| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Newsletter previews Election Day 2025 with a look at key races and ballot measures in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and California. | |
| And Vice President and ACA program director for the Kaiser Family Foundation, Cynthia Cox, discusses the expiring enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance plans and the potential impact on the marketplace. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| This is Washington Journal for Saturday, October 4th. | ||
| The government shutdown is likely to continue through the weekend after the Senate failed to pass either version of competing plans to extend federal funding. | ||
| Yesterday's vote was the chamber's fourth attempt to advance a short-term spending deal, and both the House and Senate are now out of session until Monday. | ||
| For the first hour of today's program, we want to hear your thoughts on the government shutdown now entering day four. | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you are a federal worker, you can call in at 202-748-8000 and 3. | ||
| You can also text your comments to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Be sure to include your name and city. | ||
| Or you can post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for being with us. | ||
| We'll get to your calls and comments on this, the fourth day of the government shutdown in just a few moments. | ||
| But first, wanted to get the latest on yesterday's Senate vote. | ||
| And for that, we will talk with Aiden Quigley. | ||
| He is a reporter with CQ Roll Call. | ||
| Aiden, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. | |
| We just heard that was the fourth attempt now to pass this some type of funding deal to reopen the government or at least keep it open. | ||
| Tell us more about the vote yesterday. | ||
| What did it look like? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We really are in a stalemate at this point. | |
| Obviously, there will have to be some sort of breakthrough in coming days or weeks to get us out of this situation. | ||
| Republicans have put up, Senate Republicans have put up this House pass bill now four times. | ||
| That would be a relatively clean extension of funding until November 21st, which was seven weeks. | ||
| Now that's only six weeks away. | ||
| But that was meant to give lawmakers more time to work out appropriation bills. | ||
| It's extremely typical to pass a CR ahead of October 1, but that did not happen this year. | ||
| Senate Democrats and House Democrats both really want to force a conversation about extending these ACA subsidies and make this fight about health care. | ||
| Republicans are saying reopen the government and then we can talk about those things. | ||
| Democrats are saying there's no better time than right now. | ||
| The vote yesterday, nobody changed their vote, if that is correct. | ||
| And you use the word stalemate. | ||
| How firm are both sides when it comes to not making concessions at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say very firm, but I think as time goes on, that may get harder for each side, which is, I think, why we're in the situation that we're in where Senate went home for the weekend. | |
| The House isn't even coming back next week. | ||
| They say it's the Senate's responsibility to pass a bill. | ||
| They already did their work. | ||
| That's the argument coming from over there. | ||
| But only three Democrats have so far voted to pass the Republican bill. | ||
| They would need five more to flip. | ||
| The numbers are not there right now, and it looks like it might take a while to get there. | ||
| If it ever does, it seems like there might need to be some kind of leadership agreement to work us out of this. | ||
| When we talk about leadership agreement and the House being out, obviously work will still be continuing. | ||
| Behind the scenes, do we know what kind of talks or when Speaker Johnson and Senator Thune may be talking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think those two have been in closer communication. | |
| Over the Senate, we really need Thune-Shuar agreement from my perspective. | ||
| There's also these bipartisan talks that are happening on the floor. | ||
| Whenever there's a vote, it seems like members on both sides are trying to talk to each other a little bit to see if there's any path forward. | ||
| Those talks have typically revolved around Democrats want to extend these ACA subsidies. | ||
| Republicans, again, are not on board with that at this point. | ||
| They say that they are open to having that conversation. | ||
| But Patty Morris, who's the appropriations ranking member of the Senate, has been extremely clear that they cannot just accept a promise to talk in the future to get out of this, which is kind of what the obvious off-ramp would have been, you know, if as a way to get out of the shutdown, because when there's a shutdown, the minority party has never gotten what it wanted out of shutting down the government. | ||
| So we'll have to wait and see how it plays out from here. | ||
| But at this point, it really does seem like there needs to be a leadership discussion and a breakthrough. | ||
| And something that has been floated is the idea of mass layoffs among federal agencies as a result of this result of this ongoing shutdown. | ||
| What is your sense of leadership or of GOP's response to that when it comes to that proposal? | ||
| Are members of the GOP on board with that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say not fully when it comes to members of Congress. | |
| I think the administration kind of sees this as a way to inspire Democrats to start to flip and vote for the Republican bill, some of the rank and file members who Republicans need. | ||
| But from my perspective, it's really kind of having the opposite effect where this is just making Democrats feel more dug into their position. | ||
| They are arguing that the administration has been laying off federal workers for the whole year so far, nine months, and this is nothing new, would be the argument from Democrats. | ||
| And it's just kind of strengthening their resolve, is what it appears to me. | ||
| And you mentioned that the House has now decided to continue or continue its district work period is what they call it. | ||
| They won't be in session next week. | ||
| The Senate is expected to come back in on Monday. | ||
| What will be happening in terms of another vote? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right now, it appears that they're going to vote once again on both the Democrat and the Republican versions of the bill to reopen the government. | |
| The Republican one has passed the House. | ||
| The Democrat one includes a lot of health care priorities and also kind of roadblocks on the administration's ability to not spend funding appropriated by Congress, which has been a major issue this year, which is one that Democrats are hoping to get addressed. | ||
| But it's really, there's no scenario in which the House would pass anything along those lines and the administration would never sign it. | ||
| So they'll have another vote on that. | ||
| That's always been a party line vote. | ||
| And then they'll vote again on the Republican continuing resolution, which we would expect to once again be 55 yes and 45 no, which is about where it's been give or take some absences. | ||
| But that is kind of where the numbers are at this point. | ||
| And they will need five more Democrats to flip or much more likely some sort of leadership arrangement. | ||
| But Republicans are no, they do not want to negotiate with the government closed. | ||
| That's typically the position the majority party has always taken in these situations that reopen the government and then we can talk about other things. | ||
| But at this point, they are not willing to do that. | ||
| And Democrats seem pretty resolute in their position right now that this needs to be addressed. | ||
| A lot of people are going to be paying a lot more for health care if it is not next year. | ||
| So now's the time to have this conversation. | ||
| People will be receiving notices of these increases in the mail, and they're really trying to force this debate. | ||
| Of course, Republicans are saying this is not an appropriations issue. | ||
| It is effort and should be dealt with separately. | ||
| Aiden Quigley is a reporter for CQ Roll Call covering Congress. | ||
| You can find his work online at cqrollcall.com. | ||
| Aiden, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| And we will get to your calls and comments on this day four of the government shutdown in just a minute, but wanted to bring in another piece of news, something else that's happening. | ||
| This is from the Associated Press. | ||
| It says Trump orders Israel to stop bombing Gaza after Hamas partially accepts his peace plan. | ||
| It says that U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday ordered Israel to stop bombing the Gaza Strip after Hamas said it had accepted some elements of his plan to end the nearly two-year war and return all remaining hostages taken in the October 7th, 2023 attack. | ||
| Hamas said it was willing to release the hostages and hand over power to other Palestinians, but that other aspects of the plan require further consultations among Palestinians. | ||
| Senior Hamas officials suggested that there were still major disagreements that required further negotiations. | ||
| Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was prepared for the implementation of the, quote, first stage of Trump's plan, apparently referring to the release of hostages. | ||
| But his office, in a statement, said in a statement that Israel was committed to ending the war based on principles it had set out before without addressing potential gaps with Hamas. | ||
| President Trump appearing to support that statement, posting this on Truth Social says, based on the statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting peace. | ||
| It says Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza so that we can get the hostages out safely and quickly. | ||
| Right now, it's far too dangerous to do that. | ||
| We are already in discussions on details to be worked out. | ||
| This is not about Gaza alone. | ||
| This is about long-sought peace in the Middle East. | ||
| And one other note, despite calls to stop bombing, Al Jazeera reporting this morning that Israel has continued bombing. | ||
| It says that following the, it says Israel, however, has continued its deadly bombardment of Gaza, killing at least 20 Palestinians since dawn. | ||
| That comes again after President Trump ordered that Israel stop bombing Gaza. | ||
| C-SPAN will continue to follow this story. | ||
| You can find, follow these developments online and here on our network. | ||
| But for this first hour, we do want to hear your thoughts on this day four of the government shutdown. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| The lines 202-748-8001. | ||
| That's for Republicans. | ||
| 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're a Democrat and independents are at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And again, if you are a federal worker, we want to hear from you. | ||
| You can call in at 202-748-8003. | ||
| We will start with Robin in Cleveland, Tennessee, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robin. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I would like to say that y'all had Chuck Fleischman on the other day, and he sat there like he was angry about lies that the Democrats were saying, and he straightface lied. | ||
| I depend on Obamacare. | ||
| So, yeah, shut it down to keep our Obamacare. | ||
| Chuck Fleischman does not represent everyone in Tennessee. | ||
| I tried to call in. | ||
| I believe the Democratic line was shut off because he said it straight-face lied. | ||
| The Republican Party needs to start doing their job and holding this renegade, racist president accountable. | ||
| MEGA is the definition of white incompetence, white incompetence, white mediocrity. | ||
| Have a nice day. | ||
| That was Robin in Tennessee. | ||
| Bill is in Orange Park, Florida, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me if I might be wrong, but aren't they accusing each other of lying? | |
| That's why most of the shutdowns because they're accusing each other of lying, right? | ||
| Both sides are pointing the finger at each other. | ||
| That's right, Bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, why don't you do everybody a favor and show the Democrats when they were running for office and every one of them raised their hand that they were going to give a health care to illegal aliens? | |
| That's what it's all about. | ||
| Trump wants to stop that money from going to the he's going to stop a hundred or a million or so people from getting insurance, but it's all illegals that are getting that are getting cut off. | ||
| Quit the lying to the people. | ||
| That idiot was just fine. | ||
| He said that Republicans were lying, watching your own damn thing for the election when all 10 of you said you were going to give it to the illegals. | ||
| That was Bill in Florida. | ||
| Stanley is calling from Washington, D.C., line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Stanley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for the opportunity to speak. | ||
| I think that the Democratic leadership is being very disingenuous. | ||
| The fact is, and I, and, you know, anyone who's on the ACA, God bless you, you know, everyone, I believe, you know, who needs to get insurance help needs it. | ||
| But ACA only represents 8% of the population that is insured, right? | ||
| So 92% of people don't use the ACA. | ||
| So we're closing down the government for 8%. | ||
| More so, they're also not being disingenuous when they indicate that the situation is giving insurance to illegals. | ||
| Yes, federal law says you can't get it, but states can. | ||
| So it may not be a direct funneling of money from the federal government, but it's indirectly by the states. | ||
| So and I still don't understand why can't they allow for these next three months to transpire so they can actually go ahead and negotiate. | ||
| I'm sorry, the Democrats, they lost. | ||
| That's the consequence of losing an election. | ||
| You can't stop the whole entire government for 8% of the population that potentially is infected. | ||
| So 92% don't have any impact with the things they're talking about. | ||
| That was Stanley in D.C. Deanna is calling from Los Angeles, California, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Deanna. | ||
| Deanna, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I would like to know why are they saying the Democrats is causing this shutdown? | |
| Why are they saying that? | ||
| It's the Democrats. | ||
| They're the House and everybody else have everything in order. | ||
| You know, the Democrats do not have any kind of power. | ||
| So why are they putting it on a Democrat? | ||
| That was Deanna in California. | ||
| Chris is calling from Minnesota, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I just have another question, actually. | ||
| Why don't they take the pay from Congress and Senate when they can't come up with an agreement? | ||
| Why don't they take their pay and see how fast they'd come up with an agreement then? | ||
| Because that's what needs to happen. | ||
| So thank you for taking my call. | ||
| That was Chris in Minnesota. | ||
| This from The Hill, it says Senate Democrats and Republicans on Friday failed to pass competing bills to fund the government, extending the shutdown into next week. | ||
| The measures were expected to fail. | ||
| It says shortly after the failed votes, the House GOP said it would extend its recess through October 13th. | ||
| A move to pressure, to put pressure on Senate Democrats. | ||
| The Senate Democrats voting to not pass the GOP's funding proposal. | ||
| It was minority leader Chuck Schumer who spoke yesterday after the vote. | ||
| Here are his remarks. | ||
| Well, we just heard that Speaker Johnson said the House is out again. | ||
| Johnson and House Republicans care more about protecting the Epstein files than protecting the American people. | ||
| And the bottom line is today we saw the Republicans run the same play and they got the same result. | ||
| The question is, will they change course? | ||
| The votes aren't there. | ||
| It's clear from today's vote and yesterday and two days ago's vote and the two other votes before it. | ||
| So the bottom line is we've had four votes and they haven't gotten the votes on any of them. | ||
| We have asked Republican leaders for months to sit down and talk to us, talk with us. | ||
| They've refused and barreled us into a shutdown. | ||
| They thought they could bludgeon us and threaten us and scare us. | ||
| It ain't working because my caucus and Democrats are adamant that we must protect the health care of the American people. | ||
| And so now, rather than working with us to end the pain Americans are feeling because of a shutdown, Republicans have instead, they've wasted a week, refused to talk, and exacerbated pain for America. | ||
| Instead of trying to come to the table and negotiate with Democrats and reopen the government, the White House and fellow Republicans have vowed to make this a maximum pain shutdown, they call it. | ||
| Unfortunately, the maximum pain falls on the American people, and the American people know it. | ||
| They know it's not Democrats doing this maximum pain. | ||
| It's Vogt and Trump and the Republicans. | ||
| And so it falls on them. | ||
| And so, even in the White House and in the administration, there are people saying, don't do it because the blame correctly will fall on Trump's shoulders. | ||
| They're using the American people as political pawns. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they don't want to even talk to us about reopening the government by fixing health care. | ||
| Steve is calling from South Carolina on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you? | |
| Doing well, Steve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Are you there? | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| In my opinion, it doesn't matter who is at fault for the shutdown, but I believe that they need to end it as soon as possible because it affects everybody. | ||
| And just the same as they're blaming each other for the shutdown, when it's over, they'll be giving each other high fives and slapping each other on the back when it's over. | ||
| What a mess we are in, and hopefully, it can only get worse. | ||
| I see that Donald Trump is out there selling 2028 hats. | ||
| And what a shame. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Steve, you mentioned that this shutdown is impacting everyone. | ||
| Are you seeing any effects down there in South Carolina yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, prices have gone up. | |
| I'm a disabled Vietnam veteran, and wait times at the VA since his term started back in January is getting longer and longer. | ||
| Sometimes you're having to wait three, four, five months just to get your teeth worked on. | ||
| So this is only going to make that part of it worse. | ||
| And of course, it's just a shame. | ||
| That's about all I can say. | ||
| And that was Steve in South Carolina. | ||
| Dennis is calling from Toledo, Iowa, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Dennis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The Republicans need to pace a fact that Trump is incompetent. | ||
| I mean, the Republicans have complete control in Washington, D.C., but it's the Democrats' fault. | ||
| I got a good example that shows you how incompetent Trump is. | ||
| On your station, they show Trump blaming the Democrats for Charlie Cook being murdered. | ||
| Charlie Cook, when Biden was president, Charlie was making a lot of money bashing Democrats. | ||
| He was a living, breathing human being. | ||
| Trump becomes president, and what happens? | ||
| Old Charlie Boy gets murdered in a Republican state. | ||
| Then he brings a Democrat Trump. | ||
| That was Dennis in Iowa. | ||
| Steve, one of our previous callers, noting that he is a disabled veteran, a Vietnam veteran, and mentioning that this could impact the wait times at the VA. | ||
| This is a look at some of the departments and the impact of furloughs. | ||
| The EPA, Education, and Commerce Departments, more than 80% of their departments are laid off. | ||
| Defense, 334,000 civilian employees. | ||
| That's about 45% of the total are furloughed. | ||
| Under the Justice Department, 12,800 or about 11% total. | ||
| Homeland Security, 14,000 employees or 5% of their workforce. | ||
| And the VA has one of the smallest numbers of furloughs by percentage. | ||
| 14,800 employees, just about 3%. | ||
| Let's hear from Michelle in Staten Island, New York, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Michelle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| First, I would like to say a shout out to your cameramen. | ||
| I think they're fabulous. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| And I love C-SPAN because you truly are unfiltered. | ||
| But what I have to say, there's so much. | ||
| It's like playing guacamole with Trump. | ||
| There's just so many things to talk about. | ||
| But the shutdown. | ||
| You know, Trump is doing everything and anything. | ||
| Not talk about Epstein. | ||
| This is the whole thing. | ||
| This is his retribution to us. | ||
| And he's just so mad about all of this coming up. | ||
| And he'll do anything to distract from that conversation. | ||
| But I think it's terrible what's going on in this country. | ||
| I'm ashamed of America. | ||
| And at one point, America was the strongest country. | ||
| That's how I grew up. | ||
| My father would tell me that all the time. | ||
| You live in the greatest country in the world. | ||
| Well, not today. | ||
| I mean, I think those countries are looking at us and saying, what's going on? | ||
| You took center stage. | ||
| And now, what's happening? | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| So really, that's all I have to say. | ||
| And thank you so much for letting me speak, C-SPAN. | ||
| That was Michelle in New York. | ||
| Brody is calling from Richmond, Texas, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Brody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, it's really sad what's going on in the United States right now. | ||
| And I hate to see what's going on. | ||
| But I think it all started back when the Supreme Court said that Trump wasn't liable for no lawful acts as long as he was being the president. | ||
| And I'm saying now he's just going rogue and the Republican Party. | ||
| They've been doing the Democrats wrong for so long. | ||
| And I'm glad to see the Democrats standing up right now to the Republican Party because we've been playing in a game that's been unfair. | ||
| And so I'm kind of glad because Trump is just doing too much. | ||
| And I don't understand people saying Trump doing a good job. | ||
| And I like to hear at least five things that he's doing a good job on. | ||
| And the shutdown needs to happen right now. | ||
| And Trump is going to do what he wants to do anyway. | ||
| And all the peoples he laying off, he's going to lay them off anyway. | ||
| So, you know, we need to stand up. | ||
| And everybody's saying, oh, he's giving health insurance to the illegals. | ||
| And that's against the law. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| And I'm just saying people coming on here spiriting that. | ||
| And that's wrong. | ||
| That's absolutely wrong. | ||
| And I just hope we can find it in our heart to come together and stop letting the billionaires just take over this country because that's what's happening. | ||
| Thanks for the call. | ||
| That was Brody in Texas. | ||
| And Brody mentioning President Trump's role in the shutdown. | ||
| That was something that House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke about yesterday along with the White House Budget Director Russ Vogt's role in the shutdown. | ||
| Here are those remarks. | ||
| There are lenses of review. | ||
| We happen to have a Republican, a conservative administration. | ||
| We're very grateful for that. | ||
| We're limited government conservatives. | ||
| We think the government's too big. | ||
| We think the federal government is too big. | ||
| It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well. | ||
| And so it serves the taxpayers to send less of their hard-earned money to Washington and keep more in their pockets. | ||
| That's what we're advancing through the One Big Beautiful Bill and all the legislative priorities that we achieve. | ||
| But see, sometimes Democrats, not sometimes all the time, Democrats don't agree with that because they love big government. | ||
| I mean, listen to them. | ||
| They want the government to control every aspect of your lives, and they need all of your hard-earned dollars to do that. | ||
| In fact, they'd like to take them all. | ||
| That's what the socialists are arguing for. | ||
| That's what the Marxists believe. | ||
| We believe the opposite. | ||
| So here's this situation: here's the president, the current occupant of the White House, that's been given this opportunity by Chuck Schumer, and he's a limited government conservative. | ||
| He's looking at that and saying, gee, you know, this is inefficient. | ||
| This is ineffective. | ||
| And we'd never get Democrat votes to limit that because they never vote to limit government ever. | ||
| It's against their religion. | ||
| But he has that opportunity now to say, this is a program that would serve the American people if it were not funded because government would be more efficient and effective, and that serves everyone. | ||
| So they're going to make those decisions. | ||
| Now, are they taking great pleasure in that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is he trolling the Democrats? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, yes, because that's what President Trump does, and people are having fun with this. | ||
| But at the end of the day, the decisions are tough ones. | ||
| And I've met with him. | ||
| I talked yesterday at length with Russ Vogt, who's the director of the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| Russ takes no pleasure in this. | ||
| Russ wants to see a smaller, more efficient, more lean-effective federal government, as we do. | ||
| But he doesn't want people to lose jobs. | ||
| He doesn't want to do that. | ||
| But he has, that's his responsibility. | ||
| So he's very carefully, methodically, very deliberately looking through that to see which decisions can be made in the best interest of the American people. | ||
| That's his obligation, and that's his real desire. | ||
| The president, the president takes no pleasure in this, but if Chuck Schumer is going to give Donald Trump the opportunity to determine what the priorities are, he's going to exercise that opportunity, and that's where we are. | ||
| We are about halfway through this first hour of today's Washington Journal, hearing your thoughts on this day four of the government shutdown. | ||
| Let's hear from Sarah in Annapolis, Maryland, calling on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Sarah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to make a suggestion. | ||
| I hear a lot of people call or say that the Affordable Care Act will give coverage to illegal aliens, right? | ||
| So this is very simple. | ||
| You can go to healthcare.gov. | ||
| That's the federal website. | ||
| And there you can create an account and fill out this application. | ||
| And on the application, it will ask you for your personal information. | ||
| And it will also, in one section, ask you about your citizenship. | ||
| Either yes or no. | ||
| If you answer no, you must fill out what visa you have or what legal status you have. | ||
| So if you are a green card holder, for example, you would have to put in your green card data, and then that is verified with the data hub. | ||
| The data hub includes immigration, social security administration, the IRS, and maybe various other federal agencies. | ||
| So if you are illegal and you are not on a visa and you enter something that's wrong, that is verified. | ||
| And in some cases, enrollment in the application for health insurance or for, for example, for Medicaid would be put on hold or delayed because of sometimes outstanding verification. | ||
| And I'd like to make a comment about the subsidies and Medicaid. | ||
| So the Affordable Care Act has always had subsidies since it started under President Obama. | ||
| What happened is when President Biden was in the White House, and COVID started and we had this emergency, COVID emergency, these subsidies were enhanced, so they added additional funds and additional assistance to people. | ||
| And is there a possibility that people got assistance that shouldn't have qualified for the assistance? | ||
| I would say probably yes. | ||
| But the thing is, this enhanced subsidy, that is what will expire by the end of this year. | ||
| And therefore, people who have gotten that additional assistance, they may not get this assistance anymore. | ||
| That was Sarah in Maryland. | ||
| She was talking about those enhanced subsidies for the ACA and the role that they're playing in the shutdown. | ||
| This was in a Washington Post article earlier this week. | ||
| It says, with the expiration of enhanced tax credits, ACA 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 ensures median proposed premium increase for 2026 to be about 18%, more than doubles, more than double last year's median proposed increase of 7%. | ||
| And an additional note, we will have a researcher from KFF on the program later on talking about the ACA and these expiring subsidies. | ||
| If you have a question or want to learn more about that, stay tuned. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Steve is in Salisbury, Maryland, line for Republican. | ||
| Good morning, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Thanks for letting me on. | ||
| All of this back and forth between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is just politics. | ||
| It has nothing to do with all of these medical costs that everybody is claiming that it is. | ||
| The Democrats are standing up to the Republicans because they need to do that. | ||
| The Republicans are not, are being disingenuous with the public by refusing to actually sit down with the Democrats and negotiate. | ||
| And I know there's quite a few of my friends who want us to have Congress just locked in the building until they pass an actual budget instead of all these continuing resolutions. | ||
| So I hope that happens. | ||
| Thanks for letting me on. | ||
| That was Steve from Maryland. | ||
| Chris calling from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so this government shutdown, it's fault of the Republicans. | |
| Democrats only want to pass legal Medicaid for all working class and middle class Americans. | ||
| Now, this is a huge problem because Republicans promise to help the middle class. | ||
| They promise to be the party of the working people. | ||
| And what have they done? | ||
| What have they done? | ||
| Cut, and Trump has taken away almost all of federal workers. | ||
| He almost cut it half of the agencies. | ||
| We see how he is firing people. | ||
| We see how he is taking away the subsidies and these helps that the middle class need. | ||
| The Republicans need to sit with the Democrats and sit down. | ||
| And they need to help and solve a problem, which is the subsidies, right? | ||
| The health care. | ||
| Look, I, as a Democrat, I do agree with border security. | ||
| I do believe with immigration and enforcing our military and all that stuff. | ||
| But we need also to basically remember of the middle-class people, of the health care. | ||
| I don't see nothing bad with giving health care to the middle-class Americans. | ||
| That doesn't affect our debt. | ||
| What offends our debt is on these boards that we are inverting in Iraq before and now possibly in Venezuela. | ||
| That is going to increase our debt. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Chris in Florida. | ||
| Donald is calling from Massachusetts on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Donald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Sorry. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| Give me a second because I mean to get teas from a vet from the Marine Corps. | ||
| And I can start with one because I'm sending troops to state's American arms in the service as a Marine raged riot control in Puerto Rico. | ||
| You know, in New Clinton. | ||
| They're like, we've been doing this for a long time. | ||
| Is that known? | ||
| Is that a big issue about that? | ||
| Trump is actually doing a really good job. | ||
| And the Democrats, like, are just, they don't even have a plan. | ||
| And every time you ask them what their plan is, they don't have a plan. | ||
| They only tell you. | ||
| Donald, we're talking about the government shutdown right now. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm getting right to that. | |
| The shutdown means they will give the Americans health care. | ||
| And they just want more. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The Democrats just want more. | ||
| That was Donald in Massachusetts. | ||
| This in today's Washington Post, WIC funding could run out in weeks, forcing states to reach in to own coffers. | ||
| It says that funding for a program that helps millions of women and children with neonatal care and nutrition could soon run out as the federal government plunges deeper into a shutdown, according to the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vogt. | ||
| It says an OMB spokesperson said in a statement Thursday that the program will run out of money this month, meaning that women and children could no longer receive benefits. | ||
| It says more than 6 million Americans rely on WIC for food assistance, breastfeeding support, and nutrition education. | ||
| The program offers supplemental spending monies for groceries and organizes trainings for young parents on how to feed their children. | ||
| The federal government appropriates grants each year to finance state WIC programs. | ||
| Unlike other social safety net programs, WIC is not an entitlement. | ||
| That means if government spending bills fail, there is a quick and there is a shutdown, the program quickly runs out of money. | ||
| It also means those who qualify for the program are not legally entitled to benefits, which allows states to boot participants and impose waiting lines for WIC if funding is low. | ||
| Goes on to say the Agriculture Department, which oversees the program, has been up $150 million available in contingency funds to help ferry state WIC coffers through the shutdown, according to guidance USDA released on Wednesday. | ||
| States can also use rebates from infant formula sales and leftover funds from the previous year to finance their program. | ||
| During the shutdown, formula rebates averaged $135 million each month during the past fiscal year. | ||
| It says, but the total cost of WIC for the 2024 fiscal year was more than $7.2 billion or more than $130 million per week. | ||
| At that rate, the contingency fund and rebates would be able to finance the program for less than two weeks in line with votes estimate. | ||
| After that, states will be forced to dig into their own financial reserves. | ||
| That in the Washington Post. | ||
| We'll go back to your calls. | ||
| Jim is calling from Prairie Hill, Texas, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| I'd just like to say about three years ago when Biden and them was in, my niece, she's a burrow racer, and she was 12 years old, and a horse fell with her, and she broke her leg. | ||
| Now, they took her to the county hospital right there, nearby hospital, and they couldn't get her in because it was covered up with illegals. | ||
| They, you know, all the surgeons and everything were all maxed out. | ||
| It was illegals there. | ||
| And they had to drive her 50 miles to get her leg fixed. | ||
| Now, the thing is, my relatives have been living down there, and they built the hospital with their tax money for 35, 40 years. | ||
| They paid in taxes to build that hospital. | ||
| And the day they needed it, it was covered up with illegals. | ||
| And that's what Donald Trump is trying to tell everybody. | ||
| And the Democrats want to keep funneling money when illegals go to the emergency room. | ||
| The federal government fits that. | ||
| They get the bill for it. | ||
| The American taxpayer. | ||
| That was Jim in Texas. | ||
| Robert is calling from Decatur, Georgia, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| I'm sorry, it's Roberta on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Roberta. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm coming at as far as this shutdown and the insurance premiums. | |
| As a registered nurse and patients being able to come into our ER and have health care, if you double, triple, quadruple premiums, that means there will be people who wouldn't be able to be covered. | ||
| And the hospital or ER will, I mean, you think people, the ER, you have wait times now. | ||
| You will have even more wait times. | ||
| And I just think that if you're going to, coming from a registered nurse perspective, clinical perspective, you want to be able to have people to be able to afford health care and be able to see their doctors, not only just for preventive care, but if they need to be seen in our ER and at times may have to be admitted. | ||
| Otherwise, the hospitals will have to eat that cost, which will in turn impact those of us who have insurance because there would be higher costs for us, because the hospitals will have to make up that cost for seeing patients, U.S. citizens, who aren't insured. | ||
| So I just want people to think about that when they think about people who aren't covered. | ||
| We all are going to end up paying for that if we have more and more Americans who are U.S. citizens who aren't covered by insurance. | ||
| And as far as those who are undocumented, who may be here working, we have to think about, well, let's put up bills or ask our congressmen and women to have these manufacturing plants or these other services that they may be doing for these companies. | ||
| Let them put the bill. | ||
| So I'm sure there's some back and forth with that, but always think about all of us, all of us are going to end up having to pay for health care with higher costs the more we have people who aren't covered by insurance that's affordable and accessible. | ||
| So I just want to put that out. | ||
| That was Roberta in Georgia. | ||
| We have about 15 minutes left in today's first hour of Washington Journal. | ||
| We are hearing your thoughts on this day four of the government shutdown. | ||
| Yesterday, C-SPAN went out into Washington, D.C. and talked with people about how the government is impacting them. | ||
| Here is a look at some of those comments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 DC. | ||
| So are the bathrooms open? | ||
| 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 DC. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 it affects 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We saw the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and stuff. | |
| But yeah, we just got in yesterday afternoon. | ||
| They were still open? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, they were still open. | |
| Back to your calls, hearing your thoughts on the government shutdown, now entering day four. | ||
| John in Mount Rainier, Maryland, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| Yeah, so my main point is that I don't believe Congress, the Senate, or people in the House of Representatives should be getting paid if other government workers are not getting paid. | ||
| My neighbor is currently not working. | ||
| You know, he's got a family to feed, just like everybody else. | ||
| I don't think it's right. | ||
| And I definitely advocate for, yeah, Senate and House of Representatives not getting paid. | ||
| And I want to see how they act and what they say when, you know, their income has also been halted. | ||
| You know, I really want to see that. | ||
| I want people to think about that. | ||
| These are the people who are making a lot of the decisions about how our lives work. | ||
| And they continue to get paid while other people go without. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not right. | |
| All right. | ||
| So my next point is, yeah, just folks, don't listen too deeply to political rhetoric, whether it be coming from Democrats or Republicans. | ||
| You know, if Mike Johnson says that, you know, communism or Marxism is a religion for Democrats, which is what I heard him say in that one clip. | ||
| But don't believe that. | ||
| Don't listen to it. | ||
| You know, it's not a religion. | ||
| You know, don't get fooled by the rhetoric. | ||
| Just go out there and educate yourself, read like that one caller earlier, Sarah, who is clearly very educated and can explain how government systems work. | ||
| That is the kind of things we need to be focusing on. | ||
| That was John and Marilyn. | ||
| Cheryl's calling from Middletown, New York, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Cheryl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, how are you? | |
| So I just wanted to kind of explain. | ||
| So what they're talking about when we talk about Republicans and free health care is really about ER costs. | ||
| So if you're uninsured, you can go to hospitals and get treatment. | ||
| And they don't take like polls on whether you're an illegal immigrant or whether you're just uninsured. | ||
| They just help you, right? | ||
| And when we look at that and we look at the budget, it's less than 1% of people. | ||
| And we're not even sure if they are illegal immigrants. | ||
| But that's what the Republicans are kind of using as their platform is that they want to give free health care to illegal immigrants. | ||
| And that's not true. | ||
| They just want to extend what's currently in place. | ||
| And as an illegal immigrant or an undocumented immigrant, you can't get health care. | ||
| So you don't have a social security card. | ||
| But if you work here, you can pay taxes. | ||
| And we get a lot of money from taxes. | ||
| The other thing is, is that this pissing match that's going on is ridiculous. | ||
| Just get in a room, negotiate, act like an adult, and get it done. | ||
| But my understanding, and from what I've read, is that the Republicans aren't even showing up to the table. | ||
| And the president isn't even showing up. | ||
| So if we don't have another party to negotiate with, what are we doing? | ||
| Cheryl, you're calling on the line for Republicans. | ||
| What's your message to Republican leadership? | ||
| You're a registered Republican. | ||
| What's your message to Republican leadership as they navigate this shutdown? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get in a room and negotiate it. | |
| Do your job. | ||
| Stop just putting your feet in the sand, like, you know, your heels in the sand here and push forward and negotiate something with your constituents. | ||
| This is like they're constantly fighting back and forth, and it's amazing to me, being from a corporate background, that you can't get in a room and just compromise a solution. | ||
| Also, Trump continues to talk about the $17 trillion we're getting from tariffs. | ||
| Why aren't we using that to fund the government? | ||
| Why aren't we using that to pay the people that are laid off? | ||
| He's also stated that this is a great thing that we can now clean house and get rid of all the dead weight we don't want, right? | ||
| So let's talk about that. | ||
| And then what happens in ICERAIDES when these people get hurt or injured and they need medical care? | ||
| Are we not supposed to provide it because we're not getting health care or services to undocumented immigrants? | ||
| That is Cheryl in New York. | ||
| Milton is calling from Baltimore, Maryland, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Milton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a rhetorical question, which is also, I believe, is the answer to the problem. | ||
| And that's that we, meaning America, we have to come to a decision that if a president is doing something that is illegal, unconstitutional, or morally corruptive, then we need to call it exactly what it is and stop playing around with it and just make it the issue. | ||
| And that issue is this. | ||
| It's what Donald Trump is doing in every facet of his administration is white privilege. | ||
| It would not be allowed for Obama to do it, for any other president to do it, but they're allowing this one to do it. | ||
| And I'm calling it out. | ||
| It's white privilege, and he's going to continue to do it until Americans, everyone, tell him to stop. | ||
| Milton, you're talking about President Trump's actions and the ability for him to do anything. | ||
| What is he doing that's illegal when it comes to the shutdown right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When he's saying that he's going to fire, not furlough, but fire Democratic federal workers, that's unconstitutional. | |
| What's he going through? | ||
| He's going through the rows to find out going by names. | ||
| This name is Shamika. | ||
| Maybe they're definitely gone. | ||
| So how's he going to determine who's Democrat or Republican? | ||
| That was Milton and Maryland. | ||
| Jean is calling from Yorktown, Virginia, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Gene. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I want to, first of all, thank all of my fellow Americans who are calling in because it shows that you care about our country and that you are active in what's going on with our country. | ||
| Not to say that the one that is not called and don't care, but I'm just talking about you all. | ||
| And I'm going to say I'm not loose, red, and really not independent. | ||
| I'm an American person. | ||
| I served my country for 20 years. | ||
| I am a veteran. | ||
| And I still retired, still volunteer in the school substitute to help our community do what I can. | ||
| But what I want to say is two things, first of all, OMP, the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| I'd like to see what we have spent since January. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where does the budget stand? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Again, I'm not potting. | ||
| I'm not bashing any party. | ||
| We need to know before we start approving another budget, we need to know what we spent so far. | ||
| And I also want to say that the, yeah, we need to be freaked on that. | ||
| By line item, by line item, now, what have we spent? | ||
| What's the status of our finances now? | ||
| I agree with a lot of the callers that call in to say that congress members should not get paid. | ||
| I think that their funds, their daily, break it down, that their daily earnings should go into a pot, and that money should be used for some type of cause because it's not right for you to get paid when other Americans, if that's no priority on you to take any action. | ||
| And how, Speaker, this is an opportunity for you to build that estreet of core, to build that bridge amongst your colleagues. | ||
| And then last but not least, I want to say, Democrats, you got House Speaker Jeffries and Schumer. | ||
| The Republicans don't respect you. | ||
| That's why they're not doing anything. | ||
| I mean, I hate to call it out, but they don't respect you. | ||
| I think you probably, Democrats probably need to have someone who's a little bit more forceful, a little bit more stern to speak on behalf of the Democratic Party. | ||
| But I want to tell also those that are saying that they're worried, don't worry. | ||
| Get involved. | ||
| Take action. | ||
| Everything starts from the bottom up. | ||
| Get involved in your local communities, your state level, and then force those individuals that are at the congressional level. | ||
| Force them to do their job. | ||
| That was Gene in Virginia. | ||
| Tony is calling from Claypool, Indiana, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I think the Democrats are doing the right thing. | ||
| I think that they've been pushed to do this by the Republicans. | ||
| If you go back to the very first budget talks, I think you could pull up on your show, I know you can, all the video of Mike Johnson saying that the Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, we are not going to touch any of that. | ||
| You can pull up President Trump saying the exact same thing. | ||
| So they can blame it on anybody they want, Democrat, Republican, but the Republicans have said all along they were not going to touch Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. | ||
| And what did they do? | ||
| They went after Medicaid. | ||
| So that's where it's at. | ||
| So anything they do with the ACA is going to affect all of us. | ||
| It's going to raise all of our insurance, like other people have said earlier. | ||
| Yes, it may be only 8% of people that use ACA right now. | ||
| But those 8% that can't get it, somebody's got to pay for it. | ||
| And it's not going to be the billionaires that the Big Beautiful Bill Act got all those tax credits and tax cuts for. | ||
| So that was Tony in Indiana. | ||
| Just a couple more calls. | ||
| Let's hear from Russell in Blue Springs, Missouri, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Russell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Ever since the shutdown, I've been hearing comments about that's the worst thing that Democrats could have done. | ||
| That gives President Trump like full power. | ||
| They kind of relinquished their power when they did that. | ||
| How true is that? | ||
| And how much authority does that give President Trump? | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Let's hear from James in Madison, Wisconsin, line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| As far as the shutdown goes and what it's over is health care, if you go back, and anyone with a computer can check this or take a genius, Trump promised better health care than you've ever seen. | ||
| He was referring to Australia at the time, too. | ||
| And he said that affordable health care for all. | ||
| So instead of arguing back and forth, what they should do is play that tape of Congress, a rerun of his promise, and say, where the hell is it, Trump? | ||
| You're the one that promised it. | ||
| We shouldn't have to be here fighting for it. | ||
| The other thing is that the grassroots Democrats aren't what's being portrayed. | ||
| Most grassroots Democrats, they don't want illegal immigrants in the country from any country, no matter where it's from. | ||
| They also don't want their daughters, mothers, and sisters going into bathrooms by some man who has a sex change operation. | ||
| And they just can't seem to get that through their head. | ||
| That was James in Wisconsin. | ||
| Our last call for this first hour of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Later this morning, we'll talk with KFF Vice President and Program on the ACA Director Cynthia Cox about the expiring enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance plans and the potential impact on the marketplace. | ||
| But next, after the break, we are one month away from Election Day 2025. | ||
| Inside elections, Jacob Rabashkin joins us to discuss key races in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, as well as a California ballot measure. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And past president nominee. | |
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| It is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo cause. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A. | ||
| Christopher Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia and author of 13 novels conservatives will love but probably haven't read, recommends 13 novels with conservative themes that he says aren't widely known by conservatives. | ||
| The title isn't conservative novels. | ||
| I think that that oversimplifies the case a little bit. | ||
| I think that their great literature is open to multiple, not infinite, but multiple interpretations and readings. | ||
| And so I offer what I think are reasonable conservative readings of all of these novels. | ||
| But I think that there are alternate readings that progressives could offer. | ||
| That would be reasonable. | ||
| I wouldn't necessarily agree with them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Christopher Scalia with his book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love But Probably Haven't Read, Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
| Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres. | ||
| Reimagining Food. | ||
| Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience. | ||
| The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past and spark the ideas that will shape our future. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss Election Day 2025 in key races in some states across the country in a ballot measure is Jacob Rubashkin. | ||
| He is deputy editor of Inside Elections. | ||
| Jacob, thank you for being back on the program with us. | ||
| Always a pleasure. | ||
| We will start with the significance of this off-year cycle. | ||
| People will talk about midterms. | ||
| Those are next year. | ||
| We need to get through this year first. | ||
| So talk about the significance of this off-cycle election coming up. | ||
| Well, there are a couple of reasons why we like to pay attention to these races happening this November, especially those in Virginia and New Jersey. | ||
| The first is, of course, for the millions of people who are living in both of those states, they have the opportunity to elect new leadership. | ||
| For both of these states, there's the potential that they could switch party control in their governor's mansion, and that's a big deal for the voters who live in each of those states. | ||
| So empirically, there's a big reason why anyone in those states or in those regions should be paying attention to what's going on in these races. | ||
| But more broadly speaking, a lot of people in the political business look to these races because they are the first test of widespread politics after a presidential election. | ||
| We've had little one-off special elections here and there around the country since the 2024 election, but nothing nearly on the scale of these two races in Virginia and New Jersey. | ||
| And so the parties are going to be looking for a bunch of different things. | ||
| First and foremost, they're going to get a sense of what the national political environment is. | ||
| How popular or unpopular is Trump? | ||
| How motivated are Democrats and Republicans to go out and vote after 2024? | ||
| And then they're also going to get a sense of what messages work. | ||
| What are the kinds of things that voters want to hear about in the second Trump administration? | ||
| What motivates people to show up to vote? | ||
| What is helpful to persuade voters? | ||
| What is unhelpful as a political strategy? | ||
| There's been a lot of theorizing about that question over the last year. | ||
| Now, Democrats and Republicans have the opportunity to put those messages to the test. | ||
| Millions of voters are going to head to the polls in November. | ||
| Let's see how they vote and take those lessons for us toward the 2026 midterms. | ||
| And we are entering day four of a government shutdown. | ||
| Is there a potential impact when it comes to federal workers and how that shutdown could impact these races down the road? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, you look especially at a state like Virginia, where such a significant portion of the workforce is employed by the federal government, either in the civilian capacity, especially if you look at the Northern Virginia region outside of Washington, D.C., in a military capacity. | ||
| If you look at the Hampton Roads area, the Norfolk area, where you have a major military presence, Virginia is particularly sensitive to federal government shutdowns. | ||
| We've seen shutdowns play a role in Virginia elections in years past. | ||
| 2013 comes to mind most especially. | ||
| And Democrats are already on offense about the shutdown issue in Virginia. | ||
| Democrat Abigail Spanberger really trying to leverage it against her opponent, Lieutenant Governor Winsom Earl Sears. | ||
| But in New Jersey as well, we're also seeing the shutdown politics play out. | ||
| We saw OMB Director Russell Vogt at the White House announce that he was going to cancel or pause funding for the Gateway Project, which is the largest infrastructure project in America. | ||
| It's a refurbishment and a replacement of tunnels from New Jersey to New York, obviously a highly trafficked passageway there. | ||
| And he has put a pause on any of that money during the shuttle. | ||
| shutdown. | ||
| I think some people believe the ultimate goal is to stop that project entirely. | ||
| And that has become a real rallying cry for Democrats in New Jersey trying to use it as a weapon against the Republicans in that gubernatorial race. | ||
| Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy Editor for Inside Elections, is our guest for the next 35, 40 minutes talking about the election day coming up, Election Day 2025, and some key races across the country. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now the lines, Republicans 202-748-8000. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're an Independent, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Jacob wanted to talk about that Virginia governor's race. | ||
| You mentioned the candidates in there. | ||
| It is Democrat Abigail Spanberger. | ||
| She's a former member of Congress, and it's Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsom Earl Sears. | ||
| What should voters in Virginia know about these two candidates? | ||
| Well, Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat, who is the favorite in this race at this point with just a few weeks to go before Election Day, she burst onto the national scene in 2018 during that Blue Wave House election. | ||
| She won a suburban Richmond House district, defeating an incumbent Republican, Dave Bratt, who was quite conservative. | ||
| Spanberger ran on her record of being kind of a combination of this, you know, very competent, well, you know, national security professional, CIA officer, former law enforcement officer, as well as being a Girl Scout mom and being very much kind of familiar to the voters of the suburbs outside of Richmond. | ||
| And that combination has allowed her to establish a national profile that far predated her run for governor of Virginia. | ||
| She was one of Democrats' best fundraisers anywhere in the country. | ||
| She didn't have a primary she had to get through for this race for governor, and she has been considered a rising star for quite some time. | ||
| So she is firmly in the driver's seat in this election. | ||
| Her opponent, Lieutenant Governor Winsom Earl Sears, has had a much longer political history in the Commonwealth of Virginia. | ||
| She was actually elected to a statehouse seat in the Hampton Roads area back in the early 2000s. | ||
| She ran for Congress unsuccessfully. | ||
| She retreated from public life. | ||
| She came back into public life to run for lieutenant governor alongside Governor Glenn Young back in 2021. | ||
| Either one of them would be history-making candidates. | ||
| Both of them would be the first woman ever to serve as governor of Virginia. | ||
| Winsom Earl Sears would be the first black woman to serve as a governor of any state in American history. | ||
| So a lot of historical potential in either direction here. | ||
| But at the moment, what we see from the polling and all the available data is that Abigail Spanberger has between a mid-single digit to a low double digit lead in this race. | ||
| She has blown Winsom Sears out of the water in terms of fundraising, and she's gotten a lot more support from National Democrats over the course of this race. | ||
| And when we look at this particular race, what are the major issues at play? | ||
| Well, it really depends who you ask because Republicans would like to make the major issues things that have helped them win elections of Virginia in the past. | ||
| We've seen Lieutenant Governor Earl Sears go to school board meetings across the state to try and raise the salience of school issues, both in terms of school choice issues and in terms of trans issues, you know, allowing trans kids to play sports in their preferred gender and things like that, really try and raise the salience of those topics that were so successful to helping Glenn Young get elected in 2021. | ||
| But it's not really obvious that voters actually care about that. | ||
| I think the other thing that Republicans talk a lot about is the economy, and they're trying to run on the success that Glenn Young has had when it comes to the Virginia economy. | ||
| But the problem that they're running into, of course, is that voters aren't just thinking about Virginia when it comes to the economy. | ||
| They're thinking about the national economy. | ||
| And that is the big issue in this race. | ||
| And voters are not happy with where the national economy is. | ||
| We've seen economic dissatisfaction for the last five years, essentially, due to inflation and due to rising costs and affordability issues. | ||
| Energy costs is a huge issue. | ||
| And the problem that Republicans face now is that they are saddled with an unpopular presidency in the White House and the same issues that they so successfully leveraged against Joe Biden for the past four years. | ||
| So Abigail Spanberger talks a tremendous amount about affordability issues, about cost of living, and she has been successful in turning that issue on its head for Democrats in 2025 now that Republicans are in full control of the federal government. | ||
| Ads are always a key component during election season. | ||
| Both of those candidates have been airing them in Virginia. | ||
| We want to play a couple for our audience and then we'll talk about them on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Abigail Spanberger, candidate for governor, and I sponsored this ad. | |
| Mega Republican Winsom Earl Sears. | ||
| I am speaking. | ||
| And what Sears says about abortion is disturbing. | ||
| I can't support abortion. | ||
| Sears wants a near-total ban with no exceptions for rape and incest. | ||
| And she supports making abortion a felony. | ||
| We know abortion is wicked. | ||
| I am speaking. | ||
| Winsom Earl Sears. | ||
| So far right. | ||
| She's wrong for Virginia. | ||
| I'm Winsom Earl Sears, candid for governor, and I sponsor this ad. | ||
| How radical is Abigail Spanberger? | ||
| She didn't just vote to let men in girls lock her rooms. | ||
| She wrote the bill. | ||
| Spanberger believes this man has the right to undress next to little girls. | ||
| But it gets worse. | ||
| If a child wants to change genders, Spanberger says the parents shouldn't be told. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Radical Abigail Spanberger is for they them, not us. | ||
| And Jacob, those ads highlighting some of the issues that you just mentioned, tell us, what does that say about the tone of their campaign and what's it been like between the two of those candidates? | ||
| Well, it certainly hasn't been particularly friendly. | ||
| I don't think anyone would say that these are two people that get along particularly well. | ||
| And indeed, there has been a fair amount of negative advertising. | ||
| You know, I think it's very interesting. | ||
| We see Lieutenant Governor Earl Sears trying to replicate almost word for word an attack that Donald Trump used against Kamala Harris in swing states in the 2024 election on the Kamala Harris's for they them. | ||
| Abigail Spanberger is for they them. | ||
| And the reality is the effectiveness of that attack is very different in the context of this Virginia race than it was in the presidential election. | ||
| And for whatever reason, it's just not hitting like it did in 2024. | ||
| I think that once again, and we've seen this story play out all across the country, Trump is able to levy attacks against Democrats that other Republicans simply cannot sustain. | ||
| And voters make a distinction in their minds between Trump, who they like and who they support, and other Republicans who try and talk or act like Trump as Lieutenant Governor is doing right now. | ||
| So, look, this is the one quiver in the Republicans' arrow that they have to play in this election, but they're playing a very difficult hand because Abigail Spanberger is someone who has built up such a reputation as a moderate bipartisan problem solver over her eight years in office that it's going to be hard to make this kind of attack that just came up all of a sudden for Republicans against her stick in the context of this election. | ||
| And, you know, for Democrats, I think Abigail Spanberger has the luxury of being able to litigate any number of issues against Lieutenant Governor Earl Sears. | ||
| Spamberger has so much money. | ||
| She can do all of the above. | ||
| She can talk about affordability. | ||
| She can talk about her biography as a former CIA officer. | ||
| And she can go on offense litigating the many issues, especially on the social side, that the lieutenant governor has taken a stance on in her 25-plus years as a conservative politician in the Commonwealth of Virginia. | ||
| So we heard about abortion, we heard about gay marriage. | ||
| There are plenty of things that Earl Sears has taken unpopular positions on over the course of her career that the Spanberger campaign is looking to litigate, especially in the final weeks of this race, where they're really trying to motivate Democratic-based voters to show up against Earl Sears and force Bamberger. | ||
| We'll talk about some of the other races, but want to get our audience into the conversation. | ||
| We'll start with Jamie, who's calling from Severn, Maryland, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning to you both. | |
| I want to see, I want your opinion on: do you think that now is actually a time where a third party, a viable third party candidate, could be elected? | ||
| I know it seems like money's the thing as far as presidential elections, right? | ||
| But if, and I say that because I don't think that anybody's really happy with their party, you know, being on the right or the left. | ||
| I think that both parties miss the issues of the folks that actually support them, right? | ||
| Meaning that I don't think that Republicans are really happy with Trump and the, you know, and everything that he's everything that he supports, right? | ||
| And then on the other side, Democrats, right? | ||
| I used to be a Democrat, but I didn't like the I don't like transgenders, you know, as far as I don't want men in women's sports, you know, I mean, all of those kinds of things. | ||
| And then the three major things that plague our nation, right? | ||
| Meaning unaffordable education, you know, the issues with the military budgets, and then health care. | ||
| You know, those are the three things that we still have yet to solve. | ||
| All the money that goes to foreign wars and all the issues with Israel, you know, I mean, the problems with Gaza and all of these kinds of things that I don't think the average American really supports. | ||
| But money goes to those things. | ||
| And it's like, and so it's like we lose control of all of that. | ||
| Jamie, we'll get a response from Jacob. | ||
| I think it's an excellent question. | ||
| It's one that people have been asking for many, many years. | ||
| And, you know, Jamie, you really hit the nail on the head with that point about how money is the barrier to entry for third-party candidates. | ||
| And I would say money is just the first barrier to entry. | ||
| Money is the table stakes, especially when we're talking about a presidential election. | ||
| But even in some of these other races, governor's races, House races, Senate races, to run for president in America in the 21st century, it costs $1 billion minimum, right? | ||
| So, the first question you have to ask any third-party candidate is: can you raise or loan yourself a billion dollars? | ||
| And there simply are not very many people who exist outside of the party system who can do that. | ||
| And then, once you raise or earn that billion dollars that you can spend on your race, you're not out of the woods yet. | ||
| There's still a whole process, a whole infrastructure to running for president that the parties, the Democratic and Republican parties, have built up and perfected over the last half century that is not available to anyone running as an independent. | ||
| All of the intricacies, the delegates, the relationships with ad buyers, the ability to get on the ballot, to collect petition signatures, all of these tiny, mundane things that we don't technically think about when we think about the big political issues that you were talking about, but are integral to the path to the presidency. | ||
| Those are unavailable to third-party candidates. | ||
| They have to recreate them from scratch, essentially, rather than plugging into the party system. | ||
| And then, finally, to top it all off, because we have a first-past-the-post electoral system, because you can win a state and all of its electoral votes by winning simply one more vote than the next place finisher, even if that's you got 21% of the vote and they got 20% of the vote, it makes it very difficult for a third party that doesn't have a natural base of support to capture enough votes to get to 270. | ||
| If they fall short of 270, they get sent to the House of Representatives, which is, of course, controlled entirely by one of the two parties who will elect their president of choice. | ||
| So, the barriers to entry for a third-party presidential candidate are exceedingly high. | ||
| When we look at down ballot races, there is slightly more potential. | ||
| Again, the money question: you have to raise $10 million to win a House race, you have to raise $100 million to win a Senate race. | ||
| These are things that are very difficult for anyone, let alone somebody coming in from outside of the political system. | ||
| Again, the first-past-the-post system creates difficulty. | ||
| Outside of a few notable but rare instances, we really don't see third-party candidates have any sort of viable path to victory in any state in America in any political race that they try and enter. | ||
| Terrell is on the line from Owen Mills, Maryland, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Terrell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, sir. | |
| Jacob, right? | ||
| Well, Jacob, I'm going to ask you: you answered my polling question. | ||
| I wanted to know how many points that Spanberger was leading Ms. Earl Sears in the election. | ||
| You said between six and ten points or something like that. | ||
| Okay, but do you think that the lieutenant governor is in Donald Trump's ear about these jobs and telling him not to fire these people yet? | ||
| Because it's been four days since the shutdown. | ||
| And Donald Trump, just like Speaker Jeffrey says, that he's nowhere around and that he hasn't fired anybody. | ||
| So do you think that he's thinking about Virginia in this instance? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, that's an excellent question. | ||
| And, you know, I don't have special insight into the conversations that the president is having, but I think it's completely possible that there is some political pressure working on the White House against executing some mass firing campaign while the Virginia governor's race is still ongoing. | ||
| Clearly, the White House is very invested in a lot of different races around the country. | ||
| They're not just paying attention to what's going on nationally, but they are tracking a lot of these races. | ||
| The president is traveling to Norfolk to hold a rally. | ||
| However, I do think that the White House is not predisposed to do the lieutenant governor very many favors. | ||
| The two have had a bit of a difficult relationship. | ||
| Lieutenant Governor Earl Sears said several years ago that it was time for the Republican Party to move on from Donald Trump. | ||
| She has worked very, very hard to get herself back in the good graces of the president, but I don't think that the two necessarily are conversing regularly or that she has particular sway over him, given that she was outside of the fold and has had to work very hard to regain the confidence of Trump and his operation. | ||
| Jacob, we talked about the talking about the Virginia race there. | ||
| There's also a governor's race in New Jersey that is between Democrat Mikey Sherelle and Republican Jack Chitterelli. | ||
| What can you tell us about these two candidates? | ||
| So stop me if you've heard this before, but Mikey Sherrill, a Democrat with a national security background who burst onto the national scene in 2018, coming from a suburban, wealthy North Jersey congressional district, forcing a long, long time Republican out of his district rather than face her, won a very strong election and has won some very strong reelection campaigns since then. | ||
| She's a former Navy helicopter pilot, which still features prominently in her ads. | ||
| And she's, of course, has been a member of Congress since 2018. | ||
| So for the past eight years, she is running as the Democratic nominee. | ||
| She won a crowded Democratic primary with not a ton of the vote. | ||
| There were five candidates, five or six candidates in that race running well-funded campaigns. | ||
| It was a hard-fought battle, and she managed to exit with the nomination. | ||
| But in the scope of New Jersey politics, she is still a relative newcomer, especially compared to her opponent, Jack Chitterelli, who is a former state lawmaker, also from North Jersey, who has been around in state politics and in local politics for the better part of three decades. | ||
| He's a businessman. | ||
| He's a certified public accountant, and he has worked his way up from the very local levels of town government through the state legislature. | ||
| This is his third run for governor. | ||
| He ran in 2017. | ||
| He lost the primary. | ||
| He ran in 2021, lost the general election very narrowly to Phil Murphy in what almost was an incredible upset, and is the Republican nominee for a second time in 2025. | ||
| You know, he comes from an older school of New Jersey Republican, and he's really had to adapt to the Trump era over the eight years that he's been running for governor. | ||
| He started out as a real Trump skeptic. | ||
| He didn't vote for him in 2016. | ||
| He called him a charlatan in 2021. | ||
| He was slightly warmer to Trump. | ||
| And by 2025, he has fully embraced Trump and has talked about being a strong governing partner in Trenton for the Trump administration in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And where does the race stand right now? | ||
| How close is it? | ||
| What are some of the key factors that may determine who comes out on top? | ||
| So the race is closer than in New Jersey, but there's a lot of disagreement beyond that about where it actually stands. | ||
| So Republicans have released some polls showing the race essentially all tied up, but those appear to be outliers at the moment. | ||
| The bulk of nonpartisan polling out there, in addition to the Democratic polling that we've seen, shows Cheryl with a lead in the mid-single digits. | ||
| So anywhere from three to six or seven points, depending on the poll. | ||
| So a clear lead, but not a comfortable one, certainly, for Mikey Sherrill in this race. | ||
| I think both parties expect it to be very, very close, similar to the 2021 race where Chitterelli lost to Governor Murphy by just three points. | ||
| And that guy, Governor Murphy, is a big part of why this race is so competitive, because he is ending his term relatively unpopular in the state. | ||
| I think there's a lot of dissatisfaction about rising costs. | ||
| In particular, energy prices are out of control in New Jersey. | ||
| And look, Democrats have controlled government in New Jersey for the last eight years completely. | ||
| They've had control of the state legislature for the last two or more decades. | ||
| And so there is a sense of fatigue among some voters as it comes to Democratic leadership. | ||
| And the change argument that Jack Chitterelli is making has a lot of purchase in some of the more independent voters in New Jersey. | ||
| And remember, we saw New Jersey get a lot more Republican in 2024. | ||
| Trump only lost the state by less than six points after losing it by 17 against Joe Biden in 2020. | ||
| So clearly something in the water where New Jersey voters are a little more receptive to Republicans than they have been in the past. | ||
| Whether that will be enough for Chitterelli to score the upset here, we'll see in a couple weeks. | ||
| For the moment, he's a slight underdog, but this is very much a live race. | ||
| Michael is calling from Marina Del Rey, California on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I had two questions. | |
| Why in Virginia do they have only a one-term limit, and how does that affect campaigning for both candidates? | ||
| And regarding the New Jersey race, can he speak to the Mikey Sherrill thing where he wasn't allowed to walk through the graduation? | ||
| Yeah, so the Virginia question is an interesting one. | ||
| I don't have a great answer for you as to why Virginia has instituted that one-term rule. | ||
| Of course, it's not a one-term lifetime rule. | ||
| It's a one-term consecutive. | ||
| So we have seen Virginia governors in the past serve a term, leave, and then come back and try and run again. | ||
| Most recently, Governor Terry McAuliffe, who was governor from 2013 to 2017, was the Democratic nominee for governor again in 2021, losing to Glenn Yunken. | ||
| It's one of the things that Virginia does that makes it unique among the union here. | ||
| And, you know, it's how they've always done elections, and it's a quirk of the political process there. | ||
| And look, I think that it has benefits and drawbacks for the people involved, right? | ||
| On the drawback side, it essentially makes you a lame duck from the moment that you get into office. | ||
| And that can be difficult for a governor who has just reached the peak of their political power and already people are planning for the next race that doesn't involve them. | ||
| I think it can put a strain on their relationship, especially if it's already difficult with the folks in Richmond in the state government. | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| On the other side, it definitely does unencumber people to be a little bit more strident in their politics. | ||
| They aren't thinking about re-election. | ||
| They're not hedging their bets either financially or politically. | ||
| And so they can be a little bit more declarative. | ||
| They can, if they're not trying to run for something else down the line, be it Senate or president or what have you, they can be a little bit more direct than they might otherwise be if they were also thinking not just about winning this election, but winning re-election in four years. | ||
| So it's an interesting element of Virginia politics. | ||
| It does make the state different than the other 49, certainly, but it's something that everyone has reorganized themselves around over the last century as they try and win these races. | ||
| You know, in New Jersey, I think you mentioned this story about Mikey Sherrill not walking at graduation at the Naval Academy. | ||
| I think that there's differing accounts. | ||
| The Republicans are saying that she was complicit in or affiliated with a cheating ring, an academic dishonesty issue at the Naval Academy. | ||
| Cheryl, her campaign has said that the reason why she didn't walk was that she refused to essentially snitch on her classmates at the Naval Academy. | ||
| She was not accused of wrongdoing and was punished punitively. | ||
| She graduated and served in the Navy with an unblemished record. | ||
| You know, I think that in the grand scope of things, if Mikey Sheryl loses this race, it's not going to be because she didn't walk at graduation at the Naval Academy. | ||
| I think it's going to be because voters are looking for a change. | ||
| And to a certain extent, Cheryl has been unable to articulate the ways in which she would break from and change the current policies of the Murphy administration, which voters are dissatisfied with. | ||
| And that's a difficult trap for her. | ||
| It's one that is somewhat reminiscent of what we saw in the presidential race, where voters were very dissatisfied with Joe Biden and ultimately felt like Kamala Harris was not enough of a different candidate from Biden to justify voting for her. | ||
| I think with Cheryl, it's different because she's not part of the Murphy administration, but there are similar contours here to why she is having to fight for this race, even in a Democratic state such as New Jersey, and has a lot to do with the outgoing administration. | ||
| And Jacob, our caller that we just spoke with, was in California. | ||
| They have Prop 50 on the ballot has to do with redistricting. | ||
| Remind us what that is and if what we know about it possibly it either passing or failing in November. | ||
| So all this got started over the summer when the Trump White House pressured Texas, which is the largest Republican state, to redraw its congressional maps to help Republicans gain as many as five seats in next year's House elections. | ||
| The House is very evenly divided. | ||
| Republicans have a three-seat majority. | ||
| Democrats need to flip just three seats in order to reclaim the House in 2026 and essentially put the kibosh on Trump's agenda moving forward. | ||
| So the Trump administration very much doesn't want that to happen. | ||
| And they're looking for any advantage they can squeeze out of the states that they control. | ||
| So they started with Texas and the Texas legislature successfully passed a map that should give Republicans an additional three seats guaranteed and potentially as many as five seats flipped from the Democrats next year in the midterms. | ||
| Now, in response, what we saw was Governor Gavin Newsome in California say, well, if Texas is going to try and redraw their maps to give Republicans five more seats, California will redraw its maps to give Democrats five more seats. | ||
| However, California law is a little bit different than Texas. | ||
| So the legislature in California can't simply wave a magic wand and say, all right, this is the new map in the way that the Texas legislature essentially did. | ||
| What California has to do is first they wave their magic wand, but all that does is create a statewide ballot measure to approve or push back on this proposed map. | ||
| No, so that will go to the voters in November. | ||
| This map that the Democratic-controlled state legislature in California drew would give, similar to Texas, Democrats the opportunity to flip as many as five Republican-held seats, but voters have to say yes to it first. | ||
| And that is going to be a very expensive, very fractious fight that is currently taking place in California. | ||
| As to who will win that fight, I think it's anyone's guess. | ||
| The polling data that we have is fairly limited. | ||
| It is somewhat positive for the Democratic side of Prop 50. | ||
| However, there are warning signs in those polling data that we have. | ||
| And we know, taking a step back, that trying to poll ballot measures is incredibly difficult, more so than polling candidates. | ||
| Trying to pull ballot measures in an off-off-year election that only has 100 days to unfold is an incredibly difficult task. | ||
| I don't envy any pollster who has to try and figure out what's going to happen there. | ||
| Stephen is calling from Massachusetts on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll discuss that. | |
| I'll discuss that. | ||
| Voting actually helps if you choose the right person if you're in New Jersey. | ||
| Massachusetts wherever state actually is living. | ||
| Jacob, did you catch that? | ||
| I didn't catch the first part. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, the first person you choose and the state come from is the way you can vote. | |
| We'll go on to Ken in Lancaster, South Carolina, online for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ken. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, well, please give me a minute. | |
| I wait my three months. | ||
| I'm just a regular high school graduate. | ||
| I'm a free thinker. | ||
| The Democrats will not win any election beside California. | ||
| Yes, I'm still here. | ||
| Yes, Ken, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, because the Democrat agenda is not for the American people. | |
| The Democrat agenda is crucially for illegal immigrants, health care, paying for lawyers, and et cetera. | ||
| Nothing is being said about the struggling American people, especially the black American, 16% of the population. | ||
| It's all about the new immigrant. | ||
| And the American people, the Democrats that went too far to the left. | ||
| In California, of course, they're going to win. | ||
| And in Virginia, the lieutenant governor, I hope she'll win, but I doubt it because Virginia got a lot of federal workers and they know the Democrats going to continue to feed their trough. | ||
| So they got to eat. | ||
| They think a Republican will cut the trough off. | ||
| But besides the point, the country is $37 trillion in debt. | ||
| The Democrats is holding up the bill to fund illegal immigrant hair care to give more money to the hospitals for Medicaid to cover them. | ||
| But they're not talking about the American people. | ||
| It's all about the legal and the Senate raise and got your point. | ||
| Ken, Jacob, a response to Ken. | ||
| Look, I think that if Democrats pass this ballot measure in California and they win governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey, we're going to hear something similar from Republicans, which is to say California is a really Democratic state. | ||
| Virginia is a Democratic state. | ||
| New Jersey is a Democratic state. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything that for national purposes that Democrats were able to win all three of those races. | ||
| If Democrats do win all three of those races, that is what we're going to hear from Republicans. | ||
| If Republicans win those three races, we're going to hear from Republicans that these races portend a national indicator about people being unhappy with Democrats being happy with Trump's policies. | ||
| And it's going to be Democrats saying, well, you know, the ballot measures are very difficult to get passed in California. | ||
| It was only 100 days. | ||
| People were confused. | ||
| And, you know, in Virginia and New Jersey, you know, people loved Glenn Young in Virginia and they wanted a continuation of his administration. | ||
| And that was what Earl Sears was promising. | ||
| And in New Jersey, it was Phil Murphy's fault and people were so unhappy with the outgoing administration. | ||
| And it's specific to those particular states. | ||
| Doesn't say anything about the national political environment. | ||
| So, no matter who escapes from these off-off-year elections in November, the other party is going to have their answers and explanations locked and loaded as to why it's not a bad sign for them. | ||
| But the reality is, you want to win, right? | ||
| And you want to win the races that are competitive and hard and that maybe you aren't supposed to win, but you also want to win and really have to win the races that you're favored in. | ||
| Those are the races that, if you lose, cause you the most problems. | ||
| So, we're going to see a lot of litigation about these outcomes when we see them in early November. | ||
| But both parties will have a lot of reasons why they won or lost, depending on the final result. | ||
| Let's hear from Donna calling from Pikeville, Kentucky, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Donna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my first question is: Is Virginia and New Jersey the only states in the 50 states that are to be elected? | |
| And the other question is: how many Democrats and Republicans hold office right now, and how many senators and representatives hold office at this time? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, so this year, Virginia and New Jersey are the two states that are electing governors. | ||
| Next year, we'll have 38 states go to the ballot to elect their governor. | ||
| And then the year after that, in 2027, Donna, your state, Kentucky, will elect a governor along with Louisiana and Mississippi. | ||
| So there are five states that elect governors in odd years and 45 states that elect governors in even years. | ||
| In terms of the overall makeup of the federal government right now in the United States Senate, we've got 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. | ||
| What that means is Democrats need to flip four seats in order to reclaim control of the Senate. | ||
| If they only get to three, we're in a 50-50 tie, and the Vice President, JD Vance, will be able to break ties in Republicans' favor. | ||
| So 53-47 in the Senate. | ||
| In the House, it's a little complicated because we have some vacancies, but the baseline breakdown of the House is 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats. | ||
| So again, 218 is the magic number there. | ||
| Democrats need to gain three seats to get to 218 and recontrol the House. | ||
| Due to two vacancies currently, though, we've got 219 Republicans and 214 Democrats. | ||
| So slightly different, but overall, Republicans sitting on a five-seat majority, Democrats needing three seats to reclaim control next year. | ||
| Jacob, the two states that you just talked about, they're electing governors. | ||
| There's also a mayoral race in New York City that's happening. | ||
| There's three candidates in that race. | ||
| Tell us about who's in the race and also where it currently stands. | ||
| This is one of the more interesting races taking place this fall. | ||
| We saw Zorhan Mamdani, who is a Democratic state assembly member and at 33 years old, who would be the youngest mayor of New York in a century, win the Democratic primary. | ||
| Over the summer, he defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who's been a mainstay of the political scene and comes from a political family in what is a pretty stunning upset over the summer. | ||
| So Zoran Momdani, the Democratic nominee, Andrew Cuomo, still in the race, running as an independent against him, and then Curtis Sleewa, the Republican nominee who was also the Republican candidate for mayor in 2021 and who has been a longtime figure in New York public life since founding the Guardian Angels almost a half century ago. | ||
| The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, of course, was running for re-election. | ||
| He dropped out of the Democratic primary earlier this year to run as an independent, and he dropped out of the race and is in as an independent just a couple of days ago. | ||
| So down to a three-person race and a contest that Momdani is firmly ahead in. | ||
| The polling that we have all suggests that Momdani is floating at around or just below 50% of the vote, followed by Andrew Cuomo, who is in the mid-20s, and followed by Curtis Slewa, who is in the teens. | ||
| We don't have any polling from after Eric Adams dropped out because it's so recent, but he was polling in the high single digits. | ||
| So Momdani, not in the most comfortable position because he's not consistently getting more than 50% of the vote. | ||
| However, he is 20 points ahead of his next closest opponent, Andrew Cuomo. | ||
| And so while half the city might not be on board with Momdani yet, they haven't coalesced around an alternative, which makes the Democratic nominee the most likely candidate by far to win this election in November. | ||
| We're going to give you one more call. | ||
| It is Timbo in Mountain Home, Arkansas on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Timbo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I want to throw the Democrats a lifeline. | ||
| We need a Democratic dream, team. | ||
| I'd say Team Jeffries and Gavin Newsome need to get together and formulate a run for 2828 and be a good answer to the adult children in the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We need to get them out of there. | |
| You have a good day. | ||
| I think Gavin Newsom is definitely going to be filling up at least half of that ticket if he gets his way. | ||
| We'll see if Jeffries wants to stick it out and try and become House Speaker, if he has more national ambitions. | ||
| But look, 2028 is still three years away. | ||
| And while there's a tremendous amount of jockeying going on within the party to try and position themselves for running for president, the reality is they've got to have a good midterm in 2026 if anyone wants to be talking about running for president two years after that. | ||
| Jacob Rubashkin is deputy editor of Inside Elections. | ||
| You can find his work online at inside elections.com. | ||
| Jacob, thank you so much for being with us this morning and breaking down some of these races. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It is day four of the government shutdown at the heart of the issue, extending enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire at the end of the year. | ||
| Next on Washington Journal, KFF Vice President and Program on the ACA director, Cynthia Cox, joins us to break down the premium tax credit and the potential impact on enrollees if they expire. | ||
| I'm Dasha Burns, host of Ceasefire, bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
| Ceasefire premieres October 10. | ||
| In our last podcast, Ed Luce of the Financial Times told us about his book, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who he calls America's great power profit. | ||
| In this episode, we're going to feature a book notes interview from April 2nd, 1989 with Dr. Brzezinski. | ||
| He was the first guest for the weekly Sunday evening program that ran till 2005, and that was for 16 years. | ||
| His book at the time was about his longtime prediction that there would be a failure of communism in the Soviet Union. | ||
| The name of Brzezinski's book was The Grand Failure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We revisit an interview with authors of Big New Brzezinski about his book, The Grand Failure, The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century. | |
| On this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | ||
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
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| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the enhanced subsidies for the ACA, the Affordable Health Care Act, that's at the heart of the government shutdown right now is Cynthia Cox. | ||
| She is Vice President and Program on the ACA Director at KFF. | ||
| Cynthia, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Let's start by having you remind our audience about KFF and your focus there when it comes to the ACA. | ||
| So at KFF, it stands for Kaiser Family Foundation, but I just want to start by saying we're not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. | ||
| What we are is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and polling group. | ||
| And so my focus is on doing policy and economic research on the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| I've been tracking it since its passage to kind of see how it's unfolding and what the challenges are and where there's room for improvement. | ||
| And as I mentioned, we're four days into this government shutdown. | ||
| A lot of it has to do with the subsidies included in the ACA. | ||
| Your organization did some polling in June, and the results were that 73% of Americans had heard only a little or nothing at all about these subsidies. | ||
| So explain what they are and how they came about. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the Affordable Care Act, which is also known as Obamacare, was passed in 2010 and implemented in 2014. | ||
| And at the time that it first went into place, there were already what were called premium tax credits. | ||
| And what that means is it's financial help for people who are buying their own health insurance on the Obamacare markets to lower their premium payment. | ||
| And so it's a sliding scale. | ||
| Someone who's low income pays less. | ||
| Someone who's higher income pays more. | ||
| And these are only available for people who don't get health insurance through any other way. | ||
| So they don't get it through their job. | ||
| They aren't eligible for Medicaid or Medicare. | ||
| They're also not undocumented immigrants. | ||
| This is how things were working for several years, but I think there was a lot of concern that the Affordable Care Act marketplaces were still not affordable enough for many people. | ||
| So in 2021, in the wake of the pandemic, Congress passed what were called enhanced subsidies or enhanced tax credits. | ||
| It kind of worked the same way, but it just lowered people's premium payments even more than they were already being lowered under the Affordable Care Act originally. | ||
| And so this was passed through the American Rescue Plan Act. | ||
| They were passed, as I said, temporarily for COVID relief, but then they were extended again by Democrats and Congress through the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| Again, that was a temporary measure. | ||
| And so right now they're set to expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress acts again to extend them further. | ||
| And you talked about a sliding scale. | ||
| How many people use the subsidies and who qualifies for them at all? | ||
| So there are 22 million people buying their own health insurance who get a subsidy or a tax credit. | ||
| I should explain a little bit that the way that the tax credit works is it's paid in advance to people, but actually it goes to the health insurance company to offset the premium for these 22 million people so that they actually just make a lower premium payment each month. | ||
| But at the time that they do their taxes, they have to reconcile that. | ||
| And so they might have a little bit more, a little bit less help. | ||
| But the sliding scale works such that right now with the enhanced tax credits, if a very low-income person, maybe somebody who's making just above the poverty level, is signing up for their own health insurance, they pay nothing. | ||
| So they pay a $0 premium for a silver plan. | ||
| Now, if you're higher income or middle income, you have to pay 8.5% of your income for that same plan. | ||
| And so that's how the sliding scale works. | ||
| This is just purely based on income. | ||
| Anything above that amount, anything above, say, 8.5% of your income, the federal government is paying. | ||
| And you pointed out that illegal immigrants do not qualify for the ACA and these enhanced subsidies. | ||
| We're hearing a lot about that. | ||
| Why did this come into the conversation? | ||
| And can you explain why or how it may be tied together? | ||
| Yeah, so I think there's a lot of confusion around this. | ||
| So first of all, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for any federally subsidized health insurance coverage in the United States. | ||
| But some states have offered their own subsidies, state-funded subsidies, to help people buy health insurance or to provide something that looks a lot like Medicaid. | ||
| And some of the confusion is even coming from the states who are doing it because they're calling it Medicaid. | ||
| And so, you know, people think that it is Medicaid that they're getting, but in reality, it's something that just looks very similar to that. | ||
| And so the reality is, is that at least on these Affordable Care Act markets, undocumented immigrants are not, they're not even allowed to purchase that coverage even without financial help. | ||
| They can purchase health insurance off of the marketplace, but this is not something that covers undocumented immigrants. | ||
| Cynthia Cox is our guest for the next 35 or 40 minutes. | ||
| She is with KFF. | ||
| She's the vice president and also the director of the program on the ACA. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start calling. | ||
| And now, the lines for this segment are broken down a little bit differently. | ||
| If you are under the, if you're insured by the ACA, you can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you have private insurance, the line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| All others can call in at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Cynthia wanted to talk a little bit more about the enhanced subsidies. | ||
| They are set to expire at the end of this year if Congress doesn't act. | ||
| What happens if they aren't extended? | ||
| So, if the enhanced tax credits are not extended, then that would mean that they expire January 1st of this coming year. | ||
| What that means for people who are getting their health insurance through the marketplace and who are getting a subsidy or a tax credit now is that the amount that they pay each month for their health insurance premium is going to more than double on average. | ||
| We at KFF are estimating that premium payments would increase by 114% this coming year if the enhanced premium tax credits are not extended. | ||
| Now, this, just to kind of clear up some common confusion here, this is not an increase in what the insurance company is charging. | ||
| The insurance company is charging a little bit more next year than they otherwise would have. | ||
| But what's happening is really that that increase in the premium payment is the loss of financial help. | ||
| So, that means like you're getting less financial help next year than you do this year, so you're having to pay more if you're buying your own health insurance. | ||
| But that's an average, and for some people, it's going to be more, and for some people, it's going to be less. | ||
| And so, you know, I think the other issue here is that some people are starting to get letters in the mail warning them about this. | ||
| Some people might even soon be able to start shopping online and seeing more about how much they're going to have to pay. | ||
| And so, I think it's really going to be in the next few weeks where people get a better idea of how much more they're going to have to pay next year. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Wanda, who's calling from Chico, California, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Wanda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I took my niece to the emergency room for a kidney stone recently, and it was very clogged up, and all the people in there except a couple were speaking Spanish. | |
| I just wonder who's paying for that. | ||
| And also, on your callers, I think the Democrats are using all three lines because their opinions verify what that they're not Republicans. | ||
| You can tell by what they say. | ||
| You don't have hardly any Republican callers, especially on weekends. | ||
| Wanda, we're going to get a response to your question to your comment. | ||
| Yeah, so this is a really common question that we're hearing. | ||
| So, you know, I think this kind of gets at a couple of issues. | ||
| One is that, so there is a program called Emergency Medicaid, and the idea there is that if somebody shows up to the emergency room because of another law called MTALA, the hospital has to stabilize that person. | ||
| So, if you show up with a heart attack in an emergency room, that hospital has to stabilize you regardless of your immigration status, regardless of your income or your ability to pay or what kind of health insurance you have. | ||
| That means that hospitals will eat the cost for some of their patients who are uninsured. | ||
| So, there is a program that allows Medicaid to reimburse hospitals just for that emergency or that hospitalization to stabilize the patient if they are either an undocumented immigrant or if they are a legal immigrant who just hasn't been in the country for long enough to qualify for another health program. | ||
| And so, that I think is something that is being raised here is Whether that program should continue or how much money it should get. | ||
| And then, but I think the separate issue here is just that hospitals are often having staffing problems, which can lead to longer wait times in emergency rooms or just fewer beds being available. | ||
| And so the kind of flip side of this is if hospitals are not getting funding to offset their costs for uninsured patients, then that could actually lead to even more staffing problems because the hospital might not have enough money to continue operating at their current level. | ||
| And we've heard this from a couple callers this morning, but just because somebody is in a hospital and not speaking English doesn't mean that they are undocumented or uninsured. | ||
| Right, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's you can't make an assumption about someone's immigration status. | ||
| And that's kind of the whole idea behind this law: that if you're having a heart attack, you probably don't want to have to demonstrate your citizen status to the hospital before they treat you. | ||
| Let's hear from Rich, calling from New Jersey on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Rich. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| I buy insurance from my wife through the ACA. | ||
| I have Medicare. | ||
| Now, my youngest son is starting vet school in January. | ||
| And he had, when he was working, he had his own insurance on the ACA. | ||
| But now that he's a full-time student, he has no income, so he cannot buy insurance on the ACA. | ||
| He may qualify, he may not qualify for Medicaid. | ||
| So I was wondering if I was eligible to bring him onto my family plan, but I understand there's an issue with how old your son could be to stay covered. | ||
| But he's getting, he's only 23 years old, so I don't know how much that factors into it. | ||
| Yeah, this is a really good question. | ||
| And so generally speaking, with the Affordable Care Act, if you have, like, let's say you're a parent and you have employer-sponsored health insurance, or even if you have Affordable Care Act or Obamacare health insurance, and you have a child who is an adult but is not yet 26 years old, then you can put that child on your own health insurance as it, but then it gets complicated. | ||
| It sounds like the caller might be saying that they're aging on to Medicare. | ||
| So that is an issue for some people who have college age or grad students in their family. | ||
| When the parent goes on to Medicare, then they no longer have that option to keep their child on their private insurance because they no longer have private insurance. | ||
| And so, you know, this is where that person may be able, the student might be able to get Medicaid if they have no income or very low income and they live in a state that has expanded Medicaid. | ||
| But if they don't live in a state that has expanded Medicaid, they might not be able to get any option for health insurance. | ||
| Maria is calling from Virginia Beach, Virginia, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Maria. | ||
| Maria, are you there? | ||
| We don't have Maria. | ||
| We'll go to Tim, who's calling from Tennessee. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'd like to thank you for taking my call. | |
| I do like the fact that you guessed this morning. | ||
| She was honest whenever she said that illegal immigrants or migrants, whatever you want to call them, are going to emergency rooms. | ||
| They would go there anything from being sick like the flu or being injured. | ||
| I work construction work. | ||
| If I go to the emergency room, it costs me $150. | ||
| That's my deductible. | ||
| But these immigrants will go in and they will get free medical care. | ||
| And like she said, it is paid for by emergency Medicaid. | ||
| And this is still them getting insurance coverage that taxpayers are paying for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the Democrats are still trying to extend coverage to these undocumented immigrants and shutting down the government to try to do it. | |
| I do agree with the ACA. | ||
| I have two grown children who are on that, and I'm sure that their premiums may go up. | ||
| But that's a small price to pay to keep our country afloat because we just can't afford to put all these people on free Medicaid. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So one technicality here is that with the emergency Medicaid program, that money is really going directly to the hospital to offset the hospital's cost. | ||
| It doesn't continue to provide Medicaid coverage for the undocumented immigrant once they get out of the hospital. | ||
| So it's not going to pay for their preventive care or their routine medical care after they leave the hospital. | ||
| And wanted to ask you about the, we've heard, you know, figures that only 8% of the population is on the ACA. | ||
| If rates increase, there is a thought that people won't be able to afford it, that they just won't have insurance at all. | ||
| How is that going to infect not only the marketplace, but the cost of health care across the board? | ||
| Yeah, so this is really, so this is about 22 to 24 million people who get their own health insurance through these Obamacare markets or the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. | ||
| Now, generally speaking, the way health insurance works or the cost of health insurance, insurers are not supposed to, you know, shift costs from one market to another. | ||
| And hospitals generally are not, generally economists think that hospitals are not able to shift costs from one market to another. | ||
| However, I think it is possible that there could be some repercussions that do extend beyond the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. | ||
| So generally speaking, this 114% increase or this premium payments doubling, that's just for the people who currently are getting a subsidy, just for those 22 million people. | ||
| But if they find that health insurance to be too expensive, then they might drop their coverage if they're healthier. | ||
| That means that the market that's left is sicker. | ||
| And so health insurance companies are going to charge higher premiums next year and maybe even more the year after if healthy people start dropping out of that market. | ||
| That could affect people who are buying their own health insurance who even don't get a subsidy at all to begin with. | ||
| The other issue here is that, like we were talking about, when somebody shows up in an emergency room in a hospital, that hospital has to stabilize that person. | ||
| And so if there are more people who are uninsured because they dropped their health insurance coverage because the cost went up, there's still a chance that that person's going to show up in an emergency room. | ||
| And if they do, then the hospital has to still see them and they have to kind of eat that cost. | ||
| Now, it's unclear what happens in that situation, but I think the concern is that in some rural hospitals where they might already be struggling financially, that that could lead them to cut services or to even close if they have an influx of patients who are uninsured and can't afford to pay for their care. | ||
| Will is calling from Great Neck, New York. | ||
| Good morning, Will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for talking about this very important topic. | ||
| I'm on the Republican line, but I do support the Biden approach, although not necessarily the specifics. | ||
| When you say, Cynthia, 114%, you're really mixing up small increments of a couple of hundred dollars in some cases or $300 with huge increments of what could be $12,000, it seems to me. | ||
| So the example I like to give is the self-employed person with two children, a couple, $120,000 income gets a very big subsidy. | ||
| Under this new law, the $150,000 income would get zero. | ||
| This seems manifestly unfair to me. | ||
| I think this issue should be highlighted, you know, in a very, very major way, in addition to what's going on at the $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 level. | ||
| I don't think there's enough focus on what's going on when you go above that 400% and how damaging that is to a family budget. | ||
| That is a very good point. | ||
| And yes, the 114% is an average. | ||
| I can run through a couple of examples, so bear with me. | ||
| I know it's some numbers and math here. | ||
| But so for a lower income person, so I have an example here for a 40-year-old living in Amarillo, Texas. | ||
| Let's say that they're lower income, so they're paying today $0 a month for their premium. | ||
| But if their enhanced tax credits go away, they will still get financial help. | ||
| They'll just get less financial help. | ||
| So their premium payment this year would, or next year, would go from $0 to a total of $920 next year. | ||
| Now that's spread over the course of the year in 12 monthly payments. | ||
| So that's an increase of about $1,000 over the course of the year. | ||
| But getting to the collar's point, if we think about a middle-income person, someone who's making more than four times the poverty level, that's where they really get hit hard. | ||
| And so the other example I have is, you know, maybe a little bit more of an extreme example, but this is a middle-income older couple. | ||
| So a 60-year-old couple living in Jacksonville, Florida, making $85,000 a year for their combined income. | ||
| Today, they're paying $7,000 per year for their premium, for their monthly premium payments, or $7,000 over the course of the year, but divided by $12,000. | ||
| Next year, their premium payments would be $28,000 over the course of a year. | ||
| So that's an increase of $21,000 in premium payments. | ||
| If the enhanced tax credits go away, because this couple is making above four times the poverty level, that means that they won't be eligible for any financial assistance at all next year. | ||
| And so, you know, this is the group of people who would really be hit very hard, especially older adults, older couples, and also people living in rural parts of the country where premiums tend to be higher. | ||
| Rick is calling from Georgia. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and I wanted to thank you for this topic. | |
| And I think, Cynthia, the whole country is lucky to have you with all your knowledge and everything that you're doing for the people to get health care. | ||
| This is crazy stuff that is going on right now. | ||
| I'm an eight-year Navy veteran on Medicare, best insurance I've ever had. | ||
| And the thing about the people that are coming up with these comments about how taxpayers are going to have to pay for everybody else's insurance, a lot of these people probably are having people pay for their insurance. | ||
| So, you know, people do not ask to be sick. | ||
| When you get sick, if you don't have some kind of insurance or something to back you up, you know, you're going to go bankrupt. | ||
| And so this ACA and Cynthia, we are lucky to have you, and I can't tell you how much we appreciate you clarifying this for you. | ||
| There's only one group responsible for this whole thing. | ||
| They control all three branches of government. | ||
| And they're being cruel and trying to shove this down our throat and making it the Democrats' fault when it's not. | ||
| They could come in there and negotiate this and try to help people keep their health insurance like any normal industrialized country should do instead of crying about all this nonsense about why should we have somebody else pay for your health insurance. | ||
| This is nonsense. | ||
| Well, thank you for the kind words. | ||
| So I think this is also kind of getting at a broader concept here about, you know, why do we have health insurance and how does health insurance work? | ||
| I mean, I think inherently health insurance is a pooling of money and resources from a large group of people, whether it's, you know, everyone who works at a company or everyone who's paying taxes into Medicare or, you know, who are just kind of getting together as a group to get health insurance. | ||
| What that means is that healthier people are always going to pay into that pool and sicker people are going to pay out or get a payout from health insurance. | ||
| And so the idea is that it's, you know, you pay into the health insurance system when you're healthy and then you're able to take out of it if you get sick. | ||
| Raul is calling from Miami, Florida. | ||
| Good morning, Raul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, it's a little bit misleading on your TV screen. | ||
| It says all others, but then they basically limit it to Republicans. | ||
| So I don't think you're getting a true sample of the country. | ||
| That being said, there are a lot of issues that are not being covered by this very learned and lady that you brought. | ||
| First of all, the Americans ACA is a tax. | ||
| The Supreme Court ruled that it wasn't a tax, but taxes have to be brought forth by the House of Representatives and the ACA Act, which President Obama gave us was not. | ||
| And that wasn't addressed by the Supreme Court because it was so convenient. | ||
| There are a lot of things that she's not covering. | ||
| For example, here in Miami, Florida, people just show up in the emergency rooms. | ||
| I wish somebody would do a study of the number of people without insurance that show up in the emergency rooms. | ||
| They claim they don't have money to pay and they don't pay. | ||
| And basically, they work, quote, off of the books. | ||
| They don't pay taxes. | ||
| So this is another issue that's just totally being ignored. | ||
| The other thing you're not addressing is that basically the Affordable Care Act is the big bonus to insurance companies because the government basically guarantees the payment for the health insurance that that gentleman right before you said was so wonderful. | ||
| It wasn't so wonderful because if you are not your own coverage and you have to go out and buy it after the Affordable Care Act that President Obama gave us, it is just totally unaffordable. | ||
| And the bottom line is basically this is bankrupting the country. | ||
| Raul, we'll get a response from Cynthia. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So yeah, this is raising a lot of really important issues with the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| So kind of taking a big picture step back here, the idea behind, or one of the key ideas behind the Affordable Care Act was that people who have a pre-existing health condition shouldn't be denied health insurance coverage just because of that pre-existing health condition, right? | ||
| And so, but if you mandate that health insurance companies have to accept anyone, even if they have cancer or some expensive medication that they need, then that raises the cost for everybody who's getting health insurance, especially if people are waiting until they get sick to get health insurance. | ||
| So one of the things that the Affordable Care Act did originally was to try to create an incentive for people not to wait until they get sick. | ||
| In other words, to have healthy people pay into the insurance pool to keep the premium costs lower. | ||
| And so that was called the individual mandate. | ||
| This was by far the least popular part of the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| And the idea was that if you don't buy health insurance when you're young and healthy, then you have to pay a penalty. | ||
| So this was, like I said, hugely unpopular. | ||
| And so what Congress did, you know, when Republicans were in Congress in 2017, 2018, when they were debating the repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act, ultimately those replacement plans did not pan out. | ||
| But the thing that did happen was that this individual mandate penalty was reduced to zero dollars. | ||
| So technically there still is a requirement that people have health insurance. | ||
| It's just that there's no punishment for it. | ||
| So whereas before you might have had to pay a penalty of a few hundred or even thousand dollars, now you don't have to pay anything if you go without health insurance. | ||
| But this is kind of also tying us back to the emergency room issue, which I think is something that's just coming up a lot. | ||
| You know, one of the other ideas behind the Affordable Care Act was if people have health insurance that gives them access to, say, primary care doctors or specialists, then they won't use the emergency room for that primary care. | ||
| You know, you don't want someone coming to the emergency room because they have a cold. | ||
| You want them to go to the doctor, because that doctor appointment might cost a couple hundred dollars, but the emergency room visit is going to cost several thousand dollars. | ||
| And so, you know, if people have health insurance that is actually working for them and creates an access, you know, access to care, then that can keep people out of the emergency room for things that aren't truly emergencies. | ||
| But if you don't have health insurance, then you might take advantage of the emergency room and show up there because the ER has to see you regardless of your ability to pay. | ||
| Even so, some people will still get into financial trouble doing that. | ||
| You can end up in medical debt. | ||
| It's not necessarily the case that the hospital is not going to send you to collections if you show up there. | ||
| You've talked about that 114% increase a few times. | ||
| There are some other factors that are compounding to the issue of that increase. | ||
| What are they? | ||
| Yeah, so when we originally did this estimate, this was a couple of years ago. | ||
| We thought that if the enhanced premium tax credits went away, that premium payments would increase by 75%. | ||
| We've updated that analysis based on some new information. | ||
| One really important factor here is that the amount that health insurance companies are charging on this market is increasing by 18% next year. | ||
| That is the steepest increase we've seen in over eight years. | ||
| And part of the reason that they're increasing costs is because health care costs are going up. | ||
| This is going to be happening for everyone with private insurance, whether you have health insurance through the Obamacare or ACA markets, or if you get it through work, we're expecting that next year premiums are going to be increasing a lot for people with private insurance. | ||
| And that's hospital costs. | ||
| It's also GLP-1 drugs, which are these drugs that have been used to treat diabetes but now have been found to have weight loss benefits. | ||
| And so more and more people are taking those drugs, and that's causing health insurance premiums to go up. | ||
| But in the Obamacare or Affordable Care Act marketplaces, premiums are going up even more. | ||
| And part of that is, like I was saying, insurance companies are thinking, well, if the amount of financial assistance people get next year is going to be smaller, then healthy people might drop out of the market. | ||
| So we're expecting that the group of people who we insure next year as an insurance company is going to be a sicker group of people. | ||
| So of that 18% increase, about four percentage points of that is due to the expectation that the market will be sicker if the enhanced premium tax credits expire. | ||
| The rest is due to just rising health care costs. | ||
| Mac is calling from California. | ||
| Good morning, Mac. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-STAN. | |
| 72-year-old retired Teamster. | ||
| I had benefits my entire working life. | ||
| I have Kaiser out here, not affiliated with your guest company, as she said. | ||
| I was injury-free, and even riding a Harley motorcycle and driving a big rig, 2 million safe drivers miles. | ||
| I fell out of a ladder helping my neighbor, who I've lived to for 32 years, accidentally fell off a ladder helping her trim her tree. | ||
| I broke 15 ribs for the information we have: 24 as a male human. | ||
| I broke 10 on one side, five on the other side. | ||
| I had no health care coverage because our Teamster contract we didn't bargain it in. | ||
| I had a great pension. | ||
| I'm still doing it. | ||
| Here's my point: I had to get on Obamacare at probably 65 or 60 before I got medicare. | ||
| I was in my 60s. | ||
| I was in the hospital for 23 days. | ||
| I'm talking a healthy, strong man. | ||
| 23 days in the hospital. | ||
| The cost was $276,000. | ||
| I had special treatment. | ||
| They treated me like I was the president of the United States at Kaiser Valley. | ||
| And I'm telling you, if I didn't have Obamacare, I had to pay the first $6,000, and that was it. | ||
| People, quit listening to Trump and all these right-wingers. | ||
| Obamacare is wonderful if you don't have health care with your pension or health care With your job. | ||
| All of you, us, my fellow Americans, I love you all. | ||
| If you have coverage to your employer, thank a union out there someplace that helped you get it. | ||
| But there's so many people, millions, millions that don't have it. | ||
| And I think the figure was 21 million people are going to be so affected because they gave their buddies the 1%ers over a trillion dollar tax credit. | ||
| Mac, we'll get a response from Cynthia. | ||
| Well, first of all, I'm glad to hear that you recovered. | ||
| That sounds like a horrible injury. | ||
| But I think this raises a point where the cost of a hospitalization, which can happen whether you're getting a surgery or you're getting cancer treatment, or you just fall off of a ladder or get hit by a bus or any kind of horrible thing that can happen to someone without them expecting it, that hospitalization can cost tens of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the severity of the treatment that you need. | ||
| And so a lot of people, when they're looking at health insurance, they're looking at, say, a deductible of $5,000, $6,000, $7,000. | ||
| And for someone who's uninsured, when they're shopping for health insurance, they might see, well, I could get this health insurance for almost free, you know, for $0 a month or maybe it's $10,000, $20 a month, but the deductible is $7,000. | ||
| And I don't have $7,000 in my bank account, so I might as well be uninsured. | ||
| Well, I would say, I would really encourage someone to think about, well, if you have an emergency or you have a hospitalization, that hospitalization would cost well over $7,000. | ||
| And so that's where the health insurance comes in, is it at least caps how much you have to pay out of pocket. | ||
| JC is calling. | ||
| JC, where are you calling from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Richmond, Virginia. | |
| Richmond, Virginia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I have two, well, one question and a comment. | ||
| What do you think about if the government were to implement a single payer system? | ||
| How much more affordable it would be? | ||
| Or if they at least did like a public option, they tried it before, but they couldn't get it through. | ||
| How much more efficient and how much cheaper would it be for Americans in general? | ||
| And the second thing was, you know, the Democrats are like fighting themselves. | ||
| Like they already made their peaks or whatever with this. | ||
| They put it out there. | ||
| They should just fund the government and just let whatever happens happens. | ||
| And if it turns out bad, they can run on it in the midterms. | ||
| They can say, hey, we can retroactively give these benefits back. | ||
| So whoever's running with the Democrats, they should tell them this. | ||
| Hey, we stood up for the people of health care. | ||
| Next year, people's premiums go up, run on it. | ||
| If you want your premiums to come back down, vote in in the midterm. | ||
| And as for the Republicans, they could easily pass it through. | ||
| If you would like to put up what Marjorie Taylor Green did, said she's true. | ||
| It's accurate. | ||
| They push through people with the nuclear option. | ||
| So why aren't the Democrats and Republicans, both of them can fix the problem, one or the other side? | ||
| And if you can explain that to people, but my main question was, what would it be cheaper-wise if they did just a public option? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I think there's a lot of fascination, especially from Democrats or the left around this idea of single payer or a public option. | ||
| And so first of all, I will say that when you look at the United States and how much we spend on health care as a society, we are spending about twice as much as countries spend who have single payer systems. | ||
| But we're also spending almost twice as much as countries that have multi-payer systems. | ||
| And so, you know, single payer, yes, that is a way to rein in health care costs, but it's primarily doing that not only by pooling in everybody, by forcing everyone to pay in taxes into the healthcare system. | ||
| And, you know, so you're getting the healthier people paying taxes from young age, but also because they're paying doctors and hospitals less, they're paying prescription drug companies less because they have what's called a monopsony, or basically, you know, they are the only payer. | ||
| And so the government can set prices. | ||
| Even in other countries that have multi-payer systems more similar to ours, those countries still spend less on health care, again, because they pay doctors and hospitals and prescription drug companies less than we do. | ||
| And so they have multiple insurance companies. | ||
| In some cases, you know, it's not so much that we have multiple payers, it's more that we're paying more for the care that we get. | ||
| And the difference in some other countries is that there's more regulation or price negotiation or price setting that happens between the payers and the providers. | ||
| Erin is calling on the line for ACA Insured. | ||
| Erin, where are you calling from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Erin from New York. | |
| How are you guys? | ||
| Mrs. Cox, great hearing from you. | ||
| I like information. | ||
| It's shocking that here we are back into the healthcare. | ||
| You remember when the Obamacare was going along where people were given all the Democrat was given all these different choices just to make us healthy overall. | ||
| And now here we are having the same conversation. | ||
| A lot of those states, when they have the choice to accept the Obamacare, that did not take it, it would have been a lot cheaper now if they actually did that. | ||
| And so now here we are. | ||
| It's wonderful if you can afford a very expensive insurance. | ||
| But even if you do have an insurance, you still, the doctor who are you affiliated with, they still have to go to the hospital that they're working in. | ||
| So nobody chooses to just show up in the emergency room. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| The gentleman from Florida, you're scrutinizing every little micro thing. | ||
| I can say this, if you were to go to a different country and you get into an accident, do you think they're going to send you back on the street? | ||
| Are they going to take care of you? | ||
| Because they're more humane. | ||
| They're not looking at the value of how much money they can make from you. | ||
| It's just simply being careful, being respectful as a human life. | ||
| If you show up in the emergency room, it's not because you want to. | ||
| It's because you have no choice. | ||
| Nobody does it because they want to give somebody a hard time in the emergency room. | ||
| They do it with their family and they do it with their kids because accident happened. | ||
| I've gone to places where accident happened overseas. | ||
| And do you think those countries are going to turn your way? | ||
| No. | ||
| We're the only country here. | ||
| We're one of the richest countries in the world. | ||
| And here we are scrutinizing how much we pay for a child that goes to the emergency room. | ||
| Okay, Erin, we'll get a response from Cynthia. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's really interesting that the emergency room issue is really resonating with people. | ||
| I mean, I personally dread going to an emergency room because I know I'm going to have to sit in the waiting room for a few hours. | ||
| And so, you know, one thing that is changing in our healthcare system more recently is that there are alternatives to emergency rooms now. | ||
| There are urgent care facilities that are open maybe 24-7 or at least longer hours. | ||
| And part of the issue is that if you have an injury or an illness come up after hours on weekends, it can be hard to get seen by your doctor, who might only be open nine to five on Monday through Friday. | ||
| Or if your job just doesn't really allow you to get that time off to go to the doctor, that can also mean that you're seeking care weekends and nights. | ||
| And so that's where urgent care facilities can be a good alternative. | ||
| But also a lot of people are turning to telemedicine now too. | ||
| And some employers are offering free telemedicine. | ||
| And that telemedicine can be available outside of hours so that for a lot of conditions, you don't necessarily have to show up in person at the emergency room. | ||
| And so I think hopefully people are bringing their less severe conditions to other places outside of the emergency room so that because now those options are becoming more and more available. | ||
| Right now the current enhanced ACA subsidies expire end of the year. | ||
| You mentioned people could be getting notices for rates in the next few weeks. | ||
| Another date to remember is November 1st. | ||
| That's ACA open enrollment. | ||
| How could that be affected by all of this? | ||
| And is there a deadline for when rates could lock in if action is taken or not? | ||
| Yeah, so there's a lot there. | ||
| So let me just start with whether rates can change or not. | ||
| And I think we're reaching a point where the rates are final now. | ||
| So this is how much the insurance company charges. | ||
| You know, many states they're saying, okay, this is you're locked in now and these are the health insurance premiums that are going to be charged next year. | ||
| Now, for people who don't get a tax credit or who don't get a subsidy, that means they're going to have to pay more next year than they would have had to pay if Congress had extended these enhanced premium tax credits earlier in the year. | ||
| But for people who get a tax credit or who get a subsidy, they don't really pay what the insurance company is charging. | ||
| They just pay a certain percent of their income. | ||
| And so that's where Congress can still make a big difference if they want to extend the enhanced premium tax credits. | ||
| So that could mean that instead of someone having that increase from $0 a month to $900 over the course of the year, Congress can say extending the enhanced premium tax credits would mean that that person still pays $0. | ||
| So even though the amount that health insurance companies are charging is going up next year, if the tax credits get extended, that would hold premium payments flat for the vast majority of people who are getting their health coverage. | ||
| Now, the other side of that is that because health insurance companies are charging more next year, if the enhanced premium tax credits are extended now, it's actually going to cost taxpayers more to extend those enhanced premium tax credits than if Congress had acted sooner because health insurance premiums are inflated due to this expectation that sick people are going or sicker people are going to keep their coverage next year. | ||
| So it's, you know, it's a little bit hard to explain, but basically, you know, the cost of extending, the cost to taxpayers of extending the enhanced premium tax credits is a bit higher now than it would have been if Congress had acted sooner. | ||
| And just to note the cost here, because it is a very large cost, the CBO or the Congressional Budget Office is estimating that extending the enhanced premium tax credits would cost about $35 billion per year in taxpayer money. | ||
| We have one last call for you. | ||
| We'll talk with Linda, who is on the line for private insurance. | ||
| Linda, where are you calling from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
New Jersey. | |
| Go ahead, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I work here in New Jersey. | |
| New Jersey is a blue state, which does have mandatory health care insurance. | ||
| I do taxes part of the year here in New Jersey. | ||
| I'm a tax preparer, retired. | ||
| I'm on Medicare and have a secondary insurance that I pay. | ||
| My husband and I have always been on private employer health care insurance until we both got on Medicare. | ||
| And the bottom line is I see when these people come in and do their taxes, whether they have affordable health care insurance here in New Jersey, if they don't have health care insurance, they have to pay a penalty. | ||
| Sometimes young kids come in to do their taxes. | ||
| They're making $20,000 a year and they can't afford insurance and they don't get on Medicaid or affordable care insurance because they can't even afford the premiums for that, for affordable care. | ||
| They have to pay a penalty here in New Jersey. | ||
| And I think Massachusetts is another state that has mandatory health care insurance. | ||
| You have to have health care or you get penalized at tax time. | ||
| Yeah, so that's actually, that's a very good point. | ||
| And so even though the federal or the national penalty for not having health insurance was rolled back to zero dollars, some blue states decided, well, we still want to have an individual mandate. | ||
| And so they created their own state individual mandates and state penalties. | ||
| And so that is true that in some states people still are paying a penalty. | ||
| The other issue, I love having a tax preparer call in because so much of the ACA is actually done through the tax system. | ||
| And so when we talk about these subsidies, they're technically tax credits. | ||
| And so what people are doing is they're estimating how much their income is going to be next year. | ||
| So you're saying, okay, I think I'm going to make $30,000 next year. | ||
| If you end up making $40,000 next year, then you might have to pay back some of that tax credit that you got because technically you were only eligible for a smaller amount of the tax credit. | ||
| On the flip side of things, if you estimate that your income is going to be higher than the poverty level, which is the minimum income you need to get a tax credit in these markets, then you can get a tax credit. | ||
| But if you estimate that your income is going to be just below the poverty level, then you cannot get a tax credit. | ||
| And so, you know, if you live in a Medicaid non-expansion state. | ||
| And so there's been some accusations of fraud or maybe people being a little bit too optimistic about their incomes next year because it is interesting that you see a lot of people expecting that their income is going to be just above the poverty level in these states that have not expanded Medicaid. | ||
| Now, how much of that is truly fraud is really hard to say. | ||
| I think it can be reasonable that somebody can say, I think I'm going to pick up some more Uber rides or I'm going to work more shifts or I'm going to get more in tips. | ||
| And that's going to put me over the poverty line. | ||
| So that is just kind of to raise another issue that people have expressed concern about with these enhanced tax credits. | ||
| Cynthia Cox is vice president and director of the program on the ACA at KFF. | ||
| You can find the organization online at kff.org. | ||
| Cynthia, thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| We are wrapping up today's Washington Journal with Open Forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now the lines there on your screen. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Past president. | |
| Why? | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a tangoroot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 in high school students join c-span as we celebrate america's 250th anniversary during our 2026 c-span student cam video documentary competition | ||
| This year's theme is exploring the American story through the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| We're asking students to create a five to six minute documentary that answers one of two questions. | ||
| What's the Declaration's influence on a key moment from America's 250-year history? | ||
| Or how have its values touched on a contemporary issue that's impacting you or your community? | ||
| We encourage all students to participate, regardless of prior filmmaking experience. | ||
| Consider interviewing topical experts and explore a variety of viewpoints around your chosen issue. | ||
| Students should also include clips of related C-SPAN footage, which are easy to download on our website, studentcam.org. | ||
| C-SPAN Student Cam Competition awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to students and teachers and $5,000 for the grand prize winner. | ||
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| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in Open Forum for the remainder of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll start with Guy who's calling from St. Augustine, Florida, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was sorry I missed Ms. Cox there. | ||
| She was great. | ||
| On this open forum, relative to the insurance deal, I'm in my low 80s. | ||
| My wife is still working. | ||
| Our daughter and my wife are both health care workers. | ||
| And both were denied getting the new COVID vaccine because it has not been approved. | ||
| So that's the first issue that I was shocked to find out. | ||
| I'm eligible because of my age. | ||
| We have a 23-year-old college student, and we pay $500 a month for 500, sorry, 500 every two weeks for our insurance that covers my wife and my son. | ||
| And a lot of the times that people that my wife sees and my daughter sees in emergency health care are homeless or in Daytona. | ||
| They can't even have a, they don't even have a refrigerator for their insulin. | ||
| So they have to have insulin tablets. | ||
| So these are people that are American citizens, forget which side of the poll they're on, that we have to support because you can't turn someone away. | ||
| That's not how our health care system is set up. | ||
| So even though we know that the hospitals are not going to get paid, the patients are still seen. | ||
| And I'm not speaking of Spanish speaking. | ||
| I'm not speaking of any specific language. | ||
| A patient that walks into an emergency room will be seen. | ||
| And it's unfortunate that we've made this a partisan issue. | ||
| It shouldn't be. | ||
| That was Guy in Florida. | ||
| Richard is calling from Maryland on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I worked all of my life and paid taxes. | ||
| I suffered an injury. | ||
| Now I have absence seizures from an assault. | ||
| I have Medicare now. | ||
| I did have Medicaid. | ||
| I got married. | ||
| Now I have Medicare. | ||
| Three brain surgeries, a neurostimulator in my head now, detects and stops seizures. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| Paying into all my life I worked. | ||
| And 10 years ago, I got the assault. | ||
| And now I pay the 20% for Medicare. | ||
| And I'm petrified that this might go away. | ||
| My wife still works. | ||
| Now her kidneys have failed. | ||
| And she's paying her private insurance and the Affordable Care Act. | ||
| And we're petrified. | ||
| That was Richard and Maryland Gary calling from Connorsville, Indiana, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Gary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to, before I make my point, I want to extend a hats-off salute to Cynthia Cox. | ||
| She's a stout trooper for a noble cause, and long may it continue. | ||
| And I wish they could be even more like this person. | ||
| But on to what I want to talk about is I got four words to describe our government. | ||
| Total lack of balance. | ||
| We're being pulled too far in both directions. | ||
| And I tell you what, a voter can't win for losing when it comes to trying to get our issues resolved. | ||
| I mean, nine times out of ten, anyway, you're just exchanging one group of problems for another. | ||
| Like if Kamala Harris was the president right now, we just have a whole different set of problems, man. | ||
| So what is the solution? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, voting don't do nothing. | ||
| I'm not saying don't vote. | ||
| You know, it's your choice. | ||
| That's your privilege. | ||
| I respect that. | ||
| But the people are running for office, and therefore it's a waste of time to vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see, that's what it amounts to. | |
| And I'm saying this because I care about my country. | ||
| And nobody wants to live in a country where people are being disrespected because they're poor. | ||
| Right now, we're in a developing oligarchic society, man. | ||
| It's like you need to find a way to get rich or get out of the country or just stick around and die. | ||
| That was Gary in Indiana. | ||
| Jeff calling from Florida, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, everyone. | |
| It's a pleasure to call in. | ||
| I just had a statement I figured maybe you could address. | ||
| The young lady you had on was excellent, had good information. | ||
| I just, the one thing I haven't heard discussed in the media or by our politicians is these tax credits were done during COVID. | ||
| Why were they required? | ||
| The system doesn't seem to be solvent. | ||
| Back in the days when Obamacare, as they called it, was being debated, it seemed to won't affect other people's insurance. | ||
| Now they're stating that with the uncertainty of these credits, even private insurance premiums will increase. | ||
| So that was kind of a misnomer right from the beginning. | ||
| So why is it so insolvent where my insurance might go up 8% this year due to cost, prescription costs, medical care increases in cost, and some of it was being blamed on the fact of these uncertainty with what Congress might do with these tax credits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is the system so insolvent? | |
| That seems to be the problem when you hear, like, say, the right wing of the country discuss we should get together in appropriations and try to work this out. | ||
| I don't think the Republicans want to just ignore this and see people's rates doubled. | ||
| They just want to try to make the system a little bit more solvent. | ||
| No one's discussed that. | ||
| I'd sure like to see what the problems were to drive us into these tax credits. | ||
| And now that we have to maintain them, and I'm sure the system will keep going in the upper direction. | ||
| It's never going to correct down. | ||
| That was Jeff in Florida. | ||
| We are in the fourth day of a government shutdown. | ||
| This headline from Axios, House GOP cancels more votes in escalation of shutdown strategy. | ||
| It says that House Republicans Friday canceled plans to vote next week as the federal government shut down, dragged into its, that was the third day. | ||
| It says the move means Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, is digging in against Democrats' demand to come to the table and negotiate a deal to reopen the government. | ||
| The House last month voted to pass a bill that extends 2024 funding levels until November, but Democrats largely opposed it because it lacked provisions to preserve health care access. | ||
| It goes on to say that the House had been scheduled to be in session from Tuesday, October 7th to Friday, October 10th, but Johnson redesignated it to what is called a district work period. | ||
| In other words, rather than being required to return to Washington, D.C. to vote on legislation, House members will be able to remain in their districts next week. | ||
| The House is not scheduled to meet again until October 14th, meaning at least two weeks will have gone by since the government shutdown began before the House members were gathered together on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Programming note along those lines, it is Democratic Representative Suhans Subrama, who will be having a town hall. | ||
| He has said that he will not accept a paycheck during the government shutdown. | ||
| And his town hall, this meeting, is taking place in Sterling, Virginia, in a district that's just outside the nation's capital and includes a large number of members of federal workers and contractors. | ||
| You'll be able to watch that town hall live here on C-SPAN at 2 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| You can also find it on our C-SPAN now. | ||
| That's our free mobile app or online at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Robert, also calling from Florida, a line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| First of all, thank you for C-SPAN being out there for us. | ||
| My comments, I guess, would be listening to the Affordable Care Act, so forth. | ||
| I checked back. | ||
| And back in 1946, there's a Hill Burton bill that basically said public land and public dollars allowed them to build hospitals with the agreement that they'd provide the indigent care. | ||
| Apparently, that bill sunsetted or expired after 20 years. | ||
| Just wanted to make a comment about how that switchover changed. | ||
| And maybe they could reintroduce a bill something to that effect. | ||
| And you could go as an indigent patient without having Medicare and all the different services that the government and different neighborhoods and communities, states, counties offer. | ||
| It's such a that was Robert in Florida. | ||
| David, calling from Virginia on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I'd like to talk about the debt we've accumulated. | |
| It's at, what, $37 trillion now. | ||
| It's more than 100% of the GDP. | ||
| We're paying a trillion dollars in interest on the debt. | ||
| It's about equal to or more than the entire defense budget. | ||
| And I can't see how the law of economics doesn't apply to the United States. | ||
| We won't eventually, if we keep going this way, end up with hyperinflation like the Weimar Republic in Zimbabwe, where you go to the store and a loaf of bread is $20,000. | ||
| And the problem that I see is that Congress, this is like one of the biggest problems, Congress hasn't passed a budget since 2006. | ||
| They've been doing continuing resolutions. | ||
| What that is, is just spending the same amount of money they spent in the previous year. | ||
| What's wrong with that is that every time this country hits a crisis and increases spending tremendously, like trillions of dollars like we did with the banking crisis, you know, in 2008, you pass continuing resolutions. | ||
| You keep spending at that level even after the crisis is gone. | ||
| So we did that, and then Obama comes in, so we run trillion-dollar deficits every year Obama's in office, adding $9 trillion to the national debt. | ||
| Trump comes in, same thing, trillion-dollar deficits, and then we got another crisis, the COVID crisis. | ||
| We go from spending some $4.2 trillion to almost $7 trillion. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're still spending at that level. | |
| COVID's long gone. | ||
| More continuing resolutions. | ||
| And then Biden comes in there because now we've got two crises we're spending at crazy levels at. | ||
| We go to deficits that are almost $2 trillion a year. | ||
| We're at $37 trillion in debt now. | ||
| So I think Trump's done something really incredible with terrorists. | ||
| I can't believe it that we just had a recent month where we had a surplus. | ||
| We had more money coming in than going out. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So I think maybe we don't have to become Zimbabwe of the Weimar Republic with hyperinflation and $20,000 loaf of bread. | ||
| We can go back if Congress wakes up to the seriousness of this situation, that it's just as serious as December 7th, 1941, and they get together finally and decide we got to have a budget. | ||
| That was David. | ||
| This is a headline from the Associated Press. | ||
| Trump orders Israel to stop bombing Gaza after Hamas partially accepts his peace plan. | ||
| This happened yesterday and is a story that we will be monitoring here at C-SPAN. | ||
| The deal, it says that U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday ordered Israel to stop bombing the Gaza Strip after Hamas said it had accepted some elements of his plan to end the nearly two-year war and return all remaining hostages taken in the October 7, 2023 attack. | ||
| It goes on to say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was prepared for the implementation of the, quote, first stage of Trump's plan, apparently referring to the release of hostages. | ||
| But his office said in a statement that Israel was committed to ending the war based on principles it had set out before without addressing potential gaps with Hamas. | ||
| It was yesterday that President Trump posted this video to Truth Social in response. | ||
| I want to thank the countries that helped me put this together. | ||
| Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and so many others. | ||
| So many people fought so hard. | ||
| This is a big day. | ||
| We'll see how it all turns out. | ||
| We have to get the final word down in concrete. | ||
| Very importantly, I look forward to having the hostages come home to their parents and having some of the hostages, unfortunately, you know the condition they're in, come home likewise to their parents because their parents wanted them just as much as though that young man or young woman were alive. | ||
| So I just want to let you know that this is a very special day, maybe unprecedented in many ways. | ||
| It is unprecedented. | ||
| But thank you all and thank you all to those great countries that helped. | ||
| We were given a tremendous amount of help. | ||
| Everybody was unified in wanting this war to end and seeing peace in the Middle East. | ||
| And we're very close to achieving that. | ||
| Thank you all and everybody will be treated fairly. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Let's hear from Jimmy, who's calling from California on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Hi, Jimmy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Yes, I think I've heard a lot of intelligent callers this morning and like to thank C-SPAN for the forum. | ||
| I have a couple of requests. | ||
| One of them is that I'd like C-SPAN to use charts and tables to explain some of these economic differences that we have that we keep talking about. | ||
| A lot of words thrown around, but my understanding is that they've closed down the government for $18 to $25 billion worth of subsidies for health insurance companies so people can afford their Obamacare health subsidy. | ||
| And we also just passed a big, beautiful bill that gave ICE $160 billion extra to terrorize our communities. | ||
| But my point, and the reason I called, is, first of all, my main concern about the world here, which related to the health crisis, and I'd like to get to that, is the conjob comment by the President of the United States that global warming is a conjob and a hoax. | ||
| Not in the last 66 million years in the history of this planet has the rate of carbon dioxide increase been as great as it is due to man taking sequestered carbon from under the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere. | ||
| Now, as far as health insurance goes, I personally pay $180 per month for Medicare. | ||
| I pay $700 extra for private health insurance. | ||
| When I call in for an appointment, they ask me if it's true that my health insurance coverage is Medicare. | ||
| So Medicare is paying for my insurance and my costs in the health industry, and the marketplace is simply not working. | ||
| I personally know in my lifetime many people, including insurance brokers, people that work in the legal profession, people that sell Medicare Advantage. | ||
| All of these people are part of the private health care enterprise that they profit from. | ||
| These people make millions of dollars per year. | ||
| They're some of the wealthiest people in the country, and that's why our health care costs are going up. | ||
| That is Jimmy in California. | ||
| Joseph, calling from Princeton, West Virginia, on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Joseph. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for C-SPAN Open Forum. | ||
| I believe that no force or country has been able to conquer us from outside. | ||
| Now I see my country being dismantled from within. | ||
| The President has taken away a great deal of our personal freedom. | ||
| In nine months, the Republican Party and the President have taken control of much of the three branches that were meant to be independent by the founding fathers. | ||
| Our Democratic Republic is crumbling as we silently watch. | ||
| I want for my family and fellow citizens to remember that they should be free and not subjects of some king-like ruler. | ||
| I've decided to fight back and ask you, fellow citizens, to do the same. | ||
| Alone, we have small power, power to vote, and the power to peacefully protest. | ||
| I have heard President Trump say, I'm the president and can do what I want. | ||
| I think the Supreme Court has ruled that a sitting president can do no wrong in carrying out his duties. | ||
| The voting power could be gone if he decides to cancel the 26-bit terms. | ||
| This leaves me the power of peaceful protest. | ||
| Each Tuesday, I telephone my three congressional representatives with a not insulting message asking them to use the power of their office to save our country. | ||
| Also, I've asked at least three others to do the same, and each to get three others to do the same and to pay it forward. | ||
| The Constitution preambles says we the people in order to form a perfect union. | ||
| Together we have massive power more than any politician or any other part of the government. | ||
| But we need Joseph. | ||
| I'm sorry we need to leave it there. | ||
| We are out of time. | ||
| That is all we have for today's Washington Journal, but we'll be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern and 4 a.m. Pacific with another program. | ||
| Until then, enjoy your Saturday. | ||
|
unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | |
| From Washington and across the country. | ||
| Coming up Sunday morning, we'll talk about the political impact of the government shutdown and Campaign 2026 with Kyle Kondick, managing editor of the University of Virginia's Sabado's Crystal Ball. | ||
| Then Stephen Cook with the Council on Foreign Relations talks about the reaction to the Trump administration's Gaza peace plan and broader strategy in the Middle East. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Democratic Representative Suha Subramaniam has said he will not accept a paycheck during the government shutdown. | ||
| This afternoon, Congressman Subramaniam will take questions from his constituents at a town hall meeting in Sterling, Virginia. | ||
| His congressional district, just outside the nation's capital, includes a large number of federal workers and contractors. | ||
| Watch live at 2 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseft will be part of a celebration to mark the U.S. Navy's 250th birthday. |