Emergency Episode: Insurrection, Georgia, and the Future of US Democracy

This podcast is part of the Democracy group. Welcome to another episode of the podcast, Another Way. This is Adam Eichen, Equal Citizens Executive Director.

You've been promoted.

I have. As you can see, I have my colleague and Equal Citizens founder, Lawrence Lessig on with me today.

Hi, Adam. Great to be here.

Yes, under some weird circumstances, Larry. So today we were actually supposed to put up the episode that I recorded a while ago now, interviewing the folks in Alaska that passed Ranked Choice voting there. A great interview and I promise that I will eventually post that into the feed. But given the events of the past couple days, Larry, we had to an emergency podcast to try and understand both for ourselves and for you, the listener, what is going on in our democracy. So, Larry, there's a lot to talk about about the last 48 to 72 hours. Let's start with the bad news of on Wednesday, there were insurrectionists that took over the Capitol building, something that I certainly never thought I'd see. I don't think, you know, you ever thought you'd see that either. So can I get some reactions about that? What impact will this have for our system of government and democratic legitimacy more generally?

So let's do this a little bit differently. Let's understand what Wednesday was supposed to be. It's against that background that the events that transpired are so striking. Wednesday was to be the day that Congress opens the certificates that record the electoral votes from the 51 jurisdictions that cast electoral votes and then counts them. That's what the Constitution says. And of course, we did an emergency season of this podcast working out all the ways in which bad faith actors could screw that process up. And we had a whole episode on the games that, for example, the Vice president in theory might play to flip the result from what the Democratic result was supposed to be. And what was so striking about what happened, maybe this is in the good news column on Wednesday, was that the Vice President was quite tough in telling the President straight up that he was going to do nothing other than what most people expected his role to be, which is simply to open the certificates, hand them off to the tellers. These are two people from each chamber. And the tellers would report the numbers. And those numbers would then say who got the electoral votes in each of these, in each of these states. And so that process given, there were no conflicting slates of electors. And there's a important footnote on that. We could dig in a little bit on that. But the way at least Mike Pence saw it, each of these states had just one slate of electors. And that slate of electors had been certified at least six days before the electoral college was to vote. So what that means is under federal law, Congress had no choice but to just accept the slate of electors so long as the slate had done what the slate was supposed to do, which is to cast their ballots and sign them and certify them and send them to Congress, which every one of these states did. In theory, this was to be a completely boring ceremonial, as Josh Hawley put it, antiquity inside of our constitutional process for selecting the president. But of course, that's not how it played out. Two incredibly important things happened, and from my perspective, they're both equally extraordinary. The one incredible thing that happened was that Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, was the youngest senator, but after Jon Ossoff is sworn in, he will be the second youngest senator in the United States Senate. But Josh Hawley had announced prior to sometime at the end of December that he was going to object to the votes as they were being counted from certain states. He was most particularly interested in Pennsylvania. But there was a list of these states. What was astonishing about that claim that he was going to object is that there was no legal basis for that objection at all. I've done this very long blog post you can find on my medium page where I take his speech explaining what he was doing, and I go through it line by line, and I show, I think, pretty clearly. But my view is not controversial among at least people who know about the law. There was no basis in law for him to believe he had any right to interfere in this process. He said he was just trying to answer the concerns that his constituents had about what happened. He just thought we should go through it and, like, address the issues in a way that could resolve them one way or the other. He and Ted Cruz proposed that they delay the process for 10 days while a commission goes through all the charges that, of course, 60 courts have already gone through and determine one way or the other whether the votes should be counted. But. But what that process, what that suggestion just ignored, is that there was no right to go through that process. Congress was obligated under the Electoral Count act to simply count the votes. And it was, you know, from a federalist perspective and a great insult to the role of the states to basically say, you've counted your votes, you've certified the process. After going through contests that have been executed in the states, you've certified them in time according to the Electoral Count Act. Now, after you've certified them in time, we're Just going to do our own review. We're going to, we're going to look at the same things and we're going to decide whether we think you did a good job or not. If you don't think you did a good job, then in principle at least, you can imagine them saying, we ought to throw out the electoral votes. It was astonishing and completely unprecedented. Never in the history of America has any member of Congress purported to throw away or to question the validity of slates of electors that were not even in contest. There weren't two slates from these states. Never before has this happened. It happened solely because Josh Hawley was keen to signal to the base of the Donald Trump Organization that he supported Donald Trump and that signal was important to him politically. But my view is that signal was just throwing a lighted match into a well kindled tinderbox because it reaffirmed what the President was saying, which, of course, I've gone on for a long time, but it's good, of course, was the second astonishing thing that happened. You had a president who organized a rally on the day these votes were to be counted where he basically told the, didn't, basically expressly told the audience that the election was a sham, that his votes, that he had won, he had won big. His votes were stolen from him. Everybody knew it, he said, and that they should march down to the Capitol and make sure that their representatives and senators heard them. Of course, hearing wasn't what he expected would happen. What he expected would happen is what happened. They got down there, the frenzy was uncontrolled. A number of them broke into the Capitol and they literally desecrated. I mean, there was feces spread on parts of the hallways in the House of Representatives. People went into offices, including Nancy Pelosi's office, and just treated it as if it was a public restroom. And it was astonishing the disrespect and violence that this demonstrated. But in an important way, what I hope we get to talk about is who's really responsible here. You know, I mean, there have been a lot of times over the past two months, especially when we've been working through on our podcast what might happen if things go south, if they exercise illegal discretion, if Mike Pence had exercised legal discretion, what would happen then? You know, so imagine if Mike Pence had done what Donald Trump had wanted him to do. Imagine if Mike Pence had said, well, you know, Pennsylvania, there's only one slate of electors that the legislature had anything to do with, but there's this other slate that was Also sent in, because there was. And I think that slate for Donald Trump is the slate that we should count. And if he had done that with Arizona, if he'd done that with Michigan, with. With Georgia, if he had done that with each of them and then said, well, I'm the presiding officer, so my ruling stands unless both houses vote against it. And imagine that the Senate didn't vote against it. So that. Imagine Mike Pence just ruled himself into a second term and Donald Trump into a second term. What would we have done? What would we have done if that election was stolen in that sense? And I've had many conversations with people which was like, that's revolution. That's just unbelievable that they would do it. And if they did it, then we would have to fight. I think we need to recognize the way in which the other side was there. That's exactly where they were. They had been convinced that this election was stolen from them. Now, my view is that there's no basis at all, in fact for that view, but we can see the industry that was so committed to convincing them of this. The industry, whether it's Fox News or OAN or Breitbart or the Twitter feeds and the Facebook news, or private groups, all of these groups, or parler, all of these groups profited from persuading the public that this was a stolen election. And of course, Donald Trump, I sometimes wonder whether he. I think he actually believes it. I mean, it was just astonishing, which just shows the measure of insanity care. But whatever. These people led 38% of America to believe the election was stolen. And so sometimes I think, if I thought the election was stolen, would I do everything I could to take it back? Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. And so I think this means what we should do is focus on the enablers, the people who, knowing that they were leading people into a fundamentally false understanding, what happened, still did it. You know, whether that's Fox News or oan. And then also people like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, what they did is completely inexcusable because they know better. You know, Tuberville doesn't know that there are three branches of government, or he can't name the three branches of government. So I forgive him, like, if he doesn't understand the intricacies of the Electoral Count act, fine. But Josh Hawley was a law professor. He graduated from the Yale Law School. He clerked for Chief Justice Roberts and for Michael McConnell, who was one of the greatest judges in the 10th Circuit. He is no dummy. He's extremely smart. And that's what makes this more outrageous and more scary. He knew there was no right for him to do what he did. Didn't bother him. He did what he did because he knew that was the way to put himself out there as the leader of this populist right wing faction in America and to cement his opportunity in 2024 to inherit President Trump's base.

And I think that one of the things to really underscore here, which really I haven't seen as part of the narrative about this riot, this insurrection, is that as you say, it was produced by the decades of anti democr rhetoric that we've seen that we've been arguing against, that we, you know, that the folks like the Heritage foundation and you know, in the W. Bush years were peddling knowingly false about voter fraud. All the times that they've tried to justify voter ID laws to discourage young people or people of color or the elderly from voting. This is the logical consequence. This is what happens when you peddle anti Democratic lies. It's that people begin to believe it. People begin to believe that millions of non citizens are voting, millions of dead people are voting.

Yeah, that's true, that's true. But, but I think it's important. I'm not sure what the right adjective here is. You know, Josh Hawley on the floor of the Senate invoked Lincoln's frame of, you know, we have a system to avoid going from ballots to bullets. And, and you know, that's why violence is always wrong. Josh Hawley said, and you can, you know, when you look at what happened in secession in, you know, 1861, that was a case where we moved from ballots to bullets. You know, there's the ballots. President Lincoln was elected. The south said, hell no, we're not going to accept President Lincoln as our president, so we're going to secede. So there was no debate about whether the Democratic results were as they were reported to be. There was just one. We're just not going to accept it. We're anti Democratic in that sense. But that's not quite what was going on here. These people were in some sense deeply Democratic. They just had the false facts like they deeply believe that, you know, the winner was Donald Trump, that he got more votes than Joe Biden, and that the, and that the evidence that he didn't was all manufactured, it was all completely fraudulent. And again, I just say, you know, if it were the other way around, what would we say? I think it's an important point of optimism to say both sides here believe in some sense in democracy, it's just the facts that we were processing were so radically different. One side believed that these were just fake ballots, that there was lots of illegality going on here. At least we didn't have the 3 million Mexicans claim this time. It would have been hard to imagine 7 million illegal aliens voting this time around to produce the majority for Joe Biden. But still, there was this belief that the democratic machine, like this was the whole story about Philadelphia. The Democratic machine swept in in the middle of the night and stuffed the ballot boxes with what they needed to do to get to the numbers. They needed to get all these ridiculous allegations that more people voted than were registered. All of these things were designed to trade off of a common belief in democracy, to prove that their guy had been cheated, not that their guy lost, but to hell with democracy. Let's just. Let's just throw out. Let's just make sure that we have him in a second term. So that's optimistic, because if we could just get them to understand the facts, if we could all understand the same facts, we wouldn't have such a deep conflict. But it's also scary because the idea that in this context, you could have an engineered effort to convince the public that this election was stolen and succeed in convincing 38% of the public that the election was stolen is terrifying. And, and, and it's even more terrifying when you realize how much it paid. Like, what was Fox News going to do? This election happens. If Fox News had reported the facts the way the facts were, be much less attention to Fox News, they would have lost extremely significant portion of their ad revenue. So they choose to report it in a different way. They choose to, you know, follow the kind of conspiracy thinking of Tucker Carlson or any number of those other talking heads whose main focus is just to rally up the base. And so the incentive to falsity is real. And, you know, usually you're like, well, that's okay, because the truth will win out. No, in this world of fragmented media, where you've got algorithms that feed you what you want to believe, the truth isn't going to win out automatically. And so what do we do when we have this machine that can basically produce two sides to any question and then incite one side to go to war against the other on the basis of that difference?

Yeah, it's very scary. And it's also very scary that there were a number of Nazi paraphernalia or white supremacists paraphernalia of the people storming the Capitol. So what are the consequences here for the elites, an elite, not in any sort of derogatory or any other way than say the people who are actually peddling these lies, knowingly, the Josh Hawleys, the Ted Cruz, the people at Fox News. I mean, I guess let's just start with the senators. What is the punishment here? Is there a way to hold these politicians accountable for what they knowingly did, the riot that they incited by their own lies?

Well, you know, so we're talking on Friday and a lot's going to happen over this weekend in the next couple days. And there's an optimistic way of thinking about what's going to happen here, which is this is a kind of wake up call in the Republican Party. There are many of those Republicans, you know, who, extremely conservative, Tom Cotton, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, who looked at the game that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz had played and were just literally disgusted. I mean, you know, obviously Romney was going to be disgusted and Romney, you know, was in some sense the moral center of the Republican Party in this debate. But the idea that these otherwise fully committed right wing conservatives, Mike Lee, just stood back and said, wait a minute, this is just wrong. It's just wrong from the constitutional perspective, it's wrong from a political perspective, it's wrong from a Democratic perspective that was hopeful. And it's hopeful in the sense that maybe it will trigger in the Republican Party a kind of division. You know, remember the Whigs, the party that, you know, it's a very dominant party before the Civil War, that that was rendered into two because of their split views on slavery. It's kind of the same thing here. The Republican Party is facing a choice. Is it the party of Trump or is it a party that has ideals that are separate from this megalomaniac Trump? And so one hopeful story is the party begins to split. They decide that characters like Cruz, who is, since his shutdown of the government in his maiden years of senator, he's been hated by Republicans. And now Josh Hawley is kind of the Cruz wannabe. You know, maybe the Republicans just punish them, maybe they just push them to the side. And, and if that happens, then in a certain sense we've learned something and that's hopeful. So the other side though, you know, Bruce Ackerman gave this really terrifying interview for German television station and he said, you know, this is, this is the equivalent of the beer hall Putsch in the 1920s in Germany. And what happened immediately after those efforts by the Nazis to take over was there was in the Weimar Republic a kind of renewed commitment to democratic values. And so for a number of years, there was like this renewed commitment and this commitment to the idea of, like, not allowing these extremists to disrupt the orderly process. But of course, the extremists continued and, and eventually they got the upper hand and they were able to succeed. And that's the real question here. Everybody looked at the strategy of Donald Trump before he won and said, he can't possibly win with that. And when he won, they all said, oh, my God, if people behave like this and they can win, what's the limit? And then you look at somebody like Josh Hawley, who was every bit as populist and much more a much smoother, much smarter, much more compelling a candidate. And if you see that he's not willing to accept the truth, he's not willing to constrain himself by the truth, it's terrifying. And so four years from now, where's the Republican Party going to be? I'm not sure, but wherever they are, I think that we're going to have a clear sense of it in the next week.

But so, Larry, this brings up a really important point here because, you know, I think listeners may think, well, we're a pro democracy organization, and one of the most amazing parts of a democratic system is that it's open to anybody who earns enough votes to be elected to office. And so someone might say, well, so what are you saying? So should Hawley or Cruz be expelled or something like that? But this is a real question for Democratic theorists. Right. And it doesn't necessarily have an easy answer, but it's something I want you to tease out a little bit, given what the remarks you just made of. What do we do when those who are duly elected like a Hawley or Cruz are opening openly undermining the democratic system itself? How do we as democracy advocates understand and react to such a situation where democracy may be threatened by politicians who are elected?

Well, you know, no system survives if there aren't certain ground rules that are respected. And one of those ground rules has got to be truth. You just got to tell the truth. And this was like the interchange between Holly and Romney on the Senate floor debating when they came back after the riot and they were debating continuing the debate on Arizona. And, you know, Ted Cruz and Holly had stood up and said that they were objecting because there are so many people in their states who were really skeptical about the electoral results. And so they needed to respect the views of their constituents by taking the issue up and like raising These objections. And Romney said the best way to respect the views of your constituents is to tell them the truth. If they think this election was stolen, tell them it wasn't, because it wasn't. And I think that democracy, this was an insight that Hitler's people had early on and certainly Stalin had as well. Democracy fails when truth is not its constraint. And it doesn't do well forcing people to be honest. Indeed, it doesn't really have the tools in the American conception of democracy to force them to be honest because the First Amendment says we can't regulate what they say. This is like beyond the touch, beyond the pale of what a government can do. So if we don't have people committed to these basic values, it's not clear we can succeed, survive as a democracy. But that's why I'm saying that I think that in the next couple years, we'll see whether the party tries to exercise the discipline to bring reality back into the center. And it's not clear the party has that power. I mean, they can do what they want in the Senate, but when the next president is going to be determined on by, you know, the contest in the media and you have figures like, you know, Tucker Carlson running for president and Josh Hawley running for president and Ted Cruz running for president, people who have no hesitation to do whatever it takes. It's a real challenge for democracy. And it really forces us to think about how we can improve or update our system of understanding in a way that doesn't make us so vulnerable to these fabricators and the damage they do.

Yeah, and this is something that we're going to have to think a lot about in the new year. I mean, these are very serious challenges and kind of the consequences of not dealing with them are profound. And so in some respects, the storming of the Capitol building in the past couple days was hopefully a wake up call that, you know, that the status quo just can't hold, that. This is what it looks like when democracy is faltering. This is what a democratic system looks like when it's not performing. This is not the American democratic system that we learn about in the textbooks. I mean, we've been deconstructing through the length of this podcast the ways in which the democratic system is broken and why it's not your. The same thing that's been, you know, you read about in the textbook. But this is a whole nother level of broken. But it's certainly the logical consequence, again, as you were saying, of all sorts of issues here. And certainly one is one one side is not wedded to truth.

Right. But we're again in the middle of this story and we don't know what plays out now. So imagine the president is impeached and as a way to signal virtue, signal enough Republicans, half of the Republican caucus votes to convict. And as a element of that conviction, it includes you can't run for president again, period, you're disqualified. And the discipline on the Hill continues. I mean, Mitch McConnell fired the sergeant at arms at the Senate. Nancy Pelosi said the same thing was happening in the House. They fired the head of the Capitol Police. All of these allegations that these guys were actually sympathetic, that they were resisting the pushback, they kind of almost encouraged by their pessimists passivity this to happen. If those people are punished, too. And then to the extent that any of the rumors about the alliances inside the military are true, if those people are punished, too, if all of these people face consequences that are severe, then you can begin to imagine the system correcting itself. So you shouldn't be able to get away with inciting insurrection. You just shouldn't. And, you know, the fact that it's only two weeks until you're going to be, quote, unquote, gone anyway is actually not an argument because, you know, if he walks out of here, you know, with his base and continues for the next four years claiming that, you know, Joe Biden's not legitimate, you know, he's got the right birth certificate, but he didn't get elected in the right way, according to Donald Trump, then he's going to do enormous damage over the next four years. And whether he can position himself as the next candidate or one of these wannabes like Josh Hawley, it doesn't really matter. His influence here, unconstrained by truth, will continue to have its really disruptive effect. And that's why I think the question about consequences right now is so significant. Nobody defends really what happened. So nobody should oppose consequences for those who enabled what happened. And even if we can't lock up Fox News, which I believe we can't, because I believe the First Amendment protects even the willful and in some sense corrupt to the truth, we can take steps against those who had a obligation because of their role to do the right thing. And the pretenders, Josh Hawleys, who suggests that what he was doing had any basis in law, ought to be scorned and shamed. And, you know, I think there are a lot of people in Missouri who would love to see somebody challenge him. And there are A lot of great people in Missouri who should.

Yeah. And I know that there have been calls already. I think the number three, Democrat, Murray, came out and said that Hawley should resign. So we'll see where that goes. I mean, I highly doubt he would ever do that. But I do wonder if there will be any effort to at least censure him, if not remove him. Although I think the latter option is highly unlikely. But it certainly seems like some punishment is needed for violating such a core norm of the peaceful transfer of power.

Yeah, I mean, you know what's striking about him, and I don't think we know yet enough about him to know what's explaining what happens. You know, he's always doing these things that, you know, Trump like, are extremely popular with the Trumpist base but that have no connection to reality. So, for example, objecting on January 6th, that's one example. Another example is, you know, after he did what he did, his publisher told him that the book that they were going to publish, which is obviously his here's why I want to be president book they weren't going to publish, they didn't want to publish it anymore, that he had so destroyed his character or reputation that they didn't want to be associated with him. He then went on Twitter and he said, this is violating the First Amendment. They don't want to have anything to do. We're going to be suing them. And I was like, you know, he said, this is Orwellian. That's how he started. They don't like my servicing my constituents. And so they're canceling my book. I'm going to sue them. The First Amendment needs to be defended. And you're like, talk about Orwellian. Here's a private company who decides they don't want to have anything to do with somebody who is now understood to be an insurrectionist. And here he, a member of the United States Senate, is threatening legal action against them. Where is the First Amendment apply? It doesn't apply to what the publisher is doing. It applies to what he's doing. And so when he does that, the law professor, pardon me, kind of wants to just be in a faculty workshop with him and say, you don't really believe what you're saying, do you? And what I fear is that he would actually say, yeah, no, no, I don't believe that. But, you know, that works. It works. This is the way to set me up as the anti cancel culture candidate, whether what I say is true or not to that end.

So, Larry, you know, all those things that we just talked about are extremely depressing. And I agree we'll know more soon, but and we should have another episode about this. But we have to touch a little bit on the fact that at the same time that they were airing the insurrection at the Capitol building, the cable news networks did call the final of the two Senate races in Georgia for Jon Ossoff, which means that both Warnock and Ossoff, both Democrats, won the runoff race, which means your favorite politician in America, Larry, Mitch McConnell. That's a joke for our listeners who don't know Larry very well, will no longer be the majority leader of the Senate, which means, Larry, that for the first time in at least six years, but probably longer, democracy reform will be possible. Now, LARRY I don't know in what fashion and whether or not we're going to be able to get HR1, which is the omnibus bill we've been fighting for, which tackles things like gerrymandering, voter suppression, has public financing for congressional races, has everything that we've ever talked about, maybe with the exception of reforming the way we elect the president, actually do, restoring the Voting Rights act and then ranked choice voting. But outside of those three things, it's basically everything we talk about on this podcast. What are you feeling about that, LARRY? So on the same day that we see kind of the biggest assault on our the symbol of our democracy, and this isn't a partisan statement, but the results of an election are now going to allow for us to actually potentially make progress on federal legislation to shore up and indeed advance our democracy to a place where it's never been before.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, because you and I were exchanging emails that morning, Wednesday morning we woke up, we were both extremely excited. We wrote a celebratory email because controversially, we had decided to bring equal citizens into that fight. And we and we wanted to get into that fight because we realized it if Mitch McConnell was the majority leader of the Senate, nothing of the issues that we care about would have any chance of progress for two, maybe four years. And so this fight was in some sense existential for us. If Mitch McConnell was in charge, there was no reason to do our work. If he's not in charge, there's at least a reason to fight. And so, yeah, we launched a Give Joe a Chance campaign or know, demote the Dark Lord campaign, depending on your perspective. And, well, I actually kind of feel bad now about how harsh I am to Mitch McConnell because, you know, he's been a pretty good guy in the transition from Wednesday on. I mean, you know, he's been, he was harsh, his speech on the floor. No, I agree. I'm not saying I feel too, too bad. But, you know, the point is I'm not sure he's the worst person now. I'm, you know, targets like the pathetic Cruz or Josh Hawley might be more appropriate. But anyway, he as majority leader was going to block everything, and now he is not. And I think there's a real shot that HR1 is going to pass the House. They're going to introduce it. It's already been introduced, but they're going to try to pass it as quickly as they can and then it goes to the Senate. And we have a lot to fight about to get it in the Senate. But, you know, the things that are in some sense the most controversial are actually not terribly controversial to some of the most conservative Democrats. So Joe Manchin has been a supporter of public funding of campaigns forever. Forever. And so he's not going to oppose that part of HR1, which is, in my view, the most important change in HR1. So we have a lot of hopeful work to do over the next six months or year to get as many of these changes into law as we can. And given the Republicans commitment to worrying about election security, then maybe at least we can get some movement on improving the efficiency and the completeness of the very mechanisms of voting. So there's a lot of reason to be hopeful now that we have a Congress that's at least controlled by people who are open to the idea of change. And that's going to be a lot of work over the next year to make that hope into a reality.

Yeah. And I do want to say, Larry, that this really is kind of the culmination of the work you've been doing for the last over a decade now, Larry, in terms of, you know, this is the vision. The vision was to have a chance, a real chance to pass these reforms. I mean, the Democrats, when they held unified control of Congress and the presidency in 2009 into 2010, they didn't do anything about the process issues. In fact, they kind of didn't. It wasn't even part of their agenda. They didn't see it as important at all. And then they got scorned. And then Republicans gerrymandered in 2011, and then the Democrats essentially lost control in an undemocratic system for the next eight years. They retook it. But the Senate is undemocratic. The list goes on. We've talked about it. But now it seems Like Democratic leadership actually doesn't just seem. We know Democratic leadership is fully on board with preventing the kind of minoritarian politics that we've seen. The system of gerrymandering that renders most congressional elections totally uncompetitive, the voter suppression that's rampant in states like Georgia and Texas and Mississippi, and the list goes on. And so that is a real reason to be hopeful that this isn't 2009. Again, this is very different than when you started up the fight, Larry. And we really do have a chance because the folks in Washington, at least on the Democratic side, and again, hopefully some Republicans come around, are ready to get this through Congress. And so we'll have to see. And Larry, we'll do another podcast really, really soon about what is the state of play on HR1, what the new Democratic Senate means for our fight, the role equal citizens will have in it and why we're hopeful. And in fact, we'll have many more conversations and maybe we'll have a whole multi part series about what HR1 is because it's a very complex legislation. But all that being said, Larry, we started this conversation off really in kind of a bleak fashion. But I think it's really important to emphasize that as dark as Wednesday was, as bleak as it was, we now have a shot, a shot that we weren't expecting to have to finally pass federal legislation to prevent the worst practices in the anti Democratic politics that we faced for the last decade. And I'm enthusiastic, indeed. I'm so ready to get to work here, Larry. And as you said earlier, I'm taking over as executive director of Equal Citizens. And I'm just really excited to be in this fight, Larry, and I think that you are too. And I'm excited for the next six to 12 months to try and get this through Congress.

Yeah, I think perspective is important here. You know, when Barack Obama was elected president, even though during the campaign he had talked repeatedly about the need for reform, you know, the phrase that I committed to memory when I heard it from him, if we don't take up the fight, the fight to change the way Washington was then, real change, change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo, even though that's what he said in the primary, when he became the general election candidate, that rhetoric disappeared. And when he became president, it was nowhere on the agenda. And more importantly, even if you could get members of the administration to recognize particular problems that needed to be fixed, gerrymandering wasn't as salient as it should have been. But money in politics or voting rights, everybody thought about it as just like one silver bullet after another. And the really important opportunity we have right now is both that we have leaders in Congress who are committed to reform and that the reform is comprehensive. Nobody's talking about, you know, if we could just fix money in politics, then that'll fix everything. If we just fix gerrymandering, that'll fix everything. What's been accomplished by the work of many, many people is to bring the political elite to recognize that they can't govern if they don't make these fundamental changes. And these fundamental changes are systemic. They are much more than tiny little tweaks in corners of election law. They are fundamental to restore something like a representative democracy. And obviously, we did a lot of work in the campaigns to get every candidate to commit to this. And Joe Biden at the end committed to it. And Joe Biden's got a lot of problems he's got to face. Coming January 21st, the pandemic, right at the top of the list. But we're now in a time when people get it and that is what's hopeful. They get it. We have the votes to get it passed. Now we just have to fight those who are going to resist the change because the change will make their life not more difficult, just make their life less wealthy. And that's going to be the struggle.

Couldn't said it better myself. Larry, thanks for joining me today. We're going to have many more of these conversations in the years ahead. It's both a dark day, but also maybe the start of something really positive for our democracy. So, Larry, we'll talk to you soon.

Great. And Adam, thanks for. Thanks also for stepping up and taking the lead inside of Equal Citizens. It's going to be fun to work with you.

Going to be a lot of fun. I look forward to it. Larry, this has been another episode of Another Way. We'll see you next time. Sa.