| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. | |
| The chair lays before the house an enrolled bill. | ||
| The Chair lays before the House an enrolled bill. | ||
| H.R. 2808, an act to amend the Fair Credit Reporting Act to prevent consumer reporting agencies from furnishing consumer reports under certain circumstances and for other purposes. | ||
| The chair lays before the House. | ||
| Pursuant to clause 13 of Rule 1, the House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. on Tuesday, August 19th, 2025. | ||
|
unidentified
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And wrapping up a brief session in the House, no votes will take place until after the end of the summer district work period on Tuesday, September 2nd. | |
| Watch live coverage of the House here on C-SPAN. | ||
| We take you back now to live coverage of the second day of a conference on liberalism and the challenges facing liberal democracies in progress. | ||
| And you can see the result, right? | ||
| Trump is losing Hispanic voters in throes. | ||
| So I think that there's another clear opportunity there with this constant overreach that the administration is insisting on carrying on. | ||
| And the media has to play a role, which is another big if when you bring in examples from abroad. | ||
| But I think the American media, contrary to many people's opinion, I think it's surviving. | ||
| Let's call it surviving, but surviving enough and dealing with the current moment diligently enough. | ||
| I'm starting to worry, and perhaps this is inherent in a panel on political strategies, that we're putting too much weight on how to communicate and not enough weight on what the substance of a policy, of what the government delivers, and of a core message is. | ||
| So you're right that the media has done, I think, a very good job of showing the stories of individual people who've been very negatively affected by some of these indiscriminate roundups and deportations, etc. | ||
| But when I try to understand why it is that Hispanics have changed from being in a democratic column to helping Donald Trump win 2024 to now souring on him, a lot of that seems to me to have to do with policy, right? | ||
| There is a set of views in America among the majority of the population, including the majority of Latinos, which is that immigrants can make a great contribution to the country, that this is a country of immigrants, that we should respect people's rights, that we should appreciate their contributions, and also that the country needs control of its southern border with Mexico. | ||
| And Joe Biden did not do enough to control the border with Mexico, which is one of the reasons why a lot of Latinos and a lot of other voters turned on him. | ||
| And Donald Trump has hugely overshot that message and is indiscriminately deporting a whole bunch of people in ways that also go against the views of the majority. | ||
| So, you know, are we overemphasizing in this panel the importance of how to communicate and which channel and what language, and underestimating the importance of just moving into the space where the majority of the population lies? | ||
| Is that actually the way to win against the populace? | ||
| And is that one of the mistakes that the opposition has made in some of your countries? | ||
| Is that perhaps a mistake that Democrats are making in the United States today? | ||
| When I used to teach, I would ask my students who they think are the three key interest groups, most powerful interest groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. | ||
| And they struggled with it. | ||
| Are they veteran or war veteran organizations, religious groups, conservative groups, and so on? | ||
| But they were actually way quicker to answer that question about the United States. | ||
| And it's mind-boggling that 350 or so million people were essentially centralized down to these several issues of gender, the transgender rights, which coming from a progressive party, I'm absolutely in support of. | ||
| But 350 million people really bought down to several issues, separation of church and state, gun rights, and this. | ||
| And I feel like you fell into political stereotypes here, and there was no conversation with the other side. | ||
| I visited Bosnia's diaspora community in St. Louis. | ||
| I visited the diaspora communities throughout the United States. | ||
| And they told me overwhelming majority of them actually votes for Trump, asking them why, and their overwhelming majority of them are Muslim, such as myself. | ||
| And asking them, despite Muslim ban and everything else, for them it was gas prices because a lot of them are in the truck industry and transportation industry for them. | ||
| That's like, you know, key element of their survival. | ||
| In that sense, I don't think we openly talk to the other side. | ||
| We are constantly thinking about tricking people into voting for us. | ||
| And we are constantly thinking about strategies, how to navigate, with all due respect, I don't think the Epstein case, as important as it is, will lead the United States into this progressive new future. | ||
| I think as exciting it is to use those things, I don't think we need to be corrupt by the process, not only for ethical reasons, but for strategic reasons as well. | ||
| It's simply not sustainable to play that game on a daily basis. | ||
| There needs to be something more substantial at the table for you to believe it in order to sell it. | ||
| I mean, at least that's my issue. | ||
| I simply cannot be selling a product that I don't believe in. | ||
| On the other hand, the Biden administration did try and pass through. | ||
| I'm not going to hear the debate. | ||
| Sorry, I'm selling on that. | ||
| The Biden administration did try and pass through a bipartisan bill on the border on immigration that was the toughest ever. | ||
| They did pass, do a lot of work with unions. | ||
| I think it was the most progressive economically administration ever in the United States that passed huge bills and huge infrastructure spending bills. | ||
| These were real policies. | ||
| This was a real economic vision for how the United States should function. | ||
| And he was still extremely unpopular. | ||
| And his vice president disastrously lost the election. | ||
| You're onto something here, absolutely right. | ||
| But there was no framework for that. | ||
| There were a lot of excellent policies. | ||
| And I think that's the crux of the issue with liberalism. | ||
| Not just selling each and every one of them very cleverly in social media, but it's providing a general framework where you sign onto this. | ||
| As I was saying about USAID, it's an excellent thing. | ||
| But I couldn't explain in simple terms if you woke me up at 4 a.m. and saying, explain what are the interests of, both for the United States and your own country, of these liberal, you know, liberal institutionalist policies, we didn't create a convincing, inspiring, future-oriented, but also in present-time interest-based framework in which all of this fits in. | ||
| And I think Trump is doing that. | ||
| And not just based on social media, but I think this first of all, nobody knows, it's like Will Farrell in the movie. | ||
| Nobody knows what it means, but it's provocative. | ||
| What does it mean, like make America great again? | ||
| At what point did it become bad? | ||
| At what point was it great? | ||
| To what age are we returning? | ||
| Is it 1920s, 1800s? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| But somehow it provides this general sense of we strayed in the wrong direction and I am now moving the ship where it needs to go. | ||
| I don't see that framework in the counter narrative or narrative at all. | ||
| So a basic premise of any panel is that you should underpromise and over deliver. | ||
| I think I said earlier that we're going to leave you with seven tricks to beat populists forever. | ||
| We're going to deliver nine of them and we have, before we open to QA, about four minutes and thirty seconds left to do that. | ||
| So I'm going to ask each panelist in one minute and 30 seconds to give us the free tricks to win the supremacy of liberalism for the 21st century, Alexander. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Trick number one is spend a lot of time understanding and communicating on Instagram and TikTok and making sure you understand how those algorithms work and that you are reaching voters not just through the New York Times and through CNN, but also through those social media. | ||
| Trick number two is to not just defend the institutions and not just defend the policies, but to attack and find those wedge issues that divide your opponent's base and be ruthlessly disciplined in attacking those weak spots. | ||
| And trick number three is build the broad coalition, is make sure that you can, from, if you're in the US or if you're in Poland or in Bosnia, that you can work with people to your left, to your right, and again, unite against a common enemy. | ||
| And then you can have arguments later and again, in Poland, the fact that we had a broad coalition was great for winning the election, it was not so great for governing, but in order to govern, you do need to win the election first. | ||
| So take social media seriously, attack, find those wedge issues, and unite as an opposition. | ||
| Belas 87 seconds, excellent. | ||
| Sabina. | ||
| Remember why you started. | ||
| I think this crisis is an excellent opportunity for all of us to carefully examine why do we do what we do? | ||
| And coming up for ourselves first convincing explanation why what we do matters. | ||
| And then, once you have that product in your head, explained to yourself, then it's endlessly easier to come up with strategies to deliver that product to your voters, to your colleagues, to general population. | ||
| And I believe the same way goes for professors, from activists, for politicians. | ||
| If we simply keep running into this ham, running in this hamster wheel of coming up with new strategies to sell something that we are not sure ourselves what it is, I think we are going to have a hard time achieving the assumption that we have that the sense of urgency we feel is felt by the people outside of this room. | ||
| It is not, and and in that sense I think the first step is explaining it to yourself and then to everybody else. | ||
| That was even shorter amazing Leon very, very quickly sorry Jasha, communicate better. | ||
| I think that when you think of immigration again and Hispanic voters, You hear what Hispanic voters have been saying. | ||
| The Democratic Party has failed to deliver for ages on reform. | ||
| They promised they didn't deliver. | ||
| The truth is that the Republican Party was the one that blocked immigration reform for decades in America. | ||
| The Democratic Party didn't manage to explain it correctly, and that's one example of many. | ||
| And then community-oriented politics. | ||
| If there's one thing Bernie Sanders did wonderfully with Latinos, he built offices through his advisor, Choke Rocha, a brilliant guy, quite the character, in communities. | ||
| If you are not in the community, if the community can't see, you can't feel, if you don't do grassroots, this sounds basic, but sometimes it's not, then the community won't vote for you. | ||
| Those would be my two cents. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm sure of us, no questions at all about any of these topics. | ||
| I see a bunch of hands already. | ||
| Let's start over here. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Hi, Jennifer McCoy, Georgia State University in Atlanta. | ||
| Great panel. | ||
| I want to return to the question of resistance. | ||
| And I think that there's a strategic dilemma here for the Democratic Party that I want to ask for your experiences, especially Alexander, in Poland and other countries that you've campaigned, but anyone else, in that your calls for Leon to use power essentially, the problem is Gavin Newsom has power and he's using it. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| The Democratic Party in Congress really has few levers of power. | ||
| The narrative is absolutely right. | ||
| I agree, Sabina. | ||
| There needs to be a narrative, a clear narrative explanation. | ||
| But when you have an unpopular party like the Democratic Party right now, should it be involved in organizing resistance or should it let, as it has happened so far, the society grassroots organized resistance to be independent of it? | ||
| That's a question about, you know, how did it work in Poland exactly? | ||
| And the other is in the countries that you all are from or are familiar with, Yasha, you too, what about the other sectors of society, corporate leaders, all the other organizations, the media, the university, the law firms that we know, how do you get them involved? | ||
| In Israel, they were involved in the protests, some military law firms, ABA, in Israel. | ||
| Were they in any of the other countries? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, great questions. | ||
| We have a lot more people who want to ask questions, so you each get two and a half sentences in response. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Civil society plays a very important role in getting people excited about politics and motivated to vote. | ||
| But at the end of the day, in a democracy, in order to change governments, you need to vote for a political party. | ||
| So you cannot allow the political parties to atrophy and not do their work. | ||
| And so in Poland, and I've worked in other, I worked in Georgia, the country, not the state. | ||
| And I think one of the failures there of the political parties was they didn't do politics. | ||
| Like politics means you go to your voters, you go to the villages, you talk to people, you convince people to sign up to be a part of your party, to be party activists, you fundraise, you communicate with voters, you do all the things that we talked about earlier. | ||
| The political party needs to win the next election. | ||
| You can't just turn to the nice, friendly people in the think tanks and the civil society groups and the human rights foundations to bear the brunt of the political work. | ||
| The political party at the end of the day has to win. | ||
| And so in order to answer your question, should it, not only it should, it must, it absolutely must participate in this process. | ||
| Last time I checked, you have a two-party essentially system. | ||
| Emergence of a third party, unless you're counting on Elon Musk, is not likely. | ||
| And even if it does emerge, obviously it won't be comparable to the resources the Democratic Party already has. | ||
| So the idea that it's an unpopular party, it is an unpopular party because it's not providing a coherent alternative to Trump administration. | ||
| So this is an enormous opportunity. | ||
| You have midterms coming up, and I think we need to move away from theoretical discussions, and you need to be seriously thinking, as Fukuyama said this morning, go out, vote, invite your neighbors, and work with those candidates. | ||
| Work with what you got. | ||
| We don't have ideal scenarios or context. | ||
| Two sentences. | ||
| I'll try. | ||
| I think that we're in the time of personality politics. | ||
| Personalities matter. | ||
| And I think the Democratic Party has a real deep bench. | ||
| I would argue, I have actually written a piece about this in the Washington Post a few months ago, that the party should find a group of people, a group of spokespeople who could address specific themes of the Trump presidency. | ||
| Pete Budajoj, I don't think, would be a great presidential candidate. | ||
| He's incredibly eloquent in seven languages. | ||
| He learned Norwegian so he could actually read a Norwegian author in the original language. | ||
| I mean, he's incredibly eloquent. | ||
| So is Gavin Newsom. | ||
| And so is, I can think of off the top of my pitch currently like that. | ||
| There are many people like that. | ||
| The only option is to find them and give them a platform to respond, in my opinion, on a daily basis. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Question over there. | ||
| And please keep questions to 20 seconds with one question mark at the end. | ||
| John Mackey, I guess the thing I've been struck with this conference so far is speakers who demonstrate courage. | ||
| So Sabina, when you were talking and you were talking about faking it till you make it, you weren't faking your courage. | ||
| There's a truth to courage. | ||
| And I'm realizing I haven't heard a courageous politician for a while. | ||
| And I guess my question is: are we doing enough to create the space for courageous people to speak courageously? | ||
| Beautiful question. | ||
| Who does take that? | ||
| You? | ||
| Please, obviously. | ||
| Sabina. | ||
| I have a series of lawsuits by oligarchs against me. | ||
| And I won them all. | ||
| I'm now in the appeals. | ||
| He's in the appeals process that will start in September. | ||
| And I was testifying in one of those hearings and for hours and so on. | ||
| And I thought, this is exciting. | ||
| I could do this, actually. | ||
| Bring them on, bring more of them. | ||
| And then I went home and got sick and was throwing up for three days. | ||
| So body registers something that perhaps your mind doesn't register at the time from the adrenaline and all that. | ||
| But I think the question is of authenticity. | ||
| Writers often say it's not that they want to write, but they have to write. | ||
| So I think we need more people like that who just feel like they have to do it. | ||
| And of course there are alternatives, but I'm driven by my sense of anger in observing my environment. | ||
| And there is almost no possibility of not doing it. | ||
| So that's why I'm kind of resistant to this idea of strategies that go beyond our authentic sense of what are we doing? | ||
| Why are we doing it? | ||
| I want to have a meaningful life. | ||
| I want my son being proud of me. | ||
| That's at the very core of it. | ||
| And it's not a just chess game that I want to win at. | ||
| Of course, that's a part of it as well. | ||
| So in that sense, I think we need to evoke that sense of courage in leadership in all spheres, including universities that are under enormous pressure, judges under enormous pressure. | ||
| And I feel a lot of people don't know why they started. | ||
| I'll say on the topic of courage, not just courage in campaigning or one in opposition, but courage, once you've defeated the populist and are back in government, the courage to govern effectively and to prevent the public from coming back. | ||
| So one of the failures, I think, of the Polish government in the last two years has been a lack of decisiveness and courage to prosecute all the people who we for eight years accused of stealing and of corruption and of breaking the Constitution. | ||
| So far, no one yet has gone to jail for those things. | ||
| I think one of the issues you're facing in the U.S. is the lack of courage to prosecute Donald Trump for storming or for inciting violence in the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| So political courage is not just individual politicians standing up to dictatorship, but it is also the courage once you have won by a sliver of a percent the election to defeat the populace, then to really take your values seriously and bring those people to justice. | ||
| Let's go over here. | ||
| Hi, I'm Lenny Glynn. | ||
| I'm . | ||
| I'm retired as well from Boston. | ||
| But I am a veteran of the 1992 Clinton campaign. | ||
| And I remember very well the way we had a war room that did not let one day's news cycle go by without a sharp, quick, strong response and also initiating things that the other side had to respond to, sometimes two in a single day. | ||
| So to Mr. Krause's point about having an effective response system, the Democratic Party is headless and clueless right now, whereas Trump... | ||
| I agree 100%, and I'm looking for a question mark. | ||
| Question. | ||
| Can any of you consider the possibility that Trump and the actual enforcement of immigration, the style of it, might tip over the Hispanic vote in the United States as a whole, the way that Pete Wilson's anti-Hispanic behavior in California turned it into a one-party state. | ||
| The greatest hope for... | ||
| Leon, you were saying that Hispanics are starting to swing back. | ||
| Is that going to be permanent? | ||
| Are Hispanics just a group that's always going to be a swing constituency? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think closer to that, I've never bought this idea of the, like I think I explained, of the Latino vote swinging to the Republican Party. | ||
| I think the Trump phenomenon in this particular election with the Latino voters requires a larger, deeper, more complex explanation, including some cultural factors that I won't get into here. | ||
| But I think that it was never a generational realignment. | ||
| And what we're seeing now is it even surprised me. | ||
| I mean, the speed with which in Poles at least, the Latino vote is moving towards the Democratic Party again. | ||
| And how, for example, if Texas does go on to redistrict its map, gerrymander its state, and how that will affect southern Texas, which is, as you know, mostly Hispanic and traditionally blue, although it voted red in the last election and has trended towards that. | ||
| My bet would be that we are going to see the Latino vote swing back towards the Democrats in the midterms. | ||
| And whether or not that happens in 2030, it depends, frankly, also in personalities, who the candidates will be, who the Democrats will nominate. | ||
| Trump won't be on the ballot. | ||
| And that's a big part of the deal with Latinos. | ||
| That's where the cultural aspect comes in. | ||
| I won't go into that, but I think that he's a figure, a caudillo-like figure that has an appeal. | ||
| The Latino, the strongman, has a cultural appeal for the Latino voter. | ||
| So the answer to your question is yes. | ||
| I think there's going to be hopefully a swing back to the Democratic Party. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, wait for the mic. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Jack Goldstone from George Mason. | ||
| Yasha, your t-shirt says a free society is worth fighting for. | ||
| I could say, yeah, Trump is doing that. | ||
| He's freeing us from moat cancel culture. | ||
| He's freeing our companies from unfair foreign competition. | ||
| He's freeing our communities from a foreign invasion. | ||
| Populists have stolen the narrative on freedom, patriotism, confidence in the future. | ||
| How do liberals get that back? | ||
| I mean, I think we've talked on this panel a lot about communication. | ||
| And Trump does a really good job of communicating all the time, being effective on new media, and finding new topics constantly throwing, flooding the zone, as we mentioned earlier. | ||
| And I think liberals need to do a better job of appropriating those tactics, which work better in this new media environment, to reclaim those words. | ||
| And I don't think this is anything new, but wave the American flag, use the language of freedom and America and the Statue of Liberty or whatever it might be, and talk constantly about your own ideas. | ||
| Find ways to undermine Trump. | ||
| Find ways to attack his patriotism. | ||
| Show where he's taking money from foreign policy. | ||
| I think this Qatar airplane deal, that was a good example of he's not patriotic, this is anti-American. | ||
| I think you can, by being more patriotic than the supposed patriots, than the supposed nationalists, you can win that back. | ||
| And you don't have to sacrifice any liberal values to do that because we are also patriots. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| And I think you should be able to admit that. | ||
| I will just say that I do think one of the fundamental problems of this moment is that some of the accusations against moderate political forces and some of the accusations against liberal as a governing ideology have electoral force because they smell right. | ||
| And I think one of the things that we need to do collectively is to look in the mirror and to see where we haven't been living up to our own values and where we really need to change not just how we talk, but what we stand for, what we deliver for people, what we promise to people in order to stand up for those values. | ||
| And so, you know, we need to reinvent liberalism. | ||
| And this is one of the missions of this conference for the 21st century. | ||
| The values to which we are committed are in a deep crisis. | ||
| And what happened in past periods in which liberalism was in a crisis like that was that we really rethought what that meant in terms of what we fight for, how we argue for those values, and where we fall in short. | ||
| And I think it's great that at this conference we are proudly standing for our values. | ||
| That is something that we absolutely need to do. | ||
| But I think we also have to have a deep process of introspection about why it is that we are not clearly winning in Poland, not clearly winning in Mexico, not clearly winning in the United States, and that requires some self-criticism. | ||
| I think that this panel has been great at balancing introspection and self-criticism, but also I look forward. | ||
| I think the conference as a whole is doing that as well. | ||
| So thank you very much for these wonderful panelists. | ||
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Terrific. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Before everyone leaves, can I just ask you to stay seated for a few housekeeping notes? | ||
| It's good to meet you. | ||
| Okay, so right now we're going to have lunch. | ||
| I'll make a brief announcement about lunch locations in just a second, so stay tuned. | ||
| But after lunch at 2 p.m., we're going to move to our breakout sessions. | ||
| You'll have received an email with the breakouts, and you may have chosen a breakout. | ||
| Today, President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska to discuss an end to Russia's war with Ukraine. | ||
| We'll have a rival coverage and any comments to reporters. | ||
| Also, Kennan Institute Deputy Director Jennifer Wistrand will join us for analysis of the summit. | ||
| Live coverage starts at about 2 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Weekends bring you Book TV featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 8 p.m. Eastern, Stacey Abrams, a one-time Georgia state legislator and gubernatorial candidate, talks with former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about her latest fictionalized thriller, Coded Justice. | ||
| And then at 9:15 p.m. Eastern, Michael Grinbaum gives an inside look at the glamorous Condi Nast publishing empire, the people who crafted its publications, and the standards they set for American culture with his book, Empire of the Elite. | ||
| And at 10:15 p.m. Eastern, Book TV takes you to Freedom Fest, an annual libertarian festival held this year in Palm Springs, California, to hear three authors discuss their works. | ||
| We'll talk with Wrong Speak Publishing founder Adam Coleman, attorney Kent Heckenlively, and computer information technologist Sean Worthington. | ||
| Watch Book TV every weekend on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea, it's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Next, former Gulf Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, Susannah George, in a discussion about relations between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. Ms. George touches on American airstrikes in Iran, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and what it was like reporting on tensions in the Middle East. | ||
| I did want to welcome everyone from the World Affairs Council of Maine audience, but also everyone who's tuning into this program on C-SPAN. | ||
| They are covering this on their C-SPAN One channel. |