Friday Morning Politics: What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, journalist and presidential historian Jonathan Alter who has written books about FDR, Barack Obama and now want about Jimmy Carter. There's a story in there about how Carter classed with Joe Biden on the issue of busing for integrating public schools. Jonathan also tweeted today that Hunter Biden could be the Billy Carter of the Biden administration. I'll explain. Jonathan also made the recent documentary about New York journalists Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin that won an Emmy this year for outstanding historical documentary.

Jonathan himself has been a national politics reporter for Newsweek, and The Daily Beast as well. He has his eye on both the past and the present. For example, he tweeted this. He is not just for the Supreme court to reject the lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to undo the presidential election results. He is calling on them to be disbarred on the grounds of sedition against the people of the United States and something called "Rule 11." We'll skip rules 1 through 10 and explain that. With us now is Jonathan Alter. The new book is called His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Hi, Jonathan. Always great to have you, welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Alter: Hi, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian: Can we start on the news? What's this Rule 11?

Jonathan: I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to play one on the radio, but that's a rule that allows judges to basically sanction lawyers who file frivolous nuisance suits. We need a new category, what I think of as a menace suit, a suit that is a menace to our constitution and our democracy.

Larry Tribe, who was one of the great constitutional law authorities, knows much, much more about this than I do. He has an organization called "Lawyers defending democracy," which I would urge any attorney who was listening to this program to join because he is committed to pushing back against what are now being called the "Seditious 17," those 17 attorneys general or attorney generals who are trying to stage, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, a gunless coup d'etat in the United States.

I'm not that excitable, Brian. You've had me on your program a lot, and I don't usually have my hair on fire, but this is a grave matter. If there's not push-back, if these folks, who are trying to overturn the will of the people, are not sanctioned, punished at the polls when they run for attorney general the next time or other office, but actually disbarred or at least concerned that they might be disbarred, then we will lose our democracy in the next election because they will just litigate the hell out of it, like they are this time, and refuse to accept the results of the election.

Push-back is extremely important. In the short term we're okay, Brian. Joe Biden will take the oath on January 20th, but in the medium and longer term we must have lawyers pushing back and sanctioning and disbarring these folks who are trying to upend our democracy.

Brian: You sound confident that Joe Biden will take the oath on January 20th, and all the legal analysts seem to say the suit at the Supreme Court now is groundless and doesn't stand a chance, but I was surprised to hear even Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, usually a Trump ally, say on CNN yesterday that he thinks it's baseless, and he wouldn't want other States telling Texas that they can't set their own election rules. He doesn't want Texas telling these four states who are the defendants, but Romney, Cornyn, Ben Sasse, Republican Senator, have come out against this, otherwise crickets.

Here's a new piece since yesterday's show, listeners, more than 100 Republican members of the House have gone in on the suit. This isn't just the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, 18 attorneys general, more than 100 members of Congress now. Does the politics of that give it more of a chance at the Supreme court, in your opinion, Jonathan?

Jonathan: It makes it a graver threat to our republic, but I don't think it necessarily gives it more of a chance at the Supreme Court. The point that Senator Cornyn was making is a very important one. By the way, the Republican attorney general of Ohio has this view, a number of other Republican attorneys general have this view. The Supreme Court is unlikely to take this case because it would then encourage states to sue each other on a lot of other things. The court in the past has not liked those kinds of cases.

Some lawyers I've consulted on this say that they really don't want to incentivize states to sue each other. Also, the lawsuit is just completely groundless. I actually read it. It's a preposterous case on many different levels, as any self-respecting lawyer will tell you. The real threat, I think, is not this case. Yes, maybe there's a 2%, 5% chance they could hear the case and really put fuel on the fire.

Even then there's no guarantee that they would- I think, it'd be unlikely that they would overturn the election, which is what the Texas attorney general, who, by the way- this guy Paxton, he's looking for a pardon because he is under criminal investigation, and it's about to get indicted. There's a corrupt pardon bid that is part of this Texas lawsuit as well. The larger point, Brian, is, however it plays out politically right now, and it's unlikely to change the results of the election, highly unlikely.

Brian: Just one more thing on that though. These 106 members of Congress now, members of the House of Representatives. I know you're a presidential historian, not a constitutional lawyer, but Trump has his eyes not just on the Electoral College or on the Supreme Court, but on the day of January 6th, when Congress is supposed to officially accept the Electoral College's vote, could party politics sabotage the election at that juncture?

Jonathan: No. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives. 106 doesn't get it done for those who want to restart our democracy. That's what they are. They're usurpers. They're giving aid and comfort to a gunless coup d'etat attempt. They don't have the votes. No, I'm not worried about that. What I am worried about, this is why I do want to just shift the conversation at least briefly to the medium and long-term, I'm worried about amnesia in America, and that Democrats tend to respond to these things by wringing their hands.

Then, when the danger passes, they move on to something else. That cannot happen in this time. Otherwise, we will have a huge problem in 2022 because the election results will not be accepted by the Republican Party, if there is not sanction and push-back this time. In other words, these guys have to fear that they will either pay at the polls or pay with their law license. If they don't have any push-back, they will just file these suits the next time. If the election is closer, they might win and be able to actually set a precedent for overturning the will of the people.

This requires attention. I hope that you do a show on this next year and the year after that and the year after that, to find out what has happened to the Seditious 17, whether those attorneys general are feeling the heat or not. Right now, they're just afraid of a primary challenge. That's why they did it. They all know it's wrong. They're lawyers, they know it's pathetic, but they're afraid of a Trumpist primary challenge. The rest of us have to make them afraid that they will lose a general election, and that requires political organizing, or that they will lose their law license or some be sanctioned.

Brian: Do both parties then need to pull back a little bit? Because Trump's supporters see the world in part as Trump being constantly harassed in his time in office by Democrats who never accepted that election. Some Democrats in Congress boycotted the inauguration, saying Russian interference made Trump an illegitimate president. Then there was the Mueller investigation for two years, which did not find the alleged original sin of collusion with Russia. Then there was impeachment over Ukraine, still trying to get them out of office on what supporters saw as sleazy, but you don't overturn an election for that. They saw that as a soft coup. How much does that explain this full court press against this election's legitimacy as payback? If you're going to bring up the longer term, do both parties need to pull back from that to any degree, or do you see this as just a Republican issue?

Jonathan: I think that lowering the temperature is part of what Joe Biden will provide, and that's important. We also have to build bridges to people who don't agree. I think there should be maybe a commission on election integrity, with Democrats and Republicans, and people have to start talking to each other again. I don't think this is an even-steven situation, and the Republican Party has gone off the rails as, I think, never Trump Republicans of The Lincoln Project have pointed out, consistently and explained extraordinarily well.

No, I don't think that Republicans should just get a free pass to deescalate, but I do agree with Biden's determination to turn down the temperature, and I think his Justice Department should be very careful about Trumpsters that it decides to prosecute and maybe use some discretion in not going full-bore, but it's real legal jeopardy, I think, at this point is, Cy Vance, here in New York, and there's nothing that the federal government or Joe Biden or Donald Trump with his pardoning power or self-pardoning power that comes to that can do about Cy Vance.

It's looking like you really may have something to work with. We don't know many details, but there are some indications that there's a real case here with Trump over-inflating his assets when he wants to make a deal and grossly understating them for insurance purposes. We'll see what happens in New York, as Trump likes to say.

Brian: Manhattan DA Cy Vance. That is Jonathan alter, our guests, 646-435-7280. Speaking of one-term presidents, your new book is called His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Why now?

Jonathan: I actually started working on it more than five years ago, but I was at the Carter Library when Trump came down the escalator. In a lot of ways, Jimmy Carter is the unTrump. He is a man and was a president of a great intelligence and honesty. Trump has told- what? over 35,000 lies. I actually couldn't document a single four or five Pinocchio lie that Jimmy Carter told when he was president. He certainly exaggerated sometimes. I don't think he was humble. A lot of people talk about how humble he is. I think a humble politician is a contradiction in terms, but--

He certainly made his share of mistakes, but he's unquestionably a man of great decency, accountability and integrity. I think his story can help later away to a better place in our politics. Also, to the question of "Why now?" the man has never had a biography before. Ted Kennedy is great rival, and they were like oil and water. The story between them is a fascinating one. I believe he's had nine biographies. I found a real hole in the line of scrimmage here about Carter and his quite novelistic, cinematic life from barefoot boy with no electricity and running water to global icon.

Brian: Talk about Carter and Kennedy in this context, if you would. Carter was not always the darling of more progressive Democrats. Kennedy ran that primary challenge against Carter in 1980. For people who don't know this history, he was a sitting president, Jimmy Carter at that time, and it's rare for a sitting president to get a serious challenge from his own party in the primaries as an incumbent. The conservative magazine National Review, reviewing another book about Carter in 2018, described him as a fiscally conservative former Naval officer who was pro-life, taught Sunday school and distrusted unions. How much of that do you agree about?

Jonathan: He was fiscally conservative, but not as we would define it now. He did reduce the deficit, and there were some budget cuts that liberal Democrats found painful. He also expanded things like food stamps, and he believed in an activist government. He did a lot with the unions. He just didn't give them all of their agenda. Arguably, he didn't fight hard enough for a labor law reform bill in the 1970s that would have strengthened unions.

It was not a question of whether Carter was progressive, but whether he was liberal enough for Democrats at that point. I think there's a lesson there, in Carter's career for today, for the way we approach Joe Biden. When Carter would get half a loaf, and sign a bill that maybe wasn't as great as liberals wanted, he was condemned for it. Instead, he should have been applauded. He was getting a tremendous amount of important legislation through Congress. 14 major pieces of environmental legislation, for instance, the first leader, anywhere in the world at the end of his time in office who understood the climate change was a threat, and he was a president of science.

It would be too simple to say that he was a conservative. He was personally pro-life because of his own religious convictions, but as a matter of public policy, he was pro-choice. He consistently stood up for the separation of church and state, which he believed was actually at the foundation of the founding of the Baptist church, by Roger Williams and others. He was actually, I think, much more progressive president in the eyes of history. Speaking of which, journalists, judge presidents, by how they do politically, and Carter was a political failure.

He was swapped by Ronald Reagan in 1980. He was ham-handed often in his relations inside the Democratic Party, particularly the Ted Kennedy, but he was a substantive and farsighted success. Not just because he put solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Reagan took down, that was just symbolic. It was the first president to do any investment in green energy, the first president with fuel economy standards, toxic waste cleanup, doubled the size of the national park system, the greatest environmental and conservations president since Theodore Roosevelt, that's pretty liberal.

In terms of ethics, Trump would never have been impeached if it wasn't for Jimmy Carter and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, that protected whistleblowers for the first time. Then they set up these opposites of inspector general, and Trump wouldn't have been impeached without that. FISA courts establishing FEMA, Carter would have done a spectacular job in confronting this virus.

This is very clear from any review of his time in office, but, there was a journey here that I'm trying to get at, because as you indicated, people have written some about the Carter presidency, about the post-presidency, about his miraculous 1976 campaign, where he came out of nowhere, but it's the larger story, which is an American Epic that, I think, has been neglected until now.

Brian: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJ TFM, 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 net con, and WNJO 90.3 Tom's River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. It's eleven o'clock. Quick program note, folks. Mayor De Blasio usually comes on just after the eleven o'clock news, at 11:05. He's running a little late today. He's having a news conference that has to do with the vaccine rollout in New York city. He'll be on more like 11:30. Hold your mayor de Blasio calls, but he's going to come with New York City vaccine news at the bottom of the hour.

We'll do a few things between now and then, including, take a phone call or two for Jonathan Alter right now. Here's Jeffrey in Harlem. Jeffrey, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jeffrey: Hi, Brian, I'm an attorney. I just wanted to give a bit of perspective on Rule 11, which doesn't come up very often, because it's very unusual for federal lawyers to act so completely outside the bounds of reason.

Brian: Good. Now let me just jump in and recall for listeners who have joined us since that came up earlier in the program. Jonathan tweeted today that- let me pull it back up here, that these 18 state attorneys general, who are going to the Supreme Court to try to overturn the election for Trump, should be sanctioned and possibly disbarred under what's known as Rule 11. Jonathan says, "Oh, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a journalist story and I only know what I read about Rule 11." Jeffrey, you're a lawyer, fill us in on Rule 11.

Jeffrey: Thank you, Ryan. Yes, so normal practice, a judge will state that they're willing to entertain a motion for sanctions, and that's usually not under Rule 11, which is kind of a third rail. That's for cases where a lawyer is doing something that's just completely and utterly frivolous, outside of normal practice and a reason. I've only seen a judge threaten Rule 11 sanctions once. That was for something that I thought was relatively minor, where someone had re-used generic state materials in a federal complaint.

If that can trigger Rule 11 sanctions, it really boggles the mind that no judges here, in these federal cases, have offered to entertain these motions, when these cases are just so astonishingly unmoored from reality. I don't know why judges aren't doing that here, but I can say that, from my view, it is not because of a legal problem.

Brian: Do you think judges are reluctant to seem to be sanctioning people politically, and they want to pull back from all this trying to punish the other side, or one side or another?

Jeffrey: I think that is very likely.

Brian: Jeffrey, thank you very much. Informative. Jonathan, you want to say something about this?

Jonathan: Yes, I would say that judges provide one potential form of sanction, but the bar associations can be petitioned and appealed to. I had a caller on a radio show that I do on SiriusXM the other day, who talked about a friend who was disbarred for a substance abuse problem. If somebody can be disbarred for substance abuse problem that another lawyer complained about, surely they can be disbarred for subverting our constitution and trying to overturn an election.

Brian: Before you go, I mentioned in the intro of the passage in your book where Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden clash on busing for integrating public schools. Can you tell some of that story?

Jonathan: Yes. Joe Biden, when he was a young senator, was very opposed to mandatory school busing in Delaware. Remember, Kamala Harris is a busting experience that she took Biden on in that first debate, that was voluntary busing, and Biden never had a problem with that, but he had a big problem with mandatory school busing, as many politicians did. It was very unpopular with voters. When Carter became president, and Biden had been his first supporter in the US Senate.

Biden went to Carter and asked for his support for a bill that would prevent judges from imposing mandatory school busing. Carter, who himself had been against mandatory school busing as governor of Georgia, studied the issue as Carter always did, and told Biden, "Sorry, Joe, this is unconstitutional. I'm not going to back your bill." Biden was kind of sore about it. There are many other stories that relate to today. One of them is in Peter Baker's a piece in The New York Times today about Hunter Biden.

He quotes me talking about the Billy Carter comparison. Jimmy Carter was burdened by his brother throughout much of his presidency. There's some lessons there for what could happen with Joe and Hunter Biden. Another thing that happened, we haven't talked at all, Brian, about Carter's inspiring post-presidential career. One thing that he did in 1990, that I think is very relevant and which met with great approval from president George H.W. Bush at the time, although they later fell out, was that Carter was monitoring an election in Nicaragua.

As you know, he's done that all over the world and over 100 countries. Daniel Ortega, the Marxist leader of Nicaragua, lost the election to a woman, Violeta Chamorro, and didn't want to leave office. Carter stayed up all night with Ortega and said, "Look, it's hard to lose. I know, I lost when I ran for reelection. Maybe you can make a comeback," which indeed Ortega did later on, "but for the good of the Nicaraguan people, you need to go," and amazingly, Ortega became the first communist leader ever to voluntarily relinquish office and have a peaceful transfer of power.

Brian: That's a great story.

Jonathan: If Daniel Ortega can respect the will of the people, why can't Donald Trump and 106 members of the House of Representatives and 17 state attorney generals? It's really a shock to the conscience and really dispiriting. We cannot let it drop.

Brian: Who will be the Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump, that Carter was to Daniel Ortega? Is there a Republican in the House willing to do that? We leave it there with Jonathan Alter. His new book is called His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. Jonathan, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jonathan: Thanks, Brian.

 

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