 OK, everyone, now you have to quiet down. I'm Luke Schaefer. I'm the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the Herman and Amalia Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy here at the Ford School. And I'm really, really excited to have all of you here for tonight's policy talks at the Ford School event. Everyone in the room, and we also have a good crowd joining us virtually. Today's event is hosted in partnership with the University of Michigan Democracy and Debate Initiative and the UM Alumni Association's Alumni Educational Program. You can review the recordings from tonight's event and more educational materials from across campus online at the Alumni Education Gateway. Today's event features an interview with author, Senate commentator, and Longtime Hill staffer, Ira Shapiro. Welcome to the Ford School, Ira. Ira has had a 45-year career in Washington, including 12 years in senior staff positions in the Senate. He's the author of two previous books about the Senate, both praised for their thoughtfulness and historical accuracy. The first, the last great Senate, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and described by Senate historian Richard Baker, I'm sorry, as quote, a historically and powerfully artistic work of great brilliance. I don't know, is Richard Baker, does he often speak so glowingly about things? That would be my first. That's quite a statement. Released this year, Shapiro's new book, The Betrayal, How Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans Abandoned America completes what has been called by many to be an epic trilogy, quote, unquote. It captures 60 years of Senate history. And Bill Crystal, founder of the Weekly Standard, says of the book that it, quote, at once is compelling and convincing, read it in weep, and then get to work saving our once robust democracy. Facilitating tonight's conversation is a congressional ethics and accountability reporter from CQ Roll Call, Chris Marquette. The pronunciation of Chris's last name matches Marquette the city in Michigan. And as a visitor to Michigan, I was just reviewing that with him and showing him where it is in the UP. Chris is here on campus this year, having earned one of the prestigious Night Wallace Journalism Fellowships. So we're so grateful to you, Chris, for serving as our interviewer this evening. We'll have some time toward the end for questions please write your questions on provided note cards and pass them towards the center aisle of the room to be collected. Our online viewers can tweet questions to hashtag policy talks. Another one of this year's Night Wallace Fellows, Orlando Deguzman, will be helping filter questions to ask our speakers on your behalf. Orlando, where are you? All right, welcome. So this event is one in a series of events this fall that offers insights from a range of perspectives into forces threatening and protecting American democratic structures and systems. And so without further ado, I am pleased to hand it over to Chris Marquette. Thank you for that kind introduction. So Ira, I want to start off. You've titled the book The Betrayal, How Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans Abandon America. Is the mic not? Can everybody hear me? OK. So Ira, what made you decide to write this book? And how did you go about deciding on the title? Chris, thanks for doing this. The Night Wallace program is a great one. And so having a journalist like you available to do the interview is terrific. I appreciate it. And I'm glad to be here. I've spent more time thinking about the US Senate than any reasonable person should. I spent 12 years working there and sort of shaped my career, actually. But I left a long time ago. I'm not a Senate insider anymore. I haven't been for a long time. I looped back later in life to write about the Senate because I was troubled by its decline. So I wrote two books about the Senate trying to say what it was like when it worked, the last great Senate, spoiler alert, the only great Senate, and the second book, Broken Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country. I wasn't going to write a third book, but I got increasingly angry at the Senate's complete abdication in 2020 in a catastrophic year for our country. And when I say complete, I mean after the initial coronavirus relief legislation, I felt that the Senate abdicated, particularly the Senate Republicans, when we had an unhinged president with respect to the pandemic, spewing misinformation, attacking blue states, generally doing a terrible job of leading us. And it was quite clear to me by the summer that President Trump was not going to accept the results of the election if he lost it. And so I got angrier about it, and I wrote a couple of articles that appeared in USA Today and then The Hill, suggesting that the governors who were on the front line should actually press for President Trump's resignation. And everyone said, that's not going to happen. And I said, I know it's not going to happen, but this is going to be the worst. We're going to have an awful six months coming up, and somebody ought to be doing something because the senators aren't. So it prompted me to write the book, and somebody said to me, the betrayal, that's kind of a harsh title. And I said, yes, it is a harsh title. But if you think about it, those were the people who had the responsibility for being a check against a rogue president. That's their responsibility. They're supposed to be the last line of defense, maybe the first and last line of defense. And they failed completely, and they failed knowingly, and they failed again and again. So that's why I entitled the book, and that's the way I did, and that's why I wrote it. So you talk a lot about Mitch McConnell's role in facilitating, getting Republican justices on the Supreme Court. And I want to take us back to a quote from your book when you go back to 2013. And you say, back in 2013, Harry Reid had used the nuclear option to make federal judgeships other than the Supreme Court subject to majority approval without recourse to the filibuster. As sure as night follows day, McConnell would move to extend the nuclear option to the Supreme Court justices in order to get Gorsuch confirmed. McConnell ended up changing the rules in 2016 from a 60-vote threshold down from that. I'm wondering from you, did that in any way, in your opinion, pave the way for McConnell's action on Gorsuch? And is any of McConnell's behavior justified as a reaction to Reid? It's a great question, and it gets asked a lot. I'm not a huge fan of Harry Reid. I don't think he was one of the great leaders. I think he was driven to frustration and distraction by McConnell. And that's why in 2013, he ultimately used the nuclear option as it's known to get rid of the filibuster for executive and judicial nominations. I'm not sure it was a good idea. I actually think executive nominations and judicial nominations should be treated differently. I think the president, whoever he is, ought to be able to get his executive team in place. And judicial nominations, because their lifetime, should be treated differently. Having said that, every president gets to nominate a couple 100 federal judges while they're in office. And I do think the Supreme Court is different. I think that it's possible to envision that you treat the federal judges one way but not abolish the filibuster for the Supreme Court. I think it's all academic in the sense that McConnell would have done whatever he needed to do. And one of McConnell, by the way, I have sort of an obsession with McConnell. I think he would do whatever he needed to do. And my objection to McConnell's behavior is that he has routinely trashed the customs and norms that were needed to keep the Senate working. Most dramatically of court, most dramatically that we remember was the blocking of Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016 on the bogus grounds that we don't take up these nominations in an election year, unless it's Amy Coney Barrett eight days before election day was she was approved. So the trashing of norms and traditions have taken a very serious toll. He's been extraordinarily successful in what he attempted to do. But it damaged the Senate, it damaged the Supreme Court, and ultimately damaged the country. And on the Barrett confirmation, in your book, you say McConnell was justified in claiming a personal triumph of getting Barrett confirmed because, quote, no one else would have had the shameless audacity to accomplish it. What is unique about McConnell, as opposed to some other prominent voices in the Republican Senate that enables you to make this assessment specifically just about McConnell? Yeah. Well, it's always hard to prove the counterfactual, right? I mean, if there was some other leader there, how would they have behaved? But I think that if you look at the consideration of Garland, McConnell, basically even before Scalia had been dead 24 hours, McConnell came out and said, we're not taking up this nomination. It was kind of remarkable. I don't think anyone else would have done it. With Barrett, several of the Republicans had said very prominently that we're not going to take up a nomination this late. Senator Grassley, who had been the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, well, if I was still chairman, I wouldn't take up the nomination now. But because it's too close to the election, didn't stop him from voting for it, of course. But there is one of the best political journalists and authors, Michael Tomaski, who writes for the New Republic, says he said in one of his books, will, WILL, is the most overrated commodity in politics. And what he meant by that is, actually, it's not individual will. It's sort of the big forces that move people. McConnell's an exception to that. His will is why Garland was not on the court, why Barrett is on the court. He saved Kavanaugh. And he delivered an enormous triumph to his supporters with great consequences for 20 to 30 years, at least. You put all the responsibility for what you call the most catastrophic failure of government in American history on McConnell and Senate Republicans. I do. What guided you toward that point? And where do you see the House's role in all of this? Well, look, if we're going to see a terrible House right after the election, it's going to be another disastrous House if Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans are in charge of it. But let's remember that in 2018, the country concerned about what had happened in the first two years of the Trump presidency gave us a Democratic House. And in 2020, the country gave us a Democratic President in Joe Biden. The reason I focus on the Senate is that the Senate is the one that failed us. And if you go back and look, I'm pretty old at this point. I came of age during the last constitutional crisis, which was Watergate. And what we learned in Watergate, and here we are at the Ford School, right? When President Ford, Gerald Ford became president, he said, basically said, whatever he said, the famous line. It slips my mind at the moment. But he said basically that the nation was healing. What was the line, Luke? I'm missing it. Our national nightmare is over. My nightmare is I'll be in front of you and can't remember that line. So our national nightmare was over. And the country breathed a collective sigh of relief. The system had worked. So it turns out that for the system to work, every piece of the system has to work. And in this case, the House did its job. The voters did their job. The press arguably did their job. Even the courts sometimes did their job. Who failed us? The Senate failed us. They failed us in the first impeachment trial. They failed us when Trump started spewing the big lie. They failed us in the second impeachment trial, even after the insurrection. So if I accuse the Senate Republicans and McConnell of betraying the country, I think the evidence is pretty clear. They betrayed the country. They betrayed their oath of office and the country. So I want to follow up on your comment on the impeachment trial after the insurrection. So this is. Sorry about that nightmare line. The second time former president Donald Trump was impeached, seven Republicans voted to convict. You praise some of them in the book. Senator Ben Sasse is, according to reports, leaving to go become the president of the University of Florida. So seven Republicans voted to convict. McConnell, as you note in your book, said Trump was responsible for the insurrection, but not eligible to be convicted as a former president. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what you think would have happened. The Senate would have crossed the threshold to be able to convict then President Trump in the Senate, had McConnell come out and make a statement saying he was going to vote to convict. And what kind of effect do you think that would have had on the Senate? Not a shadow of a doubt. Not a shadow of a doubt. I mean, if McConnell had come out against him, Portman, Blunt, you'd go down the list. You'd have had plenty of votes for impeachment. You wouldn't have had 90, but you'd have had plenty of votes for impeachment. And McConnell, he sort of suggested, well, he suggested later, well, the votes weren't there. The votes weren't there because he wasn't. He didn't provide the leadership, even though he was outraged at Trump. But he decided that Trump was too strong still to take down. So I have this. I start the book with a couple of quotes. And one of them is a quote from the former Under Secretary of State, George Ball, who memorably opposed the escalation of the Vietnam War when President Kennedy was in office. And George Ball said, he who rides the tiger cannot choose where he dismounts. And I think that's basically what happened to McConnell and the others. They thought they could decide when to get off the tiger, Trump. And they couldn't. And they failed us again and again. And with lasting consequences, right? I mean, here we are. It's been 20 months or a lot of time since the insurrection and since the impeachment trial. And former President Trump's hold on his party is still strong. The country is still focused on Trump and Trump's big lie. And the consequences have been disastrous. So I think McConnell failed us. And by the way, well, I'm on McConnell, think about for a moment what would have happened if on November 7, three days after the election, when the Associated Press and the networks said Biden has won the election. If McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Roy Blunt and Rob Portman had said, well, tough election, but we'll be back in four years. But Joe Biden's the president-elect. I don't think the big lie would have taken off. The big lie took off in the five weeks between election day, or that November 7, and December 14. 50 million people, 70% of Trump's voters, concluded the election was stolen. They concluded it was stolen because Trump said so, and that nobody else in the Republican Party of note spoke back. So yeah, I think they're guilty of a lot of stuff. So if McConnell spoke out right after the election was called by the outlets like the AP and other outlets, do you think that senators like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, wouldn't have chosen to object and announce their intention to object leading up to January 6? I think some of them would have. But I don't think it would have been very many. I think that the big lie, once the big lie was out there for five weeks, that led to the events of January 6. If you spiked it between November 7 and December 14, you would have a different outcome. What reforms are needed in the Senate, and do you think the Senate can be saved as an institution? I mean, I have to get off my usual McConnell rant. And look, for somebody who has been interested in the Senate for a long time, I actually don't admire the Senate rules. I think the rules don't work at a number of levels. The filibuster, of course, gets the most attention. And I think the case for a supermajority requirement for legislation is very, very weak. I think it's been weak. It's historically weak. Hamilton, Madison, and the whole crowd believed in majority rule. And the Senate, for a long time, actually worked by majority rule. They only came up with the cloture procedure because you had to find some way to cut off debate. So I don't believe in the filibuster and the supermajority requirement. Nor do I believe that Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul ought to be able to wake up one day and say, I object to going forward with this nomination. I object to all those nominations. The Senate operates by unanimous consent, which I don't think it should. I think senators should be able, guaranteed the right to speak, but not the right to paralyze the institution. So yeah, I change a lot of things. And I think that one of my criticisms of McConnell and Reed in my earlier book was when they became leaders back in 2007, 15 years ago, the Senate had been in decline for a long time. Two people who were institutionalists become leaders, and they should have said, what do we do to make this place work better? They never had that conversation. Instead, they became faction leaders. I'm the Democratic leader. I'm the Republican leader. Before that, if you think about it, you would see the Senate sort of not doing well, and the leaders kind of trying to make it work. Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, they had differences, but they tried to make the thing work. McConnell and Reed never tried to make it work. And so I would change rules. And I think it's not actually that difficult if you try. They haven't looked at the rules since 1979. That's 44 years or something like that. The place isn't working. It's the only Senate we have, but they haven't done anything about it. If you came up with rule changes and said, we're not going to apply them now, but we'll apply them at a time when we don't know who will be in the majority and who will be in the minority, you might get some fair rule changes. You say the Senate failed because its members abandoned the principle of country first. How do you protect against that? Oh, well, obviously, you can't protect against it. And what we've seen is that if you don't have people who understand their responsibilities, what being a senator means, that it's going to work out badly. The last great Senate, the only great Senate, the people there, and there was a lot wrong with that Senate in the sense that it was 99 white men. And occasionally, you'd have one woman. But they understood what being a senator was. Being a senator is you're not just a member of your party. You've got to transcend that by thinking about the country. And you're not a state legislator. I mean, look, these guys and women who are always talking about their states, yes, they're supposed to care about their states a lot. And they do. But they have overriding responsibilities. And the senators who have been the great senators, or even the good ones, understood that. Country first in certain situations. Yeah, when Senator Collins, who does some useful things, and I said an old friend of mine, but when she says, we don't need federal voting rights, federal voting rights legislation, because Maine has clean elections. Well, that's OK if you're a Maine state senator. But you're supposed to be a United States senator and looking at the national picture. What sitting senators would make the best Republican and Democratic leaders? Well, that's a great question. I think Senator Schumer has proven to be a very good leader. I didn't think necessarily that he would be a great leader, but I think he's very, very good. Infinite patience, respected by everyone in his caucus, which goes from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema. And he's really done a lot to move the Senate and move the Biden agenda. There are others who would be good also. Somebody said, who should be leader if he wasn't? I said, well, Patty Murray would be good. Or any of the Chris's. Chris Coons, Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, they're all good. On the Republican side, thinner talent group. But Colin Zermarkowski would be good leaders. Ben Sasse, if he hadn't left or wasn't leaving, would be good leaders. One of the, I don't use this, except in an academic setting. But Occam's razor, the principle of Occam's razor is that the simplest explanation for a complex phenomenon is usually the right one. The simplest explanation for what happened to the Senate and what accelerated its decline was McConnell. It was in gradual decline, and then it went that way. And that's McConnell. So John Thune would be a better leader. Any number of people would be a better leader. But we've lost a lot of years. You mentioned Elizabeth Warren. She and several other Democrats in Congress have proposed the idea of expanding the court. I wonder what you make of that. Well, I think that we're going to have a vigorous debate about the court, a vigorous and bitter debate about the court. And I want to go back for a little history. When Richard Nixon ran for president and became president, one of his central pillars of his platform and what he wanted to do was to move the court to the right. He nominated six, but he got confirmed for justices in five and a half years. He moved the court to the right. Nobody ever questioned the legitimacy of the court. They didn't question it because A, the people he nominated were actually pretty high quality. And B, the confirmation process was legitimate. That's where McConnell trashed the process. The bitterness that exists over the court is A, the outcome, and B, the process. So people come forward and say, we should expand the court. And that's going to be difficult to do. My personal preference would be to invoke, basically, impose 18-year limits on terms. I think you can do that without amending the Constitution. You can do it by having the justices then take senior status, essentially, so you get around the lifetime appointment question. So I would do that. But what I would also do is I would apply it to the existing justices. So Roberts, Alito, and Thomas are gone because they'll have 18 years. And wouldn't McConnell go back and say, hey, what about 1987, the Bork confirmation process? Like, what do you make of that? His argument saying, the Democrats started this. Yeah, it's garbage, like most of his arguments. But no, no, look, you have to understand, I mean, sorry. I don't mean to say it that way. From my standpoint, the long effort of the Republicans spearheaded by the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, et cetera, to move the court to the right has been a neuromus success. I mean, they've succeeded. They've stuck with it over the years. I'm quite sure that everyone from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, they all have regrets about not doing quite enough about the courts. So I believe that that is true. The rest of it, though, is nonsense. I mean, Bork was defeated because Bork was an extremist and had the intellectual honesty to show what his views were. He was defeated. The Republicans say that started it all. Every justice after that, with the exception of Clarence Thomas, who was a special case, but every justice after that was confirmed comfortably, all of them. Republican and Democratic for years. They were all confirmed comfortably. The situation changed when Garland was blocked. That's where the bitterness got into the process, and that's what I call McConnell's bitter harvest. For the end of book, you say the 2022 Senate election should deliver what America needs, a referendum on whether to extend or end Mitch McConnell's destructive reign. Can you draw that out a little bit? Well, look, I was hoping basically that Trump's influence would have withered by now. And even if he was less of a factor, I thought it was important that people focus on the Senate elections because the Senate has been a real problem. And McConnell's destructive reign ought to end. So there's so many issues out there, and Trump is still quite prominent. And I'm afraid personally that McConnell will skate through, right? I mean, if you read Nancy Pelosi's fundraising appeals, she often hits on McConnell. But there's so much going on, so many issues up in the air, whether it's inflation on the one hand or abortion on the other hand, that I don't think people will focus the way I would have liked them to focus. But I do think that I genuinely believe that for Democrats and independents and disillusioned Republicans, all bad roads lead to and from McConnell. This is somebody who, while he's best known for what he's done to the courts, I think of him as the leading opponent to climate change policies. I think of him as, until this year, the leading opponent to gun control. I think of him as the person who tried to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and tried to block, came very close to blocking the economic stimulus in 2009, without which we'd still be in the Second Great Depression. So I think he's got a lot to answer for, and it's unfortunate if he gets away unscathed. I mean, if he gets away undefeated. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the select committee to investigate the January 6th Capitol attack, said on Meet the Press yesterday, she said she made a distinction between the way that Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader and Mitch McConnell, you know, handle Trump. She said McConnell ignores Trump and McCarthy embraces Trump. And I'm wondering if you agree with that characterization and what you make of that distinction. I think it's a correct distinction. I mean, McConnell has been very careful from, you know, for a long time, even before the election of 2020. McConnell has been very careful, you know, not to attack Trump per se, except in those two major speeches. In 2016, McConnell wasn't very happy that Trump was the nominee, but he never agonized over it. Trump was the Republican nominee. Paul Ryan could wring his hands about this and they all agonized about it. McConnell never did that. He never saw any interest in that. And I think he's still doing the same thing, basically. He's got a difficult balance to strike. And I think given his situation, he's probably handling it as well as he can. McConnell, I mean, McConnell privately, I'm sure, thinks Kevin McCarthy's a disgrace. But it's, you know, he's worried about the Senate. He doesn't, you know, McCarthy's got his own situation to deal with and he's got a very rabid group of people to deal with. And McConnell has his own problems to deal with. Have you gotten any feedback from McConnell since the book was published? No, I don't think, I don't expect to get any feedback from him. I think he, you know, he would be more inclined to just ignore the book. There are moments where I think he's been somewhat constructive this year. Is he being constructive because of the book? No, probably not. He is being, to the extent he's being constructive on certain things, he doesn't want to go to the election with a record of absolute obstructionism. So infrastructure, the CHIPS Act, the first modest gun control bill, he's done a number of things and support for Ukraine, where I think in that case, I believe that he's acting, gone back to being, acting out of conviction. I mean, McConnell is not soft on Russia. He's never been soft on Russia. He tolerated a president who was a witting tool of Putin, Putin, but McConnell himself is not soft on Russia. So I think he's behaved more respectively, but, you know, that's to get back in power or more power. I have trouble saying get back in power. He's exercised a huge amount of power as minority leader, both during Obama's years and Biden's years. The book does not strike a very hopeful tone. Are there any things that give you hope or are any source of encouragement for future progress of the Senate in your mind? Well, my wife would say that I've always been quite optimistic and therefore have been wrong about a lot of things. My second book, which came out after Trump had been in 10 months, was somewhat cautiously optimistic because I saw some Senate Republicans who really were quite concerned about the novel threat that Trump posed and I thought they understood it a little bit. Then what happened was the independent group or independent individuals, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, left, John McCain died. The best part of Lindsey Graham died with John McCain and you didn't have the critical mass anymore. So can we be optimistic? The frustrating thing is they know how to do the job, most of them. Not Ron Johnson, not Hawley, but a lot of them know how to do the job. That's why they've been able to do some legislative stuff. They know how to do the job. And so to me, the frustration has been it doesn't take that many people to turn things around. But in the context of this Republican party, I'm not sure that you have enough people to turn it around. I don't think that you can necessarily turn things around until this iteration of the party is smashed. And by the way, we're not close to Democrats and independents and disillusioned Republicans are not close to smashing it. We're quickly approaching the midterm elections. How do you envision the balance of power playing out after the midterms in the Senate? My political predictions were really good in the 20th century. I've been sufficiently wrong in the 21st century that I've kind of gotten out of prediction mode. And I try to encourage people, I try to analyze the situation, encourage people to do the right thing. There are several Senate races. We all know this, but you know, you can point to four or five Senate races, the outcome of which would change our politics for the better if Tim Ryan won or if Raphael Warnock won. Cheryl, I mean, you can go down the list. At the moment, it doesn't look according to the polls and according to the Cook Political Report, it doesn't look that good for some of those races. We'll just have to see what happens. But, you know, the problem at the moment, the Senate is my lens on this thing. But the problem is the nature of the Republican Party and its embrace of what President Biden has said, semi-fascism, that's a real problem. The John Danforths or the Bill Cohen's or Al Simpson or Spence Abraham or a lot of Republicans, John Kasich, Governor Kasich in Ohio, they've got no place in this party. I mean, they're where Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger is, but there haven't been enough of them yet. And I think we're at the time where we can open up for questions from the audience. Oh, come on, there's gotta be a question. They're all here. Can you hear me? Yeah. So, first question. Inflation is a major midterm issue more than the threat to democracy. Is that a problem in your view? Yes, I mean, look. Inflation is a terrible problem in our country, although it's a worldwide problem. I mean, our inflation is less than what they're facing in Europe, certainly. And so there's certain things that can be done about it, but not that much. Whereas the threat to democracy is uniquely our problem. I mean, that's our problem. So when I read a headline that says, as I have, the voters think that democracy is in jeopardy, but they're not, it's not a priority for them. I think they've got it wrong. And look, I mean, I'm a Democrat, obviously, but I think Joe Biden has done a very good job under an extraordinary set of circumstances. If you look at the American economy and compare it to anything else in the world, it's doing pretty well. So, yeah, I mean, inflation's a real problem. And I understand that people will, and there are other issues that the Democrats have not excelled on. But in general, if you're talking about Biden versus Trump, Biden versus McConnell, I think the outcome should be clear, but it isn't. Thank you. The next question. Critical issues like climate change, inequality, housing shortage, and the Russian-Ukraine conflict are pushing the Senate into higher levels of responsibility, example, an increasing awareness of its power. The question is, can we expect the Senate and McConnell to hit a critical point of lucidity and take needed action, or are we heading down a slippery slope of pseudo-fascism or otherwise total abdication? Well, that's a great question. And, you know, I don't pretend to, even after all this time, I don't pretend to exactly know McConnell's mind. I mean, I know some things, you know, I can infer some things about it. He's 80 years old, and one would like to think that he might want to do something. I mean, look, my book is very fair to McConnell. I give him credit for everything he's done for the country, but it didn't take many pages. So maybe if he's 80 years old and he gets back in power, maybe he would do something for the country. I wouldn't count on it. You know, I think that the only thing that changes our politics is delivered by the voters. If the voters emphatically rejected the Republican, what the Republicans have been doing and standing for, that would make a difference. If we have a close and ambiguous result, then I don't think we're gonna make a lot of progress. It'll just get kicked over to the next election, and maybe there'll be clarity then. But the point is, what's frustrating to me is we had that kind of election in 2008. When Obama was elected. We had a president won, the House was Democratic by a lot, the Senate was Democratic by a lot, and McConnell managed to obstruct it and diminish what the Obama presidency could have accomplished. So I think that having what I call a bad faith actor at the center of the political process has been very harmful to the country. Almost like a follow-up question. Is the problem the Republican senators or the Republican voters who perhaps they fear and cannot lead until Trump is gone? Well that's a great question that gets asked, and I certainly think that I think certainly the Republican senators are very conscious of President, former President Trump's hold on the voters, many of the voters. But again, from my standpoint, they created this problem. They created this problem by not standing up to Trump. They created this problem by avoiding every possible opportunity to make things work. You know, the question gets asked, is the country divided because of the voters? Or is it divided because of the leaders? I actually think the leaders are responsible for the divisions, and I think the distance between the leaders is worse than most of the voters. You can get more common sense solutions from voters than you can from this crowd of Republican leaders. So the other question here is, what does McConnell's hold over Senate Republicans? I think the, again, another great question. I think that there is considerable respect for him because they believe that he understands the needs of the Republican senators. There's no one who understands the donor base of the Republican Party better, and there's no one who raises as much money and spreads it around. So you know, you can say, as Trump does, Trump attacks McConnell, you can't find senators attacking McConnell. So there was an article, might be six weeks ago. Democrats were very excited about this article that said that the Republicans fundraising wasn't going very well. And then there was a small thing at the bottom that said that McConnell's leadership pack had a hundred million dollars and was giving 28 million to J.D. Vance in Ohio. McConnell's leadership pack has not a hundred million dollars. It has closer to four or 500 million dollars. And so he is, you know, the Senate Campaign Committee may not be raising money. The individuals may not be raising money. McConnell's crowd raises the money. And so people stay loyal to him. Here's a question related to Democrats. Should Democrats play by Mitch McConnell's rules to combat him and the destruction of the Senate and country? You know, it's, Michelle Obama famously said, when they go low, we go high. And the debate about what you do to deal with McConnell or worse, even, how do you respond to that? Do you go as low as they do? And it's a real challenge for, I think, for Biden and for Schumer particularly. You know, these are real, they're good faith players. Joe Biden would like to work, he has said, and he means it. He'd work with anybody who's willing to work with him. And that's why they've done some things on a bipartisan basis. So he will attempt to do what he can on a bipartisan basis. And when he can't, he'll try to do it without McConnell and Republicans. But I think that it's a race, if you get into a race to the bottom, things get pretty bad. And so my answer to this basically is that the voters need to turn out some of these people. And then the Republicans say, well, maybe having crack-brained senators or crack-brained candidates, Blake Masters and Herschel Walker and these other people, maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Maybe we ought to try something a little more reasonable. In the New York Times magazine profile this past Sunday, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the House would impeach Biden if the GOP takes control in the midterms. Do you think the Senate would vote to convict if that actually happened? No, of course not. I think the Senate would not vote to convict. I think that, well, here's another. Here's one of my favorite McConnell things. McConnell and Lindsey Graham after the first impeachment trial, they said they were outraged about the first partisan impeachment. Well, far as I can remember, Bill Clinton was impeached for his behavior with Monica Lewinsky on a purely partisan basis, except he had done nothing to sort of damage the constitutional order. So yeah, I think McCarthy and his crowd will probably try to impeach Biden and they may succeed in doing that. I hope they won't put the country through it. You'd like to think there'd be a handful of Republicans who would say, in the House, a handful who would say, there's no grounds for impeaching Joe Biden. We should defeat him. We defeated him in this election by getting back to House. We should defeat him or if he retires, we should defeat someone else. But impeachment, there's no basis for that. There was a basis for impeaching Trump in the first impeachment. There was a basis for impeaching Trump in the second impeachment. So if McCarthy and those, the crowd impeaches Biden, it's one step further toward the loss of our democracy. A question here about the impeachment proceedings. Do you believe that if the second impeachment conviction vote was held anonymously, Trump would have been convicted? Even if McConnell publicly said he would convict, would that have been enough? It was anonymous, of course he would have been convicted. And if McConnell had been willing to show some courage, the others, as we said, I think a group of others would have followed him. But for McConnell, in my book, I quote Ben Sasse, who by the way, I think will be a loss that he's leaving the Senate. I quote Sasse, Sasse said in voting for a conviction, some things are beyond calculation. For McConnell, nothing's ever beyond calculation. And that's one of the problems. Some things should be beyond calculation. You don't figure out, here's somebody who's sort of organized an assault on the democracy, tried to block the peaceful transfer of power, all the stuff that has come out from the great work of the January 6th committee. The details are extraordinarily important, they're doing a great job. We kind of knew the broad outline of it before they even started. Question about your book, what do you seek to accomplish by publishing your book? And do you believe you have a role in undoing the current national polarization? I think I wanted to get the history right. I think it's really important in a period of alternative facts and outright lies to try to get the history right. And so I tried to get the history right through my lens. And I should have said my lens, the Senate thing, it's an alternative lens on the events of the last of the Trump years and since then. Everyone focuses on Trump understandably. I focus on why the system wasn't strong enough to combat Trump or to where was the checks and balances that the framers thought they were putting in place. So A, I wanted to get the history right. B, I wanted to write an account of McConnell's destructive legacy, which is part of the history. C, you'd like to remind people of what senators are supposed to be in the hope that maybe they'll behave better. You know, I think some of them feel guilty about the role they've played or haven't played. So there's a lot of reasons for writing the book. And I think all of us, everyone has a part to play in trying to save the democracy, which is in jeopardy. And so I try to use my Senate background to do that. Played my part. A question here. It's come up in my classes and elsewhere time and time again. Would you say Donald Trump is a cause or a symptom of the current illiberal political climate taking hold in the West and elsewhere? It's a great question. I think he's both. I think, and I emphasize, of course, here we go again with McConnell, but I emphasize the fact that before Donald Trump came down the escalator and ran for president, our system wasn't in good shape. So in that sense, you know, Trump is not responsible for everything. And he, you know, our politics was broken. Our government was paralyzed and somewhat dysfunctional, despite Obama's efforts and others. So Trump's not responsible for everything. Having said that, it turns out an American president, an American president particularly who came up with a very special megaphone through his tweets. He found a new way to communicate that other presidents hadn't had. An American president can have an enormous amount of, an enormous effect. So I think Trump didn't cause everything, but he's caused a lot of things. And worldwide, actually. You know, if the world's leading democracy can have a president like this and have a systemic breakdown like this, it feeds authoritarianism everywhere. I guess the final question is, where do we go from here? Where do we go from here? The Senate stands as an unrepresentative institution currently, and many of the voters, it does represent support Trump and Republicans' undemocratic ideas. There aren't even the votes to reform the institution. If Republicans won't change, how do you advise Democrats to gain more power and voter support? Well, I advise them to win elections. I do advise them to win elections and to contest elections all over the country and not concede Chuck Grassley's eighth term in Iowa, et cetera. So I advise them to win elections. You know, the two senator per state rule, which strikes us as extraordinarily anti-democratic, it's contrary to what we would believe in. It's interesting that when the Senate worked pretty well, nobody complained about that. When you had real senators from all kinds of small states, red state senators who were Democrats and blue state senators who were Republicans, you know, nobody really worried about it. So the partisan division has made everything worse. So I have this idea, I mean, I think there'll be a lot of debate about the Senate. One thought I have, and I haven't thought it through fully yet, is we ought to enlarge the Senate. I'm starting with DC and Puerto Rico, but I would enlarge the Senate by electing maybe 10 national senators and that might elevate the nature of the Senate and make people remember what the Senate is supposed to be. Other commentators have said, instead of doing that, just abolish the thing. I don't think it's gonna happen so I'm trying to figure out something else. Well, I think that's the end of our conversation. I appreciate everybody for coming out, and thank you. Let me, thanks for such a great session, and Chris, thank you for those good questions and the questions from the floor. If I can say a word about my book, because we're not selling it per se here, it can be bought by Amazon, but more important, this week, there's actually, Bob Reich, a great champion of democracy, called my, when it came out, called my book a gripping narrative, and now it actually is. There's an audio version of the book that just came out, which is read by a great actor who has read James Patterson's novels and Michael Connolly novels, so when you're running or doing the exercise on, you ought to listen to my book. It's really, I've only listened to a little of it, but it's quite riveting. So anyway, thank you all.