Civics lessons from Karen Read's retrial

The team delves into some of the many civics lessons the public got while watching Karen Read’s retrial, which ended with her acquittal on all major charges in June. Topics include the First Amendment, judicial discretion, courtroom tactics, and more. Our expert for this episode is Colin Miller, blogger, podcaster, and professor at University of South Carolina School of Law. 


Transcript

civ101-readfinalpod.mp3

Rebecca Lavoie: I'm Rebecca Lavoie.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice.

Rebecca Lavoie: And this is Civics 101.

Archive: I'm Vinny Bolton. The subject of my investigation is the death of Boston police officer John O'Keefe and the dramatic retrial of his girlfriend, Karen Reed.

Rebecca Lavoie: So today, we're going to be talking about a high profile trial.

Archive: Defendant not guilty or guilty. So say you, Mr. Foreman. So say you all.

Rebecca Lavoie: Apologize in advance for listeners who might be tired of hearing about this topic, but I promise it will be relevant to this show. Nick. Yeah. What do you know about the Karen retrial?

Nick Capodice: Rebecca I know so little about the Karen retrial. I do know it involves the police, and it happened in Massachusetts, and it's kind of bonkers, like stuff just all over the place? Yes. And it just kind of happened, didn't it?

Rebecca Lavoie: It just kind of happened. Yes. Karen Reed was just acquitted on most of the charges against her just a couple weeks ago in June. What do you know, Hannah?

Hannah McCarthy: I know more. Okay. I know that Karen Reed was accused of killing. Perhaps inadvertently. Perhaps not. I don't I don't know the details of that. Her boyfriend, John O'Keefe, by hitting him with her car. I know that he was found outside in the snow, that her taillight had been broken. And I also know that her defense claims that this was a police cover up, that she was framed, and that he was actually either wounded or killed in a fight at a party with other police officers and was bitten by a dog and left outside in a snowstorm to die.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, you're actually pretty close. So I feel like first I should give a little bit of a A disclaimer about me. Rebecca Lavoie. So I work on Civics 101 by day here at NPR. But outside of work, I also host a true crime media review podcast where we look at the journalism around true crime. And I became really interested in the Karen Reed case a little more than a year ago, and I have since become like a commentator on the case and like court TV and stuff. So I do have a point of view about this, and I'm not going to get too much into my point of view. You might get a hint of it, but it's part of why I find this case interesting. So do you want to hear the story?

Nick Capodice: Yes, absolutely.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so the reason this case is important is, first of all, this was a retrial. Her first trial ended with a mistrial in 2024. For second, the Karen Reed case drew outsized public attention for reasons we will talk about, and maybe the first highly publicized trial in a very long time where the majority of the public was rooting for the accused.

Archive: Karen Reed's second trial. Tapping into a common thread beyond the utter conviction by the free Karen Reed movement that she is innocent.

Rebecca Lavoie: Also, this trial, in my opinion, has imparted more civics lessons than any criminal case I can think of in recent years. And we will talk about some of those, but not all of them. In this episode. I want to acknowledge something really important. We're going to be talking about a case, and at the center of that is a woman, a woman defendant, Karen Reed. But the reason the case happened was because a human being died really tragically. Everybody agrees that this was a tragedy. No matter what you might think about the trial, about the outcome. Officer John O'Keefe is the victim at the center of this. But today, we're not going to be talking about O'Keefe. And I just wanted to acknowledge that we're going to be talking about the trial itself. The person who was accused of killing John O'Keefe, the person who was later acquitted of killing John O'Keefe, and some of the things that happened during these high profile trials around this person, Karen Reed. So here is the story. In the early morning of January 29th, 2022, Karen Reed's boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, was found on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts. That home was owned by a police officer who had been hosting a post night out party.

Rebecca Lavoie: Reed was arrested on February 2nd, 2022, just a couple days later, and was arraigned. And after that arraignment, her lawyer got a tip and the tipster said that John O'Keefe had actually been killed inside the home where he was found and then put outside. Karen Reed was eventually indicted and tried for a lot of charges, but the main ones were second degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene of a death. And those charges had some sub charges. And in trial two, the defense successfully argued to allow the jury to vote on one particular charge. Operating under the influence of alcohol, which did not affect other charges, and that is the only charge she was convicted of this past June. Wow. So over time, public sentiment swayed where most people believe. Now, if you poll them that John O'Keefe was not killed, the way the police say he was killed in Karen Reed's case. This is fed by the fact, in part, that his right arm does appear to be covered with wounds from a dog attack. And people believe a lot of the evidence in the scene, including pieces of the taillight, as you mentioned, were planted by a police officer who was, by the way, later fired for ethical misconduct around this very case.

Archive: In the case, a major blow, in fact, to the prosecution in the case of Karen Reed and the retrial. The jury will hear that lead investigator Trooper Michael Proctor has been fired following a three day police trial board review over three months stemming from testimony about drinking on the job and sending inappropriate messages about defendant Karen Reed.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow. Yeah.

Nick Capodice: Can I ask a quick question? Sure. Do you know? How can somebody be charged with manslaughter and second degree murder?

Rebecca Lavoie: That's a very interesting question. And that's a good civics lesson. So prosecutors very often up charge people a common way to get people to plea out. If people believe they are guilty or they want a quick conviction is to pile charges on top of charges. But you can absolutely charge people with both things. And the jury can then decide whether they're guilty of both one or neither. By the way, I'm not the only person who was deeply interested in this case. Millions of people are obviously. But one person who was tweeting and blogging about the case was somebody I really admired. His name's Collin Miller.

Nick Capodice: Ah, he was our guest on the episode determining whether or not Santa Claus as a criminal.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right.

Nick Capodice: I love Colin. He's great.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. He's incredible. He's a law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He's a blogger. He's a podcaster who's helped a lot of people get out of prison after wrongful convictions or overcharging and so forth. And I asked him why he was so interested in Karen Reed's retrial.

Colin Miller: I think the main reason is that I've done a lot of research about Retrials and the research all points toward the prosecution faring better at a retrial than the defense. And the reasoning is usually the defense knows a lot more about the state's case at trial one. And the prosecution knows less about the defense case, which then helps the prosecution in trial two. What we've seen in this case, though, was I think the defense, to me at least, seems to have learned more from trial one than the prosecution. Namely, it seemed that jurors at trial one weren't willing to accept the third party liability that the people at Fairview might have been responsible. And so, at trial two, the defense is focused much more on a there claim that there was no collision, but b this was shoddy police work rather than pointing the finger at any particular alternate suspect.

Archive: But the story you'll hear is about an investigation that was riddled with errors from the beginning a rush to judgment, conflicted and corrupted from the start, corrupted by bias, corrupted by incompetence, and corrupted by deceit.

Rebecca Lavoie: So here's why I got interested in this case. It was long before the second trial. It was just before the first trial in 2024. I learned that in spring of 2023, the FBI, working under orders from the DOJ, the Department of Justice, were conducting their own investigation into the circumstances of John O'Keeffe's death.

Hannah McCarthy: Rebecca, what triggers a federal jurisdiction in a case? I know that, like going over state lines is one example. Yes. And that being somehow involved with a federal agent or anything like that is another. But how? How is this case within federal jurisdiction?

Rebecca Lavoie: That's a very interesting question. And the answer to that isn't completely clear. However, federal jurisdiction applies to civil rights. Any matters concerning federal law, the Constitution, disputes between states, etc.. The Department of Justice has a public integrity unit and a civil rights jurisdiction. So there is a theory, and I think it's actually not a bad one, that the FBI and DOJ were looking into a pattern of misconduct around police who were involved in this investigation, or in the Norfolk County District Attorney's office run by Michael Morrisey, who's held that office for like 36 years. There's a theory that that is why they're involved now. It's important to note that in February of 2025, President Trump ordered the DOJ to stop investigations into civil rights cases and subsequently to stop investigations into cases involving police. In March of 2025, the prosecutor prosecuting the Karen Reed case announced that he had been told the federal investigation was, quote, over. But that is actually unclear. And what interested me in the case was that the DOJ, in August of 2023, sent the district attorney, Michael Morrissey, in Norfolk County a letter saying that they had come to a very different conclusion about John O'Keefe's death, in essence, that he was not hit by a car. And you would think that that would prompt the Da to take a second look. But no, they doubled down and went forward with trial one, despite the fact that they knew the FBI had looked at the case and come to a different conclusion. So, as I mentioned, Karen Reed's first trial in 2024 ended with a hung jury on all the charges. But interestingly, in a stunning turn, several jurors proactively contacted both the Da and Karen Reed's defense team after the trial, saying that they had actually all agreed on two of the charges, two of the major charges, and they were only hung on one of them. This happened, they said, because of a confusing jury form and because the judge in the case never pulled the jury when they announced the deadlock. Nor did she give the defense the chance to object and ask for a poll of the jury.

Archive: To continue to deliberate would be futile and only serve to force us to compromise these deeply held beliefs. I'm not going to do that to you, folks. Your service is complete. I'm declaring a mistrial in this case.

Hannah McCarthy: So, like multiple members of the jury say we had reached a decision. Your form was just confusing.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. And the Reed defense actually took this to the courts, including federal courts. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court after judges kept ruling in the judge and Karen Reed's case forever, saying she hadn't done anything improper. And then the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

Nick Capodice: In the Supreme Supreme court.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Nick Capodice: They filed a petition for a writ of circuit to be like, here are the Karen Reed.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Nick Capodice: I didn't know about that. I have a question, Rebecca. Yes? If a jury can't make up its mind if it's a hung jury, is that a mistrial?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. And then the prosecutor has the choice to either let it go, drop the charges, not retry, or to have a second trial, which is what happened in this case. So how does a judge actually decide if a jury is deadlocked or not?

Colin Miller: So the answer is this actually originated in Massachusetts before it went to the Supreme Court. We have what's known as an Allen charge. And so if the jury sends the judge a note saying we're deadlocked, the judge is allowed to give what's known as an Allen charge or an Allen instruction. And that tells the jurors the goal of our justice system is consensus. Please consider the opinions of opposing jurors and see if you can reach consensus. If the jury comes back again and says we're still deadlocked. The judge can give a second Allen charge or Allen instruction under Massachusetts law. Beyond that second instruction, if the jury says they're deadlocked, pretty much that's going to be a hung jury and a mistrial. There's some possibility we could have the judge instructing them to continue deliberating. But usually if there is a deadlock after that second Allen charge, that would be grounds for a hung jury and a mistrial.

Rebecca Lavoie: Interestingly, that Allen charge sometimes called the dynamite charge, basically saying, kids, get back there.

Nick Capodice: And figure this out.

Rebecca Lavoie: And figure this out. So another reason I became super interested in this case is because it's somewhat of a whodunit, right? And thanks to a very controversial but extremely popular blogger known as Turtleboy. His real name is Aidan Kearney, and he's named Turtleboy after his statue in his hometown in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thanks to his reporting, getting tips from the defense team, etc., the public learned about potential alternate suspects and theories and really began to pay attention to the story. It went like a little bit viral in Massachusetts. Now, I know you're familiar with Turtleboy, right? He's a very unconventional and sometimes unpopular methods.

Nick Capodice: Sure, I hear him a lot on sort of like he's on the radio all the time. Howie Carr yeah, we got Turtleboy on this afternoon.

Archive: Turtle boy, thanks for being with us. First of all.

Archive: Thanks for having me, Howie.

Nick Capodice: But yeah, I know Turtleboy. Also. I know Turtleboy because he reports on what's going on here in New Hampshire. Like in Concord. I follow what he writes because it's real local, local, local news.

Rebecca Lavoie: It is. And it definitely got me intrigued about the state of journalism, what I who I saw not covering this case and who I saw covering this case and the power and freedom of the press. So Kearney Aidan Kearney may not have used all the traditional methods of reporting. He doesn't have an editor. He does do some fact checking, but maybe not the same process as everyone else. And he for sure seemed to be on to something in this case and people paid attention.

Nick Capodice: One thing I want to know, Rebecca, how is it determined if someone is a member of the press?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, that used to be a much more narrow definition before the internet. Nick.

Nick Capodice: Do you have to have credentials? Do we have credentials?

Rebecca Lavoie: We can get credentials if we want to get into a specific event like.

Hannah McCarthy: The Supreme.

Hannah McCarthy: Court. Right. You got credentials for that?

Hannah McCarthy: Apply for credentials. I had to prove that I worked for a media outlet. Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: That is not the case everywhere. For instance, in this trial. Aiden Kearney, Turtleboy and other bloggers did apply for press credentials to get into this very tiny courtroom. And they got them. And they got them in large part because they were doing most of the coverage of this case for a very long time. So this talk about journalism, it reminds me of a certain amendment that we've discussed a bunch on this show, an amendment of the Constitution. And we'll talk about that. I know you know what it is when we return after a quick break. We're back. This is Civics 101 and I'm Rebecca Lavoie, the EP of this show and our resident true crime expert. I think that's fair to say. And I'm here with Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hi, guys.

Hannah McCarthy: Hi.

Nick Capodice: Hi.

Rebecca Lavoie: So before the break, I mentioned we'd be talking about the ways the Karen Reed case raised issues around a certain constitutional amendment. And since we're talking about journalism, any guesses as to which constitutional amendment I'm talking about?

Hannah McCarthy: The first.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. Who wants to tell me what the First Amendment says?

Nick Capodice: I got this one.

Rebecca Lavoie: All right.

Nick Capodice: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Rebecca Lavoie: All right. There have been so many First Amendment related issues in the Karen Reed case. I'm going to tell you about just a few of them, because we could be here all day if we talked about all of them. The blogger we were talking about before the break, Turtleboy. He didn't just cover the Karen Reed case. He has written literally more than 500 stories about it, plus broadcast on his regular nightly YouTube show. He's very active social media. He was in court for both trials reporting on it, but he also played other roles. And he admits this. He is somewhat of an entertainer and he's very much an activist. He convened rallies for the so-called Free Karen Reed movement, for instance.

Rebecca Lavoie: What's going on, everyone? So we're here to peacefully protest. So this is the home somewhere here. Hey. What's happening?

Rebecca Lavoie: So you'd think that all of this. Well, not the sort of straight journalism that we're used to consuming and making that this would all be protected by the First Amendment, right?

Nick Capodice: Sure.

Speaker16: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, well, get a load of this. Aidan Kearney, Turtleboy, and several of the people who protested about what they believe to be the truth, Karen Reed's innocence. They became targets for law enforcement during this case. What happened was they began to protest in various ways, including, you know, rallies holding signs and based on something that Karen reads, defense attorney said, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck. They started leaving these little rubber duckies around canton, Massachusetts. Okay.

Nick Capodice: Were they busted for littering?

Rebecca Lavoie: Some of them were, and some of them were arrested and charged with felonies under the Massachusetts Witness Intimidation statute.

Hannah McCarthy: I remember reading that at least Turtleboy had been accused. I didn't know it was formerly of witness intimidation.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. He was facing several felonies for this, the concept being that the witness intimidation statute in Massachusetts says it includes this provision of not trying to influence the testimony of witnesses or intimidating witnesses. And the police and prosecution were arguing in Aidan Kearney's case that because he was covering the case and talking about these alternate suspects on YouTube and creating this sort of movement on social media, that he was actually harassing these witnesses.

Archive: The man behind the online blog known as Turtleboy, Aidan Kearney, outside the Stoughton Courthouse where he had faced a judge moments earlier, arraigned on nine charges of intimidating witnesses in a different case, the Dedham murder trial of Karen Reed. This latest twist had him shouting.

Archive: And I will not be intimidated. I will not be silenced. And we will continue on our journey for justice, for John O'Keefe and for Karen.

Archive: His followers.

Rebecca Lavoie: One of the people who was arrested was this local canton business owner, a guy named Richard Schiffer. He used the sign outside of his company, Canton Fence, to display a pro care and read message, and he had been leaving little rubber duckies with stickers on them that he had made around town. Schiffer became the target of a six month police investigation. It included things like the investigation, pulling the location data from his car, pulling his trash and going through his trash, reviewing surveillance footage, etc.. He was charged with felony witness intimidation and littering. And the judge in these cases dismissed all of them, citing the First Amendment. So the First Amendment. Let's stay on that for a minute. The judge, by the way, is named Beverly Cannone. In this case, she presided over both trials. But for trial two, she instituted a strict and broad buffer zone outside the courthouse in order to keep protesters and Karen Reed supporters away from the building, and the order included things like not being allowed to wear certain attire.

Hannah McCarthy: Well, is it like a shirt with Karen Reed's face on it? That kind of thing?

Rebecca Lavoie: Anything sort of directing court officials, witnesses, jurors to do a specific thing. She banned people from being able to wear in this buffer zone.

Nick Capodice: Quick question.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yep.

Nick Capodice: What's the zone of the buffer we're talking about?

Rebecca Lavoie: It is surprisingly large. How familiar are you with Dedham, Massachusetts?

Hannah McCarthy: A little bit.

Rebecca Lavoie: All right. So I drove to Dedham, Massachusetts, while the jury had the case in their hands, and I drove to the courthouse. And as you're approaching the downtown after you pass, the Welcome to Dedham sign is the beginning of the buffer zone. Before you've approached the courthouse, before you've turned the street to the courthouse. It's huge. It's really big.

Nick Capodice: So I know the restrictions on the First Amendment, specifically when it comes to protest using something called time, place and manner. And I think because it's a courthouse, there's kind of a you can be pretty loosey goosey about how far around the courthouse can someone be restricted or allowed to protest. But like the whole town, that seems a little.

Rebecca Lavoie: Pretty much the whole downtown sort of surrounding the courthouse. Yes. It is notable that a couple of people were actually arrested for violating this buffer zone, and they went to court, and a federal judge almost immediately deemed Judge Beverly Cannon's buffer zone at least partially unconstitutional.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow.

Rebecca Lavoie: All of this stuff, it raised a question for me. Judges especially like district court judges, you know, overseeing murder cases. How much discretion do they have?

Colin Miller: The judge has to comply with the Constitution. The judge has to comply with the rules of evidence or the guide to evidence that exists in Massachusetts. And so that reins in the judge a good deal. On the other hand, Rule of Evidence 611 says the court should exercise reasonable control over the mode and order of examining witnesses and presenting evidence so as to make those procedures effective for determining the truth. And so rule 611 really gives a good deal of discretion to the judge within the confines of the Constitution, the rules of evidence, to kind of do what they want in conducting a trial. And so that gives pretty broad discretion to the judge in how the trial is actually conducted.

Rebecca Lavoie: So judges can do.

Nick Capodice: Whatever.

Rebecca Lavoie: They want. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: Given how proliferated this case was in the media, how many people know so much about it, have so many opinions? How do you select a jury? You can't select an impartial jury. You can't be guaranteed that you can.

Nick Capodice: At least I think it's really hard. I mean, I just think of that Saturday Night Live skit about them trying to find jurors for the OJ Simpson trial. And just like that, there's nobody in the nation who hasn't heard of it.

Hannah McCarthy: That's such a good comparison.

Archive: Juror number one. How is it possible that you've never heard of O.J. Simpson?

Archive: Well, as I explained, I just awoke from a 22 year coma and was driven directly from the hospital to this courthouse.

Archive: Very well.

Rebecca Lavoie: There's actually a legal answer to this question of whether or not it's possible to get a fair trial when your community or your whole country is paying attention to it.

Colin Miller: Yes. According to the Supreme Court, in 1961, in Irwin versus dad, the Supreme Court says even if members of the jury had preexisting knowledge of the facts of the case, generally, as long as they say they can put aside that preexisting knowledge, be unbiased, decide the case based upon the facts, they're qualified to be fair and impartial jurors. Now, back in 1961, we're primarily talking about people hearing things in the community, getting little snippets of information. The question is, in 2025, when we have the 24 over seven news cycle, we have social media. We have so much information and misinformation out there about the case. Does that precedent still hold? Or should the Supreme Court reexamine that ruling in 2025?

Rebecca Lavoie: What do you think?

Hannah McCarthy: I would have to guess that reexamining it is not something a court would want to do, because you need to have a jury. That's part of the procedure. What are you going to do except come to the same conclusion, which is we just got to take them at their word. Right. Because you have to have them like.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. And I don't know if I would let's say it was a super high profile case. Like it was really big. Do you want jurors who don't know anything about the news? You know, like who just don't know a single thing.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's an interesting question. In this case in particular, they had a pool of more than 2000 people to choose from. And you know how a jury is selected right here? Correct. So there were voir dire questions that both sides agreed to, and whether or not you've heard of the case was certainly one of them. But that was not a disqualifying question. It was all about have you formed an opinion about this case that became the qualifying question? And remember, both sides have strikes. They're allowed to say no to certain jurors for reasons, and they're allowed to say no to a limited number of jurors for no reason. You know, those kinds of strikes are called they're called peremptory strikes.

Nick Capodice: Oh, strikes. Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: This leads me to a larger question. You know, we're talking about fair trial around juries. But there actually is a definition of what a fair trial is. I want to hear it.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Colin Miller: First, we have the right to a competent and impartial judge. Second, the right to a competent and impartial jury that is drawn from a fair cross-section of the community of which the defendant is a member. The defendant has the right to be there in the courtroom for all critical elements of the trial. The defendant has the right to a public trial where members of the press, the public, the media are able to attend. A defendant has the absolute right to confront the witnesses against them. That is the Confrontation Clause. They have the right to cross-examine and probe the testimony of the witnesses against them. A defendant has the constitutional right to testify. Most defendants do not testify in their own defense. They have that absolute right. A defendant, as might be pertinent here, has the protection of double jeopardy. Once jeopardy is triggered by a jury being impaneled in their trial. If that jury finds them not guilty of a particular crime, they can't be prosecuted for that crime again.

Hannah McCarthy: The public trial element of that was the judge's giant barrier around the courthouse in any way, a violation of that public trial element.

Rebecca Lavoie: The public trial element actually refers more to the courtroom itself. Who is allowed to come in? Are you going to bar any members of the public from coming in? Now? That would be a big deal. So in this case, interestingly, the Karen Reed trial courtroom was tiny by design. Well, it's a question as to whether or not it's a by design or whether or not this is the courtroom that this judge prefers. It was a tiny, tiny courtroom. It had room for Karen Reed's family, close friends. It had room for John O'Keefe's family friends and room for ten members of the media. And then, like, a couple more spots. And that was it. It was a tiny, tiny courtroom.

Nick Capodice: Just a shout out. Hannah and I never tire of saying this on our show. You listener are allowed to go watch any trials you want. You can just go down to the courthouse.

Hannah McCarthy: You can try.

Nick Capodice: If they let you in.

Hannah McCarthy: They'll let you in. If there's space.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, yeah, they'll let you in. If there's space.

Hannah McCarthy: Including the Supreme Court, by the way, you can try.

Nick Capodice: You can.

Rebecca Lavoie: Try. Mhm.

Rebecca Lavoie: We just heard Colin talk about witnesses confronting witnesses, questioning witnesses, cross-examining witnesses. In this case. Witnesses were very important. There were witnesses who were first responders at the scene who said they saw and heard certain things. There were expert witnesses. And the judge issued some pretty broad discretion about what witnesses and what experts she would allow in and what specifically she would allow certain experts to say and not say.

Archive: So the defense needs to provide. I'd suggest you listen. The defense needs to provide what chronological data Mr. Varney relied upon and exactly what his opinion is. All right. By the close of business tomorrow, that's fine.

Rebecca Lavoie: So this raised a question for me. What are witnesses actually allowed to do? Because if I only watch this case, I would think, well, that's up to the judge. But that's not necessarily true.

Colin Miller: So we have two types of witnesses. We have lay witnesses. Your regular average Jane or Joe. And we have expert witnesses. We have your doctors, we have your scientists, etc.. In terms of lay witnesses, we have rule of evidence 602, which says a witness needs to have personal knowledge. If my friend tells me about a murder, I can't testify. If I saw the murder, I can testify. Rule of evidence 701 says if I'm offering opinions, I need to be basing my opinions on things that I observed. And my conclusions have to be irrational. If I'm in a cafe and there's a blurry window and I see people opening umbrellas. I could offer my opinion. I think it was raining outside. That would make sense if I were to offer the conclusion. I think it was sunny and not raining. That wouldn't make sense and my opinion would be inadmissible. In terms of experts, we have rule of evidence 702. The expert, first of all, has to be qualified based upon some combination of their experience, their training, their education, etc. and then in terms of the methodology of the expert, this is tested by at the federal level. And in Massachusetts, the Supreme Court case called Daubert Daubert is essentially asking, has this expert reliably applied a reliable technique or technology to the case at hand? In this case, did an accident reconstructionist reliably apply principles accepted in their field to the case at hand?

Colin Miller: And then, in terms of the expert in their conclusions, rule of evidence 704 says an expert is allowed to testify about ultimate factual issues, but cannot offer ultimate legal conclusions that force feed an answer to the jury. So we could have an accident reconstructionist saying in my conclusion, this Honda Accord was following too closely when it rammed this Toyota Camry at the red light. The expert would not be able to conclude this driver was acting negligently. That would speak to the ultimate legal issue in the case.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so I've always wondered about expert witnesses. They're paid sometimes staggering sums by law firms to come and offer their testimony. I presume that if a law firm hires an expert witness, they tell that expert witness. This is our position in this case. Can you provide us essentially the scientific or academic or whatever. Evidence of that somehow.

Rebecca Lavoie: Interestingly, you just accidentally perhaps hit on one of the core reasons why people were so engaged with, obsessed with, and angry while watching this trial. And we're going to talk about that after a quick break.

Rebecca Lavoie: We're back, and we're talking about the civics lessons within a high profile trial. And in this case, it's the Karen Reed case. So before the break, Hannah, you asked a question about expert witnesses. What they are allowed to say, whether or not they are just being paid to basically repeat what it is the prosecution or defense wants them to say. Now, a lot of interesting things happen in this case around expert witnesses. I cannot recap the whole trial in this episode. It included more than 30 days of testimony, which, by the way, I did watch Gavel to Gavel. It was streamed on YouTube. Speaking of public access to the trials, many expert witnesses, primarily offered up by the defense, were excluded from being able to testify in this trial by Judge Cannon, including a former FBI agent who planned to talk about the deficits in the police investigation into the case. For instance, one of the first responders in the case, after John O'Keefe's body was found, used a leaf blower to blow around the snow to look for evidence. They gathered evidence of snow and blood in solo cups and put them in grocery store bags, that kind of thing. They never looked for ring footage in the neighborhood, or they say they never looked for ring footage in the neighborhood. That may or may not have captured something happening outside. That expert excluded by Judge Cannon.

Hannah McCarthy: An expert witness. It's I mean, as Colin said, does have to be qualified. And it sounds like this person was exceptionally qualified.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Nick Capodice: What was the justification of the judge for not allowing this evidence, these witnesses?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, the FBI guy who's going to testify about whether or not the investigation was proper, Judge Beverley Cannon, said in a ruling, a controversial ruling that the jury would just know essentially what a proper investigation was.

Hannah McCarthy: What I don't know what a proper investigation is.

Rebecca Lavoie: A lot of people don't. Hannah.

Nick Capodice: Have you ever seen the wonderful Sidney Lumet film The Verdict with Paul Newman? Yes. There's a great sort of thing in there where an expert witness is called up, and then James Mason is like.

Nick Capodice: Is it not true that you have been paid to appear here to give evidence? I just wanted to do my James Mason.

Rebecca Lavoie: I appreciate that. And by the way, there is nothing wrong with paying experts for their time.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it happens every day.

Hannah McCarthy: I totally agree.

Rebecca Lavoie: With you conduct testing for travel for their time in court, etc..

Hannah McCarthy: My question is is just is that witness expected by the law firm to stick to a very narrow parameter?

Rebecca Lavoie: That's a very relevant question for this case, because the defense will tell you that they sent their experts. Basically the whole case file and their experts were able to make of it what they want. The prosecution, by the way, says the same thing, but the defense had kind of an ace up their sleeve for this. Their accident reconstruction experts were actually hired by the FBI during the federal investigation before the first trial. So they're experts in the crash reconstruction side. When they first got this information, it did not come from the defense at all.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Hannah McCarthy: Is that allowed?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. In this case, it was allowed, although those witnesses were very heavily voir dired.

Hannah McCarthy: I would imagine if you were involved in the prior investigation, but also what a witness to get right if that's allowed. Like, yeah, that's who you want.

Rebecca Lavoie: They're a firm called ARCCA and they're like the preeminent accident reconstruction and vehicle safety firm. And it was pretty clear the prosecution did not want them to be able to testify in this case.

Archive: I don't care about their opinions, but I care that it's unfair, imbalanced and hidden.

Rebecca Lavoie: Now, on the prosecution side, there were also some crash, reconstruction and car data experts. And in a moment that became a landmark moment in this trial, one of the men from that accident reconstruction company, it came out in court that he had falsified his CV and LinkedIn page, claiming he had graduated from college when he had not.

Nick Capodice: Oh.

Archive: And in fact, as you sit here today, you do not possess any bachelor degree.

Archive: Correct.

Rebecca Lavoie: Other notable things that happen in this trial. There were two motions by the defense for a mistrial with prejudice.

Archive: Your honor, the defense moves for a mistrial with prejudice based upon intentional misconduct that just occurred before the court and for the jury.

Rebecca Lavoie: A mistrial with prejudice is a mistrial is called by the judge, and it cannot be retried because it is so tainted by whatever it is the prosecution is alleged to have done. This happened notably in the Alec Baldwin case, when he was being prosecuted for that shooting that happened on the set of the film he was making. The prosecutor withheld very important, potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense, and that came out mid trial.

Hannah McCarthy: That sounds like prosecutorial misconduct.

Rebecca Lavoie: Interestingly, in that case, the judge actually allowed the defense to question the prosecutor on the stand about when she had learned a thing, how she got the information. And that was when the mistrial was called.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow, that is so dramatic. I mean, I know it's like the law and all that, but that's so dramatic.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: So at the end of all of this, there were closing arguments, our closing arguments. Evidence?

Hannah McCarthy: No, no.

Nick Capodice: They are a summation by the attorneys present. This is what we've talked about. And of course, it's, you know, putting their side in the best light. It's just like a recap.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Isn't it? It's also like. And so I urge you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to assert what you know to be true, which is that my client is not guilty.

Rebecca Lavoie: Right. In most cases, the closing argument is designed so that the lawyer who's giving it can tell a story to the jury about the circumstances, about the evidence. This is what we think happened or this is what didn't happen. And in this case, the defense kept it very simple. They had experts who they say proved there was no collision.

Archive: There was no collision. There was no collision. There was no collision.

Rebecca Lavoie: They also did a chart of reasonable doubt. Do you know what reasonable doubt is?

Nick Capodice: They have to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt. That's what the jury is told, right.

Rebecca Lavoie: But what is reasonable doubt?

Hannah McCarthy: I would say that many public radio listeners were introduced to that notion with the first season of serial, where at the end, Sarah Koenig says, I don't know if Adnan had committed a crime here. However, he cannot be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So Sarah essentially says this was a miscarriage of justice.

Nick Capodice: One thing I think is interesting about reasonable doubt is that it's personal and subjective. There can be different reasonable doubts in a room of 12 people.

Rebecca Lavoie: Reasonable doubt includes all the way up to if I think they probably did it. That's reasonable doubt. Mhm. If I think they might have done it that's reasonable doubt. I think that they did it but I don't see any evidence for it here. That's reasonable doubt. What the defense did was they had a chart which was like a piece of paper. And they had these graphics of post-it notes going on to the piece of paper. And during their hour and 20 minute long closing, they talked about all the issues with the investigation, all the evidence that they had presented, and every time they presented an issue, such as the cop who was later fired for misconduct, they would have a post-it sticky note graphically fly up and stick to that piece of paper. And at the end of the closing, he was allowed to say, look at that giant pile of notes. There's your pile of reasonable doubt right there.

Archive: As you mentally sift through those cards, realize that every one of them is a massive hole in the Commonwealth's case. Every single one of the note cards represents a hole in the Commonwealth's case. If you're holding mentally even one of those cards, you're holding reasonable doubt, folks.

Hannah McCarthy: That's a smart thing to do.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, it's very actually common in murder trials, especially for defense attorneys to do what's like the tree or the chart of reasonable doubt, because you really do have to explain it to a jury. A lot of people have been convicted based on things like their affect in court, based on gut feeling, based on a better story being told by the prosecution. Who bears like the burden of most of the work in a trial? We obviously know that defense attorneys get paid a lot of money. They can hire their own experts. But who bears the burden to do the heavy lifting?

Hannah McCarthy: Do you mean the prosecution because you're trying to prove something?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. So the state bears the entire burden. You're correct. And it is very important for a jury to understand that jurors are given instructions before they deliberate. In this case, the instructions took between an hour and two hours to read. They're very lengthy. They're about how to consider and weigh each charge, what needs to be proven and how they are supposed to deliberate. And then the judge can offer suggestions. In this case, Judge Cannon said, I urge you to not take an immediate poll and see where you all are. Now, I served on a jury once. I was the foreman. That was exactly what I did.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, that's what we did.

Nick Capodice: It's like in the movies. This is what you're supposed to do.

Rebecca Lavoie: Right? And in my case, in my jury, we were all not guilty. So I was like, oh, they just sent in sandwiches. Should we eat these and then go back anyway? Karen Reed was eventually acquitted of almost everything except for the operating under the influence charge, and the prosecutor had shown a clip of her in an interview that she gave to a television reporter, saying, I had had a few drinks and then I drove.

Archive: The 45 year old says she's not guilty of hitting her boyfriend with her SUV and leaving him to die in the snow after a night of drinking.

Archive: Has no life in it, he said. Just get get a shot and mix it yourself.

Archive: The prosecution showed jurors.

Nick Capodice: So she did incriminate herself.

Rebecca Lavoie: She kind of did. Also, the two jurors who have come forward to talk, what they say they did was that they weighed every single charge on that slip. They went through every bit of 31 days of evidence and tried to find evidence to support each of those charges, pointing to guilt, and they couldn't find any. Does it surprise you that this jury would be only influenced by what they saw in court?

Hannah McCarthy: Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: You're not alone in saying that. By the way, a lot of people have called this a rare jury, especially smart jury and a very literal jury, that they took the judge's instructions and followed them to the letter, which is not what happens all the time.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. But I will say there is something about, I don't want to call it the wisdom of crowds, but one person can be really thorough in a jury and can make everybody be like, hey everybody, let's do it this way. And that person can be very effective at controlling how it is done in those deliberation chambers.

Hannah McCarthy: I think the foreman, if the foreman is like they're put in a position of power relative to the other members of the jury.

Rebecca Lavoie: How to deliberate, etc..

Hannah McCarthy: If that person says this is the way I think we should do it, you're looking for guidance. You're going to go with the person who appears to be the voice of reason.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right, that's right. So, Nick.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hey, do you regret not following this story at all?

Speaker9: I really do.

Nick Capodice: I also regret that I have to make an episode this afternoon, and I can't just binge read every single thing on the internet about this trial.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, I will post some links to some really good reporting on this trial from outlets like Vanity Fair. I'll put those in the show notes if folks want to learn more. There is an epilog here. Karen Reed was acquitted of all the major charges. She's not spending any time in prison. She got probation for the charge, which is the standard punishment in the for the first offense in Massachusetts. However, the O'Keefe family John O'Keefe's family is suing Karen Reed in civil court. Along with the two restaurants that served all these people before. Whatever may or may not have happened that night. So civil case, legal experts also watching that one very carefully.

Hannah McCarthy: What are they suing her for?

Rebecca Lavoie: They're suing her for a wrongful death. And that is separate from the criminal proceeding in the O.J. Simpson case. The family sued him after he was acquitted in court, and they won. So legal experts are watching this, in large part because the rules of civil cases and how you can collect evidence and interviews are very different than in criminal cases. There are many fewer limits for the kinds of evidence you can bring in, and generally, civil cases are a lot easier to win than criminal cases. But a lot of people are watching this because they know what was left out of the criminal proceeding that would have benefited Karen Reed. And they want to see if it's going to come out in the civil case.

Nick Capodice: Wow.

Hannah McCarthy: I have a question about this, because you have laid out a lot of really interesting civics elements here. So we're talking about a white woman who can hire a high powered, obviously highly competent.

Speaker9: Four high powered, highly competent lawyers.

Hannah McCarthy: Go ahead. Okay. So that that requires an immense amount of money.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Hannah McCarthy: She's a white woman of means. Right. And so we see that, and we're like, well, what's going on here? And we're going to be curious about that in a way that we are often not curious about cases that do not involve a white woman of means. Right. Yes. My question is like, would a lawyer say stuff like this is going on all the time? We are just only paying attention to this one because of that element, or is this an exceptional case?

Rebecca Lavoie: This is an exceptional case, and it's also an important case for exactly the reason that you mentioned. One of the things that fascinates me about the Karen Reed case is the crossing of political lines of protesters and pro Karen Reed people you see people saying in interviews, I have never believed that the police could do anything like this before, but I believe it now and I'll believe it in the future. So what this case has actually done? Yes, this happens to marginalized people, people of color, people without means all the time. But with this case has done, I believe is open the eyes of people who weren't necessarily looking at that. And now they are. So here the so-called thin blue line is being questioned. You know, the backing of the police non questioning their authority. So is the criminal legal system in the state of Massachusetts. And that's pretty new. It's pretty new for this community. And I think that a lot of people Bull are going to be looking at this system with a new view, because in this case, and I think that benefits all defendants.

Nick Capodice: The word conspiracy when used it has a real derogatory nature. So I hesitate to say it. But please, when you when you hear me say it, know that I don't mean it that way. I sometimes wonder is is our conspiracy theories against state or government institutions? Is that going to be the answer to civil discourse? Is that how we're all going to be able to speak again? Is that going to. Is that what's going to end? Ultimate polarization is conspiracy against the man.

Rebecca Lavoie: You know what's interesting? I actually interviewed Turtleboy a few days ago along with my podcast partner, Mel Barrett, and she talked to him about this very thing. She said, I am very different from you, meaning turtle boy. However, we have a thing in common, which is we both are now afraid of this institution. I've always been afraid of it seems like you have because of your reporting. Can we build on this. And the answer was a resounding, resounding yes. That we don't have to agree on aspects of what's going on in the world, on politics, on discourse, but we can agree that we should all be looking at and being critical of the same system. And I believe that is a very big place to start.

Hannah McCarthy: I agree with that. For a long time, I guess I call it a common enemy, but what I really mean is a common concern and like a deep concern that you share with someone else, regardless of your vast differences, is absolutely vital to coming together and making change. If that is something that is important for a community.

Nick Capodice: There's that expression only connect and that goes back a long time, which is that is that is the solution. And it's been staring us in the face the whole time is what can we find that is a connection between us to care about together. We're going to both stave off this guy with a sword over there.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, yeah. We're going to gather in groups of thousands and in protest outside a courthouse together.

Nick Capodice: Fascinating. The things these people must have learned about each other, that they didn't know.

Rebecca Lavoie: About each other, about the government, about how our legal system works. A lot of civics lessons in the Karen Reed case.

This episode of Civics 101 was written and produced by me, Rebecca Lavoie. With a lot of help from our hosts, Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy, our team also includes our senior producer, Kristina Phillips. Music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound and by Chris Zabriskie. For more reading on the Karen Read case and all of the issues around it, check out the links in the show. Notes. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Forget hypotheticals: How are tariffs affecting American businesses?

Today on Civics 101, we answer listener questions about tariffs. And then, we look at how they've affected one American Industry. It's not a game, but these companies do make them, and they've been hit hard by President Trump's ever-changing tariff policies. 


Transcript

Nick Capodice: Uh, what's the sort of thing we can say to, like, indicate that we're playing an 1800?

Hannah McCarthy: You always get the cheap boxes first.

Hannah McCarthy: I always forget about the cheap boxes.

Nick Capodice: It makes it so you don't have to use artisans, but you can use workers to get.

Hannah McCarthy: I know what it does.

Nick Capodice: Goods. They're just general.

Hannah McCarthy: Goods. I know this game like the back of my hand. That's the only thing I forget. Every time you need the boxes to win the game, you need the boxes for everything.

Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And we have explained tariffs on the show recently. Please listen to our 101 on what tariffs are and how they work. If you haven't. I got a link down there in the show notes. Does anyone click on the links in the show notes.

Archive: Does anyone still wear a hat?

Archive: I'll drink to that.

Nick Capodice: We say it all the time.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, we say it in almost every episode.

Nick Capodice: I don't even know what the word show notes meant. Everyone. It's the little thing. It's like the information about this episode. We call that the show notes. Now you're an insider.

Hannah McCarthy: If you didn't know what it meant.

Nick Capodice: How does all our audience know? Anyways, yeah we are talking about tariffs again because they're changing all the time and we have gotten several listener questions about them since our recent tariffs episode. So first Hannah I'm going to answer some listener questions. And then we'll do a deep dive into how the recent tariffs are affecting one industry in particular, an industry we both love. Sound good.

Hannah McCarthy: Sound good. Is this going to be like a price of milk kind of episode?

Nick Capodice: Oh yeah. It's gonna be one of those.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Nick Capodice: Okay. Cool. The price of milk. All right. Hannah, what do we got in the old question? Hopper? The old question. Basket.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, first one, how much money has been raised by the tariffs since Donald Trump took office? And I think this one means, like, how much money have the tariffs provided to the United States?

Nick Capodice: Excellent. Yes, absolutely. Um, it's good to have a question that's got a nice firm pat answer from January 1st, 2025 to July 1st, 2025, and that's when we're taping this episode. The United States has collected $97 billion from tariffs. This is according to the US Treasury Department's daily Treasury statements. This money was paid to the US government by American businesses that bought things from outside the country.

Hannah McCarthy: And is that a lot? It sounds like a lot, but we have had tariffs for as long as we've been a nation. So how does that 97 billion compare to other years?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, to compare the same stretch of time last year, 2024, during the Biden administration, the US had collected $58.3 billion in tariffs.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so is 97 billion. Is that like breaking a record?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, not yet, but we're on track to break it. The current record is 2022 during the Joe Biden administration. We took in $102 billion over the whole year. So we're only halfway through the year, so we're probably going to break it. By the way, another thing in the show notes there is a wonderful tariff history tracker courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis.

Hannah McCarthy: That's actually fascinating.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, you can like, see what we charged every year. It goes back to 1930. That year we took about half $1 billion redos. All right, give me the next one.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, here we go. Where does the tariff money go once the government gets it? Originally in the 1700s, the money funded the government. Who decided where that money went? Is it the same now? Does it bypass Congress? Lots of good questions there.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. All in one email. Very thoughtful, very thoughtful. Uh, another pretty simple answer to this one, albeit with a nebulous caveat at the end. Hannah, the answer to where does this tariff money go is exactly the same as it's been since the 18th century. And I'm so glad our listener brought up the 1700s. And you know, why don't you, Hannah? I think I do have to be careful, Hannah. That's two carriage drops in one month. The tariff of 1789 was our very first piece of legislation as a country.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, don't I know it. Nick. And with good reason. We had just won a war. We were pretty much broke, and we owed money all over town. And by town, I mean the world.

Nick Capodice: France was basically chasing the US like Sallie Mae. Chase me for my student loans. Live at the Comedy Cellar. Did I ever tell you the bit that my best friend and I used to fantasize about, like, a revolution era stand up comedy routine? I'd wear, like, a tricorn hat. Where are you from, sir? Oh, Fredericton. I hear there's a lot of taxation down in Fredericton, but not a lot of representation. Am I right, folks? Anyways, what's the deal with the food served on carriages these days?

Hannah McCarthy: Where's Fredericton?

Nick Capodice: I don't know, it's one of the ten oldest towns in America. But seriously, folks. The tariff of 1789 was a sweeping $0.50 per ton of goods that came to America on foreign ships, and $0.06 per ton on goods that came on American owned ships. There were a few exceptions. There's one fun, one tied to a certain trade. Good, near and dear to your neck of the woods, Hannah. Very low taxes on a certain good that you might say, flooded the Boston economy.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, Nick. Is that a great molasses flood joke? People died!

Nick Capodice: So long ago. It was a sweet death.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh.

Hannah McCarthy: No no no, no.

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, but, yeah, we did need a lot of molasses in early America. It was not just for baked beans.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it was for rum. And that is how the country funded itself. 80 to 90% of our federal revenue until the 1860s came from tariffs. But back to our listener question. Where does that money go? It goes to the US Treasury's general fund. It is the same place our federal income taxes go. And once it's there, it can be spent as Congress decides.

Hannah McCarthy: Just to clarify, Congress spends the money from that fund.

Nick Capodice: They do. Article one, section eight of the Constitution. This is the taxing and spending clause.

Hannah McCarthy: And what was the caveat that you mentioned earlier?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, the caveat is, is as we're taping this, the Senate is debating and voting on a massive budget bill which may have passed in the time between taping and putting this out. I think it might have passed a couple hours ago. Wow. Yeah. So I can't say where the money is going specifically until I read the bill. It's 900 some odd pages, but I got a pretty good idea. Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, one last question here. Who collects the tariffs?

Nick Capodice: I love this one, Hannah. Let me lay out how the money gets into that treasury fund. Refund. So the business or person or company in the United States that is importing that good from the other country is called the importer of record. When we buy that thing and it's put on a cargo ship in another country and it's shipped here, when it arrives at that port in America, the person can't get it until they pay the tariff to the CBP. Cbp that stands for the US Customs and Border Protection Agency.

Hannah McCarthy: Do they have like a a book that tells them how much money to charge someone before that thing goes away? I'm sure they're not keeping the numbers in their head.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, they use something called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. The CBP says to the importer you bought hand-cut lace from China, and they look at the chart and they see what extra percentage is owed as a tariff.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. But I imagine this can get a little tricky, right? The tariff percentages on different goods from different countries have vacillated wildly in the last few months.

Nick Capodice: I think that's a bit of an understatement.

Archive: We saw a spike earlier today in markets, for example, based on a rumor and unfounded rumor, apparently, that Trump was going to potentially pause those tariffs. And then the administration said, never mind, we're not doing that. So you're seeing markets just like incredibly jumpy.

Nick Capodice: I also want to add, in April, after several changes to the tariffs, there was a glitch in the system, which meant that for a short period of time, nobody knew the correct amount of tax and no taxes were collected at all. When this glitch happened, I saw an interview on CNBC. Jared Marinelli, he's the vice president of a US sales and logistics firm. He said this, quote, social media posts are not law on the pause and increase in tariffs. With the constant changes to the regulations, all customs brokers in our industry have a difficult task ahead of them.

Hannah McCarthy: What if you buy something, it gets put on the boat and then the tariff changes while the ship is making its way here.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, that is a great question. Once the good leaves the factory or wherever it's made in the other country, the tariff rate is set right then. And this is specifically to prevent the cost going up or down while it's in transit. This is called an on the water clause.

Hannah McCarthy: One last thing. When you are at the port and paying the tariff, do you do you just write the customs person a check like, no, seriously.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, yeah, I'm good for it, I swear.

Hannah McCarthy: No, no, not an IOU.

Speaker6: I'm marker.

Nick Capodice: My marker is good in this town. Most of the time. Hannah, you get this all set before the good ships. And when the goods are at the port, people usually do a bank transfer, and they want you to do it quick. Uh, they don't want these ports clogged up with stuff like a storage unit in Weehawken. Now we've got the logistics out of the way. Time to talk about what these recent tariffs are actually doing when it comes to American businesses. One kind of business in particular. But first we got to take a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, if you like us, leave us a review. Uh, you can do it pretty much on whatever app you are listening to this current episode on. It is a tremendous way to let other people know that our show exists, and ideally that you like it, and it helps us out a lot. Thank you. We're back. You're listening to Civics 101 and today we are talking tariffs again.

Nick Capodice: Again.

Nick Capodice: Our last tariff episode was before they had been enacted. So this time I wanted a real nuts and bolts example of how tariffs affect an industry, one industry in particular, dollars and cents, how much money the US government is collecting and what the new tariffs are doing to American companies. So I decided to ask someone who makes just about my favorite product in the world.

Hannah McCarthy: Black licorice. You shouldn't eat too much, Nick. It's not good for you.

Nick Capodice: It's not good for the ticker.

Hannah McCarthy: This is not. This is not a sugar comment, everybody. Chris can be rough on the heart.

Nick Capodice: Uh, the good we were talking about is something near and dear to both Hannah and my hearts.

Jason Matthews: Kevin gave me a little bit of your background, so that's exciting. But, um. What what's what sort of gamer are you, actually?

Nick Capodice: This is Jason Matthews.

Jason Matthews: Hi. My name is Jason Matthews. I'm a game designer. I design Twilight Struggle. I work with Ford Circle games as well as a number of other publishers.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, Twilight struggle.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: That ranked number one on a little website called Board Game Geek for years.

Nick Capodice: Years.

Nick Capodice: And Jason also made a game called 1960 The Making of a president, where one player is Nixon and the other is JFK. Do you remember that one?

Hannah McCarthy: I remember that very well. Uh, I remember you were playing Nixon, and I, I don't I don't think I have ever gotten so anxious playing a board game.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it's a wonderful game. It is a stressful game. So I was tired of hypothetical cost of things in our episodes. So I wanted to get a dollar by dollar breakdown. So I called Jason up because he has been speaking publicly about the recent tariffs and their effect on the board game industry.

Hannah McCarthy: And when did you talk to him?

Nick Capodice: This was May 6th, 2025.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, okay. So this is when the tariffs specifically on anything coming from China were to my memory fairly significant.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Archive: Absolutely David. These numbers just keep changing as you know. And what we've just confirmed from the white House is that the new total rate against China is now 145% tariffs so far.

Hannah McCarthy: And just to make it clear, if I am buying sneakers made in China to sell in my local Boston store, and there is a 145% tariff on all goods from China as there was in May. If those sneakers cost me $5,000. Now I would have to pay $7,250 to acquire them.

Nick Capodice: Absolutely. And it's up to you, Hannah. It's up to you how you want to make up all that extra cash. Maybe you could, I don't know, raise the cost of shoes at your store.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. But the tariffs on goods from China are not 145% right now. Right? What are they?

Nick Capodice: Okay, here we go. What are. And what were the tariffs on goods? Cue that jangly piano. February 1st, President Trump signed an executive order putting 10% tariffs on all goods from China, 25% on all goods from Canada and Mexico. Two days later, he issued a 30 day pause on the Canada Mexico 1st March fourth. That pause ended. He doubled China to 20%. I'm skipping a bunch of these because there is a lot. Uh, March 24th, he announces a 25% tariff on any imports from countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela, which we in America do, by the way. Uh, April 2nd, he announces the, quote, reciprocal tariffs. This is a 10% baseline on every country in the world. And then more depending on a formula, with the exception of 11 nations, including the aforesaid Canada and Mexico, because they have their own situation, but also Russia, North Korea, the Vatican, Cuba and others. China then raises its tariffs and then Trump raises them back. And by April 10th, the US has a 145% tariff on anything coming from China. Uh, the next day, Donald Trump announces there is an exception for electronics and electronics only. Not sneakers, not board games. I then interview Jason. Six days later, the president announces there is a 90 day pause on those tariffs. And that is maybe half of what happened. I didn't even get into automobiles or Madagascar vanilla, or European wine or American whiskey. And I'm going to take a deep breath. Here we go.

Hannah McCarthy: I thought that was pretty well done.

Nick Capodice: Thank you.

Hannah McCarthy: But you didn't say what the tariffs are right now.

Nick Capodice: I didn't.

Hannah McCarthy: Know.

Nick Capodice: Sorry. The most up to date figure that I could find today was from a website called China briefing.com. They have a quote on their website that says trade relations between the US and China are, quote, highly complex, shaped by a tangled web of tariffs that have been imposed, adjusted, revoked and reinstated going back to 2018. End quote. This website lists the current tariff on goods from China at 55%. This is from the 10% baseline tariff, and then a 20% fentanyl tariff and an additional 25% tariff on most goods made in China.

Hannah McCarthy: Can you clarify what is meant by a fentanyl tariff?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, I'm going to just quote what a white House official said. Uh, this additional 20% is because of punitive measures that President Trump has imposed on China, Mexico and Canada. Uh, associated with President Trump's accusation that those three countries facilitate the flow of fentanyl into the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: All right.

Nick Capodice: Okay.

Hannah McCarthy: And again, we're talking about a 55% tariff. But that number could change again.

Nick Capodice: It could change while we're recording these words.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. So back to board games. How are the tariffs affecting them. That industry specifically.

Nick Capodice: All right. Here is Jason again.

Jason Matthews: The way of board game publishing works is that there are basically two models. Uh one is direct sales. So if I for instance, the company I work with for circle, most of their games are direct sales. They sell through their website. People go directly to them. So there's no middleman, but the vast majority are going through the retail sales process. So that means right off the top, you can lop 40% off of whatever a board games MSRP. The the standard price is real quick.

Hannah McCarthy: What is MSRP?

Nick Capodice: That is the manufacturer's suggested retail price. Stores can charge more or less than the MSRP, but it is a very good guide to go off of.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so the retailer, let's say a local board game store, they take about 40% of what the person purchasing the game pays them for it, 40% of the money.

Nick Capodice: Yes.

Jason Matthews: And then inside the rest of that, the publisher has to pay an artist, a designer, possibly a developer. And absolutely the person making the game, the company that makes the game, usually a production cost is somewhere between 13 and 17% of the MSRP. So it's a significant portion of the cost of a board game, but it's nowhere close to the majority. It's not where most of the money is made, but it is. You know, it's noticeable when you've taken that 13% and doubled it, or 250% increase of that cost. Suddenly now it doesn't really make very much sense to publish a board game.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm still a little shaky on the numbers here.

Nick Capodice: I was to, so I figured the best way to wrap our brains around this was to imagine that we made a game.

Hannah McCarthy: We could do it.

Nick Capodice: We could. I think we could. And just to make it simple, let's say we designed a game called Civics 101 win, win a win.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't know about winning when it comes to civics, you know, unless it's like a win win situation. Um, maybe it's a cooperative game.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, yeah, we.

Nick Capodice: All win.

Nick Capodice: Civics one.

Nick Capodice: We all win.

Hannah McCarthy: But carry on.

Nick Capodice: Okay. Okay. So, Hannah, you and I come up with the idea, but we need a for real game designer to do the rules and design the board and all that stuff. And we are going to sell it in stores.

Hannah McCarthy: How many do we make? Like, how many games?

Jason Matthews: Normally, I kind of a middling print run would be about 20,000, 20,000 copies.

Hannah McCarthy: All right.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. So first off, Hannah, nobody's going to buy this game unless it looks pretty cool. So we have to hire an artist.

Jason Matthews: So we're doing a 20,000 print run for our game, and it's going to cost us somewhere, let's say around $3,000 up front for the art. And then you might pay an upfront kind of signing bonus for the game designer to kind of help pay for the prototyping and whatnot. And that'll usually be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. So upfront costs, you're somewhere in that $7,000 range.

Hannah McCarthy: As in you and I have to pay seven grand just to get started.

Nick Capodice: Just to get started. And we have a long way to go.

Jason Matthews: And then you have to contract with your printing house. This is going to run somewhere short of 20% of the MSRP. The more components, the larger the game. Obviously the more expensive that all of that gets.

Hannah McCarthy: In the printing of the game. That happens in China.

Nick Capodice: Yes. And more on that later, I promise. I do imagine some of her listeners are like, why don't people print the games in other countries of the US? I swear I'm going to get to that.

Hannah McCarthy: Can we give a hypothetical MSRP for this game so we know how much we are going to make?

Nick Capodice: Sure. I suggested 49.95. I was going to make it 50. But you know pricey game.

Speaker10: What what?

Nick Capodice: But 49.95 is what somebody pays to buy Civics 101 in a store.

Jason Matthews: So at 49.95 we can say that this is going to cost probably about $7.50 a game to make after you have made it. Then you have to ship it back to the United States, and that will be an additional cost. Uh, normally if you're in a game of this size where you've got 20,000 units, you're going to be able to get a container. These days, you can get partial containers also. So at this very second, because of the trade interruption between the United States and China, containers are a bit cheaper than they were previously. So let's say you can do that for $10,000 or thereabouts with 20,000 units. You also have to pay for storage. You're obviously not just putting these in your garage, so you have to ship to a warehouse. Costs for shipping to a warehouse or additional to the cost to get it from China to the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. So you mentioned that customs doesn't want things lying around at ports waiting to be collected. This is why it's got to go from the port to a warehouse.

Nick Capodice: Exactly.

Jason Matthews: Normally you're going to try and pick a central location at the warehouse so that you're shipping to individual retailers or to individual customers is less expensive. So a lot of these are located in Tennessee and whatnot. If you go the retail and distribution route, then you'll have a bunch of copies of the game sent directly to the distributor, and he will handle your retail outlet shipping and whatnot. After all of that, if you're going through retail, you get to lop off 40% of the cost for the retail and, uh, distribution percentage. And now, finally, you try and make some profit out of whatever you've done. I'm guessing you're going to get about $15 out of that, if you're lucky.

Hannah McCarthy: $15. That's what we get for a $50 game.

Nick Capodice: Yep. And that was in the pre tariff world. When I interviewed Jason there was a trade battle going on between the US and China where a game publisher would pay twice as much to get it to the United States.

Jason Matthews: And so now your $15 profit on your $49 game is down to $7.50. Now, if you are a capitalist and you're interested in making money, is that a rate of return that you're really interested in? Can you make money a lot more money a lot easier without all of these risks and uncertainties? Absolutely. So now what are you doing? Like what? What's the point?

Nick Capodice: And look, we know a lot of board game designers. I think it's safe for me to say that nobody really gets super rich from making board games. I mean, of course, yes, there are a handful of outliers, some really successful games, but it's it's just not something people do only for the money. It is not a get rich quick scheme.

Hannah McCarthy: So what is stopping game publishers from moving production somewhere besides China?

Jason Matthews: It's a very hard business case to make for anybody, so why are they going to do it? Which is not to say no one is going to do it. I'm just saying that you're you have to have a business model that overcomes these kind of questions. And if you're already a printer and a successful printer, then maybe relocating a factory to a place with a lower tariff rate for the United States makes perfect sense. Or you can expand your existing facility in Poland or Germany or wherever you are. But the idea that you are going to plop down a new board game making facility in Wisconsin very, very unlikely.

Nick Capodice: Jason told me a story about some companies that had tried to print in the United States, and it was not profitable, and the quality was nowhere near as good. The US and China have a rich production history going back decades when it comes to board games. More years for other things. Factories do this tremendously well. According to board game publishers. It's not about paying workers less in another country, it is about maintaining a long developed production ecosystem.

Jason Matthews: I don't know if you haven't ever played a war game. Most of them come with counters with all these detailed little bits of information on them. Well, printing that precisely on a counter turns out to be a technical expertise that a lot of people don't have, including some European printers who, you know, do board games. Otherwise the Chinese have mastered it. And it's not it's not a question of the Chinese being cheaper. It's not a labor question. It's a technical expertise coupled with, of course, this kind of investment in manufacturing equipment, printing equipment that most American printers just haven't made.

Hannah McCarthy: So what is all of this actually doing to the board game industry?

Nick Capodice: Since I had this conversation with Jason. Several prominent board game publishers have folded. One of the largest online board game retailers Board land. They also closed up shop. In addition, a handful of other board game publishers have filed a lawsuit they are suing. The exact name of the case is Princess Awesome and Stoneware Games, et al. Versus customs, which has been filed in the Court of International Trade. So to answer your question, I asked Jason, what could all of this do to the industry we love so much?

Jason Matthews: The industry? Well, first of all, of course it's being damaged. Some people are in marginal positions in the first place and they simply don't have the capital to make the adjustments quickly enough to save themselves. American distribution was already in trouble. Some retail is already in trouble. There's practically a new announcement every day and has been since the tariffs have come out. And then we get back into this. Okay. I'm a capitalist. I'm trying to make money. Am I going to invest multi-millions of dollars into printing presses made in Germany for an industry with low margins in the first place? Who? I can't tell if the tariffs that are being enacted today are still going to be around three years from now, when I might be able to recover the cost of buying these machines. It just puts all of this negative pressure on doing the exact thing that the president suggests that he wants to do, which is bring back manufacturing to the United States. Uh.

Nick Capodice: Your turn.

Nick Capodice: Hannah.

Nick Capodice: Take those bicycles. Put them on that boat.

Hannah McCarthy: What am I supposed to do without the boxes?

Nick Capodice: That is, tariffs and specifically tariffs and board games. This episode is made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. What a joy. Thank you. Uh, Kristina Phillips is our senior producer, Marina Henke, our producer, and Rebecca LaVoy, our executive producer. While we were recording this, we were playing Anno 1800, the board game designed by Martin Wallace and published by Kosmos Games, didn't pay us anything to say that. They didn't give us a free game. We just love it. And it's about making stuff and trading it on ships. So I thought it was apropos, right? Right. Music in this episode by Epidemic Sound and the artist who I hope never puts a tariff on his crunchy beats, Chris Zabriskie Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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Cinematic Civics: Independence Day

Is there a civics lesson in the 1996 film Independence Day? We think so. 

Join the Civics 101 team for a conversation about the film, its politics, and what it says about the United States and its place in the world. 

There's even a fire-jumping dog!


Transcript

Cinematic Civics: Independence Day

Archive: Mr. president, our intelligence tells us the object has settled into a stationary orbit. Part of it is broken off into nearly three dozen other pieces. Smaller than the whole, sir. Yet over 15 miles in width themselves.

Archive: Where are they heading?

Archive: They should be entering our atmosphere within the next 25 minutes.

Christina Phillips: I'm Christina Philips, this is Civics 101, and I am here in the studio with.

Rebecca Lavoie: Rebecca Lavoie,

Hannah McCarthy: Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And Nick Capodice.

Christina Phillips: So this is another installment of our ongoing series, Cinematic Civics. Is that what we're calling it? Cinematic civics?

Rebecca Lavoie: Sure. Civics, cinema, cinematic civics, civics on the screen, whatever you like.

Christina Phillips: We'll go with cinematic civics. I like the alliteration there. What I'm talking about is where we talk about our favorite movies that have to do with the government, politics, etc., etc.. And what movie did I make you guys watch this weekend?

Hannah McCarthy: Star Wars Episode ten. Aka Independence Day.

Archive: It is confirmed the unexplained phenomenon is headed for Moscow.

Archive: It's like in chess. First there position on your pieces using this one signal to synchronize their efforts.

Archive: And then what?

Archive: Checkmate.

Christina Phillips: So we are talking about the 1996 film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich, about a giant alien invasion bent on destroying humans and harvesting all of Earth's resources. And the president, President Whitmore, played by Bill Pullman, where he data scientist David, played by Jeff Goldblum, and slick fighter pilot Steven Hiller, played by Will Smith, who team up to bring these aliens down.

Archive: Something you want to add to this briefing, Captain Hiller?

Archive: No, sir. Just a little anxious to get up there and whoop ET's, that's all.

Christina Phillips: I chose this movie for several reasons. One, because it's one of the first movies I saw in theaters when I was five years old, and I loved it. Two aliens three. Because it is a goofy artifact of American patriotism that's about as subtle as being the first country to land on the moon and then immediately planting your flag there, which is also the first scene of this movie. And for because this movie deals a lot with the military might of the United States and the role of the U.S. in geopolitical warfare. Now, one reason I didn't choose this movie is because of the United States decision to drop bombs on nuclear sites in Iran a few days ago, thereby demonstrating this military might.

Archive: With a post online and then an address to the nation. President Trump announced the United States attacked Iran's three most important nuclear sites overnight, marking a major escalation in the violence in the Middle East.

Archive: Iran's nuclear enrichment facility.

Christina Phillips: So we're taping this on Monday, June 23rd, which is two days after the United States drop bombs on three different nuclear sites in Iran. But it just so happens to be extremely, extremely relevant. More than I could have anticipated. So relevant, in fact, that the aircraft carrying the nuclear bomb that the United States drops on Houston in the movie Independence Day is the same kind of aircraft, the B-2, that the United States used to carry the 30,000 pound ground penetrating bombs that were dropped on Iran. So, in the words of our president, Donald Trump, quote, there is not another military in the world who could have done this. All this to say, it's true that this movie both does a really good job representing the geopolitical position of the United States in the 90s, but it's also about telepathic aliens. Will Smith flying a spaceship into another spaceship so Jeff Goldblum can upload a virus to the spaceship's computers. Question mark. Question mark if you've never seen it. Spoilers abound. I don't think spoilers will ruin your experience of this movie. If you have not seen it in a while, I recommend checking it out again. It's kind of fun, but that's just my opinion. So I'm curious and I'll start with you, Rebecca. What did you think watching this movie?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, I was not five when it came out. I was 24 or something like that when it came out. I was born in 1973. I think that this movie is a peak 90s film. Uh, 90s. The 90s had this entire genre of action movies and political intrigue and all sorts of like, psychological thrillers. And this movie combines a lot of those elements. And you have Will Smith punching an alien in the face.

Archive: That's what you get. Ha ha. Look at you, all banged up. Who's the man? Ha! Who's the man? Why did I get another play?

Hannah McCarthy: So I first watched this film during a party my parents were throwing. I think it was a 4th of July party. If I had to guess, it was on cable. And I just remember thinking, I can't believe I'm getting away with this. All the grown ups.

Hannah McCarthy: During the other room, and I'm getting to watch this movie. That's deeply disturbing to me. I enjoyed watching it as an adult, seeing as it's been so very long. One of the things that struck me the most is that the CGI kind of holds up. I think they were really smart about the CGI. It's often behind smoke or it's like seen through another screen. I do wonder, like, was this one of the first movies in which Will Smith is our dependable, definitely going to save us all guy? How well established was he at that point?

Christina Phillips: I will just say this movie does put him on the map.

Rebecca Lavoie: Fresh Prince of Bel Air actually ended in 1996 when this movie came out. So he had like a continuous career like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ended. And then this movie came out, which is why he's kind of never had a gap in his fame, for better or worse, since then.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, but this is the one that launched him as the action hero.

Archive: I've been waiting for this my whole life.

Hannah McCarthy: In terms of the actual civics of it. There were a lot of moments where I thought like, oh, come on. Like, there doesn't check out at all. But it was delightful nonetheless. And I was moved by the president's Independence Day speech.

Christina Phillips: Okay, Nick, what did you think?

Nick Capodice: Well, I saw it. And when it came out in theaters in 96, and I was telling Hannah, the one thing I remembered most about this movie is not just me, but the whole audience laughing at the amount of product placement that was going on particular. When Will Smith hugs his girlfriend's son? There's a giant Reebok hat scene. The entire audience exploded in laughter when the emotional highlight of the movie had a big old Reebok right there, as big as the cinema itself. But as to the movie, I got emotional. I was, you know, I was prepared to be really cynical and snide the whole way through. And of course, I was wracked with tears at certain moments. You know I do. I do that one thing that matters a lot to me. The movie opens on July 2nd, which is actually our Independence Day. So they got that right. That's not the 4th of July. The 2nd of July was when the Continental Congress approved Virginia's resolution to become an independent nation. So hooray for that. John Adams would have been thrilled.

Christina Phillips: Does someone want to sort of break down what happens? The aliens show up on Earth, and then the United States does what? And kind of what is the main climax that brings everybody together?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, I think when it becomes clear that it's a worldwide disaster, that everybody is facing the same thing, the United States comes up with a plan that they say is impossible, but they figure out how to do it in like 45 minutes. And then they put out the Aquaman signal to all of the other heads of state and militaries around the world who were able to somehow coordinate within, just like a five minute window, when they are going to be able to drop the shields of these giant ships that are floating all over the world, and they're all going to simultaneously be able to blow them up. And it takes a lot of coordination. But of course, we pulled it off from deep inside of a mountain because that's how we are.

Archive: What the hell is he saying? It seems they're getting a signal. Old Morse code.

Nick Capodice: There was a lot of like, well, we can't understand each other because we all speak different languages, even though we're all citizens of the world. But then it's like Morse code is going to solve all the problems. It's still English in Morse code. It's not like Farsi, but Morse code. It's English. Fire the missiles now. Yeah, buddy.

Christina Phillips: Exactly. Morse code is not. It has never been a universally. Every single country in the world has used it. And there are different forms of Morse code. So that is definitely like a hand-wavy thing. I do think that's a really good example of a like, well, we'll just do this. And if you poke that hole just a little bit, you're like, nah, I don't think that'll work.

Rebecca Lavoie: I think the whole point, though, was that they were using the cables under the ocean instead of like, signals over the air, presumably.

Hannah McCarthy: Well, just this idea that, like, it's Morse code, it's echoing Jeff Goldblum being like, I'll just make a virus that will infiltrate. This highly evolved technology that we've already been told by Brant Spiner that their bodies are like ours in terms of vulnerability, but their technology is way more advanced.

Archive: No no no no no. We know tons about all, but but the neatest stuff, the neatest stuff has only happened in the last few days. See, we can't duplicate their type of power, so we've never been able to experiment. But since these guys started showing up, all the little gizmos inside turned on.

Hannah McCarthy: But it was the 90s. So computer virus, you know.

Nick Capodice: Well, it's a nod to, uh, War of the worlds. Yeah, it's. Yeah, the aliens die from a virus in that.

Hannah McCarthy: I know, I thought that was great, but it's also silly.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And to be clear, Brant Spiner, that is the actor playing Doctor Brackish Ocean, who is the scientist, the sort of eccentric scientist who has been studying these aliens for the past 15 years, presumably.

Nick Capodice: At area 51.

Christina Phillips: At area 51, which we will talk about. The big thing that really stuck out to me, that I want to talk about first, is the fact that the climax of this movie is about the United States solving this problem, as we've said, and saving the world and doing so by creating a worldwide alliance which includes countries such as Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq all launching their own weapons at the same time. This was a national sensation. It was also a global sensation. This was the biggest blockbuster globally since Jurassic Park, which, like this movie, was about reptilian super beasts and Jeff Goldblum telling us we don't know what we've gotten ourselves into. So, I mean, maybe it's just the Jeff Goldblum of it all. He was not in Titanic, which was the movie that beat the record a year later, but it seems as though he's got something that's really successful. But also, I think that one of the reasons this movie was so appealing is because it hits on the sentiments of the time about the United States, both within the country and outside of it, alongside being super entertaining and bombastic and aliens and excitement. If we think about the 90s, when this movie came out, if we were to imagine a scenario set up in the movie where our world is invaded by aliens, would you say in the 90s that the United States is the one best prepared to respond to that attack?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. I mean, we just come off of Desert Storm Like we had practice.

Hannah McCarthy: We're fresh off the Cold War. And I think the United States would have prided itself on being the sort of victor of the Cold War. Right? Like, look, we came out super powerful. You guys didn't get us. And now here's a movie about nukes.

Christina Phillips: All of that. Exactly. Right. So building up towards the 90s, the United States for at least a century had the world's strongest economy. So we were already the economic superpower. By the 1990s, the United States and the Soviet Union were the two main military superpowers, far and away. No other countries were close. And then, as you said in 1991, we have the dissolution of the Soviet Union and your right hand, the United States played a major role. And I think this is a pretty good example of soft power in that George H.W. Bush was lending his support and essentially saying that if there were parts of the Soviet Union that wanted to seek independence as long as they were doing it in a way that matched the democratic ideals of of the United States, that the US would lend them aid. And so there was like sort of this tightrope that the United States is walking. And I think it's a really great example of the soft power that it's using into effect, in part because we have a lot of actual power, meaning weapons. So that is one side of it. So we have the dissolution of the USSR, and then the US is now the global superpower, right? We are the one that is left.

Rebecca Lavoie: Also, I believe I remember this correctly, that when the Soviet Union broke up and they began looking at all the nuclear sites in the Soviet Union, they hadn't really been maintained very well. So it turned out that we'd been maintaining our arsenal and it was ready to go. And the Soviet Union's was kind of rusty. Mhm.

Hannah McCarthy: Given that fact, this movie presumes that all of these other nations have semi comparable nuclear power to ours in terms of size of arsenal. We see how many nukes it takes to bring down a ship, right?

Christina Phillips: My assumption is that the nuclear weapon is only used first on Houston and then on the mothership. Agreed that all of the other weaponry is just bombs of different kinds.

Hannah McCarthy: Random missiles. Oh, gotcha.

Archive: Can I confirm that the target was destroyed?

Archive: You can take me online. I want confirmation the target was destroyed. Yes, sir. Red arrow, Alpha niner.

Christina Phillips: Houston is the one place where they try it first and it fails. And then they're like, well, we have to get down this force field. And the idea is that if you can get into the ship, you can take down the force field. We'll use the one nuclear bomb on the mothership, which is way bigger than the other ones, even though it really doesn't look that way because you don't see it in scaled to anything else. And then all the other countries will use all of their missiles to take down the other ships, presumably using the method that Russell Case, aka Randy Quaid uses by flying straight up into the solar beam and blowing up the ship.

Archive: I told you I wouldn't let you down. Just keep those guys off me for a few more seconds, will ya? Okay.

Archive: Echo niner, echo seven, take flanking positions. I want you to look after this guy. Okay?

Nick Capodice: Just wondering when is an okay time to talk about Randy Quaid. Rebecca. I think he might know what I'm talking about.

Rebecca Lavoie: Right? Yes. Yes.

Christina Phillips: I didn't mention him in the intro, but he is just some real color in this movie.

Rebecca Lavoie: I mean, Randy Quaid in this movie plays a crop duster who's a former Vietnam era pilot who claims to have been abducted by aliens at some point, which everybody thinks makes him bananas. And that kind of parallels some of Randy Quaid real life trajectory. You know, he's a mainstream actor in the 80s and 90s, and then over time, he has become this kind of outside Hollywood figure.

Nick Capodice: He tried to become a refugee to Canada and was refused entry. And, he was convinced, made public statements that actor deaths such as Heath ledger and then somebody else after that who I don't remember, those were due to somebody who was killing celebrities, and he was convinced that he was next on the list.

Christina Phillips: What's his arc in this movie? How are we supposed to feel about him by the end of this movie?

Rebecca Lavoie: Redemption. He got redemption for being a bad dad by saving the kids.

Christina Phillips: Also by he gets redemption for being presumed to have been making it up right. And then he's like, no, no, I was actually abducted by aliens. It's not clear if it's these aliens or what. Civics 101. We'll be back after a quick break. We're back. This is Civics 101. We are talking about the 1996 film Independence Day, directed by Roland Emmerich. There is one other thing that I think is really important to this time period, which we've already alluded to. What President Whitmore's job was before he was elected. So what was President Whitmore doing before he became the president?

Nick Capodice: Wasn't he a pilot in the Air Force?

Christina Phillips: Yes. In what war?

Rebecca Lavoie: Desert storm?

Nick Capodice: Yes. You mean Desert Shield or Desert Storm?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. I was actually looking this up, and they. And they've kind of co-branded everything together now. The Gulf War, Desert shield, Desert Storm, freedom, like, they've sort of said, put it all under one big umbrella on all of the military history websites.

Christina Phillips: And Desert Shield is the first part and Desert Storm is the second part. And this all took place over seven months. This was a military campaign. So I'm just going to lay out very briefly what happened. Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and this was part of a long, complex history in this region of the world. The important thing to know for today is that the United States was already deeply embedded in the politics of this region. It would be a disservice, I think, for me to try to condense any of that down into a few sentences.

Nick Capodice: I just want to give a shout out to another podcast out there. If anybody wants to know the whole history of our embeddedness, specifically in the Middle East. The blowback podcast is a phenomenal exploration of this season, one in particular.

Christina Phillips: What you should know is that post-World War Two, or even starting in World War Two, is that the US, considered the Middle East one of the most strategically important regions in the world? In large part, but not completely, because of oil and petroleum? The US government was involved in the formation of Israel in 1948, the 1949 Syrian coup, the overthrow of the Iranian Prime minister in 1953, and the first Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. So what happened in the early 90s is that in order to stop the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The US and 41 other coalition countries launched a major military campaign that involved massive land battles and massive air campaigns. And they ultimately succeeded in stopping the invasion, ending the invasion of Kuwait. But it created this major humanitarian crisis in Iraq, and it further destabilized the region. But the U.S. comes to call this the Good War because it was an example of a success, if you will. Hannah, I remember you said that you had a lot of thoughts about all of this. What were you thinking when you were watching this movie?

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so here's like one thing. And this is what often just like baffles me about alien invasion movies. It presumes that an entire planet can overcome infighting completely, get together as a planet and go invade another planet. Like the notion that there are species out there who can coordinate a planetary effort is, like baffling. And if we are to be extraordinarily generous with Independence Day, perhaps that's kind of what's going on when it comes to a full planet coordination in defense of another planet attacking us. But it is a a bridge that is very, very far away, as I'm concerned, because, I mean, we know our species is evolved. We don't know how highly evolved because we don't know what to compare to except for other species on this planet. But like we are having our real hard time with planetary coordination.

Nick Capodice: Why is there no United Nations in this, in this alien planet?

Rebecca Lavoie: They're living John Lennon's Imagine on their planet, right? No borders, no countries, no nothing. And I think these movies are a fantasy. Like if there's an existential threat to everyone, we will come together. And I think that we've proven that that's not true. Given the climate change situation. There is an existential threat to everyone, and yet we are not able to come together and agree to fight it together.

Christina Phillips: So, I mean, I will say that Roland Emmerich, one of his next movies, is The Day After Tomorrow, in which presumably there is a massive climate disaster. We're heading into the next ice age, and that plays a little bit more with the geopolitical situation, in that there is a very obvious, like 1 to 1 to Vice President Dick Cheney in that film. But yeah, to your point, Hannah, if I find one thing about this movie is that it's like very smug. It's extremely smug about the ability of the United States in particular, but also our world to create this kind of unified response to this alien invasion, as though we are all one and they are the enemy. The person who does that gets a lot of, you know, he gets a lot of time to sort of be human and to presumably be the one who can help bring all of these things together. Which is why I really want to talk about President Whitmore.

Archive: Regardless of what you may have read in the tabloids. There have never been any spacecraft recovered by our government.

Christina Phillips: So I would like to spend just a little time laying out what we know about him as a person heading into this invasion. And this is specifically things we learned essentially in the first five minutes of this movie. You know, him waking up and seeing his daughter and hearing the news in the background. What do we learn about him as a person and what people think of him?

Hannah McCarthy: We know that he's awake when he gets the phone call, even though the line immediately preceding it is wake him. But it's like, no, he's already up. He's already watching the news. We know that he loves his wife very much, right? Laura Roslin. I have a feeling that Mary McConnell, starring as President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica is her way of making up for all of the wild space inaccuracies in this movie. Because BSG is known for being pretty good at that.

Archive: I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you. I swear it.

Hannah McCarthy: But yeah. So we know that he's just an all around All-American. Sweetie. Sweetie, sweetie. Right.

Rebecca Lavoie: He gets over his wife pretty quick, though. Just saying.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, he sure does.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, he sure does.

Archive: Perhaps if we'd gotten to her earlier.

Archive: Wait a minute. What are you saying?

Archive: We can't stop the bleeding if we can. There's nothing we can do for her.

Hannah McCarthy: A doctor will not walk out of her room where someone is bleeding out. Be it internally or externally and say, ah, we couldn't stop. That doctor will work on you until you die. I mean, unless there's a doctor out there who's like, no, I do it all the time. But like, to my understanding, that's not what we do when someone is bleeding out.

Christina Phillips: I love that you draw the line not at telepathic alien speaking English, but at doctor leaving the hospital room when. When someone is bleeding out. But yes, you're right. That's ridiculous. What else do we know about this president as far as how he's doing his job up to this point?

Nick Capodice: Oh, yeah, he's a PR disaster, isn't he?

Hannah McCarthy: Mhm.

Nick Capodice: His PR person is also like mouthing the words to his speech that he's giving at the beginning of the movie. Yeah. It implies that his press secretary also writes all of his speeches for him. He's not doing well in the polls. He needs a boost. He's under constant supervision by the press secretary, who happens to be Jeff Goldblum's former wife.

Christina Phillips: Mhm. Yes. Connie.

Nick Capodice: But later in the movie, when he speaks from the heart, his own words, they rallied the world together.

Christina Phillips: One of the things that you hear sort of in the news that's coming up and in his conversations with his press secretary, is that he was a fighter pilot in the Gulf War. Right. So he's presumably fresh off this war. He's very young. He's 39 years old. And that young ness helped him win the presidency. But now it's also seen as a weakness. He is getting mired down in politics at one point. It's too much politics, too much compromise. So at this point in the movie, he's seen as a very weak president.

Archive: They're not attacking your policies. They're attacking your age, addressing Congress. What more seems less like the president and more like the orphan child? Oliver asking. Please, sir, I'd like some more.

Christina Phillips: But if you look at how he performed with audiences, a number of studies and polls have found that he is one of the most beloved fictional presidents in pop culture, alongside President Bartlet from The West Wing and President Marshall from Air Force One. The first was played by Martin Sheen, of course, in the second by Harrison Ford. Why do you think he's so popular? And you alluded to this a little bit, but I'm curious, like, what do you think this says about what we value in a leader if we're using this movie as a frame of reference for American audiences?

Hannah McCarthy: I don't think we actually value, like, experience and being a good dad the way we might pretend to saurus means loving one's wife a great deal. But my point is, while these polls might say that he's our favorite, and maybe it has to do with the fact that he ends up like redeeming himself and saving the world, maybe. I think we like people who are loving fathers and husbands in fiction, but in terms of a leader, does that really matter to us once they're actually in power? I'm not so sure.

Nick Capodice: I think one of the reasons he's so beloved as a fictional president is because he is fictional, because he doesn't have a party as long, as far as I can tell. Uh, isn't that interesting? Uh, we don't know where he stands on any issues that are sort of hot button political issues. He doesn't have any policy at all. A crime bill, that's the most generic thing in the world. We just know that he's good at fighting aliens, and he can speak with sort of a paraphrased Dylan Thomas poem and get everyone all rallied up.

Christina Phillips: Rebecca, do you have thoughts about him?

Rebecca Lavoie: Pullman. That's all I'm going to say about it. Okay. Very appealing.

Hannah McCarthy: He's handsome.

Rebecca Lavoie: He's just appealing. He's like, I mean, when the attack is first happening or first imminent, he's going to stay behind in the white House, like he's going to be with the ship, right? He's going to be the captain. Oh my God, those poor second helicopter people. They always get destroyed in these kinds of movies. Like never get on the second helicopter when you're escaping the white House. That is my advice. If I've learned anything, it's that if I'm at the white House when disaster happens. Get on that first helicopter with the president and randomly the press secretary and other people who are there, because the second one is always a goner. Always.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. The first helicopter also always has the evil guy who's going to keep saying do the wrong thing. And that actor, I don't know his name, the actor who plays the evil, uh, secretary of defense, do you know his name?

Christina Phillips: Anybody know the name of the secretary? This is the secretary of defense, Albert Nims. He's named for, I believe, a producer that Roland Emmerich didn't like. He's played by James Horn.

Nick Capodice: James Horn has been that role in about 7000 movies. And he's always like, no, no, we gotta bomb everything.

Archive: Moved as many of our forces away from our bases as possible, but we've already sustained heavy losses.

Archive: I spoke with the Joint Chiefs when they arrived at Neurath. They agree we must launch a counteroffensive with a full nuclear strike.

Archive: Over American soil.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah, I think that that is hitting on something that really stands out to me, which is that at every opportunity, this is a president who is approaching things from as peaceful a perspective as possible. So they send out that helicopter is called the Welcome Wagon. They're they're like, we're sending out the welcome wagon to like, flash some lights and see if they'll communicate with us.

Archive: No, they will not.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, but even when he's in front of an alien itself, he's like, can we strike a deal? Let's communicate.

Archive: I know there is much we can learn from each other. If we can negotiate a truce, we can find a way to coexist. Can there be a peace between us? Peace.

Archive: No peace.

Christina Phillips: And it's like the alien is like. No! We're gonna kill you. You know, it's only once the alien has telepathically communicated the future in which they take over all of Earth's resources, that he's like, all right. It's time. We have to attack them. But I think he's he's situated throughout this entire movie as Responding to attack rather than initiating attack in order to prevent harm, which at least to me, seems very different from the way the United States has been engaging in political warfare and regular warfare for much of the 20th century. Yeah, and that we have been taking active military action. And even, by the way, today, in order to prevent what we presume as a threat or prevent some sort of action in the future.

Nick Capodice: I freaking love movies like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and any movie where an alien comes to Earth and people keep wanting to kill it. And it turns out this may be the savior of humanity. All of those movies are referenced in this one. Will Smith punches the alien in the face and says, now that's what I call a close encounter. And the helicopter that's flashing lights like.

Archive: Doo doo doo doo doo.

Nick Capodice: Just gets blown to hell. So it's it's it's sort of a slap in the face to this notion that people from other planets are welcome and they might help us save ourselves. We need it.

Rebecca Lavoie: Now. They're worse than us because they want to use all of our resources even faster than we're using all of our resources.

Nick Capodice: Yes. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: How dare you do it.

Speaker22: Better than others?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, we're the ones who do that. We strip everything.

Christina Phillips: I would like to listen to the speech that the president, President Whitmore, makes on the morning in which they are going to begin this mission, to send Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum up to plant the virus somehow and wave at that and lower the defenses of all of these alien spaceships that have gathered around the world and allow us to attack.

Archive: We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day? The 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on. We're going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day.

Nick Capodice: I would love it if there was a holiday that celebrated everybody as a citizen of the world. And we're all together on this roller coaster. I don't love the idea that, hey, our independence, they're not independent from anything like from these aliens. We're already independent of the aliens. How on earth is that a celebration of independence?

Hannah McCarthy: Do you know what it is?

Nick Capodice: What is.

Hannah McCarthy: It? It's American democracy. See finally triumphing worldwide, which is the thing we tell everyone we're doing when we engage in war activities.

Christina Phillips: So we will come back to the president when we talk about aliens and area 51, which is what we're going to talk about next, about all of the things that this movie references, all of the government agencies, all of the secrets that are referenced in this movie and not really explained and oftentimes miss referenced when we come back from a break. So stick around for that. We're back. This is Civics 101. We are talking about the movie Independence Day, which came out in 1996. We've talked about the geopolitical climate. We've talked about how the US is the hero of this movie and what that says about how we feel about our country. Now we're going to talk about aliens and whether or not our government knows anything about them. I want to start with a moment where David, aka Jeff Goldblum and his father are on Air Force One.

Rebecca Lavoie: David's father is the one who invokes the idea of area 51.

Archive: None of you did anything to prevent this. There's nothing we could do. We were totally unprepared for this. Ah, don't give me unprepared. Come on. It was, what, in the 1950s or whatever.You had that spaceship.

Archive: Dad?

Archive: Yeah.

Archive: That thing that you found in New Mexico. Dad, what was that? No, no, not the spaceship. Roswell. Roswell. New Mexico. Yeah. No, you had the spaceship and you had the bodies. They were all locked up in a in a bunker. David, I don't know. Area 51. Right. Area 51. You knew then and you did nothing.

Rebecca Lavoie: And that the U.S. has encountered aliens before, and the president's like, no, we haven't. And then his people are like, yes, we have. We just wanted to give you plausible deniability, thereby putting plausible deniability in the lexicon for American English forever.

Nick Capodice: Thank you, Independence Day.

Christina Phillips: Let's talk about this plausible deniability thing. Right. So the idea is that the president does not know about a secret military base that maybe has aliens. Is it a good look that the president doesn't know what the government is doing? Or is it a good look if the president does know and is part of the scheme to hide it? What do you guys make of that?

Hannah McCarthy: The president is an elected civilian, the highest ranking civilian in the country, right. But the idea is like the president is like us, which we know that this is not true. But so the idea that someone who doesn't have the cohesive training that many people at various levels of the government have would be given a bunch of information that they almost certainly cannot understand or know what to do with. That should be a little frightening, right? Like it should the idea that the president knows everything without the tools to parse it is a bit concerning. So I can understand the concept of just. He doesn't need to know this.

Nick Capodice: I'm with you on this one, Hannah, because, you know, the president is given the nuclear codes right there, given the, the the football and the biscuit, and then they're not the president. Right. And they're not president forever. It's eight years at the most. You know, you can't take the knowledge of aliens away from the president once they're no longer the president. So, you know, I think that's kind of in keeping with the framers intent.

Christina Phillips: I do think it's interesting that once he knows, he's able to make a lot of decisions about it, once he sees the facility, he's like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. So it's almost like he gets to demonstrate the fact that he's a problem solver or whatever. But before we even get to area 51, David's father, Julius, accuses the government of having found aliens before, and he references a place known as Roswell, New Mexico. What is the significance of Roswell, New Mexico? Because he's alluding to something that actually is a part of our history. What is he talking about here?

Rebecca Lavoie: Roswell, New Mexico, is the site of an alleged flying saucer crash. And basically, Roswell has branded its entire town around this, which is super interesting. There's a lot of debate about whether or not it was a weather balloon, and there's a lot of really fun fake videos of the alien autopsy that happened after the Roswell, New Mexico incident. They're totally fake. People try to pass them off as real, but it definitely fed Roswell fed into this law that, you know, we are being surveyed, and it was very much a response to the growing power of the Soviet Union and things being up in the air that we don't know what they are. But yes, Roswell certainly took on the most legendary status of UFO incidents in the United States. It was even a television show called Roswell with Katherine Heigl in it.

Hannah McCarthy: In 1996. Was the existence of area 51 not particularly well known? We didn't have Google Maps. We didn't have a super robust internet. What was the status of the generalized knowledge that area 51 does actually exist?

Christina Phillips: The government did not officially confirm the existence of a research facility in Nevada, known as area 51, until 1998. In fact, Roland Emmerich, the director and his producer have said they originally had permission to film on military bases for this film. When the Department of Defense saw the script and saw references to area 51 and Roland Emmerich refused to take them out, the US government pulled that offer of filming locations and material. Roswell, New Mexico What the government has said is a military research balloon that crashed in 1947, in Roswell, New Mexico. The reason it was in New Mexico is because New Mexico is a place where the federal government does a lot of top secret research. This is borne out of a few things. Geography it's hard to access. There's the kind of topography that you can do a lot of tests and, you know, you have lots of space for runways also. Oppenheimer chose to build the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. And and that sort of laid the groundwork for further research facilities in that region. There's also a lot of research facilities in Colorado, Utah and Nevada in particular. So the fact that Roswell becomes important is, is honestly, because that's where the government was testing things that would go up high enough to monitor communications, especially communications and transmissions from Russia. There was also a lot of scientific research just to gather information about the planet. So once that weather balloon crashed in Roswell. The government was very secretive about it.

Christina Phillips: There were actually people who witnessed what looked like body bags when the government went to recover it, and that led to the assumption that there were aliens. It was actually, as far as the government claims, they were transportation bags for the equipment to keep the equipment safe. All of these things sort of led to these theories of aliens, when in fact it was the federal government trying to hide its own defense research capabilities. And it is true that area 51 is a place that was known to people, in part because of former military and former government officials who left the government and then would say, hey, I worked on an alien spaceship when I was at area 51. It was sort of known in popular culture, and it was also known pretty widely that there was a black box, if you will, in Nevada that was near Las Vegas. That was about 23 miles wide and 25 miles wide in the other direction. That was a no fly zone, a no fly zone, and that was the location of area 51. It was known as the Groom Box. And so there is this knowledge that there is something there that nobody is allowed to get near. And there's also this idea that we've seen these weird flying things in the sky, and it turns out that many of those things are actually researched weapons, their weapons development happening in that place. Nick, do you want to tell me your factoid about area 51?

Nick Capodice: You can go online and see people who have federal criminal records. You can see their file one day, a person who was, you know, a journalist, sort of stumbled into area 51 and was looking around and trying to take photographs and now has a file, now has a government file. And that man who walked in that day. Later on became a radio personality. And now you know the rest of the story.

Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.

Nick Capodice: Paul Harvey, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Harvey.

Nick Capodice: Paul Harvey.

Rebecca Lavoie: When did the government figure out that the UFO theories were actually good for them? Because they were. Because I remember when the stealth bomber first was unveiled. Right. And everybody in, like, Nevada or whatever was like, oh, we've seen that. We thought it was aliens this whole time.

Christina Phillips: There's lots of communications that you can see declassified information in part where the government is kind of like, people know about this place and like we know that they're seeing the military weaponry, the military aircraft that we're testing, and they're assuming it's UFOs. And like, what do we do? Should we confirm that this is, in fact a military training ground or it's a testing facility? Like, what do we do? And there were conversations about that. I think it is one of those things where the the government is like, maybe this is a better thing for you to think we're doing here than what we're actually doing, which is developing weapons and stealth reconnaissance abilities and testing nuclear bombs, which is another thing that was happening in Nevada. There was actually a civil lawsuit against the federal government in 1996 by some government contractors who were like, you're not disposing of nuclear materials properly in this area, and it's causing a lot of environmental issues and health issues.

Hannah McCarthy: There are still communities deeply affected by this who are just.

Christina Phillips: Yes.

Hannah McCarthy: Who still want some sort of help or retribution.

Christina Phillips: And it's yeah, it's been confirmed that over 700 of the over 900 nuclear tests have been done in this region. So this is just a a concentration of weapons development and weapons testing that happens In this part of the country. We have had some things declassified, but it's still like the development of weapons and the development of different kinds of infrastructure. Military infrastructure is still not very well known. Do you know of some of the things that have come out of area 51? What sort of stuff has been developed.

Rebecca Lavoie: Besides stealth technology for planes? Because isn't that area 51 stuff?

Christina Phillips: That is the correct answer. Yeah. So the first is the U-2 and then later the A-12. Now these are military aircraft, surveillance aircraft that can fly way higher than most aircraft, presumably outside of the range of Soviet missiles that can pick up on radio transmissions and monitor and take photographs. The U-2 and the A-12. For a while, they were like, yes, these cannot be shot down. And then the Soviet Union did shoot them down in 1960. They shot down one. And and in order to negotiate, in order to get the pilot back, the US government had to admit that they had developed these spy planes. So these came out of area 51. There is also something known as the F-117, which is the first stealth bomber developed in the United States. Now, if you look at the alien spaceship in Independence Day.

Rebecca Lavoie: The ones they fly around. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah. The one that Will Smith flies that if you look at the F-117 or the B-2, which is the same aircraft that was used to drop the ground penetrating bombs that were dropped on Iran this past weekend. They look very, very similar, which I think gets to your point, Rebecca, that people were seeing these being tested and they began to associate them with aliens, when in fact these are government weapons. One of the features of these Hollywood patriotic movies is that the United States is our military hero, right? This film, it does make attempts to make humanity important here, but it's pretty easy to watch a movie like this and sort of get the impression that the United States is all good. The United States is being presented as all good in this film. Until you remember that the reason we have all of these super powerful weapons in the first place is not to defend ourselves from outer space, but to use these weapons against one another and use these weapons against human beings. So I feel like this movie is really relevant in our current moment, because we are holding these two things right next to each other. These weapons are used to save humanity in this movie. They're now being used very similar weapons, in some cases the same aircraft to carry out campaigns against other people and other countries. So that's sort of where I ended up ending my feelings about this. And I'm wondering what else you guys thought about. If you have any final thoughts.

Rebecca Lavoie: I thought a lot about Jeff Goldblum's character and sort of the, you know, the before the rise of tech bro culture. You know, there were just in pop culture, especially computer guys were always portrayed as like sitting in dark rooms alone. He obviously couldn't maintain his marriage and all that stuff. Right? But he's kind of the hero, right? The guy who figured it out, the computer guy, the quote, nerdy guy who can see the code, who can interpret the code, and everybody listens to the tech guy. And it just occurred to me that, like, that seemed very much like a fantasy. Like at the time, like, you know, the smart guy in the corner who no one talked to in high school is all of a sudden the hero. Same thing with wargames, same thing, you know, with lots of these, like, 80s and 90s films. And today it's the tech guys who are running the world like they see themselves that way. Like, we're not they're not portrayed in pop culture that way anymore. They're are villains in pop culture. But they see themselves as saving the world in real life.

Nick Capodice: It's because those tech guys started making those movies in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Or they could. Be the hero. And then, you know, two generations later, they run the world.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hmm.

Hannah McCarthy: What's so strange to me about this movie is that it doesn't have a moment of the deeply selfish character who's supposed to be representative of all of the deeply selfish people who, in a moment like this, would get on a spacecraft and leave Earth. And we know that there are people who have the ability to do that privately, right, in certain ways. I mean, I know I'm stretching it a little bit, but I would have appreciated like one guy trying to get to Florida so that he could just get off the planet and then somehow he's foiled or the aliens get him or something. But there was none of that. Nobody even suggests leaving the Earth and not staying in fighting. And I have one other thought, which is that, as I hinted at the beginning of this episode, Will Smith is so Luke Skywalker coded? It's ridiculous. It is so silly.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hero's journey.

Hannah McCarthy: Hero's journey. He is someone who wants to have an adventure in space, but is mostly getting his training in an arid climate in a canyon. He performs beautifully, and then later on, he uses that exact same skill that he displays when he is in a giant, destructive structure in space after getting it ready to be blown up. It's so Star.

Nick Capodice: Wars. Oh, that's a good yeah. Just like Beggar's Canyon back home, huh? I had a thing that I thought was interesting, that I just sort of realized is that there's a scene in this movie that's kind of the reason we're all here making this show. Bill Pullman turns to his weaselly, weaselly secretary of defense and says, you know, you're fired. And the secretary of defense says, I don't think he can do that. You can't do that. He can't do that. And then the white House press secretary says, yeah, I think he just did. This notion of, can the president do this? Well, he did it. That's it. That it just got done. That's that's something we talk about a lot on our show. And that is it's part of our genesis as a show. So thank you Independence Day.

Christina Phillips: Thank you Independence Day.

Nick Capodice: Also, there's a scene where the dog jumps through a ball of fire. Before that scene happened and like the dog was in the tunnel, I was I jokingly said to Hannah, I was like, man, it'd be really cool if the dog, like, jumped through a ball of fire to get out. And we laughed really hard. And then it happened exactly like that. Yeah. 90s baby.

Christina Phillips: This episode of Civics 101 was written by me, Christina Phillips, and produced and edited by Rebecca Lavoie. A big thank you to our hosts, Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy. Our team includes producer Marina Henke. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

What does the Senate Parliamentarian do?

The Senate Parliamentarian is many things. A nonpartisan referee, an appointed official, and at some times one of the most powerful people in our government.

This week, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough found several provisions in the currently debated budget appropriations bill violated something called the "Byrd Rule."

Today we explore this complicated and often-unseen role with Sarah Binder, professor at George Washington University, and a person who spent over thirty years in the office, former Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin.


Transcript

Archival: Is it the contention of the Chair that under the rules of the Senate, I am not allowed to accurately describe public views of Senator Sessions.

Nick Capodice: Hannah, I want to play this clip from February of 2017.

Hannah McCarthy: Sure. Go ahead.

Nick Capodice: Senator Elizabeth Warren is found in violation of Senate Rule 19 and is being cautioned by the chair.

Archival: The chair has not made a ruling as respect to the senator's comments. The senator is following process [00:00:30] and tradition by reminding the center of Massachusetts of the rule.

Nick Capodice: Standard procedural stuff. Right. But I cut something out. This is what it really sounded like.

Archival: The chair has not made a ruling as respect to the Senator's comments.

Archival: Following process and tradition.

Archival: The Senator is following process and tradition.

Archival: Reminding the Senator from.

Archival: By reminding this.

Hannah McCarthy: Wait, someone is just feeding him lines. This is happening in the Senate?

Nick Capodice: It happens every day [00:01:00] in the Senate.

Nick Capodice: So I've read a few articles about you, and people tend to refer to you in sports metaphors like you're a referee or an umpire. Is that accurate? Is it like that?

Alan Frumin: Yes. Yes, it's like that.

Hannah McCarthy: Who's that?

Nick Capodice: That is Alan Frumin. I know we've had a lot of guests over the years who know an awful lot about how things work in Washington. But when it comes to the Senate, Allen beats [00:01:30] them all. And he would never say that he is a humble man. But it's true because knowing the intricacies of the Senate was his job for 35 years.

Hannah McCarthy: What was his job?

Archival: JWell, we've got breaking news tonight. The Senate parliamentarian has denied Senate Democrats attempt to include a $15 an hour minimum wage..

Archival: Senate needs to step up override the parliamentarian. The parliamentarian is not elected.

Archival: Big [00:02:00] news and it is big news, the Senate parliamentarian says. Only one new budget resolution and one reconciliation package. That's it.

Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about a position that has been referred to as, "the most powerful person in Washington," the Senate parliamentarian.

Hannah McCarthy: Are you trying to tell me that the person whispering in the chair's ear is more powerful than the speaker of the House [00:02:30] or the Senate majority leader or the president? Are you serious?

Nick Capodice: Maybe I'm being a bit hyperbolic. That line was from a Politico article about the current Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough. And I will get into why McDonough has claimed to hold so much power right now a little bit later.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. First off, can you tell me what the Senate parliamentarian does.

Alan Frumin: At the risk of sounding conceited? The Senate parliamentarian is the de facto presiding officer of the Senate.

Nick Capodice: The [00:03:00] presiding officer is the person who sits in the chair of the Senate and rules on everything, who can speak, who can interrupt somebody speaking, what someone speaking can and cannot say. They rule on every point of order. Points of order are basically objections to what someone else is saying or doing.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh wait. I thought that the Vice President was the presiding officer in the Senate.

Nick Capodice: Yes, technically they are. But when the veep is not around, which is pretty much all the time, the most senior member of [00:03:30] the majority sits in the chair. And Alan told me most of the time Senators don't want to be in the chair ruling on things. They want to be down there doing senator stuff. Now, to be clear, the parliamentarian doesn't sit in the chair, but they tell the person in the chair what they should do.

Sarah Binder: They make decisions. They give advice based on past episodes of confusion.

Nick Capodice: This is Sarah Binder. She's a professor of political science at George Washington University.

Sarah Binder: I teach [00:04:00] Congress. It's the only thing I know anything about. So if you look at the Constitution, it says Article one, Section five. The House and Senate will make their own rules if you have the power to make your rules. You also have the power to apply your rules. And that's the point at which the parliamentarians in the House and the Senate come to play a role. They are supposed to be the non partisan, neutral [00:04:30] expert arbiter of how to apply the rules. And it sounds like, well, that's not hard. However, if you look at the rules of the House and you look at the rules of the Senate, they don't actually tell you what to do and how to apply them in every single circumstance.

Hannah McCarthy: The House has a parliamentarian too?

Nick Capodice: It does. And while I am focusing on the Senate parliamentarian for this episode, the parliamentarians in both chambers of Congress are the ones who know the rules and they advise [00:05:00] the Presiding Officer on what to do in any given situation. Now, Hannah, do you know what dictates the rules of the Senate?

Hannah McCarthy: I'm pretty sure it's something that people use in like student council and community meetings. It's Robert's Rules of Order, right?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, I thought so too. But I was wrong and don't feel bad. Even some senators thought the same thing.

Alan Frumin: Laypeople assume and one or two senators elect had assumed that the Senate used Robert's Rules of Order. And I would suggest to people that, [00:05:30] okay, if you are familiar with Roberts Rules of Order, you probably know that Colonel Robert first published him, I believe, in 1876, which would then beg the question, how did the Senate muddle through from 1789 until 1876, before Colonel Roberts saved them, which he didn't do, of course?

Hannah McCarthy: If they don't use Robert's Rules of Order, what do they use?

Nick Capodice: They use their own rules. They make them and they update them every few years. [00:06:00] The most recent rules and manual of the Senate is from 2013 and comprises 44 rules.

Alan Frumin: Point being that the Senate is a self-governing body that operates by its own rules and precedents. Nobody is familiar with them coming into the Senate. And smart senators recognize right away that the rules of the road in the Senate are unique to the body, and some of them will set out in various ways to become knowledgeable. [00:06:30]

Hannah McCarthy: How complicated are those 44 rules?

Nick Capodice: Fairly complicated. I tried to read it. You're looking at basically a dense 80 pages of procedure. Honestly, I would have a really tough time learning them if I was to spend a day in the Senate. But those 80 pages are the absolute tip of the iceberg.

Sarah Binder: So here's the thing. There were what we call precedents. So the House might decide something or Senate might decide something, and some of them might have scratched it down on a piece of paper. And there might there was a clerk at [00:07:00] the front on the dais, and they usually reported to the speaker or to the presiding officer. But basically there was no written, right? There are no really compilations of precedents. So neither the House or Senate really knew the members didn't know what to do in any new circumstance. So there were lots of appeals, lots of points of order. Hey, stop. I raise a point of order. That's not how this works.

Archival: For what purpose does the gentleman from New York or Mr. Speaker, I rise to a point of order. A gentleman [00:07:30] will state his point of order. Speaker, I object to consideration of this bill because it. violates rule.

Sarah Binder: And they'd arbitrate. There'll be lots of votes on the floor.

Nick Capodice: But those decades of precedents, often written on little slips of paper, have been collected and compiled into an official manual. Allen helped edit it. It's called Redux, Senate Procedure, Precedents and Practices, and that's 1608 pages.

Hannah McCarthy: So the parliamentarian is the one who knows all of this stuff. They [00:08:00] advise whomever is the presiding officer in the Senate.

Nick Capodice: Right.

Hannah McCarthy: How did they do that physically, though?

Nick Capodice: Well, to explain this, Alan showed me a photo of where everyone on the Senate dais sits.

Alan Frumin: There's the Senate floor. Unfortunately, my fat head is in the way. There are four chairs across the secretaries desk, journal clerk, parliamentarian, legislative clerk and bill clerk. There are other chairs behind. There is a chair for the Secretary of the Senate. There's a chair for the sergeant at arms. So. So [00:08:30] this is the parliamentarian's battle station. It's a swivel chair. It's a swivel chair that rocks. I have seen it go over once, before television. That was quite a scene. And in essence, what the parliamentarian does is she swivels and speaks to the presiding officer up here. The presiding officer's mic has a mute switch. It's a spring activated mute switch. The parliamentarian can press and hold if she wants to mute the microphone so [00:09:00] that the conversation between the parliamentarian and presiding officer is not public.

Nick Capodice: I asked Alan if the parliamentarian is just swiveling back and forth all day, and he said that was pretty accurate.

Hannah McCarthy: Is this job anywhere in the Constitution?

Nick Capodice: No, it is not. The job was created in 1935 during FDR's New Deal Era.

Alan Frumin: when Roosevelt and his administration became a little more proactive legislatively. And Roosevelt's vice president [00:09:30] had other things to do than sit on the dais of the Senate and preside. And so the Senate decided that they needed somebody to be the repository of the various interpretations of the Senate's rules. And they selected a man named Charles Watkins who had first come to the Senate in 1904.

Nick Capodice: Charles Watkins. He started out as a stenographer in 1904 in the Senate. He moved up to a journal clerk. That's the person who takes the minutes [00:10:00] of what happens all day, every day in the Senate. And the job of parliamentarian was created for him in 1935, and he was good at it. He had a remarkable memory. He was considered completely non partial to either party. And before the microphone mute button existed, Watkins would spin around in his chair and whisper to the presiding officer hundreds of times a day, and as a result, a newspaper called him, quote, the Senate's ventriloquist. And he held [00:10:30] the job until he retired in 1964.

Hannah McCarthy: So 60 years.

Nick Capodice: 60 years! And the next parliamentarian, he had worked with Watkins.

Sarah Binder: My daughter once asked me like, how do you get to become the Senate parliamentarian? And I somewhat flippantly said, Well, first you have to be the assistant parliamentarian, but it turns out to be generally true that they hire from within.

Nick Capodice: Allen came in this way. He had been the assistant parliamentarian.

Sarah Binder: Why is that [00:11:00] important? It helps to limit the partisanship, right? Because they they get first of all, they get socialized into the practice of being the parliamentarian. And it's a source of expertise.

Alan Frumin: It's always been the model and it's the only appropriate model.

Nick Capodice: Alan told me in the office of the parliamentarian, you want to have assistants spaced out generationally. So when someone leaves office, the next person can be there a long time. And to this date there have been six [00:11:30] and only six Senate parliamentarians.

Hannah McCarthy: And Sarah says the job requires limited partisanship, which honestly is something that feels nearly impossible here in 2022. Can a parliamentarian be truly nonpartisan?

Nick Capodice: From what I can gather, parliamentarians just might be among the most nonpartisan people in Washington, D.C. And I say that because their rulings help both sides and they [00:12:00] take heat from both sides as a result. And let me give you an example. One parliamentarian, Robert Dove, was dismissed by Democratic Majority Leader Robert Byrd and was replaced by Alan Frumin. And then Robert Dove was reappointed again a few years later and then fired and replaced by Alan again, but this time by Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Hannah McCarthy: What did Dove do that caused so much controversy?

Nick Capodice: Well, that is related to the powers of the Senate parliamentarian that we haven't gotten [00:12:30] into. The reason why they have been named the most powerful people in America, so powerful that at one point Alan and his family received death threats. And all that's coming up after the break here on Civics 101.

Hannah McCarthy: But first, when Nick was researching for this episode, he sent me this list. It was the 56 things that they don't teach you at parliamentary school that Alan had sent him. And he promises he will include selections of that list in next week's [00:13:00] newsletter. And you can subscribe to get that free and fun newsletter that comes out every two weeks at the top of our website, civics101podcast.org.

Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're talking about the Senate parliamentarian. Let's get into why this job is so powerful.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, this is maybe the reason why we've gotten so many requests from listeners to do an episode on this. Two specific facets of the position [00:13:30] that result in some senators getting very, very frustrated. Number one committee assignments. Here's Sarah Binder again.

Sarah Binder: This one's a little less noticed about the parliamentarian, but the bulk of the work is actually deciding when a bill is introduced which committee gets the bill. That's a power of the speaker and it's a power of the presiding officer and the rules. But [00:14:00] a norm of practice is that the parliamentarian makes those decisions and those decisions can be pretty consequential.

Hannah McCarthy: So even though deciding which committee gets a bill is technically the power of the presiding officer of the Senate, the parliamentarian is the one really making the call.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Every time. And since most bills die in committee, senators care a great deal about which committee they go to. You can work on a bill for months in advance before [00:14:30] you write it, meeting with members of a committee beforehand to make sure it goes through and at the last minute find out it's going to go somewhere else. Here is former parliamentarian Alan Frumin again.

Alan Frumin: You can have a thousand page bill dealing with environmental remediation, all of this material in the jurisdiction of the Environment and Public Works Committee. If, however, there is a provision in there that affects revenues, that bill is supposed to go to the Finance Committee. Suffice to say that [00:15:00] the staff of the Environment Committee doesn't like that. The staff of all the other committees do not like that if they have a provision that might be scored is affecting revenues. They don't necessarily put a star, put stars around it. They'll let the parliamentarian find it if she's willing to spend the four or 5 hours going through every page in line.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow, so how many bills does a parliamentarian have to go through line by line?

Nick Capodice: A lot.

Alan Frumin: All [00:15:30] in all, the parliamentarian is responsible for referring probably 10 to 12000 items in any particular Congress. And virtually all of that plays out without any evidence on on the floor of the Senate. My point being silent killer, nobody sees that job being done. The committees are always jealous of their jurisdictions.

Nick Capodice: And finally, the reason why Alan Frumin was in the media spotlight a lot and dubbed the most powerful person [00:16:00] in Washington. The reason why law enforcement was sent to his house to protect him and his family in 2010. We've got a first talk about that uniquely senatorial action, the filibuster.

Hannah McCarthy: I thought that was coming.

Nick Capodice: Hannah. You want to break down the filibuster for everyone?

Hannah McCarthy: I'll take a swing at it. Bills that come to the floor of the Senate for a vote require only a majority to pass. However, a bill can be debated endlessly until what is called cloture [00:16:30] is invoked by 3/5 of the Senate, which means that, in essence, a bill does not pass unless it has the support of 60 people in the Senate.

Nick Capodice: Yep! Well done. It's rule 22 in the Senate rules and nowadays you don't even see a bill get to the floor without that support, without those 60 votes. And senators rarely stand and talk for hours like Jimmy Stewart and Mr. Smith goes to Washington anymore.

Archival: Somebody will listen to me. Somebody!

Nick Capodice: And [00:17:00] as a result, very, very few bills get through the Senate. But. There is a special kind of bill, a bill that is not subject to the filibuster. It's called a reconciliation bill. It is a bill that deals with [00:17:30] policies that change spending or revenues in the budget. So the budget bill can't be filibustered and neither can reconciliation bills that alter that budget.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. Well, if I were a senator who really wanted something passed, I would try to squeeze things into those reconciliation bills that maybe weren't related. So what stops a senator from doing that?

Nick Capodice: Something called the Byrd Rule, named after Senator Robert Byrd in the 1980s. Things in those reconciliation [00:18:00] bills and proposed amendments to them can’t be what’s called “extraneous” . They have to be about the budget. And if they're not about the budget, they have to be removed or that bill will be subject to the filibuster and probably won't pass. And guess who decides what is and is not allowed.

Hannah McCarthy: Now I'm going to guess it's the Senate parliamentarian.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, you got it. Alan told me that extraneous material removed from reconciliation bills under the advice of the parliamentarian is lovingly referred to as "Byrd droppings." Seriously.

Alan Frumin: Determined Senate majorities over the years of both parties [00:18:30] have always pushed the limits of what could be done in reconciliation bills because they recognize that these bills can be filibustered and that a simple majority is all that's needed to pass a reconciliation bill.

Archival: Last night's ruling was extremely disappointing. It saddened me. It frustrated me. It angered me because so many lives are at stake. Senate Democrats have prepared alternative proposals, will be holding additional meetings with the parliamentarian [00:19:00] in the coming days.

Nick Capodice: That was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2021. There was a massive spending bill, and a component of that bill would have provided a path to citizenship for Dreamers.

Hannah McCarthy: Dreamers being young, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children who currently have little to no pathway to citizenship.

Nick Capodice: Absolutely. But Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough decided that part of the bill was not germane, meaning the Democrats had to take it out or the bill was going to be [00:19:30] subject to a filibuster and not pass. And so the Democrats removed that Dreamers part.

Alan Frumin: And in the middle of all of this is the dear parliamentarian who has always been a career civil servant, whose entire career is dedicated to serve the Senate in a non partisan capacity, who in essence is required to talk truth to power. Every decision the Senate parliamentarian makes, every consequential decision will anger some very [00:20:00] powerful person every single time. And the parliamentarian is just doing her job.

Hannah McCarthy: Can we go back to something you said earlier? What was the ruling that Alan made that resulted in those death threats?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it was related to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The bill had gone through the House, it was in the Senate, and the GOP tried many procedural methods to kill that bill or make alterations to it because that would force it to go back to [00:20:30] the House for another vote. Alan ruled against those. He was in newspapers and blogs everywhere, and the sergeant at arms informed him that as a result, members of the Tea Party had posted they were going to his house.

Hannah McCarthy: It sounds like a really difficult and unique job.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it is. Alan said it's not for everybody. These people aren't looking to get advancement to a more powerful role. They're not going to run for higher office or recorded by lobbying firms to make seven figure [00:21:00] salaries. When they leave Congress, they make $172,000 a year. Their job is taxing, quiet and mostly unseen until they make a decision that drags them into the spotlight.

Nick Capodice: Last thing, I can't let this episode end without an anecdote. Indeed, Alan did share a list of dozens of strange and wonderful and terrifying things he saw in his long tenure in the Senate, but none more bizarre than the porta potty [00:21:30] incident.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, I'll bite. What's the porta potty incident?

Nick Capodice: Senator Lowell Weicker from Connecticut was on the floor.

Archival: a..I'll correct my language, an historic occasion.

Nick Capodice: And Senator Jesse Helms wanted him off the floor. And it's hard to get someone off the floor. You can't do that unless Weicker yielded and Weicker didn't yield.

Alan Frumin: Senator Helms kept coming to the desk wondering if Weicker had violated this rule or that rule. Blah, [00:22:00] blah, blah, blah, blah. And finally, Helms looked at me and said, Well, eventually he's going to need to he's going to need to go to the bathroom. And naturally, Weicker and his allies knew that as well.

Nick Capodice: But there is a small provision in the rules that senators could have, quote, mechanical devices on the floor of the Senate. And Wicker's ally, New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, knew about this provision.

Alan Frumin: Senator Bradley came up to me and said, well, mechanical devices, Alan, what do you think of a porta potty? [00:22:30] You know, if we can provide Weicker with some relief, so to speak, does that qualify under this provision? And I thought he was kidding. Bradley was about six, five or six, six, and he stood over me and said, Alan, I mean, it would I decided to do was pass the buck. And I've decided that that's up to the Senate Sergeant at arms.

Nick Capodice: The sergeant at arms was duly summoned. He went up to Senator Bradley and just said no.

Hannah McCarthy: This whole thing is ridiculous.

Nick Capodice: It's not [00:23:00] over yet.

Alan Frumin: Bradley wasn't deterred. He came and asked me about a can of tennis balls. I just said no.

Hannah McCarthy: I never thought that civics 101 would be a show where we talk about peeing in a tennis ball can, but things can go anywhere when it comes to American government. There you go.

Nick Capodice: Like I said, the parliamentarian has a pretty unique job.

Nick Capodice: That'll [00:23:30] do it for Senate Parliamentarian. Point of order, Hannah. We got to get out of here. pretty funny, isn't it? Motion to adjourn. Alan, if you're hearing this, thank you so much. And I hope it didn't get anything wrong. This episode was made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you.

Hannah McCarthy: Thank you. Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer.

Nick Capodice: Music in this episode by a lot of the old favorites we know and love. [00:24:00] Kevin McCloud, Konrad OldMoney, Lobo Loco, Scott Holmes, Myeden, ProletR, Rachel Collier and the Greatest of All Time Chris Zabriskie.

Hannah McCarthy: Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

How political “framing” shapes our thoughts

We know why we feel the way we do about certain political issues, don't we? Don't we??

It turns out that politicians, political strategists, and the media are working every day to alter what we think about something before we know we're thinking about it. And the way this is done is through "framing."

So what is framing? How long have people been doing it? And most importantly, how can we push back against it? Taking us through the Frame Wars is Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, professor of communication and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

For those who want to know more, check out our episode on Propaganda, as well as Jen's article on Frame Warfare.


Transcript

Jennifer Mercieca: One of the things that I have been thinking about for the last little while is the the, the bastardization of hamlet. Right? So nothing is either good nor bad, but framing makes it so.

Archival: It's crunch time in Congress, where Senate Republicans have released their latest version of the president's so-called big beautiful.

Archival: Bill could have on Medicaid and food assistance.

Archival: 23% are opposed, have an unfavorable rating of the [00:00:30] big beautiful bill. Now, to put that in some for some perspective, Donald Trump's unfavorable rating with the GOP is 9%. So this is more than double.

Archival: Big beautiful bill if it becomes law is going to fundamentally impact every American. If you're hearing my voice and you're watching this on TV, this is going to impact you.

Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And today we are talking about something that has a profound impact on our understanding of politics, something that is invisible, Effective [00:01:00] and everywhere, all at once framing.

Jennifer Mercieca: Basically any concept, any word, any choice or policy that we might make can be shaped for us to understand it, and the way that politicians and propagandists try to shape our reality, and the way that we understand reality is called framing.

Nick Capodice: This is Jennifer Mercieca. [00:01:30]

Jennifer Mercieca: I'm a professor of communication and journalism. I teach argumentation, political communication and propaganda. And I'm the author of demagogue for President The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.

Hannah McCarthy: I remember Jennifer, she was in our episode on propaganda. She talked about how propaganda is a kind of force.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, like a card force magician says, pick a card, any card, but then forces you to take one card in particular. Jen is a scholar of rhetoric, and she studied it for years. [00:02:00] And I want to point out real quick. These are her opinions based on that research. And they are not representative of her university.

Hannah McCarthy: Right. Totally understood. And, Nick, you've been telling me that you wanted to do this episode for a long time because you saw a tweet or something, right?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, it was on blue Sky, not Twitter. So it's technically not a tweet. I think some people call them Skeets. I don't know. Basically, she wrote that people who were opposed to President Trump's tax bill should stop calling it the, [00:02:30] quote, big, beautiful bill. And then she wrote, these are the frame wars. You're in them.

Nick Capodice: You're in them. You better stop believing in frame wars, Ms. McCarthy.

Hannah McCarthy: But the people who are opposed to that bill, they say it with air quotes and an eye roll. They say it ironically.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. They'll start with a qualifier. Trump's so-called big, beautiful Bill. But while [00:03:00] their intention is abundantly clear, they do not consider the bill. Big and beautiful. They are echoing the president's framing, and they're doing it unintentionally.

Jennifer Mercieca: It's what we call in persuasion theory as an indirect route to persuasion, meaning that it's not something that your brain immediately recognizes as an attempt to persuade you. Right. If I call something a stinky bill, you [00:03:30] might notice that that's weird. That it. You know, stinky isn't normally a way that we would refer to a bill. But if I call it a big bill or a big, beautiful bill or something like that, um, your brain also might not recognize that it's an indirect route to persuasion, meaning that your brain isn't on high alert for for being Persuaded instead. [00:04:00] You're just receiving information in a sort of uncritical way. And as you do that, you'll start to think of the bill as stinky or as big and beautiful. Whether you realize that you're thinking in those terms or not.

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, Nick, this bothers me.

Nick Capodice: Bothers me too. Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: I love irony. Irony made me. Nick. Actually. No sarcasm. Sarcasm made me what I am today.

Nick Capodice: It breaks my heart. Hannah. [00:04:30] But Jen said, if you're a politician, you should never use irony.

Jennifer Mercieca: Irony is poison to a democracy. It is cynicism. Saying two things at once means that we don't trust you. Instead of directly making a point, you say it in your ironic words where you use their language but use a tone that is meant to indicate that you don't agree. Which means that yes, you are repeating their language, which is bad for [00:05:00] the framing and the stickiness and the repetition. But it also means that you are not taking ownership of what you actually think. You are using the distancing strategy of irony so that you can't be held accountable. Be earnest, my friend.

Nick Capodice: So one idea we came up with was to imagine that you're hearing a robot say something without any intonation whatsoever, and then to say, who benefits from this phrase? Like someone who was not a fan of President Joe Biden's policy, saying another [00:05:30] brilliant move by Dark Brandon, or likewise a critic of President Donald Trump referring to him as a, quote, very stable genius.

Robot: Looks like Dark.Brandon is totally knocking.It out of the.Park today.

Robot: Ha ha ha. I guess the very stable genius is playing four dimensional chess.

Hannah McCarthy: Did Jen tell you why, though? Why are we like this? Why are humans like this?

Jennifer Mercieca: Our brains are essentially lazy. Where? What is called [00:06:00] a cognitive miser. We don't like to think about things if we don't have to. Because our brain, frankly, is doing other stuff. Our brains main job is homeostasis. It's to check in on all the bits and pieces of our body and make sure that our temperature is right and our heart is beating in the right way. Things that we don't think about and probably we don't even want to know about. A smaller part of your brain is devoted to scanning for threats, and so your brain is constantly looking for like, [00:06:30] oh, is there a bear? And do I need to like, prime the body to react? Flood it with stress hormones and, you know, put it in the fight or flight response anyway, so your brain is busy doing all this stuff that you are not aware of, and then it's doing a little bit of stuff that you are aware of. Right? So that's the conscious mind.

Hannah McCarthy: A little bit of stuff.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Yeah. The slow, plodding, deliberative thought process. I am sitting on a rock [00:07:00] by the sea and I am thinking these things. Now we may feel that is the lion's share of our brains work, but it is such a teensy little fraction.

Jennifer Mercieca: And so framing works precognitive on our lazy brain, the one that's working really fast but doesn't want to do a lot of hard work thinking about stuff. So the more I repeat Stinky Bill's stinky Bill, stinky Bill, the more journalists repeat that frame, the more, uh, [00:07:30] propagandists or supporters or detractors or whoever circulate that frame, the more your brain will uncritically accept the frame and you will begin to think within the frame. Stinky bill.

Nick Capodice: So the scariest part of this, to me at least, is something expressed by George Lakoff. Lakoff is the preeminent thinker on framing and linguistics and politics. He says that the frame is hard, if not impossible, to beat. So I'm linking [00:08:00] to Jen's article on Lakoff and all of this stuff in the show notes. But the money line from it is this quote you can't fight a dominant frame with evidence. Your brains frames don't care about other frames facts with their feelings. It rejects anything that doesn't conform with its existing frame structures.

Hannah McCarthy: I think this is something that may just be difficult for a lot of people to accept. We don't want to believe that there's some kind of influence making us think in a certain way and reject [00:08:30] other thoughts. This is huge, Nick.

Nick Capodice: It is.

Hannah McCarthy: Do you have some examples of this?

Nick Capodice: Oh, Hannah, I could spend days looking at framing examples. I'm gonna keep it to just a few for this episode, but let's start with something that is one of the most hotly debated issues in the country. How do we frame what is happening at the southern border of the United States?

Jennifer Mercieca: One side of the controversy would try to frame it as a humanitarian crisis.

Archival: Begin with new numbers from Customs and Border Protection [00:09:00] on the humanitarian crisis here in Arizona.

Archival: A pregnant woman seen with her children tells us she's been living on the banks of the Rio Grande for several days without food or water.

Jennifer Mercieca: And if you hear those words, there is a humanitarian crisis on the border or at the border, then it conjures up very specific images in your mind. There are humans involved that are in need, and we ought to bring care. And so that means a policy [00:09:30] position that would include things like bringing tents and water and diapers and baby formula and providing care and assistance to people who are in need. Okay, so that's one frame. A different side of the issue would say that there is an invasion at the border.

Archival: This massive invasion from from our southern border was intentional, and it was done in a systematic way, [00:10:00] and I think it was done by elements of the left that truly hate this country.

Archival: And I'm going to call it an invasion. Like it or not.

Archival: If you use the term, it's an invasion. That's not anti-hispanic, it's a fact.

Jennifer Mercieca: And if there is an invasion at the border that conjures up entirely different, uh, frames and policies and feelings. And so if you hear repeatedly that it is an invasion, then you think we ought to bring violence to the border, right? [00:10:30] We ought to stop the invasion. We ought to bring weapons and barbed wire and build a wall. Right. Like an army should be deployed to stop an invasion. And so those frames are incompatible.

Hannah McCarthy: What happens when you have incompatible frames?

Nick Capodice: You just won't be able to easily understand any policy passed by the other side. So if you've heard invasion over and over and over again, [00:11:00] the very notion of sending water and diapers to the southern border would be puzzling.

Jennifer Mercieca: Likewise, if you are someone who has always heard humanitarian crisis humans in need, and they say, we have to bring the army and the barbed wire, you think that they are inhumane, right? That they're vicious and it's nonsense.

Hannah McCarthy: This brings to mind for me a term we hear a lot. It's one that really came to the fore after the 2024 election, [00:11:30] messaging specifically that the Democratic Party has a, quote, messaging problem. Now, I have not in my own life just anecdotally heard, I think anyone say that the Republican Party has a messaging problem.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. And to that point, Hannah, if you look up the Democratic Party messaging problem, you're going to see a ton of articles on that topic. The linguist I mentioned earlier, George Lakoff. He studied the writings of a GOP [00:12:00] pollster and messaging mastermind named Frank Luntz. Luntz writes a memo to Republicans each year called The New American Lexicon with words you should never say and what words to say instead.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow. Okay, so give me some examples.

Nick Capodice: All right. We can make a game out of this. Hannah. I'm going to say the term a Republican is told never to say. And you try to guess the replacement.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, I'm in.

Nick Capodice: All right. First one is state tax. [00:12:30]

Hannah McCarthy: This one's easy for me. Death tax.

Nick Capodice: Very good. An estate tax sounds like something a rich person deals with. Death tax sounds more like something terribly unfair that your family has to pay just because you died. All right, next one. Government.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't know them. Yeah.

Nick Capodice: The others.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't know.

Nick Capodice: The others from the back of the plane. Like when you're being critical, you don't say the government needs to [00:13:00] get its act together because the government fixes our streets and it funds our troops. Instead you say.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh. Washington

Nick Capodice: Washington, the fat cats in Washington can smoke their Cuban cigars.

Archival: In outside Warshington. This is a contract with Americans for America.

Nick Capodice: Luntz also suggested replacing undocumented worker with illegal alien, replacing oil drilling with exploring for energy. [00:13:30] And he also coined the term tax relief. Can you hear the implicit framing in that term?

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, yeah. If you're constantly talking about tax relief, you're implying that taxes are a burden, that they are something that puts undue pressure on a person.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. And how on earth do you run against that?

Nick Capodice: My opponent is offering tax relief. But I desperately want you to know these taxes pay for things you need.

Nick Capodice: And [00:14:00] then members of the Democratic Party started using the term tax relief as well. The public also. And this frame stuck. All right, Hannah, I got one more framing example, as well as Jenn's recommendations for how we can all push back against the frames assigned to us. But first we got to take a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: But before that break. A reminder that if you want to pick us up and carry us around in a non audio format, check out the book that Nick and I wrote. It is called A User's Guide to Democracy How America [00:14:30] Works.

Nick Capodice: We're back. You're listening to Civics 101, and today we are talking about framing how politicians and consultants use language to make you think certain things without knowing you're thinking it. And our guest, Jen Recchia, gave a classic example I want to share with you, Hannah. Now, we talked a little bit about this in our propaganda episode, but not this part specifically. The earliest and most successful [00:15:00] framing war in our country's history.

Hannah McCarthy: I have a guess about this one. You do? Might it have to do something about trying to convince a newly formed nation that the answer to all of their problems is in a four page document that a bunch of guys haggled over one hot summer in Philadelphia?

Jennifer Mercieca: People like me who study, you know, democracy and communication. I will look at the Federalist Papers and the whole Federalist agenda in [00:15:30] 1787 and say, that was really good public relations work.

Jennifer Mercieca: They did. Right. They named and branded themselves as the Federalist Party when they were actually arguing for the opposite. They were arguing for what was known at the time as a consolidated government, a national government. Federalist meant that the confederated states would remain unique and separate.

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, I did an entire episode on federalism. [00:16:00] We talk about the Federalist Papers all the time. I love thinking about federalism, and I never made this connection. I am sorry, listeners. I should have. The people who called themselves Federalists were not in the true sense of the word Federalists. An actual Federalist would want individual states to be powerful and semi-independent and have a weaker central government. But a capital F Federalist, as in the Federalist Party, they argued for the opposite [00:16:30]of that.

Nick Capodice: And it's like a double trick. Like, not only did they frame themselves as the opposite of what they actually were. That then forced the other guys to call themselves anti federalists as an anti what they actually believed. Wheels within wheels.

Jennifer Mercieca: So the the dudes who went to the Constitutional Convention, um, they tended to support a consolidated national government, but they didn't use those words. [00:17:00] No, they did not. They sure did it. And so the Anti-Federalists were like, hey, what is? They have taken our words from us. Well, it's so confusing.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. Nick. So framing or the frame wars. This has been around for quite some time.

Nick Capodice: Thousands and thousands of years, Hannah, and we are getting better at it every [00:17:30] day.

Hannah McCarthy: So is there anything that we can do about it? Even just we, the individual? You know what I mean? If it is as pernicious and prevalent as you say, might there be a way to fight it? I mean, can we resist the iron hand of the frame?

Nick Capodice: We have, as of this moment, along with every single person listening to these words begun. The first step is simply to recognize that frames exist and then to push back against [00:18:00] them.

Jennifer Mercieca: So you have to contest the premise of the frame. And it's an old strategy, right? So we teach our students to analyze the points of stasis, which I think is traced back to Quintilian. But like, we don't actually know for sure.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't think I've heard of Quintilian.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, I thought it was the number initially. He was a famed rhetorician in ancient Rome, taught Pliny the Younger.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. Well, I know Pliny the Younger. Um, okay. So points of stasis. [00:18:30]

Nick Capodice: Yeah. These are the lines of argument in any controversy. Four steps, four points, one after the other, that you must go through to come to an agreement of what's going on. That's the stasis part. Stasis means stopping.

Jennifer Mercieca: And so the first point of stasis is. What is it? Right. So describe what happened. What are the facts? The second point of stasis is what do we call it? And that's the frame. That's the framework. The [00:19:00] third point of stasis is is it good or bad? And the fourth is what do we do about it? And if you think about any persuasive speech, if you think about, you know, a legal brief in a court of law, they go through the points of stasis very carefully and very clearly. They lead you through that kind of analysis and assessment.

Nick Capodice: Now, the points of stasis, Hannah, are a little clearer. If we're talking about a dead body on the floor and a man standing over it with a bloody dagger [00:19:30] one. Did he do it? This is like the facts of the case. So let's say we agree on that. Yeah, he did it. So then we can go to number two. What are we going to call it? Murder. Manslaughter. An act of self-defense, a crime of passion. And once we do that, we can go to three. Is this a good or a bad thing? And finally for how is he to be punished?

Jennifer Mercieca: Clear thinking right is very persuasive [00:20:00] thinking most of the time in public discourse, we're not going through the points of stasis in order. We're not describing the facts. And what do we call it? And is it good or bad? And, you know. Right. We move right on to policy. And so we assume that point of stasis that is crucial, which is the second one. What do we call it? Do we call it a coup? Do we call it an insurrection? Do we call [00:20:30] it a peaceful protest? And so we adopt these words that then trigger entire constellations of emotions and policy. And so, breezing through the second point of stasis without considering it carefully. We go all the way to the third and fourth point. But we're not really well prepared to debate those issues, because until you decide what we should call it, [00:21:00] you can't really decide if it's good or bad, right? You're going to decide something very different. If it's a peaceful protest versus it's an insurrection. And so what we do is we rely on heuristics.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, because our minds are kind of lazy.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. It's not their fault. They need a break. They're busy and overtaxed and telling you to drink a damn glass of water every now and then. So they use any shortcut they can.

Jennifer Mercieca: There are important differences for scholars of, you know, political violence [00:21:30] between a coup and an insurrection and a peaceful protest. And so so instead of doing that work, right, because we're not scholars of political violence, we just do the lazy job and the lazy work of adopting whatever frame gets repeated the most gets repeated by people we respect gets repeated by our party, right? Um, and so what we hear becomes our reality because we don't think about it.

Nick Capodice: So [00:22:00] I got one last arrow in the quiver to fight the frame wars.

Hannah McCarthy: Hannah, you realize that you're doing it right now. What? You are framing. Framing.

Nick Capodice: Framing. I'm framing. Me. This is ridiculous.

Hannah McCarthy: I mean, you're calling it a war. Uh, Nick, you're using a weapon metaphor.

Nick Capodice: Okay, so I am. This is like some post-modern meta framing of the frame. I'm okay with it. Uh, but seriously, something Jen does with [00:22:30] her students each day just to recognize the frames is to first put up the homepage of the Associated Press morning wire.

Jennifer Mercieca: Because the AP morning wire, as I tell them, is a neutral source of information that provides the backbone for all other News that gets distributed throughout the United States. It's not outrage bait. So we look at that every day, and then we compare what we see in the AP morning wire to CNN and MSNBC [00:23:00] and Fox News in The New York Times and the Washington Post and Yahoo! And when you do that, you'll see very clearly that the stories are given different priority, that the headlines use emotive language, very emotionally triggering language in some of those new sources, whereas they do not in others, that the imagery is very different. In some cases you will see. Um, Donald Trump always looks like a hero. [00:23:30] He always looks young and tough and strong and, you know, energetic. And in others he's always making a funny face. And he looks goofy and he looks old and he looks weak, right? You would have seen the same thing with Joe Biden, right? But in reverse, of course. Different news sources. And so you can see based on the imagery. Who is a hero in that news organizations narrative of the world. Right. And that's really important because once you know who is a hero, then of course you can tell who the villains [00:24:00] are to. And news organizations shouldn't be narrating a world of heroes and villains, right? They should let the audience decide who the heroes are and who the villains are. I find that if you if you do that exercise for a few weeks, then you can figure out which news organization you think is best representing reality to you.

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, do you think we could do a points of stasis on framing?

Nick Capodice: Oh, that would [00:24:30] be fantastic.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, one. What is going on? Politicians and the media are using carefully designed language to make us feel, one way or another about issues. And they try to do that without our even noticing it?

Nick Capodice: That is good. And to be honest, Hannah, if I'd heard just that, I would be tempted to leap to the.

Speaker15: Well, what can I do about this? Won't somebody think of the children step?

Nick Capodice: Uh, but we're going to do this step by step. Continue. [00:25:00]

Hannah McCarthy: All right. Step two. What do we call it? We've already called it the frame wars today repeatedly meaning that it's something that involves conflict or fighting.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. And that might even be the title of this episode. Uh, you never know until it's up there.

Hannah McCarthy: But we could have called it the framing trap, which makes you think of maybe defense, of being careful, of protecting yourself from something or frame mystery, something we have to solve by looking for clues and putting the pieces together. [00:25:30]

Nick Capodice: Yeah, like a BBC mystery with an inspector. With a name like Thurlow. Trowbridge. Trowbridge investigates the deadly frame. But I think we can stick with frame wars.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, got that? Okay. Step three. Nick, is it good or bad. Well, we're calling it a war. Now, some people would say that's a bad thing.

Nick Capodice: And now, Hannah, now that we've done all three of those, we can ask the final question. What [00:26:00] are we going to do about it?


 
 

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Cinema Civics: The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The Civics 101 team delves into the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, a political satire and thriller that is more than relevant in today’s political climate. 

Note: this episode contains spoilers for the film.


Transcript

Archive: Raymond Shaw, please.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Hi, I'm Hannah McCarthy. This is Civics 101. This is the first in what will be a semi-regular series wherein our team takes a look at our favorite movies and shows about the US government or perhaps other governments as well. Space governments, for example, and finds the Civics 101 of it all within them.

 

Archive: There will be no covering up, sir. No covering up.

 

Hannah McCarthy: And today we are going to talk about a movie that I very much love, and I am definitely going to spoil it for people who have not seen it. So if you have not seen the 1962 Manchurian Candidate, I recommend waiting to listen to this episode until you have watched it, and I do recommend watching it. It is rated PG 13 by the way, if that is relevant to you. And I am joined today by three lovely coworkers and friends who have seen this movie first Nick Capodice.

 

Nick Capodice: Hello, Hannah. I'm very glad to be talking about this movie.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Me too. Christina Phillips.

 

Christina Phillips: Hi, Hannah. I'm very happy to be talking about the Cold War.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, lovely. And Rebecca Lavoie.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: I can't be more excited to talk about a movie and the strange accents therein than I am to talk about this movie. Yeah. And the strange accents therein.

 

Hannah McCarthy: And so before we start the brainwashed fever dream, that is the true history behind what is happening in this movie. I just want to know, without actually touching on the plot, did you all like it? I will start with the two people who had not seen it prior to what? This past weekend, right? Yes. Rebecca. Did you like it?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury. What's not to like? Hannah McCarthy.

 

Hannah McCarthy: I couldn't agree.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: More. I did, I did.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Christina. How'd you feel about it?

 

Christina Phillips: I liked it, I found it very funny, and I was like, I'm not sure if that's me or if that's current context, but I was delighted. I thought it was great.

 

Hannah McCarthy: And Nick, how do you feel about The Manchurian Candidate?

 

Nick Capodice: Yeah, well, I saw this movie when I was too young the first time, and I watched it maybe ten times since then. I am in love with this movie. One actor in particular, and the most recent watching it, was just like the first watching in the last four years. It's still hits home, it's still slaps. It's still relevant to everything going on today.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Very good. So The Manchurian Candidate, it is based on the book of the same name written by Richard Condon. It stars Frank Sinatra, as we said, and Angela Lansbury, among others.

 

Nick Capodice: Yes, it includes Janet Leigh and Laurence Harvey.

 

Hannah McCarthy: With the more actor names you say, the more likely people are to tune out.

 

Nick Capodice: And do you really think people hearing the name John Mcgiver in this movie is gonna make people tune out? I gotta say, everybody, John Mcgiver is very special. He's the, uh, salesman at Tiffany's in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Yeah, he's a he's a wonderful character.

 

Christina Phillips: Which character is he in this?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: He's Senator Jordan.

 

Archive: I think of John. Iceland were a paid Soviet agent. He could not do more to harm this country than he's doing now.

 

Christina Phillips: Okay, Senator Jordan.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Got it. He's Angela Lansbury's nemesis.

 

Nick Capodice: I will block you.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Pictured, there's a scene where you see his face just in front of a giant golden bald eagle. So we know what we're supposed to think about him. A lot of, like, imagery that tells you exactly what to feel in this movie.

 

Nick Capodice: And a quick public service announcement to anyone out there, please, in my opinion, do not bother with the 2004 version of this film.

 

Hannah McCarthy: It is Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, both of whom are incredibly talented people, so you might want to bother with it. Nick and I love the 1962 one. That is the one we recommend. Guess who did not love the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate? Any guesses?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Any of the Kennedys?

 

Christina Phillips: With McCarthy still alive.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Mccarthy was not still alive. Audiences in 1962.

 

Christina Phillips: Oh.

 

Hannah McCarthy: So this movie was kind of a flop. United artists, the production company that produced this movie, pretty much pulled it out of most mainstream theaters two years into its run.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Just like It's a Wonderful Life, right? Like which was also a flop, really.

 

Archive: I'm gonna build airfields. I'm gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high. I'm gonna build bridges a mile long. Where are you going? To throw a rock.

 

Nick Capodice: Yeah, that was a flop. The only reason it's popular. Because it accidentally fell in the public domain. So every TV station snagged it. And, like, let's play it at Christmas.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Like, um, Wizard of Oz. Like it was a total flop.

 

Archive: I thought you said she was dead.

 

Archive: That was her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. This is the Wicked Witch of the West.

 

Hannah McCarthy: All right. But what I really want to start with is the term Manchurian Candidate. It is a term that has come to mean someone who's harmful or disloyal to their nation or their party because they are under the control of another nation or party. But the term does come from this book. And then this movie. So I just want to ask you all, what is Manchuria?

 

Christina Phillips: I believe Manchuria is an important location during the Chinese Revolution. Right.

 

Nick Capodice: I thought it was northern China near Mongolia, northeastern China.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That is true. And it is significant. Often throughout history, there is a long and rich, complex history of what is called Manchuria. By the way, a very controversial name for a contested place. That name comes from colonizers, right? Not from the Chinese who lived there. I'm not going to get into this whole history of Manchuria because it is. There's a lot, and I recommend people look into it on their own. What I need you to know about it today is that it was very important during the Korean War, the Chinese People's Liberation Army had an important base in what is called Manchuria. Yes, Communist China fought in the Korean War, as did covertly the Soviet Union, as did United Nations member states, including the United States. Does anybody know why all of these nations and states were involved in the Korean War?

 

Christina Phillips: Christina I guess I'll start with the United States. So this is post World War Two, and this was during the rise of the Truman era of containment, which is part of the Truman Doctrine, which is essentially this idea that there was encroaching communism. And the United States adopted a policy of preventing the spread of communism in other countries. There's also this massive decolonization happening. So the United States gets involved because they see this threat of communism entering South Korea.

 

Hannah McCarthy: You're right. But what happens way before that? Why is there a North Korea and a South Korea?

 

Nick Capodice: Yeah, I mean, it was Korea. And then like a chunk of it broke off specifically around World War two.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yes. What happened was Japan had annexed and colonized Korea. So 1910 to 1945, Japan is occupying Korea after Japan's surrender. The United States and the Soviet Union allies really in name only. They have to transition this nation into its independence, right? So what do they decide to do with this country? They decide to split it up along the 38th parallel. The Soviet Union is going to manage the northern part of the nation, and the United States is going to manage the southern part of the nation. And the idea is this is temporary. Eventually, this military government occupation is going to just step away and leave it to Korea to figure out. However, there's an important, as you were talking about, Christina, ideological difference between these two occupying forces. Right. The northern occupiers believe in communism. Communism. And these southern occupiers believe in democracy, anti-communism, capitalism. Right. So basically, what ends up happening and I'm going to grossly oversimplify this because we are talking about a movie and not world history necessarily, although it's all kind of the same thing. You know, tensions are building up, building up, building up. Communist, anti-communist. Eventually North Korea invaded South Korea. And we are not going to declare a war, of course, because we just came out of a war. However, the United Nations authorizes police action, and the United States is permitted to get involved in this war, which was a proxy war, really, between anti-communists and communists as well as North Korea and South Korea. And this is all around the same time that we are really entering the Cold War, which was what, Rebecca? What was the Cold War?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: You mean the nuclear standoff between the two most powerful nations on Earth, the Cold War, where we were all afraid we were going to blow each other up. That thing.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That thing? Yeah.

 

Archive: If you're on the playground, run for shelter. If you're in the schoolyard, get into the building. Move quickly, but in good order.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: We should mention that this movie is not perfect. It's a little bit problematic. And there are no actual Koreans playing Koreans in this film.

 

Nick Capodice: I'm glad you brought that up, Rebecca. In particular, the Korean spy at the very beginning. I have no idea where this man is really from new Jersey.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: That's where he's.

 

Nick Capodice: From. He's from new Jersey.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: And Frank Silva, who plays the allegedly Korean man who ends up coming to New York, is Italian. So, yeah, we should just throw that out there. This is a thing that we know about this film.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm very glad you brought that up, Rebecca, because I would argue that The Manchurian Candidate is not just set during the Cold War. It is a two hour tribute to Cold War paranoia and fear. It is both a critique and a product of the panic that still gripped the United States when it was released in 1962. It is not historical fiction, but there is a lot of historical truth within it. I think the movie itself is a reflection of extremism and racism and sentiments about certain elements during the Cold War, because we were still in it, and setting this movie during the Korean War kind of sets this all up, right? We're not fighting the communists, but we are fighting the communists. And the United States was partially responsible for the Korean War because of that division at the 38th parallel. That's where we find ourselves at the very beginning of The Manchurian Candidate. American troops patrolling somewhere in Korea. And what, Christina happens to those troops?

 

Christina Phillips: They're betrayed by their scout.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Their Italian scout.

 

Nick Capodice: The Italian.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Scout.

 

Christina Phillips: The Italian. Yes, they're betrayed by the Italian scout.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.

 

Christina Phillips: But, yeah. So they're basically. They're a staff sergeant. They establish that he is not very popular, and then they get captured by, we assume Russians, I assume, or Soviets.

 

Hannah McCarthy: But let me just ask you, Christina and Rebecca, having watched this, we already sort of touched on it. Did you know right off the bat who they were being captured by? Was it immediately clear to you?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: No, no, it's not clear, a because the actors are not played by people of any distinct ethnicity other than Americans, and because the setting of their brainwashing sessions is this like hotel lobby with a surgical theater audience around it. And the audience. That's the fake garden club audience that they're doing these demonstrations for all look, American. And I want to say, look, American. I mean, they speak English like Americans, and they're dressed like Americans from that time. So it's a little bit hazy.

 

Archive: Many years ago, when I was traveling about the country, I noticed magnificent hydrangeas on the hills.

 

Nick Capodice: I said before that, like, there's one scene that stands out to me. I think every character who was kidnaped, having a memory of that brainwashing that happened to them, is one of my favorite things in cinematic history. Like, I'm nuts about it because depending on who is having the memory, everybody who is in the scene is are portrayed by completely different people. So when there is a black actor who is remembering being brainwashed, he is a group of older black women talking at a garden club. And when it's a British guy, he's like remembering white British people talking. But when you see the real scene, those are people that look like they're from around the world. Like there's a guy with a thick sort of Hungarian accent. There are people from all over who are at this brainwashing demonstration when they're kidnaped in Korea. Even when I was a kid, and even until like the last time I saw that movie, it was like, well, who's doing who's actually kidnaping these people? No, I'm in the exact same boat.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: That's who. Them. Them. The big.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Scary they.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. The body snatchers. Just like an invasion of the body snatchers. It's just them. Them. Them, them.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Rebecca. Exactly.

 

Archive: It's got no detail, no character. It's unformed.

 

Archive: All of a sudden, they're growing like parasites. Is it contagious? People are being duplicated.

 

Archive: How do you know my name?

 

Hannah McCarthy: Fear of capture was a very deep one. Of course, it's a deep one in any war. But in particular, during the Korean War, American soldiers captured by North Korean and Chinese soldiers could expect absolutely horrifying conditions, which, again, I am not saying is unique to the Korean War, but we do know this about the Korean War. According to the Korean War Legacy Foundation, 43% of American prisoners of war died in captivity during the Korean War, which is a huge number. Those who survived, for the most part, returned home traumatized if they returned home at all. But in this movie, they do return home, and what is waiting for them when they return home? Nick.

 

Nick Capodice: Uh, Raymond Shaw Raymond Shaw is a returning to a hero's welcome when he comes back from whatever happened over there. Uh, there's balloons and there's a parade. And Angela Lansbury and her husband, Senator Tom Iceland, are there. Excited to bring John.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Medal of honor.

 

Nick Capodice: Medal. Congressional medal of honor. That's right.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, does Raymond like his mom?

 

Nick Capodice: Does Raymond Shaw like his mother? No, no. Raymond Shaw hates his mother, portrayed by Angela Lansbury and hates her politics as well as her.

 

Archive: What is it, mother?

 

Archive: A sort of a greeting is that at 330 in the morning.

 

Archive: It's a 2:45. And what do you want?

 

Archive: I want to talk to you, Raymond.

 

Archive: About what?

 

Archive: I want to talk to you about that communist.

 

Archive: Shut up with that mother. Shut up!

 

Hannah McCarthy: And we, the audience, are also meant to probably not like Senator Iceland and Mrs. Iceland. Right? Also, I don't think it's an accident that it's spelled I e l I n, but pronounced Iceland. Right? Cold. Not good.

 

Nick Capodice: Cold war.

 

Hannah McCarthy: So I would say it's pretty obvious that Senator Jon Iceland is a proxy, if you will, is a pretty obvious knockoff and critique of a certain real American historical figure. Who might that be?

 

Christina Phillips: Oh, I would guess maybe Senator Joseph McCarthy perhaps.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That is exactly right. Long before I understood what Joseph McCarthy had gotten up to, I used to say like, hi, my name is Hannah McCarthy. No relation, assuming people would know exactly what I meant. But like, I didn't know what I meant. Um, Rebecca, why might I have enough wherewithal without even knowing who the guy was to say no relation to Senator Joseph McCarthy. What did I mean?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Because McCarthyism, which is like the expression that was born sort of like Manchurian Candidate after his era, just became a placeholder set of words for oppression of thought. And so you didn't want to be associated with that, I'm guessing. Hannah McCarthy.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That's right. I like us all to think all we want.

 

Christina Phillips: So the Korean War was 1950 to 1953, correct? And McCarthy was really in his heyday throughout the 1950s. And then this movie comes out in 1962. The movie was probably being made as he was still alive. His legacy is very much present, right?

 

Nick Capodice: James Gregory does a pretty good impression of, I believe, of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy.

 

Archive: I am United States Senator John Yerkes, Iceland, and I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party. What?

 

Hannah McCarthy: So just to clarify, you know, we talked about the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy was sort of a thought police kind of guy. Specifically, he was fueling the flames of anti-Communist sentiment to an outrageous degree in the United States. He made accusations left and right, mostly left, that people were communists. They were card carrying communists. And he assured us that they were here on U.S. soil. They were infiltrating everything, including the government. And, Nick, I just want to ask you, what is one real simple, easy to remember number of communists in the State Department?

 

Nick Capodice: That's a really good joke. So for those of you who haven't seen the movie, Senator Iceland keeps putting out fake numbers about how many communists there are in the State Department. He's like 147. And he says to Angela Lansbury, can't you pick one simple, easy number? It shows him banging on a Heinz ketchup bottle and he says 57. There are no fewer than 57 because everybody loved Heinz, 57 at the time.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: One thing that I think is worth mentioning, though, is the reason she gives him for the varying numbers to be advantageous are that now everyone is talking about how many communists there are in the State Department, and not whether there are communists there.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That was the exact same tactic used by Senator Joseph McCarthy. That is why they have John Iceland doing that.

 

Christina Phillips: I think this is also the moment we realize that he is essentially everything he's saying is coming from the mind of Angela Lansbury, like he is sort of a puppet of her greater aims. So I thought that was fascinating like that. That conversation is so funny where he's just like squirting the ketchup and she's sitting there like, just do what I say.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, yeah. Because, like, communists are scary, but nothing's more terrifying than an older woman with power, right? That's the scary. I mean, like, that's.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Very feminist, very ahead of.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Its time. Yeah, yeah. So, John, Iceland is supposed to be Joseph McCarthy. He's portrayed as a total buffoon, right? He's the puppet of his commander wife. That wife is going to use paranoia, false accusations, and the absolutely drama thirsty media to get her husband to the vice presidency, basically. Right. Just put propaganda out there and rely on the lie so that people are talking about the lie as though the lie is simply the case. And then let's try to understand what's going on around this lie. And then in terms of how he's actually portrayed, he drinks to excess, right? His home is scattered with images of Abraham Lincoln. He in fact, dresses as Abraham Lincoln during a costume party. This, I think, is an unambiguous eye roll at Joseph McCarthy. By 1962, when this movie came out, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy had more than fallen from grace. He had been exposed. Mccarthyism had been exposed for what it was it a largely baseless hunt for an invisible threat in our own nation, for the disloyal turncoats planted on our precious soil. Mccarthy had died three years prior to this movie coming out, some say from complications related to alcoholism.

 

Hannah McCarthy: He was one of the few senators to have ever been censured by the Senate. Really? Big deal. And seven years before this movie came out was when McCarthy made the first public claim about communists in the government. It was during a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He brandished a piece of paper and claimed to have a list of the communists infesting the State Department. And when he gave this speech, it was Lincoln Day, and he referenced Abraham Lincoln in this speech as a way to sort of link himself to Lincoln and enhance his own Own credibility in his Communist hunt. Linking that to Lincoln's legacy of unity. So I just think there are so many ways in which Frankenheimer, the director of this movie, is hammering it home. Like Iceland is Joseph McCarthy, and he's a buffoon, and we need to throw him away. And America pretty much had at the point that this movie had come out. And speaking of women's clubs, Christina, I think you know where I am going with this.

 

Christina Phillips: Hydrangeas.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, hydrangeas. That's right. And we are going to get to that after a quick break. We are back. We are taking a civics look at the fictional 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and its real world foundations. And before that break, we were just about to get into a major driving force in this Cold War era film, something that we have already talked about quite a bit in this conversation. Brainwashing. Just a reminder spoilers abound in this episode. Okay, so Nick, I know this is one of your favorite scenes. You've talked about this quite a bit. We're talking about a garden club. What is the deal with the garden club when I say that, what is that referencing in The Manchurian Candidate?

 

Nick Capodice: Well, this is a scene when, uh, all of the captured soldiers are remembering a demonstration of how they have been brainwashed at the time of the demonstration to sort of the, quote unquote, axis of evil, all the evil people sitting in a room just waiting to see how these men, these American soldiers, have been brainwashed, they've all been hypnotized, and specifically, they've been hypnotized to believe they're at a presentation of a ladies garden club about how to keep and grow hydrangeas.

 

Archive: Another modern discovery, which we owe to the hydrangea, concerns the influence of air drainage upon plant climate.

 

Nick Capodice: Oh, and they're also smoking, uh, yak poop instead of cigarettes. They've been hypnotized to believe it tastes good.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Let me just ask. The group, is brainwashing real?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. Anybody who's watched a documentary about cults knows that brainwashing is real.

 

Archive: Tyndall gave us the tools to brainwash ourselves, literally wash out our humanness from our brains.

 

Hannah McCarthy: I want to acknowledge, like, first and foremost, brainwashing has become a term that we all use to mean something. So like to Rebecca's point, we use it to mean coercive conditioning tactics, often involving manipulation, deceit, and various trauma in order to change someone's perception of the world, alter their behavior away from what they might have done prior to your conditioning them right. Brainwashing is a term that many psychologists are wary of, and they're like, maybe let's not use the term brainwashing when what we mean is the thing that we think of that a cult might do to an individual, which is coerce abuse condition. And I think that that is in part because of the origins of the public use of the term, especially in the United States, which I'm about to get into because they talk about conditioning in The Manchurian Candidate. Right. There was this like, call it a moral panic, if you will. It was just a panic. There was a panic about brainwashing in the United States. I have a whole thing about this, Nick, with hypnosis, because you and I talked about this earlier. And generally, psychologists will say that hypnosis is a voluntary state that someone essentially in, in some way or another is agreeing to hypnosis itself, and that the implications of brainwashing are that it is not voluntary. Right? It is entirely, entirely against somebody's will. And so also for all those listeners who are like, this fool hasn't heard of MKUltra. I have like, you know, there are a lot of reasons. Yes. No, I have. Trust me, I have. The term brainwashing rolls off of the American tongue. It's a term I have no idea when I first heard it, but I have probably used it many, many times in my life. And we impart have an individual named Edward Hunter to thank for that. Has anyone here ever heard of Edward Hunter?

 

Nick Capodice: If I'm not mistaken, I thought he wrote the book Budwing or Mr. Budwing.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That's Evan Hunter. Um, he is a writer. He is a writer. However, Edward Hunter was a journalist, maybe, who ended up working with the United States Army and the Office of Strategic Services, which you can basically think of as the CIA. It was the CIA prior to the CIA. Some scholars think that the whole journalist thing was just a front, and that he was just an OSS agent, a CIA agent. Not everyone agrees on that. However. In 1959, Hunter testified before a Senate subcommittee, and this is what he had to say about this thing that he was calling brainwashing. And Nick, there is some outdated and inflammatory language in this quote. I just want to flag that for our listeners. But can I have you read what Edward Hunter said to the Senate?

 

Nick Capodice: Absolutely. Okay. So our Mr. Hunter said this thing called brainwashing could, quote, change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet, a human robot, without the atrocity being visible from the outside. The aim is to create a mechanism in flesh and blood, with new beliefs and new thought processes inserted into a captive body. What that amounts to is the search for a slave race that, unlike the slaves of olden times, can be trusted never to revolt, always amenable to orders like an insect to its instincts.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Wow.

 

Nick Capodice: End quote. Wow.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: This is so funny. Have any of you watched the show The Americans?

 

Hannah McCarthy: A little bit.

 

Christina Phillips: A little.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Bit. Okay. It is, in my opinion, the best show in in my lifetime in the history of television. And it's about a couple who are from the Soviet Union who have been sent over. They weren't really a couple. They were put together as Soviet spies in the United States. And this is based on a real program that existed where they would train young Soviet people to be American and send them here.

 

Archive: This work can be too much for people.

 

Archive: They tell us what to do and we do it. That's how it works.

 

Archive: Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are not Russian spies. What happened? It's hard.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: It's such a wonderful show because I remember growing up and hearing that communists were brainwashed. Right? And the show shows the perspective of somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union who thinks Americans are brainwashed by capitalism. So it's just a very interesting, like, Cold War kind of thing that I certainly remember people talking about when I was growing up.

 

Hannah McCarthy: No, it's very much a thing. Part of the propaganda war between communism and anti-communism or communism and capitalism or communism and democracy was this notion, especially in the United States, of American exceptionalism. And it was very important that we talked about the fear of communism and the threat of communism, and what communists could do to us without allowing for the possibility that the American individual was corruptible. And I think this is very important. And forgive me if I say this again later, because it's important that Americans are safe and secure in their democratic ideals. Right? That is powerful. That is our important propaganda tool. So what what do we need to ensure that we're afraid of communism? We rally support. Opposed to communism, there has to be some sort of almost mystical tool that can hack into your mind. That is not the same thing as social influence. It's very important that we cannot be socially influenced into communism, but we can be brainwashed with something, can pierce our perfect American skulls and get in there. And that's what we're fighting against.

 

Nick Capodice: Part of the reason I love this movie is the whole movie is instances of people unwittingly demonstrating their lack of understanding or feel fealty or patriotism towards the United States. You know, you've got this blatantly horrible character of the senator who's based on Joe McCarthy, who is, you know, making lies and false accusations and the constant portrayal of a drunk Abraham Lincoln. Like, these are all we are lying to ourselves. It doesn't it doesn't need to be some creepy person in a helicopter who brainwashes us. We're doing it already. That's why I like it.

 

Hannah McCarthy: All right, so getting back to Hunter and also like, by the way, that quote you just read, Nick, like, sound like a movie you just watched. Like that's what supposedly is happening to these men when they return, right? They have been hacked.

 

Nick Capodice: Hannah. Ah. Did you say that this is like the first instance of the use of the term brainwashed.

 

Hannah McCarthy: So Hunter reportedly claimed that he was the first person to ever say this term out loud in American English. Okay. He claimed that it came from a Chinese word meaning wash brain. Now, there's a notion in Chinese philosophy about wash heart or wash brain that has to do with getting toward enlightenment. And this term is actually about like a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies and like, you know, improving oneself. It has nothing to do with the government hacking into your mind. Right. He was just pulling this term also seems highly unlikely that he was the first person to use this term. There are documents that indicate that the OSS was already using the term brainwashing in internal communications prior to Hunter getting up there and saying this. And a lot of scholars believe that Edward Hunter was just a Super effective propagandist employed by the OSS to put ideas out there into the American mind. It doesn't really matter if this is purely propaganda. It doesn't really matter that Edward Hunter is making these outrageous claims or introducing this word that doesn't make a lot of sense, and that the Chinese probably weren't using the way that he was using it, because we were super afraid of communism. And this was a really an excuse that made a lot of sense to us. Right? Like, this is how bad things can happen. And also J. Edgar Hoover had earlier published a book talking about the quote unquote, communist thought control machine. So this was in the air also, Rebecca, by the way, just for our listeners, who's J. Edgar Hoover?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, he was the director of the FBI. And he, like, had files on all sorts of Americans. And he was, by all accounts, not a great guy.

 

Nick Capodice: Yeah. That's the I've.

 

Nick Capodice: Heard a lot of understatements in my day. Hoover being not a great guy. It's kind of up there.

 

Christina Phillips: I do think it is interesting worth acknowledging here that the use of saying that this is a Chinese word and that we have translated, have translated this from a Chinese word. There's a great deal of racism and this threat of invasion that is happening in this moment like that is like a very important context to that. And the idea that there is an infiltration within the United States of some foreign, scary nonwhite mind control, I think is like sort of wrapped around all of this.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Right. I do think, though, that the Soviet Union became the I mean, granted, it was a huge, powerful country, but I also think they became sort of the symbol of the communist threat because to white Americans, they looked like them. And there had to be something wrong with people who believed in a philosophy that was anti-capitalist. There must be something wrong. They must have been programed. They must have been coerced or something. Because why would anybody not want to be like us?

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And I think that's a really an important point, this idea that like communism equals bad, full stop, no conversations about it. We are not going to even think about it. Just bad evil.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: And if people want to learn more about communism, we do have an episode on communism and fascism.

 

Nick Capodice: I believe it's socialism, communism, fascism.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. And that's one you should definitely listen to in the civics 101 catalog.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Absolutely. All right, so getting back to brainwashing, getting back to The Manchurian Candidate. So I mentioned American prisoners of war in Korea. I told you that many of those who survived POW camps returned home traumatized, but that not all of them did return home. And I'm not talking about those who died in captivity. Okay, so something unimaginable to the Cold War American mind happened during the Korean War, captured American soldiers started confessing falsely, according to the US government, to war crimes. So they told their captors they had poisoned Korean civilians with anthrax and plague. This absolutely horrified Americans back home. Even more horrifying, POWs also started petitioning the US government to end the war. Unimaginable, right? That can't be done. Yes! Gasp! And then finally, when the war came to an end and the surviving POWs were told they could go home, an American delegation comes to Korea and and is going to get those soldiers back home. 21 of them chose not to go back home. Any theories as to why?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: I mean, what did they say at the time? I mean, I have theories as to why that or, you know, kind of contemporary, but like, what do they say at the time?

 

Hannah McCarthy: At the time, it had to be brainwashing, right? It had to be. There's only one reason. Over time, these soldiers who did return home were evaluated by psychologists who were saying, these are not sleeper agents, these are not people who have been quote unquote brainwashed. This idea that they have basically been turned into puppets by Communist China, these are people who have been horribly traumatized. That is the explanation. And that is a very complex state to be within. That can mean that someone behaves in a way that you do not expect them to behave. But it was protracted. It was so much abuse over a very long period of time. But again, brainwashing worked better for us, propaganda wise, right? By the way, we were trying to invent brainwashing in the United States. We were trying to do this. We wanted it. Mkultra, the super illegal super secret OSS, and then CIA human experimentation program that did many terrible things to many people, was trying to invent mind control. They used a lot of tactics, including, you know, dosing people without their consent and interrogations and abuse. And they treated Americans differently than they treated other people who they experimented on. Of course, you know, if someone without your knowledge gives you like 20 times the quote unquote recommended dose of LSD and then interrogates you for four hours, something might happen to you, you know? Right. That wasn't the only thing that came out of MKUltra, although we did not invent mind control the way that we wanted to. Anyone have any ideas of what we started to figure out during the MKUltra program?

 

Christina Phillips: Torture.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Enhanced interrogation. And. Yeah, yeah. A lot of scholars agree that it was in the MKUltra program, that we figured out that abuse can maybe get us something that we want, even though a lot of people say torture does not actually work.

 

Nick Capodice: There are so many movies in the 70s with this sort of brainwashing thing. Yeah, I love it in those movies. It's a trope that it just like scares me to my absolute core. So when I see it, it means an awful lot to me. And I think it's cool and terrifying, you know?

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Well, and again, for those listeners who are like, it is real. I'm not saying that torment toward coercion and control isn't real. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that experimenting on people and lying to people and all of that doesn't then change them. I'm just saying, if we think about the origins of the term brainwashing, I think it's important to note that brainwashing was a a more magical, impossible thing than the actual tactics used that the United States itself then started adopting toward manipulating people. Getting back to The Manchurian Candidate. You know, the story of soldiers who were successfully brainwashed by communists in a matter of days. Men who were it not for brainwashing, could never have betrayed their country. Because that's impossible. One man in particular, who is referred to as a quote unquote mechanism, a quote unquote weapon who can be triggered to murder even those he loves with a single phrase and a pack of cards.

 

Archive: Raymond Moylan to pass the time by playing a little solitaire.

 

Hannah McCarthy: This is something that in Cold War America was not beyond the realm of possibility. It was pretty reasonable, especially given what we've been told about brainwashing, given all of the anti-communist propaganda that we were consuming in the United States. The communists were and are real, and espionage and torture that was happening, and both sides were trying to create mind control. That's all true. So a movie wherein this, in fact, is the explanation for what happens to captured soldiers is totally on brand and totally believable. It makes a lot of sense. So do you remember that I told you that audiences in 1962 did not love this movie?

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

 

Hannah McCarthy: So we don't know why exactly. It did not make Bank basically when it was released. Right? It just it was not widely loved. There were some positive reviews, some negative reviews, but it was just generally what you would call a flop. You know, it also, it is a movie about politics and propaganda and influence and showing the United States in a state of panic to a United States that was still in a state of panic. I think it's not dissimilar from, for example. You know, maybe not all of us want to watch a movie about pandemics during a pandemic. That kind of thing. Right. And some of us do. But, you know, some of us, maybe not so much. I could have had something to do with that. That is me speculating. It was banned in certain communist controlled Eastern European countries because of its depiction of communists. It depicts the assassination of a political figure. Yes. So United Artists, the company that produced it, was worried that the movie might inspire a real life copycat. And Frank Sinatra reportedly asked his buddy, President John F Kennedy, for approval before the movie was released. They were, you know, real life friends. And apparently Kennedy was like, yeah, I love this movie. This is great.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Wow. But John F Kennedy was, as far as we know, more than three years younger than his mother. Right? Like the actor who plays Raymond Shaw and Angela Lansbury, real life were three years apart.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That's baffling to me.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Wow.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra is great in this movie. I just want to defend Old Blue Eyes for a second. He is so good in this movie. He has top billing in the movie, which is funny. I'm sure that was because of the contractual studio system. Or maybe somebody had a horse head left in their bed or whatever. He is super duper good in this, even though it has all the weird tropes of like, there's like some 30s movie tropes in it, like him meeting the lady on the train and then instantly falling in love kind of situation.

 

Archive: Are you married?

 

Archive: No.

 

Archive: You know.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Frank Sinatra's great. I stand by it. Stand by it.

 

Nick Capodice: Yeah. I love him so much in this movie. He's so humble and he is a wreck. He's a disaster.

 

Archive: We're busting up the joint. We're tearing out all the wires. We're busting it up so good. All the Queen's horses and all the Queen's men. Will never put old Raymond back together again. You don't work anymore. That's an order.

 

Christina Phillips: I do think it's funny. I was taking like stray notes in this and so many times I was like, is this not a conflict of interest? Also like, it seems like he is the only person and they're just like, yeah, you can try that. You can try that. Frank Sinatra's character, I don't know, it was such a strange like depiction of what existed as like, intelligence in those days because it's almost absent bureaucracy that it's very much like, I don't know, why don't you try this? And like, we have this little group and we're bringing in the FBI and the CIA like it. Just if you imagine the way those things look now, it's so bureaucratic.

 

Nick Capodice: I love that, like, the top intelligence agency in the world is just just a bunch of guys sitting around smoking, coming up with ideas.

 

Christina Phillips: Yeah.

 

Hannah McCarthy: A year after The Manchurian Candidate premiered, President John F Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Now, a man named John Logan wrote a book called Oswald's Trigger Films, and he concluded that Oswald, who by the way, had lived in the Soviet Union for three years and was married to a Russian woman. I'm just saying had almost definitely seen The Manchurian Candidate. Robert Condon, the guy who wrote the book The Manchurian Candidate, got a call from a reporter as soon as JFK was assassinated asking if he felt responsible for the assassination. And Condon was like, no. And Condon's reasoning was, why would any assassin imitate that guy in that movie, someone who's controlled by communist handlers? Why would any American want to be that right? I read an article that was interesting that was like, perhaps we shouldn't be asking whether or not Oswald was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate, but whether or not Oswald's handlers were inspired by The Manchurian Candidate.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: So interesting. That's really interesting. I really want the sequel, which is the Angela Lansbury character backstory. Like, how did she become compromised? Right?

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And again, this is spoilery enough, but like, the spoiler about Angela Lansbury is, of course, that she was working for the communists. So she's going to try to facilitate a communist takeover of the United States. But then really, what she's going to do is be the one in charge.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Power. Power. It's all about power.

 

Nick Capodice: That's what I love, too, is that power is the ultimate enemy in this movie, and this notion of a character who will do anything against their country, against America, of all places, just to get power. That is an interesting message, specifically one for the paranoia loving audiences of the 60s and 70s.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Or of 2025.

 

Nick Capodice: Or of 2025. Yeah.

 

Christina Phillips: On that note, I think it is worth pointing out that the end of the Korean War, it was not successful. So the United States is coming back from a war that ended in armistice. We are sort of walking back with our tails between our legs, because general MacArthur had this mission of not just containing, but overthrowing communism in Korea and was ultimately unsuccessful. And so the idea that it's kind of a whiplash from World War two, which birthed this idea that we are a superpower, our next big conflict is one in which we failed essentially, to do anything more than reestablish a not so great system that we had created and then was not working with this 38th parallel and Russia implementing communism in US and implementing anti-communism like the United States is not exactly a super confident and super successful in this moment.

 

Hannah McCarthy: And I think it's also this like, how could we, the great preservers of democracy worldwide, not be having an incredible success in this new era where our former allies are all of a sudden having a completely different idea than our idea. I find this to be sort of chilling little factoid. John Frankenheimer, the director of this movie, was close friends with Robert F Kennedy, and he was the person who drove him to the Ambassador Hotel on the night he was assassinated.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.

 

Hannah McCarthy: I'm not saying there's any link at all. I'm just saying. World. Small world. World. Very, very strange. In 1972, Frank Sinatra bought the rights to this film. And then he pulled it from circulation in 74. And then it was rereleased to much acclaim in 1987 and 88. Nearly the end of the Cold War. Take that as you will. So here are my final thoughts on this movie, The Manchurian Candidate. I told you that I thought of it as a time capsule. It's like Cold War paranoia bottled up for our viewing pleasure. It is also clearly a fairly scathing liberal critique of McCarthyism, extremism, scapegoating the American political system broadly. In the end, it turns out that anti-communist propaganda is itself communist propaganda that widely broadcast lies are themselves brainwashing. Quote unquote. That power can be handed to whomever yells loudly enough at the most television cameras. And it also tells us that we shouldn't trust the one woman in the movie who controls men instead of doting on them, which I find pretty interesting because the other women don't. They love and Angela Lansbury is out for herself. But I think that the absolutism of the communists in this movie, the way they are portrayed, the way they are cast, the utter lack of humanity and machine like operations and way of thinking. That, to me, smacks of propaganda. Even if the movie is satire, which it is, I think it can be both satire and a bit of propaganda itself. The communists are barely people, right? They are archetypes. Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra, Nick, as you pointed out, is very much a person, right? He's sweating. He's shaking. He he can't hold literally hold his glass. Right. Doesn't he drop his glass at some point? Like he is such a fallible person. He is also a red blooded American because despite having been brainwashed, Frank Sinatra figures it out, wiggles out of it, and then he has to go to Laurence Harvey, who plays Raymond Shaw. Raymond Shaw is not a super likable character, even though everyone's brainwashed to say that he's great.

 

Archive: Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

 

Hannah McCarthy: To me, this is just me. I feel like we're meant to feel like he's not the red blooded American who can avoid communist control.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Is that why he has a British accent? Is that why they cast a guy with a British accent in this role?

 

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Why does he? I feel like I watched it with Nick and I asked you the same question. Like, why is he British?

 

Archive: I was like, there's some backstory.

 

Nick Capodice: Maybe Angela Lansbury's former husband was British and she.

 

Nick Capodice: Didn't say much in there. You just. Yeah, she just made something up. She's like, what's that word?

 

Nick Capodice: Mid-atlantic.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: In Star Wars, all of the Empire people were British. And, you know, everyone in the rebellion was American. Like, yeah, yeah, it's pretty wild.

 

Nick Capodice: I have an answer to it, Hannah. I know why. When he was a child, Angela Lansbury spoke like Mrs. Potts.

 

Speaker8: I'll be bubbling. I'll be brewing.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Taylor's all the time. I really think that this movie is both a very effective and often funny exploitation of the era in which it was made, and also very much a product of the era in which it was made.

 

Christina Phillips: If you go into this movie having no idea what communism is, you come out of this movie with no greater understanding of what communism is.

 

Nick Capodice: That's a great point.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That does it for this episode. Thank you all for listening. Thank you to Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. Thank you to Christina Phillips, our senior producer. Thank you to Nick Capodice, my co-host. Music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound. You can find everything we have ever made, including our episode on communism, fascism and propaganda at our website, civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Or is it?

 

Speaker24: Or is it? I showed up five minutes late, I don't know.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Do you want to hear something related to this that I find hysterical? On General Hospital, there's a long going storyline that one of the Quartermaine kids who was heretofore unknown to the Quartermaines because he was like a secret twin that got spirited away or whatever, had been programed by Helena Cassadine to be an assassin, and the trigger to turn him on is a Queen of hearts.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Oh that's great.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: And now that character in the show, Drew Quartermaine, is a US senator.

 

Christina Phillips: Mhm.

 

Hannah McCarthy: Oh.

 

Rebecca Lavoie: Take that.

 

Hannah McCarthy: That's so good.

 



 
 

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How is the Alien Enemies Act being used right now?

Now that we have explored what the Alien Enemies Act is, we dive in to how it's being used to shape deportation policy under President Donald Trump. If you haven’t listened to the first part, do that before you listen to this one!

Helping us out is Liza Goitein. She is the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. 

Additional reading:


Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Christina Phillips: I'm Christina Phillips, and today we are talking about the Trump administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act. Last week, we did an episode on what the Alien Enemies Act is and how it's been used throughout history. And if you haven't listened to that one, please go back and listen to it before listening to this episode, because it lays the groundwork for what we're talking about today. And of course, I have linked it in the show notes.

Hannah McCarthy: But to give us a quick recap, the Alien Enemies Act is a wartime law that was passed in 1798. It allows the president, during war, invasion, or predatory incursion by an enemy nation to detain and deport anyone 14 years of age or older from that enemy nation who is not a US citizen. Predatory incursion, by the way, is not defined by that act, but it is a term that was used during that era to describe, for example, a raid on Virginia by super infamous defector Benedict Arnold. And this act, Christina, has not been invoked all that much.

Christina Phillips: No it hasn't. It's only been invoked four times in the War of 1812, World Wars one and two. And now in 2025, through a proclamation by President Donald Trump in March.

Hannah McCarthy: Now we know the Alien Enemies Act does not give the president the right to detain or deport anyone who is a non-citizen. It has to apply to people from a specific country, specifically those countries engaging in war, invasion or predatory incursion, like we said. So, Christina, who are those people in this case?

Christina Phillips: So the Trump administration is using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan citizens and nationals in the United States who the administration claims are members of Tren de Aragua, a gang also known as TDA.

Archive: You'll see crime all over the country dry up. Essentially, that's what Venezuela and other countries are doing. They're getting rid of their criminals and putting them into the United States of America. And they're crying.

Christina Phillips: And actually, I think we should just read part of the executive order, which is called the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, regarding the invasion of the United States. By trend. Aragua. So here's what it says. I find and declare that TDA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. Tda is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States, both directly and at the direction clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the nation's foreign affairs under the Constitution.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, let's pause here for a second. So it's not just that Trump says that TDA is invading the United States. He also says TDA is working with the Maduro regime, aka President Nicolas Maduro's government, which is often described as an authoritarian dictatorship. But it is the Venezuelan government which makes Venezuela the enemy nation in this case. Right?

Christina Phillips: Right. And here's a little bit more of this executive order based on these findings, and by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including 50 U.S.C. 21. Now, that's referring specifically to the Alien Enemies Act, including the section we read in the last episode. I proclaim that all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TDA are within the United States and are not actually naturalized or lawful. Permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

Hannah McCarthy: I noticed, Christina, that this proclamation is specifically targeting people who are part of TDA. Not all Venezuelan citizens.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, so the Alien Enemies Act doesn't require proof that someone is involved in some kind of criminal activity, or deliberately working with the enemy nation or even a terrorist in order to justify detention and deportation. But this proclamation does state that additional requirement, and the Trump administration says that this justifies immediate detention and deportation.

Archive: Do you think you have the authority, the power to round up people, deport them, and then you're under no obligation to a court to show the evidence against them?

Archive: Well, that's what the law says, and that's what our country needs, because we were unfortunately, they allowed.

Hannah McCarthy: But even if someone is being deported, even under the Alien Enemies Act, they still have some rights under the Constitution. You know, we established that in our last episode. Even if you are a non-citizen, even if you're in the country without legal status, even if you are an alleged terrorist, you still have a right to due process, meaning everything from being told when and why you are being deported, to being given access to legal counsel and the opportunity to challenge the claims against you in court.

Christina Phillips: So the short answer is yes. The longer answer gets into what proper due process looks like.

Liza Goitein: So what the Supreme Court has said is that Alien Enemies Act detainees must receive notice that they are subject to removal. Under the act, the notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.

Christina Phillips: This is Liza Goitein. She's the senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for justice. A habeas petition, by the way, is actually a habeas corpus petition. And habeas corpus is a legal principle. That means that someone has a right to challenge the legality of their detention in a court of law. She's talking about a ruling that came out shortly after the Trump administration began deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act. Deportations that the courts pointed out violated people's right to due process.

Liza Goitein: Courts have been very concerned about the lack of due process. Certainly in the beginning when the administration stealthily or at least tried to do this, stealthily whisked people away on a plane without any notice or any opportunity for those people to to try to seek judicial review or try to somehow stop this from happening.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. So the stakes are high here. If you deport someone before they have a chance to exercise those rights, that's kind of the end of the line, right? You can't really undo that decision because the person is no longer in the United States.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about what that deportation process looked like in the beginning.

Archive: The Trump administration has deported some 250 people it claims are gang members from Venezuela. But the people were not returned to Venezuela. They were flown to El Salvador. Salvadoran officials have imprisoned them.

Christina Phillips: The announcement that Trump had signed the Alien Enemies Act proclamation came out around 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 15th. And within 90 minutes of that announcement, the first plane believed to be holding deportees flew out of Texas, crossed the border and was bound for El Salvador.

Hannah McCarthy: 90 minutes. That seems to suggest to me that people were being rounded up and detained prior to this proclamation.

Christina Phillips: Oh yeah, we know that the administration was already detaining some Venezuelans and other migrants under other policies and provisions prior to this proclamation. So over the rest of that day, March 15th, several more planes containing deportees left the United States, also bound for El Salvador. That same day, a district court judge ordered a temporary halt to any imminent deportations under the Alien Enemies Act after the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of five people, and the ACLU was claiming that the administration was not giving them enough time to exercise their due process rights before they were being deported out of the country. Now, by Monday the following Monday, at about 5:00 pm, the administration announced that at least 137 people had been deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

Hannah McCarthy: Was this around the time that a judge ordered the administration to turn the planes around?

Christina Phillips: Yeah, that was that same judge in that district court.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Archive: The US district judge issued the order after lawyers said two planes were already in the air at the time of the ruling.

Christina Phillips: Part of the issue for that judge was that he had a right to judicial review, but he lost that power. If these people had already left the country before he could evaluate the legal process the administration was using.

Liza Goitein: What exploiting a wartime power allows the administration to do, or what they believe it allows them to do, is to bypass any kind of hearing or any kind of process like that, which fundamentally means that people will be deported erroneously, you know, without hearings, to actually weigh the evidence, without giving people an opportunity to contest the evidence against them and to prove that they are not members of this criminal gang. Mistakes will be made and mistakes have been made.

Archive: But today, CBS news has obtained a list of people deported. Hundreds of alleged gang members sent this past week to El Salvador. But on that list was a Venezuelan migrant living and working in Dallas with no criminal record.

Archive: Through government documents and interviews with lawyers and families, we found that at least three of the deported men, including Elvis, had been carefully vetted to come to the U.S. under the refugee resettlement program, a process for people fleeing war and persecution.

Christina Phillips: And eventually this escalated to the Supreme Court, which temporarily halted the deportations.

Hannah McCarthy: Didn't this happen in the middle of the night or something?

Christina Phillips: Yeah, around 1 a.m.. And actually, this is pretty extraordinary for the Supreme Court to step in like this. The court said, quote, the government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court, and that is referring specifically to a group of detainees in Texas. But elsewhere in the country, the administration was continuing deportations.

Archive: From Denver to Chicago to Newark. Immigration officials say Ice agents made 956 arrests on Sunday alone. And while New York City immigration officials say they've seen after.

Liza Goitein: The Supreme Court held Old, that the administration had to provide reasonable notice and a meaningful opportunity to seek judicial review through habeas petitions. The administration interpreted that requirement in a way that simply did not comply with the spirit of what they were asked to do. The written notice that people received was an English only, regardless of whether those people spoke English. Nothing in that notice mentioned that they had a right to review. It just said you are being deported under the Alien Enemies Act. The notice was not provided to people's attorneys, even when they were represented by attorneys, and they were given 12 hours, even if they were given this notice, you know, 7 p.m., 8 p.m. at night, they had 12 hours to state their intent to file a habeas petition, and if they didn't do that within 12 hours, they could be deported. The courts have that have looked at this have had uniformly said that is not due process.

Christina Phillips: And then we get another decision from the Supreme Court in May which said, quote, notice roughly 24 hours before removal. Devoid of information about how to exercise due process, rights to contest that removal surely does not pass muster. End quote. And by the way, that was signed by seven justices, with Alito and Thomas dissenting.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. What does pass muster?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So we don't know yet. And until that question is answered, these deportations across the board have been suspended.

Liza Goitein: The courts are coalescing around a 21 day notice requirement, with the notice provided in Spanish or in the language that the person speaks. At least one court has said that it has to include something about the right to review. The notice has to be provided to attorneys. The courts are coalescing around a much more fulsome notice and opportunity for review than what the administration was trying to do.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. I have another question about this. Have the courts talked at all about whether or not the use of the Alien Enemies Act is justified, because Trump's proclamation says that the United States is experiencing an invasion or predatory incursion from Venezuela. And I'm just wondering what counts as an invasion or predatory incursion. And is that up to the courts to decide?

Christina Phillips: Yes. So this is being challenged in court, and we will talk about that right after a break.

Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, just remember you can always go to Civics101podcast.org to ask us your questions about what is or is not going on in the United States of America. We might just answer your question with an episode. We're back. This is Civics 101 and Christina. You were about to tell me about how the administration is justifying the use of the alien enemies act. Mainly the claim that Venezuela is coordinating with the gang Ndaragwa to orchestrate an invasion of the United States, and that this invasion justifies the use of the Alien Enemies Act.

Christina Phillips: Yes. The administration has been sued in court over this reasoning. This is Liza Goitein. Again.

Liza Goitein: The sticking point in terms of whether the president's actions are authorized under the Alien Enemies Act has been whether or not there is an invasion or a predatory incursion. On the question of whether or not the invasion or predatory incursion is being perpetrated by a foreign government or foreign nation. There's no question about what those terms mean. If you look at the history of the Alien Enemies Act, there is no question that these terms invasion and predatory incursion were meant to address acts of war. In the case of invasion, it would be something like a full scale ground assault that had occurred maybe before Congress had actually declared war. So at that point, it's an invasion, but not a declared war. If you look at predatory incursion and you want to get a sense of what that was referring to right before the start of the quasi war, John Adams told Congress that he thought the Atlantic Ocean insulated us from invasion, but that major seaports such as New York City were navally undefended and were subject to predatory incursion. So that's what they were talking about there. It was still acts of war, but it was acts of war short of an actual full scale ground assault on the United States.

Liza Goitein: So that's what was meant originally. Now, in some of the cases that have been bubbling up. The administration's main argument is that the alien enemies act really isn't a war power, in the sense that it does not require an act of war. The government has argued in court that an invasion can include any hostile entrance or hostile encroachment, while a predatory incursion encompasses an entry into the United States for purposes contrary to the interests or law of the United States. That is an incredibly broad definition. It would seem to cover anyone who enters the country without documentation, and that person can then be called an enemy alien. What we are hearing now from the from the government is, well, if this involves a foreign terrorist organization, then we can use this war power. That is not an argument that's been made before. And it's also not consistent with the way foreign terrorist immigrations are treated under the law. Um, there is a law that provides special rules and procedures for the deportation of people who are members of foreign terrorist organizations. That is a part of immigration law.

Hannah McCarthy: Have the courts had anything to say about this?

Christina Phillips: With the exception of one decision in Pennsylvania, the federal courts have rejected the Trump administration's definition of invasion or predatory incursion. Two of the more recent cases, for example, were in New York and in Texas.

Hannah McCarthy: And has the Supreme Court had anything to say about this?

Christina Phillips: So, no, they have not taken up the question of whether the administration's claims about TDA and Venezuela meet the threshold of invasion or predatory incursion. In fact, they made it really clear that they were not making that decision, and they gestured to this important separation of powers balance when it comes to the courts, the Constitution and the interests of the federal government. Quote, we did not. On April 19th and do not now address the underlying merits of the party's claims regarding the legality of removals under the ACA. We recognize the significance of the government's national security interests, as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution. In light of the foregoing, lower courts should address ACA cases expeditiously.

Hannah McCarthy: But this could still go back to the Supreme Court.

Christina Phillips: It could. Even Justice Kavanaugh suggested that it will. At one point he wrote, quote, the circumstances call for a prompt and final resolution, which likely can be provided only by this court.

Hannah McCarthy: And also, none of these decisions are addressing the question of whether Venezuela is actually invading the United States with or through TDA.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, and by the way, the administration doesn't even seem to agree on this, even though Trump says this is an invasion.

Hannah McCarthy: Or predatory incursion.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, one or the other. Either way, connected to the Venezuelan government, which is important, right? It's what makes the alien enemies act potentially justifiable here. But the the Office of National Intelligence said they didn't find substantial evidence connecting TDA to the Venezuelan government.

Archive: A newly declassified memo drafted by U.S. intelligence agencies seems to contradict when a president Trumps reasons for one of his controversial immigration policies deporting migrants to a prison in El Salvador. Now, the memo disputes the Trump administration's claims that the Venezuelan government is working with a notorious gang.

Christina Phillips: One memo from that office said, quote, While Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: So some of the people in the federal government who helped the president figure out what is and is not a threat from a foreign government are saying that they cannot find evidence that this foreign government, Venezuela, is actually threatening the US.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And after that, by the way, the director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired the two officials that released these reports, and her office told the press they were fired for their opposition to the president. And we only know what those officials had to say because of a Freedom of Information Act request by the press.

Hannah McCarthy: But it does sound like they were fired for sharing information that contradicted the president.

Christina Phillips: I think that's safe to say. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: Now, has this been challenged in court and what role do the courts have here.

Liza Goitein: Whether trend Aragua is acting as a part of or at the direction of a foreign government or foreign nation? On that point, the courts have simply deferred to the administration's litigation position. And and President Trump's statement in his proclamation that trend Aragua is acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government, despite the fact that Trump's own intelligence community has issued two different reports concluding that that is not the case even in cases that ultimately ruled against the administration. There's been an unwillingness for judges to probe whether the factual assertions made by the Trump administration are true. So, in other words, the courts have said, you know, here is the conduct that is required in order to meet this definition of a predatory incursion. We will now accept whatever President Trump's characterization of Uruguay's conduct is, and then we will compare that, that description to our definition. And so there's been really complete difference to the how President Trump describes the conduct. Generally speaking, this kind of determination gets a lot of deference. It courts often consider this to be a political question, the kind of thing that the President or Congress needs to decide and that courts should not be deciding.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. This brings us back to what the Supreme Court said about national security concerns versus what the courts can or should say, because there's this principle of giving the executive branch some deference, because the executive branch knows some things and has some expertise that the courts potentially do not. Especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And that it would be impractical and unwise for the courts to make decisions about these things, which are the expertise of the executive branch.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, this is called the political question doctrine. And it's a major factor when the courts are looking at what the executive branch is doing and why. And so far, federal courts have not pierced that doctrine.

Hannah McCarthy: What about Congress, by the way, where is Congress in all of this?

Christina Phillips: So first of all, Congress has not declared war on Venezuela. But Congress has also not challenged the administration's use of wartime powers, such as the Alien Enemies Act. They could try to limit those powers through a vote, but that would require some political consensus and political will. Congress could also use the power of the purse, including the $80 billion in funding the administration is requesting for immigration law enforcement in the current spending bill. Congress could also repeal the act if they wanted to. Democratic legislators have introduced a bill in the House to repeal the act, and past Congresses have tried to repeal it before, so far unsuccessfully. And Liza does point out that there are more modern laws on the books that deal with the issues the Alien Enemies Act was created for. Back when we basically had no law enforcement of any kind.

Liza Goitein: We have ample other means of addressing threats that we face national security threats during wartime, not during wartime. The president has ample authority to deport people who are actually members of Trento, Aragua, under immigration law.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so there may be other laws to use, but this law is still on the books and the president is currently trying to use it.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And just to zoom out for a second to the larger strategy of the administration when it comes to immigration and deportation. Alongside the use of the Alien Enemies Act, the administration has increased the presence of Ice across the country. That's the federal law enforcement entity that is overseeing immigration, and the administration has begun detaining people who are showing up for their mandatory immigration court appointments. It's also announced its plan to revoke temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States, which the Supreme Court has said the administration has permission to do.

Hannah McCarthy: And when we say temporary protected status, this is basically protection from deportation because it would be unsafe for you to be deported for any number of reasons.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And I think we should also pay attention to how the administration has been responding to the courts and all the legal decisions we've seen, which have so far slowed down the administration's ability to deport people in huge numbers, which is something President Trump promised he would do.

Archive: Judges are interfering, supposedly based on due process. But how can you give due process to people who came into our country illegally? They want to give them due process. I don't know.

Archive: You know.

Liza Goitein: Spokespersons for the administration have basically said that they will be watching the courts to make sure the courts do the right thing in these Alien Enemies Act cases. And if they don't do the right thing, then the president will have to suspend habeas corpus.

Archive: Well, the Constitution is clear. And that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So it's an option we're actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stripped article three courts. That's the judicial branch of jurisdiction over immigration cases.

Liza Goitein: President Trump has for a very long time referred to unlawful immigration as an invasion. And, you know, originally that seemed to just be rhetorical. Now he's trying to imbue it with legal significance. Alien Enemies Act is one example of that. But he also issued an executive order in which he purported to suspend, essentially, the laws that provide protection against removal various protections against removal, including the right to seek asylum. And so, based in part on this claim of an invasion, Trump, in one of his executive orders, claimed the right to basically suspend asylum law. Now, part of the problem that President Trump is running into is it turns out that even these laws, even these really even the pretty draconian powers given to the president under the Constitution in some cases and under various statutes. During an invasion. Do not authorize him to pick and choose what statutes the government is going to comply with, and it does not authorize him to suspend constitutional rights such as due process. And that is why we are we are now hearing talk about the president suspending habeas corpus, because if your goal is to just detain people, deport people with no judicial review and no other impediment, right, just without impediment, just detain people because because you say you can detain them, deport them because you say you can deport them. The closest the president can get to that is through the suspension of habeas corpus.

Christina Phillips: So can the president suspend habeas corpus. You find the grounds for suspension in the suspension clause of the Constitution. Most legal scholars agree that habeas corpus cannot be suspended without the approval of Congress, and indeed, all four times habeas corpus was suspended was with congressional approval. In fact, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, before she was a justice, wrote that the suspension Clause quote does not specify which branch of government has the authority to suspend the privilege of writ. But most agree that only Congress can do it. End quote.

Hannah McCarthy: But there is always a chance that Congress does get on board and says, yeah, you can suspend habeas corpus.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Or President Trump could declare that he's going to do it without Congress. And I think the question there is, if he does, will Congress use their mechanisms for checking the president to stop him from doing so?

Hannah McCarthy: And I would assume that the courts would probably have something to say about that as well.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, I think based on everything we know, if a president were to try to suspend a constitutional right, people would sue the administration. But we're not there yet. So I asked Liza what we should be paying attention to going forward.

Liza Goitein: Right. So we have these decisions that are binding in the jurisdictions where they have been issued. You know, we haven't yet heard the administration say that they're not binding or that they're not going to comply with them. So at some point, this will probably get up to the Supreme Court. And let's say the Supreme Court rules in a way that the administration disagrees with and maybe says that the Alien Enemies Act does not authorize what President Trump is trying to do here. Then the next question will be, does the president try to unilaterally suspend habeas corpus in violation of the Constitution? If he were to do that, the Supreme Court would then say, that's a violation of the Constitution. I feel pretty confident that that's what the Supreme Court would say, that the president doesn't have that authority. At that point, then we have the courts ruling the wrong way, as the administration has sort of described it with the with the Alien Enemies Act cases. What happens then?

Christina Phillips: And in the meantime, I'll say this to anyone who is trying to wrap their head around this. Start with the text. Don't start with how someone else describes the law to you. And that includes us. That includes the president. That includes the Supreme Court. Read the law yourself. And I know I'm saying that after spending two episodes breaking down these laws. But before you try to hear what other people say the law means, at least have some sense of what you think you understand and what you don't. This episode was written and produced by me, Christina Phillips, with help from Hannah McCarthy and Rebecca Lavoie. Our team includes producer Marina Henke and host Nick Capodice. And Nick, I know you've been out for a couple weeks, but I wanted to thank you for letting me step into the MC mic chair and also say you're welcome, because I'm not using music with marimba in it, even though you're not here to stop me. On that note, music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriskie - Civics 101 is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm sorry. Let me just drink some water. And I'm sorry for the swallowing sounds on this tape.

Christina Phillips: Oh, I don't even hear Rebecca. Oh, yeah. Sorry, Rebecca.

Hannah McCarthy: You will?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. This is called the political question. In light of the foregoing.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

What is the Alien Enemies Act?

The Alien Enemies Act is a war power granted to the president that has only been used four times in US history since its creation in 1798. It allows the president to order the detention and deportation of noncitizens from "enemy" nations during war, invasion, or predatory incursion. When it was created, the US had a very different understanding of Constitutional rights, including due process, than we do today. We talk about how the Alien Enemies Act has been used throughout history, and how Constitutional law has evolved since 1798. 

Check out our follow up episode, all about Trump’s invocation of the AEA.

Helping us out is Liza Goitein. She is the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. 

Additional reading:


Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:03] Did you hear that?

Christina Phillips: [00:00:05] I hear it. Oh. It's spooky.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:09] The thunder is [00:00:10] back, so.

Christina Phillips: [00:00:11] Oh, great.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:12] Oh.

Christina Phillips: [00:00:13] No, I like it, I like it. I think it's good.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:16] All right, all right. You know what I can say? That I [00:00:20] am so frustrating.

Christina Phillips: [00:00:24] I like the thunder. It's a nice effect.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:27] Okay.

Christina Phillips: [00:00:28] Also, for what it's worth, I'm wearing two sets of headphones [00:00:30] right now. All right. Hello, Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:36] Hello, Christina.

Christina Phillips: [00:00:38] This is Civics 101, and today [00:00:40] we are talking about the Alien Enemies Act.

Archival: [00:00:43] President will invoke a 227 year old wartime law.

Archival: [00:00:47] And we have learned that it appears he could be invoking [00:00:50] the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Archival: [00:00:53] You must leave to the federal agencies this duty of handling all questions [00:01:00] Actions concerning aliens. This will prevent injustice.

Christina Phillips: [00:01:05] And so we are just talking about the Alien Enemies Act today, because [00:01:10] I think it's pretty fascinating to talk about a law that has only been used during the War of 1812. World War one, World War two, and now [00:01:20] in 2025.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:22] And I assume you are referring to the Trump administration's invocation of this act?

Christina Phillips: [00:01:28] Yes, I am, and our next episode [00:01:30] will be all about that. But for today, I just want to establish what the Alien Enemies act is, why it exists in the first place, and [00:01:40] how it's been used. So we don't usually read the text of a law on this show [00:01:50] because laws are rarely easy to read, much less listen to someone read. But I want to do that today because we've been hearing over and over from our guests that we should just start with the text. [00:02:00] So, are you ready? Pause for thunder.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:06] I'm just letting Mother Nature speak. I [00:02:10] am ready. I also feel like we have to jump in here and say that alien right is a legal term for non-citizens. And even though this term has [00:02:20] been around for a long time and it comes from Latin, it is also a word that people debate and they say dehumanizes non-citizens, which, given [00:02:30] the other common definition of alien. Yeah, that makes sense.

Christina Phillips: [00:02:35] It does indeed. And for what it's worth, prior administrations and other organizations [00:02:40] had or have tried to move away from using the word alien and replacing it with non-citizen. But you're right. The word alien has been used in case law for longer than [00:02:50] the United States has existed, and is being used in case law today. Okay. So the text we're going to read, the first part of the Alien Enemies Act, known as section 21, because that [00:03:00] is the meaty part and I'm just going to read the first few sentences, but please read the whole thing if you can. It's actually not that long. Whenever there is a [00:03:10] declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted [00:03:20] or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the president makes public proclamation of the event [00:03:30] all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of 14 years and upward, who shall be [00:03:40] within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed [00:03:50] as alien enemies.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:53] Wait a minute. You say shawl?

Christina Phillips: [00:03:56] Shawl?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:58] That's so. Wait. That's so [00:04:00] British of you.

Christina Phillips: [00:04:01] Is it Chow?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:02] Well, I think it must just be like a New Hampshire thing.

Christina Phillips: [00:04:06] Oh, no. I think that's a I listen to a lot of audiobooks.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:11] Oh, [00:04:10] no, I honestly, I love it, I love it. I think you should leave it.

Christina Phillips: [00:04:16] Okay. Shawl. I want to call it a couple things here. [00:04:20] So the conditions that have to be met is that we're in a declared war or an invasion by a foreign country or nation, or the threat of an invasion [00:04:30] or predatory incursion by that nation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:33] And in that circumstance, people in the US who are not naturalized, meaning they are not US citizens [00:04:40] who are aged 14 years or older can be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed.

Christina Phillips: [00:04:47] Yes, exactly. And it's important to point [00:04:50] out that the act doesn't specifically say that the president or the administration must uphold these non-citizens rights to due process [00:05:00] or habeas corpus, or any other individual rights found in the Constitution.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:06] But it also doesn't say that the president can disregard the [00:05:10] Constitution. Right?

Christina Phillips: [00:05:12] Right. And that becomes important as the legal understanding of who is guaranteed constitutional rights. And what those rights [00:05:20] entail gets more expansive over time after this act is passed.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:24] Okay, so reading this, I'm seeing a lot of what seems to me like ambiguity. And [00:05:30] also, this does seem like a lot of power to give a president. So what was going on in 1798 that led Congress to pass this law in the first place? [00:05:40]

Christina Phillips: [00:05:43] We will talk about that right after a little break. And also, this is just a shameless ask I have for people [00:05:50] listening to this. I would like to talk to people who know something about the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, and I'm also looking for anyone who has been an inspector [00:06:00] general or worked for an inspector general's office in the federal government. So if any of those things is you, send us an email to Civics 101 at nhpr.org. I'm going [00:06:10] to try this out and see if it actually helps me find some people, because we've never tried it before. I don't think.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:15] That is brilliant. I'm going to start doing that. We're [00:06:30] back. We are talking about the Alien Enemies Act. And Christina, just before the break, I [00:06:40] asked you what was going on in 1798 that led Congress to pass this act. So what was going on?

Christina Phillips: [00:06:49] Okay, [00:06:50] 1798. We are still pretty fresh off the end of the Revolutionary War. We still have a bunch of war debts to other countries who helped us out like [00:07:00] France. And after a few years, the government sort of stopped paying those debts.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:07] Okay, so not very Lannister of us. That's not a [00:07:10] not great.

Christina Phillips: [00:07:11] How dare you invoke the Game of Thrones?

Tyrion Lannister: [00:07:15] Lannister always pays his debts.

Christina Phillips: [00:07:19] So this [00:07:20] lands us in what is called the quasi war, which was never an actual declared war. But at one point, France sees some US [00:07:30] ships, and then French privateers were attacking US merchant vessels, mostly in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean and the US, which doesn't have a ton of money and doesn't [00:07:40] really have a strong organized navy, is kind of scrambling a little bit.

Liza Goitein: [00:07:45] Well, so the fear was that there might be people during wartime who were loyal [00:07:50] to the enemy nations and could sort of be a fifth column within the United States.

Christina Phillips: [00:07:55] This is Liza Goitein. She is the senior director of the Liberty and National Security [00:08:00] Program at the Brennan Center for justice.

Liza Goitein: [00:08:06] And a really important point is that at the time, there really wasn't [00:08:10] an alternative in either the criminal law or immigration law to deal with people inside the country that were national security threats. And certainly [00:08:20] in terms of having sort of federal law enforcement resources, even to sort of detect and respond to national security threats within the United States that [00:08:30] just wasn't there in any significant respect.

Christina Phillips: [00:08:33] And the US Marshals Service was the first federal law enforcement department. But we only got that in 1789, right? [00:08:40]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:40] There's no like Department of Homeland Security, for example.

Christina Phillips: [00:08:43] Yeah, we barely had an organized military, much less a national security team, a national intelligence team. And [00:08:50] when it comes to immigration law, we've got the first naturalization acts of 1790 and 1795 and not much else. And [00:09:00] for what it's worth, the Naturalization Act provided a pathway to citizenship for free white people who had lived in the United States for five years and had good moral character. [00:09:10] So other than naturalization at that time, there was no asylum process. There was no green cards, no work visas. There's no immigration courts. None of that. [00:09:20]

Liza Goitein: [00:09:20] And at the same time, you know, we didn't have the same conceptions of constitutional rights. And even the law of war was was in a very different place back then. So you had this combination [00:09:30] of not having the same rights and also not having the same ability to ferret out national security threats. And so what they came up with was this very blunt [00:09:40] hammer, where people who were natives of or born in an enemy nation during wartime could just summarily be detained or deported without any [00:09:50] sort of evidence or inquiry, even into whether they were disloyal to the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:55] So this was like.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:56] A giant panic button that cast a wide [00:10:00] net because we hadn't come up with any other processes yet, or invented the law enforcement jobs that could do the way, more nuanced work of actually figuring [00:10:10] out who might be a legitimate threat.

Christina Phillips: [00:10:16] Yeah, and we're still licking our wounds from one war in the midst [00:10:20] of another war that wasn't a war. And we're in debt and still very, very new as a country. So we're worried about France and French people in the US. And [00:10:30] we pass four laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which.

Liza Goitein: [00:10:35] Was a very controversial legislative package even at the time. Uh, and the Alien [00:10:40] Enemies Act is is the only one that actually remains. The Alien Enemies Act was the authority that would apply if this undeclared naval conflict with France escalated [00:10:50] into a perfect or total war. That was the terminology through a congressional declaration of war or through a French ground assault. [00:11:00] So it was sort of contingency planning for if this naval conflict turned into something bigger. At the same time, Congress also enacted the [00:11:10] Alien Friends Act, which was the peacetime counterpart, basically, for if the conflict did not escalate in that way. And [00:11:20] in fact, it did not escalate in that way. And so the alien enemies act didn't end up being used at the time, but it was very clear that this was sort of the wartime version of [00:11:30] how the president could treat non-U.S. citizens in a situation that, you know, for the Alien Enemies Act rose to the level of actual [00:11:40] war or otherwise it would go through the Alien Friends Act.

Christina Phillips: [00:11:44] And then there was the Sedition Act, which criminalized false or malicious statements about the government and a new Naturalization [00:11:50] Act that changed residency requirements for naturalized citizens. And it upped it from five years to 14. And as Liza said, everything but the Alien [00:12:00] Enemies Act was repealed or it expired by 1802.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:04] But the Alien Enemies Act still stands. So how has it been used since? [00:12:10]

Archival: [00:12:12] Neither the army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea of taking men, women and children from their homes, their shops and their farms. [00:12:20] So the military and civilian agencies alike, determined to do the job as a democracy, should, with real consideration for the people involved.

Christina Phillips: [00:12:30] Okay, [00:12:30] we've got the War of 1812 where President James Madison targeted British nationals. We don't exactly know how many people were detained or deported [00:12:40] from that one. And then we've got World War One. President Woodrow Wilson imposed the act first on male German nationals, and then expanded [00:12:50] it to include German Austrians and women of both nationalities. It was enacted in World War Two in order to detain Japanese, [00:13:00] German and Italian nationals.

Archival: [00:13:02] Our west coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese [00:13:10] ancestry, two thirds of them American citizens, one third aliens.

Liza Goitein: [00:13:15] The people who were interned under the Alien Enemies Act were basically [00:13:20] 30,000 non-U.S. citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. The internment of Japanese Americans during World [00:13:30] War Two was not under the Alien Enemies Act that was under an executive order, basically a claim of inherent constitutional power by President Roosevelt. It's actually generally [00:13:40] referred to as incarceration. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War Two was not done under the Alien Enemies Act, because the Alien Enemies Act only applies to people who [00:13:50] are not citizens of the United States.

Christina Phillips: [00:13:52] And actually, I found out that there was a few thousand additional people from Latin American countries who were actually deported into the United States [00:14:00] so that they could be detained. So other countries were sending their Japanese, Italian or German nationals to the United States for detention. And then Liza [00:14:10] pointed out that in the years since the law was passed, our legal understanding of how people can be treated specifically in wartime and more broadly, anyone within the United States [00:14:20] is different than it was in 1798 or even during these three previous wars. And this comes down to due process.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:29] To be clear, when [00:14:30] we're talking about due process, we're talking about giving a person the opportunity after they have been detained to know the charges against them and file a petition to the court asking [00:14:40] the court to review those charges, question law enforcement, determine if their detention or deportation is lawful.

Christina Phillips: [00:14:48] Yes, exactly.

Liza Goitein: [00:14:49] This really goes [00:14:50] to the question of what rights people in this country have in wartime. In 1798, so-called enemy aliens really had no rights whatsoever. So there wasn't even a lot of pushback [00:15:00] on that score when the Alien Enemies Act was enacted. We have a very different conception of rights in wartime today. Congress has passed several [00:15:10] laws providing reparations and apologies for people who were interned under the Alien Enemies Act. During that time period, and also since [00:15:20] World War II, there's been a revolution in our understanding of the rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution. Courts have now made clear that due process and equal protection apply even [00:15:30] in wartime, and the modern concepts of these rights are much broader and more robust than they were 80 years ago.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:49] I [00:15:40] mean, [00:15:50] this makes a lot of sense. Christina. We are in a really substantially different legal landscape today than we were in 1798 98 or during World War one, even [00:16:00] during World War two. Right. We are just in a country that has different, more robust, more complex laws pertaining to non-citizens.

Christina Phillips: [00:16:09] I was thinking about [00:16:10] this when I was thinking about what things were like in 1798. As far as who is included in constitutional protections. People who were enslaved were not granted [00:16:20] constitutional protections. In many cases, women were not granted many constitutional rights. So even on in that level, like our understanding of who gets constitutional [00:16:30] rights has evolved quite a bit. And that includes people who are not US citizens. So there's a case in 1903 known as the Japanese [00:16:40] immigrant case, where the Supreme Court said that if someone entered the United States lawfully and then was subject to deportation, they had a right to challenge that deportation in court. [00:16:50] And then over the course of the 20th century, there have been a number of cases that extended those constitutional rights to people without lawful status.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:59] So [00:17:00] bringing it back around to wartime. You said the Alien Enemies Act had not been used since World War Two. But you mean not until now? [00:17:10]

Christina Phillips: [00:17:11] Yes.

Liza Goitein: [00:17:15] I mean, I would say this law had been confined to the dustbin of history [00:17:20] before President Trump, um, you know, dusted it off and and revitalized it.

Christina Phillips: [00:17:37] In [00:17:30] March, President Trump officially invoked the [00:17:40] Alien Enemies Act via presidential proclamation. We're going to talk about how Trump has revitalized the act in 2025, what he's doing with it, how he's interpreting [00:17:50] it, and what the courts have said about it. That's all coming up in part two, which will drop in your podcast feed soon, or depending on when you listen to this, it might already be there. This [00:18:20] episode was produced by [00:18:30] me, Christina Phillips and edited by Hannah McCarthy. Our team includes Rebecca LaVoie, our executive producer, Marina Henke, our producer and host, nick Capodice. Civics [00:18:40] 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

How President Trump is trying to change elections

In March, President Trump signed an executive order that promises to preserve and protect the integrity of American elections. The data shows the integrity of our election system is intact despite the claims of many politicians and the perception of many voters. So what is the president trying to change about a system that isn't broken? Who will it affect and how much will it cost them? Finally, while Congress and the States are constitutionally-empowered to make election law, the president is not. So... can he?

Our guide to this executive order is Jason Carter of the Carter Center.


Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:01] Hannah McCarthy here.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:03] Nick Capodice there.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:05] Civics 101 everywhere. We've [00:00:10] got an executive order episode for you today, my friends. This is not the first. Probably won't be the last. And I'll tell you what. This one is a real "can [00:00:20] the president do that" doozy.

President Trump: [00:00:22] Election fraud. You've heard the term. We'll end it. Hopefully. At least this [00:00:30] will go a long way toward ending it. There are other steps that we will be taking in the next in the coming weeks, and we think we'll be able to end up getting fair elections. [00:00:40]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:40] This order Preserving and Protecting the integrity of American elections was issued March 25th.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:46] I'm just going to jump in here and say, you should go back and listen [00:00:50] to our episode on the save act, if you haven't already. It's called fixing a problem that doesn't exist.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:56] It sure is. Before we get into the details of this executive order, I'd like [00:01:00] to introduce or reintroduce you to Jason Carter?

Jason Carter: [00:01:03] Sure. So my name is Jason Carter. I am a lawyer in Atlanta, and I'm also the chair of the Carter Center [00:01:10] Board of Trustees.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:11] For those of you who don't know or didn't listen to our Save Act episode, Jason Carter, is that Carter? Late President Jimmy Carter's grandson. [00:01:20] The Carter Center does a lot of international humanitarian work, including observing and offering feedback on democratic elections. And recently [00:01:30] they started to look at our country's election system. Two.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:33] Yeah. Speaking of integrity, that is something that Jason says the Carter Center is working on. Not so much the integrity of American [00:01:40] elections, which he says we already have more like the integrity of our democracy. Democracy requires trust. So they're working on that.

Jason Carter: [00:01:49] One of the [00:01:50] things that we have found is you have to have trusted messengers on all sides, right? And so one of the things that the Carter Center has spent some real time doing is building [00:02:00] out Its network of individuals from across Partizan lines, from across geographic lines, to talk to folks in their communities. Right. One of [00:02:10] the things that the Carter Center has always been good at, and that my grandparents believed in their hearts, is that neighbors talking to neighbors is going to be more effective than folks [00:02:20] talking on TV or elsewise, right? I mean, that's where trust really comes from, is these communities of care that we all exist in, in our normal lives.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:28] Hang on, what does Jason [00:02:30] mean when he says building a network of people talking in communities?

Jason Carter: [00:02:34] Sometimes they're politicians, but sometimes they're not, right? Sometimes they are just individual community [00:02:40] leaders. You know, there's a good reason, as a former politician myself, that that people don't trust politicians because they feel like they're in the system and in the system in [00:02:50] order to win. Um, but there's a lot of other people who care about that system and have the ability to convey messages that don't necessarily have to be that some of them are journalists. We've done a lot with [00:03:00] lawyers to make sure that they understand what people's rights are and how to approach these things in court without sort of, you know, damning the system and continuing to build trust. And so [00:03:10] that's that's where we are. There's a large network of people out there that have the ability to really affect this and, and to rebuild the trust that we're missing.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:18] So Jason calls these democracy [00:03:20] resilience networks.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:22] Hannah, you must know what this reminds me of.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:25] Actually I do. I told Jason about it.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:28] Well, I'm gonna just open this mindmeld [00:03:30] up to the listener. Uh, everyone, what I'm reminded of here are the four Minutemen during World War One, the CPI, the Committee on Public Information.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:39] Aka the government's [00:03:40] wartime propaganda office.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:41] Right. The CPI organized volunteers in states across the country to stand up at movie theaters, churches, labor [00:03:50] union meetings, you name it, to give short speeches encouraging their fellow Americans to get behind the war effort.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:57] Right. You know, there were people in the community. They were trusted. [00:04:00] They were speaking on behalf of America. The difference here being, of course, that this is an attempt to get people behind democracy itself, get them to believe in it, trust [00:04:10] it by hearing from the people who know it well or even work within it. Okay, so that is in part what the Carter Center is doing. Why are they doing that? [00:04:20] Because trust in the system has eroded, due in part to people suggesting it cannot be trusted in its current state. And this brings me to the subject of our episode [00:04:30] President Trump's new executive order preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections.

Jason Carter: [00:04:41] In [00:04:40] this instance, you have the president of the United States making his own view and taking his own power to say, this is how I want this election [00:04:50] run. That is a problem, isn't that?

Nick Capodice: [00:04:53] I mean, Hannah, the Constitution leaves elections up to the states and a little bit to Congress, [00:05:00] not the president.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:02] Yeah, we're gonna get to that. So this executive order comes with a pretty long preamble, if you will. It starts off with, quote, [00:05:10] despite pioneering self-government, the United States now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections employed by modern developed nations as well [00:05:20] as those still developing.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:22] If I may translate.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:23] Sure.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:24] Pioneering self-government. So that's basically saying we did democracy earlier [00:05:30] than other countries. The United States now fails. And this one is interesting because, he says now, implying that in the past we were not failing to enforce basic [00:05:40] and necessary election protections. That kind of feels like he's saying this should be obvious and easy. People employed by modern developed nations as [00:05:50] well as those still developing. So basically other people are doing it and we're not. And that's bad. I am also glad to see the president use the term developing [00:06:00] nations as opposed to other ones he's used in the past because we do not swear on this show.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:05] Yeah, so I did think it was interesting, to say the least, that this order references [00:06:10] other countries and it does so by name. Trump brings up election protocol in India, Germany, Sweden and a handful of other nations. [00:06:20] I asked Jason about this. Like why kick it off this way?

Jason Carter: [00:06:25] It says to me that the president was nervous about what he was doing. [00:06:30] It says to me that the president didn't feel comfortable just saying, I can do this. And so he he cited Sweden, he cited Germany. And what he did is he picked the most restrictive aspects [00:06:40] of those those democracies ability to to count votes and what they do right, to make it the most restrictive possible.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:48] Wait, like what?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:49] Aspects like [00:06:50] how India uses a centralized biometric database to verify voter registration eligibility.

Speaker5: [00:06:56] Whoa. Wait. What?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:59] Fingerprints and [00:07:00] iris scans.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:01] To prove you are who you say you are.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:04] Yeah. Trump references how Sweden limits mail in voting to people who are abroad or aboard [00:07:10] a ship in foreign waters. And in either case, you need two witnesses.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:14] Witnesses to watch you vote.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:16] Yes.

Jason Carter: [00:07:17] And really, the scary thing about that is that we're not [00:07:20] looking at Sweden in terms of a balance of how the election is run.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:25] So in other words, we're not looking at Sweden for ideas on how to make elections more fair, for example, [00:07:30] or more democratic.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:32] Right. And to be clear, Sweden regularly rates among the most democratic nations on the planet [00:07:40] for everything from civil liberties to political rights. Its elections are considered broadly free and fair. To cite Sweden for a voting [00:07:50] restriction, as opposed to what makes it a healthier democracy than the United States might just be telling. Jason sees this executive [00:08:00] orders references to things like this as a way to justify what's coming next.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:06] I almost don't want to ask this. Hanna, what is [00:08:10] coming next?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:10] All right. This executive order says the following. Ready?

Nick Capodice: [00:08:15] Almost never. But this is my job.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:19] One major [00:08:20] thing is that this order is trying to change the federal voting form to require documentary proof of citizenship.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:27] Huh? Isn't that what the Save [00:08:30] act is trying to do?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:31] Yes and no. The save act again. Listen to our episode on it to learn more. Would require proof of citizenship to register [00:08:40] to vote. Full stop. It's Congress's attempt to change an election rule in the US, which they are constitutionally empowered to do. This executive order is [00:08:50] commanding an independent federal agency called the EAC, the Election Assistance Commission, to change a mail voter registration form. The big difference [00:09:00] here is that the president is not explicitly constitutionally empowered to do that, which is part of the reason. A federal judge blocked this part of the [00:09:10] order. That same judge blocked another part of the order that tells the federal voter registration agencies to assess the citizenship of people enrolled in public assistance [00:09:20] programs before they give them a registration form. That judge's reasoning was that this is an overreach of presidential powers. Now, [00:09:30] this order packs in a lot more than that, so I'm going to keep going. It orders the EAC to re certify voting systems.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:38] And what does that mean?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:40] Okay. [00:09:40] In some states and some listeners will be very familiar with this. You vote using a touch screen and then get a paper printout of your vote. Now that piece of paper has a [00:09:50] QR code or a barcode on it. And that code is then scanned and your vote is counted.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:56] And Trump wants the machines that do this to be recertified. [00:10:00] So is he just telling the EAC to give them all a checkup.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:04] Nope. We have voluntary voting system guidelines in the US. Keep [00:10:10] voluntary in mind. We are going to come back to that. Trump is ordering the EAC to change those guidelines, specifically to say that states cannot use [00:10:20] the barcode thing anymore, except for accessibility purposes.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:24] Then how can the EAC recertify those machines?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:27] They can't. Not as they are right [00:10:30] now.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:30] Aha! What am I missing here?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:33] The states or counties that use barcodes either have to update their machines or replace them. In Georgia, [00:10:40] for example, where Jason Carter is from, and I promise we will hear from him again soon. The whole state uses this system. The cost to change that system is estimated at around $66 [00:10:50] million. Georgia's Senate, by the way, had already voted to ban their QR code system, but they did not allocate money for it.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:59] But why exactly? [00:11:00] Like, what is wrong with the barcodes.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:03] This barcode system has had naysayers across the political spectrum. But in 2020, conspiracy [00:11:10] theorists claimed without evidence, that these barcodes had been manipulated. The idea is that the machine itself is hacked and the vote will go [00:11:20] to another candidate.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:21] You know, you could have just said 2020 and left it at that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:23] Anna, election officials say that the system is secure, accurate and they regularly test it. But [00:11:30] a lot of those same officials want the barcodes gone because so many voters don't trust them.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:36] And this executive order forces that action. [00:11:40]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:40] Forces that action. And in no way indicates that the federal government will help pay for it.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:44] And reinforces the idea that this system is not secure.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:49] Yes. There's [00:11:50] more. This order does not say the government will help pay for these changes. Election stuff is expensive for states. They often [00:12:00] rely on grants from the federal government to help them pay for it. And this order. Nick tells the government to prioritize states who comply when they're passing [00:12:10] out grants. In other words, no money to help you comply and the threat of no money if you don't.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:16] So states don't absolutely have to comply.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:19] This is more [00:12:20] like a guidelines than an actual rule situation. It's voluntary remember. And how do you get states to do something voluntarily?

Nick Capodice: [00:12:28] Anna you asked them if they [00:12:30] want all that pretty, pretty money.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:32] Yeah. I'm going to bring Jason back in for a moment here.

Jason Carter: [00:12:35] There's only a certain number of ways that the president has to enforce that [00:12:40] executive order. And so what the president is saying is I'm actually intent on executing on this order. The power that he has is the power of the purse [00:12:50] at this point. And so he wants to use that power and bring it to bear to get to change the rules of the game.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:55] But the president doesn't have the power of the purse.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:58] That's what I said. And [00:13:00] Jason knows that. He's more referencing the fact that this order firmly suggests withholding federal funds for states that do not comply with it. Now, [00:13:10] is the president allowed to say who does or does not get money?

Jason Carter: [00:13:14] So, I mean, that's a good question, right? I mean, constitutionally speaking, the Supreme Court has to say whether the president [00:13:20] can do this or not. So, you know, in my view, the Constitution requires the elections to be run by the states. There is some role for the federal government, as we've already discussed, because the federal [00:13:30] government stepped in, for example, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Nvra other other rules that the federal government has helped to expand and make it easier for people [00:13:40] to vote. Can the president do this without Congress? I don't think so. Because of what you described in terms of whether Congress has the ability to Congress, [00:13:50] in fact, to your point, holds the purse strings under the Constitution.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:53] So basically we'll see. All right. Moving on. This order tells the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government [00:14:00] Efficiency, aka Doge administrator, aka Elon Musk, to review voter files and voter list maintenance records alongside immigration databases.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:10] Is [00:14:10] it boring if I keep asking why it isn't?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:13] But I am going to give us all a quick break just in case it is.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:19] Before that [00:14:20] break, unless the listeners think me capable of a single boring act can never happen. A reminder that Hannah and I wrote a book, and that book is there to tell you all [00:14:30] about how things are supposed to happen. It is called A User's Guide to Democracy How America Works, and it is a reminder of what democracy is. Isn't that something? [00:14:40] You can get it wherever books are sold.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:56] We're [00:14:50] back. Nick, before the break, you were asking why? [00:15:00] Why would Trump want Homeland Security and Elon Musk to review voter lists and immigration databases.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:06] I mean, I can guess Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:08] Together with the attorney general, [00:15:10] it is all about finding and stopping noncitizen registration and voting. Listen to the Save Act episode for more on that. I'm not going to get into it all now. All right. [00:15:20] Moving on. The order says states that count ballots received after Election Day will be penalized. Basically, we'll have funds withheld.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:28] Isn't this something that happens all the [00:15:30] time? Hannah, this is why we can't know the final ballot tally on election Day. Mail in ballots have to be postmarked by Election day, but it takes the Postal Service a while [00:15:40] to deliver them because they haven't invented teleportation yet.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:43] 18 states currently allow for counting mail in ballots if they arrive after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked [00:15:50] by Election Day. Now, the order says, quote, this is like allowing persons who arrive three days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared [00:16:00] to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd, Served, unquote.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:05] Well, that would be absurd. Uh, but mail in ballots aren't like that at [00:16:10] all.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:10] They are not at all. All right, here we go. The order asks the attorney general to create information [00:16:20] sharing agreements with state election officials. The idea is to alert the DOJ to all suspected violations of election laws.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:29] If I've learned one [00:16:30] thing from police procedurals, it's that state law enforcement tends to say something snarky when the feds show up.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:36] I'll be honest, I am nowhere near an expert on the machinations and legality [00:16:40] of state federal information sharing, especially when it comes to criminal investigations. But I do know that this kind of information sharing is often largely voluntary, especially if [00:16:50] we are talking about quote unquote, suspected violations before we know whether a federal crime has actually been committed. I also know that states push back against this kind of thing on [00:17:00] the grounds of privacy concerns and resisting government coercion.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:04] It's federalism, baby.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:05] Yeah, and this is another one where Trump tells the AG to consider withholding funds. If [00:17:10] a state says no way, no how. Okay. The order also bans non-citizens from being involved in administering federal elections.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:18] To non-citizens [00:17:20] administer elections.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:21] Most states already have laws prohibiting anyone who isn't a qualified, aka citizen voter from being involved. This part of the order [00:17:30] says that non-citizens cannot access election equipment, ballots, or any other relevant materials used in the conduct of any federal election. So on its face, that means [00:17:40] non-citizens cannot be poll workers or work for election agencies. But pro-democracy groups are already raising concerns about non-citizens who, for example, [00:17:50] work at companies that make election materials or who work in buildings that become polling places on election day. We're talking schools or city halls. Does [00:18:00] physical proximity to polling places count? Unclear. Last thing the [00:18:10] order tells the AG and the Treasury to prioritize prosecuting foreign nationals who donate to campaigns.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:16] Isn't that already illegal?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:18] Yep.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:18] All right.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:19] All right, [00:18:20] back to Jason Carter. So Jason looks at the save act again. Go check out that episode to understand what I'm talking about. And then he looks at this executive order and he's thinking about [00:18:30] democracy. And here is how he sees it.

Jason Carter: [00:18:33] It's one thing to have the federal government do a power grab over our election system. It is an entirely different [00:18:40] thing to have a single human being who's the current leader of the country, making a direct power grab around the elections when the president of the United States, and this is [00:18:50] true in any country, when they start to say I, as the president, have the right to change or address these rules without the input from Congress, without taking [00:19:00] it to the states, that's very scary.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:02] Now, Hannah, I'm curious about whether this has happened before. Have any other presidents signed executive orders on elections [00:19:10] before?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:10] I did a little research on this one in recent history. Bill Clinton signed an order to help with the implementation of the National Voter Registration Act. That is the act [00:19:20] that lets us register to vote when we get our license and tell states they have to accept mail in ballots. Barack Obama had an order establishing the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. [00:19:30] It was temporary. It assessed our then system and made recommendations to improve online registration, poll access, outdated machines. Biden had [00:19:40] an order. Trump got rid of it to facilitate voter registration and education.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:44] Did you find anything like this, though?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:47] It did not. So [00:19:50] look, I already told you that a judge blocked some parts of this order, but many parts of it remain [00:20:00] up in the air. Can the president order all these executive agencies to target non-citizens, withhold federal funding, decertify voting [00:20:10] machines, create new standards and high costs for states. Well he did. Will election officials comply? That remains [00:20:20] to be seen. What I do know is that we have an elections clause in the Constitution. I know it leaves the time, place and [00:20:30] manner of elections up to the states. I know it gives Congress the power to make and change federal elections regulations. And I know [00:20:40] that the president is not in the elections clause at all.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:45] I'm an executive order, and I pretty much just happen. [00:20:50]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:50] All the more reason to pay attention.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:52] Is that it, Hannah?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:53] Till it isn't. That [00:21:10] does it for this episode. It was made by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Rebecca LaVoie is our executive producer, Christina Phillips is our [00:21:20] senior producer, and Marina Henke is our producer. Special thanks to Taylor Quimby for his edits on this episode. He is the executive producer of another NPR podcast. It's wonderful. It's called [00:21:30] Outside/In. Go check it out. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound. You can find everything we have ever made at our website, civics101podcast.org. And while you're there, [00:21:40] you can ask us a question. We might just make an episode in reply. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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Fixing a problem that doesn't exist

The SAVE Act passed the House in April, 2025. As it awaits consideration in Congress, we spoke with Jason Carter from the Carter Center. Yes, like that Carter. Jason is asking why Congress is working on a vanishingly rare problem: noncitizen voting. The SAVE Act, if it becomes law, will require additional proof of citizenship for all Americans seeking to register -- or reregister -- to vote. The goal? To stop all noncitizens from voting -- which rarely happens.


Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:00] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:02] I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:03] Nick, you know what i've been singing to myself a lot lately?

Nick Capodice: [00:00:11] Oh, [00:00:10] well, uh, it could be any number of things. Hannah. Uh, is it Stephen Sondheim?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:17] It's not always Sondheim, Nick.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:19] It usually [00:00:20] is.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:20] What I have been singing a lot lately is I have confidence from The Sound of Music, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to sing it here for copyright reasons. However, [00:00:30] the line that keeps coming to me is, uh, all I trust I leave my heart to all I trust becomes my own. I have confidence [00:00:40] in confidence alone.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:43] I wish you could sing it. I really do, uh, that Julie Andrews is a treasure.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:48] She is. Uh. But you know what [00:00:50] I think it is for me, Nick, we know that a lot of people say they have lost trust. They have lost confidence in the whole lot [00:01:00] of it. The whole system, all the people, be they sitting on Capitol Hill or down the street from us. And to that I say phooey. Where did you get that one from?

Nick Capodice: [00:01:09] Experience? [00:01:10]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:10] Yeah. Well, sure. Um. But, Nick, what if that experience isn't what we think it is? What if that mistrust is misplaced? [00:01:20] What if. Nick, we had confidence that spring will come again? Maybe it's even spring right now.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:28] It's literally spring right now, Hannah. [00:01:30]

Maria: [00:01:30] Oh, let's see if I can make it easier.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:37] Here's Jason Carter.

Jason Carter: [00:01:38] In the United States [00:01:40] and everywhere around the world. Democracy depends on trust.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:42] Jason Carter, as in Carter. Carter.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:46] As in Carter. Carter, the grandson of the late President [00:01:50] Jimmy Carter. Jason is a lawyer and the chair of the Carter Center.

Jason Carter: [00:01:54] Since it was founded, the Carter Center has done work in over 80 countries. And that work has been both [00:02:00] in terms of peace building, a lot of which is democracy and human rights, rule of law, conflict resolution, and also in health, which is a disease eradication [00:02:10] health system, strengthening, doing the work on the ground in these places that we believe builds up people, alleviates human suffering and and draws [00:02:20] people closer together. We've also observed over 120 elections in more than 40 countries.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:27] Okay. The disease eradication thing is pretty straightforward. [00:02:30] I mean, it's a gargantuan goal, but I understand it. I'm not sure what observing elections means.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:37] Right. Okay. So observing elections, [00:02:40] people from the Carter Center get invited to watch the election process in other countries. The idea is they will check out voter registration, election law, the [00:02:50] election itself. And then they offer feedback for nations that are trying to do democracy. Right. Why? Because the Carter Center can be neutral about it. [00:03:00] Basically, they are not invested in the results, but in the process. And because they come from the United States, a successful democracy. [00:03:10]

Nick Capodice: [00:03:10] Uh.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:11] Way ahead of you.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:12] All right.

Jason Carter: [00:03:13] We realized that as we go out and talk about democracy as an American organization, um, we have to do [00:03:20] that with real credibility. And we were looking around both at the way the world was looking at American democracy, the way that American democracy was projecting itself [00:03:30] out into the world. And we realized that both we needed to get involved. For the Carter Center's own credibility.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:38] The Carter Center spends a lot of its time observing [00:03:40] other countries elections, not observing the United States elections until now. We started with trust, right? [00:03:50] That is what I am thinking about right now. So is Jason.

Jason Carter: [00:03:54] There's a variety of things that have happened over the course of the last several decades in the United States [00:04:00] that have eroded that trust in the election system. And democracy depends on trust.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:08] Right. I mean, when you're living in a country [00:04:10] where there is a nationwide call to stop the steal, a belief that elections are fraudulent, full of bad actors and lawbreakers, not actually [00:04:20] the democratic process they purport to be.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:23] And we are living in that country.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:24] We are. This is a big part of the reason people say democracy is in trouble because [00:04:30] people don't believe in it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:32] Yeah. Here's how I'm looking at it. America is never Neverland. Democracy is fairies. And every time you say you don't [00:04:40] believe in fairies, a fairy dies. Where did we get the idea that fairies don't exist? A whole bunch of Captain Hook's who grew up stopped believing in [00:04:50] the thing that makes this world beautiful, and want to convince all of us to stop believing in it, to start clapping.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:56] I do believe in fairies. I do, I do.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:59] Belief [00:05:00] shapes reality, right? So the Carter Center is looking for ways to bring trust and confidence back. I'm mixing metaphors, a mix of movies, but I don't [00:05:10] care.

Jason Carter: [00:05:10] And so we are looking at a variety of different ways to to both reach out to people that are alienated from the system and also use the leaders that exist now to help increase [00:05:20] that trust. And that's our focus. What is it that we have? What are the principles for trusted elections, and what are the ways that we can get those principles out into the United States to to make sure [00:05:30] that we're doing things right, you have to do things correctly, and you also have to be seen to do them correctly. Right? The fact that we have a strong election system, the fact that [00:05:40] we have a very decentralized election system in the United States, essentially run by the 50 states and some territories, you know, the fact that in Georgia, for example, [00:05:50] where I live, you know, we have a county election boards, it makes it very difficult, very difficult to steal an election, for election, for example, it makes it almost impossible [00:06:00] to have any significant fraud that can affect the outcome of an election, right? That can thwart the will of the people.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:07] One useful tactic in making sure that [00:06:10] we do not believe in democracy can actually be pretending that what you are doing is protecting democracy. Like Captain Hook double crossing Peter Pan, for [00:06:20] example, you write a law that you say will make our elections safer.

Archival: [00:06:25] I rise in support of the Save act. The [00:06:30] American people are done messing around with a weak kneed system.

Archival: [00:06:34] The Save act would cripple American election.

Archival: [00:06:36] The Save act is required if we're going to have election integrity. [00:06:40]

Archival: [00:06:40] I rise today in strong opposition.

Archival: [00:06:42] I rise in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

Jason Carter: [00:06:46] You know, an election law like the Save act will come in. [00:06:50] And the purpose of it is from the beginning is based on something that that is solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:58] All right, the save act. I have heard [00:07:00] about this one. This is the thing that passed the house in April.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:03] Yeah. And it's now waiting on Senate consideration. We're recording this episode in May 2025, and it was about a month [00:07:10] ago that the House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

Jason Carter: [00:07:16] The Save act, in essence, is something that purports [00:07:20] to address, uh, different types of election fraud, most particularly fraud by voting by non-citizens.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:27] I'll tell you what the Save act will require of voters in [00:07:30] just a moment. We will also have a whole episode on President Trump's executive order about elections. But first, a reminder that noncitizen voting in American elections is already illegal. [00:07:40] It is also incredibly rare. I decided to look at the data published by one of the think tanks that has actively lobbied for the Save act, the Heritage Foundation.

Donald Trump: [00:07:49] Thank [00:07:50] you to the Heritage Foundation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:52] They say their database contains many confirmed instances of noncitizen non-citizen voters. It contains 79 [00:08:00] people who have done so, 79 people over four decades, in everything from school board elections to presidential. And [00:08:10] I know this because I read every report.

Jason Carter: [00:08:14] Those people get prosecuted. There it is. It is. You know, they're punished with both crimes and imprisonment. And [00:08:20] so it is we have a very robust system of laws that address what happens when someone is caught with voter fraud. And we also have an enormous [00:08:30] number of people who are out there looking to find this type of voter fraud, right? I mean, folks are out in a variety of contexts. You [00:08:40] know, we have very, very good surveillance.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:42] We should also point out here that if you're caught voting as a non-citizen, you could face deportation.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:48] Yes. So I was trying to [00:08:50] think of something comparable to this. Like, what's another federal crime that is nonviolent? But if it's committed by many people, can have a serious impact on the democratic system. [00:09:00] So a thought about the tens of billions of dollars we miss out on every year because of tax evasion.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:06] How many people commit that crime?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:08] That data was a little more elusive. [00:09:10] But the IRS estimates about a million people.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:13] A million per year.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:16] Per year. So we have laws about taxes [00:09:20] and tax evasion. We prosecute people for tax evasion. Not nearly as many, relatively speaking, as we do for noncitizen voting. Collecting taxes is absolutely essential [00:09:30] to a functioning government that sustains a functioning democracy. And look, I'm not naive. The current Congress has expressed more interest in weakening the Internal Revenue Service, [00:09:40] the agency that monitors tax evasion, than it has in strengthening it. They've rescinded tens of billions of dollars in funding. There's even a proposed bill to abolish it, [00:09:50] along with income taxes.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:52] Yeah. The current Congress doesn't seem to be such a big fan of taxes.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:56] But my point is, there is a federal crime that is way [00:10:00] more widespread than noncitizen voting, and it's the kind that could be addressed in a law. But a law like that one that beefs up the IRS, for example, is incredibly [00:10:10] difficult to pass. So how and why did the House manage to pass a law about something that barely happens?

Jason Carter: [00:10:19] One of the [00:10:20] keys that we look at when we're talking about, does this election law help or hurt? Does this election law build trust or or undermine trust? You know, an election law [00:10:30] like the Save act will come in. And the purpose of it is from the beginning is based on something that that is solving a problem that doesn't really exist. [00:10:40] So you have very little of this type of voter fraud at all and is currently being addressed in significant ways. And so when you pass [00:10:50] a law that purports to fix a problem that doesn't exist, it Increases the, uh, sort of the idea that this, that this is necessary, [00:11:00] um, when it's not. And so that's a, that's a significant problem right off the bat.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:04] All right. But what exactly, Hannah, does the save act say? Like, if it becomes a law, what's [00:11:10] going to happen?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:11] I'll get into all that after a quick break.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:15] But before that break, a loving reminder that we wrote a book. We did, [00:11:20] uh, it's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America Works. And it is your friend. It is your companion. It is your warm and reassuring hug when you need it. It is [00:11:30] a reminder of how far you've come and how powerful you are. And if that sounds nice, you can get it wherever books are sold.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:57] We're [00:11:50] back. We're talking with Jason Carter from the Carter Center, [00:12:00] a nonprofit that does a lot of work in the world, including globally, supporting democratic elections and human rights. And before the break, Nick, you asked me what the Save act says [00:12:10] and what will happen if it becomes law. So if it does, you will need a valid US passport or birth certificate in order to register or reregister to [00:12:20] vote. And there are a bunch of other accepted documents for certain people, certain classifications, but for most voters, we're talking passport or birth [00:12:30] certificate. Some states already do this, by the way.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:33] Yeah. New Hampshire does this.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:34] Yep. The state where Nick votes rolled this out this year, 2025. Now, here's [00:12:40] one big concern that opponents of this bill keep bringing up.

Jason Carter: [00:12:43] If you are a married woman whose name no longer matches the name on her birth certificate, um, then you may [00:12:50] have a problem getting registered to vote.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:52] Now, I've heard about this, Hannah. If you took your spouse's name when you got married, then your legal name doesn't match what's on your birth certificate. [00:13:00]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:00] Yeah. In that case, you would need a passport or one of the many other documents listed for people who are, for example, tribal citizens or military personnel. Now, Save [00:13:10] act supporters say don't worry about it, because the Save act requires states to decide what they are going to do about that. Like what kinds of documents they will ask [00:13:20] for for extra proof of citizenship.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:22] What kinds of documents will they ask for?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:25] That is up to the states. A marriage certificate, maybe, if you can find it. But [00:13:30] you brought up New Hampshire, Nick, where married women did get turned away this year, sometimes multiple times because of this issue. Some of them came back, some of them didn't. There [00:13:40] was one story of a woman who had been married three times, but still had her first husband's last name. Her first marriage certificate had been lost to history for a while [00:13:50] at that point. And you can always order a copy for a fee, but that doesn't help when it comes to same day registration.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:57] Okay, so if this act passes [00:14:00] and becomes a nationwide thing, there are going to be people who need to do some serious administrative work.

Jason Carter: [00:14:07] There's some estimates that it would be 20 something million [00:14:10] Americans who would have a hard time finding the documents that they need in order to register or reregister to vote under this act.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:18] So you heard Jason ask some questions [00:14:20] about this proposed law. Number one, does it help or hurt? What do you think about that one, Nick?

Nick Capodice: [00:14:28] Oh, well, uh, it [00:14:30] was proposed to prevent a very rare form of voter fraud that we already have laws for. And because laws tend not to be 100% effective, I suppose [00:14:40] the Save act could get the numbers down a little more.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:44] The numbers I have seen are between 0.0001 [00:14:50] and 0.0008% of votes are from non-citizens.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:56] Maybe they're just going after another zero after that decimal, I guess.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:59] Okay, [00:15:00] so that is the help. Here's where Jason sees a hurt.

Jason Carter: [00:15:04] When you look at a change in election laws, if there are winners and losers, you have to assess who [00:15:10] it is that's benefiting from this law. Right. And when you say you have to have a passport in order to vote, the kinds of people who have passports are the ones that take foreign trips, right? And so [00:15:20] you're talking about a group of people that are going to be per se, wealthier. You're going to the kind of folks who have all of the documents that they need for a variety of other things. [00:15:30] You know, the folks that are least likely to have these documents are folks that are that are poorer, frankly, and don't have that that kind of access to things like a birth certificate, [00:15:40] they have to go. And a lot of states you have to pay to to get one right or to get a copy of it. And so you're talking about increasing burdens on people's right to vote that make [00:15:50] it more difficult for people to vote. If you create an undue burden on the right to vote. Then there's going to be the people who feel that burden and the folks who are least likely to handle that. Um, [00:16:00] you know, tend to be less able to to, you know, you know, they're the ones who don't have the kind of resources that others have. And so when you're burdening the right to vote, you're basically burdening the right to vote of poor people [00:16:10] more than you are of rich people.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:14] Now, the other question Jason asked is, does this law build trust or undermine trust? [00:16:20] Now, I can tell you that proponents of the Save act say it will restore trust in American elections. Here's what Jason says.

Jason Carter: [00:16:28] It's an act that does a variety of things, but [00:16:30] it is also one that fundamentally, I think, sort of continues this idea that undermines the trust in the system rather than increases the trust.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:39] All right. I [00:16:40] want to go a little deeper on this one. How would this change make us trust the system less?

Jason Carter: [00:16:46] Number one, you know, you're telling people that the federal government should have a [00:16:50] bigger role. Uh, and that, I think, undermines some of the trust that people have in the system today. I think, number two, it because there is that [00:17:00] is solving, quote, purporting to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. You're perpetuating this idea that we have major, major problems in our election system when we don't. And I think that [00:17:10] continues to build this mistrust.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:12] So we do have this decentralized system in the United States today. The Constitution tells us that states are in charge [00:17:20] of the place and manner of elections, which is why some states have already passed what is essentially their own version of the Save act. But if the federal government [00:17:30] steps in and passes federal legislation, it's basically overriding states that chose not to.

Jason Carter: [00:17:37] By the way, this is not just a Republican versus Democratic issue. [00:17:40] The Democrats have made a variety of efforts to take over some election aspects from the states and give them to the federal government. And I think in general, when [00:17:50] we do that, we have to really assess everything through that lens of is this increasing trust or is this reducing trust in the system? And I think that people generally tend [00:18:00] to to like their local election officials more than they like the federal government. They tend to have more trust. And so I think when you move election rules and regulations away [00:18:10] from the trusted locals and the trusted states to the federal government, it's a it's a downgrade.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:15] The federal government has, by the way, in the past, done some sweeping intervention when it comes [00:18:20] to elections and voters in modern history. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to stop race based disenfranchisement in states across the country. Prior [00:18:30] to that, there were amendments to the constitution to allow women and people of color to vote and changes to laws that prevented tribal people, or even, in one case, pretty much any nonwhite [00:18:40] person at all from voting. But these changes were about expanding rights. Jason says the Save act is not that.

Jason Carter: [00:18:49] Why [00:18:50] do you want to make it harder for people to vote. And the answer, I think in this instance cannot be that there is some fraud issue. It has to be there's some Partizan power grab. [00:19:00] And so there are good reasons, and there are bad reasons for the federal government to get involved. But what our job is as as observers of the process, is to figure out how we can bring people [00:19:10] together to do things to solve the real problems in our system without making this partizan enough that it that it again, continues to undermine that valuable trust. [00:19:20]

Nick Capodice: [00:19:20] So, Hannah, I'm thinking about the way you started this conversation, that you have confidence. You have faith. But Jason started this conversation by telling us [00:19:30] that several decades worth of stuff has eroded trust. And I know that studies and polls are showing a frightening lack of trust [00:19:40] in the system and in other people in general. And without that confidence, democracy cannot exist. So where'd [00:19:50] you get it? Huh? Hannah, what makes you so special?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:53] Okay. When I don't think that I am all that special, I think that there are a lot of others like me. But [00:20:00] to answer your question, research and second opinions.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:03] Half of our listeners just tuned out.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:06] All right, let me put it another way. A [00:20:10] mechanic walks by my car and is like, whoa, big problem. Your car is supposed to have five wheels. This is an emergency. You need to pay me to fix [00:20:20] it right now. Now, the first thing I'm going to think to myself is. Wait a minute. That has never been a problem before. My car is running great. The second thing I'm going to [00:20:30] do is check my manual, which will tell me four wheels are the correct number of wheels. The third thing I'm going to do is talk to my regular mechanic, who I trust, and ask him [00:20:40] if this is really a problem. He will tell me no. I will go on with my life.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:44] So are you saying that everyone who lost their trust got scammed by the government version of the old five [00:20:50] wheel myth?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:51] What I'm trying to get at is that it's pretty freaky when someone who is supposed to know things tells you something is broken when you thought it was okay. [00:21:00] Now, my car might not be the smoothest ride in town. It could probably be better. It requires maintenance. I have to file paperwork, but it does what [00:21:10] it is supposed to do. Scammers nick cause extra work for all of us. They make us doubt. They make us check the manual. They make [00:21:20] us double check with people we do trust. This is an extremely annoying thing, not to mention extremely time consuming.

Nick Capodice: [00:21:28] Yeah, but if you didn't do it, [00:21:30] you'd get hit with a $1,000 wheel mod bill that you didn't need.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:33] Or I would always wonder. I would start to doubt. I'd worry. There were other things wrong with my car. I'd think the car designers [00:21:40] were maybe wrong all along. Maybe they're the ones scamming me. Every small inconvenience, every oil change would start to feel like proof that this car is a lemon. [00:21:50] I would spiral. It is hard to get yourself out of a spiral.

Jason Carter: [00:21:56] One of the things that we have learned across the world in many, many dozens [00:22:00] and dozens of countries, more than 100 elections, is that once people lose faith in the system, it's hard to build it back, because it's always easy to point out there was [00:22:10] this problem or there was that problem. And and I think the key is that students and everyone else need to get the facts about what the law is, right? It is dramatically [00:22:20] illegal to commit voter fraud. It is dramatically illegal to vote as a non-citizen. And we enforce those laws really well in this country. And so if we are [00:22:30] doing that, and if people hear an anecdote or a story about a problem here or a problem there, make sure that people are putting it into context and saying, you know, maybe you [00:22:40] don't like the outcome of this election, but really it's not because the system is broken, it's because, you know, we've we've done a variety of things to to lose an election.

Nick Capodice: [00:22:50] Wow. [00:22:50] Yeah. You know, we don't say that enough, Hannah. People lose elections, right? For a lot of reasons. They just do.

Jason Carter: [00:22:59] Lots [00:23:00] of people have lost elections in a variety of contexts. And the key to me is just make sure that people understand the facts. Make sure that people understand what we have and what safeguards [00:23:10] are in place, and then not be sore losers. I have won elections and I have lost elections, right? I've served in the state legislature in [00:23:20] my state. I ran for governor ten years ago, 11 years ago now, and I lost. Now I just feel like we all have [00:23:30] to understand that something has happened in our country where there's folks who can't talk to their parents because of Partizan politics. There's folks who have uncles [00:23:40] that they used to love that they can't talk to anymore because of Partizan politics. And we have to figure out a way to break that down. We have to figure out a way to [00:23:50] have people be opponents without being enemies. And if we can't do that in our own families, then how are we going to ask people to do that more broadly? And I just think the polarization [00:24:00] has become alienation in some ways. And so for me, the great thing about being out of Partizan politics in some ways and I still support folks, [00:24:10] I still campaign for folks, I still do the things that I want to do within my political party, but I no longer say that the other side is like an enemy, just per se. [00:24:20] We can't do that. We have to find ways to come back together and to say, hey, I listen to you. I want you to listen to me. Let's have this conversation. And I frankly think [00:24:30] that we're getting back to that, that that pendulum is swinging a little bit, even if it doesn't seem like it out there in the in the realm of the hecklers.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:48] We [00:24:40] do not have to let [00:24:50] myths and scams drive us apart. We do not have to be miserable. We do not have to stew in paranoia. We do [00:25:00] have to ask who is making us miserable and why. Who is telling us that people with different opinions are our enemies? [00:25:10] Who is telling us that gentle breeze is a hurricane? Confidence is hard. Anyone who has been a teenager can [00:25:20] tell you that. And I am working really, really hard at it. If democracy is stressed is confidence, then [00:25:30] I have confidence in confidence alone. This is my system. This is your system. And it is not the system that is broken. [00:25:40] I can tell you that much. So I am giving my whole heart to it.

Nick Capodice: [00:25:44] When you wake up, wake up. It's healthy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:01] That [00:26:00] does it for this episode. It was made by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice Marina Henke is our producer. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive [00:26:10] producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. The Carter Center is doing a lot of work on democracy and trust building. We did not have time to get to it all in this episode, but if you want to learn more, [00:26:20] which is totally up to you, you can check out their website Cartercenter.org. Ask us questions if you've got them at our website civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is [00:26:30] a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

How can Congress check the president?

Checks and balances are at the absolute core of our governmental workings. 

The framers designed a system that was directly opposed to one person or one group of people having all the power, and we see that through the myriad ways Congress can check the president. So what are those checks? How have they waned over the last few decades? And finally, why would Congress opt to use (or not use) them?

Joining us today is Eric Schickler, professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and author of Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power.

Referenced in this episode:

Our Starter Kit series.

Our episode on impeachment from 2019.


Transcript

C101_Congress check presideent.mp3

Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And just as a quick aside, we had a team meeting this week at Civics 101, and we asked, what do we do, you know.

Hannah McCarthy: I do know I was there. Our listeners were not. So you might want to elaborate.

Nick Capodice: So our show explains the basics of how our democracy works. That's our tagline. But sometimes things don't work the way they have before.

Archival: That executive order he signed [00:00:30] that ended the practice purported to end the practice enshrined in the constitution of birthright citizenship.

Archival: For more presidents proposal to halt all federal grant and loan disbursement, a move federal judges are blocking, was illegal and an assault on the Constitution.

Archival: A South Bay man said that he got an email from the Department of Homeland Security saying he had to leave the United States, even though he's an American citizen.

Hannah McCarthy: And to that point, in recent interviews in [00:01:00] particular, we have had guests say things like, well, you know, here is how this or that worked for the last 200 years or so, and here's how it's working in 2025.

Nick Capodice: Exactly. And that's going to kind of be a theme for this entire episode, because today we are talking about a classic old school 101 topic checks and balances. One check in particular, how Congress checks the power of the president or doesn't. And [00:01:30] it's worth laying out right at the top what our guest today, a scholar who has written multiple books on Congress and congressional power, specifically thinks about Congress's powers.

Eric Schickler: I believe the framers set up this system of government that has many flaws, and is not the system I would have designed. If it were me, I would have designed a very different system.

Nick Capodice: This is Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies political parties, polarization [00:02:00] and the US Congress.

Eric Schickler: But they set up this system of checks and balances and separation of powers and federalism. Over 200 years ago, you know, while it had many weaknesses, one of the virtues of it was that these separated institutions had the power and the incentive to defend their power, their own power. In this system, preventing any one branch, any one set of actors from getting too much power.

Hannah McCarthy: We do, by [00:02:30] the way, have an entire series on core civics concepts like checks and balances and the powers of each branch. It is called starter Kit. We'll put a link to that in the show notes, but we should do a little 101 on this episode first. Nick, what are the specific mechanisms Congress uses to check the president?

Nick Capodice: All right. There are four. I'm going to talk about today and I'm going to do them one by one. So number one, the first way Congress checks the chief the power of the purse.

Eric Schickler: Probably [00:03:00] first and foremost is the power of spending. That no money can be spent without Congress approving it. And, uh. And so that gives them the power of the purse. You also can't lay taxes without Congress approving them.

Nick Capodice: Number two, political appointments.

Eric Schickler: Control over the staffing of the executive branch. So executive branch officials have to be confirmed by the US Senate, which gives them the Senate a lever to influence the executive branch. [00:03:30]

Nick Capodice: Number three is investigations.

Eric Schickler: Congress has the power to supervise the executive grants, to investigate the executive branch and and sort of look around and see if there are problems with what it's doing. Are they ignoring what Congress wants? Well, you hold an investigation, you expose that and then you can take action.

Nick Capodice: And number four is that action one we've talked about many times on the show. Do you want to say it, Hannah?

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, you mean impeachment?

Nick Capodice: Sure do.

Eric Schickler: And then, of course, the final kind of club is impeachment. [00:04:00] The power of the House by a simple majority to impeach the president. And then the Senate would hold a trial and by two thirds vote has the power to convict the president, which then removes the president from office.

Hannah McCarthy: We'll also put a link to our impeachment episode in the show notes. Please give it a listen if you haven't already. Quick history aside, three presidents have been impeached in the United States so far Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. But [00:04:30] as of the recording of this episode, none have been removed from office following their trial in the Senate.

Nick Capodice: Thank you. Hannah. And going back to how we started this episode, we're going to talk about how one check in particular used to work and how it works now. And in just this instance, when I say now, I do not mean 2025. I'm talking about the last few decades after a marked increase in something we hear about so often, it almost has lost all meaning. And [00:05:00] that is polarization.

Archival: And our poll shows voters are both energized and polarized right now, with voters in both parties seeing the other side as an existential threat to the country.

Archival: How will the next president unite a nation that has become so incredibly polarized? Joining me now to talk about it, 1 in.

Archival: 6 Americans have actually stopped talking to a family member or a close friend because of politics since the 2016 election.

Hannah McCarthy: And, you know, these days, we do hear a lot that people think [00:05:30] America is more polarized today than it was at any other time in modern history. We did have a civil war. But, Nick, how is polarization tied to Congress checking the president?

Nick Capodice: Basically, if you put party above all else, party above the institution, in this instance, Congress, the checks that institution wields get weaker.

Eric Schickler: Paul Pearson and I just finished a book, Partisan Nation, and the core argument [00:06:00] of that book is that our constitutional system of separation of powers was premised on this idea from James Madison, that people who are in a given office, say, a member of Congress or a president or a Supreme Court justice are going to look out for the power of their office. You know, the famous phrase is the ambition of the of the man needs to be tied to the power of their office, ambition to counter [00:06:30] ambition. And that was kind of what underwrote our constitutional system for about 200 years.

Nick Capodice: However, things started to shift in the 1970s, and then there was a big shift in the 1990s, and polarization has continued to rise. We are now at a point where some politicians care more about protecting the party than they do about protecting, in essence, the purpose of their job, their [00:07:00] powers. What the Constitution says they can and can't do.

Eric Schickler: When members of an institution, in particular members of Congress, care only about their party and their ideology and don't care about the power of their branch. Then that undercuts that system. That gives them an incentive to just side with the president of their own party and ignore the power of their institution. Right. The [00:07:30] development of nationalized polarization, where the two parties are essentially these two armies fighting it out, where the stakes are seen as existential, has diminished the extent to which officeholders in other positions, members of Congress and also Supreme Court justices, show primary allegiance to their office and instead leads them to behave like members of a team. A Partisan team. And that just entirely [00:08:00] undercuts the this madisonian system, and is what gives rise to the danger of a president who's essentially unchecked by anyone.

Hannah McCarthy: Does Eric have any recent examples of Congress not acting like this?

Nick Capodice: Yeah he did. He had one specific example. I was barely alive when this happened. You certainly were not. Hannah, do you know about the Iran-Contra affair?

Archival: A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. [00:08:30] My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

Hannah McCarthy: I do definitely not enough. I believe it was during the Reagan administration. People were selling arms illegally.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, and it was a many year, many twists and turns. Scandal. Higher ups in the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran. Iran was under a weapons embargo at the time, and the contra part is that they used money from this sale to support [00:09:00] the Contras, which was a rebel group in Nicaragua.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. Congress passed the arms embargo, and Reagan's office went around it and sold stuff anyway.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. So if you're a ride or die Reagan fan who happens to also be in Congress, what are you going to do?

Hannah McCarthy: Well, I know he had them. So what did they do?

Eric Schickler: While many Republicans stuck with Ronald Reagan, there were key Senate Republicans who were really [00:09:30] concerned about what happened about about laws passed by Congress being circumvented. And they worked on the Iran-Contra Committee to uncover what happened. And, you know, several of them signed a report by the Democratic majority that was highly critical of the Reagan administration. So you can, in a sense, think of that as an almost last hurrah for how Congress used to work.

Nick Capodice: But then, Hanna, along comes 1994 Shawshank Redemption, [00:10:00] Beanie Babies and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the House, where they'd been out of power for 40 years.

Archival: Conventional wisdom holds the party of a sitting president loses seats in the midterm elections. But this was a political earthquake with the fault line running right through Capitol Hill. When the dust had settled and the debris.

Eric Schickler: And you get the rise of Newt Gingrich and Gingrich's entire theory in in rising to power was the way to win control of the House [00:10:30] is to destroy the House's credibility, to argue that the Democratic House was fundamentally corrupt, unethical, and hostile to the American people.

Archival: It tells you something about how out of touch they are with the American people that every item in our contract is supported by 60% or more of the American people. Some of the items are supported as much as 80% of the American people and outside Washington. This [00:11:00] is a contract with Americans for America.

Eric Schickler: And so he made that the centerpiece of their campaign and brought in a generation of Republicans who came there basically campaigning on the idea that the system is fundamentally corrupt. And the House is a kind of enemy. Starting in the mid 1990s, you get a new kind of member of Congress who doesn't see themselves as there for a career and therefore doesn't [00:11:30] have the kind of stake in Congress's power that previous generations had.

Nick Capodice: All right. So we got the then and the now. We have laid out how things work for most of us, history, and how they've started to shift in the last couple of decades. And now I'm going to get to the now. Now, what does it look like when Congress uses or doesn't use their powers that check the president in 2025 at a time of an extreme us versus them mentality? But first we got to take a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: And [00:12:00] before that break, just a reminder. You can check out any of our hundreds of episodes as well as some snazzy Civics 101 swag at our website civics101podcast.org. We're back. We're talking about the relationship between Congress and the president. And, Nick, you just set us up for the then versus now breakdown of the ways that Congress checks the president.

Nick Capodice: Absolutely. And I'm going to focus on one of those. And [00:12:30] it's the one with the name that I've always loved. It sounds like something you'd hear at the Ren Faire. The power of the purse. Here again is Eric Schickler, professor of political science at UC Berkeley.

Eric Schickler: So traditionally, you know had. The understanding essentially has been that, you know, Congress writes appropriations bills. Those bills say this amount of money is going to be spent on this program. And the president is obligated, with very narrow [00:13:00] exceptions, to spend that money.

Nick Capodice: An appropriations bill simply is a bill that appropriates money.

Hannah McCarthy: As in the bill that says where the money is going to go.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, the government can't pay for a ham sandwich or a water treatment plant or an interstate high speed rail program, unless it is through an appropriations bill. And the Constitution is pretty blunt about this. Like hands on its hips in the doorway with a stern expression. Article one, section nine. It says, quote, no money shall [00:13:30] be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.

Hannah McCarthy: Congress is also in charge of bringing money in the tried and true way in this nation, of course, is taxes.

Nick Capodice: It is indeed so a little bit more of our very to the point Constitution here. Quote. All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.

Hannah McCarthy: And can you just get to why the House specifically?

Nick Capodice: Because [00:14:00] it is the People's Chamber. The number of people in your state determines how many reps you have in the house, and they have short two year terms. They are on the hook to listen to their constituents. James Madison wrote about this in Federalist 58. He even dropped the expression in there. He said, quote, this power over the purse may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people. End [00:14:30] quote.

Hannah McCarthy: So Congress says this is how we're spending money. What if, hypothetically, a president in turn said, no, not going to do it?

Archival: President Trump signing an executive order to cut funding to public broadcasting. We're taking a look at funding that includes NPR, PBS, what they receive, the salaries, executive talent, their pay. Joining us now to discuss is Rachel.

Nick Capodice: Look, I'm not even going to dance around the word hypothetically today, Hannah. A very recent example of something [00:15:00] directly tied to this just happened. May 1st, law Day. By the way, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to, quote, cease federal funding for NPR and PBS. End quote. And that funding was the result of a congressional appropriation.

Archival: Federal funding notably accounts for about 15% of PBS and 1% of NPR's budget, with the rest largely coming from outside donations.

Nick Capodice: Now, the amount of money the CPB [00:15:30] gets isn't terribly relevant here, because we're talking about who has the power to spend and not spend, not how much, but I'm going to put it in anyways. It is $535 million, 0.001% of the federal budget.

Hannah McCarthy: We made an episode on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a while ago, by the way, and we dropped it in the feed last week for people who maybe missed it or wanted a little reminder. So check that out if you want. So Congress approved that funding for the CPB. They put that in their budget. [00:16:00] And that was two years ago, right?

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Their funding happens in two year cycles. This is by design to protect public media from being affected by political pressures.

Eric Schickler: If the president in the past were to refuse to do that. Well, a couple of consequences would follow. One is, you know, the potential for legal action from those who are supposed to receive the money. But another is, and probably the more powerful one just came from Congress itself. Well, if the president [00:16:30] wants appropriations for other things that the president cares about, we're not going to give you those appropriations unless you spend abide by our preferences, by the laws we passed jointly with you. And so that was a tremendous lever, because, you know, it's been clear, essentially, that the president cannot spend money that has not been appropriated. And so that, in a sense gives Congress a veto. And so, you know, if the president is, you know, arbitrarily [00:17:00] refusing to spend money that Congress has approved, well, Congress has a pretty powerful lever. It could, for example, threaten not to fund the white House and the executive branch itself.

Nick Capodice: Like many of our episodes, this one is about how things change. And I think it's important to note here that a fundamental shift in the way the executive branch views its power versus Congress did not begin with President Donald Trump, but with another president, Richard Milhous [00:17:30] Nixon.

Eric Schickler: So what Nixon did is something called impoundments, where he simply refused to spend billions of dollars that Congress had appropriated, targeting programs that the Democrats were in the majority in Congress really liked. Especially, you know, uh, programs in health and Human Services. And so Nixon disapproved of those programs, and he and simply withheld billions of dollars in spending. [00:18:00]

Hannah McCarthy: Now, how did Nixon justify withholding funds? The Constitution could not be clearer on this.

Nick Capodice: Well, Nixon argued it had been done in the past. It was a tried and true presidential tradition, and he cited other presidents who had done this. But the problem here is in all of those instances, that was money that everyone agreed should not be spent in these situations. It was more like Congress appropriates money to fight a war. Okay. War [00:18:30] ends. So the president says, let's spend that money somewhere else because after all that war is over. Both parties in Congress say that makes a lot of sense.

Eric Schickler: The president not spending that money is not really violating the will of Congress. Whereas here, Nixon was taking money that Congress had self-consciously approved for particular purposes and refusing to spend it. So that's set up a big showdown. There were court challenges. Um, it seemed [00:19:00] pretty clear the courts were going to rule against Nixon.

Nick Capodice: And in the meantime, Congress passed a new law called the Impoundment Control Act. This law said that a president can withhold funds if and only if a majority in both the House and the Senate agree. Impoundment, by the way, is when a president seeks to delay or cancel funding that is already approved by Congress. So this act was Congress pushing back more tightly, gripping its hold on the power of the purse? [00:19:30]

Eric Schickler: This law passed the House with an overwhelming majority, passed the Senate unanimously. Honestly? Uh, well, yes, a different world. We lived in a very different world back then, a Republican president. And yet this bipartisan bill passes overwhelmingly.

Hannah McCarthy: But, Nick, the act, the law that Eric is talking about, it isn't having its intended effect today.

Archival: President Trump promises more job cuts. Elon Musk leading the DOJ's efforts to downsize the [00:20:00] government. And The Washington Post reports Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration.

Hannah McCarthy: Billions and billions of dollars. About $430 billion dollars appropriated by Congress have been blocked, stalled or frozen by Donald Trump with the help of Elon Musk and Doge. And agencies and organizations are going to court over this. They're filing suit saying this [00:20:30] money was appropriated to us and we are not getting this money, and that is unconstitutional. Constitutional. And we're going to see how these lawsuits play out. But in the meantime, does Congress have the power to do anything here? I mean, assuming they want to. It is their power that's being overridden.

Nick Capodice: Well, there's a difference between what they can do and what they will do. They recently passed a government funding bill, and that bill could have had language in it that stopped this impoundment entirely. [00:21:00]

Eric Schickler: Congress could have very easily included explicit provisions saying, you know, all of these appropriated monies must be spent, right? Period. It spelled that out. And it could have also said to the president, we're not going to, you know, say there's some program the president really cares about. We're not going to appropriate money for that until we see that you're carrying out the other appropriations we have are free, right? That's entirely in Congress's power. They could [00:21:30] say the zero out key programs that the president cares about and say, you know, we're happy to fund these. We're not going to do it unless you show you're going to follow the law. Nothing to stop Congress from doing that in principle.

Hannah McCarthy: But they didn't.

Nick Capodice: They didn't.

Hannah McCarthy: So what stopped them?

Eric Schickler: What stops them is a lack of political will, in particular, that there are zero Republicans in Congress right now who would support that kind of action? Zero. [00:22:00] Even the ones who are critical about particular cuts. Susan Collins, chair of Senate Appropriations, says she's concerned about what's going on. Was chair of appropriations. She could exert real influence and say, we're not going to support a funding bill unless it includes these real restrictions with teeth that forced the president to follow the law. She has done nothing like that. And, you know, and that that's because she's being [00:22:30] a good team player, a good player for her party.

Nick Capodice: Congress has a whole arsenal of tools to act on this, but so too does the president. It's a two way street because the more we age and grow as a nation, the more acts we create. And with acts come exceptions to almost every rule. Now here's how it could go. Congress could say you can't spend or withhold money, Mr. President. And the president could respond by saying, well, I can, because I'm declaring an emergency and I can spend as I please. And Congress [00:23:00] could respond saying, well, we're removing emergency powers and the president could come back and say, nope, I'm going to veto that. And then two thirds of both chambers could override the veto. These Hannah, these are the checks in place, not theoretically actually in place, enacted by Congress itself. But none of those checks are going to happen. If there isn't, as Eric said, the political will to do so.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. But [00:23:30] why? I mean, I understand that Congress can check the president that they are choosing not to, and that the reason is they don't have the political will to do so. But why? Why do they lack the political will?

Nick Capodice: Well, it might be because Congress itself is being checked by quite possibly the most powerful check you can have in a [00:24:00] democracy. Us. The people.

Eric Schickler: So I think the public.

Eric Schickler: Tends not to be very focused on these balance of power questions and interbranch relation questions and and worrying about it in terms of, you know, defending Congress's power per se. I think that's especially the case when Congress itself is not giving a clear articulation of that interest. Right. And, uh, you know, maybe if you [00:24:30] had members of both parties saying Trump is is violating the Constitution is taking action. That's against the intentions of the framers, which I think is right. That might get the public's attention. But in the absence of that, and I don't think there's that much public pressure on the institutional question. Um, I think there may well be public pressure if, for example, these cuts damage programs that the public really counts on, right. And so they'll [00:25:00] be concerned, you know, for example, if there the cuts to the Social Security Administration continue to lead the long wait times for, for uh, customer service. I mean, that will that kind of thing generates pressure. But but unfortunately, I don't think that the public is is concerned for Congress's role per se. And I don't think Congress itself has done a good job of trying to make that salient to voters.

Nick Capodice: So the purpose [00:25:30] of this episode, now that we're at the end of it, is to just create a better understanding of what one check could and should look like, that the president is not the be all, end all of exerting the people's will. And Congress is our most direct line to governmental power and action. And maybe one thing that could aid in that understanding is what we try to do here each and every week, Anna, to help people understand their right to make change, to understand [00:26:00] how the government was built to function and why it was built that way. So as I feel I'm going to say a lot at the end of these episodes in the months to come, if you don't like something, complain loudly. It's your check, so use it.

Nick Capodice: Well, that is it for today on Congress. Check. And the president I was gonna say, like, check, please. That [00:26:30] felt a bit foolish. This episode is made by me. Nick Capodice with you, Hannah McCarthy and Christina Phillips. Our senior producer. Marina Henke is our producer. And Rebecca LaVoi, our executive producer. And boy howdy, do we check that executive pretty much every day. Thank you. Rebecca. Music. In this episode from Epidemic Sound, Telecinco, kilo, Kaz, Scott Grattan, Chris Zabriskie. You, beauty and wait for it. Moby. Yeah. Write that Moby. Moby is offering hundreds [00:27:00] of free music tracks to nonprofits for creative projects. This isn't like a paid advertisement here for Moby. I, I, I had play in my Discman in the early aughts until it pretty much broke in half. So thank you, Moby. Good on you. Sat next to you a bar on Avenue B in 2003. Do you remember that? Anyways, Civics 101 is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Who pays for public media?

Public media funding makes up less than 0.001% of the federal budget, and calls to defund it have existed essentially since the creation of the CBP in 1967. However, the history of public media is much longer, and more complicated, than the creation of Sesame Street or NPR. 

We revisit our episode from last year about how the government funds public media, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and how that money is spent. We also talk about free press, and the firewall that prevents politicians and the government from controlling the flow of public information and educational programming. 


Transcript

Christina Phillips: Hi, Christina from Civics 101 here - I just wanted to drop in to give you a little about this episode, which is about the Corporation of Public Broadcasting - specifically, we wanted to answer the questions “Why does the federal government set aside taxpayer dollars for public media, and what is public media, in the first place?”Here’s what has changed since that episode came out: President Trump has re-entered office, and has taken a number of steps to discredit and disassemble the free press, including public media. Now, calls to defund public media are nothing new, and they’ve been around since practically the creation of a funding model to direct taxpayer dollars to public media through the CPB more than four decades ago. However, I want to mention a few things that President Trump is doing that are new and that we do not address specifically in that episode. First,  Trump has called for the FCC, that’s the federal communications commission, to investigate NPR and other public media organizations for their use of corporate support. He also recently announced that he had fired three members of the CPB’s five-member board, something the CPB has said he does not have the authority to do, in a lawsuit they filed against his administration. And finally, alongside calling for Congress to defund the CPB, he issued an executive order telling the CPB to halt all funding to public media, which, as you’ll learn more about in the episode, is the kind of political directive that the CPB was created to prevent in the first place.Thanks for listening.

Christina Phillips: Go for it.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy, I'm.

Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice

Rebecca Lavoie: I am Rebecca Lavoie.

Christina Phillips: And I'm Christina Phillips.

Hannah McCarthy: And we're doing something a little different today instead of Hannah Mansplains senior producer Christina Phillips is going to explain stuff to us today.

Rebecca Lavoie: A Philaplain.

Nick Capodice: A what Splain,

Rebecca Lavoie: Philaplain, Christina Phillips. She's gonna Philsplain Splain.

Christina Phillips: I don't know how I feel about that. Doesn't work. Mhm.

Hannah McCarthy: We'll keep working. We'll work it out.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. It sounds like something like a waterway. Like a spill. Get it by the Phil Splain.

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, Christina, why did you gather all of us here today?

Christina Phillips: Um, well, as you remember, we were recently in Washington, DC, and while we were there, I decided to go talk to some people who are, I would say, our closest connection to the federal government. And I say our meaning, this podcast, the radio station we work at, which is to say that I went to the offices of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Yes, they distribute government funding to public media organizations like ours. And there are several reasons I did this interview. One, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by the federal government, which naturally makes it a civics topic. Two its history and function are embedded in this very democratic idea of a free press that, to quote the Supreme Court in 1971, serves the governed, not the governors. And three, because the idea of the government using taxpayer dollars to fund public media is a political issue.

Hannah McCarthy: It is. Yeah, it's super political. I mean, there are plenty of politicians and voters alike who do not necessarily think that the government should give taxpayer dollars to public media organizations, especially if those organizations are not covering certain issues the way that perhaps they feel those issues should be covered.

Christina Phillips: Usually with an episode that I work on, I'll interview people, I'll write a script for you to record. And this time I wanted to break the format, because I feel like it's worth talking through this as a group because unlike other topics, we're going to be talking about ourselves. And I think that it would be weird to do a traditional episode where we explain a subject that is essentially about our work without acknowledging that.

Nick Capodice: To that end, can we start with just sort of a big old disclaimer? Christina. Okay, everybody. Hi, I'm Nick. Uh Civics 101 is a show made at a public media organization, NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. And to be clear, NHPR gets money from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Rebecca Lavoie: A small amount of money.

Hannah McCarthy: So basically, like what Nick is saying is that some tax dollars go to helping our station run, and we receive those dollars in the form of a grant.

Nick Capodice: And to be very clear, when Civics 101 first started way back in 2017, we got an additional grant on top of, like NHPR's station grant from the CPB to fund the creation of this, this show. And then we got another grant, I think a year later or two years later to continue funding the show. But that was a while back.

Rebecca Lavoie: And we're no longer running on CPB money with this show as of today. So we're no longer a grant-funded show from the CPB, to be clear. Except for the grant that our station gets - the tiny portion of our budget.

Hannah McCarthy: And we're here to talk about the government's role in public media, specifically in relation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Right. I think it would be disingenuous to imply that we do not have some professional stake in government policies having to do with public media, like, do all of us here love and value public media and want to keep our jobs and want our work to be trusted and useful for our listeners? Yes we do. Like so that is our perspective.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And and also the perspective of the person I talked to for this episode from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Anne Brachman: Maybe one day with technology.

Christina Phillips: This is Anne Brachman. She's the senior vice president of external affairs at the CPB. And basically her job is to spend every day on the Hill talking to legislators about how public media works and why it matters.

Anne Brachman: We try to get to the Hill every single day to talk to members or their staff, and we really bring in a couple pieces of paper. One is the amount of money from CPB to all the stations in their state or district. And then we have what we call a state story. So here's all the things that CPB support enables services wise or content creation in the state. So they can really see the value of the appropriation locally serving their constituents. Okay.

Christina Phillips: So I'm wondering, um, does this sound like any other kind of job that you're familiar with?

Nick Capodice: Yeah. So my question was, is she registered as a lobbyist or is that is it not lobbying? What she's doing?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Do you want to just define what a lobbyist is? And then I can tell you why she's not.

Nick Capodice: Oh, fascinating. Of course. So a lobbyist is somebody who spends a certain amount of time, and I think also a certain amount of money talking to people in Washington, DC, talking to politicians to not necessarily convince them to do what they want, but just to provide them with as much information as possible to benefit their industry that they represent. One thing that kind of shocked me from another episode that I did is that lobbyists don't change your mind. They just provide information. They help you write a bill. They help you get something through legislation that usually never happens. So a lot of members of Congress really depend on lobbyists. And lobbyists will tell you that they are right to lobby is enshrined in the Constitution in the First Amendment. Yeah. So lobbyists are fascinating, but I'm desperate to know why she's not a lobbyist even though that's what she's doing.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So the difference here is that so her salary and the salary of her colleague who go to the Hill that comes out of CPB funding and that funding comes from the government, they are not paid by any sort of outside interest. They, like our station, couldn't donate a bunch of money to the CPB to help the CPB advocate on our behalf or on behalf of public media.

Anne Brachman: Sometimes we'll go up and we'll host briefings with congressional caucuses. There's a Congressional Public Broadcasting Caucus, the Congressional Rural Caucus, the Congressional Fire Fighting Caucus, public safety caucuses, because public media touches all these different aspects of our nation. And so it's a lot of educating. We are allowed to do technical advice. So sometimes a committee, when they're writing or drafting legislation, they will reach out to CPB and say, how would this impact public broadcasting or CPB. And in that regard, we do have a statutory recognized role to engage with and provide feedback.

Christina Phillips: And I do feel like we've been saying this phrase, public media, public broadcasting a lot. And that definition didn't really come from nowhere. And so we're going to talk about all the things a station would have to do to get the CPB funding later. But is there any sort of definition, like how would you guys define the difference between public media and, say, commercial media?

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, for one, public media is, generally speaking, a not-for-profit organization that isn't funded by commercial interests, nor does it exist to make a profit at the end of the year on its balance sheet. So that's a big, important component of it. And public media has to abide by certain federal communications guidelines in order to retain its status as, quote, public media. So those are those are some of the fundamentals. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: I think the the key thing here is that public media is not serving any sort of investors or stakeholders. I think there are three words that I see kind of all over government regulation that I want you to keep in mind when we talk about public media. And those are noncommercial, informational and educational. And that you see a lot, especially in regulations from the FCC, which is the Federal Communications Commission, which is the agency that regulates radio, television, wire, satellite and now cable communications. And despite the fact that the FCC was created in the 1930s, Congress didn't actually establish the CPB until 1967, which I think is kind of interesting. And I want to talk a little bit about the history of how we got from there to here. And so I think the first thing that stood out to me is that the FCC decided back in the 1940s to reserve certain frequencies on radio broadcast for this public programming. So specifically, you're listening to an FM radio, you know, you can usually find a public radio station in like the lower end.

Rebecca Lavoie: Or down at the top.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Hannah McCarthy: Most people who are listening to this are going to hear ads.

Christina Phillips: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: Right. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: So we I think we have to talk about why Civics 101 and tons of other public media podcasts do run commercial ads. We have to talk about it.

Rebecca Lavoie: Not all public radio podcasts run ads. To be clear, it's a choice that we've made here at New Hampshire Public Radio as part of our business model. What you hear on public radio stations, when you hear companies mentioned, those are not advertisements. It's called corporate underwriting. And essentially the difference between those messages and advertisements is that they are not allowed to have, quote, calls to action, and they're not allowed to have value statements in them, such as so and so. Law firm is the very best law firm at doing wills and estates or whatever. They're not allowed to have those kinds of value statements, and they're not allowed to say things like, go to our website in order to get a sale on blank. So those that would be a call to action. Those ads are not allowed to do that. Well, you hear instead is so and so. Law firm is proud to support this public radio station and its journalism since 1985. Uh, for more information go to so and so law firm.com.

Nick Capodice: That is if you want - you know you don't have to.

Rebecca Lavoie: It's not a value statement and it's not a call to action. So that is what is allowed. And it's basically um, it's being sold to the company as you are supporting our work and your brand is associated with our work. So it's sort of being sold like an ad, but it does not present like an ad. That's an FCC rule on demand. Audio made by public radio stations is not bound by the same FCC rules as our broadcast. So we are allowed to monetize our on-demand or podcast audio with ads. We're allowed to and it does not fall within those guidelines. So here at NPR and at some other stations, we have made the decision that in order to be able to do what we do, we are operating in a commercial podcast space, that we should participate in an economy that allows us to make a little bit of money just to fund some of what we do through commercial advertisements. So that's why you hear ads on our podcast.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so that's commercials not okay on public radio or television broadcast unless they're following those rules you just laid out, Rebecca. And one other thing I'll mention is that on broadcast and on-demand, we do not endorse political candidates or run any political advertising of any kind. Now, back to the history the FCC has codified into law the difference between public broadcasting and commercial media, and it has set aside space on the radio dial for public broadcasting, specifically that noncommercial, educational informational programming. And then a little thing called television came along.

Archive: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Christina Phillips: By the 1950s, more than half of Americans have TVs in their home. We've got I Love Lucy, Bonanza, The Tonight Show. We've got commercials.

Archive: Salads tastes so much better with Best Foods, real mayonnaise because of best foods, superb ingredients.

Christina Phillips: And we've got the chair of the FCC, Newton Minow, calling the television landscape a vast wasteland.

Archive: Keep your eyes blue to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder.

Christina Phillips: Then in 1952, the FCC sets aside certain television channels for noncommercial educational television. And one thing that Anne talked a lot about was the idea was to have television channels that children could watch, that families could watch, like there's something that you can kind of set on and not worry about it.

Anne Brachman: And Chairman Minow at the time was instrumental in really pushing and advocating for educational television. In 1962, Congress recognized educational television. But we're still five years before the Public Broadcasting Act came along. But they said, yeah, there should be this thing for expanding educational television. So they set aside about $32 million in matching funds to really help construct these new stations across America. They more than doubled the number of educational stations from about 80 to about 190.

Christina Phillips: And this is when we start seeing the kind of programming that defines public media. Today. We've got the documentaries, the national educational shows, including the first American broadcasting of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, the kind of programs that you think of when you think of PBS nowadays.

Rebecca Lavoie: These are a lot of local programming, a ton of local like puppet programming and like local hosts doing like interactive stuff with kids and stuff like that. Right?

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah. And I'm actually this is just a random trivia question. Do any of, you know, the longest continually running television show in America? It is not public media, is it?

Rebecca Lavoie: General Hospital?

Nick Capodice: Is it a soap opera or is it like.

Christina Phillips: It's not a soap opera? It's not.

Nick Capodice: But it's not public media.

Christina Phillips: No, it's not public media.

Hannah McCarthy: Is it that weird show?

Christina Phillips: Probably not.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. Never mind. Okay.

Nick Capodice: A news show, like 60 minutes.

Christina Phillips: It's Meet the Press. It's not C-Span, it's. It's Meet the Press on NBC.

Archive: Welcome to Sunday. It's Meet the Press. From NBC News in Washington, the longest-running show in television history. This is Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.

Christina Phillips: That was started in 1947, and CBS Evening News was a close second in 1948. But that has like over 16,000 episodes, whereas Meet the Press only has 3600. So eventually we get to 1967. This is when the federal government passed the Public Broadcasting Act, which establishes this government appropriation for public broadcasting.

Anne Brachman: So specifically, the Public Broadcasting Act authorized the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And we are a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation. And our purpose really is to facilitate the development of a public telecommunications system, providing universal access to programs of high quality diversity, creativity, excellence, innovation, um, but also with a really strict adherence to objectivity and balance.

Christina Phillips: And shortly after the CPB was created, it established NPR and PBS, National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. These are independent nonprofit media organizations that are not in any way owned or operated by the government. Um, they have their own newsrooms. They make their own national programming that then can be purchased and distributed by local public media stations. And NPR and PBS are not the only nationally focused public media organizations that do this. But I do think of this as kind of like the consolidation and rebranding of some of those big existing national public media institutions that were already in place before the CPB was created.

Rebecca Lavoie: But they don't exclusively get their funding from the CPB anymore, right? No. They also raise money through philanthropy, other grants. Yes.

Christina Phillips: NPR, for example, they say that they get less than 1% of their operational funding from CPB. It's a little bit more complicated. We'll talk about that. So I asked Anne how much money the CPB gets and how that money is spent, how it's distributed among stations. And this is what she said.

Anne Brachman: Currently in fiscal year 2024, our appropriation is $525 million. CPB is capped at 5% for our administrative costs, which is our building rent or salaries. Um, just basic, you know, operational expenses. Uh, Congress says we have to spend at least 6% on system support, and in that we pay for all the music, royalties, copyright, licensing fees, research on behalf of the system. Most of our funding, more than 70% of our funds go right out the door to all the stations across the country 1500 locally owned and operated, and so stations can decide how best to use them to support their community. Um, that could be local content creation, educational outreach, local journalism and news, or to buy national content as well. Congress does provide CPB with a separate appropriation $60 million each year to provide for the satellites, the fiber and the ground to distribute all this content. Our stations also most people don't know are part of our nation's public alert and warning system. Um, and so when a alert, you know, we think about it, we get it on our cell phones today. But how did that alert get to your cell phone? And it's through public media's, um, satellites in the sky and the transmitters on the ground as well, sending that to your local service provider. We've also been major investors in early childhood education programs, both for the broadcast, but all the streaming and the games and where kids are these days and those shows, I would say they're not inexpensive to make.

Christina Phillips: I think this is something that's really important. There was a lot of debate about the government's role in this media that it was now funding. There's a difference between government run media and public media, which we alluded to earlier. There's there's this idea that like, if you're funding this media, like will you have ownership of it? Um, so I'm wondering, can can someone give me a definition of government-run media?

Hannah McCarthy: So government-run media, I think pretty broadly, you could say is considered any media that is owned and operated by or extraordinarily influenced and controlled by the federal government. I think that the sort of insidious, scary embedded element of that is government run media is almost de facto propaganda. Government-run media is basically a government arm, right. And the government's going to represent itself within its best interests. Right?

Nick Capodice: So when we did our episode on Is America the freest, you know, the freest country in the world? We talked about the freedom of the press. I learned about some countries that do have state-controlled or government-controlled media. And what's interesting is it's always the radio. The radio is the form of media that the government always tries to control, because it's free and because it's cheap and it's most accessible. Like you can be working and listening to a radio. You can't be working maybe in watching a TV at the same time.

Anne Brachman: CPB has no role in content or editorial decision making. And Congress was very clear, and it was a big, intense debate during the making of the Public Broadcasting Act. You know, someone asked during the 67 debate, how can the federal government provide a source of funds to pay part of the cost of educational broadcasting and not control the final product? And their answer to that was CPB. Congress said that one of the fundamental reasons for establishing the corporation is to remove the programming activity from governmental supervision. So CPB was set up to be that heat shield, that firewall. We do have the objectivity and balance requirements within the act, but at the same time, we are told we cannot get involved in any editorial decision-making or control of stations or content. So there's tension between those two requirements.

Christina Phillips: Now, just because CPB does not get involved in any editorial decision-making, that doesn't mean it has no oversight on what kind of programming IT funds at all. The CPB is required to maintain this objectivity and balance requirement that Anne referenced, which basically means that it sets strategic goals for public media and lays out the kind of projects it will fund, and keeps an eye on how public media organizations that get funding are living up to those goals. And those goals are set and overseen by CPB management and a board of nine people appointed by the president, approved by Congress. That's required to have no more than five people from the same political party. They're made up of people who work in public media or have some sort of media background. And Anne gave me a summary of some of those strategic goals right now.

Anne Brachman: They came up working with CPB management with the Three D's Digital Diversity and Dialog, and the Three D's Guide. CPB's investments in all of our grant-making and digital is the innovation, making sure we're reaching Americans on every platform and how they want to consume content and, um, just being more cutting edge, diversity, age, geographic viewpoint, gender, ability, disability, race, ethnicity and then dialog. How are we engaging with our community?

Christina Phillips: Thoughts?

Nick Capodice: Can I relate to you all? You know, the process from which our show got started? Absolutely. I would love that. Yeah. So I was one of three people who went to Washington, D.C. to talk about Civics 101. And this was in order to like, secure further funding to make sure the show could exist. The people from the CPB that I met with and two others met with, they did say, you know, this is the kind of thing that would get support. You know, this is the kind of program, but you have to defend it. You have to like, say what you're going to do as a show, and then we will decide whether or not that meets all our criteria. But initially you can say there's no, you know, editorial process. But we were advised like, this is what's going to fly and this is what's not. But once that was done to a much broader point, since I've started working on the show, I have not once for a second had anybody communicate with me to be like, hey, you're still doing X, y, Z, or like, you know, are you following up with blah blah blah? Like, it's our show, we make it and nobody tells us anything, right?

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. And I like I want to talk about this a little bit if I may like. So this idea of okay, so the CPB is being described as like this firewall between the government and the public radio station. And I think also like there is a firewall between the CPB and the radio station itself. Right. So the like the driving force of that is the understanding that the proliferation of information to the American people is a very powerful thing, and that if the government is allowed to control that, that is not the free flow of information, truth and the press. Right. And so what I think is kind of remarkable about the creation of the CPB is that it's one of these instances of American history in which it's like there's something very ideological about it, writing down a law that, yes, we're going to support the free press because the free flow of information that is not influenced by the government, by anyone in charge is really, really important. Because, Nick, you know, you're describing this experience of not being influenced, not being told what to say and what not to say.

Hannah McCarthy: The whole democratic project. Right? Like what keeps happening in America is that the government tells us we have something. And so we say we have this, this is ours, right? You told us we have it. And like I defy you to show me a journalist who does not firmly believe in that. Right. Like there's nobody on staff here. There's no like. And I know Rebecca, our executive producer, stands behind this very much like the protection that the media yields over the ability to find the truth and report the truth without anyone telling them they can't. That's right, is so vital to us that the stink that we would make, right? Yeah. Like, yeah. Like the you would hear about it because we're reporters. Like it would be in the news and you do on occasion come across a story where reporters like, I didn't like this and I'm going to put it in the news, you know, like I'm going to make sure the American people know if anyone tries to influence me.

Christina Phillips: This is a conversation that's literally happening around us right now. We have an NPR media reporter who shared, like recently, David Folkenflik, about an experience he had with an executive at The Washington Post who was trying to pressure him to not do a story that would make him look bad. And David Folkenflik is like, okay, no, this happened to me. This is an experience I had, um, where this person was compromising the ethics of journalism, and I'm not okay with it.

Archive: So you're saying that in a conversation that wasn't off the record, he made a quid pro quo offer to you. Drop your story that I don't like, and I will give you a story, an exclusive interview that I do like. Is that it?

Archive: To misquote The Godfather, he gave me an offer I had to refuse. Okay.

Archive: And you did refuse this. You went ahead with the...

Nick Capodice: Can you even imagine if any journalist that we know and work with, like, got an email from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was like, hey, can you make sure to cover this story? Like, it would be like Watergate? Like nobody would shut up about it.

Christina Phillips: Well, actually, I do have an example of a time when the CPB did try to weaken that firewall or sort of stepped over that firewall. Is anyone familiar with this? It was in the early 2000.

Rebecca Lavoie: Rang a bell. Keep going.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so Kenneth Tomlinson was the chairman of the CPB board in the early 2000. He was appointed in 2003 by George W Bush. And he was pretty outspoken about the fact that he found certain programming on NPR and PBS, uh, to be too liberal. And so without permission, he used over $10,000 in CPB funds to commission a conservative consultant to write reports about Partizan bias on public media programs, including a show called now with Bill Moyers on PBS and The Diane Rehm Show, which was a public radio program. And one thing that this consultant was doing was tracking things like how often the president was criticized on the show, for example. And then the other thing he did is that he pushed for Counter-programming to Bill Moyers on PBS in the form of a talk show with conservative columnists from The Wall Street Journal. So two big problems here. He used CPB funds without permission to hire a consultant with a political agenda to study programs to determine whether or not they had political agendas. And then he tried to have an editorial role in PBS by telling them what kind of programs they should have, down to the specific hosts he wanted in the seats. And he did end up resigning from the board after he was investigated by CPB's inspector general. So that is one example of how the idea of nonpartisanship and a strict firewall isn't always impervious to political influence, and then how that played out. And after a quick break, we're going to talk about what stations like ours must do to get funding from the federal government and how that money is used. We'll also talk about the difference between us and NPR, because yes, we are different.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, we're back. This is Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio. I am Hannah McCarthy. I'm here in the studio today with Nick Capodice, Rebecca Lavoie, Christina Phillips, of course, and Catherine Hurley, who is joining us for the summer. And we are delighted to have. And Christina, you are walking us right now through how public media works, and you're going to tell us what a place like us, like NPR needs to do to receive government money.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And first, I want to answer one of the biggest questions any of us gets at any time. Um, when we say we work at NPR, which is are we NPR? Do you work for NPR? Do you know Terry Gross?

Rebecca Lavoie: Terry Gross doesn't work for NPR?

Nick Capodice: No, no, WHYY.

Christina Phillips: Another member station, is anyone does anyone want to take a crack at the like what is NHPR compared to NPR? How are we connected?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, I answer this question all the time. Okay. Uh, so NPR is essentially a big vendor of ours. I mean, that's the best way to describe it. They're not like a parent company. We are an independent nonprofit. We buy programming from NPR to license and play on our airwaves. So basically we are buying programming from NPR, All Things Considered, uh, Morning Edition, you know, other programs, and we sort of have a co-branding agreement with them, a licensing co-branding agreement, but we pay them for that. Like we pay them a big pile of change for that. So they're basically like a giant vendor for us. It's sort of how it works. And we have a like a loose relationship with them. And, you know, station leadership, our station leader is not at this point in this position, but station heads like ours are actually on the board of NPR. So they actually have a little bit of control of like how NPR operates and so forth. But yeah, now we're actually independent but associated with buy content. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: And I will say that the big thing there is that we have our own newsroom, we've got our own journalists, we make our own stuff, and we can also purchase programming from other affiliate stations like ours. They're called member stations.

Rebecca Lavoie: And other networks. We purchase programming from APM, PRX, which is another independent nonprofit. There's other organizations like that from which you can buy programming. Wdiy distributes Fresh Air. There's other distributors, other networks that actually sell stuff to stations like ours as well.

Rebecca Lavoie: Music swell. Next topic.

Christina Phillips: I want to talk through some of the things that you need to do in order to qualify for CPB funding. So you could be a public media organization and still not qualify for CPB funding. There's like an additional layer of things you need to do in order to like get that money. And so there are half a dozen big ones. We already set a couple, which you have to be a nonprofit or affiliated with a university school or even a local government. And then another thing that we alluded to is that we cannot run political advertisements or endorse political candidates. So unlike, you know, The New York Times being like, we have endorsed whoever for president, none of that. And we will never run like a political ad, right?

Nick Capodice: It's so weird when I listen to other radio stations, you just driving around and all of a sudden it's like a presidential candidate being like, vote for me, Donald Trump. Like what? This doesn't happen on the radio. Yeah sure does.

Christina Phillips: It says a lot about your listening habits that you're like, wait a minute.

Anne Brachman: You also have to have a certain number of employees. You have to have for certain stations, a community advisory board in your community.

Christina Phillips: It has to report its finances transparently to the public, in our case, our nonprofit 990. Like there's other forms that we share basically saying like, here's where all our money is going. You can look at those all the time. I love looking at nonprofit 990. So like one of my favorite things, um, it has to be overseen by a board of directors that are invested in the community that the programming is serving and don't own or profit from their board service. So NPR's board has a mix of people who are living in New Hampshire. The board is beholden to the public that this station is serving. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is that in order to get CPB funding, you have to have money in the bank already.

Panel: Hmm mhm hmm hmm hmm hmm.

Anne Brachman: For a public television station, for example, you have to have at least $800,000 in private, non, um, federal support, which means viewers like you, it means local foundations, local businesses, maybe state support, because CPB is determined over the years that you need at least $800,000 to offer a really strong public broadcasting service for public television, um, public radio. We also have certain minimums you have to have financially. So the most is $300,000 if you're a larger station, if you're a rural station minority station, it's $100,000.

Christina Phillips: The CPB is not just going to go out and be like, I think there should be a public radio station here. We're just going to dump a bunch of money and hire people. Like, there has to be somebody in a place with some capital saying, we want to start a station or we're already a station. We're doing all these things you need us to do.

Nick Capodice: That makes sense. You know, you don't want to back a bad pony. That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

Christina Phillips: As I had mentioned earlier, NPR has reported that it only gets about 1% of its budget from the CPB. But that's also acknowledging that NPR, a lot of its budget comes from money that stations like ours spend to purchase NPR programming. So NPR would not get a lot of its money if there weren't stations like us who get funding from the government to buy NPR. programming is sort of the circle. And it's also worth pointing out that there are a lot of incentives and tax breaks on the federal, state and local level for public broadcasting, public media. I say that because the idea of public media only existing because of this government funding through the CPB, it's not a complete picture. And the idea of the government creating a space for public broadcasting has existed for a really long time, way before the government was like, okay, we're allocating this money to these stations, right?

Rebecca Lavoie: Can I just clarify something? So what you just basically said is NPR claims don't get less than 1% of its funding from the CPB. However, a station like ours that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to NPR every year, no small portion of that is from the grant we get from the CPB. So we're essentially giving the money we got from the CPB back to NPR. So they actually get a lot of CPB funding just from other stations.

Christina Phillips: Yes. And this I think, is relevant when we talk about some of the legislation that has been proposed to defund CPB or defund NPR.

Rebecca Lavoie: Got it.

Nick Capodice: Let me just ask. A station like ours. NHPR. What percentage of our budget is money that comes from the CPB?

Christina Phillips: Do you guys have a guess?

Hannah McCarthy: I've looked it up.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so it's 6.3% for the fiscal year of 2023.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, it's like surprisingly low.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And if you wanted to by the way, go to Nhpr.org. Or you can just Google NHPR 990. You can look at our 990 and it will break down how much money we got from federal grants.

Rebecca Lavoie: So it's it's more than half a million dollars. And I know that that's about what we pay NPR for our programming?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I could look it up and do a it's a pretty close match. Like it's it's a lot.

Christina Phillips: Hello Christina from the future breaking in here. So listen I went back and looked this up. And in the last fiscal year that's July 2022 through June 2023, we actually spent more money buying content from NPR than we got from the CPB. I'm rounding here for simplicity's sake, but we got $580,000 from the CPB. That's money from taxpayers, the federal government through the CPB, and we spent around $739,000 on NPR programming. Overall, we spent about $900,000 on what's called affiliate program acquisition fees. That includes the NPR programming and then also programming we purchased from other public media organizations. But yeah, most of the money we spent acquiring national programming went directly to NPR, and it was more money than we got from the CPB. And that programming includes national and international news that you hear in the morning, in the evening, throughout the day, from shows like Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.

Christina Phillips: The other thing is, I'll say is I asked Anne. The average public television station gets 18% of its funding from the CPB. The average public radio station gets about 8%, but rural stations, including tribal stations, might get 80, 90, 100% of their budget from the CPB. In the last thing is that a public media organization does not have to be affiliated with NPR or PBS in order to get funding from the CPB.

Anne Brachman: You know, people think that to get CPB money, you have to be a PBS member. You have to be a PBS NPR member. And that's not the case. There's nothing in the Public Broadcasting Act that says CPB can only give dollars to those stations who belong. We have about a handful of public television stations. I call them hyperlocal, meaning they're not PBS members, but they do independent programming, local programming. And on the NPR side, about a third of our stations are not, you know, NPR member stations, but they're doing music and content, you know, music programming and jazz and classical and local talk. Some tribal stations are keeping their local native languages alive. We have one tribal station that's 100%, and it's also a soul soul service station, meaning there's no other broadcaster within a 50 mile radius of that station. And so rural stations, typically, um, are about 19% of a rural station's budget and more than half of all of our rural grantees, which is about 135 stations, rely on CPB for at least 25% of their revenue. And we have 50 rural stations, many on Native American reservations, who rely on CPB funding for at least 50% of their revenue. And rural stations have more challenges as well. I mean, they have more infrastructure to maintain and operate over a larger geographic area with fewer viewers or listeners there to help financially support the station. And if it weren't for CPB and the federal investment, those Americans would not have access to news or informational educational content or even cultural programming.

Christina Phillips: So now we need to get to the thing. The political thing. Are you ready for the political thing? Yeah. Okay.

Archive: From 480 million to 0, that's the Trump administration's budget proposal for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the organization behind the GOP.

Archive: Sponsor of the bill says a government trillions of dollars in debt should not pay for non-essential services. Indiana Congressman Jim Banks, among a growing list of conservative lawmakers to push to defund NPR with a new bill that would outright block federal funding for the news organization, accusing Congress of spending taxpayer money on, quote, low-grade propaganda.

Christina Phillips: So there was a piece of legislation that was introduced from Representative Jim Banks. He's a Republican from Indiana called the defund NPR act. And.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay.

Christina Phillips: And so this is, I think, interesting because it gets back to that idea of like NPR only getting quote unquote, 1% or less from the CPB, but then actually getting a lot of money from stations like ours that use the money that we earn and get in grants to buy their programming. The demand in that bil is that no federal funds may directly or indirectly be made available to use or support an organization named in subsection B. In subsection B, it was NPR, um, including the payment of dues or the purchase of programming from such an organization by a public broadcast station using federal funds received by such station. So that's a little bit confusing. Essentially, what they're saying is that NPR cannot get funding from the federal government, and anyone that gets money from the federal government is not allowed to use federal funds to buy NPR programming.

Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. You know what's interesting, I've heard in my whole life, ever since I was a kid, this call to defund NPR and PBS, too, at times, what I think is kind of funny is that everybody who is in the camp of let's defund it always says the same thing, which is, well, we can't because they're just going to say, you're going after Cookie Monster and Big Bird and wow, we can't do that. You know that some people look at the acquisition and creation of Sesame Street as like, a nefarious way to make sure that you never lose funding from the government.

Archive: Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, criminals, gluttons of greed, and the evil genius who towered over them. One man has the guts to speak his name. Big bird. Big bird, big bird. It's me, big bird. Big yellow, a menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows it's not Wall Street you have to worry about. It's Sesame Street. I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS. Mitt Romney taking on our enemies no matter where they nest.

Christina Phillips: And I will say, I did go and look through the funding history of the CPB, like over years. And there are certainly years where you see the funding appropriation, like, not go up for a while or maybe go down a little bit and it is apportioned. Is that the word like appropriated appropriated um two years in advance. So CPB funding for, you know, 2026 I guess would be decided in the 2024 year. The CPB has never been defunded, but there have been fluctuations that you can kind of trace across eras of Congress, most typically when there is a Republican-led Congress. That just seems to be how it is.

Rebecca Lavoie: So one thing that I've always heard is that one of the reasons why these bills ultimately fail is that even conservative lawmakers ultimately, who come from very rural districts, know that their constituency would be very upset if public media were to go away, because in some places that's the media, like public media is the TV because there's no broadband, there's no other stuff. That's the media. So that that's something that I have heard every time this conversation happens.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, I don't have a straight answer on that. But one thing I will say I think is interesting and maybe it's just my gut instinct, um, is that public media is sort of super entrenched already. Uh, for example, the CPB works with FEMA and has received funding from FEMA to help implement emergency broadcast infrastructure across the United States, which, if you've seen the news lately, about 911 systems going down for several hours in Massachusetts or patchy emergency service communications all over the country in the past few years, this is an essential service, and the CPB is essential in helping to build and maintain that kind of infrastructure. Now, that bill that Jim Banks proposed wouldn't necessarily impact that kind of funding, but it's still a good reminder that federal funding for public broadcasting goes far beyond funding individual media organizations like NPR and all of those individual public stations. The 1500 plus out there, with the exception of just a few, don't get most or even half or even a quarter of their money from the federal government.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. But very, very importantly, right. If we go back to the reason that NPR exists, if we think about the original idea behind the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, behind National Public Radio, the idea is to bring in that firewalled like closest thing to the truth that you can national news to all of these communities around the country. Right. And so if you say you can no longer acquire and not only can you no longer acquire, but like the institution does not exist, that has the most money, has bureaus all around the world, is able to pay for reporters absolutely everywhere and gather national and international news in a way that a local radio station is not capable of doing. What that would mean is that these communities no longer have access to this noncommercial, national and international news. You know, I know that there are a lot of people out there who want something different, right? And who are in total support of that. I'm just saying that that's what it means, right? Like that you lose that access.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hmm.

Nick Capodice: Quick question, Christina, how much money does the CPB get every year? Like how much of my taxes are going towards the CPB?

Anne Brachman: Funding for CPB each year is less than a cup of black, a large cup of black coffee at McDonald's per person per year. And I think a lot of Americans, they will say, oh my gosh, we're paying so much money for our nation's public media service. I'm like, actually, if you go to McDonald's, you get a better bargain with all the services you're getting from CPB.

Nick Capodice: I have final thoughts, but I've talked too much lately, so I'll let someone else talk.

Christina Phillips: So I don't have any final...you can.

Rebecca Lavoie: You can sum it up.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, yeah. Let me just say to anybody out there we, you know, the five of us in this room work at a public radio station. So trust me when I say this in terms of, like, what is objective? Christina, before you worked with us, what show did you work on?

Christina Phillips: The Exchange.

Nick Capodice: What's the Exchange?

Christina Phillips: It was a live call-in news talk program.

Nick Capodice: Okay. And you worked on that show for a while, and you helped book guests on that show? Um, let me just give you a hypothetical. Let's say you had a guest on in the morning who was going to talk about climate change and how, like, a glacier is melting and people are going to what, someone's going to come up to you and say, who should the other guest be on the show?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. If we were, it would be, you know, well, what other perspectives do we need to bring in? And if it's not going to be the expert in the room, we have open phones.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. So we at public radio stations, more than anyone self-police to try to find objectivity, to make sure that we're giving it a fair shake. I think sometimes to a fault.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right. And I will say working with the two of you, sometimes you worry too much about the perception of bias when you're just telling the truth.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Rebecca Lavoie: And this is a kind of editorial conversation we have all the time. And I'm like, guys, just let your truth flag fly.

Nick Capodice: Oh, did you have to use a flag?

Hannah McCarthy: And I also I just want to say really quick because like this conversation about like objectivity versus subjectivity. And I will just I am speaking only for myself. Hannah McCarthy, the individual, not for Civics 101 and like not for this station. Objectivity does not exist like no human being is capable of it. Like that would be so interesting if we were like, I would love to do a story about. I'll just say for me, what I am doing on a daily basis is genuinely trying to find the closest thing to the truth, which, by the way, is a lot harder than it seems because we talked to a lot of people who have different perspectives, who are scholars, who are politicians, etc., who are like either intentionally or not, representing their own bias, their own subjectivity. And so sometimes we try to triangulate or sometimes we just like, read everything we possibly can. Often the closest thing we can get to the truth is like finding the law and like saying like, okay, so like the law says this, and if that person says this and it conflicts with the law, then we like we know which one is true because one thing is like written down, right? Um, by Congress. But my point is just like it's it's less that we believe that we are like, like wholly capable of presenting objectivity. I don't think it's possible, but every single day of our lives is committed fully to trying not to listen to the parts of ourselves that are subjective, and trying to seek out the closest thing to the truth and give that to people. Because, like, my subjectivity doesn't help you. Like my personal perspective does not help you at all. The truth will help you do what you will with the truth. Apply your subjectivity to the to the truth. I will just try to find it and give it to you.

Rebecca Lavoie: I think it's important to understand too, that you don't always like the truth, right?

Hannah McCarthy: No you don't.

Rebecca Lavoie: And I would say we love getting part of our funding from an organization that, you know, doesn't interfere, but we also would do what we would do without it. Let's be real.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And to Hannah's point about trying every day to get as close to the truth as we possibly can, um, I'll just say there's absolutely an argument that the federal government should not give money to public media organizations. You listener may feel that way. You may have felt that way before you listened to this episode. And whether you come down on the side of yes, the federal government should pay for public media or no, it shouldn't. If this episode helped you feel more informed in that opinion. If you learn something, then I've kind of done my job right.

Hannah McCarthy: That is it, right?

Rebecca Lavoie: That's it, that's it.

Christina Phillips: Hey, it's me again. Just me and this good 'ol microphone alone by myself. Here are our credits.

Christina Phillips: This episode was produced by me, Christina Phillips, and edited by our executive producer Rebecca Lavoie, with help from our host Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy and our summer intern, Catherine Hurley. Catherine, we are so happy to have you here. And, uh, by the way, since we recorded this episode, originally, there has been more legislation introduced to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You can find links to more information about all of this legislation in our show. Notes. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriskie Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public radio.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

What happens when we don't trust democracy?

Generations of Americans were not taught how to live in a democracy. That, ultimately, is what civic education is about. So what happens when we lose that knowledge? Where are we today and why should we care? Where do we go from here?

In partnership with iCivics we're bringing you conversations with the people who are paying attention and doing something about it. Civics can have a future in this democracy -- in fact, civics is how this democracy will have a future.


Transcript

whathappenswhenwedonttrustdemocracy.mp3

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, I have a confession to make.

Nick Capodice: I knew you ate those plums, Hannah. No, I was saving them for breakfast.

Hannah McCarthy: You know it's not the plums. It is worse than the plums.

Nick Capodice: Worse than the plums.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, here we go. Before I was a journalist, I never, and I mean never did any research before [00:00:30] I voted.

Nick Capodice: All right. Grand scheme of things, Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: There's more.

Nick Capodice: Uh oh.

Hannah McCarthy: The chances of my knowing who my congressional representatives were at any given time was quite slim. I could not have told you the real difference between the House and the Senate. If the president was writing executive orders. I wouldn't have known, Nick. I probably could have told you two out of the 27 amendments. The amendments. [00:01:00] Nick.

Nick Capodice: It's a grim picture, Hannah I'm not gonna lie, but we, as in, you know, you and I, we do have an outsized investment in these things. You're a different person now.

Hannah McCarthy: I am. And, Nick, the reason I call this a confession, it's not just because I'm the host of a civics podcast. I feel genuinely vulnerable, admitting how vulnerable I once was, because now I've got my armor. I [00:01:30] know what is going on around here. I know when something goes wrong around here, I know what I can do about it. That is protection. That's strength. And why should I be safer and stronger than other people? Why should I know where I am, what I am capable of, what I have the power to do while other people don't?

Nick Capodice: Yeah, that doesn't make a lick of sense.

Hannah McCarthy: Mccarthy I agree, The stuff that I know. Nick, that isn't an [00:02:00] indulgence. It's the safety and security and strength that we all need. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Brandice Canes-Wrone: We need to commit to every American citizen, starting at a young age, to understand our system of democracy.

Josh Ober: Give them a sense of what is the positive value of democracy, and then what is the alternative? We need to teach you about what it is to live under a tyrant.

Mya Baker: You need to have an informed [00:02:30] group of citizens so that they can actually contribute to their democracy. Right? And so that way they can make decisions about what policies and what type of leaders they want to represent them.

Emma Humphries: We need state legislatures to prioritize civic education, to pass laws and course requirements for more instructional time.

Spencer Cox: We need an educated public, and it has to start young, and we haven't done a great job of that over the past 30 or 40 years.

Kristen Campbell: I think we need to do more to help people realize that democracy is larger than politics, and politics [00:03:00] is larger than our partisanship.

Aaron Dorfman: We need to teach the practice of civics and the practice of democracy anew to every generation.

Raj Vinnakota: We need your voice. We need your engagement. We need your willingness to work across difference to empathize and understand different perspectives.

Louise Dube: We need more people on this boat, and we need to be organized. We need to be all in one direction, and we need to elevate the power of this movement.

Hannah McCarthy: So who are all of these people, you may be wondering?

Nick Capodice: And [00:03:30] that's not even all the people, by the way.

Hannah McCarthy: It is not. In March, Nick and I went to California, specifically to Stanford University, where the Civic Learning Week National forum was on the West Coast for the first time.

Nick Capodice: A bunch of educators and policy makers and leaders from all these organizations, all there to talk about civics education, all these people agreeing on one Thing, and that thing is that we need it and we need more of it.

Hannah McCarthy: And Nick and I [00:04:00] sat upstairs in a small conference room waiting.

Ambient: Is that better or worse?

Nick Capodice: It's better, but it just needs a touch more because it's not really having any effect all the way over there. And we weren't alone. We were there with our friends from Icivics, partnering up with a pretty simple goal to ask government leaders, heads of foundations, teachers, even a former secretary of state what they thought, what they believed needed to be done. We interviewed over 30 people.

Hannah McCarthy: We did. And you will not be hearing from [00:04:30] all of them today because that would be a little much. And the thing is, everyone we spoke to said versions of the same thing. We need civics education. We don't have enough of it. And very troubling things are happening because of that.

Nick Capodice: Despite the best efforts of teachers across the country.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh yeah. The fact that I was a sorry excuse for a civic student. That was not the fault of my teachers. I had spectacular teachers throughout my years in school, but [00:05:00] that armor that I have now, knowing what this country is, how it works, what I can do and have in it. It just wasn't on the curriculum docket in the way that it could have been.

Donna Phillips: The challenge we're facing now is that we now have more than a generation of people who did not get strong civic education.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Donna Phillips.

Donna Phillips: I'm the president and CEO at the center for Civic Education.

Hannah McCarthy: The center for Civic Education, by the way, is there to help students learn the [00:05:30] skills they need to be meaningful members of our citizenry.

Nick Capodice: The exact thing Donna is saying a lot of adults never learned.

Donna Phillips: The first thing that I think gets lost is our empathy and our our caring about our civic health. If you don't understand your country, your government and your role in it, you can't care about it, nor can you understand when things could be better or how to make things better.

Hannah McCarthy: I love this point because this was me. [00:06:00] You know, I might have said, yeah, of course I care about my country, but did I? You have to understand something to really care about it. There was a time when I didn't know where and when I needed to show up. What I could have done if I did show up, how I could talk about what matters with other people. It's one thing to say you care. It's quite another to understand what you care about and how you can safeguard it.

Donna Phillips: If [00:06:30] you don't have civic education, then you don't have that empathy. Democracy is active, so you don't have that knowledge for how to continue to be part of the active process of democracy.

Brandice Canes-Wrone: So here's where we are in the United States.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Brandice Canes-Wrone

Brandice Canes-Wrone: I'm the director of the center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution. I'm a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. I'm also a professor of political science here at Stanford.

Nick Capodice: The [00:07:00] Hoover Institution, by the way, is where we were doing all these interviews. But to be clear, we were not partnered with them.

Hannah McCarthy: Right. They are a public policy think tank. And, you know, every time I say the words think tank on this show, I am reminded that we need to make an episode explaining what they are. But for now, all you got to know is they do research and make policy recommendations. So back to where we are in the United States.

Brandice Canes-Wrone: We have very low trust in the federal government. It's very hard to trust something you don't understand and [00:07:30] you don't know that much about. We have higher and higher what you might call affective polarization, which is a term that scholars use, but basically just means what you think of the other party of members of the other party. And basically, we Americans think less and less. So it's not simply that they just disagree. They actually have very negative feelings towards those individuals, which is quite a different thing than simply saying I like that individual, but [00:08:00] we disagree on some things. Um, and in fact we have, I think, even the most disturbing, although those are disturbing enough, we have an increasing number of people who do not have trust in the system of democracy itself. And that's particularly the case among younger adults, which is the most concerning trend. So it's this sort of lack of trust is increasing with generations.

Hannah McCarthy: You know what's really tricky, Nick telling [00:08:30] people they should trust something that they already do not trust, and not just that, that it is vitally important. They trust the thing they do not trust.

Nick Capodice: Because then they might be like, well, now I don't trust you either, you toady.

Hannah McCarthy: So let's zoom out. The path here is education to understanding, to care, to trust. So, Nick, what's trust? [00:09:00]

Nick Capodice: Oh. Ah. I feel that trust means you believe in other person will do what they say they're going to do. It means they care about you. They have your interests at heart. They will protect you.

Hannah McCarthy: I would take that even further. I would say trust is all of those things. I agree with that. I think it's also about reliance, relying on the faithfulness of something, relying on the fact that [00:09:30] it cares for you. So when we trust in a system, when we trust in democracy itself, it means we will do what we can and in fact, what we are empowered to do by that system, to keep that system functioning. Why? Because that system is designed to keep us in power to ensure that we have choices. That system lets us make our own lives better [00:10:00] if we so choose.

Brandice Canes-Wrone: Well, then you're going to have citizens who are able to hold their leaders accountable, who aren't going to be as susceptible to the claims of the sorts of people who would be tyrants. You're going to have citizens who are more engaged. Right. And who are participating. And you're also going to have citizens who understand how government functions.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Real quick, while we're all here, I wonder if we could just remind everyone how this all started.

Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay. [00:10:30]

Brandice Canes-Wrone: The framers saw civic education as essential for a well-functioning democracy, and particularly as a protection against tyranny. So if you think what was the big risk that the founders were worried about? Well, they were worried that very quickly we'd go back to having some form of, if not a monarchy, some sort of dictatorial system, because that was the system that was the natural system. And, you know, to most societies around the world or if not natural, the, the in [00:11:00] fact, system by force. They were also worried about populism, which you could consider a twin threat, but they were most worried about tyranny. And so I'm going to not have it exactly verbatim. But James Madison, for instance, quoted in a letter around the time of the founding and of course, he's the architect of our Constitution, that having that one needed to arm oneself. And he uses that word arm. That is a direct quote with knowledge that this is what [00:11:30] a democracy needed, and that if you had popular government but not popular knowledge, you were at risk of a farce or tragedy, or perhaps both. First three words we.

Kimberly Huffman: The people, we are the ones who are responsible. So if you don't know what's in the Constitution, you are not doing your due diligence to being a safeguard to our constitutional duty to prolong our country's democratic spirit.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Kimberly Huffman.

Kimberly Huffman: I am a government teacher at the Wayne County Schools Career Center. Um, it is a county career tech [00:12:00] school that feeds from ten public schools, three private home schooled students. I am also the social Studies department chair. I also teach political science for a local community college. I'm the student leadership advisor, and I had there's about 120 students that I serve yearly.

Hannah McCarthy: Kimberly, also, by the way, belongs to a bunch of civics and teacher organizations.

Nick Capodice: You know, the next time I think I don't have time to do something, I shall think of Kimberly.

Kimberly Huffman: In my beginning years of teaching, [00:12:30] they came with a certain knowledge base. They knew the three branches of government, the four levels of government. I think everybody would understand that. That is a need to know. I am finding that since they've removed in Ohio testing for social studies out of the elementary, that is no longer the case. So the last time that they've had a civic class is probably eighth grade. They take American history their freshman year, and they take world history their sophomore year. And they have basically forgotten the period of the constitutional framework time zone. And so it's like starting [00:13:00] over. And they don't they come to me without that basic knowledge.

Hannah McCarthy: For Kimberley, civics is way more than the basics.

Kimberly Huffman: So it starts with having citizens who read, who understand, who can think, who can be activated into good causes and in community as well, not just for your individual own vice or your ego or what it would profit you, but it's a virtue that is for the betterment of your entire community. So if you have a nation that is thriving, you have a state that is thriving, and then your [00:13:30] communities can thrive. And then the people, if you're eating, you know, basic nutritional, you're thinking you're sleeping, then you can concentrate on how to expand that and how to make your neighbors make sure that they're fed. Make sure that they're safe, and make sure that they're educated, that they can read and they can think, um, and all those things help you reflect on what you want in your government, and then that helps promote democracy and keeps our country growing the way it's supposed to.

Nick Capodice: You know, I really appreciated this, Hannah, because I think [00:14:00] a lot of people hear the words civics or curriculum and they maybe just tune out.

Hannah McCarthy: Education department community engagement standards. It reminds me of that episode of Parks and Recreation, where they're trying to get fluoride in the drinking water, so they rebrand fluoride to dazzle, and it works. Maybe we need that to talk to civics people.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, like maybe call it National Guard or something. [00:14:30] Well, okay. Not that. But anyway, Kimberly's point about people who are fed safe, who can read, who can think that that that is what leads to helping other people and then to asking our government to take care of us. So you talked about civics knowledge as a kind of armor, Hanna, a safety and a strength. And it literally is when you think about how that leads to physical and emotional safety [00:15:00] and strength.

Kimberly Huffman: One of the things why I'm so passionate about teaching students about the Constitution, about what the Constitution says, I believe that if they know what the Constitution says, like we can agree what we want the government to do, but we should be able to focus on what the Constitution says they can do. And there's a lot of misinformation and there's a lot of information that is just false, that is out there, and people no longer look to the truth, or the truth is in our Constitution. And I always tell my students, you have to know this [00:15:30] stuff because you don't know your rights are being violated if you don't know where your rights are listed. You don't know if the president has the power to do it, unless you see the power to do it in the Constitution. And if you allow the government to do these things in which they don't have the power to do, and you let them do it, they continue to do it. And before long, it's like the frog in the boiling water. It is dead. And you look back and you're like, how did that happen? Well, you incrementally let it happen.

Hannah McCarthy: You know, Nick, I [00:16:00] do not see this as a depressing sentiment. I see it as an empowering one. What a wonderful thing it is to know that democracy will only die on our watch, or lack thereof. So we need to keep our eyes open and stay in charge of the water temperature.

Nick Capodice: Democracy only takes a break if we let it. Speaking of, we're going to take a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: Nice transition. We'll be right back. We're [00:16:30] back. We're talking about the state of things in the United States. We're talking about what makes us a United States, what is straining those United States, and what we need to do to keep us strong. And we have not come up with the t dazzle version of civics. So civics [00:17:00] is the word.

Dame Louise Richardson: There has been a complete collapse in civic education in this country, and the polling is frankly frightening students, um, a lack of knowledge, but b lack of trust in our institutions and in our democracy is something we we worry about.

Hannah McCarthy: This is Dame Louise Richardson.

Dame Louise Richardson: I'm the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Nick Capodice: I do believe. Hannah, this is the first time we have ever interviewed a dame.

Hannah McCarthy: Did you know that only [00:17:30] knights get dubbed with the sword? Like the sword tap on their shoulders. Dames do not get the sword. Tap.

Nick Capodice: I wish we had asked Louise what she thought about that.

Hannah McCarthy: Well, we had other things to talk about.

Dame Louise Richardson: And now we're looking around us and see that this decline of trust in institutions has got to be linked to the decline in knowledge. So it is part of our general approach to trying to mitigate the political polarization of this country, that we want to invest in civic education in our schools. I would add that I'm [00:18:00] a naturalized American, so I had to take a citizenship test in order to become an American. So I would have thought at an absolute minimum, to graduate from high school, one should have to pass the same test as we require our immigrants to pass. But there's so much more to it than than simply passing a test. It's about understanding community, participating in one's community. Understanding how democracy works and what the alternatives are [00:18:30] and how ideally how it is such a better system than the alternatives, but that it only works if people participate in it.

Nick Capodice: And we should add that about a third of high school students in the United States do have to pass the citizenship test to graduate. And, you know, I've read a lot of criticism about that test. People who say, well, that's just memorization. It doesn't mean anything. But to Louise's [00:19:00] point, she's looking at a test as the absolute bare minimum. Pass the test, sure, but also genuinely understand what it means to be in this country.

Dame Louise Richardson: The democracy at the moment is is under severe strain. And when you look at polling for trust in institutions and democracy depends on functioning institutions, that's really quite frightening. So our interest in civics education is part of a broader interest in trying to redress [00:19:30] this polarization. So we're also very keen on national service initiatives, for example, and we see those as being quite closely linked to civics. I mean, a kid who understands their community is more likely to want to contribute to it. Somebody who has contributed to their community is more likely to want to engage in in making it better, engage in, in the politics that are required to, to make this country work.

Hannah McCarthy: You know what kept coming up [00:20:00] in so many conversations we had that day? Younger people who are not invested in democracy one way or another. And Louise, as she said, is an immigrant herself. And she basically said, you know, think about all of the people who are trying to get in to this country. Why do you think that is?

Dame Louise Richardson: Well, the first thing is that students have to understand what democracy is and what the alternatives are and what the great benefits, individual benefits in terms of one's [00:20:30] rights are as a citizen of a democracy as opposed to any of the alternatives. That's why it's so enormously attractive. That's why we have so many people from around the world wanting to be here, wanting to escape the autocracies, monarchies and assorted other forms of of government under which they live.

Nick Capodice: You know what really stood out to me in the conversation we had with Louise was that she said, even if we do have that understanding, even if we do know, there [00:21:00] are still going to be people who are dissatisfied with this country, and rightfully so.

Dame Louise Richardson: You know, our young people are not stupid. It isn't just because they're uneducated that they don't like democracy. They have seen the spiraling growth of inequality. They have seen they've witnessed the inadequacies of, um, of our government and how it has failed many, many parts of this country. And that, I think, is what's breeding their cynicism. They see [00:21:30] the the devastation wrought by the financial crisis and how the cost of that was disproportionately borne by those by the most vulnerable. They've seen how how globalization was welcomed and celebrated by elites like me. And yet people in various parts of this country paid a heavy cost for that globalization, because those benefiting from it didn't think through what the broader implications were. So there's a reason for the distrust of democracy. And [00:22:00] it's not just that they need to be better educated.

Raj Vinnakota: If you think about the age group that I work with, which is 10 to 24 year olds, what have they experienced all their life? What they are seeing is fundamental existential issues in front of them, right from climate change to gun control to what does even the economy look like in the future?

Hannah McCarthy: This is Raj Vinnakota. If you're a Civics 101 regular, then you already [00:22:30] know him.

Raj Vinnakota: I'm president at the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, so the path to we the people, the path to our strength, to our safety, to having choices requires trust. Raj says we need to look at what, beyond lack of civics education is contributing to mistrust.

Raj Vinnakota: And what they see is a government that is unwilling and unable to be able to actually develop solutions for these existential problems [00:23:00] that are hanging over their head. And so we shouldn't be surprised when young people say, do you believe in democracy? And every example that they look at is demonstrating a democracy that doesn't actually solve the problems that they see.

Nick Capodice: It really is a grim picture, Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, but we won't get anywhere if we just stand here and look at it.

Raj Vinnakota: Now, the translation of that to me, is to then turn to young people and say, come on in. It's now your responsibility along with us to actually make sure that democracy [00:23:30] works effectively. We need your voice. We need your engagement. We need your willingness to work across difference, to empathize and understand different perspectives and help us solve these common existential problems. Now, that's an easy thing to say. It's hard to do because what you're asking is people to take that first step and trust us. And so that's where working locally becomes so important, right. So start doing the work in your school, in your college, in your communities, [00:24:00] with your family. Start working in very simple ways that demonstrate, yes, this can work. And that'll start to build up the trust and get people to engage in bigger and bigger issues.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, I want to end this episode with the conversation we had with Louise Dubé, who is the CEO of Icivics. And again, we partnered with Icivics to try to get some answers. Where are [00:24:30] we now? Are we strong? Are we capable? Are we protected? How do we ensure that there is a we the people now and for generations to come?

Louise Dube: We have to recognize that it's a two way street. If we are to teach civics in a competent way and try to explain how this system has delivered for 250 years, we also have to acknowledge that the system itself needs to be revitalized [00:25:00] so that it is responsive to young people, but also to every American in this country, so that when there are problems to solve, common problems to solve, we have institutions that actually do something, because I think that's why people are frustrated, right?

Nick Capodice: The idea is to teach civics while acknowledging that things don't necessarily work the way they're supposed to, which is all the more reason for people to understand these systems [00:25:30] and join together to repair them.

Hannah McCarthy: So you and I know, Nick, that civics education and the need for it, you know, it's not just a nonpartisan issue. It is something that tons of people actually agree on. And yet here we are in a world where even someone with a great education with committed teachers may still be disengaged from or disinterested in the remarkable system they exist within. [00:26:00] And we know that it is because of a lack of the very thing so many of us agree on.

Louise Dube: Adults overwhelmingly They agree. We have done polling ourselves. You've never seen numbers like this 70, 80, 90% support across political partizan views. That's unusual. The problem with civics is that it's a long term investment.

Nick Capodice: It's not an easy pitch, Hannah. I think that's the thing. Long [00:26:30] term means money. It means plans. It means consistency. And not just in schools like we've been talking about, but out there in the world. We need to wake up every day and keep learning, keep talking, show respect, engage in our communities. This is not a problem that can be solved with a magic bullet.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, but you know what, Nick? Anyone who promises a magic bullet is lying to you, including politicians. [00:27:00] And if you know how your government works, you know that. And if you know that, you know not to elect those politicians, you know, to elect the person who says this will take time and effort, and I'm going to give you that time and that effort because that is how this country works. That is the only way it works.

Louise Dube: It's impossible to do this work if [00:27:30] we don't have the conditions in K-12 classroom, in higher ed, in civil society to actually teach. So if educators are not trained. So we have a simple policy menu that talks about first we need time in the classroom. We need requirements at the middle and high school level. We need a civil society to pick up the same pluralistic message, to teach adults, to teach young children, [00:28:00] to teach in boys and girls clubs everywhere, pre-K to grade. So we need that and we need a recognition program. We need civic seals, and we need educators that are trained to do this work. So we have a plan. So we need more people on this boat, and we need to be organized, and we need to be all in one direction. And we need to elevate the power of this movement at this particular time. As I said this morning, this is a fluorescent civic moment. It [00:28:30] is absolutely our duty to use the crisis to make a lot of progress. Now.

Hannah McCarthy: That [00:29:00] does it for this episode, but that most certainly does not do it for civics or democracy. If you want to learn more about our nation itself and what you can do to strengthen your armor and the armor of those around you, head to Civics101podcast.org to find everything we have ever made or visions for everything they make, including their plans to make civics strong in the US. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick [00:29:30] Capodice. Rebecca LaVoy is our executive producer. Kristina Phillips is our senior producer. Music. In this episode by Alex Laine, Pharrell Wooten, Tommy Tsunami, gridded Kakeru, just normal, Jon Runefelt and Bambi Hayes. Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

What happens when we don't trust democracy?

Generations of Americans were not taught how to live in a democracy. That, ultimately, is what civic education is about. So what happens when we lose that knowledge? Where are we today and why should we care? Where do we go from here?

In partnership with iCivics we're bringing you conversations with the people who are paying attention and doing something about it. Civics can have a future in this democracy -- in fact, civics is how this democracy will have a future.

Transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors


 

Follow Civics 101 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

What is the Rule of Law?

What is the rule of law? It's certainly not the same as the rule of men. 

This episode was recorded live at the John J. Moakley Courthouse in Boston. It features the voices of Justice Patricia Alverez and Justice Gustavo A. Gelpí.

To learn more about Law Day and ways you can celebrate the rule of law, click here.

Transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors

Nick Capodice: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nick Capodice. I'm Hannah McCarthy, and we are here today for a very special edition of Civics 101 live. For those out there who are listening, who are not in the room, we are at the Stephen G. Breyer Community Learning Center at the Moakley Courthouse in merry old Boston. Hold on. Before we start, I've always wanted to say this. Um, this episode of civics 101 was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, Nick, was that everything that you have always dreamed of?

Nick Capodice: It absolutely was. Did you ever watch lost the show? Lost?

Hannah McCarthy: I did, I believe that I stopped watching around the fourth season.

Nick Capodice: Did you all did many of you watch lost when it came out? Thank you heavens. Yeah. Of course. Right. That's the correct answer to that. And you know, in the show where the guy goes. Previously on lost.

Archive: Previously on lost.

Hannah McCarthy: Yes.

Nick Capodice: Okay. The guy who did that voice was a chairman at ABC who quit, who forcibly kind of resigned just before the show came out. And then they brought him in secretly to say previously on lost. So he's like, he's like kind of doing a secret perpetually in the lost canon.

Hannah McCarthy: Was that like a Last Jabs thing? Sort of like. All right, well, I'm taking this with me.

Nick Capodice: I'm gonna be on the show forever.

Nick Capodice: So, Hannah, we are not here today, though, to talk about hatches and polar bears.

Hannah McCarthy: We are not the. We have mentioned John Locke quite a bit on the show, so. But let's get to it. Nick, what are we doing here today?

Nick Capodice: So today on civics 101, we are talking about one of the most frequently used and infrequently defined expressions in the world of civics, the rule of law.

Archive: You know, Trey, what we know is that this administration is anti the rule of law.

Archive: Activist judges, liberal judges with a political bent. It's a threat to the rule of law.

Archive: The president himself has led a full frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law.

Archive: Donald Trump believes that following the rule of law and this is crucial, is for suckers.

Nick Capodice: And it's no coincidence this episode is coming out just before May 1st. For anyone out there, May 1st is Law Day. It's not a federal holiday or anything, but since 1958, we have recognized Law Day as an occasion to reflect upon and celebrate law. And also, Hannah, I don't know if. Did you know that May 1st is International Workers Day, aka may day, and there's a whole story there about May Day and Law Day. We are not going to get into it.

Hannah McCarthy: We also don't have time to get into the ancient Spring Festival or Maypoles or anything like that. But Nick, did you know why pilots say May day in the case of an emergency?

Nick Capodice: I thought we said we were going to stop all the factoids because it's just.

Hannah McCarthy: This is a really this is a really good one. All right. It comes from the French May day for help me.

Nick Capodice: I did not I actually did not. Did any of you know that? Of course, the whole room nodded and said, of course. So more fool me 80% of the room. But we have been goofing around just to get started. But seriously, for one second, I would love everyone here in this room just to think to yourself for one little bit. What to you is the rule of law?

Justice Alverez: I think that the way to explain the rule of law is by talking about what the rule of law is not, so the rule of law, it is not a law, and it's not a set of rules enacted by a country. It is not the rule of men.

Justice Gelpi: Well, the rule of law in very, very basic terms means that all persons are treated equally under the law.

Justice Alverez: My name is Patricia Alvarez. I'm a senior justice in the Fourth Appellate District of Texas, and I am very happy to be here.

Justice Gelpi: My name is Judge Gustavo, a Gelpi. I'm. I am a United States Circuit judge for the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which sits in Boston. And the jurisdictions within the First Circuit are Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine and Puerto Rico, where it's much warmer during the winter. And it's a story for another day as to why Puerto Rico is part of this first circuit, but I'm proud that it is.

Nick Capodice: We have two uniquely qualified guests to lead us through this one today, and I'm going to leave the next step up to you, Hannah. Judge Alvarez started with what the rule of law is not. And Judge Gelpi started with what the rule of law is. Which of those would you want to go through first?

Hannah McCarthy: So you know what they say about drawing a face so it can be incredibly difficult to get the nose correct. Drawing a human nose is a really difficult task. So the advice that a lot of new artists are given is don't draw the nose at all. Draw the rest of the face and the nose sort of emerges. You draw everything else. You draw what the nose is not. So let's start with what the rule of law is not. And maybe the rule of law will emerge.

Nick Capodice: I'm glad you opted to go. With what? It's not because the term rule of law. It's kind of difficult because the word rule is kind of complicated. It means a lot of different things. Rule can mean like, you know, I am ruled by a lord or a liege or a king or something. Rule can be a rule like, you've got to do this. You've got to do your homework before you can play video games. Or rule can be a guideline, right? You know, rule of X, rule of thumb, the rule of thirds in photography and writing, the rule of three, which is that things are better in threes. I just did it there.

Nick Capodice: But the rule of law. As Judge Alvarez said, it is not a rule like you've got to do this. It is certainly not a guideline. It is a system. All of us, we all of us in this country, are ruled by the law, and we are not ruled by men.

Justice Alverez: The rule of men is what a group of leaders want the law to be for their benefit only, not for the benefit of everyone else, but for their benefit. It could be not a group of men. It could be a political party. It could be, you know, a group of people. It could be a society, or it could be one person. The rule of men is so important to understand because it only satisfies the desire, the the rights of the very few or of one person. And the rule law is totally different than that.

Nick Capodice: I actually have a very good quote by Thomas Paine about this, and I wrote it down. Would you mind reading a slightly expedited version of it?

Hannah McCarthy: But where, say, some is the King of America? I'll tell you, friend, he reigns above and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain. In America the law is king. For as in absolute government, the king is law. So in free countries the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other.

Nick Capodice: Thank you. That was well done.

Hannah McCarthy: So thinking about this Thomas Paine quote, Nick, freedom is inextricably linked with rule of law. And as it so happens, that's how I see it too. So now I would love to focus on what Judge Gelpi said the rule of law is we talked about what it's not what it is that all people are treated equally under the law. And I'd also like to come back to that later, because I do think that deserves a little more interrogation.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. The notion that all people are treated equally under the law does deserve interrogating.

Hannah McCarthy: But he did say, in addition, that everyone has the same obligation under the rule of law. What is that obligation?

Justice Gelpi: Well, for example, no one can be discriminated in employment on the basis of race, ethnic origin, sex. That's how the law protects everybody equally. Now, the obligation is that an employer, for example, has an obligation not to discriminate. So individuals have the rule of law that applies to them. The law guarantees that they will not be discriminated against, but if they aren't, they will go to court. Same thing. An employer has to follow the law and guarantee that he is not discriminating against any individual.

Nick Capodice: All right. This is our agreement. If we are under the rule of law, it is a two way street and its best form. It is not unlike a healthy relationship. We are protected by the law, and in that protection is the recognition that we are accountable as well. Everyone else is protected from us, and if you don't have that basic agreement, you're going to have a bad time.

Justice Gelpi: You go to the days of the Old West. Who's right? Who's wrong? You draw your gun and you shoot. Uh, that's not the way we resolve things in this country. You go to the courts, the courts resolve the controversies civilly. And that's the important thing about our rule of law in our country.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. I am very glad that we're getting to the courts here. Um, because they do seem to me to be the necessary facilitator of the rule of law. Uh, and because I'm fairly sure that I am currently in a room with more judges than I've ever been in a room with before, to my knowledge.

Nick Capodice: Right, right. To your point, Hannah. Absolutely necessary. But in order for courts to play a role in order to facilitate the rule of law, they have to maintain five immutable ironclad characteristics. Laws do as well. Now, I found this quintet, this little group of five immutable characteristics from the Rule of Law Education Center, not in the United States, from our neighbor and friend, our democratic ally. This is the country that gave us the secret ballot. This is the country that champions democracy. Sausage at the polls. This is the country that enforces mandatory ranked choice voting.

Hannah McCarthy: I have a feeling you have Waltzing Matilda queued up right now.

Nick Capodice: I think I might. Let me see. Our gentle neighbor to the far, far, far south, southwest or east, depending on which you go. Uh, Australia. Thank you. Australia. The five rules for the rule of law to exist, laws must be one. Fair laws have to apply to everyone, regardless of of status. Two. They have to be rational. Laws cannot be arbitrary. You can't have a law against something or someone because you don't like them. Number three. Laws must be predictable. The punishments for breaking the law must be clear. Nobody should be thrown in jail for something they had no idea would result in that. Number four. Laws must be consistent. Similar circumstances for similar people are dealt with in the same way. And finally, laws must be impartial. The judicial branch which makes decisions on laws must be independent.

Hannah McCarthy: It's a helpful list.

Nick Capodice: List. Thank you, I like it.

Hannah McCarthy: I do want to get into that last one though. An impartial and independent judiciary. We've talked about this many times on this show. You know, judges are humans. They're not empty vessels through which the Constitution flows.

Nick Capodice: No, they are not. They are humans. Justice wears a blindfold, but behind that blindfold is a thinking considering human head.

Hannah McCarthy: So how do we define an independent judiciary?

Nick Capodice: Here is Justice Alvarez.

Justice Alverez: So what is an independent judge? Well, the independent judge is that judge that acts within his or her authority, number one. And number two is a judge that can rule, that can give an opinion if it's at the appellate level, give an opinion without the fear of being harassed, without the fear of being placed in jail. Okay. So that's what it means to be independent. To be independent also means that the executive and the legislators set forth our salaries and set forth, you know, our benefits and so forth. Despite that, we as judges can act, can rule without fear of the legislators or the executive taking away our salaries. So that's what it means to be independent, not to do whatever you want to do, but not to fear.

Hannah McCarthy: I appreciate so deeply a judge actually explaining that, you know, I think that's the first time that we've asked a judge directly what that really means. That was incredibly helpful. And as we're working through these principles, these five principles that you laid out, Nick, these rules for the rule of law, there's the ideal, right? There's the thing, there's the shining ideal, and then there's the practice. We can strive for a perfect democratic republic under a flawless rule of law. But I don't think we are that.

Nick Capodice: We sure are not.

Hannah McCarthy: And I do not want to make this episode moot. But, you know, if I asked, a room full of random people. Are all people in America treated exactly equally under the law? I don't know if everyone would say yes. Absolutely.

Nick Capodice: Do you want to try?

Hannah McCarthy: I'm a little nervous, but yes, I do. Let me ask this room. Does everyone here in this room believe that all people in this country are treated equally under the law?

Speaker11: No, no, no.

Nick Capodice: That's pretty much what I expected. Yeah, we're going to get into that. But first we've got to take a quick break.

Hannah McCarthy: We're back.

Hannah McCarthy: You're listening to civics 101 live from the Stephen J. Breyer Community Learning Center at the Moakley courthouse in good Ole Boston.

Nick Capodice: Here's to good old Boston.

Nick Capodice: The home of the bean.

Speaker4: And the cod.

Nick Capodice: Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.

Hannah McCarthy: On a little ditty that I have known since a young child. I grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, so I've known that for a while.

Nick Capodice: That's right. You and John Adams coming up in Braintree?

Hannah McCarthy: Not at the same time, but. Yeah.

Nick Capodice: Right. We are in this courthouse today with a John Adams quote chiseled on the side of it, by the way, because we're talking about the rule of law.

Hannah McCarthy: So let's get back to the law, applying equally to everyone. Because Nick, as we gestured to earlier and as we polled the room, it does not seem to. Right.

Nick Capodice: So for this, I would like to begin with sort of a broad 30,000 foot look at this and then sort of hone in on obvious inequalities in our justice system. If that's okay.

Hannah McCarthy: That's okay.

Nick Capodice: So let's take something like stealing, right? Stealing. Writ large. It's against the law. But stealing a car is not the same as stealing a pack of gum. And that's one of the reasons we have different categories of things, like violations and misdemeanors and felonies and felonies in different classes and degrees.

Hannah McCarthy: Do you remember that commercial from the 90s about piracy? Internet piracy?

Speaker4: You wouldn't download a car?

Hannah McCarthy: Yes. That commercial pained me every time I saw it. I could neither confirm nor deny that Napster played a part of my childhood, but it hurt to watch that.

Nick Capodice: I have to tell you, I didn't know. I don't know if I would or not, but when I was 13, I might have downloaded a car if I could have. But let's say it's two people who stole the same thing, or three people who stole the same thing. Let us go with the good old literary chestnut. A loaf of bread.

Hannah McCarthy: And we're not going to get into the broken window panes. And the attempted theft of the silver candlesticks.

Nick Capodice: We're not gonna. Javert. But seriously, one person steals a loaf of bread to feed a hungry family. Another steals it as a prank, and a third steals it. Not because they needed it, but just because nobody was looking and they felt like it. Should all three people get the same punishment?

Hannah McCarthy: Fortunately, that's not for me to decide. Right. That is the job of judges and juries. Lawyers play a role in that, you know, to explore the context of a crime. Um, judges, maybe with a recommendation of the jury, determine the sentence. I know that is rare, but it happens.

Nick Capodice: And sometimes that last step, determining the sentence is much more complicated than I had imagined. And again, here is US Court of Appeals Circuit Judge Gustavo Gelpi.

Justice Gelpi: And I would say sometimes sentencing is the most difficult aspect of the rule of law, because sometimes we have what are known as mandatory minimums. For example, in drug cases involving large quantities of drugs or when you have firearms involved. You have to apply that mandatory minimum. But sometimes it is tough from the judges perspective, because you will see an individual who otherwise should not be serving that much time. But for the rule of law, you have to apply it equally to everybody.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. So the difficulty that judge help is describing here is feeling that perhaps a sentence is unfair. Maybe. Right. Um, but there's a law at the state or federal level saying that certain offenses have to be punished in a certain way. So this is an instance of the rule of law being upheld, even if perhaps to that individual judge, it might not feel fair.

Nick Capodice: To take it a step further. If a defendant has a really good reason. They broke the law, and this law has a mandatory minimum sentence. But this person had really special circumstances and the judge gives them a lighter sentence. That may be fair, but it is not upholding the rule of law. Now it is time for us to get into things that are not fair, not the rule of law, and that are definitely happening in the United States of America. The law should, but does not apply equally to everyone.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm glad that we're talking about this, because to me, it gets at the very many steps that have to occur for the law to be applied. Inequitably. Right. Where and how you grew up, how you're perceived by others, how you're perceived by law enforcement, even the laws that guide your city or state. Has your legislature crafted them in a way that might put you in scrutinize way more than somebody else? And we know, based on the stats, that race and money play a huge part in this. We know that an innocent black person is seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than an innocent white person, that black Americans are incarcerated at five times that of the rate of white Americans. There's so much data on this. So, Nick, this makes me wonder what role a democracy could or should play in ensuring its citizens are set up to succeed under the rule of law. And then, you know, the money element. Wealthy people, they can pay fines. They can pay their bail. They can hire the best lawyers.

Nick Capodice: You said the best lawyers. You said the the most powerful law firms, right? And it's fitting that you said those words. Listeners to our show know we have talked in many episodes about unequal treatment of historically marginalized communities, past and present. But we are in a unique time frame right now. When we talk about fractures in the rule of law.

Speaker13: Since his inauguration, President Trump has taken 145 executive actions. And many of them, as we've reported here on the Daily Report, have involved immigration, the shrinking of government, but some have also targeted law firms. The president has attacked those in the legal community who, in his opinion, engaged in, quote, frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States.

Nick Capodice: As we are taping this, President Trump has used executive orders to target six law firms, large wealthy law firms, preventing them from entering federal buildings, ending current federal contracts with them, or removing them as potential firms for future government work. A partner in one firm, Paul Weiss. Now that is the name of the firm. It's not one person. It stands for. Um, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. This firm did pro bono work in a suit against people who participated in the January 6th insurrection. And there was an executive order, uh, Executive Order 14237 titled Addressing Risks from Paul Weiss. This executive order stripped them of their ability to continue to operate. That executive order was lifted after Paul Weiss agreed to do $40 million of pro bono work that supported the agenda of the Trump administration. There are several lawyers and judges in this room tonight. There are other legal professionals in this room tonight as well. And I do not know if they are willing or able to comment on it. So I can and I will say, if we go back to our list of five things that make the rule of law work. Ask yourself, is this fair? Is it rational? Is it predictable? Is it consistent? And is it impartial? And I'm going to leave that to you to decide.

Hannah McCarthy: All right. Nick, so we have talked about ideal versus reality. Did the judges you spoke with have anything to say about cracks, so to speak, in the rule of law? You know, Payne talked about freedom and rule of law going hand in hand. What happens if and when rule of law falters?

Justice Alverez: And it's called the democratic erosion. And that's a title that a lot of the great legal thinkers have labeled this this phenomenon. So erosion occurs when the captain of one soccer team buys one of the referees. The rules of soccer can be changed now because the referees, you know, they won't pay attention to the rules and they'll do whatever. And one team benefits from those rules and the other team does not. It's occurred in Venezuela. It's occurred in Turkey, by the way. It's just occurred in 2010, in Hungary and shortly thereafter in Poland.

Nick Capodice: Judge Alvarez wrote a paper on this, and I have a link in the show notes to anybody who wants to read it, it's tremendously written. She explains how the breakdown in the rule of law is inextricably tied to the breakdown of democracy. And she started with the example of Nazi Germany.

Justice Alverez: Well, you have Hitler coming into power in a very democratic, you know, oriented way. It was voted in. And as he became powerful, as did the Nazi Party, they started stripping the government and they started stripping not only the government, but also the judiciary and the press. And all of a sudden, you had the government of a few government of men, the rule of men versus the rule of law versus a democracy. And it was what Hitler and his people wanted. And that's what everyone, uh, was submissive to.

Nick Capodice: And then she moved on. She said things can happen differently, like in Peru or Argentina when it happened suddenly, overnight, like in a coup d'état.

Justice Alverez: And it happens really fast and everyone is just shocked. But, you know, democracy is just finito. Terminado totally in one day and with guns and with the military if you want to.

Nick Capodice: And finally, there is one more way.

Justice Alverez: There's another way. And that's the Hungarian way. And the Hungarian way is, uh, Viktor Orban, who is very charming and, uh, and his party, the Fidesz party, and they come into power, they're voted in and, uh, they just swept everything, you know, they're the majority party in Parliament. They're the majority, everything. So what do they do? Well, we got all this power. Let's do something about it. They began very slowly dismantling all the checks and balances. And they started, by the way, with the Constitution.

Nick Capodice: Viktor Orban and his party made drastic changes to Hungary's constitution. They also appointed loyalists to key judicial positions, and he lowered the retirement age of judges, forcing hundreds of them into early retirement in one night.

Justice Alverez: And they started enacting all these laws that benefited only a few, not everyone. The other problem was that they violated laws. And guess what? They were not held accountable. Why? Because the judiciary wasn't there. They Initiated the judiciary. They totally destroyed it. And so now they're doing what they want to do. So what do you have there? You have very charming people coming into power, destroying the rules or enacting new rules that give them more power. The rulers start ruling with the rule of the few men and displacing the rule of law by setting aside the judiciary. So that's what happens with the democratic erosion.

Hannah McCarthy: All right, so, Nick, as you know, something that is very important to me right now, in particular, is the emphasis that we live in a democracy wherein people do have the power, and it is the role of the media, I think to help people understand things and to not exaggerate things and to not scare them, right? That is part of our job. That's part of our responsibility. And so many guests who I've spoken to recently have said to me, you know, the important thing about this nation is that all of us, we the people, we are still here. This is still a democracy. We still have power. And that is the most important thing.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. And I have one more guest to add to your list, Hannah. We talk a lot about the pillars of democracy on this show, and the rule of law stands amongst them. Having now made this episode, if you asked me what is the rule of law, I might say it is the thing that stops erosion. It stops anarchy. It stops tyranny, and it keeps our democratic republic. Now, I don't believe Judge Alvarez or Judge Help or any of the people in this room, for that matter, want to see that pillar crack or want to see democracy A road. And fortunately for some good news. Judge Alvarez had some advice for the people. Democracy is still in their hands, but only if they are politically active.

Justice Alverez: But I don't say go, you know, become a Democrat always, or a Republican, you know. It doesn't matter you what you believe in. You become active politically, always watching that. There's no erosion of democracy, that there is no rule of men in our country, and that only the rule of law exists and that people don't. They don't take the rule of law lightly. Honor it, live it. I think that we can prevent things like what happened to Hungary and what happened to Venezuela and Argentina and and Germany. Everyone is accountable. No one is above the law. And I think That our children need to know that.

Nick Capodice: Well, that is our episode on the rule of law. I've got some massive thanks here. First, a huge thank you to Allison Gaertner for helping to organize all of this. She works at the Stephen Breyer Community Learning Center on Courts and the Constitution at the Moakley courthouse. After the taping of the episode, we had a wonderful talk with three judges, and since the microphones are off, everybody could be really candid. And it was phenomenal. So thank you, Judge Ireland, Judge Ponsor and Judge Ephraim. If you want to find out more about Law Day, May 1st I encourage you to check it out. Go to law. Org you can see the stuff that the American Bar Association has put together. And thanks to them too. Thank you American Bar Association. I'm looking at you, Frank Valadez. You're a star. This episode was made by me. Nick Capodice with Hannah McCarthy. Our staff includes Christina Phillips as a senior producer, Marina Henke as a producer. And Rebecca Lavoie is everything to all things. We Say executive producer, but she is technically the director of on demand audio. But she's so much more than that. Music in this episode from Hanu Dixit. Epidemic sound and the inimitable Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

Nick Capodice: Great time. Great time. But the break is a lie.

Hannah McCarthy: It is a lie.

Nick Capodice: Did anybody get that joke? The break is a lie. Yeah, I got it. Hannah and I had a little bet about who would get that joke in the room. Uh, it's a portal joke. Are you ready to go?

Hannah McCarthy: I'm ready.

Nick Capodice: Here we go.


 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Efficiency v. Democracy

Today we were going to explore how "big tech" has woven itself into the fabric of the Trump administration. But after a conversation with Allison Stanger, professor at Middlebury College, we decided to focus exclusively on Elon Musk and his relationship with Donald Trump. 

What is DOGE, the "Department of Governmental Efficiency?" And while we're at it, what is efficiency anyways? Has DOGE saved Americans any money? What information of ours are they trying to access? And is there any chance they've already succeeded?

Transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:01] Hannah.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:01] Nick.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:02] Civics 101.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:03] It sure is.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:04] It sure is. Uh. And today, uh, well, I have a 101 of a different color. Nick.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:12] A different color, like. Like a horse of a different color.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:15] Yes. Which, by the way, is an idiom that I thought came exclusively from The Wizard of Oz until I fact checked it for this episode.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:23] Hannah, we just don't know what we don't know.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:27] Which actually leads nicely into today's episode [00:00:30] talking about what we don't know, because the original goal of this episode today was to talk about the tech industry and the executive branch.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:40] So big tech, right? Like the fact that there were a bunch of tech giants at the inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos sitting with the president's family or former presidents usually sit.

Archival: [00:00:53] Sitting with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google's Sundar Pichai, the billionaires seated in [00:01:00] the first row in front of some cabinet nominees.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:05] And a bunch of executive orders that have to do with AI and social media and tech regulations.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:11] Right. And the idea here was, you know, like, how did Big Tech get all involved with this administration, if indeed they are? But here's the thing.

Allison Stanger: [00:01:21] It's not the involvement of big tech per se, but it is the involvement of one particular tech [00:01:30] superstar. Elon Musk.

Archival: [00:01:32] Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk.

Archival: [00:01:35] Elon Musk.

Allison Stanger: [00:01:36] Elon Musk.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:41] Are we doing this?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:43] Oh, we're doing this. This is Allison Stanger.

Allison Stanger: [00:01:46] I'm Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor, but I also have a whole range of other titles.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:52] Allison's other titles, by the way, include.

Allison Stanger: [00:01:54] Co-director of the Getting Plurality Research Network, faculty affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center, visiting fellow [00:02:00] at Stanford's Human-centered AI Institute, distinguished senior fellow at the center for Nonproliferation Studies. And what am I leaving out? Oh, I'm an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:10] Oh, Hanna, who has the time?

Allison Stanger: [00:02:12] I just am interested in everything. And that's a great thing to be at this moment, because things are happening so quickly. It allows you to put things together, maybe in a way other people cannot.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:22] And today, Nick Allison puts things together.

Allison Stanger: [00:02:27] And it's all being done in plain sight. Truly [00:02:30] unprecedented. It's interesting because a lot of people would say, like, maybe I'm like an ideologue, but I just want to stress here, I'm speaking out because I have tenure and I feel like I'm obligated to tell the truth. And so everything I'm saying to you is true to the best of my knowledge. I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I think it's really important in a highly partizan age to just focus on facts and the truth. And that's what I'm trying to do with my work. And if I'm [00:03:00] wrong, I'm happy to be corrected.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:03] Okay, so Allison said she is speaking out because she has tenure. Like literally, as in she is a professor with a permanent job.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:13] Exactly. I once had a college professor, Nick, who said to the class, class, I have tenure. And what does that mean? Everything. Uh, now, what does that actually mean? It means that the school where you teach is basically giving you a kind of academic freedom. [00:03:30] It means you can research or teach without fear of repercussion or political whims.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:34] So it's kind of like the Supreme Court lifetime appointment.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:38] Well, it's kind of like what the Supreme Court lifetime appointment is supposed to be. So Allison feels like she can safely say, this is what I think is going on with the government and say it without losing her job. And before we get into this episode, here is what Allison thinks about sharing your perspective as a teacher, because today we're [00:04:00] going to learn some things.

Allison Stanger: [00:04:01] I believe a classroom should be a place where people are struggling to understand what's true. You know, you can't get to what you believe is true unless you're allowed to speak your mind and not be told what's true. You need to own it. You need to own it for yourself, you know? And, uh, it is true that there are a lot of ideological, uh, classrooms where faculties were encouraging students to do certain things politically. It's fine if you present it as this is what I believe, and you're free to disagree. It's [00:04:30] not fine if you're not presenting it that way. Because. Because then the student, you know, what are they supposed to do? You have power over them. You're grading them. That's not what a classroom should be, though.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:40] It sounds like Allison understands the power of power.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:45] That she does. So this is what she knows, some of what she believes. And you are free to disagree. Because, by the way, Allison has concerns based on what she's seeing and what she knows about power and information, and [00:05:00] we're going to share those today. But keep in mind that there is a lot that we don't know, in part because we are talking about something and someone that isn't super clear about what it or they is are doing.

Allison Stanger: [00:05:15] I wrote a book called One Nation Under Contract on the privatization of American Power, and that was all about how increasingly things we thought of as government functions were in the hands of the private sector. And I talked about some of the potential, um, problems with [00:05:30] that trend. Well, this is like privatization in overdrive. You now have both the president and Elon Musk in an unprecedented position, where the the boundary between the public and the private is blurred. And I think that's intentional for a variety of reasons that benefit both Mr. Musk and President Trump. So it's not like it's some kind of brand new thing. It's just a trend in motion that has gone into overdrive and [00:06:00] in my view, has taken us into dangerous territory.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:02] So, Hannah, the reason this is a Civics 101 of a different color is because we are talking about specific people. Two specific people.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:12] Yeah. And we're talking about what Allison Stanger, as someone who studies this from many, many angles, thinks is going on.

Allison Stanger: [00:06:20] This isn't about tech. It's about power. And technology has increasingly, over time, come to have an impressive [00:06:30] amount of power vis a vis the US government. That's another trend in motion. The book I'm currently writing is called Who Elected Big Tech? And again, you know, these trends were in motion, which is why we're not responding as dramatically as we might otherwise, because in some sense, Americans have worshiped technology that we're really proud of our tech companies, the companies, innovation they inspire. But these innovations also have an impact on how our government works, basically.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:58] Americans might be more [00:07:00] concerned about how technology influences our government if we just didn't love technology so much.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:07] Well, technology is amazing. Most of us carry mini computers in our pockets. We can be in constant communication with each other, get a ride anywhere with the tap of a screen. Show billions of people. The video we took of a beach get practically any commodity delivered to our door. But there's a lot more to it. And Allison is asking how that [00:07:30] impacts our government.

Allison Stanger: [00:07:32] And in some way, I would say what's really going on here is we have a struggle between our kind of 18th, 19th century political institutions and how you bring them into the digital age. And Musk and Trump are showing you one version of that. I personally think it's a dangerous version. If you think democracy is the public good and you think the voice of the people matters, but it's one version.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:55] Yeah, the framers probably didn't envision us all having computers in our pockets, though they [00:08:00] did have their own self-driving cars in a way. Hannah. They were called horses.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:04] Okay.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:05] All right. Um, anyways, Allison says Musk and President Donald Trump are showing us one version of bringing this 250 year old democracy into the digital age. So what version is that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:20] Well, Allison focused on this idea of efficiency.

Allison Stanger: [00:08:24] People have this illusion that automating everything is so awesome. This comes out of Silicon [00:08:30] Valley because, you know, it's not going to be biased. It's going to be so fast, it's going to be so efficient. And the fact of the matter is, you can also kind of create this Kafkaesque world that we've all been in when you're like trying to talk to a human being and you're just going around in circles with these chatbots. That, to me is the future feature I envision when everything's been automated. It's one in which, you know, I'm increasingly feeling like a character in severance, you know, just isolated from everything going on around me. Um, [00:09:00] and we don't want to see that. Uh, we're so much better than that.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:05] We're talking about efficiency, of course, because we currently have a government department dedicated to it.

Allison Stanger: [00:09:11] As the Department of Government Efficiency proudly proclaims, it's efficient, but efficient is not democratic. Uh, efficient isn't humane. Efficient isn't about the things that bind us one to another. The things that really [00:09:30] matter.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:30] Wow. Um, okay, first, before we get to the Department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge, can we dig into this a little more? Efficiency isn't about what binds us together.

Allison Stanger: [00:09:48] Most of the things in life that are truly meaningful have nothing to do with efficiency. You know, if we operated the world the way the tech bros think we should operate it, there would be no mothers. There [00:10:00] would be no caregivers. You know, if they celebrate Ayn Rand, you know, the the libertarian. The most amazing thing to me about her novels is there's not a single mother in them. The world just keeps reproducing itself, and children are taken care of and they grow up without anybody doing it. I happen to believe that there's a lot of human beings who are empathetic and value care for others over efficiency. And that's what makes [00:10:30] our life meaningful, you know.

Nick Capodice: [00:10:32] All right. Care over efficiency. I can see what Alison means here. That efficiency isn't democratic. You know, it makes me think of what Aziz Huq said about democracy in your episode about constitutional crises, that it's like being a parent. You know, it sure isn't fast or clean, and it doesn't always go so great, but you show up every day and you keep doing it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:57] True. It's also frustrating, and it can often [00:11:00] feel like you're not getting what you want. And we want to get what we want. And to be fair here, there are a lot of people who believe that shaking up the government is the way to do it, to get what we want. Stripping it down, cleaning it out, making it more efficient. That's where Doge comes in. So, Nick, do you know how Trump created Doge?

Nick Capodice: [00:11:25] I'm gonna guess in executive order. Uh, it pretty much just [00:11:30] happens.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:31] It does. So Doge, which, by the way, is also the name of Elon Musk's cryptocurrency derived from a famous dog internet meme. It was born when President Donald Trump renamed the existing United States Digital Service established by Obama to provide digital consulting to federal agencies to the United States Doge service. The USGS is not a particularly well-known service in the government when it comes to the public [00:12:00] at least, but their job has been to make digital government stuff easier for the public to use, like they recently simplified the Social Security Administration website and customer satisfaction went up.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:11] People hate a complicated website.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:15] They do. Obama created the United States Digital Service after the healthcare.gov rollout. You remember that massive flop?

Nick Capodice: [00:12:24] Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:24] So in that same order where Trump renamed the digital service the Doge service, [00:12:30] he established the US Doge Service temporary organization. The thing that Musk is the head of.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:38] So the US Department of Government Efficiency service temporary organization is within the United States Department of Government Efficiency Service. I also think it's interesting that a department devoted to efficiency has a redundant name.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:55] That is correct. Uh, we've got a little more of that coming up. Uh, so then the president [00:13:00] told us what Doge was going to be all about.

Allison Stanger: [00:13:04] Musk and President Trump say Doge's mission is to root out fraud, waste and abuse.

Archival: [00:13:08] A new executive order directs government agencies to pursue large scale cuts, saying they now need hiring. Approval from Doge.

Archival: [00:13:15] Has moved to slash programs and the workforce throughout the federal government. Since Donald Trump took office, more than 100,000 federal employees, mostly probationary, have lost their jobs.

Archival: [00:13:25] Massive cuts also announced that the Department of Education, slashing 89 independent [00:13:30] research contracts worth nearly $900 million.

Nick Capodice: [00:13:34] All right, so Trump establishes a Doge within a Doge, and the umbrella Doge is about making federal tech better, and the Musk doge is about firing people and canceling government contracts.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:47] That's probably an oversimplification, but it is also not always super clear what the Musk Doge is doing. So I am gonna go with that. I do want to say both the white House and Elon Musk claim that Doge [00:14:00] does not have the authority to fire people, that only department heads have that authority.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:06] Even though Musk has posted about people losing their jobs if they don't answer an email.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:11] Even though that we know that Trump has issued presidential actions for workplace optimization and cost efficiency.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:19] Which means what exactly?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:20] Telling agencies to get rid of employees and government contracts, all under the guidance of Doge.

Nick Capodice: [00:14:26] All right. So even if Doge isn't doing the actual firing itself, [00:14:30] it sounds like they're a major collaborator.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:32] It feels a little to me, like those two guys in Office space who are finding people to fire.

Office Space: [00:14:38] Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.

Office Space: [00:14:40] I would say I've been missing it, Bob.

Office Space: [00:14:44] Good one.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:45] Those are business consultants. They are there to help the company downsize. Are they formally in charge of signing the papers that lay people off? Probably not, but they're getting people out the door. By the way, there are tons of lawsuits about these firings, and judges [00:15:00] are scrutinizing the whole thing and ordering people to be reinstated or to not be laid off at all. But also, yeah, layoffs are still happening.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:09] And the contract thing. What is that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:12] We're going to get to that Nick after a quick break.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:16] But before that break, a reminder that Hannah and I wrote a book that tells you all about how the government supposedly works. And if you know that, you'll know when it's not working like that. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America Works, and you can get it wherever books [00:15:30] are sold.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:42] All right, we're back before the break. Nick, you asked me about the quote unquote contract thing because Doge has been terminating government contracts across the administration, something they were empowered to do by a presidential action.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:57] Government contracts, meaning the government goes to a private company [00:16:00] and pays them for something.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:02] Exactly. Doge has unilateral authority to cancel contracts for all but law and immigration enforcement, Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka Ice and the uniformed services.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:15] And it has. Right. It's canceled a ton of them.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:17] Well, Doge says it has saved us about $25 billion in canceled or renegotiated contracts. This was as of March 30th, and they have the receipts to prove it. Do you know about the [00:16:30] wall of receipts, Nick?

Allison Stanger: [00:16:31] I just wrote a piece about the wall of receipts.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:34] Alison, does.

Allison Stanger: [00:16:35] You just type in Doge? Gov. It pops up. It's supposed to chronicle all the amazing things they're finding out and the money they're saving. Well, this has been deconstructed in particular by the New York Times as being riddled with errors, as misrepresenting what's actually going on.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:52] The purpose of Doge is to find and eliminate fraud and waste in order to save us money. The purpose of the Doge website is [00:17:00] to tell us what the government is spending money on, and what Doge decided to eliminate to save us that money, right?

Nick Capodice: [00:17:06] It is supposed to uncover, expose and eliminate.

Allison Stanger: [00:17:10] You know, I've written about this a bunch. I'm familiar with how government functions. And I said, this is really weird because this information is available publicly already.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:19] All the information on the Doge website.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:21] Well, the receipts, the wall of receipts, the list of government payments to outside companies. Nick, we have been able to see that all in one place [00:17:30] since 2006.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:32] So the Department of Government Efficiency is doing something the government is already doing.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:37] Yeah. It's not lost on me.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:39] Are they doing anything different?

Allison Stanger: [00:17:41] They don't understand how government payment systems work.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:44] Let's talk about the savings receipts. The page on the website that tells America how much money our government is spending on contracts.

Allison Stanger: [00:17:52] He makes mistakes with the data because it's a live data stream.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:56] So Allison gives this example. If you don't understand how contracts [00:18:00] and reporting about contracts work, you might get suspicious of a vague seeming payout.

Allison Stanger: [00:18:06] So you can go into it at one point in time and it'll say contract for $7 million. And if you look at it at that point in time, they'll say, wow, $7 million awarded, no receipts. What's going on? But it's it's time bound. So if you would go into the same thing a month later, you might see it perfectly reconciled.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:25] So someone who understands contracts would know that it's not clear that the Doge [00:18:30] staff does sort of like being mad that a Dalmatian puppy is all white because you don't know that Dalmatians are born without spots.

Nick Capodice: [00:18:38] Are you? Are you making a 101 Dalmatians reference there, Hannah?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:42] I am indeed. It was the only Disney movie I knew growing up. So the wall of receipts, Nick. There's a wall of spending. As in a list of government contracts and awards. And a wall of saving, as in a list of contracts Doge claims to have canceled and money they claim to have saved. [00:19:00]

Nick Capodice: [00:19:00] Claim to have.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:01] All right, let's try it this way. Nick, I need soup. Over the next three years, I would like to contract you to make me that soup. I will pay you as I receive the soup. By the end of the three years, you will have made $1,000.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:17] I don't know if that's worth it. Hannah. What kind of soup?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:19] But if I tell people today that I've spent $1,000 on soup. That's not true.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:25] It may not be, but I still have not agreed to this.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:27] And if I cancel our deal. 100 [00:19:30] soups in. It's not like I'm getting my 100 bucks back. So if I tell people that I've saved $1,000, that isn't true either.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:38] A dollar per soup is this stone soup.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:42] It is an example of how people might misunderstand how contracts work. And then, you know, publish them on an official government website. Doge has also claimed to have canceled contracts that have already been canceled, and not by them, or that have long since been fully paid out. The [00:20:00] biggest one on their wall of receipts, 1.9 billion bucks in savings that was actually canceled by the Biden administration.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:09] Wait, so you.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:09] Said earlier that this information has been public for a while. So what is the other website that we can all go to to learn about government contracts?

Allison Stanger: [00:20:19] Usaspending.gov. It shows you where your taxpayer money is going.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:23] All right.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:28] Elon Musk, by the way, is a major [00:20:30] beneficiary of government contracts, loans and subsidies.

Allison Stanger: [00:20:33] He's received about $38 billion from the US government for his companies. He's a very large scale provider of government services, be it, you know, launching rocket ships or a whole range of different things.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:47] Has he canceled any of those?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:49] No. Okay. So what else is up with Musk and the federal government on March 20th? Trump signed an executive order ordering agencies to give access to all unclassified data [00:21:00] and records to federal officials, quote, designated by the president or agency heads.

Nick Capodice: [00:21:07] On all unclassified data.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:09] All unclassified data, as in private information about just about everyone in the country. And the exception is pretty much national security secrets.

Allison Stanger: [00:21:20] Think about it. You know, when you fill out your tax return, think about the information that's on that, you know, what can you get from that? You can get the charities you donate to. You can get [00:21:30] what your children's names are. You can get your Social Security number. All these things.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:35] Not just your tax forms, by the way. Doge has been trying to access, sometimes successfully, often with legal challenges, databases that have our medical car, financial education, employment, immigration, adoption and marriage information to name a few categories. This is an order that grants access to anyone [00:22:00] Trump quote unquote designates. Trump also ordered agency heads to facilitate the quote unquote, consolidation of that information.

Nick Capodice: [00:22:10] Consolidation, as in putting all that information into one place, like a single database with practically everything the government knows about us.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:19] We are not entirely clear on what it will look like. But Musk has said it's that siloed information that leads to fraud, waste and abuse.

Archival: [00:22:29] The ways that [00:22:30] the government has defrauded is that the computer systems don't talk to each other. So if the computer systems don't talk to each other, then you can you can exploit that gap. And fraudsters exploit that, exploit that gap to take advantage.

Allison Stanger: [00:22:44] If you want to be like Communist China, you should be applauding this wonderful effort to centralize everything in one place under one tech oligarch who has very close ties to the president, who stands to benefit financially as well. There's just enormous [00:23:00] conflicts of interest involved.

Nick Capodice: [00:23:02] How would this make us like Communist China?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:04] Well, it is literally the system that China uses to surveil its citizens, Russia to. But I do want to be clear. While the word consolidate is in there, the white House has not said whether it plans to create a central database or not. Like we said, they say it's about information access and sharing across agencies to crack down on, again, waste, fraud and abuse. But they have not said how they're specifically going to use that [00:23:30] information or how they are going to keep it secure.

Allison Stanger: [00:23:33] So if they would leak out in any sort of way, that could be potentially damaging for identity theft reasons. So there's a privacy violation, but then there's also it being used in ways to automate all these services that used to have human beings involved, which on the one hand you could say, oh, isn't that great? We're becoming more efficient. We're, um, delivering services in a better way. [00:24:00] But it's really true that data, when it's that abstract, can often, often be biased. It can re reify or reinforce existing socio economic inequalities that are represented in the data. There's all sorts of ways it works against the individual, basically.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:18] Allison is wondering how this data might be used as part of the bigger efficiency project of it all. Ai is already being rolled out and tested within agencies at the federal level, and [00:24:30] we don't know how or whether our data is going to be used in ways that affect our privacy or access to care or safety.

Nick Capodice: [00:24:42] On that subject, Hannah, don't we have privacy laws? I mean, in terms of all this information about us being shared across agencies being consolidated, whatever that means. Are we protected somehow already?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:57] Actually, the 1974 Privacy [00:25:00] Act was designed to do just that. Congress saw how information was used and abused in the Watergate scandal. They knew the government was increasingly using computers to collect and store data. And they passed a law to protect our privacy. Agencies have to disclose when they release our information. They have restrictions about sharing it across the government, and Trump's information sharing executive order might violate [00:25:30] this act. Or, you know, it might clarify who is allowed to access and share that information.

Nick Capodice: [00:25:38] Aka whomever he or agency heads designate.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:41] Uh, if the lawsuits thus far are any indication, we will be hearing what a judge has to say about this in the future.

Nick Capodice: [00:25:48] All right. Hannah, this truly is quite the civics 101 of a different color. Actually, the Wizard of Oz reference really works here because that horse keeps changing color, and this Civics 101 [00:26:00] subject does as well. But here is my question. You said that Trump established Doge as a temporary organization. So does that mean Elon Musk is only temporarily in this position of power?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:15] Okay, so yes, the executive order says the Doge within the Doge will be terminated on July 4th, 2026. And Musk is classified as a special government employee who is only allowed to work 130 [00:26:30] days out of the year. However, there is no cap on how many years he can work in this administration. Donald Trump recently said that Musk will have to leave at some point to focus on running his many companies. We just don't know when that will be. But I did ask Allison what she's paying attention to when it comes to Musk's future, and whether that has anything to do with our government's future.

Allison Stanger: [00:26:55] You know, Musk has publicly stated that he would like X to become the everything app. [00:27:00]

Nick Capodice: [00:27:00] The everything app. What is that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:03] So it's, um, it's like it's everything. It's the thing you use to communicate. So texting, voice video calls, the thing you use to pay for stuff, the thing you use to shop for stuff to call a car or order food. Turn the heat on in your house. Play games, watch movies. Make doctor's appointments, even access government services. There already is an everything app, just not [00:27:30] in this country.

Allison Stanger: [00:27:31] We have an example of an everything app. It's called WeChat and it is something that goes hand in hand with a very authoritarian regime. Because when you centralize power in that kind of way, it's just ripe for abuse.

Nick Capodice: [00:27:47] So please allow me to play the fool here, Hannah, because I think I can guess. But aside from sounding like some kind of uncharted monopoly, how is an app like this tied specifically [00:28:00] to authoritarianism?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:02] Well, in China's case, it is a one stop shop for government surveillance. It's a central location for user information and activity across a lot, lot, lot of things. We have different laws here in terms of privacy and surveillance and all of that. But Allison's point is that an everything app is a risky proposition, especially when the guy who wants to make it and the employees who would help him do that have access to so much [00:28:30] of our information right now.

Nick Capodice: [00:28:32] But they're not allowed to use that information to make an everything app, right? I've got to be right on that one.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:39] Oh, there are a bunch of laws that would make that almost certainly super illegal. And the white House press secretary has firmly denied that that is happening, as did Musk's AI chatbot grok two.

Nick Capodice: [00:28:51] Wait, what?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:28:52] Politico asked grok two if it was trained on federal government data obtained by Doge, and grok two said no. No [00:29:00] data obtained from the federal government at all.

Nick Capodice: [00:29:02] Well problem solved. All right. Uh, wait, can I lie?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:09] It is capable of deception. Yeah, but grok two was really clear. But, Nick, do you know what was less clear?

Nick Capodice: [00:29:17] What?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:18] Grok three the new grok.

Nick Capodice: [00:29:21] Oh, come on, this feels like a joke.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:23] Politico asked grok three the same question, and grok three replied that it was quote unquote plausible. [00:29:30] Right. Like plausible that either it or other AI had been trained on federal information obtained by Doge, but that it, quote unquote, probably wasn't primarily trained that way. Nick, when I asked it, it said, quote, it seems likely that I was not.

Nick Capodice: [00:29:49] All right. That's that's a little less wishy washy.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:52] Although I suppose it depends on how you define wishy washy.

Nick Capodice: [00:29:55] Yeah. Come to think of it, I mean, even the term wishy washy feels a little wishy [00:30:00] washy. All right, Hannah. I think there is really just one last thing we need to cover here.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:06] Okay.

Nick Capodice: [00:30:07] We've learned a lot. We've learned that there's a lot we don't know. We've learned what one person who does know a lot is thinking about right now. But given all the unknowns, what does Allison think we should be doing right now? You know, us regular people who don't or can't have a finger on the pulse the way she does. [00:30:30]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:30] All right, so for those who, you know, maybe don't like what they just learned about.

Allison Stanger: [00:30:35] I think the things we can meaningfully do are also the things that give us meaning. Just stay engaged. Don't run away. Don't hide even if it's scary. Stay engaged because your government belongs to you. And if there's a clear signal that the majority of the American people are not happy with the current state of affairs, it will change. It exists the way it is because we allow it to be that way. So connect [00:31:00] with your friends form. Uh, there's not, like, this one silver bullet. It just takes a lot of people doing what they can to make their voice heard. And people know how to do that. It's best done in community. And it's also highly meaningful to engage with our fellow Americans in that way. So get out there and be a joiner.

Nick Capodice: [00:31:19] You know, Hannah, this is maybe like the fourth or fifth guest who has emphasized that point. Do stuff with other people and talk to them.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:28] Oh, yeah, talk to them. Um, [00:31:30] and this next point, I think, is for everybody, whether you love what you've just heard or really don't. Um, actually, two types of people who really should be talking to each other.

Allison Stanger: [00:31:40] The most important thing you do is the thing that makes life fun. Be curious about other people. Instead of recoiling when someone disagrees with you, just ask them why they think that. And listen. I mean genuinely listen to them and think about whether there's some things in your view that might change as a result.

Nick Capodice: [00:31:58] Just maybe, maybe if enough [00:32:00] people keep saying that to Civics 101 listeners, it'll start a movement.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:04] The listeners who listen, yeah.

Nick Capodice: [00:32:07] Make it happen, listeners. Listen up.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:10] Actually, you can go try it right now because, uh, this portion of your listening is done for the day. This [00:32:30] episode was produced by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie is director of on Demand audio. Music. In this episode by oat segmental, Ryan, James Carr, Arthur Benson, Duke Harrington, and Ava Low. You can find everything else we have ever made here at Civics 101 at our website, civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of New [00:33:00] Hampshire Public Radio.


 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Why do we have the National Weather Service?

Most Americans get their weather forecast from their phones -  or the local news broadcast. But those weather forecasts aren’t actually coming from the weather app or your favorite meteorologist. They’re coming from the National Weather Service - a so-called child agency of NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA - and the weather service - have been the target of deep cuts and significant changes by President Donald Trump and DOGE.

Staff have been hastily fired - and then attempts have been made to rehire them. There have been cuts to weather forecasting operations and the cancelation and lapsing of contracts. And this week it was revealed that the NWS is no longer translating its products for non-English speakers, potentially putting millions of Americans at risk of missing warnings about life-endandering weather. 

So, what is the National Weather Service - and how does its work affect public safety, food production, even national security…in addition to showing up on our phones? When and why was this agency created? 

Transcript

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:05] Nick I never knew I was afraid of tornadoes until I was in Alabama one night and the tornado radio started making noises.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:14] The tornado radio. Hannah, was this produced by Michael Crichton?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:17] They're called weather alert radios, which is the sort of thing that you have in your possession. If you live in a place where weather could otherwise interrupt all communication, and also your power could go out. So it comes with a hand-crank. But the point [00:00:30] is that I lay there on a perfectly still night, listening to the occasional, and frankly, to me, terrifying sound. Now, for.

Nick Capodice: [00:00:37] Our listeners who are curious out there, we will not be playing that sound here despite the audio medium, because it is in fact, prohibited. That is.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:45] Right. People think that that applies only to the emergency alert sound, but actually it is any sound that mimics or even sounds similar to that sound. And you know, we don't need to find we are listener supported public radio. Anyway, through that sleepless alabamian night, [00:01:00] I realized, okay, one thing I am totally terrified of tornadoes. Who knew? And simultaneously, isn't it weird and special that I live in a time and place where this free alert happens to let me know that I could be whisked away to Oz at any moment? So how did this time and place come to be? The sort where a terrifying noise pierces the radio waves when troubles come in? It's time to talk about every [00:01:30] news outlets favorite excuse for hyperbole. Whether this is Civics 101, I'm Hannah McCarthy, I'm Nick Capodice. And to get specific here, I want to talk about the federal government's role in the weather, or at the very least, in how the government shares weather data with the public and uses it to give guidance about all manner of things. Today, we are talking about the National Weather Service, how it came to be and later what it is like to actually work there.

Nick Capodice: [00:01:57] Out of curiosity, Hannah, did you actually experience [00:02:00] or see a tornado?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:01] I did not, and I acknowledge that there are bolder souls out there who might find my East Coast exceptionalism toward columns of decimating wind to be a little, you know, soft handed.

Kris Harper: [00:02:21] Okay, so I'm Kris Harper, I'm professor of history and philosophy of earth sciences at the Department of Science Education at the University [00:02:30] of Copenhagen. And I was a Navy officer, a meteorologist and oceanographer for 21 years. I'm a retired commander. And then, as my meteorology friends would say, I went to the dark side and became a historian of science. And now I study the history of the atmospheric science.

Nick Capodice: [00:02:48] The dark side.

Kris Harper: [00:02:49] Oh, well, because, you know, we look at archives and we're not out looking at the weather and forecasting and doing that kind of thing. It's all kind of fuzzy and not as [00:03:00] solid science as my science buddies would like it to be.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:05] While we're on the subject of Kris's science buddies and the weather, there seemed to be a lot of people out there who suggest that weather prediction is not as hard of a science as, say, biology or something like that. So what is with that? Is there any truth to that?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:19] All right. So let's get into this for a sec.

Kris Harper: [00:03:21] Many people didn't consider meteorology to be a real science. Or as one physicist put it, it was a guessing [00:03:30] science. I mean, you know, be still my heart. I mean, that's just I mean, really.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:35] All right. Good to know.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:36] So is meteorology a real science? Yes. And every time I open my NOAA app to check the weather, that is confirmed by me through a combination of translated physics, statistics, geography and chemistry.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:51] All right. You brought up Noah Hannah, and I think I've got this one. Noah is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:58] Very well done. Thank you.

Nick Capodice: [00:03:59] Is that the same [00:04:00] thing, though, as the National Weather Service?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:02] Actually, the National Weather Service is what you call a child agency of NOAA, which, by the way, shapes policies around climate, oceans, fisheries, coastal restorations. Basically, the National Weather Service sits under the NOAA umbrella, and they have a more focused mission.

Kris Harper: [00:04:20] So the National Weather Service, which has had a variety of names over its lifetime, its mission is to provide weather services [00:04:30] to the public to keep the public safe, to provide forecasts that help agriculture and industry.

Nick Capodice: [00:04:37] Now, that last part, agriculture and industry. That is something that I was not expecting. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:41] And this ties into where the National Weather Service actually fits in the organization of the government. While many of the Earth science, research and policy groups are housed under the Department of the interior because of the origin story of the government's interest in weather data, the service part is part of the Department of Commerce. [00:05:00]

Nick Capodice: [00:05:00] Okay, so there's that industry tie in. So what exactly was the National Weather Service doing when it was originally founded?

Kris Harper: [00:05:08] So we first see the United States get involved in collecting weather information in the early part of the 19th century.

Nick Capodice: [00:05:19] Now, hold on a moment. I happen to know something about that. A little almanac by Mr. Benjamin Franklin, but that was published way back in the middle of the 18th century. [00:05:30]

Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:30] That is right. Almanacs were a very popular publication in North America, and Ben Franklin did in fact publish one called Poor Richard's Almanac, and it, like other almanacs at the time, did contain weather predictions. They also had puzzles and witticisms. Poor Richard's was wildly popular. Now the Farmer's Almanac is still in publication today, but that particular publication started out in 1818. There is also another almanac called The Old Farmer's Almanac. [00:06:00] Two different things, by the way, the Farmer's Almanac claims to have an 80 to 85% accuracy rate and claims the bragging rights of having been predicting the weather since before the National Weather Service existed, and having been right about a number of major weather events, which is true. However, their accuracy has been analyzed and it has been found to be closer to 50%.

Nick Capodice: [00:06:23] Still not that bad.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:24] So farmers had been predicting the weather for basically as long as they'd been working the land and observing [00:06:30] the weather. But in the early 19th century, things really started to pick up.

Kris Harper: [00:06:35] So people started to specialize. And at that point you see more people taking weather measurements and keeping track of them in a systematic way, often related to astronomical observatories. Because, of course, if you're trying to look at the planets and the stars, it's a real bummer if it's cloudy and raining, right? So those people were taking weather [00:07:00] observations. So so the initial weather observations were often coming from astronomical observatories, and then they would share that information. And slowly over time, by the middle of the 19th century, they were figuring out how. How to use that information in a way that made sense.

Nick Capodice: [00:07:20] Sharing that information, as in beyond the publication of an almanac.

Kris Harper: [00:07:28] We see the rise of teletype [00:07:30] so you can send the information more quickly. You can have great weather information, but if you can't get it to anybody. Oh well, I mean, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good. Right? So we see the Smithsonian was involved. We see observatories that were involved. There were universities that were involved. So you had this loosely knit collection of people who were putting observations together and trying to make sense of them. [00:08:00] Meteorology isn't so much a science at this point. It's it's more of a collection activity.

Nick Capodice: [00:08:06] Oh, wow. So this is like crowdsourcing before there was such a thing as crowdsourcing, but with weather data.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:11] Yes. And the network grew in the mid 1800s. The Smithsonian supplied telegraph offices with basic weather instruments, and in turn, those telegraph offices would submit their observations to the Smithsonian, which would make weather maps. By the end of 1949, there were 150 volunteers [00:08:30] making observations. By 1860, there were 500 stations nationwide submitting reports to the Washington Evening Star.

Kris Harper: [00:08:46] And then by 1870, we see the formation of sort of the first National Weather Service without that being its name, under the auspices of the US Army Signal Corps.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:00] And [00:09:00] what exactly is the Army Signal Corps? So it's.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:03] Still around. It was created just before the Civil War, as the branch of the army that was in charge of communications. And by the way, the guy who came up with the Signal Corps ended up being the same guy who ran the weather service about a decade later. And while his real name was Albert J. Myer, his nickname was Old Probabilities.

Speaker4: [00:09:23] Old probabilities.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:24] As in this will probably happen today, and this probably won't.

Nick Capodice: [00:09:28] This probably [00:09:30] didn't help the reputation of meteorology as a hard science.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:33] Nicknames aside, the data was important, especially prior to the widespread use of electricity. Being able to predict the weather was pretty essential, and.

Kris Harper: [00:09:42] Originally the observations were taken by the Medical Corps in the Army because they considered it important for people's health. And the army outposts mean we're talking forts and that kind of thing right out, out west. They had teletype [00:10:00] and so they can send those reports in. And then by 1890, Congress passed a resolution that formed the US Weather Bureau as an entity and assigned it to, you know, make forecasts for agriculture, to make forecasts for industry, to keep people safe to to do near-shore kinds of forecasting, even included volcanology, you know, volcano things were part of their original [00:10:30] mandate. So by 1890, you're seeing the professionalization of meteorology.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:38] The early 1900s saw the explosion of weather, useful technology. The weather bureau was using airplanes and weather balloons. They were able to do things like tell farmers in the West how much water would be available for irrigation in the coming season, after the Titanic disaster in 1912. The Coast Guard began an international ice patrol that [00:11:00] same year had the first fire weather forecast. Natural disasters like floods and hurricanes were always spurring new weather innovations, and I'm jumping ahead a bit here. But the Hoover Dam, completed in 1935, that could not have happened without rain and flood predictions, which allowed for a relatively or compared to the alternative, safe construction.

Archival: [00:11:25] Within 24 hours. The Colorado River, under control for the first time in its history, [00:11:30] was flowing around and past the dam site through the huge divergent tubes.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:36] Also, with this lickety split progress, you saw the first ever meteorology program crop up at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nick Capodice: [00:11:44] Just in case anyone out there was still wondering if it was a real science.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:47] Just in case. All right. Now finally, in 1940, a year before the US entered World War Two, the Weather Bureau was assigned to the Department of Commerce.

Kris Harper: [00:11:58] President Roosevelt said, [00:12:00] we need to build 60,000 aircraft for the war effort, which also means you need at least 60,000 pilots to go in them. And you also need weather forecasts for those pilots.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:13] A pretty famously in World War Two, the decision to invade Normandy in 1944 was based on a weather forecast. D-day was delayed by 24 hours, big risk to allow for a break in rough weather, a break that the axis forces did [00:12:30] not predict. It is.

Nick Capodice: [00:12:31] Amazing to think that something is massive and world defining, as D-Day was in part about the weather, it.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:38] Was very much about the weather, and the US had a more robust weather operation going than Germany did at the time. But back to the Department of Commerce thing. National security is certainly bound up with wargames, but it is also pretty bound up with the economy. That's why the Weather Bureau ended up in commerce instead of defense or agriculture. [00:13:00] But it's not like the agricultural part of the government's interest in weather data went away.

Kris Harper: [00:13:04] There were still crop forecasts. I mean, there were still fruit frost warnings and, you know, fire weather warnings and all those kinds of agricultural related things. But aviation was huge. And so it left agriculture and was moved into commerce.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:19] There's this other element that I found pretty fascinating. After World War Two, you had all of these people who had been studying the weather on behalf of the government. That was their wartime job. [00:13:30]

Kris Harper: [00:13:30] We have these thousands of people, men, almost all men trained to be meteorologists during the war. And in the war is over. What are they going to do with all of these meteorologists? Well, some of them decided to do other things. Some of them went to graduate school, and some of them decided to become consulting meteorologists that they would provide tailored forecasts for a given customer. Now, that's not something [00:14:00] that the National Weather Service does because that's not their job. Their job is to keep the nation safe and the people within the nation safe. That's their job. So what consulting meteorologists did was they provided specialized forecasts to construction people, to people who were who were growing certain kinds of crops, to engineers who were working on projects, to people who grew certain kinds of crops [00:14:30] and needed to figure out how to get them safely. Some place, sometimes to sports teams. Where are they going to be able to play on the weekends or not?

Nick Capodice: [00:14:41] Wow. Private meteorology.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:43] That is how it happened. And today there's a multibillion dollar commercial weather industry. It wasn't the role of the Weather Bureau to provide small scale predictions for for profit interests. And it is not the role of the National Weather Service to do predictions for profit. But today [00:15:00] they do provide data that helps to drive nearly every weather product used by businesses and consumers alike.

Kris Harper: [00:15:06] That's the difference between the National Weather Service. They're the ones that collect the massive amounts of data for the most part, which is very expensive. I mean, the infrastructure for that is really, really expensive. That's why the government does that.

Nick Capodice: [00:15:20] By the way. Hannah predicting the weather. It it can't just be about what's happening within our own borders. Right. Like I get maybe keeping her weather predictions out of the hands of enemies back [00:15:30] in the day. But today we have a global interest in sharing weather data, don't we? Hurricanes and tsunamis don't care about borders and conflicts.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:39] That's right. The UN who else established the World Meteorological Organization in 1950? They also set the standard for monitoring the weather, because if we weren't all doing it the same way, we would have no real way of knowing what was really going on or coming our way. In the 1961 state of the Union, President Kennedy actually [00:16:00] invited the world to join the United States in developing an international weather prediction program.

Archival: [00:16:06] Finally, this administration intends to explore promptly all possible areas of cooperation with the Soviet Union and other nations to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Specifically, I now invite all nations, including the Soviet Union, to join with us in developing a weather prediction program.

[00:16:27] In a new communication.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:33] Now. [00:16:30] Today there are big weather data centers where international weather agencies like the National Weather Service share their data with everyone.

Nick Capodice: [00:16:40] When did the Weather Bureau actually get that name? The National Weather Service?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:44] That was not until 1970. And what's important to keep in mind is that all along the way, the public was able to access this weather information as they are now. And it was thanks in large part to the media which discovered how much we love [00:17:00] weather forecasts.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:02] Actually, I do want to ask about the public thing here, Hanna, because for one thing, I check my weather app every single day. And I think a lot of people out there do. And also like probably a lot of people, I am guilty of the classic well, they didn't say it was going to rain. You know, there's often this sense of, well, the meteorologists got it wrong again, which I think is where this idea that it's an art and not a science might come from. So how inconsiderate [00:17:30] are we being exactly when we get vaguely annoyed at the weather service?

Kris Harper: [00:17:34] I think it's important for people to know that, that the forecasts that come from the National Weather Service have over an 85% verification rate.

Nick Capodice: [00:17:47] Well, that's pretty good.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:48] Yeah, it's pretty good for something that tells you what the future is going to look like.

Kris Harper: [00:17:53] So people think, oh man, you know, like they never get it right. But I can tell you, having been a meteorologist [00:18:00] myself and been on the forecasting end and been on the end of phone calls from people who were not happy with what was going on outside their door, is that we tend to remember weather that interfered with what we were planning to do, whether that was a smart thing to do or not. And we don't remember all of the days when the weather was good for us. And so we really weren't paying attention to what the forecast [00:18:30] was because we didn't need to, because it was really nice outside and by really nice outside. For most people, that means the sun's out. The wind's not strong and it's not too hot. And if you've planned to be garden party and it rains on you and you weren't expecting that rain, or as I call it, two feet of partly cloudy sitting on your front stoop that has to be shoveled off, then you're not going to be really happy about that. And it may have been forecast for you, [00:19:00] but you're still not happy about it because it interfered with what your plan was.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:06] Oh, wow. It sounds like meteorologists can't really win, can they?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:10] I mean, I keep thinking about that thing of being a child and expecting a blizzard and a snow day and then not getting either, even if a meteorologist told you it was going to happen. But we really need to remind ourselves that that is not the National Weather Service's fault. All right, Nick, I want to take a quick break here, but when we're [00:19:30] back, you and I are going to hear from someone who probably deserves a bashful apology from a lot of Americans who raised a fist to the unexpectedly rainy heavens.

Nick Capodice: [00:19:48] But before that break, just a quick reminder that it is now our Civics 101 annual fund drive. When we give gifts back to you, the listeners, for supporting our show. And we have a hat. It'll keep your head dry. [00:20:00] It is a snazzy vintage black Civics 101 baseball cap and it can be yours. Just click the link in the show notes or head on over to our website, civics101podcast.org. And thank you so much. It means everything. All right. We're back. We're talking about the National Weather Service. And, Hannah, just [00:20:30] before the break, you hinted that we might be meeting someone inside the National Weather Service.

Felecia Bowser: [00:20:35] My name is Felecia Bowser, and I am the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Florida.

Nick Capodice: [00:20:44] I feel like when it comes to weather, the stakes are pretty high. Down in Florida.

Felecia Bowser: [00:20:48] In a typical weather forecast office, we are in charge of pushing out a seven day forecast. We don't go beyond seven days because it can. The [00:21:00] computer models can get a bit fuzzy, a little bit dicey, a little bit beyond that, let alone as we enter the sixth and seventh day. So we don't go beyond seven days. And of course, people will see that forecast is if it's going to rain, is it going to be sunny, what's the temperature, that type of thing. So we do issue that basic forecast.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:21] Felecia says that the National Weather Service in Tallahassee also does things like work with health departments and the Red cross and the state Department of Emergency Management, [00:21:30] all to let them know whether it's going to be rain or shine. They send out what Felecia calls weather packages via email to help entities around the state be prepared.

Felecia Bowser: [00:21:41] As a result. Because of that, our footprint is is pretty active in the sense that we get a lot of requests to do what's called decision support services, or DSF for short. And what that is, is a good example would be, [00:22:00] let's say there is the governor's inauguration, which is what we helped with as far as providing what the forecast is going to be leading up to the inauguration earlier this year, and of course, the day of. And so if I recall correctly, it was looking like there was going to be some chances for some rain. And there's a lot of moving parts that they had to get in order because there was going to be a helicopter flight. And of course that's important [00:22:30] to know if it's going to rain and whatnot. Okay.

Nick Capodice: [00:22:32] So the governor's office is doing a little bit more than just checking their weather app and booking a helicopter based on what they see there. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:38] So that's a common part of the everyday of being a National Weather Service meteorologist in the US. And in Felecia's case, communicating with these various parts of the government and private entities in Florida. Felecia refers to them as partners, by the way. But then there are the millions of others who are dependent on that information to.

Felecia Bowser: [00:22:57] So communicate with the public. We would do things such [00:23:00] as Facebook posts. We would put out videos just letting people know what's what's what to prepare for, how they need to get their hurricane plans in place, and things of that nature just to make sure that they get prepared for their homes and their families. So there's that aspect.

Nick Capodice: [00:23:19] Okay. Yeah. And hurricanes. Now we're talking about Florida here. What does it look like when a state like Florida has to predict and prepare for a major storm?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:29] All right. So [00:23:30] let's take for example, Hurricane Dahlia. When it comes to a major storm, the National Weather Service looks inward. They get on phone calls with the National Hurricane Center, which is a division of the National Weather Service that just so happens to be headquartered in Florida.

Felecia Bowser: [00:23:50] So a lot of times they talk to the officers. That's going to be most impacted, of course, when it comes to a hurricane. But [00:24:00] they also have what's called a pre call. So you have the main call where any office can can can log in and listen in on what the hurricane center has to say about a particular storm. But there is a call prior to that where they're just speaking to the offices that are most directly impacted. And of course, during that storm, we were directly impacted because it made landfall in our area of responsibility.

Nick Capodice: [00:24:27] Okay, but what are these meteorologists actually [00:24:30] talking about on these calls?

Felecia Bowser: [00:24:31] If they're seeing a little bit of a track shift or is it still in line? Has anything changed when the the reconnaissance aircraft went through? It has strengthened okay. It's strengthened. How much has it strengthened to. And so they're telling us this information prior to telling it to everybody else, just so that we can be prepared to, to make any changes on our end. And that would be conveying [00:25:00] that information about why the forecast has changed, why the track has changed, why the intensity has changed, being able to then translate that information to our partners and the public in a scientifically way, and also in a way that they understand. So it's not overly scientific because we want to be able to prepare them as well.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:21] Basically, many members of the public will have no idea what to do with the scientific data the National Weather Service is collecting. We need it translated for [00:25:30] us. I should say, though, not all members of the public, you know how the National Weather Service started off with people scattered across the country volunteering observations that could be sent to the Smithsonian in DC? Well, the volunteer thing is very much alive.

Felecia Bowser: [00:25:45] It's basically called Cocorahs. Cocorahs basically is a public volunteer service where people will have their rain gauges at their office, [00:26:00] at their homes, excuse me. And they will tell us how much rainfall has fallen. There's a there's a website that they all can go to and input this information. They'll tell us what their temperature was, their high and low temperature. This is purely volunteer. They don't get paid for this. So this is definitely out of the kindness of their heart to do this. But yeah, any anybody can do this. If somebody was to Google Cocorahs, they can go in there and see what the [00:26:30] type of equipment that they need to purchase to do it.

Nick Capodice: [00:26:32] Cocorahs so in lieu of Googling Hannah, what does it mean?

Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:36] It means the community Collaborative Rain, hail and Snow network. And I really love that it exists because I love civic participation, and having a small scale weather monitoring station in your backyard is commitment to the cause. So one last thing that's pretty important here. If you go to the National Weather Service website, you're going to find a [00:27:00] truly detailed like more detailed than I have yet to discover on any other federal website timeline. Someone at the National Weather Service really appreciates their history, and in the most recent history, you're going to see words like record breaking, increasingly vulnerable, deadliest billions in damages. Now, whether you're a member of Cocorahs or not, the weather is going to be pretty in-your-face in years to come. So I want to go back to Kris Harper [00:27:30] for a minute here, because she addressed that new challenge with those big, ominous vocab words and what that means for the meteorologists behind our weather information.

Kris Harper: [00:27:39] It's a lot trickier than it used to be, because what we're seeing is storms that are carrying more moisture. We're seeing sea surface temperatures that are really, really warm, which is basically providing the engine that's keeping hurricanes going. And they they spin up faster [00:28:00] than they used to. So like this last one went from like almost nothing to a category three like overnight. I can tell you as a forecaster, if I'm seeing something like that while I was still doing weather forecast, I would have thought, oh my, we're we're in trouble here. You know, this is this is just not acting like a normal kind of system, which should take days, days to do. So it will get trickier. It will get trickier to [00:28:30] do. It's not that the models can't handle it. The models can handle it. But people need to be ready to pay attention and realize that when a storm's coming in, it may be a lot more severe than it's been in the past.

Nick Capodice: [00:28:42] What I think is pretty interesting about the National Weather Service, Hannah, is that despite our griping about when the data doesn't match our hopes and expectations or even the politicization of weather, which has become a thing, one major and clear goal of this agency is just keep people from being swept [00:29:00] away in a tornado, because we can all agree that would be bad.

Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:04] Yeah. I mean, if you look at the US as an organism with many parts that need to be kept healthy from the economy to national security to the safety of its inhabitants, the National Weather Service is like the doctor you mostly forget about until you get sick, and then really need to be told what to do. The National Weather Service quite literally works to keep the US alive.

Kris Harper: [00:29:26] So the National Weather Service, you know, their mission is to keep people [00:29:30] safe and to provide people with the best forecasts they can based on the data that they have and the expertise of their meteorologists, who are really dedicated folks who are looking out specifically for the people who are in their forecast area. Big hand to all the National Weather Service forecasters, the observers, everybody who were on their team. Because, you know, it's one thing when it's a string of nice days, but when the weather [00:30:00] turns bad, they have a really tough job just trying to get the information out to make sure that people don't inadvertently put themselves in harm's way because the weather, the weather is not going in a way that people might expect.

Nick Capodice: This episode was produced by Hannah McCarthy and me, Nick Capodice. It was edited by our Executive Producer Rebecca Lavoie. Our staff also includes Senior Producer Christina Phillips and Producer Marina Hehnke. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound. For more on the government agencies and departments that affect the way we live and work, check out our many episodes at civics 101 podcast dot org, or on your favorite podcast app. 

Civics 101 is a production of NHPR - New Hampshire Public Radio.


 
 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

Who decides what politicians should say?

Today we explore the nebulous world of political consultants. 

These are the people who run political campaigns. They use a mixture of science and gut-feeling to determine what a candidate should say and do, and in one particular instance, what they should NOT say and do. 

How do they do it? How effective are they? What actually moves the needle in a campaign? Talking to us today are two campaign experts; David Karpf from the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, and Rasheida Smith, political consultant at Dunton Consulting. 

Transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors

Consultants final d1.mp3

Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.

Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about something that's a little weird.

Archival: Democrats have kind of organically settled on a new attack line against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Basically, these guys are just plain weird.

Archival: Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And, you know, they're running for He-Man women Hater's club or something.

Archival: It's not just a weird style that he brings. It's that this leads to weird policies. [00:00:30]

Nick Capodice: Do you know what I'm talking about here, McCarthy?

Hannah McCarthy: I think I do. This was the quote unquote GOP is weird talking point slash strategy. I guess that the Harris Wallace campaign started to use in the 2024 election.

Nick Capodice: It was. And while I will be talking about how that word was used in the campaign a little bit later, that is not what this episode is about. But when it started happening, I thought, wow, this is a bit odd. It's kind of [00:01:00] a unique attack. And then like that, it's gone. And it got me thinking. Hannah, who decided that did the so-called weird thing come out unprompted from Governor Tim Walz's mouth? Does that even happen in politics anymore? And who decided to stop saying it? And come to think of it. Who decides anything in political campaigns? Who decides? We're gonna have two town halls, 92nd opens, but the moderators can't fact check. [00:01:30] And the candidate should wear a blue tie until at least one story about hearing their parents talk about money at the kitchen table.

Archival: At kitchen tables across our country, there is a concern about our economic future.

Archival: Somewhere in America. A mother sits at her kitchen table, his kitchen table.

Archival: I learned a lot of basic lessons.

Hannah McCarthy: Yet, like, who is the first person to say that a candidate had to slow down right at the end of their sentence to make everyone applaud?

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: I [00:02:00] gotta say, Nick, I'm the biggest softy in the world for this trope in movies and television. You know, the person who knows the score and tells the candidate exactly what to do or say, like West Wing.

Archival: I think we'd lose.

Archival: Not in new Jersey.

Archival: It's never been shown that racial profiling works, and I'm against it.

Archival: That answer is pretty simple, isn't it?

Hannah McCarthy: Wag the dog.

Speaker12: Lord willing and Jesus tarries. Eight days from now, I'm going to be taking you folks into the second term. Wait till you hear the speech tonight.

Nick Capodice: Veep.

Hannah McCarthy: Yep. But, I mean, I guess in Veep, it's [00:02:30] always an utter disaster.

Archival: I will work on putting forward a new, streamlined family's first bill before Congress in the near future.

Archival: She sounds like an underwater Bob Dylan.

Nick Capodice: It is always an utter disaster, Hannah. And, as we often say, lauded as extremely accurate.

Hannah McCarthy: That is true.

Nick Capodice: So today we are talking about the nebulous world of political campaign consultants. Who are they? What do they do when they run campaigns? And how do they know what [00:03:00] will help a candidate actually get elected?

Hannah McCarthy: All right, Nick, can we start with the who before the how? Who gets to run a campaign?

David Karpf: The people who run campaigns are mostly the people who helped to win a previous campaign.

Nick Capodice: This is David Karpf. He's a professor of strategic political communication at George Washington University.

David Karpf: Because of what we call superstitious learning, essentially. Once a team wins an election, you assume that they know what they're talking about, and that leads to a whole career. And you mentioned James Carville. [00:03:30]

Hannah McCarthy: Did you mention James Carville?

Nick Capodice: I didn't today in this episode so far, but I did when I spoke to David. James Carville is quite possibly the most famous political consultant. Am I allowed to do? James Carville.

Hannah McCarthy: Hannah, I'm going to leave that up to you, man.

Nick Capodice: The Democrats have got to come down from the persimmon tree. It's pretty much like that.

Speaker16: Those are the things that that that if I'm a Democrat, I'm much more care about that than than some word in a dictionary.

David Karpf: James Carville is the classic example of this, right? He helps Bill Clinton [00:04:00] win in 1992. It is not entirely clear whether Carville's advice was material to that, win or not. It's possible that Clinton would have won without James Carville. But having been the guy who advised Clinton, he then is able to set up shop and spend decades opining on what it takes to win because he won one. So he must know something. So it's kind of you're a staffer on a campaign that wins. That means you get hailed as a genius, and that means you get to be a staffer on other things. And [00:04:30] all the time you're bringing on people who will test out messages, test out new techniques to try to find anything that seems to make the line go up.

Hannah McCarthy: Carville advised Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton won. And while we might not be able to say whether Carville's advice had any material effect there, I do know that campaign advisers do a lot. Right?

Nick Capodice: Right. In terms of carville's material effect. We can't know because we don't live in multiple timelines. We're not salvadorians. [00:05:00] That cat is going to have to be both alive and dead at the same time. But yes, as you said, Hannah, they do a ton. And I wanted to talk to somebody about all of the massive complexities involved in running a campaign.

Rasheida Smith: I always say that, um, you know, campaigns are like orchestras, right?

Nick Capodice: This is Rashida Smith.

Rasheida Smith: My name is Rashida Smith, and I'm the owner of Dutton Consulting LLC, which is a data and field [00:05:30] firm. And we are political consultants. As a consultant, you have your very specific section. You know, I say the field is like the percussions and media. You know, TV may be the horns or the brass and digital, the winds, the flutes. Right. And mail could be like the strings. So all of this is about understanding your particular role, your expertise, and how you meld into the greater organization. Um, to bring your part [00:06:00] forward.

Nick Capodice: We are going to hear from Rasheeda a little bit later on strategies and processes she and her team use in campaigns. But before moving on, I wanted to share one tidbit from her. When you're trying to get someone elected, everything. No matter how long your campaign has been going on, everything revolves around the last 30 days.

Rasheida Smith: 30 days out and everything's happening right. You're probably in the middle of preparing for GOtv, but now, in this day and age, vote by mail is live. So [00:06:30] people are voting every day. In some places you're getting ready for early vote. So people are voting one way, and now you're going to open up a second way for people to start voting before Election Day. You're also looking to close your arguments, your final persuasion arguments, And make sure that either you're doing a compare and contrast, or you're bringing your positive message home, or you're making sure that you are reconfirming the votes that you already have [00:07:00] and what that looks like. And so right now, you're really focused on how do you end. You know, we have the saying, we say we open to close and we close to open campaigns are the only corporation that is built to close. And so 30 days out you're thinking about how you close.

Nick Capodice: Abc Hanna. Always be closing.

Speaker18: Always be closing. Always be closing.

Nick Capodice: And yes, I am quoting Glengarry Glen Ross here. And that's relevant [00:07:30] today because campaign consultants are salespeople. Sort of. It's about branding and messaging. They are selling America a candidate. But the problem is you don't really have a chance to try out something new like Crystal Pepsi or the Arch Deluxe because the stakes are so high.

David Karpf: A critical thing to keep in mind here is messaging in electoral campaigns is like the worst place in the world to develop new communication techniques. [00:08:00] And the reason for that is the outcome you care most about is winning on Election Day. That happens once every two years or four years. If we're doing presidential, it's once every four years, and every four years you have a different media environment, different candidates, different everything else. So once every four years you get the actual outcome you care about. That makes testing kind of guesswork.

Nick Capodice: So one of David's favorite examples of how political campaigns are different than ad campaigns is to compare them to [00:08:30] selling gym memberships.

David Karpf: Selling gym memberships is an amazing place in the abstract to develop new communication techniques, because every week you can try out a new message or try out new targeting.

Nick Capodice: Now you have bought a gym membership or two in your time, right?

Hannah McCarthy: Hannah I have.

Nick Capodice: So what made you pick that gym in particular out of all the ones in town?

Hannah McCarthy: Uh, it was close to my apartment. They had a massive discount. It was, like, really inexpensive for the first year, [00:09:00] and it was big.

Nick Capodice: All right, so the people who run that gym can say, all right, so, you know, we doubled our size, we added a bunch of ellipticals or whatever. Let's see how that affected membership in January. Oh look, we got this huge boost in late May. That must have been in response to our six months free trial that we promoted on the radio station, the gym. People have a ton of data that they can measure and directly tie to stuff like their ad campaigns or their promotions. Not so in the world of [00:09:30] political campaigns.

David Karpf: Electoral campaigns, the only things that they can measure, they can measure engagement online. They can measure signups to your list. They can measure fundraising. Um, they can do some experiments where like they'll a B test exposure to a message and then see how people respond to that. But it's still mostly like like focus groups. You know, you were putting people in a room, exposing them to a communication and then seeing what they think. Or you're watching in the wild to see on social media [00:10:00] how people are reacting to something. And all of that is really coarse, because what that's telling is how are people reacting to a message when they're exposed to it? It's not actually telling you about the behavior you care about, which is will they vote for a candidate who they weren't otherwise going to vote for on Election Day?

Hannah McCarthy: Did David say whether or not there was anything similar out there, like something to hang our hat on, something that people sell that at least rhymes with the world of political campaigns.

Nick Capodice: He did offer one example that's a little bit closer. A famed advertising [00:10:30] rivalry.

Speaker19: You got the right one, baby.

Speaker20: Coca cola.

David Karpf: Right. Because part of what's going on here in American presidential elections Is we only have the two parties and people have a lifelong association with those two parties. And once every four years they vote for a president. So it's kind of like a Coke versus Pepsi situation where they have deep familiarity, familiarity with the brand, but they only get to buy one soda every four [00:11:00] years. Right. Like Pepsi can try out some really fascinating ads there, but convincing the Coke drinkers that this once every four years I'm going to go with the product that I don't haven't always gone with is just incredibly hard.

Nick Capodice: So we got Jim's, we got Cola, and I got one more. Hannah, can I do one more?

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, please.

David Karpf: Uh, Quidditch in Harry Potter.

Archival: It's wicked fast and damn near impossible to see. You catch this, the game is over, and we win.

David Karpf: Now let me [00:11:30] grant. I didn't read the books. I only watched the movies. I was going to read the books with my kids once. They were old enough. And now I'm less of a J.K. Rowling fan, so I'm going to go there. But my understanding of credits from the movies is that there are all of these people playing this game, and then there's two dudes running around trying to catch the snitch. And actually, whoever catches the snitch wins. Right. Like the entire rest of the normal game has no material impact on who wins. It's just those two dudes flying around trying to catch that outside other thing. Right. [00:12:00] Like the stakes of presidential elections are so high that we spend billions of dollars on communications trying to shape the outcome. And they are close enough that this stuff probably does matter at the margins, but also the vast majority of what you're doing is not going to affect the outcome at all.

Nick Capodice: Real quick, before I get Avada Kedavra the heck out of here, there are two times in the Harry Potter universe with the team that got the snitch didn't win the game. But that is not the point here.

Hannah McCarthy: You know, I didn't realize [00:12:30] until now that Avada Kedavra is like basically Abracadabra.

Nick Capodice: It really is Harry Potter. Jay. Gatsby. Both victims of the green light.

Hannah McCarthy: But, Nick, is there anything like. Is there anything that we know moves the needle to get people to vote one way or another? Did David say whether anything actually affects campaigns?

David Karpf: The depressing finding from most of political science research on this over the decades is [00:13:00] that the impact of campaigns on election outcomes is so small that it's almost impossible to measure. Now, that doesn't mean that campaigns don't matter at all, because campaigns do. Like, what a campaign is usually doing is reminding and bringing home the voters who would have voted for you anyway. So like if one side ran a campaign and the other side just didn't, we would probably expect that to have impacts. We've never had a case of it, so we can't really measure it. But the the depressing thing is it's not like the candidate with the most money always wins, or the candidate [00:13:30] with the best comms always wins. They're kind of responding to external factors that are beyond their control.

Nick Capodice: So David used a barely offensive swear word here that I'm not going to put on the radio, but I'll summarize for everyone due to external factors. Incumbents, the people who are running to keep the office they already hold. They have been getting their backsides kicked and the last few elections internationally.

David Karpf: But it seems like a big part of what's going on is we know that elections tend [00:14:00] to be just broadly retrospective, that people tend to vote based on. How do we think of the state of the country and the world right now? And if it's going great, then you tend to vote in favor of the incumbent party. It's not going so well. If you're not happy with it, you vote against the incumbent. That tends to be the broad trend in elections and every stable democracy post-Covid. The electorate, when they had a chance was like, yeah, life sucks right now and we're going to blame the people in power. That's been happening everywhere. Like a better come strategy doesn't change [00:14:30] that. Like it's a bad. It turns out in the past few years have been bad years to be incumbents. You do everything you can with a calm strategy to try to minimize that or turn it around, but there's no magic words that are actually going to fix it.

Nick Capodice: All right, so that is one side of the coin. After a quick break, we're going to get to the other side and all the things campaign consultants do to get those votes, as well as a quick dive into the world of weird in [00:15:00] 2024.

Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, if you want the literary version of what Nick and I do, we wrote a book breaking down every gear and winch in the governmental machine. It's fun. It's got cartoons. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America works. Check it out.

Nick Capodice: And there is no billboard of T.J. Eckleburg.

Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're talking about the nebulous world of political consulting. [00:15:30] And, Nick, you were about to say what kinds of things consultants do before the break.

Nick Capodice: I was so I am bringing back Rashida Smith. Rashida runs Dutton Consulting LLC. Her specific focus is on something called field operations consulting. That is basically ensuring that campaigns have enough direct contact with voters. But Rashida has worked in just about every level of campaign consulting. She started by telling us how consultants determine [00:16:00] messaging.

Hannah McCarthy: So this is deciding what a candidate should say, what they should focus on when they're going around talking to voters.

Nick Capodice: Precisely.

Rasheida Smith: A lot of this is based on science, and there's some parts of it that's just really sheer gut, right. And so understanding the local landscape and then you do polling. And so you're testing your messages and you're seeing what messages work with what constituencies, right. Or subsets [00:16:30] of voters. And so you may have some messages that say, you know, jobs are most important versus immigration. You may have someone that says quality of life and parks are more important than taxes. Maybe taxes aren't the issue for a local space. It just really depends on what's happening locally. And when you find that subject that really moves the needle, when you find that talking point or that message point, that's when you drive it home.

Hannah McCarthy: And [00:17:00] how do they do that? How do they see if the needle is moved?

Rasheida Smith: We take polls, you know, we poll likely voters and then we ask them questions. A battery of questions on issues so we can have one subject, for instance housing and have seven different message batteries. And so we'll test the messaging different ways and see would this make you more likely to vote for an individual who had this stance less likely or didn't matter. And so we weigh [00:17:30] that. Not only do we weigh it across all the voters and say everyone who participated in this poll said X, but then we look at what we call crosstabs, which is subsets of those voters. Now we're grouping them. We're grouping them by age. We're grouping them by gender, we're grouping them by geography, we're grouping them by socioeconomic status. And so that is how we understand that women who make up 54% of the electorate in a particular race feel [00:18:00] this way about this housing issue or child care. And so this is the issue that we should hone in on, because this is what moves the majority of the voters that we're going after.

Nick Capodice: And once they've chosen a message and they have polled to ensure it's the right message, they go to town with it. And it's got to be snappy.

Rasheida Smith: Years ago, you could have something that might have been two minutes and it would have kept someone's attention span. And then today we're doing seven second videos, right? But [00:18:30] at the same time, there has to be that overall message that we know that works. So how many different ways can you say, um, the rent is too high?

Archival: Once again, why? You said it. The rent is too damn high.

Rasheida Smith: How many different ways can you say lock her up? How many different ways can you say all of the campaign slogans, you know, gas, guns and groceries, right. That have won campaigns now for a couple of years? How many ways can you say this and [00:19:00] how many ways can you depict this so that your message is being heard and you're being remembered or associated with the message that works? And it's really about repetition. How many times are you in front of that voter with that message? How many times do they get a chance to see you? You know, they say, you know, you need something like 25 times in front of a voter before something sinks in.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow. I mean, repetition actually works. I should have guessed that.

Nick Capodice: Yep, repetition actually [00:19:30] works. You should have guessed that.

Hannah McCarthy: I want to step back a second and ask if consultants have anything to do with the very first step of a campaign. Not just what a candidate says, but who they are, how they present themselves. You haven't seen She's all that, have you?

Nick Capodice: I haven't, Hannah, but I will, I promise.

Hannah McCarthy: No, you really, really do not have to, Nick. It's a terrible movie, Lainey.

Archival: No offense, but when was the last time you tweezed. What?

Hannah McCarthy: Um. It is one of the many [00:20:00] movies where the protagonist takes off their glasses, lets their hair down, and suddenly they went from being someone you barely noticed to the most attractive human being on the planet.

Nick Capodice: That is an old chestnut. I gotta say, though, as fun as it is to imagine a consultant putting Walter Mondale in a leather jacket and giving him a snazzy haircut, Rashida says that is not how it actually works.

Rasheida Smith: Well, you have to know that a candidate has already been shaped by their life experiences and who they are and what they stand for. And [00:20:30] so, as much as other political consultants are seen as the puppet masters, right, in many ways the candidate has already done that. And what you are doing is amplifying who that candidate is and what they stand for. Now, there are pieces that you do help mold and shape a candidate based on experience and based on the science part of campaigning and what needs to happen. But if that stuff isn't innately in that candidate, [00:21:00] it usually doesn't work.

Hannah McCarthy: Can we go back to something that David said? Um, the fact that we're a two party system and it is really hard to get people to switch from Coke to Pepsi, but that's what consultants are hired to do, right? So how do they know if they're succeeding before the day of the election? How do they test for it?

Nick Capodice: So they have a bunch of metrics, one of which is called modeling.

Rasheida Smith: Where you assign a support score to either issues or the candidate. And [00:21:30] so you'll have a score from 0 to 100. So the people who are let's say 80 to 100 are definitely with you, definitely leaning your way. And I don't care what party you're in, the people who are below 50 are probably not coming your way, probably not coming out. And so maybe you want them to think the election day is the day after. And so that's that's slither. That's right in the middle. Those [00:22:00] are the folks who your persuasions and those are the folks who you're really looking to touch and get in front of and see if you can get them on your side.

Hannah McCarthy: Last thing, Nick, I would just love to know what, if anything, we know about the weird thing.

Archival: There's the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.

Nick Capodice: So I have to start with a massive [00:22:30] caveat here. Hannah. We did not speak to anyone involved in the Harris campaign, so this is pure conjecture, albeit conjecture, from people who work in this field or study this field so as to why it stopped so suddenly, Rashida said. That sort of abrupt cessation of a message comes from testing.

Rasheida Smith: That's it. It's testing. Right? And especially when you have larger campaigns, you're testing more often. You're testing weekly. Like if you're playing [00:23:00] on a national level, you're testing all the time, right. Or tracking polls.

Nick Capodice: But David Karp, the professor at George Washington University, who we heard from earlier, he went a little further.

David Karpf: So I have a hunch. Um, again, I wasn't in the campaign. I don't know exactly who was talking, who was being listened to and what data they had. But the thing that was very clear about the you're being weird line that Kamala Harris had used before, then Tim Walz picked up, used extraordinarily well, [00:23:30] and suddenly everyone on blue Sky was cackling over. It is. Well, it depends on which numbers you're going to look at, because amongst the party base that clearly resonates and is very powerful. Um, I particularly liked it not just because the party base liked it, but also because of the I believe that the action is in the reaction. And you could see Donald Trump, JD Vance, Ben Shapiro, like the entire conservative media and political apparatus, was visibly uncomfortable with getting called weird. [00:24:00] And in general, in politics, if you've got a line that is making the other side get flustered and make mistakes, keep on saying that line. So I really liked what I was seeing there.

Hannah McCarthy: The action is the reaction.

Nick Capodice: Yeah, and I think that's an interesting way to think about it.

David Karpf: It's a line from Saul Alinsky's Rules for radicals, which I still teach in my class. But yeah, it's a classic Alinsky ism is the action is in the reaction. The thing that I wasn't seeing and didn't have insight into was there was this slice of the of the potential electorate [00:24:30] who were probably suburban. I don't like I don't know exactly where they are, but they are Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the primary, felt deeply uncomfortable with Donald Trump and at least on paper, seemed gettable. And my guess is that the weird line that works really well for the blue sky crowd and produces reactions from conservative elites. It's very possible that in focus groups, that target segment was like, no, don't know. And [00:25:00] that then becomes sort of an internal fight amongst the advisers of should we be targeting our comms at animating our base and getting the other side to make mistakes, or should we be targeting our comms at getting people who wouldn't always vote for us, but it's a tiny segment who might to feel real comfortable voting for us.

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, can you explain what Kalms is? Is it communications?

Nick Capodice: Yeah. David said comms. A lot of times, comms is everything [00:25:30] you do to communicate in a campaign. So it's your messages on social media. It's your ads, it's all of your candidate speeches, etc..

Hannah McCarthy: All right. So which does David think is a better strategy to get your base really excited and riled up and go negative on the other side, or to be gentler, to try to convince people on the other side to come over to yours. Grass is greener. [00:26:00]

David Karpf: Um, there isn't a right answer there. And one of the things that I always tell my students is that the curse of social sciences in general is that you can't run history twice. You have different advisors saying we should focus our messaging at different constituencies. All of them are kind of guessing because while there's data we can measure, the thing that we really care about is election outcomes. And that will only happen once in November. The fight here is less party versus party left versus right than it is. Uh, [00:26:30] a broader story of the world is very simple versus the world is very complicated. Right? Like the authoritarian message from Donald Trump is and like we call it authoritarianism, we can also call it populism. But the basic message is the reason the world isn't the way you want it to be, is that the world is being run by crooks and idiots. Put me in charge. I will fire them and arrest them and then everything will be better. And the message that the Democratic Party has, or the message of progressive technocracy is the [00:27:00] world is very complicated. Uh, elect us, and we will have well-meaning people try their best to make things better at the margins. And when they make mistakes, they'll keep on trying to make things incrementally better. The worse the objective world gets, the less appealing that latter.

Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice and I am coming to you today to tell you that I made this episode. With Hannah McCarthy and Marina Henke. I am proud of the work I do here at Civics 101 with Christina Phillips our Senior Producer and Rebecca Lavoie our Executive Producer. Somewhere out there a family is sitting at their kitchen table, and they're wondering, who did the music in this episode? I am here to tell them that their names are on the way. they need to know that the music in this episode was by Scott Holmes, Jesse Gallagher, Epidemic Sound, HoliznaCCO, Blue Dot Sessions and Chris Zabriskie who makes the best. Podcast. Music. Ever. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR NHPR


 

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April Fools: Politicians, the press, and more

Pranks are a staple of April Fools' Day - even when it comes to politics and the press. 

On this special edition of Civics 101, Senior Producer Christina Phillips tests our April Fools knowledge with some surprising trivia, and a whole lot more!

Transcript

Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors

Civics 101 April Fools

Music: We've only just begun. Doo dee doo dee doo. Doo doo doo doo doo.

Christina Phillips: This is civics 101. April Fools trivia special. I am Christina Phillips, a senior producer, and I am here today with. Do you want to introduce yourselves? We'll start with Hannah.

Hannah McCarthy: Yes. I am Hannah McCarthy, co-host of Civics 101.

Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice, also co-host of Civics 101.

Rebecca Lavoie: I'm Rebecca Lavoie and I work with this team at Nhpr.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so this is the day April Fools, where people come together and play pranks on each other. And by that I mean there are the people who are good at a poker face and they thrive on this day. And then there are the rest of us, like me, who feel constantly on edge. Which one are you on edge?

Nick Capodice: I love this day. I have a great many, uh, pranks that I've played in the years. Not as many as Nhpr, because it's kind of like I get nervous, I'm going to get in trouble. But I used to. At my old workplace, I would do an April Fool's prank every single year. A big one.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow.

Christina Phillips: Give us your best. Your most successful.

Nick Capodice: Oh, God. Well, the thing is, they're all contextual. Christina. It was always about, like, fake tour content for this museum I worked at. And I always say there's this massive discovery, this huge mystery was solved, and I would photoshop very strange photos of people who currently worked at the museum onto old photographs and make them think I had discovered it. Another classic is the cheddar cheese in the shower. Never gets old. Just carve a piece of cheddar cheese like a bar of soap and carve into it. It's a joy.

Rebecca Lavoie: Nice.

Nick Capodice: Oh, the other one. My other favorite one is the, um, saying that the photocopier is voice control. Now, you write like a thing on the photocopier, and it's like they copy and say the number of copies you want completely voice controlled, and you hold the next and be like, copy seven.

Nick Capodice: Copy.

Christina Phillips: I've never heard that. I love that.

Hannah McCarthy: You are quite the pranker.

Nick Capodice: I'm a little bit of a merry prankster.

Hannah McCarthy: As someone who chronically forgets what day it is, I don't do April Fools. I have a lot of disdain for it, which is not earned.

Rebecca Lavoie: Back in the day, public radio itself used to do pranks. There was a famous NPR story about an inland whale, a nursery.

Archive: Hundreds of acres of wide pools as far as the eye can see, spread over the landscape. It is here that the nation's first farm raised whales are being grown and harvested.

Hannah McCarthy: That's so funny.

Nick Capodice: Fantastic.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, well, I'm so glad you mentioned that, Rebecca, because we have a whole section dedicated to media hoaxes. Perhaps you will do really well in that section. Today I have gathered you here and compiled some political April Fools jokes. They are from politicians, they are from government agencies and some from the media. Is everybody ready? Yes. For our first set of questions.

Nick Capodice: Absolutely ready.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so this is called come visit the Walmart Supercenter Statue of Liberty. Corporations doing business with the federal government is a grand tradition in the United States. But there's something different about a company claiming they've bought an iconic historic monument to help with the national debt. I'm going to read you this question. You get two points if you're right. One point if you're wrong, but you make a good argument for your choice.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay.

Christina Phillips: So here's your question. In 1996, this company took out a full page ad in major newspapers that said the following in an effort to help the national debt. Blank is pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country's most historic treasures. We will start with Hannah. What is your guess for the company that pretended to buy the Liberty Bell Mutual Liberty? So give us your argument.

Hannah McCarthy: Because liberty is in the name.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so the mutual Liberty Bell, if you will.

Hannah McCarthy: And it's a mutual helping, right? They get something. The country gets something. Help them out of debt. They're all about helping people.

Christina Phillips: All right, I like it. I'm not going to tell you guys the answer until I've heard everyone. So, Nick, go ahead and give me your guess.

Nick Capodice: I guess, uh, Taco Bell.

Christina Phillips: Oh, okay.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh. That's good.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's a good guess.

Christina Phillips: And give us your argument for Taco Bell.

Nick Capodice: The bell ringing is, like their copyright. The dong.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Nick Capodice: And they're also they're always kind of jokesters at Taco Bell. They have like a pretty, a pretty fire like, Twitter account and stuff like that. So I think that's the sort of thing they would do in the 90s. That's around the time of the gordita and the chalupa. Like there was like there was like their shining moment.

Christina Phillips: Okay. So, so the, uh, Liberty Taco Bell or the Taco Liberty Bell, if you will.

Hannah McCarthy: There's a bell in their logo.

Speaker8: That's right. It's the Taco Bell.

Hannah McCarthy: But don't count that toward Nick's argument I gave it. That's me.

Christina Phillips: Got it.

Nick Capodice: It's also because the bells ringing for dinner. It's like the dinner bell. It's just that the whole thing.

Rebecca Lavoie: We got it. We think you're right. Go ahead.

Christina Phillips: Okay. Rebecca, what is your guess?

Rebecca Lavoie: I guessed Velveeta because Velveeta is the iconic topping for the streetside Philly cheesesteak. And I. And this is like what you put on a Philly cheesesteak. Everyone says a properly made Philly cheesesteak is made with Velveeta. And it is sort of an iconic cheese like condiment in in Philadelphia.

Nick Capodice: I would say, Rebecca, you didn't just make a strong case, you made a strong case.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, oh.

Christina Phillips: Rebecca, I do have to fact check you. In fact, the Philly cheesesteak is cheese whiz.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, sorry.

Christina Phillips: But I really liked your argument. So you got a point. Yes. Hannah, I really liked your argument. So you got a point. Hey, Nick, you got two points because you were correct.

Hannah McCarthy: And you knew it instantly.

Christina Phillips: Also, that's additional free marketing for them. On top of the estimated $25 million in free publicity they got for this stunt, but they spent about $300,000 to run the ad, and they estimated it earned about $25 million in free publicity. One other thing I just wanted to point out. So in 1996, the entire budget for the National Park Service was around 1.1 billion. And that's money that's divided among over 400 parks and monuments. And the national debt in 1996 was over $5 trillion. So, you know, really digging into that national debt by buying the Liberty Bell. And there were a lot of people who were very upset about it, understandably imagining a company buying a monument. They did change their logo that day for that ad. So it had the little crack in the bell. So continuing with this theme, the rest of this round is questions about corporate food partnerships with the US military. So I have questions for each of you, starting with Rebecca.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, no.

Christina Phillips: During World War Two, Hormel Foods shipped 133 million cans of what meat product to U.S. troops overseas. Ingredients include chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat added.

Rebecca Lavoie: It's spam.

Christina Phillips: It is spam.

Rebecca Lavoie: I don't want to hear any more of the ingredients of spam. Okay.

Christina Phillips: Oh, they're not so bad.

Nick Capodice: A lot of them have mechanically separated chicken. I always thought about the pork mechanically separated.

Christina Phillips: Well, the meat does not. There's no chicken meat. There's pork shoulder meat, ham meat, salt, sugar, sodium nitrate, water and flavoring.

Rebecca Lavoie: Flavoring.

Christina Phillips: At least in the 40s.

Nick Capodice: It's a fun little side note, but do you guys know why? Spam. We say spam email or like I'm getting spammed on my phone text messages. It's all from the Monty Python sketch where the waiter is going.

Nick Capodice: Spam, spam, spam, spam and baked beans and more. Spam.

Archive: Egg, sausage and bacon. Egg and spam. Egg, bacon and spam. Egg, bacon, sausage and spam.

Nick Capodice: So it's like they're like something that you get all the time, even though you don't want it.

Christina Phillips: It's extremely popular in Hawaii, which was not a state at the time. It was still a territory, but it continues to be a staple of Hawaiian culinary history and cuisine. Hannah. Also during World War two, this food company created something known as Field Ration D, which was described as being 600 calories, virtually indestructible and deliberately bad tasting so it wouldn't have a high value as currency to trade for non-food items like cigarettes, because it was supposed to be used in emergencies for nutrition. Name the company.

Hannah McCarthy: Name the company.

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Who makes really bad food?

Hannah McCarthy: 600 calories. It's a single item.

Christina Phillips: Do you want a hint?

Hannah McCarthy: I do, I didn't know that was allowed. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: So the headquarters of this company are in Pennsylvania.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, Hershey.

Christina Phillips: Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: You would know that if you watched The Foods That Built America on the History Channel. By the way.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So they they really wanted it to not be traded for anything else. And so they made it taste really, really bad. And it was also so dense that soldiers would sometimes chip their teeth trying to eat it, and they would shave like use their knives, which I just imagine the, the hygiene of that doesn't matter. World War two, they would have to shave it down. And then they created when they were really like heavy military presence in the Pacific. They created an alternative that I think is called like Tropical Ration D, which was like extra unmelted so that it wouldn't melt in the hot weather. All right. So you got a point for that. Hanna.

Hannah McCarthy: Yay.

Christina Phillips: Nick, this last question is for you, but I've got a little bit of an open. It's, uh, kind of bleak. So after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States subsequent entry into World War Two, Germany lost access to the ingredients that make Coca Cola, even though the company was still operating in Germany through the war. So in order to make up for the fact that they couldn't actually make Coca Cola, what beverage did Germany start producing that was flavored with apple pulp, whey byproduct from cheese and beet sugar? It still exists today in a different form.

Nick Capodice: Oh, I need the brand name or the kind of drink.

Christina Phillips: So it's a Coca Cola soda.

Nick Capodice: Okay. And it's made with apple pulp.

Christina Phillips: It was made with apple pulp, whey byproduct from cheese and beet sugar.

Nick Capodice: You know, when you go to a restaurant and you're like, what do you have? And they're like, we have Pepsi products. I'm like, I don't know what that means. Oh, man.

Christina Phillips: Think of commercials like old school commercials for a certain kind of drink.

Nick Capodice: It's like I'm trying to decide if it's going to be like sprite or 7Up or like Fanta. I'm going to say 7Up.

Christina Phillips: It's Fanta.

Rebecca Lavoie: I think the fact that he even thought Fanta gets him a point.

Christina Phillips: Okay. All right. Fair enough.

Nick Capodice: That's very fantastic of you. Thank you.

Christina Phillips: So it's actually a shortening of the word fantastic Germans, correct me. Which it is. Um, the German word for fantastic, in case you didn't know. And the color originally was murky brown and slightly cheese flavored, and it became a global smash anyway, so they still make Fanta. But it started as a drink for the Germans during World War two. Alrighty. The scores are as follows. Nick, you have three points. Hannah. You have two points. Rebecca you have two points. Ready? Um.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.

Christina Phillips: Next category is media pranks. As we've already heard, NPR, the BBC and other publications tend to have fun with April Fool's Day by releasing faux stories that are supposed to be obvious enough to be pranks, but believable enough to make you stop and think. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don't. For example, the BBC once ran a story in 1957 about a family in Switzerland that was harvesting spaghetti from spaghetti trees, and they said that the reason it was so populous was because the spaghetti weevil had been eradicated, and it became really popular. A lot of people called in asking if they could get spaghetti trees, because spaghetti was still considered a delicacy in Britain at that time.

Rebecca Lavoie: There's an incredible video for that story, by the way. I recommend looking it up after picking.

Archive: The spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who've succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.

Rebecca Lavoie: You can see trees covered with spaghetti, and these women are up in the trees, like taking the spaghetti gently down from the tree.

Christina Phillips: Is it cooked or is it raw?

Rebecca Lavoie: Cooked?

Christina Phillips: Nick.

Nick Capodice: Hello.

Christina Phillips: One NPR, April Fool's story announced the creation of a surgical procedure that would allow people to more deeply enjoy a new kind of media technology. I'm not telling you the year because I would probably give it away. Was it a a Bluetooth chip installed behind the ear that allowed you to have your own portable Bluetooth that could connect to devices around you? B finger extensions to give your fingers more reach on a computer keyboard. See 3D eye surgery to allow you to enjoy 3D movies without the glasses or D under the skin. Battery magnets that use your own energy to charge your electronic devices.

Nick Capodice: All right, this is really tricky. You said it's NPR.

Christina Phillips: None of these are real, for what it's worth. But one of them was a real fake story.

Nick Capodice: I know people do get magnets put under their skin. A lot of times it's a thing. It's like a whole movement of people who get technology implanted in there.

Christina Phillips: But does it charge your phone with your own metabolism?

Nick Capodice: It doesn't charge your phone, but there probably is somebody out there with a phone charging magnet.

Rebecca Lavoie: Is that transhumanism that you're referring to? I believe that's what it's called.

Nick Capodice: It's gently tied to the transhumanists. Yeah. Oh, man. If it was like the, like the finger extensions. So you can type easier sounds. So NPR I'm going to go with the Bluetooth chip in your ear.

Christina Phillips: No, unfortunately it was 3D eye surgery to allow you to enjoy 3D movies without the glasses, but thank you for believing the three other ones I made up.

Rebecca Lavoie: Nicely done.

Christina Phillips: Yes. Okay. Hannah?

Hannah McCarthy: Yes.

Christina Phillips: In 2008, the IRS sent tax rebate checks to the American people for anywhere from 600 to $1200 to help stimulate the economy. That was real. However, according to an April Fool's marketplace story, the IRS was worried that people wouldn't actually spend that money, so they decided to do what? Instead, the IRS decided to do what? Instead, send people visa gift cards that expired in two months to make sure they spent them. Send people all of their rebate in $1 bills to help encourage people to spend them in small dollar amounts that would spread the stimulus more widely. Send people their rebate checks worth of national park visitor passes so they could trade like currency to get to the parks they wanted. Or d send people toasters, air conditioners and snow blowers that equaled the amount of their checks based on their regions and what the IRS thought they might want.

Hannah McCarthy: These are all good.

Christina Phillips: Well thank you.

Hannah McCarthy: So the visa gift card is not as funny as the dollar bills. And then of course, like the appliances is very funny. I'm gonna go with a just because of how much people get weird about gift cards.

Christina Phillips: Unfortunately, no, it was not the visa gift cards. So the story said that the IRS was going to send people toasters, air conditioners and snow blowers and they would decide based on where they lived and what they thought they might like. And they had, like fake interviews with people who were like, I mean, I didn't really need a toaster. I kind of wanted a snow blower.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hmm.

Christina Phillips: Rebecca.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Christina Phillips: In 2016, National Geographic announced on April Fools that they would no longer publish photographs of what a naked animals. B domesticated animals. C cars, trains, planes, or any modern transportation equipment or d anything indoors.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay, so when I was a kid, National Geographic was sort of like known for publishing pictures of naked people. Like, that was a whole thing. Yeah. And like, you know, let's just say kids were stealing their parents National Geographic sometimes. So for that reason, I'm going to pick a naked animals.

Christina Phillips: You are correct. This is the hardest one for me to come up with alternatives because it was just really good. So this is a quote from them. The media group says it will no longer degrade animals by showing photos of them without clothes. And so they actually published a series of photos with animals that have like clothes on to to demonstrate how they would do this.

Rebecca Lavoie: A zebra in a bikini.

Christina Phillips: We'll be right back after a quick break. Our next set of questions are about the zip code. Because NPR once aired a story on All Things Considered that announced that the US Postal Service was starting a program called Portable ZIP Codes, which allowed people to keep their current ZIP code even if they moved into a new one.

Archive: I'm pleased to announce this afternoon a new feature of our Go Postal campaign. Starting next month, the National Portable ZIP Codes Program will commence with it. American citizens can keep their present ZIP codes wherever they choose to live across the country or across town.

Archive: Crandall said that while the plan would at first.

Christina Phillips: So the next couple of questions are about zip codes. But first, does anyone know what Z stands for?

Hannah McCarthy: O zone?

Christina Phillips: So zone is correct. It's zone improvement plan. That's what ZIP stands for. And of course, it's also helpful because ZIP zippy, you know, makes the mail zipper essentially. So here are a couple of facts about zip codes before we start. The first number of the standard five number code determines a large region. So mail sorting systems look at that first from east to west east coast. New England starts at zero. And then as you move south and west to California, Washington and Oregon, those all start with nine and Alaska and Hawaii and some states have just one set of first couple of numbers, like Utah is only 84, and then the three after the remaining numbers further break down by county or region. And then in 1983 they introduced the ZIP plus four, which is four extra numbers that further divide mail locally. So I have a question for each of you. Hanna. There are three individuals who have their own zip codes.

Rebecca Lavoie: Hey, Christina, I know the president and the first lady are the first two, but I have no idea who else has their own zip code.

Christina Phillips: The third is an animal mascot created in 1944, and is part of the longest running public service campaign in US history to date.

Hannah McCarthy: Smokey the bear.

Christina Phillips: It is Smokey the Bear.

Rebecca Lavoie: It's actually just Smokey Bear.

Hannah McCarthy: Guys, I'm glad you.

Nick Capodice: Did it, Rebecca. Because if I did it, it would have been a disaster.

Hannah McCarthy: Did I still get the point? Oh, I'm giving you the point.

Nick Capodice: It's just the most butt, actually, I've ever heard from everybody. Like, it's actually Smokey Bear. Smokey the bear was my father.

Archive: Don't let forest fires be your fault. Make sure your fire is dead out. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.

Christina Phillips: So his zip code is 20252. Santa Claus. Many people think he should have his own zip code. Or would. He doesn't. But he does have his own Canadian postal code, which is H0 zero zero. Nick, this question is for you.

Nick Capodice: Hello. Okay.

Christina Phillips: Before Smokey Bear, the US Forest Service partnered with Disney, who agreed to let them use animated creatures from, what, 1942 movie for just a year as mascots for forest fire prevention?

Nick Capodice: Huh? Well, you know, maybe Bambi.

Christina Phillips: Bambi is correct.

Nick Capodice: Oh, hooray! Never seen Bambi. Really?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah. Don't. It's so sad. It's.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, it's absolutely devastating. But also, Disney only let them do it for a year. And then they were like, we're taking Bambi and all of his friends back. And so they were like, we must create a new mascot. So they came up with Smokey Bear. And there's various origin stories as to Smokey Bear, whether it was named after a bear or named after a man. You know, there's a whole Wikipedia page on it. Rebecca, the next question is for you. Several corporate headquarters also have their own individual ZIP codes, including the headquarters for Walmart and General Electric, and for two weeks a year, Blackrock city, Nevada gets its own ZIP code in order to accommodate which festival, which began as a summer solstice festival in the 1980s and in 2023 was the site of major flooding.

Rebecca Lavoie: Well, I believe what you're talking about is the biggest gathering annually of like, jerks in the United States. And that would be Burning Man.

Christina Phillips: Hot take from Rebecca. You are correct.

Rebecca Lavoie: People say it's just all jerks now, right? That's why I was here. It's like tech bro kind of situation, right?

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, I used to be that.

Nick Capodice: It used to be like a really kind of holistic, beautiful artist thing. And now it's like Fyre Festival. Yeah. So we all felt good when the flesh eating crabs crawled out of the ground.

Christina Phillips: That was 20, 23. That was, I think, one of those. Yeah, it did make it obvious which celebrities who were not smart enough to stream on their phones, getting rescued by helicopters, and then everyone else is just stuck in the mud. Burning man, you are correct. Okay. We've reached the end of this round. Currently, the scores stand at Nick. Four points, Hannah three points. Rebecca four points. The next category is called Bogus policy. So elected and appointed officials love to introduce fake policies or bills on April Fools. For example, in 1985, Congressman Thomas Downey put forth a proposal to lower the minimum age you could be elected to Congress to 15 to get, quote, new blood in Congress. For what it's worth, the median age in the House in 1985 was 49, and the median age in the Senate was 53.7. Do you want to guess the median ages in 2023?

Rebecca Lavoie: The median, not the average. Right. Median for the Senate I'm going to say 60.

Christina Phillips: Higher.

Rebecca Lavoie: What?

Hannah McCarthy: 65.

Christina Phillips: 65 is right. You're right on that.

Nick Capodice: But the house is maybe lower. So I guess the house is 46.

Christina Phillips: It hasn't gone down. It's gone up.

Nick Capodice: Oh, it's gone up.

Christina Phillips: Yes.

Hannah McCarthy: Nick, they don't leave 55 up.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh my gosh.

Christina Phillips: This is a little bit higher than 55.

Rebecca Lavoie: 57.

Christina Phillips: Yeah 57.8. So technically 58. Almost 58. I also am fairly certain that a lot of the people who were in the house in 1985 are still in the House today, so they probably remember that bill. I want to use another joke policy as our jumping off point for this round, which is about font, also known as typeface. Okay. In 2015, Texas Land Commissioner George P Bush, son of Jeb Bush, announced that there was an agency wide ban on which font.

Rebecca Lavoie: My guess is Comic Sans.

Christina Phillips: Okay, what's your guess, Nick?

Nick Capodice: My guess is Comic Sans.

Rebecca Lavoie: Okay.

Christina Phillips: Hannah, what's your guess?

Hannah McCarthy: Okay, I have a reason. Can I tell my reason? Yes. We're talking about a political family and like a, what do you call it, a dynasty, right? Family like, known to be God fearing Christians. Right. Appealing to other God fearing Christians, I think so I picked Helvetica.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh.

Christina Phillips: Okay. So the answer is Comic Sans. Hannah, do we give Hannah a point for effort? Heck yeah. Okay.

Nick Capodice: Really fast Comic Sans story. It was my first week at NPR. I wrote a funny Thing for the newsletter. Extra credit for our show. And I made a joke about how I hated Comic Sans. And I got a scathing email from a listener saying that I was being ableist because Comic Sans. She said it was quite useful for people who have dyslexia, and she was like, so you should never make fun of Comic Sans and you should be ashamed of yourself. And I was like, heartbroken for a month. And then I found out a month later that that's actually been disproven.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Christina Phillips: Dear listener, I'm actually I'm actually.

Christina Phillips: You're wrong.

Christina Phillips: You're totally right that there have been studies that have shown that Comic Sans is actually harder to read. And so sometimes in school, it'll be used to increase retention because you have to work harder to understand the words. But there are still plenty of people who say that it is easier to read.

Rebecca Lavoie: I thought it was just ugly and that's why we don't like it.

Christina Phillips: I mean, that's why I don't like it. These questions are all going to be about fonts.

Nick Capodice: I love fonts, I'm ready.

Christina Phillips: All right. In 2023, the State Department announced it was moving away from using Times New Roman as its default font on websites, on publications, etc., and would instead use this sans serif font with a name that derives from a word for instrument of measurement.

Rebecca Lavoie: I know this isn't right, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because it's the only sans font I could think of right now. And that's Ariel.

Christina Phillips: No, it's Calibri for Calibri. Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.

Christina Phillips: Caliber. Caliber.

Nick Capodice: So this is also an access issue. So serif fonts are more difficult for people with various learning disabilities to read than sans serif. So they're like, we can't have Times New Roman as our default anymore. So that's why schools suddenly are like, no more Times New Roman. And for your term paper, it's got to be Calibri.

Christina Phillips: Do you want to explain what a serif is?

Nick Capodice: So interestingly, they're called serifs, I believe. And I could be wrong because serifs and cherubim were often used to the angels, and illuminations were used to decorate words in old medieval manuscripts. So I don't know if that's true or not, but I've heard that before. But so serifs are the sort of chunky lines at the ends of all the lines of a letter. So the R has two serifs on its bottom feet, so sans serif eliminates those entirely. And it's a little bit easier to read.

Rebecca Lavoie: The eye is just a stick.

Nick Capodice: Yeah.

Nick Capodice: An eye is.

Nick Capodice: Stick instead of uh, an eye, which I love. The serif tie.

Christina Phillips: Nick. This question is for you.

Nick Capodice: Hello.

Christina Phillips: So the US Web Design system, which is part of the US Digital Service, which is a thing I learned about. They create standards for designing and maintaining government websites, recommends several typefaces for digital publications, including this font, which shares its name with the first name of one of our famous Western Expansionists.

Nick Capodice: Oh my God. And by a famous westward expansionist.

Christina Phillips: The first name of a westward expansionist, a famous westward expansionist.

Hannah McCarthy: The.

Nick Capodice: First name. So who's the guy who said, let me give me a second. The guy who said, Go West, young man, was that guy.

Christina Phillips: I think you're a little niche here. I don't know who this is.

Nick Capodice: Go west, young man. It's probably not even him. Um.

Rebecca Lavoie: Can I give you a clue?

Hannah McCarthy: Yes.

Rebecca Lavoie: This is a pair of westward Expansionists that we talked a lot about in grade school.

Nick Capodice: Good. Thank you. Rebecca.

Hannah McCarthy: I would not.

Nick Capodice: Meriwether.

Hannah McCarthy: Meriwether.

Nick Capodice: Thank you for the clue. Did you know that Lewis and Clark. They had to because they had such horrible constipation from being on the trail. They, like, didn't know how to eat the food. They were eating bad rations that they had to take this mercury pill for as a laxative, which they called thunder clappers. Give me a couple more thunder clappers. Good. Yeah. And you can track their trail because of mercury in the ground.

Rebecca Lavoie: Wow.

Nick Capodice: How much do you not believe the second part? All of it.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't believe that. Their excrement. First of all, I don't believe that we know exactly where they poop. And I don't believe that it then leached into the soil. Also, it would be about this big, right?

Nick Capodice: Yeah. Not from a thunderclap or. Well, we're gonna look it up after this listeners out there. You decide if the thunder clappers are real.

Rebecca Lavoie: I'm just gonna say the historical significance of Thunder clappers is the high mercury content has been used by archeologists to help verify locations.

Christina Phillips: Oh.

Rebecca Lavoie: And thunder clapping.

Nick Capodice: I'm not in anybody's graces any better after being right.

Nick Capodice: About the thunder clap. I'm in more trouble.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. 97% of the time when I ask you to please fact check that you're like, oh, it's not true. You gotta give me that.

Rebecca Lavoie: But actually.

Christina Phillips: Hannah, this question is for you.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Christina Phillips: Times New Roman was created. For which newspaper? In 1931.

Hannah McCarthy: I mean, I guess the New York Times.

Christina Phillips: No.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: Times New Roman was used by the New York Times, for sure.

Rebecca Lavoie: But who was it created for?

Christina Phillips: It was created for the Times of Britain. Oh.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: But the New York Times used it until 2007, when they switched to a little font called Georgia.

Hannah McCarthy: Mhm.

Rebecca Lavoie: The fat one.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Christina Phillips: Okay. So at the end of this round, Nick, you have six. Hannah you've got four. Rebecca you've got five.

Rebecca Lavoie: Yay! Not last.

Christina Phillips: This last and final round is called what's in a name?

Nick Capodice: Oh, what's in a name?

Christina Phillips: In 2015, representative Mike Honda, a Democrat from California, introduced a fake bill for April Fools. He did not actually introduce it into Congress, but he wrote a press release about it. And that bill was against verbose legislation names. It was called the Accountability and Congressional Responsibility on Naming Your Motions Act, aka the Acronyms Act. Here's a quote from his press release which again was fake. The last straw was the pension and Social Security measuring equivalence. Permanent linking of everyone's actual savings environment. Please pass me Act, which only corrected a typo on page 346 of the tax code. So the reason I said so many times that this was fake was because so many news sources referenced this as if it were a real bill that was introduced. The Hill, the Atlantic, Votesmart.org, The New Republic. They all refer to it as though it's a real piece of legislation, and use it as a jumping off point to talk about ridiculous acronym legislation. I just want to say this is like when a teacher gives out a quiz that it says at the top, read every question before you begin this quiz. And at the bottom it says, just write your name and turn it in. The bottom of the HuffPost article that covered this piece of legislation says, this is an April Fools joke.

Christina Phillips: This is not real. It's literally right there. So anyway, I thought that this would be a good excuse To create trivia questions about times. Legislators really did try their hardest to create an acronym out of the title of their legislation. So I'm going to give you actual pieces of legislation that were introduced. I will tell you how many letters there are in the acronym, and then I will start reading the title of the bill. When you think you have a guess, say stop. If you get it right, you get a point, and then you get to answer a couple of follow up questions about the legislation. Oh, also, I feel like I should say just because it's an acronym doesn't mean they follow the rules of acronyms. So sometimes the actual title is like 12 letters long, but the acronym is only seven. So first question. This piece of legislation was proposed by Senator Michael Bennett, a Democrat from Colorado. The acronym is one word and it is six letters long. Zeroing out money for zombie. Yes. Zeroing out money for buying influence after elections act. Oh, zombie. So, Nick, follow up question. What was this act for?

Nick Capodice: Zero. Money for buying influence after elections. Was it a bill to, like, overturn Citizens United?

Christina Phillips: No. Not quite.

Rebecca Lavoie: Is it a bill to keep people from donating to campaigns of other people who are running for office after they are running for office?

Christina Phillips: I think that's close. It required candidates to disperse unused funds after the election.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh, they had to disperse them. Okay.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So basically you had to give up your money and it set a way to do it. So, Nick, you get the first go at this. What year was this introduced?

Nick Capodice: Oh, the zombie act. I'm going to say the old zombie act. I'm going to say 2016.

Christina Phillips: No, it's 2021 now. The next piece of legislation, the following legislation, was introduced by Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois. The acronym is one word and it is seven letters long. Communications over various feeds electronically.

Nick Capodice: Coffee.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh. That's so funny.

Nick Capodice: That's hilarious.

Christina Phillips: So the whole title is communications over various Feeds electronically for Engagement Act or the Coffee Act. I cannot look at this tweet from President Trump that inspired this without laughing. It's like Donald Trump was president at the time, tweeted something at 12:06 a.m. on a Wednesday that said, despite the constant negative press, coffee and tweet.

Rebecca Lavoie: And.

Christina Phillips: It was like the next six hours overnight, people just lost it. And then six hours later, to his credit, he had a really good follow up. Who can figure out the true meaning of coffee and enjoy. And it's still up there. So, Nick, what was this act for? What did it purport to do?

Nick Capodice: Can you read the bill one last time? The name. And then I'll get it.

Christina Phillips: Communications over various feeds electronically for Engagement act.

Nick Capodice: This is monitoring the usage of politicians on social media.

Christina Phillips: Ah. I'm going to go ahead and say close enough. Rebecca, do you have a guess?

Rebecca Lavoie: It codified that the president's tweets are actually, like archivable material.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, that's exactly it. So you are going to get the point for that. Yeah.

Nick Capodice: Well done.

Christina Phillips: So it basically some of the language in here is that the bill amends provisions governing presidential records to revise the definition of presidential records to include any personal and official social media account. Nick, what year was this bill introduced? Do you have a guess?

Nick Capodice: Uh. 2020.

Christina Phillips: No. Someone else have a guess?

Rebecca Lavoie: 2018?

Christina Phillips: No, it was 2017.

Rebecca Lavoie: Ah.

Christina Phillips: This was like three months into his new administration when this happened, did it pass?

Nick Capodice: I'm going to say no because it's an acronym.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. You're correct. It did not. It did not pass. But it's worth pointing out that in 2014. So before this bill was introduced, there was an amendment to the Presidential Records Act that specified that electronic content was considered presidential records and must be preserved. So a lot of legal experts already assumed that included social media. But President Trump did come under fire for deleting tweets during his presidency. Nick, I believe you got two points for that one. Are you ready?

Rebecca Lavoie: Yes.

Christina Phillips: This piece of legislation was introduced by Democrat Gary Ackerman from New York. The acronym is one word. It is eight letters long, but the word is not spelled correctly.

Rebecca Lavoie: Oh.

Christina Phillips: The health insurance protects America. Can't HIPAA can't repeal it. Act.

Hannah McCarthy: Hypocrite.

Christina Phillips: Yes.

Nick Capodice: Oh well done.

Christina Phillips: Yes. So yeah it is spelled HIPAA like HIPAA. And then can't repeal it crit. Okay. So Hannah you got a point for that. I'm going to ask you what you think it was for.

Hannah McCarthy: Can you say it again.

Christina Phillips: The health insurance protects America can't repeal it. Act.

Hannah McCarthy: So I think it was to stop the repealing of the Affordable Care Act, stop going after Obamacare, like something like that.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So I'm going to give you points because that is the intention of the act. It was kind of like a dare. So Democrat Gary Ackerman from New York introduced a series of bills that would repeal some of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act, including the one that said that companies couldn't deny coverage based on preexisting conditions, and another that said that insurance companies couldn't just end your coverage. And here's what he said, quote, these are great safeguards to improve coverage for all Americans. Republicans wouldn't dare vote to do away with them, despite their campaign pledge to do so. But I'm calling them out on it and dare the GOP to vote for these bills. So basically saying that, like you keep claiming you want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, well, if you really want to do that, do it. Do it on these specific provisions that everybody really likes.

Rebecca Lavoie: What about the death panels, though? Do they do they put those in the list.

Christina Phillips: Death panels. What's that?

Rebecca Lavoie: You don't remember when the Affordable Care Act was being sold to the people? That was the opposition to it was that it would create so-called death panels, where a panel of people would get to decide if you lived or died. That was the Sarah Palin talking point around the ACA.

Archive: President Obama stood before a joint session of Congress and said, there is no such thing as a death panel. Is he a liar?

Archive: He's not lying in that. Those two words will not be found in any of those thousands of pages of different variations of the health care bill. No death panel isn't there.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so, Hannah, you get first guess. What year do you think that this was introduced?

Hannah McCarthy: 2017?

Nick Capodice: Nope. 2012?

Christina Phillips: Nope.

Christina Phillips: Um, so it was 2010. Did it pass? Hannah? No, no. That is all of the trivia that I have for you today.

Nick Capodice: Oh.

Hannah McCarthy: Wow.

Christina Phillips: So I'm going to reveal our final scores. Um, Nick, you received ten points. Hannah, you have seven points.

Hannah McCarthy: Huzzah!

Christina Phillips: And, Rebecca, you have six points.

Rebecca Lavoie: See, I don't always win.

Christina Phillips: Your winning streak is over.

Rebecca Lavoie: That's right, that's right.

Christina Phillips: Congratulations, Nick.

Nick Capodice: Well. Thank you. It's. I haven't won one in a good long while. It feels.

Hannah McCarthy: Pretty.

Nick Capodice: True. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There was no categories about, like, Twilight this time.

Rebecca Lavoie: That was our favorite category of all time.

Christina Phillips: I'm glad.

Hannah McCarthy: I'm glad this was so fun. It was so fun, Christina.

Nick Capodice: It was so fun.

Christina Phillips: Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody.

Rebecca Lavoie: Thanks for having us.

Christina Phillips: This episode was produced by me, Christina Phillips, with a lot of wonderful help from our hosts, Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice and our executive producer, Rebecca Lavoie, who also edited this episode. Our team includes producer Marina Henke. Music from this episode is from Epidemic Sound and the Taco Bell. Civics 101 is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.


 

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This podcast is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

The Politics Behind Your Taxes

Taxes on wages make up the bulk of federal revenue every year. Where does that money go, and who decides how much you should pay?

The process is extremely complicated - and deeply political - which is why it's important for everyday taxpayers to understand how the people they elected choose to spend the money voters give out of their paychecks every year. 

We talk with tax policy expert Beverly Moran, a Paulus fellow at Boston College Law School and professor emerita at Vanderbilt, about how budget reconciliation works. We also talk about how those decisions affect the vast majority of taxpayers, who earn most of their wealth from salary or wages... and how it looks different for the wealthiest Americans. Find Beverly's research on the impact of the 2017 TCJA here

Listen to the episode:

Related reading and listening:

Listen to our episodes on the history of the income tax in the United States, and how the tax return process works

We used a number of sources in this episode. Here are some, in order of appearance: 

How much revenue has the US  government collected this year? from the US Treasury Department. 

Reconciliation explainer from the Congressional Budget Office.

Budget Reconciliation: Tracking the 2025 Trump Tax Cuts from the Tax Foundation. 

What are itemized deductions and who claims them? from the Tax Policy Center. 

How did the TCJA change taxes of families with children? from the Tax Policy Center. 

The 2017 Tax Law Was Skewed to the Rich, Expensive, and Failed to Deliver on Its Promises from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

Lifting the SALT Cap: Estimated Budgetary Effects, 2024 and Beyond from Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. 

Differences between the traditional CPI and Chained CPI from the Congressional Budget Office. 

Republicans say Medicaid cuts won't happen. But does their budget work without them? from NPR. 

Republicans want to lower taxes. The hard part is choosing what to cut. from the New York Times. 

Transcript:

Note: This transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors

Christina Phillips: I feel like I've had the income tax song stuck in my head for a solid week.

Hannah McCarthy: What's that song? What is that?

Christina Phillips: Oh, you don't know the income tax song?

Hannah McCarthy: No. Am I gonna hear it?

Christina Phillips: I paid my income tax today. No no no no no no.

Archive: I paid my income tax today. I'm only one of millions more whose income never was taxed before. Art tax. I'm very.

Christina Phillips: Tax. I'm very glad to pay. Is it.

Hannah McCarthy: Just propaganda?

Christina Phillips: Yes, it is a 1942 propaganda song. Are you telling me you don't have this in your, like, Spotify playlist? Because. Because I do.

Archive: The sky Rockefeller helped to build them, so did I. I paid my income tax today.

Archive: I paid my income tax today.

Christina Phillips: This is the first time I think it's just the two of us.

Hannah McCarthy: I know. Hello.

Christina Phillips: Hello.

Hannah McCarthy: It's a whole new environment in here.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, it's a huge studio in just two people.

Hannah McCarthy: Just two people.

Christina Phillips: And we're talking about taxes.

Hannah McCarthy: What could be more thrilling than that?

Christina Phillips: Uh, do you want to introduce yourself and set us up?

Hannah McCarthy: Yes. Hello. I am Hannah McCarthy. I'm the co-host of Civics 101. I am here with Kristina Phillips, senior producer of Civics 101. And I am told that today. Kristina, you're going to explain income taxes to me.

Christina Phillips: Yes, well, sort of.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: So we're going to talk about income taxes, but we're not talking about how you pay them.

Hannah McCarthy: Right.

Christina Phillips: Or the history of the income tax because we've already done that.

Hannah McCarthy: We sure have.

Christina Phillips: We did that a couple of years ago. I'm going to put the links to those two episodes in the show notes. So we are going to talk about the politics of taxes.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, this is actually great because every single election and then every single presidential term or congressional term or what have you, it's always like taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes, taxes. But, you know, it's like a chief thing at the top of everyone's mind. Yes. Because people don't want to pay him, or sometimes they want to pay more. But like it's.

Christina Phillips: Or sometimes they want to pay less, I feel like is the normal.

Hannah McCarthy: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I just don't want to say, like, every person in America wants to pay fewer taxes. Maybe some want to pay more, you know. Mhm. Um, but I don't think I really have ever closely followed any political debate about it or you know, I'll know when there's a vote or something and I'll know what someone's policies are, but that's it.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. We're going to talk about how politicians come up with and then pass legislation on collecting taxes. And these are taxes that fund the federal government. And how they do that while keeping major donors and voters happy, but still meeting that bottom line.

Hannah McCarthy: That's the thing.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah. And I say major donors, because the biggest lobbying groups in the country are the National Association of Realtors and the US Chamber of Commerce, which represent people who own assets like houses and then businesses and business owners. So we are talking about keeping the people that have a lot of money happy. And then also, you know, the voters like you and me. So why are we talking about this now, other than the fact that it's tax season? Well, one, Congress is currently haggling over a major budget overhaul because huge chunks of Trump's last big tax bill, the 1 in 2017, are going to expire at the end of 2025. So our Republican Congress is trying to figure out how to keep Trump's tax cut legacy alive, and then also meet the demands that he has for shrinking the federal government and dealing with the national debt. And I want to be clear, we cannot and will not possibly talk about everything. I tried to pick examples that bubble up when people talk about wealth and inequity and taxes. And then I've got one super fascinating example that I knew nothing about, but really got me thinking that I learned about when I was doing my interviews.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Beverly Moran: I mean, it's purposefully complicated so that no one will understand it. I'm thinking about people who go to law school for three years and they're not really up on it. Right? It's deliberately made so that you have to have an Encyclopedia Britannica and just be going through it constantly, you know?

Christina Phillips: That's Beverly Moran. She is a tax policy expert and professor emeritus at Vanderbilt and a policy fellow at Boston College Law School. And she's going to help walk us through this. Okay. I want to do super 101 here for just a second.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, please.

Christina Phillips: The kind of taxes we're talking about today, for the most part, are the ones that come out of your paycheck. So when you look at your pay stub, you can see several categories of taxes that are withheld. Can you think of one.

Hannah McCarthy: Categories like Medicare?

Christina Phillips: Yes, Medicare.

Hannah McCarthy: Categories like Social Security.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So Medicare and Social Security are both those are flat taxes. So that just comes right out of your paycheck.

Hannah McCarthy: And then I know that there are in some states, not in New Hampshire. State taxes that are withheld from your paycheck.

Christina Phillips: That's one. And then we've got one other big one.

Hannah McCarthy: Just income tax. Right. Okay.

Christina Phillips: Yep. Federal income tax. More than half of federal revenue. That's money that the federal government makes every year is from income and payroll taxes. Now here's another question. Do you know where most of that money goes.

Hannah McCarthy: To the defense budget?

Christina Phillips: No, actually this is fascinating. So the defense budget, I believe is only like 13%. More than half of all of the revenue, including revenue that's earned from business taxes, borrowing and interest goes directly into social programs.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh, okay.

Christina Phillips: All right. So we're talking Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, veterans benefits and economic benefits like Snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. So this is kind of the essence of paying taxes in this country, right? You take care of your government and your government takes care of you. Your taxes pay for the programs that are supposed to help you raise your kids. If you lose your job, if you get sick, if you are or become disabled, if you served in the military, and if you're supporting someone else, or when you reach retirement age.

Hannah McCarthy: So this is not just like the federal income tax. It's all of the categories we talked about. It's also okay. Got it.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So most of revenue comes from income and payroll taxes. And most of that money goes right back out the door for services that support people directly.

Hannah McCarthy: Oh. Which is why in countries that are famed for having just a great deal of social services at a very high level, you hear about incredibly high tax rates.

Christina Phillips: Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And in the US, it's, you know, this is still the bulk of revenue and the bulk of the budget, but it is certainly not as simple and straightforward as it is in other countries where there's just a big tax that's taken out and lots of services from those tax. So the agency that collects all these taxes is the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service. Right now, Congress is attempting to pass a budget through a process known as budget reconciliation that's going to address many expiring tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And they also want to accomplish Trump's mission to cut spending, shrink the federal government, lower people's tax bills, etc., etc.. Now, one thing I do want to clarify we're not talking about the stopgap spending bill that Congress just passed to avert a government shutdown. So that's a spending bill that's just funding the government for the next seven months.

Hannah McCarthy: So budget reconciliation. Right. Like reconciling. Right. Making amends, making it all good. What is that process, Christina.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So I sort of think of the reconciliation as two things. You have to reconcile what the House wants to do and what the Senate wants to do. And you also have to reconcile cuts you want to make to revenue with how you're going to earn revenue that both the House and Senate approve of. So it's going to be we're going to make tax cuts, or we're going to make cuts that are going to decrease revenue, but we're also going to either make cuts in spending or we're going to introduce new ways to raise revenue. To make it all balance out. It has to make sense. The math has to math basically to a certain degree in a way that's responsible, okay. As in 2017, what's happening now is that the House and Senate have drawn up proposals. They have their own proposals for spending and for tax cuts. And each chamber passes their version by a simple majority. But neither one is law yet. And the only way it becomes law is once the House and Senate work off of these proposals and create an identical budget. This is the reconciliation process. So that's where we're at now.

Hannah McCarthy: It sounds like a like so much work, I struggled to envision how even within the chambers themselves, these individuals are going to work it out, let alone between the two of them.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, I think that this is super interesting because I feel like what we hear politicians sell is we're going to stop taxing tips, for example, and we're also going to reduce wasteful spending. But when you ask how, it's sort of like when a kid asks you how money works and you're like, well, so money is money and you know, it's got value. So I actually I want to jump back to when I talked to Eric Toder, who's a tax policy expert who worked in the Clinton administration, I talked to him a couple years ago for our earlier tax episodes. He actually was right in the middle of some of these budget discussions with a different president.

Hannah McCarthy: So can I just ask, Christina, were these interviews the kind of thing where you were you would ask a question and these experts would be like, Well, you know, I've had that before with like, explain the two party system. Seriously?

Christina Phillips: Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: That's what you want. Do you have three hours? You know?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. I think with Eric, what I remember is he explained that the reconciliation process. And I was like, so can you give me an example of that? And he was like, yeah, okay. And so then this is what he said.

Eric Toder: I remember when I was in the Clinton administration and we decided for political reasons, we had to have a middle class tax cut. So if we lowered rates a little bit, it just cost too much money. You couldn't lower rates across the board. So that said, we had to give some kind of credits or some benefit. So people had talked about a child credit and the number that Republicans had raised was $500. So we said, well, we have to have $500. It can't be less than $500. Well, how do we save money if it's $500? Well, we have to phase it out if people's income is above a certain amount and maybe we want to limit it instead of with personal exemptions, which was 18, maybe we ought to limit it to people under 17. And you get the picture. You go through one contortion after another to hit these various targets for how you're changing the system. And those things just stay in there.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay. So he he said cutting the rate like the tax rate would be too expensive, right? They would lose too much money. Is that. Am I understanding.

Christina Phillips: That? I do want to stop you. I don't I don't think it's even worth it to try to make this make sense. I really, purely I think that this is just a good example of what these things look like. Yeah, it is so kind of like absolutely chaotic, right?

Hannah McCarthy: It's like the biggest butterfly flapping its wings. She's like, whoa, that changed a lot.

Christina Phillips: Right? So this is how we end up with tax policies that are like our tax code is thousands and thousands of pages long, and it's because politicians float an idea and then they have to figure out how to make that work. And it becomes this like as he said, contortion of, well, we try this and then we try that. But what if we do this? And what if we change that? And what if we like, set this limit? And then you and I, as taxpayers, we go to pay our taxes and we're like, I'm sorry, which form is this and also which credit? And do I need to fill out this and which papers do I need. And like, which deduction do I take? What happens is that the people who have the time and the money and the resources to go through all of this, or even to hire somebody who understands a very specific part, maybe like a couple hundred pages of this, thousands of pages of tax code and how they can help somebody benefit from that and lower their tax burden. That's how this ends up working right is that you have to have this level of knowledge to navigate it, and it just keeps getting more complicated.

Hannah McCarthy: I use it in accountant very briefly thinking that would be a good idea. And then they fired me. They were like, no, you don't have enough money, we can't deal with you anymore. We're like too busy and you are not worth it.

Christina Phillips: I love that you're fired by your accountant.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, yeah, your taxes are out.

Christina Phillips: You're not complicated enough here. Oh my goodness. We'll be right back with more Civics 101 after a quick break. So now that we've established what this looks like, whether or not it makes any sense, I want to talk about what this looked like in the 2017 tax bill. And I'm going to pick out the major things that were cut, the tax cuts that happened in the 2017 tax bill. And then we're going to look at a couple of ways that Congress tried to make those tax cuts make sense.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: So are you ready?

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Christina Phillips: We can do this. Okay. So the federal income tax rate went down.

Hannah McCarthy: This is 2017.

Christina Phillips: This is 2017.

Hannah McCarthy: So I'm with you.

Christina Phillips: The tax cuts it's called the Trump tax cuts by a lot of people. It's the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The federal income tax rate went down. The old brackets used to start at like the highest earners owed 39% and now ends at 37%. So that's set to expire if they don't pass a new tax bill. The standard deduction, which is a deduction that is supposed to be a simpler substitution for the itemized deductions you can get for investing in retirement and paying off loans and donating to charity. That went up, which meant that more people would say, okay, so I could itemize my deductions, but the standard deduction is pretty high and I might just take that instead. So it's simplified taxes for a lot of people. A lot more people took the standard deduction. And that standard deduction is dependent on your status. So if you're single head of household married etc. also if you're 65 or older, if you're blind or supporting a dependent. So it's a standard deduction. That sort of depends on you as a taxpayer. And I should just say that for the most part, people who use itemized deductions, it's disproportionately the top 10% of earners who go through and use the itemized deductions.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah, that makes sense, because every now and then I've tried to do it and I'll go through the itemized and then I'm like, this is so not worth it. There's I'm not complicated enough. Right. Like I don't have like all of the, the questions that I would have to not not even questions is like, do you qualify for this, this this, this. I'm like, I don't qualify for any of this. Yeah, I'm a very simple entity, you know?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. I think going through the itemized deductions make you realize all the ways that people can make money that like, yeah, you I'm like, I, I can't imagine owning enough stock.

Hannah McCarthy: It never would have occurred to me to pursue that lifestyle.

Christina Phillips: I'm sorry. Estate taxes. What's going on? Like. Yeah, it makes it obvious how many different ways you can get incentives. If you have the money and you have the know how to invest your wealth in different ways, which is relevant, and we'll talk about it in a little bit. Okay. So then the other like big thing that was felt for most taxpayers I think was the child tax credit. So it used to be a $1,000 per child. It went up to $2,000 per child. Also, the bill raised the maximum income you could earn and still get that credit, meaning that people with higher incomes might still qualify for that $2,000 tax credit per child. Okay. So there is another deduction that I think is it mostly only applies to wealthier earners. But I think we should talk about it which is the pass through income. Do you know anything about that.

Hannah McCarthy: No.

Christina Phillips: Okay.

Hannah McCarthy: Does that surprise you? I probably don't qualify for it.

Christina Phillips: Okay. So this is a way that self-employed people and small business owners could deduct up to 20% of their business income from their individual tax burden. I'm not going to try to explain it with any depth, because I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to simplify it into a paragraph or less, but I do just want to talk about who this is for.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. Is it for like, I'm thinking of my dearest, dearest friend who runs a single person photography business? It's just it's their business. Right. So, like, would they qualify for that?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So so this is really specifically for people who are self-employed or they have a business that is a partnership, a sole proprietorship, and I don't think he's even worth it to go like how this works. What I will say is this deduction in 2024 results in about $60 billion in savings in people's individual taxes. Okay, so put another way, $60 billion that used to go to the government stayed in people's pockets. But almost all of that went to people who made over $100,000. And the most savings went to people who made over $1 million.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: So this pass through deduction is mostly being used by people at the upper end of the tax bracket.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: This is one really good example of when you hear that the 2017 tax bill resulted in tax cuts that benefited the wealthiest Americans directly. This is one of the ones they're talking about. So those are some of the things that are supposed to expire. Republicans really want to keep them in. There is one other big thing that's not going to expire that happened in 2017 and that was the business tax cut.

Hannah McCarthy: We're talking like business versus individual. Yeah. Okay.

Christina Phillips: So businesses have to pay taxes right. The old business tax rate was 35%. Trump lowered it to 21%. That rate is not going anywhere.

Hannah McCarthy: That's a huge cut. Yes. I did not realize it was that significant. That's it's a massive difference.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah. And do you remember like when you hear business tax cuts. How is that sold. Do you remember how that was sold to people.

Hannah McCarthy: That it will it will support businesses essentially. Right. And that's a very American idea. It might be a political American idea, but it's it's in the water. It's talked about all the time. And often you hear about the small business owner or the entrepreneur who will benefit from this. And if those businesses are strong, then the American economy will be strong.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And a big part of that is that if those businesses have more income, they will put that income back into their businesses, they'll grow their businesses, they'll grow their wages that the worker will benefit from this growth. So did this happen?

Hannah McCarthy: You tell me.

Christina Phillips: No, the answer is no. The answer, Hannah, is it did not. So at one point, Trump had promised that these kinds of tax cuts would conservatively increase household wealth for most Americans, at least by $4,000 over the first few years.

Hannah McCarthy: I remember that.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, that was his conservative estimate.

Archive: Along with a lower business tax rate, would likely give the typical American household around a $4,000 pay raise. And that's money that will be spent in our economy.

Christina Phillips: There are multiple studies that looked at how salary and wages changed across workers, in companies that found that this did not happen.

Beverly Moran: And the thing is that people who have high wages, like really high wages, have enough power within their organizations to restructure how they're paid in order to take advantage of whatever is left remaining.

Hannah McCarthy: The people in charge of how much people get paid, paid themselves. Right?

Christina Phillips: Yeah, yeah.

Beverly Moran: Those corporate tax changes had a big effect on people who are in the top 10% of the income in the United States. Those are the people who own stocks. I mean, it's all this idea that, oh, if you have a pension, you own stocks, if you have a 401 K, you own stocks, but pension accounts and 401 S and 403 B's and all those pension, you know, retirement accounts are actually taxed differently Then the way that just an individual stop is taxed. So first of all, whatever happens within the account, the retirement account is not taxed at all. So all you're buying and selling is not taxed. But then when you pull the money out of the account, you are paying taxes as though you earned that money from wages. So you're paying at the highest rates for that money. But if you just an individual who has stocks, which is very few people, now, you're in a whole different situation because if you pull money out of that stock, in other words, if you sell it, your tax rate is remarkably low.

Hannah McCarthy: So, Christina, you were telling me about the reconciliation process, the fact that, you know, the numbers kind of have to work out when Congress passes one of these budget bills. How did Congress in 2017 justify all of these cuts?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So I have to say, even in 2017, many economists said that this bill overpromised on revenue and it under promised on how much it would help the average taxpayer. The thing is, though, you do have to factor in the fact that, like they are pricing this out for a decade and there's no way to account for things like the pandemic or other policies, but there were still things that they said we're going to do in order to make these tax cuts work. The first has to do with that mandate to have health insurance. Do you know what I'm talking about there?

Hannah McCarthy: I do know that when I pay my taxes now, I have to essentially certify that I have viable health insurance, right? Like, I have to prove that I have health insurance. And, you know, if you don't get health insurance through your company, you have to get it through through the marketplace, which can be complicated and expensive. But it's part of the tax process to prove that you have health insurance.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2014, created a way for people to purchase their own health insurance on the marketplace, like you said. And you could get a penalty if you didn't have some kind of health insurance for longer than a few months. And so that's where that process was introduced, where you have to prove you have health insurance. Well, in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminated the penalty. So the mandate is still there, but there is no penalty now. And so how does this save money? Well, this is what Beverly said.

Beverly Moran: So it used to be that if you didn't have employer provided insurance, you had to get your own insurance. And so you went into the marketplace. And in order to make sure that you were able to afford the insurance. There were all sorts of federal subsidies, so the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act got rid of the individual mandate and then counted that people would not go to the marketplace and therefore there would be less demand for federal subsidies.

Christina Phillips: So basically what happened was with the mandate, the federal government was like, if we're making you buy health insurance, we have to make sure that you can pay for it. And some people are not going to be able to afford it unless they get a subsidy from the government. So the government will subsidize you buying your health insurance because it's good overall for people to have health insurance. Now, if we zero out the mandate and there's no longer a penalty, then the expectation was that less people would apply for health insurance, which means that the government would be spending less money on subsidies.

Hannah McCarthy: Got it. Okay. Yeah. So because nothing happens to you if you do not abide by this mandate, which is so interesting. And as a rule follower, there's a point at which I just glitch and I can't like, well, I'm going to do it anyway. I have to. They told me to. Um, okay. Got it. So really, I mean, it's, it's they're banking on the fact that tons of people are just going to say like, well, nothing's going to happen to me, so. No.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And and specifically it's a certain demographic of people. So even with the subsidies, when that mandate still had a penalty, the vast majority of people who paid the penalty were making under $75,000 a year.

Beverly Moran: The theory was, and it turned out to be true, that if you take away the penalty, the poorer you are, the more every penny counts, right? So even though it might have been nice to have insurance, if you're saying, okay for the year, I'm going to have to put in $500 for insurance or $500 for groceries. I'm not going to get the insurance. So the number of people who are covered by health insurance dropped when the individual mandate was taken away, and those people who dropped out no longer were eligible for federal subsidies to buy insurance because they weren't buying insurance. So the federal government saved money because people were no longer buying insurance. Right. And the Republican Congress used that as a way to meet the the deficit targets for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Hannah McCarthy: So they took a gamble and it paid out.

Christina Phillips: No. So it didn't really work. So initially it did. In the first couple of years, the number of people who enrolled in the marketplace dropped, which did save the government some money in subsidies. But then the pandemic hit and the Biden administration started offering even more subsidies. And on top of that, you know, people really want insurance because there's a pandemic and more people lost their jobs, so they're going for insurance on the marketplace. So in short, the marketplace enrollment went way up. But these subsidies are set to expire at the end of this year. I think this is a really good example of how you can the budget in some ways is a little futile, because you have to demonstrate how you're going to affect the budget over the next ten years, but there's no possible way to account for things like a pandemic. But also it's hard to account for what the next president might do or policymakers might do. I want to talk about another way that they tried to sell this, that another part of the reconciliation. And this is the salt cap. Do you know anything about the salt cap?

Hannah McCarthy: No.

Christina Phillips: Okay. So this stands for state and local taxes cap, which it basically limits how much of your local tax burden you can deduct from your federal tax burden to $10,000. So before this, there wasn't really a limit on how much state taxes you could deduct from federal taxes, which meant that there was a lot of lost tax revenue on the federal level from people who lived in states with high state and local taxes. Essentially, if if you paid like $25,000 in state taxes, you could then say, well, I'm taking that off my tax burden on the federal level because I'm paying these state taxes and I'm not going to, again, on top of that, pay the federal taxes. So they set the cap at $10,000 in an attempt to sort of recapture that money that people might normally deduct. And 91% of the people affected by this cap made over $100,000. And it disproportionately impacted people in high tax states. So the top ones are California, New York, new Jersey, Illinois, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Now, what I think is interesting about this is looking ahead to this current budget proposal. There's a lot of different ideas about what to do with this salt cap, because a lot of high income earners in these high tax states do not like it, because it does limit how much they can take off their federal taxes. Right. And so there have been proposals like, okay, so maybe we lift the cap, we eliminate the cap, or maybe we lift the cap. So maybe now it's a $50,000 cap. The main takeaway was this is one way to recapture lost revenue that was most affecting people who were making over $100,000 in these high tax states. This blew my mind a little bit. Hannah, this is my favorite one. It has to do with tax brackets.

Hannah McCarthy: I always think I know something about tax brackets, and then I'll say it really confidently to someone who actually understands them and they're like, no dummy.

Christina Phillips: Okay, so tax brackets is basically like basically the IRS sets a bracket. And if your income is between this and this, you pay that rate of tax. Right. And one of the ways that they adjust those tax brackets over time is by adjusting for inflation. Right. So costs are going up. But then also wages are going up. So you have to raise the brackets in order to continue to adjust for how people's wages are going up. So in 2002, a single person who had $6,000 or less in income got a 10% tax rate. In 2024, if you had $11,600 or less in income, you had that 10% tax rate. So that's adjusting for inflation that that tax bracket got higher and higher. Well, the inflation adjustment, which also is sometimes called a cost of living adjustment, that also applies to some of the credits people get, in particular the earned income tax credit, which is a tax credit that is specifically targeted at people who have some income but not very much income. Okay. Especially like working families. So that's a credit that will go up a lot if you have kids, if you are a single earner, if you're a couple and you've got children, but you're earning some income, but you're not earning very much income. So that incentive rate is also adjusted based on inflation. What if, in order to collect more taxes to compensate for the tax cuts, you change the inflation formula. So inflation seems to go up more slowly, meaning the IRS cost of living adjustment goes up more slowly, meaning more people's incomes are getting taxed at a higher rate proportionally over time, and more people are being priced out of credits like the Earned Income Tax credit.

Hannah McCarthy: It's so interesting, right? Like here I am just breezing along, thinking that the calculation that determines the rate of inflation is like a mathematical formula. That's absolute or something, right? Like this is what inflation is. This is how you determine inflation. But they're just saying like we're going to change what formula is the inflation rate. Right.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. When it comes specifically to the IRS.

Beverly Moran: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act changed how inflation adjustments were made. And they changed it so that they could show that they were bringing in revenues. Right. So now how are they bringing in revenues? Because they went from one calculation that would peg inflation, you know, at this level. And they changed it to a different calculation that would peg inflation at this level, so that the inflation adjustments would go up more slowly, right. But that means that people who are right on the edge. Right. For things like the earned income tax credit, they could get inflation out of those credits.

Christina Phillips: There are different ways to calculate inflation. They were using one system and they changed to a different system.

Hannah McCarthy: In order to tax people at a higher rate.

Christina Phillips: So the effect is that the tax brackets are being adjusted more slowly over time. This does not change prices. Right. It doesn't change how much things cost. And it doesn't necessarily change how much you get paid to pay for those things. The old way that the IRS measured inflation was based on what's called the CPI You the consumer price index for all urban workers. So for what it's worth, most public and private organizations use this to calculate inflation and do inflation adjustments. That's across the government on many, many businesses use the CPI You the one.

Beverly Moran: The original one was based on a basket of goods. So like they would always check on orange juice they would always check on eggs.

Hannah McCarthy: Can't do that anymore. I tell you that much. Yeah.

Christina Phillips: So this basket of goods is more like thousands of goods. But the whole point is that you're tracking how much the price changes on a set of things that an average consumer is buying over time. So in 2018, as a result of the 2017 tax bill, the IRS began using a different rule to measure inflation. And this was called the chained CPI. So the chained consumer price Index, which to me sounds like blockchain. It sounds like crypto.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Beverly Moran: It's based on the idea that if prices go up, you'll switch. So eggs are expensive. You'll buy tuna fish instead. Or orange juice is expensive. You'll buy apple juice instead.

Hannah McCarthy: I don't think that works. Like, I think you need a human behavioral analyst to come in and say, like, based on all this data, and maybe they are basing it on data that in actual fact, when people can't buy eggs, they buy tuna fish. But the idea that you can say like this is the swap. Good, right? This is the good you're going to buy instead. And if you can't get that, you'll get this instead. How on earth are you able to say like, this is the good you're going to swap out another good for? Like, sometimes if I'm at the store and I see that something's really expensive, I go and buy a frozen pizza instead. You know, like instead of buying a bunch of ingredients for salad, you know? So it's like, it's gonna be different for a woman in her 30s with no children. Then it's gonna be for any number of other people, right?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So so what you're pointing to is one of the major critiques of this chained CPI, which is that it does assume a certain level of flexibility. Now, many people who like this formula, there are a lot of economists who say that this is actually a better way to adjust inflation, and that the CPI is like over exaggerating inflation, and that this is actually more of a moderated approach, because they argue that the old formula doesn't account for the fact that people will change up their basket of goods if the prices of certain things go up. But to your point, what Beverly says is that it's more complicated and inequitable to think of it that way.

Hannah McCarthy: You know, it's like that line from sex and the city where Carrie is like, some nights instead of dinner, I would buy myself a Cosmo. I felt it fed me more. There are people who will, like, pivot to a luxury item when they're frustrated that they can't get the simple item right.

Christina Phillips: Girl. Dinner versus Cosmo? Yeah. Okay, so here's what Beverly said.

Beverly Moran: Well, the poorer you are, the less likely it's going to be that you could make those sort of choices, because core people live in supermarket desert where they can't just say, oh, I'm not going to have eggs today. I'm going to get this other thing.

Hannah McCarthy: It's a far more equitable way of putting it than my reference to sex in the city and my frozen pizza.

Christina Phillips: So I am not an economist, and I am not able to say, like I have my feelings about chained CPI just like you, that that was one of my first questions as well, is like, I don't understand how you would calculate those things, but it does seem like it's less likely that people can make substitutions like this in certain places and with certain situations. So maybe that means that inflation feels different for different people. And this is going to raise the inflation rate as far as these tax brackets more slowly, when people might be feeling the pain of inflation more deeply in certain situations. I do think like if we're going to think about, okay, so what have politicians said about chained CPI before in the Obama administration? There was this idea that maybe chained CPI would be a good way to calculate Social Security payments. So this was something that was floated. Was that like we're using the CPI for Social Security payments and like thresholds for those payments. Maybe we switch to chained CPI instead because it will make those adjustments slower. They'll be putting less money out in Social Security over time. So people who wanted to switch to chained CPI for Social Security estimated that it would save the government over $300 billion back then. But if you think about what that savings looks like, it's savings because Social Security checks get proportionately smaller over time. And so even though this calculation doesn't apply to things like Social Security. When you apply it to tax brackets, the price of things keeps going up. The inflation calculators don't change the price of things, but the change is that the rate at which the government adjusts for those rising prices and rising wages.

Beverly Moran: So just the people who are really going to be hit by the highest inflation because they can't dip and dodge, right, are the people who are then going to get hurt on their eligibility for the earned income tax credit, which might help them buy the food that's in the basket, that's going higher and higher in price. And it was changed deliberately to make the Trump tax cuts hit the goals that they had to hit in order to make it legal to make that change. Right. Because of that, the reconciliation process and all of this, that you have to show that within ten years you have to show what the effect will be on the budget and you can't have that effect be too high.

Christina Phillips: So those were some ways that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was reconciled.

Hannah McCarthy: Okay.

Christina Phillips: And with that, we are going to take a quick break. Listeners, if you support this work, which is always free to get but not free to make, consider becoming a sustaining member by donating at Civics101podcast.org. And while you're there, you'll find our entire back catalog. We've got over 300 episodes with transcripts and teaching materials. You can find all of that on our website.

Hannah McCarthy: I believe it's tax deductible. That donation.

Christina Phillips: I think you're right. I think it is a tax deductible donation.

Hannah McCarthy: It's got to be we're a nonprofit, right?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. No, it totally is. Yeah. You can deduct it from your taxes, folks. We're back. This is Civics 101, and today we're talking about the wheeling and dealing of tax policy. So now I want to talk about the new bill. So essentially, Republicans in Congress are pushing, for the most part, to extend all of those expiring tax cuts that we talked about that were enacted in 2017, which would lead to an even greater deficit. And Trump also wants to introduce a couple of new tax cuts. Do you know what some of those are?

Hannah McCarthy: I did like a month ago. That's fair. I don't remember now.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So he doesn't want to tax Social Security. And he also wants to eliminate taxes on tips and overtime. So all of these things will cost money, right? Congress has said that it will allow $4.5 trillion in lost revenue over the next almost ten years to 2034. So they're saying we're allowing ourselves to make $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts that will cut into revenue in order to pay for that. One of the solutions in the reconciliation is to reduce mandatory spending by $2 trillion.

Hannah McCarthy: What's mandatory spending versus another kind of spending.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. So mandatory spending is spending that's automatically allocated every year by law. So no matter what this amount of money needs to go to these things. And then there's discretionary spending, which is where most of the like usual every year, political haggling over where money is going happens because Congress designates that money through appropriations. So mandatory spending is more secure and stable. Source of funding. In 2023, it was at least $3.8 trillion. So a $2 trillion dollar cut to mandatory spending is like more than half right now. Do you know where most of that mandatory spending goes?

Hannah McCarthy: That's what I was just going to ask you.

Christina Phillips: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, economic assistance, veteran benefits and defense. Okay. So here's what's interesting. Republicans in Congress and the president have all promised that cuts to mandatory spending won't touch things like Medicare or Social Security. That's what they've said. And some have even said it won't cut into Medicaid and it won't touch veterans benefits, because these are all extremely popular across the political spectrum. But many policy experts say that it is virtually impossible to cut that much funding without touching these programs. And also these are programs that many people have been paying taxes on for years with the expectation that we will get to use them, right. So we have been paying into Social Security. If we've had jobs, if we've been working and paying our income taxes and payroll taxes, we've been paying into Social Security, unemployment, Medicaid, Medicare for years sometimes. And the idea is that, okay, I've been paying for this so that I can use it when I need to. So that's why it is so unpopular to try to cut that. But the call to cut that much mandatory spending is going to be really difficult without making some of these cuts.

Christina Phillips: So in the House proposal, there was a line in there that says if they don't meet the $2 trillion tax cuts, they'll lower the revenue loss proportionally. So like if we don't hit 2 trillion, we've got to like make it up in the 4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts. But that does kind of open the door up for which things they'll give up in order to make that proportional cut. Right. So that's what we should be paying attention to over the next couple of months. House speaker Mike Johnson has said that he really wants to get this budget through and on the president's desk by summer. This is what people are talking about. Now, how do we reconcile these things? And the Senate has said that they would like to pass two separate bills, right. So they want to do spending first and then do tax cuts later. And the House is like, we want to lump it all into one, and they need to somehow meet in the middle. And Johnson really wants to get that done as soon as possible. So that's what's being haggled over right now.

Hannah McCarthy: When it comes to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Somebody who is budgeting very closely around their Social Security check if the numbers on that check change. I mean, for someone who is truly dependent on those checks to make ends meet every month, that's going to instantly change the calculations they have to make and how viable their living choices are.

Christina Phillips: Right. And that's, you know, another reason why, when we go back to that inflation calculator, when there was the idea of maybe changing how inflation adjustments affect how much you get in Social Security in order to save the government a lot of money. It was extremely unpopular because so many people who rely on that Social Security money are really living on that margin, like that Social Security money. If that changes, it's going to cause a lot of recalculations. And it might be the difference between whether or not they can afford housing or food or a lot of other really essential things. It's not about how much they have in savings. It becomes really like the everyday costs that you have to think about are going to change pretty quickly. So I did at one point ask Beverly, I'm like, you study tax policy and you've studied tax policies in different countries. Like what do you think is the like simplest solution to fund these programs that people rely on in a way that feels fair? So, you know, I am paying into my government because I know my government will take care of me. Like, how could that be done in a way that doesn't feel like these programs are at risk, and it feels like you're kind of like putting in and then getting back. And this is what she said.

Beverly Moran: The real fact of the matter is, if they got rid of itemized deductions and kept the high standard deduction, almost all of the pain would go to high income people. People under 50% would see like no difference. And almost all the pain would be in the people in the top 10%. You know, who could afford it. So why aren't they doing that? Because that's not really what they're trying to do, but they're just trying to do is sort of bargain back and forth to see how much they can give to the wealthy and take from the poor to cover.

Christina Phillips: I then was like, okay, so how long have we had the standard deduction? Which is like it seems like a very obvious question that I just never thought about. So I went back and looked so itemized. Deductions have been around since 1913 when the federal income tax was established, but only the top 10% of people even paid income taxes back then. It was like a very limited wealth tax, but we already were building incentives to lower your tax burden in from the very beginning. Right? So if we're going to charge you taxes, we're going to give you ways that like if you invest it in this way, then you can lower your tax burden. The standard deduction was introduced in 1944 when the income tax became a mass tax, meaning that it expanded to basically all working Americans because the idea of introducing this tax for all people, and then all of those people then trying to itemize like it just is absolute chaos.

Hannah McCarthy: They don't have business offices, right?

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And over time, what's happened is the tax code has added more itemized deduction possibilities like this is a thing that happens. It's like you find another thing that you want to itemize, another thing you want to incentivize people to do. And so there are more and more itemized deductions being added over time. But that standard deduction is what most people take.

Hannah McCarthy: I will also like just to reiterate, when I have personally been like, let me mess around with the itemized, it mostly doesn't benefit me because most of the options on there just do not apply to me at all. It's like it's a $0 change if I do the itemized deduction, so it's pointless. For me.

Christina Phillips: The very pessimistic idea of the American dream is that you have enough wealth that your itemized deduction is higher than your standard deduction. Like yeah, that's basically it. Right.

Hannah McCarthy: So clinical.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. It's not that you can just pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It's that you make enough money in creative enough ways that your itemized deductions are bigger than your standard deduction. I think where we are today is that a lot of the itemized deductions are more beneficial to people with more money to play around with.

Hannah McCarthy: Because they're doing more things with that money.

Christina Phillips: Exactly.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah.

Beverly Moran: The Trump tax cuts blew up the deficit, right. Just like the George Bush tax cuts blew up the deficit, just like the Reagan tax cuts blew up the deficit. Right. So if they want to keep from making it worse, they have to get revenue from somewhere, getting revenue from single mothers. There's there's not like really a constituent group. Single mothers. Right. But there's a constituent group, high income individuals. Absolutely.

Christina Phillips: So this gets to another thing that might come up in this reconciliation process, and that is phasing out certain tax benefits. One of the ones that I have seen talked about was removing the head of household filing status, which is a higher standard deduction because it's meant for someone bringing in the majority of the income for a household in which there are other people living there, and you're supporting them under certain specifications.

Beverly Moran: That's very anti-female, because virtually everybody who files as head of household is a female.

Christina Phillips: The latest estimate I could find from the 2007 census was that over 75% of people who filed as head of household are women, and 75%. Yeah.

Hannah McCarthy: Yeah. All right.

Christina Phillips: And there was even more recent Tax Policy Center data that said that most people who get a higher deduction this way make under $100,000. There were other ideas that I've seen floated by politicians, including getting rid of deductions for interest paid on student loans, eliminating the tax exempt status for healthcare organizations like nonprofit hospitals, charging taxes on scholarships and green vehicles, and removing credits for using renewable energy like battery powered vehicles. So these are ways that some of these deductions that some of us may actually use could go away. Right. Like you think about somebody who's going to get it not going to have to pay taxes on paying back student loans. It's probably somebody who wasn't able to pay back their student loans in a lump sum, like you and me. And we're just over here paying and chipping away little by little every single year. Right. And like.

Hannah McCarthy: Moving one grain of sand from the pile to the other pile.

Christina Phillips: I think that's like when I was doing my deduction, I tried to do the itemized again this year and it was like, so how much did you pay in student loan interest? And I was like, no, you're going to make me look.

Hannah McCarthy: I know.

Christina Phillips: I don't want to see this.

Hannah McCarthy: And it's in a compartment under a bed in my brain.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. And it's like I put the number in and then it's like, nah, that's not enough.

Hannah McCarthy: That doesn't exactly. That's the that's what I kept running up against. I was like, why don't bother hon. Yeah. Just go back to the standard.

Christina Phillips: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually going to do you a lot more than what you think you're doing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So here's what I want to leave us. If you're trying to prepare your taxes and you feel underwater, we've had several people on TikTok, which, by the way, we are on TikTok now and I love talking to people and comments. People and comments are amazing. There. There were people who said, hey, there are free resources at the state level that can help you file your taxes and help answer your questions for free, especially if you're somebody who's lower income. Or maybe you're over the age of 65, you have limited access to technology. Maybe you're a new American. Maybe you need some assistance in a different language. These are volunteer and nonprofit organizations that help people file their taxes. And my advice is to open up a search browser, if you can, and look up the term volunteer income tax assistance and then type the name of your state. I did that for New Hampshire, and a couple of the top results sent me directly to nonprofits that have information about who you can call and where you can go to get help, specifically on your state income taxes sometimes, but also just generally federal and state income taxes. If you don't have a computer or access to the internet, I recommend walking into your local library and saying, I'm trying to find this because librarians are great at research, and they also probably know a lot of this stuff already because they're always thinking about the community. So walk into your library and be like, I would like help finding free tax resources, maybe nearby. And they will, I'm sure be delighted to help you. So that's where we are.

Hannah McCarthy: I love that it also reminds me, Christina, I believe this was in your last tax episode, right? Where you were like, you don't have to pay to file your taxes. There is a free way to file your taxes and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There's a free way. And this is just an extension of that. It's like, and even if the software people pay for it makes it seem easier. There's another way to do that for free. Yes, I love that. That's great.

Christina Phillips: Yeah, the free file stuff, by the way. Go to irs.gov and click on the Explore Free File options. It's right there. And this is software that they've contracted with the government, and they've promised to make it accessible to people who should file for free, which is anyone who made under $84,000 a year and has a relatively simple tax return. So there you go.

Hannah McCarthy: There you go.

Christina Phillips: Civics 101 facts.

Hannah McCarthy: This was fascinating.

Christina Phillips: Oh, good. I'm so glad.

Hannah McCarthy: This was vaccinating.

Christina Phillips: Well thank you Hannah. This episode was written by me, Christina Phillips, with help from Hannah McCarthy and edited by Rebecca Lavoie. Our team includes host Nick Capodice and producer Marina Henke. Music. In this episode by Epidemic Sound and Chris Zabriskie, Civics 101 is a production of NPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

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