Washington Wednesday: A movement under strain

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 19th of November.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday. Joining us is Hunter Baker, political scientist, WORLD Opinions contributor, and provost at North Greenville University. Hunter, good morning!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

MAST: We’ll start with the Epstein files. Yesterday, Republicans and Democrats in the House overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill to force the release of more Epstein-related documents held by the Department of Justice.

All but Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins voted in favor. Higgins is on the House Oversight Committee investigating Epstein. He posted on X that he’s opposed to exposing victims and witness information in the files the way this bill would require.

EICHER: President Trump has called the whole thing a distraction and a hoax. He previously promised to release the files but his administration backed off in the spring. Now he is sounding a slightly different tune:

TRUMP: I don't care about it, released or not. What I think you should do, if you're going to do it, then you have to go into Epstein's friends...

EICHER: Well, Hunter, that is a very big shift, and no doubt it drove the near unanimity in the house. Do you think this signaled confidence on his part, or was he just realizing this is a no win situation?

BAKER: There's a lot of danger in speculating about this, and, you know, kind of trying to figure out what Donald Trump's mind and motives are here. But I will say that I think that he has a pretty finely tuned kind of a radar, and I think that he realizes there is no victory available in blocking this thing. I mean, you know, when you have a person in Epstein's situation super high profile in prison, should be protected, should be watched, ends up dead, then we are all tremendously suspicious. And to get in the way of finding out what really happened is just not good for any politician who's going to face the voters, or whose party is going to have to face the voters. So I think that he finally decided to yield.

I will say one thing that's really interesting, and what's come out so far is the information about Larry Summers. For those who don't know who Larry Summers is, he was Secretary of the Treasury. He was president of Harvard University. He is currently a professor at Harvard. He has held a number of very notable posts. I mean, when it comes to the world of economics in the United States, no matter what the top echelon is, he's in it. And yet, in this release, we have him seeking advice from Jeffrey Epstein about how to basically get with a mentee, pretty, pretty bad stuff. And you wonder what else we're going to find as as it all comes out.

MAST: This is connected to Epstein, but it’s more a matter of Republican infighting,

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has moved from being one of Trump’s fiercest allies to a person in possession of a pejorative nickname from the president.

TRUMP: Marjorie Traitor Green. I don't think her life is in danger. I don't think, frankly, I don't think anybody cares about her.

This comes after Greene openly pushed the Epstein matter … and refused to back down.

The president’s version of events is that the congresswoman was disappointed after he discouraged her from running for Senate in Georgia … and that’s what led her to turn against him.

Greene responded.

GREENE: I’ve never owed him anything, but I fought for him, for his policies, and for America First. And he called me a traitor…

MAST: Hunter, Greene represents a so-called “safe” red district in Georgia, what she might not be safe from is a primary challenge. Should she worry?

BAKER: Well, obviously, when you have based your entire political identity on Donald Trump, which is what she did, it's a bad sign when you get a Trump nickname, right? But on the other hand, I would want to congratulate her on what I would call some political growth and maturity here. You know some of what she did in the past, the way she acted during one of the previous State of the Union addresses, I thought was embarrassing, interrupting yelling out, “say her name, say her name.” She is in a super safe district. She won't be defeated by any Democrat. The only danger would be from a Trump backed opponent, and and I don't know who might be out there that he might want to back, but you know, one of the things that we've seen with Trump is that these kind of disagreements are reversible. Ted Cruz was once a major rival and critic of Donald Trump—

EICHER: Don’t you mean “Lyin’ Ted?”

BAKER: —And Marco Rubio, aka little Marco, also, you know, a major rival, and now both of those guys are comfortably allied with him. She can make it back. I do want to say that I think it's a bad look for her to be hoping to run for the Senate this quickly after beginning her career. A similar example I could think of was Richard Nixon, but that's Richard Nixon. And Richard Nixon had successfully exposed a Soviet spy in a major case before the U.S. Congress, so she maybe should sit back for a while.

EICHER: Let’s widen the lens. Trump’s also defending Tucker Carlson after Carlson’s lengthy interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Here’s what the president said:

TRUMP: He’s said good things about me over the years…but you can’t tell him who to interview…get the word out, ultimately people have to decide…people are controversial…

EICHER: At the same time, conservative legal scholar Robert George has resigned from the Heritage Foundation board in protest over how that whole Fuentes episode was handled.

Hunter, connect those dots for us. What does Trump’s defense of Carlson—and Robbie George walking away from the Heritage governing board—what does that tell you about the state of the conservative movement in Washington?

BAKER: So this issue with regard to anti-Semitism is one that we often associate with the left, at least sort of the academic left, but it also also has been sort of a question on the right. There's a history there. Joe Sobren was a fantastic writer for National Review, and very close with Bill Buckley, and he began to be more suspicious of the motives of the nation of Israel, and wondering whether the United States should be so tightly allied with it, you know. And eventually that became such a large disagreement, he was removed from National Review and really never had the same career again. Pat Buchanan, similarly, often would raise these kinds of questions about Israel. And you know, he was a stronger figure and more capable of withstanding strong critiques from figures such as David Frum.

But now you have Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, others of that type. And Carlson having Nick Fuentes on is maybe a different sort of a kettle of fish compared to the kinds of things that somebody like Pat Buchanan might have said in the past. And so, you know, extremely provocative figure Fuentes is in addition to things that he might say about about Israel or Jews, also recently expressed his love for Joseph Stalin. So that gives you a sense of sort of the the flavor of the remarks.

And so now we have Robert George basically reacting to the Heritage Foundation president, not really being able to fully distance himself from Tucker Carlson, who hosted Fuentes. Robert George leaving the Heritage Foundation is a huge deal. I'm not saying that people won't disagree about this, but, but if you want to look at a figure who has been a giant of the pro-life movement, a giant arguing for traditional marriage, and to do so as a professor at Princeton all these years, I mean, somebody who has put his credibility on the line again and again, the fact that he's resigning from Heritage there's going to be continuing conversation.

EICHER: Hunter, you mentioned that not everybody's going to agree, and not everybody does. I want to read a post on social media by a really smart guy from a group called the New Founding, Josh Abbatoy. He's a he's a Harvard guy. He praises Robbie George much the same way you do, but he says he thinks that George has made a mistake here, citing Robbie George's close friendship with Cornel West, a dear friend of Louis Farrakhan. Speaking of anti-Semitism, Abbatoy accuses Robbie George of having a bit of a blind spot there, and adds, I'll quote here, “these strict associational tests always work out more strictly when dealing with radicals on the right.” So Hunter, what of that? Does he not have a point?

I think it's a pretty subtle argument. Abbatoy is a smart guy, interesting guy. I know him. I am not sure that the argument about Cornel West is as telling as it might be. I mean, Robert George and Cornel West, they became friends at Princeton, and basically what they do is they go places, and they talk about civil discourse, and, you know, the ability to have friendships across party lines and things like that. I have never heard any of that stray into any kind of publicity for Louis Farrakhan or for anti-Semitism. So I would argue there's a difference there, but it's not, it's not a crazy argument from Abbatoy.

MAST: Let’s turn to immigration, Hunter. On the ground, Border Patrol has been conducting mass arrests in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the same time, Catholic leaders have been urging “compassion.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement, and Pope Leo was asked about U.S. immigration policy. He didn’t condemn the policy outright, but he did say this:

POPE LEO: Many people who have lived for years and years and years never causing problems have been deeply affected by what's going on right now. The spiritual rights of people who have been detained should also be considered.

So how do you think about this moment? Compassion on the one hand, of course, of course! But what about the need for a functioning border and a system that isn’t overwhelmed?

BAKER: Well, it's really important here to realize that the church is not the state, and so the church to some extent, you know, one of my books, I called it the soul of the system that that the church kind of acts as a conscience for the broader society. I think that it is perfectly valid for the Pope to be raising these points about, how can we deal with an impossible situation compassionately. But at the same time, I think you're absolutely right that in the modern world, we have to have a functioning border, and we have to have some kind of a rational process. And I really think that it begins by recognizing everything that we've done wrong before. We've had a tremendously negligent system, and it has been so negligent that it has basically broken any normal sort of way of handling this thing, right?

You know that we we talk about things like due process. And then the question comes up, well, how do you give due process to millions of people? Well, so we're going to have to figure that out. But before, before I go there, that means that we've got to get the now correct. And so I think that we're getting the now correct, which is we're starting to actually control the border. I think that the numbers of people crossing the border have been vastly reduced. I think that that that momentum has got to be continued, and once we're once we're solid about that, then we can continue to work through the ways to address the the millions of people who are already here.

But no, I don't think that should be a merciless process. And I think that the church should help out every way that it can. But let's not be mistaken. We do have to have some way to deal with it. We do need to know who these people are. They do need to pay taxes. You know, I think that probably we need to have some sort of a worker visa program or something like that. People go out and then they can come back in. But it has to be done. I don't, I don't really think that it's avoidable at this point.

EICHER: You know, we always talk about controlling the border. We've got to have a border, etc, and so forth, but these questions of deportations of millions of people who came here illegally with a wide open border. Those are tougher questions. But why are they tougher?

BAKER: It's tougher because I think that there is always a temptation to say we have messed up so comprehensively and there are so many millions of people involved that we just need to declare an amnesty and start over. And I think that that logic has has kind of been out there again and again. But the problem is, if you do that, then you actually undermine the legitimate system. In fact, you you vastly reduce the chances that people will choose the legitimate system. So I think that we just need to go back and we need to look at, how do we give people in Mexico sort of a rational and not overly burdensome process where they can come to the U.S. and work, and we can easily keep track of them, and they can pay taxes,

EICHER: Hunter, Baker, political scientist and world opinions contributor. It's always a great discussion. Thank you Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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