 Today's show will be reviewing the recent national elections, and we may explore how the results can influence the next two years, how the Trump administration will function, how general government will support him. My guest expert today is the professor of international relations and a director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at UH Manoa, Jarris Grove. I have been fortunate to take several political science classes from him, and he has broadened my political understanding in so many ways. I can say I'm honestly a much more responsible citizen than I have ever been. Welcome, Jarris, and thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me on, Martha. It's always a pleasure to have you in the back of the room. There you go. It's fun to be in the back of your room, as it were. So before we look at the elections, your title director of future studies might be something people don't understand. And by the way, that is Futures with an S. What is future studies? What is being a teacher of the futures? What is it you do? Sure. And how does that influence America? I mean, I think generally speaking, futures is an attempt to fold in techniques of foresight or an understanding of how you think the world will be in an effort to try to do more to prepare for the world now. What we do at Hawaii, though, is called alternative futures. And the reason why we call it that is because we don't believe that there is a future you can predict. We think that there are multiple futures on the horizon, and you have to account for those multiple futures so you don't get caught off guard. And so rather than trying to predict for one future or the other, our goal is to use the image of the future to put more pressure on us in the present to think about how we govern ourselves, what kinds of lives we want to live, what kind of future we want under the assumption that you don't have a future that's fate, you participate in hopefully making a preferred future, a future we want, because we all participate in making the future. And so the idea is, how do we participate in better? Right. And in this case, we're not just talking about participating in the government and the system we have now, but also we extrapolate the ways in which that system might be evolved or changed to suit situations which simply could not have been envisioned either in the present or in the past when these laws were initiated, yeah? Of course, and not just in governance. I mean, the future gets made in education. It gets made at the movies. The future gets made in conversations around dinner tables, right? So, I mean, part of what we want to look at is how we build new kinds of cultures which are attentive to the kinds of disruptive futures in particular we're likely to face. So, everything from climate change to artificial intelligence to a world without work to new kinds of war, right? We look at all of these kinds of questions. OK, so considering that, what can you tell us about how the recent elections might be influencing the next few years to come in America, especially the next two, or how the entire past two years will be affecting America? Specifically, I have deep concerns about how Mitch McConnell has and the Republican parties have influenced the courts and their tendency to try to undermine investigations into the possibilities of criminal or otherwise inappropriate actions by the president and his election team. That's a lot of questions. Yeah, well, I'll give you, now you run with it. I'll start with two things. The first is that I think it's a little early yet to say what the outcome of the midterms are, not just because there are actually some races that are still undecided, but because it's actually hard to tell what the consequences will be for change. Although I will say that the leadership elections that took place in the Senate suggests not a big change, right? We see more or less the same faces. You know, it'll be exciting after Thanksgiving to find out what the leadership looks like for the Democrats in the House. But I think there's a strong possibility. Nancy Pelosi will still be at the front of the line. But there are some things I think we can still sort of think about with the midterms. One, which is that I think what it confirms is not either a blue wave or not enough of a blue wave, but it confirms what 2016 also showed us, which is we're a deeply, deeply divided country. And while it's true that there was significantly more democratic turnout, so we saw much higher turnout rates in the midterm election, it only confirms that, right? It only confirms that still we're fighting races that are, I mean, the Beto cruise race, I think is a great example, within a percentage point, right? Exactly. And my guess would be that unlike other races that we could maybe historically think about where we're within a percentage point because it seemed like there was so much overlap between the candidates. Right. I think we were within a percentage point and you would have a lot of trouble finding an overlapping series of interests between the two groups. So I think we don't have a lot of good news if we're thinking about kind of long-term partisanship. The second thing I want to say though is because I think we have a tendency to want to personalize politics in all cases. And I know why you want to think about Mitch McConnell. But my warning would be that name could change very quickly. And my guess is politics wouldn't change very much, right? So I think we should be wary of making politics about particular personalities because I think, and this is something that a futures approach we tend to focus on. Structure matters a lot more, I think, than personality does. Right. And there are a lot of structural reasons why Republicans are likely to continue down the same path that they're on right now and that Democrats are likely to go down the same path that they're on right now and that isn't likely to change a lot, even if the faces and names change a great deal. I suppose the reason I bring it up is because until the Trump election, and Mitch McConnell, the head of the Senate, even if they were Republican-dominated Senate, never took some of the extraordinary actions that Mr. McConnell has taken in the last terms of office for Obama, absolutely refusing to even give his nomination for the Supreme Court a chance to even be discussed. He has taken almost a dictatorial stand of making sure that his and his conservative Republican agenda goes forward regardless of anything. He doesn't even, to my knowledge, criticize almost anything that Donald Trump has done, even when some of his fellow Republicans have done so. Now, I understand that they may vote to support their agenda regardless of how they personally feel. But I do think that Mr. McConnell has taken actions that other leadership might not have taken because of the feeling that if I do this, when the other side wins, they will do the same things to us. And I've always felt that most of the balance comes in terms of, well, if we do it to them, they might do it to us. So let's not upset the balance too much because they might come back at us at some point. I don't see Mr. McConnell being concerned about any retaliatory action by a controlled Senate by the Democrats. That's why I mentioned him specifically. But you seem to think that's not the case. I think that any party head who thought they could get away with that probably would have taken those actions. So my guess is if we were to do a kind of counterfactual and some other member of the Republican Party had taken Mitch McConnell's position, if they thought that they had either the support in terms of electoral support or that they had the committee power to say, for instance, forestall a Supreme Court justice getting onto the court, they would have done it. I mean, I think it's not unique to McConnell's personality. I'm not saying it doesn't play a role. But I think that the Republican Party has gained a tremendous amount of ground since really probably the first Reagan administration by precisely, sabotage may be too strong a word, but interfering with process. And I think that it's not as if other like the Democratic Party may not have tried to do that, but they have gained a tremendous amount of support by doing it. So this is one of the things that Dick Packer and Peterson say in Winner Take All Politics, which is an excellent book I'd recommend to anyone, tries to track the way that Republicans were able to, for instance, really create a kind of consensus in America that, for instance, taxation was bad. That what we really struggled from was that taxes were too high, even though that they were actually comparatively much lower, that we got great benefits off of them. And a lot of it was through this kind of slow war of attrition, where you interrupt process and undermine the process such that it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you want to show that things don't work well, the best way to say undermine, hud, the housing and urban development, is to slowly choke off funds, in which you can, so that they do a bad job. And then if it's a facto, they are a terrible organization because they do a bad job, and no one ever has a discussion that they do a bad job because they don't have enough funds. So I don't think that's a new strategy by Republicans. And I do think structurally, given we have a two-party system, whatever party is in the insurgency, trying to undo a particular form of government, is going to make use of those kinds of sabotage strategies. So if you think about the United States as a country that built a quasi-welfare state that tried to minimize everything from poverty to a lack of education, to a lack of housing, and that was a kind of consensus that developed. And we developed the institutions to fulfill those, to a greater and lesser extent, but nonetheless, to fulfill them. And then you think about the Republican Party as an alternative to that. Then it's not surprising that, given that their majority platform was, how do we take those institutions and those entitlements and that approach to government apart, that they used sabotage as the way to do it. So for me, this seems more like an extension of what, from their perspective, is a very tried-and-true success plan. This strategy works for them. Until it doesn't, I think they'll keep doing it. All right, so one of the things that I noticed is in the past, the convention has been that if you get a large voter turnout, the Democratic Party will come to the fore, because there used to be a far greater percentage of the population that went in that direction. Most recently, in these recent elections, we've certainly discovered that, at least in certain states, Trump's individual magnetism, regardless of everything he does, and no matter what you put out there to show that there are contradictions in what he's saying, he seems to be able to win people over. And we have seen these close elections that you've mentioned, where we're dealing with sometimes one percentage point or less in the difference between who's being elected. Now, to me, this is a change in the entire American climate. Compared to, I must admit, my youth, where there was a definite move towards caring about other people for one thing, but also a tendency to look at the facts, research them, and act on the basis of that, as opposed to, oh, gee, he's so cool. Now, it's great if your leadership is cool or sexy or attractive, but that is a strange situation. So this election revealed to us that a good percentage of this country really is supporting an agenda, which is really contrary to many of the ideals that has made America work in the past. So where are we going? Is that going to continue? Is that all about Trump, or is it something else? Well, the first thing I would say is that we don't really know what the American people think. It's very hard, and I think it's dangerous, to kind of psychologize a vote, because a vote is an either or question. You either vote for someone or you vote for another person. And so there can be all kinds of reasons why people do that. And I think that's the first thing to remember. The second thing to remember, and this is actually very important, Trump didn't win by a majority. Trump won because of the way the electoral college system works. True. And one of the things about the way the electoral college system works is that it actually still very much reflects a deep division in this country that, if you look at it on a map, still looks like the Mason-Dixon line. We still have serious problems in this country which follow sectionalist divisions, which have flipped parties with realignment, but still very much exist. And the third, and this one I think is one of the most important, is we've always been a country that's moved by personality. The Nixon-Kennedy debates were decided because Kennedy knew how to function on television. And Kissinger looked like a hot mess. He was sweaty. He refused to wear makeup. He didn't know what he was doing. I think any skilled debater would tell you, on the substance, Nixon won that debate. And anyone who watched it would say that JFK just cleaned up. And so I think we've always been moved by personality. We've always been moved by something. But I think what Trump tapped into is a deep dissatisfaction with what government could provide. And he was able to do what seems impossible, run as a third-party candidate within the Republican Party. True. And I think it's more accurate to say that Trump's one of the first third-party candidate victories than to say that we saw this major Republican reversal. Right, OK. I'm going to go to break now. And then we will come back and continue with Dr. Jaris Grove from UH Manoa, professor of political science and director of the futures research. It's so complicated. Let's go to break. Obviously, I need one. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hey, Stan the Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary, so I'm stuck doing energy stuff. But I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan the Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan the Energyman. Aloha. Hi, this is Martha Randolph. My show is The Will of the People. And my guest today is Dr. Professor Jaris Grove from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is a professor of political science and the director of research for future studies here in Hawaii. You'll have to go back and watch the first part of the show if you want to find out about that. Now, I am going to continue with a very important question, which I think a lot of people don't really realize. What is it that now that we have a house where the majority is Democratic, what can they do, if anything, to really mitigate or balance anything that the president is doing or that the Senate will or will not do? And particularly in regards to the investigation into pre-election actions by Donald Trump which may or may not have been legal or allowed. And could you please explain really what an impeachment is? Because a lot of people think that impeachment means he gets knocked out the window. But apparently that's not the case. Great. Well, let's start with what the House can do. So I mean, I think a lot of people are excited if you're a Democrat, you're thrilled to see that the House is back in the Democrats' control. I mean, my sort of warning label would be something like, think about all the things that Trump's done that you've liked the least and then ask yourself how many of those required congressional action. And that's a short list. The travel ban was not a congressional action. The reinterpretation of asylum seeking at the border which resulted also in family separations, not a congressional action. So it's great if you're a Democrat that Trump won't be able to get potentially his legislative agenda through, but the reality is that most of things that have been outside of what we consider sort of traditional Republican policies. So the kind of more racist, the more nationalist policies have mostly been executive actions, right? There's not a lot that the House can do about that. But I do think that being in the majority means that they can undermine it in ways that the Republican House was unwilling. So I think one of the things that's very dangerous about the kinds of rhetoric that Trump uses when it comes to things like immigration or how he feels about our cooperation with Europe or with Japan is that when he said the most outlandish things he said, the Republican House was very slow to contradict him, if at all. That party loyalty meant that oftentimes, even when we knew that there were real differences, there was a kind of grudging acceptance of Trump's endorsement of violence or his sort of neo-isolationism. Now the Democrats can speak in particular ways against that kind of move and hopefully undermine the perception by our allies and also the people who feel vulnerable in this country, that the whole country is against them. I think the House can provide a kind of balance to that. And they can negotiate, they're in a position to negotiate with the Senate if a bill is put through and it passes in the House and the Senate, being Republican-dominated, decides not to pass it. There's this reconcilable situation where they have to negotiate. I would be surprised if there was a lot of reconciliation. I know, I didn't think there would be, but is there something the Senate might want that they would have to negotiate and say, yeah, well, we'll give you this if you give us that? We'll see. I mean, that's most likely to happen with the budget. But other things I think probably unlikely. But to move on to the other question, because I think this is on a lot of people's mind, on what impeachment is. So impeachment does not mean that a president's found guilty. Filing articles of impeachment means that the president will be under investigation to determine their guilt. So the House representatives could initiate and begin that process of impeachment. And the House of representatives has investigative authority, which means that they could do a great deal of looking into financial records, reviewing what Mueller has found. They could really open up how much we know about those investigations. And I think that even if by the time it gets to the Senate and the Senate actually has to make a determination of guilt or innocence doesn't result in actually removing Trump from power, a lot of things could come out of that were quite good. We could find out a lot more about how much interference there actually was in our democratic institutions. My guess is we'll find out there were a lot of things we didn't know. And we'll also find out a lot of things we thought weren't true. And I think that just as a beginning could be very important for rebuilding faith and the electoral system and also protecting the electoral system. I also think that a greater deal of transparency would really change what kind of campaign Trump can run in 2020, as well as what kind of campaign those House and Senate members who want to connect themselves to the Trump train can say with credibility. So there's certainly, I think, a rightful fear that somehow Trump broke the truth, that the truth will never come back because fake news and being able to call out fake news is sort of the order of the day. But the reality is that while facts don't matter in and of themselves, you can make facts matter. And I think the actual tax returns, actual information about traffic back and forth between the Trump campaign and potentially Russian interference, those will change those debates in ways that simply making an accusation can't. So I think there's a lot that the House can do. But I think if people think that the House is going to somehow undo the changes that Trump has made, I think that's improbable. OK, so and which means let's say Robert Mueller's report is received. The House will want to read it. Is there anything that the Senate or president can do can to keep that report private? Can it? Is it going to be public? Or is it up to the individual legislative branches to decide? Because we have seen his chosen few release information that was supposed to be kept private because it was of advantage and refusing to release information, which we thought might actually tell us something. Well, I mean, for anyone hoping that Mueller's full investigation is going to somehow be put up on the internet so we can all look through it ourselves, that's not going to happen. And my guess is we will have to fight in all the ways. I mean, probably the closest comparison would be something like the Hamilton Baker 9-11 report where because portions of it may have active intelligence significance. So for instance, it may have information about US operatives or it may have information about Russian operatives, which are still current and not intended. Then what will happen is a debate over whether or not national security protections are being used rightfully. Meaning to protect people and to protect interests. Or whether or not they're being used opportunistically as a kind of political tool to prevent embarrassing the president or embarrassing his campaign staff or maybe members of his family going to jail, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we're likely to see a long and protracted fight over what can be made public, what can't be made public, what was rightfully and legally obtained versus what maybe wasn't legally obtained. I mean, a big part of the Trump narrative has been about what he thinks of as illegal surveillance while he was actually campaigning when he was still a candidate. So it wouldn't surprise me if major portions of the report find their way to the Supreme Court, where we have to have new debates and new decisions about what constitutes executive privilege, national security, what can and can't remain confidential. And the Democrats are going to have to make really smart decisions about which of those fights are worth having and which of those fights actually kind of wear the public out. I mean, I think one of the things that happened with the Clinton impeachment is by the end of it, a lot of people were just sick of the impeachment. And I think that worked ultimately to the Republicans' disadvantage. That could happen again. Well, they're certainly driving that thought. Right. I think it is premature to believe that that's the case. So I mean, one of the reasons why I think we shouldn't overly push that parallel is that there was one incident with Clinton that we were trying to determine the fact over. Well, and also it was a personal sexual incident. It had nothing to do with governing of the nation. There are several different layers to the Mueller question, which range from everything from internal corruption to international intrigue to fundamentally how elections get run. And so I mean, if Democrats are able to make this kind of national discussion on what we want democratic institutions to be, then I think they could actually get quite a bit out of the investigation, even if they don't get a conviction. So I don't think we should think about impeachment or the investigation just in terms of, well, is Trump going to be removed from office or not? Is he going to seek re-election or not? I think it's a question of whether or not we can really have an honest discussion about how the election happened, how the sausage got made. All right. I have just a couple of minutes and so just quickly, are there rulings that the Supreme Court can make on any given issue that can or cannot be overturned by a majority vote in Congress? Now, we don't have that right now. But I seem to remember that the Supreme Court can make a ruling, but there is another balance to that, which is that the House and or Senate can override that ruling. Is that true? And is that only for certain things that involve constitutional law? Or I only have one minute. So it's a whole range of things. It depends on what the decision was. So a decision on whether or not something was constitutional is a little bit different than a decision on whether or not something was statutorily acceptable. So for instance, the court doesn't just interpret the. The president that we were just talking. But the court doesn't just interpret the Constitution. It also interprets existing laws. So if the court is interpreting an existing law or an executive order, then there is more jurisdiction for the legislative branch or the president even to clarify that law or change that law such that the objection no longer exists. So generally what they're trying to evaluate is whether or not the law is in contradiction with itself or whether or not it's in contradiction with the Constitution. If they were to make a finding that something was in contradiction to the Constitution, then Congress would have to amend the Constitution in order to get around it. Which is a whole different process. Very, very different process. When it comes to things like executive privilege, national secrecy, and actually large portions of executive power, these are not in the Constitution. So these fights are likely to be a lot messier. The separation of powers are sort of going to be more interpretive and more political. And most of the law regarding those powers and those practices are mostly created during the 20th century and mostly after World War II. OK, so obviously there is a lot more to discuss in this, but we are out of time. And I hope Dr. Grove will come back and we can follow through on this. For anyone who's interested, do whatever you can to take a class with this man. It is stunning what you will learn. And this is Martha Randolph, signing off on the will of the people. Thank you, thank the staff. Thank you, Dr. Grove. Thank you, Martha. This is thinktecawaii.com. Please tune in again in a couple of weeks to this show. I don't know who's gonna be here, but it should be fun. Thank you.