This is a transcript from the June 2 edition of the Gist, which was guest hosted by This American Life producer Zoe Chace. Slate Plus transcripts are lightly edited and may contain errors. For the definitive record, consult the podcast.
Zoe Chace: You laid this trap for now–Attorney General Jeff Sessions at his confirmation hearing—
Al Franken: I didn’t lay a trap for him. Well, people are free to interpret it the way they want. I asked him one question, and he answered a different question and gave some misinformation or didn’t answer honestly.
Chace: I want to ask you about how you figure out what questions to ask, but let me just hear this one first.
Franken: If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
Jeff Sessions: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians. I’m unable to comment on it.
Franken: Very well.
Chace: How did you prep your questions?
Franken: Actually, this had just come out, five minutes before. I really had prefaced the part that you come in on, I had said, “Look, this just came across the wire essentially. Members of the Trump campaign had met with Russians, and if this is true”—that’s where we started on your clip—“what would you do?”
Meaning, “Would you recuse yourself?” That’s what I was really asking. He gave false testimony under oath to the Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearing.
Chace: That’s why it seems like a trap. Did you just get lucky to call him out like that?
Franken: Well, that’s the question. I’ll leave it for the listener to decide. A lot of people have given me credit—“That Franken, that he’s playing three-dimensional chess.”
Chace: Indeed.
Franken: “He’s four moves ahead of everybody else. He knew that Sessions wouldn’t answer his question.”
Look, there is a pattern in this administration of Kushner, Flynn, others who seem to forget conversations they’ve had with Russians. They don’t act like people who have nothing to hide.
Chace: Kislyak, the most forgettable man in town.
Franken: Yeah, how could you possibly remember meeting a guy who looks like Nikita Khrushchev’s grandson?
Chace: One of my favorite parts in your book is the relationship between you and your colleagues. Even Sessions, you talk about having a relationship with him, at least your wife maybe knows his wife or whatever.
Franken: Yeah, there’s this thing called the Spouse Club, and the spouses get together. Mary Sessions knit a blue baby blanket for my grandson, our first grandson. That’s a really thoughtful thing.
I served on the Judiciary Committee with Sessions and when I first was in the Senate, I made a habit, I went to every judiciary hearing. I’d show up early, and I’d stay late. I’d be prepared, and I’d ask good questions. Very often these were just perfunctory nominations and hearings, and it would just be me, Chairman Leahy, and Sessions, the ranking member. The three of us were there, and he liked the cut of my jib because I asked good questions.
Then a few weeks in, Leahy couldn’t show up because he had an appropriations thing he had to go to. So he asked me to chair. I got there early. I’m sitting in the chairman’s chair with the gavel. Sessions comes in. He goes, “Well, a meteoric rise!” I said, “And well deserved,” and he laughed. I tend to like people who laugh at anything I say.
Chace: That’s very sweet, both the baby blanket and his joke.
Franken: We had a friendly relationship, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t tough on him in my questioning.
His questionnaire that he submitted to the committee, there was one item, “Name the 10 cases that you were personally engaged in as a prosecutor that are most important,” and he listed four that were civil rights cases to rehabilitate his civil rights reputation. He hadn’t been personally engaged in them. I really grilled him on that.
Chace: When I look at what’s happening in the White House and the House, the House is like a crazy, dysfunctional family—like you can hear glass breaking and the Freedom Caucus rioting. And it seems the White House can’t keep itself totally under control either. You can see the conflicts they’re having pretty clearly.
The Senate seems kind of cool. It’s a little quiet.
Franken: Well, there is some tension.
Right now, health care is the most important item in front of us, I believe. The bill that was passed out of the House is atrocious. It’s a cruel bill. I am co-chair of the Rural Health Caucus with Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas. I go around rural Minnesota all the time, and people are freaked out about this because it’s going to hurt people.
Chace: As far as the health care bill, what’s your legislative strategy in the Senate?
Franken: Unfortunately, right now, it’s 13 Republicans behind closed doors that the majority leader assigned to do this. That’s not the way we should be doing this. We should be doing this in a bipartisan way. We should be having hearings. We should be doing this out in the open. That’s what happened with the Affordable Care Act. There were 40 or so hearings. It was done in the open.
Chace: The Democrats are being cut out of the process, and there’s 13 guys in a room, and you don’t know what’s happening in the room.
Franken: Exactly. I’m not sure they know what’s happening.
I think they did not expect Trump to win. They expected Hillary to win, and I think they expected just to continue using Obamacare as a political tool, and did not think about what they wanted to do if they could write a health care bill.
I believe that many of my Republican colleagues have not given a lot of thought to health care and how it actually works.
Chace: As I said, one thing I like in the book is your relationship with your colleagues, including the Republicans. Like you were just saying, you chair a committee with Pat Roberts.
Franken: We’re co-chairs of a caucus. Pat, he’s very, very conservative. I get along with him great. He’s very funny. We’ve bonded over Jack Benny.
Chace: —I was shocked to read that. I didn’t think of him as a funny guy.
Franken: Oh, yes—he is. He loves Jack Benny. I love Jack Benny.
On the Benny show, Jack Benny would walk up to a counter, and the guy would turn around and say, “May I help you?” Very often when I see him, I go, “May I help you?” We do that a lot, and people who are under my age, 65, don’t know what we’re talking about.
Chace: It’s a Franken-and-Roberts inside joke, which is so weird to imagine. I like being able to see this stuff so much.
I will say, obviously, Ted Cruz is not your favorite guy to work with.
Franken: He’s the exception that proves the rule in the Senate. He’s violated many of the norms of the Senate, and he’s not very popular. He is the toxic coworker, the guy who microwaves fish in the lunchroom.
Chace: In this book, it’s like you saved up a bunch of jokes you felt like you couldn’t say on the Senate floor.
Franken: That’s a small part of this, actually.
Chace: It shows up though.
Franken: Yeah, it shows up.
Chace: It’s a consistent theme in chapter after chapter.
Franken: Well, there were jokes I couldn’t say.
I remember when the Supreme Court ruled to make marriage equality the law of the land. I wanted to release a thing saying, “Senator Franken is very happy that the Supreme Court on this day has made marriage equality real, but Senator Franken thinks that Justice Scalia’s dissent was very gay.”
My team goes, “No, you can’t. You can’t do that.” I go, “I’ve been reelected by a wide margin.”
Chace: It would be so fun for us, for the reporters, if you would just do that. There was a great example where you describe when you and Ted Cruz are arguing over the assault weapons ban. You have this line in the book that you didn’t say out loud that would’ve been pretty amazing if you had.
Franken: Yeah, and I knew not to do it. He gave this patronizing lecture to Dianne Feinstein. It was, May I remind the senior senator from California that the Bill of Rights is foundational in our Constitution, that the founders blah, blah, blah, that the Second Amendment is in this Bill of Rights, and the First Amendment as well. If she would limit guns that are covered by the Second Amendment, may I suggest that she would also limit which books are covered by the First Amendment. I would ask the senior senator what books she would deem not coverable by the First Amendment?
It was this long lecture. And she came back at him great, in a way that should’ve just shut him up. He just kept saying, Might I point out that the senior senator did not answer my question, which is, which books she would deem not coverable by the First Amendment?
I wanted to say, “I know a book that wouldn’t be covered—Ted Cruz Is a Pedophile—because that would be libelous. Unless, of course, you are a pedophile. That would have to be proven I would think, and we don’t know.” That’s an example.
Chace: That’s so dark.
Franken: I think my staff would’ve all bolted.
Chace: Can you just explain why you can’t make those kinds of jokes? Because it does seem right now, with the way the president is tweeting, and this new congressman knocking out a reporter for asking about the CBO score of health bill—
Franken: —He didn’t knock him out, to be fair. He simply body-slammed him.
Chace: That is fair. He knocked him down, but not out.
It just seems like you could be making some of these off-color jokes.
Franken: Well, also, that was in my first term, and in my first term, I was very, very studious about showing people in Minnesota I was a serious person and I was a workhorse.
Because the first campaign was very ugly. They’d taken stuff I had written in comedy and said as a comedian, put it through this $15 million machine called the de-humorizer. It had some Israeli technology that de-contextualizes humor. It takes all the irony out. It takes the context out. It takes the hyperbole out. It takes everything out and leaves you with something that you can attack.
Chace: It was hard for me to read about the de-humorizer, because I understand what you went through in that first campaign. You’re a comedian, and you’re trying to prove you’re not just out here to troll the Senate or be a funny guy. You have serious ideas, and you want people to vote for you based on your ideas.
But it was a little hard to see the possibility of comedy in the Senate chamber evaporate.
Franken: I think it’s back. I’m going to be a workhorse with a sense of humor. I have loosened up.
Chace: There are a lot of people, I think, who want to know what the plan is.
I know a lot of Democrats in the Senate don’t like Donald Trump. But what’s next for the party? What’s the message besides you not liking Donald Trump?
Franken: I think the message is—to a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump—he does not care about you.
A $880 billion cut to Medicaid, it’s going to hurt a lot of people who voted for him. The $900 billion tax cut is just going to help people who make over $250,000. It’s going to help the super-rich.
Part of our message is that he’s not on your side. We are. We are about about creating high-quality jobs. We are about making sure everybody has an opportunity.
Chace: I read this critique of the Hillary Clinton campaign, Shattered. One interesting takeaway was that the Clinton campaign didn’t have a concise message. You could think “Trump” and you knew he was basically like, “America first. No wars, no trade, no immigrants.” You could picture it right away. With Bernie, it was the same. “No more millionaires and billionaires.”
Franken: That’s one of our problems. All our bumper stickers end with “Continued on next bumper sticker.”
There’s a reason for government. It is to make sure that there is security and there’s opportunity. That we all do better when we all do better.
Chace: There, you got that at the end. I could see that being a bumper sticker.
Franken: “We all do better when we all do better”—Paul Wellstone said that. I dedicated the book to Paul and Sheila.
