., before my time., yeah, this this is really cool because I think I referenced it actually in the, in the latest Alix Jules episode, but had mentioned to me just when we were chatting around, I don't know when we're recording away or something about Michael A. Wood Jr.'s claims on the crime bill and some of the other stuff he said that I wanted to get your opinion on. And we thought it would be a cool opportunity to do a bit of a crossover. So we're going to cover the more, I suppose, opposed political slash responding to Michael Haywood Jr. parts on this show. And then on opening arguments, we're going to do a bit of a more of a breakdown of what's actually in that 1994 crime bill. Is that right?

0:02:08 Andrew: Rider, Knight rider, that would be the logical crossover, yeah, that's exactly right, I'm really excited to be here, because I really, I enjoyed your show with Michael A. Wood, I, I I appreciate his activism and I just couldn't disagree more strongly with with a lot of what he had to say. So so I'm looking forward for the opportunity to kind of talk about the political aspects as well as, you know, the legal stuff, which is what, you know, boring old opening arguments is for. So, yeah,

0:03:10 Thomas: Hmm. All right.

0:03:26 Thomas: We're gonna cover his claims about that. I really wanted to ask you about what Obama could do with executive orders. I mean, Michael A. Wood Jr. claimed that he could just, Obama could just make mandatory reporting for police. So lots of stuff to cover. Where do you want to start?

0:03:42 Andrew: Like to start with his central claim, which was essentially that.

0:03:45 Thomas: Was vote Jill Stein essentially.

0:03:46 Andrew: Right. Yeah. No, it was right. It was the lesson you asked him. What did you take away from the 2016 election? And he said two things. He said, number one, we have the failure of neoliberalism as seen in Obama and Hillary Clinton. And number two, that if we're going to have change, that that change is not going to come from the inside, but it's going to comes from smashing the system. And I couldn't disagree with that more strongly.

0:03:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, and I disagreed with that at the time too, but so

0:04:15 Andrew: You did. You did. Absolutely. But the example that he gave at multiple times was when you vote for neoliberals, you wind up with stuff like the omnibus crime bill of 1994. And that's as bad as anything Donald Trump would put in. And so, you know, the was don't, you know, don't vote for these establishment candidates. And so let me give my counter thesis, which is midterm elections, midterm general elections in particular, are a terrible time to be thinking about how do we smash the system.

And they are a terrific time to be think about how to we set things up such that we can have a national referendum and potentially smash the system. So we know that midterm elections are driven by enthusiasm and turnout. In 2010, all of the racist bigots and morons got together and elected Tea Party candidates who, let's be honest here, should not be allowed out in public, let alone to be serving in public office. And they did that because Democrats were kind of a little bit disheartened with the progress of actual governance compared to the political message that was the part and parcel of the Obama campaign, right? Hope and change. And

0:04:16 Thomas: Yeah, right. Yeah right. Right.

0:05:43 Andrew: Obama didn't exactly hit the ground running, right, like it took him a while. You've documented a really excellent episode of the show in talking about how the original health care, Obamacare bill got passed. It right. You can understand why Obama supporters were somewhat demoralized. We on the left remain demoralised in 2018 and as a result, you know, Republican senators win their job narrowly. Right. If Dean Heller keeps his job in Nevada. Right. Then we're not talking about a potential, you know, 50 50 situation. We're not taking about potentially taking back the Senate. We are talking about the Republicans have a much better map than we do as as Democrats in 2018. And if if if we just keep pace with the enthusiasm, we will lose a couple seats.

0:05:46 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:06:38 Andrew: Right. In order to have any chance of making any progress towards getting Donald Trump out of office, we've got to show Republicans that there are political consequences to aligning yourself with Donald Trump. And Dean Heller did that.

0:06:50 Thomas: Well, but that's where he's going to say, oh, but I don't care about getting Donald Trump out of office because he's just as bad as the neoliberals.

0:06:52 Andrew: Right. Yeah. Right, right. And that is what I would like to to tackle politically, because that is, in my view, indefensibly wrong. Right? There are a couple of things that that we need to parse out before we sort of tackle. Right again, remember, his capstone example is the 1994 crime bill. Um, first let's kind of parse it out. Um, I I am not super familiar with the term neoliberal, so I, you know, typed it into Google, and the definition it spit out at me was, uh, relating to a modified form of liberalism tending to favor free market capitalism. Um, and and I'll take that, right, like, and I, and I think that's a reasonable

0:07:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Well, let me say a couple things on that because I saw some people on Twitter asking him as well, like, hey, what did you even mean by it? How do you define neoliberalism? I'm also people on Patreon commented, like looking it up up and saying, hey, this looks like it's more of an economic thing than it is. So I want to be careful to try to make sure we're using it how he's using it so that we're not responding to not his arguments. I take it to mean how he used it. I think it just means, it sort of means like a centralist liberal stance. I don't think, I could be wrong, but from what I've seen on Twitter, I don't think he's using it in the strictly like economic uh sense, but there is part of that where there's also, as part of being neoliberal on his definition, there's like, well, Obamacare still fed corporations and still, so there is that capitalist portion of it as well yeah

0:07:39 Andrew: Yeah yeah okay right right well. And and I think it's, I think it's important to draw that distinction, because I would draw a very heavy black line between what I consider traditional centrist Democrats, of whom I would say the archetype is Bill Clinton, from the definition I just read of neoliberals, which would fairly include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Which is to say, Obama and Hillary Clinton were both strongly committed to progressive ideals, including progressive social ideals, kind of all the way down the line, but tended to favor more market-oriented solutions to social problems as opposed to government intervention, what we might call more socialist-oriented solutions to governmental problems. And why I think that that additional layer of nuance is more important, because the first thing to get clear is it is sloppy definitions to call the 94 crime bill a neoliberal bill. Right. Like it was a centrist third way Democrat crime bill. Right. It was deliberately designed.

0:08:56 Thomas: Yeah

0:09:42 Andrew: We're going to talk about this more on opening arguments tomorrow. But it was deliberately defined to have some liberal things in here, some centrist things in here and some conservative things in here. And that was a deliberate strategy by Bill Clinton. It was called triangulation. It's why Bill Clinton invited Dick Morris into the White House. Right. That odious guy that's on Fox News. Like he was a Bill Clinton advisor for a time. Like that was part of how Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. It's beyond obvious that Barack Obama did not run or govern that way. And Hillary Clinton did not run that way, and in fact, one of the things you and I pointed out on away was, unlike the classic Bill Clinton triangulation Democratic strategy of moving back to the center during the general election, election during the general election, Hillary Clinton moved left. Right, she, the things that she emphasized and and the, the major, I mean, there was not a lot of public policy that was discussed in this election

0:10:13 Thomas: Yeah it was, she also ran more against trump in the general so there wasn't as much like discussion of policy I don't think

0:10:40 Andrew: Yeah there wasn't but but the major public policy uh shift that she brought out in late August early September was getting together with the Bernie Sanders folks folks, and saying, I programs to benefit larger group of people. Bernie Sanders was free college for everyone. And Hillary Clinton was, you should have a means tested way for everybody to be able to access at least community college. Right. And in the the general election, Hillary Clinton's plan moved further left. And more importantly, there's no public policy issue that that I can find in which Hillary Clinton moved to the right in the general election. Right.

0:11:28 Andrew: Absolutely none. So that's kind of the first thing is, you know, I think that the idea of, you Know, differentiating between, you a conservative Democrat like a Mary Landrieu in Louisiana or, you You know, the way Bill Clinton ran, I would strongly differentiate between that and the neoliberal tag. But let's also look at the 1994 crime bill, because I will tell you, I think and I'm hoping you get hate mail and hate voicemails for this. Think that the Sanders campaign use of making the 1994 crime bill a political weapon against Hillary Clinton is the characterization that took place during the political campaign.

0:11:04 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:12:17 Andrew: I think it is far worse than anything Hillary Clinton did to Bernie Sanders. And that includes, and again, I would concede, stacking the deck at the DNC against Bernie Sanders, right? I openly concede to that, you know, politics ain't beanbag, all of that. But what Bernie Sanders did in terms of demagoguing this issue, and and and I should say mostly this is benign neglect of his campaign. He there were only a couple of statements by Bernie Sanders that related to this.

0:12:47 Thomas: Is I think, or is this more of a Bernie bro issue or a Bernie issue

0:12:49 Andrew: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I would say, look, this is an issue that so so what started circulating was a speech Hillary Clinton gave in favor of the 1994 crime bill in which she used the word "super predators," which was super common at the time. Right. And Bernie Sanders sort of, you know, let that be kind of part of the argument of, see, you know, Hillary Clinton isn't really one of us. She's not really committed to progressive ideals. Ideals. She signed on to this horrible crime bill and, you know, thought of young black kids as super predators. And that's why they're all locked up. And we have a prison culture in this country. That's a grotesque distortion of the facts. So first, you should not need to know this.

And our listeners shouldn't need to do this. Hillary Clinton was obviously not in the Senate while she She was first lady. Hillary Clinton was not involved in crime policy in the Clinton administration. She was involved in health care policy. We should be very, very surprised to find a first lady publicly contradicting her husband, the president, on a legislative agenda. Right. So, you know, the speeches in favor are just things that, you Know, you ascribe to that however much you want. But I will tell you, Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill twice because

0:12:50 Thomas: Okay right yeah right

0:14:09 Andrew: He was in the Congress.

0:14:08 Thomas: Twice what's the second vote oh

0:14:10 Andrew: Yeah, he voted for The Initial Version, which had some more liberal programs in it. But then after there was a reconciliation process because the version that the House passed and the version the Senate passed were not identical. So they had to go to committee and then and then reconcile the two bills. And there was the final bill vote minus some of the key liberal provisions. And Bernie Sanders voted for it that second time. OK. More importantly, I'm going to read you. This is Bernie Sanders in 1995, the year after the bill passes. OK. This Is a letter he sent in response to. You might know that in 1994, as a result of those midterm elections, that's when Newt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House. A whole bunch of right wing congressmen came in as kind of a backlash and they proposed the contract with America, which we're going to talk a little bit about one of the provisions of that in this episode.

0:14:27 Thomas: Right okay right

0:15:14 Andrew: And so in response to that, here's what Bernie Sanders said on the record. I'll give it to you so you can link it in the show notes. Second bill in the progressive promise is the Equal Justice Before the Law Act, which is an anti-crime package that retains key aspects of the anti-crime legislation enacted in 1994 to prevent crime, as well as punish that which happens. To crack down on white collar crime, for example, S&L bailout, defrauding federal government on procurement, criminal penalties for willful violation of child labor laws by employers that result in serious bodily injury or death of minors in the workplace, eliminate deductibility of legal expenses when a company is accrued of crime, and on drug trafficking and abuse. You cannot look at that a year after the passage of the crime bill and view that as anything other than a ringing endorsement of the anti-crime provisions of the crime bill of 1994 that Michael A. Woods so vociferously decried on the show.

0:16:14 Thomas: Could one Say though that that's at least an attempt to uh balance it a little more toward like typically white crimes, like it looks like he was targeting more corporate crime and and the kinds of things yeah still

0:16:26 Andrew: So, yeah, absolutely. And of course, you would expect Bernie Sanders to do that. But the critical aspect is there is zero in this speech, right, that calls for repealing any portion of the crime bill of 1994, including and it's why I read all the way to the end on drug trafficking and abuse, because one of the most horrific long term consequences of the Crime Bill is the federal sentencing guideline disparity between powder cocaine, which is even today mostly used by wealthy white people, and crack cocaine, which is mostly usedby poor black people. And the sentencing disparity in the guidelines for the same quantity was was roughly 100 to one skewed against, you know, poor inner city street crime.

0:16:33 Thomas: An endorsement of the crime bill is what you're saying right one of the major complaints of of racism in the in the bill

0:17:14 Andrew: Right. And there is nothing in this letter in discussing the 1994 crime bill that mentions reform, tweak, right. Nothing on that. OK. It endorses the anti-crime package that retains key aspects of the anti crime legislation enacted in 1994 dot dot dot and on drug trafficking and abuse. So everything that was leveled at Hillary Clinton that were sort of implied notions of being insufficiently progressive on racial disparity in sentencing, I don't see how you have the dirtiest of all possible hands in Bernie Sanders in leveling that argument. But

0:17:57 Thomas: What you're saying is Uh, people were incredibly sexist in that they were holding Hillary Clinton accountable for what her husband was doing in the 90s and, you know, speeches she might have given supporting it, which any first lady would have done. I, I would think they're holding that her more to account for that than Bernie Sanders, who actually voted for the bill twice.

0:18:19 Andrew: Right, who voted for the bill twice and defended it in public a year later. And, and now I want to do something that that, that's, that's a little bit surprising. I want to defend Bernie Sanders a little bit. Right, which is to say part of the reason that Bernie Sanders is defending this bill a year later is because he's recognizing the political landscape, right, that that just swept in Newt Gingrich and monsters who wanted to engage in a truly monstrous program that we're going to describe. And so what you have to do is you have compare, right? And this is sort of my fundamental thesis here. It is all well and good in the primaries to pick the person that you think most matches up with your ideology. But when it comes time to the general election, You can't undertake that matching program in a vacuum. Right.

You have to say, OK, this guy only agrees with me 60 percent of the time. Let's look at his opponent. Oh, she only agrees would be one percent of it. Time, right? Like you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, whatever kind of cliches you want to haul out there. You must compare.

0:18:31 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Well,

0:19:30 Andrew: If you're going to vote in a rational way, you have to compare the consequences of not voting or of voting third party or some other thing that could potentially elect that person's opponent versus giving your support, however reluctantly, to the person who most closely matches up with your political beliefs and then trying to work either from within or without the system after, after that happens, um, ahead you

0:19:52 Thomas: Plus, I mean, the assumption that always drives me nuts about this third party stuff is because everybody will say, well, we people aren't voting for Jill Stein because they think she has no chance. And it's like, you've covered a lot of, no, like she's also just a terrible candidate. Like she's not, and what drives me nuts too is that if you look at Hillary Clinton's, I'm not sure if you were going to get to this You kind of already mentioned it, but if you look at her platform, she has criminal justice reform in there. She's got like, we need to put an end to mass incarceration, like all this stuff. And people are taking the fact that they're just deciding she's a liar, so you can't listen to anything she's saying in her platform. But like how many of the things in Jill Stein's platform, like how trustworthy is Jill Stein when we've seen the very questionable legal stuff she was doing with the recount that you covered.

0:20:47 Thomas: I mean, I don't know why she would be any more trustworthy. And by the way, why we're just assuming that even though Bernie Sanders voted for the crime bill twice, he's all forgiven. But Hillary is not for having done some speeches.

0:21:00 Andrew: You know, once you've decided that you can't believe a candidate's public statements, then, you know, then I, I mean, I Honestly don't know what to say to you, right, like, because by definition what you're saying is uh, the only evidence that matters is the stuff I've made up in my head about what I think somebody's gonna do right like

0:21:09 Thomas: Yeah, Exactly. Yeah, I mean you could assign to Her the worst possible motivations, and a lot of people did, and that's how they upped the stakes to make it so, well, both candidates are just as bad

0:21:21 Andrew: Right. And they put, and they put the thumb on the scale for Trump. I mean, like, how many people did, did you hear that said? Look, like, you know, yeah, Trump is okay, he went to Liberty University, and okay, he's palling around with a lot of the, you know, traditional Republican right-wing types, but like this is a New York guy, like he's not anti-gay rights. Well, you know, one of the, the, I mean, this is, I think we should do, do an episode of Opening Arguments on this, right? Like, if you are a conservative evangelical Christian, right, like, I get why their approval rating of Donald Trump is still in the 80s.

0:21:30 Thomas: Yeah yeah, Here's

0:22:01 Andrew: Right, like, because he has affirmatively done things, right, like he has reversed the obama era uh, DOJ memo, uh, instructing attorneys to interpret Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as covering sexual orientation. We just did the episode that the government not only has reversed that policy, but filed a brief taking the opposite position in the Second Circuit. And, you know, we don't know exactly how he's going to implement, or if he's doing to implement, the ban on transgender individuals in the military. But he said it, and he certainly could. So, you, you know, this is, you hate gays, like, you should be thrilled about the Trump presidency.

0:22:44 Andrew: Yeah. And the number of people who said, oh, you know, well, he doesn't really mean it when he says that. Right. He didn't really mean it when you said he was going to kick out the Muslims. He didn't really mean that when he said he's going to build a wall like, you, know, I mean, it.

0:22:43 Thomas: He's your guy yeah yeah right so they were allowed to do their mind reading with him in a positive way and their mind reading with Hillary in the most possible negative way, yeah mm-hmm

0:23:00 Andrew: Right. Yeah. I mean all I can say, you know with respect to that is uh even if you just look at it as cynically as possible the fact that suppose she didn't mean it right suppose suppose Hillary Clinton would literally do anything in office to get re-elected, okay. Um, the factthat Hillary Clinton thought the best way to get elected was to run on a progressive platform and move to the the left in the general election should tell you that when she's being a Machiavellian political calculator, she's going to pass popular liberal programs. Right. Like so.

0:23:14 Thomas: Yeah Exactly right. Gosh I had this exact same argument with one of my friends which which is it was the, well, Democrats only do these things like gay marriage and all that when it's politically expedient. It's like, yes, we want the party in there that does those things when it would be great to have a perfect party that does all the perfect things at the perfect time ahead of everybody. Sure, we can always agree that's the best possible, but we get a choice between Democrat and Republican. Do we want a party that is trying to always roll these things backwards or the party that's going to go along with it when enough people agree with them

0:23:39 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:14 Andrew: Yeah, exactly right. So look at the key provision again. We're going to talk about everything that was in the 1994 crime bill, which, by the way, again, I don't want to be on record as defending the 1994 criminal. There are a lot of horrible things in that bill. But to say that that is the exemplar of why you shouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton is mind boggling to me. So I want to look in specifically on the COPS program, and that is capital C-O-P-S, which stands for Community Oriented Policing Services, which was given a large grant in the 94 crime bill in order to hire 100,000 new police officers in cities throughout the United States. And Michael Wood described that he said, look, I was a cop in Baltimore. I was an occupier in a foreign city. And so I want to talk a little bit about what community-oriented policing is. And most critically,

0:24:25 Thomas: Right right yeah not

0:25:14 Andrew: Following the Bernie Sanders mold, I want to talk about the alternative to community policing that was exceptionally common at this time in the mid-90s and was the subject of debate going on and was what the Republican alternative to the 1994 crime bill was. Okay, so first, um, you probably know this, there are no federal police agents, right, or officers. Um, police are state and local hires.

0:25:43 Thomas: Even like border patrol people or just

0:25:45 Andrew: Well that again they're not general purpose police right yeah you you you have ice agents agents. You have FBI agents. Right.

0:25:47 Thomas: Not okay okay no normal like cops yeah okay gotcha

0:25:53 Andrew: But you don't have federal Cops. OK, so part of why this was a popular program with Democrats is because you were talking about giving money to cities through the COPS program to hire more cops. And Democrats tend to like that because because most cities are democratic. Right. So you're giving money from the federal government to political enclaves that line up with you politically. Right?

0:25:54 Thomas: Hmm

0:26:24 Andrew: Think of all of the major cities in the United States. Almost all of them are heavily democratic, even when they're in, you know, very conservative areas. Right, like that. The reason why Georgia is arguably a purple state has to do with Atlanta. Right. The rest of Georgia is, you know, 85, 15 Republican. But Atlanta is overwhelmingly Democratic. It's even true in Illinois. Right? Like Chicago is

0:26:18 Thomas: All right right right right common

0:26:49 Andrew: So Democratic that it balances out all of the rural areas of Illinois. Illinois.

0:26:54 Thomas: Theme in pretty much every state and and to varying degrees I suppose us yeah

0:26:56 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. Tend to like programs that fund because, again, you're going to have to fund, you know, states and localities. They tend to, like, programs that give disproportionately more more money to smaller cities and that also give them military style weapons, because, again, Republican donors tend to be, Lockheed Martin tend to tend to be contractors that build these kinds of weapons. So that's why during the George W. Bush administration, you saw like, you knows, Poughkeepsie getting, you now, grants for all of this military style hardware. Right. Because you're targeting smaller cities and And you're beefing it up with your political supporters and donors.

0:27:46 Andrew: And, and that's just, you know, that's just sort of the reality of the of the interaction. So what is community oriented policing? It says we want police to be out and active and a part of the community and visible while they're on the streets so that instead of being viewed as, foreign occupying army, they come to be seen on, like, a day-to-day basis as, oh, yeah, here, I've got a buy-in. I'm a part of this community as well. Can certainly debate how well that's worked. You can use that same logic to say when we send our soldiers and they're standing on the streets in Mosul, the people never came to greet them as liberators or view them as part of the community.

0:28:35 Andrew: But that was at least the theory. So the idea was instead of just dispatching police out to to investigate crimes after they happen, that one of the ways we're going to curb crime is by putting lots more police officers on the street and having them be an active part of the community before crimes happen so that they're integrated and a part of this city. I would contrast that with the theory that was articulated in the Republican alternative to to which Bernie Sanders was replying, that was called the Broken Windows theory of crime. And this was Rudy Giuliani's signature accomplishment as mayor of New York City prior to 9/11, right?

0:29:24 Andrew: And so the broken windows theory of crime in a nutshell. It began with a psychological experiment in the 1970s. So a psychologist took two different cars, parked one in what used to be a pretty crime-heavy area. I'm not I am not going to try and go into New York City geography and expose myself to ridicule. But, I think I think near the Bronx, left the other car in Palo Alto, California, right in Silicon Valley. Both cars had their license plates removed and both cars. He put the hood up. OK. And then they observed to see what happened.

0:30:10 Andrew: So within 10 minutes of the experiment beginning, all of a sudden, criminals in New York City began vandalizing the car that was left. Right. They came out. They stripped off all of the tires and then they stripped it for parts. Then they smashed windows and they started engaging in just random destruction. Right. Like graffiti spray painted all over, like, you know, what was left of the car. And the kind of thing you would see, I mean, it became a part of the sort of cultural landscape in a negative way that you saw in any, you know, 80s movie set in New York. Right.

0:30:49 Andrew: Where you come back and and the car has been vandalized.

0:30:49 Thomas: Cars on blocks it's always yeah that's the punchline to every scene

0:30:53 Andrew: Right. Yep. The Palo Alto car sat there for a week and nobody did anything to it. And so then what the sociologist did was break the windows on the car that was parked in Palo Alto, California, um, with a sledgehammer, right, like I mean, make the car look abandoned, uh, and when they did that, then vandals came out and parted out the car and stole all the stuff and vandalized it just like they did in New York. Okay, um, and so that study, uh, led to a really, really influential article in The Atlantic Magazine. It was written by, uh, George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The conclusion that Kelling and Wilson came to was, uh, that once some kind of the social order breaks down, it doesn't matter what the underlying characteristics are. It can be a wealthy, low crime area, it can be a poor, high crime area. Once you have that outward symbol, symbol that nothing is being done to enforce the law, then everything goes to hell. Right.

0:32:01 Andrew: And so they called their theory the broken windows theory. And I should I should add parenthetically, George Kelling later came to sort of regret having this associated with his name for reasons that that are going to be that are gonna be clear. It

0:32:00 Thomas: Yeah because it wasn't it then the plan was okay, just over-police the hell out of every tiny thing, right? Wasn't that the right

0:32:20 Andrew: Was It was, it was broader than that, right? It was not just over police it was jump down with both boots on minor crime that is, that gives the outward appearance of chaos, disorder, decay, and that will then send the message that no, no, you know, this is a neighborhood in which, uh, you know, the the law is enforced. You don't get away with that stuff here.

0:32:50 Andrew: And that was going to reduce the crime rate. And, that's what Rudy Giuliani put into effect in New York City, right? And, he explicitly called out the philosophy by name as broken windows, okay? And so, So what Giuliani did was instructed New York City police to do things like aggressively ticket kids who jump the turnstiles going into the subways in New York City to aggressively ticket. I don't, I don't know if you've ever experienced the phenomenon of squeegee kids. Yeah,

0:32:50 Thomas: Where

0:33:30 Andrew: We're actually.

0:33:30 Thomas: They just try to clean your window when you're stopped or Yeah.

0:33:31 Andrew: Yeah, right. Yeah. You're stopped at an intersection. They come up. They get a dirty rag. They spray some water on your windshield and they kind of extort you into giving them a couple bucks or you get left with, you know, dirty rag water on Your windshield right and so seriously like part of Giuliani's crime measures were to arrest squeegee kids to arrest turnstile jumpers. And to police out the outward tolerated instances of social disorder in order to stop preemptively what they thought would stop more serious crime later, later on, loitering, smoking in public. Um, and I, and I have to tell you, in in New York City, if the only thing you care about is the overall crime rate, um, that method worked, it

0:33:37 Thomas: Make your window more dirty than it was. Yeah.

0:33:54 Thomas: Yeah well So, since I messed up the promo code of last week's ad, SeriousPod30 is the proper promo code over at HelloFresh, I've got to talk to you some more about HelloFresh, but that's okay, because I love doing it. I genuinely enjoy HelloFresh, I love the deliveries, I love the ingredients, they're always the freshest, they're always right at your door when you need them. HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking more fun so you can focus on the whole experience, not just the final plate. I've said before I do love the cooking experience with Lydia. It's something fun to do together, and it makes it simple so even someone like me with no cooking skill whatsoever can do it. HelloFresh creates a new delicious recipe with step-by-step instructions designed to take around 30 minutes, and it's for everybody.

0:35:17 Thomas: It's from novices to seasoned home cooks. Right now, HelloFresh is offering light summer meals and has just introduced breakfast options. Ooh, that's cool. I'm gonna have to try that out. And, as always, it is less than $10 a meal. It's healthy food. It's great ingredients. It's It's something that I would not be able to do without the help of HelloFresh. I would be try- eating the same bland meals every day. So go to HelloFresh.com, enter the promo code SeriousPod30. And try it out! Get $30 off your first week of HelloFresh!

0:35:56 Thomas: Okay, I was gonna, I was gonna chime in, you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but what's interesting is, I remember in college, my freshman year, which was 2004 or 5, I think, in an economics class, I learned about this very thing, there's like a little blurb in a textbook, and it said like, oh yeah, this was responsible for, you know, decrease in the crime rate, and then later on I thought, I thought the consensus moved more toward, oh, actually, they did some research and it really just had to do with Roe v. Wade and the fact that there weren't as many unwanted pregnancies in that time as a result of Roe vs. Wade. And that actually more thoroughly explains the crime decrease and this broken windows thing was just kind of a coincidence. That was my understanding now. Am I wrong on that?

0:36:28 Andrew: Yeah it's always difficult to try and generalize from a tiny snapshot in time but but But, yeah, you you you stepped on a little bit of the punch line of the story, which is cool.

0:36:53 Thomas: Oh, sorry.

0:36:53 Andrew: I'm used to it. But, yeah. Today, in looking back at the confluence of a lot of different factors, there it is far from agreed that the broken windows theory was what primarily reduced the crime rate in New York. And in fact, himself has looked at the long term longitudinal studies that include a lot of the factors that you've talked about and conceded that there's no direct linear relationship between heavy over policing of minor crimes and a reduction in violent crime rate. And in fact, Kelling said in response to critics, I should give a little more context.

0:37:42 Andrew: In addition to sort of the larger sociological factors, there's also just general reversion to the mean, right? Right. Like in 1993, when this was implemented, implemented was, you know, the highest spike of violent crime in New York City in the past 20 years. Well, you Know, the definition of a spike is you plot it on a graph, right? Like it's a sharp up and a sharp down immediately afterwards. Right. So, you can see that over time in major urban areas, right, like you see, it looks like a row of shark's teeth, right. Right. It doesn't look like a smooth curve upwards. And Kelling's response Was not to Say, oh, yeah, no, we can definitely prove that his response was this.

0:38:28 Andrew: He said, even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world. Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime. So I that's a fairly hefty concession. Right.

0:38:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:51 Andrew: And the actual consequence, the actual legacy of broken windows is one that can unambiguously describe, which is the burden of the enforcement of these minor laws. Turnstile jumpers squeegee kids public vandalism public smoking loitering were overwhelmingly poor african-american Residents in New York City, right? The rate of complaints in in in Rudy Giuliani's first term as mayor of New York City, the rate of uh complaints about police abuse filed against police officers went up by a factor of eight and a half. Okay, so yeah, is not just to be expected, right? Like in in some ways, I mean, I expect if you know if we if we had Rudy Giuliani, uh, you know, if he were still coherent, uh, and and we could put him under truth serum, right? Like, like he might describe that as a feature rather than a bug.

0:39:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:50 Andrew: Right? Like, yeah, we take these, you know, inner city kids, huh?

0:39:50 Thomas: Yeah. Well, of course they're going to complain. We're cracking down on crime or something.

0:39:57 Andrew: Yeah. Is the adverse consequence of the broken windows model of crime. What it is, is number one, you're vesting substantial discretion in the hands of police officers, right? They now get to, you decide what is a disorder-inducing offense. Number two, the theory itself violates kind of our basic norms of justice of thinking, right? Like, you Know, we've talked about this on opening arguments, but the theory underlying the Eighth Amendment is often one of proportionality, right, like the The idea is that your your punishment should roughly match up with the crime. And now to have, you know, all of a sudden police visibly spending their efforts, quote, over punishing, but but harshly punishing small crimes in order to deter, you know, future serious crimes. Right. Like there there is a level to which that even if you're a law and order kind of guy, you You know, to which when you say like when you ask the average person who says I'm pro law and order, like usually what they mean is, you know, lock up murderers and rapists. And, you Know, they don't mean lock up turnstile jumpers.

0:40:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:41:15 Andrew: You know that they may be willing to take it as a as a side effect. Go ahead.

0:41:15 Thomas: Well, maybe. Yeah, it depends. So you got on this by, this was sort of what the alternative to the crime bill was, are you saying? Like there was two theories. One was this, and then the other was just having more police presence in cities. Is that what it was?

0:41:26 Andrew: Right. Right. Right. This was the alternative. And the criticism of the crime bill that was leveled by Newt Gingrich was, yeah, the liberal mamby-pamby crime bill put all these community police officers on the streets to go out and be friends. No, these are thugs. We've got to have fixed broken windows. We have to follow the James Q. Wilson model. And we have to empower police to go out and crack down on evidence of gang-related crime and minor misdemeanors in order to create safer environments and deter future violent crime. Right. That was it was not just I'm not just kind of picking a minor, debate in the criminological community.

0:42:22 Andrew: This was explicitly offered as the alternative. And this is why. Right. I mean, I said this. I, you know I I mean it right like uh it's why I rushed to the defense of bernie sanders in Defending the crime bill right because if you look at it and go holy cow the the public uh alternative to community policing of which for which there is substantial support right for which Rudy Giuliani, Republican, got re-elected as mayor in New York by a staggering margin right. In 1997, Rudy Giuliani ran on the broken windows theory, you know, having cleaned up New York. He had a 70% approval rating and and he won 59 to 41, making him the first Republican mayor to be reelected in New York in almost 60 years. Right. So, you know, this is not something that was just kind of like, oh, there's one lone nut who's out there. This was a major policy that had a Republican been president in the 1990s, there was no doubt in my mind would have been made the law of the land, would have made federal policy and put into law. And so, you know, this kind

0:42:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:43:42 Andrew: Of goes back.

0:43:40 Thomas: So are you sayings this was a Compromise? Compromised? Are we back on the trolley problem? Because I imagine people on Michael A. Wood Jr.'s side would say something like, "Why are we doing this at all?" But is this the kind of thing where you're saying the crime bill was a result of trying to moderate that right-wing approach of broken windows theory?

0:43:42 Andrew: Yeah.

0:44:04 Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it predated broken windows theory, was bubbling up at the time that the crime bill was bubbling up. And so was a general I mean, like I said, in New York, it was the peak of the spike of violent crime, was a general national sense that violent crime was out of control. Right. Like that's where the the statements and the, you know, the one speech that that Hillary Clinton gave that used the word super predator. Right. That's where that came from. Right, that did not come from Democrats or Hillary Clinton demonizing, young inner city African-Americans. It came from a general political zeitgeist that, hey, this is a problem, right, like we have violence in our inner cities is out of control, and how do we fix it. And the two competing theories that were advanced to quote fix it were community-oriented policing, uh, and the broken windows theory. So yeah, I mean, it was, in in my view, it was indirect direct competition.

0:45:09 Andrew: And it, you know, it outlined that, in my view, that dovetails with sort of my thesis from this entire episode, right, which is to say, in a general election, particularly in a an off year gubernatorial general election. Not, in My view, it is sufficient to sort of say, I'm going to either get 100% of what I want, or I'm I'm going to stay home. In my view, you have to compare the policies of a flawed candidate with the alternative.

0:45:43 Thomas: Right. And I think this might be something you're going to go more into to on OA, but there's definitely other things in the bill that aren't good, right?

0:45:50 Andrew: Oh, there's a lot of horrible stuff in the bill. And on Opening arguments, we are going to go through the sort of sad way that this sausage got made, right? Because in many ways, this crime bill is an interesting political study. It is one of the the last um kind of true compromise bills uh to be passed, right? And so um, it's a, in my view, it's really really interesting philosophical question uh to ask whether it is worth accepting, right? The way legislation used to get passed is, um, a Republican president, in order to win some Democratic votes, would pass a largely Republican bill, would throw some Democratic stuff in there, right? Like that's how politics got done in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s.

0:45:53 Thomas: Right, right, right, right.

0:46:40 Andrew: And as a Democratic candidate, you know, in uh, you know, let's say it's 90, it's it's 1984, and you're a Democratic senator, and uh, that Ronald Reagan has not yet won 49 states. Uh, but you know, you, you can read Gallup polls as well as anybody. And you realize, like, okay, Reagan won overwhelmingly in 1980. He's on a pace to be overwhelmingly elected, reelected in 1984. Uh, what am I going to do in this eight year time period? Right. Am I going to just say, not going to influence legislation at all? Or am I going to try and accept, like, I get it, I don't want to go along with these Republican proposals. But, you know, am I gonna try and get half a loaf to be better than nothing?

0:47:26 Andrew: Right? Am I gonna try and salvage something out of these bills, in order to, in order to show my constituents that I'm still, you know, fighting for them in an environment that is, you know, sort of overwhelmingly pro Republican. Um, and that used to be the way in which, in which bills got done. I have a breakdown. This, so the 1994 crime bill had, um, the following components that, that I would, I would break down, for uh, liberals, it contained the violence against women act, which has been renewed, uh? The racial justice out of the bill. It contained $33 billion worth of preventative spending programs, some of which we're going to talk about on opening arguments. And it contained a comprehensive ban on many different assault weapons, right?

0:48:18 Andrew: So I want to point this out. Eventually, this bill passed the the Senate, 94 to 5, and only two Republicans voted against it. So I want you to think about this. 20 years ago, Bill Clinton got all but two Republicans to vote for a bill that banned outright the possession of certain firearms. OK, so, you know, I'm not I can't tell you how politically you ought to come out in terms of the compromise. All I can do is draw the contrast. Right. And say, could you imagine it? Right. Like, let's we, you know, imagine that we are successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams of organizing in 2018. And we start to take back the Senate and we take back The House and we get even bigger majorities in 2020 and bring in President Elizabeth Warren.

0:49:10 Andrew: Is there any — do you think there's any scenario under which Elizabeth Warren could get a bill passed with Republican support that banned any kind of assault weapon? I mean, we know school shootings don't won't do that. Right. So, you know. So those were the liberal programs in the bill. Then there were two programs that, in my view, meant to kind of target centrist Democrats and and conservatives. That was a large number. It increased. It added about 50 new federal crimes for which the federal death penalty would apply. And it created the sex offender registry. And also, I would add to I guess I should say a third. And Also, there was a tremendous amount of funding for new prisons, right? Not not privatized prisons, but federal dollars being spent to build new prisons. And those three kind of programs were all sort of targeted at conservative Democrats, law and order type, you know, moderate to conservative Republicans.

0:49:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:17 Andrew: And then finally, there was one program in the bill that was designed to appeal to right wing loons, and that was eliminating the right of inmates to qualify for Pell Grants. Right. And and that's terrible social engineering, because, you know, we know that one of the strongest ways to prevent recidivism is to allow inmates to actually learn useful skills while in prison and when they get out so that they don't have to return to a life of crime. They can actually be integrated back into society. But nevertheless, you know, in terms of appealing to and bringing in the wingnut contingent, or at least some of it, the political sausage making calculus that was undertaken was we're going to strip away Pell grants to inmates. Mates. And that's it, right? That's, that's the composition. That's the composition of the bill.

0:51:05 Thomas: It, so I in terms of the original arguments, I suppose, could you still say that there is a real worry about Republicans moving the center to the right all the time, and this is part of that, and And how do you feel about that compromising attitude that Bill Clinton had? But I guess the point would be, did we have reason to believe Hillary would be exactly the same? Or was that just kind of an assumption everybody made?

0:51:39 Andrew: Yeah. I, I would, again, I think I've given pretty good evidence on the show that, uh, we should not have expected Hillary Clinton to do that, that the, that the political environment in 2016 was very, very different than the political environment in 1992. Um, I, researched the Overton Window argument because it is something that is intuitively very persuasive to me. Um, and the result that I found was really, really counterintuitive, and I cannot wait to tell you about it on tomorrow's Opening Arguments.

0:52:10 Thomas: Oh, wow. What a teaser. All right. So we're going to cover that too. Okay. All right. So, but before I let you go, I definitely wanted to ask you about what Michael A. Wood Jr. said about Obama would have been able to make police. I think, what did he say? Uh, have, have them report, do mandatory reporting on every, uh, death, uh, stuff like that. Like he, he seemed to assume that Obama had the power to do this stuff. And he was a cop. He studies this now. I had reason to believe him, but I found it confusing that Obama wouldn't have just done this if it was something he could have done.

0:53:08 Andrew: Uh, police officers, uh, in, in particularly in minority communities. So my response To that is twofold first, I would point out the original omnibus crime bill. Uh, the, uh crime bill of 1994 has a provision, uh that requires requires the U.S. Department of Justice to issue reports on, quote, the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. This is section where I link the bill. This is Section 210402, Data on Use of Excessive Force. And it says, Attorney General, Subsection A, Attorney General to Collect. The Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers. And then B, you know, limitation may only be used for research or statistical purposes, may not reveal the identity of the victim or any law enforcement officer.

0:53:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:01 Andrew: That's pretty standard. And C, annual summary, the attorney general shall publish an annual summary of the data acquired under the section.

0:54:09 Thomas: So is this happening then?

0:54:11 Andrew: Those reports have never been been issued um and so You know, yeah, could you have, uh, an executive order that requires the Attorney General to comply with those reports? You, you could do that, so, uh, but, but I doubt, uh, again, you know, I found this through, you know, my research of reading through this, uh, enormous, uh, 300 page crime bill. Um, I don't, I didn't know that, that, that was sort of common political knowledge. Um. But, but in, in fairness, yeah.

0:54:12 Thomas: Wow. How does that work? Well hold on hold on two separate things so so why did that never happen if that was in the crime bill and and why can't somebody sue somebody about that hmm

0:54:50 Andrew: Well, the reason you can't sue, we've talked about this on OA. The reason you Can't Sue is because this section does not create a private right of action, right? It's a, it's the same reason like I can't Sue when, you you know, for, you know violations of, any kind of civil order right like we have we've talked about this before There's... there's a comprehensive bill board ban in downtown Baltimore. If somebody puts up a billboard tomorrow, right? I don't have the right to sue them even though they've broken the law and even though I kind of live nearby, right.

Like, maybe if I'm directly under the billboard and it is, you know, obstructing the view out out of my house, then maybe I'm aggrieved by it or whatever, but but you have to, uh, you have to have a cause of action that is granted to you by the statute to to sue under it, um, and and here, uh, it, it, you would have to show, uh, who's responsible for enforcing this provision because there's no enforcement specified in the section, um, again, uh, could you issue an an executive order requiring the Attorney General to do that, to comply with it? You could, if they declined to do that. I don't know what your remedy would be as the president. Right. If they failed to gather data. So

0:54:58 Thomas: Yeah I don't is there a

0:56:06 Andrew: I don't know.

0:56:06 Thomas: I don' this is confusing to me, so is there some other way that, like, is this not the right route for requiring them to to to give data, or is there's some better way than Congress passing a bill? I don't get it.

0:56:18 Andrew: No, this is absolutely the best way. And it is because I want to clarify what I think was a little bit of, I don't know if A. Wood intended for this to be, to come out in this way. But remember that, as we said at the outset, there's no federal police. The police are state and local police. So what you don't want to do is require the state and local police to submit the data. And the reason that you don't, which is in my view, how it came out. And again, it's an offhanded comment. So I don't want to I don't want to be uncharitable to Michael. But the federal government cannot demand that state cops do anything right. Right. What they can do is they can do one of two things with respect to state reporting.

0:57:06 Andrew: They can either a have provisions in place for voluntary reporting, which is which an analog of that would be on opening arguments. We discussed the I.C.E. statutes and regulations that came under fire in Trump's sanctuary cities executive That, you know, local law enforcement officials are encouraged to turn over data regarding of illegal aliens or suspected illegal aliens to ICE, but they're not required to. And in fact, one of the definitions of, quote, sanctuary city are jurisdictions that decline voluntarily to turn over that data. OK, so that's your first mechanism.

0:57:29 Thomas: Right.

0:57:57 Thomas: And it was a question of Trump trying to punish those cities if he could.

0:58:01 Andrew: Right. Exactly. Yeah. He wants to retaliate against those cities. Not that the executive order did that. I mean, you know, we sort of went through with the executive or did and didn't do. But but yeah. So, number one, you have you can voluntarily ask them to comply. And number two, what you can do that, you know, what You just said sort of dovetails into it is you can to withhold funds if they don't comply, right? You could say, oh, if you don't engage in this reporting requirement, then we're going to withhold the following funds to your city. And you can understand why a Democratic president wouldn't want to do that.

0:58:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:58:39 Andrew: Right. Like in when you're Barack Obama, the Republicans control the Congress. You're you're in what year four or five, six now of sequestration. Right there hasn't been a budget. There's very little federal dollars going from the federal government to localities anyway. Anyway, these big inner cities are your people, right? They're your political base. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta. Right. Like these are major Democratic sources. And so, you know, could Obama have said, yeah, well, we're going to withhold federal funds if you don't engage in X reporting on, you know, violent crime abuses by police officers. He could have done that. I don't know that I blame him for not doing that.

0:59:24 Andrew: Right. Like that would be, you piling on, know, on top of everything that had been done from a budgetary standpoint to hurt Democrats in the first place. So, you that's sort of how I evaluate that.

0:59:34 Thomas: Well, plus it would be interesting if your opinion is that he should have done that, but Trump has no right to do it the other way. I donno. That'd be an interesting thing.

0:59:43 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, I look, like you do, I mean, and and and I've said this, uh, in in another context, because there's been, uh, some recent, uh, there was a recent article about, um, Trump possibly going after Chicago for failure to report as a sanctuary city and withholding federal dollars that are, are, you know, federal aid dollars that are coming into Chicago. And, you know, that's that's a traditional way in which, uh, presidents attempt to, uh, use leverage over, uh, state and local governments where they can't regulate them directly. So, you, is it's a viable tactic, I want to be completely fair, uh, but I don't know that, you know, it's the tactic that you want to to encourage President Obama to use when sort of staring down a Republican Congress?

1:00:33 Thomas: Right, right. So, so what is our best, I suppose, way forward. And maybe the last thing I want to ask is the actual harm that is Jeff Sessions, if you have any insight into what he's doing. Because again, Michael's point of view was that, well, he's not any worse really than what was already happening under Obama. And if you have any examples of your opinion on why that may or may not be true, let me know.

1:00:59 Andrew: Well, you know, look, the easiest one off the top of my head is the one we just covered on opening arguments. Right. Which was to say there was massive outcry and an outrage across the country about abuses by local police agents, by local police officers and departments in civil asset forfeiture that they were calling in. And so as a result of local and state abuses, lots of states passed laws that prevented their police departments from just taking your stuff.

1:01:35 Thomas: Yeah.

1:01:35 Andrew: And so in response, these police departments would call the federal government and encourage adoptive forfeiture. Right. The government would come in and seize it pursuant to the federal standards where, of course, we're not going to get any laws because our government is irretrievably broken, uh, and um, and then often, you know, lend or lease back uh the stuff that was stolen to the police departments, the state and local police departments that were done in the first place. And uh, as we tried to say on the show, uh, that continued under Obama's first term. Uh, it continued under uh part of Obama second term, but in January of 2015, Attorney General Eric Holder issued the memo that we talked about on O.A. that ended the practice of adoptive forfeitures by the U.S. government.

1:01:43 Thomas: Oh, right. Right. Right. Mind

1:02:22 Andrew: And Jeff Sessions repealed that memo. He can do that. Right. And so, you know, that is again, you know, I

1:02:31 Thomas: Blown. But you're telling me there might be a difference between Jeff Sessions and Eric Holder.

1:02:36 Andrew: I didn't expect to have to answer that question. Right? I think it is beyond You know, let's let's do another. You know we we talked about this in last week's opening arguments. It's you know it's not directly related to crime. But you know we have the New York Times reported that the Trump administration has issued internal directives to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, to investigate and potentially sue colleges and universities that are insufficiently nice to white people, right?

1:03:16 Thomas: Yeah.

1:03:16 Andrew: And that is, even if that goes nowhere, and we talked about the risks that maybe that will go somewhere, even if that goes anywhere, that's still resources, right, like there's only so much that the Civil Rights Division can do, and if their lawyers are off looking for schools that practice affirmative action, you know, they're not not using those resources in other civil rights cases. And so, you know, you have to ask yourself, which civil rights cases do you think Jeff Sessions wants to wants to intervene in versus which civil rights cases do You think Eric Holder wanted to intervene? And you know that, That, to me, you know, you and I have both been on the front lines in this sort of false equivalency narratives, but but I don't, it is, I heard the astonishment in your voice when when when Michael said, you know, I don't think it would be any different if if Hillary Clinton were president. I mean, I just, you, in my view, it is objectively true that in an era where we have such legislative deadlock, that that power then devolves to executive branch through administrative agencies.

And that's why we have these sort of dueling executive orders. And and there are real consequences. I mean, you know, you want to talk about breaking up communities like the, you know, Executive Order 13780, the revised Muslim ban, like that's in effect, that's breaking up community right now, as

1:03:24 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:04:38 Andrew: We speak, and there is no I don't I do not know what it.

1:04:38 Thomas: Well, and I don't know why I saved it for the end with Michael A. Wood Jr. Maybe it's just because I was so blown away by a lot of the stuff. But I mean, even if all that you just said, like even if somehow that all weren't true and he was right that it was roughly equal. The Supreme Court has to throw it over the top for having a Democrat in there, right? I mean, isn't there just irretrievable harm that can be done by getting a bunch of 18-year-old Scalia clones in the court forever ruining our country?

1:05:08 Andrew: Well, and and in addition to that, I mean, I think we have presented pretty good know, circumstantial evidence that that Anthony Kennedy was moving left in 2016. And, you know, that so it's in other words, it's not just the that, you know, the two justice swing, right? When you replace Merrick Garland with Neil Gorsuch, right, that's that's minus one to the side of sanity and plus one to the side of right wing judicial activism. But it's also a pretty significant swing on on Kennedy as well. And, you know. We have not yet begun to discuss the, relative you ages of the rest of the, you know same wing of the court right now. Uh, but,

1:05:27 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Plus one evil yeah yeah wait

1:06:00 Andrew: Uh, you Know, I mean, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is what 93. Like I yes, I agree with you.

1:06:03 Thomas: She's really that old I'm sorry, I was I was googling, she's 84, I was like there's no way she's that old yeah okay she's

1:06:08 Andrew: Really? Man, gosh, because my grandmother is 93 and Ruth, Ruth, Bader, Ginsburg looks like she's two decades older than that but uh that's where I came up with the 93 from, yeah look and Ruth let's let me let me be very clear for purposes of this recording, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is much smarter than I am right now like uh you know so I'd

1:06:21 Thomas: 94, she's yeah yeah well I'll try to get her on the show that'd

1:06:30 Andrew: That'd be good I will I will give up my seat if you can get uh uh the RBG show so

1:06:32 Thomas: Be a good get yeah yeah yeah I I don't get it I mean it is such a a weird thing. And I really want to say that, like you said at the start of the show, there's a lot about what Michael's doing that I totally agree with, and I don't want to diminish that. And I also agree that there are many times that Democrats throughout history have fallen short on this issue, on mass incarceration. They've been complicit in some of these things, but there's... there's this weird, I really think it's this human flaw that we have to be absolutist about stuff, to be black and white about stuff. It's like either they're the same. It's, like, some people just have this attitude that it's either they are both evil. Like, as long as you can find some things wrong with the Democrats, they are both the same, and so we have to tear it all down or not.

1:06:36 Andrew: Yeah

1:07:23 Thomas: And it's, like, it's just not true. Like, you can look at the relative differences in these parties, you can see a lot of flaws on your side which are totally valid, and still realize, put it in perspective and realize there's a lot that is way better about the Democrats than Republicans, and that is vital, like, it's vital progress that would be lost if, uh, and will be lost

1:07:44 Andrew: Well, and and and to to piggyback on Michael on said, you could recognize that Obamacare is the plan that Mitt Romney put into effect in Massachusetts, the plan that was authored by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, and is probably to the right of the plan that Richard Nixon wanted to pass in 1972. You can recognize all of those things and still say It's worth fighting to save that. Right. Like, look, I agree with you. It is bonkers that our society is we have somehow connected up health care to employment. Right. That there's no logical linkage there. You know, and in fact, in a capitalist economy, you would expect there to be the least amount of linkage. Right. Like we want to encourage people to have mobility in the job market.

I've made this argument a lot that like if it weren't for the fact that, you know, my wife has health care coverage with FINRA, I couldn't have or it would have been much more difficult for me to start my Firm. Right. Like I was able to go off and do this on my own because a major chunk of potential future expenses for myself and my family was covered in another way. So, you know, look, so there is a neoliberal justification for universal health care, right? Like the neoliberal certification is we want to be job creators. The way to encourage small businesses to form and to be the engines of economic growth is to take health care off the table for individuals who are looking to start companies. Right. That's not a hard message to get out. I don't know why people are making that message.

1:07:45 Thomas: Right yeah right well and it's not but yeah I was gonna say it's Not even the message that that Hillary or anybody was getting out. It's because, you know, that's even further right than what Hillary was doing. Like, to go to your point that she wasn't being this, like, neocon kind of middle of the road, trying to move right in the general. I mean, she presented it as everyone should have health care, you now, because it's a good in itself.

1:09:24 Andrew: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And look, I guess what I'm trying to say sort of as we kind of bring this around, don't if a Democrat is out there, if J. Random Necktie, the ex-Goldman Sachs executive who is the Democratic congressional nominee in Idaho's congressional district in 2018, if he wants to make a pitch for uh universal health care the argument that I just made right as

1:10:16 Thomas: That appeals to conservatives more, you mean? Like, yeah,

1:10:17 Andrew: Yeah yeah that people on our side should not be out there vilifying and demonizing that guy and saying, see, this is all that we shouldn't say, yeah right? Welcome into the tent, like, let's bring you over and get you, get a vote for, uh, for, fixing the system and making society better off. And, you I worry about it because I, we know that there was a huge critical mass of Pepe the frog heads who love Donald Trump and they will vote in 2018. And if we're fractured, right, like, you know, the lesson that 2016, from start to finish, of should have shown us was, uh, when one side is unified and one side is fractured, the unified side will almost always win.

So I, I'm, I, it's why I, I contacted you and wanted to do this show. It is the number one thing that I speak about and will continue to speak about, uh, particularly as we go into next year. Like, I, you know, I know it's not going to get me Jordan Peterson money, but if I can be the guy of, hey, suck it up and compromise to get this done, I get that that's not a sexy and cool thing to say. But like, you know, God, we've seen it happen. We've seen the alternative. So

1:10:28 Thomas: Yeah.

1:11:06 Thomas: Well, on that note, thanks, Andrew, for coming on and giving a very worthy response to that episode. I think I've learned a lot. I'm looking forward to over over on Opening Arguments, your podcast. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

1:11:48 Andrew: The Thomas's Thomas's Second Chance podcast. Thank you

1:11:55 Thomas: I've met that second chance in all things. That's true. It's my second chance podcast. I'm excited to learn more about the crime bill and to hear about your research into the horseshoe theory. I didn't know that was going to be a part of it. So I'm very excited to learn more. Check that out. It should be tomorrow, assuming the scheduling all works out. Should be tomorrow over on Opening Arguments. You can hear much more Andrew and thanks for coming on.

1:12:18 Andrew: So much, Thomas.

1:12:31 Thomas: And that's it for today's episode. Thanks, Andrew, for coming on, explaining that history to us, and you're going to get even more of that on tomorrow's episode of Opening Arguments. Now, mind you, it's not the full episode, because we do segments there, so it's the middle segment is the follow-up to today. But definitely hop on over to Opening Arguments and enjoy that follow-up, and of course, enjoy the show week in, week out. It's a great show. All right, with that said, I'll see you on Thursday to talk about, well, we'll see, whatever is freshest on this... Incredible, bizarre, impossible to keep up with news cycle, probably. But I'll see you then, thanks for listening.