| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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They decided to run for office. | |
| Tonight, at 9:30 p.m. Eastern, our interviews include Virginia Democratic Congressman Eugene Vintman, who was born in Ukraine, served as a U.S. Army officer, and played a role in the story of his brother, Alexander Vintman, who came to national attention in 2019 for his testimony before Congress on President Trump's relationship with Ukraine. | ||
| I was a lieutenant colonel assigned to the White House on a detail, deputy legal advisor on National Security Council staff, the chief ethics official on the National Security Council staff. | ||
| And so I worked right across the hall from my twin brother. | ||
| And he had the portfolio of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova. | ||
| He listened to the phone call. | ||
| He heard the president's attempt at extortion, and he reported directly to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch new members of Congress all this week, starting at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
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| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
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| The congressional directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right or go to c-spanshop.org to pre-order your copy today. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Ellie Mistall. | ||
| He is a justice correspondent and columnist for the nation. | ||
| Ellie, welcome to the program. | ||
| Hey, thank you so much for having me. | ||
| I want to start with this Associated Press article with the headline, Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to let the firing of whistleblower agency head proceed. | ||
| Could you get us up to speed on what that court case is about and what the issue is there? | ||
| Yeah, so Trump likes to fire people, and he thinks that because he is the president, he can fire anybody he wants for any reason, whether or not they were appointed or not, for just because he feels like it and he remembers it from his TV days, right? | ||
| There are laws regarding how you can fire people when they work for the federal government, who you can fire, what the proper process is, and all that sort of thing. | ||
| Trump wants to ignore those laws, ignore people who have their positions that are authorized by Congress and fire people willingly nilly. | ||
| And he's hoping for the Supreme Court to let them let him do that. | ||
| There are specifically laws in place to protect whistleblowers from retaliatory firings. | ||
| One of the reasons why we have whistleblowers is because we have these laws. | ||
| But Trump, because he has that kind of mobster mentality, he wants people to have Omerta and never say anything against him. | ||
| And so he thinks that a whistleblower law is completely ridiculous and he should never be bound by it. | ||
| And so we have our classic setup of Trump versus American law. | ||
| And he is once again hoping the Supreme Court allows him to escape the realities of American law. | ||
| And quite frankly, the Supreme Court has done that for him before and might well do that for him again. | ||
| So when do you think the Supreme Court would rule on this? | ||
| Yeah, the timing on the court right now, I can't quite know. | ||
| There is so much percolating up through the lower courts to the Supreme Court. | ||
| We have seen in the past that the Supreme Court can move very, very quickly, especially when it wants to help Trump. | ||
| We've seen in the past that this court can move very slowly when it wants, when extending the timeframe is in Trump's benefit. | ||
| And I don't know how they'll play this one. | ||
| What I do know is that the Supreme Court has the conservatives on the Supreme Court, the Republican justices, the most extremist ones, believe in this very impactful theory called unitary executive theory, which basically holds that the executive branch of government, Article 1, Article 2, sorry, of the Constitution, is the president of the United States and nobody else, that he is the entire executive branch. | ||
| And everybody in the executive branch, from a whistleblower, from the head of the EPA, from the Department of Justice, everybody serves at his pleasure or whim. | ||
| That is something that they have been trying to push over the years. | ||
| Trump is going to give them many opportunities to push that theory, to stretch that theory even further and make him an even more powerful president. | ||
| And people often wonder, like, well, why would the Supreme Court give Trump so much power? | ||
| Aren't they concerned about their own power? | ||
| And of course, they are. | ||
| But the idea here is that if you make the president kind of the very most powerful person in the world, then the only person that can tell the president no is the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court then becomes the only body that's able to say, put like this, if they make up the theory, right, then they're the only people who can tell you if somebody has gone too far against their made-up theory, right? | ||
| It's not Congress. | ||
| It's not the people, voters elected that can restrain the president. | ||
| It's the court and only the Supreme Court. | ||
| And so that's why giving the executive more power actually rebounds to give the Supreme Court itself even more power. | ||
| And that is what Roberts has always been about. | ||
| Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court has always been about, of arrogating as much power to himself and his court as he possibly can. | ||
| Now, you had said that, you know, the president does not have the legal authority to fire whoever he wants, whenever he wants. | ||
| But he and Elon Musk have been making the argument that this is, you know, the people that are being fired in the federal government are an unelected bureaucracy, that we are trying to restore democracy by getting rid of these people. | ||
| And that, yes, the president should have the right to fire people that are not on board with his policies. | ||
| Okay, first of all, I don't want to hear anything from Elon Musk, right? | ||
| You can't be an unelected bureaucrat talking about the dangers of unelected bureaucrats, right? | ||
| I voted many times in my life, and never once have I seen Elon Musk's name on a ballot. | ||
| I don't know anybody who's pulled a lever for him, so he needs to shut the hell up or if he's going to talk about unelected bureaucrats running America. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, of course, the president has the power and should have the power to assign people to work with him and advance his agenda. | ||
| We have an entire process for this. | ||
| It's called the cabinet. | ||
| And if you think about the cabinet, so if you think about this idea that the president can just fire or hire anybody he wants at every time, we know that's not true because we know that even for his own cabinet, even for the people that he puts in charge of executive agencies, they have to go through a Senate confirmation process. | ||
| That has happened throughout American history. | ||
| The Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, now the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, all of these people have to be confirmed by the Senate. | ||
| And the Senate doesn't want to confirm somebody, then the President can't have that person in that position. | ||
| Hello, Mr. Matt Gates. | ||
| I hope you are well wherever you are in Florida. | ||
| But, Ellie. | ||
| just from a basic understanding of American civics, that what Trump and Musk are arguing for is provably wrong and inconsistent with American law. | ||
| I just like to say that, I mean, Elon Musk right now is a special advisor to the president, and the president can have whoever advising him as he likes, and they are not Senate confirmed. | ||
| Yes, Elon Musk is an advisor, so that's why I'm saying he cannot talk to me about being an unelected official holding power. | ||
| And sure, the president can have advisors. | ||
| The president can talk to whoever he wants. | ||
| And if he wants to put his buddy Musk on the payroll, if he wants to put, I don't know, his daughter, Ivanka, on the payroll or his son-in-law, Jared, on the payroll, that's fine. | ||
| He can talk to whoever he wants. | ||
| But there's an entire government that he represents, right? | ||
| There's an entire government that he works for, and he does not have unassailable, unaccountable power to hire and fire every single person in the federal government. | ||
| He just doesn't. | ||
| And I just proved to you why he doesn't, right? | ||
| Like the idea that just because you're the president, you can reach all the way down into a lowly civil service person working in the GAO and fire them because they happen to be black. | ||
| That is insane. | ||
| And that is, again, against the entire thrust of American civics, not even law, just the civic structure of how the country works. | ||
| This isn't how it's supposed to work. | ||
| Trump is claiming an authority that no other president has had. | ||
| And you know that he's asking for something that no other president has had because he has to ask for it. | ||
| If this is how we always did it, then Trump wouldn't have to ask the Supreme Court to let him do it because it would just be the thing that is always done. | ||
| It's not always done. | ||
| This isn't how it's supposed to work. | ||
| And there's a really good reason for why it's not supposed to work because we like to think of the president as one official among many. | ||
| He has a specific job. | ||
| He has a unique job. | ||
| He has an important job. | ||
| But he's not the only person who has authority in the federal government. | ||
| Ellie Mistal is our guest. | ||
| He's a justice correspondent and columnist with the nation. | ||
| If you'd like to join the conversation, you can. | ||
| The numbers are Republicans. | ||
| 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats call us on 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| President Trump, Ellie, has said that he will abide by court orders that block parts of his agenda. | ||
| Do you see that as likely? | ||
| And what happens if that doesn't happen? | ||
| He's already lying. | ||
| He's already lying. | ||
| He's not abiding by court orders against him right now. | ||
| The federal funding freeze, the pause that he put on has already been blocked by multiple courts through temporary restraining orders around the country. | ||
| And yet, the money is not back on. | ||
| ProPublico last week did an excellent report on this. | ||
| If you go to organizations that are expecting federal checks, they will tell you in many cases the money has not been turned back on. | ||
| So that is a clear example of Trump lying to everybody's face. | ||
| And all of us are pretending like it's normal. | ||
| It's not normal. | ||
| He said he will abide by court orders. | ||
| This is a court order against him. | ||
| He is not abiding by it. | ||
| A, B, C, right? | ||
| So do I think he will abide by future court orders? | ||
| Well, hell, I don't know. | ||
| He's not abiding by this one. | ||
| Maybe he'll abide by some other one that he finds more amenable to him. | ||
| But here's the rub, Mimi. | ||
| Here's the real, here's my real problem. | ||
| Here's my real issue. | ||
| Whatever Trump says he is going to abide by, there has so far been no at all indication that he will enforce court orders, court orders against his owner, Elon Musk. | ||
| We haven't seen any indication of that at all. | ||
| There's no suggestion at all that Trump will impose a court order against Elon Musk, telling him to rein in it. | ||
| And so that's, I think, what I'm most worried about. | ||
| But that's because I already know that Trump is lying about whether or not he himself will follow court orders, because he's not following a court order right now. | ||
| Ellie, I want to play for you, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt, when she was responding to people who say that Trump's actions are causing a constitutional crisis. | ||
| And then I'll get your response. | ||
| Now, before I take questions, I would like to address an extremely dishonest narrative that we've seen emerging over the past few days. | ||
| Many outlets in this room have been fear-mongering the American people into believing there is a constitutional crisis taking place here at the White House. | ||
| I've been hearing those words a lot lately. | ||
| But in fact, the real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump's basic executive authority. | ||
| We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law. | ||
| And they have issued at least 12 injunctions against this administration in the past 14 days, often without citing any evidence or grounds for their lawsuits. | ||
| This is part of a larger concerted effort by Democrat activists and nothing more than the continuation of the weaponization of justice against President Trump. | ||
| Quick news flash to these liberal judges who are supporting their obstructionist efforts. | ||
| 77 million Americans voted to elect this president. | ||
| And each injunction is an abuse of the rule of law and an attempt to thwart the will of the people. | ||
| As the president clearly stated in the Oval Office yesterday, we will comply with the law in the courts, but we will also continue to seek every legal remedy to ultimately overturn these radical injunctions and ensure President Trump's policies can be enacted. | ||
| Your reaction to that, Ellie Mistall. | ||
| If I may translate that gobbledygook, it's basically, I got every judge that I don't like is a constitutional crisis. | ||
| That's what she said. | ||
| She's obviously wrong. | ||
| It's a well-established part of American law that when you do something, you can be sued. | ||
| And that lawsuit will go to a judge. | ||
| And that judge will make a ruling. | ||
| And that ruling will be appealed. | ||
| And once you get to a final ruling, that ruling is final. | ||
| That's just how it works. | ||
| There is no constitutional crisis with judges imposing the law. | ||
| There is one with presidents ignoring the law, right? | ||
| That's the inversion that Levitt is trying to gaslight people and confuse people about. | ||
| It is very simple to have a court order and follow it. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| It's Trump who doesn't want to do the normal, easy thing. | ||
| And he's trying to say that these judges doing their job is somehow a constitutional problem. | ||
| But there's another thing that she said that I want people to notice and pick up on and realize how insane it is, right? | ||
| She's basically saying, and Republicans have been saying this for weeks now, that Trump was elected with 77 million people and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And so that somehow means that because he won a majority of the vote, he gets to do whatever he wants. | ||
| And again, that's just not how it works. | ||
| That's not how law works. | ||
| That's not how Civic works. | ||
| Yes, the president was elected fairly. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Congratulations on all your success, Donald Trump. | ||
| But he is still part of a system. | ||
| He is still part of a legal structure. | ||
| He is not above that legal structure. | ||
| And there are therefore limitations on what he can do, no matter how many people want him to do it. | ||
| There are things that he can do. | ||
| There are things that he can't do. | ||
| The judges are saying that in many cases, he is exceeding his constitutional and legal authority. | ||
| Just because 77 million people ostensibly want him to exceed his constitutional and legal authority doesn't mean he can. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| Let's go back to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Your cover article for the nation says this, how Trump could remake the Supreme Court for a generation with the subheading, Donald Trump is poised to become the first president since FDR to have appointed the majority of high court justices. | ||
| His potential picks are terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, so my so liberals generally think that the Supreme Court can't get any worse because it's already stacked six to three with Republican appointees over Democratic appointees. | ||
| And so I wrote that to remind people that, of course, it can get worse. | ||
| It can always get worse. | ||
| And worse right now is taking that Republican 6-3 majority and making it permanent for the lifetime of my natural life and everybody who is viewing this program's natural life, right? | ||
| And that's because the two oldest justices on the Supreme Court are both Republican. | ||
| Clarence Thomas, he's 76. | ||
| Samuel Alito, he's 74. | ||
| If both of those two men retire in the next four years, Trump will have the opportunity to replace them with those men but 30 years younger. | ||
| Thus, at some level, I can't say permanent, but like giving him control of the Supreme Court long after Trump's life, right? | ||
| These are justices that are going to outlive Trump. | ||
| These are justices that are going to impose the MAG legacy on the rest of us through unelected means for the next 30 or 40 years. | ||
| And Trump is in position, if Alito and Thomas retire, to become the first president since FDR to appoint not just Supreme Court justices, but a majority of the Supreme Court, if these two men retire, will be appointed by Trump. | ||
| And that is, you know, what keeps me up at night. | ||
| Ellie, there is a question for you on text from David Elmira, New York, regarding not following court orders. | ||
| He says, if I'm not mistaken, Biden did not follow court orders either, giving forgiveness of millions of dollars in school loans. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
| So, David Elmira, you're just wrong. | ||
| Biden did follow the court order. | ||
| They said he couldn't do the program. | ||
| He said, okay, I can't do it that way. | ||
| I'm going to try it some other way. | ||
| So he followed the letter of the law. | ||
| He followed the spirit of the law. | ||
| But just because he got an adverse court order didn't mean that he gave up on the program. | ||
| He tried to find another legal way to achieve his end. | ||
| Trump did that last time. | ||
| The first Muslim ban overruled by the court. | ||
| The second Muslim ban overruled by the court. | ||
| Did Trump say, no, I'm just going to stop banning Muslims? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, Trump did not just say, I'm going to stop banning Muslims. | ||
| He tried again and again and again until he got a Muslim ban that the Supreme Court was willing to uphold. | ||
| Now, I think that was a horrible decision by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii, but that is a problem with the Supreme Court, not with Donald Trump. | ||
| Donald Trump, when he was trying to immorally ban Muslims from coming into the country, did it the right way. | ||
| Joe Biden, when he was trying to relieve student debt relief, did it the right way. | ||
| What Trump is doing now by ignoring the court orders ordering him to restore the funding that he illegally and unconstitutionally took away. | ||
| That is different in kind than anything that Biden did, than anything that Trump did the first time. | ||
| And frankly, that anything that any other American president has done until we have to go all the way back to Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln to find somebody who so openly defined a court order. | ||
| All right, let's talk to the callers and start with Maria in Atlanta Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Maria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-Span family. | |
| Good morning, Mia. | ||
| And good morning, Eli. | ||
| Was wondering if they ever bring you back again? | ||
| I have a question for you. | ||
| I'm glad to see you. | ||
| I'm a big time follower. | ||
| But nevertheless, I want to ask you, Trump get on TV and say all kinds of stuff. | ||
| And a while back, he got on TV and he talked about how Elon Musk helped him and his swing states and how he went over there and worked on his computer and he said he's awfully good at computers. | ||
| Do you actually think, because I never heard none of the media ever, ever pick this up again and comment it. | ||
| You think he was trying to say that the election was stolen? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| And Maria, just I want to thank you for the love. | ||
| I just want to say for your own mental health, try very hard to stop watching Trump on TV. | ||
| It's not good for you, right? | ||
| He's going to say the same thing. | ||
| It's like, you know, once you see a dog bark at the dog run, like, you don't need to hear it for the rest of your afternoon. | ||
| Like, go out, touch grass, man, because it will get into your soul if you listen to that man too much. | ||
| As opposed to the specific allegation, no, I don't think that Trump would, Trump is not the most rhetorically cautious individual. | ||
| I do not think that he was trying to say that Elon Musk helped him steal the election. | ||
| And I do not think that Elon Musk helped Trump steal the election. | ||
| I actually think that Democrats and liberals somehow sometimes roll into or protect themselves with feelings that maybe something fishy, something untoward happened because that's easier to believe than it is that 77 million Americans voted for a convicted felon crazy person, right? | ||
| It's just easier to believe that we live in a place where, well, something had to be fishy there than no, people knew who Trump was and they just wanted this for to do this to the country. | ||
| Like, but the latter is actually true. | ||
| So no, I don't think Elon Musk helped him steal anything. | ||
| I do think that now that he's in power, Elon Musk is helping him do some serious illegal activity with Musk wielding power that he never should have. | ||
| But that's a different problem. | ||
| All right, let's talk to Mark, a Republican in Clifton Park, New York. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Trump won the election fair and square. | ||
| And he has a mandate to govern conservatively. | ||
| He's allowed to govern conservatively for at least the next two years until the midterms and the next four years until a Republican successor will have to run again. | ||
| So Trump is given the latitude because he won the election by the majority, by the popular vote, and by a landslide electoral vote. | ||
| So Mark, we agree that Trump won the election fairly. | ||
| I don't agree that he has a mandate, but that's a word. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| Trump won the election fairly, and he is allowed to govern as a conservative. | ||
| And conservatives are allowed to like the crazy things that he does. | ||
| What he's not allowed to do is illegal stuff, right? | ||
| Surely, Mark, we can agree that he's not allowed to do illegal things, that he's not allowed to do unconstitutional things. | ||
| Surely we can agree on that. | ||
| And while you and I might disagree on what's legal or constitutional, surely we can agree that a federal judge is the right person, is the person who should be able to tell us what's legal and what's constitutional and what is not. | ||
| So, Mark, can we not agree that Trump, while yes, he's allowed to govern conservatively, while yes, he's allowed to do what the people elected him to do, he is not allowed to break the law. | ||
| Mark, he's still there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm still here. | |
| What Trump is doing is the right thing. | ||
| He's doing the right thing. | ||
| Is it the legal thing, Mark? | ||
| Is it the legal thing, Mark? | ||
| And then who is supposed to decide whether or not it's the legal thing? | ||
| Is nobody supposed to decide whether or not it's the legal thing? | ||
| Is anything that Trump says legal? | ||
| Is that how we're, are we back to Nixon now? | ||
| When the president does it, it's not illegal. | ||
| Is that literally the best that you can get to, Mark? | ||
| Or do you think that maybe somebody who is not the president should have a say in whether or not what the president is doing is legal or illegal? | ||
| All right, Ellie, let's give Mark a chance. | ||
| Go ahead, Mark. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think what Trump's doing is great right now. | |
| He's cutting waste. | ||
| He's going out. | ||
| No, no, no, no, but that's not the question, Mark. | ||
| As far as legality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that he has a large latitude, and we're going to have to find out because obviously these court orders and judges blocking things, I think they will eventually work their way through the problem. | |
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Ellie Mustal, there's a posting here on X that I'm sure you're aware of by Vice President Vance who said this. | ||
| If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. | ||
| If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. | ||
| Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
| Well, I went to Harvard and JD Vance went to Yale, and I'm feeling really good about my choices if that's the best that JD Vance can do right now. | ||
| Look, if JD Vance was right, then the Dobbs decision canceling the right to abortion was illegitimate and illegal on its face. | ||
| And Joe Biden should have personally performed abortions for the last four years, if JD Vance was right. | ||
| Of course, JD Vance is not right. | ||
| JD Vance sounds like an idiot when he says that, because the idea that judges, that the third branch of government doesn't have a legitimate check on the power of the other two branches, the legislative branch and the executive branch, again, flies in the face of basic American civics. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, I have many problems with the Supreme Court and how it wields power. | ||
| And I can argue that the Supreme Court has too much power. | ||
| I've argued that in the past. | ||
| I'm in favor of what the scholars call jurisdiction stripping, which is kind of a way for Congress to limit the power that the Supreme Court has on constitutional issues. | ||
| I'm all for reform of the Supreme Court. | ||
| I do not think that it is the greatest body on earth, but it is a legitimate part of American government. | ||
| And acting like it cannot say what is illegal or not, what is constitutional or not, is just not something that we do in this country, right? | ||
| We understand that the judges have a role and that the rest of us have to follow the judge's role. | ||
| If you don't like it, there are many opportunities to reform the Supreme Court that I have listed in many articles in the nation that JD Vance is welcome to read. | ||
| But the idea that the Supreme Court has no authority on Trump just because he's the president, again, flies in the face of basic American law and basic American civics. | ||
| And JD Vance knows that. | ||
| JD Vance knows that he's saying what he's saying because it is in his best political interest to lick Trump's boots, even if it flies in the face of all law and reason and civics. | ||
| Here's Lewis in Pennshawkin, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Lewis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, sir. | ||
| This reminds me of when Trump was in his first term, and we had all these judges blocking him from building the wall. | ||
| It's just politics, and judges shouldn't be involved in politics, and that's what's going on here. | ||
| And another thing, he's an executive. | ||
| He can fire anybody he wants. | ||
| Okay, Lewis. | ||
| So let's start at the end. | ||
| Again, he can't. | ||
| Like, I know maybe you want him to be able to, right? | ||
| Maybe because you watched The Apprentice, you just want him to say, I'm fired. | ||
| You're fired. | ||
| And this makes you just feel good inside to know there's a strong daddy figure firing people. | ||
| Maybe that's what you want, Lewis, but that's not how the country works. | ||
| He doesn't actually have the power to fire anybody he wants, no matter how many times he beats his chest and says, I'm the president, I'm the executive. | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll lick anybody's boots, okay? | |
| You don't lick anybody's boots, but you want him to fire people. | ||
| Lewis, why can't he fire people the right way? | ||
| There's a process for firing people. | ||
| Why can't he use that process, Lewis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree with you there, okay? | |
| Man. | ||
| So to your second point about the judges playing politics. | ||
| Lewis, let him address your second point about the judges. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You were saying that the judges were playing politics with the wall, just like it was in the first Trump administration. | ||
| Have you forgotten what happened during the Biden years? | ||
| Because there were a lot of decisions from these exact same judges that were adverse to Biden's agenda and policies. | ||
| One of the other callers earlier brought up the student debt relief as just one. | ||
| So if you think the judges are playing politics, do you think it's politics that hurts Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Because I seem to recall. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What they did to Biden, too, sir. | |
| I agree with you there, too. | ||
| So you think judges just shouldn't have as much power as they do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's politics, okay? | |
| It's politics. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And I want to ask you about an article that you wrote, Ellie, for the nation with the headline, Trump's attacks on DEI are a green light for the government to discriminate. | ||
| I want you to explain that because critics of DEI say that it is discrimination because it's preferring people of diverse races, women over men, that kind of thing. | ||
| So what's your response to that? | ||
| Yeah, so DEI was invented by white people. | ||
| DEI was invented by white men. | ||
| DEI was invented by white men to try to comply with the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, right? | ||
| DEI was their white male creation to comply with constitutional law. | ||
| What diverse people, if that's what we're calling us today, what women have been asking for, has not been DEI. | ||
| They've been asking for fair and equal employment opportunities. | ||
| They've been asking for the application of the equal of the equality clause in the 14th Amendment and the application of the Civil Rights Act in hiring. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It was white guys were just like, well, we don't know how to hire all these people. | ||
| So we're just going to do some DEI. | ||
| That makes sure that we have to hire black people and women and Latinos and whatever. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| That was their solution. | ||
| So now that they don't like that solution anymore, that's fine. | ||
| It is constitutional. | ||
| DEI is a policy. | ||
| It is constitutional and legal to change policy. | ||
| Trump has every authority that he might need to change the policy of the United States. | ||
| But my question is always: well, what are you going to do instead? | ||
| Because you still have to comply with the Civil Rights Act and you still have to comply with the 14th Amendment. | ||
| So what are you going to do instead, Trump, instead, Musk, instead, white tech bros? | ||
| What are you going to do instead, Meta, to make sure that you are still in compliance with the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment? | ||
| And there, they never have an answer. | ||
| And so it goes back. | ||
| I think what they would say is we're just going to hire the most qualified person for each job. | ||
| And therefore, we are in compliance. | ||
| Is that what's happening? | ||
| Because, okay, A, remember, DEI was amended because that wasn't happening. | ||
| For whatever reason, they weren't able to hire the most qualified person for every job. | ||
| They were only able to hire the whitest male person for every job, right? | ||
| So that was what was happening before DEI. | ||
| Now the DEI is ostensibly gone. | ||
| Is that what we see, Mimi? | ||
| Do we see them hiring the most qualified people for every job? | ||
| Heck, do we see them only firing the least qualified people for every job? | ||
| And of course, no, we don't see that. | ||
| In your last segment with Armstrong Williams, there was a caller who specifically asked that man, does he think that every single person who works in the federal government who is of color is a DEI hire and was unqualified for their job? | ||
| And Armstrong said, no, of course not. | ||
| That would be ridiculous. | ||
| Of course, he said, and I'm quoting him from your last segment, most people, I'm sure, got their job on merit, which is an interesting statement because they're firing everybody. | ||
| They're firing people not based on merit, not based on their qualifications, not based on their actual work history. | ||
| They're firing people because they're black. | ||
| And that is what violates the Constitution. | ||
| And that is what violates the law. | ||
| Nobody has a problem. | ||
| I mean, like, I want to say it that way. | ||
| It is legal for you to get rid of DEI policies. | ||
| What's illegal is for you to fire people just because they happen to be black at work. | ||
| It is ridiculous to fire everybody who's been hired under a DEI program without any kind of assessment of their actual work performance, their actual, dare I say, merit for the job. | ||
| But they're not doing it that way. | ||
| They're firing everybody who happens to be black in government. | ||
| That is what's illegal. | ||
| That is what the problem is. | ||
| Let's hear from Jennifer in Midlothian, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Jennifer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning and good morning, Ellie. | |
| Thank you for taking the time to listen to our calls. | ||
| So my question is, sort of piggybacking on what you're talking about with DEI, I'm trying to understand, right? | ||
| We know there's no statute for taxation, quote, without representation necessarily, but what legal recourse do those of us who fall within these marginalized groups, i.e. African American, disabled, LGBTQ, all the things that, you know, are labeled as marginalized communities, to push back on everything being dismantled in the name of DEI. | ||
| If we are federal taxpayers, if we're paying our money, but every book that represents us is being banned from schools, every program that potentially may create spaces and access for these individuals, special education, all the things, we're paying our money. | ||
| This is an economic issue. | ||
| So as citizens and as residents of whatever state you're in, Commonwealth of Virginia, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, how can we push back and say, wait, my tax dollars are going to everybody but my community? | ||
| And how is that legal that we don't have any recourse because they're doing it in a discriminatory way, just like you said, under this guise of, well, that's considered DEI, so we just don't want it. | ||
| It's like, no, we also have Title VI, Title VII, and all of these rights that we're supposed to have access to. | ||
| And we're paying our money and we're seeing that we're not getting the services and access and empowerment that we should be getting. | ||
| So can you tell me, do we have recourse? | ||
| So Jennifer, I would just start with, it is legal. | ||
| I believe it is illegal. | ||
| And you named the statute, right? | ||
| I believe that what they are doing is illegal under the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And again, that's not because they're changing the DEI policy. | ||
| DEI is not required by the Civil Rights Act, but fairness is, but equality is. | ||
| And so when they willy-nilly fire everybody who's for the crime of being black, fire everybody for the crime of being a woman without any individualized assessment of their merit, then I do believe that that is violating the Civil Rights Act and they should catch a lawsuit. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, once they catch that lawsuit, and I know Lewis is still out there, why are they going to sue the courts? | ||
| But when they do catch that lawsuit, eventually that goes to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court. | ||
| My read on the six Republican judges is that they don't think the Civil Rights Act should be constitutional in the first place, right? | ||
| They didn't like the Voting Rights Act. | ||
| Roberts has done everything he can to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act, which is my pick for the single most important piece of legislation in American history. | ||
| So they've already gotten through the 1965 Civil Rights Voting Rights Act. | ||
| I believe next on the chopping block for these conservatives is the 1964 Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And so I don't think the lawsuit that Trump deserves to catch because what he is doing and the way he is doing it is illegal. | ||
| I don't know that that's going to work at the Supreme Court. | ||
| So to Jennifer's question, what's the recourse? | ||
| The recourse is the recourse that the people always have, right? | ||
| Trump was elected by a majority of Americans, and the only people who can take that power away are a majority of Americans activating, voting, convincing people. | ||
| I personally have started to boycott Target, right? | ||
| I vote with my wallet as well. | ||
| Target specifically, because Target has spent like a decade telling my community, oh, we like you here. | ||
| Come to Target. | ||
| Put your products on our shelves. | ||
| We love, you know, Target's basically Jerry Maguire, right? | ||
| Tom Cruise and Jerry McGuire. | ||
| We love black people, except for when Trump gets in charge. | ||
| Now we hate black people, and now DEI is not the thing that we do at Target anymore, right? | ||
| So Target deserves to not have my dollars at this moment. | ||
| So I'm doing what I can with my wallet. | ||
| I'm doing what I can with my feet. | ||
| I'm doing what I can with my voice. | ||
| We all have to do that, right? | ||
| In the words of Kermit the Frog, man, we need more dogs and chacks and dogs and cats and Muppets and chickens and things. | ||
| All right, let's hear from Dania in Butler, Missouri. | ||
| Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| You know, Biden didn't do nothing except stay on vacation most of the time. | ||
| And I hear people keep calling in, badmouthing Trump and what he's doing and everything. | ||
| And, you know, it's like deja vu. | ||
| Are we going to keep trying to put Trump in the courts again during his presidency? | ||
| Are we going to give him a chance? | ||
| I say give him a chance. | ||
| I think he's the best president we've ever had. | ||
| And whatever he does, he knows right from wrong. | ||
| He ain't going to do anything wrong. | ||
| Look at all the lawsuits they did and all of them dismissed. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| It's just the witch hunt starting all over. | ||
| And this person that you've got on your show this morning, if they are so smart and think that Trump is doing wrong, why ain't they president? | ||
| Why don't they get off their lazy butt and run towards the park? | ||
| All right, Dania, let's get a response. | ||
| Go ahead, Ellie. | ||
| I will fight Trump with everything I have. | ||
| I will fight Trump on the beaches. | ||
| I will fight Trump in the streets. | ||
| I will never yield to this orange menace. | ||
| And if that makes Denier unhappy, then I apologize to her. | ||
| But I will do everything in my small power to fight this man and what he is trying to do to my country. | ||
| But his supporters are saying that that's exactly the problem, that you're just fighting him for no reason. | ||
| I got reasons. | ||
| You want me to start listing the reasons? | ||
| That woman said that he did it wrong. | ||
| That man's been convicted on 34 counts of a felony. | ||
| The only reason why those cases have been, the other cases have been dismissed against them is because he has judges in his pocket like Eileen Cannon. | ||
| The Supreme Court gave him absolute immunity for official acts. | ||
| For the first time in American history, a president was placed squarely above the law by his hand-picked Supreme Court justice. | ||
| We've just been talking about his racist actions with DEI. | ||
| He is calling white South Africans to live as refugees in this country while expelling black and brown actual refugees who are living here now. | ||
| He is trying to overturn the 14th Amendment and strip away birthright citizenship from people who have been born Americans. | ||
| And those are the reasons that I can think of to oppose him off the top of my head. | ||
| Ellie, you have a lot of people who are going to be you have a book coming out next month. | ||
| It's called Bad Law: 10 Popular Laws Ruining America. | ||
| Give us one of those. | ||
| Give us a real brief explanation. | ||
| Let's go with voting registration, right? | ||
| All voting registration should be renounced, right? | ||
| Voting registration does not help keep our elections safe. | ||
| All it does is decrease the participation in our elections. | ||
| In the first chapter of the book, I have an argument for how voter eligibility requirements are, in fact, necessary. | ||
| But once you meet those eligibility requirements, you should be automatically registered to vote. | ||
| And that registration should be what's called portable. | ||
| That means that when you move, you are still registered. | ||
| The registration follows you. | ||
| You don't have to chase registration. | ||
| People might think that's kind of a radical idea. | ||
| I like to point out to people, and I do in the first chapter of that book, that that is the way they do it in most of the rest of the functional democracies in the world. | ||
| That's how they do it in England. | ||
| That's how they do it in France. | ||
| That's how they do it in Argentina. | ||
| That's how they do it in Australia. | ||
| That's how they do it everywhere else. | ||
| We're the slow people. | ||
| We're the people who haven't caught up with the 21st century by still doing registration as a case-by-case basis instead of having automatic or mandatory registration for all eligible voters. | ||
| And if we had that, I wonder if Mark's 77 million people who voted for Trump, I wonder if that number would be enough for him to have one election. | ||
| Dave in Lynchburg, Virginia, wants to end us on a positive note. | ||
| He says, You've suggested what keeps you up at night. | ||
| Conversely, what gives you hope? | ||
| I'm sure you can come up with something. | ||
| I got kids. | ||
| I got two kids, 12 and 9. | ||
| They're beautiful little boys. | ||
| And they are not afraid. | ||
| They are not depressed all the time. | ||
| They think that the world is going to get better. | ||
| They understand that we've got serious problems. | ||
| But, you know, my kids think that they're going to be the people who come up with a solution for climate change, right? | ||
| They think they're going to be the people who come up with solutions for our problems. | ||
| And so I take a lot of strength and hope from them. | ||
| I do think generally, and I know it's kind of trite to say, I do generally think the kids are all right. | ||
| I think the kids are seeing how our generation, my generation, Gen X, is screwing up and they're kind of committed to doing better. | ||
| And I hope that that remains the case. | ||
| All right, Justice correspondent and columnist for the nation, Ellie Mistall. | ||
| You can find his work at thenation.com. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with this news from The Hill headlined: Chutkin refuses to block Musk, Doge, from several seven federal agencies. | ||
| The U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkin yesterday refused the request of 14 Democratic state attorneys general to immediately impose wide-ranging restrictions on Elon Musk's Doge. | ||
| It's a coalition of states. | ||
| It claims that Musk's far-reaching role-heading Doge is unconstitutional since he was not confirmed by the Senate and the state sought to block Doge from accessing seven federal agencies. | ||
| She refused their demand to do so at the current stage of the case, saying they had not made the necessary showing of irreparable harm. | ||
| Here's what she said. | ||
| Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight. | ||
| In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. | ||
| Accordingly, it cannot issue a temporary restraining order, especially one as wide-ranging as plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent irreparable harm to these plaintiffs. | ||
| The current record does not meet that standard. | ||
| Well, we will show you a portion of the interview that aired on Fox News last night. | ||
| Here is Elon Musk responding to criticism about Doge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is what you get from the Democrats. | |
| You get, nobody voted for Elon. | ||
| Well, nobody voted for any of your cabinet nominees. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| People are dying because of Doge cuts. | ||
| I'll give you a chance to respond all that. | ||
| What Doge is doing is illegal. | ||
| Elon Musk is more street vernacular for a male body part. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a constitutional crisis. | |
| Why are they reacting like this? | ||
| Well, first of all, do you give a flying rip over number one? | ||
| And well, I guess we must be over the target or doing something right. | ||
| They wouldn't be complaining so much if we weren't doing something useful, I think. | ||
| All we're really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. | ||
| And what we're finding is that there's an unelected bureaucracy. | ||
| Speaking of unelected, there's a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacabed to the president and the cabinet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you look at, say, D.C. voting, it's 92% Kamala. | |
| Okay, so we're in 92% Kamala. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| They don't like me here either. | ||
| I think about that number a lot. | ||
| I'm like 92%. | ||
| That's basically almost everyone. | ||
| And so, but if, but how can you, if the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that means we don't live in a democracy. | |
| We live in a bureaucracy. | ||
| And so I think what we're seeing here is the sort of the thrashing of the bureaucracy as we try to restore democracy and the will of the people. | ||
| And we will take your calls now and start with Andrew in Sterling, Virginia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Yeah, this introduction of Elon as co-president of the United States is probably one of the most dangerous, one of the most undemocratic actions ever done by a sitting U.S. president. | ||
| We now have a president and a co-president who are in a process of destroying this country, this democracy. | ||
| He was not an elected official. | ||
| He has not gone through proper security clearance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's gone through every department in this country and basically undermining and destroying what makes this country work and what makes this country great. | |
| This guy is truly a danger. | ||
| Trump, along with Musk, have basically sold our country out to Putin and every dictator in this world. | ||
| So, Andrew, respond to what you just heard Elon Musk say that he's restoring democracy and that it's the bureaucracy that is contrary to the people's will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, for them to attack federal workers, to go through every department and just slash and burn when these are the people, these federal workers who are the heroes of this country, who are basically protecting every American citizen, is crazy. | |
| I would love to know what this country, what kind of position this country is going to be in after four years of these two clowns. | ||
| You will not be able to recognize this country. | ||
| We'll resemble Russia. | ||
| We'll resemble Red China. | ||
| We'll resemble every autocratic dictatorship in this world. | ||
| And the American people are going to suffer. | ||
| I would like to think that the American people, after what they've seen in the first few weeks, are regretting their vote for Donald Trump. | ||
| This is not what they asked for. | ||
| And this is what they're going to get. | ||
| Andrew, let's see if anybody is regretting that vote, as you believe. | ||
| This is a Republican in Wilmington, North Carolina. | ||
| David, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Just to respond to the last caller. | ||
| Democracy is not equated with wasting trillions of dollars. | ||
| But there's a couple of points that the press could really help, but they won't, but C-SPAN can. | ||
| Inflation is not the rise in prices. | ||
| Inflation is a rise, inflation of the money supply, one of the symptoms of which is a rise in prices. | ||
| So the root cause is an increase in the money supply through borrowing. | ||
| And the other is, well, the point about is just an aside, but could you set the record straight on Elon Musk's security clearance? | ||
| I think like three of my five kids, he has top secret. |