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Podcast: (Un)packing the Supreme Court with Yale Law's Emily Bazelon
Listen: The Supreme Court, one of the three branches of government that makes up this country's democratic system of checks and balances, doesn't have a military. As a result, when its justices make a ruling, they are counting on a strong sense of public trust to ensure their decisions are carried out. Not all countries on this planet can count on that public trust, and with popular support for the Court plummeting to record lows, some experts fear that the United States may soon be unable to as well.
So as SCOTUS gears up for what is sure to be a blockbuster June of Court rulings, a flurry of ethical questions surrounding the bench--as well as its hard-right turn under a conservative supermajority--have made the prospect of a potential Constitutional crisis more plausible than ever before. And then comes the 2024 election. On the podcast this week, Yale Law legal expert and co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest joins Ian Bremmer to discuss the Court's many headwinds ahead, as well as the specific cases slated to be decided in the coming weeks.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.TRANSCRIPT: (UN)packing the Supreme Court with Yale's Emily Bazelon
Emily Bazelon:
It's really all about appearance, but that's important. Judges are supposed to appear unimpeachable, so that they don't get impeached.
Ian Bremmer:
Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about the highest court in the land, the court of last resort, the Supreme Court of the United States. It's been one year since SCOTUS struck down Roe versus Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after 50 years of precedent. In the months following the decision, public confidence in the court fell to an all time low, thanks to the conservative super majority quickly moving US law away from the political center, multiple controversies surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and a refusal to address questions about Justice's ethical standards. Has the Supreme Court become overly politicized? Can public faith be restored in a deeply partisan America? And what major rulings are still to come? This session, I'm talking with Yale Law School legal expert, New York Times Magazine columnist and co-host of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, Emily Bazelon. Let's get to it.
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The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company places clients needs first by providing responsive, relevant and customized solutions. Visit Firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. An endangered porpoise, a fish whose bladder fetches tens of thousands of dollars on the black market, the highly desirable and delicious, Colossal Shrimp. Travel to the Gulf of California on a new season of The Catch, a podcast from Foreign Policy and the Walton Family Foundation. You'll hear about the tension local fishermen face in providing for their families and protecting marine habitats and your role in returning balance to the environment. Follow and listen to The Catch wherever you get your podcasts.
Ian Bremmer:
Emily Bazelon, thanks so much for joining me again.
Emily Bazelon:
Thanks for having me.
Ian Bremmer:
Great. The last time you were with me about a year ago, I think it was, we talked of course a lot about the Dobbs decision and specifically that so much was going to matter in terms of where we were going to see major restrictions and what kind of restrictions we'd see state by state. Have you been surprised by the politics around this over the last 12 months?
Emily Bazelon:
I have been surprised. So here's what's not surprising. 14 conservative states have banned abortion, more or less, and there are more of severe restrictions and bans pending in a few other states. I think we expected that. What has been surprising have been the ballot initiatives that have uniformly so far protected abortion rights in the six states where they have been up for a vote, including in Kansas-
Ian Bremmer:
A very conservative state, very red state.
Emily Bazelon:
Exactly. And Montana and Michigan, a famously purple state and Kentucky actually also another red state. So I think what we're seeing here is that when abortion is put to voters directly, one issue they can concentrate on, they are more interested in protecting abortion rights than I think a lot of people on the right and the left expected.
Ian Bremmer:
Is this because these individual referenda were overly restrictive compared to, I mean, what Roe v. Wade originally was protecting?
Emily Bazelon:
Yes, but what's interesting about the ballot initiatives is some of them protect abortion rights up to viability. And so if abortion opponents thought they would succeed by making voters focus on second trimester abortions as opposed to first trimester abortions, which are much more common, that strategy does not seem to be working so far for them at the ballot box.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, the vast majority of people that are getting abortions are getting abortions early when they find out about it. I mean, that's well over 90%, 95%. That's my understanding, right?
Emily Bazelon:
Yes, it's about 90% in the first trimester. You're absolutely right. As a political issue, sometimes second trimester abortions get emphasized by opponents as a way of making it seem as if that's more common than it really is.
Ian Bremmer:
I mean, we're talking so much of the politics here actually has very little to do with the rights that people experience. Is that correct?
Emily Bazelon:
Yes. I think that's true. The other thing that we should talk about are abortion pills.
Ian Bremmer:
I was just about to go there. So it's been a huge issue for the corporations that are offering or not offering them in red and blue states. It's been a huge issue for the legality and whether or not they are meant to be legal in the entire country. Can you send them over state lines? Talk about the politics of that.
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. So abortion pills now account for more than half of the abortions in the United States and I think before Roe was overturned, people thought that women seeking abortions would fly to New York. It turns out that while they're willing to drive quite far distances, people who are struggling to get abortions, people of color, people without a lot of money, people who need to line up childcare, take time off their jobs. Women in those positions are more interested in staying home to have abortions that they manage themselves than I think a lot of clinics and pro-choice organizations expected.
And so what we're seeing is that people are finding a way to get pills. It's like a giant legal gray area. Into states with bans or restrictions, a lot of the pills so far are coming from countries like India, which means they can take a while to get here. But there's an increasing effort on the part of blue states to pass shield laws that try to protect abortion providers in their states. So a doctor in New York who prescribes pills across state lines into a state like Texas, that is going to raise a lot of unanswered legal questions going forward. But it's an important potential avenue of access.
Ian Bremmer:
Are there potential legal repercussions for a doctor in a state where it is legal to provide abortion pills, providing them to someone who clearly is in a state where that would be illegal?
Emily Bazelon:
Well, states like Massachusetts are trying to do their best to say, "We will not cooperate. If a state with an abortion ban wants to prosecute one of our doctors for prescribing pills across state lines, we're not going to extradite her. We're not going to let you use our court system to go after her medical license or to sue her." Whether that works in the end, whether states can oppose each other's efforts to enforce laws like that, that's a big open question.
Ian Bremmer:
Would that doctor then face liability if they decided to go to the state? I mean, so in other words, you're in New York, you're just not going to that state anymore.
Emily Bazelon:
Right. I think the doctors who are planning to do this, and there are several of them, they are not planning to travel to states where there could be a warrant for their arrest. And so that ability to travel is something they are willing to give up.
Ian Bremmer:
Is that new?
Emily Bazelon:
This is new.
Ian Bremmer:
Has that ever happened before where people from individual states in the US just couldn't travel to other states because they'd suddenly get arrested?
Emily Bazelon:
I always hesitate to say nothing has ever happened before, but to see this kind of conflict over state law, you have to go back to the Civil War.
Ian Bremmer:
This is like Putin going to South Africa and the International Criminal Court. I mean, it feels like that's what we're talking about here.
Emily Bazelon:
Right. And what we're talking about, I think it bottom here is a real clash over law and morality. So a state like Texas is saying that abortion is murder and the state of New York is saying this is a human right. We want our abortion providers to be able to help women in states like Texas. That's such a fundamental clash. That's what we're seeing here.
Ian Bremmer:
Even so, I mean there have been people that have been very strongly on both sides of this issue for time immemorial in the United States, but the idea that suddenly a basic legal system architecture of the US just doesn't apply in various states and that a person's ability to stay out of jail would depend on what state they're in. That seems a little bit nutty for 2023.
Emily Bazelon:
It's really surprising. Usually when Texas wants to extradite you and you're somewhere else, that other states says, "Here."
Ian Bremmer:
It's going to extradite you. Yeah.
Emily Bazelon:
They hand you over. And so yes, you're talking about a big disruption to American law. One thing that's important to note is that in almost every state, it is legal to self-administer an abortion. So that means the person receiving the pills and taking them is not subject to criminal charges. And that's just important for thinking about who's taking risks here and how this all lands.
Ian Bremmer:
That's even true in states that have banned abortion as a legal right.
Emily Bazelon:
Yes. There are only a couple of exceptions to that in all of the 50 states and it's not totally clear how those laws apply.
Ian Bremmer:
So the doctors are the ones that are actually facing the obligation and the liability?
Emily Bazelon:
That's what it looks like. Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
That's interesting. Why is it that the states that consider abortion to truly be a murder would actually say, "We're not going to prosecute the person who's committing the murder."
Emily Bazelon:
It's a great question. I think it has to do with the evolution of the movement to oppose abortion. That movement has gone from blaming women and trying to punish them to trying to present itself as protecting them and their health and rights. Now, whether you think that's true or not, if you're going that way and you say, "We're the protectors of women," then you don't subject them to criminal charges, you say it's those bad abortion providers who we're going to go after on your behalf.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, that's not very Handmaid's Tale?
Emily Bazelon:
It's not directly Handmaid's Tale, it's true. And one of the reasons for that is otherwise you get accused of being the Handmaid's Tale.
Ian Bremmer:
Well glad we cleared that up. Okay, so let's move on to something a lot easier, which is the ethics of the Supreme Court. I have certainly been surprised to see Clarence Thomas so heavily on our bingo cards right now. Talk a little bit about what is at stake with this case?
Emily Bazelon:
So Clarence Thomas is really testing a very poor design at the Supreme Court, which is that the justices themselves are not subject to any code of judicial ethics. That's a bad design. Nobody should be above the law and have no oversight, but that is the way things have worked out. Federal judges on lower courts are subject to this code, but not the Supreme Court Justices themselves. There aren't any ways to police whether they recuse themselves from a case they might have an interest in, it's up them. In this case, what we're seeing is evidence that Justice Thomas took lavish gifts, travel, paying for the private school of a child whose guardian he was, from this one friend, a super rich guy named Harlan Crow. And when you look at the Ethics and Government Act, which is a law that Congress passed in the '70s, it looks like Thomas violated that law because you're supposed to disclose these kinds of gifts and you're not supposed to take them in the first place.
Ian Bremmer:
It violated it irrespective of the fact that there isn't a code of ethics for the Justices?
Emily Bazelon:
Exactly. Yes. This is a law, but the court has never acknowledged that the Supreme Court is subject to this particular law. They, it seems, might want to argue, "Well, we're a separate branch. You can't tell us what to do." That's a unresolved question. In order to resolve it-
Ian Bremmer:
It would ultimately have to be resolved by the Supreme Court, I take it?
Emily Bazelon:
Exactly. That's a problem.
Ian Bremmer:
That's a problem. It's turtles all the way up.
Emily Bazelon:
And to get started even figuring this out, the Biden administration would have to prosecute or bring some kind of action against one of the Justices, which has its whole own awkwardness to it. So there's really this problem here and the predicament that Justice Thomas had gotten the court in you might think would motivate Chief Justice Roberts, the court has his name on it, it's the Roberts Court, might motivate him to try to get the Justices together over the summer to come up with some way of binding themselves to some set of rules to address this problem. Because there's just really no question that the American public is losing faith in the Supreme Court. You look at its public approval ratings, the measures of-
Ian Bremmer:
Lowest in history.
Emily Bazelon:
Yes, lowest in history. People do not have faith that this is a non-political institution and that's what courts are supposed to be, at least in theory, they're supposed to be doing something called law that's separate from politics.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, it would've seemed to me, again, taking a view outside that a Supreme Court, which made a partisan decision of the outcome of a presidential election in the United States would have suffered more backlash in how partisan, how political it was perceived to be. And here, of course, talking about Bush versus Gore, than one where say, Judge Thomas doesn't bother to disclose the fact that he got some sweet deals from some random billionaire. What am I missing here?
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah, it's another great question. Well, you do see people's approval of the court sink after Bush versus Gore, but you're right, then you see it recover. The institution as a whole weathered that crisis. I think what's happening now is that there is a strong conservative majority that's going really far to the right on abortion, on voting rights, on other issues. All of its members were appointed by Republican presidents. The liberals on the other side, all appointed by Democrats. So you have partisan politics on the court, partisan affiliation lining up with ideology and you have these huge decisions in areas like abortion or access to guns that Americans really care about. So then when you layer on top of that, what looks like certainly the appearance of impropriety from Justice Thomas, some idea potentially of corruption, whether that's true or not, that kind of tarnish on the court, I think it gets to people in a particular way because the decisions are lining up with this crisis in the courts.
Ian Bremmer:
Now there's no remote finding of corruption at this point at all? There's no evidence of that at this point?
Emily Bazelon:
No. It's really all about appearance. But that's important, judges are supposed to appear unimpeachable so that they don't get impeached. Their integrity has to be really strong and pure and I think that's what's at issue here.
Ian Bremmer:
Is Thomas's wife part of this appearance thing? And is that fair in your view? I mean, we know that she was involved in trying to get people to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. And she also was being paid in part at some point by Harlan Crow. So yes, I think she is part of the story, especially because last year there was a case before the Supreme Court involving the investigation into the January 6th. What kind of access should prosecutors and investigators have to text messages from Trump's staff, including Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff?
Ian Bremmer:
Who Ginni Thomas was texting.
Emily Bazelon:
And Ginni Thomas was texting her. Justice Thomas was the only vote against allowing access to these text messages. Then we see the messages, we see Ginni Thomas's text, that seems like a classic case where a Justice would recuse himself but he didn't do that.
Ian Bremmer:
Should have recused himself because he voted to protect his wife.
Emily Bazelon:
I mean, he may or may not have known he was doing that, but just the way the whole thing played out adds to this cloud over him in a way that's really not helpful to the reputation of the court.
Ian Bremmer:
Is it remotely possible to, I mean, appoint nonpartisan Justices in this environment? I mean, Justices used to get votes once they got through from pretty much everybody. That doesn't happen anymore.
Emily Bazelon:
You're right. I mean, there was this period, at least from the '40s to say the '80s or '90s, where lots of senators voted routinely for Supreme Court appointees, whether or not they were put forward by their own party. That era is lost to us now. And you can give a lot of explanations for that, Republicans like to blame the hearings about Robert Bork, in which Bork, who was this very conservative Reagan appointee, went down along partisan lines. Democrats like to say, "Well, conservatives really politicized the court by putting up nominees like Bork, by being so focused on tying the court to things like abortion rights, which have this sharp partisan divide in the United States." Whatever the reasons for it, we are at this extremely politicized moment for Supreme Court appointments in which it's gotten hard to imagine a Senate that was in the opposition party to the President approving anybody.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the court aside from when you and I are talking, and I want to ask you, because you do more broadly, what does the United States lose? How much does it matter if the Supreme Court is seen to be just another partisan institution? So what are the implications?
Emily Bazelon:
So in the United States, if the Supreme Court is seriously out of step with the American public, it's fine for the American public to push back. The American public has a role to play in deciding what the Constitution means. In the end, this is a document that belongs to all of us and so democratic participation is key. And it doesn't matter if the court is out of step to the left or to the right, the public should be able to assert itself. The presidents who choose Supreme Court nominees, the senators who decide to confirm them, we elect those people. And so people's views of the court in the end should shape the court. That's how our system is set up.
There is a concern that internationally, the American Supreme Court has been a real symbol for a strong judiciary and that that is something other countries lack. We have a very strong, maybe too strong judiciary, but some other countries don't have strong enough judicial branches. And so when I talk to people who study constitutions in other countries, they worry that the diminishing reputation of the American Supreme Court could make people lose faith in courts elsewhere.
Ian Bremmer:
I also worry just what happens if Americans feel as if their courts have been captured by a small number of elites, by special interests, by people with money. I mean, we see already so many people believe that the regulatory system in the United States is captured by lobbies, by the private sector, by individuals with a lot of money, by corporations, and it makes people feel like the system is illegitimate. And do you think that is starting to happen with the feeling, with the perception of the Supreme Court? Is it that level?
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah, I think these things feed into each other actually because one of the things the court is doing is really policing the way federal agencies work, in a way that could give more power to corporate lobbyists. I think it depends, in your response to this, how much of an institutionalist you are. So for the Supreme Court Justices, they have a lot at stake in the vaunted, kind of Olympian image of the court. But if the court isn't living up to American's expectations, then Americans should be able to express that.
Ian Bremmer:
So I want to get to this recent case around the EPA, which is related to whether or not the Supreme Court is going to limit the ability of existing institutions to make regulations and inserting itself around wetlands, for example, arrest. Talk a little bit about the importance of this case.
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. Well, first of all, you're right. We have a Supreme Court that is very skeptical of the power of federal agencies to enforce and make regulations. And of course, that is itself a stance that tends to give corporations more power because the EPA is the one saying to various companies, "You can't pollute our water or our air."
Ian Bremmer:
Unless the EPA is run by people that actually come from those industries and then say, "We'd like to facilitate that."
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. Usually at least the career people, the people who are there forever at the EPA are not beholden, are not captured in the same way. And if you don't have the EPA making the rules, then you're going to have lobbyists influencing Congress directly. So probably having the EPA have more power is less capturing, though nothing's perfect, of course. So in this particular case, a couple in Idaho sued and the court has really cut back in response to this lawsuit on how much the EPA can regulate wetlands. The technical dispute in the case is about the word adjoining in the Clean Water Act. When is a wetland adjoining a US river or ocean, whatever? The court said that they had to be right up next to each other. But the upshot of this is that millions of acres that have been regulated up till now won't be anymore. And so when you think about the record of the Clean Water Act, which has been really important for preserving and cleaning up Americans waterways and rivers, now the EPA has a lot less reach to do that.
Ian Bremmer:
And is that a trend that we are seeing more broadly? Where are the other places that we're seeing the Supreme Court really infringe on the ability of American federal agencies to do their job, to regulate, to oversee?
Emily Bazelon:
Last year, the Supreme Court told the EPA it had much less power to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. So what you're seeing so far are a lot of environmental consequences. There are upcoming lawsuits about the Food and Drug Administration, for example, that could broaden the court's skepticism about federal agencies.
Ian Bremmer:
So we also have these cases involving education right now, one on affirmative action, another on student loans. Hot button issues in both cases, where are they heading?
Emily Bazelon:
Well, it looked at oral argument like the Supreme Court was ready to end race-based affirmative action. These are lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina and the Justices seemed skeptical that race-based affirmative action is consistent with, the conservative Justices, with their view of the Constitution as being totally race blind. And there're also issues in that case about the way in which Asian American applicants have been treated, especially by Harvard.
Ian Bremmer:
Whose numbers have been kept down at Harvard compared to the scores that that they are receiving?
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. Exactly. Not compared to the number of Asian Americans in the country, but compared to their SAT scores. Yes, for sure.
Ian Bremmer:
And the student loan issue?
Emily Bazelon:
And there's also a challenge to President Biden's Loan Forgiveness Program that's before the court and there is a boring but important technical problem with the plaintiff's case. Missouri is suing on behalf of its higher education loan authority saying that it will lose a lot of money because of the Loan Forgiveness. Not clear that that's really true at all or whether Missouri can just sue on behalf of this agency, which is not itself named in the suit. On the merits, I think President Biden's side has a challenge, which is that Biden forgave loans under the Heroes Act that was originally passed to address a national emergency after 9/11, it's been extended. The idea is that the loan forgiveness is necessary for pandemic relief.
Ian Bremmer:
Which is now over.
Emily Bazelon:
Right. The National Emergency for COVID ended in May. The Biden administration says, "Well, there can still be bad financial impacts on people rolling out from the pandemic." We'll see whether the court accepts that explanation.
Ian Bremmer:
As we head towards 2024 and an election that is almost certain to have the same level or more polarization concerns about the way it's going to be managed, oversight state by state. Talk about some of the things we should be watching out for in terms of the role of the judiciary?
Emily Bazelon:
Yeah. Well, another thing the Supreme Court is skeptical of is the reach of the Voting Rights Act. And so this term, there is a case in Alabama where Alabama did redistricting in a way that people argue dilutes the power of black and Latino voters to elect the candidate of their choice. If the court says that Alabama's map is fine, then you're just going to see less enforcement of an important part of the Voting Rights Act. And then there's another case from North Carolina also about the reach of the Voting Rights Act that is introducing a really extreme theory called the Independent State Legislature Theory, that in theory could give legislatures the power to overturn elections or set rules in a way where they get to pick the winner in a presidential election. It did not seem at oral argument that the Justices, even the conservative Justices, really had the stomach for the most extreme version of this Independent State Legislature Theory. But we don't have a decision in that North Carolina case yet, so that is still up for grabs.
Ian Bremmer:
Is there a useful distinction to be made here? I mean, I understand that the majority of the court is conservative in temperament and ideology and their belief about the role of founding documents in the US political system. They've been appointed by these political players, but it's not like they are working together to accomplish a political goal. In other words, there's no reason to believe the judiciary is not independent even though it's political. Is that a correct statement?
Emily Bazelon:
I think that's fair. I think when you look back historically, what you see is the conservative movement really energized about a few social issues, abortion, access to guns, religious liberties. And then you see a great deal of success in that movement propelling people onto the Supreme Court and the lower courts when Republicans are in power who are really interested in those issues and deeply committed to them. And that's politics. And it's the way in which politics in our constitutional system can shape American law. It doesn't mean the people who get onto the court aren't thinking independently, it just means that they come from this world the same way if liberals were pushing really hard for their people would be happening on the left.
Ian Bremmer:
Which they were in the war in court, for example, right?
Emily Bazelon:
Yes.
Ian Bremmer:
Historically?
Emily Bazelon:
Yes. Historically.
Ian Bremmer:
I say this only because I want people to see or sense the difference between a political leaning court in the United States, one way or the other, and a court in Turkey or a court in Hungary or God forbid, a court in Russia, which of course has no independence whatsoever, but actually is simply an arm of an authoritarian government. That is not what we are remotely talking about in the United States.
Emily Bazelon:
Exactly. And it's an important distinction and you can see it in the court's responses to the 2020 election challenges from former President Trump. If the court was merely an instrument of a strong man, they would've gone along with those challenges, which had very little evidence behind them.
Ian Bremmer:
And they all failed.
Emily Bazelon:
They all failed. The court said, "No." It's not interested in saying, "We are a tool of President Trump the way the constitutional court in Hungary has unfortunately become a tool of Viktor Orbán."
Ian Bremmer:
So can we say, not a fact free zone? The independence of the judiciary in that regard continues to be strong.
Emily Bazelon:
Yes. I think that's absolutely true. It's also true that on these big questions about what equality means or liberty, how that affects things like abortion or access to guns or religion, there's a lot of wiggle room here. And so you can be a perfectly independent judge or justice and come to a really different conclusion based on your ideological beliefs and values. And I think that's what we see in these big cases where you see conservatives dividing from liberals.
Ian Bremmer:
Well, thanks for helping explain that. Emily Bazelon, great to see you.
Emily Bazelon:
Thanks so much for having me.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Well, why don't you check us out at Gzeromedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter? It's called GZERO Daily.
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The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant and customized solutions. Visit Firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. An endangered porpoise, a fish whose bladder fetches tens of thousands of dollars on the black market, the highly desirable and delicious, Colossal Shrimp. Travel to the Gulf of California on a new season of The Catch, a podcast from Foreign Policy and the Walton Family Foundation. You'll hear about the tension local fishermen face in providing for their families and protecting marine habitats and your role in returning balance to the environment. Follow and listen to The Catch wherever you get your podcasts.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
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Quick Take: The election is serious, but don't panic
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody, Ian Bremmer here. It's Monday and a quick take for you right before the election. That's right. Don't panic. All of you remembering Douglas Adams, the great Douglas Adams, for those people that back in high school, this is the kind of book that you knew people that read the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. You said, "That's probably a normal human being a little dorky, but isn't going to kill me," where the people that were all about Atlas shrugged and the Fountainhead, those were people that were problematic later in life. That's just my own personal view. Maybe a little Tolkien. That was also fine. A little Hobbit. I'm friendly that way, but this is the message I really want people to keep in mind in the next 24, 48, 72 hours, the next week, two, three weeks.
It's going to be tough out there. People are going nuts. They're going crazy. The media is making it worse. The social media is making it worse, and it's going to be a tough time for the United States. But to be clear, we are not on the brink of becoming an authoritarian state. We are not about to be a Banana Republic. We are not on the verge of collapse. Instead, we are very divided. A lot of people are hurting. A lot of people are angry, and we have a whole bunch of people in very different information bubbles. They don't talk to each other, engage with each other, and that is a problem. That makes the country feel so much less purposeful, mission-oriented, communal, civic, all the things that we want. If you've got a flag, if you want to be united under that flag, you have to care about all the people in the country, not just the ones that agree with you politically.
Look, this election matters. It matters a lot. It matters more than usual. I'm the one that usually says, "American elections, whoever the president is ultimately doesn't impact your life that much." This time, it does, and it does largely because there is such a big crisis right now. If you get Biden and if you get a majority Democrat in Senate, you're going to have $3 trillion of stimulus come February or March. That's massive for a new American president. If it's a divided Congress or if Trump wins, it's going to be a lot less. So, there is a very big, a significant gap. The markets are responding too. It's going to matter a lot to the people, to the States, the municipalities, right? That does really matter.
Also, if there's a majority democratic Senate, you will end the filibuster... Heck, Washington DC will probably become the 51st state. You will have the Voter Rights Act. You'll probably redo the census again because it was cut short. These are significant impacts for a long time in the United States, not just measured in years, but decades of impact and trajectory.
So, I absolutely think Biden versus Trump is very meaningful. If Biden comes in, my taxes are going up a lot. Certainly, to Obama levels, but probably much more than that, and that's going to affect a lot of wealthy Americans. The regulatory environment's going to change a lot, and if you're in a corporate that's affected by that, that's very significant. So I don't want to say that Biden versus Trump doesn't matter. It's just the idea that Biden versus Trump is somehow this end of the world for the United States is not the case.
Now, what do we think is going to happen in this election? Well, the polls are telling you very clearly Biden is ahead by a lot. He's been ahead consistently by a lot for a long time. It's been very stable. There's been no closing of that gap the way there was between Hillary and Trump. So that means whether you look at FiveThirtyEight or you look at RealClearPolitics... I personally, we've got to deal with Ipsos and we do a blend of all of the different swing state polls, we look at the national polls. It's very clear that it's 85, 90% likely looking at the polls that Trump is going to lose.
But that doesn't mean that Trump is going to lose. That means that if you have seven, eight, nine, 10 elections, one of those elections at least Trump is going to win. That is an expected outcome of a multiple series. I just wish that more people don't think that the polls are wrong when you have an outcome that's unlikely. It just means that you only have a one shot at something that you'd like a larger number for.
Well, not that we wouldn't want that from a personal perspective, because it would drive everyone truly batshit, but personally, that's what it means. So there is a real potential that Trump is the President in a legitimate election, a legitimately counted election, one that Biden would need to concede for, and Trump would lead for four more years. If that happens, we'll be okay. We'll get through it, right? Again, it's going to drive some people insane, but the reality is that the United States will continue to persist as a damaged, but nonetheless, robust country, economy, even representative democracy.
On the other hand, it's much more likely... it's vastly more likely that Biden wins. What is very unusual about this election is that even in a significant Biden win, the amount of contestation is going to be very high. The willingness of Trump to say that he has won, if he has not, is pretty significant. If he decides to do that and say it's rigged and call his supporters out onto the streets, angry that the democratic establishment is trying steal his rightfully won election, I think you're going to see a lot of violence.
We've already seen some of that with lots of convoys of Trump supporters in trucks and cars. I haven't seen that they've been armed significantly, though you saw some of that in Portland, but easily plausible going forward. I've seen a lot of them obscuring license plates, because if you're shutting down traffic or shutting down a bridge, doing something illegal, they're trying to avoid responsibility for that illegality. That's not exactly conscientious objectionism. But if Trump were to directly call for his supporters to go out in the streets because they're going to take the election from him, I think that's going to be a level of demonstrations and violence in the country that will certainly rival anything we've seen since '68, in other words, anything in my lifetime. That's a problem.
That's why you see so many cities with streets and having all the storefronts getting boarded up, and that's being true in big urban areas all over the place, including right downstairs on Fifth Avenue from my office right now. Of course, when that happens, a lot of people opportunistically just come out to engage in looting and in violence and rioting. So, I think that's real. I think there's a very good chance that's going to happen, but I also think that it's not forever.
In fact, it's not even for a long time. Then eventually, we get to a new president and the ability of Trump to contest, to obscure, to create chaos is reasonably high. The ability to actually subvert the outcome is a very different story. Then it would have to be very close indeed, and even then for him to steal the presidency, no. For him to contest the presidency and create a constitutional crisis that would be like 1876 where you need a political outcome, that is indeed feasible if it's really close. That, we will have a good sense of whether that could happen or not in just over 30... say 30 hours plus.
So we'll get there. Don't panic stick with us. GZERO Media will be talking to you all the way through this. Be good, everybody. I'll talk to you soon.
Quick Take: One week until the US election
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. This is the last week before elections, have only lasted for two years, cost billions of dollars. We're sick of it. We're ready. We're ready to get past this. What do we think is going to happen?
Well, let's be clear. Biden is way ahead, and it's hard for incumbents to lose. They tended to win in the United States. They need to be unpopular and unlucky to lose, but Trump does seem to be checking both of those boxes. He's never been enormously popular. He has a pretty narrow base that is very strongly supportive of him, some 38 to 42% back and forth, but a narrow band, which has been pretty consistent for most of them the last four years, but he's also been massively unlucky. Unlucky, how?
Well, the timing of the election, compared to coronavirus. I mean, it's getting colder, and people are going back inside, and the second wave of coronavirus, including a White House superspreader event and the vice president's aides testing positive in reasonable number, all of that happening right before the election, weeks before the election. Trump still does well on the economy. In fact, in general polls, he's been ahead of Biden pretty consistently, though narrowly, on who would handle the economy better. He does reasonably well on law and order issues, certainly amongst Republicans and some independents. He does reasonably even in a bunch of foreign policy issues like on trade, the new NAFTA, the U.S.-South Korea deal, the Middle East plans and agreements diplomacy, the breakthroughs that have happened, a bunch of China technology stuff, getting the allies on board.
But the big crisis, the largest crisis of my lifetime, of our lifetimes is coronavirus. 225,000 Americans dead, millions and millions having gotten the disease, largest number of cases on record right now, one week before the election. Hospitalization's going up, and even mortality. The rates overall have been going down, but the numbers of people dying is going up again and will almost certainly continue to right through election day. Trump wants us to be talking about anything but coronavirus because that's the issue that he polls the worst on, and it's what we're all talking about. The ability of Trump to actually win this election is a hell of a lot lower than it normally would have been, and 2020 is not like 2016.
A couple of additional things. First, getting through the vote itself. If you think about polling error, it is certainly possible that Trump can win. If there's polling error that's largely in his favor in swing states, it's a lot closer than the national polls are, about 5.6 points. It did look like Biden was ahead in Texas. Now it looks like Trump's ahead two, three, maybe even four points there. We've seen that in some of the southern swing states too.
If there's a decent amount of polling error in Trump's favor, he can win narrowly. If he wins narrowly or if it is close in Biden's favor, then it's pretty clear that this is going to be a process, a long process where both sides contest it. I mean, Trump is going to say he wins almost irrespective of what happens, and if it's close, and Biden actually has a larger number of electoral votes, but Trump says, "No, I'm contesting it. This was rigged," you could end up with a constitutional crisis.
It's very important to understand that the willingness of GOP members to go along with President Trump just as they did in the impeachment, only Romney voting to convict every other Republican Senator supporting Trump on what was a fairly open-and-shut case that he was using the power of the presidency to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, it was pretty clear they had him to rights on that, but the GOP was not going to respond to it. It was a political decision. It was not based on a view of how American rule of law is supposed to be handled.
I can easily see the same thing happening if it is close in this election, even if it's close and legitimately it looks like Biden actually won. The potential for constitutional crisis, if it's narrow, is real. I think under any surface, Trump says, "I won, and that was rigged, and it's not reasonable," if it's close. Certainly, the media, his supporters on social media and the GOP in Congress likely to pull out every stop to attempt to effectively contest that.
Now, what about if it's a landslide for Biden, which is certainly plausible, a little bit of polling error in Biden's favor, and he wins really big, and then Trump can say whatever he wants, it doesn't matter. The Republicans aren't with them. They throw them under the bus. They say, "That's it. We move on." McConnell already gotten his 6-3 Supreme Court, and from his perspective, that's a big legacy win. He's not going anywhere. They lick their wounds. They move longer-term.
But if Biden does win by a landslide, we should remember how we got here. Trump won the 2016 election. He won it legitimately. He is the president. He is our president. He is my president, despite the fact that he is clearly one of the least fit-for-office people to ever seek that position, and even after 225,000 people have died of coronavirus, even after he has governed for four years and shown that he is incapable of actually not only not unifying the country, but incapable of responding effectively to the worst crisis of our lifetimes, this is something that would sink almost anyone that you can imagine, he still gets roughly 40% approval.
That's because people don't think America works for them. That's because the working class, and particularly, the white working class in the United States, has been treated like cannon fodder for decades, whether it's the result of trade policies that have depleted their ranks and not found ways for them to experience upward mobility and the American dream, whether it's immigration with lots of others coming into the United States to have their land of opportunity, but no one's taken care of the Americans already here, whether it's wars that have been fought on the back of the poorest Americans for decades and we've lost those wars and taking care of those and their families that have given all? Now, under Obama and Biden as vice-president, you had eight years of focus on progressive social policy, which, I mean, there's lots of good things that come out of that, but if you are a white member of the working class rural area in the United States, you view that nobody cares about you anymore.
I mean, there is structural racism in the United States. Blacks absolutely have the worst situation in the country, and they have the least amount of wealth, but at least, from their perspective, there is more opportunity. The absolute situation is the worst, but their trajectory has been improving. The white working class, undereducated, has a lousy... I mean, they're doing better overall than blacks and Hispanics in the U.S., but they're not doing well. They've been stagnant for decades, and the trajectory is actually getting worse. Indeed, life expectancy is going down. Suicide rates are going up. Opioid addiction is going up. I mean, these are people who are not just angry because they're all racist, they're angry because everyone's been lying to them.
There's no question. There is an enormous amount of racism in the United States, not just structural racism in the system, but individual racism that exists in many of these communities to a great and disturbing degree, just as it exists in other communities in the United States, but I will tell you that everyone in my feed that hates Trump, almost everyone I see in social media are also saying that these people are all racist and that it's unacceptable to vote for him.
I will not say that. I think it's pretty clear that when you're talking about 40% of the population voting for Trump back in 2016 and just about that in 2020, it is not just about them. It's about us. It's about how we could get to the place where so many Americans would feel that the system was indeed so rigged against them, and they're right. Trump is not fixing it for them, but you understand how angry they are.
I look at Borat and this movie that is out now, Sacha Baron Cohen, and I see how it does well in part because it's fine to laugh at the idiots in the middle of the country, the flyover states, the uneducated. We're responsible for that. I don't think it's okay to punch down. I think you have to reach out and help your fellow Americans, and when they're hurting and when they're angry and even when they say and do things that are unacceptable, realizing that those of us that are in a vastly better position and have done so little to help them, it is unacceptable for us to say it's their fault.
I know so many people in the United States on the left who strongly oppose stereotyping of blacks, of Hispanics, of Muslims, but they would think nothing of mocking rural working class whites, of laughing at them. This must end because if we don't learn those lessons, if we don't understand that's how we got Trump after a massive Biden win, then populism in the United States and racism in the United States and extremism in the United States is going to get much, much worse. These people are going to suffer so much worse in 2021 and 2022 unless we get our act together on the back of coronavirus with digital transformation, the knowledge economy doing fine, and so many of the jobs remaining for these people just going away. If that happens, the next time they vote someone in, it's not going to be someone as incompetent as Trump, and that's going to be much more dangerous to the American system that I hope we all still believe in.
Thanks a lot for listening. I'll talk to you all real soon.