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Washington Journal will take your calls and comments live. | |
| Then we'll talk about the September 30th government funding deadline and congressional news of the day with Democratic California Congresswoman Judy Chu, a top member of the Budget and Ways and Means Committees, and Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Tara Kopp on the Trump administration's military campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels. | ||
| WASHINGTON JOURNAL STARTS NOW. GOOD MORNING. | ||
| It's Wednesday, September 10th. | ||
| Israel attempted to kill senior members of Hamas in an airstrike yesterday in Qatar. | ||
| The group said its officials were meeting to discuss a ceasefire proposal backed by President Trump. | ||
| According to the president, the U.S. military notified him of the Israeli attack and that he immediately directed Special Envoy Witkoff to inform the Qataris, but it was too late. | ||
| Hamas claims its leadership survived, but five lower-level members were killed. | ||
| This morning, we're getting your reaction to that attack. | ||
| Do you think it was justified or a reckless escalation of the war? | ||
| What do you make of Israel not notifying the administration prior to the airstrike? | ||
| Here's how to reach us. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can always send a text to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Include your first name in your city-state. | ||
| And we're on social media, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Take a look at the front pages of the major national papers. | ||
| Here's the Washington Times. | ||
| Israel hits Hamas leadership in Qatar, orders Gaza City residents to leave. | ||
| This is the New York Times. | ||
| Israelis target Hamas with a strike in Qatar, a Gaza war mediator. | ||
| Attack may put ceasefire talks at risk. | ||
| Here's the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| Israel strikes Hamas leaders in Qatar capital. | ||
| Attack inside U.S. ally, leaves six dead. | ||
| RIST's effort to end war in Gaza Strip. | ||
| And finally, here's the Washington Post. | ||
| Israel attacks Hamas leaders in Qatar. | ||
| Airstrike stirs outrage, upends talks. | ||
| Trump joins critics. | ||
| And group says that no top figures were killed. | ||
| Well, here is White House spokesperson Caroline Levitt at the White House briefing yesterday talking about Israel's attack on Hamas in Qatar. | ||
| This morning, the Trump administration was notified by the United States military that Israel was attacking Hamas, which very unfortunately was located in a section of Doha, the capital of Qatar. | ||
| Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally of the United States, that is working very hard and bravely taking risks with us to broker peace, does not advance Israel or America's goals. | ||
| However, eliminating Hamas who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza is a worthy goal. | ||
| President Trump immediately directed Special Envoy Witkoff to inform the Qataris of the impending attack, which he did. | ||
| The president views Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the United States and feels very badly about the location of this attack. | ||
| President Trump wants all of the hostages in Gaza and the bodies of the dead released and this war to end now. | ||
| President Trump also spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu after the attack. | ||
| The Prime Minister told President Trump that he wants to make peace and quickly. | ||
| President Trump believes this unfortunate incident could serve as an opportunity for peace. | ||
| The president also spoke to the emir and prime minister of Qatar and thanked them for their support and friendship to our country. | ||
| He assured them that such a thing will not happen again on their soil. | ||
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I just wanted to get a bit of clarity on the sequence of events for the Doha attack and the notification. | |
| You said that the U.S. military notified, if I go right to you, the Trump administration was notified by the U.S. military. | ||
| That's right. | ||
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Was the U.S. military notified by the Israeli military, or did the U.S. military detect an incoming Israeli attack on Qatar? | |
| The U.S. military notified the White House and the President of the United States. | ||
| That's all I have to share for you on that, Danny. | ||
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Thank you. | |
| Jeff. | ||
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Also, following up, you said that the President assured the leaders of Qatar that this would never happen again. | |
| Did he say that to the Prime Minister of Israel? | ||
| And did Prime Minister Netanyahu agree to that? | ||
| The President told that to the Emir and the Prime Minister of Qatar, and the President also overstressed the importance of peace in the region in his conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu as well. | ||
| Here is BBC reporting on this topic saying, Qatar says it reserves the right to respond to Israeli strike. | ||
| It says Qatar is directing a legal team to looking into holding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for a breach of international law. | ||
| In a press conference, the Prime Minister described the strike as an act of state terrorism carried out under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a violation of sovereignty. | ||
| Quote, the state of Qatar reserves the right to respond to the Israeli assault and will act firmly against any reckless breach or aggression that threatens its security and regional stability. | ||
| That was in a statement. | ||
| It added that they pledged, quote, all necessary measures would be taken in response. | ||
| And that is at the BBC. | ||
| We are taking your calls on this topic. | ||
| This is a brief response by President Trump yesterday, speaking to reporters on his way to dinner last night. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| Just, I'm not thrilled about the whole situation. | ||
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It's not a good situation. | |
| But I will say this, we want the hostages back. | ||
| But we are not thrilled about the way that went down today. | ||
| I'm never surprised by anything, especially when it comes to the Middle East. | ||
| How did you work out this happening? | ||
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I'll be giving a full statement tomorrow, but I would tell you this. | |
| I was very unhappy about it. | ||
| And to the calls now, Oval in Memphis, Tennessee, Independent Line, good morning. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| I'm concerned about the Qatar incident to the point where Netanyahu cannot be trusted. | ||
| I think President Trump is wasting his time dealing with Netanyahu. | ||
| He should wash his hands of Netanyahu. | ||
| The American people, I believe, are progressive enough in their thinking that dealing with a thug like Netanyahu really lowers our credibility in the world. | ||
| So Netanyahu can't be trusted. | ||
| And I think President Trump is trying with all his goodness and might that he may have to end this devastation in the Middle East. | ||
| But again, Netanyahu just cannot be trusted. | ||
| And we're just wasting our time and money dealing with Israel. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that's this is Angela in Sylmar, California, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Angela. | ||
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Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| My big concern about Qatar is that it's a shame that we have boots on the ground over there and they disrespected our boots on the ground. | ||
| We're going to be pulled into a war. | ||
| We don't have that many boots on the ground to be killed over in the Middle East when we got China, Russia, and North Korea all congregating over there. | ||
| We got 33,000 Asians illegally in LA. | ||
| I haven't seen ICE take one of them out of here. | ||
| They have over 200 and something students in the colleges. | ||
| We over there fighting in the Middle East and Qatar, and China is going to walk in here and take us out from the inside out. | ||
| We need to get out of there. | ||
| This thing has been going on. | ||
| I remember when Carter, one of the Bushes was in office, I could remember those tanks going in, and those kids used to be throwing rocks over there. | ||
| So this has been going on for a long time. | ||
| Either we back in Israel to demolish the Middle East, we got to be right in the middle of it. | ||
| Where is the UN on this? | ||
| We're going to wreak what we soak about this. | ||
| This is going to come back to bite our kids 20 and 30 years from now. | ||
| Donald Trump better get Nahu under control, get this war started, and get our boots off the ground over there. | ||
| We haven't won over there. | ||
| We're just killing our kids over there, and we need to stop it. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| And what Angela is talking about as far as it's El Udaid Air Base in Qatar, that is the U.S.'s largest presence in the Middle East. | ||
| It's the largest space. | ||
| It's the let me find you an article about that, but it is the headquarters of U.S. CENTCOM. | ||
| Here is Robert, Oak Hill, Tennessee, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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This time, Israel has gone too far bombing an ally of the United States, being informed. | |
| That's not the actions, the behavior of an ally of the United States. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| The worst thing, the thing that Israel fears the most is a peace initiative. | ||
| They do not want peace. | ||
| They're bombing the negotiators. | ||
| This is a prime example of the fact that they do not want peace. | ||
| They're portrayed as being the victim. | ||
| They're portrayed as being the good guys. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They are not the good guys when it comes to the progress of democracy through history. | ||
| They are colonialists. | ||
| They are going in the wrong direction historically. | ||
| And they're trying to take us down with them. | ||
| President Trump, it's time that you stop letting them boss you around. | ||
| Okay, this is for the, as the man earlier, the person earlier said, this is the future of our children and their children. | ||
| And look at the children of Gaza. | ||
| What in the world are you people? | ||
| You've got your head in the sand. | ||
| All right, Robert. | ||
| Well, let's hear from Prime Minister Netanyahu. | ||
| He spoke about the attack yesterday. | ||
| At the beginning of the war, I promised that Israel would reach those who perpetrated this horror. | ||
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And today, Israel and I have kept that promise. | |
| Now much of the world, much of the world, including much of the democratic world, or governments at least, have shamefully forgotten October 7th. | ||
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But I don't forget, and Israel will never forget. | |
| Never. | ||
| There was a time when Jews could be murdered with impunity. | ||
| But since the founding of the State of Israel, those days are over. | ||
| On this day, as in previous days, Israel acted wholly independently, wholly independently, and we take full responsibility for this action. | ||
| And this action can open the door to an end of the war, end of the war in Gaza. | ||
| Israel has accepted the principles, the proposal put forward by President Trump to end the war, beginning with the immediate release of all our hostages, which have been held in the dungeons of Gaza for 700 days. | ||
| If President Trump's proposal is accepted, the war can end immediately. | ||
| We can begin once again to pursue the expansion of peace in our region for the benefit of all. | ||
| It's Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and we have a posting on X by Kier Starmer, who is the UK's Prime Minister, who says this. | ||
| I condemn Israel's strikes on Doha, which violate Qatar's sovereignty and risk further escalation across the region. | ||
| The priority must be an immediate ceasefire, the release of hostages, and a huge surge in aid into Gaza. | ||
| This is the only solution towards long-lasting peace. | ||
| And Steve is in Ohio, Independent line. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
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Oh, good morning. | |
| Morning, Steve. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
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Yes, I'm just really disappointed with Israel and what they've done here. | |
| You can't honestly think that those hostages are still alive. | ||
| I mean, they were in one of those buildings. | ||
| Netanyahu blew them up, and he's just making a fool of Israel. | ||
| I would not live in Israel. | ||
| I'd get the heck out of there as soon as I could because it's going to get ugly. | ||
| It's going to get real ugly. | ||
| They're surrounded by all these Arabs, and he's doing the stuff he's doing. | ||
| It's over for Israel. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You have a good day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Some more information on El Udaid Air Base in Qatar, America's presence there. | ||
| About 10,000 troops, American troops are stationed at the base. | ||
| It serves as the regional headquarters for U.S. Central Command. | ||
| This is in the New York Times. | ||
| It says, the U.S. military has been using El Udaid since the days after September 11 attacks when it positioned planes there to target the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. | ||
| Two years later, El Udaid became the main U.S. air operations hub in the region. | ||
| U.S. commanders used the base to coordinate a wide variety of missions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as strikes against the Islamic State in Syria. | ||
| Air Force has deployed a wide variety of aircraft there from advanced fighters and long-range bombers to drones, transport planes, and in-flight refueling tankers. | ||
| This is Mark, Floral Park, New York, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Mark. | ||
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Yeah, good morning, Mimi. | |
| You know, Israel is going to do anything it has to do to survive. | ||
| The talks were sabotaged by Hamas. | ||
| Hamas makes the moves first. | ||
| Israel responds. | ||
| Israel is always the bad country doing things. | ||
| People have to know history about Israel. | ||
| President Trump is going to back Israel until the end. | ||
| Thanks, Mimi. | ||
| And Mark, I just want to know what you make of Israel not notifying President Trump ahead of that attack. | ||
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You know what? | |
| I'm an American citizen. | ||
| Why do they have to? | ||
| Why do they have to? | ||
| They are going after Hamas, trying to eliminate Hamas. | ||
| And they're in it alone. | ||
| We are their best ally, and we're going to stay Israel's best ally. | ||
| We're not going to get involved. | ||
| Israel's going to survive. | ||
| So the callers who think Israel is the devil here, they're wrong. | ||
| Check the history. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| All right, Mark. | ||
| And this is the Hill with the headline, Trump, quote, feels very bad about Israel's strike on Qatar, according to the White House. | ||
| It says that the White House on Tuesday yesterday said President Trump, quote, feels very bad about the location of Israel's Tuesday strike in Qatar that targeted Palestinian militant group Hamas's senior officials in Doha. | ||
| Quoting Caroline Levitt, the spokesperson, said this unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally of the U.S., that is working very hard and greatly taking risks with us to broker peace, does not advance Israel or America's goals. | ||
| Here is John in Dearborn, Michigan, Independent. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| It's absolutely horrible watching this go on for now two years or three years, this genocide and famine, and every credible institution has called it that. | ||
| So, you know, I'm waiting for what a global institution or something is going to do anything. | ||
| The UN is hamstrung by us, really, the United States. | ||
| And I don't know, maybe the Pope could go to Gaza. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I know the last Pope was more interested in that cause, but Trump's not a smart man, so he doesn't know much anyways. | ||
| And he's just, he's probably blackmailed by Epstein, but that's a whole nother situation. | ||
| And this is an posting on X by Vatican News. | ||
| It says, Pope Leo responds to journalists' questions about the Israeli bombing in Qatar, calling it, quote, very serious news and inviting everyone to insist on peace. | ||
| That's from the Vatican News posting on X. | ||
| And this is Noor in Falls Church, Virginia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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Yes, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I think President Trump needs to use his leverage of initiating an arms embargo against Israel and not to break essentially diplomatic relations with Israel. | ||
| Don't give them any more of our tax dollars and certainly obey the Leahy law and not give Israel any more weapons, because they know full well, the government does, and Trump knows as well, that they're going to use our weapons in this genocidal war. | ||
| of Metanyahu's against the Palestinians of Gaza and we are really on the wrong side. | ||
| Our government is on the wrong side of history. | ||
| Palestinians will get their freedom. | ||
| But I'm afraid that as crazy as Netanyahu is being an atomic power, that in his efforts to get rid of his quote-unquote Palestinian problem in Gaza Strip and West Bank, | ||
| he will use his nuclear weapons against Gaza. | ||
| Then there will be no Palestinians. | ||
| All right, Noor, and we are taking your calls this morning on this news of the Israeli strike yesterday on Hamas' leadership in Qatar and the White House response to it. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| The numbers are Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans, 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| Noora did mention the Leahy law that is here on state.gov that says that the term refers to two statutory provisions prohibiting the U.S. government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights. | ||
| And this is John in Portland, Connecticut, Independent Line. | ||
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Yes, good morning, Mimi. | |
| Good morning. | ||
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Before I make any comments about what's going on in Gaza, a couple days ago, someone called in. | |
| It was either you or Kim talking about, someone was talking about Representative Al Green making comments about him. | ||
| And as either you or Kim said, we don't insult people on this network. | ||
| Well, just two minutes ago, a man called Trump, President Trump, ignorant. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| If you recall, no, that was me. | ||
| And if you recall, I say we don't take personal attacks on our guests when I hung up on him. | ||
| So that is a very clear line for us, at least for me. | ||
| If you'd like to talk about Gaza, you can. | ||
| Otherwise, we'll move on. | ||
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All day long, personal attacks about President Trump from 90. | |
| Larry, St. Stephen, Minnesota, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
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You know, if Donald Trump, President Trump, he seems so concerned about this, I think he ought to take Mr. Netanyahu to the ICC. | |
| I think that would be the right thing to do here. | ||
| And we could sure use a new God. | ||
| Can somebody please make one? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Robert in Oli, Pennsylvania, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Robert. | ||
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I would like to make a comment on this. | |
| I do support Israel. | ||
| However, I don't think we need to necessarily blindly support everything Netanyahu does. | ||
| We've had good Israeli leaders in the past, and we've had some that haven't been so good. | ||
| My personal opinion is: I think Netanyahu would like to see this continue because he is under investigation for a number of crimes in Israel. | ||
| And by continuing this war, I think it's to his advantage. | ||
| I think we're also to the point where there's so much bloodshed in Gaza right now that any human being watching what is happening can't really support Israel 100% like we used to. | ||
| We need to draw this to a conclusion. | ||
| And I think that President Trump and the leadership of this country need to take a firmer attitude with Netanyahu and take away the blank check. | ||
| Qatar has been a country that's been working with us to try and have peace there. | ||
| And I think this is a blow to the overall peace effort. | ||
| All right, Robert. | ||
| And this is Kim on Facebook who says, yes, it was justified. | ||
| It's a war, not a Hollywood film. | ||
| It is most unfortunate, but Israel, unlike the majority of the world, is fighting to win and they mean it. | ||
| You can join the conversation on Facebook. | ||
| We're at facebook.com slash C-SPAN. | ||
| We're also watching our X-Feed, which is at C-SPAN WJ. | ||
| Here's George, Sykesville, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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Yes, good morning. | |
| I just want to say that the Hamas war is not a new incident. | ||
| This has been going on between Israel and the Palestinians and surrounding Arabs for many, many years. | ||
| And what it's done is that it's exposed who Israel really is. | ||
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It's a racist apartheid country. | |
| And the other point I want to make is that we talk about the United States and Israel. | ||
| Really, it's just one entity. | ||
| The United States is pretty much controlled by Israel. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let's take a look at what the Qatari Prime Minister said in a statement yesterday. | ||
| Here he is speaking through an interpreter. | ||
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The Israeli attack that took place today in the state of Qatar, we can only call it as state terrorism that is being exerted by someone like Netanyahu, given his attempts and his policies as he tries to threaten the regional security. | |
| This is only a clear message to the whole region. | ||
| And this message says that there is one layer and there's also a disrespect to all the policies and also a violation to the sovereignty of all the countries and the states. | ||
| Netanyahu said himself that he will reshape the Middle East. | ||
| Does he mean that he's also going to reshape the Gulf region? | ||
| I think that we have reached a decisive moment. | ||
| There should be retaliation from the whole region in the face of those barbaric actions that only reflects one thing. | ||
| It reflects the barbarism of this person that is leading the region to, unfortunately, to a point where we cannot address any situation and we cannot repair anything and we cannot work within the frameworks of international laws. | ||
| He just violates. | ||
| That was the prime minister of Qatar speaking through an interpreter on Al Jazeera English. | ||
| El Jazeera, of course, is a media, state-owned media by Qatar and headquartered there. | ||
| We're taking your calls. | ||
| Let's go to Wilton, Powderly, Texas, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Wilton. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| You know, why is the media not allowed in the Gauss? | ||
| You know, that would be, you know, a way that I could make up my form my own opinion about what's going on in there, but there's no media there to cover it, and we had it in every rule. | ||
| So that's all I had to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And somewhat related is this news from the Associated Press. | ||
| Activist group says a drone hit a Gaza aid boat in Tunisia. | ||
| Authorities deny that claim. | ||
| That's at the AP. | ||
| And here is Lloyd in Staten Island, New York, Republican. | ||
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Hi, Lloyd. | |
| Yes, it's got two parts. | ||
| The first part is: I don't know why everybody feels so sorry for these people in Qatar being killed, these people in charge of it. | ||
| The main point is, though, everybody, you know, most people that call up the station other people are very envious of people's money. | ||
| These people are billionaires. | ||
| The ones they killed that were in charge of the raid. | ||
| And this is fax war billionaires, not millionaires, billionaires, like what's his name says on TV all the time. | ||
| The billionaires and oligarchs. | ||
| They were the billionaires. | ||
| I don't think it's a big flaw having them killed since they ran the thing anyway. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Jonathan on Facebook agrees. | ||
| He says Qatar should face war crimes for protecting war criminals. | ||
| Elon says, I think Qatar may ask for their plane back. | ||
| That's on Facebook. | ||
| And this is Simeon, Boca Raton, Florida. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
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Hello. | |
| Hello, we're here. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
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Okay, this is Simeon. | |
| Look, I've been listening to your program, and I'm just amazed about the lack of true comprehension about the history and about how this whole war came to be. | ||
| I want to remind everybody that on 2005, Israel gave that territory to the Palestinians, and not to Hamas. | ||
| And Hamas stepped up and stole the land from the Palestinians. | ||
| And I want to remind everybody that the war was started in 03, in 30, well, when the war was started, it was started because the Hamas sent their fighters into Israel and killed over 1,000 people and created all kinds of rapes and murders. | ||
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And they're holding the hostages, and they're playing to this notion that it's Israel's fault. | |
| I also want to suggest an independent thought about President Trump. | ||
| I don't, in the depth of my heart, believe that Netanyahu did not speak in great detail before he made such an action. | ||
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I think the political reality that we see that what Trump is saying are things that he has to do politically. | |
| He's a very, very savvy politician. | ||
| So I wouldn't just assume that Israel stepped all over the United States. | ||
| It's not a smart move, and they could not afford to do so. | ||
| And I thank you very much for the opportunity. | ||
| All right, Simeon. | ||
| And a couple of news items for your awareness this morning. | ||
| This from Reuters. | ||
| Poland shoots down Russian drones that violated its airspace. | ||
| It says that this is the first time a NATO member has fired shots in the conflict. | ||
| Polish prime minister has asked NATO to invoke Article 4, which is for consultation, not for a military response. | ||
| Russian diplomat says that there's no evidence that drones are of Russian origin, and it says that NATO is treating the incident as an international incursion, not an attack. | ||
| And Warsaw's airport has been reopened after closing for several hours. | ||
| That is news from this morning. | ||
| Also, a Virginia House special election. | ||
| We have the results, and that is Democrat James Waukinshaw. | ||
| He is succeeding the late Representative Jerry Conley, and that is a Northern Virginia seat considered very safely blue. | ||
| Here is David in Park Hill, Oklahoma, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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Hi, my name is Dave Hughes. | |
| I'm calling from the VA officer in Muscle Rana where I'm nation there. | ||
| And while I support anything that the Republicans or President Dean in a country, position been meaning for a long time, we've talked about Jim Gerigway. | ||
| And I just wish that some of the rest of the country would get to be on board with this. | ||
| Frank and Aberdeen, Maryland, Democrat, good morning, Frank. | ||
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Yes, ma'am. | |
| I have two parts to my message. | ||
| Israel has already used weapons supplied by the United States to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. | ||
| Now Netanyahu is attacking Qatar, the site of the United States' largest regional airbase. | ||
| All this on top of a Gaza genocide and West Bank atrocities. | ||
| It's time that Israel needs to do one of two things, accept a two-state solution or dissolve itself, create a greater Palestine, and have a single secular state where all the people from the river to the sea are one nation and have one vote. | ||
| And I'm sorry, I do support the state of Israel. | ||
| And Frank, would you, in that scenario of a one state, would you allow all the Palestinian refugees living around the area to come back? | ||
| The so-called right of return? | ||
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I would be sympathetic to that. | |
| I don't really know. | ||
| It's too complicated. | ||
| We created a mess in the Palestinian regions starting all the way back in the 1890s to the 1920s. | ||
| And it's only gotten worse. | ||
| And the more we try to solve the problem, the more complicated it becomes. | ||
| And here's Roberto in Houston, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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Good morning, Amy. | |
| I'm so glad to speak to you concerning this topic. | ||
| I like what you said about being polite to guests. | ||
| And I'm going to relate it to this in a second. | ||
| I think you guys should have a new segment. | ||
| It's called Dur Mr. President, where you can tell the president anything, suggest anything to him directly, because he does listen to C-SPAN. | ||
| But you need to be polite in this particular segment, just like you said, and set that rule. | ||
| And this is what I would tell Mr. President. | ||
| Dear Mr. President, please research the Jonathan Pollard U.S. spy case under Ronald Reagan. | ||
| It is related to this topic. | ||
| And please respond in public. | ||
| And I want to say, why don't everybody, every American say this, rescue the Palestinian children now. | ||
| And that makes one last point, Mimi. | ||
| I am tempted to run for position in the House of Representatives as an independent. | ||
| Could y'all run segments as to how do you run for office, public office in the United States? | ||
| I've tried calling my representative, does not respond because I would be in effect running against her. | ||
| So against her interest to tell me how to do it. | ||
| So Mimi, thank you very much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for that suggestion. | ||
| And this is Senator Jean Shaheen. | ||
| A Democrat of New Hampshire and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. | ||
| She was reacting to this Israeli strike. | ||
| Here she is. | ||
| The Qataris have been very helpful in a number of these efforts, as have the Saudis. | ||
| And it's unfortunate that Israel bombed in Doha, one of our allies. | ||
| I understand that they were going after one of the Hamas leaders, and we all agree that Hamas should be eliminated. | ||
| But we have to be thoughtful about escalating things in a way that aren't helpful, especially when we've got this opportunity in the region. | ||
| Iran is on its back foot. | ||
| It's weaker than it's been, you know, probably since they took our embassy officials hostage back in the 70s. | ||
| And Russia is influence in the region has declined significantly. | ||
| China's not yet there in any major way. | ||
| And so we have a real opportunity. | ||
| And the question is: are we going to take advantage of that? | ||
| Democratic Senator Gene Shaheen speaking yesterday. | ||
| Here is Elaine, Worcester, Massachusetts. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Elaine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning. | |
| I'm 92 years old, and I was in high school in 1948 when Palestine was divided, and thought was given to the Jews who said that they wanted to go to Palestine. | ||
| Well, they went to Palestine, but they didn't take any land with them. | ||
| So all the land that Israel is on is Palestinian land. | ||
| And I really don't know about all of this warrior business that Israel is on because I think that they feel that they are still living in ancient Israel. | ||
| And they are not. | ||
| They are living on Palestinian land. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And one more news story for you from NBC News, just for your awareness, and that is that a judge has temporarily blocked President Trump's firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook. | ||
| That is a restraining order that just happened last night blocking the firing of Fed Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for now. | ||
| The ruling means Cook will remain on the board of the central bank until her case is heard at length. | ||
| She is allowed to continue carrying out her work during that time. | ||
| This is at NBC News. | ||
| Back to our topic of the attack on Hamas in Qatar. | ||
| Here's Kim Mount Vernon, New York, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| So my question is this. | ||
| If the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel, USS Liberty, for all those who maybe don't know, was an American ship in the Mediterranean. | ||
| And they were getting information intel on the Golan Heights. | ||
| Supposedly, Israel, they found out that Israel was going to take the Golan Heights. | ||
| What year was this, Kim? | ||
| 67, 1967? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it was 67 or 68. | |
| And they attacked the ship for almost two and a half hours. | ||
| And Robert McNamara, the Admiral, and Lyndon Johnson called back the rescue mission and allowed Israel to attack an American ship with an American flag. | ||
| In fact, they flew so low that they could see the Americans, that the Israeli airmen could see the American Navy guys on the ship. | ||
| So them bombing Qatar is absolutely 100%. | ||
| They are guilty. | ||
| This is a method that they use. | ||
| They try to stop peace talks. | ||
| They've always done this. | ||
| They will always do this. | ||
| They don't want peace. | ||
| They want the entire Middle East. | ||
| They want the Persian Gulf. | ||
| They will not stop. | ||
| America has been occupied by the Israeli government. | ||
| Every single congressman, except for a few, maybe Matthew, you know, I give him a lot of credit what he's doing on both ends, working with the Democrats and the Republicans. | ||
| But to be honest, we are occupied just like we were in the American Revolution. | ||
| Our government, we fought an American Revolution to remove a foreign country from our soil. | ||
| We pay taxes to Israel. | ||
| Our money goes to Israel. | ||
| So how are we governing ourselves? | ||
| We're not. | ||
| We're being governed by a foreign dictatorship. | ||
| 2% of the population are Jews. | ||
| How are they governing the entire American government? | ||
| And here's Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, who says Netanyahu is so hell-bent on sabotaging peace talks designed to stop the killing and free hostages that he is now literally blowing up negotiations. | ||
| The U.S. should not support what Israel is doing. | ||
| Trump is either complicit in this strike and lying or was played for a fool. | ||
| And here is a text we got from Anthony in Miller Place, New York, who says, a question we should be asking. | ||
| Should America's political elites continue to be allowed to take billions of dollars in bribes from the Israeli lobby? | ||
| In God We Trust? | ||
| Professor C-SPAN, what is the difference between a race of militants claiming to be Aryan and a race of militants proclaiming to be chosen by a benevolent God, chosen to slaughter innocents? | ||
| And this is from Brenda and Sarasota. | ||
| Why can't the surrounding countries of Israel take in Palestinians that are being displaced? | ||
| They certainly have enough empty land to resettle them. | ||
| Israel is fighting for their survival. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| This is Patty. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Patty in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| And thank you, C-SPAN, for taking my call. | ||
| Listening to some of your callers, I had to call in. | ||
| The last caller said 0,0.2% of the world are Jewish people. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| 31 plus approximately percent are Muslim. | ||
| 30% approximately are Christian. | ||
| The rest is a mixture. | ||
| So the world has pretty much wiped out the Jews. | ||
| And it's been that way since the beginning of time. | ||
| But I'm going to go back to 1948 because what really bothers me about this whole conversation is that the side for the Palestinians, they delete history when they're talking. | ||
| In 1948, the UN gave Israel and the Palestinians the land. | ||
| It was partitioned for the Palestinians and Israel by two votes, by the way, in the UN. | ||
| My mother was sitting by the radio at that time, shaking. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Anyway, so the Palestinians said, no, we will not take that partition. | ||
| We want the whole land. | ||
| The land is ours. | ||
| That was in 1948. | ||
| Ever since then, they have been invaded by their Arab neighbors. | ||
| Each time, somehow, this tiny little sect of people managed to win. | ||
| And when you win a war, you take land sometimes as a buffer. | ||
| And, you know, the whole concept of, you know, occupation is really not really precise because Israel was the one invaded. | ||
| And my point is, is that, you know, with 0.2% of the population being Jewish people, and by the way, Jewish people are generous, they're kind, they love their families. | ||
| You know, it pains me to hear of these people protesting, you know, against Israelis and stopping students from going to classes and so forth. | ||
| It pains me. | ||
| And, you know, frankly, it's anti-Semitism. | ||
| And I hear people calling in, and it's just so upsetting. | ||
| You know, they're not crying about the Ukrainian children that are being killed by a dictator, Vladimir Putin. | ||
| And where are the Arab neighbors? | ||
| Got it, Patty. | ||
| And this is Mary in Utica, Michigan, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm calling because I agree with the last caller. | |
| I feel like Hamas has done a great propaganda in brainwashing so many people. | ||
| Qatar should not be harboring Hamas leadership. | ||
| And I think everyone forgets what happened on October 7th. | ||
| And I wish everybody would watch the video so that they can remember how this started. | ||
| Plus, Hamas is the one stealing the food. | ||
| Hamas is the one hiding among the Palestinians. | ||
| And if you want to blame somebody, blame Hamas. | ||
| And I feel like so many people calling in just want Hamas to succeed. | ||
| And I don't understand that at all. | ||
| I just feel like Hamas has done a great job at brainwashing all of America. | ||
| Thank you for listening. | ||
| And we are taking your calls for another 15 minutes on this topic of the Israeli strike on Hamas in Qatar and the White House response to it. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| 202-748-8000 is the line for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans, and 202748-8002 for Independents. | ||
| Let's get a reaction from Speaker Mike Johnson, who talked about this yesterday at a press conference. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As we were all driving and walking in here, Israel struck Qatar to take out Hamas leadership. | |
| I'm curious if any of you think that whoever survives there should be evicted from Qatar. | ||
| I don't know anything about that development. | ||
| That's news to me. | ||
| I've been a little busy the last couple hours. | ||
| But we'll have to see how that plays out. | ||
| I mean, it's a, look, I was in Israel myself a few weeks ago in early August. | ||
| It's a very dangerous time there, and they have enemies encamped around them, and they're trying to bring that to a peace as well. | ||
| But Hamas, you know, by anybody who looks at this reasonably, and in my view, this is my personal view, that Hamas has to be eradicated. | ||
| You've got to remove that threat on the immediate border, frankly, within the bounds of Israel. | ||
| And back to the calls now. | ||
| This is Philip in South Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Philip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how you doing? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the only thing I want to say is this. | |
| Those Israelis, they are not really the Jews. | ||
| If you read your Bible, you'll tell you that those people are from Khazar. | ||
| Yeah, from the mountains of the Cashman Mountains, and they are not real Jews. | ||
| They just took over that land from them people and claim they are Jews. | ||
| But the Bible says they are not Jews. | ||
| They're the synagogue of Satan. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is Bill on Facebook who says, Israel knows that Qatar gave Trump a $400 million jet. | ||
| It knew Trump would warn Qatar in advance of the attack. | ||
| Secondly, Netanyahu has a faux positive relationship with Trump and the U.S. Bibi is in the game for Bibi, and Bibi is all he cares about. | ||
| And this is from Steve in Tampa, Florida. | ||
| Qatar has allowed billionaire leaders of Hamas to live in their country and direct the Hamas attacks on Israel. | ||
| And Rob in West Virginia, Netanyahu is on trial for three separate corruption cases. | ||
| The trials are on hold based on the justification that he needs to concentrate on his national security responsibilities as prime minister. | ||
| In other words, he is delaying the trials and getting kicked out of government by continuing military actions. | ||
| It may not be exactly what Trump has done, but it rhymes. | ||
| Kerry in Milwaukee, Republican, you're on the air, Carrie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| A few of your callers have expressed what I had originally wanted to call about, and that is I'm not even sure that a lot of Americans until this point have understood that the leadership of Hamas, again, the Qatar government has allowed the leadership of Hamas, who are very rich, to live in their country. | ||
| So again, it struck me very early on. | ||
| I mean, it's been going on like three years ago now or whatever, that, and people do need to understand that not everybody in the world, I mean, half the world considers, well, I don't know about half, but it comes down to who considers Hamas a terrorist organization. | ||
| And if they are, again, you shouldn't allow their leadership to be there. | ||
| One other thing I want to say on the genocide thing, I believe, and please, callers, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there's about 60,000 people who have been killed in Palestine in Gaza right now. | ||
| And I believe about half of them are Hamas, and the other half are women and children, innocent women and children. | ||
| Now, unfortunately, that is a one-to-one one, what I guess political analysts or whatever would consider, oh, what is it, damage, incidental damage, or whatever that is part of the war. | ||
| Collateral damage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Collateral damage. | |
| Thank you, Mimi. | ||
| Yes, collateral damage. | ||
| I don't know what is acceptable in a war when you're trying to get rid of Hamas or whatever. | ||
| But again, Hamas is hiding them. | ||
| They don't wear uniforms. | ||
| They're hiding deliberately and using the Palestinians as shields. | ||
| So I'm just not sure what, you know, Netanyahu, I guess I can understand why he's doing it because the problem is, how can we have a two-state solution? | ||
| We cannot if Hamas is still part of it. | ||
| So unless Hamas is eliminated and completely, or at least completely banned from that region going forward, there cannot be peace and there cannot be a two-state solution. | ||
| So I don't know, you know, for a long time I felt there is no solution to the war, obviously. | ||
| So anyhow, people correct me if I'm wrong on some of those things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, Kerry. | ||
| And regarding this question, why does Qatar host Hamas's political office? | ||
| This is from El Jazeera. | ||
| And as I mentioned, El Jazeera is state-owned by Qatar and based there. | ||
| It says, Qatar has hosted Hamas's political office since 2012 after what Qatari officials say were requests from the United States. | ||
| This is Khaled Mishal, who is one of the senior political leaders of Qatar. | ||
| And this says that Qatar has long served as a mediator, both in the Middle East and further afield. | ||
| The country has good relations with nations that oppose each other, such as the United States and Iran, and therefore serves as a location where conversations can happen between adversaries. | ||
| The presence of many leaders from the Palestinian group Hamas in Doha has meant that the city has become a base for negotiations to end Israel's war on Gaza and secure the release of Israeli captives held in the enclave. | ||
| But that looks like it's in jeopardy following Israel's attack on several Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday. | ||
| You can read more of that at el Jazeera.com. | ||
| They go on to talk about why are those leaders based in Qatar, what is Qatar's relationship with the Palestinian movement, and some history there. | ||
| Joe, Washington, D.C., Democrat, good morning, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| So there's a lot in my mind in terms of what's going on. | ||
| I'm just going to throw a few things out there, and then I'd like to try to pull it together. | ||
| The first thing is that all this is going on in what's called the ancient world. | ||
| I mean, when humans came across, you know, the land bridge from Africa, settled, you know, in what we now call the Middle East in the Near East. | ||
| So these folks, the people who live in this whole area, if you look at a map of the ancient world, you see that it touches on Russia, Iran, Turkey, all this stuff. | ||
| These people have been fighting each other for like 10 or 12,000 years. | ||
| And people like the United States, here we are, 200 years old, something like that. | ||
| We're walking into the middle of this, acting like we think we know what's going on. | ||
| I mean, even the diaspora of the Jews, I mean, that was 2,000 years ago. | ||
| They got pushed out of the area, obviously wanting to come back. | ||
| So kind of fast forward to where we are now, we have Israel surrounded by Arab countries that are primarily not democratic. | ||
| I mean, we have elites that are running these countries, and people have asked, well, why don't they want to take Palestinians? | ||
| Somebody said that they thought that the 60,000 folks who have been killed in Gaza were like maybe half Hamas and half women and children. | ||
| I think that's kind of nuts. | ||
| My sense of this is that Hamas is actually a very, very small organization. | ||
| These are people who are militant, who believe in what they're talking about, but they're kind of nuts. | ||
| I mean, they don't really consider the implications of what they're doing in terms of the impact it'll have on the rest of the population. | ||
| They have a cause, they believe in it. | ||
| They talk about people being killed as being martyred, things like that. | ||
| So they're kind of, again, go back to 10,000, 12,000 years ago. | ||
| These people are fighting. | ||
| You have these epic battles that are recorded in the Bible and things like that. | ||
| And it's like, think of nothing of killing 15, 20, 30, 40,000 people because God is on your side or Allah is on your side or whatever it is. | ||
| So there's a lot of instability, not just in terms of political, but I mean mental instability in this whole area. | ||
| And the United States is walking around and there's oil, so we have an interest in there. | ||
| So I think that nobody really knows what's going on. | ||
| I think it's clear that Netanyahu is very extreme. | ||
| He's backed by a right-wing government that I think probably does want to own as much of the Middle East as they possibly can. | ||
| I'm kind of running out of breath here, but you kind of get what I'm getting. | ||
| I think I'm really confused. | ||
| Yep, we got it. | ||
| Bob in Ocean Park, Maine, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| And first, thank you. | ||
| C-SPAN does a phenomenal job bringing diverse opinions. | ||
| And it's so much, it's hard to respond to every caller. | ||
| First, just historically, Palestine was, there is no really Palestinian nation or Palestine. | ||
| Before the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish population were called Palestinians. | ||
| And the Israelis sort of took their biblical name back when the State of Israel was formed. | ||
| But the newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, before the formation of the State of Israel was called the Palestine Post. | ||
| And it was a Jewish paper. | ||
| The Jews have been in Israel for 5,000 years. | ||
| So they're not taking over territory. | ||
| But anyway, I just wanted to thank, and this war would be over. | ||
| And it's been said many times if Hamas returned the hostages and laid down their arms. | ||
| I don't think Netanyahu wants anything other than to have a safe Israel and protect its population. | ||
| When we were attacked on 9-11, we followed and took Osama bin Laden, and rightly so. | ||
| We tracked him down, and I think we got him in Pakistan. | ||
| So you do what you have to do to protect your people. | ||
| And Netanyahu and the Israeli government is doing that. | ||
| As far as the number of people who are in favor of Hamas in Gaza, some of your callers were right. | ||
| And they said Gaza was an independent Palestinian state, or NZI, in 2005. | ||
| Israel took its people out, removed the cemeteries from Gaza and gave it to the Palestinians. | ||
| And Hamas took over. | ||
| It's a terrorist group, but more than 75 or 80% of the population do support them. | ||
| If they didn't support them, how could they have allowed tunnels to be built under their schools and churches and mosques and hospitals? | ||
| They weren't building a population infrastructure to support the people of Gaza. | ||
| They were building a terrorist operation. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And Anthony, Los Angeles, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last time I checked, Hamas is a terrorist group. | |
| I don't understand why the world is looking at them like they're not. | ||
| Anywhere they are, they should be eliminated. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| But I do believe that Israel needs new leadership. | ||
| The leadership that they have, starving kids and women, and then saying that they're not doing that is just ridiculous. | ||
| The UN needs to get a bigger role. | ||
| They always lean on America. | ||
| But where is the UN? | ||
| The UN, to me, is nothing. | ||
| I mean, their wars are breaking out. | ||
| They do nothing. | ||
| Why is Israel fighting this war by themselves? | ||
| The rest of the world should have come to their aid and supported them. | ||
| And Gaza's not that big. | ||
| Why can't you just go through Gaza and clean it out? | ||
| It doesn't make sense to me in this day and age that we let these terrorist groups run around and sympathize for them. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Here's Tom in Coco, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| That guy, wow. | ||
| You know, I hear people saying the Bible and God and religion and everything like that. | ||
| No, don't go yet. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| What my point is, Netton Putin, I know it's not his real name, but that's what I call him, Netten Putin is killing people. | ||
| Regardless of where they live, like we did with the Indians, we killed all of them. | ||
| No, not all of them, but the rest of them, we put them in jail. | ||
| But anyway, stop with the religious doctors. | ||
| Did we lose you, Tom? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I left me. | |
| See ya. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is real quick on X from Von Hilliard of NBC News that says the Embassy of Qatar in a new letter to the U.S. Congress is publicly suggesting that Qatar believes Israel acted unilaterally in its strikes in Doha and without U.S. consultation, and that Israel sought to undermine the U.S. and Qatar's negotiations with Hamas. | ||
| And one more here. | ||
| This is Senator Tom Cotton. | ||
| Hamas has the blood of American citizens on their hands and should have no safe harbor. | ||
| Israel has every right to hunt these terrorists down. | ||
| And that's it for this segment of Washington Journal. | ||
| But coming up at 9 a.m. Eastern, we've got Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Tara Kopp. | ||
| She joins us with her reporting on the administration's new military campaign against drug cartels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But right now, we're cruising into Open Forum. | |
| You can dial in with any public policy or news story on your mind. | ||
| During Open Forum, we'll also talk to Democrat Judy Hsu of California, a member of the Budget and Ways and Means Committee. | ||
| And we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Middle and high school students join C-SPAN as we celebrate America's 250th anniversary during our 2026 C-SPAN Student Cam Video Documentary Competition. | |
| This year's theme is exploring the American story through the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| We're asking students to create a five to six minute documentary that answers one of two questions. | ||
| What's the Declaration's influence on a key moment from America's 250-year history? | ||
| Or how have its values touched on a contemporary issue that's impacting you or your community? | ||
| We encourage all students to participate, regardless of prior filmmaking experience. | ||
| Consider interviewing topical experts and explore a variety of viewpoints around your chosen issue. | ||
| Students should also include clips of related C-SPAN footage, which are easy to download on our website, studentcam.org. | ||
| C-SPAN Student Cam Competition awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to students and teachers and $5,000 for the grand prize winner. | ||
| Entries must be received before January 20th, 2026. | ||
| For competition rules, tips, or just how to get started, visit our website at studentcam.org. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. | ||
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| It is open forum, so we will take your calls after we speak with Congresswoman Judy Hsu. | ||
| She is a Democrat from California and a member of the Budget and Ways and Means Committees. | ||
| Congresswoman Hsu, welcome back to the program. | ||
| Nice to talk to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, and thank you for having me here. | |
| I want to start with the news. | ||
| Since your district covers parts of the LA, the greater Los Angeles area, this is CBS News with this headline. | ||
| It says, Supreme Court lets Trump administration resume sweeping immigration stops in Los Angeles area. | ||
| Can you first tell us what the implications are of that ruling and your reaction to it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's extremely disappointing. | |
| ICE agents have terrorized our community. | ||
| They were stopping at home depots and at car washes and just sweeping up people based on their looks, their language. | ||
| It was indeed racial profiling. | ||
| And an earlier judge said that that is not right, that they should not be making these sweeps based on racial profiling and what language people speak, but instead on their warrants, on their records which show that there are undocumented people there. | ||
| And now the Supreme Court has reversed that and said that they are free to go wherever they want. | ||
| And as a result, there have been tragedies. | ||
| For instance, I went to the memorial of a worker who was in a Home Depot in Monrovia. | ||
| ICE agents just came and tried to sweep him up. | ||
| He ran away onto a freeway and was killed by an oncoming car. | ||
| Tragedies like that should not happen. | ||
| He was a 52-year-old grandfather. | ||
| That is not right. | ||
| And as far as the National Guard that were deployed in Los Angeles earlier this year, what's the situation now? | ||
| Are they still there? | ||
| What are they doing if they are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, there were 4,000 National Guard troops sent here and 700 Marines. | |
| The Marines are gone. | ||
| And I believe that only a couple of hundred National Guards persons are still here. | ||
| They pretty much did nothing. | ||
| They were not necessary. | ||
| It was a waste of money and deployments. | ||
| These National Guards persons were ripped away from their families and their jobs. | ||
| But actually, our local law enforcement had everything well in hand and under control. | ||
| This was just an attempt by the administration to show a great deal of intimidation of the people in Los Angeles. | ||
| And we did not want them here. | ||
| We did not, in fact, ask them to be there. | ||
| And I am glad that they are largely gone. | ||
| I want to ask you, Congresswoman, about this Fox News article that says that hundreds of DOD civilians have accepted the Call of Duty and Southern Border Mission under Trump's order. | ||
| This was a request for civilians at the Defense Department to volunteer for supporting border security and doing things at the border. | ||
| Do you know about this? | ||
| What's your reaction to it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, there has been the largest increase in the budget for border control ever in our history, $170 billion increase in the Department of Homeland Security for this. | |
| There certainly are more than enough resources to go to the border. | ||
| And in fact, there is a massive hiring effort going on with CBP. | ||
| So if these employees are asked to go there on a volunteer basis, well, and they want to do it, then let them do that. | ||
| But I think that there is a huge influx of funds for the border. | ||
| And what I regret is the fact that there are so many other uses for these funds, whether it is in helping those who need food or their health care, how much other things could be funded with this $170 billion is astounding. | ||
| And that's where that should go. | ||
| And President Trump has federalized the police department in Washington, D.C. | ||
| He has announced plans to do the same in other Democrat-led cities, including Los Angeles. | ||
| What's your reaction to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A judge last week said that the nationalization of our National Guard being sent to different cities is illegal and that what happened in Los Angeles never should have happened because there is a law. | |
| It's the posse comitadas, which is saying that a National Guard's troops should not be sent for local police efforts. | ||
| They are for deployment to other areas and not to police our local people because of course there is already local law enforcement. | ||
| And unless there is a true emergency, they should not be deployed to cities. | ||
| Switching to the Epstein files, I just want to play you a portion of what Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer said to reporters yesterday about the new release documents and then we'll talk about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well the Epstein documents are released because I subpoenaed the estate for the documents. | |
| That's why we have the documents. | ||
| So I know the media has been obsessed with the discharge petition. | ||
| The discharge petition didn't even cover the estate. | ||
| This is a serious investigation, just like I said it would be. | ||
| We're going to be transparent. | ||
| I think we got the documents uploaded last night on the computer. | ||
| It takes, you know, a few hours. | ||
| Obviously, when they send out, when I subpoena documents, they send them to the Republicans and the Democrats. | ||
| Of course, you know, the Democrats, they find one thing in there and they promote it and try to get a narrative. | ||
| This investigation is about providing justice and accountability for the victims. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the Democrats, you know, it's really disappointing to see how they've acted. | |
| I mean, Garcia, he's been on the job for about two weeks. | ||
| He's proven to me to just be a real big drama queen because this is all about providing transparency to the American people and justice for the victims. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not about scoring political points. | |
| So hopefully he'll mature up and get serious about the investigation. | ||
| We've got a lot more documents we expect to get in. | ||
| We're going to bring a lot of people in for depositions. | ||
| So this investigation is moving along very rapidly and hopefully we'll get some answers and some justice very soon. | ||
| And Congresswoman Chu, your assessment of how House Republicans have handled the issue of the Epstein files and your reaction to what Congressman Comer just said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They are afraid of a true revelation of the documents. | |
| What is being released is only a portion of the documents out there. | ||
| Now, I had the privilege of meeting with the Epstein survivors, and they talked about how they were not properly included in the investigation. | ||
| They talked about how they were not notified of the different steps of the agreements that were made with Epstein. | ||
| And clearly, there has been some kind of cover-up in terms of what really went on in this in the final agreement that was made about the punishment for Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
| So there is a lot more that is there, and we need an actual true release of the documents. | ||
| That's what this discharge petition is all about. | ||
| And I have signed it. | ||
| We actually only need two more Republicans to sign this discharge petition, and then we can know the truth about what really happened with Epstein and what has been covered up. | ||
| And the federal government runs out of funding in three weeks. | ||
| What is the Democratic plan to avoid a shutdown? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we will support a bipartisan government funding bill that improves the health, public safety, and economic well-being of everyday Americans, but we will not support a partisan Republican spending bill that rips health care away from the American people. | |
| Remember, with regard to health care, we are facing a catastrophic situation where there are millions of Americans that will lose their ACA, their Affordable Care Act subsidy, and that will get notified actually within a month. | ||
| And all these American people are going to have their health care ripped away from them unless we do something. | ||
| So we have to really act quickly. | ||
| And it is my desire with this government funding bill that this health care funding will not be ripped away from millions of Americans. | ||
| And finally, Congresswoman, the recovery efforts for the wildfires in Southern California from January, where does that stand and how much aid has the federal government sent at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the debris removal has now been completed. | |
| It was supposed to take 18 months, but now it's been done and completed within six months. | ||
| So it was the fastest debris removal in our nation's history. | ||
| So I really have to commend the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for that. | ||
| Now the residents of our area in the LA wildfires can begin to rebuild. | ||
| But we do need the supplemental disaster aid bill to be implemented. | ||
| Governor Newsom has asked for $34 billion and the people of North Carolina truly need help as well. | ||
| And they have suffered with 230 people who died in their catastrophe over the last several months. | ||
| Whether it is in North Carolina or in California, disaster aid has to be passed. | ||
| And we need to make sure that that funding is there so that people can return to the life that they had without worrying. | ||
| about whether they will recover from the most devastating moment of their lives. | ||
| And that's Congresswoman Judy Chu. | ||
| She is a Democrat of California's 28th District, which covers Pasadena, Monterey Park, and Glendora, member of the budget and ways and means committees. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for having me. | |
| And it is open forum. | ||
| We'll get to your calls. | ||
| Just wanted to let you know that we did have a Republican lawmaker lined up for you, but he did have to reschedule at the last minute. | ||
| So apologies for that. | ||
| Go to the calls now to Sam on the Republican line in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Good. | ||
| I don't know if you've had an opportunity or anybody really. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of people listening to this show, watching the show, has seen the two parts of this Ukrainian young woman being killed by this savage. | ||
| I don't know if people have seen the second part of this, but the way she died, I mean, she was startled by what this guy did. | ||
| But what really irritates the crap out of me was the fact that you had other people on that train that didn't even try to help her. | ||
| I mean, they walked right by her. | ||
| I mean, just basically left her to die, and she just fell. | ||
| I mean, it breaks my freaking heart when I see that kind of stuff. | ||
| And you know, you know who's responsible for this kind of stuff? | ||
| Or the Democrats, the freaking evil Democrat Party who have allowed judges, magistrates, and everything else to have these people get out back out on the streets to kill people. | ||
| And it seems like lately it's been all white women that these clowns have been killing. | ||
| So I'm telling you right now, you know, this stuff has gotten way out of hand. | ||
| And there are so many people mad about this now, black and white, that are so mad about the way crime has just permitted itself through all these cities, these urban cities, you know, that Trump's trying to, you know, basically get the crime wave down, whatever he needs to do. | ||
| But this young woman came from a country that's been bombed by Russia to live over here in the United States, and she gets killed. | ||
| She's learned the language, she learned what to do. | ||
| She's working, and this clown is on the bus waiting for some white woman so he could kill somebody. | ||
| And nobody on that bus or whatever it is even helped her because they were all black. | ||
| Now, if the situation was reversed, I'm going to tell you right now, it'd have been a whole different ballgame. | ||
| You'd have Al Sharpen, and you have every other freaking clowns out there, racebaters they have out there, to do whatever they can with this. | ||
| And the media has done. | ||
| We got that, and here is CNN about that. | ||
| That says video shows fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee on Charlotte Light Rail, stirring debate on crime in major U.S. cities. | ||
| It says that the gruesome video shows a man stabbing a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte light rail train, a case that has turned into a flashpoint as the Trump administration vows to crack down on crime in large, predominantly Democratic cities. | ||
| It says it was an unprovoked attack. | ||
| It's being investigated by the FBI, and it happened shortly before 10 p.m. on August 22nd. | ||
| Here's Benjamin in McLean, Virginia. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Benjamin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| My call is about Hamas in the context of various callers this morning. | ||
| Hamas clearly is a terrorist organization, but it is a movement that has engaged in terrorism, and it is much more than a terrorist organization. | ||
| As a caller suggested, it has had the support of many, perhaps a majority of Palestinians, because it is a legitimate representative of Palestinian aspirations, including for statehood. | ||
| Furthermore, Hamas, unlike the way it is often pictured, is actually a pragmatic organization. | ||
| And at various times, it has indicated a willingness to negotiate with Israel on a two-state solution. | ||
| Israel, however, has over decades assassinated Hamas leaders who have indicated an interest in negotiations, including in the past couple of years. | ||
| Finally, we should keep in mind that two former prime ministers of Israel had been members of terrorist groups before the Israeli state was established in 1948. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And that was McLean, Virginia. | ||
| This is Lynchburg, Virginia. | ||
| This is Tommy, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Tommy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, thank you. | |
| Thank you so much for taking my call. | ||
| First of all, to that guy, Sam, he needs to check himself because there is a white gentleman on the bus as well. | ||
| It wasn't just black people, and that white gentleman watched that young lady bleed to death and did nothing. | ||
| So maybe he needs to not put that on the black community on that bus, but maybe put it on his own people. | ||
| Now, secondly, I do want to talk about Israel's attack on Qatar. | ||
| And now keep in mind, I'm a person who voted for Donald Trump three times, and if he could run for a fourth, I'd vote for him. | ||
| But for Israel to make that attack in Qatar, think about if a foreign country had a terrorist group here in the United States that they were targeting, and they decided to do an airstrike in the United States of America against their terrorist group that they're targeting in the U.S. | ||
| We all would be outraged about that because we are a sovereign nation. | ||
| Israel likes to poke this button with America's as America being its ally where they'll hit somebody and then they'll run behind the United States to protect them. | ||
| I'm not saying Israel is not our ally, but if anyone, Republican or Democrat, justifies Israel still doing an airstrike strike in another country who is an ally to us that has nothing to do with what's going on between them and Hamas, I will not vote for that person because that person cannot be trusted about America first or the whole national push that we are talking about and why we voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And here's the Wall Street Journal with this news. | ||
| U.S. added 911,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March. | ||
| That's March 2025. | ||
| Revised job numbers show significantly weaker labor picture than earlier reports indicated. | ||
| You can see here is this going back from 2000, and this is 2025, so this covers 25 years. | ||
| The blue is preliminary and the green is final. | ||
| So you can see here those numbers for jobs. | ||
| And this is White House Press Secretary Caroline Lovitt yesterday talking about those job growth revisions. | ||
| Let me just say something about the revisions that came out this morning. | ||
| And this was one of the biggest revisions in absolute terms in decades. | ||
| And the benchmark year, March 2024 to 2025, shows that the job growth was vastly weaker during the Biden administration than ever previously reported. | ||
| Between this revision and last year's job growth was actually overstated by approximately 2 million jobs. | ||
| And the Biden administration stood up here and vouched for that data and told you that data was real. | ||
| And when President Trump calls into question the veracity of that data, like he did before he took the oath of office and even now as President of the United States, he was ridiculed for that. | ||
| And turns out this revision proves two things. | ||
| Number one, the president was right. | ||
| And this is why we need new leadership at the Fed. | ||
| And this makes it very clear that President Trump inherited a much worse economy by the Biden administration than ever reported. | ||
| And it also proves that the Federal Reserve is holding our monetary policy far too restrictive. | ||
| Interest rates are too high. | ||
| The Fed needs to cut the rates because of the mess that we inherited from the Biden administration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Time frame, the president has said a year. | |
| Secretary of Beston said maybe the fourth quarter. | ||
| When can we expect these numbers to increase? | ||
| Well, first, we need accurate numbers. | ||
| We need truthful and honest data, which is why the president took the monumental step to try and appoint and confirm new leadership at the BLS so we can have data that we can actually rely on. | ||
| And that's what the president has been doing, and we hope that his nominee will soon be confirmed. | ||
| We are in open forum, and we are taking your calls on anything related to public policy or politics, what's happening in Washington or around the world. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| Democrats are on 2028-8000. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| Here is Jerry in Indiana, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| At first, I had called in to complain about, you know, you all never mentioned murder that Ukrainian girl, which was terrible. | ||
| And MSNBC still hasn't mentioned anything about it. | ||
| But I see today it was brought up. | ||
| You finally did read or read something about it. | ||
| But, you know, as much as you all quote the New York Times, LA Times, you know, all these liberal newspapers, you would think that you would have found something in there about this murder. | ||
| And the reason that people didn't, you know, I guess, jump up to help was because look what the Democrats tried to do to Dan Penny in New York when he tried to protect people on the subway. | ||
| You know, they tried to ruin his life. | ||
| So they've made people afraid to try to, you know, help each other when they shouldn't have. | ||
| You know, they would be willing to step in and help out, but then they'll be put through all kinds of stuff. | ||
| But no, I'm glad you finally did mention today and read something about it. | ||
| So. | ||
| All right, Jerry. | ||
| Here's Greg, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| You had that Representative Chug on there. | ||
| How come you didn't ask her about Newsom and them fires where he's getting ready to take them people's land and put projects in there? | ||
| And how about the news stories out about Newsom getting ready to take the farmland from the whites and give it to the colored people? | ||
| I'm just wondering why you don't bring all that crap up. | ||
| Freddie in Easley, South Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Freddie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing today? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would just like to say that America needs to wake up and realize that that clown that's in the White House right now, Donald Trump, he's putting out these soldiers, you know, the soldiers that's going from town to town and everything. | |
| But see what it is, he don't have to put a ticket out to pay for this because the government is already giving these people a check every month anyway. | ||
| And then he wants to take them out and then he wants to say, Well, look at that. | ||
| Look what I've done. | ||
| I put all these people in there. | ||
| Now, if he's really serious about it, then give him some extra policemen and ask Congress to pay for them. | ||
| So that's what he ain't got to worry about, having to pay for these reservists that he's sending everywhere and piling it up here when they take them out. | ||
| Look at that, look at that, and he's right back. | ||
| But tell him if it looks so bad, go to Congress and have him give people some extra policies. | ||
| But I bet you he won't want to do that. | ||
| But that's all he's giving them reservists out there. | ||
| He makes it look like he's doing something. | ||
| So when he takes them away, hey, give him some police. | ||
| Go to Congress and tell them to give him four fabric police. | ||
| He'll get somewhere and say, he cannot do it. | ||
| He don't have to pay for that because we people are already paying them a check anyway. | ||
| So don't stand on him. | ||
| Got it, Freddie. | ||
| And some news from Bloomberg that says the Supreme Court to review Trump tariffs on fast track schedule. | ||
| It says the U.S. Supreme Court said it will decide whether the bulk of President Donald Trump's tariffs are illegal, agreeing to quickly review his signature economic policy in a case with worldwide financial and political implications, heeding calls from both sides. | ||
| The justices said in an order on Tuesday that they will hear arguments in the first week of November, an unusually aggressive schedule that suggests the court will try to resolve the case quickly. | ||
| The tariffs remain in place for now, even though a federal appeals court ruled that Trump exceeded his authority by imposing them. | ||
| Fred in Nebraska, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I guess my question to you is: why, when you have these Democrat politicians on here spewing nothing but garbage, why don't you start asking them the tough questions about this crime problem we got in this country? | |
| That's all because the Democrats defunded the cops four or five years ago and they thought they were smart defunding them. | ||
| So now Trump's trying to clean up their mess and now they're all mad about it. | ||
| So I guess my question is why don't you question them Democrat politicians on this? | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is Paul, Plymouth, Connecticut Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Beautiful. | |
| Hi, Mimi. | ||
| It was August 30th, I believe, or 31st, my last call, and to my favorite host as well. | ||
| I always thought that I would be protected against police retaliation and government retaliation because of my high profile here in Connecticut. | ||
| And it appears that it's worked in the opposite direction. | ||
| My attorneys tell me that disability rights and disability advocacy is the new civil rights movement. | ||
| Certainly, this administration has exposed the raw nerve with a lot of the public, and we hear them call up your show often. | ||
| Anyone who is not the ideal physical, the physique, or the ideologically pure, those people are being targeted. | ||
| The leadership starts at the top. | ||
| It trickles down into all these towns and cities like Plymouth. | ||
| And Plymouth is a town not many people even know around here because everybody thinks it's Terryville, the heart of Eagle Lock and the Mills. | ||
| But this Milltown attitude has translated into attack anyone who expresses a different opinion, go after them, make their lives hell through either medicalization based on elderly and elderly status, or destroy their reputation. | ||
| It doesn't matter what organizations in town. | ||
| How are they doing that? | ||
| And what does medicalization mean, Paul? | ||
| How are they destroying your reputation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, with me, it's direct police involvement after having a spectacular crime-free record of 15 years in town. | |
| Arresting me for two phony counts, making... | ||
| Two phony counts of what? | ||
| Disturbing the peace, and I think it was interfering with an officer because I was in my residence and I failed, well, I went into my residence and I failed to give ID. | ||
| So even though they knew who I was. | ||
| So these type of actions are going to increase, in my opinion. | ||
| Like I said, I thought my public, you know, calling radio stations in Connecticut and C-SPAN, but last Friday it came to a head when I called out the town fathers by Monday evening, Tuesday. | ||
| I gave myself up with a $1,000 surrender bond. | ||
| So the destruction of reputation, the defamation that goes on from public agencies, the housing authority located in the same building as the police, the refusal of records of so called. | ||
| We got your point. | ||
| We've got to move on. | ||
| I want people to know about this political article. | ||
| Trump wants to punt showdown deadline to January 31st. | ||
| As you know, government funding runs out at the end of this month. | ||
| It says the request could pave the way for an easy stop gap or spark a partisan confrontation with Democrats. | ||
| Here is House Speaker Mike Johnson talking about that looming government shutdown during a press conference yesterday. | ||
| House Republicans continue to work through regular order to fund the government for FY26 for the next fiscal year. | ||
| We're working closely with the White House and the Senate to ensure we meet our deadlines. | ||
| And Chairman Cole, Tom Cole, of the appropriators, continues to diligently work towards getting all 12 bills out of committee. | ||
| And they're almost done with that. | ||
| And as we get closer to the funding deadline, though, we recognize the shutdown chatter from the left is growing louder. | ||
| Some of these people seem to enjoy this. | ||
| It seems Democrats may take the path of maximum resistance and try to shut the government down. | ||
| This is not surprising because they're struggling because they don't really have a message or a leader or their party registration is falling. | ||
| Their approval ratings are in the low 20s and they're about to elect a Marxist to be the mayor of New York City. | ||
| They are desperately searching for a solution and some in the party apparently think a government shutdown would be some sort of political advantage to them. | ||
| It'd be what we all know is dangerous and harmful to millions of Americans and that is not the answer. | ||
| So I'm going to say this again and I'm going to say it in good faith. | ||
| I've shared this with the Democrat leader in the House and other colleagues. | ||
| If Democrats are willing to work with us, we have our sleeves rolled up and we want to do this in good faith. | ||
| We just have to think responsibly how to spend less money than we did last year. | ||
| And if they're willing to do that, and it's incumbent upon all of us to do it with the high national debt, we're open to that. | ||
| But the ultimate question of whether there's going to be a government shutdown at the end of the month is going to be up to congressional Democrats, and that's just the way it is. | ||
| We're an open forum until for about 25 minutes and taking your calls. | ||
| Here is Woody on the line for Democrats in San Diego. | ||
| Hi, Woody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
| A couple of questions. | ||
| Would it or would it not be to our advantage to use technology and electronic capabilities along the border rather than people personnel? | ||
| And also, would that or would that not save us money by using that technology rather than people? | ||
| And also, does it or does it not make sense for us to educate our population so that we would increase our productivity, which would reduce crime overall? | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| This is Sam in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| My question here would be on the unemployment thing that's going on. | ||
| Listen, if the unemployment was that good before Trump was elected, don't you think that he wouldn't have won by such a landslide popular vote? | ||
| And doesn't that kind of make sense what you're reporting now that unemployment is so bad? | ||
| I just don't quite, I put a few things together, and that's what I came up with for an answer. | ||
| And also, if they could come in with some kind of report on what these immigrants are costing this country for the tens of millions of dollars or millions of people that came into this country, that's basically all I have to say. | ||
| I wish somebody would report on how much this is costing. | ||
| All right, Sam. | ||
| And on the Independent Line in Roslyn Heights, New York, Charlie, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just want to point out that Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s deinstitutionalized the mentally ill here in New York. | ||
| What that meant was the mentally ill no longer had a place to go, so they'll put out the streets. | ||
| Now, the recent murder of that Ukrainian woman, obviously that guy was insane. | ||
| Okay, this is a result of a Republican policy, Ronda Reagan's policy of doing that. | ||
| You also have a president right now who's being very racist and attacking just Hispanics. | ||
| He's bringing a climate to this country that we don't need. | ||
| And by the way, that poor woman who's Ukrainian, I invite all Ukrainians over here. | ||
| At the same time, if they're Nazis, we can't have that. | ||
| We can't have that in this country. | ||
| Here's the New York Post with this RFK Jr. Maha report calls for researching screen time, quote, addiction, cracking down on vapes, overhauling baby formulas. | ||
| And here is the health secretary, RFK Jr., speaking about the state of U.S. childhood health. | ||
| We're the sickest country in the world. | ||
| We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. | ||
| And yet we spend more on health care than any country in the world. | ||
| We spend two to three times what European nations spend. | ||
| We spend nearly as much in our country for health care as all the other nations in the world combined. | ||
| And yet we have the worst health outcomes. | ||
| We've lost six years in lifespan and longevity to Europe in the past 20 years. | ||
| Our kids, our girls are hitting puberty six years earlier than historically. | ||
| Our young men have sperm counts that are half of what they ought to be. | ||
| They have testosterone levels that are half of what they ought to be. | ||
| We have diabetes that is now endemic, not just epidemic. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| 38% of teens are now diabetic or pre-diabetic. | ||
| When I was a kid, it was zero. | ||
| And the autism rates, which the president is particularly concerned with, have dropped from less than one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in every 31 kids today. | ||
| This is a national security issue. | ||
| Eight of 10 of our children, of our young men, cannot qualify for military service. | ||
| It's national security. | ||
| It's our economy. | ||
| It's wrecking. | ||
| This is an existential crisis for our country. | ||
| And I'm so grateful that I work for a president that is willing to run through walls to stop this and to heal our kids. | ||
| That was the HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. speaking yesterday. | ||
| And this is Anthony, Line for Democrats in New Jersey. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
| You're on Open Forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| You know, there's so many things to talk about, and especially with this Robert Kennedy, who's not a doctor. | ||
| I mean, I just don't understand how these Republicans sit there with a straight face and create all these policies that are just for them and lie to us. | ||
| How does Mike Johnson hold the Bible, sit in front of us, and tell us how he's trying to save us money? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And this is Diane in Arkansas, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Diane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Got a lot of topics you covered this morning. | ||
| First thing I'd like to comment on is the Hyundai factory. | ||
| Now, people are complaining about sweeps, but that company comes over to our country and trying to build in our country to avoid tariffs. | ||
| But they're not helping anybody in that community by hiring people from that community. | ||
| I tell you what, people ought not buy no Hyundai cars because they didn't help anybody. | ||
| They didn't have no tax numbers. | ||
| They wasn't paying no taxes. | ||
| They wasn't buying no homes. | ||
| They wasn't helping the millage techs for the schools or anything else. | ||
| They brought people in from overseas. | ||
| Now, the lady that you had on talking about Trump bringing in the National Guards, I live in Arkansas. | ||
| The National Guards were brought in here, Central High School. | ||
| I'm sure you all have all heard about it. | ||
| They were brought in because our governors wouldn't follow the laws of the federal government. | ||
| If countries are wanting to safe harbor immigrants, they are not obeying the laws of the country. | ||
| The president has a right to send in troops to withhold those laws. | ||
| And the other thing with the girl that got killed on the train, that's pretty bad in our society where people won't step up and help somebody. | ||
| I don't care if you're white, black, or purple. | ||
| And you ought not be afraid of getting in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, it's awful that they try to get in trouble, people that try to defend the innocent. | ||
| But people ought to do it anyway, regardless if they're going to get in trouble or not. | ||
| It's the humanity thing to do. | ||
| What does that say about our nation? | ||
| We're waxing cold. | ||
| We have no feelings. | ||
| We had that couple that got beat up there in, I think it was Ohio, and 30 people fammed it, and only one out of the 31 called 911. | ||
| We're in a pretty bad shape here. | ||
| And people are only going to obey the laws if they fear the authorities. | ||
| And that's my comment. | ||
| All right, Diane. | ||
| And regarding Diane's point about the Hyundai raid, the Washington Post business section has this, how the Hyundai raid could upend Trump's dream of more U.S. factories. | ||
| It says that Trump said he stood up for Georgia workers by detaining 300 South Korean nationals. | ||
| Experts say he risks killing thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs. | ||
| There's a picture there, and it says that the raid last week on the partially constructed Hyundai LG car battery plant in Georgia, the administration touted it as a victory for American labor and evidence that he won't tolerate unauthorized workers. | ||
| But immigration and manufacturing experts say the episode lays bare how U.S. immigration rules hamper foreign companies from bringing in workers crucial to building modern manufacturing centers that President Donald Trump and his predecessors have pursued and that would ultimately employ tens of thousands of American workers. | ||
| So this is an economics professor from University of California says this. | ||
| Episodes like this are going to make many companies way more cautious before investing here. | ||
| The goal of this administration's tariffs was luring exactly these kinds of factories. | ||
| And now we are closing the door to some of these companies who fear they won't be able to bring in the right workers to set up their plants. | ||
| Here's Steve in Mentor, Ohio, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for allowing me to speak today. | |
| Now, on immigration, Trump is replacing the immigrants in the farm fields and elsewhere with the idea that he would replace those people by the downstricken people who he is kicking off of Medicare. | ||
| Medicaid, and all of the people that he fired from the federal government into the tens of thousands of people illegally. | ||
| Now, he wants to replace those farm people with the and pushing and pushing the people to the farm fields. | ||
| That's what he's trying to do. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here is Warren in Seattle, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Warren. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First, I want to thank C-SPAN for the double-edged sword. | ||
| One is you get to hear what America thinks. | ||
| And the other side is you get to hear what America thinks, which sometimes is a little disturbing, but people can have their say. | ||
| I want to thank you, Mimi, for using the term Democratic Party because I think one weakness of the Democratic Party is they let the name be hijacked, as they would call the Democrat Party. | ||
| Two other things. | ||
| One, the comments by the Senator, I believe, about the investigation into Epstein. | ||
| He talks about doing it for the victims, but they won't interview them. | ||
| The same thing kind of happened with the Kavanaugh hearing, where they said there was no evidence, but they didn't interview any of the people. | ||
| The FBI had not interviewed any of the people who had accusations. | ||
| And lastly, with the recent Israel bombing of Hamas in Qatar, you know, people talk about sovereign nation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I believe Osama bin Laden was, they came and got him because he was an enemy of the United States and killed. | |
| It was a good thing, and people celebrated, but that was a sovereign nation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Qatar is a double-edged, double-edged, a two-sided country. | |
| They support the billionaire Hamas leaders, and they also say they are chief negotiators of peace. | ||
| So it's really playing both ends of things. | ||
| With Israel, you know, 70% of the people can't stand Netanyahu. | ||
| That's how you see hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. | ||
| But you've got a country full of people who now have PTSD because of the genocidal attack on Israelis. | ||
| I don't use that word often. | ||
| I hear it a lot. | ||
| The words of genocide, which is systemic approach. | ||
| I do not think that's happening in Gaza. | ||
| Occupation, there's no occupation, hasn't been since 2005. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So anyways, leave it at that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's Paulette, Democrat, Monticello, Florida. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you so much for C-SPAN because this is a different caller. | ||
| It's apparent. | ||
| There's two sets of news, depending on your party's evidence. | ||
| Paulette, we're having a hard time hearing you. | ||
| Are you able to get a better connection there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you hear me now? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I said thank you so much for C-SPAN open forum because listening to the callers, it's apparent that there is two sets of news depending on the algorithms, and it's dependent on party affiliation. | ||
| And what it's doing is keeping us separate. | ||
| And we all know that United, we stand, divided, we fall. | ||
| There are crimes being committed by humans against humans all over the world. | ||
| There was another caller that stated that blacks are being given white farms, and we know that the tariffs is the reason why so many farmers are losing their livelihoods. | ||
| Also, I wanted to mention that with homosexuality and mental illness, there should be a poll that shows how many of these people that are in these type of situations have been a victim of sexual abuse or physical abuse as a child. | ||
| And the last thing is that MIDAS Touch Network is a very good news source to watch. | ||
| Thank you so much for your time. | ||
| All right, Paulette. | ||
| Here is Katrina in Georgia, Line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I just want to comment on some of the callers. | ||
| The young lady from Arkansas, a lot of people tend to talk out the side of their neck. | ||
| One minute you want to say have empathy for the young lady who got hurt on the train or murdered on that train. | ||
| And then you want to ridicule the people that did not assist her, which I do understand that they should have. | ||
| But then you say you want people to have empathy and sympathy for that situation, but you'd have no empathy or sympathy for these people who come to this country and try to have a better life for themselves and possibly save their own lives, let alone their family lives, because of where they're coming from. | ||
| And another thing about as far as them wanting people to come here the right way, it should not take 10, 15, 20, 30 years for anyone to gain citizenship. | ||
| All this money that they are spending, sending ICE and the National Guard and all these other individuals to these states, that money could be used to better our immigration system. | ||
| So people can come here and want to come here the right way. | ||
| It is ridiculous that you be in a country, you establish roots, you have kids, you pay into the government, you form a community, you work within that community, you pay taxes, you don't get a return off your taxes because you're a hardworking person and you can't file taxes because you don't have the proper documentation. | ||
| But they're not crying about that. | ||
| They're working. | ||
| They're showing up. | ||
| They're doing what they're supposed to do. | ||
| Trump has put in these people's mind that everybody that he's picking up are criminals. | ||
| They are not criminals. | ||
| He sold you all a bag of bad goods and you're accepting it. | ||
| And for the plant here in Georgia, I want people to understand. | ||
| Kemp knew exactly what was going on. | ||
| Just like if we go to the United States and build something outside of the United States, we tend to bring our own people in, get the thing established, and then they hire local people. | ||
| The same for this plant here in Honda. | ||
| They knew what the agreement was. | ||
| That's why they allowed them to send a plane here to come and get their people and not send them to different countries like he's doing the people of Mexican descent. | ||
| So that's why I say that you all are so, and I want to say not you all, but people are so gullible by the information this man and Donald Trump is putting out in his administration. | ||
| Edward in a Republican Manchester, Connecticut. | ||
| Good morning, Edward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was just wondering if anyone in the whole entire country wonders what happened to American virtues in our nation. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Virtues like life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shouldn't we value each other's lives as much as our very own as people in our nation by now in our country's history? | |
| I mean, we did have a good president that was honest with us all when he did tell us we were all sold out. | ||
| The system is broken. | ||
| Our votes don't count. | ||
| And that's a God's honest truth. | ||
| But we held elections anyway. | ||
| Doesn't anybody know that only voting on people And then having no choice nationwide but to trust our lives and our children's lives in the hands of people we elect now that they have allowed us all to elect people, no matter what color or sex we are as citizens of this society of ours. | ||
| The only way to fix a broken system is by having a nationwide vote and letting the will of the people decide which government system we, the people of America, use. | ||
| The one that was taken away from us after we earned our freedom in the beginning of our nation altogether or the one that was put in place of it that never worked for us and never will. | ||
| All right, Edward. | ||
| Here's Cindy at Austin, Texas, Independent Line. | ||
| Cindy, you're on Open Forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have two topics I want to quickly talk about. | |
| One is the media, and it ties in with the Democratic Party. | ||
| I have been somebody who has voted Democrat my whole life and am actually wondering what's going to happen with the next presidential election to all consider voting for. | ||
| One of the people I'm considering voting for, even though I don't know a whole lot yet because it's early, is Tom Cotton. | ||
| And if you had asked me five years ago if I would ever vote for somebody like Tom Cotton for president, the answer would be H no. | ||
| But let me tell you, I like the immigration bill that he and I think he used to be the former senator from Georgia passed or proposed. | ||
| And this is why I want to talk about quickly politics and then the media. | ||
| So how it ties into the media is I used to be an avid watcher of MSNBC, love Chris Hayes, never really liked Rachel Maddow, but watched her and was on the fence about Lawrence O'Donnell. | ||
| I cannot watch that network anymore. | ||
| It is so off the charts to craziness. | ||
| I can't even watch it. | ||
| And I still like Chris Hayes, but I don't like his show anymore. | ||
| And it's just the mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. | ||
| And the Democratic Party, I hate to say, I don't think I'll, even though I'm an independent, I called in on the Independent line. | ||
| I've always been a Democrat. | ||
| So what I want to say to the Democratic Party, the DNC, is stop picking the presidential candidate. | ||
| Let the people pick it. | ||
| Because if you all pick somebody like Gavin Newsome or any other California crackpot, I will definitely not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate for president. | ||
| I did last time with my, you know, biting my tongue as I did it, but I did it. | ||
| I will not do it again. | ||
| Gavin Newsome is so, anyways, off the charts. | ||
| So that's how the media ties in with the politics. | ||
| The other thing I want to say is what I have switched to watching in the morning mostly. | ||
| I don't watch Washington Journal as much, except for when you host Mimi or when Pedro hosts. | ||
| I think you two are the best hosts. | ||
| The other ones I cannot deal with is when is the last time you all had a senator or sitting cabinet member or like this morning, CNBC had the head of the FDA on Dr. Marty McKay. | ||
| I'm very curious now that I started watching that network that they get senators regularly. | ||
| You get the same old congresspeople, the lady from California you had, the black guy from Texas you have, the white guy you have from Nebraska a lot, the guy you had, some Bubba guy or something, I think you get from the South a lot. | ||
| When's the last time you had a senator as a guest? | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for that feedback. | ||
| And Lawrence is a Republican in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Hi, Lawrence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just want to touch on a few issues. | ||
| One being the immigration issue. | ||
| And in particular, people call up about the humanity of the issue. | ||
| But the core of the issue is that these people do not belong here in the United States. | ||
| We are spending tens of billions of dollars in health care, education, and social services. | ||
| This is money that could be going to our own people. | ||
| These immigrants, they do not pay any tax except for sales tax, and it's just wrong. | ||
| And what does it say for all of the people who legally have taken the time and the money to become U.S. citizens? | ||
| Where is the fairness in that? | ||
| And one other issue I'd like to touch on is the Gaza issue. | ||
| First, it is not a genocide. | ||
| If you look at the definition, it's deliberate, intentional targeting of civilians. | ||
| That is genocide. | ||
| Israel is the only nation on earth that does roof knocking, distributes warning pamphlets, evacuates civilians, and creates safe zones. | ||
| And on top of that, Israel is the only country that feeds the people of the army they are fighting. | ||
| So this whole thing has been blown out of proportion. | ||
| And it's a war that must be prosecuted to the end because the political leaders of Hamas, including Ishmael Hania, have stated they will massacre and massacre again. | ||
| And it's explicitly written in the charter of Hamas, calling for the destruction of not only Israel, but the Jews. | ||
| So if there is to be any peace in the region, this war has to be prosecuted to the defeat of Hamas. | ||
| It is that simple. | ||
| It's not something that there's a black or a white or an in-between. | ||
| It must go to the end if even the Palestinian people have any hopes of freedom from the Hamas tyranny. | ||
| We got that, Lawrence. | ||
| Let's go to Janice. | ||
| One more call. | ||
| Arkansas, Democrat. | ||
| Janice, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, how are you? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First and foremost, I would just like to say that Trump doesn't care about if you are Republican, Democrat, Independent. | |
| He just care about himself. | ||
| The only thing he gets on TV and talk about is what I done. | ||
| And that's it for this open forum. | ||
| We'll have another chance later in the program. | ||
| But coming up next, we've got Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Tara Kopp. | ||
| She's joining us to talk about her reporting on the administration's new military campaign against the drug cartels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stay with us. | |
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us now is Tara Kopp. | ||
| She is Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. | ||
| Tara, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| First, before we get to what's happening in the Caribbean, talk to us about the Pentagon's reaction to yesterday's strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was one of surprise. | |
| We waited for hours to get a good sense of who knew what when. | ||
| And did Israel actually notify the Pentagon or were our own military assets in the region the reason that we knew that something was headed towards Qatar was able to at least relay a message, although it didn't land in time. | ||
| The Qatar has said that basically they got the warning from the U.S. as the missiles were falling on them. | ||
| So is it typical for Israel to notify the United States? | ||
| This is not the first time that they have gone after Hamas in other countries. | ||
| Is it typical for them to notify the United States ahead of the attack? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Pentagon has relied on an extremely close working relationship with Israel. | |
| And the notification goes both ways. | ||
| When the U.S. has been taking action, let's say against the Houthis, we have notified. | ||
| What caught everyone by surprise in this particular instance is that Israel gave the Pentagon a heads up that these strikes were happening, but did not say where they were taking place or what country. | ||
| And it was up to the Pentagon to quickly try and ascertain where this was going to take place. | ||
| So that was intentional. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| I mean, do you have an opinion on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't have an opinion on it. | |
| But I can say that it was a source of frustration. | ||
| The various people that I talked to throughout the building yesterday, different offices were wondering what sort of impact this is going to have. | ||
| You know, Qatar is home to one of our largest bases in the Middle East and has been an invaluable partner in negotiating hostage releases. | ||
| You know, he saw with Trump yesterday that he seemed rather incensed that these missiles fell on such a close, major non-NATO ally of the United States. | ||
| They also, Qatar does buy a lot of U.S. weapons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does, and just provided a 747 to the president. | |
| They are a major U.S. buyer. | ||
| The idea is that they have a lot of Western weapon systems. | ||
| They use our same platforms. | ||
| It provides some interoperability. | ||
| The U.S. has been trying to build up that relationship for years. | ||
| It's always a complicated one, but basically as the last two years or after the October 7th attacks, our relationship with Qatar has been more complicated, but they have also been a leading partner in trying to secure hostage release. | ||
| Their critics, of course, say, yes, they are doing that, but at the same time, they are harboring Hamas leadership and giving them safe haven. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, with the U.S. knowledge. | |
| And part of that was that, you know, to be able to negotiate, to be able to try and eventually get to a peace deal, there have to be people to negotiate with. | ||
| And I think that the sentiment at that point was to have them operating somewhere where there could be communication. | ||
| You can be in touch with them. | ||
| The Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Kane, were in Puerto Rico. | ||
| They made an unannounced trip there earlier this week. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this happened on the heels of the U.S. military strike on the drug boat off the coast of Venezuela. | |
| It was a show of force. | ||
| It was signaling. | ||
| The U.S. has maintained a military presence. | ||
| There's about 10,000 National Guard troops, obviously, U.S. territory. | ||
| And they are looking at options to further build up that military presence. | ||
| We have bases that have been closed for years. | ||
| There's still a port at Viecas. | ||
| There's a Air National Guard base at Muniz. | ||
| There's a lot of possibility there to station troops, station ships, station aircraft, if this is actually going to escalate into something larger with Venezuela. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about what that military hardware is that is being stationed in the Caribbean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there are eight warships right now. | |
| There's a cruiser, there's three destroyers, there's a number of landing dock ships, which are important for their ability to carry helicopters. | ||
| So they can transport troops onto shore easily. | ||
| They can resupply. | ||
| There's also an amphibious warship that's got about 2,500 Marines on board. | ||
| All of these ships together are mostly in the Caribbean. | ||
| There have been a few that have gone onto the Pacific side, but have been basically doing patrols, presence. | ||
| In the past, that would be, I mean, having eight ships in U.S. Southern Command, and I've covered U.S. Southern Command for years, they never have that many warships there. | ||
| It's usually a Coast Guard presence. | ||
| It's the Navy hospital ship. | ||
| Maybe a destroyer makes, you know, a port tour. | ||
| I mean, eight warships. | ||
| There's F-35s, which is America's premier fighter jet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is this overkill for drug cartels? | |
| Well, it may be a larger move than just the drug cartels, and that's the bigger question that you're seeing Maduro raise in Venezuela. | ||
| Is this going to be a military overthrow? | ||
| And it wouldn't be the first time Trump has thought of this if that is indeed the administration's thinking. | ||
| In 2018, he was actively suggesting that the U.S. military be used to overthrow Maduro and looked for options, and he got talked off of it by his advisors at the time. | ||
| But as we've seen in the second term, a lot of this is about Trump's unfinished business. | ||
| And so you have to raise the question, does he consider this part of that unfinished business? | ||
| If you'd like to talk to Tara Kopp about anything happening at the Pentagon, she's the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| The lines are by party. | ||
| So we've got Democrats on 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line set aside for active and former military members. | ||
| You can call us on 202-748-8003. | ||
| Use that same number to text us, your comments, and we're also on Facebook and X. | ||
| So this all follows that deadly strike on the vessel in the Caribbean Sea. | ||
| 11 people were killed. | ||
| The Trump administration says that they were carrying illegal drugs bound for the United States and that they were members of Venezuela's Trenda Aragua. | ||
| What's your reporting on how all that went down and what's the intelligence that you've seen that would confirm that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hardly anyone has seen the intelligence to confirm that, not even members of Congress, and they've been asking for it for more than a week. | |
| There was a briefing yesterday that didn't go particularly well with members of Congress, and we're still trying to report out details of what was briefed. | ||
| But the general assessment from there and from our own organization and others is that it still has a lot of unanswered questions on the authorizations used, the authority used, the process for this. | ||
| Typically, when the Navy interdicts or even the Coast Guard interdicts a vessel, there's a process to a warning shot to getting them to slow down. | ||
| From everything that has been provided to us to see to date, you just see a vessel speeding along and then you see an airstrike, whether it was a missile or a drone, you know, a drone-fired missile or a helicopter-fired missile. | ||
| Don't even know that, and the administration has been very tight-lipped on how this was actually carried out. | ||
| I want to show you what Senator Paul said. | ||
| This is Senator Rand Paul. | ||
| He's quoted in a semaphore about this. | ||
| He said, It says, Paul said, the U.S. government needs, quote, some kind of process before you kill people. | ||
| He acknowledged, however, that he didn't expect any other Republicans to join him in speaking out about the subject. | ||
| Quote, people are very much afraid to have opinions right now. | ||
| I doubt anybody else will. | ||
| I know you don't cover Congress, but what have you been hearing from Republicans specifically about this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very little, as the senator noted. | |
| I think right now the main question is: under what authority was this carried out? | ||
| And you saw on Trump's very first day in office, he identified the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. | ||
| That opened a pretty wide door to use the 2001 AUMF potentially. | ||
| And administrations have been using that particular vehicle for now almost 25 years. | ||
| This is authorization for use of military force that we used against terrorists in the Middle East. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, to respond to Al-Qaeda directly in response to the September 11th attacks. | |
| And ever since then, we've seen this authorization be used to target terrorist cells in Africa, in the Sahel. | ||
| We've seen it in targeted strikes in Yemen. | ||
| I don't know exactly if this specific authorization was used for this, but it would be the first time I think it would be used in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Are you hearing anything about possible strikes within Venezuela? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of chatter. | |
| There's a lot of chatter that it could potentially be strikes against cartels in Venezuela or that the mission will expand and strike cartels in Mexico and that this is really a paradigm shift for how the military is operating in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| That now that it has identified these groups as foreign terrorist organizations, the reins are off a little bit, so to speak, and that if they have a target of opportunity, they can take it. | ||
| I think that Congress is going to probably weigh in because that could very easily engage the U.S. in a wider conflict here in our very own hemisphere. | ||
| And Maduro's allies are, of course, Russia and China, adversaries of the United States. | ||
| What are we expecting, or have we heard any reaction from either Russia or China? | ||
| I mean, Venezuela, China buys about 90%, I understand, of Venezuela's oil. | ||
| So how are they responding to this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think there's two diplomatic back channels right now. | |
| It's kind of a wait and see. | ||
| This was one vote, the first strike. | ||
| We have signaled through both Rubio and through JD Vance that this won't be the last strike. | ||
| So I think that the response right now is muted as there's kind of a wait and see what is the U.S. really going to do here. | ||
| Let's talk to callers. | ||
| We'll start with Wayne Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Republican. | ||
| Hi, Wayne. | ||
| You're on with Tara Cop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| How are you doing, Jay? | ||
| Good. | ||
| We've been having a war against drugs for the last 40 years, right? | ||
| And y'all haven't put a dent in it. | ||
| But, you know, this is what I want to say, right? | ||
| I'm going to go off the tough topic a little bit, right, for one second. | ||
| If the President of the United States, Donald Trump, would go up on a minimum wage, $20 an hour, people in the inner city wouldn't be selling drugs. | ||
| And this is what you all say. | ||
| You all say if you go up $21 an hour, the small businesses won't make no money because they won't be able to hire them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The people in America, they spend money on garbage. | |
| Still up that gate on me. | ||
| So they will buy, right? | ||
| Now, the inner city is the problem. | ||
| I don't know why they don't want the National Guard, the FBI, ISIS. | ||
| I don't know why they don't want them in the cities because we need it. | ||
| Like Donald Trump say, the inner city need peace in the neighborhood. | ||
| All right, Wayne. | ||
| The deployment of the National Guard in American cities in D.C., what has been the, has there been a strain on the National Guard and their resources? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was already a strain on the National Guard even before this. | |
| You know, it's actively getting ready for this hurricane season. | ||
| It has been used non-stop for the last 20 years, not only to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but then Syria and then COVID and then response to January 6th and response to domestic unrest. | ||
| This has been a non-stop churn on the National Guard. | ||
| So this latest iteration of how can we use the National Guard? | ||
| How can we put more National Guard troops in cities across the U.S.? | ||
| That's going to have to be considered in the wider, these units have to train. | ||
| They have to be prepared to deploy overseas. | ||
| If you've got, if you're polling, you know, right now in D.C., there's about 2,200 troops and they're coming, 900 of them about are D.C. National Guard. | ||
| And then, you know, you've got some states that are sending as few as 12 or some states that are sending a couple hundred. | ||
| But that all pulls those guys and women from what their scheduled training was going to be and what their unit was preparing for them to do. | ||
| And that has a ripple-down effect. | ||
| And from their jobs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And from their jobs. | |
| They all fly. | ||
| I mean, you know, the troops that have been here now for 30 days, they missed their kids' first day of school. | ||
| The troops that are coming in from D.C., they all live in the wider area. | ||
| And some of them are commuting as much as two hours just to get here to do the mission and then drive home. | ||
| That starts to weigh on things. | ||
| And that ultimately factors into conversations around dinner tables of can we really sustain this? | ||
| And how long is it expected to be sustained for D.C.? | ||
|
unidentified
|
For D.C. right now, they've actually been considering orders to extend it through either late November or late December, and that is not to see troops in D.C. through that timeframe, but they want to make sure that all the National Guard forces that are sent here get all the benefits that accrue. | |
| So right now, if you're on deployment orders, you have to deploy for at least 30 days to be able to qualify for all the benefits that follow that. | ||
| And a lot of the time when the military wants to save money, they'll put them on 29-day orders. | ||
| And so that doesn't seem fair. | ||
| Ask the troops. | ||
| Let's talk to Robert, Las Vegas, Nevada, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, Democrat. | |
| And listen, what scares me is that maybe we're just on the precursor to what's actually going to be happening several months from now with thousands and thousands and thousands of people being laid off with nowhere to go. | ||
| This could be a precursor to that. | ||
| What could be a precursor, Robert? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Big people being gathered up and put in pens. | |
| The ICE detentions for immigration? | ||
| For immigrations or more, they'll make more of them because you have these thousands and thousands of people without jobs with nowhere to go and they're going to have to go somewhere. | ||
| Try thinking maybe those pens would be the start of it. | ||
| There was some military facilities that are now being used by ICE. | ||
| What can you tell us about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| This is in Chicago. | ||
| And as we've been reporting on Chicago being considered kind of the next city that you might surge National Guard troops, part of that also is making the facilities around Chicago available for federal agents, federal law enforcement, to be able to surge their own people to house their backup operations, to house their supplies. | ||
| And so there is a base in Chicago, or right actually north of Chicago, where they've allowed them to kind of assemble and use it for facilities, use it for storage, use it for parking. | ||
| The question is, if troops also follow on, would they also go there? | ||
| And we haven't seen that deployment yet. | ||
| I think because of the very reasons we were just talking about earlier, one, there's strain, but two, there's some actually pretty strict legal authorities on what troops can and cannot do if they were sent to Chicago. | ||
| Let's talk to Jane, who is calling us from Augusta, Maine, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Jane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, Mimi and guests. | ||
| My name is Jane. | ||
| I'm a registered licensed dietitian in Maine. | ||
| I'm doing my 30-day call. | ||
| And you may be familiar with the on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| They had a book, Green Gold, and it talks about the avocado industry. | ||
| I saw it last week and I've read the book. | ||
| I know a few things from putting this all together about military, possible military action against drug cartels in possibly Venezuela. | ||
| But first of all, work on group process for bills. | ||
| Organizations work on group process. | ||
| I think schools should be talking about group process. | ||
| And of course, in areas, individuals talking about health care need to deliberately choose health and not elicit local drug dealers, which is the start in other countries. | ||
| But the main thing I wanted to talk about is if you're familiar with the book, there's a chapter 15 in the avocado book is titled Cartels. | ||
| And it talks about that the cartels, they shifted to extorting farmers, increasing violence in avocado areas in Mexico. | ||
| And this is all detailed in the book between the years 2013 and 2022. | ||
| And extortion should be a concern to everyone everywhere. | ||
| But has there been anything related to any of the agricultural industries, the extortion? | ||
| I'm thinking, because I've looked at reports, USDA GAIN report, May 12th, 2024, it talks about imports and exports. | ||
| But is there anything that is related or you know about that relates to this concern that has to do with cocoa, chocolate, dried beans, or any other agricultural concerns? | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
| Okay, Jane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the cartels have kind of reached into all aspects of the economy to diversify and just to increase their power. | |
| But the action that you're seeing by the military right now isn't part of a, they aren't trying to do economic pressure. | ||
| They're not trying to do diplomatic pressure. | ||
| This is purely military pressure and military strikes. | ||
| And, you know, in a very dramatic fashion, killing 11 people on a boat without, you know, she said group process, which made me think due process. | ||
| And you're thinking again of Senator Paul and a few others now who have questioned, you know, what were the due process elements of this? | ||
| And the U.S. has said that it was conducted this way just to send a message and that the other ways of doing things, the economic pressure, the trying to round up drug shipments, trying to interdict them, hasn't put a stop to the flow of drugs into the U.S. | ||
| And so this is a much sharper approach. | ||
| What kind of weapons do these drug cartels have? | ||
| And could they put up a fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They could put up a fight. | |
| They're extremely sophisticated. | ||
| I think that one of the reasons for the secrecy in the military's approach from people I have talked to is that they are trying to avoid the cartels getting wind or being able to intercept or be able to react to any of the military's future actions. | ||
| These are not simple maneuvers. | ||
| You've seen already the underwater drones that are used to deliver drugs. | ||
| They have vast reach in both people and resources funding. | ||
| So this is, you know, Trendio Agua by itself is questionable as to how big its reach is and whether it was really kind of the global cartel that the U.S. is purporting it to be right now and the administration is saying it will be. | ||
| But overall, the cartels are extremely powerful. | ||
| Where are they getting those advanced weapons? | ||
| Because a submarine drone is an advanced weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's also an expensive one, but I mean, you have very well financed, it's through drug sales. | |
| And is Russia selling them or China selling them? | ||
| Who's selling it to these drugs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Let's go to Griff, who's in Massachusetts, former military. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would like people to be advised that the United States Navy has been undergoing these activities in the Caribbean for a long, long time now, at least 20 to 30 years. | ||
| And this is nothing new at all that they have been trying to interdict the use of these boats in a number of ways and drugs being smuggled into the country. | ||
| So this is nothing new at all. | ||
| This is just part of our national strategy in the Caribbean. | ||
| And Griff, did you serve in the Navy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did, and I actually did that kind of work. | |
| What did you do? | ||
| Can you tell us specifically what you did? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I can tell you some things. | |
| I was on a destroyer, which had particular equipment which would be able to locate these boats and run them down and take them into custody because they were running drugs, they were running weapons mostly into the northern part of South America and through the Caribbean. | ||
| So the United States had a very, very vigorous presence in the Caribbean for just those reasons. | ||
| This wasn't necessarily a Russian thing. | ||
| This was just things that were going on in the Caribbean, which were interdicting all kinds of large ships, small ships, or going into countries and overthrowing governments and causing a lot of havoc there because of the need for weapons. | ||
| And in some cases, these weapons were actually brought in from the Russians. | ||
| Okay, let's get a response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So yes, the Navy has been doing interdiction, has been supporting interdiction missions for decades in the counter-drug effort. | ||
| Typically, what will happen is they will be assisting Coast Guard. | ||
| Either they'll have a Coast Guard unit embedded on the warship itself because the military, as we have seen a lot in the National Guard deployments, cannot do law enforcement. | ||
| And so they will have the Coast Guard there under DHS and they will go and they'll do the interdiction. | ||
| They'll do the detaining. | ||
| What we have seen that is very new here and at first is this direct strike on the boat, a direct military strike. | ||
| We have, from the various earliest hours of this happening, the Navy said it wasn't us. | ||
| But it wasn't that they were trying to back off of it. | ||
| It was just it wasn't a Navy ship that fired. | ||
| It was an air asset. | ||
| So it could either be a drone or it was an Air Force asset or it was an Army, a Special Operations helicopter, but it was not Navy. | ||
| Is that not public, what actually fired on the boat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We have tried, and we are continuing to try to figure out what fired on the boat, and that is part of the very unusual secrecy around this strike. | |
| Usually even in counterterrorism strikes in Somalia, for example, over the last few years, U.S. Africa Command will put out a statement, a drone strike, and they may not say what type of drone, but they will say a drone strike against, and then they'll name the target and they will release the name of the target. | ||
| We have not seen the U.S. release the names of the people who are on this boat. | ||
| We have not seen them admit to whether it was a drone or a helicopter, if it was a manned or unmanned aircraft. | ||
| There's just still a lot of questions. | ||
| Here's Daryl in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Daryl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| My question is, if Trump can use this ICE now and the National Guard now, will he use this National Guard and ICE during the midterm elections and also during the national elections because he considers it a security risk? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll hang up and wait for your answer. | ||
| I've gotten this question probably more than any other in the last two weeks from people who are genuinely concerned that this is the start of something new of a domestic force. | ||
| I just would like to point out that one of the reasons that we have not seen a Chicago National Guard deployment yet is there are very strict federal laws on what the National Guard can and can't do in domestic situations and under either state control or federal control. | ||
| And I think that that is for now going to be one of the limiting factors in its use. | ||
| And you've seen that challenge in the courts in the Los Angeles case, the courts finding that those federalized troops did not have the authorization to conduct the law enforcement that they did. | ||
| And even in the kind of standoff positions that they had, they were saying they weren't doing law enforcement. | ||
| They were just performing a protective perimeter around the ICE agents that were doing the detentions. | ||
| The court found, and it's under appeal, that even that perimeter was part of the wider law enforcement operation that the troops were not supposed to engage in. | ||
| Here's Gerald in Bellevue, Kentucky, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Gerald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| And this is definitely a topic that I wanted to make a comment on because I did 20 years in the United States Army and about 14 in the National Guard. | ||
| But, you know, the way that changed, because I went into 1986, I was a liaison officer with the National Guard in Ohio. | ||
| And we used to work with local armed enforcement. | ||
| I learned some stuff about Plant Ready and how you actually make this happen. | ||
| I just wanted to make it really plain for most Americans, if you got a governor or a president that you elected, this is what you get. | ||
| This is what you get. | ||
| I don't know what people even know about 1974, and we had the National Guard actually shoot at Kent State, but this is what we get. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| What do you think maybe next year, if the Democrats win to Congress, that they can do to stop this president? | ||
| What can they do? | ||
| Any comment on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that there are a number of lawmakers who are looking at options on how do you further clarify the Guard's role? | |
| How do you further clarify and, I guess, further define presidential powers and congressional powers? | ||
| You've seen a growing amount of frustration, particularly, let's say, right now, with the Venezuela strike. | ||
| It's more than a week out, and Congress didn't get notified in a timely fashion, or according to how they're, by statute, they're supposed to be notified. | ||
| And now they're still trying to get answers from both the Pentagon and the White House on what authorities were used and the process. | ||
| And that's to say, unusual. | ||
| You've also been reporting on the Pentagon's rebrand announcement by President Trump, referring to it as the War Department. | ||
| What's the latest on that? | ||
| And do you know about how that came about and why that happened now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
People that I've talked to said that both the President and Secretary Hagseth have been kicking the idea around for months, and it started to get talked about more in earnest around March with the President quipping at one particular meeting to the Secretary: you look more like a Secretary of War. | |
| They prefer the name because of the Department of Defense. | ||
| The connotation is that we're defending against war, but that was the whole point in 1949 to prevent wars and that whole peace through strength. | ||
| But this administration takes a different view of that and to be on more of a war footing. | ||
| And they think that the recalibration of the name better reflects that. | ||
| And how much has that cost, the rebrand? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is, again, a question that we have for them. | |
| So let's just take in the last year, we've seen the Biden administration switch names of major U.S. military installations from honoring Confederate soldiers or Confederate military leaders to, for example, in North Carolina, it went from Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty. | ||
| And then the President and Secretary Hagseth said, no, we're going to switch it back to Fort Bragg. | ||
| So that initial switch of the name plates and the big sign on the base and everything else between Bragg and eight other just Army installations, so we're just looking at a pool of about nine, cost more than $60 million because you have to do the sign in front of the base. | ||
| You have to do all the seals. | ||
| You have to do the stationery, you know, on and on and on. | ||
| Now, if you look at it this way, we've got hundreds of military bases around the globe. | ||
| We've got military, you know, the Defense Department has about 600,000 buildings in its inventory. | ||
| Not every single one of them has a Department of Defense seal, but a lot of them do. | ||
| And it's that big wooden blue seal. | ||
| We've already seen some of them inside the Pentagon be taken down to just a wooden sign that says Department of War. | ||
| Are we going to do that hundreds or thousands of times? | ||
| And the price tag on that, the only thing that the Department has told us is that this will be incremental and that when they have a clear cost estimate, they'll provide one. | ||
| Here's Bob calling us from Ruskin, Florida, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Bob. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| Well, you know, this is a loaded topic. | ||
| We could go on for six years talking about this, but I'm a retired Army Ranger, 26 years military. | ||
| I was also a 9-11 first responder. | ||
| And, you know, to remind America, I'm sure everybody knows this Thursday is 9-11 and to set your clocks for 8:48 a.m. | ||
| That being said, you know, we can go back to opium and all other kinds of drugs in Afghanistan and other countries. | ||
| And how much of this drug trade and drug processing fueled 9-11? | ||
| Does anybody know that anybody researched? | ||
| So, you know, 9-11 is coming up, and we got to take immediate action, blow up more boats in the ocean, whatever it's going to take to stop these drugs from killing Americans, because there will be another 9-11. | ||
| So, this Thursday, everybody set their clock for 848, and remember the people who lost their lives in New York City and the Pentagon and other places. | ||
| And we need to step up the pace and stop these drug dealers. | ||
| All right, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's been 24 years, and sometimes it feels like it's just yesterday. | |
| I was here on 9-11. | ||
| I watched the Pentagon burn from across the tidal basin. | ||
| I was part of those initial embedded reporters that went into Iraq. | ||
| Covering this and the after effects have been part of my career for the last two decades. | ||
| This turn to the Western Hemisphere, you're seeing the administration signal it, that they do see the drugs as a large threat. | ||
| Illegal immigration and drug flow they see as two primary threats. | ||
| And I think that as they move forward with their national defense strategy, we're going to see more emphasis in the national defense strategy toward the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Whereas for the last at least 10 years, the administrations have been trying to pivot to the Pacific and say that China is the greatest challenge. | ||
| It is the biggest competitor to the U.S., but as far as preventing drug flow, this is really a sea change in how we're seeing the military think about and plan for and operate. | ||
| Here's David, Lakeland, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for my call. | ||
| You know, I've seen this happen since the Ronald Reagan administration began trying to stop this situation. | ||
| And there's only one way and one way only to stop it. | ||
| You stop it from the source. | ||
| You have all the F-35s out there in the sea. | ||
| Just equip them with some napalm and let everyone know they're coming and just eliminate, eradicate the sources. | ||
| Take the poppy plants that are in Afghanistan, burn them down that Cheney and Bush made the reservoir to supply those poppy plants. | ||
| They built that reservoir and now, whether it's in Colombia, any place in South America that's got the cocoa plants, just eliminate them, eradicate the plants with napalm and be done with cocoa, be done with poppy seeds, and now you don't have no more heroin or no more cocaine in the whole world. | ||
| Doesn't that sound a lot more logical? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Logical? | |
| So the military already has a pretty active role in trying to eradicate some of the cocaine fields. | ||
| I actually traveled to Columbia with U.S. Southern Command during Trump's first term to get a first-hand look at the cocaine fields and a look at the eradication efforts and actually traipsed and like hiked through basically hillsides worth of cocoa plants. | ||
| And they were training locals on how to detect them, how to destroy them, how. | ||
| And the Guard is a very big part of working with Colombian forces to help improve and help bolster their capabilities in doing that. | ||
| So this is already taking place. | ||
| Just last night, Poland shot down some drones, Russian drones that had come into their airspace. | ||
| I don't know if you have had the chance to get a response from the Pentagon about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know anything? | |
| Just what I have read, and this is a very potentially sensitive and dangerous escalation if one of those drones did actually strike Poland. | ||
| If, you know, you saw it a couple of years ago when everybody was concerned about the distance that missiles that the U.S. provided to Ukraine or that Russia was shooting. | ||
| Because if Russia hits a NATO member, that could be the change where we are all under Article 5 required to provide troops and respond and defend, whether it's Poland or whether it's one of our Eastern European allies. | ||
| So I think that, you know, given the strike in Qatar and given the strike in Venezuela and now this potential uptick, there's a lot going on in the world. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we're happy that you are here to talk to us about it and covering it at the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent, Tara Kopp. | ||
| Thanks so much for coming in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| And coming up after a short break, we will go back to Open Forum and take your calls about politics, public policy. | ||
| The lines are on your screen. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thursday morning. | |
| Watch C-SPAN's live all-day coverage of the commemoration ceremonies marking the 24th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. | ||
| Coverage begins at 7 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, and then at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, we'll take you to the remembrance ceremony at the 9-11 Memorial in New York City with Vice President JD Vance in attendance. | ||
| At 9 a.m. Eastern, the observance ceremony from the Pentagon with President Donald Trump. | ||
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| Watch live all-day coverage of the commemoration ceremonies marking the 24th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're in open forum until the end of the program, where we will take you to the House. | ||
| They are gaveling in at 10 a.m. and they will be completing their work on the 2026 defense programs and policy legislation. | ||
| The Senate gavels in also today, that's on C-SPAN 2, and they will be working on continuing work on that same bill. | ||
| Also, at 10 a.m. Eastern, a look at President Trump's artificial intelligence strategy with the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. | ||
| His name is Michael Kratzios, and he's testifying at a Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing that is set to get underway at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| That will be over on C-SPAN 3. | ||
| You can also watch all of our programming at C-SPAN Now, our app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Well, here is Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. | ||
| He was with reporters on Capitol Hill yesterday. | ||
| He talked about those revised jobs numbers and also the looming government funding deadline. | ||
| And this morning, we learned that Trump's economy is even in worse shape than we knew. | ||
| The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency Trump is literally working to bend to his will, reported that the economy added 900,000, almost a million fewer jobs than everyone originally thought. | ||
| This report shows one thing: Donald Trump has tanked the job market. | ||
| After promising to lower prices to curb inflation on day one, his tariffs are raising prices and slowing the economy. | ||
| His big, ugly bill is kicking 16 million people off health care. | ||
| Unemployment's going up. | ||
| Health insurance costs are facing some of the largest increases in years. | ||
| Since Donald Trump took office, there are fewer jobs, there are higher costs, less opportunity for Americans. | ||
| Meanwhile, for weeks now, Leader Jeffries and I have been asking Leader Thun and Speaker Johnson to meet with us to start negotiating, keep the government funding. | ||
| We've heard nothing, crickets. | ||
| As Senator Murray can tell you, the only way to avoid a shutdown is to work in a bipartisan way. | ||
| And to the phones now to Mike, an independent in Valley Center, California. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hey, I just wanted to make a comment on that boat that they destroyed. | ||
| To me, things just don't add up. | ||
| If there's 11 people on that boat, I would be surprised if it actually was a load of drugs because you think there would be no more than like three people on there. | ||
| Their boat wasn't that big, and they'd want to own more drugs and fewer people. | ||
| So, in my mind, I think they destroyed a boat of immigrants. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Here's Debbie in Williamsburg, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Debbie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to bring up the fact that we keep calling in, and the majority of us are loyal Americans. | ||
| We see what's going on in our country, and we keep talking about it. | ||
| When it's we ask for any action from Congress, it's like, well, they did this, or the other party did that, or Trump's doing this, and things will get better, but it seems like it's just a lie. | ||
| And I don't see anything being resolved. | ||
| My one main thing that I have an issue with is that he took an oath of office. | ||
| And when you take an oath of office, you're swearing not just to the country, but to God, that you will uphold the laws and the values of our country. | ||
| And right now, he is breaking our laws, and they're going before the courts. | ||
| And the courts are saying that they're illegal. | ||
| And he's interfering in our future elections, political elections, by the things that he's doing and the people that he has underneath the pill net are doing. | ||
| And I don't understand why he cannot be brought before Congress for impeachment. | ||
| If this was somebody else doing this, he would already be in jail. | ||
| And I really are in bad times. | ||
| And I really hope that everybody is praying for our country and that God will intervene on our behalf, not on the rich people's behalf. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Stewart, a Democrat in Illinois. | ||
| Good morning, Stuart. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. | |
| And the last conversation you had really incensed me, where we're spending millions to change the name of departments and change the names of military bases. | ||
| And yet, the pediatric brain tumor consortium, which costs the government $4 million a year, has been cut and it will end. | ||
| And now children with brain cancer are no longer being enrolled in cutting-edge trials. | ||
| And I just think, where are we putting our money? | ||
| That has to be thought about. | ||
| Here is Jim in Pottsboro, Texas, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, Nami. | |
| What I want to talk about, and I would hope that Ceasebank could bring some guests on the topic. | ||
| People call it the iron law of prohibition. | ||
| And so whether it's the shooting of this boat, you know, cartels, all these things, this is a product of prohibition. | ||
| We learned this lesson about alcohol, you know, earlier in the 20th century. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| The government is way too involved in the personal decisions of American citizens. | ||
| The drugs, you know, drugs have, you know, an effect on people's health, but we should have the right to choose. | ||
| Nobody's going to tell me to come in and arrest me for not being in bed by 10 o'clock. | ||
| If we would stop this endless war on drugs, we would not have had fentanyl enter the market and replace heroin or prescription drugs. | ||
| So I just like for the government to become less involved in our decisions. | ||
| They can inform us of the negative effects that perhaps these behaviors, choices could be, but then let us make our own personal decisions. | ||
| I'm sure that there's lots of people who say that abortion, They oppose it, but on the other side, there's the argument, it's my body, it's my right. | ||
| Same should apply to anything, whether it's drugs, behavior, eating. | ||
| So I have a guest on that does a better job because you often have people only on one side, politicians or drug abuse councils that are people that really have an agenda. | ||
| We would not have the deaths from overdose that we have now had they not reduced the prescribing of pharmaceutical products. | ||
| All right, Joe. | ||
| Alan, Heath, Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, how are you today? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
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What I'm calling about is there's so much on the news anymore, so many different things that people can focus on. | |
| But one of the things I want to look at is a new item that's being used, I believe, to the point that it's obsessive: AI. | ||
| They're using AI to call people. | ||
| And I've gotten to the point where when I get the phone call, I ask the question, do you mind if I ask a question? | ||
| They always say yes. | ||
| And then I ask them, are you AI? | ||
| Yes or no? | ||
| And then they always say, I'm having problems with my headset. | ||
| Well, after checking in with these people, and they always ask your age, I give them a wrong age. | ||
| But I also started looking at where are these phone calls coming from. | ||
| I found out that one of the people when I got through their frontline defenses to an actual operator was Mutual Vonah Hall. | ||
| And another was another well-known insurance company, but for the medical aspect of the field, I think there should be laws to ban using AI to call people with robocalls in business like that. | ||
| I think it's wrong, offensive to the American public, and it should stop. | ||
| And it's not going to stop until we finally take a stand and say, let's use AI in a proper way. | ||
| If we want to use it for writing or music or poetry or whatever, then that would be acceptable, but not for these robocalls. | ||
| All right, Alan, to Miami Beach, Florida next on the independent line. | ||
| Dave, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello, good morning. | |
| I wanted to continue on the AI focus as well, since it was interesting to hear from the previous caller. | ||
| One of the things that I also am worried about with artificial intelligence, or if we're going to go step down machine learning, is that there are no laws that are securing humans to have these jobs. | ||
| Now, I understand that AI is very useful for heavily automated processes. | ||
| That's why it's very popular in the software development field, the uses of AI and the implementation of AI because it can easily do these complex tasks and already complex the code that one produces. | ||
| But there's no security for other employers. | ||
| And it seems like the government is very much working to promote AI, but not to protect job security. | ||
| And I was hoping that the Congress can do something like that. | ||
| Here I live in Florida, where it's interesting because here in Florida, we don't really have the legislators of the Florida Congress working to protect AI or promote AI or such. | ||
| It seems not much in Governor Sanson's vocabulary to talk about AI much or in many other legislators, including speakers of the House, speakers of the Senate. | ||
| I forgot the name of it. | ||
| And so that's kind of the main things I just want to speak about. | ||
| I don't know how to end this off, but thank you for taking my call. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is Alicia, sorry, Alyssa, Heyattville, Maryland, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning and good morning to all your listeners. | |
| I just have one concern. | ||
| I would like to know if any and how many insurrectionist, pardoned insurrectionist and documented proud boy types are employed, if they are, by Homeland Security and the KGB. | ||
| I mean ICE. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And we mentioned earlier today, but the Democrat in the special election in Virginia, his name is Waukinshaw. | ||
| He has won, and he is looking to get sworn in. | ||
| He put this on X. | ||
| He says, as promised, I arrived at the U.S. Capitol at 9 a.m. | ||
| My hope is that Speaker Johnson follows the precedent he set and that I'm sworn in right away to begin serving Fairfax families in Congress. | ||
| This is now a new representative representing Northern Virginia in the House of Representatives, replacing Jerry Connolly, who passed away earlier. | ||
| And Alan is in Tennessee, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hello there. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I just had two thoughts. | ||
| I'm probably one of the only mental health qualified special forces people in the world. | ||
| So I have both a military and a clinical social work perspective. | ||
| And here are two quick thoughts. | ||
| Great speakers today. | ||
| I learned a lot. | ||
| One of them is if we have countries that are so corrupt that they cannot monitor themselves and they represent a threat to our country, we can wring our hands or continue to talk about the sovereignty of the country, or we can realize that they are incapable of protecting their own populations or preserving us against them. | ||
| So when we strike a target in a country, say it is Venezuela or some other country, and everybody says, oh, it might be an act of war, how is it that they're going to develop the ability to have a response against us when they can't even have a response against their own drug lords? | ||
| That's the first point. | ||
| The second point is, having heard about Israel, I'm not trying to be hawkish, but when I hear about Israel finally striking a target in Qatar, my attitude is it's probably about time considering how long it's gone on in the double dealing from that country. | ||
| Yes, we have very large military bases, but it continues to be in their interest for both. | ||
| Finally, and I don't mean to be didactic or hard-handed sounding, but finally, this idea that people have this rights and things can't be imposed upon them. | ||
| I've watched people that were seriously mentally ill, who need intramuscular injections to manage their schizophrenia, go free because of the collapse of the mental health system. | ||
| When the modern drugs came out, there's only one catch. | ||
| You have to actually take them. |