This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 5 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Welcome everybody.
This is Perry Bacon. And this is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Leah Greenberg. She’s the co-executive director of Indivisible, which organized many important rallies and mobilizations against the administration, from 2017 to 2020, and also last year. Leah, great to see you. Welcome.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
Bacon: So I want to talk to you about what happened over the weekend. I’ve talked to some political scientists and scholars, but I want to ask—just in lay terms—why Americans should be concerned that the U.S. government seized the leader of a foreign nation without congressional authorization over the weekend.
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?
Greenberg: Look, I think if the last couple of decades have taught us anything, it is that ill-conceived, aggressive foreign policy interventions into places that we’re fully unprepared to be involved in have enormously horrifying consequences, both for the places that we’re intervening [in] and their people, and for the American people, right? Like, we have been in multiple decades of these endless wars that are wars of choice that have been activated by American governments with no real sense of what they’re getting into.
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.
Bacon: You used the “most illegal” phrase, explain why?
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.
And also, I think that it’s possible sometimes for us as Democrats to go down this rabbit hole where we’re talking about kind of the constitutional authorities. And it’s a big problem that Congress was not consulted before Donald Trump decided to go to war. It’s also a big problem that this is a crazy, terrible idea, right?
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?
Greenberg: One would certainly hope—yes, one would hope, right? If you think about the congressional history here, right? We got very close to a War Powers Resolution on the attacks—on the ongoing series of attacks on fishing boats, right? And, like, literally within, I think, two votes of the last resolution coming up.
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.
Bacon: Talk about what you want Democrats in Congress, and then Democrats in America, to do about this. What should their reaction be—both groups?
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.
We are seeing Trump, as of the last couple of days, rattling his saber at Cuba and at Mexico and at Greenland, right? It is extraordinarily important that his interpretation and his cronies’ interpretation of what happens here is not: “I took this aggressive action, I got away with it. I should try doing that again and again.” And that means a combination of popular backlash; that means everyone continuing to mobilize pressure on their own elected representatives, Republicans or Democrats.
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.
Now, there is the potential for a War Powers Resolution that would come up, these are privileged resolutions, which means that the leadership can’t stop them from coming to the floor within certain parameters. And so there’s an opportunity for a vote on constraining the use of force in both the Senate and the House; the House one [is] likely to come up relatively quickly. And so there’s going to be an opportunity for an actual vote on what is happening here.
Bacon: I’m not an expert on the War Powers Act—so what would the actual vote be? What would the policy actually be?
Greenberg: I can’t give you the specifics of each one, but they’re both aimed essentially at preventing—or they would be aimed ostensibly at preventing—further non-defensive military operations and some amount of ongoing effort to constrain the independent action of the executive.
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].
Bacon: You said people who are not anyone’s idea of a progressive—I’ll just name Ruben Gallego. There were a lot of members who I don’t think of as very left-wing who said very critical things. You said there’s a gap between the members and the leadership. Explain that a little bit.
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.
Greenberg: Yeah, what I would say is, if you can explain it to me, then that’s great too. I’d welcome it. But I think you’ve seen notably more caution and hesitation in the framing coming from Minority Leader Jeffries and Schumer than you have coming from a lot of members across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic Party.
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.
I think Democratic leadership is in many ways... often, what we find is that they are cautious. They are not guided by a core set of principles that allow you to simply and clearly react and say: No, absolutely not. Not another Iraq, not on our watch. And it’s our job to generate that pressure to get them there.
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.
Talk about what you mean by that. Is this about challenging existing members? Is it about more open primaries? Talk about what you’re thinking about.
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.
And our anticipation is [that] it is going to be a combination of places where we’ve got Indivisible groups who are going in for a candidate in an open primary, or where Indivisible groups are backing a candidate who’s a challenger to an existing Democrat who has not gotten with the program. It’s going to be some combination of those two.
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.
Bacon: So I was looking online at your principles, and I think one of them is that Senate candidates should commit to not endorsing Schumer for majority leader again. Are there any other civic principles for House or Senate candidates?
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.
It includes a host of things, and we’re not trying to be super prescriptive. This is not like 40 different questionnaire questions. And, like, I’m a former policy staffer myself. And filling out those questionnaires for the different interest groups was, like, very traumatic because you’re researching things you certainly don’t know enough about to comment on.
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.
Bacon: But it’s also something you’ve been talking about since Trump won. You’ve been saying the divide in the party is not necessarily left or right, or progressive versus moderate, or left versus center. There’s an element of that. It’s more about who’s a fighter—who sees the threat for what it is—versus who’s not.
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.
Greenberg: That’s right. And look, I think of it as an X and Y spectrum, right? Like, how far to the center versus the left are you? And then, how much do you think we’re in an emergency or not?
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.
Bacon: I was going to say Van Hollen is actually even more known for being mild-mannered. I don’t know where he falls on the center-versus-left spectrum. I think he’s fairly mainstream in his policy views, but he’s been much more engaged in a certain way.
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.
Bacon: Last thing, I guess: Mayor Mamdani called Trump on Saturday and registered his objections. What did you think about that? That was just—I didn’t—I’m not sure how many members of Congress actually have access to the president. What did you make of it? I thought it was a good first sign that he’s engaged, though.
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.
To the extent that he experiences this as a poll boost or an easy win, he’s more likely to pursue more of these hits. To the extent that he perceives this as a lot of, like, a poll drag—a big problem for him, because suddenly there’s a bunch of extra investigations and votes and he is having to answer questions about this for the next two months—then it’s just not something that he wants more of. We’re more likely to be able to constrain the next offensive action.
Bacon: So how we react to these next few days matters and how outraged we all sound really matters.
Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And I am always obligated to say: Call your members of Congress. There’s active legislation here that they will be called to vote on relatively soon on the War Powers Resolutions. We’ve got to make sure that there’s a resounding rebuke of what Trump has done here.
Bacon: All right, Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me.
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