CSPAN - Washington Journal 05/19/2025

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May 19, 2025 07:00-10:00 - CSPAN

02:59:43

Washington Journal 05/19/2025

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douglas holtz-eakin

27:07

john mcardle

cspan 38:48

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brian lamb

cspan 00:38

jake tapper

cnn 00:38

jd vance

admin 01:15

jim clyburn

rep/d 01:05

ralph norman

rep/r 00:56

rand paul

sen/r 01:16

ray mcgovern

00:43

scott bessent

admin 01:36

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ellen brown

00:07

jonathan karl

abc 00:05

kristen welker

nbc 00:10

walter burien

00:12

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louise in virginia

callers 00:14

russell in wyoming

callers 00:05

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Congressional reporter on the week ahead in Congress.
		Also, Washington Examiner White House reporter Naomi Lim previews the week ahead at the White House.
		And Virginia K. Salomon of Common Cause discusses President Trump's decision to accept a luxury plane from the country of Cotter and reports of potential conflicts of interest in his administration.
		Washington Journal is next.
		Join the conversation.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		It's Monday, May 19th, 2025.
		The House returns at noon Eastern today.
		The Senate meets at 3 p.m.
		And we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal.
		We begin with the announcement yesterday that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
		The announcement said that the 82-year-old former president was diagnosed on Friday and that the cancer cells have spread to his bones.
		This morning, we're getting your reaction to that news on phone line split regionally.
		If you're in the Eastern or Central time zones, it's 202-748-8000.
		If you're in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001.
		You can also send us a text, that number 202-748-8003.
		If you do, go ahead and include your name and where you're from.
		Otherwise, catch up with us on social media on X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook.
		It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN.
		And a very good Monday morning to you.
		You can go ahead and start calling in now the news coming yesterday afternoon about the former president's health diagnosis.
		This was the statement from his personal office in its entirety.
		Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increased urinary symptoms.
		On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a gleason score of nine with metastasis to the bone.
		While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the statement said the cancer appears to be hormone sensitive, which allows for effective management.
		The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.
		That was the statement yesterday afternoon, that diagnosis coming on Friday.
		And the Washington Post today with some more information about prostate cancer and the incidence of prostate cancer around the world.
		In 2020, prostate cancer was the second most commonly diagnosed cancer and the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States.
		That's according to the National Cancer Institute.
		According to 2020 data published in the Journal of Frontiers and Public Health, there are 1,414,000 new cases globally with 375,000 deaths.
		It is the most frequent diagnosis of cancer in 112 countries and the leading cause of cancer death in 48 of those countries.
		The Washington Post today with a wrap-up.
		Plenty of statements coming and sympathies being sent to the former president, including by the current president.
		This was Donald Trump on his Truth social page.
		Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden's recent medical diagnosis.
		We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.
		Also, statements from the previous Democratic presidents, including Barack Obama, the former president saying, Michelle and I are thinking of the entire Biden family.
		Nobody has done more to find breakthrough treatments for cancer in all its forms than Joe.
		And I am certain that he will fight this challenge with his trademark resolve and grace.
		We pray for a fast and full recovery.
		And statements from members of Congress as well.
		And we will get to those throughout this first segment of the Washington Journal.
		But we want to hear from you your reaction to that news coming yesterday.
		We'll start in California.
		This is Annie.
		Annie, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		My favorite one of them, Greta, and such like that.
		Well, I just want to say that I think Joe Biden did one very courageous thing, several, and one that I'm going to just point to is he appointed a Native American to be the Secretary of Interior.
		And I just applaud that.
		I feel like, you know, the wounds of this country, and I've said it before, but anyway, it just sounds like we're not going to move forward in any way if we don't look at what we've done.
		And I know it's not the current people maybe who did it, but I just feel like that's so important.
		And I just applaud Joe Biden for doing that.
		And I'm very sorry to hear that he's going through, it sounds like a painful, very painful time.
		And I hope people honor him for the things that he's done that are good like that.
		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Annie in California.
		Harold is in Tennessee.
		Good morning.
		You are next.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		Thank you for taking the call.
		I just want to send President Biden our blessings and hope that he has a speedy recovery.
		And here I just noticed over on CNN are talking about that book, about his mind.
		But when people stop and look pleased with what Joe Biden done during his presidency, you know, the Social Security raises, the man done a good job.
		The man was not crazy.
		I mean, that's just awful what they're doing at that man.
		And he ate his life trying to help this country.
		And he's not a crazy man.
		But thank you for taking the call.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That book that I assume you're talking about, the one that's getting a lot of attention, Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, it's by Jay Tapper of CNN, Alex Thompson of Axios.
		There's the cover of that book.
		Excerpts of that book, Making the Rounds in various newspapers in the front page of the Washington Post.
		Their wrap-up of today's news about Joe Biden's health issues.
		They write, this news comes at an extraordinary moment for the 82-year-old Biden and his party as Democrats.
		In recent days, they have been second-guessing their handling of the 2024 election, especially the aging Biden's insistence on running for re-election until a stumbling debate performance forced him from the race.
		That's today's Washington Post.
		We're getting your reaction to news about Joe Biden's diagnosis.
		This is James in New York.
		Good morning.
unidentified		It's me.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's you, James.
unidentified		Okay, good morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		78 years old, Vietnam vet.
		I was just diagnosed four weeks ago with a nodula on my prostate.
		The problem is, and I guess the same thing happened with President Joe Biden, who I like a lot.
		The problem is they stopped doing the back door test about six years ago.
		Up until six years ago, I was getting the back door test, which for anybody that doesn't know, that leaves a finger in the rectum.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Gotcha.
unidentified		They stopped doing that about six years ago, and they were just doing the blood test.
		And men like that because it was kind of belittling the back, but it was necessary, and especially now.
		So I went for an exam four weeks ago, and the doctor said he found something, so I have an MRI test Friday coming.
		And I wish Joe a speedy recovery.
		I'm praying on my own self.
		I'm not over anxious because I believe in prayer.
		And I asked the men, you have to ask a doctor, go ahead and check it.
		It takes 10 seconds and it's uncomfortable, but you get over with it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's James in New York.
		Melissa is in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, Mr. McArdle.
		You know, I find this all a very strange story, frankly.
		I mean, I can't remember, I'm a middle-aged woman, I can't remember a single modern president who has been diagnosed with stage four cancer.
		They are receiving literally the CEO plus benefits package.
		A doctor travels with them.
		Prostate diagnosis in a man of his age is very easy to come by before it gets to stage four.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When you have a doctor in the house, so Melissa, what are you saying that this should have been diagnosed sooner?
unidentified		Well, first of all, I question if it's a real diagnosis.
		I guess is this the same doctor that told us he was fine, sharp as attack, fit as a fiddle?
		I mean, these things are really just unbelievable.
		I can't believe the continuous lies.
		I really can't.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What would be the reason for lying about this, Melissa?
unidentified		I don't know.
		Three books just came out about them.
		You had two of those authors on your program, the Amy and then Mr. Whipple or Whittle.
		Chris Whipple.
		I mean, Chris Whipple, thank you.
		So, and then there's another one coming out by two more liars.
		I don't know why these books weren't written when those of us who had two articulating brain cells could see that something was wrong neurodegeneratively with Joe Biden back in 2018 at least, if not before, frankly.
		But that's as far back as I can really remember seeing it myself.
		So I don't, I mean, 2018, that's a long time.
		And they just kept telling us he was fine.
		And the people who wrote the books also lied.
		So I guess this is a furtherance of a cover-up.
		You know, it's never the crime.
		It's the cover-up.
		But I can't think of a single modern president who's gotten to stage four cancer or, frankly, cancer of any kind.
		They've got an in-house doctor.
		Come on.
		That's for plebes and PMs like that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point.
		That's Melissa in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
		This is Guy in St. Augustine, Florida.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I happen to be a little bit older than President Biden, and I want to qualify that last caller, that gentleman.
		I just had a prostate exam less than two months ago, and they're using both procedures.
		And all my doctors have always used, as he wants to call, as he'd like to call it, the backdoor procedure, and not just a blood test.
		They're both currently used.
		And furthermore, I just believe truly that nobody in government should be in that position, whether it's the president or anybody in service for our country over the age of 70.
		Pilots are required to quit flying at 65 for a good reason.
		It's a very stressful job.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And you don't think we should have a president over the age of 70?
unidentified		No, I think that that's ridiculous.
		And the same with the Supreme Court.
		There's no reason to die in service of your country.
		70 should be a cutoff.
		And most corporations also do that.
		So it's not.
		It's not unusual.
		You've got a high-pressure job.
		And it's the same thing why the FAA requires controllers to quit before the age of 60.
		It's just you're in a pressure cooker all the time.
		The bottom line is we should put new laws in effect.
		You have to be a certain age to run for president, and it should be a maximum age for cutoff for running for president.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's a guy in St. Augustine, Florida, another former president with a statement out yesterday evening.
		Former President Bill Clinton.
		My friend Joe Biden's always been a fighter.
		He wrote on X. Hillary and I are rooting for him and are keeping him, Joe, and the entire family in our thoughts.
		Just one of the many statements coming yesterday in the wake of this diagnosis, statements from Republicans on Capitol Hill as well.
		Steve Scalise, the majority leader, praying for former President Joe Biden as he battles prostate cancer.
		Marjorie Taylor Green, the congresswoman and often critic of Joe Biden when he was in office, saying, I'm sorry to see this news.
		Cancer is truly awful.
		My dad passed away in 2021 with cancer.
		Prayers for Joe Biden and his family and statements coming often yesterday in the wake of that diagnosis that was released.
		The diagnosis was made on Friday.
		The announcement from Joe Biden's personal office coming yesterday afternoon.
		This is Jim, Grand Forks, North Dakota.
		Good morning to you.
unidentified		Hey, John, are you reading me?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I am reading you loud and clear.
unidentified		How you doing, buddy?
		Well, yes, I'm no fan of Joe Biden's politically, but my father had prostate cancer.
		And the one good thing, I'm not a doctor, but I'm playing one on TV right now.
		From what I found out with my dad, he passed away for something else at the age of 94 a couple of years ago.
		He got it late in life.
		He got it in his late 70s.
		And it grows a little slower when you're older.
		It's all about testosterone.
		I think some people might not know that.
		And he had, there's different ways they can deal with it.
		He had this, I think, they seeded it.
		They seed the actual prostate with these radioactive little things, and then it shrinks it.
		And he had all kinds of problems that go along with it, having to be catheterized.
		It's really, if you remember the pain he went through, but he defeated it after about a year, completely defeated it totally, and then he went on to live another 15 years.
		But this is a, Biden's gone pretty far here.
		I don't know how, like the one person said, how did it get this to this to this moment?
		I probably have to keep an eye on it.
		I get up a lot at night and go to the bathroom.
		I better watch it myself.
		But also, it's interesting.
		Since this is a political show, it's a good chance to maybe make a statement.
		You hear a lot about breast cancer and female health needs.
		We hear about women's health all the time, women's health.
		You never hear about men's health because that's the way our society is.
		We're female-oriented.
		We like to take care of women and we worry about women, but we don't really take care of our men.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This brings more attention to prostate cancer.
unidentified		Yeah, because you know, John, one time I even asked a girl this when she got mad at me, but all these breast cancer, they have breast cancer walks and breast cancer parade.
		The men put on pink shirts and follow behind their wives, pink ribbons everywhere.
		I even see trucks that are painted pink in North Dakota, a cement truck that breast cancer awareness cement truck.
		I swear to God, it's a little ridiculous, but because more men die of prostate cancer than women die of breast cancer.
		But the truth is, really, women, you won't see women marching for us.
		They won't put on a blue ribbon if we had organizations for that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		If you didn't know, March has been designated Prostate Cancer Awareness Month and several campaigns out there about prostate cancer.
unidentified		You can Google them yourself or look up.
		That's good.
		One more thing, please.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Sure, Jim.
unidentified		Yes.
		Also, African, we should be, we talk a lot about African-American men's health.
		This is not about African-American men get this really higher than white men or Asian men, but it's not because of socioeconomic, it's not because they can't get to a doctor, it's because of testosterone.
		Once again, blacks have a higher serum testosterone rate than whites and even higher level than Asians.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All right, that's Jim in North Dakota.
		This is Yvonne in Florida.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		The first thing that I would like to say is I send healing prayers for Joe Biden, and my heart goes out to the family, although I truly could not stand his politics.
		However, I came across a video just this morning where Joe Biden back in 2022 was speaking about something in the water or something out there in Delaware that was causing a lot of men to get cancer.
		And he actually said me and others get cancer.
		So my question is: I wonder if he's had it since 2022.
		And of course, the obvious reason for the cover-up was the reelection.
		And like they covered up everything else.
		And personally, I don't see how anybody can go overnight.
		One checkup last week when he's had the best doctors in the world when he was in the White House.
		I believe that the family has known.
		I believe this is another cover-up, just like the cover-up with his cognitive issues.
		And I believe the reason they release this information now is because of the information that came out with the tapes that were released on the book of showing how bad Joe's memory was with him not remembering his son dying or even being the vice president.
		So to take the light off of that, they're going to release the information about him being sick so that it will, he'll get the sympathy and not be getting the backlash of lying and covering up to the American people.
		And that basically is all that I have to say.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The tapes that you're referring to, I'm assuming, is the recordings of the former president's interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.
		They were held over two sessions in October of 2023.
		And they were released, the transcripts released last year, the full interview and the tapes of that interview.
		Axios published them, and they're several hours long.
		As you can hear in them, Joe Biden struggling to find the right words and dates when recounting various details, including the time of his son's death, notably, and what has made many of the headlines.
		You can listen to those tapes at Axios' website, axius.com.
		This is Michael in Elmhurst, Illinois.
		About 10 minutes left here for this discussion.
		We'll move to open forum in about 10 minutes.
		But Michael, go ahead.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		I just want to point out that a president getting advanced cancer is very rare.
		Only two presidents have died of cancer, U.S. Grant and Grover, Cleveland.
		And that's over 140 years ago.
		So it's very rare.
		And I kind of think that, you know, this certainly takes a lot of pressure off the Democrats.
		You know, that it's going to be very hard to attack Biden now that he has his so-called stage four.
		So that's my conspiracy.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Michael, where do you go for presidents who have died of cancer?
unidentified		Well, you can, you Google it.
		It's very common.
		And that's so, I mean, there have been a couple of skin cancers from Reagan and Lyndon Johnson has skin cancers.
		But to get this far, when you have around the clock here, to get to stage four, that's unheard of.
russell in wyoming ▲ ● ▼		That's a failure of the medical system around the president.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Michael in Elmhurst, Illinois.
		Sue is out of Baltimore.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi.
		It's always sad when people are ill and have to suffer.
		And it's a little bit of a rude awakening.
		The first two calls I heard this morning were sort of speculating about a cover-up.
		And I just want to say, as a Christian, one of the commandments is not to bear false witness.
		And it seems like that's an awful lot of what television is.
		Can't really blame callers too much because that's what a lot of anchors do on a lot of news shows.
		But in particular, this is sort of like the most negative type of speculation.
		I think the prior caller made a good point and a more valid point, which is that this could be just a failure on the part of the president's medical team.
		And what it is a good opportunity for us as Americans to discuss our medical system, the types of care that the type, the quality of care that people are receiving, which is we now know is much, is way under par, especially for what we pay.
		And this is for the average American.
		It is surprising that a wealthy and or powerful person would receive this type of apparently a failure to adequately screen, likely.
		But this is happening to many, many people.
		So many people are suffering because of poor medical care, underdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, missed and misdiagnosis.
		And this is an opportunity for us as Americans to reach out to each other, to care about each other's suffering, to stop being so combative and cruel to each other, and to look at some of these institutions that have the power, that are making the money, that are making one-fifth of the GDP off of the medical care system and say, why are we being failed?
		And my prayers go out to everybody who's suffering or injured and not receiving adequate care medically or socially.
		And that's my comment this morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Sue out of Baltimore.
		Sue, you mentioned that several callers have brought up Plenty of coverage about Joe Biden's medical conditions over the years and ideas of whether they were covered up, getting attention specifically in the new book that's coming out from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios' original sin: President Biden's decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.
		Jake Tapper was interviewing James Clyburn, the Democrat of South Carolina on CNN's State of the Union yesterday.
		This was in the morning before the news from Joe Biden's office about his cancer condition came out, but the discussion surrounded the idea of a cover-up around Joe Biden's medical condition leading into the 2024 election.
		This is about a minute and a half.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that your party's incredibly low standing with the American people in polling has anything to do with the impression that many people in your party, especially in the White House, and especially President Biden and his family and inner circle, hid his actual dysfunction, his non-functioning abilities from the American people, not only hidden from the American people,
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		but hid them from you and cabinet officials and donors and even other people in the White House?
unidentified		Do you think that the low polling has anything to do with that?
jim clyburn ▲ ● ▼		Well, it very well could have.
		I haven't looked at the numbers behind the numbers to come in the conclusion as to what exactly is going on here.
		I do know that on yesterday, I spent a pretty full day starting out with the commencement of a Converse College up in Spartanburg, finished last night at a sneaker party of a hit start fundraiser.
		And I talked to people, talked to students, and people still feel that Joe Biden has had the capacity to do the work that needed to be done.
		They still feel that Joe Biden was a good president, and I do as well.
		And so, but these people are also concerned.
		I mean, they look back at those tapes, they remember the debate, and they are concerned as to whether or not that was, in fact, just an incident or whether that was a condition that was being kept from people.
		I have no way of knowing which one is true.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Jim Clyburn and Jake Tapper yesterday on CNN's State of the Union.
		This is Paul in Louisiana.
		As we have been talking about Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis released yesterday, Paul, your reaction.
unidentified		Well, it's tragic, you know.
		And I'll be honest with you, I just don't understand people.
		You know, this man was a president who he had a prior life, and it wasn't a good life.
		It might have been for him, but it wasn't in God's eyes.
		And I think a lot of the things that he did, he didn't do because he wasn't present.
		And the Democrats covered that up.
		The news media covered it up.
		Everybody saw it.
		That's why Trump won the election.
		But I want to ask you one question.
		Name one honorable Democrat in the House of the Senate.
		Just one.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Paul, how would you answer that question?
unidentified		I don't see one.
		I don't see anybody in the Democratic Party that's honest.
		They're all screaming.
		You got the squad scream.
		It's so much anger.
		You know, you got to forgive Joe Biden for what he did.
		Everybody, you know, the Bible says, don't forget seven, seven times seven.
		And that's the problem.
		We're supposed to always forgive.
		And the Democrats have so much hate in their hearts that they have no capacity to love people.
		They hate.
		That's all they do.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I would like to know if you feel that way about every Democrat in this country.
unidentified		What's that?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You feel that way about every Democrat in this country?
unidentified		I'm sure there's a handful of them, but I don't see them on TV.
		Those are the quiet ones that are, you know, probably honest Christian guys.
		Everybody else is out screaming.
		I don't see, I don't hear Mr. Clyburn screaming, but he's protected Joe Biden, and he covered up too.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Paul in Louisiana.
		We're going to shift now into open forum for the rest of this first hour of the Washington Journal.
		Phone lines, as usual, Democrats 202-748-8000.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Independents 202-748-8002.
		You can continue to call in about the former president's cancer diagnosis or any public policy, political issue that you want to talk about.
		And there is plenty of news going on.
		The House returns today at noon Eastern, though the House Budget Committee was meeting late into the night last night on that mega bill, as it's being called, the Big Beautiful bill, as President Trump likes to refer to it.
		Here's a story from Politico.
		House Republicans finally launched their party line tax and spending package from the budget committee late Sunday night after Republican leaders promised changes to appease fiscal hawks after an embarrassing setback last week.
		The vote to approve the measure for floor action follows a weekend of negotiations between House Republican leaders, the White House, and four Republican lawmakers who tanked the same committee vote on Friday.
		Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters late Sunday night that minor modifications were promised to those holdouts.
		And Speaker Johnson is looking to have a final vote in the House on that tax and spending package by the end of this week heading into the Memorial Day weekend.
		We'll see if that happens and we'll talk more about the week ahead in Washington in about 30 minutes.
		But did want to show you just the cameras outside the House Budget Committee meeting late last night.
		They finished their vote last night, advanced it to the House floor.
		It was Republican Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Chip Roy of Texas speaking to reporters after the meeting.
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		Had some great changes.
		Got a lot more to work to do.
		We're excited about what we did.
		We wanted to move the bill forward and it went like I thought.
unidentified		What changes are confirmed that you've secured?
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		Took the delays out of the work requirements.
unidentified		When are those going to kick in for Medicaid?
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		25 to three year kick in.
		So they'll kick in and the Medicaid kicks in early.
		I think two years that they'll have it.
		IRA was a big deal.
		They cut that timeframe back to three years instead of 31, 32.
		Work requirements were a big deal.
		We were excited about it.
unidentified		So when do the work requirements kick in now?
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know.
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		I've been, my mind is, we've been having a lot of work lately, up late, but it's a lot better than what it was.
unidentified		And why vote present?
unidentified		What do you still need to get you to a yes?
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		Well, we've been downgraded three times.
unidentified		I mean, we're going to have to.
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		We have problems with the money in this country, the debt.
		And thus, we just got a lot of the F maps got to be dealt with.
		Thank you, Congressman.
unidentified		Can you explain what's happening?
		Can you stop this?
		I just put out a statement.
		I just put it out on Twitter.
		They'll speak for itself.
		Good luck.
		What was this?
		You guys can read.
		Are you going to advance it rules?
		I mean, we'll see.
		There's a lot more work to do this week.
		Have you guys settled on the area?
		How are you going to advance the start date of the Medicaid requirements?
		For the speaker to sort out, we made progress this weekend, but as you'll see in my statement, we didn't get nearly far enough.
		Do you think you can solve it?
		They're already trying to.
		Well, I'm just going to leave it at that.
		There's more that needs to be done.
		Did President Trump lean in this discussion?
		I'm not going to talk about private conversations.
		Excuse me, guys.
		Do you think you can get it for the rules this week?
		We'll see.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Chip Roy and then Ralph Norman before that.
		Two of the four Republicans who voted present at that budget committee hearing last night, not a yes or a no, but present.
		But doing that lowered the threshold for Republicans to advance that bill.
		They did last night.
		It heads to the House floor, and we'll see what happens this week on a final vote in the House.
		That's one of the topics we can talk about in this open forum or any public policy issue or political issue that you want to discuss.
		202748-8000 for Democrats.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Independents 202-748-8002.
		About 30 minutes left here in this first hour to do that.
		This is Deborah in California, line for Democrats.
		Deborah, good morning to you.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
unidentified		How are you?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing well.
unidentified		I'm calling, first of all, I'm just devastated about President Biden, and it has really broken my heart.
		But there is a possibility that he will pull through this.
		God is good.
		I just want to say, pertaining to the vote and all this that's going on, it is amazing to me how people can just forget so fast how much the Democratic Party did for America.
		President Biden was a president for all people, red states, blue states, no matter who they were.
		And everybody, if they really come out of that fog that's in their mind, they know it's the truth.
		They know what's true and they know what's false.
		And it's been my prayer for a while, especially since Trump has come back into office.
		And it has been just like absolutely every day like a whiplash with your head.
		Can you even believe what these people are doing?
		It's like to me, they're just raiding, raiding every agency and putting us back on our heels to a place of, say, maybe 1930 or something.
		I wasn't born then in 1930, but it's something that I have never, ever seen in my whole life in America.
		And I wish that these people are participating in this, I don't even know what to call it.
		It seems like a cult.
		It's cult mind.
		They need to wake up and realize, for instance, one thing that was on my mind is about how President Biden got the insulin.
		I mean, people forgot how he was trying to do good for everybody to help America.
		Now cutting Medi-Cal and Medicaid and all these things that they want to do to get trillions of dollars for the rich.
		And they did that in 2020 and never paid the bill.
		That is why our deficit is so high.
		They never paid back the first money for the rich.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you think the 2017 tax cuts passed during the first Trump administration, do you think they will be extended?
unidentified		It's a possibility the way they're going.
		I mean, I think that they are, you know, like really afraid, so afraid of Trump that even though a few want to come out and try to do the right thing because their constituents in their town hall meetings are just coming out and coming in the streets, the Red State.
		But yet still when they get in the back, in the back and they get a phone call, obviously from Trump like he's been doing, they all come back out and say the same thing.
		We're sticking together.
		Why are you sticking together when it's affecting your mother, your grandmother, all these people that are going to be like in poverty?
		I mean, they're going to be in nursing, maybe not even be able to go to a nursing home.
		I just don't get it, sir.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Deborah in California to Florence Mass.
		This is John, Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hello, John.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		I'd just like to say that there's some good and there's some bad with every side.
		However, the mainstream media and the public media focus the narratives only on the positive for the Democrats and the negatives for the Republicans.
		For instance, I hear about this $400 million plane that the Qataris are going to give us, and they say that that might give us undue influence.
		Well, what about the millions and billions of dollars that they give to our universities for their undue influence to support this anti-Semitism?
		So I don't think that that's very fair.
		And whenever Democrats have a failure, they have group gaslighting like Joe Biden's mental incapacity, and now they're all going to cry about his cancer.
		And they say they're looking forward now, but all they ever want to talk about is January 6th, Charlottesville, which was proven fact-checked as a false narrative.
		And the media says that the Republicans and Elon are threatening Congress and all these people with primaries.
		Well, I just want to know what happened to Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema that were driven out of the Democrat Party had to become independent.
		What are they threatening with Chuck Schumer or John Fetterman now because they don't go along with their anti-Semitism agenda?
		So, and I don't want to hear about how the Republicans are a whole bunch of dangerous people and like, you know, for the country when the Democrats' army marches for everything.
		They march for George Floyd.
		They march for everything that they can march for and riot for and destroy the country.
		So I don't want to hear about any of that stuff anymore.
		And I don't also want to care about a few thousand people out in the streets rioting in a country of 350 million people that aren't out rioting, that voted for President Trump and want to keep the illegals out, want to keep the fentanyl out, want to make law and order the order of the day.
		So I don't remember them fighting for the January 6thers rights the way that they're going down to other countries to fight for illegal aliens that are in gangs and are women beaters.
		So thanks a lot, Democrats, for doing nothing for Americans yet again and keep pushing that because it's working real good.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's John in Florence, Massachusetts.
		He started on the Qatari plane.
		That was a subject of conversation on ABC's This Week yesterday with Republican Senator Rand Paul.
		This was Senator Paul's thoughts on that plane.
rand paul ▲ ● ▼		I would say that we sell more arms than any other country in the world.
		We are the largest arms merchant in the entire world.
		And a lot of those arms go to Gulf sheikdoms and monarchies like the Qataris.
		Those decisions are made by the executive branch.
		We have a veto power in Congress, and I've been part of vetoing or trying to veto arms before to Qatar as well as to Saudi Arabia over human rights abuses.
		So could it color the perception of the administration if they have a $400 million plane to be more in favor of these things?
		Perhaps.
		It at least gives the appearance of a conflict of interest.
		I don't think it's worth the headache.
		And I think it's detracting from a largely successful trip to the Middle East, which includes a lot of good things as far as expanding trade.
jonathan karl ▲ ● ▼		He also said it's a perfectly legal transaction.
rand paul ▲ ● ▼		Do you see it that way?
unidentified		I know you raised questions about the emoluments clause.
rand paul ▲ ● ▼		I think it sort of depends on how the transaction is set up.
		Is there a possibility that, you know, could they donate it back to Boeing and Boeing sells it to us?
		There's a lot of ways this could be arranged, but I think what set up signals that people were concerned about was that it was going to be temporarily part of the government and then it was going to the president's library when the president retires.
		So I think all of those things could be fixed, could be corrected.
		There probably is a perfectly legal way, but right now it's raised more questions than I think it's worth.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Rand Paul yesterday on ABC's This Week.
		The Senate returns at 3 p.m. Eastern today.
		You can watch it gavel to gavel on C-SPAN 2.
		The House is back at noon, and you can watch that here on C-SPAN.
		Robert, Ohio, Republican, Europe next.
		It's open forum.
unidentified		How are you doing?
		I just wanted to say, you know, I heard this lady in here talking about how Biden was for red states and blue states and what the Democrats did.
		What had the Democrats done in the last 12, let's say 25 years besides put us in debt?
		The only Democrat that was even a good, that you could say that was a good president was Bill Clinton.
		Now, you sit here and talk about how Biden was for blue states and red states, but Biden weaponized the FBI to go after Republicans, Republicans, not Democrats.
		He weaponized them to go after people that was praying for the life.
		And then you got the January 6th.
		But guess what?
		You know, out of all of that, none of these, none of these, ain't nothing happened to none of these people that went out here and rioted at Musk little Tesla shops and all this.
		It just, you know, the Democrats ain't for Republicans.
		They're not even for this country.
		If you can't see that already, you could see it by just saying they want all the illegal immigrants to come in and be legal.
		They want to go fight for El Graziel, Abrazia, whatever that guy's name is that's in El Salvador's prison.
		He needs to be down there.
		That's where he's from.
		That's where he needs to stay.
		Don't nobody want none of these illegal immigrants in our country.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Robert in Ohio.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This is Mark, Charleston, South Carolina, Democrat.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Hi.
		My name is Mark.
		I would like to know why no one is pointing out the fact that we have such a heavy debt and they're still giving the rich tax breaks.
		We haven't paid the last tax break off yet.
		And I don't applaud the Democrats either.
		I am Democrat.
		I don't applaud them because at this very critical moment, they're not even trying to put out any kind of publication about what Trump is doing.
		And he's giving them plenty of material to work with.
		That's my biggest thing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mark, we're going to be talking a lot more about the debt in about 15 minutes.
		We're going to be joined by Douglas Holt Aiken, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office.
		He's joining us to talk about the Republican tax bill that they're trying to move through the reconciliation bill and the U.S. national debt, which is currently at $37,868,839,000,000 and counting if you go to U.S.debtclock.org.
		So, Mark, hope you stick around in about 15 minutes.
unidentified		I will.
		I will.
		I just also would like to say I hate this way that President Trump is merchandising the resources of the United States to the world.
		There's nothing honest about it.
		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mark, what's an example of merchandising the United States?
unidentified		Well, for one, the airplane that is in question, that's just one of the things that he's doing in addition to all of the other deals that he's making and his fancy collegiate and going to other places and setting it up before Trump gets there, shaking hands and do a photo op.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Mark in South Carolina.
		It's Florida, Gainesville, Gene Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		How are you today?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I'm well, Gene.
		What's on your mind?
		It's open forum.
unidentified		Open forum.
		Listen, this country was founded on the God of the Bible.
		And when they took the Ten Commandments out, that was blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
		That's the only unpardonable sin is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
		If you burn the cross and you're in the KKK, that's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit when you burn the cross.
		If you put the KKK and the Black Panthers up against each other, facing each other, let them kill each other.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		This is Joe in Chicago.
		Republican, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		How are you?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Doing well, Joe.
unidentified		I was going to say the black vote has always, or recently, most recently from the 60s, has been the determination of the president.
		And the black vote is starting to shift.
		And I looked up Malcolm X on YouTube, and Malcolm X was one of the smartest leaders and advocates for the black that there ever was.
		And in one of his speeches, it's on YouTube, he said, if you vote Democrat, you're a chump.
		And if you're black and you vote Democrat, you're not only a chump, you're a traitor to your race.
		And guess what?
		Two days later, he was dead.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		There's a new there's a new book about Malcolm X coming out.
		It's by Mark Whitaker, The Afterlife of Malcolm X, an Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America.
		Are you going to read that book, Joe?
unidentified		I would love to.
		I didn't even realize it was out there, but I'll look into it.
		Yeah.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Brand new book out on the life of Malcolm X. Danielle is in Woodbridge, Virginia.
		Democrat.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi, how are you?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing well.
unidentified		Great.
		I just wanted to, because it's, I don't know, I just feel kind of sad because we just got the message about the president yesterday.
		And I just wish everyone would just stop being so divided.
		Everybody should just kind of come together.
		You know what I mean?
		It's like throwing hate here and there.
		I don't understand why does it have to be like this.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And what is it that can bring this country together in 2025, Danielle?
unidentified		I don't know.
		I just think if everybody just could, I don't know, just the hate just seems just so intense.
		I just think that everybody should just kind of just bring it down a little.
		You know what I mean?
		Just like with the president, you know, that's very awful, what is happening to him.
		And everyone has a grandfather and a father and an uncle and a brother.
		Why don't they kind of look at him like that and say, hey, that could have been someone in my family that that happened to?
		You know what I mean?
		And then it's like, be more compassionate instead of just saying, oh, he did this.
		He deserved that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Danielle deserves why do you think he have trouble with compassion, with empathy?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And do you think it's do you think it's worse today than it used to be?
unidentified		Yes, I think it's absolutely worse than it was before.
		And I just wish we could just all come back together.
		It's like it's, I almost kind of wish we never had Republicans, Democrats.
		Just let everybody kind of be one, you know what I mean?
		And we all just work together.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		But it doesn't have to be where it's just so you think George Washington was right when he warned about political parties?
unidentified		Yeah, I think so.
		Yeah, I do.
		But I just, I wish everyone like would just literally come together and just, you know, kind of think, be like, hey, I have a dad.
		I have a brother, an uncle.
		This could be me.
		This could be my family.
		And just let's just kind of uphold his family.
		He has a wife.
		He has kids.
		He has grandkids.
		You know what I mean?
		They watch TV.
		They can hear things.
		I'm sure they watch C-SPAM.
		You know what I mean?
		People should just start showing him more love and what's going on.
		At the end of the day, he's a human.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		It's Danielle in Woodbridge, Virginia.
		This is Van Paris, Ohio, Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What's on your mind, Van?
unidentified		I would just like to ask the Republicans out there.
		I was Republican at one time.
		I voted Republican.
		And the last several elections, I voted with independent thoughts and not Democrat or Republican.
		And George Washington had it right.
ray mcgovern ▲ ● ▼		Get politics out of our elections.
unidentified		There shouldn't be political parties.
		It should be people all concerned about hiring and voting for the best people available.
		And then we'd have a much better outcome.
		And they should look at what happened to the president when he went into trial with Eugene Carroll, jury of his peers.
		He was found guilty.
ray mcgovern ▲ ● ▼		He sexually assaulted her in a dressing room.
unidentified		He was $90,000, $90 million in debt for this atrocity.
ray mcgovern ▲ ● ▼		He also got convicted by a jury of his peers and indicted by a grand jury in 34 counts of misappropriations of funds in the hush money ordeal.
unidentified		And he got out of that.
ray mcgovern ▲ ● ▼		And Mueller reports, he would have been in big trouble had he not been president at the time.
ray mcgovern ▲ ● ▼		And then the Supreme Court allows him to be scot-free and not accountable for all these trials that he was convicted of a crime.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		It's Van in Ohio.
		This is Duke, West Virginia.
		Republican, good morning.
unidentified		Hello.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Duke.
unidentified		Yeah, I hope you guys are having a good day up there.
unidentified		I kind of think maybe Joe Biden's got this problem because he's been a cancer ever since he got into politics.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Duke.
		This is Brian, Gainesville, Florida, Democrat.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		Thanks for taking my call.
		I only have a quick comment.
		I just think that we're doing way too much infighting between the parties, between the Republicans and Democrats.
		We just don't really have our eye on the ball here.
		You've got a big, beautiful bill coming up for a vote, and I don't think most of America is really paying attention to what's in it.
		If they use the same kind of intensity in trying to get hold of their congressmen to say, this is how I feel about what you're doing, or this is what I don't like about what you're doing, maybe there'd be a lot more things getting taken care of in government.
		And the other comment I had was for the guy that said that we're kind of exploiting the presidency.
		Yeah, I mean, take a look at the guys that bought the meme coins or the access to the White House or the first 220 people that pick up a coin get a free tour.
		I don't think that's necessarily the right way to go.
		But I appreciate you having the consumer, is it the Consumer Budget Office coming up?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The Congressional Budget Office, the former head of that office, Douglas Holtz, A. Great.
		Yeah, we'll be talking about it.
		He's with the American Action Forum now.
		But let me ask you, I mean, one of the things we're going to be talking about is that budget bill that advanced to the House floor late last night after finally overcoming the votes needed to get out of the House Budget Committee.
		This is one of the headlines on it from the Wall Street Journal this morning.
		Republicans spar over how deeply and how quickly to cut Medicaid.
		How much do you know about what's in this bill, Brian?
		And are there specific things that concern you?
unidentified		I don't.
		That's half the problem.
		You had a vote last night.
walter burien ▲ ● ▼		There was five Republicans that kind of held out because they didn't agree with some of the language that was in the bill.
unidentified		Those passed the bill.
		Four of them decided to go ahead and pick president, and that's why the bill got out of that committee.
		It's going to keep going.
		My problem is how much is getting added to it that the congressmen are never going to read anyway.
		You tried to put it all into one bill, and it's just going to be this massive bill that has a whole bunch of different things hidden into it that you won't find out about until after it's gone through Congress.
		I think they're trying to cut a lot more out of Medicaid.
		I don't see how it's possible.
		And I'm still kind of confused on how the work ethic, you have to work so many hours before you can actually pick up Medicaid.
		What do you have to do?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Work requirement.
unidentified		Yeah.
		What does that have to do with someone who needs medical assistance that can't afford it?
		You want them to work to prove that they need the medical assistance?
		Is that what you're after?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So Medicaid itself, a program that serves some 70 million people or so.
		This is from that same Wall Street Journal, sorry.
		The package that Republicans are moving takes aim at Medicaid in part by instituting work requirements for most able-bodied adults through age 64 without dependents.
		The work requirements wouldn't take effect until 2029, and that may have been negotiated down when we see the final results of what it took to overcome this hurdle in the House Budget Committee.
		It also takes aim at California by reducing federal medical payments to the state that provides health care coverage for immigrants in the country illegally.
		That provision, also the timing and question of when that would kick in.
		But those are some of the work requirements provisions that you're talking about, Brian.
unidentified		Yeah, and I understand the people that are in the country illegally getting the Medicaid payments.
		I'm not for that either.
		I understand it.
		I understand the plight and the problems that they have.
		But what happens then if you take the Medicaid payments to these people away?
walter burien ▲ ● ▼		Do they end up showing up at a hospital in an emergency room for the hospitals that have to?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And so the question is: who pays, Brian?
unidentified		Well, if they don't and they don't have any medical coverage, they end up showing up at a hospital, in an emergency room that's yeah.
		And they talk about flutting out hospitals then.
		It's always got an upside and a downside to each one of them.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Brian, thanks for the call.
		We've got about five minutes left here in open form.
		We'll have more open form later in our program today.
		If you didn't get in for this one, Ken, staying in Florida in Tampa, Independent.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Good morning, John.
		How you doing?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Doing well, Ken.
unidentified		Yeah, John, I called you about seven, eight years ago when Donald Trump first came on the scene about make America great again.
		And you was asking me, hey, what do you think?
		And this and that.
		And I asked you to ask any of your callers to name that time when America was great for everyone.
		And no one yet in the last seven years have said, when was America great for everyone?
		But anyway, John, you guys do a great job.
		And I'm calling because, like, I'm an independent.
		And the gentleman that called a while back and said that he could not find no Democrat that was good or this and that.
		Well, yes, he cannot say, name a Republican that he can consider to be good or honest or this or that.
		Now, America, it's two countries, John, because, you know, I'm retired military.
		I've been around the world.
		It's two countries that I noticed skin color is an issue.
		And that's America and South Africa.
		And I don't know why they are still caught up on this skin issue deal when everybody's supposed to have been made equal in the sight of God.
		You always have these people calling talking about they're Christian, this and that, but they always want to say, because of this person's skin color, oh, they DEI or they're this or that.
		And lastly, John, I appreciate everything you guys do.
		I hope that someone will call in and say, when was America great for everyone without the police putting their knee on someone's neck and killing them and feel good about it?
		Thank you, John.
		Keep doing what you're doing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ken in Florida.
		This is Mark in Lickfield, Minnesota, Republican.
		Good morning.
		Time for just maybe one or two more calls here.
unidentified		Yeah, I just wanted to say I'm really disappointed in Jake Tapper and CNN for disparaging President Biden.
unidentified		He may have made a bad decision, but we all have.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And what was the bad decision you're referring to, Mark?
unidentified		Well, his decision to run for president.
unidentified		He obviously wasn't prepared or wasn't able.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You're saying in 2024 or sooner?
unidentified		Well, when Biden ran for president in 2024, and Jake Tapper's book about the original sin, Jake, you know, it's bad enough that he did it, but you're trying to make money off of it, and that is disappointing to me.
unidentified		Thank you for your time.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Are you a big CNN watcher, Mark?
unidentified		I watch all CNN, Fox, all of it.
		And I'm just disappointed that he would disparage our president.
		And, you know, now that the cancer thing has come out, it just sort of makes it a little worse for me.
		But anyway, thanks for your call.
		Appreciate it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mark in Minnesota.
		This is Mary, Potomac, Maryland Independent, last caller in this first segment.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Hello, I'm calling about Gaza.
		It's unbelievable that 75,000 Palestinians have been killed in the last few months.
		And Netanyahu is committing genocide, and we are giving him arms.
		Netanyahu is doing what he's doing because to make room for more settlers.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Mary, you said 75,000.
		The number I thought that I read recently was 53,000.
		These numbers are hard to pin down.
		Where do you go for your numbers?
unidentified		I think I watched it on MSNBC or someplace there.
		But also, we should stop giving arms to Israel so that we cannot be complicit in this genocide.
		It is outrageous that we are giving them arms and they are doing what they want to do.
		Trump is trying so hard to contain them, and yet Netanyahu pays no attention to what he's saying and continues to do what he wants to do.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Mary, the front page story of today's New York Times, you may be interested in reading.
		Israel expanding its attacks in Gaza.
		This is the lead graph.
		The Israeli military announcing on Sunday that its forces had begun, quote, extensive ground operations throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip, advancing its plan to move farther into the enclave and seize more land in an intensified campaign aimed at pressuring Hamas amid negotiations for a ceasefire.
		That's how the story begins.
		You can read it there in the New York Times.
		That's going to do it for this first hour of the Washington Journal.
		Stick around, though.
		Plenty more to talk about this morning, including a little later on today, a conversation with Virginia K. Salaman of the watchdog group Common Cause on potential conflicts of interest and the Trump administration.
		But first, former CBO director and president of the American Action Forum Douglas Holtz Aiken joins us to talk about the Republican budget and what's ahead for the president's economic agenda.
		Stick around.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		This week on the C-SPAN Networks, the House and Senate are in session.
		The House plans to take up GOP tax and spending legislation, supporting President Trump's priorities, as well as border security and energy production goals.
		The Senate will attempt to take up cryptocurrency legislation for a second time.
		Senators voted against advancing the stable coins bill earlier this month.
		Several cabinet secretaries will be on Capitol Hill this week discussing their budgets.
		C-SPAN's live coverage begins on Tuesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
		Watch live this week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app.
		Also, head over to c-span.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime.
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		Washington Journal continues.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		We welcome now Douglas Holtz Aiken back to our desk.
		He's, of course, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office, currently president of the American Action Forum.
		And for folks who might not know, what is the American Action Forum?
		What's your mission?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It's a center-right think tank in Washington, D.C.
		We evaluate and try to understand the range of domestic and economic policies.
		We don't do any social issues, international affairs.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Economic policy is very much a part of this budget bill that was passed out of the House Budget Committee last night.
		The expectation, at least from the Speaker's office, is that it'll get a vote in the House this week.
		Your 30,000-foot view of this bill, do you like it?
		What are your concerns?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It's going to do one thing, and that is it's going to avoid a large tax increase in 2026 that would almost certainly lead to a downturn.
		And that's his great virtue.
		Past that, it's not outstanding tax policy.
		It's not a real step forward on the fiscal problems, which we obviously know are really pressing given the downgrade on Friday.
		So, you know, in terms of what's at stake here, it's an extension of the 2017 law.
		So that's more of the same.
		It's not going to do much for the economy.
		There are some provisions to improve business investment and research and development.
		They are, I think, positives, modest.
		And then there's a whole collection of promises the president made on the campaign trail, which, in my view, will have very little to do with economic growth and actually go the wrong direction from a tax policy point of view.
		You know, the rule in tax policy is broaden the base, treat everything the same.
		This part, you know, sort of pulls out special favors for overtime or tips or seniors.
		So it's not another step in tax reform.
		It's actually very different than the 2017 effort.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		There was a caller in our first segment very concerned about the debt in this country.
		We're at about $37 trillion approaching that.
		What does this bill do for the trajectory of debt in this country?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It makes it modestly worse.
		And that's a real disappointment.
		I thought the gold standard would be do something which is budget neutral, progrow tax reform.
		And if you do that, you would make some progress on the fiscal situation.
		That was the gold standard.
		At the other end of the spectrum, make it no worse.
		This doesn't even do that.
		So you can't be too excited about this from a budgetary point of view.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You talked about the Moody's downgrade.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Can you just explain what that is?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Moody's is one of three very important rating agencies where they look at a borrower and say, you are credit worthy, you're going to pay back for sure.
		There's some risk associated with you.
		The first to downgrade the United States was Standard ⁇ Poor's in 2011.
		They said, you're no longer AAA guaranteed to repay.
		We have some concerns.
		Those concerns were about the politics.
		2023, Fitch Ratings, the second group, did essentially the same thing.
		Said, the U.S. is showing some inability to manage its finances.
		Those are largely political disputes over debt ceiling increases or shedding the government.
		We've been through these episodes.
		This is very different and more, I think, troubling because what Moody said is: you have a lot of debt and you have a lot of interest, and you might not be able to pay it.
		And for that reason, we're downgrading you from a surefire repay to a little bit of risk.
		That's not a good development.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besent, was on Meet the Press yesterday, and he was asked about the Moody's downgrade.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I want to play his response and then get your response to that.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		I think that Moody's is a lagging indicator.
		I think that's what everyone thinks of credit agencies.
		Larry Summers and I don't agree on everything, but he said that when they downgraded the U.S. in 2011.
		So it's a lagging indicator.
		And just like Sean Duffy said with our air traffic control system, we didn't get here in the past hundred days.
		It's the Biden administration and the spending that we have seen over the past four years.
		We inherited 6.7% deficit to GDP, the highest when we weren't in a recession, not in a war.
		And we are determined to bring the spending down and grow the economy.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		Fair enough, but under President Trump's first administration, he added $8 trillion to the nation's debt in his first term.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		So there's plenty of blame to go around.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, no.
		But let's review.
		We were in the rescue portion of COVID.
		The Biden administration was in the recovery portion.
		And Kristen, it would have been, if not for Senators Manchin and Cinema, who were no longer in the Democratic caucus, it would have been $4 or $5 trillion more.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary, yesterday on Meet the Press, your thoughts on his view on the moody's downgrade.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It's a little disappointing.
		It has two answers.
		Number one, don't pay attention to it.
		It doesn't mean that much.
		Number two, it's not our fault.
		I'd like someone who is a little more serious to say, yeah, this is a problem, and we intend to do something about it.
		That's what the country really needs.
		The notion that it's a lagging indicator is just confusing to me.
		A lagging indicator is something where the problem arrives, and later you find out because the lagging indicator showed up.
		Well, that means he's acknowledging we have a problem.
		Why don't we do something about it?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Debt being a big part of that problem.
		How much debt is too much debt?
		Is there a moment when we will accumulate a certain amount of debt that will be a breaking point, and we will all know it's too much debt?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		The answer is yes.
		At some point in our trajectory, which is just ever-increasing amounts of debt, even relative to the size of a growing economy, at some point, international creditors take a look at that and lose the confidence that you will repay either the interest or the principal in a timely fashion.
		And as a result, they no longer extend you the credit.
		Now, the trouble is, I don't know what that day that is.
		You don't know what day that is.
		No one knows what day that is.
		But that's not missing.
		That's all this happened all at once.
		There have been lots of sovereign debt crises.
		The most recent being Greece, Portugal, Argentina.
		And they have this sort of troubling characteristic that it's usually something unrelated to the budget that triggers it, and then suddenly it's there.
		And so, like Hemingway famously said, you go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once.
		And that's a lot true for countries as well.
		So I think the right way to think about it is having a sovereign debt crisis is failing.
		That's all there is to it.
		But not having one isn't great.
		That's getting a D.
		I think we can do better and get a D. Let's take this on.
		And in fact, put our finances in order.
		We did that in the 20th century by and large.
		Average deficits 2.2% of GDP, compared to over five in this century.
		And we got better economic performance.
		The standard of living doubled every 30 years, roughly.
		Now it doubles every 56 years.
		And you get to sense that people know that.
		Like, I don't have the same opportunities my parents had.
		Well, why don't we take care of our finances, plow that money into educating people, building factories, building software, all the things that make people more productive?
		That's the right way to go.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		There was a caller on Friday on this program who said, why don't we have balanced budgets anymore?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Why don't we have balanced budgets anymore?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		We don't have balanced budgets anymore for two reasons.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		And we did manage to balance the budget at the end of the 20th century.
unidentified		If you're old, that would be me.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I recall that.
		Two things have gone on in this century.
		Number one, we don't clean up after crises.
		You know, the 20th century had its crises.
		World War II, it had recessions.
		It had all the things we've faced.
		We've had recessions, financial crises, pandemics.
		That went way up.
		That was true in the 20th century, but then it came back down.
		And in this century, it hasn't.
		It goes up, it stays up.
		The spending goes up, it stays up.
		We don't clean up after the emergency response.
		So we have a lot more debt out there.
		We have to pay the interest on it.
		We're going to pay a trillion dollars in interest this year.
		The second thing that's gone on is just the entitlements.
		We have Social Security and Medicare.
		They are more than one half of all non-interest spending over the next 10 years.
		They are driven by the demography.
		And there's just a fundamental mismatch between the revenue, which grows here, and the entitlements, which grow much faster.
		And that's continued throughout the 21st century.
		And so we have a structural deficit plus emergencies.
		It's added up poorly.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Douglas Holtz-Aiken is our guest.
		He's currently the president of the American Action Forum, formerly of the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, taking your phone calls with us for about the next 30, 35 minutes or so.
		It's 202, 748, 8,000 for Democrats to call in.
		Republicans, 202-748, 8001.
		Independents, 202-748-8002.
		As folks are calling in in this big bill that's made its way out of the budget committee last night, House 4 vote this week.
		Remind viewers what the role of the Congressional Budget Office is, what a scoring is, and how that works.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So a score is very simply, how much will this bill change money flowing into the Treasury over the next 10 years, money flowing out of the Treasury over the next 10 years?
		What does it do to the deficit or in the old days, surplus over the next 10 years?
		That's the score.
		And it shows it year by year, and it gets it for each provision in the bill.
		It's a detailed accounting of the budgetary impact of the bill.
		CBO's job is to score bills considered by Congress so they know what they're doing to federal finances.
		In the process, they have to make some evaluations of how programs work, like how many people will take up a Medicaid provision and get health insurance or not.
		And they do all of that based on the consensus in the research literature and in a completely nonpartisan fashion.
		And so it's a phenomenal place.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you think those numbers in a place where we get a whole lot of numbers and people saying this means this and no, this means this, are the CBO numbers the most trustworthy numbers when they come out on a big bill like this?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		That doesn't mean they're right.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Explain.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So an example, when I was CBO director back in 2003, we passed the Medicare Modernization Act, which created what is known as the Part D drug Program for seniors.
		It's an insurance product against the cost of outpatient prescription drugs for seniors.
		There was no such insurance product out in nature anywhere at the time when that bill was passed.
		So the CBO had to imagine who would supply the insurance, who would supply the drugs at what price, how would the federal subsidy affect the purchase of the insurance and less the drugs?
		And what would all this mean to the taxpayer?
		It was an extraordinary complicated exercise.
		And we got it wrong by about 25%.
		But CBO is most important when Congress is doing something new about which there is the least evidence.
		And so it's not that they're right, but they're going to try their very best to be just as equally likely to be too high as too low, put it in the middle of the range, and give you some notion of the scale of the enterprise that Congress is involved in.
		And they did a good job on that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Want to get into this bill that's going to be on the House floor a little bit more, but let me take some calls.
		There are plenty waiting for you.
		This is Katie in Silver Spring, Maryland.
		Democrat, good morning.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		I was curious.
		We have our president who, in his personal life, had multiple bankruptcies, and maybe that was kind of a strategic way to manage his finances and capitalize it.
		I was wondering if maybe that perspective, how that translates or if it does translate into the administration's policies and representation of our debt, our standing in the world, and how we kind of move policy forward.
		Thank you.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It's a really good question.
		I get asked questions like this a lot, including, you know, why did the president levy these tariffs?
		And, you know, why did he do X, Y, or Z?
		And I don't know the answer to those questions.
		I'm not qualified to guess at his state of mind.
		It's certainly the case that his track record, both in his first time in office and now again as president, is not one that indicates he's serious about taking on the fiscal situation.
		If you're serious about that, you should be serious about taking on reforms to strengthen and preserve Social Security and Medicare.
		Those are the two big numbers.
		In the process, you have to reduce the amount of spending on them.
		But he flatly took them off the table.
		And so that says we're not going to try to deal with it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is there enough fraud, waste, and abuse in those programs?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		No.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So then how do you have to change the programs?
		The programs were designed for the 1930s and 1960s, respectively.
		They aren't programs that are going to survive in the 21st century.
		They don't match our demography or anything like that.
		I mean, things change a lot.
		I mean, again, Part D program is much more recent.
		That was in 2003.
		It's now only 20 years later.
		In 2003, the major job was to have an insurance product that covered people's statins.
		Now we're keeping people alive on very expensive oncology drugs for years.
		It's a completely different world, and the program has to reflect that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So what's a fair way to modify, which means reduce benefits?
		Who does that impact?
		What do you think, if you were the one that was being asked, design this bill, what would you do?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't.
		I would let the American people decide.
		And I'm serious about that.
		So here's the situation.
		And it's the reason I'm hopeful, despite everything that, you know, I've lived a life of disappointment.
		I do budgets.
		So Social Security's trust fund will go bankrupt in eight years, which means they will not have the legal authority to pay full benefits.
		And there will be an across-the-board cut of 21% if Congress does nothing.
		Now, I don't think you or I believe Congress is going to decide and let people take a 21% cut in retirement if they shouldn't.
		But that means that if you're 55 and think about retiring in 10 years, there's going to be a Social Security reform.
		There has to be, and you don't know what your benefit is going to be.
		That's a terrible way to run a pension program.
		And I think every year that we get closer to that, people are going to start to realize: hey, what's the deal?
		How are you going to extend the life of this program so I can make my plans and I can retire?
		And Congress owes them that answer.
		And instead of going to a town hall and saying, I want to reform Social Security and ending up working at the Tasty Freeze, they're going to go to the town hall and say, we need to reform Social Security so that you know what the deal is.
		And they'll say, thank you, go do it.
		And then there will be a huge fight over the details of that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So at some point, you don't think it becomes a hot potato that gets passed?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		There's no longer a liability to want to fix it.
		You have to fix it.
		And that's a good thing.
		And our representative actually will be engaged in fixing it.
		And there will be a vigorous debate over the best way.
		And so I don't think any single sort of analyst like I is going to have the right solution.
		But we've had many commissions.
		They all do a collection of things that are very similar.
		They, number one, they raise the cap on taxable earnings so that we collect more revenue.
		They change the award of initial benefits so that very affluent people get less of their lifetime earnings than they do now.
		We might even consider not giving the most affluent any at all.
		I mean, Social Security is an insurance policy against the event that you outlive your resources.
		And I can name a handful of people I don't think are going to outlive the resources.
		So maybe they don't get Social Security.
		And then you have to figure out where to draw the line.
		But that's just a more aggressive means testing.
		It's already mean tested some.
		And you can do some flipping of the dials on how you index things for inflation and things like that.
		You can make some real progress on making the program fit the 21st century and last longer.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Fort Lauderdale.
		Tom, Independent, good morning.
		You're on with Douglas Holtz Aiken.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Good morning.
		I wanted to ask about these Medicare cuts.
		The Republicans in Chiproy want to make sick people work to give tax cuts to people like Charles Koch.
		And the Democrats can't make a point of this.
		What's wrong with these Republicans?
		And the second question I have is a tangent.
		All these Doge press release, are any of these legislations and cost cuts going to be legalized in this new bill?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So two good questions.
		First, these are Medicaid cuts that they're proposing.
		That's the low-income health care program.
		And I don't think anyone is proposing that people who are sick be forced to work.
		They would have work requirements for those who are able and have no dependents.
		That's the basic framework.
		That's, in my view, not really a budgetary issue.
		That's a philosophy issue that says you should be willing to work in exchange for the assistance of your fellow Americans.
		And we've had this debate several times and we'll have it again.
		But I don't think there's any real budgetary savings in the work requirements.
		That's a slightly different issue.
		As for the Doge cuts, this is quietly a very big deal.
		There are two kinds of things that the Doge has done.
		One, it has reduced federal employment.
		And the listeners should know that's not a serious budgetary activity.
		We spend maybe $400 billion on compensation for civilian workers in the federal government.
		We ran a deficit of $1.8 trillion last year.
		We're not going to solve the deficit problems by changing the footprint of the federal government.
		The second thing they've done is simply not spend some money.
		That's called an impoundment.
		Congress has authorized the spending.
		They're not spending it.
		A long time ago, 1974, President Nixon did this.
		They took him to court.
		And that actually spawned the creation of the Congressional Budget Office, which I ran, the budget committees in both House and Senate, the budget process.
		And now it is against the law to simply impound money.
		Instead, a president can say, I don't want to spend this money, notify Congress, and Congress has 45 days to agree, in which case the money comes back.
		It's called a rescission.
		Or disagree, in which case the money goes out.
		I fully expect that the money that Doge is just sitting on will end up as part of a court case that will test the legality of that 74 law.
		And if the courts uphold its legality, that money has to go out.
		And all of those proclaimed savings will have turned out to be ephemeral.
		They haven't really cut anything.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		We have several viewers who tweet about this program every day and have a conversation as they do it.
		Michael Langweiser is one of them.
		He sends this question to you.
		How much will taxes increase if the 2017 tax reform is not made permanent?
		And will or could that help the budget deficit?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So they would go up by about $425 billion next year.
		So that's, and that would help the budget deficit by $425 billion.
		There's no question about that.
		My concern is that abruptly that's going to generate enough headwinds to knock the economy sideways or in its weakened state into a recession.
		And one thing that does not ever improve federal finances is a recession.
		I mean, we have automatic stabilizers that spend more and collect less taxes in recessions.
		We also have Congresses that typically turn right around and do a big tax cut or do a big spending program to counter the recession.
		I don't think we've done a very good job on that front, but those are reflexes I've seen.
		So I don't think we should root for a recession.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		By the way, I should note, we've been talking about this budget bill that made it out of committee last night.
		For viewers who want to watch it, the House Rules Committee just announced their meeting to consider the bill.
		And this is the rules vote, the package that gets put together for the final floor vote.
		And that's going to take place Wednesday.
		And I had to triple check it at 1 a.m., 1 a.m. ahead of the floor debate and vote.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		But only C SPN has viewers at 1 a.m.
unidentified		So you can watch the rules debate.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And those are often vigorous debates about what gets to be considered on the House floor.
		But 1 a.m. on Wednesday morning, I should say that is Eastern time for viewers around the country.
		This is Jeannie in Marysville, Ohio, Republican.
		Good morning.
unidentified		I have a question.
		I wanted to know: is there a budget for?
		I'm a welder and I've been experiencing union discrimination.
		And I want to know if there's something in the budget for the working class people that are trying to work and trying to get employed.
		And there has been pushback on women in construction.
		And I want to bring that up to see if there's going to be something in the budget for policies and procedures that will help individuals like myself that are being blackballed from the industry.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you for the question.
		The short answer is no.
		And the reason is that the Republicans are trying to pass this legislation using special fast-track procedures known as reconciliation.
		Forget the origins of the name.
		The important restriction on reconciliation is that you only get to do that if you stick to things that are strictly budgetary in nature, raising lower spending, raising lower taxes.
		You can't go out and make new policy like union or anti-discrimination policy.
		So you hear a lot of talk about things that might be in this bill, energy policies, border policies, regulation reforms.
		There's going to be a winnowing of what's in there by the Senate parliamentarian where they will sit down and literally go through the bill line by line and say, is this primarily budgetary in nature or not?
		And if it's not, they'll take it out.
		So reconciliation has become something both parties have used.
		And in the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats used reconciliation to pass, they tried to include an increase in the federal minimum wage, and that came out as not primarily budgetary in nature.
		So it seems to me that's not likely to make it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When the Senate parliamentarian does that, is it going line by line?
		Or does one side propose challenges and say, this doesn't seem budgetary to me.
		Can you check that one?
		How does that work?
		Is it kind of like knocking off jurors in a juror pool?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		This is a procedure which we owe to the late Senator Robert Byrd, who really didn't like the idea of reconciliation because it bypassed the rules of the Senate.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It allowed a finite amount of debate, no filibusters, and then a vote.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And he liked to protect the rules of the Senate.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		He loved his Senate and he loved the rules, and so he wanted to put it in a box.
		And so the way this works is literally the parliamentarians here with the bill, Republicans, Democrats, and they start going through, and Republicans say, that's fine.
		And Democrats can say, no, I don't like that.
		And they make their case, and the parliamentarian decides.
		It's called a birdbath.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is that something that happens behind closed doors?
unidentified		Yeah.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is that something you think would ever be in front of cameras or no?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I've never actually thought about it, but I think probably not.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Dee, Cheney Washington, Democrat.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Hi, Mr. E. Good morning.
		Aiken.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		I am hoping that you can help me make the math work.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Pick the right category.
unidentified		And as far as the budget is concerned, and this is including Doge, this is including the fact that we are practically at five months in 2025, and the last I checked were already $319 million over budget.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		That'd be more than that.
unidentified		You'd be doing well if it was probably billions, my guess.
		Well, I thought it was millions, but maybe I didn't get the right number.
		It's just, I'm confused.
		If Doge is doing such a great job, why are they asking for $4.5 trillion more for the next budget?
		And why are they changing the debt ceiling, making it $4 trillion higher as well?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the math is very confusing.
		And I would say you've got at least three things going on.
		First of all, just for level setting, in fiscal 2025, the year that we're in, the federal government will spend $7 trillion.
		It'll spend $1 trillion on interest.
		It'll spend $1.8 trillion on the annual decisions of Congress, defense spending, funding for the agencies to do basic research, infrastructure, education, all those things.
		And it'll spend $4.2 trillion on so-called mandatory spending, which are entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, foreign programs, things like that.
		So that's a lot of money.
		And the president has made requests for changes to that $1.8 trillion in discretionary spending for next year.
		So if you've heard about wanting more or less, it's in that context.
		That's not yet law.
		Congress is now evaluating those.
		They're going to have to pass law to decide how much they're going to spend.
		So that's a to be determined.
		The House and Senate are considering changes to the big mandatory spending programs, the 4.2, to see where that goes.
		And as you can tell, there's a lot of controversy over where they're headed on that front.
		The bulk of the changes are concentrated in the committee that has Medicaid jurisdiction.
		So Medicaid gets all the attention, and they've said they're not going to touch Medicare and Social Security.
		So they have limited ability to change that very much.
		So those are all things going on as they fight about what it will actually look like next year, starting from this baseline of spending $7 trillion and raising $5.2 trillion in revenue.
		Big gap in there.
		Then there's the debt limit.
		The debt limit says that, you know, we have run deficits for a long, long time.
		And as a result, we've borrowed a lot.
		And at some point, you hit the limit that Congress has authorized the Treasury to borrow.
		And we hit that limit on January 1st.
		And since then, the Treasury has been keeping us under the limit using what they refer to as extraordinary measures, which in reality are not particularly extraordinary.
		We go to federal employees' retirement accounts.
		We take the treasuries out of them.
		They count toward the limit.
		So if you take them back, they're under the limit.
		We then borrow more from the public.
		We have cash.
		We pay our bills.
		This process, and then we restore the employees' treasuries after the fact.
		But this process can only go on so long.
		They've said it can last till August.
		They have to raise the debt limit.
		They've already spent that money.
		The bills are just coming due.
		I'm concerned, given the downgrade by Moody's, all the eyes are on the United States, that we might have another episode where we go right up to the last second on raising the debt limit and scare financial markets to death.
		I think in these circumstances, it would be wise to have a plan to take that off the table.
		But I haven't heard anything about that, so it makes me nervous.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned we're going to spend about a trillion dollars in interest on the debt.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Can you ever renegotiate interest payments?
		Can the federal government ever do that?
		Or would that be a disaster?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		That would be a disaster because that's Tanton saying we can't pay.
		And we want to get a payment plan, sort of lower our payments.
		And I think that would frighten international lenders to death.
		And the disaster comes from the fact that treasuries, the dollar, is the foundation of the global financial system.
		You hear this all the time.
		But what that really means is that if I'm an Argentina or an Ecuador or France, I can go get a hold of some treasuries and I know I can buy some because they're always available.
		And I know I can sell them when I need the cash to pay this international transaction.
		So it's that willingness to buy and sell the liquidity of treasuries.
		And the reason we have that is they're not risky.
		Everyone believes you can always get your money.
		If you're starting to have to get something where you're not sure you get your money back, you don't want to buy it.
		And now you've ground the international financial system to a halt.
		And we shouldn't mess with that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kathy, in the Tar Hill State Republican, you're on with Douglas Colts Aiken.
unidentified		Hi, how are you?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I'm good.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		How are you?
unidentified		Yeah, I'm fine.
		I'm 65 years old.
		And I have paid in Social Security and worked all my life.
		And I'm tired of people viewing it as an entitlement program.
		It's not.
		We paid in it.
		But everybody said that we're not paying for Medicare.
		Yes, I have $150 a month for my Social Security benefits taken out for that very purpose.
		And may I might add that you can go to the government health care website and get insurance for $79 a month.
		I also pay.
		And then people have been getting free health care for how long?
		And I also pay for a premium of $140 a month to protect myself financially from that 20% that the Medicare doesn't cover.
		So quit telling us that we're not responsible.
		We have been far more responsible than everybody in the everybody for the past 10 or 15 years of this generation.
		We have been robbed.
		The government has dipped into this fund.
		We've had death, physical irresponsibility of both political parties.
		So I don't want to hear this anymore.
		We paid our fair share.
		We went through a period of corporate raiders, suit our pensions, lost our homes, lost our jobs.
		We have been victims multiple times.
		You have no idea what our generation has been through.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kathy, let me let Douglas Holtzakin jump in.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So lots of people feel that they pay for all of their Social Security, and many have.
		Social Security redistributes, and there are some people who pay more on a lifetime basis than they ever get out of it.
		They're typically the affluent.
		Some people pay less, and they get more out of the program than they put in.
		So that's a case-by-case basis.
		Medicare was never designed to be fully funded.
		The original program was just the hospital program, and it was a mini Social Security.
		It had a payroll tax and a little trust fund, and you paid the hospitals for the care.
		But when they moved to doing outpatient care and did prescription drugs, and now the Medicare Advantage whole insurance program, they decided to make it premium-funded.
		So you pay a premium like you would with a private health insurance fund.
		But when they looked at the premiums, they said, oh, that's a lot of money.
		We'll have the premiums cover a quarter of the cost of the program.
		We'll get the rest from the Treasury.
		So Medicare was never designed to be financially self-sufficient, and it's not.
		And nobody pays for their Medicare.
		It gets subsidized by the general taxpayer throughout the life of the program.
		That's the biggest source of red ink in the federal government.
		It's responsible for about a third of all debt outstanding.
		And I think going forward, it would be wise to rethink how all of Medicare adds up.
		Maybe put the entire program on a budget and make sure that it does add up each year instead of just always going to the Treasury and getting more money.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		About 10 minutes left.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I did want to ask you, what's your view on tariffs?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I think this has been a terrible misadventure.
		I do.
		Tariffs are taxes.
		And so if you just looked at this from a tax policy point of view, if you wanted to raise a fair amount of revenue, and what he proposed on April 2nd was a $400 billion tax increase.
		Now, we're all worried about not doing that next year to avoid a recession.
		He did that on April 2nd.
		That was extraordinary.
		And you saw how people reacted.
		So you wouldn't pick a national sales tax that sort of only covered half of the third of the goods or something.
		You have a broad base and a rate.
		And it's a very regressive tax.
		And tariffs are really hard to administer, and they invite...
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Why is it a regressive tax?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		It...
		It hits the poor harder than the affluent.
		They're buying things out of need, and they have to pay the tax.
		And so it's not a good revenue instrument.
		It's not a good idea, I think, to have a big tax increase.
		The economy is noticeably weaker now than it was even in December.
		There's no question about that.
		And we have different kinds of tariffs.
		We have these product tariffs like steel, aluminum, autos, and he's promised semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, lumber, copper, and films.
		All of these are done under the guise of national security.
		These sort of threats to our national security.
		We have to have a tariff, do more of it at home.
		I think it's an open question whether that ever plays out.
		Certainly, we've done steel tariffs.
		This is now the third time in my lifetime.
		I worked in the White House.
		2001, we did it.
		Did it again in 2018?
		Here we are again.
		It doesn't work.
		Like, we've got to stop trying to save the steel industry this.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is it bringing in enough revenue to make a difference on that spending gap that we keep watching into the future?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Suppose it's $400 billion and we have a $1.8 trillion deficit.
		It's not a substantial amount of revenue.
		It never will be.
		So it's a questionable whether it's working on its sort of policy merit.
		It's not a budgetary item in my view.
		And the ones on Canada, Mexico, I mean, Canada, Mexico, and the United States are a unified economic entity.
		And those tariffs threaten to tear it apart.
		They're the most damaging thing he proposed, and people recognized it.
		And so he carved those out to a great extent.
		We have a 10% universal tariff.
		We've never done that.
		And now we have these reciprocal tariffs, which the latest thing is, Secretary Besson said he's going to start sending letters to people, giving them their new tariff letters, tariff numbers, if they don't get to the table and negotiate.
		And that puts us at levels we haven't seen in 100 years.
		So we are in uncharted territory with this experiment, and I haven't seen any good come of it yet.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ronald in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Democrat, good morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		About five minutes left here with Douglas Holtakin.
unidentified		Okay, I'll read quick.
		I got two little things.
		Has there ever been a budget analysis of work requirements?
		How much is it actually going to save?
ralph norman ▲ ● ▼		Not much.
unidentified		It can't be.
		I mean, we require people to work.
		And then the second thing is you got to go, you want to volunteer for city or state or whatever, or businesses to show work requirements.
		A lot of those businesses don't want people there that are unemployed and have handicaps or whatever to work.
		And so they don't want those people.
		So what do you think about those?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know about the latter.
		That's just not something I've ever studied or looked at.
		Certainly, work retirements requirements have come up a number of times in the policy debates.
		And as I said to a caller earlier, I don't really think they're about the budget.
		There's never a lot of budgetary dollars saved with work requirements.
		It's about your view of the philosophy that you should be willing to work in exchange for the support of your fellow taxpayers.
		And that's really the debate.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This is Carla in Missouri Independent.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Morning.
		I wanted to ask your guest, what is the status of the SNAP program and what he thinks the prospects are to get it restored to the budget at the House?
		And then in the Senate, I'd like to know what he thinks about it.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So the SNAP program is still on the books.
		It's not going away.
		The reforms to the SNAP program that have been proposed in the House are primarily shifting more of the burden to pay for it to the states.
		And to have the amount that they shift depend on how effectively the program is administered.
		And they have some measures of errors in payments that they want to use to index this.
		But it's not really anything that says we want to change the beneficiary's life.
		They want to change how the program gets administered and who foots the bill.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Can I come back to tariffs for a second?
		This headline from this weekend.
		Donald Trump tells Walmart to eat the tariffs after the retailer warned it will raise prices.
		His Truth Social post, this is what it said.
		Walmart should stop trying to blame tariffs as the reason for raising prices through the chain between Walmart and China.
		They should, as it said, eat the tariffs and not charge valued customers anything.
		I'll be watching, and so will your customers.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I don't think we should have gravity.
		I really don't.
		Things fall and it hurts.
		I mean, that's no good.
		It's a cost.
		Businesses have to cover their costs.
		And he can watch them, and he cannot like it.
		But Walmart's in a business that has really tiny margins, 3%.
		He just put a 30% tariff on China.
		So you can kiss the margins goodbye.
		And Walmart's not going to be around long if it does nothing but sell things at a loss to keep the president happy.
		They don't have a choice.
		He's put them in an untenable position.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		We're so focused on recent memory.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Do you remember another time a president told a specific company how to price their goods?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		No.
		I'm sure it's happened, but no.
		Car industry or I mean, we've had bully pulpit job owning by presidents on issues like labor issues.
		You know, President Biden walked a picket line.
		I mean, so people have done similar things just to tell people how to run their business.
		But he gets pretty granular, and that's unusual.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This is Wayne.
		I tried to get it in.
		Wayne from Pennsylvania, Democrat.
		Go ahead, Wayne.
unidentified		Yeah, how you doing, John?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Doing well.
unidentified		And Douglas, I got one simple thing to ask.
		Everybody's worried about Medicare.
		Well, let's take the cap off.
		You know, Jeff Bay was what Elon Musk pay their share.
		That's all I got to say.
		If y'all want to save it, that's a simple thing.
		God bless you all.
		Bye.
		Take the cap off.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		As it turns out, there is no cap on Medicare payroll taxes.
		So it's a smaller tax.
		It's taxed on all your labor earnings.
		The cap is in Social Security.
		And there have been a variety of proposals to raise caps, change the caps.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Where do you stand on those proposals for some reason?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		I think we should raise the cap for sure.
		I mean, when Social Security was first adopted, we taxed about 90% of wages.
		We're now well south of that.
		Low 80s, high 70s, depending on how you do the measurement.
		I think we have big budget problems, and we're not going to solve them on either exclusively the tax side, that won't work, or the spending side.
		And so we've got to figure out where we are willing to do spending cuts and tax increases.
		And that, as we know, has been politically difficult.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Final two minutes here.
		I did want to ask you about the American Action Forum.
		What projects are you working on that we haven't talked about yet that you do want to discuss?
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		So I built the American Action Forum out of my experiences on the McCain campaign, where it seems to me that what I did was I did policy research, policy education, policy options, policy advice, all those things.
		But I did it in real time on whatever was happening that day.
		And the idea was to educate the people around me on the campaign on what was going on and what we might do.
		And it struck me that there would be value to that outside of the political setting, that average Americans might want the same information.
		Something, an oil rig blows up in the Gulf and they're a market-oriented person and they say, oh, what are options?
		What can we do?
		So that's what the American Action Forum does.
		So we are an events-driven think tank, different than most think tanks.
		We're going to cover what's going on in the Congress, and we've talked about that today.
		That's what we're doing.
		And we keep track of what goes on in the agencies as well, because there's a lot of executive activity right now.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		AmericanActionForum.com, easy enough to find.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Douglas Holtz Aiken is the president of that group, former CBO director, and do always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal.
douglas holtz-eakin ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Later this morning, a conversation with Virginia Case Salaman of the watchdog group Common Cause.
		Stick around for that discussion in about a half hour.
		But starting now, it's our open forum.
		Any public policy issue, any political issue you want to talk about.
		Phone lines are yours.
		Numbers are on your screen.
		start calling in and we'll get to your calls right after the break.
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john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Here's what's happening on Capitol Hill today.
		The House is in at noon Eastern.
		The Senate is in at 3 p.m. today.
		It's open forum right now on the Washington Journal for about the next 30 minutes, taking your phone calls on any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about.
		Phone lines are yours.
		Democrats 202-748-8000.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Independents 202-748-8002.
		As you're calling in an update on the week ahead on Capitol Hill with Nicholas Wu of Politico Congressional Reporter there.
		And start with last night's budget committee vote and where this so-called big beautiful bill goes from here.
unidentified		What we saw last night was really the big beautiful bill getting over the latest hurdle on its way to the floor.
		Last week it came up in the budget committee for a vote.
		It failed.
		But by Sunday night, GOP leaders got the holdouts on that committee to flip their votes from a no vote to a present vote.
		And this allowed them to keep on moving on the bill, even as these guys have registered some pretty strong objections to what's in the legislation.
		And so this week, what we're going to see is a give and pull between all these different factions of the GOP over the Big Beautiful bill as they've run up against this deadline to pass it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		These conservative members in the budget committee who voted present last night, what did they get?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Have they been able to detail what allowed them to flip their vote at least enough to allow this bill to move to the House floor?
unidentified		So details have been pretty sparse.
		I mean, even last night, the budget committee chair, Jody Arrington, admitted that things were very much in flux.
		They weren't sure exactly what was going to be in the bill by the time it was voted on later this week.
		But what seems to be clear is that they are moving up the date for Medicaid work requirements to move in.
		That's being phased in earlier.
		And then what these conservatives really want are deeper cuts to these Biden-era green energy programs and perhaps deeper cuts to Medicaid as well.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And these conservative members still have a chance in the final vote to put a check on this bill.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Just remind viewers of the math here and what Speaker Johnson is up against.
unidentified		It's a really tight margin in the House.
		It all depends on how many folks are going to be present on Thursday when this is expected to come up for a vote.
		But Speaker Johnson can't lose more than a handful of members on this.
		And there's, on the one hand, there's conservatives who want these deeper cuts to Medicaid, to spending programs.
		But the problem is if they cut too deep on there, they start to lose the Purple District Republicans who have vowed to vote against a bill that doesn't include enough on Medicaid, that doesn't include enough on state and local tax deductions and so on.
		And so it's really hard.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I imagine as a congressional reporter, this is going to be the story that dominates your week this week.
		Who are you going to be focusing on?
		Who are you most interested in talking to this week as you track what happens here?
unidentified		I think the folks that are going to be interesting this week are the folks that have really been registering their objections all along.
		And that's the hardline conservatives like Chip Roy, who have made clear all throughout this process that they want these deeper cuts to Medicaid and to spending programs.
		And I'm also going to be keeping an eye on the kind of Purple District Republicans like Mike Lawler of New York or Don Bacon of Nebraska, who could really be the flying element on the other side of their conference.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		How unusual is a House Rules Committee meeting at 1 a.m. scheduled for Wednesday at 1 a.m. ahead of the House floor debate and votes?
unidentified		It's usually very unusual.
		I mean, normally that's the kind of thing that happens during the daylight hours.
		But for seasoned viewers of the Rules Committee, that'll provide some interesting late night watching.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What happens in a rules committee meeting?
unidentified		Well, what we would likely see here is Republican leaders introducing what's called a manager's amendment, which will be the final cut of the bill that they'll introduce to kind of replace the existing text and resolve any of these last-minute issues that are popping up in their conference before they vote on it, possibly Thursday morning.
		But literally in the next couple hours, we're expecting Republican leaders to brief their members on a private conference line about all these changes that are happening to the bill.
		And so we'll get more details coming soon.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And say this does pass the House this week.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What's the path in the Senate?
unidentified		Well, some Senate Republicans have already declared it dead on arrival, like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a fiscal conservative.
		Those senators are likely to try to advance their own version of the Big Beautiful bill.
		And so resolving those differences is going to be very hard.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Obviously, this is going to take up a lot of your time this week.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What else should we be watching for on Capitol Hill this week?
unidentified		You know, the Big Beautiful bill is probably going to be the thing that crowds out pretty much any other legislative action this week.
		But I mean, I'll be curious to see how the debt ceiling gets baked into this, whether that causes problems among Republicans.
		And then there's also how the House Oversight Committee is taking a look at non-citizen voting in D.C., which has also been a hot-button issue.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And you can read all about it as it happens on Capitol Hill at politico.com, Nicholas Wu, a congressional reporter there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And thank you for starting your week with us.
unidentified		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Your calls now in our open forum.
		Any public policy, any political issue you want to talk about, now is your time.
		This is Danny in Tennessee, Republican.
		Danny, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		This Trump memcoin thing, I've never seen anything like this.
		It's just a way to bribe the president.
		You know, he's going to have a dinner up there.
		I'd like to see who these 220 people are and how many people are going in there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Danny, you say that as a Republican?
unidentified		Yes.
		Hey, I call it like it is.
		I call a spade a spade.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Are you a Republican who voted for Donald Trump any of the three times that he ran?
unidentified		Yes.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		All three times out of curiosity?
unidentified		No.
unidentified		No.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When did you support him, Danny?
unidentified		Pardon?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What elections did you support him?
unidentified		The last one.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That was the only time?
unidentified		That's it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Why was 2024 the one that convinced you that it was time to vote for Donald Trump?
unidentified		Well, I thought he was going to do something for the country, but all he's doing is fattening his wallet.
		I don't, I mean, you know, and he jumped all over Zelensky when he was up there in the White House.
		He's going to give Putin whatever he wants over there.
		And if I was up there, I'd give Zelensky everything he wants to stop this idiot.
		Putin is a tyrant.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Danny in the volunteer state to Fayetteville, North Carolina.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ray, Democrat, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, sir.
		Good morning, C-Span audience.
		First of all, I want to start off and say I am a 14-year-old prostate council survivor.
		Now, I have heard some pretty disturbing calls this morning from Mega accusing Joe Biden of cover-up.
		Now, you got the master of cover-ups in the White House.
		You understand what I'm talking about?
		Now, this is sad, man.
		And what has Joe Biden done?
		He saved us from COVID.
		Stimulus bill, all the bills that he passed.
		You understand?
		I am a 79-year-old combat Vietnam veteran.
		You got it?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ray, what did you make as somebody who has been a survivor of this of prostate cancer?
		What did you think about the announcement that Joe Biden's office put out yesterday?
		They gave some detailed information about his diagnosis.
		What did you read into it?
unidentified		Well, I mean, it's something that most men, if you live long enough, is going to have to put up with.
		You will get prostate counselor if you live long enough.
		You understand?
		And for these people to criticize the cover-up, man, good Lord, boy, these people are wow.
		What can you say about the Republican megas?
		I'm serious.
		It's Satan.
		It is.
		It's Satan.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Ray in North Carolina to the Buckeye State.
		This is John Independent.
		Good morning.
		It's open for him.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I don't know if you guys have covered at all the story that was on 60 Minutes two weeks ago where they had Linda Miller on, and she talked about the fraud that is being perpetrated upon the U.S. government.
		And she estimated it's somewhere between $550 billion and $750 billion a year of loss and fraud.
		And it seems to me that when, you know, people were talking about Elon Musk and his approach to try and crack down on fraud, that I'm not hearing about these numbers at all.
		And I was just really liking to hear both sides, Republican and Democrats, be able to come together on this.
		And that's a lot of money that if we could stop that, that would, you know, help improve our situation.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What did you think of that 60-minute interview?
		And Linda Miller, I know she spent 10 years or more at the Government Accountability Office.
		That's the 60-minutes Instagram page of the video of her appearance.
unidentified		I thought it was very interesting, and I was surprised to hear those kind of numbers being talked about and that, you know, it's not something being talked about within our government, at least publicly.
		As a matter of fact, at one point in the interview, she said that when she would talk to different congressional leaders about this issue, and she would submit a report, that they were wanting her to change the word fraud in the report to something else.
		And she was like, what do you want to call it?
		It's fraud.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's John in Ohio.
		We're coming up on 9 a.m. Eastern time.
		I did want to note that there is a White House briefing scheduled to start at 9 a.m.
		We are going to cover that over on C-SPAN 2.
		If you want to pop over there and watch that, we'll be back here on the Washington Journal until 10 a.m. Eastern, if that ends in time for you to join us back here.
		The House is in at noon Eastern.
		The Senate is in at 2 p.m. Eastern.
		Some other events on the C-SPAN networks today, a discussion on public transportation, members of Congress and the American Public Transportation Association Legislative Council are meeting in D.C. We're going to be covering that.
		Speakers include Congressman Rick Larson, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and others.
		That's on C-SPAN 2 today at 1.30 p.m. Eastern.
		We'll also cover it on C-SPAN.org.
		And of course, our free C-SPAN Now video app.
		Later today, this evening, 6 p.m. Eastern, chiefs from all six branches of the U.S. military will discuss defense strategy, military readiness, and the emerging global challenges at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
		We'll be covering that on C-SPAN 3, also c-span.org, and the free C-SPAN Now video app.
		So a day full of coverage here on the C-SPAN networks.
		Hope you stay with us all day long.
		And right now, it's our open forum.
		This is Phyllis in Durango, Colorado.
		Republican, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		John, I have a good idea.
		You know, Mr. Aiken was saying that people shouldn't be sitting on the couch if they're able to go out and work for the good of the American people and the taxpayer.
		Well, how about if the president meets with all those mega companies that just charge so much money, like the telephone companies, the electric companies?
		How about if they lower their rates to the good of the American people and we can get on with life at a regular rate?
		Thank you.
		Phyllis, do you think they'd do that?
		Well, he negotiates with the whole world.
		Maybe they would.
		I mean they got money up the kazoo, don't you think?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Phyllis in Durango, Colorado.
		More of your phone calls in just a second here, but we want to take viewers now to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue at 1600 Pennsylvania.
		We're joined by Naomi Lim of the Washington Examiner, White House reporter there.
		Naomi Lim, good morning to you as we look ahead at the week there at the White House.
		And how much at this point is, do you get a sense that the White House is going to get involved in this so-called big beautiful bill that Republicans are trying to pass in the House before the Memorial Day break at the end of this week?
unidentified		I think the pressure is actually mounting on them to get involved.
		We saw after the House Budget Committee failed to pass it out of the panel that we had Trump from the Middle East put out a tweet saying, you know, get the job done.
		We know that the House Speaker Mike Johnson was in really close connection with the White House over this week as we also over the weekend as budget negotiations continued and we saw that eventually get out of the committee last night.
		Now moving forward we have that big late or early morning vote scheduled for Wednesday morning to see whether the rules committee in terms of just the official sort of procedure about how this will go forward is voted on.
		But we're sort of seeing all of the different factions within the Republican Party still at loggerheads.
		And so I think you know Johnson is in a bit of a pickle, a political pickle that hopefully Trump can get him out on.
		I think that they'll try and use him sort of as a last minute resource, the president I mean, but I think we'll see that happen, particularly over how the president wants to handle the Medicaid cuts that are potentially being discussed on the table.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		If the president gets saved for the last minute, who's likely to come before that last minute?
		Is it the Treasury Secretary, the Vice President, a former member of the U.S. Senate?
		Who are those people who may be actually making the trip down Pennsylvania Avenue?
unidentified		And potentially the names you mentioned, I mean, the Vice President has been used more as a Senate envoy, and we'll probably see that sort of ratchet up when this bill eventually goes to the Senate.
		I mean, they also have their deadline to try and get this all passed by July 4th.
		And we saw that the Commerce Secretary is also making overtures.
		And so I think there'll be a team of people being dispatched and trying to leverage pressure wherever they can, because obviously you have the moderates that want, you know, well, there's a range of what the moderates want in terms of whether they want cuts to Medicaid, whether they want sort of state and local tax abductions, the cap on that to be raised.
		And then on the other line, you have the hardliners that, you know, want the opposite.
		They want sort of more harsh fiscal management.
		And so I think to corral all those groups together, it's going to have to be a team effort.
		And we actually have seen that with those representatives that you said.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned the Commerce Secretary.
		Let me shift to trade and commerce.
		Are any new trade deals expected out of the White House this week?
unidentified		I mean, this is something that we are all hoping to know.
		We saw reporting over the weekend that they're expecting something within this week.
		It might be sort of a package of trade deals.
		I think that was a tacit acknowledgement that getting 90 different trade deals in 90 days, potentially what the trade advisor Peter Navarro suggested after the whole Liberation Day announcement, that potentially that is something that is a little bit harder than they thought.
		But we've got eyes particularly on the Asia partners.
		I think Japan and South Korea were floated originally, but there seems to be a lot of things that still need to be worked out with the way that those talks are progressing.
		It might be sort of more of Vietnam or sort of smaller trader partners like that, particularly as the administration tries to figure out how to tackle the China trade deal, like the China trade network and stop products going through third parties.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And then, always interested in high-profile visitors to the White House this week, the President of South Africa expected here in DC this week.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Explain what President Trump will be chatting about.
unidentified		So, the White House hasn't technically confirmed that meeting, but obviously, the South African president will be in town.
		It comes at a high-stakes moment for him and his country, particularly when he has a high-profile critic of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who has, although has been having a diminished profile within the White House, has been a very vocal voice, particularly given his own South African heritage, and the pressure that is mounting around the idea of racial discrimination, but against white people.
		We saw last week sort of 60 so-called refugees from South Africa, white South Africans, arrive at Dallas airport and with an expedited visa process.
		And the White House has had to force to be to force to defend that.
		And they've sort of said that, you know, that program is not just for one race, for all racial minorities.
		But we'll see that probably come to the fore.
		You also saw the White House last week mention that they're not going to try and help South Africa organize the G20 summit, which is happening later there this year.
		They're going to be hosting it later this year.
		And so there's sort of a pressure on all mounts.
		And I think this will be a very high-stakes meeting for that leader.
		Well, there's a lot of high-stakes meeting when it comes to foreign policy, but that is one that everyone will be watching for all the politics that surrounds it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		One more foreign policy question, just the latest on the White House's efforts to achieve a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
unidentified		Yeah, so we're seeing that Trump is speaking with him early.
		Sorry, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
		There's a call scheduled at sort of 10 o'clock within the next hour.
		We'll see what comes from that.
		It obviously comes after last week where Trump sort of put pressure on Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Skolensky, to meet with Putin in Turkey.
		That meeting actually happened with lower tier representatives because Putin backed out in the end.
		And so we're seeing sort of Trump really put his personal reputation on the line here.
		We saw him say last week that only Putin will come.
		He has to sit down with Putin.
		It has to be a one-on-one discussion with him to hopefully end the war.
		But at the same time, over the weekend, we saw a record number of drones come into sort of northwest or the north part of Ukraine.
		And so for that, I think the pressure is mounting on Trump to get some sort of deal, which I think is making our European allies a little bit nervous about what that deal will potentially entail if Trump wants a quick win rather than a sort of a good win in the eyes of Ukraine.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And as if that's not enough for the Washington Examiner White House team to cover this week, anything else that you and your colleagues are watching for this week?
unidentified		No, great question.
		I think the thing that I'm really curious about is this meeting on Thursday or this dinner on Thursday for investors in the president's meme coin.
		I think we're seeing sort of these ethics conflicts of interest and things like that.
		Those concerns are sort of increasing, particularly after the revelation last week that the Qataris have offered to buy the president a 400 or donate a $400 million jet to this White House.
		And so I think we're seeing sort of whether this idea of him, his merging of business interests and politics come together.
		Basically, there's a dinner with his top investors to be at his golf club in Virginia later this week.
		And I think we'll see, I mean, there's said to be foreign guests on that guest list.
		And so I think that will be something that, you know, will earn criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		WashingtonExaminer.com is where you can go to read Naomi Lim's stories and her colleagues.
		And we appreciate you starting your week with us on the Washington Journal.
		And back to your calls in Open Forum.
		Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about.
		Phone lines are yours.
		A few more minutes here.
		This is Don in Pennsylvania, Jeanette, Pennsylvania, Democrat.
		Good morning.
		Thanks for waiting.
unidentified		Morning, John.
		First of all, I'd like to start off by saying in your first segment of open forum, you had a lady from Virginia.
		I believe her name was Danielle.
		And she expressed a lot of my views that I share.
		I think she was very spot on on some of her comments that she made.
		On a follow-up to that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And Don, for folks who didn't watch that segment, what comments were you talking about?
unidentified		I was talking about what, or what she was talking about, how the program has Democrats and Republicans constantly attacking each other, and we need to show more respect towards each other.
		And I agree with that 100%.
		And the second purpose of my call is I'm going to start calling you guys, and I'm going to change that in the way that I feel can help get that turned around.
		And I'm going to start making my calls more about fun and educational things.
		And I think it's something that could benefit everybody.
		You may be able to learn something, and we might be able to have a little fun instead of everybody wanting to put down each other, Democrats wanting to put down the Republicans and vice versa.
		So with that, I would like to say let's talk civility to each other.
		Let's get more enjoyment out of the program.
		And maybe we can all learn something from the program.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Don, 30 seconds, give me an educational thing that you think would be fun to talk about.
unidentified		Well, I'll give you one specifically to the month of May since we're in May.
		This is just a fun fact.
		I enjoy presidential history.
		And so for you and your other viewers today, we have only had two presidents born in the month of May, and that is Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, which were only separated by Eisenhower.
		But we have not had any death in the month of May of any president.
		It's the only month where there's never been a presidential death.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Huh.
		What's the month that has the most presidential births and the most presidential deaths?
		Or am I getting ahead of your research here, Don?
unidentified		Oh, no, you're not getting ahead of it, but it's going to be a strong guess.
unidentified		I believe July is the most for presidential deaths, and I believe September is the most for presidential births.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Don, appreciate the call from Jeanette, Pennsylvania.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Have a good day.
unidentified		Thank you, John.
		I appreciate it.
		And I always like it when you're on.
		You're one of my favorites.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate that, Don.
		Bob, Arlington, Texas Independent.
		It is open forum for a few more minutes here.
unidentified		Yeah, John, I appreciate it.
		Coming up on Memorial Day, and one thing that always ticked me off about your calls on Memorial Day, everybody says, Happy Memorial Day.
		Well, it ain't so happy.
		Happy maybe for some people, but those of us who've lost people in the wars, the overseas, don't celebrate.
		We really are sad to be reminded of what these crazy people have done before us.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Bob, how many family members have you had that have served this country?
unidentified		Well, I had my brother died in Korea in August 5th, 1952.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And what was his name, Bob?
unidentified		Billy.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And you're going to be thinking about Billy on Memorial Day?
unidentified		I should do.
		Let's say the whole family got hit with a Chinese bullet fired by a Chinese sniper.
		He was due to come home, but within a couple of weeks, they got him.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		How old was Billy, Bob?
unidentified		He was 21.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for telling us about Billy.
unidentified		Okay, thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Susie, Fairlawn, Ohio Republican.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, I've been listening for a while, and I kept hearing people call in, you know, wanting to know how much the illegal aliens are costing this country.
		So I looked up, they had a House Budget Committee meeting on May 8th, 2024.
		It was called The Cost of the Border Crisis, ran by Arrington from Texas.
		And they had a girl there, Jolie Kirschner, who worked for FAIR, Federation for American Reform, a nonprofit, 45 years, study the impact of mass immigration.
		They figured during Joe Biden's letting all these illegals in here, it costs $182 billion annually.
		They said that's conservative during Joe Biden's mass immigration.
		They only get about $31 billion from the illegal aliens.
		That's only 17% of the costs that they create.
		The first burden is illegal aliens usually have low income.
		They pay very little taxes.
		Second, they incur significant costs to the taxpayers on a daily basis in public services such as policing, K-12 education, emergency services.
louise in virginia ▲ ● ▼		Intentionally or otherwise, they receive benefits illegally from federal, state, and local jurisdictions despite that they have legal status.
unidentified		And there's a lot more I could say, but one thing I did find through this article was, and this is all in Congress, you know, if you look at their minutes, when Joe Biden got rid of the T, when Joe Biden put the TPS in, that's temporary protective status, shut down all deportations the first day of his administration.
		Nobody was being deported no matter what kind of crime they committed.
		These people, after five years, can end up getting all the services that the citizens of the United States get.
		Social Security, the child tax credit, just anything that we can get, they can get in five years.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Susie in Ohio.
		Just a few minutes left in open forum taking your calls on any public policy topic.
		We mentioned just a few moments ago with our discussion about the week ahead at the White House, the ongoing efforts to achieve a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia.
		It was just moments ago that the Vice President JD Vance spoke with reporters during his travels back from the Vatican.
		He mentioned the ongoing negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Vlodymir Zelensky.
		This is from earlier this morning.
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		Look, I'd say we're more than open to walking away.
		The president's supposed to talk to President Putin of Russia and President Zelensky as well.
		And I'm sure he'll talk to a number of world leaders today because he always does that.
		But look, the president's been very clear.
		This is not, the United States is not going to spin its wheels here.
		We want to see outcomes.
		And the first major outcome that we wanted to see, which we were glad about, is that we wanted the Russians and the Ukrainians to put a real peace proposal on the table.
		What would you need to do in order to stop fighting that happened?
		The second thing is they needed to agree to direct talks with one another.
		These sides hadn't talked in years.
		We thought that was a disgrace.
		That has now happened.
		But now, you know, the talks have been proceeding for a little while.
		We realize there's a bit of an impasse here.
		And I think the president's going to say to President Putin, look, are you serious?
		Are you real about this?
		Because the proposal from the United States has always been: look, there are a lot of economic benefits to thawing relations between Russia and the rest of the world, but you're not going to get those benefits if you keep on killing a lot of innocent people.
		So if you're willing to stop the killing, the United States is willing to be a partner for peace.
		That's been the proposal to the Russians, to the Ukrainians, and frankly, to nations and other hotspots around the world.
		I won't prejudge the president's conversation.
		I actually was just on the phone with him.
		I know he's looking forward to it, and I wish him all the best.
		I think he's the right guy to negotiate for the country, and I'm excited about it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Vice President JD Vance from just a few minutes ago, back to your phone calls.
		Just a couple minutes left here in open forum.
		This is Henry in Fort Deposit, Alabama.
		Democrat, good morning.
unidentified		Morning.
		My take on this is: if President Trump wants this $400 million airplane from Quaid, ask Quaid to donate the plane to the United States, not to President Truman.
		I mean, I'm sorry, President Trump.
		That's my take.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Henry in Alabama.
		And one more call here.
		Debbie in the Show Me State, Columbia, Missouri, Republican.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		The plane from Qatar is going to our military, but Trump will be able to use it.
		And I think he should take it.
		And I wanted to talk about the symbols.
		The 8647 is a direct threat to kill the president.
		Mobs and mafia have been using it since before the Depression, and it means 80 miles out town and six feet under.
		So anybody on either hat or a sign ought to be treated by the FBI as a threat to the president.
ellen brown ▲ ● ▼		And the symbols on that Maryland man hand were a marijuana leaf or smiley face.
unidentified		And the number 13, it means MS13 and for marijuana.
		S for smiley face and 13.
		And Comey ought to be put in prison for giving that shell picture that he took and posted.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point, Debbie.
		That's Debbie in Missouri, our last caller in our open forum.
		Stick around.
		About 45 minutes left in our program today.
		In that time, we're going to be joined by Virginia Case Salamano of the Watchdog Group Common Cause.
		We'll talk about that Qatari plane and other potential conflicts of interest.
		Stick around.
		We'll be right back.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Ernest Cuneo played Ivy League football at Columbia University and was in the old Brooklyn Dodgers NFL franchise before becoming a city hall lawyer and a brain trust aide to President Franklin Roosevelt.
		While on the payroll of national radio columnist Walter Winchell, Cuneo mingled with the famous and powerful.
		But his status as a spy remained a secret, hiding in plain sight.
		All of this is the way Hanover Square Press introduces readers to Thomas Mayer's book, The Invisible Spy.
		Mayer, a graduate of Fordham and Columbia, is an author and a television producer.
unidentified		Author Thomas Mayer with his book, The Invisible Spy, Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring, and America's First Secret Agent of World War II on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
		BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
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		Democracy.
		It isn't just an idea.
		It's a process.
		A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles.
		It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted.
		Democracy in real time.
		This is your government at work.
		This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered.
		Washington Journal continues.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Virginia K. Salomon joins us now.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		She serves as president and CEO of Common Cause, an organization whose mission is one.
unidentified		Well, we hold power accountable.
		That is point blank, period.
		That is our role to do.
		And so we serve as a watchdog for government.
		We also really just support everyday individuals in making sure that their voices are heard in our government across the country, both at the federal level, local, state, you name it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		How do you hold power accountable?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And how long have you been around?
unidentified		So we've been around since 1970.
		So for 55 years now almost, we've been doing this work.
		And the way that we hold government accountable is by working in both state legislatures, by working at the federal government, looking at what the ethics rules are and what exists in those local and state and federal legislatures to make sure that they are abiding by those rules.
		And in addition to that, we work really closely with people at the community level to make sure that government leaders are not engaged in any kind of grifting, right?
		And so we want to make sure that everyday people have trust in the elected officials that they have.
		One of the biggest challenges that we see is that people won't participate in government civically if they don't trust the leaders that have been elected.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		One of your latest efforts is a petition to encourage Congress to block President Trump from accepting that Qatari luxury plane.
		One, why are you against it?
		And two, what can Congress do about it?
unidentified		Well, there's a lot of reasons why we're against it.
		But first, there is a new plane that is being built.
		Boeing is taken on the contract to do that.
		It is set up to all the specifications that would be required from a security standpoint.
		So taking a new plane on, not only in addition to the fact that it just really looks bad from an optics standpoint, it is an ethical conflict, we believe, but the amount of money that it would cost taxpayers to be able to get that plane up to speed from a security standpoint from our government will cost about a billion dollars, according to the most recent number that we've seen.
		So a free is not free.
		You get a free $400 million plane that would still basically need to be stripped down to the nuts and bolts of it to be able to make sure that it was safe for any elected leader.
		How is that saving money?
		That is not a gift, number one.
		And number two, it just looks really bad.
		I mean, from an ethics standpoint, George Bush couldn't take a dog when he was president without going through all kinds of ethics and compliance rules.
		We're talking about a $400 plane.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So what can Congress do to stop this?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		If they wanted to?
unidentified		Well, because of the emoluments clause, Congress wouldn't technically need to approve it.
		So if they wanted to, they actually could say, we do not approve this.
		We will not allow this gift to be accepted.
		The concern right now is just that Congress is not doing anything, at least on the people who are in the majority who could hold him accountable.
		I would add that there was a review done by Pam Bondi, who is the now Attorney General, but she was getting $100,000 a month lobbying for the same government who is gifting this plane to President Trump prior to her becoming Attorney General.
		So the conflicts and the optics around this are just really, really terrible.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Never miss an opportunity to quote the Constitution.
		Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 is the Emoluments Clause.
		No person holding any office or profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present emolument, office, or title of any kind, whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.
		When the consent of Congress, is that just a simple majority vote?
		How does that work?
		And is that something that both the House and Senate have to vote on?
		And can the president step in in any way?
unidentified		So here's the thing.
		This is not a usual administration as far as adhering to laws and ethic guidelines.
		I just want to name that first because what should be happening is yes, it should go through congressional approval.
		Will it actually happen and will we see a plane show up at some point is another question.
		And that is why it is so concerning right now because we've seen so many rules and guidelines and norms that have been bypassed.
		So I will say yes, it should go through congressional.
		The concern is that are there loopholes or can he just bypass these things and do it anyway?
		I mean that that is really what so there's yes there should be congressional approval.
		Yes it should be going through the House.
		They should be looking at this.
		The question is will it happen?
		And what we're concerned about is just the courage that is coming out of many elected leaders on the Hill right now who are afraid to speak up.
		You saw people like Susan Collins who recently said we are afraid to.
		So rules are supposed to apply.
		It doesn't feel like they necessarily are.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The Treasury Secretary Scott Bassent was on CNN's State of the Union yesterday.
		He was asked about the Qatari plane.
		This is what he had to say.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		Even if Cutter isn't asking for anything in return now for the jet, I mean that's a bill that could come due.
unidentified		Nobody in the Middle East gives things just to, or anywhere in the world, just gives a $400 million jet just to be nice.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know, Jake, the French gave us a Statue of Liberty.
		The British gave us a resolute desk.
		I'm not sure they asked for anything in advance.
		And the more important airplane deal was there's 100 billion of orders from Qatari Airlines to Boeing.
		Kelly Oortberg, the CEO of Boeing, was with us in the Middle East.
		This is the biggest order in the company's history.
		So, you know, I think that that plane deal is much more important than this other one.
unidentified		Well, I will just say about Statue of Liberty.
		I mean, that was authorized by Congress and it belongs to the American people.
		It doesn't belong to whoever was president at the time.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that this plane would be a gift to the American government.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Virginia K. Salomon, your response to what the Treasury Secretary had to say.
unidentified		That's disconcerting.
		A Congress authorized the Statue of Liberty, which is still sitting in New York right now to this day.
		It was a gift to the American people.
		It was not a gift to an American president for specific use.
		The president wasn't holed up on Ellis Island or, you know, sitting, not Ellis Island, but sitting in the Statue of Liberty.
		It is frustrating because it is a twist, in my opinion, and on ethics watchdog opinions that you could even conflate the two.
		We're talking about a jet that will be used for personal reasons when there is a perfectly good, there's nothing wrong with Air Force One right now.
		Maybe it's not as updated.
		It's a little bit older than he would like.
		But by all means, there is nothing wrong with it.
		And he has said that it would go to his presidential library afterwards.
		Again, it is just such a twist on reality.
		And at the end of the day, business is business, and I get that, right?
		But it should not be a quid pro quo situation that we're facing here, where Qatar, for example, saying, oh, we're going to do all these contracts, but we're also going to get you a free plane out of this gig.
		That just feels really wrong, and it stinks.
		And I would just say this.
		You know, there was so much conversation from this president and from the administration, many administration officials, about quote-unquote draining the swamp.
		And I just feel like we've got it, we just dumped a bunch of alligators and crocodiles in the swamp and said, hey, guess what?
		We've drained it, but we've got new visitors here.
		And it's just all very, it's just very nasty and mucky.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Virginia K. Salamon is our guest.
		She's the president and CEO of Common Cause.
		If you want to check them out, commoncause.org.
		Phone lines for this segment.
		As usual, Democrats 202-748-8000.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Independents 202-748-8002.
		About a half an hour left in our program this morning.
		So go ahead and get your calls in as folks are calling in.
		What's your view on the Donald Trump meme coin?
unidentified		Again, this family has enriched itself beyond means.
		This family also, previous presidents have always had an ethics executive order.
		There was never one.
		There was an executive pledge that was signed to have outside counsel review ethics.
		Here you go, once again, this family being enriched.
		I think it's a total of $2.9 billion since him coming into office that we have seen this family make just an exorbitant amount of money.
		It's hard to put into words because this is not the type of thing that we've ever seen before.
		We saw some things in the last administration.
		I think what is concerning here is not only that the family and the president are making just ridiculous amounts of money, but it's at the cost of the American taxpayer.
		And what I mean by that is we're talking about they were just getting ready to have a legislation that would have potentially started cryptocurrency, kind of a national reserve for cryptocurrency.
		That legislation actually got pulled by Republicans because they were concerned that this was a bad look and that it could be abused.
		The president himself is actually raising alarm bells, not only with Democrats, but with Republicans in the House and the Senate.
		And while many of them will not say it out loud, this is what we're hearing behind closed doors, that they are very concerned about what they are seeing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned you had some concerns in the previous administration.
		Let me anticipate perhaps some callers' questions.
		What did Common Cause raise a red flag on in the previous administration?
		And is there a way to make comparisons between what you're talking about right now and what you were talking about then?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, before it was with his hotel, for example, the Trump Hotel that used to sit down on Pennsylvania Avenue.
		And you would see businessmen coming in and people would need to kind of kiss the ring in order to be able to get a meeting with the president or to meet with administration officials.
		And so there was a lot of gearing people towards the hotel.
		Now it goes to Mar-a-Lago, for example.
		You can get a membership at Mar-a-Lago and you get lots of direct access to Trump and his family and other people who are in his ecosystem.
		And that's that direct line to the president that people are able to have.
		That is no different whether it's in Florida or whether it is here.
		When it comes to some of his business practices, what we're seeing is direct benefit to Donald Trump and his family.
		And they may not pay immediate dividends.
		It might not all be happening right now.
		But after the fact, we saw Jared Kushner being able to receive really, really big gifts from the Saudi government.
		We've seen his family now with the Qatari government being able to make really strong business deals that will benefit them well into the future.
		These things have not changed.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What were the things that you raised red flags about during the Biden administration?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And how do those compare to what you were just talking about?
unidentified		So we didn't have the same ethics concerns from a financial standpoint.
		We did have a lot of concerns about Hunter Biden and his interactions and what was happening with his financial dealings and really getting into trying to understand whether or not the president was actually involved.
		And what we found during that was that as a father, yes, he was very involved in providing support to his son, emotional support.
		He was also not financially involved.
		And so there was, you know, a parent who had a child who had very serious substance abuse issues, who was making poor choices versus a situation now, but the president himself not directly being involved in those financial dealings versus a situation where it's a whole family that is involved and dad is in the White House.
		So it's a very different situation.
		Common Cause has filed all kinds of ethics lawsuits and investigations.
		We were actually the ones who, on the Stormy Daniels hush payment money, it was an intern of ours who discovered that campaign finance conflict.
		So these are the types of things that we tend to focus on.
		But I think ultimately what we're saying is it's not good whether it's a Democrat or a Republican.
		It's not good at all.
		It's not about right and left.
		It's about right and wrong.
		And the American people, they're feeling bad right now when they see all of this stuff happening.
		And yet we're talking about proposing cuts to Medicaid.
		And so as we look at it, it's about not what's good for any political party or any politician.
		It's what's good for the American people and what makes the American people have trust in their government.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Again, commoncause org, if you want to check out their work, and there are plenty of callers waiting to chat with you.
		This is Deborah Liu out of Forest Ranch, California.
		Up first, line for Democrats.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Hello.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Deborah Liu.
unidentified		Well, my comment, I've seen everything that the Trump administration has been doing.
		And I think back on the McCarthy era with the quote, and I'm reading it from Wiki, until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.
		Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
		Have you left no sense of decency?
		That was what started to change things during that era when McCarthy had so much power.
		And the problem today, I believe, is that there are too many Republicans who have no sense of decency.
		They're going after progressive values, and they seem to forget that what the United States, how we began, and what we really stand for.
		So I agree with everything Common Cause is doing, and I appreciate that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Virginia K. Salomon.
unidentified		Well, thank you.
		And I think that is a big thing that is missed in all of this, is that there is at it our country at its core is, I think, comprised of really good people who want to be able to have good lives.
		And we also want decency and kindness in our politics.
		And while politics are messy and it's nasty, and we should be able to have policy debates, what we're seeing right now has gone beyond any kind of norm.
		The attacks on American people, American values, is what is really concerning.
		And we're seeing this play out through a lot of these ethics challenges with this administration.
		It can't be what's good for me as the president can't be good for you as the American people.
		He shouldn't be able to take a $400 million airplane.
		But yet at the same time, we're seeing a ridiculous amount of cuts to Medicaid, for example, that would harm a lot of vulnerable people.
		So this is all, you know, again, going back to the idea of decency.
		Have you no decency?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		To John in California, Republican, good morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for waiting.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I do believe that we need a lot more watchdogs and like that.
		I love the way you whitewashed the Biden administration and his son going around the world gathering up funds.
		And oh, there was no financial involvement.
		I don't think they ever, I don't think that was ever a conclusion by anybody that Joe Biden didn't profit from his son's graft and corruption.
		I wonder what you think about the $2 billion that was given to this organization that was cobbled together in 30 seconds by Stacey Abrams that went out of the government.
		Yeah, there's going to be cuts to Medicare, or Medicaid, what they want to cut is the graft and the corruption.
		And you have had political on this morning.
		You've had the man that has been manager of office of management budget that came on to do nothing but belittle and whack Trump.
		And now you've got this lady from Common Cause, which is a very left-wing organization.
		And I don't want Trump to take the darned airplane.
		I think it is bad optics.
		But by the same token, I want some equity when it comes to the criticism.
		And Joe Biden's administration, from the covering up of his health and mental problems to what his son did and what other people in his administration did.
		And for you to sit there and say, oh, this is outside the norms.
		The norms have got us $36 trillion, almost $37 trillion in debt.
		There has been graft and corruption.
		What about the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation that took literally billions of dollars from around the world when Bill Clinton was president?
		John, you bring up the Common Cause on there berating that fact.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Bring up a lot of little points, John.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Let me give Virginia K. Salamon a chance to respond.
unidentified		Yeah, and I think one of the things that I would say is that, again, going back to it's not about right or left, it's about right and wrong.
		And it's interesting.
		Common cause, we have not changed our values.
		We were actually founded by a Republican in 1970.
		A lot of people don't know that.
		So what I would say is when it has come to speaking out against whether it's Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, Common Cause has actually done that.
		You should check at us.
		We have both sides of the aisle pretty angry with us all the time.
		And when we talk about left-leaning, our values haven't changed over the past 55 years.
		The political ecosystem has.
		And so we always stand on behalf of voters.
		We are nonpartisan.
		We don't support or endorse candidates or political parties, but we do identify where we see wrong.
		And we call it like we see it.
		We call strikes and balls.
		And if we're talking about specifically saying we're going back in history, and we can go back as far as you want.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You brought up the Clinton Foundation.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Was Common Cause concerned about money taken in by the Clinton Foundation when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State?
unidentified		I was not at Common Cause at that time, so I can't speak specifically to the work that Common Cause did around that.
		But what I can say is this.
		If there is a commitment from an administration saying, moving forward, we are going to do X, we are going to drain the swamp.
		He goes back in the history.
		Wouldn't we say that moving forward, instead of saying, well, they did it too, let's start, turn over a new leaf, let's start on a new page and say, moving forward, these are the things that we want.
		Because that is what was promised to the American people.
		No different than Joe Biden, no different than the Clintons.
		Whoever you want to point back to, if there is this constant churn in Washington where there is finger pointing going like this with both sides pointing at each other, at some point, somebody has to be the adult in the room and say, enough is enough.
		This has to stop.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned the Stormy Daniel hush money payments, that that was a common cause investigation.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What are some other common cause investigations, ethics complaints that you filed at the first one on it that viewers would know going back into your history?
unidentified		So Common Cause has been working on ethics, I mean, since Watergate, honestly.
		So there were tons of investigations, a lot of the transformation that came out of Watergate.
		We just celebrated the Federal Elections Commission at 50, just turned 50 years old.
		That was actually born out of Watergate, and that was one of the things that Common Cause helped to set up.
		So from Watergate until now, Common Cause has been a part of that.
		Going back to the Iran-Contra affair, you name it.
		There are many, many different times where Common Cause has looked into these ethics investigations.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		How do you fund Common Cause?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		How do you fund this work that you do?
unidentified		So we raise small dollars from donors across the country, whether it's $5, $10, $25.
		We have a lot of small dollar giving that comes into our organization.
		We also have money from foundations and philanthropy.
		We take zero business dollars.
		We take zero federal money.
		And the reason that we do that is because we want to make sure that we can maintain that nonpartisanship.
		And again, we work with Republicans and Democrats.
		We're in all 50 states in every congressional district, and we have offices in 23 states.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		To Barbara in Florida, Independent, thank you for waiting.
unidentified		You're very welcome, and thank you for letting me speak.
		I would like to ask her how she enjoys flying on airplanes that go all the way back to where they started.
		And I don't like it.
		I don't like the fact that all of our even commercial planes are so old until my children are younger than that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So Barbara, bring me to the ethics issues that we're talking about right now.
unidentified		It's about the airplane that was given to them, and the Arabs have given us more contracts for arms and things over the years than you can probably name any other country.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So you're okay with the gift, Barbara?
unidentified		Israel.
		You're okay with the gift of the plane?
		I'm not.
		I am very okay taking the plane because it's for the United States of America.
		It is not for the president, no matter who he is.
		But I happen to like most of the things this one is doing.
		I happen to be 82 years old and I've always listened to politics.
		And frankly, he's doing a pretty freaking good job.
		I don't mean he's great.
		I don't mean he's terrible.
		He's neither one.
		He's just doing the best he can to do what he does.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Let me take your point and allow Virginia K. Salamon to respond.
unidentified		I would just say, going back to what I said earlier, a $400 million gift of an airplane that would cost nearly a billion dollars to bring it down, strip it down to the nuts and the bolts, basically to make sure from a security standpoint that the president was safe to fly in that plane, number one.
		And number two, that our national security and our national secrets would be protected while on that plane.
		Those to me, the math isn't mathing when it comes to that.
		Why would you spend that additional amount of money?
		It's going to cost us more.
		It's going to cost taxpayers more.
		And that's money that could be used, again, towards something like Medicaid or protecting Social Security or making sure that our FAA system is fixed.
		We know, talking about aviation, right now, the FAA is broken.
		Air traffic controllers are at the highest levels of stress.
		I'm more worried about getting on a plane, as most Americans are, when we're hearing of all of the issues that we're seeing with air traffic control than I am on the act that I'm worried about the actual planes themselves.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Less than 15 minutes left this morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		On a different topic, I did want to ask you your view on members of Congress making stock market trades and managing their portfolios as they are making laws.
unidentified		Yeah, absolutely.
		We are 100% in support of stock trading and bans on stock trading for members of Congress and their family members.
		It makes absolutely no sense.
		The rest of the world in the private sector and in civil society have 401ks or 403Bs, right?
		They go and they invest in their portfolios like normal folks.
		You should not be able to have insider information about what is happening potentially around different stocks and then be able to go and trade those stocks accordingly.
		And so we are kind of very serious when it comes to that issue and we are 100% in support of a stock trading ban.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		So what are you doing about it?
unidentified		Oh, we're lobbying on those issues and we have been for a long time.
		We're currently looking at the Pelosi Act that Senator Hawley has put into place.
		I think that's the same thing.
		Does that seem like a good solution?
		It's the devils that are always in the details.
		I don't necessarily like naming legislation after people unless it's honoring somebody personally, but I think the components of it, the legislation itself, actually make sense.
		What I will say is that there are lots of pieces of legislation that have been introduced in the past that have not made it through.
		And the one thing that I think really is important and one of the things that we need to be reminded of is that the lobby industry in this town is huge.
		There is still a disproportionate amount of influence that they have.
		And I think that that is why we're seeing some of these challenges because they want their stock to be able to be traded.
		They want to be able to go in, whether you're big oil, big agra, you name it, big pharma, crypto.
		You want to be able to go in and have that access.
		And so the people that will vote on your behalf, there is a lot of influence going there.
		We always have to follow the money trail.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		It's interesting, you know, your concerns about the lobbyists.
		You said we're lobbying on this issue.
		Do you consider what you do a form of lobbying?
unidentified		I think we do advocacy.
		And I think that's one of the things that's important.
		You have to register as a lobbyist in order to be able to meet with legislators on Capitol Hill.
		Again, we are 501c3, 501c4 organization, and so we are tax exempt.
		We don't take any big corporate money.
		So what we're doing is on behalf of the American people, we consider our work advocacy, though.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Ithaca New York Fay Democrat, good morning.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Good morning, John.
		Please, please let me elaborate on a few things.
		I will just because you cut me off last over a month ago when I was about to talk about offshore accounts.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Just jump into it, Faye.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Just go for it.
unidentified		Yeah, okay.
		So, yeah, offshore accounts.
		But so, okay.
		So let me just make it very simple.
		I agree with the woman that you have on.
		I can't hear what you're saying because I muted my TV.
		So I agree with the woman, what she's saying.
		I want to make something very clear that's bothering me, and that is I watch a lot of news and a lot of good news.
		uh your your programs um uh bbc watch fox and now about get me to the issue that you want to get to something about I want to say something about the airplane.
		The reason I brought up the news programs is because I don't see anybody talking about the fact that Trump wants to fix this airplane.
		It's going to take a couple of years and then it's his.
		I mean, it's clear as day that this plane is his gift.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Got your point, Faye.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And you were making this point earlier, the amount that it would cost to fix this airplane.
unidentified		The amount of money that it would cost the American taxpayers, I think that's the most important thing.
		And if we're talking about huge deficits, our credit rating has just been downgraded.
		There's a lot of uncertainty around our economy.
		Why would you take something like this on, knowing that it just looks horrible, horrible, horrible, not only to us as taxpayers and as people who live in this country, but to other countries?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Are you doing like a whip count, as it were, on who has come out against this and whether he would have the votes if he went through Congress to get it approved?
unidentified		Our staff is looking at that right now.
unidentified		And I will be honest, I just got back from vacation, so I'm not sure where we're at from that, but I will tell you that they are looking at what that would look like.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Tim in Michigan, Republican, good morning.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You are next.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		Yeah, I was just listening.
		It's quite interesting how for the last 58 years that I've been around, we have talked about the same stuff every day.
		And things seem to never get better, but we always blame each other too or whatever.
		And the people out here in the actual real world that go to work and pay their bills, we're talking about billions and trillions and all that stuff every day.
		It's so funny that it doesn't even make sense to us because when we go eat or when we go buy a car that's not even worth it, I worked in a car plant for 30 years.
		I don't understand how we get this trillions of dollars.
		The jet, who cares about if he gets a jet and brings it back here and flies around?
		He's going to do that anyway.
		He was going to do it as a businessman.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Tim in Michigan.
		Speaking of President Trump and what he's said about this jet and about previous ethics concerns that have been brought up, he famously said a president can't have a conflict of interest.
		What's your view on that?
		Can a president have a conflict of interest?
unidentified		Absolutely.
		Anybody can have a conflict of interest.
		And I think, you know, I want to go back to what the previous caller said: that, you know, this has been happening for a really long time in his 58 years of life.
		This is what he's seen.
		And that's what's concerning: we have normalized things that should not be normal.
		We have said this corruption is okay.
		These ethical concerns are okay because everybody does it.
		That's what that's what is concerning.
		That is not normal in a healthy functioning government.
		It shouldn't be okay if it's a Democrat.
		It shouldn't be okay if it's a Republican.
		And I think what this president is doing is just raising the bar for people's tolerance to be able to accept corruption and ethical issues and say, well, I'm the president.
		We can't have any ethical conflicts.
		And quite frankly, he's never been held accountable.
		So at the end of the day, people are going to be like, meh.
		And that's just really what's sad and concerning in this moment.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Charles is in Alexandria, Virginia.
		Independent.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Hey, good morning, John, to your guests, ma'am.
		I could not be with you more.
		I'll be very brief.
		I'm a retired military army guy, and I fought and served for the Constitution of this country.
		Therefore, I can't agree with this president taking a gift such as that plane.
		I won't repeat everything that you've said about the money that it's going to cost to refit it.
		But to my caller, friend in California, and to the last Republican caller, I'm an independent.
		I just don't understand why we allow our morals to go down to the ground.
		As long as this man is a quote-unquote businessman, it's okay.
		Corruption and his family's benefited or benefiting from what he's doing.
		I mean, the trip that he just came, the trip from overseas just now.
		His sons benefited from it, the golf courses.
		I mean, the whole family is benefiting.
		No one is talking about Kushner in the last administration when Kushner went to Saudi Arabia and got millions or billions of dollars or his daughter.
		But that's okay because he's a businessman and is right in our face.
		As long as it's in our face, according to some people, it's okay.
		What is not okay?
		And I didn't serve this country and fight for this country for this to be false, for this to be okay, especially when Medicare, my mom's Medicare and Social Security may be being threatened because he wants to cut assistance.
		But yet your family can benefit.
		They don't need Medicare.
		They don't need Social Security.
		They've got money.
		But I guess the country doesn't care about that.
		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's Charles and Virginia.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Give you the final minute here.
unidentified		No, thanks, Charles.
		I think one of the things that we want to just be reminded of is when we think about what our country needs in this moment, we're looking for us to be able to continue to have people thrive in this country, to be able to do simple things like go to work, make sure that you know you can pay your rent, that you can buy food in the grocery store, that you can take care of your family, and know that when you retire, there's going to be a little something in place.
		People shouldn't have to be distracted, and the legislature should not have to be distracted by all of these, all this outsized noise.
		These are distractions from doing the people's business.
		When we see these types of ethical concerns, whether it's Republican, Democrat, I guess the question I would ask is if you would be okay with the previous president or future presidents doing exactly the same thing, or if you're just okay because it's Donald Trump.
		Same thing I would say about Biden when he was in office.
		Were you okay with the things that he did because he was Biden or because he wasn't Trump?
		And so we have to get back to a different place where we're looking specifically at the issues and apply everything evenly and fairly across the board.
		And there's got to be a restart at this country at some point, or else we're going to continue along this partisan divide that doesn't help us drive our country forward.
		In fact, it further divides us.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Virginia K. Selimon is president and CEO of Common Cause.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You can check out their work at commoncause.org, and we appreciate the time.
unidentified		Thank you so much.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's going to do it for us today in our program.
		A reminder for viewers that this afternoon, 1.30 p.m. Eastern Time, a conference on public transportation.
		The Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, will be there along with members of Congress.
		That's on C2, C-SPAN 2 today at 1.30 p.m. Eastern and also at 6 p.m. Eastern Time today, a discussion on military defense strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
		You can watch that live on C-SPAN 3.
		In the meantime, the House is in at noon Eastern today, the Senate at 3 p.m.
		You can watch them respectively here on C-SPAN at C-SPAN 2.

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