| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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administration's agenda. | |
| And then the Heritage Foundation's Mike Gonzalez discusses the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle federal DEI programs. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern this morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Live today on C-SPAN. | ||
| At 10 a.m. Eastern, a Senate subcommittee hearing will investigate the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and its impact on U.S. trade and national security. | ||
| On C-SPAN 2, live at 8 a.m. Eastern, congressional Republicans will hold a news conference at their annual retreat in Doral, Florida. | ||
| Then at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Senate returns to continue work on the nomination of Sean Duffy to be Secretary of Transportation. | ||
| A final vote is scheduled later in the day. | ||
| And over on C-SPAN 3, at 10.30 a.m. Eastern, former service members and advocates discuss the community care program and President Trump's executive order on a government hiring freeze that could impact veterans' access to health care services. | ||
| These events also stream live on the free C-SPAN Now video app and online at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Yuval Levin joins us from the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He's their social, cultural, and constitutional studies director. | ||
| He's also the author of the recent book, American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could. | ||
| Again, Mr. Levin, thanks for joining us. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me and thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| This idea from the book as far as the Constitution bringing things together, we've had you all have to talk about it before, but how does that parallel to the days we're seeing now under a new president when it comes to unity in the United States? | ||
| Yeah, you know, the argument of the book really is that the Constitution brings us together by helping us fight properly, by helping us disagree in ways that are constructive, and that it assumes that there will always be deep divisions, but establishes procedures and institutions that are set up to let Americans disagree in ways that lead toward negotiation, toward bargaining, toward compromise. | ||
| I think that is what our institutions can do for us, and especially in a time when we're intensely, deeply divided, the kind of 50-50 moment that we've lived in now in the United States in our national politics for the last generation means that we have to let our institutions function. | ||
| That's going to be hard to see in the first week of a new administration where everything we hear is what they want to do, but what they want to do and what is actually going to happen is going to be mediated by these institutions. | ||
| The difference between what the president wants and what he gets is a function of what he can get through Congress, of what he can persuade the courts of, of what the public thinks about what he's up to. | ||
| All of these things are there to help us broaden coalitions, to help us deal with each other, to force us to confront the reality of disagreement, which is the basic underlying fact of our democracy. | ||
| His main avenue right now, executive order, he has a Republican-controlled Congress. | ||
| How does that help or hit him? | ||
| Well, look, every new president since Bill Clinton, so for 30 years now, has come in with his party controlling both houses of Congress. | ||
| And that hasn't meant that they've just been able to do whatever they want. | ||
| It's a challenge. | ||
| The first week of a new administration, you know, this is one week. | ||
| There are, what, 208 weeks in a presidential term. | ||
| The first week is defined by the president because what's in the news is what he wants to do and what he's starting to say. | ||
| Very soon, the president has to confront the reality of the world and he doesn't simply control that reality. | ||
| And very often, our presidents are really assessed and tested by how they respond to events they don't control. | ||
| So what we learn in this first week is what he's trying to achieve. | ||
| And I think it does show us that President Trump has a distinctly assertive executive approach to this term. | ||
| There are things he wants to do and he's going to be very aggressive about doing them on his own. | ||
| But the system nonetheless constrains the president in trying to do those kinds of things. | ||
| The orders we've seen, a lot of them are about telling his executive officials to start a process, to begin to do something. | ||
| And the question of what really comes of it is very much an open question. | ||
| Every president seems like he's on top of the world and getting everything he wants in the first week, but it doesn't last. | ||
| He said in his inaugural address, and I'll quote, my proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier. | ||
| What does he face on that front? | ||
| Well, obviously, we're a divided nation. | ||
| And so I think a lot of our recent presidents have started out by saying they want unity. | ||
| I think if you look at his inaugural address, the way in which he describes unity is actually very similar to how a lot of our recent presidents have. | ||
| You look at former President Biden's inaugural or at Trump's previous one or at President Obama. | ||
| They talk about unity in terms of not disagreeing. | ||
| They say, if we all agree with each other, there's nothing we can't do. | ||
| But that's not actually what unity means in the life of a free society. | ||
| What unity means is not so much thinking alike as acting together. | ||
| The challenge for a president, the challenge for our national politics, is how do we act together on national problems when we don't think alike. | ||
| And the answer to that involves negotiation, involves bargaining, involves working through the system. | ||
| And the test of any president is what he can get accomplished in that way. | ||
| Not only how does he use his power himself to do what our system lets him do on his own, because ultimately that's actually much more constrained than we often imagine. | ||
| And what presidents learn is they need other people to agree with them in order to get anything accomplished. | ||
| The challenge of whether this president, as any president, can be a unifier is whether he can get other people to come along. | ||
| Do you think there's a better sense of him doing that this time around, say the first time around we was president? | ||
| I think President Trump seems to have a better sense of what the role of the president is than he did at the beginning of the last term. | ||
| That's natural for a president who's already served for four years. | ||
| I think he's much more inclined to be active in dealing with Congress than he was last time. | ||
| He said that he wants to meet every Republican member of the House in the first month. | ||
| I think he should meet every Democrat, too. | ||
| Our presidents too often assume they can only get support from their own party, but I actually think if the president reached out to some Democrats, you can easily imagine Democratic votes for certain versions of a tax bill or some of his immigration bills, as we've seen in this first week. | ||
| But he's intent on getting to know members more than he was last time. | ||
| He's much more involved in setting the strategy for Republicans in Congress, thinking about, you know, how many reconciliation bills, what do we do first, what do we do second. | ||
| He was much more passive about that last time than this time. | ||
| And I think that's in part because he thinks he sees how important it is for that to work out, for his agenda to get anywhere. | ||
| Whether it'll succeed is another question. | ||
| Presidents who involve themselves in how Congress does its work don't always end up getting what they want. | ||
| But I think he does have a different approach, a different strategy than at the beginning of this first time around. | ||
| Yuval Levin from American Enterprise Institute joins us for this discussion. | ||
| If you want to ask him questions, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you want to text us questions or comments, 202-748-8003, a recent piece that folks can find online, Trump Redux Begins. | ||
| You write in it that him coming back now is a refusal to pay attention to some things, not only from the former President Joe Biden, from former President Trump in his first term. | ||
| Yeah, look, there's a way that really you look at the politics of the 21st century in America, and in a sense, the public over and over has said no thank you to the person in power and has wanted change. | ||
| We've had very, very close, narrow elections now for a long time. | ||
| What really stands out about this moment in American politics is that we've had no majority party, no clear majority party for almost 30 years. | ||
| That is very unusual in the scope of American history. | ||
| All of our elections have been close. | ||
| Every newly elected president has started out thinking, oh, I won. | ||
| I get to do what I want now. | ||
| I'm going to push hard. | ||
| But in fact, every one of them has won very narrowly. | ||
| And that's true of Donald Trump in this second time, too. | ||
| He won less narrowly than the first time, but he got 49.8% of the vote. | ||
| That's a 50-50 election. | ||
| And each time when a new president has pushed hard at the outset, the public has reacted poorly because what they've said is, we don't like the last guy more than we love what you're offering. | ||
| That's what's happened here, too. | ||
| And I think the danger of overreading the mandate is a danger that every 21st century president has run and that Donald Trump is clearly running. | ||
| He's behaving as though he won a massive landslide election when he won a narrow election, a 21st century election. | ||
| And rather than start out by broadening his coalition, he seems to be starting out by spending political capital gained from the election. | ||
| And, you know, we'll see. | ||
| But that has not worked out for his predecessors. | ||
| It didn't work out for him in the first term. | ||
| What's the danger of a president spending that gain early on? | ||
| The danger is losing public support quickly and the public saying, no, no, no, we don't like this either. | ||
| This is not what we were saying. | ||
| The fact is, neither of our parties is quite connected with what voters are looking for. | ||
| They've faced this challenge for a generation now. | ||
| And each time they've been elected because the other party was unpopular. | ||
| And that's a hard mandate to read, to just say, well, I'm here because the other guy didn't meet the public's expectations. | ||
| You want to say, I'm here because I made promises. | ||
| The public wanted it. | ||
| And now we're going to do it. | ||
| It's very hard for presidents to get their heads around the fact that they won because the incumbent was unpopular. | ||
| They then take actions that make themselves unpopular. | ||
| And as we've seen with President Trump, the public is willing to turn against him and throw him out, even when they elect him. | ||
| I think he needs to be very cognizant of that and think about how to build broader support before he takes aggressive action. | ||
| But like our other 21st century presidents, it's going to be a challenge for him. | ||
| Could immigration or one of those other topics be because we see Democrats now, some Democrats expressing support for some of these immigration proposals, is that an avenue he can start building that support? | ||
| Or are there other avenues that he can take? | ||
| It's possible, but he has to think about where there is broad public support on immigration. | ||
| I think there is broad public support for controlling the inflow at the border. | ||
| I think there's much less public support for mass deportation of people who are here. | ||
| And that distinction is an important line to draw. | ||
| So there are ways, I think, that he could use immigration to broaden his support, but there are also ways in which it could become a huge political problem for him if he acts too aggressively. | ||
| Again, the lessons of the first term are there for him. | ||
| The way in which they moved early on with travel bans and other things soured the public pretty quickly on President Trump's immigration views. | ||
| He does run that risk, but he does have some opportunities here as well, of course. | ||
| Yuval Levin of American Enterprise Institute, the book is American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. | ||
| This is Dorothy in Baltimore, Democrats line. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I wanted to ask him, because he seemed to be very knowledgeable as far as what he's talking about, his Constitution and everything. | ||
| I want him to answer me this question. | ||
| Why does the press not talk more about the things that help or hurt us when presidents, Congress, or the Senate does what they do? | ||
| The thing I think we're missing is this. | ||
| We talk about, you say what the president wanted to do and what Congress and all that, and that's good. | ||
| But the things that people were talking about was hurting them wasn't just immigration. | ||
| Now, Trump has went against the Constitution. | ||
| He files the Inspector General. | ||
| Now, that is against it because it's a law. | ||
| He halted the DOJ's civil rights division, which people just keep saying that's a minorities. | ||
| That is not all minorities. | ||
| That's just people with disabilities. | ||
| It could be with lawsuits. | ||
| You know, they've been discriminated against. | ||
| could be for women white black or whatever it's not just for people of color let me put it like that and people keep saying it but that's a major place where you would go if if some even if the police department if they did something that wasn't right to a citizen that's where you would go you would contact your federal government if your police department wasn't handling it right he halted all of that people don't know that hurts citizens They're not thinking very well. | ||
| When the press keep talking about what the president wants, what the Congress want, what does you all should name each one of those things that he do that hurt us and be truthful about it? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Dorothy, thank you for the question. | ||
| We'll let our guests respond. | ||
| Yeah, you raise a number of important points. | ||
| I would say a few things. | ||
| First of all, one of the ways in which thinking about politics in this first week of a new administration is a challenge is that there hasn't yet been much of a response to the president's actions within the system, and especially from the courts. | ||
| The federal courts act in the past tense. | ||
| They review actions after they happen. | ||
| And the question of these early actions are going to pass muster in the courts and which are not. | ||
| I think there's some that are going to run into challenges very quickly. | ||
| The notion that the 14th Amendment doesn't require birthright citizenship, I think it's going to get tested all the way up to the Supreme Court, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| What you describe here also falls into some of these categories. | ||
| To fire the inspectors general, for example, is a violation of federal law. | ||
| A relatively recent federal law that was passed in 2022 after Trump's first term says that the president can fire them, but has to give Congress 30 days' notice. | ||
| He didn't do that here, and there's going to be a lawsuit almost inevitably, and we'll see what happens. | ||
| I think there will be some pushback from the courts. | ||
| There may ultimately be some pushback from Congress, maybe from the states, to various things that the president does. | ||
| And that is how our system works. | ||
| Our system exists in a kind of tension so that different interests, different pressures, different groups can exercise the power they have in the system. | ||
| And where we end up is where they land when all of those pressures are added together. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| This is not the last word. | ||
| It's the first word. | ||
| The other thing I'd say, though, is part of what you say is that politicians need to focus on what the public is asking for and not only what they want. | ||
| And one of the challenges of operating as a political official in a 50-50 era is that it is difficult to know what the public wants. | ||
| There's not a strong, broad majority behind any party's agenda or platform at this point. | ||
| Again and again, we've had 50-50 elections, and that genuinely does make it difficult for policymakers to know exactly where the public is pushing them. | ||
| I think gradually they're coming to some understandings about public concerns about disorder, public concerns about a lack of agency and control, whether that's at the border, whether that's in foreign policy, whether that's in criminal law in the United States. | ||
| Both parties are coming to recognize that that's a public priority, for example. | ||
| But when elections are so close, and when the other factor we've seen in this century is control goes back and forth. | ||
| We've had more swings back and forth of control of Congress in the last 25 years than in any quarter century period in our history. | ||
| We've just had the third presidential election in a row where the party in the White House has shifted. | ||
| That's only happened one other time in American history at the end of the 19th century. | ||
| So this is a time when politicians find it genuinely difficult to know what voters are asking for. | ||
| From Pensacola, Republican line, we'll hear from Pat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pat, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I want to respond to the previous caller from Maryland. | ||
| She was talking about the Constitution and Trump halting some civil rights issue cases or whatever. | ||
| But my question for her, and this is what people on the right see. | ||
| Where was the civil rights division of DOJ when these students at Columbia and Georgetown were blocking Jewish students from being able to go to their classes? | ||
| We heard nothing from the DOJ about that. | ||
| If that situation was reversed, if there were a bunch of white students keeping black students from getting to their classes, Biden would have had the National Guard on campus. | ||
| But this is another plain hypocrisy that we as the right see from the civil rights or the DOJ because they were left-leaning. | ||
| They didn't even touch that issue. | ||
| And they still haven't mentioned the issue. | ||
| And the civil rights division, I think it was Kristen Clark, she never uttered a word about it. | ||
| So this is the, you talk about the Constitution, it's all about people's perception. | ||
| People like us, on the right, Republicans, we expect to be treated fairly. | ||
| The J6 people were not treated fairly. | ||
| And it goes on and on, and that's why we voted for change. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Pat in Florida. | ||
| Well, I agree with a lot of what you said. | ||
| I don't agree about the January 6th folks who I think committed violent crimes and were treated accordingly. | ||
| But otherwise, I think you make a very important point. | ||
| The selective enforcement of civil rights laws under the Biden administration is a big part of why there's been this reaction against DEI and against the way in which the civil rights division of the Justice Department has been operating. | ||
| And some of the President's early administrative actions on that front are very much a response to that, including a response to campus anti-Semitism, which I think was not taken seriously enough by the Biden administration and needed to be responded to in the way in which we ought to respond to the violations of any American's rights. | ||
| My hope is that the direction we're headed in is that kind of direction, a colorblind enforcement of our laws that doesn't take account of someone's identity first, what religion are they, what color is their skin, but of the simple fact that they are Americans and their rights need to be protected regardless of anything else about them. | ||
| I think that's the way our laws need to be enforced. | ||
| We'll see if that's where we're headed in this administration. | ||
| But I do think that that is part of why there has been the kind of reaction that the caller describes, and I agree with him. | ||
| This is the recent headline about the DEI programs of the federal government, that the administration will lay off employees in those offices. | ||
| What do you think about specifically the action? | ||
| And what do you think about the existence of these programs overall within federal office? | ||
| Yeah, look, these programs are new. | ||
| They're not some kind of long-standing feature of American public policy or the federal government. | ||
| They're intended, frankly, to advance part of the progressive agenda of the Biden administration, which try to treat federal workers, among others, differently based on their race, based on their ethnicity, based on other factors that I do not think should factor into how our government treats its employees or its citizens. | ||
| And so I agree that these offices should go away. | ||
| I think the federal government has less power to do that over the private sector. | ||
| And the idea that the president is trying to compel private actors and private companies to change their procedures seems less right to me. | ||
| But the underlying principle does seem right to me. | ||
| I think we should treat one another as equals, regardless of any identifying feature about ourselves. | ||
| What matters is that we are all American citizens, and that means that we are all equally American citizens. | ||
| It was the former Democratic leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, Stacey Abrams, who ran for office, runs an organization known as American Pride Rises, said this about this action, saying, DEI works to ensure that all people, no matter their background or zip code, are treated fairly and able to participate fully in our nation. | ||
| The principles of DEI have undergirded important legislation advancing these goals, such as the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities Act. | ||
| Despite false arguments about DEI from cynical activists and politicians that pervert Dr. King's vision of a society of equals, the values of DEI are rooted in removing barriers to opportunity so that merits can speak for themselves. | ||
| I think those are good goals, but I don't think that's a good description of what DEI has been in practice. | ||
| It seems to me that it's actually stood in the way of the kinds of principles that underlie our civil rights laws and our commitment to civil rights in the Constitution. | ||
| And so I don't disagree with what she says there about what our goals and aims should be, but I do disagree about what DEI has been in practice. | ||
| Yuval Levin is with us for this conversation from American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| This is Susan in Massachusetts, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Well, hi. | ||
| Well, thank you for being on today, Mr. Levin. | ||
| Yeah, I, you know, I believe the Constitution is a great roadmap for running a democracy, but we have a failed one due to our two-party system, which isn't embedded in the Constitution as I understand it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really rooted in politics. | |
| I think it got solidified in the 1840s, maybe by Congress, and it protects two parties that don't represent the American electorate. | ||
| The American electorate, by and large, is center-left, center-right, center. | ||
| They're not fringe. | ||
| And yet, the way things are set up, their states end up being one-party states. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that sends technically safe people to Congress. | |
| They know they're safe because they come from one-party states, right? | ||
| And then they have no incentive to compromise with people of the opposite party. | ||
| So that's something I learned when Jeffrey Rosen is always on on Constitution Day, and I just love that man. | ||
| And, you know, and then, so I also think as a sidebar to that, because Congress has failed really since Roe v. Wade, even if you're pro-choice, which I am, with modification, you know, with limitations, severe ones actually, but, you know, the Supreme Court now has become a legislative wing of our federal government. | ||
| And I think they're overburdened, and they're picking up the slack from a failed Congress. | ||
| And lastly, I think we should start getting back to formally declaring wars overseas and not just do it. | ||
| And then one. | ||
| Okay, you got three points. | ||
| Thank you, Carler. | ||
| Appreciate the call and the points, but we'll let our guests respond to the point. | ||
| Well, great points. | ||
| There's a lot I agree with. | ||
| Let me start with where I don't quite agree. | ||
| It's true that the two-party system is not embedded formally in the Constitution, but the two-party system is a function of our constitutional structure in a very important way, and particularly of the way in which we choose the president. | ||
| So because in order to win the presidency, you have to win an absolute majority of electors in the Electoral College. | ||
| It's been the case since the beginning that if there are more than two serious candidates for president, there's a very real danger of the election going to the House of Representatives and the people not really getting to choose the president. | ||
| That happened twice in the 19th century. | ||
| And then you had the doubling down on the two-party system, which you described, which happened for that reason. | ||
| And we haven't had an election go to the House since then, since 1824, when we began to see the real entrenchment of a two-party system. | ||
| I think our two-party system actually is a pretty good fit for the American Constitution. | ||
| What it means is that each of the two parties is a broad coalition, and that a lot of the kind of coalition building that happens between parties in the European parliamentary systems happens within parties in the American system. | ||
| And the parties themselves are broad tense where a lot of negotiating has to happen, where a lot of coalition building has to happen. | ||
| I think generally that's been good for us. | ||
| But in recent decades, we've seen the party system become deformed somewhat, especially by primaries, somewhat also by changes in the media environment, so that we are left in a place where, as you say, the fringes of the two parties make the most important decisions at the beginning of each election cycle, which is who gets to run, who's the nominee of the party. | ||
| Doing that in the way we do through primaries means that a very, very small fringe of each party You have about 8% of the public showing up to vote on primary day. | ||
| Those people are very intensely engaged. | ||
| They're ideological. | ||
| They don't want to see a lot of bargaining and accommodation in our politics. | ||
| They want to see people who are more hardline along their views. | ||
| And those are the kind of people we now get in our system. | ||
| I think there is room for reform of how the parties choose their candidates. | ||
| But I do think that broadly speaking, the two-party system works well for us. | ||
| But I very much agree with what you say about the way in which the weakness of Congress has come to misshape and deform the American constitutional system. | ||
| A lot of the overreaching of the courts, even a lot of the overreaching of presidents, which we see now, is a result of underreaching by Congress, underreaching that's intentional, where members don't want the responsibility of making the big decisions in our system, and they leave it to other people. | ||
| The system's not meant to work that way, and we do see a lot of problems as a result of that. | ||
| I think it's necessary for Congress to reassert itself in the system, to put itself at the center again. | ||
| You're writing your piece about disgrace. | ||
| And I think you said of President Biden, he leaves disgrace, not because he was re-elected, because he has acted disgracefully. | ||
| But at the same time, there's no getting around the disgrace involved in bringing Donald Trump back to the White House after his own post-election betrayals of his constitutional oath in 2021. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| Well, look, what happened in 2020 and 2021, Donald Trump lost re-election. | ||
| That happens. | ||
| And instead of accepting that as every past president has, he decided that it didn't really happen. | ||
| And he decided to try to persuade his voters that it didn't really happen. | ||
| He persuaded a large chunk of the public that the result of that election was not real, was not legitimate, and created a real constitutional crisis, part of which was an assault on the Capitol, which was done by people who thought they were acting at his behest, whether they were or not. | ||
| I think there's no getting around the fact that that is a failure of a failure to uphold the president's responsibility under our Constitution. | ||
| Whatever you think of Donald Trump and of what he did before that moment and of what he's done since, that was a failure to uphold the responsibility of the president that I think can only be seen as a disgrace in our constitutional system. | ||
| To bring him back after that, I do think is a kind of civic failure, that the Republican Party went back to the same candidate it had given what he did, I think was a failure of responsibility on their part. | ||
| Now look, President Biden ended his term by taking all kinds of actions that I think are well beyond the scope of appropriate uses of presidential power. | ||
| His use of the pardon power at the end, the notion that he could declare a new constitutional amendment to be valid. | ||
| That is not how our system works. | ||
| That is not what our presidents do. | ||
| And I think in both of these cases, the public was faced with a very unfortunate choice in this election. | ||
| And, you know, you could see it in the way people voted. | ||
| They were not happy with either choice here. | ||
| That's what a 50-50 election looks like. | ||
| They had to make a choice between, in a sense, two evils. | ||
| And they made one. | ||
| They decided that the incumbent needed to be out. | ||
| But I don't think we should forget what happened after the 2020 election. | ||
| And I think it's very important to hold our presidents to account when they fail to uphold their oath of office. | ||
| And that has happened here. | ||
| There's just no way around it. | ||
| This is Liz from New Jersey, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am an American on one side of my family, three. | ||
| We've been here since the 1600s. | ||
| We fought in the Revolution and we also had a part to play in forming the Constitution that everybody's talking about today. | ||
| But right now we have a president who does not really wish to follow the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| He sees himself as above the law and he has reason to, thanks to the poor actions of our Supreme Court, giving him what he sees as unlimited powers. | ||
| It's going to be a rocky four years. | ||
| I pray that we don't have anything serious happen to this nation as a result of his total incompetence and criminal activity. | ||
| But I can't be guaranteed it. | ||
| Nobody can be guaranteed it. | ||
| And I would not blame President Biden. | ||
| His four years was a relief from the rule of Donald Trump. | ||
| And what it also tells me is that America has changed, and not demographically or racially or ethnically, but we have people who applaud criminality. | ||
| They applauded what he did. | ||
| They applauded what the oath keepers and the proud boys did on January 6th because they are criminals to the core. | ||
| And we have to call it out as it's not who we are. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Liz, thank you. | ||
| Thank you for the call. | ||
| Well, look, I agree with what she says at the end there. | ||
| I do think that there was dangerous criminality in the January 6th assault on the Capitol. | ||
| I don't think they should have been pardoned. | ||
| At least the people who committed violent crimes certainly should not have been. | ||
| And I also think we're in for a rocky ride. | ||
| There's no way around that. | ||
| You know, at the end of the day, every administration has something like the personality of the president, for good and bad. | ||
| We saw that the first time around with Donald Trump, but we've seen it with every president. | ||
| And the strengths and weaknesses of the individual are reflected in the work of the administration. | ||
| There's a way in which character is destiny. | ||
| And if character is destiny, that's not great news for Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, what can you say? | ||
| She talked about the Supreme Court and the immunity decision, how it could affect the next four years. | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| What is it and what is it not? | ||
| I don't agree that that immunity decision broke new ground in a way that changes the place of the president in our system. | ||
| The idea that there is some immunity for presidential actions and for especially the processes by which presidents make decisions is a very long-standing principle in our law. | ||
| The court had never before really been asked to codify or expound on the meaning or extent of that principle. | ||
| What they did was fairly generic, and it's going to have to be tested as a practical matter. | ||
| I think the question of exactly what it means is going to have to be decided over the next few years because Donald Trump does intend, I think, to test the bounds of his constitutional power. | ||
| My hope is that the courts are strong enough to stand up for those bounds. | ||
| Our system only works if our constitutional officers are assertive and aggressive, but also restrict and restrain one another. | ||
| And it is incumbent on the courts to make sure that presidential actions happen within the framework of our laws and of the Constitution itself. | ||
| I think the Supreme Court does mean to do that. | ||
| That's my sense of this Supreme Court, is that it does want to restrain both of the other branches from reaching beyond their appropriate powers. | ||
| They've done that a fair amount. | ||
| They've restricted the power of the president of the administrative state. | ||
| And I certainly hope that they have the backbone to continue to do that. | ||
| I think they will, but we'll see. | ||
| On our Republican line from Florida, this is Nelson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Mr. Levine, I tend to disagree with a number of your statements. | ||
| So before I ask my question, I would like to point out that in the 2020 election, there were several states that violated their own election laws and their own constitutions, which puts a question mark as to what the real results were for that particular election. | ||
| I would also like to point out that Donald Trump, since he's taken over in one week, has been making the United States a safer place to be by his getting rid of the numerous criminals that were allowed to come in by the last administration. | ||
| Now, having said that, I am a Trump supporter. | ||
| I think he's a good president, and I did vote for him. | ||
| Having said that, I do have a concern where you and I may agree, and that is the proliferation of executive orders that has been used by the last several presidents because Congress can't seem to even agree as to what a man and a woman are. | ||
| And I think that that is a danger in regards to the possibility of slowly losing our freedoms and our rights. | ||
| I hear a lot of things about dictators and things of that nature, oligarchs, but I think that this trend of a continuation of executive orders in order to get anything done leads to the possibility of those potential results. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Nelson and Florida. | ||
| Yeah, a number of points there. | ||
| First of all, I would say the 2020 election was litigated and adjudicated, and the outcome of it was decided in the ways in which are available to us in our system to decide things like that. | ||
| In a close election, what's really being tested is our commitment to the law. | ||
| And I do think that it's important to recognize that what happened after that election was the loser of the election just simply being unwilling to accept the result, and that should not happen in our system. | ||
| I very much agree with the latter point. | ||
| A big part of the problem we face is that Congress is not willing to step up and do its job. | ||
| And so on whatever issue may be important to you, where you see presidential action in an aggressive, assertive way that tries to make policy through executive orders and administrative actions, very often what's happening there is a vacuum has been created by Congress, and the president is rushing in to fill it. | ||
| It is a problem. | ||
| The presidents are doing this. | ||
| They exceed their authority. | ||
| But the underlying problem is the vacuum created by Congress, is the unwillingness of our national legislature to step up and do its job. | ||
| That job is hard. | ||
| It means taking responsibility for decisions that may not always be popular. | ||
| And it does require a willingness to do it. | ||
| But no one's forcing these people to run for Congress. | ||
| If that's the job they want, they have to recognize that that's the responsibility they've taken on. | ||
| And Congress has to reassert itself. | ||
| I think we've seen under both parties in the 21st century Congress stepping back, turning power over to the president, and treating itself as a kind of observer, or at best as just doing oversight over presidential action. | ||
| That's not Congress's fundamental role. | ||
| Legislation is, and I think we need to see much more legislative action in our system. | ||
| To that end, to what degree do you see Congress as it currently stands as a rubber stamp to the president? | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, there are narrow Republican majorities, and they try to support the President's agenda in whatever way they can. | ||
| The challenge is they make themselves secondary to the president. | ||
| They treat themselves as existing to advance his agenda, and that's just not quite right, even when the president is of your own party. | ||
| I think we're reasonably likely to see a divided Congress after the midterm election, and at that point, obviously, oversight changes a lot. | ||
| But that just shouldn't be the case. | ||
| There should be a commitment both to oversight and to legislation at any point under any kind of party leadership in Congress. | ||
| Congress has to see itself as the prime mover in our system. | ||
| And we've gotten to a place where Congress sees itself as secondary. | ||
| A conversation with Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He's also the author of the book, American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. | ||
| Jack is up next. | ||
| He's in Pennsylvania, Republican line. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thanks for taking the call. | ||
| And hello, Mr. Levin. | ||
| You seem to have taken a stance that the 2020 election was a free and fair election to the American people. | ||
| And I don't believe that for a minute. | ||
| I believe that in every form and fashion, the 2020 election was corrupted. | ||
| I believe it was corrupted and targeted in one direction. | ||
| From summertime on, I believe people like Mark Elias, people like the 51 intelligence officers, and our mainstream media were in full cahoots to create an election that was neither free nor fair. | ||
| Something we're guaranteed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, we do disagree on that front. | ||
| I mean, look, I think that there certainly were all kinds of actions at the margin on both sides that were attempts to distort the election result, but that ultimately the election was a free and fair election, that where there were questions, they were litigated, they were adjudicated. | ||
| But it's worth seeing that the reason that we can even have this kind of argument about an election at the national level is that our elections have been very close in the 21st century. | ||
| And whatever you think of how it was run, you would certainly say the 2020 election was extremely close. | ||
| And what happens in a close election is that it becomes a test of our commitment to the law, to the rule of law. | ||
| Ultimately, these questions are decided in court. | ||
| The outcomes are determined both by judges and by Congress through its certification. | ||
| That was done in 2020. | ||
| I think we have to accept the results of elections. | ||
| The prior two elections before 2024, both 2016 and 2020, were treated as illegitimate by the party that lost them in somewhat different ways, but nonetheless, the result and the resulting president were treated as illegitimate. | ||
| I think we have to move away from that way of treating our national politics. | ||
| And one thing I do feel good about about the 2024 election is that even though it was still quite close, it was at least decisive enough that the losing party did not treat it as an illegitimate election and instead is trying to think about how to deal with the fact that it went the way it did. | ||
| What are voters teaching us? | ||
| What are they showing us about what they believe and about what we should be arguing for? | ||
| I think a party that loses an election should always try to learn from its loss in that way. | ||
| To pretend that it did not happen is not a serious way to respond to the outcome of an election. | ||
| The 2020 election did happen. | ||
| It was four years ago. | ||
| Any of us who are adults saw it happen. | ||
| And I think the notion that it was fundamentally distorted by some conspiracy is not right. | ||
| It's worth looking at the results. | ||
| It's worth looking at the work that's been done since then to assess the outcomes, to assess the way it was administered. | ||
| It was certainly not without problems, but I do think we have to take the outcome of it as legitimate and serious. | ||
| Let's hear from Jill. | ||
| Jill's in Ohio, Democrats line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, you know, when I look back at the past election, I look at it as an election of hate. | ||
| And on the Republican side, I never would have guessed 10 years ago that they would be against the Constitution, against law and order. | ||
| They are pro-Russian, and they're pro-corruption. | ||
| I just, you know, all because the fact is that they are freaking out over the fact that the white population is decreasing in the United States. | ||
| And then on the Democratic side, you know, a lot of people didn't because of their anti-Semitism. | ||
| I mean, I never would have guessed. that the progressive wing of the party would be for the death of Israel and the extermination of Jews, either wittingly or unwittingly. | ||
| And so as a result, a lot of these people sat home, and that's why Trump won. | ||
| And I guess I'm very upset over the fact that when everybody, you know, votes on hate, it makes everybody poor, especially with the corruption. | ||
| We should have been concentrating on trying to increase the middle class. | ||
| Look at the housing. | ||
| Why do we have a shortage of housing? | ||
| You know, look at economic issues. | ||
| But no, people are driven by hate. | ||
| And now, look what we got. | ||
| We've got Trump and we've got corruption. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Jill and Ohio. | ||
| Yeah, I think one way to think about the point that this caller is making is that a lot of our elections lately have been fundamentally negative elections. | ||
| Voters have been voting on the basis of what they're against and have not been offered enough by way of a positive agenda to vote for what they're for. | ||
| It's actually connected to the fact that we've had 50-50 elections over and over. | ||
| What happens when you have two minority parties, rather than a majority that's holding a coalition together and a minority that's trying to broaden its own coalition, both of those are engaged in coalition building and trying to reach out to more voters and build support. | ||
| In a 50-50 moment, when you have essentially two minority parties, they're each most invested in getting their most devoted voters out, which means that their core message to the country is that the other party must not be allowed to win. | ||
| And if you step back from American elections in the last 20 years, the essential message that both parties have offered is if the other party wins, the country's over. | ||
| That's an argument that might get 50% plus one out there for you, but it's not an argument that builds the future of the country. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| And it's not an argument that helps us think about what we're going to need in 20 years that we don't have now, what our politics is going to be doing for us to help this country be more prosperous, more peaceful a generation from now. | ||
| The next durable majority coalition, the next real winner of an American national election, is going to have to offer the country a positive vision to vote for, to think about not just 50%, but 60% voting for you. | ||
| You have to think about how to appeal to that broad segment, middle of the country that is underrepresented in our elections over and over. | ||
| And you have to offer more than the argument that if the other guys win, it's the end of everything. | ||
| You have to offer up yourself as more than just not the other party. | ||
| And I think both of our parties have done a terrible job on this front for most of the 21st century. | ||
| We have confirmations hearings this week for RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence. | ||
| Kash Patella's FBI. | ||
| You can comment specifically on those, but what message do you think these and other nominations is the president trying to send? | ||
| Well, look, I think these are very controversial nominations. | ||
| Not all of President Trump's appointments have been that way. | ||
| Marco Rubio got confirmed 99-0. | ||
| We've seen a number of other of his cabinet-level appointments get confirmed with very broad bipartisan support. | ||
| I think we're going to see that at the sub-cabinet level, too. | ||
| But there are a number of individuals he's chosen who absolutely pick at the divisions of our society and who, frankly, in some respects, are just not the right choices for the jobs they've been appointed to, are not appropriate, are not experienced, are not right for it. | ||
| I think that way, especially about RFK Jr., who strikes me as a very poor choice for running the Department of Health and Human Services. | ||
| But I think in all these cases, they're going to be marginal. | ||
| They're going to be very hard to get through. | ||
| And the fact that even in this moment, when Republicans are very intent on helping Trump succeed and on advancing his agenda, a number of them are willing to say no to these particular nominees, should raise red flags. | ||
| That's the Senate's job. | ||
| The Senate's job is to raise red flags when those are necessary when it comes to nominees who are not appropriate for the jobs they've been appointed to. | ||
| It happens to every president. | ||
| Every modern president has lost a couple. | ||
| This president already has his first choice for Attorney General, dropped out before there was even a confirmation hearing. | ||
| I think he'll have some more choppy waters in the coming weeks. | ||
| The website for our guest organization, AEI.org. | ||
| You all live in the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| Thanks for the conversation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, a live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. and across the country. | |
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