| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
operations through Friday, October 17th by using court fee balances and other funds not dependent on a new appropriation. | |
| You can continue to follow the government shutdown on the C-SPAN networks and each morning at 7 Eastern, C-SPAN's Washington Journal will take your calls and hear from reporters on the negotiation efforts to fund the government. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Agriculture is the main life in Sussex County and I'm very proud of that. | ||
| I felt like we were being left behind. | ||
| Everybody around us seemed to have internet, but we did not. | ||
| When I found out that Comcast was coming, I ran down the road and I said, welcome. | ||
| High-speed internet is one of those good things that we needed to help us move our farming, our small businesses, our recreation forward. | ||
| And now future generations will thrive here in Sussex County. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yuval, 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. | ||
| 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 Quote 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 has 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 202748-8000. | ||
| And Independence 202-748-8002. | ||
| 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 within. | ||
| 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, you all? | ||
| 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. Jefferies 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 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're 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 because 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. | ||
| 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, you. | |
| 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 Russe Vote 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? | |
| Good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 with 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where did it receive? | |
| And where'd the $17 trillion go? | ||
| And it's awful funny. | ||
| After that, he shut the government down. | ||
| Now, where'd the rest of the money go? | ||
| 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 percent, 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 Washington Journal. | ||
| Yeah, my biggest question, I know that the the debt is the well the debt is the biggest driver of this disagreement, but can you tell me what to make up and who who's the biggest receiver of those uh the debt and uh The debt, how much of the debt does it actually help 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 that'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 being there 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 best. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As the federal government shutdown enters a third day, C-SPAN interviewed various people on the streets of Washington, D.C. to get their thoughts on the shutdown and how they're impacted by it. | |
| I'm very worried about federal workers. | ||
| I'm worried about threats to what the government is threatening to do, but I feel like it's necessary because I'm even more worried about the cost of health care and ACA premiums. | ||
| I have a lot of friends and family. | ||
| I'm originally from West Virginia. | ||
| I have a lot of friends and family that live there still and depend on the ACA for their health insurance. | ||
| And it's untenable. | ||
| The costs rising are untenable. | ||
| Well, I think everyone is looking for efficient government, but this is also the natural interplay in a healthy democracy. | ||
| Well, it actually does affect me a little bit because I work as a tour guide here in D.C. | ||
| So are the bathrooms open? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are they closed? | |
| Some of the roads leading to some of the memorials are closed. | ||
| Whether you count parkland or not, the federal government owns between 20 to 30 percent of the land in D.C. | ||
| So you can't help but encounter shutdowns, closures. | ||
| The museums are closing on Monday. | ||
| The monuments closed. | ||
| Capital tours are closed. | ||
| So it's affecting me as a tour guide, but also visitors who come here. | ||
| I have a bunch of stuff booked, and I can't do any of it. | ||
| Well, it's making me worried about not being able to work. | ||
| As of now, we're still working. | ||
| We're remodeling the Air and Space Museum, but we're going day by day. | ||
| So we'll find out this afternoon if you want to shut us down or not. | ||
| I think it's a waste of time. | ||
| I guess every time they go through this little process, it's just a silly game that they're playing with a back and forth. | ||
| I think it's really a waste of time and affecting a lot of people that need to be working and they need to focus more on important things. | ||
| I'm from Australia. | ||
| I don't feel comfortable commenting about another country's political feelings or what they do or how they act. | ||
| It's really up to Americans to decide how they run their country, not me. | ||
| But I can say from my perspective, I find it quite confusing that you have these government shutdowns that your government doesn't continue to make sure that the services that the taxpayers are paying for are continued. | ||
| I just don't understand it. | ||
| However, I want to make it clear it is totally Americans' decisions on how they run their country and what they do. | ||
| We came in from South Korea, but I'm originally from Texas. | ||
| And yeah, we're here visiting DC for two days and seeing the sites. | ||
| How has the government shutdown affected your visit? | ||
| So far, not too much, but this morning we tried to go to the archives and they were surprisingly shut down. | ||
| We thought stuff was going to start shutting down next week, but I guess they're already closed. | ||
| Have you been to any other sites since you've been here? | ||
| We walked around outside. | ||
| We saw the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and stuff. | ||
| But yeah, we just got in yesterday afternoon. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. |