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Brian Kruger
Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm Brian Kruger, the producer of the show, and I have a producer's note for you. This is a two part episode; episode 172 and episode 173. They are both part of the same interview that Rich had with Robert Greenfield, one of our favorite guests. He traveled all the way from Perth, Australia to be here. I think you're really going to enjoy this, but we're going to cut it up into two segments, one this week and one next week. So we join Rich and Robert in conversation.
Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Rich Helppie. We're bringing back a favorite guest, Mr. Robert Greenfield, all the way from Perth, Australia. We're going to talk a little bit about his travels, what it took to get him to beautiful Ann Arbor, Michigan and we're going to talk about a lot of the issues of the day. It's always a great conversation with Robert. The Common Bridge, of course, is at substack.com; please go to substack.com, enter The Common Bridge in your search engine and please subscribe, either as a paid subscriber or as a free subscriber. The Common Bridge is also on most podcast outlets; find us there. Please subscribe on YouTube TV, and of course at Mission Control Radio on your Radio Garden app. And so today from Australia, Robert it's so nice to see you.
Robert Greenfield
Wonderful to be here, Rich. It's fantastic. It's summertime here in America. It's beautiful weather. So thank you.
Richard Helppie
Great. Now you had quite a journey from Perth. It wasn't Perth to Detroit. How did you get here?
Robert Greenfield
Actually, we...I think it's a great way to open. I think one of the great challenges for the entire world right now is travel. So we went from Perth to Singapore, Singapore to Europe, a couple places there - Germany and Hungary - then to Toronto, Canada, and finally Detroit. And just to comment, everybody - most, I imagine - of the audience is here in the United States. Travel is a challenge everywhere in the world right now. Everybody is struggling with the shortage of staff, shortage of this, shortage of that. I have to admire the patience of the customers, as well as the ground staff, in particular. But it took us five days - two day stop in Hungary - and now we're here in the US, which is really exciting for me and my wife, Gabriella, who's accompanied me, to be here for reunions. It seems like in the United States, there are tons of reunions, people are out and people are talking and people are doing things. Regardless of what the media says, I find here a very vibrant atmosphere right now in this country.
Richard Helppie
Yes, indeed, there is a disconnect between our media and the real world. We'll probably dive into that a little bit. Last time we talked, you gave us an insider's view on the Australian COVID policies. You were locked in a hotel room for a period of time; fortunately, you brought Gabriella with you, good call on your part. How did that COVID policy work out for the Australians and what's going on there now?
Robert Greenfield
Thank you for the question. I mean, Australia was a lockdown country. Melbourne - in fact, I don't know if Shanghai is rivaling it now - but Melbourne had the longest period, over different times, of lockdowns. Their lockdowns were very strict, meaning only out for the groceries kind of stuff. They had almost one year out of the two years plus of COVID where they were in lockdown. Perth, Australia, cut themselves off, literally, from the rest of the country so we didn't have as many lockdowns because we literally did not allow people in or out. The challenge, or the problem, with that, to me, ultimately, is that when you cut yourself off from the rest of the world, I don't find that to be a good thing. I think that the China policy that Xi Jinping has is very negative. It's not just negative for the economy, it's negative for the emotional, mental health of the people. It also - by cutting you off from the rest of the world - you have an us against them mentality, which he is really fostering in a negative way. So for us in Western Australia, we were cut off. We managed to leave after a lot of work. When we came back, I have to admit to you, I was very frustrated. We were very frustrated. We're like hey, the rest of the world is getting it back together. I posted photos of shelf outages. We were not getting things in; we were still on the toilet paper crisis two years later. It's finally now sorting itself out. We've been open five months since then. The remarkable thing to me is how quickly we as human beings are now putting this behind us. It's - some people still do some masking; obviously, there's still COVID boosters, those kind of things - but people really, really want to move on, and the sentiment of the Australians, in particular, and this is the Aussie way of saying [it], we've had enough of it.
Richard Helppie
As you stroll around in Arbor today, you'll see plenty of people wearing masks; a minority. Tragically a few blocks from here, here's a little class of preschoolers and they're out on an outing. None of the adults have a mask on but these poor little things have masks on. I've asked people do masks actually work. And this is what the CDC says, masks can help prevent COVID when combined with vaccines, social distancing. It's like, huh? It's like the guy that buys the exercise machine and it says, if you use this machine, you're going to lose weight - when combined with the diet that we've inserted in there and it's 1200 calories - or something like that. So a lot of the discussion around COVID, even giving people the benefit of the doubt, they didn't know what to do. There were voices, particularly the Great Barrington Declaration, that said, we're violating every principle of public health, and it looks like they were right; that these lockdowns really weren't effective in doing anything but allowing more variants in and extending the pandemic. I don't know that we'll ever get to a reasonable conversation about it.
Robert Greenfield
Well, China has...another part of that, China did not order any of the mRNA vaccine. I think it's important for your readers, listeners to know that. What does that mean? They had their own thing called Sinopharm. Sinopharm had low efficacy and that's why they have lockdowns, because they don't actually have a backup plan. So if you don't have a vaccine that actually works, and they also did not vaccinate, by and large, the older population. Their entire policy in China is "bass-ackwards." It really is not working at all and this is part of the problem of authoritarian governments. You don't have a lot of interaction between, this side and that side, in order for you to come to a consensus of what actually works for the majority of the people. So my feeling about it is that I think vaccines worked. I think the mask policy was overblown, but I never really minded the mask policy for myself, I felt kind of comfortable in it. But then all of a sudden, one day again, I want to go back to what the Aussies say, we're done with it, we just can't do this anymore. As human beings, you can only lock us up for so long before we finally say we've had it. I think that's really the sentiment now, globally. Everywhere that you go everyone's trying to figure out, how am I going to get my gas, petrol, at a reasonable cost? How can I do this? How can I do that? I want to go on vacation for a change. I want to see my family that I haven't seen. The last thing I want to worry about is masks or these policies. Are we forgetting and maybe not having the right lessons learned? I don't know, maybe. But I know this; people are done with it.
Richard Helppie
Well, they can be done with it emotionally. Jim Baker, who has been on the show four times, and he writes a blog called J. Baker blog, it's great, called "Pandemic Pondering," I highly recommend it. His most recent post said, look, we're watching herd immunity in real time. When we had the Spanish flu, people quit dropping dead in the streets and so we kind of knew that the pandemic was over, he said, but there were probably variants out there, asymptomatic, and we couldn't see them. This is where I think we just have to have a discussion and continued research. We really don't know what the vaccines do long term. I mean, right now we have a president who's gotten four vaccines. He's gotten Paxlovid, and now he's got another bout of COVID; 79 year old man. But we really don't know yet. They appear to work really well. How are they working today? And even the variants; the current vaccine does not address the current variant. That's again, something from Dr. Baker's blog, Pandemic Pondering. Highly recommend it.
Robert Greenfield
Isn't though that...my understanding is that right now, there may be no more COVID shots until the new vaccine comes out, which is a BA.5 or something like that.
Richard Helppie
That's the really interesting thing is that there are groups recommending wait until the new variant comes out, unless you're at risk. And then at the same time, you have people literally hell bent on wanting to push this thing into the arms of six month olds; which I don't see any case for doing that at all. Again, this is where we need to make sure that our government - who theoretically work for us, and the media, who theoretically reports honestly - start doing their jobs. Let's go a little bit further into China. I know you have a great deal of experience in this part of the world, a great deal of business experience, and also very appropriately, technology and manufacturing experience. The CHIPS Act, I know we depend on Taiwan for chips. I know that there's a lot of saber rattling. Any take on what the heck's going on as far as the Chinese economy and what we're going to do for chips?
Robert Greenfield
My view on this is, this is a tremendous victory for the United States, the CHIPS Act. I think that the numbers show it the...I don't want to say that Republicans would not like to see Biden succeed, but they certainly would like - enough of them - would like to see America succeed. The CHIPS Act is a critical path, 280 billion, but there's a whole bunch of sub-sections, as you know, of the CHIPS Act. So I think it's really, really critical. As you mentioned - Taiwan - Taiwan is the one that makes the highest end of chips. So let's just say China does not need to necessarily attack or invade, they can just surround the island. What are you going to do with the chips? You're not going to send them out by airplane. So we really need to have our own re-shoring of critical technologies. One of the core arguments that I think whoever you want to say, whichever side is anti-globalization people - which I still don't understand but anyway - has been that the wholesale outsourcing of not only manufacturing, but also the RD that went with that really put the US in a bind. And that kind of driving that profitability matrix, I mentioned before Hewlett Packard and other people like that, they basically outsourced everything, to where they were a brand manager. Well, that is not possible in the new world that we are in today. We're no longer - even Vladimir Putin put it that way and he's correct - we're not in a uni-polar world anymore. And critically, it's not about Putin, it's more about China. So where's China at right now? I think Xi Jinping has been slowed down by the COVID situation. I think that actually the Ukraine situation - while he gets some cheap petrol, some cheap gas - he's not winning on that, because now everybody is sensitized to what happens if somebody attacks somebody else. That being said, he is amassing the amount of hardware and technology that it would be impossible for the US to actually defend Taiwan. We all know that the carriers now sitting out there are somewhat vulnerable. They're no longer the perfect war machines. They're only 100 miles from Taiwan. You can also look at Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a test case; which Hong Kong is not Hong Kong anymore, regardless of who you are on the spectrum. His showing up there recently, in the last month, to wave on the 25th anniversary of the hand-over back to China tells you that he is now accomplishing his mission. So my view on Taiwan is this, as somebody asked me the other day, what's going to happen with Pelosi flying over there? I said they're not going to shoot down her plane, okay, so that's not going to happen.
Richard Helppie
I hope they don't pull...[laughter] who wants that? That would be ugly.
Robert Greenfield
Exactly, but I don't think that. It's not going to be that dramatic. He is saber rattling, okay. I think where Biden has excelled has been in cooperation and collaboration. You look at South Korea, [it] is now really a much better partner. Through Abe and now his successor, Japan is a much better partner. The challenge is, do we want to have that kind of militarization of the world? The answer is no. But on the other hand, if China is going to be as powerful as it is, is there any other choice? And one last point here is this; I don't think that Biden has changed one bit of Trump's policies, core policies, he's just got better cooperation.
Richard Helppie
I know you were in favor of a lot of what Secretary of State Pompeo was doing in China. I hope people go back and listen to those. So you touched on Ukraine and the Russian invasion. We had Professor Anthony Colangelo on talking about the legalities of what we could do to defend. Of course, it's been in the news where we are supplying advanced weaponry and F-35 jets now. And we had Timo Stuart on, a policy analyst from Finland. (Robert Greenfield: The HIMARS are being very effective.) Yes, indeed. And now there's this proxy war, it seems, being fought on the ground of Ukraine; terrible cost in lives and in destruction of cities. Any thought on how this resolves, ultimately?
Robert Greenfield
Well, I think that, clearly, the ratcheting up by the US has been successful. It has...we got kind of a stalemate. HIMARS in particular, are very, very effective to pinpoint, blow up munitions, things like that. So the problem that we have is that Putin is still winning on the oil front. He can turn on the tap: natural gas or whatever he wants to sell to China, to sell to India. So he's got enough money to do that. What he does not have is technology. So the lesson on this one for China and anybody else to learn; it's [that] Russian technology is old, their command structure is not good. You can see that almost every day. So the problem for the Ukraine is that all the high tech weaponry of the United States basically keeps them about on par. Can the Ukraine forces actually take back the Donbas or any other place like that? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. So I think in the long run, whether anybody likes it or not, Zelinsky can keep saying Europe, hang in there, support us. Winter's coming and there will be additional pressure on the Ukrainians to actually sit down and discuss. Now we just had the grain deal. The grain deal was a good thing. This morning, as you probably already know, 26 tons of corn and wheat went to Lebanon, first time. Everybody, even Putin, wants to be able to send his stuff out too, so everybody gets that. Is that a precursor for something where we'll have almost like a ceasefire? My feeling is, in the long run, we're going to have a South Korea/North Korea situation. We're going to have a ceasefire, where nobody actually says these are hard borders, but they will in effect become hard borders. And that means that the eastern area, the Donbas region all the way across - but not Odessa, that will still remain for the Ukraine - the rest of it will become kind of a ceasefire border. In return, what Putin is going to do is he'll agree to stop, and that's going to happen sometime in the next 12 months, in my view.
Richard Helppie
That would be a much improved situation over what we have today. We had Professor Jesse Kaufman on from Eastern Michigan University and he opines that he doesn't think that this war would end absent regime change, either in Moscow or in Kiev. So [you think] we should see a ceasefire. I think everyone would welcome a ceasefire; let cooler heads prevail.
Robert Greenfield
Let me ask you your opinion, okay. You're a guy that has done extremely well, in life, you probably met an oligarch or two along the way. And those oligarchs, my understanding is that Putin knows those guys. So do you think Putin is really going to go?
Richard Helppie
This is way above my pay grade. So do I think he's going to go? No. But as I kind of think about moving the chess pieces around, he has no other way out. He has to find some way to declare victory, and get out. But how does he do that? Can he say, alright, I've got the Donbas and then I'll leave. Well, can Ukraine say alright, you can have that part but don't bother us anymore. You're going to be sitting there in a perpetual state of anxiety of wondering when the next Russian invasion comes. Absent something in a brokered deal where it would bring the Western powers in; which effectively would be Ukraine joining NATO. That is something that Putin says he'll literally go nuclear over.
Robert Greenfield
That's why ceasefire is the only way.
Richard Helppie
That, I like it. I mean, again, I think that's a vast improvement. Ceasefire until we get regime change, because eventually we will get regime change. I mean, if you look at our adroit Cuba policy, it only took us what, like seventy years or so, to receive change.
Robert Greenfield
Exactly. I think for Putin, my personal feeling is he's going to be there until he passes and he's in good - all the rumors aside, as Anthony Blinken put it - he's in way better health than we would hope.
Richard Helppie
There's a clip in there about the relative health of Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. I'm not going to even try to dig that one out, though. But, Robert, a little closer to home, we have been treated to the January 6 Committee. I don't know how this is playing in your part of the world, or if you had a chance to watch it and what might happen next?
Robert Greenfield
Well, I have to say this; outside the United States, generally speaking, people were...there are people who like Trump, kind of like on the authoritarian side, and he was not without his supporters in places. Obviously, Hungary was a place that he had some support, in some other countries also. So it's not a, we don't like Donald Trump, per se. There is a broad consensus that he was not good for them and for the rest of the world, meaning the democratic world. They felt that they had to carry more and more of the burden, and they weren't necessarily ready to do that. Trump was pushing too hard, too fast. So I think when they look at January 6, most of the people outside the United States are saying, yeah, we get that, we watched it. So I think that the January 6 situation is actually much more of a domestic audience in the United States, about how both sides are doing it. The so-called ABC producer, who's now turned this into a much slicker thing than, let's say, Watergate, or something like that. So I think outside the United States, there are very few people who would like to see Donald Trump come back, including his former supporters, mostly because in in the uncertain world that we have today, they're not afraid about what he would do to them, they're afraid about what he would do to the United States, in his retribution towards anybody else - that scares them. The actual feeling outside the United States is that the US could be heading for something almost like a breakup. It's very hard to read what's going on in the United States, when you're outside. With COVID - people are starting to travel again - but I would say the the entire world is sitting back going we don't know about the United States right now. We're not sure. As much as Biden comes around, and everybody shakes hand and we're good friends, right now people say...and I don't want to talk about reliability. I think it's deeper than reliability. It's much more like...people always think about themselves. What does it mean for me if NATO expands? What does it mean for each one of these...Singapore, what does it mean if they push on Xi Jinping? So most of the world right now is trying to figure out, how do they fit into, what's honestly, an evolving situation.
Richard Helppie
Our system of government, United States, says here's an administration that comes in, another administration's elected and says, okay, we're going to care for the country for the next four years, hopefully, the next eight years. And even the differences that you see in election campaigns, people tend to moderate to the middle. If you remember Barack Obama being elected with a change agenda, and he said, I would have liked to do that earlier, then he said, we've got to deal with this financial crisis first. He was a good steward - other people can debate whether it was the right policy or not - but he at least made the right priority and I think did a lot of right things there. In retrospect, he wasn't the guy that forgot all about taking care of the country. I think, and this is my view, that Donald Trump is just about Donald Trump and everything he's doing is for Donald Trump. I can't imagine him being elected dog catcher versus anything else. You and I've worked with a lot of executives, we know that you can't be an effective executive running anything if you're careening from pillar to post and preening and spewing things out randomly. It just doesn't work. People don't know what you're thinking and where you're going to go. You don't want somebody that is arguably the most powerful person on the planet doing that. So I'm thinking okay, major party defeated presidential candidate, you move on, you try to re-group and try to get the next one. Notice the Democrats didn't bring Hillary Clinton back. She lost. It's like, you're yesterday's news, you're done. And the thing that really puzzles me is why are the Democrats so afraid of Trump running? I mean, I'd sit there and go - if I'm the Democrats - I'm like, we beat this guy with a very old guy that couldn't get out of his basement. Like, we're gonna lose again? I don't get that.
Robert Greenfield
I have not spent as much time on Quora as I used to and I answered a question about that; who's going to win in 2024 and I had a picture of Biden and Trump and I said neither of these guys, right. (Rich Helppie: Right.) I've got almost a million views of that in two weeks, which is extraordinary given the non...it's summer after all. Basically I say the same thing, which is that whether the Democrats want him or don't want him, if Donald Trump gets nominated, there are so many people who don't want him. The only person probably that he could beat is Kamala Harris that I can figure out. Maybe Mayor Pete, because there's a latent prejudice of that, some people are not going to vote for a gay candidate.
Richard Helppie
Well, if they unwrap Pete's record as a failed mayor of South Bend, Indiana, oh, yeah. He's in way over his pay grade right now.
Robert Greenfield
So that leads us to...and I agree with you on everything that you said about Donald Trump. I don't think anybody has - not anybody, 90% of the people in the United States now get that - they may, some may still support him but none of them can say that he's there for us, okay.
Richard Helppie
He needs to move on. I think that his influence is exaggerated. I'm going to talk about that later on when we talk about the upcoming elections. In a recent episode of The Common Bridge, I did a short solo segment about it won't be Biden or Trump as the nominees in 2024. Not gonna happen. Yesterday, I watched, on one of the news programs, Joe Manchin. Joe Manchin is a guy balancing different...[Robert Greenfield: I like Joe Manchin.] Yeah, I'm like, now there's a good chance...
Robert Greenfield
He saved the Democrats. How many times?
Richard Helppie
Right. I mean, I'm loath to put out other names, but the Republicans have a lot of great options. The Democrats have a few good options, but you can certainly do better than a Biden/Trump re-match. But back on January 6, here's the situation the way I see it, there's only four things that can happen right now: that Trump's indicted, Trump's not indicted, he's convicted, or he's not convicted.
Robert Greenfield
And which one of those four you think could happen?
Richard Helppie
Well, here's looking at the tea leaves and watching the pundits and picking up their nuance. I'm going to guess no indictment. (Robert Greenfield: I agree.) And I think the committee has served its political purpose; that by their own admission, what they've said is, hey, we went through thousands and thousands of hours of tape and video and depositions and we brought you these 26 seconds. That to me says, okay, there's some kind of defense in those other unreported things. And I would imagine the attorney general is looking at this and saying, do I have a winnable case? And so I'm thinking that the attorney general is most likely to not bring an indictment. What that will mean is like every other thing that they've gone after Trump about, well, he's guilty, and now he's getting away with it again, and that core, that MSNBC audience, they're still going to believe he needs to go to prison. I don't know if he does or not, but I think they're going to have a hard time proving it.
Robert Greenfield
My view on this is that there are always extremes. The ones on the right are going to say, of course, he was never guilty. My feeling is this. I don't want to see an indictment because I think it's bad for the country. I don't think that we should be indicting former presidents. I think it's a bad precedent. I think the blood in the water would be really negative for us. We don't need that at all. I think what the best thing that can happen, is what you were talking about...2020 forward a bit, is that the Republicans come up with a good candidate who can help ease Trump out, not just telling him he's the bad guy, the wrong guy, but essentially say, thanks a lot, you did a lot of good things. If you watched any of the Jan 6, I'm sure you'd have, Poindexter I thought was the best. He started off on his little speech before he talked about what happened on that day as an internal deputy national security counsel. He said, I really believed in everything that Donald Trump did. I liked what Donald Trump did. I supported him 100% until I could no longer support him on that day. He said it was a bridge too far. So I think that most of the people, if you look at it, rationally, not emotionally, would say the same thing if you are a Trump supporter; meaning that they liked a lot of things that happened along the way, maybe they were not thrilled with the personality. But what happened on January 6 was, that's it. I'm done. Even Betsy DeVos, okay, not to mention her name, but she was loyal and even she walked out. Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao walked out. People didn't walk out at the...they could have hung on for two weeks. They just said I've got to draw a line in the sand. So what for me January 6 is about is that, as you say, political purpose, I don't disagree, anyone can trot that out on any one of a hundred different levels and say, that's proof that Donald Trump should not be in office.
Richard Helppie
I think it punctuated that he wasn't prepared for the office. And never mind the testimony, whatever things that we all got to see, this assault on the Capitol is going on for three hours when he could have got on the TV and said, hey, knock it off, get out of the building - [he] didn't do it. There is no dispute about that. I was in California at the time, and I was listening and the radio reports were coming on and they were calling...I was driving, and the president was railing against Mike Pence. And I'm like, this guy is off his rocker. Thank god Mike Pence said A.) I'm certifying the election and B.) I'm not leaving the Capitol grounds. This is why it was just astonishing to me that normally when you watch a trial go on, the witnesses get stronger and stronger at the end, and then you finish strong. I just watched the Democrats, some of whom of course, they fed Raskin his own video of him not wanting to certify electors four years earlier, and now he's railing about not certifying electors. So that kind of hypocrisy gets put back. But then also you bring in a witness that's going to put this to bed. And this is what you have to believe, Donald Trump leapt from the back of the Beast, this huge SUV, got his hands on a secret service agent, and was trying to overpower him. That's what she said. A few months earlier remember, Donald Trump was too weak to walk down a ramp at West Point by himself. He had to drink water with two hands. One of these can't be true. Of course, the Secret Service said, nope, that didn't happen and we'll come in and testify. And what did we hear from the punditry? Well, that part of her story wasn't important and ignore the three things she said that were, quite frankly, bullshit. But believe everything else, she said. I think it's like, well...the game that couldn't shoot straight.
Robert Greenfield
I'm not going to dispute that. My feeling is the star of this thing is Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney, has been calm, very clear. If you want to talk about crescendo, she learned from her father quite well. She knows how to ratchet it up...she didn't start off by saying Donald Trump should not be president again. She moved that all the way towards the end. She gave her big time speech when Benny was out with COVID. I think Liz Cheney did a really good job and she was speaking directly to Donald Trump. She was not speaking to the country, she was basically saying to him, you run again and you're going to have a lot of people that are going to be against you, and I am going to be one of them, and I'm going to make it my mission. I kind of feel like January 6 is a Liz Cheney mission. Kinzinger is okay, he's a war hero. He's not as articulate as Liz Cheney, she is quietly polished. What do you think?
Richard Helppie
Well, I look, I think they did the job they were sent to do, it is clearly a partisan group. There is no counterbalancing narrative. So you have to accept that just like every other end of the trial you're at, the prosecution puts on their case and you think, well, they got the guy and then the defense comes in and you go, oh, yeah, that's the case. Now, since Johnnie Cochran long since left this mortal coil. I don't know what Donald Trump would do in terms of defense. I know frankly, I don't want to see it. So I think this is going to end kind of like the Mueller report. We really don't have anything indictable unless maybe you want to talk about these things and just leave it hanging. I think it's going to keep people in their polar camps. But again, the thing that just baffles me is - if I'm a Democrat - it's like, we want Trump to run. It's like, well, we have to stop him now so he can't run again. It's like, just beat him. You're telling me your party is so bereft of candidates, policies, and ideas that you can't beat an obvious, crazy narcissist, who we all got to watch? That's what you're telling the world.
Robert Greenfield
You're on to a bigger subject here, which is the Democrats don't have an agenda and I write about that a lot. The agenda that they do have is clearly not in the majority of the citizenry of the United States; definitely not. They're not...the progressives are not...they think that they've got some kind of majority; they don't have it. The big preponderence of people are in the middle. (Rich Helppie: Yes.) And so a lot of those, yes, there are...it's diversity, but a lot of those are white, suburban, women; people like that. Those are the people who are really kind of a backbone of this country, in my view, and they are not being very well served by either side. So when I look at what's going on now in Congress, you want to say, half empty, half full. Let's go back to your chips thing, just as an example. I've seen some really good bipartisan stuff. So let's give people some credit where credit is due; they they passed the infrastructure bill, they passed a gun... (Rich Helppie: Bipartisan.) bipartisan on the gun bill, they passed now the CHIPS thing that we talked about, they passed I think marriage equality act - that's going to go through - these are things that the vast majority of the population in the United States agrees with, regardless of what Supreme Court and Amy Coney Barrett or anybody else, or Clarence Thomas or anybody else [does]. So that is not a bad thing, those are good things. And I think that there is a - and I'm not going to give Biden credit for that, I can give Joe Manchin credit or anybody else.
Richard Helppie
You can give the Supreme Court credit for actually, when we've had big changes in the country - Medicare, for example - there had to be a broad consensus for big things. The Supreme Court threatening some of these big things, like marriage equality, it made our legislative branch react to that and say, well, wait a minute, we're going to codify this into law and make that what we think people have...(Robert Greenfield: No choice.) Right. In a perverse kind of way the judiciary has forced the legislative branch.
Robert Greenfield
I don't disagree, because unless - we talk about this all the time, you and I spoke about it - the legislative branch has basically not stepped up for a long time. You're right, the left wing was relying upon SCOTUS, Supreme Court, to basically protect certain rights. The right side says, we don't think that that's right and you can argue about originalism, or anything else that you want to do, which is probably not the point here. But I think that it now says to the Congress, there's enough people, whether it's 60, 70% kind of majorities, we should be able to get some of this stuff, at least the basics, into law so we don't have to argue about [it]. Abortion is too difficult but a lot of these other things such as a marriage equality, or interracial marriage, or things like this, or contraception, there's, I don't know...
Richard Helppie
Can you believe that we're talking about that in 2022? I mean that just...
Robert Greenfield
But look at Joni Ernst. Joni Ernst - I don't know if you know this - pushing the over the counter contraceptive. Let's get it off the table. [Laughter.] My point is there are Republicans who have said exactly...[crosstalk].
Richard Helppie
Where is the constituency for that? I mean, where are they? Do you know anybody that says, hey, here's a good idea; be sexually active and don't take any contraceptives. That is like the worst of the bad ideas.
Robert Greenfield
But that also shows that when you have any kind of extreme power - in the super majority now, conservative in SCOTUS - means that, in a positive sense and I try to look at the glass half full, is that the Congress is actually stepping up. I don't give Biden any credit for that. I give actually, the credit to the American people. Nobody wants to go backwards on some of the basic fundamentals. (Rich Helppie: Indeed.) And you cannot trust what's going to happen now in the Supreme Court. Once there's a change - probably going to happen - in the Congressional side, maybe not in the Senate, well then that means we're going to get a lot of the opposite.
Brian Kruger
That concludes part one of Rich's interview with Robert Greenfield. You can catch part two of this interview in the conclusion of it as Episode 173, which we'll drop a week from today. You can also catch us at Substack - and use the Substack app, it's really great, I think you're really going to like it - you can read the transcript there, as well as make comments on there. We'll see you next week on The Common Bridge.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
Dialogue and Deference: From the End of The World, to Your Town.