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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Thanks to Brigid Bergin and Arun Venugopal for filling in last week. Meanwhile, it was just another weekend in the world, wasn't it? Since Friday's show, we learned that Vladimir Putin is being charged with a crime, and Donald Trump says he will be too. Putin was charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, if you haven't heard.

If we can believe Trump on this one, he says he will be indicted by the Manhattan DA in the Stormy Daniels hush money case this week. He would be the first president or former president ever charged with a crime and is calling on people to protest, much like he did before January 6th. These two developments can almost make the fact that some banks are going under and the implications for the economy seem like not the biggest Monday morning headline.

Let's talk about all three, and maybe then some with Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes relevant to all of these stories, as a member of both the House Intelligence Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, Financial Services will hold its first hearing on the bank failures this week. Congressman Himes, for those of you who don't know him, is a Democrat whose district begins just over the Westchester line from New York and covers most of Fairfield County there and a little of New Haven County. His bio page notes a whole bunch of Metro North stations that bring commuters into Manhattan in his district.

Congressman, thanks for coming on at a consequential moment. Welcome back to WNYC.

Congressman Jim Himes: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: With your financial services committee hat on, let's start with the banks and the broader economy. Do you think we've seen the last of the bank failures in this current wave?

Congressman Jim Himes: I don't know if we've seen the last of the failures. There are a few other banks that share some uncomfortable things in common with Silicon Valley First Republic signature, and that is a very high percentage of uninsured deposits. People are acting irrationally now. They're saying, "Oh my goodness, I've got more than the $250,000 insured amount at this bank. I should take those deposits and put them elsewhere."

That, of course, creates pressure, and if there's enough of that activity, you get what's known as a run. I do think that the regulators acted rapidly in concert with the president and the treasury secretariat, and it does seem like this is not going to grow into something cataclysmic, but I think it would be a little bit too audacious to say that we're completely out of the woods at this point.

Brian Lehrer: This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen after the Dodd-Frank Banking Reform law following the bank failures of the 2008 financial crisis, as you know, here's a clip of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who's a hawk on these things on CBS Face the Nation yesterday saying some of the ways she thinks the federal government reopened the door to this kind of risk.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Starting back in 2016 or so, these multi-billion dollar banks like SVB, in fact, Gregory Becker, the CEO of SVB, came to Washington and kept saying, "Lighten the regulations on us. We're just like tiny little banks, so ease up on the regulations." Donald Trump then ran for president, promising he would ease up on the regulations on these multi-billion dollar banks.

He then was elected president and he put in a lot of regulators who eased up on banking regulations. Trump then went to Congress and he said, "Let's ease up even more." With the help of both parties passed laws to roll back on regulations and open the door to easing up even more. Then Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Fed, stepped up and took a flame thrower to the regulations.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Elizabeth Warren on Face the Nation blaming the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, Donald Trump as President, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. How much do you agree with Senator Warren there on that timeline?

Congressman Jim Himes: I think she's using very colorful language and speaking with a degree of certainty that nobody has. She's not wrong that in 2018 a bill passed, which differentiated between the monster banks, the city banks, and the JP Morgan's, the truly systemically important banks, and the next level down. She talks about multi-billion dollar banks and they are in fact multi-billion dollar banks, but they're a small fraction of the size of the JP Morgan's and the Citi banks.

The Federal Reserve is working right now on an after-action report about what happened at Silicon Valley Bank, you obviously had irresponsible behavior on the part of depositors who in many instances had hundreds of times more on deposit than was guaranteed by the FDIC. It certainly looks like there was a basic risk management failure inside the bank. They just got caught off guard by banking 101, which is when interest rates are rising, the value of your bond portfolio goes down.

It does seem that there may have been slowness or maybe even a lack of attention at the San Francisco Federal Reserve. I'm not surprised that Senator Warren is saying that this is about a piece of legislation that passed in 2018, and she's blaming it on Donald Trump, the reality is that that bill that passed was passed with pretty strong bipartisan support. I just think it's a little early to say.

The other thing I would point out, Brian, is you said it wasn't supposed to happen after 2008. It will happen. We're never going to rid the banking system of the occasional bank failure. There have been failing banks for two centuries now. The work that was done in Dodd-Frank after 2008/2009, of course held up pretty well because what's happening right now really bears almost no relationship to what happened in '09 when you had banks with just incredibly toxic securities on their balance sheets.

Here we had a very narrow and specific set of causes which created a scary moment, but not one that looks anything like what we lived through in 2009 or 2010.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Warren though says Jerome Powell has two jobs as Fed chairman and has failed at both, regulation and interest rates. Now we know Warren has opposed the interest rates going up as risking workers' jobs unnecessarily the wrong way to fight inflation in her opinion, as well as not regulating the banks well enough, in her opinion. How much do you agree or disagree regarding Jerome Powell?

Congressman Jim Himes: The story has yet to be told on whether the Federal Reserve is going to adequately wrestle inflation down. That is their job. The Fed has a dual mandate. She's absolutely right that one of the things the Fed does is regulation. Again, I think we do need to unpack whether the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank was asleep at the switch with respect to what was going on at the Silicon Valley Bank.

On the inflationary thing, it's a little too early to say that he's failed on that. It is fair to say that the Fed probably kept interest rates too low, too long, and then in response to really pretty dramatic inflation, and again, I represent people just as Senator Warren does, who come home from the grocery store and say, "Oh my God, I cannot believe what inflation has done to my budget."

It is Jerome Powell's job to address that. He's done that with the one tool he has at his disposal, which is raising interest rates. Senator Warren doesn't like that for all the reasons that we understand. It makes mortgage rates go up, it runs the risk of cooling the economy, which in some ways is the point of monetary policy, but the one conclusion I can give you, Brian, is that it's too early to say, because inflation is still higher than we want it to be.

If Powell succeeds in getting it down in relatively short order without a major dislocation in our economy, without creating a recession, which he has not yet done, then I think, if he brings inflation down without a recession, that will be the definition of success. It's a little too early to say for certain.

Brian Lehrer: Do you, I guess, unlike Senator Warren, have confidence in Jerome Powell to lead us out of this if he contributed to getting us into it?

Congressman Jim Himes: Let me step back from that question. One of the key foundations of a stable economy is independent monetary policy. That means that people like me don't get to run the monetary policy, and there's a very good reason for that. There's lots of countries that get it wrong where politicians get to lower rates going into an election or mess with monetary policy.

I'm hesitant to answer the question of what I think about J. Powell's running of monetary policy. I will tell you this, it's hard to escape the conclusion that rates were too low for too long. I mean, for decades, bankers and others got used to zero interest rates, and that was probably kept too low for too long. Whether J. Powell has steered monetary policy to do what he must do, which is defeat inflation, and did it with a soft landing or a hard landing, again, it's way too early to tell. So far so good.

The economy is still very strong out there and rates are nowhere near where they were the last time the Fed tried to really wrestle inflation down in the early 1980s where rates went into double digits. Again, it's just too early to tell.

Brian Lehrer: The Fed will consider interest rates again this week. Would you like to see them go up again to fight inflation, stay the same, or go down maybe to ease pressure on the banks?

Congressman Jim Himes: You keep trying to get me to violate that axiom, which is that politicians really shouldn't advise on independent monetary policy. I will tell you this, I think it's an interesting moment because based on what we were just talking about, you never really know where the next crash is going to come from. It was mortgage and toxic mortgage securities in 2008, this time it was people piling into deposits, unguaranteed deposits and probably some foolish risk management at Silicon Valley Bank.

You never really know where the next banking problem is going to come from. You'll never solve them entirely. Again, we've seen bank failures over two centuries. The idea that all of a sudden it's going to stop is, I think, not accurate. I do think it's an interesting moment though, because an awful lot of people are experiencing something they've never experienced before, which is high interest rates. It might make sense with that as a motivation for the Fed to say, "Oh let's let people really learn from what happened to the Silicon Valley balance sheet with high rates before we continue cranking it up." Again, it's really important that people like me stay out of advising on monetary policy.

Brian Lehrer: The last member of Congress, or for that matter, the presidency, to let the Fed stay independent [laughs] without really weighing in. Listeners, we welcome your phone calls and tweets for Congressman Jim Himes on anything bank failure, interest rate, and economy-related and anything related to his position on the House Intelligence Committee, which we'll get to regarding Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump's new calls for protests when we know what happened January 6th, and the risks generally of domestic right-wing violence these days, or anything else that's relevant to Congressman Himes from Connecticut.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Just one more follow up on the Fed, cause you said maybe the San Francisco arm of the Fed was asleep at the switch a little bit on Silicon Valley Bank. I think the public that doesn't follow these kinds of things is getting an education on the fact that when interest rates go up, the value of long-term US treasury bonds goes down. That can be confusing to people who don't follow those kinds of things, but that's something we're learning now. Silicon Valley Bank was heavily invested in government treasuries as a supposedly safe hedge against private market forces.

I'm no expert to be sure, but I don't get based on what I have learned in these last couple of weeks how these banks or the Fed didn't see the decline of treasuries coming early on like a year ago when the Fed first started raising rates. Because everyone seemed to know that they would raise them as high over the course of the last year as they have. Is it only 20/20 hindsight to ask, why didn't they dump their long-term treasury bonds? Why didn't they get prompted by the Fed to dump their long-term treasury bonds much, much earlier, or did someone mess up?

Congressman Jim Himes: Yes, and I'll tell you what, answering that question is where I get into the headspace that Senator Warren occupies. The reason I say that is that it may be a little bit obscure to the general public, but it is an iron rule of banking and finance that when interest rates go up, the value of existing bonds go down. That's just an iron rule. It always happens, and it's not just US Treasury, it's every single bond out there. It's pretty clear why that happens. If you have a bond from last year that's yielding 1% and now rates have gone up and you can go out there and buy a bond that yields 4%, that one that's yielding 1% loses value because it's only yielding 1%, so iron rule of banking. Here's the thing, here's where I cotton on to where Senator Warren is coming from.

Risk managers at banks, management teams at banks get paid extraordinary amounts of money. Six, seven, eight figures because supposedly they're smart and they work really, really hard to manage risk inside their institutions. Yet inside Silicon Valley Bank, they had this massive portfolio of bonds, rising interest rates was a secret to precisely nobody, and they didn't do any one of the half dozen things, as you said, selling those bonds, hedging those bonds. They didn't do any of those things that might have been prudent risk management. That's where I do get pretty, pretty frustrated. These folks get paid an awful lot of money for what they do and in this case, they just ignored the most basic axiom of banking.

Brian Lehrer: Were you at the hearing as a member of the Financial Services Committee that Senator Warren was referring to in the clip? I don't know if it was before your committee or somewhere else, where Silicon Valley Bank CEO Becker testified that he wanted Congress to roll back some of the regulations on the riskiness of their investments?

Congressman Jim Himes: Senator Warren is exactly right. I remember the period in which the mid-size banks, there was both testimony and there was lots of lobbying where they were saying,

"Guys, we are not systemically dangerous the way a Citibank at J.P. Morgan is." That led to the passage of this legislation. Again, we'll pull that apart. Over time, we'll come to learn whether that legislation, which did lighten some of the obligations of these medium size banks, had something to do with Silicon Valley. It's a little early to tell, but no, it was a full-on lobbying effort. I think the lesson to be drawn there was -- Frankly at the time, I'll admit to this, I thought, "Yes, there is a difference between a $50 billion bank and a $500 billion bank."

I thought at the time that therefore there is less systemic risk. What I missed, and what many people missed was that just because a $50 billion Bank can't do what Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns did in '08, they have this other mechanism that we saw in play two weeks ago. There's this other mechanism whereby they could create systemic risk. It's a moment for the humility that comes from knowing that you will almost never see the bullet that's going to get you this time if you are just obsessed on what happened last time. That's why right out of the box, I said, "Are we ever going to stop bank failures entirely?" No, because there will always be a new twist that creates some problem.

What you hope is, you hope that the end of the story here is that a couple of banks fail, but there's no dislocation to the broader financial system. As uncomfortable as the week may be, that's actually a certainly far better outcome than we saw in 2009 where people lost their homes and their jobs, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: The New York based bank that failed, Signature Bank, I've read that Barney Frank himself, co-author of Dodd-Frank, former congressman, liberal democrat from Massachusetts is on their board. Are you scratching your head if that's the case over how the co-author of the Keep the banks from Untenable Risks Law did not see the risk his own company was taking?

Congressman Jim Himes: Yes, and I was actually in some communication with Barney. We're good friends, we served together for a long time. There is an irony to that. I would also say that Barney is a legislator, he's not a regulator. I wouldn't necessarily expect that he would be the one that would identify a deficit in Tier I capital inside the bank. Anyway, he has a theory that this also had a little something to do with crypto in the case of Signature and First Republic. I haven't talked to him in detail about it, but I think that's also worth unpacking a little bit.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Congressman Jim Himes. Hi Stephanie.

Stephanie: Yes. Hi. Good morning. I just wanted to add or broaden the conversation of what went wrong here. Not only did the San Francisco Fed miss this, but Wall Street analysts missed this as well. It's kind of a gallows humor joke that something like 14 out of 15 analysts had buy ratings on these banks before they crashed.

Brian Lehrer: Buy rating for the general public, buy ratings, meaning a good investment, buy stock in these banks.

Stephanie: On the stock, yes. Then related to that, and all of this is the conversation that's more on the financial channels about something called mark-to-market where how you value the securities rather than valuing them on the books at their current price. If they were to be sold today in the public markets, they were being marked as it were on the books with their face value. Dodd-Frank got into all that and let the banks avoid mark-to-market accounting of these assets. I think that plays a part in all of this as well. I think that ought to be reviewed because if the banks that had to mark, "Mark to market the securities," all of this would have been right on the surface and laid bare in their balance sheets.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Stephanie, thank you. Do you want to do a little mark to market 101 for the general public congressman, and do you agree with the caller?

Congressman Jim Himes: Yes, Stephanie makes a really good point. I would say this, whether a bank marks-to-market, which is a term of art that basically means if your bond that says $100 is no longer worth $100, it's worth $92, which is what happened inside Silicon Valley Bank. You ought to show it on your balance sheet at $92. Now, I think that Stephanie is right, but that doesn't really let the management team off the hook because again, these are people who were paid extraordinary amounts of money to manage risk. They knew at the start of every day, whether it was on their balance sheet for $100 or $92, they knew that the value of these bonds had declined precipitously.

By the way, they sold a bunch of them too, and when they sold those bonds by definition, they were "mark to market." This is what precipitated the crash. They sold it, they reported a $2 billion loss on that sale, and it was off to the races. Again, making sure that banks are accurate about the value of their assets is exactly right, but they should know. They should have taken measures long before the crash to address the fact.

Now, not to get too far down the road of bond math, Brian, but they might have said to themselves, "Well, if we hold these bonds till they mature, eight or nine years from now, we'll get our full money back." They didn't then take into account but what happens if you need a lot more cash than you have on hand today? They didn't have that cash on hand, and the rest is the ugly history of the last two weeks.

Brian Lehrer: Cynthia in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Congressman Jim Himes from the Financial Services and Intelligence Committee. Hi.

Cynthia: Hi. Good morning. One thing about the very low-interest rates for the last 10 years or so has been that those of us who have money in CDs and other interest-bearing accounts have really been the one subsidizing the low-interest rates for everybody out, or for peoples' mortgages and stuff. Prior to 2010, if you had like even federal bonds or savings accounts, you could get 6%, 5%, 7%, and it was actually worth having money in savings.

Then when it fell, you were in a way forced to put your money in the stock market because you could potentially make something on your money but also potentially lose it, which is now what's happened to everybody in their 401(k)s. [crosstalk] I'm in favor of higher interest rates.

Brian Lehrer: Higher interest rates, at least to this degree, does she have a point about where normal should be considered?

Congressman Jim Himes: Well, I think the really important point here, Brian, is that you need to remember when you're talking about interest rates is that whether they go up or they go down, there are winners and losers. When rates go down, and they've been down for two decades now, that's wonderful for new homeowners. You can go out there and get a 30-year mortgage for 2.5%. They're out there. It's really, really hard on senior citizens who are living on fixed incomes, who necessarily have bank accounts and bonds, really, really hard. As rates go up, of course, it's great for folks that are living on a fixed income or better, I should say, but it's tough for folks that are going to try to buy a home or finance a car. There's always winners and losers when rates move.

I come back to the point that there are some people who are paid very, very well to address the risk inside their institutions associated with those moves in interest rates. In Silicon Valley Bank, obviously, those people just got it wrong.

Brian Lehrer: To get even more wonky and a little bit historical, I even wondered when the financial crisis happened in 2008, and of course, that was a mortgage crisis, too many investments in home mortgages that turned out not to be good, and that crashed a lot of banks, that whether the fact that interest rates went practically to zero, around the year 2000, after some of the financial shocks of that time and Iran, 9/11, that that forced too much money into home investments, as opposed to bank investments.

People invested in homes because that was the only place, or that was a big place that they could see their money grow rather than stagnate against inflation, and that caused the housing bubble that we then paid for in 2008, 2009, and in a way ever since. Do you think that's the case?

Congressman Jim Himes: It is. I would add to that, I would point out that zero interest rates are naturally going to get people to build more homes, buy more expensive homes, because mortgage rates go to good pretty close to zero. By the way, we also dramatically subsidized real estate in this country. It's probably the most heavily subsidized industry there is. How do we do that? We do that because the mortgage interest you pay on your mortgage is tax deductible. We do that because if you sell your home, you don't have to pay capital gains to a certain point. We do that because we have these esoteric mechanisms called like-kind exchanges for commercial real estate.

All of this is a subsidy for the real estate industry which if you've ever wondered why your average middle-class home in suburban Illinois is much, much larger than your average suburban home outside of London or Paris or Germany or Tokyo, it is because not only do low-interest rates spur the real estate industry, but the government of the United States is in the business of massively subsidizing real estate.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Yet you know as a New York City area Congressman in nearby Connecticut, that there's a massive housing shortage in this metro area nonetheless.

Congressman Jim Himes: Well, that's a different issue, but you're exactly right. You're exactly right. What happens is when you have massively subsidized real estate, those people who can qualify for a mortgage do very, very well. Those folks who are forced to pay rent do a lot less well. Of course, in communities like New York and Boston and San Francisco, where there's a lot more people who want to live and work there, then there is housing available for them, you get some really catastrophic rent situations.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing on this before we turn the page, and I ask you to put on your intelligence committee hat and talk about among other things, the prospect of protests of Donald Trump is indicted. The FDIC, which really means the federal government, has been insuring depositors money up to $250,000, to protect smaller depositors, more or less, from bank failures.

When this happened with these banks in recent days, as you know President Biden announced the FDIC would make all depositors whole, even those businesses with millions of dollars in uninsured accounts that they knew way exceeded the $250,000 limit, and there's debate about whether that's a good thing. Why should there be that kind of socialism for businesses, if you accept that term, general public bailouts, through the fees they pay to banks when they fail like you and I, as private citizens wouldn't get even when these businesses depositing millions of dollars knew the risks they were taking?

Congressman Jim Himes: You outline the problem exactly right. We're about to get to a conversation about our poisonous politics. Our politics are poisonous for a lot of reasons. One of them is that we certainly saw this back in '09, oh, wait, '09, and we're seeing it again now. Which is that people who do extraordinarily well, in a capitalist system, when catastrophe strikes, we socialize those losses.

Now, to be clear, what the FDIC has done here is not a bailout, no taxpayer dollars are being used, and the FDIC fund is funded by the banks, but nonetheless, the federal government works all weekend long and steps in because a lot of very well-paid people who live in Palo Alto, in this case, didn't do their jobs. That creates an awful lot of political anger out there for good reason.

The thing we need to struggle with now, Brian, is the rational thing to do if you have more than $250,000, and if you're a business you do, and by the way, these are the businesses who showed up and said, "Oh, my God, if I don't get my $10 million in deposits back, I'm not going to be able to pay my workers next Monday." People like me say, "Oh, my gosh, they're not going to be able to pay their workers, we need to help here." That creates a moral hazard.

The rational thing for people to do right now is to either spread their deposits across lots of banks, or more concerningly, may put those deposits in the huge banks that people generally believe aren't going to be allowed to fail. That all points to the possibility that over time, the United States could end up just having four or five massive banks, because people are nervous about using these smaller or medium-sized banks. We got to grapple with that.

Brian Lehrer: There's a third option, which is very much in the news right now, and I'm curious to find out if you support this option. I see that your democratic colleague Congressman Ro Khanna will introduce legislation to ensure all deposits with no limits, not $250,000 anymore, no limits permanently. One detractor I see is former FDIC chair Sheila Bair quoted in the New York Times saying these were big tech companies like Roku whining and crying about their deposits. Will you support Ro Khanna's bill?

Congressman Jim Himes: No. I think it's a bad idea. I think it's a really bad idea and I say this as a former banker. If the United States were to guarantee all deposits, remember, deposits are the fuel that banks use to turn around and extend loans. If the government says those deposits in their entirety will be guaranteed, the banks are going to say, "Well, if we take crazy risks with the loans we make or otherwise take crazy risks, shoot, everybody gets made whole in the end."

We'll see an uptick in the risks that banks are willing to take. No, you do need to guarantee some deposits because otherwise your retail investors, mom, and pop are going to lose confidence in the banks from time to time but, no, the idea that every single dollar of deposit in this country should be guaranteed is a perfect way to [chuckles] socialize the losses that will be associated by newly risky behavior that happens inside those banks that have their source of funds guaranteed by the federal government.

Brian Lehrer: With respect, is there a money-in-politics issue here because I see on the web that your biggest campaign donors by industry are in the securities and investment businesses, and campaign donors from commercial banks are third, and you're a member of the Financial Services Committee. I'm not accusing you of anything but the public might have reason to be suspicious of a system that allows that.

Congressman Jim Himes: There's no question in the world. Look, I sit on the Financial Services Committee, and I represent a very heavy financial services area. Fairfield County has an awful lot of people who work in New York in the financial sector so of course-

Brian Lehrer: Greenwich, Stanford.

Congressman Jim Himes: Exactly. Yes, I spend a lot of time around bankers. Now, what people need to do is hopefully believe that their representatives can be supported by these institutions, and I'm not happy that that needs to happen. If I could snap my fingers and do away with the money that sloshes around our political system, I would do it in a second, but obviously, the Supreme Court has had something to say about that.

You highlight one of the toxic, toxic qualities of money in our system. Look, I helped write Dodd-Frank, and the banks were none too happy with Dodd-Frank, so I don't worry that my constituents should worry that I'm in the pocket of the banks or whatever. I have been very serious about the establishment of sane regulation. Every time something goes wrong, people say, "Well, the Congress is corrupted by the amount of money that flows through," so that is something we should absolutely, absolutely fix. It's just been very, very hard to do subsequent to Citizens United and the Supreme Court's belief that money equals free speech.

Brian Lehrer: All right, in our last five minutes, I'm going to ask you to switch hats from Financial Services Committee Member to House Intelligence Committee Member. My question is, does the committee have a role in preventing political violence like was not prevented by good enough intelligence, apparently, on January 6th now that Trump is again summoning his supporters like he did then? You always want to respect the vital right in our democracy to protest, including protest someone's arrest, if it happens. I'm sure we have to agree on that first by all means.

We know from the past few years and from the FBI statistics that right-wing political violence is our biggest terrorism threat these days, and Trump, after all, was impeached for inciting the January 6th Riot. What's the intelligence committee's role, if any, as we anticipate Trump's possible arrest and his calls to his supporters to take to the streets?

Congressman Jim Himes: Well, Brian, it is a purely technical matter. The intelligence committee is outward looking. We look at foreign intelligence. We don't look at what is more of a law enforcement issue around intelligence, around violent protests, that sort of thing. The broader point is exactly right. One of the things you need to do when there's a threat of political violence is you need to make sure that people understand what's about to happen far better than they did on January 6 when I was stuck in the chamber because of a brutal and violent insurrection. Yes, FBI, police forces need to make sure that they have a pretty good sense of what's about to happen, and they've got the assets deployed to stop what happened on January 6th.

The larger issue, though, Brian, and this is truly a horrifying thing, number one, that an ex-president continues to stoke the possibility of violence. Number two, that that's rooted in the belief that he is not subject to the laws. Anytime somebody tries to hold Donald Trump accountable, he paints it as a corrupt, fake news hoax. Thirdly, and most horrifyingly, if you look at the statistics out there, and you're right, the vast bulk of violence out there is right-wing often white nationalist violence of the variety that we saw in Charlottesville.

We have come to a horrifying place where more I think than in three or four generations, more Americans believe that violence is sometimes okay in our system. We certainly saw that on January 6th. We certainly see that online and in the chat rooms and stuff. I don't know that government can fix that. I think community leaders, fathers and mothers, priests and rabbis need to pull us back from that brink even in the face of the incitement that we hear from Donald Trump. As a society, if we come to believe that violence is okay, we've taken a huge step towards losing our democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Also as a member of the intelligence committee, today is the 20th anniversary, as you know, of the start of the Iraq War, a war the U.S started, I think it's fair to say, based on faulty intelligence that Iraq's leader had weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda, both wrong as US intelligence officials later admitted, have we learned anything that will stop us from making such a mistake again?

Congressman Jim Himes: I was thinking about that this morning Brian. There's all these retrospectives where you come to understand that the case was always flimsy for weapons of mass destruction and yet sort of a mania. I wasn't in politics at the time, so I didn't see it up close and personal, but there was almost this mania that took over. The Democrats and Republicans left and right agreed that the right thing to do was to invade Iraq, which of course turns out to be probably the single biggest strategic mistake the United States has made certainly since Vietnam, empowering the Iranians, devastating the Iraqi people and the country to a point where groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda really, really flourished.

Here's the lesson for me, I already hear the drums of war on the horizon with respect to China. If you look at the study of conflict, a lot of wars get started because people get into this mania that I think seized the country prior to the Iraq War or mistakes get made. The story of World War I is the story of a series of catastrophic errors that wound up with millions of people dead.

I'd like to unpack it better, but the lesson for me is, let's diagnose that. When people are making extremely, almost violent statements with respect to China, which by the way, if you thought the Iraq War was tough, wait till you see what a war with China could look like, not even to mention the commercial interrelationships, the $700 billion in trade we do. Let's take a deep breath, let's learn from the mania that seized the United States prior to the Iraq War and try not to get into that headspace again.

Brian Lehrer: If I can ask you one follow-up and I know at the time that we were told that you were going to be out of time, so if you have to go, just say so and it's all right, but if you have time for one follow-up, what's the proper response then, the measured response, but effective response to things like the Chinese spy balloon and what the government thinks TikTok is doing?

Congressman Jim Himes: Look if we had more time, I would get more into it. The spy balloon is a red herring. It was a stupid thing for the Chinese to have done. They know it because now we own it, and we're pulling it apart. What is more concerning is maybe what the spy balloon represents, which is an increasing audacity on the part of the Chinese to make open threats against Taiwan to fly their fighter jets over Taiwan, to fire rockets over Taiwan, and then, of course, all the human rights abuses that the Chinese undertake.

The right response is to recognize two things, that the Chinese do things that are deeply inconsistent with our values, the treatment of their minorities, the stealing of the IP, and we need to confront them on those things, even as we recognize that we've got profoundly deep commercial ties, again, $700 billion in trade. People forget that the Chinese own $1 trillion with a T of United States treasury debt.

Madeleine Albright before she died, she said, "There is one word which needs to define the way we think about the Chinese, and that word is statesmanship." It's not cheerleading, it's not the drums of war, it's not stereotypes and saying we're in a new Cold War, it's the statesmanship to push back where we should push back, but to find common ground and to keep the conversation prudent and careful because the stakes are so high.

Brian Lehrer: Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes, Democrat from Fairfield and a little of New Haven County, thank you very much for joining us today. I appreciate the conversation.

Congressman Jim Himes: Thank you, Brian.

 

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