| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q ⁇ A and all our podcasts wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app. | |
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Jim Antle, excuse me, who's the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So can you first give us an update? | ||
| We're on day 40 of this federal government shutdown. | ||
| What's the state of play? | ||
| Well, I think things are mostly still as they have been. | ||
| You have Republicans saying that they would like the passage of the clean continuing resolution, which has passed the House and which they've had on offer. | ||
| Democrats would like to see some movement on the extension of Obamacare subsidies or some other concessions that would justify reopening the government in their minds at this time. | ||
| I think where there's been some degree of movement is we've had elections. | ||
| Democrats did well in them, to put it mildly. | ||
| And I think for some Democrats, that means, well, we've shown our base that we will hold firm, that we stood up to President Trump on this. | ||
| We reaped the electoral benefits of that. | ||
| So it may be time to look at an off-ramp from the government shutdown. | ||
| But I think for other Democrats, it's sort of a bit emboldening. | ||
| It's like, well, why stop now? | ||
| We've shown this has sort of validated the polls that suggest that perhaps Republicans are still being blamed for the shutdown despite it really hinging on a Democratic procedural vote in the Senate. | ||
| Why not see what we can get in terms of concessions from Republicans, particularly on health care, which is an issue where Democrats do tend to poll better than Republicans. | ||
| So I think there seemed to be some movement towards an end to the shutdown with maybe up to 10 Democrats being willing to vote for a continuing resolution. | ||
| But that sort of seemed to have fallen apart and based on the view that there weren't really enough concessions being wrung from Republicans. | ||
| So now, even though I do think as travel and the impending holidays and things of that nature are going to put some pressure on both sides to get a deal done, I think for right now, things are, while there are talks that I think are more serious than what has happened in the past, things are still remaining in a bit of a holding pattern. | ||
| The Senate is having a session today. | ||
| They were in yesterday, but the House is still out. | ||
| What can actually get done this weekend or even in the coming week? | ||
| Well, obviously, if you have a breakthrough in the Senate, then this whole matter can be resolved. | ||
| So if you know that you have the 60 votes to advance a continuing resolution, then I think House can come back. | ||
| Things can get resolved fairly quickly. | ||
| The likelihood is whatever does happen won't simply be the already House-passed CR. | ||
| So the House would have to, in all likelihood, vote again. | ||
| But at that point, given that Rand Paul is the one Senate Republican who's been voting against this, you need a minimum of eight Democrats to get the closure vote to really get things moving. | ||
| And if that were to happen, if you were to have a Senate breakthrough, my view is things could happen fairly quickly. | ||
| I want to turn to the elections of this past week that you mentioned, big successes for Democrats in many parts of the country. | ||
| You have a piece in the Washington Examiner magazine, what will and won't matter in the midterm elections from Tuesday's results. | ||
| And you write that this was not a guarantee of a 2026 blue wave, as some Democrats are predicting and in many ways hoping. | ||
| What leads you to that conclusion? | ||
| Well, I mean, obviously, it makes it more likely that you will see that than if the elections had gone the other way, certainly. | ||
| If Republicans had done well or held their own, you know, you might tend to think that the Democratic resistance to Trump is a non-starter. | ||
| Clearly, in these elections, that posture resonated with enough people. | ||
| But it is true that even though there was a smattering of negative results for Republicans in places like Mississippi, you know, there were some local elections, the Supreme Court races in Pennsylvania. | ||
| It's still true that the biggest elections that happened on Tuesday were in areas that President Trump didn't win in 2024, where there might have been some rightward movement, but Trump wasn't the winner even at the peak of his sort of electoral success a year ago. | ||
| So these are relatively Democratic areas, relatively blue states, and Democrats did well in them, better in many cases than even the polls were predicting. | ||
| But in the midterms, you're going to have a somewhat different map. | ||
| So the House Republicans are defending fewer swing districts and far fewer districts that voted Democratic at the presidential level than they were in 2018. | ||
| And so there's going to be a narrower set of districts that are going to be competitive, at least in the House races. | ||
| Now, it's a very small House majority that Republicans have, so it doesn't necessarily take some massive blue wave for them to take, for Democrats to flip control of that chamber. | ||
| You may only need a net gain of two or three seats, depending on how the various redistricting fights go and what the final numbers composition-wise are by the time the elections roll around. | ||
| But it's not necessarily the case that being able to win in New York City, being able to win in New Jersey, being able to win in Virginia tells us what you'd be able to do in some of the swinger House districts and also some of those Senate races. | ||
| Though obviously Democrats have to feel a lot better about next year's elections after Tuesday than they would if those races had gone differently. | ||
| Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had some takeaways from Tuesday's elections, and I want to listen to his comments that he made on the Senate floor and then get your assessment. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, Mr. President, Americans plagued by high costs fired a political torpedo this week at Donald Trump and Republicans. | ||
| They spoke loudly and clearly. | ||
| We are fed up with the high cost of living. | ||
| We're fed up with attacks on health care. | ||
| We're fed up with your broken promises. | ||
| And the question now is, will Donald Trump and Republicans listen to the American people? | ||
| Will Republicans finally work with Democrats to reopen the federal government and negotiate a fix? | ||
| And I think that is one of the two areas from Tuesday night's election that I think Republicans ought to be very concerned about is that whereas President Biden... | ||
| Vice President Harris once bore the blame and faced the political liability of inflation and the high cost of living, now as the incumbent party, Republicans have that issue as a real liability. | ||
| And the economy is not currently in a set of conditions where that is to the net benefit of Trump and the Republican Party. | ||
| And so that is something that they're going to have to try to address over the next year if they want the midterm elections to go significantly differently than Tuesday night's elections did. | ||
| In terms of the different assessments and reasons that people are giving for why the elections went the way they did, President Trump did very little campaigning for these Republicans this cycle. | ||
| And then after the election said that that was probably the reason, because he wasn't on the ballot with them and didn't necessarily get so involved. | ||
| Do you think that's a good assessment? | ||
| Well, there are a couple of different factors here. | ||
| I think certainly one of the reasons President Trump wasn't super involved in these races is that his poll numbers being down is a big part of what created the national conditions that shifted things a bit to the left of where they were in 2024. | ||
| And while the breadth and conditions under which Trump won the 2024 elections was impressive in many respects, you know, it still wasn't such a huge margin that you can have much of a shift in the leftward direction and have that not translate into Democratic victory. | ||
| So I think one of the reasons Trump wasn't very active, aside from the fact that he, you know, at least in the case of the Virginia candidate for governor, he wasn't a huge fan of, but I think mainly he wasn't involved because he knew to some extent he would be a liability in these races, that he would be used against the Republican candidates. | ||
| But I think it is also true that there are a lot of low-propensity Republican-leaning voters who turn out for Trump and who do not necessarily reliably turn out for down ballot Republicans. | ||
| And there's also some question, and this is going to be a very important thing for Republicans not just next year, but also obviously in 2028 and beyond. | ||
| There are questions about whether Trump's appeal, particularly to certain groups, will transfer to Republicans when he's not on the ballot and then perhaps when he's finally gone from the political scene. | ||
| So I think it's a little bit of both. | ||
| People who are very motivated to protest against Trump and to hand an electoral rebuke to Republicans over Trump will vote regardless of whether it's an off-year election, a special election, an election for dog catcher. | ||
| A lot of very Trump-friendly voters are more likely to take a pass if the president isn't on the ballot himself. | ||
| Even in local races like the New York City mayoral race, it was effectively Trump on the ballot in many ways. | ||
| Although Zoram Mamdani, the mayor-elect, campaigned mainly on affordability issues. | ||
| What do you think he faces in terms of keeping some of those campaign promises? | ||
| Well, obviously, one of the big things that Andrew Cuomo, the former governor and his main opponent in that race, one of the main arguments he tried to make was that a lot of Mamdani's promises can't really be kept, that they're unrealistic. | ||
| And Mandani in his victory speech really set a high standard for himself. | ||
| He essentially said that there's no problem too small for government to care about and no problem that government can't effectively manage. | ||
| And that should really be how Democrats judge their success going forward. | ||
| I think the thing with local government is it's much more results oriented than how things might be judged at, say, a federal level. | ||
| Whereas there are certain bills that one side may like and may satisfy certain ideological or policy goals that that side has had for a long time. | ||
| Other side might not like it. | ||
| But there simply will be certain metrics in terms of is crime under control? | ||
| Is crime up or down? | ||
| Are the streets being taken care of? | ||
| Infrastructure in general. | ||
| If you're doing free buses, is that working? | ||
| Are the buses showing up on time? | ||
| Are people using them, finding them clean, finding them safe? | ||
| The business climate in the city. | ||
| Does he actually deliver things in terms of lowering the cost of living? | ||
| New York City has been a very expensive place to live even before we had inflation running at a 41-year high a couple years ago. | ||
| So even before inflation emerged as an issue, again, for the first time in decades, New York City has always been known as kind of a tough place for, you know, you could be affluent living in another city and really feel a lot of financial strain living in New York. | ||
| So I think some of those things are really tangible, and he's either going to be able to deliver on them or he's not. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because President Trump also campaigned on affordability and promising to lower prices for Americans. | ||
| How do you think he's delivered on that particular campaign promise so far? | ||
| Well, obviously not to the satisfaction of a lot of voters, both those who turned out on Tuesday and what we can assess from public opinion polls. | ||
| I think they've made some progress in terms of accelerating energy production. | ||
| I think they've done some things on the deregulatory front. | ||
| But he's also sort of battled with the Federal Reserve. | ||
| The Fed continues to regard the rate of inflation as being higher than what it would prefer, the 2% that it would prefer. | ||
| The challenge with inflation is that, you know, when you have a recession and the recession ends, you know, the economy starts to grow again, unemployment goes down, people go back to work, assuming they're able to get jobs that pay comparably to what they were being paid before, life sort of returns somewhat to normal, no matter how bad the recession might have been at the time. | ||
| With inflation, prices go up. | ||
| You may be able to then get inflation under control and you're lowering the rate of inflation, but prices don't necessarily go back down to what they were before you had this big spade of inflation. | ||
| So a lot of people, I think, voted for Trump hoping that the economic conditions of, say, 2019 could be quickly or immediately restored. | ||
| And the reality is the cumulative price increases that began when the inflation started to heat up are remaining in place even as the rate of inflation lowers. | ||
| So, you know, I think that a lot of what you can do with inflation is simply try not to make it worse, but there is a certain amount of managing of expectations, and that's a very difficult sell. | ||
| And I think President Biden and Vice President Harris found that a tough sell, and I think Trump is now. | ||
| We're going to be taking your questions for Jim Antel, who's the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Before we go to callers, I want to ask you about a bit of an internal fight within the Republican Party, and this has to do with what's going on at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| There's coverage here in the Wall Street Journal, and I'll just read a bit of it for context. | ||
| The crackup at the Heritage Foundation is a warning sign from MAGA World. | ||
| By defending a controversial Tucker Carlson interview, think tank President Kevin Roberts unleashed a flood of discontent in the conservative establishment. | ||
| And it goes on to say, the Heritage Foundation is no ordinary think tank. | ||
| Since the days of Ronald Reagan, it has been the conservative movement on the march, delivering ready-made policies and battle-hardened pundits to Republican presidents. | ||
| Heritage spoke proudly with one voice, insisting that its scholars take a unified stand on key issues. | ||
| Today, that almost military discipline has collapsed, and many current and former staffers blame Kevin Roberts, who took over as the foundation's president in 2021. | ||
| They joke that the group's operating principle is now more of a one-man policy, with Roberts moving aggressively to align the think tank with the Make America Great Again movement. | ||
| As Democrats revel in their electoral success this week, the divisions at Heritage highlight the growing fractures facing President Trump's Winning 2024 coalition. | ||
| I know this seems very DC inside baseball, but talk a little bit about what's happening at the Heritage Foundation and why that matters more broadly for the conservative movement and American politics. | ||
| I mean, there's an element of it that is entirely DC inside baseball. | ||
| And there's an aspect to it, though, as well that has broader implications for the Republican electoral coalition going forward. | ||
| So I think when Kevin Roberts took over the Heritage Foundation, part of what he's been trying to do is keep that venerable conservative institution that has had a lot of its identity and a lot of its policy positioning defined in the Reagan era, | ||
| which is obviously a very important period of time for the conservative movement, but also at this point a very long time ago in a grand scheme of things, at least certainly within an electoral timeframe. | ||
| I think Roberts has been trying to keep heritage abreast of changes going on in the conservative movement, whether that's changes to the Republican Electoral Coalition, whether that's changes in leadership from Bush-era figures to President Donald Trump, | ||
| whether that is changes in attitudes and viewpoints among younger conservatives, and then attempting sort of to figure out really where things are headed. | ||
| And I think Roberts has been trying to adapt heritage to that without really making a clean break from the Reaganite consensus that came before. | ||
| And I think even before the current controversy, he was at times finding that that is not always very easy to do and that not everybody internally is necessarily going to A, want to do that at all, but two, | ||
| people will have different interpretations of what that would mean and what that would really look like if you were to try to adapt it to certain things and what things are sort of timeless principles that can't be altered or can't be broken with or violated and what things are really more a matter of prudential judgment. | ||
| And so I think when the current controversy... | ||
| And just to be clear, the current controversy is that Roberts was defending Tucker Carlson, for doing an interview with Nick Fuentes, which many people said was a bad idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And Nick Fuentes has trafficked in genuine anti-Semitism, in my view, certainly in Holocaust denial. | ||
| And he leaves sort of ambiguous as to what he's saying seriously and what is sort of a subversive joke and things like that. | ||
| But that's sort of why Nick Fuentes in particular is a controversial figure. | ||
| So in my view, not being entirely privy to all of the inner workings, but just as an informed observer looking on the outside in, you know, it looks to me that there was some pressure to maybe distance Heritage from Tucker Carlson, which Kevin Roberts did not want to do. | ||
| And he received advice from younger staffers to forcefully push back on these efforts and to publicly push back on these efforts. | ||
| And then in the process of doing that, got drawn into a debate over Nick Fuentes that he wasn't really ready to have and committed himself and his institution to a position he wasn't really ready to defend. | ||
| And he's been trying to extricate himself from that ever since. | ||
| It kind of reflects the larger issues within the Republican Party about sort of which factions they're going to choose to uplift, you know, especially when you consider what this movement looks like after President Trump. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| And there are ways in which the Republican coalition under Trump is less internally coherent than it was as the Reagan coalition. | ||
| Now, to people from outside the coalition, it has never looked perfectly coherent. | ||
| It's like, well, why do we not like government when it comes to the economy, but we like it on social issues and foreign policy? | ||
| But to people who are conservatives and are long-standing Republicans, it had a logic to it that did make sense. | ||
| You know, it wasn't like that necessarily pre-Reagan, the Republican Party. | ||
| And it's becoming a bit less like that under Trump. | ||
| So you have a lot of working class voters who've been added to the coalition, which has certainly put the Republicans at a stronger position in the Electoral College. | ||
| But you retain a lot of evangelical and religious conservative voters who became an important part of the coalition under Reagan, still important part under Trump. | ||
| So there's some tensions on economics, on foreign policy, increasingly over Israel, which is sort of the proximate cause of the heritage crackup. | ||
| So how do political leaders manage this? | ||
| And still, there are large parts of red areas of the country where you could still win as a Republican campaigning as if it's 2004. | ||
| And so a lot of those political leaders are hesitant to make any of these types of shifts. | ||
| All right, let's get to your calls for Jim Antel of the Washington Examiner. | ||
| Deanna is in Kentucky on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Deanna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is to ask him who is in control of both houses of Virginia and New Jersey. | |
| And I also like to ask him, it wasn't mentioned that Democrats won down ballot offices in red states. | ||
| And I'd like to also say that they're condemning Mamdani about him saying that he can do something they can't. | ||
| And the gentleman said, you know, talking about Biden, but Trump said that he would get rid of the high prices on the first day. | ||
| I'd just like to hear his comment. | ||
| Well, I know, Jim, you already commented on whether the president has kept up with his promises on lowering prices. | ||
| But what about what you were saying about the down ballot races? | ||
| Yeah, well, I did mention the Mississippi in particular was one I mentioned. | ||
| But there weren't very many of these types of races. | ||
| And in the midterm elections, you're going to see a lot more races. | ||
| But it's certainly the case that high-propensity voters lean Democratic at this point. | ||
| And that means you're going to see a lot of special election wins. | ||
| You're going to see a lot of off-year election wins. | ||
| And if Republicans don't find a way to counteract that, that bodes well for Democrats in the midterm elections. | ||
| Doesn't necessarily translate in the same way in a presidential election year. | ||
| I mean, if you look back when Democrats had the issue with their coalition involving a lot of lower propensity voters, Democrats had worse midterm elections under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than Donald Trump did in 2018. | ||
| But those midterm elections ultimately didn't say anything about the subsequent presidential elections. | ||
| Bill Clinton was reelected quite easily. | ||
| Barack Obama was re-elected in a more competitive race, but fairly easily. | ||
| And I suspect that if the pandemic hadn't happened, Trump would have been narrowly re-elected. | ||
| Obviously, that's something that can always be debated now. | ||
| So that, I think, is a part of it. | ||
| In terms of whether people could keep their promises, that's something at every campaign that you're going to be evaluated on the basis of your promise keeping. | ||
| I mean, I think a thing that's going to be debated heading into 2028 about the Trump administration, depending on where things stand at that point, is clearly President Trump decided to prioritize certain things after getting elected in terms of his broader economic agenda, using tariffs to try to rebalance trade, | ||
| try to reassure certain American jobs, try to extract certain concessions from foreign governments that sat potentially sat uneasily alongside some of the promises that he was making about prices. | ||
| Tariffs certainly opened the door. | ||
| You know, there's a dispute as to how much tariffs have affected consumer prices up to this point. | ||
| But they at a minimum open the door to give you a plausible way of blaming Trump for the high prices. | ||
| Tariffs are certainly something that will make certain goods more expensive, although the importers can eat the costs. | ||
| There are other ways to shift them. | ||
| But should Trump have prioritized cost of living issues versus this wider economic agenda that would take potentially a longer time to implement? | ||
| We'll have to see. | ||
| A lot of it also, too, is Trump pursued a more modest tariffs agenda in his first term, and that was able to coincide with fairly low inflation. | ||
| Inflation didn't really become an issue until the pandemic and still wasn't really much of an issue when he left office. | ||
| But this has been a much broader tariffs agenda, and it's coming after several years of inflation already being in effect. | ||
| Jim is in Dubuque, Iowa, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I think the information that the public has provided about inflation is not very useful. | ||
| If you look at the Chapwood Index, which reports see unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation, the top 150 items of which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation, the average is well over 10% right now. | ||
| If you look at the site of John Williams, the economist who has a website called shadowgovernmentstatistics.com, who uses the techniques we use to calculate these numbers like GDP and inflation up until the early 80s when they began to manipulate them for political reasons. | ||
| Inflation is somewhere around 8%. | ||
| And unemployment, when you actually count people who gave up looking for work and things like that, is presently around 25%, which is Great Depression levels. | ||
| Rodolph and Reinhardt, economists. | ||
| Jim, I understand that you're raising the issue about whether or not the data we're getting actually reflects what's happening in America. | ||
| But what's your question for Jim? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wonder if he agrees with Roehoff and Reinhardt, economists from Harvard and Stanford, who observed, who published a book and showed that a country that has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90% is on an irreversible doom. | |
| We're presently at about 120%. | ||
| Yeah, I think our debt-to-GDP ratio is unsustainable, but I also don't see a viable political solution. | ||
| Neither political party seems interested in the debt anymore, if they ever really were. | ||
| And the voting public largely seems disinterested in that as an issue. | ||
| In the 90s, you had candidates like Ross Perot, whatever you thought of the viability of some of his proposals. | ||
| He was at least running on the issue of the national debt. | ||
| Millions of people were voting for him. | ||
| There were some people pushing back on the debt within the Republican Party. | ||
| You had figures like Paul Sagas running as Democrats who were concerned about the debt. | ||
| You even had a brief period of bipartisan budget surpluses in the late 90s. | ||
| There's really no incentive, however, to reform entitlement programs. | ||
| There may be a little bit of a desire to reform Pentagon spending, but even there, not much of a desire to shrink American commitments abroad, despite Trump successfully campaigning on that issue. | ||
| Obviously, taxes remain a very controversial issue. | ||
| So all of these things have to be dealt with and paid for in some way, and there doesn't really seem to be any constituency for making the math add up. | ||
| Ruben is in Morgan City, Louisiana, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ruben. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, I am born as born by political birth was in Republican, Reaganism as a Republican. | ||
| And, you know, we were big for free trade. | ||
| We wanted to get products into this country as cheap as possible. | ||
| I remember arguing with my Democratic friends about why we're anti-tariff. | ||
| That had to do with the unions and protectionism. | ||
| And we wanted to make sure that the Japanese did not take over our car markets, our automobile markets, and our electronics, that TV sets would no longer be made in America. | ||
| Cars would no longer be made in America. | ||
| And the other thing was abortion. | ||
| As a conservative, very much for a national abortion ban. | ||
| Yeah, we wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, but we don't believe it's okay to have abortion in any state. | ||
| So, you know, I just would like to get some response to what does it mean to be a Republican today or conservative today if you don't have Donald Trump at the top of the ticket? | ||
| Well, a lot of that will depend on who is at the top of the ticket, right? | ||
| So, you know, at the moment, I think the person best positioned to succeed him would be Vice President JD Vance, who I think would be more socially conservative than the president, but also probably more willing to experiment with different things that he might think would benefit the working class economically. | ||
| So that could certainly signal a shift from what we've seen in the past. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio, I don't think, would run, but he's also somebody who would be well positioned if circumstances allowed. | ||
| And, you know, he had traditionally bid more in the Reaganite mold, maybe even a bit of a neoconservative, but he's moved much more, even economically, in the populist direction over the past decade of Trump. | ||
| You know, so I think there would be, at a minimum, subtle but perhaps significant differences just between those two gentlemen, although I do still think that certain Trumpian innovations of the Republican brand would remain in effect. | ||
| And then if we're not talking either of them, it becomes a bit more difficult to see who it might be. | ||
| You know, there's obviously by then former Florida governor Ron DeSantis, he's the governor. | ||
| He's still the governor right now, but by 2028, he'll be out of office. | ||
| Nikki Haley is obviously somebody who still might harbor some ambition in that area, but it's a little harder to see how that would, how she could win, given that Trump just won. | ||
| And, you know, Ted Cruz, I think, is somebody who still would like to be president. | ||
| But, you know, a lot really rides on who wins the 2028 primaries. | ||
| And I think at the moment, Vance really has the inside track for that. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| In response to the Tuesday electoral results, JD Vance had several comments about it on X, mentioning, I think it's idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states, but a few thoughts. | ||
| And he talks here about voter turnout. | ||
| Our coalition is lower propensity, and that means we have to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past. | ||
| We need to focus on the home front. | ||
| The president has done a lot that has already paid off and lower interest rates and lower inflation, but we inherited a disaster from Joe Biden, and Rome wasn't built in a day. | ||
| We're going to keep on working to make a decent life affordable in this country. | ||
| And that's the metric by which we'll be ultimately judged in 2026 and beyond. | ||
| And then says the infighting is stupid. | ||
| I care about my fellow citizens, particularly young Americans, being able to afford a decent life. | ||
| I care about immigration and our sovereignty. | ||
| And I care about establishing peace overseas so our resources can be focused at home. | ||
| If you care about those things too, let's work together. | ||
| Hitting on a lot of those points that you raised about what the future of the party might look like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, and I think a lot of those points are valid. | ||
| And, you know, I do think they will to some extent be judged on how they perform on the cost of living metric. | ||
| But I also think, given that Donald Trump will not be on the ballot in 2028, and I'm fairly confident in making that assertion, that 2028 will in some ways be a whole different campaign. | ||
| You'll be facing the binary choice between a Democratic nominee, maybe Gavin Newsom, maybe the former vice president. | ||
| We'll have to see, maybe somebody we're not even thinking about or talking about right now. | ||
| And the vice president. | ||
| Now, Vance will face some of the challenges that Harris faced in that he's going to be tied to an existing Cubbit administration. | ||
| And so he'll get all of the benefits associated with that, but he'll also get any of the criticisms that are still being made of Trump at that time. | ||
| But it'll have a person in Trump, I think, who is even less eager than Biden to see his successor potentially showing daylight between the two of them. | ||
| So that's going to be a very challenging thing, I think, to manage. | ||
| Greg is in Wisconsin on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning. | |
| James, it sounds like you have a cold. | ||
| I hope everything's okay. | ||
| A couple of things I do want to comment and a question. | ||
| The comment being that when we associate the results in the recent election, the White House press corps, you know, ask questions, and when Trump gives an answer, he's stating things of metrics that aren't really accurate. | ||
| Now, what those metrics might be back and forth, okay. | ||
| But for presidents over the course of Biden, over the course of Trump, a question is asked at a press conference, and it sometimes is just equally dismissed, saying it's fake news or whatever it might be. | ||
| But it seems to me there's never any follow-ups. | ||
| And is it that important? | ||
| My question is, is access that important to where you give up your ability to do actual journalism and questions to have access to a president? | ||
| My concern is that the more and more we see these press conferences, it's turning into someone interpreting the president, interpreting the question, calling it fake news, dismissing it, and not putting a cohesive statement of at least even three minutes on a policy like health care. | ||
| For example, health care, I'm going to give you great health care. | ||
| That's what Trump has stated. | ||
| But we have yet to see any plan of health care at all from this administration. | ||
| And they have control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency. | ||
| So why is the press not asking those types of questions in that type of situation? | ||
| Just like in Biden's. | ||
| Let's allow Jim to respond here. | ||
| Well, you know, I think there's a lot that goes into that. | ||
| So, you know, I think that in terms of access to the president, I think that press conferences are good, and I think it's desirable for the president and for cabinet officials and for the press secretary to be regularly made available to reporters. | ||
| And I think it's been a positive that Trump has been more available in that way than Biden was. | ||
| But I don't think that's the sum total of how journalism has to be conducted. | ||
| And I don't necessarily think even these public press appearances are the most important thing in terms of reporting on what's going on within an administration. | ||
| And so whether the president is introducing a health care plan or whether Congress is close to passing one or is there any important committee that is coming up with one? | ||
| I mean, you can know the answers to those things without needing the president or needing the speaker or needing the Senate majority leader to tell you in a press conference. | ||
| Is it useful to, once you know the answer to those questions, to regularly ask why there isn't a plan or what your plan would be or when are you going to have a plan? | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| But you don't necessarily have to just ask a question at a press conference to know Whether Trump care is about to be signed into law, there's a lot of publicly available information that media outlets can certainly suss out that answer those questions in a way that's more reliable than what a politician's answer to that question might be. | ||
| So there's the question of optics, there's the question of political pressure, which is obviously there's some level of controversy of whether that should be properly the media's role. | ||
| And then there is just the discovery and reporting of accurate information. | ||
| And those are not necessarily in conflict with each other, but they are different. | ||
| And I would say that the information aspect of it is what's most important. | ||
| Well, thank you very much for your time, Jim Antel, who's the executive editor of Washington Examiner magazine. | ||
| Thank you so much for coming back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| All right, later on on Washington Journal, we're going to take more of your calls and comments in open forum. | ||
| But joining us next will be the nation's D.C. Bureau Chief, Chris Lehman, who's going to discuss this week's elections, including Democratic Socialist Zoram Mamdani's win as the first Muslim mayor of New York City, the progressive agenda, as well as campaign 2026. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold new original series, today with our guest, the Chronicler of Adventures, award-winning, best-selling author David Graham, whose books include The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The New Yorker. | |
| and The Wager. | ||
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | ||
| So what about this fact, about this occurrence, made you think this could be something worth your time? | ||
| And I started to realize that this odd little old manuscript contained, you know, the seeds of one of the most extraordinary stories of survival and mayhem I had ever come across. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with David Graham today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| And past precedent nominal. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a kangaroo chorus. | |
| Fridays, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Politico Playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns is host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue. | ||
| Ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides. | ||
| Fridays at 7 and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Retired George Mason University history professor Peter Henriquez starts off his author's note writing, quote, if anyone had told me in the summer of 2023 that I would be writing one more book on George Washington, I would have expressed extreme skepticism. | ||
| In episode six of this Book Notes Plus podcast series in 2021, Professor Enriquez told us the same thing. | ||
| But at 88 years old, he's back with another book on our first president, George Washington, his quest for honor and fame. | ||
| In the afterword chapter at the end of the book, Peter Henriquez puts a special emphasis on George Washington and slavery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Peter Henriquez with his book, George Washington, His Quest for Honor and Fame. | |
| 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. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Chris Lehman, who's the D.C. Bureau Chief of The Nation magazine. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks, Kimberly. | ||
| Always a pleasure to be here. | ||
| Can I get your assessment of the state of play of the shutdown negotiations right now? | ||
| I know the Senate is supposed to be in today, but what are the actual prospects for negotiations? | ||
| They remain in a quagmire, the most effective description. | ||
| Democrats had an offer, Republican Spurn, on the basis that Republicans are saying that you end the shutdown first before you negotiate on the ACA Obama care premiums, which is at the center of this fight. | ||
| And Democrats are saying no, you know, we need assurances. | ||
| And so now some Republican senators are coming up with sort of Hail Mary sort of plans. | ||
| Like Senator Kennedy in Louisiana had a flexible savings account plan that is not that serious. | ||
| So yeah, you'll see a lot more of this back and forth. | ||
| And the underlying dynamic is Democrats have a very popular issue at the center of this. | ||
| I think it pulls 80 to 20 support for extending the ACA premiums. | ||
| So they feel like they have the upper hands politically in these negotiations, whereas Republicans are sort of digging in. | ||
| And President Trump, meanwhile, is pressuring Republicans to nuke the filibuster, which would be a precedent that would upset a lot of people in the Senate. | ||
| And the Democrats got quite a bit of wind in their sales this past week with the outcome of some of these off-year elections. | ||
| Let's look at some of the results you had. | ||
| You had in New Jersey win a 56 to 43 percent with governor-elect Mikey Sherrill, governor-elect Abigail Spamberger, Democrat in Virginia won 57 to 43, plus 14 points there. | ||
| Obviously, the New York City mayoral election with Mom Donnie getting ahead there by a pretty significant margin. | ||
| And then in California, the voters chose yes on Proposition 50, redistricting 64 to 36 percent with a 0.28 spread there. | ||
| And even though going back to that New York City mayoral election, he broke 50 percent. | ||
| It was a three-way race, so that was a pretty decent margin there. | ||
| Why do you think Democrats did so well last Tuesday at both the state level as well as in some of these local elections? | ||
| Well, you know, there's an obvious disclaimer that this is, these are off-year elections in very disparate settings. | ||
| It's very easy to over-interpret. | ||
| But I do think it is clear that President Trump is, even though he says he's not on the ballot, he is for Democrats. | ||
| They are very disenchanted with the direction of the country, the state of the economy. | ||
| And you're seeing that reflected, you know, there were polls showing before the election, the New Jersey race, you know, sort of being a toss-up and it was a blowout. | ||
| Not the same in Virginia, but similar results. | ||
| These margins are sort of eye-opening. | ||
| And the Mamdani election is also interesting because it's a rebuke to both Trump and the Democratic establishment, which poses a lot of interesting questions going into 2026. | ||
| Your publication, The Nation, was pretty prominent in the New York campaign because you all endorsed Mom Dhani back in May, quite early in the primary, before his upset win over the three other main contenders. | ||
| Why did you all endorse him back then? | ||
| How was he different? | ||
| Well, he is, you know, I think a change candidate, and The Nation is a change magazine, by and large. | ||
| And he, I think, represents a way out of a lot of the, you know, ever since the 2024 debacle for Democrats, there's been a lot of navel-gazing, a lot of post-mortems about how messaging should be tweaked. | ||
| You've seen, it seems, centrist group after centrist group and the Democratic side comes up with a report saying, don't use certain words or don't, you know, stay focused on, quote, kitchen table issues. | ||
| And what's interesting is Mamdani is laser focused on kitchen table issues. | ||
| Affordability is the corner, you know, pretty much the entirety of his campaign. | ||
| And he has very concrete measures to address this crisis, and that's clearly appealing. | ||
| And what's striking is a lot of national Democratic leaders are pretending like he doesn't exist. | ||
| You know, Hakeem Jeffries very grudgingly offered an endorsement the week of the election. | ||
| Schumer wouldn't even say who he voted for in the New York election, which I think is a pretty clear tell he voted for Cuomo. | ||
| So it's interesting, the Democratic leadership cast doesn't like this moment, whereas I think a lot of people in the Democratic base are really energized by Mamdani's when it suggests, among other things, that there's been this intra-party debate about cutting loose support for trans rights or LBGQT rights. | ||
| And I think Momdami sort of threaded the needle there by just saying, you know, let's look at what unites us. | ||
| Let's look at the epic struggle to just keep your head above water in a city like New York. | ||
| Let's address those issues. | ||
| It's a universal appeal, and I think that it's proved pretty effective. | ||
| Washington Journal has an exclusive look at the cover of the nation's upcoming issue that's going to be out this Tuesday, looking on the Mamdani victory. | ||
| It shows a smiling Mom Dhani and reads, extra, extra, Mamdani beats Trump and the billionaire class and the Democratic naysayers. | ||
| Can you elaborate? | ||
| Well, I will largely end up saying what I just said. | ||
| But yeah, I think, you know, the billionaire class part is a reflection of there are all these sort of finance titans in New York, like David Sachs famously, who's been out there attacking Mamdani. | ||
| They've been saying they're going to leave the city under his election already. | ||
| They're walking back a lot of those threats. | ||
| If you're working in finance, you're in New York at that sort of level of operation anyway. | ||
| But I think, you know, again, I think we're trying to address this debate within the Democratic Party of how best to move forward. | ||
| And Mamdani definitely represents this very inclusive, very popular sort of appeal. | ||
| What are some of the challenges he's going to face in terms of actually delivering on those promises? | ||
| You mentioned he's got concrete strategies ahead, but what's in the way of actually delivering them? | ||
| you know, politics. | ||
| And he will have to get these measures, you know, which include free and faster buses, a freeze on rents, you know, potentially publicly owned grocery stores, things like that. | ||
| So yeah, it's going to be a big challenge to go from a campaign that has immense momentum behind it to broker deals and make the New York City Council go along, make Kathy Hochell, the governor of New York, go along. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So who knows? | |
| Mamdani opponents are framing his victory in a variety of ways. | ||
| Here's a New York Post front page, a cover showing a picture of Mamdani holding a hammer and sickle, and it says, on your marks, spelled like Karl Marx, get set, Zoe, Socialist Mom Dhani, rins the race for mayor, the red apple, making sort of all these allusions to communism. | ||
| This is a common theme that Republicans are using talking about Mom Dhani. | ||
| Do you think that this strategy is actually going to make a difference? | ||
| No, I think it largely appeals to people who are already ill-disposed towards Mom Dhani's candidate. | ||
| I will say, I find the New York Post's headlines and tabloid coverage quite entertaining. | ||
| And I think it's certainly successful in those terms. | ||
| But yeah, I think sort of red baiting more than 30 years after the collapse of the Cold War, I don't think is going to really engage the general electorate. | ||
| Zooming out, who are the leaders of the Democratic Party right now? | ||
| That's a very good and very open question. | ||
| There are a lot of people positioning themselves for a potential 2028 run. | ||
| Gavin Newsom is an obvious figure, and I think the win in the California redistricting vote is going to certainly be a shot in the arm for his prospects. | ||
| I think J.B. Pritzker in Illinois is also emerged as a very eloquent anti-Trump voice, and he's doing important work, especially in the disgraceful broad view detention facility where there are so many protests. | ||
| He has really drawn attention to that. | ||
| It's interesting, though, there aren't a whole lot of figures in Congress. | ||
| And I guess we should also mention Kamala Harris, who I think was flirting with the idea of succeeding Newsom as governor of California, but I think has pushed that aside, which could be a sign that she wants to take another run at the presidency. | ||
| We're going to be taking your questions for Chris Lehman, who is the D.C. Bureau Chief of the Nation magazine. | ||
| Democrats can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| While folks are calling in, I wonder what you think the wins, especially of progressive candidates like Mamdani, is going to mean for the broader field of candidates in the midterm elections in 2026, as well as, as you just mentioned, what it means for even the party platform heading into 2028. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because shortly after Mamdani's victory, Josh Shapiro, who's a pretty moderate governor of Pennsylvania, kind of came out swinging against JD Vance over the shutdown fight and said a lot of sort of was a striking departure from his usual rhetoric, | ||
| saying J.D. Bans got rich writing this memoir about his hard-scrabble Appalachian childhood and coming of age, and he's now showing his true colors by taking away insurance premiums, trying to stop SNAP benefits from food benefits from going to Americans. | ||
| So I think politicians are not terribly original people. | ||
| So when they see something that works, they try it out. | ||
| They emulate it. | ||
| So I think this direction, you know, could I've always sort of argued economic populism is the best way to counter what I view as phony populism on the right that offers sort of identity-based anti-immigrant hatreds and anti-Muslim and now increasingly anti-Jewish hatreds in lieu of a concrete universalist program that can benefit everyone. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| Even though Mamdani, Democratic Socialist, very, very progressive, won his race, you also had the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey won by moderate Democrats. | ||
| Which is appropriate. | ||
| You know, it's a big country. | ||
| There are many different, you know, in both New Jersey and Virginia, independent voters are, you know, moderates on either side of the partisan divide or key constituencies. | ||
| So you have to reach out to them. | ||
| And I think, you know, the party found candidates who did well in meeting that challenge. | ||
| You know, the Democrats do need a Big Ten, as any, you know, anyone doing mass politics in a country the sides needs to accommodate many positions and points of view. | ||
| Speaking of one of those governor's races in New Jersey, we've got Jerry, who's in Sewell, New Jersey on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I have a comment and a question for you. | ||
| With the elections of these Democrats, there was a break between Trump's first election and the second. | ||
| And it was run by Democrats. | ||
| And resoundingly, Trump won the election. | ||
| Now, my fear factor for the Democrats is they got a progressive agenda again, back to where they lost the election in the middle here between Trump's two terms. | ||
| Now the question I have for you is, if Mamdani and the Democrats do not succeed at what they ran on, like especially Mandani in New York, he's got a lot of young people that voted for him. | ||
| Is he going to piss them off or turn them off? | ||
| And they'll vote against him, and it'll be back, and the Republican may have a chance to win New York because of it. | ||
| If he gets his agenda through, New York is done. | ||
| It's doomed. | ||
| People are going to be moving, especially the wealthy. | ||
| So my question to you is, I think they're kind of like between a rock and a hard place here. | ||
| Everybody's applauding that they won, but they're kind of like if they do what they say they're going to do, they could lose the election again. | ||
| And if they don't say what they're going to do, what's going to happen then? | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Thank you for your comment and question. | ||
| Yeah, it's very high stakes for Mamdani. | ||
| And as we were saying earlier, it's going to be a big level of difficulty. | ||
| But I think Mamadani often echoes back to Fiore LaGuardia and who I think he somewhat misleadingly calls a Democratic socialist. | ||
| He was a Republican actually at a very different time. | ||
| But, you know, I think local elections, as James Antel was saying earlier, are all about results and delivery. | ||
| And I think I don't think the threat of an Ayn Rand type capital strike in New York is a serious thing. | ||
| I don't think you know. | ||
| Can you elaborate what you wow? | ||
| And Atlas shrugged. | ||
| It's a novel where all the wealthiest, quote, creators leave and sort of try to start their own hyper-capitalist utopia. | ||
| I think everyone, you know, Mamdani himself sort of quoted Andrew Cuomo's dad in his election night speech saying, you know, you govern in prose, you campaign in poetry. | ||
| And that's absolutely true. | ||
| And I think, you know, a lot of people will be looking to the results, you know, whether he's able to deliver on his platform in New York. | ||
| I guess I'm not as sure that it would translate onto a shift in the national fate of the party. | ||
| But you do reference, you know, what is this ongoing debate, whether the party should tack to the center, should moderate its positions, or be more progressive. | ||
| Kamala Harris actually did not run a notably progressive campaign. | ||
| And the issue of the Gaza War in particular was a big albatross. | ||
| And what's one striking thing about Mamdani's win is he was very forceful in denouncing what is a very unpopular and brutal occupation war. | ||
| And, you know, pundits predicted that would, you know, there's a big Jewish vote in New York. | ||
| It would go badly. | ||
| It didn't so much. | ||
| So that's, you know, these things are complicated. | ||
| Joe is in Tampa, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I guess my thoughts run this way as I am thinking about the topics you all are mentioning. | ||
| It's just very interesting to me to think about the fact that the Democratic Party looks like it's really centering on hating Trump. | ||
| And at the same time, while they're doing that, they are focusing very, very clearly on socialism. | ||
| And, you know, it's clear, I think, to anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute that socialism only concentrates power in the government. | ||
| So, I mean, you know, you're seeing Trump as such a hated figure, but yet you're setting our country up for another, whether it's on the Democratic side, another leader in a government that has the same type of power. | ||
| So, I mean, it's very contrary. | ||
| And I think anyone that thinks about it understands the Democratic Party has become really a flashpoint for everything people's parents have told them not to be in their life. | ||
| That is, you know, lawlessness at the border, lawlessness in the country. | ||
| It's a shame that people in our country really have fallen for these type of things that have happened before, concepts, whether it's from the Castros of the world or whether it's the mousetongs of the world. | ||
| It's a shame that people have even began to continue to trifle in this. | ||
| And that's my thoughts. | ||
| Joe was talking there about Democrats' opposition to Trump motivating everything, but Trump's approval ratings are down pretty consistently, especially in some of these areas that just held elections. | ||
| This is from NBC News, their exit poll in some of these elections. | ||
| In New Jersey, Trump's disapproval rating was 55% in Virginia, 56%. | ||
| In New York City, where Mamdani's win, 69%. | ||
| In California, where that proposition related to redistricting passed, 63%. | ||
| Yeah, the Trump hidden part of it is, I think, a reflection of that polling. | ||
| Again, politicians are opportunists, and right now, Trump is registering a historic low in his polling, even surpassing the end of his first term. | ||
| So, you know, politics is about creating enemies, and it's not the most attractive part of it. | ||
| But negative partisanship is sort of the direction that our politics has been headed well before Trump. | ||
| As to socialism as a sort of Maoist monolith, there's actually a robust and healthy socialist tradition in this country. | ||
| Milwaukee had a socialist mayor, Victor Berger, who was very successful, coined the term sewer socialism, which is to say you deliver on basic municipal services, as Berger did, and people care less about this high-octane ideological labeling. | ||
| I don't think as mayor of New York, Mamdani is going to be focused on nationalizing the means of production. | ||
| I think he's going to be focused on continuing rents and rebust service and things like that. | ||
| Julius is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Julius. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, very refreshing, your guest. | |
| He speaks with some sanity and some insight. | ||
| Typically, we get the think tanks that, you know, just sort of parrot the billionaire class talking points. | ||
| So this is very refreshing. | ||
| I'm glad that he's doing a little history on socialism. | ||
| We all love the military, right? | ||
| The military would be socialism. | ||
| I wanted to say about Mamdani. | ||
| I fell in love with him when they asked him on the debate stage whether he was going to Israel. | ||
| And he said, no, I'll be right here working with the New Yorkers and trying to make it more affordable. | ||
| So for your guest, I think one issue that's coming up and kind of the question is, is, you know, I'm really worried about the country. | ||
| The callers that call in, the level of ignorance, the animosity toward the sides. | ||
| I don't stand with Democrats or Republicans. | ||
| I think they're both pretty awful, the parties. | ||
| I do like Mamdani. | ||
| So the question is, is affordability. | ||
| Trump ran on it, right? | ||
| Now the Democratic Party's running on it. | ||
| Mamdani ran on it. | ||
| I'm really interested to know what the guest sees as what's happening and sort of draw some conclusions from that. | ||
| The thing that I believe that's happening is there's something called income inequality. | ||
| It's worse than probably any time, even worse than like the Gilded Age. | ||
| And so you have this very concentrated wealth, and it's impacting everything, the media, our governments, their level of power and control. | ||
| And I wonder if that, if the guest shares that view, and then how do we push back? | ||
| How do we get an FDR again? | ||
| How do we even get reasonable tax policy, maybe like a Eisenhower, as solutions? | ||
| But I'll hang up now and let the guests respond. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you for your comment and question. | ||
| Yeah, I think income inequality is sort of the story of the last political generation in America. | ||
| And I think it's been very telling. | ||
| I think most polls, speaking of polling, show that Bernie Sanders is still one of the most popular politicians in the country who sort of pioneered the path that Mamdani has taken in this election. | ||
| And I think it's certainly eloquent that a figure that influential in terms of popularity is still largely regarded as an interloper in the Democratic Party. | ||
| So I think there's going to be, at some point, my view, there will have to be a very serious reckoning with this issue. | ||
| The Ballyhood, quote, big, beautiful bill that was Trump's signature tax and spending legislation represents the largest upward distribution of wealth achieved by any piece of legislation in our history. | ||
| We're also seeing this sort of Versailles turn in the Trump White House where he demolished the East Wing to build this vanity ballroom. | ||
| He had this great Gatsby-themed Halloween party that was just sort of grotesque in my view to see the photographs of. | ||
| It reeks of kind of contempt from on high, and I think people really respond. | ||
| I think the demolition of the East Wing resonated with a lot of just ordinary voters who see that sort of thing for what it is. | ||
| And when Trump tries out of the other side of his mouth to say he's going to create a new economic golden age with tariffs, which, by the way, are taxes, it falls flat. | ||
| And that's a huge opportunity for, you know, and I'm like the collar. | ||
| I'm sort of party agnostic. | ||
| But I do think a reform movement and to the question of how do we get back to a new deal, you know, sadly the new deal was, of course, occasioned by the Great Depression, which was a crippling economic calamity. | ||
| I hope we don't face anything like that again. | ||
| But we do need people to think differently in fundamental terms about these issues. | ||
| Stephen is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Stephen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I was going to initially make a comment more or less about the new elected mayor of New York, Benjami. | ||
| And I think the Republicans are just going to use him to beat up the Democrats as if we were bringing communism into this country. | ||
| He's only a mayor of a city in New York, and he's a new mayor, and there are constraints of things that he can do and can't do. | ||
| Unfortunately, there are constraints in Washington, D.C. that are supposed to keep Donald Trump in order, but he's just bulldozing right through them. | ||
| That's why our democracy is in such peril, and everybody knows it. | ||
| That's why the elections that just went on just went into Democrat favor. | ||
| People are just so afraid of what Donald Trump is doing in every aspect of our politics, including our culture. | ||
| I mean, he's a hate monger. | ||
| And I just want to end this call by saying I agree with Nancy Pelosi 100%. | ||
| Donald Trump is the most vile creature that has ever walked this earth. | ||
| And he will, if allowed, destroy this nation and probably the world too. | ||
| He's already started with destroying the world order. | ||
| And I'll take your comments off there. | ||
| Yeah, I do think, you know, to your point about the mayor of New York being new and untested, and that's all very true. | ||
| And, you know, again, he's a local figure. | ||
| But I think you're right. | ||
| There will be tremendous effort expended from the right to make him the face of the Democratic Party. | ||
| But this isn't especially new. | ||
| The Republicans have been calling Democrats socialists for my entire political lifetime. | ||
| And I think one lesson of Mamdani's when he avowed his socialist beliefs, did not Walk them back, and voters were not persuaded by the red baiting any more than they were persuaded by the Cuoma's desperate and ugly anti-Islam efforts on the home stretch. | ||
| I do think there is an appetite, as I was saying earlier, just for thinking differently and thinking creatively about how we get out of what is an oligarchy that has maldistributed our resources and put basic social goods like health care and education beyond the reach of the middle class. | ||
| Richard is in Rockland, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hello. | |
| Yeah, I was everybody's talking about President Trump as a dictator, and I grew up in California. | ||
| And the way the Democrats have run California into the ground, I don't think that our youth can achieve the American dream here of owning a house. | ||
| The mortgage rates, which have increased so much, I don't know, 8, 9%, but that's on all the Democrats the previous four years, where they continue to spend $2 trillion more than what's brought in. | ||
| And that's why people can't afford to buy houses now. | ||
| You can't lay that on President Trump. | ||
| And then you're going to have Newsom, I guess, who hasn't accomplished anything in California. | ||
| I don't know what he's going to run on, but he's the one that said, you know, McDonald's or the fast food workers, they all get $20 an hour. | ||
| That was a couple years ago. | ||
| Nobody can afford to go, you think twice about going to a fast food place or McDonald's. | ||
| So I think that's just a touch of what Mandami's going to do. | ||
| So if I just can't see going with the way our country's going and this, I just think we're just losing the American way of people pulling up their bootstraps and making it on their own without worrying about what government's going to do for you. | ||
| If you do that, you put yourself in a real bad position. | ||
| And I think you can educate yourself and make better decisions about your health, you'll be a lot better off. | ||
| So that's kind of what I'm my two cents on this thing. | ||
| Well, thank you for your comments. | ||
| I do think just addressing the interest rate issue, you know, interest rates are largely set by the Federal Reserve. | ||
| And even though President Trump doesn't like to be reminded of this, he appointed Jerome Powell. | ||
| So I definitely agree that inflation was a big issue under Biden, and a lot of that was driven by the COVID recovery. | ||
| But, you know, the Democrats paid for it at the voting booth. | ||
| And I think, you know, turnabout is fair play. | ||
| I think right now people are seeing the cost of living really escalate under a Republican regime that is enacting tariffs, that is not addressing these core issues. | ||
| You know, we're seeing right now the Trump White House desperately went to the Supreme Court to get A release to stop snap food benefits for that 42 million people take because they want to use those people as sort of pawns in the shutdown fight, which I think is another thing that is not helping the image of Trump and the Republican Party. | ||
| We had a comment that we received via text message from Renee in Marietta, Georgia, who says: when the government takes a stake in private business, that's socialism, and that's what Trump has been doing. | ||
| He's the socialist, not the Democrats. | ||
| What do you think of that as a person? | ||
| Well, the viewer is right. | ||
| You know, he's taken stakes. | ||
| Yes, and in the chip company, whose name I'm not remembering in the video, yes. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, David Brooks, who is not my favorite commentator, but he had an somewhat amusing column a couple weeks back where he said, you know, Trump is stealing all the socialist left's ideas. | ||
| I don't think that's true, but I do think, you know, what you're witnessing under Trump is something that is more of a corporatist or, you know, a sort of private takeover of government. | ||
| Fred is in Admore, Pennsylvania on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Fred. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, Mr. Leland. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| I was following Mamdani when he first, you know, ran for the mayor of New York, and he seems like he's very interesting, just like President Obama when he first started out. | ||
| President Obama said he would like to transform this country. | ||
| That's a different story for a different day. | ||
| Mr. Bondami, when he's talking, I've never or have so far heard him say anything about making the country, helping to make the country stronger. | ||
| Now, let me go back for me. | ||
| I go back as far as President Eisenhower. | ||
| And we start in civics when I start out in school, and we learn how to, not learn, I'm sorry, but talking about keeping the country strong and keeping the country what the great generation had fought for. | ||
| Now, moving forward for me, you as a journalist, I hope that you, when you get an opportunity to ask Mr. Obama, I'm sorry, Mamdani, I have to give it credit for him. | ||
| He did come out and say he's what he is, a Democratic socialist. | ||
| Socialists have been around, the Democratic Socialist Party has been around since I think the 70s and everything. | ||
| And I've been around and I listen to people and I listen to how they talk about their views on different things. | ||
| One thing I've been doing for a lot of years is that the Democratic Party is, back then, they had diplomats that actually talk to both sides. | ||
| I'm not going to go through all the things I've seen and try to follow my life there. | ||
| But I would like, if you had, you as a journalist, when you get an opportunity, just to see how he feels about this country. | ||
| And that's all I have to say for now. | ||
| Okay, well, thank you for your comment. | ||
| I'm based in D.C., so I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to interview Mom Donnie, but I would love to, and I would happily raise a question like that. | ||
| Wanda is in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Wanda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I was just sitting here listening and it seemed like I am watching the movie, The Fight Club, where people were just fighting one another and they was doing it because they was like stressed out at their jobs and everything. | ||
| And I really do remember that man that was portraying Brad Pitt was subconscious to one of the workers that was frustrated and they ended up robbing the businesses and if I'm not mistaken, the government. | ||
| Wanda, what's your question for our guest? | ||
| Should we be concerned? | ||
| Because see, I was thinking that a clip, I heard, I saw a clip where they were saying that they need to put chips inside of the EBT cards. | ||
| And I was just wondering, is our cards in jeopardy or would you know? | ||
| So I understand what you're talking about. | ||
| There has been some effort to add additional security measures to the EBT cards, but that's something that hasn't been rolled out yet. | ||
| But there's been some research showing, arguing that if there were chips similar to the ones that are in credit cards, EBT cards would be more secure for the people using it. | ||
| I'm guessing that's what you're referencing, Wanda? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I appreciate that. | |
| Yes, thank you. | ||
| And do you say, my question to him would be, do he see any similarities if he even watched the movie to what I'm speaking about? | ||
| And I answer offline. | ||
| Yeah, I saw Fight Club in the theater, which is a long time ago now. | ||
| But I do remember broadly. | ||
| And, you know, I gather your point is that, you know, the hostility these, they're all men expressed toward each other eventually gets routed towards government and business. | ||
| You know, they blow up things, as I recall. | ||
| I don't see much of a parallel there. | ||
| I do think, you know, there certainly is a lot. | ||
| You know, we saw it in the last election. | ||
| What's interesting is young men were sort of one of the big constituencies that broke for the MAGA coalition in 2024. | ||
| And at least in New York, the Mama Donnie results show men 18 to 29 were a huge constituency that broke form. | ||
| So I would just say like the reports of a permanent new MAGA coalition in America, I think were premature. | ||
| And I misspoke a bit about the SNAP EBT cards. | ||
| That initiative actually has started rolling out here on the USDA's website about the SNAP EBT modernization. | ||
| The issue is that the EBT fraud, including the use of card skimming to steal benefits, is on the rise. | ||
| Modernizing EBT, including the introduction of chip cards for SNAP EBT, is an important step to ensure that SNAP benefits are protected. | ||
| As of August 28th, 2024, that new standard to add those chips in is officially published and states are beginning to add chips to their EBT cards. | ||
| And that initiative is going to be rolling out over time. | ||
| It looks like chip cards have already been rolled out in California. | ||
| Other states are working on it and some other states have it in progress. | ||
| Rick is in Los Angeles, California on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| You had another Rick from Los Angeles. | ||
| I just want to touch on what he said about the $20 hour workers for SAS Fews in Los Angeles. | ||
| Yeah, everyone you go to, they're all Hispanic. | ||
| They have to be able to speak English and Spanish. | ||
| The only blacks they hire at McDonald's, Burger King, wherever you go, is black security guards. | ||
| You got to be a security guard. | ||
| The only black that they hire is. | ||
| We're about out of time. | ||
| Rick, do you have a question for our guest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the question is, California lost over $24 billion that they don't know what happened to. | |
| Where did Gavin Newsom get this $100 million for the 50 proposal number 50? | ||
| I heard he got it from FEMA, which was also going to go to repair the La Cedina fires last January. | ||
| He took it from that. | ||
| I'm not really sure what he's referencing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not. | ||
| And let's just hear from Ron in North Carolina on our line for independence. | ||
| Go ahead, Ron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| Good show today. | ||
| I come from a school that I kind of look at, I try to look at a macro picture, and I feel that Wall Street has privatized so much in America. | ||
| And the factor of squeezing profits out of one thing after another is part of the problem. | ||
| It seems like since deregulation, the wealth divide in America has grown a lot, and it feels like politicians, so many are courted by lobbyists that the system's skewed. | ||
| So people in the middle, like myself, who I work very hard, I'm about to see my health care for my family go from $670 subsidized per month to $2,500 per month. | ||
| So I think there's like 22 million of us that are caught in the middle that are working hard. | ||
| And it just seems like we need to push this down another year as far as the subsidies, even though it's going to cost. | ||
| But I feel like there are too many people that work too hard, that have too much on their back, that are going to be hurt if this isn't extended another year. | ||
| We need to bring health care costs down in America. | ||
| It's obviously something that's being talked about and worked on, but the wealth divide is a sign of we've lost our bearing some. | ||
| So Ron, just because we're about out of time, I'm going to let Chris go ahead and respond. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm really sorry to hear of your premium increase. | ||
| That's devastating. | ||
| And, you know, the reason that this issue is so charged right now is so many people are facing that sort of increase, which is a flaw in the original design of Obamacare. | ||
| But yeah, I definitely agree. | ||
| I think, you know, eight years after we deregulated investment banking, we had the worst economic collapse since the Great Recession. | ||
| And wealth inequality has continued, as we've discussed earlier, to be a huge, though unacknowledged, issue in a lot of mainstream political discourse. | ||
| And I think the caller is right. | ||
| You know, that both major parties, you know, it's expensive to run campaigns and win elections, and they are heavily reliant on a donor class, which is very forthright about what it does and does not want. | ||
| And we're seeing the fallout from that. | ||
| Now, the one factoid I would throw in is that I believe keeping the premium benefits on the ACA is supposed to run around $38 billion for a year. | ||
| And Trump just sent $40 billion to the leader of Argentina, who is a crony. | ||
| So there is a very straightforward issue before us of what are the priorities of our government? | ||
| Is it to look after the common good or is it to punish your enemies and reward your friends? | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Chris Lehman, who is the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation magazine. | ||
| Really appreciate your time this morning. | ||
| Thank you, Kimberly. | ||
| And thanks to all of our callers this hour, but we have a little bit more time of our show today. | ||
| And coming up, we're going to be in open forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Our line for Democrats is 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
America 250 years and C-SPAN is there to commemorate every moment. | |
| From the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the voices shaping our nation's future, we bring you unprecedented all-platform coverage, exploring the stories, sights, and spirit that make up America. | ||
| Join us for remarkable coast-to-coast coverage, celebrating our nation's journey like no other network can. | ||
| America 250. | ||
| Over a year of historic moments. | ||
| Only on the C-SPAN Networks. | ||
| Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, White House Historical Association President Stuart McLaurin, author of The People's House Miscellany, on the history of the White House and White House-related trivia. | ||
| He'll also talk about the changes that presidents and first ladies have made to the White House's interior and exterior, going back to President Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| The president never and his family never had a place to go outside and enjoy like we have a deck or a patio. | ||
| And so Truman broke up that colonnade of the South Portico and right in the middle, put a balcony off the residence level of the White House so the family could go out there and enjoy fresh air. | ||
| And very controversial. | ||
| People thought it ruined the look of the White House. | ||
| Congress was not going to fund it. | ||
| Truman said, I'll find the money and do it anyway. | ||
| And he built it. | ||
| And in this book, there are quotes by a number of presidents who said, Thank you, Harry Truman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White House Historical Association President Stuart McLaurin. | |
| Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
| You can listen to QA and all our podcasts wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| C-SPANSHOP.org is C-SPAN's online store. | ||
| Browse through our latest collection of C-SPAN products, apparel, books, home decor, and accessories. | ||
| There's something for every C-SPAN fan, and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. | ||
| Shop now or anytime at c-span shop.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in an open forum, ready to take your calls with comments about public affairs or whatever news is on your mind. | ||
| Before we get to those calls, just an update with President Trump making comments over the weekend about those ACA subsidies that are at the heart of the government shutdown debate. | ||
| Here's a headline from the Washington Post: Trump says, give ACA subsidies to people. | ||
| He urges a pivot from paying insurers and aims to press Democrats on ending the shutdown. | ||
| President Donald Trump on Saturday urged Senate Republicans to redirect funding for Affordable Care Act subsidies away from health insurers and towards average Americans. | ||
| His latest gambit to pressure Democrats as the government shutdown snarls air traffic, leaves food stamp benefits in limbo, and furloughs roughly 650,000 federal workers. | ||
| The Senate remained at an impasse on Saturday, a day after Republicans rejected a Democratic proposal that would have extended soon-to-expire ACA subsidies, a key sticking point in negotiations, for a year while reopening the government. | ||
| Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, said he would keep the chamber in session until there is an agreement to reopen the government. | ||
| He continued to insist that any action to address health care costs, including Trump's proposal, would have to be after the Senate resumes funding. | ||
| Now, to your calls in open forum, we'll start with Perry in Warren, Michigan on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Perry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, I can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing today? | |
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's your comment? | |
| Well, I just pray and hope and wish that in our midterm elections, everyone just vote Democrat and we can get the House and the Senate and impeach this person that's sitting in the White House so we can get something normal going again. | ||
| Well, I mean, this guy just up in there, him and his family and his buddies are just ripping this country off. | ||
| And that's my comment. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Tim is in Rosharan, Texas, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| First of all, thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I would just like to, my comment is simply this: I would like to remind everyone that the Democratic system that we have, the two-party system that we have, is the minority and the majority, not Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| The Republican Party, the Democrat Party, those are both two of many privately held political parties. | ||
| We've got to stop, even in the media, of giving free advertising to these two parties because what we've wound up with is a bunch of representatives who represent their party agendas blindly and have stopped talking to each other. | ||
| Once we get to the place where we are no longer actually looking at the issues and we're just looking at what my party says is best, we've stopped having representative government. | ||
| And I urge Mike Johnson to bring the House back into session and stop depriving people of their representatives' abilities to vote on the issue. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bob is in Silver Spring, Maryland, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'd just like to remind everyone that communism first failed in this country with the impotence, Bob, and then go ahead. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Okay, well, let me, that communism first failed in this country with a Mayflower Compact. | ||
| The Mayflower Compact said everything would be held in common and everybody would be provided for their needs. | ||
| It failed the first year. | ||
| Everyone starved to death. | ||
| They figured out a simple solution. | ||
| They gave everybody a portion of the land, said, do what you can with it. | ||
| So people then began to develop more than they needed so that there was access to provide for those in need. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Communism fails because there is no incentive. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Jeffrey is in Brooklyn, New York, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jeffrey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, hello. | |
| Yeah, I'm a Democrat. | ||
| Listen, Trump did some good things, but he's got to come to the table. | ||
| He's the one that can open up the government. | ||
| The Republicans aren't going to do a thing until he says. | ||
| They don't do nothing unless he says. | ||
| So he's the one that can open up the government. | ||
| I mean, we got to get off of this Democrat Republic thing. | ||
| We all Americans. | ||
| We all got to act like that, man, and get off Republican, Democrats. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of people out here. | ||
| Like, I'm eating, man, my family eating. | ||
| A lot of people out here ain't eating. | ||
| That's not right. | ||
| Both parties, they families eating. | ||
| They're not missing no meals. | ||
| And you got people out here struggling, and they ain't going to open up the government because they're getting their paycheck. | ||
| So why should they care? | ||
| They can't pay their families eating. | ||
| They're living good. | ||
| You got people that's living paycheck to paycheck. | ||
| This open up the government. | ||
| I mean, like, listen. | ||
| So, Jeffrey, what do you think of the Democrats' demands that the health care subsidies be extended for a year as a condition for reopening government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's something I can. | ||
| Maybe you can help me. | ||
| I can't understand. | ||
| If, say, if the Democrats didn't close down the government, the enrollment was going to still go into effect, even if they wouldn't have closed down the government, right? | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| Is that how that worked? | ||
| It still would have gone through, even if they didn't close down the government, the premiums is going to go up anyway, right? | ||
| The premiums were going to go up anyway, but the actual out-of-pocket cost that people will pay, those people who were receiving the subsidies, will be significantly higher if those subsidies go away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I understand that part, but the government's still, I mean, the premiums is going to go up if they close down the government or not, right? | |
| Yes, but not to the same extent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It still was going to go up anyway. | |
| They could have maybe could have talked it out down the line, but that don't even make no sense. | ||
| The Democrats that closed the government in the premium, they wasn't going to stop it anyway. | ||
| They still was going to go up anyhow. | ||
| So if you bear with me for a second, Jeffrey, I'm going to read from KFF, which is a health policy research institute, because they kind of describe the core of the issue here. | ||
| And it says, the amount health insurers charge for coverage on the ACA marketplace, that's Obamacare or those exchanges, is rising 26% on average in 2026. | ||
| In states that run their own marketplaces, the average benchmark silver premium plan on which the tax credit calculation is based is rising 17% next year. | ||
| In states that use healthcare.gov, those premiums are rising an average of 30%. | ||
| So that's what you're talking about, that premiums are going up anyway. | ||
| And then it goes on to say, most enrollees would face even sharper increases in what they pay if the ACA's enhanced premium tax credits expire. | ||
| This 26% is the increase in the amount the insurers are charging, which is not in most cases what enrollees pay. | ||
| 22 million out of 24 million marketplace enrollees currently receive a tax credit. | ||
| The amount subsidized enrollees pay is not what the insurers charge, but rather a sliding scale share of their household income based on a formula set by Congress. | ||
| If Congress extends the enhanced tax credits, the amount subsidized enrollees pay each month will remain about the same, even though the amount insurers are charging is increasing sharply. | ||
| Does that make more sense now, Jeffrey? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I understand what you just read and everything like that. | |
| Only thing I'm not understanding is by the Democrats closing down the government, is that going to stop that from rising right now? | ||
| Or do they have to speak about it and get it to stop it from rising? | ||
| What I'm trying to say, maybe I'm not saying it right, by them closing, shutting down the government, is that going to stop the premiums from going into effect anyway while the government. | ||
| No, you're being clear, Jeffrey. | ||
| The premiums are set to expire, regardless of whether the government is open or closed. | ||
| Democrats are arguing that in order for them to vote to reopen the government, they need a promise that these subsidies will be extended. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, bud. | |
| All right. | ||
| We're going to go on to Betty in Blacksburg, South Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Betty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Come on. | ||
| Betty, it sounds like you're pretty far from your phone. | ||
| We can't hear you all. | ||
| Can you move a little bit closer and make sure your volume is down on your TV? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My volume is down off TV all the way down. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyhow, he ain't the one that shut the government down. | |
| It was the Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats ain't open it up because of the fact that they want money for the illegals, for insurance. | ||
| It ain't the Republicans doing this. | ||
| It is the Democrats. | ||
| I know all these people seize all this stuff, because what I've seen has been all Democrats, not Republicans. | ||
| The Republicans, it's not doing this. | ||
| And they're not going to do nothing unless they get what they want. | ||
| Once they get what they want, and they ain't doing it to their own people, Democrats, the Democrats that's not far. | ||
| They're still doing it to the ones that ain't. | ||
| So they're making them suffer too. | ||
| So, you know, until they, and he, I don't blame him for not open Trump or doing anything. | ||
| I hope he stands his ground because I don't think we ought to be paying the illegals when they don't give, they don't pay the American people. | ||
| The American people don't, they the taxpayers, the ones that pays, and the Democrats, they want everything free for the Democrats, not the American people. | ||
| And to me, it sounds like they hate the American people. | ||
| What I find. | ||
| Because everything you know was my. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's hear from Reggie in Pennsylvania, sorry, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Reggie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's not different. | ||
| Can you turn down the volume on your TV, please, Reggie, and then go ahead with your comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The comment I wanted to make was about it's appalling that Trump wants the stadium named after him when he's done so much to gut the DMV from his projects, its employment, and taking the FBI away from Greenbelt, Maryland. | |
| And I think the stadium should be named after Mary and Barry, and that's all I want to call and say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So the story that Reggie's referring to has been reported in multiple places. | ||
| Here's a story from ESPN that, according to sources, Trump wants the commander's new DC stadium named for him. | ||
| This is according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, told ESPN that President Donald Trump wants the Washington commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him. | ||
| A senior White House source said there have been back-channel communications with a member of the Commander's Ownership Group led by Josh Harris to express Trump's desire to have the domed stadium in the nation's capital bear his name. | ||
| The new stadium is being built on the old RFK stadium site that served as the team's home from 1961 to 1996. | ||
| Maria is in Silver Spring, Maryland on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Maria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| It's so frustrating when some facts are not corrected in time. | ||
| Everybody knows undocumented immigrants are not eligible for the only receive care and emergencies. | ||
| But anyway, this is definitely a Republican shutdown. | ||
| Why are they so set on a clean CR? | ||
| By October, there should have been a whole new 25-26 budget in place. | ||
| They only pass a clean CR so they don't have to commit to anything and they can just go back on whatever they're promising in a month. | ||
| So this is ridiculous. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| And they have not even why are Democrats demand to at least extend the credit for one year so that they could come up with maybe that plan that they say they have in a year because they don't have anything. | ||
| So it's great that Democrats are holding the line because this is a Republican shutdown. | ||
| And one more thing. | ||
| The question that a caller asked earlier to the examiner person about access versus useful information was excellent, and the guy's reply was pathetic. | ||
| What good is more access to the president if the information he provides out of mouth is useless? | ||
| He has nothing useful to say and they won't even correct or follow up or hold him accountable. | ||
| While at Biden, they would be screaming all the time their questions and he would only, of course, give them access when he has something useful to say. | ||
| So Maria, your line is cutting in and out, but I think we have your point. | ||
| Let's hear from Richard in Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Richard. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I think the Democrats should let the public know, let the people know more about why they giving $40 billion to Venezuela. | ||
| Argentina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Argentina. | |
| And I don't think the Democrats expressing themselves too clearly. | ||
| President Trump is expressing himself very clear why he giving the money. | ||
| But it seems like both parties are hypocrites. | ||
| And it's the good cop and the bad cop. | ||
| And the Democrats are going to eventually lose this battle because they're scared to actually talk about the $40 billion that they're giving to Argentina and talking about why they're giving so much money to Israel. | ||
| And Trump is going to win this battle. | ||
| And the Democrats are going to be looking stupid at the end because they're not getting the word out to the people enough. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tim is in Syracuse, New York on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Tim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Love your show. | ||
| And I love the form. | ||
| I think the biggest challenge when the caller before was talking about health care. | ||
| I've worked in, I'm a Republican in a completely 100% Democrat state, the largest tax state in the country. | ||
| And the thing is, my health insurance for my family is $36,000 a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's $3,000 a month to pay for health care. | |
| And at the end of the day, I think all Americans need to pay their fair share. | ||
| I think when my friend is a school bus driver, his health insurance is $181 a month. | ||
| And the part is, is that right now, we're not treating all Americans fairly. | ||
| And I think right now we need to work and focus on joining the parties together. | ||
| I think both parties are accountable for the failure and the demise of everyone that's been calling in that's upset about their health insurance, that's upset that they don't have a job, they're upset that they're talking about Medicare or Medicare being taken away or Social Security taken away. | ||
| 1940, Social Security had 16 or 19 people for every recipient. | ||
| Today we have only three. | ||
| If we keep losing jobs and people that cannot have a job that makes a living wage, that's a big problem. | ||
| And I just think at the end of the day, you know what? | ||
| As far as I'm concerned, a lot of people are only worried about themselves. | ||
| They're worried about their pension from their school district or fire department. | ||
| There's abuse in all facets of our government. | ||
| We need to come together as a whole. | ||
| I believe that personally, 435 congressmen, 100 senators, even the president and vice president need to be replaced. | ||
| The only way we're going to fix it for Americans. | ||
| One last thing. | ||
| All these people talk about immigrants are illegals. | ||
| I know why, there's one thing of people saying that I don't want immigrants in this country, but I also know why people do want immigrants in this country. | ||
| New York State is losing population. | ||
| We need the immigrants to maintain our position in the House of Representatives. | ||
| When the census comes out in four and a half years, we're going to recount the ballots and the votes. | ||
| That's why I think we've opened up the borders through Biden, because we know that New York State's going to lose another two seats. | ||
| Countries or states like New York and California, all the major Democrat cities are going to struggle with this. | ||
| And that's just my thought on it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My goal today was really to bring America together. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Ann is in Fayetteville, North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Ann. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My comment is about the Supreme Court and President Trump. | ||
| Why would President Trump do anything that's positive, run a rough shot over the lower court when it's ruled against him when he knows the Supreme Court, nine times out of ten, going to rule in his favor? | ||
| I think that the voters, the American people, also, instead of marching on Washington, need to focus their attention on the Supreme Court. | ||
| President Trump reminds me of a child that misbehaved in school and Runs to his mother, even though he misbehaved. | ||
| And the mother, instead of talking to the child about his misbehavior, would side with the child, regardless, against the teachers. | ||
| I don't see any right in any of this. | ||
| That's my comment. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Michael is in Washington, D.C., on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I just wanted to say that we all need to remember that we have the government we deserve. | ||
| We sit here and we argue about crumbs, you know, about SNAP and about Medicaid and Social Security when the government, | ||
| our elected leaders, are given the largest lion's share, actually, of socialism and subsidies go to the wealthiest corporations in this country. | ||
| Some of them are the wealthiest in the world. | ||
| So why are we always pulling out each other and attacking one another for things that we make appear to be big issues when the people who are robbing us blind are the people at the top, these corporate leaders, these executives, these corporations. | ||
| So I just want to reiterate again: you know, we have the government we deserve. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Gene is in Illinois on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Gene. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Great program. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Yes, I'm a retired first responder who earned his pension the hard way and also a United States Marine Vietnam combat veteran. | ||
| I think with all this negotiations that's going on with foreign countries, we should be able to come back down to our level and form a special negotiating team for both sides and sit down and hammer this out because what makes me sick is to see uniformed personnel standing in the child lines. | ||
| That's unacceptable. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Anthony is in Calhoun, Georgia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Anthony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| My comment relates to the position of money in politics. | ||
| Since the Supreme Court allowed unlimited input of money, it makes it, in my opinion, impossible for to have a functioning government that serves the general public. | ||
| Money allows a few individuals to skew the situation so that we don't address the things that are important to the general public. | ||
| So I think the way to improve our government, the way to improve the country as a whole, is to remove money from the politics through some process. | ||
| If we can achieve that, I think we can move on to turn limitations and improve the quality of our political system. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you to everyone who called in for Open Forum and the other segments of our show. | ||
| That's it today for Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Coming up right after this C-SPAN's Washington Journal, a live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. and across the country. | |
| Coming up Monday morning, Republican strategist Adam Goodman and Democratic strategist Lucy Caldwell on day 40 of the government shutdown and how the stalemate could impact the midterm elections and President Trump's agenda. | ||
| And then we'll preview the week ahead in Congress and discuss the latest on the government shutdown with semaphore Congress reporter Eleanor Mueller. | ||
| And notice reporter Violet Gyra previews the week ahead at the White House and discusses the latest on the government shutdown. | ||
| Also, Politico deputy energy editor Ben LeFave previews the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at cspan.org. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold new original series, today with our guest, the Chronicler of Adventures, award-winning, best-selling author, David Graham, whose books include The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon, and... | ||
| and The Wager. | ||
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein. | ||
| So what about this fact, about this occurrence, made you think this could be something worth your time? | ||
| And I started to realize that this odd little old manuscript contained, you know, the seeds of one of the most extraordinary stories of survival and mayhem I had ever come across. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with David Graham today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN, democracy unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced and said, wouldn't this be great if this was going to be something that we did for anyone? | ||
| Comcast has always been a community-driven company. | ||
| This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Tonight, on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A, White House Historical Association President Stuart McLaurin, author of The People's House Miscellany, on the history of the White House and White House-related trivia. | ||
| He'll also talk about the changes that presidents and first ladies have made to the White House's interior and exterior, going back to President Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| The president never and his family never had a place to go outside and enjoy like we have a deck or a patio. | ||
| And so Truman broke up that colonnade of the South Portico and right in the middle, put a balcony off the residence level of the White House so the family could go out there and enjoy fresh air. | ||
| And very controversial. | ||
| People thought it ruined the look of the White House. | ||
| Congress was not going to fund it. | ||
| Truman said, I'll find the money and do it anyway. | ||
| And he built it. | ||
| And in this book, there are quotes by a number of presidents who said, thank you, Harry Truman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
White House Historical Association President Stuart McLaurin. | |
| Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA. | ||
| You can listen to QA and all our podcasts wherever you get your podcasts or on our free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| In just a few minutes, C-SPAN viewers will see the oral arguments in the consolidated Supreme Court case officially known as VOS Selections v. Trump and Learning Resources v. Trump. | ||
| Unofficially, it's the Trump tariff case. | ||
| Before we take you to the arguments, SCOTIS BLOG EXECUTION Editor Zach Shemtaub joins us. | ||
| He's been following the case. | ||
| Zach Shemtaub, this case at its heart is about executive power, but what is the decision that the Supreme Court is being asked to look into in this particular case? | ||
| Well, it's deceptively simple, and it's whether a statute passed by Congress in 1977 called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes the president, here being, of course, President Donald Trump, to impose tariffs. | ||
| Whether the president had the power and authority through that statute, again, passed by Congress in the late 70s, to impose the tariffs that he has imposed over the last few months. | ||
| Who are the parties that are challenging the Trump administration here? | ||
| So there's a number of small businesses, and in front of the court during oral arguments, they were represented by Neil Katial, who's at Millbank, a very seasoned, very noted lawyer, you know, advocate before the Supreme Court and a former deputy solicitor general. | ||
| The states also were challenging this, and they were represented by Oregon Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman. | ||
| And the representing the Trump administration, who I probably should have started with, because that's who begins the argument, is Solicitor General Sauer, who is also a seasoned advocate and perhaps most recognizable during these arguments through his raspy voice. | ||
| This argument goes, for viewers who are going to watch it with us, about two hours and 45 minutes. | ||
| It was only scheduled to go for 80 minutes. | ||
| Is that unusual for an argument to go so long past its scheduled time? | ||
| It's, well, it is not unusual. | ||
| For less important arguments, they still often go past their scheduled time, but only by a matter of minutes or half an hour or so. | ||
| For major arguments, they often schedule them for this amount of time or around this amount of time, and they almost always go way, way longer. | ||
| So this was not unusual by any means. | ||
| You saw this in many cases. | ||
| The what they call the Obamacare case, Sebelius, went on and on for many hours, as have many other important cases. | ||
| And to be fair, in the old days, cases like McCulloch versus Maryland, these classic cases, were argued over a matter of days. | ||
| So this is nothing compared to, you know, back at the founding of the country, the earliest cases. | ||
| Viewers are going to hear some jargon here. | ||
| What is IPA and what is TWIA? | ||
| Yes, IEPA is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. | ||
| And again, this is what was passed in 1977. | ||
| And the idea behind this was to allow the president in the national emergencies or emergencies to impose a number of things, including sanctions. | ||
| Whether through that the president can impose tariffs is at the heart of today's argument. | ||
| TWIA is the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. | ||
| That was the predecessor statute to IEPA. | ||
| So before IPA came into effect, it was this other statute, which they argue in oral arguments they talk about as being broader. | ||
| And IEPA actually limited that. | ||
| And so that also plays a role today. | ||
| And as viewers get set to watch this here in just a couple minutes, what would you tell them to watch for in terms of how the justices ask their questions and who's asking the question? | ||
| So I would say that the most important justices to watch, because they will likely be in the majority, are Chief Justice Roberts. | ||
| By the way, last term, Roberts was in the majority in around 95% of cases. | ||
| So he's a good bet to be in the majority in this one. |