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|---|---|---|
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Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live. | |
| Then a look at the Medicaid provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with Paragon Health Institute's Ryan Long and Brandon Novick with the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Georgetown University Professor Jonathan Ladd on the role of third parties in the U.S. and Elon Musk's plans to start a new political party. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Thursday, July 10th. | ||
| When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was with President Trump at the White House Monday, he presented him with a letter that nominates the U.S. President for the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| The letter cites the president's 2020 work in the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several countries in the region, and for his, quote, dedication to promoting peace, security, and stability around the world. | ||
|
unidentified
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This first half hour, we want to get your take on that. | |
| Do you think President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize? | ||
| Do you think he's made the world more peaceful, less peaceful, or neither? | ||
| Here's how to reach us. | ||
| Democrats, 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can send us a text to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Include your first name in your city-state. | ||
| And you can post your comments on social media, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We're glad you're with us. | ||
| Let's start with that moment at the White House where the Prime Minister presents the letter to President Trump that he has sent to the Nobel Committee. | ||
| I want to express the appreciation and admiration not only of all Israelis, but of the Jewish people and many, many admirers around the world for your leadership, your leadership of the free world, your leadership of a just cause, and the pursuit of peace and security which you are leading in many lands, but now especially in the Middle East. | ||
|
unidentified
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We have great opportunities. | |
| The president has an extraordinary team, and I think our teams together make an extraordinary combination to meet challenges and seize opportunities. | ||
|
unidentified
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But the president has already realized great opportunities. | |
| He forged the Abraham Accords. | ||
| He's forging peace as we speak in one country and one region after the other. | ||
| So I want to present to you, Mr. President, the letter I sent to the Nobel Prize Committee. | ||
| It's nominating you for the Peace Prize, which is well deserved. | ||
|
unidentified
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And you should get it. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| This I didn't know. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| Coming from you in particular, this is very meaningful. | ||
| Thank you very much, Beamie. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for everything you're doing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's a great honor. | ||
| Wonder what you think about that. | ||
| Should the president get the Nobel Peace Prize? | ||
| The numbers are on your screen. | ||
| Take a look at this YouGov poll. | ||
| It asked, this was conducted June 24th. | ||
| It asked 4,420 U.S. adults, do you think as president, Donald Trump has made the world more peaceful, less peaceful, or neither? | ||
| 26% said that the president has made the world more peaceful. | ||
| That's at 26%. | ||
| Less peaceful is at 49%, And neither at 17%. | ||
| So, wonder what you think about that, if you'd like to weigh in on that. | ||
| Also, if you'd like to have more information about the Nobel Prize itself, their website is NobelPrize.org, and it gives you some information about the prize, the history of it, the prize money, which it comes out to about $1. | ||
| So, $1,035,000 would be awarded to the Nobel Prize winners. | ||
| Start with Roy, who's calling in Sun City, California. | ||
| Democrat, hi, Roy. | ||
|
unidentified
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How are you doing? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I'm calling because I don't definitely not. | ||
| You know, you got it's more chaos in the world since he's been in there every time. | ||
| He's been in there. | ||
| He's created chaos. | ||
| It's less peaceful. | ||
| And he's in cahoots with the knucklehead from Israel who's nominating him, who was just slaughtering people for no reason. | ||
| This is a farce. | ||
| Yeah, this guy is a joke. | ||
| And when you say the world is less peaceful, give me an example. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, they're still killing people in Gaza. | |
| The war in Ukraine, which was supposed to be, he was going to solve in 24 hours, is still going on. | ||
| Putin is making him look stupid. | ||
| And that's how it is. | ||
| You know, it's as simple as that. | ||
| And he thinks he should get the peace prize. | ||
| And he can't even remember that the president of Liberia speaks English, which is their first language. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| This guy's a joke. | ||
| You have a good day. | ||
| Let's talk to Jack next in Mechanic Falls, Maine. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| There's no way he should be getting a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| The world is going downhill at a rapid rate. | ||
| The wars are increasing in intensity. | ||
| There are more people getting killed. | ||
| And now there's all the people that are dying because of his cutting aid from America that's been saving lives across the world. | ||
| So no peace prize for this clown. | ||
| He should get the award for the world's biggest liar and the funniest man to watch on TV if you're a serious person, because he's just hilarious with the crap he comes out with. | ||
| Love you all. | ||
| Have a great day, America. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here is Estella in Ventu, Oregon, Republican? | ||
| Vanetta, Oregon? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it's Vanita. | |
| Vanita. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course, he should. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Of course he should. | ||
| It doesn't matter how much people hate him. | ||
| He's done some pretty awesome stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, give some examples, Estella. | ||
|
unidentified
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What the peace thing with Israel over there? | |
| What he did with Jordan where he moved the wall or whatever that was. | ||
| He's been there for a few people, the floods that have been going on. | ||
| He's put up the wall, and he's definitely helped with the migration thing going on. | ||
| The illegal immigrants coming across. | ||
| I don't think Obama did it half as much, and God is. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's take a look at a portion of this meeting. | ||
| The president hosted African leaders at the White House yesterday, and they were asked by reporters to weigh in on this question as to whether President Trump should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| So here are some of their responses, and this is through an interpreter. | ||
|
unidentified
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A Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| While I don't see any problem with it, I think that President Trump deserves it for all the efforts that he's worked on. | ||
| And he brought peace back in the Siak region. | ||
| That is my region, the region where DRC and Rwanda signed a deal. | ||
| And so he is now bringing peace back into a region where that was never possible. | ||
| So I believe that he does deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| That is my opinion on this. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| Very nice. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I didn't know I'd be treated this nicely. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is great. | |
| We could do this all day long. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
| Mr. Bertham, I believe that we have to continue to support Americans in the strength to be able to bring about peace in the world. | ||
| America is a melting point and also a country that we all look forward to. | ||
| And I want to encourage you because without peace, we can have a world to live in. | ||
| And we stand with you on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| Please. | ||
| And if you'd like to take a look at the letter of the Prime Minister of Israel nominating President Trump, you can see that on his X feed. | ||
| He did post the full letter on X. Here it is. | ||
| It's a little bit hard to see, but this is the letter from the Prime Minister's office addressed to the esteemed members of the Nobel Committee. | ||
| And it starts with, I wish to submit the nomination of the Honorable Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States for the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And you could read the whole thing there. | ||
| Here's C.J., a Democrat in Falls Church, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Yeah, President Trump does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He still deserves probably to be locked up. | ||
| And I say that for a few reasons. | ||
| First of all, on the home front, between his first term and now his second, he's already sicked the American military on our own citizens for the, you know, little simple parades or whatever, little protests that weren't violent. | ||
| And so that's one thing. | ||
| The second thing is Neville Chamberlain deserves a peace prize because he just folded. | ||
| He just let Hitler do whatever. | ||
| And Trump is in that same posture vis-a-vis Putin. | ||
| Number three, the whole Gaza thing, Trump has unilaterally said essentially, we could read between the lines, 2.2 million Palestinians are going to have to leave that God-forsaken strip of land to go elsewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
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And then he and his cronies can build hotels and make it look really nice and shiny, like how it is in Qatar and Saudi. | |
| And that's that's a real sick uh degradation of our own country's morals. | ||
| Um all right and when got it, CJ, Gloria, San Antonio, Texas, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh, yes. | |
| Um, no, he does not deserve the peace prize as a Jew. | ||
| I think that Netanyahu is a thug. | ||
| I was very upset when he came back into power. | ||
| And so we have two thugs in power, one here and one in Israel. | ||
| So, no, I do not believe that he should be given the peace, the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And as a Jew, I just feel very, very strongly about this. | ||
| And God gave me a bring. | ||
| And even though I am Republican, I guess I'm in the Liz Cheney Republican type. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Gloria. | ||
| This is Tom, a Democrat in Orchard Park, New York. | ||
| Hi, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Donald Trump does not deserve to be the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He's a criminal. | ||
| He's a liar, and he's a cheat. | ||
| He has to be removed from office. | ||
| He is turning this country into a cesspool. | ||
| And he and the Republican Party have got to be voted out or just taken out of office. | ||
| They're bad people. | ||
| Donald Trump is a bad, ignorant person. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| Here's Randy in Hager City. | ||
| He's in Republican. | ||
| Hi, Randy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, morning, C-SPAN. | |
| You know, it's something how the Democrat, you're never going to get one Democrat to call in and say they like he should have a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Well, let's stop and think about what President Trump has done. | ||
| He's brought peace to the Middle East. | ||
| He's got Iran and the big sponsor of terrorists under control. | ||
| Now, you take Barack Obama. | ||
| He got a Nobel Peace Prize before he even got to be president. | ||
| And what did he do? | ||
| He didn't do nothing. | ||
| And as far as the Palestinians, the Palestinians voted in Hamas to run their country. | ||
| Enemy of Israel. | ||
| Now, look what Hamas has done to Israel. | ||
| They started the war, and then they hide and use the Palestinians for cover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So don't give me this, that the Palestinians are suffering. | |
| Sure, they are. | ||
| They should have known better than to bring Hamas into their government. | ||
| So anyway, that's my thoughts for today. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Well, let's take a look back to 2009. | ||
| This is December 10th, 2009. | ||
| Former President Barack Obama was the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for, quote, his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. | ||
| Here's a portion of his remarks. | ||
| For all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. | ||
| Our actions matter and can bend history in the direction of justice. | ||
| And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. | ||
| In part, this is because I am at the beginning and not the end of my labors on the world stage. | ||
| Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize, Sweitzer and King, Marshall, and Mandela, my accomplishments are slight. | ||
| And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice. | ||
| Those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering. | ||
| The unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. | ||
| I cannot argue with those who find these men and women, some known, some obscure to all but those they help, to be far more deserving of this honor than I. | ||
| But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. | ||
| One of these wars is winding down. | ||
| The other is a conflict that America did not seek, one in which we are joined by 42 other countries, including Norway, in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks. | ||
| Still, we are at war. | ||
| And I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. | ||
| And some will kill, and some will be killed. | ||
| And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict, filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace and our effort to replace one with the other. | ||
| That was former President Barack Obama after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| That was in 2009. | ||
| And this is from the Obama White House archives. | ||
| This day in history, four presidents and a VP have received the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And those are Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1920, Jimmy Carter in 2002, Vice President Al Gore in 2007, and then Barack Obama in 2009. | ||
| Here's David in Independence, Louisiana, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Ms. Gurdis. | |
| I think he should. | ||
| You know, I'll be the only caller. | ||
| No, me in that last call. | ||
| Look, you know, DDT, the poison and sectoric, it won a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Okay, so I don't know how much that means. | ||
| If you don't think Trump don't deserve some type of recognition, you must be high and a Democrat. | ||
| Look, man, after everything that our government and our media did to Trump and tried to do to Trump and still doing it to him. | ||
| And you don't see that that's wrong? | ||
| That's what you want back in office, is your professional politicians like Joe Biden and Barack, right? | ||
| Them people give you assurance. | ||
| They look like the leadership to you. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It almost ain't worth it, man. | ||
| As I hear your callers. | ||
| Oh, so David, sorry to cut you off, but I just wanted to say when you said that an insecticide got the Nobel Prize. | ||
|
unidentified
|
DDT. | |
| Yeah, so I just wanted to clarify. | ||
| So that's the Nobel Prize for Medicine. | ||
| It went to Dr. Paul Mueller, and that was in 1948, and that was for his discovery of the effects of the insecticide DDT on people. | ||
| So, just to clarify that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wasn't expecting you to be so brushed up on that. | |
| No, no, no, I just looked it up. | ||
| I wasn't brushed up on it, but go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just something I know, but most people don't believe it. | |
| But, man, after what they did to Trump, they even tried to kill him. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| He lucky he ain't shooting back. | ||
| Return for. | ||
| God bless y'all. | ||
| Robert in Concord, West Virginia, Democrat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And first of all, I was a Republican when I first started voting in 1981. | ||
| And then in 2016, the first time I actually voted for Trump. | ||
| And before he even took office, I knew I made a big mistake. | ||
| And he is a convicted criminal. | ||
| He is a compulsive liar, pathological liar. | ||
| And he is basically sponsoring state terrorism with his ICE agents and everything. | ||
| And he would fit in the category of the most evil or one of the most evil on the planet. | ||
| And I just hope that what will happen is that the country will be safe from Trump at some point. | ||
| Here's Jesse in Colwich, Kansas, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thanks for taking my call and congratulations to C-SPAN and other public broadcasts while they last. | |
| Trump is a professional grifter, and so we shouldn't be surprised. | ||
| I voted for him. | ||
| I voted against him. | ||
| But he's not going to stop until he degrades every single individual in this country. | ||
| The idea that he is up for a peace prize is laughable. | ||
| That would require peace and constructive work towards peace. | ||
| And so for my two cents this morning, I'm going to have to see a little more work on whether it's floods or Gaza or Israel or let me ask you this, Jesse. | ||
| If what would it take? | ||
| I mean, what would need to happen for you to believe that Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, the idea is laughable. | |
| I mean, just even having the conversation is hysterical if it wasn't so sad. | ||
| I mean, for me, it would require a peace treaty, a peace deal between Israel and Gaza or the U.S. and Iran or some sort of actual accord. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not saying that it can't happen. | |
| I'd like to see it happen, but there has to be not press releases or statements, but a deal, an actual deal. | ||
| A previous caller said, you know, Barack Obama got one and he hadn't done anything. | ||
| Did you think that he deserved the peace prize at that time? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't have a constructive answer for that, to be honest. | |
| I haven't looked at it. | ||
| I just peace starts in the heart. | ||
| And I'm not saying never. | ||
| I'm just saying I want to see some sort of a deal that says peace, that is peace. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Here's Stephen, Independent Line, Lexington, Kentucky. | ||
| Good morning, Stephen. | ||
| Stephen, are you there in Lexington, Kentucky? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| Sorry about that. | ||
| Yes, having me see Span and Mimi. | ||
| Yeah, I don't believe he deserves the peace prize. | ||
| Where is the peace? | ||
| There's no peace right now in the Middle East. | ||
| Right now, there's no peace, Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| Here in America, there's no peace. | ||
| You could just be picked up at any point. | ||
| So, no, he doesn't deserve it. | ||
| And a couple of Republicans ago said that Obama got it before he was president. | ||
| See, this false confidence that some people have, it's just wild. | ||
| He wasn't president before he got that. | ||
| But yeah, there's no peace here. | ||
| He's so controversial. | ||
| He says very ugly things. | ||
| He's not humble. | ||
| He's, like the last guy said, a grifter. | ||
| It's just, I don't understand what is it with this guy? | ||
| Is he just so anti-establishment that individuals like three Republicans ago and a fake independent guy from Louisiana can just spew hate? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| No, the guy doesn't deserve peace. | ||
| He's the worst president we ever had. | ||
| And we deserve better. | ||
| And the world deserves better. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| This is a YouGov poll, and it asks the question. | ||
| So this was asked, again, June 24th of this year, last month. | ||
| It surveyed 4,420 adults. | ||
| The question was, in October of 2009, Barack Obama, who was president at the time, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his, quote, extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people. | ||
| Do you think Obama deserved to win a Nobel Peace Prize for this? | ||
| 43% said yes, he deserved to win. | ||
| 34% said he did not deserve to win. | ||
| 23% said don't know. | ||
| You can weigh in on that as well. | ||
| Debbie and Rancho, Cucumonga, California, Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My name is Debbie, and hi. | ||
| Good morning, Mimi. | ||
| You know, he does not deserve any type of award whatsoever for peace. | ||
| Maybe for chaos, but definitely not for peace. | ||
| It's like, it almost feels like he hates America. | ||
| So I just feel like between him messing over the veterans and the Medicaid, and I'm sure when he gets a chance, Medicare. | ||
| It's just like he hates America and why these people are so brainwashed and believe everything that he says, I believe has to do with the news that they watch, which is more than likely Fox News or Newsmax or something of that sort. | ||
| And Debbie, we are going to have a roundtable about Medicaid later in the program. | ||
| So stay with us for that. | ||
| Here is Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlining some of the peace efforts that are happening around the world. | ||
| Well, it's just going through a list here, Mr. President. | ||
| And I think the Vice President's point out to the great team you have, but in all these achievements that have happened domestically, but you think about it, under your leadership, we prevented an end of the war between India and Pakistan. | ||
| NATO's now at 5% for the first time ever, the highest numbers ever. | ||
| A peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. | ||
| A 12-day war that ended with an American operation that we're the only country in the world that could have done. | ||
| Hopefully, pretty soon a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia. | ||
| The entire Middle East and the infrastructure of it has the potential now to change because of Syria and Lebanon. | ||
| And it hasn't even been six months. | ||
| It hasn't even been six months. | ||
| So it's a straight testament to your leadership in this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| And you've done a fantastic job. | ||
| Steve, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Republican line. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Should President Trump get the Nobel Peace Prize, Steve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nobel Peace Prize is probably a high order, but in my opinion, President Trump leads by strength by peace through strength, right? | |
| By shutting down the border, you know, you don't have these migrants coming across or trying to make that journey. | ||
| A lot of them die that way. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The preemptive strike on Iran, try to eliminate the nuclear energy enrichment that's going to cause World War III and maybe our destruction, the world's destruction. | ||
| Yeah, I'd say he's made some several great efforts to try to preempt stuff. | ||
| He came in trying to shut down Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| No, it didn't start under his watch, right? | ||
| And he doesn't want to go to war. | ||
| So, Steve, would you say you would say no to a Nobel Peace Prize right now, but you'd be open to it later, depending on how things go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, no. | |
| I mean, in my opinion, he avoided war in his first term, whereas others paid, I mean, have just dived into war, both Republican and Democrat. | ||
| He gets the most negative press of anybody I've ever seen in my life, right? | ||
| I mean, I just was listening the other day. | ||
| They said, people don't know how this is going to affect them until we let them know how it's going to affect them. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| I'm a veteran, and I just call it in reference to the lady or the guy or whatever said about the veterans, they're going to destroy it. | ||
| I'm a retired veteran. | ||
| I've never been affected. | ||
| And when Trump was in the first time and he is in today, I got nothing but praise for him and the way he reformed the BA. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was his reform that helped veterans seek other civilian care and all the rest. | ||
| That was his. | ||
| Then it was renamed under the other guy's watch. | ||
| I don't care about the other guy. | ||
| I don't care about anything. | ||
| All I'm saying is, yeah, he's on his way to a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And the first thing he did, some of the initiatives he did when he first took over this time, was try to end these impossible wars. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Tom, a Democrat in Miamisburg, Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Tom, are you there? | ||
| In Miamisburg, Ohio. | ||
| John, Nashua, New Hampshire, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| It's unbelievable how many times I have to call before I can finally get through. | ||
| You're such a popular show, I guess. | ||
| There's no doubt in my mind he deserves it. | ||
| If you lay the facts out on the table and you look at what he's been doing, the Congo-Rwanda war, that was a 30-year war. | ||
| He helped stop that war. | ||
| The Indian-Pakistan war, two countries with nuclear weapons. | ||
| They were ready to go at it. | ||
| He stepped in. | ||
| He stopped that war. | ||
| How many hostages did he get out that would be dead right now? | ||
| So all those things combined. | ||
| And let me, I have one thing, a couple of things to say to the Democrats, if you'll allow me. | ||
| The one I walk a lot. | ||
| I walk every day. | ||
| That's how I stay healthy. | ||
| I've had some issues in the past, either from COVID or from the shot, but that's neither here nor there. | ||
| Anyway, as I walk, I walk by these homes and I see signs. | ||
| And these signs say hate doesn't live here. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The first thing I think of? | ||
| The first thing I think of is a Democrat lives there. | ||
| And the second thing I think of is that Democrat hates Trump. | ||
| There's no doubt in my mind. | ||
| So absolutely, he deserves, he deserves an award. | ||
| And, you know, going back to Obama, I don't know why he won. | ||
| the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| I don't know if anybody does. | ||
| It's kind of like the 36 Selenis that were made up. | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| They're not Selenes. | ||
| I mean, everybody. | ||
| Got it, John, and we're going to continue taking your calls. | ||
| We're going to take a quick break. | ||
| We'll go to Open Forum so we can continue on this topic about the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Or if there's other things you'd like to talk about, you can certainly bring those issues in. | ||
| The numbers are Democrats, 202-748-8000, Republicans, 202-748-8001, and Independents, 202748, 8002. | ||
| we'll get back to your calls very soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| We're back to Open Forum, and we'll hear from Jimmy in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Jimmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I would like to say I voted for Donald Trump twice, and I think he's a great leader. | ||
| But as far as the Nobel Peace Prize, they hand out trophies to everyone nowadays. | ||
| And I don't understand why. | ||
| So, I mean, what the hell? | ||
| Obama bombed more people than any other U.S. president. | ||
| And we're just trying to make peace here, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And this is Curtis in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I believe Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| I'm a proud American, and Trump is making America great again. | ||
| I work hard with my hands. | ||
| I'm a construction worker. | ||
| Over the years in Oklahoma City, construction work for true Americans has gone completely away. | ||
| Now that the illegal immigrants are being moved out of this industry, us Americans are able to work again under Trump's administration. | ||
| And I hear comments from the Democrats that border on the line of treason and promote treason to the American people. | ||
| And as far as the Ukraine guys of war, Trump can ask and he tries to promote peace there. | ||
| Just because you ask does not mean you're going to receive. | ||
| If they want the war stop, it would take American boots on the ground to stop it within that 24-hour period. | ||
| And that's something Trump will not do. | ||
| But he will find a way. | ||
| And thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right, Curtis. | ||
| And this is CNN reporting this headline: Trump said he threatened to bomb Moscow if Putin attacked Ukraine. | ||
| 2024 fundraiser tapes show. | ||
| It says that Donald Trump told a private gathering of donors last year that he once sought to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from attacking Ukraine by threatening to, quote, bomb the blank out of Moscow in retaliation, according to audio provided to CNN. | ||
| Quote, with Putin, I said, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the blank out of Moscow. | ||
| I'm telling you, I have no choice, Trump said during one 2024 fundraiser, according to the audio. | ||
| And then Putin goes, I don't believe you, but he believed me 10%. | ||
| And he says, Trump later claimed he relayed a similar warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping over a potential invasion of Taiwan, telling him that the U.S. would bomb Beijing in response. | ||
| Quote, he thought I was crazy, Trump said of Xi before noting that, quote, we never had a problem. | ||
| You could read that at CNN.com if you're interested in that article. | ||
| This is Mark in Hampstead, Maryland, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| So, you know, you guys have been kind of focused on the foreign wars and things like that, but I would submit that he should maybe get the Nobel Peace Prize for what he has done domestically. | ||
| And let me explain that real quick. | ||
| You know, they say that history repeats itself. | ||
| Sometimes it rhymes. | ||
| 1860, we elected our first Republican president, and his mission was to stop the Democrats and their human trafficking operation known as chattel slavery. | ||
| So Lincoln gets elected. | ||
| The Democrats lose their minds and burn the country down. | ||
| Thank God they lost the Civil War. | ||
| But then you fast forward to 2024, and once again, we elect a Republican president who once again has to stop the same political party, the Democrats, from running a human trafficking operation, except this time at our southern border. | ||
| So, yes, I'd say he's definitely a better candidate than any American president who's won a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Charter, Woodrow Wilson, these were garbage presidents. | ||
| So, yeah, I'd say he definitely deserves a prize. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Sandra Waynesboro, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Sandra. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Mamie, I am an ardent Democrat. | ||
| I was the chairman of the Democratic Committee here in Waynesboro for many years, and I would never vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances. | ||
| I practically had shell shock when he was first elected. | ||
| I just knew that we were going to get our first woman president, and Hillary was going to be it. | ||
| And I could hardly get out of my bed for three days. | ||
| I was so shocked. | ||
| I don't like Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't like his personality. | ||
| I have a hard time listening to him when he talks on TV. | ||
| But he is trying for peace. | ||
| He is making an earnest effort, as far as anyone can tell. | ||
| People will say, oh, he's a bald-faced liar. | ||
| And I have myself caught him in lies, but most of them are fairly harmless. | ||
| He just blathers. | ||
| But as far as peace is concerned, he seems to have been able to get peace in countries where nobody else even seemed to realize they were still at war, that people were starving there, and that bombing was going on there, and that people were caught in a perpetual state of poverty and hunger and anguish. | ||
| And he has got those things done. | ||
| So, like the man or hate him, he's gotten some things done. | ||
| I adored Barack Obama. | ||
| I still have his book on my coffee table. | ||
| I have his and Michelle's picture up in my living room. | ||
| But I think that Donald Trump is trying for peace just as hard as he knows how. | ||
| And for all of the confusion about his tariffs and the ICE agents with their masks, which I think is despicable, all of those things anger me. | ||
| But they don't stop me from saying, honestly, the man is trying to bring peace in some regions where nobody else gave it a try. | ||
| And he's trying in some places where people have tried and failed for decades. | ||
| So I have to hand it to him. | ||
| If anybody deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for trying to bring peace, then he does. | ||
| Barack Obama tried to bring peace in these same regions. | ||
| And his personality was such that he was believable. | ||
| You thought he was a peacebringer. | ||
| He was trying. | ||
| So it wasn't hard for me to say, yes, he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| It's a little harder when you don't like the man who's doing the thing, but I have to honestly say, I do think he deserves the peace prize. | ||
| And I have one other thing to say in this open forum, and that is that those Americans who say that our country was just handed to him as a hellhole that we were being stomped on by everybody else, it's amazing to me because every single economist said we were the only country that came out of the COVID crisis on top of our economic structure. | ||
| We were the number one economy in the world. | ||
| And if everybody else was stepping on us, how did we get to be that number one economy? | ||
| All right, Senator People. | ||
| I got to move on. | ||
| Here's Charles, Independent, West Covina, California. | ||
| Good morning, Charles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes. | ||
| My hope here is that Trump comes into California and cleans it up. | ||
| I'm a farmer. | ||
| We have lost so much farming land because of the policies of the Democrats. | ||
| Los Angeles is burning every night. | ||
| And I see no care packages coming from anywhere in the world, not one country, to help the people who have had disasters in their area, like in Texas, California, and other areas. | ||
| It's always the United States that rushes to help them. | ||
| We rebuilt Europe after the Second War. | ||
| I don't see Europe sending over one thing, not one two by four, to help us rebuild here in California. | ||
| We're not rebuilding. | ||
| We're still burning. | ||
| We have our forest fires, and we're just in a shape. | ||
| And I think it's going to be the Trump administration that will come to California, take it over, get rid of our governor and the mayor of Los Angeles, and start rebuilding California. | ||
| We're a great state, but we're just tied down with Democrats. | ||
| And I don't want to down all Democrats, but we could have prevented those forest fires. | ||
| If we would have allowed the farmers to run cattle in those hills, like California Edison stopped us from doing that, we could have had very little brush, but they wanted to save the brush. | ||
| So you saw what happened. | ||
| So I just think that Trump deserves the pride. | ||
| He's going to stop the war. | ||
| And if it takes bombing Moscow, so what? | ||
| I don't have anything in Moscow. | ||
| All right, Charles. | ||
| This is a Republican, St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| Mark, good morning. | ||
| You're on Open Forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I believe most polling indicates that 90% of Republicans support President Trump. | ||
| Yet, curiously, you have a question on, you folks put a question out there that asks whether or not Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And yet every Republican caller who calls in says that he certainly should not. | ||
| He's a grifter. | ||
| He's a liar, whatever the parade of horribles is. | ||
| And everyone sees that everyone claiming that they're a Republican as opposed to everything that Trump does. | ||
| And like he once said, he could cure cancer and nobody would be satisfied with that. | ||
| So ultimately, my conclusion is either that this polling must be absolutely worthless or as a profession, or these people calling in on the Republican line are just flat out liars. | ||
| And they are not Republicans at all. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Donna, Palm Harbor, Florida, Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is the first time I'm watching your show. | |
| And I just dialed the number out of curiosity. | ||
| And I am really taken aback. | ||
| I feel like I live in an alternate universe from what all these people are calling about. | ||
| The idea of Donald Trump winning a Nobel Peace Prize is about equivalent to me as Jeffrey Dahmer winning a cooking award. | ||
| I have lived in complete fear and disgust since the election. | ||
| I have watched people being dragged off streets in the United States of America without due process and thrown into concentration camps. | ||
| I now have our governor all happy standing at Alligator Alcatraz. | ||
| Like this is some good thing that we have a concentration camp now and Alligator Alcatraz and they're selling souvenirs. | ||
| I do not understand what is going on in this country. | ||
| I see a totally different thing. | ||
| I see a 34-time convicted felon. | ||
| I see an insurrectionist. | ||
| I see a partner of insurrectionists. | ||
| I see people who supposedly backed the blue, but the Capitol police were not included in that. | ||
| I live a whole different reality. | ||
| I think Donald Trump is a criminal. | ||
| I don't think Donald Trump deserves anything except to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell. | ||
| I can't even believe when I'm listening to this, it's the first time I'm watching this show and I'm like horrified. | ||
| Like, I live in a totally different reality, a totally different reality than the rest of these people do. | ||
| I don't even understand. | ||
| If the man is speaking, the man is lying. | ||
| He makes no sense whatsoever in anything that he says. | ||
| I am just beyond appalled by the support of Donald Trump getting a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| He has disrupted and caused so much chaos in this country alone with his masked ICE agents running around dragging people who are screaming they're American citizens and not even allowing these people to have due process. | ||
| All right, Donna. | ||
| This is a headline from the Associated Press: Trump tariffs goods from Brazil at 50%, citing a witch hunt. | ||
| That's in quotations, a trial against the country's former president. | ||
| It says that the president singled out Brazil for import taxes of 50% on Wednesday, that's yesterday, for its treatment of its former president, Bolsonaro, showing that personal grudges rather than simple economics are driving a driving force in the U.S. leaders' use of tariffs. | ||
| It says that Trump avoided his standard form letter with Brazil, specifically tying his tariff to the trial of Bolsonaro, who is charged with trying to overturn his 2022 election laws. | ||
| Trump has described Bolsonaro as a friend and hosted the former Brazilian president at his Mar-a-Lago resort when both were in power in 2020. | ||
| This trial should not be taking place. | ||
| Trump wrote in the letter posted on Truth Social: It is a witch hunt and should end all caps immediately. | ||
| That's at the Associated Press. | ||
| And let's talk to Anna, Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Anna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Just a couple of points. | ||
| I'm really concerned about the Democrats talking about that they need to get in the streets and get violent and there needs to be blood with the law enforcement and ICE officers. | ||
| I think that's extremely dangerous. | ||
| I know it's happening all through Europe. | ||
| It's the same paid protesters and rioters, and they're called Antipata. | ||
| But anyway, the reason why they wear the masks is to protect them from being doxxed and from these very dangerous people going to their homes and it's to protect their families. | ||
| And people don't realize that they're not pulling people off the streets for no reason. | ||
| These people have criminal backgrounds. | ||
| There's a process that law enforcement has to go through. | ||
| They have documents. | ||
| They have strategic positions where they have to go. | ||
| And these people are very dangerous. | ||
| These people in this riot gear and shooting at these ICE agents and law enforcement. | ||
| It's happening everywhere globally because there was such mass illegal migration throughout Europe that now in Ireland and in the UK, most of the schools they're being taught Islamic law, that's whatever. | ||
| And all the mayors are Muslim. | ||
| And it's just kind of a chaotic world right now. | ||
| And it was all by design, I do believe, because they're stating that they want to end the Western civilization as it is. | ||
| And that's very concerning. | ||
| And this is Jay Bronx, New York, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Jay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm calling them because they were saying that a person with 34 felonies needs to get a Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| And I know all the guys in prison, they probably saying, you know, I got one felony. | ||
| Maybe I can get a Nobel Peace Prize too. | ||
| Well, you know, not to mention to say who the person is. | ||
| But when you think about it, an individual that brings horses on certain American streets and bring the military inside of the American streets to stop protests and go and get criminals who break into the White House and you get them out of jail and you put them into jobs and to work. | ||
| A person that hustles from the White House, the highest job in the land, you got a criminal sitting there with criminal enterprise all around the country selling boots and sneakers. | ||
| This is a guy that won a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Well, I tell you, you know what? | ||
| Our next president might be coming out of Attica State Prison. | ||
| I don't know if they closed that down. | ||
| Well, that's where it seems like the job is open. | ||
| That house seemed to be soiled now. | ||
| You got a person sitting there running around and got people want to clap to him, want to lift them up. | ||
| He's looking for praises. | ||
| And he got his family running around hustling in the Middle East. | ||
| Everywhere they go, he want to put a hotel there. | ||
| He wants to shut the, just cut people off. | ||
| I don't know why he took the job. | ||
| He wants to soil the office. | ||
| The rest individuals, he do not care about the American way. | ||
| And I believe that when you think about it, there's no reason to even begin to say, well, should he receive a peace prize or not? | ||
| All right, got it, Jay. | ||
| And this is some business news for you. | ||
| I had the front page of the Wall Street Journal, NVIDIA is first to $4 trillion. | ||
| It's NVIDIA, which is an AI chip maker, became the first company in history to reach a market value of $4 trillion, beating rivals Apple and Microsoft to the milestone yesterday. | ||
| Tim in Westby, Wisconsin, Democrat, good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would just like to say that when Trump makes a statement like he's going to bomb Moscow, that should tell you all you need to know because that would probably be the end of the world as we know for sure. | ||
| And as far as judging tariffs on the mow d'narrow from Brazil, how crazy is that? | ||
| But as far as the peace prize, I'll admit Donald Trump has done a few things that are good when it comes to world peace. | ||
| But Putin's playing him like a fiddle in Ukraine. | ||
| That's getting worse every day. | ||
| And what's his face from Brazil comes to the White House three times. | ||
| They met three times. | ||
| And they're killing innocent children in Gaza every day as we speak, arms and legs blowing off. | ||
| I wish that some of these Christians would speak up and say enough is enough. | ||
| I mean, I'm not condoning what happened on October 7th. | ||
| That was absolutely terrible. | ||
| But Amas is hiding in the tunnels, and the people above ground are the ones that are starving, no water, getting bombed on a daily basis in tents. | ||
| I mean, come on, isn't it time to call out the dogs? | ||
| And Trump is the only one that could possibly stop that. | ||
| Milton who won't listen to anybody except maybe Trump. | ||
| If Trump said, hey, enough is enough, he might stop it. | ||
| And if he could manage to do that, then he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Roy in Georgia, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Roy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| You know, I was listening to the late about an alternate reality, and half America is living in an alternate reality, especially when it comes to President Trump. | ||
| As far as the peace prize, we have to remember that it was President Trump that held Russia at bay when he had sanctions on their oil so they couldn't finance a military. | ||
| He also had money back from Iran. | ||
| So Iran could not provide money to the Houthis, to Hamas, and Hezbollah. | ||
| There was no war because of what he did. | ||
| Iran did not have a money to start a war. | ||
| So he kept peace by employing economic means against these countries. | ||
| And we keep talking about lies and lies. | ||
| The FBI, the CIA, made up lies on Trump during his first election. | ||
| They created these lies about this Russia hoax. | ||
| Now, finally, Comey is going to be investigated, hopefully by Congress, because all the lies they did with the Russia gate. | ||
| During the debate for Democratic nomination, Corey Booker stood up there and laughed at Joe Biden, saying he could not remember what he said two minutes ago. | ||
| So they knew Biden could not be president, but they shut out other members. | ||
| Everybody else bowed down so they could put Biden in office, but they knew that he wasn't mentally capable of being president. | ||
| And so now we have a president that's using economics for peace. | ||
| Economics for peace. | ||
| A lot of people have no idea that these tariffs are serious. | ||
| I've said this before, and you guys did not accept it, but I was in Germany. | ||
| To buy an American car would cost three times as much as it would to buy a car made in Germany. | ||
| Three times as much. | ||
| As much as they love American cars, they couldn't buy it. | ||
| So now we have a president saying, wait a minute, you're treating us unfairly. | ||
| We're going to reciprocal tariff on you. | ||
| That's the only right thing to do. | ||
| And then I hear that this president has a faith office in the White House. | ||
| That's prayer. | ||
| That's not violence. | ||
| That's prayer. | ||
| Trying to keep the peace, trying to seek the wisdom of God and his decision making. | ||
| 1,500 pastors have gone to the White House this year. | ||
| Nobody is talking about that. | ||
| All right, Roy. | ||
| Here's Bobby, St. Paul, Minnesota, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Bobby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thank you so much for taking my call. | |
| I want to talk about Ukraine, you know, and Putin. | ||
| You know, there's three types of people in life: person who doesn't get it, a person who now gets it, and Putin who doesn't want to get it. | ||
| And I think President Trump has tried every angle you can think of dealing with him, praising him, talking about this, about that, and two-hour phone calls, and this and that. | ||
| And nothing seems to work with him. | ||
| What I think the president should do is finally get on the phone and say, listen, Vladimir, I think that's the way you pronounce it. | ||
| Here's what's going to happen. | ||
| You don't stop what you're doing right now. | ||
| I'm going to give Zelensky and Ukraine cart blots anything they want. | ||
| From short range to long range missiles, you're going to extend this thing. | ||
| You're going to have more young Russian soldiers shot. | ||
| It's up to you. | ||
| The ball is in your court. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Foxbusiness.com has put out this article that the IRS clears the way for churches to endorse political candidates. | ||
| And that previously was not allowed. | ||
| So that is now allowed given the tax exempt status of churches. | ||
| So that is at foxbusiness.com if you'd like to see that. | ||
| Let's talk to Lester in Los Angeles, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Lester. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I love your professionalism. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About concerning Donald Trump and the Nobel Peace Prize. | |
| I find that hilarious. | ||
| I think people are looking at, they're trying to say what he's doing overseas, is trying to bring peace overseas when he can't even bring peace to his own, to the United States. | ||
| And he is the creator of that unrest in the United States. | ||
| Number one, the man, he caused the insurrection in January 6th, where he had his minions basically storm the Capitol. | ||
| And he encouraged it. | ||
| It did not say anything. | ||
| He has insulted legislators, calling names. | ||
| Perfect example of just what happened in Minnesota with the legislator who was murdered and whom I went with her husband. | ||
| And Donald Trump, as a president of the United States, never called the governor, Kim Walls, of that state to send his condolences. | ||
| He definitely does not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| Again, if you cannot take care of home and you have chaos going in your home and you're the cause of that chaos, how is it that people around the world can look at you and say, wait a minute, you can't bring peace in your own home. | ||
| How dare you, dare you try to bring peace here? | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| And that's our first hour of Washington Journal coming up later in the program. | ||
| A conversation with Georgetown University Public Policy and government professor, Jonathan Ladd. | ||
| It's about Elon Musk's plans to start a new political party and the challenges he faces in our two-party system. | ||
| But first, coming up after the break, a deep dive into the Medicaid provisions in the president's newly minted Big Beautiful bill, that discussion with Ryan Long of Paragon Health Institute, Ryan, and Brandon Novick from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | |
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| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
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| America 250. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by a roundtable to discuss Medicaid provisions in the One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| Joining us is Ryan Long. | ||
| He is Congressional Relations Director and Senior Research Fellow at Paragon Health Institute and Brandon Novik, Policy Coordinator at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. | ||
| Gentlemen, welcome to both of you. | ||
| I want to start high level and ask you both that now that this bill is law, what are the most significant Medicaid changes that Americans should expect to see? | ||
| Brandon, we'll start with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so this bill cuts around a trillion dollars for Medicaid over 10 years. | |
| And so the two probably biggest changes in it are work requirements and limits on what are called provider taxes and state-directed payments. | ||
| So with work requirements, people can expect that if you're age 19 to 64 and you're low income, so you qualify under the Medicaid expansion, you're going to have to prove that you work 80 hours a month in a job, community service, a student, stuff like that. | ||
| Now, this is also going to create a big administrative burden. | ||
| We've seen it like in states like in Arkansas and Georgia. | ||
| These are often really bloated programs that waste lots of money. | ||
| In Georgia in its first year, 90% of the money went towards administration and consulting. | ||
| Only around 2.3% of the people who actually could get in the program end up being enrolled. | ||
| So these are often bloated programs. | ||
| Get ahead. | ||
| If you're covered under this, I would get ahead of it and try to make sure that you can get your Medicaid coverage. | ||
| The other thing is the state is the provider taxes and the state-directed payments. | ||
| These are mechanisms the states use to take advantage of federal matching funds to get more money because Medicaid reimburses providers less than Medicare and commercial insurance. | ||
| And so they use these higher payments to give more money to providers, which is really important for rural hospitals who, without these high payments, many of them are going to close. | ||
| What do you think, Ryan, as far as the biggest changes we're going to see? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the biggest changes that Americans are going to see, as Brandon's right, they do institute community engagement requirements. | |
| It's 80 hours a month, and that could be satisfied through work, through job, through volunteering. | ||
| But on the state-directed payment piece, that's actually not going to affect Americans and their eligibility, because this bill doesn't affect benefits. | ||
| Now, Brandon didn't mention the low payments for Medicaid. | ||
| What this bill does is says that Medicaid isn't going to pay more than Medicare. | ||
| What's happening in a lot of these states is they use Medicaid money laundering techniques to draw down federal funding, and then they increase substantially payments to providers. | ||
| Sometimes that's two and a half to three times Medicare rate. | ||
| Wait, who's money laundering? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The states are using, they're legal money laundering techniques, but what they do is they will tax a provider, they'll give a guarantee that that tax will come back to the provider, and then they'll use that money that they got to draw down federal money, effectively minimizing what the state has to put in, putting more onus on the federal government. | |
| And then there's less and less fiscal responsibility the state has, and that's why they sit there and they are able to pay providers two and a half to three times Medicare rates. | ||
| This bill says for Medicaid, the federal government isn't going to pay more than Medicare. | ||
| I think that's a very common sense proposal that 80% of Americans support. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So we've got to ask money laundering for what? | ||
| This is moving money to the states so that they can reimburse providers, many of which need higher payments, especially rural hospitals and hospitals with negative or low margins. | ||
| They need these higher payments to be able to provide coverage for Medicaid patients because a lot of providers don't accept new Medicaid patients. | ||
| So it's, when I say money laundering, it's not money laundering to rake in profits, money laundering to make sure people get health care. | ||
| Now, a part of it, I actually agree with you, is that there definitely are hospitals, big hospital systems, that are struggling and that they can definitely take advantage of this system. | ||
| But this bill doesn't differentiate between if you're a big hospital system who is trying to get as much taxpayer money as possible and a rural hospital that needs this to survive. | ||
| We already had a closure of a center in Nebraska. | ||
| It's just an anticipation of these cuts. | ||
| So if you wanted to narrowly target it to providers that don't need it, great. | ||
| But this doesn't do that. | ||
| And people are going to feel it right away when hospitals start closing. | ||
| And this doesn't just affect Medicaid patients. | ||
| Imagine you live in a rural community and your hospital shuts down. | ||
| Where are you going to go? | ||
| If you need emergency care, you have to go miles away to get coverage. | ||
| And then we have to ask the bigger question, what is this for? | ||
| They say it's for reducing federal spending because we're in a big debt. | ||
| What does this bill do? | ||
| It adds $3 to $4 trillion to the debt and the deficit over 10 years. | ||
| So why are we cutting Medicaid if it's such a terrible thing? | ||
| One of the things that I do agree with Brandon on is there are large institutions that don't need the assistance but get the majority of it from these policies. | ||
| Now what this bill does is we're no longer going to just flood the zone with money indiscriminately where the vast majority goes to people that don't need it. | ||
| This bill created a $50 billion rural health transformation fund. | ||
| So for those rural hospitals, we are now targeting assistance rather than just giving money hand over fist, mostly to wealthier hospitals that don't need it. | ||
| But sorry, Brandon, I just want to talk about one thing specifically, which is the loss of coverage. | ||
| So people losing health care coverage, so people that were on Medicaid and will no longer be able to get Medicaid. | ||
| Those estimates range anywhere from 7 million people to 15 million people. | ||
| Ryan, what is that number? | ||
| What do you think the number is and what is it based on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the number that CBO said, and we're still waiting for the final estimates, but if you look at it, 5 million of those people are working-age, able-bodied adults that do not have any children below the age of 14. | |
| That's 5 million of the number. | ||
| They will be required to, part-time, do a community engagement requirement, whether that's working, whether that's volunteering, whether that's going to school. | ||
| So that is a choice that people will make. | ||
| Now, some people will say there are a lot of people already working. | ||
| And if that's true, they shouldn't have a problem. | ||
| Now, it seems to me that Brandon's problem with work requirements isn't the work requirement itself, but implementation. | ||
| And it's true, we have to make sure that implementation goes smoothly. | ||
| But to act like we have the same type of systems and capabilities now that we did in 2018, I think is just laughable. | ||
| I mean, we were on the iPhone 10 now. | ||
| Now we're on the iPhone 16. | ||
| No one knew what AI was. | ||
| So our ability to implement things like this is vastly different than 2018. | ||
| And you think that the states have the capability they need right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the other issue is what was happening in the states that Brandon mentioned is these were one-off waivers. | |
| There wasn't a concerted national effort to have implementation sort of across the board. | ||
| So now you're going to have more investment from HHS that provide guidance to states. | ||
| There's also grants to states within the bill to help them to implement the systems they need to operate this smoothly. | ||
| So let's talk about a couple of the other coverage issues. | ||
| The other are people that aren't eligible for the program. | ||
| These are not children. | ||
| These are not pregnant women. | ||
| are not disabled people who are not elderly. | ||
| What we're talking about is more eligibility checks for able-bodied working-age adults to make sure that they qualify. | ||
| How would they have gotten onto Medicaid in the first place if they were not qualified? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, there are a couple of different reasons. | |
| One, that the Biden administration just had an enrollment at any cost strategy. | ||
| And so they were really lax on eligibility checks and made it very difficult to states to actually do eligibility checks. | ||
| So now under the bill, states every six months for able-bodied working-age adults who are expansion populations, not the traditional vulnerable populations of Medicaid, will have to demonstrate that they are eligible for the program every six months. | ||
| And it's currently every year. | ||
| So there's a doubling of that eligibility issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is, but there were also a lot of barriers that the Biden administration put in place for states to actually check eligibility. | |
| All right, let's take a look at what KFF says about what you were talking about with states having done this in the past. | ||
| It says the state experiments with work requirements have been plagued with administrative issues, such as eligible enrollees losing coverage over paperwork problems and budget overruns. | ||
| Georgia's work requirement, which officially launched in July of 2023, has cost more than $90 million, with only $26 million of that spent on health benefits, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. | ||
| What do you make of that, Ryan? | ||
| Just a quick response on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I do think that there are challenges when you implement any new program. | |
| But the concept of work requirements for people getting welfare is not new. | ||
| We've had that since 1996 when Bill Clinton signed welfare reform. | ||
| It was acknowledged then that work requirements and getting people to work was a good thing. | ||
| It was good both for the programs, but it was good for the individual. | ||
| So there may be implementation problems. | ||
| And everything that I've heard from the opponents of work requirements are focused on the implementation issues. | ||
| We have a couple of years. | ||
| States will get grants. | ||
| And I think that those people that have those specific issues related to implementation should be working with HHS and the states to make sure that it's implemented smoothly. | ||
| I'm going to get your response, but I want to let people know that they can join the conversation. | ||
| If you've got a question about Medicaid, you can give us a call. | ||
| The lines are Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line set aside for Medicaid recipients. | ||
| So if you're currently on Medicaid, you can call us on 202748-8003. | ||
| Brandon, you wanted to respond to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there's a lot of things there. | |
| First, when you mentioned the $50 billion in the Rural Health Fund, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that those, the same time period, those providers are going to lose $155 billion. | ||
| So that's only a third of the money they're losing. | ||
| So they're still going to suffer a lot. | ||
| Now, on the $4.8 million figure, that comes from the CBO for the House bill. | ||
| But so several things. | ||
| One, we do know that a majority, most people on Medicaid either work full-time, part-time, our caregivers, our students, have a qualifying illness or disability. | ||
| And the remaining 8%, there's other reasons like they're really struggling to find work or they're retired. | ||
| But there's other key aspects of this is that a lot of times they frame, people frame this as it's lazy young people who just want to watch TV and play video games all day. | ||
| Well the most high-risk group of not meeting these work requirements are 50 to 64 year olds, not the lazy young people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We've also already seen in Arkansas and Georgia, there's no evidence that these measures increased employment. | |
| So this idea that we're bringing people to work through taking away their health care, that makes no sense. | ||
| Why don't we do other programs to increase employment? | ||
| Why do we have to threaten them that they can't see their doctor? | ||
| Another thing is that the exemptions to this, they don't, there's a lot of people who have disabilities, who don't have supplemental security income, and for other reasons struggle to qualify for Medicaid coverage under their disability. | ||
| The Medicaid expansion, which is what the population that the work requirements apply to, these people were protected under that. | ||
| Now a lot of them are going to be threatened to lose their coverage when they do have a disability, even though they're being called able-bodied. | ||
| Another thing is that a lot of people who are caregivers, so this bill exempts parents with children under the age of 14. | ||
| But what if you're caring for your elderly parent? | ||
| You're not exempted then. | ||
| So there is an exemption for caregivers in the bill. | ||
| But the caregiver exemptions is parents and affordable. | ||
| So also if you don't, there is an exemption for caregivers for family members in the bill. | ||
| For the elderly as well, for your elderly parents. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Now, you know, the thing is, is we have a situation where the labor participation rate for those people that are 19 to 54 is in the low 80s. | ||
| 40 years ago, that was in the high 90s. | ||
| There are going to be people that need exemptions. | ||
| This bill is full of exemptions. | ||
| Now, I do agree with Brandon that states have been misdesignating disabled people as expansion, because if you're an expansion population, the federal government is going to give you a nine-to-one match. | ||
| Whereas if you're a non-expansion population, so you're elderly, your children, you're disabled, you're going to get $1.33 for every dollar that's spent. | ||
| And so states do have an incentive to misdesignate people. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| We're going to need to get to calls, but I want to ask you about what impacts this could have on people that are not on Medicaid. | ||
| So will this trickle down to people that are on private insurance or people that are on Medicare? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that there were some things that Democrats stripped out in the Senate through the parliamentarian rules that would have lowered premiums for people, including the funding and the cost-sharing reduction subsidies. | |
| That could have lowered premiums by about 15%. | ||
| But what we've seen is with these massive inflated payments where they're tying Medicaid payments to average commercial rates, it actually increases people's private sector premiums. | ||
| I think the treasurer of North Carolina wrote a letter to CMS in 2023 with that concern. | ||
| I think employer groups have shown that concern. | ||
| When states tie payments to average commercial rates, you don't see average commercial rates go down. | ||
| You actually see them go up. | ||
| So I think on the common sense proposals to limit Medicaid reimbursement to Medicare rates actually have a downward pressure on premiums. | ||
| Brendan, how do you get costs under control for Medicaid, if not with this bill? | ||
| What are your solutions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's actually a great question because in the context of this bill, we're talking about rising federal spending for Medicaid, but there's also rising spending for Medicare. | |
| There's also rising spending for commercial insurance because health care costs are increasing at too high of a rate. | ||
| Does this bill address the actual reason health care costs are rising? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| So why are we focusing on potential lazy young people who need to get to work and not on, let's say, the big-time hospitals, which price for the same goods and services as other countries multiple times higher than other countries? | ||
| Why don't we focus on the Medicare Advantage companies, the insurers, who will make an estimated $1.2 trillion in overpayments. | ||
| It's stealing taxpayer money over 10 years. | ||
| That's more than the entirety of the Medicaid cuts. | ||
| They could have literally cut exploitation by big insurance companies and not touched Medicaid. | ||
| Why aren't we talking about big pharma and how they exploit their patent monopolies and charge prices incredibly high for drugs that often aren't even novel? | ||
| So tackle the real reasons why health care costs are high. | ||
| You need to address corporate power. | ||
| You need to address the interest that if Armada is a lobbyist and campaign contributions and they buy Congress, people on Medicaid, they can't afford to see the doctor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think they have money to buy a voice in Congress? | |
| They don't. | ||
| So when we talk about solutions to lower Medicaid costs, we should be really talking about solutions to rein health care costs. | ||
| Because theoretically, if everyone, like if we had what I want, which is a universal single-player system, the government would be paying more. | ||
| But what really matters is, is the country paying less? | ||
| And to do that, we need to tackle the big money interest. | ||
| All right, let's start with Ruth in College Park, Maryland. | ||
| Democrat, I'll give you a chance. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Go ahead, Ruth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| Thank you for see, Sam. | ||
| So I just wanted to mention two things. | ||
| And one is for, since about 1999, if a foster youth wants to stay in foster care after the age of 18, they have to work or go to school 80 hours per month. | ||
| And I didn't see similar pearl clutching when that happened. | ||
| So I just thought I would mention that, and that does have implications for Medicaid. | ||
| But to the money laundering point, and you asked the gentleman about how to save money, there's a group of people within HHS and at think tanks that keeps expanding what Medicaid can be used for, like case management, rental assistance, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And those folks then create contracts that the professional class then fields. | ||
| All of this is paid for with Medicaid. | ||
| It's not health care. | ||
| So I'm wondering if there's anything in the big beautiful bill that is going to contain that kind of excess in Medicaid to help control spending. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Ryan, what do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that states have to prioritize their Medicaid spending when they can no longer use these money laundering techniques like provider taxes to put all of the costs of the program on the federal government. | |
| They are going to have to determine what are the things that they need to pay for versus not pay for. | ||
| So I think indirectly it will address some of those issues. | ||
| But going back to what Brandon had said before, I do agree that we need to address overall health care costs. | ||
| There's not one bill that is going to fix that issue. | ||
| We do need to look at Medicare Advantage payments. | ||
| At Paragon, we have a proposal out there that would save over $250 billion from the Medicare Advantage program without taking away benefits, without slashing access to the private plans and Medicare that seniors overwhelmingly want, as we can see with 60% of seniors in rising enrolling those programs. | ||
| To say there isn't special interest in the Medicaid debate, I just disagree with that. | ||
| This debate that we had on the one big beautiful bill was loaded with special interest money trying to defeat it. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Because there are large health care systems and hospital systems that make a lot of money off the Medicaid program. | ||
| They take the vast majority of assistance that we have, and there are people that members of Congress who voted for this bill do have sympathy for rural hospitals and for other struggling hospitals. | ||
| But the system we have now is a system that funnels money to rich, well-established, well-connected hospitals at the detriment of rural hospitals. | ||
| And I think this is one of the things this bill is getting at. | ||
| But if we want to tackle health care costs and we want to do things like how do we reduce health care, things like site neutrality and Medicare is something that we can definitely do. | ||
| Looking at consolidation within health care, both on the insurer level and on the hospital level that's needlessly driving up costs is something we should do. | ||
| Hospital inflation has gone up 233% above regular inflation since 2000. | ||
| That's something systematically that we have to look at. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Ryan, I want to ask you, do you think rural hospitals will close as a result of this bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that larger, wealthier hospitals that have been able to get the vast majority of money continually hold up rural hospitals is the reason not to change the status quo. | |
| They benefit financially from the status quo. | ||
| So if we can have a system where we better target resources and better target assistance to struggling hospitals rather than just flood the zone with hundreds of billions of dollars, most of which does not end up with rural hospitals. | ||
| We should do that. | ||
| You think that this bill addresses that and that those hospitals that are very much in need for their populations will not close? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm actually very hopeful for the Rural Health Transformation Fund. | |
| I want to see it succeed. | ||
| I think states are going to have to put in plans to the HHS Secretary by the end of the year on how they're going to use that money. | ||
| But it could serve as a blueprint of how we better target assistance in the future and reduce health care costs, reduce health care spending without affecting access for people that need it. | ||
| I know you want to respond, but I'm going to go to William, who's a Medicaid recipient in Rockaway, New Jersey. | ||
| Hi, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| You know, this is really scary for people like me who are on Medicaid and on Medicare because you basically scare us because all our services are tied to So William, how old are you first? | ||
| It took me almost three years after my dad passed away. | ||
| I'm 56 years old. | ||
| I worked for 33 years and I am only getting an 11-year pension. | ||
| So I get like $100 a month after the pension takes out almost $200 for insurance. | ||
| So I have three insurances and none of my bills get paid. | ||
| So would William have to then go to work? | ||
| He's 56 years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it is. | |
| I do work. | ||
| I do work. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Go ahead, William. | ||
| You do work. | ||
| How many hours a week do you work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
15 the most. | |
| Well, one, it's hard to tell because he implies that he may also have a disability and may qualify for some of the exemptions. | ||
| Do you have a disability, William? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have a CG. | |
| I have epilepsy. | ||
| I have a heart condition. | ||
| And I have vein deficiencies. | ||
| So how does that work with proving a disability and if that disability is enough to get you out of the work requirements? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there are certain things that de facto will get you out of the, or will be an exemption for the work requirements. | |
| I mean, Brandon mentioned being on SSSI. | ||
| There are other exemptions. | ||
| They're going to have to put out regulations, I think, by the middle of 2026. | ||
| So we don't know exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's hard to tell with his particular situation. | |
| Because he mentioned like a heart condition. | ||
| And there are jobs that you could do with a heart condition, but there's some that you can't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so it does depend on his particular circumstances. | |
| And who makes that decision? | ||
| Is that a state official? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ultimately, the state will be making the decision on the exemptions. | |
| You wanted to respond, Brandon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, just on that point, look at who we're targeting. | |
| Like, I agree with several of the things you brought up in terms of solutions, like addressing consolidation. | ||
| But this bill doesn't do that. | ||
| It's targeting people who literally don't make enough money to see the doctor. | ||
| So we're saying we're going to take away your health coverage to save money. | ||
| But by the way, we're also going to increase the debt in the deficit by $3 to $4 trillion. | ||
| So this entire discussion is almost like a joke, where it's like we're saving money to just lose money. | ||
| I also want to point out, I'm glad you have a lot of hopes for the Rural Health Fund. | ||
| Those rural hospitals are still losing $100 billion in money. | ||
| So they're still out, and they're going to close, and people are going to die. | ||
| There was the University of Pennsylvania put out an estimate for the Medicaid-related cuts of how many people will die, preventable deaths. | ||
| It was $42,500. | ||
| Now, let's say it's inflated. | ||
| Let's say it's half that, $20,000. | ||
| 20,000 people die for what? | ||
| Why are we increasing the debt in the deficit by $3 to $4 trillion? | ||
| It's because there's so many tax cuts, 80% of which would go to people making over $100,000, over a third for people making over $500,000, because we want to increase the Pentagon budget by $150 billion, which primarily goes to defense contractors. | ||
| By the way, the Pentagon hasn't passed an audit seven times in a row. | ||
| So we're not addressing any of that, anything that touches those interests, but we are attacking Medicaid patients. | ||
| And yes, the hospitals did lobby against this. | ||
| But there's, you know, I say a good rule, which is sometimes a certain special interest will lose when their opponent is many more special interests and when their interest is tied to the poor and the needy. | ||
| All right, I've got to bring this up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to say that. | |
| I'm going to go to the Sussex, New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
| Brandon, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, everyone. | |
| I think you guys touched on the subject of private organizations handling Medicaid, like for-profit groups, such as I'm looking at Centene, United Healthcare, Molina, CBS Health, which is voting Aetna now, and Elephant Health. | ||
| These are for-profit companies handling Medicaid. | ||
| And I'm curious why we're not looking into things like for-profit companies and how much they're profiting off of taxpayer dollars rather than attacking individuals such as the previous caller that's disabled and now, you know, worried they're going to lose their Medicaid? | ||
| Seems very silly. | ||
| And bravo for calling out the tax cuts. | ||
| Hurting Americans to get people tax cuts is irresponsible. | ||
| We all know it. | ||
| And that's my question. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Go ahead, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of the things that has really frustrated me about this debate is William from New Jersey was talking about he was scared. | |
| And he's scared because there's a lot of disinformation about this bill and how it's going to affect beneficiaries. | ||
| I think because they're the opponents on the Hill, they talk about children losing coverage and the elderly losing coverage and the disabled losing coverage. | ||
| They know very well this bill doesn't do that. | ||
| But they don't want to actually talk about what the bill does. | ||
| And so they use scare tactics like 40,000 people are going to die with no methodology that anyone could ever check. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| And it's frankly, it is more than frustrating that people continue to do that. | ||
| The fact of the matter is, if you're an able-bodied working-age adult, should you have to do something to continue to be on welfare, modicum 20 hours a week, whether it's jobs, whether it's volunteering, whether it's going to school? | ||
| Most Americans, two-thirds of Americans, support that. | ||
| And for those people, if they are really looking for a job and just can't find one, is that also an exemption? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there are ways you can do it through job training. | |
| You can also do volunteering while you're looking for a job. | ||
| So there's a variety of different ways that you can satisfy the community engagement requirements. | ||
| Larry Galesberg, Illinois Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, all. | |
| My question is twofold. | ||
| One, first part of the year, I started to have to pay for my medications, which I have never had to do before. | ||
| And the second question is, I went to a prompt care before this bill was ever signed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And now I get a bill for prompt care that I owe part of the money that was charged for me being there. | |
| Larry, are you on Medicaid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Medicaid, Medicare, and then I've got welcare. | |
| And before, like I say, before this bill was signed, everything was paid for. | ||
| Did they know in advance that this was going to be done so they started charging sooner or what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I don't understand it. | |
| Ryan, why don't you do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am handicapped. | |
| Yep, you're, yeah, sorry. | ||
| We heard you, Larry, that you're handicapped. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll get you an answer. | |
| I don't know the specifics of his particular situation. | ||
| Someone that changed a practice less than a week after the bill has been signed into law. | ||
| I don't think that had to do with the bill. | ||
| I'd be happy to talk to William offline on his particular circumstance Because I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't sound right. | ||
| Brandon, any input on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I agree. | |
| I don't know enough about a specific circumstance, but I do want to touch upon a point you brought up before, which is being, you said you were frustrated by people like fear-mongering. | ||
| But what do you think happens when people lose their coverage in hospitals closed? | ||
| I mean, they're going to get unhealthier and people are going through diet. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| That's what happens when your provider goes away. | ||
| Why is the fo, we have to look at the broader context. | ||
| Why is the focus of reducing spending on saying we need to have government have more bureaucracy and seeing whether someone who's low income can get health care, can see a doctor, but not on the corporate interest. | ||
| Which, yes, you agreed on some of some good proposals, but notice the bill doesn't include those, and there's a reason for that. | ||
| It's because of corruption. | ||
| No, the state-directed payments goes after corporate interest. | ||
| That's what that does. | ||
| Partially. | ||
| Now, that being said, you talk about going after healthcare. | ||
| The Biden administration increased Medicaid spending by $1.2 trillion, projected Medicaid spending, above and beyond what it was going to do. | ||
| This bill does not cut Medicaid. | ||
| Medicaid spending will still go up 3% every year. | ||
| So to call it a cut is disingenuous. | ||
| But that's not true. | ||
| Because why does spending increase? | ||
| It's because more people are on it. | ||
| And yes, there are higher payments, but for like rural hospitals, they need that. | ||
| So this bill doesn't protect them. | ||
| So if you just want to say we should have a provision that targets those high-end hospitals which are abusing the system, fully agree, let's do that. | ||
| This bill does not do that. | ||
| Well, it'll take people off their health care. | ||
| Okay, we're going to talk to Audrey Sumter, South Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Audrey, go ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you, Mimi. | |
| This question is to Brandon. | ||
| Brandon, could you explain to the C-SPAN audience when this big tax cut bill will take place and how it's going to affect Medicaid? | ||
| You're talking about the timing, Audrey, as to when things will start to take effect? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and then another thing I heard that that bill is going to affect Medicaid somewhere down the road. | |
| I don't understand exactly how, but they say we'll expect Medicaid down the road. | ||
| That may Medicare down the road. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So in terms of the timing, the work requirements are going to begin, they could begin earlier, but around the end of 2026, the provider tax parts are immediate. | |
| So those are like the most relevant things. | ||
| So for people worrying about work requirements, they're not going to go into effect right away. | ||
| So you do have time to prepare. | ||
| Do states have the option of starting early? | ||
| And do you think some will? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The bill specifically lets them if they want to. | |
| And would they be incentivized, Ryan, to start early? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they'd be incentivized if they want to run an efficient program, but there's no additional money in the bill for them to start early, if that's the question. | |
| Let's talk to Iris, Uriah, Alabama, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks for taking my call. | |
| I just, I'm one of those people that is a little afraid. | ||
| I'm disabled. | ||
| I'm 69. | ||
| I get Medicare and Medicaid. | ||
| And I have to take a lot of medication. | ||
| And I was going to speak to some of these insurance companies. | ||
| I have to drive 162 miles round trip to see a specialist. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Then they want me to come back for a follow-up in a couple of weeks when, and I have to drive another 162 miles round trip just to tell them I'm okay. | ||
| And insurance is requiring this, not the doctor. | ||
| The insurance company that I'm with requires you to go back. | ||
| And I can't call them and tell them I'm okay. | ||
| I have to drive the 162 miles and tell them face to face I'm okay. | ||
| And then I turn around and come back another 162 miles. | ||
| It's just that is the insurance company. | ||
| I asked the doctor. | ||
| He said they didn't have nothing to do with that. | ||
| The insurance required that. | ||
| But to me, that is a ripoff. | ||
| That's something that the insurance is getting kicked back far or something I have no idea. | ||
| And then I assumed to mention people that are on these younger people that own drugs. | ||
| They may get hired for a little while, but then as soon as they have a drug test, they're on Medicaid, they're either quit, or the people won't hire them because they know they're on drugs. | ||
| And something needs to be done about that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Who wants to respond to Iris? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think IRIS is the population that Medicaid was intended to serve. | |
| It was intended to serve low-income children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the disabled. | ||
| That's what this bill is intended to do is focus on that population. | ||
| Now, I do agree with what she said about the round trip and having to drive 160 miles. | ||
| I think we need to do a better job in our health care system of leveraging technology, introducing things that can make the patient experience a lot better and improve health outcomes. | ||
| Those are things like remote monitoring, patient monitoring, virtual health care, telehealth, all of those things can expand access to specialists in rural health. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that Rural Health Transformation Grant is supposed to accomplish. | ||
| You know, what won't help is taking $100 billion away from rural hospitals. | ||
| But another thing I want to bring up is the latest colour I mentioned this, and another one had to, the fear. | ||
| And there are people who should qualify under the exemptions who will still lose their coverage because as we've seen in the cases, if it's Arkansas or Georgia, it's amazing to me that the congressional Republicans, who often talk about the government being inefficient, bureaucratic bloat, are now suddenly super trusting of the government's ability to efficiently carry out these programs when we know from previous examples that they haven't. | ||
| So the CBO already estimated there's going to be millions of people who, because of the red tape and the bureaucratic waste, are going to lose their coverage, even if they technically should be exactly. | ||
| That's what CBO said. | ||
| I mean, the latest estimate for the broken down was for the House version, basically for the Senate version. | ||
| But they did definitely say that people who, not the people, the able-bodied figure you're saying, oh, millions of those people are going to lose their coverage. | ||
| Here is Mike in Wisconsin, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, please. | |
| Go right ahead, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just want Brandon to know there are people who take advantage of the system. | ||
| I have a sister who was on disability. | ||
| She's 65 now. | ||
| Next thing I know, she's made a deposit of $65,000. | ||
| And so I just want people to know. | ||
| People do take advantage. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I want to address that because I 1,000% do not disagree with that. | ||
| There's always people who take advantage of the system. | ||
| The question is, is where are the real problems? | ||
| Where is the massive waste? | ||
| And what's the cost of the reforms in this bill? | ||
| So this bill, maybe there's the minority of people, because most people in Medicaid, again, are working caregivers, some illness, they're a student. | ||
| So it's not like narrowly targeted in taking out only these people who are abusing the system. | ||
| The rural hospitals are going to close, and a lot of people who are not abusing the system are going to lose their care, millions of people. | ||
| So it's going to hurt a lot more people than targeting those minor case or very few cases of abuses. | ||
| And also, why are we focusing on these small cases that he pointed out and not the massive cases of corporate fraud? | ||
| I mean, you agreed on this. | ||
| There's massive overpayments in Medicare Advantage. | ||
| Bill Cassidy brought up potentially touching Medicare Advantage overpayments. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| He brought it up for like a week. | ||
| And the insurance industry made sure it did not happen. | ||
| That's $1.2 trillion over 10 years in overpayments. | ||
| It could have totally negated any Medicaid cuts, which they did not even touch. | ||
| This discussion is not serious. | ||
| Brian, supporters of this bill do talk about fraud and saying that there are no cuts, that we're just essentially addressing fraud. | ||
| So what is in the bill specifically that would enhance oversight and address fraud in the system? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one thing I'm just going to disagree with, this $100 billion from rural hospitals and the number that Brandon cites on rural hospital closures, that's just not accurate. | |
| That is an advocacy group making that up because they're opposed to the bill. | ||
| Now that being said, this bill saves $17 billion for the federal government by saying we're not going to pay Medicaid-managed care companies twice for the same person who may be enrolled in different states. | ||
| That to me is common sense. | ||
| The payment error rate for Medicaid, when it's actually calculated for real rather than being suspended under Obama and Biden, some states it's over 30%. | ||
| So one of the bills, one of the provisions of the bill, it says, okay, if your payment error rate is above 3%, you better get in line or else there's going to be a penalty. | ||
| And so I think that there's a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| The 2 million people that CBO says may be disenrolled aren't eligible for the program. | ||
| They are millions of illegal immigrants on the Medicaid program that the federal government is either directly or indirectly paying for, and this bill is going to stop that. | ||
| So there's a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in the system. | ||
| There is more that we can do, I agree, to address health care costs in this country. | ||
| We should. | ||
| Hopefully we'll have a bipartisan discussion on that. | ||
| But you can't solve every problem in one bill. | ||
| You mentioned illegal immigrants, and I want to ask about that. | ||
| Once they do lose their health coverage, what happens? | ||
| Do they end up at emergency rooms where the current law is that everybody that's right now under current law? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you're a legal immigrant, legal, you came through the proper process, you have a five-year waiting period before you can get Medicaid. | |
| That was signing a law in 1996 by Bill Clinton. | ||
| If you're an illegal immigrant and you're paroled into the country, you can get Medicaid immediately. | ||
| I think most people don't find that fair. | ||
| I do want to get your response to that, but let's take a call. | ||
| Tom, San Jose, California, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, please let me finish. | |
| I've sold long-term care insurance for over 40 years. | ||
| My mother is getting Medicaid in Oregon right now under in-home services. | ||
| When the Republican says it's not a cut, it's only going to decrease it from 5% down to 3%. | ||
| That's going to be brutal when the cost of in-home services, if you can't even find people to do the jobs, is increasing at 7% to 10% per year. | ||
| Now, the other thing says that there hasn't been any oversight for the last four years because we're going to blame Biden. | ||
| Well, my mother and I have to fill out a form every year to prove that she is impoverished, that she qualifies. | ||
| As far as oversight, says who? | ||
| My mother has a caseworker. | ||
| We have to fill out financials every six months to a doctor who has to state that she cannot perform the ADLs, you know, bathing, dressing, toiletty, eating. | ||
| These people that they hire are also trained by the state and have a case manager that oversees them. | ||
| My mother lived in a trailer park. | ||
| When she dies, the state of Oregon, as in California, will put a lien on her house to recover. | ||
| It's called a state recovery unit. | ||
| We'll recover the 400,000. | ||
| My mother's been on in-home services for eight years because it's cheaper to keep them in their home than to put them into a nursing home. | ||
| And so when my mother dies, they're going to come in there, they're going to sell her house, and they're going to recover. | ||
| Her home is only worth $200,000, and they're going to recover it for that. | ||
| As far as the immigrants, that's just a red herring. | ||
| The immigrants, it's a drop in the bucket to the people that are on long-term, that are in these nursing homes. | ||
| And the people that are in these nursing homes, they try to, you know, there's a waiting list to get in for in-home services. | ||
| And I've also, I'm a financial advisor, and I've also seen these people who game the system. | ||
| They gain the system by hiding money so they can get their parents into a long-term care facility so they don't have to spend down their money. | ||
| So there's the cheat and fraud, people trying to qualify. | ||
| And as far as immigrants and these illegal immigrants, that's only a drop in the bucket. | ||
| Let's get Ryan to respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, one part of the bill does provide about $6 billion to increase home and community-based services for the elderly and the disabled. | |
| So that is part of the bill. | ||
| I do agree with Tom that there's a lot of fraud in Medicaid long-term care services as people try to hide assets in order to qualify. | ||
| In addition, you had the state of California. | ||
| Tom mentioned that. | ||
| They completely eliminated their asset tests for qualifying for long-term care services and Medicaid. | ||
| So you could have a $10 million house equity of $10 million in your house, and you could have qualified for Medicaid in California. | ||
| I think most people think that that's absurd. | ||
| So there's a lot of things been said. | ||
| First, on that call, I just want to ask or have the audience think about this. | ||
| What if his mother didn't have him to help out? | ||
| How are those people going to deal with these burdens and requirements? | ||
| That's a reality we have to deal with. | ||
| But on a lot of things you've said, first with the illegal immigrants, I think the CBI estimate was for immigrants was 1.4 million. | ||
| I'm not even sure those were all illegals. | ||
| But the federal government through Medicaid does not directly pay at all for illegal immigrants to get Medicaid. | ||
| States like California use state funds to do that. | ||
| But then here's the question. | ||
| Even if you wanted to say we don't want that to happen and we want to use federal levers to stop states from doing that, ask this question. | ||
| Is stopping immigrants from getting health care, is it worth it to kick 12 million people off their health insurance? | ||
| Is it worth it to close down many rural hospitals? | ||
| There's 300 high-risk rural hospitals. | ||
| That's not true, Brett. | ||
| But let me finish on this. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| Is it worth that when people are going to die because of this? | ||
| Is it worth it to cut taxes primarily for the wealthy to increase our debt and deficit by $3 to $4 trillion? | ||
| Is it worth it? | ||
| Is it worth it not to tackle any of the actual reasons why health care costs are high? | ||
| And is it worth it to not deal with, I think, the root problem with this bill and predominantly Congress as a whole, where we have significant issues of corruption, release debates, or farces. | ||
| The framework is already set by these interests. | ||
| They're not going to... | ||
| What's going to happen is that we've had a deficit for a while now. | ||
| And each time the Republicans come in and they say, we need to control spending. | ||
| We need to reduce spending on programs that people need to get health care, to live, snap, to get food access. | ||
| They're cutting SNAP. | ||
| And they say, you want to cut that. | ||
| At the same time, we're going to cut taxes for the rich so much that the deficit's going to skyrocket. | ||
| Then several years down the road, we're going to revisit this question again. | ||
| And we're going to say, oh, look, it's even worse. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Do we think Congress is going to be like, okay, now it's time to increase taxes on the wealthy that we lowered before, to get rid of those corporate handouts we gave the defense contractors? | ||
| We're definitely not going to touch Medicaid again. | ||
| Brendan, let's get a response real quick, Ryan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The vast majority of the tax cuts actually go to the middle class. | |
| That's true. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| 50%. | ||
| That is a fact. | ||
| No, I mean, and so you keep saying things like $100 billion from rural health care or 40,000 people are going to die because you're cherry-picking stats from liberal advocacy organizations. | ||
| You're just saying it's wrong with no evidence. | ||
| Because you don't like it. | ||
| Because it's not true. | ||
| But based on what? | ||
| Based off some group pulls out a number that no one else can actually go through and justify their methodology? | ||
| I'm an honest person. | ||
| If you want to debunk the number, go ahead. | ||
| And we can say, I mean, I'm going to have to go and look at it because I read about it and it was facially, it was laughable. | ||
| All right, let's talk to a caller. | ||
| Let's talk to a caller, Mark, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hello. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Let me tell you, the conversation has been very interesting, and I almost forgot what I originally called in about. | ||
| But thank goodness I'm remembering. | ||
| The fact of the matter is, this argument is, do you want to take care of people or do you want to hurt people? | ||
| Mr. Paragon, there, this thing about people are taking advantage, waste-fraud and abuse, liars, cheaters, thieves, stealing from all this free government stuff. | ||
| Him and his organization have been saying that same thing since the 80s. | ||
| The welfare queens, the welfare mothers, the people with Cadillacs using food stamps. | ||
| They use all that stuff to get away with not helping people. | ||
| But having said that, if I could say to Mr. Novik, I love most of what you're saying, but every time the subject of fraud or who should pay for the fraud or who does the most fraud comes along, you talk about Medicare Advantage. | ||
| It's corporations, yes. | ||
| Just a few weeks ago, there was like a $10, $15 billion Medicare fraud discovered. | ||
| It was durable medical equipment people. | ||
| It was bowie doctor's offices. | ||
| It was runners. | ||
| That wasn't Aunt Tilly or Uncle Mo sitting at home squeaking by on their Medicare. | ||
| Now, when you talk bad about Advantage, Medicare Advantage, I wish you would rethink that and look into it. | ||
| And maybe everything overpays. | ||
| Anything government-wise, they always end up getting screwed and overpaying, and people flock around trying to glom onto that money. | ||
| Mark, let me get both of them to respond. | ||
| Go ahead, Brandon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to just explain more about the overpayments, what they mean. | |
| What it means is that's money that if people were in traditional Medicare, that's extra money that would not have been spent. | ||
| These are going into the pockets of executives of insurance companies. | ||
| So I'm fully aware when I talk about Medicare Advantage overpayments. | ||
| Let me be absolutely positively clear. | ||
| I am not talking about the people who are the beneficiaries under those plans. | ||
| I'm talking about the insurance companies, which purposely make people look sicker than they actually are and choose people who are healthier intentionally to get more government money and exploit the system. | ||
| That's who I'm talking about. | ||
| And your response to our caller, Mark. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree that there is overpayments in Medicare Advantage. | |
| And really, there should be nothing in our federal health care system that we call off-limits in terms of how do we make it more efficient, how do we improve it for the beneficiaries, but then also make sure that the programs are sustainable over time. | ||
| You know, we provide $160 billion over 10 years for bonus payments for Medicare Advantage for supposedly quality star rating. | ||
| I'm not really sure that that does anything to benefit the beneficiary. | ||
| So there's certainly things that we can look at and we should look at. | ||
| I'd like to wrap up with a question to both of you, and I'll start with you, Ryan, and that is what should Americans be watching in the next two to three years to gauge whether or not this is working, whether or not this is, that the implementation is going as it was intended to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, there are a couple of things. | |
| I mean, one, what should they look at? | ||
| How is the economy doing? | ||
| Because this part of the bill was a small part of the bill. | ||
| My belief is because we are preventing the largest tax cut in American or the largest tax increase in American history, that we are doing pro-growth economic policies, that we're going to see an economy that was similar to what we saw after 2017 with high growth and low on inflation. | ||
| That's the opposite of what we saw for the past four years, which was low growth and high inflation. | ||
| At the end of the day, as it relates to Medicaid, if you are a traditional population, i.e. you're a low-income child, you're a pregnant woman, you're the elderly or the disabled, this bill does not impact you. | ||
| If you are a working-age, able-bodied adult, you may have to go and get a job if you don't have one. | ||
| If you are here in the country illegally, you're not going to get access to Medicaid. | ||
| If you're ineligible for the programs, you're not going to be on those programs anymore. | ||
| So that's really the crux of the bill is should we make sure that the program is prioritized to the truly vulnerable that need it, that those that can for themselves, we actually require them to do something. | ||
| Brandon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This bill is going to throw millions of people off their health coverage. | |
| It's going to close rural hospitals. | ||
| It's going to add $3 to $4 trillion to our debt and deficit. | ||
| But we've got to ask, I want to end on just a fundamental question we should ask ourselves. | ||
| Why are we focusing on the lower income and needy people who need health coverage? | ||
| Why is that the focus of reducing spending at the same time as we balloon the debt and the deficit? | ||
| It's because of corruption. | ||
| The number one issue in our government today is that most people do not have a voice in Washington. | ||
| It's the special interest. | ||
| And if you want to address any issue, if you want to make sure that down the line when we have to address the debt and deficit issue again, we don't want them to further cut programs people rely upon for food and for health coverage. | ||
| If we want that discussion to be focused on going after the special interest and raising the taxes on the wealthy after we just cut them, we need to address money and politics, campaign contributions, lobbying. | ||
| If we don't address those, we're going to keep having this debate over and over again. | ||
| We're going to be more and more debt and more and more people are going to be struggling. | ||
| That's Brandon Novick, Policy Coordinator at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. | ||
| They're at CEPR.net and Ryan Long, Congressional Relations Director and Senior Research Fellow at Paragon Health Institute. | ||
| They're at paragoninstitute.org. | ||
| Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| In about 25 minutes on the Washington Journal, a conversation with Georgetown University Public Policy and Government Professor Jonathan Ladd about Elon Musk's plans to start a new political party. | ||
| But after the break, it's open forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 6.45 p.m. Eastern, Financial Times San Francisco correspondent Patrick McGee shares his book, Apple in China, that looks at Apple's relationship with China and the impact of locating so many factories there. | ||
| Then at 8 p.m. Eastern, Joseph Churidian talks about his biography of Chinese President Xi Xinping's father, Zhi Xiangzhun, a leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party, in his book, The Party's Interests Come First. | ||
| Headed 9.15 p.m. Eastern from this year's Freedom Fest, Ludlow Institute founder and president Naomi Brockwell, author of Beginner's Introduction to Privacy, talks about the lack of privacy in the digital age and recommends ways for people to preserve it. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
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| c-span democracy unfiltered this show and c-span is one of the few places left in america where you actually have left and right coming together to talk and argue and And you guys do a great service in that. | ||
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| Answer questions all day, every day. | ||
| Sometimes I get to do fun things like go on C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN is, I think, one of the very few places that Americans can still go. | |
| C-SPAN has such a distinguished and honorable and important mandate and mission in this country. | ||
| I love this show. | ||
| This is my favorite show to do of all shows because I actually get to hear what the American people care about. | ||
| American people have access to their government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access. | ||
| That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | ||
| Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | |
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We've got open forum for about 20 minutes or so, and we will take your call shortly. | ||
| I want to make sure that you know that earlier this morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has met with Russia's foreign minister, Lav Roff. | ||
| That was in Kuala Lumpur, and he made a few remarks. | ||
| Here's a portion of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you get the sense that they're moving towards flexibility? | |
| Yeah, I'm not going to characterize our conversation other than to tell you that I expressed what the president has said publicly, which is we feel as if we've dedicated a lot of time and energy to this matter and just not enough progress has been made. | ||
| We need to see a roadmap moving forward about how this conflict can conclude. | ||
| And then we shared some ideas about what that might look like. | ||
| And obviously I'll take that back to the president here as early as this evening. | ||
| And hopefully there's something that we can build on there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A couple weeks ago you said that what was necessary to end this war would be a conversation between President Trump and President Putin, but there have now been multiple phone calls between the two of them and yet the war in Ukraine goes on. | |
| Does this speak to any weakness in terms of the president's ability to negotiate an end to this conflict or why does it persist despite them having spoken? | ||
| Well this is a war that the president inherited right he got elected and it had already been going on and no progress had been made up to that point towards peace of any kind. | ||
| In fact there had not even been any meetings between the Ukrainians and the Russians for quite some time. | ||
| So while there's been some humanitarian exchanges made, obviously that's our goal here is to end this war and any role we can play. | ||
| So this is not a war that started under President Trump. | ||
| It's a war that wouldn't have happened had he been president, but now it's here and we'll continue to engage and do everything we can and hopefully make progress. | ||
| As I said and I've said repeatedly, look, if we see an opportunity to make a difference in this, we're going to take it and we're going to pursue it. | ||
| And that's what the president has done. | ||
| And he deserves tremendous credit for having multiple phone calls with leaders from both countries and anybody else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Secretary, Russia has launched its most massive attacks in the last three days. | |
| And you, of course, saw your counterparts today. | ||
| Are you willing now to put stronger sanctions on Russia? | ||
| Well, the President has said that that's an option that's available to him, both under existing authorities, but primarily if the Senate and the House can pass legislation that gives them the opportunity to do that. | ||
| So we've been engaging with Congress on what that bill would look like. | ||
| Obviously, the President needs flexibility on how those sanctions would be applied and when, because it gives them maximum leverage in any conversation and negotiation. | ||
| So he has talked about that as being a real option. | ||
| And now, obviously, we've been engaging with the Senate in particular over the last week on what that bill will look like. | ||
| And the leaders of both chambers have said that they're prepared to begin to move forward on that. | ||
| We've expressed this to the Russians weeks ago. | ||
| We told them that the moment would come where something like this could happen. | ||
| And we'll continue to express it because that's the reality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But has the moment come or not yet? | |
| Well, again, that's the President's decision to make. | ||
| That was earlier today, Secretary Marco Rubio, and we'll talk to Sherry in Indianola, Indiana, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's Indianola, Iowa. | |
| Iowa. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| There's a lot of INs going on in that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to make it clear that this is nothing new. | |
| I have a child who is MR. She has been on disability since school. | ||
| She's now 50 years old. | ||
| She's been working on what they called a work program. | ||
| If she would work at 15 hours a week, she could continue to get her Medicaid. | ||
| That is nothing new that's going on here. | ||
| Maybe the hours are a little different, whatever. | ||
| I now like to say now that the federal government is dropping Mr. Trump has cleaned it up as far as federal workers. | ||
| I have been on the phone with Social Security a couple, two or three times, and they will say to you, your wait line is 80 minutes. | ||
| And this is to talk about Medicare and Medicaid because you have bills coming in and you don't understand them. | ||
| The other comment I wanted to make is I don't understand how you can put someone in a nursing home and expect them to live on $50 a month. | ||
| That check is taken. | ||
| The family is left, which we all know families have to work two at a time now for parents. | ||
| But this is nothing new. | ||
| This has been going on for some time. | ||
| It's free bargaining. | ||
| And she has just graduated, or excuse me, she has just been awarded for working 30 years at a grocery store. | ||
| So I do believe that people really understand that this has been going on for some time. | ||
| All right, Sherry. | ||
| Here's Chico, California, Republican line. | ||
| Wanda, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yeah, I don't hear any talk on this show about the cost of drugs, which contributes a huge amount to the cost of medical care. | ||
| And you don't mention that Trump has a program that's going to reduce the cost of drugs drastically. | ||
| And also, Mexico has socialized medicine. | ||
| So why don't we send our medical costs of the illegals and the legals to Mexico and let them pay us for the cost of their citizens' medical care, or we can deduct it from the foreign aid that we send them in the millions of dollars every year. | ||
| And Wanda, are you on Medicare? | ||
| How do you get your insurance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I have TRICARE. | |
| All right. | ||
| And Paul, Cedar Hill, Texas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, this is one of the better shows I've seen on C-SPAN. | ||
| I've been following C-SPAN for quite a while. | ||
| I really love the back and forth of the base because it was very informational and also allowed the public to get involved and share their concerns. | ||
| The interesting part about all of it is I heard they were trying to get rid of DEI programs. | ||
| And on the same token, they said, oh, guess what? | ||
| If you have some disability, we're going to put you to work. | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| Because some of the states and cities are already cutting out DEI programs. | ||
| Then you turn it back around and say, oh, yeah, if there's something wrong with you, just come on in. | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Rip in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Republican. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for taking my call. | |
| My name is Rip. | ||
| And I just wanted to say that your country is still incredible. | ||
| Too many chefs in the kitchen. | ||
| But as far as Trump getting a Nobel Peace Prize, I don't know, but he should get a prize for teaching the country how to act, maybe backing down to what we were 50 years ago. | ||
| And we are a terribly immoral, unethical, and confused group of people in this country. | ||
| And if any nation wanted to really see the disposition of the intelligence of the United States, all they need to do is watch C-SPAN. | ||
| They would clearly see what's going on. | ||
| As far as our debt goes with all of the illegal immigrants, it seems like it's pretty simple. | ||
| All we need to do is go to each one of the countries that we have a deficit with and say that each individual that comes to this country is a child of yours and taking care of your child costs. | ||
| And so we will take the cost of your child, give it back to you by taking it from the deficit that we owe you, and those countries would immediately stop immigration. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Sue in San Diego, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Sue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to talk about, I was trying to get on with the two gentlemen that were just on talking about Medicare and Medicaid. | ||
| And I'm just wondering why when we talk about waste fraud and abuse that we don't talk about the fact that, for example, Rick Scott had a huge case of fraud in Medicare, got away with a slap on the wrist, is still in our Senate. | ||
| And then didn't Trump just grant clemency to a $205 million fraudster who was a CEO of a health care company? | ||
| Those seem like really big waste fraud and abuse issues that are never spoken about. | ||
| Instead, we're like going after these people who actually use and need the services. | ||
| So I just wanted to bring that up. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, yesterday, Texas officials briefed reporters on rescue and recovery efforts after that flood in Texas. | ||
| Here is Kerr County, Texas Sheriff. | ||
| He was asked why it took county officials almost six hours to issue a widespread emergency alert to residents. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Code Red Alert System has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent days. | |
| And now there's reports of a timeline on Friday morning where an Ingram volunteer fire department commander asked a Kerr County Sheriff dispatcher for the Code Red to be issued. | ||
| The dispatcher says, I can't, I have to get a supervisor's approval for that. | ||
| Almost six hours passes until 10 o'clock when 10-04 when the code red is issued. | ||
| How do you account for that lapse of time? | ||
| What happened and what could have happened in that time? | ||
| Okay, as I've said earlier, with every significant event, you know, we're going, with every emergency, you know what? | ||
| We're going to have to, there's going to be an after action. | ||
| Please, y'all, listen to those words. | ||
| After action, okay? | ||
| Those questions are going to be answered. | ||
| I believe those questions need to be answered to the family of the missed loved ones, to the public, you know, to the people that put me in this office. | ||
| Those need to be, and I want that answer, and we're going to get that answer. | ||
| And I know that's going to be asked over and over. | ||
| Please understand that. | ||
| You know, we don't have, we're not running, we're not going to hide for anything. | ||
| That's going to be checked into at a later time. | ||
| I wish I could tell you that time. | ||
| I don't know that time. | ||
| Let me share something with y'all. | ||
| One of the main things I've been doing is going and visiting the family. | ||
| We still have some of those missed loved ones here. | ||
| I go visit them twice a day. | ||
| You know, as a sheriff, you know what? | ||
| What I want is I want closure for those people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And those are important questions. | ||
| We will answer those questions. | ||
| I wish y'all would bear with me in that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| Bear with me. | ||
| We'll get them. | ||
| I can't tell you in a week or two. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to get them. | ||
| I'm not trying to deflect them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My primary to me. | ||
| I asked you, I've been in this business 36 years. | ||
| I don't know if any of y'all, how many of y'all have gave notifications, death notifications. | ||
| I've done them. | ||
| What is worse, a death notification or telling somebody I don't know where your loved one was? | ||
| That's my priority. | ||
| Okay, now please understand that. | ||
| And it is open forum. | ||
| We'll talk to John in Alabama. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Minnie. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I'm calling about Trump getting the Nobel Peace Prize. | ||
| And he sent the Marines in on U.S. citizens in California. | ||
| I don't know how that he can get a Nobel Peace Prize for that. | ||
| Plus, he uses starvation with USA aid to all of these other countries that receive it, and they will be starved to death. | ||
| And starvation is an act of war. | ||
| And the other thing is he supports John. | ||
| I'm afraid you're breaking up, but we got most of your comment. | ||
| Steve Anderson, Indiana, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I got a couple of things I'd like to talk about here about the illegals and due process that they had. | |
| How about the 400 people that marched at the Capitol building in jail for four years with no due process? | ||
| I understand there was a few people there that might have broke a few windows out, but the majority of the people there, all they were doing was maybe trespassing. | ||
| Steve, when you say that they did not get due process, they did go through court hearings. | ||
| So they did appear before a judge and they had a ruling against them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but some of them were in jail for four years for just a actually, they wasn't fined for anything. | |
| There was no erection that they called act like there was. | ||
| None of them was charged for it. | ||
| But yet they kept bringing this up. | ||
| And how about the another thing I want to talk about is the felonies that Trump got over there in New York City. | ||
| It was all Democrats. | ||
| There wasn't no Republicans at all in these courtrooms. | ||
| The jury was all, all the jurors was all Democrats. | ||
| They were all Democrats, the whole bunch of them. | ||
| If there was any Republicans in there, they were just, they was actually Democrats. | ||
| It was all a big joke over there in New York City. | ||
| The American people aren't stupid. | ||
| They've seen it all happen and unfold. | ||
| But yet they keep bringing this up about 43 felonies. | ||
| And it was just a big joke, the whole thing was, all of it was. | ||
| This stuff at the Capitol building, no way that these people should have been in jail. | ||
| We had old women. | ||
| We had women in there that all they was doing was marching. | ||
| That's all the half of them there was marching. | ||
| And it was, it just wasn't, the American people aren't stupid. | ||
| We got that, Steve. | ||
| And this is Fox News with this headline, FBI launches criminal investigations of John Brennan and James Comey. | ||
| It says that there's more headlines there, but that's the top line there about those FBI criminal investigations of John Brennan and James Comey. | ||
| CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Brennan for criminal investigation to the FBI. | ||
| That's according to Fox News Digital. | ||
| Let's talk to Meha in Herndon, Virginia, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| This is Maha. | ||
| I want to make sure we understand Medicaid patients, there is so much abuse going on. | ||
| You just look at the patients who come through the primary care doctor physician's office. | ||
| They all have I-16. | ||
| They come in Lexus cars, but they have food stamps. | ||
| So the patients who really need the Medicaid is not serving. | ||
| Patients who have a lot of money, I don't understand how they're able to get Medicaid of Virginia. | ||
| It makes no sense to me. | ||
| So the president is right. | ||
| There is a lot of fraud and abuse, and it needs overall system. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Ray in Quincy, Massachusetts, Democrat, you're next, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yeah. | |
| I mean, I mean, Trump being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is the biggest joke. | ||
| You have a war criminal like Netanyahu nominating him. | ||
| I mean, this, I mean, Trump's a clown. | ||
| I mean, he's done nothing for world peace. | ||
| All he's done is just grift and make money for him and his family while he starves the poor and takes away from the poor. | ||
| I mean, it's just his entire administration is just pure incompetence. | ||
| I mean, you could see Republican incompetence on display, full display when you look at what's happened in Texas with the floods and what's happened with planes crashing. | ||
| I mean, it's just incompetence. | ||
| I mean, we're headed for an economic disaster. | ||
| I mean, it's just a terrible situation. | ||
| I don't know if America can even survive to get to the midterms to correct things. | ||
| I mean, it's just terrible. | ||
| I mean, it's just pure incompetence. | ||
| And if you look at Trump, I mean, they're not going to nominate, they're nominating a guy who's BFF with Epstein. | ||
| And, you know, and that's, and yeah, that's the reason we'll never see the Epstein file is because Trump's name will be all over it. | ||
| And it's a disgrace. | ||
| I mean, this is just pure, you know, it's just sad to see what's happening to America. | ||
| It's just really sad. | ||
| Anthony in Shelton, Connecticut, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Anthony, here. | |
| Medicare, I worked on with 50 years in nursing homes. | ||
| The biggest problem is that when they changed over from the doctor being the gatekeeper to the insurance companies, in fact, my own Medicare, I find on the bills sometimes things I did not have done, procedures and medications or equipment. | ||
| And then other people that I talked to have the same thing. | ||
| In one group of four people, we found over $15,000 charged in one month that shouldn't have been there because you let these people from Medicare, all different companies, supposedly send you equipment or get a medication for you, which they're not. | ||
| They've got to get it back to the doctor, get it out of the hands of the insurance companies. | ||
| I appreciate the time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Ralph in Victoria, Texas, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Looks like we lost him. | ||
| James, New York, New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| James, are you there? | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Well, this is Politico reporting that NOAA nominee pledges full weather service staffing. | ||
| Senator's question to NOAA picks in the wake of the deadly flooding in Texas. | ||
| Here's an exchange between Dr. Jacobs, who is being nominated to lead NOAA, and Senator Maria Cantwell. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What can we do to help communities get better plans? | |
| Well, going back to your weather service question, if confirmed, I will ensure that staffing the weather service offices is a top priority. | ||
| It's really important for the people to be there because they have relationships with the people in the local community. | ||
| They're a trusted source. | ||
| I didn't mean to imply that this was going to be regionalized or anything. | ||
| As I mentioned before. | ||
| Some people have suggested that the private sector, you could just do it in one location. | ||
| And I'm just trying to get to this point, this regional data and integration with the emergency responders is critical. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, consolidating the data, not consolidating the people. | |
| Okay, I would love for the people to be more embedded in the community. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And you can watch that entire hearing on our website, c-span.org, if you missed it yesterday. | ||
| Here's Vince, Newport, Ritchie, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Vince. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Just want to give you a little background. | ||
| I am a retired U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer. | ||
| I worked up at headquarters targeting individuals, and we were responsible for paroling people into the country. | ||
| There are only two instances a person can be paroled in. | ||
| I want to let the audience know, and that is for a severe medical situation or if they're going to be a witness in a trial. | ||
| President Biden paroled in thousands of illegals without any vetting for those instances. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, people need to realize these charges against President Trump. | ||
| That was a civil case, and they do not understand you cannot turn a misdemeanor into a felony. | ||
| So, people, you need to do research. | ||
| That's about all I want to say, Mimi. | ||
| All right, Vince. | ||
| Rhonda, Ohio, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it's nice to talk to you, Mimi. | |
| This is my first time calling. | ||
| Nice to talk to you, Rhonda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I'm calling because President Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize, and I think it's from his first term when he deployed the Mercy ships to New York when the COVID had started and he gathered all the medical equipment. | ||
| That has never been done since the early 1900s. | ||
| And I also think that when he stepped across and shook hands with Kim from North Korea, I mean, those things had never been done. | ||
| And for a president to go through assassination attempts and still be the man that he is and the president, I mean, he should receive it. | ||
| And that's all I wanted to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Janine, Holtsville, New York, Democrat, you're next, Janine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Mimi. | |
| First time caller. | ||
| There's so much going on in the country today that I don't even know where to start. | ||
| But getting back to the gentleman prior with Corporate America is getting all these tax breaks. | ||
| And what people don't talk about is all the loopholes that they have to pay little or no taxes. | ||
| And the whole thing about trickle down, it doesn't work because the corporations wind up doing stock buybacks and they continue to get richer and richer. | ||
| So if we're looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, it needs to start with corporate America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that ends our segment of Open Forum. | ||
| Coming up after the break, we've got a discussion about Elon Musk's plans to roll out a new political party that was after a major fallout with President Trump. | ||
| We'll talk about this new effort and the history of third parties in America with Jonathan Ladd of Georgetown University. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to talk about third parties in America is Jonathan Ladd, Public Policy and Government Professor at Georgetown University. | ||
| Jonathan, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mimi. | |
| It's really great to be here. | ||
| So, as you may have heard, Elon Musk has announced that he's forming the America Party. | ||
| This is his posting on X. We'll just show it to everybody. | ||
| He says this: by a factor of two to one, you want a new political party and you shall have it. | ||
| When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. | ||
| Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom. | ||
| What was your reaction when you found out about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first, he's right that most people are dissatisfied with the choices they have. | |
| Most people, if you ask them, they would like more parties, more options. | ||
| So, he's correct about that. | ||
| The other thing that came to mind, though, is that it's actually quite hard to start a new party that would challenge the existing parties. | ||
| So what are the steps? | ||
| What does he have to go through to do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he has to decide first, does he want primarily a presidential party to run a third party for president, or does he want a third party that's going to run candidates all down the ballot, right? | |
| You know, for Congress, for state offices, right? | ||
| A third party that would be more realistic would be one that actually challenged at all these levels. | ||
| The biggest challenge for all third parties, though, is that the U.S. compared to other democracies has single-member plurality districts, which means that you don't need to get a majority to win a House seat in Congress. | ||
| You don't need to win a majority to win a Senate seat in almost all states. | ||
| You don't even need to win a majority of the votes to get elected president. | ||
| Whoever gets the most, which means whoever gets the most votes gets electoral college votes from states, gets elected for the Senate or House, which means that people are always afraid of splitting their votes, right? | ||
| A big challenge for minor parties is that voters are afraid of splitting their votes and supporting minor candidates. | ||
| So this is a big challenge for minor parties. | ||
| When you say splitting their votes, you mean from the top of the ticket to down ballot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so like if you, I'm sorry. | |
| So like if you are considering voting for a third party, like Elon Musk's party, but your second choice is Donald Trump, and the candidate you least like is the Democrats, right? | ||
| You're afraid, oh, if I vote for Elon Musk, I'm going to make it more likely that my least preferred candidate's going to win. | ||
| Right, so there's institutional challenges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| And Democrats want to vote for like the Green Party have the same issue. | ||
| Like they're worried about splitting the liberal vote and their least favorite candidate getting elected. | ||
| So this is always a challenge for minor parties, is that people are afraid of splitting the vote and the candidate they least want to get elected gets elected. | ||
| So what would need to happen? | ||
| What are those institutional changes that would need to happen that could make a third party viable in America? | ||
| Just if you were to, if you had a magic wand, what would change? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if more states rather than had single-member districts had some sort of proportional representation system where they elected the, you know, the each party got House members from that state in proportion to the vote they got rather than single member districts. | |
| Now, that doesn't seem to be against the Constitution, but it is in violation of a federal law that would require a change in federal law. | ||
| There's a federal law that requires states to have single-member congressional districts. | ||
| So it's possible, but it would require a significant change. | ||
| Another thing is that another change that's not proportional representation for the House, but that is popular among many reformers is ranked choice voting. | ||
| I wanted to ask you about that. | ||
| So explain that and how that would impact a third party candidate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, ranked choice voting basically is the same as an instant runoff, right? | |
| So if no one gets a majority, you don't have to worry about splitting the vote on your side, right? | ||
| If you vote for a third party candidate, your votes get instantly reallocated to your second choice candidate. | ||
| That would mean that third-party candidates might get a lot of votes in the first round. | ||
| There's no guarantee they would get elected. | ||
| Their votes just might get reallocated, but they might be viable and stick around for a while and get a lot of first round votes. | ||
| So I think it eventually maybe replace the major parties. | ||
| So if more parties switch to ranked choice or instant runoff voting, it's plausible that you might get more third parties sticking around for a while. | ||
| It's no guarantee they will replace the major parties that people want. | ||
| There's no guarantee of that, but it's more realistic. | ||
| And most people's experience with ranked choice voting recently probably is the Democratic Party primary in New York City, which had ranked choice voting. | ||
| So people ranked their choices. | ||
| And if you're one of your first choice candidates wasn't top two, your vote got reallocated to your second or third choice candidate. | ||
| So that's a perform many people support as making it easier for minor parties. | ||
| If you've got a question or a comment about third-party political, third political parties, I guess it's called, you can give us a call. | ||
| It's Democrats are on 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Our guest is Jonathan Ladd of Georgetown University. | ||
| Let's talk historically. | ||
| Do third parties typically revolve around specific issues? | ||
| So I'm thinking about like Ross Perot about fiscal issues. | ||
| George Wallace was a segregationist. | ||
| Is that typically what happens with third parties? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are basically two types of third parties in presidential elections in American history. | |
| One is they have a particular issue, right? | ||
| So they run on an issue that the major parties are ignoring. | ||
| You can go all the way back to 1852 and the Free Soil, I'm sorry, it's 1848 and the Free Soil Party, which got 10% of the vote, like anti-slavery party. | ||
| And you can think of Ross Perot in 1992, whose main issue was deficit reduction and ran and got 19% of the vote. | ||
| So sometimes you get people running on an issue that's been ignored by the major parties. | ||
| And the other thing you get is when one of the major parties split, and that's a pretty different thing, right? | ||
| So you get in 1912, the Republicans basically split in two, William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt. | ||
| Teddy Roosevelt kind of runs his own party because he didn't get the nomination. | ||
| And that basically dooms the Republicans because they split the Republican vote almost evenly and Woodrow Wilson gets elected even though he didn't get a majority of the vote. | ||
| A very similar thing happened in 1948 when the Southern Democrats or Dixiecrats walk out of Democratic convention and Strom Thurmond as a Southern Democrat third party because he's upset of Harry Truman's support for civil rights. | ||
| Truman managed to surprisingly survive that and still get elected, although it was a come-from-behind surprising victory in 1948. | ||
| But it was a big problem for him. | ||
| So you occasionally get these instances where a party splits and that is often fatal for the party. | ||
| But then you get these other instances where the third party really is putting forth an issue that other parties are ignoring. | ||
| Sometimes that's successful in the sense that that third party gets the major parties to pay attention to their issue. | ||
| So after 1992, the major parties did pay more attention to deficit reduction. | ||
| You could argue that Ross Perot succeeded in getting that issue more attention. | ||
| And that's the model of, there's a 20th century historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that American third parties like this are like bees. | ||
| They sting and then they die, right? | ||
| They get their issue on the agenda of the major parties and then they go away, right? | ||
| Either voluntarily or interest in them goes away after the major parties actually address their issue. | ||
| So the question is, is Elon Musk going to be like this, just trying to put forth an issue? | ||
| And if the major parties address it, will he go away like a bee? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So who would you say was the most successful third party candidate in history? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a good question. | |
| I mean, the example people always give is in the 1800s, right, after the Whigs collapsed, the Republican Party started out as a minor party and became one of the two major parties, right? | ||
| And when the Whigs were collapsing, there were several rival parties trying to be the major alternative. | ||
| The other major rival to the Republicans was the American Party, which is better known by its nickname in the 1850s, the Know Nothing Party, which was called the Know Nothing. | ||
| Its official name was the American Party. | ||
| It was the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Party. | ||
| It got 21% of the presidential vote in 1856, the election before Abraham Lincoln was elected. | ||
| So it was vying to be the second party and had substantial support. | ||
| I think that's a good question. | ||
| So the Republican Party clearly is a minor party that became a major party and was most successful and was the most successful. | ||
| Arguably, some of the other anti-slavery parties earlier, predecessor to the Republican Party, was the Free Soil Party, anti-slavery party that ran a candidate for president in 1848. | ||
| It got the agenda, got the ball rolling for more anti-slavery parties. | ||
| So if you go back to that, those are clearly very successful. | ||
| I think when you go further towards closer to the present, I mean, I think in many ways, Ross Perot's third-party candidacy was fairly successful in getting his issues on the agenda and getting, I mean, Bill Clinton's first major bill was a major deficit reduction bill. | ||
| You know, I'm not sure he's the most successful, but he was successful in getting his issues addressed. | ||
| Let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Will Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a Ross Perot question. | ||
| He's always given credit for getting Bill Clinton into office. | ||
| So what was his base? | ||
| Where did his base come from? | ||
| Was it all Republicans or did he pull some Democrats into that also? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| Political scientists have tried to answer that, to say, like, was Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote or was he a third-party candidate that drew from both sides and just trying to get his issue attention? | ||
| My understanding is most of the polling data found that his voters were not exclusively conservatives, but was a mix of conservatives and liberals and people who didn't have strong ideologies but were kind of disengaged from political process otherwise. | ||
| So my best understanding is from the public opinion research, that his voters, especially in 1992, really drew from both sides. | ||
| So I don't think he, I don't think the consensus is that he got Bill Clinton elected, especially when you consider the context that the incumbent president who was very unpopular, whose popularity, approval ratings were in the low 40s, high 30s. | ||
| I would put him in the category of outsiders bringing in and advocating for a specific issue. | ||
| It does cost money to start a third party. | ||
| You got to hire staff. | ||
| You got to have infrastructure, get signatures, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Going back to Elon Musk being the wealthiest man in the world, we don't know how much money he's willing to spend on this. | ||
| But could this be a game changer given his enormous wealth? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a good question. | |
| In that way, he's most similar to Ross Perot in that he wasn't comparably, he wasn't the wealthiest man in the world, but he did have a lot of money. | ||
| Ross Perot spent it to air half-hour long national infomercials at the time in 1982 to get attention for his campaign. | ||
| And Elon Musk could do the modern equivalent of spending a lot of money to get attention. | ||
| I think the most likely strategy to be most effective would probably to spend that money on lower level offices. | ||
| If he wants to run, you know, you dump a ton of money into a House race or a governor's race or even a Senate race. | ||
| I think even with the fear of splitting the vote, maybe your candidate becomes the second most viable candidate, right? | ||
| And so people vote for you because you're one of the top two candidates. | ||
| I think it's most likely at lower offices for that money to be successful. | ||
| It's hardest at the presidential level, as Ross Perot indicated, because every presidential nominee gets so much attention. | ||
| It's very hard to end up being the one running second in the polls and have people vote for you as one of the top two candidates and not being afraid of splitting the vote with their favorite party. | ||
| It's hardest at the presidential level. | ||
| Terry in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Terry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, how you doing this morning? | |
| Good. | ||
| I was trying to figure out how in the world we get to a point where we know the tree by the food in the barrel. | ||
| Elon Musk is not really capable of running a third party or opening up a third party. | ||
| I think we're going to see all the destruction he's going to create through the government agencies and different things of that nature. | ||
| High in the world, we're considering even having a third party where we need to revamp or overhaul the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, which are all come to unfit for democracy or anything else of this day. | ||
| So I'm just trying to figure out how in the world are we considering this man to try to create a third party. | ||
| He's not even qualified to be in the government. | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| What do you think, Jonathan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the good point I hear there is that, like I said, he's most likely to have success at lower offices. | |
| The presidency is the hardest office to have be successful as a minor party, as a third or fourth party. | ||
| Does he have the attention span and interest in developing the organization to recruit candidates and then help them develop actual campaign organizations with the money he has at these lower levels? | ||
| That's going to require some attention, sustained attention to organization building. | ||
| Will he want to do that is a question. | ||
| It's not obvious he will. | ||
| And he would need to recruit candidates as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| He himself cannot run for president. | ||
| He's a naturalized American citizen. | ||
| But as you say, in those lower levels, he would still need to recruit people that are interested. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's correct. | |
| He needs to find candidates, good candidates who are going to run competent campaigns, who don't have backgrounds that prove embarrassing in a campaign. | ||
| And to some degree, you want organization to get out the vote and these sort of things for these offices. | ||
| So it requires money, but money put into organization building. | ||
| And he has a lot of commitments. | ||
| I mean, he's running a lot of different companies. | ||
| As we saw with his time in Washington with Doge, he actually did have big effects. | ||
| He didn't stick around that long. | ||
| So it does require party building requires a lot of attention to organization building as well as money. | ||
| Vincent, a Republican in Gaithersburg, Maryland, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| First of all, there are no third parties. | ||
| Republicans did not morph into a from a third party. | ||
| Of course, C-SPAN never fat sex. | ||
| They let people come on just as misinformed, and then they hung up just as misinformed, spreading lies. | ||
| But anyway, let me speak to the point. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You could have all the money in the world. | ||
| It's the people. | ||
| Constitutional Republic. | ||
| We good people will vote you in if you have the right issues. | ||
| Whether you have a $1 or $1 billion. | ||
| And he's coming from a stance and not to help America. | ||
| He's acting like a spoiled rich child, didn't have his way, spreading all kinds of lies about his own work because he didn't get his way. | ||
| You cannot win that way. | ||
| The American people, you know, believe it or not, we're smarter than what C-SPAN, CNN, and the Democrats think we are. | ||
| We are a lot smarter than that. | ||
| We see right through you. | ||
| All right, let's get a response. | ||
| Go ahead, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'll clarify about the 1800s and the Republican Party, whether it was a third party. | |
| People can call it what they want. | ||
| I think the caller made a good point that the two major parties in the early to mid-1800s were the Democratic Party and the Whig Party. | ||
| The Whig Party was very diverse. | ||
| It was made up of a lot of politicians who were opposed to Andrew Jackson for a lot of different reasons and became the party that was opposed to Andrew Jackson Democratic Party. | ||
| And as the Whig Party kind of lost support, a number of parties vied to be the second major party. | ||
| I mentioned the Free Soil Party, then the Republican Party, and I mentioned the American or Know-Nothing Party as some of the major ones. | ||
| You could also mention the Anti-Mason Party as other major parties. | ||
| And a lot of parties vied to be the other major alternative. | ||
| By 1860, the second major party had become the Republican Party. | ||
| So I'm happy to clarify that. | ||
| Is that possible to happen in the future? | ||
| Would any of those things that were kind of in place back then happen again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, probably it's not going to happen the way it happened then, because you had one of the major parties really lose its electoral support, right? | |
| And so, you know, they were not electing, they were electing few and fewer major people to office. | ||
| They were getting fewer and fewer presidential votes. | ||
| You had a series of presidential elections where the Democratic Party was getting a certain amount of votes and the Whigs and then other parties were kind of splitting the vote because the Whigs were losing support. | ||
| You know, people don't like the Democratic-Republican Party, Democratic-Republican Party, but in national elections, they still vote for them, right? | ||
| Like if you compare Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's votes, right? | ||
| They're still getting, you know, 48%, around 48% of the vote at a minimum. | ||
| You know, one part of this, one attribute of our polarized era is that sometimes people have such negative partisanship or dislike of the other party that they do support the major party that is against them. | ||
| So it might not be because of positive feelings, but both major parties are still getting a lot of votes. | ||
| Richard, an independent in Augusta, Maine. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| I guess I don't know if I'm going to know here his answer, whether I hear it on TV or on the phone. | ||
| But my whole thing is there is three parties right now, independent, Republican and Democrat. | ||
| But the thing is, they don't recognize the Independent Party. | ||
| And just like you have, you had like five independents. | ||
| There was 49 Republicans and five independents, which made, what, 46 Democrats? | ||
| But yet Chuck Schumer was a Senate majority leader. | ||
| Why don't they just recognize the Independent Party? | ||
| If people leave the Democrat Party and go there, then they lose the Senate majority or the House majority because these people are no longer Democrats. | ||
| They're independent. | ||
| If they started recognizing the Independent Party, then you would have Free Party, and you might have people from the Democrats and the Republicans joining the Independent Party. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he's right that there are some independent senators. | |
| Senator Sanders from Vermont, Senator King from Maine. | ||
| I hope I'm not forgetting a third independent senator. | ||
| But you do have some independent senators who what's called caucus with the Democrats in that they will vote for the Democrats leader, if they're in the majority, the majority leader, if the minority, the minority leader. | ||
| There's been calls over the years for independents in Congress or in the Senate to not caucus with the major parties and instead have their own faction. | ||
| They usually don't because there is fear that it kind of creates chaos in the Senate. | ||
| And in theory, it could create chaos in the House if you've got a similar situation, if no majority faction kind of organizes the chamber and decides when to bring things up. | ||
| So that's a reason I think it has not happened yet. | ||
| It's not impossible that you might have the faction of independents in the House or faction of independence in the Senate, you know, holding the balance of power and only partially going into coalition with one of the parties to govern. | ||
| But it hasn't happened yet, I think out of a fear of it creating chaos. | ||
| Michael in Mahapok, New York, Democrat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question has to do with the organization of Congress. | |
| If a independent party was able to get traction, how would Congress organization differ? | ||
| In other words, now you have everything Democratic, Republican. | ||
| If there really was a third party that had traction, how would the running of Congress differ? | ||
| And how was it done in the past when before there was just Democrats and Republicans? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| A really nice follow-up on the last question. | ||
| Now, someone probably who's even more aware of the history of Congress might find examples of when in Congress there were three parties and none had the majority. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| There were some brief times in the Senate in the 1950s when the parties basically had equal amounts of senators. | ||
| And there was some sort of bipartisan running of the Senate in the very early 50s. | ||
| There might have been some brief times in the 1800s, but I'm not aware of it. | ||
| So there's not a lot of historical precedent for there being more than two parties in Congress and parties having to basically run a House of Congress as a party coalition. | ||
| It's not unusual worldwide, though, to run a legislature as a coalition of parties. | ||
| So it's not impossible. | ||
| In parliamentary systems, it's very common. | ||
| On parliamentary systems, usually the parliament runs the country and elects the prime minister. | ||
| And very often, the prime minister will be elected and the government will be selected by a coalition of parties that put together a majority. | ||
| So I think it's possible. | ||
| The challenge is just that because of the winner-take-all single-member districts, it's hard for minor parties to win a lot of seats. | ||
| But sometime in the future, you could imagine parties governing in coalition. | ||
| Now, would voters see a coalition with Democrats as you being essentially Democrats? | ||
| So yet some independents who, what's the difference between a group of an independent party that coalition with Democrats and now the independents who just caucus with the Democrats? | ||
| Is that a real distinction? | ||
| Will voters see it that way? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Those parliamentary systems where there's a lot of political parties, do citizens tend to be more happy with those, more satisfied with that system as opposed to our system. | ||
| I mean, we've got polling that shows that like 58% are unhappy with both parties here in this country. | ||
| What do you think of that, like the European system? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a good question. | |
| I think it depends what you ask. | ||
| I think you don't get high levels of people saying they're unhappy with the choices offered as much as you get in the United States. | ||
| So you, for a very long time in the United States, have had high numbers of people saying, you know, I wish I had more choices. | ||
| And I think you are much less likely to get that in a parliamentary system that has more and more parties. | ||
| Now, I don't know, and it's a great question. | ||
| And I don't know off the top of my head the answer to are people, to the question, are people happier with their country in general? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, do they think in general the government works well, the political system overall works well in parliamentary systems versus single-member district systems, presidential separated systems like we have? | |
| I don't know the answer to that question. | ||
| Let's go to Charleston, South Carolina, Independent Line Mar. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had a question about the 1912 election. | |
| Sure. | ||
| I wanted to know, like, what was, I know, besides the party itself with Theodore Roosevelt, it was being popular at the time. | ||
| But I wanted to know what made the Boomuz Party, Progressive Party, successful at that point to where they got as far to make second place in the 1912 election. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| There's probably a more sophisticated answer to this. | ||
| I mean, but my simple answer, which probably was a big part of it, is that it helps if your candidate is a former almost two-term president who's fairly popular and very well-known. | ||
| So, and was associated with one of the major parties, so it could take a lot of Republican votes. | ||
| I think his major policy difference with William Howard Taft, who was the Republican nominee, was that he was more progressive when what progressive meant in that era, the progressive era, the 19 oughts and the 19 teens, which is not always necessarily what progressives now has endorsed. | ||
| There's some overlap, but it's not exactly the same. | ||
| So they had a very popular candidate and well-known candidate. | ||
| And that probably explains a big part of it. | ||
| Although there may be other reasons as well. | ||
| Let's talk to Tanya in North Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I had a comment and a question. | ||
| First, I think it's crazy for Elon Musk to call himself creating a new party because he was annoyed with Trump because he didn't do what he wanted with the electric card where he wasn't subsidized. | ||
| And I just think it's crazy because he ought to realize that Trump is going to push him to the side after he gets what he wants anyhow. | ||
| But my question is, President Trump is not a Republican. | ||
| He's a Rhino, really, in name only. | ||
| And what is Elon Musk? | ||
| But is he a Democrat, Republican, or what? | ||
| You know, that was my question. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, it's a good point. | ||
| Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have at some point in their past supported Democrats. | ||
| They've definitely not been lifelong Republicans and in some ways not been lifelong conservatives, although Donald Trump has supported some conservative positions consistently throughout his life, even when he supported Democrats. | ||
| There's another good point that, you know, it's unclear if Elon Musk will really follow through on this or whether this is just a reaction to his objections to some things in the reconciliation bill. | ||
| As we mentioned, it requires sustained follow-through and a lot of organization building in addition to consistent overtime commitment of money to build a viable political party. | ||
| Even that is no guarantee of success. | ||
| It's not impossible. | ||
| So whether Elon Musk will follow through on this is a question we can't answer today, but it is a fascinating historical question and prompts a lot of our fascinating historical discussions today. | ||
| Leonard in Westfield, Massachusetts, Independent Line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Elon Musk will really follow through on that. | |
| Leonard, you got to turn down your TV so you don't hear it in the background. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Staying to the right still. | |
| Leonard? | ||
| Westfield, Massachusetts. | ||
| Tony in Redlands, California, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I'm tuning in late, but I had a question, or I had a comment about Elon Musk trying to start his own independent party. | ||
| That's a huge red flag because what's wrong with our political parties is money. | ||
| And there's too much dark money in politics. | ||
| You can pretty much buy the Supreme Court. | ||
| You can buy a political candidate, just pay lots of money. | ||
| Donors can give, since Citizens United passed, donors can give unlimited amounts of money. | ||
| It's sickening what's happened to our country because the people have no power because Elon Musk and Donald Trump and rich donors control everything. | ||
| The Heritage Foundation purchased the country by purchasing political candidates and pushing them to run. | ||
| And now we're stuck in this situation where nobody has any power because the executive branch is the only branch that has any power because he's paid for and he's doing all of his bidding for all the people that paid for him to become president. | ||
| Jonathan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think there are a lot of people dissatisfied with the role of money in politics. | |
| I mean, it's similar responses that you get to the question of, are you happy with the current options in terms of political parties? | ||
| You know, everyone, you know, not everyone, but a very large majority of Americans are unhappy with the role of money in politics. |