Tuesday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Andrew Walworth discussed a new survey saying 70% of Democratic voters want the party to get back to basics, Steve Bannon’s insistence that Trump 2028 will happen, and the House Oversight Committee concluding that President Biden’s use of the “autopen” makes some of his last-minute pardons invalid. They also discuss Karine Jean-Pierre’s fascinating interview this week in The New Yorker and what this shows about the future of the Democratic Party. After that, RCP national correspondent Susan Crabtree joins the show to discuss new polling that shows California’s Prop 50 is likely to pass next week, ushering in congressional redistricting designed to help Democrats win more House seats in the 2026 midterms. You can listen to the show weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and here on our website. *** The show opened with a new survey titled “Deciding To Win” offering Democrats a moderate path forward. Can the party make that kind of turn? “Bill Clinton went further than this. It wasn’t just talking about things differently; it was doing things differently,” Cannon said. “I think it would work again if they really did it. But this seems a little bit cosmetic.” “I think of Fetterman as the only one who’s willing to sort of buck the trend and speak the hard truth to the party,” Bevan said. “Bill Clinton famously had this ‘Sister Souljah’ moment. You can’t even have that non, because you’ll get dragged into the public square by these Democrats and canceled, excommunicated.” *** After that, at minute 12, the group discusses Steve Bannon’s recent interview with ‘The Economist’ where he declared that Donald Trump has a special, “providential” place in history and must serve a third term. How representative is this kind of thinking in the White House and the MAGA movement? “Bannon is a revolutionary,” Bevan said. “He wants to seize and purge these institutions, which kind of echoes Mao. But he sees this as an existential struggle for the soul of the country, and there are a lot of people in the MAGA movement who feel that way, that if Democrats gain control again, the country is lost.” “He’s radicalized. They put him in jail. They went after him. He’s one of that litany of Trump people,” Cannon said about Bannon. “Whenever my Democratic friends say, ‘they’re criminalizing political differences,’ like, where have you been for nine years? I don’t say all these people were pure as the driven snow, but Bannon’s crime was, you know, contempt of Congress.” *** And then, at timestamp 23:20, the House Oversight Committee published a report concluding that some of President Biden’s presidential pardons should be voided because of his use of an automatic pen. Will this have real consequences? “Are they going to rescind some of these executive orders? I’m not even sure how they would go about doing that, but more broadly speaking, I think it is something that’s worth investigating because we don’t want it to happen again,” Bevan commented. “The Republicans on the committee made the point of saying that the presidential pardon power -which is nearly absolute for federal crimes and not subject to any checks and balances- cannot be delegated to others,” Cannon said. “That doesn’t mean the president can’t tell somebody to do it, but a lot of these former White House aides stonewalled them in figuring out exactly how the chain of command worked. It sounds like Hunter Biden was issuing some of these orders.” *** Finally, at minute 33:30, RCP national correspondent Susan Crabtree joins the show to discuss California’s Prop 50, which is likely to pass next Tuesday and is designed to redistrict the state to favor Democrats in retaliation for what is happening in Texas. “It’s one of the most expensive ballot initiatives in California state history, racking up close to $ 150 million in ads and direct mail,” she said. “I kind of see this as Gavin Newsom just digging in. It’s sort of a preview of his 2028 race. He’s gone in with George Soros, putting millions into the ‘Yes on 50’ side, and the unions. Newsom has even put in $ 2 million left over from his recall campaign.” “You’re seeing sort of extreme language on the Democratic side, saying, ‘This is about Donald Trump. Vote against Donald Trump. Donald Trump is destroying democracy. Democracy is on the ballot.’ But this is actually, you know, the most un–small-d democratic thing,” Crabtree said. *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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