| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
To resolve the impasse. | |
| And we'll continue the conversation first with American Enterprise Institute's Yuval Levin discussing the latest on the government shutdown and other news of the day. | ||
| And then Max Deyer from the Partnership for Public Service discusses the government shutdown and its impact on federal workers. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Friday, October 3rd. | ||
| It's day three of the government shutdown with little hope for a quick funding deal. | ||
| President Trump yesterday said that the government shutdown was an unprecedented opportunity to enact sweeping cuts to agencies. | ||
| The president has also halted billions of dollars in energy project funds to mostly Democrat-led states. | ||
| And the jobs report that was due out today will not be released because of the government shutdown. | ||
| For this first half hour, we'll get your thoughts and reaction on this third day of the shutdown. | ||
| Here's how to reach us. | ||
| Republicans, 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| Federal employees have a separate line. | ||
| That's 202-748-8003. | ||
| That's the same number you can use to text us. | ||
| If you do include your first name and your city-state, and you can post your comments on social media, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Welcome to today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We're going to start with an update for you on Punch Bowl News. | ||
| The Senate will gavel in at 11:30 a.m. | ||
| You can watch that over on C-SPAN too. | ||
| But here's what Punch Bowl says of the state of play. | ||
| The Senate will vote today for the fourth time on the GOP's November 21 stopgap funding bill, as well as the Democratic counteroffer. | ||
| Both are expected to fail, and senators will head home for the weekend. | ||
| Majority Leader Thun has said the Senate will try again Monday, and informal bipartisan talks on Obamacare subsidies are continuing. | ||
| Speaker Mike Johnson will also bring the House back on Monday. | ||
| That's going to dial up the temperature of the partisan showdown dramatically. | ||
| The House hasn't voted since September 19th, a shockingly long break considering what's going on in Washington. | ||
| Plus, the threat of President Donald Trump and OMB Director Russ vote to enact mass layoffs will add more fuel to the shutdown fire, especially after the administration canceled billions of dollars of federal funding for energy and infrastructure projects in blue states. | ||
| There's one more point to consider. | ||
| The impact of this crisis is both immediate and cumulative. | ||
| Things get worse the longer the stalemate goes on. | ||
| That's at Punch Bowl News. | ||
| And this is Speaker Mike Johnson. | ||
| He was at the Capitol yesterday talking about saying that Republicans have nothing more to negotiate. | ||
| They have made a decision that they would rather give taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens than to keep the doors open for the American people, to keep vital services, veteran services, health care and nutrition for women, infants, and children. | ||
| They would rather not pay the troops and TSA agents and Border Patrol agents. | ||
| They would rather stop services of FEMA in the middle of a hurricane season than to do the right thing for partisan political purposes. | ||
| It is selfish, it is reprehensible, and it is exactly the opposite of what they have all said themselves in their own words very passionately every day until now. | ||
| We've been playing the greatest hits loop here on a video right outside the Speaker's office for days. | ||
| You've all seen it. | ||
| Make them answer. | ||
| Don't ask the Republicans what we should be doing or what we should be negotiating. | ||
| I don't have anything to negotiate. | ||
| I sent them in good faith exactly what they had voted for before. | ||
| We did not put any Republican provisions in that. | ||
| And we tried to make this very simple, in good faith, so the appropriations process of the people can continue. | ||
| Speaker Johnson, yesterday, let's go straight to the phones now to Mike in Youngstown, Ohio. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The whole thing's ridiculous. | ||
| These people, this cabinet that Trump has, obviously, if they say one thing he doesn't like, he just disregards them, gets rid of them. | ||
| You call this a government? | ||
| This is a joke. | ||
| It's a joke, and I hope we survive. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So what do you want to see happen, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do I want to see happen? | |
| Do you think Democrats should stand firm and not capitulate? | ||
| Or what should they negotiate on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How can you negotiate? | |
| You don't have any strength there. | ||
| You don't have anything. | ||
| They have the numbers. | ||
| They have everything. | ||
| Let's just hope they don't destroy the country totally. | ||
| You know, obviously, I think that Trump is mentally ill. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's John in Ventura, California, Republican. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'll tell you something. | |
| Republicans are not the cause. | ||
| And this is the first time that the House has gone through the appropriations process in order to obtain this big, beautiful bill. | ||
| And it's quite a shame that the Democrats are going out of order to not have this and to block us. | ||
| Imagine if every time a budget comes up, the opposing party pulls a stunt like this and blocks it with some outrageous demand. | ||
| So I got to say that it's quite simple. | ||
| If you vote no, then you are shutting the government down. | ||
| If you vote yes, you are keeping the government open. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| And one final comment. | ||
| Oh, yeah, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| No, I was just going to ask you when you said unreasonable demands. | ||
| I wanted to know your thoughts on extending subsidies for Obamacare. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I got to tell you that I'm sure these were all covered in the Appropriations Committee and they didn't get included in the budget. | |
| So these were probably already covered. | ||
| And if the Democrats did this, they probably already covered them. | ||
| So already covered. | ||
| So the Republicans did not want to take it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, they've already dealt with it in the Appropriations Committee. | ||
| So why would they bring it up at the last minute now? | ||
| So you're in favor of those expiring? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in favor of keeping the government open, and I'm against the Democrats voting no at the last minute and putting up a lot of roadblocks that are, you know, unreasonable. | |
| And I got to say, my final thought that is that, you know, Jimmy Kimmel, you think he's funny, but I tell you, the sombreros on all the people that are voting no sombreros and mustaches, I think is the funniest thing. | ||
| It really puts the humor back onto the people that need to be laughed at. | ||
| So the sombreros are great. | ||
| Cheryl, Alexandria, Virginia, aligned for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Cheryl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am not calling to be a Democrat. | ||
| I'm not calling to be a Republican. | ||
| I'm not calling to be an independent. | ||
| I'm calling to be a free citizen of the United States of the country. | ||
| And I want to ask you a question. | ||
| Is it okay if I ask you a question? | ||
| Go right ahead, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, would you do a segment of the Nazi history in America? | |
| Is that possible for you to do? | ||
| And ask people questions. | ||
| Do they know about the history of the Nazi regime in America and all over the world? | ||
| Well, Cheryl, we do a lot of coverage of history over on American History TV, and you could certainly watch that C-SPAN 3. | ||
| What are your thoughts on the shutdown, though, Cheryl? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, my thoughts on the shutdown is that this shouldn't be a shutdown. | |
| Everyone should be working collectively together, and that means the whole entire Congress. | ||
| That means the Supreme Court. | ||
| That means all the media. | ||
| That means the entertainment. | ||
| We need to fight against this hate. | ||
| And I would love a segment on how do we fight against the hate that's going on in America. | ||
| I think that's what you need to be talking about. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Well, thanks for the input. | ||
| And this is the Washington Post did a poll of 1,000 people asking the question: who do you think is mainly responsible for the federal government partially shutting down? | ||
| And here's the response that they got. | ||
| 30% said Democrats in Congress. | ||
| 47% said Trump and Republicans in Congress. | ||
| And 23% said not sure. | ||
| Let's take a look at Democratic House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. | ||
| He was on the steps of the Capitol yesterday. | ||
| Republicans have shut the government down because they don't want to provide health care to working class Americans. | ||
| House Democrats continue to be here on duty. | ||
| House Republicans are on vacation. | ||
| We are ready, we are willing, we are able to sit down with anyone, anytime, any place, including the president and the vice president, to try to find a path forward to reopen the government, enact a spending agreement that actually meets the needs of the American people while at the same time addressing the Republican health care crisis. | ||
| Unfortunately, Republicans have shown zero interest in even having a conversation. | ||
| After the White House meeting, on Monday, we've seen behavior by the president that is unserious and unhinged. | ||
| And Leader Schumer and myself haven't gotten a single phone call as it relates to a follow-up conversation. | ||
| We're ready to have that conversation, but we need credible partners on the other side of the aisle. | ||
| And Donald Trump and Republicans have made clear they wanted to shut down the government. | ||
| They want to inflict pain on the American people. | ||
| They continue to engage in their retribution efforts, and they have zero interest, zero, in providing high-quality, affordable, and accessible care to everyday Americans. | ||
| We're getting your thoughts on the government shutdown. | ||
| It's day three. | ||
| The numbers are on your screen. | ||
| We do have a line set aside for federal workers. | ||
| You can call that number 202-748-8003 if you're a federal employee. | ||
| Otherwise, lines are bipartisan. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| And Bill is an independent in Wheelersburg, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, ma'am. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, listen, I need someone to explain to me how when the Republicans are in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House, how it can be the Democrats' fault that we have a government shutdown. | ||
| It's mind-boggling to me that people absolutely will say Democrats caused this. | ||
| Ma'am, that is so ridiculous. | ||
| Donald J. Trump shut down the government because that's what he wants, because he wants to be a dictator. | ||
| And if he can get rid of all the guardrails, he's working his way to get there. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Maybe somebody needs to give me a history lesson, but I don't understand how you can blame anyone if the Republicans are in control of everything. | ||
| And so, Bill, what are your thoughts on the main sticking point, which is the health care, the expiration of the Obamacare subsidies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| It's sad. | ||
| How many 20 million people are going to be without health care in the United States of America? | ||
| Let me ask you this: why can Canada, a little small country like they are, have free health care for everyone? | ||
| But we, the richest country in the world, cannot do that. | ||
| Now, I want to ask this too: tariffs, all this stuff that Donald Trump has put in place. | ||
| He talks about all the billions of dollars that are pouring into the country. | ||
| Will you tell me something, ma'am? | ||
| Where's that money at? | ||
| Prove it. | ||
| Show it. | ||
| They don't show anything, they just talk. | ||
| And I'm telling you, if we don't do something, this country is finished. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Haley, a Republican in Birmingham, Alabama. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead, Haley. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| My whole thing is, no matter who is right, who is wrong in any of it, they are completely forgetting about the American people, period. | ||
| I mean, it's sad because, yes, we all need health care and all that, but what about the people who are barely surviving in the world right now? | ||
| Because you can't go out and find jobs. | ||
| You can't do any of it because all of these other people that are being brought over here are taking our jobs. | ||
| So, what do you want to see happen, Haley? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would like to see the shutdown, like them, like somehow come to some kind of agreement and work it out for the American people. | |
| They say they're for the American people. | ||
| Well, then be for the American people. | ||
| Worry about our home here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's James in Simpson, North Carolina, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing? | |
| I'm doing great. | ||
| Go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Who I blame for this shutdown of the American people. | ||
| And the reason why I blame the American people. | ||
| In 2016, we went through, I mean, literally hell in this country under Donald Trump from 16 to 20. | ||
| He has not been a leader of this country. | ||
| The Republican Party have never. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 1st of January, Congress come in. | ||
| What was the very first thing they worked on in Congress? | ||
| Tax breaks for the wealthy, besides eliminating government jobs, eliminating benefits in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. | ||
| Why is it that the Republican leadership in this country never proposed any legislation that really helped the American people? | ||
| First thing Biden did when he was elected was put in a infrastructure bill in this ragged country, supposed to be the most richest country in the world. | ||
| Still seeing railroad tracks around here, you can't even, a train can't even go 20 miles an hour because the infrastructure of the train track is ruined. | ||
| We have a problem in this country, and it's not the government right now. | ||
| If the people not paying attention to what's going on in our government and who to choose that they lead. | ||
| It's too much hate, too much racial tension. | ||
| And who spurs all this racial tension? | ||
| Republicans. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And take a look at the website for HUD. | ||
| That's Housing and Urban Development. | ||
| This is a government website. | ||
| It's at HUD.gov. | ||
| And if you go to that website, you'll get this pop-up. | ||
| It says this. | ||
| The radical left in Congress shut down the government. | ||
| HUD will use available resources to help Americans in need. | ||
| And if you close that, it has the same as a banner on the top of that HUD website. | ||
| And also on USA Today, it says out-of-office emails at Education Department blame Democrats for the shutdown. | ||
| Messages from the official accounts of furloughed staffers were changed on Wednesday to point fingers at Senate Democrats. | ||
| It says this, this is what you'll see if you send an email. | ||
| It says, thank you for contacting me. | ||
| On September 19th, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5371, a clean continuing resolution. | ||
| Unfortunately, Democrat senators are blocking passage of the bill in the Senate, which has led to a lapse in appropriations. | ||
| Some of the two furloughed employees told USA Today they were deeply frustrated to see the outgoing message on their email accounts. | ||
| They felt it likely violated the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from certain political activities. | ||
| And this is what it says. | ||
| This is what Politico says. | ||
| Top Oversight Dem calls for investigation over White House shutdown messaging. | ||
| It's Representative Robert Garcia. | ||
| Said the White House appears to be in violation of the Hatch Act. | ||
| That's on Politico. | ||
| And this is Andra in Statesboro, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm calling in because I have a lot of health issues. | |
| Sickle cell. | ||
| I just had a heart attack in April. | ||
| I have the degenerative disc disease where I'm constantly in pain. | ||
| I tried working several times and I can't. | ||
| I can't get any Social Security when I've been working since I've been 15 years old and I'm 43 now. | ||
| I have five children. | ||
| I have my oldest son in the Navy. | ||
| At this time, with the government shutdown, I think it's ridiculous because not only do I have kids in the home and also try to work, they cut off Medicaid for me. | ||
| I could only be seen by OBGYN. | ||
| I need to see neurosurgeon doctors. | ||
| So, Andrew, Are you not considered disabled then and qualified for Medicaid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they denied me several times. | |
| And so how are you paying for your health care now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right now I have no money to pay for health care. | |
| I've been trying to do you just not go to the doctor then? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go to the doctor and the last doctor I went to, I had to give them $500 of my rent money just to be seen to get epidurals in my back. | |
| That doesn't work. | ||
| So have you tried the Affordable Care Act, the exchanges, Obamacare, or no? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't tried Obamacare because they had me on Medicaid. | |
| And the only Medicaid part I can do is OBGYN. | ||
| Before I had my heart attack in April, I had insurance, and then they cut it right off. | ||
| Here's Frank in Texas Republican line. | ||
| Hi, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| I would just like to say, I know that Mike Johnson and Caroline Levitt and them are telling the truth. | ||
| They held up the papers and everything the other day and showed it on camera on Fox News and on Newsmax of exactly what the Democrats are doing. | ||
| Now, Mike Johnson and Caroline Levitt and them are telling you the truth. | ||
| Let's just see what the Democrats do. | ||
| There's 2.1 million Democrats that have not registered. | ||
| They don't belong to the Democratic Party anymore. | ||
| They have switched and went 2.4 million. | ||
| It's added to the Republicans. | ||
| The Republicans are gaining more votes, millions and millions more votes. | ||
| Democrats are coming over to Republicans because they see how much the Democrats lie. | ||
| Now, let's just look at the line that the Democrats do, not just on this bill on the CR plan, but on other things. | ||
| These are the same Democrats that said Biden, he's the most brilliant man, got unbounded energy. | ||
| He can do trigonometry while he's doing backflips. | ||
| So Frank, let's stick with the shutdown. | ||
| What do you see as the lies from the Democrats when it comes to this specific issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it goes back to that. | |
| I mean, just like they said, you know, they wanted illegals to come into the country where they could vote, just like they're trying to do in California. | ||
| They're trying to flood it over into California, a lot of it, because it ups your census in your electoral thing. | ||
| They want to let illegals vote, and then they want to give them free medical. | ||
| So, Frank, on the shutdown, what do you think should happen? | ||
| Do you think that would you be okay with the Republicans negotiating and agreeing to extend the Obamacare subsidies in order to reopen the government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mike Johnson and them have done an excellent job. | |
| They've already negotiated. | ||
| They've already done everything they can possibly do. | ||
| Schumer is desperate. | ||
| He knows he's going to be challenged by AOC. | ||
| He's just desperate. | ||
| Him and Akimja. | ||
| Look at their approval ratings. | ||
| They're being drove out. | ||
| You know, so he's going to, he's letting the radical left tell him exactly what to do. | ||
| And the radical, just like in the White House, they run the White House during Biden year, the radical left said, you know, and just lied to the American people. | ||
| Got it, Frank. | ||
| And as we mentioned, the Senate does come back into session later today. | ||
| You can see that on C-SPAN too. | ||
| Take a look at Senate Majority Leader John Thune on the Senate floor yesterday urging Senate Democrats to vote for the House Pass CR. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| Asking Democrats to swallow a list of new Republican policies or partisan demands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not in there. | |
| We are asking Democrats to do nothing more than pass a clean, nonpartisan bill to fund the government for a few more weeks so that we can get back to bipartisan appropriations work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I said, Mr. President, bipartisan appropriations work. | |
| The kind of bipartisan work that has seen the Senate pass three appropriations bills so far by robust bipartisan margins. | ||
| The kind of work that we want to continue once Democrats have stopped holding government funding hostage to a long list of partisan demands. | ||
| Mr. President, so far three of our Democrat colleagues have joined Republicans to attempt to reopen the government. | ||
| If we can just find a few more Democrats to join us, we can end this shutdown and get back to bipartisan appropriations work and the business of the American people. | ||
| Democrats voted for clean CRs like the one before us 13 times, 13 times during the Biden administration. | ||
| I hope they'll join us to pass this clean CR and reopen the government for hardworking Americans. | ||
| Senator Thune mentioned three senators that voted with Republicans. | ||
| Those are Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, Democrat of Nevada, and Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine. | ||
| And this is, take a look at the Democrats, Senate Democrats' key request. | ||
| That is extension of pandemic era expansions of Obamacare premium subsidies and spending guardrails to prevent the Trump administration from ignoring congressional spending directives and clawing back funds through impoundments and rescissions. | ||
| That's according to the Washington Times. | ||
| Christine, Atlanta, Georgia, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Christine, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| First of all, I do fault the Republicans. | ||
| From day one, they have been trying to destroy the affordable health care. | ||
| They never wanted it in play. | ||
| They never had anything. | ||
| They wanted to destroy because a black man put it into law. | ||
| That's the bottom line, it's the top line. | ||
| All this other stuff, if they want to really work with the Democrat, extend the affordable health care. | ||
| And remind a lot of people, some people, they think it's two different things. | ||
| They think Obamacare is one thing, and American, the affordable health care is two things. | ||
| Call it like it is, affordable health care. | ||
| Stop calling it Obamacare because most Republicans, they think that's one insurance, and then they think affordable health is another insurance. | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| As far as the shutdown, it is the Republican fault because they never wanted the affordable health care and they never had anything to put in place. | ||
| They only doing this because they want to get it out of the way because they're blackening it. | ||
| Sorry, Christine, we got that. | ||
| And this is what the Washington Post says. | ||
| They said this: quote: With the expiration of enhanced tax credits, ACA, that's the Affordable Care Act, marketplace consumers' out-of-pocket premiums will increase more than 75% on average. | ||
| An analysis by health policy group KFF found separately, KFF found that insurers' median proposed premium increase for 2026 to be about 18%, more than double last year's median proposed increase of 7%. | ||
| Here's Lonnie in El Cajon, California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I'm doing okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, what I'm calling about the Affordable Care Act. | |
| Right now, there is no Republican Party. | ||
| There's no, because when I was started able to vote, I started when Reagan was coming in the office. | ||
| Right now, there is no Republican Party. | ||
| What I'm talking about, like in March, when Federman and Schumer were going to, they're going to start, they're going to start, you know, shut the government down, but they decided to keep it open. | ||
| They didn't shut it down. | ||
| Now they're shut down now. | ||
| The Republican Party, the House, they had seven months between March and October 1st. | ||
| They knew this day was coming, that they had to do something. | ||
| But they didn't work with the Democrats. | ||
| They didn't do nothing for seven months. | ||
| Now they want to kick the can down the road. | ||
| And that's seven weeks down the road. | ||
| And November 21st, six days later, you got Thanksgiving. | ||
| You know what the House Speaker is going to do? | ||
| Senior vacation. | ||
| Then you got Christmas break, civil vacation. | ||
| By that time, you know, all the things will expire, and they won't have to do nothing. | ||
| It'd be January. | ||
| So I believe, in my opinion, even though I'm a Republican, that the Republicans should come to the table and do something because it's going to fall back on them because they keep blaming, well, the Democrats didn't go. | ||
| No, they had seven months to come and negotiate. | ||
| They just had a clean CR. | ||
| They could have passed something that had Affordable Care Act in it and then worked with them. | ||
| But it's, I'm sorry, it's Republicans. | ||
| It's Republicans shut down. | ||
| And Ronald Reagan is probably turning over in his grave because they don't, to me, America is lost because they don't want to work with nobody. | ||
| They just say, my way of the highway. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Here's Rob in Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Rob. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, can you hear me? | |
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's actually a perfect segue or dovetail into what the previous caller was talking about. | |
| Yeah, I think that what, like, I heard Speaker Johnson talk about, you know, hey, we're getting things back into regular order. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And I'm all for that as a kind of independent independent. | ||
| But I think the bigger issue is, like, forget, you know, I'm a federal worker. | ||
| We're not going to, and I'm accepted, so I'm not, I'm working and I don't get paid. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But so The current CR that's on the Senate's desk that they can't pass is until sometime in mid-November, I think. | ||
| And so how about just like, why is the House on recess or on vacation? | ||
| Like, how about just get all that done? | ||
| Like, sure, the government can be shut down for six weeks till November 17th, right? | ||
| And then if that's the amount of time you think you need, Speaker Johnson, then just come back and on the 17th of November, pass a full budget. | ||
| I think that would be great. | ||
| That's my opinion. | ||
| All right, Rob. | ||
| And that's it for this segment. | ||
| We'll have more chances later in the program for you to share your thoughts. | ||
| Coming up later this morning on the Washington Journal, American Enterprise Institute's Yuval Levin will join us to discuss the latest on the government shutdown and other news of the day. | ||
| But next, after the break, we'll talk with Representative Chuck Fleischman, a Republican of Tennessee and a member of the Appropriations Committee about the shutdown and negotiations to resolve the impasse. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| I'm Dasha Burns, host of Ceasefire, bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined by Representative Chuck Fleischman. | ||
| He's a Republican of Tennessee's 3rd District and also a member of the Appropriations and the Science, Space, and Technology Committees. | ||
| Representative, thanks for joining us. | ||
| Welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| It's a pleasure to be here. | ||
| I wanted to get your thoughts on the government shutdown. | ||
| It's the third day now and bring to your attention the poll that the Washington Post did of asking who they think is most to blame. | ||
| And it came out 47% blaming President Trump and Republicans in Congress as compared to 30% Democrats in Congress. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been in Congress now 15 years. | |
| This is my eighth term. | ||
| I'm a chairman on the Appropriations Committee, as you properly allude to. | ||
| I chair the Energy and Water Subcommittee. | ||
| But I never lie to the American people and I never lie to my constituents. | ||
| So I'm going to be abundantly clear to Republicans, to Democrats, to Independents, to the people of this country. | ||
| I am outraged at the Democratic Party for the farce, the lies that they have done in this government shutdown. | ||
| And there's something when you serve the truth about what is going on and the process to me is so critically, critically important. | ||
| This is why we have such an erosion in public confidence. | ||
| People get out and literally spread misstrews. | ||
| I've listened to some of the calls that you've gotten this morning. | ||
| So today, I'm going to be absolutely straightforward, lay out the process with you, take any phone calls, but I will not lie about this. | ||
| So we've got the truth. | ||
| You've got policy. | ||
| There's a time to be partisan. | ||
| But let me be clear. | ||
| The Democrats shut the government down. | ||
| It's clear. | ||
| It is factual. | ||
| The House of Representatives passed a relatively clean continuing resolution. | ||
| I'm glad to go into that. | ||
| The fiscal year ended on September 30th. | ||
| Long before that, we passed a continuing resolution to November 20th, which in effect allows us to continue to negotiate on appropriation bills. | ||
| Some of your earlier callers were talking about Obamacare, this and that. | ||
| This is appropriations. | ||
| Most of the Affordable Care Act, 85% of it, is on the mandatory side. | ||
| It's not even affected by appropriations. | ||
| Well, Congressman, let's focus on the truth. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Let's talk about Obamacare and talk specifically about the extensions of those subsidies. | ||
| And as you know, KFF is estimating that premiums, out-of-pocket premiums will go up by 75% if those subsidies aren't extended. | ||
| Where do you stand on that point specifically? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The way I stand on that point is extraneous. | |
| It has nothing to do with this. | ||
| This is the farce put on by the Democratic Party to the American people. | ||
| These are appropriation bills. | ||
| These are the 12 bills that we pass every year or not if we fail and get into a shutdown or a continuing resolution. | ||
| Any other extraneous things are irrelevant to this. | ||
| The Democrats went out. | ||
| Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, they've hurt their credibility, not only with the American people. | ||
| This is going to linger on. | ||
| I have to stress this after this, because even though I'm a very forgiving person, I cannot sit back and lie. | ||
| When the Republicans shut the government down, please listen to me. | ||
| In 2013, we were wrong. | ||
| We should have never done that. | ||
| We should have never shut the government down. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| You said Obamacare, 85% of it was under mandatory spending. | ||
| I remember sitting with my hands in my head saying, why did we do this? | ||
| It hurt the country then. | ||
| It was wrong then. | ||
| Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries had a clean, continuing resolution that Democrats, three Democrats in the Senate have joined. | ||
| They will have to cave. | ||
| You talk about polls and you talk about these other subsidies. | ||
| We can sit down and talk through these things, negotiate through these things, but they are extraneous, completely outside the appropriations process. | ||
| And Congressman Orange. | ||
| You say it's extraneous, but the Democrats are saying that they have tried to get these extended. | ||
| Republicans have refused, that this is the only chance they have to get them extended before open enrollment starts November 1st. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| And if this came to a vote, would you vote to extend Obamacare subsidies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will vote for a clean, continuing resolution. | |
| I'm an appropriator. | ||
| That is my job. | ||
| I chair the Energy and Water Subcommittee. | ||
| I'm America's Energy Member of Congress. | ||
| I work with Republicans, Democrats, Independents, members of the House, members of all administrations. | ||
| I've worked with the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump administrations on energy. | ||
| That's what I do on appropriations. | ||
| The saddest thing about all this, if I can impart something to your listeners, whether they're Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, I'm going to stand on the truth. | ||
| You've got to keep it clean and simple and on point. | ||
| We've got to keep the government open. | ||
| It's never a good idea to shut the government down. | ||
| This is costing the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars a day. | ||
| It put federal workers, it puts our troops in a very difficult position. | ||
| By the way, guess who gets paid under the Constitution? | ||
| Members of Congress. | ||
| That's outrageous. | ||
| That's why I stopped my pay. | ||
| But in reality, we go through this farce. | ||
| So, Congressman, I guess we should take that as a no, that you would be against extending subsidies on Obamacare if you had to vote on that right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will take a look at what is proposed at that time. | |
| But once again, the Democrats needed an issue to bring into the argument that was extraneous and it's farcial. | ||
| One thing I respect, I respect partisan politics. | ||
| I respect debates over policy, where you stand, but I do not respect lying to the American people. | ||
| That's what the Democrats have done, plain and simple on this. | ||
| And Mimi, I've got to say this. | ||
| You never play fast and loose with the American Republic. | ||
| You keep the government open. | ||
| Think about it this way. | ||
| All across America, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, partisans, and nonpartisans go to work every day. | ||
| They pay their taxes. | ||
| They get around the water cooler. | ||
| They may argue about their favorite sports teams or their favorite or not favorite president, but they get their job done. | ||
| They don't shut down the business and then say, let's reopen it and let's hurt it. | ||
| That's what the Democrats have done. | ||
| They're proud of this shutdown. | ||
| This is Chuck Schumer, who basically has been on record, time untold, he was right the last time. | ||
| He kept it open. | ||
| You keep it open and you talk. | ||
| Doesn't mean that I'm right all the time or my party's right all the time, but you keep talking and working through these things. | ||
| And we look at the Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| I've got to talk about this one last thing. | ||
| Two things you never want to do is shut the government down or, God forbid, default on the national debt. | ||
| Now, in the big, beautiful bill, we raised the national debt. | ||
| The Democrats voted against that. | ||
| So I could be difficult and say, well, they voted to default on our national debt. | ||
| But candidly, I'm going to be honest. | ||
| I get as many calls from Republicans that say, well, just shut it down. | ||
| That is irresponsible to the American people. | ||
| We've got to keep the full faith and credit of the United States strong, and we owe it to the American people, to the American Republic. | ||
| It's a higher calling. | ||
| It's beyond just being partisan or being a representative of your district. | ||
| You've got to keep, Mimi, the government open. | ||
| It is so critically important to our country, to our workers, to our safety. | ||
| God forbid something happened to our country in this time. | ||
| So, Congressman, in order to keep the government or to reopen the government, what points would you be willing to negotiate on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or is it now completely just a CR? | |
| Right now, this is the clean CR that the House passed. | ||
| And what did the Democrats want in there? | ||
| They wanted additional security for members. | ||
| Now, I don't take security for members, but I respect the fact that many Democrats and some Republicans want additional security in light of the horrible Charlie Kirk killing and the violence and the threats that are out there. | ||
| I received those threats. | ||
| But again, I will stand on the truth. | ||
| That doesn't worry me personally. | ||
| But if someone has a concern, there's money in this clean CR that was actually added to it for security for House, Senate, Executive Branch, and Judiciary. | ||
| So it's not exactly entirely clean, but the Democrats are holding that up. | ||
| So you said, what would I vote? | ||
| I have voted for a clean, continuing resolution. | ||
| Democrats have joined us, at least in the House, one, three in the Senate. | ||
| I can't stress enough whether you agree or disagree with me on any other policies, keeping the government open with a clean, continuing resolution so that we can negotiate all 12 appropriation bills, keep it relevant, is what we need to do in November. | ||
| Because if we don't do that, we're either going to get into another shutdown or, God forbid, fail again and have another continuing resolution. | ||
| I think we ought to have a conversation that's up to you about what a continuing resolution is and is not. | ||
| But we continue to fail as a Congress, as a country, every year when we don't pass a budget. | ||
| We owe it to the American people to pass a budget. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| And I'll just let our audience know: Representative Chuck Fleischman, a Republican of Tennessee, is with us. | ||
| You can give us a call if you'd like to join the conversation. | ||
| Lines are biparty. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Let's start with Steve. | ||
| He's an Oak Ridge, Tennessee Democrat. | ||
| I believe that's in your district, Congressman. | ||
| Steve, you're on the. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He is. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I bring $10 billion a year into the Great Oak Ridge Reservation, birthplace of the Manhattan Project, and clearly the best Department of Energy reservation in the country. | ||
| And I love them all. | ||
| I fund them all. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Steve, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| First off, I would like to know: did you vote for the infrastructure bill? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I travel from here to North Carolina a lot, and 640 around Knoxville was a death trap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
After the infrastructure bill got passed, it all got repaved. | |
| There's bridges being replaced in Tennessee left and right. | ||
| It was because of the infrastructure bill. | ||
| But here's what I want to say to you, sir. | ||
| I moved back here six and a half years ago. | ||
| In the six and a half years I've been here, I have been lied to, cheated, and stolen from more than 45 years in North Carolina. | ||
| I sold my truck. | ||
| A guy did not let me put the amount of the sales on the title because he didn't want to pay taxes on it. | ||
| I had a guy painted, pay me cash. | ||
| I don't want to lose my SSI or my public housing. | ||
| They're all Republicans. | ||
| They're all Trump Republicans. | ||
| I am leaving Tennessee Monday. | ||
| I'm moving back to North Carolina. | ||
| We're not this purple. | ||
| And at least I have a chance of maybe my vote counting. | ||
| I'm very disappointed in Tennessee. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Well, I appreciate the gentleman's comments. | ||
| If I may maybe talk about what I do. | ||
| And I think the gentleman's frustration is my district in my state, thank God, is Ruby Red. | ||
| This is Donald Trump country, but this is Republican country and the like. | ||
| But let me say this. | ||
| I represent all of my constituents, Republicans, Democrats, people who vote, people who don't vote. | ||
| And I am Tennessee's appropriator. | ||
| The gentleman from Oak Ridge alluded to the fact that he did not have a good time in our great state. | ||
| Tennessee is leading candidly in so many different areas. | ||
| We're booming economically. | ||
| We're the lowest tax state. | ||
| I can't take credit for that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I am the appropriator. | ||
| But I will tell him this. | ||
| In Oak Ridge, even the Democrats, not just Republicans, even the Democrats and the unions come out and support me. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I bring $10 billion of federal investment into the greatest national lab in the country, Oak Ridge National Lab. | ||
| The Y-12 National Security Facility, which is an NNSA facility under DOE, does a tremendous job. | ||
| We're building the uranium processing facility. | ||
| I lead nationally in environmental cleanup. | ||
| I'm a Republican environmentalist. | ||
| We clean up legacy sites in Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Paducah. | ||
| That's what I do in the country. | ||
| That's why even most of the, all the Republicans, but most of even the few Democrats who get elected support me in Oak Ridge. | ||
| That's not the case in Chattanooga, and I understand that, but that's why I win with such large margins. | ||
| I'm an appropriator. | ||
| I work to help people, and I work to get things done, solutions. | ||
| That's why I'm so upset with the Democrats playing fast and loose with the truth on this issue. | ||
| It hurts me. | ||
| Fundamentally, it hurts me that they would misrepresent this to the American people. | ||
| And this is Axios' headline. | ||
| Department of Energy ends billions in clean energy awards after vote post. | ||
| That's about $8 billion, Congressman, in energy contracts going to mostly blue states. | ||
| Are you in support of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this is one of the problems. | |
| First of all, nothing in the third district of Tennessee was affected, but there was a project in Knoxville, Tennessee. | ||
| And the second district of Tennessee, I mean, is red or more red than even my district. | ||
| But the reality is this is the danger of mistruths started by the Democrats, because what happens is you shut the government down. | ||
| And what do you do constitutionally? | ||
| Unfortunately, you shift that power, that ability to control a shutdown from the legislative branch. | ||
| If we'd have kept it open, we'd have kept that power to the executive branch. | ||
| When the government was shut down, when Democrats were in power, when Obama was there and when Biden was there, it gave the president, the executive branch, the ability to basically put the pain where they needed it, where they wanted to put the pain. | ||
| I'm saying there shouldn't be any pain. | ||
| I'm saying the legislature, the House and the Senate should do what the House did, pass that bill. | ||
| And Mimi, I'm going to tell you this. | ||
| Three Democrats joined all the Republicans in the Senate. | ||
| They're going to have to cave because they're not standing on the truth. | ||
| So were these canceled? | ||
| Yes, they were. | ||
| And do I support it? | ||
| The reason I'm going to end up supporting it is because we ceded our authority to the executive branch. | ||
| And God forbid, that's why we've got to get the government open. | ||
| The Democrats and the Senate have an ability to vote to do that today. | ||
| I hope and pray they do that for the good of the country. | ||
| But if they don't, more cuts are going to be coming. | ||
| And are we going to be stuck with them? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's unfortunate. | ||
| Here's a post on X from Russ Vogt, director of OMB, who says $2.1 billion in Chicago infrastructure projects, specifically the Red Line Extension and the Red and Purple Modernization Project, have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting. | ||
| More information to come soon from the Department of Transportation. | ||
| And here's Jeremy, Washington, D.C., Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Jeremy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm a government employee and my retirement was just approved. | ||
| But I do agree with the speaker. | ||
| This strategy of Chuck Schuber is going to hurt the core of the Democratic Party. | ||
| He really does not know how to legislate, to be honest with you. | ||
| I think it's really foolish because what's going to happen, you think President Trump is going to negotiate $1.3 trillion in spending when he's ready to cut more jobs and he's cutting all the infrastructure projects in blue states. | ||
| The Democrats have lost their mind. | ||
| They have. | ||
| And why should my taxpayer dollars be going to support illegal immigrants? | ||
| No way. | ||
| I agree with the speaker. | ||
| I would tell the guest speaker that he said the Depositive Party should stand tough. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Congressman, any comment to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I thank the gentleman, but once again, I'm getting back to the fundamental truth. | |
| If we had shut the government down, and remember, Republicans have shut it down in the past. | ||
| I think wrongly so. | ||
| Democrats own the shutdown. | ||
| They're proud of it. | ||
| They've been hoping for this. | ||
| It hurts the process. | ||
| It hurts the Republic. | ||
| It hurts the American people. | ||
| Governmental shutdowns always cost more money to the American taxpayer when we reopen. | ||
| It puts us at peril. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| Our troops don't get paid. | ||
| Our federal workers don't get paid. | ||
| Many of them now have their jobs at risk because of that, because of a fundamental shift when it shuts down to the executive branch, whoever is in that executive branch. | ||
| What I really think we really need to do is get the government open right away and then focus on what's relevant, the 12 appropriation bills in the House and in the Senate. | ||
| We negotiate that, and then basically we get a budget for the country. | ||
| Think about how many times we fail the country and don't get a budget for the American people. | ||
| That's a bipartisan failure, okay? | ||
| And Congress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a very partisan Republican, but I'm always going to call balls and strikes. | |
| The thing about this shutdown that has me outraged, and I rarely get angry, but I'm angry now because of the lies and the falsehoods. | ||
| And then the Democrats, not all of them, are just piling on top of that and saying, well, it's about health care. | ||
| It's about this or that. | ||
| No, it's about keeping the government open with a clean, continuing resolution. | ||
| You never shut it down. | ||
| And, Congressman, regarding those 12 appropriation bills, how come they haven't been done until now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an excellent question. | |
| Several have been passed. | ||
| My bill has actually been passed on the House floor. | ||
| Let me explain the process. | ||
| An excellent question, Mimi. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| Some years, the House and the Senate do their jobs. | ||
| Other years, they do not. | ||
| Since I've been in Congress most years, the House has done its job. | ||
| And what that means is you pass all 12 appropriation bills in committee. | ||
| The reason that some of them have not been passed, and mine did get passed, about six of the 12 have been passed. | ||
| All of them have been passed in committee. | ||
| I can't speak for the United States Senate as to what they've been able to do or not do. | ||
| I can only talk about the work that's on our plate. | ||
| The reality is we have not had enough votes to get some of those bills passed. | ||
| Candidly, we lose all Democratic votes. | ||
| Now, Democrats will say, look, we've been told by our leadership we cannot vote for an appropriations bill that you pass, even though it's good, even though we put community projects in there for them and for us. | ||
| And I understand it on one level. | ||
| I respect that. | ||
| But sometimes we don't have the Republican votes. | ||
| Our more conservative friends to the right, many of them will not vote for appropriation bills. | ||
| That's not me, but I respect the fact that they've been elected in their districts. | ||
| So when certain members say they won't vote for that, bottom line, we didn't have the votes to get them all passed in the House or the Senate, but we will be able to take those bills, those 12 bills, those that are passed like mine and the ones that are not, conference them with the United States Senate, and then guess what? | ||
| It's going to take 60 votes in the Senate. | ||
| We know that, to pass a budget. | ||
| What you'll see ultimately is Republicans and Democrats come together. | ||
| and basically vote to pass a budget probably in November or whenever that vote comes. | ||
| We cannot pass a budget in this country with just Republican votes because we need 60 votes in the Senate. | ||
| Let me point to the 60 votes that we need to reopen the government right now. | ||
| That's why we're stuck. | ||
| So when Democrats mean me say, oh, well, Republicans have the House, the Senate, and the White House, that's true. | ||
| But we don't have the majority in the Senate. | ||
| We don't have 60 votes in the Senate. | ||
| We have a majority of 53. | ||
| 55 have voted yes. | ||
| We need five more votes, get it to closure, and then we're done. | ||
| And here's Dave, a Republican in Auburn, New York. | ||
| Dave, you're on with Congressman Chuck Fleischman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hello. | |
| I was just trying to figure out what I could add to this conversation to make any sense. | ||
| But my thing is I've been watching this process for decades. | ||
| The shutdowns are so predictable. | ||
| And they argue back and forth about where the spending should go, who should spend on what. | ||
| Never seems to resolve itself. | ||
| So I just think we're going to see more inflation in all of this process because that's just the way it seems to work. | ||
| We hit getting more gap, more inflation, and no resolution to this. | ||
| So I would like to see one last thing about this. | ||
| One of the guys that founding father, Jefferson, the wise and frugal government, I'd like to refer back to that and hopefully we would ever go down that road again. | ||
| But we don't seem to be going that way. | ||
| So I'll just kind of leave that. | ||
| That's my contribution to this conversation, not much, but thank you very much. | ||
| Congressman, a quick response to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Mimi, maybe we should take a historical look as to how we got here, how that process is flawed. | |
| If we look at how the process is flawed and not get into a partisan fight over this, in the 70s, we as a nation changed the way that we budget, and that process has not worked. | ||
| Overwhelmingly, it has failed like 90% of the time. | ||
| And what it basically does, in my view, under the Constitution, Congress, meaning the House and the Senate, should be basically doing the budgetary work. | ||
| But we passed a law in, I believe, 1973 or 1974 post-Watergate that basically set up the way that we do our federal budget with the executive branch, the legislative branch, and how it plays out. | ||
| And it's played out as a disaster. | ||
| Many times we don't get a budget. | ||
| Other times we get a continuing resolution. | ||
| And when we're talking about continuing resolution, when I talk to my constituents and the like, I don't like D.C. dialect. | ||
| I can speak D.C. dialect with anybody. | ||
| You get the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, they can only speak D.C. dialect. | ||
| It's kind of sad. | ||
| But the American people want straight talk and honest talk. | ||
| The reality is the budget process is flawed. | ||
| We should go back and address that. | ||
| Congressman, I just want to fit in a call from Tennessee, Dunlap, Tennessee, Republican. | ||
| Ron, good morning. | ||
| you're on with Congressman Fleischmann. | ||
| Ron, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's refreshing to have someone that's a straight talker on there. | ||
| You know, we get gaslighted constantly with these Washington Post polls, the compost. | ||
| You know, it's this is my take on it. | ||
| They want to pass $1.5 trillion in spending so they can blow up the Trump economy that's coming because the tariffs are bringing in business. | ||
| The people don't want to pay the tariffs, so they're going to invest in America. | ||
| The jobs will be coming. | ||
| And they want to blow this up because if they fail, they're going to be shown to be such failures, they're scared to death and they're running. | ||
| It's like a Hail Mary Pass for them. | ||
| And yeah, I get so irritated listening. | ||
| All right, Ron. | ||
| And here's Joanne, Harvey, Illinois, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Joanne. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want just to say a couple of things. | ||
| The congressman has so far that I've seen has told one truth, and that is that the Republicans ceded their authority to the executive branch, which is what they have done. | ||
| They're letting Donald Trump do whatever he wants to do. | ||
| They're sitting back and just okaying whatever he does. | ||
| If he's telling the truth, he would tell that the trillion-dollar budget that they passed in the last time when Donald Trump was president was that they passed this budget that was only in favor of billionaires. | ||
| That's why we're trillions of dollars in debt right now because of those tax cuts that were given to the billionaires. | ||
| All right, Joanne. | ||
| We're running out of time, so I'm going to have Congressman Fleischman with a quick response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ma'am, I wish I could tell you that you were wrong about everything. | |
| Here's the situation: the reason we're $36 trillion in debt is the mandatory side of our spending equation is out of control. | ||
| When we talk about being an appropriator, and I'm an appropriator, 75% of our federal budget is not even appropriated. | ||
| It automatically happens. | ||
| That's what's driving our deficits, the mandatory spending programs. | ||
| Only about 20 to 25% of the budget that we're talking about now is covered by appropriations. | ||
| And so I promise you this: I have not told a lie. | ||
| I will not tell a lie. | ||
| I don't need to tell a lie. | ||
| I win with 70% of the vote in my district. | ||
| I look Republicans, Democrats. | ||
| I want to see our country get to a better place. | ||
| I practiced law for 24 years, made a lot of money. | ||
| My retirement has basically been spent working towards trying to get our great republic back on track, fiscally, morally, and so that we could do something that, unlike in that call when you accused me of telling only one thing truth, I want to get to a point where my dad was an Eisenhower Republican. | ||
| My mother was a New Deal Democrat. | ||
| The reality is I'm a Ronald Reagan Donald Trump Republican. | ||
| But let's try to get credibility back so that we can respect our elected leaders, so that elected leaders tell the truth. | ||
| You can disagree with my vote on things, but please, I will always tell the truth. | ||
| I want Democrats and Republicans to tell the American people the truth because we have so eroded the faith in our elected leaders. | ||
| And I want to see more people, younger people, older people, men, women, all coming to the process and wanting to serve our great republic again. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Representative Chuck Fleischman representing Tennessee's 3rd District, which covers Chattanooga, Cleveland, Oak Ridge, and Kingston. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amy, thank you. | |
| It's a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you for the show. | ||
| Later on this morning on the Washington Journal, we have Max Steyer from the Partnership for Public Service. | ||
| He joins us to discuss the government shutdown and its impact on federal workers. | ||
| But first, after the break, we'll talk with American Enterprise Institute's Yuval Levin about the latest on the government shutdown and other news of the day. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
|
unidentified
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| c-span democracy unfiltered have been watching c-span washington journal for over 10 years now This is a great format that C-SPAN offers. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Yuval Levin. | ||
| He is Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Director at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He's also written a book called American Covenant, How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. | ||
| You've all welcome to the program. | ||
| Thanks very much for having me. | ||
| Let's start with the government shutdown. | ||
| Your thoughts on that and how this one is different than previous shutdowns. | ||
| Yeah, I think that I would go back to something that your previous guest, Congressman Fleshman, said, which is a lot of this is really rooted in the nature of the budget process and the way in which it's incompatible with our contemporary political culture. | ||
| The Budget Act of 1974 was really meant for a process in which a Congress dominated by one party was confronting a president of another party and gives both sides a certain amount of power in a confrontation like that. | ||
| We've now, since the 1990s, every new president has come in with his party controlling Congress, and the balance of powers between the branches has just shifted dramatically in the direction of the president. | ||
| Congress has been left in a strange place, and oftentimes the only thing the minority party can do is just blow up the process and try to exercise some power by creating a crisis. | ||
| We saw that with Republicans in the Obama years. | ||
| We have now seen it with Democrats in the Trump years twice. | ||
| I think in that sense, this shutdown is like those. | ||
| To me, what stands out about this one is different is that there's not, at least to begin with, an intense urgency to get this done. | ||
| It doesn't feel like the president is all that worried about the shutdown. | ||
| It doesn't feel like the Democrats have an easy way out of it. | ||
| And so I think ultimately this will end with some agreement to talk about the Obamacare subsidies at some later time and they'll move forward, but it could take a little while. | ||
| They're not quite there. | ||
| So what do you make of the Republicans being in control of Congress yet failing to get the appropriations bills passed? | ||
| Yeah, look, I think that we've seen now in a number of successive Congresses a failure of the appropriations process, which is the fundamental process, the core process of that original 1974 way of budgeting. | ||
| The Congress has become very centralized. | ||
| The committees are less powerful than they used to be. | ||
| And that's left us in a place where a lot of the work is done by leadership and not by committees. | ||
| So that the process of breaking down the budget into 13 different bills with 13 different committees doing the work is just not how the institution wants to work anymore. | ||
| And I think we're in a place where it's very difficult for that process to coexist with the culture of Congress. | ||
| Members can change the budget process. | ||
| If they wanted to budget well, they could think about what they need now. | ||
| But Congress is not in a place where it's ready to do that. | ||
| How would you recommend it changed? | ||
| Well, I think if members really wanted to strengthen the institution again, first of all, they should think about decentralizing power in the institution, allowing committees to matter again, allowing committees, for example, to control some floor time the way that many state legislatures work, so that it's not only the leadership that decides what moves and when, and allowing that process to happen over time and not in one concentrated burst. | ||
| I frankly think there's even room to think about whether Congress needs a single appropriations committee or whether the authorizing committees could do some appropriating. | ||
| Congress worked that way for almost a century and it's worth thinking about what isn't working now because the budget process they've inherited, which is now more than 50 years old, is not written in stone. | ||
| It's not written in the Constitution. | ||
| It's a statute. | ||
| Congress can change it. | ||
| And if this isn't working, which it clearly isn't, then they should change it. | ||
| You wrote an article called in National Review called Status Quo or Revolution. | ||
| You look at the fiscal approach of the Trump administration. | ||
| Can you explain what you found in that? | ||
| You know, at the core of that argument is that for all the noise and all the intensity around these early months of the Trump administration, they haven't really moved federal spending much at all. | ||
| And what the article does is try to compare spending this year and last year. | ||
| And it's easy to do that in this case because Congress is the federal government has worked on a continuing resolution the entire year, which means that as a practical matter, they're still on the spending levels agreed to in Joe Biden's last year. | ||
| And so any changes from that would be functions of administrative policy or of changes Congress has made. | ||
| And it turns out there are very few such changes. | ||
| Federal spending is basically where it was last year. | ||
| And for all the talk of dramatic transformation, of Doge and all the rest, essentially none of that has moved the needle at all. | ||
| But, I mean, about 200,000 federal employees have been either let go or have retired. | ||
| USAID has been shut down. | ||
| There's talk of the Department of Education being shut down. | ||
| Has that not made any impact? | ||
| What you find when you look at the federal budget is that the great bulk of spending, first of all, is entitlement spending, and secondly, is focused in a few departments. | ||
| Now, we haven't seen the full scale of the layoffs affect federal spending yet, because a lot of those were deferred layoffs that really only begin now at the end of the fiscal year. | ||
| We'll get a sense of what those look like in terms of fiscal effect. | ||
| But in the big picture, you know, USAID has a very small budget. | ||
| It's just not a big part of the spending picture. | ||
| And if the goal is to affect the trajectory of federal spending, they have to think about entitlement programs. | ||
| They have to think about defense. | ||
| They have to think about HHS. | ||
| It's not possible to make that kind of difference with the sorts of marginal changes that make for exciting news cycles but ultimately don't make much of a difference when it comes to federal spending. | ||
| What about the One Big Beautiful bill and cuts to Medicaid? | ||
| So those cuts to Medicaid take effect not even in this coming fiscal year but in the one after, in FY27. | ||
| And so partly for electoral reasons, partly for structural reasons, a lot of those were deferred and they don't show up yet in the federal budget. | ||
| Some of the increases in that bill to defense and to immigration enforcement show up. | ||
| And so you begin to see those as increases in federal spending. | ||
| But we haven't yet seen significant reductions in federal spending. | ||
| And I think Republicans need to be honest with themselves about that. | ||
| If they care about the fiscal direction of the country, then they really need to be thinking about much more dramatic fiscal reform than they have. | ||
| And we've got Yuval Levin with us for this segment. | ||
| You can join our conversation. | ||
| He's with the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| Call us on our lines by party. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| And we'll go to the calls now. | ||
| Gwen in Knoxville, Tennessee. | ||
| Democrat, good morning, Gwen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good morning. | |
| My question is, with the government shut down, first of all, one of the speakers said that it didn't seem that President Trump was too worried about this. | ||
| If you can recall, back when President was in his first held office, he said it wouldn't matter if the government shut down. | ||
| So this is pretty much true to form. | ||
| The other thing I'm concerned about is the moving of troops from one place to another and saying they will train in cities, American cities, and that we have an enemy with them. | ||
| Things are getting very strange. | ||
| And this is not the America I grew up in. | ||
| I have great respect for many Republicans. | ||
| John McCain was like a hero to me. | ||
| I also have respect for a lot of Democrats. | ||
| We need to get to a place where we don't have a group that feels like they're in the driver's seat. | ||
| You know, there has to be some kind of Peaceful intention toward one another for the benefit of the American people. | ||
| So what can we do? | ||
| What can we do, Yvol? | ||
| Well, I certainly agree with the sentiment there. | ||
| And look, I think one way to think about what we can do is to think about the balance of power within our system of government. | ||
| I think one thing that's happened in the 21st century in particular is a rebalancing of the American constitutional system in the direction of presidential power. | ||
| And the presidency is not an institution that can facilitate negotiation within it. | ||
| Negotiation is the purpose of Congress. | ||
| And in a divided country, a legislature that can facilitate negotiation, bargaining, accommodation is a better way to govern ourselves than allowing power to flow mostly through the executive branch where one person, whoever that is or whatever you think of them, is going to be making the key decisions. | ||
| And so I think one way to think about the future of our country with an eye to allowing there to be more accommodation, less polarization, is to think about reasserting Congress's fundamentally central place in the constitutional system. | ||
| The first branch is not first by coincidence. | ||
| It's first on purpose because the way our system is meant to work is intended to involve negotiation, bargaining, and compromise. | ||
| And that can only happen if Congress is central and if Congress is functional. | ||
| And so to my mind, although this is a time when we think a lot about presidential power and these clashes between the president and the courts, the most important thing to be thinking about is actually the absence of Congress and finding ways to reassert the authority of Congress to allow our system to find its balance again because we are a divided country and that division has to be represented somehow. | ||
| Let's talk to Patricia in Lando Lakes, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Patricia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, how are you? | |
| I have a question about the shutdown. | ||
| How do the agencies and institutions like the Smithsonian and things talk about closing down within one or two days after the shutdown? | ||
| Hasn't that money already been earmarked for those agencies to run? | ||
| Well, you know, the way that federal budgeting works really does mean that when their funding expires, they can't continue to accrue new obligations. | ||
| And so basically what it means is they can't spend new money until they have a line of appropriations again. | ||
| They don't have money set aside. | ||
| There are a few exceptions to this. | ||
| And in fact, in this moment, there are a couple of exceptions that are a function of the Big Beautiful Bill, of the reconciliation bill that was enacted in July. | ||
| So the Defense Department has some money that is not a function of the normal appropriations process because of that bill. | ||
| The Department of Homeland Security does too. | ||
| Most other government programs don't. | ||
| And as soon as their appropriations run out, they are no longer authorized to spend money. | ||
| They technically don't have that money. | ||
| And it really is at midnight on the day that the deadline expires, they have to stop spending money. | ||
| And so their hope is they can backpay their employees when the funding is flowing again. | ||
| They can get back to running. | ||
| But at the moment, they really are not allowed to spend a dollar. | ||
| Well, both sides are blaming the other for the government shutdown. | ||
| I'm going to show you a piece of both Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Johnson, and then we'll talk about it. | ||
| Day two of Donald Trump's shutdown, but it's day 256 of the chaos that the Trump presidency has unleashed on the American people. | ||
| Republicans have shut the government down because they don't want to provide health care to working class Americans. | ||
| The president takes no pleasure in this. | ||
| The president did not want a shutdown. | ||
| I'm telling you this from my own testimony. | ||
| I was in the Oval Office. | ||
| He pleaded with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to do the right thing. | ||
| Keep the government open. | ||
| We'll talk about all these other issues later because that's how the process works. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Who bears the most blame for this shutdown? | ||
| Well, look, I think the blame ultimately is a function of Congress failing to do its fundamental work of appropriation. | ||
| And in that sense, both parties and the president as well bear some blame for not prioritizing the fundamental cause of advancing federal budgeting for the year. | ||
| I think the party that makes demands on, that holds a hostage is generally in the worst position in these kinds of fights. | ||
| And that was the case for Republicans with President Obama. | ||
| It's the case for Democrats now. | ||
| Republicans are trying to pass a clean continuing resolution. | ||
| Just say, let's keep it open, and then we can talk about what the appropriations bills for the year should look like. | ||
| I think it's an easier case to make. | ||
| But the fact is, Republicans run Congress, and they've not prioritized the appropriations process in a way that would allow this to have been resolved before a shutdown. | ||
| So I think they're both at fault. | ||
| I do think that it's important for Congress to take responsibility for this itself. | ||
| When the Speaker says this is up to the President, I don't think that's right. | ||
| This is ultimately up to Congress. | ||
| Congress has the power of the purse. | ||
| The president could veto an appropriation bill, but I don't think that he would. | ||
| And ultimately, it's a function of Congress not being willing to do its job here. | ||
| And in part, that's a function of Republicans in Congress saying, the president's in charge, let's see what he wants to do. | ||
| Our system makes these two branches responsible together. | ||
| And at the moment, it's Congress that isn't doing its job. | ||
| And I think both parties have to take some responsibility for this. | ||
| Is there an off-ramp here, or are we just going to be in the shutdown until one completely caves? | ||
| I think there is an off-ramp in the sense that Republicans could agree that they will negotiate about the Democrats' demands, but after the government is reopened. | ||
| So a CR could be a short-term CR. | ||
| There's been talk about funding the government through November. | ||
| The President has talked about funding it through January. | ||
| I think if you do that with an agreement that the ultimate appropriations bill will involve some discussion about the Obamacare subsidies that the Democrats have prioritized, I think the Democrats don't really trust the Republicans to do that. | ||
| That's certainly true. | ||
| At least that's what they've said. | ||
| If they feel like they need an off-ramp, that's an off-ramp they could take. | ||
| But obviously, there is a lack of trust here. | ||
| And look, the administration has made it clear that the president will try to rescind spending even after an agreement. | ||
| There are reasons for mistrust here. | ||
| But I do think that ultimately that's probably what an off-ramp looks like. | ||
| Here's Bobby, an independent in Homewood, Illinois. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My question is this. | ||
| I'm a cement masons from Illinois. | ||
| I've lived in the union for 30 years. | ||
| Now, I've also been a veteran. | ||
| I've been overseas. | ||
| I've done it all. | ||
| I have 13 grandkids. | ||
| I'm also on disability and retirement now. | ||
| Now, there's nothing bothering me with the Social Security. | ||
| I still get my Social Security. | ||
| I just got my check through the mail through the bank the other day. | ||
| Now, with everyone saying that whose fault is this and whose fault is it for this, why can't everyone just get together and agree on whatever each group wants? | ||
| I don't understand how we arguing about trying to take something away from one group or another and then say, oh, it's their fault or it's their fault that this is happening. | ||
| Well, a couple of things there. | ||
| First of all, you're right about Social Security. | ||
| Social Security is funded by an entitlement that is not part of the annual appropriations process. | ||
| And so Social Security checks are not going to stop in the course of a government shutdown. | ||
| And, you know, I think the process of making decisions in Congress is intentionally a process of conflict and disagreement. | ||
| That is how it's meant to work. | ||
| Congress represents groups of Americans who disagree with each other. | ||
| But Congress is intended to function in the form of structured negotiation. | ||
| And so when the institution is functioning well, those disagreements can work their way through the process. | ||
| Members can give and take and arrive at a point that they can all live with. | ||
| That's the structure that Congress is meant to function through. | ||
| What we're seeing here is dysfunction, right? | ||
| It is a breakdown of that process. | ||
| I think it has to do in part with the fact that there are very, very narrow majorities in Congress over the last few Congresses. | ||
| Republicans are operating with about a three-member majority, which means it's very, very hard for them to maneuver. | ||
| There are not a lot of members they can lose. | ||
| The Democrats similarly feel like they have to stick together, not allow anybody to vote with the other party. | ||
| Obviously, that makes it difficult for any compromise to happen. | ||
| But ultimately, the pressure of the shutdown itself will lead us somewhere. | ||
| This won't last forever, but it does represent dysfunction, a breakdown of the process. | ||
| We shouldn't kid ourselves about that. | ||
| And among other things, it points to the need for rethinking the nature of the budget process. | ||
| Here's Miguel in New Mexico. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I just have one question to begin with. | ||
| But all I want to know is who gave the president the authority to represent the Catholics on the abortion issue? | ||
| Not sure what that has to do with the shutdown, Miguel. | ||
| Did you have a question about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that divided the country. | |
| And that divided the votes. | ||
| The votes, where are they going? | ||
| There's a lot of Catholics being killed all over the world right now because of it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go to Robert, Covington, Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Yura. | |
| I was wondering, what do we need from the House of Representatives? | ||
| Why do they keep playing Jeffries talking? | ||
| They've shown his piece three times now. | ||
| And what do we need from the House of Representatives right now concerning the shutdown? | ||
| Well, look, the way out of a shutdown is ultimately for congressional leaders to come to some agreement that's able to get enough votes, particularly enough votes in the Senate, where it requires 60 votes and therefore requires some Democrats, to get an appropriations measure passed, a continuing resolution, presumably, and to the President's desk. | ||
| And so there has to be some negotiation between Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| In the House, Republicans can do this on their own, and they have passed a clean, continuing resolution. | ||
| But because you need Democratic votes in the Senate, there's ultimately going to have to be a bill that can also get some Democrats in the House. | ||
| It's very unlikely that you get a bill that only Republicans vote for in the House but gets enough Democratic senators. | ||
| So there's a need here for bipartisan negotiation. | ||
| And I would say, by the way, that is intentional. | ||
| That is part of the design of Congress that compels the two sides in our politics to negotiate with each other. | ||
| That's the purpose of the institution. | ||
| It's why there are some supermajority requirements. | ||
| They aren't constitutional but are in the rules of the Senate. | ||
| It's there in order to make sure that significant decisions are made by relatively broad majorities and not by the narrowest possible partisan majorities. | ||
| I think that's a good thing, and members have got to flow with it rather than against it and find a way to work together. | ||
| Now, President Trump and OMB Director Russ Vogt have said that they want to use the shutdown as an opportunity to lay off more federal workers. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Well, it depends a lot on how they do this, but I think almost any way to go about doing that would be illegal because firing people in the federal government actually requires spending some money. | ||
| The way in which these kinds of reduction in force, as they're called, operate is you've got to give people a 60-day notice of their termination. | ||
| They have to be paid during those 60 days and then terminated. | ||
| There's also a severance package that's part of a reduction in force under the law. | ||
| And oddly, in this moment, that would actually mean spending money that hasn't been appropriated, which is not legal. | ||
| So it seems to me they'd run into some very serious legal obstacles to trying to use a government shutdown as an occasion to reduce federal employment. | ||
| They can do that in normal times. | ||
| Reduction in force is a tool that's available to the president. | ||
| He's able to lay off people, as we've seen this year. | ||
| But to do that in the course of a shutdown and to try to use that as leverage in a shutdown, I think, first of all, is a way to break down the process rather than to facilitate its working. | ||
| But it's also very likely not legal. | ||
| Here's Rick in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and how are you guys today? | |
| Oh, excuse me, Mike. | ||
| I got a problem in my throat. | ||
| You know, I used to be a Republican, but I finally just said the heck whether I'm going to independent. | ||
| What gets me is when Trump said on the news a while back, we have $17 trillion from TERP, you know, you know, paying, okay? | ||
| And after he said all that, we got $17 trillion, where did it receive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And where did $17 trillion go? | |
| And it's awful funny. | ||
| After that, he shut the government down. | ||
| Now, where'd the rest of the money gone? | ||
| You know, you look at the White House, all that gold and stuff. | ||
| That ain't cheap, and that's taking our taxpayers' money. | ||
| And not only that, sir, I believe what you said. | ||
| This is Congress that spoke. | ||
| To my opinion, sir, I believe Trump is a wolf dressed in a cheap clothing. | ||
| I yield back, and God love you all. | ||
| Well, thanks, Joe. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| I do think that some of the talk about revenue from tariffs is vastly overstated. | ||
| He was referring kind of in a way to a CBO report about long-term effects of tariff revenue. | ||
| We obviously haven't seen anything on that scale in terms of revenue in the last few months, and I don't think it makes sense to expect anything on that scale, period. | ||
| But in this moment, the revenue levels really aren't part of the conversation about the government shutdown because money can't be spent without appropriations. | ||
| And that means that regardless of where federal revenue stands, the government is shut down unless there's some agreement about appropriations levels in Congress. | ||
| And so these are two separate conversations on two separate tracks. | ||
| Here's Lorraine, Ithaca, New York, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Lorraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Other than, good morning, Mr. Levin, and good morning, C-SPAN. | ||
| Other than Congress itself making a new appropriations method, which it doesn't sound like you feel is possible now and they could do, but they probably won't do, | ||
| is there anything average citizens can do to make their Congress more functional in this regard, maybe other than telling them, you know, get a new appropriations method, or changing the 1974 budget policy. | ||
| That's one question. | ||
| Another thing that it's October, and I have received two letters about my health care premiums. | ||
| One will go up 15%, and my Part D will be going up. | ||
| The deductible went way up, went up about $200. | ||
| So the health care is the sticking point, is one of the sticking points. | ||
| But for me, it feels like many things are being taken away from the poor and working-class people. | ||
| I believe that the upper middle class is still happy because AI is driving so much investment that the 401ks everybody has are still holding firm and people can see that their 401k is okay. | ||
| But for working class people and for people at the lower end, it feels to me as though everything really is being taken away in so many ways. | ||
| And billionaires do have the money, and corporations do have the money, and they are not taxed at the level. | ||
| And that is a public relations thing that I don't understand why it's not working for, because working class people and poor people are more of the people. | ||
| But the laws are all made in favor of the corporations, the billionaires, and the Republicans are pushing it, for absolute sure. | ||
| They're pushing that business is the only way, business is king, that money trickles down. | ||
| And it just, you know, we got it. | ||
| Let's get a response. | ||
| Well, a few things there. | ||
| First of all, in terms of what citizens can do, the power citizens have here shouldn't be underestimated. | ||
| Ultimately, members of Congress are accountable to their voters, and it's the expectations of voters that matter here. | ||
| And I would say as a broad matter, the way in which voter expectations drive this kind of process is that a lot of the voters that members feel most accountable to, which in the case of the House in this moment is their primary voters in many cases. | ||
| They have safe seats. | ||
| They're not looking at a competitive general election. | ||
| They're listening to their primary voters. | ||
| And in both parties, a lot of those voters don't want to see compromise and bargains. | ||
| They want to see more ideological purity. | ||
| And I do think it's incumbent on those voters to see that our system cannot work as long as that is the expectation that they apply to their members. | ||
| Now, obviously, those members face their own incentives, too, and they drive in the same direction. | ||
| And it's not simply the fault of voters alone. | ||
| It's a shared responsibility between voters and public officials. | ||
| But I think we have to approach our politics with the expectation that the system is supposed to work through a process of bargaining and negotiation. | ||
| Our system is built on the premise that we disagree, we're going to continue disagreeing, and the people we disagree with aren't going away, and therefore we have to deal with them. | ||
| We have to bargain, we have to negotiate. | ||
| That's why Congress is the first branch of our government. | ||
| That's why Congress is intended to work through a process of structured negotiation. | ||
| And when it doesn't work that way, it doesn't work at all. | ||
| That's what we're seeing now. | ||
| You wrote an article after the murder of Charlie Kirk with the title, Have an Argument. | ||
| Disengagement, not disagreement, is the real failure of our politics. | ||
| What's your major point there? | ||
| You know, there's a way of thinking about our divided time when we are seeing a rise in political violence and in the intensity of polarization and division. | ||
| There's a way of thinking about this moment that says we're just disagreeing too much and we have to disagree less. | ||
| I actually think, and this is very much connected to that last caller's question, I think the problem is more like the opposite of that. | ||
| We're not disagreeing enough in our politics. | ||
| Even people who are very engaged politically spend very little of their time actually engaged in disagreement with people they disagree with. | ||
| We spend all of our time with people we agree with, talking about people we disagree with, on the internet and in various kinds of cultural cocoons where we don't actually have to deal with people who we don't agree with. | ||
| And you even see it in Congress, where rather than deal with each other, the two parties spend their time talking to cameras about each other. | ||
| Our society is diverse. | ||
| It has always been diverse and it is always going to be. | ||
| And our system of government is built on an understanding of that premise so that it's ultimately built to facilitate constructive disagreement that leads to negotiated ways forward. | ||
| Unity in a society as vast and diverse as ours, unity doesn't mean thinking alike. | ||
| Unity means acting together. | ||
| And our system is built to allow us to act together, even when we don't always think alike, by allowing us to negotiate, to learn from each other, to deal with each other. | ||
| And it's pulling away from that, disengaging, not disagreeing, that is responsible for the breakdown of our political culture. | ||
| So I think ironically, in a moment like this, we actually have to seek out more active, constructive disagreement with people who have different views than ours rather than run away from it. | ||
| And the venues in our society where that kind of disagreement can happen, like Congress, like the university campus, like a lot of our political media, have to be more open to diverse voices rather than less. | ||
| And they've become less open to that in the last few years. | ||
| Do you think that we've, as a society, have lost the ability to have civil discourse? | ||
| I don't think we've lost it, but I think we've lost some of our sense that we have to do it. | ||
| Disagreement is unpleasant. | ||
| It's not what anybody really loves to do, or almost anybody. | ||
| And so we try to pull away from it. | ||
| We try to avoid it. | ||
| We try to look for ways to think about our politics as a way to make those people we disagree with go away. | ||
| But they're not going away. | ||
| And our politics has to be premised on understanding that we share a future in common. | ||
| And people we disagree with are still going to be here tomorrow. | ||
| The question is, how do we live together? | ||
| I do think we've lost the sense that that's the question we have to answer. | ||
| And so some of the knack for constructive disagreement, some of the skills involved, we can regain those, but we have to begin by accepting the premise that that's what our politics is for. | ||
| Here's Doug in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning, Doug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, great. | |
| Thanks for having me on this morning. | ||
| Thanks for watching Journal. | ||
| Yeah, my biggest question, I know that debt is the, well, the debt is the biggest driver of disagreement, but can you tell me what the makeup and who's the biggest receiver of the debt and the debt? | ||
| How much of the debt does it actually help the American people? | ||
| Well, you know, the thing about the national debt is that it amounts to spending in the past that was not covered by revenue in the past. | ||
| And so it's very hard to break down our debt in terms of where the money went. | ||
| In a sense, it's debt undertaken for general ongoing costs. | ||
| To think about where the debt comes from, you have to think about where federal spending goes. | ||
| And at the moment, the largest drivers of growing federal spending and therefore growing debt are our entitlement programs, particularly Medicare, but also Social Security and Medicaid. | ||
| Those programs are a function both of the way they're structured and of the demographic changes in our society. | ||
| A lot of that money flows from younger Americans to older Americans. | ||
| And as our society gets older, the costs of those programs increase over time. | ||
| And government revenue is not increasing at the same pace and probably can't really keep pace with the way in which Medicare in particular is slated to grow in the coming years. | ||
| And so in order to get some control of the debt, we have to think about entitlement reform. | ||
| There are obviously other places in the budget where you can save money, but the growth of spending is driven especially by entitlements. | ||
| Discretionary spending, non-entitlement spending, has actually not grown as a share of the American economy. | ||
| Over the last 25 years or so, it's remained largely in the same place. | ||
| But entitlement spending as a share of the economy has grown dramatically. | ||
| And so there's no way for Congress to avoid thinking about how do we meet our obligations through Social Security and Medicare, but in ways that are more economically efficient. | ||
| It's a question both parties have avoided now for much too long, and they have to take it up if we're going to get control of the debt. | ||
| Kurt, a Republican in Cocoa Beach, Florida, you're on the air, Kurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| You kind of led into my questions here with your last one, but basically, I believe that the shutdown is a result of money. | ||
| It's the budget, correct? | ||
| So given that as a starting point, I believe the budget for the federal government is somewhere between $6 and $8 million. | ||
| I could be wrong. | ||
| You can clarify me on any of this after I'm done. | ||
| But I believe that's about right. | ||
| So the first one comes up to me. | ||
| I have two things, the question and a comment. | ||
| Is the Affordable Care Act, ACA, the A, I don't understand, affordable. | ||
| If we need to provide subsidies to a self-sustaining program, it's not affordable. | ||
| So my question to you is, is the $1.5 trillion you're talking about that's hanging up the health care process of this negotiation, is that for a year, five years? | ||
| And what percent does that represent of the $6 or $7 million yearly budget? | ||
| Trillion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And is it trillion? | |
| Big difference, Kurt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said trillion. | |
| I could be slurring, but it could be trillion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And is that money what you call discretionary or is it appropriated monies? | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| Let's make some order of that. | ||
| So the federal budget now is for this year, it'll probably be just about $7.2 trillion. | ||
| So as you say, it's between $6 and $8, but trillion, not million. | ||
| A very large number, an unimaginably large number for most of us. | ||
| The arguments we're having about the government shutdown are arguments about discretionary spending. | ||
| So the spending that Congress appropriates every year and has to be reappropriated every year. | ||
| Entitlement spending, which covers largely the Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs. | ||
| There are some other smaller entitlements elsewhere in the budget. | ||
| Those programs are not funded through annual appropriations. | ||
| They're formula grants, so they're funded in an ongoing way. | ||
| Congress can certainly change the way they're funded anytime it wants to, but it doesn't have to reappropriate them every year. | ||
| Funding for the Affordable Care Act, what's also known as Obamacare enacted in 2010, is a mix of entitlement and discretionary spending. | ||
| What's being argued about here is discretionary. | ||
| So it's an amount of money that's used to provide subsidies for people in the exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| An amount of money, an additional amount of money that began in 2020, actually is part of the response to COVID and that has continued to flow since then. | ||
| It's been renewed just about on an annual basis. | ||
| There was a two-year renewal in there. | ||
| But that is appropriated money. | ||
| And so that money does have to be renewed every year. | ||
| Parts of the ACA are entitlement spending, especially through the Medicaid program. | ||
| And there's some talk about that in these debates too. | ||
| But at the core of what the Democrats have demanded here is an increase in appropriated spending, a set of subsidies that was intended to expire at the end of this year, not the end of the fiscal year, not now, but in December, and that they would like to extend for another year. | ||
| So that is a discretionary spending debate. | ||
| Here's Michael in Hartford, Connecticut, Independent Line. | ||
| Hello, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My statement is that ugly bill that the Republican pushed down our throat to cut the being there tax, that raised a deficit more. | ||
| He was talking about that you want America great. | ||
| We're the only country in the world that the bill don't pay no taxes. | ||
| I'm a retiree. | ||
| I had to subsidize being there. | ||
| If you want America great, everybody should pay a tax tax. | ||
| Why should I have to subsidize some of the richest people in the world and some corporations? | ||
| You know, this is the same thing. | ||
| Okay, let's talk about tax cuts. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So broadly speaking, the income tax is paid by the top 50% or so of the American public, and it's a graduated tax. | ||
| So wealthier people do pay higher rates and taxes. | ||
| But obviously, there's always room for debate about how high those highest rates should be. | ||
| They have come down some in the last 10 years. | ||
| They did in 2017, and then those lower rates were extended as part of the reconciliation bill passed this year. | ||
| And so the top rates now are in the low 30s, about 32, 33% for the highest earners. | ||
| And generally speaking, people in the lower half or so of the income distribution don't end up paying federal income taxes. | ||
| They still pay federal payroll taxes and, of course, many state and local taxes. | ||
| So certainly there's always room for an argument about what rates of revenue ought to be. | ||
| The debate we're having at the moment is about spending in part because spending has been growing at a pace that you probably couldn't keep up with with growing revenue. | ||
| There has to be some thought given to how the growth rate of federal spending could be constrained. | ||
| And again, I think that ultimately has to be an argument about entitlement reform and not about the kinds of discretionary spending we're talking about this week. | ||
| One more call for you, Patricia, Jacksonville, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Patricia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you people doing? | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, as the structure of the government, Congress has always been the head of our government. | |
| And we were always taught that the president is a figurehead. | ||
| So now that's reversed. | ||
| So Congress is no longer the head. | ||
| The president has taken all authority. | ||
| And from where I stand, they shut the government down. | ||
| Normally everything is televised. | ||
| That one particular meeting, why wasn't that televised? | ||
| Why didn't we get the opportunity to listen to what went on in there as opposed to listening to this side, that side, and his side? | ||
| Well, let me say a couple of things there. | ||
| Our presidents certainly have never been figureheads. | ||
| George Washington was not a figurehead, or Andrew Jackson, or some of our assertive presidents, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan. | ||
| They've always had a role in the policy process, but that role has generally been to set priorities and general direction. | ||
| And Congress has been understood to be the place where policy is really worked out. | ||
| And I do think that we have seen a decline of Congress in that role in the last 30 years or so that has to be reversed if our system is going to work again. | ||
| So in that sense, there is absolutely a necessity for Congress to recover its capacity for policymaking. | ||
| I would say one thing on your latter point. | ||
| I think that it's not really possible to negotiate in front of cameras. | ||
| And so there is a need for some private spaces for American political officials to have conversations that they are then accountable for. | ||
| The results of what they negotiate has to be public and the public can hold them accountable for them. | ||
| But I think it makes some sense both for members of Congress and for Congress and the President when negotiating to have the ability to do that in private. | ||
| I don't think absolute transparency could allow a government that's rooted in negotiation to really function. | ||
| That's Yuval Levin. | ||
| He's a social, cultural, and constitutional studies director at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| He also wrote a book called American Covenant. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me. | ||
| Next up on Washington Journal, we have Max Steyer from the Partnership for Public Service. | ||
| He'll talk about the government shutdown and its impact on federal workers. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Past president. | |
| Why? | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo car. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Max Steyer, President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. | ||
| Max, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for having me. | |
| Just real quick, remind us about the partnership and what your mission is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to better government and a stronger democracy. | ||
| We've been at this for over 24 years and largely focused on making the federal government work better. | ||
| Now our work has expanded to state and local government as well. | ||
| I want to read to you a Truth Social post by President Trump who said this. | ||
| I have a meeting today with Russ Vogt, he of Project 2025 fame, to determine which of the many Democrat agencies, most of which are a political scam, he recommends to be cut and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent. | ||
| I can't believe the radical left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. | ||
| They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to quietly and quickly make America great again. | ||
| Your reaction to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So many different things to be said here. | |
| I think the most important is that unfortunately we have a president who no longer subscribes to the bipartisan concept that our government is there for the public good and instead has been in an ongoing war on the notion of a government for the people and is changing it to a government for himself. | ||
| And the effort to make partisan every activity of our government is an example of that. | ||
| We don't have Democrat or Republican agencies. | ||
| We have a constitution that has a process for creating agencies. | ||
| It requires congressional action and ultimately president signature. | ||
| It's worked very, very well for us and is being blown up in a way that's going to hurt all Americans. | ||
| So my reaction is this is really damaging, scary, and people should be concerned. | ||
| And honestly, our Congress should be putting a stop to it. | ||
| How typical or not is it to lay off federal workers during a shutdown and is it even legal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's certainly not typical. | |
| A government shutdown, and we can come back to what a government shutdown actually means. | ||
| It does not offer any additional authority for a president to lay off federal workers. | ||
| Indeed, the president is supposed to be looking out for the public's interest here. | ||
| The president is supposed to determine whether or not an activity is essential to the preservation of life or property. | ||
| And those activities are considered accepted. | ||
| And those employees that need to do it continue to work without pay. | ||
| And everybody else gets furloughed and goes home. | ||
| But there is nothing in that process that empowers the president to fire additional people. | ||
| The rift threat that he's making is not fundamentally connected to the shutdown. | ||
| And it's pouring gasoline on a fire when what we really need are adults looking for compromise and looking for a way to fulfill their core function of keeping the doors open of our government. | ||
| About a week before the shutdown, you wrote an article with the headline, a shutdown might make Trump More Powerful. | ||
| The sub-headline is, given the extraordinary power grab by the president, the stakes surrounding Congress's spending power are much higher. | ||
| This is a critical turning point for democracy. | ||
| Explain how you felt that a shutdown would make President Trump more powerful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think we're watching this right now. | |
| And wherever the president has discretion or perceived discretion, he has shown no restraint to use that to try to change our government structure to further his own personal aims again. | ||
| And typically, those are not actually well aligned to the public's interest. | ||
| So the concern that I was outlining there is the one I just described, which is there is discretion for a president to decide what functions keep going when appropriated dollars are no longer there. | ||
| It's a small slice, but an important slice of governmental function. | ||
| And I was concerned, as I outlined in that article, that this president would misuse that authority. | ||
| And we're watching that happen right now. | ||
| So it is particularly problematic because this is on top of eight months of deadly and damaging hammer blows to the capacity of our government to serve public needs. | ||
| So you're adding chaos on top of chaos. | ||
| You're watching the core governmental processes unravel. | ||
| Keeping the doors open, as I mentioned, are fundamental. | ||
| The spending power belongs to Congress. | ||
| They're Article 1 in our Constitution. | ||
| It's very clear. | ||
| And this president, even without a shutdown, has seized that power without real pushback from Congress and now is doing even more to grab a hold of something that does not belong to him. | ||
| So then would it be your recommendation, Max, to have the Democrats sign on to a clean CR and reopen the government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My recommendation is that the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties figure out a way to do their job and keep our government open. | |
| I am not in the business of making the political calculus of what deal they should make, but I think it's incumbent upon all of us to hold them to their burden of responsibility here. | ||
| It really is the most basic burden. | ||
| We've seen prior proposals for legislation that would say Congress doesn't get paid. | ||
| Congress can't have publicly funded trips back to their districts. | ||
| The administration should not be paid. | ||
| I mean, the reality is it's the leadership failing that is what is happening here. | ||
| And you have federal employees that are now both first responders and victim. | ||
| And the American public is getting hurt too. | ||
| So I'm not going to tell the Democrats or Republicans what exactly they should do in terms of a deal, but I am saying that it is their responsibility to get one done. | ||
| Well, let's talk about that impact. | ||
| On the partnership's website, you have something called the Federal Harms Tracker, the Cost to Your Government. | ||
| You have workforce reductions by month. | ||
| It's an animation that can go through each month and talk about the reductions. | ||
| What are you seeing as the biggest harm to the American public? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the most important harm is that we're watching our core asset, the people of our government, being thrown away in a non-strategic and thoughtless and often dehumanizing way. | |
| You know, this is fire, fire, fire, not ready, aim, fire. | ||
| Are lots of things we could do to actually improve our government. | ||
| It's important to know that that workforce is the same size or used to be the same size as it was in the 1960s. | ||
| So our government has grown. | ||
| There are a lot of choices that we are making as a society that have long-term impact. | ||
| Your prior speaker was tremendous in describing some of the challenges that we face and what we really need to do about them. | ||
| But indiscriminately firing federal workers is not the way to get there. | ||
| You asked what harms are there, and the reason why we did a tracker is they're countless in every respect, whether you're a veteran, whether you're someone who is older, who relies on Social Security, whether you're a farmer. | ||
| I mean, on and on and on, all of these communities are getting hurt unnecessarily because of wasteful and, you know, frankly, you know, damaging management of the public infrastructure of our country. | ||
| You know, a president is temporary help. | ||
| They don't own the government. | ||
| They're there for a period of time, and their duty is to be a steward of the public good. | ||
| We're watching that model get blown up. | ||
| So those harms are both near-term and they're going to be devastating long-term as well. | ||
| And our guest is Max Deyer of the Partnership for Public Service. | ||
| He is the president and CEO there. | ||
| If you'd like to talk to him, you can start calling us now. | ||
| The lines are by party. | ||
| Republicans are on 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line for federal employees. | ||
| So federal workers, please call us on 202-748-8003. | ||
| And this number, Max, on your website of total reductions of just over 200,000 employees. | ||
| Does that number include layoffs, voluntary retirements, early retirements? | ||
| What does that number encompass? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so the attempt here, and I think this is very important, we have an administration that I think is doing a lot of damage to our government and then, frankly, hiding the information. | |
| So our intent is to try to provide as much transparency about what is happening as possible. | ||
| Later this month, we'll actually be putting phase two out, which will look at the harms by community, by congressional district, that I think will be quite useful. | ||
| That 200,000, 200,201 encompasses all the information we can gather about who has been either effectively fired or constructively fired. | ||
| And the largest group then is those that took the deferred resignation program. | ||
| They, frankly, in our view, were pushed out of our government. | ||
| And we've tried to do that by agency and, as you note, by time as well. | ||
| And then not just offer the data, but provide some information about the impact that is occurring. | ||
| And as I said, we'll be able to do that by community later on. | ||
| It is unprecedented. | ||
| And as I said earlier, there's lots of good reasons or good approaches to making our government work better. | ||
| This is not it. | ||
| And instead, we're watching colossal waste that's unnecessary and that is ultimately going to hurt our safety and the appropriate and proper use of taxpayer dollars. | ||
| And it is here on your website the numbers by agency with Department of Defense, of course, being the largest agency having the largest reductions. | ||
| That's at ourpublicservice.org. | ||
| If you'd like to look at all those agencies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amy, can I make one quick point on that one, too, which you highlighted nicely? | |
| And that is you heard from the president this notion of Democrat agencies. | ||
| You just highlighted the fact that the agency that has actually seen the most people pushed out is the Defense Department. | ||
| You're seeing harm done to the intelligence community, to the FBI, to the Department of Justice. | ||
| There is really no agency that has not experienced substantial harm. | ||
| I don't really know what the president is referring to as far as Democrat or Republican agencies, but I will tell you that the entire government is being mismanaged and huge amounts of waste created and huge amount of risk being put on the shoulders of the American people. | ||
| Now, the civilian workforce is about 2 million. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| So, a cut of 200,000 is about 10% of the federal government workforce being cut so far. | ||
| How much more has the president indicated that he wants to cut from that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, again, there really has been, I said earlier, no planning. | |
| It's not ready, aim, fire. | ||
| It's just been fire, fire, fire. | ||
| And we don't have real good guidance. | ||
| Part of the challenge here is the chaos that is fundamentally being demonstrated in this whole process. | ||
| The OPM director, Scott Cooper, has indicated earlier that he expected there would be another 100,000 federal employees gone by the end of the year. | ||
| I don't know where that number comes from that was pre-shutdown and pre-threat from Russ Vogt and the president for additional risks. | ||
| So, you know, I don't think there is any long-term thoughtful master plan that is being executed here. | ||
| It is a lashing out in a way that is damaging and damaging to the American public. | ||
| This is, again, the public's government. | ||
| It's not the president. | ||
| So we don't know, but what we know is that a lot of damage has happened already, and the signals are that more is to come. | ||
| Let's talk to callers now. | ||
| We'll start with Linda, Democrat, Guysville, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I have basically two questions. | ||
| One is when the continuing resolution was passed in March and why negotiations weren't taking place then, my feeling is probably there were very few calls to negotiate with the Democrats. | ||
| I kind of heard back then that they really were refusing to meet with them, the Republicans. | ||
| I also had a question about, I live in Ohio's breadbasket area, but I wonder why Trump gave $18 billion to help the economy of a dictatorship in Argentina who turned on us and ends up selling all the soybeans to China they could, and now our soybean sales are down 0%. | ||
| I just don't quite understand that. | ||
| And of course, I am for people having health care. | ||
| And I do believe that right now the times are going to be and are as poor as during the pandemic, really economy-wise. | ||
| And I know people are going to need this help continued. | ||
| So if you could give me some answers on those two questions. | ||
| All right, Linda. | ||
| Go ahead, Max. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So it's so important that you keep a sense of history here. | ||
| Unfortunately, shutdowns and the threats are not new. | ||
| The last time we had this was in March. | ||
| They did ultimately agree on a continuing resolution. | ||
| Continuing resolutions, I should say, are not actually good management either. | ||
| They're only good in reference to shutdowns. | ||
| It's sort of a lesser of two evils rather than really effective management. | ||
| The reason why they're not good is that they just kick the can and they limit effective management of government. | ||
| You're not permitted to close down things that actually should be closed down or to have new starts. | ||
| So, you know, it was better than a shutdown, but it was not actually their job, which is to thoughtfully pass appropriations bills. | ||
| Your point is important because they've had lots of opportunity to figure this out and they haven't. | ||
| And we have to go back all the way to 1996, frankly, to find a year in which Congress has done its job and actually put all of the appropriations bills through on time. | ||
| That's just not acceptable. | ||
| And frankly, Congress should be held to account for that. | ||
| And we should have processes that make them bear at least some part of the burden rather than the public and the federal workforce. | ||
| As to your point about the support of Argentina, look, I don't want to stray outside of my lane of good management. | ||
| I think it's important to see that we do have a president that, frankly, is not listening to or hearing from the expertise of his own government. | ||
| Part of the reason why we have a nonpartisan expert civil service is to get good information to the political leaders so that they can make better choices. | ||
| And one of the things that I worry about the most is that we're in the midst of an administration that thinks it can do it on its own and is always right and doesn't need that expertise. | ||
| And that's just not right. | ||
| We live in a complex, difficult world. | ||
| They get to make the choices, but they should listen to the information. | ||
| One last point on this. | ||
| 9-11 started off our century in a scary way. | ||
| It told us we were at risk from foreign threat. | ||
| And the 9-11 Commission, in examining why 9-11 happened, highlighted the fact that we didn't connect the dots. | ||
| We had all the information there, and we didn't put together to understand that this threat of a terrorist attack was coming our way. | ||
| We're in a worse situation than we were then because we have an administration that's not only not connecting the dots, it doesn't want to know about the dots. | ||
| And it's crushing the parts of our government that provide the dots and teaching them the lesson not to provide information that they think that the leadership is uninterested in hearing. | ||
| That's a very bad place to be. | ||
| It's a very dangerous place to be. | ||
| So we need to push back on that. | ||
| And the caller did mention soybeans. | ||
| So I just wanted to bring this up, Politico article from yesterday, Trump making plans to send billions in cash bailouts to farmers with taxpayer money. | ||
| It says the president has also said he wants to use direct tariff revenue for the payments, but that could trigger a major fight in Congress. | ||
| And here is Kay in Coppel, Texas, Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Kay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you doing? | |
| I love your show. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, I'm on Obamacare, and I'm really worried about those subsidies going away because I'm tattoo diabetic. | ||
| I'm also a breast cancer survivor. | ||
| I'm a Gen X. | ||
| And I remember when Obamacare came out about 15 years ago, I was working for a small law firm. | ||
| And the cheapest bonds plan, the monthly premium was about $200 more than my monthly rent. | ||
| And it didn't cover anything. | ||
| And I think back in those times, it didn't even cover prescriptions. | ||
| But I was perfectly healthy, so I didn't worry about it. | ||
| But now it's 15 years later, you know, I'm in my 50s. | ||
| And I worry about that because if something happens to that, I mean, I could not afford the $900 or $1,000 a month. | ||
| I mean, when I've had jobs since the job that I had 15 years ago, I never paid more than like $174 a month. | ||
| And that was with prescriptions, vision, and dental. | ||
| And I'm worried about that because, I mean, God bless Obamacare. | ||
| I've been a lifelong Republican. | ||
| I was secretary of the Young Republicans Club in college. | ||
| And I'm worried about that because, you know, if that happens to me, I mean, I don't own any real estate, never been married, you know, not by choice, don't have any kids. | ||
| So, I mean, I, and I've been out of work for three years due to I'm a licensed edge scrub officer in the state of Texas to the licensed edge scrub officer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, let's go. | ||
| Okay, let's get a response from Max. | ||
| Go ahead, Max Dyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so look, I think the issues you're identifying are true for so many Americans. | |
| Again, the numbers are over 20 million Americans depend upon the healthcare subsidies. | ||
| I would just take a step back for a second and ask the question: why can't we see our political leaders negotiate before we wind up in a situation where the consequences of failure getting things done means that our government shuts down? | ||
| And I think we have to demand better. | ||
| We've accepted, as I noted earlier, a Congress that hasn't gotten the job done since the last century. | ||
| And that's no good. | ||
| So these are fundamental issues for you, for so many Americans. | ||
| And we need political leaders that are able to work them out without tearing things down during that process. | ||
| And that is what we're watching right now. | ||
| And with the current administration, we are also seeing, you know, using this process to cause further damage. | ||
| I think one of the biggest distinctions between prior shutdowns and this one is in the past, we've seen administrations try to minimize the harm to the public, minimize the harm to our government. | ||
| They should never have been in the position of having a shutdown. | ||
| Here we have an administration, this is the point of the piece that I wrote, that's actively using the shutdown to cause more harm. | ||
| And that is wrong and deeply disturbing. | ||
| In Salita, Colorado, Independent Line, is it Perusha? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Go ahead, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| Please forgive me if this is a rather stupid question. | ||
| Do you, sir, believe that America can be taken down by the end of this administration and our democracy is gone? | ||
| I feel it's already eroding to such a point where people are hurting so bad. | ||
| But if it succeeds at the end of three years, do you, two questions? | ||
| Do you feel that it's going to happen as I'm speaking it, that it will be successful? | ||
| And when and if it is, how do you see the possibility of what America can look like, where she's going to go? | ||
| Meaning her people, what is the society going to do if it is if it succeeds? | ||
| Because I sense I'm 84 years of age, and I've been down here for a while. | ||
| And it's so negative, the thought. | ||
| But America, there's nothing like America, or ever will be, I think. | ||
| But I feel that it's a negative question. | ||
| But what happens to the country? | ||
| All right, Parisha. | ||
| Let's get Max's opinion on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first of all, thank you. | |
| My mom turns 86 in a couple of days here. | ||
| And I hope these are good days for you. | ||
| I'm trying to make sure they're good days for my mom. | ||
| And I will say this, which is your question is a profoundly important one. | ||
| And someone I respect a great deal told me once, hopelessness is the enemy of justice. | ||
| And my mom always taught me to look for ways to make a difference. | ||
| And my strong advice to you and to everybody else who's listening is to say, we can't know what the future is, but what we can know is that we as Americans have an opportunity to influence it and that we all have a lot at stake to find ways to create a society that brings people together rather than pushes them apart. | ||
| And I believe, you know, next year will be our 250th anniversary as a country. | ||
| We have a lot to celebrate and we have a lot of strength to draw upon. | ||
| But I do think that there are a lot of challenges that we face. | ||
| And I believe that fundamentally we need to hold on to this idea that our public institutions are there for the public good. | ||
| And it is not return to the world of the 19th century where, you know, to the victor went the spoils. | ||
| And it's the world in which this administration is pushing us back towards. | ||
| I am an optimist about our ability to survive this. | ||
| I think it ultimately depends on the American public understanding what is happening, understanding that they are getting hurt by what is happening, holding the folks who are in charge right now to account, and knowing that there is a better path because we can and should be doing better. | ||
| So I believe that that's the work that I'm trying to push on. | ||
| I think all of us have a role in doing this. | ||
| And if we do, we will see continued greatness from this country. | ||
| So thank you for raising this issue. | ||
| I hope that you will hold on to optimism because it is fundamental. | ||
| And I believe that if we all do, we will get through this and use this as an opportunity to learn and have a public that cares about our government in a way that it hasn't for a very long time and works towards reforms that will actually make it better. | ||
| Marie in New York, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Marie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for having me on. | |
| My comment is about what you said in the beginning of Mr. Trump's true social post about meeting with Project 2025, Brest Volight, I think you said his name was. | ||
| Vote. | ||
| During the election, he disavowed anything about Project 25, knowing anything that it was about. | ||
| And it was pretty unpopular with the American public. | ||
| The whole thing, it basically takes us down to a place in government where the government has very little to do with helping the American people and whether it's Social Security or health care. | ||
| So I would think that this would speak to people that now during this shutdown that the Republicans went home on, they didn't stay around to try to negotiate anything, would alarm some people that he was talking to this man. | ||
| And then I want to speak on your earlier guest who also mentioned that our system was built on forced compromise. | ||
| And neither it's not a parliamentary system where the winner takes off. | ||
| And if I could, the last question I have is, does your guest believe that gerrymandering plays a role in how divided our country is and that we're not getting proper representation, especially in the House of Representatives? | ||
| Thank you, and I appreciate your answer. | ||
| Lots of good, good, good, good questions there. | ||
| And I do think you're right to highlight that the president hid the ball. | ||
| He did disavow Project 2025, and it is remarkable that now that he's embracing it, choosing Russ Vogt as his OMB director was obviously the more direct way of doing that. | ||
| I do think it was unpopular then, and it's unpopular now because it's actually really bad for our country. | ||
| One thing that I would just underscore here is I don't generally see this as a partisan battle. | ||
| I think what we're watching is two very different models of governance, one of which, as I stated earlier, is the notion that our government is there for the public good. | ||
| And the second is that 19th century notion of the spoil system. | ||
| And I think we have an administration that is using partisan clothes to push this idea that we should be in a country where the victor gets the spoils, even though every country that has gone down that road, including our own, has found it to be a bad one with incompetence and corruption. | ||
| So I think the more we think about this as more of a cult of personality, then partisanship is more true to what is occurring and will be helpful in us moving away and moving beyond this. | ||
| And Max, we do have that portion from the campaign rally in July where President Trump disavows knowing about Project 2025. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll just play it real quick for people. | |
| And you know, the other side's going around trying to make me sound extreme. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like I'm an extremist. | |
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm a person with great common sense. | ||
| I'm not an extremist at all. | ||
| Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, and I don't even know. | ||
| I mean, some of them, I know who they are, but they're very, very conservative, just like you have, they're sort of the opposite of the radical left, okay? | ||
| You have the radical left and you have the radical right, and they come up with this project. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what the hell it is. | |
| It's Project 25. | ||
| He's involved in Project, and then they read some of the things and they are extreme. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, they're seriously extreme. | |
| But I don't know anything about it. | ||
| I don't want to know anything about it. | ||
| Max, any other comments on that? | ||
| You can't do better than what you just did, which is a play of the tape. | ||
| All right, then we'll go to Daniel, Great Falls, Virginia, Republican line. | ||
| Good morning, Daniel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Hey, just a couple points, and I got a couple questions. | ||
| So the first thing I would say is, if you're scared of Project 2025, I would go in and look at what they stand for. | ||
| They want to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, dismantle the administrative state, secure our border, and return our God-given individual natural rights. | ||
| Contrast that with the agenda of the Democrat Socialists of America. | ||
| Go in and do your own research, people, and look at the two of them side by side. | ||
| What is it that I prefer? | ||
| And Daniel, with regard to our conversation right now, as far as dismantling the administrative state, what do you feel that that means? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So here's the thing. | |
| The administrative state, as you mentioned, is 2 million employees. | ||
| They apparently have a special, they're apparently a special class of people. | ||
| If you look across the nation or any other nation, really, there's always going to be times when companies have to lay people off. | ||
| But apparently, that is not allowed among a special class of federal employee. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It may have been Reagan who said there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. | ||
| And we see this with the Administrative State. | ||
| We also see it with these subsidies that they're talking about trying to extend, these Unaffordable Care Act subsidies, which were put in during COVID for emergencies. | ||
| The Democrats want to make those permanent now. | ||
| They were put in as an emergency subsidy and they want to make them permanent. | ||
| This is a thing. | ||
| And I want to ask your guest. | ||
| He mentioned that the bureaucracy, the federal bureaucracy, the 2 million employees, it's the people's bureaucracy. | ||
| Well, I want to ask him, I am a person, the 75 million people who voted for Donald Trump, do we count as the people? | ||
| Do we get a say in this? | ||
| And what is it with those four things I mentioned with the Project 2025 that you have a contention with? | ||
| All right, Max Dyer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So, first, Daniel, I love your point, and that is go look at the document. | ||
| I think that's very, very important. | ||
| I think looking at Project 2025 makes a lot of sense. | ||
| You did just hear a clip from our president calling it the radical right agenda. | ||
| So that I think tells us something in and of itself. | ||
| But yes, definitely look at the document. | ||
| You also suggested looking at the Democratic Socialist agenda, and I'm not quite sure what the relevance there would be. | ||
| It's not representative of, I think, pretty much any of the political leadership in our country today. | ||
| So I think looking at an original research is something that is absolutely fundamental. | ||
| When you talk about the 2 million people being a special class of people, they are a special class of people in that they're there to serve the American public, and they take on a responsibility that is extraordinary and brings with it a lot of challenge, as we're experiencing right now. | ||
| It is worth noting that a lot of people, and I think you referenced this, think of them as not being subject to being fired. | ||
| There actually are lots of federal employees that are fired or resigned because they're going to be fired, like you would see in any other company. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| The government, just like any other organization, should be subject to thoughtful, periodic review to see what is it that you want to remove, what people are doing better or worse. | ||
| That happens, maybe not as much as it should. | ||
| And as I said earlier, there are definite reforms that could take place. | ||
| But what we've seen right now is not that careful pruning. | ||
| What we've seen instead is the chainsaw. | ||
| And I don't know any company that would benefit from a chainsaw coming after it. | ||
| I don't know any company leadership that walks in that says they want to, in effect, terrorize the workforce and believe that they're going to get better outcomes from it. | ||
| We're not watching the careful stewardship, the careful management that you, I think, would so strongly want to see in any context, but certainly, as I've noted before, and as you repeated, in our own public organizations, the institutions that are there for our own good. | ||
| 70% of that workforce is there for national security reasons. | ||
| A third of those workers are veterans. | ||
| 85% of them live outside of DC. | ||
| The entire number is the same as it was in the 1960s, despite the fact that our country has grown enormously and the various responsibilities of government have increased. | ||
| I think it's the political leaders that have not done their job. | ||
| It's not the civil servants. | ||
| We need political leaders to keep our government open. | ||
| We need them to actually manage the government more effectively. | ||
| We need to make good choices about what we can afford to do. | ||
| But don't blame the civil servants. | ||
| They don't deserve it. | ||
| And Max, you did write in a recent op-ed that the government does need to be reformed, to be more efficient. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Has your organization put out any proposals or plans to make government more efficient? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And the answer is it does, as any organization would. | ||
| Our world is changing in pretty dramatic ways. | ||
| We do have proposals that are up on our website. | ||
| We've seen some changes adopted by various administrations, even this one, that have made small-scale improvements. | ||
| I do think that one of the possibilities that might come out of the destruction that's taking place is the opening for larger, more important reform. | ||
| I mentioned this about the political leaders really being the bigger problem. | ||
| There are 4,000 political appointees. | ||
| There isn't any real careful selection for character and capability. | ||
| There are no performance plans for any of them. | ||
| They're not held to account. | ||
| I've never seen an organization work where the leaders are not held to account and there's not clarity about what they're supposed to do. | ||
| And it's only the junior people that are held accountable. | ||
| That's what we have in our government today. | ||
| So that would be one of the biggest reforms that would have huge, huge positive impact on our government. | ||
| We have things like AI that I think offer enormous opportunity for better improvement and better responsiveness from our government. | ||
| We need a government that is more customer focused. | ||
| There's a lot that can be done. | ||
| We're just not watching that happen. | ||
| And it is in part, you don't get there by antagonizing and terrorizing your workforce. | ||
| It's just never a good approach to improving management in any organization. | ||
| And we shouldn't be having it today. | ||
| Rich is calling from Pennsylvania on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I like to start off by first saying that a true patriot is loyal to the Constitution, not to a person, party, or a cult of personality, as you say. | ||
| My question is, my thinking is, I feel for the federal workers. | ||
| If they are fired, that means you're affecting every neighborhood in the country. | ||
| We have federal employees in every 50, all 50 states. | ||
| They're not just the special people living in DC area and it's across the country. | ||
| That means if they're fired, they won't be able to spend the money for the groceries or whatever. | ||
| The economy will take a hit. | ||
| Yet, we can give billions and billions in subsidies to the oil companies. | ||
| Yet we can't help people afford their health care. | ||
| Whether it's special from the COVID, that's just the tip of the iceberg. | ||
| That's just them chipping away at what they want to make this great, this great structure to be. | ||
| They want to get rid of the health care, yet they don't have a plan. | ||
| Yet you can cry about we don't have money. | ||
| Yet to join ICE, you're offering $50,000 sign-on bonus to join the Trump Gestapo Brownshirt. | ||
| All right, Rich. | ||
| Go ahead, Max. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that the caller is exactly right that we should understand that federal employees are in every community. | |
| They're there because they're providing services in those communities, whether they work at a veterans hospital or staff a Social Security Administration office or are firefighters or food safety inspectors. | ||
| I mean, the list goes on and on and on. | ||
| It is important, I think, to understand that it is bad for the federal worker, but it's even worse for the American public that is losing services and losing them, again, without any strategy or thoughtfulness being done to ensure that the cuts are smart and that the cost-benefit analysis has actually been done. | ||
| So that's the reason why we do the harms tracker. | ||
| We're trying to shine a light on what is occurring here. | ||
| I do believe that ultimately, It's all up to the American public. | ||
| They need to understand what is happening. | ||
| And when they do, and if they do, because we need to get information to them, they'll say this is not the right way to be treated for us or for the people who are serving us. | ||
| All right, that's Max Dyer, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service. | ||
| They're at ourpublicservice.org. | ||
| Max, thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| And we are wrapping up our show with Open Forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now on whatever is on your mind. | ||
| Numbers, Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll get to your calls right after the break. | ||
| I'm Dasha Burns, host of Ceasefire, bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ceasefire premieres October 10th. | |
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| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
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| America's Book Club, premiering this fall, Sundays at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| It's Open Forum, and just before we get to your calls, a couple of things for your schedule. | ||
| At 11 a.m. today, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune will hold a press conference to give an update on day three of the government shutdown. | ||
| We'll have live coverage of that starting at 11 a.m. Eastern right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Also, there is a White House briefing that is at 1 o'clock. | ||
| We'll hear from the White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt on this third day of the shutdown. | ||
| That is also on C-SPAN. | ||
| And both those programs are on C-SPAN now, our app and online at c-span.org. | ||
| And just for your awareness, this article from The Hill with the headline: Trump labels vote the grim reaper ahead of threatened shutdown layoffs. | ||
| And that's at The Hill. | ||
| We have a video of that that was posted, I believe, on X, on Truth Social. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here comes the Reaper. | |
| And dear babies, comes the Reaper. | ||
| Gonna tie your hands. | ||
| Here comes the Reaper. | ||
| Be able to fly. | ||
| Here comes the Reaper. | ||
| And that was posted yesterday on President Trump's Truth Social account. | ||
| We'll go to your calls. | ||
| Carl, Messick, Michigan, Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hey there, good morning. | ||
| I was listening with great interest to both your guests today. | ||
| Levin and Steiner did a good job as advocates for keeping the government open. | ||
| A couple things I wanted to mention: you got this firing people while the government's closed and disappearing agencies. | ||
| Don't forget, POTUS has immunity. | ||
| Okay, we've heard about the unitary executive theory, and we've also heard that we won't need any more elections. | ||
| Here's what I ask the viewers: Can the House be adjourned permanently? | ||
| Whether the government shut down or not, could that happen? | ||
| And can it be adjourned with a pro forma session daily so it is still a thing? | ||
| But it eliminates direct representation and the need for elections for the House every year, or excuse me, every two years. | ||
| That's consolidating power to the executive to a great degree. | ||
| And we'll find out as we approach the midterms next year. | ||
| And, you know, the Blue Oyster Cult thing is terrible. | ||
| And did they get the licensing to use the music from the band or their legal representation? | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| All right, Carl. | ||
| Here's Marlon in Coos Bay, Oregon, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| You know, we call in to want to talk to the guest that's there. | ||
| I know you have a schedule you've got to keep, but we'd like to talk when we call on you. | ||
| We have to wait here until we go through all these calls before we can talk to this guy. | ||
| And then he gets off and we can't talk to him. | ||
| So that being said, I'll say what I wanted to say. | ||
| The reason we got a shutdown here is because we've got a disgrossly dysfunctional Congress. | ||
| You got the Democrats that are stuck in the Obama era and they hate this president and they will never give in to this president. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries, when he did six months ago, the Republicans were fighting for almost six months to get the big beautiful bill in. | ||
| And Hakeem Jeffries and the rest of the House, Democrats, they all have the Democrat talking points of President Trump is giving buyouts to the top 1% and all the billionaires. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's ridiculous. | |
| All you want to do is extend the tax credits from 2017. | ||
| And so are you still there, Mimi? | ||
| Yes, I'm listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see a picture coming on the TV there. | |
| So anyway, he sit there and give this big speech, and everything that the Democrats right now, Schumer and Hakeem is propping up this shutdown with is exactly what's in the Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| And it's the health care part of it, and it's $50 billion that they, and that's another thing. | ||
| They talk about how these rural hospitals will be closed down. | ||
| They got $50 billion in the Big Beautiful bill to help protect those hospitals that was put in there by the Republicans. | ||
| So until this shutdown will not stop until Schumer and Hateem and the Democrats drop their $1.5 trillion giveaway or what they're wanting to draw back and just go with a Clean CR. | ||
| And in seven weeks, we're going to go through this again on November the 21st. | ||
| The Democrats will do this again after that seven weeks. | ||
| They should extended this Clean CR into January. | ||
| All right, Marlon. | ||
| And some news for you from Semaphore. | ||
| Carr, Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, to testify before Cruz's Senate committee in the wake of the Kimmel flap. | ||
| That's at Semaphore discussing that. | ||
| If you'd like to read it, here's Annie, Crawfordville, Florida, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Annie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I was hoping I can talk to Max, but of course I know I'm too late now. | ||
| But I just want to make a statement. | ||
| Maybe he might still hear it. | ||
| I am praying that five more senators, Democrat senators, vote with Speaker Johnson. | ||
| And I was hoping they were going to do that today, but I just heard somebody say they might not have any more. | ||
| I don't know, but I was hoping they would. | ||
| But whenever they do it again to either today or later, that they get 60 votes. | ||
| The senators have to have 60 votes for this. | ||
| And that's what's holding up everything. | ||
| They only got, well, we got three others, and two of them was a Democrat and one was an Independent. | ||
| So they got the other three to go with the 50, to go with the 50 or two, because, of course, Speaker Johnson has 53, but one of his did not or did not vote with him. | ||
| And I know that they are the majority, but they don't have 60 senators to vote on this like that. | ||
| They have to have the Democrats. | ||
| So that's why I was praying, and I was going to make a statement and say that, because we really want the government to open back up so they can get the monies to the hospitals, so they can get the people their checks and stuff that they need or whatever they need to make it. | ||
| And also, nobody really ever hardly says, would say that. | ||
| And they need to say that more often that they always, I don't know about always, but I know if it's a Senate vote, they have to. | ||
| It's not like the majority. | ||
| You have 45 and 50 or something. | ||
| It's not like that. | ||
| That's right, Danny. | ||
| And this is Barbara, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Barbara. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Mimi, I don't always listen to C-SPAN, so maybe you can tell me whether or not this has been answered. | ||
| I have a question for you. | ||
| And if you can't answer it, maybe someone listening can. | ||
| All this talk about Trump is breaking the law, you hear it all the time. | ||
| And if they're saying it's the law, so that means it is written. | ||
| Why in the world can't he be prosecuted immediately for breaking that whatever particular law people are saying that he's breaking? | ||
| And instead of having to go through the long judicial process, he's the president. | ||
| That should have immediate attention. | ||
| Can you answer that for me? | ||
| What, I mean, is there a specific law that you're saying that he's breaking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, we hear it all the time. | |
| I don't have to give you examples. | ||
| You'll hear the latest one I think I heard this morning when they were talking about he's going to take advantage. | ||
| He did say, or give us the impression he's going to take advantage of the breakdown, the closing, so he can start eliminating people. | ||
| And it was stated that's against the law. | ||
| He can't. | ||
| Yeah, by one of our guests. | ||
| So, I mean, Barbara, you know, he's got immunity from the Supreme Court, right, for all presidential actions that he would take. | ||
| Any official actions as president, he's got immunity from prosecution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So let me make sure I can understand what you're saying. | |
| You're saying anything he's doing while he is a president, I'm not talking about before. | ||
| Official acts. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Official acts. | |
| Well, that's official when he makes those statements. | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he's immune. | |
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You can just do any day and going thing. | ||
| We're doing. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Andrew, Clearwater, Florida, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Andrew. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I have just two quick points. | |
| One of which is, I think that the shutdown is occurring in lieu of good public policy on the part of the Democrats. | ||
| I think that they basically don't have anything viable to contribute to the public discourse. | ||
| So this is better than nothing. | ||
| I think it's kind of like scuttling the boat because you don't have control of the steering wheel. | ||
| I think that the second thing is that I'm kind of giving a gimme to the Democrats. | ||
| If they want to become more politically viable, they need to start having a moral compass. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is an article for you from The Hill with the headline, Kavanaugh's attempted assassin to be sentenced Friday. | ||
| That's today. | ||
| That's at the Hill. | ||
| If you'd like to read that article. | ||
| Taylor, reading Pennsylvania Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| So I'm in a rare situation, but I have two things I want to bring up, Jeff. | ||
| The first one, just something I've been thinking about. | ||
| I'm 29 years old, so I'm a baby. | ||
| I've got a lot of time to learn. | ||
| But one of the things that's always blown my mind, when we go to vote for our presidents, when we go to sign up, you have to pick either Republican or Democrat in order to pick who you want to run in the primaries, right? | ||
| As an independent, I've always found that weird because in a country built on freedom, why are freedoms being restricted to people that we don't necessarily follow? | ||
| And on a different note, just two things to chew on for you. | ||
| The other one is, is I'm in a hospital in a kind of rural area, and the abuses and the checks and balances that are not present within the hospital are astronomical. | ||
| I've been hospitalized for the last 26 days and have never faced more racial discrimination, physical abuse. | ||
| It's been a whole thing. | ||
| Just like we need checks and balances in our governments. | ||
| Why are you in the hospital, Taylor, for 26 days? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I came into the hospital due to something called posture orthostatic tachycardia. | |
| The hospital cannot treat it. | ||
| They have refused to transfer me. | ||
| And the doctor, like, he took my heart monitor off today. | ||
| He didn't find it necessary to have it on, but I went into tachycardia and passed out in the middle of the night. | ||
| They had to call a rapid response team. | ||
| There's no checks and balances on doctors in hospitals, just the way we feel our president. | ||
| Some people may feel our president doesn't have enough checks and balances. | ||
| There's the same thing going on in hospitals as is in our government. | ||
| Our freedoms in both spaces are very limited, and it's only the freedoms that are handpicked and are okayed. | ||
| And I would like to hear your opinions on those things because you're a very educated woman. | ||
| This is your job. | ||
| And I'd like to know how you feel about these things. | ||
| And how are you paying for this? | ||
| What kind of insurance do you have, Taylor? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I became disabled at the age of 25 at a freak workplace accident. | |
| I am on disability. | ||
| I am on Medicaid, Medicare, and a Pennsylvania health waiver. | ||
| And I do pay my premiums for anyone who's going to get SAFI. | ||
| Well, thanks for sharing that with us, Taylor. | ||
| Jeff is calling on the line for Democrats, Kansas City, Missouri. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you're morning. | |
| We're listening, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, well, I guess I have a question for America. | |
| How do you negotiate with a Republican Party if they can't tell what's up and what's down? | ||
| And my point is, I mean, say if you have a Democrat that goes outside on a bright sunny day and looks up at the sky and says, my, the sky is blue, and it's a beautiful sunny day. | ||
| And you got a Republican, his neighbor goes out and looks like the same thing and says, no, the sky is black and pink polka dots. | ||
| How do you negotiate or how do you debate that? | ||
| And the example is Trump. | ||
| I mean, Trump is a liar. | ||
| We know it. | ||
| Trump is a felon. | ||
| He is a sexist. | ||
| I mean, we know what he is. | ||
| He says it every day. | ||
| He does it every day. | ||
| But the Republicans look at him and say, oh, he's a Messiah. | ||
| I mean, he should be sitting next to Jesus. | ||
| You know, and they want Democrats to believe that. | ||
| And Democrats are not going to believe that. | ||
| And that's what I think makes them the most upset. | ||
| How do you negotiate with that? | ||
| And here's Larry in Alton, Illinois, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Larry. | |
| Democrats cannot come to grips with what God blessed them with. | ||
| And we're going to have an opinion on Republic. | ||
| For the young lady that called a few minutes ago, the only reason we have independents is so they can be seen smarter than everybody else in the room. | ||
| And the one new one that I picked up on today, when we have Republican hosts on, we're dumping the mic or Republican guest. | ||
| We're dumping the mic. | ||
| And I don't, you know, it was really bad a while back. | ||
| I don't know how long ago it's been, but you guys were just dumping the Republican guest on and on. | ||
| But if we could do something about that, I'm a longtime listener, viewer of C-SPAN, love you guys. | ||
| But boy, and to the young lady again, also, TBS is running rampant. | ||
| I mean, just instead of paying attention to what Mr. Trump says, how about let's just pay attention to the waddy does. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Gloria in Lobelville, Tennessee, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to say I think that any president who wants to run for a presidency, they all should be stripped down, given hospital gowns, taken away all their electronics, and take a test on our Constitution. | ||
| I had to learn the Constitution when I was in eighth grade, and I'm now a great-grandmother to seven, eight, eight-grand-great-grandchildren. | ||
| And I'm very grateful that I'm still alive, but I'm dismayed at how Congress is turning against the laws to support the stupid things of a president. | ||
| And he's the only one I've ever heard of that bankrupted his own casino. | ||
| And he expects to be able to take the country and just do what he wants with it. | ||
| He may be the president, but he is not God. | ||
| And people need to be more intelligent about knowing our laws before you can go into the office and try and support our country. | ||
| And that's about all I have to say. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And this is The Hill with this breaking news. | ||
| Supreme Court takes up new Second Amendment case. | ||
| It says that it is the Supreme Court took up its next Second Amendment case on Friday. | ||
| That's today, agreeing to hear a challenge to Hawaii's ban on carrying concealed weapons on private property without the owner's express consent, the owner of that private property. | ||
| That's at The Hill. | ||
| Here's Mary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I started calling when Mr. Steyer was on, but I've heard such shocking things right now listening to everyone. | |
| Barbara from Philadelphia, I'd love to have lunch with you. | ||
| I mean, she was not aware on July 4th of 2024 that I think most Americans are not aware of, that the Republican Pact Supreme Court, I believe Judge Alito wrote the law in that the president has total immunity. | ||
| I cried that day. | ||
| Our country changed that day. | ||
| We are no longer, in my opinion, the country that we knew. | ||
| And I don't think a lot of people are aware of that. | ||
| And the lady also in a rural hospital in Pennsylvania, when this administration is cutting back Medicare, Medicaid, and other SNAP programs, things like that. | ||
| And that woman is languishing in a rural hospital that doesn't have the proper funding. | ||
| And she should call our governor, Josh Shapiro. | ||
| He'll help you, hon. And I just feel that there's so much, you know, the man who called me, you know, talked about how God had, God gave us a gift. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| God works in mysterious ways, but I don't think God gave us the man in the White House. | ||
| I believe six billionaires paved the way for him to be there by lowering their standards on a chesspool of social media and muddy in the water. | ||
| It seems like a lot of Republicans like the entertainment that he gives. | ||
| And I'm going to sign off right now because What I wanted to say and appreciate from Max Steyer, I wish we knew how to get in touch with him and become more partners for public service. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Yeah, and you can check their website if you want to reach out to them or interact with them in any way. | ||
| Ourpublicservice.org. | ||
| Robert, Tampa, Florida, Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Thanks for giving us this opportunity to have our First Amendment rights to talk about whatever we want. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| I would just like to say that America lets more illegal immigrants into the country than any other legally, more than any other country in the world. | ||
| President Trump is doing a great job. | ||
| I support him. | ||
| The Medicaid and the Medicare cuts that people are talking about are only for able people that are using the system, young people that are able to go out and work. | ||
| And they're taking it away from them and they're taking it away from illegal citizens, you know, people that are here illegally. | ||
| And I feel bad for those people. | ||
| God bless them. | ||
| We all want them to have a better life. | ||
| So, Robert, you know, I was looking into this about who's going to lose their Medicaid. | ||
| And part of it is anybody that doesn't have a green card. | ||
| So, for instance, if somebody has come into the country and is an asylum seeker and has been granted a stay to stay and have their asylum claim heard, or they've been approved, but they're still waiting for their green card, those people will now lose their Medicaid. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| So, they're not exactly, they're not illegal. | ||
| They're not in the country illegally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And see, I don't agree with everything our president does and our government does. | |
| I agree that that should not be happening. | ||
| I don't think they should take it away from the people that are waiting for green cards or their citizenship that are here doing it through the right process. | ||
| So, but I do agree with a lot of what they're cutting on Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| I just think that a lot of people are confused and they're being misled by the mainstream media, no disrespect to you guys. | ||
| The other thing is, is if people just look around the world and they see what's going on in other countries and all the protests with the digital ID and all these things going on, man, forgive me, Jesus, for saying this, but we are so blessed Kamala Harris didn't get in there because we would be going through the same thing they're going through right now. | ||
| And then our kids are being indoctrinated. | ||
| Just look at Netflix. | ||
| I mean, those people with the cartoons and all these things going on with the cartoons, they deserve what they get. | ||
| And again, thank you so much. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| All right, Robert. | ||
| And a couple of news articles for you. | ||
| This is the Washington Post. | ||
| U.S. in, quote, armed conflict with drug cartels, Trump tells Congress. | ||
| Trump administration is seeking legal justification for strikes on what it has claimed are Venezuelan drug traffickers at sea. | ||
| That's the Washington Post. | ||
| And then this is an article in Politico. | ||
| The FDA has approved a new generic abortion pill before the shutdown. | ||
| The agency's decision has drawn conservative criticism. | ||
| That is a generic abortion pill on mifipristone. | ||
| That is the brand name for that. | ||
| Here is Danny in DeSoto, Texas, Independent. | ||
| Hi, Danny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you guys doing? | ||
| I am a longtime missionary and viewer, a C-SPAN. | ||
| I thank you and appreciate you for letting me have a moment this morning. | ||
| I think it's very interesting that the Republicans have the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and enlarge, the Supreme Court. | ||
| But they're accepting blame on the Democrats. | ||
| I think that is a bridge too far. | ||
| And I believe that we have to be mindful of the fact that if we're going to speak as Christian, as a Christian nation and as God's children, we have to affect that really deals with what the needs are of those that are the least of us. | ||
| And I just think that this administration at this particular time doesn't have the wherewithal or doesn't have the residency in their mind's eye to really fix anything. | ||
| I think they want to burn it down. | ||
| I think they want to put in place a compilation of what authoritarian dictators are doing in other parts of the world. | ||
| And it's an atrocity. | ||
| And it's a shame that the American people, the American people, don't see this division being such an outrage that we don't come together as a people and modify what has been a real division in this country. | ||
| And it's just been in the last 10 years, it seems to me, in as much as it has become. | ||
| So this is what I say. | ||
| We talk about being a Christian nation. | ||
| We're talking about being in line with God. | ||
| But we have to stop capitulating to those who have power. | ||
| Power without principle is nothing. | ||
| And when you disregard the principles and the obligations of what this country stands for, you find yourself, you know, in a degradating stage. | ||
| And this is where we're at. | ||
| We're going nowhere fast. | ||
| And I think we're spiraling out of control. | ||
| And we can't sit back and say and point at one another. | ||
| I think the biggest problem is we're no longer engaging in fixing problems. | ||
| We're just, you know, that's only lives. | ||
| That's only the Republicans. | ||
| No, we have to. | ||
| Jenny, we're running out of time, so I'm going to get in. | ||
| Gary, Albany, Georgia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you doing, Mimi? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, I like to say, look where we're at now, talking about make America great again. | |
| We got disaster all around our country. | ||
| We're more divided than ever. | ||
| Country's laughing at us. | ||
| We got a president that's supposed to be for all people, but all he does is still stand for one group. | ||
| You're supposed to be for all. | ||
| And what I hate about it is we have past President Bush, Reagan, Obama, Clinton. | ||
| They all come across the line for everybody, not division. | ||
| And for the ones that are talking about, oh, I love Trump. | ||
| Oh, he's doing a great job. | ||
| You got money. | ||
| Put yourself in other people's shoes. | ||
| People are hurting out there. | ||
| Right now, they're struggling to get groceries. | ||
| They're struggling for health care. | ||
| They got families. | ||
| For the farmers out there, they're struggling. | ||
| For all y'all that made all that money that vote for Trump, y'all thought he's going to help. | ||
| You see what he's doing now. | ||
| He lied once, he's going to lie again. | ||
| Democrat, say, yo, stand your ground. | ||
| Stand where you're at. | ||
| Fight for us. | ||
| Because those people that y'all voted for don't have y'all enough. | ||
| They don't have y'all's missed needs. | ||
| We need somebody going to stand up for the people. | ||
| It's about the people. | ||
| One more call, Maria, Baltimore, Maryland, Republican. | ||
| Go ahead, Maria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, Chris. | |
| I thank you for my call. | ||
| I just want to say I think that President Trump is doing the best he can. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| He's not the cause of them people stopping. | ||
| It's Netanyahu. | ||
| Because Netanyahu is an evil man, and Trump is afraid that they're going to get some people take his money. | ||
| And Trump was right about that power and all, because me and my husband took it for years. | ||
| My husband is in his 70s. | ||
| And he says, Tomo calls him to lose his ability. | ||
| And that will be our last call for today. | ||
| We thank you for everybody for calling us, for joining us, for watching, and we will be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern on Washington Journal. | ||
| Have a great day, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And here on C-SPAN, we continue to bring you live coverage on the federal government shutdown. | |
| At 11 Eastern, we'll take you live to Capitol Hill, where the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader will talk to reporters about the ongoing impasse on the government funding agreement. | ||
| And later at 2, we'll hear from the House Minority Leader on his position in the standoff. | ||
| Also, today at 1, remarks from White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt amid President Trump's reported plans to impose massive layoffs of federal employees and make cuts to infrastructure projects. | ||
| Just this morning, White House Budget Director Russell Vogt announced the administration will withhold $2.1 billion for infrastructure projects in Chicago, following a similar move earlier this week on projects in New York City. | ||
| Also, today at around 1:30 Eastern time, we'll see more votes in the Senate as they make a fourth attempt to pass a short-term funding package. | ||
| Both the Democrats and Republicans' measures will be considered. | ||
| Both have failed so far to reach the necessary 60-vote threshold. | ||
| Media outlets are reporting that informal negotiations are taking place among rank-and-file senators on both sides of the aisle. | ||
| If the Senate fails to approve a funding package to reopen the government, we expect the next round of votes to be held Monday. | ||
| No plans for a weekend session as things currently stand. | ||
| Over in the House today, just a brief procedural session is expected at 3:30 Eastern and no votes scheduled. | ||
| Stay tuned here on C-SPAN as we bring you the latest developments of the shutdown. | ||
| Our coverage, both live and archived, is also available on the free C-SPAN Now video app and online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| And pass president nomination. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo clause. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire, this fall, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the President's Cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. |