Time For The DNC To Sue CBS News For $20 Billion
A free idea for Ken Martin.
Knives are out for Ken Martin as Democratic National Committee chair, and they probably should be. Fundraising has been anemic, spending has been questionable, and he broke a clear promise to release the committee’s post-2024 autopsy.
So Martin may not be long for the job. He may not even want the job anymore. But if he’s hanging on for dear life, I have an idea, offered for free, that he can put to the test relatively cheaply: He can sue CBS News for $20 billion (but be willing to settle for $16 million and not a penny less).
The story begins on Sunday, when Donald Trump participated in a 60 Minutes interview with Nora O’Donnell. First, observers noticed the segment seemed spliced together. Then CBS posted the full transcript of the interview, and critics confirmed that 60 Minutes producers edited a bunch of Trump’s emotionally dysregulated ranting out of the final cut.
“No, I’m not a king,” our president said. “I-- I get-- I-- I don’t laugh. I don’t-- I-- I see these No Kings, which are funded just like the Southern Law was-- funded-- you saw all that? Southern Law [sic] is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that-- like Charlottesville. Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law [sic]. That was a Southern Law [sic] deal too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was-- a rigged election.”
One could reasonably argue it’s journalistic malpractice to edit stuff like this out of an interview with the sitting president. Sanewashing is the newish term of art. But the general practice—that television news magazines edit down interviews to sharpen focus on particular topics—is uncontroversial.
Except… when 60 Minutes applied that practice to its pre-election interview with Kamala Harris, Trump sued for $10 billion, then $20 billion, claiming “election interference.” He alleged, falsely, that CBS had concealed damaging portions of the interview to help Harris and thus hurt Trump and the GOP. The suit was frivolous, a loser, a p.r. stunt. But then he won the election, and CBS settled. For $16 million.
The shoe’s on the other foot in an obvious way now, but it’s of little interest to anyone in power, except as a gotcha. Democrats are weak, Trump is aggressive. They play by the old rules, he plays by his. Nothing will come of this, so it’s not worth making a fuss. Outsiders like me and others can wail about the hypocrisy—of Trump, of CBS, of its new editor Bari Weiss. Her website, The Free Press, spent months pretending to believe 60 Minutes was in the wrong for editing down its Harris interview—until Trump effectively installed her to turn CBS into a pro-regime outlet, and her misgivings vanished.
We can whine, whine, whine about their shamelessness all day. And we’re obviously right to be outraged. But this kind of limp appeal to hypocrisy is a symptom of partisan asymmetry. It’s pervasive only because everyone takes for granted (with good reason) that Democrats won’t stoop to the GOP’s level. But what if they did? What if Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than it interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?
I don’t know how CBS would respond, but I suspect some rank-and-file Democratic voters, people who’ve stopped donating to the DNC, would develop strange new respect for Martin. Enough to save his job and fix the party’s fundraising problems? Again, hard to say. Probably not! But it couldn’t possibly make things worse.
Martin is in many ways a victim of the same asymmetries that leave the rest of us whining about hypocrisy while Republicans bend powerful institutions to their will. It may be that he’s uniquely unsuited to this job in this moment (I don’t know nearly enough to say) but he’s certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t create the crisis of confidence in the Democratic Party as an institution—people like Chuck Schumer and other long-time machine hands did that, leaving Martin holding the bag.
But of course, as DNC chair, Martin can’t blame his own woes on the weakness of the party’s congressional leadership and its reluctance to fight.
What he can do is think creatively, then lead by example. He, or whoever replaces him at DNC, could demonstrate to disaffected Democratic base voters that the party is remaking itself as one that won’t take shit lying down. That, whenever possible, it will impose penalties on Republicans and their enablers for dealing in bad faith.
It’s frustrating, because I’m basically restating what I wrote almost six years ago, just a few weeks before the 2020 election. Joe Biden was poised for victory, and it was clear to me that allowing bygones to be bygones wouldn’t just result in miscarriages of justice vis-a-vis specific crimes. It would teach Republicans that there’s no downside to operating in bad faith as a default mode. Reading back on it, as I do from time to time, is a bit painful.
The Republican Party’s core rottenness—its dishonesty, corruption, pettiness, racism—is the defining political fact of our time. Whatever we say about it, confronting all of us in the weeks and months ahead is the more important question of what we do about it. What do the rest of us—most importantly elected Democrats, but also journalists, political elites, and regular citizens—need to change about public life to account for the fact that one of the two major parties has embraced bad faith as an organizing principle?
…
[Democrats can] codify norms so that Republicans can’t violate them or take hostages going forward. Rather than increase the debt limit, they can eliminate it; rather than devise new stimulus every time the economy turns downward, they can create permanent programs that snap into effect when unemployment climbs. Donald Trump proved that Republicans will withhold disaster relief from states that don’t vote for Republicans; Democrats can change the law to treat all victims of disaster equally, no matter their politics or the partisan leanings of their states. Rather than shame Republicans out of suppressing votes, they can expand the franchise by law. Rather than acquiesce to the GOP theft of the courts, they can expand the judiciary, erasing decades of conservative scheming to rule the country without winning elections.
These are strategies that the House and Senate can implement. But they won’t do it without presidential leadership, and that would require Biden to govern with the understanding that Republicans don’t just disagree with him, but want to destroy his presidency. He can’t, for instance, stop Republicans from pretending to care about deficits the minute Donald Trump departs the political scene, but he doesn’t have to play along. When they pretend to believe that backward looking accountability for Trump’s wholesale corruption of the government is petty retribution, he can ignore them. Or he can behave as if he was born yesterday.
…
If in the name of unearned and unreciprocated comity we grant Republicans a seat at the table and a voice in governing, they’ll learn only one thing: that cheaters prosper. If we do nothing but elect Joe Biden and close the book on the past, things will only get better until the pendulum inevitably swings back again, and Republicans come roaring back to power unchastened.
Well, guess what happened.
There is, I’ll concede, some tension between zealously policing partisan tit-for-tat, and portraying the Democratic Party as big-minded, or attuned to public need. But not nearly as much as Democratic strategists seem to think.
Would a big public relations campaign against CBS News be a “distraction” from “affordability,” the magic word that powers politicians to victory? Maybe in the narrowest, most literalistic sense.
But zoom out. This would also be a fight about Trump and his incoherence and unfitness for office. People might hear the word “affordability” a little bit less each day for a couple weeks, but that discourse would be replaced with something just as damaging to Trump and the GOP. And it’s not as though prices are poised to fall!
It’s also of material interest to voters. The public obviously and always has an interest in lowering the cost of living. But it has a similar interest in diminishing the power of corrupt right-wing oligarchs—and, crucially, Democrats can more credibly promise to impose accountability on Trump and his media cronies than to lower prices.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if Democrats never draw a hard-line against the bad faith of their opposition, they will resign themselves to governing under the current rules, fully rigged for the GOP. If they won’t take easy shots across the bow like this, would they really do bigger, more important things that need to be done? Break up firms that bribed Trump for merger approval? Investigate executives who arranged the payments? Impose accountability on organizations, foreign governments, judges, and others who participated in the Trump-era bonanza of venal and intellectual corruption?
Sam Alito and the five other Republican Supreme Court justices, just rendered the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, and justified it on intentionally deceptive grounds. I encourage you to read this whole thread to understand just how mendacious the justices chose to be, but the gist is this: Fear not, we don’t need a Voting Rights Act anymore, because racism is over, and we know racism is over because black turnout exceeded white turnout in two of the last five presidential elections. Almost half!
Except: Barack Obama, the first and only black president, was on the ballot for both of those elections. And they both took place before John Roberts stuck the first dagger in the heart of the VRA with his decision in Shelby County. Indeed these are the same two elections Roberts cited in justifying Shelby County, which allowed southern states to redraw district lines without first demonstrating to the federal government that the districts weren’t gerrymandered by race. Immediately after that ruling, the racial turnout gap returned and widened. Things are getting worse, but Alito justified further dilution of black voting power by trying to trick people into thinking things are getting better.
As long as that ruling stands, we are governed by its bad faith; if we choose to abide it, rather than change the law and the composition of the court itself, we legitimate it and accede to all of its knock on effects for public policy. If it at some point throws control of Congress into Republican hands, that’s just our tough luck. Again.
Democrats can’t do anything substantive about that ruling now. But every time they stand up for themselves, it strikes fear into the hearts of people like Trump, Alito, and the Republican leadership, who must wonder if Democrats will reach a breaking point and claw back the GOP’s ill-gotten gains. When Democrats regain power, expanding the court will be more than a matter of policing bad faith. It will determine whether we get to have anything resembling representative democracy in this country. In the meantime, they can say to the court what Ken Martin should say to CBS, and really to all participants in Trump’s authoritarian takeover: We will not submit to being governed by unprincipled actors. We are taking notes, and you will pay a price.
This was EXACTLY my thought when I saw the interview was edited. Taking their big fat bribe as precedent.
And don’t the viewers also have a cause of action for fraud?
On one of the subtopics today: I think it’s a mistake to think of ‘affordability’ and any other issue as this-or-that. How about Jon Ossoff’s approach (which I think has the added advantage of being correct): “ you can’t afford gas, groceries, healthcare BECAUSE OF the graft, BECAUSE OF the oligarchs etc etc”.
Oh yeah, and yes! Sue ‘em!