What Would Bartlet Do?

They want to block-grant Medicaid. Hand it to the states with a fixed amount and call it flexibility.

What about it?

It doesn't.

It doesn't.

It doesn't do that either.

It makes for a good rally line.

Can I say something? The politics of this aren't what they were ten years ago. Polling on clean energy is through the roof — in red districts. You know where the solar jobs are? Georgia. Texas. North Carolina. These aren't blue-state vanity projects. The IRA money is flowing into places that voted sixty-forty against us, and their mayors are lining up for it. The politics caught up to the science. We just need to stop letting the other side frame this as environmentalists versus workers, because it hasn't been that fight for years.

I just got off the phone with three county election directors in Georgia, two in Arizona, and one in Michigan who's crying. Actually crying. These are career civil servants — Republicans, most of them — who ran clean elections and are now getting death threats because a man with a microphone told his followers the count was rigged. One of them told me she carries a gun to work now. An election administrator. In America. I want to be very clear about what's happened here: we haven't just undermined an election result. We've made it dangerous to count the votes. And when you make it dangerous to count the votes, eventually people stop volunteering to count them. And then you don't have elections anymore. You have appointments.

I'm not done. You know what the other side figured out? That you don't have to steal an election if you can make people believe elections can't be trusted. It's cheaper. It's legal. And it works. You flood the zone with doubt, you pass laws that let state legislatures override certification, you put loyalists in secretary of state offices — and you never have to stuff a single ballot box. You just break the system from the inside and call it reform.

I've been on the phone with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I want to flag something that isn't getting enough attention. It's not just NATO. We're simultaneously picking fights with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Canada. These aren't adversaries — they're the countries that buy our debt, host our bases, and share intelligence that keeps Americans alive. You know what happens when you tell Japan and South Korea they're on their own? They start building nuclear arsenals. You know what happens when you tell Canada and the EU we might slap tariffs on them? They sign trade deals with China instead. We're not pulling back from the world — we're pushing the world toward the people we're supposed to be competing with.

Privately? Panic. There are Republican senators who served in the military, who chair defense subcommittees, who know exactly what NATO does — and they won't say it publicly because they're afraid of a primary. I talked to one yesterday who told me, off the record, that withdrawing from NATO would be the greatest strategic gift to Russia since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And then he went on television and said the president was right to demand a better deal. That's where we are. People who know better are pretending they don't.

I'm busy.

It doesn't. It qualifies as tax policy that benefits the donor class wrapped in rhetoric that benefits the campaign. Those are two different things, and the genius — and I use that word with full bitterness — is convincing people they're the same thing.

The top one percent got an average tax cut of fifty thousand dollars a year. A family making sixty thousand got about nine hundred dollars — which phases out. The corporate rate went from thirty-five to twenty-one percent. Corporations used the savings primarily for stock buybacks, which enrich shareholders. The factory workers waiting for raises? The vast majority are still waiting.

The same people who spent eight years saying the deficit was an existential threat added trillions to it in a single bill. And when someone points that out, they say the cuts will pay for themselves through growth. They said that in 1981. They said it in 2001. They said it in 2017. It has never once been true. Not once. The CBO has scored it every time and every time the math doesn't work. But the promise is more fun than the math, so the promise wins.

They love to cite Adam Smith. They've apparently only read the first chapter. Because Adam Smith — the father of free-market capitalism — also wrote that the subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government in proportion to their respective abilities, and that it is not unreasonable for the rich to contribute more than in proportion to their revenue. That's progressive taxation, Donna. Adam Smith invented the argument for progressive taxation, and the people who wave him around like a flag have never bothered to finish the book.

You're going to regardless.

Nine hundred dollars for a teacher. Fifty thousand for a hedge fund manager. And then you sunset the individual cuts but make the corporate cuts permanent. So in ten years, the teacher's cut disappears and the hedge fund keeps its rate. That's not modernization, Ainsley. That's a tell.

Please.

That's exactly right. And that's exactly why tax cuts for the top aren't populism. They're the opposite of populism dressed up in a baseball cap. FDR said the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, but whether we provide enough for those who have too little. That was 1937. We're still failing the test. Real populism would be: we're going to make insulin affordable, we're going to fund public schools so your kid doesn't need to go private, we're going to make sure the tax code asks more from the people who have the most. That's what fighting for working people actually looks like. It's just harder to fit on a hat.

Tariffs are a tax. That's not an opinion. It's definitional. A tariff is a tax paid by the importer, which means it's paid by American companies, which means it's paid by American consumers. When you put a twenty-five percent tariff on steel, the price of every car, every appliance, every construction project in America goes up. The factory that was supposed to benefit from cheaper domestic steel now pays more for it, and the factory down the road that uses imported components just got a cost increase it can't absorb.

I agree. Targeted enforcement is real policy. But blanketing allies and adversaries alike with tariffs — Canada, the EU, Japan — and calling it "America First" isn't enforcement. It's a sledgehammer where you need a scalpel. And the retaliatory tariffs hit American farmers, American manufacturers, American exporters. We had to bail out farmers with billions in emergency subsidies because the trade war cratered their export markets. That's not winning. That's breaking something and then paying to fix it.

Sorry — I've been tracking the voting bills. Can I give you the landscape? Fourteen states have passed new restrictions since the last election cycle. Fourteen. And these aren't fringe legislatures — these are states that decide presidential elections. Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin. They're shortening early voting windows, they're purging voter rolls more aggressively, and in some cases they're giving partisan poll watchers the authority to challenge voters at the precinct level. Do you understand what that means in practice? It means someone with a clipboard and an agenda can stand in a polling place in Detroit or Atlanta or Milwaukee and slow the line to a crawl. You don't have to turn anyone away. You just have to make it take four hours to vote. And the people who can't afford to wait four hours — the people working two jobs, the people who can't get childcare — they go home. That's not a bug. That's the feature.

We're short. We've got forty-eight in the Senate, maybe forty-nine if Manchin — and I use the word "if" advisedly. The filibuster kills it unless we can get sixty, and we can't get sixty because there are Republican senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — unanimously, by the way, ninety-eight to zero — who now won't touch it. The same law. The same principle. Different political climate. That's what we're dealing with. The courage evaporated.

Can I talk about the politics of this for a second? Because the politics are actually worse than the policy. The voucher coalition isn't one thing — it's three things held together with duct tape. You've got libertarians who want to dismantle public institutions on principle. You've got religious conservatives who want taxpayer money for religious schools. And you've got suburban parents who've been told their public schools are failing — when in fact their public schools are fine, but they've been scared into thinking otherwise by a decade of "schools are broken" rhetoric funded by people who have a financial interest in the alternative. The coalition works because each group thinks they're getting what they want. But there are only so many dollars. And when the voucher pot runs dry, the religious schools and the suburban parents are going to turn on each other, and the libertarians won't care because the building's already on fire. That's the coalition. It's not an education plan. It's a demolition plan with three different contractors who haven't read each other's blueprints.

Here's what I want to know. Where's the outrage from the religious communities that aren't Christian? Where are we on outreach to Jewish organizations, Muslim organizations, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist groups? Because the "prayer in schools" caucus assumes it's their prayer. It's always their prayer. And the moment a school in Dearborn, Michigan wants to lead an Islamic prayer before homeroom, these same people will discover the Establishment Clause faster than you can say "strict constructionism." We should be making that argument. Not as a gotcha — as a principle. The First Amendment either protects everyone's faith or it protects no one's.

Fifty years. Fifty years of settled law. The Court didn't discover a new constitutional principle. They didn't respond to new evidence. They reversed a half-century of precedent because the political composition of the bench changed. That's not jurisprudence. That's a hostile takeover.

The messaging is: the government just told a hundred and sixty-seven million women that the state has more authority over their bodies than they do. That a rape victim in a state with a total ban must carry her rapist's child to term or become a criminal. That a woman having a miscarriage may have to prove to a prosecutor that it wasn't intentional before she can receive medical care. That doctors are now practicing law instead of medicine, consulting attorneys before treating patients, because the penalty for making the wrong call is prison.

Go ahead.

Here's what I need people to understand about the Religious Right. Every major religion has extremists. Islam has extremists. Judaism has extremists. Christianity has extremists. And when we talk about Islamic extremism, we're very careful — or we should be — to distinguish between the faith of a billion people and the ideology of a violent fringe. The KKK burned crosses. They quoted scripture. They said they were doing God's work. Nobody in their right mind would say the KKK represents Christianity. So why do we let a political movement that wants to impose its specific interpretation of one faith on a pluralistic democracy call itself "the Christian Right"? They're not the Christian Right. They're the theocratic right. And there's a difference.

I get mail for everything. The point stands. The evangelical political movement — not evangelical faith, the political movement — has spent fifty years building a parallel infrastructure. Think tanks, legal organizations, judicial pipelines, media networks. They didn't just overturn Roe. They built the machinery to overturn it. They recruited judges, funded campaigns, created voter guides, built the Federalist Society into the most powerful force in judicial selection. This wasn't divine intervention. This was a political operation. And treating it as anything else means you don't understand what you're fighting.

Mr. President —

Kant — and I'm going back to Kant because he was right — said that the only truly moral act is one chosen freely. Morality under compulsion isn't morality. It's obedience. If you force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, you haven't made a moral choice. She hasn't made a moral choice. Nobody has made a moral choice. You've just used the power of the state to remove choice altogether. And Kant would say that's the opposite of moral.

Can I talk about what's happening right now? Not the border — the interior. ICE is conducting raids in American cities. They're going to courthouses and arresting people who showed up for their hearings. Think about that. People who are following the legal process, who have lawyers, who were told "show up on this date" — and when they show up, they get detained. They're going to schools. Parents are too afraid to drop their kids off. Domestic violence victims aren't calling the police because they're afraid the police will call ICE. Hospitals are seeing drops in emergency room visits in immigrant communities because people would rather be sick at home than detained at the hospital. We have created a system where following the law gets you arrested and seeking help gets you deported.

I worked in the White House. I know what the chain of command looks like for deploying federal agents to American cities. Someone signed off on this. Someone in a suit, in an office, with a law degree, authorized unidentified federal officers to detain American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. And do you know what the legal basis was? A statute about protecting federal property. They stretched a graffiti statute into a justification for snatching people off the street. This is what it looks like. Everyone always asks what they would have done in the thirties. This is what it looks like. It doesn't come with a soundtrack. It comes with a legal memo.

So what do we do? We're not in the building anymore. We don't have the levers.

I want to talk about Congress because that's where the system completely broke down. Article One, Section Eight. Congress has the power to declare war. That's not ambiguous. That's not a suggestion. The Founders were explicit about this because they'd watched the King of England send men to die on his personal authority, and they said: never again. Not here. The people's representatives decide when we go to war. And what happened? The president ordered strikes. Troops deployed. People started dying. And Congress found out from CNN. The War Powers Resolution says you have forty-eight hours to notify Congress after introducing forces into hostilities. They filed the notification late. Late. And when Congress tried to invoke the War Powers Act to force a withdrawal vote, the Senate couldn't get past a filibuster. So we are in a war that Congress never authorized, that the public was never consulted on, and that can't be stopped because sixty votes is an impossible bar. The constitutional framework for going to war is dead. And nobody held a funeral.

Here's what I keep coming back to. Iran was ten years away from a nuclear weapon. The deal pushed that to fifteen, twenty years — with inspections. We had time. We had leverage. We had the international community united behind a framework that was working. And we blew it up because someone wanted a photo op. And now we're in a shooting war with a country that's ten times the size of Iraq, with three times the population, with a military that's been preparing for this fight for forty years, in terrain that makes Afghanistan look like a parking lot. Iraq cost us a trillion dollars and four thousand American lives and we're still dealing with the aftermath twenty years later. Iran will be worse. Everyone who knows anything about this region will tell you it will be worse. And the people making the decisions either don't know that or don't care.