Washington Wednesday: Edges of authority

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, December 3rd. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

Joining us is political scientist Hunter Baker. Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

EICHER: Well, you heard the news from Mark Mellinger a few moments ago. We saw this coming as we went into Election Day: Looks like Republicans hold the seat—but just barely. In a district President Trump a year ago carried by twenty-two points, this race was way closer than one would think. What does a result like that tell you?

BAKER: First thing I want to say is something I think that not many people are talking about, which is the decision of Representative Mark Green to abandon his seat halfway through his term. You're talking about a situation where the Republican majority is on a knife's edge, and he is leaving midterm to pursue a job opportunity or a new business or something like that. And I'm just thinking to myself, when you ran for office, you ran to represent the people, and I just don't think that it makes sense to leave, especially when national policy is on the edge to pursue a new interest. The term is only two years. Now that, having been said, yes, it's a big deal. It's a big deal for the Republicans to hold the seat, and it's a big deal that they barely held the seat. You're exactly right. This should be a very easy hold. And I think that's why the opponent, Ms Behn, is such an odd opponent who has talked about how she hates Nashville and she hates all the bridesmaids and all the pedal taverns and all these things like that. Normally she would not register, but it looks like she has. And I think that that's not good news for Donald Trump, because it indicates that there's tremendous resistance even in Trump country.

MAST: Let’s turn to Honduras. The presidential election there is in what officials call a “technical tie.” The two leading candidates are separated by just a few hundred votes. The country’s electoral council has halted the electronic count; it’s begun a manual, vote-by-vote verification that could take weeks. I read the law allows the council 30 days.

Now, the reasonable listener is saying, “this is Washington Wednesday right now, not World Tour”, well, there's nothing wrong with your podcast player. This Honduras election does have a Washington angle because of President Trump’s huge footprint.

He weighed in in favor of National Party candidate Nasry Asfura. And just days before, the president pardoned a former Honduran president from that same National Party: Juan Orlando Hernández, he’d been convicted in a U.S. federal court for conspiring with drug cartels. But the word on the street was that he’d retained a level of popularity:

AUDIO: [Translation] He was a not a bad president. His error was getting involved in something else, in drug trafficking, but he wasn't a bad President.

That food vendor in Honduras saying Hernández was not a bad president, his error was getting involved in drug trafficking.

Just drug trafficking, no big deal, right? Unless your name is Nicholas Maduro and you run Venezuela.

Hunter, what do you make of this? It’s one thing to endorse a candidate, it’s another to pardon a kingpin collaborator.

BAKER:There is a lot going on here, and I think that part of the reason that we are talking about Latin America so much is because Donald Trump is involving himself in Latin America so much and so often. The first thing I want to take note of is that we've been talking about Argentina Bolivia and now Honduras, and in each of those cases, we've seen a rejection of the parties of the left. Now in Argentina, we had Trump directly saying to the people, I'm going to withdraw support if you don't vote for Milei, who is my candidate. And that seems to have happened again here in Honduras. So his involvement is extremely transactional, very specific. And you know, it wouldn't necessarily always work. You could alienate the electorate of another country by inserting yourself into their national politics. But so far, it seems to be working for Trump here. The pardon of the former president is pretty tough to understand. We are claiming that we're extremely unhappy with quote, unquote, Narco terrorists and people who are bringing drugs into the continental United States, and yet we're pardoning this ex president, I guess, on the theory that it could marginally affect the calculus of that election. So the thing that I would say is, I. Think that Trump should think about his principles versus just kind of a pure situational decision making that seems to be going on. We need to know what the United States stands for, and then, just to clearly pursue that kind of an agenda.

EICHER: So much serious news this week, Hunter: Now we need to turn to a controversial harder line against drugs. Congress is now looking into a U.S. strike on a Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean that killed the crew and, according to the Washington Post, may have also killed survivors after the vessel was blown up.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denies giving any order to “kill them all,” as the Post said. And a New York Times report — citing different officials — says the follow-up strike was authorized on the scene by Admiral Frank Bradley. That name specifically surfaced in this White House statement by the press secretary Karoline Leavitt. I'll play most of it.

LEAVITT: Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.

And I would just add one more point to remind the American public why these lethal strikes are taking place — because this administration has designated these narco-terrorists as foreign terrorist organizations. The President has a right to take them out if they are threatening the United States of America and if they are bringing illegal narcotics that are killing our citizens at a record rate, which is what they are doing.

And under the previous administration, there was enough fentanyl trafficked into our country to kill every American man, woman, and child many times over. And so that’s why you’ve seen a drastic difference in this administration’s policy with respect to the last. …

So, the White House saying the operation was lawful and part of a broader campaign against what it now classifies as foreign terrorist organizations.

I read some friendly commentary from The Wall Street Journal editorial board, saying the seriousness of the allegation demands full congressional oversight. The Journal says Congress needs the full paper trail—written orders, comms, rules of engagement. It’s not prejudging guilt, but it does insist on transparency.

There, that’s the waterfront. Hunter, we’re going to draw on your legal training

What are the pertinent legal questions for Congress? And then you can pivot to the political angle.

BAKER: Well, I'm going to start by using a highly legal term, which is, this is what is known as a mess. It's a big mess now, which should get your attention when you look at any story about this or these words Narco terrorists, that's because we're kind of setting out a new sort of way of engaging drug traffic. You can imagine that in the past, we would, you know, maybe intercept these vehicles, maybe board them, maybe search them. Something really different is happening here. This is more like warfare. And so these are not just sort of drug smugglers. These are Narco terrorists. Presidents have tremendous power to do things in the short run. I think that we've recognized early in the history of this country that you can't wait for Congress to deliberate on these things and to authorize presidents to act in the short term. However, I do think that there's a serious question here between what is criminal and justifies sort of police actions, and what is warfare and justifies lethal force. One thing that I would say is in favor of the warfare interpretation, is the state involvement, based on what I've seen so far, it seems that we have kind of a union of cartels and the Venezuelan state, which is empowering this sort of drug trafficking. But boy, we're getting into some scary questions, right? Well, you know, we still don't know this idea of a second attack. Are we attacking survivors after the boat has already been disabled? And if we're are we changing the rules of warfare? Even if it is warfare, what are the duties to survivors? So I think that there's more to unfold with this.

MAST: Hunter, an Afghan national who received asylum earlier this year is now charged with killing a member of the National Guard blocks from the White House. He’s also charged with the grave wounding of another. That attack has revived questions about how the government screens asylum applicants and how it keeps track of people once they’re here.

We are assured again and again — and we’ve reported these assurances in our online stories, quoting refugee NGOs, including one that actually, according to The New York Times, helped this particular man. We are told that these individuals are well-vetted. That the system works. That this guy just snapped and he’s just one bad apple.

The administration, of course, disagrees. President Trump has already paused new asylum applications, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has floated a new travel ban aimed at countries that are unable or unwilling to provide information about their citizens to the administration’s satisfaction.

So that’s the policy landscape: the shooting, the claims of “strong vetting,” the pause on asylum, and now the prospect of a broader ban.

Hunter, what are the core questions the administration is going to have to answer on vetting?

BAKER: We really don't know if vetting would have prevented this incident. This young man may not have been the same sort of person when he came in that he has become. Some of these problems that we experience are the problems of basically an open and a free society. And part of how you lose a free society is if enough people act in this fashion, if enough people begin to act in unpredictable, dangerous and lethal ways, then the state grows and the restrictions are increased. So that's what we're facing. Do we have to figure out, are there things that we can do to make this sort of thing less likely? One thing that I would say, and I think this is going to sound weak to people, but I mean, it is to police our discourse. I think that the way we talk about politics. You know, some people hear the have heard of the phrase conflict entrepreneurs? I think that there are conflict entrepreneurs out there who gin things up so much that they sometimes launch some of these people into dangerous sorts of ways of thinking and activity. So the first thing we can do is to discipline our discourse.

EICHER: Major fallout this week over a fraud scheme involving a Somali immigrant community and the man who would’ve been Vice President–Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Hunter, the information coming out is staggering: Federal prosecutors say dozens of people took more than a billion-that’s billion with a B- dollars in Minnesota taxpayer funds meant to help feed children during Covid.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced yesterday that his department is investigating whether some of the money may have gone to a terrorist organization.

A New York Times piece quotes one investigator who says the situation grew because democrats in the state didn’t want to tackle it and face backlash from the Somali community–a key voter bloc for them.

Hunter, this isn’t a Washington story per se, but this certainly says something about the leadership of the man who was very nearly the Vice President. Paired with the increased scrutiny on immigrants right now and there’s a lot to unpack. Hunter what stands out most to you?

BAKER: Well, first of all, this, you said, this is a national story. It is a national story. This is not just a Minnesota story. I think that we probably could go through the country and find many, many examples of this in the state governments and in the federal government. And really what it comes down to is that governments like to do the easy things, and they don't like to do the hard things. It is always easy to dispense massive amounts of money to anybody who asks you for it, or anybody who fills out an application. What's hard is figuring out who deserves the money and what's what is actually a justified request. And then what's hard after that is making sure that you actually police the system, that you find the people who are committing the fraud, that you stop the fraud. You stop it fast. But you don't stop it after a billion dollars in the hole. And I just think that politicians don't want to do that. They haven't been doing that, and it's a betrayal of everybody who is working hard and doing things the right way, and it's a betrayal of the taxpayer. And I want to see some political leaders who are ready to tackle this problem.

MAST: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University. Thank you, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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