much for your time. >> is great to see you f again. thank you.

>> ira shapiro integra's focusd on american politics and international. might be served 12 years in senior staff positions in the u.s. senate working for a series of distinguished senators gaylord nelson abraham ribicoff, siegelman robert byrd and jay rockefeller. he served in the office of u.s. trade represented during the clinton administration first as general counsel and then as chief negotiator with japan and canada with the rank of ambassador. from 2012 to 2017 is the chairman of the national association of japan american societies and received a commendation from the foreign minister of japan and he's the author of two previous critically acclaimed books abou. the senate. in 2012 the last great senate courage and statesmanship and

times of crisis and in 20 team broken, can the senate save itself in the country? ira latest book is called "betrayal" how mitch mcconnell and the senate republicans abandoned america. interviewing mr. shapiro will be eugene meyer and award-winning journalist with passion for history and travel, real estate and the chesapeake bay. widely published in magazines he has authored four books and was for many years of reporter and editor of the "washingtonon pos" since leaving the post in 2004 mr. meyer has7 received 17 awars for his work and more than 50 bylines in "the new york times." his firstal journalism job was s a washington are laboring for the old new york he wrote tribune where you got to tag along with a white house reporter who watch lbg -- lbj signed the 1964 civil rights act into law.

pretty cool. [applause] it's hard to avoid partisanship when discussing his book or just look at that title. and as i tried to tie his introduction to current events are last few weeks i kept waking up to new headlines every day that seem to require constant rewriting. it was like oh what method mitch mcconnell responsible for today whether the supreme court abortion or campaign finance voting rights or climate change are holding up critical appropriation or primary election results so much traced back to what is the so-called grim reaper. with your indulgence let me focus on the fact through lens of mitch mcconnell ira shapiro raises the foundational question. what should we expect of electedon behind officials in our public? should we simply expect them to be driven by nothing more than a

quest for unbridled power employing tactics in the main -e name of amassing control as james madison warned us about in the federalist papers, or maybe, just maybe we should expect something more of our leaders that they be able to at the least sometimes rise of love and desires to a mass power that they serve the t greater good wh communitynd country posterity before themselves and their tribe. at the very least not incite angry mobs or he racist dog whistles or be apologists for conspiracy theorist or standby in thes face of the tempted co. that's a pretty low bar. perhaps we should expect ultimately at their best our leaders can inspire a shared vision based on fundamental principals, vision toward which we can all work in the name of up with a not only ourselves.

each o other and all of us as te irgang of tennis tried to do a a explains in the book really in gaithersburg at the local level of government generally subscribe to that latter view that because we are naïve. because we have seen it p as possible and we have made it possible and we know it's aa better path so we try to be an example of something more than a sad a and politics in his detaid account of mitch mcconnell's career in the trump administration. as a writer ira is a wonderful ability to translate tones of dense political news coverage in academic and historical analysis personalna experience into a fld and captivating er about the misguided characters at the center of our national crisis. it all makes for an engaging way to digest and make sense of the news coverage many of us are familiar with. i have to say rereading this

book in reliving the moments gave me a little bit of ptsd. with a warm welcome and with gratitude for your willingness to tackle topics so. enn depressing hand the program over to eugene meyer and ira shapiro. welcome. [applause] >> thank you and good morning and ira it's a pleasure to be on the stage with you today. to flashback to 2013 when you publish your last book the last great senate and although mitch mcconnell had declared his primary goal was to make a president obama or one-term president you areel optimistic. you spoke to college students and you felt regular order was breaking out citing the gang of

eight and he looks forward to the next great senate. what happened? [laughter] >> thank you, thanks for being here. it's great to be interviewed by somebody who has had a remarkable career as a journalist and has also been a wonderful author beside your contribution to the community. so thank you for doing this. and for bringing up my occasional effort to be more optimistic which has established a long record of naïveté or disappointment. it's interesting when i wrote the first book which was the last great senate they did it for the purpose of showing how the senate worked when it worked to and how the senate was a source of inspiration at one time not just frustration and

disappointment. i kind of thought as you point out i was looking for sheets of evidence that things were getting better. many of the senators actually wanted the senate to work better so there would be some moments when it appeared that things were going to get better. inevitably my hopes would he dashed. mcconnell would strike forward and regular order. regular legislative process would fail in the senate would spiral downward again. that has been the sequence of events i believe where the senators would like it to be better but the leader has insisted that it not he. >> joe biden when he was campaigning for president at his inauguration he was the

bipartisan former senator who could bring everyone together and overcome the polarization that you so eloquently write about. my question was he being naïve or just political? >> a great question. it getsa asked a lot because president biden of course had 35 years in the senate. he loves to make bipartisan deals. he likes or liked to think he was a friend of mitch mcconnell theban. i think the answer is complicated. i think the president has a way that he believes politics should be and he's made every to have it that way. at the same time i think he was under no illusions about mcconnell because he saw him close up in eight years at theth obama presidency. so i think he knew. to make the effort you can bring some other republicans along but

i think he was under no illusions by the time he was president. >> my question is beyond mitch mcconnell witches you look back wistfully is that based on on -- as opposed to foundational and i ask that because we have this i don't not afraid to, authoritarian minority rule based on the founders vision in 1787 somehow giving everyone a call in these two senators would work out fine and now you have a situation where wyoming was 690,000 people has two senators in california with 41 million peopleat has two senators see he this great imbalance; is is it

about mcconnell or so more foundational and other basic flaw in our system that mcconnell and the authoritarians are exploiting? >> that's a great question and pretty foundational actually. i guess when i wrote the first book the last great

i don't think he was a great leader, but he got some things

done including the affordable care act. he really played an important role in that. i think that he really played an important role in that. i think schumer is a capable leader dealing with the challenges of the 50/50 senate. i think he's done considerable things in the way of accomplishments and is probably made some mistakes as well. >> given we don't have the two parties closer together than they were a generation ago what if anything can be done about i described as the authoritarian minority rule? >> well i have tried in the book and in my articleses before, i'e tried very hard to encourage the relatively small group of

independent minded republicans are moderate republicans to be their best selves, to come forward and join biden in the democratic senators in moving the country forward and occasionally that happened. the infrastructure bill etc.. so i think i'd like the republicans to show more independent from their leader. it doesn't happen very often. my answer beyond that is i take away as many things as i could thatat interfere with majority rule in the senate. i would get rid of the filibuster. i would get rid of polls holes which it turned into this thing where rand paul can stop action in the senate by himself and so i would focus on those things. ultimately i believe that the senators have to understand the

great privilege they to have been the responsibility they have to protect the national interest and not just the partisan hacks. >> do you think the democrats who have a slim majority vice president harris is the majority vote have been as effective as they couldha be or have they've been less so? >> like probably every democrat i share frustrations about joe manchinn and the role he has played. i know of no precedent actually for senator who plays that role not just on a couple of issues but one thing aftero another no matter how many concerns are met. he has more concerned so i have that frustration. but i do think the problem is that joe biden came to office

with a very ambitious agenda based on the conditions of the countryy. and their needs as a country and it has collided with his very narrow majority and that has required him to pull back and one could say possibly biden and schumer should have understood that earlier. >> we are in a different time than a generation ago. i refer specifically to social media and breaking news which is breakingn 24/7, cable news and o on and i wonder what your thoughts are and has the media been complicit with their horse race with both sides of the coverage in making the legislative economy more difficult? >> yes. i always say or i always think

and sometimes they that it's much harder to be a senator now than it was in the earlier years and among the important factors that changed it are the very 24shrill 24/7 cable news and now the intense effect of social media which amplifies differences in anger so yes i think it is more difficult. my view is that makes it more important for them to be real senators, to recognize their responsibility to bring people together to the extent possible. we can't always agree on things. bring people together and not exacerbate differences and if i had a criticism, and i have many criticisms of senator mcconnell i know of no time or

few times that he brought people together as opposed to driving them apart and that's wrong for senators the particularly wrong for a senate leader. >> how would you make the democratic response to mcconnell's behavior? >> it certainly hasn't been effective overall. i think it's getting sharper and stronger and i think the president is taking on the republicans and will continue to take on the republicans particularly as the republican party becomes more and more extreme, nationalist parties. i think it's getting stronger but you know there's an inherent and this sounds obvious. an inherent problem which is it was captured by sam rayburn the most famous speaker of nancy

pelosi. rnsam rayburn famously said hey- it takes a to knock down the barbara takes a carpenter to build one. that gives mcconnell, has given mcconnell great advantage. he did succeed in some of his major objectives when he was in the majority as well. obstruction is easier than governing. >> it's interesting you say that. the other day he was asked about inflation for the economy and what republicans would do if they got thehe majority of theel response they would like us to find out. >> we will tell you later.f >> no plan at all. >> he does have a thesis there which is a very strong part of what he does.

he believes that the party in power is going to be held responsible for the conditions of the country and so if biden is having trouble and the country is angry about a whole range of things that frustrated understandably withun thing is, that while were ward the out party. that's his plan. >> it's probably a bipartisan consensus on that. i would think the democrats although wouldn't publicly say that would agree with that. >> naturally being an optimist i disagree with that consensus and will be proven naïve as usual. >> i want to talk a little bit about judges which is the majors sore point among democrats and many others and the fact that mcconnell held up merrick garland on the excuse that it was too close to a presidential year and rushing in coney

barrett just before the election of joe biden. and basically it's a push by the senate many very conservative judges. is there anything the democrats could have done differently to stop that or slowed it down? >> well i think there are things that could have done. let's dropop back and say that e republicans and particularly the federalist society has focused on judges for a long time in a way that the democrats didn't and the democrats looking at the last long game would say that they didn't pay enough attention. there's a man named brian fallin. founded the band justice.

he broke with schumer because he didn't think the democrats were doing enough. to some extent this is the long arc of how things of law and, the federalist society. effectively has been fighting this fight since the reagan years. harry reid opened the door to the federal judges other than the supreme court by using the nuclear option as we know to take away the right, the ability to filibuster. so what could they have done? not that much. but i want to make one distinction here. and i looked this up. we'll think of mcconnell running through every federal judge he could in the four years of trump and he did. jimmy carter in his one term had more judges confirmed ben donald

trump. so presidents come, presidents go. carter had the district court andpe appellate judges more than trump did. what is changes the supreme court. what has changed is the confirmation of three radical right-wing justices and in that regard the democrats didn't do very well and it shows the polarization of the country. those justices could be confirmed but i will takeas a breath before i go on to attack mcconnell's role specifically. >> mcconnell would say perry reed opened the door by allowing federal judges a simple majority so he was justified in doing the same for the supreme court.

is there a sponsor that? >> yeah i think there is a response to that. and by the way one of the charms of senator mcconnell he not only has victories. then he rewrites the history. he is very recently said and he has said many times the left is -- the democrats are responsible for every escalation of the judicial war. that is simply not true. the confirmation of supreme court justices was proceeding relatively normally for a long time until his unprecedented action to prevent the nomination and consideration of merrick garland. he won that one. he came out of he came out a winner when trump came in. everything else followed frompr that including and that was an unprecedented at. utterly unprecedented and the

ramming through of amy coney barrett which i call the banana republic confirmation eight days beforeio the election was i thik the most anti-democratic act i have ever seen. >> going back to 2015 back on mcconnell. [laughter] >> let's talk about mcconnell. >> it's trite to me looking back at 2015 you mentioned the democrats didn't take the supreme court seriously enough. seems to me at the time 2015 for democrats was mostly about breaking the glass ceiling and very little attention was paid to the supreme court. which is of equal if not greater importance and that was something -- >> spoiler alert i'm an old guy. you and i together old guys so

we go back in history a long way. i was in the mondale presidential campaign in 1984 and wrote speeches about the importance of the supreme court and how we might lose the majority. if we didn't pay more attention ton it. that was a half a lifetime ago. look i think what happened in 2016, while a number of things happened. one, donald trump had a gut instinct when it was brought to him the idea that he could really solidified the republicans if he had opus the judges that he was would promise to pick the supreme court justice from. he grasped it. it was a mcconnell idea and domick and the white house counsel from the federalist society and the heritage foundation but he got it. he got it and it worked for him.

number two though i think the trump versus hillary clinton race was so astonishing overall that i think anyone issued got subsumed by it. you talk about the supreme court but you came back to it's either trump or hillary etc.. so mcconnell actually didn't expect trump to win from what we could tell that he wanted to keep the seats just in case and he came up a winner. >> going back to mcconnell and current events really what he said in private about trump's impeachable offense of the i insurrection which was a forget his exact words, i'm sick of the guy.

then his vote to acquit and followed by public criticism of trump and his comments that he justified his vote. can you believe -- >> that's a really greatea question. you can believe certain things mcconnell says and he's transparent about certain things. when he tells you he wanted to repeal the affordable care act you could believe that and when he tells you how important the courts are, you can believe that. there are things that he says that you can believe but in general look, if you look at mcconnell's speech on the morning of january 6 when mcconnell came together to certify the results of the election or you look at his

brilliant speech on february 13, he couldn't make a better speech condemning trump. then he pivots and finds a way to keep trump from being convicted. i write in the book that i think he genuinely was outraged that trump. he 36 years in the capitol. he was outraged by the desecrationn of the capitol and the insurrection but he quickly calculates. he's too powerful iny the party to bring him down. maybe over time you will wither away. that iss my strategy basically. >> time will tell. >> time will tell and certainly thus far donald trump remains very powerful withinpa the part. trump has criticized mcconnell

and condemned mcconnell repeatedly. it hasn't shaken mcconnell's position of senate republicans. time will tell. let's see what the the january 6 committee does for one thing. >> i have one final question for you. >> we are done already? >> i'll give you a chance to expound on it. my question is should the republicans regain the senate majority after the november election and what you expect and what can we expect of mcconnell? >> first i woulday say might bok which some people have said is a very good book is somewhat depressing -- [laughter] a very good book. somewhat depressing. it ends with a call to action. fundamentally if you want to change the political direction of the country what you need to

do is reduce mcconnell's power.ha to be honest we've been living what i called mitch mcconnell's america for a long time and we still are. if you elect more democratic senators and reduces power that would change things and the math is very favorable for democrats even though it's an uphill struggle given the climate at the map is favorable. the republicans have more seats up. if forbid mcconnell again becomes thee majority leader i expect he will do the bear minimum for the country and he will be focused primarily on how to regain the white house in 2024, forever -- for whoever the republicans nominated despite trump he is able i would support them, of course that theseouou nominated. so the senate elections become

really important. >> a lot of pundits have said our democracy hangs by a thread right now. do you share their pessimism? or not so much? >> i think art democracy hangs by a thread. i'm astonished at how precarious the situationen is. if you had told me that we would have this pandemic, two years of covid, we would have joe biden become president and we would have been insurrection and yet the divisions are greater than they everha were you would have said well maybe we can get back on track but it has not worked that way and it has gotten. one of the things that is most important about mcconnell as he has managed to keep help the

madness of the republican party stay in power all these years. basically he reflects the republican party at this point. he would say otherwise but he is the republican party. i think a hangs by a thread. >> is there anything else you would like to add? >> well i want to return to the notion of him as the architect of division. he is very unrepentant for anything that has happened in so judge ketanji jackson is nominated to the supreme court. it's a moment when could celebrate an african-american woman comingng to the justice. they still have a 6-3 majority of right-wing judges on the court. no, he can't do that. he can't even say it's quite an achievement. i don't agree with her and i'm going to vote against her.

no, it's the radical left. she is the choice of the radical left, always division. i want to say i commend him for going to ukraine. i think it wouldou be great if president zelensky and the courage of the ukrainian people reminded him of the importance of democracy but he has done huge damage to american democracy. >> thank you very much.h. i think we have time for a few questions. [applause] >> thank you. >> hi. i manned the story and so i'm going to go way back before your time. when i look at social media today and i look at newspapers from the 1860s, i see a lot of similarities.

the last time the senate was so divided and last time the country was so polarized was before the civil war. today we have two major things mainly pressuring our society. one is the growing influence of though supremacist whose aim is to start a race war and the other is o the climate emergency in the climate crisis. both of these things lead to violence in our society. do you think we are heading in that direction with division between the states? >> thank you for the question in your perspective as a historian.

i think we are heading in a direction. i think that's why it's incumbent on people who have the responsibility as leaders to look at the division of the country and the national interest and behave accordingly. i guess the reason, and i would say the social media exacerbates everything and frankly it's not clear to me whether democracy can survive social media but i should have said to the audience, the reason i focus on senators, citizens have a responsibility but the senators have real responsibilities. they have these privileged positions like nobody else have the multiple six-year terms. they are going to serve three,

four, five times longer than any president can. it's a privilege and the deal which most senators used to understand, is an exchange. you have a responsibility to the nation. you have responsibility particularly in timess. of cris. you are a party member but you are not a partisan hack. youta care about your state that you are not a state legislator. you have to lift it up and they haven't lifted it up. so that's why voters have their responsibilities and mccain came through in 2018 and 2020 in a powerful way that the senators they owe us a lot more than they are giving us. [applause] >> i've heard a lot about what

you think mcconnell's traits are. i know one of them. do you think the supreme court is one of the things he has done to the country. based on your last comment i would say the voting rights in the senate not protectin' people's right to vote is the thing in the last questioner's comment about protectingme democracy. how would you evaluate mcconnell's impact on that? >> well that's a great question from a friend who is my wife. [laughter] [applause] >> it wasn't planted. there are things than the supreme court.

>> i was on lawrence o'donnell the other night and he read something where i had denounced mcconnell bennie said anthony it.ht, that's not all of i think he's been on voting rights. i think the unified republicans havepe opposed voting rights tht are desperately needed and i made that comment that senators aren't state legislators. you have people like senator saying you don't need federal voting rights legislation because elections went well and maine. that's not an answer to the rest of the country and what we actually need. part of my reason for inc. urging people in the 2022 election, whatever whether it's

abortion rights, voting rights climate gun control, health care mcconnell is at the root of all of it. he's at the root of all of this. i blame him for a ripping with the exception of the -- i don't really blame him for that. [applause] >> i come from a slightly different perspective. i don't have much of a perspective on history. maybe that's an advantage because they see things for what they are. things have changed over the last few years especially on the democratic side. for me the republicans to a

certain extent, there's a lot of supremacists. i'm also seeing a lot of now on the democratic side. if you are looking at a solution for this, where'd you go-go from here? you could say the extremes on the i democratic side are making that stronger. so maybe it's incumbent to come closer to the middle. for example i think manchin helped by the pushing the party away from this big bill which was creating a problem with inflation and bring it back.

it seems like whenever someone is pushing the party closer to the middle there so much pushback on the democratic side. that's the problem i have. i see this whole concept of [inaudible] which is great. that's just my perspective and they think from my perspective at least i would like to see the democrats pull more to the moderate side than otherwise. >> well look as we have discussed i think biden had extraordinarily ambushes -- m. tisch -- ambitious goals across the country and an ambitious agenda and realize things that

have been a certain kind of progress that has been very rare in our country. at t.r., lbj, you don't get these opportunities very often and i think the democrats felt there was an opportunity. it collides with their narrow majority and that's why. but i don't share the view that the problem is merely a democratic album. ifif you look at bernie sanders and the 6 trillion-dollar program the democrats made it a 3 trillion-dollar program and then $1.5 trillion. they didn't compromise. for 30 years the republicans have moved in that direction of conservatism to radicalism and nihilism to white supremacist

and. it's a long story and american politics. we have one political party the somewhat fractious andwe one apocalyptic cults. a [applause] i didn't deliver the line quite right. we have one party that's fractious and one party that was described by a 25 year veteran stalwart of the republicans and years ago as the talk collected cold and it's only gotten since then. [applause] >> during the second impeachment trial there were -- there was the opportunity to drive a stake t.through trump's heart and we were told it was a private vote with well over 67 votes. there were some republican senators not running for

re-election. voted took an effect. yet portman voted not to convict. in your research did you find other reasons why republican senators wouldn't vote to convict even though privately they would have? >> it's a great question. look may be one to end on because despite my cause i exception with mcconnell, mcconnell could not have succeeded if otherif republicans had pushed back on him. at any time five or six republicans or for could have stopped not only mcconnell. trump. what happened was a couple of the independent-minded republicans left politics. john mccain passed away. the best part of lindsay died john with -- died with john

mccain. and then we were left with susan collins and lisa murkowski. mcconnell after his great speech or as he was condemning trump he has later said well i couldn't go against all the other republicans. the other republicans many would rally to convict trump is mcconnell headed by the way i don't know how rob portman and lamarhe alexander and any number of the others have lived with their records over the last four years. thank you all. [applause]

thankk you everyone for coming. my name is parker van houten i'm a fifth-year senior at the university of kentucky. i'm very happy to be here on this brisk and blustery morning. our first presenter is an associate professor of finance at kentucky university the author of the books "taboo" 10 facts you can't talk about and 50 million-dollar question. please welcome wilfred reilly. our next speaker is the author of 11 books including "thought criminal" google