Special: The Long Road to Same-Sex Marriage, Latest Clinton Email Release & Jeb Bush's Tax Returns

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL: Hello, and welcome. We had so much to talk about on the regular broadcast that we just had to stick around a little longer. Joining me, Peter Baker of The New York Times , Jeff Zeleny of CNN and Molly Ball of The Atlantic .

Molly’s reported a truly remarkable deep dive this week into the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision that proves, once again, that nothing happens overnight. The issue did not accidentally percolate to the top of the national agenda. It was the result of disciplined effort that reminded me of how conservatives have rolled back abortion and gun rights over time, one bit at a time. So tell us a little bit about the four-plus-decade fight to get gay marriage as a constitutional right, Molly.

MS. BALL: Thank you so much for the plug for my story. You can find it on TheAtlantic.com.

You know, the Supreme Court first considered whether same-sex marriage ought to be allowed in 1972, when two gay men tried to get married in Minneapolis and were turned down for a marriage license and appealed and appealed, and the Supreme Court dismissed the claim as if to say why would we even consider this, it’s ridiculous. And so the way this issue ends up coming to the Court in 2015 is by activists gradually making the case to society at large that this is a plausible idea, that this is something that could exist and therefore the Court has got to consider it on its merits.

And so the other turning point that I highlight in my piece is the Hawaii case in the ’90s, where three same-sex couples in Hawaii applied for marriage licenses, were refused, went to court. And for the first time in any court in the world the court said this is discrimination and the state is going to have to actually prove its case if it wants to discriminate for marriage.

MS. IFILL: So in order for it to be plausible, two things had to happen: public opinion had to shift over time and it had to percolate up from the states. So there was a state-by-state-by-state strategy.

MS. BALL: That’s right. And I looked in particular at one central figure who has been called the architect of the marriage movement, Evan Wolfson, who’s the head of a group called Freedom to Marry. And –

MS. IFILL: Which no longer exists, by the way.

MS. BALL: It does exist for now, but it is going to disband in the coming months in a – in a sort of deliberate way. But he’s always said that once his goal was accomplished he would dissolve the organization. That was its only goal. It was very focused.

And what he did was he went back and he looked at the 1967 decision that made interracial marriage constitutionally mandated and – the Loving versus Virginia case – and he said, OK, there was some combination of states where this was already the fact – the law of the land and a level of public opinion gradually coming around that made the Court agree to consider this case. And you know, we like to think of the justices as sort of sitting up in their ivory towers making these dispassionate decisions, but they are always influenced by the times that they live in. And that’s why we see the Constitution’s meaning gradually evolving as the sort of societal consensus evolves. And so, you know, at the time Loving versus Virginia was decided, still 70 percent of Americans were opposed to interracial marriage. However, it was already legal in 34 states. So you had a Court that felt comfortable making this constitutional decision and imposing it on the rest of the country and knowing that there wouldn’t be a sort of major backlash or some attempt to undermine the Court’s legitimacy, which is what the Court always fears if it does something that’s dramatically out of step with public opinion.

MS. IFILL: Well, it was fascinating. In fact, that’s part of the argument that John Roberts made, which is that maybe the Court was still ahead of where the public opinion was. But that was his argument in a dissent that did not succeed.

Peter, I want to talk to you about something you wrote about this week. You spent a lot of time, I’m afraid, reading those Hillary Clinton emails. We had been –

MR. BAKER: (Laughs.) I read them so you didn’t have to.

MS. IFILL: Thank you. Thank you.

Hillary Clinton has been releasing in kind of serial dumps emails that she had on her private server that she turned over to the State Department – or I suppose I should say the State Department’s been releasing them. Are we discovering anything?

MR. BAKER: Well, I don’t think we’ve found any great bombshell revelations in these – no new scandals, no new understanding of how the Afghanistan policy worked or things like that. I think what we do get, though, is a small glimpse into her life as a secretary of State. We don’t see that very often. This is the first secretary of State we’ve ever seen daily emails from. Previous ones didn’t really use it, didn’t release them. So I think it’s interesting.

You see little glimpses of the discomfort, the awkward marriage she had with the White House run by the person who had beat her for the nomination just a year earlier. At one point, she writes an aide saying: “I heard on the radio there’s a Cabinet meeting this morning. Is that true? Can I go?” Which sounds a little weird, right? She would presumably know. And she wanted to be in the right meetings. She wanted to make sure she wasn’t cut out of things where she should be. And she worried at times that the White House might be feeling awkward about people who had supported her. But most of them are very logistical kind of emails. So these are small glimpse –

MS. IFILL: Anodyne.

MR. BAKER: Yeah, small glimpses you have to read from the – from the tea leaves.

MS. IFILL: One of the small glimpses I read was when the president appointed Bill Clinton as envoy to Haiti that she didn’t know, and she was the secretary of State.

MR. BAKER: Well, it’s not 100 percent clear.

MS. IFILL: Is that exactly the way it happened? (Laughs.)

MR. BAKER: It’s not – it looks like it that way because there’s – an aide to Bill Clinton emails an aide to Hillary Clinton saying the U.N. has just – you know, Bill Clinton has just accepted this envoy position, actually from the U.N., and it’s already begun to –

MS. IFILL: U.N., that’s right.

MR. BAKER: – already begun to leak out. And Hillary Clinton’s aide says, well, you better hurry up and tell another aide, you better hurry up and tell Mrs. Clinton. It may be that they had discussed it and she didn’t know that he had actually, you know, formally accepted it and –

MS. IFILL: All this – a lot of this is buzz among aides, not necessarily the –

MR. BAKER: Right. But it is interesting, by the way, they communicate to some extent between the aides. At one point, one writes to the other saying, well, he meant to call her, he hasn’t had time yet, he’ll get to it. You know, this is, you know, two very busy people and they’re communicating through other people. It’s a very interesting, again, small glimpse into their relationship.

MS. IFILL: Jeff, I want to take us back to the 2016 campaign trail. You mentioned part of this on the broadcast in passing, but I wanted to get a little deeper into the money piece here. In three months, it is remarkable to me that Bernie Sanders can raise $15 million, as you pointed out, without giving a single big fundraiser or fundraiser at all, and that Hillary Clinton giving them, but $45 million is still a lot of money. What’s happening with the money?

MR. ZELENY: It’s a lot of money; $45 million is the most so far that any presidential candidate has raised in a single three-month period of time, more than Barack Obama raised in the first quarter of his reelection bid. And this is all primary dollars, and what that means is that all the money can or has to be spent in the primary.

When she ran in 2007, she decided that she was going to raise money for the primary and the general at the same time. And so it kind of clouds everything and it – A, it makes you look presumptuous. So this time she said only primary dollars.

So what that means is she has been not, you know, doing a lot of meeting with voters over the past several months, but she’s been doing a ton of fundraisers – 18 states, a lot of New York, a lot of Washington, a lot of Los Angeles, Hollywood, but also some other sort of like smaller cities, mid-sized cities in the country: St. Louis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis. And what they’re doing is, in living room settings, it’s a couple things: trying to give her a test run for how she sort of gets back out into campaigning before very friendly audiences. It gives her a chance to reconnect with her old network, which she really has not been in touch with since ’07-’08. It gets her a chance to reconnect with, you know, for a first time perhaps, with the Obama old funders/networks. So taking all that together, she’s raised $45 million. But that is mainly through people maxing out, giving a maximum of $2,700 per person. So it takes a lot of checks for that, but Bernie Sanders on the other side has people – it’s just coming in the door, or rather online, organically. So that does remind us of what Howard Dean did. And the Internet now, of course, is –

MS. IFILL: Reminds me a little bit about what Barack Obama did, too.

MR. ZELENY: Right.

MS. IFILL: There were people who were not giving the maximum over time.

MR. ZELENY: Sure. And it’s sort of like a monthly subscription, if you will. You know, you pay your phone bill every month, you give to Bernie Sanders every month. That’s what they’re kind of hoping for.

MS. IFILL: How about Jeb Bush?

MR. ZELENY: Jeb Bush, he has not yet reported how much he’s raising in this first quarter. He did things a little bit differently. He jumped in sort of at the very end here, but he’s been raising money for his super PAC all along. So he is promising or saying he might raise $100 million for this super PAC, which is slightly different rules. But he did something even more interestingly this week money-wise: he released his taxes.

MS. IFILL: Thirty-three years.

MR. ZELENY: Thirty-three years of taxes. He’s trying to win the A-plus for transparency award. You know, we all remember in 2012, the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney, was he going to release his taxes, was he not, hemming and hawing and things. Well, this sort of gets that out of the way, but it doesn’t answer a couple things. It doesn’t answer how he exactly made his money. And he, in fact, has become quite wealthy since leaving the Florida governor’s office, you know, on the power of his name, on the power of his intuition in Florida and whatnot. But I think, you know, everyone gave him very strong marks for releasing this. It’s all online. You can look at all of his tax returns, except for 2014; that’s still being amended.

MS. IFILL: Once again, you read them like Peter reads the emails, so we don’t have to.

MR. ZELENY: (Laughs.) Exactly. And I read those emails. That was some good reading the other night, though. (Laughter.) I was up till one in the morning reading those emails. It’s pretty fascinating.

MS. IFILL: Ooh. That tells you what you need to know about this panel. (Laughter.) Thank you, everybody.

And thank you for watching. And while you’re online, be sure to check out my take this week on the filters we embrace and the ones we should not. And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .