| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Security Conference. | |
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| Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| Then, Professor David Super at Georgetown Law School discusses the legality of the efforts by President Trump and Elon Musk through the Department of Government Efficiency. | ||
| And longtime economic advisor to President Trump and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Moore talks about the president's economic agenda. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Washington Journal on this Friday, February 14th. | ||
| We'll begin this morning with the debate over education policy in this country. | ||
| Yesterday on Capitol Hill, President Trump's pick for education secretary, Linda McMahon, sat before senators for her confirmation hearing. | ||
| Senate Democrats peppered Ms. McMahon with questions about the future of our education department. | ||
| This morning, we want all of you to join the debate. | ||
| What changes should be made to education in the United States? | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, your line, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Also, parents and educators, your line this morning is 202-748-8003. | ||
| Everybody can text at that same line at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just include your first name, city, and state. | ||
| And also, you can join us on Facebook.com/slash C-SPAN with a post or on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Before we get to our topic this morning and our conversation with all of you, I want to give you an update on President Trump's cabinet and momentum on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Yesterday, RFK Jr. was approved by the Senate 52 to 48, largely along party lines, with Senator Mitch McConnell joining Democrats in opposition to Mr. Kennedy. | ||
| He was then sworn in at the White House later by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, with President Trump overlooking. | ||
| Also in the Senate, Brooke Collins confirmed on Thursday to lead the Agriculture Department by a vote of 72 to 28, including 19 Democrats in support. | ||
| Kash Patel, President Trump's pick to be the director of the FBI. | ||
| The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12 to 10, excuse me, along party lines to proceed with the confirmation for Kash Patel, President Donald Trump's nominee for the FBI director. | ||
| Linda McMahon, as we said, up on Capitol Hill yesterday for her confirmation hearing. | ||
| Before we get to what she told senators, though, listen to President Trump just one day before she was in the hot seat testifying before senators when he was asked about the Department of Education. | ||
| Oh, I'd like it to be closed immediately. | ||
| Look, the Department of Education is a big conjob. | ||
| We're ranked, so they rank the top 40 countries in the world. | ||
| We're ranked number 40th, but we're ranked number one in one department, cost per pupil. | ||
| So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked number 40. | ||
| President Trump on Wednesday. | ||
| Now yesterday, on Thursday, here's what the Education Secretary nominee Lyndon McMahon had to say when asked about President Trump's plans to dismantle the agency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order requiring the Secretary of Education to develop a plan for downsizing the Department of Education and working with Congress to eliminate entirely. | |
| Yes or no, do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education? | ||
| And certainly President Trump understands that we'll be working with Congress. | ||
| We'd like to do this right. | ||
| We'd like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with and our Congress could get on board with that would have a better functioning Department of Education, but certainly does require congressional action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And in terms of the plans to downsize, what would be the components of that plan that would not require congressional approval? | ||
| Well, I do believe, Senator, that there are departments of education that are established by statute. | ||
| And those particular departments we'd have to pay particular attention to. | ||
| But long before there was a Department of Education, we fulfilled the programs of our educational system. | ||
| Are there other areas, other agencies where parts of the Department of Education could better serve our students and our parents on a local level? | ||
| And I am really all for the President's mission, which is to return education to the states. | ||
| I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child and not certainly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If the department is downsized, would the states and localities still receive the federal funding which they currently receive? | |
| Yes. | ||
| It is not the president's goal to defund the programs. | ||
| It is only to have it operate more efficiently. | ||
| The Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon there when she was asked about President Trump's plans for the Education Department. | ||
| This morning, we are asking all of you to tell us how you think education should change in this country. | ||
| We're going to get to that conversation in a minute. | ||
| Also want to show you some headlines related to the efforts by Elon Musk's Doge Committee. | ||
| Here are several. | ||
| CBS News saying federal employee layoffs begin at Education Department as Doge tries to shrink the government. | ||
| Moving on to the Washington Post, Doge rips through Education Department, cutting contracts, staff, and grants. | ||
| Then there's also this from the Associated Press. | ||
| Doge cuts $900 million from agency that tracks American students' academic progress. | ||
| And then finally, here is USA Today. | ||
| Education Department will shield federal student aid data from Musk's Doge for now. | ||
| Let's get to the conversation with all of you. | ||
| John in Jacksonville, Florida, Democratic caller. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
| What changes would you make to education in this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, I want to say on the national level, I think civics should be taught at every level in schools. | ||
| And primarily because I remember when they started taking civics out of schools. | ||
| And kids don't know how, you know, the next generation didn't know how the government is supposed to work. | ||
| This is why we're in the mess right now because people don't understand that the president is not king. | ||
| There's supposed to be checks and balances in places. | ||
| And there's certain things that he cannot do. | ||
| But people don't know that, so that's part of the problem. | ||
| And then secondly, funding. | ||
| Here in Jacksonville, in the state of Florida, other states that participate in the lottery. | ||
| That money is supposed to go to schools. | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| In Florida, in Jacksonville, in particular, Duval County has some of the worst schools I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| My kids didn't go to the public schools in Duval County because they were so substandard. | ||
| And, you know, unfortunately, there are good teachers in the Duval County system, but they have to buy materials for the kids themselves. | ||
| So, John, then when you hear the Education Secretary and Republicans talk about sending education down to the state level and not having a federal government agency, what's your reaction to that idea? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bad idea. | |
| We have a governor, a racist governor, who is trying to take African-American studies out of school. | ||
| African-American studies are part of American history. | ||
| And this banana republic leader that we have who looks like Matt from Mad Magazine, but you could cut me off if you wanted to. | ||
| But this guy is a racist. | ||
| And that's the problem. | ||
| If you let the states handle it, you're going to get, there's not going to be any continuity on how people should be educated in this country. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| All right. | ||
| John's thoughts. | ||
| Here is the Democratic caller. | ||
| Myra is in Chestertown, Maryland. | ||
| Myra, good morning to you. | ||
| Welcome to our conversation this morning. | ||
| So how would you change education? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to you. | |
| Also, my concern is for the last four years, there isn't any homework. | ||
| I think children are so far behind in Chestertown, Maryland, due to this. | ||
| There's just, they don't have anything to, how can I say this, to keep themselves occupied like we did when I was a child. | ||
| I just think education, they need to put more homework, bring it back to where we used to have it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's what I'm concerned about. | ||
| I think they would learn more. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, Myra, calling for more homework in our nation's schools. | ||
| Her changes to the education policy here in the United States. | ||
| Gwen in Detroit, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Gwen. | ||
| We'll hear from you next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my call. | |
| Well, you know, what changes should be made to education in the United States? | ||
| This is not a normal, I mean, we're acting like, okay, what's going to, what should we do today? | ||
| What should we do tomorrow? | ||
| Our Education Department is being taken over. | ||
| One thing, let me go hang up. | ||
| No, you just hung up on me? | ||
| No, I'm nowhere near the button, Gwen. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, okay. | |
| One thing we don't need, one thing we don't need is for Christian religion, Christian nationalism, they put in our schools a Trump Bible on every desk. | ||
| We don't need to be converted. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| So this is not normal. | ||
| We shouldn't be asking, what should we do? | ||
| We should be asking, how can we stop this takeover? | ||
| And when you say takeover, are you referring to a takeover of the Education Department? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I mean they kicked everybody out. | |
| They locked the doors. | ||
| You know, not just the education, our government. | ||
| What can we do to stop this takeover? | ||
| Because that's what's happening. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Lydia, Easton, Maryland, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Lydia. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I think that we have to consider when they talk about the United States is top spending in education. | ||
| The other countries don't have all the extracurricular activities, the sports, the music, all the travel that kids do after school at our expense. | ||
| So we're not comparing apples and apples. | ||
| We're comparing apples and oranges. | ||
| If you want to cut the costs, then cut all those extracurricular programs. | ||
| Thank you very much for taking my call. | ||
| Anna in California, Democratic caller. | ||
| Anna, we are getting your thoughts this morning on changes to the education system in this country. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I cannot believe that all our children, I mean all our children, what this change, what this new administration is trying to do is erase history, erase difference, erase everything that means that you are a human being and reducing it to saving money. | ||
| I cannot believe the heartless. | ||
| Well, give me an example of what you're referring to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, trans people, trans children. | |
| Even scientifically, we know there is not just a man and a woman. | ||
| We have evolved. | ||
| Can we be human? | ||
| Can we please be human and stop talking about taking things away from children? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Anna, you may be interested in this moment from the confirmation hearing for Linda McMahon to serve as Education Secretary. | ||
| Here's Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut questioning the nominee about President Trump's executive order eliminating funding for programs that support DEI, that's diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what that means for public schools. | ||
| If a school in Connecticut celebrates Martin Luther King Day and has a series of events and programming teaching about black history, are they in violation of a policy that says schools should stop running DEI programs? | ||
| Not in my view. | ||
| That is clearly not the case. | ||
| The celebration of Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month should be celebrated throughout all of our schools. | ||
| I believe that Martin Luther King was one of the strongest proponents of making sure that we look at all of our populations when he said that he would hope that his children wouldn't be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. | ||
| And I think that is the fundamental basis that we should celebrate Black History Month. | ||
| West Point has closed down all ethnic clubs so the Society of Black Engineers no longer can meet because they believe that to be in compliance with this order, they cannot have groups structured around ethnic or racial affiliations. | ||
| Would public schools be in violation of this order? | ||
| Would they risk funding if they had clubs that students could belong to based on their racial or ethnic identity? | ||
| Well, I certainly to date I want to address hypothetical situations. | ||
| I would like, once I'm confirmed, to get in and assess these programs, look at what has been. | ||
| Is that a pretty easy one? | ||
| I mean, you're saying that it's a possibility that if a school has a club for Vietnamese American students or black students where they meet after school, that they could be potentially in jeopardy of receiving federal funding? | ||
| Again, I would like to fully understand what that order is and what those clubs are doing. | ||
| That's pretty chilling. | ||
| I think schools all around the country are going to hear that. | ||
| What about educational programming centered around specific ethnic and racial experiences? | ||
| My son is in a public school. | ||
| He takes a class called African American History. | ||
| If you're running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this corridor, of this executive order? | ||
| I'm not quite certain, and I'd like to look into it further and get back to you on that. | ||
| So there's a possibility, there's a possibility, you're saying, that public schools that run African American history classes, right? | ||
| This is a class that has been taught in public schools for decades, could lose federal funding if they continue to teach African American history. | ||
| No, that's not what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm saying that I would like to take a look at these programs and fully understand the breadth of the executive order and get back to you on that. | ||
| Lyndon McMahon sitting before senators yesterday at a confirmation hearing, getting peppered with questions about how she would steer the education department in the second term of the Trump administration. | ||
| The education department this morning is our topic for our conversation. | ||
| What changes would you make? | ||
| Here are the numbers for the federal department. | ||
| It began operating in 1980. | ||
| It employs 4,400 people and has a budget of $238 billion for 2024, 1.8% of the overall federal budget. | ||
| 1.8% of it is this money for the Education Department. | ||
| Jerry and Orr, Minnesota, or Republican. | ||
| Jerry, we'll go to you next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for taking my call. | |
| I believe in dismantling the federal department of education. | ||
| Like you say, it began in 1980. | ||
| Before 1980, we never had a Department of Education on a federal level. | ||
| Every state has departments of education. | ||
| Every local school district has duly elected people who run the school districts. | ||
| And that's good enough. | ||
| We did a very good job with that for about 200 years, and we should dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. | ||
| All right, Jerry, Republican from Minnesota. | ||
| His thoughts. | ||
| Ruby in Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| What do you say, Ruby? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| People probably don't know the history of this, but in 1954, they closed the schools in Prince Above County rather than obey the law of the land. | ||
| And I went there in 1965 as a volunteer student. | ||
| And some of the people who lived there told me that when they got through with the white kids got through with the books, then they gave it to the black kids who were all raggedy and torn up. | ||
| So we need the federal government to overlook things. | ||
| And I really get tired of people always bad mouth for education because we live in a state of Virginia where it used to be against the law to teach black people how to read. | ||
| And I'm from Michigan. | ||
| So that's all I want to say. | ||
| All right, Ruby, npr.org has an article that outlines what the U.S. Education Department does and doesn't do. | ||
| Two of the most important federal funding streams to public schools are Title I, which provides money to help districts that serve lower income communities. | ||
| In 2023, the Education Department received more than $18 billion for Title I. | ||
| The IDA, IDEA, Individuals with Disability Education Act, this is another funding stream, which provides money to help districts serve students with disabilities. | ||
| In fiscal year 2024, the department received more than $15 billion for this funding stream. | ||
| Both of these, like the department itself, created by separate acts of Congress. | ||
| Title I was signed into law in 1965, and this Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1975. | ||
| They cannot be unwound except by Congress. | ||
| Large changes to either are unlikely as the money enjoys broad bipartisan support. | ||
| Carrie in Locust Grove, Georgia. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Carrie. | |
| Good morning, Greta. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I'm retired Navy 20 years, but I also taught high school ROTC for 20 years. | ||
| And throwing money at things, it probably helps in a certain way. | ||
| But what I see is the biggest problem is the lack of parental involvement. | ||
| If we could find ways to make parents more responsible for the child's education, I think that would be a big help. | ||
| And how do you do that, Carrie? | ||
| How do you force parents to be more involved? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I'll give you an example. | |
| My first nine years of teaching, I taught at a private Catholic school. | ||
| If a kid didn't obey the rules and, say, for example, got Saturday school, the parents would have to pay for them to go to Saturday school because the school had to pay the teacher. | ||
| So financially, if it's an impact to families financially, that might wake up some of these parents. | ||
| But I'm telling you, Greta, these parents don't get involved. | ||
| They don't get involved with their kids. | ||
| Only area I see them get involved with their kids is sports. | ||
| When it comes to academics, you very seldom see them. | ||
| I got a friend that teaches honors classes. | ||
| He said he had four parents come for open house this year. | ||
| So that's my thoughts about it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Carrie there in Georgia. | ||
| We'll go to Arkansas, Jonesboro. | ||
| Carol, good morning to your Republican. | ||
| It's your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| How are y'all today? | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I've got several things, but I hope I can not be so nervous. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Oh, don't worry about it. | ||
| Take your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I just want to answer one thing that you took a call from a lady from Nevada. | ||
| And she said she wanted the Bibles from Trump's Bibles taken out of the schools. | ||
| There is no Bibles with Trump on them. | ||
| So sorry. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There is three things that have bothered me. | ||
| When COVID hit, I had two grandchildren. | ||
| One of them, she's my oldest, and she was in high school. | ||
| And then I had the youngest grandson. | ||
| And they both went to school for a little while. | ||
| And then I think the first semester and then the second one, they said they had to do, I guess, work off a computer or something at home. | ||
| And the teachers weren't paying attention to them and checking their homework every week and all this stuff. | ||
| Well, to get the kids, make sure they pass school and all this, they didn't check their homework. | ||
| The kids were having trouble with their homework, need to ask questions. | ||
| The teachers would ignore them. | ||
| What does that mean for today and changes you would make today to the education system? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, for me, what I would like to see done, these teachers are given, you give them an inch and they're going to take a mile. | |
| Are you referring to the unions that represent them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, because they get out here and they start yelling that they want more money, they want this, they want that. | |
| Then they turn around and you give them all that stuff and then they don't want to help our kids. | ||
| They don't want to teach them. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Joan, Crestview, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Joan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just have a different perspective. | |
| I think that there's a social contract that exists between the federal government and individuals and organizations. | ||
| And I just, I was born in 58. | ||
| I remember segregation. | ||
| I remember desegregation. | ||
| I was young, but it impacted me. | ||
| I'm really at this old level. | ||
| It really meant a lot to me because I lived in a society that I felt treated people differently socioeconomically. | ||
| If you came from one background, you've got this, and so on and so forth. | ||
| Took me, I think it's a break of a contract, and I respectfully disagree with changing the federal government's oversight. | ||
| I don't know the long-term impact. | ||
| I don't know the specific cuts that are going on, but I know that when you leave communities to their own choices, sometimes those choices are not in the best interest of the community. | ||
| And I just remember desegregation. | ||
| I remember Congress originally, I think it was in 1896, had determined that segregation between people of color and people that were not was legalized. | ||
| And then it took until the 50s to reverse that decision. | ||
| And I just remember seeing some horrible things on television. | ||
| I remember seeing Walter Conkite. | ||
| I remember all of it. | ||
| And I was just a baby. | ||
| So you want to go back. | ||
| Your concern is if you do away with the federal education department, that states could reverse course and go back to that part of our society, part of our history of segregation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am, I do. | |
| I grew up in a privileged life, and I always felt some remorse for people who did not. | ||
| And I could see the differences, and I could see discrimination occurring, even if it wasn't in my own backyard. | ||
| I could see it on a global scale. | ||
| It still occurs. | ||
| We have racism in this country. | ||
| And I think it gives power to those that will perhaps misuse their power because of their perspective. | ||
| And I think that when you look at things from the top down, I would prefer that we maintain any ability to not go back in that direction. | ||
| That's some sort of federal oversight. | ||
| Got it, Joan. | ||
| All right. | ||
| From that NPR article that we cited earlier, the Department of Education has no power over what's taught in schools. | ||
| Over the years, President Trump has vowed to rid America's school of such ideas as wokeness and critical race theory. | ||
| And he has said that he would close the Education Department in order to return all education and education work and needs back to the States. | ||
| In reality, it is already up to the States to determine what is taught in classrooms. | ||
| Nick, who's an educator in Michigan. | ||
| Nick, what grade do you teach? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a university professor. | |
| My mother was a school teacher, and all her sisters were school teachers, as was my paternal grandfather. | ||
| And I've been a professor for 42 years. | ||
| And I teach in one of the top public universities in the country. | ||
| And sometimes it's ranked number one public university in the country. | ||
| And you cannot, you will not believe the poor quality of the students that we get. | ||
| They don't learn anything in high school. | ||
| We have to spend the first two years to teach them the things they should have learned in high school. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Give us examples. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mathematics, physics, everything. | |
| They are deficient in everything, even English. | ||
| Now. | ||
| Well, wait, Nick, before you go on, just give us a little bit more, though. | ||
| Mathematics, where are they falling behind? | ||
| What do they need to know that they don't know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't have much time, and I have a lot of points to make. | |
| So they are behind in everything. | ||
| And those people that say we don't have enough money in education, we don't spend enough money, that's totally 100% false. | ||
| We spend the highest amount in the world, and we get the poorest results. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's the mentality. | ||
| It's the mentality. | ||
| Education is hard. | ||
| People should try much harder in high schools, both the professors, the teachers, and the students. | ||
| Parents should take this very seriously. | ||
| They cannot graduate illiterate children. | ||
| They have to speak English. | ||
| They have to know mathematics. | ||
| We have done studies and mathematics. | ||
| Your knowledge of mathematics determines how much money you will make. | ||
| The more you know of mathematics, the better salaries you will have. | ||
| Now, I go to China and teach in China. | ||
| I really have a lot of experiences. | ||
| Are you listening? | ||
| Yes, still listening. | ||
| You went to China? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I asked the Chinese students, the Chinese professors, why are they so good in math? | ||
| It's because they do 20 hours a week math. | ||
| And in the U.S., in the high schools, they play football and they have cheerleaders. | ||
| Well, they should hit the books. | ||
| They should hit the books real hard. | ||
| It is not a matter of money. | ||
| The education department has made no difference. | ||
| They wasted billions, and people are worse educated today than before the education department was founded. | ||
| So I wouldn't care less if the education department is closed down or if it continues to do nothing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Jeremy, Ontario, California, Republican. | ||
| Jeremy, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Yeah, I kind of agree with the guy who just kind of called in. | ||
| On that note, you asked what changes I would make to kind of improve the education system. | ||
| I think I just make the curriculum, change the curriculum itself, make it more relevant, more engaging. | ||
| I don't think it's up to date with some of the jobs that are available to people as a result of being educated. | ||
| So I think there's no attention paid by the student, and there's definitely not enough engagement by the parent. | ||
| So I guess the answer to my question would be that I would change the curriculum and just make it more engaging. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Jeremy, how old are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 40. | |
| Well, turning 40 this year, so 40. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Democratic caller Jenny in Stowe, Ohio. | ||
| Hi, Jenny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| We can. | ||
| So what changes would you make? | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, I think it starts from home also, okay? | |
| When my kids were young, they had homework to do, and I would always ask them, hey, you know how kids will be. | ||
| They'll tell you yes. | ||
| And I'll say, go get it, and so I can look at it. | ||
| And something might be wrong with it. | ||
| And I would tell them, hey, you need to look at it again. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I don't think it's all the teacher's obligation to see if the child should do their homework. | ||
| Another thing, now they're teaching kids to write in school, not cursive. | ||
| So they don't do that. | ||
| So I thought, well, how are you going to write a check or anything like that? | ||
| And history is very important, very important. | ||
| And I think that when kids act up in school the way some of them do now, I think they it should be the fighting and everything. | ||
| I think that they should be put out of school for a couple days or something, you know. | ||
| But they do not learn and listen in school. | ||
| They use calculators. | ||
| They don't learn how to add, you know, manually. | ||
| So they are using calculators even in probably the second or third grade on up, you know. | ||
| So I don't think that helps at all. | ||
| All right, Jenny. | ||
| Javin in Suitland, Maryland, independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I kind of agree with, I guess it was about two calls away. | |
| The curriculum is, it is too much, too much wokeness in the school system. | ||
| You got too many politics. | ||
| You got the talking about LGBT and transgenders. | ||
| The history that you are teaching that the kids are learning is not accurate. | ||
| You know, I don't, I do think they should do away with the whole black history because what is a black person? | ||
| You can't even define it now. | ||
| Everybody with melanated skin is said to be black. | ||
| So these people are a part of history. | ||
| They're not a subdivision of history. | ||
| So, you know, when you think about history and the term, these terms like black and African American, which the government has never on any birth certificate or legal document called people African American, it's dead in the color of law, so it's not even relevant. | ||
| It's a misnomer. | ||
| So I think we can do away with it and just teach the true history. | ||
| And I think everybody will be fine. | ||
| All right, that caller from Suitland, Maryland, his opinion this morning. | ||
| Mac in Churchill, Tennessee, Republican. | ||
| Mac, we'll turn to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, American people and parents and grandparents, you better get your head in the game. | |
| Our kids have been darkened by the school system. | ||
| Education ain't education like it used to be. | ||
| Teachers need to teach English, read and write, arithmetic, and getting them educated. | ||
| And this woke stuff is out of character, these teachers. | ||
| They need to go through and get the best teachers they can and teach what should be taught. | ||
| This woke stuff. | ||
| And you've seen what happened in 2017, well, 2019 when COVID hit, and you see what happened. | ||
| You see what was going on in the classroom, what they're teaching their kids. | ||
| All right, Max Thoughts there in Tennessee, a Republican. | ||
| We'll continue here this morning in our first hour discussing education policy in this country and getting your thoughts on how you would change it. | ||
| Also, want to give you an update on international news. | ||
| Here's a headline from the New York Times happening overnight. | ||
| Strike damages the Chernobyl site as leaders meet to discuss the Ukraine war. | ||
| The UN said radiation levels were normal after an explosion at the former nuclear plant in Ukraine. | ||
| The war with Russia was expected to dominate a security conference that is happening in Munich. | ||
| Here is the video put out last night on X by the Ukrainian President Zelensky. | ||
| And he put a statement out saying, last night a Russian attack drone with a high explosive warhead struck the shelter protecting the world from radiation at the destroyed fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. | ||
| This shelter was built by Ukraine together with other countries of Europe and the world, together with America, all those committed to real security for the humanity. | ||
| The only country in the world that attacks such sites, occupies nuclear power plants, and wages war without any regard for the consequences is today's Russia. | ||
| This is a terrorist threat to the entire world. | ||
| Every night, Russia carries out such attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure and cities. | ||
| Russia continues to expand its army and shows no change in its deranged anti-human state rhetoric. | ||
| This means that Putin is definitely not preparing for negotiations. | ||
| He is preparing to continue deceiving the world. | ||
| That is why there must be unified pressure from all who value life, pressure on the aggressor. | ||
| Russia must be held accountable for its actions. | ||
| That's the statement by the Ukrainian President Zelensky as he prepares to meet with allies at the security conference in Munich. | ||
| The explosion came hours before the start of the security conference. | ||
| He'll meet with top Trump administration, the Zelensky, that is, with top Trump administration officials about negotiating an end to the war with Russia. | ||
| Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to speak at the conference at 8.30 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| And you can follow our coverage on C-SPAN2 and c-span.org of JD Vance's remarks. | ||
| Meanwhile, this morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was visiting Poland, said President Trump would personally lead the negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine. | ||
| This after he pulled back some comments he made about Ukraine earlier this week, where he said that NATO membership for Kiev was off the table. | ||
| Here's what he had to say earlier today. | ||
| President has said multiple times inside his framework for discussions of this. | ||
| And I just want to lay out that these are not comments or statements that I make in a vacuum or make without direct consultation with our team. | ||
| So President Trump's national security team, from Mike Waltz to the vice president to Secretary of State Marco Rubia, we're all on the same page. | ||
| And our job is to ensure that our commander-in-chief, the President of the United States, has the full spectrum of options to bring this conflict, bring the killing to an end, to an end. | ||
| And my message to the Ukraine contact group was: I do not believe, as a part of those negotiations, that U.S. troops will be on the ground. | ||
| You can say that, and I believe that to be true. | ||
| I don't believe that's what President Trump has said. | ||
| That is what he has emphasized, that this is for Europeans to resolve alongside Ukraine and Russia, and that U.S. boots will not be on the ground. | ||
| Again, negotiations happen. | ||
| The president has latitude, and what happens in those negotiations is his prerogative because he is the American people's representative on the world stage. | ||
| There's no daylight in those conversations. | ||
| There's no daylight between myself and the vice president. | ||
| We are collective advocates on behalf of the president. | ||
| He reserves the right to have any option as he discusses troops and partnerships and investment opportunities and frontline limits. | ||
| Those are all what President Trump will negotiate with his counterparts. | ||
| The Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, in Poland earlier today, talking about negotiations that President Trump said would begin between Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| This morning, we're getting your thoughts on education policy here in our first hour of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We want to know what changes you would make to education in the United States. | ||
| There are the lines on your screen. | ||
| Yesterday on Capitol Hill, Lyndon McMahon, who is the president's pick to serve as education secretary, took questions from senators on the education committee about how she would lead that department. | ||
| Here's what she had to say when she was asked by Senator Patty Murray of Washington about the Doge efforts that Elon Musk's group efforts to hold back education funding that's appropriated by Congress. | ||
| If confirmed, do you commit to getting every dollar we have invested in our students and schools out to them? | ||
| Well, the appropriated dollars and those monies that are passed by Congress, yes. | ||
| I have no issue, however, with the fact, and I believe the American people spoke loudly in the election last November to say that they want to look at waste, fraud, and abuse in our government. | ||
| So, Doge, there are a couple of implants at the Department of Education as there are with agencies throughout the district, and they're doing an audit. | ||
| Right, you know, I understand an audit, but when Congress appropriates money, it is the administration's responsibility to put that out as directed by Congress, who has the power of the purse. | ||
| So, what will you do if the President or Elon Musk tells you not to spend money Congress has appropriated to you? | ||
| We will certainly expend those dollars that Congress has passed, but I do think it is worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door. | ||
| It's much easier to stop the money as it's going out the door than it is to call it back. | ||
| The process by law is that you look at that, you make recommendations to Congress, and we implement those laws. | ||
| So, I mean, the question really is: who decides how much federal funding public schools get in Seattle, where it's already been allocated? | ||
| The school district or Elon Musk or Congress. | ||
| And I think Congress has been pretty clear that the personalized here, we pass our appropriations bills. | ||
| We expect those programs to come. | ||
| If you have input, if you have programs you have looked at that you believe are not effective, then it is your job to come to us, explain why, and get the support for that. | ||
| Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, they're questioning Lyndon McMahon, the nominee to head up the Education Department. | ||
| Randy is in Chicago Heights, Illinois, an independent. | ||
| Randy, good morning to you. | ||
| After listening to the nominee this morning, what changes would you make to the Education Department? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greto. | |
| Could you hear me? | ||
| We can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, Greta, I'd like to just bring, you know what? | |
| I'd like to really see to bring back the trades and high schools. | ||
| Because when I was going to high school, I used to have wood shop, welding courses, drafting. | ||
| We had automotive shops. | ||
| And this brings back all these trades. | ||
| Because our teenagers graduating from high school now, they don't even know how to change a tire anymore. | ||
| The only thing they know how to do now is press a button to turn the phone on. | ||
| That's all they do. | ||
| And I'd like to see all these trades come back because when I graduated high school, I got a job with a carpenter, building homes, because I knew a little bit about carpentry because I took wood shop in high school. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Randy there in Illinois. | ||
| Felicia in Georgia, Democratic caller. | ||
| It's your turn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'd like to make a statement. | ||
| Someone mentioned before about black history being eliminated. | ||
| You know, black history is American history. | ||
| There's a lot of things that we definitely want for black people to contribute to American history that we all utilize in this country. | ||
| I believe that the teachers should be paid more. | ||
| We need to have more teachers and education. | ||
| And by Trump trying to eliminate the Department of Education, we're not going to have your talented teachers to teach the students. | ||
| He keeps saying that we should be number one, competing with China and Sweden. | ||
| And how are we going to compete when you want to eliminate something that we need? | ||
| Also, they want to eliminate the Individuals with Disability Education Act. | ||
| That helps, you know, us to have aid to certain schools with kids with special needs. | ||
| And really, the red states, the Republican states will definitely be hurt if you eliminate this because censors tell us that the red states do have a lot of kids with special needs and they use that money and the budget to help it. | ||
| And then also free. | ||
| Well, Felicia, before you go on, because I want to show our viewers what the Education Secretary nominee had to say on students with disabilities, Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Lynn McMahon about this. | ||
| Here's what she had to say. | ||
| What does the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act promise? | ||
| It promises that we're going to take care of these students, that they're going to be provided with assistance that they have in the schoolrooms, the technology that they need, the assistance, and you and I talked a little bit about that with the IDEA guarantees children with disabilities a free, appropriate education. | ||
| What is the federal investment promised to states under IDEA? | ||
| What's it supposed to be? | ||
| In terms of dollar amounts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The federal government committed back in 1975 when it passed IDEA to pay 40% of the average per-pupil expenditure for special education. | ||
| You know what we actually, what the federal government actually does? | ||
| I think it's around 14 to 18 percent at this point. | ||
| It's about 15 percent. | ||
| But it's uh it's an appropriated amount from Congress, though, and so Congress needs to appropriate those dollars to spend it. | ||
| That's right, but the President of the United States is proposing, and the Republicans in Congress are proposing massive tax cuts for billionaires, and they're trying to pay for it by massive cuts to education and other services. | ||
| And just so you know, New Hampshire would lose $60 million in IDEA funding if IDEA were eliminated. | ||
| I'm going to, my time is almost up. | ||
| I'm just going to say this. | ||
| The reason the Department of Education came about in about 1975, IDEA was passed in 1975. | ||
| 1979 was the department, and Mr. Chair, I'll take just a second here. | ||
| But people need to understand, people like my son, we talked about him. | ||
| Before IDA, before the Department of Education existed, state and local schools did not educate these kids. | ||
| They barred them from the classrooms. | ||
| These kids were institutionalized and abused. | ||
| There is a reason that a Department of Education and IDEA exists, and it is because educating kids with disabilities can be really hard. | ||
| And it takes the national commitment to get it done. | ||
| And that's why so many people are so concerned about this proposal to eliminate the department, because they think kids will once again be shoved aside, and especially kids with disabilities. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chair. | ||
| Senator Hassan from New Hampshire questioning the nominee to serve as Education Secretary, Linda McMahon. | ||
| If you missed any of that hearing yesterday, you can find it on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| What does the Education Department do? | ||
| From the Washington Post, the department has 4,400 employees, according to the federal grants website. | ||
| It is responsible for $1.6 trillion federal student loan program and a range of grants for K through 12 schools. | ||
| In addition, the department runs achievement tests dubbed the nation's report card and collects statistics on enrollment, staffing, and crime in schools. | ||
| It enforces civil rights laws that bar discrimination in federally funded schools on the basis of race, sex, and other factors. | ||
| States and school districts, not the federal education department, set curriculums. | ||
| That runs counter to Trump's repeated call to send education back to the states as it already mostly resides there. | ||
| How would you change education in this country? | ||
| Catherine in Carrollton, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Before we get to business, I love your hair. | ||
| You look like Jennifer Annison from Friends. | ||
| Aw, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now let me get to business. | |
| I want to tell the viewers out there, very important. | ||
| United States is ranked 39th in the world in terms of Western countries and education, 39th. | ||
| We've been in Korea for 70 years. | ||
| Out of the top 10 bases that we are in with our soldiers, five of them are top students. | ||
| The number one students in the world are the South Koreans. | ||
| If they are that smart, they should be smart to defend themselves. | ||
| My second point is to the one guy. | ||
| I think he was from Tennessee or Illinois. | ||
| He said he went to shop and everything. | ||
| I went to high school in Colorado. | ||
| I did typing and bookkeeping. | ||
| And I learned basic skills before I went on to the University of Colorado and had a great career in logistics. | ||
| I respect everybody. | ||
| I'm an independent. | ||
| I respect the viewers from Republicans and the Democrats. | ||
| Our big issue with education is that our children know that we have forgotten them. | ||
| They can't even function. | ||
| I interview these kids. | ||
| They want to listen to their music. | ||
| They can't interact socially with business people. | ||
| But to the question at hand is what do we need to do? | ||
| I don't have an opinion on Dodge getting rid of a Department of Education, but I do know that we need to teach our children languages, Chinese, Arabic, and Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. | ||
| This is the future. | ||
| We can stop talking about black history, LGBT. | ||
| Teach the children how to function. | ||
| And thank God I had a good education foundation in Colorado. | ||
| But we're failing. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Catherine, I'm going to leave it there for now. | ||
| The Education Secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, was up on Capitol Hill as we told you. | ||
| That was not the only cabinet secretary for the President Trump's second administration that saw some action yesterday. | ||
| We also, as we told you, RFK Jr. was confirmed by the Senate and then hours later sworn into office at the White House. | ||
| Senator Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote against his nomination. | ||
| Here's what the former leader of the party in the Senate had to say: I'm a survivor of childhood polio. | ||
| In my lifetime, I've watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. | ||
| I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles. | ||
| Individuals, parents, and families have a right to push for a healthier nation and demand the best possible scientific guidance on preventing and treating illness. | ||
| But a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories and eroding trust in public health institutions does not entitle Mr. Kennedy to lead these important efforts. | ||
| Now, Mitch McConnell voted no on RFK Jr., and as you know, he voted no on Tulsi Gabbard and no on Pete Hegseth as well. | ||
| Yesterday, President Trump was in the Oval Office with reporters, was asked about Senator McConnell's no vote on RFK. | ||
| Here's his response: I was the one that got him to drop out of the leadership position, so he can't love me. | ||
| But he's not voting against Bobby, he's voting against me, but that's all right. | ||
| He endorsed me. | ||
| You know, Mitch McConnell, do you know that Mitch endorsed me, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he did. | |
| Do you think that was easy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he had polio, obviously. | |
| I don't know anything about it. | ||
| He had polio. | ||
| He had polio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you doubting that he had polio? | |
| I have no idea if he had polio. | ||
| All I can tell you about him is that he shouldn't have been a leader. | ||
| He knows that. | ||
| He voted against Bobby. | ||
| He votes against almost everything now. | ||
| He's a very bitter guy. | ||
| And we have a very strong party, and he's almost not even really a very powerful member. | ||
| I'd say he's not a parent. | ||
| He's lost his power and it's affected his vote. | ||
| And, you know, it's one of those things. | ||
| But in the meantime, Bobby did great, got more votes than anybody thought. | ||
| And I think he's going to do phenomenally, just phenomenally in that position. | ||
| President Trump on Senator Mitch McConnell. | ||
| Now, here on C-SPAN, we spent an hour looking into the legacy of Senator Mitch McConnell when he stepped down as leader of the Republican Party, the longest-serving party leader. | ||
| And we sat down with his biographer, Michael Tackett, for that conversation. | ||
| Went through the C-SPAN archive showing you Mitch McConnell's career as a leader over the years. | ||
| And you can find that legacy program if you're interested on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Philip in Edison, New Jersey, we're talking about changes to education in this country. | ||
| What would you do, Philip? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| Thank you for having me this morning. | ||
| First of all, you just said that the Department of Education does nothing. | ||
| They don't do nothing but just collect money. | ||
| Politicians, they're not teachers. | ||
| They're politicians now. | ||
| They teach our kids to hate Trump. | ||
| During COVID, my son was in first grade, and it was computer school. | ||
| And they were teaching my son how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. | ||
| Every day the news is so outraged that Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat. | ||
| All these people that are working, he's placing an unelected bureaucrat. | ||
| This is insanity. | ||
| No outrage over the things that they're finding. | ||
| Seriously, this is just bananas to me. | ||
| I was a Democrat all my life up into 2020-20. | ||
| I mean, this is just bananas. | ||
| These LGB, men and women's sports. | ||
| Is that a real thing? | ||
| You have my son, they weren't even teaching him how to handwrite. | ||
| No handwriting, everything on a computer. | ||
| In first grade, when was he going to learn how to write? | ||
| When was he going to learn math? | ||
| When will Congress act? | ||
| When? | ||
| Black History Month? | ||
| Black History is American history. | ||
| It should be taught all year long. | ||
| I don't understand these stupid things. | ||
| I'll go to Pat, who's in Newport Ritchie, Florida. | ||
| Republican. | ||
| Hi, Pat. | ||
| Pat, we're listening to you now. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
| Hey, Pat, mute your television, please. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| I did, dear. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If I had any chance to change anything in the Board of Education, I'd stop any history with a color or ethnic preference. | ||
| I think anybody who wants to read about any of their background, I'm an Irish, second-gen-generation Irishman. | ||
| If I want to read about Ireland and Irish and how the famine was the 300 years, I go to the library, I get books, and I read all about it. | ||
| That should be a private thing for me to learn, not the world. | ||
| I also think that every state in the United States should have the same curricula. | ||
| And I also think that teachers should be held accountable. | ||
| Give them some more money. | ||
| Make them be accountable for their careers and their jobs. | ||
| Help them and get them to educate our Americans. | ||
| Most of the people this morning before me said the same exact thing, whether they were Republicans or Democrats. | ||
| So please think about our children. | ||
| They're not educated. | ||
| It's insane to think what we're teaching our kids in these schools. | ||
| These kids are coming out of school. | ||
| They can't even read and write. | ||
| I go out every single day. | ||
| I see things that make me crazy in this world because they're not being educated. | ||
| So let's get back to education. | ||
| And I got to tell you, I think Trump is trying to do this in a way. | ||
| I know he doesn't have the talent sometimes to speak, but I think this is where he's heading. | ||
| So please, America, let's wake up, stop being a color, stop segregating ourselves. | ||
| Let's all be American and get to the issue. | ||
| Educate our children. | ||
| All right, Pat, they're a Republican in Florida. | ||
| Bonnie's a Democrat in Brandonton, Florida. | ||
| Hi, Bonnie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm just calling. | |
| I have worked in school districts for many years in secretarial work. | ||
| I also, since I moved to Florida, have volunteered in two or three different schools to help out in the classroom. | ||
| The one thing I have noticed, and in talking with many teachers, the big thing they hate is testing, testing, testing. | ||
| They are so busy working to get kids prepared for the testing because I guess funding is based on testing. | ||
| We need to find a way to get rid of this and tend to the things that are really important. | ||
| And another thing I have noticed is schools have thousands of kids in them instead of small schools like we used to have. | ||
| And I know that because of large populations, we have to do different things. | ||
| But in the process, when a teacher has seven to eight classes a day and has different kids in every class all day long, there is no personal communication and getting to know the kids when you have that many classes. | ||
| In the schools I worked in that had 400 children, teachers got to know by the time half the years was over, every kid in the school was noticed and the teachers knew who they were. | ||
| We need to find a way to maybe not put so much money into the fancy things in buildings and make this building have more smaller schools with less high-class, impressive things to impress everybody and start working on have classrooms where everybody can feel like somebody knows who they are. | ||
| All right, Bonnie's thoughts. | ||
| Deborah in Potsdown, Pennsylvania, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Deborah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| What I like to see in the school district, and based on the conversation that I've been listening to, is that we have to get out of that six mindset to think that school is the same when you went to school in 1960 or 1940. | ||
| The children are different. | ||
| Our future will be different. | ||
| And it's not the same skill set. | ||
| Our kids need to have a 360-degree education. | ||
| And checks, we don't need to learn how to write checks because they don't exist anymore. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So everything is done with technology. | ||
| Do the children need to know how to write in cursive when we type emails? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think we need to learn that. | |
| That's a waste of the time and energy. | ||
| Our kids are not writing in cursive. | ||
| They're not writing. | ||
| They're doing everything on the computer, on their phone, on their tablet. | ||
| If we teach them how to become drone operators, how to become the future technology prompt engineers for AI, let's think about the future. | ||
| Stop thinking about when you went to school because that era is gone. | ||
| And we also need to lean in on black history because it is American history. | ||
| And if our kids don't know where they came from, then they don't know where they're going. | ||
| And thank you so much. | ||
| All right, Deborah. | ||
| Roger in Guilford, New Hampshire, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Roger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Roger. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The changes I would make in the school system would, I find the biggest problem, of course, is the labor unions. | |
| The changes that I would make, I would take teachers off salary and put them on an hour rate, install time clocks in every school, and make them accountable for that time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| John, Russellville, Arkansas, Republican. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you this morning? | |
| Doing well. | ||
| I'm a 91-year-old working on 92, retired educator. | ||
| I spent my life in education, so I have some opinions. | ||
| When I went to hear me, yes, we can. | ||
| You said you have some opinions about all your years teaching. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I retired in 93, so it's been a long time ago, but I spent my life in education, so I watched wow, education has gone on. | ||
| One thing, I'm not hearing you, dear. | ||
| I can see you, but I'm not hearing you. | ||
| All right, John, just go ahead. | ||
| We can hear you, so just don't worry about it. | ||
| Go ahead and finish your thought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, I want to talk about race as a problem because when I went to Hendrix in the 50s, we didn't have any blacks. | ||
| But I coached at Arkansas Tech. | ||
| And now I see history is what it was. | ||
| And it wasn't too good in America about blacks. | ||
| But when I look at history at Arkansas Tech, they have football, but I still enjoy. | ||
| They have 96% to 95% blacks on their football team now. | ||
| So history was what it was, and history is what it is. | ||
| I don't want to spend time there. | ||
| I just want to hit that one point. | ||
| All right, John, I'm going to have to leave it there because we're running out of time. | ||
| We're going to take a break. | ||
| And when we come back, we'll talk with David Super, an administrative and constitutional law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. | ||
| We'll talk about the legality of Doge efforts and the role of the courts in checking executive power. | ||
| And then later, Steve Moore of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity discusses President Trump's tariff plans and his overall economic agenda. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series, First 100 Days. | |
| We'll explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians, authors, and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| We'll look at accomplishments and setbacks and examine how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to the present day. | ||
| This Saturday, the first 100 days of Ulysses Grant's presidency, Grant was a famous Civil War general who won the White House in 1868. | ||
| His campaign slogan was, Let us have peace. | ||
| Issues during Grant's first 100 days included reconstruction, the payment of Civil War debt, voting rights, and the fight against the KKK. | ||
| Watch American History TV's series, First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 12:20 p.m., Tamara Lanier, author of From These Roots, traces her family's bloodline to an enslaved man, Papa Renti, who's in one of the first ever photos of enslaved people from Africa. | ||
| She also speaks about her lawsuit against Harvard University to reclaim the 19th century daguerreotype of him. | ||
| And at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, in honor of President's Day weekend, we'll look back at presidents as authors. | ||
| You'll hear from Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. | ||
| At 8 p.m., Microsoft CEO Bill Gates discusses his life and career and early influences in his memoir, Source Code. | ||
| Then at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, former president of Anheuser-Busch Sales and Distribution Company Anson Freerichs offers his insight to the Bud Light controversy, declining sales, and its future in his book, Last Call for Bud Light. | ||
| He's interviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Richard Morrison. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.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. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| And we are back with David Super, who is a law professor at Georgetown University's Law Center, here to talk about Trump administrations and legal challenges. | ||
| There are the Trump administration, David Super facing several lawsuits. | ||
| Broadly, there are legal questions about the following: revoking birthright citizenship, Doge's access to personal and financial records, reinstatement of Schedule F for some federal employees, establishment of Doge, and the funding freeze. | ||
| David Super, just your reaction overall to all those legal challenges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This administration has made an unprecedented move to disregard long-standing laws. | |
| It's not surprising they're being challenged. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Most of these things that you mentioned are flagrantly illegal. | |
| They're only valid if many acts of Congress are unconstitutional, and in one instance, they're effectively rejecting a part of the Constitution itself. | ||
| Explain a little bit more about flagrantly illegal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, for example, the Administrative Procedure Act says that when the government makes regulations, it has to put out a draft for public comment and consider what the public has to say to that. | |
| In reinstating Schedule F, they've got a new name for it, but the same idea to strip civil servants of protection against arbitrary firing and political coercion, they simply canceled. | ||
| They disregarded a rule that was already in place that gave those workers some rights. | ||
| They didn't seek public comment. | ||
| They didn't put out any drafts. | ||
| They simply disregarded the Administrative Procedure Act. | ||
| The White House Press Secretary Caroline Lovitt responded to these legal challenges at the White House on Wednesday when she held a briefing there with reporters. | ||
| Here's what she had to say. | ||
| 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. | ||
| David Super, respond to Caroline Lovitt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a gross exaggeration. | |
| All these judges are doing is enforcing laws on the books. | ||
| And the American people absolutely voted for Mr. Trump to be president, but under the laws, the Constitution says the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and they have every right to expect that the courts will insist on that if Mr. Trump does not. | ||
| What do you make of the injunctions by these judges? | ||
| Why do they take that step? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They take that step because the administration is refusing to follow the law. | |
| It's imposing across the board freezes on spending that Congress has directed it to put out there. | ||
| It is effectively disregarding those statutes that say we need to spend money on senior meals and service to homeless youth and things like that. | ||
| And they are taking the position that they are not bound by the law. | ||
| When anyone, you, me, or the president, defy the law, courts will enjoy us. | ||
| Here is the commentary section of the Washington Times this morning. | ||
| Ben Klein, who's a congressman from Virginia, Republican, writes, Musk and Doge are doing exactly what Trump told voters they would do. | ||
| And he says, I'm fed up with the scripted outrage and the blizzard of lies. | ||
| He writes this: The left has stomped its collective feet because it claims Doge is working in secret. | ||
| However, it fails to acknowledge that it is subject to the requirements of the Presidential Records Act and that the White House has issued regular declarations of its progress. | ||
| Each executive agency's Doge team works in coordination with agency heads to ensure the implementation of the mission. | ||
| Indeed, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has approved Doge's lawful access to unclassified records and systems to facilitate this integration. | ||
| Despite rants from Democrats and media figures, no evidence supports the allegation that Mr. Musk or anyone else has unlawfully accessed or seized sensitive data. | ||
| Any access is strictly regulated, and the role of DOES is focused on modernizing outdated systems, not compiling private information. | ||
| The real threat to Americans' privacy has come from an unchecked bureaucracy that has mismanaged data security for decades. | ||
| The reforms proposed by Mr. Trump and implemented by individuals like Mr. Musk are designed to prevent government overreach, not expand it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's cold comfort to people whose personal information, their banking data, their social security numbers are being, by all accounts, transferred to insecure laptops and are available for cyber criminals or for the Russians and Chinese and Iranians to easily hack in and potentially empty out our bank accounts. | |
| What evidence do you have of that happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's been asserted by the career civil servants who've managed these accounts for decades. | |
| They manage them under Democratic presidents and Republicans. | ||
| There's never been political officials in charge of that. | ||
| They managed them for four years under the first Trump administration. | ||
| We are asking all of you to join us in this conversation this morning about President Trump's first 100 days, his first few weeks here, and the actions that he has taken by executive orders, as well as the efforts by Elon Musk and this Doge Commission. | ||
| Your thoughts, questions, and comments on it. | ||
| Stephen in California, Republican. | ||
| Stephen, let's hear from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greta. | |
| I'm up first, huh? | ||
| Yes, how is marriage life treating you? | ||
| Okay, back to business. | ||
| Have you, guests, actually looked into the Christian right, who seems to be the ones that are behind all these laws or Trump's vision of laws that have been attacking every institution that they're against, | ||
| such as the food aid program because they're giving food to Palestinians, and the education program because Bob Jones University was trying to not segregate his schools and was forced to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll take my question offline. | |
| David Super? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know the origins of this. | |
| I'm a lawyer, not a political scientist. | ||
| But I do know that many of the assertions that have been made about the law in the media and in defense of this have been plainly wrong. | ||
| And this does take us away from a world governed by laws and towards one governed by individual whim, which is disturbing. | ||
| Explain that a little bit more. | ||
| What are you referring to? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When Congress passes a law saying that we will spend money on something, the president is obliged to carry it out. | |
| But he's been canceling contracts without any authority, at least in some of the contracts, to do so, because he disagrees with the program. | ||
| If he can do that, every president can do that, and we'll have no stability in government, no confidence in laws, and frankly, our Congress won't be all that important. | ||
| Here's the opinion section of the New York Times this morning, their editorial board. | ||
| Trump dares the courts to stop him. | ||
| In the editorial board writing this, the U.S. Constitution established three branches of government designed to balance power and serve as checks on one another. | ||
| The Constitution order suddenly appears more vulnerable than it has in generations. | ||
| President Trump is trying to expand his authority beyond the bounds of the law while reducing the ability of the other branches to check his excesses. | ||
| It's worth remembering why undoing this system of governance would be so dangerous to American democracy and why it's vital that Congress, the courts, and the public resist such an outcome. | ||
| Are we facing a constitutional crisis, in your opinion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, we are. | |
| We have one branch of government that is increasingly regarding itself as unchecked by either of the others. | ||
| They're following only those laws that they see fit, which sidelines Congress, and they're savagely attacking the courts, suggesting that judges who enforce laws on the books should be impeached or disregarded. | ||
| This is a constitutional crisis. | ||
| How do you respond to the president and Republicans who say, as you heard from Caroline Levitt, the American people elected us? | ||
| They gave power to both the power to Republicans at both the White House and on Capitol Hill. | ||
| And they are doing what the American people elected them to do and passing the president's agenda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If Congress wants to amend these laws to allow the president to do these things, that's entirely appropriate. | |
| But the president is disregarding the laws. | ||
| If they try to amend the laws, that will get public attention. | ||
| Members will have to go on record voting for it. | ||
| The public elected Congress as well as the president, and they elected the previous Congresses that passed the laws. | ||
| No one voted for this president thinking that he was going to be a king. | ||
| They voted for him to be a president as part of our system of checks and balances, and that he's throwing over the side. | ||
| Is it one reason why the president is acting the way he is through executive action is because of the filibuster rule in the Senate. | ||
| And such razor-thin majorities means that it takes more than 60 votes to get his agenda through. | ||
| So in his argument, he has no choice but to do this by executive action. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he has a choice, and that's compromise, which every president has done since George Washington. | |
| The filibuster is still in place in the Senate because every Republican senator who was sitting a few years ago said that it was important. | ||
| And Mr. Trump may disagree with that, but his party overwhelmingly feels that it is important that we have the filibuster so that we can have compromise. | ||
| And why do you think Republicans and Democrats, for the most part, are standing by the filibuster? | ||
| What role does it play? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The filibuster makes sure that all interests in our society are considered. | |
| That a thin majority, Mr. Trump didn't even get a majority of the popular vote. | ||
| He came close but didn't get it, should not completely control everything in the country to the disadvantage of others. | ||
| That we need reason, we need continuity. | ||
| Businesses need continuity. | ||
| They don't want policies changing wildly every four years. | ||
| Roy in West Palm Beach, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Roy, good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| My question for your guests there this morning. | ||
| Anyway, good morning, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, I'm calling from Florida. | ||
| And anyway, you know, back to the education system. | ||
| And, you know, I'm listening to this guy speak. | ||
| I see he's from Georgetown University. | ||
| And my question to him, well, actually, my answer to him is what is going on with the Trump administration. | ||
| You know, he knew ahead of time through the attorneys that he has backing him that what is taking place where he's being rejected with all this stuff because it's being sent to these, you know, low-life judges and mostly liberal states like Rhode Island and so on and so on. | ||
| There's several that are, but Trump already knew that ahead of time before he did these orders, what he's trying to do to help America get back on track of the way it's supposed to be. | ||
| So what's your question, Roy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question to your guest this morning, okay, everything I've heard from him so far is that how, what's his opinion on the Biden administration and all the things that he tried to do, knowing that they were unconstitutional for giving, you know, loans, you know, for the college kids and all that. | |
| Okay, so we're talking about Biden's executive orders here. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Biden made many executive orders that he thought were legal, some of which he was right, some of which he was wrong. | |
| By the way, those cases were all challenged in very conservative states. | ||
| So we have Rhode Island challenges for Trump. | ||
| We had Texas challenges for Biden. | ||
| Some of what Biden did was held to be legal, some of it not. | ||
| In one of the cases that your guest mentioned about student loans, the Supreme Court said, literally the law would support this, but we think it's just too big a change. | ||
| So there was strong reason in the language of the law. | ||
| The court just didn't think that was enough, which is the court's prerogative to say. | ||
| But it's very different from what Mr. Trump is doing, which is largely regarding these laws as non-entities, as not binding in any way at all. | ||
| Where do you see the Supreme Court stepping in here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we'll hear from the Supreme Court very soon because we're going to start seeing appeals from the Trump administration within maybe two weeks. | |
| Those appeals will very rapidly get, at least for emergency orders, up to the Supreme Court. | ||
| And we will learn, I think, by the end of April, perhaps earlier, whether the Supreme Court is willing to let this go or not. | ||
| In the New York Times opinion pages, Rosa DeLauro, who is the top appropriator in the House, a Democrat, writes, Congress, not Trump, controls the money. | ||
| I want to get your thoughts on what she argues here. | ||
| And she says, Justice Anthony Scalia took aim at supposed presidential impoundment powers in Clinton v. City of New York, saying, President Nixon, the Mahatma Gandhi of all impounders, asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his constitutional right to impound appropriated funds was absolutely clear. | ||
| Justice Scalia noted that two years later, in Train v. City of New York, the court proved Nixon wrong. | ||
| Empoundment is a fanciful attempt to give the president the powers of a king, and it will be a disaster for our republic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Justice Scalia is right about that, as about many things. | |
| The Constitution's system of checks and balances gives the power over the people's money to the people's representatives in Congress. | ||
| And the president is not free to overrule what Congress has done. | ||
| He can veto bills, and this president has vetoed bills, and prior presidents have as well, and that gives them influence on spending. | ||
| But once something's enacted into law, the president is bound by the law, just as you and I are. | ||
| So where right now do you think this administration has violated the empowerment powers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
By freezing money across the board that Congress is directed to be spent. | |
| Joseph, Flint, Texas, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me on. | |
| This is Joseph from Flint, Texas. | ||
| I'd like to hear the guests' opinion on the risk of civil unrest as a result of the executive branch violating the laws that the judiciary is tasked with ruling. | ||
| I'd also like to guest opinion on how this lawlessness is going to affect our international standing with our international partners on the laws that we have bonded as it results to NATO and everything else. | ||
| It just seems like a complete collapse of rule of law, which is clearly concerning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I think there's not likely to be civil unrest. | ||
| I certainly hope there isn't because we do have courts and we do have a Congress. | ||
| And this is not the first president who is overreached. | ||
| Courts have reined them in in the past, and I expect they will this time. | ||
| In terms of our international standing, those are laws passed by Congress as well. | ||
| In many instances, those are also binding on the president. | ||
| I have not seen the kind of clear illegality in the president's actions in some of these areas, but I will confess I have not been following that as closely. | ||
| Mary in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I have three questions I would like for the guests to elaborate on. | ||
| The first one is the young men that are going into our private information, their ages are running from 19 to 25, I believe. | ||
| And they are the ones that he hired to go into information. | ||
| And I want you to elaborate on that. | ||
| The second one is about the fact that he hired these men that work for cybersecurity, which they were fired from because they're hackers. | ||
| That's one thing I want you to elaborate on. | ||
| And the next one is, as an individual citizen, and they're allowing people to go into our personal information, as a personal person that's concerned about my personal information given to these young people and these hackers, do I have a right to sue? | ||
| Those are the three things I would like to elaborate. | ||
| All right, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Well, the career civil servants that have managed the Treasury Department's checkbook, as it were, for decades and decades, including under the first Trump administration, are subject to extraordinarily severe security clearances. | ||
| They're checked all the time, closely monitored, and heavily trained in cybersecurity. | ||
| The people that are being brought in, we know nothing about them. | ||
| All media reports suggest they're quite young. | ||
| They're quite inexperienced. | ||
| There's no indication that they've received training in data security. | ||
| And this makes many people very much afraid. | ||
| Whatever one feels about the policies that Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk are pursuing, they don't need access to sensitive information to do that. | ||
| Knowing my bank account number will not help them resolve anything about government spending. | ||
| If there's a program that needs to be shut down, ask Congress to shut it down, but don't go into the personal information. | ||
| There is a Privacy Act that provides some protection against mishandled data that's given to the government. | ||
| I certainly wouldn't presume to offer any individual any advice about that, but in some instances there may be litigation, yes. | ||
| David Super, an administrative and constitutional law professor joining us this morning. | ||
| He's at Georgetown University Law Center. | ||
| Marty, you get to talk to him next in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| I was just calling. | ||
| They're complaining about people getting their personal information, and then people from Social Security work from home, and they can do my application or whatever you want to call it, sitting at their kitchen table with all my personal information in their house. | ||
| And that's not a big deal. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead, Marty, finish your thought. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But people in a secure place, they're worried about that. | |
| I'm more worried about someone at their house doing it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you have any thoughts on that, David Super? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know the details of Social Security's work-at-home procedures. | |
| My understanding is that there are substantial cybersecurity measures taken in these instances, but if there's insecurity, that would certainly be a problem. | ||
| There's no clear information as to how this data is being handled. | ||
| We are hearing reports in the media that things have been copied onto laptops or otherwise moved around, so it may not be in secure locations. | ||
| And as troubling as it is to have one person's information out there, to have millions and millions of people's data out there is very troubling. | ||
| I don't get Social Security, but I sometimes do overpay my taxes and get a refund sent to my bank. | ||
| So my banking information is in there as well. | ||
| And I didn't choose to have them made available to a 19-year-old with an obscene online handle. | ||
| We'll go to John, Florence, Massachusetts, Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hello. | |
| I was wondering if you were as outraged when John Kerry was an unelected, unvetted official for his climax are going around the world entering future climate agreements. | ||
| I also, and he wouldn't appear before Congress when they subpoenaed him. | ||
| And I'm also wondering, where were all the Democrats and everybody when Biden opened the border? | ||
| And the Supreme Court was controlled by Democrats for 50 years, and you guys didn't have any problem with when you won every case and got every side of the coin that you possibly could. | ||
| It was heads, you win, tails, they lose. | ||
| So I'm just curious how all that happened. | ||
| And Biden didn't follow. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Is that what the D stands for? | ||
| It's not Democrat. | ||
| It's different, right? | ||
| Because when Biden went against the law over and over and over, trying to do these student loans and getting struck down by the Supreme Court, he just kept going against it. | ||
| But yet when they told him he couldn't do something on the border, he didn't try again and let it go for four years. | ||
| That was clearly a lie, as we've seen President Trump shut down the border. | ||
| And as for Doge, you're all worried about that. | ||
| It started under Obama, and he had a bunch of tech bros, kids working for him that were 20, 25 years old. | ||
| So stop being an ageist and talking about young people. | ||
| They can't do things. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| All right, John, we'll get a response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in terms of the Supreme Court, it's had a Republican majority since 1969. | |
| So I'm not sure what those 50 years you're referring to are, but it has been Republican controlled for a very long time and currently has a 6-3 Republican majority. | ||
| As far as President Biden's student loans, the Student Loan Act is legislation is quite complicated. | ||
| He invoked one part of it to forgive student loans. | ||
| The Supreme Court said literally he might be right, but that that was just too big a stretch for the provision that he used or too expansive an action for the provision that he used. | ||
| He then used a different provision. | ||
| He didn't defy the court. | ||
| And when lower courts raised questions about the new provision he used, they obeyed the court orders and did not make the forgiveness. | ||
| Clay in Wisconsin, a Republican. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I believe that Biden wants, the Biden administration and Democrats want political decisions and not constitutional decisions. | ||
| That's why they promised to pack the court or overrule the filibuster. | ||
| The difference between the student loan forgiveness, the Supreme Court deemed that it was Congress's right to spend that kind of money, not the president. | ||
| And the president continued to go to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Like I said, he doesn't want a constitutional decision. | ||
| I love the fact that Trump is questioning and driving some of these ways these institutions are paid for. | ||
| And hopefully the Supreme Court will decide some of these in the near future. | ||
| So thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Well, just to be clear, I have never supported getting rid of the filibuster. | ||
| I've written in the Washington Post and other places about how stupid I thought the Democrats were to undermine the filibuster and how delighted I was that they failed to do so. | ||
| So if your point is the filibuster is important, I could not agree with you more. | ||
| We'll go to Puerto Rico Democratic caller. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| My question is, should we be worried if President Trump will in fact try to undermine the three branches of the government, like judicial and whatnot, with more executive orders since he tried to, since he said, don't stop the courts. | ||
| He's not, he said, come and try and stop me. | ||
| Should we be worried? | ||
| I have a great deal of confidence in our Supreme Court. | ||
| I think at the moment we have nine serious justices who are trying to do their jobs as best they understand it. | ||
| They don't always agree with one another or with me, but I think the court will take this matter very seriously. | ||
| And where the president is violating the law or the Constitution, I believe they'll rein him in. | ||
| Richard is in Brooklyn and Independent. | ||
| Hi, Richard. | ||
| Your question or comment here for our guest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I have a question, two questions for your guests. | ||
| And what I want to know, is this a democracy or is it a constitutional republic? | ||
| Because the last time I checked it, this is supposed to be a constitutional republic, not a democracy. | ||
| And the second thing is, is it lawful for the Doge agency to do what it's doing to delve into people's personal information, allegedly from what they've been saying? | ||
| Is it lawful for these individuals to do that? | ||
| And what kind of recourse, if it's not lawful, can the people take? | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| All right, Richard. | ||
| David Super. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there is potential recourse. | |
| Indeed, there's already litigation about access to the personal information that people have. | ||
| Courts can absolutely require that all copies that have been made be deleted. | ||
| That's a fairly common order in privacy cases. | ||
| We can hope that they will get it done in time. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| But I am confident that we will have resolutions in the courts that will bring back the power of the law. | ||
| As to the first question, we are a constitutional republic with democratic selection of our officials, but part of being a constitutional republic is that we have laws and we don't simply go with whoever won the last election, but we go through an orderly process of lawmaking and discourse. | ||
| We'll go down to Tampa, Florida. | ||
| Tom is a Democrat watching there. | ||
| Hi, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you very much for taking my call. | ||
| My question is, especially in light of what you just said about some of these executive orders have broken the law. | ||
| Well, if they go to the courts and even go up to the Supreme Court, who is going to enforce the laws? | ||
| Because it seems like he's, just like what happened in New York last night, he's completely taken control of the Justice Department, and the Justice Department is the one engaged with enforcing the laws. | ||
| If someone breaks them, how are we going to resolve that if he refuses to listen to the courts? | ||
| The courts have a number of means of taking care of this, if necessary. | ||
| No president has ever defied a court order. | ||
| There have been some presidents that have failed to comply because of incompetence, and the courts have dealt with that very severely. | ||
| At one point, an executive agency wasn't allowed to use its email until it came into compliance with a court order. | ||
| So I think there are ways of doing that. | ||
| The Justice Department is now loyal to the president, as they should be, since he is the president. | ||
| But they're also officers of the court with sworn oaths to uphold the law and the Constitution. | ||
| And I'm confident that they will honor their oaths when court orders come down against them. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's hear from Dominique in Germantown, Maryland, an independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| So my question is generally just in regards to what are the legal ramifications and guardrails for if he continues to decide to attack everybody and everything that rules against him as far as the judges are concerned and just in regards to the judicial check of power that's supposed to happen. | ||
| And does and how might the ruling that came last year sometimes that from the Supreme Court stating that he has this immunity for things that are done while he's in office, does that play a role in any way in the legal ramifications that could possibly happen? | ||
| Like, could he do anything or could he ignore a ruling in any way that might trigger that? | ||
| Like, okay, in normal circumstances, it would be something that he could get in trouble for. | ||
| And because of that ruling, now, you know, he has this freedom to just do what he wants and act like a king. | ||
| Well, throughout this country's history, we have never prosecuted a president for things that they've done in office. | ||
| We came fairly close with Mr. Nixon, but President Ford pardoned him, and that ended the discussion. | ||
| We've never seen criminal prosecution as part of our checks and balances system. | ||
| We've kept the government stable for over 200 years without it. | ||
| So I don't think the Supreme Court's decision last summer, although I believe it was rather badly reasoned, it's really not a factor in all of this. | ||
| The question is whether the president is going to be ordered to comply with the law. | ||
| If he is, those orders will extend to the people working for him as well. | ||
| And the courts will, I'm sure, not take action against Mr. Trump, but they will take action against officials that defy court orders. | ||
| On these injunctions put forth by judges on the president's actions. | ||
| Mike Lee, senator from Utah, Republican, puts on X, I've been thinking about ways to hold the judicial insurrectionists accountable. | ||
| Perhaps we need a law providing that when someone seeks a nationwide injunction against the government, it must go to a three-judge district court with a direct appeal to the Supreme Court. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think that's a bad idea. | |
| I think getting this to the Supreme Court on major constitutional questions is a pretty good idea. | ||
| These are obviously important cases, and a three-judge district court makes a lot of sense to me. | ||
| We've done that in the past. | ||
| Give us the history there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For a long time, we had three-judge district courts for any challenge to the constitutionality of a law of the United States. | |
| If you filed that kind of a case, it would go to a three-judge court, and again, it could be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. | ||
| There were too many of those cases, so we cut it back, and now it applies only in certain voting rights cases, a few other very specialized things. | ||
| But Senator Lee makes a good point that these are important cases and that they may deserve more treatment. | ||
| Joseph, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Greta, how are you? | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I just got a couple things to say. | ||
| I don't want to insult your guests, but it's people like him from Georgetown and in that city where you are that think everybody else in the country is stupid. | ||
| You're talking about people's rights being violated because they're looking for fraud and abuse and possibly criminal kickbacks. | ||
| Two years ago, they were going to put the guys that I voted for in jail for bookkeeping error. | ||
| That was okay. | ||
| They went to Melania Trump's son's closet for documents that he had every right to be, to have because he was president after he left the White House. | ||
| And he was going to declassify them. | ||
| That was okay. | ||
| But Elon Musk is looking for abuses and criminal kickbacks, possibly. | ||
| Congress approved money to go to USAD, but they didn't approve money going to people in Guatemala. | ||
| All right, Joseph, I'm going to jump in. | ||
| David Super, your response to that caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't think it's useful to relitigate the Trump legal matters that happened before. | |
| Mr. Musk does a huge business with the government, and he's not the right person to be looking for conflicts of interest because he has them himself. | ||
| There are mechanisms in place, there are officials, and unfortunately, President Trump has fired 18 inspectors general whose job is precisely to look for waste fraud and abuse and who have the expertise and the staff to do that. | ||
| So I'm not persuaded that this is a search for fraud because President Trump has disabled the best mechanism to get at it. | ||
| We'll leave the conversation there. | ||
| David Super, law professor at Georgetown University Law Center. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| Joining us next is Steve Moore, longtime economic advisor to President Trump and founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. | ||
| We'll dive into the President's announcement yesterday to impose global reciprocal tariffs and his overall economic agenda. | ||
| Before we get to that, though, we want to bring you live to remarks by the Vice President Jee De Vance before the Munich Security Conference. | ||
| Our full coverage of his remarks will be on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| We want to listen in now and show you a little bit of what he's saying to that audience. | ||
| I hope that's not the last bit of applause that I get, but we gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. | ||
| And normally, we mean threats to our external security. | ||
| I see many great military leaders gathered here today. | ||
| But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it's important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense, the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor. | ||
| And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America. | ||
| Now, I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. | ||
| He warned that if things don't go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany, too. | ||
| Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. | ||
| For years, we've been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. | ||
| Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy. | ||
| But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we're holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. | ||
| And I say ourselves because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. | ||
| We must do more than talk about democratic values. | ||
| We must live them. | ||
| Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. | ||
| And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. | ||
| Were they the good guys? | ||
| Certainly not. | ||
| And thank God they lost the Cold War. | ||
| They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty. | ||
| The freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. | ||
| As it turns out, you can't mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can't force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. | ||
| And we believe those things are certainly connected. | ||
| And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners. | ||
| I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content. | ||
| Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action. | ||
| I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder. | ||
| And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief. | ||
| And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. | ||
| A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. | ||
| After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. | ||
| Now the officers were not moved. | ||
| Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility. | ||
| He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution. | ||
| Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person, but no. | ||
| This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. | ||
| Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime. | ||
| In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat. | ||
| And in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. | ||
| Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China, our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth. | ||
| So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. | ||
| And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that. | ||
| In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. | ||
| And under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree. | ||
| Now, we're at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up canceled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbors. | ||
| Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. | ||
| But I'd ask my European friends to have some perspective. | ||
| You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. | ||
| We certainly do. | ||
| You can condemn it on the world stage even. | ||
| But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with. | ||
| Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear. | ||
| And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. | ||
| Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organizers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. | ||
| Now, again, we don't have to agree with everything or anything that people say, but when people represent, when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them. | ||
| Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or even worse, win an election. | ||
| Now, this is a security conference, and I'm sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target. | ||
| And that's great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. | ||
| We don't think you hear this term, burden sharing, but we think it's an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger. | ||
| But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don't know what it is that we are defending in the first place? | ||
| I've heard a lot already in my conversations, and I've had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. | ||
| I've heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that's important. | ||
| But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you're defending yourselves for. | ||
| What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? | ||
| And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. | ||
| Vice President JD Vance speaking at the Munich Security Conference this morning. | ||
| If you want to continue to listen to what he has to say, you can go over to C-SPAN too. | ||
| Joining us this morning at our desk is Steve Moore. | ||
| He's the founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a former senior economic advisor to President Trump. | ||
| Mr. Moore, let's begin with the work that happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. | ||
| The House Budget Committee passed the budget, which is the framework for a reconciliation proposal, meaning a simple majority in the Senate. | ||
| They passed their version of it. | ||
| It differs from the Senate. | ||
| Compare the two. | ||
| Well, first of all, thank you for having me on C-SPAN. | ||
| I love C-SPAN and love the job you do. | ||
| Listen, this is going to be a long process. | ||
| We're just getting started with this because Congress has to pass both a budget in terms of how much we're going to spend and then also accommodate this Trump tax cut that he wants to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. | ||
| So there's a big debate. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of your viewers have been following about whether it would be one beautiful bill, big, beautiful bill like Trump is talking about or two bills. | ||
| And that's complicated. | ||
| Some people in the Senate want two bills. | ||
| The House wants one bill. | ||
| But the main point I think people have to understand about this term reconciliation is that, as you just said, this is the one piece of legislation that only requires 51 votes in the Senate, not 60, you know, because of the filibuster rules. | ||
| So it's critical for Trump getting his budget passed and getting his tax cut passed. | ||
| I'm kind of ambivalent about whether you do it in one bill or two bills, but I do think the priority that I've been telling Congress is you've got to get this tax cut done. | ||
| I want to remind people that if failure is not an option here, if the tax bill is not passed by this fall, then everyone's taxes are going up and the average family is going to face a $3,000 tax increase. | ||
| And a lot of the wonderful things in that tax bill, and I think that the 2017 bill was quite an achievement, that would be essentially wiped out. | ||
| So we've got to get this done. | ||
| I think it's going to be a long process. | ||
| I think we'll be talking about this for six months. | ||
| And these are the first skirmishes in a long debate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The House Budget Committee approves this budget proposal along party lines. | ||
| Just be clear, it was because I was going to say that. | ||
| The budget committee passed it. | ||
| Oh, the budget committee, not the full house. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Not the full House. | ||
| We've got a ways to go, as you said, before that. | ||
| But here is the framework of this, according to the New York Times: $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, $4 trillion increase in the debt limit, and at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. | ||
| Here is where the party internally differs, because you've got the fiscal hawks who want that number in spending cuts to go to $2 trillion. | ||
| They want it bigger. | ||
| $300 billion in new spending on defense and immigration enforcement. | ||
| Those fiscal hawks are saying you cannot cut more in taxes unless you cut more in spending. | ||
| And Wiesen Means Chair Jason Smith has told his colleagues he needs more than $4.5 trillion in room to cover everything Republican lawmakers and President Trump wants to do on taxes. | ||
| Do you think that's a good idea when we face the amount of deficit that we face in this country? | ||
| Well, a couple things. | ||
| One thing I feel very strongly about, and by the way, our group is kind of leading the coalition of all the taxpayer groups and all the business groups to try to get this tax bill done. | ||
| I think the single highest priority is to make sure that we don't raise taxes on American families and businesses, that we remain competitive. | ||
| Now, you mentioned the $4 trillion estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that would, quote, cost the budget to pass this tax bill. | ||
| I firmly reject that. | ||
| These are the same people who said that the tax cut when we passed it in 2017 would cost $2 trillion. | ||
| And so far, actually, if you compare how much revenue has come in versus what their prediction was, they were off by about $2 trillion. | ||
| So my point is, I completely reject that $4 trillion number. | ||
| I think it's outrageous. | ||
| I think here's the problem. | ||
| They're not taking into account the positive effect that tax cut has on the economy. | ||
| And if you take into account what's called the dynamic effects of this, I think it'll be much smaller. | ||
| So, by the way, this is a big issue because Republicans in the Senate are saying we should just score this as the current policy. | ||
| In other words, the current policy is these tax cuts are in place. | ||
| We shouldn't say this is going to cost anything to extend the current bill. | ||
| I think it would be extremely damaging to the economy if we don't pass the tax cut. | ||
| And I reject the $4 trillion number. | ||
| I think it's going to essentially pay for itself because it's going to grow the economy. | ||
| Washington Post editorial, Republicans risk repeating Biden's fiscal mistakes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No politician wants to make the painful choices that serious deficit reduction requires. | ||
| So let's review why they're necessary. | ||
| Since the pandemic, America's debt-to-GDP ratio has leaped from an already painful 79.2 percent of gross domestic product to almost 100 percent. | ||
| You read that right. | ||
| The United States now owes its creditors nearly the total value of all the goods and services Americans produce in a year. | ||
| If we don't put our finances on a sustainable footing, debt service costs will squeeze out other policy priorities, especially if the bond market begins to wonder whether all this debt will really get repaid. | ||
| So why? | ||
| How do you respond to that? | ||
| I mean, is President Trump at risk of making the same fiscal mistakes? | ||
| Well, first of all, I mean, it's a little rich for the Washington Post to write that. | ||
| I mean, I've been writing that for the last five or six years because Joe Biden increased the debt by $7 trillion. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act, the Build Back Better bill, they just blarded up massive amounts of spending that we didn't need. | ||
| I do think that Joe Biden will go down in history as our most financially irresponsible president in history. | ||
| But given that, you know, we absolutely are at a huge hole, and it is unsustainable. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| And I've been talking about this, Greta, for 40 years. | ||
| I've been coming on C-SPAN a long time. | ||
| We do have a spending problem in Washington. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| I think everybody agrees with that. | ||
| The spending is out of control. | ||
| We have to put caps on government spending. | ||
| This is why what Doge is doing is so incredibly important, pointing out the fact that we could probably spend $2 trillion less, and most Americans wouldn't even miss that spending if we could just get rid of the redundancy and the fraud and the abuse. | ||
| So as I see it, it's a two-pronged process. | ||
| First, we have to make sure we have an economic growth policy that expands our economy. | ||
| And second of all, we have to get control of government spending. | ||
| Now, I want to make one point really clear, because this is really critical in understanding the budget. | ||
| Those numbers that you're talking about and the Washington Post are talking about, if you look at the forecasts that the Congressional Budget Office makes, they're estimating that the U.S. economy over the next 10 years will grow at 1.7 percent per year. | ||
| Well, that's pathetic. | ||
| We can grow much, much faster than that. | ||
| The average growth rate of the U.S. economy over the last 75 years has been about 3 to 3.5 percent. | ||
| So, why is this important? | ||
| If you take that forecast and put in 3 percent growth, not 1.7 percent growth, in other words, you grow the economy faster, then you know what happens to that curve that you're talking about? | ||
| It starts to bend down. | ||
| And the economy grows faster than the debt, and that's the critical thing. | ||
| So, what is my point? | ||
| We have to grow the economy faster. | ||
| There's no way we're ever going to get this debt under control if we're growing at 1.7 percent. | ||
| And I guarantee you, Trump is hyper-focused on that. | ||
| If it increases economic growth, it's a good thing to do. | ||
| If it doesn't increase economic growth, we shouldn't. | ||
| So, tariffs increase economic growth. | ||
| So, I'm a free trade guy, as I think you know, Greta, and I do believe that free trade has been a huge, huge benefit to the United States. | ||
| I was a student of Milton Friedman, maybe the greatest economist of the last century. | ||
| And Milton Friedman taught us, and so did Adam Smith, by the way. | ||
| Let's go back 200 years, that the term comparative advantage, which is huge in economics, which means I'll keep this very simple. | ||
| If Brazil makes really good coffee beans and the United States makes really good microchips, then we should sell microchips to Brazil, and Brazil should sell coffee to us. | ||
| And so trade, international trade is absolutely critical to global economic growth and prosperity. | ||
| And I'm opposed, for example, to Donald Trump's steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs because I think the evidence is pretty clear that when we put those into effect, what happened was we did save some steel and aluminum jobs, a few thousand, but the evidence shows pretty clearly we also lost jobs, for example, in automobile manufacturing, in construction, and so on, because steel and aluminum were more expensive. | ||
| So protectionist tariffs, I oppose. | ||
| What's really interesting is what Trump announced yesterday, Greta, which is this idea of reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| And what he's saying there, and I'm still kind of getting my arms around this, but I think I support it. | ||
| What he's saying to these other countries is we in the United States have the lowest tariffs in the world. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| Maybe there's a few smaller companies, but among all the major trading countries. | ||
| So as Trump is saying to Canada and Mexico, and he's saying this to China and Japan, your tariffs are up here, we're down here. | ||
| Either you lower your tariffs so we have fair trade to the level we have, or we're going to raise ours up to the level you have in a reciprocal way. | ||
| Now, in a strange sort of way, first of all, I believe that Trump is going to prevail on this. | ||
| I think a lot of these other countries will be forced to lower their tariffs on the things that we produce and want to sell abroad to create more jobs in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and so on. | ||
| And so he's using this leverage that the United States has to force other countries to lower their tariffs. | ||
| Now, it's a risky game because if we raise our tariffs on them, they may say, well, we're going to raise, you know, we don't want to see a trade war. | ||
| But I'm pretty convinced and persuaded that because the United States is the alpha male economy, every country in the world has to trade with the United States. | ||
| That gives us a leverage over these countries. | ||
| So I think this is going to work out. | ||
| And I think in the end of the day, believe it or not, that Trump's threat of reciprocal tariffs will lead to lower tariffs around the world, not higher. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's get off. | ||
| Let's see what our viewers have to say. | ||
| Milton in Philadelphia, Democratic Columbia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I'd like to make a couple points here. | ||
| One, you know, your figures are way off base there. | ||
| One, let's look at the 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| Now, what happened was that you had these massive tax cuts. | ||
| Trump added $8 trillion to the deficit. | ||
| These big corporations went out, got these tax cuts, and instead of reinvesting that money back into hiring new workers or whatever, they took that money and they engaged in stock buybacks. | ||
| Then you had AT ⁇ T. | ||
| They got all that money. | ||
| And guess what they did? | ||
| They gave out a few bonuses. | ||
| Then a few months after getting the tax cuts, they announced they're going to lay off massive employees. | ||
| Now, as far as trade deficits, deficits never work. | ||
| When Trump instituted his tariffs against China, guess what ended up happening? | ||
| China stopped buying farm products, right? | ||
| The farmers heard it, and the government had to come in and give them billion dollars in aid. | ||
| That even added more money to the deficit. | ||
| And tariffs only causes more inflation. | ||
| So I don't understand how you could criticize Biden for his economic policies when Trump policies gave us even more debt. | ||
| All right, Milton, let's get a response. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there is a bit of historical revisionism going on there. | ||
| First of all, that by early 2020, after three years of the Trump tax cuts, the U.S. economy was absolutely booming. | ||
| We were in one of the great booms of all time. | ||
| What caused the economy to collapse, as everyone knows, was COVID. | ||
| And we made, look, everybody agrees we made major, major mistakes in shutting down our economy. | ||
| We never, never, never should have done that. | ||
| We never can allow that to happen again, where we shut down our schools and our churches and our businesses, a catastrophic mistake that didn't save lives. | ||
| But it also torpedoed the economy. | ||
| But before COVID hit, we had a great, great economy under Trump, in no small part because of the tax cuts. | ||
| The idea that Trump is responsible for the deficit, yeah, clearly. | ||
| I mean, there's no question. | ||
| I'm not here to tell you that Republicans are physical saints because they're not. | ||
| Both parties love to spend way too much money. | ||
| We have an overspending problem in Washington. | ||
| I think we can all agree on that. | ||
| But on the idea that the tax cut caused the deficit, it simply isn't true. | ||
| That the revenues are higher today with the tax cut than CBO said they would have been if we didn't cut taxes. | ||
| So we're doing fine on the revenues. | ||
| It's just that we're spending way too much money, and that's what we have to attack, in my opinion. | ||
| Wall Street Journal editorial board, Trump's tariff stress test. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They write. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley this week warned that Mr. Trump's threatened 25% across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada, quote, would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we've never seen. | ||
| Mr. Trump's response, teased tariffs on autos to stitch the hole. | ||
| The better course is to negotiate bilateral trade deals, which is what China is doing. | ||
| Mr. Trump's tariff threats encourage other countries to get closer to Beijing. | ||
| U.S. businesses are huffing and puffing, but Xi Jinping is smiling. | ||
| So, Greta, you may know that I worked for 10 years on the editorial of the Wall Street Journal, so I very rarely disagree with their editorials. | ||
| And look, I'm a free trader. | ||
| I do agree there are risks to the tariffs Trump is talking about. | ||
| But I want to go back to this idea of reciprocal tariffs, because that is bilateral. | ||
| You know, they're saying, well, they should go back to bilateral trade deals. | ||
| That's exactly what Trump is doing. | ||
| He's going to China. | ||
| He's going to Mexico. | ||
| He's going to these other countries one by one and saying, you have to lower your tariffs on the things that we make. | ||
| We want a fairer trading system where we both reduce our tariffs in a way that doesn't hurt American workers. | ||
| And I think most Americans would agree that's a good strategy. | ||
| Greg Ipp, though, argues in the Wall Street Journal this morning. | ||
| Greg Ipp in the Wall Street Journal in his column argues though that this tariff strategy along with the tax cuts on Capitol Hill is going to be a problem for President Trump and his promise to reduce inflation. | ||
| He says the aggregate boost to inflation from tariffs is likely to be small and from tax cuts smaller still, especially if they are offset with spending cuts. | ||
| The problem is that Trump has inherited inflation above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target and his agenda risks keeping it there, making it harder to bring down interest rates. | ||
| So I want people to remember, I mean I laugh when people say, well, Trump's policies are going to cause inflation. | ||
| That's exactly what they said in 2017 when he became president. | ||
| So let's look at what happened. | ||
| We had basically the lowest inflation rates in history. | ||
| In fact, the inflation rate under Donald Trump in the four years that he was in office, and these are just the facts, was 1.9 percent. | ||
| So there was no inflation under it. | ||
| In fact, the inflation rate in Trump's first term was below the Fed target. | ||
| 1.9 is below 2 percent. | ||
| That's point number one. | ||
| Point number two, Trump's policies are anti-inflationary. | ||
| So let me give you an example. | ||
| There's a reason they call economists like myself supply-side economists. | ||
| What we want to do is expand the productive capacity of the United States. | ||
| So we produce more and more goods and services. | ||
| And it's very simple, Greta. | ||
| If the economy produces more apples, what happens to the price of apples? | ||
| They fall. | ||
| They fall. | ||
| So we want to produce more output, which will cause prices to fall, not rise. | ||
| And that is the kind of key to what we are doing here. | ||
| What that means is by deregulating the economy, which Trump wants to do, that's deflationary. | ||
| By producing more oil and gas and coal and American energy, that will be deflationary. | ||
| It'll mean gas prices will come down. | ||
| By cutting the budget and the excess of that in the budget, that is deflationary. | ||
| Now, I agree that if you, and by the way, the main thing is the tax cut is deflationary because it'll increase the amount that we produce in the country. | ||
| We believe that's the best way to solve the inflation problem. | ||
| But by the way, the Fed is also going to have to, look, I think this idea of cutting interest rates right now, and I disagree with President Trump on this, I don't see how we can cut rates right now when the latest report that just came out, what, two days ago, shows that the last three months we're on a 5% inflation track. | ||
| Now, that was three months that Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump. | ||
| All right, we'll go to John in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Republican. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Nice to hear from you, Stephen. | ||
| I've seen you many times and listened to you, and I really follow along with you on a lot of things, and I agree with you on a lot of things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I actually have two questions. | |
| One's real easy, but the Doge system that is currently going through the federal government right now, Congress is supposed to pass 12 appropriations, and I believe the Republicans were able to get that done last year, but Chuck Schumer wouldn't take it up. | ||
| But I don't think they've ever passed an appropriation prior to that for God knows how many years. | ||
| And therefore, all of the spending that's been done that he's freezing right now never really went through a constitutional process to be authorized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was all done through the massive bills that they did to keep the government shutting down. | |
| The second question I have for you is, we all know about NAFTA and how our manufacturing in the United States has disappeared since NAFTA. | ||
| But I heard about a year ago, and I only heard it in one place, and I can't find it, and I can't remember. | ||
| And that was that the European Union, after NAFTA went into effect, went to their hedge fund or passed a tax law over there for their hedge funds and their so-called billionaires, that any income they derived outside of the European Union would not be taxed. | ||
| And so they started coming to the United States and buying our companies up, i.e. Anheuser-Busch and Electrolux and a few others. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I had a friend who went through it. | |
| All right, John, I think we've got to leave it there. | ||
| We'll get a response to both of those. | ||
| Well, appreciate your call. | ||
| Appreciate the kind words, sir. | ||
| So two quick issues that the caller brought up. | ||
| Number one is, I think, oh, the budget process. | ||
| And this is a big issue that you'll be covering over the next nine months for sure. | ||
| So the question arises whether the president has the authority. | ||
| There was something that every president from George Washington through Richard Nixon had, which was called the empowerment power, where the president could say, let's say Congress appropriated $100 million for a program. | ||
| And the president said, well, we don't have to spend $100 million. | ||
| We can spend $80 million. | ||
| And prior to Richard Nixon, presidents had that authority. | ||
| I believe, just like a CEO of a company, if you allocate $10 million to build a plant, it only costs $8 million. | ||
| You don't spend the whole $10 million. | ||
| You would save the money. | ||
| And so that's going to come, I believe the Supreme Court is going to have to make a decision on this, whether President Trump has the authority to not spend money that's already been appropriated. | ||
| And I hope that the court decides that just like a good CEO of a company, if you don't need to spend all the money, you shouldn't. | ||
| So that's going to be a big deal, and we'll see how that turns out. | ||
| But I have to say, I am completely supportive of what Doge is doing. | ||
| I think the American people are really happy about the fact that we finally have somebody looking up under the hood of how government money is being spent and how wasteful and redundant and inefficient it is. | ||
| And to my Democratic friends who are watching this show, I want to make a point. | ||
| If you believe in a big government and you think the government can help people by giving people benefits and these kinds of things, and we all want a good and efficient government, then waste and fraud are the enemies of good government. | ||
| And I don't understand why Elizabeth Warren is running around saying this is a terrible thing. | ||
| No, getting rid of the redundancy and inefficiency and waste is a good thing to do if you believe in good government. | ||
| Now, second of all, on NAFTA, I'll just make a quick point on this. | ||
| I'm a big supporter of North America being a big free trade zone. | ||
| This was Ronald Reagan's vision going back 40-some years ago, where basically we have Canada, Mexico, and the United States as one trade zone. | ||
| I think that was a very good vision. | ||
| It was supported by Reagan. | ||
| It was supported by Bush. | ||
| You know what president signed in the law? | ||
| NAFTA? | ||
| It was Bill Clinton. | ||
| So it was a bipartisan agreement. | ||
| And I don't want to see trade wars with Mexico and Canada because they're our allies. | ||
| I just want to note for our viewers, Rosa DeLaure, who's the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee in the House, notes in a piece written in the New York Times today that Antonin Scalia in Train V City of New York said that the court proved Nixon wrong on the powers of empoundment. | ||
| Empoundment is a fanciful attempt to give the president the powers of a king, said Scalia, and it would be a disaster for our republic. | ||
| Well, you know what president in history used the empowerment power the most? | ||
| This is a kind of, I bet you probably don't because most people don't know this. | ||
| It was Franklin Roosevelt. | ||
| I didn't know I was getting quizzed this morning. | ||
| You're pretty good on these, I have to say. | ||
| So Franklin, and this is a good historical lesson. | ||
| So what happened is during Franklin Roosevelt's president, we had the New Deal and all these social programs that we created. | ||
| We can have a debate about whether those worked or not. | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| But the point is, then on December 7, 1941, we have Pearl Harbor. | ||
| And all of a sudden, we have to transition to a wartime economy. | ||
| And so what Franklin Roosevelt did, thank God, is he impounded funds, at that time billions of dollars of funds that had been allocated for domestic social programs, and he reallocated that money to the national defense. | ||
| And that was critical to winning World War II. | ||
| So my point is, it was Democrats and Republican presidents who used the empowerment power in a very fiscally responsible way. | ||
| And I do believe, and I think most people would agree, the chief executive should have the authority not to spend money if we don't need to. | ||
| Why would you waste money if you don't have to? | ||
| All right, let's go to Germantown, Maryland. | ||
| Joanna, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, first of all, we're not in a world war right now. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| All you did was build a straw man to justify what Trump is doing. | ||
| When Trump was in office the first time, he added $8 trillion to our debt slash deficit. | ||
| Okay, more than any, all previous presidents combined. | ||
| That is it. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Let me finish. | ||
| That's a choice. | ||
| We're letting you go ahead, Joanna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he started to interrupt me. | |
| Okay, on top of that, I was reading an analysis of this budget that the Congress put out yesterday. | ||
| Lots and lots of ginormous credits and tax breaks for large corporations and the very wealthy. | ||
| Everybody else got crumbs. | ||
| Well, eviscerating things like Medicaid that takes care of poor people. | ||
| Of course, poor people are the enemy, aren't they? | ||
| They're just terrible, horrible human beings, and we shouldn't do anything for them. | ||
| The idea of impoundment under Trump has nothing to do. | ||
| I've gotten all disbobulated now since you brought up the FDR thing. | ||
| It's completely different. | ||
| Completely different. | ||
| But this idea, the thing I have found about Republicans, the only time you're ever concerned about the deficit slash debt, the only time you're ever concerned is when Democrats are in office. | ||
| All right, Joanna, we'll take your points. | ||
| So a couple points. | ||
| I mean, yes, we spent way too much money under Trump as well. | ||
| And I think this woman is correct on that. | ||
| And I was complaining, you know, I'd go see the president. | ||
| I'd say we're spending too much money. | ||
| But it's important to realize that the deficit was coming down, and then we were hit with COVID, and we shut down the whole American economy. | ||
| So that meant that we had to have this massive government spending. | ||
| And as I said before, we all agree that it was a huge mistake to shut down our economy. | ||
| And that added enormously to our debt, and it put us in a bigger, deeper hole. | ||
| But you have to grow the economy. | ||
| I just want to make this point over and over again. | ||
| We cannot solve this debt problem unless we have more economic growth. | ||
| And that means deregulating the economy, cut taxes in strategic ways that brings jobs and factories back to the United States. | ||
| It means let's produce every barrel of oil and gas and produce our nuclear power, everything we can, so we're not dependent on foreigners. | ||
| If we do these things, I think we can turn the economy around. | ||
| Because you're right, I am worried about inflation rearing its ugly head again because of the massive amount of spending. | ||
| One other quick point on Medicaid. | ||
| Just so people understand what we're talking about, what we're saying is if you are able-bodied, if you're not disabled, and you have the capacity to work, then you're going to get food stamps or Medicaid or other government benefits. | ||
| You have to have a job. | ||
| And I think that's something 90% of Americans would agree with. | ||
| And if you can't find a job, you're in a training program. | ||
| The idea we're just going to give people money, and if that sounds like a radical idea, it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who enacted welfare reform, and it was an enormous success. | ||
| And then what happened is we got rid of the job, you know, the work requirements. | ||
| And all Trump is saying is you got to get a job. | ||
| And the jobs are out there for people to get. | ||
| And I think most people would say, yeah. | ||
| We'll go to Gridley, California. | ||
| Sheila, an independent. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| This isn't very well formulated, but my question has to do with how policies are set, like how the Heritage Foundation gets their ideas. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if, and I don't know how to explain where I got this idea, but if our government, if the United States of America is somehow propped up or kept strong by being enmeshed with monarchies historically from all over the world or from maybe just from Britain, | ||
| and I don't really understand my question even fully, but I do have a sense that there's more going on than most people notice. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let me try to tackle this. | ||
| Thank you for calling, by the way. | ||
| You know, we've been saying all the problems that America has, and we do have big problems. | ||
| But it is also true that, I mean, what has happened in the last 40 years in this country has been the most amazing technological revolution. | ||
| It is true we're running these enormous deficits, but we have by far the biggest, strongest economy in the world, no question about that. | ||
| And we have some of the most brilliant, brilliant minds in this country, and we have some of the greatest businessmen. | ||
| And what Trump has done, I think, and this is long overdue, is said, let's bring up some of these super smart businessminds to Washington and figure out how we can get rid of all the excessive. | ||
| Look, we're spending $7 trillion a year right now, and we did a study at Unleashed Prosperity where you just asked the average 1,000 people in a poll, how much of the federal budget do you think is wasted out of 30 dollars spent? | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The average answer was 37 cents out of every dollar is wasted. | ||
| And I think that's, you know, I would say maybe 30 to 35 percent. | ||
| But what that's telling you is the American people are onto this, that there's so much fraud, there's so much, you know, self-serving programs. | ||
| There's a reason why, by the way, three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in Washington, D.C. Because the money doesn't, it comes into Washington, but doesn't go back out. | ||
| My point is, by bringing in really smart people like Elon Musk, who's a genius, and saying, look, you've done this in private companies. | ||
| Tell us how we can save money. | ||
| Why are we spending $10 billion, not million, $10 billion a year paying rent on empty office buildings? | ||
| I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Why are we spending all this money on USAID, which for the last 30 years has not led to any international development anywhere? | ||
| If programs don't work, we should get rid of them. | ||
| Mr. Moore, can you find enough waste, fraud, and abuse, though, to tackle the nation's debt without looking at Social Security and Medicare? | ||
| So I think that the American people are very clear on this. | ||
| Before we start talking about cutting these, you know, their Medicare benefits and Social Security benefits, which I'm against, by the way. | ||
| I'm against doing that. | ||
| Now, I do think we can find huge amounts of, I mean, the government's own auditors have told us that they found $200 billion, again, not million, $200 billion of fraudulent payments under unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security. | ||
| $200 billion. | ||
| Why should we cut people's benefits when we should hunt down these criminals? | ||
| By the way, a lot of those people who got the benefits, they don't even live in the United States, for goodness sakes. | ||
| People hacked into the system and found how they could steal money from the taxpayers. | ||
| And I'm with, I think, the majority of Americans who say, before we start talking about cutting Social Security Medicare, why don't we go after the people who robbed the program? | ||
| So, yes, there's huge amounts of waste and fraud, and that will solve a big part of the problem. | ||
| All right, we'll go to Holyoke, Massachusetts. | ||
| John, Democratic caller. | ||
| John, quick question from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Give me the respect to not cut me off because you have a three or four second delay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You were talking about George Washington to Nixon, right? | ||
| What happened from George Washington to Nixon when there were already people here and they got genocide? | ||
| Number one. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| After Roosevelt came here and he signed the Great Deal, right? | ||
| What happened to the big corporations, right? | ||
| Here's another thing. | ||
| DeSantis tried to sue Disney. | ||
| Why couldn't DeSantis sue Disney? | ||
| Because it belonged to the monarchy. | ||
| We're a commonwealth of Great Britain. | ||
| Number two, here's another thing. | ||
| When Anthony C. Sutton wrote about how we were going to war and we were funding Hitler through Wall Street and all the big corporations and they were getting all the big tax breaks, right? | ||
| And all the big corporations, which were all Nazi corporations that came. | ||
| Okay, I'm just going to leave it there. | ||
| His overall point, though, about corporations and our economy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we have some of the greatest corporations in the world. | ||
| You know, we want America to be number one. | ||
| And, you know, you look at these amazing companies like Google and Apple and Amazon. | ||
| Do you know seven, the magnificent seven, those seven technology companies, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, blah, blah, blah, those companies, those seven companies have a bigger market value than every single company in Europe. | ||
| So we are so dominating in the technology sector, and that is a beautiful thing to see. | ||
| And look, I just want America to be the most prosperous place on earth and attacking our corporations. | ||
| And I hate corporate welfare, by the way. | ||
| I do not think it's the government's responsibility to give money to our companies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate that through tax breaks? | |
| Even tax breaks. | ||
| What I want is a low, flat-rate tax system that does not give special favors to anybody. | ||
| And, you know, my buddy Steve Forbes and Art Laffer have been talking about this for years. | ||
| I mean, we could lower our tax rates and then get rid of all those special interest provisions. | ||
| For example, why should corporations be able to write off their state and local taxes? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's just a giveaway to them. | ||
| Especially, think about this. | ||
| We have a policy today where General Motors can write off their state and local tax deductions, but the little auto repair shop down the street can't do that. | ||
| So yes, I'm very much in favor of getting rid of corporate welfare payments. | ||
| I wrote a book about this, by the way. | ||
| So I'm the biggest advocate of not letting the government give money to our corporations and companies. | ||
| Our viewers can learn more about Steve Moore, his books, if you go to committee to unleashprosperity.com. | ||
| He's the founder of that group, a former senior economic advisor to Mr. Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| As always, we appreciate the conversation. | ||
| I love C-SPAN. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're going to take a break here. | ||
| We're wrapping up today's Washington Journal with Open Forum. | ||
| If there's a public policy issue or political one on your mind, you can start dialing in. | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| But first, before we get to Open Forum, there are more than 60 new members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and we're going to meet many of them here on C-SPAN starting next week. | ||
| We'll hear them talk about their lives, why they ran their career path that led them to Congress as well. | ||
| You can watch our series with the new members of Congress all next week, beginning Monday at 9.30 Eastern Time p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN running through Saturday. | ||
| Here's a preview of what they had to say. | ||
| I started my career off actually as a welder. | ||
| I worked in a mining operation. | ||
| I went to trade school and I didn't go to college right after high school. | ||
| So, you know, my mother's family, they're all union labor, and that was kind of the route that I went was I went into the trades, had no interest in politics whatsoever. | ||
| I just liked building things and ended up going to college and majoring in government and international relations. | ||
| Ended up being pretty significantly affected by the events in 9-11, and that's what kind of pushed me towards that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'll tell you, you know, my dad used to say, do something even if it's wrong, but don't just stand there. | |
| And there's a work ethic in agriculture that I think Congress could learn a lot from. | ||
| And I think about what goes on back here. | ||
| Every, well, not every, but sometimes it feels like every politician you talk to back here has somebody to blame. | ||
| Oh, it's the other party's fault. | ||
| It's the other person's fault. | ||
| Well, I think about working for my dad at the store. | ||
| If I were to walk in and a job wasn't done that my dad had asked me to do, and my answer was, oh, it's Paul's fault, I can't imagine the look on his face. | ||
| And that's the problem with this town. | ||
| Everyone's telling you whose fault it is, and nobody's taking accountability to get something done. | ||
| At the end of the day, people want results. | ||
| They want communities that are safe, good education, good health care. | ||
| And we ought to be doing that work every day. | ||
| That's why I came to Washington. | ||
| It's what I intend to do. | ||
| I have absolutely no political experience whatsoever. | ||
| Nobody in my family so much has ever ran for dog catcher. | ||
| So I am certainly the first one to come through the political environment, to say the least. | ||
| But our family business is and was traffic signals, heavy highway electrical contracting. | ||
| My grandfather started the company in 1973 with a station wagon and a ladder tied to the roof. | ||
| And he was an IBW electrician and grew the company. | ||
| And in 2008, we got totally clobbered by the financial downturn and with banks, insurance, and bonding partners looking for a succession plan. | ||
| I was going to go to school in Philadelphia for construction management at Drexel University, but my grandparents said, Hey, we will sell you the company after you get a four-year college degree from a university of my acceptance. | ||
| University of Scranton checks that box. | ||
| And I always knew I'd be back into the family business. | ||
| I just didn't think it would be at the age of 19 as CFO. | ||
| But to whom much is given, much is required. | ||
| And it's certainly something that I took very seriously. | ||
| And the company grew 400% over a period of 12 years. | ||
| We went from 50 employees to 165, worked in, I think it's 19 different states now. | ||
| And now I'm just so incredibly excited to represent my home, my family's home in Washington, D.C. Watch our new members series all next week, starting Monday at 9:30 p.m. Eastern Time here on C-SPAN. | ||
| We are in an open forum here this morning. | ||
| Any public policy or political issue that's on your mind, we'll begin with some news out of the Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian President Zelensky telling reporters that President Trump has no ready-made plan to end the Ukraine war. | ||
| President Trump said that Mr. Zelensky would be meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Marco Rubio at the security conference. | ||
| JD Vance speaking earlier this morning to those attending the conference, we covered it on C-SPAN too. | ||
| You can find it on our website, c-span.org, or our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| Let's get to Rick, who's in Golden, Colorado, Republican. | ||
| Rick, we're in an open forum. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| What's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes. | ||
| You know, talking about budgets and this in the government, I think one thing that needs to be addressed in their process would be not to look for programs that were, and then what money it costs to do these programs. | ||
| I think they need to get to what corporations do, which is to say, on a yearly basis, they say, how much money do we have to spend? | ||
| And let's spend it on our highest priorities. | ||
| And they go down the list and say, you know, this is the top priority. | ||
| We'll spend this much on that program, this much on that second program, so on and so forth. | ||
| So we need to get to where we determine how much money we want to spend. | ||
| And the arguments between the Republicans and Democrats would be on what programs and how much you would spend on that. | ||
| I think that would be probably the first step and to try to get to a balanced budget, which is really what we need. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, the committees, both on the House and the Senate side, are taking up the budgets and this reconciliation plan. | ||
| And we covered the Senate budget proceedings here on C-SPAN this week. | ||
| And you can find that on our website, c-span.org, our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| House Budget Committee marked up their version. | ||
| They have one bill. | ||
| The Senate wants to do it in two pieces. | ||
| You can follow the debate here over the coming weeks and months here on C-SPAN as we cover gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House here on C-SPAN and over on C-SPAN 2 gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate. | ||
| Front page of the New York Times this morning, Kennedy wins slim approval in Health Post is their headline. | ||
| A prominent vaccine skeptic is what they say. | ||
| And the Washington Post, their headline, RFK Jr. anti-vaccine activist gets top health post. | ||
| And another headline for you from the nation's newspapers, this is the Washington Times. | ||
| Kennedy gets final approval to, quote, go wild. | ||
| New cabinet secretary vows to solve childhood chronic disease epidemic. | ||
| And then USA Today this morning, their headline, RFK Jr. will oversee the nation's health care. | ||
| He was confirmed by the Senate yesterday on a 52 to 48 vote, largely along party lines. | ||
| Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the only Republican to vote with Democrats in opposition. | ||
| Later on in the day yesterday, sworn in the Oval Office at the White House, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch doing the swearing in, delivering the swearing in to RFK Jr. as President Trump watched on. | ||
| And then also yesterday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Collins was confirmed to lead the department 72 to 28. | ||
| That included 19 Democrats in support for her. | ||
| And then Kash Patel, President Trump's pick to lead the FBI, the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted 12 to 10 along party lines to proceed with his nomination, and that will head then to the Senate floor. | ||
| Robin in Silver Spring, Maryland, Democratic caller. | ||
| Robin, we're an open forum. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yeah, thank you. | |
| The policy issue I wanted to talk about today is fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| And one of the things I'm noticing is that, you know, Elon Musk and Trump are accusing the federal government for a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse, which I'm sure there's some that we can find, and efficiency is necessary. | ||
| But I do want people to realize that some of the fraud that's happening is from Elon Musk himself and Trump himself. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed by Congress, has been frozen, even though the courts have said that it needs to be unfrozen and it's unconstitutional what they're doing, abusing the power of the president through the Empoundment Act. | ||
| And millions of people are not getting the money that they need. | ||
| Farmers, small business owners are now out to dry because the money that they were promised to build solar panels and to buy farm equipment are not going to be paid because Trump wants to save that money for his billionaire friends rather than letting the rural American small businesses get that money, which was already passed by Congress. | ||
| And Elon Musk also has created waste in the government by completely shutting down USAID. | ||
| And now there's $500 million of food from American farmers sitting in containers in Houston wasting away spoiling when we could actually do a good transition and notice where their waste is on. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| If we were actually doing things efficiently, then there would be a systematic approach to figuring out where the reductions need to happen rather than doing all these across the board cuts. | ||
| And the Office of Inspector General of 17 agencies have been fired and they have many, many recommendations for how the government can be efficient. | ||
| But when they reached out to the Dodge team, they did not respond back. | ||
| So, my point is that we need to look on both sides to see how fraud, waste, and abuse is happening and not just point the finger and look at ourselves and make sure that the things that Trump and Elon Musk are doing are actually not a smokescreen for efficiency and just deregulation and making things worse. | ||
| All right, Robin. | ||
| All right, let me go to Wayne, who's in Winter Haven, Florida, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| It's been interesting to hear from Mr. Moore and your previous guests. | ||
| I'm calling in particular to address what I believe is a culture issue because we're farmers and we harvest a lot of acres of row crops in Florida, particularly. | ||
| And I don't have one American citizen that we get all of our labor through the H-2A programs, which is very expensive, drives up costs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And, you know, we're trying to promote healthy foods and introduce better diet habits into children's lives, but we're driving up costs because we have to import labor to get it done. | |
| And I'm not, I don't know. | ||
| I haven't heard much about agriculture from the new administration. | ||
| I'm certainly anxious to hear their proposals. | ||
| Governor DeSantis raised our minimum wage to over $13 an hour, which I'm in favor of. | ||
| Everybody needs to make a living wage. | ||
| And California, the breadbasket of this country, had their minimum wage raised to over $20 an hour. | ||
| These are necessary, but then when people go to the grocery store and see the impact of what manual labor does to their food bill, they're not happy about it, but yet they won't allow young unemployed people. | ||
| It's almost taboo to have to work on a farm. | ||
| And when I was a child, I got to work on a farm, and I think it teaches you a lot of great lessons for life, etc. | ||
| And thanks again for taking my call. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Wayne, Winterhaven, Florida, Republican there. | ||
| Sean is in Leewood, Kansas, an Independent. | ||
| Hi, Sean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| So I just wanted to quickly talk about what I see as a few short-term benefits that we're trading off for long-term relationships in terms of the raising tariffs positions and also the repeal of the foreign corrupt practices or the pause on enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. | ||
| That's all I really had for today. | ||
| All right, Sean. | ||
| Front page of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| For those of you interested, the paper takes a look at the Trump's fortunes, Trump's Family's Bonanza. | ||
| And this is on the jump page. | ||
| They note that the First Lady was shopping a documentary around that would look at her serving as First Lady again. | ||
| She had shopped it to other companies when Amazon's CEO came to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| The first lady mentioned this to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | ||
| And shortly after that, the company offered $40 million for the documentary. | ||
| The First Lady's cut is more than 70% of the 40 million, according to people familiar with the matter. | ||
| And she is trying to shop around sponsorships for the film, starting at 10 million to prominent CEOs and billionaires who were at the inauguration. | ||
| This is from the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| They also look at the settlement that the president made with X over his lawsuit there. | ||
| His share of the $10 million settlement from Elon Musk agreed to this week is expected to go to him directly, according to people familiar with the matter. | ||
| Also, on ethics, they say that Trump has ramped up his retail efforts since eight years ago. | ||
| The Trump organization sells merchandise, including a $95 ornament with a 3D depiction of Mar-a-Lago and 550 gold Trump-branded bling clutch. | ||
| Trump also licenses his name to companies selling, for example, 100,000 18-karat gold, tour billion watch, and there are no requirements that those businesses disclose who is making the purchases. | ||
| The Trump organization, meanwhile, has been in talks to reclaim its hotel in D.C., the lease for which the Trumps sold in 2022 for $370 million. | ||
| The price of a membership initiation fee at Trump's Florida result hit one resort, hit $1 million in the months before the election, up from $200,000 in 2017. | ||
| It goes through other areas as well in this lengthy piece that starts on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Mary in Philadelphia and Independent. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow, after all of that that you just said from the Wall Street Journal, see, this is what happens because this man is masterful at throwing a bomb in the room and making everyone scatter. | |
| So I thought I had a concise question for you, but this is what happens. | ||
| It's like a big, huge Benn diagram of chaos. | ||
| And to quote him, he did say, and it's been on the record: chaos is my friend. | ||
| So that's what he has been creating. | ||
| And when we go back to talk about the deficit and cutting and how fabulous the tech bros are, I'd like to remind everybody that all those tech bros companies are global. | ||
| They're international companies. | ||
| And they're hiding here under the mantle of the United States of America for their protection. | ||
| And all these tech bros do not have the same protections in other countries. | ||
| So that's why they bend to the knee, as I understand Apple just did to China. | ||
| You know, they're allowed that they're not, they have to go by certain regulations in China that we don't require of them. | ||
| And everyone taught how fabulous they are. | ||
| And Mark Zuckerberg said to, when asked a question about, okay, with your AI program, and what are your employees going to do? | ||
| And his response was, oh, they can now all go crazy. | ||
| So, and listening to Bloomberg News two nights ago about an Elon on live with the World Economic Summit, I think. | ||
| It was shocking to me how he was telling people basically that smart people need to have more children and dumb people and his concept of who's smart and who's dumb and how AI is going to become 90% of the intelligence that they're going to rely upon. | ||
| So wake up, folks. | ||
| All right, Mary, Jan in Minneapolis, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Jan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I mean, I hear people are pretty upset, and I understand why. | ||
| I think it's pretty interesting that being a country of loss, suddenly we're no longer following constitutional law. | ||
| The Empowerments Act was instituted after President Nixon's problems. | ||
| And now funds are being spent that have been appropriated by the Congress to be used for specific programs that were negotiated last year. | ||
| Those funds are being clawed back to quote a member of the current administration. | ||
| Those funds were intended for specific purposes. | ||
| If there's fraud and mismanagement in the government, that needs to be prosecuted. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Jan, before you go, your reaction to Tina Smith, your senator, saying she won't seek reelection in 2026. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's disappointing. | |
| I think she's been trying to do a good job. | ||
| But I think the phenomenal lawlessness of this administration has discouraged truly dedicated people to leave. | ||
| For instance, the prosecutors in New York. | ||
| We have got to pay attention, people. | ||
| What about the prosecutors in New York? | ||
| What about them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, didn't six of them resign because the mayor of New York, the prosecution of him, is being used in a very manipulated fashion to force him to allow certain aspects of immigration to occur. | |
| This is not the country my parents died for. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And they were quoted as saying that the deal looked like a quid pro quo. | ||
| On Tina Smith deciding not to run for reelection from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. | ||
| Smith's announcement already created an early scramble among Minnesota Democrats. | ||
| Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan quickly announced she would run. | ||
| And Governor Tim Walz has not ruled out a bid. | ||
| Representative Elon Omar's team said she was considering a run herself. | ||
| And sources close to Representative Angie Craig and Secretary of State Steve Simon also said they're being encouraged to run. | ||
| On the New York Mayor and the Justice Department's actions, House Minority Leader in New York City Resident Hakeem Jeffries shared his thought on the Trump administration's decision to drop the criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. | ||
| Here's what he had to say yesterday on Capitol Hill. | ||
| What is clear is that the White House made a decision to dismiss the criminal charges pending against Mayor Adams without prejudice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Translation. | |
| It is the intention of the Trump administration to keep the current mayor on a short leash. | ||
| How the mayor responds to the White House's intentions is going to determine a lot about the political future of the current mayor of the city of New York. | ||
| That's the leader of the Democratic Party in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his colleague from New York, Congresswoman, says that New York Adams must be removed. | ||
| She said she is encouraging him to resign, echoing previous calls to remove him from leadership following his federal indictment on corruption charges. | ||
| Linda in North Carolina and Independent, Linda, good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling about the education issue. | ||
| I think the real problem is motivation. | ||
| And that comes from parents, but it often comes from the society. | ||
| And I think a large problem of that is the income disparity because kids go to school now and they hear about, you know, athletes and celebrities and people making billions of dollars. | ||
| That is not going to be you. | ||
| I'm sorry, kid. | ||
| That is not going to be you. | ||
| I mean, there is a rare chance it could be. | ||
| But, you know, like I have one grandson that is very good scholastically, but he's afraid to admit it because he'll become a nerd. | ||
| And that's not popular. | ||
| And it's not cool. | ||
| Now, there's some teachers that have the ability to make that light bulb go on at some point in your education. | ||
| That happens. | ||
| I remember the moment when it happened to me. | ||
| And those teachers should be encouraged and rewarded. | ||
| And there has to be, and in terms of getting rid of the Department of Education, there has to be the national testing to make sure that everybody in the country is up to a level of learning. | ||
| All right, Linda. | ||
| Linda, talking about education, we started there this morning on the Washington Journal, playing clips for you from yesterday's testimony of Linda McMahon. | ||
| She's President Trump's pick to serve as education secretary, and she answered questions from senators yesterday. | ||
| We covered the hearing, and you can watch it in its entirety if you go to C-span.org or online at UH or our free video mobile app, C-span now. | ||
| D is in Clarksville, Tennessee. | ||
| Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi D. We're an open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my question is, Elon Musk wanted the richest man. | |
| Why is he not hip at his home country, Africa? | ||
| He's from Africa, Africa is one of the poets country. | ||
| Yet he want to and put hisself inside America, but he's leaving his home country out. | ||
| Is he trying to turn America into Africa? | ||
| All right, D's thoughts. | ||
| We'll go to Barron Wisconsin, Henry Independent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| First of all, before I get to my main point, I wanted to ask of the producers of the Washington Journal uh, for the viewers at home, maybe if you could uh put the uh state or sorry, the party that the call is calling from, alongside their state. | ||
| That would be, sometimes they don't catch it, sometimes they do, but you know it would just be efficient for, you know, viewers just tuning in um. | ||
| But what I wanted to talk about was um, the situation with Doge, and I was. | ||
| I I was listening to the first two segments of today's Washington Journal and I was concerned, mostly because I live in a House OF UM people who are heavily in the UH Department OF Education. | ||
| So my concern was, you know our children got to learn. | ||
| You know they need to be properly taught mathematics. | ||
| They need to be properly taught foreign language. | ||
| They need to properly be taught about the squirrel that died on Donald Trump's head they need to talk about you know. | ||
| All right, we're gonna go on. | ||
| Pamela Dayton, Ohio Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, the i'm calling. | |
| I don't know if this has anything Do with what they're talking about. | ||
| But I had heard that Biden had dementia the whole time that he was running for president. | ||
| What I don't understand is when he was elected for president and they knew he had dementia, why did they allow him to run? | ||
| I don't understand this. | ||
| And I don't understand everything that he put forth. | ||
| Why is it gone through? | ||
| Because when you have dementia, I mean, you're incompetent and you shouldn't be signing anything that's political or anything that is even legal or unlegal because they're not responsible. | ||
| I just don't understand it. | ||
| And I voted for Trump because I felt. | ||
| All right, Pamela, we'll go to Gregory next in Willington, Connecticut, Democratic caller. | ||
| Gregory, open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Greta. | |
| Happy Valentine's Day. | ||
| The reason I'm calling, I'm really asking for a guest request based on Mr. Stephen Moore there. | ||
| It's interesting that you guys didn't talk about, I'm a big anti-war guy, as you maybe remember. | ||
| You didn't talk about military spending and how the military hasn't passed any audits and that whole nine yards. | ||
| This morning I looked at the website run by Brown University. | ||
| I guess it's the Watson Institute. | ||
| And since 2001 or 2001, we've spent at least $8 trillion on military wars and conflicts about the world. | ||
| So I would love somebody from Brown University to speak on Washington Journal. | ||
| That would be awesome. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for the suggestion. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| Mike in Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Oh, we lost Mike. | ||
| We'll go to Tony, who's in Oregon, Democratic Color. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, I'm calling about a podcast I watched last night. | ||
| It had a Democrat strategist on. | ||
| I think her name was Lindy something, Lindy Lee, I think it was. | ||
| And she talked a great deal about the condition of Biden. | ||
| And I just wanted to know the condition of Biden and who was running the White House while he was in that condition. | ||
| And I just wanted to know how much of that might be true and if there was any way you could get somebody like her on there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Francis, Lexington Park, Maryland, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Francis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good Laura. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, I was calling about the, like I said, we are a country of laws. | |
| And I was wondering why the Republicans with Mr. The President and Mr. Eland trying to like override the, just override the laws and do what they want to do. | ||
| And I don't understand how they could just, you know, people can allow them to do that. | ||
| Like the courts, the presidents against the courts. | ||
| I do not understand that either. | ||
| How can they do that? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Guy in St. Augustine, Florida, a Republican. | ||
| Guy, do you have a public policy issue or do you want to talk politics? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little of both. | |
| The first thing on earlier on C-SPAN on the appropriations committee for the military, a number of the senators brought up the fact that Elon has a contract for, I believe the number was $24 million worth of Tesla armored vehicles. | ||
| I mean, why are we, and where are we going to use these Tesla armored vehicles? | ||
| It's staggering. | ||
| And the fact that even though I'm a Republican, I don't understand most presidents have been required to put all their business holdings in a blind trust during the presidency. | ||
| I don't understand why this hasn't happened this time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hey, Guy, you may be interested in the New York Times reporting State Department suspended plan to buy armored Teslas. | ||
| Vehicles made by Elon Musk's company were on a purchase list issued before Donald Trump was inaugurated and before Mr. Musk became one of the president's top advisors. | ||
| Let's go to Lily in Brook Park, Ohio, Democratic caller. | ||
| Hi, Lily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm Colin because I want C-SPAN to give the information that's needed for voting in 2025, the voting rights for 2025. | |
| While we are not, and I think we need to be discussing more about the voting rights for 2025 out of the project 2025. | ||
| I would appreciate that. | ||
| All right, Lily. | ||
| Thanks for the suggestion. | ||
| Michelle, Birmingham, Alabama, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Michelle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I wanted to talk about Doge. | ||
| Earlier they were talking about how they didn't appreciate the younger kids being in our finances, but younger kids to be in our military and guard our nuclear centers. | ||
| And that's just the point that I wanted to make. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Richard, Verona, Missouri, Democratic caller. | ||
| Richard, do you have a comment this morning? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need a call from Missouri here about the state of Kansas. | |
| My neighbor, they said that they have a lot of tuberculosis over there. | ||
| I'm old enough to remember back when we had a sanatorium over here at Mount Vernon, Missouri. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For whether in there, if you had tuberculosis, you did get out until you was cured. | |
| Now, they have a law in Arkansas they're talking about about selling raw milk. | ||
| Now, back in the old days, cows all had to be checked for tuberculosis, I think. | ||
| That's what they did over at Mount Vernon. | ||
| So my son-in-law goes out someplace in Kansas and gets raw milk to drink. | ||
| And I just caution them because I don't know. | ||
| That's the one thing they had to worry about is the cows. | ||
| We used to get. | ||
| All right, understood, Richard. | ||
| Martha, who's in Washington, D.C., Republican. | ||
| Hi, Martha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I just want to state that my position is I don't think the federal government should be paying anything. | |
| I don't think it should even be here. | ||
| I think every state should take care of itself. | ||
| I don't want to be paying for other states' problems when they have hurricanes. | ||
| People there choose to live there. | ||
| That's their problem, not mine. | ||
| I'm for total breakdown, no federal government, no money. | ||
| That includes the congress people. | ||
| They pay high percentage rent on penthouse levels in D.C. when they're here. | ||
| And they get paid a lot of money. | ||
| So that goes, no congresspeople in D.C. either, no federal government. | ||
| All right, Martha, they make less than $200,000, and some of them sleep in their offices just in FYI. | ||
| We're going to leave it there this morning. | ||
| Thank you all for joining in on the conversation. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern Time for another one. | ||
| your day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series, First 100 Days. | |
| We'll explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians, authors, and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
| We'll look at accomplishments and setbacks and examine how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to the present day. | ||
| This Saturday, the first 100 days of Ulysses Grant's presidency. | ||
| Grant was a famous Civil War general who won the White House in 1868. | ||
| His campaign slogan was, Let us have peace. | ||
| Issues during Grant's first 100 days included Reconstruction, the payment of Civil War debt, voting rights, and the fight against the KKK. | ||
| Watch American History TV's series, First 100 Days. | ||
| Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | ||
| This weekend, at 3:15 p.m. Eastern, we'll look at American presidents and the U.S. Navy with Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro discussing the naval careers of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. | ||
| Then at 5 p.m. Eastern, a discussion on the life and legacy of civil rights icon and Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis with author David Greenberg, former Clerk of the House Cheryl Johnson, and current and former members of Congress. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, watch American History TV's series, First 100 Days, as we look at the start of presidential terms. | ||
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Ulysses Grant's first term in 1869, including the treatment of Native Americans and freed slaves. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Indiana University History Professor Juan Mora talks about the U.S. Border Patrol and how 20th century immigration laws shape the creation and development of immigration agencies. | ||
| Exploring the American story. |