 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly dose of Libertarian Insight into the decidedly non-libertarian world we all live in. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nik Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mengie Ward. Happy Hanukkah, everyone. Howdy. Happy Monday. Hey, Matt. So, President Joseph Robinette Biden II on Friday signed a stop-gup. Stop-gup? Wow. The hell. A Steffi Graf government funding bill designed to give congressional negotiators until this Friday, December 23 to wrap up work on a reported $1.7 trillion Cromnabas package that would keep the federal bureaucracy and business until we do the same exact stupid exercise next year. Lawmakers report that they are just hammering out the final details of the so-called must-pass mega-bill, saying in statement last week that they had, quote, reached a bipartisan bicameral framework that should allow us to finish an omnibus appropriations bill that can pass the House and Senate and be signed into law by the capital P president. In completely related news, the Treasury Department last week announced that the federal government just for the month of November ran a record-shattering $249 billion deficit, spending a half a trillion dollars while taking in just one quarter. For context, that $249 billion one-month deficit number is more than the amount that the governments of all but 20 other countries in the world spend every year. One of the main drivers of debt is borrowing costs, which are up a staggering $53 billion over November 2021. Turns out when the government borrows and redistributes vast amounts of money, this can lead to inflation, which can lead to higher interest rates, which makes borrowing more expensive just at the moment when your debts have ballooned because you've just borrowed and redistributed vast amounts of money. This economic insight brought to you by any third-grader who can count. Catherine, I was at a menorah lighting event last night in New York City at which Congressman Richie Torres, a Democrat, said normally Congress doesn't really do much, but this week I actually have to go back and vote on the annual spending bill. What's wrong with this picture? Congress could consider doing stuff all year. I feel like this is a bold proposal that would both improve governance and improve my fucking mood. I don't know. I'm so mad right now. I don't know why I'm taking it personally and I will be examining that later, but this is absurd. It's absurd. They knew all year they needed to do a spending bill. They know. It's not like a big surprise that creeps up on them and yet every year they behave like college students who have not yet learned this lesson the hard way and I don't know. I appreciate that. I have colleagues who are similarly outraged, especially Jacob Sallam. I wish I felt as strongly about almost anything as Jacob Sallam feels about how badly Chuck Schumer has screwed up marijuana banking, which will now be shoveled into this bill just as one example. Peter, 10 years ago you were one of a chorus back then of voices singing about the Concredital ... What's wrong, my guy? Wow. Wow. It's bad. It's a stopgap. Can we get him into a stroke center immediately? All budget office's long-term fiscal outlook, which back then was busy freaking out people using words like unsustainable and really super-duper unsustainable. Now that the future that it was always warning about is the present, is there anyone besides you who talked about this anymore? There's Eric Bame and the committee for a responsible federal budget. Sure. That's the happy hour. I want to be invited too. Yeah. I mean, reading the coverage of this, it's amazing. When I started reading news this morning at 7.30 in the morning, all the reports were still like, well, we don't know what's in it. They had a framework, but they didn't have any details or any information on what was really going to be in this bill. Even by like 9.30 or 10, there was a bunch of stuff, and it's just amazing. The sheer kind of bonkers number of different things in this bill. So like, Boeing Jet Safety Protocols, maybe some big deal corporate tax changes with regards to expensing research and development costs, maybe an extension of the child tax credit that was included in that giant spending bill that the Democrats and Joe Biden did right when Joe Biden came into office and then expired last year. And maybe they're going to unexpire it, even though it was supposed to be temporary, although at the time, admittedly, there were a bunch of Democrats saying, we're passing this on a temporary basis with the intention of making it permanent. But then it wasn't, so who the hell knows, state conservation funding. So like for all the endangered species, that's in this, maybe, again, we don't know for certain. Also election reform, like all the election reform stuff that is supposed to prevent the confusion and some of the lack of clarity about what happened on January 6th of, you know, like that's maybe going to be in this. And it's just like, you know, everybody knows that old saying, government is just the word for things we choose to do together. I think we need to update it to like government is just the word for a single multi-trillion dollars spending and everything else, Bill, that gets written in past without anybody reading it in the space of a single week at the end of every year. Or it's the things we choose to do to each other because we hate each other. Speaking of hate, let's go to Nick. This is a bill filled with love, man. There's not a lot of hate. I want to extend Peter's conversation, but before that, Nick, since you've written a number of great pieces over the history of Reason Magazine and everything else about the size of government spending and whatnot, this looks like right now we're on track for a deficit of this fiscal year of $1.9 trillion, which would be more than the $1.4 trillion of last year, the largest non-pandemic deficit in history. The Cromnebus is expected to add between $240 billion to $585 billion on top of that and maybe, you know... That range just tells you how clear we are about what's in this thing, right? It's like maybe it's going to add a whole lot to the deficit or maybe it's going to add a whole lot more than a whole lot to the deficit. It's not sleep on the $5 trillion sort of give or take over the next 10 years. So Nick, was Joe Biden telling the truth as he was campaigning before the midterms or was he telling the whole truth that when he was bragging on how he's reduced the deficit? You know, I mean, this is... It's always time for a Seinfeld quote, but this one is better than most, which is, as George Costanz once counseled Jerry, it's not a lie if you believe it. And that sums up the entire budgeting process. There's a Republican version of this, which we won't be seeing for some time because they're idiots, but the Democratic version is now we are reducing the deficit. And then they'll come up with some explanation for why, despite increasing deficit numbers, it is in fact declining. For me, the big takeaway and as somebody who's been writing about budget stuff for like 20 plus years at this point is that we're not even talking about what this bill or discretionary spending stuff that Congress votes on every year takes up 30% of federal spending. So there is 70% of what the government is actually spending. Most of that is so-called mandatory spending. Some of it is interest on the debt, which of course is much higher now because as all of us inflation hawks were carping about forever, and so I can completely mix metaphors, those chickens are coming home to roost from the hawks who carp at things. But that is possibly the single biggest thing that worries me the most about this is that as we talk about this and we need to and we need to drill down on all of the idiot spending that is involved in all of this, we are not even talking about where the money is. So those mandatory spending items, particularly the old age entitlements, we had to spend more over time. It's not like it's flat. That continues to increase as does the debt service and the- It's a great creation to have split, and this goes back decades, but to split the budget into so-called mandatory and so-called discretionary spending because it really does let the government, Congress, and the president to some degree off the hook, they're like, well, we would obviously tackle that if we could, but it's mandatory, so we really can't. We just have to let it go and grow and double. I mean, it's like an infinite sourdough starter that is just going to take over the whole. Well, I'm calling back to the early pandemic when the internet was clogged instead of Elon Musk tweets. Everybody's sourdough stars. I feel a sick piece coming on, which fruit cake government's over, but the thing that was amazing too is when I really started writing about budget issues around 2000, 2001, the shorthand was the federal budget is comprised by two parts, mandatory and discretionary spending, each of which take up about half of spending. That was back when- That's not true anymore, and that's really really bad. The last real budget under Bill Clinton was $1.8 trillion, so nominally less than the deficit will be this year. So it is true that the deficit has come down from its pandemic high, and the Biden administration is using that fact to argue that President Biden is somehow or another responsible for that, but the reason the deficit has come down from its pandemic high is because we are no longer passing trillion or $2 trillion pandemic relief bills every couple of months like we were starting in April or so of 2020. And also those bills were packed with temporary spending that was intended to end at some point, and so Biden wasn't responsible for about $4 trillion of the $6 trillion that was spent, right? The first part of the first couple of bills were passed under President Trump. So Biden is arguing that because that that spending has expired as planned, as passed under somebody else, his administration should get credit for the falling deficit. When you actually look at the policies that President Biden himself has signed into law, they will add trillions of dollars to the deficit and are responsible for for the deficit was was already going to grow. They are responsible for increasing the amount that the deficit is expected to grow over the next decade. And so it is on the one hand true that thanks to the expiration of a bunch of pandemic spending, the deficit has fallen from its peak. But it is also not true that Joe Biden deserves any credit at all for reducing the deficit. And in fact, if you are somebody who cares about the deficit, you should be opposed to the policies that Joe Biden has signed into law. You know, if we can flip that to it's, you know, and again, because it, you know, the Republicans had such a terrible, you know, turnout or, you know, outcome in the election that we it's going to be hard to think about them as a dominant party. You know, although that can, you know, they control the house. So they they took that they might win the presidency in 2024 to follow through on what Peter is saying is that the spending increases went up under Donald Trump even before COVID. And from a libertarian perspective, this is not to say, OK, the two parties are exactly the same. They are rotten in their own individual ways. But one thing that they share consistently is voting for more and more government spending, both permanent and temporary or, you know, mandatory and discretionary when they are in power. And there's got to come a point where this, you know, it has to stop. We're seeing the things that, you know, large scale, nonstop government spending, debt finance government spending does. And it slows down long term economic growth. It increases deficit spending and it destroys long term, you know, ability to kind of change the way the trajectory of where the government is going and what kinds of policies we're actually doing. It's, you know, it's deeply, deeply disturbing. It's inflationary. And, you know, we need to have a bipartisan consensus, at least or an acknowledgement that they're going to do something about it or we're never going to speak of this again. And we should all move together in microdation. What Nick just mentioned, because people react to this with surprise, I find, is that pre-pandemic federal spending under Donald Trump in three and a half years increased more from the beginning of his term to that three and a half year mark than federal spending increased in Barack Obama's eight years as president, which is people don't want to believe it and also it's true. Catherine, you referenced the Chuck Schumer Marijuana Banking Act. Give you the choice either to expound on that or any other thing that is tucked in or is expected to be tucked in to this must pass never going to be read bill that's going to be up by Friday. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I think Peter and Nick both eloquently attempted to drive home how incredibly large these numbers are. But in some ways, I think it's more troubling when what goes into these bills are things that are have really are not spending at all. Like it's one thing to be like, OK, we got to do a budget because budgets are a thing. But the rush to dump things that should be clearly should be and sometimes have been separate pieces of legislation that are substantive that are not primarily about spending at all is the stuff that troubles me more. So the marijuana banking thing is an example of that. The short version is that Chuck Schumer vote. What was the old line that John Kerry was a John Kerry, the like, I voted for it before I voted against it. Do you remember that from back in the day? He voted against it before he voted for it. So there is he had a Schumer had a different version of marijuana banking that he wanted. He murdered in its cradle. This bipartisan should have passed. Bill, the Safe Banking Act, and now he wants to shove it into this last minute gigantic bill in order to get it through because his thing didn't work out. But the other thing I want to talk about is is the thing that Suderman mentioned, the the Electoral Count Act, which is going to be shoved in there. This is arguably the most important thing to get right this year, legislatively. Like if if the presidential election doesn't go well next time, because this set of rules wasn't carefully considered and crafted in an ideal manner, the consequences are going to be disastrous. Because they did it at 1 a.m. on Thursday. And I'm pretty sure that this is not carefully crafted in an ideal manner because they're going to do it at 1 a.m. on Thursday right before the year ends. Now, to be fair, this is language that was already debated, right? I mean, this is, you know, it passed the House. It it moseyed its way through the normal process. But the whole problem, right, is the last little fidgety details. And, you know, what happened last time around was that it was not clear who had final authority in some ways to certify these votes, to to certify these legislators. And we cannot let these electors, we cannot do that again. And the fact that we are willing to just chuck this into this big, dumb, messy spending bill and hope for the best, to me, is like the greatest evidence yet that Congress is not being in any way serious about its obligations to the American people. Nick, are there any other elements of the bill that are attracting your specific eagle-eyed attention? Mostly what I was looking at in the the budget bill was the misdirection. So I would say no. My eye is firmly on that big, fat 70 percent. And the actual interest on the debt is really worrying, because again, as somebody who's been, you know, shouting about inflation caused by government spending and persistent deaths and lower long-term growth and the worry over heightened interest costs, this is this is where we're at. I want to give a special shout out to Jonathan Chait, to Steve Bennett at MSNBC, to a bunch of other people who Joe Biden, Joseph Robinette Biden, the second and a bunch of other people who in the month of October were busy saying that the most underreported political story in the run up to the midterms was that the Republicans were about to shut down government because they were going to cut social security and Medicare and they're going to hold they're going to hold the government hostage and actually engineer a global economic breakdown. I'm not exaggerating. None of this is hyper purple. I'm writing to this extent in the past because some of us said, you know what, we would have noticed probably the libertarians might have noticed that this was happening. Here's a quote from Richard Shelby, the lame duck or outgoing Republican from Alabama, I believe. And he's a lead negotiator on the Kromnebus as it speaks. Here we go. So I think it's irrational to shut down the government always. It's the wrong message. The American people don't want that. A few people say, well, we will go to the edge of the earth. We'll make people do so. And so I think it's best to try to work it out. You have to give and take a lot of things are in the bill or will be that I don't like and I wouldn't vote for. But military veterans, safety nets for people and everything. Let's do it. So you're wrong, people. Be all right to go ahead and admit that. I will not set my watch for that. But that's an excuse to pivot to what Shelby just mentioned, which is military veterans and such, because it's not just the Kromnebus that gets passed in Washington's annual. Let's do our jobs week. Um, it is also last week, there was a by overwhelming bipartisan majorities was passed an eight hundred and fifty eight billion dollar National Defense Authorization Act. That is forty five billion dollars more than Biden asked for. It's a one year increase of 10 percent over a baseline that wasn't exactly small. We spend more on defense than the next 10 big spenders government defense people combined. You can hyphenate a lot of works. It is also more the Pentagon gets more than the 10 seconds or the 10 other largest cabinet agencies combined. So Catherine, from your point of view as a as a person, what are the problems, the potential problems with the U.S. spending one hundred million dollars on the military per hour? So many potential problems, one of which we've seen in action this year, right, which is that when you have an enormous pile of weapons that you bought with the versions of this spending in previous years, people ask you for them and sometimes you give them to them. So this is obviously what has happened in Ukraine. And I think an interesting thing about the kind of rhetoric around the the Pentagon spending this year is there are separate appropriations for Ukraine, right? Like the Ukraine stuff is happening, you know, in a different bucket. But the reason that we need so much more money for the military this year, according to advocates of this absolutely enormous bill is that we got to rebuild all of our stockpacks because we gave all the cool weapons to Ukraine. And this is kind of like a self perpetuating cycle. I always think about, you know, there was sort of a neocon moment that I was privy to in my weekly standard days, where some of the arguments genuinely did amount to like if we what's the point of even having the world's most powerful and expensive military if we're not going to just use it sometimes. Yeah, if your stereo goes that loud, why wouldn't you blow out your ears? Correct. That is a very good metaphor. I'm surprised to say for your stereo metaphors. Could you have smashed that a little up, Peter, though, please? I don't know what that means, but the, you know, this idea that we have to replenish the stockpile. And of course, the reason that we were called upon to use the stockpile in the first place is because we had the stockpile. And why do we have the stockpile? Because we wanted to be ready in case we needed to use the stockpile for stuff like this. To some people, this is a working system. To some people, this is like, yeah, we did it. This is the whole idea. I am not sure this is the right way to do it. I beg to differ. Nick, back in 2015, you criticized Rand Paul, who was then a serious presidential candidate. It's hard to remember. You criticized him for proposing a significant increase in the Pentagon budget all the way up to nearly 700 billion dollars. That's like seven years ago. We're at eight hundred and fifty eight billion now. We're those Tea Party era politics. Well, it's a it's a rebuilding year, Matt. That's true. You know, we had we had a bad couple of seasons. We got a new owner and, you know, we just got to put more money into the stadium and to the personnel. It's that like is was that just a hallucination? The stuff that was happening ten years ago? I mean, we were we there with the word sequestration was found like on a daily basis in the newspaper. There we never came back. Never. I guess it was when the government shut down and like whole parts of the country haven't been heard from since. What what was that and are like people even going to be looking back at that as like this a fantastical micro moment that must have been a glitch and then it went away immediately. Well, you know, I mean, you earlier referenced the last Bill Clinton budget and that is unfathomable that, you know, that the government spent so little money on so much stuff. And now we just spend so much stuff with nothing really to show for it. You know, that to me and in a lot of ways, there are many ways to parse the kind of, you know, rolling tragedy that is government massive unpaid for increases in government spending. But one of them is like, what do we have to show for it? And I remember when George W. Bush left office, that was one of the things, you know, he gave the he oversaw the biggest DC based, you know, party since Lyndon Johnson. They're really if if we're going to monkey with the Constitution, please make it that nobody from Texas can ever be president again. But, you know, like there was nothing to show for it. Like it's not like there were 60 Maserati's parked on the lawn or anything like that. And I think with the defense spending, you know, we have something like that. We have a couple of graveyards, you know, new freshly minted graveyards around the world. And we're looking for new ones to to kind of dig up and things like that. But we don't really have anything to show for it. And it's I don't I don't even know how to deal with this on some profound level. And this is also in a moment when, you know, America is actually rethinking its defense of posture. You know, the the past couple of decades actually did force more Americans to seriously consider whether or not the US should be the world's policemen. A majority of people say, you know what, we should probably be doing less in terms of military intervention and military spending and things like that. And it has the exact opposite on elected officials, which is deeply disturbing. And I don't quite know how to process that. I mean, I remember as part of even the Ram Paul discussion in 2015 and just general discussion of military spending back then, it was presumed that it was radical seeming. It was presumed that we would have wound down our engagements in both Iraq and Afghanistan and therefore wouldn't be spending all those emergency appropriate. So, you know, that would go down from 150 billion a year or whatever it was to zero. And that's not even part of the discussion at all anymore. Like, I pretty sure we left to Afghanistan. I've got to maybe check check the notes here. Let's get the ombudsman play the table. But we left it, right? Yeah. The, you know, the the other thing is that you also see, you know, that the the military is the ultimate jobs program and not for the people who serve in the military either, but for military contractors and whatnot. And one of the things that's worth keeping an eye on is the the new B-21 bomber, which will probably come online, which was announced recently. And, you know, even the Washington Post, as Alan Vatiman, a longtime reader, sometimes commenter at reason.com and similar places, notes that even the Washington Post is saying, what are we doing with this? And the Washington Post had an op-ed on this saying, the U.S. Air Force has to put it mildly a mixed record building strategic bombers over the past 60 years. And it's true. The last two big bomber programs were virtually complete bus. This new one is going to be and by the time it's operational, if it is, it'll be, you know, redundant or useless because it's going to be a manned bomber. And we have things like the F-35 fighter plane. Like this is the hardware that goes into all of this is kind of an open spigot for spending, for jobs, for influence. And then as Catherine was pointing out, this stuff ends up somewhere. Sometimes it's a, you know, a kind of military graveyard in the middle of Arizona or Nevada. Oftentimes it's somewhere overseas. And occasionally, you know, we leave it behind so that it can be turned against us or our allies sometime in the near future. But it's really worth kind of hammering home. How poor, how poorly responsive Congress is to things related to defense. And it's also worth highlighting the continuity of spending with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the New York Times commissioned an outside group to do an analysis of the most recent Pentagon budget. What they found was that on inflation adjusted terms, military spending is set to reach its highest level since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011 and the second highest in inflation adjusted terms since World War Two. So we are spending as if we are still at war. And in some ways, that tells you we are effectively in at war via, you know, via proxy in Ukraine. Well, Catherine, speaking of Congress and war and sort of the abdication of constitutionally prescribed duties. Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, who caucuses with the Democratic Party. He last week or the week before as the NDAA was winding to its beautiful eight hundred and fifty eight billion dollar close, he withdrew his Yemen war powers resolution, which would have stopped some of the ongoing US assistance to Saudi Arabia in its prosecution of the very brutal and deadly Yemeni civil war. This is something that was backed a lot by people in the Libertarian Party, a lot of anti-war people on both sides of the aisle and yet couldn't get enough support, especially from Republicans, even though Republicans had endorsed similar things in the past, depending on who the president was and who controlled Congress. What does this tell us about the depressing state of congressional authorizations and lack thereof of ongoing war? I mean, it sounds like this is a lost battle. I don't know. I mean, I always, always, always think it's worth pointing out that we have a very clear instructions from the founders about who gets to declare war and under what conditions and the fact that we've just chosen to be like, yeah, we're going to ignore those is probably not great. Bernie Sanders' choice to to back off of that resolution, I think, is, you know, it shows that this is still it's all about getting in line with the party and both parties like war. But they just both love it. They both are delighted to do war. They're even more delighted if we can do war and not have their names on it, right? It's the perfect situation. They just kind of wave a hand. They give an emergency authorization. They give sort of very broad-based open-ended authority to the president, and then it's both not their problem. And they can kind of take credit if things go well. You know, I appreciate an anti-war Bernie Sanders. That's that's my favorite Bernie. But even even that is not terribly reliable. And we've talked about this before on this podcast, you know, over the years, there have usually been a few folks hanging out somewhere on the hill that I that you could kind of count on to at least make a little fuss about this sort of thing. Now, they weren't enough, but a little fuss, a little fuss about Congress's prerogatives and the proper order of things. That seems to be fading. I, you know, I hate to I had to give up the fight on both spending and war today in this podcast. But it's December. It's a rough month. It's hard out there for a person. Not a lot of daylight. That the power of the state should be constrained. You know, Santa works for NORAD, right? So I mean, it's all comes together in December. Cancel that or something. I thought I saw a headline that was like, we're not were they threatening to do that because of budget? Oh, maybe. Maybe it's like they're going to fire the teachers. They're going to stop tracking Santa. It's terrible. Firefighters, probably. All right, we're going to talk even more about Congress here in a moment. But first, friends, you might think you've done everything in your power to ensure your family in the case of a medical emergency. But what many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full cost of, for example, an emergency medical flight. If you require air transport, even comprehensive coverage can leave you with high deductibles and copays. That's where AirMedCare Network comes in. 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All right, let's go back to our discussion of Congress's annual Do Your Job Week and talk about other areas, legislative areas that are not necessarily being covered in the Cromnibus or the NDAA that either are being discussed because Congress is working this week and last week or is shamefully not being addressed and though it should be. Peter, why don't you lead us off? So Medicare has a trust fund. It does. It has several trust funds and it has a big one that pays a lot of bills to a lot of providers for people on Medicare and it's gonna be insolvent in 2028. And guess what no one is talking about? That, that's it. That's what I got for you. What would they do like in a Peter world? I mean, is this a huge overhaul? Is there a doc fix? I'd miss the doc fix. So in my world, what they would do is probably something that looks a lot like the early Paul Ryan plans, which basically say that people who are within 10 years of being eligible for Medicare, no changes to your benefits because you've lived a life in which we've told you that Medicare will be there for you and so we are going to, we're gonna keep that promise for people who are basically 55 and older and I think that that's maybe not ideal from a libertarian perspective but like not a completely crazy political compromise. And then for people who are younger, we're gonna change the way that this is funded so that it's sustainable over time and so that it's a somewhat more market-based program and so that it is not sort of unlimited benefit, a kind of unlimited payment system where doctors can just bill for whatever and there's sort of no cap on how much it's paid and where there's maybe some relationship between money that people choose to put into the system and what they get out of it, which is not the case currently. Catherine, what is an area that is either being dealt with by Capitol Hill but kind of on the download because everything else is going on the same week or is not being covered and should be and shame on them? Immigration, we still have a really serious problem at our border. We have not resolved the backups, the confusion, the general mess created by pandemic era immigration policy. I was reminded by a post on Twitter recently that we also still have a vaccine mandate for people entering the country even from nations where vaccines remain scarce, especially perhaps from those countries you might even say. Once again, there was kind of some talk that maybe there was a bipartisan immigration deal that was going to come together excitingly in this, the week that Congress does its job, but no, the last headlines that I saw contained phrases like dead on arrival, which tragically is also true of some of the people trying to get into this country. I think that there is a... I really wish we could fix that. There's an eternal kind of a lingering mistake or attachment to comprehensive immigration reform, which is not to say that we don't need comprehensive immigration reform. It's just that that was a term used to describe negotiations that have stopped being a viable thing for the most part 15 years ago, because it's kind of too big of a question to get people to agree. Every time it's gonna involve lots of wall building, lots of tracking of individuals, ID programs, real ID programs, and at the same time, making people who are here illegally legal, all of these, there's many of them are contentious issues and because people can't agree on them, they just don't have a plan in place for when a political party takes power in Washington, which is the first two years of every presidency, and then it goes away. So there isn't any like, here's what we should do to maybe just add a number of visas. That would be helpful. Right, well, there's also this, there was just this idea that has hunted our politics for a long time, that the Republicans want border control and the Democrats wanna let in more people, and so we could do those two things at once together. They are not in theory in conflict, and if we did them both together, so everyone would get something they want, and then we could do it. That's wrong. That didn't work. It turned out that that is not a viable bargain, and yet for some reason, we keep trying to do that bargain. This last theoretically bipartisan deal was a Kirsten Cinema Jam, so I'm sure it wasn't helpful that she decided to sell her high heels shoes on the internet and change her partisan affiliation this week also, but yeah, the imagined structure of a bipartisan bill simply isn't one that actually garners bipartisan support, and it's bizarre to me that Washington can't move on from that delusion. It's also, I mean, it's worth pointing out, the recent deadlock goes back to the late 80s when Reagan signed off on the last comprehensive immigration reform package, and the Republican narrative coming out of this was that he granted amnesty to a million-plus illegals living in the country and didn't do the border security that we needed, and it is squarely on the Republicans' shoulders right now. They are so completely against any acknowledgement that people come to the country legally or illegally and increasing that. I mean, it's really significant to such a degree that when George W. Bush, after winning reelection in 2004, had talked about comprehensive immigration reform along with social security privatization as one of the two priorities that he was going to go after, and even people like John McCain ended up kind of sub-marining all of that, somebody who was as pro-immigration a Republican as you could see who was in the House or Senate. That's really the problem, and Matt, I think you're right that the only way forward on any of this stuff is through very small piecemeal reforms, but you even saw with the Dreamers and whatnot under Obama that Republicans, for reasons that are bizarre because even a majority, a clear majority of Republicans think that immigration and immigrants are good for the country, that no Republican politician of any significance will say, you know what, we should be letting more people into the country legally. They just cannot concede that, and that is a big problem, and then you have the fecklessness of Democrats who just won't get on with the smaller legal reforms that they can actually enact. The key moments in all that period was the almost failed presidential nominating campaign of John McCain. He'd been a co-sponsor along with Teddy Kennedy of the negotiations to get bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, and his campaign almost was still born at birth, right, Catherine, because of it, and like the only way that he could rebound was to disassociate himself from that, get himself off of the negotiations, hand that off to his colleague in Arizona, and eventually vote against things that he had previously sponsored, or at least argue against things that he had previously sponsored, because the insight was you couldn't run for presidents in the Republican party without suddenly talking about like, we need to build the dang fence, as he memorably said in the Senate campaign ad when he was feeling a little bit of heat in a primary a few years later, and from that point on, the hawk, immigration, the hawkish, most hawkish person has either won or competed way above you would have expected them to in every Republican primary, and the key was, and this will last long after Donald Trump waddles out of our lives, when Trump came in and compared illegal immigrants or immigrants from Mexico to rapists and not sending their best, and the reaction was his poll numbers shot up. Every single Republican, everyone, there wasn't an exception to this, who were running for president at the time, suddenly lost their mind on immigration, like Ben Carson was like, we need to close the border with the Atlantic Ocean. People were talking about how we need to get like FedEx to stamp. You know, we can track FedEx packages. Why can't we track the humans? Come on, man. It was nuts, and that duttyness, those lessons have been learned, and until that fever breaks, but it's gonna not break for a long time. Nick, would it go? If I may, I may just to extend the discussion about immigration a little bit. You know, one of the last good working kind of mythopoetic definitions of America was that we were a nation of immigrants. You know, and this became the mantra after World War II, which had to be fair, you know, had effectively cut off immigration for most parts of the country, most parts of the world for a while, and it started trickling back in from Mexico first, and then after the 1964 reforms from Asia in particular. But you know, that rubric, that America was a nation of immigrants, John F. Kennedy ghost wrote, and possibly ghost read a book called A Nation of Immigrants in the Late 50s as he was preparing for presidential nominating run and whatnot, but that was a capacious way of talking about what America was for. You know, it was a place where everybody from all over the world could come and kind of become themselves and have a second chance or a first chance, and it also was being adapted in the early 60s to include black migrants moving from the South to other parts of the country, but like, you know, the immigration, the role of immigration and of people coming here and becoming something that they couldn't be in their home country or in their hometowns is a really powerful way of making people kind of get along while recognizing and even celebrating difference. And I think, you know, that's gone away, it partly went away after the end of the Cold War and also as immigration started ramping up again, particularly in the 80s and 90s, but I think, you know, that's a successor narrative, you know, that we might wanna revisit because it comports with the world. The world is only gonna become more and more globalized, people are only gonna be moving around more and mixing more and it's really a shame that the political rhetoric around immigration is so toxic because it actually, it was a myth about America that worked really well to include a lot of people and generate good feelings, so. Nick, what is your one thing that Congress is either doing on quietly this week or should be doing and is not this week? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's that they're not, but you know, I'm just going back and I was looking at some stuff, both Peter at Reason.com or at Reason Magazine and our colleague Emma Camp have written again about the new challenges to Biden's student loan forgiveness program and that's gonna become a compelling, or you know, it's in the courts and things like that and I just wanted to call attention to the fact that the warrant for this action by the Biden administration was the HEROES Act of 2003 law giving the Secretary of Education the power to give federal student relief in connection with the war or other military operation or national emergency and you know, when you are forgiving student loan debt to people who come from households making up to 250 grand under the idea that there's a war or other military operation or national emergency going on, something is so wrong and I would love to see Congress, you know, actually do something to knock this down, you know, to take it out of the courts. Hopefully the courts will see fit to keep knocking this down because it's just, it's bad policy on every possible level but it's also like the argumentation behind it. It's like, it's just awful and terrible and we shouldn't even bother having a, you know, a government of laws if we are going to torture plain language into whatever is necessary in order to do whatever we're gonna do. I would just rather live under a naked despot like we are increasingly doing at Twitter. My nominee for the thing that actually got passed, I forget which one it's through the NDA, must be the NDA because it actually passed. The Iran Hostages Congressional Gold Medal Act, you'll be relieved to know, has passed honoring its resolution, honoring the forgotten 52 Americans who were held hostage. I have nothing wrong with that at all. Just I found out about it last night because I happened to be falling into conversation with like 12th ranked or 9th ranked 2020 presidential candidate Brock Pierce who's like a crypto bro and he has a super PAC that's doing nonpartisan things and this is one of the things they're doing to prove that we can do things. And I was like, dude, pretty sure you were born after 1979, Nick and I remember 1979, but you can't and indeed he was born in 1980, but you know, gold medal for families and those people suffered and we should remember them. So whatever. I would have expected him to have wanted to be either an NFT or a Bitcoin medal. I mean, why would Brock Pierce of all people be going back to mere gold? He can do a lot of different things. The guy's involved with toys for tots too, Nick. He's doing a lot. Look, I'm just saying you're either a Bitcoin maximalist or you're kind of a fiat boy. I don't know. Speaking of fiat boys, let's go to our end of podcast. That doesn't work. End of podcast. Who are you calling a fiat boy? Consuming. Peter, you're a fiat boy. What have you been doing? Wait, is that what f-boy means? Yeah, it is actually. But is it an Italian fiat or a Polsky fiat? That's the question. What have you been consuming? So I watched Avatar, The Way of Water and guys, it ruled. It just ruled. It's great. It's a genuinely novel and astounding cinematic experience. The use of 3D and high frame rate photography is incredibly immersive. So this is director James Cameron's first movie in over a decade since his last one was the first Avatar in 2009. And he's created a computer generated alien world that just feels more real than almost anything else I have ever seen on a movie screen. At times it's like watching a particularly epic episode of one of those super lush immaculate nature documentaries, you know, Planet Earth or Blue Planet except it's set on a fictional alien planet with peacenik battle whales. They like attack the bad harpoon guys and it's just, it's just awesome at every moment. And yes, yes, you could argue that the story is kind of cheesy at times. Cameron absolutely indulges in a bunch of very silly eco spiritualism that is not particularly to my taste. But ultimately it's, he's telling the story that he's been telling for 35 years now going back to the first Terminator and Aliens and True Lies and even Terminator 2 which are all kind of found family films about struggling families that are sort of, you know that maybe you're not actually biological families but are like going through hard times and figure out how to come together to kick ass and win and be awesome. And the experience of it is just, it's just a wonder. It's the kind of grand scale forward looking ambitious filmmaking that I think has gone out of fashion in the age of endless Marvel sequels which tend to use cruddy computer generated effects as a crutch. James Cameron is a visionary and he is trying to take moviemaking into the future trying to capitalize on the promise of technology to make movie magic and to make entertainment that is more astounding and more spectacular. And I think Avatar the Way of Water is largely successful in that it is truly a spectacle of the kind I have never seen before. Well, Catherine, what have you been consuming? Well, Peter's recommendation is the most on brand for him you can imagine. I'm gonna go the other way and say I watched Argentina defeat France in the World Cup. Wow, what? I know, I know. I'm as surprised as you are. I know it's football, I understand. It was pretty great. I understand that this is potentially one of the greatest sporting events of all time and so I'm glad that I decided to watch it. To be clear, I decided to watch it because I heard there were gonna be snacks. So I went for the snacks. For the football players or for you? For me, the snacks for me at my friend's house. And I did eat some super delicious Argentinian snacks which made me happy then that the good guys won. I particularly enjoyed the part where adult men wept the world over. I just like men to have feelings sometimes and if this is what it takes then I'm all for it. I had them about the CG whales. Yeah, so like say everybody can get their feelings whatever way they want. I will say I presciently hated the first avatar, like walked out and said this is bad and here's all the reasons why. But also it made me really motion sick and so I'm scared to go see this one. But the World Cup was great and I know that that is not a particularly novel recommendation but maybe the only form of nationalism that only makes me a teeny bit uncomfortable but mostly happy. It was awesome except for the wrong team one but yes, that was good. Nick, you're crying even right now. What did you consume? Oh yeah, no, I'm crying all over the place man. And my recommendation is another world building experiment as well but it's by historian Beverly Gage who has written G-Man, Jager Hoover and the Making of the American Century. It's a phenomenal recreation of Jager Hoover's life and times. And it raises a really fascinating question which I will be putting to Beverly Gage in a future episode of the Reason Interview podcast which is does a national police force inevitably become corrupted and used for crass political or personal excesses but G-Man, Jager Hoover and the Making of the American Century is a phenomenal kind of addendum to Tim Weiner's enemies, a history of the FBI that came out maybe a decade ago or so. Really fascinating and particularly in a moment now where our big moments where we're like, we need to root out terrorists, we need to be worried about where this and that et cetera has passed kind of going back and looking at Jager Hoover the long time 48 year head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the way in which his power kind of incrementally increased and kind of corrupted him as well as he corrupted the institution is well worth kind of puzzling over while we have kind of a breather in terms of national security state issues. My recommendation, which I'm still reading through but I'm taking a very heavy nutrient value from is 1948, a history of the first Arab-Israeli war by Benny Morris, Israeli historian came out in 2008. I believe it was for those who are ignorant about Middle East conflicts, which I definitely am. It's a very, very good and dense primer, any way you wanna pronounce it, it's that. And very detailed about the run up to the creation of the state of Israel and all the wars and the British mandate and all that business been going on a jag in that direction for a while and just really well done. I appreciate it, it's rare to read a history where there's a way in for people who know everything about it and a way in for people like me, again, who are ignorant and it can be read in both ways and certainly provides context that enriches the discussion of what's happening right now in Israel, which is new government, some bad people. It's looking pretty dicey and I think we're running up towards a possible pretty significant split between Jews in America and Jews in Israel about what's happening there. And that will eventually or sooner rather than later affect foreign policy in the state of a lot of people living in the West Bank and whatnot. But anyways, great book, 1948, Benny Morris, check it out. All right, thanks for checking us out this week. Like our podcasts, listen to more of them, reason.com slash podcast. Nick, what do you got teed up coming in the great state of the city of New York? We've got on January 4th a reason speak easy featuring drug policy experts and harm reduction reformers, Andrew Tatarcki of the Center for Optimal Living and journalist and author Maya Salovitz go to reason.com slash events to get details and tickets. All right, we will catch you on the other side of Christmas. So Merry Christmas to everybody and thank you so much. The other side of Christmas sounds like a very good Hallmark movie. Do you know with a little, maybe it's a 1974 disaster? Maybe with cannibalism, yeah, cannibalism, a plane crash on Christmas Eve and yeah. Honestly, I think you could just do it as a straight Hallmark movie. Like Big City Gal goes back to her hometown to find love on the other side of Christmas. I'm picturing a dark Clive Barker-esque fantasy in which on Christmas someone looks into their mirror and they see the Christmas tree, it's behind them and they go into the mirror and then suddenly they're on the other side of Christmas. There are pink lasers in this, aren't there? Always. Yeah. All right, goodbye.