Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
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greta brawner
cspan09:38
Appearances
hakeem jeffries
rep/d00:45
Clips
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louis ferrante
00:21
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Speaker
Time
Text
Senate Budget Proceedings00:10:38
unidentified
Of a two-part interview.
He gives a history of the mafia in America, discusses Attorney General Robert Kennedy's war against organized crime, and the involvement that he says the mafia had in the 1960 election and 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy becomes Attorney General for his brother, and that becomes Clash of Titans.
That's the first time there's a massive concentrated attack on the mafia from someone who holds all of the almost unlimited resources of the United States government at his disposal.
And that's when the mafia finally feels threatened.
It's a life or death situation.
unidentified
Louis Ferrante with his book, Borgata, Clash of Titans, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-Stand Now app.
Any public policy or political issue that's on your mind will 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 2.
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 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.
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 gabble-to-gavel coverage of the House here on C-SPAN and over on C-SPAN 2, gabble-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 Impoundment 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 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, they 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, 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 are that Trump and Elon Musk are doing are actually not a smokescreen for efficiency and just deregulation and making things worse.
Let me go to Wayne, who's in Winterhaven, 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.
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, or 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.
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.
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.
Education Issues Caller00:15:19
unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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, kids.
That is not going to be you.
I mean, there is a real 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.
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, uh C-span now.
D is in Clarksville, Tennessee.
Democratic caller.
Hi D, we're in open forum.
unidentified
Yes, my question is, Elon Musk wanted the richest man.
Why is he not helping his home country, Africa?
He's from Africa, Africa is one of the poet country, yet he want to put hisself inside America but he's leaving his home country out.
First of all, before I get to my main point, I wanted to ask of the uh 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 I don't catch it and 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 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 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.
I don't know if this has anything to 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.
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. Elon 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.
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.
Hey, Guy, you may be interested in the New York Times reporting.
State Department suspends 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 calling 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, we need to be discussing more about the voting rights for 2025 out of the project 2025.
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.
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.
Enjoy your day.
unidentified
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SBAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
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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.
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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.
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