washington career has focused on american politics and international trade. he served 12 years in senior staff positions in the us senate. working for a series of distinguished senators jacob javits gaylord nelson abraham rubikoff thomas eagleton robert byrd and jay rockefeller he served in the office of the us trade representative 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. he was the chairman of the national association of japan america societies and received a commendation from the foreign minister of japan. and he is the author of two previous critically acclaimed books about the senate. in 2012 the last great senate courage and statesmanship in times of crisis. and in 2018 broken can the senate save itself and the country? ira's latest book is called the betrayal how mitch mcconnell and the senate republicans abandoned america. interviewing mr. shapiro today will be eugene meyer an award-winning veteran journalist with passions for history and travel real estate and the chesapeake bay. widely, published in magazines. he is authored four books and was for many years a reporter and editor at the washington post. since leaving the post in 2004 mr. meyer has received 17 awards for his work and has had more than 50 bylines in the new york times. his first journalism job was as washington bureau librarian for the old new york herald tribune where he got to tag along with a white house reporter to watch lbj sign the 1964 civil rights act into law pretty cool. so it's hard to avoid partisanship when discussing this book. i mean just look at that title. and as i tried to tie this introduction to current events over the last few weeks. i kept waking up to new headlines every day that seemed to require constant rewriting. it was like, oh what mess is mitch mcconnell responsible for today. whether it's the supreme court and abortion or campaign finance or voting rights or climate change or holding up critical appropriations or primary election results so much can be traced back to what is the so-called grim reaper? but with your indulgence, let me focus on the fact that through the lens of mitch mcconnell irish apero raises a foundational question. what should we expect of the motivations behind elected officials in our republic? should we simply expect them to be driven by nothing more than the quest for unbridled power employing cynical tactics in the name of amassing control and influence as james madison warned us about in the federalist papers. or maybe just maybe we should expect something more of our leaders that they that they be able to at the very least. sometimes rise above petty and selfish desires to amass power that they serve the greater good put community and country and posterity before themselves and their tribes. at the very least that they not incite angry mobs or use racist dog whistles or abandoned ethical norms or be apologists for conspiracy theorists or standby in the face of an attempted coup. that's a pretty low bar. but perhaps we should expect that ultimately at their best. our leaders can inspire a shared vision based on fundamental principles a vision toward which we can all work in the name of uplifting not only ourselves but each other and all of us as the gang of 10 has tried to do as ira explains in his book. we in gaithersburg at the local level of government. genuinely, subscribe to that latter view not because we're naive but because we've seen that it's possible and we've made it possible and we know it is a better path. so we try to be an example of something more than the sad and jaded politics on display in ira's detailed account of mitch mcconnell's career and the events of the trump administration. as a writer ira has a wonderful ability to translate tomes of dense political news coverage and academic and historical analysis and personal experience. into a fluid and captivating yarn 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 that many of us are already familiar with although i have to concede that reading this book and reliving the moments. it covers gave me a little bit of ptsd. but with a warm welcome and with gratitude for your willingness to tackle a topic so infuriating and depressing. i hand the program over to eugene meyer and irish shapiro. welcome. well, thank you and good morning. and ira it's a pleasure to be on the stage with you today. um, so back in let's flash back a little bit to 2013 when you would published your last book the last great senate and although mitch mcconnell had declared his primary goal was to make a president obama one-term president. president. you were relatively optimistic. you spoke to montgomery college students. and you felt that regular order was breaking out the side of the gang of eight there were stirrings of healthy politics, and he looked forward to the next great senate. what happened? gene in fact thank you for thanks for being here. it's great to be interviewed by somebody who has had a remarkable career as a journalist and is also been a wonderful author besides your contribution to the community. so thank you for doing this and for bringing up my occasional effort to be more optimistic, which is established a long record of naivete or or disappointment it's interesting. when i wrote the first book, which was the last great senate i did it for the purpose of showing how the senate worked when it worked. and how the senate was a source of inspiration at one time not just frustration and disappointment. and i kind of thought as you point out i was always looking for green shoots of evidence that things were getting better. many of the senators actually wanted the senate to work better and so there'd be some moments when it appeared that things were going to get better. but inevitably i would be my hopes would be dashed. mcconnell would step forward and regular order regular legislative process would fail and the senate which spiral downward again. and 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 be. so um, joe biden when he campaigning for president and upon his own inauguration. pitch that he was the bipartisan former senator who could bring everyone together and overcome the polarization that you so eloquently write about my question is was he being naive or just political? great question and it gets asked a lot because of by president biden, of course had 35 years in the senate. he was steeped in it. he loves to make bipartisan deals. he likes to think or liked to think that he was a friend of mitch mcconnell's even i think the answer is complicated. i think that the president has a way that he believes politics should be and he made he's made every effort to have it that way. but at the same time i think he was under no illusions anymore about mcconnell because saw him close up. in eight years of the obama presidency so i think he knew you make the effort. maybe you can bring some of the other republicans along but i think he was under no illusions about it by the time he was president. so my question is goes beyond mitch mcconnell which is that this age of comedy that you look back sort of wistfully at? is that based on a tradition as opposed to foundational i that because of you know we have this. around the phrases on majority and minority rule currently based on the founders vision in 1787 and somehow giving every one of the colonies two senators would work out fine. so no you have the sudden situation where wyoming with 3,000 people has two senators. and california with 41 million people has two senators. so you have this great imbalance and so my question is is this billy all about mcconnell or is it more foundational? is there a basic flaw in our our system that mcconnell and the small state majoritarians are exploiting? well, that's a great question and pretty foundational actually. i guess. when i wrote the first the book the last great senate. i subsequently have said maybe the only great senate. maybe there was an exceptional. confluence of events that brought about the possibility, you know the world war two great generation senators who came back from the war and also the threat of the cold war right after world war two and the party's not being so far apart, right? we had liberal republicans and moderate republicans from the and we had conservative democrats. so the parties weren't that far apart. so the senate worked in a certain way. but i also believe that people make the difference by and large and i think that our politics as difficult as they would have been anyway, our politics have been affected disproportionately by a couple of bad actors and the two that have had the end the two that have had the most think are. newt gingrich and mitch mcconnell and so it's a combination of things, you know, everyone talks about how they're two senators from each state and this is outrageous. it's baked into the constitution. we know that we never thought about it in the earlier. because there was so many good small state senators, and they knew how to be senators and what they were there for and that's also what's missing. but also leadership as you have emphasized it's very important on both sides of the aisle. and i want to go across the aisle to the democratic side for a moment and look back on the on the time when harry reid was the democratic majority leader as opposed to chuck schumer. who would you rate is more effective of the two? well i've written harry reid was not a leader that i think was a great among the great leaders. but i always cave at it because he was the majority leader during the obama presidency and faced endless and relentless obstruction from think it probably drove them to first not only to frustration maybe crazy at a certain point. 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. i think schumer is a capable leader dealing with the challenges of a 50/50 senate a polarized situation and i think that he's just he's done sick considerable things in the way of accomplishments and probably made some mistakes as well. so we'll give that we don't have the the two parties that are closer together than they than they were a generation ago. what if anything can be done about what i describe? it's majority and minority rule. well, i've tried in in the book and articles before i've tried very hard to encourage the relatively small group of independent-minded minded republicans or more moderate republicans. to be their best selves to come forward and join biden and the democratic senators in moving the country forward and occasionally that happens with the infrastructure bill etc. so i think i'd like the republicans to show more independence from their leader. doesn't happen very often. my answer beyond that is i'd take away as many things as i could that have interfere with majority rule in the senate. i would get rid of the filibuster i would get rid of holds which have turned into this ridiculous thing where rand paul can wake up and stop action in the senate by himself. and i would you know, so i would focus on on those things. but ultimately i believe that the senators have to understand the great privilege they have and the responsibility they have. to protect the national interest and not just be partisan hacks. so do you think that the democrats who have this very slim majority with the vice president harris is that majority vote have been as effective as they could be or have they been less so like every probably every democrat i share frustrations about joe mansion and the role he has played i know of no precedent actually for a senator who plays that role not just on a couple of issues, but one thing after another no matter how many of his concerns are met he has concerns so i have that frustration. but i do think that the problem is that joe biden came to office with a very ambitious agenda based on the conditions in the country and our needs as a country. and it is collided with his very narrow majority and that has required him to pull back and one could say possibly to biden and schumer should have understood that earlier. so we're in a different time than a generation ago. and i'm refer specifically to social media. and you know breaking news, which is breaking 24/7 on the cable news and so on and so i wonder what your thoughts are. what role the have the media been complicit with their. horse race and both ciderism coverage in making the legislating and comedy more difficulty. yes. i always i always say or i always think and sometimes say 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 shrill 24/7 cable news. and now the intense effect of social media which amplifies differences and anger. so yes, i think it is more difficult. but my view is that that merely makes it sorry. not merely that makes it more important for them to be real senators. to recognize their responsibility to bring people together. to the extent possible can't always agree on things bring people together and not exacerbate. and if i had a criticism and i have many criticisms of senator mcconnell. i regard him as an architect of division. i know of no times or very few times that he brought people together as opposed to driving them apart and that's wrong for senators, but it's particularly wrong for somebody who's a senate leader. democratic response to mcconnell's lies and behavior ah, 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 a white nationalist party. so i think it's getting stronger, but you know, there's an inherent this sounds sort of obvious, but hearing problem which is it was captured by sam rayburn the famous the best and most famous speaker before nancy pelosi. sam rayburn famously said any -- can kicked down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. obstructions easier than governing and that gives mcconnell has given mcconnell a great advantage when he's been obstructing. but he did succeed in some of his major objectives when he was in in the majority as well. but obstructions easier than governing. well, yeah, that's interesting. you would say that i just read the other day that. he was asked what the the problems with inflation the economy. and what would republicans do if they gotten the majority and he his responses? well, you'll have to you have to elect us to find out here. we'll tell you later have no no plan. to talk about if they have a plan at all. so let's study. he does have a thesis there, which is a very strong part of what he does. he believes that the party and power is going to be held responsible for the conditions and the country and so if biden is having trouble and the country is angry about a whole range of things and frustrated understandably with things that will reward the out party. that's his it's his plan. so is probably a bipartisan consensus on on that? i would think the democrats would probably although they wouldn't want public publicly say that would probably agree with that. well, naturally, i being an optimist i disagree with that consensus and will be naive as usual. so i want to talk a little bit about about judges. which is a judges a major sore point among democrats and many others and the fact that mcconnell. up mary carlin on the excuse that it was too close to a presidential year and then rushed through amy comey barrett, you know just before the election of joe biden and and it's basically a push through the senate many many very conservative federal judges. is there anything the democrats could have done differently to have stopped that or slowed it down? well i think there are things they could have done but i will let's drop back and say that. the republicans particularly the very the federalist society has focused on judges for a long time in a way that the democrats didn't and democrats looking at the last the long the long game would say they didn't pay enough attention to it. there's a man named brian fallon who founded the fan justice he broke with he's a former schumerade who broke with schumer because he didn't think the democrats were doing enough. so to some extent this is the long arc of how things have gone. federal society very effectively has been fighting this fight since the reagan years. but and harry reid opened the door to the to the federal judges other than the supreme court by using the nuclear option to as we know to take away the right to fill up 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. this was kind of interesting. we all think of mcconnell ramming 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 can commit confirmed than donald trump did so presidents come presidents go carter had district court and appellate judges as more than trump did. what's changed is the supreme court? what changes a the confirmation of three radical right-wing justices? and in that regard to democrats didn't do very well and it shows the polarization of the country that those justices could be confirmed. but i'll take a breath let you'd ask you and ask question before i go on to attack mcconnell's role specifically. i would say harry reid opened the door by lowering the bar for federal judges to assemble. party, so he was justified in doing the same for the supreme court. that's what he would say. is there a response to that? yeah, i think there is a response to that and by the way one of the one of the charms of senator mcconnell is he not only has his victories, but he then rewrites the history. he has very recently said and he said many times the left is response to democrats are responsible for every escalation of the judicial wars. now that's simply not true. the confirmation of supreme court justices was proceeding sort of relatively normally for a long time. until his unprecedented action to prevent the nomination and consideration of merrick garland. he won that one. when he came up a winner when trump came in. everything else from that including and that was an unprecedented act. utterly unprecedented and the ramming through of amy coney barrett. which i called the banana republic confirmation eight days before the election. was i think the most anti-democratic act i've ever seen? okay, we're going back to 2016 back on mcconnell. yeah. stepping away from mcconnell. yeah, let's talk about mcconnell, but we will yeah, we are. but it's it strikes me looking back on 2016 and you mentioned the democrats didn't didn't take the supreme court seriously enough. it seemed to me at the time and since the 2016 for democrats was mostly about breaking the glass ceiling. and very little attention was paid to to the supreme court. which you know, it's it's equal if not greater importance in the term and that we're you know. suffering the consequences of that spoiler alert, i'm an old guy. jean and i together are old guys. so we go back on history a long way. yep. 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 to it. that was half a lifetime ago. but look, i think what happened in 2016. well a number of things happened. one donald trump had a good instinct. when it was brought to him the idea that he could really solidify the republicans if he had a list of judges that he would promise to pick the supreme court justice from he grasped it. it was a mcconnell idea. it was don mcgann the white. council it was a federalist society and the heritage foundation, but he got it. and he got it and it and it worked for him. number two though, i think. the the trump versus hillary clinton race was so astonishing overall that i think anyone issue got subsumed by it, you know you could 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 can tell. but he wanted to keep the seed just in case and he came up a winner. okay, so going back to mcconnell and and more current events. reading what he said in private about trump's impeachable offense from the insurrection, which was that he's tired of the guy. and i forget the exact words. i'm sick of the guy the dems are going to take care of them. meaning that he would be impeached and then his vote to acquit and his public criticism followed by his public criticism of trump and his comments on the narrow grounds that he justified his vote on. do you can you believe anything with connell says well, that's a that's a really great question. you could believe certain things mcconnell says and indeed. he's pretty transparent about certain things. i mean 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 know, you can believe that so there are things that he says that you can you can believe. but in general look if you look at all speech on the morning of january 6th when the congress came together to certify the results of the election. or you look at his brilliant speech on february 13th. you couldn't make a better speech condemning trump. but 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 at trump. he spent 36 years in the capitol. he was outraged by the desecration of the capitol and the terrain insurrection, but he quickly calculates. these two he's too powerful in the party for me to bring him down. maybe over time it wither away. that's that's my strategy basically. well time will tell. well time will tell and certainly thus far donald trump remains very powerful within the party. at but trump has criticized mcconnell condemn mcconnell repeatedly, it hasn't shaken mcconnell's position in the senate republicans time will tell let's see what the january committee six committee does for one thing. so i have one final question for you. we're done already. i haven't covered everybody few kids through expound on whatever else you want to expound on but my question is should the republicans regain the senate majority. after the november election what do you expect and what can we expect from mcconnell? well first i would say that my book which some people have said is very good book, but somewhat depressing. very very very good but some what depressing. someone it no it what it ends with a call to action. i mean fundamentally if you want to change the political direction of the country. what you need to do is reduce mcconnell's power. to be honest, we've been living in what i call 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 map is very favorable for democrats even though it's an uphill struggle given the climate but the map is favorable the republicans have more seats up. if god forbid mcconnell again becomes majority leader i expect he will do the bare minimum for the country and he will be focused primarily on how to regain the white house in 2024 for whoever the republicans nominate. and despite his condemnation of trump. he has said well, i'd support him of course if he's nominated. so the senate elections become really important. so are a lot of pundits have said that. our democracy hangs by a thread right now to share their pessimism. we're not so much. no, no, i think our democracy hangs by a thread. i'm astonished. at how precarious the situation is gene if you had told me that we would have this pandemic two years of covid and we would have joe biden become president and we would have an insurrection. and yet the divisions are greater than they ever were it hasn't you you would have said well, maybe we can get back on track, but it hasn't worked that way and it's gotten worse and one of the things that's important about understanding mcconnell she's managed to surf the madness of the republican party stay in power all these years now. he's basically reflects the republican party at this point. he would say otherwise, but he is the republican party. no, i i think it hangs by a thread. is there anything else you'd like to add? softball question well i guess i want to return. to the notion of him as an architect of division. so he's very unrepentant for anything that happened. and so judge. catanji jackson is nominated for the supreme court. it's a moment one could celebrate an african-american woman becoming the justice. they still have a 6-3 majority of right-wing judges on the court. but no he can't do that. he can't even say it's quite an achievement. i don't agree with her. i'm going to vote against her. no, it's it's the radical left. he's the choice of the radical left always division. and i want to say that i commend him for going to ukraine. i think it would be great if the president zelensky and the courage of the ukrainian people reminded him of the importance of democracy. but he's done huge damage to american democracy. thank you very much. and i think we have time for a few questions. mike it's on. thank you. thanks for the great question. oh good one. hi gene and excuse me. i'm a historian. so i'm gonna go way back before your time. when i social media today and look at newspapers from the 1850s. i see of a lot of similarities. the last time that the senate was so divided and the last time that the country was so polarized was before the civil war. now today we have two major things mainly pressuring our society one is growing. influence of the white supremacists who want to their aim is to start of a race war and the other is the climate emergency the climate crisis, which is both of these things may lead to increasing violence within our society. so do you think we're heading in that direction for? education between the states thank you for the question and your perspective as a historian? i think we're heading into terrible direction. i think that's why it's incumbent on. people who have responsibility as leaders to look at the condition of the country and the national interests and behave accordingly. and i guess the reason. and i would say that social media exacerbates everything and frankly. it's not clear to me whether social democracy can survive social media, but i i should have said gene and and to the audience the reason i focus on senators is i mean with citizens have responsibilities? but the senators have real responsibilities. they have these. positions like nobody else has multiple six-year terms they're going to serve three four five times longer than any president can. privilege and deal which most senators used to understand is in exchange you have responsibility for the nation. you have responsibility particularly in times of crisis. you're a party member, but you're not a partisan hack. you care about your states, but you're not a state legislator. you got to lift it up. and they haven't lifted it up. so that's why i you know voters have their responsibility. and we came actually came through in 2018 and 2020. in a powerful way but these senators they owe us a lot more than the giving us. so i've heard a lot about what you think mcconnell's worst traits are and the worst accomplished. i know one of i know you think the supreme court is perhaps the one of the worst things that he has done to the country. but i based on your last comment. i would say the restriction of voting rights in the that the senate not protecting people's right to vote is perhaps the worst thing based on the last questioners comment about protecting democracy. how would you evaluate impact on that issue? that's a great question from a friend who's my wife, but and it wasn't planted. it was just i'm thinking yeah, there's worse things than the supreme court. well, look i was i was on lawrence o'donnell the other night and he he read something where i had denounced mcconnell and then he said and then you write that's not all of it. i think his i think he's been terrible on voting rights. i think that he and the unified republicans have opposed federal voting rights legislation that is desperately needed and you have people i made that comment that senators are in state legislators. you have people like susan collins saying we don't need federal voting rights legislation because elections were well in maine. well, that's not an answer to the rest of the country and what we actually need part of my reason for encouraging people that the 22 elections and so important whatever your issue. whether it's abortion rights voting rights climate gun control health care mcconnell's at the root of all of it. he's at the root of all of it. i blame him for everything. kind of with the exception of inflation. i don't really blame him for that. it's working. so i come from a slightly different perspective. i'm an immigrant to this country so i don't have that much of a perspective on history. maybe that's an advantage because i kind of see things for what they are. and i've seen a know some some change over. last few years, especially on the on the democratic side so for me you know that the republicans to certain extent there is there's a lot of hate on the on the on the the white supremacist side. but i am also seeing a lot of hate now on the democratic side. so the hate levels are increasing. now if you're looking at a solution for this right for this impasse where do you go from here? right so you could say that. the the extremes on the democratic side are important people who are supporting trump and making that stronger that for stronger. and so maybe it's incumbent on on one party to come closer to the middle. for example mansion, right? i think mansion helped. by pushing the party away from this. big bell, which was which would have really created a problem with inflation, you know bringing bringing it back so you it seems like whenever someone is pushing the party closer to the middle. there is so much pushback on the democratic side. so, i mean that's that's the third i have right and i'm as as an as an asian. there is a lord of ic on the democratic side this whole concept of are white adjacent and things like that, which is very hateful. so that that's just a perspective and i i think from my my perspective at least i would like to see the democrats move more to the moderate side than otherwise. so what what are your thoughts? well look as as we discussed. i think biden had an extraordinarily ambitious agenda and certainly the progressives in congress and across the country had an extraordinarily ambitious agenda and the hopes that you could realize things. that have been certain kind of progress that has been. very rare in our country periods that are rare. fdr lbj, you know you don't get these opportunities very often and i think the democrats felt that there was an opportunity. it collides with their narrow majority and that's why they've had to i think a judge but i don't i don't share the view that the problem is primarily a democratic problem if if you look at bernie sanders and his six trillion dollar program the democrats quickly made it to three trillion dollar program then they looked okay one and trillion dollars they've been compromising. for 30 years the republicans have moved in the direction of from conservatism to radicalism to neilism. to white supremacy. it's a long story in american politics. we have one political party, which is somewhat fractious and we have one apocalyptic cult. that that's a i i didn't deliver the line quite right we have we have one hardee that's practiced and one party that was described by a 25 year veteran stalwart of the republicans ten years ago as an apocalyptic cult, and it's only gotten worse since then. this might be the last question. during the trial there were there was the opportunity to drive a stake through trump's heart. and we were told that if it was a private vote they would get well over 67 votes. there were some republican senators not running for reelection like burke cassidy and to me that voted to convict but yet portman voted not to convict in your research. did you find other reasons why republican senators wouldn't vote to convict even though maybe privately they would have it's great question, and maybe i mean look, maybe one to end on because despite. my quasi obsession with mcconnell mcconnell could not have succeeded. if other republicans had pushed back on him. at any time five or six republicans or four could have stopped. not only mcconnell, but trump. but what happened was? a couple of the independent-minded republicans flake and corker left politics john mccain passed away the best part of lindsey graham died with john mccain, so so and then we get left with sort of well what susan collins and lisa murkowski doing what about mitt romney? mcconnell after his great speech or as he was condemning trump. he's later said well, i couldn't go against all the other republicans. they were all the other republicans many of them would have rallied to convict trump if mcconnell had and by the way, i don't know how rob portman and lamar alexander and any number of the others lived with their records in the last four years. thank you all. i'll kind of do a slight introduction i think as i know to before this topic is always tr