| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Philip Wallach. | ||
| He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book called Why Congress. | ||
| Phil, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great to be with you. | |
| So just start by telling us about your background and your areas of expertise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, I'm a political scientist who studies American politics and especially our constitutional system, our policymaking system, and the separation of powers, how our branches fit together. | |
| And over the last seven or eight years, I've mostly focused on studying Congress because I really am concerned that Congress is in some ways the part of our government that's having the most trouble. | ||
| And because Congress has troubles, we get a lot of problems passing laws that are legitimate, that the whole American people accept that will be binding. | ||
| And we end up putting so much stress on our presidential elections that it really strains our political system. | ||
| So you're a senior fellow at AEI. | ||
| Does that mean you have a conservative point of view? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think of myself as a center-right person. | |
| But I'm especially, I'm a little unusually concerned about process and sort of the way we do things and not just a particular set of priorities. | ||
| So let's talk about the speech tonight that the president will be giving. | ||
| What are you looking for in terms of how President Trump defines his role and his powers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think President Trump in this second term has been very clear that he thinks he won a huge victory, a mandate from the American people, and that gives him pretty much entitles him to do whatever he thinks is right. | |
| And of course, the president takes an oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, right? | ||
| And sometimes President Trump seems to think that when he finds laws inconvenient or bad, they don't apply. | ||
| And so I wonder if he'll say anything on that score to reassure those of us who are worried that they're playing a little fast and loose with the law in this new administration. | ||
| But, you know, I expect President Trump to revert to form as a showman, right? | ||
| He will tout his accomplishments. | ||
| He will say, this is the, we've seen more good things happen in the last six weeks than ever before in American history. | ||
| There was a posting on X, I believe, where President Trump wrote, quote, he who saves his country does not violate any law. | ||
| That is quoted. | ||
| It's tributed to Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor. | ||
| What was your reaction when you saw that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gosh, I mean, Trump is the master troll, right? | |
| He knows how to provoke reactions, and he can always say, oh, I was just kidding around. | ||
| I was just trying to get a rise out of my opponents. | ||
| But it's crazy for the President of the United States, we a constitutional republic, to be favorably citing this Napoleon Bonaparte who made himself emperor, who ended the republic in France and converted it into an empire and went trying to conquer the whole of Europe. | ||
| That's a crazy thing for a President of the United States to be favorably quoting on his social media. | ||
| So, you know, I do consider myself successfully trolled. | ||
| It did get a rise out of me. | ||
| That's not what kind of country America is supposed to be. | ||
| We are a country where we have the rule of law. | ||
| The law is king in America. | ||
| There is no other king. | ||
| We don't elect a king. | ||
| A president is bound to be an officer of the law. | ||
| Tell us about unitary executive theory. | ||
| What does that mean and where did it come from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So there's a question about how the executive branch ought to be organized. | ||
| We obviously have literally millions of people who are employed in the executive branch of our government today. | ||
| That's quite a contrast from the beginnings of our country when there were just a few hundred in 1789. | ||
| So the question is, how much do we need to have it be so that the president as the boss at the top of this pyramid sort of is literally responsible for everything that happens in the executive branch and has the ability to hire and fire as he sees fit? | ||
| The unitary executive theory says, yes, the Constitution makes the president the sole head of the executive branch, and there really isn't room for independence within the executive branch. | ||
| So independent agencies, which we've had for many, many decades, are suspicious. | ||
| We think, why are they independent? | ||
| Why don't they answer to the democratically elected president? | ||
| So President Trump and his supporters have leaned very hard into the unitary executive theory to justify why the president needs to be sort of having direct control over every part of the government. | ||
| They've maybe taken it even farther in sort of suggesting anything the president says goes, which the unitary executive theory doesn't necessarily need to say. | ||
| Philip Wallach is our guest. | ||
| He's the author of the book called Why Congress. | ||
| He's also a senior fellow at the AEI. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation, you can do so. | ||
| Start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| So where does that theory leave Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so the executive branch is one thing, and Congress is another thing, right? | |
| Congress is the Article I branch of government. | ||
| It doesn't get its power from the President. | ||
| It gets its power from the people who elect our representatives and senators. | ||
| So Congress is meant to be the preeminent branch of our government that makes the big decisions. | ||
| They're the ones who make the law and the president is supposed to be executing the law. | ||
| So that really ought to give Congress pride of place. | ||
| But it's clear that Congress in recent years has often sort of marginalized itself. | ||
| Members of Congress, you'll see them sort of begging the president to do things. | ||
| Well, you could trust make a law, but instead you're going around the lawmaking process and saying the president is the one who somehow is supposed to make all the policies, make all the decisions. | ||
| And so as a member of Congress, the most effective thing I can do is bend the president's ear. | ||
| That's really a dangerous shift for Congress that suggests that it's a subordinate branch. | ||
| Do you think that the power of the executive had already been expanding in the past, even before our current time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I think it's a long upward trajectory. | ||
| Not always steady, right? | ||
| After Watergate, Congress seized back a lot of powers. | ||
| So there have been times when Congress has shown that it can stand up for itself. | ||
| But in the 21st century, especially, we've seen some very assertive presidents. | ||
| You know, you had Barack Obama say, well, when Congress isn't doing what I want, I have my pen and my phone, and I can do an awful lot of policymaking just with those by ordering people to do things in the executive. | ||
| So Trump has fit into this upward trajectory, but I think it's fair to say that this second Trump administration is making the most aggressive claims of really any administration we've ever seen. | ||
| You published a commentary with the title, The Rule of Law Has Seen Better Days. | ||
| Explain what you mean by that and if you think that there are laws being broken right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's clear that there are. | |
| You know, some of them are kind of detailed, not likely to be things that the ordinary American is experiencing directly. | ||
| So there's a question about the funding of research labs. | ||
| And Congress very clearly set out a formula that it wanted and said it had a disagreement with the first Trump administration. | ||
| And so it very clearly put this into law. | ||
| The second Trump administration says, well, sorry, we're giving less for overhead. | ||
| It doesn't matter that the law says otherwise. | ||
| So there's little things like that. | ||
| That is an important policy, but something most people won't notice. | ||
| Then there's just the question of the civil service laws and how the federal employment is structured and what kind of procedures you have to go through to shut down an agency, right? | ||
| The USAID is established by law. | ||
| The president has made it sound like, nevertheless, he can just disappear it because it's right. | ||
| Because under unitary executive theory, that whole branch belongs to him. | ||
| So he could shut down an agency if he chose to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, again, the president is charged with taking care that the laws are faithfully executed, and those are good laws on the books. | |
| So the president has to have sort of direct lines of control through the executive branch under unitary executive theory. | ||
| But traditionally, they don't have the power to just disregard the law. | ||
| Now, another place where this is going to come up is this question of impoundment, right? | ||
| This spending. | ||
| When Congress passes spending laws, is the president required to spend up to the amount that Congress has said? | ||
| Or does the president have an inherent power to say, actually, I don't want to spend as much on this. | ||
| That's just a ceiling for how much I could spend. | ||
| So President Nixon made some very aggressive claims about how he could simply impound funds if he thought the policy was bad. | ||
| President Trump seems to be moving in that direction, although he hasn't formally made any claim of that yet. | ||
| And I would just put up what the Empoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the President to spend appropriated money unless he obtains congressional approval within 45 days not to disperse the funds. | ||
| And has that ever happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Many presidents since the passage of that 1974 Act have successfully gotten rescissions, they're called. | ||
| So we rescind the spending that originally was in the appropriations laws. | ||
| It does require going to Congress and working with members of Congress to pass those bills. | ||
| And certainly easier for the president to just say, I can do this all on my own. | ||
| But certainly since the big clashes with Nixon in the 70s, no president has really gone outside of that framework to say, I have a strong impoundment power. | ||
| President Trump looks like he may. | ||
| Let's talk to callers, and we'll start with Mary on the Republican line in Smithville, Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yeah, go ahead, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, my name is Mary Smith, and I come from a long line of Democrats, and I voted for Obama and for Biden. | |
| But I had a friend that was very politically astute who informed me that Biden was pro-abortion up to the ninth month, and I'm a pro-life person. | ||
| So I made a 180 and became a Republican. | ||
| And then I started watching Newsmax and Fox Nation, and I became a conservative Republican. | ||
| And I will be watching the president tonight. | ||
| And I appreciate your show very much today. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Carol in Illinois, line for Democrats. | ||
| Carol, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| I'm very concerned that all of our relatives died in the past to have our U.S. constitutional rights. | ||
| And Congress is not stepping up and doing their job. | ||
| What can we do to get Congress up doing their job instead of taking away from the people and giving it all to the oligarchs? | ||
| It doesn't hurt them, but it hurts the American people. | ||
| And that's our money. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| Well, thanks for the question, Carol. | ||
| I say there's some complicated reasons why Congress is sort of shirking its responsibilities in our time. | ||
| Part of it is the change in the media environment. | ||
| Members of Congress can sort of reach a huge crowd of people on social media and get rewards from those kinds of interactions, including raising funds from all around the country. | ||
| That sort of incentivizes them to the sort of spectacle rather than the hard work of policymaking. | ||
| And I think a lot of our members of Congress today need to remember that their job is to be a lawmaker and to really figure out how they can get together with all the other members who come from all around the country, work through the country's difficult problems, and figure out some compromises that we can all live with. | ||
| If we do that, we end up with laws and policies that are acceptable, broadly acceptable, and that can endure, that won't just snap back and forth when the control of the White House changes hands. | ||
| The way we have it now, where so many members of Congress are just cheerleading or jeering the president, depending on whether their party is in control of it, we really get a kind of whiplash, and that's not healthy for our country. | ||
| Here is Stephanie in South Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| If I'm a veteran and I'm calling because I'm concerned about the documents seized by the FBI when they raided Trump's house for the documents he stole during his first term, now I'm reading in the Washington Post, they're saying that those documents were returned to his house. | ||
| I'm wondering who's keeping an eye on that and why do those documents need to be at his house? | ||
| I'll be watching his speech tonight because I don't hear anybody reporting on this, and I'll be watching the speech for clues as to why he needs those documents at his house, the same documents that he stole before. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Not very related to the topic, but do you have any comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say that I don't know so much about the details about where the documents are today, but it does seem that the caller is right that people have moved on from this issue. | |
| Trump is the president now. | ||
| He has security clearance, obviously, for anything and everything. | ||
| So I think it's sort of become a non-issue. | ||
| Here's Carol, Republican in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Carol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Speaking to Mr. Wallach's point of the whiplash, we need checks and balances in the congressional procedures. | ||
| We have a seesaw effect that occurs when one party is in power. | ||
| The fact that the other party has no rights to bring things to the floor is unhealthy for our Congress. | ||
| And Joe Manchin has rightly said that 50% of the people are centrists. | ||
| And the way our system has evolved, it's just going whiplashing, as he said, between radical left and radical right. | ||
| Well, thank Carol for that comment. | ||
| I very much agree that the way we organize the procedures in both the House and the Senate today really cuts down on our members' ability to work things out and sort of look for bipartisan compromises where they can find them. | ||
| We have very leader-dominated institutions today relative to most of the history of Congress. | ||
| And the top partisan leaders, Republicans in both chambers today, have a very tight control over the agenda. | ||
| And we have a very sort of cramped lawmaking process. | ||
| We don't often see good sort of nose to the grindstone work in the committees leading to bipartisan bills that then get brought to the floor where other members have a chance to offer amendments. | ||
| That's really become very uncommon in our time. | ||
| And that process of lawmaking is good for building, again, compromises that we can all live with. | ||
| When we try to do everything through our top partisan leaders, they tend to think mostly about how things look for the next election, which again doesn't always motivate them to think about how we can calm things down. | ||
| Well, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was speaking last month in Florida, and she was asked about the continued relevance of checks and balances and the power of Congress to appropriate funding. | ||
| So I'm going to play a portion and then get your response. | ||
| Our founders believed that they had created pretty, and they had and have, created a pretty incredible checks and balances system. | ||
| The woman who asked Franklin, she said, do we have a monarchy or something else? | ||
| And his response was a republic. | ||
| Our founders were hell-bent on ensuring that we didn't have a monarchy. | ||
| And the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse. | ||
| And because that's an incredible power. | ||
| They gave the presidency the power of the military. | ||
| And that's also, and that means not just armed forces, but law enforcement, which is an incredible obligation of a president. | ||
| They gave the courts the power to interpret. | ||
| And we have to do it by persuasion. | ||
| We have to, in our opinions, make it clear to the society, to the presidents, to the Congress, to the people, that we are doing things based on law and the Constitution as we are interpreting it fairly. | ||
| And so our goodwill or our power is the power of reason. | ||
| And that's most people would consider a soft power, but it's the most powerful of all of it because money can be taken away by Congress. | ||
| They give it, they can take it away. | ||
| A president has four years and he or she could be removed. | ||
| Those things are ephemeral in that sense of it. | ||
| Court decisions stand. | ||
| Whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not, it doesn't change the foundation that it's still a court order that someone will respect at some point. | ||
| What do you think, Phil? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I share the justice's love for that Benjamin Franklin quotation when asked what kind of government have you made coming out of the Constitutional Amendment. | |
| He said, a republic if you can keep it, right? | ||
| And so it is always the responsibility of the American people, we the people, to make sure that our government remains responsive to us and doesn't get out of our control. | ||
| So I think the justice did a good job outlining the different spheres of each of the branches. | ||
| But I will say that it's controversial exactly where the executive power ends, you know, and exactly how far court decisions can go. | ||
| So she suggested that Supreme Court decisions are really the most powerful thing because they last until they are overturned. | ||
| But there is a view that has periodically popped up in American history called departmentalism that says, actually, judges get to decide cases, and that's it. | ||
| So everyone else is bound to follow the decisions they make in particular cases, but they don't have to treat everything the court says as having great precedential value. | ||
| They can keep pushing. | ||
| So I think you see some signs that the current Trump administration has a view like that. | ||
| It wants to very narrowly limit how it's going to read the Supreme Court's rulings. | ||
| So do you think the Supreme Court will ultimately decide all these questions as far as the power of Doge, their ability to fire federal workers, the power of the presidency? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's dozens and dozens of lawsuits that are currently playing out. | |
| And lawsuits take time. | ||
| We're only a few weeks into this administration, really. | ||
| Lawsuits play out over the course of months and years. | ||
| So we're going to see, I think many of them will end up in the Supreme Court eventually, but there's sort of a whole lot of action that plays out while the judicial process is unfolding. | ||
| So Jimbo in Bakersfield, California, is asking you if you think that when the President disregards or ignores court orders, that by definition is a constitutional crisis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think crisis sort of depends on how things play out. | |
| Is disregarding something that most people would find unimportant, a crisis? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think... | ||
| But if it's a court order. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I think the other question is whether they pretend that they're complying and then sort of in fact aren't doing what's ordered. | ||
| I think if they openly said, we don't have to follow what the court says, that would be sort of maximally aggressive and I think would lead to the question of whether the president has any limits on what he can do if ultimately he can just ignore a court of law that says that he's not following the law. | ||
| Here's Doug in New Semarina Beach, Florida, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Doug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just have a question to ask for general understanding. | ||
| Congress has the budget and they appropriate money to whatever cause it might be, whatever situation might be. | ||
| The money is then given or passed, I believe, to the executive branch to execute that. | ||
| But Congress doesn't look line by line for every single item in which that department is spending the money or allocating the money, however it should be called. | ||
| So what authority does the executive branch have to determine what individual items within that appropriation should be spent in what way? | ||
| Thanks for the question, Doug. | ||
| It's a really subtle question, and you're right that it's kind of complicated. | ||
| The money gets appropriated by Congress, and then it's in different accounts that are managed by the Department of the Treasury, but ultimately, you know, tied to different departments within the government. | ||
| And yeah, the government moves money around to execute its programmatic responsibilities. | ||
| Congress has intentionally given the executive branch quite a lot of flexibility in how it moves money around between these different accounts because it thinks that's necessary to just deal with the realities of a complicated world. | ||
| Now, I think I should say, does Congress continue to keep track of things line by line? | ||
| Yes, they really do. | ||
| The GAO, which was originally created as an accounting office, now called Accountability Office, is responsible for auditing the books of the executive branch and reporting back to Congress. | ||
| So Congress does have the capacity to keep track of the way money is moving around in the executive branch. | ||
| That said, you know, when this new administration starts making things happen really fast, I think it's fair to ask whether Congress really even has a good grasp over what's happening. | ||
| So that's an important question. | ||
| Here's Charlene in California, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, it's very hard for either of the branches to work together because they're attempting to operate out of spirit of fear. | ||
| They're afraid. | ||
| Mr. Trump have a lot of people that support him that are not does not have the country's unity and progress for all in their best interest. | ||
| Uh, between the wrestlers, the proud boys, the 1600 that were let out of prison, jail wherever they were um, between all of them. | ||
| Most people would be afraid to do their job too, but I hope we have enough people at the top that know Jesus, know the Lord, know the Creator, know that he's the boss, and not Trump, and not Biden, and not nobody else. | ||
| And I hope they do their job for the betterment of the people. | ||
| Phil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that's a great comment, Charlene. | |
| I think we need our lawmakers to remember that they take an oath to the Constitution, that they have a responsibility to their constituents who sent them to Washington and to the whole country. | ||
| And I think, yeah, there are an awful lot of people who think that the other side is so bad that compromising would somehow be suspicious or treasonous even. | ||
| And that's an assumption that we just can't have if we're going to have a country with a functioning politics. | ||
| We have to believe that even though we disagree with each other on an awful lot, we can still work through our problems, hear each other out, figure out where we can come to agreements and go from there. | ||
| And Rich is a Republican in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. | ||
| You're on with Philip Wallach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you. | |
| Yes, first, I guess, as a comment, it appears to me that there's not been any fact yet of President Trump violating a court order or a decision from the Supreme Court, yet I recall the activity of Mr. Biden, his predecessor, with student loan forgiveness, an utter disregard. | ||
| And I don't recall a similar level of scrutiny. | ||
| That prompts two other questions from Mr. Wallach's commentary this morning regarding employment oversight on the federal employee workforce. | ||
| If that is not a function of the executive branch of government, then I fail to see whose it would be. | ||
| They're the ones who are supposed to make sure the money that is spent on them is appropriately spent, not excessively spent, and that the people are being productive and efficient in their work to serve the American taxpayer. | ||
| The last thing I guess I would like to raise as a question relates to any disruption, since there's some things I've seen in the news that could suggest disruptions for the president's address to Congress tonight, and would welcome any of your comments. | ||
| All right, Rich. | ||
| Thanks for those questions. | ||
| They're really good ones. | ||
| So first, let me say I wrote about Biden's student loan policies. | ||
| I criticized the way that he went around Congress to try to put those plans into effect rather than trying to see whether he could secure legislative package to offer relief to those who really needed it. | ||
| I think that that was troubling the way that he stretched legal powers in ways that ultimately the Supreme Court repudiated. | ||
| But I don't think you're right to say that he just disregarded what the court said. | ||
| He most certainly shut down the particular program that the court said was unlawful. | ||
| And then he went ahead and tried to find other ways of doing some student loan relief that would be lawful. | ||
| So I don't see that as an open, openly disregarding the court decision. | ||
| Now, you talk about federal employees and controlling them. | ||
| If that's not an executive function, what is? | ||
| And I think that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| But nevertheless, it's a very huge workforce set up in all these different agencies. | ||
| These agencies are creatures of law. | ||
| We've evolved a civil service system where laws govern how we have to deal with federal employees. | ||
| We have these laws because we want a high-quality workforce that doesn't merely do whatever the top brass say they should, but who actually are devoted to doing their jobs right and are going to keep doing them from one administration to the next. | ||
| We want a non-political civil service to some degree, and we have laws in place to ensure that that's the case. | ||
| So I think Trump harkens back to Andrew Jackson and the spoils system as somebody who basically thinks that everybody in the executive branch ought to be answering directly to the president and that would be better. | ||
| But that's not the laws that we have in place. | ||
| Finally, you ask about possible disruptions at the speech tonight by Democrats. | ||
| I can only say that I think that would be a huge gift to the president. | ||
| I think that's exactly what he hopes will happen. | ||
| He's very lucky in his enemies, Mr. Trump. | ||
| That's one of his great political talents. | ||
| And I think getting certain people to make a spectacle is just the kind of thing that he can sell to his supporters as justification for the way he's conducting himself. | ||
| Let's talk to Kevin in Ackworth, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Philip. | |
| I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. | ||
| And I was glad to hear you mention that the law is supposedly the final authority in our country. | ||
| It begs the question, if the power is ultimately resting with the individuals who voluntarily delegate that authority to various levels through representation. | ||
| Those representatives in the Congress are responsible for making the laws. | ||
| And the executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of those laws. | ||
| There are obviously subsidiary enforcement agencies and local police forces. | ||
| Where does the responsibility lie when the laws are not consistently and uniformly enforced by those representative bodies? | ||
| Yeah, so when the law doesn't seem to be making sense in practice, what are we supposed to do about that? | ||
| If the executive branch doesn't seem to be applying the law in a consistent way, it's a great question. | ||
| I think the judiciary certainly has a role in trying to order consistent conduct to say this is the right way to interpret this law and it needs to be applied fairly in all similar situations. | ||
| I think ultimately, though, Congress has to look after its own laws. | ||
| If it finds that the executive branch is not executing the laws that it has passed, that ought to be offensive to Congress as an institution. | ||
| And Congress has all kinds of tools to look after its own interest. | ||
| The most important one being the power of the purse. | ||
| It can defund the executive branch. | ||
| It could throw the president out of the White House if it really wanted to. | ||
| It has an awful lot of power to have the last say. | ||
| But again, Congress has been a little bit passive and really likely to minimize its own responsibility in recent years. | ||
| So when that happens, and then you have laws that don't seem to be getting carried out uniformly, it is a fair question. | ||
| Is there really any recourse? | ||
| This is Angela, a Democrat in Lancaster, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Angela. | ||
| Angela, are you there? | ||
| In Lancaster? | ||
| Here's Lynn in Charlotte, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I hope everyone there is doing well this morning. | ||
| Hey, I have a couple of comments about I always watch the Washington Journal every morning. | ||
| You know, what a shame that the Democrats can't get on board and recognize that we are $37 trillion in debt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this goes back to there was clips of Clinton saying, oh, we need to audit. | |
| We need to get the debt under control. | ||
| Then there was clips of Obama. | ||
| There was clips of the Biden administration. | ||
| Instead, you know, no one addressed it. | ||
| And now that Trump is trying to address it, America could literally go bankrupt. | ||
| And we could be in a lot of trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So Trump is taking a lot of whack for trying to straighten the United States out. | |
| We got a debt here to pay, and no one has addressed it. | ||
| Can't just keep supporting a never-ending war. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look, I feel sorry for the Ukrainians, but look, you've got to have a peace still there. | |
| I understand that, you know, you've got to have the best interest of the Americans at heart, whether you're a Democrat, whether you're a Republican, or whether you're an Independent. | ||
| America first, whether you're a Trump fan or not, you need to think about this $37 trillion of debt so we can continue to enjoy our freedom. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks so much, Lynn, for your comments. | ||
| I'm in full agreement with you about the seriousness of our debt problem, $37 trillion in debt, as you say. | ||
| And what are we doing about it? | ||
| Well, Trump says that by getting Elon Musk to slash various departments of the federal government, that's going to fix it. | ||
| I'm sorry, the math does not add up. | ||
| That's not where our government spending is mostly going. | ||
| I believe personnel costs are 8% or something, and most of that is military. | ||
| You can't cut your way to a balanced budget just by throwing out some federal employees or by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Much as I wish that were the case, if we could get there, if Elon Musk manages to do it in spite of what I'm saying now, I'll be thrilled. | ||
| I would be so happy to be wrong. | ||
| But that's just not mostly where our federal spending goes. | ||
| It mostly goes on these big entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. | ||
| And so if you want to actually shrink our budget deficit and therefore get the debt a little bit more under control, you're going to have to find ways of getting those programs under control. | ||
| And I just don't know if Republicans are on the way of doing that. | ||
| They're going to pass a tax package that will likely increase the size of our deficits. | ||
| So I agree with all the rhetoric about the need to get the debt under control. | ||
| I'm not sure that the current Republican Party is on the way to doing it, notwithstanding President Trump's claiming that he's on the way to balancing the budget. | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| Valerie's in Indiana, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I thank you very much for what you said, did say just now to that lady. | ||
| It can't be done, not the way that he wants to do it. | ||
| But I was just wondering after looking at the two idiots with a gentleman the other day, it was so embarrassing. | ||
| And it really put our country in a down position. | ||
| And my question is, is there any way to get rid of this president through dereliction of duty or unfit Well, well, Valerie, there's two ways that we have under the Constitution to remove a president. | ||
| One of them is impeachment, which has to do with high crimes and misdemeanors. | ||
| So you have to get members of Congress to agree that the president did something so egregious that it would warrant removing him from office. | ||
| We saw that that didn't happen in Trump's first term in spite of two attempts by the Democratic House of Representatives that did impeach him, but the Senate did not convict. | ||
| Then there's the 25th Amendment, in which you get all of the members of the cabinet together to say that the president is somehow unfit to hold office, possibly because of physical or mental debility. | ||
| Let me tell you, that's not happening anytime soon, and you still need Congress to go along with that. | ||
| The truth is that President Trump has a lot of support in his party right now, very strong support amongst Republicans. | ||
| That would have to change dramatically to have a realistic chance of removing him from office. | ||
| So right now, it's not on the cards. | ||
| William in Burlington, North Carolina, is asking you on text, would you say that identity politics and a two-party system are more the problem overall? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we've had a two-party system for pretty much our entire political history, and we find ways to make it work. | |
| Parties are coalitions. | ||
| They're not all people who agree on exactly the same ideas. | ||
| There always is internal dissension within parties, internal disagreements that have to get worked out. | ||
| The truth is that's very much true of the Republican Party today. | ||
| But at least in some of his moods, President Trump likes to make it seem like disagreeing with him is itself a questionable act. | ||
| So I think that's not healthy for the way that our parties have to function in our two-party system. | ||
| Identity politics, I would say, can be a real poison for our system if people think that certain people's identity makes them suspect, makes them so we can't work with them. | ||
| Basically, if I see my group as sort of implacably opposed to your group, then what are we going to compromise on? | ||
| I think if people think of themselves in those terms, we're really sunk. | ||
| I don't really think most Americans do, though. | ||
| Even those who feel some strong feeling of identity in different racial or ethnic or religious groups, I think still they feel themselves as Americans, as people who can work with other Americans of good faith, and we need to get back to that. | ||
| All right, Philip Wallach, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book, Why Congress? | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
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