CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC HOST: And that`s HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us. "ALL IN" with Chris Hayes starts right now.
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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight on ALL IN.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. Chairman, there are 23 ayes and 17 nos.
REP. JERRY NADLER (D-NY): The article is agreed to.
HAYES: The impeachment of Donald J. Trump moves forward.
NADLER: The House Judiciary Committee has voted articles of impeachment against the President.
HAYES: Tonight, Democrats vote to remove our cheating president.
REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): The President was caught red-handed.
HAYES: As Donald Trump prepares for his trial and meets with his bagman at the White House.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I`ll do long or short.
HAYES: Plus, the Supreme Court stunning decision to take up the fight over Trump`s taxes. Connie Schultz and Senator Sherrod Brown on how Trumpism is playing in the Midwest. And filmmaker Michael Moore on the American takeaways from the Conservative blow out in the U.K.
BORIS JOHNSON, PRIME MINISTER, UNITED KINGDOM: Let`s go out and get on with it.
HAYES: Live from Studio 6A in Rockefeller Plaza, ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES: Hello. Good evening. Hey, there. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. It`s great to have all of you back in 30 Rock, a very -- a crazy and historic week, a very big day, a historic day, really. It`s just the fourth time in American history that articles of impeachment against the President of the United States are voted out of committee. They`re headed to the floor of the House of Representatives.
Now, the vote in the House Judiciary Committee happened this morning. It was not surprisingly -- it was a party-line vote 23 to 17. That vote coming on the heels of this marathon, at times very heated markup that was happening for two days. It`s worth noting, of course, that, you know, impeachments by definition are going to be contentious, right?
Like if you`re impeaching a president, something has gone deeply wrong in the mechanics of a political system. And yesterday`s session, you could see that. It started at 9:00 in the morning, it went into almost midnight, and the Republicans clearly wanted to push it into the dead of night so they could say Democrats voted in the dead of night. And then -- and then Jerry like adjourned them and they were mad about it. Which was weird because he was like, let`s go get some sleep and they`re like, how dare you, sir? I don`t know.
So then today, the 40 members of committee got to sleep and they came back in, they reconvened and they took the vote in just ten minutes. They approved two articles of impeachment, abuse of power, Article One, Article Two, obstruction of Congress. And those two articles are going to go to the floor for debate and a vote that we expect to happen sometime probably in the middle of next week.
And once that happens, then it`s going to go to the Senate for trial, which will probably be sometime in January. But apart from the historic, solemn, sad nature of today, it also really felt like a weird movie scene that was happening because all this stuff was happening at once. In screen one, you get the House Judiciary Committee debating and voting to impeach the President of the United States for his extortion scheme to get a foreign country to meddle in the American election. In screen two, you have Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the guy who runs the body that will hold the trial of the 45th President of the United States, basically out telling anyone that would listen, and he is aiding and abetting the president right now.
He said he is working in, "total coordination with the White House Council, which is a pretty remarkable thing to say, given all of the times that Republican senators have gone to reporters saying they don`t want to weigh in on impeachment, because they`re independent, impartial juror." Well, so long for that, right.
I mean, the guy who runs the Senate just went out to announce that there is no daylight between the Senate jury and the President`s defense attorney. They`re working together. And while that`s happening, while McConnell`s talking about the trial, there`s Rudy Giuliani walking into the White House, freshly back from Ukraine, where the President`s bagman and the President of the United States are still doing the thing that Donald Trump is being impeached over.
The exact scheme at the heart of all this is still being run today. Literally, when Rudy landed in New York on Saturday, he`s texting down the runway and he says that his phone rings and it`s the President of the United States saying, what did you get? More than you can imagine, Giuliani replies.
Now, remember, this is a guy who`s close associates Lev and Igor were indicted just a couple of months ago for their part in this very scheme, among other things. It`s a guy who according to multiple reports, is currently itself under criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York, the federal prosecutors. And there he is at the White House briefing the president of what he discovered in Ukraine.
All that happening at once. The House approves articles of impeachment, Mitch McConnell announces the fixes in and the crime it`s still happening in broad daylight. One of the things that really stuck with me while I was listening to the Democrats making the case for impeachment during interminable markup is they kept using this word -- they kept using the word cheating to describe what Donald Trump was doing, that the President was cheating.
And it was interesting because just this week, actually, my five-year-old son David was asking me and my wife Kate about what the whole impeachment thing was about, which is hard to explain to a five-year-old. But my wife, Kate, boiled it down pretty nicely. She said, the President got caught cheating, which is true, he got caught cheating. He`s still trying to cheat.
I mean, we`re impeaching the president because he`s trying to cheat on the next election. And not because he -- I mean, we kind of know that he likes to cheat, not because he cheated at golf, not because he cheated his contractors, or he`s cheated his taxes, he`s cheating on the basic fundamental thing that we use to select our representative government, right? The thing that we pride ourselves on fair and free elections.
And remember, this isn`t an abstract thing. Donald Trump did cheat the last time around. Donald Trump was -- and this is just a factual statement, Donald Trump is a beneficiary of two separate criminal conspiracies to get him elected. One of them engaged in by the Russians, we have the indictments in which the President actually openly solicited and encouraged their help. And one of them was engaged in by his former personal lawyer.
Michael Cohen is in jail right now for evading campaign law, campaign finance law, to avoid disclosure of Stormy Daniels pay off in the weeks before the election. And people forget this. Remember, Trump was hanging on by a thread after Access Hollywood. Remember that? All these Republicans coming on MSNBC calling on MSNBC, I can`t look at my daughter in the eye. Chaffetz on our air. I`ve always wondered like, did he ever look at his daughter again?
And now imagine after that moment, right, the low moment when he`s hanging on the thread that everyone learns that he had paid off adult performer to cover up an affair that really would have made an impact. But we didn`t find out because Donald Trump and Michael Cohen conspired to cheat to violate campaign finance law to make sure that didn`t happen.
So cheating an election is not just like cheating at something else like a sport, it`s not just unsporting, it`s like a profound assault on democracy. But here`s the thing and the thing that we`re seeing. The President`s supporters do not care. They don`t care. And the reason I think they don`t care is because, in their eyes, the President is cheating in furtherance of the will of the American people. That the ends justify the means.
And by the American people, as they keep saying over and over and over again in the hearings, what they mean is their base.
REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): This is about one basic fact. The Democrats have never accepted the will of the American people. Three weeks ago, Nancy Pelosi called the President of the United States an imposter. And the attacks on the president started before the election.
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HAYES: House Republicans throughout the hearings in the market, they kept talking about the will of the American people. It`s worth remembering always that more people voted against Donald Trump and voted for him, right, three million more people. Now, it`s true -- it`s true the Electoral College is the system we have and that`s why he`s the president, but that`s a very different thing than the will of the American people.
And then there`s also the fact that there was another election in 2018. And we know that the Republicans are in the minority sitting on that day as in the minority because nearly ten million more Americans voted for the other party in 2018.
So when they talk about -- when they talk about the will of the American people, they are talking about a minority of those people. They just are. That`s their base. But those are the people they view as real Americans. Those are the people that are worthy of representation. They are the rightful owners of this country`s destiny.
And we saw that on full display in the past couple days. You know, Republicans, they`ve been making all these silly signs. They`ve been putting up the hearing, which maybe you`ve seen it, maybe you haven`t. But they put up one sign behind the markup during the impeachment articles showing seven members of the House Democratic leadership and the states they`re from, California, New York, Massachusetts. And there were some tweets about like, oh, look at these out of touch cultural elite liberals, right? How dare they tell us what to do with our country. Those three states represent a fifth of the entire population of the country, right?
But honestly, it can feel like when you`re watching these hearings and when you`re watching politics, that House Republicans particularly, really don`t view that part of the country that does not support them as legitimate, that they are not worthy representation or political power or being able to like call the shots because those are not the right people. They`re not the rightful heirs to the American project.
And so like Donald Trump, they are all in on this cheating as a political project for the party. And it goes beyond this impeachment. You have gerrymandering in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina as soon as they get controlled by Republicans and voter suppression. These things have become just endemic in states that Republicans control because they want to control who they`re voting constituency is. They want the right people voting.
In Georgia, Brian Kemp is the governor, and he won by 50,000 votes over Stacey Abrams. Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did this incredibly thorough statistical analysis to look at Kemp`s own efforts to close down voting locations, precincts, and he found that they found that those attempts took away probably between 54,000 to 85,000 votes, and the people disproportionately affected were African Americans.
When Matt Bevin lost the Republican incumbent in Kentucky, when he lost in Kentucky, he gave an interview and he blamed his loss on Democrats`, I`m quoting him here, "harvesting votes in cities." As if the cities are not part of Kentucky. There -- that`s Kentucky. Louisville is part of Kentucky. And not just harvesting votes, harvesting votes is getting votes from the human beings who cast them. There`s a person on the other side of that vote.
But when you say harvesting votes in cities, you`re giving away how you think about those people. And so if you view it that way, then you could come to see cheating as righteous because the cheating is in furtherance of making sure that the right set of Americans keep their hold on power. And that is when you become a party of cheaters. And that`s what hangs in the balance with this vote on impeachment. And it`s why our first guest this morning voted to advance those articles on the floor of the House. Please welcome Democratic Congressman David Cicilline of Rhode Island.
Was that -- what was that vote about to you this morning? Was it about stopping -- was it about the election? Was that the sort of first and foremost thing in your mind?
REP. DAVID CICILLINE (D-RI): Absolutely. It was about preserving our democracy, preserving our rights as citizens of this great country to decide our own futures, to decide who will represent us in the White House, and who will really control our democracy.
And you know, one of the most extraordinary things about this country is it`s a country of self-government. It`s a democracy that`s an example to the world. If we let the President of the United States cheat in this election by dragging a foreign power in here to help him win, we will lose our democracy. We will have a dictatorship, we will have a monarchy, we will not have a democracy.
And so this was about preserving what has made this country so great and so strong and the envy of the world.
HAYES: There`s a lot of questions I want to ask you about. I want to follow up on that, because I heard that. I heard you say that on your colleagues. And then I thought, well, you`re going to impeach him. He`s probably not going to be convicted. And then he`s going to keep doing it. So what`s that mean?
CICILLINE: Well, we really don`t have a choice. You cannot watch this grave misconduct with the President. I mean, part of what the President does is he does a lot of this out the open. And most people think, is this really bad, because doing it out in the open?
HAYES: Right.
CICILLINE: Doing it out in the open doesn`t change the character of what he did. He used the tremendous power of his office, the power of the presidency, to drag a foreign power, to coerce a foreign leader to interfere in our election to help him. And if we don`t move forward with impeachment, we will be inviting him to continue to this as he is. I mean, this is a crime in progress.
HAYES: Yes. I mean, Rudy was there today. You use at a moment in the markup towards the end of the night, I think, where -- last night, where you were asking your colleagues like, basically, you`re like, is this OK? Do you -- would you do this? Do you think it`s fine to ask a foreign leader to investigate your political rival to go after that? And you were like, let the record reflect. No one raise their hand. Do you think they think it`s not OK?
CICILLINE: Well, I mean, we asked that question all throughout the hearing. Do you actually think it`s OK for the President of the United States to attempt to coerce a foreign government to interfere in an American presidential election? They never really answered it. So I wanted to ask them very directly, what about in your election? How many of you think would be OK to reach out to a foreign power to help you in your reelection? Raise your hand? And of course, nobody did. I`m trying to make the point to them, that this isn`t OK.
You, like many of your colleagues, seem genuinely personally disappointed or frustrated with your Republican colleagues. And I understand that, you know, part of these hearings, and the markup is for the public, but I could actually watch, you guys were speaking to each other for a very long time. At a certain point, I want to be like, they`re not going to listen. Like, I just -- I just want to be like, it`s -- they`re not. No one -- No one is persuading anyone here and yet -- and yet at a very human level, it really does feel to me like a lot you kept talking not because you thought people were looking at the camera, but you felt like if you just went five more minutes, you can get --
CICILLINE: And it`s true. I mean, maybe it`s -- you know, we`re exaggerating our ability. But, you know, you`re also like you love -- you know, we love our country. We love our democracy. We -- the idea that we have folks that are protecting this president who`s abused his power and to cheat an election, used hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money as leverage to try to do it.
And remember, Ukraine is at the tip of the spear. This is an emerging democracy at a very important part of the world, and they were attacked by the Russians. Russia took part of their country killing people in eastern Ukraine over 11,000 Ukrainians, and they`re at war, in an active war today. And so weakening them helps Vladimir Putin. And if this scheme worked, it would have helped Donald Trump.
HAYES: So what did you think -- I saw some of your colleagues today after Mitch McConnell went on Hannity and he said don`t worry, me and the President`s White House Council have this. We`re at lockstep. We`re going to do this together. The fix is in essentially. I saw Val Demings who`s a colleague of yours on that committee saying McConnell should recuse others. What do you think about that?
CICILLINE: Well, I mean, think about it. This is the fourth person of the jury, the fourth man of the jury saying I`m openly working with the chief defense counsel for the defendant. I mean, it`s an absurdity. It will make a mockery of the trial. It will undermine any confidence the American people might have in the process. You know, all these senators have been running and say, I can`t talk about impeachment. I`m a juror. You know, and they`re fixing there.
And, you know, except that, you know, there is -- they at least have the initial idea that they`re supposed to be impartial. They`re going to have to take an oath.
HAYES: The oath is that they -- the oath actually uses the word -- if I`m not mistaken, the oath uses impartial.
CICILLINE: That`s right. That`s right. And so the idea that they are supposed to listen to the evidence, evaluate the evidence, apply the provisions in the Constitution and make a decision as to whether or not this president should be removed, and the fact that they`re openly coordinating is a deeper front to our democracy and to the American people.
HAYES: Last question for you. I saw this tape. It`s Lindsey Graham talking to a bunch of reporters back when he`s a House manager for impeachment thinking about, you know, people say, what if this was Republican president? And Graham says, You know, I would, I would hope that we would have the courage to tell him to get out of town. It`s amazing. I will play it at some point. T.V., it`s a theater of the mind. I`m just -- for some reason I`m reciting it rather than playing the clip.
But do you run that experiment in your head? Do you think yourselves as you watch your colleagues there, you know how strong partisanship is, you know how strong it is and important it is in some ways to get things done in Washington today, do you run the experiment if I was on the other side, do I have the guts to break in my party to do the thing I think is right?
CICILLINE: All the time. I always say -- I would say to myself, imagine if Hillary Clinton won the election. And imagine if she tried to undermine NATO. She was -- welcomed assistance from Russia in her election. She appointed, you know, half criminals to her cabinet. She stood with Vladimir Putin and undermined her national security. She tried to undermine American leadership in the world. Would I -- she cozied up to Kim Jong-un, and on and on. Would I still support her? I would say no, I can`t believe she turned out this way.
Well, what if it meant she was going to run a primary candidate against me and run? Would I probably lose, and I would go do something else? I wouldn`t betray my country to continue this.
HAYES: We`ll see if you`re ever called upon. We`re looking through on that. Congressman David Cicilline, thank you very much.
CICILLINE: Thank you very much. My pleasure.
HAYES: All right, coming up, we got very big breaking news tonight from the Supreme Court. We`re going to tell you what that is. It`s important. It`s somewhat surprising. It may be somewhat ominous or not. Also, Michael Moore is here so don`t go anywhere.
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HAYES: The Trump administration has been fighting in a variety, of course, to basically stop anyone from getting their hands on the President`s financial records, particularly his tax returns. But whether it`s congressional committees acting in their lawful oversight role or the Manhattan district attorney investigating a crime, up until today, President Trump has lost every single court case. Oftentimes, his lawyers essentially getting left out of court.
But today, what do you know, the Roberts Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeals. The Trump administration seems to think it could count on five conservative justices to keep his tax returns away from America`s prying eyes. The Supreme Court`s decision will likely land in June right in the middle of an election year.
Here to talk about it, Jamal Greene, Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia University Law School. Good to see you. So, you clerked on the Supreme Court or for Justice Stevens?
JAMAL GREENE, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL: Yes, I did.
HAYES: And so, you sort of know a little bit about how this works. Were you surprised that the court was called granted -- the court agreed to hear these appeals?
GREENE: It wasn`t that surprising that they agreed to hear the cases. Anytime you`ve got the president asserting something and Congress is on the other side, you`re going to get the court`s attention. So not that surprising that they took it. As you said, you know, six losses below three courts of appeals so pretty important courts that are deciding against the president. So he`s rolling the dice here.
HAYES: You think he is? You think this is risky for him?
GREENE: I think there`s a pretty good chance he`s going to get a big loss in at least one of the cases. You know, one of the cases involves a criminal investigation by the Manhattan D.A. into really these hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. And he`s asserting that because he`s president, even though these are his private tax returns, even though they`re held by a third party, his accountant, this investigation can`t proceed at all, just because he`s president. And that that basic claim has been rejected by the Supreme Court already.
HAYES: Yes. So, that`s the case. So, in one of the cases, the Manhattan district attorney trying to get the records from his accounting firm, right? And that`s the case where in the -- in the trial court, his lawyer argued, I think, was in the trial court, maybe there`s any appeals, that if the president literally shot someone on Fifth Avenue in front of a bunch of witnesses, like the district attorney couldn`t subpoena people`s records.
GREENE: Yes. They -- so they said that they can investigate --
HAYES: Like the president could commit murder in Manhattan.
GREENE: -- that the state just can`t investigate him at all. And that`s a really out there claim. It`s more out there than Nixon`s claim in the 70s that was rejected by every member of the Supreme Court.
HAYES: So that`s, that`s one of them. And you think that he`s -- that seems to believe the place where he`s weakest. I mean going -- and that`s going to be a separate case they`re going to hear, and you think that`s -- that he is holding a bad hand as he comes before even the Roberts Court.
GREENE: Well, they`re basically bringing the cases together. I mean, there are three separate cases. Two of them involve Congress, one of them involves this Manhattan D.A. case. The Congress case is a little bit more interesting, still a really broad claim that he`s making in that case where the basic argument is that Congress needs to, when it`s investigating the president, investigating his financial records, needs to be operating in pursuit of a legislative purpose. So, connected to lawmaking. And courts in the past, I`ve interpreted that very, very broadly. So, sort of anything that Congress can legislate about, they can investigate it.
HAYES: Yes, it almost seems to me that you could just say, look, right now the law doesn`t require presidents to release their taxes. That`s a law we think will be useful for transparency, anti-corruption purposes, ergo, we would like to see the record of this President`s taxes to see if we`re justified in thinking that you should have to release them. Legislative intent solved.
GREENE: Well, that`s basically the argument. And that sort of argument has been accepted in the past as -- you don`t really want to defer to Congress when it`s saying it has to -- it might legislate about something, instead of making -- you know, the invest the oversight power that Congress is trying to execute here has been part of parliamentary procedure before this was even a country. So, it`s a very old power that courts have been reluctant to interfere with.
HAYES: I guess the final question here is a kind of legal realism, cynicism question. I know that people like yourself, my wife also clerked for Justice Stevens. You know, they really don`t view the court cynically. They really do view it as good faith people wrestling with very difficult issues.
The cynical view is they`ve got five republican appointed justices, and they`re going to cape for their dude. And when push comes to shove, it`s the Roberts Court and he`s going to be there to back up President Trump to keep embarrassing details from the public. What do you think of that cynical view?
GREENE: Well, you can be kind of cynical without being all the way -- so Roberts himself has had a number of cases where he`s decided against the Trump administration, the census case, for example, last year, the Affordable Care Act case a number of years ago. So, he`s got an eye on the long term and sometimes that means that he might have to show that the court has to have independence.
HAYES: All right, Jamal Greene, thank you very much for that. It was illuminating. Up next, special guest Michael Moore is here in studio. Stick around.
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HAYES: There`s a Democratic debate next week in Los Angeles. Today, all seven candidates who qualified threatened not to attend the debate, because it would involve crossing a picket line. Workers are -- they`re in contract dispute with the food service provider at Loyola Marymount University where the debate will take place.
The paradox here is the Democratic party is a party of organized labor even as organized labor has been eviscerated, and that has been a key part of the problem the party has faced across the country, particularly throughout the industrial Midwest.
Joining me now to talk about this here to talk about this academy award winning filmmaker and activist Michael Moore.
Hey, how are you?
Have a seat.
MICHAEL MOORE, FILMMAKER: Thank you.
HAYES: It was interesting. All the candidates came out and said we`re not going to cross the picket line. Tom Perez said we`re not going to cross the picket line, which is as it should be. But then it makes you realize like how much union membership, union identity has declined in the last 20 years. And when people say, wow, what`s gone wrong in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, I always seem to think like that`s one of the first places to look is that.
MOORE: My family, my uncle, was in the Flint sit down strike 1936. It began in December right about this time of year. And they took over the factories for 44 days in the middle of winter. And the UAE was formed and had their first victory when they forced General Motors to acknowledge the union and got something like -- I don`t know what it was -- a dollar a day.
But, I mean, so I`ve lived this life because then I was raised in a union family. And my dad, whose job it was his entire work life was to build AC spark plugs, on the General Motors assembly line. What I got out of that as a child growing up there was completely free health care, no co-pays, no deductibles, free dental, complete, free eye care. I mean, it was just a four weeks paid vacation, factory workers.
HAYES: I know.
MOORE: And then finally the last benefit they got was free lawyers. Any time you needed a lawyer for a civil matter, the union provided it for you.
HAYES: Your dad was just like suing people left and right.
MOORE: Yes. And it`s like who wouldn`t want that? That`s like every year one of the polling companies does a poll and has asked this question now for 50 years, do you support the idea, the concept of labor unions? Do you think labor unions are a good idea? And I don`t know how many years it`s been, it`s been over 50 percent, sometimes over 60 percent of the American public, even though the only -- only a small percentage of them.
HAYES: Under 10 percent, particularly in the private sector.
MOORE: Yes, belong to a union. They love the idea of somebody fight for them and stand up for them for the things that they deserve.
HAYES: You know, I was thinking about this question and talking to you in the context of last night`s UK election results where conservatives swept to victories. And they swept to victories in places roughly analogous, in some ways -- I mean they even call it the Rust belt in UK -- areas that were traditionally Labour strongholds that are the white working class, so to speak. And they swept to power there, and you don`t want to over analogize -- it`s a very different situations. Obviously, Brexit front in mind, but the sort of Labour -- the Corbyn Labour approach, right, was an approach that I think you`ve urged and others in the Democratic Party which is, look, the only way you can get these folks back who are being pulled away by the Trumps of the world and the Brexit lure of the sort of culture politics, immigration politics, is to give them a forthright economic message that says we`re going to fight for you on economic grounds.
And Corbyn did try to do that last night, and it didn`t work that well. And I wonder like what you think about that and how it colors your thinking about what that appeal looks like here in the U.S.?
MOORE: Wow, that`s a lot to unpack there.
HAYES: I know it`s a lot. I`ve been thinking a lot about this since last night.
MOORE: Well, first of all, let me say this, a week before the first Brexit vote I was in the UK and I saw what was going on. And in fact I called up Corbyn`s office to see if he`d go have a drink with me, and he did. And so we talked about this.
It was clear to me at the time that he was of two minds about Brexit.
HAYES: Clearly, yes.
MOORE: That if you can`t get the message clear -- he was against it for all the right reasons, we can`t leave Europe. We are Europe. Europe would have died had we not given a million lives or so to keep it -- yes. So there wouldn`t be a Europe without what Britain did.
On the other hand, he didn`t want to desert what he felt was a strong feeling in the working class base of the Labour Party of wanting to get out.
This is -- the message here is that Democrats need to lead, not follow. Democrats need to say, no, this is the way it should be and this is what we`re going to fight for even if--
HAYES: You see the message and that`s interesting, because I think it`s a critique -- I`ve seen one of the lessons is you can`t be half in and half out, which is I think one of the big things that people are saying in the wake of this.
MOORE: You to stop when you think working class -- and I`ve said this to you before -- when you think working class, you can`t be thinking lunch bucket Joe, some white guy, you know, who`s like I`m off to work, you know- -
HAYES: Well, but you want lunch bucket Joe -- I mean, you want those people in your party, too?
MOORE: I want a lot of things but I`m not going to get my pony for Christmas -- so, therefore -- no, I`m serious about this, because now we`re closer to the election and we all tried at Thanksgiving dinner to convince the conservative brother-in-law of the wrongness of his ways, but he`s three years deep into pro-Trump. He`s lost. And we have to kind of give up on them, because we don`t have the time.
All of our time right now between now and next November, has to be getting out the largest political party in America, the non-voters. 100 million people who do not vote.
HAYES: Although, let me just -- one counter to that is that a lot of those people are Trump voters. Like, one of the things that I think is a cautionary thing that Democrats should understand is there is a pool of non-voting people who would support Donald Trump if they voted that`s in the tens of millions.
MOORE: I got it. So, let me put it this way, then, the -- when you think working class, the majority of the working class and the minimum wage workers these days, the majority of them are women, not guys. The majority of them are people of color and the majority are young. 18 to 35 make the least amount of wages.
So, that`s who we should -- how can we help our young people? How can we help people on the lower rungs of the ladder? And how can we finally in our lifetime pay women the same as men? You know, if we can get on that horse, we win.
HAYES: You know, one of the other similarities, and this is so striking in all the polling is the age cross tabs. I mean, you know, 18 to 34 in the UK wildly -- went well to Labour, and 65 and older swung wildly to the Torries. And if you look at our own politics, like, you can sketch these generational gradients through the economy where the youngest cohort, people 35 and under, are very far to the left of where 65 and over--
MOORE: You know why? Because it`s their future. And they see that the only way to save the planet, to save what we have, what has not been shredded by Trump, is to go that way. That`s why the Quinnipiac Poll yesterday of young people, 18 to 35, Bernie 52 percent. And the millennial candidate, Mayor Pete, 2 percent of 18 to 35 rural voters.
HAYES: In fact, in that Quinnipiac poll that was interesting to me, Sanders, 52 percent. Sanders, Warren and Andrew Yang to combined for 75 percent of that age cohort, which is in a different universe from 65 and older.
Although, from a voting perspective the issue is people over 65 vote much more reliably both in primaries and general election.
MOORE: That`s not going to happen this time. Young people--
HAYES: That`s the question.
MOORE: I know it because I saw it in Michigan last year in the off-year election. We put two ballot proposals on the ballot -- legalize marijuana fully and make gerrymandering and voter suppression a crime and they both passed with 60 percent of the vote, and that`s because -- we doubled the youth vote from the last off-year in 2014 to 2018. We`ll do that again if we have the right candidate and the right proposals on the ballot next year.
HAYES: It`s funny you mentioned that on marijuana the Data for Progress, which is a sort of digital think tank that releases these sort of really interesting polling reports had one famously been like if you want to convert young non-voters into voters, like marijuana legalization, is incredibly, incredibly persuasive.
Not in a like -- not in a jokey way, in an actually like this is an issue that`s right on the merits and is very good politics among a cohort of people that you can energize.
MOORE: Yes, and is this the next step now you`ve got a studio audience, the next will be free marijuana for everyone? It`s Friday night.
HAYES: We`re all just going to get high.
MOORE: But seriously let me say this. That it`s so interesting that the youngest group of voters is for the oldest candidate. And that`s why -- the reason for that is they see him doing nothing but fighting and caring about their future. Bernie doesn`t have a future.
Bernie -- no, seriously when we say future I`m sad to say this but 30 years from now Bernie won`t be with us.
HAYES: This is an actuarial fact, yes.
MOORE: If you are 20, in 30 years you`re going to be alive and you`re going to be living on a planet that is choking to death. And they know that the moderate candidates, the ones that are in the middle, the ones that want to play it safe, young people know this is not the time to play it safe. They are fighting for their future. And that is why I believe they will come out if we have the right candidate.
HAYES: I think that`s true.
I think the other thing, which I think that our political system hasn`t gotten their mind around is the depth of the effect of the great recession, particularly on that cohort. I mean, the data is if you graduate into a financial crisis and a weak labor market your earnings and your job prospects for the next 20 years are hurt.
And so there`s this entire cohort of people -- there`s all these people that are like, well, we got out of the recession and the unemployment is 3.5 percent and that`s that. For the entire cohort of people, that was the defining cataclysm of becoming an adult in America. And I think that lingers and that lasts.
MOORE: Let me say something else about the unions in the UK and the unions here. The unions in Europe after World War II decided there had to be universal health care, socialized medicine. But they went about it not to get it for their union members, they got it -- they passed laws for everybody. The unions in Europe said everybody`s got to have it, not just union members.
Our unions made sure that my dad and other union members had their health care, but they didn`t work at trying to get it for everybody. And it created -- it created in like even where I lived--
HAYES: That`s a slightly over personified history, but I take your point.
MOORE: Yes, no, but it`s not that didn`t support it, but they have to fight for it like they fought for their own selves. We only win when we win together, not just for our little group, our little union or our little thing.
And this is why -- I have to say this, when the Democrats talk about, you know, people don`t want to give up their private health insurance, well, you know, that`s the wrong way to look at this. It`s not private health insurance, your company controls it. And we saw with the General Motors strike, they cut that insurance off three days into the strike, because they have the power to do it. They don`t have the power to do it when your health care is guaranteed by your government that you voted for, that is the way you have to have it.
The private thing still leaves it in the hands of your employer. Your boss could wake up tomorrow and say screw it, no health care.
HAYES: It happens all--
MOORE: It does.
HAYES: --my health care has changed like three times since I worked at MSNBC. Like it happens all the time. People -- you know, the idea that like you have some connection to it when it`s employer provided is--
MOORE: Is crazy and it`s the wrong way to look at it.
HAYES: Michael Moore, thank you so much for having me over.
MOORE: Thank you so much for having me over. Thank you.
HAYES: Still to come, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz and her husband, United States Senator Sherrod Brown will both join me in studio. You don`t want to miss that. Stick around.
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HAYES: All right, so my next two guests are from the state of Ohio, which if you`re going to pick a state with the most receptive audience to Trump and Trumpism, there`s a case that`s as good a state as any, it`s part of the industrial Midwest, a huge number of white working class voters, a lot of people, particularly frustrated about trade. Trump carried it easily. He beat Hillary Clinton by about 8 points, which is higher margin than he won in the state of Georgia.
And given that unemployment in Ohio has gone down during Trump`s tenure, you would think if there`s anywhere that he is doing well it would be there. And yet, polling company Morning Consult, has him five points under water in approval in the state, which I actually found genuinely surprising. It makes me wonder about the broader appeal of his kind of politics in the places it is most designed to appeal to.
So, I thought we`d talk to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz, who used to be with Cleveland Plain Dealer, she got her first novel, The Daughters of Eerie Town, coming out next year, which I cannot wait to read; and Senator -- Democratic Senator from Ohio, author of Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America, Sherrod Brown. Good to have you guys here.
This is my Ohio pal.
You guys know each other, right?
No, I`m just curious in a general sense what the view from the ground of Ohio looks like to you right now at this moment?
CONNIE SCHULTZ, AUTHOR: Well, as you know Sherrod ran for re-election last year. Throughout the campaign, we didn`t let him sit in on any of these focus groups, but we held focus groups with Trump voters throughout the state.
And something started happening as we got closer to November. The guys, the men, were lost to us. I remember sitting there listening to them talk about how John McCain was not a war hero, because he`d been a prisoner two weeks after he had died, so we know where they are--
HAYES: Wow. Just like just literally parroting -- saying the thing--
SCHULTZ: Exactly. But some of the women were starting to peel off, and it was over two issues, family separations and health care. I suspect if we were do those focus groups now with like the shootings where somebody died, I suspect guns would become more of an issue as well.
But it made me optimistic about some of the women.
HAYES: So you saw in real-time that gender split, which the gender splits are wild. Right now on impeachment they`re like 15 or 20 points apart, men and women. You saw that happening in real-time during the campaign.
SCHULTZ: Well, and you know we split -- we never have women in the same room with men because I`m sure it`ll stun you men will talk over women frequently, so we put the women--
HAYES: Oh, you gender segregated them. It was like the wailing wall.
SCHULTZ: Oh, yes. And they don`t know we`re there. And, yes, it was pretty interesting how dramatically different they were towards the end.
HAYES: On the economy -- so you announced today, people probably don`t know this, but when you came first to the House was right around the time the big kind of Democratic pivot towards big trade deals. And your first book is about how they were bad, which I think is quite prescient.
At the time it was a very lonely voice in the wilderness -- I actually read that book when I wrote my first profile of you. It`s a good book and it stands up.
You announced today that you were going to vote for this USMCA, which is the deal the president struck and then was sort of changed a bit by the Democrats. Why are you voting for that--
SEN. SHERROD BROWN, (D) OHIO: More than a bit.
HAYES: Yes. So why are you voting for that? And how do you think that plays, works in the politics in your state?
BROWN: We`ll start with this, that in an addition to what Connie said, workers in Ohio more and more are seeing that Trump betrays workers. He opposes a minimum wage increase, hadn`t been increased in 10 years. He took overtime pay away from about 50,000 Ohioans, on this trade deal--
HAYES: Wait, let me just stop you right there, those are true. Both of those statements are true, but do people know that, I guess is my question?
BROWN: People are learning that. And it`s the job of progressives and the job of Democrats and the job of all of us to make sure that people to know that Trump betrays workers. He appoints people to the Supreme Court that put their thumb on the scales of justice, choosing corporations over workers and Wall Street over consumers.
He has -- what he`s done on health care trying to take -- Ohio had 900,000 people have health insurance today because of the Affordable Care Act that Trump has gone to court -- first he tried through congress, failed by one vote, then he went -- now he`s in court in Texas,. which could have, if he wins that we could many of those gains.
So, people more and more seeing that he`s betrayed them. The economy in Ohio is growing at a slower rate than nationally. I think people more and more are seeing that the Obama economy, the last three years, actually had higher rates of growth than the Trump years in a comparable time, following one another. So I think that people increasingly are hearing that.
On the trade stuff, Trump promised to renegotiate NAFTA. He came out -- these trade agreements are all pro-corporate trade agreements. They never consider workers. The first -- he came out with his proposal. It was another corporate trade deal two years ago, and we have fought and fought and fought, Speaker Pelosi and Senator Wyden from Oregon and I with the labor movement to get strong labor standards, labor enforcement, Trump continued to resist. And we won on it. So this trade agreement now in spite of Trump has the strongest labor standards we`ve ever had.
HAYES: You were -- both of you were on a tour that you did at the sort of beginning of this election season.
SCHULTZ: Right.
HAYES: And you wrote an incredible book of the first campaign in which you and Sherrod were together. It was a phenomenal campaign memoir -- And His Lovely Wife I believe is the title.
SCHULTZ: Which we all love to be called that so much.
HAYES: Exactly.
We introduced him as your husband. I hope you caught that.
SCHULTZ: I did hear that. Yes, it made my night.
HAYES: And, you know, and I`m actually just curious -- again, this is less of a political question than a human one, what it was like to think about weighing the pros and cons of entering into the maelstrom of a presidential campaign.
SCHULTZ: I think it`s hard for people who have never done it to comprehend what all is at play there, because you are talking about not just affecting your marriage -- I mean, if he was going to do it I was all in, I was clear on that. But we have grown children, we have seven grandchildren.
HAYES: Who you want to see and hang out with--
SCHULTZ: Well, more than that, we felt protective of them. We know how dirty, how nasty it`s going to get. But I was just describing to someone, I think it was yesterday, one of the things that really hit me about Sherrod, when we started getting serious and we had a big meeting with our senior staff on the campaign and people who know us well, it did not occur to Sherrod until we actually said he started talking about we`re going to do this in the senate this year, we got this bill. And we looked at him and I said, you know, you`re not going to be that senator if you run for president.
And the look -- I always think you looked stricken, because that hadn`t occurred to you. And you just won for reelection, right. And it really hit him.
HAYES: That makes me th ink that you like your job as a U.S. senator.
BROWN: Yes, I can`t believe I get to this.
HAYES: It`s funny you say that because I feel like a lot of U.S. senators don`t feel that way, and particularly in McConnell`s senate feel very frustrated.
BROWN: Well, it is. But it`s all that, and as Connie`s book publisher says, there`s no whining on the yacht. I mean, you get to do this job. You don`t complain. But it`s not just going to the floor and voting and going to committees and asking questions, it`s what you do outside of that.
One of the things I spend a lot of time doing is I call heads of insurance companies and hospitals and banks in Ohio and I ask them, I talk to them about raising their minimum wage to $15. A number of them have done it, not that my call was a part of it, that`s perhaps part of the reason. But then they ask the next question how about the people, how about the custodians and security people and the food service people? Well, they`re contracted. I don`t know what they make.
Well, you`re CEO of the company that contracts them. You can figure that out. So you--
SCHULTZ: You`re so annoying and I love it.
BROWN: But you use this title of senator to do all kinds of things in your state to help working families, and that all comes out of the dignity of work that -- Dr. King said no job is menial if it pays an adequate wage. And my job is to help make sure that happens.
HAYES: Your most recent book is about some of the senators that had the desk you have. So many of them have interesting ideological trajectories that put them in places where they find themselves arguing for progressive positions that you wouldn`t necessarily have counted on. I wonder like how much you think those trajectories are still possible in our time?
BROWN: I think at some point -- Al Gore Sr., the vice president -- former vice president`s father, held the desk that I sit in, now desk 88, and Senators -- the way I came to this was I -- when you decide where you`re going to sit on the senate floor, one of the things I looked at is you pull your desk drawer out and senators actually like middle school carve their names in it.
And Bob, there was one name just said Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy was sitting nearby. And I said, Ted, come here a second. I said which brother is this. He said it`s got to be Bobby`s, I have Jack`s desk.
So -- but Gore in his last term, he voted against Civil Rights in 1964. His son, the future vice president and his daughter, who I believe became an elected official in New Jersey, both implored him to vote for it. He decided not to. He then voted for voting rights the next year. He then broke with the Democratic president, opposed the war in Vietnam, only politician in Tennessee, then he lost in 1970 because he was willing to stand up to Nixon on two racist judges and Nixon went after him.
But he made a decision late in his career. I`m willing to lose an election. And politicians that are willing to lose an election are always better at their jobs.
SCHULTZ: Yes, they sure are.
HAYES: Connie Schultz and Sherrod Brown, thank you so much for joining us tonight. It`s great to have you here.
Don`t go anywhere, Rachel Maddow is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Thank you all for joining us so much tonight. To everywhere here at Studio 6A, you watching at home, thank you for making these live audience shows such a success this year. We`ve got many to come. But until then, that is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.
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