Stacey Abrams on the SAVE Act: The New Voter Suppression Threat

Welcome to The Oath in the Office podcast.

I'm John Feekel saying it's so great to be with you. And today, well, when you throw in a legal war, to get the Epstein files off the headlines, and then that war kills many civilians and troops. And it's run by lying idiots, and it doesn't make you more popular. And judges are pushing back on your jury-mandering.

“You have to do something to rig the mid-terms, which brings us to the save act, friends,”

because nothing says freedom, like a bill designed to save democracy, by throwing several million citizens out of it. For more, let's go to the star of our show, the author of The Oath in the Office, and the presidents and the people. Professor Cory Brechnerider, it is great to see you.

- You're welcome. - Thanks so much, John, an amazing show planned today. Of course, we'll talk about the save act, and we have the honor of talking about it

with one of the most important pro-democracy activists somebody who's been in the state house.

Stacey Abrams, an incredible voice for democracy, so we'll have our segment as usual in the beginning, and then we'll bring her on to really go in depth on some of these issues. It's really an interview that I've been so excited about, and that I think the listeners will love. I'll say, too, if you're just joining us for the first time, be sure to push that subscribe button, and then finally, John, I was just speaking to a journalist today for a story that's coming out soon,

who listens to the podcast, he was asking me some follow-up questions from discussions we had, and he gave us an amazing compliment. He said that we're not the odd couple, we're really this different, you know, two different personalities that work well together, the best analogy is Bush and Sundance. I was one of the best compliments that I've ever received.

We're symbiotic, like I'm like a parasite that gives you something back for the song. Is that how Bush and Sundance work? No, not really, no, they were much more, they were much more insane. They were both equal outlaws of you past the bar. But I'm so thrilled that Stacey Abrams is here today, because I really have been wanting for a while,

Cory, to go deep with you on the Save Act, it's very scary. They don't think it's going to pass the Senate, however, it is getting more popular.

“And the Save Act is really the political equivalent of a bouncer, I think, who says,”

"This club is for everyone, but only if you brought three forms of ID, your original birth certificate, a time machine and the name you had before the Patriarchy got involved." This is really scary, Cory, and I'm grateful that you wanted to go deep on this,

because I think they named it the Save Act, because Republicans have finally realized

if they called it the "we're losing elections because women and minorities keep voting act, it would not poll as well." So just to dive into it, I mean, for listeners who are hearing about this fight brewing, over this act that could dramatically reshape who can vote, what exactly is the Save Act, Cory? And what problem do it's claim it is solving?

Well, the argument for it, and it seems kind of straightforward, and if you're not well informed, and you don't go deep as we will in this segment and with Stacey Abrams, you might think it's innocuous, what's the big deal? And the way defenders put it is it's just a way of ensuring that only American citizens are voting.

And of course, in our federal elections, you have to be an American citizen in order to vote.

“So what's the big deal that you have to show in particular ID?”

That's how they're framing it. But when you really get into it, what they're doing isn't just requiring showing ID, but showing forms of ID, that they are listing in the Save Act, that a large percentage of Americans don't have, and you might wonder who doesn't have ID, because it is true most Americans have the kind of ID, for instance, passports that they want,

or so-called real IDs, but many don't. And most jurisdictions, I should say, require some form of ID, and the whole maneuver here is to pick those forms of ID at the national level. You're surfing whatever local understanding local needs are in order to demand this specific kind of documentation. And who doesn't tend to have it?

Well, big surprise. It's young voters who Trump is worried, of course, it's going to turn on him and his party. It's often minority voters, and it's by and large people who have been moving for instance, state to state. And, you know, the S-O-N-Coveries. But we're talking, yes, I mean, we're talking about millions of people that are potentially going to be disenfranchised.

And even if most people have the ID, that's not how elections are won. They're won by the sliver of votes that they are going to try to shave off using this. And I love your analogy of the seemingly welcoming bouncer, but when it comes down to it, right, what the rules are doing is they're extremely exclusionary at the same time as pretending to just protect democracy. Well, Republicans say the safe act is about stopping non-citizens from voting.

It has been illegal. It is aggressively illegal.

“And you have to register to vote to vote illegally.”

So they can't vote because they can't register. It's like a go to jail felony to port yourself on the way out of legal. There is no evidence of mass non-citizen voting. Donald Trump has pushed a lie since 2016 that 3 million undocumented citizens were somehow able to register and cast votes illegally. And no one talks about this.

He's still pushing this lie to justify him losing the popular vote in 2016. And more importantly, there is no voter in personation problem. You know, we do a signature and match the address. And that's how we know you are who you say you are.

And it's never been a problem because there has never been an election that has been swayed by voter in personation.

This is a solution in search of a problem. But more accurately, it seems like it's a problem in search of voters to eliminate. And critics say professor this could be the most restrictive voting law ever passed by Congress. Is that an exaggeration or is that accurate?

“Because I think our African-American brothers and sisters know the history better than a lot of white folks do.”

Well, I don't know about most restrictive. If you look back, for instance, and you know, people who study history as I do are often skeptical of claims like that. And does something doesn't have to be the worst ever in order to be really bad. But it is in the tradition of rules and laws that were meant to, and especially usually at the local level. This is now at the national level that were meant to look neutral and really weren't.

So I'll give you one of the most important ways that Southern white supremacists tried to suppress the black vote after the Civil War.

And that was, of course, so-called literacy tests, which often didn't just test literacy, which itself, you know, why would that be a requirement, especially for formally enslaved people. But, you know, they would ask, in particular, black voters, questions that were extremely obscure, for instance, about American history in the name of literacy tests. So, you know, you might say, well, what's the big deal? We're just trying to make sure we have informed voters, but this supposedly innocuous technique was used to disenfranchise people.

So, you know, was that worse? Yes, I think in a lot of ways that was worse, but that doesn't hide the fact that this is extremely dangerous. Also, I mean, in another difference, and we will talk about this with Stacey Abrams as well, the complexities of this, is that in the past, a lot of the voter suppression techniques were done at the local level. Correct. I don't know Trump has, we talked about it on the podcast last week, and previously is promising to nationalize elections, which we know means to use the power of the federal government to steal them.

And this is a technique that he can use in order to do exactly that. I'll say, one other pernicious thing that's in the save act that I'm very concerned about, if it passes, is it really threatens to punish poll workers who don't enforce the law, the save act. And that could lead to rather than common sense prevailing at these moments. And of course, a lot of poll workers throughout the country, this isn't some federal office. It's people who are holding a job for a brief period of time, they're nervous.

And if there's a penalty associated with on the side of allowing somebody to vote, you might get at the local level, extremely restrictive poll workers who just don't let people cast the ballot. And what's going to happen to somebody who shows up, they just might get frustrated. So we are talking about millions of people potentially that using these various techniques and what's so pernicious is they look innocuous, but really are anything but. And I want to point out, the save act doesn't just say show ID at the polls, that would be too modest.

It says no online registration, no mail in registration, no mail in voting unless you're stationed overseas with military, no voter registration drives. No using the kind of IDs Americans have used for decades instead.

“As you said, professor, you must produce specific proof of citizenship documents.”

These are documents tens of millions of citizens don't have readily available, especially those born in certain parts of the country before 1965 when people weren't always born in hospitals.

And that's the trick, right? If you can't vote, it's not voter suppression. It's just paperwork. This is like Jim Crow's greatest rebrand. The supporters say they say this is about election integrity. What is your response to that argument, professor? It's not about election integrity, and I think we've already started to unpack that. It's about targeting in a way that doesn't look like you're going to get caught. People who are going to vote against you, and it's a republic against a very partisan way of trying to shut down the opposition parties voters.

And that's what we've got to call out. Unfortunately, it's hard to do because again, it looks innocuous. But when you look into the details of how it's aimed and what it's impact is, it's a plan. I love the idea of calling it for what it is, which is an attempt to rebrand Jim Crow. Jim Crow is obviously associated with literacy tests. I just had to say that phrase and people know it's not really about making sure there are informed voters.

They didn't say let's bring back slavery. They tried to do it by stripping the real meaning of the rights of citizens through this supposedly innocuous thing. And that's what's happening again.

“By the way, I'm not completely opposed to debating a national literacy test to vote. Can you imagine if everybody who can't spell your correctly?”

How do you show up? I know a series for Mary and Facebook wouldn't be able to do it. What gets me is, you know, we talk about how in the past these voter ID bills, if yes, they've gone after African Americans, they've gone after seniors, they've gone after college kids,

especially college students who go to college universities in cities because they are the least likely to have a driver's license.

But this bill, this bill, unlike previous editions, this one hammers women. And Republicans know it because in this country, as you know, professor millions of women do this thing called getting married and then this radical thing that's called changing their last name. And so now their birth certificates don't match their legal name. And I can't wait to talk about this with Stacey Abrams because under the say back, married women, suspicious, widowed women, suspicious, divorced women, extremely suspicious, 69 million women could face barriers,

because Republicans suddenly discovered they cared deeply about name consistency. And it's kind of funny, Corey. We talked about this before, but this concert appeared right after women started voting against Republican by double digits for 30 straight years. Since 1992, women have voted Democratic in every presidential election. And Republicans look at the state and they're like, well, we could change our policies, or we could change who's allowed to vote.

“And guess which one felt easier? What do you see happening? Is this likely to pass the Senate or is this going to head for a long bloody showdown?”

I don't think so. It's passed the House and now it's in the Senate. And the thing that's going to save us ironically is the thing that also stops civil rights legislation and that's the bizarre moment that we're in and that's the Phil Buster for many decades. It's an attempt to get the civil rights bill that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, among other things, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public accommodations like hotels and restaurants, and the 1965 act was a serious attempt to shut down various forms of local restrictions on voting.

And we'll talk to Stacey Abrams about both of those and how the save act is part of a long standing plan to attack those two pieces of legislation.

But to go back to my main point, the reason why it took so long to pass those bills in the 60s. And remember, this is, you know, almost 100 years after the end of slavery, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments about 100 years later. There are originally civil rights bills in the 19th century that are destroyed largely by the Supreme Court, including in a famous moment. Civil rights cases that destroy the original attempt to ban segregation in public accommodations 100 years later. So why does it take so long? Now I'm getting to the save act. The Phil Buster in the Senate is used to block this legislation.

But the thing that's going to save us now from the save act, so to speak, is the Phil Buster. The Republicans, as much as they want this bill and as much as Trump in particular wants it, they see that the institution of the Senate has a bow work against tyranny, you know, or against laws they don't want in their case. So what I'm saying is all these angry liberals have to thank Chuck Schumer for saving the Phil Buster. Is that what you're saying, Professor? I think in this instance, you know, we could talk in depth about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for democracy, but right now I think it's undoubtable as we're facing a threat from a president who is a want to be authoritarian.

It's a good thing it's in place because it's what's going to block the save act from it and becoming law. And again, just because, you know, of shiny things confused me, Corey. Is there any evidence that non-citizen voting has ever been widespread enough in any of the 50 states to justify any kind of law like this? No, I mean, I, you know, we can't emphasize that enough that it's a non-problem, this idea of voter fraud in the form of showing up as a non-citizen. You know, why would you do that, especially the ice out there?

Because they wanted it caught, Corey, they wanted it caught. I'm saying the non-citizen, you know, almost no, we're going to show it to you. Oh, I got to wait with this for so long, I crossed the border and I've got to jump now. Right, I got to wait here, risking my life, you know, in dire conditions in order to show up to vote.

“I don't think so. That's what they're claiming though.”

And it's a non-problem, so then, you know, when government is lying to you and that is what's happening here, Donald Trump and all the supporters of this act. Including in the Senate are lying when they say this is about protecting democracy.

That's it. Now, speaking of politicians lying to us, and thank you for the artful segue professor.

Donald Trump launched this random flurry of late night attacks against the Supreme Court. His Supreme Court, for not overturning Joe Biden's lawful 2020 election win. And I quote, they wouldn't even call out the Rick presidential election of 2020 because they said that I as president of the United States did not have standing in quotation marks to challenge it.

Now, Trump was referring to the Supreme Court declining to hear the 2020 lawsuit filed by Texas and supported by 18 Republican state attorneys general.

And a hundred and six lying Republican members of Congress who tried to invalidate Joe Biden's victories in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Trump said they're completely inept in embarrassing court was not what the Supreme Court of the US was set up by our wonderful founders to be. They are hurting our country and will continue to do so. Now, there's a lot we have to cover, but this seems to be an overt pressure campaign ahead of any future election races. We're very used to politicians criticizing courts. How unusual is it for a sitting president to attack the Supreme Court of the United States?

For not overturning an election he lost with 60 lawsuits to prove he lost it?

Well, I gotta say, you know, he's figuring out, unfortunately, and this is what's scary about the moment that there is a way to destroy democracy. The way to destroy democracy is to see who is protecting it and who protected it on January 6. And in the events surrounding it, it was the courts, including the Supreme Court, who refused to allow this lie that there had been some sort of mass voter fraud,

“which is connected, of course, to our previous discussion, that lie, including the lie, well, the lie, that non-citizens were somehow being included here. None of that was true. And as the lower courts looked at the evidence, that's what they said.”

Like, I don't think so. This is just not a thing. And the Supreme Court not wanting to comply with his coup. I think it's part of the point. There is one thing, you know, before we get to heroic about what the Supreme Court might have done or might not. I should say just a general thing, which is, January 6, we talked about this with Tom Jocelyn, literally wrote the report about what happened, the details. He shared with us the role of white supremacist organizations, white nationalist organizations, but also the nuance of what was going on, which was really wasn't about the riot.

It was about using the chaos at the Capitol, to pressure Mike Pence, in order to deny the certification of these votes, and to also simultaneously have these fake slates of electors. Now, we never got to the moment where that happened, because Mike Pence didn't comply, as we talked about, but what if he did comply? And what if, in the end, like Bush versus Gore, this went to the courts, they might very well have intervened on his side in the big picture.

“Now, they didn't do so here, they might have, and what does that show you? What was missing, and what is missing in the future, if you want to have a coup, are the courts, not the lower courts, the Supreme Court of the United States.”

And so this pressure campaign is recognizing his weakness, which is the Supreme Court in the end didn't back him, and to try to put pressure for next time. You know, he has such a lazy way of doing it, just to criticize and to rant, to threaten threatened threatened threatened, but, you know, thankfully, that isn't what's happened when it comes to the lower courts, the Supreme Court, I don't have much faith in, but hopefully this will be a wake-up call to them, that they're dealing with somebody who is going to attempt to steal another election.

Yeah, I don't think this is just a political venting by a vindictive jerk. I think this represents something a lot scarier about how executive power views the judicial branch. I mean, he's, you know, he's going after the court, because they wouldn't hear the Texas case, challenging the 2020 election results, but, Corey, can you explain what lack of standing actually means? The courts, including the Supreme Court, have a variety of ways of not even bothering to get to the merits of the case, the question of whether or not the law was violated, and they do that often by looking at whether or not some particular person has an injury or a claim that allows them to be in court in the first place, and so that's what that means.

“If the courts were to ignore standing requirements in politically sensitive cases, what would that do to the legal system?”

Well, you know, that's an interesting question, because on the one hand, you don't want to, I think it's good to not allow the president when he's trying to steal an election standing. But the question of the standing doctrine and how courts use who gets to sue and who doesn't, is actually a wider issue. I mean, to me, they're probably too narrow actually in when they allow standing, so we're going to face, for instance, a question in the war powers case about whether or not Congress has standing in order to challenge the war.

We've talked about that before. That's something where I think the court should be generous.

There's a case called Lujan about that, that narrows who has standing.

“So, on the one hand, yes, I don't want the president to have standing to try to steal an election, but I think, you know, the wider issue is an interesting one that we might want to open up the possibility of more action.”

The possibility of more advocacy by citizens with even broader standing doctrine than we have. One more question about this, and then we'll take a break.

But it seems like all this changed last month. He's always gone after lower courts and judges like Judge Bozberg who we're going to talk about after the break.

But it seems like something shifted last month when Trump unloaded on the Supreme Court after they declared that he had violated federal law by unilaterally imposing those tariffs all over the planet last year. And after that ruling, we discussed it on the show. Trump accused certain Supreme Court justices of being unpatriotic and disloyal. Disloyal Supreme Court, he never said their names. But it seems like he's looking at, you know, Andy Cody Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are not Brett Kavanaugh. He was a fiend, but John Roberts.

I mean, you know, he didn't just criticize past rulings. He's saying how he expects the court to behave in future election disputes.

“What point does criticism become attempted intimidation?”

I mean, I think that's all he's about his intimidation. You know, his lawyer, Roy Cohen, had a famous line.

Don't ask what the law is asked who the judge was or he was. And the idea, of course, was, you know, certain personalities are on our side and certain aren't. That's not how things are supposed to work. Judges are supposed to interpret the law and force it against everyone. And of course, no president is supposed to be above the law.

That's not how he sees it. He sees the judiciary, especially his justices as doing his bidding on his political team.

And thankfully, at least in the tariffs case, it was six to three. And as you said, Roberts Barrett and Gorsuch voted to strike down those tariffs. Because they looked at the law that had given him far from giving him the power to enact them, had actually restricted his power. And they did what they're supposed to do. Now, that makes him live it. And what these two stories have in common that we've been talking about the tariffs case and also that earlier threat to the judiciary for not intervening on his side is attempt to have a coup.

What they're about is his desire to control his justices.

“Now, some justices, I think are pretty much in that mold when I look at Kevin on the tariffs case.”

The majority actually says, it looks like you just took the government's argument and cut and pasted it into your own opinion. He is the kind of judge justice that Trump won. Somebody's doing his bidding. And if you remember, you and I were on serious hexagon together, the night that he did nomination was announced. And he gave the most sicophantic speech about how this was the most carefully vetted choice that had ever been done by a president, an American history, and it just so happened to pick him.

And he simultaneously building himself up in the most arrogant way, and also kissing the ass of the president in the most embarrassing way. That's the kind of judge that he wants. And thankfully, that's not what we've seen from the lower court judges who we've often talked about and we'll talk about. And at least in the tariffs case from these three justices, you know, thankfully we never got to the point where we had to ask whether or not the Supreme Court was going to steal the election for Trump.

I, you know, we've talked about this before. We get a future episode on it. When I look at Bush versus Gore, I do think it was an example of the Supreme Court, he was surfing and really stealing an election for Republican candidate. And would see what happens with this court. The tariffs case gives me some hope that they wouldn't. And the fact that he's railing in the way that he is also gives me some hope because his frustration is an indication that something's working. I gotta say I'm terrified Cory. I don't want to ask Stacey Abrams to hold me when she's here. Don't, don't, don't, don't let me say hold me. Miss Abrams, please, because it's, it's too scary.

But we, we got to take a break. We're going to get thrown in podcast jail. I want to ask a bit more about Judge Bozberg and about Greg Bavino as well back in a moment on the oath in the office. This episode is sponsored by the ACLU. On April 1st, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Trump versus Barbara. The ACLU's case challenging President Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship. The ACLU and partners will argue that the president's executive order violates the constitution over a century of Supreme Court President and a longstanding federal statute.

The 14th Amendment speaks for itself. The constitution, not the president, defines who is the citizen. The ACLU is proud to defend the integrity of our constitution and protect birthright citizenship for every generation to come. Learn more at ACLU.org/barbra. You can also find the link in our episode description. Welcome back to the oath in the office. I'm John Fugle saying so professor Gregory Bavino, let's talk about him.

He was removed from his Minneapolis post in late January after the murder of American citizens. And now he is out.

“Why is this significant? Is departure from Border Patrol? What does this represent in terms of immigration policy?”

Well, you know, I don't want to get too excited about it, but I think it's one of the signs that what's happening when citizens resist works. And as you know, and listeners to this show, no, my view is that the traditional checks on a president are relatively weak. We haven't seen an impeachment actually remove our president. We have seen one resign as a result of an impeachment in the next in case. But two, we agree just cases of impeachment and yet Trump survived them.

The Congress has been so weak, the Supreme Court, despite the terrorist case which we were talking about has just so often through the emergency or shadow docket enabled this president.

And yet here we have an instance in Minnesota and I really want to speak to this where citizens rising up, you know, documenting witnessing ice and its abuses resulted in them pulling back. In Minnesota and also in the firing of one of the faces of this really horrific moment for our history, the shutdown of civil liberties.

“And let me just say in particular what I think is going on there in the name of removing undocumented people from this country. It wasn't attempt to really shut down protesters to shut down the opposition.”

And this guy was the postchild for that, both with his coastplay Nazi outfits, but also with some of his statements really indicating along with Christina, and that these were terrorists who were literally murdered by his people. Refusing to acknowledge that you need serious investigation. I mean, this was about as horrific nightmare in the kind of thing the framers worried about using national deportation force really becoming a national police force without authorization of law to go in and shut people down.

And he was the guy cheering it all along when he looked at the white nationalist language that was used to recruit ice officers, the fact that ice itself has so little training. Here is somebody and border patrol, I should say two more generally, here is somebody who really was the face of all of it. Yeah, and he was fired. So it worked. He, well, he retired. He retired. I mean, again, like to me, this is like Kristi known being replaced by Mark Wayne Mullins. So what? Like, I don't see how his exit signals any kind of policy shift.

“We talked a lot on the show how I think Donald Trump in his first term tried to hire competent people and competent people say no sir, you can't do that. So he hires these misconceptions and henchmen in this term.”

So when things get too close to him, he can easily cut them loose none of these people from cash but tell to RFK juniors to realize, especially Pete Hexat, that they're fall guys. I mean, isn't this just a personnel change with the same exact policy approach continuing? I'm a little more optimistic, you know, I think that, yeah, that I'm not a lot. I don't want to pretend the war is over and, you know, civil liberties are safe. Now we're still facing a shutdown. But I think the plan here was to use this national deportation force and this kind of guys for really shutting down the opposition, what they call the radical laugh, what is really the democratic party and to spread it to roll it out.

On my view, John, you know, the firing of bovino really does mean something. I wouldn't say the war is over that we can declare a victory, but I think the plan was that bovino was going to lead these kind of rollouts throughout the country and we would have seen cities across America with him appearing with his white supremacist rhetoric and his anti opposition rhetoric. I love to offer costumes. Yes, and the costume and instead the fact that he was fired doesn't show again the end, but it shows that we've slowed them down at minimum and we've not really seen the same kind of presence that we saw in Minnesota and we're definitely not seeing the rollout.

So I don't want to celebrate too quickly, but yeah, I think citizen protest is working in Minnesota and that this firing, yes, he says he's retired is an example of it.

Meanwhile, let's talk about Judge Bozberg, who's really become a hero of just basically following the law and what used to be Boris boring old jurisprudence.

Judge Bozberg just kind of quashed the subpoena in the fed investigation of Jerome Powell, which was straight up harassment. Donald Trump is furious of Powell because Powell won't change interest rates to make the damage of tariffs on the economy look better. We've discussed it many times, so the judge just blocked the subpoenas in this huge investigation and now Trump has lost his mind and is calling on the judge to be fired. He called Judge Bozberg a wacky nasty crooked and totally out of control judge who suffers from the highest level of Trump derangement syndrome and then in parentheses he puts TDS.

So you'll understand what he's saying and has been after my people and me four years again, an illegal subpoena going after the federal reserve it was all made up.

Oh, I mean, Trump has been on this for a long time. I should just set it up with little context. We've talked about this before the federal reserve is protected in its independence, it's bored and including its chairman.

“From political firing, you have to find that there's malfeasance. So the first thing the Trump tried to do was find malfeasance. Well, what is it? They claim that there was some sort of fraud and construction.”

And in fact, he appeared with the chairman of the federal reserve together with some form claiming that he could show fraud and this highly educated chairman of the federal reserve was ready to respond by saying, you know, I don't think so and had the numbers and the receipts and of course there is no evidence of any of this mismanagement or malfeasance. And the idea that there's some sort of criminality here is ridiculous. And Judge Bozberg, who is one of really the heroes of the moment, one of those lower court judges who was pushed back in crucial moments was basically said the same.

He just stopped this case so early on in its tracks way before we get to any kind of thing like a trial.

And that's as it should be. Judge Bozberg also is the one who stopped the deportation of Obrego Garcia in the Garcia case and related cases to the Gulag and Al Salvador and remember at one point he said to turn the planes back because there was no evidence really here. And he rejected the ridiculous idea that of 1798 law just stripped all rights to even appear in court. Those heroic moments, it's not just this one, have earned the ira of Donald Trump and again, you know, when Trump's angry about something that's a good indication that the person he's angry at is a decent person.

And I'd say a hero.

And I want to point out, Judge Bozberg is technically the conservative in this case. He is adhering to the rule of the law.

Donald Trump is the radical and now he's calling and his allies are calling to remove or impeach this judge. Corey Howell unusual is that and how dangerous is that. I don't remember a lot of presidents demanding judges be impeached in my lifetime. Yeah, we're going to hear it more and more, you know, he wants to govern as a dictator. That's clearly not I probably. And what's in the way of governing as a dictator? It's not necessarily Supreme Court, although he's more recently turned on them, but it's certainly lower court judges.

And these lower court judges, if they're in the way, then what does he want to do? He wants to get rid of them. And the legal process, the political process for removing them, is the same as removing a president. 50% of the House of Representatives votes to impeach in two thirds of the Senate. We have had instances before, in federal judges, being impeached and removed a number of them throughout American history.

“But, you know, it's for high crimes and misdemeanors, as the Constitution requires not for opposing a president. That's what's unusual about this piece, this moment, this purely partisan attack.”

I mean, even in America's top aristocrat chief Justice John Roberts pushed back publicly against the tax on judges, which is very rare. Corey, what happens if those lower courts are ignored or just politically delegitimize like this? Well, they've already tried, you know, the Supreme Court of the United States has done a lot to undo the power of lower court judges, and particularly in the birthright citizenship case.

They took away this crucial power of what are known as universal injunctions, and the cost of case.

And that had meant that lower court judges like Bozberg would have the ability to stop illegal unconstitutional policies nationally, not just when it comes to their own court rooms and their own jurisdictions. So, you know, there's a way in which there are already under attack, but they still are pushing back on case by case basis, including this one. They're stopping in many instances by Trump to simply imprison his political opponents, which he's trying to do obviously in a lawless way. He hasn't bothered to get a new sedition act passed, he couldn't do that, the way that John Adams did and succeeded in shutting down the opposition, and so that meant that these judges, along with, you know, the American people are a real bore against tyranny.

And he sees that, and he wants tyranny, he wants dictatorships, so I'm talking about impeachment trying to intimidate them as he's tried to intimidate the Supreme Court, all of that is part of a pattern.

“So, because Stacey Abrams is waiting backstage, but Cory, when you look at the save act and this unlawful immigration enforcement, and he's attacks on judges and the Supreme Court, I mean, what's the pattern here?”

Is this just normal partisan conflict or is this something more fundamental about our norms breaking down? Is this a constitutional crisis? It is beyond a crisis, I mean, a crisis is a good thing because it means that we're fighting back with, we're in dictatorship, there wouldn't be a pushback, but we are fighting back. And that's what we're going to talk about with Stacey Abrams, we're going to talk about the fact that it's happening on a couple of levels, sometimes with hard power, simply going after political opponents, and sometimes more subtly as with the save act, trying to dupe the American people and to thinking that you're protecting democracy when you're really destroying it.

Well, then enough of my app, and let's take a quick break and we'll be back with the one and only Stacey Abrams.

Hey, it's Cory. If you're like me, you may need to take a break from the 24-hour news cycle to recharge and renew your mind, which is why I recommend listening to how to with Mike Peska, the longstanding advice show and the ambinominated best personal growth podcast.

“Back for a new season with a new host, how to with Mike Peska finds answers to your most pressing questions.”

I'm a fan of Mike and you might recognize him from being a recent guest on the oath in the office, or from his award winning reporting, or from his role as host of the longest running daily news podcast, the just. Each episode of how to follow the curiosity of a listener invited guest to tackle a real problem with help from world class experts who actually know what they're talking about.

Think of it as ease dropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silence.

You've got questions. They find the answers. Follow how to with Mike Peska on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell them I send you. There is a lot. I mean a lot going on in the news around our government and our laws, and there's one question we hear all the time. Is this constitutional? If you don't remember all the civics classes you may have taken in school, you can get the answer to that question, and many others by listening to civics 101. The claim podcasts from New Hampshire Public Radio. Civics 101 is an entertaining way to learn about how our government works, or at least how it's supposed to work, and you'll hear a lot of surprising stories along the way.

Hosted by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capoteche. Civics 101 will help you understand a bit more about what's going on, and maybe even make you a smarter citizen. You can listen to civics 101 wherever you get your podcasts, and tell them the oath in the office sent you.

“Welcome back to the Oath and the Office. I'm John Fuckel Singh. Professor, do you want to introduce our extremely special guest or should I? I like you want to do it?”

Yeah, I think I'm going to fight for this one. This is all right. I'm not going to debase myself in front of her. You go ahead. All right. It's my pleasure to announce our guest today. Leader Stacey Abrams, political leader, bestselling author, voting rights champion, and host of the podcast assembly required. I should mention on the huge fan, and after serving 11 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, including seven as the minority leader. Stacey Abrams became one of the nation's leading voices on the themes of this podcast on democracy, on elections, on political power, and fighting authoritarianism.

She's founded and led major organizations devoted to voting rights and civic participation, leader Stacey Abrams. It's really a pleasure to welcome you to the other one. We're going to have a little bit of a go through two of both fiction and non-fiction. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You look, this is an embarrassment of riches. Thank you so much for the very kind introduction. And for having me on this extraordinary show, I appreciate it. Thank you. Really a pleasure. I will jump right into it as you know, one of the things that we're really focused on every week on the oath in the office is the threat to democracy that's coming from this president.

And so just off the bat, I wanted to ask you about Donald Trump's threat to nationalized elections and what that could mean. And we are you as a real expert in this topic, having seen so much of the threat to democracy up close. Where do you think the threat might lie in that rhetoric? And well, I guess I should ask too, whether you think it is beyond rhetoric. So one of the reasons I appreciate the show so much is that you all have really been inviting your audience into understanding what we face.

The way I frame it, they're 10 steps to authoritarianism and democracy. I borrowed it from and remixed it based on some research by Kim Shuffle. But I've also looked at the work of Erica Chenoweth and the work of Tim Snyder.

And what it all tells us is that there is a pattern to this behavior. There might be unique strains that are endemic to the US, but it always looks the same.

And it starts with an election. You have the expansion of power, the diminution of competing powers, the skateboarding of vulnerable communities, the termination of outside voices and the rise of propaganda. But the ultimate goal is always to dismantle democracy for everyone. And so when you get to that 10 step, you know you've reached the end game.

“The US has spent more time than any of us expected on step nine, which is normalizing state violence. And that's an important one to hold because we know that elections are the moment where the people say as loud as they can and what they want.”

And if you're an authoritarian, you've done steps one through eight to convince them not to speak.

And what they're trying to do is use all of these pieces to tell us that it's not worth our voices being heard. I am not concerned about them calling off elections. You don't have to.

“Venezuela has elections. Hungary has elections. Russia has elections. It's no longer a question of do you have elections is do elections have meaning. And that's what they're trying to erase.”

And so I believe we are very fully in the grip of an authoritarian regime that is every intention of gaming the system and denying us our full voices and our full rights. And I'm happy to walk through why and how we're going to do it. But yes, they intend to initiate our elections, but not by declaring martial law, not by declaring a state of emergency. Instead, they're going to gain the system and use administrative authority and threats in order to convince us that it's not worth trying. Yeah, I wanted to ask about some of the specifics, just as a first follow-up, you mentioned the save act. And I think one of the challenges is some of what's mentioned in the save act and what Republicans Trumpers, I should say, have tried is to institute things like voter ID, which sounds innocuous to some people, but to go on your theme, if you understand what they're really up to, it might look innocuous on the surface.

“On the one hand, I'd love it if you could explain to us what's in the save act, things like voter ID, why that actually is exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about when it comes to threatening democracy.”

And then I also, you know, to throw in another kind of aspect of this, I mean, when you're thinking about the administrative moves that they might make, I mean, is that include things like having ice monitor elections or you're worried about that as well.

Exactly. So let's start with some framing. We have always had voter identification. You have never been allowed to vote in the United States of America without identifying yourself.

That's right. That is a term of art that has been weaponized in order to hide what they're actually trying to accomplish. One of the books I've written is called "Our Time is Now." It was actually briefly banned by the US Naval Academy. This book is very much, because one of the things I talk about is voter ID as this false flag operation, we've always required identification.

“No one says you shouldn't have it. The argument is, over what kind of paperwork do you have to have to prove that you have the right to be heard? That's the question.”

They are trying to deny you the right to vote. And what the save act does is build on years of this narrowing of opportunity that began in 2006 when the state of Georgia and the state of Indiana passed restrictive voter ID laws.

And it was the first time this country at the federal level through the Supreme Court said, "It's okay to deny people access because they don't have the paperwork you want them to have.

Not that they can't prove who they are, but you don't like the proof." And that was the starting gun. And since then we've watched states like Ohio and Wisconsin, North Dakota, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, all of these states sort of jump on the bandwagon. The reason all of this matters is there are three points of access to voter suppression. So when we talk about voter suppression, here's what it is. One, can you register and stay on the rolls? Because that's the point of entry. That's the driver's license.

And again, is can you cast a ballot? So can you vote by mail? Does your polling place stay open during the time that you're awake? And then three does your ballot get counted or do they raid full and county and try to take all the ballots they don't like. So let's start with what the save act does. The save act tries to attack all three points of access to democracy and voting rights. It starts by saying we're going to restrict the kind of proof you have not to cast a ballot, but to even get registered.

In the United States right now, every registered voter has to provide proof of citizenship. What they're saying is that that proof is no longer enough. The Heritage Foundation studied two billion votes cast in the United States over the last decade plus. They found 85 examples of non-citizen voting. And most of those were mistakes, not intentional fraud. So what they are trying to do is stop people at the gate and say you can't even get on the rolls without paperwork. We know you can't find that's women losing the right to register because their last names no longer match what was on their birth certificate.

That's people of color. Lots of black people who were born before 1968 when you weren't allowed in many states to be born in a hospital. You don't have a birth certificate that matches the requirement of the save act.

It's the more than 100 million Americans who don't have a passport.

And if you're talking about elections in the United States, they get decided by 1.5 million votes give or take. I just gave to you categories that could include up to 100 million people who would suddenly lose their authority to participate in democracy.

Well, that changes the rules in a number of states. Then the next piece is who gets to be there to oversee it? And that's can you cast about it and query your question about ice showing up is one of the issues. In 1980 New Jersey gotten trouble. Because Republicans in New Jersey had officers standing outside of polling places where they had too many black people voting and they would scare people out of voting. For the next 30 years, the Republican National Committee was prohibited from having that kind of poll observation in the country.

“That got lifted after Donald Trump became president the first time. Well, this would put that on steroids. And so what you would see is absolutely ice agents roaming.”

You don't have to not be a citizen to be afraid. Because in the United States, the Supreme Court has said that it is completely permissible to pull someone to detain them for ice to detain you if they suspect you may not be a citizen based on your race, your accent or the language you speak. And so you don't have to actually have harm. The threat of harm is sufficient to induce people not to vote. And then the third is what's coming up with the mega act. And that is the act that would seek to eliminate absentee validating or mail invoting across the board.

Well, if you are elderly, if you are rural, if you are Native American, if you are disabled, often vote by mail is your only point of access to democracy.

And so if you think about all of those component pieces, what the save act intends to do, what the mega act would want to do is to stop you from being able to register and stay on the roles, stop you from casting your ballot and ensure that your ballot never gets counted.

“And if those things happen, our democracy is dismantled and total.”

Leader Abrams, I have so much appreciation for your leadership on this. Obviously, this would also among the other groups affected would of course be college students who are very likely to not have a driver's license, especially the ones going to university and cities with public transportation. And so in cities and we've talked about this a lot and how undocumented folks are not able to register to vote. But one of the areas where we keep trying to break through to our friends on the right is what would this do to US servicemen and women stationed overseas, how would they be able to exercise their constitutional right.

So you're absolutely right in the state of Georgia, we had to fight in 2024 to block an intent by the state election board to deny the return of absentee ballots, most of those ballots were coming from service members.

And so we don't have a federal system of voting. We have state-by-state voting according to the Constitution, but we also have acknowledged that we no longer live in the days of cards and buggies.

That's, you know, we still have Tuesday voting which was largely around an agrarian economy, but we have these need and nifty things like airplanes and telephones and phones, but we still have to get the information to its location.

“Vote by mail is essential for our service members. And to your point about our students, new hamster, try to pass a law, limiting the ability of college students to participate in elections because they were not getting the outcomes they wanted.”

Texas and Georgia will not permit you to you and Florida will not permit you to use a student ID to cast a ballot. And Texas, you can use your gun license. That's right. You can't use your student ID. And so I want everyone to understand when you hear them say voter ID, they do not mean identification. They mean is proof that you believe what they want you to believe. That's the argument. And my best example is twofold. In North Dakota in 2012 Native Americans, the Standing Rocksuit tribe, they had an outsized effect on the North Dakota Senate race and Heidi High camp got elected.

The following year, they passed a law saying that Native Americans will get everyone in North Dakota had to have a street address on their ID in order for that ID to work. The problem is the state of North Dakota and the counties decide who has a street address. Well, if you are Native American and live on a reservation in North Dakota, the state had to give you that address and they refused through the body of the county. So you had an entire tribe that was told you can't vote, not because you haven't proven your citizenship since you were here before everybody else, not because you don't have ID, but because you don't have a form of proof that we refuse to give you.

And the Supreme Court said that was okay because the Native American population was de minimists and if it didn't affect everyone, it didn't really matter.

That's it. And if you can shave points with Native Americans, with people of color, with students, with service members, you don't have to outlaw voting. You just have to outlaw their participation through administrative effort. Yeah, our theme has been so far. The idea that you don't need a military style coup in order to destroy democracy. You can do it with the existing laws on the books and with the veneer of supporting it. And in some ways, that's what makes it the most pernicious authoritarian threat that we've seen.

We're Trump is able to claim that he's supporting democracy. I guess another example of this certainly is claiming to investigate so-called voter fraud at the same time that you're really trying to undermine elections.

And you certainly had a front row seat in Georgia to that process.

I'd invite you to remark on that. But what I really also want to just dig into on this big theme, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court. And having listened to your podcast, I know that you grew up around the civil rights movement.

“I believe your parents were involved in the civil rights movement.”

If I were to pick one of the things that's most frustrating to watch right now, it's instances in which we have legislation on the books. In particular, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that we're so hard fought for. And yet, our being eviscerated before our eyes in the name of the law, you know, so when Clarence Thomas seems to indicate that he thinks actually section two of the voting rights act might be incompatible with the equal protection clause. I'll totally absurd idea, given that the idea of reconstruction, of course.

What is your equal protection? So, I mean, what do we make of that danger in all this? Because on the one hand, defeating dangerous legislation, which we've talked about, in the long-term trying to pass legislation, my worry, as I look and try to be honest about the current moment, is that we have a court that will just undermine even the best legislation. So I invite your thoughts on that. I think your right and part of what I try to encourage people to do is to not pay attention to the moment and time, but to how those moments are woven together.

And so if you think about the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, yes, it was designed to operationalize and require states to do what the law already said. Federal law already said through the 1314th and 15th amendments that black men were citizens that had the right to vote. The 15th amendment in particular was about making that manifest. But it took until 1965 because even though the law said it was true, they used the law to deny how you got to access it.

“And that's what we have to be so afraid of in this country, not that we don't have the laws that say the right thing,”

it's that we have people who decide if those laws count and that's into medical to democracy. What we are watching happen with the CalA decision, that's the one you're referencing professor is a case out of Louisiana,

where a group of white voters who watched in horror as a group of black voters for the first time had access to one more seat.

So in the state of Louisiana, black voters for the last 100 plus years have basically only been able to elect one person who may possibly say they want to represent their interest. In terms of knowing that race is one of the strongest predicate of political leanings. And so they got that seat because in the census, the black population of Louisiana hit the threshold, it said, we can't ignore you anymore, we've got to do what's right. And the Supreme Court actually in 2023 said, yeah, do it's right. They did it based on the case in Alabama.

But it was so effective because that one extra seat was not going to change anything in the house.

“But those voters basically brought suit saying, we don't think that you should have the right to say that our racism is wrong.”

That's what this decision is. Because if it is mental that, you break democracy, you're targeting black voters, but let's be clear. When the voting rights act was reauthorized in 1975, it wasn't done just because of black voters. It was done because Latino voters had been uniquely targeted by this guy named William Rinclist who went on to become the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and his protege John Roberts were entirely the architects of trying to dismantle and deny access to the rights of vote for Latinos and Native Americans.

And Asian Americans who are also growing population.

And so now sitting on the Supreme Court, you have people who have never believed in the full signature of our democracy.

They do not believe in full citizenship for all Americans. Because that full citizenship is made manifest through voting. But if we know that our job is to do something about it. And so the work that we are doing through the 10 steps campaign, the work that I'm proud to founded through fair fight, the work we've done through my organization that I launched, but it's independent now fair count.

And so we've got to do all of the pieces and one of the reasons your show is important, the reason I do what I do is it now is the time for us to understand all of it because they do. And even if you are in the most protected class in America, they're coming for you to if they don't like what you say. And so we should all be concerned about the CalA decision coming out of the Supreme Court. We should all be terrified about legislation that redraw districts in the middle of a decade in order to gain the system.

And we should all elaborate what happened in California and what's happening in Virginia because any time we can nullify the bad actions of the court. We are buying ourselves a little more time to build the democracy we deserve. And I really want everyone to understand, yes, I grew up in a family that was steeped in the voting rights act because my grandfather fought in World War II and in the Korean War once by choice, once by conscription. The vote each time he came back from defending democracy abroad.

My dad was arrested at the age of 14 for registering black people to vote.

“I believe in voting rights because I know that's how we access the American dream.”

And the reason they're fighting so hard to stop us from leveraging our democracy is their afraid it might actually work. Hmm, I want to thank you for mentioning rank list, who was a segregationist and defended segregation. We are not that far removed from that period and John Roberts is the living breathing aristocratic proof of it. When you were first running for governor in the primary, one of your opponents was saying we have to try to reach out to our maga loved ones and neighbors.

We have to try to connect to them and what I always admired most about you was you said no, we don't, we need to reach out to the people who haven't voted.

To reach out to people who've turned 18 become citizens or been too jaded to show up in the last election. And I've always kept that in my heart. You really, really convinced a lot of people that this is the way to go and it's only going to be a massive turnout.

“Only huge democracy can save democracy. Beyond that though, what else can ordinary citizens do, what actions can people take right now to defend democratic institutions?”

Because I'm with you, I think the greatest problem among those who oppose fascism is folks tend to show up in vote and they've done their civic duty and then they check out for two to four years. So John, I'm going to revise an extended remarks just a little bit. Please. I spoke to everyone. I can't meet in all 159 counties. I talked to those who violently oppose my existence and those who were so desperate to be seen.

My point was, I was never going to change my values in order to court their vote. And that's the danger. The danger is when you compromise your values in order to achieve a victory.

You lose because you're never going to change the values of someone else by not having your own, but you lose those who share your values because they don't trust you anymore. And so I was very clear that I was going to live and talk and breathe my values and I was going to reach out to people who'd never heard from us because we were afraid it was harder to get them to show up than it was to try to convert those whose values were different hours. And as the daughter of my parents became pastors eventually and in the way I put it, my parents do conversion. Their job is to change your soul. I don't have that kind of time or patience. My job is to help you change your behavior.

So you can change. I'm not changing your beliefs. I'm changing your behavior and the behavior that moves you from not voting to voting isn't magic.

“It's actually seeing people and asking how can I help? What's wrong? And that's what average folks can do. We keep thinking that we have to have the right polling and the right message.”

People want their lives to be better. They want to thrive. They want to be able to take their kids to a park and know that it's going to be there. They want to be able to wake up and go outside and breathe clean air. They want to be able to afford to go outside. Those are basic issues. And so the average person who thinks, well, I'm not in power has to understand that freedom and power don't belong to the elite.

We loan it to them. And the problem is we keep forgetting to go and take it back.

And that's why we say that there are 10 steps to authoritarianism and democracy. There are also 10 steps to freedom and power. And so if you go to 10 steps campaign.org, we are walking you through what those 10 steps are. And we're doing it with more than 30 partners across this country who are doing that work in thousands of people who've signed on because John, to your point, this isn't about the elite suddenly deciding they don't want to be powerful anymore. This is about us deciding we want our power back.

And so I always say your first job is to find somebody who doesn't believe in voting and say what's wrong, how can I help? And you help them first and then you talk to them about voting second. And the help doesn't mean you have to solve their problem.

“Help means I hear you, I see when I recognize your humanity and I'm going to make sure you know you're not in this alone. That's how we make change and that's how we get people to turn out.”

One of the things I love about your message that you're sharing with us here and that I know you've shared your campaigns and also on your podcast is, you know, one response to what we're facing now is very often cynicism or worry that we just can't beat these people. They have too much control, they have the court, they have legislation that they're working on, they have administrative controls that really violate the fundamental spirit of the law that they're able to use to undermine our democracy.

And you've been outlining an account of hope and resistance to cynicism. So in that spirit, I mean, I wanted to ask you, long term, certainly the immediate threat to democracy is Donald Trump and the power he wields from within the presidency. But in the same way that there are these dangerous pieces of legislation, including the save act that we've talked about that are pending and that we have to resist in the moment. What long-term fixes would you want to see? We're often asking our guests that and I know you have a lot of ideas. What kind of new civil rights act, new ways of shoring up our democracy?

Because we are facing a threat from Donald Trump, but there's also a long-term threat that Trump is in might survive him. So Donald Trump is an avatar. He is not the architect of what we face. He couldn't explain what we're facing.

“So true. So he is a very good salesman. And that's what we keep forgetting. We keep thinking he built the product. No, he just figured out how to sell it.”

Yeah. So there's every other flim flamm artist. So there's every other populist strong man. They never ever created. They only ever sell it.

And so we've got to stop paying so much attention to the salesman. And we can't ignore him because he's got bombs. But we also have to pay attention to the architects, the people building the engineers. That's why I'm more focused on Steve Miller and Russell Boat. And the heritage foundation and everyone and the oligarchs who are or can be Sam Altman should worry all of us. People who are actually pulling the levers, not the people they put up front to distract us.

And so one of our responsibilities is first to commit to understanding that.

It is easy to pour all of our pain in our anger and our hope in the idea that Trump will be gone. His leaving doesn't change a thing. Nicholas Maduro was the president. Chavez was the one who undead democracy. He's been dead for 15 years. There is no Castro running Cuba. And so we've got to stop thinking about this in terms of the cult of personality that's designed to distract us. We have to think in terms of what do we need to see? And my response is we need to elect the people we need to elect the midterms matter, but not just at the federal level.

Most of the pain people feel actually happens at the state and local level.

“That's why they've been so assiduous in their attack on local elected officials, on state elected officials.”

So we've got to pay attention to what's happening there. We've got to elect judges at the state and local level because that's the pipeline to the Supreme Court. But once we get our power back, we need to change the architecture of the Supreme Court. We need to change the number of states in the United States. We need to make DC a state. And while I know Puerto Rico, the language has been to let Puerto Rico have autonomy in deciding. I think we need to go ahead and make them a state. We can't guarantee how they're going to vote.

But if we're going to tax them, they should have a say. And then we need to renew our fight for the John Lewis freedom of vote act. We need to build architecture that can withstand those who would dismantle it. Our responsibility is not simply to restore what we had because what we had was clearly insufficient for this moment.

Our job is to demand what we've always deserved.

And that is a democracy where the right to vote is sacrosanct and they have to have a reason to take it away, not a reason to give it to you, where the access to elections should be easy, not hard. And where the outcomes of those elections should reflect the will and the need of the people. Even if we don't like every aspect of it, we should be absolutely certain that we had a say in it. And that means making it easier for people to not only show up to vote, but then to show up to protest, to show up at the committee meetings and to show up in hearings and to be present in our democracy every day and every way.

Yeah, I love this vision and of course looking beyond Trump seeing that the threat both will last beyond Trump is so fundamental and also though the vision of what we have to accomplish in terms of legislation that it has to go beyond just defeating the people in this moment.

“One of the themes that we've been struggling with on the oath in the office is so much of the period that we've focused on 1964 and 1965 before that, as you mentioned, the ideals of reconstruction and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.”

We're about reconstituting national power around the protection of the civil rights and civil liberties that we're talking about.

And yet in the moment what we're seeing and you mentioned this too is local resistances and state officials and sanctuary cities and states, for instance, are realistically one of the ways that we're fighting back against the national government that is undermining rather than protecting civil rights. So I'll leave you with a kind of conceptual puzzle, we're often trying to go really deep on some of these questions, you know, how do we think about that that progressives are now turning to local resistance, even though there's a shameful part of local resistance, for instance, resistance to civil rights in the 1960s.

I mean, do you have a way of reconciling those? We just have to, yes, and do both.

“It's a mechanism, we've conflated the usage with the instrument. I recently wrote a novel, coded justice, and it talks about AI, DEI, and Veterans Healthcare.”

And the point of my book is to say that the instrumentality of AI is neither good nor bad. It is.

Question is who uses it and to what end? States rights was never bad or good, it is an instrument, but it is up to us to determine what we will allow to be determined by the state versus what is guaranteed by our federalism. Freedom and access is guaranteed by the federal government. That should be sacroshing. There should be no capacity for state or local governments to diminish your baseline access as a citizen. And what civil rights was about was that we were being denied in a number of states, the full sumeness of the democracy that we were part of, of the nation to which we were citizens. And so it took the radical Republicans and then the civil rights movement to put that into law.

But the reason it had to be put into law was that we forgot that state's rights was not about all rights. It were rights that were not reserved and powers not reserved to the federal government. Protecting our citizenship is the federal government's responsibility. Expanding that is the role of the state. And so we have to stop being afraid of doing the work of expanding justice, of expanding equity of expanding what diversity actually means. Progressives have to stop being afraid of people seeing what we're doing.

Because the other side is more than happy to grow its pronatalist white supremacist Christian nationalist values. We are actually right. We are what people want. They want to live their lives free of fear free of harm. They know there is risk, but they don't want that risk to be undo and they know they're going to be barriers, but they want those barriers to not be constructed because of who they are, who they love and what they look like.

“That's the responsibility we have. And so I believe that the states should absolutely be laboratories for expansion. What Oregon and Washington state have been able to do with voting rights, I wish everyone could do.”

What Georgia for one shining moment was willing to do with voter registration and automatic registration until they saw it worked is something that should be modeled if we're going to do it right.

But more than anything, the smallest piece of democracy begins with what a citizen believes they are entitled to and how they're willing to treat each other. And that's the work I think that you're doing that I'm doing. And when we do that work, that is the most profound resistance we can have in this country. What a great place to end this amazing conversation to think about the different levers of power and the idea that what the constitution gives us is a variety of mechanisms, but there is no constitution police, it's not self executing.

We need all of us to be pulling on those levers and right now some of the most powerful levers that we can pull on and resisting the president of the United States and his attempted self-coo is attempted authoritarian takeover is to use the states and cities and local officials to fight back. Stacey everyone, thanks so much for joining us on the oath in the office. This has been amazing conversation. Thank you for being honest both about the threat that we're facing and also of providing us hope it's really been a pleasure.

Thanks, Corey. Thanks for having me. Thank you to John as well. Thanks again to Stacey Abrams. Wow. Corey. What a booking. What's the best way professor for our listeners to follow you and keep up with your brilliance all week long? You couldn't find me and us the oath in the office.

I hope Americans are grasping how fragile our democratic norms actually are and I thank you again for putting up this podcast to remind us of what's it's stake and how we can fight back. Would a pleasure John and thanks again to Stacey Abrams and of course to our new sponsor the ACLU. I've heard of them and thanks again to Wendy and Bay of Wolf and everyone who helps with this monster together every week. I pray always a pleasure. Thanks for making me smarter. Thanks for talking me off that constitutional ledge every week and we will see all of you next time on the oath in the office.