All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Feb. 19, 2026 10:09-11:04 - CSPAN
54:58
Politico Holds 2026 Governors Summit
Source
|

Time Text
We Don't Know Exactly What's Coming 00:07:43
Finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service.
Not in 10 years.
People building these systems say one to five years, some say less.
So this would indicate a much bigger disruption, Vance, than going from the horse and buggy to automobiles.
And it could, especially in certain tech industries and other places.
But what I would consider is what Frederick Hayek, an economist, called the knowledge problem.
We don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future.
We know what the jobs are today that are using AI in other areas in our economy, but we don't know what new jobs, new sectors, new innovations that will come out in the future that will allow us to feel many of those jobs that are displaced in the process.
So I'm not here to say that there's not going to be any disruptions and there's not going to be any sort of changes in the economy.
I think that there will be.
The issue is that I'm trying to argue is that we don't know exactly what the future is.
You can find all of our Washington Journal segments online at c-span.org.
We're going to leave this conversation to take you live to the Politico Governor Summit for remarks by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
He is amazingly his last year as governor of the great state of OH.
We got some Ohioans here today.
All right.
Governor, thanks for joining us here today.
First thing I want to ask you about is something I know you're passionate about, that you and I have talked about in the past, which is the plight of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.
Folks here are very familiar with this story because of what happened in the 2024 campaign.
There has been an effort by the administration to remove the Haitian community, not just from Springfield, but to basically strip them of their temporary protected status, TPS.
Now, a court has blocked this, but are you concerned that once that injunction ends or it somehow is lifted or it's overruled by a different court, that we could see chaotic scenes in Springfield that we've seen in other American cities?
Well, I certainly hope not.
First of all, I could try to separate the policy.
I've talked about policy, but I think removing that status is a mistake.
The situation in Haiti today is we stay in touch.
We have a friend who's down there.
We stay in touch with what's going on.
He described it as worse than it's ever been.
He's been there for 30 years.
So it's a very, very dangerous place.
It's so dangerous that if you look at the State Department list, it's a place don't go.
You can't fly into Port-au-Prince because they shoot the airplanes.
The gangs basically run the country.
It's a dysfunctional government.
It's a dysfunctional police.
So it's a worse situation, if that's the criteria, which I think legally is.
But from Springfield point of view and the point of view of the state of Ohio, you've got to go back a little bit.
But Springfield, as you know, Jonathan, is an industrial city, manufacturing city historically, and had been down for a while.
But, you know, the last five to ten years is actually moving up and is doing much, much better economically.
And still, a significant part of that is Haitians.
And what they're doing is they're filling jobs that were not being filled.
And when this started to surface, I sat down, my wife, Fran and I invited the different companies, different employers that were employing Haitians, and said, well, why are you doing that?
We sat down with them and had a discussion.
And they said, look, they're filling jobs that were not being filled.
We couldn't fill.
Doing jobs that Americans wouldn't do.
Well, one would say we could now go to a second shift or a third shift.
We can expand.
We could get more customers.
So not only are they working, but They're spending money in the economy.
Some of them started a restaurant.
You got some of them who are fixing houses up.
So huge, huge influx of people that certainly created some challenges in regard to how you take care of all these individuals, medical, in regard to the schools.
But what the employers basically said is, yeah, maybe we have a language problem and maybe we have some cultural problems, but they're filling jobs we couldn't fill.
So if you, so if those, if you pull back their legal status, you know, whatever that happens, if that happens, they're all unemployed.
I mean, these employees are not going to hire them.
They're not going to keep them on.
They've made it very, very clear.
If you're not legal, we cannot hire you.
It would create a profound challenge to the police.
It's a huge, huge, huge problem.
Have you conveyed to either President Trump, VP Vance, or Secretary Noam that you are concerned about lifting their TPS?
Well, I don't get into those conversations, but I think they know, you know, there's no question where I stand on the issue as far as a policy.
Now, you also, though, ask, do I expect to see something like Minnesota or some problem?
And so, you know, we have spent a lot of time working with the Springfield Police.
We've worked with the Sheriff's Office.
In Ohio, we don't have state police, as you know, highway patrol, and we will back up the local police.
And look, whether I like the policy or not, we're Ohioans.
We follow the law, and we're going to follow the law.
And I have every confidence that the Springfield police will do a good job, that the sheriff will do a good job, sheriff's deputies will do a good job, our highway patrol will do a good job.
Our job is to keep the peace.
And we will do that.
Frankly, we expect ICE, if they come in, to follow good police protocols.
If they do that, we're going to be able to work our way through it.
People have the right to demonstrate if that's what they want to do, but nobody has the right to interfere with a federal officer physically.
So we're going to keep the peace.
And I am confident that things are going to work out okay no matter what happens.
Do you have confidence in Secretary Noam overseeing that operation?
Look, I think that what happened in Minnesota was a signal to a lot of people.
They like what they saw.
You know, I think I'd rather state it this way, Jonathan.
I'd rather stay it the way of what we expect.
You have confidence in time?
I expect that the ICE, if they come in, and first of all, we don't know if they're going to come in, even if the TPS is taken away.
We've not been told at all that they're going to come in.
I want to make that very, very clear.
I mean, they've told us, we don't have any orders.
We don't have any indication that we're going to come in.
But they've also said that that could change.
But following good police protocol is really important.
I mean, for example, our highway patrol men and women are told in their training, you don't stand in front of a car.
Nothing good is going to happen.
You don't reach in, you reach your arm in and try to control the driver because, again, nothing good can happen.
So it's not being conveyed to you.
We just expect that kind of policy to be followed.
And that's what we expect.
But it's not been conveyed to you that ICE is coming at some point.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
It's not clear at all.
We just try to be prepared for matter of what happens.
Prop Bets and Gambling Concerns 00:05:06
Let me ask you about something else that's been in the news in Ohio recently, but that's also a sort of global issue, and that is this ongoing Epstein affair.
Yesterday, Les Wexner, a prominent figure in Ohio, was deposed by members of the House Oversight Committee.
Now, Wexner was Epstein's personal money manager for quite some time.
And here's my question to you, because Wexner's given a lot of money to a lot of Ohioans over the years.
More than that, though, Governor, his name is on a lot of buildings across the country, but all over Columbus and all over Ohio State.
Do you think it's appropriate for his name to still be on buildings prominently displayed at your flagship university?
Look, there is no evidence that I'm aware of that he has done anything wrong.
And every article you see, newspapers are careful.
They always put that in there.
And so, look, I think that he has been a prominent member of the community, done many, many things.
The Western Medical Center, not only is his name on it, but he has put a significant amount of money into it and leadership there.
So barring some new information of something that he has done illegal, I don't see it as a problem.
Again, information could come out, but this thing has been beaten around, as you know, for a long, long time.
A lot of information has come out.
But isn't that a bad look for Ohio to have this name blaring on the side of buildings that is so tied to the Epstein affair?
I'm not sure it's tied.
I mean, you know, there's clearly, you know, the story has been clearly out for a long time of the connection between the two of them.
You know, Epstein was a financial advisor, et cetera, et cetera.
That story is an old story.
There's not anything new that has come out.
You could go back three years and they were writing the same sort of story.
So I don't think it's anything new here.
Let me ask you about a topic that's near and dear to your heart, Governor, which is baseball.
You're a big baseball fan.
You're a lifelong Reds fan.
No, it's not about Pete Rose being in the Hall of Fame.
Well, I can answer that, too.
I know you have an answer ready for that.
It's something, Alice.
And I talked to Spencer Cox about this too, which is this pervasiveness of gambling.
And gambling, not just on the outcome of games, but obviously it's now what are called these prop bets.
You stepped in and talked to the head of Major League Baseball, Rob Manifred, about this issue of prop bets.
Tell me about that and tell me about your concerns about gambling.
Yeah, look, I have a big concern.
I signed the gaming bill in Ohio.
Somebody asked me a few months ago, what mistakes did you make as governor?
And I don't like to get into that, but certainly that is one of them.
If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have signed the bill.
Now, it could have been enacted over my veto.
I wouldn't have signed it.
Tremendous addiction that we're seeing among, particularly among young men.
Do you see it in your grandkids?
And not that I'm aware of.
Not that I'm aware of.
But it is, you know, you're carrying around a casino in your hand, basically.
And there it is, and it's always there.
Tempting.
Big, big, big, big problem.
But, you know, getting back to your question, I first started seeing this with the prop bets when the University of Dayton basketball coach a number of years ago, he started complaining and said, you know, our players are being threatened.
Our players are being harassed by gamblers.
And they lost.
And so they're going on social media and beating them up.
And so I went to Charlie Baker, of course, I knew his governor.
The former governor of Massachusetts, now head of the NCAA.
And I said, what do you think about prop bets?
He said, well, we don't really like them.
I said, well, look, my law in Ohio is kind of unique.
It says that if an organization such as yours asks us, comes out against something, then that gives us the authority to ban it.
So we banned.
He sent me a letter, and then we banned, our Ohio Casino Control Commission actually banned prop bets in regard to intercollegiate athletics.
And we did that three or four years ago.
Fast forward to your question in regard to Major League Baseball, when we saw the two Guardians being, they weren't charged at this point, but in indication that they were gambling.
The former Indians baseball team or the Indians baseball team.
And so, you know, again, I contacted Manford and, you know, we started having a conversation about it.
I said, look, you really need to ban prop bets.
I mean, what's inherently wrong about them is they're just so susceptible to, you know, all you have to do, a pitcher has to do is throw one bad pitch.
One ball.
One pitch.
And, you know, that pitcher could justify and say, oh, look, I can control what I'm doing.
It got away from me.
Yeah, it's what, you know, it got away.
And it goes to the integrity of the game.
I mean, those of us who love sports and love watching it, why does everybody watch it?
Why is it always the top-rated TV is always sports?
Bringing Reading Success to China 00:13:38
Because we don't know the outcome.
It's live.
It's real.
And if we ever stop thinking it's not real, that's a problem.
Do you worry that a 21st century Black Sox scandal is inevitable, given this technology?
Look, I think it's a ticking time bomb.
And quite candidly, I've asked all the major leagues to do something.
And some of them aren't doing a whole lot.
Who's the worst offender?
Well, I'm not going to go there.
But, look, what everybody needs to do, first of all, everybody needs to get rid of prop bets.
Prop bets are inherently.
Is the NFL engaged?
The problem.
We've had conversations with them.
Yes.
We've had conversations.
But conversations with most of the leagues.
But they all need to get on top of this because it is a ticking time bomb.
And yes, you're going to see more and more scandals and more and more problems emerge.
Governor, you've been in public life now for, well, a half century.
You're down to months, not years.
What issues do you really want to see get done or sort of come to fruition with the months you have left?
You're passionate about education and children.
I know the first lady is here, Friendly One as well, very passionate about children.
What do you really want to focus on for the final 10 months?
You know, Jonathan, Ohio is doing very, very well.
Ohio is red hot.
We're bringing jobs in, and we love it.
We're bringing in California.
We sound like Trump.
We're bringing them in from the East Coast.
First time, by the way, in human history, anybody ever said to Mike the Lion, you sound like Trump?
Was just now.
We're hot.
All right, we're hot.
Okay, we're hot.
Our challenge is when the companies come in, and the question always is, do you have the employees to fill them?
And we generally do, but we know that that's our biggest challenge.
And so we have to make sure that every Ohioan can live up to their God-given potential.
And to do that, it starts with reading.
And so if you ask what we're focused on the last 10 or 11 months, we're going to stay focused on reading.
Three years ago, we went to the science of reading in every classroom.
Now we're getting it implemented.
We know that makes a huge, huge difference.
It changes kids' lives.
My wife, you mentioned Fran, Dolly Parton Imagination Library.
It was scattered all over the state, just a few places.
When I became governor, she became first lady.
Today, 70% of all households that have a child under the age of five are now getting a book in the mail every single month.
And they just came out, Dolly Parton Imagination Libraries came out with a worldwide study that shows as far as kindergarten readiness and many other things, having those books come in every single month makes a huge difference.
We're also doing something that we just really got started.
We found out in Ohio the law requires every grade school must do what they call a screening of children to see whether or not they can see well enough or do they need an eye exam.
What we found is that even though they're required to do that, they are doing it.
But of the kids that are red flagged and said, yes, you need an eye exam, only one out of every three are getting an eye exam.
So now we've come up with a model that we just started, and we're basically bringing a mobile unit into that school, and they can do six to eight of these kids in an hour, and the child picks out the glasses.
They get all kinds of choices of different colors.
They pick out their glasses.
Two or three weeks later, they come back, put the eyeglasses on the child because, look, it's life change for some of these.
It's life-changing.
And rural Ohio on the river there, right?
Fran, I've been there when these kids put these glasses on.
The first place we were, we were in Cleveland.
And the child, this little girl put it on, little girl, little boy, I can't remember which, but she looked up and said, it's snowing.
She didn't know it was snowing.
And so this all goes back to reading.
Reading is the key to success in school.
It's the reading to success in life.
What we're starting to see because of this work we're seeing, the kindergarten readiness, is going up dramatically in Ohio in the last year.
Which is key for employers, obviously.
Let me ask you about your succession out there.
You've endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy, who's going to be the nominee of your party.
Governor, are you confident that Mr. Graham Aswami would continue and sort of fulfill your legacy and the kind of politics that you've modeled in Ohio for all these years?
Well, politics has evolved, so no one should be encumbered by my worse.
I think, by and large, for the worse, but that's a different issue.
But your question is on policy.
And, you know, I've had long conversations with him because it matters what happens.
I think it matters who the next governor is in the state of Ohio.
You know, he has told me his focus is on education and is on economic development.
And I love that.
I think that's the right approach to it.
I told him about what we call our Ohio Sea program that I just described to you about the eyeglasses.
I told him about something else that we're doing, which is putting clinics into schools, particularly in areas that are underserved.
He said, I love that.
So I think the two big things that we've been working on, I think he's all in.
Are you convinced that he wants to be a good governor of Ohio or does he want to be a national political celebrity?
I don't know this, but I assume he wants to be both.
Yeah, false choice, right?
No, I think you look, I think that the more he has looked at this and seen the challenges that any governor faces, I think he's been excited about it.
He's excited about doing the job.
It's a good platform.
Speaking of Ohio, it's with ambition, nothing wrong with that.
You had some for a while, I know, and maybe still do.
JD Vance, a son of the Buckeye State.
Should he be your party's nominee in 28?
Well, look, I'm a Buckeye.
I know J.D. You know, he's a favorite son of ours.
And, you know, we'll see how this whole thing plays out.
It's obviously too early, but too early.
We were excited when he got the nomination.
And I was there, and Fran and I were there, two of our grandsons, and it was an exciting day.
No endorsement yet for the VP.
Okay.
Do you think President Trump has been a force for good for the party in the country?
Let me tell you, Jonathan, what I think the president can do.
And I think this is a unique time in history.
We started this conversation about talking about immigration.
He has done something that has not been done before, and that is he has basically sealed the southern border.
And you can talk to Democrats, talk to Republicans.
I think everybody is happy about that.
When he ran, he said two things.
We're going to seal the border, and we're going to get rid of violent offenders.
Yes.
Everybody buys into that.
I think.
His biggest success by far.
Big success by far.
I have a long history, obviously.
I was there when Ron Mazzoli and Simpson.
I was in the House.
It was more Mazzoli, but Mazzoli-Simpson, Democrat-Republican, Ronald Reagan.
So I've seen these debates over the years.
What stopped us, I think, from being able to come up with a rational legal immigration policy is our inability to deal with the southern border.
I think President Trump can be, this could be a Nixon ghost to China.
Well, that's what I was saying.
I think he literally has, he's the one person who can put this together and bring people together.
Look, have you told him to do that or will you?
I've not personally told him that.
No.
No.
Maybe I am right now, though.
Well, you're going to see him today.
Maybe you could.
Stephen Miller, if you're listening, trigger warning here.
But what you're saying, though, is that this president, having already closed down the border, he's done it.
It's a success.
Take that credit.
You know, run with it.
But he could go even bigger and say, I fixed the border.
Now I'm going to fix the entire system.
And I'm going to address folks who are in this country illegally, but not committing any crimes.
Let me take the state of Ohio.
So how do you get around the A-word, which is amnesty?
How do you get around that?
Because that's tough for your party to overcome.
Look, this whole, that has been the issue of what do you do with people who are here.
That's been what's blocked bills for decades.
But he could do it, you're saying.
I think he could do it.
And certainly, if you look at what governors face, I won't speak for other governors, but I can tell you what we face.
You know, if you look at the state of Ohio, we need people.
And we need people.
Quote my friend Phil Graham one time we were talking about immigration.
He said, you know, we always have room in this country for people who want to pull the wagon, not for people who don't.
And so we've got a lot of people out there working that, frankly, we need to continue to be able to work.
There are things that could be changed.
Look, let me tell you a situation.
You know, two years ago, I have the numbers from two years ago.
We had 22,000 foreign college students in the state of Ohio.
We are a net importer of students from all over the country.
That's a good thing.
Because it's a great thing.
We have so many colleges that are independent colleges as well as our state colleges.
But isn't this ridiculous?
The law says today we educate them.
They could be engineers.
They could be doctors.
It could be anything.
They got to leave.
They got to leave.
And now, and then we tell them they have to leave.
And they may not even go back to the country they came from.
They may go to some other country that's competing directly with us.
How stupid are we to do that?
So these are places, and if you've listened to what the president has said, he's talked about shortages in different areas.
And so I think he understand as a business person, I think he gets this.
So I just think it's a great opportunity for President Trump to do something that nobody's been able to do since Ronald Reagan.
And that is to come up with a legal immigration policy that keeps people working, keeps our economy moving.
And that's the political level.
And that's the lever for President Trump is Reagan tried, Bush, Obama tried.
You can actually do it, right?
Look, he's dealt with the border and done a great job.
You're going to see him today.
Maybe you can convey that personally.
Let's end with this, speaking about the immigration issue, and sort of walk off with this.
Looking forward to what's next for your party, if you and I were sitting here 2030, 2031, I asked Mr. Cox the same question.
Is your party going to be what it was when you were coming of age in the House in the 1980s, which is pro-free market, strong U.S. role abroad, welcoming to immigrants who are playing by the rules?
Or is it going to be more of a European-style nationalist party that's much more inward-looking when it comes to race, immigration, and foreign policy?
First of all, Jonathan, I don't think anybody knows.
That's one.
I don't think anybody really knows.
I don't think we can really tell.
But look, we only have two parties.
And these parties evolve over the years.
And so they're going to continue to evolve.
We have now become more sensitive, as we should, to working men and women.
You've had a real switch.
If you look at voting patterns in the state of Ohio, working men and women are voting Republican.
You know, all eastern side of that state, you know, I've talked about this before.
All the way to a lake down the river that historically was blue-collar, predominantly Catholic, socially conservative Democrats.
Now, all that's still true, except now they're Republicans.
70-30.
So you've had a fundamental, fundamental change.
I do think there's going to be a reset in regard to our relationship with NATO.
I think with our where is our place in the world?
You know, I'm more a traditionalist.
I believe we have to lead.
If we don't lead, there's a vacuum there.
That vacuum will be filled by China.
That vacuum will be filled by Russia.
Some other countries.
We have to lead.
We have to have alliances.
We have to be out there.
President's right.
Europe has not paid its fair share.
And I think Secretary Rubio talking about the other.
It's absolutely true.
But they're our friends.
We have to keep our friends.
We have to keep them close to us.
And look, the danger we have is China.
That's who we are.
We're still a creedle nation, you think.
America's a creedal nation.
America's a creedal nation.
You believe that?
Creedle, meaning what?
Well, the word idea about the people of black soil.
Yeah, no, I do believe that.
And I think there's a difference of opinion of some people.
You know, this is what has brought us together.
Ronald Reagan has some great quotes about this.
It's what we believe.
You know, it's what we believe.
And we don't care what color you are.
We don't care where you came from.
And as long as you embrace the basic principles that we have in this country, if you don't, we don't want you.
But if you do, yeah, and you want to work?
Stephen Miller.
Mike DeWine's coming to the White House.
He's going to see the president today.
Get ready for this.
Mike DeWine from Ohio, everybody.
Baltimore's Guard Deployment 00:15:22
Thank you all so much.
Thank you very much.
Our nation is standing up for American workers, restoring the pride of making products here at home.
That's what we do every day.
We're America's beverage companies, making American products with American workers in America's hometowns, delivering brands that have been enjoyed for generations, creating good-paying jobs, the kind that require only a strong work effort.
Because we believe in the promise of America and the people who make it great.
We'll bring you back to the Politico Governor's Summit live shortly as state leaders discuss what's on their agenda ahead of the midterm elections.
Coming up shortly, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.
In the meantime, we'll take a look back at one of the discussions from earlier today with current Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.
We actually do have now live coverage again from Politico at the Governor's Summit.
Today, I'm leading a conversation about the balance of federal and state powers with two former governors who know that issue very well.
We have Larry Hogan, who served as the Republican governor of Maryland from 2015 to 2023 after a decades-long career in real estate and business and a term as Maryland Secretary of Appointments.
Janine de Palutano served as the Democratic governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009 and then went on to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security and president of the University of California.
She's now the founder and faculty director at UC Berkeley's Institute for Security and Governance.
Thank you both for being here.
Thank you.
There's been a lot of commentary lately about the state of American federalism, even including from governors earlier today.
Some of the phrases I've seen thrown out there include on the ropes, under assault, contemporary civil war.
How would you describe the state of U.S. federalism?
Secretary, I'll come to you first.
I think it's a real struggle right now.
And you can tell that in part because I think there's something like 240 cases between states and the federal government in active litigation since President Trump took office.
And you can see it in a variety of contexts.
You can see it in efforts to preempt states in the Congress.
You can see it in the wave of executive orders by the president.
You can see the administration conditioning appropriated monies on states agreeing to other issues with which they may not agree.
So I think it's a real struggle and it's a real challenge for governors to know how to deal with it because nobody has, I think, really reached the level that it was originally conceived of in the Constitution.
Governor Hogan, what about you?
Yeah, I think we're at a really tough time.
I think there's always been a struggle between the power of the states and the federal government.
And obviously we had that whole Civil War thing was a pretty big disagreement.
Pretty big one, yeah.
But I think we're at a unique point in time.
I don't think there's anyone probably that thinks the federal government should get more power right now.
I think states are standing up saying, hey, we've got powers here too.
And I think the lack of communication, the lack of civility and cooperation back and forth is a problem.
I mean, we, look, I was governor during some very difficult times under three presidents, and we didn't always agree, but we always stayed in close communication.
You know, we had unrest, there were riots in Baltimore in 2015 where I talked with President Obama, I talked with the mayor of Baltimore, but we worked together as a team.
During COVID, I was the chairman of the National Governors Association.
Not all the governors agreed.
The federal government didn't agree that they were doing the right job, but we talked at least once a week with all 50 governors, with the whole cabinet, with the president and or vice president.
Today, I think it's just broken down.
And you saw some of that this week with the White House dinner tonight and people getting disinvited and reinvited.
It's just, you know, we can passionately disagree, but we've got to be able to respect the powers of the other side, and we've got to listen to all of them.
I think most people are completely frustrated.
They think Washington is broken and that our entire political system is at risk.
Is there a moment from your time as governor where you felt that state-federal tension or are we in a different time now?
I think there was tension, but not nearly.
It wasn't the same.
So I'll give you two examples.
And right after I became governor, I was in for 89 days.
We had the worst violence in 47 years broke out in our largest city of Baltimore.
And just in the first couple of hours, we had 130 police and firefighters injured and hospitalized.
There were places on fire and flipping over police cars.
And I talked with the mayor of Baltimore and with the folks at the federal level.
I declared a state of emergency.
I sent in 4,000 members of the National Guard and 1,000 extra police officers because my most important job was to keep the people safe.
And people knew that I was never going to put politics above public safety.
I remember President Obama calling me and saying he had concerns about the actions we were taking, but we had a very good discussion.
I talked with the mayor repeatedly.
I walked the streets of Baltimore.
We were in constant, you know, the Baltimore City Police, the Maryland State Police, the National Guard were all completely in sync.
You know, they all had different roles.
That's not what's happening today.
It seems like the state and local governments aren't talking to the federal folks.
Her former department, DHS, is not really talking, letting the folks in the cities and the states know what's going on.
And it's a recipe for disaster.
It's almost exactly the wrong way you would want to handle a crisis.
And it's the opposite of the way that we handled it while I was governor.
When I was governor, 60% of the border patrol arrests for immigrants crossing the southwest, the southern border came through the Tucson sector in Arizona.
I mean, it was a flood.
And I was trying to get Washington to engage more, to put more resources down there, et cetera, and wasn't getting much of a response.
So I did a presser and I made up a great big invoice, you know, cost to the state of Arizona, you know, prison cost, et cetera.
And to illustrate that, some of this burden fell on the states.
And, you know, I didn't hear much from the president, the secretary.
So two weeks later, I did another presser, and I added a late fee.
And, you know, look, it was performative.
I understand that.
But it opened up a very useful dialogue that we had.
And then the president came down to the border and so forth.
So, I mean, there were, as Larry, as you say, there were opportunities there to contest but cooperate as well.
Yeah, you talk about, that was actually a good performative politics.
I mean, I'm disgusted with all the performative politics all over the place these days, but that one wasn't so bad in retrospect.
Thank you.
You brought up DHS, and I do want to talk about sort of what we've just seen in Minnesota with the surge of immigration enforcement, a lot of tensions there.
You know, Secretary of Politano, you ran DHS.
You know how it can and should function.
Is what you're seeing overreached?
Did you experience sort of these kinds of issues with governors when you were running the agency?
No.
No, you didn't?
Or no, it's not overreach?
No.
Maybe it was partially the fact that I came into the secretarieship having been a border governor and before then a state AG and a U.S. attorney in a border state.
So I was very familiar with the ins and outs of immigration and immigration policy.
I'd been dealing with it for years.
But what we're seeing now out of the department is beyond anything that we could conceive of when I was secretary.
And realize under President Obama, he was nicknamed the deporter-in-chief.
I mean, we did not, much to his chagrin, I think, but We had a very strong, not only border policy, but what to do about interior enforcement within the country.
And we're seeing all of those guardrails have disappeared and then the federal government just bigfooting into states or cities where they somehow target.
And their targeting is also kind of suspect.
But no, we did.
And we, you know, I would get on the phone and talk to governors.
I knew most of them.
And, you know, and we didn't always agree.
Trust me, we didn't always agree.
We had lots of issues.
We had FEMA issues.
We had Real ID and its implementation.
We had all that kind of stuff.
But I realized and came from that background that so many of the issues that Homeland Security deals with are really issues that are state-focused.
Are you surprised?
The current Secretary of Homeland Security, a former governor, are you surprised that she's not more sensitive to these issues?
I'm surprised by a lot of what the current Secretary does.
That included, I guess.
I'll just leave it there.
Governor Hogan, you know, your time in office, you mentioned you sent the National Guard into Baltimore after the killing and death of Freddie Gray, and sort of how that is different from what we're seeing now.
I do wonder how different it would be if that had been an action for President Obama.
I mean, we've seen President Trump send, you know, nationalize the National Guard, send it into California if you're in D.C. What do you make of what's happening in major cities and how would you have handled that?
Well, I think we handled it better than anyone in the country, any governor or any mayor.
We didn't have a single incident.
We immediately stopped all the violence and brought peace and calm to the city.
The people of the city overwhelmingly appreciated the job that we did.
We had great cooperation between the National Guard, the Maryland State Police, other allied police from around the state and the folks in Baltimore City.
It's the opposite of what is actually happening in some of our cities.
To Minneapolis, as the most recent example, look, we were in constant communication and it was all coordinated.
You know, we had the Baltimore City police who are trained in urban policing and the state police who've been trained in de-escalation techniques are completely in sync and everybody knew their role and then the National Guard would back them up because it was a major unrest.
In this case, the feds came in heavy-handed, no communication.
People that, you know, some of them may be dedicated Border Patrol agents or ICE agents who are good at their jobs, but this is not their job and they're not used to doing it.
And then there was no communication with the mayor or the governor and the local police weren't there to intervene with these pretty large demonstrations, some of which got a little, it wasn't like the riots in Baltimore, but some of them were the obstructing the actions of the Fed.
So yes, there are mistakes at the federal level, but it wasn't great from the governor and the mayor either because they were kind of encouraging people to not to protest and to obstruct the actions because they saw them as wrong.
And nobody was talking to anybody.
They were all on cable news performing and you had the mayor and the governor blaming the president, the president blaming the mayor and the governor, and yet no one was talking about what was actually going on in the streets.
So it's, I would say here's an example of what not to do.
And the way we handled it a couple times was exactly the right way to do it.
There's one other story that I've personally been tracking quite a bit, and that's the Trump administration trying to preempt AI laws in the states.
It's not the first issue in which they've done this.
Energy laws have also been targeted.
We've seen in California trying to preempt state permitting regulations to rebuild LA.
I mean, would you see kind of the federal government coming in trying to supersede state laws?
It's something that's gone to the Supreme Court.
Is this just more of the same that we've seen throughout history, or does this moment feel different to you?
It feels a bit different.
It seems like there are more efforts to preempt the states.
And AI is a good example.
We have this rapidly evolving technology that is literally going to change the way we live, the way we work, the way we operate, our economy, the global economy.
And the notion, you know, last spring when they were debating the Big Beautiful Bill, or whatever it's called, there was an effort there to put in a preemption provision that states could not preempt.
And that failed dramatically.
I think it failed in the Senate like 99 to 1 or 98 to 2, something like that.
And then you have the administration trying to do the same thing by executive order.
Well, look, lots of states have lots of valid concerns about AI, and they're experimenting.
They're experimenting with what makes sense, what should be open and transparent from the industry.
How do you provide safe guardrails without unduly hindering innovation in the area?
California is a great example of that.
That debate has been going on in California for several years now to stop states from doing their own innovation to being, and I'll use the cliché, the laboratories of democracy, to me seems not only bad policy, but unwise, particularly because the federal government doesn't have anything proposed that would substitute for what the states are looking at.
So it would just leave a huge, huge vacuum.
But the preemption issue has taken lots of forms since then, statutory, but also the plethora of executive orders.
Now we see it expanding.
You mentioned the energy sector.
The voting area, the electoral sector is also in that category.
And so it leaves states with some very hard options.
Do you just disobey?
Do you file a lawsuit?
What does one do when the federal government keeps bigfooting what inherently are state-based issues?
Governor, I'm curious for your perspective too, because I've talked to Republican governors who, including Tate Reeves in Minnesota, and you hear this from Ron DeSantis in Florida, this idea that preemption of the states is something Democrats push for, not Republicans.
And they're surprised and kind of annoyed, I think, that Trump is pursuing this.
Trade and Federal-State Alignment 00:12:18
Well, it's interesting.
Republicans have always been pushing for states' rights and saying the federal government's too large and exercises too much power on things that they shouldn't be involved in.
And now they're doing, it's almost like a role reversal because everybody's opinions are changing.
Look, I have a little bit of a different perspective.
I don't believe in federal overreach, and I'm a big proponent of states deciding for themselves.
I think there's most things that the state does better than the federal government does.
And I think they know their constituents better.
They're closer to the problems.
And they can tailor the laboratories of democracy.
They do come up with really innovative solutions that sometimes the federal government's unable to do.
But there are certain times in certain instances that only the federal government can do it.
And COVID is a perfect example.
Look, President Trump was like, hey, the states are on the front lines.
It's up to you.
Good luck.
And I was leading the governors in all these discussions and governors were making decisions about how to do it.
But Operation Warp Speed wouldn't have happened without the federal government.
We wouldn't have had vaccines.
We had to implement them.
We had to build the vaccine infrastructure, the testing infrastructure.
But the federal government was an important, in a crisis, the worst global pandemic in 100 years.
Without the federal government, we would have been in trouble.
But that was again back to really sometimes disagreeing about working and communicating very well.
And sometimes you have to feel out: is this a state, is this better handled with the state?
Or is it this an issue where we do need the federal government to step in?
Your question about AI, I mean, that's a great question that needs to be debated.
I mean, certainly we want the states to have their rights to make their own decisions and they want to be innovative in this rapidly changing world.
But there may be some things that the federal government has to do to make sure that we're not really getting off track.
Well, I want to ask actually that that raises a good point because we've been hammering a bit on the federal government here, potentially big-footing the states.
I wonder if there's some guilt on the part of governors.
I mean, we have seen in recent years states get more into national security policy and border security, international trade and trade agreements, tech and AI.
I mean, there's an argument that this is interstate commerce, which is the jurisdiction of the federal government.
Are governors also overstepping?
Well, it's a really good question because, for example, an immigration on border policy, historically and by court decision, that was held to be exclusively the power of the federal government.
And then there was great dissatisfaction with how the previous administration was managing the border.
So you had states like Texas step in and put border structures along the Rio Grande River and so forth.
That was to me the opening of at least a discussion that should be had about what is the role of states versus the federal government where a federal concern like immigration is concerned.
We have not resolved that clearly, but it really deserves serious discussion.
But in other areas, you know, trade agreements, I don't know about you, Larry, but when I was governor, we traveled to other countries.
We did memorandums of understanding.
We had people that were constantly in touch, particularly with Mexico, because Arizona, it's its number one trading partner, is Mexico.
And that was not unusual.
So that to me doesn't seem kind of outside the pale of state-federal relationships.
It goes back to the powers of both the states and the federal government and making sure that you're in alignment or working together on trade.
I think we had 13 international trade offices.
We did missions around the country.
We couldn't set trade policy.
Only the federal government could do that.
But almost all the actual trade was going on with the states.
And all of the economic development was at the states.
When, let's say, one of the foreign companies wants to come and build a factory to build cars or batteries or energy of some kind, the governor is the one that's involved in most of that.
And it's happening in their states and creating jobs for their state residents.
And so the states and the federal government both have a role to play.
And I think there's always a little tension about who should be doing what.
And some stuff kind of falls in the gray area on certain issues.
Governor Hogan, you mentioned the need for more communication between the federal government, between governors.
That does sound very nice.
But the reality is we live in a world where you have President Trump and Governor Gavin Newsom in California sparring on X, right?
And you've got Trump and J.B. Pritzker in Illinois hurling insults at each other.
I mean, from each of you, how do you get this relationship back on track between the president and governors?
It's worse than it's been.
And certainly, you know, we're seeing that right now.
Here we are in Washington at the NGA.
There's a big rift between governors and each other.
Like one of the things I loved about the National Governors Association was that it's not really very partisan.
They tend to work together in a collaborative fashion and they tend to try to share best practices.
You don't suit up in red and blue jerseys every day like you have to do in Washington when you're arguing about stuff in committee or on the floor.
It was much more collegial.
And now even that's starting to be, you know, Democrats and Republicans are caught up in the kind of Washington divisiveness that is now reached into the governors who were always kind of like the one island of sanity when all the crazy was going on.
And look, I think we need to get it back on track.
It's the only answer.
We can't continue to go along the way we've been heading.
And we have done it before.
I mentioned President Trump and I didn't always agree on a lot of things.
But during COVID, I mean, I think I led 40 or 50 different meetings with all the governors and the whole coronavirus task force and the president and vice president.
If we didn't, we never would have made through that crisis.
And there were mistakes all over.
It wasn't perfect, but we made it through and kept people safe and got to the other side of the crisis.
And I think we need to get back to that because right now they're not even sitting at the table.
They're not talking, and that's not helpful at all.
And the same with the local governments.
I mean, yesterday in my state, they just passed the bill.
Governor Moore signed an emergency bill to prohibit local law enforcement cooperating with ICE.
And all the local law enforcement officers saying we're going to ignore that because we're required to work with them.
So I get the whole overreach and overstep and doing the wrong things.
But when they have violent criminals that they're holding in jail that ICE wants to be detained, they shouldn't be let back on the streets.
So there's two sides to this argument.
Secretary, I'm curious from your perspective, too.
I'd love to hear your answer on this and also if the courts you think are part of the solution here, because so much of this is now being litigated with states suing the federal government.
Is that kind of the path ahead now for this relationship?
Well, it is a path, but it can't be the only path.
I mean, the courts are really not set up to resolve what inherently are big questions about who exercises what power in the United States and how can they exercise it.
And if we leave everything to the courts, first of all, we won't get decisions in time where things are already happening.
Money's already moving, people are already being deployed, and so forth.
So they're important, but it's more important, I think, for the elected political leadership to exercise their role and to recognize that, as Governor Hogan said, this relationship, this state-federal relationship has always had tensions and ins and outs, but it works best when it works together.
And right now, we're not seeing that.
And by the way, NGA being bipartisan, Republican governors, Democratic governors, there is a Unity between all of you, regardless of party, in respect to the role of governors versus the role of the federal government.
And coming together on that as a group is important.
You know, the topic today was about the 250th, you know, the semi-quincentennial.
And, you know, you think George Washington, who resigned his command of the Continental Forces in our old Senate chamber in the capital in Annapolis, it was the first peaceful transition of power.
He also, when he resigned, when he left the presidency, his farewell address, Washington, was, you know, he must have been like Nostradamus because he said that parties were going to be the ruination of our republic and that factionalism and division was his biggest concern for the nation.
And here we are 250 years later, and it seems as if that is a big problem that has to be addressed.
And so maybe we can somehow, you know, reach back to some of that founding father wisdom with the formation of the nation and say they didn't always agree either.
In fact, they had pretty strong disagreements about the role of the federal government and the state government.
But the good news is somehow we've made it work.
And I'm hoping we can get things back on track the way that I think they should be.
I think Hamilton could have had a whole nother act on federalism as part of it.
I do want to end on America 250.
My last question for you both.
I'm also curious if we look ahead to America at 300, right, 50 years from now.
From each of you, quickly, what is the most important decision being made today that will shape what federalism looks like 50 years from now?
Secretary?
Well, I think the most important long-term decisions being made today that affect the health of the country in 50 years involved the decisions to withdraw from the international order.
the decisions to underfund and cut the role of science and scientific research, and the total backtracking on the fact that the climate is warming and that will have effects that only increase over the next 50 years.
Yeah, I think some of the stuff that we've been talking about all day is how we resolve these issues.
I think it's going to be important for the next 50 years.
The balance of power between the federal government and the states, the separation of powers, the rule of law, all those things are going to be really important.
But it's kind of hard to predict with the technology, and you're the tech guy, the technology advancing so fast with AI we were just talking about, just even imagine what the issues are going to be in 50 years.
But I think the founders, they were pretty ingenious in the way they created our system.
And we just got to make sure that the safeguards hold and that we can kind of write the ship and get back on track and protect the democracy.
Well, Secretary Napolitano, Governor Hogan, great conversation.
I really thank you both for being here today.
Thank you.
State Leaders Discuss Agenda 00:00:49
Live coverage from the Politico Governor's Summit and live shortly expecting to hear more from state leaders discussing what's on their agenda ahead of the midterm elections.
And coming up shortly here at the Governor's Summit, we will be hearing from Kelly Armstrong, Governor of North Dakota, and Jared Polis of Colorado.
In the meantime, we'll take a look back at one of the discussions from earlier today with Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.
I'm excited to get started rather fittingly with NGA Chair, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.
And we also have Vice Chair Maryland Governor Wes Moore.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you.
Export Selection