Stuart Stevens, Mary Ziegler & Lisa Graves

Published Apr 3, 2024, 4:01 AM

The Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens discusses the disastrous choices Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is making. True North Research’s Lisa Graves tails the nefarious plans of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Then we’ll talk to legal historian Mary Ziegler about the latest aggressions against women’s bodily autonomy.

Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and a federal judge. As migrants can sue the company that flew them to Martha's vineyard. We have such a great show for you today. True North researches Lisa Graves stops by to talk about the nefarious plan of Republican Attorneys Generals Association. It's called RAGA rhymes with maga. Then we'll talk to legal historian Mary Zigler about the post row apocalypse. But first we have legendary campaign manager and close personal friend of mine, the author of the conspiracy to end America Five ways my old party is driving our democracy to autocracy, the Lincoln Project. Stuart Stevens. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Stuart Stevens.

Diis you ask me to party? Roy?

You are the best. We're looking down the barrel of this endless general election cycle. The thing that has struck me with all all of this news has been this weird Biden raising all this money and then Trump being jealous. Do Republicans really have a money problem?

Trump has a money problem because he needs a lot of money that has nothing to do with the campaign. You know, from the very beginning, if he really knew Republican politics, this is going back to twenty fifteen. The Trump campaign was set up as a large criminal enterprise. And let's don't forget that Trump's campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, national security advisor, foreign policy advisor, lawyer, all of those are now felons. So that was how it started, and it didn't improve. And he has never been interested in building the party at all. It's why there's sort of an ad suicide pack that the party has entered into with Trump. I mean, they literally are out in the jungle drinking the kool aid. So he's killed much of the apparatus of the RNC, and I you know, he has a small donor base, but I don't think that he is going to raise the kind of money that the president is. I think it's harder to say no to the prosident the United States than a guy who is under indictment in four different jurisdictions and is having trouble making bail.

Yes, though he did make bail.

It did make bail.

He did get the bond he needed one hundred and seventy five million dollar bond. Can I ask you? It does seem like there are a number of opportunities to influence trade in Trump world, like, for example, right, I mean you have the bonds, right, you could be one of the people who gave him a bond. You could be an investor in the Donald Trump spack, right, which is locked up so Trumps can't sell a stock. If you buy into that spack, you could be giving Donald Trump money essentially. Right.

Yeah, Look, this has been a reality of Donald Trump from the very beginning. You know, Craig Unger wrote a great book about his rushing connections to go back long before the campaign. Think that we talk about this enough, boy. In twenty sixteen, Russians tried to elect Donald Trump. There is no disagreement over this. Every intelligence agency and the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee agrees that they tried to elect Donald Trump. Well, they did elect Donald Trump. What did they get? Well, as it turned out, they got a lot. And we now have what was the most consistent element of anti Soviet Union standing up the Russia part of American politics was the conservative part of the Repoking Party, and that has now become the propute and part of the Repokan Party and these Russian connections for Trump, you know, the people that were buying condos and Trump towers and these other places. He's always been a huge conflict of interest guy. And let's don't forget you know, in twenty sixteen, and this still blows my mind, Donald Trump went around the country saying, no one's going to holle me because I'm founding my own campaign. So then if you went to his website, prominently featured was a donate button. So I mean, it's always been just a sham. There are one hundred contacts, over one hundred contacts with Russians in the sixteen campaign. You can ask anybody wh's worked in a democratic Republican campaign, what would you do if a hostin foreign power tried to get in touch to the campaign? Do you call the FBI, you tell the campaign lawyer. It's just unimaginable. And this has now been normalized by the Republican Party.

Right, so let me ask you as we're in this world today. There was a piece of the Times about Chinese influence, right, so if the Chinese wanting to get involved in election medaling, we had Russia in twenty sixteen, we have tech companies that seem completely uninterested in doing anything to prevent it. First of all, why do China and Russia want Trump to win? I mean, I sort of understand Russia because he loves Putin, but China he wants to do all these tariffs. I mean, what does China just think that America in chaos is a win? I mean, what do you think the endgame there is?

I think a weakened America helps China across the board, and there is no question that an isolation is too weaker America will be the reality of Donald Trump's president of the United States. Donald Trump is the most easily to manipulate human being in American politics.

You know, he's the dog that if you pet them, he'll follow you home. And the Chinese know this.

So for him versus Joe Biden, I mean, you know, this is one of the interesting shifts that's happened here. There was a time, if you go back to sixties early seventies, when the Democratic Party had a strong call it strengthen foreign policy elements, Scoop Jackson all of that. There is an opportunity here for Democrats to reclaim that I mean, who was it who went to Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan, and it is a repositioning that I think could have generational impact if Democrats can embrace it and deal with their own internal conflicts.

That helped the Democratic Party become the.

Party of strength and foreign policy, which it certainly is now.

So many of these policies is Republican policies suck, right, like the few ones that were right, I mean, besides the lower taxes, which I think a live rich people really like. Most these policies are just terrible, right, and they're not even popular, like banning abortion, States rights, just kidding, not states rights? No rights. Can you use a Comstock Act to make it so you can't send metha pristone in the mail? Going to make it so you can't you know, just I mean endless? You know, regulations, you can't teach kids about certain books, no vaccines. Who want to regulate to have you bring back polio?

I mean, who is this for a small percentage of the country.

I am of the opinion that commnsional wisdom is that this campaign is going to come down to four hundred thousand people and you know, four maybe five states. You know, that's probably right. I mean, the convinsional wisdom is often right. I think there's another chance here, and that is that you know, around October twentieth or something, that Trump campaign could just begin to collapse the same way to Carter cam Pa began to collapse at that time in nineteen eighty. There is no policy that people like. You know, one of my mentors in politics said, you know, sooner or later, you've got to be for stuff that people like. And this is a fervent base. That is an extremist movement. So what is the thing about extremist movements is they always become more extreme. There's not like a well immoderate wing of the Red Guard the demand stronger purity test. We've gone from at least saying we were a big tent party to saying they don't want they don't want anybody that doesn't agree with Donald Trump. The bargain that you have to make with yourself and your values to be for Donald Trump keeps getting steeper and steeper. And when you saw this in the primaries, that bargain sort of a threshold thing was you had to believe that you didn't live in a democracy because you had to believe that Donald Trump really should be pres the United States, which means we don't live in democracy, and that was overwhelming the majority of the supporters. Now, most people don't believe that. Those people think that we actually have a legal government. I think that what has happened is because these polls show that Trump is ahead. I think if you're sitting in a room with Donald Trump, and you know, there's some smart people there, like chrislas Adeta, and they're saying, you need to appeel more to mainstream, you sell ya why I'm winning now, right, I'm not going.

To do it.

And he loves the crowds, right, It's part of the reason he's so manipultaal by farm agents.

These crowds don't represent America.

And he gets up there and he says, you know, crazy stuff, but it's really not crazy, and they love it, and so it keeps getting deeper and deeper and the party. You know, in our system, political parties should form a circuit breaker function, and the Republican Party never pulled a circuit breaker on Donald Trump.

Democratic Party pulled the circuit breaker on George.

Wallace eventually threw him out and he ended up running as an independent. The Republican Party didn't do it, and now it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc.

This is this incredible Senate map for Republicans, sort of a once in a twenty year map that where they could really change the director of the Senate when it's back and their candidates suck too.

Yeah, you have to ask yourself how many of these Senate races are going to overperform the top of the ticket on the Republican side.

Not a lot.

I just keep going back to what is the policy that people afford that you get with Donald Trump? Usually in a campaign you say, okay, you get me, and you get this. He's going to settle the score. It's the final battle. It's about retribution. He's going to build these camps down on the border and deport lots of people. People can walk around feeling angry about the idea of a leal immigrants, idea of the southern borders. It's not really affecting your life. And the button has an extraordinary campaign administration really has an extraordinary record of ITCHI even that does affect people's life. You know, if you're now paying thirty five bucks for insulin instead of whatever you were paying before. That is more relevant to your life than some image of caravan coming up to the southern border. This infrastructure stuff, it's the largest public works project in the history of the country. The chip stuff, These are all all big things that Biden managed to get passed, a sort of extraordinary managent to get passed, given the dynamics of our time and the key element axis that this campaign has to drive. For the Biden campaign, Biden has to be for the future and Trump has to represent the past. And how does the oldest president do that well by proposing ideas that affect people in the future, that will make your life positive. And you know, traditionally an American pology, it's the most optimistic candidate wins. We very rarely elect a candidate who is a Neil list or things that things are going to get worse. That is the essence of the Trump campaign. And listen, I just if you have not gone on YouTube and watched Trump's announcement in Waco until you see that thing IM reading about it is one thing, but I made myself go watch it for this last book I wrote, it is an extraordinary moment that if Donald Trump wins this race that's going to be looked at, I think as a turning part in American history. It's a declaration of war against the United States as we know it today.

Right the polling again, I don't necessarily the polls, but they are really tight. There are certainly a number of worries in this campaign between Israel stuff. Voters hate that, or at least a lot of young voters hate that. You've got RFK Junior supporting Trump's insane rhetorick that Biden is anti Democratic because of his COVID tweets not being allowed to stay. Do you think these are real threats? Do you think these are exaggerated threats?

Yeah?

Look, I mean when I worked in presidential campaigns, people would say are you worried about? I would stop them there and say yes, because whatever it was you're worried about, that's what you're supposed to do. So there are a lot of very troubling things. Biden's best group in twenty we're younger voters. He won them by double digits. That is obviously a cross pressure. Now with the war between Israel and Amas, he needs to get a higher percentage of Hispanic votes than he's getting now there's lots of problems, but you know, at the end of the day, literally at the end of the day, I think the question you always ask yourself is would I rather be my guy or the other guy?

And I'd rather be the Biden campaign. Now, does that mean you're going to win? No?

Tell me why.

Your problems compared to the other guys or his problems are monumentally more when he's under indictment. He is running as a candidate of anger. Those candidates rarely win. He has surrounded himself with people who who are the people you like in the Republican Party today?

If people like Mike Johnson, I don't think so, seems like this weird little guy. So who's the people you like?

There's really nobody out there. Who are you gonna put out there as surrogates? And you know, the economy is getting better, which helps. If you read the book The Last Politician A fact for about Biden, there's a phrase that he keeps using the recurs in the book, don't bet against America, which is a very Biden phase.

And I actually that's how I feel about the campaign. Biden is more in the American mainstream. He is a candidate who is optimistic. He's not a hater, he's not a cruel man. And you look around the country, most of the role models that we look to in our life are more like Biden than Trump. Right, And how many coaches, teachers, boy scout girl Scout leaders act like Donald Trump? Not many?

And you wouldn't tolerate it. And the Republican Party has tolerated this and sort of normalized it. But I think that there's a limit to how that's normalized. I think Biden has a better story to tell. I would expect that Biden's going to be behind until the convention. If I was a Biden campaign, I kind of want to be up behind until the convention because I think there's a great comeback story here, and you don't want that comeback story to begin too soon. Come October fifteenth, Are people really going to be looking at four years of Donald Trump and want Donald Trump in your face and right now to say that you're for Donald Trump. There's no penalty to you could be a Muslim voter somewhere, Sai.

I don't like that. You know, I'm mad at Biden. I'm going to vote for Trump.

He come around and he goes, you're really going to go for the guy that wanted to ban Muslims, right?

So I think the same with the younger voters.

Do you really want somebody who clearly wants a national banner on abortion?

Really?

So, you know, I think the Republican Party is basically at war with the modern world.

They're mad at everybody.

They're mad at Disney, they're mad at the NFL, they're mad at Nike.

And that's just a weird place to be.

The NFL's wildly popular, Disney's wildly popular, Nike self, you know, billions of dollars. They got a war with Nascar because Nascar banned the Confederate flag. You're in a culture war with Nascar, right, how's that working out? There's gonna be a lot of bad days for the Bidon campaign. There always are. I think it's impossible to run for president and not be humiliated. It's a question of how you deal with that humiliation. And there's a resiliency to the campaign that I admire. I'm gonna admire the Biden campaign operation. It's very difficult to beat an incumbent president and they did it. And particularly now that we're out of the federal funding system where both kendidates get the same amount of money. The last time an incumbent president lost, he wasn't in the federal funding system. With Herbert Hoover before Donald Trump, we had a bad year. Look, I think the way to wake up in this if you're on the side of democracy and you're on the side of America, is to wake up every day scared to death. I mean, that's what we do in the Linking Project and act like that. But I think you should walk with confidence. And if I ran the Democratic Party, that's a message I would deliver. I would say, there are more of us than the r of them. Walk with confidence, get some swagger. We're right there wrong, act like it, and I think that that's the way you go out and you just take this thing.

Thank you, Stuart.

Thank you Rollie.

Lisa Graves is the founder of the investigative watchdog group True North Research. Welcome to Fast Politics, Lisa.

Thank you so much for having me on. It's a joy to be on your show. I'm a longtime Fanily.

Oh, thank you, well, I need to tell the story of how I decided to have you on. Dahlia is one of the greats and she has a podcast called Amakus and it is one of those podcasts I listen to certain podcasts like to sort of sound smarter than I am, and they tend to be legal podcasts because I have a very short attention span, so the legal stuff I can never maybe read through get through it quickly enough, for you know, my reading comprehension is a little spotty. So I was listening to it, and I was listening to you, and I was thinking to myself, holy shit, this is big and it's important. You're here to talk to us about the Republican Attorneys General and it's RAGA is the shorthand for it. I'm hoping you could tell our listeners sort of how you got here.

Sure well, And I'm a huge fan of Dahlia's as well. These are some of them must listen to podcasts. But she had me on to talk about RAGA and RAGA is, as you said, the Republican Attorney's General Association. So it's a way for them to raise money from a range of sources and an amount that for many of them, they could not raise that money directly for their own campaigns, and so it's really a pay to play operation for those who want to have access to the top law enforcement officers in each state. So how I got into this is that back about twenty years ago, when I was a chief counselor for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was working there handling nominations and we had a whistleblower who came forward from within RAGA, and she had the call records, which are the records that the AGS were using to solicit funds for RAGA. Then RAGA would spend that money on the campaigns of those Republican attorneys general. And the way it worked was that for a number of these ags, they could not solicit from corporations or for sources that big for their own campaigns with campaign finance laws and their states, and so RAGA was a way around that, and so it was a big pay to play operation.

So raga's basically functions as a super pack right.

In a way, it's a five to two seven organization, but that's that's sort of how it operates. It's all political and it helps them with their races, but it also helps organize events with their major donors, right, you know, to shape policy, particularly policy against environmental regulations against regulating tobacco, against regulating a number of things that people want regulated.

For example, Yes, RAGA didn't come to my attention until after Donald Trump lost his reelection and they started getting involved in the efforts to over turn the election, which is so insane. These are Republican attorneys general, so talk to us about their sort of how they got involved in the twenty twenty lead up to January sixth and the legacy there.

Yeah, that was generally shocking, even for RAGA. They have this arm called the Rule of Law of Defense Fund ROLDF, and it was promoting the January sixth events on the mall, the ones where Trump said come it will be wild. I mean, it was actually doing robo calls urging people to go to the mall that day. It was basically advancing Trump's big lie, which I call the big lucrative lie because it raises so much money. But basically, this group that is constituted of the top law of course an officers in several states that claims to be devoted to the rule of law was actively promoting people to go to that event. And then after that came out their role in trying to get people to go, they disavowed that activity. The staff left, but it didn't really change anything because in fact, many of those state ags had been actively trying to stop the certification of the election and continue to back Donald Trump at basically every turn.

Talk to me about sort of who the kind of biggest offenders in this group are.

Well. Greg Abbott, who is the Attorney General of Texas, is a significant part of RAGA. You also have Jonathan Scrametti from Tennessee who has been actively trying to intimidate the DC Attorney General who's investigating Leonard Leo. And that's significant because Leonard Leo his network is the biggest funder of RAGA over the past ten years since it was created as a separate entity separate from RSLC, And so you have state attorneys general coming in to try to block the investigation of their biggest benefactor. That certainly stinks. And it's not just Scrimetti, it's also Alexander Mairez who is the Attorney General of Virginia, who is also part of this effort to impede the investigation of Leonard Leo. And Mayor's for quite a while was in business with Garry Marx, who is one of the key leaders of part of Leo's nonprofit network, which included Digital Crisis Network and Judicial Education Project.

It's so interesting to me because, like, you expect this from a state like Texas, right they are having all sorts of their republican state legislature is fighting against their Republican state legislature right now, right, I mean, they're a mass You expect that, and you even expected from Tennessee because it's so red, and you know, you expect these sort of very red states to have that kind of corruption. But Virginia is surprised to may well.

It is a state that has certainly gone blue and red and has a Republican governor, as you and your listeners know, and when that happens, they have had a number of really right wing appointees in the virgin And governor's administration and so or the election related to that with Maras and so in that sense, it's not a surprise because when they rule, they tend to rule and do in my view, rule from an extreme position, regardless of the mandate, regardless of whether the population might be purple or you know, tend toward blue in you know, the popular color parlance for politics. But it's really a function of the fact that RAGA is such a powerful entity for helping these state law enforcement officers get elected and stay elected. And so it's more a matter of power, I suppose, although I mean it is about policy, but it's about power and then wielding it. And so Virginia, you know, I do think it's significant. I suspect that a lot of people who live in Virginia would not be supportive of some of the things that the Attorney general there is. But the fact is is that he has power, and he's holding that power in concert with these other Republican ags who are also doing things like trying to intimidate the state of Maine for its efforts to protect people's right to access abortion and parents' right to help their children get gender affirming care. And so you recently, in the past week or so, had another letter from some of these state RAGA ags basically telling Maine that they should not be allowing people in their state to exercise freedom.

In my opinion, yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because it is like this big lie. There are obviously a number of big lies here, but the lie, my favorite, is that Republicans are like this is a state issue, right, states rights issue. They're going to kick abortion back to the states. Right. That was the lie, and here we are with them trying to control what happens in Maine, which obviously so it's not. I'm wondering we talk about attorneys generals. They are all elected or some are elected. Somewhere pointed, is it all standard? How did this organization get so out of control?

Well, they are elected, and I think part of it has just been allowing themselves are basically being designed to do the bidding of their sort of highest bidders. There's price sheets that we've obtained over the years through open records requests, and the price sheets say something like, you know, if you give us ten thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars, you get X number of tickets to this event or that event, you get to have a panel. And then they have at the top of that, you know, if you give two hundred thousand dollars or more, call us you good. And guess who gives two hundred thousand dollars or more. It's Leonard Leo's network. He's directed more than twenty million dollars to RAGA over the past decade that exceeds coke industries meant other major corporations who you would think might give more, but in fact it's Leonard Leo, and so I think the reason why they're so out of control, the reason why there's this massive policy divergence and this aggression by the state attorney general toward other states, is because they're advancing Leo's agenda, which is one that is venmily opposed to abortion access. Who claim to support state rights actually think that their state law should be applied extra territorially. Does reveal the lie, because it's quite extraordinary to see some of the things we've been seeing happen in Texas, where at one point Abbott was threatening a woman whose doctor said that she could not go forward with this pregnancy and she needed to have an abortion, threatening anyone who would help her get that abortion. And so this extraterritoriality thing is quite extraordinary and it's new. I don't think it's really ever happened in US history. I've looked for other examples of interstate fights of this nature and have seen nothing like what we've seen. But we're seeing it because you have a training around. It's not just that they're beholding to Leonard Leo in part because of his massive funding of the operation that helps fuel their elections. It's because he's also someone who if they're aligned with him, they could get appointed to the Supreme Court or lower courts or state supreme courts, and so it's part of their pathway, the pipeline of power that Leonard Leo has built right.

And Leonard Leo heat figures in a lot these stories about how the judiciary is used to enact more conservative laws and undermine the rights of others and also people who have less When you read about the Supreme Court and how this court became so conservative, he's very much a fixture and a lot of those stories. I'm hoping you could explain to us what happened after the twenty twenty election, that there were a few moments when this group kind of almost got frozen out, and then what happened from there.

Well, so after Documented, which is a group I co founded, but I wasn't working with them at the time, found the robocalls, the documentation that Raga's Rule of a Lot of Defense Fund was actively supporting the January sixth events, the precursor to the violent insurrection. There was outcry and there were corporations that basically said they weren't going to fund Rolled Out. Now that's similar across the board. There were corporations that said they weren't going to fund certain Republican activity. So there was a widespread action, you know, among the American people, most people to what they saw with their own eyes about the violence that Trump unleashed, his incitement, the groups that were involved, the politicians that were involved, and so there was I would say at least three months of disdain or you know, active disavowing by a number of corporations, not just of RAGA and rolled AFT, but of other components of what happened on January sixth, and also the broader election denial. And then it faded. I think it was a big story about a year or so ago about the number of corporations that basically went back to the usual funding of a number of these groups, including RAGA, And so there was a moment of maybe awakening and fear of public repercussions for supporting such groups or such politicians, and then things sort of returned to business as usual as the Republican circled the wagons and basically, for example, locked the impeachment of Donald Trump even though it was a majority vote, there wasn't a super majority vote for that impeachment trial in the Senate. They started peddling very hard this notion that basically nothing he did do anything wrong and this was just free speech. This was in accordance with the claims by Trump that this was Antifa, it wasn't his followers. So there was a whole massive disinformation campaign and ultimately they managed to I think secure a substantial majority of Republicans to accept that lie or promote that lie, and that has continued to be part of the massive distortion, including their reaction to the January sixth Committee and its extraordinary findings of all the key players in this effort to subvert our election.

These are like the kind of quiet things that happened behind the scenes that got us to Trump, right. They're kind of the places where you know, this is the quiet groundwork that set up this Supreme Court that's so conservative now that got us the overturning of roby Way that got us SBA. These are the things in Texas. Obviously Centibilite, the one that overturned Row before Roe was overturned. I feel like these are the sort of quay machinations. He's sort of the air apparent to the Koch brothers. Is that right? And tell us a little more about Leonard Leo if you can.

Well, it is part of a longer term effort that we've seen really since the election of Barack Obama. You had this amazing sort of populist response electing Barack Obama, and in the midst of the financial meltdown that began under George W. Bush, and there was a moment where there were headlines, you know, the Republican Party is losing, they've lost their way. They're going to try to broaden their appeal, and that was you know, really pushed back very quickly because suddenly in the spring of two thousand and nine, they basically launched the Tea Party. They claimed it was an organic event, but this superstructure infrastructure, as Jane Mayer and others have documented, was really supported and supplied by the Coke money. Charles Coke, the you know billionaire from Kansas who runs a you know, big oil conglomerate, and his infrastructure to really support give a length and distance, give talking points to this Tea Party effort. That Tea Party effort was in essence of rebranding of the Republican Party that had lost its brand in some ways under the end or the denlopment of Bush. That Tea Party effort was one that itself was built on a lie, the idea that Barack Obama was responsible for tax policy, you know, three months into his presidency, or even the financial crisis. It was a way to basically redirect the focus from Wall Street, for example, and the pain people were suffering with the foreclosures, et cetera, toward this president and blaming the government. And then they turned that into an attack on efforts by the obamaistration to bride people access to healthcare. So there was just an extraordinary fight against the Affordable Care Act, and Coke really helped fuel that fight. And Leo was helping in his own way as well, in terms of his efforts to help get briefs submitted to the Supreme Court amicist briefs by Republican Senators, by Republican ags attacking the Affordable Care Act using some of these groups that he's closely aligned with for these many years. And so they've been operating in tandem. You can see that relationship in what happened after antoninsk Glia died suddenly in February of twenty sixteen, where Leo comes together with Coke to rebrand the George Mason University of Public University's law school as the Antoninisklia Law School. And the money that came in was ten million dollars from Coke and then twenty million dollars from an anonymous donor who we now and with the good work of Uncoke, my campus at the time, connected the dots to show that that was Barry Side, who became very famous a few years ago, two years ago now when we learned that he had actually given control of a one point six billion dollar fortune, a one point six billion dollar trust to Leonard Leo and so Coke sent out materials during the Trump administration talking about how this was great for their policy. They were going to get a once in a generation tax cut, they were going to move a lot of deregulation, and the third prong was that they were going to support this effort to pack the court. Basically, in their view or their words, they were going to install rule of law judges to the court. That was the claimed rule of law judges. You see this phrase again. They were going to work with the Federal Society and Leonard Leo to do so. And so this has been you know, a cooperative joint effort, joint agenda, and that agenda has has resulted in a Supreme Court that has voluntarily taken on cases that some of which seemed mood at the time, like the idea that they're going to take up the clean Power Plan from the obaministration, which was never implemented. They took that case up in twenty twenty one twenty two, issued a decision in West Virginia versus EPA that was spearheaded by one of.

The genial Sorry sorry, sorry, Yeah, that's a decision that haunts me. That is it air pollution or watervolution.

Air pollution and also and also just to redirect efforts to have more clean energy in order to mitigate climate change. And who was at the helm of that but someone who Leo's groups had really groomed, Patrick Morrissey, the Attorney General West Virginia. What were they aiming for? Coke's wish list on this thing called the Major Questions doctrine, which is an invention doesn't exist, not part of the Constitution, but now has been embraced by these appointees to advance cokes agenda, to have a way to assail environmental regulations. And now we're here again with these cases, the Relentless Case and Low or Bright Case, which are designed to not just deal with major questions that agencies write about, but basically anything else that allowed judges to set aside agency expertise on environmental laws and so much more. Again, this is the unity of the Coke wish List and Leo. And it's also the case that Coke Industries and the Coke fortune have funded the Federal Society for many years as well, so they have a long standing relationship. But now, in essence, Leo has the control of a billion dollar fortune in his own right, so he doesn't necessarily need them. But they're still aligned, even though you know, they both sort of claim that they're not backing Trump, but they're more than happy to have him in power in order to accomplish their substantive policy agenda.

Lisa Graves, we're all going to die. Thank you for joining us.

No, No, there's hope and knowledge and I do think you know, there's so many people who are waking up and standing up and helping to make a difference. So you know, there are a lot of people who are working on addressing this court that's surrounded by this cloud of corruption. There are a lot of a lot more people focusing on Leonard Leo and you Molly helping to bring this to light as well. So I'm hopeful that we can make progress.

Mary Ziggler is a legal historian. Mary Zigler, Welcome back to Fast Politics.

Thanks for having me back.

So excited to have you. I think of you as like one of the smartest people thinking and writing about what's going on right now in our post row healthscape. You've been writing about this for a long time and thinking about it for a long time. Isn't as bad as you thought it would be.

Yes, But I think seeing it actually happen is still surreal. Right, So if you study it, you're kind of aware of what could happen and what people are shooting for, and you know, so in that sense, you could kind of see it coming, but actually having it happen is still different.

Today, I was on Morning Joe talking about abortion, Like I was talking about like how Florida's moving the Supreme Court said that this six week ban can come into effect, and it's like the six week ban even though DeSantis signed this into law under the cover of night just a few months ago. The anti choice movement is like light years ahead of the six week ban, right, I mean, in Alabama, they're at Glastis's personhood And I see that you're writing an academic book for Yale University Press about this embryonic personhood fiasco, since you are much more sort of read in on the legal side. Was this always cooking up with them? And are you shocked at how quickly they've gotten here and whatever else you want.

To say, Yeah, I mean they've always been cooking this up. So, I mean one of the kind of big mistakes I think a lot of progressives to make and talking about aborsh is that they they really do believe that personhood is like a new thing. So you'll see people say there's this new personhood movement. Reality, I think is that the anti abortion movement, for the most part, really any major group of any kind, from the very beginning, has always been a fetal personhood movement. So this isn't new in terms of how quickly the movements achieved its objectives, and well, they haven't. Really, It's more sort of how quickly they've come humblic with the fact that this is what this is about. In a way isn't surprising because I think after Dobbs, after the reversal of the right to choose abortion, a lot of conservatives, especially social conservatives, began sort of looking at one another and saying, well, what are we going to do now right, how are we going to get people to vote, How are we going to be keepit people to good money? How are we going to justify to people that this movement is worth their time versus some other conservative cause. And the answer there really was kind of an easy answer, which is fetal personhood, because that had been really what rallied most people to the movement in the first place, and the Alabama Supreme Court's decision I think was obviously really exciting and alganizing for people who believe that fetuses or embryoser zegots are persons, because they weren't. I don't think they were expecting it. Like if you look at who was involved in that case, it wasn't anybody like major in the anti porshion movement. It was just random plaintiff's a joneys, right, So I think they when once that happened, they got really energized and thought, well, maybe we can get some action in words, even if voters are decidedly not interested in this idea of feal person hit.

Yeah, let's talk about that. It is incredibly amazingly weird this, I mean, I guess it makes sense if you think of the history of Republicans and abortion, right, which is that originally, you know, abortion being a religious idea only came about in the you know, in the sixties or seventies. Before that, you know, it wasn't necessarily tied to religion quite the same way it is. I'm sure I have that wrong, but you know what I mean, it wasn't always evangelicals hating abortion quite the same way. Is that right?

Totally?

Yeah?

I mean, so the early nineteenth century laws that we still sometimes saw in the books, that was just doctors who were mad about a bunch of things. They were mad that midwives were competing with them. They were mad that married women were having sex and not having children all the time. They were mad that immigrants were having more babies than non immigrants. But they weren't really talking as much or centrally about religion. And then in the sixties when they're what's the sort of modern anti abortion got going?

That was Catholics.

This being a predominantly evangelical Protestant movement was a thing that didn't happen until, you know, sometime between the eighties and the nineties.

And when that happened, the movement became.

A lot more comfortable talking about Christianity because it wasn't just Catholicism, right, and this is there's more anti Catholicism than there's anti Protestantism. It was easier to say this about Christianity when not all the Christians were the same kind of Christian. The kind of modern it's a super religious cause vision of things came about a while after the movement got its start.

When it comes to IBF, IVF is popular. Mike Pence admits to have done it, though he says it was an IVF. They say it is some kind of Christian IVF. Okay, but it certainly sounds like IVF. Not Mike mother Mother Pens admitted to do it. So is the goal here to make IVF just untenable for religious people? I mean, is that where these Republicans are going?

And if so, why well, I mean, so, if you think a fetus or a zygot or an embryo as a person, you're going to have a problem with IBF. Right, So you're gonna have a problem with the way IVF is currently practiced because IVF often involves the creation of more embryos than are implanted in a given IVF cycle. And there are, you know, a couple of reasons for that, including the facts that not everyone's yours IVF cycle is successful. Obviously sometimes people are planning on having more children. But in either case, right, they don't like the idea that embryos are stored. Steve Aiden of Americans United for Life said, you know, we don't put our children in hold storage indefinitely. They don't like the idea that embryos are destroyed sometimes, right if people break up or they don't need the extra embryos anymore. They don't like the idea that embryos are donated for research. So if once you kind of make that step that the embryo is a person, the way IVF currently works is not going to be okay with you.

And that's been true.

I think for people in the anti worship movement going way back to the very beginning of IBF, but now I think, you know, they just think more is politically possible, so attacking IBF gradually first, I think by saying, hey, IBF, it's like underregulated, it's the wild West. We need more sensible regulation, right.

That's what they say on the Heritage Foundation website, which is like, honestly amazing to me, Like, these are people who don't want you to be able to regulate fossil fuels. They don't want you to begulate anything except IVF.

Oh pretty much.

Yeah, And so they say that, and then they also say essentially like you know, if we're taking this whole person note seriously, we have to be consistent, right, We can't say, oh, well, an embryo is a person in context A and not context B. The problem, I think is again that a lot of evangelicals, you know, don't believe that right there. There's something similar I think has happens with Catholics, where there's you know, been church Catholic church teachings for a long time that IVF is a problem, and yet lots of Catholics willing to use IBF right. So I think convincing she Bols to agree with you is, you know, very different from embarking on a campaign to try.

Yeah, I mean just incredible. So now this personhood thing, I mean, what do we think Alabama seems like one of the things, like with SBA and overturning Road Texas, really was in the forefront. Now it feels like Republicans have gotten really distracted trying to impeach each other and the Republican state.

Yeah, that that happens, you know as one does you know.

Yeah, the Ken pax In fiasco. So I feel like now they've sort of moved on and they're working really hard in Alabama at undermining IVF. Would that decision kiv rights, you know, signed something to indemnify IVF clinics. So if you kill a fetus person, it's not a fetus a blastosist person, You're okay because you're doing it in the name of making money. I mean, what do you think is going on there?

Well, I think Republicans essentially realized that if you're in Alabama, you can't be opposed to the idea that an embryo or a blasticist is a person and you can't be against IVF either. So the fix, the kind of middle ground was Okay, we know we're gonna let not let you sue if you know any embryos destroyed during idea, regardless of how right, regardless of even and whether you know in scenarios where maybe we think, you know, an IVF provider did something wrong and maybe should be sued for something that isn't personhood, but then also didn't say the Alabama Supreme Court was wrong on personhood, right, They let that part stand. So I think this was supposed to be, you know, among other things, kind of a way for even Republicans in Alabama to stop the bleeding. We just had an election recently in near Huntsville, where there's lots of aerospace industry, where a Democrat won a state election. So this was designed to say, of course, you know, if you're for IBF, you don't need to be opposed to Republicans. But if you're for fetal person good, you also don't need to be angry at rebuttal's against try to write like pla eate everybody.

I mean, do you think though, that they've really painted themselves into a corner hair Basically The goal here is to do why right is to make it so you can't have IVF. You know, they don't want the morning after pill. They don't want iud's right. Because this group doesn't know much about biology. They've decided iud's or aboord fashions or whatever it's called. You're tacking dangerously close here to just getting rid of all birth control. And you have to wonder, like, when do the American people say like, no, no, Like I remember Tipper Gore and porn Like I feel like there's a moment where Americans are like, no, no now. Like we think of ourselves as hypocritical, you know, religious zalads, But even for us, this is too far.

Yeah, I mean I think the question the answer is really after. I mean, I hopefully not after. It's too late. But Americans have this tendency when it comes to reproductive rights to basically think that's just not going to happen.

Right.

That's especially true of younger people, and it's especially true of people who don't live and have never lived in Red States.

I say, this is someone who you still live in Florida.

Like that.

Things people will tell me they just don't believe things I've seen can happen one. I mean, the Alabama Supreme Court is a case in point, right, because I don't think anybody really took this fetal person and thinks seriously until the court actually took it seriously for them, right, you're more likely to see the American people say no, this is way too far once someone has gone even further. We've already seen this in pulling right that people who are living under abortion bands are more unhappy with abortion bands than people who aren't, because they know what it actually means, right, as opposed to it just sort of an abstraction. So I think the more of that we see, the closer we move to any recognition of fetal personhood that would affect everybody, the more backlash from the American people we're going to see.

That's what's going to happen in Florida possibly right, because the abortion ban goes into action in a month, and so it'll be a six week abortion ban, which basically means that you can't get an abortion in the state, and then you're going to have a ballot initiative. Right, so it's April now, so you'll have a whole summer of no abortion and a fall and Florida voters will really know what they're voting on.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And I think Florida voters also get to vote on the Florida Supreme Court, right, They're voting on that too, which is a dynamic obviously, you know, different from the one where you used to with the US Supreme Court, because you know, if you don't like Samuel Alito, there's not well, you know, pretty much all you could do. And I think you could say, but if you are unhappy with the Florida Supreme Court, they're judges who face you know, retention elections.

With the six week ban, this is a big seed change for Florida. Right, Florida was always a place where you could get an abortion for much bigger window, you know, with sort of the sanctuary of the South when it came to reproductive health. I mean, the reason that DeSantis signed this ban in the dead of night was because he wanted to primary Trump, because he knew that if you're going to get the evangelicals, you have to have a six week ban. Do you think this hurts DeSantis? I mean, obviously he's term limited out, so he can't, you know, just keep running it definitely. But I mean, do you think like this comes to a place where it like actually bites you know, Republicans, people like Rick Scott, I mean, or do you think balant initiatives in itself are sort of cloistered and don't necessarily connect with what regular voters vote for.

I mean, I think it depends, right, So, I mean, we have evidence pointing both ways. Right, we have the twenty twenty two mid terms where Democrats did better than expected. We have state elections, so like in places like Kansas where voters went for ballot initiaves and then still gave Republicans majorities or even increased Republican majorities. So the question is, like how much ticket splitting like that is there going to be. The good news for turnout is that there are going to be a lot of younger, you know, people of reproductive age who you know, may just screen up not have voted, will be more likely to come out for the ballot initiative in Florida. Whether that's enough, because Florida's pretty read, whether that's enough to overcome that, I don't know. I mean, I think this sort of the way it's been framed recently has been you know this sort of makes Florida interesting again. I don't know if it gets you all the way to anything changing, but it does at least make the question worth considering versus it sort of being like, gee, who will win Alabama. It's like no one is going to stay up late to find that out. We already know, right, And I think that's still probably true in Florida. But I think it'll be an interesting litmus test, if nothing else, about how much this kind of a reproductive rights ballid initiative can move the needle when it is on the ballot, right, And I.

Mean that's going to be the ten million dollar question is can it move the needle. I don't know if a Senate is down ballot from that or up ballot from that. I don't know where all of these things occur on the ballot. But really good question and really important point. When you see this coming from embryotic personhood, do you think they are just Republicans are too far gone on this? Now? Clearly this is not popular. I mean, do you think they're just banking on the idea they could make this popular? No, I don't.

I think there's some elements of that, but I think there's also efforts to sort of figure out where you can exercise power where things aren't popular.

At the moment. That's quartz right.

It's federal courts prom barrel, it's all of state courts like the ones in Alabama. It's state legislatures where there's no political competition, where you essentially have single party states. And it's also increasingly the thinking is through the executive branch, right because you know, in addition to the Comstock Act and all the other sort of pals that are on the table from the Heritage Foundation for Donald Trump if he's elected, there's also you know, arguments that he could just start doing personhood executive orders. And the reason for that again is if Trump's re elected, he's not going to be able to run for the election, so he too is sort of not going to be accountable in the same way. So I think for the most part you've seen anti aborshin groups sort of trying to pick those spots, essentially saying, you know, we think this person put idea is more important than what voters think about it, and so we're going to try to sort of exercise power where we can, with or without voters backing us.

Up.

Mary, Thank you. I hope you'll come back.

Yeah, I definitely will.

Like we you know, maybe with the Supreme Court, if not before, maybe when the Supreme Court starts seeing stuff in June, No, no moment, Jesse Cannon.

Molly Jong Fast. We got some wild news out of Florida. What are you seeing? And it's not just Florida men doing wild things.

For once, marijuana and abortion are going to be on the ballot in November. We want abortion available, but it's a healthcare issue now Florida voters are going to get to vote on it so much too. Ron Desanti's chagrin, the fact that voters are actually getting to exercise their democracy. Desanta's being upset about that is our moment of buck Ord. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.

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