 You're known as one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his behavior on January 6th. In fact, this is the way that the New York Times is characterizing your Senate run. Peter Meyer, a Republican who voted to impeach Trump is running for Senate. Given what the GOP has become though, we've seen this glide path to the nomination that Trump is on, how big a problem is that for you in terms of being viable in a Republican primary? I frankly don't think it's much of a problem. I think there's, I was just having this conversation earlier, there's an interesting dynamic where from, and I'm not labeling reason as sort of media, quote unquote, you are obviously a media organization, but in like the broader media narrative, everything can be reduced down to these, these kind of polar dynamics, right? You're either pro or anti or on one side or the other. I never called myself somebody who was anti-Trump or never Trump. I took serious issue up to and including obviously voting to impeach the former president for his actions on January 6th. I thought that that was worthy of both condemnation and also worthy of a adjudication in the Senate because that was a dark and shameful day in the American people deserve to hear the facts presented and for the president and then former president to make his case. The reality I think of so, well, the reality that escapes so much of our politics and where it becomes challenging is, I don't accept that you have to be all one thing or all the other that you're in either the black box over here or the white box over here. I try to call bulls and strikes. I try to be as honest a broker as I can of not excusing something that I would have condemned had it been somebody of the opposite party doing. And I think that's something I grew up despising politicians for watching John Stewart back when he was actually funny and seeing him playing clips of a member of Congress arguing against the two year prior version of themself on the same issue with the only difference being who was the president and they supported it when their guy did it and they opposed it when the other guy's other person's guy did it. I think that leads to the cynicism we have. And so that's who I try not to be. I try to have that consistent approach, try to call balls and strikes being honest broker. And at the end of the day, I can honestly say I would vastly prefer even maybe my least favorite Republican candidate to a second Joe Biden administration. Why were so many of your colleagues such cowards when it comes to the impeachment vote? There were certainly plenty of folks who had what I would say are kind of sincere and reasonable objections. The vast majority of folks will just, and this is not limited to that vote on almost everything. It would say, well, there are safety in numbers whereas everybody else going, I'll just follow suit. But to me, that's just the definition of like moral cowardice, right? Like when push comes to shove, they're not willing to actually be leaders in any way and assess the evidence in front of them and say, the stolen election claims are fairly bogus. They can be adjudicated via the court system. In many cases, they ultimately were and judges consistently ruled that they were not very credible and the actual actions that people took on January 6th were pretty abominable. Really an attempt to impede the ability to appropriately register people's political preferences. I'm sorry, but like I just, am I missing anything or is that a pretty clear cut situation where there's just an extraordinary moral cowardice problem among Republicans right now? Oh, I mean, the sort of line is you never have to explain why you voted no on something, but if you vote yes, somebody will always find something to take fault. Again, I had some colleagues who would agree with everything you said, but would say, well, they read the article of impeachment and they were uncomfortable that it was alleging a criminal action. Again, not a criminal process, but that it didn't have a kind of broader dereliction of duty. There were actually Republicans who were trying to work with Nancy Pelosi on having a more limited article who had committed to voting in favor of it, but she said, no, we're going with what we drafted because her goal was to have as few Republicans in support as possible. I'm gonna save a lot of that for a memoir, but I mean, the reality is, and again, the way I look at things, change the party, change the person who's doing it from somebody who's on my side to oppose or somebody who's opposed to me to being on my side. If that changes how I view the action, then my ethics are clearly only situational and I should find something that I can be consistent about. There's going to be votes that are shirts and skins, there's going to be things that, what is a sticking point to you in the minority you might be comfortable with if you're in the majority or vice versa, but the sort of just reflexive approach where it doesn't seem like anybody actually believes anything. Yeah, I don't abide that, I don't like that. I saw plenty of it, it disgusted me. I enjoyed quietly being like, now you voted this way in the effort to hold, Eric Holder in contempt, but how are you making the distinction between this? And to some of my colleagues' credit, they would say, okay, honestly, like I can find two or three distinctions, but I don't really believe in it, like some of this just comes down to shirts and skins. But it's pretty- I don't want to glide over what you said earlier, which is that you say that you would support even your most disliked Republican over the, a second Joe Biden term, least favorite Republican. So we can possibly put Donald Trump into that category. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but why is that given your sincere kind of principled and moral objections to what went down around the election, what have the behavior on January 6th and post January 6th and just these ongoing legal cases hanging over his head, what is it that still makes that more appealing than a second Biden term? No, I mean, I would say to me, the two most pivotal days in my time in Congress were January 6th of 2021 and August 15th of 2021 when Afghanistan collapsed. And my, you know, both were moments where a lot of folks that I had thought better of or systems I had thought, you know, had some competency, you know, were really shown, the shine was totally off, you know, both of those respective apples. You know, one on the domestic political side, the other, you know, in our kind of incompetency of our national security apparatus and the unwillingness of a lot of people to, you know, gauge and react to appropriate risks. But is it fair to lay the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal completely at Biden's feet? I mean, wasn't there a certain inevitability that, you know, if we were to pull back, there was gonna be a collapse of the government there? And I wanna be very clear, you know, I think there was a, we could spend an hour on this. My specific way in which I felt, you know, very much betrayed and felt like that was sort of a betrayal by proxy of a lot of the folks who had, you know, hinged on us. When Biden announced that he was going to withdraw, you know, by then said September 11th and then it was moved up to September 1st, that was in April of 2021. And I was supportive of that, I was supportive of Trump's effort to withdraw. We immediately had a bipartisan group of us working in Congress saying, okay, we still got a lot of folks who supported us, this special and Grin visa program, what can we do to, you know, now that we have a timeframe, now that we have sort of a final clock that should light a bit of a fire to go and process all of this. It was roadblock after roadblock. Those flights only started leaving, I think the first one was on July 29th and it was 200 people a day, not every day. And then within two weeks, the entire, you know, kind of country collapsed and we were left with the mass evacuation that we had. When I say we encountered roadblock after roadblock, some of it was just bureaucratic and competency, making sure everything goes through the interagency process, yada, yada, yada. And there was also, I think, a great fear on behalf of the Biden administration that the evacuation of, you know, Afghans, which was supported in a bipartisan way, this was very much not a controversial issue, you know, that that would end up getting compared or draw light to the problems that we were having on the Southern border, which even at that time, the Biden administration was aware of and were paranoid of that becoming a larger media focus because they thought it would be so politically damaging to them or raise uncomfortable questions. Now, you know, that fear that led to basically the, you know, evacuation of Afghans who had supported the United States forces that we had a commitment to, that ultimately was really the inflection point that tanked as approval rating. And so I both have, you know, a deep feeling of kind of personal betrayal from that and just it's still kind of a knife in my gut that I still feel is very sharp. Combined with my overall long-term view of what is going to be better for the country, I think that overall, where the root of so much social chaos and disorder is going to come from, what will be the number one exacerbating factor that will certainly be capitalized to expand the size scale and scope of federal government to turn a ratchet in ways that we can't ratchet back is if we encounter significant and severe and persistent economic uncertainty and unrest, that will make everything worse. I think that's where I come down to. And Biden is more likely to deliver that in your opinion. I mean, I would be very open to someone making the counter argument. You know, what I saw in Congress in terms of the administration ramming through policies that even some of my Democratic colleagues knew would be economically harmful, but they didn't feel like they could stop or have a voice to say no. The insane like post COVID spending bills, yeah. The American Rescue Plan was probably, I think the consensus estimates, at least three to four points, or sorry, at least two and a half to three points of the inflation that we saw could be solely attributed to the 1.9 trillion coming out of that. We're always gonna have some inflation just with COVID. I think there were some well-intended policies that I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt on. And then when you're passing policies when there's very clearly no economic imperative to do so. And it's just all sort of a partisan grab bag. That buck stops at the president's office. But the broader challenge and issue that we have, I mentioned sort of legislative supremacy, our executive branch is far too powerful. The fact that we feel like if you elect the wrong president, the country is going to take a nosedive. A lot of that problem is because of the office. I think the office of the president is one of the most dangerous institutions in the Western world right now because of how much power, both through Supreme Court decisions and through legislative ineptitude, incompetence, or inattention has ultimately accrued into that office. And that to me is far more important than who the individual office holder is and what their policies are. I sincerely appreciate the argument that you're making and the pragmatism that you're talking about with regard to how Joe Biden has actively made the inflationary situation so much worse in a way that harms people's budgets. And then that incubates a certain amount of political unrest that stems from that. I am very sympathetic to all of that, but I'm still struggling with this fundamental idea that if push came to shove, you would feel more comfortable supporting Trump than Biden in seeking another term. I mean, are you concerned about Trump's co-opting of the Republican, the degree to which the Republican party has been totally co-opted and corrupted under Trump, as well as, I mean, you have been such an ardent voice against a lot of the election conspiracy theory stuff. How do we know that that's not going to get worse in a way that fundamentally threatens American democracy and our institutions? Yeah, and this is where I always try to be, understand, okay, well, let me try to have a consistent standard again, that notion of being consistent, understanding the components and depths of a problem, the numbers of Democratic voters who viewed the 2016 election as illegitimate or the mirror image of Republican voters who viewed 2020 as illegitimate, that doesn't excuse Republicans doing that. And obviously the post-2020 election period was dramatically different than the post-2016 election period. But to me it says this is a, the problem that's underlying this is more widespread, right? The violence on January 6th and the violence that we saw over the summer of 2020, again, neither excuses or should allow anyone to condone one while condemning the other. I think both are worthy of condemnation and both may have degrees of difference in various attributes, but the common thread is it was a large group of people expressing a frustration that they felt could not be resolved within the system. So they engage in activities that were attacking the system from without rather than working from within. So again, my broader view is while not condoning either is to say, well, let's look at what is underpinning some of this, what is the problem beneath the problem? Because that, if we don't address it, if we don't get at some of those issues of institutional trust, if we don't have a government that feels like it is representing everybody that there are minimal incompetent moments that are going to be highlighted because with social media and the internet is a lot easier to highlight them. If we reduce the amount of times where someone looks at the government and says, what are these trying to swear less, but insert your profanity of choice guys doing, then maybe we can get to the point where that temperature is kind of boiled down. The challenge is from one partisan position to the other, it's well, let me condemn all the things that I can on the other side and then find convenient ways of rationalizing my own. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify or any other podcatcher. See you next week.