| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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How does your tour make you feel about the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza? | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Thoughts on the wind in Munich this morning? | ||
| Okay, guys, let's go. | ||
| Thank you all. | ||
| Thanks, guys. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Press, let's go. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Move. | ||
| Load up the motor pay or display in the middle. | ||
| Today, President Trump welcomes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the White House for bilateral talks. | ||
| And the two leaders will hold a joint press conference. | ||
| We'll bring that to you live on C-SPAN when it happens. | ||
| You can also watch on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send Cash Batel's nomination for FBI director to the full Senate for consideration. | ||
| You can watch the committee meeting tonight at 9 o'clock Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are joined now by Representative Glenn Ivey. | ||
| He's a Democrat of Maryland and on the Appropriations Committee. | ||
| Congressman, welcome to the program. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Your district borders Washington, D.C., home to 50,000 federal employees, another 20 to 30,000 federal contractors. | ||
| So I want to start there. | ||
| You recently held a teletown hall meeting with federal workers. | ||
| Can you tell us about how many people attended and what you all talked about? | ||
| Well, it's about 20,000. | ||
| We capped it at 20 and bumped right up against it. | ||
| Mainly people who are interested in the government employment issue, because that was the focus of that town hall. | ||
| There's a lot of concern and confusion about what's going on, what the Trump administration is doing with these flurry of executive orders. | ||
| There have also been a number of court rulings that have put in injunctions in place that have delayed some of what's going on with what the Trump administration is trying to do. | ||
| They're just trying to figure out what their rights are and how things might play out for them personally. | ||
| And then the larger issue on that front is the impact of, you know, if you scale down the government this quickly and fire, you know, a lot of government employees, what services won't be delivered to the American people and how that's going to have an impact on them across the country. | ||
| And what are you telling your constituents, Congressman, the ones that are either afraid of losing their job or have already lost their jobs? | ||
| Well, the ones that are afraid of losing their jobs, you know, there's some that are in different places. | ||
| If you're on the probationary period, they're very limited rights that you have. | ||
| But if you're not on probation anymore, you know, government employees have a series of rights that are in place to protect them from unfair termination. | ||
| And rightly so. | ||
| They got these jobs based on merit and competition. | ||
| And so we want to make sure that they have protections in their jobs so they're not forced out for political reasons. | ||
| There are also collective bargaining agreements that unions have reached with the federal government that provide an extra set of rights as well. | ||
| So we talk through those issues with them and how we think things might play out. | ||
| We offer up information to them as things become available. | ||
| This is rapidly evolving, as you know. | ||
| And so a lot of them have questions about how things might be changing. | ||
| Another issue that popped up was whether they should take the quote-unquote buyout, the opt-out that was proposed by the Trump administration. | ||
| Our recommendation was no for a couple of reasons. | ||
| One was we didn't think the money had been appropriated to do what was proposed. | ||
| Basically, the offer was if you resign today, we'll pay you for the next six months or so, even though you're not working. | ||
| There's no money appropriated for that as far as we know. | ||
| Also, we were concerned about enforceability. | ||
| If you accept the agreement, the terms that were floated in the essentially contract that the Trump administration sent didn't have any kind of enforcement clause. | ||
| So, if you accept it, but they reneg on the deal, what can you do? | ||
| It's not clear based on what was sent. | ||
| But lastly, you know, the government is supposed to be providing services to the American people, not paying people to not show up for jobs. | ||
| So, as I've been telling people, the Sopranos have no show jobs. | ||
| The federal government doesn't and shouldn't. | ||
| I just want to go back to something you said about probation. | ||
| Are all federal employees when they're initially hired in a probationary period, and how long is that period? | ||
| It's one year, and not all federal employees, but most. | ||
| There are many that are hired. | ||
| Like, for example, when I was a federal prosecutor and I was hired by the U.S. Attorney's Office, I didn't get civil service protections for that position. | ||
| So I was essentially an at-will employee for my entire term there. | ||
| But most people have probationary periods, and then if they get into the civil service structure after a year, they do have a degree of protections. | ||
| And those that are in favor of what Doge is doing are saying, what's wrong with going through the federal government and seeing where the places are that we can save money if there's fraud going on, if there's waste going on? | ||
| That should be a good thing. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
| Well, I agree that going after waste, fraud, and abuse is a good thing and should be done, but they're not going about doing it the right way. | ||
| So just a couple of points to make on that front. | ||
| Every major department in the federal government has an office of Inspector General. | ||
| The first thing the Trump administration did when they came in was fire all of the IGs across the board. | ||
| I think they fired 19 at this point. | ||
| And when Doge came in, the IGs were already gone. | ||
| So instead of consulting with the people who were doing these investigations, and some of these investigations might have been, you know, midway done, maybe not even completed, they didn't consult with them. | ||
| They fired them and moved him out and decided to start from scratch. | ||
| Secondly, they brought in a group of people who apparently don't have any kind of investigation experience. | ||
| And the other part of it, too, is none of them seem to have had gone through any kind of vetting process. | ||
| They don't seem to have security clearances and they're being given access to highly personal information, Social Security number, financial information, and health medical data that we don't want to necessarily have made available for any circumstances whatsoever. | ||
| You want to make sure the people that see it actually have the clearances and protections to handle it in the right way. | ||
| But the biggest issue, I think, with the Musk effort here is that he's got obvious conflicts of interest. | ||
| He owns businesses that are doing a lot of work with the government and have major contracts. | ||
| And there are open investigations with respect to at least two of his companies I'm aware of. | ||
| And he had access to some of that information, which he should not. | ||
| So there's a lot of concerns about what Musk is doing, but there's a right way to do it. | ||
| I think a lot of this would have been done instead of just firing employees before you even got there or trying to force them out. | ||
| Do the investigation first. | ||
| If you identify waste, fraud, and abuse, deal with that. | ||
| Fire people or send them to be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. | ||
| But they did it. | ||
| They put the cart before the horse. | ||
| They started firing people right away and not doing investigations. | ||
| And Congressman Ivey, how are Congressional Democrats responding to this? | ||
| Well, certainly we're opposing what Musk is doing from that standpoint. | ||
| And you've seen, you know, we've done protests and demonstrations at some of the departments. | ||
| Department of Labor was one that I was at maybe a week and a half ago. | ||
| In some instances, we've had members of Congress go to these buildings like USAID, but they were denied access to even getting into the building, which is astonishing to me. | ||
| You know, even the public, everybody should be able to at least get into the building. | ||
| Senators and congressmen should certainly be able to get in and make legitimate inquiries as to what are you all doing and what are you looking at. | ||
| And who stopped them from going into the building? | ||
| Security that was at the building that was, I think, told to do that by the Trump administration, because we've never had that happen before. | ||
| And we have Congressman Glenn Ivey with us, a Democrat of Maryland, until the House gavels in in about 20 minutes. | ||
| If you'd like to call in, you can do so now. | ||
| Republicans 202748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| The White House Press Secretary, Caroline Levitt, addressed charges that Trump's actions were causing a constitutional crisis. | ||
| I want to play a bit of that and then have you respond to it. | ||
| Now, before I take questions, I would like to address an extremely dishonest narrative that we've seen emerging over the past few days. | ||
| Many outlets in this room have been fear-mongering the American people into believing there is a constitutional crisis taking place here at the White House. | ||
| I've been hearing those words a lot lately. | ||
| But in fact, the real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump's basic executive authority. | ||
| We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law. | ||
| And they have issued at least 12 injunctions against this administration in the past 14 days, often without citing any evidence or grounds for their lawsuits. | ||
| This is part of a larger concerted effort by Democrat activists and nothing more than the continuation of the weaponization of justice against President Trump. | ||
| Quick news flash to these liberal judges who are supporting their obstructionist efforts. | ||
| 77 million Americans voted to elect this president. | ||
| And each injunction is an abuse of the rule of law and an attempt to thwart the will of the people. | ||
| As the president clearly stated in the Oval Office yesterday, we will comply with the law in the courts, but we will also continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure President Trump's policies can be enacted. | ||
| Congressman Ivey, your reaction to that well, it's a little interesting. | ||
| I mean, the first injunction that was put in place, which is on birthright citizenship, was put in place by a Ronald Reagan appointee. | ||
| So her, you know, suggestion that these are all quote-unquote liberal judges, I think, is just factually incorrect. | ||
| But beyond that, I think if the Trump administration wants to criticize judicial decisions, that's one thing. | ||
| I think where we get more concern is when you have people like Vice President JD Vance say things like, we might have to remove some of these federal judges. | ||
| And I think Elon Musk actually went even further yesterday and talked about impeaching these judges. | ||
| That's problematic because that's an intimidation effort at judges who are not doing anything wrong from my perspective. | ||
| Even the one that was reversed yesterday with respect to an injunction. | ||
| I'm not saying because he reversed his position, he should be impeached. | ||
| And remember, impeachment is for high crimes and misdemeanors. | ||
| It's not like just because I disagree with him on policy issues. | ||
| So when they start talking about impeachment, that's another level because it really goes to the heart of judicial independence and undermining that in a way that I think is not based on preserving separation of powers and checks and balances that the framers put in place. | ||
| And she mentioned that the media were fear-mongering that there's a constitutional crisis. | ||
| Do you believe that there's a constitutional crisis right now in this country? | ||
| I can't say that we're there yet, but it feels like, based on some of the things that the Trump administration is saying, certainly about judges, is heading it in that direction, laying the found work, the foundation for it. | ||
| But I don't know that we're there yet. | ||
| And the other piece of it, too, is Congress. | ||
| The Republicans control the Senate and the House. | ||
| House and Senate Republicans aren't doing anything to impose any kind of checks and balances on the White House. | ||
| That's their call. | ||
| But the bigger concern is the impoundment conversation that's coming out of the Trump administration. | ||
| And impoundment means we're going to ignore the constitutional power of the purse that was given to Congress and say, look, we don't care if you appropriated money for a particular purpose. | ||
| The president's going to decide to hold the money and use it for what he wants to use it for. | ||
| If you do both of those, and you've totally undermined the separation of powers in the three branches of government, if you get to that point, that could be a constitutional crisis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, Congressman, we've got callers waiting to talk to you. | ||
| First is Perry in Montgomery, Alabama, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Perry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Representative Ivan. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Democrats come on these shows and then they don't understand about the talking points that the Republican have to give to these people while these people vote for them. | |
| And so it is going to take something to hurt them to realize that you voting the wrong way. | ||
| But when it comes to the Democrats, you've got to understand also that the Republican got their media that are going to push everything they say and they're not going to mention anything else. | ||
| But Democrats do not. | ||
| So C-SPAN, MSNBC, and all those other places are not going to push your points for you if you don't come up with some kind of Bible means that you're going to let these people know about these policies that are going to hurt them. | ||
| And so these policies that are going to hurt them is going to hit them hard and then they're going to turn back around and say they think it should be the Democrats that rescued them. | ||
| It's going to be too late then by the time you get through four and five and ten years. | ||
| And some of these things are going to hurt people for years. | ||
| All right, Perry. | ||
| Go ahead, Congressman. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's good points there. | ||
| You know, the communications issue for Democrats, I think, is very significant. | ||
| I think it's one of the main reasons we lost the White House in 2024. | ||
| We didn't do a good job of explaining to the public the positive things that the Biden administration had done for them, certainly from an economic standpoint. | ||
| And, you know, Trump was very effective in communicating his positions. | ||
| And he did it through not just the legacy media, but also a whole network of, you know, whether they're podcasts or other means where he was reaching Republicans and persuadables that the Democrats weren't speaking to. | ||
| So I think that's a fair point. | ||
| As far as the other aspect of that, depending on how this plays out, yeah, a lot of people could really be hurt by some of the policies he's putting in place, especially from an economic standpoint. | ||
| If he moves forward with these tariffs, that's just basically a tax increase and increased costs for Americans across the country. | ||
| And I'm not sure why he would want to do that. | ||
| The economy he got from Biden is in pretty good shape. | ||
| In fact, we're doing better than most of the Western world on that front. | ||
| But, you know, he's not doing the things he said he would do. | ||
| He's done a lot of big flurry of activity when he got in, but very little to address the economy in ways that he talked about doing. | ||
| And I hope he'll get focused on that in the very, very near future. | ||
| Here's John, a Republican in Shiner, Texas. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks, C-SPAN, Mr. Harvey. | ||
| I have a couple of concerns. | ||
| First, you just mentioned that your concern about the independence of the judiciary. | ||
| We all know the Democrats attacked the Supreme Court. | ||
| Chuck Schuman stood on the Senate capital steps and threatened the Supreme Court. | ||
| You threatened to pack the Supreme Court. | ||
| So your hypocrisy is unbelievable. | ||
| But what really concerns American people is that the Democrats just don't seem to care. | ||
| Listen, this is not your money. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The fact that you're going to sit there nonchalant and go, well, the processes and lie about Medicare, Medicare, we're not going to take it away. | ||
| The government is corrupt to the bone, okay? | ||
| We need to fix it. | ||
| And if you don't want to do it, then quit. | ||
| But it's not your money. | ||
| It's ours. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Which part of that don't you understand? | ||
| All right, John, we'll get a response. | ||
| Well, you know, I got voters that sent me here to Congress, and they feel a little bit differently about it than you do, at least as far as how the money should be spent. | ||
| For example, Title I dollars for education. | ||
| I think we should be sending money around the country to help low-income districts in red and blue states hire more teachers. | ||
| I think that's a good thing. | ||
| Meals on Wheels, I think, is a good thing. | ||
| Cancer research, I think, is a good thing. | ||
| And I think most Americans support those things. | ||
| You might not, but I think most Americans do. | ||
| But the Democratic process is aimed at making a decision about where the money should go based on what the elected leaders determine. | ||
| I'm on the appropriations committee. | ||
| That should be the function of what we do. | ||
| And the president obviously has a say in that, but I think that's the way it should work. | ||
| On the judiciary piece, you know, I never took a position about impeaching Supreme Court justices or federal judges. | ||
| I've just never said that. | ||
| I think it's okay to disagree with judges for the rulings that they make and the decisions they reach, but to start talking about impeaching them just because you don't agree in this instance with the injunctions they put in place, that's not the right way to go. | ||
| And that certainly isn't the structure that the framers put in place. | ||
| This worked pretty well for us for the past two and a half centuries. | ||
| Here's Harry, an independent in Inverness, Florida. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Inverness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| Congressman Ivey, I wanted to talk about the Elon and Doge. | ||
| I think the bigger concern is not so much that they're not qualified or they don't have the background checks. | ||
| The problem is that they're basically hackers. | ||
| And this is a data heist. | ||
| Elon owns a data center in Texas and a Starlink network. | ||
| And if you were able to suck all this proprietary data into the data center and train the data center, train the AI, you would have kind of like ChatGTP meets J. Edgar Hoover, if you will. | ||
| So like type in the congressman's name and up comes everything, basically, all your bank information, medical information, everything you've ever watched on Netflix, every webpage you've ever been to, on and on. | ||
| And that information could be weaponized and used for doxing purposes on X to oppress and manipulate the United States. | ||
| And unfortunately, I think that's what's already, that's what's happening, and there's nothing so far has been stopping it. | ||
| So that is my concern. | ||
| I think that's a fair concern. | ||
| And, you know, there are other aspects of that, too, that go to the conflicts of interest issue. | ||
| You know, taking all this information and using it, for example, to benefit some of his companies. | ||
| The issue potentially that was raised with respect to the Consumer Protection Board that was just shuttered or they're trying to shut down was that he's got an interest in moving forward with a business interest that could be regulated or limited by what the CFPB does, and they wanted to get it out of the way. | ||
| I don't know if that's true or not, but you know, back to my original point of vetting these people, we need to make sure that we know what interests he's got, what conflicts there might be, so we can separate that out. | ||
| And if there are too many conflicts and you can't wall him off from those, and frankly, that's what it feels like. | ||
| He's multi-billionaire with interests, just a web of interest across the board. | ||
| Maybe he shouldn't be in that position to do that. | ||
| I think that it might be too much power and too much access to information for him to have under these circumstances. | ||
| You're Steve in Mentor, Ohio, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Congressman, what do you think about the separation between the Democrats and the Republicans and just move to states where the Democrats want to live and then let the Republicans, you know, do whatever they want to do? | ||
| There's an old saying: you can lead a horse to the water, but you can't make him drink. | ||
| So if they want to go down that road, I think that there's a peaceful separation. | ||
| People that are Democratic leaning, let them move to the states. | ||
| People that want to, you know, not drink the water or drink the Kool-Aid, let them do whatever they want to do. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I mean, I appreciate the comment. | ||
| There are a lot of people already voting with their feet. |