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Ezra Klein: “The Democratic Party is very legalistic. It's got a lot of…”

Featuring: Ezra Klein, Liberal | New York Times Columnist and Podcast Host | National

In-Studio Discussion with Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom on 'Abundance' and Democratic Governance

Published March 26, 2025 | Video Starts at 1:00:41

He wrote this piece that's very influential these days and very influential for me called the Procedural Fetish. And one of the things he says in that that I think is really wise is that The Democratic Party is very legalistic. It's got a lot of lawyers in it. between. Tim Walls was the first person on a Democratic ticket since Mondale to not go to law school. We're very legalistic. (1:00:41–1:00:45)

CLAIM

Asserts that the Democratic Party is heavily influenced by legal professionals.

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Ezra Klein

“Of the 56 states and jurisdictions that were trying to apply for the money, three had made it through.”
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“It took the Affordable Care act four years to begin delivering actual insurance.”
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“We built the Empire State Building in a year.”
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“The average environmental review takes four and a half years.”
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“By the end of 2024, functionally, nobody is hooked up to [rural] broadband.”
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“Every major company [Elon Musk] has done is built on government subsidies, government loan guarantees, over 3 billion government demand.”
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“We could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis.”
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“California high speed rail has always lit me on fire.”
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“We have to build faster than we have ever built and the laws don't really permit that.”
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“There is something liberalism is good at and knows how to look for, which is where can we subsidize something that people need?”
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“There's something liberalism is bad at because it doesn't know how to look for it, which is how do we create more?”
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“Not only are we not good at pursuing that, we don't even realize how often we are getting in the way of it.”
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“The cost of living crisis is worse in blue states.”
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“All these fast track bills required me to take on a bunch of new standards and requirements.”
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“One of the big headline pieces of it is $42 billion for [rural] broadband 2021.”
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“The stimulus bill under Obama that had three big headline projects for reinvestment, it had high speed rail, it had smart grid, and it had a…”
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“0 for 3.”
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“Europe builds trains better than we do. They just do. And they have governments, I checked. And they have unions more than we do.”
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“We do government different in this country than they do in Europe. There's a qualitative difference between it, which is they run government…”
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“There are two major liberal movements that happen in the 20th century. The one we think about a lot is New Deal liberalism.”
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“In the 60s, 70s, 80s, you have real problems that have emerged from this New Deal order.”
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“We are cutting highways all across the country, many of them, though not all of them through marginalized communities.”
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“There is a genuine despoiling of the environment.”
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“It's Reagan who signs the California Environmental Quality Act.”
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“Initially cea, it just says, look, when the government does stuff, it's got to produce a report on, you know, what the likely consequences…”
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“The Supreme Court rules. No, no, no, no. Public development is anything that requires a permit by the state of California.”
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“CEQA's power is amplified a lot by courts that interpreted it in a way that was very different than anybody initially.”
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“This is part of a period in liberalism where you have this rise of an environmental movement that has legal dimensions and political…”
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“The key thing about this period of liberalism, the New Left period of liberalism, is that it is fundamentally skeptical of government…”
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“The New Deal is this alliance between the government, the unions, and the corporations to build, to put people to work, to industrialize…”
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“The New Left comes in and says, we are destroying this place. We are turning this country conformist.”
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“The way it tries to square it is create a million different ways that individuals or individuals represented by nonprofit groups typically…”
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“It did not used to take this long to deliver Medicare. Medicare delivered Medicare cards a year after they passed that bill.”
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“It took on the Inflation Reduction act, which is doing the much smaller job of just beginning to negotiate prices on some drugs, three years…”
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“You are not going to hold the people you need to hold. If your answer in every term is you can't feel what I did because the government…”
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“But they would build fast in a lot of cases if we let them build fast. I mean, they're not why we didn't get rural broadband on.”
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“The difference between places that construct apartment buildings quickly and that don't is that's us 100%.”
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“If these emergency declarations and people are celebrating it, if emergency structures work better, then why is it not making the normal…”
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“That is a breakdown of the way the voters can maintain accountability.”
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“You can avoid short term pain in a way that ultimately creates almost unsolvable long term pain.”
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“People are furious about the homelessness problem there. And that's in large part a housing problem.”
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“In Oakland, they recalled the mayor.”
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“It is very hard to be successful when people are angry about problems that maybe you didn't cause.”
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“California is the frontier of the future. It always has been.”
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“The reason the housing thing matters here... is that you need to make it possible for people to be [in California].”
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“The point of California's riches is that they should be shared... through the ability of people to go live in these super high productivity…”
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“In making these cities so expensive, we did the real gating. We really closed the frontier, because the true frontier isn't land, it's…”
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“The Merced Bakersfield leg, which is the leg that is currently being tried... had line of sight on something like it was in the range of 11…”
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“The estimate on finishing [Merced to Bakersfield] was 36 billion.”
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“For this to really work, it needs to be L A to San Francisco and that would cost $110 billion.”
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“There is not a line of sight on that 36 to 110 billion. Right. That, that doesn't exist.”
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“The ridership in those quarters, as fast growing as they may be, is not enough to throw off money. It's not even enough to handle that…”
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“It wasn't exempted from CEQA in the first place. It's a pro environmental project.”
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“People have no fucking idea what is happening in these regulatory processes.”
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“What really connects government to people is outcome, is a lived experience of government acting in their life.”
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“Democrats have developed a dysfunctional relationship with technology and in way the future.”
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“The harms of social media became really salient to people [around 2016].”
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“A huge amount of social progress...is not just new social insurance programs...it's technology.”
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“For the people who have health insurance, which is most people, what really matters is when you get sick, is there a cure?”
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“If we could do more modular housing, it would change what is possible in housing policy.”
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“Trump and [his supporters] are trying to destroy wind and solar.”
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“They don't want more trade. They don't want more people.”
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