S1 BONUS: The Master Planners’ Election (With Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse)

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The level. Welcome everybody to our special bonus live event. The master planter's election is recalling it. It's going to be a conversation with myself, Senator Sheldon. White House about this election, and I should add, after Senator White House and I talk about

the master plan and how it's affecting the election, we're going to also open it up to questions about the master plan series. At the end of the series, hopefully everyone's listened to the series or at least parts of it. So, we're going to take questions from you to the master plan reporters who reported out the series. It feels like the perfect time to have everyone with us right now.

Just as we've wrapped up the first season of Master Plan, this season, if you've listened to the season,

you can tell we put a ton of work into it, but really proud of it. And it came out at exactly the right time, right in the middle of an election dominated by billionaires dominated by master planners. Anyone who hasn't yet listened, the full season is now available to stream, to listen to, to download on your podcast, Tap, you can find it at YouTube and your podcast app.

Just search Master Plan in your podcast app. So here is Senator White House. Thank you so much for being here, Senator White House, to really appreciate it. I have to say in introducing you, having now reported this series, spent almost two years on this series, I feel like I know what you personally because we've followed your work.

So closely in this, and I should mention, Senator White House has a terrific book about a lot of these topics called the scheme, which I encourage everybody to read.

So I'll just throw it to you, the first question that we have for you.

The 2024 election is shaping up to be the most expensive in history. You've run in a lot of elections, you've watched American politics for a long time.

“How different is what we're experiencing now than what we've experienced before?”

Is it more the same or has something changed? But it has changed dramatically, there didn't use to be superpacks. Now you can't run for a president without having one. You used to know who was behind advertising. Now, phony front groups intermediate so that the ad says that this was brought to you by

Rhode Islanders for peace and puppies and prosperity, but nobody knows who's really behind it.

It's a shell, maybe only a mail drop, and it used to be that if you were a very powerful

corporate special interest, let's say the CEO of a big oil and gas company, you could do some money from your corporate pack, $10,000, but everybody would be disclosed to give to that corporate pack, and you could maybe round up 50 of your top executives to each max out to somebody for, let's say, it was $4,200 the time, so 50 times $4,000, you raise 200 grand.

Now, you can write a $20 million check, you can drop it through a phony front group, and you can blast into a political race with serious negative advertising, which you can actually borrow from the candidate's website, they can put, you know, usable stuff up for you, and

and then, of course, there's no point in doing that if the candidate doesn't know, so

you find one of 10 million possible ways to let the candidate know, and the people who are

left out are the fourth estate, the press, who are supposed to be monitoring our political behavior, and the general public, the citizen of the people who are supposed to ultimately to be adjudicating our political behavior, the other ones who don't know what's going on.

“What would you say to those who look out at the current election and say, hey, wait a minute?”

I see Elon Musk right on the stage. I've read stories about billionaire, he's funding this or that candidate, this or that super PAC, the problem isn't that we don't know, Elon Musk has made clear that he is bankrolling Donald Trump's election bid, right?

So I guess the question is, is like, with billionaires so out front now, I think that's

kind of in some ways what's changed, it's like they're right in our face now, how important like aren't they essentially self-disclosing? Some are. I mean, I think to a significant extent, Elon Musk is, but they're an awful lot who aren't. And there is an entire architecture of anonymity that did not exist before 2010 that has

sprung up to take advantage of the citizens' united decision and behind that architecture of anonymity are an awful lot of special interest folks who don't want you to know who they are.

“So I think Elon Musk is kind of the madman exception who loves the drama and the attention”

of being in the middle of things, watching his fat belly as he hopped up and down on the stage. You start up, I mean, this is not a guy who has, who's worried about attention for himself, but in some respects, that's a lot less dangerous than the complete wipeout of bipartisanship for instance on climate change that happened precisely in January of 2010 when the citizens

united decision came down and the fossil fuel industry was ready and somebody went to Mitch McConnell and said, "You wipeout bipartisanship on climate and we will give you unlimited amounts of money and will hide that it's us, so nobody can blame you for being hitched up with the polluters and it took years to figure that out." And even now we don't know the specifics of it, we just know generally the fossil fuel industry

paid Mitch McConnell to kill bipartisanship on climate and it worked and we lost 15 years of progress. My question is looking forward because I'm trying to preserve some hope that this will change that this immersion in the corruption that you've talked about and that we've reported on that will change.

I wonder if you think that let's use Elon Musk as an example, that Elon Musk's central role in this election is so in our face and there are other billionaires who are so in our face, I wonder if you think there could be after this election, depending on how the election goes, some kind of boomerang effect in which the corruption is so in our face that it

will create some kind of more of a critical mass to do something about it.

Or do you think alternately that the corruption is so in our face that it's just helping further normalize it and ignore us to it?

“Yeah, I can't really tell that's a really good question, I think it could go both ways.”

I can tell you what sort of baseline public-ish revulsion for this is and that is that when you poll people about political dark money, you get these unbelievable reactions. You get 80% revulsion, you get 90% if the question is formed sometimes in just the right way. You get high 80s numbers and districts that went for Trump and low 80s numbers and districts

that went for Biden. So it's not like it's Democrat issue. People generally, I think, are fed up. They're second. I think one of the reasons people are attracted to a Charlottesville like Trump is because

them.

They're lifted to the big dark money, look no further than climate legislation to prove

that point. So I'm hoping that at some point we put enough effort into getting rid of this damn dark money on the democratic side that people understand that there's a real difference between the two parties. There actually is a real difference between the two parties every 10%.

It's to get rid of dark money, every Republican votes to protect dark money. We do this like we do this maybe twice a decade. So nobody knows. So if you poll people and say, okay, you hate the hell out of dark money. You know it's corroding and corrupting our democracy.

“Who do you trust more to get rid of the damn stuff?”

And it's to toss up.

Yeah, I'm guessing it's to toss up because people see that the Democrats are not and I don't

think they can unilaterally disarm in a system like this. So they see, oh, well, dark money helps both sides. So you all must be both parties must be the same, which I totally agree. Both parties on this issue are absolutely 100% not the same period at end of story. And anyone who pretends they are as ridiculous.

I want to ask you looking forward, clearly, if Donald Trump wins the election, nothing is going to happen on this, probably things will get even worse if you look at project 2025. What he proposes for the federal election commission. If Kamala Harris wins the election, what is your big ask of a the next democratic administration

on this issue's set of issues?

“Are there have you gotten any commitments from a future democratic White House about what”

to do about this? And by the way, whether it's Supreme Court Ethics Reform or the Disclose Act or anything like what is your big ask, if you know, you go in there and they say, all right, what do you want?

Um, the big ask would be that we take, well, first of all, the big ask really only works

if we hit the trifecta. Right. Yeah. Um, I mean, it'll take some time, otherwise, once people understand the Democrats want to get rid of dark money and Republicans are protecting it, then it will become a more

operative distinction politically. And we can build pressure on Republicans to come over so that we can maybe try to work through a non trifecta universe or a filibuster universe. But setting that aside, if we hit the trifecta, then the big ask is that we line up the Senate Democrats and agree to find a way around the filibuster really to find a way around

the quorum call rule to be partly mentally technical about it and that we put into that bill, the really important stuff that we need to rebuild our democracy to put in the voting rights act that the Supreme Court took down to restore the reproductive rights that dobs took down to get rid of dark money, put the Supreme Court under an ethics code. We have a massive government reform package, and we pass that, and we let the Republicans

fight about it for a month for two months, you know, old school filibuster, get on your hind legs and complain about it on the Senate floor until you run out of breath. But at some point, you're done. And at some point, you then vote. And that's where we change the country back.

“Here's a question that I think about a lot, which is John McCain seems to me, it was”

the last politician in the Senate, really national politician, I mean, he's running for president, to really truly elevate campaign finance and these corruption issues to the center of the national political conversation. Yeah. I guess my question for you is, how was he able to do it?

What elements was he able to marshal that haven't been able to be marshaled as effectively since then? Boy, what a good question. I think that, you know, John and I were very close. I was the one senator who he asked to be a Paul Barra, for instance.

And we wrote a brief together to the Supreme Court after the citizens united in decision in the Montana case that followed it, in which we pointed out, hey, guys, when you said that all this new money or letting loose into politics was going to be transparent, that hasn't happened. That wasn't true.

When you said it was going to be independent of candidates, here are a half a dozen major

You were actually wrong in the predicates, the foundations of your decision. You were actually wrong in disputably wrong, you got to go back and fix it.

“And of course, they declined to do that because I think they had an ulterior motive in all”

of that at the Supreme Court. So, something unique, drove, John. Mitch McConnell is driven very differently. Mitch McConnell was driven by the notion that if he could break up restrictions on campaign finance, then huge amounts of special interest money would flow to the Republican

party, the natural home of big corporate special interest money.

And that would allow him to basically blow out and hold power against Democrats because he'd

be way quicker to get the big huge gobs of unlimited dark money that would be unleashed after his work was done at destroying the honesty of our campaigns.

“So they couldn't have been more opposite, those two.”

And what attracted the Republicans to follow Mitch was that it actually worked. The money did, in fact, pour in and they won races that they were predicted to lose because they had more money sooner than anybody ever had seen in politics before because the rules have changed and we didn't catch up quickly. How concerned should people be, and I'm summarizing questions that people are sending

us, how concerned should people be that on the Democratic side, there have been billionaire mega donors who seem to be making specific demands on the Democratic nominee, for instance, this, you know, the big question is, will a president Harris fire lean a con? What do you say to people who look at that and say, look, this feels just as bad or

similarly bad as what we see, you know, Donald Trump soliciting a billion dollars from

the oil industry in exchange for, you know, gutting environmental laws. What do you say about that? I say, yes, it absolutely is bad whether it's what are you going to do by crypto, right? Or are you going to make the AI guys bring their own clean energy, you can let them dunk everybody back into coal by loading their electric demand into some utility system that

can bear it. I mean, they're really basic questions. Could you keep who do you fire?

“And that's why I think you got to get rid of the damned stuff. That's why it's so toxic.”

And that's why we've been, I think, we haven't paid enough attention to our efforts, which should be persistent and constant to get rid of the damned stuff, because then what people will see is here Democrats trying to get rid of it, here Republicans trying to protect it. And that's an important distinction that helps us in elections. Instead, they see exactly what you just pointed out, which is here a billionaires giving to Democrats,

here a billionaires giving to Republicans. It's all a racket. Nobody's interested in me to hell with it. Let's get vote for the biggest disruptor. And that's why you end up with Charlotton criminal like Trump as a potential candidate for a potential next president. Short of repeal mad. Short of repealing citizens united, right? I mean, there's the push for a constitutional amendment overturned citizens united. The Roberts court's not going

to overturn citizens united on its own. Talk to us a bit about what can be done under what

we presume to be. And I know it always changes. But what we presume to be under the current

paradigm of the Supreme Court, and they, you know, again, they go out of their way to change paradigms and precedents all the time. But taking citizens united at its word, what can be done short of repealing citizens united? It's not three, four things. Yeah, we passed the disclose act. It's pretty simple. It says anybody gives more than 10 grand into a federal race has to identify who they really are. And unlike super PACs, which have to disclose who

the immediate donor is, namely the entity through whom the donation was last longer, you actually under the disclose act have to go back to the actual donor at the end of the day. You actually get back to the true like beneficial owner. And so you really can find out who is met meddling in our elections. And my belief, I haven't had a chance to test it, but my very strong belief, is that once you take the dark money aspect out of unlimited political

money, most of the unlimited political money goes away. Because let's say that somebody

industry and the pollution that they call us. So two things can happen one, they can

“run an ad against me telling Rhode Islanders that I'm a bum and allows in a crook that I'm”

no good that I'm rotten. And then at the end, they say, and this ad was brought to you by

marathon petroleum, in which case every Rhode Islander gets the joke. And I basically say,

hey, you guys want to keep running that ad, you're just actually kind of helping me with Rhode Islanders because they know what's going on here. Or marathon petroleum can longer that through some phony front group with a mail drop in a, you know, little boxing company in Kranston, Rhode Island called, let's say, Rhode Islanders for peace and puppies and prosperity. And nobody knows who the hell they are. That's actually happening

to me right now with funds coming through some creepy phony entity in Madison, Wisconsin

of all crazy places. So first of all, citizens don't get the joke, you know, we're

supposed to adjudicate as citizens are politics. We don't even know who the players are. So that's really disabling to our democracy. And then everybody gets, I think, irritated. Why the hell are these people on my television when I don't even know who they are? And they don't make a product or provide a service. It's just a front group. So it's demeaning to the public and to slap in the public space every time one of these phony ads comes

on. So I think if you can get rid of that and people are accountable for what they say,

“a lot of it goes away. One last question before you have to go, I want to, I want to,”

to you to give us a sense of how dark money connects to the inability to do the things in Congress that the public wants. And I asked this question because a colleague of yours told me at one point that part of the thing that a lot of people don't understand is that corruption and the influence of money is not what not only what lawmakers do, but what they don't do, what that he said, this person said that that these special interests often don't even

have to spend the money, they just have to shake the change in their pocket to threaten to spend money, which is what the House Corruption Systemically works. Just talk to us a little bit about, you know, people who don't understand how it works. So probably the best and clearest example is Congress's failure to pass significant climate legislation. If you go back to when I first got to the Senate in 2007, 2008 and 2009, those three years,

there were three different, very significant bipartisan climate bills being worked on in the Senate. And in 2008, a Republican Senator John McCain ran for president with a very legit climate platform. So there was exactly what you would expect them, a lot of attention and knowledge about climate, the Senate responding and the likelihood that a bipartisan bill would pass. All of that drop dead in January of 2010. All of that drop dead with

the Citizens United decision. We know from some of the information about Jenny Thomas, that the fossil fuel guys were preparing for that in advance of the decision. They kind of knew what was going to happen, I guess. And so they were setting up the 501C3s and the 501C4 mechanism to hide their hands. And it died like that. It was like a headshot. I mean, just fell. And we have not had bipartisanship on any serious piece of climate legislation since January

of 2010 for that reason. When we did the IRA stuff, we had to do that in a partisan bill pushed through the reconciliation process in the Senate. It has been just that bipartisanship didn't die, bipartisanship was killed by the fossil fuel industry with money. And now we're

“at a stage where I think we're in real planetary, we're on our way towards real planetary”

emergency that we could have forestalled if it weren't for the corruption of the fossil fuel

industry. And to your point, us not doing a thing on this because it was always easier

to wait for a day later. And you know, some of us get our best, try to point out that this

of it to really drive it home and make it a voting issue for people in the same way that

“we fail to drive the case home on dark money and make it a voting issue for people.”

It reminds me of my favorite scene in the movie, the old movie, the distinguished gentleman, the Yeti Murphy movie where any Murphy's at lunch with a lot of abuse talking about money

and he says, finally at the end, there's so much money in the system. How does anything get

done and the lobby is says to him, that's the beauty of it. It doesn't. And I feel like that sort of summarized that telegraphed in a lot of ways where we are today. And I just want to say, I mean, I'm as cynical as anybody, but I just want to be on here and say, I genuinely appreciate the fact that you have made this a priority in your work. There are not enough people have made this particular cause a priority in their work to focus

on it. It's an issue that I feel like people can fall asleep. They think it's, you know, boring. It's not interesting. Nothing's going to get done. Like I just feel like I just

want to say, like, keep pushing it because I hope there's going to be critical mass. I hope

after this election, you know, I want to be naive about it. So thank you so much. And thank you for participating in our in this live event and for your, your book and for your participation. Thank you. And my question is from the trouble looking into the, and some other time, we can talk about how dark money has facilitated the corruption of the Supreme Court because yes, that's a whole, those there too. It's a whole lot of a whole other topic. Thank you so

much, you really appreciate it. So we're going to take questions from the audience. Now to our master plan team,

“Jared J. King, mayors here. I'm here. So if you want to ask us questions about the series”

itself, we wanted to do that for our paying subscribers. And I just want to say thank you to our paying subscribers. You made this entire project possible. I should mention our project is now has won a number of prestigious awards in the podcast industry. So that's a huge thing. I mean, we started our, the lever five, less than five years ago from complete scratch. And so it is a big deal to have a listener and reader supported news outlet that has made such

an impact with a, an audio series like that. So I should mention a, a huge thank you. So if you want to post your questions in the, in the chat, you can, and we're going to bring Ula, our other producer onto the stage. Nick, if you can bring Ula, that would be great. Um, so Lily, thank you. Um, so I'll just start taking questions right now. I'm reading here through everyone's questions. How can we repeal citizens united? This is one question. And I asked the question

about what can be done within the context of if citizens united isn't repealed. The answer to that question is what we get into at the, um, in the last episode of, of, of master plan, which is that essentially you got to either expand the court, uh, put term limits on the court to try to get a new court ruling, uh, or you got to get a constitutional amendment, which is both of those things, um, are not easy. Uh, but I should mention when it comes to the court,

it is worth mentioning. The Roberts court is not going to overturn citizens united, but the court issuing citizens united. So soon after upholding the McCain find gold law is just a reminder that one or two vote changes on the court can change kind of everything, like really quickly. I mean, if you really think about that, McCain find gold 2003, citizens united 2010. So in, in a span of seven years, you went from a court, by the way, not a liberal court, like the

rank was court, not a, not, not, not the war in court, right? Not even the burger court, right? The rank was court upheld McCain find gold, not a perfect bill, but certainly, uh, not the citizens

united rule, which was just repealed basically everything. So you're going to have to have to change

the court. And Ula worked on that episode with us, the citizens united episode. Ula, if you have anything else to, to add, uh, about how to deal with citizens united, uh, please go ahead.

“Yeah, there's, uh, it's additionally challenging, I think, as opposed to other drawings,”

because of how it's argued, um, in the decision, or, like, how the decision is articulated,

from the show. So it's not just, it's not this one decision in a vacuum that has turned into president.

It has sort of, uh, rewritten a perspective on how to interpret, like, as 76, as it had made, 19 decisions from the 1980s. Um, so there's some difficulty there that, um, yeah, it's not, it's not just like a one-off just with your citizens united or just overturned citizens united. It's, um, it's a, a perspectives on that entire scheme of law that, um, yeah, that, but I think, like,

“basically packing the court, it's sort of the only way to overcome. Here's a question from Michelle,”

oh, which, which would come up, uh, also in episode eight of Master Plan. I didn't quite, this is Michelle, oh, writing. I didn't quite understand the reasons why I having dark money and

corruption on the courts means anti-abortion. Not sure if you can clarify that. What is the connection

between business money corruption and anti-abortion decisions? And I think this goes to the deeper connection between the Master Planters, uh, effort to deregulate the campaign finance system, and the connection with the anti-choice movement, personified by, uh, a guy we interviewed James Bob, uh, the legal architect of the citizens united case. Uh, I found this to be one of the most fascinating and revelatory parts of the reporting of this, but Ula, why don't you talk a little

bit about that? Here, yeah, this was like, I remember when we kind of realized how, uh, explicit

“the connection between the two of us, because I think, like, even our perspective going into the”

reporting was like, the people, on, on, on this side of things just happened to feel those two ways on these two issues, but not that those two issues are interrelated and what we found, uh, with Bob as sort of our, um, or the main character that, I think, clarify that for us is that, um, so he is

an anti-obortion activist first in his career, and then, uh, in order to, um, like, a rovy-weight

passes, he, uh, becomes a legal representative of the national right to life committee, um, and in order to pressure politicians to overturn rovy-weight, ultimately, but more immediately, focusing on local and state-level policies about abortion, um, he needed to get interested in campaign finance and, uh, and politicking in order to make the, uh, and our, and our, I'll see, an effective, like, argumentative body. So that's where, how, how do we, like, get these issues into

ads? How do we make sure that this candidate who doesn't support our views on this doesn't get

“elected? How can we run whatever ads we want against them? How can we pressure them in public?”

In these ways, that all becomes about campaign finance and how, how to, the supporter, non-support certain candidates, and it just happens to be that this issue is his way. And so it's way more, like, um, interrelated than, I think a name is really expected. I just sort of thought, like, oh, you're conservative on this or conservative on this, um, but it's actually an animating impulse. Um, yeah, and I think it, uh, the history of it, I, I frankly, I didn't know about, um,

the James Bob in, in the early 1980s, late 1970s. Remember, he's, he's operating with a Republican party that is essentially, I think people forget this, split on the issue of abortion. So in that time period, the anti-abortion movement is trying to use Republican primaries, uh, by the way, and Democratic primaries, because the Democratic party also had an anti-choice faction. So they're trying to use these primary elections to push their issues into the discourse,

and they're running up against, uh, campaign finance rules that they don't like. Uh, and so they, I mean, at one point, James Bob is in a direct confrontation with the FEC over whether, uh, they are, quote, unquote, electioneering or not. So the point is, they really are interrelated. And then, you know, you, you, you fast forward 20 years and you've got Leonard Leo, who is also at the center of this, an anti-abortion, uh, activist, who also is

has, you know, huge connections into the, uh, you know, billionaire corporate space. And I, I kind of see it now as like, it really is kind of a marriage of convenience, right? Like, like, okay, the anti-abortion anti-choice movement and the corporate powers that be, they agree together on gutting campaign finance and bribery laws. Uh, and so this is something that they sort of can work in tandem with each other on, right? It's, you know, David,

this is, this is Jared. And I, I remember when we were researching, it was episode seven rise of the machine. And there's a specific moment that I realized in 2005, where you can really see that, um, alliance,

And, uh, 2003 was when there, there was a lot of fighting going on between Bush, uh, pushing his conservative judges that were, um, you know, better than approved by the Federalist Society and the Senate Democrats opposing them. And there was a speech that George W. Bush made in the Rose Garden and at that meeting, uh, or at that big speech televised speech that they had, they in the front row, where members of the groups that were working behind the scenes, uh, to,

to basically forge this alliance that we are going to put money, effort, resources into this,

judicial nominee effort. And, uh, you could really see it, even the tension that was going on behind the scenes with some of the emails that we got, where these weren't natural allies. But in that era, they both realized we have, uh, something very much in common is to get these conservative

“judges that will be both pro-business and also, um, anti-abortion. And I think the pro-business”

factions really look to the anti-abortion groups, uh, namely, you know, who people like James Bob, as kind of their passionate foot soldiers that they could really deploy, uh, to change the political dynamics around some of these judges. And, um, you know, I still wonder sometimes how long that

alliance will hold after, uh, ROV Wade was overturned. But it, it, it, it is kind of a head scratcher.

But when you look at the history of it, you can see why for them for both sides, it was, um, the American convenience. There's a question from Jen, uh, who asked, well, my question is the obvious question. What happens when the election ends up in the Supreme Court? What do we do? And can we ever, um, on F ourselves, uh, vis-a-vis the Supreme Court? Um, if the election ends up in the Supreme Court, I would expect, uh, I'm not making a prediction here. I would just, if past is prelude,

I would expect that what happens is what happened in the year, uh, 2000, uh, which was the, uh, Republican appointees, uh, handed the election to the, uh, Republican candidate, uh, and stopped the counting votes. Uh, uh, I think everyone, a lot of people have been re-holded this. I think we've watched, um, the Democrats campaign with, uh, touting the endorsement of one of the people who, uh, helped engineer that, uh, Dick Cheney. I think that's been nauseating as I said in our, uh, new

do episode out on the premium feed, which everyone, uh, watching this, uh, the premium feed of lever time, I should mention, uh, we have a whole episode about, uh, the Cheney's, whether they'll help or hurt the Democrats, as I said, if you had told me back, uh, in 2000, that the Democrats would be campaigning with Dick Cheney, I probably wouldn't have believed you and if I did, I'd probably throw up in my mouth. Um, that's a whole separate, uh, conversation, so I encourage everybody to

go listen, uh, to that episode about the Cheney's with, by the way, Adam McKay, uh, one of the experts

“on the Cheney's, as he did the, uh, definitive biopic on the Cheney's. Um, so I, that's what I would”

expect to happen in, in, in the Supreme Court in the immediate term. I want to get to the question of what to do about the Supreme Court in the long term, and you heard Senator Sheldon White asked talk about an ethics, um, bill and shaming the Republicans into imposing ethics laws on the, uh, Supreme Court, and there's questions of separation of powers as Congress have the right to, uh, force the judicial branch to, to do something, et cetera, et cetera. I step back, beyond, uh,

back from just the specific things that can be done. And I think a lot about why the Democrats up until this point have been so hesitant to challenge the Supreme Court. I mean, Joe Biden opposed court expansion only belatedly up into, you know, I think he was a couple, you know, six months ago, eight months ago, said he supports now, term limits, et cetera, et cetera.

“Why is it taking the Democrats so long? And I think there's, to challenge the courts. And I think”

there's two, there's two reasons. One, I think a lot of the Democrats are like Joe Biden, they are inherently institutionalists, they, they believe in institutions. I mean, it's kind of like a whole shitty phrase, like believe in institutions. But I, I think one of the religions of the Democratic Party is believing in institutions. In other words, what is here now deserves to be and must be protected in its current state? Like that, that has become the ethos of the Democratic

Party, uh, by and large, that the Republicans are the revolutionary party. The Democrats have become

the party protecting, uh, the so-called institutions. And I should mention, sometimes that's very necessary, right? Because the Republicans are assaulting, uh, the basic institutions of democracy

the Supreme Court, having an institutionalist view at this point is at best outdated, uh, and

“at really, it, more honestly, kind of, kind of completely out of touch with what the country wants”

according to polls. And all of that is to say, that's the one reason. There's another reason that I think we don't talk about at all, which I am fascinated with, and I should probably at some point do an entire audio series on it, which is the internalization of the story of when Franklin rose to the felt challenge, the Supreme Court, and tried to pack the Supreme Court. In the establishment telling of that story, FDR lost. That's the story you read in your history

books. That's the, that's just like the general accepted story. FDR tried to pack the courts. He had a problem with the lockner. It was at the lockner corner. The conservative court headed by, it was very, very conservative court that was overturning, blocking the new deal. And FDR tried to pack courts any failed. That's the story. And that's been internalized in the Democratic Party for decades. But there's a one, there's a great book called FDR's Gambit.

There's one of the books about this, which is that actually this didn't fail at all. That FDR challenging the court, threatening, and trying to stack it, he didn't succeed in stacking it. But the way that they prevented him from succeeding in stacking it was by backing down

and allowing the public will to finally proceed. The public will vis-a-vis the new deal.

“That the success of the new deal was predicated on FDR having the fight. And I think that's”

important when we look ahead if there is a democratic administration, which I should add. I think is very, very much in question right now. We're not talking about the, you know, I might make an election predictions, but that's very much in question. But if there is a democratic administration, this notion of it's worth having the fight with the Supreme Court, even if you're not able to win that specific fight, it's worth trying to expand the court. It's worth fighting

with the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court, it is protected by, you know, lifetime terms,

et cetera, et cetera. But it does, it is in the public sphere. And it, I'm not saying it can be

shamed, but it's worth trying to shame this institution, the least democratic institution of our government. And so you're asking, it's a very long way of answering, you know, what do we do to, you know, unath the Supreme Court. Part of it is getting an opposition party to the Supreme Court. It's willing to fight with it, right? That's really actually willing to fight with this court as opposed to defer to it. And I should add, I don't know where a comma I hear as if she becomes

president, I don't know where she'd be on that. Joe Biden, I mean, I would say this, if Joe Biden's willing to push for term limits, Joe Biden is like, Mr. Institutionalist, maybe that's a sign that the party, if they win power, will actually have more of an appetite to fight with the Supreme Court. And I have like an unsexy deal, please, please, I think like the FDR story is very useful in one specific way, like in terms of like an actionable idea that is relevant now. So one of the reasons

that FDR quote unquote failed is because the framing of this bill that he was pushing, which would allow him to reform the court was that he would allow him to point an additional justice for every justice on the court that was over 70 years old, which is like a totally arcade wild way to do it. It would immediately put 16 new justices on and like it's the framing of that seems like such obvious fodder to people who wouldn't agree with it. And to me, the lesson of that,

it was just like extremely relevant to how that could happen today, is just like frame it in a better way than that. Like in a way that doesn't seem like such a such a, you know, executive overreach into a this supposedly independent branch of government and all that stuff. So I think the lesson is, you know, it's not it's not like, I mean, this is kind of like denots and bolts and politics, right? It's like how you frame that bill, however that looks,

will it will live or die based on how that arguments are articulated within it. And I think there is actually vocabulary that could get that job done that isn't this like, I don't know said, like court packing, derogatory, right? Yeah, I mean, that's right. I mean, the whole framing

“of court hacking, right? Like packing, like, I mean, I mean, here's the thing. We have just”

experienced court packing. It was when Mitch McConnell didn't allow Barack Obama's nominee

literally court packing. I mean, it's quite literally that happened. So, you know, but, but to be clear,

“not many people call that court packing. That was actually court packing. I mean, that was actually”

court packing. Okay, a couple more questions. This question comes in. Wondering if the lever

had plans to continue the master plan series, especially now with Leonard Leo's billion dollar

fund, it would be good to know what else is happening. Okay, the answer to that is one, regarding master plan, this was what you've all listened to was our first season. We have plans for another season. I can't really divulge much more than that. We have plans for more bonus episodes. We are going to let everybody know those plans at some point soon after the election, but yes, we're going to continue the master plan series. And I should mention,

day-to-day we cover corruption at the lever in our reporting and on lever time. So, if you haven't

already subscribed to lever time, our weekly podcast, which is sort of on the news podcast,

go subscribe to lever time. Let's try to take... Actually, before we go, I want to just ask, oh, do we just lose Ula? Did she leave? Ula left. Okay, Ula left. Well, I guess I would ask Jared,

“your, what do you think? What is your favorite part of what we reported?”

Like, if you could name one, I mean, such a long, it took us almost two years to do this series. I'd just be curious from your perspective having gone through it. What was like, I don't know, a big moment, your favorite part. Like, if you could tell people who are watching right now, they haven't listened to the whole series, what's the one thing they got it listened to? I think it was for me, you know, an enbiased, but episode three and four,

focusing on the bowel memo and the documentation that we discovered in some of these arcane locations and of reversing the common belief, even among people like Senator Whitehouse who had written a lot about the bowel memo and incorporated it into a lot of his books and other things that after the bowel memo was released that it kind of disappeared or, you know, that there was a connection, we hope that came next with the Chamber of Commerce and Neoliberal

economics, but it was hard to draw that direction and then this enormous trove of document showing the entire track record of, yes, these people did meet, yes, they did have lots and

lots of meetings and funding and it was kind of all out there. It just never in the lens of history

have been brought out. So that was the most exciting part for me because it was the missing link

“as we called it internally, found the missing link. I mean, I think we've gotten used to this”

feeling that everything has already been uncovered, everything in the past has already been discovered, but it's actually not true. I mean, that was one revelation that I had was when you found those documents about the bowel memo. Also, when we interacted with the National Archives about how many pieces of paper are not actually digitized or really archived in any searchable way from even Watergate. Watergate, which is one of the most written about

However, events in American history and yet we're like, there's so much. Yeah, finding that memo that we found from G Gordon-Litty to John Dean, I mean, it took us forever to try to actually find that one piece of paper and we've gotten used to being in this world where you can just like punch it up on a database or like, no, like, there's so much buried in history that remains buried. I mean, it's like, it kind of felt like those early episodes kind of felt like

an archeological project. Like, really, you know, and I used the one point when Jared found the the record of the Louis Powell cocktail party. So the film of Morris record. I said it was like our version of that scene and Raiders of the Law Stark when they like lift the arc out of, you know, the tomb. It was like dusty and like, it's just that was incredibly exciting. But I should mention, just like archeology is not as exciting as in Indiana Jones movie. Our daily work on this was

we're going to, that's a good place to end. I just want to once again thank everybody who's listening

to this, whether you're listening to a recording on our podcast feed, we're going to put a recording of this on our master plant feed and everybody tuning in live sincerely. Thank you so much for your support of this. We truly could not do this without our paying subscribers. I say that a lot, but it is just absolutely true. This is the kind of journalism that's simply cannot be done

without the support of you. And so what you are doing, I hope we're giving you the content that

“you enjoy that enriches you, educate you, make sure you're more informed citizen. But you should”

know you are funding an endeavor to do this. It's not, you know, you're not making a charitable contribution, but you were contributing to the unearthing of these stories. And my hope for Master Plan is, you know, the series as a whole, the season one is that it helps give people context

for why we are, where we are. And that it helps remind people that if what we're living through

is the product of specific decisions by specific people, it can feel hopeless, but there's hope

“baked into that in this way. It means that different decisions can be made by different people”

for different outcomes. In other words, it's not a natural inevitability. We are living in a human created set of problems, which means there can be human created solutions. So thank you for funding this. We will be back in touch with everybody soon about what we're doing next with Master Plan. In the meantime, strap in for this election, I have, I've got very, very thoughts on this. I haven't been sleeping all that. Well, I hope everyone hangs in there has a happy Halloween and does what

“you need to do to white knuckle it through this election. And stay tuned for an update on what we're”

doing next. Thank you, everybody. Really pretty. Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast, The Shadow Sessions, hosted by me, Hibba Belfake, a psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, the shadow sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow the shadow sessions wherever

you're listening now. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-world were two east and west Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from more equitable democracy at large media, hosted by me, Colin Cole and Heather Villanova. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow the future of our

former democracy wherever you get your podcasts. [Music]