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Jan. 4, 2025 11:02-13:17 - CSPAN

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Washington Journal Washington Journal

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tammy thueringer

cspan 23:51

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sen/d 02:37

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rep/d 02:14

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sen/r 02:22

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rep/r 01:24

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Speaker	Time	Text
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		To the Carter Presidential Center for an arrival ceremony and service later today.
		You can stay with the C-SPAN networks for continuing coverage of the state funeral of President Jimmy Carter, events in Georgia and Washington here in Washington, D.C. next Thursday.
		That is it for today's Washington Journal.
		We'll be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern for another edition.
		Have a great day.
unidentified		C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
		Coming up Sunday morning, Democratic strategist Martha McKenna and Republican strategist Mike Reache discuss the incoming Trump administration, the new Congress, and political news of the day.
		And then the Cato Institute's David Beer talks about the H-1B visa program, foreign workers, and their impact on the U.S. economy.
		Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org.
		Former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, December 29th at the age of 100.
		Here are some of the events and services that will lead up to his burial.
		Today, the Carter family is traveling throughout Georgia in a motorcade with stops in President Carter's hometown of Plains, Georgia, and in Atlanta for the state funeral, which will be held at the Carter Center.
		On Tuesday, the family travels to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., where the former president will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
		The public will be invited to pay their respects beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern that evening.
		President Carter will again lie in state at the U.S. Capitol throughout Wednesday.
		At 9:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, President Carter's remains will be taken to Washington National Cathedral for a funeral service there.
		And later in the day, the former president travels south to be buried at the Carter family home in Georgia.
		We'll show these events live on the C-SPAN networks, streaming online at c-SPAN.org and on the free C-SPAN Now video app.
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		The tellers agree on their tallies that the total number of votes cast is 434, of which the Honorable Mike Johnson of the state of Louisiana has received 218.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		This is Washington Journal for Saturday, January 4th.
		This was the scene on the House floor yesterday as Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, was re-elected as Speaker.
		Speaker Johnson ultimately won the gavel on the first ballot after a lengthy vote.
		To start today's program, we want to hear your thoughts on Speaker Johnson's win and opening day of the 119th Congress.
		Here are the lines: Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002.
		You can text your comments to 202-748-8003.
		Be sure to include your name and city.
		You can also post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ.
		Good morning and welcome to Washington Journal.
		We appreciate you being with us.
		We'll get to your calls and comments in just a few minutes, but first wanted to share more about the floor proceedings yesterday.
		This headline from the Wall Street Journal: Johnson survives speaker vote after GOP holdouts give way.
		The article says Republicans' 219 to 215 margin meant Johnson could afford no more than one GOP defection Friday if all members voted for a candidate.
		Thomas Massey of Kentucky already had vowed not to back Johnson, while others had said they were undecided.
		As the clerk read off all 434 member names alphabetically, Massey stuck to his word and voted for another candidate.
		Representative Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota.
		Representatives Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Keith Self of Texas also voted for candidates other than Johnson, leaving him shy of the 218 votes needed for a majority.
		Instead of accepting defeat and heading into a second vote, Johnson huddled with Norman, Self, and members of the Freedom Caucus on the floor and in an adjacent room trying to negotiate a path forward.
		Upon seeing that Johnson didn't have the votes, Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, called Trump, who was playing golf, and handed her phone to Norman so the president-elect could talk to the holdout, said Norman and others involved in the talks.
		Article says that at about 2:30 p.m., two and a half hours after the new House had convened, Norman and Self walked to the well of the House and asked to change their votes to Johnson.
		The final tally, Johnson had 218 votes, exactly enough, while Jeffries of New York had 215 votes.
		Emmer had one vote from Massey.
		After that vote took place and Representative Mike Johnson was elected as the new House Speaker, he spoke to the entire chamber.
		Here are some of his remarks.
mike johnson ▲ ● ▼		We have a mandate, and that was shown in the election cycle.
		People want an America first agenda.
		They do.
		Sadly, for the past four years of divided government, too many politicians in Washington have done the opposite.
		Open borders and overregulation have destroyed our cities and stifled innovation.
		Inflation and weak leadership have left Americans poorer, and they have placed our country in a perilous position.
		That's right.
		But in recent months, we've witnessed something happening, something that's really remarkable.
		A political moment in our modern history.
		A groundswell of Americans from every state, race, and religion who now demand that we put the interest of Americans first again.
		And we will.
		And we will.
		This is a powerful new coalition of our country.
		It's a coalition that insists that we purge the policies of America last and we bury them in the graveyard of history's mistakes because it was a big mistake.
		To that end, this Congress will renounce the status quo and we will listen to the voices of the people.
		We will act quickly and we will start by defending our nation's borders.
		That's the number one priority.
		In coordination with President Trump, this Congress will give our border and immigration enforcement agents the resources that they need to do their job.
		We will secure the border.
		We will deport dangerous, criminal, illegal aliens and finally finish building the border wall.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We are hearing your thoughts for this first hour on Representative Mike Johnson being reelected as the House Speaker and the opening day of the 119th Congress.
		Again, if you'd like to join the discussion, the lines on your screen, Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We will start with Bill in Florida, line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Bill.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I'm very optimistic about this, but you know, this happens all the time.
		They all promise everything and they don't deliver.
		So I'm very skeptical at the same time.
		I think what we need to do is also have term limits.
		And I think also what we need to do is stop all this pork barrel spending.
		One bill at a time, not with all the extras behind it.
		If we can get to that point where we just pass one bill at a time, I think we can get things done.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Bill in Florida.
		David in Michigan, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, David.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I just want to hit up on something.
		Your last call.
		I'm a Democrat, okay?
		He's saying the same thing I want to say.
		You know, I'm a damn, but what he said, I agree with 100%.
		Because the whole talking thing with the Republicans, they talk about the border wall.
		The border got open when Ronald Reagan did it, okay?
		We're going to be talking about this same stuff on the next thing.
		But I disagree with the last, I agree with the last call.
		I'm a damn.
		Well, we can get so many things done.
		But I'm going to tell you, when they start talking about messing with Social Security and Medicare, Republicans always do that.
		Just imagine if something happens to Social Security.
		And we'd be in bad shape.
		And that's all.
		And thanks for taking the call.
		Love C-SPAN.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was David.
		JJ in California, line for Republicans.
		Good morning, JJ.
unidentified		Yes.
		This is a whole fresh, fresh air, breath of fresh air.
		And, you know, you hear all these talk that Democrats are saying, but they had four years and we're going backwards instead of forwards.
		This is a new era, and things are going to change.
		We're going to drill, baby, drill.
		We're going to cut back on the government.
		There's too many unelected people that ran this country, and we never voted for them.
		Who ran this country?
		And then, number who covered for Biden being mentally deficient since day one or whatever?
		That's why all these unelected people try to run our country.
		And can you believe that they say there's economy is great?
		There's no open borders.
		America has spoken.
		We love what's coming forward, and everybody's going to see the change.
		Did you know Biden never fired anybody?
		No one got fired.
		We're the new people coming in.
		The Republicans are going to fire people to do what's right for the people or step aside.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was JJ in California, Greg, in Glen Allen, Virginia, line for independence.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Greg.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		So I like Mike Johnson.
		I think he said a lot of good things in the speech.
		However, I still didn't hear enough about what they're going to do about the $36 trillion debt.
		I just don't hear enough of how seriously they're going to take that, how seriously they're going to.
		I heard some about cutting government spending, but are they going to do anything about entitlement reform?
		Are they going to do anything about tax reform?
		I just, you know, I hope it happens, but I'm not confident because I'm not sure how seriously they are taking that $36 trillion debt.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Greg, how would you like to see them address it?
		You mentioned entitlement and taxes.
		Is there one of those that you would prefer the approach?
unidentified		Well, our tax system is a mess, and I think they could go to some sort of flat tax and actually end up straightening out a lot of farms that way.
		And also, they keep kicking the can down the road.
		Somebody's got to deal with entitlements.
		I know we don't want to do that.
		Nobody likes to hear it.
		But that's where the debt is.
		And so they're going to have to have some kind of reform in that area.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Greg in Virginia.
		Yesterday after the vote, it was House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries who addressed the chamber as well.
		Here are some of his comments.
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		It's fair to say that in a democracy, there's a time to campaign and a time to govern.
		The election is over.
		This is a new Congress.
		The American people need us as their elected representatives in this season to put down our partisan swords and pick up bipartisan plowshares.
		It's time for us to come together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans to get things done for the people.
		In that spirit, House Democrats will work hard to find bipartisan common ground with our Republican colleagues and the incoming administration on any issue, whenever and wherever possible, in order to make life better for everyday Americans.
		For far too long in this country, the cost of living has gone up, but the size of the middle class has come down.
		Housing costs are too high.
		Grocery costs are too high.
		Childcare costs are too high.
		Insurance costs are too high.
		Utility costs are too high.
		America is too expensive.
		There are far too many people in this great country who for decades have been struggling to live paycheck to paycheck.
		That is not acceptable in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
		We need to build an affordable economy for hardworking American taxpayers, and we need to build it now.
		It's time for us to come together and finally lower the high cost of living in the United States of America once and for all.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Hearing your calls and taking your comments on social media about Representative Mike Johnson being reelected as House Speaker and the opening day of the 119th Congress.
		A couple comments on social media this morning.
		This from Faye says, Jeffries would have been a world better than Johnson.
		Johnson didn't bring them back from vacation to vote more funds for the storm's victims.
		And Richard says, I feel Johnson will be able to cross party lines and work together with Democrats.
		Let's hear from Roy in Orlando, Florida, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Roy.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I watched the election gavel to gavel, and it didn't surprise me at all that the outcome came the way it did.
		I firmly agree with one of the Republican callers earlier who said we need term limitations.
		We have career politicians that have been around for years, and they're not representative of the common people.
		I have been a Democrat my entire life.
		I'm 75 years old, and I have always voted Democrat.
		But I'm a conservative Democrat.
		I am not a liberal Democrat.
		And I support the system the way it works.
		But I think we need term limitations.
		That's it.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Ryan in New Mexico, line for Democrats.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Ryan.
unidentified		Good morning.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Lewis in California, Line for Democrats.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Lewis.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Hello.
		I think that Johnson would be just about as okay as you can get for, you know, people coming from a slime fit like the Republican Party.
		They say all these beautiful things, and people's IQ in the United States have gone down the hill.
		I think that people are not really digging deep into the corruption that lies in the Republican Party.
		I mean, in all offices, we need our so-called deep state workers, which were actually just people that just working for us, United States citizens, all of them, both sides of the party.
		The deep state is not with a devious conglomeration of people toying with our lives.
		They are here to service us, and they do a very good job.
		So the heck with deep state rhetoric.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Lewis in California.
		Dave in New York, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Dave.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I see.
		Good morning.
		Yes, I just hope that Speaker Johnson will not be a puppet to the current president, and he will work along with the Democrats to make sure that we have bipartisan bills passed that would benefit the country.
		I know he's a Christian man, as he proclaims, and so I hope that he will do the right thing.
		As you can see how close, how thin the margin is in terms of his election.
		It's only three votes away from the Democrats being the Speaker of the House.
		And so I'm hoping that he will work along.
		Wish them all the best, and I hope that they will govern and make decisions that will benefit the entire country.
		Scott.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Dave in New York.
		Up next is Barbara in Massachusetts.
		Good morning, Barbara.
unidentified		Hi.
		Hi, good morning.
		I'm a longtime caller.
		I'm going to suggest the kernel of an idea for an alternative tax plan for President Trump to propose.
		Okay, so theoretically, the billionaires want the tax rates lowered so that their tax liability would be lowered, and similarly for the large corporations.
		Now, we have this thing called a charitable deduction in our tax system.
		And if you, my idea is to create a 501c3 nonprofit called reduce the debt.org, and the billionaires and anyone else would donate massive amounts of money as charitable deductions, which would reduce theoretically their bottom-line money payments that are owed to the government instead of lowering the rates.
		So then what would happen is the monies that would have been collected from those people into the treasury for the regular, you know, consistent for the spending for the current, but you know, the current, whatever the current spending plan is, that money would instead go to theoretically reducing interest payments on the debt.
		Now, we know the debt is massive.
		It's $38 billion or $37 billion, sorry, trillion with a T. You know, so it's massive.
		But as people start doing the numbers, you know, as these, you know, it might be a possibility that everyone could understand.
		And also, the last thing I want to say about it is it would convert the bad guy reputation of the super wealthy into the good guys because they'd be doing this patriotic thing of lowering, reducing the debt over years, but simultaneously reducing their own personal tax liability.
		So I really hope people will think about this idea and call it and comment on it.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We'll leave it there, Barbara.
		It was yesterday that Congress had their first day of the 119th Congress, but it's been weeks of work for the office of the chief administrator as they moved people in, new members, and their staff.
		C-SPAN spoke with them and got a look at the behind the scenes of those efforts.
		Here is a look.
unidentified		I'm the chief logistics officer.
		Thank you for coming here and seeing all the logistics and support functions that support the transition that's occurring in the month of December.
		Transition for LNS actually started in July of 2023.
		That's when we started bringing desks in to go through the finishing process.
		And we have to have 70 desks available by December 1st of 2024 so that in the month of December we start moving all these 192 offices in December and all have to be completed by January 2nd, 2025 so that they can be sworn in on January 3rd.
		They walk into their office and everything is set up.
		All the furniture, all the computers, all the phones, copy machines, everything is set up and they're ready to do the business for the people.
		This is the House Upholstery Shop.
		We are a group of 11 individuals.
		We restore and refurbish all the original house furnishings.
		Every building had furniture designed for it, and we maintain it.
		Come on back, all the original furniture in the House office buildings was designed with horse hair.
		Horse hair in Turkish chairs, in all our sofas, in all our executive chairs.
		Watch your stuff come through.
		Sorry, guys.
		Horse hair doesn't break down like the phone products of today.
		So we still have our original horse hair picker.
		And I'll show you with the Turkish chair.
		We turn it on, and when we take it out of the chair from 1907, this hair, it doesn't break down.
		All we do is we put it through here, it fluffs it back up, we shove it back in, and we upholster.
		It never breaks down, it doesn't rot.
		So all we're doing is picking it through this massive amount of giant spikes in there.
		And all it does is it fluffs it right back up so we can reuse it.
		It's the ultimate and reusable product.
		So it didn't hurt the horses.
		It's from the mane and tail.
		I always tell people that.
		This is the original 1977 Lawmark chair that we're doing for Appropriations Committee.
		Their whole committee's built in them.
		Everything in the base, it's all horse hair inside.
		So the only thing that wears out is the leather and the finish.
		So we've just been recovering them.
		So, you know, we'll just keep doing it until nobody wants to turn for anyone.
		So this is Turkish chair without.
		Everything under here is horse hair.
		And then when Corey builds this up, it'll all be horse hair.
		And it's all hand sewn.
		There's no wood up here.
		It's all hand sewn and stitched.
		And so it comes out looking like that.
		And it's all horse hair and hand stitching to make it happen.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		The 119th Congress officially gaveling in yesterday, their first order of business electing the House Speaker, which was Mike Johnson.
		This from the Wall Street Journal opinion section this morning, a squeaker for the House Speaker.
		The article or the opinion says that the power flex by the malcontents, those who had earlier voted against him, shows how hard it will be for this narrow GOP majority to get anything done, much less meet the high expectations for the next two years that Mr. Trump has built among his voters.
		The GOP has the narrowest House majority in more than a century, but voters aren't likely to consider that an excuse for failure.
		Republicans also now control the Senate and White House and voters expect them to govern.
		It goes on to say Mr. Johnson's management style is about as collegial and inclusive as you'll ever get in a speaker.
		His problem is that a handful of members haven't been willing to accept the partial victories that are inevitable.
		And at Congress with narrow majorities, they can't balance or budget or reform the welfare state in one bill or even one Congress.
		But they can still accomplish a great deal if they show they can get to 218 GOP votes on legislation.
		If they can't do that, they will force Mr. Johnson to get Democratic votes.
		And that means accepting liberal policy demands.
		Congratulations to Mr. Johnson on his victory, but his trials have only just begun.
		Back to your calls.
		Gracie in North Carolina, Line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Gracie.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I wanted to say I am so happy that Michael Johnson got voted in again.
		Is House Speaker, and I'm so proud that he and President Trump can really make a difference in our world in the next four years.
		But what my request was, I wondered if Mike Johnson would consider opening his speeches, or, you know, when he starts talking to the public, open his speeches with a word of prayer.
		That was my request.
		And like I said, that's just a suggesting.
		And it's the first time I have ever called, and I really wanted to do this.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Gracie in North Carolina.
		And as she noted, first time caller to the program.
		We'll hear from Michael in Alabama, lined toward Democrats.
		Good morning, Michael.
unidentified		Yes.
		My comment is: for the next four years, this will be a clown show.
		So get your popcorn and your alcoholic beverage ready, your adult beverage, because with the Trumpers and these idiots, it's just a clown show.
		I mean, how can you take this serious?
		Elon Musk is in control.
		He tells Trump what to do.
		I mean, these people are nuts.
		The first thing you want to do out of the first thing out of the park is tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires.
		What happened to the price of gas?
		I thought he was going to bring the price of food down, bread, beans, whatever.
		Whatever happened to that.
		Thank you, America.
		You are so silly.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Michael in Alabama.
		It was yesterday that Speaker Johnson was elected.
		Again, the first day of the opening day for the 119th Congress.
		And that means that all of the members were also sworn in as well.
		Here are a few of those moments from yesterday.
unidentified		Wait, let me see.
		Marine biologist and science guy, math act.
		Oh, this is so good.
		And you even have an email address.
		So that you can see.
		Oh, so now I can stay in touch.
		Yeah.
		This is so good.
		This is so good.
		Very exciting.
		Wow.
		Look, look.
		Everybody has to see these cars.
		I can tell.
		I'm honored.
mike johnson ▲ ● ▼		I feel the same way, bro.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Just about 30 minutes left in this first hour of today's Washington Journal,
		getting your thoughts on Representative Mike Johnson being reelected as House Speaker and the opening day of the 119th Congress.
		If you would like to call in, you can do so.
		The Lions, Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We'll hear from Janet in Ohio, Line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Janet.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Yes, sir.
		Everybody's got to look more into this Christian nationalism, which he's a Christian nationalist.
		Number one, they're very homophobic, extremely pro-life, and they don't believe in sex unless you're married.
		So please look into this man.
		He's dangerous, but sex, you can't, you're not supposed to have sex unless you're married.
		So Christian nationalists, please look into it.
		Thank you so much.
		Bye-bye.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Yesterday was also the first day of the session for the Senate, and they have a new Senate majority leader.
		This headline in this morning's Washington, or I'm sorry, the New York Times, a pragmatic leader takes the Senate's helm.
		It is talking about Senator John Thune of South Dakota, who was elected as the new leader, the party's new leader after Senator Mitch McConnell stepped down from leadership.
		The article says, Mr. Thune's tasks this time is to juggle President-elect Donald J. Trump's demands, the competing desires of 53 GOP senators, and a formidable legislative agenda.
		It starts with shepherding multiple baggage-laden Trump nominees to confirmations in a closely divided Senate, where he can afford to lose no more than three Republican votes if Democrats hold together in opposition.
		At the same time, he intends to use a tricky maneuver to steer around a filibuster and pass a combination, border security, military spending bill and energy production, military spending, and energy production bill that will require serious legislative finesse.
		And he wants to do it in the first month or so while also reordering how and how often the Senate works.
		It goes on to say Mr. Thune's ability, though, has prompted some senators to worry privately that his desire to be liked could hinder him.
		Being a Senate leader requires making tough calls, certain to anger someone, and they fear that his determination to avoid upsetting colleagues or getting hammered on social media could work against him.
		It goes on to say the person Mr. Thune might find the hardest to please is Mr. Trump, who was agitated by Mr. Thune's past criticism of his conduct and incensed that the Senate's number two Republican did not back his challenge to the 2020 election outcome and voted to certify the results.
		Mr. Thune himself chose not to contest his 2020 Senate loss by just over 500 votes, saying it would be divisive for the state.
		Yesterday on the Senate floor, Senator John Thune made his first remarks as the new leader of that chamber.
john thune ▲ ● ▼		Mr. President, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the founders established safeguards, checks and balances throughout our government to keep the government in check and ensure that the rights of all Americans were protected.
		One of those safeguards was the United States Senate.
		In his discussion of the Senate in Federal 162, the author notes, and I quote, a Senate as a second branch of the Legislative Assembly, distinct from and dividing power with a first, must be in all cases a salutary check on the government.
		It doubles the security to the people by requiring the concurrence of two distinct bodies in schemes of usurpation or perfidy.
		He further notes, and I quote again, that as the improbability of sinister combinations will be in proportion to the dissimilarity in the genius of the two bodies, it must be politic to distinguish them from each other by every circumstance which will consist with the due harmony in all proper measures and with the genuine principles of Republican government, end quote.
		And the founders did indeed distinguish the House from the Senate.
		They made the Senate smaller and senators' terms of office longer with the intention of creating a more stable, more thoughtful, more deliberative legislative body to check ill-considered or intemperate legislation and protect the rights of the American people.
		As the past 237 years attest, it is a structure that has served this nation well.
		Unfortunately, today there are a lot of people out there who would like to see the Senate turn into a copy of the House of Representatives.
		And that, Mr. President, is not what our founders intended or what our country needs.
		And one of my priorities as leader will be to ensure that the Senate stays the Senate.
		That means preserving the legislative filibuster.
		The Senate rule that today has perhaps the greatest impact on preserving the founders' vision of the United States Senate.
		It also means restoring the Senate as a place of discussion and deliberation.
		That includes empowering committees, restoring regular order, and engaging in extended debate on the Senate floor where all members should have a chance to make their voices and the voices of their constituents heard.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Julie in St. Paul, Minnesota, line for Democrats.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Julie.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		Two things struck.
		Can you hear me?
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I can.
unidentified		Okay.
		Two things struck me listening to Mike Johnson's speech.
		One was the mandate, which they certainly do not have a mandate.
		Half of America still thinks differently.
		So they, yeah, they won, but it was a slim margin.
		They're acting like it's a landslide, and all he has to do is look around the room.
		They're on the brink.
		It's going to come to a brink every single time.
		Whereas Hakeem Jeffries, his focus was actually on bipartisan.
		Okay.
		And then about the border, he said they will give them the border resources.
		Well, that is something they never gave Biden.
dr rebecca grant ▲ ● ▼		The Biden administration asked several, several times for the resources for more border agents, for judges for the backlog after the COVID after the backlog due to COVID.
unidentified		Trump had Title 42 to stop people from coming because of COVID.
		Well, that was lifted during Biden, so that worked against him, but he was trying to get more money to control the surge and then the backlog.
		And Trump kept people in cages.
		He kept people in Mexico.
		Women were getting raped and all sorts of other problems emanated.
		And then he is already lying about the Mexican president saying that, you know, we can keep people there before they're processed again.
		So he's already, you know, telling lies about that.
		So I guess that's all I have to say.
		And just, you know, people are so disillusioned about the border situation.
		I don't think they look deep enough.
		I don't think the wall is going to be the full solution to this problem.
		We have a lot of better technology to invest in than this wall.
		I think that's just a farce.
		So thank you for taking my call.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Julie in Minnesota, Ted, North Carolina, line for Republicans.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Ted.
unidentified		Good morning.
		You see, when you have a lot of gas and oil doing drilled, the prices of vegetables and like Walmart, for instance, will come down.
		Like you go in there and you see one bell pepper for 83 cents, and then you see a cucumber for 64 cents.
		That's ridiculous.
		And they should know that gas runs electricity.
		Well, you get more gas, you get and you pay less for your electricity.
		That's the way it should be.
		And they should have a sealed border, yes.
		I'm not against legalizing aliens if they go do it legally, not the other way around.
		Some people can't work in vegetable patches or tomato patches or farm areas.
		But that's it.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Ted in North Carolina.
		Nancy in Rhode Island, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Nancy.
unidentified		Good morning.
		How are you this morning?
		Happy New Year.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Nancy.
unidentified		I'm just calling.
		I'm a Democrat.
		I'm in Rhode Island.
		And what I heard yesterday from Speaker Johnson was all about the tax cuts permanent for the rich, the billionaires and millionaires tax cuts of Trump.
		There's no mandate.
		There's no mandate at all.
		You know, we're supposed to lower the prices with the utilities, gas prices, food prices.
		Yeah, that's just to be seen.
		And he didn't speak about the everyday American, you know, that is struggling, you know, working hard and trying to make ends meet.
		But we'll see what happens.
		In the border, they didn't work with President Biden, you know, so hopefully they can work bipartisan.
		But the Republicans, if you notice, they didn't want when he made good points, Hakeem, they didn't applaud him and give him his due.
		You know, the Democrats seem more like they want to work together.
		Republicans, they can't even work amongst themselves.
		But we hope for the best, but remains to be seen.
		I thank you for taking my call.
		You have a great day.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That is Nancy in Rhode Island.
		This from Axios House approves new rules protecting Mike Johnson from ouster.
		It's talking about the rules package that was voted on yesterday.
		It says that they voted mostly along party lines, adopting the rules package that protects newly re-elected Speaker Mike Johnson from a potential ouster.
		When it's highlighting the Why It Matters section, it says the new rule makes it so that a vote on removing the speaker can only be brought if at least nine Republicans support what is called a motion to vacate.
		It is significantly a higher bar than the 118th Congress when any single member in either party could force such a motion.
		It goes on to say that the tool was used to remove former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October of 2023.
		Johnson faced an unsuccessful ouster attempt in April.
		It also notes that House Democrats railed against the change, noting that for the first time in U.S. history, the minority party would be restricted from introducing a motion to vacate.
		Back to your calls, we'll hear from Steve in Pennsylvania, line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Steve.
unidentified		Good morning and good morning, America.
		I'm happy that Mike Johnson was re-elected as Speaker of the House.
		It's time to get on with business.
		I'd like to see the new administration hit the ground running on January 21st.
		In fact, what I would really like to see is see them just cancel all the ridiculousness and pomp and circumstance of the inaugural on January 20th and just get sworn in and get right to work.
		That would send a very strong message to the American people, I do believe.
		Another question I had for C-SPAN in general is it's very often that, and I listen to C-SPAN every single morning, and it's if I put a certain inflection in my voice or if I'm very angry against things that Donald Trump says, I pretty much get to talk as long as I want.
		It just doesn't seem that way when it's if somebody were to say if I were to start slamming the way Hakeem Jeffries presents himself in Congress as a roboton as opposed to an actual human being, the way he talks and his mannerisms.
		He looks like he's some sort of a pinochial puppet being marionette, being controlled by strings with his crazy hand gestures and his insane way of speaking.
		And I just wonder now, now that he's all about bipartisanship, if he is going to stop every time he gets in front of a camera, start talking about MAGA and extreme MAGA and everything like that, because that is his MO.
		But besides that, I just wanted to rant a little bit.
		I hope you have a nice new year and hope you have a nice day and nice talking to you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Steve in Pennsylvania.
		Rico and also Pennsylvania line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Rico.
unidentified		Good morning, C-SPAN.
		I'm a regular listener, and I believe that C-SPAN is very unbiased.
		Now, as far as Johnson getting back ahead, well, I think it's good for the government, for the country, because he has been looking out for we the people.
		And we, the people, are the ones that ought to be taken care of by our Congress, et cetera, et cetera, the people that are in control.
		So with a very strong Republican Congress, the Senate and the House, and up at the head start, I'm just hoping that we can have a very successful and blessed 25 and continue on from there.
		From there on, I'm just going to say, God bless America.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Rico in Pennsylvania.
		Tyree in North Carolina line for independence.
		Good morning, Tyree.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I want to say I think it was very important for Mike Johnson to get his speaker role back because after they got rid of Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Party kind of got crazy with arguing with each other.
		I think he's very important, and I think he's going to help Trump out what really needs to be done.
		And I wanted to make a comment on, I want to say it was like four callers ago, she was talking about the border wall.
		The border wall is very important for us to use the material that Joe Biden was going to sell and to use drones to help us support the border.
		So we have to respect them and help them and support them.
		We are Americans and we have to stick together.
		This is important for us as taxpayers.
		That's all I wanted to say.
		Thank you.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Tyree in North Carolina.
		And Tyree speaking in favor of Speaker Johnson, Mike Johnson being re-elected to that position.
		This is from this morning's Washington Post.
		It mentions that Johnson spent the past week trying to persuade roughly a dozen Republicans who remained skeptical of his candidacy, reaching out to them by phone and holding in-person meetings as late as Friday morning.
		Trump heaped praise on Johnson, casting him as key to enacting conservative policies.
		And quote, President Trump is probably the most powerful president, and his voice and his influence is of singular importance, Johnson said after successfully winning reelection.
		I think it was a big factor.
		Back to your calls.
		John in Ohio, line for Republicans.
		Good morning, John.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Yeah, I'd like to.
		The lady that called and said the taxes for the millionaires and billionaires, she doesn't realize that when taxes run out, if it's not extended, everybody working for $15 an hour on up is going to have taxes taken out of their check because they got a tax cut too.
		The other Johnson, I like Johnson.
		Reagan said that if you get 80% of you want in a bill, you take the win.
		Not enough people remember that.
		And well, that's what I was going to say.
		I was going to say something else, but I forget.
		I'm just waking up.
		But anyway, thank you.
		And oh, yeah, I know what I wanted to say.
		Johnson isn't going to get help from the Democrats.
		I remember when Trump gave one of his state of the unions and he cited that black unemployment was at its lowest in history, not one person in a black congressional caucus clapped, not one.
		So they're not going to get help from the Democrats.
		It's going to be just the entire opposite.
		Anyway, thank you and have a good morning.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was John in Ohio.
		Deborah, North Carolina, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Deborah.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I am so hopeful that we do increase the minimum wage.
		I'm hopeful that Social Security is not destroyed.
		I'm in hope that we can work together and not spend useless time arguing over passing something that makes sense for the American people.
		It is fine that Johnson is a speaker, but I'm like Representative Jefferson.
		We have to consider the middle class.
		Not the first thing came out of Donald Trump's mouth is that they're going to lower taxes or destroy taxes on the billionaires.
		It seems like the billionaires are more favorable in this country, although they make up just a handful of people.
		And Donald Trump has an unelected representative, Elon Musk, telling him what to do that would benefit him.
		Of all the money that Elon Musk gave Donald Trump for reelection, why didn't he give the money to pay back what he owed to our government that he's borrowed for his space program?
		I am a Democrat, and I feel that we care more about the country.
		A lot of Democrats did get brainwashed thinking Donald Trump lines, but the first thing he said was he doesn't see how he can lower groceries.
		So please pray for our country.
		Pray that Republicans stand up for what's right.
		They don't even clap for what's right when Jefferson was speaking.
		So how do they think our country should be?
		Thank you so much for giving me this platform.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Deborah in North Carolina.
		Yesterday with the 119th Congress gaveling in for the first time, C-SPAN was live for a good portion of the day, letting you see everything that was happening.
		And usually our gavel-to-gavel coverage is controlled by the House cameras, the House of Representatives, not C-SPAN.
		But yesterday, if you were watching, you probably saw some different shots.
		That's because C-SPAN received special permission from the speaker to have our own cameras inside the chamber.
		You can see our hard-working crews set up there.
		We also received permission to have our own cameras in the Chamber for Congress's joint meeting to certify the 2024 election.
		That is happening on Monday.
		You can watch all of that live on C-SPAN and c-span.org.
		Gwen in Detroit, Michigan, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Gwen.
unidentified		You know, just listening to the people calling in here, like the man that just said that the Democrats didn't clap for the Republicans.
		You showed it on here where Jake Jeffries was making the speech, talking about everything the Democrats are going to do to protect the people and asked for bipartisanship.
		None of the Republicans stood up.
		You could see that.
		That was right there, you know.
		And then this lady calling in asking Mike Johnson to pray before they do work to pray before each session.
		I remember when they said they were going to hold up the Bible, give a verse from the Bible every time they got ready to come on the floor.
		But like the other man that talked about Christian nationalists, I agree with him, you know, because Mike Johnson, he got up there and spoke a false prayer by Thomas Jefferson.
		And Jake Jeffries was speaking the truth.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Gwen in Detroit, Michigan.
		Steve and Carol Stream, Illinois, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Steve.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		I'd like to say that I'm absolutely repulsed by Trump giving the billionaires and the wealthy restoring the tax cut that thank God Biden took away from them when he became president.
		Look at what it did to Wall Street.
		They couldn't replace the money.
		And it ruined the economy.
		But let's not forget, Republican people, that Trump added $17 trillion to the deficit, the most ever by any president ever in the history of this country.
		And who got all those breaks for the people who voted for him, like Elon Musk?
		He wants us to pay for his satellite program or whatever it is.
		I've had enough of this.
		Well, thank you very much.
		You have a nice morning.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That was Steve in Illinois.
		And as we mentioned, yesterday was also the first day of the new session for members of Congress.
		The Republicans did flip the Senate chamber and now have control.
		Yesterday, it was now Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who spoke about how Democrats will approach the next two years.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		Democrats stand united, not because of who we fight against, but because of who we are fighting for, the American people.
		We are here ready to fight for the American people.
		We are here to fight for the working class of this country.
		We are here to build ladders of opportunity to the middle class.
		Democrats aren't a monolith.
		We come from many different states, have many different opinions.
		But we grew up in places.
		We grew up in places as varied as Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia.
		We're from the West Coast, the East Coast, the industrial Midwest, and everywhere in between.
		And we sometimes disagree, just as any tight-knit family disagrees.
		But Democrats are united, fiercely united, when it comes to fighting for working Americans, for working families.
		In the months and years to come, Democrats will show where our values lie through our actions and words and through the policies we push in this chamber.
		Democrats are here to tackle the biggest problems that face our country.
		Democrats are here because we need to make housing more affordable for the millions struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
		We need to make sure Americans earn higher paychecks, keep more of their paychecks too.
		Democrats are here because we want to lower the cost of child care, an outrageously high expense, for too many American families who struggle to give the best lives for themselves and their children.
		Democrats are here to defend a woman's right to choose, to defend our fundamental liberties, to defend the wellspring of democracy.
		We want to help our small business owners thrive and function as the engines of our economy.
		We want to help Americans save more money when they go to the grocery store, when they go to the pharmacy, when they pay their cable and internet bill.
		We want to make sure Americans aren't ripped off by giant corporations through hidden fees and predatory behavior.
		Democrats stand ready to make lives better for the American people.
		We want to work with anyone and hold the line whenever necessary to achieve that goal.
		Mr. President, the time to get to work is now.
		It's a new day, a new Congress, and Democrats stand united and ready to fight and deliver for the American people.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We have time for a couple more calls, but wanted to share this programming note as well.
		Today at 1 p.m., President Biden will speak at a ceremony honoring recipients of the Medal of Freedom.
		The 19 people are set to receive the Medal of Freedom, including Ralph Lauren, Hillary Clinton, Jane Goodall, Denzel Washington, and Bono.
		You can watch that live here on C-SPAN from the East Room of the White House at 1 p.m. Eastern.
		You can also find it on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org.
		We'll hear from Jacqueline in Capitol Heights, Maryland, Line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Jacqueline.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I wanted to say that I have been listening to 90.1, and I heard President Trump said to send the American people the stiper for $2,000 during the time of COVID.
		And Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats called him crazy.
		We lost the election and the Democrats took over.
		And the problem for the American people is with HUD.
		HUD is denying low-income residents to pay only $50 in rent.
		And that's why we have a statewide homelessness pandemic that's going on.
		And I'm looking forward to President Trump's administration, his new appointee with HUD, Mr. Scott, to help Americans escape homelessness that was caused by the Democrats.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That's Jaclyn and Maryland.
		Our last call for this hour, Tim in Kentucky, Line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Tim.
unidentified		Good morning.
		There's a couple of things that I wanted to bring up about Johnson.
		Johnson was one of the architects of all this election-denying stuff.
		So he's really somebody that needs to be watched very carefully.
		These people, they take an oath to the Constitution, which they failed to uphold from Trump all the way down.
		They're taking the oath to support the Constitution, which a lot of the times they seem to just throw out the window, and laws don't apply to Donald Trump.
		If I was Hockey and Jeffrey, I would bring up impeachment.
		Impeach Trump already.
		Get rid of all these billionaires running the government.
		It's terrible.
		And that's all I got to say.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		That's Tim in Kentucky.
		Our last call for this hour.
		Next on Washington Journal, Martin DeCaro, host of the podcast History As It Happens.
		We'll discuss key political news of this past year and a look ahead to 2025.
		And later, University of North Texas at Dallas political science professor Orlando Perez will discuss the history of the Panama Canal.
		The first here's more from C-SPAN's behind-the-scene visit with the chief of the with Office of the Chief Administrative Officer highlighting all the logistics that go into moving new members and their staffs into their offices on Capitol Hill.
unidentified		This is the house drapery shop.
		We're 11 people, upholstery and drapery are combined group.
		This past transition, we had 192, 193 member offices to move or new member setups.
		Of that, about 63 were brand new.
		They got to choose their new carpet, their new drapes, paint, everything, which is great for them.
		They're excited.
		So what we do in here is we wait for those orders to come in from the move coordinators and we pull them.
		We make stock ahead of time by guessing what people will pick out of 10 different colors and patterns.
		And we get them ready for the next day's moves.
		So this is what we do.
		And every member office, we take down for the paint shop because no matter what, they get new paint and then we go reinstall or we install their new rooms.
		And so we just get orders, pick them out of our stock, get them ready, and get them back up the next morning.
		We have 5,000 windows on the house campus that we care for.
		Capital, three house office buildings, two other house office buildings, Corden O'Neill Power Plant.
		And so we have a lot to do, but transition, it's all done in 30 days to move that many offices.
		So kind of a challenge, but we've never failed.
		I'm here with this shop.
		Well, these are my crews.
		Well, some are upstairs right now taking care of some of the rooms.
		Some of the moves that go on, you know, later on today or so.
		We like to take care of their, you know, some of the damages and scratches or anything that goes on between the moves.
		And our other crews will be down here taking care of all the finishing process.
		And as you can see, you have sanded down on top, members desk.
		And we can do, we try to, you know, fix all the imperfections, some of the dents, the holes, and we like to do some staining, some grain filling.
		Right there, you have the second step of their cycling.
		We'd like to scuff, to do some sealing before they get to finishing up the spray cream.
		Then they come out all sprayed up and ready for the drying process before they get wrapped up and sitting upstairs.
		Other portions of the finishing, we also do some of the engravings as well.
		So we deal with a lot of engravings, etching on the glasses, on the woods.
		I do majority of the special engravings and finishing portions as well, like for example, the Congress seal.
		This is one of the most recent ones that I've done.
		It took a lot of time and to design and to see how I'm able to imply the colors, you know, the details all around me.
		We're in the house cabinet shop and we make and repair the furniture, the custom furniture that comes in and out of the members' offices and the house camps.
		So we make everything including our own workbenches.
		So pretty much everything in here we've built to accommodate ourselves.
		We have incredibly talented people that are so artistic and the people that come here stay here.
		They've worked here for people who don't come here to go somewhere else.
		They come here to stay here.
		And we have people that never want to leave the bench.
		They are not interested in climbing any kind of corporate ladder.
		They want to build furniture.
		And so I would say the collective years of experience we had here in this shop, probably 250 years.
		So essentially we're asset operations.
		We're essentially responsible for all the equipment that comes in.
		So new equipment from cradle to grave, meaning the receiving process, the tagging process, and the disposition.
		Once a member is using the device and the equipment has come to its useful end of life, disposition is done.
		So we do a removal, we go to that member office, we do the removal, we disassociate that asset from the member's account and no longer, the member is no longer responsible for that equipment.
		Once that equipment comes here, it goes through a degauser first.
		So essentially what a degauser does, it shoots a magnetic field.
		It's kind of like an ESP pulse.
		We hear that loud top.
		In about 15 seconds, you're going to hear a pop, which means it's complete.
		So that's essentially now you got that one that falls out at the bottom.
		Once it falls out, he scans it, records it in the arc sheet, and then it goes to shrink.
		The shredded material here goes to an off-site facility that does it in an environmentally friendly way.
		It's smelted down, it's separated, the metals are separated.
		And so you can see the, so as you can see, like the hard drive, the boards itself, those are smelted down and the metals smelted down as well.
		Washington Journal continues.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Joining us now to discuss key political news of 2024, including the passing of former President Jimmy Carter, is Martin DeCaro.
		He is the host of History as It Happens podcast.
		Martin, thank you so much for being with us.
unidentified		Thank you.
		It's good to see you again, Tammy.
		Happy New Year.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Happy New Year.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		I know you've been on the program before and talked about your podcast, but remind our audience about history as it happens, your approach, and who you talk with.
unidentified		Sure.
		So I'm a journalist and an audio producer.
		I'm not a historian, but I speak to historians and political scientists about the origins of current events.
		This project I undertook four years ago was with the aim of stepping back from the daily headlines, the churn.
		We're assaulted every day in our social media feeds with so much news we can feel overwhelmed.
		My idea was to take a step back and examine our origins because our origins are always contested.
		They're always important.
		And especially now, I think during all times in history, but especially now, people are asking questions about how did we get to this point in history in our country's existence.
		For instance, one example that I've been thinking about and talking about a lot on the show lately is the post-Cold War period.
		Enough time has passed that we can look back at the early 1990s as a period of history that can be analyzed and studied.
		Enough sources and documents are available.
		There was so much optimism in those early 1990s about the march of democratic capitalism, the defeat of the Soviet Union, freedom, free markets were on the march, free trade, globalization, the internet, right?
		I remember Bill Clinton in the 1990s saying, the personal computer and the internet will do more to pull people out of poverty than any other invention in history, paraphrasing a bit.
		But he said something close to that at a White House conference on the new economy in 2000, shortly before he left office.
		So all of this is to say, just to use that as an example, all this optimism about where our country and where the world was going, well, now a generation or more has passed.
		And we're looking back on that saying, you know what, all that optimism was misplaced.
		Not entirely, but a lot of it was misplaced or it didn't turn out the way we had expected to turn out for a number of reasons.
		Why is that?
		Why has there been such a backlash to free trade?
		How did we get somebody like Donald Trump as the president of the United States?
		Why is there a backlash to immigration?
		NAFTA, for instance, helped cause illegal immigration to this country from Mexico.
		So in a nutshell, those are the types of ideas and themes and subjects that I examine on my show with historians, political scientists, and other thinkers.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Two of the historians you had on for your most recent episode, Jeremy Surrey, Jeffrey Engel, you talked about President Carter's what you call uneventful, but largely eventful but largely unsuccessful presidency.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		As we remember President Carter's legacy, what are some of his highlights and lowlights and what will define his legacy when we look back?
unidentified		So sure, yeah.
		And when I say largely unsuccessful, that conclusion's been challenged by some biographers recently, like Jonathan Alter, Kai Bird, and some others who have written full-length cradle-to-grave biographies of Jimmy Carter.
		And I think there's some legitimacy to that.
		That's a generalization when I say largely unsuccessful because every presidential administration has successes and failures.
		And there are always continuities between one administration to the next.
		Ronald Reagan, although maybe the editors of the National Review may not admit this, Ronald Reagan owes some of his success to Jimmy Carter, who started to deregulate industries like airlines and natural gas and energy.
		Carter wasn't around to see some of the benefits of these, of course, because he lost the election in 1980.
		So the way I approached Carter to answer your question, Tammy, you know, I've been on the show with you once before.
		You know that my answers can kind of go in a maze-like direction.
		But to answer your question, I approach this as what was consequential?
		What endures?
		Especially with the passage of time and partisan passions cool, and we can get some perspective and see how policies and programs turned out.
		Did they actually meet the goals that they were designed to meet?
		Carter does have some relatively, I would say he has some relatively significant achievements in his presidency.
		I mentioned deregulation, mentioned some of these other things.
		Like on the issue of race, he was progressive in his inaugural address as the governor of Georgia in early 1971, so before he's president.
		And this was still a very touchy issue, of course, in the South as a Southern Democrat.
		The time for racial discrimination is over, he said in his inaugural address.
		But he appointed more African Americans, Latinos, and women to the federal judiciary than probably any other president or all other presidents combined to that point.
		So that's one example, and that's something that, of course, endures to this day.
		President Biden, of course, followed in those footsteps.
		They were contemporaries.
		I think Biden was in the Senate.
		Yeah, in the early 1970s.
		Actually, I think, yeah, I think Biden's political career predates Carter's in Washington.
		So that's one example of something that endures to this day.
		Most presidents, especially Democrats, feel that they have to have a diverse, and even Republicans as well, a diverse group of people on the federal bench.
		His failures and what is consequential.
		This runs in both directions in all directions when we're talking about the consequences of a presidential administration.
		I think Carter's chief failure, it wasn't that he caused inflation or stagflation, which meant high inflation and low growth.
		Usually those two things are together.
		You get rapid economic growth causes inflation or they coexist.
		Stagflation was low growth, high unemployment, and high inflation.
		Carter didn't cause stagflation.
		He did not cause the oil embargo of OPEC in 1979.
		He certainly did not cause the Iranian Revolution.
		But the way he responded to the cascading crises of his term, especially with his mid-July 1979 crisis of confidence or Malays speech, sent a signal to the American people that he was no longer leading and that he had lost control of events.
		And he was a scold.
		And there was, of course, a lot of truth to this.
		He was kind of, as one historian put it, you know, an eat-your-peas parent, scolding Americans for their soulless materialism.
		Whereas Ronald Reagan was a sunny optimist and he told Americans, you know, we don't have to live with less.
		We can be a great nation again.
		Reagan had more of a vision than Carter did to compare the two because their presidencies, of course, overlap.
		And I think that probably was Carter's greatest failing rather than picking it this policy or that, is that he failed to lead in times of crises.
		He also had really bad luck in backtiming.
		We can get into that too as the calls I'm sure will start coming in.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We are talking with Martin DeCaro.
		He is the host of History as It Happens podcast.
		And we are discussing key political news of 2024, including President Carter's legacy.
		If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now.
		The lines broken down by party.
		Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		That was just your most recent episode on Carter was just one of 100 episodes that you did last year, that you produced last year.
		Your most listened to was the crisis of liberalism.
		And your guest, historian, Daniel Bessner, during it, argued that liberalism, not just the Democratic Party, has long been in decline.
		When did it start?
		And how did we get here?
unidentified		Wow, under the start.
		We could spend the entire day discussing that question.
		Of course, Jimmy Carter, his supporters probably could relate to this subject as well.
		So first of all, what do we mean by liberalism?
		I don't mean liberal conservatives sitting down over a cup of coffee and bickering over this issue or that.
		Who should be appointed to the Supreme Court?
		Should abortion be legal.
		No, no, I'm talking about the governing philosophy of liberalism and capitalism, right?
		That we, a free press, political plurality, free trade.
		Some people might even call this neoliberalism after the Cold War.
		The governing philosophy that defines the post-1945 era in the American experience.
		What do I mean by how is it in crisis?
		Well, look no further.
		We could certainly broaden this, but if we want to narrow it, right, we can look no further to how the Democratic Party has simply lost connection, Lost its link to the working class in this country.
		Okay, liberalism has failed to provide for social mobility now for generations of working class Americans.
		Part of this has to do with free trade and globalization and major structural forces that are difficult for any one president or any one Congress to contend with.
		But just look around.
		How did we get an illiberal president, right?
		Well, liberalism has failed.
		It has failed to provide an aspirational goal.
		I mean, this is the criticism.
		I'm not saying I'll necessarily agree with all of this, right?
		But this is the criticism, especially from those on the left who wanted liberalism to have a more aspirational, if not revolutionary, if not utopian goal for the American people.
		And instead, what the critics would say, we got something called neoliberalism, which was the excessive financialization of our economy, untrammeled free trade, which of course saw many manufacturing jobs in our country not go to Mexico, mostly to China.
		But also what that did, it was just the threat of leaving.
		So manufacturing companies, big industries could threaten their employees if they talked about unionizing, right, or doing something to strengthen their position at the bargaining table.
		They could be threatened with moving overseas, offshoring, right?
		All of these factors, I mean, there are myriad ways that institutions, liberal institutions, have failed us, right?
		The news media hasn't been that great recently.
		In recent years, it has lost the faith of the American people.
		Public health industries, public health institutions rather, failed during the pandemic.
		We've been in two, at least two very long, costly wars in the last 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq.
		You can even push this back to Vietnam as well.
		So over the past, however many decades, and a lot of this does come up in the 1970s with Ford and Carter and some of the problems they faced, liberalism has fallen short.
		Now, what are we getting next?
		Are we moving into a new period of history, an illiberal, anti-democratic period?
		That's harder to define, you know, where we're going.
		But I think we certainly have moved on from this post-Cold War period, and we're in a post-post-Cold War period that's difficult to put a label on at this moment.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We have.
unidentified		If I somehow got around to answering your question, it's a sprawling topic.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		It is, and it's one that you could have touched on throughout a series that you did over the year, which is influential elections in U.S. history.
		Looking at the November election and President-elect Trump winning, and the Senate Republicans also winning control of the Senate.
		Looking back at the series you did, which elections throughout history stuck out most and how do they tie to what we saw in November?
unidentified		Yeah, so in the context of our current situation, our current conversation, rather, I would say let's look at two.
		1932, Franklin Roosevelt and the inauguration of the New Deal order, a quarter century after World War II, the most prosperous to date in American history, where the rising tide lifted most votes.
		We still, of course, had the civil rights revolution to come in the 1950s and 1960s.
		That was a definable era.
		Then 1980, Carter losing to Reagan.
		I mentioned continuities between Carter and Reagan.
		Carter started the defense buildup.
		He started to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979.
		But Reagan was bringing something much more radical than Carter would ever have envisioned.
		Reagan was a visionary where Carter was not.
		He was more of a good government technocrat.
		Reagan brought his revolution to Washington.
		That does not mean he accomplished everything he wanted to do, but think of the attitude or the governing philosophy, using that term loosely, that Reagan brought to Washington.
		That attitude still dominates or animates the dominant politics of our time, and that is distrust in institutions and a hostility to the federal government.
		So here we are with Trump now.
		There's instability in our politics.
		For Democrats who are looking at the results in November, it's like it is with many parties when they lose an election.
		Doom and gloom.
		We're never going to get the White House back again.
		That's it.
		We've lost the judiciary for a generation.
		That's actually probably true.
		What are we going to do with the Congress?
		It's one-party rule.
		We're seeing a lot of instability in our politics, not unlike the 1960s, although a completely different set of circumstances, where we're seeing, you know, Donald Trump was a one-term president, Joe Biden's a one-term president.
		Control of Congress shifts back and forth every few years.
		I think we're going to continue to see that instability because the American people are not loyal to parties the way they used to be.
		Our two major political parties are hollow items compared to what they used to be.
		There isn't a lot of institutional loyalty relative to the past.
		So for people who are confounded as to how Donald Trump, who says lots of nasty and racist things about immigrants, they're poisoning the blood of the country, they're vermin, how did he then also grow his share of the Latino and African-American vote?
		Well, because he is able, he has this gift.
		He's not an ideologue.
		He has this political gift of being able to offer all things to all people.
		So it doesn't really fall in, you know, the old pieties have been upended, it's been said.
		He doesn't really fall in a left-right paradigm, conservative versus liberal.
		He certainly is a Republican.
		Tax cuts, deregulation, we'll get all of that.
		But he's kind of somewhere in this point of history.
		And I said we're moving into some of this new period where there isn't a lot of loyalty to one side or the other, at least among that vital part of the electorate that seems to decide every election every four years in that handful of states.
		But those states have seen the most, you know, significant or severe changes in their political economy in the dawn in the age of globalization post-1991.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We will bring the audience into the conversation and start with Stephen in Quincy, Illinois, Line for Independence.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Stephen.
unidentified		The ideologue, he has this critical gift at the end of the day.
		Good morning.
		Good morning.
		You know, the old pieties have been upended.
		Excuse me.
		Hi, Stephen.
		I have an observation.
		Anytime that Jimmy Carter is mentioned or the Carter administration, almost always the first topic in issue is the hostage crisis in Iran.
		I would point out that zero American lives were lost in the hostage crisis.
		I would also point out that in the four years of his administration, there was no member of the American military lost in combat, unless I say lost in combat, killed.
		In 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, 241 Marines were killed in their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, because of a car bomb or truck bomb.
		And there had been warnings before.
		There'd been a previous car bomb blast that killed some Marines, and there was this and that and the other.
		Yeah, the CIA station was blown to smithereens and Bob Ames was killed.
		You are correct.
		I couldn't remember exactly what had happened.
		Very rarely when the Reagan administration and Ronald Reagan is discussed are those issues ever brought up.
		I think that is interesting and I pass that along.
		And do you have an explanation as to why I believe my observation is correct?
		Well, you'd be the best one to explain that.
		But I think you're hitting on something that's really important.
		That is the difference between history and memory.
		The caller is correct.
		To use a sports analogy, Tammy, when a team is doing well, the quarterback gets too much credit.
		The team is doing poorly, the quarterback gets too much blame.
		That would be the last sports analogy of this conversation.
		I think Carter's presidency is judged too harshly.
		And I think Ronald Reagan's presidency is judged too or remembered too fondly.
		The caller's correct Stephen in Illinois.
		He is right to say that there were no scandals, really major scandals, during the Carter administration.
		There was no Iran-Contra.
		These things didn't seem to stick to Reagan's reputation.
		Partly because he wasn't directly implicated in the worst parts of the Iran-Contra scandal.
		That was because he was so out of touch and aloof at that point in his administration with what his underlings were doing.
		So that's not necessarily a good thing, right?
		Carter was a micromanager.
		Reagan was not.
		But what Reagan was good at was setting that, as I mentioned before, that overall vision.
		And then he was a delegator, of course, which of course runs into trouble, Iran-Contra being one example.
		But not to digress about that, I'll give you another, I think it's best to illustrate by example to build on Steve's point.
		Jimmy Carter passed two major energy packages while he was president, right?
		Energy was a huge issue.
		It directly related to inflation in 1979, which brought on a recession when Paul Volcker had to raise interest rates to try to tame inflation, caused a recession in the 1980 campaign year.
		So political pain for making the right move by Carter there.
		But his energy packages and his deregulation of oil and natural gas prices would eventually lead to a large increase in the supply of energy in the 1980s.
		Carter was no longer around by that time to see the benefit of that.
		When he came into office in 1976, the United States, and I credit the historian Robert Strong for pointing this out at the Miller Center, which is a great resource, the MillerCenter.org for presidential and American history.
		In 1976, the United States was consuming a fourth of all OPEC oil production.
		That went down significantly by the mid-1980s, and the United States would increase its domestic oil production between 1980 and 1985 by about a million barrels a day.
		So who gets the credit for that, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter?
		I would say probably Jimmy Carter, right?
		But to the caller's point, we seem not to remember some of Carter's positives, and we accentuate his negatives.
		Why that happens, it's hard to say.
		I mentioned timing before and luck.
		I think that has a lot to do with it.
		The country wasn't in good shape in 1980 when Carter ran for re-election.
		And as I mentioned before, he had kind of lost his touch with the American people.
		Worse than that, he looked like he had lost control of finding solutions to any problem that had beset his administration, including the Iran hostage crisis.
		I know this is a long answer, Tammy, but these are sprawling subjects.
		I just want to touch on one last point that the caller made about the Iran hostage crisis.
		It is true that no Americans were killed.
		However, had the rescue attempt not been a fiasco in the deserts of Iran, it's possible that Americans would have died in that rescue attempt.
		I'm not sure how that rescue attempt would have been successful.
		I think we all remember two U.S. aircraft collided in the desert when they were refueling on their way to try to save the hostages, and eight American service members were killed.
	It was a low point in Carter's presidency.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		When we look at presidential legacies and what they're remembered for or what they're not remembered for, Carter's not the only one.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		How have other presidencies shifted over time?
unidentified		Harry Truman was very unpopular when he left office.
		There was an enormous amount of corruption, although not directly tied to Truman during Truman's administration.
		So I think he is now looked at more positively because of how he stewarded the country during the early years of the Cold War.
		I'll give you another example of a president's.
		Well, Carter is one.
		I think there's been some more positive books and biographies that have been written about him.
		I think when people closely look at Reagan's presidency, I don't think it looks as good as it did even 10 or 15 years ago.
		And I think that same goes for Bill Clinton as well.
		The prosperity of the 1990s, according to the historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who's been a frequent guest on my show, talking about the transformation of American capitalism and all that optimism about a wondrous high-tech tomorrow that was on the way in the 1990s.
		I think a lot of that was built on sand, as Lichtenstein says.
		And I think many of the callers who will talk to us today can relate to that, especially if they're in the Rust Belt, if they're in the deindustrialized parts of the country, where nothing really replaced the industries that left or went out of business.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Tom in Springhill, Florida, line for Republicans.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Tom.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Good morning, sir.
		Good morning, ma'am.
		You would think that since the failure of the Carter administration with its policies, you would think that Democrats, especially Joe Biden, would learn from past mistakes.
		For example, with the energy crisis, instead of getting oil from Venezuela, borrowed, begging, and pleading for Venezuelan oil, as Trump says, we have our own liquid goal.
		You would think Joe Biden would learn a lesson, especially with the energy crisis, the long gas lines, the oil embargo.
		You would think Joe Biden would have learned from that.
		You'd also think with like affirmative action and policies like that, today, the DEI and all, you would figure instead of minorities,
		worried about the people that are competent, the people that are able to do the job, instead of worrying about ethnic background or skin color, it's clearly that the Democrat Party is no longer the party of my grandfather and great-grandfather.
		It has, even James Carvelle said it's gone so far to the left that Americans can't recognize what it used to be and now see for what it is, DEI, the restrictions of petroleum and other energy sources.
john in unknown ▲ ● ▼		And now with this other mess with the transgender nonsense, forcing kids to take these hormone pills and all, it's gotten ridiculous.
unidentified		It's been hijacked so far to the left.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Tom, we'll get a response from Martin.
unidentified		I agree with one thing the caller said about the Democratic Party is no longer recognizable to the fathers and grandfathers.
		Some of that, maybe for reasons while I might disagree with the caller, I think we've become a much more diverse country that we should embrace that diversity.
		DEI, yes, probably has gone too far.
		Some of these social issues, as the caller mentioned, James Carville, has criticized the party for going too far as out of touch with normal people.
		I would agree with that.
		But about energy, the United States is energy independent now.
		We're producing more oil than at any point in our history.
		So I don't think that was correct.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Bill in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, line for independence.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Bill.
unidentified		Good morning, and thanks for taking my call.
		It's really hard to get into you guys, but I just want to add a little anecdote that people don't remember or realize, or maybe it never came up, that Ronald Reagan was sort of responsible for when Challenger went up and blew up a minute and a half later.
		You have to excuse me for being a little nervous.
		The guy responsible for the launches fought hard, but he said he didn't fight hard enough to keep it from launching because the weather in Florida that night was freezing cold.
		It was below 30 degrees.
		And everybody said they should not launch.
		don't want to launch because it'll be too risky.
		Well, Ronald Reagan came up and said, put it up for the Gipper.
		His eagle is what killed those guys.
		He said he wanted to be able to talk to them for a photo-op while he was making his...
		I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.
		Yeah, I just got through Max Boot's marvelous biography of Ronald Reagan.
		And based on that and other things I've read over the years about this, I don't believe that's accurate.
		I don't think Ronald Reagan's responsible for the Challenger disaster.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Basil in Cleveland, Ohio, Line for Independence.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Basil.
unidentified		Good morning.
		My concern for both parties is not who's running the country, but the Federal Reserve Bank in this country controls what goes on and the owners of the Federal Reserve Bank.
		I wonder if Donald Trump's going to do anything in regards to the money business going on in America and how it's being controlled by the money system instead of the political system.
		Thank you.
		Well, I think he does have a decision coming up with Jerome Powell, does he not?
		Yeah, the Federal Reserve is supposed to be independent.
		Some people say it's too independent, too unaccountable.
		But the Federal Reserve Board and who the president appoints to that position is enormously important.
		We know this from Jimmy Carter's presidency.
		Paul Volcker was criticized after the fact.
		Yes, he tamed inflation.
		But in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, under Reagan's first term, when interest rates were allowed, again, to beat inflation, because inflation, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would relate, is an incumbent killer.
		But when Volcker did this in the late 70s and early 1980s, it caused real economic distress in our nation.
		Unemployment rates in 1982 shot up to 10% because of, and I think interest rates were something around 17, maybe even higher than that, 17% in Reagan's first term.
		But once inflation was defeated, interest rates came down and the business cycle recovered in time for Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign.
		Jimmy Carter did not have that good luck in 1980.
		Now, as far as how Jerome Powell has handled the Federal Reserve, I'm not an expert on that.
		He's gotten mixed reviews from people who do know more about this than I do.
		Whether or not the Fed acted soon enough to raise interest rates fast enough to tame inflation, I mean, that debate will continue.
		I mean, I think monetary policy was too accommodating for too long, which some would say helped lead to the inflation that we eventually got after the pandemic.
		I think that mostly had to do, though, with just the economic distortions that were caused by the pandemic and supply and demand.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		In terms of the economy, trade policy, and the potential for tariffs is something we'll likely be hearing more about in the coming year.
		But it's a topic you covered last year in one of your episodes.
		Explain what you call economic nationalism and its history in the U.S.
unidentified		Well, yeah, the United States used to be a high tariff country.
		It's been a while because of the lessons of the Great Depression and the post-World War II period when the idea of free trade became the conventional wisdom.
		Economic nationalism, protectionist tariffs, although tariffs can't be too high, right, because then you won't get revenue from the tariffs because people will stop buying the goods.
		But protectionist level tariffs to, I mean, in the 19th century, it was designed not just to increase revenue, but also to protect certain industries.
		Libertarians would call that rent-seeking because businesses will then lobby the government for this tariff or that tariff, depending on what they want to be protected.
		And also rejection of immigration is a part of economic nationalism.
		There is a number of intellectuals, there are a number of intellectuals in our country today.
		They call themselves the National Conservatives who are bringing back this idea of high tariffs and lower levels of immigration.
		I don't know if JD Vance considers himself the vice president-elect, a national conservative, but he's spoken about this a lot as well by limiting or drastically cutting the number of, and then also deporting people who are in this country illegally and raising minimum wages.
		And I'm taking this straight from what JD Vance told the New York Times this past summer.
		You would be able to get an American, a Native American, a native-born American, I should say, a job at McDonald's if you pay them a little bit more and that job does not go to an immigrant.
		This is what this is Vance's vision.
		I mean, that is kind of in a nutshell what I would call like economic nationalism.
		But I don't know if economic nationalism, especially when you're the number one economy in the world, that's something that the people who you're competing with are trying to catch up to you.
		Those are the types of tactics they would take.
		It's often called managed trade.
		This is what Japan was doing in the 1980s, the successive U.S. administrations try to break the Japanese market, and they weren't allowed to.
		We're living in a globalized supply chain era of capitalism.
		So I'm not sure that Donald Trump's ideas, if he chooses to implement them, high tariffs, what have you, really work.
		Actually, it'd be quite damaging because it can cause shortages and higher prices.
		Even though he says that it won't happen, he's economically illiterate.
		Donald Trump is.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Kiki in Massachusetts, Line for Democrats.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Kiki.
unidentified		Oh, good morning and happy new year.
		I just wanted to make a few comments on some of the callers.
		One regarding the price of oil and gas.
		It was because of COVID that people stopped driving and that the oil companies stopped producing, which led to higher prices.
		And when people started driving again, Congress asked the oil companies if they would increase their drilling, which would increase the supply and technically lower the price.
		And the oil company said, no, we don't want to hurt the profits for our shareholders.
		So that's one reason why we had high oil prices.
		The other was a question, and that is, the United States produces the most amount of oil, as your guest had stated, but I thought that they sold a lot of it to Europe because they can get a higher price.
		And one lastly, the issue of transgender.
		Most people who have negative comments talk about transgender is because they don't understand that it's a legitimate medical condition of gender dysphoria.
		Thank you very much.
		Yeah, the transgender issue is not one that I've spent a lot of time discussing on my podcast.
		I think all people deserve respect and dignity.
		The issues concerning treatment for children, minors, that's a very thorny one, and I'm not in a really position to comment on that with any level of expertise.
		The oil market, it's really misunderstood, and I'm certainly no expert on it either, about what the United States should do and how the price of gasoline is arrived at.
		But you have to think of the oil market as a global market.
		If one part of that market is producing more, it could lead the other part of that market to produce less, okay?
		And we're also dealing with a cartel, OPEC, that fixes both supply and price.
		So it's really complicated.
		Most people, including myself, have difficulty explaining it or understanding how the price of oil is determined.
		But it's not as simple as United States, drill more, pump more oil out of the ground, et cetera.
		That oil needs a market, right?
		So you don't want to have a glut of oil either.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Mark in Annapolis, Maryland, Line for Republicans.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mark.
unidentified		Hey, good morning.
		Merry Monday of Christmas and Happy New Year.
		To you have best wishes for success health, prosperity and peace uh, here and abroad.
		Um, I had a quick uh couple points, but it's a great uh panel, by the way, and thanks for organizing um.
		On the statement about the, about the?
		The U.S. being kind of the most, I guess, independent or biggest producer of oil in history.
		In our history, yes.
		That point might be going back to maybe, you know, the 70s, but certainly when you go back to the Victorian era of the United States and discovery of oil and oil city Pennsylvania and the production of oil, we were infinitely greater in terms of our production and our sources and our uses of that domestic supply.
		Um...
		and you know, you look at the NAVY and you look at the military and and the sprawling uh complex that is managed.
		We're certainly procuring oil and distillates and refined oil from around the world from various suppliers, some of which are allies and others are maybe pseudo allies.
		So um, we're definitely not supplying our military U.s.
		Produced oil on U.s Uh Shore um, unequivocally um.
		Secondly, um you know, on tariffs and related China right, we have had a string of hacks from Chinese state supported and non-state supported actors over the almost the last 30 years uh, if not more.
		And you look at the OPN breach that happened shortly after uh Apple was allowed, I think, to be used as a byod or DOD um, and 30 million records that were breached.
		You look, just last couple uh days ago, the Treasury breach and everything in between.
		Um, we have a massive supply chain problem.
		We have a friend in India and we can't uh act any faster than basically saying, if it has made China on it, the answer is should be no for every single American and every single ally.
		It's just that simple and uh, you know we need to come to grips.
		You mentioned the supply chain and the global interdependency here.
		Yeah uh, no question.
		But we've got alternatives, and certainly U.s alternatives, Mexican alternatives, Usmca alternatives across the Caribbean capita, where we lived in a managed trade environment and always have, it's not a free trade environment.
		Anyone thinks uh, the latter uh is uh, you know, uh a fool.
		Well, that is an excellent point.
		Um, the United States, of course, has been a free trade nation, but not all countries uh operate well.
		It's often called unfair trade.
		Right, we want fair trade, not free trade.
		And the caller is right about China and its uh trade practices and its economic practices, etc.
		But you know, when it comes to the supply chain and the problems of the supply chain, these things take time to reverse.
		So the uh chips act under biden.
		Uh, I mean, that's just making a dent right.
		Try to produce More of semiconductors inside the United States because of the volatility between China and Taiwan, one of the most important companies in the world is Taiwan Semiconductor.
		But, you know, the notion that because of the global interdependency of the economies and the financial system and supply chains, that is an incentive then to avoid conflict and avoid hostility.
		Well, history shows us that does not always work, right?
		Wars can break out, conflicts can break out, trade wars can break out, even though we all do rely on each other.
		So I think the caller made some good points there.
		I guess I don't feel like I have to comment on every aspect on some of these points.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		They like to throw a lot at you.
		We have just a couple minutes left, so we'll see how many more callers we can get to you.
		Turk in Illinois, line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Turk.
unidentified		Hi, I'm from Hegwish.
		A joyful new year to all of us.
		Gosh, that guy stole all the rest of the callers' thunder.
		There's a great book out there, It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.
		And he talks about the discontents in the country.
		And he means human beings that are discontent.
		And I had been a maintenance electrician my entire career, more than 40 years.
		And most of my friends are craftsmen also.
		And I led a pretty good life.
		I could go on vacation for two weeks a year anywhere in the world.
		And most of my friends are too.
		And half of them turned into Trumpers, my craftsman buddies.
		And could you speak to the people who are discontented in this country?
		Let me ask you, sir, if you don't mind, were you in a union?
		Of course I've been an auto worker at the end of my career, a paper worker.
		I started my career in one of the basic steel producers on the southeast side of Lake Michigan.
		Wow, so were you in a union in a union hall?
		Union is in my blood, bro.
		I grew up in the Rush Belt, man.
		There you go.
		Could you speak to the discontents?
		I was at a graduation party this summer sitting at a Picton bench with an 80-year-old fella.
		And he was a Trumper.
		And I asked this guy, do you know anybody that's not doing okay?
		And he thought a minute, and the guy said, myself.
		And I looked at him.
		He was dressed nice.
		He had a beautiful wife of the same age.
		And she had a beautiful jewelry on, and they had a nice car.
		And he was feeling good.
		And he said he was one of those types.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Turk, we'll get a response from Martin.
unidentified		How much time do we have left?
unidentified		I don't want to.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We have some time.
unidentified		Okay.
		So, to my earlier point, and thank you for that call and sharing that.
		And the reason why I wanted to know about whether you were in a union hall, someone, and I wish I could remember her name, just wrote a book about the decline of union hall politics and the disconnect or the breach between the Democratic Party and blue-collar workers in our country over the past 30, 40, 50 years.
		I mean, deindustrialization has been happening long before the 1990s and the free trade regime of NAFTA and China and the World Trade Organization.
		And what this researcher did is she went to the union halls, the parking lots, at least the ones that are left in western Pennsylvania, the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
		And whereas in prior generations you would see bumper stickers about the union and Democratic politics and whatever may have been in the union hall newspaper that week, you're now seeing replaced by Trump stickers, the NRA, the churches.
		So when there's a void, voids are filled.
		And if I mean, to make a very long story short, there's been a shift from blue-collar workers away from Democratic politics.
		And, you know, the author of this book tried to illustrate this with the change in the bumper stickers you saw in the Union Hall parking lots towards more conservative, cultural, Republican-leaning institutions.
		Because, as one of our earlier callers said about how the Democratic Party is no longer recognizable to his father and grandfather, the Democratic coalition used to have blue-collar workers who are more economically liberal, if you will, but socially conservative.
		And the Democratic Party has lost touch with those voters.
		You can't sneer at people because they don't share the same values as you do.
		You know, the Democratic Party has become amazingly what the Republican Party used to be stereotyped as the party of the very wealthy, highly educated, white-collar working class.
		That is now one of the main pillars of the Democratic Party.
		So, I know some of my answers, they take a bit to explain this.
		I hope I'm explaining as well as I can, but there's a book I would just recommend to people if you want to just sit and take in these ideas, and that is a book called A Fabulous Failure by Nelson Lichtenstein.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We have time for one last call, Marlene in Minnesota, line for independence.
unidentified		Good morning, Mr. DiCarlo.
		I don't know if you're going to be able to answer my question or not, but I'm wondering when did all of this heavy, heavy pork start coming into our bills that are supposed to be for the American people?
		This millions and billions of dollars that they pass in these 1,500-page bills or the 3,000-page bill that Pelosi wrote and said, you know, just sign it, you can read it later.
		When did that start happening, that this became unaware to the American people?
		1789.
		Now, I mean, Congress did do away with earmarks some years ago.
		That's an enormous question.
		I mean, not all of this is negative.
		I mean, that's what lobbying the First Amendment is for, right?
		But no, not to give you a flip-hand answer.
		Obviously, powerful interests in our country are able to stuff bills with what they want.
		And, you know, until Congress gets back to doing business like it used to be and having hearings and all this and to fully vet these things rather than just sign it and read it later.
		So I'm sorry I can't give you a better answer to that because that's an enormous subject to tackle in a short period of time.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Our guest, Martin DeCaro, host of History as It Happens, the podcast.
		You can find his work online at historyasithappens.com.
		Martin, thank you so much for being with us today.
unidentified		Thank you for having me.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		A lot of topics we got through.
		Next, on Washington Journal, the University of North Texas at Dallas, political science professor Orlando Perez will discuss the history of the Panama Canal.
		We'll be right back.
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tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Joining us now to discuss the history of the Panama Canal is University of North Texas at Dallas Political Science Professor Orlando Perez.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Professor Perez, thank you for being with us today.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
unidentified		Thank you for having me, and it's a pleasure.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We will start with just the basics.
		We've been hearing a lot about the Panama Canal the past few weeks.
		Remind our audience what the canal is and why it was or is important to the U.S.
unidentified		Sure.
		So the Panama Canal is one of the most important interoceanic waterways in the world.
		About 5% of global cargo commerce passes through the canal on a yearly basis, but for the United States, it is over 40% of our container shipments passes through the canal.
		And about 70% of canal traffic is from the United States.
		We are the leading users of the canal.
		And particularly, it's particularly important for trade between the eastern seaboard ports and the West.
		It cuts down about 7,000 miles of shipping distance When you traverse the canal to go from the east coast to the west coast.
		So, in terms of shipping and global commerce, the canal is a very important and perhaps the most important inter-oceanic waterway.
		We really have to go back in history to understand the importance of the canal to the world and to the United States.
		The idea of an inter-oceanic canal through Panama really dates back to the Spanish Empire.
		It really dates back to the 16th century.
		The Spaniards had visions of building a canal.
		It was technologically impossible back in the 16th century.
		So, the Spaniards built a system whereby their gold-laden galleons from South America would port in the Pacific side of the isthmus and then would transport that gold via land, and initially via mule-laden cargo,
		to the Atlantic side of the isthmus.
		It's about a 51-mile distance from the Pacific at the shortest point from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and then would transport, would transfer that cargo, mostly gold and silver, onto galleons and then transport them first to Cuba and then to Spain.
		So, the isthmus of Panama and the geographic location of the Isthmus of Panama has been a key component of global trade for hundreds of years.
		In the 1850s, the gold rush in California led the United States to begin to get an interest in the canal route.
		Initially, Panama at that point was part of Colombia.
		And the United States worked out a deal with Colombia at the time in the 1850s and 60s to build a railroad that connected, again, Panama City on the Pacific side with the largest city on the Atlantic side being Colon.
		That railroad was instrumental in transporting people and transporting cargo from the Pacific to the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States and vice versa.
		In the late 19th century, in the 1880s, 1870s, 1880s, the French were involved in an attempt to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama.
		That effort failed because of disease, because of corruption, because of technology, and because of the way that the French wanted to build the canal.
		They wanted to duplicate their success in Egypt in the Suez Canal, which is a sea-level canal.
		And That type of canal is not possible on the Isthmus of Panama because of geography and because of the continental divide.
		And so disease, inefficiency, the wrong planning and corruption led to the failure of the French effort.
		That then, at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, after the Spanish-American War, the success of the United States in the Spanish-American War, led the United States to then enter the process of trying to negotiate the rights to build a canal.
		For Teddy Roosevelt, for President Roosevelt, the canal became a very important part of his international policy.
		The United States had, at the turn of the century, become a major global power.
		The notion of a two-ocean Navy, of having a two-ocean navy, and the ability to traverse the distances between the Atlantic and the Pacific for military purposes were key.
		And the United States was able to reach an agreement with Colombia to build a canal, but the Colombian Senate failed to approve that treaty.
		And it was at that point that the United States then aided in the independence of Panama and subsequent to that, and we can get into some more details about that process,
		subsequent to that signed what is known as the Hay-Bunovarilla Treaty that gave the United States the rights to build an interoceanic canal through Panama at that point in perpetuity.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		And the U.S. did have the major role in construction of the canal and then had control of the canal for several decades until a couple treaties were signed, the Neutrality Treaty and the Panama Canal Treaty.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		What did those treaties say and why were there two separate treaties signed?
unidentified		So the United States began the construction of the canal in 1904.
		It opened in 1914.
		And as I said, the rights of the United States were guaranteed in perpetuity in the so-called Hay-Bunovarilla Treaty of 1904.
		It is important to note that Hay in the Hay-Bunovarilla Treaty is John Hay, the then Secretary of State of the United States.
		And Philippe Buno Varilla was a Frenchman who had worked on the French canal and had acquired the rights to the equipment of the French Canal Company in Panama and had been assigned by Panama as the negotiator of the treaty.
		So it's a treaty that no Panamanian, and Panamanians are very keen to remind folks about this, it was a treaty that no Panamanian actually signed.
		That treaty, of course, generated a great deal of consternation and opposition in Panama to many of its provisions.
		And Panamanians, for the rest of the 20th century, had sought to change that treaty and to gain greater access to the canal.
		The treaty allowed the United States to control what became known as the Canal Zone, a 10-mile wide, 50-mile long stretch of Panamanian territory to build the canal.
		And the United States built a military and civilian infrastructure around the building, the administrating administration, management, and protection of the canal.
		Throughout, again, throughout the 20th century, the Panamanians had sought to change that treaty.
		By the 1960s, the issue of national sovereignty over the canal was critical to Panamanians.
		And in 1964, early in January of 1964, there were a significant level of protest and violence in the canal zone.
		About 20 Panamanians died from the protests and the reaction to these protests.
		Panamanians had sought to raise the Panamanian flag over a section of the Panama Canal Zone, over the canal zone, specifically Balboa High School in the Canal Zone.
		They were repressed by U.S. military personnel and police.
		And in the scuffle, again, about 20 Panamanians died, about four U.S. soldiers died.
		And that incident led to the start of series negotiations to revise the Canal Treaty, to revise the treaty that gave the United States the rights to the canal zone in perpetuity.
		That really started with Lyndon Johnson.
		It continued with Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
		But the problem was that there was significant opposition in the United States to giving back the canal.
		And in Panama in 1968, there was a military coup that brought to power General Romarto Rijos a military dictatorship.
		And so there was concern in the early 70s, really, that making a treaty, a deal for the revision of the Hey Bueno-Varilla Treaty with a military dictatorship was not in the interest of the United States.
		By the time that President Carter came to power in 1977, those negotiations had advanced significantly.
		And I think Carter, generally, in his foreign policy and in his engagement with Latin America, wanted to really change the narrative of our relations with the region.
		He wanted to emphasize human rights, not just in Latin America, but across the world.
		And I think the notion for many in the Carter administration and many scholars and many political figures in the United States was that a new treaty was necessary to change the nature of our engagement, not just with Panama, but also for the rest of Latin America.
		And those negotiations were not easy, but they led to, as you mentioned, those two treaties.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Professor Perez, sorry, I'm going to hop in right here really quick because I want to make sure that our callers have the numbers to call in so they can join this conversation as well.
		We are opening those phone lines.
		Democrats, your line, 202-748-8000.
		Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		Our guest is Orlando Perez.
		He's a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.
		And our discussion is on the history of the Panama Canal.
		And Professor Perez, apologies for jumping in there.
		You were talking about the treaties, what they allow us to do.
		Please continue.
unidentified		So as I was saying, and please interrupt me whenever you feel the need to do that.
		I can get carried away with the narrative here.
		So two treaties, one, the Panama Canal Treaties, and the other one, the Neutrality Treaty.
		The Panama Canal Treaties basically set up a process by which the United States would eventually, by December 31, 1999, turn over control of the Panama Canal, the management of the Panama Canal to Panama.
		This was a process that took about 20 years, gradually turning over pieces and areas of the canal zone to Panamanian management until ultimately on December 31, 1999, Panama received the management of the canal.
		The Neutrality Treaty was a separate treaty by which the Panamanians committed themselves to maintaining the Panama Canal as a neutral waterway,
		not favoring any particular country or particular international power or actor to treat every user of the canal equally.
		And this has become an issue recently with the President-elect's comments on the Panama Canal.
		The Neutrality Treaty also gives the United States the right to intervene in the canal if that neutrality is jeopardized.
		The reason two canal treaties were done instead of one, my understanding is that it had to do with the best way to get this entire process through the United States Senate, which was not an easy process, but the treaties were ratified by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate in 1978.
		They went into effect in 1979, and they were effectively implemented by December 31, 1999.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Our guest is Orlando Perez.
		Our discussion is on the history of the Panama Canal.
		And our first caller for the segment is Roy from Riverside, California, Lineford Democrats.
		Good morning, Roy.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		How are you?
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		We're doing well.
unidentified		I just want to make it clear.
		I'm a native Panamanian.
		I was born in that country, and I came here in 1963 as a nine-year-old.
		I'm a citizen, 22-year military vet and everything.
		What's misleading is what he's saying about the United States having the Panama Canal in perpetuity.
		It was a 99-year lease.
		Okay, and that's what's misleading, because that'll hide the craziness from a failed leader now.
		You know, they're going to take it back.
		It wasn't theirs to take back.
		We need to clarify that.
		Yes, the canal zone was American and all.
		It was actually governed by Louisiana law with all the Jim Crow trappings of gold and silver fountains.
		And the only reason there were a large number of black employees from the West Indians was because they spoke English.
		And that in itself became divisive with the American Hispanic public also.
		So this issue about we're going to take it back wasn't yours to take back.
		Yes, you did the construction, but you have no sovereignty now over that land.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Professor Perez, your response?
unidentified		I agree.
		I agree totally with Roy.
		Now, the question of whether it was perpetuity or 99 years, that has been a controversial issue, and it has to do with the translation from English to Spanish and Spanish to English of the initial treaty.
		But I agree with Roy.
		The treaty itself said literally that the United States would act as if it was sovereign.
		But the implication of the ask-if statement is that the sovereignty remained with fundamentally with the Panamanians.
		I also agree with him that the canal was built mostly by black labor from the Afro-Caribbean region and from imported labor from other parts of, again, the Caribbean and Latin America.
		And so I totally agree with Roy that indeed sovereignty rested with the Panamanians and that any Discussion of sovereignty,
		any discussion of returning the canal back to the United States, United States management, is, I think, counterproductive to our relations with not just Panama, but with Latin America in general.
		And I think if the aim of this discussion is to bully the Panamanians to move away from Chinese investment and Chinese engagement in the region,
		I honestly believe it's counterproductive and will not readily succeed.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Tina in Alabama, Line for Republicans.
tammy thueringer ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Tina.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you for this.
		Mr. Perez, nice job.
justice neil gorsuch ▲ ● ▼		I was born and raised in the canals and lived there for 22 years through the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
unidentified		My father is a civil engineer who maintained government contracts.
		We lived in the canals on Panamans, and America has got along great.
		And the influence of America in Panama created a middle class that no other Central American company country enjoyed.
		Panama had 137 bank charters, second to Switzerland when I was down there.
justice neil gorsuch ▲ ● ▼		But in 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Cuba and Russia who sent a lot of instigators down for the riots.
unidentified		And that happened throughout Central America.
		I would encourage you to look into that.
		But I appreciate your taking the topic on.
		Thank you, sir.
		God bless.

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