| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Of Florida. | |
| The chair announces the Speaker's appointment pursuant to 46 U.S.C. 51312B and the order of the House of January 3rd, 2025 of the following members on the part of the House to the Board of Visitors to the United States Merchant Marine Academy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Valadeo of California. | |
| Mr. Swazi of New York. | ||
| The chair announces the speaker's appointment pursuant to 10 U.S.C. 7455A and the order of the House of January 3rd, 2025 of the following members on the part of the House to the Board of Visitors to the United States Military Academy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Womack of Arkansas. | |
| Mrs. Vice of Oklahoma. | ||
| The Chair announces the Speaker's appointment pursuant to 10 U.S.C. 8468A in the order of the House of January 3rd, 2025 of the following members on the part of the House to the Board of Visitors to the United States Naval Academy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Elzey of Texas. | |
| Mr. Franklin of Florida. | ||
| Pursuing the Clause 13 of Rule 1, the House stands adjourned until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, January the 28th, 2025. | ||
| And that was the gavel. | ||
| That was just a very short pro forma session in the House. | ||
| We're back with you on Washington Journal, and we're joined now by Dean Ball. | ||
| He's a research fellow at the George Mason University's Mercatus Center. | ||
| We're talking about the AI infrastructure investment that has just been announced. | ||
| Dean, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks so much for having me. | |
| So before we talk about that, this is the AP that says that Trump signs executive order on developing artificial intelligence, quote, free from ideological bias. | ||
| Explain that to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So on Trump's first day in office, he rescinded Biden's executive order on AI, which was one of the longest executive orders in the history of executive orders. | ||
| And yesterday, he replaced it with, I would say, a starting point, much smaller and simpler than the Biden order, but also much fewer sort of directives to agencies. | ||
| Basically, what he said is all the things that the Biden executive order told federal agencies to do, federal agencies need to go back and look at all of them and decide whether or not they conform with Trump's priorities on AI policy, which are economic competitiveness, national security, and human flourishing. | ||
| Now, the Biden executive order that has now been revoked, it had this, it says that it was meant to curb government use of the kinds of AI tools that have been found to unfairly discriminate based on race, gender, or disability from medical diagnosis, chatbots spouting false information to face recognition technology tied to wrongful arrests of black men. | ||
| So what do we expect is going to happen now that that's been revoked? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that a lot of these tools will continue to be used by many different people. | |
| I think the discriminatory aspect of these tools, there's not a lot of hard data on that subject. | ||
| There's a lot of anecdotes that people have, but we haven't seen a ton of hard data about that. | ||
| And at the end of the day, there is still a wide variety of civil rights law at the state and federal level in the United States that protects against discrimination of all kinds. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether you use an algorithm or a computer or just your brain. | ||
| So I don't think that the effect of that particular provision is going to be all that dramatic. | ||
| The executive order says that Mr. Trump is talking about AI dominance as a goal for his administration. | ||
| How does that executive order pave the way for AI dominance in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that it's really much more of a starting point, I would say. | |
| It gives various officials within the administration about 180 days, if memory serves, to come up with new policies that will hopefully ensure dominance. | ||
| But in addition to that, the Trump administration has put a very significant priority on energy production and infrastructure development, both of which are going to be very important in AI. | ||
| And for that reason, I think that the Trump administration will prioritize fast-tracking environmental permitting and other kinds of regulatory approvals for new construction of infrastructure and energy. | ||
| And I think that will be hugely important for American AI dominance going forward. | ||
| Well, so let's talk about infrastructure. | ||
| There is an announcement of a partnership investing $500 billion in AI. | ||
| Tell us about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so this is called Stargate. | |
| And Stargate is a company. | ||
| It's its own new venture. | ||
| There's no public dollars going into it. | ||
| So there's no federal or state taxpayer money going into this project. | ||
| Instead, it's a collaboration between OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, Oracle, which is a data center and software company, SoftBank, which is a Japanese investment fund, and MGX, which is an investment fund located in the United Arab Emirates. | ||
| Those four companies are together going to collaborate with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and some other technical partners to build data centers across the United States. | ||
| The very largest, most sophisticated, and most expensive data centers that are needed to run the most advanced AI models. | ||
| Now, this is already underway. | ||
| I mean, this has already happened, and the first data center is already under construction. | ||
| That's right, Texas. | ||
| So what's new? | ||
| What's being announced that's new now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's being announced is a commitment, or at least a goal, to spend up to $100 billion in the next year, and potentially as much as $500 billion over the next several years by these companies on data centers of all different types. | |
| And I think that even before these figures were announced, the infrastructure build out for AI in the United States is one of the largest industrial buildouts we've witnessed in the history of the country, particularly in peacetime, which should give you a sense of the economic opportunity that private investors see here. | ||
| When you talk about the build out and the infrastructure, we're talking about data centers that essentially house these chips and these processors to run AI models. | ||
| So what is actually, describe a data center, how big is it, and what are the issues surrounding energy and water? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely, yes. | |
| So an AI data center is actually a somewhat different thing from a normal data center. | ||
| And the main reason for that is that an AI data center is filled almost entirely with GPUs, graphics processing units. | ||
| These are the computers made by NVIDIA, which is now one of the most valuable companies in the world that are used for AI, running and training AI models. | ||
| These chips are extremely power-hungry. | ||
| They are sort of just more energy intensive in all ways. | ||
| They also need to be networked together really, really tightly so that they can send data among one another as quickly as possible. | ||
| You're talking about sending volumes of data of the entire internet, basically, Across a data center at one time. | ||
| So they're kind of these remarkable industrial facilities, really the largest supercomputers that humans have ever built by far. | ||
| And that is what this venture hopes to produce many of. | ||
| And if you'd like to join our conversation with Dean Ball of the Mercatus Center, we're talking about AI, AI infrastructure, the energy required for those data centers. | ||
| If you would like to join our conversation, give us a call. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 2028-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 2028, 8002. | ||
| You can go ahead and give us a call. | ||
| Now, you said that the infrastructure is using private funds. | ||
| There's no taxpayer money going into this. | ||
| So, what is the U.S., the U.S. government, getting involved for in this infrastructure? | ||
| What's the role that the government plays? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| So, a data center in the past might have taken, a big one, might have taken 50 megawatts, 50 million watts. | ||
| The data centers that we're talking about here could conceivably be taking as many as four or five gigawatts, billion watts. | ||
| The energy infrastructure that you need to power those facilities is just fundamentally different from what older data centers required. | ||
| And you asked about water too, that is a factor as well. | ||
| And so, for that reason, to build both the data centers and the energy infrastructure, which could be natural gas facilities, it could be solar panels, it could be one day nuclear power plants or even nuclear fusion plants, you need federal permitting for much of that infrastructure. | ||
| And so, the role of the federal government here, and also state governments will be quite important, is going to be, I think, primarily creating smoother regulatory pathways so that these projects don't get mired in years of waiting for permitting and years of litigation, which is something that we've seen happen. | ||
| That's thwarted green energy agendas for the past decade and thwarted all kinds of infrastructure in the United States. | ||
| And I think that the government role here is mostly clearing the way so that this private money can be spent most efficiently. | ||
| And Elon Musk has pushed back on this announcement. | ||
| The AP says this: Musk clashes with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over Trump-supported Stargate AI data center project. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| What's his concern? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think Elon Musk has a long history with OpenAI, which is the lead sort of operator of this company, Stargate. | |
| He was a co-founder of OpenAI, and he wanted OpenAI to remain sort of under his control, I think. | ||
| And there was a falling out. | ||
| He left the company. | ||
| He started his own venture eventually called XAI, which is his frontier AI company. | ||
| And so, there's A, there's just a history of bad blood. | ||
| In this specific case, and also lawsuits, Elon is, you know, he's suing OpenAI for a variety of different things. | ||
| But in addition to that, on this specific instance, he has claimed that Stargate does not have the money that they claim they have. | ||
| He says they don't have a path to spending $100 billion in the near term, and they certainly don't have a path to spending $500 billion. | ||
| And at the end of the day, I can't validate that, and very few other people can. | ||
| We don't know what exactly they have committed. | ||
| But I would say that the people involved here are credible people. | ||
| As President Trump said, they're very wealthy people. | ||
| And I think, given what I expect the scale of the economic opportunity is, I don't think they have $500 billion in the bank right now. | ||
| I would be shocked if they did. | ||
| But I think there's a path to raise that money. | ||
| There are, Axios is talking about communities pushing back on these data centers, saying, you know, I understand that they're important, but I don't want them in my neighborhood. | ||
| So what's going on with that? | ||
| And what, I guess, where can you put them that it's going to work for the technology and work for communities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, it can be a tough sell. | |
| Data centers, they create a lot of jobs at the construction phase, but once they're built, even a multi-billion dollar data center might only have 100 or 200 employees because you just don't need that many people to keep the computers running in essence. | ||
| Now, they are very complicated industrial facilities. | ||
| They're definitely creating a lot of economic value, but it's not like a steel factory with thousands of jobs that could employ an entire community. | ||
| So the pushback in that sense does make sense. | ||
| People always push back to new construction. | ||
| And in addition to that, they take up a lot of energy. | ||
| And, you know, without, unless that's properly managed and unless we build the infrastructure that's necessary for them in a very aggressive way, then the reality is that this will drive up energy costs. | ||
| So I think it's important to build the amount of energy that we need to really have an abundance of electricity so that that does not happen. | ||
| Also, though, you know, some of these facilities, in fact, a lot of the ones, especially the places where you train the biggest models, those don't need to be close to population centers. | ||
| Those can actually be really out in the desert because. | ||
| But then you need water, which is not easy to find in the desert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As long as you have, you can recycle a lot of the water, I will say. | |
| But as long as you have the energy and yes, a path to get water, you can build in remote areas. | ||
| You know, you could build in Alaska, for that matter. | ||
| In fact, that might be even better because you have free cooling because it's cold. | ||
| And that's what the water's for, by the way. | ||
| It's to cool off the data centers because the GPUs run very hot. | ||
| Let's talk to callers now on the independent line. | ||
| Here's Alan in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I've got two questions. | |
| The first question is: with half of the partners in this project being from Japan and Saudi Arabia, I don't see a public benefit there that redounds to the United States. | ||
| And my second question is, well, it's really the same as my first question. | ||
| What is this doing for the United States of America? | ||
| Why should the U.S. government be investing in this? | ||
| I see it taking millions of jobs for the 200 or so jobs that it gains in running a data center. | ||
| It just seems ridiculous to me. | ||
| And the investors, as I said, are 50% foreign. | ||
| So. | ||
| All right, Alan. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a great question, Alan. | |
| And I think, first of all, I think it's worth pointing out that the federal government is not investing any taxpayer dollars in this project. | ||
| So that is worth clarifying. | ||
| But to your point, yes, there are foreign investors who will be part of this project. | ||
| At the end of the day, though, American companies are going to lead the construction. | ||
| Those facilities will be populated with American GPUs, and they will run AI systems developed by American companies. | ||
| And most importantly, I think they will be in America. | ||
| The alternative here could be a situation in which a country like the United Arab Emirates builds these very large facilities On their own soil, and we have no control over them, and we have potentially security and privacy and all kinds of other issues. | ||
| So, I think that to that end, this is a way to structure this that uses the fact that foreign capital wants to invest in this country, but to the benefit of the country. | ||
| And just to follow on that, the caller mentioned Saudi Arabia. | ||
| This is, I believe, CBS. | ||
| It says Saudi Arabia plans to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. | ||
| That's according to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia saying that in a call with President Trump. | ||
| Any security issues there with this kind of level of foreign investment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's extremely important when it comes to security that the companies that actually manage these data centers, and these are familiar American names for the most part, like Amazon and Microsoft and Google, they're the leading companies that build these data centers. | |
| It's very important that they manage the facilities, and it's also very important that they have high security standards for frontier AI systems, and not because of Saudi Arabia in particular, but because these facilities are going to be the target. | ||
| I think there will be a future in which they are important military assets in addition to being important economic assets, and they'll be targeted by America's rivals for hacking, for sure. | ||
| So, I think that high levels of security are extremely important, and that's why we're doing this, I think, in a smart way that ensures that companies we trust, companies that the American government can regulate thoroughly, are going to be the ones who build and manage the facilities. | ||
| Here's Ruth, a Republican in Hemphill, Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was very, I'm 76 and I'm blind, and I was very skeptical of AI. | |
| But then I thought about how worried people were about railroads in the 1800s and how everything progresses to help us. | ||
| But my original reason for calling was I used AIApp yesterday for the first time to help me. | ||
| My assistant downloaded an app where I can just hold an iPad camera up near an object and it will tell me what the object is or read the document. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can actually hear what the labels are on my prescriptions now so I don't get them confused any longer. | |
| And it's opened just from yesterday has opened up a new world for me that I've been in for 20 years with this blindness. | ||
| So, that's really interesting, Ruth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm glad you shared that with us. | |
| Any comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that there are going to be profound medical innovations that come as a result of AI. | |
| I think there is a chance there's a, in fact, Elon Musk is working on a company that might allow the blind to see again with neural devices and AI working together. | ||
| Curing cancer, being able to give people who can't speak a voice again. | ||
| All these things that seem miraculous will become commonplace. | ||
| And yes, a lot of things will change, and there will probably be some parts of the change that we don't like, as there is with any technological change. | ||
| But my strong suspicion is that the good is going to outweigh the bad by quite a bit. | ||
| Are there any regulations that you would support? | ||
| I mean, I know you're coming from the Mercatus Center, which tends to be libertarian, but what guardrails do you want to see on AI? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| So, I mean, the first thing that's worth noting is AI is a general purpose technology that will be used by all of us, already is used by all of us and will be used in increasing numbers of ways, just like you use computers and the internet for sort of a mind-boggling number of things. | ||
| And in that sense, AI is already regulated by kind of all the laws that exist, and we have quite a few of them. | ||
| So, there is that. | ||
| But also, I think there are some ways in which AI demands specific regulations. | ||
| So, I have written a report about deepfakes, for example. | ||
| I looked at the state laws in every state and found that there are actually situations in which a person could distribute a malicious deepfake of somebody and not have legal liability for doing so because of just sort of loopholes that exist in the law, because nobody anticipated something like AI deepfakes. | ||
| So, that's an example of plug that hole in the law. | ||
| I'm all in favor of that. | ||
| Give people the right to bring people to court if somebody distributes a malicious deepfake of them. | ||
| And I would also say, you know, I'm quite supportive of transparency efforts, particularly at the frontier of AI, where these systems that we're building, they pose risks that are novel, that could be, you know, totally novel things for us. | ||
| The ability to do autonomous cyber attacks, for example, is something that people talk about. | ||
| And, you know, those risks haven't manifested themselves, and it's not obvious how we would regulate them, you know, regulate a risk that we can't even really see the shape of. | ||
| But transparency and information from the companies that are developing this, where they have to tell us, how are you evaluating these models? | ||
| How are you testing these models? | ||
| What kind of security provisions do you have around the models? | ||
| All these kinds of things I think are very wise and so that the public can see and so that people in the public, researchers like myself or in academia, can comment and contribute and make these plans better over time. | ||
| And ultimately, those kinds of plans will be the governing documents in some sense, in my view. | ||
| So I'm very in favor of work like that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is Terry in Bellwood, Illinois, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Terry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, my question about this AI is what benefits as the public, I mean, we understand about the benefits that supposedly is going to affect all of us, but what are all of us going to have to contribute to to garner this benefit? | |
| Are we going to have to have another supercomputer in our homes? | ||
| Is there an ethical board that's going to be on? | ||
| Who's going to be overseeing this? | ||
| This is going to affect all of us. | ||
| We don't even know the changes. | ||
| I think AI is going to be a good thing, but we got to have some regulation that's going to protect us as citizens, regulation that's going to protect us as Americans. | ||
| You got all these foreign investors coming in. | ||
| Whose interests are they looking out for? | ||
| Is this part of cryptocurrency? | ||
| You know, these are questions we need to ask. | ||
| I don't disagree that we should approach this with seriousness and even some degree of caution. | ||
| I think the question about regulation and the thing where you have to be careful is that you can really easily go too far. | ||
| And yes, you can quash innovation with regulation. | ||
| That is definitely a concern. | ||
| But it's not the only concern. | ||
| Another concern might be that regulation causes the industry to centralize because no startup can comply with the regulation. | ||
| And so only the biggest people can survive. | ||
| And as a result of that, actually all these problems we worry about with AI, things like ethics and concentration of power and privacy, all these things are actually made worse by the regulation that we tried to have help ourselves, had tried to have help us. | ||
| So I think that it's not that we shouldn't do regulation. | ||
| It's that we should be extremely thoughtful and careful about it. | ||
| And we should be knowledgeable of history and the ways in which regulation has gone wrong over American history. | ||
| On the Independent Line, this is John in Houston, Texas. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| This is a great call. | ||
| Just have a question. | ||
| I mean, my concern mainly is the future job loss, because we feel it's going to affect a lot of folks, especially college graduates. | ||
| There'll be a lot of millions of job loss, more money for the investors, most who are foreign that will eat the elimination of millions of jobs. | ||
| Just last year, Elon Mosque, he was worried about the pace, and then all of a sudden he's for it. | ||
| So do you think the cons will outweigh the pro in the long run? | ||
| I think that the good will outweigh the bad in the long run. | ||
| But on the job issue in particular, you're not wrong. | ||
| There's going to be some job loss. | ||
| I think there are going to be types of jobs that just go away, which has happened in the past. | ||
| We used to, a computer used to be a person, right? | ||
| It used to be a person who did math. | ||
| And then we automated that. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| Well, the computer made a lot more jobs. | ||
| And there are people who spend their entire day doing jobs on computers that would have been inconceivable 50 or 100 years ago, much less 500 years ago. | ||
| So I think that there will be some things that get automated. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I don't expect for AI to automate away the need and the desire that we will have for humans to be in the workforce. | ||
| And those people, the great part about technology is that if AI automates, say, 75% of my job, well, the other 25% will come to fill a larger part of my time. | ||
| There'll also be entirely new things that I can do with AI that we probably don't even have words for today. | ||
| And I'll make a lot more money. | ||
| And so will everybody else because I'll be way more productive. | ||
| And that is how we increase prosperity over time. | ||
| All right. | ||
| One more call for you. | ||
| This is Michael in Johnstown, Colorado, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Dean. | |
| How are you doing this morning? | ||
| I want to thank you for coming on the show and being a great American to discuss this AI. | ||
| So I'm the mayor of Johnstown, Colorado. | ||
| So I'll be interested in how we can tap into the Stargate and become a landing spot here in Northern Colorado because we have a unique story where we had a meteorite land over 100 years ago during the LL funeral that was the first meteorite witnessed by humankind and studied by NASA. | ||
| And a piece of it's down there in Washington down here in the Denver Museum. | ||
| So I guess my question to you is how do we get in contact with Sam Alton and yourself to be a landing spot to start this infrastructure process? | ||
| Well, I can't help you there, but I would say, you know, OpenAI actually does have a forum on their website. | ||
| If you just Google Stargate Project, I looked at it this morning. | ||
| They have a forum on their website where people that are interested in providing infrastructure can fill it out and talk directly with OpenAI. | ||
| So I would encourage people in the city to do that. | ||
| I would encourage people all over the country to do that because I think there's no way we're going to, this is going to be a whole of country effort. | ||
| I think the whole country is going to have to contribute to this. | ||
| So geographic distribution, I'm all in favor of. | ||
| All right, can you take one more call? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| All right, let's talk to Deborah in Cocoa, Florida, Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My question is, I've heard that these data centers could be extremely noisy. | ||
| And if so, what are your thoughts about that? | ||
| And as far as regulations, since we have to have power, I mean, and you're talking about nuclear power. | ||
| I don't think I'd want that in my neighborhood, would you? | ||
| Well, actually, I used to live in New York City, and 25% of our power in New York came from a nuclear power plant that was a few miles up the Hudson River. | ||
| And, you know, nuclear power is heavily regulated in America and probably in my view, actually over-regulated. | ||
| It's actually one of the safest forms of energy. | ||
| It's much safer than coal or natural gas in terms of documented evidence of physical harm or death that's come as a result of it. | ||
| In terms of data center noise, it's a great question. | ||
| They can be noisy. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You're talking about large industrial HVAC systems that are running to keep the GPUs cool and power generation and all of that. | ||
| I don't think they're louder than, I think there's a lot of other industrial facilities that we've built in American history that have been way louder, but we have industrial zoning for a reason. | ||
| I wouldn't suggest building one of these data centers right next to someone's house in most circumstances, but we have a big country. | ||
| We have a lot of land. | ||
| And so I think there's room for all of us. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Dean Ball, Research Fellow at the George Mason University's Mercatus Center. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| And coming up, more of your phone calls in open forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And it's 202-748-8002 for independence. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A. | |
| Part two of our interview with historian Nigel Hamilton, author of Lincoln vs. Davis. | ||
| He talks about the military face-off between these two American presidents during the Civil War and the impact the Emancipation Proclamation had on the war's outcome. | ||
| From that moment, the 1st of January 1863, the South was doomed. | ||
| Until then, Jefferson Davis had been allowed by Lincoln to frame the war as a noble white southern fight for independence. | ||
| Pure and simple. | ||
| But from the moment that Lincoln said no, you, Jefferson Davis, and your commander-in-chief, Robert E. Lee, have attacked the North, which is what they did in September of 1862. | ||
| It's the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, if you like. | ||
| Once you attack the North, you change the whole game. | ||
| Nigel Hamilton with his book, Lincoln vs. Davis, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
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| You can find About Books on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in open forum. | ||
| A couple of things for your schedule. | ||
| Later today, President Trump is traveling to Asheville, North Carolina today. | ||
| He is en route there as we speak to meet with those who are impacted by Hurricane Helene back in September. | ||
| This morning, he'll receive an update on recovery efforts, and we'll bring that to you live at 11 a.m. Eastern right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also on C-SPAN today at noon, it's the 52nd annual March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. | ||
| The event will include House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other pro-life advocates. | ||
| That rally is live from the National Mall at noon here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Both those events are on our app, C-SPANNO, and online at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| The president also travels to Los Angeles to survey damage from the wildfires. | ||
| And we will take your calls up until the end of the program in about 15 minutes. | ||
| We'll start with Marcy in advance, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I was just calling to see why the Washington Journal. | |
| We've got 15 minutes left, and this is the first mention of the March for Life rally. | ||
| Last year, it was covered by pro-abortion activists, and this year you've totally ignored it. | ||
| So I don't think we're ignoring it. | ||
| I mean, we are covering it in full starting at noon Eastern. | ||
|
unidentified
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The CS-AND Journal's ignored it. | |
| There's a difference in C-SPAN and Washington Journal. | ||
| What's the difference between C-SPAN and Washington Journal? | ||
|
unidentified
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Last year, you had someone on the Washington Journal that was a pro-abortion activist. | |
| I'm sure you've not had anybody to represent the March for Life on this segment. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| I understand your feedback, and thank you for that, Marcy. | ||
| This is William in Burlington, North Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| A couple of things. | ||
| One, I completely disagree with the executive order on birthright citizenship. | ||
| It's in the Constitution. | ||
| These people that are trying to find loopholes in that particular amendment, if you're born in this, it's not like it's unique only to the United States. | ||
| Almost all of the European nations, Asian nations, they all have the same thing. | ||
| Two, on the AI issue, I have a question. | ||
| Wouldn't it be more prudent if these processing or these plants for the AI had their own separate energy grid so that it doesn't interfere with the grids of the entire United States? | ||
| And the desert seems to me to be like a good place. | ||
| Yes, I know water might be hard to get, but wouldn't it be easier to get water in there than have it play in these metropolitan areas or these rural areas where people are going to complain all the time? | ||
| I think AI will eventually be a good thing, but I do concern myself with the amount of money behind it. | ||
| Is it going to be one of those things controlled by only wealthy people? | ||
| I appreciate your time, and I hope you have a great day. | ||
| Hey, William, are you still there? | ||
| William? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I'm here. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So when you talk about the energy, do you know about Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant? | ||
| This is the plan is to reopen that and to have that power Microsoft's data centers. | ||
| Have you seen that information? | ||
|
unidentified
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I have not seen that information, but I think that's a great idea. | |
| I think the Three Mile Island plan, I mean, I know there was that accident years ago, but it's just sitting there. | ||
| It might as well be utilized. | ||
| And it's cost a lot of money to build these nuclear plants. | ||
| So if you have one already in place, just getting it restarted is probably a great idea, and I would be all for that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is Eric in Freeport, Texas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello. | |
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
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Am I on? | |
| You are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, I really like Walking the Journal. | |
| I watch it every morning. | ||
| I just got one statement. | ||
| We pay all tariff taxes. | ||
| China has never paid one red cent in tariff taxes. | ||
| Please fact-check me. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is Frank in Clear Lake, California, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I was calling in about the guest that was on earlier this morning, the Republican, who was talking about the climate in Butte County, where I was born and raised. | ||
| These people down there in Washington don't know anything about California or living in the woods or the mountains. | ||
| You know, these fires, like La Motha, he believes in stripping the land clean down to nothing, planting trees, which only maybe an eighth of those trees will survive. | ||
| It'll be three, four hundred years before those trees can ever be harvested for lumber. | ||
| But yet, these, you know, they just want to strip the land in California. | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| But, you know, this guy is wrong about everything he said about the climate. | ||
| If we don't change this climate where California has regular weather like it used to have when I was a child, the bark beetles don't die. | ||
| The mosquitoes don't die. | ||
| Hence why we have outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases. | ||
| And Frank, what do you think is the best way to fix the climate, as you put it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I'm not an expert at this. | |
| I was just born and raised in the woods, lived in the woods my whole life until I had to move away because so many people from the valley moved up there who had no idea how to live in the woods. | ||
| I got tired of dodging human feces on every road I went down to go deer hunting or turkey hunting or just take my wife out camping. | ||
| They come up here from Texas, Indiana, Missouri. | ||
| I mean, all these other states, they all seem to hate California, but yet they all move here. | ||
| I just assume they move back to where they came from since they're destroying my way of life in California. | ||
| You know, we can't drink out of any of the waters or streams in the mountains anymore because people are using them as toilets. | ||
| We don't have beaver in California, so Geordia is present because of the fact people are using our creeks and lakes as toilets. | ||
| All right, Frank. | ||
| And some news from yesterday from the New York Times: Trump revoked security detail for Pompeo and others despite threats from Iran. | ||
| It says the officials had been part of an aggressive posture against Iran during President Trump's first term. | ||
| Their security Secret Service details have been revoked by President Trump. | ||
| And this is Daniel in Pine City, New York. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Motion. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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I just wanted to make a comment about Jenny Hearst, you know, her support for headset. | |
| You know, after all she's been through, for her to change her vote, I just don't believe her vote is going to make one bit of difference. | ||
| And, you know, the vice president can settle the vote. | ||
| But for what she's been through, and then to turn around and change your vote, she knows what guys like this are all about. | ||
| And I just think she has to have more respect for herself. | ||
| You know, do you agree? | ||
| This is Joni Ernst you're talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is the latest on that, Daniel, is that the votes are scheduled for today in the Senate this evening. | ||
| So be sure to watch that. | ||
| Here's Punch Bowl news that says Heg Seth Noam on tap for weekend Senate votes. | ||
| We're expecting it says Heg Seth, who lost two Republican votes during a Thursday cloture vote, will likely be confirmed during a 9 p.m. vote series. | ||
| Senate Majority Leader John Thune will then move to a cloture vote on Christy Noam's nomination to lead DHS. | ||
| If no time is yielded back, Noam's confirmation vote would occur on Sunday morning. | ||
| So be sure to follow that over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| And this is David, Staunton, Virginia, Independent Lion. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I had a couple of issues. | ||
| Number one, a potential solution to the war in Ukraine would be to have the citizens of the Donbass region have a referendum supervised by the UN or some other neutral third party. | ||
| And then people in the various states of the Donbass region could then decide whether they're going to vote pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian as far as their future citizenship. | ||
| That way, the Department of State, Mark Arubio, could have one more suggestion in his toolbox for that. | ||
| The second thing is that with the AI centers and a lot of other things, the federal government owns 640 million acres of land that they supervise, mostly under the Bureau of Land Management or under Doug Bergham's hand. | ||
| And they could just take 1% of that, that's 6.4 million acres, that's 10,000 square miles, and put power generation or the data centers in those regions and then could solve that problem about not putting them in urban areas. | ||
| Plus, the federal government could lease that, have money coming in from the lease, as well as possibly a tariff, or not a tariff, but a tax on the generation of the power or the AI, whatever gets utilized. | ||
| There's a lot of unutilized federal properties, buildings, so forth that could be leased out to private concerns to provide income to the federal government. | ||
| All right, David. | ||
| Here's Jennifer in Belmore, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Actually, no, I think I called it on the Republican line, but that's okay. | ||
| Morning, Nimi. | ||
| Happy Friday to you. | ||
| I was calling in today just two things. | ||
| Well, actually, three. | ||
| It's my 50th birthday, and I got to call in for C-SPAN. | ||
| I love watching C-SING. | ||
| Happy birthday, Jennifer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Two things, two comments. | ||
| The first one is the pardons for the, you know, the J-6 rioters and all of the hubbub around that. | ||
| If you think about it, the people serve their time. | ||
| I mean, honestly, a lot of them did not cause a lot of damage and cause a lot of pain to people. | ||
| There were a few, select few that did. | ||
| And those people, I'm sure, are being punished as they should be. | ||
| Those other sentences are communicated. | ||
| It's just one of those things that people have to come to grips with. | ||
| If you compare that to President Biden's pardons, the preemptive pardons, where these people supposedly didn't do anything wrong in his whole term, he said, oh, you know, my son, this, and the backing behind the J6 committee and Liz Cheney, and now turns around and he gives them preemptive pardons. | ||
| There's no outrage for that. | ||
| It's just, it's weird. | ||
| These people serve time and they're citizens. | ||
| There are people. | ||
| There are, you know, we should view each other as one and stand united with that and realize that they were done wrong. | ||
| And then the second thing was with the ENO or the executive order with regarding to the ending of those citizenships. | ||
| Birthright citizenship. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you compare that, the one that Trump just signed now, where he's going to end it or was trying to, and now the courts, it's going to be dragged into the courts. | |
| If you compare that to the Biden administration's executive order for the student loan repayment, where the courts said that you couldn't do that, but yet they continued, and there was no outrage for that. | ||
| And if you look up the amount of money that was spent and given back to people after the courts said no, no, it just should be all viewed and weighed separately. | ||
| There's a precedent, that's a precedent that's been set now, and that's probably why, you know, Trump signed what he did. | ||
| And if you take into consideration that our founding fathers probably never accounted for the amount of illegal immigration that's happening in this country at this time, which would call for a change to the amendment in the Constitution. | ||
| And that's really all I have to say this weekend. | ||
| All right, Jennifer, and this is Adriana in Los Angeles, California, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am an attorney in California, and I've worked for three different prosecutorial agencies. | ||
| And when I first became a prosecutor in the DA's office, I had to go through a district attorney training program. | ||
| It took about a month. | ||
| And one of the premises that we were taught was that as prosecutors, that we're not there to win, that we're there to do justice. | ||
| In other words, that if we see that there's evidence that points to innocence or points that there's insufficient evidence, we're required to act fairly and not go prosecuting against individuals for crimes where there's no evidence. | ||
| And I'm concerned because this January 6th pardoning has brought up a lot of other issues regarding the misuse of power by our Justice Department and how now it's acceptable in law schools and in prosecutorial agencies throughout the country that it's okay to win at any cost as long as you're winning for this, whatever cause you believe in. | ||
| And I'm very concerned about it. | ||
| For example, in Los Angeles, we had a district attorney, Gascon, who had philosophical beliefs and forced the prosecutors to follow his philosophical beliefs, even though it violated all the rules that prosecutors were trained to follow. | ||
| And I'm worried that we're going down a very dangerous road when we're training attorneys in law schools to win. | ||
| at any cost rather than to make sure that the truth prevails and that justice prevails. | ||
| It's going to hurt a lot of people if we have prosecutors who just go after people without any legal basis and misuse the system. | ||
| And I think that it started in Biden's administration from the very top with Merrick Garland. | ||
| He had no reins on his political views, and he abused his position by having the prosecutors go after people to promote their philosophy. | ||
| All right, Adrian, I want to get one more call in. | ||
| Michael in Kokomo, Indiana, a Democrat. | ||
| Go ahead, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a few things written down here that I want to read to you. | ||
| It is frightening to think of Donald Trump as back in the White House. | ||
| I have two words to describe Donald Trump, liar and criminal. | ||
| He is a big-time liar and a big-time criminal. | ||
| He's a tyrant. | ||
| His only purpose to occupy the White House is to become the richest man in the world. | ||
| If he could get hold of the so-called keys to the U.S. Treasury, he would wipe it out to enrich himself, his family, and friends. | ||
| Or he could wipe out the Social Security Trust Fund for the same reason. | ||
| This country is dangerously in peril with Trump in the White House. | ||
| Most of his talk is rhetoric, a smokescreen. | ||
| It is something for people to talk about, as well as the news programs. | ||
| He doesn't care about the American people or this country. | ||
| His only real purpose is to become the world's richest man by robbing the American people and anyone else he can rob. | ||
| And he has a team of people to help him do that. | ||
| And I'm sure the plan has been in the books for several years. | ||
| Also, look for so-called scandals. | ||
| These are only diversionary tactics they use to divert your attention away from what he is really wanting to do, and that is to rob the American people. | ||
| Sorry, Michael, we got that, and we are at the end of the program. | ||
| Thanks to everybody who called in. | ||
| Thanks for watching. | ||
| We'll be back again tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern on Washington Journal. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Today is the 52nd annual March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. | |
| The event will include House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and other pro-life advocates. | ||
| Watch the rally live from the National Mall at noon Eastern on C-SPAN. |