| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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After protesting the redistricting plan. | |
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| Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
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| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Wednesday, August 20th. | ||
| On a Truth Social post Monday, President Trump said he would lead a movement to eliminate mail-in voting, calling it, quote, a scam and a hoax. | ||
| The president also called out voting machines and said he would sign an executive order that would bring honesty to the 2026 midterm elections. | ||
| We're getting your thoughts on that this morning. | ||
| Are you in favor or opposed to voting by mail? | ||
| Have you done it in previous elections? | ||
| What do you think of the use of voting machines? | ||
| Here's how to reach us. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can send us a text to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Include your first name in your city-state. | ||
| You can also post your comments on social media, facebook.com slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with a Washington Examiner article with the headline, Trump promises executive order to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines. | ||
| Here's what the article says. | ||
| Trump has long opposed voting by mail or electronically, particularly since his 2020 election loss. | ||
| During his second presidential run, he repeatedly said there was widespread voter fraud. | ||
| On Monday, Trump said the United States is the only country that uses mail-in voting and that all other countries, quote, gave it up because of the massive voter fraud encountered. | ||
| More than two dozen countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea, have postal voting systems, with some dating back to the 1990s. | ||
| Countries with right-wing governments, such as Italy, also offer limited mail-in voting. | ||
| The U.S. has had a form of mail-in voting for centuries. | ||
| Well, here is President Trump from Monday talking about this topic. | ||
| Mail-in ballots are corrupt. | ||
| Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. | ||
| And we, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. | ||
| Going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt. | ||
| And you know that we're the only country of the world, I believe I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses them because of what's happened. | ||
| Massive fraud all over the place. | ||
| The other thing we want change are the machines. | ||
| For all of the money they spend, it's approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots. | ||
| And paper ballots are very sophisticated with the watermark paper and everything else. | ||
| We would get secure elections. | ||
| We'd get much faster results. | ||
| The machines, I mean, they say we're going to have the results in two weeks. | ||
| With paper ballots, you have the results that night. | ||
| Most people, almost, but most people, many countries use paper ballots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the most secure form. | |
| And we're getting your thoughts on that. | ||
| What do you think of mail-in voting on voting machines? | ||
| Amber, Independent in Potomac, Maryland, you're up first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I feel that honesty and integrity should be in all areas, not just mail-in voting. | |
| So a lot of our seniors do not have computers. | ||
| They are not into the internet and using technology to vote. | ||
| So I feel that honesty should be in all areas, not even starting with the voting mail-in. | ||
| It should be in every area of the president's agenda. | ||
| Honesty and integrity. | ||
| Let's start there, not just with mail-in ballots. | ||
| What about the lady who was just transferred from state prison to federal? | ||
| Let's start with that. | ||
| So, Amber, have you used mail-in voting before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Some people don't have computers, especially our elderly people who are wonderful voters. | ||
| You know, they are diligent and mailing in their ballots. | ||
| They don't have computers. | ||
| Some of them can't even afford the internet. | ||
| You know how much it costs to get the internet service nowadays? | ||
| I think the issue is going in person, not necessarily needing the internet at your home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The ones who can't go in person, they're handicapped. | |
| They're elderly. | ||
| Understood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are we going to provide transportation for our elderly? | |
| We don't even help them now. | ||
| We're removing every benefit there is from them right now. | ||
| So now we want them to walk into voting booths and vote. | ||
| And a lot of them can't even walk. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Here's Betty, a Democrat, Atlanta, Georgia. | ||
| Good morning, Betty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think we should have the voting right in because, like, I'm 83 years old and I have trouble in my knee. | ||
| I can't stand up all day long. | ||
| So, Betty, do you think that everybody should be allowed mail-in voting, or should you have a reason? | ||
| So, for instance, if you told them, look, I can't, I've got a medical issue. | ||
| I can't get to the polls in person, then they would allow you to vote by mail. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think everybody should write in and vote, whether they can walk or not. | |
| Okay, and here's Ray in Aurora, Colorado, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you this morning? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't mind having mail-in voting options. | |
| I think a good first step would be to have an affirmative request from the voter to do mail ballot instead of in person. | ||
| That way, it preserves the idea of choice. | ||
| And I can tell you from my experience as a poll worker, I mean, as far as my home county, it looks like things are pretty straight. | ||
| There are people in between the ballot, the Dropbox, and then the results. | ||
| And we all check on each other, and we all want to keep the process fair. | ||
| So I don't see. | ||
| And what about the issue that the president brought up? | ||
| He says that it's not safe. | ||
| It's ripe for fraud. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Is there more of a possibility for fraud in mail-in voting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think there's a possibility for fraud for mail-in voting just as much as there is for having any form of identification. | |
| It's all really, it really boils down to how close of an audio are you going to be able to keep on the process. | ||
| Okay, and here, let's take a look at White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt talking about the president's vow to abolish mail-in voting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The president says that he's starting to movement to eliminate mail-in voting, but states administer elections, not federal authorities. | |
| So can you provide any more details about how the White House plans to eliminate that? | ||
| The White House continues to work on this. | ||
| And when Congress comes back to Washington, I'm sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill and also our friends in state legislatures across the country to ensure that we're protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people. | ||
| And I think Republicans generally and the president generally wants to make it easier for Americans to vote and harder for people to cheat in our elections. | ||
| And it's quite mind-boggling that the Democrat Party could stand in opposition to common sense. | ||
| He wants to ensure election integrity. | ||
| There were great efforts that were made in 2024. | ||
| I won't get ahead of myself for hatch act reasons to get ahead for the next election. | ||
| But I can assure you this is a priority for the president. | ||
| And here is the Associated Press. | ||
| Trump vows to change how elections are run. | ||
| The U.S. Constitution doesn't give him that power. | ||
| It says that the president on Monday vowed more changes to the way elections are conducted in the U.S. | ||
| But based on the Constitution, there is little to nothing he can do on his own. | ||
| Relying on false information and conspiracy theories that he's regularly used to explain away his 2020 election loss, Trump pledged on his social media site that he would do away with both mail-in voting, which remains popular and is used by about one-third of all voters, and voting machines, some form of which are used in almost all of the country's thousands of election jurisdictions. | ||
| These are the same systems that enabled Trump to win the 2024 election and Republicans to gain control of Congress. | ||
| It goes on. | ||
| Trump's post marks an escalation even in his normally overheated election rhetoric. | ||
| He issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year that, among other changes, would have required documented proof of citizenship before registering to vote. | ||
| His Monday post promised another election executive order to, quote, help bring honesty to the 2026 midterm elections. | ||
| Let's talk to Jason, a Republican, Riverdale, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Jason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Yeah, I think anything you can do to bring the integrity back to the voting system is great. | ||
| This idea that we can't make it out to vote, because probably honestly, we're watching Netflix. | ||
| It's just that we're so disconnected from our system as it is. | ||
| And right now, half the country doesn't have confidence that the voting works. | ||
| So anything we can do to bring integrity back to the system, I think, will help. | ||
| Jason, why do you think that is? | ||
| Why do you think there is doubts in the integrity of our voting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's pretty much accepted that George Bush lost when he won by four with Florida and they found out there was a graveyard vote. | |
| So there is history behind it. | ||
| And then, of course, you know, Trump, he's stumping on that, you know, that there is no integrity. | ||
| And whether you know, whether you anybody thinks there's a lot of people who do believe it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's take a look at how many the different voting methods that were used in 2024. | ||
| We'll put it on the screen. | ||
| It says 35.2% voted in person before Election Day. | ||
| So this is in person, but it's before Election Day. | ||
| That's 35%. | ||
| 37.4 voted in person on Election Day. | ||
| And 30.3% voted by mail. | ||
| So almost a third. | ||
| This is lower than it was in 2020. | ||
| So it was 43% during COVID in the 2020 election. | ||
| 43% voted by mail. | ||
| But it is still higher in 2024 than it was before COVID. | ||
| And here's Beth in Kirkland, Washington, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Beth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi there. | |
| I'm 65 years old. | ||
| Washington. | ||
| I'm old enough to have voted both in person, you know, at the nice little church with the ladies handing out cookies, but also have enjoyed mail-in ballots for, I can't remember when they came into fact. | ||
| But the thing I find with the mail-in ballots is that it gives us an opportunity. | ||
| We receive the initiatives and the people that are running in the little program. | ||
| And then our ballots come about a week later. | ||
| But it gives us the opportunities you have, get together with friends, have robust discussions about the different candidates and the different initiatives, and gives us time to really think through what we're voting on. | ||
| And with taking that away, I feel like people will be voting just like, you know, okay, I got a vote. | ||
| And they don't have time to think it through, discuss and decide. | ||
| And I really, it breaks my heart if they take that away because it's kind of every election season. | ||
| My friends and I, we get excited. | ||
| Let's go out and have a beer and talk about what's happening and how are you going to vote. | ||
| When you say take that away, are you saying take away in-person voting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Taking away the mail-in voting. | |
| Oh, the mail-in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you guys get together with your ballots or it's just a like tell me why that that would be kind of a social thing for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's like sometimes life is busy, so you don't have time to pay attention to each candidate or each initiative. | |
| And then when the, I don't remember what you call the little catalog thing comes in the mail, the program, whatever, then, you know, especially like during COVID, we did it all over the phone. | ||
| It's like, okay, what do you think of this one? | ||
| And we'd have these little debates and discussions about the things. | ||
| And I felt like my vote was better informed because I discussed with my friends who also live in my community, you know, like what's their opinion. | ||
| And sometimes they could change each other's opinions or confirm that, yeah, yeah, that was what I was thinking, right? | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It just kind of is more of a community thing. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Independent line, Buena Vista, Colorado. | ||
| Ted, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know, I'm 73 years old, and I've been voting pretty much all my life. | ||
| And when I register to vote, I have to show a driver's license, social security card, and an address. | ||
| Mail-in voting is the most safest way of voting. | ||
| And, you know, Mr. Trump always contradicts himself because you leave a, he said a paper trail. | ||
| Well, mail-in voting is the perfect paper trail. | ||
| And he tried to sabotage mail-in voters during his first administration by taking those little blue mailboxes away from communities so they couldn't have a place so people would have to drive somewhere for a mail drop box. | ||
| And then he took away those state-of-the-art sorting machines at the post office. | ||
| You know, if everybody in federal government is ethical and follow the laws that are on the books, then mail-in voting is one of the safest. | ||
| And why do we have someone from Russia coming to Alaska and telling him how we should vote? | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, this man is an agent of Russia. | ||
| And this is Axios. | ||
| Trump raises end to mail-in ballots after claiming Putin questioned their security. | ||
| It says that President Trump pledged to end mail-in voting. | ||
| He says that while he shifted his tune before the 2024 election to promote absentee voting, Trump has long railed against mail-in voting. | ||
| And he's back to singing that song in harmony with him. | ||
| Trump recently claimed in a Fox News that it was Russian President Vladimir Putin that brought that up. | ||
| Let's take a look at a portion of that interview on Fox News where he's talking to Sean Hannity about that. | ||
| Vladimir Putin said something. | ||
| One of the most interesting things. | ||
| He said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. | ||
| He said mail-in voting every election. | ||
| He said no country has mail-in voting. | ||
| It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections. | ||
| And he said that to me. | ||
| It was very interesting because we talked about 2020. | ||
| He said, you won that election by so much. | ||
| And that's how he got it. | ||
| He said, and if you would have won, we wouldn't have had a war. | ||
| You'd have all these millions of people alive now instead of dead. | ||
| And he said, and you lost it because of mail-in voting. | ||
| It was a rigged election. | ||
| But mail-in voting, Sean, the politicians, I think I'm going to make it a big, I know the answer is that Jimmy Carter, years ago, along with Scoop Jackson and some others, they had a committee, respected people, good committee, Jimmy Carter, good guy. | ||
| You know, he's a good man. | ||
| And the conclusion was you can't have mail-in voting. | ||
| We have mail-in voting. | ||
| It's so dishonest. | ||
| They send stuff. | ||
| Some people get seven ballots. | ||
| Look at California with that horrible governor they have. | ||
| He's one of the worst governors in history. | ||
| He's incompetent. | ||
| He doesn't know what he's doing. | ||
| They send out like 38 million ballots. | ||
| Some people get five, six, seven. | ||
| But Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can't have an honest election with mail-in voting. | ||
| And he said, there's not a country in the world that uses it now. | ||
| Here's Will in South Carolina, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| I'm a white new resident of South Carolina, but when I changed my address, self-care, I'm from Maryland, the go-figure, get a nice Democratic state. | ||
| When I changed my address, my driver's license, everything, I still was receiving mail-in ballots from Maryland. | ||
| So the integrity of it is lost. | ||
| I believe mail-in ballots should probably only be for military. | ||
| I think that's why they designed it and put it forth. | ||
| It was for military purposes being overseas and they could still cast their ballots. | ||
| So I do. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It should be in person with photo ID. | ||
| If you get pulled over, you need an ID pretty much to verify who you are and almost everything that you do. | ||
| So Will, going back to, you said that you moved to South Carolina, you changed your address, so your ballots for a Maryland election were being sent to your South Carolina address. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| After I had already changed my address, had a Maryland driver's license ever since. | ||
| And did you register to vote in South Carolina? | ||
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| And my friends who I went down there with and stayed with, they were all Maryland residents from Southern Maryland. | ||
| They got the same thing in the mail, and they had been there a year before I got there. | ||
| So they were still sending it out to us. | ||
| And you did change your voter registration to South Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| Yes, ma'am. | ||
| So what did you end up doing, Will? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you just threw it in the trash then wrote, you know what I mean? | |
| He laughed about it. | ||
| But now you're voting in person in South Carolina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yes, ma'am. | |
| I've always voted in person. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, I believe I received two. | ||
| I received two ballots for Maryland in the mail in my South Carolina residence. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go to Kevin Fort Wayne, Indiana, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Kevin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| You know, I find it fascinating to hear the president and, for that matter, any number of callers referencing this process that Trump is proposing for the purpose of establishing integrity in our election. | ||
| That's laughable and contemptible on his part. | ||
| He's a hypocrite, for one. | ||
| The man has himself, on a number of occasions in the past, voted by way of mail balloting. | ||
| So for him to condemn the process is yet another example of hypocrisy on his part. | ||
| And here's Peter, West Palm Beach, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm 94 years old, and my wife is 87. | ||
| And we both vote by mail. | ||
| But the problem is with people our age, it's so convenient by mail. | ||
| I've been registered voter for all my life, and I've been voting many times by mail. | ||
| He won the election in 1999, the first time he ran, and there was vote in mailing. | ||
| There was no discrepancy about cheating. | ||
| I says, this is very safe. | ||
| If you get caught doing something wrong, you'll be punished for it. | ||
| Is it worth doing that to go to jail to vote twice or try to sneak a vote? | ||
| Naturally, 99.9% of people will not do it. | ||
| This is a perfect example of Trump creating a problem that's not there. | ||
| Now, if he does lose or he does lose the Congress next year, I definitely would start hear him screaming, it was stolen again. | ||
| It was stolen again. | ||
| But if he wins, oh, it was a very safe election. | ||
| As long as it wins, it's a safe election. | ||
| If he loses, it's a stolen election. | ||
| That man has been fooling people all his life. | ||
| I know his father. | ||
| I grew up knowing his father. | ||
| And I know his whole family because they all against this man. | ||
| His own family resents him. | ||
| So people do not believe what he's saying. | ||
| We could vote by mail at my age. | ||
| It was convenient. | ||
| And then people that lives in areas like farms and 30, 40 miles away from voting, why would you take that advantage away from them poor people so he could win? | ||
| Thank you, America. | ||
| Please wake up and realize this man is a fake. | ||
| Here's Politico that says the GOP spent millions supporting mail ballots. | ||
| Now Trump's attacking them again. | ||
| It says Donald Trump's renewed crusade against mail voting is once again threatening to undermine his party's efforts. | ||
| Republicans bored tens of millions of dollars last year into convincing their voters that casting ballots by mail was safe after Trump spent years bashing the practice and basis insisting it was rife with fraud. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| The GOP voters closing or even reversing the mail voting gap with Democrats in several states. | ||
| That's Politico. | ||
| And this is Angel Waynesboro, Georgia, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Mamie, I just want to say that I completely agree with the caller from South Carolina. | ||
| I think mail-in voting was mainly aimed for the military. | ||
| And Trump is completely right about that. | ||
| There's so much fraud. | ||
| If you'll show a clip, there's been a clip being showed from people stuffing ballots in those ballot boxes in different states, just for local elections. | ||
| But it still can be very detrimental to our voting system by letting anybody just put ballots in the mail. | ||
| I've seen it on TV. | ||
| And I just wanted to let you know that I completely agree with Donald Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Fiona Hill was the senior director for Russia and European Affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration. | ||
| She talked on Sunday about Putin's weighing in on mail-in ballots. | ||
| Here she is. | ||
| One of the Fox interviews that President Trump did, he said that he spoke about mail-in voting in the United States with Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And during that press address, Putin also claimed that the war wouldn't have happened at all if Donald Trump had been president. | ||
| I mean, that's a counterfactual, but that's something Trump often says on the trail. | ||
| Why would those things be discussed at all if this was about Ukraine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Well, look, this is Vladimir Putin, as usual, trying to manipulate U.S. domestic politics. | ||
| I've seen him do this over and over again, including at Helsinki, when he set the president off, not in the press conference, but before that, in a whole diatribe against his political enemies, because Putin deliberately asked him about this. | ||
| So Putin knows that President Trump wants to have an acknowledgement of his self-assertion that the war wouldn't have happened had he been in the presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so Putin's giving him something that plays well for President Trump in his own domestic environment. | |
| It doesn't play well in the international environment where people know things are much more complicated, but it's basically a gift and a concession to President Trump himself. | ||
| And Putin wants to sow chaos in the American electoral system ahead of the midterms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So of course he's laid into this whole issue of mail-in voting. | |
| And President Trump asserted in his Fox News interview that there are no countries in the world that allow mail-in voting. | ||
| Well, Russia allows mail-in voting. | ||
| And if everybody wants to go out and look, they can look for themselves in 2020. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Vladimir Putin signed into law Russians being able to vote by mail and also on the internet. | |
| And more than 30 other countries also allow some forms of mail-in voting. | ||
| So it's just not true that other countries, including Russia, don't use this. | ||
| It's a pure, blatant piece of manipulation. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that Putin likes to do. | ||
| Wonder what you think about that and your thoughts on mail-in voting and voting machines, if you feel like they're safe, if you feel like they should be allowed for American elections or should be done away with here on the independent line in Wisconsin is Greg. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Hey, thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I just have two things to say. | ||
| First of all, I have an 89-year-old mother, and she votes devoutly Republican all the time, and I help her with the mail-in ballot because she can't get out of her house. | ||
| This is very frustrating on that one end. | ||
| The second end is the state elections also have lots of referendum items, lots of wording, and some of this wording is legal jargon in which they need to take time to process what they're actually voting for. | ||
| And I think that mail-in ballots is increasing amongst Americans. | ||
| And how can we deny my mom the ability to vote? | ||
| Now, maybe she doesn't vote the way I want to, but it's our civic duty to vote. | ||
| And it's our civic duty to support even those people we might disagree with on some things politically to get them to vote. | ||
| And I am absolutely frustrated. | ||
| And also, what about those workers working second and third shift? | ||
| I mean, they can't get to the ballot box because I have parents right now who I live with sometimes around the area, and they can't get because they're working the second and third shift. | ||
| And the ballots, the elections close at seven, eight o'clock. | ||
| Well, they're working all day. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I'm working right now, and I'm kind of finding it to be something to balance my mom's needs with the needs of voting. | ||
| So those are some of the things I have to say. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right, Greg. | ||
| And this is Nissa in Buffalo, New York, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| What I want to say is that Donald Trump is trying to take our freedom from us. | ||
| You see, I got Washington, D.C., I rather vote by mail. | ||
| I'm 79 years old. | ||
| So therefore, everybody in this country needs to stand up and stand up against Trump because everybody is he wants to be poo. | ||
| So therefore, what I'm thinking is that he's trying to brainwash everybody here in the United States that wants to fall in for his tactics. | ||
| So therefore, I feel that he should be out of office because he's trying to rig the elections before it happens. | ||
| So that's all I've got to say because everybody else is kids. | ||
| And on the Republican line in Jessup, Georgia, Kel, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing, Madam? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| In reference to the Voting Machine Act and reference to FCT vote, Mr. Donald Trump is perusing the law, in a sense, and he is actually bringing to life the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, in my opinion. | ||
| So those individuals who may be has and who may stand strong against, say, Mr. Trump, he has the voting integrity in mind. | ||
| The 1965 Voting Rights Act, it ensured racial discrimination would be removed from the voting proclamations of the United States. | ||
| The state of Georgia has within itself violations of such rights, and it also somewhat has a lineage of postal theft, postal prevention. | ||
| So in order to ensure the capacity of mail-in ballots, Mr. Trump has somewhat enforced a type of propagation that will ensure the integrity of voting. | ||
| And Brothervich versus the Democratic National Committee, there was a landslide attempt to disparate the impact of minority groups and voting. | ||
| And haphazardly speaking, Mr. Trump is trying to prevent that with trying to secure in-person type of voting. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Gary Fletcher, North Carolina, Independent Line, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I had an experience that most Americans don't have. | ||
| I lived in public housing for a while. | ||
| And at the time, it was like a separation between the elderly people who were on disability and other people that were on it. | ||
| And I think they thought that it was not fair, you know, so they started mixing the old people in with people with all kinds of other problems. | ||
| In the area I was where we received our mail, the ballots, people would come out and like as volunteers and try to induce people to get the mail and ballot cause of convenience and stuff. | ||
| And the building I was in, which had several hundred people in it, they would argue over the chicken flyers or the free coffee at McDonald's paperwork. | ||
| And it was a trash can where the mail, like if you didn't want the mail, you just threw it in there. | ||
| And it wasn't set up like in an official way like people might expect. | ||
| But in this world that people don't see, like everybody thinks they live in an individual house or something, you can tell old Miss Jones, what are you going to do with that flyer? | ||
| What do you want to do with that? | ||
| Do you care who votes? | ||
| Now, I don't remember the year, but I remember like Ross Barot days, you know, going back to whenever that was, where voting wasn't so, everybody wasn't on each other's necks as much. | ||
| But you could get a ballot from somebody for a couple of cigarettes, you know, or a favor, or people just didn't care. | ||
| And these things were like not treated right. | ||
| And did that happen, Gary? | ||
| You saw people like exchanging cigarettes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I took them in my own hands. | |
| And I didn't know like the value of the corruption or anything. | ||
| And were they signed? | ||
| Like, did the person fill it out? | ||
| Because they all have to be signed, right? | ||
| So how did that work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They said, listen, I know you don't care about that, but if we don't put these things in, we don't get our money. | |
| Like, we got to, the more you vote, the more we're going to get our stuff. | ||
| And that was kind of like the attitude more than what was important about who won or lost. | ||
| So let's check in on social media. | ||
| This is Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, Republican, who says, let's get back to voting in person. | ||
| American elections are too important to risk mail-in ballot fraud. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| And that I can't see. | ||
| Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Democrat, mail-in voting is safe and secure, which is why President Trump and Republicans in Congress have repeatedly endorsed it. | ||
| Elections are run by states, not by the president. | ||
| We will stand up to any attempt to undermine our democracy. | ||
| And Gavin Newsom, governor of California, said Trump knows he is going to lose in 2026. | ||
| His plan to rig new congressional seats is going to backfire thanks to California. | ||
| Now he's clamoring for other ways to cook the results. | ||
| This man reeks of desperation. | ||
| Let's keep up the pressure. | ||
| And Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia says, I strongly support President Trump in ending mail-in voting. | ||
| Elections have been stolen for decades with this practice that is ripe for fraud. | ||
| Save America by saving our elections. | ||
| Here is Mike in Racine, Wisconsin. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know, a couple points here. | ||
| I hear a lot of people talking about voter fraud, voter fraud here, but no one's talking about what percentage of our vote is actually fraud. | ||
| You can look at independent analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Brookings Institute if you want to go there and read what they have to say about voter fraud in America. | ||
| And the thing that jumped out to me when they were giving the numbers is that you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to incur voter fraud here in the United States. | ||
| What Trump wants to do with the mail-in ballots is he wants to eliminate those and get everybody to come to the ballot box where they can really rig the election. | ||
| I mean, come to the polls where they really can rig the election and have you standing in line for hours on end trying to get there to vote. | ||
| It's much easier and more convenient and it's very safe to do mail-in voting. | ||
| Oregon is one of the states that I think they do all mail-in voting. | ||
| Okay, and it's easier and again, more convenient for people to get a paper ballot and mail-in. | ||
| I think a lot of these people are talking out the side of their mouths when they're talking about, oh, I got 19 ballots and all these fraudulent ballots went in. | ||
| This stuff is not encouraged. | ||
| Trump wants us all in that line. | ||
| Then the Republicans can really, really manipulate the vote if people are standing in line and they can commit voter suppression. | ||
| If you look at, for example, here in Wisconsin and Milwaukee, you can go out to the suburbs and you can go into Brookfield and all these surrounding areas and you'd be hard pressed to find long lines wrapped around buildings because those are Republican areas. | ||
| But if you come into the city, that's where you see lines and lines and lines of people standing in line waiting to vote because it's just harder to vote when you're standing in online. | ||
| But if you have mail-in voting, you can avoid those things. | ||
| Okay, and let's take a look at by state. | ||
| So this is from 2024. | ||
| And here's the map of the United States. | ||
| The blue gives options to vote early, in person, and by mail, and that's available to all voters. | ||
| So you can see the majority of the United States here, including Alaska and Hawaii, are give that option. | ||
| So you can vote either in person early before Election Day or by mail, and that's available to all voters. | ||
| Now, the yellow states, including here Texas and South Carolina, is you do have the option to vote early in person. | ||
| That's for everybody. | ||
| But you have to have an eligible reason if you want to vote by mail. | ||
| So if you're disabled or for some other reason, you have a good reason that you can't get to the polls, you would have to give that reason and it would be approved. | ||
| Then the red, which is just three states, so that's Mississippi, Alabama, and New Hampshire up here, is no early in-person voting option available, and you do have to have an eligible reason required to vote by mail. | ||
| So this is voting only in person on Election Day in these states, and you have to have a reason to, if you want to vote early. | ||
| Sorry, if you want to vote by mail. | ||
| And Geraldine in Fort River, New Jersey, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I did a little research on the voting by mail. | ||
| And just give me a moment here. | ||
| France banned mail-in voting in 1975 due to fraud. | ||
| Mexico banned mail-in voting in 92 due to fraud. | ||
| Belgium banned mail-in voting in 2018 due to fraud. | ||
| Sweden does not permit mail-in voting. | ||
| Italy does not permit mail-in voting. | ||
| Ukraine does not permit mail-in voting. | ||
| Russia does not permit mail-in voting. | ||
| Japan does not permit mail-in voting. | ||
| No Middle Eastern country permits mail-in voting. | ||
| So where are you reading this, Geraldine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
In voting. | |
| That's what I have. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I researched it. | ||
| Why don't you research it? | ||
| Because there are many, many, many countries that banned mail-in voting because of fraud. | ||
| So I'm really on Trump's side with this because a lot, a lot of countries banned mail-in voting due to fraud. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Mary in Alpena, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| I wanted to point out when that interview was going on that Sean Hannity did not say a word. | ||
| The reason Sean Hannity did not say a word when that question was, and he let the president go on and on, because if you remember back, how much did Fox News pay the voting machine company? | ||
| Was it $768 million? | ||
| And now it came out the other day that Newsmax is paying $60 million to these companies. | ||
| It may take a while, but they got their money. | ||
| That's why Sean Hannity sat there. | ||
| And you would think, with as big a platform as the President of the United States has, that he would ask one of his thousands of staff members, hey, look up how many countries in the world have nothing but mail-in voting. | ||
| And I looked it up. | ||
| In all 50 states, it is a felony to tamper with a mail-in vote ballot. | ||
| Do you actually think someone is going to commit a felony over voting for the local school board? | ||
| And here in Michigan, we counted the ballots. | ||
| They counted three times. | ||
| It costs millions of dollars because of his rhetoric and handling of the pandemic. | ||
| Trump lost Michigan in the year 2020 to President Biden. | ||
| And it turned the state purple. | ||
| And it's still a purple state, which I'm kind of happy. | ||
| And look up how President Trump and Melania Trump voted in 2024. | ||
| How did they cast their ballot last year? | ||
| So, and I have a book club, and two of my ladies are 92 and 95. | ||
| I helped them, I sat here and I helped them fill out their ballot and that. | ||
| And they were afraid to put them in the mail. | ||
| I drove out to a Dropbox at the township where there's a camera, and they got out separately out of my car and walked across, held up their ballot, their envelope to the camera and dropped it in the ballot box. | ||
| They were afraid to put them in the U.S. Postal Service. | ||
| All right, Mary. | ||
| And Mary mentioned the Dominion lawsuits. | ||
| So this is ABC News. | ||
| Dominion voting system settles defamation lawsuit with Newsmax over 2020 election claims. | ||
| That came out on Friday. | ||
| It says the settlement is to be paid out in three installments: $27 million to be paid August 15th, $20 million on or before January 15th, 2026, and another $20 million to be paid January 15th, 2027. | ||
| And then the Fox settlement was $787 million. | ||
| That's with Dominion over election claims. | ||
| Loretta, Tampa, Florida, Democrat, good morning, Loretta. | ||
| Loretta in Tampa, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm here. | |
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say that there doesn't need to be any changes to the voting system because we know that Donald Trump is a man that likes integrity. | ||
| He's the one in 2020 stated that I only need 11,000 plus more votes to win the 2020 election. | ||
| And also, we need to have the availability to vote by mail for many people that are disabled and senior citizens that cannot go to the polls and stand in line for hours in order to vote. | ||
| So what we need to remember is Donald Trump likes integrity. | ||
| And not only that, we don't want to accept any advice from Putin considering what he's doing in his country as well as attacking Ukraine. | ||
| So thank you for allowing me to speak. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is Newsweek with a worldwide map showing different countries. | ||
| And what you're seeing here is the dark blue is no for mail-in voting. | ||
| The light blue is yes for some voters. | ||
| And the purple is yes for all voters. | ||
| So you can see here the United States, Canada, parts of Western Europe. | ||
| And then the blue for some voters is a little bit harder to see here. | ||
| But you have that in Europe. | ||
| And then you've got India, Pakistan, other countries here in Asia, Australia. | ||
| Japan is still offering mail-in ballots. | ||
| This source is the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. | ||
| If you'd like to look that up and take a look, Bob, Republican, Humble Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Bob. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I think it's kind of interesting that you show the two different maps, the world map showing probably a limited restriction for mail-in voting, and then the United States map that was almost in reverse. | ||
| But I think the conversation needs to get a little more precision, Mimi. | ||
| We need to talk about absentee balloting, which are ballots that are offered to be sent in by mail that have some kind of a justification. | ||
| The person's disabled, elderly, there's a good reason that they can't attend and vote by mail. | ||
| Whereas running a mail-in, as California and other states do, where you just mail out ballots indiscriminately based on rolls that people may have signed up for or their houses or whatever, those do have the possibility of being harvested. | ||
| And there has been evidence, there's been lawsuits, there have been criminal prosecutions in the United States of people doing that. | ||
| The last thing I'd want to offer up is there was a significant increase with mail-in voting in the 2020 election. | ||
| Joe Biden collected 80-something million votes, significantly different than Democrat presidents before him, almost 10 million votes higher. | ||
| And that alone leads some to suspect that mail-in voting could be compromised. | ||
| So we need to have some precision. | ||
| Absentee balloting for a reason versus just indiscriminately mailing ballots. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So here's Bob. | ||
| Stay with me. | ||
| This is the map that I showed of the United States. | ||
| What you're seeing here, the blue, I don't know if you can see it, is for anybody without a reason. | ||
| The yellow, you do have to have a reason, like what you mentioned. | ||
| You're disabled, you're away, you're stationed somewhere else, that kind of thing, that you have to have a reason, as well as the red. | ||
| So you do have to have a reason. | ||
| You are able in the three red states that you can vote by mail, but you have to have a reason, an eligible reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I do understand that. | ||
| And I think the issue right now that we need to be discussing is all of that blue, which is just mailing ballots to either residences or however they're identified, is a question. | ||
| And they can be harvested and there can be fraud. | ||
| And there ought to be some protections. | ||
| So you like the idea of you just have to present a reason. | ||
| So you have to ask for the mail-in ballot and you have to show, look, I'm, you know, let's say disabled or I don't have a ride to the polling place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely, Mimi, and that needs to be brought in the discussion. | |
| And if the Republicans or Trump are just saying eliminate absentee balloting, then I would be very much against it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Rick, Tuckerstown, or Tuckerton, New Jersey, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My name is Rick, and it's nice to talk to you. | ||
| I live, New Jersey has 21 counties. | ||
| The county I live in is rock solid Republican. | ||
| Since the days of Lincoln, the local government has always been controlled by Republicans. | ||
| And yet, starting 30 years ago, they started offering mail-in voting for a big reason. | ||
| So many people in New Jersey are snowbirds that go down to Florida in the winter that they wanted the people that go down to Florida to be able to vote for their own county. | ||
| And I got to tell you, I'm a Bernie Sanders socialist, but in my life, I always voted for the Ocean County clerk who was in charge of elections because he did a fantastic job. | ||
| And he had a good reason for those mail-in ballots. | ||
| So thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here is Michael, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Mimi. | |
| Thank you for the question. | ||
| And it's a very important question. | ||
| And I think that I agree 100% with the fellow gentleman from Texas that called in. | ||
| There's a real distinction between mail-in voting and absentee ballots. | ||
| Mail-in voting was done on such a large scale, and ballots were just produced indiscriminately and sent out indiscriminately. | ||
| And here in Pennsylvania, we've had that problem, and we found truckloads. | ||
| It was a truckload of ballots from New York that was sent to Pennsylvania. | ||
| And those kind of things were happening here in Pennsylvania. | ||
| And I think that President Carter was right on his deathbed. | ||
| I mean, he took it away, I guess, but nonetheless, when he was doing the surveys for mail-in ballots all over the world, he concluded him and the Republican concluded that it was a very bad way of voting and subject to so much fraud. | ||
| So, Michael, I just have this article from The Guardian about that. | ||
| It says, so it says this: Trump falsely claimed that even that late former president Jimmy Carter opposed mail-in voting, saying, Even Jimmy Carter with his commission, they set it up. | ||
| He said the one thing about mail-in voting: you will never have an honest election if you have mail in it. | ||
| And it says, in reality, Carter urged the opposite during the 2020 COVID pandemic, with the Carter Center arguing that the best way to tackle potential voter fraud in a vote-by-mail situation is to strengthen safeguards and expand voting access. | ||
| This is from President Carter's statement: quote: I urge political leaders across the country to take immediate steps to expand vote-by-mail and other measures that can help protect the core of American democracy, the right of our citizens to vote. | ||
| And Al in Watertown, Tennessee, Independent Line, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm a sworn voting machine operator. | |
| I've worked many, many elections. | ||
| The fellow from Texas, I believe it was, was correct in differentiating between absentee and mail-in ballots. | ||
| And it's interesting, the very next caller couldn't understand the difference. | ||
| In Tennessee, we have 15 categories of reasons that you can ask for an absentee ballot, and then you have a signature on that application. | ||
| The absentee ballot voter, their signature is checked three times. | ||
| First, a comparison of the envelope, the application, and then their voter registration card. | ||
| It is very secure to vote absentee. | ||
| However, it is well known that fraud is in the universal mail-in system. | ||
| First, these places maintain corrupt voter rolls, and then they automatically send a ballot to everyone on the voter roll. | ||
| Their goal is to generate as many mail-in ballots as possible and then harvest them. | ||
| Now, into the voting machines, there's no possible way to have elections here without voting machines, especially in a primary. | ||
| We will sometimes have 50 styles of ballots. | ||
| That is, wherever you live, that will determine wherever you know, I back that up, where you are registered to vote will dictate what's on your ballot. | ||
| And because there can be so many, you know, there's 25 county commissioners, there's a House race, a Senate race, a presidential race, all these races add up to very particular ballots per registered location. | ||
| I don't think there's any possible way to do that without a voting machine. | ||
| I'll take any questions. | ||
| So, Al, I was just going to ask: you are in favor of keeping absentee voting because there's a reason, right? | ||
| You mentioned there's one of 15 reasons that you could vote absentee, but no mail-in as far as without a reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's the way that you commit large-scale fraud. | |
| Only reason that you have universal mail-in ballots is to fraud elections. | ||
| That's the only purpose. | ||
| And when you say that those ballots are harvested, what do you mean by that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean that if you have corrupt voter rolls, there's many states that know that their voter rolls are corrupt, and they fight tooth and nail in court to make sure that they're not cleaned up. | |
| And that's only because they will mail a ballot to everyone on that voter roll. | ||
| And once that ballot is out in circulation, an operative will capture that ballot, the physical ballot. | ||
| They'll vote it, and they will mail it in. | ||
| That's why sometimes you'll see someone go to a Dropbox with multiple ballots. | ||
| That's the reason for that. | ||
| And then as soon as possible, they will remove the ballot from the envelope. | ||
| And that will reduce the ability to check the signature on the absentee ballot to the signature on the voting card. | ||
| Now, I believe it was Pennsylvania, no, I think it was Arizona or Pennsylvania one. | ||
| There was a court case where they asked if on the mail-in ballots, were the signatures matched to the registration card. | ||
| And the testimony was not only they were not matched, there was no way to match them. | ||
| There was no system in place to match the signature of that mail-in ballot to the signature of the voting card. | ||
| But there is a way to do that, are you saying with absentee ballots? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| We may only have one or two percent absentee. | ||
| And there's a Republican, a Democrat, and an election official that looks at every one of those signatures on every one of those absentee ballots. | ||
| You can't do that when there's millions and millions of them mail in universally. | ||
| And if you don't have some kind of optical scanning system for that, it's impossible. | ||
| A mail-in ballot, a mail-in ballot, and a corrupt voter roll is how elections are frauded. | ||
| Okay, got it. | ||
| Monique, Washington, D.C., line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo-wee! | |
| As a young adult living in the United States of America, and I hear all of these folks calling in, the older generation is literally messing up this country for young adults like myself. | ||
| Here, the stuff that comes out of their mouth, especially when it comes to election integrity. | ||
| You know, and I think the reason why we are specifically talking about voter fake voter registrations and voting and stuff is because Newsmax had to pay $67 million to the minion, and Fox News had to pay $700-something million for lying about their machines. | ||
| Nothing is wrong in my eyes with mail-in ballots. | ||
| I mean, my goodness, Trump won the election off of mail-in ballots. | ||
| And we are not Russia. | ||
| We do not follow what Putin says. | ||
| We are a country that develops our own strategies. | ||
| We have our own rules. | ||
| We have our own policies. | ||
| And the only people that we should be listening to, the only people that the president should be listening to, is the citizens of the United States of America. | ||
| There is no fraud. | ||
| There is nothing like that within our political system. | ||
| And I am so sick and tired of hearing false information being spewed throughout the United States. | ||
| We have got to stop. | ||
| There is no fraud in our election system unless you're talking about a.00001. | ||
| Just stop because there are a lot of elderly people throughout this country who need it. | ||
| And plus, there are a lot of people like myself who work seven days a week, sometimes 10, 12-hour days, who don't get an opportunity to go to the poll and have to mail it in. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Everybody is not lazy. | ||
| Some of us are really out here working, trying to pay these high grocery bills, the high rent, and everything else. | ||
| So, to the older generation, stop messing this country up for the people who have to continue to pay to ensure that you get your social security and your Medicaid. | ||
| All right, Monique. | ||
| Here's Mary, Republican, Cumberland, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Maria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to put in when I heard the Maryland person talking. | ||
| I am a proud citizen. | ||
| I vote every time. | ||
| You know, I don't miss it. | ||
| I have mail-in ballots, and Maryland does send everybody and his brother and sister and cousin all these ballots. | ||
| And my children, I have six, we raised six children, and they are excellent citizens. | ||
| And they went to school, and of course, while they were still had this address, they would, whatever came in, I knew that they had a chance to vote. | ||
| But when they left and made, they all went to new places, New Hampshire, New Hampshire, and New Jersey, and freaking Kansas. | ||
| What child away from home? | ||
| But, anyways, I had papers coming here for them to vote. | ||
| So I notified the county election thing. | ||
| And of course, they told me that I couldn't, you know, it was a good thing that I mentioned it, but they would send me a paper, and they sent me a paper, and I sent it to the kids to make sure that they were established to vote in the state that they were working. | ||
| And I think that's one place that you can have a lot of fraud voting: if the kids are off and doing their thing, someone's filling in ballots. | ||
| So the people that have children out there and still getting ballots, you just need to notify. | ||
| Like I notified my area here, and they sent me a paper, and I got it to my kids, and they had to sign it and everything to say to take me off the Maryland state and to register in the place they vote. | ||
| That's another way that you can keep things straight. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And one more call, Leo in East Weymouth, Massachusetts, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-SPEN. | |
| I'd just like to make a comment about how elections are run. | ||
| Every state administers their own elections. | ||
| The feds cannot tell you anything. | ||
| So Trump is blowing hot air. | ||
| He's trying to scare everybody like he always does. | ||
| He's got nothing to back him up. | ||
| And all these people saying they did research, they stake. | ||
| And that'll do it for this segment later this morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
| The Trump White House is considering a major change to federal marijuana policy. | ||
| We'll discuss with Bo Kilmer, co-director of Rand's Drug Policy Research Center. | ||
| But first, after the break, a closer look at how the president's tariff policies are impacting manufacturing here in the U.S. | ||
| That conversation with Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This August, tune in to C-SPAN for highlights of our America 250 coverage. | |
| Join us as we continue to explore the American story through the voices, sites, and stories that shaped it. | ||
| Tonight, we'll go on a walking tour of Philadelphia's historic sites, then tour Boston's Freedom Trail, whose stops include the site of the Boston Massacre. | ||
| As one of the soldiers, Pirate Edward Montgomery, is knocked back, his gun goes off over the crowd. | ||
| Seconds go by. | ||
| Preston is trying to block his men. | ||
| He's standing between them, but they don't hear the order. | ||
| They don't know what to do. | ||
| One by one, led by Matthew Kilroy, fire, fire, fire, fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch C-SPAN's America 250 highlights tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | |
| And past president. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a kangaroo corpse. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| ceasefire this fall on the network that doesn't take sides only on c-span honor the person who first showed you democracy in action and ignite america 250 c-span's 18-month ad-free celebration of our nation's story | ||
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| Thank you. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Joining us to talk about the Trump administration's trade and tariff agenda as it relates to manufacturing is Scott Paul. | ||
| He is the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. | ||
| Scott, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe great to be with you again. | |
| So I want to start with this Fox News article, tariff uncertainty threatens $490 billion in U.S. manufacturing investment. | ||
| What's your take on how the trade and tariff uncertainty is affecting manufacturing in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a good question, and it is having an impact because any capital decision like where to invest, where to locate production, how to hire workers, particularly those that you're going to need for the long term, is a bit up in the air until the policy is settled. | |
| And I think we know some of the contours of the policy right now. | ||
| There have been a number of agreements, bilateral agreements that have been announced, but it's also been reported that those haven't been fully executed, that we don't know what the bottom line is going to be on those or if they may also be subject to change somehow. | ||
| And so I think for a lot of businesses, to the extent they were thinking about either reshoring production or building up new factory lines, that they've hit the pause button until there's a little more certainty about where this is going to land with China, with some of the other countries, with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement as well, which is a big chunk of our trade. | ||
| And not all of that is settled yet. | ||
| No, when you say hit the pause button, these things take a lot of time to really ramp up and to get the benefits of it. | ||
| I want to share with you an opinion that was printed in The Guardian. | ||
| This is Susan Helper. | ||
| She's an economist at Case Western Reserve University. | ||
| She worked on industrial policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. | ||
| She said that Trump's tariff rates on some countries and markets, like 15% on the EU, Japan, and South Korea, are too low to spur much investment. | ||
| Questioning why a company would build a major factory to circumvent such a duty. | ||
| A semiconductor fabrication plant, that's a billion dollars. | ||
| You need to get a payback, and that takes several years. | ||
| If the tariffs are 145 percent, as Trump once imposed on China, that's attractive for building a plant. | ||
| But if you fall back to 15 percent, then it's really hard to get a return on your investment. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I don't think that Dr. Helper is wrong, and I respect her work quite a bit. | |
| I think that there is probably what you would call an optimal tariff rate, and that's the rate at which you're attracting in that foreign investment to come into the United States and to build things here instead of importing it. | ||
| And I think that will land for some countries. | ||
| I don't know in the case of Japan or Europe that you'll see a lot of that diversion to the United States. | ||
| I think in the case of those countries that the tariffs are probably more of a revenue strategy. | ||
| And I think that's an important thing that underpins all of this is some of this to the administration, I will say, is about bringing some manufacturing back. | ||
| Some is about rebalancing trade. | ||
| Some of it is about building up revenue to either try to lower our debt or to offset the costs of some of the other priorities the administration is trying to do. | ||
| Now, the minority arm of the Joint Economic Committee, that's a congressional committee, and it released its August report, and it said that U.S. manufacturing jobs fell by 37,000. | ||
| That's May through July. | ||
| What's your reaction to that? | ||
| And what have you seen among your members as far as jobs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, there's been some treading water. | |
| And in a economy that has about 12.7, 12.8 million manufacturing jobs, those changes are very, you know, that's like a treading water number, basically. | ||
| I think it's important to point out that we've been treading water in manufacturing since February of 2023. | ||
| And so that predates a lot of the tariff uncertainty. | ||
| And part of the reason is that, and I think this is an accurate criticism, is that interest rates have been too high for manufacturers to both borrow to make capital investments and they've probably priced out some consumers from affording loans to buy things like automobiles, for instance. | ||
| And so I think that's had an impact. | ||
| And we're also in kind of the unusual situation where the U.S. economy, while it certainly has its challenges, has been generally doing better than many of our peers around the world. | ||
| And that's limited export opportunities for manufacturers for some period of time. | ||
| Basically, since the end of the pandemic, it's been like that. | ||
| And so Now with the tariff uncertainty, that adds another layer of, I think, weight to trying to build on manufacturing jobs. | ||
| I do think that once some of the tax policy kicks in, once some of the tariffs are settled, that we might see some growth in manufacturing, but there's still a lot of important decisions that need to be made between now and when we arrive at that point. | ||
| So you say that manufacturers are treading water. | ||
| What does that look like from a business perspective? | ||
| How do you tread water? | ||
| Do you just wait on any major decisions, major hiring, major capital purchases? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and it's important to point out that manufacturing is not a monolith. | |
| So everybody has different strategies. | ||
| Everybody's impacted by this in different ways. | ||
| People that are manufacturing consumables that folks can't do without are generally going to be doing okay, right? | ||
| Things that are more discretionary purchases, you might run into challenges. | ||
| Things that have complicated supply chains, you might run into challenges. | ||
| But what it basically looks like is if you're going to buy a new piece of equipment to increase your productivity, you might be deferring that decision until you have a little more certainty about the tariffs. | ||
| If you were thinking about sourcing from a domestic supplier instead of your supplier in China or Vietnam or somewhere else, you may want to do that, but you may not want to do that until you know exactly what the policy is going to be. | ||
| And so it's not like there's a lot of manufacturers that have gone out of business. | ||
| That's certainly not the case. | ||
| But we're also not in a period where we've seen spectacular growth at all. | ||
| And unfortunately, and some of this predates the tariff policy because of the interest rate situation in the global economy. | ||
| But the sooner we can arrive at some certainty, the more capital expenditures, the more hiring I think we're going to see inside domestic manufacturing. | ||
| I'd like to join our conversation with Scott Paul. | ||
| You can call us. | ||
| The lines are Republicans 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line set aside for those working in the manufacturing sector. | ||
| So you can call us on 202-748-8003. | ||
| That's the same line you can use to text us. | ||
| Well, earlier this month, Apple announced plans to invest $100 billion in U.S. manufacturing. | ||
| I want to play you a portion of that announcement at the White House, and then we'll talk about it. | ||
| Today, Apple is announcing that it will invest $600 billion. | ||
| This would the B in the United States over the next four years. | ||
| That's $100 billion more than they were originally going to invest. | ||
| And this is the largest investment Apple has ever made in America and anywhere else. | ||
| And it's just an honor to have you. | ||
| As you know, Apple's been an investor in other countries a little bit. | ||
| I won't say which ones, but a couple. | ||
| And they're coming home. | ||
| $600 billion. | ||
| It's the biggest there is. | ||
| The company is also unveiling its ambitious new American manufacturing program, which will bring factories and assembly lines across our country all roaring to life. | ||
| Areas that we're not doing so well are doing very well. | ||
| We have about $17 trillion coming into the United States, which is more than ever before. | ||
| It's never even come close. | ||
| There's never been anything like it. | ||
| Even you, that's even a lot of money for you. | ||
| But we have commitments of more than $17 trillion, that was as of a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| These investments will directly create more than 20,000 brand new American jobs and many thousands more at the Apple suppliers like Corning, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Samsung, who all deal in that world. | ||
| He says $600 billion. | ||
| That is a big number. | ||
| How does that show up in the United States? | ||
| How does that impact our economy and our jobs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, obviously this is going to be a very significant event for the communities where Apple has or is planning manufacturing facilities. | |
| And this is one of the important things that I think is the great hidden benefit of manufacturing. | ||
| And it's easy to cast as being that's part of yesterday's economy. | ||
| But the truth is, you ask any mayor, you ask any local official if they can get a factory. | ||
| That's exactly what they want. | ||
| They'd rather have a factory than virtually anything else because it means that factory is going to also attract some downtown businesses and it's going to attract some retail stores and it's going to spur more economic development and those jobs are likely to be good. | ||
| Now from Apple's perspective, they have had some manufacturing in the United States. | ||
| It's been on their very high-end products and that require less physical manipulation and a lot less putting together of parts. | ||
| Now, to be very clear, this announcement is not about bringing iPhone production to the United States. | ||
| We're a long way from that right now, and Apple is still deeply embedded in China. | ||
| They may be doing some final assembly of those products in India now, but that big part of their business is still in China. | ||
| Nevertheless, it's encouraging that you have an industry leader, a market leader that is choosing to invest in the United States. | ||
| And as the president indicated, that's going to have a ripple effect for other suppliers like Corning and like Broadcom, who build components who go into Apple products. | ||
| That's going to expand their business as well. | ||
| So this is a step in the right direction, I think. | ||
| Let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Stephen in Lexington, Kentucky, Independent. | ||
| Good morning, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| And I am in the manufacturing world. | ||
| I work for a global manufacturer that has been struggling this year. | ||
| It's been a very whiplash kind of economy. | ||
| You know, at one moment, we think we have it figured out. | ||
| The next we don't because of such of the reactive rather than proactive approach from this administration. | ||
| We're also noticing I'm in the automation world, and we haven't had enough people in the automation world since 2020. | ||
| So it's been an ongoing thing. | ||
| But I'm noticing when we're bringing stuff in from abroad, let's say we brought a machine from Mexico, the people here, you know, locally in Kentucky, they are running around like chickens with their heads cut off because we don't have the people. | ||
| We don't have the experience with this machine. | ||
| It was kind of brought onto them and inherited quickly. | ||
| And so it just seems like it's a very chaotic moment. | ||
| Sales are down. | ||
| We had to let people go. | ||
| We had to let the older employees, we kind of convinced them to take an early retirement. | ||
| We're trying to cost cut or cost save right now. | ||
| It's a downtime. | ||
| I'll say on the optimistic side, we're going to keep operating as normal. | ||
| And then when it does come up, we're going to be blasting off into outer space. | ||
| But at this moment, it's very painful. | ||
| Were you able to hear? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I heard almost all of it. | |
| There were a couple of parts where it cut out, but I got almost all of Stephen's comments. | ||
| So This is interesting because it shows the paradox in manufacturing. | ||
| On the one hand, you have this whiplash and you feel like you're being moved back and forth in a boat that's in choppy seas. | ||
| On the other hand, you've got this ongoing problem of having a Help Wanted sign-out and having a difficult time in some circumstances building up your workforce. | ||
| And the reason... | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, why is that? | ||
| I mean, are there not enough people looking for those jobs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, part of it is geography, right? | |
| And just when you've had areas that have been either depopulated or have little population growth, it's just harder, number one. | ||
| Number two is that, and this has been true for a while, is that the way in which high schools determine success for too many kids is are they going to go to a four-year college instead of can they find a good job with a few months of training and get into a factory or into the trades. | ||
| And I do think that we've arrived at a point where it's becoming, I think, more acceptable for this generation to have careers that utilize their hands and their minds as well. | ||
| I don't think that was the case essentially for the last 20 or 30 years. | ||
| And so, you know, factory owners have to be, I think, a little more innovative than they have in the past about how they reach kids. | ||
| They have to put a little skin in the game when it comes to training. | ||
| They have to think about things such as child care, which might not have been an issue 30 years ago when they were hiring, but it sure is today for everybody. | ||
| So it takes some adaptability to be in that modern hiring workforce system as well. | ||
| Let's talk to Harold, Memphis, Tennessee, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Harold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| I would like to make a point. | ||
| The point is we are not prepared basically for the future. | ||
| We have a group in Washington not supporting the people. | ||
| We are not prepared based on the policies that they are presenting. | ||
| They kick the can when I say Congress is kicking the can down the road. | ||
| We are not. | ||
| Harold, we're starting to lose you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| These policies that we have. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the policies. | ||
| He didn't quite get it out, but anything you wanted to say about the policies in D.C. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm going to take advantage of that and just try to channel what I hope Harold was getting to here, which is that I do think that to have an economy that is robust and resilient in the future, it will take more than tariffs, right? | |
| Or it will take more than a tax bill. | ||
| It's going to take some investment in our workforce. | ||
| It's going to take continued investment in innovation. | ||
| That's always what made America stand out among economies around the world. | ||
| And it's going to take continued investment in our infrastructure to do all of this. | ||
| Because if you think about it, there's stories now about how our energy grid is strained already by the demands of AI, by residential consumption. | ||
| And if you have a manufacturing boom, that's going to put another strain on that. | ||
| So we need to build up our energy grid and really get into that. | ||
| Same with logistics. | ||
| We have a rail system and other systems that could be constrained as we ramp up this activity. | ||
| And so that's going to take some investment as well. | ||
| And yes, I don't see a focus from Congress on those issues. | ||
| So I think Harold is right about that. | ||
| I want to ask you about steel. | ||
| The AP headline, Nippon Steel finalizes a $15 billion takeover of U.S. steel after sealing national security agreement. | ||
| The deal included a commitment to invest $11 billion to upgrade U.S. steel facilities. | ||
| What was your reaction to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I've been in many of those facilities, and they've been a part of the steelmaking legacy in the United States for a long time, and they serve important markets like automobiles and durable goods, things like washing machines that we buy or things for construction. | |
| And so I think it's exciting that steel in the United States is viewed as an attractive investment. | ||
| Because I remember a time not so long ago when a lot of companies were going bankrupt in steel and you were seeing a lot of factory shutdowns and layoffs. | ||
| And so I'm hopeful that we will see some modernization, some new equipment put in that is going to keep our steel industry globally competitive because it is a base material that goes into almost everything that we utilize in our daily lives, as well as like for national security purposes and construction and what have you. | ||
| So it's an important sector. | ||
| I'm glad it's getting some attention. | ||
| Let's talk to Matt in New York, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Matt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hi. | |
| Hi, Mr. Paul. | ||
| My name's Matt. | ||
| And, you know, I was just, I'm not that smart of a person, but I was just wondering how Don Trump's trade and tariff policies have made us enemies with Canada, who are like our brothers and sisters who we just get along with great. | ||
| And now all of a sudden there's like hatred between us when we're such friends with them. | ||
| I also wonder if he's put a tariff on the Epstein files and that's why we can't get at them. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, with respect to Canada, we have a very close trade relationship with Canada. | ||
| We've had a free trade agreement with Canada since the 1980s. | ||
| It was one of the first free trade agreements that we had. | ||
| There's a lot of trade that goes back and forth across the border. | ||
| And a big chunk of the trade imbalance with Canada happens to be energy that's coming into the United States that makes our energy costs lower. | ||
| And so I don't know that we want to disrupt that. | ||
| And I think that's excluded from a lot of the tariffs as well. | ||
| But I am hopeful that as we move ahead, that we arrive at a point where with the U.S. and Mexico, with the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, which is part of what used to be called the NAFTA and is now the USMCA, | ||
| but which is now kind of just like two kind of like little bilateral things because of the tariffs that the President has put on, that we get to a point where we can find that right balance of regional economic integration and opportunity for American workers. | ||
| Because I think there is a way to structure it where it could benefit citizens and workers in all three countries. | ||
| I don't think we've found that yet. | ||
| But my hope is that we get there soon and that it is a priority. | ||
| And I know a lot of folks in Congress are paying attention to that as well. | ||
| I want to ask you about the Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| There are provisions in it intended to boost manufacturing. | ||
| If you could, we'll put that on the screen when we have it, some of those provisions, but if you could talk about your take on those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I do think that there were some facets from this legislation that could be very important for manufacturing. | |
| And that is, you know, one of those features is called like bonus depreciation or upfront expensing that makes it a lot easier for a company to make a large capital purchase. | ||
| And Mimi, I mentioned this before with like if you're thinking about a new piece of equipment that's going to help you both hire new workers, get new markets, make your process more efficient. | ||
| It's going to be easier to do that with this feature of the tax legislation in place. | ||
| And so I'm excited about that aspect of it in particular. | ||
| And I think that could be beneficial to American manufacturing. | ||
| Let's talk to Micole in Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So my thing, I've been listening to everything you're saying, but I'm in the United States, I'm in Florida, and I'm in the workforce. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, the issue that I have is that I'm kind of on board with bringing warehouses and bringing everything back to the United States. | ||
| But this is going to create to me another problem because, see, when I was in high school, they taught you mechanics, wood, they taught you electronics, they taught you how to make stuff, how to look at the eclipse and the moon and everything like that. | ||
| And schools today aren't structured for that. | ||
| They're structured, like he said, for you to go to college. | ||
| They're not structured for you to go in these warehouses in these companies. | ||
| And then with the automation that's going on, nobody is prepared. | ||
| So as quiet as it's kept, a lot of Americans are losing their jobs right now because in the last 15 or 20 years, nobody has been trained in the United States. | ||
| So now you got this workforce, you know, 40, 45, 50, 55 who's not eligible or doing or eligible for Social Security or anything like that. | ||
| And they're being forced out of their jobs. | ||
| But yet, as we're being forced out of our jobs, you're not preparing our young adults to take on these jobs. | ||
| Like, you're going to have to restructure the whole educational system in order to match what's going on with the reconstruction of the United States because these kids is not trained. | ||
| It's just like I said, well, if we go to war, what these kids are going to do? | ||
| Pull up with a gun and TikTok them to death? | ||
| Because these kids aren't trained for any of this stuff. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's get a response for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I want to say, I almost want to hug Nicole because I think she's spot on with all of this. | |
| And I wish more policymakers would hear that message is that, and we've identified a couple of the key gaps that we have in the United States. | ||
| One is how we approach workers who mid-career need to make an adjustment to another career. | ||
| We don't do a good job of that traditionally in the United States. | ||
| We have a lot of agility and a lot of entrepreneurship, but our workforce training system unfortunately hasn't been that agile. | ||
| The second point of this was headed back to high school and building skills as well as educational attainment for young people today. | ||
| And I think that's an important aspect of it. | ||
| It is true that at some point in time, shop class disappeared from a lot of high schools. | ||
| It's coming back in, actually, because I think that there's an awareness that there needs to be some pre-apprenticeship program or some level of basic skills that students need if they're going to go on in careers that don't require a four-year college degree but can be well-paying. | ||
| Things like welding or being an electrician or, again, doing some factory work where you can have a family supporting job with, say, six months or a year of additional training beyond high school. | ||
| And so I wish that there was more focus on this. | ||
| There are a couple of green shoots. | ||
| For instance, recently Congress and the President made a change to allow the utilization of short-term Pell Grants for things like learning how to weld. | ||
| That used to not necessarily be the case. | ||
| And so I'm encouraged that we're getting there, but the progress is way too slow. | ||
| I want to talk about artificial intelligence. | ||
| You mentioned it in terms of the energy that it requires for the data centers. | ||
| But how does it impact manufacturing? | ||
| What are the pros and cons of more AI in manufacturing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's a very, very good question. | |
| And so there are a lot of benefits that can be derived out of artificial intelligence for manufacturing. | ||
| Both, think of it, improving processes, improving the chemistry of materials, aiding in efforts for manufacturers to be lean. | ||
| Lots of different ways where it can be helpful, identifying markets. | ||
| The list is almost endless. | ||
| It is probably less likely to have a major impact on employment than it is in some other sectors because in manufacturing production, it's either you or it's you and a robot or it's a robot. | ||
| But there's some combination there, and there's always going to need to be humans in a factory. | ||
| The kind of jobs that they do may vary. | ||
| And it used to be physical manipulation. | ||
| Now it's a combination of physical manipulation and also maintaining or coding machines or robots to do some of the work as well. | ||
| Even in a Tesla factory, which is a marvel, you have things that look like they're out of Terminator alongside thousands of people. | ||
| And so you do have that employment component to it as well. | ||
| And so I see a potential upside for this working if we get it right. | ||
| I don't think it's a disaster at all for manufacturing jobs. | ||
| Here's Steve, Independent, Frankfurt, Kentucky. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, ma'am. | |
| My question is: I've noticed that gold went up like $1,000 one week, and I was like, wow, what's going on there? | ||
| So I started looking into it, and our currency has dropped 10% in the last six months, which is the worst in 50 years, my understanding. | ||
| And they said part of the reason is because of tariffs and I don't know what other policies, but obviously it's costing us 10% more to buy the same thing we bought six months ago. | ||
| What's your opinion on this? | ||
| Yeah, with respect to tariffs and cost increases, we've seen so far, the hard evidence is that outside of a couple specific areas, we haven't seen a widespread consumer impact. | ||
| Now, the soft data, like how people are feeling about things, tells a bit of a different story and shows some underlying concern that consumers have about the potential for inflation. | ||
| Now there's some goods for which there's no substitute for imports and which are subject to a higher tariff. | ||
| And so one example, and I know I'm dependent on this every morning, is coffee. | ||
| And so you've seen an increase in the price of coffee, for instance. | ||
| In other things, you haven't seen that price component come in for one of a couple of different reasons. | ||
| It could be that suppliers, retailers, manufacturers, warehouses stockpiled things ahead of the tariffs, and they're offering those inventories now. | ||
| It could be the case where the companies have found alternate suppliers from, say, China or another source that was subject to a higher tariff. | ||
| It could be that the manufacturer renegotiated a contract with their overseas supplier, and that overseas supplier wanted the work, and so they said, okay, we will negotiate down the price with you this time. | ||
| It could also be that the company is willing to take a slightly lower profit margin in order to keep market share. | ||
| Now, the thing that will keep prices in check in the United States is that American consumers, like consumers all over the world, are very price sensitive. | ||
| And so if something's too expensive, they're just not generally going to buy it or they're going to defer the purchase. | ||
| And so it will align. | ||
| So I don't know that we're going to see double-digit inflation or things like that, other than for a couple of items for which there's absolutely no substitute. | ||
| Coffee is the best example of that, I think. | ||
| But I think in a lot of other cases, the price or inflation effect is going to be very nominal. | ||
| And by the way, it's not going to be nearly what we've seen from things like car insurance, housing, other things that aren't constrained by tariffs, basically, that have been real drivers of inflation over the last couple of years. | ||
| The tariffs aren't going to impact that one way or another. | ||
| Eric in Buffalo, New York, Democrat, good morning, Eric. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| It's a push and pull on everything with trade and commerce and goods. | ||
| But coming to the labor force, we have to get these kids, kids, I'm talking to young employment involved in education with skilled trades. | ||
| You still have to have a workforce that has to be involved with their hands building, you know, welders, electricians, like they said, like the gentleman was saying, off the couch and involved, you know, and just along with everything else, you know, you know what I mean? | ||
| We have to have building, you know, integrated with high-end and education. | ||
| You know, it's everything, you know, all together. | ||
| everybody's got to work together with, with everything, you know, it's, it's all right, Eric. | ||
| Yeah, this is an important issue, and it gives me the opportunity to talk about a couple of things that give me some optimism that I've seen. | ||
| For instance, incorporating AI, and I think this is brilliant. | ||
| There are now these virtual welding exercises that students can do where you're not in the situation where you're actually welding, but it's done via virtual equipment, and it gets you socialized, and I think more, you have greater awareness of what the challenges and opportunities are. | ||
| That's one aspect of it. | ||
| I think another aspect that I've seen are a lot of programs in high schools that have started up that are making products for local companies. | ||
| And they've asked a lot, you know, and you see this at the college level all the time, but I think that you're seeing this in high school. | ||
| And all we need for a lot of these programs is scale. | ||
| That takes resources, that takes replication. | ||
| But I am optimistic because I do see local communities starting to provide some solutions for these challenges that a lot of the callers have raised up about where the worker is going to come from. | ||
| On the Republican line in Albany, Georgia. | ||
| Evie, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Do you hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, Mimi, and good morning to the citizens of America. | |
| Scott has been on many times with the Alliance. | ||
| I was just looking and knowing that he was coming on, I looked back at some of the videos that you had on C-SPAN, where he stated that there wasn't, his general concern is, of course, the import competition. | ||
| He's been in existence for about 17 years. | ||
| He says that he primarily represents steel workers. | ||
| You keep using the word manufacturing. | ||
| Word manufacturing for me means consumer goods. | ||
| They had the data on, and I'm looking for it as I'm talking, that shows that consumer goods, Samsung sends in washing machines, they send in microwaves, they send into the port of Savannah, where I am here in Georgia. | ||
| And those are the consumer manufactured goods, not steel. | ||
| So I would like for him to explain to us, and as far as this trade talk, when they sent, most of the manufacturing is firms that have 10, 20, 50 people, not hundreds of thousands, because those manufacturing places are in Mexico and in China and India and Vietnam. | ||
| And that happened 40 years ago. | ||
| So as far as young people going to trade, you should have had that 30, 40 years now coming where you would have that establishment, which he claimed, which he says, not claim, I'm sorry, which he said he did not have with that supply chain. | ||
| It's not about going to a trade school. | ||
| This is about the manufactured goods that left North Carolina with the meals, that left the Firestones, the Michelins. | ||
| That is what happened in America, and that was done by corporate CEOs that flew planes, not an Army. | ||
| Scale, exactly. | ||
| You need scale. | ||
| But scale is a 30-long, 40-year, which is where we have been when those jobs left the Joe Biden, when you were on during the Joe Biden era, when Joe Biden gave subsidies and credits to these companies, have that commerce lady to come on. | ||
| That's who the former commerce of Rhode Island, I believe she was the governor. | ||
| She's the one that instituted a lot of these challenge grants. | ||
| Right now, like I said, Georgia and rural counties have these Evie, Rod Portman and Jared Brown, they got rid of that working class man. | ||
| Okay, Evie, Evie, let's get our response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, first of all, thank you for being engaged in all of this and for taking the time to understand more about it. | |
| Yeah, when you hear the word steelworkers or something like that, we're hard to pin down in Washington because we have a labor component and a business component, which sets us apart from a lot of other associations. | ||
| And even though the Steel Workers Union says steel, they also make things ranging from neutrograin bars, Gatorade, to that heavy steel that we were talking about. | ||
| And so there's all sorts of products in there. | ||
| But I think the caller is absolutely right in terms of like the evolution of this challenge that it is, we've seen it play out in some cases in slow motion over the last 30 or 40 years. | ||
| And it has been a lot of large multinational corporations that have utilized the advantages of certain trade policies to shift production overseas where they can produce the good for a lower cost and bring it back in at virtually no cost. | ||
| And so one of the things that the tariffs are trying to correct is that problem. | ||
| One of the things that I supported all of these efforts that the Biden administration was doing to try to lift up some specific sectors of the economy that are very important, like semiconductors or automotive production in the United States, and to keep that momentum going. | ||
| I think that's critically, I think that's critically important. | ||
| And again, I just want to say that I do think that we've encountered serious challenges with manufacturing in the United States over the last couple of decades. | ||
| I have reasons for optimism because, you know, in part, I think the pandemic opened up a lot of folks' eyes about, hey, we actually need AI is great, apps are great, but we need to make some things in the United States too. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That is Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. | ||
| You can find out more about that organization at AmericanManufacturing.org. | ||
| Thanks so much for coming in today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mimi, thank you, and thanks to the callers. | |
| Later this morning on Washington Journal, the Trump White House is considering a major policy change in federal marijuana policy. | ||
| We'll discuss that with Bo Kilmer. | ||
| He's co-director of Rand's Drug Policy Research Center. | ||
| But first, after the break, it's open forum. | ||
| Start calling in now the numbers. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be right back. | |
| Have been watching C-SPAN Washington Journal for over 10 years now. | ||
| This is a great format that C-SPAN offers. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| I enjoy hearing everybody's opinion. | ||
| I'm a huge C-SPAN fan. | ||
| I listen every morning on the way to work. | ||
| I think C-SPAN should be required viewing for all three branches of cover. | ||
| First of all, if you see a lot of C-SPAN and how you'll covered these hearings. | ||
| Thank you, everyone at C-SPAN, for allowing this interaction with everyday citizens. | ||
| It's an amazing show to get real opinions from real people. | ||
| Appreciate you guys' non-biased coverage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love politics, and I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices. | |
| You and C-SPAN show the truth. | ||
| Back to the universe for C-SPAN. | ||
| It's the one essential news network. | ||
| So you interviewed the other night. | ||
| I watched it about two o'clock in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching. | |
| Don't worry, you were on prime time too, but they happened to have a little re-rush. | ||
| Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week? | ||
| Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor. | |
| I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN. | ||
| There's a lot of things that Congress fights about that they disagree on. | ||
| We can all watch that on C-SPAN. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN. | |
| Thank you! | ||
| That was a major C-SPAN moment. | ||
| If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground. | ||
| And welcome forward to everybody watching at home. | ||
| We know C-SPAN covers this lot as well. | ||
| We appreciate that. | ||
| And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell. | ||
| This is being carried live by C-SPAN. | ||
| It's being watched not only in this country, it's being watched around the world right now. | ||
| Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | ||
| He was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you ever miss any of C-SPAN's coverage, you can find it anytime online at c-span.org. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| It is Open Forum and we are taking your calls. | ||
| This is Carol Pennsylvania, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Carol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I watched a segment regarding mail-in ballots, and I usually just listen, but this time I have to speak. | ||
| During COVID, the county sent out postcards saying if you wanted a mail-in ballot, call this number. | ||
| And it was a county number. | ||
| It was a legitimate number. | ||
| I thought I would get a mail-in ballot. | ||
| What I received was an application for a mail-in ballot. | ||
| On this application, they wanted your name, address, phone number, social security number, driver's license number, your county, and your party affiliation. | ||
| In Pennsylvania, we have a closed primary that you must be registered Democrat or Republican to vote. | ||
| Independents cannot vote in primary, which I think is a bunch of hogwash. | ||
| But anyway, and then you have to sign it. | ||
| I was already registered. | ||
| I did not want all this information going through the mail, so I shredded it. | ||
| I have difficulty walking. | ||
| I'm 83 years old. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I go to my polling place every time to vote because I think it's important to vote. | ||
| And I don't know how other states do this mail-in ballots, but Pennsylvania makes it really hard, and they have it very accurate. | ||
| And that's all I want to say about mail-in voting. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Paul, San Antonio, Texas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I want to say is Don Trump doesn't care about the mailing ballots. | |
| He's trying to read the literature. | ||
| All his fire has been aimed at black and brown people around this country. | ||
| He's trying to keep power so you keep doing what he's doing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And regarding the Texas House of Representatives, they're meeting today to resume those redistricting efforts of its U.S. congressional map. | ||
| The legislation session happens amid Democratic lawmakers returning to the state after protesting the newly proposed map. | ||
| That is happening at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| That is today on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| You can watch that. | ||
| It's going to be live from Austin, Texas. | ||
| Also, right after this program at 10 a.m. Eastern, we'll have the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, that's PETA. | ||
| They'll hold a press conference outside the Department of Health and Human Services calling for a ban on importing monkeys for research from Asia and Africa. | ||
| That's right after this program here on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can watch both those programs also on our app, C-SPANNOW and online at c-span.org. | ||
| And Mike, Oak Grove, Missouri, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| I'd like to talk about yesterday when Pedro was hosting the show. | ||
| And I know that C-SPAN isn't into, oh, I don't know, like calling people out. | ||
| But yesterday, Pedro played a clip of Donald Trump on Fox News saying that the United States has given $350 billion to Ukraine when the amount is actually somewhere around half of that. | ||
| And Pedro, you know, just let that go by. | ||
| And I think that somebody needs to call things like that out when they're just blatantly wrong or lies, whatever. | ||
| And I think it goes to show the honesty of the man that we have in our White House these days, which is not, he has no morals and no honesty in him. | ||
| While he was in Scotland, they captured a video of his caddy dropping a golf ball for him. | ||
| That's the man that we have in our White House today. | ||
| And I got to say, the way he is doing Ukraine sickens me. | ||
| It sickens me that they are the victims of an invasion and, you know, an unwarranted invasion. | ||
| And Donald Trump will not see that. | ||
| He will not help them. | ||
| I'm 65. | ||
| For the first time in my life, I'm embarrassed to be an American. | ||
| I really hate what this country is becoming. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Mike, with respect to Ukraine, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt spoke about the President's stance when it comes to U.S. military support for Ukraine. | ||
| Here she is. | ||
| The President has definitively stated U.S. boots will not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we can certainly help in the coordination and perhaps provide other means of security guarantees to our European allies. | ||
| The President understands security guarantees are crucially important to ensure a lasting peace, and he has directed his national security team to coordinate with our friends in Europe and also to continue to cooperate and discuss these matters with Ukraine and Russia as well. | ||
| Helen, now, have the Russians responded at all? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know we spoke with President Putin last night. | |
| What has been their response? | ||
| Because we've heard some reports from the Kremlin and others saying they're unequivocally against NATO troops on the ground. | ||
| Well, look, the President continues to have these conversations with both leaders. | ||
| Those conversations took place in Anchorage, Alaska, again yesterday with the Europeans and President Zelensky. | ||
| And he has directed his team to come up with a framework for these security guarantees that can be acceptable to help ensure a lasting peace and end this war. | ||
| Here's Robert in Washington, D.C. Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Yes, I live in Washington, D.C. | ||
| I am actually seven blocks away from the Capitol building. | ||
| I walk past it every day. | ||
| I love the previous caller's statement about skills, training. | ||
| But I have to remind everyone that America told us that you need to go to college, get into extreme debt, and speak Spanish, become bilingual to succeed. | ||
| And now we want to deport all of those folks. | ||
| The situation that we have here in America, and especially in my hometown, Washington, D.C., is that we hear all kinds of explanations for not doing the right thing. | ||
| What is the right thing? | ||
| Best practices. | ||
| Donald Trump, I'm a Democrat, but you know, Donald Trump could actually be a very great president if he was just not so mean. | ||
| I mean, he used to be a Democrat, but he's mean now. | ||
| And everybody around him is mean. | ||
| Mean in what sense? | ||
| Give me an example, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Mean in the sense that people, veterans like myself, I'm a Marine Corps veteran, people like my, and I'm on Social Security. | ||
| I mean, why are you cutting, why is the Republicans cutting support for us guys? | ||
| I mean, just be nice. | ||
| Keep Social Security. | ||
| Keep support for the veterans. | ||
| Do you understand what I'm saying? | ||
| And I know I'm going long, and I apologize. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| We got your point. | ||
| Ann, Santee, California, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Ann. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I would like to know that thank you like the rich and how I look like Democrats or 12 Democrats party like Detroit. | ||
| Sorry, Ann, I'm not able to make out what you're saying. | ||
| Try again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I wish somebody could explain to me why the rich and how I look like Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats are becoming more socialistic than Democrats, or communists. | ||
| Do not the rich people understand that they want to eliminate private property, that they take people's property and put on a planet in Russia and Cuba. | ||
| That's what they did, and I'm sure they did other places too. | ||
| Attempts on communism off-ended food shortages and starvation. | ||
| You remember Venezuela, just recently, where they went post-war and there was starvation and thread lines. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And Mike, New London, Connecticut Independent Line, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think that the vote the best security for voting would be same-day voting in person using a government-issued photo ID on a hand-counted paper ballot. | ||
| I think the more convenient we make voting for all voters, the more convenient we make it for all the fraudsters. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tommy Belcher, Kentucky, Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| I was calling to say, I don't understand all these news programs, MLC NBC and all of them. | ||
| They get on there and they analyze things a bit, but they don't have no answers. | ||
| And the Agavace just bringing stuff up that maybe the other side could even help, you know, help the other side against us. | ||
| And Trump, I was sickened to see him the way he was manhound on Putin. | ||
| I didn't see Putin manhound on him like that. | ||
| He loves that man, and he ain't going to do nothing to help Ukraine. | ||
| He's already made up his mind. | ||
| And people better go back. | ||
| I'm 77. | ||
| And Khrushchev, that's the old Russian leader, he said that they would take over America without firing a shot. | ||
| And brother, they've worked on it ever since, and they finally got the president they need to do it. | ||
| And all this stuff of cutting people, I worked all my life since I was 11 years old. | ||
| I went in the military. | ||
| I worked in the coal mines. | ||
| Nobody is giving me nothing. | ||
| I paid enough taxes if they give me back the interest. | ||
| I'd never signed up on their pensions. | ||
| But they told me if I worked hard, done everything I was supposed to do when I got where I couldn't work. | ||
| And I'm 77, blind in one eye. | ||
| I can't hardly walk at all. | ||
| And this mail-in voting, I need it because I cannot get to the polls. | ||
| I've got prostate problems, health problems, you won't believe. | ||
| And these people, they don't care. | ||
| They got their little billions through their daddy. | ||
| And Donald Trump bought his, his dad bought him deferments to get out of the military. | ||
| He don't like the military. | ||
| He wants Putin to take us over and act like a big shot. | ||
| All right, Tommy. | ||
| We got your point. | ||
| Michael, Elkridge, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just want to comment on a postal mail-in ballot. | ||
| And I want to expound on one of your first callers that talked to you this morning, integrity. | ||
| And I'm not just talking about the mail-in ballots. | ||
| I'm talking about the United States Postal System across the board. | ||
| Mail theft is obnoxious. | ||
| How can you trust a system that cannot create a mail system that ensures that you get your mail? | ||
| I have gone through so many channels in trying to correct receiving my mail for years. | ||
| I have received two and three ballots in the mail. | ||
| And even after the election, I receive mail and ballots. | ||
| So I'm saying across the board, it's just not about the mail and ballots, the postal service itself. | ||
| And it's within the postal service that all this mail is not being delivered, and it is being stolen. | ||
| If you check the research on how much mail is being stolen and has been stolen for years, it's crazy. | ||
| And so far as people getting this Employment with the furnace that Trump is trying to clean up. | ||
| You look at the ratio of our young people that are employed everywhere you go. | ||
| The fast food restaurants, the markets, the stores. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Where are our young people? | ||
| Thank you for taking. | ||
| And this is a website that you might be interested in regarding the topic of mail-in votes. | ||
| This is vote.gov. | ||
| It is a U.S. government, it's an official U.S. government website, vote.gov. | ||
| And it starts with this banner: your vote is safe. | ||
| What happens after you vote? | ||
| Whether you voted by mail or in person, there are processes in place to make sure your vote is secure. | ||
| State and local election offices take steps to make sure your vote is counted correctly and your voice is represented. | ||
| You can take a look at that, the specific issues that they bring up. | ||
| This is a section on mail-in ballots and how to secure it. | ||
| And that's all the time that we've got for this open forum, but we will have another segment of open forum, so there'll be more time for you to weigh in on whatever's on your mind. | ||
| Coming up next, Bo Kilmer, he's co-director of Rand's Drug Policy Research Center, joins us to talk about some big changes that are possible in the Trump White House and considering federal marijuana policy that's coming up right after this break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us now is the co-director of RAND's Drug Policy Research Center, Bo Kilmer. | ||
| Welcome to the program, Bo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good to see you, Mimi. | |
| Can you tell us a little bit about the type of work that you do at the Drug Policy Research Center? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so RAND is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that really tries to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. | |
| We work on a lot of different topics, but at the intersection of the work that we do on health and social and economic well-being and on criminal justice, we have our drug policy research center where we work on all substances ranging from alcohol to cannabis to fentanyl and looking at all different levers, whether it be on the supply side, reducing demand, and analyzing the economics of these markets. | ||
| Really trying to help federal, state, and policymakers in other countries have the information they need so they can have productive conversations about this controversial issue. | ||
| Now, in speaking about federal policy regarding marijuana, first, what is that federal policy? | ||
| What is it right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, as many people know, there are 24 states which have passed laws to allow the production and distribution and retail sale of cannabis to adults for any reason, covering more than 50% of the U.S. population. | ||
| There are another, we have, I think, 40 states now that also allow cannabis to be used for medical purposes. | ||
| But the important thing to keep in mind is that this is all illegal under federal law. | ||
| And when we look at federal laws with respect to illegal drugs, we really want to focus on the Controlled Substances Act. | ||
| Now, there are many different aspects to that act, but what seems to be getting a lot of attention is this discussion about rescheduling. | ||
| And within the Controlled Substances Act, it places all controlled substances into five different categories. | ||
| We could call them schedule, with Schedule I being the most restrictive and Schedule 5 being the least restrictive. | ||
| And the way that drugs get classified into these different schedules largely depends on two factors. | ||
| One, whether or not the federal government recognizes that there's a medical value to using the substance. | ||
| And then also it's a potential for abuse and dependence. | ||
| And so, so, Bo, not to cut you off, but I wanted to put that on the screen, actually, so people can follow along with what you are talking about with these DEA drug classifications, starting with Schedule 1 with, as an example, heroin, ecstasy. | ||
| and marijuana are in Schedule 1. | ||
| Schedule 2 is cocaine and fentanyl. | ||
| And then it goes all the way down to Schedule 5, which is something like robotuscin. | ||
| This isn't an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea. | ||
| I mean, how did marijuana be in the same category as heroin and considered less dangerous than cocaine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, Mimi, while there are five schedules, it's best to think about this as there being two buckets. | ||
| If something doesn't have a federally recognized medical value, it automatically goes into Schedule I. | ||
| And if it does have a federally recognized medical value, then it goes either into Schedule II, three, four, or five. | ||
| So that's why you've got cannabis, you've got LSD, and you've got heroin in Schedule I. | ||
| It's not because the federal government thinks that heroin is, or that cannabis is just as dangerous as heroin, but that's the bucket that it goes into. | ||
| And so if it doesn't have a federally recognized medical value, it automatically goes into Schedule I. | ||
| So let's take a look at President Trump addressing this issue. | ||
| This is from last week about changes to marijuana regulation, and then we'll talk about it. | ||
| There is reporting that the administration is going to reclassify marijuana. | ||
| Would that send mixed messages that marijuana is okay, some drugs are okay, but we're trying to clean up crime. | ||
| How do they go hand in hand? | ||
| We're only looking at that. | ||
| That's early, but somebody reported it, which is fine. | ||
| We're looking at it. | ||
| Some people like it. | ||
| Some people hate it. | ||
| Some people hate the whole concept of marijuana because if it does bad for the children, it does bad for people that are older than children. | ||
| But we're looking at reclassification, and we'll make a determination over the next, I would say, over the next few weeks. | ||
| And that determination hopefully will be the right one. | ||
| It's a very complicated subject, the subject of marijuana. | ||
| I've heard great things having to do with medical, and I've had bad things having to do with just about everything else. | ||
| But medical and, you know, for pain and various things, I've heard some pretty good things. | ||
| But for other things, I've heard some pretty bad things. | ||
| So, Bo, what do you take away from that as far as where you think the president is going on policy, possible policy changes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When we talk about, he was talking about reclassification or rescheduling. | |
| And, you know, within those five different schedules, it's possible to either reschedule a drug, meaning you move it from one schedule to another, or it's possible to deschedule, which means remove it entirely from the Controlled Substances Act. | ||
| Now, the conversations that are happening right now are about moving cannabis or marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. | ||
| This is something that's been debated for decades, but it was actually something that was started during the Biden administration. | ||
| And in the Biden administration, they started doing this through executive action. | ||
| And long story short, it ended up stalling out at the end of the administration. | ||
| And so now there's conversations about whether or not through executive action that cannabis should be moved from Schedule I to Schedule III. | ||
| Now, it's in terms of, well, you know, a lot of people wonder, well, what does that actually mean? | ||
| I want to be very clear that moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III doesn't make all this activity legal at the state level. | ||
| So all those dispensaries and all the production, that still would be illegal under federal law. | ||
| But when we think about the potential consequences, I kind of put them into four different buckets. | ||
| And the first is with respect to tax relief. | ||
| There's a part of the internal revenue code or the tax code that specifically states that if you are trafficking in a Schedule I or a Schedule II drug, you can't claim regular business expenses. | ||
| You can't get exemptions for them under federal taxes. | ||
| So that means that these cannabis companies are spending a lot in terms of federal taxes that other businesses don't have to. | ||
| And so if you move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, that would no longer apply. | ||
| And so it would make the cannabis businesses richer. | ||
| And there's also some concern in the public health community that if you allow these companies to deduct their expenses for advertising and promotion, that we could see more marketing. | ||
| So that's one bucket. | ||
| The second bucket is with respect to penalties. | ||
| Now, in general, the penalties for Schedule I drugs for selling and possessing them tend to be more severe than they are for Schedule III. | ||
| So if you move from one to three, it should reduce some of those penalties. | ||
| However, within the Controlled Substances Act, there are some penalties that are specific to the drug, not necessarily the schedule. | ||
| So overall, we would see a reduction in penalties for some offenses, but not all of them. | ||
| Kind of the third bucket is with respect to research. | ||
| Now, you can definitely do research on Schedule I drugs, but there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through. | ||
| And when you move a drug from Schedule I to Schedule III, that should reduce some of those regulations and some of those administrative barriers. | ||
| However, the Congressional Research Service came out last year saying that a move from Schedule I to Schedule III probably wouldn't have much of an effect on research because there already was a different law signed or a different bill signed into law in 2022 regulating research with respect to cannabis. | ||
| And now some people will say, well, if you move from Schedule I to Schedule III, maybe you're reducing the stigma. | ||
| You might get more researchers involved in doing work with cannabis. | ||
| But the thing to keep in mind is even if on the margins, if this reduces barriers and it gets more people involved in research, a lot of this is all going to depend on how much money is available. | ||
| The National Institutes of Health, they fund a lot of the research on marijuana. | ||
| And so a lot will depend on how much money is actually available. | ||
| And when we're thinking about the overall implications on research. | ||
| And the final area, and where there's a lot of questions, is with respect to what this means for the FDA. | ||
| Now, if you move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, that doesn't mean that you're going to be able to go down to your CBS and get botanical cannabis from the pharmacist. | ||
| There's a whole process that the FDA requires for drugs to be able to get a kind of or pass kind of a new drug application. | ||
| And so there are a lot of questions about, well, what does this mean for the FDA? | ||
| I mean, on one hand, they might say, well, yeah, you're moving it to Schedule III, but this hasn't gone through the normal FDA process. | ||
| So maybe nothing happens. | ||
| Perhaps maybe there could be changes with how the FDA regulates and evaluates botanical cannabis. | ||
| Or here we're talking about the flower. | ||
| Another possibility is, you know, there is an enforcement arm of the FDA. | ||
| And, you know, will they potentially crack down on a lot of these medical dispensaries? | ||
| I doubt that that's going to be the case. | ||
| But there are a lot of questions about what this means for the FDA. | ||
| And also, if this were to go through, how much money would be available for the FDA to regulate and enforce? | ||
| That's a big question. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's tell viewers that they can join the conversation with Bo Kilmer of Rand's Drug Policy Center at the numbers. | ||
| Republicans are on 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats are on 202748-8000. | ||
| And Independents are on 202748-8002. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| Bo, as far as public opinion on legalizing marijuana, this from the Pew Research Center, 57% say that it should be legal for medical and recreational use. | ||
| 32% say it should be legal for medical use only. | ||
| And 11% say it should not be legal at all. | ||
| What have you been seeing as far as the trends in public opinion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Overall, the trends have gone up. | |
| I mean, not necessarily with the Pew Poll, but Gallup has asked this question for decades about, you know, should marijuana be legal or not? | ||
| And I remember, I think it was in the mid-1990s that was the respondents, about 25% of them said, yes, marijuana should be legal. | ||
| You know, you fast forward to today, some of those numbers are closer to 70%. | ||
| And so we definitely have seen an increase in terms of public approval for legalization. | ||
| One thing to keep in mind is, you know, those questions are pretty vague. | ||
| Do you want it legal? | ||
| And there are a lot of different ways that you could legalize cannabis. | ||
| You know, the way it's being implemented here in the United States is that, you know, we essentially are allowing for-profit companies to produce, distribute, and sell. | ||
| But if you go outside of the United States, there's a lot more interest in what we might call these middle ground options, where they're legalizing some access, but they're not necessarily allowing commercial sales, whether it be just allowing people to grow it at home and maybe give it away. | ||
| Or you've got Germany experimenting with co-ops. | ||
| And so once you get outside of the U.S., there tends to be a lot more interest in some of these middle ground approaches. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers. | ||
| Rush East at McKeysport, Pennsylvania, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Rush. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| And, Bo. | ||
| Hey, I'm 73, Pittsburgh here, and went into the Navy in 69. | ||
| And when I graduated from high school, I didn't know, we didn't know, I didn't know anybody that smoked pot. | ||
| We used to drive down to Shadyside to see what a hippie looked like. | ||
| Now, in the Navy, I got introduced to pot out on an island in the Pacific. | ||
| And then in the meantime, within that next year, drugs took over big time back here. | ||
| My point is, I never cared for marijuana, and everybody I knew smoked it. | ||
| In fact, it got to the point I would blow out on a joint to make it look like it was lit up and, you know, give it a big inhale. | ||
| And because I got paranoid. | ||
| So now my daughter, a very successful teacher this and that, she has neuropathy. | ||
| So she was getting this medicinal stuff. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| So I quit, unless I had enough beer in me, then that marijuana was okay. | ||
| But a year or so ago, a little over a year ago, a buddy of mine, he's passed now, but his wife's been smoking since high school. | ||
| And she had some, and they were out there taking a smoke break. | ||
| And I went out. | ||
| I thought I'd take a couple hits. | ||
| And I did. | ||
| I took about three hits. | ||
| I'll tell you what, the marijuana she had is not the same as what you used to smoke, or I used to smoke. | ||
| I mean. | ||
| All right, well, let's get a comment on that, Bo, as far as the potency of marijuana today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rush, I appreciate the comment. | |
| And yeah, you being in Pennsylvania, this is a hot topic of conversation. | ||
| But with respect to potency, there definitely has been an increase over time in terms of how people are growing the plants. | ||
| And if you look at the data from the DEA, when you look at the samples they've seized, back in the 1990s and even around 2000, on average, the Delta 9 THC concentration, so there are a lot of different cannabinoids, but it's the Delta 9 THC or THC, which is primarily responsible for intoxication. | ||
| Well, back then, it was on average about 5%. | ||
| Now, you definitely could get higher potency product was around, but typically people were using stuff that was around 5%. | ||
| You fast forward to today and you go into a lot of these shops and you're seeing the flour being sold, being sold with concentrations of 20% or higher. | ||
| Now, we know that there is some inflation, and so you've got to be skeptical of what you see on some of these labels in some of these states, but there definitely has been this increase. | ||
| And that's in, and right now we're just talking about flour. | ||
| But also, there are other products that are now available. | ||
| There are different, what they'll call waxes or shatters, which is a concentrate, which could have potentially, you know, 80, 85% THC. | ||
| And so that's whether or not you want to allow that to be sold in stores is a policy decision. | ||
| And so far in the United States, while we do have potency caps with respect to edibles, most places, there are a couple exceptions, but most places don't put caps on the THC levels for flour or for the concentrates. | ||
| And so this is something that policymakers and voters need to be thinking about. | ||
| Do you want to allow the industry to decide these levels or do you want some type of regulation? | ||
| Here's Tim, a Republican in St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Love your show. | ||
| Love the ability to make comments to the nation and to the world. | ||
| I've been using medical marijuana for probably two years. | ||
| I typically eat the gummies. | ||
| I've just seen a lot of benefit with pain. | ||
| I had back surgery a few years ago, so I have some neuropathy in my legs and some back pain. | ||
| And rather than take other prescription drugs, I've just found a big benefit to the medical marijuana. | ||
| I think that I can't believe that some states don't allow medical marijuana. | ||
| There's just so much benefit to it. | ||
| People are going out and getting it anyways through back channels. | ||
| So a reschedule seems to make a lot of sense economically to the people producing the products. | ||
| And it just makes sense. | ||
| I don't understand the current laws. | ||
| So that's my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Anything to add to that, Bo? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, but I mean, you know, Tim's final comment about not understanding the laws. | |
| I mean, I get that. | ||
| As a researcher, you know, you've got all this stuff happening at the state level, but then it's illegal at the federal level. | ||
| And so you really, you know, I would say for at least the past decade, while all this has been happening at the state level, you know, lawmakers and federal agencies have largely kind of sat on the sidelines and kind of watched this industry grow. | ||
| And I was part of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel that was focused on cannabis policy and public health last year. | ||
| And I would say one of the main takeaways from that particular report, which is free to download, was that even if the federal government's going to continue to prohibit marijuana, there still is a lot that federal agencies can do with respect to providing guidance in terms of testing these products, also monitoring what's happening in education. | ||
| So regardless of this whole conversation about rescheduling, and even as, you know, if marijuana remains illegal under federal law, there still is a lot that federal agencies can do to help guide states and help protect public health. | ||
| And I'll just show a map of the United States from Newsweek showing where marijuana is legal, completely legal, and where it's legal just for medical uses. | ||
| This blue color is just medical uses. | ||
| So that includes Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, I guess for now. | ||
| And legal is the purple. | ||
| And the gray is it's still illegal in those states. | ||
| You could see that at Newsweek if you'd like to look that up. | ||
| I do want to ask you, Bo, about a new drug called, or a group of synthetic opioids called nitazines that is currently an issue in Europe. | ||
| How big of a problem would that be here in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It could be huge. | |
| And so, so Mimi, as you said, we do see some of these nitazines, which is just another class of synthetic opioids. | ||
| So fentanyl is a type of synthetic opioid. | ||
| The nitazines, some of them tend to be a lot stronger and more potent than what we see with fentanyl. | ||
| And while we do see this showing up here in the U.S., I mean, this is really an issue of concern in Europe, and so they're paying really close attention to this. | ||
| Now, these nitazines were originally developed for pain relief, but they've never been approved for use in humans. | ||
| And one of the difficulties is a lot of our standard toxicology panels don't necessarily test for the nitazines. | ||
| So we have a hard time gauging what's happening with respect to prevalence. | ||
| But the thing to keep in mind is these nitazines are synthetic opioids. | ||
| And so if you're with someone and they've, you know, and they've been using nitazines and they and they've overdosed, you can use naloxone or narcan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You might not, you might need a couple, you might need a couple doses of it. | |
| But it's important if you suspect that someone has overdosed from fentanyl or from the nitazines, administer naloxone if it's available and call 911. | ||
| And that's also called Narcan. | ||
| And that is effective against these nitazines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| But in some cases, you may need multiple doses. | ||
| So what is happening with fentanyl and the flow of fentanyl into this country? | ||
| Has that been stopped completely? | ||
| Have overdose deaths dropped off? | ||
| Like where is that right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it hasn't stopped. | |
| You know, since 2013, there have been on the order of about 450,000 deaths related to illegally manufactured fentanyl. | ||
| And, you know, since 2013, these numbers continued to escalate. | ||
| But I want to say it was around the summer of 2023 that they started to flatten out and then we saw a large decrease. | ||
| And so if you look at the most recent provisional data from the CDC, it suggests that in the past year that there were 45,000 deaths, approximately 45,000 deaths related to fentanyl. | ||
| Now, while this is still unacceptable, this is a big decrease from when it was at its peak and we were closer to 75,000 deaths in the previous year. | ||
| But the one thing to keep in mind is, I mean, those are just the national numbers, but things get a lot more complicated when we look at the state level. | ||
| If you look at what's happening with fentanyl-related deaths in the states, and some of them you're seeing a big decrease, some you're seeing a small increase. | ||
| And in fact, in a couple of states, you're actually beginning to see an uptick. | ||
| And so it gets a bit more complicated, but there are a lot of researchers trying to figure out, well, why do we see this large decrease? | ||
| And I want to say there are probably more than 20 different possible explanations, ranging from a precursor control efforts in China. | ||
| Maybe there was something that happened with respect to the drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. | ||
| Other people think that this may have to do with an increase in access to treatment or overdose prevention services. | ||
| And I have to say that, you know, and you're going to be seeing a lot more research coming out on this over the next six months. | ||
| But one of the big challenges is that we really are, as researchers, we really are hampered by our weakened drug policy data infrastructure. | ||
| The United States used to lead the world in this, and that's no longer the case. | ||
| And, you know, for example, we've cut really important data programs. | ||
| There was one that used to be called the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program. | ||
| And this was funded initially by the Department of Justice and then the Office of National Drug Control Policy. | ||
| And this was, they did interviews with jail inmates. | ||
| And this was by far the best source of information we had on local drug markets and how much people were paying, who they were getting it from. | ||
| And we were actually able to use these data in combination with others to then begin to figure out, well, how much money were the Mexican drug trafficking organizations making. | ||
| So it was a really important data program that ended up being cut in 2013. | ||
| And I would love to see some version of it come back. | ||
| Another issue is that the United States has been really slow to take advantage of emerging technologies. | ||
| You know, for example, wastewater testing. | ||
| You can actually test the sewer water for metabolites and drugs to get a sense of what drugs are being used. | ||
| And then you can actually back out how much is being consumed. | ||
| And while there have been parts of Europe that have done this for decades, and Australia has a really strong national network, in the United States, it's not as if this doesn't happen, but it's pretty idiosyncratic. | ||
| You know, you may have one university here, a city there. | ||
| And so, you know, as we saw with COVID, you know, we created a whole wastewater testing network for COVID to be able to understand what was happening with different strains. | ||
| It would be very easy to do that for illegal drugs. | ||
| And then you could also think about this as an early warning system. | ||
| Let's talk to Mary in Wisconsin, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Amy. | |
| I just wanted to mention that there is medical knowledge that the THC content in the marijuana has caused psychotic breaks for children coming in the emergency room. | ||
| And as a result of that, they have been a long-standing history of bipolar disorder and other psychiatric disturbances like schizophrenia. | ||
| And I've heard of people getting children in daycare centers, those little bears, men having to go to the emergency room. | ||
| What's going to happen to those little kids when they're 10 years old? | ||
| Is their brain going to be damaged from the THC? | ||
| And look what alcohol has done to children. | ||
| We have to learn that we should not succumb to politics and money to save our children. | ||
| And the only other thing is it causes a lot of depression in people, and they get lazy and they don't want to work. | ||
| All right, let's get an answer for you, Bo Kilmer, on marijuana and kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mary, you're right. | |
| As marijuana has become more available, you definitely are hearing more about ER visits increasing, calls to poison control. | ||
| One thing you have to keep in mind is the numbers that you'll see in the press, they'll say, oh, there's been a 500% or 1,000% increase. | ||
| But that's usually based on a really small number. | ||
| That's not to discount the effect that this has on the kids and the parents. | ||
| But if you look at the actual numbers, it's gone from something that's really small to something that's just a little bit larger. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| And one of the issues is especially with some of the gummies, right? | ||
| I mean, they look like a little gummy bear in a lot of places. | ||
| And if kids see them on a table, they're going to think that's regular candy. | ||
| And so that's why there's a lot of movement toward using childproof packaging for some of this. | ||
| But you're exactly right. | ||
| There is a real concern. | ||
| I mean, fortunately, most of the kids that have enough THC to have to go to the emergency room, most of them end up being fine. | ||
| And there isn't any long-lasting damage. | ||
| But there are people that do run into problems. | ||
| And Mary, getting to your earlier point about some of the overall consequences, I think, whether or not we're talking about using marijuana or alcohol, I mean, if you've got a history of schizophrenia and mental health conditions kind of in your family, you need to be very cautious when thinking about using these substances. | ||
| Here's Constance in Chesapeake, Virginia, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm glad that I'm following Mary's call. | ||
| I'm a 72-year-old person, and I've been smoking marijuana off and on since I was 16 years old, and it never has hurt my mind. | ||
| I feel that it's been demonized. | ||
| Now, knowing the history of why it was made illegal, let's go to that right now with Mr. Ann Slinger and the FBI. | ||
| But they did it over race reasons. | ||
| They wanted a reason to pick on Hispanic people coming to this country and a reason to pick on black people in the country. | ||
| That was the reason it was made illegal. | ||
| Hemp was grown freely in this country, also was used in paint at one time, but if a child ate a paint chip, then it didn't kill them. | ||
| It started to kill them when they started using the petroleum companies in the paint. | ||
| All right, let's oil companies. | ||
| Let's hear from Bo Kilmer. | ||
| Go ahead, Bo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, no, this question about hemp is really interesting. | |
| And this is another reason why there's a lot of confusion about what's going on. | ||
| You know, that you can produce hemp for fibers and seeds. | ||
| And in the 2018 federal farm bill, they created a definition of hemp. | ||
| So hemp is the same plant as what you would get your marijuana budget from. | ||
| It's cannabis sativa-l. | ||
| But what the federal farm bill did in 2018 is it said if that plant has less than 0.3% or less than or equal to 0.3% Delta-9 THC. | ||
| So once again, THC, kind of the main intoxicant. | ||
| If it has less than that, we're defining it as hemp. | ||
| If it has more than that, we're defining it as marijuana. | ||
| And what that meant is that those plants that had less than 0.3% THC, then were no longer subject to the Controlled Substances Act that we talked about before. | ||
| But what this has meant is there now has been a proliferation of all of what they're calling intoxicating hemp products. | ||
| Because when you're growing kind of industrial hemp or when you're growing those hemp products, you know, there could be a lot of CBD, which is another cannabinoid in the plant. | ||
| And what you can do is you can take out that CBD and then you could synthesize it into Delta IX THC, Delta VIII THC, which is also intoxicating. | ||
| And so that's why, you know, for example, we look at states like Indiana. | ||
| On the books, Indiana is probably the most restrictive state when it comes to cannabis, but they allow all of these intoxicating hemp products. | ||
| I was just there a couple weeks ago, and I mean, I went into the grocery stores, and I was seeing aisle, a whole aisle focused on Delta IX and Delta VIII drinks. | ||
| I mean, that's something I don't even see out here in California. | ||
| And so while there's been all this conversation about rescheduling and what's legalization at the state level, you've then had all this, you've had all these issues coming in with these intoxicating hemp products, which technically are legal under federal law. | ||
| Now, states have different policies with respect to these intoxicating hemp products. | ||
| Some of them ban them. | ||
| Some of them are regulating them. | ||
| Some of them have no regulations. | ||
| But this has created a real challenge, not only for policymakers, but also for researchers. | ||
| For example, we rely a lot on surveys asking whether or not people have used marijuana in the past month. | ||
| Well, if someone goes into a store and buys a four-pack of Delta-9 THC seltzer water, are they going to say that they use marijuana? | ||
| So that's one of the things that as researchers, we're trying to figure out. | ||
| And here is Alan in Old Saybrook, Connecticut Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Miss Mimi and Mr. Kilmer. | |
| I'll be as succinct as possible. | ||
| I went to Le Minster, Massachusetts, and a dispensary. | ||
| I just want to say my experience of it and three reasons why I think objectively this should not be used. | ||
| Number one, when I went there, I got a kind of cannabis sativa. | ||
| I went to a kind of a monastery in Millis, Massachusetts. | ||
| I heard it was a stronger strain at the moment, so I only took three toques. | ||
| About 15 minutes later, it took effect. | ||
| And what I could say is like everything had a halogen-like look around it. | ||
| Like everything was lights with halogen. | ||
| It's a distorted perception. | ||
| Now, I went to Rhode Island and I had an autism-like effect. | ||
| It fascinates me to look like bubbles that were just in a stream, a kind of autism. | ||
| Now, it was a disincentive. | ||
| I didn't want to do anything else that day. | ||
| And I think what it can do is this will disappoint the potentials of people of smoke marijuana. | ||
| They say, I should have been an engineer. | ||
| I should have been a work in finance. | ||
| And now I've wasted my education. | ||
| I don't really think straight. | ||
| My memory is not as good as I had liked it to be. | ||
| And I think it also can cause a false spirituality. | ||
| I think you're getting a spiritual experience. | ||
| Well, it's just a drug. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| All right, Alan. | ||
| Thanks for sharing that with us. | ||
| Any last comment, Bo? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, the thing to keep in mind is, you know, similar to alcohol, most people that use cannabis don't run into any issues. | |
| But there are people who, especially those that are using more frequently, can run into significant problems. | ||
| And in fact, you know, the most recent data from the Federal National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that the number of people meeting criteria for a cannabis use disorder was about 20 million in 2024. | ||
| Now, I want to be very clear: when we talk about a cannabis use disorder, that's not, you know, it doesn't mean that's as dangerous as someone with a heroin use disorder. | ||
| And even within that criteria or that category of a cannabis use disorder, there's a lot of variation. | ||
| But look, there are people that do run into problems because of their cannabis use. | ||
| And, you know, there are people that end up going to treatment. | ||
| And so this is something as states begin to make these products more available. | ||
| This is something they need to keep in mind in terms of education, but also in terms of making treatment widely available for those who need it. | ||
| All right, that's Bo Kilmer, senior policy researcher and co-director at Rand's Drug Policy Research Center. | ||
| You can find more on his work at rand.org. | ||
| Bo, thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me, me. | |
| And after a short break, we'll take more of your phone calls in open forum. | ||
| Start calling in now, Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| It's 202-748-8000 for Democrats and 202-748-8002 for Independents. | ||
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in open forum until the end of the program. | ||
| We'll take your calls. | ||
| This is an article for you from Fox News. | ||
| National Guard troops from six red states head to DC to help tackle crime. | ||
| It says National Guard troops from Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee are joining in on the Trump administration's crackdown. | ||
| That's at foxnews.com. | ||
| And Maryland's governor, Wes Moore, was speaking yesterday. | ||
| He gave his opinion on the National Guard deployment in D.C. Take a look. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And honestly, and it's something that we're not trained for. | |
| And I said this to the president, you know, and I, you know, listen, listen, the only uniform the president has ever worn is a Brooks brothers suit. | ||
| So I said, so as someone who's actually worn the uniform of this country, let me explain to you how this works. | ||
| How this works is this: we are trained to fight and win our nation's wars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's how we were trained, right? | |
| Our National Guard are trained to make sure that we can actually address moments of crisis, moments of tragedy inside of our states under the jurisdiction and under the authority of the state's commander-in-chief, right? | ||
| And I have had to activate members of the Maryland National Guard since I've been the governor, but it's also a duty that carries a significant amount of weight and soberness to it because I will not deploy these remarkable men and women for no reason, and definitely not for a publicity stunt. | ||
| That when we are putting them in harm's way, that when we're putting them in harm's way, we have to understand the weight that that decision should carry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so, this concept that we're going to put them out there to do municipal policing operations, which they are not trained for, my National Guard's not trained to do municipal policing. | |
| And he knows that. | ||
| And that is what is so unbelievably damaging about this decision and this racket that is then, that he's asking these men and women to do on behalf of quote-unquote public safety. | ||
| And you can see on your screen there, National Guard deployment right outside of Union Station. | ||
| That's D.C.'s train station. | ||
| And it's right in front of C-SPAN's studio here. | ||
| So that's a live look at that right now. | ||
| We'll go to your calls now, Robert, Washington, D.C., Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for taking my call. | |
| Yeah, I wanted to catch your last guess on the marijuana policy. | ||
| But I wanted to make some clarifications. | ||
| Now, I've done my own personal research at the Library of Congress. | ||
| And I put in about like about several thousands of hours on research on cannabis. | ||
| Now, remember, one gentleman, I think, he called and said he had taken a sativa. | ||
| Well, you know, that in the plant world, in the plant kingdom, that you have many different species that are similar to, but they're not alike. | ||
| Now, the CBD thing came in as a medical, I guess, a schedule for dispensaries because it was a hemp plant. | ||
| But now, the hemp plant and the cannabis plant are two different species of plants. | ||
| Now, the CBD that the gentleman was saying that he took the sativa, whether or not that it was an actual variety, or rather than, which in many dispensaries, they sell what is called a knockoff version of the real thing. | ||
| And that many dispensaries now, about 90%, usually contain hemp, but that they are usually hybridized with GMO, another varietal that brings about. | ||
| So I've had many of these dispensary types, and they'd be known now. | ||
| Like I said, I've smoked at least over 100 different varieties. | ||
| And I've been on my own personal, been growing cannabis in D.C. itself for over 30 years. | ||
| I've been growing cannabis in D.C. | ||
| Now, I've grown about at least 37 different varieties, and each one of them is different from the next one. | ||
| They all have different properties and different, but they call the cannabinoid profile. | ||
| So now, the CBD does not have a particular profile other than that I did find that it was very good for pain. | ||
| It's excellent for pain. | ||
| But anything else, I wouldn't even use CBD at all. | ||
| But one of the reasons why I didn't allow that is because it doesn't have any and contain any THC. | ||
| But now, in the District of Columbia, now in all the dispensaries, they could only sell CBD products only. | ||
| And that THC was considered as an illegal product in D.C. | ||
| Now, like, I was up in Colorado several years ago, and so you could only produce only a certain amount of plants and certain types of plants. | ||
| And so certain ones that they did have were— So, Robert, I've got to move on to other callers. | ||
| Stan Grants Pass, Oregon, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Stan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think I got my TV off. | ||
| I was wanting to say one of the reasons why I called you the first time ever on C-SPAN. | ||
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, you caught up with me on the TV. | |
| I'm concerned about in 1972, the Interior Secretary came out, and they were defunding and not getting the money to the forest because the fires came every year. | ||
| That was part of the OMC properties that were in southern Oregon. | ||
| And it was 1972. | ||
| I was only 16. | ||
| And I took the Interior Secretary out to CB repair shop to have shown them that I boxed them up. | ||
| They're going to be gone. | ||
| And I didn't have no repair person To repair the CBs so I could make sure everybody got back in from the compounds that were around. | ||
| And they were cutting back before even that. | ||
| In Langloys, Tip of Curry County, there was a forest state National Forest Service. | ||
| Well, that was gone in the early 70s. | ||
| But the fires came every year. | ||
| The ONC lands and the bylaws were set up to run perpetual, to take care of the land because it's the breeze and the stuff that comes off the continental drifts that creates weather. | ||
| It's a wave. | ||
| All right, Stan, and here's Joel in Cleveland, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Joel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I have a cheaper solution to the crime problem around the country. | |
| I think Trump should nationalize open carry and conceal carry. | ||
| It's more effective. | ||
| It's cheaper. | ||
| And if you don't like that, best practices are the Singaporean model. | ||
| Singapore has no crime. | ||
| It's clean as can be. | ||
| Those are our two ideas. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Elizabeth and Maryland, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to comment on the relationship with our President and Putin. | ||
| I am a child of war. | ||
| We were caught by the Russians. | ||
| I come from East Prussia, which belongs today to Russia. | ||
| And Mr. Putin's goal is to get back all the countries that were given taken from them in 1990. | ||
| He's very angry about this. | ||
| He wants to have East Germany back. | ||
| He wants to have Poland back. | ||
| He wants to all those. | ||
| The Ukraine is a big pretense. | ||
| And I read that in the Christian Science Monitor, so it's not a fly-by-night magazine. | ||
| And I don't understand that our president sells this country to a man who has killed thousands of people. | ||
| He was a middle-level person in the military in East Germany where he already killed people. | ||
| So why does this country, why our Republicans don't stand up against our president and say, look, you can do this. | ||
| You can sell your country down the drain. | ||
| We fled the Russians. | ||
| I know what it was like. | ||
| We had to hide. | ||
| The women had to hide on rooftops at night because the Russians took the building where we were refugees in Czechoslovakia. | ||
| And the women were going to, my mother said, I will jump off the roof if any Russian comes up here. | ||
| And the owner of the villa protected the women at night. | ||
| My 10-year-old cousin had to be up there. | ||
| The Russian came up to us and said, women, don't be worried. | ||
| I will not bother you at night. | ||
| They had taken place on the first floor. | ||
| We were on the second floor. | ||
| All the children, my cousins, we slept in one room. | ||
| I will never forget that entry. | ||
| That same night, he came looking for the women and my 10-year-old cousin. | ||
| And the owner of that villa protected him by putting a big cover over the door that led to the roof. | ||
| My mother always said she would have jumped. | ||
| Elizabeth, what do you want President Trump to do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't understand that our president sells us to a low-level man who has killed thousands of people, who has attacked the Ukraine. | |
| My heart bleeds every day on that one because I live through war. | ||
| That is a message to our country, to the people. | ||
| Well, this is from the BBC with the headline, Kremlin plays down Zelensky talks as Trump warns Putin may not want to make a deal. | ||
| And here's more from White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt yesterday reaffirming that there will not be any ground support for Ukrainians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First question is, whose idea was it to change the next steps from a trilateral to a bilateral meeting? | |
| It was an idea that evolved in the course of the president's conversations with both President Putin, President Zelensky, and the European leaders yesterday. | ||
| And as you saw, Kristen, with all of those European leaders leaving the White House, including the NATO Secretary General, they all agree that this is a great first step. | ||
| And it's a good thing that these two leaders are going to be sitting down together, and the President expects that to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And how long is Trump willing to wait and operate in good faith for Putin to actually arrange a meeting before he intervenes? | |
| Look, the President has put tremendous public pressure to bring this war to a close. | ||
| He's taken actions, as you've seen, sanctions on India and other actions as well. | ||
| He's made himself very clear that he wants to see this war end. | ||
| And he has scoffed at the ideas of others that have been raised that we should wait another month before any meeting takes place. | ||
| The president wants to move and he wants to bring this war to an end as quickly as possible. | ||
| Here's Ron in Florida, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, good morning. | |
| How are you today? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| You know, in these days where it doesn't seem like anyone can get along, Republicans or Democrats, it seems that they could find an issue that really benefited the American people, that they could get together and pass it and maybe start getting along with one another. | ||
| Now, my idea is, number one, the amount of people we lose on the road every year due to distracted driving, I've been told it's 4,000 or 5,000. | ||
| I'm sure it's much more because most people lie and say I wasn't on the phone. | ||
| Now, everyone knows that they have passed laws that are supposed to keep you from texting, but everyone still does it. | ||
| So why don't they just tell the technology companies to say, if this device is moving, it doesn't work. | ||
| And if you want to text or talk, you pull over and you text and talk. | ||
| No one dies at all. | ||
| In the meantime, we have children going to school, getting T-boned by people that are getting messages that are probably unimportant and dying every day. | ||
| Now, the party, the Republicans, say they're pro-life. | ||
| Well, if you're pro-life, life begins and then life ends, and you should have protection the whole way. | ||
| You shouldn't have to get on a road where you're supposed to be safe and get killed by someone that's using a device that shouldn't be used. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I talked to him. | |
| Got that. | ||
| And just for your awareness, NBC News is announcing that Walmart shrimp may have been exposed to radioactive material, according to the FDA. | ||
| The raw frozen shrimp was sold at Walmarts in 13 states, including Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania. | ||
| That's at NBCNews.com. | ||
| Elizabeth Utica, New York, Independent, go ahead, Elizabeth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my niece, Elizabeth. | |
| I was wondering, how come the Republicans do not stand up for this country? | ||
| Putin has been playing Trump, and Trump has been playing us. | ||
| For the simple reason, he held back the money from Ukraine a few months ago. | ||
| So their ammo went down, so Putin can take a little more land. | ||
| This wouldn't happen if he didn't hold up all of the ammo and what we needed. | ||
| They needed there. | ||
| Everybody stands by and just watches this. | ||
| I cannot believe it. | ||
| Trump knows that the insurrection was caused by him. | ||
| He done this, and he's holding up everything just so that they can take the rest of Ukraine. | ||
| I don't know what the Russians got on Trump, but they have something because that is why he's stalling everything off. | ||
| To get Ukraine, let Russia take it. | ||
| To bring him to Alaska to shame this country, to bring that war criminal here is another thing. | ||
| It's just unbelievable that we watch this and the people don't go against it. | ||
| They should boo him every time he comes, no matter where he goes. | ||
| That is what this person should get. | ||
| All right, Elizabeth. | ||
| And we got this text from Rob in Huntington, West Virginia. | ||
| I wonder how black people that voted for Trump feel about Trump attacking the Smithsonian by saying there is too much focus on how bad slavery was. | ||
| And this is an article from NBC News. | ||
| Trump says the Smithsonian focuses too much on how bad slavery was. | ||
| That's a quote. | ||
| A White House official told NBC News that Trump plans to expand his review of museums beyond the Smithsonian, which is based in Washington, D.C. | ||
| This is an article that you can read at NBC if you'd like more information about that. | ||
| Steve in Mission, Kansas, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Steve. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes. | ||
| My name's Steve. | ||
| I'd like to mention a few things. | ||
| You ought to have a special on the first 53 days of Hitler. | ||
| It describes Donald Trump to the T. | ||
| They destroy any news media, any credibility for anything against democracy. | ||
| And also, that summit was a joke. | ||
| All this is, is more diversion. | ||
| So we do not talk about Epstein. | ||
| Let's face it, that's going on. | ||
| He's running this country like a crime boss. | ||
| It's just total ridiculous. | ||
| And that war they call over in Israel, it's been genocide for a year. | ||
| Maybe we should start calling it that. | ||
| We need to learn how to enunciate fascism and dictator, because that's what we've got right now. | ||
| And these tension centers you call without due process, they're concentration camps. | ||
| So let's start stating some facts about this guy. | ||
| All right, Steve. | ||
| Elizabeth, Randallstown, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I just want to talk about Trump. | ||
| And first of all, the big, beautiful bill that he got through Congress, food stands, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and everything else he did. | ||
| I'm a disabled senior relying on food stamps and Medicare and Social Security. | ||
| And he wants to cut food stamps way down. | ||
| I lost nine-tenths of my food stamps. | ||
| I can barely eat. | ||
| I barely have enough money to eat. | ||
| And I don't have Medicaid. | ||
| I don't know why, but I don't. | ||
| I have Medicare and Social Security, but he wants to get rid of Medicare. | ||
| And it's just terrible. | ||
| Trump is the worst president we've ever had. | ||
| His foreign policy has just got awful. | ||
| DeGaza, he has been sending arms to Netanyahu. | ||
| Netanyahu is just slaughtering the Palestinian people. | ||
| Trump is the worst president we've ever had. | ||
| That's all I want to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Timothy, Democrat in Matawan, Michigan. | ||
| Good morning, Timothy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, listen. | |
| Was really perturbed when I heard the one lady that was on that was supposed to be a Russian expert during his meet with Putin, the war criminal. | ||
| Are you talking about reality? | ||
| Yeah, Fiona Hill. | ||
| Yep, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Now, Russia has always had a takeover policy. | ||
| NATO has never had an offensive attack Russia policy. | ||
| It's only for defense. | ||
| And Putin is using that for an excuse to attack everybody. | ||
| Wait, sorry, Timothy, who are you talking about that you heard? | ||
| Was this yesterday's Washington Journal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Her name was a mumbling girl that was on during the summit in Alaska. | |
| You're talking about on Washington Journal? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, go ahead. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Were you done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, look, Russia is using NATO as an excuse to attack everybody. | |
| And NATO has never had any intentions of invading Russia. | ||
| They are only there to protect against him because he's always had a defensive policy, an offensive policy. | ||
| He wants to attack and take over everybody. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Iris in Uriah, Alabama, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, everybody. | |
| Boy, this world's in a terrible shape. | ||
| But look, I was so embarrassed at the way President Trump treated Luzinski when he came to the White House. | ||
| So sit there and just cuss, they're about cuss that president out and roll out the red carpet for Putin. | ||
| It turned my stomach. | ||
| That was awful the way he talks to that man. | ||
| That man's losing thousands of people, his people and his country every day out there fighting himself. | ||
| And Putin comes to Alaska. | ||
| And the way I took that meeting was he kept saying, we're your neighbors, you know. | ||
| We just right across there. | ||
| We're just so many kilometers across from y'all. | ||
| You know, just like, well, if you do anything, we just right here. | ||
| All we got to do is come right over here. | ||
| And Trump was sitting there listening to all that stuff. | ||
| I get it one way. | ||
| You can't fist Putin off, excuse me, because you don't want him to do no more damage, but he's going to do it anyway. | ||
| There's nothing that can stop that man but us, but we're not. | ||
| We're letting him keep on inching and inching and inching. | ||
| And remember now what they said. | ||
| He's right there across from Alaska. | ||
| He's just a couple kilometers away. | ||
| We're neighbors, you know. | ||
| We're really neighbors. | ||
| And when the time comes, we're going to see what that neighbor does for us. | ||
| All right, Iris. | ||
| Here's Connie, Bakersfield, California, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First, I want to say the Democrats need to help pay for the rezoning for California because we are really in a bad financial shape sad because of the fires and everything else. | ||
| But I think Donald Trump should go ahead and bomb Panama because, you know, the president sold it for a dollar. | ||
| And then he needs to sell Alaska to Russia because Russia used to own it. | ||
| And he's preparing the military force to bust Americans' teeth in and curt Americans. | ||
| And he's training the military to attack American people. | ||
| And there's nothing that seems like anybody can do about it because all the authority is him. | ||
| I honestly, and I'm for Trump. | ||
| I was for Trump until Putin. | ||
| He is in there taking lessons from Putin and trying to be like Putin. | ||
| And he has three more years to get to do this. | ||
| And then he's not going to leave presidency. | ||
| And it's just a really bad future. | ||
| And it's really scary because I honestly think the Russian came over, the president came over just as a real estate view. | ||
| And it just real estate when he started talking about Alaska and how it used to be his and all this. | ||
| It's very scary. | ||
| All right. | ||
| One more call, Jerome, Silver Spring, Maryland, Independent. | ||
| Go ahead, Jerome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my question is, everyone that thinks that Russia has something on Donald Trump, if that was the case, why didn't Russia invade Ukraine during his first four years of the presidency? | |
| That just kind of like really behooves me when people just continuously run that narrative and there's no fact to it at all. | ||
| So he invaded Ukraine during the Biden administration, but there was no new war starting during Trump's first administration. | ||
| They accused him of probably being the one that was going to start the new war, but he did not. | ||
| And then the only thing he's asking for is peace. | ||
| And reaching out to your enemy to say, hey, can we come and meet in the middle is not, to me, it's a good thing. | ||
| All right, Jerome. | ||
| That's all the time we've got for today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll see you again tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Have a great day, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Live today on the C-SPAN Networks, starting at 10 a.m. Eastern, senior officials from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, hold a press conference on tuberculosis in monkeys and the potential spread of the disease. | |
| Then at one, a discussion on the social and economic status of black men in the U.S., hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And at 4.15, astronauts from NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 talk about what it was like spending nearly five months at the International Space Station. | ||
| On C-SPAN 2, live at 11 a.m. Eastern, the Texas House of Representatives meets to resume GOP efforts to redraw the state's congressional district map. | ||
| This is the second legislative session since Democratic lawmakers returned to the state after protesting the redistricting plan. | ||
| You can also watch these events live on the free C-SPAN Now video app or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| C-SPANShop.org is C-SPAN's online store. | ||
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with a Washington Examiner article with the headline, Trump promises executive order to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines. | ||
| Here's what the article says. | ||
| Trump has long opposed voting by mail or electronically, particularly since his 2020 election loss. | ||
| During his second presidential run, he repeatedly said there was widespread voter fraud. | ||
| On Monday, Trump said the United States is the only country that uses mail-in voting and that all other countries, quote, gave it up because of the massive voter fraud encountered. | ||
| More than two dozen countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea, have postal voting systems, with some dating back to the 1990s. | ||
| Countries with right-wing governments, such as Italy, also offer limited mail-in voting. | ||
| The U.S. has had a form of mail-in voting for centuries. | ||
| Well, here is President Trump from Monday talking about this topic. | ||
| Mail-in ballots are corrupt. | ||
| Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. | ||
| And we, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. | ||
| We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt. | ||
| And do you know that we're the only country of the world, I believe I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what's happened. | ||
| Massive fraud all over the place. | ||
| The other thing we want change are the machines. | ||
| For all of the money they spend, it's approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots. | ||
| And paper ballots are very sophisticated with the watermark paper and everything else. | ||
| We would get secure elections. | ||
| We'd get much faster results. | ||
| The machines, I mean, they say we're going to have the results in two weeks. | ||
| With paper ballots, you have the results that night. | ||
| Most people, almost, but most people, many countries use paper ballots. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the most secure form. | |
| And we're getting your thoughts on that. | ||
| What do you think of mail-in voting on voting machines? | ||
| Amber, independent in Potomac, Maryland, Europe first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I feel that honesty and integrity should be in all areas, not just mail-in voting. | |
| So a lot of our seniors do not have computers. | ||
| They are not into the internet and using technology to vote. | ||
| So I feel that honesty should be in all areas, not even starting with the voting mail-in. | ||
| It should be in every area of the president's agenda. | ||
| Honesty and integrity. | ||
| Let's start there, not just with mail-in ballots. | ||
| What about the lady who was just transferred from state prison to federal? | ||
| Let's start with that. | ||
| So, Amber, have you used mail-in voting before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Some people don't have computers, especially our elderly people who are wonderful voters. | ||
| You know, they are diligent and mailing in their ballots. | ||
| They don't have computers. | ||
| Some of them can't even afford the internet. | ||
| You know how much it costs to get the internet service nowadays? | ||
| I think the issue is going in person, not necessarily needing the internet at your home. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The ones who can't go in person, they're handicapped. | |
| They're elderly. | ||
| Understood. |