Marc Elias: Joyce Vance, welcome back to Defending Democracy.
Joyce Vance: Thanks for having me.
Marc Elias: We got a lot to cover, including your amazing new book, which we're gonna get to in a moment. I hope everyone goes out and buys it. But before we get to that, I wanna cover what has been some very sort of breaking news. It's weird, it's like breaking news in slow motion. Like every day we get another story about the weaponization of government. So we have, obviously, we had the Tish James indictment, we had the James Comey indictment, we have had suggestions that Adam Schiff is under investigation for lord knows what, depending on your point of view the Bolton indictment maybe, maybe not falls into the same category.
And now there is this seeming sort of gathering in South Florida of, according to many news reports, an effort by Donald Trump to kind of take all of his grievances and put them in one US attorney's office to go after everyone from Jack Smith to John Brennan to Barack Obama. What do you know about this and how do you help us make sense of it?
Joyce Vance: Look, first thing, I don't think that we should even pretend for a second that there's legitimacy to this. There isn't. This is a revenge prosecution, a corruption of the Justice Department, a blatant effort, by the way, to impanel a grand jury in the division in the Southern District of Florida where Donald Trump's favorite judge, Aileen Cannon, who torpedoed the Mar-a-Lago case sits. So it's just crazy sauce from start to finish.
There's an interesting detail that I learned recently, Marc, which is that the Trump U.S. attorney in southern Florida was the first Trump U.S. attorney to be confirmed in this administration. You know, southern Florida isn't one of the places that you normally think of as going first. It's not a place with powerful senators who demand appeasement. I was in the group of the first confirmed Obama U.S. attorneys simply because Jeff Sessions wanted in with Senator Schumer and Senator Leahy and others to be able to say that he was first. But that's not what was at work in Southern Florida. This was a DOJ employee who had sort of a sketchy performance record, a Trump loyalist who became the US attorney and signed off on empaneling these witch hunt investigations.
Marc Elias: And so, are we to just accept that this will move forward and hopefully collapse under its own weight? What should people do about the fact that this is going on?
Joyce Vance: This is the cost of electing a president like Donald Trump because prosecutors do have enormous power to conduct grand jury investigations based on a very low standard of proof, just the reasonable suspicion that crimes were committed, that this defendant or these defendants were involved, and they're off to the races. It's a very low standard, as we've seen in some of the cases that you just mentioned, for indictment.
People can have their names dragged through the mud, whether or not there's ultimately an indictment. They can be forced to expend a lot of money on defense counsel, stressful for families. This is why good prosecutors are so careful before they open a case to make sure that they're doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. And the real kicker on this one is the fact that we know that this investigation is underway because grand jury investigations by statute are secret, you don't disclose them. Sometimes we do get an early view because someone who receives a subpoena might talk. But that's not how we're learning about these cases here. As I recall, Mike Davis, a Trump-allied Republican lawyer, tweeted about it, which raises the question of how he knew in the first place that it was going on. There's nothing here that's regular order.
Marc Elias: Okay, so on a little happier news, we had elections for the off year. And Democrats really swept throughout the country, including in a number of places in the South, including the deep South in Mississippi. I know you are, I believe, a native of Alabama.
Joyce Vance: I'm not actually, I'm a native Angeleno despite the accent that comes from living here for way too long, but I've been in Alabama for a long time. I remember Alabama when every statewide elected official was a Democrat, which has been a minute.
Marc Elias: We saw two elections go the Democrats way on a statewide basis in Georgia, the first time in more than a couple of decades. We saw the supermajority broken in Mississippi in the state legislature. We saw, in Virginia, which, you know, people forget was the capital of the old South, the Confederacy. It's still a southern state in many respects. It went overwhelmingly for Democrats.
What do you make of this? Is there anything you make of it on a regional basis? We've heard a lot about what it means on a national basis. What does it mean that California, New Jersey, but is there anything you take from this on a regional basis that's going on?
Joyce Vance: It's been decades since the South did have strong Democratic participation in the electoral process and in the outcomes. And we both know the story of how that came to an end with careful maneuvering by Republicans that included gerrymandering, that included the infusion of lots of cash into the electoral process that Democrats couldn't match, and really just out-strategizing Democrats, being better off the blocks, planting younger candidates and positioning them better.
I don't think that we should be surprised to see, in a sense, the pendulum swinging back. What surprises me, quite frankly, is that it has taken so long. We saw it first in Georgia. Mississippi, where black voters are 40 percent of the makeup of that state, finally managed to end the supermajority control on the Mississippi legislature. These are all steps that we should have seen happening years ago.
Maybe it takes a Donald Trump presidency for us to make the gains that we should down here. And I don't want to oversell it, Marc. Alabama is not going to flip blue in 2026 or even in 2028. But the reality is that we've gotten so used to this narrative that Republicans have just a tight grip on these states that can't be broken. I think the reality is when people go out and vote, then actually Democrats can and do win. And we need to push back on these narratives that say that you should just stay home, you shouldn't bother, especially where it's too much trouble, right? Like four-hour lines in my precinct in 2024 that meant working people had to struggle to stick around and vote, or just ridiculous identification requirements that are really expensive for people who don't have the means for them.
The reality is it's a moment where we should all come together to make sure everybody in our communities who's eligible can vote because we get results like what happened on Tuesday.
Marc Elias: Yeah, and we just recently saw that the U.S. Supreme Court granted another voting case that it's gonna take. And this one out of Mississippi. And it goes a little bit to the point you're making about when everyone's allowed to vote. Mississippi is one of, I think, 19 states to allow voters who cast mail-in ballots, if they are postmarked by election day but arrive a day or two afterwards due to delays in the postal service, those ballots can count.
And the Republican National Committee sued Mississippi to try to reverse that, try to strike that down, saying that it conflicts with the federal election day statute. They've tried this elsewhere in the country with no success. They had success in the Fifth Circuit. And now that case is gonna be heard by the US Supreme Court. So on the one hand, anytime there's a case in the US Supreme Court, people worry. On the other hand, this was a case brought to the US Supreme Court to try to reverse an adverse ruling in the Fifth Circuit. What do you make of this?
Joyce Vance: No good deed goes unpunished when you take a voting case to the Supreme Court these days. And you would hope that the Supreme Court would understand, although they've persistently refused to, that how you vote might be a political choice, but your right to vote, your ability to exercise that right as a fundamental American right, and that they as a court should be upholding that. I mean, of course, that said, we've watched them gut the Voting Rights Act. We've watched them make it more difficult for people to vote.
I think at this point, what we really need is strong public narratives explaining how this stuff works. Because I find time and time again, people are very susceptible to myths about voting and particularly myths about voting fraud. That I think is a job for you and me and people like us. And we should do a better job of holding community forums and reaching out not just to people who are predisposed to get educated about voting, but perhaps to people on the other side of the aisle or people who don't view voting in the same way that we do as almost a religious rite of passage.
Because my sense is that we just are no longer a country, and I write about this in the book, that values civics education, that makes it important because the reality is voter fraud is not a problem in this country. Donald Trump can say it all he wants. The statistics, the data just isn't there. Voter suppression is the problem and that's what this Mississippi case is all about.
Marc Elias: So I'm just curious, you live in Alabama, which is not Washington, D.C., maybe as far away as you can be in many respects, and you just are finished up or in the midst of a book tour, which brings you in touch with thousands, tens of thousands of people. How divided are we on these democracy issues? In Washington, D.C., it just feels like there's no conversation that goes on between the two parties on democracy issues.
I will say, I don't engage in those conversations with Republicans in Washington, D.C., because I don't assume they're in good faith. When you're out in the country, and I assume you've been all over the country with this book, is it different or do you run into those same problems?
Joyce Vance: This is the challenge that we face as a country, right? It's sort of a moment that takes great leadership and none is really on the horizon in this regard. When I'm out signing books and speaking about my book, I'm speaking to an audience of people like us primarily. Occasionally, you'll get somebody who drags a partner or a kid along and wants you to talk with them. But by and large, I'm talking with people who are incredibly uplifting, telling me about the work they're doing, joining the League of Women Voters, writing postcards to voters, working in the polls, all of the above.
The challenge for all of us is how do we talk to people? And here's how I sort of slice this. I seriously doubt that very many people will listen to this podcast who aren't already at least curious about supporting democracy. I think where we make a difference, it's these small incremental conversations that we have with people around us. I live in the middle of a bunch of Republicans. And I try to have conversations with friends, with family members, with people who don't see eye to eye with us in hopes that when you plant small seeds, over time they take root.
I really think this works, by the way. This is not being Pollyannish. What you sometimes have to do is plant those seeds and let them sort of sit there for the moment where people come to realize in stark personal focus how devastating the lies this administration has been telling them are. It might be when they lose a job because of DOGE. It might be when SNAP benefits aren't there. And they come to realize that Donald Trump, who's engaging in widespread kleptocracy, is not interested in them.
I'm telling you, Marc, I think some days it's hard work, it's slow work, it feels frustrating. But for a lot of people, you're their most trusted source of information. If you're talking to a cousin or an aunt or a neighbor, they're gonna trust what you have to say more than some guy on TV. So be fearless about having those conversations and giving people accurate information. How you do that in this confrontational environment is very, very difficult. It's something I struggle with every day.
Marc Elias: So I want to turn to your book because it is a great read. I hope everyone goes out and buys a copy. It is also, by the way, a New York Times bestseller, just to brag a little bit. But in all seriousness, it's a really important book for this time. And I want you to tell me first why you wrote it. What made you think that 2025, after 2024 but before the next presidential election, was the right time to write this book?
Joyce Vance: So this book was written fast and it was written in reaction to that moment after Kamala lost when I started hearing far too many people saying, "I did everything that I could. It didn't work. I just need to walk away from this now. I'm just giving up." And it occurred to me that it would be devastating for an unopposed Donald Trump to take office. I thought it was important to write the book. I'm not sure that my husband agreed.
He missed out on a lot of home-cooked dinners as a result of my writing it. But I think it was ultimately the right moment to tell people, our history and our tradition suggests that we have institutions that are nimble enough to take on this moment. As long as we don't give up, as long as we understand that we're the cavalry, nobody is coming to save us.
Marc Elias: So how are we gonna save democracy? People are dispirited by the lack of institutions standing up to Donald Trump, whether it's large law firms, whether it's the institutional media, whether it's colleges and universities, business leaders... They don't feel like there is enough of the big players standing up. So what can they do? What is the answer to the question when people ask you what they can do and why they shouldn't give up?
Joyce Vance: Let's not sugarcoat it, right? Congress is supine. The lower courts, the district courts, the courts of appeals, I think have been doing their jobs and we owe them a debt of gratitude for rejecting Trump's efforts to intimidate them. However, the United States Supreme Court has been something of a disappointment. That's putting it mildly. So primary institutions, problematic. There are problems with the press. There are bright spots in the press, especially the development of new media. Like you say, institutions like schools, businesses, mixed bag.
And so the argument that I essentially make in the book is it's ultimately up to the voters. When institutions fail, it's up to us to reshape those institutions, which by the way, we have the ability to do in 2026 when we vote for every member of the House of Representatives and a third of the members of the Senate to say nothing of state and local elections. And, you know, I got to confess, Marc, it felt a little bit like I was lonely out there on the ledge, sounding like Pollyanna for the first few months.
And then last Tuesday and the election happened. And I think people saw a concrete example of what outraged voters can do. Donald Trump tries to convince us that he's inevitable and that there's nothing that we can do to counter that. After last Tuesday, that narrative of his is really shot. And this is our moment, right? Elections will count for a lot. We will all play a role in different ways. Some people might go work the polls. Other people might make a short film or write a song that people can use as an anthem to get other people interested. So if we all do what we do best, but we're all working towards the goal of restoring democracy because we understand what's going on and we're angry about it and we want better for our kids and for our country, that's how I think we get through this moment.
Marc Elias: So I have to ask you in particular about the media. The way a lot of people came to know you is because you are actually the host of two really big mega podcasts. One called Sisters-in-Law, which is very popular, and then one with Preet Bharara called Cafe Insider. And that's one way of reaching people. You also have one of the largest Substacks, period. You're like a force, an absolute force in the newsletter arena. And then on top of that, you write periodically for op-eds and in the more institutional press. You've written books. You're a law professor.
And I'm just curious, as you look across all of those things, is there a through line to them or are you just reaching people where they are? Some people are in their car listening to a podcast and some people are reading books and some people are reading Substack, or is it more cohesive than that?
Joyce Vance: You know, I never really thought about it that way and tried to create a through line. I mean, I'll tell you what it's about to me. I worked at the Justice Department for 25 years and that was an unbelievable privilege. It was an honor to get to stand up in court and say, "May it please the court, I represent the people of the United States." And having had that experience, you have an absolute obligation to give back to communities and to explain how the legal system is supposed to work. And when something is wrong, to call it out and when people do things right to defend what they're doing.
And now we live in this moment where the Justice Department is no longer the Justice Department that I served in, a principled place where we tried to serve our communities. So I think the through line for me is this: it's just an obligation to share that knowledge and expertise that I had the privilege of acquiring so that other people can make up their own minds about what's going on and understand it through the lens of that experience.
Marc Elias: And what do you make of the growth of Substack? You're one of the most successful. There are lots of people who have very small Substacks and do it to reach smaller audiences or for other reasons. But what do you make of the phenomenon of it as a way to talk to audiences? It seems more influential than ever. On the other hand, I do sometimes think that those of us, including myself, who write newsletters, we are in some sense speaking to the people who are seeking out our content. So we're not necessarily reaching huge numbers of people who are not, for example, interested in democracy or voting rights or the law. How do you think through that?
Joyce Vance: So I see a lot of value in the Substack newsletters. For one thing, I know from my own personal reading habits, I may be interested in an area, I may have views, but getting more information, more current information, explanations, helping me draw the linkages between different events is just invaluable for me as someone who tries to be a thinking person. But there's more, right? Because at the bottom of Substack, there's this share button, and I am learning that my readers will share my Substack columns with their crazy Uncle Jack and say, "Uncle Jack, you need to read this." I know this because I then get an email from Uncle Jack.
Marc Elias: But Jack probably doesn't agree with you, right?
Joyce Vance: He doesn't agree with me and that's the beauty of it. He'll tell me where I'm wrong and I'll say, "Well, here's how I think about this. What do you think is wrong?" And you will occasionally find along the lines of having these individualized conversations that people will, if not accept your views, they will begin to accept facts, which is so much of what's wrong, right? People being fed misinformation. You know, I thought I was going to write the newsletter one or two days a week when I started it. Last night, I finished one just before midnight. And then I got up in the morning and I had to write more because legal news happened overnight. Sunday night, that's not supposed to be a time for legal news, but it was.
But I think that because people that we are writing to then share our information with people in their circle who may or may not agree with us, I think we're constantly advancing this fight for facts. You know, Kellyanne Conway, bless her heart, when she coined the phrase "alternative facts," I think she was saying the quiet part out loud about what the Trump administration was gonna bring to America.
Ultimately, that's the most devastating thing that they've done, convincing so many people in Donald Trump's base and beyond that there are two ways, "alternative facts," not just facts, and that if the facts don't serve you, you just discard them and create your own facts. And that's what we really need to take on in this country.
Marc Elias: So I've got to ask you about the other audience, which I alluded to, but I skipped over. But I am fascinated because I'm a lawyer. We hire law students. One of the unique perspectives I think you have is you're talking to people who want to be part of the legal establishment, who want to have careers in law. And what is the message you're saying to them? It's one thing to say to a lay person, "Talk to your Uncle Jack, participate in civic engagement, don't give up on democracy."
In a way, I think that is too little to say to someone who is joining the legal establishment who will have ethical obligations and hopefully can do better for democracy than simply engaging in it from their own terms. So what do you say to the law students that you teach?
Joyce Vance: Yeah, so I love teaching law school. This was like a late career shift and I had no idea how gratifying it would be. You know, the whole goal is to teach students to think like lawyers, right? It's a different way of thinking. Instead of going in with preconceptions and looking at a situation and making it conform to your preconceptions, you have to go in and look, for instance, when you're looking at criminal cases, at the facts and at the law and then you have to decide what they mean. So something that I always have to say to my students at the start of the semester is, "Look, I know what I think and I'm not all that interested in what I think. I'm interested in what you think.
So let's talk about how we look at these situations and what you make of them." And you know, if you want to be uplifted about the future of American democracy, come sit in on one of my seminars one day. Because I get students who are from across the political spectrum, all different kinds of backgrounds. They're so smart. And what I sense in them is a commitment to having a functioning democracy. I teach a class on prosecutorial discretion. The students want to know how to be good prosecutors. They want to know what their obligation is. The same in my democracy seminar.
Marc Elias: That's great to hear because I interviewed Michael Klarman, who you probably know from Harvard Law School a few months back now. And he said that the students there have really, in some ways, segregated, at least in the sense that he said conservative students looking for clerkship recommendations for conservative judges don't go to him. They go to other faculty and vice versa. It doesn't surprise me that your student body is probably more ideologically diverse, but also probably less focused on which professor they are asking for which clerkship. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
Joyce Vance: No, I don't think you are. Maybe in smaller schools or schools that are outside of the beltway in the Eastern Seaboard, maybe. But truly, I think people are still more willing to listen to each other when I think about my students at Alabama than some other places that I've lectured where the student body seems to mirror this sort of fractured body politic that we have more largely. I mean, it really is the existential question for this generation. How are you going to work together with people that you don't see eye to eye to? You know, my law school roommate is a Tea Party conservative, Federalist Society member, love her to death.
We've spent our whole lives arguing politics. And we were okay with doing that because we had a shared commitment to democracy. And I think it's important for us to say this is not a problem on both sides, right? This is a problem with people who are no longer committed to our shared understanding of democracy.
Marc Elias: You end your book by saying, "We are the cavalry." And that's, you know, it's easy for people to hear that they are in some sense the folks who are going to save democracy. It is sometimes hard for them to understand how to operationalize that. So assume you've got a person and maybe they have a horse and they're willing to jump on the horse and ride into battle. What are you telling them to do?
Joyce Vance: I think we each have to decide what's in front of us, right? What are we interested in? What are we capable of? Some people may feel comfortable working online and from home and connecting with other people. I have a wonderful friend, a former assistant United States attorney, who takes her friends from church and goes out and protests every week in a pretty good sized southern city where holding signs in a crowd serves a purpose.
Something I think we are often too quick to dismiss is that protests don't work or people talking online doesn't work. It absolutely does because it motivates more and more of us and helps us see what's possible. Donald Trump's popularity ratings are not doing well. That signifies that the more of us who come on board to support democracy and recognize that this move towards autocracy is very dangerous, the more other people feel like they can. It's like trying to go to a party all on your own on a Friday night, which is awkward and uncomfortable. But this democracy party that we're having in this country, everybody is invited and increasingly people understand that because they have the opportunity to join other people.
My youngest kid is just out of college. And I write about it in the book. He told me at one point, "Mom, protests don't work. I was four years old when the Occupy protests happened and rich people still control the country." And that took me back. I mean, that forced me to rethink my belief that if we all work together, we can constantly make progress. Maybe not linear progress, right? I'm aware of the lessons of the civil rights era where progress came in fits and starts and sometimes with the courts and sometimes with the people. But I still believe that that's possible.
No one would be fighting so hard to take away our right to vote if they didn't understand how powerful the right to vote was. And so judge our ability to move forward by the fear we see in the eyes of the people who don't want us to move forward. They understand that we have very powerful tools. They're trying to convince us that they aren't powerful. Our path then is clear.
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