Kimberley Strassel joins the podcast to talk all things domestic policy, including the future of the country under Joe Biden’s Administration. We cover the infrastructure bill, the future of the filibuster, the state of the press, and, finally, whether progressive policies will hurt Democrats in the next election cycle.
Kimberley Strassel is a member of the editorial board for The Wall Street Journal. She writes editorials, as well as the weekly Potomac Watch political column, from her base in Washington, D.C. Ms. Strassel joined Dow Jones & Co. in 1994, working in the news department of The Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels, and then in London. She moved to New York in 1999 and soon thereafter joined the Journal’s editorial page, working as a features editor, and then as an editorial writer. She assumed her current position in 2005. Ms. Strassel, a 2014 Bradley Prize recipient, is a regular contributor to Sunday political shows, including CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Fox News Sunday, and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” She is the author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, which chronicles recent attacks on conservative nonprofits, businesses, and donors, and Resistance At All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, Kimberly Strassel joins us to talk all things domestic policy, including the future of the country under the Joe Biden administration. We’ll get into the infrastructure bill, the future of the filibuster, the state of the press, and finally, whether progressive policies will hurt Democrats in the next election cycle. But before I bring her on, a little bit more about Kimberly. Kimberly Strassel is a member of the editorial board for the Wall Street Journal. She writes editorials as well as the weekly Potomac Watch political column. She is a regular contributor to Sunday political shows, including CBS’s Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and NBC’s Meet the Press. She is the author of The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech. And she’s also the author of Resistance at all Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America. Kimberly, it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Kimberley Strassel:
It’s great to be here, Beverly, thanks for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
I know we’re going to get into a lot of domestic policy talk, but I thought we would start by just focusing on the meaning of words. You are a journalist, so you write words for a living yet, a word that seems to has lost some of its meaning in Washington, DC is the word infrastructure. We’re going to get into the infrastructure bill, but first, what do you make of a word like infrastructure losing its meaning, and do you think that that does have deep concerns, not just about this word, but other words in the English language?
Kimberley Strassel:
Yes. I do care a lot about words. Infrastructure is now being redefined completely differently, but you have to ask yourself why that is. And I think it says something very profound about Democrats’ acknowledgement that the agenda that they are trying to push through with Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal is not one that most Americans agree with, because if you were proud of all of your climate agenda, you would call it your climate agenda. And if you were proud of all of your union giveaways, you would call them your union giveaways. They know that these are not ideas that are popular with a lot of people. And so you have to give it another name. And infrastructure is something that sounds wholesome, sounds good, something that always has bipartisan support, who doesn’t want a bridge that works or a road that doesn’t have potholes? Americans tend to associate that with a core government function. And so they’ve put that out there. I think there are some other words they’re redefining too, Joe Biden’s definition of bipartisanship is another [crosstalk 00:02:54].
Beverly Hallberg:
And unity.
Kimberley Strassel:
And unity. And so I think that when we look at the reality that Democrats are attempting to try to change words, you have to actually ask about the motivation. And I think that says something a little deeper.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, let’s get into the motivation of it since we’re on this topic. What do you think the whole motivation is behind this?
Kimberley Strassel:
Well, on the infrastructure bill, look, I think you can see it in both the COVID “relief bill” that was… There’s another word, relief. The COVID bill that was passed earlier this year and this infrastructure bill, what you’re actually seeing is Democrat, I don’t know if they’re fearful, that they will only have the congressional majority as they do for two years, but there is this intense push by the ascendent wing of the party, the progressive wing to get through as much of their wishlist in as short a time as possible, because Democrats have learned something over the years, they do this much better than Republicans, that if you can get something on the books, even if it isn’t exactly what you wanted, it becomes very difficult to ever get rid of it. Look at Obamacare, which really was an unpopular law, and we still have it. And so the idea is get it into law, get it into statute, and then you’ll have a very good chance to build on it.
So these two bills have encompassed everything, but infrastructure. Everything from unionization procedures to broadband, to more money for healthcare, and the list goes on, climate. So this is a grab bag of everything they’ve been wanting. And again, just to get it on the books.
Beverly Hallberg:
And we’re talking about increasing the debt by an additional $2.3 trillion if this piece of legislation is pushed through under, looks like what may be the reconciliation process, which we’ll get into, but when we’re talking about a debt that it’s increasing, of course, as you said, we had the COVID so-called relief bill, we had money spent under the Trump administration. Are Americans concerned about the debt? Are they seeing these numbers going up, and putting two and two together and realizing, “They’re going to have to raise my taxes in order to help out with all this debt that we have”?
Kimberley Strassel:
I think some Americans are cottoning onto that and beginning to understand that there isn’t a free ride forever. We do have a lot of liberals in Congress who have come to believe in modern monetary theory, this idea that you can simply spend limitlessly and borrow forever, and that there are no consequences. We know that’s not the case. At some point, this is going to come back to bite us. And hopefully not in some cataclysmic way, but even Democrats understand that Americans are concerned about rising debt. The Biden administration certainly is, which is why they’re now saying that for instance, this infrastructure bill, they want to come up with ways to pay for it. Right now, they’re going after their favorite bogeyman, which is corporate America, and that is their proposal for how to cover some of the spending in this bill. But at a certain point, look, all of the provisions that they have, everyone understands that there simply isn’t going to be enough money from corporate America.
And by the way, I would also point out that when you raise corporate America’s tax rates, you’re actually raising taxes on Americans because corporations don’t pay taxes, they just raise their prices and pass along that to customers. So we’re already on the verge of seeing in essence, a sales tax hike on Americans if these corporate rules go through. But at a certain point, yeah, you’re going to have to go after Americans, and look at Joe Biden’s shift in definition of the income levels. We were told no one under $4,000, now it turns out that counts for, if you’re a married couple for each of you. So I mean your money combined together rather. So they’re really going to have to come after just average folk in the end if they want to have even a shot of paying for some of these proposals, many of which we haven’t even seen the price tags for yet.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. And I think most Americans have noticed that already, food prices and gas prices are going up and that will continue to increase if the infrastructure bill does pass. Now, what it looks like Democrats want to do is push this through the Senate, through the reconciliation process, because they’re trying to avoid the filibuster. Can you explain to us what the reconciliation process is and whether or not you think that can be used in this infrastructure bill?
Kimberley Strassel:
Yeah. So just to lay the groundwork, what they’re actually doing at the moment is pretending, in my mind, I think it’s a ruse, to be sitting down with Republicans and trying to come to some proposal on which everyone can agree. But since Republicans are asking for something that’s more like 600 billion or $800 billion, and focus very much on traditional infrastructure like roads and bridges, and not all of the rest of what Democrats want, I don’t think that that effort is necessarily going to pan out because so far we haven’t seen a lot of appetite by the democratic majorities for cooperation. So they’re looking at reconciliation, which is a… Traditionally been viewed as a once-a-year process in which you can set levels of spending and revenue for the government. And because it’s a budget process, it’s laid out in the 1974 Budget Act, you can do it with just 50 votes, it’s not subject to a filibuster.
Now, for many complicated reasons, we didn’t do a bill last year, a reconciliation bill, it got pushed into this year. And so that’s what they used their first COVID bill for, they used that reconciliation. In theory, they have one more shot at the apple for this year. There are some discussions about whether or not the Senate Parliamentarian would let them do more, we don’t have a final answer on that yet. The real problem with reconciliation and this infrastructure bill is the pure spending pieces, yes, they can probably get it through reconciliation, but there are very strict rules governing the process that are designed to make sure it remains focused on spending and revenue.
And so things that tend to fall in the straight up policy area, for instance, that $15 minimum-wage increase, it doesn’t necessarily affect government revenues or spending, it’s simply a rule that applies to other people. Those things aren’t usually allowed by the parliamentarian in reconciliation. And this infrastructure bill contains a lot of such policy, in particular on the union front. And so, they could use reconciliation for this, but they wouldn’t be able to get a bunch of it through.
Beverly Hallberg:
And something I’ve wondered, you mentioned the $15 minimum wage, which was excluded from the COVID relief package by the Senate Parliamentarian. It makes her really powerful in Washington, DC right now. I think of Joe Manchin, very powerful since he tends to be a swing vote in the Senate. And then you have the Senate Parliamentarian who is deciding what can be passed through reconciliation or not. Do you think she feels the pressure?
Kimberley Strassel:
Oh, I have no doubt. And this, by the way, this has happened to her before, and at the hands of Republicans. Don’t forget, back during the first year of the Trump administration, Republicans attempted to use reconciliation to get rid of Obamacare. And she wouldn’t allow a number of the key provisions. And there was a big Republican push led by Ted Cruz to overrule the parliamentarian, which thank goodness did not prevail. And by the way, is a good reason why it’s not good to set new precedents because you’re not going to be in power forever. But yet, this entire situation of a 50/50 Senate is creating all kinds of new power brokers in Washington. And Joe Manchin has been perhaps one of the most prominent one. But if you think about it, it’s fascinating, any one Senator could hold immense power when you have that kind of a division. And I think we’re going to see a lot more moments of certain individuals in the sun over the next two years.
Beverly Hallberg:
And even beyond this, there’s been a lot of discussion about the filibuster in general, even the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki was asked about the filibuster this week in reference to police reform after the Derek Chauvin verdict was released. And she made the statement that since Republicans and Democrats were always already working together on the front of police reform, that, “He doesn’t believe having a discussion about the filibuster is constructive to that.” So that’s a quote about what she’s saying Joe Biden said, that the president said. Where are we on the filibuster? This continues to come up, I think since police reform is front and center in many people’s minds right now, that question is coming up. Where are we going on the filibuster?
Kimberley Strassel:
Well, it has been quite remarkable, because… I have to be honest, that when we first started out in this new administration, and both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema said that they weren’t going to vote to get rid of the filibuster, I had my doubts as to how much they would actually hold up that statement because the pressure is immense. It’s going to get even more intense as time goes on, but so far they have held really strong. You had Joe Manchin, probably about a month ago, come out, and I did wonder if he was wobbling because he said that, “Well, maybe some reform would be worthwhile.” He talked about bringing back the talking filibuster. He’s since come back out and suggested that he would not allow any reform that in any way would water down the 60-vote standard, because that is… You saw this happen in both the press and among democratic activists.
As soon as Manchin and Sinema came out and said, “We won’t vote to kill the filibuster,” instead, the watch word became, “Let’s reform it instead.” Now, of course, all of these proposals that those progressives were putting forward were just other ways to kill the filibuster under the guise of reform. Manchin and Sinema both seem to have ruled out that as well too. But one thing that’s interesting is, that you almost watch them, and it’s almost as if they’re pleading with their party to just take them at their word and move on and adopt the mentality that if anything is going to get done, it needs to get done via some outreach to the other side. That is not where the rest of the party is right now. So there’s going to continue to be a huge amount of pressure on both of them to bend or crack or get on board with reform.
And in the meantime, you’re also going to continue to see Chuck Schumer look for other ways to get around the rules. I mentioned earlier that he’s trying to bully the parliamentarian into letting him use reconciliation more than once. But when you get to these policy bills, and it’s the, as I mentioned, union stuff, but also, policing reform is another great example, that doesn’t have to do with federal spending or federal revenues, or at least very little of it. You simply can’t do those via reconciliation. So that’s why you’re going to see this campaign continue. So far, it sounds as though the institution is prevailing.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah, I know that even Al Sharpton and some others have promised to go after Senator Manchin and Sinema, calling them racist for their opposition to blowing up the filibuster. And we’ve heard this word racist also being called against the Georgia election law. We talked about the meaning of the word infrastructure, what about the meaning of the word racist or racism these days? Has it lost its meaning because it’s used to define so many things these days?
Kimberley Strassel:
I worry about that, I really do. I have three kids and we have these conversations about mistakes and bad areas in America’s history and how we’ve moved beyond those, but also talking about what is racism. And it’s increasingly difficult, especially for the younger generation anymore, to understand that and to realize the difference between this political rhetoric and what is true racism and what we should be on the guard against and what we should all be united in condemning. And if you water it down, that word, as you said, simply loses its meaning. And to call what is happening in Georgia racist or Jim Crow is absolutely absurd, and simply on the merits, for the simple fact of that the provisions in the law, that they are calling races, are provisions that are a lot more generous to voters than those that exist in say, Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, and nobody is suggesting Delaware is a racist state.
So, we need to tone down the rhetoric. I don’t think that that’s going to happen because right now Democrats simply see it as too effective a tool to try to bludge bludgeon people into their agenda.
Beverly Hallberg:
And we’ve seen that corporations have gotten involved in this woke meaning and woke mentality. We saw that with the Georgia election law, you had a Coca-Cola and Delta speaking out, saying that this law was racist and should not be passed. You even have this week, the other side of this coin, where you had Georgia faith leaders calling for a national boycott of Home Depot because of their non-response to the voting law, because Home Depot decided to focus solely on, I don’t know, home improvement, that all of a sudden they need to be called out and boycotted because they didn’t speak up. Where are we on woke capitalism, those who speak in favor of what is referred to as social justice and the attacks on those who remain silent? Are you concerned about this?
Kimberley Strassel:
Well, one thing worth noting, is to put this in context. So this isn’t necessarily new. I actually wrote a book about five years ago called The Intimidation Game. And a lot of it was on the tactics that the Left was employing, even back then, even years before it, against corporations, against industry groups, the US Chamber of Commerce, to basically intimidate them into adopting their policy agenda. And they’ve already been successful to a certain degree if you look around, on a number of issues, for instance, climate. The number of big banks now that are saying that they don’t want to fund any fossil fuel projects, or even the US Chamber of Commerce has this official climate agenda, even the American Petroleum Institute is debating getting on board with this, and things that by the way, are clearly not in the interest of their businesses or their customers.
But we have seen in general, companies nonetheless try their hardest, other than some of these key issues, to avoid getting pulled into the political fray. And that is now all changed. It was quite stunning to see corporate America step up and say it had an obligation to do this, because the actual reality and mentality that has dominated corporations, and the healthy mentality is that what you really want to do is have both political parties on side. And that’s, by the way, the big difference of what happened in Georgia, is that in the past, you might see companies step out on a policy issue here or there, but what you’ve never done is actually seen them take a political side, a partisan side and say, “Republicans are actually doing an evil thing.” And the risk of that is, look around and when you look at corporate America, who has been the most consistent, and sometimes the only defenders of the free-enterprise system that they operate in, it is Republican, they’re getting a lot of doors slammed in their face in Washington right now.
I think that’s why you’ve seen some companies step back, because this was arguably a big mistake. They exist to help their shareholders. And alienating an entire political party in the country is not good for your long-term prospects.
Beverly Hallberg:
Do you think it has surprised some companies that this has been the case? Maybe they think that prevailing narrative, if they watch certain news outlets, is that America is on board with them with a certain way of thinking, and then they step back and realize, “Oh my goodness, the majority of Americans do support voter ID laws, I didn’t realize that.” Does this come as a shock? I’m trying to understand, does this come from intimidation? So they feel like they have to, or do they think they’re making a good business decision when they move forward with siding with a political party?
Kimberley Strassel:
I think a lot of it comes with fear, and then short-term thinking. So take the example of Major League Baseball deciding not to hold its game in Atlanta. By most press reports, this action was taken in part because they were warned that if they went ahead, that they might have certain minority players who would refuse to take part. And you can have no doubt that that sent concern through them, that they were going to have a PR problem on their hand, but that gives to the short-termism. So they decide to move, not realizing that the potential PR problem of doing that is going to be 10 times as much as not having a couple of players take part.
So, I think that this is one of the problems. We have a greater problem we have in corporate America. We talk about this, a lot of corporations are too short-termism, ruled by their quarterly reports and the stock market, et cetera. It’s a big departure again from… When you look around, most corporations, you look at for instance, their political donations, they’re usually 40% to the party they think is going to lose, 60% to the party they think they’re going to win [crosstalk 00:21:30].
Beverly Hallberg:
Hedging their bets, yes.
Kimberley Strassel:
But hedging their bets, but never kind of moving too far out of that 60/40 lane, because they understand the risks. And this was short-term thinking motivated by fear. And I think one of the things too is, at some point the Right’s going to have to figure out a way to better send their message to corporations as well too, and let them know that they don’t appreciate all of this and may choose to go shop or buy services elsewhere if they got a company that’s in their face constantly on politics.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s talk about what this means for journalism. You’ve been working in the field for a while, and you’ve seen the state of journalism change over the years. What is it like to be a journalist in today’s environment? Do you think how the press covers administrations, how the press covers the news, is similar to what we saw maybe a decade ago, or have you seen a lot of change, and maybe change that’s not going in the right direction?
Kimberley Strassel:
Well, first of all, you’re very kind, I’ve been working in it for more than just a while, been laboring it for decades. I’m really old.
Beverly Hallberg:
You look very young. I’m just going by looks.
Kimberley Strassel:
Oh no. It’s changed overwhelmingly, but the thing that I think that is a little frightening to me is how quickly that has happened. I wouldn’t even date it so much to 10 years ago, as much as well, four and a half years ago, five years ago. And it really was the election of Donald Trump and what you saw in the press. Look, everyone understands, we’ve seen the surveys and the polls, and everyone knows that most newsrooms’ journalists tilt to the Left, but I believe that other than some agenda-driven journalism, often had to do with policies or the choice of topics, or simply a little bit of ignorance. I always made the argument that the old-fashioned media bias, the kind that I actually miss these days, because it was better than what we’ve got now, was just from people who actually didn’t know they were biased.
They all went to the same colleges together, they all think the same. And so it wasn’t that they were getting up and saying, “Today, I’m going to take it to one side.” They just wrote their worldview, and that worldview tends to lean in one direction. What’s changed is the election of Donald Trump inspired a number of newsrooms to decide that they were entitled to, in fact, they had an obligation to now take a side because somehow they were speaking truth to power. And they completely abandoned any sense of fairness or even truth in their journalism. And I know there was a lot of hope that this was going to switch back perhaps when Joe Biden got elected, but once you got that new approach between your teeth, not many people are willingly going to give it up. So yeah, it’s changed a great deal, I think has done enormous damage to the reputation of the industry. I think is doing enormous damage to the country.
You need a functioning for the state and a country to keep people honest, but they have to keep both sides honest. And right now we basically have… A part of some press is acting as an adjunct to one party in the country.
Beverly Hallberg:
And how much do you attribute to that, the young people who are coming into these jobs, who are coming from more Left-leaning universities who have a different world view versus… It is some of those standard bearers who’ve decided to become more politically active. I mean, is it a combination of both?
Kimberley Strassel:
So I actually would put it more on the editors and the owners of the company, because look, we always have idealistic young people coming into newsrooms and voicing their ideas of how things should change or how things should work. But what you’ve always had, are that the grownups in the room saying, “This is what we exist to do. These are the rules of journalism. These are the standards.” Editors are there to do that, they’re the second look, the third look, they’re helping shape coverage, and owners as well too. And you expect them to not give in. Now look, I’d like to throw in here, I love working for the Wall Street Journal. I think we are an amazing institution and we’ve had a consistently high quality on… I speak on the news side, the editorial page.
I’m proud to work there, but take the example of the New York Times. You have the editorial page editor who runs the op-ed from a sitting United States Senator, and the blowback is huge. That’s what’s changed, is that in the past, yeah you can run controversial things and you have the backing of your superiors because that’s what you’re in the business to do, especially on an editorial page, instead they caved and he was out on his ear. So those are the people I put a little bit more responsibility on.
Beverly Hallberg:
And final question for you is about what do you expect in the midterms? So as we see people losing trust in the institutions of the press, people are worried about voting, whether or not they can trust whether or not votes are accurate. And by the way, Democrats questioned votes in 2016, Republicans in 2020. So in my opinion, this is a bipartisan concern that people have. You also have more of this virtual signaling going on, you have critical race theory entering schools. And so as we see more of this progressive policy seep into so many different institutions, does this hurt Joe Biden? Does this hurt the Democrat Party in midterms and in four years from now? Because the realization is, America’s not all there. Some are, but not all Americans are there.
Kimberley Strassel:
Yeah. Well, historically as we all know, the party in power tends to lose seats in midterm elections. So Republicans have that going for them. I think that Democrats are also laying the groundwork for the kind of blowback that you saw in the 2010 midterms which, let’s remember, it was one of the Republicans’ biggest days, especially in The House in 60 years. And this was the response of the nation to a lot of policies from Barack Obama that they viewed as a lot more radical than anyone had thought they were signing up for when they put them in office, whether it was a stimulus or Obamacare or the attempt to pass a sweeping climate bill, which didn’t in the end, but there was certainly pushback in the country. I think the one thing that is the wild card here though, is the state of the GOP.
And we still don’t know where that really is with Donald Trump out of office. What role does he end up playing in the party? Is it one that attempts to truly get behind the best candidates, support them. Or are there divisions and nasty primaries that pull the party apart and potentially elevate a candidate that is not in the best position to win a general election? And the other thing too, that’s a wild card is Republicans, yet again, have a lot more people up in the Senate, than do Democrats. They’re in tough seats. So, now they’re making their own plays, they’ve marked out people that they’re going to go after Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly out in Arizona. So they’ve got a list themselves, but I think we’re going to be another year along before we have a better sense of where midterms turnout.
Beverly Hallberg:
And there’s no doubt there’s still a lot of moving parts, which is why, if people want more of your political insight, they should check out your weekly political column, Potomac Watch, which is with the Wall Street Journal. Also the book that you mentioned, The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, is available for purchase, and also your latest book, Resistance at all Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America. So people should go out and get those. But for now, Kimberly Strassel, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your political insight during very interesting times.
Kimberley Strassel:
Thanks, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
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