Perry Bacon: Welcome everybody.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Why is this bad? Maduro is not a good person. He lost an election and stayed in power. So why should we be concerned about this?
And this is perhaps the most ill-conceived, most illegal, most immoral in recent history. This is just an absolutely wild, completely, fundamentally crazy decision to go in and try to execute a gunboat diplomacy–style attack on Venezuela in a period when Americans are crying out for us to address challenges at home. What I would say is that we should all have learned important lessons about what it means to destabilize another country or region without a plan. And also, this is just another demonstration of the fact that Donald Trump does not consider himself constrained by any domestic or foreign law, and will simply put his craziest ideas into action without taking seriously the consequences for anyone.
Greenberg: Let me walk that one back. But it is a wildly illegal series of events. Now, I think that is important. I think that should be part of an ongoing process of investigation and examination of exactly what happened, what decisions were made, [and] who was responsible.
Bacon: Congress, had they been consulted, should have said no because, and I’m guessing this, these things are tied and that this is so radical and so crazy. If Congress had been asked, it never would’ve happened, right?
And so what we know is that Congress is quite skeptical of this kind of aggressive foreign policy intervention. At the moment, we’re going to have some coming moments in the next week to test that and to see what kind of overall pushback we can harness as we have War Powers resolutions come up, hopefully. But it’s really clear that you would not get an affirmative go-ahead from this Congress.
Greenberg: Look, I think fundamentally, we know this administration’s M.O.: they do something awful. They see what kind of blowback they get, and if they’re able to get away with it, then they do more and they escalate, right? And so I think it’s very important that right now we are collectively outraged, in action, in motion, and creating as much backlash as possible in reaction to what has happened in order to avert future and further escalations and interventions.
I would say the median Democratic member this time has actually been pretty forward-leaning—certainly more forward-leaning than Democratic leadership has been on this. But you have folks who are nobody’s idea of a flaming progressive who are out very clearly [saying] that they think this is a terrible and illegal series of developments. We need to continue to stoke that energy within the Democratic Party. And we also just need to make sure that Republicans are getting some heat on it.
Bacon: I’m not an expert on the War Powers Act—so what would the actual vote be? What would the policy actually be?
Now, obviously, we’re in uncharted territory in terms of how willing this executive is to simply disregard laws. But we also do see some ongoing evidence that when they are formally constrained, rebuked, et cetera, they sometimes pull back, right? Thinking about, for example, a quieter defeat that they had over the last month, which was pulling the National Guard out of blue cities following the Supreme Court’s ruling that [it] is in fact not [authorized].
I know Jeffries’s statement led with Maduro being a bad person. I think it got decent after that. So talk about the diversity in what the leadership has done and what the members have done, in your view.
I think a lot of moderates, and particularly folks who’ve got combat experience like Senator Gallego, are really clear that getting involved in incredibly ill-conceived, immoral actions leads nowhere good for the people of that country and leads nowhere good for American troops. And so they’re responding with a lot more clarity in this moment.
Bacon: Last thing—and this is a different subject—you’ve announced that Indivisible is going to have one of the biggest primary campaigns it’s ever had this year.
Greenberg: Yeah, absolutely. We’re working with our folks around the country on this right now because, fundamentally, Indivisible is a nationwide movement. It is led by folks all over the country on their home turf, and so it is in every congressional district, in every state. We’re in the middle of working directly with folks on where they are going and on primaries, and where we can, as national Indivisible, provide additional support.
Obviously, there’s, like, way more races than any one organization can coherently support. But we’re going to be coming in behind a bunch of our groups [in] key pivotal places where we think we can really make a difference in the direction of the Democratic Party.
Greenberg: Yeah, look, fundamentally we’re looking for fighters, right? We want to see people who understand this is an emergency, who understand that it requires using all the tools in the toolbox. We’re going to take a different approach to business as usual. That includes being willing to embrace structural reforms, like reforming the Supreme Court. It includes your relationship with money in politics, right? Not taking money from the funders of fascism, not taking money from crypto or AIPAC.
And so we’re not trying to get to that level of detail. We want to create an overall flexible set of framing and principles that folks are capable of applying wherever they are, and that gives us some cohesion across the country about what it means to be a Democratic fighter.
So in some ways, you’re looking for fighters. That’s a little harder to define than who’s for Medicare for All or who’s for a wealth tax.
And frankly, there tends to be some alignment between people who are more to the left and more to the “emergency” quadrant, but it’s not everyone and it’s not always right. Like, we’ve seen Chris Murphy—who would be nobody’s [idea of a] progressive champion—emerge this year as a very important leader in the “This Is An Emergency” caucus.
Greenberg: Yeah, I think you’ve seen some people who got a really clear moral center, who’ve got a willingness to stand up and be counted and who are properly alarmed and horrified by what’s happening, who’ve emerged as leaders who maybe weren’t, who weren’t the center of attention before, like Van Holland.
Greenberg: That is a fascinating relationship. Obviously not what I think a lot of us were expecting when Mayor Mamdani was elected. We were expecting much more of an aggressive Trump onslaught on New York. Fundamentally, I think this is the kind of pushback that you want Trump to experience from a lot of different spaces and unexpected sources where his frames, his mental frames are so simple: Special Forces are cool. Take the oil. That’s great.
Bacon: So how we react to these next few days matters and how outraged we all sound really matters.
Bacon: All right, Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me.
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