michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week, is impeachment finally, really going to happen?

ross douthat

The idea that you’re going to successfully impeach a president for the orders he gave to subordinates that the subordinates ignored or didn’t obey has always been fanciful.

david leonhardt

Then we dive into our voice mailbox and answer your questions.

michelle goldberg

I mean, I would say you’re right, that is the biggest thing that you have to worry about.

david leonhardt

And finally a recommendation.

ross douthat

Plastic straws are just the vastly superior technology. [THEME MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

The impact of Robert Mueller’s testimony last week may end up being different from what it first seemed. Yes, his testimony was halting and uneven, and didn’t seem to change many people’s minds, but he did again lay out much of the damaging evidence against President Trump. And now Democrats seem to be using Mueller’s testimony to jumpstart an impeachment inquiry. Michelle, you wrote this week that you think the impeachment proceedings may already have begun, which I imagine surprised some Times readers. Why do you think the chances of impeachment are higher than many other people seem to think?

michelle goldberg

Well, for two reasons. I mean, partly because we’ve seen this, I don’t know if a wave is the right word, but a substantial number of Democratic lawmakers have come out for impeachment since Mueller’s testimony. So it was 93 congressmen beforehand, and it’s now up to probably 110 or 111. And pretty soon, we’re going to be at, I think, half or more than half of the Democratic caucus. But I think what’s more significant — and it’s been so interesting to me that this happened, and it’s almost like nobody noticed, but in fact — an impeachment inquiry has begun in the Judiciary Committee. So the Judiciary Committee filed this lawsuit on Friday seeking access to some of the grand jury testimony in the Mueller probe. And in the lawsuit they said that they need this information because they’re considering whether or not to recommend articles of impeachment to the full House. In the past two presidential impeachments, you’ve had the full House vote to instruct the Judiciary Committee to carry out this inquiry, although in Nixon’s case, the judiciary had started its work before the full House vote. But there’s nothing in the Constitution or even in the House rules that say that this is how the process has to go. So when you talk to people in judiciary, they’re very open. They say, yes, we are conducting an impeachment inquiry. And in a way it’s sort of like — it can seem a little bit maybe too coy. They did it in a way that it wasn’t a big explosive news story, but something that only people who follow this super closely picked up on, and allowed them to kind of neutralize this debate about, should we launch an impeachment inquiry. But the fact remains, they’ve started on this process, there’s going to be a series of high-profile hearings in the fall, and they basically said, at the end of this, we will either recommend articles of impeachment or not.

david leonhardt

And I assume, for people in the House and elsewhere who are in favor of impeachment, the argument would go like this — you start holding hearings, you air out this evidence, you get more attention to it, and then support for impeachment, both in the country and among Democrats in Congress, would increase, and the fact that you can’t get it through the House now will change.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, that is the assumption. I mean, I still don’t think that they think that it would actually result in conviction and removal in the Senate. The refusal to vote for impeachment in the Senate, I think, they think could potentially become a liability if the evidence is damning enough. And one of the things I think we see is that the evidence is extraordinarily damning. And it sort of depends on whether we have these moments when it pierces the ambient degeneration of our political culture and gets everyone all worked up. There’s so much lawlessness that there’s a limitless potential for drama. If they can present it in the right way.

david leonhardt

And Ross, what do you think the Democrats should do here? Do you think they should just forget about this because they’re not going to win over swing voters? Or are there some potential advantages for Democrats here?

ross douthat

I think there’s something to the coy strategy that Michelle is outlining, in the sense that I think the optimal political space for the Democrats to operate in is to be conducting public investigations of the Trump White House that keep the sort of miasma of corruption and self-dealing that hangs around Trump in the news without actually having it come to a specific impeachment vote that would be, one, uncomfortable for some of their members in the House, and two, would lead to the spectacle, most likely, of Trump being acquitted in the Senate. You always want to be approaching impeachment, both because that’s what part of your base wants, and because the things that might lead to articles of impeachment are, in fact, things that Democrats should want in the news. But you don’t actually want to get there. And I think the challenge is, I think you specifically don’t want to get there right at the moment when the Democratic contest for the presidency is sort of at maximal ferocity. Suddenly you have this big “are we going to impeach him or not” battle in the Democratic Party, just as Biden, and Harris, and Warren and so on are reaching their moment of battle. And I think that’s a recipe for sort of some of the kind of internal democratic chaos that we were having a few weeks ago before Trump decided to step on it with his Twitter account. But as long as you can avoid actually getting there, I think the coy strategy is kind of plausible. But Michelle wants them to get there, right?

michelle goldberg

Well, I care more about the hearings than I do about the vote. That was the maddening thing about refusing to start this inquiry, is that I feel like you needed to be daily televised hearings that are trying to weave together all the different strands of Trump’s corruption, disloyalty, lawbreaking, et cetera. My guess is that when they finally recommend articles of impeachment, they’re not going to do it, probably, until and unless they have the votes to pass it. It might end up being sort of an anticlimax, right? They’ll recommend it and Mitch McConnell will quash it in the Senate, and the contest for the nomination will — my guess is that it will overshadow all of that. To me, the political calculation that people make about all this, like the idea that this is going to really hurt Democrats, I don’t quite understand how that works. Because I don’t think anybody believed that the endless Benghazi hearings, which were ridiculous — first of all, they certainly didn’t hurt Donald Trump, they actually unearthed things that ended up kind of being fatal to Hillary Clinton. But people don’t really evaluate presidential candidates according to their thoughts about what’s going on in the House of Representatives.

david leonhardt

Oh, and I’ll add to that, which is there’s this conventional wisdom that impeaching Clinton was terrible for Republicans. But I think that’s not nearly as strong a case as you hear people suggest when they toss it out there. So the history here is important. Republicans were talking about doing it before the 1998 midterms, and then they did worse in those midterms than they expected. They thought they would get a big boost from the Clinton scandal, they didn’t, and that’s why everyone kind of looks back and says it was a disaster for Republicans.

michelle goldberg

Right, although let’s add they didn’t lose the House, they lost seats.

david leonhardt

Exactly. They didn’t lose the House. And then, after they impeached him, then they didn’t lose the House for years after that. And so I’ve been skeptical of impeachment, but the one thing that I would say that advocates for impeachment have said about the politics that weighs on me is that most Americans don’t follow politics nearly as closely as journalists do, and the mere fact of impeaching Trump, even if he’s not removed from office, puts a kind of stain on him, as it did to the Clinton administration, that might be meaningful to some number of voters. And I don’t think we can rule out that possibility, even if I remain somewhat skeptical of the argument for Democrats to focus all their energies on impeachment.

ross douthat

But look, two things can be true at once, right? It’s probably true that the House could vote to impeach him, the Senate could vote not to remove him from office, and two weeks later, we would have moved on to the next insane controversy. And in that sense, it’s not the most risky possible move the Democrats could make. At the same time, it’s also true that, in the midst of what promises to be a hard-fought primary campaign and then a hard-fought general election, you want to sort of play where you have a big advantage, and you don’t want to do things that, at least right now, are pretty unpopular. And so the Benghazi hearings were not a dispositive factor at all in American politics. But if the Republican House had tried to impeach Obama over one of the various things that different conservatives said were impeachable offenses, that would have been really foolish politics. Unless something is unearthed beyond what we know at the moment that radically changes public opinion, actually getting to impeachment would mean doing something unpopular, and doing something unpopular to no huge purpose.

michelle goldberg

But not that unpopular, right? I mean, if you look at the polls, the support for impeachment is about the same as support for Donald Trump, which is to say under 50 percent, but not negligible. This is not something that the American people, writ large, are going to rise up and reject. But I also think there’s a broader point, and Michael Brendan Dougherty, the conservative writer, actually made this, which is that Democrats need to be willing to sustain a certain amount of political damage in taking on Trump. Everybody kind of keeps hoping that somebody else will do the dirty work of taking Trump down.

ross douthat

But I guess my question for Michelle— but really for both of you — is, assume that we have this sort of coy process that generates a lot of hearings, is there something that you imagined happening in those hearings that would change the public’s view of all this in a way that I think now it’s fair to say Mueller’s testimony did not?

michelle goldberg

I’m not sure that it’s totally clear that Mueller’s testimony didn’t change anything. You know, I’ve spoken to Democratic members of Congress who say that, after Mueller’s testimony, the intensity and tempo of constituent calls demanding impeachment picked up significantly. But I think it’s hard to predict what impact playing all this out in public will be. I mean, given that Trump is a rock — when you turn it over, there’s just sort of every kind of insect, and vermin, and creepy crawly, that you turn over any part of Trump’s dealings, and there is going to be scandal and crime.

ross douthat

My view is basically that it would have to be some sort of investigative act that turns over a direct bribe that has solid evidence behind it from Middle Eastern foreign powers or something. For me, the idea that you’re going to successfully impeach a president for the orders he gave to subordinates that the subordinates ignored or didn’t obey has always been fanciful. And so you need something bigger than what Mueller offered, both in his testimony and in his report.

david leonhardt

I guess, Michelle, I’m pretty skeptical that he changed minds, because the initial polling shows no evidence of it, because how do you even summarize exactly what his testimony was? I don’t think the ratings were off the charts for it. I guess I’m interested in what you think is sort of the elevator pitch for impeachment that would win over people who aren’t yet won over to his unfitness the way you and I are.

michelle goldberg

I don’t know if you’re going to win over anybody who’s not already board with his unfitness. But to me the question is the gap between the people who believe he should be impeached and the people who just believe he shouldn’t be president. You know, voting someone out is what you do to a normal bad president. And so if you basically say that there is going to be no other sanction but the next election, you’re sort of establishing that as the new normal, as the new baseline. Or in other ways, basically say that Trump is different than a bad president.

david leonhardt

What should people look for going forward? I’m skeptical that impeachment is going to happen, meaning that the House is going to impeach Trump. Ross, what will you be looking for?

ross douthat

I’m looking for something outside the Russia investigation or outside the direct confines of the Russia investigation to emerge that offers evidence of Trump’s corruption or his family’s corruption that goes beyond the guests staying at the Trump hotels and so on.

david leonhardt

And Michelle, what about you?

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be looking for the hearings. I think that what the members of the Judiciary Committee argue is that what’s important at this point is not whether there is a House-wide vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry, but the shape of these hearings which they would like to model, I think, on the Watergate hearings if they can force all these people to testify. And so I’ll be looking for the disposition of their lawsuits. Which it seems like they have the law on their side, but we also have a court system full of Trumpist ideologues who might kind of disregard what the law says.

david leonhardt

O.K., we will leave it there for now, and we will take a quick break. [MUSICAL INTERLUDE] A couple weeks ago, we asked you to call in with any questions, or thoughts, or ideas you had, and we said we’d play a few of your comments on the show. Many of you called in. Thanks to all of you who did. We’re now going to play a selection of those comments and reply to them. So here we go.

rafael castro Hi, my name is Rafael Castro. I’m a Puerto Rican living in Florida. I would love for you to discuss how the Puerto Rico crisis is affecting the people down there, and how the federal government is reacting to that.

michelle goldberg

To me, the significance of Puerto Rico for national politics is that we kind of often will say, like, just wait till Trump faces a real disaster or a real emergency. Well Puerto Rico is, to me, the ultimate example of how he fares in that sort of situation. And it’s just that it happened to people who don’t have any real voice in our electoral system. So he hasn’t been held accountable, and it’s sort of been wiped from the public mind that he disastrously mismanaged this crisis. It’s such a stark example of his utter failure as an administrator. And then I’m fascinated by these most recent protests against the governor, and wish that the rest of the country could learn from those. And you see how mass demonstration can still really change things. And I keep thinking, where are our mass demonstrations? Where are the millions of people who should be on the streets until this nightmare comes to an end?

david leonhardt

That’s the lesson that I took from it, the power of popular protest. I mean, Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post had a really nice column recently where he pointed out, yes, democracy has mostly been in retreat over the last decade, but if you look around recently there have been the demonstrations in Puerto Rico that forced out the governor. There have been the demonstrations in Hong Kong. There have been demonstrations and protests in Sudan and Algeria and Slovakia and Moldova. And as Diehl noted, the outcome of all these movements is uncertain. But I took some real cheer from seeing people in Puerto Rico rise up and force the resignation of a pretty terrible governor.

ross douthat

I hate to, as always, be the angel of pessimism. But I think the Diehl argument could be flipped around a little bit, and you could say that, actually, protest politics is usually in a kind of symbiosis with state failure and governmental failure. We have so many examples in recent years, particularly all across the Arab Spring, of protest movements removing ineffective governments or corrupt governments, and then re-capitulating the existing problems. And I think honestly we should probably do a longer segment at some point about the specific issues that Puerto Rico faced long before the recent hurricane and Donald Trump. And I think it’s a really interesting problem with this sort of overlap of its peculiar political relationship to the United States, a sort overlay of attempted subsidies from the U.S., but also various restrictions and regulations that make it hard to do normal trade between Puerto Rico and the mainland. There’s a whole nest of incredibly challenging issues that aren’t reducible to a single government or the failures of the Trump administration. And you need a politics for the day after the protests at the very least.

david leonhardt

O.K. Thank you, Rafael. Next call.

ezra Hey there. My name is Ezra, and I had a question in regard to Elizabeth Warren’s student debt policy, and just what your overall opinions are, and just student debt in general.

david leonhardt

I am not a fan of universal student debt cancellation. College graduates, people have four-year degrees, overwhelmingly are able to repay their student debt. And if you have universal debt cancellation, what you end up doing is canceling debt for a lot of lawyers, and doctors, and Ivy League graduates who really don’t need their debt canceled at all. Now, Elizabeth Warren’s plan is not universal debt cancellation. She grappled with those critiques of the idea, and she came up instead with a plan where she draws the lines higher than I would, and she still forgives debt for people who have higher income than I think is a good idea — say, someone who’s 23 making $100,000 in Silicon Valley gets their debt forgiven under her plan. But for the most part her education plan, I think, is a good one. It would reorient more resources to people going to college. I think it would get more people to go to college. I guess what I would urge progressives to do is spend more time thinking about the problems in the education system for the true middle class, and less time thinking about the poetry major who ends up working at a barista after getting a four-year degree from a fancy liberal arts college, because there actually are not that many of those people. And given that government resources are finite, I think it’s much more important to help people who need help more.

michelle goldberg

But exactly what you just said, David, that there aren’t that many of those people is sort of why I think it’s a mistake to use that caricature to symbolize the debate about debt forgiveness, right? Because that’s the person that maybe is very unattractive as someone who’s deserving of a government bailout, but that’s usually not who we’re talking about when we’re talking about both debt and these unmanageable debt burdens. I’m curious to hear what Ross says, because it seems that conservatives who are worried about young people not getting married and not starting families should reckon with the fact that one reason they’re not doing that is because they have this albatross of debt hanging over them that makes doing things like buying a first home completely out of reach.

ross douthat

Yeah, I mean, look, I’m in favor of everything that raises the American birthrate. So there is a world where you can talk me into student debt forgiveness on exactly those grounds. My doubts about it, one, are similar to David’s in the sense that the people who are affected by this proposal are often not the people who are necessarily delaying family formation. It is not the people who have the strongest financial pressure on them, the lower middle class, in terms of delaying family formation and marriage, it’s people who are often more privileged. And the evidence that student debt is that crushing a burden, I think, is at best mixed. My issue is more sort of the moral hazard issue here, where if you do this kind of program, the question is how do you prevent colleges and universities from just sort of accepting this forgiveness as yet another effective subsidy for their own business model? The schools are complicit in this system, where you take government subsidies and use them to raise tuition. And the schools benefit financially from the debts the kids take on. So you can’t just have an endless cycle of government forgiving debts without dealing with the universities’ role in the problem.

michelle goldberg

Right, but can I just say, part of the universities’ role in the problem, particularly when you’re talking about public universities, is that because states have cut funding to higher education, what you end up seeing is a lot of these colleges and universities become very dependent on luring affluent out-of-state people who can pay $20,000, $23,000. That’s now what you pay for, say, a public university in Arizona. And then the university, in order to lure all of these students, builds all sorts of ever-fancy or resort amenities, deluxe gyms and gourmet eateries. In it’s this vicious cycle that has been substantially caused by the defunding of public higher education, making them no longer truly public and truly accessible.

david leonhardt

Yeah, and I guess what I would like to see is a mix of targeted debt relief for people, for example, who didn’t graduate but have debt, and then much more funding for state higher education systems. Because I agree with you, Michelle, the cuts, over the last decade to 12 years have really been horrific. And counterproductive — it’s one of the best investments that a government can make. O.K., now let’s listen to the next call.

tiffany Hi my name is Tiffany, and I live in Boston. I would like to see a future podcast about U.S.‘s role in liberalism in international relations, especially with regards to China. I think the U.S. has given up on servicing any kind of moral authority in the international order. It would be interesting to hear Michelle and Ross and David’s thoughts on this.

ross douthat

I think there’s this strange dynamic where, basically, under a series of administrations going back to the 1990s, the U.S. had its theory about China that the cause of liberalization would be served by deep economic engagement, and even the kind of entanglement that got described sometimes as “Chimerica,” where we were going to have that were strongly favorable to Chinese development, and with Chinese development, at some point, would come liberalization. And I think the evidence is pretty clear at this point that that policy was a failure. It was a failure in a modest way in the U.S. domestically, in the sense that, in being pro-Chinese-development, we ended up costing ourselves more in terms of industrial job losses than a lot of people anticipated. But then it was a bigger failure with China itself, where both sort of economic growth generally and the rise of internet technology in China has all been, so far, pretty effectively harnessed by Beijing to authoritarian ends, indeed extremely totalitarian ends in the case of the treatment of religious minorities, Christians and now especially Muslims in the Chinese west. So you can see Trump, in part, as a reaction to that failed approach. Trump is much more confrontational with China, and he betokens, I think, a much larger shift in how people in D.C. and elsewhere are thinking about China, that sort of assumes that we are back in a kind of great power conflict and ideological conflict. But I agree with Tiffany that even though Trump has pivoted U.S. policy, in certain ways, towards China, Trump himself is just a terrible vehicle for having any kind of moral component to this pivot. So there are, I think, people inside the Trump administration who want to make much more of an issue of China’s human rights abuses and what they’re doing in terms of surveillance and, effectively, religious persecution in the far west and so on. But I think it’s totally absurd — let’s be honest — to imagine Trump himself as a voice for that kind of message in a way that past U.S. presidents have generally tried to be.

michelle goldberg

Right. And so the irony is that because Trump has so much instinctive sympathy for authoritarianism, he’s actually been much softer on China in terms of its human rights record than any other U.S. president would be. So you could imagine a different hawkish Republican or a Republican who was a China hawk but maybe who was more in the Reagan mold, would both be economically and kind of militarily aggressive, but would also try to harness multilateral institutions to punish China for its concentration camps, to punish China for its growing surveillance state. You could have kind of imagine maybe something that was more like the Cold War, which had this moral overlay. Even if the moral overlay was often hypocritical, at least it spoke of a set of commitments that went beyond just kind of an extra half-a-percentage-point G.D.P. It’s a difficult thing that because U.S. intervention has been so disastrous in recent years, this whole humanitarian interventionist framework that was so powerful in Democratic politics, that’s all been sort of wiped away. And so there’s I think a lot of tenuousness about what a Democratic foreign policy vision should be that’s not interventionist, but also is not amoral and isolationist the way that Trump has been. And one obvious avenue for democratic engagement is through all of these multilateral institutions — through the U.N., through NATO, through the W.H.O. There’s all kinds of ways that the U.S. used to be able to exercise at least a degree of leadership on the world stage. And Trump has just taken all of that and completely set it on fire.

david leonhardt

TIffany, I agree with the implication of your question, which is that the United States should be a force for the international order and should care about being a moral authority in the world. And the way I think about it is I hope the next president actually can be a moral authority, unlike Donald Trump, but also approaches some of the world’s most important powers — China principal among them — with a little less naivete and a little more skepticism than presidents from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, Bush, and Obama all did. So thanks again for the call. We’ve got one more.

caller Hi, my name is Joe Hesh, and I want you guys to talk more about climate change, because I’m 16, and that’s the biggest thing I have to worry about.

michelle goldberg

I mean, I think you’re right, that is the biggest thing that you have to worry about. And we don’t talk about it so much. And one reason I think that it doesn’t figure in our political debates the way it should is because the scope of the problem is so overwhelming, the scale of loss that we’re facing is so staggering, and our political system is so obviously not up to the task of dealing either with preventing even-worse climate change or mitigating the effects that are already in play, these conversations take on this kind of circular quality, where instead of, what are we going to do about climate change? It often becomes, how can we talk about climate change in a way that will make people awake to the scale of the problem? And I think one of the only reasons for hope is that young people seem to be awake to the scale of the problem. They’re the ones who are going to have to live with the burning, drought-stricken world that their irresponsible elders have created for them.

ross douthat

David and I especially have wrangled, sometimes uncomfortably, over climate change a lot in past episodes. I think climate change is a real and pressing problem, but I think it is probably a mistake, especially for young people in the United States of America, to assume that it actually will be the worst problem that they’re likely to face in their personal and political lives.

david leonhardt

I think it may well be the worst problem. And even if it’s not the worst, I think it’s going to be bad. And so I appreciate the call. And the only advice I would have for you is, vote, get all your friends to vote, organize around it. Because as Michelle said, young people are pretty clear-eyed about the dangers and risks of climate change. And if the country had the policy that Americans under 35 wanted, we would be in better shape than we are. [MUSICAL INTERLUDE] So thank you again to everyone who called in and left us questions and comments. We’re sorry we weren’t able to play more of them. Please keep the questions and comments coming. Leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com, and we may include your comment in an upcoming episode. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. This week is my turn, and here’s what I have: bamboo straws. I hate paper straws, so as I’m sure many of our listeners are aware, there’s this movement to get away from plastic straws which people use once, and throw away, and they end up in the ocean, and they’re bad. And so a lot of restaurants have moved toward paper straws, which to me is a little bit like sucking on a pencil. It’s an extremely unpleasant feeling while enjoying a beverage. And my wife and my daughter came home knowing my very strong feelings about paper straws, and they said that they thought they had found a solution for me — and they are right — which is bamboo straws, which are bamboo. So when you’re done with them, you can keep them and use them again — and you should — or you can just throw them into a forest because they’re wood. And so they’re not bad for the environment, and they aren’t disgusting like paper straws. And so for people who don’t want to harm the environment with plastic straws, and do want to use a straw, I am recommending bamboo straws.

michelle goldberg

We actually have some metal straws that a friend gave to us a long time ago as part of this cocktail set, and they’re pretty great. Ross, what’s your straw policy?

ross douthat

I’m sorry, the whole plastic straws thing is a case study in that kind of dead ends that certain well-meaning forms of environmentalism end up in. Because there is no conceivable world in which phasing out plastic straws has a dramatic and meaningful environmental impact. And all you are doing is conditioning people to look upon environmentalism as this incredibly annoying thing that, with one voice is saying we have a climate catastrophe looming that’s going to destroy the world, and with the other voice is saying, and by the way, now you have to suck on a paper straw that dies in your mouth.

michelle goldberg

I don’t know that you actually have any evidence about kind of plastic straws being no big deal for the environment. But also isn’t the other argument that you often make that liberal responses to climate change are too far-reaching and too transformative, and are just an excuse to completely reorder society? And so conservatives complain about that. Well, here is that kind of very small, modest adaption that people are asking you to make and that you also find intolerable.

ross douthat

My understanding is that with many of the substitutes, including metal straws, that the fact that they’ll be offered by restaurants, but then people will take them from restaurants, and then obviously they will lose them and so on, that the manufacturing costs and the ecological impact end up being kind of a wash. Now, I don’t have the piece that made this argument ready to hand, so it could just be my internalized libertarian propaganda. But something like that has been true with plastic bag rules, too. There’s a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty about how much of an impact these proposals actually have. And plastic straws are just vastly superior technology. So if you’re going to get rid of them, you want to be certain that it’s having the impact that you want it to have.

david leonhardt

I feel like the downside of my recommendation was I dragged us into a political debate. But the upside is we snuck in three recommendations. Michelle says metal straws, Ross’s is good old plastic straws, and my recommendation is bamboo straws. [MUSICAL INTERLUDE] That is our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, please leave us a reading or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Kristen Schwab for Transmitter Media, and edited by Michael Garofalo. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We will see you back here next week. [THEME MUSIC PLAYING]

michelle goldberg

How often do you really need a straw? I mean, neither of you even wear lipstick.

david leonhardt