Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I'm glad we have Liz on the show today though because it brings it puts Texas on my mind and the most important story of our time and and that is Steve Sarkeesian. I'll I'll quote I'll quote for y'all. Diana Racini of the New York Times and The Athletic, nice Irish girl, I'm sure. Quote, I'm told that representatives for Texas coach Steve Sarkeesian have let NFL decision makers know that he would be interested in potential head coaching openings, including the Titans. And I I just want the three you to to know as well. I am also interested in potential NFL head coaching openings, including including the titans. And and I will to the titans, I would like to say that, yes, I would take your coaching job even though your hot chicken is not nearly as good as Rockies in Asheville. Also, for for my my resume, I have two key components. One is, I have multiple national championships in NCAA fourteen. And number two, I am I am unlike Steve Sarkisian. I am not currently y'all being in Tennessee. I am not currently ruining Peyton Manning's nephew. George: Paul, that dang old Sark got a $55,000,000 buyout, Paul. How we gonna get him off these longhorn, Paul? This is Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too much. I'm George in Charlotte. Propter Malone: In DC, I'm Propter Malone. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: In Outer Florida, I'm low tax speedrun enjoyer. Propter Malone: And I'm Ed in Boston. George: Welcome to Normal Men this week, folks. We are unfortunately down a podcaster. You are stuck with Propter, Low Tach, and I because our dearest Edward is recovering from a very rough bout of, we think it's laryngitis. We're hoping it's nothing more serious and that we will see him again at some point soon. So please send your best wishes to Ed. You can DM him on Blue Sky, say something nice, reply to him heavily on completely unrelated posts. I'm sure he would love that. Hi. Propter Malone: I'm Ed. I'm in the edit bay. I'm editing this episode. Ed. Anyway, as you can tell from my stentorian tones, the laryngitis has cleared up. Enjoyed a lovely walk that afternoon with my dogs. But I may be out next week because I don't quite know when I am getting back from a trip. So you might not hear me next week, but don't worry. I I I had to make sure that George knew just how just how appreciative I am of all his kind words. Catch you next time. George: So, yeah. Just all all the best to our our little boy, Ed. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Ed was Ed was actually Ed has died, actually. He after he texted the the three of us in Hell Machine, my Pebus Hortz apparently rolled over their their minivan. Propter Malone: Anyway, his voice box is down, but I'm sure his, I'm sure his typing fingers are operational. Yeah. Get better soon, buddy. We are delighted to be joined today by professor Liz Sepper of the University of Texas at Austin, who is here today to talk to us about the state of play for reproductive rights in The United States Of America. As I think we've all been aware from the start of the Trump administration, the assault on abortion rights in particular has been a through line for Trump's ascent to power and has been a priority of the administration. But in light of all the other horrors, the media coverage on it has perhaps backed off a little bit as it has seemed less in your face and urgent than the kidnappings or the tariffs or possible economic woes or any of the other many things that are going on. The assassinations. I forgot the assassinations. One of the things that happened to move the ball on this, however, is the BBB this past summer, and the associated both regulatory and statutory assaults on Planned Parenthood funding. Liz, can you tell us a little bit about what is happening in the Planned Parenthood space in terms of federal funding? Liz Sepper: Sure, and thank you for having me. Medicaid dollars are not flowing to Planned Parenthood anymore. Now, the big beautiful bill sometimes described as a defunding of Planned Parenthood. But what it really is, is a refusal to pay Planned Parenthood for lots and lots of services from STI screening, to cancer screening, to wellness exams that they provide to low income people around the country. No federal dollars through Medicaid pay for abortion at a Planned Parenthood. So that's not really what this is about. But what the bill does is say no Medicaid dollars in any state in the country can go to an entity that provides abortion is nonprofit and has received more than $800,000 in Medicaid payments across all its affiliates. This is really a bill that targeted Planned Parenthood and has put at risk care for about 1,100,000 people nationwide. Propter Malone: So the play here is that the administration is trying to cut Planned Parenthood off at the knees by attacking the bulk of what it does, which is provide healthcare writ large. Liz Sepper: That's abs. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And the estimates are that about a third of Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide could close as a result of losing Medicaid dollars. And I think it's important to note here that so called blue states, I don't really love the blue state, red state label, but blue states are particularly severely affected because they have expanded Medicaid. All of them have expanded Medicaid, so lots of their population is insured through Medicaid and goes to Planned Parenthood, especially in rural or sole community areas where there's just Planned Parenthood. And we think probably about a quarter of Planned Parenthood patients aren't going to be able to access the services that they get anywhere else because they just don't have other providers. George: Do we have a feel for why they established the $800,000 Medicaid receipt threshold as opposed to just saying anybody that performs abortions can't get Medicaid funding federally? Because the latter would seem to be a lot more in sync with the Republican Party's stance on this stuff. So why did they carve out that threshold to target Planned Parenthood as opposed to anyone providing abortions and receiving Medicaid receipts? Liz Sepper: As so often, it has to do with the Senate parliamentarian. Because this was passed through reconciliation, the Senate parliamentarian has to review it for compliance with how it affects the budget and other rules. And basically, they initially set a $1,000,000 threshold. Word is they dropped it to 800,000 in order to try to satisfy the parliamentarian, and it effectively impacts Planned Parenthood and three other abortion provider chains or family planning chains in the Northeast. And so it was really targeted at Planned Parenthood. Now in a sense, this actually gives Planned Parenthood a stronger legal argument. They are challenging their exclusion, but so far they are under the exclusion that's already gone into effect, but litigation is ongoing. And one of their arguments is that this represents what's called a bill of attainder, which is prohibited by the constitution, where Congress has really targeted them for punishment. And I think it's important to note that right, it's not just abortion providers either because the way the the bill is phrased and the interpretation of the Trump administration is that Planned Parenthood affiliates who don't perform abortions are nonetheless to be excluded from the Medicaid program. So we have litigation ongoing on that issue as well. Propter Malone: Do you do you think that litigation has a shot? I mean, is this something where Planned Parenthood affiliates can avoid disaffiliating possibly and still get the federal funding for non reproductive care? Or is this an uphill battle? Liz Sepper: I think it's both. So Planned Parenthood had succeeded in winning a preliminary injunction in a district court in Massachusetts on a number of grounds. One of them was actually the First Amendment Freedom of Association, which is at issue in lots of litigation against the Trump administration that universities are raising, for example. They also made equal protection claims, bill of attainder claims, and they prevailed in getting that preliminary injunction, right? But then the first circuit granted the Trump administration a stay of that preliminary injunction. And so the law has gone into effect. So in some sense, the impact is already being felt around the country. Some states, a number of states have stepped in and said that they will deliver the state funding to Planned Parenthood. That's not sustainable in the long term. And a number of states, have not done that. And we know that a number of states will not come to the aid of Planned Parenthood. Propter Malone: We're broadly market oriented here, so that also creates just a tremendous disconnect in terms of health care markets if you have no federal funding coming into one major provider in a competitive area. And it's exclusively state funding for other providers. So you've got even if the stop gap were to be more sustainable, that creates distortions that are going to have negative effects down the road. If that's how you're offloading things where functionally, reproductive health care is is in a different bucket. Reproductive health care and organizations that do reproductive health care are in a different bucket than everybody else. George: Do we have a feel for how big in quote unquote blue states? And I agree with you, Liz, entirely that that term is not particularly helpful. But in states that are taking action to protect abortion rights in this context, What sort of numbers are we talking about in terms of how big the state's obligation becomes for funding? Liz Sepper: Yeah, in California, this is the number that I have on hand, it's $300,000,000 So that's a lot. That is a really big amount. And we're talking about, you know, the problem for states, of course, is that they're subject to balanced budget requirements. So they can't deficit spend the way the federal government can. And, of course, they have other priorities that they're having to spend on at the moment given a tax from the federal government. Right? They wanna backfill science research. They wanna backfill educational dollars. They need to be backfilling a lot of funds that have been cut or suspended by the Trump administration. So this is just a yet another bucket and a pretty significant bucket. So I will say, right, what we do know is that spending on Planned Parenthood or other family planning is cost effective. You avoid cancer, you avoid sexually transmitted diseases, you avoid unplanned pregnancies, right, you get a healthier population. Propter Malone: Correct me if I'm wrong, but particularly as you go down the socioeconomic ladder, Planned Parenthood is often the only regular health provider that many people see, that this is the first point of contact with the healthcare system, for lots of particularly younger women and their families. Liz Sepper: Yeah, that's right. For a number of people, this is their healthcare provider, and over the years, Planned Parenthood has extended into something like primary care for people of reproductive age, providing more full service care to low income populations. And what we do know is this is a particularly important for certain populations, but also I mean, and lots of rural populations where this is the only place that they can go. Important to say too, that even if you're in an area with lots of healthcare providers, many of those healthcare providers aren't willing to accept the rates that Medicaid pays, which are lower than private insurance, lower than Medicare. And Planned Parenthood is also a great healthcare provider. This is part of what's lost sometimes in the debate. This isn't sort of a healthcare provider of last resort. They provide really sophisticated care. They provide same day appointments. They provide appointments where you can get access to long acting contraception immediately. These are not services that lots of other places are able to offer at that level. So that's a real loss as well. George: It's also worth saying too that Planned Parenthood's focus on a specific population that has not always been treated very well by our healthcare system, that is, women of reproductive age and people who are trying to manage their reproductive process, is really unique. Like, we don't that's not typically how we approach healthcare, so there are huge advantages to that in terms of getting access to those populations and getting in front of people and building trust with those people. I can't tell you how many people I know, women between the ages of 15 and 30 or 40, who just don't trust the healthcare system because of the experiences they've had around access to a range of things, but among them reproductive management. And that, when your focus is that, then that builds you a lot of credibility in ways that the traditional healthcare system has sometimes failed to do. Liz Sepper: It's also, I mean, I think in this vein, Planned Parenthood is a major provider now for gender nonconforming and transgender people, including in terms of gender affirming care. And it is a place where people know they're safe. George: Yep, yep. And again, that you just some there are other parts of the medical system that are like that, but they're not common. They're not that's that's un that's out of the norm, especially these days, unfortunately. As far as other Trump administration policy priorities, EMTALA is something that's come up with this Supreme Court. Do we have a feel for how the Trump administration taking over the DOJ and moving forward with, with with some of the litigation there is going to impact access and how EMTALA is carried out with respect to abortion? Liz Sepper: Yeah, so EMTALA is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. It's the law that means you can go to an emergency department in The US and they have to check you out make sure whether you have an emergency condition and if you do they have to treat you. And for pregnant people, this is really important. There are lots of serious pregnancy complications every year. And what EMTALA10 requires in those circumstances could be a number of treatments. But one of those is sometimes a DNC, sometimes an abortion, right? Because someone is miscarrying, suffering premature pre viability rupture of the membranes. This is an emergency medical condition for the pregnant person and you don't have a viable fetus by definition. So there've been lots of complaints to the federal government over EMTALA over the last number of years since Roe v. Wade was discarded by the Supreme Court. We know people have made to miscarry in restrooms or their cars. They've gone into septic shock, sitting in an emergency department waiting to be seen. And these are all things that EMTALA should guard against. But there's conflicts between EMTALA and bans in states like Texas and Idaho. And so the Biden administration had litigated against the state of Idaho saying, your law only allows doctors to intervene if death is likely to occur. But EMTALA says you have to intervene if there's serious jeopardy to the pregnant woman's life, or health. And so if the health jeopardy exists, then you have to perform an abortion. And our constitution says federal law is supreme. Now that litigation went up to the Supreme Court rather quickly. The Supreme Court allowed Idaho's abortion ban to go into effect, contrary to what the district court had done there. And what we ended up with is people airlifted constantly out of the state of Idaho to get emergency abortion care. That's the Supreme Court that did that. Then the Supreme Court said, oops, we made a mistake, let's send it back. And so it went back to the district court ultimately. The Trump administration, of course, dropped that litigation, but a hospital system in Idaho has continued to litigate it. So that is ongoing. But it has effects beyond Idaho because lots of state laws have limited exceptions where EMTALA at least on the margins would require something more. And so that's a real ongoing issue. I also think it's important to flag here that the Supreme Court, a number of the justices showed themselves, three of them, showed themselves to be fetal person hood curious, and this is a problem. Three of them signed on to a truly ridiculous opinion that said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, was enacted in '19 in the mid eighties, is effectively a law that says to emergency room doctors that they cannot provide abortions, that they have to save the fetus, that the fetus and the pregnant person are both their patients on equal terms. And this is wild because if that were right, then EMTALA would require doctors in states across the country to intervene to save the fetus as much as or more than the pregnant person. And that's just not their call. Like, if you're pregnant and you're miscarrying, you can choose to do everything possible to try to save that pregnancy, and that is your decision. But it's not a decision where the federal government should say, no, save the fetus first and whatever about the pregnant person. Which is basically what Justice Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch said in this non opinion from the Supreme Court in 2024. George: There's two things I wanna pull at from that couple answers you just gave there that I think are really important for listeners to understand, especially listeners that don't think about abortion regularly. I think if someone that's really spending a lot of time thinking about abortion or educated on it as a procedure, as a, you know, in Reaper rights in general, this is going to be something that you know already. But if you're not used to thinking about abortion deeply, abortion is not something that is a binary one zero, that's an abortion, that's not. It does not work that way. Human reproductive systems are way too complicated for that to be the case, and there are way too many cases where something goes wrong, where something where a wanted pregnancy or an unwanted pregnancy develops complications that are not consistent with the fetus surviving, either period, or without grave risk or certain harm to the mother. So there is this view in popular culture, and especially on the far right, especially among the anti abortion movement, that any abortion can be avoided. Right? That in every instance an abortion can be fixed through some other means. And that's totally wrong. It's complete BS. That is not true. There will always as long as there are people getting pregnant and carrying pregnancies to term, there will be a need for abortion. Because some percentage of those, and you know, the percentage is going to change over time depending on care and other stuff, some percentages of those just aren't going to go well. And you need to be able to solve those problems without basically, sentencing mothers to death. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: And at the end of the day, someone has to make the choice here. Yeah. I I always bring abortion back to this. Someone has to make the choice. Who's going to make the choice? Is it going to be the mother in consultation with her medical providers or is it going to be the government? And I I I don't think the conversation this isn't getting into, you know, all the nuances of of legal cases and that. But just as normal people discuss abortion day in and day out, I don't think they really think of that often enough. So there is a binary there of who has to make the choice. Propter Malone: I would elaborate on that actually a little bit that that increasingly with the intel cases in particular, it's a secret third thing. It's the hospital's lawyers who are who are assessing the risk. And Yeah. And that's that's not necessarily in accordance with either the wishes of the mother or the wishes of the government as expressed in statute because they have to look at things in a probabilistic way, and hospital lawyers tend to be risk averse for obvious reasons. George: I am married to a lawyer, I'm the son of a lawyer, I'm the grandson of a lawyer. You do not want lawyers running your risk management process, especially with regards to like, lethal risk. Right? Like, that is not we don't want that. Trust me. Propter Malone: And and particularly as states move towards prosecution of of medical providers as one of the major levers for preventing abortion, putting providers in an impossible position where they are going to be second guessed on decisions that should not be second guessed, on on on decisions that are emergency decisions made with necessarily incomplete information, under necessarily pressured conditions. You don't have clean outcomes available to you when you are looking at an emergency room case with a pregnant patient who is bleeding and possibly bleeding out, or who is possibly facing sepsis, but you're not sure yet. And the standard of care conflicts directly with the risk management approach. Liz Sepper: I will say, so ProPublica has done really good reporting on this. There are differences between hospitals. So they've looked at hospitals in the state of Texas, and it's clear that some of them have protocols aimed at avoiding some of the really serious complications and terrible outcomes for both infants and mothers that other hospitals have imposed on their patient population. Both of them operating under the same law consistent with the law. Doctor. Caitlin Bernard in Indiana, just a real hero in this area, has really worked hard with that university's healthcare system to develop protocols that allow doctors to go up to the limits of the law to protect their patients' health. And that's really important. Lawyers can be allies to physicians here and to their healthcare systems and to healthcare quality, or they can be enemies. We're definitely seeing both. And I think there's an irony here because usually healthcare system lawyers, they're trying to do everything for whatever their client wants, right? So you wanna merger an acquisition? Sure, let's go up to the limits of antitrust law, right? You wanna do some affiliations? Let's go to limits of fraud and abuse. That's a criminal law too. And they're pushing hard to the limits of the law there, but not when their patients' lives are at stake. And I think that tells us something gross, about the institutional actors here. George: Definitely. I also wanted to talk a little bit about fetal personhood because I think that is a subject that, again, for folks that aren't steeped in this stuff, maybe it doesn't really trigger the same alarm bells that it does for somebody who is has thought deeply about abortion rights and about what the implications would look like. Can you walk us through what the implications of for like, hypothetically, we talked about how there were only three only three. Hate that I have to say it that way, but, we talked about the fact that there were three justices that were at least fetal personhood curious with respect to the Emtala case. Can you explore what that would look like if, for instance, that had been five? And what sort of thin edge of the wedge that would look like for fetal personhood being applied more broadly and what the implications would be of that? Liz Sepper: Yeah, so the notion here is a statutory fetal personhood. So it could mean for instance, that a pregnant person shows up at the hospital with signs of sepsis, right? And sepsis can just become totally uncontrolled very quickly. And so the solution here would be to offer a DNC, right? An abortion to the pregnant person. Let's assume the fetus is not viable. If the fetus were viable, then one would offer labor and delivery of the fetus. But in the absence of viability, a DNC might be in order. If EMTALA required treating these two patients as co equal, the fetus and the pregnant person, regardless of viability, then that could very easily mean that a doctor might have to wait to consider the interests of the fetus in continued pregnancy to viability over the patient's the woman's own life. And so we would see, I think, a great deal more maternal mortality. Not clear that we would see any more babies born, but we would see a great deal more maternal mortality. And we'd see a lot more hesitation in states where there aren't abortion bans, and we don't have doctors dealing with that dynamic. Beyond that, I mean, fetal personhood is this idea that the anti abortion movement has been pushing for a long time, though it's not actually the origin of the anti abortion movement. And they've been doing it through statute, right? Their goal is fourteenth amendment constitutional personhood fetuses and embryos and blastocysts are people just like the rest of us under the constitution. But the way they try to get there is through statute. So we've seen this in a number of states where fetuses become persons under say child neglect statutes. So you prosecute pregnant people for child neglect. They failed to go to doctor's appointments while they were pregnant and therefore neglected their child. Chemical endangerment, which were about cooking meth in your house, that's when those laws were enacted, become laws used to prosecute pregnant people who take drugs during their pregnancy, even sometimes prescription drugs. And so we've seen this kind of development as a stepping stone. That stepping stone can have major impact. Just last year, I believe, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that their wrongful death statute, which is a civil stat tort statute, included embryos. And what this meant was IVF was basically shut down, at least temporarily, in the state of Alabama. Because if the death of a frozen embryo is a wrongful death that you can be sued for, right? If the power goes out, you could have killed, so to speak, thousands of people and be liable for the total cost of the loss of those people. And so, right, this is sort of what's at stake with fetal personhood at the statutory level even. Propter Malone: I'm curious how they do economic damages and future earnings calculations on that situation. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Well also, who would have standing to sue there? Liz Sepper: So those are those are the parents and right that there is, I mean, these are actually quite tragic sometimes, And I don't wanna to disregard that, but that doesn't mean fetuses are a person. So right, a lot of There have been lots of instances of negligence on the part of fertility clinics. And what, you know, they implanted the wrong embryos. They gave your embryos to someone else. They thawed your embryos, right, accidentally. Someone kicked out the plug on the freezer. So those are harms, right? People have invested tons of money in getting pregnant and tons of money in hoping for this future child. And to be deprived of that is I think a real wrong and a real harm. It's just like, if you're in a car accident, and your major injury is miscarriage, that strikes me as a real harm. But it doesn't strike me as the death of a constitutional for full person. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah, makes sense. George: Yeah. If you're not familiar with IVF, it's an interesting process because each one of these embryos is incredibly precious to the person that invested, the person or people that invested time and energy, and just difficulty in producing them. But there's also a lot of them and they're kind of flying around and you don't really know exactly how many you need, right? You could for instance have a patient who had a huge cycle where they got 10 embryos successfully fertilized, and they only want one child. Well, you know, in that instance, it's a little bit different from a couple who gets one embryo out of three cycles. And again, again, if you're not familiar, an IVF cycle is incredibly intensive: daily injections at specific times, lots of invasive procedures to determine how things are going along, lots of risk in terms of will an embryo be fertilized, will it pass genetic screening, etc, etc. So there's just this incredibly involved process that both creates this these very fraught individual items, but also sometimes there's a bunch left over. And and also you're dealing with a business who, you know, people make mistakes. No business is going to operate perfectly, but sometimes it merges into negligence. So, you know, it's it's a it's a it's a confusing and difficult process, even without the loss of something that's had so much care and time and energy and money invested in it? Liz Sepper: The estimates are, I mean these are totally made up, I am going to say that, that there are around 1,000,000 frozen embryos that no one intends to use currently in The United States. They're sort of abandoned or just being kept frozen. But if they were constitutional persons, imagine our population goes up by a million people overnight, and then you can distribute voting according to where those people live, for example, Right? They can move to different states. Right? We could get really creative in thinking about what Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I this George: think we've just found the solution to gerrymandering in the senate. Propter Malone: The great the great Wyoming embryo depository. Liz Sepper: I don't know how they vote. We'd have to poll them first. Propter Malone: Yeah. George: So I guess the other major policy arena we want to talk about today is Comstock and restrictions on mefopristone and restrictions on abortion care via mail, as well as just access to, pill abortions. I for, again, for folks that are familiar with pre pro, you're not really going to be learning anything new when I say this, but, the increasing access to, medication based abortion has really changed the landscape in this country. When Roe v Wade was decided, or Planned Parenthood versus Casey, the way that people got abortions was generally surgical. Now it's not like that at all. Now the vast majority of, early term abortions are going to be via or sorry, shouldn't say vast majority, a large majority of early term abortions are going to be carried out via medications, where you take a couple of pills. It's a very simple protocol, depending on the state you're in, access to that in terms of whether you how you get checked up beforehand and how the pills are dispensed, etc, is going to be different. But even if you do have to go to a clinic, it's a much less invasive procedure than a full surgical D and C. It is, it is not the same thing. So, on top of that, you can actually access, not strictly speaking legally, but you can access these medications, from international providers without ever speaking to a U. S. Doctor. That is something that's very easy to do. And, there is just generally a lot more access around this stuff than I think the popular image we have in our minds of an abortion clinic where a doctor is is using surgical instruments to perform a procedure. So all that said, access to Mifeprazone is, Mifeprazone is one of the two drugs used in this protocol, threatened both by the Trump administration and, by Congress via the Comstock Act. So can you talk through sort of both the Comstock Act stuff around using The US mail service to provide mefepristone, and also the possibility that the FDA may pull some sort of approval for mefepristone or change access to mefepristone? Liz Sepper: Yeah, I'll take those from the opposite order because the FDA announcement was just last month. RFK Jr. Announced that the FDA was going to revisit the approval of mifepristone. Now mifepristone has been approved in The United States since the early two thousands. And Mifepristone is an exceptionally safe drug. We know this from just millions and millions and millions of uses in lots of different countries. But the anti abortion movement has been very dedicated to ginning up concern that is un safe. And so mifepristone has always operated in US under restrictions that aren't on other drugs, including drugs that are much less safe. But over time we've loosened restrictions. And one of the major loosening of restrictions came under the Biden administration in the form of allowing mifepristone to be prescribed via telehealth, just like other drugs are. Well, not quite just like other drugs are, but in any case through telehealth. And that really led to a surge in the percentage of abortions that are telehealth abortions, because people can then use the pills in the comfort of their own homes. It's cheaper, it's easier, it's more comfortable, better medical care across the board, right? We care about cost, quality and access and it does all three right there. The FDA is revisiting what is it revisiting? Well, we don't exactly know. It could go so far as to pull approval of mifepristone claiming that it's too dangerous. Now that would be quite extreme also because mifepristone is quite clearly not at all dangerous. Nonetheless, I mean, another possibility is that it pulls approval of telehealth and that would dramatically affect availability of mifepristone. Because right now you do have physicians in The United States prescribing telehealth medication abortion within the states where abortion is legal. This is actually huge. Many abortion providers only do telehealth services. And many providers are providing out of state, so from New York to Texas. And this would effectively cut off that practice both, and really dramatically reduce access to safe and effective abortion care in every single state. Now there are out of country providers who would be entirely willing to continue to ship into The United States. And so it's not clear to me if they fill the gap, but abortion pills would continue to flow through the mail. Which brings me to the second thing and a much older thing. So the Comstock Act is of 1873. It is named after Anthony Comstock, notorious anti masturbation crusader. This was sort of his personal obsession. Propter Malone: Extremely normal. Liz Sepper: Extremely normal guy. Just would follow women around on the street and harass them too. Quite obsessed with masturbation really brought him George: Wait, he would pick out random women on the street and tell them to stop masturbating? Liz Sepper: No. He was mostly concerned with male masturbation. But he was concerned about women being obscene or lewd or reading certain materials. So the Comstock Act prohibited mailing obscene, lewd or lascivious materials like pornography, or any article or thing intended for contraception or abortion. Congress eventually stripped out the contraception language and much of this is unconstitutional under the first amendment because it's about information. But the abortion provision still remains. Now, it hasn't been enforced in years. Courts interpreted it to mean you could mail abortion producing items through the mail because in every state it was legal to provide some abortion. So we couldn't say it was illegal that you were giving these items for illegal abortions because it could be that they were male for legal abortion. So essentially it's had no effect for almost a hundred years, But project twenty twenty five, which of course, President Trump had nothing to do with, nothing to do with his administration, really is focused on the Comstock Act. It wants the DOJ to enforce it. And I I imagine the anti abortion movement is quite put out that the DOJ hasn't gotten to that yet. And it seems like it has to be just a matter of time before the DOJ acts and tries to use the Comstock Act once again. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: So since RFK junior is running this, what if what if they added beef tallow to the abortion pill? George: One of the themes on this podcast, Liz, is that DOJ is running out of lawyers. And we are pretty convinced that a lot of the harm reduction involved in dealing with the second Trump administration is just the fact that they don't have warm bodies to do all the stuff they want to do, because there are just not that many lawyers who are going to go along with with their whole deal and risk a bunch of things. And this strikes me as one of those areas that is very likely a symptom of that. I mean, you just you're gonna need a lot of time and energy to find a prosecutable case under the Comstock Act Comstock Act, assuming you want to go ahead with that. Right? And they've got a lot of court appearances to to be making, and they are barely managing to keep up with that, and really in a lot of cases aren't, currently. So using going on the offensive with DOJ, on top of the challenge of finding someone inside DOJ willing to actually go ahead with that, just finding anybody at all is is starting to get challenging. Let alone actually finding someone who's capable of getting a a case across the line. So I I mean, that may be one explanation for why they're not doing it. It may be that they just don't want the PR, but who knows? I I will say the anti abortion folks that I interact with on a weekly basis are much less enthusiastic than they have been in a while. I don't know if that's because of Trump. I don't know if it's because they there's sort of a realization that there's a limit to how much appeal their movement has. But there are a number of indicators that I'm not going get too specific with that suggest to me that they've lost a lot of steam relative to five years ago, for instance, or something like that. So I don't know. We'll see. Maybe that's maybe that's me wish casting, but we'll see. Liz Sepper: And the movement is not a monolith. Right? There's a lot of disagreement within the movement, right? We and it here in Texas, we actually we see invocations of the Comstock Act, by Jonathan Mitchell on a fairly regular basis. Lawyer who routinely attacks abortion access, usually in the state of Texas. But, I think there's a great deal of disagreement over the most effective strategy for the movement going forward. George: Yeah, it's a lot easier for the Trump administration to pardon, for instance, Lauren Handy. For for those who aren't familiar, this is the woman that stole fetuses. Like literally stole the, like, fetal remains of, an abortion clinic's patients, that were being that were on their way to be disposed of in a medical waste facility, and she stole them and kept them in a freezer. She was, eventually convicted of violations of the FACE Act, if I remember correctly. Spent, some time in prison, about a year and a half in federal prison, and was promptly pardoned by the Trump administration. You don't really need an attorney to do that, but going ahead and prosecuting something like the Comstock Act in a novel way is a very different thing. I'll also say, to your point about the abortion, anti abortion movement being diverse and sort of having a bunch of different people and different perspectives in it, if you ever want a really wild afternoon, Google the, anti abortion movement called the abolitionists. Will abortion abolition is like a whole different and there are people within the abortion movement that are too extreme for the kind of the most extreme people you've ever heard of in the abortion movement. Like, it's that diverse. And so, yeah, I I think that's a really good point that that there's a range of of views and a range of understandings of politics that these people have. And the more extreme you get, the more it's just totally disinterested in democracy and entirely Christian national. But that's sort of a separate tangent. We don't have to go too far down that road. Propter Malone: So one of the things we're seeing with with the Comstock Act litigation in particular is that it's it's state versus state, correct? That that that you have individual states attempting to enforce Comstock to prevent telecare that's originating in other states. Liz Sepper: So it's not Comstock at work there, it's a similar kind of issue, right? The ongoing litigation involves the state of Texas versus New York. But with Texas trying to enforce its laws in ways that prohibit doctors in New York from engaging in telehealth that comes into Texas. Yeah. Propter Malone: Is that is that something that you see as being is being a winner for Texas? Is that is this is this a real threat to, reproductive rights in this country that you're going to see kind of a race to the bottom, where various states are enforcing their laws on medical care originating in other states? Liz Sepper: Yeah, it is a real, it is really an open question in the sort of disputes between states. So you had the Texas AG file a civil claim in the state of Texas against Doctor. Maggie Carpenter in New York, who has sent abortion pills into the state of Texas, at least allegedly. And he prevailed. He prevailed because she defaulted. She didn't show, she should not have shown. And so he won a $100,000 judgment, which is what he asked for. And he then went to the state of New York, to the county where she lives, to the county clerk and said, here's the judgment, enforce this against her, give me my money out of her bank account, you know, go after her till she pays. And the clerk said, well, New York has this relatively new law that shields abortion providers or helpers from enforcement of abortion bans so that the state institutions cannot cooperate with you in this regime. And so the Texas AG has now filed a lawsuit against the county clerk to compel him to enforce the judgment. New York Attorney General Letitia James has intervened as she should have. This is really a dispute between the two states, but it's not clear how it's going to go. The full faith and credit clause of the constitution generally requires New York to enforce the judgments of the state of Texas or Louisiana or so forth and vice versa. There are exceptions though, and New York is gonna lean into one of those exceptions, which is known as the penal exception. That usually means New York doesn't have to enforce Texas criminal law. But it also means that civil laws that are just criminal laws dressed up as civil laws don't need to be enforced either. And I think there is a definitely a colorable claim that this isn't about a private remedy between injured parties, and especially where you have the attorney general of Texas seeking this judgment, it really does look like a punishment. So not at all clear how that will turn out. Pretty clear that we're going to the Supreme Court on this one, and we know how that story ends usually. George: When was the last time there was a dispute like this between states with state law? Because I'm thinking of, for instance, the Fugitive Slave Act, was a federal law. Right? So it wasn't a question of Alabama enforcing against Massachusetts. It was the federal government enforcing against Massachusetts. Do has there ever been a a sort of real dispute around stuff like this? Civil, criminal, anything that that's been adjudicated? Like, how did that turn out? Liz Sepper: Yeah, is getting outside my depth, I'm gonna say, right? There's all like George: Nothing wrong with that answer. We love people that say, This is not my area. That's totally fine. We can cut this Liz Sepper: I out mean, a real difficulty, just to add on reproductive rights is it's now not about the constitution. It's not about Medicaid. It's not about EMTALA. It's about, like, choice of law and federal courts and standing. Right? So, yes, I I like to admit where I where my limits are. George: Or just making things up. I mean, that's the other thing. Like, the Supreme Court is perfectly happy to make up a fact pattern or selectively address a fact pattern that is as good as made up. And they have no compunction about doing that. There's no effort to get a holistic understanding of what's going on in a given situation. So it's all vibes, baby. Great. Hell of a Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Look, there was there was that guy in in the sixteenth century who burned witches and and said abortion was bad, and that's precedent, really. What do you think about it? George: History and tradition. Love it. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: That's right. Propter Malone: I wanna jump back for just a second to something we touched on earlier, which is, change in abortion regulation as being something that's prenatal or not. Just to make the point that it is anything but clear that you get more births out of moving a reproductive rights regime to being more punitive to mothers. Mothers and potential mothers are actors with agency who pay attention to things like how dangerous is my pregnancy going to be. So you have you have a feedback loop there that sometimes enters into the picture. I also wanted to ask Liz if she happens to know, you mentioned that there was some differentiation between Texas hospitals in terms of the approach that they're taking, in terms of legal risk. Are we actually seeing that show up in output statistics at this point in terms of patient outcomes? Liz Sepper: Yeah, that's what ProPublica looked at. So worse outcomes in terms of maternal mortality and morbidity in terms of hospital policy, which makes a great deal of sense. And we had a very small study early on in Dallas area hospitals that showed something very similar occur with regard to infant mortality actually. So bad outcomes for both moms and babies and because pregnancy is complicated, like OB GYNs say, you know, if you hear hoof beats in pregnancy, expect zebras. Because it's so complicated, you know, we've had story after story of people who have been denied miscarriage management and now are infertile, right, have lost their reproductive capacity. So this is not a way to encourage pregnancy or childbirth. And I think it's also important to observe that what we know about people who get abortion is the majority of them are already mothers. And they're usually thinking about what's good for my family, for my existing children. Can I sustain another child? And in our country, so often the answer is no, because we provide no supports for mothers or parents. George: I cannot tell you how many patients and companions I've talked to that have multiple children already, and love their children, and love their family, and wanted children, and are happy to be parents, but just cannot manage more. Can't do it. And, yeah, it's it's incredibly common. Propter Malone: Well, we'll get a link to that ProPublica item in the show notes. If you're a if you're a parent or prospective parent in Texas, it sounds like you might have some opinions about which hospital networks are better, for your future treatment. Liz, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming by. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and the rest of The Normal Man audience. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah, thank you so much Liz. Liz Sepper: Thank you for having me. It was really fun. George: I think we have all gotten a very good objective lesson in the past couple weeks here about why you don't make politicians and supporting them your personality. So to be clear, when the Plaidner campaign rolled out in Maine, I think I speak for all the normal men in saying that we were pretty enthusiastic about the concept. Right? This was an idea that we liked. This guy had rock solid values in terms of being open to supporting transgender people. He was opposed to the genocide in Gaza, stridently opposed to it. He was in favor of more redistribution, in favor of cracking down on the concentration of power that has so badly distorted our democracy and our economy. And all that sounded great to us, and the fact that this is a guy who comes across as someone that we would get a beer with and like to talk about swing kettlebells around with helped. Propter Malone: Yeah. Mean, we're we're a bunch of Cisco ed white guys. We're not immune to identity politics any more than anybody else is. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Nope. I will say, I warned y'all that you shouldn't trust, like, this guy is from Maine. But he's but he's an oyster farmer? Like, who the fuck is an oyster farmer in Maine? George: Well, apparently, is. And so, you know, we were we were reasonably enthusiastic. I don't I don't think anyone on this podcast or associated with it got to the point where this guy has to win. You know, this is the most important candidate of the of in years. You know, this is exact Dems like this need to run everywhere. He's gonna romp yada yada yada. No. We were we were guardedly enthusiastic, and and, you know, this struck us as a good concept. But look, this is why we have primaries. This is why we have a process where candidates are evaluated in public by members of their community, by voters, before we decide who goes on to the next contest in line. And that process is quite a ride for this particular campaign. Propter Malone: There's been a lot of news and revelations about Graham Platner, which I think have varying valence. I some of these are more deal breakers than others, but let's start Definitely. To the big one. Yes. So let's use Graham Plattner's telling here, which is, I think, the most the most charitable version that we'll then we'll then pick out a little bit in a few ways, which is that approximately eighteen years ago when Graham Plattner was in the Marines, he was on liberty with some of his Marine buddies in Croatia. And they got blackout drunk and decided to get tattoos together, as as one does when one is on liberty with a bunch of marines in Croatia. Walked into a Croatian tattoo parlor, selected a skull and crossbones motif from the wall, and proceeded to get a Totenkopf tattooed on each of them. A Totenkopf. George: Yeah, I was gonna say, can we can we, define that term? Propter Malone: So Totenkopf is literally just German for death's head. It's a skull and crossbones, but this particular skull and crossbones happens to be the insignia of the SS, which is the division of the Nazi police that was responsible for managing concentration and death camps. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Now, maybe he saw it was a death set and he's just really into Wolfenstein. Nobody has considered that, have they? Propter Malone: Now, I also gotta say that, like, it's an ugly freaking death set. George: It looks like he got it drunk in Croatia, like, fifty Propter Malone: days ago. George: It looks like that. You can It looks like shit. Propter Malone: Ink. Yeah. And, like, the logo itself is kind of, like, it's it looks kind of, like, blocky and squished, like, admittedly my own personal aesthetics, but I this is not the death's head that I would personally choose off the wall if Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I didn't know anything about George: Nazis. Anyway, Propter Malone: in Plattner's telling, is unaware that this is a Nazi tattoo and he remained unaware that this was a Nazi tattoo. He and I guess everyone else who got the tattoo at the same time remained unaware that this was a Nazi tattoo for the next eighteen years until he was running for senate and people started Can George: we can we just hit pause right here? Let's take this narrative up to this point as given. Maybe not eighteen years, but let's just cut it off after two years. Right? He's had he's had this tattoo for a couple years, and that's it. I don't think anything up to this point is remotely disqualifying. I think, you know, again, assuming that the telling is correct, and that it was a drunk thing, and he didn't know what he was getting, and whatever. I don't think that's disqualifying. I don't think getting a dumb tattoo is disqualifying. I don't think having, you know, I don't I don't not knowing something and getting it tattooed permanently on your body, to me, is a little bit odd. But I mean, look, I I do not judge because that's that cultural valence around tattoos is different in different communities, and that's legitimate and fine. Getting a dumb tattoo is not disqualifying for a senate candidate, in my opinion, and I I think y'all would agree with that. Propter Malone: Yeah. There's there's a certain amount of new or should have known. If he'd if he'd gotten a dumb swastika tattoo, then I would, you know, be doubting a little bit more aggressively. But for a toad and cough, I I I'm willing to extend that that that good faith. Yes. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: My okay. I first of all, I appreciate that George does not want to disqualify Hell Machinery from ever running for the Propter Malone: senate. Because Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: we both have terrible tattoos. Propter Malone: If you if you have any Nazi ink, you gotta tell us now, man. George: Yeah. We need to know. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I do not I do not have any Nazi ink. Appreciate it. Propter Malone: Appreciate you. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I I am 100 sure. And I'm I'm I'm pretty sure just knowing Hell Machine well enough that that he does not either. George: Yeah. No. I'm confident that one too. Yeah. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: That said, if you're going into a tattoo parlor in Croatia, which is a beacon of diversity and liberalism as we all know, as the Balkan countries tend to be. If you are going into a a tattoo parlor in Croatia and you are picking out a Totenkopf, What is the probability that there are not other also Nazi affiliated tattoo designs by or generally around that tote and cop design. I because I I have two tattoos. I have been to many a tattoo parlor. I am just gonna tell you, I think that probability, it may not be zero, but for those of you who've taken if you've taken calculus at the limit, it's zero. Propter Malone: You know how you know when you walk into the barber shop, they've got those posters of various men's haircuts and they kinda group the like ones together? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: That's exactly right. George: What what is the percentage of normal men limit listeners that have taken enough calculus to know what the limit is? It's gotta be high. Right? 98%. Yeah. I think yeah. Something like that. So y'all get reference. It's it's Yeah. Probably. Yep. So okay. That established. I just to be clear, getting a dumb tattoo is not the issue here. Because the issue is, he had the dumb tattoo for eighteen years, Propter, to continue the narrative? Propter Malone: Yep. Eighteen years. George: And there is compelling evidence that, in fact, over that eighteen years, he was aware that it was not just a skull and crossbones. Right? A funky skull and crossbones. Propter Malone: We have we have allegations that he referred to it as his totenkopf when he would take his shirt off while bartending. George: That's my fucking totenkopf. Which also, taking your shirt off while bartending, I do not consider in any way shape or form a disqualification for senate. Propter Malone: Yeah. That's fine. A brief aside here. So, Grant Plattner spent some time bartending at at the Tune Inn in DC, which is a DC dive bar over on Capitol Hill of long standing that is probably immediately familiar to anyone who has lived in DC or worked on the hill for any length of time. You have probably been at the tune in, you have probably eaten eaten the burger at the tune in, it's pretty good. You probably had the drinks at the tune in, they're not good. But but they are cheap and they're strong. My guess is that additional follow-up research on Plattner's history at the tune in could be performed by most DC journalists without varying in any way from their weekly routine. They're just gonna ask the other people at the bar they're going to anyway, whether or not they remember Graham from fifteen years ago. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Isn't Capitol Hill where all the Republicans live in DC? Propter Malone: There aren't any Republicans that live in DC. They all live in Virginia. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: No. That's not true. They there are Republicans there there are Republicans in Georgetown, but I thought Capitol Hill the Capitol Hill neighborhood was a a big Republican hotspot. Propter Malone: Probably more Republican than than like than like Northwest is, because because it's Yeah. Because it's closer to the capital, so you tend to get more staffers who live there, rather than, you know, people who work for who work for agencies who aren't quite as drawn to that to that part of town. But I I would not describe Capitol Hill as a as as as Republican territory in any in any way residentially. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Alright. Fair enough. George: He's referred to it as his Totenkopf. He's been pictured with his shirt off with it numerous times. Also, I'm sorry, like, let's be clear here. Plattner strikes me as a pretty thoughtful guy. I know that sounds strange given the broader context here, but this is not a guy who has never read a book before. Propter Malone: This is a guy who is who is, among other things, invested in military history. Seems invested in, I guess, kind of the art and practice of soldiery. This is something that is important to him. It it doesn't pass the sniff destiny that that he was unaware of the Tunkhoff as a symbol. Yep. This is a guy who has opinions about wars. Yep. So Yeah. That's one kind of point of doubting the story. Another one that I think is compelling and that we maybe we'll get some follow-up on this at some point is that this was a group tattoo. He went in and he got, according to his telling, this tattoo with other members of his unit. I think it makes it a much better story if rather than we went in and got drunk and all got skull and crossbones, we went and got drunk and all accidentally got a Nazi tattoo that we later had to cover up. That is a funnier story. That is a funnier army story. George: Absolutely. And and also, if he had done that, if he had gotten the Nazi tattoo that he then that he then, even a few years later, like, somehow didn't realize, and then as soon as he realized, oh no, that's not great. I gotta get this covered up or removed or whatever you wanna do. I also think in that scenario, nothing disqualifying at all. If as soon as you learned that this was an issue, you dealt with it. I to me, in fact, that is exactly the kind of normal person reaction that like, oops, I did something that isn't great, and I'm gonna make amends for it. When people talk about extending grace, which is a discourse that happened on Blue Sky this week, that's what we're talking about. Right? That's holding that he once made a mistake against him is not extending someone grace. Saying, you know, you're entitled to make mistakes, you dealt with it, and we moved on. That's extending grace. He did not do that. Right. I'm sorry. Whatever happened, it wasn't that. Propter Malone: Yeah. And I I mean, there's there's kind of a general principle here, which is that if you're doing something offensive that you don't realize is offensive and later you realize that it is actually extremely offensive, you should try to make amends for it. You should try to rectify the behavior. You should try to stop the behavior, and you should try to apologize. George: Yep. That's that's being normal folks. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. It's it's it's fine to make a mistake like that. You have to acknowledge the mistake and make amends for it. Yeah. You can't be here eighteen years later lying about it. George: And it really does look like he's lying about it. I mean, I I it's just hypothetically possible he isn't, but Propter Malone: You have to extend so much so much good faith. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. When the my totenkopf thing came out, that was where I was like, okay. Yeah. You're lying about this. George: Done. Done. He done. Propter Malone: Yeah. To be maximally fair, the my totenkopf thing at this point is is a single anonymous source, but given the location that it was alleged to have happened, I will be very surprised if they can't find anybody else who's willing to talk on the on the record about it. Because this is one of the gory, cheap watering holes of DC. There are accessible people who would have been there for this. Yeah. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: And there's there's gonna be do the three of us all agree there's going to be more that drops here? Propter Malone: Oh, Lord. Yes. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Like Yeah. Like, we're going to find out that he's a tool fan. We're going to George: Come on, man. It can't get that bad, can it? Propter Malone: Yeah. I don't think like in Maynard is disqualified for being a senator either. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I think it is. Propter Malone: I mean I mean, okay. So like so like the tool fans in the senate right now, probably Fetterman. Definitely Fetterman. Maybe Ossoff? No. No. Probably not. George: Cinema would have been, but she's gone. Propter Malone: Yeah. Yeah. She's Yeah. Showing for data centers in Arizona now, I think. George: Wild story. The condescension in that was wild. For those who didn't see this clip, former Arizona senator, Kristen Cinema, is lobbying for a data center in some capacity, and showed up at a city hall meeting, I think Chandler, Arizona is the name of that town. Propter Malone: Chandler, yeah. Yeah. George: Yeah. Currently run by a Republican mayor, so maybe this won't end up mattering. But she showed up to basically say, you y'all need to let this data center through because we are working hand in glove with the Trump administration. That's a verbatim quote. And we're just gonna bring the power of the federal government down on you if you don't okay it. And I gotta be honest, if if I was serving as a representative and anybody brought that to me, I would say, well, whatever you're asking for, I'm voting against it. I Yeah. Mean I don't know how they behave out in Chandler, Arizona, but that would be my take personally. Propter Malone: Arizona's got a long history of being very willing to say fuck you to everyone, but particularly to the federal government. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: That's supposed to be a thing that the West is really good at. It's a it's a is that kind of libertarian streak and being like, no, fuck you. Don't tell me what to do. Yeah. But So backing up, who do we think Oswald's favorite band is? George: Aryan. The White Stripes. Oh. Propter Malone: White Stripes. That's Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: don't want that to be true. Propter Malone: Outcast is in play at the timing. But I George: Outcast is yeah. If you wanted to get really insulting about it, could say the Lumineers. No. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: No. Don't do my boy like that. George: Okay. So back to Plattner. I there this has devolved into this of course, it's devolved into this meta thing, and I the it's really one of the interesting things is how badly it scrambled the traditional battle lines within the Democratic party. So the people that are that have gone to bat for him the hardest are, like, the pod save bros. Propter Malone: Yep. George: And I don't I genuinely don't understand why that is. I've I've seen people theorizing basically that they see this as an ascendant approach to Democratic candidates, and that they want to get in on that gravy train early. Maybe, but it doesn't strike me as that obvious. I I like, I I I'm not sure Propter Malone: I wanna develop a a general theory of Pod Save America here, but George: People have gone mad trying to do much less than that, so be definitely be careful with that ring you're playing with before it slips onto one of fingers and you disappear. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: The There's a good John Maynard Keynes joke here somewhere, with that comment. Propter Malone: The ascendancy of Pod Save America is is tied to the ascendancy of president Obama. And if that is your theory of politics that you find an extremely charismatic politician, and that gets the electorate on your side, and then through getting the electorate on your side, that gets you the policy outcomes you want and that that gets you the personnel outcomes you want, but everything stems from having a charismatic horse to back, then I can see the appeal of a platter. George: Yeah. That's Propter Malone: fair. Because he is charismatic. Mean, I 100%. This is this is a guy who has demonstrated, and and maybe we should talk about the polling a little bit for a sec. George: Yeah. So so just to to level set with the polling. So we we've had one real poll out of this race. There have been a total I have seen three polls. Two of them are either Dem or Republican internals. We'll get we'll come back to those. The first poll, which was prior to the whole this all blowing up, was him winning a huge percentage. Like, he was crushing Mills. Now Propter Malone: The first poll is UNH, which has a reputation as being as being Republican leaning. Yeah. So, like, they're they're not an in house pollster, but but that's that's been something that's been leveled at them as an accusation before. George: That said, I mean, I think he had, what, 60% or something in that poll? I mean, was a huge number. Propter Malone: Crushing Janet Mills. And and frankly, I don't find the the name recognition explanation compelling at all given that he was beating a sitting two term governor. George: Yeah. I mean, by name recognition, I just mean, like, like, mental he's been in the headlines or been in been in my social media feed, you know, the the the Mamdani experience. Right? Now I I'm I'm not trying to I'm not trying to tune down the result there. I mean, suffice to say, if you snapshot the race there before all this breaks, then, yeah, Mills is in for a real fight in the best case scenario, think is the only to interpret that poll. You know, like, maybe she can still win, or maybe another candidate can win, but it's gonna be tough. Propter Malone: Yeah. George: Yeah. So okay. Then we had two other polls, both leaked, both from Republican side or the Democratic side, internal senate campaign poll or senate campaign campaign committee polling. Propter Malone: Right? One was a Republican Senate internal. Yes. George: And Right. That essentially corroborated that first UNH poll we had. Yes. Although importantly, was purported to be after stuff started breaking about Plattner. Propter Malone: That that poll we should disregard entirely. Got some of the language from that poll and and they I Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: don't know what you mean. That was great language. Look, would you not describe a totenkopf as an anti Israel tattoo Propter? Propter Malone: They describe the totenkopf as an anti Israel tattoo. George: Yeah. Let me let me let me read it. So this is the polling question. I'm gonna read it in full because it's very funny, and we can Graham Plattner is a progressive combat veteran and small business owner who says Maine needs, quote, more leaders who stand up for working people instead of the political elite, end quote. He has faced criticism from opponents for an old tattoo that some say is anti Israel and for spoken out social media posts on policing and gun ownership. Plattner says the attacks are quote cheap distractions meant to divide Democrats end quote and that he'll keep fighting for workers rights, abortion access, and climate action. Does this make you more or less likely to support Plattner? Yeah. Propter Malone: So, we can throw that one out. That was the National Senate Republicans trying to bolster Plattner a little bit and make this a harder situation for both institutional Dems and and insurgent Dems, for people who are either backing aside already or who are torn about how to engage with this race. The third poll we had, this is getting into some election Twitter lore here, but the third poll we had was from SoCal, which is Republican leaning election Twitter zoomers who straight out of high George: school started their own polling polling Republican leaning election Twitter zoomers. Pretty cursed. Propter Malone: Right? George: That is about the worst sentence I can imagine. Propter Malone: Yeah. So for the record, I don't think they're bad pollsters necessarily, but we can give some amount of credence to that poll. They're not obviously operating in a Republican function. It's not clear that they were paid by by Republicans or anything, but that poll shows something more like what I would have expected was the initial state of the race, which is to say it shows it shows a a moderate Mills lead over Plattner and that that turns into a big Mills lead over Plattner after they mentioned that the Nazi tattoo. Yep. Which seems appropriate and Justin as it should be. Even that result would have been a better result for Plattner than I would have expected ex ante. Yep. You know, he's he's he's he's going up against a a two term sitting governor. That George: number would have been very encouraging if without all of this. Right. Propter Malone: Having it framed by these initial polls that had very, very large platner leads where he was just gonna romp to victory makes it look a lot worse. But if that had been the only poll we had, that still would have looked pretty good for Blatt. That first poll was before the Nazi tattoo stuff, but it was after the Reddit stuff. Do we wanna talk about the Reddit stuff? George: Sure. I mean, just briefly, we can give a a two eighty on it. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Couldn't couldn't we just say he's a he was a Redditor? Propter Malone: I mean, Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: he was a And leave that to people's imaginations. Like like, people know what Redditers George: There a number of comments that were really unfortunate. I I will put it that way. And that if I if I was a main primary voter, or someone who was looking to get involved supporting Plattner's campaign, I would have real concerns over. I would wanna see some evidence or some, you know, sort of contrition or whatever that he'd moved on from those views. Again, having had those views in the past, I don't think is outright disqualifying. How you deal with them is a completely different story. And, you know, when when you're saying that anyone who has been sexually assaulted would, you know, could have avoided it by doing some other thing. Propter Malone: Some of this stuff has has, I think, gotten mangled a little bit in the game of telephone, in part because the presentation of this is coming through reporters that are paraphrasing these That's fair. And I think that there's an assumption for some of it that Plattner wrote the very bad version of something rather than what he actually wrote. In the case that we're talking about, where he's talking about rape, the context is he's replying to to a thread about these Kevlar panties that lock onto you that are, I guess, being marketed as as an anti rape device. And I I don't know if they're effective or not. I don't know if anyone actually wears Kevlar panties or not. More power to you if if you I want do George: not wear Kevlar panties for the record. Just I don't know why I need feeling to say that. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I'm thinking about it. It Propter Malone: seems like breathability would be a anyway. Let's not. Yeah. Let's not. Yeah. No. So so that was that was reported as Plattner saying some things about how is this really, you know, the first step you're gonna take, or are you not gonna be drunk around people who you don't trust completely? And there is definitely a whiff of of of victim blaming about that, but also like Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Right. Propter Malone: His actual comments started with the sentence, rape is real. And, you know Yeah. George: But but it's still that's why I said, you know, like, it's one of those things where it's like, this is a this is a comment that concerns me, not a comment that, like, that's disqualifying. Like straight up that, you know, other people might take it, draw a different line there, and I think that's where we get into this conversation about, grace and and quote unquote, purity or canceling or whatever. Like that, like, we can have a other people may have a different view there, but I I just regardless of your view on that, I have not been impressed by his ability to say, this is not really my deal. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. Yeah. His communications have sucked. People are drawing hard lines in the sand here and saying, you know, we've got Plattner all wrong or I'm done with Plattner. He can he can go to hell. He's the most evil person who's ever lived. You can take either of those positions to me and tell yourself a story that I think I may not agree with, but I think can be a perfectly respectable story. There's a story you could tell of Plattner here, even with the tattoo. And as I said, once we had the tattoo and once we had his comments on it, I was pretty much done. I'm like, no, you just go away. But if you do wanna tell yourself a story about it, that is more favorable to him and more generous to him that I think he is deserving of, you can do so. And I I don't really object to people doing that. I think a lot of people are really dying to grab on to somebody who, you know, represents a push forward for democrats. A more combative version of democrats. And so, I don't object to that. I do object to this idea of the the pod save bros and these guys that, oh, if you find this whole totenkopf tattoo thing disqualifying, then you're a hall monitor. Like, fuck you. A 100%. Yeah. Propter Malone: No. This one's actually bad. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: This is this is really bad, and it needs to at the very least, it needs to be addressed. George: I will say, there is a world you can imagine where the way that he deals with this, the way he has dealt with it so far, that has created sort of revulsion from us, or at least not revulsion, that's probably too strong a term, but but has created skepticism from us, or increased skepticism relative to what's originally reported. That can resonate with a certain part of the electorate who say, this is actually what we want is a guy saying stuff like this, as opposed to saying the smart thing that, you know, political strategists would want him to I am amenable to the idea that this actually pays off in his favor. I don't think that's gonna be how it works, but it's possible. It's And certainly look, I will say too, if he takes all this, and he still manages to beat the sitting two term governor in a Maine primary in the Democratic party in Maine, and he carries that into the Senate race. I don't know how enthusiastic I'll be about the guy, but you have to admit that as a sign of extreme political skill. Propter Malone: Yeah, that's true. George: There's no other way to interpret that. Does that mean he will beat he would beat Susan Collins? No. But I would much rather have a very skilled political challenge to Susan Collins than an unskilled one. So at least he would have that going for him. I think that's unlikely to happen. I think what happens is his volunteers bail, he his campaign doesn't have infrastructure to to spread around, that he's weighed on this weighs on him with Normie Dems, and he doesn't expand the primary electorate enough to do real damage, and Mills, or maybe someone else wins, and that's the end of the story. And I don't know what that would portend for what happens next in in the general election. But I do think there is a possibility here that that he that he spins this to his advantage. I just don't it wouldn't be my assumption of a baseline thing to happen. Propter Malone: Except for the Nazi tattoo. There is an authenticity story to be told here coming in a through line through the Reddit comments. You know, like, I I didn't read everything he wrote on Reddit, but I read a chunk of what he wrote on Reddit and he struck me as as basically a thoughtful guy who has a, used some squirrels he definitely needs to apologize for. But the slurs he used on the spectrum of slurs, they're they're probably in the lower 50 percentile of slurs you need to apologize for. George: They're the sort of things that were on South Park back in the day as opposed to at a KKK rally. Propter Malone: Right. My read on Plattner is that this is a guy who has defined himself as a liberal or a lefty, including in very male and pretty conservative spaces. I mean, the guy the guy did four tours of combat arms in The Middle East, plus a brief hitch as a mercenary, which is a whole other thing that we'll get to in a minute. But this is this is a guy whose self image is very much built around being a champion of liberal causes, a champion of leftism. And I think that some of this is the disconnect between discovering that what he thinks is acceptable behavior for a champion of leftism, like you can have a winking Nazi tattoo because everybody knows you're the you're the lefty guy, you're fighting for the truth and the good, is not necessarily everyone else's definition of a champion of leftism. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up that he did four tours because if it had only been three tours, I think Bernie would have pulled the plug on him Propter Malone: here. I mean, like, you keep going back for it. It's it's because you're enjoying it or you feel duty bound in some sense. Right? Yeah. Yeah. This is a guy who liked combat arms. And there are some people for whom that's that's a reason to bail. You make your own decisions there. And that kinda gets to the mercenary thing also, which I think has been also somewhat distorted in online spaces, that he worked as a security contractor for the State Department through Constellis, which is the successor company to the successor company to Blackwater. Like, you trace the lineage of Constellis back, eventually, you do get to Blackwater somewhere in there, but it hasn't been an Eric Prince joint for it it it had not, at that point, been an Eric Prince joint for almost a decade. So Right. And it's, I think, the largest single security contractor the State Department employs. So, you know, if you think that's disqualifying, fair, But you should know what it is and what it isn't. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: We also don't know what he did as a contractor there, do we? Like, we we don't know if he was out working in Fallujah or if he was, you know, guarding the embassy or something. Propter Malone: Yeah. We don't know what I my understanding is he was in Afghanistan, but we don't know what he did. George: Yeah. I will say I think I think there was something that you said there proper that was very insightful in that this is someone who has held a very consistent or reasonably consistent set of values in spaces that tend to select away from those values for a long time. And that puts him in strong contrast to someone like Fetterman, right? Who was not the lone voice with his opinions in similar spaces, or one of very few voices with hit those opinions in similar spaces for long periods of time. I have a very I mean, if you look at Plattner's original campaign website and the positions he lined, I think they're it's probably the same today. I I say original, but it's probably the same today. This is someone who shares my politics very closely, and I have had that experience of being that lone or or near lone left wing voice in very different spaces, to be clear, but equally selecting spaces. A college football team, or working at an investment bank. These are spaces that punish heavily left and liberal views. And Right. I think you really can trust somebody who has had those views in spaces like that for longer periods of time, over someone who has the exact same positions, but hasn't been tested on them repeatedly by their life, you know, in terms of being given an incentive to cave. I whatever Plattner is, however he does in this primary, he is not a plant in my opinion. Propter Malone: Yeah, I agree with that. George: I I am very convicted on that. Does that mean he should beat Mills? Does that mean he should be the next senator from Maine? I am not gonna say that. What I will say is that I don't think he's a plant, and I'll also say, we've said this a bunch of times, every time we talked about it we said this, and we haven't said it explicitly today. This is for Mainers to decide. Yeah. You know, if you're not a main primary voter, like, just fire off a take or two, but y'all just it's it's their primary, and you are not going to be the one that decides what happens there. It's gonna be Mainers, for better or for worse. Let's just not get too stuck in on either side of this thing, regardless of our opinions. And again, I share low tax and Propter's view on this that if I was pulling the lever in this primary at this point, I would not vote for this man. I wouldn't. I'm I I think it it it it's too far gone for me. But I'm not. So, you know Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I will say, as terrible as this is, it does give us a respite from the New York mayoral. And we should all be grateful for that. George: We which I mean, I will say congratulations, New Yorkers. You appear to be blowing the doors off early voting, which we love to see regardless of who you're voting for. So good at work there. I think the numbers were basically a multiple of five in the first day of early voting or first couple days of early voting. So love to see that from all of our folks who live in New York City. Good work. Propter Malone: I wanna say one last thing about Bladder, which is that I do not honestly think he's a Nazi. No. I think he's a line stepper, and I think he's a little bit of a shithead, but I don't think he's a Yeah. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: I think that's right. George: I agree. But those those things have gotten to the point where, again, for me, I'm not voting this primary, so this is not me saying if anyone, you know, doesn't agree with this, then they're a bad person or something. No, no. Like, you can reach a different conclusion. That's fine. Whatever. I'm sure a lot of minors will. For me, it's reached the point where that line stepping is is too much. I just like, there's better ways to do this. And that's yeah. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: And we can all say, so none of the three of us think he actually is a Nazi. But the picture we have in our heads of him, may not be right. And you gotta go into a primary with the evidence in front of you. Just as with ever anything else. Now, you can you can project on to him and and we all we all have to do that to some extent, right? When we're evaluating candidates. But it's not a fault of you if you look at him and say, no, I can't do this. Yeah. Propter Malone: It it it it's not great that the is he a Nazi question is on the table in any way. No. We sort of assumed that nobody was. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a luxury we don't have anymore I guess. George: Actually, maybe we should talk about this because, yeah, it is there is some interesting stuff to talk about there because Yeah. Basically, people are gonna keep eating food, but, like, they're not gonna spend on other stuff now. Propter Malone: Right. Yeah. Maybe maybe we kinda fumble our way through it a little bit, and then and then hit it again next weekend if it's still if it's still gonna happen. Because like I mean, you you are pulling, like like, approximately $8,000,000,000 a month out of The US economy, and that's that's like first dollar spend. I'm assuming that we're not gonna cut all this, that we're gonna actually use some of this. But anyway, that's that's like first dollar spend on on these on these snap cuts. That's incredibly high propensity to spend. George: Yeah. Like the the Yep. If you're if you think about this from the perspective of a household that is reliant on snap for a large proportion of your calories, which is not everyone on snap nor should it be, but it is a decent chunk of the roughly 42,000,000 people who receive Snap. If you no longer have the resource that gives you food, you rely you have to transfer other resources to meeting that need. You may spend less on food, but dollars are fungible, right? Like like that income or or wealth you have somewhere else, even an income and when I say income and wealth, I mean in very small numbers here, right? We're talking about people that are close to close to or below the federal poverty line. I don't mean large wealth. Mean, when people hear wealth, they think large wealth. I mean, the last few bucks you have in your bank account, that's still wealth. That wealth being transferred or income being transferred means it's not going to get spent on something else. And if you're that close to the poverty line, quantitatively, in this country, that means every dollar you spend is going out the door and sometimes more than. A lot of the time more than. Right? The I haven't done this analysis for the latest data, but historically in The US, for the bottom quintile, a dollar of new income means more than a dollar of new spending, because there is such a high propensity to consume. They need to consume so much more to get to be at a subsistence level, right, in the context of our economy. In other words, if you then take those dollars of income away, which is what Snap is, it's income that you're it's specific to food spending, but it's still income. If you take that away, then you're shifting dollars that were guaranteed to be spent anyways to to cover that need, and that means overall spending is gonna go down. It has to. Propter Malone: And to put that in quantitative terms, SNAP spending on on food benefits is on the order of $8,000,000,000 a month, nationwide. So this is not a negligible slice of consumer spending, especially if you think that there are second order effects that are happening. Food banks are not gonna be able to to cover this either. Like, we do not have sufficient funding. George: It's not even a it's not a dollar issue either either. It's a logistical issue. Right? Like, second harvest food bank here in Charlotte does amazing work. They're they're they're great. They do not have the logistical capacity to replace people being able to go down to the Walmart Supercenter. They don't. There's just too many people in Mecklenburg County that are gonna need food to even if money was no object, they still couldn't it's the same problem we've talked about in the past with domestic manufacturing or whatever. Like, you you can't just snap your fingers. Right? Snap your fingers. Propter Malone: Jail. With any of this stuff, you're gonna get more efficient spending handing dollars or some dollar like proxy like food stamps to people, where they can buy to fit their own needs than you are going through some goods distribution channel like food banks, where people are gonna get stuff that they don't necessarily want, that doesn't necessarily fit their family. And doesn't necessarily fit, you know, things like the kitchen equipment they have available to them. Yep. You know, you you give somebody a can of green beans and they don't have a stove. That's not a super useful can of green beans. George: Let alone the sort of whole produce that you'll often get at food banks, which is great. And we should be giving people whole produce at food banks. But again, you just you can't one for one transfer over. Anyhow, so in in the grand scheme of things economically, $8,000,000,000 is not huge, but it's something that we haven't had to digest before. I mean, for context, The US economy's run rate is between 2.7 and $3,000,000,000,000 per month. Like that's that's what GDP is, roughly. $3,000,000,000 is or sorry, 8,000,000,000 is not a huge number on that, but it's going to be really intensely felt by specific people. And, I mean, one of them is Walmart. Like like, 25% of SNAP benefits are spent at Walmart. Right? That's a big number, and that's a very politically powerful lobby, because it's not just Walmart, it's also grocery stores who tend to be owned by people who are prominent in the local Republican party. That that tends to be how that works. Right? Like, independent grocery stores are the kinds of small business tyrants that, end up in Republican party politics in in local areas. And a bunch of their customers are just gonna evaporate. Propter Malone: Walmart sits at about 50,000,000,000 in revenue monthly. So, you know, losing 2,000,000,000 off of 50,000,000,000 is that's that's a significant hit Yeah. To the bottom line. That's not that's not gonna sink Walmart, but you're absolutely gonna notice George: Moves the needle. And also, if you're going into Walmart to purchase stuff based on your Snap benefits, then you're gonna be purchasing other stuff at the same time. I mean, I see this in the Walmart around the corner for me that I go to, not every day, but fairly regularly. Right? You'll have someone checking out an entire cart of groceries, they'll use Snap, and then they'll have their couple t shirts or whatever it is they got, that are, by the way, much higher margin, and, much more desirable from Walmart to be selling. Groceries are a huge business for Walmart, but they're very low margin. They're always low margin. They're getting people in the door. That's that's that's what they're there for. They're not there to make a ton of money on them. So if now people are not coming to you to buy the groceries as much, then you're not selling other stuff as much. And if they are coming to buy the groceries, and they're not they're having to spend actual cash, and that means they can't buy the t shirt. So there's a there's a there's a a waterfall effect here if, you know, going down the chain. Propter Malone: One other point I wanna hit on Snap is is that this is a broadly applied program. There's just over 40,000,000 people, on average who receive monthly Snap benefits. Talking a a little bit north of a tenth of the country here, get SNAP benefits. This is something that people are gonna notice. They're gonna notice right away when their SNAP benefits don't work. George: And a again, it is more prevalent in places it's more relevant to the local economy in places where Republicans have outperformed in recent cycles. Right? Like, if you're from a rural county in Ohio, SNAP matters way more than it does in the county I live in, or in the District Of Columbia. Which isn't to say it doesn't hurt lots of people in both those counties, but as a percentage of the total, it's just a way smaller number. And there are resources there to mitigate a little bit. In rural areas, especially the kind of rural areas that have swung so hard to the right in recent years, it just ain't the case. Propter Malone: And you know, sometimes we think about agricultural regions, rural regions, as as being self sufficient food wise. Are not. Is doing everybody is doing, something that looks a lot like like monoculture. And, you know, you can't just eat wheat. Right? Like, you can't just eat sorghum. That's not gonna that's not gonna get you through the month. Let's talk a little bit about how we got to the the state of a snap shutdown here because I think that the assumption a lot of people had, even as recently as last week, was that USDA was gonna tap its emergency fund to push off the snap shutdown date. That's an administrative decision. USDA has an emergency fund that could be applicable to this. USDA is who runs SNAP. George: Do we know how big that fund is? Is it like multi billion dollar? Is it Propter Malone: They've got about 5,000,000,000 in that emergency fund. People in the house are telling them to use the emergency fund, so that wouldn't get you an additional month of runway. But if USDA were to say, okay, we've got we've got these emergency funds. If states cover the nut, we'll reimburse and then hopefully there'll be some legislative fix down the road. That gets us at least another couple of weeks and that provides more time for whatever's happening with the shutdown to happen with the shutdown. George: But there's two problems with that. Right? Like first problem being, the Trump administration said, nope, not doing it. Propter Malone: Yep. So in terms of who gets the blame, that's gonna be one thing that tends to put the blame on the Trump administration. George: It's like they think they genuinely think that the only people that get snap are, like, poor black folks in big urban cities, I guess, is like is the assumption. When no, like, the the modal snap recipient is probably a Trump voter. Right? Propter Malone: If I had to guess, yeah. Well, I I don't know. As as you go to as you go down the income ladder, you get you get bluer. George: Sort of. Depends where you are. That's the thing. Like, a lot of that is ecological effects. So the the point is there are a lot of Trump voters who are on Snap. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: How much do they care about their voters who are on Snap, though? George: All stick, no carrot. Right? Like, I but that's the thing. Like, the political coalition that they've managed to stitch together is contingent. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Yeah. But George: Like, all political coalitions are contingent, and they're acting like it's not. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: Are they are their voters gonna blame them, though? George: Great question. But eventually, someone's at fault. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: You think about that media environment. Right? George: Eventually, president Trump is is the president, and I used to get snap, and now I don't. Propter Malone: That's Mandate of Heaven stuff right there. There is a crop failure, so the king is at fault. Yep. I think that that has to be sort of the default assumption that it's hard to pin your literal food benefits going like like literally the food off your table is disappearing here. It's hard to pin that on the minority party when they don't control either house of Congress, they don't control the presidency, they don't control the courts. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: That's true, Yeah. George: You don't even have to get that far down the separation of powers, right, and who controls what, right? Trump's the president, he was supposed to do all this big, all this great stuff, inflation was supposed to go down, oops, that didn't happen. We were supposed to have all the illegals gone, but but just the bad ones. Oh, wait, hold on. I'm seeing tear gas all the in random streets. Like, there there's there's only so much you can do to protect these people inside an information bubble. And again, when it when it gets down to I literally can't buy food anymore, I don't know how your, you know, your Instagram algorithm isn't gonna isn't gonna protect you from drawing some conclusions there. Especially the sort of conclusions that have been drawn by working people who are dealing with political, leadership, making bad decisions, and, you know, leading to starvation for millennia. I just like, this is a tale as old as time. Propter Malone: I think I think one thing that may be getting underplayed right now on the economics of it is that we're getting into seasonal food purchases. So like, if I raise turkeys, this is this is apocalyptic. Yeah. Because because you're talking about something where a significant slice of the whole turkey's you're gonna sell in an entire year happened in the month of November. George: Although that's mostly a retailer from a from a raising perspective, I think a lot of them get frozen, so there's some buffering there through the year. I've I've looked at this before, I can't remember the Propter Malone: You think you think you think that you think that's gonna fall on the retail chain rather than on the rather than on the producers? That makes sense. George: Well, because because by by early November, those birds are slaughtered and in the distribution chain chain. Right? So but but I mean, it's still for producers in general, you're still you you still got issues here. I mean, and we're not talking about stuff like, for instance, school lunch ladies. So Bitter Southerner, this, this issue. Great magazine, by the way. Hope everyone subscribes to it. I'll put a link in the show notes. They do wonderful work. Like, they're they're I posted about this on Blue Sky last night, but I was reading their their issue this this, I think they're biannual. And it's just this gorgeous print. It just feels so good in your hands and looks so good to your eyes. Anyhow, they have this great story about lunch ladies. And those are the kinds of institutions that are gonna have to shoulder the the burden here because those kids are still gonna be coming to school and they're still gonna need to be fed. And, you know, even more so because there's no snacks at home. Right? I mean, you're already talking about a population that gets 70% of their calories from their school. So it's only gonna get worse, and it's it is really gonna hit home in a lot of heavily Republican areas. And I don't I don't understand the logic of, the Trump administration saying we're not gonna do something to ameliorate this even though we can. The other thing is here, it's not just, oh, Democrats are voting against something in the Senate. The House isn't in session. It hasn't been in session for a month and a half. Propter Malone: That's suggestive of some some pretty dysfunctional dynamics within the Republican House caucus to me. Yeah. But We talked George: about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Right? Propter Malone: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's there's definitely some internal pushback against what Mike Johnson is trying to do, and I think it seems to me that Mike Johnson is keeping the house out of session because he doesn't think the consequences of bringing them back into session are gonna be good for him personally. George: Or for Trump. Propter Malone: Or for Trump. Yeah. That's fair. George: Yeah. I the the okay. I think this is really important to understand. The Trump administration cannot handle an internal revolt within the Republican Party. They do not have the horses for that in any way, shape, or form. It is a very, very, very topsy-turvy tower they've built, and one small push in the right floor is gonna bring the whole thing crashing down. And it might not be this particular I I I'm not gonna say it this is the thing. But I think elites in this country, whether they're inside the Republican Party, outside of it, need to completely reevaluate the mental model that they established last fall, that the Trump administration was extremely powerful, had a huge mandate, had a massive political will on it. No. Very much the opposite. And it's gotten so much weaker since then. And it's going to take almost nothing to knock the whole thing over. And I don't know what the first person to stand up is going be. Maybe we'll look back and say, Kimmel, that was the one. Right? And that sort of showed people that if you stand up, they don't have the horses. At some point it's going to happen inside the Senate or inside the House. And it might be this issue. It might be something else. But they don't have the horses to deal with an internal rebellion because they do not have the political movement behind them that everyone thought they did or acted like they did. Propter Malone: Yeah. And you're seeing those cracks kind of kind of develop and widen, like like you're seeing the NatSEC Republicans in the Senate, at minimum irritated and maximum angry about the various boat strikes. You're seeing, you know, the the relative, like, spending cut Republicans are are starting to wonder when the spending cuts are happening, especially as Doge and its children's firings have slowed down and that was supposed to be the the pound of flesh that those guys were exactly. You know, you're seeing we mentioned it earlier on the show, how you haven't seen Comstock Comstock enforcement out of DOJ. A lot of these guys are starting to wonder when they're getting paid for what they for the work they're ostensibly putting in for the Trump administration. George: Yeah. All right. I think that's it for this week. We have run long enough. We don't want to force y'all to listen to our nonsense for two hours, even on a weekly episode. So I'm gonna cut it off there because, for normal men in Charlotte, I'm George. Propter Malone: In DC, I'm Propter Malone. Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer: In Outer Florida, I'm low tech speedrun enjoyer. George: Stay normal, y'all.