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First 100 days of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. | |
| He became president on November 22nd, 1963, after the assassination of President John Kennedy. | ||
| President Lyndon Johnson kept Kennedy's cabinet in place and proceeded to push for legislation on taxes and on civil rights. | ||
| Early in his term, he also declared a war on poverty in America. | ||
| Watch our American History TV series First 100 Days, Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern on American History TV on C-SPAN 2. | ||
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Aaron Mehta. | ||
| He's editor-in-chief of Breaking Defense. | ||
| Erin, welcome. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Let's start with the firing of General C.Q. Brown. | ||
| He's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. | ||
| Explain what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs does and why he was fired. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is notionally the top uniformed officer in America. | ||
| His main goal is to be the top military advisor to the president. | ||
| He's not actually in the chain of command. | ||
| He can't order forces to go anywhere. | ||
| He's basically the president's uniformed guy to say, this is our best military advice. | ||
| He was named Air Force Chief of Staff, which is the leader of the Air Force under President Trump in 2020, and then promoted by Biden to be the chairman several years later. | ||
| The second black man to be nominated after Colin Powell to have that job. | ||
| This is a four-year term. | ||
| He got about a year and a half in the seat before he was fired on Friday. | ||
| As to why he was removed, there haven't really been many statements from either President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about why they made this move. | ||
| We know that very early on, you know, there were comments from Hegseth about, you know, he gave an interview right before he was nominated for Secretary of Defense, and he said specifically, the first thing you do when you get into the Pentagon is you fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs because he's too woke, too tied into DEI initiatives, which has been a big target for the Trump administration. | ||
| It seemed like for a couple of weeks, Brown might have been safe, but ultimately Hegseth seemed to have signaled that his plan was to get rid of him, and that seems to have happened. | ||
| Was he involved in DEI initiatives at the Pentagon? | ||
| Or, I mean, what's behind that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, so certainly as chairman, he spoke at events that could be dubbed DEI, speaking out on statements about Black History Month or for pride issues. | ||
| That's kind of part of the role of the chairman is to speak for the military, all the military, which includes members of those groups. | ||
| Brown had gained some prominence before he was nominated by Trump, actually, for chief of staff, during some of the situations that were going on in 2020 with racial instability in the country. | ||
| He spoke about his background as a black man and his experiences there very, very eloquently and notably in a video that he put out. | ||
| That had not been an issue. | ||
| Again, Trump nominated him for the Air Force role after that video came out. | ||
| So something, if that is the issue, something changed in the last four years. | ||
| Tell us about the individual that is nominated to replace him. | ||
| Yeah, Dan Kane. | ||
| And we're going to say Dan Kane, not General Dan Kane, because he's currently retired. | ||
| He retired as an Air Force three-star in December. | ||
| Not a very high-profile member of the military, not somebody a lot of people had in their radar. | ||
| Had a very interesting path. | ||
| Actually, at one point was secunded to the Department of Agriculture. | ||
| Did a lot of classified programs. | ||
| His last big stop was as the military representative to the CIA. | ||
| So not somebody with a very public profile. | ||
| Probably the most public thing about him is how President Trump has talked about him in the past. | ||
| He's actually appeared in a number of campaign speeches throughout the years, going back to when Trump met him, I believe in 2019, while he was downrange in the Middle East. | ||
| The story Trump says is Kane said, hey, if you let me take the gloves off, I'll be ISIS in a week. | ||
| And Trump has said that he also, Kane then put on a MAGA hat, which would be against certain rules for the military. | ||
| People have said that last part didn't happen. | ||
| John Bolton actually told the New York Times, I was there, that never happened. | ||
| But clearly, Kane made an impression on Trump, and enough of impression that Trump is reaching out to make him his top military advisor. | ||
| Now, the fact that he is a three-star, has not had certain commands, and is retired creates some logistical things. | ||
| There's going to need to be a waiver because he's not actually at the level that he should be to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. | ||
| You have to be a four-star? | ||
| You have to be a four-star who's had certain commands, whether combatant command or some other top leadership role. | ||
| There are waivers built into that, so that's possible to certainly do a waiver, but there's a process there. | ||
| And we haven't seen this before where a retired person is brought on to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. | ||
| So there's going to be a bit of a process. | ||
| And then, of course, you have to go through the Senate confirmation. | ||
| What is the process for those waivers? | ||
| So the president can bring somebody back on active duty. | ||
| This has happened before. | ||
| I think the last time, most notably, was 2003. | ||
| The Bush administration brought back somebody who had been retired to be the Army Chief of Staff. | ||
| You just have to kind of start the process. | ||
| There's paperwork, obviously. | ||
| Kane will have to divest of any private interests that he's built up over the last, you know, whatever it is, eight weeks since he retired. | ||
| It can get done. | ||
| It will get done. | ||
| And I imagine that the confirmation hearings will probably be fine because the reality is that's happened for everyone that Trump has put forth. | ||
| But it's going to be a very interesting process to see. | ||
| Here's what President Trump put on Truth Social about this. | ||
| He says, during my first term, Reason was instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS Caliphate. | ||
| It was done in record-setting time, a matter of weeks. | ||
| Many so-called military, quote, geniuses said it would take years to defeat ISIS. | ||
| General Kane, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly and he delivered. | ||
| What did he actually do? | ||
| How was he involved in the fight against ISIS? | ||
| Yeah, he was a deputy commander down during the ISIS fight. | ||
| I think certainly everyone knows that the fight was not won in weeks. | ||
| This was a many years operation against ISIS that went on. | ||
| You know, Kane, again, he's not a super well-known figure, even in military circles. | ||
| Obviously, we've been reaching out and other outlets have been reaching out as well to try to find people. | ||
| The feedback we've gotten on Kane is he's very smart. | ||
| He's not going to make a big scene of himself. | ||
| But this is still a very unusual and surprising pick. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Aaron Mehta about what's going on at the Pentagon and the Pentagon budget as well, you can give us a call. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We do have a line set aside for current and former military members. | ||
| That number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| And you can use that same number to text us if you'd like. | ||
| Well, there are two other high-ranking leaders also removed on Friday. | ||
| Is that a big deal? | ||
| Or is this part of a normal kind of turnover with a new administration? | ||
| It is a big deal. | ||
| So the two people who were removed were Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who is the chief naval officer. | ||
| That's the top officer in the Navy. | ||
| And then General James Slife, who was the Air Force number two officer, the vice chief of staff there. | ||
| You know, the president, two things can be true. | ||
| The president absolutely has the right to hire and fire general officers as he feels they fit his needs or don't. | ||
| It's also not something that has historically been done, in part because of fears about politicizing the uniformed officers. | ||
| The last time I believe that a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired was 2009 when Bob Gates fired the Air Force Chief of Staff and Air Force Secretary. | ||
| And the reason then was that a live nuclear weapon was flown over the continental United States by accident. | ||
| We have not heard if there was anything like that with Franketti. | ||
| There's certainly no signs of it. | ||
| And frankly, we haven't gotten a lot of information from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about why he made this move. | ||
| So, you know, again, we're drawn back to comments that have been made in the run-up to the election as well as after the election about the I hires. | ||
| And it's notable that Franketti was the first woman to be on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
| I want to play for you, Senator Jack Reed. | ||
| He's a top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. | ||
| And he talked about the firings at the Pentagon as politicizing the military. | ||
| And then I'll get your response. | ||
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It was completely unjustified. | |
| These men and women were superb professionals. | ||
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They were committed to their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. | |
| And apparently what Trump and Heg says are trying to do is to politicize the Department of Defense. | ||
| And it's not surprising. | ||
| They put Kash Patel as the FBI director, who is a partisan, who has no, I think, respect for the traditions of neutrality of the FBI. | ||
| And now they've turned to DOD, and they want everyone in DOD to be holding to the president, not to the Constitution. | ||
| They want everyone there to do what they're told, regardless of the law. | ||
| What was also startling over the weekend was firing all the advocate generals of the military. | ||
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If you're going to break the law, the first thing you do is you get rid of the lawyers. | |
| So we're looking at a very dangerous undermining of the values of our military, and the repercussions are being felt already. | ||
| People questioning whether they should stay, talented leaders wondering if they should get out. | ||
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It's the beginning of a very, very serious degradation of the military and politicization of the military. | |
| What do you think? | ||
| I think that those fears are something that we're hearing a lot both inside the building and outside the building, even from some people who are Trump supporters. | ||
| Look, the military has, by design and by tradition, always tried to avoid becoming entangled in politics. | ||
| There's always been kind of a red line that you don't cross in that regard. | ||
| We know that President Trump in the past has often talked about my generals and talked about how he feels the generals should be more loyal to him. | ||
| Certainly saw his feelings about General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who he appointed and then felt like he betrayed him. | ||
| And there are actually some legal actions that have been launched against Milley since Trump took office again. | ||
| And pulling his security details. | ||
| Pulling his security detail, exactly. | ||
| That's part of them. | ||
| So I think there's a lot of people who are very concerned about this. | ||
| Again, the president has the right to remove officers as he sees fit. | ||
| That's absolutely legal. | ||
| But traditionally, this has not been done in part because these officers are supposed to be nonpartisan, non-political, and rollover from administration to administration. | ||
| Let's talk about the firing of the civilian workforce at the Defense Department. | ||
| So probationary employees have been let go at DOD. | ||
| Tell us about what's exactly going on there and what are we expecting. | ||
| Yeah, it's a little unclear if they've actually been let go yet or they've just announced they're going to be let go. | ||
| On Friday, it was announced, I believe it was 5,400 give or take employees, probationary employees would be let go this week. | ||
| The status of that is kind of hard to ascertain. | ||
| This is what we've seen elsewhere in the federal government with the Doge groups coming in, and the first thing they do is they let go all the probationary employees because those are the easiest ones to go after. | ||
| They've also said, the department said in a note that it was going to seek to fire 5% to 8% of its federal workforce. | ||
| The GAO said there's about 700,000 people in the civilian defense workforce. | ||
| So that equates to something like 36,000 to 50,000 people who are in line to lose their jobs. | ||
| That's a significant potential impact in terms of defense operations. | ||
| Yes, I'm sure there's absolutely some bloat in the bureaucracy. | ||
| I think anybody who's been around the Pentagon knows this is true. | ||
| But a lot of these people are also jobs that have to be done to support the military operations, to support the warfires, to make sure that people in uniform don't have to do some of these other tasks. | ||
| Now, the Pentagon has said it will make sure it's not going to impact actual warfighting operations. | ||
| We're going to have to see how that plays out. | ||
| Does this mean that the Pentagon just has to depend more on contractors to get certain functions done? | ||
| And will that cost more? | ||
| That's going to have to be seen. | ||
| Certainly, we know that Elon Musk, who's back in the Doge group, which is driving at least some of this, and Silicon Valley in particular, goes after this idea of kind of you break everything down and then you rehire for the jobs that you find you really need. | ||
| That seems to be the attitude they're bringing to the federal workforce. | ||
| I think that's very different when you're talking about building a widget as opposed to when you're trying to maintain constitutive government and military operations. | ||
| What you don't want to do is find out, oh, the guys that we fired are actually vital. | ||
| We saw actually with the NNSA at the Department of Energy, the people who do nuclear weapons maintenance and repair, 300 of them were let go and then they had to scramble to try to bring them back on because they realized, oh, wait, we need these people. | ||
| So I think you're absolutely going to see some of that just naturally because there's a lot of people who do a lot of jobs that may not seem important on paper, but it turns out they're kind of part of the cogs to keep things going. | ||
| Let's talk to callers and start with Jeff in Dearborn, Michigan, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Jeff. | ||
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Good morning, Mee. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, A-Rob, could you tell us why you think Hegseth and Trump fired all the JAG officers, the lawyers for the military? | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| Unfortunately, we have not gotten a lot of information out of the Pentagon. | ||
| Frankly, since the turnover of the administration, there haven't been great kind of clear lines of communication. | ||
| So we haven't gotten a real statement from Secretary Hagseth about why he made this particular move. | ||
| You certainly heard Senator Reed talking about it and saying he views it as a politicization and a push to be able to say our laws are the laws. | ||
| And that's certainly, I think, the interpretation for a lot of people who are concerned about this. | ||
| The flip side you'll hear is, again, the president has the right to hire and fire as a Secretary of Defense the people that he thinks are the best fit for the public for what they're trying to do in the Pentagon. | ||
| And I just want to play for Jeff a quick portion of Secretary Hegseth being asked about General Cain's qualifications and the JAG. | ||
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Why did you reject an under-qualified, retired Lieutenant General to be the next chairman of the judge? | |
| I'm going to choose to reject your unqualified question. | ||
| Secretary Hewitt. | ||
| Secretary Hewitt. | ||
| How do the three JAGs that you say you're replacing present roadblocks, as you said, to what the president's wanting to do? | ||
| It's not about roadblocks to an agenda. | ||
| It's roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander-in-chief. | ||
| So ultimately, I want the best possible lawyers in each service to provide the best possible recommendations, no matter what, to lawful orders that are given. | ||
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unidentified
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And we didn't think those particular positions were well suited. | |
| And so we're looking for the best. | ||
| We're opening it up to everybody to be able to be the top lawyer of those services. | ||
| What's your reaction to that? | ||
| I mean, I think you heard right there that people are going to be concerned about what that means, saying these lawyers weren't willing to do what we believe to agree that what we believe are legal laws were legal laws. | ||
| It's important to note that JAG set the rules for, hey, was this action legal? | ||
| Is it legal to deploy forces here to use force here? | ||
| So I think, you know, anybody who's concerned about the politicization of the military and how this administration might try to push its own ideas through is going to seize on that clip. | ||
| What about the Inspector General of the Department of Defense? | ||
| Is he still there? | ||
| Was he one of the ones fired? | ||
| And who's in that position? | ||
| A number of Inspector Generals were let go previous to Friday's kind of large-scale firings here. | ||
| I believe the Department of Defense Inspector General was one of them. | ||
| That's in line with what we're seeing across the federal government where a number were just kind of told, hey, you know, thank you. | ||
| We're going to put our own people in. | ||
| Let's talk to Robert in Gadston, Alabama, a member of the military, Robert? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, retired. | |
| Okay. | ||
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unidentified
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All right. | |
| I was a combat wounded veteran in Vietnam, and so I've seen the military screw up many, many, many, many a time. | ||
| And what gets me is if you wanted to have the worst possible withdrawal from Afghanistan, then you would do what Biden and his bunch did. | ||
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And after all that disaster, no one was held accountable. | |
| No one was fired. | ||
| All these generals, all they did was cover their ass. | ||
| So I'm glad to see a lot of them go, and probably more of them need to go. | ||
| So what do you think about that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think anybody can reasonably say the Afghanistan withdrawal was handled incredibly poorly. | ||
| I think some people would point back to the initial concept of we're going to set a deadline that we saw from first President Trump saying we're going to do this and then President Biden specifically saying it's going to be on this date. | ||
| We're going to be gone. | ||
| A lot of people who covered the Pentagon and were aware of military stuff wrote pretty quickly, this is going to end badly. | ||
| And unfortunately and tragically, it did. | ||
| I think questions of who should be held accountable for that are certainly fair. | ||
| If that was the reason for these firings, I think I'd love to hear a statement and clear lines of communication about we looked at this, we feel that Brown or Franketti had a clear role in this process, although neither was on the Joint Chiefs at the time. | ||
| And that's our reasoning. | ||
| I think that's totally fair if they could explain that. | ||
| Another retired military is Sean in Shackles, Fords, Virginia. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I just want to ask you a question about the pre-positioning of all the troops of the Army where we are in Europe. | ||
| And what is going to happen with the cane of command, with all the combat brigades, with the people that are supporting them, including civilian workers. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, the forces across Europe and across the world and what that's going to look like is something that we're obviously going to be watching going forward. | ||
| Obviously, there have been some comments from this administration and people in this administration about how we need to draw back from being out in the world as much. | ||
| What that actually looks like, we're waiting to see. | ||
| There have been no major force posture changes yet, no announcements of that. | ||
| I would expect that nothing really changes, at least until we get a sense of what the next budget looks like. | ||
| And that's going to be at least a couple of months. | ||
| There's some reporting out there about some people who are now in the Pentagon and what they've suggested about potential cuts. | ||
| But until we know more, that's just speculation about what that looks like. | ||
| So what about the Pentagon is looking to shift $50 billion in planned funding. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| And where would that money be coming from? | ||
| Yeah, so this is when a new administration comes in, it's pretty normal for them to say, okay, because of the way the budget process works, the next budget, which in this case is fiscal 2026, is largely been built out. | ||
| That's usually done really by December, and then it's just tinkering around the edges. | ||
| So when a new administration comes in, they take a look at what that is, and then they start, they make some shifts. | ||
| What Hegseth's memo, which said we're going to take every agency and organization needs to find 8% of its budget and plan to cut that to then reinvest that in other areas that are more priorities for this administration, that's a much bigger step than we usually see in terms of tinkering with the budget. | ||
| But ultimately, it is tinkering with the budget. | ||
| It's taking what was built by the Biden team and saying, okay, we're going to shift to more of our priorities, but largely things are going to stay the same. | ||
| They outlined 17 areas that are priority areas to be protected. | ||
| Those include things like munitions, nuclear weapons, small drones. | ||
| To the previous caller's question, interestingly enough, it included the Pacific, NORTHCOM, which is the border, but does not include European Command, AFRICOM, or Southcom as areas to be protected. | ||
| So you might see some force reductions there to invest elsewhere. | ||
| You know, this was kind of a scrambled drill. | ||
| They said basically you have three weeks to figure this out. | ||
| That's all a pretty big lift. | ||
| We won't see really what happens with that until the budget rolls out, though I expect some leaks will begin about, oh, well, the Army has decided just to try to cancel this program with that program. | ||
| Usually what happens in these cases is the services say, you know, this program, which had nothing to do with these protected areas, is now a key part of these protected areas and try to save it. | ||
| I expect we'll see a lot of gains like that. | ||
| All right, let's talk to Cheryl in a sitting in New York, Republican. | ||
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So Trump fired the four-star general who he hired because he thought he was very good. | |
| He just wanted to stigmatize him and say, oh, this is the guy who's doing DEI. | ||
| Trump doesn't care about, all he cares about is loyalty. | ||
| And Hegseth says he wants the best. | ||
| HegSeth is not even qualified. | ||
| They don't care about qualifications. | ||
| Trump said he wants total loyalty. | ||
| He wants to be a dictator. | ||
| And that's exactly what he's doing. | ||
| And none of this is normal. | ||
| To see Kash Patel retweet a picture of him taking a saw to Liz Cheney, and he's going to be in charge of the DOJ. | ||
| None of this is normal. | ||
| The FBI dictatorship. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Certainly what we've seen at the Pentagon is being unusual. | ||
| Again, it's rare to see officers fired. | ||
| It's usually with great cause when you get to this level of leadership. | ||
| And, you know, again, there may be cause there that we are not aware of, but to this point, there has been no explanation with Brown, Frank Hendy, and SLIFE that they did something so egregious they needed to be removed immediately. | ||
| Here's Walter in Cleveland, Ohio. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| My question is, with the savings that President Trump and Musk, when they made the cuts to these departments, what happens to that money? | ||
| Where do it goes? | ||
| Do it go back into the government? | ||
| Yeah, it's a great question, partly because there's been a lot of questions about how much savings have actually been found. | ||
| For instance, the Doge group, Musk Group, put out a list of, hey, we've saved XYZ, and a lot of people quickly pointed out, actually, those are savings that were already there or don't actually exist. | ||
| And then that list was deleted and updated. | ||
| You know, where does it go? | ||
| In theory, it goes back to reinvesting, or at least at the very least, you say, okay, well, now we've saved, you know, we've cut X number of overhead. | ||
| We don't need to spend that money. | ||
| So that means the next budget, the budget, in theory, the top line could be less, which in theory means the government is spending less money and that can go towards paying off some of the debt or tax cuts to you're bringing, you don't need as much money. | ||
| You can bring in less money in theory. | ||
| We have to really see how much these savings are real, where they actually are, and then be able to kind of understand off of that information. | ||
| John in Charleston, South Carolina, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I'm also retired military, but this is my line that I always call in on. | ||
| But I just want to speak up a moment about the Air Force. | ||
| And so a lot of people don't really understand what the military is all about. | ||
| When I went in the military, you know, I was an enlisted guy. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| And I quickly learned that, you know, enlisted guys are, and I'm a black guy. | ||
| Enlisted guys are kind of just like, you know, black people were in society and everything. | ||
| Enlisted guy in the military. | ||
| Basically, you know, you're, you know, I mean, it's a good job. | ||
| They make good living. | ||
| They take care of me, but you basically, you're a second-class citizen. | ||
| You do not associate with officers in the military. | ||
| You don't marry officers in the military. | ||
| That's where it used to be. | ||
| I'm not sure how to do it now. | ||
| And Brown, being in the Air Force, you know, you got people enlisted, you got officers. | ||
| And then it separates even the officer corps. | ||
| Well, in officers, you got rated and non-rated. | ||
| Brown was a rated officer when he was a pilot. | ||
| And that's the top. | ||
| That's the top in the Air Force that you can be as a fighter pilot. | ||
| You fight a pilot in the Air Force. | ||
| You are first-class citizen to go, even if you're a captain. | ||
| But he's a four-star general and a black guy. | ||
| You know how long you got hard, you got to fight to get in that position, to be like that? | ||
| I mean, it's a tough thing, but hey, the president can do whatever you want to do. | ||
| And that's exactly what he did. | ||
| And, you know, it's not hurting anybody that I know enlisted feeling because, you know, we didn't associate with. | ||
| All right, John. | ||
| We got that. | ||
| Any comment on that? | ||
| And also about recruitment numbers. | ||
| How are they doing for the services? | ||
| Yeah, so certainly Brown was well respected. | ||
| Really somebody who you never heard bad things about. | ||
| People had kind of tagged him early on as somebody who was going to rise through the ranks because of kind of his intelligence and his capabilities. | ||
| In terms of recruiting, don't have any numbers on hand right now. | ||
| Obviously, there's been a recruiting issue for the military writ large. | ||
| The Air Force did fall behind its recruiting goals the last cycle. | ||
| Part of the reason that Secretary Hegseth has talked about getting rid of DI initiatives is to his mind, recruiting has been hurt by kind of this process and emphasis on going towards minority communities or less served communities instead of more traditional military communities. | ||
| So the argument for going against DI from Hegseth and other folks has been this will actually help recruiting. | ||
| The counter argument we've heard is, well, we're going after other communities because this basic community is not actually stepping up recruiting the way that we need it to. | ||
| So we're going to see in the numbers if things change. | ||
| Obviously, this will be a process that takes a couple of years. | ||
| You don't get numbers right away. | ||
| But it'll be kind of an interesting litmus test of those theories. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Aaron Maida, editor-in-chief of Breaking Defense, thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
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On Tuesday, March 4th, watch C-SPAN's live coverage of President Trump's address to Congress, the first address of his second term, and less than two months since taking office. | |
| C-SPAN's live coverage begins at 8 p.m. Eastern with a preview of the evening from Capitol Hill, followed by the President's speech, which begins at 9 p.m. Eastern, and then watch the Democratic response after the President's speech. | ||
| We'll also take your calls and get your reaction on social media. | ||
| Over on C-SPAN 2, you can also watch a simulcast of the evening's coverage, followed by reaction from lawmakers live from Capitol Hill. |