#StopKavanaugh

With the Kavanaugh hearings underway, CAP Action’s Jesse Lee catches us to up on what we know so far; Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, unpacks the new USDA report finding 40 million Americans struggle against hunger, and the latest on the Farm Bill; plus the news of the week. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Despite calls for a delay by Democratic senators, the Senate Judiciary committee began confirmation hearings for Trump’s supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In the first two days, the conservative judge predictably dodged questions on whether he would uphold Roe v. Wade or recuse himself from a potential case involving Donald Trump. To break down everything that’s happened so far and what we can expect in the coming weeks, Rebecca spoke to Jesse Lee, Vice President for Communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and former adviser to President Obama.

Next up, the Kavanaugh hearings aren’t the only news going on. A new report from the US Department of Agriculture released this week showed that 40 million Americans — more than the combined population of West Virginia and California — struggle against hunger. The report was released just minutes before members of the House and Senate went to conference on the so-called Farm Bill, which if House Republicans get their way, would take food assistance away from 2 million Americans. To discuss the new data and give us an update on the farm bill process, Rebecca welcomed back Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, and a veteran of the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Clinton.

This week’s guests:

• Jesse Lee, Vice President for Communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and former adviser to President Obama
• Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America and former senior USDA official under President Clinton

For more on this week’s topics:

• Stay up to date on the Kavanaugh hearings by following CAP Action and Jesse Lee on Twitter
• Read the full USDA report on food insecurity — and learn more about how the Trump administration is trying to politicize and weaken the agency as part of its ongoing quest to downplay poverty in the U.S.
• Find the list of members of Congress currently debating the Farm Bill behind closed doors at HandsoffSNAP.org
• Nerd out on the history of nutrition assistance in the U.S. in Joel’s book, All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America

For more on this week’s ICYMI topics:

• Get up to speed on the GOP’s Tax Scam 2.0 (which is now supposedly going to the floor for a vote this month)
• See the chart on wages vs. corporate profits in the Trump economy (aka the chart Jeremy was awkwardly acting out with his body)
• Learn more about the literal nazi in the Trump administration who helped shape its “public charge” attack on immigrant families
• Check out the New Yorker’s inside account of the prisoners’ strikes
• Learn more about the newly updated Puerto Rico death toll from Hurricane Maria

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week talking Kavanaugh because of course we are, I’m talking with Jesse Lee, the Vice President for communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former Obama administration official, deeply enmeshed with Supreme Court confirmations, lot to cover there. Also looking into a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that found that more people in the United States are struggling with hunger than the populations of California and West Virginia combined. I talk with Joel Berg the CEO of Hunger Free America about the implications of that report, which ironically came out just minutes before the House and Senate went to conference on a Farm Bill that could if House Republicans get their way strip food assistance away from as many as two million Americans so a lot to cover in this first episode back after I was away for so long that I almost forgot how to do this show, so I’m really glad that Jeremy Slevin is here to help.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Welcome back!

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Slevs, that’s your entry point there.

SLEVIN: We’re happy to have you back.

VALLAS: Well Slevs, I wish I could say I were glad to be back but travelling away and not working was great. But here I am and I did miss you, I did.

SLEVIN: I missed you too.

VALLAS: And I kind of missed this banter too.

SLEVIN: Yeah, I missed these sessions.

VALLAS: Is that what we call them?

SLEVIN: Yeah, these sessions. This is my therapy I don’t know what it is for you.

VALLAS: I am going to be for the first time ever a good steward of time because we have a lot —

SLEVIN: Someone’s gotta be.

VALLAS: Well it’s not going to be you.

SLEVIN: I know.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I love the self awareness. We have a lot to talk about that is not to do with Kavanaugh and that is getting almost no attention because that is what everyone is rightly or maybe not really, solely focused on in this moment and it all starts yet again with taxes.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so today —

VALLAS: Seriously though, it’s like I go away from a month and I come back and it’s literally Groundhog Day, I showed up —

SLEVIN: It’s literally Groundhog Day!

VALLAS: It’s literally Groundhog Day.

SLEVIN: It is February 3rd or whatever, is that the day of Groundhog Day?

VALLAS: I don’t know that it is. All I know about Groundhog Day is the Bill Murray movie.

SLEVIN: Which is also a great film.

VALLAS: It’s a great film.

SLEVIN: Yeah they’re passing tax cuts and they’re trying to take away health care, that’s what’s happened in the past month that you’ve been gone.

VALLAS: Yeah.

SLEVIN: So tax scam 2.0 can I delve into it?

VALLAS: I think you should.

SLEVIN: Alright, so today Paul Ryan announced —

VALLAS: And wait, we’re only a minute in and you already gave away the day that we’re taping this is so great Jeremy, the more things change right?

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: I didn’t even mean to!

VALLAS: You never do!

SLEVIN: I’m so used to trying to be timely, well so Paul Ryan [LAUHGTER] announced —

VALLAS: I would just like everyone to know by the way —

SLEVIN: We’re never going to get to the news, so much for being a steward of time.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I was going to tell people that just to give them an indication of your new state of mind is you explained the news that just before we started to tape you were saying to yourself, “wake up, wake up, wake up” and literally slapping yourself on the face, so –

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: Wow. Secret’s out, OK.

VALLAS: But this is me being a good steward of time Jeremy.

SLEVIN: So Paul Ryan today announced that Republicans or the House of Representatives in September will vote on another tax bill. It has been getting no attention but it’s something they’ve been planning for months, they’ve been kind of wishy-washy on whether they would actually do it. And this comes as they virtually stopped talking about their supposed really popular tax bill on the campaign trail because it’s political kryptonite for them but as the reporting has shown, donors are demanding a new round of tax cuts, essentially making the tax cuts for the wealthy individuals permanent. So that’s currently the plan in September. No one thinks that this is actually going to make it through before the midterms so that makes the midterms all the more important for making sure this doesn’t get through after the midterms but they’re back at it.

VALLAS: Well let’s break this down and process it for a second. Because it’s actually, we’ve reached the point where Republicans are a parody of themselves and I thought we were there, I didn’t realize there was farther we could go, but if there was farther for us to go we’re there now. We’re sort of back at where the sinkhole formed on the White House lawn. That’s kind of how this feels.

SLEVIN: Which we did a great segment on.

VALLAS: We did, didn’t we?

SLEVIN: Plug our show.

VALLAS: Sinkhole, we said great, a great session as you would call it Jeremy. [LAUGHTER] So but we’ve got $1.9 trillion currently being added to the deficit over the next decade because of the what now will be called tax scam 1.0, it’s like back when World War I wasn’t World War I.

SLEVIN: It was just the Great War.

VALLAS: The Great War.

SLEVIN: Or like “Back to the Future” before “Back to the Future 2” was just “Back to the Future”?

VALLAS: Right, yeah, um, yeah. [LAUGHTER]. So it’s like that, it’s like all those things but so it’s no longer just the tax scam now, it has to be tax scam 1.0 because now there’s tax scam 2.0, which on top of the $1.9 trillion that Republicans singlehandedly have added to the deficit to help finance millionaires second yachts, they’re coming back for not just another bite at the apple but we’re learning this week from the Joint Committee on Taxation who has now taken a look at Paul Ryan’s proposals, they’re looking to add another $627 billion to the deficit over the next ten years with this next round so we’re not even talking about little bits of extra tax cuts. This is huge.

SLEVIN: Right, and it’s all being led by Paul Ryan, still as we speak, as he’s trying to pass another tax cut that costs $600 billion we’re getting fawning articles talking about how Paul Ryan, he still brands himself as a serious debt savior. Like read anything this guy stands for! He only wants to give rich people more tax cuts! It’s the only thing he stands for aside from taking away people’s Medicaid and Medicare.

VALLAS: But Jeremy, I thought that cutting taxes for really rich people helped make wages for everybody else go up, right? Isn’t that a big part of why we’re doing this?

SLEVIN: Oo, funny you should say that.

VALLAS: I almost totally deadpanned that by the way, I don’t know how I managed to keep a straight face.

SLEVIN: Almost doesn’t count. [LAUGHTER] Well we actually have great data on this —

VALLAS: Funny you should ask is basically what you’re saying.

SLEVIN: We got the year-to-year wage report on how wages have done over the past year. It turns out wages are, real wages meaning adjusting for inflation, real wages are actually down. And real wages rarely are down, they’ve been pretty flat for the past 30 years. But since the tax scam went into effect technically this data starts in the summer.

VALLAS: Well, tax scam 1.0, let’s be clear.

SLEVIN: Wages have gone down and there’s been no evidence that they have helped wages or workers in the meantime, we’re expected to get a trillion dollars in stock buy-backs for company executives and shareholders and corporate profits are through the roof. If you want any better illustration of the fact that trickle down economics is a giant scam, CAP Action put this in a chart. They have corporate profits, which have sky rocketed and wages, which have flat lined and even declined. And that is the effect in one chart of the Trump tax scam.

VALLAS: And Jeremy, one of the many reasons that I adore you is that you do the same thing I do when you’re describing a chart, [LAUGHTER] which is to contort your body into all kinds of weird ways —

SLEVIN: I’m the chart! It’s like the YMCA but it’s just two line graphs for my arms.

VALLAS: Makes sense to me because I do it.

SLEVIN: It’s actually great to talk about on radio because no one can see.

VALLAS: If you could see this, Jeremy has one arm twisting into the ceiling and that’s corporate profits.

SLEVIN: That’s corporate profits.

VALLAS: And then he’s got the other arm tilting a little flatly downward, kind of down to the radio table, and Will’s getting this all on photo so that we can shame Jeremy with this picture. Unfortunately you’re not wearing a fur coat today, that was another day but we’ll work on that, we’ll find another one. But anyway, point being that graph of corporate profits sky rocketing, workers wages actually falling, that is basically all you need to know whenever anyone, Trump or otherwise or Paul Ryan debt savior that he is or pretends to be, tells you that trickle down economics is why we need to throw away literally good money after bad through tax scam 2.0

SLEVIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: I’ve stunned you into silence, that doesn’t happen.

SLEVIN: I was just wondering if we’re done with tax scam 2.0 because I could keep talking about this for an hour. we have so much more.

VALLAS: I think we are, I think we have to move on because the next piece of news that is not to do with Kavanaugh has to do with a literal Nazi.

SLEVIN: Yeah, so another item that is strangely getting buried, although not as, there’s been more attention paid to this than tax scam 2.0. but there was a Trump administration [official] who has not resigned who was a literal Nazi. Thanks to reporting by the Atlantic who obtained emails this official who was in charge of policy for many of Trump’s immigration policies was in regular contact with white supremacists and literally Nazis like Richard Spencer.

VALLAS: The dude who got punched in the face for being a literal Nazi.

SLEVIN: Yes, and actually attended dinner, group dinners with them and actually I can’t believe I’m reading this, when someone invited him to dinner and said his home would be “Judenfrei”, which was a term used by Nazis during World War II to described territory that had been cleansed of Jewish people during the holocaust, this Trump official responded, “they don’t call it the Freytag for nothing”, which is German for “Friday”. They’re literally using Nazi code words.

VALLAS: So as if this could not, as if this could get worse —

SLEVIN: It does get worse.

VALLAS: It actually does get worse, which is —

SLEVIN: This person had power.

VALLAS: Yes, because this person had not just power but power over certain areas of policy where being a literal Nazi is even more horrifying than it might even sound from the horrifying things that you’ve said.

SLEVIN: Yeah well the terrifying point that you alluded to, it’s like it’s not that he was just saying these things, it’s that this person was working on what’s called the public charge rule, which we’ve talked about on this show, which is a rule to basically expand immigration law or to block people from entering the country if they don’t have enough money or their kids rely on Medicaid or they have a disability. That same rule was used in the United States in the lead up to World War II to prevent many people fleeing Nazi Germany from coming to the country and is widely seen as a stain on this country’s history, was also used before that to block Irish Americans from coming to the country, it originated around the same time as the Chinese Exclusion Act, it is steeped in racist policy history. And the fact that the person who was helping to write that rule was a literal Nazi should tell you all you need to know about that rule.

VALLAS: And this of course is the rule we’ve talked about on this show called public charge, it sounds really wonky, it gets really wonky but it’s about upending our nation’s entire family based immigration system in ways just like you describe that has all kinds of roots in really horrible periods of our nation’s history and of course it comes out it was basically designed by a literal Nazi. That is what we’ve learned this week.

SLEVIN: Yes.

VALLAS: What else you got Slevs?

SLEVIN: Well, there is so many important movements going on that are also being buried in the Mueller-Kavanaugh coverage. So there have been ongoing nationwide prison strikes, the largest peaceful prison protest in the country’s history, in 19 states organizers announced there were participants. It’s admitably hard to report on because it’s not easy to cover prisons by nature. But it was when I initially tweeted about this The New York Times had not covered it at all in the first week these prison strikes were underway, it was finally eventually covered. But there’s been very little coverage of a massive peaceful protest and as someone pointed out, sadly if these were violent confrontations, they would probably be front-page news. But the fact that prisoners who are often paid cents an hour to do work, for example, fighting the California forest fires, are now protesting those conditions is huge news.

VALLAS: And a story we’re going to be following on this show in the weeks to come as well but something we thought was worth mentioning up top in this In Case You Missed It segment because you probably missed it because it isn’t getting a lot of coverage and nor are the updates that we’ve now seen or not seen if we’ve missed it to the horrible, horrific death toll in Puerto Rico.

SLEVIN: Yeah so the Governor of Puerto Rico commissioned a study to update the official statistics on the death toll in Puerto Rico. The Trump administration had officially been saying for the past year that it was only 60 some odd people who had died in Puerto Rico, we now got an official tally that it’s close to 3,000, about 2,579 people perished in Hurricane Maria. That makes it about the same amount of people who died on 9/11 and it makes it the largest disaster in modern history. That is, to put in context larger than Pearl Harbor, it’s thousands more than Hurricane Sandy, it’s thousands more than who died in New Orleans and sadly there’s been no movement from congress or the administration, any accountability. In all of these other disasters that I mentioned there was a congressional investigation, there were major policy changes, nothing.

VALLAS: Well we have great urgency to make sure that millionaires can chase their second yacht with a third yacht Jeremy because I’m realizing that my second yacht meme that I’ve been using for so long with tax scam 2.0 is probably going to need to become third yacht, it’s a boat inside a boat inside a boat, is where we’re heading and that’s what needs to be happening right now Jeremy, not anything to do with helping folks in Puerto Rico who even though they’re not getting any news coverage anymore and we’ve all forgotten about them are still struggling and in some cases still dying.

SLEVIN: That’s right.

VALLAS: So we’re out of time.

SLEVIN: Great steward!

VALLAS: Wasn’t I a great steward?

SLEVIN: Excellent steward.

VALLAS: I was just the, I was stewardly.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: Rebecca ‘Steward’ Vallas.

VALLAS: Periodic steward, Rebecca Vallas, so Slevs we’ll have you back next week if you still like to do this show after all of the flack that you take every week but so far it’s worked so I’m going to assume you’ll come back

SLEVIN: Another session next week.

VALLAS: And with another session next week, and with that don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, talking Kavanaugh with Jesse Lee.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week despite calls and justifiable ones at that for a delay by Democratic senators, the Senate Judiciary Committee began confirmation hearings for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In the first two days, the conservative judge predictably dodged questions on whether he would uphold Roe v. Wade or recuse himself from a potential case involving Donald Trump. To break down everything that’s happened so far and where things go from here I’m thrilled to welcome Jesse Lee, he’s the VP of communications for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a guru of many things who has been following the Kavanaugh hearings very closely. Jesse, thanks so much for coming on the show.

JESSE LEE: Oh thanks for having me and thanks for calling me a guru.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well you know, I feel like your title doesn’t do you justice. [LAUGHTER] That’s what I’m saying here.

LEE: Well I appreciate that, I appreciate that very much.

VALLAS: So Jesse just to remind us and for anyone else maybe like me is catching up on a whirlwind of stuff that’s been happening over the course of the past several weeks that used to be called August but didn’t feel that way I think for most people. Remind us what is it that we knew about Brett Kavanaugh heading into these hearings, who is he, what kind of guy is he, what were we expecting before these hearings got underway.

LEE: Yeah so it really is kind of a high drama crazy situation where right before Kavanaugh was chosen Mitch McConnell told Trump don’t nominate him because he has this really problematic really long paper trail and it’s going to derail his nomination. And Trump for whatever reason chose him anyways and I think we have some idea of what those reasons are and as a result their solution to this long paper trail full of scandalous whatever has been to basically to put the petal to the metal, get him through as fast a possible, don’t wait for the documents and right now I think the estimate is they have 10% of his records to even look at and even that 10% is really troubling. Even what’s just out there publicly is really disturbing and if you look at he’s been auditioning for a long time to prove his anti Roe v. Wade credentials, giving these speechs in front of hardcore anti-choice groups and doing all the winks and nods, even using language like abortion on demand in his written opinions, which is like you know, just basically a giant winky face to the anti-choice movement.

VALLAS: Classic dog whistle on that issue.

LEE: Yeah, it’s like a dog whistle with the words dog whistle written on the side of it. [LAUGHTER] And I think in terms of why did President Trump choose him over everybody else, I think it’s clear that his defining unique characteristic is that he has a strong belief that presidents are above the law.

VALLAS: And we’re going to get into the substance, to the extent that we can based on what these hearings have given us but before we do that, a big part of what has dominated these first couple of days of hearings and I should be clear to listeners, we have having this conversation after day two of hearings has begun to wrap up, there’s a lot more to come so this is what we know as a Wednesday evening but process has actually dominated a lot of the discussion and a lot of that has been coming from Democrats who actually called right at the outset for adjourning the hearings until lawmakers have a little bit of time to review Kavanaugh’s record. You mentioned a huge document dump but the first thing that happened before the gavel even hit the wooden thing that the gavels hit in this realm was the night before the hearings there was a huge 42,000 page document dump related to Kavanaugh’s time in the White House and senators had 15 hours to review 42,000 pages.

LEE: Right and not only that, they’re not actually allowed to discuss the documents that they read because they haven’t been fully reviewed to go public and so one of the more bizarre exchanges today was Senator Leahy trying to discuss with Judge Kavanaugh a situation back when Kavanaugh was in the Bush White House where a Republican judiciary staffer broke into the computers of the Democratic judiciary members and basically used it to get all their strategy on judicial hearings and who they were going to pose and whatever, and this person who was ultimately found and arrested was in communication with Kavanaugh during that time who was overseeing the judges process and so —

VALLAS: You can’t make this stuff up, this is literally a ‘House of Cards’ episode.

LEE: Well right, exactly and I think it speaks to Kavanaugh’s whole career trajectory that he’s been in the middle of this political agenda, use the law by whatever means necessary to accomplish the Republican Party agenda and the agenda of their big corporate donors and in this case, it was interesting because there was apparently emails in these documents that got dumped over there all of a sudden but that Leahy couldn’t actually talk about openly so they were kind of talking past each other, Kavanaugh didn’t seem at all prepared for the line of questioning and I think one of the big questions in the days ahead is are there things in these documents that actually prove Kavanaugh has lied either in this hearing or in previous hearings about how deeply he was involved in this kind of little hacking ring that was going on.

VALLAS: Which would seem to be a total threshold question for whether someone’s even fit for this position, let alone what types of position they might take if they were confirmed and yet we don’t have the time to find that out because Republicans’ to Democrats’ pleas for a little bit of time to read lots and lots of documents were summarily dismissed. They said sorry we can’t go another day without a confirmed justice effectively which seems kind of funny. I’m trying to remember something in the not that distant past when Republicans felt a little differently about having a justice, what is it I’m thinking of? Oh, Merrick Garland of course.

[LAUGHTER]

LEE: I had almost not forgotten about him at all. [LAUGHTER]. It was sad, I was at the White House as part of the core group that worked on Merrick Garland through his entire nomination process for that almost entire year and he was literally almost like the perfect human being and I think actually in the official American Bar Association review of him, somebody called him “the perfect human being”. And these same Republicans who as you say now suddenly for some reason feel like he has to be on the court right away, who knows, maybe Trump might get subpoenaed, Trump might get indicted, Trump might decide to fire AG Sessions and do some kind of lame duck massacre situation and now they’re suddenly really antsy to get the court up to nine justices. And in a way when I step back to some extent this moment feels the entire Trump presidency to date coming to a head, because it’s really Trump trampling every kind of rule of our democracy, every kind of rule of decency, any kind of legitimate process whatsoever all for his own good and the Republican congress enabling him in the most embarrassing shameful ways possible.

VALLAS: I mean maybe, you tell me if this is a fair comparison to make but back when we were watching Republicans and it’s not over yet so I shouldn’t say back when but the first couple of times when Republicans were trying to ram through Affordable Care Act repeal legislation without giving any space or process to that there were a lot of us saying and a lot of leading progressives saying that it was unprecedented how little process and time and space they were giving to something that impact 1/6th of the national economy and it feels almost like they’ve not only learned from that experience but put it on steroids.

LEE: Yeah well I think there’s a fundamental truth here, which is Republicans ideas and nominees and platforms are wildly unpopular with the American people and almost exactly the opposite of what the American people want when you look at giving giant corporations tax cuts or giving people’s heath care away or this kind of hardcore pro-corporate justice that they’re nominating and they’ve learned that if you have a situation like repealing the Affordable Care Act where you let it sit in the sun for even more than a couple months the American people are going to rise up and stomp it out and that’s what happened with ACA repeal. Whereas with the tax bill, boy, they just put that thing on the high speed rails straight through, they would release the bill two hours before the people had a chance to vote on it and they all agreed to keep their heads down and just ram it through. And so I think they way they’re looking at the Kavanaugh nomination is hey, let’s do it more like the tax cut and a lot less like the ACA repeal, don’t give people a chance to look at the records, don’t give people a chance to think about this, don’t give a chance for the word to spread about what’s going on here. Instead just get it over the finish line and pay the price later.

VALLAS: And you mentioned the traumatic unpopularity of health care repeal, the dramatic unpopularity that continues to plummet of the tax plan that took effect earlier this year and became law. And Kavanaugh himself is not exception to the pattern, polling has now consistently shown that he has the lowest public support of any judicial nominee to the Supreme Court since Robert Bork, what feels like a million years ago. And polling by the Center for American Progress Action Fund that’s actually very specific to some of the constitutional crisis that we may be on the precipice of facing if Kavanaugh is confirmed find that a large majority of Americans have really, really serious concerns about Kavanaugh’s views on whether, for example presidents can be subpoenaed and for obvious reasons.

LEE: Right, I think that’s right and we found that even before some of the most dramatic stuff came out, I think what is happened at this point is the American people have come to terms with what Trump is and who he is and the fact that he’s fundamentally corrupt and we have a big problem sitting in the White House, desperately, desperately we want somebody to be a check on that power and what now you have is the Republican congress not only has not been a check, they’re trying to strip the courts as a check as well. And everybody knows it, this is an open secret, this isn’t a subtle thing when you pick somebody that says the unanimous decision on U.S. v. Nixon that made Nixon turn over the Watergate tapes was wrongly decided, that’s not subtle. That kind of a big signpost. And I think it’s almost like some kind of post apocalyptic novel or something where every hour or so the coverage of the Supreme Court hearings gets interrupted by say, an anonymous New York Times op-ed by a senior Trump official saying that Trump is insane and there’s a resistance from within the Trump administration silently preventing nuclear war at all times and oh yeah by the way, we should let Trump stack the court with Supreme Court justice who will let him do whatever he wants, right? And it’s this split screen between total insanity and congress blithely pushing through more insanity.

VALLAS: So to the extent that anything has happened during these first two days of hearings that has shed any light on substance what jumps out to you? Obviously some of the hot button issues that people have been most focused on with this nominee and also what’s at stake in this court generally given it’s make up are Roe v. Wade which you mentioned before, health care and pre-existing conditions, and then just generally constraints on presidential power, we talked subpoenas, a couple other things, what have we actually learned in these hearings so far that we didn’t already know about Kavanaugh and to the extent that we aren’t learning new things, what has jumped out at you as particularly noteworthy?

LEE: I think part of this big paper trail that we talked about right up front is that actually we know a fair amount about him going in. we know he thinks the president is above the law, we know he thinks the dissent in Roe v. Wade was correct. We know that he’s got this career as a political operative who will go into the court and view it as his job to do things like overturn the ACA and back the frivolous law suit that Trump is pushing as we speak is also in court today to strip preexisting condition protections. I think the biggest thing that was new today was about this scandal with the justice, judicial committee hacking years back. I think if there’s one thing to keep watching, that’s going to be something where it again, it’s this metaphor of covering up for corruption and partisan gain at any cost. And if that thread keeps getting pulled and those documents keep coming out it just starts to be, what is that old metaphor where you’re pilling up the elephants to the sky it’s like endless pile of cover-ups on top of each other. I forget how that riddle ends but whatever happens at the end of the giant pile of elephants I’m sure is not good and that feels like where we’re going right now.

VALLAS: It’s probably not a rainbow, I’m just going to guess.

LEE: Yes.

VALLAS: At the end of the pile, by the way I’ve never heard this and now I’m picturing lots of elephants in a pile but thanks.

LEE: Yeah, the old elephants in a pile metaphor.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Which I’m pretty convinced you actually just made up right now.

LEE: I would be patting myself on the back if that were true.

VALLAS: If any listeners have ever heard about this metaphor before feel free to tweet at me and @offkiltershow to let us know Jesse didn’t make this up. But back to substance, so for folks who have been watching or who have been seeing clips here and there that have been dominating national TV cable news there have been lots of instances of Kavanaugh saying what sound like the right words. That if you didn’t know anything else about right, you could hear some of the things he has said in these hearings and go yeah, that sounds fine and maybe Roe v. Wade is a good example. He was asked about it and he said, yeah it’s settled law. And that might sound really reassuring to people who think that women should have the right to choose and control their own bodies. But like you said there’s a lot more context to each of these issues. What is your advice to people who are trying to consume these hearings when it comes to being informed and really knowing how this fits in with the broader set of things that we know about this nominee?

LEE: Yeah, my suggestion is listen carefully to what he’s saying but also believe your own lying eyes a little bit here. If he’s talking for five minutes and he’s got a really sincere tone of voice and talking about how precedent is really important to him and women who have abortions, that’s a really difficult decision, but he won’t just say Roe v. Wade was rightly decided, well he’s pulling a fast one on you. He got asked about saying that the Watergate decision was decided wrongly, having said that a couple decades ago and he went on this big elaborate filibuster and finally somebody was like, so will you just say it was rightly decided now and he said no I can’t say that. And to some extent, I don’t actually think this guy is really the slickest guy, I have the old belief that people who work in politics tend to look how they are and if they look like a scumbag political consultant they probably are. [LAUGHTER] And to me he looks like somebody who’s not telling the truth and he’s not telling you the truth. He’s only there to use the law to pursue a political agenda that he’s been working for since he was on the Ken Starr investigation, since he was working on Bush v. Gore, since he was helping with all kinds of Bush Administration scandals and that’s who he is. That’s what he’s there to do. He’s been groomed for it his whole career and believe your own lying eyes on it.

VALLAS: It’s been interesting to watch just how almost comical some of the Republican attempts have been to trot him out as a really great guy. You were for comparison talking about Merrick Garland before being described as almost a perfect human being and there’s been whole back and forths, hours of back and fourths that have all been about him being a great father or a great husband or a great whatever and how he’s so nice. Basically the campaign to try to get this guy with a paper trail as you described that is elephants to the sky long, did I use that correctly?

LEE: Yeah, I think so. [LAUGHTER] #ElephantsToTheSky.

VALLAS: Has been, and let’s let that catch on, I don’t even know where I got with that sentence anymore so we’re going to start a new one. [LAUGHTER] The Republican strategy has been to try to paper over it with he’s somebody you want to have a beer with, right?

LEE: Yeah but it’s almost been kind of, it’s been something kind of half-hearted about it. It’s almost like Supreme Court nomination in a box or something. it’s like here’s the card you say, you take your kids to the soccer practice, right, talk about just how much you love, sports, do they play badminton ever, drive them to the badminton also. It’s a 24-hour job for you and you couldn’t love it more. And this was his whole introductory statement and it’s like people are tuning in, they want to hear, they’ve their doubts about you, they’ve got their doubts about the guy that appoints you. They’ve got deep doubts and they’re tuning to why they should put you on, believe you and believe that you should go on the Supreme Court and it’s like yeah I really love my kids and I carpool, I would carpool all day if I could. And it’s like OK, I’m sure your kids give the best hugs, my dog gives the best hugs too but that’s not actually a reason to be on the Supreme Court and it’s like everything’s very, there’s no coherent picture to you actually believe what you’re saying here. You’re saying the words, it’s all pre-packaged, it’ss all written out in the script and they’re just counting on Republicans in the senate to just put their heads down and say well I know you already passed the test for the donors but our donors want a Supreme Court justice too so alright, whatever you want. And again his whole career has been corporate Supreme Court justice in a box where he’s been groomed by the Federalist Society, he’s carefully put his markers down to make clear that he believes government can’t regulate anything. And he’s going out and made clear, I’ll take care of Roe v. Wade.

VALLAS: So this is a show about poverty and inequality but I want to focus in on the presidential power piece because that’s probably, if you’re going to think about Maslow’s hierarchy that’s probably the most important of all types of things given the threshold level here of actually could be on edge of constitutional crisis. He refused to answer basic questions so far. Whether a president could be subject to a subpoena for example.

LEE: Right, he’s been, there’s even time when he was asked about his own statements from 15 years ago suggesting that the president was above the law or couldn’t be investigated or couldn’t be subpoenaed. And he refused to say whether he still agrees with his own statements. And it’s like you’re just sticking it in our eye at this point.

VALLAS: Not even trying.

LEE: You could say I’ve changed my mind, we could all forgive you if you say I was a young man who thought the unitary executive was the hot new thing and I’ve thought better of that, that’s a childish things, but no I just can’t tell you whether I still agree with that. OK, to some extent I also think the presidential power stuff and the poverty stuff is still one thing because it’s really about instituting a partisan agenda in both cases. It’s not even really about I believe we should have a king. It’s more about I believe that Republican presidents in particular should get to do what they want to do and I’m going on the court to advance that agenda. So if that means taking healthcare away from 20 million people I’ll do it. If that means saying well hey I’m not sure Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security was really altogether constitutional in the first place, that’s what I’ll do. And we know what the Republican Party agenda is, it’s frankly give more money to rich people and if that means putting more people in poverty that’s fine. In fact if we can keep wages low, that means profits go up. We’ve had this chart going around that we put together that shows that since the tax bill wages have stayed completely flat and profits have gone through the roof. Now part of profits going through the roof is wages staying down, that is actually the agenda, that’s deliberate and that’s what Brett Kavanaugh is going to the court to help implement. That’s where he thinks he can best serve that agenda.

VALLAS: For anyone who is listening and is hearing the phrase “constitutional crisis” and who’s rolling their eyes and going jeez, come on progressives, stop using all of this histrionic language, that’s not what this, it’s just a guy you don’t agree with on some stuff, what would you say to anyone who’s not persuaded that that’s what his confirmation could bring about.

LEE: I think this is people are drastically underestimating how quickly this could happen. You could have a situation where he gets on the court within a month and shortly after that the special counsel subpoenas Trump, Trump as he says he will challenges it to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh is the fifth vote to squash the subpoena. Trump then turns around and right after the election fires the Attorney General, which Grassley and Graham have now signaled it would be OK for him to do and then puts in an Acting Attorney General who fires Mueller and one by one tries to fire all the prosecutors and all the different pieces at Trump’s direction. And that in turns goes to the Supreme Court and again five-four, four judges say actually that would make the president above the law and that is ridiculous and five judges would say yeah well actually president’s above the law, sorry and that’s it. The cover up worked, the president’s above the law, the investigation’s done, the president moves on to things like shutting down voting rights and there we are. If that’s not a constitutional crisis I don’t know what is.

VALLAS: And then all bets are off and we really don’t have any more checks that can actually be meaningful.

LEE: Well right, exactly now what happens if the president is found to be legally, say the president starts sending intimidation tactics to voting booths in 2020 in minority neighborhoods. Well we already established that the president can do whatever he wants so where are we now? This is not far away, this is one vote on the Supreme Court away on a lot of this stuff and the dominos start falling real fast.

VALLAS: You’re a pretty terrifying guy, Jesse.

LEE: Yeah, sorry about that.

VALLAS: Anyone ever told you that before?

LEE: I can go back to the giant pile of elephants.

VALLAS: Also maybe you could have just brought your dog because I really need one of your dog’s hugs right now.

LEE: Well my dog is good at hugs, that’s true. I don’t know if that qualifies me for a Supreme Court but —

VALLAS: It might!

LEE: It couldn’t hurt!

VALLAS: I don’t know, maybe if I were one of the people on the judiciary committee it might not help you because I am a cat person as people will know so I might, but if your dog gives really good hugs, I’m also a hugger, I’m a hugger who’s a cat person.

LEE: Well it’s a pug so it’s kind of like half cat.

VALLAS: Oh yeah I can do pugs. I’m fine with pugs.

LEE: it’s like half cat, half dog, half pig, half seal.

VALLAS: Oh we’re totally friends again.

LEE: It’s kind of a weird genetic amalgamation.

VALLAS: Also now I want, what’s your dogs name?

LEE: Body.

VALLAS: Of course, well I need to meet your dog, OK, so we’ll get back to your dog next time but in the however many minutes, Will, that we have left, what comes next? We are not done as I mentioned up top with the confirmation hearings, there’s a lot more still to come but fast forward to the end of the actually hearings and the dog and pony show, or seal or whatever show that that is, what comes after that and what should people be watching for?

LEE: Well to be clear, we are definitely not at the end of the road yet, there could definitely be fireworks ahead. I think one thing that goes through my head is the Affordable Care Act repeal where year after year after year they all voted yeah let’s repeal the thing, can’t wait to repeal is, it’s going to be great to repeal it but then when the rubber hit the road and it came time to actually take it away, suddenly didn’t sound so great and I still think there is very much a chance that when as we get closer to the rubber hitting the road the idea of Collins and Murkowski putting on a fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or to just gut it step by step, which it’s already being gutted little step by little step, drastically accelerate, the idea of putting on a judge who really I think they know will jump at the opportunity to gut the ACA I think as this crisis around President Trump’s criminal liability, his corruption, his mental stability accelerates the idea that someone who puts him above the law becomes more real, I think there’s a real chance for the American people to weigh in and come out in force and no this has to stop, this has to stop. And go back to the drawing board, find somebody who is not this giant rigged system pre-baked, fix is in kind of guy and frankly do it after the election because the idea of continuing to drive off this cliff when we can see it coming a mile away is just ridiculous.

VALLAS: So you’ve gone from being the most terrifying guy I’ve talked to today to being someone with a lot more optimism than I think a lot of folks have because you’re painting a very plausible picture to an outcome that is different from what a lot of people are talking about as though it’s baked as though it’s inevitable, so this is not an inevitable outcome but also in what you said was a really important piece, which is especially for listeners, it’s not just that you’re describing an outcomes that’s just going to happen, it’s not just that Collins and Murkowski are going to wake up one day and feel really bad about what they’re about to do if they vote yes on this guy, it’s that there’s an opportunity to influence people who actually have votes that could make a difference here. And to that end I feel like the number of emails and tweets and calls that I’ve gotten since Kavanaugh was put forth from folks saying what’s the point? Why even try, this guy is going to get comfirmed no matter what, they have the votes is a lot higher than I would even care to admit, especially from close friends who know the work I do and that CAP and CAP Action does, what is your message to those folks about what, you’ve made the case for why it matters to get involved but what can people be doing? This isn’t the Affordable Care Act getting voted on again, this isn’t tax, this isn’t the fights that people have been familiar with that I feel like they see the path to influencing it, this is the Supreme Court and that’s kind of a different animal in some regards. What can people be doing right now?

LEE: I honestly think for people like Collins and Murkowski and probably some other senators, they think they’re getting away with it right now, they think people are not watching, they’re not paying enough attention, if Roe v. Wade gets gutted or overturned in a couple years, nobody will really blame Susan Collins or Murkowski, if the ACA gets overturned, nobody will really blame them or connect this to that. Even if they know it themselves, they don’t really think it’s going to be on the hook for them. Or for that matter if some constitutional crisis does unfold with Trump they think well I don’t think anybody’s going to really hold it against. And people need to make clear to them we’re going to hold it again you, we’re not forgetting and these aren’t things that are going to happen 20 years down the road, these things are going to happen in a year or two, less. And I honestly think, I think about Collins hot mic moment like a year ago where I forget who she was talking to but it was like in some senate committee, I think she was talking to a Democrat like, yeah I don’t know, Donald Trump, he seems crazy. And so she knows it but she needs to know that we know, and she needs to know that we know that she is enabling it, that she is complicit in it, especially if she puts this Supreme Court justice through. Because this is not just close your eyes and cover your eyes and pretend it all goes away, this is an active vote to help him continue his corruption, continues his frankly, betrayals of the country and by the way, yes to overturn Roe v. Wade and the ACA. And I said earlier to me this feels like a giant culmination of the entire Trump presidency and there is something about the idea of Trump of all people installing this guy who is this political operative, kind of corrupt guy in this corrupt process all to come in and take women’s control of their own bodies away from them. That enrages me in the way that the Access Hollywood tape viscerally enraged me. It feels like it all stems from that in a weird way. And there is time to stand up, I do think, there’s been a lot of protests in these hearings and people are rolling their eyes at it and they’re like this is dumb, they’re even interrupting Democrats, what this protests are doing are saying hey, something’s not right and it has to stop. And that’s what happened during the ACA fight and that’s what didn’t happen enough during the tax fight maybe. The tax bill shouldn’t have passed period but if there was a big distinction between those things that’s where it was. They rammed the tax bill through before that kind of outrage could build and it’s on us to adjust our tactics and build that outrage now before it’s too late.

VALLAS: Jesse Lee is a, is the Vice President, unless you’ve got friends who have the same time, I may not screw that up, the Vice Presidnent for communications for the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He’s a former communications guru, see I got it in there again with the Obama White House and he’s someone who apparently has a dog I need to meet and I look forward to having you back on the show soon, Jesse. Thank you for everything you’re doing to #StopKavanaugh.

LEE: It’s been a pleasure and I’ll look up the thing about the elephants.

VALLAS: Yeah if you would that would be great.

LEE: Thank you very much.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas, believe it or not, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings are not the only thing happening in the world or even in Washington DC, a new report out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture this week found that 40 million Americans, more than the combined population of California and West Virginia and struggling against hunger. The report was released just minutes before members of the house and senate went to conference on the so called farm bill which if house Republicans get their way would take food assistance away from two million Americans to discuss these new data, their significance and also get a little bit of an update on the farm bill process, I’m thrilled to bring back Joel Berg, he’s the CEO of Hunger Free America, he also served in the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Clinton. Joel, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

JOEL BERG: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So we’re going to get wonky here, so wonk alert for folks listening but this report, which I’m going to say it here and now is going to get almost no attention because of how much is going on in the world, Kavanaugh and more, is really important. Joel what does it find and what are some of the top lines people should be aware of from this USDA report?

BERG: As you said the report finds that there are 40 million Americans living in households that can’t afford enough food. Under the wonk alert, I’m twirling my propeller on my beanie now. [LAUGHTER] But what this means is the term food insecure, which means they’re probably not starving in the streets, like you may see in parts of North Korea or parts of Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America or parts of South Asia where you may have seen in the United States 100 years ago before there was any safety net at all, but it does mean that people are choosing between food and medicine, choosing between rationing food, buying less food, getting less healthy food and often parents going without food to feed their children. So that’s the reality of this problem. There’s a slip dip over last year, but the bottom line is it’s still 11% higher than before the recession and 29% higher in 1999 in the height of the Bill Clinton era economic boom. And so the stock markets about 25,000 now, there are so many billionaires in America that merely having a billion dollars doesn’t get you on the Forbes 400 list anymore. Imagine that, you’re only at $1.1 billion and you don’t make the list, and their combined net worth is $2.7 trillion so imagine all that and there are more people struggling to afford enough food in America that could fit the entire population of California and West Virginia.

VALLAS: And the report, which is going to fall like, I’m going to bungle this, what ist the thing with the tree in the forest and it doesn’t make a sound, well that’s what’s going to happen to this report.

BERG: And at the same time a bear is doing something, I don’t know.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Exactly right. So we can put all these together but no one’s going to pay attention to this before of so much that’s going on.

BERG: Well no one other than the 40 million people experiencing it on a daily basis.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right, no one other than the directly impacted folks who get ignored routinely by mainstream media, which is the whole reason we have this show as folks will know. But as this report was getting released we actually in the same moments, it was almost in the same few minute span as the report was being put online we saw from President Trump a tweet saying the Trump economy is booming with the help of house and senate Republicans, farm bill with SNAP work requirements will bolster farmers and get America back to work, pass the farm bill with SNAP work requirements. There’s a lot there actually to break down although you did have a response that was somewhat on brand, Joel.

BERG: My response back to the president was does executive time tweeting at cable TV in your pajamas count towards your work requirements, no it doesn’t. And I’ll point till I’m blue in the face that this president is saying that people who live in public housing, the people who get government health care and people who get government subsidized food should work for a living, at least 20 hours a week on top of everything else they’re doing, and yet he gets government housing, food and health care and he’s clearly not working 20 hours a week.

VALLAS: And we’ll come back to the farm bill because as I mentioned up at the top that actually is a really timely other piece of news that’s getting almost no attention. Conference is of course the next step in the process. We had a senate bill and a house bill that were very different and now they have to try to hash out the details and we’ve got Trump putting all kinds of pressure on congress to basically make hunger even worse than this report that came out today tells us it already is but a big piece of what I actually really want to talk to you about before we get back into the minutia in the farm bill and where that heads and what’s at stake here is that this report is actually notable in that it came out of a Trump administration federal agency. And that was part of what you actually pointed to in your organization’s press release about the report’s findings. Why is that notable?

BERG: Yeah, this report was produced by the USDA Economic Research Service. And I must say, these are really smart, dedicated, professional, non-partisan people. And when I was in the government sometimes their data came to conclusions we didn’t love but we never thought in a million years discard the data after we [INAUDIBLE] a little we said maybe we should improve our policies a bit. And now the Trump administration is actually threatening this agency. They said they’re going to close down their office in Washington, where the vast majority of their employees are and spread it out across the country, which is essence is helping destroy their agency if that comes to pass because a lot of these folks have families, have spouses, have kids in schools here and they’re not just going to relocate willy-nilly to all these other places around the country. So it is yet another serious attack on data, another serious attack on science. Now, these numbers are always politicized. When the first state-by-state rankings came out in 1997 I had nothing to do with the research, I had nothing to do with producing the report, I had nothing to do with calculating the numbers, I was merely involved in releasing them. But because I was a political appointee, certain Republicans blamed me for the numbers, they thought we were purposely making them look bad because Texas had a high hunger number when W. was running and they actually put in the agricultural appropriations bill, the bill that funds USDA a line eliminating my position by name. now since I was the only person ever in a position with that name it was obviously aimed at me. Now I didn’t lose my job, the senate didn’t pass similar language but that just shows you there’s a long history of this being politicized going back again to the Bush Administration, W’s administration when they actually stopped using the term ‘hunger’ to describe the most severe form of food insecurity. So Orwell is turning around in his grave and smiling.

VALLAS: Just to unpack a little bit of what’s at stake here and I think that story, by the way, I have to say congratulations, I would take being named in that way by as something of a badge of honor and I’m a little surprised it’s not in your twitter bio although maybe it’s because the story takes longer than the number of characters you have to tell.

BERG: Well you have to read my first book, “How Hungry is America? All We Can Eat” because I tell the story there, a little plug.

VALLAS: Well plug for the book that’s well deserved and we’ll make sure that that’s on the nerdy syllabus page as well, but this just to make this very real, what you’re describing in terms of Donald Trump’s and it’s through his Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, it was just a couple of weeks ago that Perdue announced major, major changes as you’re describing that really are at their core designed to politicize and to weaken the agency that produces these data and we’ve seen from the Trump administration’s ongoing and really in some ways unbelievable back and forth with even the United Nations following their all too inconvenient report that there is widespread poverty and hardship and inequality in the United States, my God, clearly this is an administration that has an incredibly thin skin and that is looking to clamp down on any sources of information that could be unhelpful to it, we’ve seen this on a whole range of different issues not just to do with poverty but here is just the latest example of their trying to basically silence any sources of information that could be unhelpful to this president. Is it unfair to say that?

BERG: No and it’s not just a left/right issue. A lot of the information, most information the Economic Research Service at USDA puts out has nothing at all to do with poverty. They do a lot on the impact of trade on agriculture and perhaps slightly more of a free trader than many of your listeners but clearly there’s some support on the right and the center for more free trade and they’ve put out publications indicating that more trade helps American farmers and so I’m sure there’s some people in the administration don’t like that somebody in the federal government is pointing out that some of the president’s economic proclamations are just factually untrue and there’s also the human element how they announce this. They apparently announced this to the employees only very, very, very, shortly before they announced this to the media. There are good government reasons occasionally to have reorganization, occasions even to relocate some employees, but people’s lives are at stake. People’s careers are at stake, people’s families are at stake, you don’t announce this virtually simultaneously to the public as you let the employees know that there’s a good chance they’re going to be out of work. Again it’s another sign of basic lack of civility and humanity.

VALLAS: And it also comes on the heels of the announcement from the Trump administration and we’ve talked about this on the show at length but not for some time that there’s an effort underway to reorganize the entire federal government and it seems inline with what’s happening here, a big part of that actually has to do with food assistance and with the SNAP program in particular, talking about taking SNAP out of the, excuse me I’m saying it backwards, taking it out of the Department of Agriculture and putting it over into the Department of Health and Human Services, making it all into one giant quote, unquote, “welfare” agency, which is basically slapping a giant dog whistle on the doors of the building that administers all of the programs that Trump is trying to cut.

BERG: Now in a sane world and country it would make sense to have all the social programs in one agency and in the sane world and country as much as the rest of the developed world does, it would make sense to basically give out cash to low-income people to buy the things they need. America is the only industrialized western nation that even has a SNAP program, the name for the food stamp program because we don’t trust poor people with cash, we don’t say well if we give them money they can choose between whether they spend it on food or rent. That being said in the current political context where the only reason is the last really broad-based part of the safety net left because it’s tied to food, because it’s tied to agriculture in the current context if you take SNAP out of the Department of Agriculture it would lead to a massive slashing of the program, even more massive than what they’re trying to do now beyond the wonkish propeller twirling philosophy about how this compares to Western Europe the reality is trying to move the program is yet another way to attack it and delegitimize it and slap that racial freighted phrase ‘welfare’ on it.

VALLAS: And particularly when it comes in tandem with a proposal to appoint some kind of a czar whose whole job is literally just to figure out how to slash programs that like SNAP, help families make ends meet when they fall on hard times. But I mentioned the farm bill and we only have a couple of minutes left to talk about it but I think it’s important because of how very related it is to this report finding that hunger is indeed despite the Trump administration’s attempts to pursued us that poverty and hunger in America don’t exist, that was hard to believe it was just a couple of months ago where that mass poverty denial was what the Trump administration was pedaling but now as of this week we have the house and the senate going to conference on the farm bill, which listeners may remember is putting at stake 2 million Americans’ food assistance as well a 265,000 kids’ school lunches, that’s what at stake here and we’ve got Republicans in the house particularly, Congressman Conaway from Texas who is really featured as one of the leading villians in this fight, pushing, pushing, pushing, despite how unpopular it is to cut food assistance, more than two-thirds of Americans oppose it, we’ve found that time and again in polls, despite the fact that we saw in the house vote just how absolutely partisan it was, not a single Democrat voted for that house bill and actually 20 plus Republicans defected and didn’t want to vote for a bill that was going to have this kind of hardship in it, he’s not ready to let it go and he is still trying to get that to be and that being huge cuts to nutrition assistance to be part of what the ultimate farm bill that the House and Senate agree upon looks like. Where do things go from here, what do we need to be knowing about what comes next for the farm bill in this process?

BERG: Two real quick points before the process; number one is they are, the media is portraying a lot of this as debate over work requirements, many of the cuts in the bill have nothing to do with work requirements, they’re coming out of food for working parents, children, senior citizens, disabled people and veterans, that’s number one. And number two it’s so hypocritical that not applying work requirements to the billions and billions and billions going to absentee landowners who are getting farm subsidies. So the next step is they’re in the so-called conference committee and they have to try to work out the differences between the house and the senate side. Unless the house abandons the so-called Hastert rule, which the Republicans implemented that says they’ll only pass a bill that gets the majority of the Republicans in it, I don’t know that they can agree on a compromise. I can only imagine a bill passing the house with a handful of moderate Republicans voting for it and virtually all the democrats voting for it and I don’t know that the Democratic leadership is going to agree to that. So if I had to be a betting person we may not get a bill and if there are more progressives in congress after this November I think that would be a positive outcome, stopping it entirely and just going back to the drawing board next January hopefully with a more progressive congress although there are a lot of ‘ifs’ there.

VALLAS: And for anyone wondering what you can do in this moment, there’s a lot going on with Kavanaugh and many other things but this is as good a moment as any to go back to www.handsoffSNAP.org which has a list of conference committee members, it has their phone numbers, it has their Twitter handles, that’s a great way with #HandsOffSNAP to let them know how you feel about what they should be doing with this conference process. But Joel, we’re going to have to leave it there and have you back soon and I suspect there will be plenty of opportunities given what this administration has been up to when it comes to poverty and hunger specifically. I’ve been speaking with Joel Berg, he’s the CEO of Hunger Free America, he served in the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Clinton and Joel plug your books!

BERG: I have one book, my first book still available “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?” and the second book more recently “America, We Need to Talk: A Self Help Book for the Nation” which is a parody of self-help books, hopefully a big humorous but with concrete things we can all do to fight back and win.

VALLAS: And he wears lots of propellers because he’s a total wonk nerd as you can tell. Joel thanks so much for coming back on the show, always love to have you here and sometime, sometime, someday there will be good news to talk about.

BERG: Absolutely.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.