C-SPAN’s Washington Journal dives into the partial government shutdown, with Senate funding legislation (S. 3705) pending House approval by February 2nd, while callers clash over ICE reforms—masking, warrants, and sanctuary cities—amid claims of racial bias and fraud. Democrats like Reva and Dorothy demand accountability on Epstein’s unreleased files (3M+ with murder allegations), while Republicans blame open borders for crime, citing incidents like SNAP abuse and Signal-coordinated protests. The Doomsday Clock’s 85-second warning highlights nuclear risks, overshadowing Congress’s focus as Groundhog Day looms. Meanwhile, bipartisan "Action for Progress" tackles mental health, and a subpoena fight over Clinton-Epstein ties escalates, revealing deep divides over justice, immigration, and national security priorities. [Automatically generated summary]
As you heard, the house is in recess, subject to the call of the chair.
So that gives us some time this morning on the Washington Journal to open up the phones for you to call in.
Open forum here in this final hour of the Washington Journal as the House stands adjourns.
They may come back in and we'll go there if they do.
But until then, your phone calls about what's happening on Capitol Hill, the politics, the policy, what's happening in your state.
Any public policy issue that you want to talk about, now's your time.
202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
We'll also look for your text messages as well.
If you do text in, please include your name and where you are from.
Here's where we are on Capitol Hill today as the House is in recess, subject to the call of the chair.
The Senate not expected to come in today until 3 p.m.
We're currently in a partial government shutdown and it's not expected to end until tomorrow at the earliest.
The Senate passing legislation on Friday that would fund the government fully, but that legislation needs to be passed by the House.
Members of the House coming back into Washington today to take up that legislation.
There's a Rules Committee meeting this afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern Time that we're going to be airing on C-SPAN 3 to see if a rule can be made to cover the legislation.
That will then be voted on on the floor tomorrow.
Also at that House Rules Committee hearing today, a lot of attention will be paid to the debate over whether to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with a subpoena related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.
That's expected to also happen at that Rules Committee hearing today.
Other events and happenings on Capitol Hill that we'll be covering on the C-SPAN networks today on C-SPAN 2.
In just about 10 minutes from now, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States and former Republican Senator Rob Portman will convene to discuss the future of a post-war Ukraine.
Again, in about 10 minutes or so on C-SPAN 2.
Also on C-SPAN 2 at 1 p.m. today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty McCary will join a bipartisan group of policy leaders and health care experts to announce Action for Progress.
That's a national initiative they're launching to confront mental health and addiction in America.
We're going to be covering that again at 1 p.m. Eastern, and you can watch on C-SPAN 2.
So a lot happening today on the C-SPAN networks.
With all of that, we are in open forum.
Your calls on any public policy, any political issue, now is your time to call in.
This is Reva out of Maryland, Up First Democrat.
Good morning to you.
unidentified
Good morning.
Reva's Concerns About ICE00:15:16
unidentified
There are so many issues that I could talk on.
Just listening to you talk tells me how much there is to cover.
Okay, so we've got these 3 million files, and there's at least 2 million more that they're not planning to release at all.
And what happens with these files?
Well, the first thing that happens is, you know, they're uploaded, and it's not easy to go through.
I've tried going through it, and so I've found that sometimes it's better to go to a second place where it's easier to go through them.
And most of them are just come to my party kind of stuff.
And is it an awful party or is it just a party party?
Because these were really social people.
But 3 million, there's some stuff there.
And there is mention of murder and torture.
And I want to know what the FBI and our Justice Department did to investigate these.
I don't want to hear these are just crazy people because when it's a claim like that, the automatic human tendency is to push it away and say, I don't want to see that.
So there's a lot more I want to know.
And it is a number one issue with American people when polled.
Considering all that's going on, that makes it news that the American people care about it this much.
And there are people on Reddit that are pulling these emails off and archiving them because they're too much to go through at once.
But they will be gone through.
It's not going to go away no matter how much the gentleman from Politico and many journalists want it to go away.
I think one reason they want it to go away is it looks like work to go through all that.
There's a lot of different levels of journalism, and investigative journalism is harder and more time consuming.
And I think it just looks like work.
It is easier to go, oh, well, this just isn't here and people are making this up.
A thousand women have come forward, women now, young girls then, and said they were raped and abused.
And Robert, those things don't stop in a government shutdown, and it's a partial government shutdown.
There's only six out of the 12 federal appropriations bills that are not fully funded at this point.
So agencies like the Department of Transportation, Homeland Security, they're being affected by this, but it's not a full government shutdown like we saw last fall.
But you say you'd like the government to come to an agreement.
Democrats are making demands when it comes to immigration enforcement operations, things that they want to see in order for the government to fully reopen and the Department of Homeland Security to be fully funded.
It was Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer on the floor of the Senate on Thursday of last week laying out the changes that Democrats want to see when it comes to enforcement operations.
These three, ending the roving patrols, enforcing accountability, masks off, cameras on, are common sense reforms.
They are reforms that Americans already expect from law enforcement.
Now, the onus now is on Leader Thun and Senate Republicans to work with Democrats to turn these goals into legislation.
They are in the majority, the Republicans are.
They're the ones who have responsibility to govern, and Democrats are ready to come to the table.
If Republicans refuse to work with us to rein in ICE and to end the violence, they're telling the American people they're choosing to protect ICE over choosing to protect people's safety.
Americans, by and large, support law enforcement.
I do.
And most people support border security.
I do as well.
But Americans do not support ICE terrorizing our streets, operating outside the law, killing American citizens.
The madness and violence must end.
Congress must act to rein in ICE and end the violence.
Rein in ICE and end the violence.
The American people deserve nothing, nothing less.
Chuck Schumer on Thursday, again, that was before the Senate passed a bill that would fund five of the six appropriations bills and pull out the Department of Homeland Security and give a two-week extension for the Department of Homeland Security funding while that debate over reforms happen.
That debate played out again yesterday on the Sunday shows on Meet the Press.
It was Speaker Mike Johnson who was asked about those potential reforms to the Department of Homeland Security.
Yes, look, I think President Trump was right to acknowledge that.
I think he's operated in good faith.
He said he wanted to turn the temperature down.
He put Tom Holman in charge there.
He was right to deputize him over that situation.
He has 40 years experience in border patrol and in these issues.
So I think that this is going to happen, but we need good faith on both sides.
Some of these conditions and requests that they've made are obviously reasonable and should happen, but others are going to require a lot more negotiation.
In fact, I was in the Oval Office with the president a few days ago when he was on the phone with Leader Schumer, and they agreed, and Tom Holman was on the other line, and they agreed to most of those conditions.
But the mask, for example, the additional judicial requirement for a warrant would be a whole other layer of effectively bureaucracy.
Remember, the immigration judges have already issued warrants, and that's what the ICE officials are acting upon.
So there's a lot of details in this.
We could get deep in the weeds, but we will do that over the next two weeks.
And I hope that Democrats will be in good faith, as Republicans are, to try to bring some order to all this.
That's Christine talking about, I believe, MS-13 was the gang that she was referring to.
This is Gray in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Republican.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
I hate that I missed Mr. Kedari.
A couple things.
One, I'd like to address about his statements, and I don't really understand because he seemed like an intelligent, upright gentleman.
But he said he doesn't understand why ICE agents wear masks.
And I think the only thing we need to point to that explains why they wear masks is what happened in the city's church in Minneapolis Sunday before last, where you had a group of people who targeted a specific official within ICE who was on the board of this church, and they go to the church and they disrupt the church service.
This is what certain elements of folks who are opposed to the operations of ICE would like to do to garden variety ICE agents who have families and who deserve to have a life of anonymity while just doing their job like we all do to some degree more or less.
And the second thing is his statement about that cities are not purposely refusing to honor ICE detainers.
And the question I would ask Mr. Kedari is: what does it mean to be a sanctuary city?
Because a sanctuary city, that's exactly what they do.
They do not honor ICE detainers.
If the law enforcement officials in a particular town, county, or city interact with a person regardless of immigration status, once the trial situation for that person has been adjudicated in that jurisdiction, they release them rather than holding them for 24 hours as ICE requests.
And the way that you can see this is true, the only place where we have ICE people, ICE agents on the street doing things that result in the tragic accidents or tragic events of the killing of the two individuals and what have you are in cities where they are sanctuary cities.
This does not happen in the rest of the country where law enforcement cooperates with federal officials.
So Ankush Kadori, to your first point, he was saying on the masks issue that we give these police officers extraordinary powers as federal agents.
Why does that mean that they should have anonymity?
And his concern is that anonymity might be used as a way to push those powers too far or as a way to not have restraint on some of those extraordinary powers that we give policing officials in this country.
What would you say, or what did you think about those statements that he said?
unidentified
Well, so if you had invited me on and it was me sitting across from Mr. Kadori and he had said what you just said to me, I would say to the folks who want to stop this action, which is supported widely, even a plurality of Democrats support removing illegals, particularly dangerous, violent illegals from our streets.
If it weren't for people trying to stop that, they wouldn't need to mask up.
These people, this idea that it would make ICE agents more aggressive is a feature, not a bug to them.
They want there to be mistakes made by ICE agents.
And these people who follow, track, and otherwise harass ICE operations in these sanctuary cities are looking for that.
Literally, these ICE operations are followed by people in a coordinated fashion using signal chats.
You might recall signal chats from Secretary Hedgekiss, I can't even say his name correctly right now, earlier in the administration where they had a signal chat going with the folks in the Department of Defense or Department of War, whatever we're going to call it today.
And it was not a secure thing.
They used this same signal chat app, which is encrypted, to communicate ICE sightings and then go to those places and harass them with rape whistles, horns.
You know, even the two individuals who were killed, tragically, they were actually interjecting themselves in the path of law enforcement conducting their law enforcement business.
I'm not here to say justified, not justified.
That's for somebody else, beyond my capability there.
Yeah, I have two questions or a couple questions, and then I guess a bit of a bone to pick with C-SPAN.
I guess the first question is: has C-SPAN had any articles that illustrate or that talk directly to the notion that people have been let out of prison or countries that have let their prisoners out of the country or out of prisons and they're rapists and trial molesters and pedophiles and have as I have do you have the articles that speak to that?
I've never seen one.
The second one is if they did do that, how'd they get in the United States?
All right.
So, are you saying that we just said, hey, rapists, criminals, murderers, drug dealers, come on in and we're going to let you run rampant until Trump shows up and then we're going to do something about it at that point?
And if there aren't any evidence, there's no evidence that illustrates the fact that these folks have been, in fact, let into the country or allowed to come into the country or another country allowed them to come in, then why are you guys continuously perpetuating that mythology?
You know, because what this sounds to me more is this is a racist, xenophobic approach to trying to marginalize the community to get folks up in an uproar to maintain a certain nonsense policy that has no real merit.
But again, where is the country that have done this?
Let's talk about them.
Let you show me the evidence and then I'll go along with some of the noise that Trump and his clonies are talking about.
But if there's no evidence, then why do you guys continue to let folks come on and say that this is happening?
I would like to start by saying to the House of Representatives: they come on in the morning and they pray, and the chaplain uses the word righteousness.
And then they say the Pledge of Allegiance.
I said it also, haven't said it in a long time.
And then, so then, what is their day for?
To what?
Represent the people?
Oh, yeah.
We the people.
We the people.
No, no, it's not.
So now we need a 2026 word for the United States of America, which is kindness.
We do not have it.
We have sold our souls to the devil, and everybody's walking around talking crazy, repeating themselves, blaming the journalists, blaming this.
No, it's we the people.
Okay, so then ICE.
Okay, so I noticed that some of the guys did take the mask off, but the United States of America, part of it, is still riding around on black ice.
I don't see any black ice people.
I don't see any black ice.
What is that?
The January 20th insurrectionists that make up that organization.
Benny, what's your view from Minneapolis this morning?
unidentified
More of a libertarian, but I'll take it.
You know, I've lived here my whole life, and the Somalian community was concentrated at Riverside Apartments, and that was it.
We called it Little Somalia.
And when they allowed the, you know, the sanctuary status to kind of take over the whole state, they just started flooding everywhere.
And I got to tell you, most of Minnesota is not happy about it.
And many of them are illegal.
I don't care what they say.
Most of them are illegal.
And if they're not, they were, you know, they're committing fraud.
Pure and simple.
They've stolen a lot of money.
And, you know, people depend on that.
A lot of families, kids, people that actually need the help.
And, you know, so that, so ICE came here because of that.
And, you know, they're talking about masks, body cameras, warrants.
I think the warrants will just allow them to have a little more, you know, legitimacy when it comes to arresting these people.
So I think the warrants are good.
I think the masks, what they're doing is they're to protect the, you know, protect the people's family.
You know, the mask is for protection.
And, you know, with all the doxing that's going on and everybody outing these mask agents or these ICE agents, they need protection.
And the body cameras, why not?
You know what I mean?
It'll just make things a whole lot easier for proving things.
And I don't know.
I'm just not happy about ICE being here, but I'm not happy about people being here illegally and taking advantage of a system that's meant to help people that truly need it.
Immigrants are fine.
Illegals, no.
So, as for ICE being too aggressive, that might be fair.
But, you know, maybe if they dialed it back a little bit.
Benny, are things been dialed back in the six days since Tom Homan has taken over operations in Minneapolis?
What have you seen?
What'd you see this weekend?
What did you see at the end of last week?
unidentified
People kind of, they calmed down a little bit, but now they're starting to go inside Target, singing songs, clapping.
They're getting in front of the blue line, the rail system here, and people can't travel because, yeah, okay, people dialed back to protesting a little bit because ICE dialed back a little bit, but still they're in the way.
I mean, let ICE do their job and they will go home.
They will leave.
That's all it is, is if they do their job, the quicker they do their job, the quicker they'll leave.
And these people don't get it.
The more they fight, the more ICE is going to get aggressive.
I've even heard legal immigrants talking about that.
A very nice man from Liberia, a cab driver, said, you know, if ICE was able to do their job, you know, they would leave.
Why fight them?
It's just going to make things worse.
You know, and those protests are just ridiculous.
They're making things worse.
And it's just, you know, it's just going to cause trouble.
And to the comments from the other callers, I don't know if you were listening, but two other callers were saying that the right to peaceably assemble, the First Amendment right to assembly, is different from protesting.
And what they see in Minnesota is not peaceable assembly.
What do you think about that as somebody who protests, who assembles?
unidentified
I have seen a whole different bunch of people, you know, people who are more provocative than other people.
But I believe strongly that this is a country that supports people speaking out about public issues, and this is definitely a public issue in terms of what's going on.
I mean, I have heard comments made on C-SPAN and elsewhere about, you know, people who are citizens, for example, people who've been shot and killed.
The idea of not objecting to that is abhorrent to me.
Somebody has to stand up and protest and say this is not right.
I can't imagine that there are many people in this country who think it's right to go out and shoot and kill somebody, shoot 10 times, which I think is ridiculous.
If you feel like we're inching nearer to the end of the world, you are not alone.
The bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday of last week set their doomsday clock closer than ever to midnight, the metaphorical point of human annihilation.
The latest adjustment, 85 seconds to midnight, marks the third time in four years that the scientists have ticked the clock towards catastrophe, and it is the latest in more than a decade of steady advances in that direction.
Since 2020, we have been closer to the precipice than any time during the Cold War arms race, according to the bulletin.
It's a Chicago-based nonprofit.
Nuclear threats remain a key factor, and we have compounded the risks ranging from climate change and adversarial world leaders to artificial intelligence and disinformation campaigns.
The doomsday clock is what the caller was talking about by the bulletin of the atomic scientists.
This is William out of Houston.
Democrat, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Good morning, C-Span.
You're looking at a veteran, not only a military, but a veteran of the Jim Crow area.
The only difference between now and Jim Crow to use and Hispanic and non-white people speaking that you haven't been putting dogs on your water hose, but that's probably going to be next.
But I say this.
Why aren't I stopping white people in that papers?
And they assume all white people here are here legally.
This is racist.
And until more white people start getting killed by ICE, they're not going to stop.
I would just like to ask the people that's complaining about all these ICE agents wearing their mask and stuff, who are they going to call when we let all millions of these illegal aliens into our country and they come after one of their families?
Who are they going to call?
The ICE agents?
That's who they'll call.
They're all against them.
And also, I'd like to make a comment to the gentleman that racist, racist.
That's all you want to call is racist.
There's white people, black people, Asian people, all kinds of people in this world that's affiliated with this mess that we are in.
Our last administration let millions of people into this country, and we have got to get them out.
If we don't, you people are going to be crying to ISIS and everybody you can cry to if something happens to your family.
The scene today from Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, this Groundhog Day, that was the ceremony earlier this morning.
Congress is in today.
The House gaveled in at 9 a.m., but continues to be in recess subject to the call of the chair.
The Senate is in at 3 p.m. today, and there's plenty happening on Capitol Hill, including a rules committee hearing at 4 p.m. today, in which a rule will be voted on that may end the partial government shutdown that we are currently in.
It is a shutdown that began just after midnight on Friday with Congress not having passed six of its annual 12 appropriations bills before its deadline.
And so agencies like Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security are shut down today and have been since late on Friday night.
Though as Susan Page writes in the pages of today's USA Today, another shutdown, meh, says many in D.C., she says, the partial shutdown that started at midnight on January 31st created less buzz over the weekend than the early and almost entirely negative reviews of Netflix Melania.
This, even though parts of the Pentagon and Health and Human Services Department and Transportation Department left without the regular funding, were ordered to begin an orderly shutdown for at least a few days.
It will go on as long as this current impasse lasts.
Congress trying to find a way to fund five of those six appropriations bills and then fund the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks as negotiations take place over possible changes to immigration enforcement rules.
That's where we are today on Capitol Hill.
This is Rachel in Texas Independent.
Good morning.
What's on your mind?
unidentified
Good morning.
Hi, I was calling because I was wondering if you happen to know what the status of the Credit for Caring Act is.
Is that a bill that they're going to be that Congress is deciding now?
So, Rachel, I'm not familiar with the details of that one, though Congress.gov is a great place to go to track individual bills and see where they are in the process.
So, I'd recommend you go there, but I don't want to speak to something I don't know much about, and that's not a bill I've been following.
But why are you following that bill?
unidentified
Well, that is a bill for family caregivers who could receive up to $5,000 in tax credits.
And as a caregiver, that would be extremely helpful.
And so, that is one bill I am interested in.
And I'm also hoping that Congress is going to pass a bill to refund telehealth for Medicare patients, because that has apparently stopped.
So last week on this program, we talked about the 40th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, but also showed that on American History TV on Saturday.
It was a 24 hours on the history of the U.S. space program for viewers who missed it.
But if you did miss it, you can watch all that programming on our website at C-SPAN.org.
Just click on the American History TV tab.
Rachel, thanks for watching it.
Thanks for watching all of our programs here on the Washington Journal and on American History TV.
One is about them releasing all of these Epstein files.
I think that's going to be a problem if someone else was to get prosecuted.
Then they have a way out to say, well, they have released all my information.
So I don't have, you know, they don't have a standard chance in court.
And the other thing is that about all of these immigrants coming up here, people forget that that was the governor of Texas that put these people on buses and sent them throughout all over the country.
And I think the governor in Florida helped put these immigrants throughout the nation.
And on the explosion of the challenger, I had seen it.
I heard the first boom and I stepped out my door and I looked up in the sky and I've seen the rest of it.
We had parts of this spaceship all over this Burnham Parish here in Louisiana.
I'd also like to, you know, speak to my fellow American there about the right to peacefully assemble is obviously in the Constitution, but nowhere in there does it let you gather to violently storm churches.
In fact, we do have federal laws protecting that.
It appears that Don Lemon and his cohorts have violated that law by breaking into a place of worship and interrupting their service and creating all this commotion.
And that's really what I think it is.
Like, it's a lot of commotion to cover up for the fraud that's going on at the state level.
The governments and the people in charge are not being honest with us.
And they're using us to fight each other and create these divisions where it's pretty easy to see what's going on.
I mean, they've always said follow the money.
Okay.
Well, if millions of dollars are going to daycare and transport companies and there's no good receipts and these businesses aren't even open or have any clients, well, something's going on there that doesn't meet, you know, doesn't pass the smell test, right?
Like, it's pretty easy to say, oh, this is a legitimate business or these people are probably doing something shady.
We should investigate it.
It'd be real easy for Governor Waltz and these people to come out and say, hey, we need to work with law enforcement.
Does it matter to you that Don Lemon will say he's an independent journalist and that he was practicing his First Amendment right to freedom of the press in that situation that you're referring to?
unidentified
Well, of course, that matters in the sense if you could articulate and prove that you weren't conspiring with those people beforehand.
If a bunch of people go, if I know my friends are going over to rob a bank and I take my camera and I interview the bank teller why it's going on and asking her, you know, have you listened to them?
They're poor.
They need money.
Go talk to them.
Is that make me an accomplice in that crime or am I protected by the First Amendment?
I just want to say that this whole thing could be solved without them showing us, throwing us all this bait by just prosecuting the people that hire the illegal immigrants.
We wouldn't have to go after them, millions of people.
You know, they shouldn't be here, obviously, but we could go after the employer.
No job, no illegal immigrant.
Case solved.
We're not talking about that because we're getting stuff thrown at us by the very people who initiated it, our politicians.
So just go after the employers.
Tell them: hey, if you hire an illegal immigrant and we find out you're going to jail, not a fine, they can afford a fine.
Yeah, I would just like to talk a little bit about the immigration.
I really don't have a problem with people coming here legally.
The problem I have is when you release millions of undocumented immigrants into the country, there's going to be a part where they use SNAP, they use Medicaid.
They have to because how else are they going to make it?
And meanwhile, you know, you can go to a local Walmart and you can literally see them cashing some kind of a card where they get $2,000 at increments.
I've seen this three different times waiting to get a money order.
And then they'll send each of them $1,000 back to Mexico, Walmart.
That's Ray in Kentucky, our last caller in today's Washington Journal, but we will, of course, be back here tomorrow morning.
It is 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific.
In the meantime, hope you have a great Groundhog Day.
unidentified
And the House today is considering several pieces of legislation related to veterans as the federal government enters a third day of a partial shutdown.
As soon as tomorrow, members are expected to consider a Senate-passed package to fund multiple government agencies till the end of September.
That includes the departments of defense, education, health and human services, housing, state, transportation, and treasury.
The package will also cover funding for the Homeland Security Department for an additional two weeks.
But before the package can be considered on the floor, it will be debated by the House Rules Committee later today, along with the Republican effort to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena related to the investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The committee meeting is set to begin at 4 p.m. Eastern.
When that happens, be sure to watch our live coverage on C-SPAN 3 on our free C-SPAN Now mobile app and online at c-span.org.
Democracy.
It isn't just an idea.
It's a process.
A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles.
It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted.
Democracy in real time.
This is your government at work.
This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy, unfiltered.
C-SPAN's Democracy Unfiltered00:00:26
unidentified
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
Jonathan Horn's latest book is titled The Fate of the Generals, MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
The publisher Scribner explains the premise of Horn's book.
For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received the country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor.