What Next, Democrats? (Neon Liberalism #71, with Bethany Andres-Beck)

Samantha interviews Bethany Andres-Beck, running in the Democratic primary for Massachusetts' 6th Congressional District. They talk about the spiritual crisis in the Democratic Party, the need to fix what's broken in America, and how they intend to fight for working people across a range of issues.

"I have no patience for people who dodge responsibility for their power. You have power whether you use it or not," Beth explains—and now it's time for Democrats to take and exercise power.

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [00:00]
So welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li. As you know, I am very interested in the future of the Democratic Party, of where our party is going and how it's responding to the events of our time. And so one of the ways I try to do that is to try and keep in touch with officials, people who are not just having takes or thinking about things on the internet, but are actually getting out there and doing the work. And so today I'm really excited to have on Bethany Andres-Beck. Bethany is an activist, a software engineer, and is running for an open congressional seat — maybe open, I'm not sure if it's open — a congressional seat for sure in Massachusetts's Sixth District. So yeah, Bethany, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Okay, so yeah, I guess first question — probably you've got an answer ready for this one. How did you get into politics, right? What led you to run for this seat?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [01:07]
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Well, originally I got into politics protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which was the issue of my college years. And then Howard Dean ran for president, and he told me "I'm the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," and I was sort of passively involved from there. I've thought of myself as a Democrat, but it was really the 2016 election that got me into formal politics. I was a software engineer on Hillary for America, so I spent a year of my life trying to stop Trump the first time, and I also got to learn a ton about how campaigns run, how a campaign at that scale works.

And after that I got involved in local politics — I've supported municipal races, I'm on my Affordable Housing Trust Master Plan committee, I'm organizing in my local town, which happens to have a little bit of a MAGA problem. And it turns out organizing works, that you can push back effectively on people who want power and are getting it just because other people weren't doing anything to stop it.

And then Trump got reelected, and suddenly people being mean to my local librarian isn't the biggest problem I'm seeing from conservative politics. And what I saw was a Democratic establishment, and particularly my representative Seth Moulton, that was having this crisis of confidence, and was so terrified that everything they had ever stood for was not worth fighting for, because it means you lose — even though I don't think that's what that election was about at all. And so he's going on CNN, talking about how the party needs to move to the right, and trying to figure out which marginalized group to throw under the bus to magically win again. And I'm like, none of this is good politics, all of this is terrible politics, and I've seen things work in my local community that were not this.

And so I stepped up to challenge Seth Moulton, and then he dropped out. He decided that he was not going to run for this seat again — he's running for Senate instead. And so now it's an open race, but the establishment absolutely found their establishment candidate, who was in the Biden White House, who had previously run in a different district and lost, his dad was in Obama's cabinet, his grandfather wrote memos for Obama justifying the drone assassination program. And so he is the champion of the establishment, and I still think that that is not the way forward for the party.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [04:02]
So I definitely want to come back to your principal opponent, Dan Coe, at some point, but I am really interested in what you said about the crisis of confidence. This is something that I have also been really struck by, right, looking at liberal elites especially. I don't think the liberal base is having quite the same crisis of confidence, but I think you can absolutely see it among liberal elites, and almost a spiritual crisis in a way. And I'm curious, what your read is on this crisis of confidence. What's going on there? And what should we do about it?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [04:42]
I think some of it is a DC bubble where — one thing I noticed as I moved from lower socioeconomic classes up is that people who make more money don't talk to people who make less money. They also don't talk to each other about money, which is very weird. But they are in conversation with the kinds of people who get op-eds in the New York Times, and they aren't talking — they don't actually talk to anybody who voted for Trump, and they assume that other people care about what they care about policy-wise.

There's a Massachusetts policy that's requiring towns to change their zoning laws, but it didn't just tell them "this zoning doesn't work anymore." It was like, you have to go and decide how you're going to get some zoning we like. And people in my local town hated that because they were being told what to do. It didn't actually have anything to do with what the outcomes would be. They just felt like they were being ordered around by people on Beacon Hill. And we had our local representatives come, and they were like, "Well, yeah, I think the number was a little high for what was required." And I was like, "Nobody talked about the number, nobody cared about the number — they cared that they're being ordered around by the people that you're talking to about that number."

And there's just this disconnect between what goes on among these hyper-nerds, basically, whose nerd-dom is raising money for elections — that's what they are very good at and spend a lot of time thinking about — and actual democracy on the ground: what is it voters want, what is it voters care about, how are people thinking about their relationships to power. All of those things aren't things that you can even learn about if you're mostly talking to other people from DC.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [06:35]
So I will confess to being something of a nerd, to caring about policy, and I definitely want to come back to housing, because I think that's an important topic in America today. But before any of that, I do kind of want to ask you — another one of these easy, easy questions, right? From your experience, ordinary people, your district, your own beliefs — what's the most important problem in America today? What are you trying to go to Washington to do, number one?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [07:12]
Yeah, so there's two answers to that, because there's the immediate crisis, which is that we have this out-of-control president trying to destroy institutions, tearing down things that have worked for years, threatening people's Social Security and Medicare. And then there is the thing where corporations are getting to do whatever they want, and what they want is to replace all workers with robots, and the government is helping them do that.

And the lack of action on AI — when I talk to people on the street, that is what I hear. They hear that I'm a software engineer, and they start asking me questions like, "Can the government spy on me through my cell phone?" And I have to say, "Well, what kind of cell phone do you have?" — which is not the answer I want to give at that moment.

But we haven't had a government willing to stand up for all of us in our relationships to technology, and so people don't trust the new technologies. And they are seeing what the companies are saying they want to do with the new technologies, and what the Defense Department wants to do with new technologies — build autonomous murder robots — and people are really worried. And I don't know how much of that is that it's new and unknown, and nobody has any idea what's going to happen, and we can't trust the people who should be paying attention and should be taking care — and how much of it is that our individual experience with AI is mostly like calling a company to hopefully get customer service and encountering a robot that cannot help us.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [09:02]
Okay, so I think you're right that there are these two tracks here, right? How do we respond to the immediate crisis, and also some economic questions, real anxieties, economic anxieties that people have about the future and the country. So let's start with the first track, the first thing you mentioned. And I think this is from your website: the biggest threat to our country is this president. And we could go on talking about how the orange man is bad, because the orange man is really bad. I want to know what you're going to do about it, right? What's your plan for doing something about the present crisis?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [09:35]
Yeah, so one thing I've noticed is that almost nobody in Congress ran for Congress to fight fascism, and almost none of them got into politics to fight fascism, because that was not what leads you to intern at a senator's office 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think that's also part of the crisis of confidence — the toolbox that they have doesn't give them anything they can do about this. Whereas I'm coming from activism backgrounds where sometimes you go bang on pots and pans and yell and sing "This Is the Song That Doesn't End" until people get really annoyed and go away. There are some times when the goal isn't to win hearts and minds — it is to provide some incentives for people to behave differently.

I would love to see Congress step up and use the powers in the Constitution — set the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to rein in the horribly corrupt institution that we have at the moment, where they're openly taking bribes from people they're deciding cases about. I would like to see us treat the institutions as one tool, but — they're planning on building a giant arch. Why are we not planning and going and sitting on the site where they're going to build the giant arch to celebrate Trump? We have tools from activism and creativity.

And then you are also doing the community organizing work inside of Congress itself — talking, figuring out who in Congress doesn't actually care about the policy things they want, they want to get on Fox News. I don't know, maybe I say something nice about a communist, as long as you support my thing over here, and then you can go and yell about how I'm terrible because I like communists, or whatever. What is it that you would like to be able to run against? We can provide the entertainment, the sort of WWE of it all on Fox News, as long as we're also making progress on the things that actually matter.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [12:04]
Okay, so I'm interested in that line about going and sitting on the ground. I mean, I've been there — it's like a roundabout somewhere in DC. I was really struck by earlier last year, when the mass deportations were first spinning up — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he's sent down, sent into CECOT, this prison that nobody ever leaves from. And his senator, Chris Van Hollen, just goes down there on his own recognizance, basically. He's not a representative of the United States on an official mission or whatever, he's not been invited by the government — he just flies there and is like, "I'm going to go see my constituent." And eventually does, right, they let him in. And that's a way of leveraging the power and the stature of the office in ways that are not just working on the Hill. So I'm curious — how do you want to do that, right? What actions do you want to take that aren't just part of the office but are in the aura here?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [13:00]
Yeah, I think it's a little bit hard because I don't know what crisis is going to be happening when we're sworn in in January, right? It's far enough off that — are we still at war? But I was struck that for all of the service members who were arrested protesting this absolutely egregious war of aggression that we're in right now, there weren't any members of Congress with them. Part of it is finding the people who are already drawing eyeballs to a problem, who have already found ways to make that activism creative and visible and engaging and tell a strong story, and supporting them, and bringing additional eyeballs, collaborating with the movement as a whole.

And I think that's one thing that's different, that I would like to do differently. Not just while we're in crisis, but right now the activism and formal power tend to be very far apart. And I have relationships that I expect to be able to maintain, because I've had them. And I think we saw this with the generation of legislators who came out of the civil rights movement — Barbara Lee, John Lewis, people who had the community ties to collaborate outside of formal politics. And so you get policies that move forward not just because someone in DC thinks they're a good idea and goes around and shows everybody a white paper and tells them how amazing it's going to be and convinces everyone to go along with it. They happen because people — voters — like them, and are calling and demanding them, and this is what Indivisible figured out from the Obama years. That's how the Tea Party worked.

What we don't have is a giant rich fund to support challengers to establishment Democrats who aren't participating in these movements, the way the Tea Party had the Koch brothers fundraising. The only outside group we have pushing people in the Democratic Party is AIPAC, pushing them to support Israel. But if we can take that movement, have representatives from it in Washington — we've seen that be effective with things like the Green New Deal becoming the Inflation Reduction Act, big pieces of that made it in there because it's popular, because we had the popular movement behind the idea. And so it's not about great individuals in Washington, it's about who in Washington is representing these broad coalitions that we're building across America.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [16:14]
Fair enough, fair enough. The Inflation Reduction Act — "Infrastructure Reduction Act" is a very different concept. Sorry, just going to tear down as many bridges as possible.

So I have a question, which is — you get elected, how are you going to keep contact with these activist groups and these movements that you want to keep contact with? Because this is a problem that we've seen officials have sometimes, right? Once you're inside the House, people who are outside the House can have a little bit of a fractious relationship with you. I'm curious how you foresee navigating those kinds of issues.

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [16:55]
Yeah, one thing I noticed during the pandemic — I hadn't been working remotely, and I went to working remotely — is that a lot of people were doing that for the very first time, and they had their challenges with it. Especially for managers — managers did not know how to manage, especially executives didn't know how to manage companies remotely, because they'd never had to. But I am a millennial, and I had played World of Warcraft, and I had organized a World of Warcraft guild with people across the country and other countries who I had never met in person. And we have these digital tools now — I will be in group chats, I will be in the same Discord servers I'm in right now. I'll be busy, but I've been busy at other times in my life.

And there are real concerns of who has formal power versus not, but I've navigated those before too. Having been a manager, having been in roles where, yeah, we would be friends in some other circumstance, but right now you're working for me, and I want to respect that. I think there are ways that we can navigate those relationships also by understanding that unless you're working in the office of a member of the House, they don't actually have any power over you. We've seen them not have any power over the president who they're supposed to have power over.

And I think that's also where, if we can make the work more visible, it becomes less like, "Oh, that person is withholding something from us by not doing exactly what we want," and more like we're all in this together, we're all working on the same project. Here's the next steps that we're all doing. You're collaborating on something instead of having that separation.

And I think this is also where — this is not my career. Being a politician is not my career. My goal is not to end up Speaker of the House or president or even a senator. I want to use the tools of this office as effectively as possible to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. That's my goal here. And we've just, in my district, had somebody who — very clearly, he had already run for president, right? Nobody noticed, but he had already run for president. He clearly was trying to use this to leverage himself into higher roles and other careers. And I want to do this job really well, and I think that means I don't have to become part of the same institutions, because I don't think that is the important part of doing this job well.

And I think one of the downsides of having made it so hard to run for office is that you have to be incredibly motivated, you have to really want to do this. This is not pleasant, this is not easy, this is not something that anybody wants you to do. Nobody wants you to go challenge the Democratic incumbents. You have to really, really want it. And so either that's because you really want to hold that office, or in my case, you are very offended by people who are bad at their jobs.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [20:01]
Okay, I mean, I personally am also very sick of politicians who seem to run for political office in order to hold political office, but not to do anything with it, whether that's at the local level or the national level. It's just like, why would you want all that power if you didn't want to exercise power to do something good for the world?

Yeah, so going back to this question of power — on your website, you talk about, here's one thing you want to do: impeach the president, right, for his many crimes. I think that's a gimme on the bingo card right there. I'm interested in the broader scope of corruption that we're seeing in Washington right now. I've talked about this in previous episodes of the podcast, but just to take one example — the scale of corruption we're seeing on these tariffs, the extent to which it seems like companies are just bribing Trump, the way that the Trump meme coin was used to funnel money into Trump's pockets.

Right now, Trump is suing the IRS for, I believe, $10 billion, and he also happens to run the IRS, and he's saying you should settle with me personally for $10 billion to come out of the taxpayer's pocket. We've seen — I believe again, this is from last year — CVS was number one, trying to get an enormous merger approved, and number two, being sued by Trump for defamation. Trump gets elected, and they're like, "We are going to settle with you right now, here's a big pile of cash." And the FTC says, "That's great, your merger is approved."

There's a scale of corruption happening in Washington right now that I think really boggles the mind — boggles my mind. Anyways, maybe other people have hardier minds out there. What do you want to do about it? Let's say we take back power, let's say we win some big elections in 2026, take back the House. Let's say we win even more elections in 2028, take back more power, can really start passing laws. What are we going to do about the corruption that's already happened, and the corruption that will keep on happening as long as Trump is in office?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [21:55]
Yeah, and I often point back to not putting Nixon in jail as the start of all of this. They decided that — a bunch of Republicans decided that even those consequences were too much, and we had to stop anyone from ever doing that again. And the country learned that we can't do anything when powerful people are breaking the law. And to restore trust in a society, you can't tolerate that. You can't have people putting out press releases about their corruption.

And I would love to see us lock up a ton of people, investigate things as RICO charges. I think the pardon corruption schemes — that's potentially a crime. Clearly, a Department of Justice under the President is not going to investigate those. So I do think there are a couple of possible solutions. One I really like is establishing a truly independent — and telling the Supreme Court they don't get to say it's not, because that's one of the things they keep doing, saying nothing can be independent, everything belongs to the President — that cannot be how a country runs. So establishing a truly independent anti-corruption investigation force and an anti-corruption prosecution force. This is the model they're using in Ukraine, that went after one of Zelensky's closest associates, because independent anti-corruption forces can work. And it's clear — what we had in America is not working, so let's try a model that does.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [24:33]
Yeah, I think that's really interesting, these proposals for some kind of independent agency. For a few years, anyways, we had the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was structured to be a kind of independent branch within the executive branch. The president couldn't meddle with it too much. And like you said, the Supreme Court was like, "No, that's not okay, that's not allowed." They've endorsed this unitary executive theory that says actually the president can just do whatever he wants in the executive branch, except for the Fed — the Fed is different and special. Don't touch the money, Mr. Trump, but anything else, go nuts. Which I think is an extremely spurious piece of legal reasoning.

But I think you're basically right to highlight the court as a problem here. I mean, this is something — you mentioned Ukraine — this is something we've seen in other countries, like Poland, where they've removed one aspiring autocrat, very conservative government, but then there are people left over from the previous regime who are going to do absolutely everything they can to throw sand in the gears and prevent anything from actually being done to prosecute the crimes of the regime. And so right now, very visibly, that's probably going to be the court. You talk about court reform on your website. What do you want to do about the Supreme Court?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [25:40]
So it depends on how big majorities we get, or how many Republicans we can convince that they actually want to save America. Because there are some things we can do with simple majorities, which include passing laws that exempt things from jurisdiction. There are things we can do with supermajorities, like impeach justices who have taken bribes or have ruled on things they have a personal stake in. And the standard for judge impeachment is just bad behavior — it says they'll keep their office in times of good behavior, and I think plenty of what they're doing qualifies as bad behavior. So I think impeaching justices should be way less controversial than it currently is.

And yeah, Republicans the next time they get power will try to abuse that and impeach all the Democratic justices, and we can't be afraid of tools just because the bad people are going to use them for bad ends. So I'd like to impeach justices. And then we should just expand the court — as soon as we have the presidency, we should massively increase the court size. Nine was just — pack it in. And expand the district courts and the circuit courts at the same time, because we're seeing that these caseloads are unmanageable. America has gotten bigger. Why can we not have a court system that is going to go along with that?

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [27:35]
I absolutely agree with that. Here at Liberal Currents, we actually recently published an article, "Break Up the Big Court," arguing that number one, we should massively expand the circuit courts. The country has gotten much, much larger, and the circuit courts have expanded barely at all. So they're handling these impossible workloads, and then whenever you need a Supreme Court, you just do a random selection of nine or thirteen or whatever of the total circuit court justices, and that'll be the Supreme Court that hears that case. It's not going to be the same nine people over and over again. And that will, in many ways, take some of the extremely high stakes out of Supreme Court appointments. As we've seen, it has been unbelievably consequential when one random person has a heart attack and dies in bed, or stays on a little too long and dies of cancer, and suddenly the whole policy of the nation changes because of these tiny, tiny margins on a small body.

So that's one proposal — expanding the court, term limits for the court. I know people have knocked that around a little bit, just to ensure a regular turnover of justices. Do you have a preference among these different kinds of proposals, or thoughts on what is more workable or less workable? Where's your head at?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [28:54]
So my goal is to reduce the power of money on justices, so term limits don't help with that — they make it worse. Whereas the random selection, I'd be very open to, because if you have to bribe thousands of people because maybe one of them is the one that you care about, that makes it exponentially more expensive. At least we can raise the cost of rampant corruption.

I think the other thing, though, that we have to look at is the role of conservative institutions, because these judges are not individual bad actors. One idea I really like is not letting judges pick their own clerks — instead having clerks apply to an independent nonpartisan body that will hire out of law schools. Because I think the Federalist Society is a conspiracy against America. For everything they accuse Democrats of doing, they are doing. When they talk about — they're bringing charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center. I assume that the Federalist Society is doing all of the corrupt things they're accusing all of the democratic institutions of doing. They destroyed ACORN for doing way less than the Federalist Society does.

So I think we need a government that is willing to go and look at not just the text but the subtext that has gone into bringing us to the point we're at. And that's what was missing during the Obama years, or during the Biden years, where Biden came into office and was like, "Oh yes, now everything is back to normal," and in fact you have pulled out none of the roots, and the dandelions are just going to grow again.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [30:44]
Yeah, I think that is — in retrospect, I mean, we blew it, right? He made it his campaign — the soul of the nation, we're gonna take America back, the fever will break. And then in the office, what does he do? Well, Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan infrastructure bill, Build Back Better — all of these, what they call "deliverism," right? We're going to deliver results for the American people, and they'll reward us. But we're not going to attack power, we're not going to change the institutions, we're not going to change structures.

And I think we're starting to see a huge reaction among Democrats to that. Virginia being an obvious example here, where Donald Trump says gerrymandering is great, gerrymandering is good, do more gerrymandering, Republicans are like, we're going to crush you Democrats, we're going to gerrymander Texas, we're going to pick up X number of seats and rule forever. And unlike in previous years, Democrats are like, "Okay, we're going to do the same thing."

The Virginia process — I mean, they're kind of constrained to do it that way because of how the Virginia constitution can be amended, but then again, the voters very much did it. They approved — I think Virginia used to be like a five Republican, six Democrat state, and some people said we're going to change some maps and have, I believe, nine Democrats, two Republicans. And the voters were like, "No, we're going ten Democrats, one Republican, screw that — we're going as far as we can." And the whole Virginia Democratic establishment was like, "We're doing it." And then the voters were like, "That's great."

So there's a real willingness to be like, yeah, we are actually going to start playing procedural hardball, we are going to change the rules, we are going to change the institutions, we're going to start changing these structures of power. And so I'm curious — what structures of power do you want to change? Not just the court, but other institutional structures in Washington. What would you want to change? What would you vote for in the House?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [32:55]
Well, and ask the voters to do the same thing, which I love. One thing the Republicans did and Democrats didn't, that I think has worked very well for Republicans, is term limits on committee chairmanships. The chairpeople don't get to sit there for the rest of their lives — you have to move around, you have to have new people come in. It has created a more vibrant party for them. And what they've done with that party is just support a dictator, but I think there are some things around — when we've structured things around seniority, that works if you're deciding between people who are spread over maybe ten years, where there's general turnover. It doesn't work well if people are staying in office for 30 or 40 years, because it encourages them to stay in office long past when they would otherwise be there. It distorts that whole system.

And I think as a party, we should be thinking about what are the outcomes we want, what kinds of people do we want coming up. And we're seeing problems in Massachusetts because our legislature is very secretive. The voters voted for an audit of the legislature, and the legislature just said no. And their audit is literally two pages — just how much is in their bank account. It just said the money is in the bank account. That's it. That was not what people were looking for.

And then a lot of the committee hearings — you don't know what committees are meeting, you don't know what they're considering doing. They recently — the House passed a measure to impose some of the worst age-restriction laws on social media access in America. I found out about it 18 hours before it passed, and nobody knew it was happening. I only found out about it because I was chatting with a legislator. It's very opaque, and what happens is that you don't have people coming out of that who would step into a role like a federal House seat. Everyone gets there, realizes that they have to play along with whatever the leadership wants or they're not going to get their thing for their district that's going to let them get reelected, and just sort of gives up.

And that system isn't good for the party in the long run, even if it's good for some people right now. And that question of how do we give up power to build a better community is a hard one, but it's also one that I navigate professionally as a principal software engineer. I'm going into companies where executives are unhappy with the way things are going, and they don't know what's wrong, and they don't know how to fix it, and what they need to do is trust other people more than they've been able to trust them. And what I do is help facilitate the community of people that need to be trustworthy. How do we build accountability? How do we decide what we want to build together? How do we decide that we're going to do our job well, no matter what anybody else tells us?

And then you have to work with the people who hold the power, because they can break it — it's much easier to break things than it is to fix them. And say, so you're sad that your software is full of bugs and customers keep canceling? If we can give you software that's free of bugs, are you willing to give up your weekly updates? Are you willing to give up individual performance reviews? These are the things that are getting in the way of what you want — sort of a little bit of motivational interviewing, help them through that process.

And I think that if we look at Washington as a system, it's clearly not making anybody happy right now. And so I think there's an opportunity to look at the party and say the way that we've changed it since Obama has not worked for us. I think Rahm Emanuel really did change the way the party operated, and it has not served us well. And then the unitary — having everything under the president, we just got to get rid of that, because that's the path to tyranny. And I don't want a Democratic tyrant either. I don't think the solution is to have a feminist girl-boss — as hilarious as the feminist girl-boss, socialist, trans president would be. That's not actually my goal in life.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [37:45]
I am with you there. So you've talked a little bit about reforming the structure of the party, reforming the way the party runs itself in the House. There are some other proposals that I've seen kicked around about restructuring the House generally. Some of the big ones are: we should add new states. We should turn DC into a state, maybe keep a tiny little federal district that encompasses the major government buildings, but the city of DC should just be its own state. Puerto Rico should be a state — maybe do another referendum there to make sure they still want it. Possibly some of the Pacific territories — maybe we should offer them statehood.

Another proposal I've seen is to expand the House — that the size of the House was capped way back in 1920-something, Permanent Apportionment Act. So the House has stayed here, nation has gotten much, much bigger, and this in many ways makes gerrymandering possible for various mathematical reasons. So we should expand the House to bring the number of House seats back in line with the total population.

Another proposal is multi-member, proportional districts, or other ways of trying to just directly attack gerrymandering, to say you can't pick your own voters. We are going to make sure that everybody's votes count. Are you a Republican in a deep blue city? Your vote's going to count. Are you a Democrat in a deep red rural area? Your vote's going to count. You will have representation. You won't be drowned out in this first-past-the-post system. I'm curious what your take is on any or all or some other of these kinds of structural reforms.

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [40:02]
Yeah, as soon as Democrats get power, we should make DC a state. We should make Puerto Rico a state. We should make a Pacific state. I fundamentally hate the idea of taxation without representation. I don't think America should be an empire, and I think that if we just set a line in the sand that says we are not going to be an empire, you can drive much better decisions from that. And that includes — DC should get to vote, and everybody should get to vote for a representative.

Uncapping the House — I'm absolutely in favor of uncapping the House. And I think part of what stopped that was that we were not very good at organizing bodies of more than a couple hundred people at the time. And I have worked in companies with 40,000 engineers. I have worked at much bigger scale than that now, because in the last hundred years companies got bigger and the world got bigger. And you do have to do things differently — I've been with companies as we went from 100 engineers to 500 engineers, and processes have to change. You have to move from having one group decide everything to having groups of groups, and distribute power a little bit more. But we already have subcommittees of the committees. I think we've already built a lot of those processes that we would need to make that work anyway.

And I think capping the House has had some really negative side effects. So absolutely those two. And for proportional representation, for multi-member districts, my only question is what is the coalition that's going to get it done, and what is the exact solution that we end up wanting? I think it would be a positive direction for America. A lot of people are really frustrated — our parties aren't really parties, they are coalitions. The primaries are where we build a coalition, and so the primaries are where your vote actually has the impact that you think your vote is going to have. And that's not — the participation is a lot less there, the attention is a lot less, we get less media coverage for a primary because people are just like, "Yeah, it doesn't matter yet, the only thing that matters is which coalition are we picking." And so it becomes a lot of insider baseball, and we expect people to pay so much attention to politics in this country to be able to participate.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [42:18]
That's right.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [42:54]
No, I mean, that's absolutely — in Pittsburgh recently we elected a new mayor, but the real election was the primary election, right? Whoever had D next to their name, barring extraordinary circumstances, was going to win. So the actual election for mayor was the Democratic primary. What's the turnout in that? Not very much. So it seems like there are certain problems here. Could go on about this for a long time. Time is limited, which —

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [43:16]
I'm a big fan of — we should try some stuff, we should talk about it, and we should be willing to think about what is it we want this to accomplish, instead of just what is the thing that we wrote down a hundred years ago.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [43:35]
I think that's exactly right. We can't be trapped by our traditions, especially traditions that aren't even in the Constitution, right? This isn't the deep law, this is just some law we passed in 1920 and weren't even thinking about that hard.

So I absolutely applaud, like you say, that willingness to just try stuff, do stuff, change stuff. I do have other topics that I kind of want to get to. One of them is foreign policy — a bit of a hard swerve here. We are clearly in the midst of some kind of crisis. Are we at war, or is it a special military operation, or what is it? You talk a bit about foreign policy on your website, on supporting both Gaza and Ukraine, which is a great combination — I'm a big fan of that particular combination.

And I want to ask you one other question, though — maybe press a little bit on some of the things that you say on your website. Let me make sure I get this quote correct: "America's foreign policy shouldn't be about what makes money for defense contractors. It should create a stable world." Stable world — that sounds great, but I think if you asked the Ukrainians, they would tell you you might need some defense contractors too, right? What did the Ukrainians want? Well, they would like more Patriot interceptors. Who makes those? Raytheon. They want more F-16s, more missiles, more 155-millimeter shells. They make those in Pennsylvania — other side of the state, but they make some of them here.

So if we do want to defend countries that are under attack by their neighbors, we still need some weapons to do that with. I'm curious how you balance all of these competing concerns. Because we've also seen — you build all those weapons and sometimes somebody just picks them up and uses them, right, as is happening in Iran right now. So how do you navigate these kinds of problems?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [45:36]
I think one thing — so I'm not proposing that we abolish military contractors. What frustrates me is when we make foreign policy decisions because of who they're going to profit, as opposed to — going to war because we have a bunch of missiles lying around that we would like to use so we can buy new ones. People are dying — these are actual human lives, and we've become very separated from that.

And I worked at a defense contractor early on in my career, when it was the job I could get that paid my bills. We were doing computer vision research, trying to do early self-driving cars for DARPA Grand Challenge stuff. I don't think anybody is evil in these places. I think we were doing basic computer vision research — it's just that the only way you could get that funded was by saying, "And then it will be used by the military." So there are some things where we can spend the same money and just admit that it's for research, and be able to open up the world of what can we explore, what can we do with it, so it's not only private companies desperately trying to burn as much money as possible before their funding runs out. There's a lot of things about the way we're funding these things that aren't going great for us.

I don't want to — it's not that I don't think we need any weapons. I do wonder how many nuclear weapons we need. President Trump is proposing that we more than double the number of nuclear weapons we make next year, and I don't think we should be building weapons that we wouldn't want used. So that's my concern with autonomous robots that could kill — at some point they're going to shoot a U.S. soldier in the back, right? No matter what you do — we have not created software that has no flaws, and so there are some questions there.

And I think deterrence is about what is the consequence when you do something bad. So for Russia, the thing that's going to stop them from invading countries is if it goes very badly when they do. And my concern with approaches that are more about "nobody should ever fight ever" is that that means the only thing you can do is constantly move away from anything anybody else wants, and that doesn't lead to a stable world — that leads to a world full of aggression. But wars of aggression, like attacking Iran, attacking Lebanon — those are things that also destabilize the world.

And right now we don't have a real check on the president, because we declined to indict presidents who launched wars without talking to Congress, and that didn't start with Trump. It's become a thing where Congress — I think since voting for the Iraq War became an albatross around a lot of people's necks — politicians who care the most about keeping their seats don't want to be seen as voting for an unpopular war. And I just have no patience for people who dodge responsibility for their power. You have the power, whether you use it or not — or through inaction allow people to come to harm — it's right there in your Rules of Robotics. Just step up. It's the same way tax cuts are just government spending — you are spending money, you're just spending it on billionaires. Admit it. And I will be a lot less frustrated if you were just like, "Yeah, I'm going to spend billions of dollars on billionaires," because that's what they're doing.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [49:45]
You have power, whether you admit it or not, or use it or not. I think that is a very important thing to remember, and I'm glad to see you being very clear about that, because I believe it very strongly.

I do want to kind of press back on this question — I don't think we attacked Iran because Raytheon wanted the government to spend more on missiles. I don't think that was actually the decision-making process in Washington. But again, time is limited.

You've brought up repeatedly your work as a software engineer, so I kind of want to start edging in that direction and at least ask you about autonomous weapons. Here's an example — this is an older weapon system. I can't remember the name of the damn thing. It's like the Duo or something, totally blanking on the name. It's an artillery shell. You shoot off the artillery shell at somebody, halfway through it cracks open, and two little maple-leaf helicopters come out, and each one of those is a shaped, explosively formed projectile. It just looks for a tank, right? It looks for a tank beneath it, and it shoots out this little jet of molten copper and kills the tank. That's an autonomous weapon, in a certain sense. It looks for a target on its own, and if it finds something that looks like a tank, it's going to shoot it with a jet of molten copper. What do you think the line is? How do you think we should be thinking about autonomous weapons systems?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [51:11]
Yeah, and this is one of the challenges we get into with AI in general — that definitional piece of what is intelligence. There's a lot of software that's not generative anything that is AI. And then the companies building generative systems have branded their things as AI.

My concern is where you have a computer choose a place or person — a particular person — and no human has a chance to say no. Because we spent years making sure that no one person was generally doing that, that there is — for target acquisition, for example. One of the things that people have been talking about with these AI-assisted targeting systems is we can choose so many more targets. We could have already chosen more targets if we were willing to cut out the safety steps that we had put in to avoid bombing schools.

And my concern is where we end up in a situation where the computer is essentially pulling targets out of a hat and then sending drones in through the window and exploding apartment buildings. So I think — who do you hold responsible? Who goes to trial for the war crime? To me that's part of the question. If the anti-tank weapon misfired — I don't know, hit an elephant or something, thinking it was a tank, I'm trying to think about what the failure mode there is — who gets held responsible for that? It's something that when you're building software, you have to think about: how do we know if this is successful? How do we know if it's gone wrong? And what is the group of people who is going to take responsibility when it goes wrong and make sure that doesn't happen again? If we don't have those feedback loops, it's bad.

And then there's a real concern — my concern is less robots doing whatever they want and more robots doing exactly what their billionaire owners tell them. Because I don't think that every individual in America should get to have a private army of terracotta soldiers, and that's where Elon Musk is heading.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [53:24]
Being a billionaire seems to be really bad for people's brains. He is a particularly kooky individual. And yeah — terracotta soldiers, except they're his kids, or his robots. I don't know, we could talk about his own weird psychosexual hang-ups. It does legitimately seem to mess with their heads in ways that I would not want my head messed with in that respect. I don't think it's good for you.

Okay, I said I was going to talk about housing. We're running out of time to talk about housing. I want to ask about AI. Do I have anything else on my list I need to talk about? I want to ask about Dan Coe. We're kind of going at the end here, so I guess you choose — do we want to talk about AI, do you want to talk about housing, do you want to talk about Dan Coe?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [54:46]
Let's do one minute of housing, because that's super fast. I want to build affordable housing where jobs are. One of the big challenges we're seeing is urban sprawl causes traffic, which people hate, which is a pay cut, which hurts local businesses — it just makes everything worse. And we saw the government decide it wasn't going to be part of the solution back when Bill Clinton was president, and we can just decide that that was a mistake and do something better. There's lots of local and state level stuff, and all of these other issues, but what we've seen time and again is that when housing is available, housing is more affordable. And if you don't have enough places for people to live, things become unaffordable.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [55:30]
I mean, this is something that in my life — I've moved around the country a lot, I've lived in a lot of different places, I've kind of been on the coalface of this kind of problem many times. Where, okay, here's where the jobs are, here's where people want to live. 40 years ago we made it illegal to build anything new there, and so where do you live? Well, you just find a place farther and farther out. You have a longer and longer commute. You do the math of how much can I afford in rent versus how long is this going to take me to commute, and then you make that work. So is that — do you think that's one of the core problems, these artificial restrictions on housing supply that we've created in so many of our cities in so many different ways?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [56:10]
Yeah, I think we've very clearly seen that this zoning started in the '70s, and that's when the problem started. Very clear cause and effect — places like Minnesota that have taken steps to relax those constraints have seen housing prices come down.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [56:25]
Very hard to argue with results there. People do anyways, but I find it hard to argue with the results.

Okay, I guess I'm gonna have to ask you one last question, though. We started with this at the beginning — your primary opponent is Dan Coe, someone that you see as a real representative of the establishment. What do you think the biggest difference is between you and Dan? Why should voters prefer you to Dan Coe?

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [56:50]
You know where I stand, and so you can decide whether or not I am someone you want to support — and not just what I say on my website, although I've tried to lay it out there, but in my 20 years of activism, I have been public with what my positions are, what my beliefs are, what I want our government to do for us. And then I have 20 years of building software that works for ordinary people, and it would be great if we had a government that did the same. And we can regulate AI so it works for all of us, if Congress understands when it's being lied to by CEOs. And Dan Coe doesn't even have a positions section on his website.

**Samantha Hancox-Li** [57:42]
Right — again, I have to apologize. I did not ask you nearly enough about AI. I know you had a whole section on being a software engineer and understanding that so much of our world is software these days, so much of the government's business is regulating technology. I am very sorry for not asking you more about it. The robot tax — I saw that, and I was like, "What is a robot tax? Do I have to pay extra for my Roomba? Is that what's going to happen?"

Anyways, thank you, Bethany, so much for coming on. Bethany is running for Massachusetts Congressional District Six. If you live in Massachusetts Congressional District Six, take note — bethfordemocracy.com. Bethany, thank you so much, and everybody have a lovely afternoon, or day, or whatever time it is when you're listening to this.

**Bethany Andres-Beck** [58:21]
Bethfordemocracy.com. I would love to come back and talk about my robot tax.