Amanda Carpenter

I've heard a lot in recent years from people sharing their fears about what could happen with these midterms: federal agents deployed to intimidate voters, the post office interfering with the delivery of ballots, or even the federal government coming up with some pretext to, quote-unquote, "cancel the elections." My next guest is someone who's been thinking and writing and preparing for all of this for several years now.

Amanda Carpenter is with Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group explicitly working against authoritarianism in America.

She grew up in Michigan, went to college in Indiana.

After working in conservative journalism and politics, including as an advisor and speechwriter for Ted Cruz, she has become an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.

And so if you don't want them to be tiltable, have a massive turnout so that they're not tiltable, and the direction is clearly, clearly going in one way or the other.

All right, we're gonna take a break on the program.

Uh, we are speaking with Amanda Carpenter of the group Protect Democracy, which works to safeguard the integrity of American democracy and elections, and I guess to be blunt about it, to prevent authoritarianism here in America.

We taped this conversation in advance, so no calls today, but you can always let us know what you thought.

To this day, though, no one knows exactly where the rest of the money is coming from.

And the Bulwark's Amanda Carpenter says that is a big problem.

If a president can both spend money Congress refused to give him and refuse to spend money Congress ordered him to spend, Congress no longer has the spending power because the president has aggregated it to himself.

And once Congress gives up this fundamental purpose, deciding how the country will spend its money, it starts getting harder to see the point of Congress at all.

It's just politically dumb, and it seems to be a lose-lose no matter who's paying for it.

It's a lose-lose unless you're somebody who's grabbing power.

And if Congress is giving you that power or just refusing to fight you on taking that power, I mean, I think Amanda Carpenter has a point.

She has a great point.

And I want to share just a clip from a couple of Republicans.

This is from the Bulwark podcast, and it's Tim Miller and Amanda Carpenter, longtime Republican operatives.

And they lay out how both of these two things have completely just, they felled.

And I think Republicans went into November thinking that people would be mad about a stolen election, worried about integrity.

And so...

I believe it's just falling apart, and this is really well laid out by a couple of Republicans.

Take a listen to what Tim Miller and Amanda Carpenter say about this issue of the election and lawfare by Democrats and how the agenda that Trump had hoped to really push and campaign on.

Remember, he gave a primetime address on this.

But first, formerly with The Bulwark, she's now a writer and editor at protectdemocracy.org. Their Substack is If You Can Keep It.

It's Amanda Carpenter.

What's up, girl?

Hey, I think I should be complimented be, by being compared to Charli XCX, but I'm not totally sure.