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Coming up this morning on Washington Journal, your calls and comments live.
And then the Cato Institute's Alex Narasta talks about ongoing protests over Trump administration deportation policies.
And New York Times White House correspondent Luke Broadwater on White House News of the Day and the week ahead.
Also, the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin discusses the future of Iran's nuclear program amid Israeli military strikes and pressure by the U.S. to reach a deal.
The House and Senate are both away this week, but we'll be with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal.
And we began this morning considering the rising threat of political violence in this country.
This weekend's lawmaker shootings in Minnesota are being described as politically motivated and add to a growing list of attacks and killings in recent months that have a political connection.
So this morning, we're simply asking for your suggestions on how to reduce political violence in this country.
Here's our usual phone lines for you to call in.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
Independents 202-748-8002.
You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003.
If you do, please 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 go ahead and start calling in now.
Here's just a sampling of some of the headlines this morning in the wake of those shootings over the weekend in Minnesota.
This is from the front page of the New York Times.
Violent action tied to politics as the new reality partisan divide in the U.S. drives the rise in threats.
This is from the Washington Post this morning.
Minnesota killings show depth of the nation's political fractures.
And this is how the Associated Press puts it in their story.
The assassination of a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition To a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States.
The Associated Press going on to say, the list in the past two months alone, the killings of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages, the firebombing of the official residence of the Pennsylvania governor on a Jewish holiday with his family inside.
The story goes on to say, and here's just a sampling of some of the other attacks before that, the killing of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York late last year, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in a small Pennsylvania town during the presidential campaign, the 2022 attack on the husband of the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories, and the 2017 shooting by a liberal gunman at a GOP practice for a congressional baseball game.
Quote, we've entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels that the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence has been lifted.
That's Matt Dalek, a political scientist at George Washington University here in Washington, D.C.
He said, quote, a lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.
This morning, we're asking you for your suggestions on reducing political violence in the United States.
Again, having this conversation in the wake of those killings in Minnesota, it was late last night that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz spoke to the public about political violence.
This was after the suspect in the shooting had been arrested.
The news conference after that, this is the governor of Minnesota.
A moment in this country where we watch violence erupt.
This cannot be the norm.
It cannot be the way that we deal with our political differences.
Now's the time for us to recommit to the core values of this country.
And each and every one of us can do it.
Talk to a neighbor rather than arguing.
Debate an issue.
Shake hands.
Find common ground.
This is who Melissa Hortman was.
In the first negotiating session that I had a chance to work with her, she got all the partners in the room, and she provided each and every one of us a copy of a book called Getting to Yes.
And the whole premise was: debating with a sense of goodwill, a sense of trying to come to compromises that serve everyone.
And because of her, we did that.
Because of her, we did that year after year after year.
That's the embodiment of how things are supposed to work.
It's not hatred.
It's not about mean tweets.
It's not about demeaning someone.
It's leading with grace and compassion and vision and compromise and decency.
That was taken from us in Minnesota with the murder of Speaker Hortman.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, that was late yesterday evening talking to you this morning and simply asking for your suggestions on reducing political violence.
President Trump weighing in over the weekend after the shooting took place on Saturday, this was what he posted on Truth Social.
He said that such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.
God bless the great people of Minnesota, a truly great place.
That was part of the president's statement that he put out on Truth Social.
We'll look for more today and hear from you on your suggestions for reducing political violence in the United States.
A conversation in this first hour of the Washington Journal.
Matthew is up first out of Dearborn, Michigan, line for Democrats.
Matthew, go ahead.
unidentified
Yeah.
I don't know what to, I don't know what we can do to stop it.
I know open carry laws and concealed carry laws haven't helped in one bit.
But let's hope our thoughts and prayers have a little more wisdom to them.
Matthew, in terms of political violence and it being on the rise, the Associated Press going through some of the recent incidents, why do you think it's on the rise in this country?
unidentified
That's another one I completely don't understand.
We live in the wealthiest country, and we are the wealthiest country.
We have a lot of wealth disparity, which is a sad thing.
And I mean, on a weekend, you can go to a ball game.
You can be in a park with your kids.
You'd think people would want to do more of that.
For some reason, I don't understand why people gravitate to the end of the world stuff.
I don't understand it.
It's all gloom and doom, but it's not gloom and doom.
I mean, America is, I can't think of a better place to live.
I play golf on a weekend.
I see my friends a lot.
I don't understand it.
I don't understand why people are so bitter at the world.
I'm also a high school history teacher in Philadelphia.
I think one of the ways we could hopefully quell the violence is I think it's really not going to be us as individual citizens, but it's going to have to be some of the leaders of our country, lawmakers, specifically lawmakers of whatever political affiliation that the people committing violence are affiliated with.
So like conservatives need to talk down extreme right-wingers and condemn them publicly, just as it's going to take liberal lawmakers to condemn hard left-leading extremists.
Do you think that we have the leaders who can do that or will do that?
unidentified
Perfectly honest with you, no.
Only because I feel like it's become, for many of our lawmakers, profitable in the sense that they need those votes of those extreme candidates.
Because if you saw a lawmaker condemning this, I guess you could call it extreme supporter from their base, it makes them look weak.
It makes them not look affiliated with the party or the ideas.
And I think on some level, they're also a little bit of afraid of these people because they're afraid that they'll become targets.
But they need to step up, I think, and tell them, look, this is not okay.
And it's only going to be able to come from like a conservative leader is only going to be able to talk to an extreme right leader, just as a liberal leader is only going to be able to talk to an extreme left violence person.
This is from that New York Times story I showed the headline a little bit earlier.
This is diving in on the jump page.
They say, like school shootings, political violence is both sickening and becoming almost routine.
Another fact of living in an anxious and dangerously polarized country.
What do you think about making that comparison to school shootings to where we are right now with political violence?
unidentified
Wow, that is a heavy question.
No, I think it's appropriate.
I mean, literally, what was it?
The first week of school this past year, we just wrapped up.
We had a whole day of training on how to, you know, prepare in case there was an active shooter in our building.
I posted a photo of our training session on my personal Instagram, and someone was like, What the heck are you doing?
And it has become routine.
Like, we treat it like a kind of daily routine now, where it becomes almost you feel desensitized.
I don't think we're there yet because political violence, I think, we're still a little bit shocked with.
Whereas I fear with school shootings, which is something we've had since Columbine, the trainings and mass murders, we're slowly, and I hate to say this disturbingly, becoming desensitized to.
Would you equate to a certain moment in history where you feel like we are right now?
Is this, we're this year, 60 years from the assassination of Malcolm Max.
There's a new book out about his legacy.
68, 1968, the political assassinations of 68 often gets brought up.
Is there a comparison that you would make historically?
unidentified
Well, there's the old adage: history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
I would say there's, depending on which historian or history teacher you ask, you're going to get numerous answers to that.
I know many have equated this to like the years before the Civil War.
God willing, I hope that's not the case.
There are those who've compared us to like the 60s with like many of the radical movements and changes, which I kind of hope is more so the case because we're seeing a lot of different social movements right now.
But with in terms of political violence, it could go any numerous way in the U.S. Civil War, pre-Civil War.
The political violence of the 60s is an appropriate comparison, I think.
And then also, you could look at some historical revolutions in Europe and Asia and possibly equate it to that as well.
And in terms of, obviously, this incident in Minnesota happened over the weekend, but are you getting questions from your students about what's going on right now when it comes to politics and violence?
unidentified
I had some questions.
We just actually let out, so I would not have, so I won't be explaining that to my students this week because we're on summer break.
But I did get some questions earlier last year when it came to foreign policy regarding the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
In terms of what's going on now, I had a lot of questions from students the beginning of 2025, so like January, February, regarding the ICE raids, which I am firmly against, just to be very clear.
And many of my students were concerned about their friends, their family members, especially, and wondering why they might be detained, what would happen.
They were detained, what should they do?
That was a very concerning issue.
They are, my students are very alert and concerned about the current situation in America.
In terms of political violence, I think, because some of them also come from countries where there's political violence, they've kind of seen this before.
James, some of the issues that you bring up that your students are interested in, we're going to be talking about throughout the course of today's program.
Alex Norasta of the Cato Institute joining us to talk about the Trump administration's deportation policies.
I really think that a lot of political things need to come to an app where people are informed on what their senator does or didn't get done.
And I'm 45 years old.
I've served in the military, and I find it daunting to have to really research my elected officials and see what they do and what they don't get done.
And I'm always surprised how, you know, Kentucky suffers, but they continue to elect Lindsey Graham and the senators, you know, who have these long tenures, their states suffer.
So I think that's starting to contribute to a lot of the violence.
Words from federal officials, members of the House and Senate, plenty in the wake of the shootings over the weekend out of Minnesota.
This is Senator Susan Collins, the Republican of Maine, on her ex-feed on Saturday saying the attacks on public officials and their families in Minnesota are tragic and horrifying.
Incidents of political violence and threats are becoming far too common in our country.
We must stand united in support of the victims' families and survivors and local law enforcement as well.
Susan Collins from Maine on his ex-feed on Sunday, the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted this video.
The targeted and tragic attack directed at two Minnesota elected officials is disgusting and it should disgust anyone who has any decency in this country.
There are so-called leaders in America in elected and appointed office who are creating a climate of violence, making it clear to some of their supporters that it should be open season on public officials.
They are targeting, arresting, prosecuting, and manhandling people who are elected to serve their communities and going after them simply for doing their jobs.
Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Minority Leader, on his ex-feed.
Back to your phone calls.
We're simply asking you this morning for suggestions on reducing political violence in this country.
Willie, Texas, Republican, good morning.
What do you think?
unidentified
Good morning, Hakeem Jeffries.
You know, it's amazing.
This guy went on to talk about political violence.
You know, here's my suggestion.
My suggestion, political violence would be to take all the Democrats, all the Democrat leaders, okay, and censure them.
I mean, the Republicans need to do censure them.
You don't hear the type of things that come out of their mouths from Republicans.
You don't hear them talking about calling them this Gestapo.
You don't hear people like Chuck Schumer saying that Gorsuch would reap the whirlwind.
You know, you don't hear any of that.
You don't hear Maxine Waters, people like Maxine Waters saying, attack people in the grocery store or in a department store.
You don't hear that.
All of the things that you hear are from liberal Democrats who are exciting the emotions of the individuals, particularly young people, who have no idea about what civics are.
All they do is they listen to people like Hakeem Jeffries and they say, okay, we're going to do this.
We're going to start doing things like being bold enough to attack ICE agents who are simply just trying to exercise warrants on very, very dangerous people.
It's amazing to me how we're talking about political violence when it's all coming from one side of the that's Willie out in Texas.
David, suggestions for reducing political violence in this country?
What do you think?
unidentified
I mean, I really feel like the main thing is to division of the country.
I mean, I feel like the main reason many people are inciting the violent acts are because they feel disenfranchised.
They don't feel like they are actually part of the country.
Where they try to do their best to be involved or become part of the country and they become separated or again disenfranchised, they are in that violence in some kind of way.
I feel like that's mostly the reason.
So, like a lot of the times when you think about it, there's no reason to destroy your own community.
There's no reason to like burn down your hometown that does not help you.
They only do that because they don't own anything.
We're coming up on 7:30 on the East Coast, and we're simply asking you in the wake of those shootings in Minnesota, your suggestions for reducing political violence in this country.
202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats.
Independents, 202-748-8002 on the incidence of political violence.
This is from the Washington Post story on that topic.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks extremism, identified some 58 U.S.-based violent events and alleged plots in the year 2024 alone that involved 61 individuals with confirmed or assessed connections to violent extremist ideologies or online radicalization.
That's according to the Institute.
And the story note that politicians and government facilities were targeted in seven of those incidents.
And of course, in Minnesota, we had the latest incident that happened over the weekend.
It's still being investigated.
The suspected gunman was arrested late last night, if you missed that.
And it was on CNN State of the Union yesterday that Senator Amy Klobuchar spoke about the violence in the state of Minnesota and this feeling of political violence in this country.
This has gotten totally out of hand with threats against members of Congress in 2016.
There were like 1,700 of them last year, over 9,000 of them.
And so, one of the things that we have done, our delegation with Congressman Emmer and Congresswoman McCollum, Senator Smith, and others, we actually put out a joint statement that said, We speak with one voice in condemning political violence.
I think we need to see more of this across our country.
People need to call people out.
Some people need to look in the mirror and say, Hey, I've got to stop this or stop my colleagues from doing this because it makes it much worse.
We need to bring the tone down, and we also need to stand up when people do bad things.
Minnesota Democratic Senator Andy Klobuchar, that was yesterday on CNN State of the Union.
Back to your phone calls this morning on the Washington Journal.
This is Monroe in Maryland, Independent.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
All right.
I'm going to try to get it all out and be as concise as possible.
First of all, people need to appreciate that this has nothing to do with political parties.
This is decades old.
I'm only 49, so I'm not as old as some of the callers, but I mean, come on, people, we've seen it.
There are messages in the movies, in the music, in the TV shows.
Like, yo, if you believe you are what you eat, which is why you probably don't eat McDonald's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week, otherwise there'll be consequences.
Well, we need to watch what we've been feeding our mind.
And what we've been feeding our mind as a society is not good.
It's not healthy.
And I don't have all the answers.
I just have some suggestions.
We need to watch what we feed our back in the homes.
Like, there are so many studies that show how kids do better at succeeding in school, better with their emotions, less violent.
We need to get the fathers back in the home.
And how these are going to be the kids that are going to grow up running our country.
And if that scares you, then people say, hey, we need to do something about that.
I mean, these kids have more power than the teachers in the classroom.
They have more power than the security guards in the mall in the public space.
They have more power than the parents in the home.
We need to get, these are some of the things we need to do to fix this.
So, Monroe, it's a cultural issue that you're talking about.
When did we, this cultural breakdown that you're concerned about, when did that start?
unidentified
Again, I was born in 1975.
I'm pretty confident that there are going to be some other callers who can point to moments in history that they grew up with that can say this for me, for what I believe.
When we swung to populist candidates on both the left and the right, where people are just too busy trying to do what's going to get them elected.
And in that process, we have a whole bunch of divisive attacks.
And I mean, mudslinging has been around since, what, the beginning, but this is crazy.
Like, everybody always wants to sit up here and say what's different when the reality is, instead of looking at populism, pluralism.
We all have way more in common than we do different.
And it's the divisive stuff that starts at the federal level in all the campaigns and then it trickles down to your local stuff and then it trickles down into the schools and then it trickles down into the workplace.
It's like this tribalism that exists in this country needs to be dealt with.
We have way more in common than we do different people.
They do get when the man or the father kind of took it out during the really it was the drug war when it started.
It really did incarcerate a lot of fathers.
But back to politics.
I mean, if you want to point to one thing, like the violence, why it's escalated here in the last, I don't know, five or six years.
It's not just Donald Trump, but could you please show the tweet that Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, put out about this incident, the shootings or whatever.
And I'm just saying the callousness of just, it's not, it is all Republicans because by their silence, like, like, share that tweet.
And then Donald Trump, look at the way he talks about everyone except other than Russia or China.
He calls, you know, I'm a liberal, I'm a Democrat.
So, Bradley, this is Chris Murphy, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut.
He says Donald Trump sends clear signals to supporters to clear signals of supporting political violence.
He said he might pardon those who plotted the kidnapping of Governor Whitmer, threatened peaceful protesters of his military parade.
He says Democrats don't say these things.
He said, don't both sides this issue.
Though he does note in this ongoing series of tweets that he has that the violence sometimes is trained on Republicans, including Donald Trump himself.
Yesterday, in fact, he wrote was the anniversary of the congressional baseball game shooting.
And yes, there have been some on the left who've been too cavalier about violence, and they should be condemned as well.
He goes on to say, but there's no comparison anywhere on the left with MAGA's regular legitimization of violence in our politics.
There's a straight line from January 6th to the pardons to the assault on Senator Padilla in Minnesota.
A democracy cannot function when one faction embraces violence.
Senator Chris Murphy specifically pointing the finger in one direction.
unidentified
I mean, I do want to agree it's Trump.
I mean, Trump says he came down the escalator.
But it is, you know, there's a whole ecosystem of these people, the Charlie Kirks, and somebody's giving them marching orders.
I mean, you can literally see how they're putting out a narrative about how the guy was a Democrat right off the bat.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, that's how they're thinking.
They're not trying to think like, I mean, this stuff is so like our country is in serious danger, man.
I don't know how things like, and just wait to this fall.
Russia is going to start a huge invasion into Ukraine this fall.
I mean, it's about to get crazy in this whole world.
Iran, Israel.
I mean, God, I mean, we are in serious trouble.
We got buffoons running our country, corrupt buffoons.
You know, I disagree with some of these previous callers, and I disagree with some of the things that Mr. Jeffries and Kobachar says because what they say, they don't live by.
I definitely condemn all killing of any type and all the tragedies and all of the misuse of authority.
But when they say that they need to be called out, the Democrats do not call out those that cause destruction in the cities.
The Democrats do not call out the illegals that come into the country and cause violence.
Anyone that causes violence, I don't care if they're illegal, if they're an immigrant, if they're a civilian that's been living here, born here, raised here.
I don't care if they're Republican, Democrat.
If you cause trouble, you should be dealt with, and you should be dealt with quickly.
This thing where they get tied up in legalese needs to stop because when people see that there is a price to pay for your actions, then people will be held accountable for their actions.
When you go into writing, that's different than peaceful protests.
Peaceful protest is wonderful.
But when it gets violent, that's when the Democrats or the Republicans or anyone should call them out and hold them accountable.
And Randall, before you go, Randall, you might be interested in Robert Knight's column in today's Washington Times.
He's talking about the violence in L.A.
And it's not just Democrats, he says, but the media as well that refuses to call out the violence that's happening.
The headline of his piece, believe your lying eyes about the L.A. riots.
To Democrats and the media, the mayhem is just all in your mind.
unidentified
Well, you know, they can say it's in your mind, but when we see it on the TV, if that's what's going to be broadcast, people clearing out the Apple stores, those people that own the Apple store, they've got livelihoods that's just been destroyed.
When you see all the cars being burnt, who paid for those?
The taxpayers.
The taxpayers are everyone, Republican, Democrat, independent.
And when you want to hold them responsible and you can't really identify who, pull back federal funding.
When you've got the governors of certain states that want to refuse federal law and you've got the populace that vote them into office, then it is those people that need to be held responsible through lack of federal funding.
Here's one other column from today's papers about political violence in this country.
The columnist in the New York Times piece is Barbara McQuaid, a professor from the University of Michigan Law School, former U.S. Attorney.
She wrote the book, Attack from Within, How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.
This is the first three graphs of her piece today.
After learning about the shooting of two lawmakers and their spouses on Saturday, President Trump appropriately denounced the tragedy, saying such horrific violence will not be tolerated.
This violence, she writes, did not come out of nowhere, though.
The landscape for it has built up over time because of a variety of factors, including deeply polarized politics, social alienation, disinformation, and in-your-face trolling on social media.
Also among those factors, surely, is Mr. Trump's pardoning of the January 6th rioters.
The unfortunate reality is that Americans of all political stripes are coming to see violence as a legitimate means of expressing dissent.
Whether attacks are directed at Democrats, Republicans, or anyone else, they come at a steep cost to democracy, she says.
When threats and the risk of harm are unavoidable components of serving in elective office, many well-qualified candidates will conclude that this job is not worth that heavy price.
Barbara McQuaid, if you want to read her piece today in the New York Times, this is Kenneth in Arkansas Democrat.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
I was listening to a fella from Texas that called it mostly put the blame on Democrats.
But let me give y'all the real talk.
The reality check of the whole matter is that fish rots from the head down.
Now, when you have a guy running for office, Kenneth, I apologize.
You know, I'm listening to everybody, and they're talking about Donald Trump.
This has been going on way before Donald Trump.
You know, because you've got a pretty good job and a pretty good brain, that in the 60s and the 70s in America, it was very violent, what was going on.
They actually used to have bombings, political bombings.
Now, we have a bunch of loudmouths who talk crazy talk as elected officials.
When you keep calling people Nazis, deplorables, fascists, all of these things, when you keep telling black people that Republicans want to put you back in chains and bring back slavery,
when you tell old people that we're trying to steal your Medicare and Medicaid and shut up your Social Security, then people keep hearing this stuff, and naturally they jump to the conclusion that they've got to do something and that Republicans need to be stopped.
Republicans, if you look at the constituency of the Republican Party, it's a huge amount of veterans.
It's mostly ex-law enforcement and current law enforcement.
Calm Down, Move Forward00:08:33
unidentified
It's all of these people on the right.
And these people are trained in actual violence.
They don't use it, but they're actually trained in it.
It's been part of their profession.
So if you had a violence problem on the right, believe me, you'd know about it.
This guy who shot the people in Minnesota, he worked for Tim Walz.
That was a Democrat that did that.
And then Tim Walz goes on last night.
He talks about we need to turn the rhetoric down.
And then he starts talking right away about Donald Trump and about the hatred coming from Donald Trump, pumping up the hate.
I wish I could have had you on with the previous caller who was saying what you're saying, but from the other side, he's saying when you have one side saying that if you disagree, you're the enemy of the people, then the rhetoric is already amped up.
The Nazi quote that you talk about, he was pointing to enemy of the people.
So what would you say to that caller if they were still on the line?
And is there a way to move forward?
unidentified
Well, as a member of the basket of deplorables, and as a, I mean, I can't even go through the list of things that Joe Biden called Donald Trump voters.
And you know, when Donald Trump says they're not going after him, they're coming after us.
We've elected that guy three times now.
Our government is so corrupt and so crazy, and we see all of this stuff going on.
And we watched the entire summer of love where they were burning down places all around the country with the BLM riots.
And then on January 6th, some people rioted in the Capitol building.
They didn't burn it down.
Does anybody think that if those were Democrats attacking the Capitol building, that there would have been anything left of the Capitol building?
They would have lit everything on fire.
They would have burned every piece of artwork in the place, smashed every statue.
Well, unfortunately, people need to calm down, start telling the truth.
Part of it's the media has got to start calling these people out.
And when somebody says Donald Trump wants to steal your Social Security or cut your Medicaid, you need to fact-check that and talk about things like, well, the Medicaid they're actually looking at cutting is from illegal aliens and people that aren't actually supposed to be getting it.
People have lost track of there's only so much money that comes into the government.
It's got to be spent in a certain way.
And if you want to keep funding, you know, old people and disabled people and the people that we want to fund, then we've got to cut out the illegal people that shouldn't be getting that stuff.
The people that are stealing it, you've got to do something about them.
And you can't just keep raising taxes because at a certain point, the people that are paying the taxes are going to revolt against that.
That's what our country was founded on.
And this whole thing of no kings, that's very upsetting, also.
So keep doing that.
And because I believe all you're doing is creating more Trump voters.
If you look at where under the No Kings protests took place, it was all in blue states.
So God bless America and let's keep talking.
And if Democrats would stop shooting people, we'd have way less violence.
Georgia, the motivations, the shooting itself is still being investigated.
It's hard to get ahead of that investigation.
He had a target list.
He was targeting Democratic leaders that night.
But doing that and getting into the investigation, I'm not sure how productive that is.
So a way we thought we could be productive this morning is to talk about political violence and ask people for their suggestions on reducing political.
unidentified
Oh, okay.
I was going to, yeah, I was saying you have good people on there right now.
I'm listening to all of it.
But I got a suggestion maybe, and it could start with our politicians and their potty mouths, you know, and what they tell people to go do.
Like the lady was saying, or the man was saying, go, like they were telling people like Maxine Waters.
That was terrible.
And she says, and she still does it.
She tries to break into that ice building.
I mean, it's funnier and all get out because she knows she's not going to get anywhere doing that.
And it doesn't look very good doing something like that.
And then she always tells people to go and attack other people.
And so did Schumer.
And I can name a lot of them.
Jeffries, oh, Jeffrey's getting really bad.
I have to turn him off.
I can't listen to him no more on the things he says.
And it's just the same things over and over again.
Well, I think it's very important for us to, you know, be careful about what we say.
My sister and I, we don't agree with Trump and his agenda.
But when we walk, we walk in a neighborhood that has both sides.
We talk to people in both sides, but we don't talk about politics.
We don't have to engage or try to force people to believe like us, or we don't have to make them uncomfortable to be around us.
And I think the thing is to respect people for their feelings and to not take it to violent actions or you're wrong or you're full of hate or you're stupid or you should go away.
Because that, like many of the callers have said, that only divides us, which makes our enemies happy.
And I truly think the thing that disturbs me is the politicians who make fun of the violence when it happens.
Apparently, Utah Congressman Mike Lee made fun of these two people that died and the people that were injured this weekend.
And, you know, I can understand Republicans say they want to censure that California Democrat for wanting to ask a question and they didn't want him to.
But I would think if a congressman made fun of two dead politicians that he served with, that would deserve more of a censure.
I think that's what we need to censure.
We need to censure the violent language of our politicians.
You can't say, hey, hit them, and I'll pay for your legal fees and be surprised when people act violent.
You can't bring a gun, an AR-15, and stand outside your office and have your picture taken for Christmas and think that you're not inciting violence.
You know, you can't make fun of Nancy Pelosi's husband when his head was beaten in with a hammer and not say you're inciting violence.
And so I think, and it goes the other side, too.
Although I tried to look up Democrats that did that and I couldn't find them, I tried to look up both sides.
We have to quit talking like the other person's the enemy.
We have to quit laughing at the other political side's hurts.
And we need to be more human.
We need to be more human.
And I think if you are, you can see that we have a lot more in common.
And really what we should all be getting together on is saying we don't want tax cuts for the billionaires while the rest of us get our services cut.
Let us all come together and agree that the billionaires have plenty of money and they don't need tax cuts and quit chewing each other apart and letting them rake in the money at our expense.
My suggestion is to keep the balance between rationality and emotion slightly towards the reality side, fact-checking.
I mean, going rah-rah and this and that creates radical people that do stupid things like that, shooting other people for their opinion, First Amendment, and so on and so on.
Education.
Education, history, social studies, maybe the kids get wiser than the old people.
In several recent episodes of Book Notes Plus, we have featured books from the World War II era.
An important figure from that time has been mentioned, but not discussed during any of those interviews.
Her name is Elizabeth Bentley.
She was the first person to reveal to the FBI and the Congress the names of people living in the United States and spying for the Soviets, both Americans and foreign-born operatives.
In order to better understand this former communist spy turned informant, we asked Catherine Olmsted, author of Red Spy Queen, a biography of Elizabeth Bentley, to tell us the late spy's story.
unidentified
Author Catherine Olmsted with her book Red Spy Queen 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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c-span democracy unfiltered in a nation divided a rare moment of unity This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins.
Debating Immigration Offense00:15:35
unidentified
In a town where partisan fighting prevails, one table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground.
This fall, ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN.
He's a vice president at the Cato Institute, a think tank, that according to its website, promotes libertarian ideas in policy discussions.
So Alex Narasta, in the issue of illegal immigration in this country, in general, what's the libertarian approach to this policy discussion?
unidentified
Well, the libertarian approach is to recognize that illegal immigration primarily exists because the government makes it so difficult to come to this country legally in the first place.
American employers, American sellers, Americans here demand to interact with foreigners in the economy and primarily through employment and by buying goods and services from them.
However, the government gets in the way and makes it very difficult for people to come here lawfully.
The second most complicated portion of American law after the income tax is the immigration system.
The wait times for some categories of visas to come here is literally over 100 years, which is a joke.
You have to use actuarial tables to see people's lifespans and see how long it takes for them to come in.
And so as a result of that, we have a large problem with illegal immigration, the vast majority of whom are not violent or property criminals, but are merely people who are seeking to work and live here.
And we should make it easier for them to do so and legalize those who are not a threat to public order and justice.
The majority are not violent and property criminals, you say.
What are the rates when it comes to illegal immigrants committing crimes compared to citizens in this country?
What should we know in this debate when the term criminal and illegal alien gets put together almost all the time by the Trump administration?
unidentified
So we don't have the best data on this possible, but research that we've done show that nationwide, illegal immigrants have a criminal incarceration rate, that is those incarcerated in prison, about half that of native-born Americans.
Now, a few states do track illegal immigration and crime.
The state of Texas is one of those.
And in Texas, which is a great state to study for this issue, it has the second highest illegal immigrant population of any state.
We find that illegal immigrants have an criminal conviction rate half that of native-born Americans.
And then when you drill down into specific crimes like homicide, it's about 40% less than native-born Americans.
And there's data from the states of Oklahoma, from Georgia, and other states that confirm that.
So all the evidence that we have shows that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans.
Most of the time, though, when we talk about illegal immigration and crime, and they talk about criminals like that, most of them are actually immigration offenders.
They commit immigration offense, immigration crime, like illegal reentry.
And that's who most of the criminals are who are incarcerated or detained in immigration enforcement.
They haven't committed a violent or property crime.
What they have done, though, is they have committed an immigration offense.
When was the last time in American history that there was an immigration, illegal immigration crackdown like we are seeing now?
What would you compare it to?
unidentified
I think the last time would be either the mid-1950s or the 1930s.
So in the mid-1950s, there was a program under President Eisenhower.
It had a politically incorrect name at the time.
It was called Operation Wetback, not my term, but their term.
And they targeted about a million people for deportation during that time, but it was different.
What they would do is they would drive them down to the border, make them take one step over the border into Mexico, and come back into the U.S. legally on a work permit and then drive them back to their farms.
So it was a little different than what they're doing today.
And in the 1930s, Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt deported about a million illegal immigrants, primarily from places like Los Angeles, Michigan, and from Chicago area, many of them who were actually native-born Americans who were moved out with their families.
About how many immigrants have been deported at this point under the Trump administration policy since he's taken office, what do we know about the numbers?
unidentified
We don't have actually great evidence on the numbers.
We have sort of inconsistent evidence released by leaks inside of the administration.
The evidence I've seen for the fiscal year 2024, which began in October and runs to now, is about 180,000 people have been deported from the United States.
About one-third of those criminals, and most of those criminals either trafficked, nonviolent, or immigration offenders.
Do you think we'll get to the millions numbers like you were talking about in the 50s and 30s?
And how long would it take to get to a million deportations?
unidentified
A million deportations in a year, I think, is unreachable for this administration.
That is why Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, called all the ICE agents and ICE supervisors into a room last month and yelled at them.
He said, you need to do 3,000 a day in terms of arrest.
That's a very hard thing to do.
They might be able to arrest 2,000 a day, but moving them through the justice system, moving them through the courts, moving them through detention, and out of the United States is quite a heavy burden.
I think the Trump administration will deport more than a million people over the course of its second term, but it will not get to a million people a year or anywhere close to it.
What would be the economic impact of deporting a million people from this country?
unidentified
It would be devastating.
Illegal immigrants are much more likely to work than native-born Americans, and they work in particular regions of the country, a lot of them in the southwest, in states like Florida, Texas, California, Arizona.
They also work in particular industries.
So they're heavily concentrated in the industries of like food production, so on cross, but also in construction, in services, in manufacturing, in all levels of food production, including like meat packing plants.
So it'd be devastating for some industries more than others, and some regions more than others, but it'd be very bad.
And then on the other side, you would diminish demand for goods and service produced by other American workers.
So squared that, you said the economic impact would be devastating with this report that came out in the beginning of June from the Congressional Budget Office.
The headline, the effects of the surge in immigration on state and local budgets in 2023.
This is just the top line numbers from, again, this is the Congressional Budget Office, that nonpartisan scorekeeper in Congress.
They write, the surge in 2023 led to a direct increase in revenues of $10.1 billion, primarily from sales taxes, and a direct increase in spending of $19.3 billion, chiefly from public elementary and secondary education, shelter and related services, and border security costs.
The result was a direct net cost to this country of $9.2 billion in the year 2023.
unidentified
So yeah, that's the tax side of things.
So the fiscal side of things, you know, taxes and benefits is different from the rest of the private economy.
Ideally, we'd want them to pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits.
However, I know that report and other reports done by the CBO, which is a wonderful organization, by the way, that tracks these things, shows that over the next 10 years, the surge of unlawful immigrants would pay about $900 billion more in taxes than they would consume in benefits.
But I think some of those problems that you addressed there, a lot of them are on the state and local level, especially educational, people who are younger.
And what happens is when they get older with their educations, they work and contribute more.
And the same way that you and I, when we were in school, we weren't paying much in taxes either, right?
We were consuming more in benefits.
So in the long run, that will even out.
It will be positive.
But I think there are some positive reforms they can do on the local and state level to make that even better.
Alex Narasta, our guest here, to take your questions on immigration, border policy, costs of these different programs and issues.
202-748-8,000 for Democrats to call in.
202-748-8001 for Republicans.
202-748-8002 is the number for independents.
Alex Narasta, as folks are calling in, how did you get into this line of work?
How did you get interested in this topic?
unidentified
Wow, so that's really plumbing the depths of my memory.
So I have an undergraduate degree in economics, a background in economics.
I had this silly idea I wanted to become a lawyer for a while, and in the meantime, I decided to intern at an organization called the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
And they needed somebody to work on immigration.
I thought immigration was a fascinating issue.
It allows me to study social science, study economics, study American history.
And there was nobody else doing it at the time.
And lo and behold, 20 years later, I never thought it would be the big issue that it is, but here I am.
How you said that immigration law is the second most complicated law in the books.
How did it get that way?
unidentified
So it's a combination of statutes applied on top of each other over time.
Until 1875, the U.S. had literal open borders.
If you came to the United States, the federal government did not do anything.
It didn't filter you at all.
It was up to state and local governments to do that.
Beginning in 1875, they passed some laws, some good laws, in my opinion, to keep out criminals, people who were diseased, et cetera.
And then in 1882, they started to target Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act, a very bad law, in my opinion.
They tried to keep out workers who were coming to compete with unions.
Fast forward to the 1920s, they kept out Europeans, southern Eastern Europeans, the rest of Asians, the rest of Africa.
And it sort of just built on top of each other, sort of like the rest of American law.
It got more and more complicated.
You had a particular crisis at a particular period of time, maybe in the 1920s, where there were some communists coming in blowing things up.
So they put in a bunch of restrictions to keep out Italian anarchists and communists.
And lo and behold, we still have to deal with those regulations today, even though there really is no threat from Italian communist terrorists in the United States.
So illegal immigrants is a term that most Americans use when they talk about it.
It's a term that also exists in American law.
In the most places, you're right that in other portions of American law it says illegal alien.
American law also says unauthorized immigrant at different times.
Sometimes it even says undocumented, although that's very rare.
So I use the term illegal immigrant because that's what most people understand it to be.
I don't like to play word games.
I just like to be able to communicate.
If most people understood illegal aliens, which they don't, they think of science fiction when you use that term, then I would use that term.
In terms of consequences, when it comes to this, you know, you are right.
Illegal immigrants did break American immigration law.
And the consequences of doing that in a lot of cases is removal from the United States.
But you also need to recognize that the costs to American liberty, the cost to the economy, the cost to our freedoms are very, very high.
We are having a debate in this country right now about the application of due process.
And that is sparked by the Trump administration removing from the United States without due process illegal immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador Supermax prison for lifelong incarceration without any due process.
And I don't think that that is a consequence that is appropriate to the punishment for either him nor to the United States.
And furthermore, I want to change the laws to make it so that these people can come to this country lawfully, so that they can work lawfully, so that they can be above board, and so that we can weed out the actual criminals who mean to do us harm, and we don't waste our time trying to separate workers from willing employers.
What would be the single most effective change to immigration law that would help the situation right now?
unidentified
The single most effective change would be to allow people who are low-skilled and mid-skilled to come into this country legally for a term of years to be able to work legally above board and then when they're done return home with a minimum of regulations, a minimum of labor market checks and to allow American employers to contract.
What makes you think they would return home when there are so many visa overstays that is one of the biggest causes of people becoming illegal immigrants?
unidentified
That's a great question.
The reason why there are so many visa overstays is because they can't come back and they can't stay to work.
So most of the visa overstays aren't tourist visas.
They come in on a tourist visa, but their real intent is to be able to work.
If they could come in on a work visa, they would do that and they go back and forth.
We saw this actually in the 1950s.
There was a big increase in illegal immigration in the early 1950s.
The government responded by creating a work visa program called the Precero Program.
The government said to employers, hire as many as you want.
They can come in legally.
And it said to the immigrants, you can get it as many years in a row as you want as long as you follow the rules and incentivize rule following for the employers and for the migrants.
And we got a much better system.
I mean, I think it's much better to be able to regulate a legal market than it is to have a black market that we can't regulate.
President Trump, his truth social page, often talks about illegal immigration, said just last night that he's hoping to create the largest deportation, mass deportation in U.S. history.
His true social post from 12 hours ago, a couple of about a week ago amid the unfurling protests in LA, he talked about shielding migrant farm workers from ICE raids.
How did you, what was your reaction to that amid what we saw out in California?
unidentified
So it's very difficult to take the president's words at face value because he takes basically every side of every issue at different times, right?
Port Entry Processing Challenges00:15:29
unidentified
And so he's a politician.
This is what we expect from him.
He's probably worse than most on this.
But I think what we saw was a reaction last week to the raids in Los Angeles where he got a lot of pressure from people in the business community.
So he toned it down.
And then this morning, he basically does the opposite, right?
So I don't take his words on this seriously.
But what I was, I was, though, disturbed by what happened in Los Angeles.
I'm from Los Angeles myself originally.
I'm a Southern California native.
I think that there is no excuse for rioting under any circumstances.
And the people who rioted, whether they are sort of progressive activists, whether they are illegal immigrants, whoever they are, should be arrested, charged, and if convicted, removed from the United States if they're illegal immigrants.
However, I think what we also learned is that waving troops around, being very aggressive in police tactics, going to home depots to arrest people who are not violent and property criminals, but who in some cases are just looking to feed their families and work, is also too aggressive an action.
So I would like to see both sides pull back, but also a concerted law enforcement effort to go after rioters and punish them severely.
Like I grew up watching the 92 riots on television.
You just can't have that kind of disorder go unpunished.
Asylum seekers seems to be the focus he wanted to get to.
unidentified
Yeah, I think asylum seekers and then why can't they get legal?
And, you know, unfortunately, American immigration law does not allow these people, except under very weird and exceptional circumstances that are uncommon, to legalize and to become citizens.
So this is a problem that can be fixed in law.
A lot of other countries do have this fix where they allow, like, if you've lived here for 10 years, unauthorized, you haven't committed any types of crimes or offenses, or if you came as a child, then once you become, you know, the age of maturity and after a period of years, you can legalize.
And I think that's a wise reform that we should do in the United States.
Does that incentivize people to come in illegally and then not get caught for 10 years?
unidentified
So it probably does in some circumstances, right?
Especially because the benefits of being here are so high.
But what we also see is so many people coming in illegally anyway to that because there's really a big poll in the U.S.
I mean, the big poll to the U.S. is the labor market.
People want to work here.
They want to live.
I think on the asylum point, though, it is difficult to claim asylum in the United States.
The Trump administration and the Biden administration also restricted asylum seekers along the border.
And that's worrisome in some ways because some people are fleeing political violence.
But on the other hand, there is a big incentive to come here and claim asylum because that gets you in for a period of time.
Now, I think the way to fix that is not to restrict asylum.
The way to fix that is to make it easier for workers to come in legally so that they can be pushed away from the asylum system so that they don't have to commit that kind of asylum fraud.
And then we can preserve that system for the people who are actually fleeing political violence.
If the big magnet is an economic magnet, people trying to make enough money to feed their family.
What's your view on E-Verify?
unidentified
So E-Verify is a system that is used to check workers when they come in and they apply for a job.
And it's used against all workers, legal native-born Americans like you and me, but also other workers to try to prevent illegal immigrants from working.
And it sounds like a great system.
However, what we've learned from experience is that it does not work very well.
It is very easy to fool.
So for instance, to give you an example, what it does is it checks your paperwork when you get a job.
Let's say I'm an illegal immigrant and you're a native-born American.
If I take your paperwork and give it to a boss and E-Verify checks it, it will approve me to work because it approves just the paperwork.
So what it actually does, E-Verify incentivizes identity theft and then incentivizes illegal immigrants to use other people's identities to work.
And so it doesn't work very well.
I oppose it.
And then I also oppose it just on a principled stance.
I don't think you should have to ask the government for permission to get a job.
And I am also worried that E-Verify, if it becomes nationwide, if it goes into effect nationwide, people are going to realize it doesn't work.
And then the next step is to create a national biometric identity card, which is what a lot of E-Verify supporters support.
Jeremy in Madison, Wisconsin, Independent, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Good morning, everybody.
So, sir, please forgive my stupidity and please forgive my ignorance here.
But I heard you say it was very, very hard to deport a million a year.
So I'm under the impression that it would be a fact.
It'd be a hell of a lot easier to get into the country than to get out of the country, to have individuals taken out of the country.
So I also, as well, due to the first segment, I'm wondering if pointing out such an obvious base crude fact is base, crude, and violent.
I'm wondering.
I'm having a hard time here.
And I appreciate your answer.
Thank you so much.
Alex Narasta.
So I think it's absolutely true that it is easier to come into the country illegally than it is to get deported.
That's why we have such a large illegal immigrant population over the decades.
You know, I estimate in my work somewhere around 14 to 15 million total.
Others estimate a little higher, others a little bit lower.
But I think that that simple mathematical fact shows that it is far more difficult to remove people from the U.S. than it is for them to enter illegally.
And that's because in this country we have due process, we have civil liberties.
The Constitution, our constitutional rights, which I always carry this around me, a Constitution, Cato Constitution, it applies to all persons who are in the United States.
So as a result of that, it's just going to be very difficult for the government to do it.
I don't think it's violent to point out facts about that at all.
I don't think that speech or words are violence in any way.
I think violence is violence, not words and not pointing out facts.
The government, what this administration is also looking for is self-deportation as well.
So there's a headline in today's Washington Post.
More migrants may exit than enter the United States.
U.S. policies could drive a reversal the first in 50 years in the year 2025.
And a lot of that is not just deportations, but self-deportation, people leaving the country, immigrants leaving the country.
unidentified
Yeah, there's always a steady stream of people who are coming in and who are leaving the United States.
And what's happened is in the last year, the massive decline in illegal immigrant border crossers, you know, largely due to Trump administration policies.
It was going down before, but when he came in, it really cratered because of the policies to put into effect.
But also the decline in legal immigration that is happening.
So he basically put a pause on all student visas coming in and a pause on other J-1 visas, which includes O-Pairs.
And then we have a decrease in other types of visas coming into the United States currently as a result of this.
And that's the result because the president actually has more control over the legal system than the illegal system, than the illegal system.
Well, there is no illegal system.
But my friends who put that report together, Tara Watson and San Voyger, Tara's at Brookings and Santa's at the American Enterprise Institute.
It's a very great analysis.
It's a good report.
They know what they're talking about.
But this is the first time that we've seen this reversal of more people likely leaving the United States this year than coming in.
And it's going to do a number in our economy in the long term.
So their number is, I think it's on the net of a few hundred thousand negative leaving the United States on net.
I think that probably makes a lot of sense.
The labor market is also slowing down in the United States.
So there's just less demand for people to come in to work.
And that combined with the extra border security and the restrictions on legal immigration that the president has put into effect are sort of this classic situation, a perfect storm of reducing the population at a time when birth rates are falling and way below replacement.
So we're not going to see the population of the United States fall this year, but we're probably going to see the lowest population growth on record in American history this year.
If you want to see some of his work on this topic, it's all available on their website.
And you can also call in and ask him your questions like Richard did out of Vail, Arizona.
Republican Richard, good morning.
unidentified
Hi.
Hi.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Thank you for taking my call.
A little background on me.
I did 34 years in the Border Patrol.
I've been retired probably eight years now.
Time flies.
And I've got a son in the Border Patrol, and I've got a son that works in OFO, which is Office of Field Operations.
He works at a port of entry.
And my son, that's an agent in the field in the Border Patrol, can tell you that the apps are down significantly than what they were.
And also, the thing that kind of surprised me is talking to my other son who works at the port of entry, and maybe Alex can confirm on this: the number of H1 visa holders or agricultural workers who legally come through the port of entry and are processed, and then they are bussed all over the country to work in certain agricultural aspects.
Some go to Kentucky, some go to Washington State, some go to Montana, what have you.
Very interesting.
And the Bracero program was a very good idea.
Plan it did work.
I think there has to be better controls on it, though.
Not so much on the U.S. side of the coin, but on the Mexican side.
If Alex researches it, he'll find that the monies were paid back to the workers that did work in the Brazil program.
When they went back to Mexico, the Mexican government stole their money and there were lawsuits continuously about trying to get their money back.
So if they worked on a better program for that, I think it would be much better.
I have a question for you when Alex Narasa is done.
unidentified
Yeah, so it's the H2 visa program that I believe your son references for the agricultural workers.
It's a wonderful program.
It's still too complicated.
Workers on that need to get permission to come into the U.S. to work from four different federal agencies.
At most, it should be one.
But it's got a very low visa overstay rate.
That visa, it's primarily from Mexicans going back and forth, and it has done quite a lot to reduce illegal immigrant border flows by channeling these workers into the legal market.
I've done a lot of work on the Bracero program, so thank you for raising some of those concerns with it.
Ironically, it's because the U.S. government worked too closely with the Mexican government at that time.
It was sort of this government-to-government labor migration agreement where a lot of the money was paid to the Mexican government or through the Mexican government to the workers, which exposed a lot of them to wage theft from the Mexican government.
I think the way that it's done now, which is you pay the workers directly, it's in their bank accounts.
The money is distributed like that, you know, in the same way that you and I would be paid as employees is a much better way to go, is treating these workers as individuals rather than as arms of the Mexican state.
Richard, I know Vail is down there by Tucson in Arizona, so close to the border.
But how did you get into the job and stay for decades?
And what did you think about your children getting into this career?
unidentified
I was kind of surprised that they chose this career.
I'm happy for both of them.
It sometimes can, I can't speak to the people that work at the port of entry, but I can speak to my older son.
It sometimes can be a thankless job.
As to me, I came into the patrol after military service in college.
I grew up in Southern California, and it's just something that I wanted to do, and I stayed with it for a long time.
I worked a variety of programs in the agency.
The one that I had the most fun in was employer sanctions.
That was actually taken away from the Border Patrol because we were too successful in it versus at that time the INS and their office that had employer sanctions also.
But that's the key thing with if you want to put an end to workers coming over here to work, I think, is employer sanctions.
I was saying we talked a little bit about that with E-Verify.
I wanted to ask on the thankless job aspect.
Do you think there's more of a feeling today that it's a thankless job?
Or were there other times in your career for the decades that you've been in the Border Patrol that people appreciated the job that you did more perhaps than they do today?
unidentified
Well, I'll say I try to be apolitical on the whole affair, but I will say because my son was in during the time or is in, but he had started just at the very beginning of the Biden administration.
So he was kind of new to it and didn't know any better, didn't know what to expect.
But I stay in touch with a lot of friends who are still in the Border Patrol who are still working or have retired.
And it did cause a large influx of people to retire from the agency as soon as possible.
Or people that couldn't retire, they transferred off to a different agency.
They went to the ATF or the DEA or U.S. Marshal Service or what have you.
But the morale is much better now than it was under the Biden administration.
As far as the port of entry, my son's only been in for a little while, and he did at the very end of the Biden administration.
And he would go to work and they would see hundreds of people lined up at the port of entry coming in through filing an asylum claim or some other instance and they'd have to be processed.
We'll see what happens over the next couple of years.
I guess if there's any Supreme Court cases that come down or if Congress can pass any more laws, I don't know.
I think there are enough laws on the books that can be enforced already as it is.
I don't think they have to create any more.
There's plenty of them out there.
I don't think they have to use the, what's the law from the 1800s?
Or the yes, yes.
There's plenty of teeth from the 1996 immigration law.
And I might remind you that in the mid-90s during the Clinton administration, they had a large influx of Central Americans that were coming up into the United States.
Most of them were coming in through Brownsville and Rio Grande Valley area.
And the Clinton administration clamped down really hard on that.
They set up tent cities.
They brought in immigration judges under the executive office at the immigration reform, which is known as the EOIR.
And those people that came in and said, we want asylum, they had their asylum claims held immediately within a day of being apprehended on the border by the Border Patrol agents.
Well, Richard, let me let Alex Narasa jump in on that history there.
But before you go, thank you for sharing your family's story and what your sons do.
Appreciate it.
unidentified
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah, so that history was that processing of visas at that time of those immigrant asylum claims was at a time when there really was no backlog in the immigration courts.
Now the backlog is over a million per year.
So over a million, and that will take years and years to clear.
So, you know, we can learn a lot from history on this, but also the differences are dramatic.
When he says if the Supreme Court steps in, things could change.
Is there a specific case that's moving through right now that you think could have a big impact on immigration law, something you're watching?
unidentified
No.
Not huge cases.
I mean, some of the cases that I'm really looking at are those involving like the Alien Enemies Act, as well as some of the deportations of individuals like Ms. Oz Turk, who is a Turkish student at Tufts University, who wrote an op-ed,
who is detained and is going through deportation proceedings right now, as well as Mahmoud Khalil, who is a Columbia student, green card, green card holder, who is also being deported because of his speech and a bunch of anti-Israeli protests at Columbia University.
So I'm more interested in those.
And also, there's an immigration angle, of course, but also a First Amendment angle.
What is your feeling on those who have participated in protests on college campuses and the crackdown by certain colleges and the reaction from the Trump administration?
unidentified
So if somebody is just engaged in speech, I think that there is nothing to do in terms of immigration law or criminal law in the United States.
I mean, the First Amendment is very clear on this.
It applies to persons who are here in the United States.
And I think that non-citizens who are here have the same rights that you and I and other people do in the United States, that native-born Americans do.
So that is, I think, an illegitimate application of American law.
However, if somebody has engaged in a violent or property crime, such as rioting or destroying property or attacking somebody in these situations, then I think it is totally fair if they are a non-citizen to go after them.
And indeed, they should be prosecuted for those crimes.
And if convicted, serve their sentences, and then afterwards be removed from the United States.
You say immigrants have the same rights as we do as citizens.
They have the exact same rights.
There's no rights that we have as citizens of this country that immigrants don't have.
unidentified
So in the Bill of Rights.
So not voting.
They don't have the same rights to vote.
They don't have the same rights to sit on a jury.
And there are good reasons, I think, for that.
You want people to be integrated and assimilated and have a stake in the United States for that.
But in terms of their First Amendment rights, in terms of their Fourth Amendment rights, their Fifth Amendment rights, their rights to a jury trial, the right to say what they want, then they have those same rights that we have.
So there's a lot of court cases going forward on that.
It's a controversial issue.
There are limitations in American law on the ownership and carrying of firearms.
I think that it's pretty clear if you read the Second Amendment and the jurisprudence, we are moving toward a space where non-citizens have Second Amendment rights as well, which I think is appropriate.
But that is not where we are right now in American law.
Appropriate because I think the language of the Constitution and the language of the Second Amendment and the language of how we understand how these inalienable rights affect everybody who are here, how they apply to everybody who are here.
The idea is that our rights precede the creation of the government and that we create a government to protect these rights.
And that even somebody who is here who is not a citizen also has at least some rights in regard to firearms that native-born Americans do too.
A few minutes left with Alex Norasta and Percy is in Lake Worth, Florida, Independent.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yeah.
How are you guys doing today?
Doing well.
Good.
Yeah, a little bit about me.
I'm a recruiter, and I actually was, and I agree with Alex that the E-Verified is very unaffected because I was hands-on in the Asylum Seekers Project in New York staffing that and saw the fraud that he discussed.
I do disagree that it's it can be better.
It could be an effective way.
I have a love-hate thing with immigration, but what people don't realize is that there's a huge part of it's not really, it should be called immigration.
It should really, it's more like global movability or business work visa.
And there's tons and there's thousands of different visas that you could use.
You come in and work, and you could essentially, after years of working, and you get your family to come over with you, you can get legally citizenship or permanent residency.
That being said, people don't also realize without it in the 1950s, I believe it was, we still had a shortage of nursing.
But in the 1950s, we had a really bad one.
And thanks to India, we had an influx, and that saved us.
So, I mean, I'm all for business immigration or work visas.
And I agree with the statement he made before where the in-and-out thing is not allowed anymore, where it should be.
I actually had a good friend who was from Sicily, and we became friends.
He was going back for the summer, was going to come back, and he was not allowed back in upon reentry for what reasons I don't know.
So, I mean, I have a love-hate thing with it, but I just want people to realize that if you look at the DOL and the USCIS, there are thousands of different visa applications, petitions, and otherwise that you can utilize to your advantage.
I think thousands may be a bit of an exaggeration, but there are large numbers of visas, basically, one for each letter of the alphabet, and usually many subcomponents.
However, what we're really missing are a large number of visas for low- and mid-skilled workers to come to the U.S. temporarily to work in occupations that are year-round.
I mean, there is no year-round visa for low-skilled workers to come to the United States to work.
There are seasonal ones for agriculture, but those are maximum 10 months.
There are seasonal ones for the H-2B visa, which is for seasonal non-agricultural workers, primarily in tourism, but also in a lot of landscaping and lumber occupations.
And we just need more lawful visas for more workers from more countries in the world who are allowed legally to work in different occupations.
If we had that visa going back decades, we wouldn't be talking about this illegal immigration problem in the United States.
We'd be talking more about the legal migrants who are coming in and helping us grow our economy.
The United States is a wealthy and successful country because we followed a few principles over time.
Rule of law, individual liberty, free markets, peace.
And immigrants are attracted to that because it grows the economy and makes us a successful place.
And immigrants in turn help grow the economy and make us freer.
I think that we are really turning against our traditions.
We are turning against our values as Americans by closing the border and restricting legal immigration and by cracking down on trying to remove illegal immigrants who are no threat to anybody else.
So I really hope we go back to the principles that helped this country grow and that welcomed tens of millions of people here lawfully to make us a better country.
To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN.
unidentified
They had something $2.50 a gallon.
I saw television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN.
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It's about 8:45 on the East Coast, and it's time for our open forum.
About 30 minutes here to let you lead the discussion on any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about.
It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in.
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The House and Senate are away this week ahead of the Juneteenth federal holiday, but there's plenty happening here in Washington, D.C. today on the C-SPAN networks, including at 9 a.m. Eastern.
It is the Attorney General Pam Bondi hosting the first Religious Liberty Commission meeting established under an executive order by President Trump.
Religious professors and experts are expected to testify at 9 a.m.
You can watch on C-SPAN2, also c-span.org and the free C-SPAN Now video app.
4 p.m. this afternoon, former U.S. Attorney Bill Barr will discuss law and national security at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.
That's here on c-SPANC-SPAN.org and the C-SPAN Now video app.
And 6 p.m. Eastern today, Democratic Representative Yvette Clark is hosting a town hall in Brooklyn, New York, where we're expecting comments on the Republican tax and spending bill, the upcoming election of the New York City mayor, President Trump, and more.
That is, again, happening at 6 p.m. Eastern Today coverage on C-SPANC-SPAN.org and the C-SPANNOW video app.
And now it's your phone calls in open forum.
Lee's up first out of Crossville, Tennessee.
Republican Lee is not with us, so we go to Carl in Chicago.
Carl, looks like you're up first.
Line for Democrats.
Go ahead.
unidentified
Oh, I'm calling.
I'm really concerned that the country has become so polarized.
Ten years ago, we didn't have this.
And all of a sudden, people hate each other.
And I'm especially concerned about the Republican Party.
Bob On Immigration Riots00:07:24
unidentified
What do they want?
They want poor people to disappear, immigrants to leave.
And what happens?
As the immigrants are deported, who's going to grow the food?
Who's going to work in our restaurant?
The Republicans, they want the rest of the country to just to die.
I mean, it's sad.
I never thought the country would get to this point.
And I think Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass would be in deep trouble if the judge overturns that Trump-controlling National Guard.
Because, God forbid, if they lose the National Guard, I don't know if LA police could handle it all, really.
And then, man, if that city goes up, we're in real big trouble.
And also, there still is a lot of too much violence coming out of Hollywood.
They could tone down the gunplay in the movies and that.
And I think the parade, President Biden started planning the parade to have him, but Trump naturally enlarged it, according to how President Trump does.
And Alex, I think Alex might get a job with Steve Miller.
He could go to Home Depot and get rid of being kind of tongue-in-cheek.
He could quiz the people at Home Depot and the ones that are not legal or have criminal crimes hanging overhead.
What do you think about this headline and first couple graphs of Susan Page's column in USA Today?
Trump's parade could be a pivot point is the headline.
A show of force comes amid a sense of peril and growing unrest is what she writes.
President Donald Trump's military parade was just eight blocks long, she said, and it was heard around the world.
What was your sense of what we should take from that parade?
unidentified
I think she's kind of going overboard a little bit.
You know, I looked at it as a celebration of the armed services.
And just because Trump is president at this time, Susan Payne used to be kind of like down the middle a little bit, but she's kind of pretty far left lately.
She writes, the parade may prove less consequential than the no kings rallies and marches that it sparked in the biggest and broadest protests of the second term.
Millions of Americans in about 2,000 communities gathered to object to President Trump's assertion of unprecedented presidential powers.
That's what she writes.
unidentified
Well, that's not true.
This is the United States of America.
We don't have a king anymore, so I wouldn't go that far.
That's Tim in Pennsylvania on flying the Mexican flag during LA protests.
This is a column from today's Washington Post.
Enrique Ecevedo is a writer and anchor on the news program on Televisia.
And this is what Enrique Ecevedo writes.
When somebody waves the Mexican flag in the streets of L.A., it strikes a nerve.
But maybe what unsettles people isn't the flag itself.
It's what it reveals.
It confronts us with the complexity that we struggle to accept, that being American doesn't require being less of anything.
That pride in your roots doesn't cancel your claim to this country.
That loving where you are doesn't mean forgetting where you're from.
After all, no one objects when an Irish flag is flown on St. Patrick's Day or when many other flags are paraded down city streets each summer.
Those moments are seen as safe, sanctioned as the right kind of ethnic pride.
But when that same pride surfaces in protests, when it carries grief and frustration and demand for recognition, it suddenly feels unruly and out of place, as if visibility becomes acceptable only when it poses no challenge to the dominant narrative.
We must move past the false choice, he writes, between assimilation and exclusion and ask whether our vision of pluralism is generous enough to include people as they are, not just as we expect them to be.
If you want to read that column, it's in the Washington Post.
Steve Camdenton, Missouri, Democrat.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
I was proud to be at a No Kings rally myself this last weekend.
And I have a question.
Nobody ever brings up Moscow on the beach, how Trump helped fund his first campaign and getting into office by selling $89 million worth of condos to 68 top Russians, including the contractor that builds his military bases.
I mean, you can tell by what's going on in Ukraine now that he's definitely friends with Putin.
G7 Summit Pressures00:08:07
unidentified
And it's very upsetting that nobody ever brings up that or any of the other sources where he's getting the money to do what he's doing here.
No, as far as that, I was just calling in so I could express my concern.
As far as my family has been in this country for the past 200 years.
And as far as that being, and now with that being said, I get frustrated when, well, when, well, like when someone from Mexico comes across our border and then he kills somebody or then he killed and he killed one of our citizens.
That's why I think, you know, I mean, they have to tighten up our border.
I'm sorry, you know, I mean, we shouldn't let anyone else in here.
I mean, because no matter how hard they try, they're still getting drugs in our country.
And there's people coming in and doing damage to our country.
More of your phone calls in just a few minutes, but we want to head now from Capitol Hill down Pennsylvania Avenue to 1600 to the White House, where Luke Broadwater joins us for a look at the week ahead at the White House.
Luke Broadwater with the New York Times, good morning to you.
Well, right now, the administration is really having a difficult time to figure out what to do about this.
We saw for months and months the administration try to negotiate a deal with Iran.
They were about to have another meeting, and then these Israeli strikes hit.
The president was sort of caught off guard by that.
It wasn't part of the plan, and it has disrupted negotiations, obviously, very much.
There, you hear him saying that they're going to have to fight it out, right?
So, and that's exactly what's happening.
You're seeing strikes on both countries.
You now have two dozen Israelis dead, more than 200 Iranians dead.
And there's going to be questions now about whether the United States will supply more military capabilities to Israel as this war continues.
You know, the president hopes that this will ramp up pressure for Iran to strike a deal with the United States and with other countries to avoid getting the nuclear bomb.
But it's definitely, it's thrown a big monkey wrench in the middle of these negotiations.
In terms of what the priority or what the main message is from the White House right now, is it supporting Israel amid these strikes?
Is it containing the conflict?
Or is it bringing Iran back to the negotiation table?
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, the president is getting pulled in both directions from different sides of the Republican Party.
There's a lot of Republicans who really want him to stand strongly on the side of Israel, and there's a lot who want to stand on the side of peace, right, and not get involved.
And it's a very tough situation.
I would say that so far he has been in lockstep with Israel, but there's a lot of pressure to avoid the United States getting further involved in this conflict.
Luke Broadwater of the New York Times, turn to the G7 summit and what we're expecting from the president as he travels to Canada and what's going to be happening this week.
unidentified
Right.
So he's in the Canadian Rockies right now as we speak.
He's got a packed schedule from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a lot of meetings.
He's going to have three one-on-one meetings with different world leaders, including Claudius Scheinbaum of Mexico, Mark Carney of Canada, and Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine.
Obviously, there have been tensions with all three of those countries.
You know, the president has threatened to make Canada the 51st state.
That's received a lot of pushback in the host country, Canada.
And Ukraine is locked in this bitter war with Russia where they've been invaded and are trying to fight them off.
And so with that conflict, front and center, along with the Iran-Israel conflict, front and center, and frankly, multiple conflicts elsewhere in the world, there's a lot on the plate for these capitalist leaders, for these leaders of the world's biggest democracies.
And then when it comes to the White House, what more have you heard from the White House about those shootings in Minnesota of the Democratic lawmakers there and since the statement that President Trump made on his Truth Social over the weekend?
unidentified
Well, there's a lot of fear for lawmakers across the country.
Political violence is on the rise.
Obviously, there were the two assassination attempts against President Trump.
You had the arson at the Pennsylvania governor's house.
They're getting lots and lots of calls from people who are afraid.
And it's on both sides of the aisles.
People are afraid of the heightened rhetoric in this country, the way the right and the left are at each other's throats and hate each other, and the rhetoric that can inspire what they call lone gunmen or lone wolves who will take some of this harsh rhetoric and really believe it and pick up arms and try to do something terrible.
Luke Broadwater, as if all that isn't enough for you to cover at the White House this week, what else are you watching for?
What else should be on our radar?
unidentified
Yeah, well, there's, I mean, look, there's so much happening all at once, right?
You've got the Trump administration is being sued in court on multiple fronts, including the court case today with Harvard and the banning of international students.
You've got an immigration crackdown.
President Trump posted on Truth Social that he wants to ramp up the deportations and he's not happy with the levels of deportation.
At the same time, they've backed off rounding up people at farms and at work sites.
So they're trying to figure out a lot of this immigration enforcement policy on the fly.
When are they going too far?
When should they pull back?
And at the same time, they're fighting lawsuits about immigration and about their deportation efforts.
So, and to make matters even more complicated, they're still trying to get this one big beautiful bill done.
I mean, that's held up in the Senate.
I know the president had a phone call with Senator Rand Paul about that, about some of the fiscal concerns in the Senate.
So, really, in the courts, internationally, on the immigration front, this is an extremely busy week for the president.
And Luke Broadwater and his colleagues in the White House Bureau of the New York Times cover it all, and you can, of course, find all that coverage at nytimes.com.
We always appreciate your time, and thanks for starting Monday with us.
Ron, thanks for the call from New York to Lima, Ohio.
Sue, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
How are you?
Doing well.
I just wanted to bring up a couple of things.
The week before last, I believe his name is Sam Bassett, Secretary of Treasury, announced he was working on banking regulations.
And there's been quite a rumor going around that the bankers have been going down to Mar-a-Rago with their requests and wanting to drop the FDIC, which is the insurance that the banks pay to cover your money in their banks in case they go under.
So you don't lose the money you've been saving for your house or car or whatever.
And Mary, the article makes a point that the ban, the new travel bans from the Trump administration on individuals from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, with partial restrictions on several other countries, adds a new barrier for some of these incoming medical residents on top of the pause of J1 visas that you're talking about.
unidentified
Yes, I just thought it was, you know, I worked at a federally funded clinic, and that was our lifeline for doctors and nurse practitioners and whatever was the foreign, I mean, whether they came from Canada.
We used to, the people that did the recruiting for our clinics, our main competition was Canada.
But these physicians that come here, they work in the rural area and they work in the inner cities where a lot of American doctors don't want to work in rural areas.
It's just, I just couldn't believe it when I read the number 6,653.
So you're waiting, you know, this is our lifeline for physicians and nurses also.
I'm from Michigan, and if the nurses, like in the Detroit area, they come across the bridge from Canada and they work every day.
If we didn't have Canadian nurses coming to the Detroit area, our hospitals would be in dire straits.
The story from Forbes that I believe you're referencing from June 13th, Trump's visa ban is barring new foreign doctors from entering the United States.
This is Chris waiting in the Peach State Republican.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
You had the New York correspondent on, and one of the things he said is the White House was caught off guard.
There has been no official notice of that.
Where did you get coming with that?
Was that just scuttle buddy you heard?
How do we believe these New York Times people, when they didn't even do a good investigation on the laptop, they hadn't been doing any investigation on Comey, who admittedly lied to a Pfizer court to get illegal search warrants against who?
And with the New York Times and the legends, there's always an opinion thrown in or some type of slant thrown in with the real news to make you go down the lane same way.
I have a few quick comments, and I hope you can understand my speech.
I fail, and the nerve on the left side of my face is numb.
So I'm trying to make it brief as I can.
They sitting up talking about immigration, sir.
I remember I'm 74.
I hope to see 75.
When it was people of color used to pick in the field vegetables and fruits down over in America.
When the civil rights movement came along, they wanted more pay.
They stopped that and let the immigrants come over here.
Why don't they mention that?
They're not mentioning the truth.
Our government lies to us.
This is something what I lived through.
I remember before my mother died in 59, my grandmother made up a last round going from state to state, picking fruits and vegetables.
When she came home, she had $825.
I never saw this much money in my life.
But when the civil rights movement came on, these white people here let them go because they wanted to be paid more and let the immigrants come here.
And another thing about our country, they over here talking about raping, the immigrants raping and killing.
They're raping and killing every day in the United States.
They are not saying anything about it.
I'm here in Tennessee.
Somebody's getting killed every day.
And I know this margin Blackburn just started saying something last week.
I have been calling in about this.
What about that, sir?
And this crooked president we got up there, he's throwing out all these accusation, different stuff on people, letting them go while he's robbing this country, him and his family.
Yeah, hey, about those Mexican flags, I believe we need no further proof that the Democrat Party is an American-hating faction of the country.
They're advocating for the mass importation of foreign criminals and terrorists.
And the thing that the Democrats in California don't realize is that Trump is a patriot.
You know, I heard Senator Rafael Warnock say that Trump is sending a National Guard as pitting Americans against each other.
And I believe that's the underlying issue plate in the party.
If they cannot discern between an American citizen and a violent criminal illegal, they just might find themselves flying en masse to El Salvador to meet with MS-13 gang members.
But thank God we have a president to understand American exceptionalism, which is also why he's advocating for returning the original names to our great American military bases.
You know, the only reason why we want to change that is if you hate America, and the left absolutely does.
Congresswoman Marcy Kapdor, she was saying last week, she was telling Pete Hexett that she disturbed that he is referring to the warrior ethos of our military.
And she hates that because she hates that her military is the most lethal, powerful army on the planet.
That's James in New Jersey, our last caller in Open Forum.
Stick around.
About 45 minutes left this morning.
In that time, we'll be joined by Middle East expert Michael Rubin.
He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
We'll talk about the latest when it comes to Iran and Israel.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
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You wrote last week about potential opportunities that the U.S. should be prepared for here as we try to find out what happens.
What are those opportunities that may arise?
unidentified
Well, first of all, John, consistently I criticize U.S. foreign policy across both administrations for not being proactive enough.
When I look at opportunities that might exist, I'm not trying to cheerlead the military action.
They certainly represent a failure of diplomacy on some level.
But what I'm suggesting is, just as with the liberation of Kuwait, that opened new diplomatic doors.
For example, in 1991, we had the Washington Conference, which I'm sorry, the Madrid Conference, which was the first time that Israelis, the Syrians, the Palestinians sat together.
What I'm asking now is, what's being put in place once the guns fall silent in order to see whether we can break new diplomatic ground, perhaps something that's even unthinkable right now or a few weeks ago, such as getting Israel and Iran to have diplomatic relations.
How do we go about doing that and who's in a position to lead that?
unidentified
Well, certainly when it comes to the Iranian people, we should be asking who is actually representing that government right now.
We see that the government, aside from Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini, has been largely decapitated.
The question we need to ask is, are we going to recognize the Islamic Republic as the legitimate representative of the Iranian people?
We've been through this before, for example, back in the 1990s when we withdrew recognition from the Afghan government because it wasn't clear who was in charge.
We've seen this similarly with Venezuela as well.
What I would suggest is that we simply suggest that we no longer recognize the Islamic Republic as the legitimate government of Iran, and we sit on the sidelines and see who else is emerging that can take charge.
Would it be the head of a labor union in Iran?
Would it be the head of the retirees union, the women's movement?
Are there parliamentarians in place?
There's a lot that we should actually be discussing, even if there's not clear answers at this moment in time.
And what do we know about what's happening inside Iran right now?
unidentified
Well, one of my biggest regrets, John, when I used to work in the Bush administration between 2002 and 2004 is for the first time during that period, Iranian bus drivers went on strike.
And that might not seem important, but the Middle East is a country that is a region that doesn't really have independent labor unions.
The two exceptions were Israel and after the bus drivers successfully defied the Islamic Republic, the bus drivers themselves.
Now, once you start, it was a Lekwilenza moment referring to solidarity in Poland back in 1981, but the Bush administration missed it.
If you have organized labor, which is able to act independently, that itself suggests much more legitimate leadership from inside the government, at least an institutionalization of leadership that could help within a transition.
So the first thing I would suggest we do is reach out to the labor unions, which have now expanded tremendously.
What I don't know about, for example, some of the AFL-CIO and other international labor unions in Europe and so forth, is why they're willing to help organize labor everywhere in the world except for Iran.
Likewise, in Iran, the environmentalist movement is also important and it scares the regime to death because the Islamic Republic has been scared of any sort of movement that can unite people across socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, and geography.
Now, why is it that the Greens, for example, in Europe won't support the Greens inside the Islamic Republic of Iran?
Those sort of natural grassroots organizations are those with whom I think we could be working in the future.
In the past, grassroots uprisings run directly into the teeth of the military and the security apparatus in Iran.
What do we know about, is there any sort of daylight between the Ayatollah and the security apparatus or the military?
Is there any indication that their commitment there has been shaken in the wake of these attacks?
unidentified
Well, you're absolutely right, John.
One of the reasons why the reform movement in Iran never worked is because the Islamic Revolutionary Guard is charged not just with territorial defense, like the Iranian army is, but charged with defense of the revolution, which means that enemies can be ideological, they can be internal.
And so the reformists could never really have their muddle through reform because it was always stopped by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
One of my other criticisms of U.S. policy is we talk a lot about, we talk about what we do know, about hardliners and reformers and politics and so forth, but we don't talk about what we don't know.
Intelligence analysts don't like talking about what they don't know.
But one of the things we don't know, for example, is with regard to the factional divisions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In 2007, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reorganized itself so they put one unit in the province to keep control.
We don't know whether the people staffing those units are native to the provinces in which they serve.
The answer to that would show whether ideology trumps kinship if given the order to fire in the crowds in the street.
But what we've been seeing over the last 24 hours militarily is hugely important.
The Israelis have been going after the apparatus of repression.
For example, Radan, who was the head of the law enforcement forces, this was the person who was responsible for the murder of Masa Amini, the 22-year-old woman whose death sparked the woman life freedom movement.
They've been going after other elements of the Interior Ministry and the secret police.
What it seems is happening is that Israel has shifted from not only targeting the military and the nuclear programs, but also targeting the mechanisms of state repression, hoping that the Iranian people will now rise up if they don't need to fear the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Ministry of Intelligence.
He's with the American Enterprise Institute, a senior fellow there, also director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum.
And happy to take your phone calls with us until 10 a.m. Eastern.
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Independents 202-748-8002.
It was John Bolton writing in today's Wall Street Journal about some of these issues that you were just discussing.
Mr. Rubin, of course, former White House National Security Advisor back in 2018.
He writes, in the current crisis, further divisions within the Iranian regime's leadership should be fostered and supported, especially among military officers who could emulate Egypt's military during the 2011 protest, refusing to attack civilian protesters.
If significant elements of the regular forces and the Revolutionary Guard make clear that they won't fire on their own people, the regime could fall very quickly.
Offering amnesty to regime officials to switch sides could also be a useful tool for more consolidated opposition.
Are those things that the United States would have to do?
Is that something that would be an international effort?
What are your thoughts on his proposals?
unidentified
The short answer is yes.
The United States should be making this clear.
The international community should be making this clear.
The idea is to give an off-ramp for regime officials so that they don't fight to the death.
Now, what we do know, and as you know, I used to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran when I was doing my PhD.
I've met Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps people.
And what's very, very clear is that they are not a homogeneous bunch.
Many people join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for different reasons.
Some are true ideologs.
Some join IRGC-related after-school programs when they're eight years old.
You can think of them as the equivalent of evil Boy Scouts.
And then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps runs clubs through secondary school.
They run their own universities.
So if you're caught in this bubble, you may be ideologically indoctrinated.
But Iran is a conscript society.
Every male needs to join the military, but you get greater privileges if you join the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So some people just join the IRGC for the money, and they should be the ones that are easier to peel away.
But, you know, we've got to peel them away.
One of the issues which I saw when I lived in Iran is that many veterans of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were very, very bitter at veteran services inside the Islamic Republic of Iran.
No moral equivalence to what happens in the United States.
It's an order of magnitude, a greater problem inside Iran.
What are we doing, for example, to offer free medical care for war-wounded Islamic Revolutionary Guards corpsmen?
That's the type of thing that if they join us, it's an intelligence coup.
It also shows momentum.
If they're prevented from joining us, it increases dissension.
I don't see any sort of problem, and it's a non-military, non-kinetic sort of strategy on our part.
Let me switch from what's happening inside Iran to what could happen inside Israel.
I started by asking you your biggest concerns right now in the region.
You'd written a piece for the National Security Journal within the past day or so about the concerns about a dirty bomb attack in Israel.
unidentified
Yes, that's absolutely my concern.
First of all, too often when we look at U.S. intelligence analysts, our intelligence analysts allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
So for example, we define a nuclear weapon or what it takes to build a nuclear weapon as 20 kilograms of 90% enriched uranium.
Now, the important thing to remember there is that, number one, that the bomb that we dropped on Hiroshim during World War II had an average enrichment level of 80%.
So the Iranians have already surpassed that level.
Then the question is, why are we assuming that the Iranians would only wait until they were able to achieve a U.S.-style nuclear bomb, the most high-tech of all options?
Why wouldn't they try something else?
Now, this is what worries me, and this is also probably what contributed to Israel's decision to attack Iran when it did.
While many Americans, many pundits, many analysts cheered when back in April and October 2024, the Israelis managed to shoot down many of the drones and missiles which Iran had fired at them.
For example, in April 2024, seven got through.
If any of those seven had missiles, had chemical, biological, or radiological warheads, dirty bombs, then it would be a whole different conversation whether shooting down seven out of 300 represented a success or not.
The other thing, by the way, which people need to understand to understand why Israel may have acted when it did, is the United States often says, hey, look, if Iran got a nuclear weapon, they're not suicidal.
They're not going to use it.
We can have deterrence.
But that's never been the Israeli concern.
The Israeli concern hasn't been if Iran is suicidal.
Their concern is if Iran is terminally ill.
So if you have the Iranian regime collapsing, and we've had a number of protests over the years, what's to stop the most ideologically pure units of the Revolutionary Guard in that situation from launching a nuclear weapon when they know that their regime only has 24 hours left?
Would anyone really retaliate against a country that had already had regime change?
And the answer would be no.
And so in a situation like that, that's where the deterrence upon which we relied, for example, during the Cold War, breaks down.
And that was why the Israelis were becoming increasingly nervous about the possibility of having to live with an Iran with a nuclear weapon.
First of all, when it comes to regime change, look, regimes changed after World War II.
The Khmer Rouge is no longer a problem in Cambodia.
What I would say is that externally imposed regime change can be problematic.
But we've had any number of, for example, revolutions in Eastern Europe, revolutions in the Caucasus that have brought democracy or brought much better government.
So I would quibble a little bit with the first part of that question.
The second part of that question about having neighbors with nuclear weapons.
Of course, Iran does have a neighbor with nuclear weapon.
It's called Pakistan.
But what has gotten people so worried about Iran having nuclear weapons is that on multiple occasions, the senior Iranian officials have talked about using those nuclear weapons, not in defense, but in offense.
Some of the Friday prayer leaders, for example, that Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini had appointed to give sermons, the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rasanjani, and so forth.
This is why people were becoming so worried.
And I should also note that many within Iran didn't particularly care for their regime's adventurism in this regard, which is why you've had teachers' unions, for example, protest in Iran, forget about Hezbollah, forget about Hamas, think about our salaries.
I mean, Iranians, after 46 years of the Islamic Republic, seem to have lost the populism that perhaps allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the revolution in 1979 and are taking a much more pragmatic, realistic view, and they want to rejoin the international community.
A question from James and Alexandria, Virginia, as we've been talking, he sent this in.
What's the difference between the approved Obama treaty with Iran and what was being planned with the Trump treaty?
unidentified
Okay.
With regard to the 2015 Joint Conference of Plan of Action, which was a political agreement legally, it wasn't a treaty, that basically sought to constrain some of Iran's uranium enrichment.
Now, one of the reasons it was so controversial is it didn't address directly the weaponization activity which Iran had engaged in.
Those are listed in something called the possible military dimensions.
So if you Google possible military dimensions, International Atomic Energy Agency, November 2011, there's an unclassified UN report that lists all the issues that Iran had been engaging in, which were so much concerning.
For example, warhead development or mathematical modeling of explosions and so forth.
The other thing it didn't really address, in fact, it purposely bypassed was the issue of delivery systems, the missiles that would deliver the warheads potentially to Israel or the United States or so forth.
Now, what the Trump administration agreement seemed to be doing was saying, no, you will not have any enrichment whatsoever.
But what Secretary of State Marco Rubio had suggested is externally, we can supply your enriched uranium, we being the international community, not the United States, so that you can power your nuclear reactors.
Remember, initially, Iran said it wanted nuclear power in order to have, I mean, basically an alternative to fossil fuels and so forth.
They only have, Iran only had enough natural uranium to power eight nuclear reactors, which is what they said they wanted for 15 years.
One of the big concerns the Americans had, of course, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, is if this is purely a civilian program, then why do you need underground facilities?
Why were you working on warhead designs and so forth?
Yeah, Mr. Rubin, I'd like to ask the question here.
Where does religion play into the Islamic nuclear program?
Are they willing to use nuclear weapons in the future, regardless knowing that the religious belief is, you know, you pray to Allah and you go to heaven, just like any religion in the world?
The second thing I'd like to know is, do they really, do you really believe that they are making nuclear enrichment in order for power play?
Or are they really making it well underground to the point where the U.S. wants to use those bunker bombs for Israel if Israel can get it from us to make sure that they destroy the entire program?
I'm curious what religion will play now as well in the future as to whether they will actually use a nuclear weapon to destroy the Middle East.
Thank you.
Okay.
First of all, second question first.
The reason why there was such a crisis was simply because they were enriching far beyond what they would need for a civilian energy program.
So for example, you enrich uranium to around 5.4% if you need to power a power plant.
You enrich uranium to 20% for some medical isotopes.
The Iranians were approaching 70-80% and so forth.
That was a concern.
Now with regard to religion, first of all, just a caveat, that not every Shiite Muslim believes and interprets the same way.
But the basic Shiism 101, the theology aspect of this, is that the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia goes back to succession struggle after the death of the Prophet Muhammad about who was going to take over leadership of the Muslim community.
Now, the Shia ended up with a more familiar succession, usually father to son, sometimes brother to brother, and these were called Imams.
For Iran, the last Imam, the 12th Imam, didn't die.
He disappeared.
His name was Muhammad Al-Mahdi.
And what Iranians or what 12 or Shias believe, and these are a different flavor of Shia than, for example, what the Houthis are in Yemen.
But what 12 or Shias, the type we have in Iran and Lebanon, believe, is at the end of days, the Mahdi will return, actually with Jesus Christ at his side as a first convert to, as a convert to Islam, and they will usher in a period of just and divine, uncorruptible Islamic government on earth.
Now, traditional Shia look at this and say, well, until the Mahdi returns, until this messianic figure returns, by definition, all society is corrupt, and therefore we don't want the clergy being involved in this.
This is why traditionally the Shia have had a separation between mosque and state.
Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 changed this and he said, look, Muhammad didn't differentiate between mosque and state.
We won't either.
And the way I'm going to get around this theology is I'm going to say I'm the deputy of the hidden Imam.
And so that's what the Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini of Iran believes today.
Now, to get to the heart of your question, if you remember back in 2005, the Iranians elected someone named Mahmoud Ahmadine Najad to be the president.
And he served as Iran's president from 2005 to 2013.
He was the first Iranian president who came from a military, sort of from a military background.
He wasn't in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but he came from Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps circles.
And one of the first things he did was he built a highway from the mosque in Jamkaran, near Qum in Iran.
That's a mosque through which many Shia believe the hidden Imam is going to re-emerge.
And so he was putting in preparation all this sort of infrastructure in order to show that the hidden Imam, he was helping the hidden Imam return.
And here's the thing.
Many people believe that the hidden Imam will only return after a great war.
So you had the combination of Iran working on nuclear weapons and this guy who seemed to believe that he could hasten the return of the hidden imam.
Now, that's one thing that raised concern.
The other issue, however, and this is more Iranian domestic politics, and it's a counterpoint, is that until the hidden imam returns, all government is by definition corrupt.
So by talking that he was trying to hasten the hidden imam's return, and all these other ayatollahs were saying, no, no, no, you're not doing that, all that sort of thing.
What Mahmoud Ahmedine Nijad could do at the time was say, hey, I'm trying to bring incorruptible government back on earth and look at all these corrupt corrupt clerics.
So he was really killing two birds with one stone.
He was playing Iranian politics, but at the same time, he was worrying the outside world a great deal, given the confluence between this interpretation of religion and Iran's covert nuclear program.
Just some information on Michael Rubin from his AEI bio, and you can find it at AEI.org, a former Pentagon official.
Dr. Rubin has lived in post-revolution Iran, Yemen, and both pre- and post-war Iraq.
He also spent time with the Taliban before 9-11.
For more than a decade, he taught classes at sea aboard about the Horn of Africa and Middle East conflicts that goes on from there.
When and why were you living in Iran and what was that experience like?
unidentified
Oh, I mean, I had a fantastic time, and honestly, I'm still in touch with many Iranians, including Iranian officials.
What I was doing, I was doing my PhD in 19th century Iranian history.
Look, I always just had the Middle East bug.
My first degree was actually in biology.
I grew up in a family of veterinarians, but I'm allergic to dogs and cats.
So there you have it.
And I just got fascinated by Iran.
Now, a lot of people don't realize this.
I went to Yale University, but in the 1950s, the Ivy League schools divided up world studies.
So Yale got Iran and Russia.
Cornell got Southeast Asia.
I think Princeton got the Turks and Harvard got the Arabs.
And it's no longer like that.
But each of those schools' libraries are still sort of skewed to one direction or the other.
And so when I was taking introduction to Middle East, I mean, my professor, a guy named Abbas Amanath, who wrote the book on Iranian history, he basically said, look, we can talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but it's really late in the game when it comes to the Middle East.
There's so much more.
There's 2,000 years.
And we started talking about Iran, and I just got fascinated.
It was like peeling off layers of an onion.
And it's just an amazing society.
Living there, yeah, on some hand, some Iranians joked around and they would call me in Persian Pasadi Shaytani Bozorg, son of the great Satan.
But Iran has a very cosmopolitan culture.
And so people actually read, they understand what's going on.
And one of the things that I really internalized is that many Iranians, 10% of the country, took part in the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
I mean, compare that to the U.S. Revolution in 1776, where only 1% of our population took part, or the Bolshevik or French revolutions, where only 2% of the population took part.
This was a true mass movement, and it's because Ayatollah Khomeini promised an Islamic democracy, but he never really defined it.
And so what I was constantly hearing is, yeah, we joined this movement to get rid of a dictator.
We thought we were getting democracy.
By the time we realized that we weren't, it was too late.
And so a lot of the Iranians who took part in the Islamic Revolution peeled away from it within about six months, and they've been struggling ever since.
But even though many Iranians have been upset at the trajectory of Iran, they haven't always been revolutionary.
Because remember, from their perspective, the last time they had a revolution, they had a war, the Iran-Iraq war, that killed a million people.
And therefore, it takes a lot.
I mean, they're primed, but it takes a lot to actually transform that spark into a fire.
How and when will we know if this time is different?
unidentified
Ultimately, I think this time very well may be different for two reasons, for a few reasons.
There's a perfect storm.
Number one, let's put aside the Israeli attack on Iran for a moment.
Starting around May 22nd, truck drivers went on strike, and it quickly spread so that you have had truck drivers on strike in 125 different towns and cities in 31 Iranian provinces.
Remember, what led to the success of the 1979 Islamic revolution was actually the labor action.
And you had started seeing teachers, oil workers, and so forth joining the truckers who were striking.
So that's number one.
Number two is that Israel seems now to be targeting the mechanisms of repression.
For example, the head of the Interior Ministry, specific units in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which were involved in repressing the woman life freedom movement, and so forth.
So you have that.
You have the economic downturn in Iran where inflation is running out of control.
People are very, very upset, and they were upset before this happened.
On top of all that, the supreme leader of Iran is 86 years old.
He's had cancer publicly and he's partially paralyzed from a 1981 assassination attempt.
People were already starting to talk about his succession and whether he would be able to have a smooth succession.
The only other time the Islamic Revolution, the Islamic Republic had a succession was in 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini died.
At the time, there's a heat wave in Tehran, and the quip on the street was, the old man was so senile, he forgot to close the door on the way down.
But regardless, you've got a situation now where Iran really is in a perfect storm.
And even if Iran survives for the next, the Islamic Republic, I should say, survives for the next two or three weeks, you're still going to have to deal with that succession.
Now, the other point, normally I'm a bit of a realist or even a pessimist when it comes to these sorts of things.
But the only sort of silver lining here is while in Iraq and in Afghanistan, people could rightly say, hey, democracy externally imposed, it's a foreign concept.
It can't take root.
The Iranians don't look at democracy as a foreign concept.
In 1905, they had something called the Constitutional Revolution.
It was modeled after what had happened in Russia when Russia threw off absolute monarchy.
The Tsar was still there, but they had the Duma, the parliament.
So Iran wanted something similar.
And from around 2000, I'm sorry, from 1905 to around 1915, 1916, you actually had a thriving democracy, a parliamentary democracy in Iran.
And Iranians will look back on that and say, see, this is an indigenous thing we want to get back to.
The other reason to be optimistic is during the woman life freedom movement that began in 2022, there was no single clear charismatic figure.
And a lot of people could look at that and say, you know, that's a problem if you want to change the regime, not having a single charismatic figure to rally around.
But during the Constitutional Revolution, the only successful democratic movement in Iran, there too wasn't a successful charismatic figure.
The real question now is what happens to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?
I mean, because could they ruin the Iranian people's aspiration for democracy and establish a dictatorship?
If it's a dictatorship like what we have in Egypt with Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, a dictatorship that might be repressive but doesn't destabilize the region, I suspect both Democrats and Republicans in the United States will live with that.
If it's an ideological dictatorship, the Islamic Republic without the clerks, that will become a problem.
I would say that based on what I've been studying from world politics, geopolitical politics, and my I have to use the internet, I go down rabbit holes, true.
But then I watch all kinds of news of both kinds and use common sense.
What it's all led me to is to look at the World Bank.
And over history, the World Bank seems to have been financing both sides of many wars, if not all of them.
And as they do, they get the people, the geopolitical people invested in the fight for their lives.
Michael Rubin, is this a connection that you've looked at?
unidentified
Well, first of all, John, I want to congratulate you because on Washington Journal, by having myself on and Gary asking the question, two Republicans who come from Maryland, I think you have two out of the three of us all together at once.
But when it comes to the specific question, I'm going to have to punt this.
I'm not an expert on the World Bank.
I tend to believe that conspiracy theories don't work that well or don't actually aren't actually often true in organizations as large as the World Bank or for that matter, the U.S. government, simply because it's hard to have a conspiracy and include thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people in it.
So on one hand, I'm going to punt, but on the other hand, I don't think the question passes the smell test.
I'm really in the dark about the historical animosity between Jews and Muslims.
Can you explain that to me?
Okay, well, first of all, the way it's a great question, and I'm actually thrilled that this time on Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle.
I would actually argue that the animosity that might occur between Jews and Muslims is very, very localized.
In certain areas, it exists.
In other areas, it doesn't.
When we look at the Israel conflict that started in, of course, with Israel's foundation in 1948, ultimately, this is a land dispute which took on some religious overtones, but it's reasonable to suspect that if that land dispute is settled, some of those religious overtones would go the other direction.
I know, of course, you can probably tell by my last name that I'm Jewish, and I travel in Afghanistan with the Taliban, in Somalia, in Iraq, both pre- and post-war in Yemen.
I don't hide my religion.
And normally, I find that people are fine with that because they look at me as a person.
Now, there have been episodes that led to many Jews leaving, for example, Arab countries or Islamic countries because of what they saw as unfair taxation based on their status as religious minorities.
There are problems, for example, today in Turkey.
Turkey and to some extent Azerbaijan as well treat Jews and Christians almost as museum exhibits where they will trot them out to show that they are tolerant, but they also constrain freedom of religion, freedom of activity, and so forth.
So, look, it's a complicated question, but again, I'm not as pessimistic in the answer as you may be.
I did want to ask you about your latest piece in National Security Journal.
Israel-Iran War could be a dry run for a future war with Turkey.
Explain.
Okay.
unidentified
Well, first of all, I mean, we've got to understand that, for example, when I worked in the Pentagon, my job, and this is true across administrations, doesn't matter Biden, Trump, Barack Obama administration, and so forth.
You're working, I mean, your focus is what's going to happen in the next 24 hours, the next National Security Council meeting, the next, what just happened in Iraq, what just happened in Afghanistan.
When you're in a think tank, you have the flexibility to think over the horizon.
What might happen over the next year?
What might happen over the next decade?
One of the reasons why I loved actually teaching for the Navy, as opposed to when I used to teach for the Army, was when I taught for the Army, people were only interested in what might happen over the next six months within maybe 20 kilometers of where they were.
When I taught for the Navy, they were interested in what could happen in the world over the next nine months that they might need to sail to.
And so for an academic, it was truly fascinating.
Now, to your question, when I look at the future, we're focused on Iran right now, Iran's nuclear program, and the problem it causes.
I see Turkey going down much the same path that Iran did.
You have a dictator in Turkey who is engaged in incitement against Israel, incitement against minorities.
Turkey this year is opening a nuclear power station.
Turkey has developed a domestic weapons industry, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why I'm so opposed to shipping American weaponry to Turkey.
It's not just about destabilizing the region.
It's about reverse engineering our technology and undercutting our own military industry.
Turkey should never have the F-35 joint strike fighter, for example, for that very reason.
Now, you've got a situation on top of that where if the death of Hezbollah or the problems with Iran in terms of Syria, in terms of the Houthis, in terms of Hamas, in terms of Hezbollah, have led Iran to sort of back off from some of these groups for very practical purposes.
They can't get there without being killed.
Unfortunately, these orphaned groups have now been finding a new patron in Turkey to the point where Hamas and Hezbollah are establishing cells in Turkey to run operations against Israel, to do their banking, and so forth.
Now, when you have this perfect storm, I worry that if Turkey is going down the same rabbit hole as Iran, even though Turkey is Sunni, Iran is Shia, could this actually lead to a similar situation we have now?
The only difference being that Israel can't easily strike at Turkey because Turkey is a NATO member.
So basically, I'm using my think tank position to sound an alarm and to raise a balloon about something that could happen down the pike because in Washington, it's just the nature of our government to be so inwardly focused and to be focused in such short-term intervals that we don't look at what's happening, the long-term patterns.
Final question, and this is a question outside the region, but this from one of our viewers writing in on X. Why did we let North Korea build nukes?
And we could, or maybe the question is, could we have had Israel stop them, meaning North Korea?
unidentified
We couldn't.
Israel couldn't stop North Korea.
That's too far afield.
We didn't want North Korea to build nukes, but here's the problem.
We, starting in the Clinton administration, actually starting in the George H.W. Bush administration, actually wrote a book about this called Dancing with the Devil.
If you order it and you get a vampire romance, that's the wrong book.
But same title, different book.
But it looked at the failure of diplomacy against rogue regimes.
And basically, what happened is we look at diplomacy sometimes in the West about how to solve problems.
Some of our adversaries look at diplomacy as an asymmetric warfare strategy to run down the clock.
So that's what North Korea did.
They did it successfully.
And one of the reasons why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was so frustrated with U.S. restraint and constant diplomacy was because he thought that the Iranians were following the North Korean playbook.
And so North Korea looms large here.
But I'm not sure there's anything Israel could have done.
The U.S. Senate returns later today at 4 p.m. Eastern.
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As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him.
He was on C-SPAN 1.
That's a big upgrade, right?
But I've read about it in the history books.
I've seen the C-SPAN footage.
If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN.