 Unfortunately, today, we don't have Danielle Conway, Sandra Sims, Bill Harrison, Ray Dean. With us all had schedule conflicts. They'll be back in two weeks and we'll have a lively session. So to keep today's lively, we have the man himself, Jay Fadal, the head of think tech, former highly respected lawyer, and there aren't many of those. So Jay, welcome. What's going on that captures your attention? Well, you know, we have a situation on our hands where now we have the completed ticket. We have Biden and Kamala Harris. And I am hoping that they can respond to Trump on a daily basis. He was in the briefing room today at the White House and I didn't catch it all, but he was making some really outrageous statements. And what we have needed for the last three and a half, almost four years, is somebody to answer those statements instead of letting him get away with it. We have let him get away with it. You know, you can't count on the media to call him on everything. You know, you need some secondhand clapping. We haven't had that really. So maybe now, maybe now we'll have that. But to go a step further on it. Let's assume in a kind of optimistic moment, Chuck, that this is subject to some discussion that Biden wins, Biden and Harris wins. Despite Trump's attempts, which are Herculean to screw up the election, to cheat in every way possible and screw up the election. But let's assume for a moment that Biden and Harris win. So the question I would put to you, the question for discussion is, what then? We have a lot of things that have failed. You know, in our last show, we talked about how the, how Trump has hollowed out the State Department. All the expertise is gone. The Secretary of State is by no means an expert in foreign policy. There is no foreign policy. And so we have a lot of fences to mend. And that's just one of dozens and dozens of issues and functions that have failed in this administration. So what does Biden, what does Biden and Harris do? Because they have their work cut out for him, for both of them. And it's a legal question. How do you put Humpty back together again? And that's an optimistic view of the matter because Humpty is not going to come back together again automatically. There are still people out there. They were the base, the ultra rights. They're going to oppose any effort by the next administration to correct, to fix, to repair what Trump has done in this administration. So it'll be, it'll be contentious. It won't be easy and they will have to develop a plan on, I made a list of about 20 separate things plus, you know, to fix the country. So what comes to your mind on the top of the priority list for what they have to do. I think the biggest advantage that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have is completely unlike Trump, who for four years has never had a team. Every flunky he puts in there to do his bidding, even the ones who attempt to do it, screw it up and have to be replaced, maybe because they have an honest moment or whatever. But one of the wonderful things about this VP sifting and winnowing process is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have available to them. An exceptionally talented experienced diverse wealth of teammates to run this country and to fix the broken things in it. They've got people like Susan Rice on foreign policy. They've got people like Elizabeth Warren on domestic policy. They've got people like Cory Booker, Tammy Duckworth, other really strong leaders out there. They don't have to just depend on Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to try and hold the marginal line against the incursions and encroachments of a truly corrupt leadership and party. They can actually bring a truly exceptional team of high integrity, high experience, high ability people to the table. And I think if there's one thing that's going to make a difference in this country is the movement from an extremely corrupt dishonest bigoted individual leadership who has cowered his entire political party into abject innocence with everything he does to tear down the environmental protection administration to tear down the post office to tear down the courts to tear down every institution that we depend on for the checks and balances against that kind of corruption. And I think what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris offered is a team who is dedicated to exactly that type of diversity and strength, knowledge, experience and integrity that can offer to bring back the kind of leadership and the kind of rank and file mid-level leadership in government that we're going to need to fix all the things that have been getting broken from last. Yeah, as much as I would like to say that the Senate will flip, I don't think we can be sure of that. If the Senate flips, they can really do stuff. We've got the House of Democratic, the Senate Democratic. It'll be a dream come true. But if the Senate doesn't flip, then you have the same thing that we've had the last two administrations. Obama had the problem of not being able to get Congress to do any of his initiatives. They were determined to make them look bad. So he wound up getting into this rhythm of proclamations, some of which were questionable. Trump, you know, followed suit on that. And he does business by proclamations all the time. I bet you didn't know that the president can lay huge, multi-multi-hundred billions of dollars tariffs on any country anytime he wants, and then go up, go down, add more, take away, use it as a personality tool. I bet you didn't know the president could do all that stuff all by himself. And I don't know the law on that, but he's gotten away with it. Nobody's called him on it. Nobody's taken him to court on it. And he's mucked up our foreign policy with it. So there'll be a lot of other things where, in that case, in the case that the Senate doesn't flip, where Biden and Harris will have to rely on proclamations, they won't necessarily have the benefit of a Congress that will cooperate with them. This makes the chore of repairing the country. I call it fixing Humpty more difficult. So it's an unpacked situation. So let's, for example, this administration hasn't done anything about election security. That's because Trump doesn't want election security. He wants the power to screw up the election, and he's doing that. Every day, every moment he's doing that. As hard as he can, he's trying to screw the election up. Just what he complains about. He's, you know, a rigged election. He's trying to rig the election. So how do you fix that? Biden and Harris are in there. They don't have the benefit of a unified Congress or Congress that's cooperative even. How do they fix it? Got an idea? I think the silver lining in it is the fact that Trump has now taken ruling by executive order, especially in the last two years, to a new high, so that you can start with rebuilding those institutions that we rely on to rebuild our environment, our educational system, all of those things. Once you start enabling new leadership who are dedicated to the beliefs and values and ideals that this country grew on, you put those people back in charge of those agencies and those people then instill in middle management the ones who will carry out that rebuilding. Got it. I got so proclamations, you know, executive orders, and you have various, you know, departments in the government who now have qualified competent committed people who want to do the right thing. What about statutes? A lot of the problems that we have now, I think will have to be handled and corrected by statutes if the Congress is not unified and cooperative, and it has not been for sure under McConnell. It has not done anything, and it has stymied the entire Congress on so many things, nearly everything. So if that condition persists, how can you have statutes to correct the problems? We need to question the assumption that statutory changes are the key to restoring the political health and the economic health and the physical health of the country. I'm not sure that they are. If the administrative agencies are populated by people who are dedicated to the values that traditionally they have been, whether it's the environment or education or any of the other institutions, health, intelligence, foreign policy, any of those. Unless somebody stops them in the courts, they're welcome to go ahead and make the reforms and changes that restore the protections for the values of the society and institutions aside. So I don't know that we need statutes. For some things, the President can do, I hate to say this, but what Trump has been doing with proclamations and executive orders and instructing his appointees, you know, go forward. Now, one of the problems about his appointees, a footnote point, is that a lot of his appointees he never sought consent for, and they never did get consent. There's a problem about accountability there. But if he did, but Biden did try to get consent to a Senate that is not flipped. He may not be able to get consent. This is a real problem. You talk about putting more competent people in there, but if they don't, if they presented for consent, then there is no consent. What happens then? It's a rhetorical question. No, it's actually a real question. It's a really good one because one huge difference, if Biden and Harris win, is if you have the administrative agencies populated with people of integrity and conscience as their leaders, and if you have the DOJ populated with people of integrity and conscience, you're not going to have the government trying to stop those reforms. You're going to have the government supporting those reforms in the courts. It changes the balance and the tilt of the playing field hugely. One of the weapons that Trump has wielded is getting Bill Barr to go out there and directly interfere with our legal system and to get away with it in a lot of ways. There are some judges, Emmett Sullivan in D.C., and others who have stood up to him, Amy Berman, and others, but we're not expecting to see courts at the trial level resisting a government push from both administrative agencies and supported by the administration and the DOJ to bring about reforms that protect the values and institutions of the country. Well, you know, you talk about the courts. Of course, the courts are a factor here, and he's managed to appoint something close to 200 judges. All of them are, he believes, are sworn to him, loyal, and who he believes are right-wing judges. And they're there in the federal system. They're there for life. That exceeds any term by Biden or Harris. And some of them are, you know, some of the judges are going to see the light. They're going to protect the democracy, even judges who be appointed. But I would suggest that other judges that he's appointed are not. They're beyond hope. So you run into a kind of minefield with the courts. And then remember the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court itself is a minefield. So, you know, I don't think we can count on the Supreme Court to validate the new vision of the Biden-Harris administration. The courts in general are like an unknown, and maybe there are problems, and the Supreme Court is a problem. What are we going to do there? Because at the end of the day, you know, Biden's adversaries are going to take it to court, and they're going to believe that the courts will support the Trumpian view of things. But that's still a definite minority of judges. Trump was hoping to get up to a quarter of all the federal judges by the end of the year. That process, at least currently, has slowed down substantially. He's filled all of the appellate federal spots, but not so many of the district court spots. That's where things start. I think the difference of not having the DOJ on the side of trying to tear down protections for the society is going to make a big difference to how courts are going to deal with things. If Trump loses, and if he loses, there will be some change in the Senate. It may still be close to even, or it may even still be a Republican majority. But it's not going to be Republican-controlled in a party-line sense because the more erosion there is in the electoral results for the Republicans, the more likely it is for those who have already started to split off from Trump to start being available for bargaining on issues and trade-offs on issues. They're still going to be pork barrel people. They're going to be trade-offs. So I think what happens at the bargaining table, both in the Congress and in the administrative agencies and therefore the society, and as a result in the courts, that whole balance shifts if Biden and Harris win, and they populate the administrative agency leadership with their people, because ultimately judges still have to follow precedent to some extent. They can't just say, Trump appointed me. I'm going to do what he would have wanted me to do, even though the country has now thoroughly rejected him. Well, don't say thoroughly, because even if they vote him out, he's going to be around, and he's going to continue to make a mess, and he's going to continue to provoke and send dog whistles to his base, and he's going to look to have Jared Kushner run for office the next opportunity, which I have no comment on that. That's ridiculous. But I wanted to ask you the big question, the money question. You know, a lot of the initiatives, and we have a list of 20 things here to talk about. We're not going to get through them all. Trust me. But all these issues that need to be repaired and fixed and reversed that Trump has screwed up in the course of his administration, a lot of them cost money. And to get a budget through, they say the house is the deliberative body that does the money, but it still needs the Senate in order to pass the budget. And for that matter, if the Senate doesn't flip, you won't be able to get a budget through. You won't be able to spend the money. Look what's happening right now. Right now with, with, you know, an emergency life and death situation for millions of Americans, the Senate went home. They're going to be home for weeks. And so what is going on here. That's completely immoral. But that's what we get. That's what we get in a Trump world. So how do we get the money necessarily to make the changes that you and I would like to see happen when Biden, if Biden wins. That's exactly the difference. Trump's entire administration has been negative and destructive. He has sought to tear down Obamacare healthcare for tens of millions of people. He has sought to tear down funding support for the sectors of society that depend on it to be able to provide our essential workers. If that shifts, and the push from Biden Harris and their administration and their team is to rebuild infrastructure, jobs, income, education, healthcare, even if the Senate is close to 5050 or even slightly the unpopularity of resisting rebuilding, build back better is too risky for that many Republicans. We won't need many, if two or three jump ship and start to say, we recognize this has to happen. We will need some trade offs for that. We need some port barrel for that. But if you'll do that, yes, we will build infrastructure. We will support jobs and income. We will support the healthcare system to really build preparedness for the pandemic, because we're not only incapable of dealing with what's out there now. We're not only capable of having an administration that resists any steps toward rebuilding and preparedness for the next wave. What I thought was interesting in the course of this administration is if Trump said that he was going to veto a bill, the Senate wouldn't even consider it. So that kind of, we're going to call it loyalty, upside down loyalty, the founders would be spinning in their grave over that, you know, really demonstrates the corruption that has entered into the federal government at the managerial level. And even if, let me offer this thought, even if McConnell stayed, even if he wins in Kentucky, even if he's got enough Republicans in the Senate to allow him to continue as the leader, the dynamic is different. The paradigm has changed, because now he doesn't have Trump there to, you know, have that unholy relationship between the two of them. Now he has to deal with Biden and Harris, it's different. Now I don't know if it'll turn all the way upside down, but it'll be different. See, I think your points are really important one, Jake. One of the huge questions is, if Biden and Harris win, what happens in the leadership of the Republican Party? It's not going to still be one guy sending the signals and everybody else following sheep like lobster. There will be change in the Republican leadership. And there isn't anybody out there right now that has the charisma, the courage or the backing to be able to command that kind of support. That's going to be the question. Nancy Pelosi hit it on the head. If the Republicans lose, they not only are in disarray, they will be in disarray. They have no one but Trump to look to for leadership, but if he loses, they won't, they can't. So let's look at just one of the issues. I mean, I'll read the list just so that people can see what we would like to talk about and maybe in future shows. You can cover, you know, you can unpack some of these things. Election security. Dealing with the pandemic, that's really important because actually this administration hasn't done anything. When he gets up there and he says, we're working and we've done strong things and powerful things. He actually hasn't done anything. He's abrogated his role completely to the states and the cities. I find it amazing. Anyway, the next administration is going to have to deal with it. All these people you're talking about the ones who quit or were fired. The administration is going to have to rehire them or replace them. This is this is going to be repopulating the entire federal government. A lot of those agencies have been hollowed out starting with State Department. The national economy. It's in tatters. It's good and as a lag, of course, it's going to take a long time before whatever action is taken will actually make it work again. You have to, you know, somehow reinvigorate all these businesses that will have failed and they're failing every day. The national debt. We've spent trillions and we've wasted and squandered and in corrupt fashion. Is it any surprise that when you throw trillions of dollars around, Trump and his friends are taking part of that money for themselves? Who is left to question him about it? Who is left to stop him? That's what's happening. Police violence on the streets that obviously the brown shirt maneuver in Portland did not improve that. It made it worse. So somebody has to deal with it as a national issue, not city by city and certainly not brown shirts. That's very scary business and wait, he might do that again. Bigotry and racism. He's done dog whistles about bigotry and racism from back in Charlottesville. Some of those very fine people happen to be bigots. Remember that one? Gun control. One of the oldest issues. Remember all the children, all the people, the night clubs, you know, the groups, I mean, shot dead 50 at a time. We have not, can I remind you, Chuck, we haven't done anything zero, zero after all of that about gun control. I think that's got to be on Biden's plate. Not necessarily going to be easy because there's two constituencies there. Investigations and accountability in the government. In the inspector's general and either quit or been fired. Investigations have been, you know, completely undermined. Think of Mueller. You know, a gold plated gold standard investigator. He was made a monkey of immigration, huge, big. Can you imagine all the work that's going to have to go into that to fix that up to make it moral again. To deal with all of those issues. We needed immigration reform before, but now we need it 10 times more education. Betsy DeVos has done a remarkable job in screwing up the American education system. It's got to be, it's got to be completely revised now to get back and to do better. Look at the environment, look at the environment and climate change. He's turned his back. I can go on. I'm not finished yet. There's another 10 of them. So anyway, my point is that each one of these things is going to require a campaign. It's going to require champions in the Congress. It's going to require a lot of staffing a lot of reading, writing, publicity, public advocacy. This is a job for a Superman. What's your reaction. It's a job for a super team. And I think that's exactly the difference between what Biden and Harris offer and bring and what Trump has done. This has evolved to a one man destructive force to tear things down and block things. People are now suffering as a result. The pandemic has to be managed and controlled for the economy to rebound for education, health, and all of our sectors to rebound. We need to take a concerted team approach coordinated and collaborative. I think that's what Biden and Harris off. So in our last minute. Any last words. Yes. I think that the job to just get back to stability stability I'm not asking, you know, bring back the old stability that be the slogan of my hat. You know, make America great again just make America stable and undo all the instability that this administration that this man has done all the damage he's done. I think that's going to take more than four years. I think that's going to take a couple of terms at best. And then Biden and Harris left to work on that 24 by seven. They'll have to get all those really bright and noble people back into government. A lot of people left government they're not inclined to come back somebody has to make a call right. And somebody has to bring them in and convince them, can you please help your, your country. I don't slogan mask not what your country can do for you mask what you can do for your country. You notice the term mask. But anyway, my thought is that it's going to take a long time. And the bottom line on it is that we have to be supportive and patient, and we have to help him through this. And we have to offer ourselves to government, and we have to offer ourselves to a much noble, nobler, kinder, gentler way of putting this country back together. And as we wrap up, I'm going to leave us with one word. The most important thing to be rebuilt in this society is equality in all sectors. We'll take that up next week, or two weeks from now with Danielle Sandra bill and redeem, and you're welcome to join us then, if you have time. Thanks everyone.