B (5:00)

Yeah, it makes what the Georgia Secretary of State and the Georgia governor did in the 2020 election, especially the Secretary of state, and saying, I'm not going to find you 7180 votes or whatever I'm going to get. I mean, it makes what he did just so tremendously important that that could have been. I mean, that could have been the end of democracy right there.

C (5:27)

But. But yes, and I agree. And that's, I believe, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, who did that. But what have we come to when, first of all, the leader of the United States would do such a thing? That, that, that literally is unprecedented, but that his entire party wouldn't revolt. Remember, as recently as 70s Republicans, even fervent Republicans like Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, went to Richard Nixon over his. The revelation that he had in fact worked to cover up the Watergate break in. They went to him and said, we will set. We will. If the House passes articles of impeachment, which it was in the process of doing, we will say you are guilty and you will be convicted. And that's what forced Nixon to resign. Now Nixon looks like a piker compared to what the Republican Party is swallowing.

B (6:25)

Yeah, there would be no Watergate today. There would be no. The term gate at all. Wouldn't exist. I mean, that term came from Watergate. And then we had, you know, Iran gate or. Yeah, but this gets to another question I had that is a worry of mine ever since the Supreme Court came down with this decision saying essentially that a president cannot be prosecuted. When that happened, I felt like, wow, that was a really big deal. And I wasn't sure that the rest of America got it. But, I mean, did you feel the same way?

C (7:02)

You know, this is one of the great advantages of writing every night. Not only did I feel the same way, we have proof of that, because I said at the time it was the most important event in American history. I think people didn't pay attention to it because they figured, like, you know, it's always one of those Supreme Court decisions. But what it did is it overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no person is above or below, but certainly above the law. They said, in fact, a president is above the law so long as he at the time is operating within his Article 2 powers, which is the section of the Constitution that sets out what the executive can do and that he should have presumptive protection from or immunity from prosecution for other official acts that are not necessarily enumerated in Article 2. And one of those things generally, I mean, I think you can argue about this, but generally has been accepted to be interaction with foreign affairs. And you can see the Trump administration is now trying to couch virtually everything it's doing as a foreign affairs issue. But I will make one comment about that that I think is really important in this moment, and that's that if you read the. And this is Donald J. Trump versus United States, which is a really fitting name for it. The court didn't say the President gets to decide what is an Article 2 power. The court said, because we have never said this before, which, by the way, no president has ever asked for, and Every president has acted as if he did not have immunity, but it said, because we have never done this before, we don't exactly know what will fall into that category. It will be up to the courts, which ultimately meant them. So it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide what is an article 2 power and what is not. And I don't think it's a stretch of the imagination to say that they would have, they said that, would have said that Joe Biden, a Democrat, could not do virtually anything under their formula, whereas somebody like Donald Trump could do an awful lot of stuff, which is exactly what we're seeing right now as they keep rubber stamping the things that he's doing that other presidents could never have gotten away with. So in a way, it's a shift of power to the executive, but what it really is is a shift of power to the judicial branch, to the Supreme Court and to the Supreme Court that has been packed with right wing extremists by Donald Trump. It's a shade of a different thing, but a very important different thing. When you think about the fact that the lower courts right now, even ones that are overseen by judges appointed by Don Trump, are deciding against the administration in really high percentages. Off the top of my head, I don't remember what they are, but they're, I believe they're over 90%. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, is deciding in favor of what the administration is doing. I think it's 77% of the time.

B (10:04)

Wow. I mean, it's so scary. And it goes back to my first question of this party loyalty thing, you know, that we haven't really seen, I think, in American history to this extent. What's going on right now is we, we see 800 or so national Guard troops that the President is deploying to Washington D.C. and we're seeing this in my belief. I was in the military for 24 years. A politicization of the military in ways I have never seen in my lifetime. I certainly didn't see it while I was in the, in uniform. This idea that you would send troops to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. under the guise of fighting crime or quelling civil disturbance, all that stuff, it's way overreach. It's not what the military was designed to do and it's not something I ever would see, at least in my lifetime. Do you, in your expertise, are there any connections? Obviously the Civil War, right. It was a very different time. But have we ever seen anything like this before that wasn't just like hey, we're going to temporarily do this. The governors have asked for help in the case of the Rodney King riots. Have we ever seen what Donald Trump's doing right now ever?

C (11:37)

Well, in a sideways way, sort of. How's that? Because one of the things that is an important distinction, I think, with what he is doing with the military is that the military people that he has called out in Washington, D.C. for example, is the National Guard, which is, you know, we don't have to talk about the peculiarities of the way the District of Columbia is run. The National Guard, but also law enforcement officers that are associated with the agencies that rest under the Department of Homeland Security. That to me is enormously important because of the Posse Comitatus Act. And the Posse Comitatus act from 1878 covers originally only covered the army, but the other branches of the military consider themselves bound by it. So one of the things that the administration is doing is it is leveraging these law enforcement officers from a brand new agency that does not consider itself governed by the Posse Comitatus Act. And that really matters for this reason, the Posse Comitatus act, when I said we've seen this before, what happened in 1970, I'm sorry, 1876 and 1877 is important and it's actually different than a lot of people are talking about right now. The reason we have the Posse Comitatus act is because there's a contested election in 1876. A lot of people know about that. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, got less of the popular vote than the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden of New York. And when that happened, there's this huge battle about the electoral votes in four states. We tend to focus just on the three states in the Deep south where it appeared that Tilden won. And yet the Democrats had kept Republicans, especially black Republicans, from voting at gunpoint. They literally said, we don't want you here. And we didn't have national systems of elections and we didn't have clean elections or anything at the time. And the vote was incredibly messy in the American South. So what happened is both the Republicans and the Democrats returned different slates of electors at the end of that election. So what happened then was that there's this huge fight, a national fight, over whether Hayes really won or Tilden really won. And people forget. This went on for a long time. The election was in November, and it's not going to be solved until March. I think it's March 3rd of 1877. And in that period, it appeared that we were going to War, again, remember, the Civil War at that point is only about a decade in the rearview mirror. So when that happens, there's all these people kind of flurrying around to make, to create a solution. And one of the key players in that was a man named Thomas A. Scott. He was the major railroad baron of that period in the late 19th century. And he went to the American south and he said to leaders down there, listen, if you will dump your Tilden ballots and put in Rutherford B. Hayes ballots back, that said, instead, I'll make sure you get some stuff from the administration, including the funding of railroads across the south, which the south desperately needed. And there were a bunch of other things in that as well. They do that. Rutherford B. Hayes becomes president on March 4th of 1877. And that's so March 1877. And then in July of 1877. So what's that? Four months later? March, April, May, June, July, four months later, there is a major, major railroad strike that begins on Thomas A. Scott's railroad lines. It's our first national strike. It's known as the Great railroad strike of 1877. And when that happens, Rutherford behaves, sends in the U.S. army to defend Thomas A. Scott's property and to put down the strikers. So the federal government was using the army to defend property against strikers who had quite legitimate reasons to be striking. When that happened, Congress, especially the Democrats at that point, who, after all, had not had their candidate put into the White House because of this deal that Scott had caught. At that point, they said, if I'm allowed to say this on this podcast, nfw, we're never doing that again. The army may never work for a political end domestically. So when you asked if this had ever happened before, we get the Posse Comitatus act because of that, because of that, where it certainly looked as if Hayes was doing a political favor for his buddy and putting down the strikers in order to keep not only Scott in power, but also the Republicans. And that's what the Posse Comitatus act was designed to stop. And people always point now to the issues of Reconstruction itself in the American south. And that was a part of it. But the congressional debates, which I've read, were really focused on keeping the army out of the hands of the President of the United States. So we had that before. Where we are now, we have the running up against the Posse Comitatus act, which is in court right now over the deployment in Los Angeles of troops there, where the administration is now saying, oh, no, no, no, we didn't Break the Posse Comitatus Act. We didn't really do anything for all the time that those. I think it's 4700 troops were there at the same time that the state of California is saying, what are you talking about? We have you on film working with ICE agents. So. So we have that going on in this moment as well.

B (17:01)

Yeah, we almost need to have leaders in this country, have a debate. If we had a real Congress, we could do this and have another law that basically says if you're gonna deploy the military on the streets of our nation, you have to be invited to do so by the governor or the mayor or something like that. It just seems like every time Trump does something, I feel like there's this loophole in the law that allows him to do it. And previous to Trump, we were working in an age where previous presidents agreed to certain norms, and now all that's out the window. And so we get a lot of these things that Trump does, and Republicans are just bowing down and allowing him to do are lawful, but they're still awful. And if we had a, you know, in a post Trump world, we have to have serious Americans that get into office that really look at some of this stuff and try to fix it. Not. Not in this some radical, crazy way, but in a way that, like, just closes those loopholes. You know, if you're.

C (18:11)

If.

B (18:11)

If you're needed in the. If National Guard is needed in the streets of America, then, okay, then they're needed in the streets of America. That. But the governor should be in agreement with that. The mayor of the city should be in agreement with that. That's just my opinion.

C (18:26)

And the law enforcement officials under the Department of Homeland Security should be bound by the Posse Comitatus Act. And the other piece of this that I suspect you could speak about far more powerfully than I can is that people don't join the FBI or the ATF or the US army or the National Guard to hunt down their fellow citizens on the streets of the United States. They actually want to serve the missions of those institutions. And, you know, the recruitment efforts for those agencies now are at complete odds with what the agencies are designed to do at the same time that we're not actually getting the protection that we should against fentanyl traffickers, against violent crime, against trafficking. Trafficking, when, you know, FBI agents, for example, are being deployed in Washington, D.C. yeah, totally.

B (19:22)

Well, so I wanted to let you know my brother is a PhD historian. He's a high school teacher in Indianapolis, and he said to say hello, by the way. And many of his fellow. When I told him I was going to be interviewing you, he was very excited. He said many of his fellow teachers all follow you, your substack, as do many people, of course, around the nation and around the world. And you're a university professor as well. And all of the stuff that is going on right now with pressuring the President of the United States, pressuring universities. I'm curious as to your opinion as a university professor. How do universities, administrators, professors resist this sort of push from the President to comply these days? I mean, how do we do that? I'm just curious.

C (20:27)

Well, first of all, thanks to your brother and his colleagues because they're really the ones on the front lines in so many different ways. And I put on social media the other day. One of the things that really makes me bonkers these days, days is when people talk about teaching as easy. You know, anytime somebody makes says something about teachers sort of just phoning it in, I'm like, they should go to a fourth grade classroom because they would not make it for, you know, even three hours. And, and high school is such an exciting age actually, he and I should talk. But anyway, one of the ways to think about the attacks that the administration is making, not only on universities, but also on law firms and also on journalists and also on corporations, by the way, is essentially it's an extortion program to give the MAGA Republicans control over all the pillars of American society. And this is a concept that was articulated Fairly powerfully in 1971 by Lewis Powell and what we know as the Powell memo, which was designed for the U.S. chamber of Commerce to be able to push back on the wildly popular liberal consensus of that era, which is not about Democrats. People have made the connection that liberalism means Democrats in the modern era, but it did not. It meant those Americans of all political parties who believed that the government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and working to have foreign affairs rest in the rule of law. That was really widely spread. But a number of big business people or Southern racists or religious traditionalists did not like that system because they wanted to go back to what they saw as an older order, a word that you see coming up again now when the radical right talks about law and order, many of us interpret that as being about criminal activity, but they really mean they want to reinstate a hierarchical society. When they use that word order, that's what they are talking about. So that idea of those Pillars of Society is really a business proposition in 1971, but it is also one that has become a central pillar of a part of the evangelical white Christian movement. The idea that, that the radical right must take over the seven pillars of American society and change them from their current secular, multicultural, democratically based organization to one of Christian nationalism. That attempt on the part of the administration to take over all of those aspects of society and to insert essentially Project 2025 is what we are seeing now. And one of the things that is important, I think, for people to remember is that before election of 2024, when Americans knew what was in Project 2025, they hated it. Only about 4% of Americans wanted to see it instituted in the United States. So for people who feel like they are alone in pushing back against the Trump administration, know that about out of a group of 100 people, 96 of them would be standing with you. And that's going to be really important for us to recognize going forward.

B (23:57)

I feel like there's so much out there and part of the tactic of Trumpism, part of the tactics that you're seeing right now is just a deluge of stuff and people can't take it all in. They're just, they're overwhelmed. And that is real. I mean, that is definitely one of the tactics and it works. As I look at some of the things that worry me and as I had this conversation with my brother prior to this conversation I'm having with you, one of the things he brought out, which I agree with and I'm interested in your take it on, is this idea that's being talked about that you can take a citizen and somehow make them a non citizen. That that is, in my belief, pretty new, right? I mean, to American history. And that is also very scary to me.

C (24:58)

It's new to American history. It's not new to world history, where it's a common way to create a population that you can then dehumanize and strip the rights from and make disappear. That's something we should be all over. And I'm a little concerned about how little we have heard about concerns about the detention camps that the administration is supporting, if not funding themselves in a number of American states. That is incredibly insidious. And of course it does go against the U.S. constitution. And if you want to talk about that, I can. But we don't have all that much time. And I have been following your career since you first appeared on my radar screen, running for office in what year was that? 2018. 2018. So I can't do math. Is that like seven years at least?

B (25:52)

Yeah, it was good seven or eight years ago.

C (25:54)

So I would love to ask you about something about that. Can I?

B (25:58)

Sure, sure.

C (26:00)

So the reason that I followed you and I wrote quite a bit about your campaign was because you did something in your campaign ads that I had not seen before that I think is really important and is still echoing in the present and I hope will continue to grow in the present. And you weren't the only one. There were, I think there were four of you women who had served in the military who were running for office in that year. And you all were doing similar things in your ads. And that was. You talked about community, but not in I'm a mom and therefore I want to take care of my children kind of way, which is an old trope in American history. It goes all the way back to the 1860s at least. You talked about community as your military units and taking that home to a community of everybody in the community and somebody, one person. And I don't remember now off the top of my head, it might have been Stacey Abrams talked about her role as an aunt, which is kind of its own trope in American history. And I wondered if that was deliberate because in many ways what we're seeing in this moment of the rise of MAGA Republicanism, which is based in a sort of toxic, I've called it, cowboy individualism, the idea that it's every man for himself and that this is a bromance between these high powered guys and women and Americans with disabilities or gender differences or racial differences, that none of those people even exist. It seemed to me like you were offering quite literally in color. Your stuff was very well produced, a vision of American society that was much more a reflection of reality. And that was really harked back to World War II, for example, to the idea that we're all in this together. And I actually think that's the message of our future. Is that what you were up to?

B (28:02)

You know, when I did my first campaign, my first ad was introducing myself. So it was sort of telling my story. And I have always been somebody that cares deeply about service. Lots of people do service in different ways. I chose to do service in the military. And obviously in my campaign ad I had to highlight that Heather. So I had pictures of aircraft and pictures of, you know, when I went over into combat and that sort of thing. And. And I had to fight. I had to fight to get to be able to have that service. Like women were not allowed to be fighter pilots when I was young. And so I told the story of having to fight in order to serve the country. But I also think in that first ad, I told the story of my mom, who also served in her way as a doctor, and she had to fight to become a doctor. And so in that first campaign ad, I told the story of her being one of the first women to graduate from the University of Kentucky Medical School. And that when she got out there, she then was serving some of the people that my opponent was trying to take away their health care. So it was kind of tying everything together where we're just servants of the community. And just like you, teachers, workers, people who are connected to unions, we're all serving each other. And so that's what that first ad in my mind, was trying to convey while telling my story.

C (29:58)

Do you remember the process of writing it? Did you focus on the word service?

B (30:03)

You know what, at that time, I had a great media guy by the name of Mark Putnam, and he helped me frame my words. And I had a campaign manager who just sort of got to know me, and they picked up on certain words when I would tell my story to them and they would help and they help me write the script for this. And of course, it was a back and forth of, oh, I would never say it that way. You know, I'd say it this way. And you know, you know what that's like when you. When somebody is writing sort of for you, you can't just take what they have. You have to kind of, you know, you have to edit it because there's words in there that you would probably never say. So that's how that worked.

C (30:52)

Well, I thought it was an incredibly powerful message written powerfully for a new generation, not only of American women, but for a new generation of Americans. And it's been really quite critical in my thinking since I first saw it. And for instance, I first started thinking about what you all were doing in that moment.

B (31:12)

Well, it's, you know, and I ran in 2018 with a lot of women who served our country who won that year. I did not win. My race here in Kentucky is a very tough state to run in, but Abigail Spanberger, Alyssa Slotkin, Mikey Sherrill, Christy Houlihan, they all won their races, and they're either in Congress or going to be the next governors of Virginia and New Jersey. So, you know, it's important. We all sort of motivated each other, and we all knew each other. You know, once we. Once we launched, we got together, we were brought Together by Seth Moulton, who is a current member of Congress, who kind of brought all the veteran candidates together and we got to know each other, and it's been, you know, we have friendship to this day, and I'm so thankful that they are in office, you know, working for our country.

C (32:07)

So I just gotta say that would be a great boss. Just saying. In your spare time.

B (32:13)

In my spare time, with my three kids in the podcast and everything else. Well, it's been really lovely talking to you, and I don't want to end on a negative note, but I do have one final question for you because it's one that almost everybody, when I told them, hey, I'm going to be interviewing Heather Cracks Richardson. What would you ask her? The biggest question that comes from everyone is, how are we going to get through this time? And how are we doing enough? When you look through American history and you see so many figures who have done tremendous things to be able to get us to the point we are today, good or bad, are we doing enough on the outside to protect our democracy?

C (33:11)

One of the things that has come out of this moment that was long overdue is that the American people are waking up to recognize that they do have agency over our country. People tend to forget that our Constitution begins with the words we the people. And that's not just window dressing that says, that document says that the power in the government is inherent in the people and that we the people give that power temporarily to people we have elected to create the legal structures under which we live. If that government does not have our blessing for what it's doing, it does not, under our Constitution, exercise power legitimately. And the way that we make that clear is by speaking up against it. And the ways that people are now speaking up and not, I don't just mean at the national level, although it's certainly there, but also at the state level and at the local level and in the streets and over social media and in letters to the editor and in holding up signs and in putting up posters and in throwing sandwiches. What we are seeing is the recognition among the American people that, in fact, this is their government. It does not belong to MAGA Republicans or to any of the elected leaders who hold seats. I mean, your word service, I think, is really important there. So in this moment, you know, I think about other times in American history when it looked as if we were going to lose democracy to an oligarchy in the 1850s and the 1890s or in the 1930s, and in each of those moments, in the 1850s and the 1890s and the 1920s, 30s, you saw the rise of behavior that looks quite a bit like the MAGA Republicans now, the attempt to game the system, the attempt to create sort of a cult around a few specific leaders, not necessarily the president, sometimes it's somebody in the Senate, for example, but this idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. And in each of those moments, the American people, who probably beforehand weren't paying a lot of attention to politics, it wasn't their game. They didn't care. It seemed to be going well enough, stepped up and said, listen, I may not agree with my neighbors about internal improvements or finances or immigration or any of these major issues, but by God, I can agree that I have a right to be treated equally before the. I have a right to have a say in my government, and I have a right to have equal access to resources like education and health care and the minerals in the soil, if you will. And when they did that and came together to protect American democracy, they not only protected it, they created something better. So we got, in the 1850s, for example, in about 10 years, we went from the idea that the elite Southern states, slaveholders, got everything, to the idea that we would have a government of the people, by the people and for the people that would not tolerate human enslavement in most instances. In the 1890s, we went from the Andrew Carnegie's saying the robber barons have a duty to amass all the money in the country because we're the only ones who can do it, who can manage that money, right to the Progressive Era, where we got the idea of kindergartens and of business regulation and a basic social safety net. You know, in the 1930s, you get something very similar. You go from a period when you literally have a Nazi movement in the United States that's concentrating wealth and power to the New Deal of fdr, which called for business regulation, that social safety net, equal access to resources, and protection of civil rights. In each of those moments, we got to something better. So that's what I look at in this moment. And are we doing enough? I would say we are never doing enough, because this is is the water I swim in. But Americans are stepping up to the plate. The thing that we will need to do going forward is making sure that those people who are not currently engaged become engaged, because as I say, when people understand what's happening, they are against it by about 96 to 4. And we need to make sure that those people stop saying Oh, I don't like politics. It's too much for me. Which is, of course, exactly like you said, the goal of the radical right, to get people overwhelmed so they back away. So we're doing enough. We're doing a lot. We can always do more. And I have confidence that we are and will.

B (37:46)

Yeah. So it's, it's so refreshing to hear you, with all your expertise on American history, to say, hey, I think there's going to be at least precedent for something good and something big to come out of this moment in the future. That actually makes me very, very optimistic because there's not a lot to be optimistic about right now. And also, you're right on when it comes to. We gotta make sure that as many people, as many of our fellow Americans are listening and pay attention as much as we can right now. And that's what this show is about. I know that's what you do with your letters to American. Are you working on any other books?

C (38:32)

Yes, I am. Sparked in part by what you did all those years ago in those ads.

B (38:36)

Awesome. Well, I look forward to that. And I really appreciate you coming on the show. This has been amazing, quite an honor for me.

C (38:44)

It's been a real pleasure to meet you after all these years. Let's do it again.

A (38:47)

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