| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
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| C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next. | ||
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| The Washington Journal for July 17th. | ||
| The House is in at 9 a.m. Eastern, so a two-hour program today. | ||
| Earlier this morning, the Senate passed a package that would make cuts to not only foreign aid programs, but also the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR. | ||
| It goes to the House today. | ||
| Republicans cited their effort as a commitment to the American people to make cuts in federal spending. | ||
| Democrats criticized it, saying the cuts would do harm internationally and domestically. | ||
| What do you think about this effort to cut foreign aid spending and money for public broadcasting? | ||
| Do you support or oppose it? | ||
| Call and tell us why. | ||
| 202748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can text us at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Post on Facebook at facebook.com slash C-SPAN. | ||
| And you can also post on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| If you want to, as you're calling, to let us know about your thoughts about these cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, here's a summary of the legislation that passed in the Senate yesterday. | ||
| It would rescind about $9 billion overall in appropriated funding for those two categories. | ||
| When it comes to specifics, about $8 billion would be pulled back from foreign aid and about a little over a billion dollars pulled back from the corporation for public broadcasting. | ||
| By the way, this bill reflects rescissions proposed by the president under the 1974 Budget and Impoundment Control Act. | ||
| The Senate passed this package in the early morning hours of today. | ||
| Stephen Newcomb, who writes for Axios, posted a story based on that effort. | ||
| Here's the headline. | ||
| Senate passed Trump's foreign aid public broadcasting clawback. | ||
| Stephen Newcomb joining us now from that very early morning he had. | ||
| Mr. Newcomb, good morning. | ||
| Thanks for giving us your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And thank you for having me. | |
| You describe in your story that this was a win for Hawks. | ||
| What did you mean by that? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a win for fiscal hawks who, you know, through the first six months of the second and Trump administration, I think have been pretty frustrated by the lack of progress toward some of the spending cuts who were, you know, still upset with some of the lack of cuts in the big, beautiful bill that they were able to pass, you know, earlier this summer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's also a win for the White House. | |
| I mean, this is sort of a priority for the president, and it also stemmed from the Department of Government Efficiency sort of initiative. | ||
| And this is a culmination of those cuts. | ||
| And the thing to watch here is that the president has signaled and the White House has signaled that they have interest in doing these types of rescissions packages going forward. | ||
| So it's sort of an unprecedented use of the process. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I think that this is something that you might see the White House try to achieve again in the next two or three years. | |
| Earlier in the week, we saw as it was the procedural votes took place to the final vote, we saw some resistance from Republicans. | ||
| What did we see from the final vote? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we saw Republicans who I think we knew were going to vote against this package. | |
| Obviously, the obvious ones, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, the two moderates, and also Mitch McConnell, who is a part of the appropriations process, a subcommittee chair. | ||
| And a number of the Republicans bought the argument that Democrats are making that this circumvents the appropriations process. | ||
| It takes at least 60 votes in the Senate, which means that it must be bipartisan to pass any spending bill, any funding measure to keep the government funded. | ||
| And then Republicans essentially, Democrats say, in this case, turned around and used what they argue is essentially a carve out of the filibuster, needing just 50 votes, a majority of votes to claw back funding from those spending packages that they agreed to pass in a bipartisan nature. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So yeah, some consternation on the Republican side, but because of the margin that they have in the Senate and a Democratic illness, I think Senator Tina Smith was not able to vote last night. | |
| They were able to get this bill through. | ||
| As it goes to the House, what's expected there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has set up a procedural vote on this for today. | |
| I think the wildcard going into this was that the House for about the entire week has just been completely frozen. | ||
| It's their crypto week where they meant to pass all these crypto legislations. | ||
| And they've just been unable to so far. | ||
| Now, last night they sort of unlocked a support of conservative hardliners to move forward with that process and sort of unlocked the deadlock that was on the floor. | ||
| So it looks like Republicans will be able to get this through the House by the end of the week. | ||
| And that is key because there's a July 18th deadline on getting this rescissions package to the president's desk and signed. | ||
| It only takes 45 days before being sent from the White House to Capitol Hill to expire. | ||
| Before we let you go back to sleep or whatever from the early morning that you had, what's the expected Democratic response from all of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been sort of signaling implicitly that Democrats would walk away from the fiscal year 2026 government funding process if Republicans pass this rescissions package and pursue further rescissions packages in the future. | |
| So I think what you saw Republican leadership doing yesterday was sort of calling that bluff, right? | ||
| Saying we think that Democrats will still work with us for government funding, which needs to be funded at the end of September at the end of the summer. | ||
| And we're going to have to see how Democrats respond to Republicans passing this bill and their continued and the White House's continued interest in doing more of these rescissions packages. | ||
| It's the only leverage point, the spending battle in September that Chuck Schumer and Democrats have, and we'll have to see how they choose to use that leverage. | ||
| A late night, early morning for Stephen Newcomb. | ||
| You can find his work at axios.com. | ||
| Mr. Newcomb, thank you so much for giving us your time today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Again, if you want to comment on these cuts that are expected that have passed the Senate and going to the House, largely on foreign aid, largely on public broadcasting funding, 202-748-8,000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Vic is from California, Democrats line. | ||
| Vic, go ahead and tell us your thoughts. | ||
| Thank you for waiting. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I just want to say after paying very special attention on C-SPAN to the House and the Senate and back to the House again for the big, beautiful nightmare bill, a trillion dollars here, $550 billion there, $200 billion there. | ||
| $9 billion doesn't sound like a lot of money until you realize that public television is so very, very important to so many, many people. | ||
| And the foreign aid, what is left of it, it's like they're going back and taking everybody's peanuts off of them that they forgot to collect the first time. | ||
| So these cuts will bring some consequences to America, and we just don't realize what terrible things it's going to bring to our country. | ||
| What consequences do you think might happen because of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, like they said, on every package of food and anything that has ever been sent abroad since the Marshall Plan has had from the people of the United States of America or something like that on it. | |
| So people know that it's a goodwill effort on behalf of the American people. | ||
| The world isn't going to see this anymore because there is no goodwill going out to the world from America. | ||
| It's all about money and it's about the con and it's about corruption. | ||
| And it's heartbreaking. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I can only hope that if we ever change over to Democrats again or goodwill people that we could change this because that's awful. | |
| Vic there in San Jose, California, another Californian calling in. | ||
| This is Darrell in Long Beach, Republican line on the topic of cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. | ||
| Hello, Darrell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, this is Darrell Regina. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Fine, thank you. | ||
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to let you know that I really don't feel it's necessary to cut certain public broadcastings in foreign aids because we need education because of a scripture I found in the Bible by the Daniel chapter 1, verse 4, that talks about the importance of learning in literature. | |
| But obviously, this guy and George Soros has been trying to defend these people by going further to the left. | ||
| And I say, if I am in my way, George Soros, he should be locked up behind bars and his mental freedom taken away. | ||
| He's been defending the mainstream media, a lot of other people who may left for organizations like the ACL. | ||
| So, well, as far as Mr. Soros says, as far as Mr. Soros, how does he apply to these topics, either foreign aid or public broadcasting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Public broadcasting in this case. | |
| Because the saying is, public broadcasting was originally supposed to be saying John F. Kennedy wanted to get done, but it was Lyndon Johnson who signed into law. | ||
| The problem is they haven't been telling the truth about certain issues because they keep attacking Republicans, conservatives in the faith. | ||
| I feel that public broadcasting needs to be corrected. | ||
| It shouldn't be cut. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Daryl there in California, very early his time calling us in on these topics. | ||
| Kathy joins us next in Michigan. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Good morning, Pedro. | ||
| Good morning, C-SPAN. | ||
| Well, I've been a sustaining donor to CMU Public Radio, which is out of Mount Pleasant since 1980. | ||
| We have a couple of radios, no TV in the house. | ||
| And I listen to Interlockin in the dining room, and the other one we have on CMU. | ||
| My children were raised listening to radio in the car, traveling to school, and stuff like that. | ||
| I stream on the web to watch programs. | ||
| And, you know, you don't take the best of what people create and destroy it because you don't agree with whatever you don't like about it. | ||
| And Trump probably doesn't like the news. | ||
| He doesn't like the facts. | ||
| And I think if they cut that funding, it's going to just be another thing that stops people from having information and making decisions that are sound. | ||
| I am so disappointed in this administration. | ||
| You know, it's just not just the public broadcasting. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| He's going after anything that helps people grow and mature and have information that you can count on that's legitimate. | ||
| Kathy there in Michigan giving her description what her concerns over public broadcasting in USA today. | ||
| There's a profile of a PBS station in Kansas. | ||
| What might happen if these funds to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting are cut, saying if the cuts pass Congress, Smoky Hills PBS will have a slew of difficult decisions to make, according to the general manager, Becky Schwine. | ||
| The station does not use any of its federal funding to purchase PBS programming. | ||
| She said, rather, it helps cover the cost of operating the stations for transmitters, for example, as well as salaries and the station's local programming. | ||
| The station would have to weigh the benefit of each of its costs to determine what should be prioritized on a bare bones budget. | ||
| Quote, do you retain national children's programming that has a historic name of Sesame Street or Daniel Tiger, Curious George? | ||
| Or do you cut the local value where your local students and children are highlighted for their accomplishments? Schwine said. | ||
| It's just a horrible choice to have to make. | ||
| That's a profile of that Kansas station you can find that at USA Today. | ||
| The larger issues you can talk about foreign aid, as well we've seen in this package of rescissions, cuts, as they're known, or public broadcasting. | ||
| We showed you a list or at least a graphic kind of highlighting where that would break down. | ||
| You can call us and tell us about it. | ||
| 202748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| 202748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Al is in Tennessee. | ||
| Independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, let me tell you how this works. | |
| A few years ago, I was a major airline pilot. | ||
| I spent 15 nights a month out in a hotel room. | ||
| And when I'm in a hotel, if a good show came up on the public broadcasting, like a Ken Burns or a concert or something like that, and they were doing fundraising, which they often do during good shows, I would call and send them money, whatever the local station is. | ||
| Well, one day I started, I began to get fundraising appeals from Massachusetts politicians, all Democrats. | ||
| And I did a little homework. | ||
| And what had happened, WGBH in Boston had given my name as a donor to them to all these local Democrats. | ||
| They're all progressives, liberals, and they want my money. | ||
| I go, I don't even live in Massachusetts. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So that shows you how much PBS and NPR, they assume that the people that are watching their station are progressive liberals. | ||
| And all their programming is designed for that. | ||
| Their news is slanted for that. | ||
| And I know that for a fact because I was getting fundraising appeals from liberal Democrats in Massachusetts. | ||
| I can't even vote in Massachusetts. | ||
| So, yeah, the federal funding should be turned off to zero on those people. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Well, Al there in Tennessee, by the way, the Washington Times has its own take on public broadcasting. | ||
| This is from Dan Schneider, an opinion piece. | ||
| He's with the Media Research Center under the headline, Biased Assaults from NPR PBS on McConnell's judicial legacy. | ||
| They say that working closely with President Trump and the Federalist Society, Mr. McConnell helped confirm more than 200 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices. | ||
| These aren't partisan wins. | ||
| They're constitutional victories. | ||
| PBS, of course, responded with smears. | ||
| Its 2020, quote, frontline documentary, Supreme Revenge, Battle for the Court, was a textbook example of leftist spin. | ||
| Ominous music, dramatic black and white footage, and breathless commentary, all designed to paint Mr. McConnell as a conniving villain. | ||
| If you want to read more there, that's the Washington Times, their own take when it comes to funding for public broadcasting, at least Mr. Schneider's take on it. | ||
| We heard from Al in Tennessee. | ||
| We'll hear from another Al. | ||
| This is Al in Georgia, Republican line. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see what the salaries of those people over the TV and the radio make. | |
| A million dollars. | ||
| They've got people making $400,000. | ||
| And I tell you, it's just nothing but a mouthpiece for the liberals. | ||
| If it was fair, it'd be different. | ||
| But it ain't fair. | ||
| And I don't know what we're going to do. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I'm worried about these colleges. | ||
| And that woman over the NEA now, she's more worried about getting Trump than the reading, writing arithmetic. | ||
| Well, go back to the salaries. | ||
| First of all, where'd you get those figures? | ||
| And do they apply to NPR? | ||
| Do they apply to PBS? | ||
| Where are those salaries? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look it up and see what their salaries are. | |
| One of them makes a million dollars a year. | ||
| This over the radio or the TV, one of them, look it up. | ||
| And there's a bunch of them making $400,000 a year. | ||
| Just to inform our audience, where did you look it up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I looked it up on my phone. | |
| It showed it. | ||
| What they salaries, their names, it's two women that's over these things. | ||
| Look it up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's Al in Georgia there. | ||
| Again, talking about the public broadcasting aspect, you can talk about that. | ||
| You can talk about the foreign aid aspect. | ||
| Another Michigander. | ||
| This is from Democrats line, Bradley. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for taking my call. | |
| Coincidentally, I echoed earlier Michigan caller. | ||
| I listened to the exact same stations that she does for PBS and NPR. | ||
| The excellence in what they're able to offer, the variety is unsurpassed. | ||
| And people that have a problem with it are fairly narrow-minded, which is obvious. | ||
| All these issues coming down to just a few senators, Murkowski and maybe McConnell and Collins. | ||
| I mean, where are the other 40-some Republican senators? | ||
| They just sort of, they don't even have to answer to anything. | ||
| They're just shills for Trump. | ||
| They do exactly his bidding, and it's sad. | ||
| Cutting aid is just seemingly ill-advised. | ||
| Food allowed to rot so we don't have to help is sad. | ||
| Shutting down help in the great American way and misdirecting it to a profit-only type of a country is sickening to me, and it has to change. | ||
| And it is going to require some of you MADA people to do it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Again, the Senate voted on it earlier morning hours, about 2:30-ish this morning. | ||
| It goes to the House today. | ||
| Stay close to our main channel, C-SPAN. | ||
| If you want to see how this plays out, you can also follow along on our app, C-SPANNOW, and our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Sonia off of X offers these comments this morning. | ||
| You can post there too, saying that she opposes the selective cuts to things real Americans care about. | ||
| She adds, win for the oligarchs, and then the time zone from X saying the significance of cutting funding to NPR is important. | ||
| You can't take taxpayer money and push asinine propaganda. | ||
| It's sick and twisted. | ||
| I'm glad this message has been sent. | ||
| X is available to you at C-SPAN WJ. | ||
| Text us too at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Facebook available at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN. | ||
| Anthony joins us next. | ||
| He's in New York, Independent Line. | ||
| Hello, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I do support cutting funding to both foreign aid and to public broadcasting and NPR. | ||
| I used to be an NPR supporter and donator and donated to their cause. | ||
| However, you know, over the years, I noticed that they were becoming less and less balanced and they were definitely favoring the Democratic side. | ||
| I'm surprised people don't talk about a former reporter, Yuri Berliner, who back in 2023 came out, pretty much exposed NPR for where there was a coordinated plan to only show Trump in a negative light, and came out with a piece saying that NPR basically said that they can't show or publish. | ||
| anything positive about Trump because it might the risk of him getting elected was too great. | ||
| And he got fired for that. | ||
| But I rarely hear people interviewing him or talking to him about that and why, you know, after working there for 25 years, nobody brings that up. | ||
| When you say that you guys, have you guys ever interviewed Yuri Berliner? | ||
| I don't know if we have. | ||
| It doesn't recall to me that we have. | ||
| But let me ask you this: as far as you say that when you watch PBS or if you watch public broadcasting, it tends to favor more progressive side. | ||
| Is that specifically in programming or newscasting or where do you find that specifically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think in newscasting, honestly, I used to listen to NPR more than I watched PBS. | |
| I did watch some PBS, and I do support some programs like the gentleman said earlier about like Ken Burns programs. | ||
| I think those are very informative, but definitely when it's covering current events, they definitely favor the more liberal and the kind of side. | ||
| And it's not just me saying that. | ||
| Again, talk to Yuri Billiner, who was a reporter for 25 years. | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned that. | ||
| And yeah. | ||
| Let's go to Rick. | ||
| Let's go to Rick in Idaho, Republican line. | ||
| You're next up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Good morning, Pedro. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| This is Rick Aitcherson, retired Marine Map, Idaho. | ||
| I have a valid record which I'd like to bring to light. | ||
| It's a foreign aid introduction report, CRS report 40213, updated April 16, 2019. | ||
| When you open it up, you go to the last three pages, 28, 29, and 30, and you're going to see from 1946 to 2019, 71 years of 4 and 8 dollars. | ||
| Those are our federal tax dollars. | ||
| President Trump, in his first term of office, he only spent $29 billion, $900 million. | ||
| And I added that to George Bush's $209, Bill Clinton's $127, and George Bush Sr. $63 billion. | ||
| The Grand Toll is $428 billion, but the Democratic president Barack Obama said we had to pay our fair share, $478 billion. | ||
| But as a compromise, we could use those $4.8 and push to PBS. | ||
| That would satisfy the need of public broadcasting. | ||
| And we've only had one country ever office any help during our time of need, and that was during Hurricane Katrina, a very noble, honorable judge from the great country of Japan. | ||
| Pedro, I know my time is limited. | ||
| America. | ||
| Let me ask you personally, do you have concerns over these cuts for PBS? | ||
| Are you okay with that? | ||
| Or is that something you would not like to see? | ||
| Where do you fall on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, on PBS, if that is an American broadcasting programming system that employs Americans, we can use those $408 and push it to that to fund that. | |
| That would be a good compromise. | ||
| But as far as funding the world, America, 71 years, that's your health care needs, your education needs, journalism needs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN, Washington Journal, is that going to affect you guys? | |
| I know my time is limited, Pedro, and I appreciate the extra three seconds, but those $408, that's coming out of your paycheck, America. | ||
| Rick, thank you for your hospitality. | ||
| Thank you for calling. | ||
| And just to answer your question, and we've said this many a time, and people who've watched us over the years know this. | ||
| We're funded by the cable industry. | ||
| Your dollars that you contribute when you have cable helps to fund what we do. | ||
| We're shifting around and looking for other sources of funding as well. | ||
| Nothing from the federal government, just to be clear, is we don't take money from the federal government. | ||
| Barbara in Tallahassee, Florida, Democrats line. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| I'm well, thank you. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, I'm just a little old lady down here in Tallahassee, Florida, and I love to watch Antiques Road Show. | ||
| It's on PBS. | ||
| I like to watch Florida Crossroads. | ||
| It's on PBS. | ||
| So all this mess that everybody's calling in about, I really don't understand it because it has not affected me. | ||
| So I just don't understand it. | ||
| You know, Trump has cut everything. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| I don't know what is next, but, you know, probably my Social Security. | ||
| Anyway, thank you. | ||
| Let me ask you, Barbara, are you concerned that if for some reason the money to PBS is cut and it goes down to your local station, that your local programming or programs like Road How the one you described, do you think that's going to be affected? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yes. | |
| It's all about taking American freedom away, Pedro. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Just they work on it every day, one little freedom at a time they're trying to take away. | ||
| They don't care if I can watch Antiques Road Show, but you know what? | ||
| That's my choice. | ||
| I'm free to do that. | ||
| That's Barbara there in Florida giving us her thoughts this morning. | ||
| This is a viewer on X, again for public broadcasting, saying public broadcasting issues emergency alerts. | ||
| In times where local alert systems are not reliable and extreme weather events have hit many states, I don't think public broadcasting should be cut. | ||
| When it comes to foreign aid, it was a few months ago that Pew Research put on a poll. | ||
| This is what they asked, the percentage of those who say that the United States should give foreign aid for the purpose of when it comes to providing medicines and medicinal medical supplies to developing countries. | ||
| 77% of Republicans or those who lean Republicans say that that should be used there. | ||
| 91% of Democrats or those who lean Democrat. | ||
| Same categories. | ||
| The topic, providing food and clothing to people in developing countries. | ||
| 68% from the Republican side, Democratic side, 89%. | ||
| Supporting economic development in developing countries. | ||
| 46% of Republicans saying that should be the purpose of foreign aid or a purpose of foreign aid. | ||
| 80% from the Democratic side. | ||
| And strengthening democracy in other countries. | ||
| 45% from Republicans. | ||
| 77% from Democrats. | ||
| You can see that at pewresearch.org. | ||
| Let's hear from Kevin. | ||
| Kevin is on our Independent Line. | ||
| He's from Massachusetts. | ||
| The question of supporting cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. | ||
| Hello, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yeah, I support CutNet. | ||
| I also like some of their programs. | ||
| I like the Antiques Roadshow and stuff like that. | ||
| My time is limited to listening to them on the radio and the roundtable that they have out of Albany. | ||
| And those people, they will be the first ones to tell you how bright and smart and well-informed they are and everything else. | ||
| But the small percentage, even if they take all of their money away from the federal government, they should be able to run a corporation. | ||
| If Rush Limbaugh had been getting money from the federal government, the Democrats would have had their head on fire. | ||
| Rightfully so. | ||
| They were slanted. | ||
| And I mean, as far as NPR is concerned, Trump and the Republicans have never done anything right. | ||
| And they, even on things that I agree with, they get vile. | ||
| They like to assign motivation to these people and say how horrible they are. | ||
| Even when I agree with them, I turn it off sometimes. | ||
| And that's all I got to say. | ||
| Is your concerns only on the public broadcasting side, or what about the foreign aid side? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Foreign aid, I think that we should be giving out water to people that are thirsty and food to people that are hungry, but for art and stuff like that, they can support themselves. | |
| Okay, that's Kevin there in Massachusetts on our Independent Line. | ||
| This is a viewer off of X saying NPR and PBS are already getting funded by every leftist billionaire on earth. | ||
| They are completely left-wing biased. | ||
| Even their fiction is based left. | ||
| There's no reason that taxpayers should be paying for public broadcasting that isn't really public. | ||
| They are slanted politically. | ||
| Again, if you want to make comments on X at C-SPAN WJ is how you do that, you can post on our other social media sites as well. | ||
| We'll continue on, and you can continue to call 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans, Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| And again, texting us, that's an option too, 202748-8003. | ||
| We'll hear next from Kathy. | ||
| She's in New York, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hi. | |
| Here's the deal, okay? | ||
| I did a ton of sustaining donations to PBS. | ||
| But the next thing I knew, I kept drifting into overdrift and insufficient funds with Chase Bank. | ||
| And then I realized, wait a second here, this PBS never sends me an itemized bill so that I know when, what, but for what reason, at what point of time, money is being taken out of my account. | ||
| Now, this is like a nifty little thing going on here. | ||
| So I drilled down on it. | ||
| And finally, PBS said, oh, no, no, no, no. | ||
| This is how it is. | ||
| You know, when your bank statement shows up, that's your receipt for having done a transaction for sustaining donations. | ||
| Kathy, Kathy, Kathy, I'm sorry, may I pause you only for a second? | ||
| Because we're getting some interference on our site. | ||
| So, can we do this? | ||
| Control woman, can we put her on hold and then go back to her, see if we can fix that interference that's on the back, and then we will come back to her again. | ||
| We want to hear from you. | ||
| So, Kathy, stay on the line with us and see if we can get a better signal there. | ||
| And you can still continue to call in: 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, and Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| There was a poll from the journalism website editor and publisher talking about funding for PBS. | ||
| Many of you mentioning that, saying, according to the poll that was conducted online by Peak Insights from the 29th of June to July 1st among 1,000 likely voters, voters highly value public media's core services and programming, such as emergency alerts, 82%, children's educational programming, 66%, local programming, 66%, and 60% national news reporting. | ||
| The survey reveals voters more widely trust public media compared with media in general when it comes to reporting the news, quote fully accurately and fairly. | ||
| Only 35% of voters trust media in general, but 53% of voters trust public media networks and local stations. | ||
| Again, editor and publisher putting that out. | ||
| Let's try Kathy again. | ||
| Kathy from New York, go ahead. | ||
| Okay, we'll try her in a bit. | ||
| Let's try Jerry. | ||
| Jerry in Detroit, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Good morning, Pedro, and greetings yet again from Motown. | ||
| First, I want to start off to the caller from New York a few callers back, along with the other archie bunkers on the Republican line. | ||
| There is absolutely nothing, nothing positive about Donald Trump. | ||
| As far as funding for public media goes, I think the reason most of these guys are against public media is because it exposes Donald Trump and his supporters for who they are. | ||
| And I think probably the one show that they're against on PBS, for example, is Frontline because it exposes the kind of man Donald Trump Trump is and the kind of people his supporters are. | ||
| And what Donald Trump is trying to do is to try to silence public media so it doesn't tell the truth about him. | ||
| And these archie bunkers on the Republican line are against him because it exposes him for who he is. | ||
| As far as my favorite, of course, my favorite program on PDS, of course, is Frontline, and another is the American Experience. | ||
| If I may, Pedro, I like to, you know, I grew up on public broadcasting as a kid. | ||
| I watched both Sesame Street and The Electric Company. | ||
| Both of those shows have contributed a great deal to my education. | ||
| And it would be tragic if King Trump tries to cut funding to these institutions because they are very important. | ||
| My favorite radio program on NPR is, of course, all things considered. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Jerry there in Detroit. | ||
| And let's try Don. | ||
| Don in Iowa, Independent Lying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this is Don. | |
| Go ahead, Don. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yeah, I think all these funding for all this stuff is for the birds. | ||
| I didn't think the government was supposed to be in for the funding the private industry. | ||
| And if this, to me, this is a private industry because they go out and get taxpayers' money from other sources too. | ||
| I just don't think we should have anything like this going on anymore. | ||
| It's past its debut and everything like that. | ||
| I just think it's time to get rid of it. | ||
| Don in Iowa, Independent Line, talking about public broadcasting. | ||
| It was in the lead up to the amendment process of the bill yesterday. | ||
| Washington Democrat Patty Murray coming to the floor in defense of public broadcasting. | ||
| Here's some of her comments from yesterday. | ||
| When Hurricane Helene battered North Carolina, a local public radio station was the only source of information for many people. | ||
| And in fact, many stations use their towers to actually deliver emergency alerts to people's cell phones when cell towers go down. | ||
| This funding supports stations who play an integral role in many of our state's emergency planning. | ||
| Do you think our communities should have less warning in an emergency? | ||
| Do you want to leave folks back home with less information when they are in harm's way? | ||
| Well, I guess you vote for this bill if that's how you feel. | ||
| I want you to know I'm a hard no. | ||
| And let's not pretend a secret deal from Trump and vote to reallocate $10 million is somehow a serious fix to this. | ||
| It is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the massive cuts being pushed through here. | ||
| In fact, it's less than 1% of the overall funding that this package would rip away for public broadcasting and those alerts. | ||
| And don't forget, these cuts will impact some of our kids and parents' favorite educational shows. | ||
| Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, Daniel Tiger. | ||
| PBS Kids has a long track record of creating shows that are beloved, not just because they keep kids entertained, but because they are thoughtfully crafted to help them learn and grow, to stoke their curiosity, to teach them caring and empathy. | ||
| Any parent will tell you that is a worthwhile investment. | ||
| And any parent will also warn you. | ||
| If you take away shows like this that gets kids engaged and gets them thinking, take that away, then there's an avalanche of brain rot television that's waiting to fill that void. | ||
| Content that is crafted not to get kids thinking, but to keep them watching at all costs. | ||
| The Senate started this process in the afternoon yesterday. | ||
| It continued on until very early this morning. | ||
| They passed that bill that was passed previously by the House that would make these cuts to foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. | ||
| It goes back to the House today for consideration. | ||
| And if it passes, it's go to the President's desk. | ||
| I'll watch that play out on our various networks, C-SPAN, the main network, when it comes to today. | ||
| This is from X saying, a viewer saying the market provides as good as or better programming. | ||
| Supposedly talking to public broadcasting. | ||
| We do not need taxpayer-funded public broadcasting. | ||
| And then, viewer, this is also X saying, I remember when America would help out the less fortunate here and abroad. | ||
| Now we exploit them. | ||
| They say cruelty is the point, so take it from there. | ||
| You can post there on social media. | ||
| Greg is calling us from Illinois. | ||
| Democrats line, hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| As for public broadcasting here in Champaign, Illinois, we have one of the oldest stations in the country. | ||
| It's over 100 years old. | ||
| Decades before it started getting any money from the government, and it will continue after this money is gone, as it will in nearly all the blue counties that provide 70% of the national GDP. | ||
| So it's mainly going to affect rural America. | ||
| And I guess rural America can continue to stew in its own juice if that's what it wants to do. | ||
| As for foreign aid, every dollar we don't spend on foreign aid, we're going to spend $100 on the military. | ||
| And all the lives we don't save with that foreign aid will be paid for with the lives of American soldiers. | ||
| And that's basically all I got. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| From here in D.C., Republican line, Alistair, good morning. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for leaving my call. | ||
| I just wanted to say that I see NPR, PBS, and USAID as American assets. | ||
| I don't want to throw the baby out with a bathwater. | ||
| Due to the fact that they take U.S., a little bit of taxpayer money, I believe that's, I mean, this is kind of more conservative side, that it should look somewhat balanced for all Americans, not just as a blue asset. | ||
| But as far as PBS itself, I'm very grateful growing up without much access to libraries and school that I had NOVA and science and reading rainbow, and I couldn't be more thankful. | ||
| I just hope that it represents us a little bit better. | ||
| Alistair, there is in D.C. | ||
| This is from Illinois. | ||
| Donna joins us next. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I am very against taking PBS away. | ||
| I think it's a very quality program. | ||
| And if it's gone, look what's left. | ||
| And I think that Donald Trump is making himself look more and more like Hitler every day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| From Deborah Lee. | ||
| Deborah Lee is in North Carolina. | ||
| Independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, everyone in America. | ||
| What a travesty. | ||
| What a travesty that they would take away PBS, the excellent, the almost the only educational programming. | ||
| PBS is a national treasure. | ||
| It just turns my stomach thinking about this. | ||
| And they're cutting school lunches so that the very richest among us might have more money. | ||
| What a travesty. | ||
| God bless America. | ||
| I'll tell you one thing. | ||
| On the other side of this, Mr. Trump, America is going to be better off because we needed big changes. | ||
| And he certainly is a wrench, a monkey wrench thrown into the works. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, we need that. | ||
| But this is so tragic. | ||
| His presidency is so tragic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Deborah Lee there in North Carolina. | ||
| It was the Republican senator from North Carolina, Tom Tellis, who recently announced his retirement yesterday on the Senate floor talking about possible unintended consequences to the cuts that are being considered. | ||
| Here's a portion of that from yesterday. | ||
| We've been told that through Doge, there should be $1 trillion or $2 trillion in savings. | ||
| The reason why it's so important to get this rescissions bill right is because if confidences are betrayed with a $9 billion bill, do you really think you're going to have the support for wide open, trust us decisions for future larger rescissions? | ||
| In other words, if my confidence is betrayed here, then I won't vote for another rescions bill unless we have that line out in programming. | ||
| But I'm willing to go through this exercise, and hopefully we can trust the administration to not go down the path that we've been assured that they won't when they're enabled, they're given this broad ability to make up to about $7 billion in cuts. | ||
| Now, some of them are obvious. | ||
| People are going to say, well, tell us you're worried about, you know, pick some sort of liberal program in some part of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Obviously, we're not. | |
| There's a lot of things that we can cut where scope creep or fraud or abuse exists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ladies and gentlemen, some of these programs will have life impacts. | |
| I was in Kenya, in Nairobi, outside of Kenya. | ||
| I was at a Sudanese refugee camp a couple of months ago. | ||
| And what struck me in this refugee camp were these American signs in a maternal ward with children that had distended bellies. | ||
| They had flies crawling all over them, mothers, expectant mothers sick. | ||
| And they were thankful that they had that condition to bring their children to and to potentially get support for expectant mothers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were thankful for those conditions that we would find abominable in this country. | |
| And they were willing to give the United States credit to give them those conditions. | ||
| Those are the kinds of programs that I am imploring the administration to not touch when given the broad authority that they'll get with this bill. | ||
| You can see that comment and others made early yesterday into the morning at our app at C-SPAN Now, also our website at c-span.org. | ||
| Republican Line from Florida. | ||
| Phyllis, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| How are you today? | ||
| I'm well, thank you. | ||
| How about yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I support taking the money away from the foreign aid and the programs. | ||
| I like the programs on PBS, but who is paying for them? | ||
| The people who don't pay any money on taxes, they don't have to pay anything to watch these things. | ||
| And I'm tired of helping these other countries when we are in debt. | ||
| What is it, $37 million? | ||
| I have a question to ask. | ||
| Could you please ask sometime how many people want to go in debt further? | ||
| Could you please ask that sometime? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Phyllis, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much for calling and letting me call. | |
| I appreciate it a great deal. | ||
| Well, Phyllis in Florida, thank you for the call. | ||
| Thank you for the question, suggestion. | ||
| Let's hear from Dennis. | ||
| Dennis in Alabama, Republican Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Yes, I'm cutting all the employees, 100% of them, about 98, are all Democrats. | ||
| Turn it around. | ||
| What if they were all Republicans? | ||
| Would the Democrats want to be giving all this money to the Republican-run business? | ||
| Heck no. | ||
| Can't they see, ball? | ||
| Can't they put their feet in the other shoe and see? | ||
| What about all the drag queens teaching our children? | ||
| That's not straight up. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| That's negative in my world. | ||
| And let's see. | ||
| I'm trying to read my notes. | ||
| I believe that all that money, they're going to support themselves. | ||
| They're making millions and millions and millions of dollars from their Sesame Street products. | ||
| Every other buddy's got to take, pay their own way. | ||
| Why do they get a free ride? | ||
| They're not going out of business. | ||
| But if you listen to them, there is not any conservative talk at all. | ||
| And the lady that was the CEO of NPR, when she was on TV, she was lying through her face saying, no, we're equal. | ||
| Well, fact check. | ||
| I mean, all you have to do is listen and watch. | ||
| And they really doubled down since we started talking about defunding them. | ||
| So they're a left-wing hat group, just like the rest of them. | ||
| There isn't very much good coming from the Democrat Party. | ||
| It's all negative. | ||
| It wants to tear up our country. | ||
| Now, if you see a United States flag in front of a house, you know it's a Republican. | ||
| They don't want anything to do with a United States flag. | ||
| I don't know what has got into half of these people. | ||
| They hate Trump so much, they forget about everything else. | ||
| They forget about lunch. | ||
| They're on their phones looking at their. | ||
| We got the point, Dennis. | ||
| Dennis brings up the head of NPR. | ||
| Catherine Mayer is her name. | ||
| She was on CNN yesterday, talked about criticisms that she's heard about the bias in their program at NPR. | ||
| Here's some of her comments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you say to Republicans who argue the funding is a waste of taxpayer dollars and consider your outlet to be a biased propaganda machine? | |
| Well, I would take those two things apart. | ||
| Number one, 70% of all funding goes directly to local stations. | ||
| NPR receives 1 to 2% of national funding on an annual basis. | ||
| We're talking $3 million, $5 million. | ||
| It's not much. | ||
| I think, unfortunately, this is cutting off their constituents' noses despite NPR's face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't help anyone to take this funding away. | |
| As far as the accusations that we're biased, I would stand up and say, please show me a story that concerns you because we want to know and we want to bring that conversation back to our newsroom. | ||
| We believe that as a public broadcaster, we do have an obligation to serve all Americans, and we need to make sure that our coverage reflects the interests and perspective. | ||
| And we hear from Americans across the political spectrum. | ||
| That's important to us, and we want to make sure we live up to that. | ||
| Again, the Senate passed a bill that, if it's passed in the House and signed by the president, would introduce about $9 billion in cuts, largely to foreign aid programs, some to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. | ||
| We're asking about your thoughts on these type of cuts. | ||
| Do you support that? | ||
| 202-748-8,000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, and Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let's hear from Brian. | ||
| Brian's in New Mexico, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| I like to focus on the foreign aid budget. | ||
| I say not one more dollar for Israel. | ||
| We've given the Israelis tens of billions of dollars over the years, actually, over hundreds of billions of dollars since its founding. | ||
| Many American presidents have told them to stop the illegal settlement activity, to stop what they're doing in Gaza, and they ignore us and keep doing it. | ||
| And then they turn around and ask us for money. | ||
| So let's all remember now, we're going to cut all these beloved American programs like PBS. | ||
| And in about six months or so, and everybody's forgotten about it, all of a sudden there's going to be a movement in Congress for another Israeli aid package. | ||
| I'll bet my life on it. | ||
| And they're going to want another $10 or $20 billion. | ||
| Let's remember how our Republicans in Congress cut all these other programs. | ||
| But when the Israelis show up wanting money, they're all going to get in line and just shovel it at them. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| No more money for Israel. | ||
| That's Brian in New Mexico, Sue from New Jersey texting us saying we have seen and heard of foreign aid going into the pockets of corrupt government officials. | ||
| Never making it to the intended people in need. | ||
| How can we help when we lack oversight? | ||
| She asks. | ||
| Patricia is next, also from New Jersey in Camden, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| I definitely support NPR and PBS News. | ||
| I mostly watch PBS News every night. | ||
| Christine Amapor, PBS News, I forget his name, but Jeff somebody around six o'clock. | ||
| New Jersey spotlight that keeps me abreast of what's going on in my state, and the local news doesn't. | ||
| What I do find different, and I've been retired for about three years, they have an awful lot of foreign broadcasting, specifically PVP. | ||
| I mean, BBC. | ||
| They have these shows, and we have Americans here, I'm sure, that would love to be on PBS. | ||
| And I feel like BBC has a whole channel to itself, or, you know, just like, you know, fun shows, not educational. | ||
| They do have BBC News that don't watch it. | ||
| But yeah, so, and also learned so much. | ||
| And the children's shows for all the generations I've lived, I'm 69 now, are great. | ||
| And that's all I'm at. | ||
| But PB supporting BBC, a foreign country? | ||
| Nope, I don't agree. | ||
| That's Patricia there in New Jersey in the lead up to the vote yesterday. | ||
| It was on Tuesday. | ||
| Senators had a chance to make comments about the rescissions package. | ||
| It was Marcia Blackburn, Republican senator from Tennessee, giving her own assessment of funding for public broadcasting. | ||
| Here's a part of it. | ||
| Now, this is an organization that funds NPR and PBS. | ||
| And what we know, think about NPR. | ||
| They have been pushing a left-wing ideology using the taxpayers' money for years. | ||
| And my colleague from Louisiana, Senator Kennedy, talked some about Catherine Mayer, who is NPR CEO, and the things that she has had to say about President Trump. | ||
| And she has called him all sorts of names. | ||
| Now, she is not somebody that's neutral, and she is not somebody that wants to give you a point and a counterpoint. | ||
| She has an opinion, and she is using your tax dollars to spread her opinion far and wide. | ||
| One of the things that they did ahead of the 2020 election, NPR refused to cover the revelations about Hunter Biden's laptop and his overseas business deals. | ||
| And Mr. President, at that time, NPR's leadership had this to say, and I quote them: We don't want to waste the listeners and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions, end quote. | ||
| Now, that was their opinion. | ||
| They're entitled to that opinion, but they are not entitled to take the taxpayers' hard-earned money and spend it to push their opinion. | ||
| As we now know, they were wrong. | ||
| Stephen in Michigan says this: PBS was created to give the United States citizensary educational TV platform to benefit we the people. | ||
| He texted us that. | ||
| And then this is from Fred Hunaker from X saying: if you want funding, you have to represent both sides equally with no bias. | ||
| And if you don't want, if you don't want to know money, then you can make your comments on X. You can make your comments text-wise, post on Facebook. | ||
| Give us a call too. | ||
| Robert in Texas. | ||
| Hello there in our independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro, and thank you for being patient with me. | |
| I know this is I'm catching the end of the segment here. | ||
| I know you want to wrap up, so I'm, but I got a lot to unpack here. | ||
| One, I know you mentioned you get funded by the cable industry, right? | ||
| I don't want to trust the Trump regime not to try and co-opt that at some point if they can co-opt, if they can get law firms to count to them, right? | ||
| So I had to explore alternative funding platforms like Patreon, Discord, Twitch, and the like. | ||
| The same for NPR and CBS as well, PBS as well, if they're getting funding cuts. | ||
| Two, the Neo-Reaction agenda. | ||
| I called in two months in a row on that the last couple of months, and nobody's mentioned anything about them, right? | ||
| And this is a threat behind Donald Trump that I believe that is worth paying a lot of attention to. | ||
| And I'd like to hear something from the production staff about this at some point. | ||
| Three, I saw an article on The Atlantic about how Trump wanted to burn 500 tons of food aid and then for 1.5 million starving children if they're talking about cutting USAID funds. | ||
| And there's also one more thing. | ||
| There was an attack on July 4th against a nice detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. | ||
| They were well organized, well funded, and I think this signals a growing insurgency in the United States. | ||
| Okay, Robert, we're going to leave it there. | ||
| We're going to leave it there. | ||
| Cedric in Ohio, Democrats line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thank you for my call. | ||
| I look at, as far as the foreigns aid, that being military, because the military, people look at powerful. | ||
| What makes you powerful is being helpful, being the aid to the country. | ||
| That's why people seek America, because they look at it as a safety net. | ||
| And you can go, that's why everybody's trying to get to America. | ||
| But as far as the PBS, I grew up on Sesame Street. | ||
| I grew up on electric companies. | ||
| And from what I'm hearing from your other constituents, Trump, Republicans, and against the PBS, half of them is uneducated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Half of them is misguided. | |
| And half of them is racist. | ||
| And they don't want, I feel like this country wants to have servants and rich people. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And that's my comment. | ||
| Cedric there in Ohio. | ||
| Carla up next. | ||
| And Missouri, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Pedro. | |
| The reason I called in is I wish some people would get more informed about these bills. | ||
| We're not trying to do away with PBS and NPR. | ||
| They're just withdrawing taxpayers' support. | ||
| They'll get along just fine. | ||
| They should be competing with private enterprise. | ||
| That just irritates the life out of me. | ||
| And as to USAID, when you read what's in some of these bills, it's just ridiculous what they want to use the money for. | ||
| It isn't going to help starving children. | ||
| It's social programs. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Carla in Missouri there. | ||
| William joins us from Ohio and Cleveland, Republican line. | ||
| Hello there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Pedro. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| John, sir, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm watching C-SPAN, and I see Senator Kennedy explain this whole thing about public broadcasting. | |
| It's owned by George Soros now. | ||
| He bought all the public stations. | ||
| So now we're getting communism stuff on our public broadcast. | ||
| He owns all of the stations. | ||
| Why don't you tell the people that he owns it now? | ||
| Everything's going to change. | ||
| But he ain't buying it. | ||
| You should tell the people that. | ||
| They call him complaining. | ||
| What are they complaining about? | ||
| George Soros screws everything up in this country. | ||
| Why does he own all the companies? | ||
| He bought them. | ||
| Now what are we going to do about it? | ||
| May I ask who told you that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll change now. | |
| May I ask who told you that George Soros owns all the public broadcasting stations in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was on C-SPAN. | |
| See, he was on C-SPAN. | ||
| I watched it on C-SPAN. | ||
| Explain the whole thing. | ||
| George Soros bought all the stations in the country. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| William there in Ohio. | ||
| This is Scott. | ||
| Scott in Wisconsin. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hey, Pedro. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Goes well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I just want to call and say, you know, I watch PBS almost every day. | ||
| You know, if we want to cut money to something, how about if we cut the $8 billion in subsidies that big oil gets from American taxpayers every year? | ||
| You know, if we're going to cut money, let's cut everybody's money, not just the money that benefits the little people. | ||
| All right, that's all I got to say. | ||
| Have a good one. | ||
| One more call on this topic. | ||
| It'll be from Roger in Ohio, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| During World War II, Germany and Japan bombed us. | ||
| When the war was over, we rebuilt all of their countries. | ||
| The war now between Russia and African people down there, it's an extension of World War II. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| And we're getting money to the Nazis to take care of, they had Biden pay all the college people's education and owed money. | ||
| My kids all went to school and worked and paid their own way. | ||
| I have six grandchildren. | ||
| They all worked and paid their own way. | ||
| The whole situation, I see, is that if people get paid, Roger, you still there? | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| Go ahead and finish your thought, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| They're trying to knock rich people and take the money. | ||
| I want my boss to be rich so he can pay me. | ||
| If they work their butt off and make money, why should we take it away from them? | ||
| Biden's idea was crazy. | ||
| His son got forgiven for having drugs in the White House. | ||
| So, you know, it's a situation that the public broadcasting, they get money to all the people that are on the shows. | ||
| They're paid. | ||
| They're paid to come on the shows. | ||
| There was one religious program that Roy Rogers got $25,000. | ||
| Okay, Roger there in Ohio, finishing off this hour. | ||
| Thanks to all of you who made the calls and contributed on social media as well. | ||
| As we've been telling you, the Senate passed this yesterday. | ||
| It goes to the House today. | ||
| The House coming in at 9 o'clock this morning to take up this bill and other things. | ||
| You can watch for what happens on our main channel, C-SPAN. | ||
| For the next hour, up until the House comes in, we'll have short visits with two legislators, Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet, freshman Democratic Representative from Michigan, and South Dakota Republican Dusty Johnson, the chair of the Republican Main Street Caucus. | ||
| But we will also do open forum. | ||
| So if you want to participate in open forum, you can talk about what happened yesterday. | ||
| You can talk about other matters of politics. | ||
| 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans and Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Go ahead and make those calls for Open Forum. | ||
| We will take them when Washington Journal continues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This weekend, as the nation prepares to celebrate its semi-quincentennial, American History TV begins a year-long series, America 250, on the American Revolution and its impact on the country. | |
| This weekend at 11 a.m. Eastern, we look back at how the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord led to the larger outbreak of war in Britain's American colonies with Citadel professor David Preston. | ||
| At 4 p.m. Eastern, historian Claire Hoffman, author of Sister Sinner, talks about the rise and fame of evangelist Amy Semple McPherson, along with her mysterious 1926 disappearance that launched a month-long investigation and a nationwide media frenzy. | ||
| Then, at 5 p.m. Eastern, military historian Harry Labor on General Andrew Jackson and the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. | ||
| And at 10.15 p.m. Eastern, a look back on July 20, 1969. | ||
| One all step for man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One diamond leaf for man. | |
| Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to set foot on the moon. | ||
| Watch a pre-launch interview with the two moonwalkers and Michael Collins, who piloted the command module Columbia, followed by a NASA film documenting the Apollo 11 mission from launch to the astronauts' return to Earth. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Book TV continues the celebration of America's 250th anniversary with two author conversations on the American Revolution. | ||
| At 4.15 p.m. Eastern, Shirley Green talks about free blacks William and Benjamin Frank, who joined the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment during the war. | ||
| And at 6.30 p.m. Eastern, Richard Bruckheiser discusses Revolutionary War-era painter John Trumbull's time as an aide to Generals George Washington and Horatio Gates and his work documenting the conflict. | ||
| Then at 7.30 p.m. Eastern, historian Martin Dugard looks back on the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, highlighting U.S. and Japanese intelligence operations before the engagement and how the battle changed naval warfare in his book, Taking Midway. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern, Isabel Allende speaks about identity and resilience in her historical novel set in the 19th century against a backdrop of civil war breaking out in Chile in her book, My Name is Amelia Del Vallier. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's the plan until 9 o'clock. | ||
| We will engage in open forum. | ||
| And if you want to call 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans and Independents 202-748-8002, go ahead and call. | ||
| If you're on the line, just stay put for a few minutes. | ||
| You can keep calling in during the hour up until the House comes in at 9 o'clock. | ||
| We'll be joined by two legislators for short visits. | ||
| Our first one of the morning is Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet, Democrat from Michigan. | ||
| She serves on the Agriculture Committee. | ||
| She also serves on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Today the House will pick up where the Senate left off when it comes to the rescions package. | ||
| What's your planned vote on it and what are your concerns about what happened in the Senate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, anytime we are looking at these funding packages, whether we're looking at the reconciliation bill that passed a couple weeks ago, when we're looking at the rescissions package that's coming to us now, my question is always, who are we prioritizing? | |
| So I'm from the middle of Michigan and we are fill up with working families who are just trying to, you know, kind of make it until the end of the month. | ||
| And what we know, people in my district and generally across the country are really struggling to make ends meet. | ||
| So when we are looking at where we're cutting money and who is benefiting, they should be the people that are benefited. | ||
| And I just don't think that that happens in this rescissions package. | ||
| We can talk about the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. | ||
| I'm a mom of six kids. | ||
| Elmo was almost a family member in our house while my kids were growing up. | ||
| But, you know, those are the kinds of programs that I think are really important, that there can be good programming on radio and TV that families can get in their homes that is free for the most part, that are cutting that kind of stuff, where when we see what we saw in the reconciliation package, the uber wealthy billionaires getting most of the benefit from that, it is problematic from my perspective. | ||
| I intend to vote no on the resistance package. | ||
| You've probably heard Republican arguments even from yesterday saying because we're cutting X amount of dollars in this case with the rescission package, Americans overall will benefit from those cuts. | ||
| What do you think of that argument? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, I think it's a talking point, but I can tell you when I head to the grocery store, it is still incredibly expensive. | |
| When we look at how we are seeing a rise in cost of basic things like clothing, school's about to start. | ||
| You know, that's the time when most families go out and they buy school clothes for the coming year, getting ready for the fall. | ||
| They're going to see a price increase from where we were last year. | ||
| We're starting to see grocery prices more expensive than they were last year. | ||
| The cost of gas, still really expensive. | ||
| So that might be a beautiful talking point, but it's not reality on the ground for most families. | ||
| You talked about the reconciliation bill. | ||
| You recently held a press conference on it. | ||
| Talk about the bill itself, but what have you heard from your constituents back in Michigan over it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So 80% of the people in my district make less than $50,000 a year. | |
| So just think about what take-home pay looks like on $50,000 a year. | ||
| So when they start to hear a trillion dollars out of Medicaid, a reduction in access to food programs, eliminating and pulling money back from school lunches, they get scared. | ||
| These are programs that people in my district, working people, really rely on in order to be able to live their life in any kind of way. | ||
| So the cuts in that package were incredibly dramatic for average folk. | ||
| And that's what we're talking about. | ||
| What does it look like when we start to, it's not just the losses of the people who are covered by Medicaid, but also the help for folks that are buying health insurance out on the exchange. | ||
| That cost, those premiums are going to start to rise as early as next year. | ||
| So we're talking about that and making sure that they have as much information as possible and also driving home that this, the reconciliation package, the rescissions package, these are not priorities that benefit working people. | ||
| These are priorities that benefit the billionaires that surround the president in the White House. | ||
| I suppose going forward, then what's the Democratic strategy going forward in light of the bill passing since it's already a pass tense kind of thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well you saw us during the process, both processes, you know, that many amendments going up, doing what we could to be able to try to make it a little bit better. | |
| Republicans entirely rejected every single Democratic amendment. | ||
| So now we're telling the story, making sure people across the country in small town America know exactly what happened in that bill. | ||
| And then honestly, the ultimate strategy is that we take control of the House and get our gavels back. | ||
| You once in your background, you served as the executive director of the Michigan Head Start Chief of Staff too. | ||
| From that perspective and what you saw not only in the passage of the bill, but we saw the Department of Education also going to probably be seeing renewed cuts because of the Supreme Court. | ||
| How does that affect programs like Head Start and other things on the ground level? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So let's just talk about where we are, right? | |
| So right now, we have some of the lowest reading scores in our nation's history. | ||
| We are graduating kids from our K-12 system who can't do basic math. | ||
| And we're also trying to think about how we recover from the pandemic, which our kids were enormously affected. | ||
| So this is a moment where we need to double down in education, double down in early education. | ||
| And what we're seeing from this administration is that we're cutting all over the place. | ||
| And, you know, I got to be honest with you, that's just bananas from my perspective. | ||
| We actually need to get in there and help our teachers, give them supports, wrap around our kids to make sure that they can do math and reading and then eventually things like algebra and study literature. | ||
| All of those things are important. | ||
| And in particular, for our kids who receive special education services, all of that's in jeopardy now. | ||
| And why we, I honestly can't wrap my head around why this would be a priority when we are in such a state as a country that our kids really, really need us. | ||
| To bounce more on that, tell us a little about your freshman representative to Congress. | ||
| What's your background and what drove you to run for Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm fairly new to this elected office business. | |
| And I got to tell you, it's been a doozy of a year. | ||
| But I actually spent my career working on behalf of kids and families, started in Head Start, served, as you said, as the chief of staff of the Michigan Department of Education. | ||
| I worked at a children's foundation and several nonprofits, really focused on how do we make sure that regardless of where you live, where you came from, in America, you got a shot at the middle class. | ||
| And there are a lot of things that we can do. | ||
| I believe that early education and education play a really big part of that, but so do tax cuts for working families that benefit the folks like the people who live in my district. | ||
| Those things make enormous differences. | ||
| So I ultimately ended up getting into throwing my hat in the ring for Congress because I just really saw the policies and the decisions that were being made here were not benefiting the people that my neighbors, the people that were surrounding me. | ||
| And our outcomes, especially for kids, are getting worse in this country. | ||
| So, you know, I am here to work on that, to make sure, you know, like I said, working families need a fair shot. | ||
| They don't have one right now. | ||
| You also serve in a district where the President Trump won the district in the last election. | ||
| What's the secret to your success? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We really have to talk about how hard it is for families, for working people. | |
| And then we have to actually work on that. | ||
| You know, President Trump won my district by two points. | ||
| I won my district by seven points. | ||
| And it was by building a coalition of people and talking about the economic reality of what is happening in their lives, putting forward solutions. | ||
| Let's get child care more affordable. | ||
| Let's see what we can do in housing so that people can actually buy houses and be able to build wealth in that way. | ||
| Making sure we have safe community schools that people can walk to in their neighborhoods. | ||
| These are very core things that we not only talked about, but I have a track record of actually getting things done in that area. | ||
| Representative Kristen McDonald Rivets, Democrat from Michigan. | ||
| She serves on the Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Again, we'll be joined by another legislator in about a half hour from now, but this is open forum if you want to participate. | ||
| Kelly is in Texas, Republican line. | ||
| First of all, thank you for waiting. | ||
| Kelly, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yeah, I just wanted to say, yes, I am MAGA Republican, so please don't shoot your arrows at me. | ||
| But I believe that we need to continue to fund NPR and PBS. | ||
| I don't have cable. | ||
| I just have the regular over-the-air. | ||
| And I love NPR. | ||
| I love PBS because I can get the real news. | ||
| And I love these programs. | ||
| And thank God for them and bless you for being there. | ||
| I love to watch you. | ||
| And yeah, because I don't, you know, I'm a Gen Xer, okay? | ||
| And I'm not so much for, I know my niece and nephew are in their early to mid-20s, and they do all the internet things and stuff. | ||
| And I don't really believe that much in them. | ||
| But NPR and PBS, that I believe in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because I've been watching that for years and years since I was a teenager with, you know, back in the 80s and stuff. | ||
| And I love the programs. | ||
| And I don't want to see that end. | ||
| Okay, Kelly there in Texas. | ||
| Shirley joins us from Connecticut, Democrats line. | ||
| Hello, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, America. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I thank you for taking my call, but I wanted to just say that, you know, this is a country that's supposed to be under God We Trust. | ||
| And it was supposed to be where we just try to have moral values. | ||
| And it disturbs me that they have to burn food that was designated for people who are hungry and dying from hunger. | ||
| And it disturbs me that they want to get rid of different outlets for us to obtain news like NPR and the broadcasting network, where children programming was key to help our children learn things. | ||
| And I am not happy on how Republicans are now trying to be so self-centered and selfish. | ||
| And it's all about money, money that we generously give to pay the salaries of our representatives and to do things for the people, the regular people or the little people in this country. | ||
| And the programs that they're cutting is only for the smaller people who need these programs instead of the programs that we give for contractors like Elon Musk getting $200 million to blow up, you know, ships that go up into space. | ||
| And how is that benefiting American people? | ||
| How is that making us better? | ||
| Shirley, let me stop you there only because your signal's breaking up a bit. | ||
| New York is next, Republican line. | ||
| Kathy, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, I'm calling back a second time because the phone wasn't acting right. | |
| Now, look, I'm just going to try to shrink wrap this for you. | ||
| I loved PBS. | ||
| I went to Bennington College of Vermont, Vermont, super rich Ivy League College for Art and Poetry. | ||
| And I loved all the programs on PBS. | ||
| I have 25 grown fighting America's wars, and you can't even think about who my brother's children, five brothers with 25 kids, are doing for this country. | ||
| And I wanted to give them a significant gift because I'm dying of cancer. | ||
| And I did a ton of orders with PBS. | ||
| And next thing I knew, I was going into insufficient funds, getting overdraft fees from the bank. | ||
| I go, what the heck's going on here? | ||
| And then I realized PBS was not sending me an itemized bill. | ||
| And I drilled down on it with them, and they got around to saying, oh, Chase Bank agreed that when your bank statement shows up in your mailbox, who knows when that is, that's your receipt for having done a transaction with us. | ||
| I got a hold of Chase. | ||
| I said, did you agree to such a thing? | ||
| That when I do a transaction over the TV set for sustaining donation, that your bank statement, and I don't know when that's showing up in my mailbox, that's going to be my receipt for having done a transaction with PBS. | ||
| And they said, no, we never agreed to that, Kathy. | ||
| So that's the only thing. | ||
| PBS, the public needs to know this. | ||
| You get involved with them. | ||
| I started calling up the bank and saying, give me the breakdown. | ||
| And the numbers that they gave me ended up not matching up with even the bank statement kind of thing. | ||
| The PBS people made them give me an itemized breakdown over the phone. | ||
| And it was a fiasco is all I'm saying. | ||
| It was very extremely, you know, depressing and really sad because I definitely adore their programs. | ||
| I think they're better than the corrupt Ivy League College Bennington in Vermont that I had to stand up to. | ||
| And that's how come I know the art world can get away with bloody murder. | ||
| And as far as I'm concerned, they got away with bloody murder with not having to send me an itemized bill, you say. | ||
| Okay, Kathy Vera, thank you for calling back from our previous segment. | ||
| This is from John, John in Illinois, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, they got people talking about all this grain going to waste and you starving kids. | |
| Well, the farmer grew that grain. | ||
| And over there in Africa, they got people, their leaders chanting and got whole stadiums of people chanting, kill the farmer, pow, pow, kill the farmer. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| That farmer can grow some wheat. | ||
| That makes flour. | ||
| That makes bread. | ||
| That makes tortillas. | ||
| That makes biscuits. | ||
| That farmer can grow some corn. | ||
| Corn feeds people. | ||
| It feeds livestock. | ||
| You can raise cattle with that corn. | ||
| You can raise hogs. | ||
| Man, there's you a steak on your plate, some hamburger. | ||
| There's you some ham, some bacon. | ||
| And they got people starving, and their leaders are over there, kill the farmer, pow, pow, kill the farmer. | ||
| They ought to be helping the farmer, learn from the farmer, go to work for the farmer, learn how to farm for yourself. | ||
| And they try to make us feel bad, which I don't like to see nobody starving. | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| But they're over there killing the farmers. | ||
| That don't make no sense to me. | ||
| John in Illinois, this is David in Indiana, Republican Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I like to talk. | |
| I've got a couple of things I'd like to talk to you about. | ||
| This cloud shading that they're doing, and it's messing our weather up here in Indiana and all down south. | ||
| All this rain we're having, we're having rain just about every day coming in. | ||
| We never had this before. | ||
| And another thing I'd like to talk about is these Democrats and this open border that they opened the border. | ||
| Our government is supposed to be to help the people. | ||
| I don't know how they could consider helping the people, letting 20 million illegals come in here and take all our resources. | ||
| Promise we're already In debt, almost $37 trillion. | ||
| And then they just put us further, further in debt as all these Democrats has done. | ||
| We need to get these illegals under control. | ||
| And the Democrats is still fighting this over. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| David there in Indiana. | ||
| He brings up his previous topic. | ||
| There's a story in the Washington Post under the headline, Republican officials are embracing a niche weather conspiracy saying Florida Attorney General James Udenmeyer sent a letter to all public airports in the state Monday to warn them of a new law banning any injection of chemicals to change the climate or weather. | ||
| Quote, violators of this law are guilty of third-degree felonies and fines as high as $100,000. | ||
| The letter seemed to endorse a persistent conspiracy theory that cloud seeding, quote, could have played a role in causing the floods in Texas that have killed at least 132 people. | ||
| The story adding that the Florida law and the letter from the Attorney General underscoring it is the latest example in a surge of right-wing support for conspiracy theories that have spread across social media in recent years. | ||
| Far-right conspiracy theories saying airplanes are leaving chemtrails in the atmosphere that can change the weather, harm human health, and even control the minds of the population. | ||
| The story from the Washington Post, by the way, concludes saying that none of these conspiracy theories are true, but they are nevertheless taking root in the highest offices of government. | ||
| You can read that for yourself if you wish. | ||
| That's at the Washington Post. | ||
| Let's go to Dave, Dave, Democrats Line, Wisconsin. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, Pedro. | |
| I just want to talk about the rescission package with, and I'll concentrate on the PBS funding. | ||
| I think there's a misunderstanding about that. | ||
| That's not, PBS is not fully funded by the government. | ||
| There's foundations, there's some corporate sponsors. | ||
| They're very, very transparent about where they get their funding from, for one thing. | ||
| And there's such a wide variety of programming on PBS, everything from science to entertainment to local interest stuff. | ||
| And it's basically PBS, most of their programming is in the public interest. | ||
| And yes, they do get a billion, you know, that was passed, that they were going to get a billion dollars. | ||
| Most of that money goes to the rural stations to keep them going. | ||
| They're on a shoestring budget. | ||
| They're without the money. | ||
| Probably a lot of them are just going to close up. | ||
| And those are the kind of things that I think there's a lot of Republicans out there that like to hear some of the stuff. | ||
| And as far as the PBS news hour, it's one hour a day. | ||
| They're about as straight down the middle as I've seen as far as news broadcasts. | ||
| And if there's any left leaning at all, all they're doing is telling the truth. | ||
| And I think a lot of these Republicans that call in there, they're just afraid of the truth. | ||
| They don't like to hear it. | ||
| If it's something they don't believe in, and they hear something, well, I think, you know, probably Donald Trump heard something he didn't like. | ||
| And now he threatens people that vote against this bill that he's going to primary them. | ||
| You know, I guess he can get away with that kind of stuff. | ||
| But anyway, I thought there's just a big misunderstanding of the funding involved. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It's not that. | ||
| That's Dave there in Wisconsin. | ||
| Let's go to David in Connecticut, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hello. | |
| So I want to talk about the same thing, PBS and NPR. | ||
| I find that I listen to NPR occasionally, but I usually have to turn it off. | ||
| Find their coverage very, very biased. | ||
| PBS News Hour, I watch every evening, not as much so. | ||
| I'll get to that in a second. | ||
| But the first point I want to make is the NPR can't have it both ways. | ||
| They want to say that, oh, we only get one or two percent of our money from the federal government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Most of it is privately funded, which, as the last caller said, it no doubt is. | |
| Well, you know what? | ||
| Then don't go crying poverty. | ||
| If it's only one or two percent, you just do an extra fundraising thing and you'll make it up. | ||
| I'm sure that they'll be able to do that. | ||
| It's not a problem. | ||
| As far as, by the way, and then the Democrats like to say that, well, if you cut off NPR, people are going to die in floods. | ||
| They're going to die in hurricanes. | ||
| Who the heck goes to NPR to get weather information? | ||
| If you know anything about AM and FM radio, FM radio has a very short range. | ||
| AM has a much longer range. | ||
| If I'm getting flood information or weather information in my locality up here, I'm going to turn on my local Connecticut radio station, AM station. | ||
| I'm not going to go to NPR. | ||
| So that's a false thing. | ||
| Last thing I want to say is about PBS. | ||
| I watch the news hour every night. | ||
| 10, 15, 20 years ago, they were much more balanced. | ||
| They've become very, very left-wing in the recent past. | ||
| They used to have, if there was an issue, no matter what the issue was, the Mideast, a budgetary thing, they would have two guests on at the same time, and they would talk back and forth, and you would get both points of view. | ||
| Now you put on PBS News Hour, watch it, and you'll see usually they have one guest only on an issue. | ||
| And eight times out of ten, that person is left-wing or liberal. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So they become a lot less. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Gotcha, David. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| George in Maryland, Republican Lion. | ||
| You're next up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes. | ||
| How are you doing today? | ||
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead, please. | |
| Okay, I've been listening to all this stuff. | ||
| I was a candidate for Congress several times, and I'm a Republican. | ||
| And the thing is, is this a nation was formed one nation under God. | ||
| We, when these elected officials, now they're not elected, they're bought by corporation. | ||
| Corporation elects 99% of our candidates today. | ||
| They're all funded by the Bar Association. | ||
| Okay, one way or another, because the corporations can only act through their attorneys. | ||
| Now, when you're elected, you're supposed to take your affiliation, either Republican or Democrat, and leave it outside of the halls. | ||
| When you go in to vote, you're supposed to leave your affiliation outside. | ||
| You are supposed to represent all citizens, and you're supposed to be fair and honest, and you should not be able to go in because you have a president who is threatening, intimidating not only every Republican. | ||
| If you don't vote my way, I'm going to get you put out of office in the next election. | ||
| This is an embarrassment to the world, what's going on right now. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm tired of it. | ||
| I think people should stand up and demand that all corporations cease funding campaigns. | ||
| Okay, George and Marilyn there. | ||
| Again, this is Open Forum: 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans and Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can comment on matters of politics. | ||
| And one of the things emerging yesterday was President Trump talking several times during the course of the day about the future of the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. | ||
| This is the story that headlines the Wall Street Journal this morning under the headline, Trump Floats Ousting Powell from Fed, reading in part this: President Trump consulted with Republican lawmakers this week about the possibility of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, but he said Wednesday it remained, quote, highly unlikely that he would move to dismiss the head of the central bank. | ||
| Going on to say, quote, I talked to him about the concept of firing, and the president said Wednesday, referring to a closed-door meeting with GOP lawmakers at the White House the previous day. | ||
| I said, quote, what do you think? | ||
| Almost all of them said, and going on to say in the story, I should, but I'm more conservative than they are. | ||
| Here's the president further elaborating on his thoughts on Jay Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| He's always been too late, hence his nickname too late. | ||
| He should have cut interest rates a long time ago. | ||
| Europe has cut him 10 times in the short period of time, and we cut him none. | ||
| The only time he cut him was just before the election to try and help Kamala or Biden, whoever the hell it was, because nobody really knew. | ||
| Obviously, that didn't work, but he tried to cut him for the Democrats, Kamala. | ||
| And how did that work out? | ||
| You'll tell me. | ||
| It didn't work out too well, did it? | ||
| But I think he does a terrible job. | ||
| He's costing us a lot of money. | ||
| And we fight through it. | ||
| It's almost the country's become so successful that it doesn't have a big impact. | ||
| But it does hurt people wanting to get a mortgage. | ||
| People want to buy a house. | ||
| He's a terrible, he's a terrible Fed chair. | ||
| I was surprised he was appointed. | ||
| I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him. | ||
| But they did. | ||
| So, no, we're not planning on doing anything. | ||
| We're very concerned. | ||
| He's doing a little renovation for $2.5 billion of the Fed, building a renovation, and they have a close to $900 million cost overrun. | ||
| And it's a shame. | ||
| But the biggest cost overrun is the cost overrun for interest rates because we should be paying three points lower, and we would save a trillion dollars a year in interest if that were the case. | ||
| And all it is is the stroke of a pen. | ||
| And that goes for his board, too, because his board is not doing the job because they should try and rein this guy in. | ||
| So he's doing a lousy job, but no, I'm not talking about that. | ||
| Fortunately, we get to make a change in the next, what, eight months or so? | ||
| And we'll pick somebody that's good, and we'll pick somebody. | ||
| I just want a fair job. | ||
| This is Carl in Michigan, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal, I'd like to bring your attention to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the IMLS. | |
| And I am most concerned with the library sharing program in our great state of Michigan. | ||
| It has come to my attention that the program is facing elimination in the negotiations over the 2026 appropriations bill in the House. | ||
| On March 14, 2025, POTUS signed an executive order instructing that the budget and staffing of the IMLS be reduced to the minimum required by law. | ||
| I'm hoping that my Michigan delegation, of whom I wrote letters to every single one of them, will take time to inform yourselves and your colleagues about the IMLS and all the positive impact they have in states and communities across the United States. | ||
| I believe Michigan received over $8 million in the 2024 budget out of the $267 million that the IMLS received. | ||
| So write your congressman about this, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. | ||
| Thank you, Washington Journal. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| Carl, that is Carl in Michigan. | ||
| Just to show you what Michigan.gov says, if you're interested in anything that he had brought up, this is the headline from March 20th of this year. | ||
| Michigan library users will be harmed by order to abolish the federal agency. | ||
| There's more there at michigan.gov if you're interested. | ||
| This is Jeannie in Texas, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, Bezo. | ||
| I just want to say, when did Democrats think it's okay to take pictures with a war criminal? | ||
| I just got a picture in my email with Corey Booker's name was in there, but I didn't see his pictures. | ||
| I don't know if his face got cut off, but Chuck Schumer, it just goes on and on and on, taking pictures with Ninyahoo. | ||
| And I want the world to know that we Americans are being censored right now with Israeli propaganda. | ||
| Have been for decades. | ||
| I just found out really recently what really has been going on in Palestine, Israel for all this time since 1948. | ||
| I had no real idea. | ||
| I'm 61. | ||
| I'm ashamed of myself that I didn't understand all of this. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| I don't care if you're Christian, Democrat, conservative. | ||
| These people are being killed. | ||
| And I don't want to hear October 7th. | ||
| Let me tell you, it was horrific. | ||
| That does not give Nanyahu the power to wipe out all these people. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We're on the wrong side of war. | ||
| And I'm just fed up right now with conservatives and people who don't. | ||
| You bet everyone needs to get educated. | ||
| Go on YouTube, look at videos. | ||
| There are Zionist Jews that have made videos now. | ||
| They have renounced that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know when people are going to wake up. | |
| Genie in Texas. | ||
| Axios reporting this morning, by the way, that the ambassador, Mike Huckabee, to Israel made an appearance at Benjamin Yetian Yahoo's corruption trial, saying that his appearance at the court hearing is a significantly unusual and unprecedented move by a U.S. ambassador to Israel. | ||
| The move was a way for Huckabee and the Trump administration to express support for Israel's prime minister and to signal what seems to be distrust in the nation's Israel's judicial system. | ||
| There's more there. | ||
| If you want to read that, that's at the Axios website about the Israeli ambassador from the United States attending that hearing. | ||
| Let's hear from Michael. | ||
| Michael in Washington, D.C., Republican line, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm just fed up with Trump telling people this and telling people that. | |
| We just got to just deal with these three years and get him out of there and move on because this guy wants everything his way and want people to just do and suffer. | ||
| And it's just too much. | ||
| What do you tell your fellow Republicans about support for Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| What do you tell your fellow Republicans about support for Donald Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That they just need to just keep on moving on because this guy is just terrible, man. | |
| He is everything his way. | ||
| He is just terrible. | ||
| Thank you for letting me comment. | ||
| Aaron in New York, Democrats line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| This is so sad. | ||
| I think when people have no defense for the indefensible, you come up with all kinds of scenarios how the Democrat, the this, the that. | ||
| I vote for policy that makes sense for the masses of people. | ||
| I've been watching C-SPAN now since the 70s with Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, all that stuff. | ||
| Did my time serve everything that I'm supposed to pay my taxes? | ||
| Because I know in my head my taxes is going to fix the road, gonna make my beautiful park. | ||
| When I go around this country, I travel, bring the kids. | ||
| I can enjoy my park, and I know that's where my tax is going. | ||
| When you start listening to the bad part of what these people are to make money, these grifters, I don't know if you guys realize that this president and his family and his cronies has made more money being in the White House than he did when he owned casino in Atlantic City. | ||
| So essentially, the White House is now officially a casino. | ||
| Okay, officially. | ||
| And if any of those people want to defend all of this, And then you're going to come up with the old thing about, oh, the Democrat has nothing to do with it. | ||
| You voted for this. | ||
| Stop blaming other people for your problem. | ||
| You voted for this man, and now your life is being ruined. | ||
| And now you're upset, but you still defended it. | ||
| In the meantime, you're dying slowly. | ||
| And keep in mind, the blue states are the donor states. | ||
| So anything that happened in the donor state is going to affect you and vice versa. | ||
| But you don't want to see these things. | ||
| You want to walk around with your head so far up that you want to defend indefensibly. | ||
| There's no water. | ||
| Water is being effective. | ||
| Healthcare is being affected. | ||
| The roads are being affected. | ||
| The parks are being affected. | ||
| Your education. | ||
| Where are we going, people? | ||
| Where are we going? | ||
| Aaron in New York, the Washington Times, this is their headline about hearing from the House Oversight Committee featuring Anthony Bernow, who was an aide to President Biden. | ||
| And the first lady refused to answer questions Wednesday from House lawmakers investigating the alleged cover-up of Mr. Biden's mental decline, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. | ||
| The story going on to say he was subpoenaed to appear as part of the House investigation into President Biden, aides to President Biden, who allegedly covered up his mental decline and may have acted on behalf using the presidential auto pen. | ||
| It was Mr. Comer himself who made comments after this hearing talking about their investigation. | ||
| Here's a portion of his comments. | ||
| Well, we want to understand who was authorizing the use of the AutoPen. | ||
| We want to understand why it was used so many times. | ||
| Why was it used when Joe Biden was in the White House? | ||
| Did Joe Biden know who was using the AutoPen? | ||
| I mean, we saw in the New York Times article that Joe Biden admitted he didn't know all the people that were pardoned. | ||
| He didn't go through all of that. | ||
| Well, that's not the way it works. | ||
| That's not the way presidential pardons work. | ||
| So more evidence emerges on a daily basis with respect to the illegal use or the unauthorized use of the AutoPen. | ||
| We think there's legal consequences to many of these pardons and executive orders that were used by the AutoPen. | ||
| It's disappointing Dr. O'Connor pled the fifth. | ||
| Remember, the first question we asked Dr. O'Connor, were you ever told to lie about President Joe Biden's health? | ||
| And he pled the Fifth Amendment. | ||
| So this isn't going very well for the Biden administration, but Bernal is going to have his due process. | ||
| He's going to have an opportunity today to tell the truth and set the record straight, and we'll go from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Super, could we see, are you not ruling out criminal referrals coming out of the committee? | |
| I think it's very possible. | ||
| We'll see if criminal activity has taken place. | ||
| But look, the tell-all books, the interviews, the depositions, the transcribed interviews, everything that we're gathering thus far, it's not very reassuring for the Constitution or for the rule of law with respect to what was taking place in the White House. | ||
| So hope we may learn more today, but we'll be transparent and let you know. | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Depending on what you learned today, would you consider potentially calling Jill Biden into the meeting? | |
| Just like we did in the influence peddling investigation, we followed the money. | ||
| We're going to follow the trail. | ||
| So we've identified the people that we believe were the ones using the Autopen. | ||
| Now we're starting to bring people that we believe may have authorized the staffers to use the autopin. | ||
| So we're just trying to trace this back to figure out if Joe Biden had any idea whether or not people were signing his name on legal documents like pardons and executive orders. | ||
| Apologies, audience. | ||
| Mr. Comer's comments were before the hearing yesterday, but you can still read that story in the Washington Times. | ||
| Again, this is open forum until 9 o'clock when the House is set to come in. | ||
| 202748-8,000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans and Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| We'll keep taking your calls until 9 o'clock. | ||
| As we told you when we started this, two legislators would come by for short visits with us. | ||
| Before that time, joining us now, Representative Dusty Johnson, Republican of South Dakota. | ||
| He's a member of the Agriculture Committee, also the member of the chair of the Republican Main Street Caucus. | ||
| Representative Johnson, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Mr. Johnson, this was supposed to be what was known as crypto week in the House. | ||
| There was some stalling as far as passage of bills related to that. | ||
| Can you tell our audience what is happening? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there were three different digital asset bills. | |
| Some members of the House wanted to join them all together and send them over to the Senate to kind of jam the Senate, make the Senate take our consolidated work product. | ||
| The rule that really provided the path forward didn't call the play that way. | ||
| Say we were going to vote on each of them separately. | ||
| That's ultimately what's going to happen. | ||
| There are some folks who have very legitimate concerns about what is called a central bank digital currency. | ||
| That's where a federal government like our own would create a digital asset, a coin, something like Bitcoin, but it would be a government asset. | ||
| And people have some very legitimate concerns about what would that mean for the privacy of Americans. | ||
| Could a government just turn off your ability to use that money to buy something maybe the government didn't want you to buy? | ||
| We have seen that kind of authoritarian behavior in China and raises concerns about what our federal government could do. | ||
| And so we've come to an agreement on the Republican side that a top priority is going to be the prohibition of the formation of that central bank digital currency. | ||
| We're going to pursue it. | ||
| We're going to pass that as a standalone bill today. | ||
| We're also going to pursue some other ways to try to get that passed into law. | ||
| Explain what cryptocurrency is and the House's interest in it this week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, people have a tendency to think about cryptocurrency or digital assets as a payment mechanism, and that's really not it. | |
| I mean, I guess somebody someday will be able to buy gum with Bitcoin, but that's not really what empowers or why we're so excited about this. | ||
| The reality is that Web3, the next wave of innovation, is really going to be built on blockchains. | ||
| These are publicly available ledgers where you can see where these different tokens are going and by whom. | ||
| Now, there's lots of anonymous information in there. | ||
| It's not like everybody's personal private information is out there for everybody's review, but it makes it frictionless. | ||
| These tokens can just do all kinds of things behind the scenes in a way that is far less cumbersome than today's financial or logistic system. | ||
| And so it's the blockchain innovation we want. | ||
| The tokens really unlock the use of that blockchain. | ||
| And every single industry over time is going to be revolutionized by these blockchains in the same way that every industry was revolutionized by the web. | ||
| We want that innovation. | ||
| We want that investment to happen here. | ||
| And because our country has been so far behind the eight ball on having common sense regulatory regimes, a lot of that innovation has moved overseas. | ||
| And the lead up to this, Representative, it was the Congressional Progressive Caucus talking about that Clarity Act that you mentioned. | ||
| He said this, that the Clarity Act proposes broader crypto market structure overhauls, but similarly fails to address Mr. Trump's financial conflicts of interest or impose adequate consumer protections. | ||
| It enables corruption through pay-for-play schemes involving Mr. Trump's personal cryptocurrency and meme coin while undermining regulatory enforcement and shielding bad actors. | ||
| It goes from there. | ||
| But what do you think about the argument made there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's very weak, in part because this bill does not enable any of that. | |
| I mean, they can say that. | ||
| That does not make it reality. | ||
| This bill is silent on things like meme coins. | ||
| The Clarity Act provides a regulatory regime for digital commodities. | ||
| Okay, and that has legal meaning in the law. | ||
| We have a Commodities Future Trading Commission. | ||
| We have a Securities and Exchange Commission. | ||
| They have regulatory oversight over a particular type of asset. | ||
| Our bill provides that kind of oversight, which would normally be over traditional commodities and traditional securities, and makes sure that we have a regime that works for digital commodities. | ||
| And that's not what a meme coin is. | ||
| If somebody's committing fraud, there are existing laws that would be able to hold them accountable for that. | ||
| The reality is that everyone acknowledges that there are spot market gaps that today, fraudsters like the folks at FTX, our current lack of regulatory clarity is making it easier for them to defraud consumers. | ||
| When clarity passes, consumers will be much, much, much better off. | ||
| You mentioned it, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the president does have a meme coin. | ||
| I believe he has a stable coin. | ||
| Does that complicate the matter considering this is a legislative effort? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, you've got a certain number of folks, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, that every bill we bring up is about President Trump. | |
| And listen, I don't know all his business dealings with regard to meme coins. | ||
| I think a lot of this activity is being done with some of his associates. | ||
| And the reality is, if they're breaking any laws, then they're going to be held accountable to the, they're going to be accountable to the law, obviously. | ||
| That's how it's supposed to be in our country. | ||
| But let's set that aside for a minute. | ||
| What we know is that, regardless of how you feel about somebody issuing a meme coin, we want to make sure that consumers are protected with regard to digital commodities. | ||
| We want to make sure that the innovation and investment happens here. | ||
| We want to make sure that a central bank digital currency is not created in this country. | ||
| We want to make sure that the stablecoin environment is one where consumers are and investors are protected. | ||
| That's what clarity, that's what genius, that's what the anti-CBDC bill would get done in the next 24 hours right here in the House. | ||
| The Senate is sending over to you their version of what they took on the rescissions package. | ||
| Where are you on it as of today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I voted yes on the rescissions package when it first came through the House. | |
| The Senate has backed off some of those cuts. | ||
| A number of their changes, I think, make sense. | ||
| I want a little more time to analyze them, but I too had some concerns about what some of the corporation for public broadcasting cuts might mean in very rural areas and in reservation areas in my state. | ||
| One of my senators, Senator Mike Rones, did a good job raising that issue and getting some adjustments made. | ||
| I expect the rescissions package will pass through the House on the same kind of vote totals that it did the first time. | ||
| Some of the ones, because of where you live in North Dakota, some of the cautions that were made is because PBS provides emergency services and in an emergency, the ability to communicate information related to that, are those part of your concerns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, none of the emergency response dollars were cut as a part of this. | |
| And so clearly, there is a really, really important role in making sure in rural areas that you've got that emergency response. | ||
| That was untouched by this. | ||
| And so that's not one of my primary concerns. | ||
| Now, there can be some ancillary areas to the concerns to that where there can be really important public information provided that wouldn't be part of a national emergency broadcast system. | ||
| And so, I understand why myself, Senator Rounds, and others wanted to make sure that those extra rural concerns were taken care of. | ||
| On the tech front, you are championing something called e-permit. | ||
| Can you explain what that is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it takes way too long to build big projects in this country, and it is unfortunately a uniquely American problem. | |
| The same kind of road project you can get cited in Germany in six months takes you six years in America. | ||
| It is absolutely unfathomable why we have let things get so bad. | ||
| We can cut the review time in half by having a cloud-based digital platform where agencies are able to seamlessly shift all of those papers from one agency of review to another or have both of them doing parallel review. | ||
| Right now, they're dealing with old, cumbersome PDFs, it does not work well. | ||
| And so, let's try to bring some more modern technology to this review process. | ||
| Clearly, the German government still cares about the environment, they still care about habitat for endangered species. | ||
| If they're able to protect, if they're able to do their work in six months, there isn't any reason why the United States shouldn't be able to as well. | ||
| Before we let you go, the Main Street caucus, what is that? | ||
| What's the purpose? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that would be 80 or 85 of the more traditional Republicans, think of them as the Reagan Republicans. | |
| There are the folks who basically want to get things done in this town. | ||
| Some of my colleagues like to yell and scream. | ||
| That's not as much the main street way. | ||
| We are authentic conservatives. | ||
| We want to bend the arc of history toward freedom, but we want to do it in a way that I think makes sure that America is able to build and that America is able to, that this institution is able to get its work done. | ||
| So, back to the rescissions package, real quick, because it's compared to the regular budget and overall it's a small amount. | ||
| Are other rescissions packages coming, or do you think that what was recommended by Doge initially overall will be seen passed in the House and the Senate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We don't yet know how effective this year's appropriations process is going to be. | |
| If it works like it should work, the appropriate cuts that were found by Doge, the kind of things that are broadly supported by America, will be implemented, will be put into that appropriations package. | ||
| In which case, another rescissions package wouldn't be quite as important. | ||
| But we still have a long time between now and September 30th. | ||
| To the extent that we have found dollars that should not be spent between now and September 30th, a rescissions package could make a tremendous amount of sense. | ||
| Representative Dusty Johnson joining us as part of this open forum hour. | ||
| Representative, thanks for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Back to your calls. | ||
| We will go to Thad. | ||
| He's in Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Thank you so much for waiting. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Yes, my name is Thad. | ||
| Basically, I wanted to talk about the media bias. | ||
| You know, I was a registered Democrat my entire life. | ||
| I'm 55 years old. | ||
| And what I noticed is that when I say media bias, I would have both like two TVs together, one showing a left-leaning station, and then one showing the right-leaning station. | ||
| What I notice is that the right-leaning station, whether it's like Fox News, they will show a lot of live coverage. | ||
| And even if you look today, that the president is meeting with world leaders or whatever he's doing, isn't showing live coverage. | ||
| Then you look at the left-leaning station, a lot of times they're not even showing live coverage. | ||
| They're showing their opinion. | ||
| So I think what's hurting the left-leaning media that leans to the left, they're actually hurting the Democratic cause because there's a lot of opinion rather than showing live coverage. | ||
| And, you know, even if they showed live coverage and, you know, just talk about that, you know, they would gain credibility. | ||
| I think that it, you know, it, you know, it's really helping Donald Trump. | ||
| It moved me to be an independent, you know, being a lifelong Democrat because I'm watching something. | ||
| And just to give a quick example, is like the Secretary of Defense, you know, he spent 20 years in the military, but the left-wing media doesn't talk about that. | ||
| They talk about, you know, Fox News personality, but he spent his entire career in the military. | ||
| Then when he left, you know, he still was, you know, spent his life talking about the military. | ||
| So what I'm saying to gain credibility, if they would show more live coverage. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Mr. Fad, I'll leave you there only because you made that point already. | ||
| Let's go to Dan. | ||
| Dan in Florida, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I just wanted to agree a little bit with the last caller. | ||
| I just wanted to let him know that the reason that the left always tried to control the media is because that's how communism works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They control everything, they control your information. | |
| As far as the rescission packages, NPR, PBS, all that, even you guys, like whenever I want to go laugh, I watch you guys. | ||
| Whenever I want to go laugh, I watch PBS, especially that Christian Amonpour. | ||
| You have to make sure and say her name right because she's so rich and spoiled. | ||
| It's pretty funny watching these things because, you know, you watch this stuff. | ||
| She actually wore a, she went to the Geneva, Switzerland to the One World or New World Order Summit. | ||
| She went there, wore a pin. | ||
| She's actually part of the New World Order or the One World government whole situation. | ||
| They're all for that. | ||
| They're all for one world government. | ||
| They're all for communism. | ||
| That's what they're all for. | ||
| And you can tell by what they say in their news media. | ||
| And as far as you guys, yeah, it's funny watching Ericoni listening to all the Democrats freak out about everything. | ||
| It's pretty comical. | ||
| Dan in Florida, let's hear from Steve. | ||
| He's in Tennessee, Democrats line. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, Pedro. | |
| Boy, there's a lot to talk about this morning, so I'm going to try to hurry up here. | ||
| Number one, I would like a little criticism toward you. | ||
| You use up so much of open forum interviewing people, so I don't know why I particularly do that. | ||
| But anyway, I have never listened to NPR, so I can't comment on them. | ||
| I taught science for 31 years, and a couple of times I gave a homework assignment of watching a particular show on MOVA, which is a science program that had to do with the topic we were doing. | ||
| Anyway, so the next day I'd say, hey, how many of y'all watch Nova? | ||
| Some of the kids raised their hands. | ||
| And once again, I asked one, I said, well, why didn't you watch it? | ||
| And the kid said, my father said, I'm not watching that crap. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, that kind of goes back to the guy from Alabama that called in earlier. | ||
| Also, I would like to address a caller from Mississippi. | ||
| She calls in. | ||
| She's a Republican, and that's fine. | ||
| But she talks about how Trump has been so totally mistreated from the day he walked down the elevator. | ||
| But I kind of go back to the day after Obama was elected, and Mitch McConnell got up there and said, we're going to do everything we can to make this man a failure. | ||
| So, you know, I just, that's an issue. | ||
| Anyway, I will say this and then I'll stop. | ||
| My family, I was born in Mississippi. | ||
| The best thing that ever happened to me was my family moving from Mississippi to Ohio when I was three years old. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Steve there in Tennessee on this open forum. | ||
| Like I said, part of our mission here at C-SPAN is to get input from legislators, which is why when we have the opportunity to talk to them, especially on days, busy days in the House and joining us during these times, we'll take opportunity to do that. | ||
| Hopefully, they'll give us longer segments here where they can take your calls as well. | ||
| Buddy in Pennsylvania, Republican line. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Hey, listen, I supported Trump. | ||
| And all I got to say is to all these people is that you will never find a perfect politician and you will never find a politician to agree in all your views. | ||
| All right? | ||
| You got to come close to policies. | ||
| So Trump came to my policies, like the illegal immigrants. | ||
| And next year is midterm elections. | ||
| I call them midterm adjustments. | ||
| And if the Republicans win, then the Democrats are going to have to figure something out. | ||
| If the Democrats win, then the Republicans are going to have to find out where did they go wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we'll see if this beautiful bill who will win? | |
| The Democrats or the Republicans. | ||
| But if the Democrats lose, they got a big problem. | ||
| They got to figure out where they went wrong. | ||
| And they got to get rid of the. | ||
| Okay, that's Buddy there. | ||
| It's Miriam in Texas Democrats line. | ||
| The House is about to come in in about two minutes. | ||
| Miriam, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, yeah, it really aggravates me and it really infuriates me that Republicans are talking about bias in the news. | |
| They're attacking NPR. | ||
| But you have a lot of Republicans that are poor. | ||
| And I don't know what your audience is. | ||
| I don't know if they're low class, middle class, upper class. | ||
| I don't even know if they watch your program. | ||
| But there's a lot of rural people that are out there. | ||
| And the big, beautiful bill is going to take money away from the poor people and give it to the rich people. | ||
| They're going to take away your education, your local hospitals. | ||
| I don't understand why Republicans want that. | ||
| Like, it really boggles my mind because a lot of people are going to get hurt, including Republicans. | ||
| It's like if you have a damn pie and you're feeding it to America, 10% of it is going to go to the poor people, while 90% of it is going to go to the rich people. | ||
| And NPR, I have cable. | ||
| I don't watch it that much. | ||
| Actually, I do watch it. | ||
| I watch educational programs. | ||
| It's like the Republicans want to make Republicans even more stupid. | ||
| Like they want to keep people stupid and they want them to eat cake. | ||
| Trump wants for the Americans to eat cake. | ||
| That's what he wants. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Like Stephen in Kentucky, Independent Line. | ||
| Again, the House just about to go in. | ||
| So jump on in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I'll be real quick. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I want to bring up something that hasn't been talked about a lot is on a lot of medical forum threads, they're talking about health concerns for Trump. | ||
| If you look at one of his hands, it's constantly bruised, constantly being put makeup on. | ||
| There's a red mark constantly, forms of syphilis. | ||
| Something's going on with the president's hand and a lot of bruising. | ||
| So I want to bring that to people's attention because something is off. | ||
| Hopefully news outlets are out there looking and hopefully Trump is listening as well. | ||
| Something's going on with his health. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Carolyn in Texas, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I want to respond to the male caller about the African chant, Kill the Farmer. | ||
| The song originates from the anti-apartheid struggle. | ||
| So he took that completely out of context. | ||
| It was used as a protest anthem against the Afrikana-dominated government. | ||
| During that time, the farmers were part of the problem. | ||
| In 2022, a South African court ruled that the song did not constitute hate speech, considered it part of a historical political discord and not a literal incitement to violence. | ||
| And that ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in South Africa in 2024, just last year. | ||
| So the caller took that completely out of context. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| That's Carolyn in Tyler, Texas. | ||
| Again, the House was slated to come in at 9 o'clock. |