What does this do for the Republican revolution in Washington? Does it speed it up, slow it down? Does it make any difference? I

think the impact will be very slight.

The revolution, as it were, is already on track in the form of a budget resolution, which every Republican in the Senate has already voted for.

What the Finance Committee has to do now... is put in the specific changes that get you the amount of cuts, the amount of tax cuts, the amount of Medicare cuts, in precise language.

That is a difficult but largely mechanical task.

So it wouldn't make any difference

What difference will there be that a more conservative Senator Roth will be in charge of the committee rather than a more moderate Senator Passler?

Well, you might argue a more willing-to-experiment Senator Roth.

Were there any lingering benefits from studying acting in the rest of your life?

I don't think it benefited me very much as an actor, which I was never very good at.

I think it helped me a lot as a writer.

I tell you, the immediate thing I think writers and actors could understand about this is...

One of the things you learn that acting class will help you discover much quicker than you ever will through your own experience as a writer is where you don't need a line.

And that's, I see it in writing all the time, where for me, the scene is over, it's done, but the writer feels the need to give someone else this button of some kind on the scene to complete a thought in an excessively obvious way.

And I had a great moment one day on the West Wing set with Richard Schiff, played Toby in the show.

I wondered how he had become such a passionate champion for the needs of Malawi school kids.

The part was written almost entirely by Lawrence O'Donnell, and his years of experience as a member of Senator Moynihan's staff gave his stories a great sense of reality.

I was very lucky to get that assignment.

John Wells, who was running the show, first of all, uh, came into the writers' room one day and said, to our delight, that he has Alan Alda to come to the show.

John had pulled that off, uh, on his own.

We knew that's, that's who he was going for and that's who he got.

And, uh, Alan, you were to play, uh, you know, the RepublicanPresidential candidate in a show that had been about a Democratic president, and to the extent that the audience is rooting, they're, they're rooting on that side of, of the show.

And so the theory of, of the drama going forward was, um, of course the Republican's gonna lose, but the audience can't know that.

But there are people who don't do that, I guess.

Yeah.

You know, when I, when I, i- you know, when I was there, when I was working in the Senate, the Republicans had not controlled the House of Representatives-...

in my lifetime, literally in my lifetime, okay? [laughs] And so the House was like a Soviet institution.

The minority had absolutely no rights, and here's the important thing about the minority, the Republican minority in the House: they had no expectations, none.

They never expected to be allowed in the room where a governing decision would be made, and they never were in the House of Representatives.

And some of them, you know, shared enough, uh, policy agreements with Democrats that they would join a, a lot of different kinds of legislation, especially, you know, defense funding and, uh, infrastructure spending was non-controversial in those days.

There was a lot of stuff that was in the middle of the field, you know, that they got to participate in, but no House chair- chairman ever put something in a bill because a Republican member of the committee [laughs] wanted it, you know? And so, so they just got to vote on the product of the- that this other party was, was putting out.

Mm

Mm-hmm

...

Eastern District of Virginia by the judges who actually run that district, uh, from the bench, and it's a Trump judge.

It's a judge named, uh, David Novak, uh, who, uh, a Trump appointee, I'm reading from the New York Times reports-

Mm-hmm

... of the breaking news, warned Ms. Halligan that continuing to file court papers in which she is listed as the US attorney would be, quote, "A false statement made in direct defiance of valid court orders," end quote, and that is a federal crime.

So [chuckles] she had to have a federal judge tell her, "You do this again, you are committing a federal crime.

In fact, you've already committed a federal crime." They got her out of there tonight, and so Donald Trump's choice of a completely incompetent US attorney to try to prosecute James Comey and Letitia James is now finally out of there.

(laughs)

Um, but I miss Staten Island.

Uh, so my job, there's a, someone, there's someone there, right, who has the business cards that I used to have, staff director of the Senate Finance Committee, staff director of the Committee on Environment and Public Works before that, uh, you know, chief of staff to a senator, that sort of thing.

Th- those job titles exist and the jobs don't exist, uh, those legislative jobs especially, because they don't legislate that way anymore.

They don't govern, you know, the- the committees don't govern, the members don't govern, the stuff that gets passed is passed through this horrible, uh, centralized thing that's kind of run out of the Speaker's office and the majority leader's office of each body, and the members now are, you know, they're like silent jurors, uh, who, who just get to vote, you know, in the end and they vote th- uh, the way they're told.

And the c- the work we were doing there was just the most important work, uh, I've ever done and will ever be close to, and it was so real and it was so powerful and- and you, it- in- in, in, sometimes in real granular detail and other times in bigger shapes, you know, of, of things like, you know, what should the top income tax bracket be, what should the bottom bracket be, uh, in a giant, you know, budget bill, uh, a- along, along with Medicaid, Medicare issues that were all in the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee.

Welfare was there, Social Security, everything.

Yeah.

I will say that.

So I haven't read the book.

Uh, and, and so that passage that you mentioned, uh, that has gotten a lot of, uh, controversial coverage, uh, where she talks about, uh, Joe Biden making the decision to s- to run for, uh, a second term and then it being up to him in the end to decide not to, and she uses the word recklessness in that passage and, and r- and, and tonight in discussions with you, she includes herself in that-

Yeah.

And, and, uh, wh- what I was, was struck by, uh, in all those campaigns that you mentioned, Rachel, is, you know, here's somebody who won every campaign, uh, that she ran in, uh, right up to the United States Senate, you know, and her first setback was in that primary, uh, running for president.

And so, uh, this, th- she was a winner in California politics, as you know.

She was on this program for the first time when she was San Francisco district attorney, uh, again when she was attorney general, and, uh, and I remember someone, uh, telling me, you know, before I ever knew anything about her, you know, someone in Hollywood telling me about her, and talking about her, this was, uh, the, the, basically Black political Hollywood already knew about her.

(laughs).

And, and in one sentence, my entire culture was explained to me.

Um, I, I, I suddenly understood everything (laughs) that surrounded me from Little League, you know, (laughs) to high school, uh, to college and beyond.

It was like, "Oh, thank you.

Thank you, Carol O'Connor.

I get it." And so, you know, the, the last place on Earth I expected to learn the single most important thing that I hadn't yet learned, uh, and put into words about my culture was right there on the Merv Griffin Show.

Anyway, yesterday, Sonia Sotomayor on The View talked about the responsibility that voters have to educate themselves, and she used the word "educate." She talked about, you know, "Read my dissent.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, can you explain this to me?

Yeah, of course they reckoned, and this is the most ludicrous political challenge that the news media, and the news media alone, has decided to pose to one side of our politics.

And never posed anything like it to the other side of our politics about the convicted felon who that side of our politics fully embraced every day, so much so that they would compete to get in the front row of his criminal trial, to show how much they s- personally supported paying off porn stars for their silence, okay? There's never been any kind of similar media demand and, you know, book publishing demand, you know, that the Republicans deal with the, to put it mildly, range of infirmities, moral to intellectual, in Donald Trump.

Uh, no, I think any Democrat who feels like they have to explain, you know, why they didn't think it was a good idea or they didn't jump up and down as, as soon as they read their first op-ed piece saying Biden should drop out in the middle of a presidential campaign, why they didn't embrace that, why they didn't embrace the thing that has never happened before in history.

And let me define for a moment, and this is the, this is, this is the section of the puzzle that every one of these, you know, uh, theories of the case decidedly avoids.

The definition of the middle of a presidential campaign, the middle is two years into a presidential term because the puzzle parts that are left out every time this subject comes up is that a presidential campaign is not two years long or one year long.

It is four years long, okay? Four years long.

And I just think that's a bit ironic.