| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Current state of the U.S. economy, including the April Jobs Report and other economic indicators with the Wall Street Journal's Paul Kiernan. | |
| And later, high school teachers Kevin Jackson and Ryan Warinka join us to discuss the upcoming Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics exam and how students can prepare for it. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| This is Washington Journal for Saturday, May 3rd. | ||
| This week, several new reports on the U.S. economy were released, including a stronger-than-expected April jobs report and another showing the country's GDP fell in the first quarter of this year. | ||
| Also, President Trump unveiled the 2016 White House budget request, which proposes cuts to non-defense discretionary spending and increased funding for defense. | ||
| And the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could establish the country's first public religious charter school. | ||
| Those are just a few of the stories C-SPAN has been following. | ||
| And for the first hour of today's program, we're asking you, what's your top news story of the week? | ||
| Here are the lines: Democrats, 202-748-8,000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text your comments to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Be sure to include your name and city. | ||
| You can also post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Good morning, and thank you for being with us. | ||
| We will get to your calls and hear about your top story in just a few minutes. | ||
| But first, wanted to give you some more information on one of the top stories I just mentioned, and that is the April Jobs Report from CNBC. | ||
| It says job growth was stronger than expected in April despite worries over the impact of President Donald Trump's blanket tariffs against U.S. trading partners. | ||
| Non-farm payroll increased a seasonally adjusted $177,000 for the month, slightly below the downward revised $185,000 in March, but above the Dow Jones estimates for $133,000, the Labor of Bureau statistics reported on Friday. | ||
| It also noted the unemployment rate. | ||
| It says the unemployment rate held at 4.2% as expected, indicating that the labor market is holding relatively stable. | ||
| The survey of households, which is used to calculate the jobless rate, showed an even stronger gain with an increase of 436,000 in those who reported holding jobs in the month. | ||
| Another one of the reports is looked at the GDP and the first quarter results there. | ||
| Also from CNBC says the U.S. economy contracted in the first three months of 2025 on an import surge at the start of President Donald Trump's second term in office as he wages a potential costly trade war. | ||
| Gross domestic product, which is the sum of all goods and services produced from January through March, fell at 0.3% annualized pace, according to a Commerce Department report Wednesday adjusted for seasonal factors and inflation. | ||
| This was the first quarter of negative payroll growth since Q1 of 2022. | ||
| It was during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that President Donald Trump was asked about the state of the U.S. economy and was asked about who gets credit or blame for its current state. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's his response: I don't view the stock market as the end of it. | |
| It's an indicator, but what the stock market really tells you, and what you when you look at the stock market in this case, is it says how bad a situation we inherited. | ||
| I took place, this is a quarter that we looked at today, and I took all of us together. | ||
| We came in on January 20th. | ||
| So this is Biden. | ||
| And you could even say the next quarter is sort of Biden because it doesn't just happen on a daily or an hourly basis. | ||
| But we're turning it around. | ||
| It's a big shift to turn around. | ||
| And we're going to have the greatest country financially in the history of the world, I believe. | ||
| I think we're going to do things that, and we had to do it. | ||
| We reset the table. | ||
| We were being ripped off by every single country with just about without exception. | ||
| I'd have to really think hard for who hasn't taken advantage. | ||
| And I don't even blame those countries. | ||
| I blame the person that was sitting right here where I am for allowing it to happen where our country was ripped off on trade hundreds of billions of dollars. | ||
| And now we're doing better than we've done in a long time. | ||
| You know, we were losing four to five to even six billion dollars a day on trade with Biden. | ||
| And now we have it down to a very manageable number. | ||
| And the tariffs, for the most part, haven't even kicked in yet. | ||
| So that's the way stock markets to me are an indication. | ||
| But the big indication is what's happening, and the people around the table know what's happening. | ||
| Again, for this first hour, we are hearing on your top news story of the week. | ||
| The lines, Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Some of the news stories, again, that we have been following this week include the GDP first quarter numbers as well as the April Jobs Report. | ||
| President Trump ordering the federal funding cuts to PBS and NPR. | ||
| President Trump threatens Harvard's tax-exempt status. | ||
| And President Trump releases the budget request, the White House budget request for 2026, as well as the Supreme Court hearing a case on publicly funded religious charter schools. | ||
| And a judge rules President Trump's use of Alien Enemies Act unlawful. | ||
| Those are some of the stories we want to hear. | ||
| If those are one of your top stories or if there's something else that caught your eye, we will start with Donald in Golden Valley, Arizona, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Donald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm just wondering why Trump wants all of our personal information from Social Security. | ||
| And I'm 76 years old, and he doesn't have any right to that information. | ||
| And another thing, Trump wants to cut money from the federal budget, but how about this big parade? | ||
| And he wants a poll of Putin where they go by and salute him and all this other crap. | ||
| How many millions of dollars is that costing? | ||
| And I'm about sick of it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| That was Donald in Arizona. | ||
| And Donald mentioned access to President Trump asking for access to social security information. | ||
| It was a headline that came out yesterday. | ||
| This is from the AP. | ||
| Trump administration asked Supreme Court to let Doge access social security systems. | ||
| Let's hear from Ron in San Clemente, California, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Sammy. | ||
| Thanks so much for taking the call. | ||
| A couple of things. | ||
| Of course, the tariff story is about as exciting as you're going to get because once he put his foot on the pedal there of the tariffs, it completely distorted all the markets throughout the world. | ||
| So that was a good start for our president. | ||
| I mean, what is that going to do except disrupt the natural flow of goods from now until who knows? | ||
| And it doesn't matter if he rolls them back or not. | ||
| Once you've started that, it's really a bad situation. | ||
| And we can't let this go on like this. | ||
| You know, if the first hundred days were bad, think about the next 100. | ||
| The next hundred are going to be even worse because this guy is a systems guy, and you have to give Trump his due. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He understands systems very well. | |
| And what he's doing is he's destructing our country step by step by step. | ||
| And we can't let this go on. | ||
| And I don't know how we're going to stop it except to remove the treasonous Republicans in the Congress that are going along with his program. | ||
| And it's just not right. | ||
| Ron, you're calling on the Republican line, is that correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| I'm a Liz Cheney Republican, old school Republican. | ||
| I still believe in the Republican factors of the 90s and 2000s. | ||
| And I still believe in those things. | ||
| But I certainly don't believe in this guy. | ||
| His methods and operation are unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, we can't, I mean, the people he chose us, of course, I've got one big thing. | ||
| I'm a decorated Vietnam veteran, and all I can tell you is when I look at Pete Hickseth and his sideburns, I just want to, you know, cry. | ||
| I mean, because my first sergeant would have told us, you go and get your hair cut right now, or you are not allowed back in the barracks. | ||
| So, you know, I mean, that's just a start. | ||
| I mean, I know that's a small thing, but it's just something that is indicative of the type of people that he's had chosen to represent this country. | ||
| And removing Mike Waltz is a bad thing. | ||
| But it was funny because I didn't realize he was actually probably a real patriot. | ||
| That's the reason why Trump got rid of him. | ||
| But, you know, there's lots more they're going to be going, hopefully, and we'll see how it all turns out. | ||
| But, you know, I'm. | ||
| Got your point, Ron. | ||
| We'll go to Pete in Massachusetts, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Pete. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Yeah, I don't know where the list begins. | ||
| It's another week and another disaster. | ||
| And like the fellow said, it's going to continue. | ||
| But the NPR PBS thing, that's more illegalities that will be ironed out in the courts, so that'll be coming up. | ||
| But that has to be approved by Congress. | ||
| That can't be approved by the king. | ||
| The other thing is the Russia thing, Ukraine, continues to just escalate. | ||
| And we just seem to be okay. | ||
| This administration just giving away land. | ||
| It's okay for people to come in, take land, seize land. | ||
| Do you know what kind of message that sends to our friends over there in Beijing? | ||
| You know, with the land, that it's okay, that you get, you know, you get the aggressor gets the spoils. | ||
| I mean, it's just such a terrible policy. | ||
| I don't even, Rubio is supposed to be smart, but the other thing, I don't know if anybody cares in MAGA world, but this golfing thing every week. | ||
| This week, it'll be three or four days. | ||
| This guy must be in the office about 20 hours a week. | ||
| I mean, if people aren't seeing that, I mean, my God, spending our taxpayer money on these golf trips and then going to a commencement where he wasn't wanted. | ||
| And it's just so I don't know. | ||
| I could go on all morning if you gave me the time, but it's a disaster. | ||
| That was Pete. | ||
| Let's talk with Bill in Tennessee, Memphis, Tennessee, line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I'm just frustrated over Donald Trump. | ||
| I voted for him the first time. | ||
| He read not the second time because I figured he was going to be a disaster, and he has proven to be a total disaster. | ||
| Now, this is one thing Americans need to realize. | ||
| Now, this boy, what's his name? | ||
| This me billionaire, this billionaire is getting all this money from the federal government. | ||
| And we made him a billionaire. | ||
| All these grants and things we give him for that sorry Tesla that he is working on. | ||
| Why should he go into our Social Security? | ||
| I'm almost 80 years old. | ||
| And he's what he got his money from grants. | ||
| And all this corruption that Trump is doing, I think Trump is senile. | ||
| I know I am. | ||
| Have a nice day. | ||
| That was Bill. | ||
| Let's hear from Julianne in Sanford, Connecticut, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Julian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you today? | ||
| I'm doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The thing I want to say is this: you got all these Democrats calling in every day, right? | |
| Making these outrageous comments that you let them talk for an hour, right? | ||
| They don't even know what's going on because every time Trump speaks or he speaks in the cabinet or the press conferences, they don't see that because MSNBC and CNN doesn't show anything. | ||
| They only golfer more like people like Anderson Cooper, Nicole Wallace. | ||
| So they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Julian, you don't have a top story this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me? | |
| You don't have a top story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My top story is: give this man a break. | |
| For four years, I heard, oh, you know, give Biden a break. | ||
| He's doing the best he can, this and that. | ||
| Give this man a break. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's 78 years old. | ||
| He doesn't need millions anymore. | ||
| He just wants to fix this country. | ||
| This country was going to be destroyed if Kamala Harris or somebody else was going to be elected. | ||
| Why can't they see that? | ||
| That was Julian in Connecticut. | ||
| Catherine, Plymouth, Massachusetts, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Catherine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm so glad. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I'm so glad I got on after that Republican. | ||
| I mean, that guy is full of baloney. | ||
| All of the channels cover Trump. | ||
| But also, the thing that bothers me more than anything else is that Trump, with this business about he's going to make America great again. | ||
| My father was in World War II. | ||
| My father-in-law, who I never knew, was killed in the Korean War. | ||
| We are very patriotic Americans, and we think America is the greatest country in the world. | ||
| Also, the people like this guy that just spoke, Biden had created the strongest economy in the world, so I don't understand what the people are talking about. | ||
| Let's bring the economy back, let's make America great again. | ||
| But my other point I wanted to say is that people don't know what happened with Trump's first administration. | ||
| One quarter of the farmers went out of business because of his tariffs, and some of those farmers committed suicide because those farms had been in their families for years. | ||
| So the tariffs didn't work the first time with Trump, but I don't understand why the majority of the American people don't understand that. | ||
| And then the other thing that bothers the heck out of me with Trump is that he has given the power to Elon Musk, who's a nobody, to basically dismantle our government. | ||
| And certainly, as an older person, I'm 79, I'm objecting to him having our Social Security numbers and any information about us. | ||
| And there was one story out that didn't get much coverage: that one of those Doge young men had been selling that information to a foreign country. | ||
| Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. | ||
| But I want to say that I grew up with a Republican family background. | ||
| And in the old days, the Republicans were well-dressed, well-informed, and well-educated. | ||
| Now I think they're just a bunch of like I'm mean. | ||
| I'm very mean. | ||
| I'm calling them scumbags. | ||
| I also knew Donald Trump from New York City because I grew up in New Jersey. | ||
| He was a white supremacist then, and he's a white supremacist now. | ||
| He wouldn't rent or sell to black or non-white people until the courts went after him. | ||
| So thank you very much. | ||
| I appreciate your shows, and I wish more people were like better informed. | ||
| Oh, one story I wish you'd cover is: did he negotiate the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban? | ||
| He closed down the airports in northern Afghanistan so they couldn't use them. | ||
| And then he blamed Joe Biden for the chaotic withdrawal. | ||
| And somebody said that he freed 5,000 Taliban prisoners. | ||
| And some of them could have been the ones that killed those American soldiers. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that story has never been out on the news. | ||
| And I wish somebody who knows something about it would put it there. | ||
| That was Catherine in Massachusetts. | ||
| And another story making headlines this week was President Trump signing an executive order cutting funding for NPR and PBS from Axios. | ||
| It says President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday night that's designed to cut funding for those two stations. | ||
| Under Why It Matters, it says the order that calls the two biggest public broadcasters in the U.S. biased and directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease direct funding for them comes amid a broader push to target traditional media companies that Republicans see as biased against them. | ||
| It goes on to say the situation is already intense with the CPB, which allocates about $535 million in federal funding annually to NPR and PBS. | ||
| The CPB filed a lawsuit against Trump and several administration officials on Monday for attempting to fire members of its board. | ||
| It was during an event on Wednesday that Axios hosted that PBS CEO Paula Kerger discussed potential cuts to public broadcasting. | ||
| Here's a clip from that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Paula, we've got a lot of breaking news, but I first want you to respond to Speaker Johnson. | |
| He said that in a free market, you should be able to make your case for why PBS deserves government funding. | ||
| In 30 seconds, make your case. | ||
| Yeah, I actually agree. | ||
| I mean, I think anyone that is asking for federal funding should be very clear on why it's important. | ||
| And I think it's important to understand that the federal appropriation actually goes to our stations. | ||
| Most of the money that comes in through the federal government was designed to ensure that we have public media stations in all parts of the country. | ||
| And it's especially important for parts of the country where without that support, there wouldn't be public media stations. | ||
| So for me, that's the strongest argument. | ||
| I've spent a lot of time on the road. | ||
| I've visited a lot of stations. | ||
| In many communities, our public television, public radio stations are the last remaining locally owned and operated media companies. | ||
| And just remind the audience, how many of those local stations fall under that PBS umbrella? | ||
| We have 330 stations across the country. | ||
| So we are in every community. | ||
| When we think about what's been happening lately in terms of public funding for media, the Trump administration has tried to go after your funding as well as the funding of USAGM, which is the VOA parent. | ||
| Yesterday was a very newsy day. | ||
| The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is the entity that funds PBS and NPR, sued the Trump administration for trying to fire three of its board directors. | ||
| Within hours, a federal judge halted that through an injunction. | ||
| I would like your reaction to that situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So CPB should speak about their own board circumstance, but from what I understand, those three board members, you know, they're nominated by the president. | ||
| They're approved by the Senate. | ||
| This is not a government agency. | ||
| This is a non-profit organization that was set up to receive the federal appropriation and then distribute it out to the stations. | ||
| Their job principally is to make sure that the stations are well run and that they are worthy recipients of funding. | ||
| They do that for public television and public radio stations and I think have done an excellent job. | ||
| So it was a little surprising yesterday because they are an independent company as we are. | ||
| We're a separate 501c3 organization. | ||
| So we'll obviously be following that very carefully. | ||
| If Donald Trump were to go after your board members, would you take the same action and sue? | ||
| Well, it would be hard to understand how that's possible because we're a non-profit 501c3. | ||
| We have no connection to the federal government whatsoever. | ||
| But of course, if anyone went after our board in any way, we would defend it vigorously. | ||
| We have an outstanding board that does an extraordinary job in making sure that we are meeting the needs of the communities that we serve. | ||
| Half of our board are the presidents of stations from around the country. | ||
| And then we have a wonderful group of leaders representing both parties that represent a broad spectrum of interests and experience. | ||
| And they do, I think, a really terrific job in making sure that we are meeting the needs of the public. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Let's talk with David in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing today? | |
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sounds good. | |
| The reason I called is because I've been thinking about everything that Donald Trump has done for the country. | ||
| He's done a lot. | ||
| He's done many things for our country, and people don't see it. | ||
| Because 92% of the 92% of all the information brought against him is negative. | ||
| So I'd like to see, I'd like to see all the things really tell the truth about what's going on. | ||
| I know Trump isn't perfect, but he's not all these things that everybody's saying online about him. | ||
| That was David in Wisconsin. | ||
| Lanita in Fort Payne, Alabama, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Lenita. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, that stuff that you just played, we can watch that for ourselves. | ||
| And the newspaper clippings that you keep reading, we're not interested in that. | ||
| And the lady from Massachusetts, I cannot believe that you sat there and let her call people names. | ||
| That should not happen. | ||
| Lanita, what's your top story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're all human, and that lady had no business calling in and degrading. | |
| Lenita, what's your top story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| You will go to Roland and Glenn Burney, Maryland, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Roland. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know, the whole purpose, the whole essence of the Trump administration is cruelty and retribution. | ||
| That was all this man had in mind: cruelty and retribution. | ||
| That's the guiding force. | ||
| That's the guiding lights to everything he does. | ||
| You know, I wish folks in West Virginia that normally votes 80% Republicans, they voted 80% for Trump would actually call him and explain and tell me one thing they've actually gained or how he's made life right now in West Virginia better. | ||
| As a matter of fact, they're about to get it a little habit worse because when half the folks in Virginia lose their jobs, it's going to affect West Virginia as well. | ||
| And back to the guy that's called, you know, somebody that said a while ago, oh, and he doesn't even take no salary. | ||
| I mean, a paycheck for all he does. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Roland. | ||
| Roland, our question for this first hour is your top news story. | ||
| What caught your eye this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, when will Cis Kane do a story about all the different ways Trump has been making all kinds of corrupt money? | |
| You know, they went on and on and on and on a Biden, I mean, Hunter Biden. | ||
| This man makes the kind of money Hunter Biden made his entire career in one day. | ||
| I mean, all kinds of ways. | ||
| Even next thing we'll be like, oh, really? | ||
| Got your point, Roland. | ||
| We'll go to Kevin in Erie, Pennsylvania, lying for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| So my top story this week is exactly what probably the last five or six callers have called in about. | ||
| It's about the media and about the negative news that Trump has been going through with this media. | ||
| The things we can look at in the past, your last caller said something to the fact that tell me something positive about it. | ||
| We'll let you know that he's not watching the news that some of the Republicans are watching. | ||
| Because we just had the first 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency, and they listed this thing one thing after another. | ||
| He's had 200 executive orders that have really made things happen. | ||
| Earlier this week, he's in an interview with JD Vance, where they were asking him about this lopsided polling of the president. | ||
| And I think Vance said it well when he said, well, look at how the pollers are. | ||
| They said that Kamala Harris was going to win all the swing states. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| They said choosing win the popular vote. | ||
| That didn't happen. | ||
| So I think something that's very important in the news right now is the media and when are they going to be checked? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Kevin in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Barry in New York, line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Barry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| Your last caller was such a snowflake. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| All of your Republican callers today just seem to be lamenting how Trump has been covered by the media. | ||
| I just have to remind them, he has an extremely lengthy rap sheet. | ||
| But my top stories were, first of all, I attended a town hall meeting with my representative, Mike Lawler. | ||
| And what really annoyed me, I'll be, I think he's holding several more. | ||
| I'll be to each one of them. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the clips. | ||
| He got booed and laughed at. | ||
| And what annoyed me most about him was that he would be asked a direct question, and he would launch into an extremely boring and condescending explanation that totally bypassed each of the questions he was asked. | ||
| In the next town hall meeting, if I'm called on, God help me, I hope I'm called on. | ||
| I want to know from him. | ||
| He was asked direct questions about Medicaid. | ||
| The people in the town hall meeting were concerned about cuts to Medicaid. | ||
| And he kept assuring us we will not cut Medicaid to eligible recipients. | ||
| And he made it clear that that eligibility was going to be changed somehow. | ||
| And so my question to him will be, tell me about the Doge Medicaid death panels that you're going to set up in order to figure out who will still be eligible for Medicaid. | ||
| And will those people who remain eligible, are they eligible because they are sufficiently MAGA? | ||
| Is there going to be some sort of retribution? | ||
| I mean, this is the regime of retribution. | ||
| I'm sure that that's what's going to happen. | ||
| And then the second thing was I attended a May Day rally in New York City on Thursday. | ||
| And these rallies are going to continue and they're huge. | ||
| And the different thing that I saw in the May Day rally in New York City was the construction unions were there. | ||
| And I actually saw a union member who was shouting along with everyone else who had a Let's Go Brandon sticker on his helmet. | ||
| I kind of think that's an indication that something is turning here. | ||
| And these union people are waking up to the fact that Trump is trashing unions and destroying their rights. | ||
| And I am so glad to see the strength of these guys with the rest of us against the Trump regime. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| I am so happy. | ||
| That was Barry in New York. | ||
| Glenn, also in New York, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Glenn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'd just like to say that I love Donald Trump and everything that he's doing, especially the last couple of weeks. | ||
| But he has to hire Derek Huff to teach him a few dance moves. | ||
| Union people are waking up. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| We'll go to John in Florida, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My top, I have a few top news stories. | ||
| One of them would be the Transportation Department learns it's funding $54 million in woke grants and they ended them. | ||
| Also, another one was the White House sides with C-SPAN in its fight against YouTube for street streaming, which I find interesting as well. | ||
| Also, Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI, talking about the biolabs in Ukraine this week and going to be checking into those. | ||
| So just been a busy week. | ||
| And also, of course, the big one was, you know, President Trump trying to get rid of the funding for PBS and I forgot what the other one was, PBS and whatever the other one was. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| NPR. | ||
| And then also trying to pull the tax exempt status from Harvard, I found interesting, too. | ||
| It's been a busy week as it is every week in the Trump administration. | ||
| So I found it to be very entertaining. | ||
| And as far as all the callers this morning, I hear a lot. | ||
| I'm Generation X. I'm 53 years old. | ||
| I hear a lot of old people calling in. | ||
| And when I say old, I'm talking the boomer generation. | ||
| And the boomers seem to be very upset about their Social Security and their Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| But if they ever listen to anything that President Trump says or any of the press conference or the hundreds of things on C-SPAN that you guys cover, they're not going to be touching them. | ||
| You guys are going to be okay. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| My Generation X is the one who's going to be footing the bill for everything. | ||
| I think they said in four years, they're looking at $47 trillion in debt. | ||
| So I doubt I'll see any Social Security order. | ||
| It'll definitely be altered by the time I get to it. | ||
| So don't worry, boomers. | ||
| You'll be okay. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| That was John in Florida. | ||
| And John mentioned President Trump threatening to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status. | ||
| From Politico, it says that the president on Friday said his administration would revoke Harvard University's tax-exempt status, escalating his fight with the nation's oldest institution of higher education. | ||
| It says that Harvard, along with many other universities across the country, are exempt from paying taxes because they are included in a section 501c3 of U.S. tax code, which designates them as nonprofits. | ||
| The IRS could yank Harvard's tax-exempt status, though not without cause. | ||
| I'm sorry, it would be required to show the school is violating long-standing rules governing when entities can receive tax exemption. | ||
| That would be a lengthy process, and Harvard would be free to challenge the decision in court, a case that some experts have said the school would be likely to win. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Let's talk with Harold in Alton, Illinois, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Harold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-SPANners. | |
| I'm getting tired of everybody talking bad about Trump. | ||
| It's not Trump. | ||
| It's actually the Congress that's letting him get away with this. | ||
| And the only reason they were letting him get away with this is because they want to keep that job. | ||
| They're mostly Harvard and Ivy League educated lawyers that work up there in Congress and the Senate and the House. | ||
| But yet they're willing to take jobs that are only worth $175,000, $180,000 a year. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, because now we don't have lobbyists that come to you with 200,000, 300,000 signatures of your constituents to get you to vote the way they want you to vote. | ||
| Now we have corporations that fund your campaigns. | ||
| So what I'm proposing is we get rid of the campaign financing through donations, and we fund it through the federal government and through the states locally. | ||
| And everybody gets the same amount of money. | ||
| They get the same amount of airtime. | ||
| And maybe we can get a butcher and a baker and a candlestick maker inside that Congress that will vote the way that their constituents want them to. | ||
| And another thing is, we need to quit gerrymandering all these states. | ||
| We just draw a line straight through in so many sections. | ||
| You got that section, you got that section. | ||
| You can't gerrymander your way to where you can vote any way you want to. | ||
| You need to vote the way your constituents want you to. | ||
| And my other thing is the Supreme Court, if you get to go in and do your confirmation hearing and lie to the Senate to get confirmed, as in Kavanaugh and them all saying they're going to uphold president, but then they go ahead and overturn Roe versus Wade that's been the law for 50 years, they should be taken out of there because they lied in front of Congress, just like anybody else does. | ||
| And if you take a bribe from a person, you get charged, and the person that takes the bribe ought to be charged too. | ||
| If we go back to that way of doing, our country would be a lot better off. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Harold in Illinois. | ||
| Dave in Omaha, Nebraska, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, since day one, even before day one, when Trump took office, the Democrats have been denied, denied, denied. | |
| What they're finding out is that by doing this this long, whatever they have to debate now means absolutely nothing because it's all been watered down. | ||
| Trump is doing the best he can for the country. | ||
| Don't worry about Social Security. | ||
| They want to get the people that are on Social Security that don't belong on it to get off. | ||
| We're $36 trillion in debt. | ||
| I'm tired of the Dems. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I hope Trump's 2028 and beyond. | ||
| Make America great again. | ||
| That was Dave in Nebraska. | ||
| A headline from The Hill: Trump proposes steep cuts in the first budget request of the second term. | ||
| The story says that President Trump unveiled the White House budget request for fiscal 2016 on Friday, a set of proposals that would make steep cuts to non-defense programs while boosting defense and border funding. | ||
| Said in a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and Office of Management and Budget, OMB Director Russell Vogt announced the president's budget would reduce base non-defense discretionary budget authority by 22.6%, cutting spending levels by $163 billion. | ||
| That would include a roughly $18 billion reduction for the National Institute of Health compared to fiscal 2025. | ||
| The article goes on to talk about the defense spending. | ||
| It says on the defense side, the administration proposes to increase funding by 13%, bringing the total to just more than $1 trillion. | ||
| On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson outlined deadlines ahead in the budget process as they work to enact President Trump's legislative agenda. | ||
| Here's a clip from that event. | ||
| So it's a very aggressive timetable for a reason. | ||
| We're trying to get this done. | ||
| My original aspiration was by Memorial Day for the whole thing, but I've accepted reality. | ||
| We'll get it out of the House by then, and then we'll send it to the Senate. | ||
| I hope the Senate doesn't do a whole clause rewrite. | ||
| I hope they accept a lot of what we've done. | ||
| We're working very closely with our Senate colleagues. | ||
| Leader Thun and I meet talk all the time, meet at least once a week with our lieutenants. | ||
| We have a big six meeting once a week, and that's the Treasury Secretary and Kevin Hassett at NEC, Senator Crapo, Leader Thune, myself, and Jason Smith, Ways and Means Chair. | ||
| And we meet with all of our top staffers. | ||
| So there's a very close coordination. | ||
| There's no secrets or surprises. | ||
| And so the legislation that is sent over there, I think, will be well received. | ||
| I don't think, I hope they don't do much to modify it. | ||
| And I think we can get it at the president's desk quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, Mr. Speaker, respect we hope isn't necessarily a strategy. | |
| They have serious senators over there who have serious concerns about the bill that you are drafting, and they are not going to rubber stamp that. | ||
| So July 4th almost seems too optimistic for them. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I mean, that was the Treasury Secretary said July 4th this week in public statements, and we applauded that. | ||
| But I really hope we do it sooner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is the real deadline the debt ceiling? | |
| Sure, that's a big pressure point. | ||
| And we don't know exactly when that X date will fall. | ||
| The early projection is August or September, but I spoke with Secretary Besson just two days ago, and he said we're counting the tax receipts from April 15. | ||
| We have a little bit more to do on that count, but we don't know exactly where it'll fall. | ||
| I have had to work under the assumption, Hans, that it could be the earliest date, maybe early June. | ||
| So we can't be caught flat-footed on this. | ||
| And that is one of the other reasons why we push this so aggressively on the timeline. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there no other way to do debt ceiling other than put it in the reconciliation bill? | |
| Well, I wish we could do it in a bipartisan fashion. | ||
| That's the way it used to be done. | ||
| But Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have shown no indication they have any interest in working with Republicans, even to save the U.S. economy. | ||
| If you would like more information on President Trump's budget proposal, you can find it on the C-SPAN website in a skybox at the top of the page. | ||
| Just go to c-span.org. | ||
| Let's hear from Dewight in Georgia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dewight. | ||
| What's your top story? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| My top story is that I hear a lot of these Republicans they called in to say Trump is doing this for free, which he is not. | ||
| He has made more money from Bitcoin and all the stuff that he is doing just this year, over $50 million. | ||
| Just a billion dollars is what I was told. | ||
| And I don't understand why they think that he's doing something for free. | ||
| You know, they need to post how much money he has made since he's been president just this year. | ||
| Because when he was when he lost the president and he had to pay all these fines that was due, he couldn't even come up with the money. | ||
| You know, in other words, that the government, they dropped down how much he's supposed to pay because he couldn't even get the money. | ||
| So if you're a billionaire, you should have had no problem coming up with the money so you can be able to pay your fines or put the money up so you can appeal to cases. | ||
| And he didn't have the money at the time. | ||
| So all of a sudden, now he's the new president, and he don't make more money since he's been in there. | ||
| Now, he has been in there for 100 days, and he made a whole bunch of money. | ||
| Got your point, DeWaite. | ||
| We'll go to Lawrence in Minnesota, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Lawrence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My big story was from the Washington Correspondents Dinner where Alex Thompson from Axios won an award for his courage in reporting on the demise, I don't know a better word, of over the years of President Trump in the White House and the failure, and he he used the word failure of his peers to report on that. | ||
| And while I do not think PBS and NPR should be defunded at a congressional hearing a couple weeks ago, you can look it up on C-SPAN. | ||
| Both leadership from PBS and NPR admitted that they failed in reporting on that. | ||
| So I appreciate your time, and I think you do a wonderful job. | ||
| That was Lawrence in Minnesota, and Lawrence said his top story was Alex Thompson winning an award at the White House Correspondents Dinner. | ||
| C-SPAN covered that event. | ||
| You can find it in full if you'd like to watch it on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Just about 15 minutes or so left in this first hour of Washington Journal asking your top story of the week. | ||
| We'll hear from Richard, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my call. | |
| My top story is Elon Musk stepping down from Doge, and I realized he was on a temporary assignment, so his time was designed to end because he had not been confirmed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's disappointing that he's found $160 billion so far, and that's all he's found. | |
| But I want to turn attention to the Social Security Administration because he's being blocked from his organization's being blocked from access, Doge, to that information. | ||
| And I think if you were able to investigate, you would find a lot of savings there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And possibly you could lengthen the time by which you have to cut Social Security by 20%, which is projected to be in 2034, 2035, and everybody's Social Security check will go down. | |
| So that is, to me, that's my top story. | ||
| Elon, it's not Elon's fault. | ||
| He was limited by the typical government barriers that everybody else who has ever tried to do this has found. | ||
| And I just hope in the future we get a handle on the deficit and the fact that we need to trim Gossett's Social Security Administration to get be able to lengthen the time we can pay out. | ||
| That's my top story. | ||
| That's Richard in Oklahoma. | ||
| Tim in Asheboro, North Carolina, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| My number one story is the raid on the house in Oklahoma City where the mother and her two daughters were forced out into the rain. | ||
| I saw on Rachel Maddow where that raid was perpetrated by a new group as part of Oklahoma, I mean, Homeland Security, called Homeland Security Investigations. | ||
| I would like to congratulate the administration on creating an internal police. | ||
| This is the equivalent to Hitler's Gestapo. | ||
| And for those who think that the debt is a problem of spending, the big problem is we're not willing to tax. | ||
| And the administration To the proposed budget is going to make it even more impossible to find the tax cheats. | ||
| So, if you have any questions from me, I'd be love to answer them. | ||
| Tim mentioned, our caller mentioned that his top story was the Oklahoma raid. | ||
| This is an headline from the Associated Press from just a few days ago. | ||
| It says the Homeland Security pushes back against criticism of immigration raid at Oklahoma home. | ||
| It says that the department on Thursday fought back against that criticism over its handling of a raid of an Oklahoma City home as part of an immigration smuggling investigation, saying the people living there hadn't been ruled out as suspects. | ||
| The updated statement by Homeland Security came after the agency initially said the home's previous residents were the intended targets. | ||
| The initial statement was followed by backlash from congressional Democrats and by the family that lives in the targeted home. | ||
| The family, a mother and her three children, told KFOR-TV they had just moved into the home about two weeks earlier and had tried to tell the agents that the suspects listed on the search warrant did not live at the house. | ||
| Let's hear from George in Maryland, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, George. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Tammy. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| And I'd like to talk about the subject most aggravating to me this week is the parade, the military parade that this character in the White House has got set up. | ||
| I want him and the spineless Republicans in Congress to know that I'm not fooled, that the only reason for this parade is because it's his birthday, and it's something for him to satisfy that out-of-control ego that he's got. | ||
| And I'm an independent. | ||
| I'm also a John McCain Republican. | ||
| So for him to perform a travesty that this parade, I hope it doesn't take place, but if this parade takes place, to me, it's not a tribute to the Army. | ||
| It's a pass and review to his ego. | ||
| And I feel bad for the military personnel that are going to have to take part in this parade. | ||
| And I'm glad you brought the subject of the budget up and the money that's going to be taken from different agencies to fund the Pentagon. | ||
| And I'm all for our military defense. | ||
| I'm a Vietnam veteran. | ||
| I was in the Marine Corps. | ||
| I was proud to serve my country. | ||
| And for him to hide behind the military like he does and then claim to be a supporter of it after he evaded military service. | ||
| He insulted John McCain. | ||
| And I've called in a number of times and brought this subject up, but it aggravates me so much that I want him and I want those spineless Republicans in Congress to know that I'm not fooled and that I hope that a whole lot more Republicans aren't fooled by the ridiculousness that's going on in this administration. | ||
| That was George in Maryland. | ||
| George bringing up a parade. | ||
| This headline is from Fox News. | ||
| It says, Trump to host military parade to celebrate Army's 250th birthday, honor active duty service members and veterans. | ||
| The article says that President Trump will host that military parade in June to honor military veterans and active duty service members, commemorate the birthday. | ||
| Says the parade is scheduled for June 14th. | ||
| That's the 250th birthday of the United States Army. | ||
| And as our caller mentioned, it's also President Trump's birthday. | ||
| Says the parade will have reenactors, equipment, and more from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Desert Storm, and the global war on terror, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. | ||
| It will also feature active duty service members and students at the U.S. military academies. | ||
| Let's hear from Lloyd in West Virginia, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Lloyd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd just like to say I'm satisfied with what Trump's doing. | ||
| I mean, at least he's done something with the border. | ||
| And that's more than Joe Biden done. | ||
| That's the reading they say Joe Biden had a good economy. | ||
| That's the reading Joe Biden let all the people come in here across the border because that was for his economy that kept his economy going. | ||
| And him and Kamala didn't do anything about it. | ||
| So Trump's done a lot more than they've ever done. | ||
| And the same way with the Ukraine. | ||
| I mean, Biden was just pouring money into Ukraine to fight the war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just like pouring gasoline on a fire. | |
| And so Trump sees that that's not necessary to keep doing that, killing a lot of people. | ||
| And he's interested in stopping that war. | ||
| And he's doing a lot of things to help. | ||
| But the people, they just want to fight him. | ||
| And the American people, their own worst enemy. | ||
| They don't know what's good for them. | ||
| And so as long as that's going on, this country will never be no better. | ||
| And people, they just fight against fighting against Trump. | ||
| Lloyd, we'll go to Harriet in Atlanta, Georgia, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Harriet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| And I say unequivocally, not no military parade for Donald Tudor Trump ever. | ||
| And I say, God bless America. | ||
| And I hope everyone joins me in protest against this because I plan to hit the streets to protest. | ||
| He does not deserve it. | ||
| God bless you, Americans. | ||
| Bye now. | ||
| That was Harriet. | ||
| This is a story from Politico. | ||
| It is talking about a Supreme Court oral arguments that were heard this week having to do with charter schools. | ||
| And religion says the Supreme Court conservative justices signaled Wednesday that they are open to allowing the Catholic Church to launch the country's first publicly funded religious charter school, despite arguments from opponents who say the school would violate the Constitution's ban on government-established religion. | ||
| Says the justices heard arguments on an Oklahoma court decision last year that rejected a state contract to open the planned online-only charter school known as St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. | ||
| If the justices overturned the decision, they would allow for the first time a charter school receiving state funds to teach an explicitly religious curriculum. | ||
| It was on Wednesday that those oral arguments were heard. | ||
| Here is a clip featuring Chief Justice John Roberts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what they described it as at page 4A in their application of the respondents' appendix is the charter schools are privately operated not-for-profit entities. | |
| So that's what they're making up under state law. | ||
| Just not only Oklahoma, North Dakota just became the 40th state in the Union to recognize charter schools as public schools, as the Congress of the United States is recognized. | ||
| What do you do with Fulton? | ||
| You have a state agency that refused to deal with the religious adoption services. | ||
| And we held they couldn't engage in that discrimination. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| How is that different from what we have here? | ||
| You have an education program, and you want to not allow them to participate with a religious entity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think it's fundamentally different. | |
| I mean, and our position doesn't threaten faith-based contractors at all. | ||
| The adoption agency in Fulton wasn't established by the state through legislative action. | ||
| It wasn't fully funded by the state. | ||
| It wasn't controlled by the state. | ||
| I mean, the charter schools here are controlled in fundamental ways that my friends have glossed over this morning. | ||
| I mean, with respect to curriculum, there's front-end and back-end requirements. | ||
| They have to show as part of their application that they will meet the state's academic standards, which are highly reticulated down to the point that they have to teach Reagan's Tear Down the Wall speech in U.S. history or dangling modifiers in ninth-grade English. | ||
| They can't teach what other public schools can't teach, which is critical race or gender theories. | ||
| You're a little far afield, I think, from the chief's question, at least as I understand it, because I think a concern here is that religiously operated senior homes or food banks or foster care agencies or adoption agencies or homeless shelters, | ||
| many of which get substantial funding from the government, would potentially, under your theory, this is the concern, become state actors and thus not be able to exercise their religion. | ||
| So can you explain why the principle that you're articulating would not have that result? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So in none of those cases do you have contractees that actually become a part of the state as charter schools established? | |
| Sorry. | ||
| I just want you to come back. | ||
| When you say a part of the state, I want to drill down on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that they're established by the state, the legislature, that they become a component of the state system, which is what the Oklahoma Supreme Court. | |
| Just a few minutes left in this first hour. | ||
| Let's talk with John, Cleveland, Ohio, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think people are like little dogs going around in a circle chasing their tail. | ||
| Both the Democrats and the Republicans are nothing but, at this point, and have been for a century, you might say, vassals of the CIA military industrial Pentagon-Israel lobby complex, | ||
| which has dragged us into wars for the past century to the tune of excess of ten times the next nine biggest military spending powers in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that little detail is hardly ever mentioned in any of the media. | |
| And I think there's a phrase that I made up, and it begins to reveal, if you search it, the total control of the media by the military-industrial CIA Israel lobby complex. | ||
| It's called the CIA Operation Mockingbird Controls Media to demonize and slander countries for U.S. attacks against those countries. | ||
| And I think you'd find out that there's an incredible amount of Senate and congressional committees, the church committee and the pike committee that proved this in the late 70s. | ||
| I got your point, John. | ||
| We'll go to Jerry and New Jersey. | ||
| Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was just for Trump because the millions of illegals that came in, we put out $450 billion on them. | ||
| I voted for Trump because we were forced to take an untested vaccine that under Biden, inflation hit 9%. | ||
| And Biden's dementia, I was a critical care registered nurse in a very high retirement area. | ||
| And in 2021, I said Biden shows dementia. | ||
| And of course, I was blocked from everywhere that I put it online. | ||
| And then I've never seen in my entire life where Kamala Harris could run without a single vote as president. | ||
| And the entire Democratic Party covered Biden's dementia until it was obvious. | ||
| Jerry. | ||
| Is there, it sounds like you're a Trump supporter. | ||
| Is there a headline this week about President Trump that caught your eye? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, well, the NPR. | |
| Now, who was the man that killed himself after he came forward that worked for them and said that all 86 are all Democrats? | ||
| I would think that would show a little prejudice in an NPR, don't you? | ||
| I mean. | ||
| That was Jerry in New Jersey. | ||
| And our last call for this hour, Judy in Indiana, Pennsylvania, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Judy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| As far as there being a military parade, that's just for Trump's ego. | ||
| When Donald Trump was asked about the four soldiers missing in Lithuania, the commander-in-chief said he didn't hear anything about it. | ||
| He didn't know anything about it. | ||
| Well, the four American soldiers were dead. | ||
| And when they were brought home, Donald Trump didn't even go to Dover to meet the caskets. | ||
| So this is the commander-in-chief that's going to honor the military. | ||
| And the cabinet meeting I saw this week, Elon Musk said he saved $160 billion. | ||
| Well, out of the $2 trillion he said he was going to save, he only found $60. | ||
| And then Pam Bondi listed all the drugs that were confiscated at the border. | ||
| And she said, thanks to President Trump, 258 million lives have been saved. | ||
| So is she saying that 258 million people are drug addicts? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Judy in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Our last caller for this first hour. | ||
| Still ahead on Washington Journal. | ||
| This morning, high school teachers Kevin Jackson and Ryan Renka will join us to discuss this year's Advanced Placement U.S. government and politics exam and how students can prepare for it. | ||
| But first, Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Kiernan joins us to discuss the current state of the U.S. economy, including the April Jobs Report and other economic indicators. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 6.45 p.m. Eastern, Dylan Mulvaney, creator of the Days of Girlhood TikTok series, speaks about her life before and post-transition in her book, Paper Doll. | ||
| Then at 8 p.m. Eastern, British author and journalist Douglas Murray shares his book, On Democracies and Death Cults, where he argues that protecting Israel is fundamental to preserving Western civilization. | ||
| And at 10 p.m. Eastern on Afterwards, journalist David Graham looks at how parts of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document are being implemented by the Trump administration in his book, The Project. | ||
| He's interviewed by author and George Washington University professor Matthew Dalek. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
| He was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | |
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles. | ||
| We are speaking to the country. | ||
| Nonfiction book lovers, C-SPAN has a number of podcasts for you. | ||
| Listen to best-selling nonfiction authors and influential interviewers on the Afterwords podcast and on QA. | ||
| Hear wide-ranging conversations with the non-fiction authors and others who are making things happen. | ||
| And BookNotes Plus episodes are weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a wide variety of topics. | ||
| Find all of our podcasts by downloading the free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, c-span.org slash podcasts. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the current state of the U.S. economy, including the April Jobs Report and other economic indicators, is Paul Kiernan. | ||
| He's a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Paul, thank you for being with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Tammy. | |
| We'll jump right in. | ||
| You had a busy week, a lot of news out, financial news on and talking about job indicators overall, including the April Jobs Report, which was released yesterday. | ||
| Tell us about the report. | ||
| What were the expectations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the expectations were for a pretty solid report, and what we got was an even more solid report. | |
| Economists at the Wall Street Journal surveys had expected the economy to add 133,000 jobs in April, and we got 177,000. | ||
| The unemployment rate remains steady at 4.2%, which is low. | ||
| What does it say that it beat expectations considering the economic uncertainty right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, really what it says is that the U.S. economy is resilient. | |
| It's like a big, complex machine. | ||
| Think about it like an ocean liner or a tanker ship that's, or a container ship that's crossing the ocean from China right now. | ||
| Those things don't stop on a dime even when they hit rough seas. | ||
| And talk about some of the factors that are considered when we look at numbers that come out of a report like that. | ||
| What overall are they looking at? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, the biggest thing, the biggest factor in the jobs report was private sector hiring was strong. | |
| The federal government shed a few jobs, but it really wasn't enough to make a dent in the overall economy. | ||
| Stepping back, I think, you know, I mentioned rough seas. | ||
| The Trump administration is throwing a lot of shocks at the economy right now, but the U.S. economy is big and resilient, and we just haven't seen anything really roll over yet. | ||
| Another report that came out this week was on the GDP. | ||
| It showed that the first quarter of, for 20, first quarter of 2025, it shrank. | ||
| Explain why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the headline number doesn't look great. | |
| It shows that the U.S. economy shrank by 0.3% in the first quarter. | ||
| That was largely because there was a rush of imports, and imports kind of mathematically subtract from GDP growth. | ||
| So what most economists seem to think is that companies, businesses, and consumers were kind of rushing to get ahead of tariffs that Trump has been talking about since last year and even longer. | ||
| So there was really a surge of imports. | ||
| But the rest of the report was like pretty solid. | ||
| I mean, consumer spending was up, business investment was up. | ||
| Those are kind of the real engines of the economy. | ||
| And so, you know, the headline number was bad, but there wasn't much cause for concern, immediate concern in the report. | ||
| Our guest for the next 30 minutes or so is Paul Kiernan. | ||
| He is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal covering the economy. | ||
| If you have a question or a comment for him, you can start calling in now the lines, Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Another headline from one of your colleagues, Consumer Sentiment Plunges on Tariff Concerns survey shows. | ||
| Explain consumers' expectations and what this report found. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so one thing that is really interesting that we're seeing in the economy right now is a split between what we call hard data and soft data. | |
| A great example of hard data is the jobs report that came out yesterday. | ||
| Soft data is expectation, surveys of consumer and business expectations. | ||
| So those have really kind of tanked this year. | ||
| I think that you're talking about the conference board consumer confidence index, which came out last week. | ||
| I think it's been going down for like five consecutive months. | ||
| And that's partly a function of news headlines and policy announcements and all the uncertainty that's out there. | ||
| So people's expectations for the economy are pretty low, but what they're actually experiencing so far is pretty good because most people have jobs. | ||
| There is when it looks, when we're looking at economic uncertainty, there's consumer sentiment, there's also businesses. | ||
| How have businesses been impacted or how are they reacting to the current economic state? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, we've gotten some first quarter earnings in the past couple of weeks. | |
| And companies like McDonald's and Harley-Davidson and A number of retailers and consumer products companies have seen slowing or declining sales. | ||
| So, you know, the sentiment seems to be getting felt by businesses, but at a high level, consumer spending has been pretty good. | ||
| I want to play a clip from President Trump's cabinet meeting that he had on Wednesday. | ||
| During it, he was asked by a reporter about the state of the economy and who gets credit or blame. | ||
| We'll play it and then we'll get your response on the other side. | ||
| Some people on Wall Street have expressed concerns that the possibility of a recession is increasing. | ||
| And I want to know what you think about that. | ||
| Are you comfortable with the country potentially dipping into a recession for a period of time if you are able to achieve your long-term goals? | ||
| Well, you know, you say some people on Wall Street say, well, I tell you something else. | ||
| Some people on Wall Street say that we're going to have the greatest economy in history. | ||
| Why don't you talk about them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because some people on Wall Street say this is what I'm getting at, though. | |
| It's the same question. | ||
| There are many people on Wall Street who say this is going to be the greatest windfall ever happened. | ||
| And that's my question in the long term. | ||
| Is it okay in the short term to have a recession? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, yes, everything's okay. | |
| But we are, I said, this is a transition period. | ||
| I think we're going to do fantastically. | ||
| We apologize. | ||
| That was actually a clip from an NBC interview with President Trump. | ||
| It'll be airing in full on NBC's Meet the Press tomorrow. | ||
| But, Paul, tell us what you heard there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I heard the president defending his economic policy and the economic outlook. | |
| You know, no president is going to come out and say, you know, yeah, we're going to have a recession. | ||
| It's going to be terrible. | ||
| That said, we do surveys of economists, and I haven't really seen any survey responses from economists on Wall Street or elsewhere that suggest there isn't going to be some slowdown potentially from these tariffs, especially if they remain in effect. | ||
| You had a headline back in March: here's what to look for early signs of a recession. | ||
| Tell us about some of those signs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, probably, so we talked about the soft data and the hard data. | |
| I mean, we've seen the soft data, the expectations rolled over, but we haven't really seen it in the hard data yet. | ||
| Traditionally, the first thing to kind of the first canary in the coal mine is initial claims for jobless benefits. | ||
| When people get laid off, they go to their state labor agency and they request unemployment benefits. | ||
| Those really have been range-bound for more than a year. | ||
| And last week, they ticked up a little bit, but it wasn't outside the range. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We will start with Guy in Oklahoma, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Nice to talk to you, Paul. | ||
| First of all, people seem to forget that a year and a half ago, we had two quarters in a row of negative GBP, which indicates the recession. | ||
| And the media refused to acknowledge that. | ||
| Oh, job numbers are up. | ||
| You know, everything looks good. | ||
| Economy's great. | ||
| And, you know, here we are in Trump's first quarter. | ||
| You know, we have negative GDP, but that's a lagging indicator. | ||
| The only current indicator is the job report, which was 228,000 added last month, 177,000 added this month. | ||
| The stock market is roaring back. | ||
| It's almost repeat all of its losses here in the last month. | ||
| Your take on inflation, Paul, because inflation, the last time I checked, it was at two-tenths of 1%, which has dropped from 2% when Trump came in office. | ||
| Could you explain the inflation outlook? | ||
| And the tariffs, also, by the way, they've all been put on pause except for China. | ||
| And now China is coming to the negotiating table. | ||
| So the tariffs have served their purpose. | ||
| Please give me your take on the inflation outlook, your outlook for the next six months to year. | ||
| Thank you, Paul. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So on inflation, I think you may have been comparing month-on-month numbers to year-on-year numbers. | ||
| What we had in the first quarter was the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge was, I think, up 3.6% from the previous three months. | ||
| And so that's, they target 2%. | ||
| So inflation, I mean, inflation stepping back has been coming down since 2022 when it reached like a four-decade high. | ||
| But it's not quite where we want it to be, which again is 2%. | ||
| Most economists in our surveys and out in the world and also consumers expect inflation to be pushed up, at least in the short to medium term, by Trump's tariffs. | ||
| And that's a concern for the Fed. | ||
| On GDP growth, I'm not sure what number you were talking about when you said that it declined last year. | ||
| If we look at sort of the first quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter of last year, it contracted a little bit. | ||
| And that was the first decline in three years, since 2022. | ||
| It's pretty rare for GDP to decline, but again, like I mentioned earlier, the underlying factors are pretty strong. | ||
| EJ in Atlanta, Georgia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, E.J. Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was wondering if you can tell me the difference between the economic indicators that you have now compared to what they were, you know, I guess in previous months since we had this changeover. | |
| Have they gotten better or worse? | ||
| Hi, E.J. | ||
| It's been remarkably steady. | ||
| I mean, if you look at the policy announcements coming out of the administration, the Trump administration seems quite different from the Biden administration, to say the least. | ||
| But the economic data don't really show a huge change. | ||
| I mean, one thing to think about is average job growth in the first four months of this year, I think, was $144,000 per month, including April. | ||
| Last year was like $168,000, so that's come down a little bit. | ||
| But if you look at kind of the underlying elements of GDP, it's pretty strong. | ||
| So the hard data on the economy are still pretty good, but those are lagging indicators. | ||
| Along those same lines, a question coming in on X from Aztec asks, at what point do economic job numbers reflect the current administration, Biden-Harris fiscal year budget, and policies are still affecting much of what is happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think that's right. | |
| And it's a great question. | ||
| I wish I had the answer. | ||
| I mean, I think that the most significant policy that President Trump has enacted so far on the economy are the Liberation Day tariffs, which were partly rolled back. | ||
| But I think there's still 145% tariffs on a lot of stuff coming out of China. | ||
| Those went into effect April 2nd. | ||
| The jobs numbers that we just got were gathered early to mid-April. | ||
| And so we could maybe start to see some effect in May. | ||
| Let's hear from Jerry in New Jersey, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Listen, I have a couple of questions for you. | ||
| One, I keep listening to the news media. | ||
| You know, in the last couple of days, I heard them say the jobs numbers were going to be low and things were going to be really bad. | ||
| And, oh, my God, you've got to worry. | ||
| Everything's getting affected. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the job numbers come out and they're pretty good. | ||
| Now, as a Democrat, I am concerned because they keep saying how bad things are going to be. | ||
| And yet, he's actually doing pretty good. | ||
| Now, when you hear the numbers and then you hear the media, it don't coincide. | ||
| And I think the media is trying very hard to get the public to really panic and go and try to stop them from spending and that kind of stuff. | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| As a Democrat, I'm looking at numbers that look outstanding. | ||
| And another thing, can you please answer what has actually gone up so far? | ||
| Everybody keeps predicting with the tariffs, oh, we're going to be doing this and we're going to be spending this. | ||
| Can you give me an actual increase in spending for things yet with the tariffs? | ||
| I haven't heard that yet. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| It's maybe. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| But can you give me an actual number of what actually has increased? | ||
| Eggs are down. | ||
| I'm paying gas is down. | ||
| It's 100% better. | ||
| So what's gone up? | ||
| I mean, can you give me an answer to that, please? | ||
| I'm not actually sure what's gone up. | ||
| I mean, I was looking at one of our stories from this past week, and we analyzed some e-commerce data on about 10,000 products sold by Amazon, Walmart, and Target, I believe. | ||
| And they're basically flat since Liberation Day. | ||
| A big part of that is because we saw in the trade data that companies were building up inventories during the first quarter. | ||
| They knew tariffs were coming. | ||
| They wanted to get as much product into the country as they could before they hit. | ||
| And so, you know, there's a little, I think there's a little bit of time before they start actually having to raise prices. | ||
| They have warned that that is probably going to happen if the tariffs remain in effect. | ||
| And then in terms of what's going to happen, I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen to the economy, where it's going to be in six months or a year. | ||
| And anyone who says they know with any confidence has got a little bit of hubris. | ||
| The Federal Reserve has a meeting next week. | ||
| President Trump has called for them to cut the interest rate. | ||
| So far, it has not happened. | ||
| What needs to happen before we could see a cut? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sorry, I was looking at the camera. | ||
| The Fed is really worried that tariffs are going to push up prices and also drive people to expect higher inflation for a long time. | ||
| And they really want to avoid that outcome. | ||
| So they're in no hurry to cut interest rates. | ||
| And the jobs report yesterday, which showed continued hiring through April, have probably pushed off the chance of a rate cut beyond June. | ||
| I mean, a week ago, most market participants thought a rate cut might be coming in June. | ||
| Now they pushed it back to July. | ||
| So to get a cut, to answer your question, I think it's going to take some kind of meaningful deterioration in the labor market. | ||
| A programming note, it's on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve will have that meeting. | ||
| After it, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will give an update on the interest rates and the U.S. economy. | ||
| That's a closed-door meeting, but he will speak after. | ||
| You can watch that news conference. | ||
| It'll be live here on C-SPAN at 2:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3. | ||
| You will also be able to watch it on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Let's hear from James in Akron, Ohio, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have two questions, but I want to answer the lady from Jersey about the economy being better. | |
| What happened was that the bad projections weren't met. | ||
| And so, therefore, it is doing better than they had expected it to be. | ||
| So, the economy is not doing good. | ||
| In fact, everything you go to the store now is just as bad or worse than it was several months ago. | ||
| Now, I have a couple questions. | ||
| One in particular, I don't understand. | ||
| We talk about the border crossings and stuff like that. | ||
| Right now, the Republicans are in charge. | ||
| They can change, they can put a border law in so that we won't have this border problem again because they own all branches of the government. | ||
| And by not doing that, once this thing is all over again, we start all over again and we'll start hearing about how bad the border is. | ||
| Why won't the Republican Party pass a law so that we can change the laws to what they like so that we won't have the problem with the border? | ||
| And the other question that I want you to answer that question in particular, and I want you to answer this one: at what point does the economy become Trump's economy? | ||
| When does that happen? | ||
| I want those two questions answered. | ||
| When will the economy become Trump's economy? | ||
| And why can't the Republicans pass a border law so that we don't have the border problems again? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
| Yeah, so on the second question, you know, the longer we get into the Trump administration, the more of the economy I think he owns. | ||
| You know, if we had tumbled into recession in January of 2025, it wouldn't really be fair to pin it on Trump. | ||
| But, you know, if things start to go pear-shaped later this year, next year, you know, that looks a little bit more like it's Trump's problem. | ||
| On the border, you know, I can't really speak for Republicans, but the data that we have so far this year shows that border crossings have really plummeted. | ||
| You know, it's, you know, there's been a really real drop in border crossings. | ||
| And, you know, that's probably because of the administration's policies. | ||
| Will it last? | ||
| Is it structural? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Let's hear from Homer in Florence, Massachusetts, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Homer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, yes. | |
| I was wondering if you can explain to me how inflation rose under Joe Biden and the press gave every excuse in the book. | ||
| They said inflation is not happening. | ||
| Then they said, okay, it's happening, but it's transitory. | ||
| Then they said inflation is not as bad as the rest of the world. | ||
| And then they said, it's not a recession because of the old definition of two quarters in a row. | ||
| I mean, they changed the definitions. | ||
| I remember during Trump's first president administration when the stock market was booming, they said that was just the rich people and that the poor people were just not getting nothing. | ||
| And now they're saying it's the 401ks and all that when it's like not even 12% of the stock market goes to them. | ||
| So I'm just curious about that. | ||
| I remember when the Democrats pushed through their reconciliation bill during the first two years of Biden and they didn't have any Democrat or Republican input into it. | ||
| So nobody complained about that. | ||
| And the Democrats had, for that last guy, the Democrats had everything for the first two years of Biden and didn't do anything about the border. | ||
| So I'm wondering why they didn't do anything about it when they could have done it. | ||
| They just kept telling us that the president can't do anything about the border, and then suddenly now the president can. | ||
| And I'm also wondering why they said that before when everything was going bad, they said, well, the president doesn't have that much to do with the economy. | ||
| I know Joe Biden's spending billions of dollars on everything else in the world, like green energy, nothing to help Americans. | ||
| And then they said the pain would be worth it. | ||
| Okay, Homer, that's a lot for Paul to unpack. | ||
| We'll have him respond to some of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| On the border, you know, I think that people's decision to migrate to the U.S. is based in part on their perception of an administration's policy. | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm here to talk about the economy, so I don't want to get too far into that. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, on inflation during the Biden administration, you're right. | ||
| There was a big spike. | ||
| A lot of economists, particularly inside the administration and at the Fed, frankly thought that it was going to be transitory. | ||
| And it did end up being transitory, but that didn't mean that it wasn't painful. | ||
| And, you know, prices are still kind of too high for a lot of people's earnings. | ||
| You know, they're still feeling it. | ||
| On the topic of immigration policy, somebody sent a question in on X it says, what is the impact of the deportations on the job report? | ||
| Do we have those numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a really interesting question. | |
| So on deportations, on deportations, we don't, this administration has not actually deported a lot more people than the Biden administration, I think, if I'm recalling correctly, maybe even deported less. | ||
| It has arrested more people. | ||
| The big change has been the significant drop in immigration flows and people crossing the border. | ||
| That does not have an immediate effect on the labor market because, you know, for a lot of people, maybe even most people, it takes time to get a job. | ||
| If they're getting work permits, it takes time to get a work permit. | ||
| Most economists think that job creation, sort of the run rate, the sustainable rate of job creation the economy can handle is going to decline over the course of this year to reflect the drop in immigration flows. | ||
| That drop began last summer under the Biden administration, but it's accelerated under Trump. | ||
| Let's hear from Robert in Raleigh, North Carolina, Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Paul. | ||
| I have a comment and a question. | ||
| My comment first is: individuals, we're all individuals and we all have our own personal economies. | ||
| You know, some are entering the workforce, some are retired, some are working class, middle class, working, some are millionaires. | ||
| But in America, my comment is I find a lot of people and business people who, no matter what their economic status is, they want more. | ||
| Everybody wants more. | ||
| Everybody's becoming more individual. | ||
| Everybody is hiking up prices for whatever reason. | ||
| And then my question is, you as a reporter, how do you report without any biases when it seems like in our country there's just so much bias? | ||
| And how can anybody truly gauge the economy when everybody is so individually minded? | ||
| And the economy is supposed to be the distribution of wealth for everyone. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, Robert. | ||
| You're talking to a fellow Raleighite here, so glad to hear you. | ||
| Glad to hear you calling in. | ||
| You know, on your second question, you know, journalism, Our job, you know, someone asked me earlier what's going to happen to the economy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, our job is to really, it's a great job, and it's a simple job in a way. | ||
| We go out and we kind of try to report on the state of the world as it is. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people thought that the labor market, the economy would have turned south in April. | ||
| We got data from a very trusted source yesterday that showed that it didn't, that it continued humming. | ||
| And so, you know, we just kind of try and report on those facts. | ||
| Wanted to ask you about another headline that you had in March related to what you just mentioned. | ||
| You were referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that's where we got the numbers for the April jobs report. | ||
| You had a headline, Trump administration disbands two expert committees on economic statistics. | ||
| It's going to impact that bureau. | ||
| Tell us about this story and also the impact it could have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there's been kind of a since January and even before that, you know, there's kind of a long-running concern about the quality of our economic statistics. | |
| Part of that is because government statisticians gather data by surveying the public. | ||
| They call tens of thousands of people a month. | ||
| They knock on doors and visit houses. | ||
| And as you probably know from other survey sources, public opinion polling, people just don't answer the phone like they used to, especially when it's a strange number calling. | ||
| So what you're talking about now is kind of part of this suite of concerns about economic data quality. | ||
| Disbanding those panels, those committees, is not going to have an immediate impact. | ||
| No one's out there saying that our economic data are being cooked or anything like that. | ||
| What those panels do, if I recall correctly, is they try to make sure that the questions that the government is out asking people about the economy are still relevant. | ||
| So there's kind of a long-term implication there, but not short-term. | ||
| Let's talk with Ruth and Sebastian, Florida, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ruth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for letting me speak. | ||
| And good morning, Mr. Kiernan. | ||
| The question I have for you is: what is your belief or your feeling regarding the policy that Mr. Vesos, the Amazon president, had come up with advising the customers, the difference in the price with the tariff, with apparently the Trump administration didn't like? | ||
| I think we as customers would be a great idea to know what is the difference in the price because right now we're thinking it's going to be tremendous and people are not buying. | ||
| They're not going out to eat restaurants. | ||
| They're not going to McDonald's. | ||
| But if you know the difference in the price, you may even give us an idea to see how we're going to proceed. | ||
| And also the price may go down eventually. | ||
| So what is your feeling? | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question. | ||
| I wasn't reporting on that, but I think it's not surprising that Amazon would want to say these price increases are not our fault. | ||
| And it's equally unsurprising that the administration would not want to be publicly blamed for that by a company that so many people buy their goods and services on. | ||
| Goods on. | ||
| Let's talk with Willie in Chicago, Illinois, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Willie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Mike's question is a simple one. | ||
| I see on the news that the deportationists approach the farmers, and I wanted to know how accurate that is. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I'm not sure that we've seen. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I haven't personally seen those reports. | ||
| I'd love to know more. | ||
| Mentioned at the beginning of the segment that it was a busy week for you with a lot of information data coming out. | ||
| What are you going to be watching in the coming weeks and months? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing is really going to be continuing to keep the pulse on the labor market. | |
| Also, inflation. | ||
| I mean, it's possible that we could start to see some prices rise in April. | ||
| The more companies kind of wind down their inventories, the more likely that's going to be. | ||
| And then, of course, the Federal Reserve's meeting this week is probably the kind of highlight in economic news land. | ||
| We had hit President Trump's 100 days in office earlier this week. | ||
| When we look at what he's done and what he's put in place, a couple callers have asked the question: when could we see the overall impact? | ||
| When could we see his actions affect the economy? | ||
| Traditionally, do we know how long it's taken other administrations to see an impact? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, we don't really know because the tariffs that President Trump has imposed are kind of unprecedented. | |
| You know, the most recent comparison we have is, I think, like the 1932 Smoot-Hawley tariffs or 1930, I can't remember. | ||
| So, you know, there's really not kind of a strong precedent for like this many tariffs on this many products, this many countries, you know, when it starts to jack prices up. | ||
| But, you know, companies are not going to buy a year's worth of goods to put in their inventories. | ||
| So maybe in the next few months. | ||
| Let's take one more call. | ||
| It's Tony in Cleveland, Ohio, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was calling to see how come people can't see that what Trump is trying to do is to tear down our democracy, the rule of law, so that he could make everything in his way and disenfranchise black, poor, and brown people. | ||
| And the problem that he's calling like he's fixing now, he made these problems, and now he's trying to act like he's fixing them. | ||
| How come people can't see that and talk about the plane issues? | ||
| And when they're talking about issues, get straight down to the point. | ||
| He's disenfranchising black people, brown people, and he acts like he don't know the law, but he knows the law. | ||
| Hi, Tony. | ||
| You know, we live in a polarized country that's politically polarized. | ||
| And people live in often their own kind of little information bubbles online. | ||
| You know, they get news feeds on, you know, ex formerly Twitter or other social media platforms that often kind of reflect the views that they already have. | ||
| And I think that happens on both sides of the political spectrum. | ||
| Our guest, Paul Kiernan, reporter for the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| You can find his work online at WSJ.com. | ||
| Paul, thank you so much for being with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, Tammy. | |
| Still ahead this morning, high school teachers Kevin Jackson and Ryan Werenka will discuss the upcoming Advanced Placement Government and Politics exam and how students can prepare for it. | ||
| But first, it's open form. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Next week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and Senate are in session. | |
| The House plans to vote on legislation by Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, codifying President Trump's executive order into law. | ||
| The Senate will vote to confirm Frank Bizignano to serve as Social Security Commissioner. | ||
| Also, for the first time since taking office, Trump cabinet members will testify before House and Senate committees on their respective departments and agencies. | ||
| On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee conducting oversight on her department. | ||
| And Treasury Secretary Scott Besant will appear before two committees on Tuesday before the House Appropriations Oversight Subcommittee on the Department of Treasury and on Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee for his annual testimony on the state of the international financial system. | ||
| Also Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gives a press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting. | ||
| And Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will participate in a fireside chat to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York. | ||
| Watch live next week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime. | ||
| c-span democracy unfiltered get c-span wherever you are with c-span now our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy live and on demand Keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips. | ||
| Catch the latest episodes of Washington Journal. | ||
| Find scheduling information for C-SPAN's TV and radio networks, plus a variety of compelling podcasts. | ||
| The C-SPAN Now app is available at the Apple Store and Google Play. | ||
| Download it for free today. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| For the next 20 minutes or so, we are in open form. | ||
| We will start with Daniel in Ithaca, New York, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Daniel. | ||
| Daniel, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yes, Ham. | |
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Hi, Daniel. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I was homeless in D.C. | |
| That was my bravery, first sir, Cad Vietnam. | ||
| I'm my roommate out on the other side of town. | ||
| We'll go to Luann. | ||
| I'm sorry, Lukandu in Chicago, Illinois, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Likandu. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you there? | |
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| I just have one question. | ||
| One thing I wanted to say about this. | ||
| Like, I don't understand why we're not seeing what this Trump administrator is doing. | ||
| He's not doing nothing for the country. | ||
| He's only doing stuff to make him and his billionaire friends who elected him richer while the other country starving. | ||
| Then for him to say some stuff that we gonna be go through a little transition period where we're gonna have a little bit of problem. | ||
| But is any other billionaires gonna have any problem like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| So I don't understand that Trump administrator is doing. | ||
| That was Likandu in Chicago. | ||
| Let's talk with Diane in Barberton, Ohio, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Diane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, Tammy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| First of all, I think let's go back to years ago when the government then allowed the open amount of money that came in from the companies that went to China. | ||
| These were rich people who had companies, then got people to work for very little, and so they then in turn got very rich. | ||
| Somehow they transitioned over to the Chinese people and so they became the Americans that went over there became very, very rich. | ||
| Why shouldn't they be the ones that pay for our debt in terms of they made all the money off of that Chinese and yet we're the ones who are having to pay back money that they actually were earning? | ||
| So why wouldn't that help our economy instead of throwing the tariffs on the Chinese? | ||
| And second of all, I want to say that people who are talking about him doing such a good job, he's not. | ||
| He is doing what he thinks we need, and we need a strong economy. | ||
| And prices are going still sky high. | ||
| I can tell you right now, I went to the grocery store yesterday. | ||
| Beef alone is $3 more than it was back in December. | ||
| So this idea that prices are going down, they're not. | ||
| When it comes to gasoline, those are still sky high. | ||
| I think it was, I saw 305, 350 in the northeast Ohio area. | ||
| There are many, many things I can talk about, but we don't have the time. | ||
| So thank you, Tammy. | ||
| And people listen. | ||
| Don't just assume he's doing a good job. | ||
| My miane in Ohio, Mary in Maine, line for independents. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My comment is that, and my question is, could Donald Trump have done what he wanted to do in a legal, kind, respectful way instead of the bullying way he's doing it, instead of making us the laughing stock of the world, instead of making us ashamed to be an American, could he have done what he wanted to do in a respectful and legal way? | ||
| I just want everyone to consider that. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| That was Mary and Maine, Linda, in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, line for Republicans. | ||
| Hi, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Tammy. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I've been trying so many times. | ||
| And I'm going to go back to, everybody made a big deal about COVID and Donald Trump. | ||
| Okay, what about all the people that have died because the Biden administration left all the illegal people in? | ||
| They're complaining about the price it's going to cost. | ||
| What about the cost that it costs to bring these people in and take care of them? | ||
| Also, this is something old. | ||
| The Democrats always say Donald Trump's a rapist. | ||
| Well, what was Clinton in the White House with his wife and his child there with the interns? | ||
| They forget about that. | ||
| And we wouldn't even be talking about immigration if they wouldn't have left all these people in. | ||
| Also, nobody protested when Biden signed the thing where all the frackers lost their job. | ||
| 11,000 people. | ||
| Second of all, what about the people that were government people that got let go because they wouldn't take the shot? | ||
| Where's my body of my choice? | ||
| It's all confusing to me. | ||
| I know Donald Trump's not perfect, but I'm sure the Biden administration was more imperfect because we never even saw the man. | ||
| We see Donald Trump constantly, like it or not. | ||
| So that's all I got to say. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Tammy. | ||
| And you do a great job. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| That was Linda in Pennsylvania. | ||
| A look ahead at next week. | ||
| A headline from The Hill, Canadian Prime Minister says he'll visit the White House on Tuesday. | ||
| It says that Canada's newly elected Prime Minister, Mark Carney, said he will visit the White House on Tuesday for a meeting with President Trump. | ||
| It says that the meeting comes in the wake of tariffs that Trump has imposed on Canada and the President's proposal for the nation to merge with the U.S. Something Kearney earlier this week said isn't ever going to happen. | ||
| It was during Prime Minister Kearney's first news conference after winning the election that he was asked about Canada becoming the 51st state. | ||
| Here's a clip from that event. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In your second call with the President, did Mr. Trump outright say or insinuate at any point that Canada should become the 51st state? | |
| He did not. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We've heard Mr. Trump on April 23rd and his surrogates throughout the final days of the campaign reiterate the idea that they believe Canada should become the 51st state on the campaign trail. | ||
| You said on multiple occasions that respect for Canada would be one of the key things in terms of having a meeting with him. | ||
| Do you think over the past few days we have seen respect for Canada from the Trump administration? | ||
| Look, I would distinguish want from reality. | ||
| La voluntée et la cheer, right? | ||
| What someone wants and what is reality and what the Canadian people clearly have stated, virtually without exception, is this will never ever happen. | ||
| And if any of the leaders of the party and their representatives would attest to that, I think the votes attest to it. | ||
| I think the public dialogue attests to it as well. | ||
| And we are, you know, we're meeting as heads of our government to discuss that partnership. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, I'm not pretending those discussions will be easy or they won't proceed in a straight line. | |
| There will be zigs and zags, ups and downs. | ||
| But as I said in my remarks, I will fight for the best deal for Canada and only accept the best deal for Canada and take as much time as necessary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Davis Legree, eye politics. | |
| Hi, thanks for taking our questions. | ||
| Just one for me to try and squeeze some more reporters in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But to my colleague's point, the White House's public position has continued to be that Canada should be the 51st state. | |
| You yourself have said that Donald Trump is trying to break Canada. | ||
| Considering all that, how can you expect good faith negotiations when you travel to Washington next week? | ||
| Look, I think the first I've had the direct conversation with him on whatever day it was, Tuesday, I guess it was, a couple of days ago, and we agreed to have those negotiations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very clear discussion between us, as I said, very constructive. | |
| And I would say the time allocated to our meeting and the seniority of the, I mean, he's the president, so that's as senior as you get, but the other members of his administration who will be assisting at those meetings suggests the seriousness of the discussions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again, we are not, do not expect white smoke out of that meeting. | |
| There will be white smoke probably later somewhere else in the world this month, but do not expect that. | ||
| So that's the first thing, is just the level of the direct dialogue, the discussion, the level of people there. | ||
| The second point, I'll make it quickly, and thank you for restricting the question so others can get in, is that he respects, as others who are good negotiators, and he's one of the best negotiators, they respect strength. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why we're building Canada strong. | |
| There's lots of reasons to build Canada strong, but the point is, and I will make this point repeatedly, we have more than enough to do here at home. | ||
| That point about we can give ourselves more than the Americans can take away is absolutely right. | ||
| We can have a bigger boost to our economy, to incomes, to jobs, by focusing on building one Canadian economy, by building these nation-building projects, by focusing on getting productivity up, by reducing government waste, by driving investment in this country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so that is a good in and of itself. | |
| We're going to focus on that while we have these negotiations with the Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if the negotiations with the Americans take longer, so be it. | |
| We've got more than enough to do here. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in this open forum, but wanted to share a programming note. | ||
| Today, the McCain Institute hosts its annual Sedona Forum this year focusing on U.S. power through economic leadership, technological innovation, military strength, and cultural diplomacy. | ||
| Our coverage of the event begins at 11.50 a.m. Eastern with the panel on the Russia-Ukraine war featuring Senator Amy Klobuchar, and then at 12.30 p.m. and intelligence conversation with the former Deputy Principal Director of National Intelligence and Senator Mark Kelly. | ||
| You'll be able to watch the live panel discussion beginning at 11.50 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also find it on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Let's talk with Perry in Bellflower, California, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Perry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to address two presidents that everybody seems to think are so great. | ||
| The first would be Mr. Lyndon Baines Johnson. | ||
| I don't know if anybody out there has been watching, but Ken Burns' Vietnam mini documentary has been on, and it just shows Lyndon Johnson for what he was, an openly racist president who passed the Civil Rights Act in an attempt to save his legacy after putting all these thousands of young GIs into Vietnam when three presidents before him knew better than to do that. | ||
| They all sent special forces in, but this guy, he had to send all these Americans in there and try to win this no-win war. | ||
| And then the second one would be Mr. Barack Obama, who no less than 10 years ago, knowingly, willingly, and with forethought, armed the cartels with thousands of semi-automatic weapons in an attempt to undermine the Second Amendment and then tried to call it a botched gun-running operation when even the IG, Michael Horwitz, the former IG, thank God, even he could not clean that up. | ||
| So, you know, all these people with all their hate for Donald Trump, what they don't like about Donald Trump is he's a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. | ||
| He wasn't liked by Democrats or Republicans in the upper echelon of the elite country here. | ||
| So that's my thing for today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That is Perry in California. | ||
| Carl in Washington, Pennsylvania, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Carl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| We are living in a dictatorship right now. | ||
| How can the Republicans defend the sloshing of funds from various agencies on the federal government? | ||
| And we're going to have a parade on June the 17th to glorify the man that lives in the White House. | ||
| Those tanks falling down the avenues in Washington, D.C. I'm going to crush the streets. | ||
| Who's going to pay for that? | ||
| Who's going to pay for the all nearly 7,000 troops or the bands and the airplanes and the helicopters that are going to fly over? | ||
| We live in a dictatorship until they are willing to justify the spending. | ||
| He is a dictator. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Carl in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Joseph in Florida, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Joseph. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I find this astounding. | ||
| Trump held a cabinet press conference this week where all his cabinet members sat there and extolled the virtues of him and their accomplishments. | ||
| What's astounding is that Fox News wouldn't even carry it, which is absolutely amazing and shows you what's going on here that nobody's even believing what it was said. | ||
| Ian Coulter likened the conference to Kim Jong-il in North Korea's conference calls where they all just sit there and tell him how great he is. | ||
| But for Fox not to carry it must really tell the MAGAs that, of course, the MAGAs would not know about this because the MAGAs weren't able to see it. | ||
| The second thing is Doge. | ||
| Musk is leaving or stepping back quite a bit. | ||
| And this week, which, you know, they promised $2 trillion in savings, he has now admitted that it is going to look like $150 billion to $160 billion. | ||
| Once again, what is going on here? | ||
| And what's really interesting is that the Wharton Institute has estimated the cost to save that $150 billion is $135 billion. | ||
| And last but not least, there was a town hall on News Nation with Como heading it, and Trump was on it. | ||
| And Trump was asked the question, what is his biggest mistake? | ||
| And he said, I haven't made any mistakes. | ||
| And I'll leave it like that. | ||
| But MAGA, wake up. | ||
| That was Joseph in Florida. | ||
| Craig in Lameda, California, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Craig. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I'd just like to thank you for taking the call. | ||
| And also, it's interesting to hear all the different opinions from all over the country on what's going on. | ||
| And again, the last caller just stated, what the media puts out is all that we're given. | ||
| And, you know, Fox, ABC, and Donald goes back to fake news, fake news. | ||
| But if you look at what's really happening, and there's a lot to look at, obviously, but with the immigration and the gas prices and the tariffs, which aren't in place yet, it's going to take a little time to shake this whole thing out. | ||
| But God bless America. | ||
| And I think that he's the only guy that really sees this in the big picture that we need to straighten stuff out and get back on track and make America first again. | ||
| That's Craig in California. | ||
| Let's hear from Fred in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| The reason I'm calling is the people in Gaza are starving to death, are dying from thirst, and the Israelis are not letting the food and water get through to them. | ||
| I want to know why Donald Trump isn't enforcing a no-fly zone over Gaza, why the Israelis, what they're doing to the people, the Palestinian people, not Hamas, the Palestinian people, is no different than what the Nazis did in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. | ||
| And they're exterminating these people. | ||
| And that needs to stop. | ||
| And the United Nations should step in and do something. | ||
| Secondly, I found it interesting that they had the peace talks for Ukraine and Russia held in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Now, doesn't it seem strange that Saudi Arabia is a major oil producer, Russia is a major oil producer, the United States is a major oil producer, and Ukraine wasn't even invited. | ||
| And all of a sudden now prices are starting to come down because Saudi Arabia is going to start production up. | ||
| That seemed kind of odd to me. | ||
| And the third thing, and the final thing, is the next three months are going to be retribution, paying back for those who spoke out against Donald Trump. | ||
| So keep your eye, I'm with the people in the media out there who are listening to this, keep your eye on Guantanamo and see who gets picked up off the street and who gets taken there. | ||
| Well, how are they going to be treated? | ||
| Are they going to have good food? | ||
| Are they going to have shelter? | ||
| Are they going to have clothing? | ||
| Are they going to be mistreated and punished and tortured? | ||
| I think it should be, people should watch out for that above all else. | ||
| But the people of Gaza are starving and dying of thirst, and the United Nations should get off their rear end to do something about this and stop Israel from killing all these people. | ||
| Thank you for letting me talk. | ||
| Goodbye. | ||
| That was Fred in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Our last call in today's open forum next on Washington Journal. | ||
| It's our annual cram for the exam. | ||
| High school teachers Kevin Jackson and Ryan Warenka will join us to take live questions from students across the country ahead of Tuesday's Advanced Placement U.S. government and politics exam. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A, Education Design Lab founder Kathleen Delaski, author of Who Needs College Anymore? | |
| Questions if the U.S. higher education system, with its skyrocketing costs and declining enrollment, is currently suited to meet the needs of future generations of students. | ||
| The four-year degree college model has been seen for the last hundred years at least as the surefire ticket to better jobs, to the coroner office, being a doctor or a lawyer. | ||
| And so that's been the aspiration, particularly in the last 50 years, right, for families for their children to be successful. | ||
| And I think that's beginning to break down to the point where even the haves, if you think about the haves and the have-nots, even the haves are recognizing that the degree, the four-year degree, is not necessarily achieving the American dream for them or their children. | ||
| And it's becoming, you know, the affordability issue Has kind of reached a fever pitch, and we're kind of looking at how jobs are changing and how quickly skills become obsolete. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kathleen Dulaski with her book, Who Needs College Anymore, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | |
| You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on the C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| After a career in investment management and some time as a credit risk specialist at the U.S. Treasury Department, Jill Eicher has written her first book titled, Mellon vs. Churchill. | ||
| The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War. | ||
| It's all about collection of war debts from World War I, which was fought between 1914 and 1918. | ||
| Andrew Mellon, a wealthy industrialist, served as Secretary of the Treasury for Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. | ||
| 11 years total. | ||
| Mellon took on Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill. | ||
| Jill Eicher tells a story that will be new to most readers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Jill Eicher with her book, Mellon vs. Churchill, The Untold Story of Treasury Titans at War. | |
| On this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| Celebrate Mother's Day with our C-SPAN shop sale going on right now at c-spanshop.org, our online store. | ||
| Save up to 20% on our Mother's Day collection of apparel, accessories, drinkwear, mugs, and more. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN mom, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Scan the code or visit c-spanshop.org during our Mother's Day sale going on right now. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| High school students from across the country are getting ready for end-of-year advanced placement exams. | ||
| And for the next hour, we are looking at the AP U.S. Government and Politics exam that's coming up on Tuesday. | ||
| It's part of our annual Cram for the Exam review session where we take live questions from students. | ||
| Joining us for this year's Cram for the Exam is Kevin Jackson. | ||
| He is a high school teacher in Petaluma, California. | ||
| And Ryan Warenka, he is a high school student in Troy, Michigan. | ||
| Kevin and Ryan, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| We will jump right in just with an overview. | ||
| We know that there are a lot of students watching. | ||
| We'll be talking with them in just a bit. | ||
| But Ryan, first explain what is the Advanced Placement Government and Politics course. | ||
| How extensive is it? | ||
| And what are some of the recent topics that students are learning about in addition to the foundations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, first of all, happy to be here. | |
| You know, I'm coming from Detroit, Michigan, which during World War II was the home of the Arsenal of Democracy. | ||
| But I like to think in 2025, the new Arsenal of Democracy are all the classrooms around the country where students are learning AP government from all these great teachers. | ||
| And so you're going to have a chance to show on Tuesday what you've really learned. | ||
| So we've got five units for the AP U.S. government exam. | ||
| The first one is Foundations of American Democracy, which is the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, several Federalist papers. | ||
| Our second unit is about the interaction amongst the branches of the government and including also the bureaucracy. | ||
| Our third unit is about civil liberties and civil rights. | ||
| The fourth unit is about American political beliefs and ideologies. | ||
| And the fifth unit is about political participation. | ||
| So, really, you get that government in the first part of the class and the politics in the second part of the class. | ||
| And in terms of the recency of the exam, it's not a current events exam. | ||
| So, anything pertaining to, say, the 2024 presidential election or the Department of Government Efficiency, don't worry about that. | ||
| That's not going to be anything that's going to be asked on the exam. | ||
| Now, you could certainly use those for the free response questions. | ||
| If you want to use those as examples, that would be okay. | ||
| But, realistically, probably things that are in the range of two to three years old, those are events that maybe could make their way onto the exam. | ||
| But don't worry about like cramming all the news from the last six months and figuring you might see a question on that. | ||
| Kevin, we just heard about the topics that will be on there. | ||
| Explain the format this year and what kind of questions students should be ready for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gladly, and again, like Ryan said, thanks for having us on. | |
| It's an absolute honor. | ||
| But, yeah, so the test is broken up into two main sections. | ||
| The first half, you'll have 80 minutes to complete 55 multiple choice questions. | ||
| It could be literally anything that Ryan just referenced from those five units. | ||
| Then, you get a short break. | ||
| Then, you get one big 100-minute block of time to complete four free response questions. | ||
| There are four types: one is what they call a concept analysis. | ||
| From there, there's a quantitative analysis. | ||
| Usually, they give you like some piece of information, whether it's a graph, a chart, an infographic, something like that, asking you to analyze. | ||
| Then, question three regarding a Supreme Court case. | ||
| There are 14 that you must know for this course. | ||
| And then, finally, they do give you an argumentative essay prompt where you're supposed to basically pick a side and defend it using some of those documents that Ryan referenced. | ||
| Whole thing's done in about three hours. | ||
| You know, obviously, it's both a short and very long window of time. | ||
| Ryan, it's a lot to talk about. | ||
| It's a lot to cram into that three hours. | ||
| What time management tips do you have for your students? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so Mr. Jackson did a really nice job explaining the multiple choice. | |
| So, you have those 55 questions, you have 80 minutes. | ||
| There's going to be a variety of different kinds of questions. | ||
| So, it's really important first to start. | ||
| You know, it's also important to remember that this year the exam is going to be digital. | ||
| So, it's going to be on Blue Book. | ||
| And so, students should be on there and test it out. | ||
| And they do have some sample things where you can play around with Blue Book and make sure that you're familiar with and comfortable with that. | ||
| So, over the next couple of days, please do that. | ||
| So, in those 55 multiple choice questions, there will be some that might be vocab-based, that might be kind of easy for you. | ||
| Answer those first. | ||
| Then, there are going to be different kinds of questions, different stimulus-based questions. | ||
| There will be reading and analysis. | ||
| There could be, like Mr. Jackson mentioned, infographics. | ||
| There's comparison tables, you know, so you have to take time. | ||
| Do the easy questions first. | ||
| If you look at a question and you know it, answer it. | ||
| And then, if there's one that's got a graphic or reading or something, push that to later, save some time, you know, because you'll bank questions on the easy ones. | ||
| Get those points early. | ||
| It's also important to remember that there's no penalty for if you get a question wrong, so you just don't get the points. | ||
| So, if you're not 100% sure and you're trying to go through at the end of the multiple choice section, just go ahead and answer something because maybe you get lucky. | ||
| In terms of the free response questions, you know, it's 100 minutes for those four questions, so there's any number of different ways to allocate it. | ||
| Some teachers tell them 25, tell students 25 minutes per question. | ||
| I generally tell my students try to allocate 20 minutes for each of the first three and bank about 40 minutes for the free response question. | ||
| That's what I tell my students, but your teacher may say something different, totally fine. | ||
| It's still the same 100 minutes. | ||
| But with that, for the free response questions, it's a ton of time. | ||
| I've never had a student come back and say, Mr. Warenka, I ran out of time in the FRQs. | ||
| It's tons of time. | ||
| Take the time to outline your ideas and then craft your answer, especially this year being on Blue Book. | ||
| If you're allowed scratch paper, outline your ideas and then kind of keep coming back to that. | ||
| You should also be able to take notes and do things in Blue Book. | ||
| So take advantage of whatever you have, but definitely, you know, calm down, breathe, relax, and then you'll find out you have plenty of time if you do those things. | ||
| Once students complete their test, they're going to be scored. | ||
| Explain how the scoring works and what students should be aiming for if they want to receive college credit for the exam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, gladly. | |
| So this is not your traditional 90% for an A, 80% for a B. | ||
| The test gets scored on a one-to-five scale with five being the highest. | ||
| And college board and universities all around the world have agreed that a three, four, or five score is considered passing the exam. | ||
| And then colleges and universities do get to have a little bit of discretion of will they accept a three, a four, or a five? | ||
| And what credit do they earn? | ||
| Is it elective credit or have they now just waived any kind of political science general ed requirement? | ||
| So definitely I would encourage you students to take a look on the College Board AP website. | ||
| Look at, you know, many of you have committed to your college and congratulations for that. | ||
| So now look and hey, what does your college want you to score and what are you getting by passing the exam? | ||
| Our guests for the next 40, 45, 50 minutes are Kevin Jackson, Petaluma High School teacher, and Ryan Warrenca, Troy High School teacher in Michigan. | ||
| This segment is for students only. | ||
| This hour we're going to be hearing from them. | ||
| Students want to let you know that you can call in with your questions now. | ||
| The lines are Eastern Central, the numbers 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you are in the Mountain or Pacific region, it is 202-748-8001. | ||
| You can also text us your questions, 202-748-8003, or you can post your question on X at C-SPANWJ or use the hashtag CRAM4, that's the number for the exam. | ||
| When you call in, you can either ask our guests a question or you can take a challenge question. | ||
| The first five students who answer a challenge question correctly will win a C-SPAN hat. | ||
| We're showing it to you on the screen right now. | ||
| We'll get to those calls in just a minute. | ||
| Ryan, I want to ask you one more question before we get to them. | ||
| For many students, they're going to be taking the test on Tuesday. | ||
| This is their last weekend to get some last-minute cramming in. | ||
| What is the best use of time when it comes to reviewing for the test? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, one of the things that I've told my students to do is go back first through your foundational documents. | |
| So know what those documents are because you could see those, the main ideas of those, obviously for the argument essay, but also you're going to see those on the multiple choice section. | ||
| So definitely know kind of the main ideas of each of the documents. | ||
| Also, you know, go back and review those Supreme Court cases. | ||
| Know kind of what are a couple of the facts of the case and what was the court's holding and why? | ||
| Because for the Supreme Court FRQ, you're gonna need to know that. | ||
| But also, they're gonna utilize, they make you learn 14 questions. | ||
| They're gonna use those in other places, so they'll use those in the multiple choice section. | ||
| So, go back and do those. | ||
| And when you're reviewing those, you're also reviewing some of the other course content. | ||
| Then, one of the other strategies is, you know, look through some of the various units that maybe you're the weakest on. | ||
| If there's an area where you kind of just don't think you know as much, go there. | ||
| And then, there's a ton of different great resources out that are a lot of them are free that you can use. | ||
| I actually do recommend going to the C-SPAN classroom website. | ||
| There's a great page of review materials that are absolutely free that you can use just from C-SPAN. | ||
| There's others too, but C-SPAN Classroom is a really good one to start with. | ||
| Brian, we appreciate your help. | ||
| I know you've put a lot of those together, so thank you on many fronts. | ||
| We appreciate that. | ||
| We will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very welcome. | |
| We already have students ready to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Dominic in Altoona, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Dominic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Dominic, do you want to give your teacher a shout out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I would. | |
| I would like to shout out Mr. Blau from Altoona PA. | ||
| Okay, and Dominic, do you want to ask our guests a question or do you want to take a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to ask a question, please. | |
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is the best way to remember the foundational documents and their main arguments? | |
| Well, there's a lot there. | ||
| I think, you know, oh, okay, go for it, Kevin. | ||
| I was ready to defer to you, Ryan. | ||
| I mean, I would say, oh, okay, there is a lot there, right? | ||
| Go ahead, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, definitely. | |
| So, okay, sorry. | ||
| So, yeah, there's a lot there. | ||
| So, definitely for the foundational documents, you know, go back through and again, just know kind of maybe some bullet points about what each one is for. | ||
| So, you know, one of the famous ones is Federalist number 10, right? | ||
| James Madison. | ||
| And, you know, what is he worried about? | ||
| He's worried about factions. | ||
| Okay, well, what is a faction, right? | ||
| It's a group of people with a common interest. | ||
| That's one of those concepts. | ||
| And how do we make the system of government work with these factions? | ||
| We acknowledge that they'll exist. | ||
| We make them open. | ||
| The Compound Republic makes it so that no factions can be secret. | ||
| Fed 51 about separation of powers and checks and balances. | ||
| And Brutus number one, man, the sky is falling. | ||
| The Constitution is creating a government that's way too powerful. | ||
| So just kind of know those. | ||
| One of the things on Twitter I just shared a little bit ago, and if you check the hashtag theCRAM4The exam, you should be able to find the tweet that I put. | ||
| I put together a little Quizlet that does have little like pointers and things about foundational documents. | ||
| So that's one of the easy ways that I would review those. | ||
| Okay, let's hear from Madison in North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Madison. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Do you want to give your teacher a shout out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I would. | ||
| Mr. Hobby, you're the best. | ||
| And Madison, would you like to ask Ryan and Kevin a question or do you want a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like to ask a question. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So can you explain the holding and the reasoning behind Shaw versus Reno? | |
| Yes, gladly. | ||
| So Shaw versus Reno, you know, there are two questions that we face of the court cases, right? | ||
| You have Shaw versus Reno, you have Baker v. Carr. | ||
| And my students definitely try to put these together and get them a little bit mixed up. | ||
| So Shaw versus Reno took place in North Carolina, not Nevada. | ||
| And essentially, when North Carolina redistricted their congressional districts, they created one very interesting majority minority district. | ||
| And what happened was it got challenged, it got brought before the court, and it got called racial gerrymandering. | ||
| And basically, where the court lined up with that was the court decided that you can't just outright racially gerrymander your congressional districts, but you do want to protect, what is it, communities of interest, I believe is the phrase they used. | ||
| And so, what you need to know about that case, students, is when we are redrawing district lines, there are a million different factors that need to come into place, and that race can be part of one of those factors, but it can't be the defining factor. | ||
| It's a 14th Amendment equal protection clause case. | ||
| And so, if you can just really lock onto those main ideas, you'll be great. | ||
| Hayden in Mission Viejo, California. | ||
| Good morning, Hayden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| Warm welcome from California. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Hayden, do you want to give your teacher a shout out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Definitely. | |
| Shout out to Mr. Woods at Tribuco Hills High School, one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| I think all AP government teachers are pretty great. | ||
| But would you like to ask our guest a question or do you want a challenge question, Hayden? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You mind if I do both? | |
| We're doing one or the other. | ||
| We're trying to get a lot of voices in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fair enough. | |
| I'll just ask a question then. | ||
| For the purposes of being successfully elaborate enough for our explained task burgs on the FRQ, is it necessary to expound upon and define specific technical jargon that is used for, say, the Supreme Court, such as writ absurdiori, de jure for the purposes of talking about Brown versus Board of Education, Amiscus Kyrie, etc. | ||
| Okay, well, you know, Hayden, I'm going to, first of all, thanks for being awake so early. | ||
| You and Mr. Jackson are holding it down on the West Coast. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| I'm going to put my AP reader hat on. | ||
| So this is for the past, this will be my sixth year. | ||
| And I'm going to give you the answer that you probably don't want, which is it depends. | ||
| It depends, honestly, on the scoring rubric, and it depends on the free response question. | ||
| More often than not, if you are explaining a concept without necessarily naming it, if you're kind of in the vicinity, you've given us a good enough description, fairly generic, but we get that you know what you're talking about, you're going to earn the point. | ||
| So don't worry too much about drilling down or becoming fluent in Latin over the course of the next three days. | ||
| You know, you'll want to use time elsewhere. | ||
| And wanted to ask if I could jump in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One thing I tell my students, sorry about that, Tammy. | |
| One of the things I tell my students is, yes, the college board is going to want you to be precise in a couple places. | ||
| And so, for example, my students, we did a practice free response question about the court cases around Wisconsin versus Yoder. | ||
| And Wisconsin versus Yoder is a free exercise clause case, not necessarily just a freedom of religion. | ||
| And so I told my students, you know, we got two religion cases. | ||
| We got Engel and we got Yoder. | ||
| And you really, really need to be able to say one of those, Engel, is an establishment clause case, and one of them, Yoder, is a free exercise case. | ||
| And if you just say freedom of religion, you're being a little too vague there. | ||
| So make sure that you're precise where you absolutely need to be precise. | ||
| And then, yeah, I mean, I always try to tell my students, hey, let's try to not be vague. | ||
| Let's not talk around it. | ||
| Let's try to drill down where we can. | ||
| But also, to Ryan's point, yeah, don't worry too, too much about your Latin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of the AP workshop I did a number of years ago, there was a teacher that had a little acronym and it was APBS. | ||
| And don't worry, I'm not going to get bleeped here. | ||
| But it was answer the prompt and be specific. | ||
| So answer what's being asked and try to give those specifics. | ||
| So yeah, so don't say First Amendment or freedom of religion. | ||
| In some cases, you will need to be specific. | ||
| And to follow up with both Kevin and Ryan, when we, something you mentioned there is the free response questions. | ||
| Kevin, you passed along a concept application question that was used on the California in 2023 about the California recall. | ||
| We're showing it on the screen right now. | ||
| I know you can't see it. | ||
| It is a very lengthy question. | ||
| Walk us through how these work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gladly. | |
| So in this one, and again, I also can't see it, friends, they're going to give you, it's called a concept application, right? | ||
| This is your first free response question, but with the beauty of Blue Book, you can skip right by it and come back to it in that 100 minutes. | ||
| But they're going to give you usually a two or three paragraph story, news story of something that happened. | ||
| One of my hacks is oftentimes the answer to Part A is a couple of specific words in that reading. | ||
| And so, yes, this recall election of 2003 asks about kind of what type of voter behavior was being used by the voters here in California that year. | ||
| That's where we talked at the beginning of Unit 5 about how do I vote? | ||
| Why do I vote? | ||
| Is it prospective voting based on, hey, you're promising me better days tomorrow? | ||
| Is it retrospective voting based on, hey, how have things been over the last two or four or six years? | ||
| What have you done for me lately? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so in this specific one, yes, they were looking for you to talk about retrospective voting because we here in California were not particularly pleased with Gray Davis at the time. | ||
| Then it jumps into Part B, and Part B is going to ask, you know, how was the media a linkage institution that helped lead Arnold Schwarzenegger to becoming our governor? | ||
| And here's where you can talk about, again, much of the media narrative, much of the media coverage at the time was all of Gray Davis's faults and flaws and how we had plenty of issues here in California at the time. | ||
| And the fact that a very, very world-famous celebrity was throwing his name in the hat. | ||
| I remember he officially announced on the tonight show with Jay Leno, you know, the media got the message out and voters were motivated. | ||
| Now, Part C, that's where they might throw you something out of left field to connect it across more than just voting and voter behavior. | ||
| And so in part C, thankfully in this question, they laid out for you what the California recall process is. | ||
| There was a ballot initiative started by local voters that made it to the state ballot. | ||
| How is that different than impeaching a president? | ||
| And that's where they're going to ask you to remember, oh, appeachment process. | ||
| The House impeaches, the Senate tries. | ||
| So we as voters have a lot more impact and influence on how to recall a governor, but we're going to have to rely on our elected officials if we wanted to impeach a president. | ||
| We're going to get back to our student callers in just a minute, but wanted to talk about one more free response question. | ||
| Ryan, it's an argumentative essay. | ||
| You sent us an example that uses interest groups versus social movement. | ||
| Walk us through how students should approach questions, argumentative essay questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so one of the things that you'll notice on that argument essay is that it doesn't have that big long write-up that you have. | |
| So for the concept application question or the SCOTUS question is going to have two to three paragraphs of information. | ||
| This one, it's basically giving you a very open-ended prompt and asking you to make an argument. | ||
| So this one was basically saying, is, you know, are interest groups or social movements more effective for instituting participatory democracy. | ||
| So they're giving you a couple of things to work with. | ||
| And so you basically have to look and see, well, which one do I think I could do better? | ||
| Then they're going to give you three foundational documents. | ||
| And in this case, if I remember off the top of my head, it was Article 1 of the Constitution. | ||
| It was Federalist 10 and Letter from Birmingham Jail. | ||
| And so you want to see that one of those documents will align to one side. | ||
| One will align to the other side. | ||
| And then one's usually you could kind of use for both. | ||
| And so if you're talking letter from Birmingham Jail, okay, well, that's probably a good example of social movements. | ||
| If you're talking about interest groups, well, that's a faction, a group with a common interest. | ||
| That's going to be Fed 10. | ||
| And then Article 1 of the Constitution, free speech, free religion, free assembly, free press. | ||
| I could kind of use that for either one. | ||
| And so once you've decided, okay, I think I can write this side better, then that's where, you know, start outlining your ideas. | ||
| You have four different things. | ||
| So it's unlike the other, you know, four different sections that you have to write. | ||
| It's unlike the other free response questions in that you don't see an A, a B, a C, and a D, but they're essentially there as check marks. | ||
| So the first thing that you have to do and the most important point of an argument essay is that first point where they're asking you to form a defensible claim or thesis with a line of reasoning. | ||
| And that's the key thing that you really need to do. | ||
| If you do a claim with a line of reasoning, that's going to unlock the opportunity to earn every point on the argument essay. | ||
| And so without that, the most points really that you can get is about, I think it's two, and it comes from the second line. | ||
| The second line is where you're going to use evidence to prove your claim or thesis. | ||
| So you have to use one of those foundational documents. | ||
| And then for the second piece, you can use anything. | ||
| You can use another foundational document, a court case, a current event, a historic event. | ||
| Any of those things work. | ||
| Then you also need to tie it back to reasoning. | ||
| The reason this proves my point is this, whatever your line of reasoning was, make sure you're addressing that. | ||
| And then you have to acknowledge an opposing perspective. | ||
| So if you were arguing that my students did this one, we practiced this one this week. | ||
| A lot of them were going with social movements. | ||
| I said, okay, well, what if somebody said interest groups? | ||
| So you'd say an opposing perspective is that interest groups would be better for instilling participatory democracy. | ||
| And you would then need to, you know, explain maybe why that's wrong and why your side's better. | ||
| Or you can concede, like, hey, they make a good point here. | ||
| Generally speaking, the rubrics are looking for rebuttals, though. | ||
| So that's really where you'll want to make sure that you do that. | ||
| But then one last thing. | ||
| Mr. Jackson mentioned a magic word. | ||
| He mentioned linkage institutions. | ||
| The Gray Davis California recall question talked about linkage institutions as well. | ||
| So there it was the media serving as a linkage institution. | ||
| What could be other examples? | ||
| Interest groups are a linkage institution. | ||
| Political parties are a linkage institution. | ||
| So students, I would spend time going back over what linkage institutions are, models of voter behavior, models of democracy, participatory democracy, elite democracy, plural democracy, right? | ||
| Those are things that I would spend some time. | ||
| Make sure you have those down because they kind of keep finding their ways onto free response questions. | ||
| Hannah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ryan, I have a follow-up question for you. | |
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Well, so Ryan, one of the things that I've been talking with my students about lately on that argumentative essay is, you know, you've written your claim or your thesis, right? | ||
| This is better because and. | ||
| And so your topic sentence in that first body paragraph is your because. | ||
| Then you bring in your document to support it. | ||
| Then in that third sentence, therefore, this is better because Brutus 1 helps prove it, or Federalist 10 speaks to it, right? | ||
| It's a very rigid structure, but I think it helps students kind of understand what are these readers looking for as they read these paragraphs. | ||
| And as a reader, I will say thank you, because yes, the more structured they are, we read everything. | ||
| But if you have a line of reasoning anywhere in there, we have to give you that point. | ||
| I had a student one time do it as the very last line of their essay. | ||
| And I can't, I would get bleeped if I started saying the words I said to that student as I was creating theirs. | ||
| But I graded it. | ||
| But yeah, make it really easy. | ||
| Hit them over the head with it. | ||
| Hey, I'm giving you my because. | ||
| I'm giving you my reason. | ||
| We'll actually thank you in the long term. | ||
| When you read 1,500 to 2,000 of these, the easier you make it for the reader, the more we appreciate it. | ||
| Hannah in High Point, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Hannah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Do you want to give a shout out to your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, Mrs. Hoots from Westland Christian Academy. | ||
| And Hannah, would you like to ask Kevin and Ryan a question or would you like a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would like to ask, please. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go for it. | |
| What is the best way to tell the differences between the grants? | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| Mr. Jackson, do you want to take that one? | ||
| That was one of my favorite topics. | ||
| Gladly, gladly. | ||
| So think about a grant is money from the government to do something. | ||
| Categorical grants, we're going to break them into categories. | ||
| There's a lot more restrictions around it. | ||
| There's a lot of kind of rules and regulations both for who's eligible and how can they spend that money. | ||
| A block grant, on the other hand, is just a big block of money and try to tie it back to the main goal or tie it back to the main goal. | ||
| But those who receive a block grant are going to have a lot more kind of freedom on how to spend the money. | ||
| The way I frame that to my students is many of them have applied for financial aid or scholarships. | ||
| If you get an athletic scholarship to go play football at UC Berkeley and decide to transfer that money to go to UC Berkeley goes away. | ||
| That's a categorical grant. | ||
| But if you apply for, luckily here locally, we have the Petaluma Educational Foundation, they're going to cut a check in your name and expect you to use it wisely. | ||
| Does that offset your tuition? | ||
| Does that offset books? | ||
| Does that buy you a new laptop? | ||
| That's more like a block grant. | ||
| Keep in mind, the federal government generally tends to like categorical grants because they can put those conditions on the grants. | ||
| They have a little bit more control over where the money gets spent. | ||
| And states really like block grants because it's much more generic and they have a lot more leeway with where the money goes. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Thank you, Ryan. | ||
| Let's talk with Trey in North Anover, Massachusetts. | ||
| Good morning, Trey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gotcha. | |
| All right. | ||
| I'd like to ask a question. | ||
| So it's a basic one, but I think it's still important. | ||
| What do you think is the most common mistake from students on the exam? | ||
| Going too fast. | ||
| I'm going to go as going too fast. | ||
| Ryan, you can, you know, by all means disagree with me, but especially when you hit response questions. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| But yeah, when you hit those free response questions, 100 minutes is an eternity. | ||
| And my class is a bunch of seniors, many of which took the APUS history test the year before. | ||
| And so in the APUS history test, there's that mandatory time where you have to read and start outlining. | ||
| That doesn't exist in the GovTest. | ||
| And, you know, 100 minutes is longer than you think it is. | ||
| You've got plenty of time. | ||
| Really, really hone in and underline your verbs. | ||
| What is the test actually asking me? | ||
| They're going to throw out distractors. | ||
| There's going to be noise in that concept application. | ||
| There's going to be a little bit of noise in that free response about the Supreme Court case. | ||
| Slow down. | ||
| You have the time. | ||
| Like Ryan said a few minutes ago, definitely take time to outline your essay. | ||
| Don't just start spilling out words on your document and hope for the best. | ||
| Take that time, take a breath. | ||
| You've got it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And one other one that I'll say is a common mistake is leaving things unanswered. | ||
| You know, and I get it, maybe students don't know the answer. | ||
| For the multiple choice, there's no penalty for no deduction for wrong answers. | ||
| There used to be about 20 years ago, you would lose a quarter of a point if you had a wrong multiple choice answer. | ||
| There isn't that anymore. | ||
| So if you're not sure on the multiple choice, take a guess. | ||
| And a lot of them you can use deductive reasoning. | ||
| You're going to look at the four choices. | ||
| Two of them, a lot of the time, have nothing to do with the question. | ||
| Cross those out. | ||
| Now I'm down to two. | ||
| One might be kind of adjacent to what the question's asking me. | ||
| And then the other one's going to be completely about it. | ||
| So you can take time. | ||
| Again, again, even on the multiple choice, you'll have 80 minutes for 55 questions. | ||
| You'll have time. | ||
| So answer everything. | ||
| And for the free response question, yeah, like Mr. Jackson said, you're going to have 100 minutes is an eternity. | ||
| And, you know, I will, as a reader, nothing makes me sadder than when a student doesn't attempt a question. | ||
| If a student attempts it and they're wrong, you know, whatever, you only gain points. | ||
| And maybe that one point that you just barely got on the FRQ section gets you college credit, then it was absolutely worth it. | ||
| So please try to answer everything. | ||
| Trey, do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, shout out to Mrs. Fryermus. | |
| We'll go next to Presley in High Point, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Presley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Presley, do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, shout out Ms. Hoot, sixth period at Wesleyan Christian Academy. | |
| And would you like to ask a question or take a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would like to ask a question. | |
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, can you explain the benefits and potential problems of an interest group's influence on elections? | |
| Okay, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So benefits of an interest group is they might take a policy, something that obviously they care a lot about, and either through providing information or running a pressure campaign or campaign contributions, they might take an issue that was kind of on the periphery and make it more of a mainstream issue. | ||
| And so if that's an important issue that needs to be addressed for the country, that can be definitely a positive. | ||
| Negative of that, obviously, could be that, you know, with campaign contributions, with outside influence, now with super PACs and 501c4 groups funding advertisements, it could ratchet up the negative, and that could really anger people. | ||
| It could dissuade people from voting. | ||
| There could be misinformation from a super PAC ad. | ||
| Could make, so it could increase political polarization. | ||
| It could really turn the conversation negative. | ||
| And maybe it gives the perception of corruption. | ||
| And so maybe that's one of the areas where interest groups could be seen as a negative force. | ||
| Up next, Lucas in Altoona, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Lucas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you guys? | |
| Good. | ||
| Thanks for joining. | ||
| Lucas, do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, shout out to Mr. Blau, my APGov teacher. | |
| He's the goat. | ||
| And Lucas, do you want to ask a question or take a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to take a challenge question because no one has yet. | |
| Appreciate your bravery, Lucas. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lucas, you're the man. | |
| All right, Lucas. | ||
| What are the three sides of an iron triangle in one way that iron triangles impact policymaking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, so there's the bureaucratic agency, an interest group, and then the congressional committee. | |
| One way it affects it is the interest group can lobby the congressional committee or the congress members to sway one way or another on a public policy. | ||
| Ryan, Kevin, what do you guys think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get Lucas. | |
| That was awesome. | ||
| Lucas, yeah, wear it proudly. | ||
| You earned it, my friend. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Seriously, you're one in, you know, of all the APGov students. | ||
| You got that hat. | ||
| I would just follow up, and you were 99% of the way there. | ||
| But remember, we're going to loop now back. | ||
| That congressional committee has passed a bill, and now that bureaucratic agency is going to implement it in the way that hopefully the interest group wanted it. | ||
| So, yes, that is all three sides. | ||
| That is how it works. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| Man, wear that hat with so much pride. | ||
| And friends, ask, you know, take these questions from us. | ||
| We want some, give away some hats. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you guys. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| We have some questions coming in also on social media. | ||
| This is from Benjamin in Colts Neck High School, New Jersey. | ||
| Shout out to Mrs. Richmond. | ||
| Says, I was just curious if you could explain exactly which group does dark money and why can they be so secretive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what was the first part of it? | |
| I was just curious if you could explain exactly which group does dark money and why they can be so secretive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This is one of my pushing the boulder up the hill. | ||
| I was going to say, you know, how far down the rabbit hole do we go when we talk about campaign finance? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Technically, dark money is going to come from, what is it, 501c3s, fours, and fives? | ||
|
unidentified
|
501c4s. | |
| 501c4s. | ||
| Yeah, I always worry with my students because this is the epitome of maybe you get a multiple choice question. | ||
| If you see it as a free response question, you're going to try to tie that back to just campaign finance in general, talking about things like the Citizens United case, one of those 14 cases we must know. | ||
| But I always tell my students, friends, some money gets tracked more carefully than others, but there are these kind of carve-outs where dark money has entered the system. | ||
| How much is college board going to ask you about it? | ||
| I don't know, but I'm praying for you. | ||
| Yeah, 501c4s, which groups get involved, we don't know. | ||
| That's the key thing. | ||
| It's secret because they're not political ads there, ready? | ||
| Air quotes, issue ads. | ||
| So because they don't use elect, re-elect, vote for, vote against Smith for Congress, it's an information ad. | ||
| And so therefore, there's no regulation of, you know, who is donating this, how much. | ||
| None of that is regulated. | ||
| So yeah, like Mr. Jackson said, hopefully we don't see this, but it's possible that we could. | ||
| So it's good to be ready. | ||
| Let's hear next from Liz in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. | ||
| Good morning, Liz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Liz, do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'd like to shout out my teacher, Ms. Bell from Wayland Academy. | |
| I am with my AP Gov class right now. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, Liz, would you like a challenge question or do you have a question for Ryan and Kevin? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'd like to take a challenge question. | |
| Great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Are you ready? | ||
| Identify and explain two factors that influence political socialization. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Family and media. | |
| Okay, you got the identify. | ||
| How about the explain? | ||
| Oh, well, family is where you grow up with. | ||
| So naturally, you're going to have the opinions, similar opinions to where you grow up with. | ||
| And media is what you consume and what you see and what you're surrounding yourself with. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| So naturally. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That looks like a definitely. | |
| Political socialization is simply, yeah, how did you get your views? | ||
| And the first place you're going to get it is from your family. | ||
| And then from there, there are a million different factors. | ||
| It could be your friend group at school, the city or town you live in, the region of the country you live in, and yes, the media you consume. | ||
| All of those are great. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And Liz, the reason too, I harped on that, give me the explain. | ||
| So remember, for your free response questions, you have those very specific task verbs, and that's going to tell you basically what the reader is looking for, what the rubric's calling for. | ||
| So if it's an identify, so when you mention family and you mention media, cool, you've identified something. | ||
| It's like saying, what's your favorite candy, right? | ||
| You could say Sour Patch Kids. | ||
| Okay, cool, you've identified it. | ||
| When you see explain, you need a how and a why. | ||
| You know, how, you know, tell me what Sour Patch kids are. | ||
| They're a gummy, they've got seasoning on them. | ||
| I want to engage in like cannibalism. | ||
| So there you go, whatever, right? | ||
| So you can have some fun with it. | ||
| But you need to give a little more detail in the explains. | ||
| So just be aware of that. | ||
| Liz, somebody from C-SPAN will be in touch. | ||
| We have your contact information. | ||
| I have another question coming in from text message. | ||
| It says, hi, my name is Roshan. | ||
| I hope I said that right. | ||
| Ready, and I am a high school student from Mitchell High School. | ||
| First off, I'd like to shout out my wonderful AP government politics teacher, Mr. Scott, and for the amazing work he's done and the time he's taken to teach us this year. | ||
| My question is, can you explain some of the main types of causes of high voter turnout and how that will influence high voter efficacy among young voters? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good question. | |
| Yeah, when we talk about voter efficacy, voter efficacy is, you know, frankly, how much do I think my vote matters? | ||
| And if I have high voter efficacy, I'm going to show up. | ||
| And how do you drive people to the polls? | ||
| It's through those policies. | ||
| What are the things that matter to me? | ||
| And how are you going to earn my vote? | ||
| And so whether it's education or whether it's some of the big issues that come up in recent years, whatever it is, if it matters to me, I'm going to show up at the polls because I have high voter efficacy and I know that my vote matters. | ||
| If I feel like these guys aren't really talking to me, I don't connect with any of them. | ||
| They aren't addressing the issues that are important to me. | ||
| I might sit out on the sidelines. | ||
| Young people, register and vote. | ||
| It matters. | ||
| It's vitally important. | ||
| If you want to get your voice heard, you got to show up. | ||
| I will echo that completely. | ||
| I think that is a great sentiment. | ||
| You know, and typically, in addition to addressing the issues that young voters care about, which is where your question went, sometimes, you know, you get candidates that are young. | ||
| Like, we haven't really had that in the last couple of elections. | ||
| You know, I've thought in 2028, one of my hypotheses is that any candidate under 60 is practically a child now, and that they will actually exert a lot of enthusiasm. | ||
| So, if we get candidates, typically when we have candidates in their 40s, which you think's ancient, but be quiet, you know, as a presidential candidate, that's where we've really seen young voters get very excited. | ||
| Barack Obama was in his 40s, Bill Clinton was in his 40s, John F. Kennedy was in his 40s. | ||
| But I can, you know, vividly remember the enthusiasm amongst youth with younger candidates. | ||
| JD Vance is really young. | ||
| So, again, for him, if he's running in 2028, he might get a lot of enthusiasm amongst young voters. | ||
| So, definitely the issues, but I think also the youth of the candidate can really excite them. | ||
| Let's hear from Nona in Westland, Michigan. | ||
| Good morning, Nona. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Michigan. | |
| Nona, do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I want to shout out Mr. Currier. | |
| I actually have to call in because every single time I ask him a question, he does like he makes eye contact with me and he doesn't break it, so it kind of freaks me out. | ||
| So, this is the last resort. | ||
| Nona, would you like a challenge question or do you have your own question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there any way I can do both? | |
| We're doing just one or the other today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I'll do a challenge question. | |
| Great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The next question we have is: if you can get up on the screen, identify an expressed power of Congress and a way that another branch could check that use of power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, one of the powers of Congress is to, they have the power of the purse and they have the power of the sword. | |
| So, I know that I guess could the executive branch can make executive agreements rather than treaties because Congress has the power to make treaties. | ||
| Okay, yeah, for I would say the an expressed power is the power to oh, actually, I'm sorry, the president, yes, the president negotiates treaties, Congress has the power to ratify the treaties. | ||
| So, Mr. Jackson, what are you thinking? | ||
| I'm a little on the fence on this one. | ||
| You know, whenever I see the powers of Congress, I immediately go to Article 1, Section 8. | ||
| And so, what are the big ones there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Power to tax, regulate interstate commerce, declare war. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, for example, on this question, you know, yeah, Congress has the power to declare war, but the president is the commander-in-chief. | ||
| So, the president can deploy troops and Congress can pass a resolution to say that's okay, or they can pass a resolution saying no, bring them home. | ||
| Yeah, Nona, we appreciate it. | ||
| But I also want her to get a hat. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want her to get a hat. | |
| Get her a hat. | ||
| We're going to get her a hat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, we got to look out for Michigan. | |
| All right. | ||
| Nona, go ahead. | ||
| We have your contact information and someone will be in touch. | ||
| Kevin and Ryan, do you have any other question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, so Mr. Jackson absolutely gave a good point. | |
| So, students, it's a good idea to go back to Article 1, Section 8, kind of look back through those powers. | ||
| Not a bad idea, too, to look at Article 2, maybe for some of the examples, because there are some legislative powers in Article 2 and to see also what roles the president plays. | ||
| So, it's good, might be a good thing to do in these last couple days before the exam. | ||
| National Constitution Center has a really great interactive constitution where they explain these things, so that might be a good resource, and it's free and accessible and easy to use. | ||
| Kevin, wanted to ask you a question about constitutional provisions. | ||
| We have a chart on our screen looking at enhanced federal powers and enhanced state powers. | ||
| What can you tell us about it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, personally, I love these questions. | |
| I think they're really fun. | ||
| And so, here's my advice. | ||
| Again, students, I ran the math this morning. | ||
| You have 80 minutes to do 55 questions. | ||
| That's 87 seconds per question. | ||
| Yes, as Ryan said earlier, some of these have readings attached to them. | ||
| And usually, if there's a reading attached, they're going to ask you two or three questions, so you kind of bank it all together. | ||
| When you see one of these two-column questions, go one column at a time. | ||
| Okay, so enhances federal power. | ||
| Does the necessary and proper clause, a power of Congress, their implied powers? | ||
| Yes, that does. | ||
| Okay, we're keeping that one in the pool. | ||
| Does the Commerce Clause? | ||
| Yes, that does. | ||
| Uh-oh, we're keeping a lot in the pool. | ||
| Supremacy Clause? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| Fifth Amendment? | ||
| Not as much. | ||
| So I think we can throw away the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| Now let's go in the enhancing state powers. | ||
| Does the 14th Amendment enhance the power of states? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I bet there's a better one on the board. | ||
| Does the 10th Amendment? | ||
| Yes, the reserve powers, powers reserved to the states. | ||
| So we're pretty sure it's going to be B, but let's keep going. | ||
| The 17th Amendment, popular election of senators. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| And Article 5 with amendments? | ||
| No, that's going to be both. | ||
| So now we come back and we say, oh, look, the Commerce Clause and the 10th Amendment answer both sides of this. | ||
| That's our answer. | ||
| Go column by column and then see where it's both. | ||
| Let's talk with Penelope in Garden Grove, California. | ||
| Good morning, Penelope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I'd like to shout out Mr. Warmer. | ||
| And Penelope, do you have a question or do you want a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I had a question. | |
| So my question was: how do I prepare for the variability or the different scenarios of Part C for the SCOTUS FOQ? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's going to be tricky. | ||
| They could ask you a lot of different things for the SCOTUS question. | ||
| One of the resources that I will direct you to is to C-SPAN Classroom. | ||
| And so in the AP government review section, there are, I think at this point, around 15 Supreme Court questions. | ||
| This was a couple of years ago when I was a C-SPAN Summer Fellow. | ||
| I made it my mission to write more practice questions than what the college board had, and they're all housed on C-SPAN Classroom. | ||
| And you can just go to the C prompt for all of those and see all the different things that they could possibly ask. | ||
| And one real big pointer that I'm going to mention for that one is if they ask you about what is a constitutional process for someone that they didn't like, you know, the way that the court case was handled, what they're looking for is a constitutional amendment and be sure to explain the process of constitutional amendments, that it involves both the federal government taking action and state ratification. | ||
| If you're not going to mention that, if you just say, oh, it would be a constitutional amendment, that's not going to be enough because it's an explain prompt. | ||
| So you really do want to make sure if you see that constitutional process, make sure to hit both federal and state. | ||
| Close that loop. | ||
| Close that loop. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Another question coming in on X for you. | ||
| It says, my name is Yeb Sarah and I'm a student from Walkersville High School. | ||
| What do you think is the best way to memorize all of the required Supreme Court cases before the exam? | ||
| Also, shout out to my APGov teacher, Miss Skeena. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do you eat an elephant? | |
| One bite at a time, right? | ||
| And so realistically, you just got to dig in. | ||
| You got to dig in. | ||
| And, you know, college board is fun. | ||
| They've thrown a couple of, you know, flip sides of a coin almost. | ||
| Like we talked about earlier. | ||
| Baker v. Carr, Shaw v. Reno are both about congressional apportioning and reapportionment. | ||
| One's about people, one's about race. | ||
| Whatever shorthand you can make that for yourself, great. | ||
| Engle v. Vital and Wisconsin v. Yoder are the two religion cases. | ||
| Engel is about school prayer. | ||
| Yoder is about religious practice, taking your kids out of school. | ||
| Free exercise, right? | ||
| And so as you look through each of them, you know, there's going to be something that hopefully clicks for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know one of the resources I shared on X is a Quizlet that I have of the 14 cases. | ||
| So again, just like Mr. Jackson said, one, you know, eating an elephant one boat at a time, you got to just practice them and try and remember. | ||
| And yeah, maybe categorize them and know like, okay, these are my First Amendment cases. | ||
| These are my gerrymandering cases. | ||
| But, you know, it is nice that you only have to know 14. | ||
| Prior to the 2019 redesign, you had to know like every Supreme Court case ever. | ||
| So we have it a little bit easier this time. | ||
| So it was the important ones, Ryan. | ||
| The under all thousand million of them. | ||
| Let's talk with Adam in West Haven, Connecticut. | ||
| Good morning, Adam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you? | |
| Doing well. | ||
| Do you want to shout out your teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| I want to shout out Mr. Consorti the GOAT at OSAM, Connecticut. | ||
| Been teaching for 20 years, one of the best guys I ever met. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Adam, do you have a question or would you like a challenge question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll take a challenge question. | |
| Great. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Explain the difference between a delegate role and a trustee role for members of Congress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Perfect question. | ||
| So essentially, like a trustee role is when it's like, so their constituents, they're going to be like, oh, vote this, vote this, however. | ||
| The trustee model is like, you know what? | ||
| I'm the one doing the job. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| I have the experience. | ||
| Like, you know, let me do my thing. | ||
| And the delegate model is essentially like the constituents, you know, they kind of try to convince the guy what to do, and then he's going to go based off the constituents to make them happy. | ||
| Get our friend a hat, Tammy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I was going to say, you got a hat going to Connecticut. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, Adam, that was solid. | ||
| When I do it, I just tell my students, trustee, trust me. | ||
| Delegate, I am delegating my authority to you. | ||
| What do you want me to do? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Adam, stay, or we have your contact information. | ||
| Somebody from C-SPAN will be in touch. | ||
| Thanks for calling in. | ||
| And up next, Henry in Bethesda, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Henry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, everybody. | |
| I go to Walt Ripple High School shouting out Mr. Obando. | ||
| And I have a question for you guys. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Yeah, so I can't figure out or comprehend how Marbury v. Madison ends up in judicial review. | ||
| It's really confusing for me. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good question to have. | ||
| It seems that does it have anything to do with William Marbury not getting his appointment as a Justice of the Peace? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| John Marshall kind of just weaves it in there and it just becomes the biggest precedent and check that the Supreme Court has. | ||
| You know, when you read Article 3, there's not a lot of there there. | ||
| I mean, judicial review is kind of hinted at, but that's one of the big controversies early on in American constitutional era. | ||
| But Marshall basically says, we got to end this now and kind of wedges it in there. | ||
| So yeah, in terms of the facts of the case, it doesn't really relate. | ||
| But as long as you know it establishes judicial review, you should be good. | ||
| Yeah, and I would just chime in. | ||
| You know, yes, as Ryan said, Article 3, there's not a lot of there there, but linking Article 3 to Federalist 78, one of the other documents we have to know that talks about that independent judiciary. | ||
| And Hamilton in 78 speaks a lot to what judicial review is likely to be. | ||
| And then when you go to Marbury v. Madison, the key quote from there is, you know, it is the job of the court to determine what the law is. | ||
| And so if you can tie those three thoughts together, good grief, I'm strumbling over my own words here. | ||
| Tie those three together. | ||
| We have run out of time for this year's review session. | ||
| If you missed, it went so fast. | ||
| Time flies when you're having fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Let's do another hour. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| I tell them that every year. | ||
| Let's just do three hours. | ||
| If you've missed any part of this segment, you can find it online at cspan.org slash classroom, along with previous year's review sessions as well. | ||
| Both students and teachers will also find a collection of resources specifically for the advanced placement, government, and politics exam mini. | ||
| Again, thank you so much. | ||
| Designed by Ryan, one of our guests. | ||
| You can find that by going to our features resources page in the upper right-hand corner. | ||
| There are also resources for teachers of other subjects as well, including social studies, economics, and science. | ||
| Our guests, Kevin Jackson and Troy Renenka, we really appreciate your time and expertise. | ||
| Any final words for students who are going to be taking the test Tuesday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am jumping all over. | |
| Yeah, students, oh, go for it. | ||
| Just put in the work. | ||
| Ryan, I cut in front of you. | ||
| Students, you put in the work. | ||
| No, no, go for it. | ||
| Take a couple hours this weekend and, you know, just review things, right? | ||
| Think about all the hours you've put in so far. | ||
| Just get through that finish line and run through it. | ||
| Don't just wait back. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Teachers, you're amazing. | ||
| You've done so much work with these kids. | ||
| Kids, it's amazing hearing all the shout-outs this morning. | ||
| We've got Teacher Appreciation Week coming up next week. | ||
| I have to appreciate all of the people in our teacher networks. | ||
| Ryan, thank you so much for asking me to be a part of this. | ||
| Ms. Condit up in Washington, Ms. Smith and Ms. Whitmer out in Pennsylvania. | ||
| You all do amazing work. | ||
| Don't ever let me win an award because I know I'll forget to thank my mom. | ||
| So thank you, mom, also. | ||
| My wife, my friends here at Petaluma High, Lisa Kane across town at Casa Grande. | ||
| Lots of great things. | ||
| Students, you got this. | ||
| You've put in the work. | ||
| See it through. | ||
| And most importantly, you are a productive, wonderful, amazing member of society. | ||
| This is part of all of us. | ||
| You are the government too. | ||
| Get involved. | ||
| Ryan, go for it. | ||
| We actually lost Ryan, so we will end it there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| We know it would have been great, but we lost him. | ||
| So, Kevin, we very much appreciate your time. | ||
| Again, your wisdom. | ||
| Good luck to all the students out there. | ||
| And that does it for today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern with another program. |