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Welcome to Chatter. I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of Lawfair. This week we're talking

with Bob Bauer about his new book The Unravelling Reflections on Politics

without ethics and Democracy in Crisis.

When I emerged from law school, which was in 1976, the United States was embarking for the first time in its history in a significant degree of regulation of its politics.

And that has not been really true for the most part. And I graduated in 76

and I targeted it as a practice that I wanted to develop because it was consistent with my most

passionate interest.

It's very rewarding work, and of course if you win, it's exceptionally rewarding work.

When we say the system works, the system is the aggregation of all of these individual decisions

under enormous political pressure to do the right things as a matter of law and as a matter of

ethics. So that's very difficult, but I count on those people

and those positions of responsibility to make a decision that is the right decision to make even at some considerable

personal and political cost of them and our democracy utterly depends upon that

at the end of the day. So Bob, we are here a couple weeks after you participated in some deeply important historical events related to a matter that we're not going to discuss.

And I just want to put out there for listeners who might be expecting you to talk about the recent presidential

debate that we are going to talk about debate prep but not this cycles debate prep.

...