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March 21, 2025 07:00-10:01 - CSPAN
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Washington Journal 03/21/2025
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unidentified
Decades ahead.
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Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, your calls and comments live.
And then we'll talk with Georgetown University Law Center's Stephen Vladik about President Trump's recent statements about the judiciary and reactions from the legal community.
And former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, now a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, discusses Trump administration immigration and deportation policies.
Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making.
In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the Federal Department of Education once and for all.
unidentified
Trump yesterday moving closer to a campaign pledge to dismantle the Education Department.
First hour of the Washington Journal, your reaction to the President's executive order yesterday.
Here's how you can join the conversation.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, dial in at 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
Educators and parents, your line this morning is 202-748-8003.
If you don't want to call, you can text, include your first name, city, and state to 202-748-8003 or post on facebook.com slash C-SPAN and on X with the handle at C-SPANWJ.
Good morning, everyone.
First hour of today's Washington Journal focusing on dismantling the Education Department.
Do you agree with President Trump's move yesterday or disagree?
Dial in now.
Let's hear a little bit more from the President yesterday at the White House.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
The department's useful functions and such as, and they're in charge of them, Pell Grants, Title I funding, resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be preserved, fully preserved.
They're all going to be.
So if you look at the Pell Grants, supposed to be a very good program, Title I funding and resources for children with special disabilities and special needs, they're going to be preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.
And that's very important to Linda, I know, and it's very important to all of us.
But beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department.
We're going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible.
It's doing us no good.
We want to return our students to the states where just some of the governors here are so happy about this.
They want education to come back to them, to come back to the states, and they're going to do a phenomenal job.
You know, if you look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, I have to tell you, I give them a lot of credit.
China's top 10.
And so we can't now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate because China is very big.
But you have countries that do a very good job in education.
And I really believe, like some of the governors here today, from states that run very, very well, including a big state like Texas, but states that run very well are going to have education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and those top Finland, those top countries that do so well with education.
I think they'll do every bit as well.
And what do you think about that, Governor?
Do you agree?
I think so.
Ron, do you agree?
I think so.
unidentified
Florida.
Iowa.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
I really believe that they'll be as good as any of them.
unidentified
President Trump vowing to take all legal steps to shut down the Education Department.
Recent polls taken on this move by the president show that 60% oppose eliminating the Department of Education, while 33% support it.
This is according to a Quenna PIAC poll.
Take a look at another poll.
When they were asked about eliminating the Department of Education by party, 98% of Democrats oppose it, 64% of independents and 18% of Republicans.
67 of Republicans support the idea of dismantling the Education Department.
1% of Democrats support it, while 31% of Independents.
Those poll numbers from Quenna PIAC, a recent poll done by that outfit.
Take a look at congressional reaction.
This is from the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in a tweet saying, attempting to dismantle the Department of Education is one of the most destructive and devastating steps Donald Trump has ever taken.
This will hurt kids.
The horrible decision by Donald Trump will be felt by teachers, parents, school leaders, and in the quality, he said, of education our children receive.
Then you have this from Michael Bennett, Democratic senator from Colorado.
Parents are worried enough about the state of America's public education system.
Reading scores have hit a 20-year low, and chronic absenteeism is on the rise.
All of this is proof we need to work together to reimagine our public schools for the 21st century.
Now take a look at Republicans' response.
Bill Cassidy, who is the chair of the Senate committee that oversees the Education Department.
I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission.
Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the President's goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.
And then you have this from Thomas Massey, who has opposed the president and Republicans in recent weeks.
Bravo, Congress should support President Trump's bold agenda by passing his bill, H.R. 899, to abolish the Department of Education.
We could also use rescissions in the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 51 votes in the Senate, to back him up.
If you support this idea of getting rid of the Federal Education Department, do you think Republicans should do this through reconciliation and with a simple majority?
Let's get to calls.
Helen in Long Beach, California, Republican.
Good morning to you, Helen.
Go ahead.
Yes, hi.
I'm a Republican, and I've been a special needs teacher for four decades and still am teaching.
My comment, good.
Time to go.
It's been a waste of resources.
It's been a waste of money.
It's been ridiculous mandates that we all have to pay lip service to.
Complete waste of money and time and precious resources.
So Helen, when you say mandates, ridiculous mandates, explain for those who are not familiar with the education system some of those mandates.
We have curriculum mandates for special needs students that came out, I think, maybe about with the Obama administration.
And it was requiring a uniform curriculum for all students with disabilities, moderate to severe.
And we got stuck with some ridiculous curriculum.
And because they're older students, some of my students are high school students, but they're still developmentally delayed.
And, you know, I'm going to put it bluntly.
They're developmentally about three or four years old.
You're mandating.
Teach chemistry.
You got to teach geometry.
You got to teach physics.
And so we get these little crappy packets that come from a company that's been contracted with by the district.
And they tell us, well, you need to modify it.
You need to be creative.
In so many words, fix it.
All right.
So, Helen, as you know, the curriculum comes from the local level.
But when it comes to special education, you're saying this came from the federal government.
This came from the federal government.
They're all supposed to have equal access to all academic materials.
Well, you know, it translated into fix it, make it look like geometry, make it look like chemistry, do what you got to do.
And then, as a dedicated teacher, you run out and you spend your own money on the weekend trying to find materials that you can modify, fix to show that you're doing this.
So that's one thing about getting rid of the Department of Education.
Secondly, I've also served briefly as a Title I coordinator.
Get this.
My students aren't even verbal, but we had Title I funding coming in, so we had to go to the meetings.
Nothing but layer upon layer upon layer of bureaucracy, paperwork, paperwork, meetings to be in compliance, how to fill out the paperwork properly, how to get the funding, how to word it correctly.
This has been just a bunch of bureaucratic nightmare.
All right, Helen, I'm going to jump in so that I can put a little bit more meat on the bones of what you're saying.
This is from USA Today.
Title I, student loans and other programs will continue under this executive order.
Public schools rely on the Education Department to distribute federal education dollars.
A major stream comes from Title I, a program that boosts funding to schools serving high poverty populations.
Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, said federal Title I and funding for students with disabilities, as well as Pell Grants and student loans that help students pay for college will be administered by the department under the order.
So all of that stays in place.
Caroline Lovitt also telling reporters in the driveway at the White House yesterday that the Education Department has failed to deliver despite spending $3 trillion since it was created in 1979.
Let's go to Dana in Indianapolis, a Democratic caller.
You're next.
Welcome to the conversation.
Yes.
My son is special education, and it did wonders for him.
It did him very good as far as helping him on his communication skills, as far as helping him want to get out in the public and his comprehension of certain topics and whatnot.
So I think the program is great, especially for federal grants to lose.
Okay.
John in Syracuse, New York, Independent.
John, what do you say?
Well, first of all, I think what concerns me is discrimination.
The Department of Education kind of monitored school districts that like to discriminate, especially out of the South.
So I think it was a mistake.
I think educators should have gotten together.
If there was a problem with the Department of Education, then those educators who have a really strong union should have gotten together, band together, write to your congressman or tell your senators, look, this is, we're having issues here.
And so instead of destroying the department, try correcting the department.
And that big, powerful teachers' union could have done it.
So quit crying like babies and blaming and doing the finger-pointing Name blaming game and work together to try to improve it.
All right, well, look at this to your point about getting Congress on board because it would take an act of Congress to fully eliminate the Education Department.
Back to USA Today, legislation in Congress to eliminate the Department of Education will require support from Democrats, which makes such an effort unlikely.
It's unclear whether moderate Republicans in the U.S. Senate would be on board with a Republican proposal to shift the agency's offices elsewhere within the federal government.
Trump has begun discussing the idea with his cabinet anyway.
Kyle in Buffalo, New York, Republican.
Kyle.
Hey, good morning, Grandma.
Yeah, so as a teacher for 23 years, the caller from California was partially right.
It was actually the programs, all these things started under the No Child Left Behind Act under the Bush administration.
The mandates.
Yes, the mandates, which changed a lot of these programs.
But the problem I have is that even still, states are left to do what they really do.
And so that's one of the reasons why I was a few years ago had questions, anyways, about why we need the Department, Federal Department of Education, because all 50 states pretty much came up with their own curriculum and different types of policies.
So I would be comfortable if the federal department had a blanket caliber for all 50 states when it came to the curriculum.
But since they do not, I kind of agree that we need to downsize it.
As long as they keep the funding still for the special, I actually have a master's in special education.
And so the funding, as long as they keep the funding, then I'm comfortable with that.
I mean, we have to downsize a lot of these government organized, you know, departments that kind of blew up over the last 30, 40 years.
That's costing us a lot of money.
You know.
All right, well, let's talk about money, Kyle.
This is from Washington Times.
The Education Department enforces non-discrimination policies in schools.
The money it distributes to schools accounts for less than 10% of the nation's public school funding, which is driven primarily by state and local taxes.
So 90% of the funding for K through 12 education comes primarily from the local property taxes that you pay.
The federal government is distributing 10%.
Lori, Hollywood, Florida, Democratic caller.
Lori?
Yeah, hi.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My word is it's about time.
I agree with the previous caller and a couple of callers ago also that the Department of Education has overgrown.
It doesn't provide, as a matter of fact, it's redundant in what it says to provide because the states have already done this.
They've done this before 1979.
As a matter of fact, before the Department of Education, we had the Office of Education, and its primary objective was only to monitor the results of the state education programs.
And the other thing, the federal government really has no business in the education.
It goes under the 10th Amendment, which is to the states and the people, which means basically the teachers and the parents and the students.
Okay, a little history, Lori, about the Education Department.
started under Carter administration in 1979, began operating in 1980.
It had 4,400 employees and its 2024 budget was $238 billion.
That was its 2024 budget.
It does more than that 10% that I talked about for K-12.
Obviously, it's administering college grants and loans as well.
From USA Today, Didn't the Trump administration already cut the agency's workforce?
Trump's long-anticipated order comes after more than 1,300 Education Department employees received termination notices last week as part of a large-scale reductions in force across the federal government pushed by Elon Musk's Doge Committee.
Combining layoffs and other types of departures, the Trump administration has trimmed the department's workforce from 4,333 to 2,183 since the start of his second term.
Despite the dramatic downsizing, the agency continues to oversee vital federal funding programs for schools.
Now, for more reporting in the national newspapers this morning, from the Washington Times on what the, excuse me, this is from the New York Times, the Washington Post, administration officials have been less forthcoming about which programs should be eliminated and they have not detailed any that will be returned to the states.
The Education Department does not determine curriculum or graduation requirements, which are the responsibility of the states already, nor does it administer the Head Start preschool or school meals program, which are run by other federal agencies.
So unclear yet what exactly is being returned to the states.
Akiva in Clifton, New Jersey, a Republican.
Let's hear from you.
Good morning, Governor.
susan swain ▲ ● ▼
Good morning.
unidentified
I have to say that President Trump is doing the right thing.
And I always remind myself every single day that I get up, I remind myself President Trump should work with Democrats.
President Trump should work with Republicans when it comes to education.
And if I disagree with President Trump, I will write to my congresswoman.
Not really, but for the most part, what I do is that people should speak out.
But I honestly think that this is fine.
This is fine.
And besides, a lot of Title IX money can simply be appropriated.
It can simply be put into an annual yearly budget.
You can call it fiscal if you want.
But I just see what is going on in our country and say, President Trump was given a mess.
Four years later, he can clean it up.
And in a few years, this will be something that people will just be so proud of.
And if it requires a constitutional amendment, so be it.
And now, can you please ask me a follow-up question?
All right, that's Akiva in Clifton, New Jersey.
I'm going to move on to you members of Congress and their reaction.
Johanna Hayes, a former history teacher, a Democrat, took to X to react, to respond to the president's yesterday.
Here's what she had to say.
I want to be sure that everyone understands what is happening right now.
The Department of Education handles Title I funding for low-income students.
It protects the civil rights of students.
It manages Pell Grants and student loan programs.
All of those things.
Trump and Linda McMahon keep talking about returning it to the states, but I have not heard them say once that that means providing the states with the funds to carry out their responsibilities.
I haven't heard them once say what will happen next, how students with special needs will be protected, how low-income communities will still have the resources that they deserve.
None of them, Trump, Musk, or even Linda McMahon, have ever had to put their children in public school.
So, quite frankly, I don't think they care about what happens next.
We've heard about waste, fraud, and abuse, and I am open to having hearings and looking at anything that they think may be wrong with the Department of Education.
But it's interesting that they're saying they want these cuts, but nothing has been said about providing more tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals.
Nothing has been said about auditing Elon Musk and the billions of dollars in federal contracts that he holds, far more than even the Department of Education is responsible for.
So, their targeted attacks on children, on the most vulnerable children, through programs like SNAP and now the Department of Education are just awful.
And we all have to push back on this.
I am really, I mean, the silence of good Republicans right now is deafening because I would like for them to explain to their communities how education will be delivered in those rural areas, how education will be delivered in low-income communities that rely on federal funding.
I'm thinking about many of the people that he introduced in the room who are at the bottom of education in this country because they haven't put in the resources or invested in our children.
Democrat Joanna Haynes on X yesterday, pushing back on what the president had to say about the status of the Education Department.
He moved yesterday to dismantle it.
Gerald, and Louisiana Independent, we're getting your reaction to the president's move.
Go ahead.
Hey, good morning, America, and good morning, C-SPAN.
Good morning.
I just have a small comment.
If our government cannot get along, how can we?
I agree, we need to save in every department, but education is the key to growth, is the key to staying ahead.
What about these poor states, Mississippi?
How are they going to fund?
It's just sad that we cannot work together, our government.
Gerald, part of the rationale is the poor results that we are seeing in American schools.
This is from the Washington Times.
Studies show that American students are falling behind their global peers.
The trends in the international mathematics and science study, an international test of math and science skills given to fourth and eighth graders, found that American fourth graders have declined 18 points in math, and eighth graders have declined 27 points since 2019.
Very good point.
I believe if we paid these educators more money, we will get better quality teachers and will get better results in the long run.
I know my sister has stayed in education for 30 years, could have left, but she loved it.
So the key is working together, working for the kids first, and just keep moving ahead and let's get along.
All right, Keith, Fargo, North Dakota, Democratic caller.
Hello, Keith.
What do you say to Washington this morning?
I think it's stupid to dismantle the education.
We need to put more into it.
No, I already forgot what I was going to tell you, but we got people that are, you know, I don't believe in kids at 17 or so being allowed to drop out of school.
We got enough idiots in this country.
We need to educate them more.
I'm tired that people aren't being educated more.
All right, well, Keith, the president says it's going to be up to the states to do the educating.
From USA Today, since returning to the White House, Trump has discussed giving states full authority to oversee schools, often signaling out Iowa and Indiana as two strongly performing states that should run their own education.
Looking to stress this concept, Trump was expected to sign the order along with several Republican governors and education chiefs.
They include Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Greg Abbott of Texas, and Mike DeWine of Ohio.
But it's not entirely clear what Trump means by such an arrangement.
Local school districts and state already control their school curriculums.
The federal government, on the other hand, provides limited oversight for schools that receive federal funding to ensure students are being kept safe and treated equally.
That is the role of this education department, which, by the way, is one of the smallest departments, federal departments in Washington.
Iris in Michigan, Republican Iris, good morning.
I think it's independent.
Good morning, Greta.
You're looking great.
I really believe that local, the closest you can get to your parents and their interest in you is the best way to go.
Yes, it's limited outlook that the government has on children, but we need more close ties with the mothers, the fathers, the community, parent-teachers' conferences, the association of the children close to their environment that they're growing up in.
It worked for me, it worked for my children, it's worked for my grandchildren all brought up in public schools.
Accomplished, accomplished, accomplished parents' interest, report cards, expectations of the children.
Forums opened up to them that I don't believe that they have now.
Well, why would any of that go away, Iris, if this is run by the states?
Because of their closer contact with their roots.
The federal government is so scattered.
They're interested in war in the Ukraine and soldiering and, you know, what's going on outside of their community, but in a limited fashion.
Okay.
Understood, Iris.
Thomas in New York is next.
Democratic caller.
Thomas, support or oppose the president's executive order to, as he said, step-by-step, shut down the education department.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼
He made the first move yesterday.
unidentified
I'm a Democrat.
Some of it I support, some I don't.
I support breaking up the education.
I'm a Democrat, but the way he's doing it, I come from the South.
I come through discrimination.
I'm 76 years old.
I come to Jessica Hill, Bull Connor, and other ones that didn't believe blacks would go to school.
Who's going to make sure that there's no discrimination?
All blacks that come on the phone to talk about discrimination that we have as blacks in our education system.
All right.
I didn't like their Board of Ed education because they've spent $9 on a black kid, $3,000 on a white kid.
Who's going to stop this?
Like, Mitch McConnor.
All right, Thomas.
Thomas, to your point, I want to read from Axios.
Why it matters.
Funding for public schools primarily falls to local and state governments, but federal funds work to fill the gaps.
States that voted for Trump last November, on average, use more federal funding in their education apportions than states that voted for Vice President Harris.
Average federal spending in the 2021-2022 school year was 17% in Trump voting states compared to 11% in states that voted for Harris.
At 23%, Mississippi had the highest proportion of federal public funding that school year, with South Dakota and Arkansas following with 22% each.
New York at 7% had the lowest.
Mississippi spends an average of $12,390 on public K-12 spending per student compared to New York's 33,440.
This is per the Education Data Initiative.
Anywhere from 11 to 14% of public school funding is federal.
All right.
Gerald in Redfield, Maine, Republican.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I don't know.
I think we have a math problem in Congress.
Number one, the Democrats refuse to understand that, and they should be telling their constituents across the country that we are $36 trillion in debt, and the amount of interest that comes from that deficit is as much as we spend on defense in an entire year.
So I think the numbers they've got to look at is $36 trillion.
It's going to be $110,000 right now for each kid, each child, to pay off the debt that we're going to give them.
And the other thing that people are not harping on, and I think the president needs to do this, is two numbers, one and 40.
ALL RIGHT, GERALD, WHEN THE PRESIDENT, LET ME ASK YOU THIS THOUGH.
When the president is taking action to dismantle one of the smallest federal agencies, the Education Department, and not talking about the Defense Department, which is the largest, does that give you concern?
You're talking about the argument is the federal debt and deficit.
Should the Pentagon and its budget be on the cutting table?
No, it doesn't, because number one, these mandates that are DEI and all this sex changing and all this stuff that's going on are coming from the government and they're being mandated to the states.
How does that add to the debt and deficit?
How does that cost trillions of dollars?
Well, I'm not talking a money factor here.
I'm talking a moral factor here.
And I think the states are better equipped to decide, just like in Maine now, our governor is sticking up for men that think they're women and they're playing in women's sports.
And we're having to fight all the Democrats, not just the governor here in Maine.
We're having to fight all the Democrats on this.
This is a hill that they want to die on.
All right, Gerald, there, his thoughts in Maine.
More of your calls coming up.
Let's go back to the White House yesterday, hear more from President Trump on this executive order to dismantle the Education Department.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
And it sounds strange, doesn't it?
Department of Education, we're going to eliminate it.
And everybody knows it's right.
And the Democrats know it's right.
And I hope they're going to be voting for it because ultimately it may come before them.
But everybody knows it's right.
And we have to get our children educated.
We're not doing well with the world of education in this country.
And we haven't for a long time.
And we're pleased to be joined today by the woman who I chose because she's an extraordinary person.
And hopefully, she will be our last Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon.
Linda.
unidentified
Thank you.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
Thank you very much.
That's another interesting statement.
These are very, that's an interesting opening, right?
But it's true.
And people, it's been amazing how popular this has been.
I tell people that this is what I'm doing today.
And they say, oh, it's about time.
Everybody says it.
Republicans and Democrats have said it.
They're all saying it.
unidentified
President Trump, it's about time, he says, about dismantling the Education Department.
Do you agree with that?
This morning, we're getting your thoughts on the President's executive order to begin taking apart the Education Department.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼
He said he'll do it legally.
unidentified
It would need an act of Congress to abolish the agency.
Senator Cassidy, who oversees the Education Department in Congress, he's the chair of the Senate Help Committee, says, I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission.
Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the President's goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.
On the House side, there is legislation that already exists.
And Thomas Massey yesterday saying, bravo, Congress should support President Trump's bold agenda by passing his bill, H.R. 899.
It would abolish the Education Department.
We could also use rescissions and the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 51 votes in the Senate to back him up.
Otherwise, Senate Republicans who control that chamber, as in the House chamber, would need 60 votes to pass any legislation, any education, any legislation that would eliminate the Education Department.
Betty in Upper Marlborough, Maryland.
What do you say on this, Betty?
Hi, Greta.
You know, for me as a parent, I actually have so many questions.
The first question that I have is that why is the president trying to abolish the Department of Education?
Why do you want to fix something that is not broken?
That's the first question that I had.
And the second question is, one of your callers mentioned that we are so divided as a country, and that's the main concern that I have right now.
I will just share a quick story about my son.
My son was in a private school, and we spent a lot of money for him to be in a private school.
Since, you know, pre-K, he was in private school because he didn't believe in the public education.
Guess what?
I had to withdraw him last year in the middle of school year because we are really not happy with the private schooling.
And now he's in a public school and he is doing so well.
There are so many interventions right now in place to try to improve his literacy level and math.
So once again, my question is, why break something that is not broken?
Why fix something that is not broken?
Because I just don't get it as a parent.
And I'm so concerned about especially schools in the Southeast, for instance.
I sometimes volunteer in the Southeast and it's low-income areas.
What's going to happen to those schools?
I sometimes volunteer in APS, which is Allington Public School.
And you can see the resources in both sides of the state as completely different.
All right, Betty.
And Betty's saying this country is so divided and divided on this issue as well.
According to Quinn a PX poll, 98% of Democrats oppose eliminating the Department of Education, 64% of Independents oppose it, and only 18% of Republicans.
But 67% of Republicans support the idea.
Only 1% of Democrats do, and 31% of Independents.
Chris, Derby Line Vermont Independent.
Good morning.
I think we're missing the problem when it comes to evaluating education.
If you look back, there's a direct correlation between our failing educational grades, which is how people evaluate things or by test scores, and it's because society has changed in the last 40 years.
I mean, right now, when you get students as young as preschool, kindergarten, first, second, third grade all the way up, the first thing that you have in their hands is some kind of a technological device, a Chromebook, a computer, something.
And it's great because they have those skill set, but when it comes to analyzing and communicating, we're missing those skill sets that are so important in just learning.
These kids come to school, they're tired because they've been up all night playing games on their phones.
They're hungry when they come to school.
The students that are coming from a stable environment that have rules, they're in bed, they're eating well, those kids are self-motivated, they come, they're ready to learn.
And I do believe there is a connection too with the food business.
I mean, we've got kids coming to school that have got Red Bull in their thermoses.
So diet, sleep, structure, that plays a bigger role in how our kids are doing educationally than who's distributing the money.
Okay.
All right.
Chris has thoughts there in Vermont.
Let's go down to South Carolina.
Jermaine, Democratic caller.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Can you hear me?
We can.
Okay, good.
I don't think it's the Department of Education's necessarily fault.
A lot of folks will say, hey, you know, our students are failing and they're not doing as great.
I don't think it's the federal Department of Education's fault.
They don't set curriculum.
They don't control classrooms.
It's the states that do that.
So if you want to blame someone, you should blame the states for their handling of education.
And to send everything to the states seems not productive.
It's not going to help the situation.
Jermaine, let's just show our viewers what you're talking about here.
The federal government plays a relatively small but important role in K-12 education funding.
This is from the Peterson Foundation.
The federal government spending about 10 to 14% of the total amount of money on K-12 education.
44% coming from the state and 43% coming from your local government.
When you dig down a little deeper, states funding formulas often assign weights for students who are English learners, have low income, family income, or have disabilities.
So those learners are going to get more of the dollars for K-12 education.
You can see it broken down here.
English learners, disabilities, low income.
Those are the categories where they give more weight to the student.
And then they also note this that school financing varies by states, creating disparities in spending per student.
Look at how much New York is spending per student compared to Utah, which is at 9,552 at the bottom.
And as we said, Axios reporting that it is mostly states that voted for President Trump that get the large portion of federal government funding.
Barbara in Pennsylvania, an independent.
Barbara, good morning.
Good morning.
You've been hitting it on the head the last couple of callers.
It's not all about dollars.
No one has ever said a darn thing about discipline.
Discipline has been a major problem for the last couple of decades.
And I was here to say, people who are listening to this show, half of them, if you probably couldn't even get half or a quarter of the people to just take a trip through some of the schools.
They don't go.
They just look at the dollars and we have failing students.
You can't teach anybody without discipline.
I don't care how many students you have in the classroom.
And until you get your hands on that, how in the world are you talking about bullying, bullying?
Evidently, there is a lack inside of the school to handle this bullying.
All right, Barbara's thoughts there.
And Independent in Pennsylvania, we're getting your thoughts this morning.
Your turn to tell Washington what you think about President Trump's decision to sign that executive order that would begin dismantling the Education Department.
It's one of the smallest federal agencies.
In fiscal year 2024, it made up 4% of all federal spending.
All federal spending, 4% was to the Education Department.
Its budget, $268 billion.
That was spent by the Education Department.
Maurice in Maryland, Independent.
Good morning.
I'm sure what's best for students, teachers, and also the taxpayer.
The lady that called a couple of calls ago saying she's moved her kid from a private school back to public school, she has to understand that that is the exception.
It's usually the opposite.
If you look at most private schools, we've been blessed enough to have our child in private school, preschool all the way up to 12th grade.
They have a 90%, almost 100% rate of seniors going to college.
So we don't have that in public schools.
You keep mentioning how small the percentage is, but it's hundreds of billions of dollars.
And you keep making the point that you don't understand what the purpose of sending it back to the states is since the states pretty much already control it.
So the next question would be, then what's the purpose for the Department of Education?
Because the programs that you mentioned that they take care of or help to put help towards, the states can do that too.
That money can be allocated to those states for them to do that.
So that's my question to you when you keep asking that, making that point to how small it is.
But it equates to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Anybody that has their child in private school, if their scores continue to be horrible, like we've been last on the list, then we would pull them out like that lady did, like the mom did.
We would pull them out and put them somewhere else.
So let's see what happens.
I mean, every president has been talking about doing what he's done.
So let's see what happens.
So we have to try something, man.
I'm tired of us being at the bottom as far as education is concerned.
All right.
Heard Maurice's points there.
And as he said, they've spent, the education department spent $268 billion last year.
They're also only 10%, 14% of all money for K-12 education.
Most of it's state and local, as we've been talking about, but they do get money for Pell Grants and distributing college loans, et cetera.
So it's beyond K-12 education.
And the White House saying yesterday that that will stay with the Education Department, college loans, et cetera.
Andrew in Atlanta, Georgia, Democratic caller.
Hi, Andrew.
Hi, how are you doing?
Morning.
I'm calling because I think there's a piece here that's missing, which is charter schools.
And I have first-hand knowledge of using the Department of Education Civil Rights Division.
My son, when he was in fifth or sixth grade, had an independent learning plan, a 504 plan, and was in a charter school.
And he had some resources, a reading instructor, and things like that.
But a lot of these kids have emotional problems or discipline problems where they can't sit in the classroom.
And so the IEP plans actually protect them.
But what his school did, because it's a charter school, they get allocation from the federal government directly.
They would have had to hire more teachers or give them more time with the reading instructor.
So instead, what they ended up doing was finding a way to put him on a track where he had enough demerits, let's say, or warnings that they eventually, literally with like one month left of his sixth grade, told me they were booting him from school and he had to go to public school.
And then the Department of Education Civil Rights Division came in and helped us.
And it turned out that we won the case.
The principal had to resign.
The school had to train all their teachers on how to deal with kids on independent learning plans.
And the school is on probation with the federal government for about five years.
Okay.
Andrew there in Atlanta, Georgia, with his story.
More of your calls coming up here.
Wanted to show you, though, yesterday, C-SPAN cameras were in Colorado for a town hall with Senator Michael Bennett.
You've heard about the town halls that have been happening across the country while the House and Senate are in their congressional recess this week back in their states and in their home districts.
C-SPAN was in Colorado yesterday, and this is what Senator Bennett had to say about Democratic leadership.
On the leadership question, you know, there's been, it's not a secret that we've been having debates there about what the future should look like.
And I did say last night, and I'll say again, that I think we should be looking at all the Democratic leadership.
And that's not a new idea for me.
I mean, I was the first senator after Joe Biden's terrible debate with Donald Trump to say that we were going to lose in a landslide if we didn't make a change.
And I took no joy in that, by the way.
We have a lot to thank Joe Biden for.
We really do.
We really do.
Not the least of which was beating Donald Trump to begin with.
And he also was critical to keeping Space Command here in El Paso County, which I'm very sure for.
That's, you know, we should always be asking whether we're fielding the best team.
And I don't have a more clear answer for you tonight.
Senator Michael Bennett in Colorado yesterday holding a town hall.
You can find that on our website at c-span.org or our free video mobile app, C-SPANNow.
We also have coverage this evening with Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Elcasio-Cortez.
The two of them are traveling the country and holding rallies.
And tonight they'll be in Denver.
Tune in at 7 p.m. Eastern Time to C-SPAN, C-SPANNOW, or C-SPAN.org.
And then on Saturday, New Jersey Freshman Senator Andy Kim holds a town hall in Brick Township in Ocean City, New Jersey.
We'll have live coverage at that at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app are online at c-span.org.
And then we'll show you the other town halls that we have covered this week, including some Republicans.
That all happening this weekend.
So tune in to C-SPAN, C-SPANNOW, or C-SPAN.org.
We will go to Becky in Ohio Republican.
Becky, thanks for waiting.
Back to our conversation here about dismantling the education department.
Do you agree?
Oh, absolutely.
100%.
I agree.
Kids aren't getting education like they should.
Doesn't matter.
My grandkids go to public school and their proficiency tests are lousy.
And the whole United States, they're very, I think it's just time for the states to take back over.
When I was growing up, the states took care of us.
Then in late 1979, when all that gets changed, it's like these kids are just dwindling.
So, Becky, what do you say when people say the states do have control right now?
They control the curriculum.
No, they don't.
There's a lot of stuff that's going on that's shady.
And I believe I just have a few friends that are teachers in the school, elementary and middle school.
And they said it's like they don't teach them anything like they used to.
Reading, math, writing, cursive, they don't do hardly any of that anymore.
Okay.
Andy in North Berwick, Maine.
Hi, Andy.
How are you doing, Greta?
Yes, a brief history.
I'll be real quick.
My father started off as a high school English teacher in far northern New Hampshire in 1956, a little paper mill town.
He then became a principal and then a superintendent of schools, earned his master's in education, was hired by the University of New Hampshire in the early 60s to run the Masters in Education program there.
My father said to the end of his life that teachers' unions have way too much power.
Teachers' unions want parents to be very uninvolved in their child's education so that the unions can control the curriculums.
Get rid of the teachers' unions, and our children will fare much better throughout the world.
That's what I have to say.
Thank you.
Okay, Andy's thoughts there in Maine.
Mac is joining us from Ohio, Republican.
Good morning, Mac.
Hello, how are you doing?
Doing well.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well, my thoughts are: I come from the magnet program back in maybe 84, 85.
And I remember growing up as a kid, we used to play with the computers, and it was just unrolling that stuff.
And I'm with Donald Trump with Get Rid of Department Education.
My wife's a teacher.
She comes home and complains about the curriculum.
They've gotten rid of her for watching, you know, movies that actually teach the kids something.
They want to watch other movies that really don't belong in our curriculum at school, things that I wouldn't even watch, let my kids watch at home.
She was actually fired for it.
So these are things that are happening.
And teachers need to get paid more.
Also, I think they're very much underpaid.
A lot of the callers are expressing the same things and they're dealing with the same things all across the country.
I think the people are fed up and I think it's time for change.
The guy, the last caller, talked about the union.
I'm not very familiar with that, but it makes it sound a lot like the issues that I'm dealing with.
Maybe that could have been done first, but who knows?
I think this has gone on too long.
I'm a black man in America, and we're just not getting the proper education that we need in the cities that we reside in.
It's pretty much dealing with babysitting and dealing with problems that arise because of the lack of education.
So I think it's time for change, and I think it's time that we grow up and understand it's not always about money.
It's about bettering human mankind.
All right.
All right, Mac.
Mac and the other call are mentioning teachers' unions.
Here's a recent TV ad from the American Federation of Teachers and a union targeting Elon Musk and the education cuts that have already been made before President Trump signed that executive order yesterday.
The Musk Trump team taking a chainsaw to the Department of Education to pay for a tax cut for billionaires, slashing critical services for poor kids, special ed for disabled children, career and technical education, and student loans for working families.
Cutting taxes for the wealthiest at the expense of America's children is wrong.
Educators, parents, and advocates, make your voices heard.
Call on lawmakers to reject the devastating cuts and protect our kids.
From one of the teachers' unions, an ad being played in response to Elon Musk and the cuts that he made to the Education Department as part of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Bonnie in Chesapeake, Virginia, Democratic caller.
Bonnie, let's hear from you.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I haven't heard enough Democrats, I would say do a good job, but I haven't even heard them say anything about the impact of these cuts to each individual state and the potential need for having to increase our state taxes to make up for that loss.
And I really would like to hear Democrats talk more about that.
I think it was very showboaty of Trump to have had all those children.
And from what I've read, they had to wait 20 minutes for him to come in and sign with his Sharpie pen.
I think it was just very showboaty, which is typical him, to have them sit there and then they had to hold up a sign with, you know, drawings or whatever, their signature.
And I want to hear more of these cuts, again, explained by Democrats, how the end intention will be to benefit the wealthy.
Even Warren Buffett, even Warren Buffett complains that he doesn't pay enough taxes.
He's one of the few good billionaires who aren't in this life for simple greed.
All right, Bonnie.
Got your point.
We'll go to Mike, who's in Houston, Texas, Republican.
Hi, Mike.
Good morning.
Well, in regard to Warren Buffett, he has the same tax code that everybody else has to deal with.
So it's written by people in Congress.
If you want to simplify it, that's what Democrats should talk about.
As far as the test scores, why do we talk about test scores?
You know, from 1983 to today, students aren't reading to grade level.
And those things aren't measured by the dollar spent in the classroom.
I tell you, about two weeks ago, you had two guests on the CCM C-SPIN program, competing views, respectful to each other, and both of them agreed that 90% of the mandates that come for local school districts come emanate from Washington.
It's unfunded.
So the dollars aren't coming from Washington.
We agree.
It's just maybe 9%, is what they were saying.
But 90% of the mandates come from Washington.
Unfunded mandates.
Got it.
So your point is, Mike, is that by getting rid of that, maybe states can do better, states and local governments can do better if they're not trying to use the money, the 90% that they spend on fulfilling these mandates.
I agree.
Yes, that's correct.
And I think that what we're useful, because I think teachers, they have all the talent.
They're exactly where they should be, in my opinion, maybe 95% of them.
And let them teach.
And I think they feel like their hands are tied and they can't be the creative teachers they were.
I had a great English teacher in high school.
And this time of year, way back then, she said, You kids aren't going to learn how to write paragraphs.
You don't know how to write paragraphs.
You're not leaving here and going to high school, going to college without learning how to write paragraphs.
She made us write paragraphs for three weeks.
And we learned how to write paragraphs because she could do that.
And did it help?
And did it help when you went to college?
Not only did it help when I go to college, it helps every email I send to customers.
Absolutely.
I never have forgotten that.
She changed lives.
Five years after that event, I asked my friends at a five-year reunion, how many, well, who was your best teacher that you ever had?
Five out of the six said the same one.
And the sixth one said, I didn't have her as a teacher.
What was her name?
What was her name?
Mrs. Berardi.
Mrs. Berardi in Harvard, Ohio.
She was amazing.
All right.
Mike there in Houston, Texas.
JJ in Silver Spring, Maryland, Democratic Caller.
Hi, JJ.
Good morning.
I guarantee that most of the people that have called that are against the Department of Education have never attended a school board meeting, or they probably don't even know the name of the school board president or the superintendent of the schools where they live.
And secondly, people don't understand about the Department of Education that its main function is to distribute the money allocated by Congress to the states, and it goes to the state education agencies.
And they do that.
The Department of Education's job to do that is to have formulas to determine how that money is appropriated among the states and the territories.
And they do that by the number of students enrolled.
And they have a formula that they use to make those allocations.
And these, like I said, these people are complaining.
They say they know that the teachers aren't allowed to teach, but they never attend school board meetings to find out what's going on.
I have attended school board meetings, sat in the audience, and I see that there are teachers and the members of the school board are dedicated officials who want to do, who wanted to turn out quality students.
And they work.
But again, with these people who are there complaining about it, I'm sure they don't know what's going on in their own school district.
All right, JJ.
Reba is an Alabama Republican.
Let's hear from you, Reba.
What do you say to Washington?
Yes, I say looking at the test scores for years and years, they've continued to go down.
So look at that.
That's not good.
They put an iPad in front of these kids that go home and usually like play on things at home, something they looked at all day.
They've stopped teaching the things that are important to the students.
So I think that they need to try, give it back to the states and make sure that's monitored so that it is done right.
I think some of the states, maybe sometimes it might be allocated and not put in the right area.
So look at the way the world is now and everything that they're finding out and where is all this money going.
Okay.
All right.
Reba's thoughts there, Republican in Alabama.
We will leave the conversation there.
Thank you all for joining us for that convo about the Education Department and President Trump's move yesterday.
If you missed the executive order signing, you can find it online at c-span.org.
We're going to take a short break.
When we come back, turn our attention to executive power and President Trump's use of it.
We'll talk with Georgetown University Law Professor Stephen Vladek about that.
And then later, a conversation with former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli about President Trump's deportation policies.
We'll be right back.
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
This weekend, at 5.45 p.m. Eastern, Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker gives the annual reading of George Washington's 1796 farewell address in observance of the first president's birthday.
The Senate tradition began on Washington's birthday in 1896.
Then at 7 p.m. Eastern, watch American History TV series First 100 Days as we look at the start of presidential terms.
This week, we focus on the early months of President Jimmy Carter's term in 1977, including inflation, energy policy, and the pardoning of Vietnam War draft evaders.
At 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures and History, University of Texas history professor Bruce Hunt on the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and the role of the Army Corps of Engineers General Leslie Groves.
And at 9.30 p.m. Eastern on the presidency, author John Shaw, with his book Rising Star, Setting Sun, recounts the presidential transition from World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy's New Frontier in 1960 and 61, focusing on the 10-week period between the two administrations.
Exploring the American story.
Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history.
book tv every sunday on c-span 2 features leading authors discussing their latest non-fiction books Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
At 6.45 p.m. Eastern, Pakistani British author and activist Tariq Ali discusses his memoirs, You Can't Please All, which covers the years 1980 to 2024.
He also talks about the war in Gaza and student protests in the United States.
Then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzig, with his book Golden State, The Making of California, looks at the history of California from the 1840s gold rush era to the current tech boom.
At 9 p.m. Eastern, Grove City College political science professor Paul Kengore, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, talks about the role of communists in the creation of International Women's Day and other progressive celebrations.
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He's interviewed by Harvard Kennedy School of Government Public Policy and Management professor Elizabeth Lenos.
Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org.
Washington Journal continues.
Joining us this morning is Stephen Vladek.
He's a professor of law at Georgetown University's Law Center here to talk about the court challenges facing this Trump administration and the administration's view of the courts.
Mr. Vladek, let's just begin with the number of challenges in the courts to the president's executive orders actions.
Talk about how many there are and why has this gone to the courts.
Yeah, good morning, Greta.
I think that it's a striking number.
I mean, here we are just over two months into the second Trump administration.
And by my count, we're now over about 130 different lawsuits challenging actions that the federal government has taken specifically since January 20th.
You know, math is, I know, a challenge, but that's more than two a day.
And, you know, it's not just the lawsuits, Greta.
It is how broadly these lawsuits are pitching, that they're about, you know, almost every agency and almost every type of policy, that they're being filed in, you know, a geographically diverse set of federal courts.
And Greta, perhaps most importantly, that a bunch of them, at least so far, have produced relief, even temporary relief, in the form of temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.
So it really is, I think, a sharper conflict between a new president and the federal courts than one we've seen really in American history because of the volume of cases, because of the significance of some of these cases, and because of the degree of judicial pushback, at least to this point.
What types of judges are issuing these injunctions?
I mean, so every type of judge.
I mean, so, you know, we're seeing injunctions from Democratic-appointed district court judges.
We're seeing injunctions from Republican-appointed district court judges.
You know, a lot of these lawsuits have been brought in, I think, slightly more favorable seeming parts of the country.
So we're seeing a lot of lawsuits, for example, in Boston and in Baltimore and on the West Coast in Seattle.
But actually, Greta, the court that has had the most number of cases has been the federal district court here in Washington, D.C.
And so, you know, when you hear folks like President Trump or Stephen Miller or the White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt complaining about efforts by Democrats to judge shop, I mean, the reality is that most of the lawsuits are being brought where the federal government is and where you're getting random assignment across the entire federal court bench here in Washington or across the state lines in Maryland or even up in Boston.
So it really has been not just one judge or two judges or three judges, but 25 or 30 judges.
And as much as the president has taken to calling these rogue judges, I do think there comes a point where if there are this many judges from this many different backgrounds appointed by this many different presidents ruling against your policies, maybe the rogue actor is not the courts.
Why is that then?
What does it come down to in your opinion?
Is the executive power limited?
I mean, so first, yes, there's just no argument that the president has unlimited power under the Constitution.
That's not how the Constitution works.
I think part of why we are seeing such a diverse array of court rulings blocking the Trump administration is because, you know, to be perfectly candid, the Trump administration is pushing a whole lot of legal envelopes and is in a number of cases crossing what even the administration would concede are well-settled legal lines.
Take birthright citizenship, for example.
The arguments in favor of the Trump administration's executive order mostly turn on disregarding or overruling an 1898 Supreme Court precedent.
The president's power to fire, you know, members of the Merit Systems Protection Board or the National Labor Relations Board turn on overruling a 1935 Supreme Court precedent.
So, you know, Greta, when we look at what the job of a lower federal court judge is, not the Supreme Court, you know, their job is to faithfully apply precedent to whatever case is brought to them.
And so when you have a president who's acting in a way that is unprecedented, when you have actions that are defying settled precedents, when you have a number of other actions that aren't even authorized by the relevant statutes, I think that's why we're seeing such a confluence, such a sort of a high number of these kinds of rulings adverse to the Trump administration.
Let's listen to the president.
In an interview with Fox News, he talked about his views on the judiciary.
Going forward, I had judges.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
I never did defy a court order.
unidentified
And you wouldn't in the future?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
No, you can't do that.
However, we have bad judges.
We have very bad judges.
And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed.
I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.
The judge that we're talking about, you look at his other rulings, I mean, rulings unrelated.
But having to do with me, he's a lunatic.
unidentified
Stephen Vladik?
I mean, I'm not sure how much we're supposed to take what the president says seriously, but I'll take a stab.
So the specific judge he's talking about in that clip, Chief Judge Jeb Bozberg here in the D.C. Federal District Court, is about as highly regarded a federal district judge as there is in the country.
I mean, Chief Justice Roberts has tapped him on multiple occasions to serve in roles that you wouldn't pick a rogue judge for.
You'll note the president didn't offer examples of cases that prove that Chief Judge Bozberg is a, quote, rogue judge, unquote.
In fact, Greta, the one other case Bozberg has had involving President Trump, he actually ruled for then President Trump back in 2018 or 2019 when it was an effort to get his tax returns disclosed.
So, you know, I really think that we have to be very specific about the facts here and not just the rhetoric.
And the facts are that the administration is losing in cases before literally dozens of different federal district judges, not all of whom are Obama appointees, not all of whom are Biden appointees.
And, you know, if you really think that a district court is getting something wrong, and Greta, it's entirely possible they are.
Our legal system has remedies for that.
The remedies are to appeal.
The remedies are to seek relief from a higher court.
So in the case of Chief Judge Boesberg, that would be the federal appeals court here in D.C., the D.C. Circuit, and if necessary, from the U.S. Supreme Court.
And, you know, don't just take my word for it.
That's exactly what Chief Justice John Roberts said in his, I think, fairly remarkable statement to the press on Tuesday.
Yeah, let's read that.
Chief Justice John Roberts issuing this statement.
For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.
The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
You called this remarkable.
Why?
Well, I mean, first, you know, this is in the Chief Justice, we have someone who doesn't get out of bed in the morning without a plan.
And so this was not exactly spur of the moment.
I think this is only the second time in his almost 20 years now as Chief Justice in which he's made this kind of public statement.
The first was during the first Trump administration, also in response to President Trump.
And Greta, I think it's important because it's a message from the Chief Justice that in his view, the rhetoric has gotten out of hand.
And the rhetoric is coming, in this case, almost exclusively from the White House and its supporters.
And so John Roberts, I think, is not suggesting he agrees with all of these district court rulings.
He may well not.
But I think what he's saying is we have a process through which, you know, if you have a district judge who's behaving badly, the remedies exist within the legal system.
And once again, I mean, I just can't stress this point enough.
We're talking about a whole lot of district judges who would have to be behaving badly if these charges from the White House are to be believed.
On Judge Bozberg, he stopped the department from deporting some immigrants, illegal immigrants that the administration said were terrorists.
They categorized them as that.
Pambondi, the Attorney General, putting out a statement saying that order from the judge disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump's power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk.
Respond to Pam Bondi.
I mean, so just to be very clear about what we're talking about, the folks who were put on an airplane or three airplanes on Saturday were already in immigration detention.
They were not posing any threat to the public at the time they were placed on these airplanes.
And we now know, I mean, thanks to reporting in the New York Times yesterday, that for a number of these folks, they were being held without any criminal conviction.
They were being held without any proof that they're members of Teren de Aragua, the gang that is at the heart of all of this.
And so, Greta, I think part of the problem here is that we have due process in this country entirely so that we can be confident that when the government whisks individuals off to other countries, they are who the government says they are.
We have due process for undocumented immigrants.
Absolutely.
If we didn't, you could summarily execute people, and we don't do that.
Because, Greta, how can you be sure that they're undocumented immigrants just by looking at them, right?
So, even in prior declared wars, when the government used the Alien Enemy Act during the War of 1812, during World War I, during World War II, the folks who we picked up and said, you are alien enemies.
We can hold you and remove you, Greta, they got hearings because they were entitled to challenge whether they were in fact who the government said they were.
There are reported judicial decisions from the War of 1812, from World War I, from World War II, where federal courts looked carefully in the middle of a war at the question of whether a particular detainee was a German citizen or an Italian citizen or perhaps a Swiss citizen who could not be detained.
If that was available during World War II, our most complete total war in American history, it's hard to see the case that the Attorney General is trying to make that it shouldn't be available today.
Let's go to Bruce in New York, Independent.
Our first call here.
Welcome to the conversation, Bruce.
Go ahead.
Well, thank you.
Good morning, Stephen.
I'm a political anthropologist, and I have a two-part question.
One, I've been watching concentration of executive powers for decades now, really.
And I'm sure you're aware that it's been issues and escalating as an issue for some time politically.
But I've never seen it become a domestic problem where it's an attack upon institutions within the system itself.
That's number one.
Number two, I appreciate your objectivity, by the way.
What I see is, you know, people keep taking Trump's rhetoric, as you had difficulty doing, as a kind of equivocation, and you can't really be sure whether it's rhetoric or what he means.
And then it goes through, and people are saying, well, you better take him serious after the fact, et cetera.
When are we going to start seeing this as a pattern?
It's not just the judges.
It's not just the Justice Department under Biden.
It's not just the education system.
He uses the same rhetoric all the time.
And we don't basically represent it as a pattern of his attack.
And the question of his attack, of course, is an open question as to why he's doing his political power, whether he's attempting to change the institutions, whether he's trying to basically, there's accusations of trying to destroy democracy itself.
That aside, the fact that he has taken a battering ramp to institutions systematically, including the free press, including news on TV.
Every single institution in the country seems to be subject to his wrath.
And he's using the power, the executive powers, to do this, whether or not it's justified, whether or not it's legitimated.
They use rhetoric to move ahead.
And then damage being done, they make no apologies.
They move on to the next group.
All right, Bruce, let's get a reaction from Mr. Vladik.
So, I mean, Bruce, thanks for the questions.
I mean, I think there are two different things going on here, and it's worth breaking them apart.
The first is that some of the moment we're in did not come out of nowhere.
I mean, I think, right, we have been building for several generations toward sort of a state of government where presidents of both parties come to office, have very little policy support from Congress, even if their party controls both chambers of Congress, and is left to do most of their major domestic policy work through executive orders.
And, you know, Bruce and Greta, what that does is it heightens the conflict points.
It means you're going to have more and more conflict between the president and the courts because the presidents of both parties are claiming power that is less and less directly traceable to statutes that Congress has enacted.
It's a lot of what's happening with Trump.
But we saw this to some degree with the Biden administration.
We saw it with the first Trump administration, et cetera.
So in some respect, we have been heading for this for some time.
And really there, I think, it's a conversation about how Congress has abdicated so much of its regulatory responsibility and so much of its role in setting nationwide policy.
But, you know, even within that space, where this is in some respects a difference of degree and not kind, there's still something unique about what the current administration is doing.
And I think Bruce is right, Greta, that there's a sort of a hostility to institutions that we didn't see even during the first Trump administration.
I mean, just yesterday, the executive order purporting to try to start dismantling the Department of Education, which you were talking about earlier this morning.
You know, these are sort of larger challenges to settled understandings than we've seen even in prior administrations.
And those challenges are coming in different forms, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated, mass firings of federal employees without whom these agencies cannot effectively function, and now trying to even shutter entire agencies.
And so, Greta, I think part of what is provoking all of these lawsuits and all of these judicial rulings against the Trump administration is the novelty of what we're seeing.
Not just that like it's new, but it's new in ways that are fundamentally inconsistent with how the separation of powers had worked in this country for the better part of 240 years.
And I think that's part of why federal judges from across the ideological spectrum have been reacting the way they have.
Julius Kreine, who's the editor of American Affairs, writes in the opinion section of the New York Times, Trump does need to actually legislate.
There are limits to governing by executive order.
And he notes that executive orders can easily be reversed by a future president, and they can only go so far.
Right.
I mean, I think, you know, there's a larger story here about not just Congress's fecklessness when it comes to President Trump, but Congress's broader abandonment over the last 30 or 40 years of the lead role in setting domestic policy.
I mean, it used to be that a president would come to office and would have, you know, 100 days to try to get major policies through Congress, to try to get legislation enacted through Congress.
When President Trump signed the continuing resolution last Friday, I believe, Greta, that was the second bill he has signed since January 20th, the second.
And it wasn't a policy bill.
It was just keeping the money on.
So, you know, I think part of what has created the space for someone like President Trump to come in and try to do all of this stuff through novel assertions of executive power is that Congress has stopped asserting legislative power.
And so if we're thinking about sort of longer-term solutions that are not just about the current administration and our current political moment, you know, I think we really have to start thinking again about why it's important for Democrats and Republicans alike to be voting for folks to represent us in Congress who actually are interested in the institutional politics of Washington and not just in partisan politics.
And that's, I think, a tricky, a tricky road to hoe.
Let's go to Christian, Phoenix, Arizona, Republican.
Hi, Christian.
Hi.
Good morning.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
So what we have seen is a continuation of the interference from federal district and circuit appeals judges.
And this continuance that we saw from 2017, really even prior to even Trump really getting into office.
So some of these judges were going after Trump from the federal judiciary.
And then when he became president, they were interfering with Trump, starting with the travel ban, which was overturned, by the way.
These 200-plus lawsuits and all of these different courts, none of these judges were elected president of the United States.
I didn't see their name on a ballot.
They didn't run in a contested primary.
They weren't nearly assassinated on national television.
So the idea that these judges or any one of these judges are the president or they get to make executive decisions from the federal judiciary is that is a threat to our Republican form of government.
Christian, what, Christian, how do you respond to the judiciary being the third branch of government, co-equal government?
Say that again, I'm sorry.
That the judiciary is the third branch of government.
It's there for checks and balances, just like Congress.
The judiciary, their job is not to challenge or try to rule from the bench with temporary restraining orders and running down these TROs in a conveyor belt.
That is not their job.
And it's a shame that Congress allowed something like this.
Let's get a response.
Mr. Vladik.
So first, let's be clear.
That's exactly their job.
I mean, the reason why we have independent judges who are not elected is not an accident.
It's because the founders were very wary about the British system where the courts were not independent of the executive.
And the whole point was to have judges who could be sufficiently insulated to stand up to what the founders called tyranny of the majority.
I dare say this is about as powerful a moment of that as we've seen in American history.
And Granted, just on the facts, you know, Christian mentioned the travel ban.
Let's be clear about what happened with the travel ban during the first Trump administration.
The first iteration of the travel ban, the chaotic Friday night weekend, you know, airport version, that was blocked by the federal courts and the Trump administration, you know, took it down.
The second iteration of the travel ban that was blocked by the federal courts.
That block was mostly affirmed by the Supreme Court in the summer of 2017.
And the Trump administration went back to the drawing board.
It was only the third iteration of the travel ban after the administration had responded to two rounds of judicial rulings that the Supreme Court upheld five to four.
That's how the system is supposed to work.
And so when Christian refers to federal judges interfering with the executive branch, I guess I would put it slightly differently.
It's federal judges insisting that the executive branch follow the law.
And if it's not going to be federal judges, I think the question everyone should be asking themselves is: who will it be?
Or is the law just whatever President Trump says it is?
Because if it's that, then we're not living in a democracy.
And I think we have to come to terms with that.
David's in Baltimore, Independent.
Morning, David.
Good morning.
Your guest said that if we can't trust what Trump says, well, I ask, who are we to take seriously?
Dostoevsky wrote this gem of a quote from one of his books.
He says, If there is no God, all things are permitted.
And I would suggest that while politicians and academics and commentators, journalists have been speaking from their ivory towers, the streets have become lawless.
The institutions have become lawless.
Even the church is becoming lawless.
Now, when Moses got the Ten Commandments from God himself, the kings of the earth, apart from Israel, they were writing their own laws.
And if they didn't like them, they changed them.
Just look at what happened to Daniel and his people in Babylon.
They didn't like him, so they wrote laws to condemn him.
Show me the person, I'll find the crime.
Now, we have to get serious about whether we want to live or whether we want to die, whether we want this nation to thrive just in a normal, peaceful way, or whether we want to see it crumble as Russia did in 1917.
All right.
Stephen Vladdick, do you have any thoughts?
I mean, just, I think the first question is the right one.
So, who should we trust?
You know, the old Russian proverb is trust but verify.
I think part of why federal judicial proceedings are able to bring clarity and shine light on what the government is doing to a degree that White House press briefings are not is because you have lawyers who are speaking before judges with a duty of candor.
You have, you know, statements that are filed under penalty of perjury, where lying is not just what everybody does, but actually can come with real serious consequences.
You have the possibility of professional misconduct charges for lawyers who misrepresent things to the courts.
So, Greta, you know, I'm not here to say the courts are perfect.
They're not.
I mean, there's lots of stuff we need to do to fix the courts.
But I think it's much more likely that we're going to get an accurate sense of what the federal government is doing when federal officers are testifying under oath, when federal government lawyers are answering questions under penalty of professional misconduct than in any other space in our current discourse.
So it's not that I trust courts implicitly.
It's that I think if folks are looking for facts, you know, I would look at what the government is telling courts as opposed to what the government is telling friendly media outlets.
All right, Broadway, Virginia, Jerry is there, Republican.
Yeah, good morning.
Good morning.
First, let me say that one radical lunatic judge does not have a right to erase 77 million American votes.
And then you talk about process.
You're right.
Those people should have been processed when they entered our country.
ICE knew that these people were criminals, but they ordered illegally, it's federal law, to release them into the country, fly them anywhere they wanted to go with no they knew who they were.
They knew they were criminals.
All right.
Stephen Gladik?
I mean, I guess, you know, two things to say.
First, again, we are not talking about a single, quote, radical lunatic judge.
We're talking about dozens of judges.
Second, with regard to undocumented immigrants, I mean, I guess the question I would ask anyone who takes that position is if ICE were to pick you up off the street tomorrow and haul you off to an immigration detention center in Louisiana because someone in the government says you committed a crime, you entered the country unlawfully, you're not an American, you don't have a visa.
I would think we would all want you or I or anybody else in that position to have a meaningful opportunity to contest what the government's basis is for arresting you, for detaining you, and for potentially removing you from the country.
And, you know, we can debate, Greta, how severe our immigration laws should be.
We can debate whether the Alien Enemy Act even applies to Trende Aragua.
I think it really ought not to be an issue that divides Democrats and Republicans that every single person is entitled to at least some due process before any of that can happen.
Because even if the government's not acting maliciously, the possibility that the government might make a mistake should be something that's always on our minds.
We're showing a video of these gang members that were deported from the United States.
They were not brought back to their home country of Venezuela.
They were brought back to El Salvador and they were met by soldiers and the El Salvadorian president.
What do you make of that?
Is that illegal?
I mean, so it raises a whole separate host of issues.
Greta, there are circumstances in which the federal government has the authority to remove non-citizens to a country other than their country of origin.
And the Supreme Court in a case in 2005 largely upheld that.
The problem is that there are two different federal laws.
There's the UN Convention Against Torture, and there's a federal statute called the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998 that bar the federal government from removing anyone to circumstances in which those folks credibly fear torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
And at least based on what we know from the pictures we're seeing out of El Salvador, there's a non-frivolous claim that that's part of what's happening on the far end of this.
So, you know, again, I mean, I go back to where we started, which is, you know, even if you think the law should allow the federal government to do this to folks who are members of Trende Aragua, we should all hopefully have common cause that it only allows the federal government to do it to folks who are members of Trendearagua, and that whether or not you or I or they are members of Trendeeragua should not just be up to the federal government.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is the law that the president in this administration has cited.
And it says, whenever there shall be a declared war or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the United States, all subjects of the hostile nation or government could be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.
When has this law been used?
So, you know, we talked briefly about the three most visible prior invocations of the act, the War of 1812, when it was used against British nationals living in the United States, World War I, when it was used against predominantly German nationals living in the United States, and World War II, when it was invoked against German, Italian, and a handful of Japanese nationals living in the United States.
And Greta, what's striking is, I mean, you read the sort of the operative provision.
There's also a provision in the statute that provides specifically for judicial review, even during wartime.
I mean, in contexts in which historically there really was not a lot of judicial review.
And so that's why I think it's really important when folks are learning about this, you know, 1798 statute to point out that even during World War II, there were literally hundreds of court cases where people we were holding under the auspices of this statute objected on the ground that they weren't who the government said they were or that they weren't nationals of countries with which we were at war.
And Greta, federal courts reviewed those claims.
They often rejected them because oftentimes they were meritless, but not because the federal courts lacked the power to hear those cases, not because these folks didn't have a right to judicial review.
And so I think, you know, part of what is so, I think, disheartening about our current discourse is that there's this sense that like as long as the right labels are used to describe the wrong people, due process doesn't matter.
And it seems to me that we all ought to keep in mind the idea that like whether fee people are the right people or the wrong people is a due process question.
And we can believe that the government has remarkably broad authorities to remove people who are in this country unlawfully.
But how do we know that they really are?
And that's why I think so much of the issue surrounding the Alien Enemy Act case surrounding what's happening with these mass removals to El Salvador is the absence of due process.
Let's go to Jacksonville, Florida.
Fran, Democratic Color.
Yes, I totally, totally agree with your guests today.
And to think that all these people are calling in, giving the president the authority to do whatever he wants.
Now, this is just too much.
I don't care who the president is.
This is a country of laws.
That's why so many people want to come here.
They think they'll get a fair shake here.
You know, if a person is a criminal, that's determined by the courts, not by the president.
The people who are calling in thinking that this is okay, they want a king.
And then the king can off with anybody's head, including theirs.
And they should keep that in mind.
All right, Fran.
Stephen Vladic.
I mean, I think what Fran says is exactly right.
You know, due process is how we can have faith that the government is acting pursuant to law and not pursuant to fiat.
You know, the only thing I would say is it's Justice Robert Jackson, who was on the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954, and who also spent time as the lead U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.
You know, Greta, he wrote a series of opinions after he came back from Nuremberg in which he tried to sort of contrast what had gone wrong in the legal system in Nazi Germany versus what he thought was right about the legal system in the United States.
And every time he had one of those cases, it always came down to the same basic idea that you can have harsh substantive laws.
You can have substantive laws that are immensely rights restricting as long as they are applied fairly, as long as they are applied in a way that's not arbitrary, as long as they're applied in a way that is meaningful, that folks are on notice about.
He put it in one case in a particularly colorful way.
He said, if given the choice, I suspect most of us would prefer to live in a world with Soviet substantive law and American procedural rules than the other way around.
And I think that's, you know, it's a sort of, it's a nerdy insight, but I think it's an important one that, you know, we can have policy disagreements.
We will always have policy disagreements about what the rules ought to be for the federal government's behavior.
But the notion that the rules should be enforced in a way where we have faith that they're being enforced properly, where we have faith that they're being enforced correctly, and where we have faith that they're being enforced against the right people is really what separates the rule of law from something else.
And so I get very nervous when anyone, whether it's a supporter of President Trump or during the Biden administration, a supporter of President Biden, says, you know, we should just defer to the president on this.
That's not the system the founders set up, and they set it up that way on purpose.
All right, let's go to Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Obi, Independent, good morning to you.
Good morning here.
Good morning, America.
My thing is, Donald Trump, the person, lied tonight, came through, been the courts, lost one, moving forward fast.
Now he's the president.
He's still lying, going to court, doing this, doing that, holding up boggling the courts down with all his lies, and he should be held accountable.
First, he should tell the truth, be made to tell the truth, show facts and not all mouths.
That's my point.
Goodbye.
Stephen Vladic, when it comes to the deportation of these alleged gang members to El Salvador, at this point, what can the judge do?
I mean, they've left the country.
They're there.
So.
Right.
I mean, so, so, you know, obviously federal judges don't have authority over El Salvadorian prisons.
And, you know, Chief Judge Boseberg hasn't claimed that authority.
But, you know, Greta, the federal courts do have authority over the federal executive branch.
And so, you know, we've been led to believe by statements from the president of El Salvador that the reason why these folks are being held there is because we're paying for that.
We could stop paying.
Right.
And indeed, there are other immigration cases where individuals have been wrongfully removed from the country, where federal courts have ordered the federal government, Greta, not to bring them back, but to take all possible steps to bring them back.
You know, that might not be sufficient.
And it is possible that the nearly 300 folks who were removed last weekend will have a very hard time having that reversed.
But I still think there's real importance.
And part of why I think Chief Judge Bosberg is still pushing this issue is in trying to prevent that from happening again.
It's one thing if the executive branch takes one action that's unlawful.
It's something else entirely if they're able to do it over and over and over again.
And so I think part of what's happening in that case is not just trying to get to the bottom of the authority for what the government did last weekend, but whether the government has any authority to do that again in future cases to come.
Bill is in Venice, Florida, Republican.
Welcome to the conversation.
Thank you, and good morning.
Good morning.
I'd like to comment on the unconstitutional use of executive orders.
Executive orders, they're federal executive orders.
They apply to federal employees, federal land, and the military.
Executive orders do not constitutionally apply to the states.
They're being used to bypass the Constitution and in other unlawful ways.
Would you comment on that, please?
Sure.
I mean, I think it's a little tricky because not all executive orders are equal.
Executive orders are not per se problematic.
The typical executive order is either, as you say, directed toward the federal government, the internal workings of the executive branch, or is the president articulating his interpretation of authority he has, whether directly under the Constitution or as delegated to him by Congress in a statute.
And so part of the trick is that whether an executive order is lawful or not really depends on the validity of the interpretation it reflects.
So let's just take birthright citizenship as an example.
The president has the power to interpret immigration law by executive order.
Just about every president since Harry Truman has done that.
The problem with the executive order in this case is that the way that President Trump is interpreting the relevant statutes is unconstitutional, right?
That the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment does not provide for the reading that the president's offering.
And so I guess, you know, Greta, my suggestion would be for folks to try to separate out the sort of the inherent validity question for executive orders, which I think is a bit of a red herring, from the specific claim each executive order is making, which is about a reading of a statute or a reading of the Constitution to give the president the power to do a particular thing.
A bunch of those readings are probably valid, but not all of them.
And that's where we run into the court battles.
Floor Town, Pennsylvania, Tony is an independent.
Hi, good morning.
Excellent conversation.
I agree with many of the principles that this Georgetown professor is putting forward.
I think we do need to get back to rule of law, equal protection, freedom of speech.
I think just basic first principles.
And I'm worried that around the world, democracies are under threat.
We see growing authoritarianism, oligarchy, and these forces are building.
And the undermining of this democracy has been happening for decades.
It's not new with Trump.
I worry that many of the callers think this is new.
There's a few that have pointed out that we've had these issues for some time.
One study I would point out is there's a Princeton study in 2014 that looked at legislative outcomes.
There's no relationship between voter preference and legislative outcomes.
There is a very significant relationship.
Three-quarters of the time, special interest lobbyists get what they want legislatively.
This isn't democracy.
It's not even a constitutional republic anymore.
It's a fascist system controlled by corporations and big money.
You can't have democracy in people like Elon Musk.
If you have billionaires that have $400 billion, democracy in a society like that is not possible, not even a constitutional republic.
So our system has been overthrown.
It's no longer a democracy.
It's no longer a constitutional republic.
All right, Tony, I'm going to jump in so that Stephen Vladic can give us his response.
Well, I mean, I think I share a lot of Tony's concerns, and I think I also agree that this has been going on for a lot longer than the last two months.
I guess I'll just say, you know, to me, I don't want to sort of get out over my skis.
I think part of what is missing from our current discourse is the notion that institutions matter for their own sake.
That we've gotten to a point where the separation of parties has really become the dominant question in American politics as opposed to the separation of powers.
And it's those conditions, it's those circumstances that make it possible for what we've seen over the last two months, that make it possible for someone like Elon Musk to wield the stunning amount of power he's been given without meaningful pushback from Congress.
And so I guess, you know, there are broader currents that are, you know, not limited to the United States that I think are going to be hard to resist.
But one of the ways in which I think we can all insulate ourselves better against those pressures is really to go back to basics when it comes to the separation of powers.
You know, James Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that the way we are going to preserve liberty in this country is through ambition, is that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
We want an ambitious executive.
We want an ambitious judiciary, but we also want an ambitious Congress.
And the idea is that the branches will push up against each other, and that's how we will be the safest.
And Greta, I think part of what we're seeing today is the culmination of decades of one of the branches, Congress, no longer being ambitious in the institutional sense.
And so, you know, when we think about how we build back from this, how we recover from this, it's not just about who we're electing to lead the country from the White House.
It's about who we're electing to represent us on Capitol Hill.
And I think the more that we can, you know, push for people to run based on commitments to Congress's institutional power and not just to short-term partisan political wins, the more we'll be in a position to defend against the pressures that the caller raises.
Deborah's in Pennsylvania.
Democratic caller.
Morning, Deborah.
Good morning, C-SPAN.
I just think this is one of the best conversations I've heard in a long, long time.
This professor is spot on with everything he's saying.
Please, if you called in defending the executive branch, heed his warning.
He is so spot on.
We have three co-equal branches of government, and defying the judges' orders in this deportation of migrants, excuse me, was definitely an overreach by the executives to the judicial branch.
The whole reason we must heed the rule of law is because there could be human error.
A doctor was among the deported, and the tattoo was misread as a gang image.
I fear we're losing one of the hallmarks of our great nation, home of the free.
All right.
Stephen Vladic, pick up there.
I mean, I don't know what to add other than to say, you know, I would hope that even in these toxic political times when we are all so inclined to disagree with each other and to distrust each other's motives, that the one thing maybe we can all agree upon is that folks are entitled to notice and an opportunity to be heard before bad things happen to them.
Not because they've earned it through their conduct, but because we need that confidence that the government is acting in a way that is responsible.
We need the confidence that when the government arrests someone and whisks them off to El Salvador, they're arresting someone who they had a right to arrest and not a political opponent and not a mistake and not a family member.
And that's the mentality that I think has been missing from so many of our current conversations because we've become so fixated on whether our side is winning.
Our side, to me, isn't Democrats or Republicans.
Our side is the rule of law.
And the rule of law right now, I think, is losing to a degree that we haven't seen in a very long time.
And that should scare even folks who like the bottom lines of what that's accomplishing.
Stephen Vladdick, Georgetown University Law Professor, thank you for the conversation.
Thank you, Greta.
We'll take a break.
And when we come back, we'll zero in on the president's deportation and immigration policies.
Former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli joins us for that conversation coming up next.
Stay with us.
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Come on, C-SPAN.
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Joining us this morning is Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, also in the Trump administration, and former Attorney General for the state of Virginia.
Mr. Cuccinelli, thank you so much for your time.
Let's begin with this legal battle.
Our viewers are familiar because we were talking about it in our last hour, this legal battle between the judge and the Trump administration over deporting these alleged gang members that are from Venezuela, but deporting them to El Salvador.
The Trump administration invoking an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act.
Your take on using that law?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
So I think that the president has set goals of deportation for himself that would effectively result in the largest logistical undertaking domestically of our lifetimes.
I mean, if you talk about, and it's hard to nail down exactly what the goal is, but he said he wants to deport more people than any other president.
It may surprise people to learn that the record holder is Barack Obama.
But that number is around 3 million.
And if President Trump is going to do that in this administration right now, and earlier this month, they sort of held a show-off press conference.
Hey, look at all these things we've done.
But the pace at that point was one-third of the Obama pace.
So what you see going on here with the Trende Aragua situation is an attempt to expand their available legal authorities to minimize due process.
And that may sound funny to people because we're used to prizing due process, but the reality is that's for U.S. citizens at the 100% level.
The courts have said that for those who are aliens, whether they're illegal or legal, they get the due process that Congress has given them.
And the Alien Enemies Act gives very, very little.
It essentially allows the president to make a determination and then remove people associated with the nation that he's targeting, in this case, Venezuela.
And it doesn't require a war.
That statute is now at 50 USC, Section 21.
And he utilized the invasion clause, he being the president, declared that they have Trende Aragua has invaded the United States and done harm here.
They clearly have done harm here.
But I would point out that in other invasion cases, typically around the invasion clause of Article 4, Section 4, four different courts of appeals all across the country have addressed the question of invasion,
and all four have ruled that it is non-justiciable, which for the non-lawyers listening means the courts have found that they themselves do not have jurisdiction to review that determination, that it is solely in the hands of the president.
And in the case of Trende Aragua, President Trump has based his utilization of the Alien Enemies Act on a determination that these folks have invaded the United States.
By the way, a characterization with which I agree, though I would say that about all of the illegal aliens who came across or who have come across our border, not just under Biden, but under Trump as well, and so on, back in time.
So that's the legal foundation.
They knew there would be a fight over it, and they started it early in the term so that they can fight it out, if you will, all the way to the Supreme Court and have the legal questions settled.
unidentified
As you said.
As you said, the president has cited this Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
I want to read it for the viewers who might be just tuning in.
Whenever there shall be a declared war or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the United States, all subjects of the hostile nation or government could be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.
Our last guest, Stephen Vladek, Georgetown Law Professor, said there is some due process provisions in this law as well.
You said the same.
So do you think the president has followed the due process for these undocumented immigrants?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
I think that if his assessment is correct, for example, if somebody wasn't Venezuelan, for example, the process that he has put in place would not properly apply.
So I agree with the professor, and I listen to the tail end of the discussion, that there is some due process.
My point is that the president is looking for ways to look for, I'll call them pipelines, if you will, to deport folks that have as minimal a level of due process as possible.
And frankly, it's hard to get a lower due process requirement level than that that you will find under the Alien Enemies Act.
So I think that's why this is being used.
I should also point out, from a security and safety standpoint, Trende Aragua is not like any other gang that has come into the United States from this hemisphere.
You know, you mentioned that I was Virginia's attorney general during that time and still today, the most dangerous, from a violent crime standpoint, group in Virginia is MS-13.
They are the most violent, most dangerous group in Virginia right now.
Now, Trende Aragua takes that first position in some other states, not necessarily Virginia.
But MS-13 never had any connections to the El Salvadoran government.
Trende Aragua has, there's reason to believe that Trende Aragua has done the dirty work of the Maduro regime in various parts of the Western hemisphere.
They actually have nothing formal, but an informal working relationship with the Maduro regime, it appears.
So that is important here because the Alien Enemies Act would seem to fit a lot better for Trende Aragua than, say, MS-13.
And as a simple matter of smart, strategic deployment of law, they have chosen a good first target in Trende Aragua and Venezuela to prevail.
They have set themselves up with facts and law that are about as favorable as they can be.
So it's smart lawyering and it's smart presidenting, if that's a verb.
And yet it will go through the courts.
We'll see how it ends up.
unidentified
I want you to explain a little bit more about what you were saying after I read this from Democratic senators.
Let's be clear, they write, we are not at war and immigrants are not invading our country.
Furthermore, courts determine whether people have broken the law, not a president acting alone, and not immigration agents picking and choosing who gets imprisoned or deported.
It's what our Constitution demands, and it's the law Trump is bound by no matter how much he tries to mislead the American people otherwise.
These protections are there to help ensure U.S. citizens aren't wrongfully deported or people who haven't committed a crime aren't wrongfully punished.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
So parts of that are correct and parts of it are incorrect.
Of course, there's no declared war with Venezuela.
Congress has sole power to declare war.
However, I definitely disagree, as I've already said, with the notion that we're not being invaded that they assert.
In fact, we've been being invaded for a long time, and perhaps not by government entities directly, but I would point to a different part of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 10, the very end of Article 1, which we normally think of as the Compacts Clause.
It lists things states are not allowed to do.
One of them is wage war.
Well, that says it contains an exception, unless actually invaded.
Well, Texas has been being invaded for some time.
They have argued that they have the right to repel that invasion.
At least two of the judges on the Fifth Circuit have agreed with that position.
And we'll see how those cases play out, particularly now with a Trump Justice Department.
I think they will probably agree with Texas's position.
And, you know, that will end the discussion on the question of invasion, frankly.
But critically, I think, again, what will end up happening in those cases is that the courts will determine that they don't have the authority to determine whether an invasion is occurring or has occurred, because that is left to the executive branch.
And one of the reasons it's left to the executive branch is because the alternative brings courts into managing the response to an invasion.
And that's not, you know, that's not, that doesn't have justiciable standards.
It doesn't have standards courts can apply reasonably and certainly not on a timely basis.
So some of this is going to play out.
It isn't just going to be in Judge Bosberg's courtroom.
It's going to be in other courtrooms as well.
And but I, as just a constitutional litigator, I find it all fascinating.
As somebody who wants to see the United States have an aggressive deportation policy for people who are here illegal, I appreciate what the president is doing.
And I think if I were a betting man, which I'm not, I would bet on the president's side winning this contest.
And I'd probably give it fairly decent odds, like two to one odds.
But that's going to take a little while to play out.
unidentified
All right.
Let's go to Telford, Pennsylvania.
John's a Republican.
John, welcome to the conversation with Ken Cuccinelli.
Go ahead.
Hey, Ken.
I wasn't able to get on the last segment with the Steven guy, but this is my question.
Like, the judge is from Washington, D.C.
The detainees weren't from Washington, D.C.
I thought the judge, in other words, it has to be from the state from where these people are flown out.
Plus, nobody brought it before the judge.
In other words, the judge took it upon himself.
Nobody came in and said, hey, judge, this is unconstitutional.
And the other thing I was going to say is: the daughter of this judge makes her money from representing these illegal people.
That's not a conflict adventures.
He shouldn't recuse himself.
I remember when Clarence Thomas was told that he had to recuse himself because of Jenny Thomas, because she didn't like the outcome of the 2020 election.
And I just find it all political.
And where were all these judges when Joe Biden was flying these people in overnight and dropping them off with everybody down in Texas?
I don't understand where these judges were.
And I just think it's totally political.
Okay, John.
Mr. Goodwin.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
So there's a few points there.
First of all, let's just start with the appearance of impartiality.
Like the judge that heard the New York civil case against President Trump in New York, this judge's daughter makes money off of political consulting of one form or another, taking on the president.
I think the judge should have recused himself.
I think the judge in New York should have recused himself.
There are plenty of other judges who can hear the case.
The fact that a judge in this circumstance does not recuse himself suggests to me that he wants the case.
And if you want a case, then there's a reason you want a case.
And you're already moved off of the center point of impartiality.
So I think it's very unfortunate.
I think the judge does harm to the opinion of the judiciary by not letting another judge who clearly doesn't have a conflict take the case.
But here he is.
He's on the case.
And you mentioned a jurisdictional question.
They just ran to a judge in D.C.
And by the way, the judge didn't start a case.
The ACLU represents some of these deported Venezuelans.
And so they brought the case.
That being said, it certainly was not brought from any of the localities where the Venezuelans were picked up or transported out from.
And that raises the question of district judges dealing on a national basis, which is something that the Supreme Court has very slowly been cranking down on.
For example, in an abortion case out of Idaho, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction imposed by a district court judge, but they limited it to the parties in the case, as opposed to saying, essentially wiping out the application of the law.
I think you're going to begin to see that much more aggressively under the Trump administration.
If you look at the statistics, the overwhelming proportion of all nationwide injunctions this century have been delivered against President Trump, two-thirds of them, and those have been delivered, 92% of them, by Democrat-appointed judges.
You know, those statistics are pretty ugly from a standpoint of an objective judiciary.
And they're doing harm to the opinion of the judiciary.
And as you noted, I'll take your last point: the things Joe Biden was doing.
You know, Joe Biden was flying people in and out using military aircraft.
Well, guess what?
Joe Biden has set the precedent.
Nobody can really complain about Donald Trump doing that.
Joe Biden was using military bases to stage in and out for aliens.
Well, guess what?
Donald Trump is pretty free to do that without an expectation of any blockage because of the precedent.
And I find it very interesting, the people who think that in the deportation space, there is some kind of problem with how the Trump administration has behaved here with Judge Boesberg.
But they had no problem with Joe Biden literally defying the U.S. Supreme Court on student loans, something that is clearly 100% domestic, and that even somebody like Nancy Pelosi had pointed out beforehand that the president had no authority to do.
So there wasn't any controversy about the outcome.
I think there's real controversy about the prospective substantive outcome in this case, and it is not domestic.
It is dealing with immigration and foreign affairs, which has traditionally been skewed by the courts toward deference to the executive branch for very good reason.
unidentified
I'll have you respond to our previous guest, Stephen Laddock, because he talks about the judges that have been ruling against the Trump administration in his second term.
Take a listen.
Sir, Pean brought where the federal government is and where you're getting random assignment across the entire federal court bench here in Washington or across the state lines in Maryland or even up in Boston.
So it really has been not just one judge or two judges or three judges, but 25 or 30 judges.
And as much as the president has taken to calling these rogue judges, I do think there comes a point where if there are this many judges from this many different backgrounds appointed by this many different presidents ruling against your policies, maybe the rogue actor is not the courts.
Mr. Cuccinelli?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
So the fact that let's presume for the moment that the chief judge was randomly assigned to this case, that doesn't change the recusal analysis.
He still should have recused himself in favor of a judge that had no family ties whatsoever to the circumstances that would be judged before him or her.
That's not law so much.
That really is opinion.
Different people can have different views of that.
And I don't mean a daughter who felt strongly about it or who was an activist.
We're talking here about making money.
And that puts things in a very different category.
With respect to the seat of government, that's certainly true.
It also demonstrates they were targeting a national effort and not actually just defending the clients that the ACLU had.
I think they had five clients or so.
I could be wrong on that signed up among those who were deported this way.
But you should be bringing those cases from the location of where what you allege to be the offense took place.
They clearly weren't there to defend their clients.
They were there to attack the Trump effort.
And there is a difference between the two.
And it brings up the whole question of national injunctions and judges reaching beyond the borders of their jurisdiction.
And I think that's a very legitimate debate to have.
It's a debate that's been simmering for a long time under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
unidentified
Let's go to Linda, St. Louis, Missouri, Democratic caller.
Hi, Linda.
Hi, good morning.
Thank you for having me.
I just want to say that I get so sick of them.
They want to go, oh, Biden did this and you did, you know.
What about doing what is right?
They're disrupting people's lives with this immigration crap.
You know, they're grabbing the wrong people.
You can't say anything.
If you're not an illegal, but if you're a migrant, whether you have a green card or whatever, you can't say how you feel.
You can't even speak these days.
You want to, I'm just tired.
After that, let's take Linda's points, Ken Cacionali about freedom of speech.
Sure.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
Thank you, Linda.
I appreciate it.
It is an important subject.
And let's keep in mind a baseline here that the constitutional, we'll call it 100% of constitutional rights belong to U.S. citizens.
That is not the case for non-citizens.
And there are various degrees.
Khalil had a green card that puts him in one category that is somewhat different from someone who, for example, has overstayed a visa or who is here illegally, crossed in illegally.
It still is not at the 100% level, and you are still a guest of the United States.
No one has a right to be here other than U.S. citizens.
No one.
And I think that's just a fundamental difference in how some people view these circumstances.
Khalil was removed because he was offering support to an acknowledged terrorist organization, including by organizing in their support.
And while that, in terms of speech only, that would be arguably not, wouldn't be a problem for a U.S. citizen.
That does not protect someone with a green card when you are, you know, organizing for a terrorist organization.
And let's be real clear what they were doing at Columbia.
They were intentionally threatening and intimidating Jewish students.
This was, in my view, low-level terrorism.
And when I say low-level, I mean they weren't trying to kill people necessarily, but they certainly were trying to scare them so badly that they would leave.
And thus my low-level appellation, it wasn't killing people.
Burning Teslas for political reasons.
A little bit higher level, low-level terrorism, because they seem to be doing it in a way that they don't want people to get hurt, but they're creating fires and destroying property.
They're willing to risk at least firefighters' lives.
So it's still terrorism.
When you commit violence or threats, which Khalil was involved in organizing for political purposes, that is terrorism.
And we have not typically been very tolerant of that until recently.
And the only people who are tolerant of it, in my view, are on the left.
I wonder if the caller, Linda, had problems with people burning cities in 2020 after the George Floyd murder.
It was a murder.
They were prosecuted.
Those police officers were prosecuted for violating the law.
Does that make it okay?
Did she call those peaceful protests like so many elected officials who were condemning police, who were protecting folks?
In Minneapolis, if my recollection serves, 60% of the property destroyed in Minneapolis by those left-wing domestic terrorists was uninsured.
Those people were ruined.
They were ruined.
And I can't imagine that in downtown Minneapolis, those were very many folks other than left of center politically.
So they clearly weren't specific targets, but the people doing the burning and the destroying and the killing didn't care.
And if we're going to accept violence, if we're going to accept terrorism against our country from either side, then I think we've reached a threshold that's going to be hard to return from.
Back to Khalil.
Khalil was, in my view, supporting, and in the Secretary of State's view, supporting a terrorist organization.
People want to say that if you oppose Israel, you get booted out.
Let's be honest, that overstates the case.
This guy was organizing for Hamas, as I said, threatening Jewish students.
That was part of the purpose.
And then negotiating from a position of strength with the Columbia administration, which was rolling over for it.
And Columbia allowed a lot of this to happen, but Khalil led the way.
And so he will not be invited in this country any longer.
He will lose the privilege of being in the United States.
unidentified
Let's go to Bob, who's in Wakefield, Rhode Island, Independent.
Hi, Gretor.
It's good to hear your voice on.
And I just want to say quickly that this is the far greatest program on TV of all times.
And I watched the story the other day with Brian Lamb and what's going on right now.
And pray to God you'll be able to stay on the air.
Thank you.
My comment was going to be the previous guest you had hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned about this issue.
And Ken, I'm sorry.
You're a good-looking guy.
You've got some good words.
You put things together.
But I think you're, in my mind, a place that I think we have to deviate from and get into the more specific problems of how people are treated in this country.
And we are losing the law in this country.
We're losing, and if we lose it, we're done.
All right, Bob, I'm going to, Ken Cuccinelli, can I pick up on what Bob's talking about and just focus it on the New York Times story today about the Fourth Amendment?
Because I'm wondering if your argument about undocumented immigrants and due process applies to this.
They say that the Trump administration lawyers have determined that the 18th century law that we've been talking about, the president has invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant, according to people familiar with internal discussions.
The disclosure reflects the Trump administration's aggressive view of presidential power, including setting aside a key provision of the Fourth Amendment that requires a court order to search someone's home.
It goes on to quote Christopher Welborne, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who says that the Fourth Amendment applies to everyone in the United States, not just individuals with legal status.
Yeah.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
Again, I think they're picking a strategic legal fight to determine the parameters.
They've staked out a position.
And where I can have some agreement with Bob and some disagreement with Bob's comment is that I've been concerned about the deterioration of law for some time.
And I think what you're seeing from the Trump administration, though, is not some willy-nilly, we're going to do whatever the hell we want.
It is a strategically thought out effort to actually define, have the courts define, by the way, they take a position, courts will decide things, to define the parameters of that presidential authority.
I think that is fairly reasonable, frankly.
It looks rough in a case-by-case basis, and I understand that.
I have not studied, you know, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Fourth, Fifth, they're all going to play out a little bit differently depending on the circumstances of the aliens at issue, and let's say alleged aliens.
A simple case with the Fourth Amendment is you could be wrong.
They may not be the people you think they are, and you could be going into the home of a U.S. citizen.
And of course, under the Fourth Amendment, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine would bar anything you uncovered there from being used in your case for the government.
And you'd be ordered to release the wrong folks you'd picked up.
Presumably, that wouldn't need to be ordered once it was realized.
But so, different elements of constitutional rights are going to be handled differently by the courts and for good reasons.
But, you know, here we have another test where I think you actually have a little bit of the opposite of what Bob is saying going on: they're trying to define the parameters within which they can work with the idea, as the president has said in his sometimes inartful way of saying, that they intend to abide by, but they want to define them.
And this hasn't been really directed legal effort hasn't been taken to this over the 250 years of our country.
And now it's going to be.
So we're going to get a lot more definition out of some of these circumstances.
And that's going to be in place for the hundreds of more years of the United States of America.
unidentified
We'll go to Circleville, Ohio.
George, Republican.
Yes, thanks, Ken.
Thanks for all your views.
Doesn't the only one that can actually declare a state of emergency, a national state of emergency, is the president, if I'm correct?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
You're correct.
unidentified
The Congress can't do that.
The judges can't do that.
But Trump, if he wanted to, he could declare a national emergency right now about immigration, couldn't he?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
I believe he has, actually.
unidentified
That is a fact.
And I heard this Democratic caller talking about immigration.
Well, my mother came from Yugoslavia.
She was a legal immigrant.
She had to learn our language.
I'm 70 years old.
I've seen a lot in this country.
Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution only gives the right of the government to impose taxes for the defense and welfare of the American taxpayer.
And that judge better have trillions of dollars because if he can provide the funds for the U.S. government, let him do that.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
But like you said, even James Madison, all the way back to 1795, they were already spending money on things that just felt politically nice.
And he said words to the effect of, I can't put my finger on that part of the Constitution that allows us to spend money for your benevolent purposes.
But in fact, that has been allowed.
That general welfare clause has been read by the courts to be immensely expansive.
And so spending money even on aliens, legal and illegal, is viewed and can be explained in terms of benefiting the United States.
And that's all it takes to make that within that spending within the boundaries of the clause you just read.
I may not like that.
You clearly do not like that.
And part of the reason I don't like it is I have great concerns about our debt that it doesn't seem like many people in Washington are very concerned about.
And if you're 70, I'm guessing and hoping you have grandchildren.
Well, they're being burdened with that debt to a degree that is going to debilitate their government at some point.
And for folks who assume Republicans in defense, when I get the defense hawk saying, well, don't you want to defend against China?
Yes, I want to defend against China, but I also want to be able to do it in 2050 and 2075, not just 2025.
unidentified
And so all the spending has to get rolled back.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
But, Greta, I think that's a subject for another day and one that I'd be happy to come on and talk about.
But we're going to have to rein it all in, including in the immigration space, by the way.
I mean, there's not going to be any exceptions if we're actually going to get back to a balanced budget.
unidentified
All right, Chris in Tellarusa, New Mexico, Democratic Caller, you're next.
Hi.
I think you're grossly misusing the word invasion in the Alien Enemies Act.
I mean, to me, it clearly refers to an armed invasion by a foreign power.
What immigrants are doing is, you know, you might call it an encouragion or an infiltration or something like that, but it is clearly not an armed invasion.
And I think you use the term invasion as part of a propaganda campaign to frighten gullible people in the United States, just like Trump calls them rapists and murderers and job takers.
And this propaganda campaign against immigrants is very, very similar to the Nazi campaign against Jews in the 1930s.
Ken Cochinelli?
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
Well, if you want to go there, Chris, I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to stay respectful.
And if all you've got is ad hominem attacks, then I presume that you recognize the weakness of your own arguments.
And we'll start with the economic.
We'll start with some very basic ones.
Large-scale, unskilled immigration hurts American poor people very badly, and it has for a long time.
And it's been allowed to go on on a bipartisan basis because, in my view, the people who fund both parties, the tops of both parties, have made sure that cheap, illegal labor has been made available so that companies can benefit by keeping their costs down and running their profits up, who at the expense of, at the expense of American unskilled citizens, and we have a lot of them.
And we have some data to prove it.
When in 2019, just before COVID, at the end of 2019, after tax cuts and deregulation under the first Trump administration, but also three years of actually earnest enforcement of immigration laws after more than a decade where that had not happened, some might argue far more than a decade.
The economy was doing well.
But if you break down the economy, the people who are doing the best were at the bottom of the scale.
That's why black unemployment spent more time under 8% under Donald Trump in his first term than the rest of my life combined up to that point.
The same is true of Hispanic unemployment.
And the poverty rate reached the lowest level in recorded history up to that time because poor people were being benefited by protecting their labor market so wages can go up and they could get jobs.
They here being poor American citizens.
That's who I'm most concerned about.
You don't hear people on the right, and I think it's a lament I have that people on the right don't talk about how much better our policies are for American poor people than the policies of the left.
But this is an example where it is absolutely and completely true economically.
And if you have a problem, if you want to start making Nazi illusions because people like me favor American poor people over poor people in the rest of the world, well, that's your problem.
That's not my problem.
And if all you can do is assign motives because of your preferred outcomes, then you're not honestly looking at the question in the first place.
Your analysis of the Alien Enemies Act, it's so obvious to you.
You cited nothing but your own obviousness.
You didn't cite any law.
You didn't cite any other provisions.
There are elements of the Constitution and law from early in the United States that do, in fact, reflect the position you stated where invasion deals with invasion strictly by a nation state.
But that is not spelled out in the Alien Enemies Act.
It's not the case under Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution.
And I would go back 20 some odd years after 9-11.
The declaration of war by Congress itself was against individuals or groups.
It was very amorphous.
Go read the, they call it an authorization for the use of military force.
That is the constitutional equivalent of a declaration of war.
They declared war against individuals they couldn't identify at that point.
So I think your scratch legal analysis is 100% driven by your preferred position and your hatred for Donald Trump.
And that's not much of a way to analyze a legal question.
unidentified
Rick is next in Nampa, Idaho, Republican.
Top of the Morrison, American.
Can you hear me, Greta?
We can, Rick.
Go ahead.
You're on the air with Ken Catinelli.
Good morning.
Ken, good morning.
Ken, this is Rick Hen, retired Marine, Nampa, Idaho.
You're spot on.
I've got four valid references I want to bring to light.
And Greta, give me an extra second.
The first one is foreign aid.
Reference CRS report 40213, April 16, 2019.
Open it up, go to the last few pages, Appendix A data table, you'll see 71 years of foreign aid.
Who's spending the money on the world?
Americans are.
The second program is refugees coming into America.
They get $3,032 per month per person.
Who's paying for it?
American taxpayer dollars are.
Doctors and Dreamers, $7 million a week.
There are health care inspections.
It's called intercommunal funds, Medicaid, Medicare.
Part D, Doctors and Dreamers.
You're paying for it, grandmas and grandpas.
Illegals coming into the White House.
State and city and county property tax dollars for law enforcement.
We're paying for it.
My message is: Ken, if we posture the math, we show America the Democrats will not have a leg to stand on.
If they say President Trump is wrong, we'll sue this.
Democrats, you have spent an excess of $2 trillion on foreign aid.
The Republican Party is at $901 billion.
Trump only spent $29.99 in his first four years.
Truman from $46 to $52 spent $41 billion in $6, $31 billion in $4.
Trump $29.9.
Tell President Trump I got $16 trillion, $700 billion of nation debt gone.
38 months, two weeks, I can generate $440 million every 24 hours.
That's my resume, President Trump.
You got a door?
Give it to me or VP pass.
Ken, Greta, C. Span Larson Journal.
I'm looking forward to getting up top.
I'll show you how to fix this country.
Thanks for your hospitality, Greta.
All right, Rick.
All right, Mr. Cuccinelli.
ken cuccinelli ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, well, thanks for your service, Rick.
You know, the foreign aid enthusiasm, in my view, has been very bipartisan.
And, you know, as someone who I've already told you, I'm very concerned with the fact that we haven't balanced our budget, that we are digging a deep, deep, deep hole for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren that is going to debilitate the government when they need it.
Foreign aid is an obvious thing to shrink.
I would note, I would note, and I'll expand this to immigration, that, you know, some people are critical of folks who hold my views where I have very restrictive immigration views, not zero, of course, but I think that we have overdone it.
And certainly on the illegal front, there's no question.
And I think the American people resoundingly made that statement with the last election.
But America, for a long time, has been the most generous nation in the world on the immigration front in accepting people from all over the world.
Even if I'm not, I don't think we should accept people from all over the world.
The fact is we have.
And that's been going on for a very, very long time.
And my problem isn't accepting people from all over the world.
I think we should be a lot more selective about it and in ways that help America first before just throwing the doors open, as we saw, for example, in Joe Biden's time.
The refugee program is part of our foreign policy, of our foreign image, if you will.
We do spend a lot of money on it.
There's no question.
And that both legal and illegal aliens here absorb an awful lot of government funds.
Look at, forget the federal government, just look at school districts.
You know, I live in central Virginia.
I'm talking to one teacher recently.
A third of her students, a third, are listed as, quote, homeless.
Well, they're not actually homeless.
They're living in hotels paid for by us, the taxpayers, really our grandchildren, because we don't have the money right now.
And that money goes and is gone.
And we're going to have to make it up at some point.
So the financial argument is awfully strong in terms of cranking down what the federal government does monetarily for folks who are here, especially illegally.
It's also a good argument to move them out and move large numbers of them out, the mass deportation the president has talked about.
There is cost savings to be had.
unidentified
Ken Cicinelli is at the Center for Renewing America, former Trump administration official with Homeland Security.
Thank you, as always, for the conversation.
We appreciate it.
Good to be with you, Greta, as always.
We'll take a break.
When we come back, we will be an open forum.
You can continue talking about immigration or any other public policy issue or politics.
There are the lines on your screen.
start dialing in.
Saturdays, watch American History TV's 10-week series, First 100 Days.
We explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors and through the C-SPAN archives.
We learn about accomplishments and setbacks and how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day.
Saturday, the first 100 days of Jimmy Carter's presidency in 1977.
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brian lamb ▲ ● ▼
Stephen M. Gillen was a scholar in residence at the History Channel for more than 20 years.
He has written 12 books on subjects including a history of the United States, the Kerner Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the life of John F. Kennedy, Jr.
His latest book is titled Presidents at War, How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents from Eisenhower and JFK through Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.
Steve Gillen closes his book saying, quote, ironically, the threats facing America in the third decade of the 21st century are very real and in many ways similar to the challenges the nation confronted in the 1930s.
unidentified
Author Stephen Gillen with his book Presidents at War, How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents, from Eisenhower and JFK through Reagan and Bush on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb.
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Happening today in Washington from the Washington Post, President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver the remarks from the Oval Office.
We'll have live coverage of those remarks at 11 a.m. Eastern Time right here on C-SPAN.
You can also follow along at c-span.org or our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now.
Washington Post reports that the remarks are scheduled for this morning from the Oval Office.
The White House has not advertised the subject matter.
Reuters is reporting that the president will announce the Pentagon's decision on a next-generation fighter jet contract.
Separately Friday, Elon Musk is scheduled to receive a briefing by Defense Department leaders focused on the threat posed by China and the billionaires' work to slash the U.S. government bureaucracy.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼
People familiar with the matter told the Washington Post.
unidentified
The president putting out this on his truth social page, retweeting Elon Musk, Elon Musk saying the New York Times is pure propaganda.
Also, I look forward to the prosecutors of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to the New York Times.
The president saying the fake news is at it again, this time, the failing New York Times.
They said incorrectly that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow.
It's today to be briefed on any potential war with China.
How ridiculous.
China will not even be mentioned or discussed.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼
How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can take up such lies.
unidentified
Anyway, the story is completely untrue.
Grant in Washington, D.C., Independent.
We're an open forum.
Hi, Grant.
Hi there.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
I was really hoping to talk to Ken Cuccinelli.
He was chiding callers for going ad hominem while he was defaming every single campus protester, many of whom were Jewish, by the way, at Columbia University by calling them all Hamas supporters and not really listening to what they actually were, which was anti-genocide and anti-ethnic cleansing protesters.
And I suspect that we can do a little thought experiment here.
There was, in fact, an Israeli green holder called Shai David Dai who was banned from campus from engaging in actual violence, including stalking and harassment.
But, you know, do the thought experiment.
Would Ken Cuccinelli and his ilk support the deportation of green card holder Shai David Dai, who, like Cuccinelli, is pro-genocide and pro-ethnic cleansing against Palestinians?
All right, Grant, those are his thoughts there.
I want to give a programming note to all of you today at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN 3.
We'll be covering the United Nations Security Council.
They're going to have a debate on Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
That taking place at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
You can watch live on C-SPAN 3, our free video mobile app, C-SPANNOW, or online at c-span.org.
Donald in Richland, Michigan, a Republican.
Donald, let's hear from you.
Yeah, I have just a couple of words to say.
I know that all of our politicians on both sides are liars, cheaters, and all kinds of bad things because the Democrats call Republicans that and the Republicans call the Democrats that.
So we got to figure out right away what we're dealing with.
We're dealing with Bucks of Crud.
But people also, the schools don't begin to teach history anywhere near what history really was.
I've done quite a lot of research and reading over the years about history, and they think that the JFK was the best thing since sliced bread.
Well, the first thing he did when he got elected was create the Bay of Pigs problem, which created the missile crisis.
Then he got us into Vietnam, and then he got himself killed.
And he was a great president?
I don't think so.
Thank you.
All right, Donald.
Dorothy, Omaha, Nebraska, Democratic caller.
Dorothy, what's on your mind?
Yes.
There is a higher law that is, and that is the law of God.
God says that if you hate your brother, you are in danger of judgment.
He also says that if you hate your brother, you are a murderer like Cain, and no murderer has eternal life.
Stop fearing immigrants and fear God.
He can destroy your body and your soul in hell.
And preachers need to preach this to their congregations.
We're talking about hatred, hatred of our brothers.
All right, Dorothy's thoughts there in Omaha, Nebraska.
The Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noam, was in Florida yesterday touting the seizure of nearly a half a billion dollars worth of cocaine and marijuana off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.
Listen to what she had to say.
Their core mission is simple, but it's incredibly crucial.
It's to secure our territorial waters and to safeguard our nation from those who seek to do us harm.
Their mission directly aligns with President Trump's vision to make America safe and strong again.
And thanks to the Coast Guard's relentless maritime security and their interdiction efforts, $517 million worth of illegal drugs will never reach American communities here by what you see today as a result of these weeks of work.
That means that fewer families are going to be torn apart by addiction, that fewer lives are going to be lost to overdoses, that communities will be safer, and fewer resources will be at the hands of dangerous, violent cartels that seek to do all of us harm.
This action is a testimony to President Trump's commitment to delivering for the American people.
And he has unwavering dedication to our military strength, to our border security, our law enforcement are producing incredible results, and his leadership is making America safe again.
To find all of our coverage of the Trump administration and Washington, go online on demand at c-span.org.
Sherry in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Republican.
Hi, Sherry.
Hey, how are you doing?
Good morning.
I just wanted to comment on what Ken had said.
And yes, I'm 100% for immigrants not being in the United States of America unless they are a citizen of the United States.
And we are tired of our children not being able to find jobs because they are taking our jobs under the table.
And no, it's not that I hate them.
I love all people.
But there's a time and a place for everything.
And they had their own place to live.
So why don't they go ahead and work there and bring their place up like we're trying to do?
All right, Sherry.
Lee, Rockville, Maryland, Independent.
Hi, Lee.
Good morning to you.
Good morning, Greta.
Enjoying the show.
When President Trump, during President Trump's first term, his first term, Nancy Pelosi was asked why Trump was cozying up to dictators like Putin.
And he said, she said, they have something on him.
They have something on him.
One of your callers a couple of weeks ago alluded to this.
Putin used to be a colonel in the KGB.
The KGB is a spy agency that uses all kinds of dirty tricks to get influence over foreign people.
They had a profilo, the Minister of Defense in Great Britain back in the 50s, got into a scandal with a bunch of ladies of the evening because of the ladies of the evening compromised him and got the plan, British defense plans.
That's what I think happened with Trump.
All right.
All right.
Lee there in Rockville, Maryland, with his thoughts.
The president says that he will sign a Ukraine minerals deal soon from Reuters reporting this morning.
The president said on Thursday the United States will sign this minerals and natural resources deal with Ukraine shortly and that his efforts to achieve a peace deal for the country were going pretty well after his talks this week with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders.
So that is something to look out for in the coming days.
Sharon in Dade City, Florida, Democratic caller.
Sharon.
Good morning.
I'd just like to mention that your previous guest, Mr. Cuccinelli, who did an awful lot of I think and I believe, which I find is kind of interesting any time an attorney talks like that.
But he alluded to the false equivalency argument that liberals are okay with rioters and looters during like BLM protests or any college campus protests, that we're all okay with them destroying property.
And they make that false equivalency in order to support the January 6th rioters, insurrectionists who destroyed property and threatened lives.
And then he also, another point, he also talked about the black unemployment rate going down under Trump, but he didn't mention that the wages were stagnant and people were working two jobs in order to make ends meet.
So I just wanted to clear those two things up that they paint this picture.
It is propaganda.
So people need to do the research and really think, use some critical thinking skills.
Thank you for taking my call.
Sharon, Democratic caller in Dade City, Florida.
President Trump yesterday moving one step closer to a campaign promise to abolish the Education Department.
Yesterday, signing an executive order that would dismantle it.
Putting back to the states, he said, a lot of what the Education Department does when it comes to K through 12.
Now, the Education Department, when it comes to K-12 education, only funds about 10% of the funding.
The rest, the 90%, comes from states and local governments.
Here's what the President said about what would be preserved at the Education Department under his executive order.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
The department's useful functions and such as, and they're in charge of them, Pell Grants, Title I funding, resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be preserved, fully preserved.
They're all going to be.
So if you look at the Pell Grants, supposed to be a very good program, Title I funding and resources for children with special disabilities and special needs, they're going to be preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.
And that's very important to Linda, I know, and it's very important to all of us.
But beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department.
We're going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible.
It's doing us no good.
We want to return our students to the states where just some of the governors here are so happy about this.
They want education to come back to them, to come back to the states, and they're going to do a phenomenal job.
You know, if you look, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, I have to tell you, I give them a lot of credit.
China's top 10.
And so we can't now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate because China is very big.
But you have countries that do a very good job in education.
And I really believe, like some of the governors here today, from states that run very, very well, including a big state like Texas, but states that run very well are going to have education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and those top Finland, those top countries that do so well with education.
I think they'll do every bit as well.
And what do you think about that, Governor?
Do you agree?
I think so.
Ron, do you agree?
I think so.
unidentified
Florida.
Iowa.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
I really believe that.
They'll be as good as any of them.
unidentified
President Trump yesterday before signing executive order to dismantle the education department.
If you missed the event and the signing, you can find it online on demand at c-span.org.
Maurice in Sterling, Virginia and Independent.
We're an open forum, Maurice.
What's on your mind?
Thank you.
Good morning.
Good morning to America.
So the guy you had on earth, Steven Vladik, he is a better friend.
You should bring him back again and again and again and again.
He was just spot on.
He made a lot of sense.
What did you agree with?
Okay, due process, rule of law.
Without due process, rule of law, America is nothing.
We become something else.
I'm speaking as an immigrant.
I came to this country from Nigeria.
It's not even the technology, it's not even the printing of money or the dollar being the local reserve currency.
It is due process and the rule of law that makes America great.
Without it, you have nothing.
All right, Maurice, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, agreeing with you, says in an interview that's going to air this Sunday that a lawless Trump has caused a constitutional crisis.
Here's his interview on Meet the Press for this Sunday.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼
This week, the president called to impeach a judge who ruled against him on deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members, as you know.
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts released a rare statement rebuking the idea of using impeachment to settle judicial disagreements.
Some constitutional scholars and fellow Democrats, Leader Schumer, say this is a constitutional crisis.
Do you agree?
unidentified
Is the United States in a constitutional crisis?
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼
Yes, I do, Kristen, and democracy is at risk.
Look, Donald Trump is a lawless, angry man.
He thinks he should be king.
He thinks he should do whatever he wants, regardless of the law.
And he thinks judges should just listen to him.
Now, we have to fight that back in every single way.
And we actually have had over 100 cases in the courts where we've had a very good record of success.
So Donald Trump, infuriated by that success, said judges should be impeached.
Let me tell Donald Trump and the American people, Democrats in the Senate will not impeach judges full stop.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼
President Trump said he would not defy a court order.
Do you agree?
Do you believe him?
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼
I don't trust him.
We have to watch him like a hawk.
Defying court orders is why our democracy is at risk, and we'll have to do everything to fight back in that regard.
unidentified
The Senate Democratic leader appearing on Meet the Press this Sunday.
James in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Republican.
James, good morning to you.
Hey, James, you've got to mute your television.
You ready to go?
All right, Terry in Dixon, Illinois, Democratic caller.
Terry, what's on your mind?
Yes, good morning.
Yes, I'm calling about.
Hey, good.
I really love your show, and I've been listening for, well, 20 years.
But anyway, yeah, I'm calling about Ken.
Ken, you know, he sure has a different view on the justice system.
You know, he calls for these judges to be impeached or investigated because their daughter's getting money.
But wow, did it go over his head that we had Clarence Thomas and Anthony Scalia that is in the Supreme Court?
And Thomas's wife, she was collecting money.
And Thomas, he was going on all these vacations with the Koch brothers and all this on their dying.
But when we called for him to recuse himself, he said, no, I do not have to recuse myself.
And Ken, I'm sure Ken was like, oh my God, he did do that, but oh, yes, he can.
So this double standard, I'm sorry.
Due process is due process.
And if he doesn't like the judge's decision, they can appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which we know the Supreme Court, especially two of their Supreme Court justices that Donald Trump really, how would I say, really pushes to push his agenda, have conflicts of interest, and they should step down.
All right.
All right, Terry, programming know for all of you.
Congress is in recess this week.
The House and Senate back in their states and their home districts.
Some have been holding town halls back in their home states, and we've been covering them here on C-SPAN.
Mike Flutter, Republican, Harriet Hagaman, another Republican from Wyoming, Democrats as well.
Senator Michael Bennett, C-SPAN Cameras, were in Colorado yesterday for his town hall.
Tonight, we are going to show you coverage of Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
They're holding a rally in Denver, part of the senators' tour of congressional districts that were narrowly won by Republicans.
They're expected to discuss the economic policy agenda and what they say is the rise of authoritarianism in America.
Watch live at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
And then on Saturday, we'll begin a marathon of town halls with New Jersey freshman Senator Andy Kim hosting a town hall in Brick Township in Ocean City, Ocean County, excuse me, New Jersey.
You can see that live at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, or free video mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
You can find all of these town halls online on demand, online at c-span.org.
Susan in San Diego, Independent.
Good morning to you, Susan.
Go ahead.
Good morning, Greta.
Thanks so much for taking my call this morning.
Great show.
I wanted to just come in and say that Center for Renewing America, of course, started by Russell Vogt.
Of course, that is Heritage Foundation.
When are people going to wake up and see that this is just one big web of Christian and white nationalists trying to take over this entire country, consolidating power, and Donald Trump is just handing it to them.
He doesn't really care.
He's not going to be around.
He's just an actor.
Someone said earlier that he's angry.
I think it was Chuck Schumer.
I don't think he's angry.
I think he's a good actor, and he knows how to stir up the people in America who are angry.
Okay, so that's just really sad.
All right.
Laverne in DeForest, Wisconsin, Republican Laverne.
Let's hear from you.
Yeah, good morning.
Good morning.
You have this, C-S-SPAN has this policy of when there's a guest on that callers are not to use ad hominem attacks.
And I agree with that 100%.
But what I'd like to see, you know, so many people are talking about, can't we please come together?
How about C-SPAN having a policy so that every time a caller makes an ad hominem attack, they are automatically cut off.
This idea of, oh, Donald Trump is a liar.
Yeah, has he told a lie?
Sure.
Has every caller that's called in and called him a liar never told a lie?
It's the pot calling the kettle black.
How about trying to bring people together, change your policy, ad hominem attacks, bam, you're done.
Thank you.
All right.
Jeff in Black Creek, Wisconsin, Democratic Caller.
Hi, I would like, hi, I would like to know about Elon Musk theory about Social Security.
He said the other day that that is nothing but a posi scam.
Now, what I would like to know what his opinion is about 401k plans.
You talk about a posse scam.
Everybody out there can't put in 80 grand and turn around and think they're going to make a living on that when they go to retire.
This is absolutely terrible.
Like the company that I work for, they hired a company from New York.
And after the meeting, I went up to this gentleman and asked him, I said, what if I pick something and I lose it?
I don't get my 401ks.
I lost everything.
His response back to me was, well, not everybody's going to make money on this.
You have a nice day.
Thank you.
Dwayne, North Liberty, Iowa, Independent.
Hi, Dwayne.
How are you doing today?
Anyway, talking about the drug seizure that came up on Fort Lauderdale, I watched a show on Discovery Channel called Contraband Seize at the Border.
Those guys work their butts off.
And they have also shown where drugs will, a drug boat or something will crash or they'll throw it overboard or whatever and it'll wash up on it on the shore.
It's been going on for years.
He's just taking credit for the one time.
Yeah, then another, I've got four different points.
Duane, pick one more.
We're running out of time.
Okay, the school funds.
I work for a school.
And is the funding going to quit when the government, when the education department shuts down, or is it going to keep going or is it going to go somewhere else?
Because there's no way small town, small town, even Iowa, Nebraska, small town anywhere, can survive on state and local funding without raising taxes.
And then people are going to start complaining about that.
All right, Dwayne.
Let me go to George, Tom Zero, New Jersey, Independent.
George, we'll end with you.
Good morning.
You're doing an excellent job.
I have to bring it up: one thing.
With all these lunatics out there marking the Tesla vehicles, burning the Tesla vehicles, burning the dealers, today understand insurance pay for everything.
What are the insurance collecting?
Collecting for the people.
So the people they marking, they got to realize we have to pay back to the insurance because the time it comes renew insurance score, insurance has got to go up.
All right.
George's final thoughts there this morning.
Before we let you go, President Trump and the Defense Secretary, as we said, will be delivering remarks in the Oval office at 11 a.m. Eastern Time.
Tune in right here on C-SPAN, online at c-span.org or our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now.
Thanks for watching.
We'll be back tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern Time.
Enjoy your weekend.
Ladies and gentlemen, here's the deal.
mike flood ▲ ● ▼
Here's the deal.
That $36, $36 trillion number is not going away.
It is not going away unless we deal with Medicare and Medicaid.
unidentified
We are not interested in hearing that you are in the minority.
We know that.
We want you to show some of the backbone and strategic brilliance that Mitch McConnell would have in the minority.
Right.
We want you to show fight.
And you are not fighting!
This weekend, join C-SPAN for a special Congressional Town Hall Marathon.
Watch unfiltered conversations with lawmakers as they engage directly with their constituents on key issues.
The marathon starts at 10 a.m. Eastern with a town hall by New Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim, live from Brick Township, New Jersey.
Other featured members include Wyoming Republican Congresswoman Harriet Hageman, Maryland Democratic Congressman Glenn Ivey, Nebraska Republican Congressman Mike Flood, Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennett, and many more.
C-SPAN's Congressional Town Hall Marathon beginning Saturday at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN and online at c-SPAN.org.
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