00:00Something that is not consistent with American democracy.
00:04It is consistent with autocracies.
00:07Hungary under Orban, what we think of is a fair system
00:13in which everybody's voice matters and people have a seat at the table
00:17and there are checks and balances and nobody's above the law.
00:22Democracy is not self-executed.
00:24It requires people, judges and people in the Justice Department.
00:33All those institutional norms and laws
00:37that were embodied in the Constitution imperfectly
00:43and then over time were expanded so that we had a basic understanding
00:47like I can't just be picked up on the street and hauled off to another country.
00:54That's not something, that's not, that's not, that wasn't a partisan view.
01:05That wasn't a Republican or Democratic notion that that shouldn't happen.
01:09That was an American value and norm.
01:13And so what I believe continues to be that there has to be responses and pushback
01:30from civil society, from various institutions and individuals outside of government,
01:41but there also has to be people in government in both parties who say,
01:48well, no, you can't do that.
01:50And what we're seeing right now is when you do not have those constraints and guardrails, right?
02:02When you don't have people inside of government who say,
02:07no, you know, this is how the law works and we should follow it.
02:18Democracy is not self-executing.
02:20It requires people, judges and, you know, people in the Justice Department
02:29and, you know, people throughout the government who take an oath
02:34to uphold the Constitution.
02:38It requires them to take those, that oath seriously.
02:44And when that isn't happening, we start drifting into something that is not consistent
03:01with American democracy.
03:03It is consistent with autocracies.
03:06It's consistent with Hungary under Orban.
03:14It's consistent with places that hold elections but do not otherwise observe
03:22what we think of as a fair system in which everybody's voice matters
03:29and people have a seat at the table and there are checks and balances
03:32and nobody's above the law.
03:37And we're not there yet completely,
03:40but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that.
03:55And we need people both outside government and inside of government saying,
04:02let's not go over that cliff because it's hard to recover.
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