Biden's Risky Asylum Policy

David Plotz
Hello and welcome to the Slate political gabfest.

June 13, 2024, the Biden's risky Asylum policy edition. I'm David Plotz of Citycast in Washington, DC. Boy, do I have a crow update. But let me introduce John Dickerson of CBS's daily report from New York. First, hello, John.

John Dickerson
Hello. And from New Haven, Connecticut, New York Times Magazine, Yale University Law School, Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily. Hey, guys. Okay, crow update, mega update really quickly.

David Plotz
So my attempts to make friends with a pair of crows in my backyard who are nesting in a tall tree in my backyard, has been failing. I leave out nuts for them. I wave to them. I try to greet them and stuff, leave out shiny objects for them. No interest.

This week their fledgling arrived. Their fledgling appeared. So there's a small crow that suddenly appeared in our backyard on the ground. Didn't realize it at first that that was a fledgling. I just thought it was a small bird that the crows were.

I thought the crows were harassing this small bird that was on the ground and kind of couldn't really fly. And we, my girlfriend and I thought it was injured. And then, and they were yelling and chattering around this bird. They were sort of in the other trees and yelling. And then we realized, oh, no, this is the fledgling that's trying to fly, learning to fly.

And the crows just started attacking me and my girlfriend. They just, like, whenever we would go in the backyard, whenever we'd get anywhere near where this fledgeling was, they just dive bombed us. They never touched me, but they could feel the swoop of their wing on them. One of them shat on me once. It was terrifying.

I couldn't go out in the backyard. They now seem to have calmed down a little bit. Anyway, my friendship attempts failed. I'm now an enemy of the crows. This week on the gabfest, Biden's crackdown on asylum, whether it will help him politically, then, is Europe careening toward the far right?

We will talk to Ann Applebaum about the results of the european parliament elections. And then new York Governor Kathy Hochul canceled the ambitious Manhattan congestion pricing program weeks before it launched, delighting suburbanites and enraging public transit advocates and urban planning nerds and also enraging me. So we'll discuss that. And of course, we will have cocktail chatter.

Emily Bazelon
That's not just the sound of that first sip of morning Joe. It's the sound of someone shopping for a car on Carvana from the comfort of home. That's a good blend. It's time to take it easy. Like answering some easy questions.

To get pre qualified for a car in minutes, talk about starting the morning, right? Just like customizing your terms so your car fits your budget, visit carvana.com or download the app to experience car shopping the way it should be. Convenient, comfortable.

David Plotz
President Biden, by executive order, vastly constrained the ability of migrants to ask for asylum. He did what he tried to do legislatively. So legislatively, it was a bipartisan effort to, to try to address the huge migration on the southern border with constraints on asylum. Trump torpedoed that effort, and so Biden has carried it out by order. He's basically barred people from asking for asylum if they cross into the US illegally as long as levels of illegal migration are high.

If more than 2500 arrests a day are happening, people are not going to be allowed to apply for asylum. And that 2500 arrest today level has been. We've been above that level for years. People who use the Border Patrol's app and cross at an official port of entry to make an appointment can still ask for asylum. And when they make that asset, that generally allows them some period to be in the US and to live in quasi legal status in the US over some period of time because the asylum system is so backlogged.

So this is a lot more like a Trump immigration policy than you might expect. And it seems to reflect the huge liability that immigration and the southern border have become for Biden and the Democrats. So do you think that this policy change will have political benefit? Yeah, I mean, it has a political benefit of how big? Don't know.

John Dickerson
I think the political benefit is Biden had nothing. He had a bunch of bad daily migrant numbers. When you look at the number of migrant encounters at the border by administration, the graph kind of bounces along under Trump and then skyrockets under Biden. There may be plausible explanation. There are some plausible explanations for that.

Joe Biden doesn't want to spend 20 minutes, and Democrats don't want to spend a lot of time on that turf explaining why that might be the case. And there are all these other reasons. Now, what he's given himself is two things, which is an answer to a question at a debate or criticism about immigration. He can say, I did this thing. And then when the obvious follow up is, why did it take you so long and why didn't you do more?

He can say, well, because I was trying to do it legislatively, which everybody agrees, though a lot of people on the republican side won't say this now. Everybody knows that doing it legislatively is the best way to take on immigration, the problem is they just haven't been able to do it for 40 years. Emily, shifting to the policy itself, there's real anger, I think, on the left about this, and there's also anger at the left towards sort of the Biden center left, at the idea that asylum has become a loophole. There's this term, the asylum loophole, that's breaking the immigration system, and a lot of people are saying, no, asylum. Is this right guaranteed under international law?

David Plotz
How could it possibly be a loophole? But it is kind of a loophole. Right? So asylum comes out of the world War two, really, as a kind of promise the world is making to refugees. Right.

Emily Bazelon
I mean, there's all this retrospective distress about people trying to flee Nazi Germany. Boats full of german Jews that were turned back around the world had to return to Europe. People died in the Holocaust. So we come out of world War two with this idea that if you leave your country and you can show that you have a credible fear of persecution, if you're forced to return, you should have the right to resettle somewhere else in the world. So, yes, asylum has a strong foundation in international law.

The way in which people talk about it as a loophole is that now people who are migrating, mostly because they want opportunity and to make their lives better, they know that when they show up at the border of the United States or another country, the thing they're supposed to say is that, yes, I have a credible fear of persecution, because that is the thing that will mean that the country cannot usually simply turn you around, which is what Biden is now doing. Right. Normally, based on asylum law, what happens is that american officials interview you at the border, and then they give you a hearing. You're supposed to come back so that they can actually test whether your credible fear of persecution is stable enough and solid enough. But in the meantime, you get released within the United States, often with an ankle bracelet.

Often people do come back for their hearings, but those hearings take a long time because we have an incredibly overburdened immigration court system that doesn't really function in any kind of timely manner. And so, you know, if you're an American who sees all these people coming across the border and thinks this is this, like, threatening wave of illegal immigration, you see people coming and getting released and counting on asylum law to give them this pause in enforcement. That does allow them often to resettle temporarily or for a longer time in the United States, because you can kind of melt into the shadows once your asylum claim is denied, which also often happens. So that's the tension here. When Biden closed the border.

What he's saying is you no longer get to present your asylum claims if you come in illegally, although, as you said, David, he is leaving these other routes open if you go through the app that they've set up or other legal avenues. There's just a kind of real politic tension between this grand promise the world has made and the reality of how many people want to migrate from poorer countries to wealthier countries all over the world. And we've never come up with a kind of real system for allowing them to do that or really reckoned with what that means. And it's becoming worldwide just this enormously tense contested political issue. Is it that we don't.

John Dickerson
Haven't come up with a system or we failed to enforce the actual system? Because presumably if you didn't allow people to come through illegally and said, just come through the ports of entry using the system we have set up, that would be following the system. It's just they've, we've been overwhelmed and not put enough money towards those interdictions in the illegal spots, haven't given, made enough judges. The backlog is 3.6 million people who've made asylum requests that are still being backlogged. I mean, there is a system, it just hasn't been funded or respected.

Emily Bazelon
What I meant is internationally, like, we don't have a way of, you know, deciding, okay, in this year, for example, because of the war in Syria, there are, say, 6 million people trying to leave Syria. Where are they all going to go? Let's think about a way to apportion them, you know, rationally and fairly around the world. What happened in that instance was almost everybody ended up in Turkey, another relatively poor country. Right.

And then we sort of rely on, like, we just. That's what I meant. There isn't a worldwide system. And then the system in the United States. Yes, absolutely.

Has been entirely overwhelmed by the numbers. And we, because of the sclerosis in Congress you were talking about, we don't have. We have not had a legislative answer to this. That the evidence to me that asylum is pretextual is that almost none of the people seeking asylum are seeking it from Mexico. They are from other countries, and it means they have crossed through at least one other country, Mexico, to get to the United States.

David Plotz
And if the issue is like, I'm trying to flee a danger in my home, then shouldn't it be the case that you should have to make an asylum claim in Mexico if that whatever the first country that you can credibly make that asylum claim is, and it's clearly that the US is this economic magnet and an opportunity magnet because we have economic growth. And that's great. But it does seem to me like the fact that most people are not making asylum claims in Mexico and instead are just like, I'm going to get to the US and then I'll do it, indicates that this is a flaw in the system and we need a cogent policy with lots of legal immigration. We want lots and lots of legal immigration. I want lots and lots of legal immigration.

But to do that, you do need a much stricter, more vigorous, coherent effort to prevent people from coming in without authorization. Because when you have lots of people coming in without authorization, just lose public trust, you end up with huge communities in the shadows. You end up with what we have in this country, which is this incredibly partisan sense about what immigration is and how damaging it is. And it's agonizing that we're risking legal immigration because so much illegal or gray immigration is happening for reasons of underfunding, mistaken policy choices. I think this is the very least that Biden needs to do to constrain what's happening with this vast migration of people claiming asylum.

John Dickerson
Much of the strength of America's post pandemic, or a pretty good portion of the growth has been the result of the migrants who've come across, who've come into America. They seek opportunity and they're finding it. One other thing I would throw in is that eight Tajiks who came across the border were arrested this week with ties to ISIS in three different cities, which maybe didn't get that much attention, but will, because that makes this not just a labor and economy story, but, but certainly one of the biggest claims from the president's opponents is that the borders are allowing people who are a danger to Americans into the country. Do you guys understand, maybe one of you has read up on this way that I haven't. If you're somebody from Venezuela or Haiti or another country which is really chaotic, distressed, and with which the US doesn't have normal relationships, and you are caught up in this and you are one of these people who make, try to make an asylum claim, and the US now says, no, you can't make it, what happens?

David Plotz
Does Mexico just take, it's like now it's Mexico's problem. There are some countries that Biden exempted from this order because the countries won't easily take them back. And so that includes Haitians and Nicaraguans and Cubans and Venezuelans and Colombians. So that's one answer to your question, David. He also exempted unaccompanied kids and victims of trafficking.

Emily Bazelon
And one thing about the unaccompanied kids is, of course, then that creates an incentive to have more kids cross the border on their own. There are all these, like, really upsetting, just incentives that get created even though you're making the exceptions for what are really good humanitarian reasons. Somebody was making the point that obviously, if Trump is elected, a policy like this, or much even more strict will continue. And that's certainly weird. Expect that.

David Plotz
But I think what's to me so upsetting about the Trump potential policy is that it's also going to implicate all kinds of legal immigration and a huge effort to curtail channels of legal immigration into this country. And that, to me, is just bad news in all respects. I don't know. This is such a depressing topic. And it's also depressing how potent it is for Republicans politically.

John Dickerson
Well, and it's depressing because it's complicated. And there's human suffering and mass scale. Sorry, you probably say that. And there's humans suffering at a mass scale, which is this gets, gets to the heart of what are your values as a country? And that's not even really a part of the conversation.

Even if you were to have the conversation say it's a suffering in a mass scale, but we lack the resources to do this because we have to make priorities or whatever, it's just not a part of the conversation. One, two other things I would add is that a majority, six in ten voters in the most recent CB's poll said they supported mass deportation. So that's even, that's not just what do you do with what's happening at the southern border right now. That's what do you do with the migrants and the undocumented immigrants in the country right now. And then we should also add that Biden this week suggested giving green card status to the undocumented spouses of us citizens, which is a way for him to try to balance this new migration policy.

But it's also him having to do it on his own and not through Congress, which is not the way to do it. I mean, we just could do so much better if we had rational, bipartisan legislation on this, we could have much more legal immigration. We could then justify a more crackdown approach at the border because we were providing more orderly paths to get in, and we could recognize the incredible benefits that immigrants do bring to this country. Yeah. Although I would not say that we're certainly not unique in handling these things badly.

David Plotz
I mean, look at, you have other governments which are, for the most part, more functional than ours. You have the British pursuing this plan, which is not going to be carried out to deport immigrants to Rwanda. In southern Europe, you have all these boats where people are dying by the score, by the hundreds because boats are being turned away. You have european policies which are forcing migrants who are in Africa literally into the desert with no water and no shelter. Amazing.

And it's so Australia putting people on random islands. So we are certainly not unique in handling this poorly. The world is handling it poorly. Do you want to hear more from us after this episode? No response.

John Dickerson
Desperately. Maybe today. Okay, well, then stick around. For our bonus segment today, we're going to be talking about the conviction of Hunter Biden and what that could mean for the presidential campaign. But that segment is just for Slate plus members.

David Plotz
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Whenever there is a european issue that confounds or delights us, the gabfest calls on Anne to make sense of it. The European cup does start today. That's not we're going to talk about, although that is the european, the confounding european issue that is most fascinating for me. But there is no greater european mystery for me, for most Americans probably, than the european parliament. It seems to have a ludicrous number of members, a set of opaque responsibilities, elections on some kind of cycle that I don't understand, and weird results.

And this week, parliamentary elections made big headlines in the US, which is unusual because they superficially, and Ann is going to explain why. Superficially it was superficial. They seem to indicate further gains by the far right, especially in Germany and France. So, Anne, I think you're here to tell us that there's been a big misreading or big sort of misdirection about what these elections seem to signal. Yes.

Anne Applebaum
Well, first of all, you started with the correct point, which is that most people don't understand it in the anglo american, english speaking world. Actually, the european parliament does have some important responsibilities. It is because of the European Parliament that Apple was forced to have us be, whatever it's called, ports, because the European Parliament insisted on it. And because Europe is a big enough market, it made apple do it. So if you want something to be grateful to the European Parliament for, it's that it is big.

There are representations from all the countries, but when they have european elections, these aren't national elections, so they don't. You're not voting for your own government, you're voting for the European Parliament. Sometimes countries combine european parliamentary votes with local elections or national elections. Sometimes they don't. And sometimes they do affect national politics, which actually, this time they did, but indirectly.

And each country has several parties. And there's center left, center right, far left, far right, conservative, green, liberal parties in every country. Almost all of them have multi party systems. And so figuring it out is quite complicated. And of course, the british and american press always looks for one headline to explain this whole very complicated, messy thing.

And this time the one headline was the far right one, and America better watch out. And it is true that in one very, very important country, the results of the far right were really important. And this was France. And the Marine Le Pens rally has had different names over different times. It's a far right party that goes back actually many decades, won about a third of the vote, which in these elections counts as a lot.

And it meant that her party was the largest party in the polling. And because of that, the french president, Emmanuel Macron announced snap elections. And the reason why he did that was because very often in european elections, because they're not usually connected to your national parliament, people tend to, they vote in protest. You know, they vote against the current government or they vote for wacky parties who they wouldn't normally vote for. They don't vote in the same way that they voted national elections.

And so he's guessing that people won't vote for Le Pen's party in a national election if it's going to affect their government. One further complicated caveat is that even if Le Pen wins and she repeats her result with 30%, she still won't really be running the country, because Macron has three years left. And in France, the french president gets to determine french foreign policy and lots of other things. And so it'll be very messy and complicated, but it won't probably mean anything in terms of international politics or France's support for Ukraine, at least not right away. So some of the kind of hysterical headlines, I think, were wrong.

In Germany, the far right also did well, although less well than expected. And in fact, the really big winner in Germany was the center right. This is the Christian Democrat party, who probably will be the next government at the time of the next election. And they are even more pro Ukraine and even more anti russian than the current one. So it didn't look to me like we were seeing some kind of earthquake or catastrophic change.

Meanwhile, if you really, really want to go down in the weeds in Poland, the center right ruling party did very well and won. And the far right former ruling party came second for the first time in ten years in several countries, the center left did better than they had done before. And that includes in France and Italy. It includes in Slovakia. In a number of countries, the far right did badly or underperformed Scandinavia, Spain.

So it's actually kind of a mixed picture. And the European Parliament itself doesn't look that different from how it did last time around. It's true there are more seats for the far right, but also the largest party is the center right, and they've been the largest party for a long time. And that's the party that has the german Christian Democrats and the polish ruling party and lots of other parties. Can we.

Emily Bazelon
Can I ask a question just about France, since it's all my small brain can contain right now? So one thing that occurred to me when I was reading about Macron calling these snap elections is whether it evokes Brexit in the sense of David Cameron, then the prime minister in Britain, having this kind of impulsive decision to take this huge gamble which he thought he would win, and then he lost. And I realized that Brexit is a gamble of another whole kind and bigger than any decision about who is in power immediately. And also that Le Pen would not be the president of France even if she won this election. And yet I still just wonder if Macron's doing something in a kind of impulsive moment which will end up setting France or being part of setting France on a course that is not actually good for him or necessarily good for France.

Anne Applebaum
It's definitely possible the stakes are a little bit lower in the sense that Le Pen is no longer anti european. So she's not calling for France to leave the European Union and she's not calling for France to leave NATO. So one of the other interesting things about these elections, and actually this is something that's been happening over the last few years, is that several of parties that were far right or are far right and have been very radical in the past have toned down their language and their policies in order to win. And we already saw that happen in Italy. That's.

But Le Pen has been trying to present herself as a kind of nice grandmother, you know, who just wants the best for all french people and not as some kind of radical who's going to upset the system. Even letting her in won't mean that, you know, France is. There's some huge revolution in France. I mean, she could win. In which case, if she repeats her result, her party will have 30% of the french parliament and might, will therefore have to be part of whatever governing coalition there is.

But again, then they'll be living in France. They call it cohabitation. So then she'll be living in cohabitation with Macron, who can do lots of things to undermine them and make their lives miserable. So the stakes are a little bit lower. Like, even if he gambles wrong and she wins, it doesn't mean an immediate, massive change.

John Dickerson
And can you, to the extent it's possible, help us define what far right really means? You already touched on Ukraine a little bit with respect to the economy, immigration and Ukraine. And then I'll just add a second question, which is if it's now possibly going to be a little bit more of a muddle in Germany, a little bit more of a muddle in France in terms of power sharing or just messy time spent dealing with a more complicated coalition, could that affect the big question, which is Ukraine? Does it get, does it complicate Ukraine? So with the far right.

Anne Applebaum
First of all, that's also complicated because it's a little bit different in each country because the far right, by definition, are nationalists. And so they emerge from whatever national, or in some cases fascist tradition their country has. And so that makes them all a bit different. But just to be very vague, I mean, roughly, they have historically been against the European Union. They've been against NATO.

They've been anti american. Some of them have been racist, some of them very racist. They've been historically anti immigration. Some of them have been also, you know, I mean, actually even anti capitalist in a kind of statist way. You know, we don't want these global companies in our country.

We want to shut our borders. We want only, you know, Germany for the Germans or France for the French. And the, you know, and they all come from their own. True. So the French far right does have, through a somewhat convoluted chain, does link back to Vichy.

I mean, it was the people who were mad at the end of the war that Vichy lost. Okay? That was their origins. The Italian far right links back to Mussolini, and this was Mussolini's party, developed into the party that is now Georgia Maloney's party. So they do have those historical links.

In recent years, they've usually tried to distance themselves. I mean, somewhat like european communist parties eventually tried to distance themselves from Stalin, but they, but they have a. They're historically nationalist, anti foreign, anti internationalist, anti globalist, whatever. Globalist is a new word invented in America. They didn't used to use that.

Recently it's become more muddled because quite a few mainstream parties, especially center right parties, are also more anti immigration than they used to be. And also because many far right leaders have tried to tone down their rhetoric or their language in order to get elected. And in particular, after the Brexit vote, which most Europeans perceive as having been a disaster for the United Kingdom, they all stopped being any. They stopped talking about leaving the EU because that was very unpopular almost everywhere. So you're right to detect that there's a little bit.

It's more muddled than it used to be. And they used to be very. I mean, Germany didn't used to have a far right party. Spain didn't have a far right party, and the French one was very, mostly very small historically. So they've changed and evolved a bit in the last, I would say even five years, but certainly the last ten years.

So that's one question. In terms of Ukraine and kind of big geopolitics, I don't think it affects anything right now, it's true that historically, Le Pen has been pro Putin and she took money from Putin. I mean, the German far right, as far as I can see, is an invention of Putin. I mean, it's pushed very hard by russian and russian linked propagandists. Several of its leaders have had financial links to Russia.

The same has been true on the Dutch far right, although not so much with the current party that's doing well. Almost all the far right parties have had some, you know, particularly the older ones, some links to Russia. Most of them have backed away from that recently and have started, you know, they don't openly praise Putin anymore.

But it's true that, I don't know, should Trump win our election, should the war start to go badly? These aren't the people who would be Ukraine's most solid friends, if I can put it that way. And actually, and I do think that the result of the us election will push some of those leaders and some of those parties in a different direction depending on what decision he takes. And since we don't really know what he's going to do, and he probably himself doesn't know, it's very hard to. Predict, actually, Anta, just to follow up on that.

David Plotz
I mean, one of the points I think you make is that in a way, the far right is much more dangerous in the United States where there is no far right party, because there's only one. There's only one party that the right ignorance. No, no, I mean, so the rhetoric that Trump uses, the language he uses, the language his followers use, this whole, you know, the violent harassment of people, I don't know, election workers who are perceived to have not gone along with the 2020 election lie. January 6, a violent assault on the Capitol, an attempt to block election results. Right now in Europe, there aren't any far right leaders who are as extreme as that.

Anne Applebaum
So Trump is well, to the right. I mean, he's a much more extreme figure. His followers are more extreme. They use more extreme language. They use more violence than right now.

Anybody in Europe, I'm not saying Europe couldn't go that way someday. And, you know, it, were le pen ever to become president of France, it's very possible you would see an assault on institutions and an attempt to undermine democracy in the way that you will see if Trump wins in the US. And actually, one other thing I should say about the far right is the other objection to them historically is they were very often pretty clearly anti democratic. So it wasn't just that they were, you know, they were anti immigration. Their language was against the post war democracies.

It was, it was anti liberal, anti democratic language, which they've all toned down. But Trump has not toned that down. I mean, he's still talking about revenge on his enemies and using the Justice Department to go after people he doesn't like. And, you know, so, so the language that Trump uses about the state and about destroying the state or undermining the state, most european far right parties now stay away from. And applebaum with the Atlantic, thank you so much.

David Plotz
We'll be back when there's some other opaque european issue or less opaque, too. Thanks, Anne. Thank you. We'll be right back after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Z biotics.

E
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It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day, Zbiotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make zbiotics your first drink of the night.

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We wont give up and we wont back down. Help ensure the next generation can decide their own futures. Donate to Planned Parenthood. Visit plannedparenthood.org future just three weeks before. It was going to take effect, the pioneering enormous congestion pricing plan for Manhattan was indefinitely delayed by New York governor Kathy Hochul.

David Plotz
Under the plan, cars would have been charged dollar 15 to enter Manhattan below 60th street at most hours of the day, trucks even more, all administered and enforced by an enormous apparatus, half a billion dollar apparatus of cameras and computers. The congestion pricing plan was modeled on similar efforts in London and Stockholm and other cities. And it would likely have significantly reduced traffic in Manhattan, where the average car travels at 7 miles an hour, which is incredible. And it would have generated a billion dollars a year that would have gone directly to the public transit agency for hugely needed improvements to that, both at the sort of safety level and at the rider experience level. So, John, you were an actual Manhattanite.

Why did Hochul do this? What are the actual reasons and the stated reasons? I mean, the stated reason, she said, is that New York recovery from the pandemic is too fragile. Rents in the portion of Manhattan that would be protected by congestion pricing are really under a lot of pressure. People aren't coming back to the buildings.

John Dickerson
And so in that particular area, it's more fragile. And so she worried that this would be a chilling on those people coming from out of town who might go to those areas to work or go to restaurants. She talked a lot about diners, which a lot of New Yorkers and those writing about it were like, you know, people don't go driving to diners the way you seem to claim that they do. You know, so people were like, it's not even really working. But the more, I think the more powerful argument is that it's both.

It's, it does not pull well even on Manhattan, and it pulls even worse in the surrounding suburbs. And if you look at the battleground congressional districts in New York, almost all of them, depending on what you count as a battleground. But the first, 3rd, 4th, 17th, 18th, 19th are all arguably affected. Those are either on Long island or counties near New York would all be affected by this. The 22nd is also battleground, but that's up near Syracuse.

So Hochul and New York Democrats were criticized for botching the redistricting of the state and basically giving power to the Republicans. This pisses off suburban voters and they punish Democrats, and that causes them not to be able to win back these seats or to, or to hold battleground areas. It could, you know, I'm going a little far here, but it could determine who controls the House of Representatives. So I think that's, you know, certainly in play here as well. The most charitable possible explanation is she isn't really killing it.

David Plotz
She's just killing it until November 10 and then it comes back around. That's, that's a charitable explanation. I just find this so frustrating. They put up all the cameras. It's all ready to go.

Emily Bazelon
You just have to flick the switch. The subway system in New York is in terrible shape. Was promised a billion dollars a year in revenue from this plan. Hochul has no idea about how to replace that that is viable. The New York legislature ended its session without doing anything about it.

I mean, yeah, it's possible she's just putting this off for several months and maybe that promised political gain for the Democrats will pay off and everyone will congratulate themselves, but it just feels like a big bet to take that it's going to matter that much and just total betrayal of what the Democrats have been promising to do forever in New York. And the thing about the public opinion polls and how congestion pricing isn't popular, when you look at the other cities like London and Stockholm that David mentioned, of course, people start off with that idea because everybody resists change always. And people don't even really understand what it is. And whoever named it congestion pricing, that is like a terrible label. However, once it's in place and people see less traffic, it actually rises in popularity.

And when you look at the incomes of the people who are affected, those people who really are driving in a lot of, a lot of times to central and southern Manhattan, it's almost all really affluent people. So this is also just blocking a form of economic redistribution that New York promised to do. And then the benefits in terms of, you know, reducing pollution, et cetera, they go to everybody. So it's just so disappointing that, you know, like, why? What is the point of electing local and state democrats if they can't follow through with a plan like this?

David Plotz
It is so difficult to make mega investments in infrastructure. And they'd already done the work they had already. It took them decades to get this through the legislature. Past governors, they'd install the cameras. And now all to waste infrastructure.

The start of infrastructure is always costly and inconvenient. No one wants the construction. No one wants them to building the damn subway and all the noise. But it's like you have to do that kind of early suffering. You have to endure that and endure the kind of inconvenience to businesses and inconveniences to people so that you can reap these benefits.

And like, will congestion pricing would, it discourages some businesses from locating in Manhattan, some people from coming to work in Manhattan, probably a teeny little bit. But you know what? You know what? Cities that are easy to move around in, cities that have nice public transit that people like to take, city that have breathable air, cities that don't feel like one big traffic jam. Those are cities people like to visit, cities that people like to live in, cities that people like to work in.

And the evidence from London and Stockholm and London is one I've experienced personally. It is a much nicer city. Central London is much nicer to be around. You can move around so much more easily than you could before. You also generate all this revenue without having to directly tax people and put that revenue towards so abused, so decaying infrastructure that needs a huge helping hand in order for New York to survive.

If you want to see New York die, you want to see New York have mega problems. Let the subway system get much worse than it is. That's when New York will be completely and utterly fucked. And this is just, it's just so incredibly stupid and short sighted. And I astonished by it.

And it probably came from Biden, White House pressure because they don't want to lose the house. I don't have the answer to this question, but is it totally for cocaed if they just wait five months? No, it's probably okay. I mean, they've got the infrastructure. I mean, they probably have to.

John Dickerson
That's the strategy. Put umbrellas over the. If they come back in several months. We promise to at least notice the strategy. Exactly.

David Plotz
It's a strategy. It's a tragedy with a strategy. I mean, if that's the strategy, though, and they hold that and they take back the House and Trump wins, I think you'll be happy. I will not be happy if Trump wins.

And we need a congestion pricing experiment in the United States. Do you guys know that John Kenneth Galbraith phrased private opulence and public squalor? That that's what the United States is, this country of private opulence and public squalor, that's what Manhattan's becoming. Manhattan has all this incredible private wealth. These enormous skyscrapers, these needle skyscrapers that are owned by, I guess, no longer russian Kazillionaires, but Kazillionaires.

Private equity assholes. But the public streets are squalid. And one reason why the public streets are squalid and the subways are squalid is because there's not been the investment and because there's this endless, horrid array of traffic through the city. It's such a clear thing, clear way to improve the city. For the long term.

And Michael Bloomberg, if Michael Bloomberg were mayor, this would have gone through. Didn't he try and get it to go through and it failed? Yeah. Yeah. He would not have allowed this to get derailed this way and that.

John Dickerson
We should note this is all being fought out in the courts. So maybe Hokul will lose her, although by the time, it's probably won't get adjudicated by the time they have the election. So do you guys remember when Chris Christie canceled the $12 billion tunnel between New York and New Jersey? There would have been this enormous economic boost. It's finally back on the books.

David Plotz
It's finally going through the Hudson tunnel, but now it costs like 50% more. And it's a decade late. So all of this, it's still going to happen. But the city and the state, New Jersey and New York could have been reaping the benefits from it now, but instead, they're not. Let us go to cocktail chatter when you're viewing the public squalor of your home city and having a drink to allay your despair about it.

Emily, what will you be chattering about? I am really interested in a story this week from South Florida. A jury in Florida found Chiquita, Chiquita banana, as many of us know it. Chiquita brands, it's called. They sell a lot of bananas.

Emily Bazelon
The jury found them liable for eight killings committed by a paramilitary group in Colombia during the long, basically civil war in Colombia. And so the allegations here are basically that Chiquita bankrolled this right wing paramilitary group in Colombia. This is between the years 1997 and 2004 that was murdering people. And now the company has to pay more than $38 million to 16 family members of the people who are killed. This is a really unusual kind of jury verdict.

First of all, because it's holding a corporation liable for murders that can be traced to these payoffs it was making, and Chiquita admitted to making millions of dollars in payoffs in previous legal action. And then also because it's a jury verdict in the United States about something that happened abroad, it took decades for this result to be reached. And it'll be really interesting to see if there are other kinds of cases like this where people are able to seek justice in the american courts for this kind of wrongdoing. And then, obviously, what matters, in addition to justice for the families, is this question of deterrence. Like, does this check companies that think of making these kinds of payoffs?

Will they think about this kind of liability? And will that deter them from doing these things in the future. Is it a final disposition or is just the jury verdict? So there'll still be a raise of appeal? It's just the jury verdict, and Chiquita will absolutely appeal.

But, yeah, but there, this has been winding for the courts for so long, they dealt with a lot of the preliminary issues. Anyway, interesting jury verdict in South Florida. John, what is your chatter? My chatter has two things, a recommendation and then some amusing poll numbers. The first is a recommendation for Asher Perlman's book of cartoons called, well, this is me.

John Dickerson
He's a cartoonist for the New Yorker. My favorite cartoonist for the New Yorker. He also writes for Stephen Colbert's show. Anyway, it's such a delight. I have this book, and just dipping into one of them, it refreshes the day.

So I recommend that to everybody. The other is a poll that was done by Yougov about people's behavior on planes. And as the good people at morning brew put it, airplanes are where all the unwritten social rules get litigated. It feels like maybe the most, um, of any other public space. And here's some findings, and people can decide whether they comport with their own values.

Letting your kids play in the aisle, is that appropriate, do either of you think, on a plane? Uh, for how long? A long flight? Yeah, I think so. A little bit.

86% of the poll respondents said it was unacceptable. Uh, what about to get drunk on the plane? Uh, yeah. I mean, unacceptable. I think that's.

Emily Bazelon
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends how you behave. If you're just, like, quietly drunk in your seat, I don't care if you're raucously drunk, then, no, not. Okay. If you want to talk to me over and over again, bad. All right, now we've got.

John Dickerson
Now we're going to get to the more important questions. Armrest. Is it unacceptable to use both armrests when someone is sitting next to you? Yes. 75% said yes.

Is it acceptable to wake up a seat mate to go to the bathroom? Yes. Yes. Okay. You guys are in keeping.

Emily Bazelon
I mean, you have to really have to pee. Yeah. You can't just pee. You can't do it lightly. All right, so this is the final.

John Dickerson
This is the final one. What about taking off your shoes? I think it's. Yeah.

Emily Bazelon
See, this is the line between me and John Dickerson. Yeah. The bear. Do you ever take your shoes off on the plane? I mean, I leave my socks on.

David Plotz
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I sometimes do, but that's. Why they provide you with socks, like. When you're on why do you care?

John Dickerson
Oh, well, because I think it, probably not everybody who removes their shoes have the most pleasant smelling feet. Have you ever really had a foot odor problem on the plane? Of all the things that happened to me on planes, that is not a. Thing I ever worked for. Yeah, I'm with Emily.

Remember, I used to spend a lot of time on the road, so maybe I have a. That's true. I think shoes are a health issue. Like when you, you need your feet to, your feet expand and shoes become super uncomfortable. Well, that's an excellent point.

Also, you're supposed to walk up and down the plane to keep from having thrombosis. So what are you going to do? Walk in your crunchy shoes? Excellent point. Can I name the one bit of airplane etiquette that drives me bananas, which is there is this now this trend.

David Plotz
This trend.

John Dickerson
Finally. It took a while. That was good. Yeah. Where you land and people who are like in row 36 race up to get to row 26 before other people can get out of the.

David Plotz
And it's like, dude, just wait. It's ridiculous. I mean, if the flight is late and your connection, that's one thing. And they usually tell you, please let these people go first. That's one thing.

But if people are just trying to inch by you, there's an etiquette everywhere. You let the row in front of you empty out. That's how it works. My chatter also double chatter. Not nearly as entertaining.

First of all, some super log rolling if you are in the Nashville DMV. Nashville. Not the Nashville DMV. Wait. Yes.

Emily Bazelon
Keep that going. If you're in the Nashville DMV. No, if you're in the Nashville metro area, podcast the Nashville metro area. We in the district call our metro area the DMV. If you're in the Nashville metro area or you're in the Austin metro area, there is now a daily podcast and a daily newsletter for you about your city.

David Plotz
So we have hey, Nashville is a daily newsletter and Citycast Nashville is a daily podcast and hey, Austin and Citycast Austin are a daily newsletter and podcast in that city. We launched this week. They're great. We launched on Tuesday with interviews with the mayor of Austin in Austin and the mayor of Nashville and Nashville. And we'll be with you every day.

So please, please check them out. Hey, Nashville. Hey, Austin. Citycast Nashville. Citycast Austin.

My other chatter is this is probably the only book thats ever been double chattered on the gabfest because Im sure that Emily has chattered it before, which is im listening to open the Andre Agassi memoir from 2009 and its incredible. Im not unlike you guys. Im not a tennis player, not even a tennis fan. I don't really have that much interest in Agassi. It's just an amazing book about an incredible life and how terrible can a father be like, is it possible to have a romance with Barbra Streisand when you're 23 and she's 51?

It is. Can you dump Barbra Streisand for Brooke Shields? You can. Can you talk about your hair piece for literally chapters at a time? You can.

Emily Bazelon
And that's the best part of the book because it flies off in the middle of a big tournament. It doesn't quite, it almost does. It almost does. You know, his hatred of Michael Chang and Jim Currier, it just comes through. It's just a wonderful, vivid book.

David Plotz
His ghost writer was Jr. Moringer, who also wrote the Prince Harry memoir Spare or helped write, I should say, anyway, open by Andre Agassi. It's incredible. Would you not agree, Emily? It's a totally fabulous book and I'm always really excited when non tennis fans discover it.

Roger Federer is one of the men, I know several men who he is their male icon. He's like the person they want to be in the world. Can I say a Roger Federer tennis thing? He said that he won something like 85% of his matches, but only 54% of the points, which is so helpful for me in understanding why tennis is such a frustrating sport to play and why I remain like capable of mental breakdown every time I play tennis. Yeah.

John Dickerson
Yeah. That would just, that's an amazing statistic. It's insane. I mean, I guess if you thought of like how many times you miss a basket in basketball or like miss a pass in soccer, maybe it's similar, maybe. But I mean, it is just the sport in which you play.

David Plotz
It's different. It's different. It's difficult. No, because it means your opponent won 46, his opponents won 46% of the points and only 15% of the matches. Right.

John Dickerson
That's a really interesting point because, so Michael Jordan has this famous quote saying, I've missed more than 9000 shots. I've lost almost 300 games, 26 times. I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. And he said, you know, he says, I failed over and over again in my life and that's why I succeed. Which is a wonderful version of the same thing that Federer was pointing out when he said that, you know, you basically, you fail.

That's how you learn to succeed and also, like, let it go past you. But as you pointed out, David, when Jordan misses, well, I guess on the other hand, I mean, when Federer loses a point, it's to another person. Like, it's right there in front of you. And that's, that's a different mental dynamic. It's a, well, it's, it's a, it's a zero sum game.

David Plotz
Like in a basketball, you miss a shot, the other team doesn't get a point. Like other things can happen. Whereas you miss a shot in tennis, the other guy gets a point. So only one person can get that point. And it's incredible that with 54%, he gets 85% right.

Emily Bazelon
And what that means is he's winning almost all the big points. And that is the difference between champions and the rest of us, mere mortal, often losers. Listeners, top that set of chatters. We hit everything we had. Lots of good listener chatters.

David Plotz
Please keep them coming. Please email them to us@gabfestflight.com. and this week's listener chatter comes to us from Jason Anderson. Hi, Gabfest. My listener chatter is about the Museum of Science and Industry, a gem in Chicago and the only remaining building from the fabled white city built for the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

G
The museum has recently been renamed the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry after Ken Griffin. Griffin donated $125 million to the museum in 2019, but a few years later, he moved himself and his company out of Chicago and into Florida. Still, he got the naming rights. I encourage you to check out a column by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun Times, where Neil reminds us that the museum began with a donation from Sears executive Julius Rosenwald, who deliberately did not put his name on the museum because he believed that anonymous giving is the highest form of charity. The column hearkens us back to a time when a person's honor was earned and not bought.

David Plotz
That's our show for today. The gabfest is produced by Shayna Roth. Our researcher is Julie Hugin. It soldiered through, soldiered through despite illness, came through always. Nice job, Julie.

Our theme music is by they might be giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast ops. Alicia Montgomery is the vp of audio for Slate. For Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson, I'm David Plotz. Thanks for listening.

We will talk to you next week. We're actually going to be together. We're going to tape together next week. Remember that? So it'll be a special episode.

You may have seen Hunter Biden, President Biden's son, was convicted of three felony counts. Two of those accounts were for lying on a gun application, and one of the accounts was for illegally owning a gun for eleven days. It was in a locked box in his trunk and never uploaded and never used. These counts carry up to 25 years in prison. But he hasn't been sentenced yet.

And so we don't know what, what possible sentence he will face. But it is astonishing that each of those counts as up to 20 plus years in prison. Astonishing. We talked about the trial and the case itself last week. Now that Hunter Biden has been convicted, I think the question comes up is, will this have an impact on the presidential election?

Obviously, it has an impact on Hunter Biden and his family and his children and on President Biden. It will have a enormous, no doubt, emotional impact on them. But let's discuss the political impact. Jon, what are the possible ways this plays out, if at all? I think, you know, who knows in this race, everything's so locked up.

John Dickerson
Although I do think that, you know, the former President Trump being referred to as a felon all along, I still do think that has a chance to matter in the race. But in this case, Hunter Biden isn't running for president. It's a story, it's a family story that I bet a lot of people can associate themselves with if they've had addiction struggles in their family. And as JV last wrote in the bulwark, at every turn, Biden and his administration and his family have behaved in keeping with the norms that we usually expect and associate with the president, which includes letting a prosecutor from Trump's Justice Department continue on in the case, giving that David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware independent counsel status, not interfering with the case, not bellyaching about the judge who was a Trump appointed judge who unwound the plea deal. Basically at every turn where you would have expected, were former President Trump involved in this?

All kinds of madness. Biden did none of it. When the, when the, when the verdict came in, he said, I abide by the, you know, ruling and he'll appeal. And basically, and then he went to go visit his son on the tarmac like he did all of the things that you would expect a president to do and he'll get, you know, that. Was just a snippet from our Slate plus conversation.

David Plotz
If you want to hear the whole conversation, go to slate.com gabfestplus to become a member. Today, it's opinion Palooza season. Here at Slate. I'm Dalia Lithwick, the host of Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and law and the Supreme Court. As this Supreme Court term hurtles towards its close, the justices are handing down decisions that will shape our politics and our lives for years and decades to come.

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My team and I are putting out analysis of the biggest cases just as quickly as we we can, bound to our closets and fire up our laptops to speak to you. From presidential immunity to social media content regulation to domestic abusers gun rights, we will be here unpacking the news for you. Listen to Amicus wherever you get your podcasts I'm Dalia Lithwick, and I'm host of Amicus Slate's podcast about the law and the US Supreme Court. We are shifting into high gear, coming at you weekly with the context you need to understand the rapidly changing legal landscape, the many trials of Donald J. Trump, judicial ethics arguments and opinions.

At SCOTUS, we are tackling the big legal news with clarity and insight every single week. New amicus episodes every Saturday. Wherever you listen.

Biden's Risky Asylum Policy

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