Welcome to Beg to

Begg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the

political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I'm Mona

Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark and I'm joined by our regulars

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal

Damon Linger of the Week and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Walter Olson, a Senior Fellow in Constitutional

Studies at the Cato Institute. So thank you one and all. This is the one year anniversary of Joe Biden's

inauguration and we're going to devote significant time to evaluating his first year in office. But before we turn to that, I'd like to begin

with a little discussion of voting rights prompted by Walter Olson's excellent piece that he did for the Cato

Institute called the do's and don'ts of defending democracy and you made a number of points that are worth going over starting with the fact that

you argue that a lot of what both parties are doing is focusing on the trivial or unimportant

at the expense of the significant. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure, and thanks, one of the kind words.

We have just had a long, long season of fighting over voting law, which may or may not be completely over with the refusal

of the Senate Act.

And I mean, let me start with the Republicans and even the most moderate and reasonable Republican position places all this emphasis on election

integrity by which they soon begin talking about the dangers of voter fraud.

Now this is one instance where by and large

the liberal response is pretty accurate,

which is, although voter fraud has been a problem

at different times in the American past,

...