| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| sweats, mood swings, weight gain, and dozens of other symptoms. | ||
| Each woman experiences menopause and symptoms differently. | ||
| Hormone replacement therapy alleviates those symptoms of menopause, but it also has profound long-term health benefits of reducing the risk of bone fractures by 50 to 60 percent, reducing the rate of fatal heart attacks in a woman's future by up to 50 percent, and reduces cognitive decline. | ||
| And in one study, even reduced the risk of Alzheimer's. | ||
| So those are profound long-term health benefits that have been kind of lost because people see it more as a treatment for the immediate symptoms of perimenopause. | ||
| Now in medical school I was taught in kind of that traditional paternalistic approach in medical school that, oh, you know, we don't talk about menopause. | ||
| It's just some women experience it, but it's usually just for a couple years. | ||
| The symptoms are mild. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| 80% of women experience symptoms of menopause. | ||
| The average duration is eight years. | ||
| And for many women, those symptoms are severe. | ||
| And tragically in America today, a woman is more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant for symptoms of menopause than they are estrogen to replace the body's estrogen that the body intrinsically produces. | ||
| So a warning decades ago was placed on these products, a black box warning. | ||
| When and why was it put in place? | ||
| What is a black box warning? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Yeah, so women, the context is women were feeling better and living longer using hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| But then in 2002, when one in four postmenopausal women were taking hormone replacement therapy, a study came out that scared women worldwide and women stopped taking hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| And that was the 2002 Women's Health Initiative study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. | ||
| And the study was released to the public, tragically, before it was published. | ||
| It was released to the media a week before it was published. | ||
| And this headline was, this causes breast cancer, it created mass hysteria. | ||
| Doctors called their patients, said, get off this thing. | ||
| Women with a topic as sensitive as breast cancer flush their pills down the toilet. | ||
| Some women use an estrogen patch. | ||
| They would rip it off. | ||
| And so this was a massive moment that suddenly changed the prescribing patterns. | ||
| And so hormone replacement therapy was deemed a carcinogen, no longer as this incredible treatment with short and long-term benefits. | ||
| And the FDA jumped on the bandwagon by issuing the following year a black box warning, the highest level of warning our agency, the FDA, can put on a product. | ||
| And so that created a lot of fear and the fear machine took on a life of its own. | ||
| The great irony was that when that study was published and the data were released after the media headlines, there was no statistically significant increase in breast cancer rates. | ||
| And no clinical trial has ever shown subsequently that hormone replacement therapy increases breast cancer mortality. | ||
| And in a weird twist of irony, the women who took estrogen alone, because doctors can recommend estrogen alone if a woman does not have a uterus, it's been removed for some reason, in that subgroup, they had a 25% lower rate of breast cancer with hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| This was something that you wrote about in your book, Blind Spots, is something that you've looked at for years. | ||
| This happened again over decades ago. | ||
| Why did it take so long for the FDA to come to this decision and make this announcement this week? | ||
| To be honest, I think it's medical group think. | ||
| I think there's bandwagon thinking and there's been groupthink in medicine. | ||
| It kind of gets broadcast from on high from the elites of the leadership circles of academia. | ||
| It gets taught in the textbooks and enforced on the exams and it just became synonymous. | ||
| Hormone replacement therapy causes breast cancer. | ||
| And nobody really would question it or look back at the original data set. | ||
| And so, look, we as a medical profession have done this before. | ||
| You get a lot of power concentrated in some medical elites. | ||
| That's why we got opioid prescription opioids being non-addictive wrong for 15 years, missing the entire igniting of the opioid crisis. | ||
| We got natural saturated fat causes heart disease wrong for 50 years. | ||
| And so there has been a history of these groupthink recommendations. | ||
| Probably the most consequential one that we still live with today is it was recommended that infants up till the age of three avoid peanut butter to try to prevent peanut allergies. | ||
| Turns out that increases the risk of getting a peanut allergy by sevenfold because a child needs to be exposed early in their life to peanut butter. | ||
| So that dogma lived for 15 years. | ||
| So it was medical dogma. | ||
| And when I did that research on this topic and went back to the original paper and talked to the co-authors of that study and said, how could you say this increases breast cancer when it wasn't statistically significant? | ||
| I learned they had a meeting just before the announcement. | ||
| And in that meeting, a shouting match erupted where one of the researchers said, you can't put something like this out there. | ||
| Quote unquote, you will never be able to put the genie back in the bottle with something as sensitive as breast cancer. | ||
| So that fear machine took on a life of its own. | ||
| Our guest is Dr. Marty McCary, FDA Commissioner. | ||
| And we are talking about the agency's recent decision to remove the black box warning from hormone replacement therapy treatments. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for Dr. McCary, you can start calling in now the lines for this segment are broken down regionally. | ||
| If you are in the Eastern or Central time zone, your line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you are Mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| You can also send us a text at 202-748-8003. | ||
| It's been a couple decades now, but it's now being removed. | ||
| Tens of million women have been denied or not offered HRT over the last two decades because of this warning. | ||
| What impact has that had on women? | ||
| You know, people have described, like Dr. Peter Otia, a lost generation. | ||
| 50 million women over the last 23 years denied this powerful, life-changing, life-saving therapy that has profound long-term health benefits. | ||
| You know, just to give you a sense of bone fractures alone, it dramatically reduces osteoporosis, that is, taking hormone replacement therapy starting within 10 years of menopause, by 50 to 60 percent. | ||
| So it reduces the rate of a hip fracture. | ||
| Well, hip fractures occur in one in three women who make it to age 80. | ||
| As many women die from hip fractures each year as women die from breast cancer each year. | ||
| Bone strength matters. | ||
| Preventing osteoporosis matters. | ||
| And the best way to prevent osteoporosis if or in a woman is to take hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| Take, for example, the heart benefits. | ||
| Lowering the rate of heart attacks by 50% if a woman starts hormone replacement therapy within 10 years of the onset of menopause. | ||
| Well, statins lower it by, say, 35%. | ||
| CPR lowers cardiac fatality rates by roughly 10%. | ||
| So, I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about those things and doing CPR classes in every place in America and putting an AED machine in every mall in America, but we never even talk about menopause and we never talk about hormone replacement therapy and the profound effects on a public health scale. | ||
| There may be no intervention in medicine that can improve the health of women at a population level more than hormone replacement therapy when started within 10 years of the onset of menopause, arguably with the exception of antibiotics or vaccines. | ||
| This is a powerful public health intervention. | ||
| The discussion has been dominated and distorted by the fear machine. | ||
| That ends this week. | ||
| We put out very powerful messaging to let people know we're setting the record straight. | ||
| And we have seen a tremendous response with an awareness now with the doctors who have been waving a flag in the air saying, Hey, we got this wrong for 23 years. | ||
| Look at the evidence. | ||
| Patients that say, Look, my life was changed. | ||
| My marriage was saved. | ||
| I live longer and feel better. | ||
| I don't deal with the debilitating symptoms because of hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| That discussion is now reignited, and it's a beautiful thing to see. | ||
| And it's not to say that hormone replacement therapy will no longer have no warnings. | ||
| You're removing the black box warning. | ||
| You explained what that was. | ||
| What will it look like now? | ||
| Yeah, so the recommendation to take it is not a recommendation we as a government are making, but we want people to have the right information. | ||
| And the recommendation to take it is really nuanced. | ||
| For example, many doctors do not prescribe it and do not initiate hormone replacement therapy after age 60 or after that 10-year window after the onset of menopause because a feeling is that the risk-benefit ratio inverts if you start it after age 60. | ||
| And tragically, a woman who's 78 years old came up to me and said, I really want to start it. | ||
| Can I start it? | ||
| And I said, generally, doctors do not recommend it because that's when you see some of those complications. | ||
| But the reason why it's good for a woman's body to have continuous estrogen in the body without these big gaps is that estrogen increases nitric oxide that keeps a blood vessel wall soft and dilated. | ||
| And that is probably why we see this profound cardiac benefits. | ||
| And a century ago, researchers at the Mayo Clinic noticed in young women in their 20s who had their ovaries removed and therefore their estrogen levels reduced to zero that they went on to have severe heart disease in their 30s and 40s. | ||
| Young women. | ||
| So that early data suggested a powerful cardioprotective effect of estrogen. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with William, who's calling from Georgia. | ||
| Good morning, William. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I hope you can hear me, especially you, Dr. Macri. | ||
| I don't know if you remember me. | ||
| And just before the election in 2024, I spoke to you when your book first came out. | ||
| And I spoke to you specifically about the American Academy of Pediatrics. | ||
| I myself, as a physician, I'm now retired, but I noticed that when I started recommending, according to the LEAP study, the introduction of peanut butter of all foods to young infants, that I saw a dramatic drop in asthma, eczema, and all these allergy illnesses in children. | ||
| And in your book, I remember you spoke about the peanut butter business. | ||
| It's amazing how the American Academy of Pediatrics and many pediatricians still cling and provide advice to the patients, to their mothers, not to give peanut butter until the child is two or three years of age. | ||
| I wish the FDA would really push the fact that children or infants, excuse me, starting four or six months of age, depending if the mother is speaking or not, to start giving early foods like they do in many other countries where they don't see the scourges of eczema, asthma, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| It's just this country does stupid things based on studies, based on politics, based on corporations. | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, William, nice to hear your voice. | ||
| I honestly don't remember the last time you called in, but I love what you said. | ||
| We have to be willing to question everything in medicine. | ||
| And if you look at that incredible story of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommending against peanut butter exposure in young children, something they tragically got wrong for over 13 years, a lot of kids were hurt by that. | ||
| And tragically, the study, the LEAP study you referred to that showed, no, no, you want to expose young kids to peanut allergens, not whole peanuts because of the choking risk, but some little sprinkle of peanut butter in foods that they consume as early as six months of age to reduce the risk of peanut allergies. | ||
| You know, that research was stalled, downplayed, and there was a general feeling in the field that, well, the American Academy of Pediatrics has decreed that you should avoid peanut butter until age three. | ||
| Why would you study it? | ||
| It's already sort of settled science. | ||
| And in science, we should be willing to question everything. | ||
| To the caller's point and something you mentioned earlier, the idea that putting a genie back in the bottle once something is out now 23 years later, there are possibly doctors and women who would still have concerns about hormone replacement therapy even after this black box warning is being removed. | ||
| What is your message to them? | ||
| So the message is talk to your doctor and talk to a doctor who has experience prescribing hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| Because some doctors, you know, a doctor has to know a million different things. | ||
| And if you're not in a field or have spent time doing a deep dive on the research, you may just simply know hormone replacement therapy for its broad association with breast cancer and just generally avoid it. | ||
| You know, I've talked to doctors, and tragically, half of primary care doctors in America up to last year would tell me when I'd say, hey, a woman comes in with perimenopausal symptoms, what do you do? | ||
| They say, well, I don't do that hormone replacement therapy thing. | ||
| I just worry about that breast cancer thing. | ||
| We're not saying it absolutely does not cause an increase in breast cancer diagnoses. | ||
| We're saying that the long-term health benefits are profound and would eclipse any increased risk of breast cancer. | ||
| And that risk of breast cancer has never translated into a risk of dying of breast cancer in the large clinical trials in any clinical trial. | ||
| And the early observation of the slight increase in breast cancer diagnoses may have been a function of the fact they were getting frequent mammograms and the type of progesterone used called midroxyprogesterone acetate or MPA may have been associated with that slight increase in diagnoses. | ||
| That's not a type of progesterone in common use today for hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| There's some important contraindications. | ||
| If you have active breast cancer, it is contraindicated to start hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| And for some doctors, there are relative risks they talk to patients about to evaluate the risk-benefit ratio, such as an underlying risk of blood clots. | ||
| If you have an underlying risk of blood clots, a doctor may recommend a topical or vaginal form of estrogen, which does not increase the risk on top of that underlying risk. | ||
| Jeannie is calling from Austin, Texas. | ||
| Good morning, Jeannie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning to both of y'all. | |
| Hi, Dr. Macri. | ||
| I was going to definitely talk to my doctor, but I am in remission from stage three breast cancer, going on seven years. | ||
| And I am going to actually be getting in a couple of weeks my first bone density test. | ||
| But I was told I could not get on hormotherapy because, you know, I have HER2 positive, and that's hormonal. | ||
| And so thank you for just speaking right now. | ||
| I'm learning a lot just while I was holding on the phone. | ||
| But what is your opinion then if I am going to go? | ||
| I actually am trying to make an appointment with my oncologist, gynecologist. | ||
| Thank you both for speaking about this. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's not spoken up about enough. | ||
| And this is women. | ||
| This is women's health that's so critical, whether I have breast cancer or not. | ||
| And so anyway, I just wanted to get your opinion on what you thought being in remission from stage three breast cancer. | ||
| And I know I'm going to talk to my doctor anyway, but I'll get off the phone and I want to listen to you and see what you're saying about. | ||
| And like I said, I was told not to get on because of HER2 positive because it's hormonal. | ||
| So anyway. | ||
| Yeah, so this is an area of controversy. | ||
| And the decision as to whether or not a physician might recommend hormone replacement therapy in somebody with a history of breast cancer would be based on the degree or the aggressive nature of the invasiveness of that breast cancer, how far out you are from the breast cancer, what the risk of recurrence is, and the receptor status. | ||
| That is, whether or not it was HER2 or estrogen or progesterone positive. | ||
| And so that is a nuanced discussion. | ||
| Some doctors have generally adopted a view that, well, any breast cancer in the past means you'll never be a candidate for hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| But there are a group of very smart physicians led by Dr. Avram Blooming, who's an oncologist, who has said, no, there are great candidates for hormone replacement therapy in women who have had breast cancer in the past. | ||
| It's a nuanced discussion, but he has written on this topic. | ||
| Arlene is calling from Mayfield, New York. | ||
| Good morning, Arlene. | ||
| Arlene, are you there? | ||
| Give you one more try. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| Hi, Arlene. | ||
| Go ahead, you're on. | ||
| I think we're having some problems with your phone. | ||
| Arlene, give us a call back. | ||
| We'll go to Teresa in Bloomington, Illinois. | ||
| Hi, Teresa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would like to understand these doctors. | |
| The hormones that we go through are horrible. | ||
| I've never had any female problems. | ||
| I had two natural births. | ||
| I still have everything, and they put me on the hormone. | ||
| They gave me too much. | ||
| They say I have anxiety. | ||
| They want to take an anxiety. | ||
| I get hot flashes so bad that it'll make me sick to my stomach. | ||
| I've been told from doctors after doctors. | ||
| It only lasts for 10 years. | ||
| The hot flash is why I am sorry. | ||
| Started at 41. | ||
| I am 61 with all my female parts. | ||
| I got scared. | ||
| They had me on PrimPro, and they scared us as a genie in the bottle. | ||
| And I'm tired of taking an anxiety. | ||
| I don't take any other medicines. | ||
| I don't take nothing. | ||
| I want to know, should I get a hold of my nurse practitioner to see if I should get back on hormone PremPro? | ||
| Because hot flashes do not last 10 years, is what I've been told. | ||
| Everybody's been told they last only 10 years. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| I talked to a woman yesterday. | ||
| She's had them for 35 years. | ||
| Would we please understand what women are going through? | ||
| I mean, can you have a hot flash and be in the grocery store and get totally nauseous and going to throw up on the floor? | ||
| They say they don't understand women's hot flashes. | ||
| Yeah, so there's a good example, Tammy, of what we were just talking about, that every woman experiences the symptoms of perimenopause a little differently. | ||
| And for some women, it's not an eight-year duration of severe symptoms of perimenopause. | ||
| It may be longer. | ||
| And many physicians, if they can start the hormone replacement therapy within 10 years of the onset of menopause, will keep women on it as long as they'd like to stay on it, for up to lifetime, for life. | ||
| That is one practice pattern out there. | ||
| I will say that although that was a complicated clinical picture, and I'm often keen to point out that the government is not your doctor, and at the FDA, as the head of the FDA, I'm a regulator, and so I'm not making health recommendations, but we want people to have the right information. | ||
| We did have, we do have now two products that have been FDA approved for women who are not candidates for hormone replacement therapy to address the hot flashes or some of the other symptoms. | ||
| And it's a non-hormonal therapy. | ||
| So there are sometimes options for individuals like the woman who just called in. | ||
| Mickey is calling from Potomac, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning, Mickey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I read a book by Dr. Avram Blooming on estrogen matters, and he said all of this years ago. | ||
| Why did it take so long for Dr. Blooming to be validated? | ||
| Yeah, so Dr. Blooming is one of the, and that book was co-authored by Carol Taveras, and it's an excellent book that outlines the issues. | ||
| I personally read that book after Dr. Peter Attia started talking about this, and he's a friend of mine and told me, you know, this may be one of the greatest screw-ups of modern medicine, the demonization of hormone replacement therapy for women when started within 10 years of the onset of menopause. | ||
| Incredible long-term and short-term benefits. | ||
| And so a couple doctors like Dr. Blooming have been waving a flag in the air. | ||
| And women who have had the incredible benefits of hormone replacement therapy have been waving a flag in the air saying, hey, there's groupthink in medicine. | ||
| You guys are not looking at the actual evidence. | ||
| And they've been telling this story from a scientific perspective and from their experiences. | ||
| And so it's been a tremendous, there's been a tremendous calcification of the medical thinking on this topic. | ||
| And so Dr. Blooming and a couple other key leaders in the field have been basically saying, we have got to re-examine this. | ||
| And so the FDA is responding to a petition we have that has said, we have got to re-examine this and remove these very frightening black box warnings that are on estrogen products. | ||
| Explain the process behind making this decision to remove the warning. | ||
| What did it look like? | ||
| Who took part in it? | ||
| Yeah, so we have a citizens petition that has said we need to reevaluate these black box warnings. | ||
| They talked about how it was resulting in tens of millions of women not taking these products. | ||
| They come into their doctor and ask about it. | ||
| They've got symptoms of menopause, and their doctors either do not offer hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| Never bring it up. | ||
| Talk them out of it, or get into a back and forth about how this is very dangerous if you take it, and you should take as little as possible for as short a time as possible if you take it, sort of suggesting this sort of harm of these products. | ||
| And a lot of that was fueled and affirmed with these FDA black box warnings. | ||
| There are even cases where women have been prescribed hormone therapy. | ||
| They go home, open the package, and see this very frightening black box warning. | ||
| And up to 30% in one analysis have chosen not to take it because of that scary black box warning. | ||
| It just, the topic is nuanced, and to fuel that fear machine with that background that we discussed earlier on the real story and the real evidence on the topic is something that we decided to hold an expert panel to discuss further at the FDA. | ||
| We did that a few months ago. | ||
| The overwhelming voice of the Citizens Petition, the expert panel, and so many others in America was for us to reexamine this. | ||
| So we then took the issue to our subject matter experts, physicians like Dr. Christine Wen, who are FDA subject matter experts, an OBGYN physician, very close to this topic, and her team. | ||
| And they came out with recommendations on the changes to the label. | ||
| They presented that to me as FDA commissioner, and I accepted those changes. | ||
| And those changes are now being made. | ||
| We are working with the companies to get those inserts reprinted. | ||
| And we're letting people know what we're doing very openly and honestly because they need good information. | ||
| Issues of women's health have not received the attention they deserve historically for many reasons. | ||
| Maybe it's a historic male-dominated paternalistic culture. | ||
| Maybe it's just the perpetual self-affirming effect of not teaching about menopause in medical school, not having the right information on this topic of hormone therapy that's been dominated by dogma, the sort of group think of medical leaders who have perpetuated the bad misinformation on this topic. | ||
| And so in this administration, we are committed to elevating issues of women's health that have not gotten the attention they deserve, that desperately need to be front and center. | ||
| IVF treatments for women who want to have a baby. | ||
| That is a topic we discussed from the Oval Office a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Hormone replacement therapy and postmenopausal women were discussing today. | ||
| We are actively seeking these issues that have not gotten proper attention and trying to bring attention and awareness to them. | ||
| The decision to remove the black box warning, the process happening maybe quicker than other decisions would happen. | ||
| What do you say to people who may be concerned that the amount of time and the process wasn't thorough enough? | ||
| Yeah, so this has been a criticism that we've received is that we're moving too fast. | ||
| And I make no apologies for it. | ||
| We are not moving at government speed. | ||
| We are moving at the speed of normal people in business. | ||
| And we're going to get things done. | ||
| Now, we're not going to cut any corners on our safety evaluation. | ||
| We had our subject matter experts take the time they needed to review this literature and make recommendations on changing the hormone replacement therapy labels. | ||
| That process was not rushed. | ||
| It was just done by cutting the idle time, where we normally take six months or a year. | ||
| We are not messing around in this administration. | ||
| My agency, the FDA, we are getting things done. | ||
| For example, they've been talking about banning one artificial food dye for 35 years at the FDA. | ||
| Within weeks, I announced we're removing all nine petroleum-based food dyes from the U.S. food supply. | ||
| They've been talking for decades about making our drug rejection letters public information so the public can see why we chose not to accept a drug or why we chose to accept a drug. | ||
| They've been talking about that forever. | ||
| And the lawyers have said, well, you probably couldn't do this, but maybe. | ||
| And they've just been debating it. | ||
| Well, within a couple months, we have now have all petroleum, we have all what we call CR letters or rejection letters that are now public information. | ||
| People can go look up the product. | ||
| And this has been the way we are working. | ||
| They've talked about using AI for a long time. | ||
| We got AI agency-wide. | ||
| So we are getting things done, and I'm very proud of our track record. | ||
| I've been in office about eight months, almost eight months, and so we're going to keep moving at this pace. | ||
| We will not cut corners on safety. | ||
| But why does it take 10 to 12 years for a new cure to come to market? | ||
| We have to challenge these deeply held assumptions. | ||
| We have a program now to get an FDA decision out on a final product in weeks. | ||
| It's a new pilot program. | ||
| We're not going to cut corners on safety, but we can do much, much better. | ||
| Our goal is very simple. | ||
| More cures and meaningful treatments for the American public and healthier food for children. | ||
| And so we're going to keep delivering on that. | ||
| John is calling from Farmingdale, New York. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hello, Doctor. | |
| Yes, hello. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Okay, well, I believe Robert Kennedy Jr. was the main leading guy in removing petroleum-based products. | ||
| He's been championing that. | ||
| Isn't that true? | ||
| He's been talking about this for a long time. | ||
| And so we work as a team. | ||
| He has shown tremendous leadership, not just with the action to remove petroleum-based food dyes, but with talking about the thousand-plus chemicals that appear in the U.S. food supply that do not appear in the food supply in Europe. | ||
| So we are evaluating everything. | ||
| We have to talk about school lunch programs, not just the price of insulin. | ||
| We've got to talk about the SNAP program. | ||
| In this administration, thanks to Brooke Rollins and Secretary Kennedy, we now have waivers for the SNAP program, whereby states don't have to use taxpayer dollars for junk food and sugary drinks. | ||
| We have got to do something differently because the population is getting sicker and we keep spending more and more money and it's making the system unaffordable. | ||
| We are taking dramatic action to lower drug prices. | ||
| You saw from the Oval Office an announcement that a drug that goes for $1,300 is now going to be a $50 copay. | ||
| A drug for $243 for IVF is now going to be $10. | ||
| We're not interested in tiny little 1% or 2% reductions in drug pricing. | ||
| We want to make health care affordable dramatically different from how it is now. | ||
| And we're doing that. | ||
| So we've got a big agenda to make America healthy again. | ||
| And so that's really the focus of so much of what we do. | ||
| We've only been talking about playing whack-a-mole in healthcare, diagnosing, treating, and operating. | ||
| The prescription pad and the surgical knife have been the tools by which we have thought we're making the population healthier, but it's not working. | ||
| Sure, medicine's amazing. | ||
| It's some sophisticated operations, and we have new medicines and gene therapies that we're advancing that are truly remarkable. | ||
| And that's been a success. | ||
| That has been a modern-day success. | ||
| But when you look at the health of the population of children in this country, modern medicine has been a failure. | ||
| 40% of our nation's kids have a chronic disease. | ||
| It's not their fault. | ||
| This is not a willpower problem. | ||
| This is the highly processed, high-glycemic, low-fiber food. | ||
| I don't even know what you call it sometimes. | ||
| It's not even food. | ||
| It's like a food-like substance that we feed our nation's children. | ||
| We don't talk about natural light exposure, the importance of communities, cell phone addiction. | ||
| And so we have a generation of children that are sad and sick. | ||
| And what do we do? | ||
| Instead of talking about these issues, we drug our nation's kids at scale. | ||
| And it's not right. | ||
| So Secretary Kennedy has led this tremendous revival in America that's Republican, Democrat, Independent, people from any party. | ||
| Mom showed up to vote for President Trump over this issue that Secretary Kennedy championed, and I'm proud to be a part of it. | ||
| Darlene is calling from Orlando, Florida. | ||
| Good morning, Darlene. | ||
| Darlene, are you there? | ||
| Still don't think we have, Darlene. | ||
| We'll talk with Betty, who's calling from Verona, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning, Betty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I would like you to explain the difference between bioidentical hormones versus manufactured hormone replacement. | ||
| Yes, so great question. | ||
| Thank you, Betty. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| And so a biodentical is more identical to the intrinsic estrogen that your body will naturally produce. | ||
| And so there is a bit of a trend now to prescribe more bioidentical forms. | ||
| The original form of estrogen that was used in that famous 2002 Women's Health Initiative study, I believe it was a horse estrogen, and the medroxy progesterone acetate used, or MPA, is not the type of progesterone in common use today. | ||
| As a matter of fact, some women get their progesterone from an IUD. | ||
| It is important, and I should say that since we're talking about hormone replacement therapy in postmenopausal women, that if you have a uterus, that is, if your uterus has not been removed, then you do need to take progesterone, a progesterone, progesterone, or progestin product in addition to the estrogen, because unopposed estrogen in a woman with a uterus can result in endometrial hyperplasia. | ||
| And that's an important point, and that is being retained in the boxed information on the products. | ||
| Roger is also calling from Florida. | ||
| Good morning, Roger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Dr. Marty McCary, you are the best FDA commissioner by a mile this country has ever had. | ||
| Thank you for your service. | ||
| I'm a physician who also teaches medical students to rotate through our clinics. | ||
| And I have a quick two-part question. | ||
| What about women with the BRCA1 or 2 gene that have inherited a gene that increases their risk for breast cancer? | ||
| And secondly, because you are a distinguished graduate of Johns Hopkins, where a lot of the research for long COVID is being done, because COVID is associated with hypercoagulability that increases blood clot risk. | ||
| Would you address those two issues, please? | ||
| And I'll hang up and listen to your distinguished, well-thought-out answer to the questions. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you for the comment, and it means a lot to me, especially coming from a physician. | ||
| You know, we have a lot of collegiality in the medical community, and we've always had very civil conversations that you don't see outside of medicine, where you've got the echo chambers of social media and that sort of toxic polarization we've seen in society. | ||
| We have to preserve that healthy dialogue. | ||
| Now, in those situations, I will tell you that some physicians will prescribe hormone replacement therapy to postmenopausal women if they have a BRCA1 or II gene mutation, if they engage in active surveillance of that breast cancer, that is, have sort of continual close surveillance of the risk of breast cancer. | ||
| Now, I'm not recommending that, but that is one common practice pattern that is out there. | ||
| And on the issue of long COVID, it may be that a physician might prescribe a topical or vaginal estrogen for somebody with an underlying risk of blood clots instead of what we call the systemic estrogen form. | ||
| Elise is calling from Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Good morning, Elise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, good morning, and thank you for C-SPAN, and thank you, doctor, for your work. | |
| I'm 70 years old. | ||
| I moved from Florida to Oregon for better medical care two and a half years ago. | ||
| I was on birth control pills back in the 70s, and at that time, the estrogen levels were probably 50 times higher than what they are recommended today. | ||
| And I got that through Planned Parenthood. | ||
| And now that's being wiped out for young women. | ||
| And the doctors are not trained in women's health. | ||
| Women's health have taken a back seat for as soon as the entire period of our country. | ||
| And I'm also a survivor of domestic violence, and I had PTSD and severe TBIs. | ||
| Most women, 75% women who survived the domestic violence that I did, have traumatic brain injuries. | ||
| And I'm only being treated now 18 years later. | ||
| And even in Portland, my doctor did not know about PTSD and traumatic brain injury and again wanted to prescribe antidepressants. | ||
| Women make up 52% of the country and we're treated not better than animals. | ||
| Yeah, so first of all, on the traumatic brain injury or what we call TBI, and by the way, this is a big issue, PTSD with our nation's veterans and others who have sustained trauma in the past. | ||
| This is a big issue and a big priority for this FDA. | ||
| There are some potentially promising treatments out there. | ||
| We are committed to reducing the idle time that we have had historically to review some of these applications. | ||
| We need to talk about treatment in a holistic fashion. | ||
| It is not as simple as somebody simply taking a medication. | ||
| But that is a big priority in this administration. | ||
| And you just heard Doug Collins, the secretary of the VA, discuss this topic very passionately. | ||
| On the topic of menopause and in medical education, I remember Tammy in medical school, and it was mostly guys. | ||
| It's a lot of dudes there in medical school when I went. | ||
| And one woman, I still remember this moment, at the end of one of the courses, the professor said, is there anything, any feedback you have in the courses? | ||
| And she said, I wish we spent a little more time talking about menopause. | ||
| And a lot of the guys in the back are rolling their eyes thinking, I'm not even sure I knew what menopause was at the time. | ||
| But we thought, you know, we want like the hard diagnose treat kind of approach to medicine, give us a condition like appendicitis that we can go in there and do a surgical procedure. | ||
| Let's learn that, you know, all this sort of complex biochemistry. | ||
| But we had really sort of this bias. | ||
| about spending any time in a medical. | ||
| Now I've come full circle in my career. | ||
| You meet, I would see patients in my own surgical practice who were in that period and I would have the conversation with them, ultimately referring them to someone else to prescribe hormone replacement therapy. | ||
| But you realize this is an integral part of health. | ||
| Half of the people in the world are women and every woman that makes it to age 45 to 55 roughly is going to experience this change in their body's physiology that is 80% plus likely to actually change their mood or how they feel or how they have sexual activity, how they gain or lose weight. | ||
| It has such a diverse range. | ||
| Every cell on the human body has estrogen receptors. | ||
| And so it is part of brain health and heart health and bone health. | ||
| And these are things we talk about in medical school in terms of how to do a hip replacement or to hammer a rod down a woman's femur. | ||
| But we really never talked about this incredible opportunity to increase bone strength by 90 plus percent by replacing a body, a woman's estrogen levels once a woman's estrogen levels naturally decline. | ||
| Our guest is Dr. Marty McCary, Commissioner of the FDA. | ||
| Dr. McCary, always a pleasure to talk with you. | ||
| Thank you so much for being with us. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Good to be with you, Tammy. | ||
| In about 30 minutes on Washington Journal, CNN congressional reporter Annie Greyer breaks down a consequential week in Congress with the end of the shutdown, but the beginning of a fight over the Epstein files. | ||
| But first, it's open form. | ||
| Your chance to weigh in on any political or public policy issue on your mind this morning. | ||
| You can start calling in now the lines there on your screen. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And as we go to break, we wanted to show you a portion of an event earlier this week hosted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics with the TV show VEEP about the role and importance of political satire. | ||
| Here's a clip. | ||
| I would love to hear from you all on sort of the staying power of this series that went off the air several years ago, but yet has had this kind of resurgence, especially, and you all remember this when Biden said he wasn't going to run for reelection again and Kamal Harris said there was like, she was a meme and like zero shit went up on Netflix, like 350% on HBO. | ||
| So talk about that kind of staying power that this show has. | ||
| Tony, that's pretty incredible. | ||
| No, I was, one of the things that I've heard is, am I, is this me, my micros are good. | ||
| Is when the news gets obviously so crazy and it's difficult to watch and it's a lot of hardship and you're like, I can't believe this is happening, people feel the freedom to laugh at VEEEP. | ||
| So it's the sense of when they feel bad laughing at the news, it almost gives them permission to get it out on VEEP. | ||
| And that was just a real comfort for people, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I always think that, like part of the timelessness isn't the show that, like ever since the first person was like I'm gonna be a politician? | ||
| That then the first person was born who was like I'm gonna make fun of that dude, you know like? | ||
| So I feel like it's just been like a timeless thing that you can make fun of politicians. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| There is that part of it too, and I there is then also, just like the. | ||
| You know we, the writers of the show, tried to come up with this the single dumbest thing any politician could ever do and then ultimately, a politician would do it, and then it was like, so there was like that part of it too, that we kept trying to be ahead of it and then ultimately, we're kind of behind it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think the show benefits because it never revealed her party. | ||
| I think they attacked like the classic tropes of politics issues that were going on in VEEP, gun control, abortion. | ||
| We're still living with all of it. | ||
| So in a way, the way it was designed gave it some longevity and I think, like Tim said, I think you know politicians are always doing something really stupid or screwing something up your experiences with DC and the political world in your research for the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did it make you admire politics more? | |
| Did it turn you off from politics, that kind of thing, and do those experiences at all inform your view of politics today? | ||
| I felt like I earned tremendous respect for people in the trenches, because that is a job I would never do. | ||
| I would never be a congressman, I wouldn't like be inside that because of so many reasons. | ||
| So I did earn a lot of respect for the people who are in office and those people who serve them. | ||
| So that's one thing I learned. | ||
| I think I mean I just learned a lot about the process, I guess, and I mean I went into it pretty, you know, knowing about politics on a very inch deep mile, wide way, and I think I did learn a lot about process. | ||
| I remember like when we first went to the House floor I was looking around like what the fuck is a quorum, I don't know, and I do think it has colored my thought of how quickly things should happen, just of learning about how the actual processes of these things go. | ||
| Some of them could definitely move faster, but it's not the kind of thing and I don't think it's the kind of thing that we want to have turn on a dime. | ||
| I don't think we want government to change tomorrow and then change the next day and then change back the next day, and so I. | ||
| It maybe has taught me a little bit of patience with having just seen a little bit of the underlying process. | ||
| Not that much patience, but at least a little more than I had. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Washington Journal continues. | |
| Welcome back it's open forum, your chance to call in on any political or public policy topic on your mind. | ||
| Your lines are open, Democrats, that line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independence, your line is 202-748-8002. | ||
| And before we get to the calls, I wanted to bring you up to date on the latest happenings from Washington, D.C. 43 days that shutdown lasted, a historic shutdown. | ||
| Life is getting back to over now. | ||
| Life is getting back to normal now that it is over. | ||
| One headline we have for you is exclusive from Semaphore: Trump administration lays out a plan for federal workers back pay after the government reopens. | ||
| It's from Shelby Talcott, who was on the program last week. | ||
| It basically lays out agency by agency of when workers can expect to get their first paychecks. | ||
| It says that paychecks for employees at the Department of Energy, Health and Human Services and Veterans Affairs, as well as Army and non-Army civilian employees at the recently named Department of War, are projected to be processed on Sunday. | ||
| The document that this article cites notes that paychecks will include standard pay as well as payments for things like hazard pay. | ||
| Another article that we have for you is that the FAA eases flight steps to FAA takes first steps to restore flights after shutdown strain, but some limits remain from the Associated Press. | ||
| This says that the agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, says that airlines will only have to cancel 3% of flights beginning at 6 a.m. Saturday instead of 6%, citing safety concerns, the FAA first ordered flights reduced at the busy airports on November 9th as absences mounted at air traffic facilities and airport towers. | ||
| Controllers were among the federal employees who were required to work while going unpaid during the shutdown. | ||
| We actually heard from DHS Secretary Christy Noam, who oversees some of the airports and flight happenings in the country, where she actually gave checks to the TSA workers at the airports, those who continued to show up throughout those 43 days that the government was shut down. | ||
| Take a listen. | ||
| And for the last 43 days, we have been dealing with a government shutdown that has dramatically impacted the lives of the American people. | ||
| And people were not just convenienced, inconvenienced, but they were also damaged and harmed by what Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic Party did to the American people. | ||
| What I'm so proud of, though, today and what I'm here talking about today, is the outstanding patriotism and service of our TSA officers and officials that stepped up every single day to make sure that those individuals at our airports and at our transportation systems continued to be safe and secure while they went about their daily lives and limited the impact on those families that relied so much on getting to where they needed to be on time. | ||
| So today we are announcing that we are going to be handing out bonus checks of $10,000 to TSOs, to agents who work for TSA, who served with exemplary service. | ||
| And what that means is that we are going to not only continue their paychecks like they should have received all along, but also they're going to get a bonus check for stepping up, taking on extra shifts, for showing up each and every day, for serving the American people and taking seriously the mission that the Department of Homeland Security takes seriously and that they take seriously every single day. | ||
| And that's keeping the American people safe while they go and commute across the country and while they do their work and business and take care of their families. | ||
| All right, turning to those callers, Charlie from Washington, a Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Am I up now? | |
| You're up now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So here's my question. | |
| All right. | ||
| So I think it's the East Wing that is being demolished and rebuilt as a ballroom that did not go through the public process of vetting, of all of the things that need to be done to actually do things in the public sector because it's all of ours, the citizens White House. | ||
| My question is, the thing I'd like to think about or thought is all of the public, like big donors that are providing money to take care of this because Trump's saying it's not the public funded. | ||
| Well, since it didn't go through all the legal processes to do this the way we, you know, the National Historic of Registered Places and all the, you know, public vetting of the plans and bags and bidding and all that. | ||
| Well, the people providing that money, the big, huge corporations that have that kind of money are private people. | ||
| Are they not like, I guess in a legal perspective, culpable or assisting in doing illegal activities? | ||
| Is it not possible to bring a case against all of those donors to, you know, I guess charge them for not allowing the public to go through the appropriate process? | ||
| That's all I have. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I'm not sure what legal options that people would have. | ||
| Obviously, this week, we saw J.P. Morgan Chase's head CEO Jamie Dimon come out and say that he did not want to give to the ballroom for various reasons. | ||
| But I just actually found an article from Roll Call with the title East Wing Demolition Highlights Loopholes in Preservation Law. | ||
| And it says that Trump administration's decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House without consulting preservation agencies and organizations is a reflection in part of the unusual position the building has in historical preservation law. | ||
| Now, one thing that I know that the White House has said repeatedly is yes, that this is a privately funded renovation and that they've made a lot of those people who have given to that ballroom public, a lot of them have actually been back to the White House for various dinners that the president has had. | ||
| And that some of the commissions that would necessarily oversee those constructions, the president has really remade a lot of those. | ||
| So I would invite you to look at this article and perhaps maybe one of our producers could look into whether or not there are legal openings or opportunities for people for some of the folks who are donating. | ||
| But I know from talking to officials at the White House, they believe that they are abiding by the laws and that this is a private donated renovation. | ||
| Andy from Georgetown, Kentucky, a Republican, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Just a couple of different topics, if I may, on those drug votes. | ||
| People, I've seen many or heard of many of them. | ||
| I've seen a couple of people that would tell me about their children or friends that they knew dying in the floor at their feet from drug overdoses. | ||
| And they are thanking God for Donald Trump that he's getting rid of this drugs coming in here that killed their children, their wives, their husbands, their grandchildren. | ||
| How could anybody know that you see this stuff floating on the ocean when he destroys them? | ||
| And they test them for the media and people out there just not have any clue of what's going on and they'll take anybody else's side of, oh, he's doing this, he doing that. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| But anyway, on the Epstein charges, do you know that Jeffrey Epstein was never convicted at a trial of any of these charges? | ||
| He pleaded guilty in 2008 to state-level prostitution charges as part of a controversial plea deal. | ||
| And he served, I think, 13 months under a work lease program that let him out for jail for six days a week as a condition of that. | ||
| And he was not supposed to be federally charged. | ||
| But in 2019, Andy, may I jump in here and ask you whether or not, obviously, a huge conversation happening in Washington this morning is about the Epstein files. | ||
| Do you believe that the Trump administration should release the Epstein files in full? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they've already been released. | |
| The only thing that's holding them up isn't that from what I've seen and read, and I know you want to change the subject on this, but from what I see and read, he can't do anything that the courts won't allow him to do, just like the go to pretrial, or you have these where just one side presents evidence, and that's not supposed to ever be released. | ||
| Well, I'll jump in here, Andy. | ||
| The president actually can release the Epstein files that his administration has cited that they don't want to because they want to protect the victims and other issues, but they can release the full Epstein files. | ||
| What you are describing is a court case in which they petitioned the court to release some specific jury documents that the court then said that they couldn't. | ||
| Billy, up next in Anderson, Indiana, an independent? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I'd like to talk a little bit about the deficit that we have. | ||
| Mainly, I think it was caused by COVID. | ||
| And we do know that the Democrats, Fauci, worked with the Democrats. | ||
| They give over in the Wuhan lab, we funded like $11 million over there for the funding of this. | ||
| And we do know it was a Democratic thing. | ||
| Billy, can I ask where you read that, one, that COVID caused the deficit, which, of course, is over a trillion dollars. | ||
| And first, let's just start with that. | ||
| Where did you read that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just common sense. | |
| If people had a little bit of common sense, you can figure it out. | ||
| Look, it shut all our schools down. | ||
| Right, but how is that tied to the deficit? | ||
| Well, also, the funding, the funding for the COVID relief fund and the infrastructure bill that went through, the Democrats put in about $11 trillion. | ||
| Obama, why okay? | ||
| Well, I'll just say that right now, the U.S. deficit for the fiscal year of 2025 was $1.78 trillion. | ||
| Steve in North Carolina, a Democrat? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I have a topic or two I want to talk about, but I want to go back to the man from Kentucky, if I may, and with some real life. | ||
| My son, my son's wife, called me several years ago and said, your son's in the hospital. | ||
| He's unconscious. | ||
| They don't think he's going to live. | ||
| And it was from a drug overdose. | ||
| So the next morning, my wife and I get up, drive to North Carolina. | ||
| We don't know if we're going to be identifying our son's body or seeing him alive. | ||
| Now, I will tell you this: if he had died, I would have shed a tear every day. | ||
| But I'm going to tell you what, he knew what he was doing. | ||
| All these people taking these drugs know what they're doing. | ||
| So, you blame anybody in the world you want to, but the fact is they're sticking it in their body. | ||
| No one else is making them do it. | ||
| The problem is they don't have jobs. | ||
| They don't have an education. | ||
| They don't have anything that they'll look forward to or live for. | ||
| So, they're taking these drugs. | ||
| In Knox County, Tennessee, one person dies from a drug overdose every year. | ||
| So, you can believe what you want to, but the fact is they're putting the drugs in their body. | ||
| They're killing themselves. | ||
| Steve, I'm glad that your son seems to be okay, but may I ask, since you do have some experience with this, are you supportive of the administration's efforts to stop the flow of fentanyl into this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, let me say this. | |
| And the answer is: it needs to be an education issue. | ||
| Okay, but let me tell you this: these drug cartel people are not stupid. | ||
| They'll pull somebody off the street and say, look, or somebody that owns a boat, a fishing boat, if you don't run these drugs up there, if you don't take this boat for us, we're going to kill everybody in your family. | ||
| So, what are you going to do? | ||
| So, the fact is, you may be killing a lot of innocent people doing this. | ||
| Why not catch them? | ||
| You got enough people down there now to stop these boats. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| I feel sorry for these people, these parents. | ||
| I know what they're going through, but nobody made those kids put those drugs in their body. | ||
| Those kids or whoever decided to do it on their own. | ||
| Okay, thank you, Steve. | ||
| A relevant headline out today in the Washington Wall Street Journal, excuse me, headlined, Secret Memo Lays Out Case for Boat Strikes. | ||
| In there, it says that a lengthy document by the department's Office of Legal Counsel outlines the Trump administration's still secret legal justification for the military operation, which has sparked criticism from Democrats and some Republicans since the strikes began in September. | ||
| We're talking about those strikes, obviously, in the Caribbean, that the administration says is targeting drug cartels running drugs to the U.S. | ||
| The mention of fentanyl is one of the many points in the draft in the brief drafted over the summer to justify the use of military force against drug traffickers. | ||
| It notes that fentanyl has been weaponized in the past. | ||
| Stephen from Dewey, Arizona, a Republican, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Yes, I called yesterday, and I gave some information that I called when the guest you had was talking about the 50-year home loans. | ||
| And I talked about how I paid off my home and how I did that. | ||
| I had high credit, 30-year loan. | ||
| And after five years, I got a lower loan. | ||
| So I went from 25 to 18. | ||
| And I was in loans for 30, 35 years in the automobile business. | ||
| And this can only happen with simple interest loans. | ||
| So if you pay half the loan, no matter what it is, if it's $3,000, if you pay $1,500 two weeks before the loan and the other $1,500, they can't charge you the full interest. | ||
| So I went from, I paid off the home in 12 years. | ||
| So I saved another six years just by making the payment I was supposed to make, not making more payments. | ||
| And then they cut me and the guest kind of said, oh, you shouldn't do that. | ||
| So I AI'd it. | ||
| And this is what AI said. | ||
| And this is going to help anybody that has a home loan or a car loan. | ||
| That's a simple interest loan. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| Yes, paying half the loan payment halfway through the month will reduce the amount of interest you pay because more of your payment will go toward the principal. | ||
| By making the first payment earlier, reduce the principal balance sooner, which lowers the amount of interest that occurs over the remaining period of the month. | ||
| Stephen, can I ask about the politics of this 50-year mortgage? | ||
| Are you, as somebody who has been able to successfully pay down their mortgage, and it seems like in a shorter amount of time than what your mortgage was for, are you in support of a 50-year mortgage? | ||
| Do you feel that that is going to incur too much interest on the borrowers? | ||
| Where do you stand on, obviously, this issue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's up to the individual. | |
| I mean, the guest was saying that, you know, is making it a doomsday thing where, you know, everything was fixed interest loans. | ||
| Saying stuff like the average price of a home is a million dollars, where the average price of a home I just AI'd it is $400,000 in the $400,000 range. | ||
| But that's up to the individual. | ||
| When you go get a loan, that's going to be up to you to decide if you want to do 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. | ||
| So that's going to be an individual. | ||
| Okay, so you're not off the bat against that issue. | ||
| Okay, Stephen. | ||
| Sabrina from Asheville, North Carolina, and Independent, you're up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm calling because I was very concerned about what the man from the FDA had to say about hormone therapy. | |
| So the hormones just got took out of the vaccinations a while back. | ||
| So it makes sense that the FDA would be pushing to try to get the warning labels off of hormones off because they're most likely receiving payments for it. | ||
| But what he's proposing is extremely dangerous. | ||
| You don't want to go in and start taking those warning labels off those medications because it takes an act of Congress and almost an act of God to get those warning labels put on those medications in the first place. | ||
| So I just wanted to voice on that because what he's talking about doing is going to have a negative effect on a massive amount of people. | ||
| And that is not something that we should be doing. | ||
| We should not be discussing the Epstein files because those victims of that man most likely were underage. | ||
| There might not be underage now, but the trauma that those individuals received is going to be triggered every time we talk about it. | ||
| What we should be talking about is Dr. Fauci. | ||
| Where are the files on Dr. Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies that have been flopping on the market and getting themselves put onto the child vaccination list? | ||
| That's what we should be talking about. | ||
| Sabrita, let me go back to the Epstein files quickly, even though I know that you said we shouldn't be talking about it. | ||
| The Epstein's victims that are still around have been actually very public about wanting these files to be released in full so that the country can understand what happened to them and what happened to the other victims. | ||
| I wonder if you disagree with their position. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, considering I am a rape victim, you know, like a serious rape victim where somebody literally bathed in my blood. | |
| Yeah, what happens when you go through something traumatizing like that is anytime that you have to talk about it or anytime that you see something that is related to what happens to you, it triggers the memory of those incidents. | ||
| So you see, if a victim really, really had a traumatizing experience in that, every time you say that word, it's going to trigger a memory of what happened to them. | ||
| Like the doctor that did that to me, his name is actually in a song. | ||
| I can't even listen to the song without it triggering their memories. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| But the bigger issue is Epstein is old. | ||
| You know, that stuff has, I'm not saying it's not a big deal, but it's old. | ||
| Well, Sabrina, thank you for sharing your story. | ||
| I would just say, point to this Axios report filed about 19 hours ago that say Epstein survivors urge Congress to release all the files in quotations, no hiding. | ||
| It says a group of Jeffrey Epstein survivors is calling on Congress to release all the files and documents related to the investigation into the convicted sex offender. | ||
| What they're saying, quote, you have the ability to vote to release the Epstein files and with it, deliver a promise the American people have awaited for far too long. | ||
| We implore you to do so. | ||
| Reads the letter attributed to the family of Virginia Guffery and other survivors. | ||
| Karen from Chester, Pennsylvania, Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| I've been sick for a while, so I haven't been listening, so I don't even know if you covered this. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I haven't seen all the coverage. | ||
| Well, Karen, you can actually talk about whichever public policy or political topic that you want since it's open forum. | ||
| So what's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They should release the files, but what I want to talk about is health care. | |
| People have faulty memories. | ||
| They don't remember back in December of 2009 when the Republicans would not pass the affordable health care unless it ceased to be a single-payer plan. | ||
| If they had let the plan go the way and work it the way it was designed, of course Obamacare is failing because you're not using it the way it was designed to be used. | ||
| If it had been passed the way it was designed, it would not be more expensive. | ||
| You'd be able to pick the doctor that you want any doctor. | ||
| You wouldn't have any of these stupid rules that the insurance companies have. | ||
| You wouldn't be able— Sarah, can I ask, are you in favor of the Democrats' position that the subsidies should just be extended for another year or two years? | ||
| Or are you hoping that the administration comes up with the sort of replacement that could either put the money directly into the hands of the Americans to pay down some of those fees or a different version that would make Obamacare cheaper? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, to be frank with you, after seeing all these things, I'd like to see him extend the subsidies for now. | |
| But what I'd really like to see, I've been looking around at all the different healthcares, and, you know, not in other countries too much, but just around here. | ||
| And Bernie's idea is not too bad. | ||
| I think they should extend it. | ||
| Donald from Spokane, Washington, Republican, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I just, I was hoping to talk to Dr. Marty. | ||
| I know he's gone now. | ||
| So my question for him, I'll just make is a comment, if that's okay. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| First off, thank you to C-SPAN. | ||
| I wanted to wait the full 30 days till today to call because it's a special day in my family. | ||
| It's my big brother's birthday. | ||
| I want to say happy birthday to him. | ||
| Happy birthday. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I wanted to thank Dr. Marty and some of his, I guess it would be colleagues that I know from the John Hopskins, Dr. Fearon and Dr. Sacco out of Dallas Medical City for the Cranio Facial Center. | ||
| They saved my son and many children's lives. | ||
| And what they do down there is just amazing. | ||
| We get to go see them in about a month for his final checkup. | ||
| So just wanted to thank all those people. | ||
| Wish my brother happy birthday. | ||
| And if I could go ahead and ask my question and maybe one of his aides or him, if he's a good C-SPAN watcher. | ||
| Okay, Donald, we've got ahead to break. | ||
| What's your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is about the recent hemp ban or whatnot that came out in this last bill. | |
| And I'm hoping that President Trump and Dr. Marty and RFK Jr. can really look into this because we need to be there to support our veterans and our patients that have other medical issues that maybe modern medicine doesn't necessarily help or doesn't help at all. | ||
| And by pulling these. | ||
| Okay, Donald, we'll take that question on the hemp band and hopefully you'll get an answer from the administration. | ||
| Up next, we have CNN Congressional Reporter Andy Greyer who breaks down a consequential week in Congress with the end of the shutdown, but the beginning of the fight over the Epstein files. | ||
| That conversation after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Friday on C-SPAN's Ceasefire. | |
| At a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman and Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the top issues facing the country. | ||
| They joined host Dasha Burns. | ||
| Bridging the Divide in American Politics. | ||
| Watch C-SPIRE Friday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPIRE. | ||
| American History TV, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | ||
| This weekend, as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, join American History TV for our new series, America 250, and discover the ideas and defining moments of the American story. | ||
| This week, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, author Rick Atkinson, and retired Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford examine Revolutionary War leadership at an event held at George Washington's Mount Vernon. | ||
| Watch documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein as they join C-SPAN's Washington Journal to discuss their upcoming PBS series, The American Revolution. | ||
| Take a tour of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where we look at the lunar lander that touched down on the moon, Charles Lindbergh's plane that flew across the Atlantic, and the X-15 flown by Neil Armstrong. | ||
| On Lectures and History, a discussion on the U.S. and the Arab-Israel peace process with Trinity College professor James Stoker, looking at the history of the U.S. negotiating ends to Israeli-Arab conflicts, including the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV every weekend and find a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series. | ||
| Sunday, best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson, who chronicles history's most remarkable lives. | ||
| His books include Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Einstein. | ||
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein. | ||
| What attracted you to these people? | ||
| Was it because they were geniuses or you just happened to like them? | ||
| Smart people are a dime a dozen. | ||
| In order to be a genius, you have to be creative. | ||
| You have to think out of the box. | ||
| And one of the things that struck me when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin early on was what a great scientist and technologist he was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch America's Book Club with Walter Isaacson. | |
| Sundays at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. | ||
| Only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Joining us to talk about the end of the government shutdown and other news of the week from Capitol Hill is Annie Greyer, Senior Congressional Reporter for CNN. | ||
| Annie, hello. | ||
| Thanks so much for joining us. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| All right, I want to jump right in. | ||
| We are just on the heels of the longest shutdown of all time, ending this week 43 days. | ||
| You've done some great reporting on this. | ||
| What was the mood on Capitol Hill after the vote? | ||
| I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle were asking, what did we get out of this? | ||
| Democrats went into the shutdown saying they wouldn't vote to reopen the government unless those expiring Obamacare subsidies were addressed because they were worried about people's health care prices going up. | ||
| Republicans said they weren't going to vote to reopen. | ||
| They wouldn't address any of those subsidies until the government was reopened, but they were getting more and more pressure to bring House members back into session to have some negotiation to maybe even bring the president in. | ||
| And there was pressures from all sides of the party at one point. | ||
| The president was asking for the filibuster to be abolished to sort of get the shutdown over with. | ||
| So 43 days, and I think both sides were really scratching their heads what was accomplished here. | ||
| But even more so, Democrats left that shutdown feeling extremely divided. | ||
| I mean, what's if there's been no change in policy, obviously Democrats were not able to get changes to healthcare, which is why they said that they were shutting down the government in the first place. | ||
| What did change? | ||
| Is it their messaging? | ||
| What was the actual change that Democrats and Republicans can point to after the shutdown? | ||
| So a few things. | ||
| First, what happened, addressing federal workers as a result of this shutdown, there was a part of this deal that Democrats wedged in there that ensured that any federal worker who was fired during the shutdown will actually get rehired, that all federal workers, including furloughed workers, will receive back pay, which is something the administration was weighing whether or not that they were going to do. | ||
| So Democrats can really point to that as a win. | ||
| And then on the expiring Obamacare subsidies, no, Democrats did not get a solution, but they got a vote on the Senate floor, which a lot of Democrats saw as a win given Democrats are in the minority. | ||
| They don't control the floor. | ||
| So for the Republicans to give them that one vote, the Democrats say, you know, that is something tangible at least we can hold on to. | ||
| Of course, it is very unclear if that would pass in the Senate. | ||
| Even less likely that that would get taken up in the House. | ||
| So again, it's not a huge win, but it is something tangible that at least those eight Democrats are pointing to. | ||
| I want to invite our viewers who join in on this conversation shortly. | ||
| Democrats, your line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, your line is 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, your line is 202-748-8002. | ||
| Obviously, we talked about Republicans putting, or Senate Republicans at least, deciding that they would give Democrats a vote on health care. | ||
| How over the course of the 43 days did Republicans' message change or did it not change at all? | ||
| It didn't really change that much, but There was not a lot of flexibility in that message where there maybe could have been. | ||
| I mean, Mike Johnson kept the House out of session the entire shutdown. | ||
| The House was completely not at the table for any of this. | ||
| And even Republicans were getting anxious. | ||
| They were getting frustrated about this because there were things that members could have been doing. | ||
| They could have been trying to make sure military workers get paid, make sure SNAP benefits go out. | ||
| Instead, those were things that the administration ended up getting involved in. | ||
| But Johnson made the calculation early that keeping the House out would, one, prevent sort of tempers from flaring in hallways because lawmakers wouldn't have much to do, so it could get pretty tense. | ||
| And two, continue to put pressure on Senate Democrats, which ultimately ended up working, you could argue. | ||
| But, you know, what did what the House is now so behind in its work as a result of it? | ||
| There was no hearings. | ||
| There was no committee meetings. | ||
| And now they have on a very shortened timeline to try and come up with sort of bipartisan deal on those expiring health care subsidies. | ||
| And Johnson keeps saying that there's, you know, a ton of different ideas out there, but we haven't seen pen to paper yet. | ||
| We know that there is Republican interest in doing something here because a lot of Republicans represent districts where their constituents are deeply affected by this issue. | ||
| In fact, there's a bill that has at least 14 Republican co-signers on it that would extend these subsidies by a year. | ||
| So Johnson's going to have to now address all of these sort of competing factions in the Republican Party because he knows that there are Republicans who want to do this. | ||
| And then I think, you know, one more thing about just what Republicans sort of got out of this shutdown or learned is Tuesday's elections two weeks ago, that was a moment where even the president acknowledged that people were blaming Republicans for this shutdown. | ||
| Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, the White House, obviously. | ||
| And Tuesday's elections, a lot of Republicans saw sort of a wake-up call that maybe their strategy wasn't working. | ||
| Democrats got even more dug in, that they should keep holding a line. | ||
| Then, of course, everything fell apart by the weekend, and now we're in reopened government. | ||
| And one thing that we saw after that falling apart where eight moderate Democrats joined Republicans to reopen the government in the Senate was divisions among House progressives and Democrats in the Senate. | ||
| Our notice reporters talked to Chris Murphy, a senator, where he said, quote, you cannot defend democracy effectively if you are not united as an opposition party. | ||
| And we are repeatedly showing that we are not united. | ||
| So my hope is that the caucus comes together and decides to stop breaking apart like this. | ||
| Can you talk about some of those divisions among Democrats after the shutdown? | ||
| Yeah, this is a really big moment for the Democratic Party for eight Democrats to vote for this government deal and reopen it. | ||
| And the majority of all House Democrats, I think it was only six House Democrats that ended up voting in the House for this, but that the top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, said publicly he was fighting this deal, that he was going to work to convince his members not to vote for it. | ||
| I mean, you had the Democrats had this moment where, I mean, let's go back a little bit to March, the last time the government funding issue came up. | ||
| We saw Chuck Schumer and a bunch of Democrats vote to reopen the, vote to keep the government open. | ||
| There was no shutdown then, right? | ||
| And between March and September, there was a lot of soul searching in the party of how do we best use our position in the minority to stand up for what we believe in, to push back against Republicans. | ||
| And the decision was, let's make this about health care, these expiring subsidies that are causing 22 million people's health care prices to go up. | ||
| This is something that, you know, we can explain to people that we can all be united behind, that Republicans are affected by too. | ||
| And the decision was to really fight. | ||
| And then the shutdown starts dragging on. | ||
| And all of a sudden, you have these eight or so moderate Democrats, a lot of whom are not up for reelection for many years. | ||
| Some are retiring. | ||
| You know, they have a different calculus than those like John Ossoff, who's up and running for a tough reelection, or Democrats who have tough competitive races in the House. | ||
| So there was all these kind of political calculations swirling. | ||
| And those eight moderate Democrats, I learned, you know, didn't just decide on a whim to agree to a deal. | ||
| They had sort of been working behind the scenes the whole time of this shutdown and meeting with Thun and meeting with Republicans and having the sort of intermediary with the White House because they were never really on board with this shutdown strategy. | ||
| But Schumer wanted, Schumer wanted to fight. | ||
| He wanted to keep Democrats sort of together on this. | ||
| He couldn't keep those eight moderates, hold those eight moderates off any longer. | ||
| So now Democrats are back in this soul-searching period of, okay, in March, we voted to reopen the government. | ||
| The base was really pissed. | ||
| In September, we tried to stay united and fight and hold until we got what we wanted. | ||
| People caved early. | ||
| Now they have until January 30th is the next government funding deadline. | ||
| Are we going to see a different strategy here? | ||
| I mean, people, there's some Democrats, notably not in the Senate, really, but some Democrats in the House who say Schumer needs to resign or step aside. | ||
| He can no longer leave the Democratic Party. | ||
| That's a conversation they need to have. | ||
| Then there's, you know, just the broader question of what is our strategy here in this Trump, in fighting Republicans in this Trump administration. | ||
| One other relationship that you profiled during the shutdown was a relationship between Hakeem Jeffries and Mike Johnson, now House Speaker. | ||
| Can you talk about how their relationship has evolved since basically Trump has been in office? | ||
| Your headline of this one piece was how Johnson and Jeffries' once collegial relationship has soured in the era of Trump and shut down politics. | ||
| Yeah, so rewind to when Mike Johnson gets sworn in October 2023. | ||
| The two of them are hugging on the House floor. | ||
| It was marking an end to a really bitter chapter in House politics. | ||
| You know, Johnson went through 15 rounds, or there were so many rounds for, you know, being who was going to be Speaker. | ||
| The Republican Party was in shambles. | ||
| And Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries, starting in 2023, forged this new path of working together. | ||
| Now, we were in a totally different Washington then. | ||
| Joe Biden was in the White House. | ||
| Democrats controlled the Senate. | ||
| But Mike Johnson and Jeffries really found areas to work together. | ||
| They kept the government open. | ||
| Jeffries helped Johnson save his job when Republicans tried to oust him at one point. | ||
| They worked together on passing crucial foreign aid for Ukraine and other countries. | ||
| And compare that split screen to now, where they publicly have gotten very, you know, really started attacking each other in ways that I had not seen before. | ||
| So that's when I started talking to sources and asking sort of what was going on behind the scenes. | ||
| And turns out they were barely talking during the shutdown. | ||
| I mean, yes, there were check-ins here and there, but it was not like meaningful discussions. | ||
| And there is a feeling among Democrats that once Trump got elected, that Johnson could no longer be trusted as sort of an equal negotiating partner because he was always going to defer to the president on whatever issue it may be. | ||
| And Democrats saw this sort of start to happen once Trump got elected in November 24, that in December and January, slowly it started to creep to where it is now where Johnson has to rely on Trump to pass any piece of major legislation. | ||
| We saw that over the summer with the Big Beautiful Bill where Trump was literally making those calls on the floor to lawmakers to try and switch them to yes at the last minute. | ||
| And so that lack of trust has really soured that relationship. | ||
| And just quickly that now that this kind of foundation is broken with the government reopening, the two of them really need to work together. | ||
| There's ever going to be any sort of bipartisan health care deal. | ||
| How are you going to do that when this shutdown has really soured the relationship? | ||
| And that's sort of what I learned. | ||
| Let's turn to our callers, Anne, Annie, and from Brian Wood, Wisconsin, a Democrat. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you for having C-SPAN and for talking about the current issues. | |
| I guess for me, the shutdown, I was very disappointed as a Democrat that those Democrats gave in. | ||
| But I think the pressure is so great on everyone. | ||
| I can understand why they did. | ||
| And I think the issues, people are really tired of all of this, Democrats, Republicans. | ||
| Everybody's just trying to make a living and pay their bills, and it's getting harder and harder to do that. | ||
| And we just want a government that will solve our problems rather than just distract. | ||
| And I don't know how other we're trying to protest, we're trying to talk to our representatives, and they don't listen. | ||
| And I don't know what else can we do to get this government to start working for the people. | ||
| Annie, why don't you take that? | ||
| I think one thing that came out of this shutdown was if you were to rewind to September 30th, I don't think anyone in the public really knew what these expiring health care subsidies were and the impact it was going to have and how big of an impact it was going to have on people. | ||
| And now, fast forward to today, and this is an issue that's front and center. | ||
| People really do know about it. | ||
| And that came from people sharing their personal stories, you know, posting their bills online, which is a very personal decision to make, but to show, look at how much my costs are going to go up if these subsidies go away. | ||
| And I think that that sort of personal stories creates a lot of public pressure, probably more than you realize. | ||
| And there are a lot of Republicans who understand this issue deeply. | ||
| And I think people continuing to talk about how their cost of living is going up, but specifically on the health care issue, how their health care prices are going up, is only going to keep the pressure ratcheting up, which is, you know, if you want your voice heard, I think that's the best way to do that. | ||
| Kate from St. Louis, Missouri, an independent. | ||
| Your line is up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I've got two things. | ||
| Essentially, in my opinion, the government is truly broken, and maybe we need to do a clean sweep. | ||
| Mike Johnson is so dug in to his principles, he's not willing to cross the line. | ||
| That also goes for the Democrats. | ||
| Some of them are like that as well. | ||
| And on a side topic, I just want to know, what is the government afraid of that they refuse to open and release all of the Epstein files? | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Annie, Epstein files. | ||
| So starting with the Epstein files, I mean, the administration, the way that the president and his allies have handled this, I think have made this continue to make this more of a firestorm by withholding information. | ||
| I think if if the Department of Justice and the White House said today, release all the files, I think people would appreciate that transparency. | ||
| And it would be, you know, a horrible moment for the victims. | ||
| But hopefully that, you know, they would finally get the sort of recognition and validation that they so that they so desperately need and deserve. | ||
| And that people can sort of start to potentially move on from this. | ||
| But the fact that this has continued to be this cat and mouse game where the administration keeps changing its position here or changing its changing how it's going to respond to all of this. | ||
| And it's just continued, by continuing to sort of hide the ball here, it's made people more suspicious. | ||
| And it's created all of these, this uproar that we've seen. | ||
| And we're going through the 20,000 emails that the Oversight Committee put out earlier this week. | ||
| The president's name is mentioned in there. | ||
| So that raises all kinds of concerns. | ||
| But of course, just because he's mentioned doesn't mean that there's wrongdoing. | ||
| And so I think the White House is, of course, trying to avoid, it seems, some embarrassment if more, you know, more mention of the president comes up. | ||
| But if there's truly no wrongdoing there, I think releasing all this information is truly kind of the only path forward here. | ||
| And the House is going to take a big step towards that this week. | ||
| I was going to say, for Republicans signed on that discharge petition just this week, they are on the screen here. | ||
| Representative Massey, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, after some pressure from the White House, Johnson says that he's putting the vote on the floor on Friday. | ||
| Can you talk about why he has shifted his position, potentially away from the White House to hold a vote and to hold it immediately? | ||
| Yeah, I think the Speaker has made the calculus that, look, a lot of Republicans want to vote for this. | ||
| Let's just vote for it, move on, send it over to the Senate. | ||
| Because it's still a long way for this to actually see all these files to see the light of day because it would have to pass the Republican-controlled Senate and then be signed by the president into law. | ||
| Now, given his position on all this, there's a lot of questions. | ||
| Would he sign something like that? | ||
| But this is going to be a big moment in the House this week. | ||
| We think as soon as Tuesday, because this House Republican conference has really been in lockstep with the president every step of the way of his second term. | ||
| And I'm hearing from sources that it could be 40, 50, 60 Republicans who vote for this on Tuesday. | ||
| That is a major rebuke of the President and his position here, but that's how strongly people across both parties feel about this issue. | ||
| So, what I hear from sources close to the speaker is he understood all this and just said, like, delaying this any longer, because there was sort of a procedural mechanism he could have used to delay this vote, decided let's not delay, let's just do it, kick it to the Senate. | ||
| John from Long Beach, California, Republican, your line is open. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I really appreciate it. | |
| Thank you very much for having me today. | ||
| I really appreciate C-SPAN. | ||
| I feel like our government is like a bad Hollywood divorce. | ||
| It is so dysfunctional. | ||
| And the problem is there are so few people left in the middle that you can't get a very hard left-leaning group of Democrats to actually move towards the center and find some compromises that have to take place if our representative government's going to work. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Annie. | ||
| The retirements that we're seeing sort of across the board really speak to your point. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of moderate members who have said publicly that they feel like their respective parties are moving away from them. | ||
| I mean, look at Jared Golden, who announced his retirement from Maine. | ||
| He is a Democrat who Republicans have tried to unseat many times. | ||
| He represents one of the most Trump-leaning districts represented by a Democrat in Congress. | ||
| And he just put out an op-ed saying, look, I don't know if this is worth it for me anymore. | ||
| I'd rather be with my family, giving back to my community in other ways. | ||
| There are on the Republican side, Republicans like Don Bacon, who's known for working across the aisle, represents a district in Nebraska. | ||
| And he has also said something similar, that it's time for him to move on from Congress. | ||
| So the historic level of retirements that we're seeing in both chambers from both parties, I think, really speaks to your point and raises a lot of questions of, you know, how do both parties continue to recruit high-level candidates when there is such this dysfunction in Washington? | ||
| I mean, signing up for this job means you are signing up for a lot of craziness, a lot of chaos, a lot of things out of your control. | ||
| Unfortunately, the potential threats to your personal safety. | ||
| And a lot of people are looking at that and saying, I don't know if it's worth it anymore. | ||
| Well, talking about dysfunction, overnight we saw a real breakup of a long-term relationship between Marjorie Taylor Greene, who signed on to that discharge petition to release the Epstein files, and President Donald Trump. | ||
| I want to take a listen to how he talked about the Epstein files of it all yesterday at Air Force One and Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| The Congresswoman was on CBS News. | ||
| She was talking about how the files should be released. | ||
| We anticipate that a vote will happen in the House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know you have, you wrote about the investigation today. | |
| I don't care about it, released or not. | ||
| What I think you should do, if you're going to do it, then you have to go into Epstein's friends. | ||
| This Reid Hoffman spent a lot of time on the island. | ||
| I was never in his island. | ||
| Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. | ||
| You're going to have to look into his friends because, you know, if they're going to do that, then I think the perfect guy to do it would be Southern District, somebody like Jay Clayton. | ||
| I understand that's who's been assigned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But does the Congresswoman have a point though? | |
| Does Marjorie Taylor Greene have a point? | ||
| Does she have appointments? | ||
| I know nothing about her. | ||
| For the release of votes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hold the phone. | |
| Well, they can have whatever they want. | ||
| They already do. | ||
| I think they have 50,000 pages already. | ||
| Look, this is a Democrat hoax. | ||
| This is a hoax put out by the Democrat, and a couple of few Republicans have gone along with it because they're weak and ineffective. | ||
| But this is a Democrat hoax to get away from the fact that they just lost the shutdown and they've lost the elections. | ||
| They've lost the big election to me in a record number. | ||
| They lost the popular vote. | ||
| They lost the swing states. | ||
| They lost everything. | ||
| I think it was 312 to 220-something. | ||
| So this is a way of not talking about that. | ||
| It's a hoax. | ||
| This is no different than Russia, Russia, Russia. | ||
| And it's headed up by Democrats and some very weak Republicans. | ||
| So how is that going to land on the Hill? | ||
| I think this is a bombshell on the Hill, honestly. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene has been Trump's closest ally on the Hill, most unapologetic supporter for years. | ||
| I mean, she's been at State of the Unions wearing Trump hats. | ||
| She's the first to kind of pass companion legislation for whatever policy he was bringing up on the campaign trail or is doing in administration. | ||
| She's his number one cheerleader. | ||
| And to see this breakup happen so publicly, so directly, just really shows sort of where the Republican Party is right now. | ||
| Now, Green says Trump is doing all this because he wants to scare Republicans off from voting against the Epstein discharge position on Tuesday, because as we mentioned, she's one of the four co-signers. | ||
| But she has been very publicly in the last couple weeks just talking very negatively about the administration, how they're not addressing affordability, how they're not addressing the health care crisis, critical of Republicans for keeping the House out of session. | ||
| So people are sort of scratching their heads as to why she was coming out so strongly against the president when she previously had been so for him. | ||
| But now President Trump officially like ending this relationship is really stunning. | ||
| Robert from Harrison, Arkansas. | ||
| Democrat, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, thank you for my opportunity. | |
| One of the main things, every day that they voted on the shutdown, Senator Thune emphasized this would only be a vote for a clean CR day after day after day. | ||
| When the vote finally came up, it was an extended CR, but it also included snap in a fit, I think money for the military, but also that senators. | ||
| Robert, we're running close to our time here. | ||
| What's your question for Annie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How come they can have that vote when it included senators being excluded from Department of Justice when they refuse to take up health care, which we have a problem with? | |
| Well, you're not alone in that frustration. | ||
| House Republicans are furious about that too. | ||
| In fact, some didn't vote for the government funding bill when it came to the House for that very reason. | ||
| And the Speaker had a press conference after the House passed the government funding bill saying he was furious and blindsided by this. | ||
| In fact, he had had a conversation with Leader Thun about how House Republicans are going to introduce a way to strip that provision because you're right, it wasn't a clean CR in the end by adding this provision in. | ||
| And it doesn't even include House lawmakers. | ||
| It was just addressing people in the Senate. | ||
| And there are Republicans who are furious. | ||
| So this issue is going to be back on the House floor this week where Republicans are going to vote to strip that provision. | ||
| And then senators are going to have to address, are they going to hold by their vote or are they going to understand the public pressure that's mounted around this and remove it? | ||
| So that vote is going to be on the floor this week. | ||
| Annie, what else are you looking out for on Congress this week? | ||
| Well, this is their first real week back. | ||
| It's sort of like back to school vibes. | ||
| Like, what priorities are Republicans going to be focusing on? | ||
| I mean, they have to get through the Epstein vote on Tuesday. | ||
| They're going to have this vote about stripping the provision from the Senate bill later this week. | ||
| And then, is it back to regular order? | ||
| Like, are they going to try and pass more appropriations bills? | ||
| They're behind on the National Defense Authorization Act, which has to be passed by the end of the year. | ||
| They haven't held committee hearings throughout this whole government shutdown. | ||
| I think it's going to be kind of chaotic. | ||
| That's what I love covering about Congress, though. | ||
| And we really don't know what to expect. | ||
| Andy Greyer covers Congress for CNN. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| And that is all for our program today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Another edition of Washington Journal is up tomorrow at 7 a.m. 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 Sunday morning, we'll talk about the government shutdown, Campaign 2026, political extremism, the Epstein files, and news of the day. | ||
| First with syndicated talk show host Arnie Arneson. | ||
| And then we'll talk to the Washington Examiner's Peter Laughin. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Have been watching C-SPAN Washington Journal for over 10 years now. | ||
| This is a great format that C-SPAN offers. | ||
| You're doing a great job. | ||
| I enjoy hearing everybody's opinion. | ||
| I'm a huge C-SPAN fan. | ||
| I listen every morning on the way to work. | ||
| I think C-SPAN should be required viewing for all three branches of government. | ||
| First of all, if you say hello to C-SPAN and how you covered the hearings. | ||
| Thank you, everyone at C-SPAN, for allowing this interaction with everyday citizens. | ||
| It's an amazing show to get real opinions from real people. | ||
| Appreciate you guys' non-biased coverage. | ||
| I love politics, and I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices. | ||
| You and C-SPAN show the truth. | ||
| Back to the universe for C-SPAN. | ||
| It's the one essential news network. | ||
| Today, California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff sits down for an interview with journalist Terry Moran at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. | ||
| Watch it live at 3.15 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Charter Communications. | ||
| Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers. | ||
| And we're just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. | ||
| Charter Communications supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Speaker Mike Johnson held a swearing-in for Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva on the House floor Wednesday. | ||
| She had won a special election in September to the seat formerly held by her late father, Congressman Raul Grijalva, who served more than 20 years. | ||
| Speaker Johnson had delayed the swearing in for seven weeks. | ||
| It's a move that Democrats allege was politically motivated to prevent the representative from signing a petition to force a vote on the release of the Epstein files. | ||
| Representative Grijalva spoke after her swearing in, announcing she would sign the petition immediately. | ||
| The Honorable Speaker, House of Representatives, sir, I have the honor to transmit herewith a copy of the certificate of election received from the Honorable Adrian Fontes, Arizona's Secretary of State, indicating that the special election held on September 23, 2025, the Honorable Adelita Grajalva was duly elected representative in Congress for the 7th Congressional District, state of Arizona. | ||
| Signed sincerely, Kevin F. McCumber, clerk. | ||
| Will Representative-elect Grijalva and members of the Arizona delegation present themselves in the well? | ||
| And all members will rise. | ||
| And the Representative-elect will raise her right hand. | ||
| Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that you will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that you take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that you will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which you are about to enter. | ||
| So help you, God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| Congratulations. | ||
| You're now a member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman from Arizona is recognized for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | |
| It is my pleasure to rise today to congratulate our newest colleague and fellow Arizonan on her swearing in as the representative of Arizona's 7th congressional district, Congresswoman Adelita Grajalva. | ||
| Congresswoman Grajalva has concentrated her career on issues associated in advocating for students and supporting families. | ||
| As she follows her late father's footsteps, and boy, those are some footsteps, especially with those bolo ties. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I have no doubt she will bring to the halls of Congress the same energy that has defined her years of public service. | ||
| As Dean of the Arizona Congressional Delegation, I wish to congratulate Congressman Grajalva and welcome her to the United States House of Representatives. | ||
| I now yield to my friend from Arizona, Mr. Stanton. |