Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Hope you had a nice Fourth of July. Politically speaking, most of the fireworks seemed to be coming from the Supreme Court. Any thoughts on how the term ended?
Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve never been too romantic about Independence Day. I guess in my youth I learned to regard a successful Fourth as one in which nobody got a finger blown off.
Bret: Where I grew up, Independence Day was on Sept. 16, though festivities began the night before with a famous shout. Anyone who knows the country to which I’m referring without help from Google gets a salted margarita.
Gail: Well, Sept. 16 is Mexican Independence Day — you know, we haven’t had nearly enough talks about your life south of the border. Putting that down for a summer diversion.
I admit I did have to look up the famous shout, which I assume is the Cry of Dolores, calling for freedom from Spain, equality and land redistribution.
Bret: Mexico was always progressive, though more in theory than practice. And if you really want to nerd out, next month marks the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Córdoba, when Mexico gained its formal independence.
Gail: And Sept. 16 is also the day the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower. We need to set aside a fall conversation about history.
But right now we’re going to talk about the Supreme Court’s performance. Given its current makeup, I tend to see success in any get-together that concludes without total disaster. (The Affordable Care Act survives!) But I’m very worried about the way the majority is siding with the bad guys on voting rights issues.
How about you?
Bret: Not that it will surprise you, but I was with the bad guys on that Arizona voting case. It isn’t at all tough for anyone to vote in the Grand Canyon State, in person or, for a full 27 days before an election, by mail. I don’t think it violates the Voting Rights Act to require people to vote in their precinct, or to ban ballot harvesting, which is susceptible to fraud.
Gail: One person’s ballot harvesting is another person’s helping their homebound neighbors vote. But I’m not as concerned about what the court’s done so far as where it will take us. We’ve got Republican states eagerly dismantling many procedures that make it easier for poor folks — read Democratic folks — to vote. And some have also been very protective of political leaders’ right to squish their voters into districts that are most favorable to their interests, even if some of them look like two-headed iguanas.
Bret: There’s a perception that ballot harvesting mainly helps Democrats. Maybe that’s true, though there are plenty of poor Republicans. But the most notorious example of ballot harvesting being used to steal an election was in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018, where the fraudster was working for the Republican. But I’m with you on those two-headed iguanas. Democracy would be much better off if we could find our way out of the partisan gerrymanders.
Gail: Very tricky, since both parties tend to be in favor of creative district-drawing when their folks get the advantage.
Bret: On the whole, though, I think the court had a pretty good term considering the fears people had about a 6-3 conservative-liberal split. Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts voted with the court’s liberals to uphold a federal moratorium on evictions. Amy Coney Barrett voted to uphold Obamacare. And every justice except Clarence Thomas upheld a cheerleader’s right to use a certain four-letter epithet in connection to the words “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything” that we’re usually not allowed to write in this newspaper.
Gail: Yeah, we’ve moved into a world in which, for teenagers, posting that word on Snapchat or Instagram is getting to be as common as … buying sneakers or Googling the answers to a take-home quiz. If every student who did it got punished, we might have to replace all after-school activities with detention.
Bret: I think the culture crossed the curse-word Rubicon a long time ago. Like, around the time of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” monologue in 1972.
Gail: Although I do have to admit it’d be nicer if the cool kids were the ones who thought of the most creative non-four-letter ways to express their dissatisfaction with life.
Maybe bird metaphors? (“Family reunion? I’d rather hang out with a flock of starlings!”) Or … well, let this be an ongoing project.
Bret: Flocked if I know how that’ll ever happen.
Gail: Let’s talk about something cheerful — the Trump indictments. Or rather, the indictment of the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization for failure to pay taxes on about $1.76 million worth of perks.
Have to admit, the part I liked best was the family, particularly Eric, treating perks like a luxury apartment and car and $359,000 in private school tuition as normal life. I mean, if your neighbor brought you over a plate of cookies, would you have to pay taxes on that?
Do you think this is going to lead to something bigger? The chief financial officer in question, Allen Weisselberg, is a longtime Trump loyalist. Of course, he’s also 73 …
Bret: You know that I hold the Trump Organization in the same high regard in which I hold toxic sludge, K.G.B. poisoned underpants or James Patterson novels. But I’m a little dubious about this prosecution. After all this investigating, this is the worst they can come up with? I’m not excusing it, assuming the charges stick. But it seems like the sort of sneaky and unethical corporate self-dealing that usually results in heavy civil penalties but not criminal charges.
Gail: There’s been so much anticipation of an indictment of Donald Trump himself, for overvaluing his properties at sale time, and undervaluing them for tax assessments. Instead, we’ve got a guy nobody’s ever heard of getting a tax-free Mercedes. You’re right — it is kind of a downer.
Presumably this is just an early step. Remember there’s that grand jury in Manhattan that’s committed to spending six months looking into possible Trump misdeeds. And they’ve hardly begun.
Bret: The larger point is that it has more of the feel of a political prosecution, of the sort that Trump was always threatening against his political opponents, starting with Hillary Clinton. It’s a game at which two can play.
Gail: The challenge for the prosecutors is to come up with something bad enough to shock New Yorkers. Or something so very likely to lead to jail time that Trump will come around and make the kind of deal that would freeze him out of politics forever.
Bret: My general theory of Trump is that the best thing we can do is starve him of the things he most craves, which is publicity (doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad), plus the opportunity to play the martyr.
As for something that could shock New Yorkers — either he skins cats for pleasure or he’s a fan of the owners of the Knicks.
Gail: Hey, give the Knicks a break. And let’s change the subject. Give me a snappy summary of your feelings about the never-ending negotiations over Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Bret: The result is going to be good, I think. And popular, too. We need a program that’s ambitious and forward-looking, that allows for projects like the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges — projects that will last for centuries — to be built, except this time with greater environmental sensitivity.
Gail: Readers, please get out your Twitters and quote this.
Bret: I’d also love to see the Biden administration resurrect some of the more inspiring programs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works of Art Project. I don’t just mean creating programs as employment schemes, but also as a way of channeling civic energies toward active, participatory environmental stewardship and aesthetic creation. I also think the art project should be open to foreigners, so that future Diego Riveras can leave their imprint on American buildings and parks and boulevards.
Gail: We are in total agreement. But — just checking — are you equally enthusiastic about the other side of Biden’s plan, which would shore up and expand critical social infrastructure like early childhood education and community colleges?
Bret: Sure. Why not? You’ve worn me into submission — I mean, agreement!
Gail: Pardon me one more time while I pour a glass of champagne. Are you listening, moderate Republicans?
Bret: Final topic, Gail. July 4 was supposed to mark the date when Americans could finally mark their independence from the Covid pandemic. Do you finally feel free of it?
Gail: Pretty much, Bret. I guess for most people it depends on the things they liked to do that weren’t doable during the shutdown. For me a lot of the loss was not being able to go with my husband to crowded public places like theaters or jazz clubs and not seeing the friends who weren’t real comfortable interacting outside their families.
Bret: And I missed the foreign travel.
Gail: Now pretty much everything we like is back. The one thing I still really miss is being at work in the real physical office. The work gets done digitally but it really isn’t the same. As much as I love hanging out with you in these conversations, I’d like it better if I could walk over to your desk and make fun of Mitch McConnell.
Bret: That, and putting the office’s fancy coffee machines to regular use.
Gail: But soon, right? See you in September!
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