Maddow: Senate Democrats have chance to expose Trump nominees in waning days of control AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Rachel Maddow Show

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Episode: Maddow: Senate Democrats have chance to expose Trump nominees in waning days of control

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 00:43:16

Episode Shownotes

Rachel Maddow looks at ways that Democrats can, and are, using their power and positions to prevent Trump from taking full, unfettered power.

Summary

In this episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel Maddow discusses the final days of Senate Democrats' control and their opportunities to challenge Donald Trump's nominees. The conversation highlights the significance of utilizing subpoena power and conducting hearings to address controversies surrounding nominees, particularly the implications of placing them in key government roles without proper oversight. Senator Elizabeth Warren emphasizes the need for unity and public awareness regarding these nominees to ensure that the American public acts as a check on Trump's authority. The episode also introduces an initiative by various governors to safeguard democracy against the backdrop of political challenges.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Maddow: Senate Democrats have chance to expose Trump nominees in waning days of control) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_01
So, once upon a time, there was a senator. And this senator was from a rich and very well-connected family. He was a real smooth talker. He was handsome-ish, kind of, depends on your taste. He was very ambitious, even for a senator.

00:00:18 Speaker_01
I should mention that he wasn't all that successful as a senator in political terms. For example, he had this leadership job in the 2008 election where he was responsible for all the Republican Senate campaigns that year.

00:00:32 Speaker_01
That election year, under his leadership, Republicans lost eight seats in the Senate, which is a lot. So maybe not the best record, but still, you know, he had been in leadership and he thought very highly of his own prospects in politics.

00:00:46 Speaker_01
Right after presiding over that huge loss in the Senate for his party, he went right to Iowa, started giving speeches in Iowa because he very clearly was planning on a presidential run of his own.

00:00:59 Speaker_01
So this guy is from money, he's got a good head of hair, he was youngish for a senator, he was telegenic-ish, very confident, very ambitious, and he was also stooping one of his own employees.

00:01:17 Speaker_01
And that poor decision started a cascade of terrible and increasingly amazing decisions and ultimately consequences for him and his career. So this senator, John Enson, he is sleeping with a woman who works for him in the Senate.

00:01:33 Speaker_01
John Enson himself is married. He's publicly a very pious man who is all about family values. He has called on other people to resign when they have had affairs. But he's having an affair.

00:01:44 Speaker_01
He is married while he is having this sexual relationship with a woman who works for him. The woman he's having the relationship with, she is also married.

00:01:52 Speaker_01
And because this Senator John Enson was a lot of things, but super strategic, was maybe not one of them, this employee, this female employee he decided to have the affair with, this woman's husband,

00:02:06 Speaker_01
was also working for John Enson in the Senate at the time. So he's sleeping simultaneously, right? He's sleeping with this woman who was married and who works for him, and he's also sleeping with the wife of somebody else who works for him.

00:02:22 Speaker_01
Same woman, but. Yeah. When John Enson and his employee got caught having the affair, genius Republican Senator John Enson decided that his reaction would be not only to fire the woman he was sleeping with, but also to fire her husband as well.

00:02:40 Speaker_01
He fired them both from their jobs in his office. And just in case that wasn't smart enough, he then took some additional steps as a sitting senator who, remember, has presidential ambitions.

00:02:51 Speaker_01
And that's why I spent several years talking about this a lot, particularly 2009. In the wake of this affair being exposed, John Enson arranged for his parents to make multiple payments to the couple, payments that totaled up to nearly $100,000.

00:03:05 Speaker_01
He then put the teenage son of the couple on the payroll of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. He then lined up an illegal lobbying job for the husband.

00:03:15 Speaker_01
He set him up in a lobbying job in which he himself, the senator, would be lobbied by this guy whose wife he's sleeping with, who he got the illegal lobbying job for.

00:03:27 Speaker_01
I spent a ton of time covering that scandal when it first happened in 2009, in large part because it just kept getting worse and weirder and weirder and worse the more we learned. It was just never ending.

00:03:39 Speaker_01
My favorite part of all of it was that this was an increasingly open secret among Republican members of Congress at the time. A whole bunch of them knew about it while they were all keeping it secret.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
An Oklahoma Republican senator named Tom Coburn was reportedly involved in negotiating payments between Senator John Enson and the family of this woman he was sleeping with.

00:04:02 Speaker_01
He was trying to save Senator John Enson a little money as he was making these payoffs to this family.

00:04:09 Speaker_01
When Senator Coburn was ultimately confronted about his alleged role in negotiating the payoff amounts and helping to keep the scandal secret, Senator Coburn gave this indignant response.

00:04:21 Speaker_01
He told Roll Call, quote, that is privileged information that I will never reveal to anybody, not to the ethics committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody. Privilege? Why was this privileged information?

00:04:35 Speaker_01
Senator Coburn reportedly helping this other senator in his financial negotiations with his mistress. Why would that be privileged and therefore secret? Senator Tom Coburn explained it was because, quote, I was counseling him as a physician.

00:04:52 Speaker_01
Oh, that kind of privileged. Doctor-patient confidentiality. Senator Tom Coburn was in fact a doctor But he was an obstetrician. So he was gonna keep his role in Senator John Enson's scandal a secret because John Enson was his patient.

00:05:18 Speaker_01
He was an obstetrician. Nobody ever got to the bottom of whether Senator John Enson was pregnant, postpartum, or actively giving birth at the time he was involved in this scandal with his obstetrician. But that was their line.

00:05:32 Speaker_01
Doctor fiction confidentiality was their line on how and why they were going to keep this all secret. You will be shocked to know that this line of defense did not hold.

00:05:43 Speaker_03
Last year, I had an affair. I violated the vows of my marriage. It's absolutely the worst thing that I've ever done in my life.

00:05:57 Speaker_01
Senator John Enson admitted publicly to the affair. And then when all the financial and ethical complications came to light about how he had managed and tried to cover up the affair, with or without the advice of his obstetrician,

00:06:13 Speaker_01
Senator John Edson ultimately had to resign his seat in the United States Senate. He resigned from the Senate with that scandal looming over him.

00:06:21 Speaker_01
And in fact, at the time he resigned, the Ethics Committee was deep into a thorough investigation of what exactly he had done. But it was April 2011 when he resigned. And then the following month,

00:06:36 Speaker_01
In May 2011, the Ethics Committee released their report on him. They released their ethics report on him, even though he had already resigned. He was already gone from Congress. And that Ethics Committee report was not good.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
They said they found substantial and credible evidence that Senator Ensign conspired to violate lobbying laws, and he lied about the money, and he had obstructed justice by destroying evidence he'd been told to preserve.

00:07:02 Speaker_01
But bottom line here, what's the take home lesson?

00:07:06 Speaker_01
Well, if you ever find yourself in Congress, the best plan is to not be involved in any big scandals, sex scandals, ethics scandals, corruption scandals, or in cases like Senator John Enson of Nevada, all three of those things wrapped up into one big scandal.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
Best move is just to not get involved in that stuff. But if you do find yourself in Congress, and you do find yourself involved in scandal, and you get investigated by the Ethics Committee,

00:07:32 Speaker_01
you should know, and in fact, all members of Congress do know, that resigning from Congress will not make that investigation go away. There is a known track record in the U.S.

00:07:43 Speaker_01
Congress of releasing ethics committee reports on scandal-ridden politicians even after those politicians resign from Congress to try to escape the scrutiny.

00:07:54 Speaker_01
In the case of John Enson, not only did they release the ethics report on his scandal a month after he resigned, they also released their recommendation to the U.S. Justice Department that the senator be criminally prosecuted for what he had done.

00:08:07 Speaker_01
And you know, that is one thing when it is a senator stooping one of his staffers and then getting involved in a weird payoff and corruption scheme with her and her family to try to cover it up and make it right. I mean, that's bad, that's bad.

00:08:19 Speaker_01
But it's not like, it's not like this bad.

00:08:25 Speaker_05
When she arrived at the party, she had sex with Representative Gates within minutes of her arrival.

00:08:32 Speaker_05
Later on, when she was walking out to the pool area, she observed to her right Representative Gates having sex with her friend, who was 17 at the time. And on this question, she's absolutely sure?

00:08:42 Speaker_05
She's absolutely certain that she observed seeing her friend and Representative Gates having sex against what she described as a game table of some sort. If the House Ethics Committee report were to be made public, what do you think it would reveal?

00:08:54 Speaker_05
My clients want to know that this happened and it's real. They do want the public to know that they are not lying. They did not come forward willingly. They've never spoken to anyone without the force of a legal subpoena.

00:09:06 Speaker_05
The testimonies of her and the other 11 individuals that testified would show that this actually did happen, and the American people would know, and they could decide if that's the person they want.

00:09:18 Speaker_05
to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

00:09:21 Speaker_04
Joe Leppert also told us that there are lots of text messages in the possession of the House Ethics Committee between Matt Gaetz and his two clients and others, and that the Ethics Committee is in possession of Venmo and PayPal receipts showing that Matt Gaetz and others working in his behalf paid for sex at these parties.

00:09:44 Speaker_01
That was a lawyer for witnesses who have testified to the Ethics Committee speaking tonight with CBS News. Congressman Matt Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing of any kind.

00:09:55 Speaker_01
President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he wants Matt Gaetz to be his nominee for the next Attorney General of the United States.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
When this was first announced, it was a choice so laugh-out-loud ridiculous that even very serious people with no sense of humor very soberly speculated that the pick can't have been real and that Trump must not really want Matt Gaetz to be attorney general.

00:10:17 Speaker_01
Trump must have just named him as his choice so when Gaetz inevitably withdraws from consideration, the person Trump names next will sound better by comparison.

00:10:28 Speaker_01
A lot of very sober people are inventing that sort of roundabout Rube Goldberg explanation for this announced appointment. That does not at all seem to be what's going on here.

00:10:39 Speaker_01
Trump really does appear to want Matt Gaetz to be the Attorney General of the United States.

00:10:43 Speaker_01
Axios is reporting tonight that Trump is personally calling Republican senators and telling them one-on-one that he expects their vote for Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States.

00:10:55 Speaker_01
Now, there is an ethics committee report on allegations that Matt Gaetz, as a member of Congress, paid for sex with underage girls, an alleged activity you might have heard described as child sex trafficking.

00:11:11 Speaker_01
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a very publicly pious man, is insisting that the ethics committee can't release any such report because Matt Gaetz, after all, has resigned his seat. He is no longer a member of Congress. However, resigning your seat

00:11:26 Speaker_01
doesn't stop the Ethics Committee from being able to release its report on alleged misbehavior or even criminal misbehavior committed while a person was a member of Congress. Just ask the world's least likely obstetrics patient.

00:11:40 Speaker_01
The world's least likely obstetrics patient. Now disgraced former Senator John Enson, who was never criminally charged, but who has left politics and has gone back to being a veterinarian in Nevada.

00:11:54 Speaker_01
Two lawyers for witnesses who gave testimony for the Matt Gaetz Ethics Committee investigation have come forward publicly to tell the public the nature of the testimony that their clients gave in that investigation.

00:12:06 Speaker_01
In other words, the kinds of material that the Ethics Committee reviewed in making its Matt Gaetz report. We have news tonight that all 10 members, five Republican and five Democratic members of the Ethics Committee, now have that report themselves.

00:12:20 Speaker_01
But the, again, very publicly pious Republican House speaker keeps saying, no, no, no, don't release it. That information can never come out. And that, I will just mention, that just creates the possibility. Think about this for a second.

00:12:35 Speaker_01
That creates the possibility that they will figure out a way to keep this ethics report on Matt Gaetz from being released, and they'll figure out a way to get Matt Gaetz confirmed as attorney general, whereupon he will become the head of the U.S.

00:12:49 Speaker_01
Justice Department while at least 10 members of Congress have this report on him. What is vetting, really, right? What is vetting? Why do they do that?

00:13:02 Speaker_01
The whole reason nominees for high office get checked out, the whole reason they get vetted, the whole reason there's supposed to be a deep dive background check on anyone applying for a security clearance, anybody potentially being appointed to high office, the whole reason to do that is to make sure there isn't going to be any leverage against them or any hidden dynamics at play while they have a sensitive position on behalf of the United States of America.

00:13:25 Speaker_01
So you wanna know, like, is this person a foreign agent? Or were they a foreign agent in the past? Are they linked to organized crime? Do they have a criminal background of any kind or links to criminal associates?

00:13:36 Speaker_01
Is this person on someone's payroll or in debt to someone? Are they addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling? Is there anything about this person's life or background that makes them potentially vulnerable to blackmail or extortion?

00:13:47 Speaker_01
Is there anything that can be known about them that they really wouldn't want to get out and they might do anything to keep it from being made public?

00:13:56 Speaker_01
Well, how about if a guy got his job only because the contents of an official government report into his alleged child sex trafficking was politically suppressed, and he's therefore desperate to keep that hidden from the public?

00:14:09 Speaker_01
While, among many other people involved in the process, at least 10 members of Congress have that report that he is desperate to keep hidden. Is that a good situation for the Attorney General of the United States to be in?

00:14:27 Speaker_01
This election, it turns out, was close. Closer than the rhetoric and the noise around it would make you think. Donald Trump only improved on his electoral vote showing from 2016 by six EVs.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
He got six more electoral votes than he got in his razor-thin win in 2016. He went from 306 to 312. In 2016, at least in all the states he won, the Republican Senate candidate won as well. In this election, that did not happen.

00:14:57 Speaker_01
There were four states where Trump won, but the Republican Senate candidate lost. So his coattails were pretty short, pretty thin.

00:15:05 Speaker_01
Republicans in the House will still have only a teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny majority, one of the smallest majorities in history. The popular vote still, to this day, continues to get tallied up.

00:15:15 Speaker_01
It looks like Trump will end up being below 50% of the popular vote, which means most of the people who came out and voted in this election voted for someone else, not Trump. So he won, yeah, but it's a narrow win.

00:15:29 Speaker_01
Here's how the New York Times put it. Quote, Trump secured his victory by just a cumulative 237,000 votes in three states that, had they gone the other way, would have meant victory for Harris. So it was a narrow win for Trump, but it was a win.

00:15:47 Speaker_01
And in addition to holding onto their tiny majority in the House next year, Republicans will also take control of the Senate next year. But that's next year. And that means for Democrats, right now, right this very minute, this is an important time.

00:16:03 Speaker_01
And they should be making the most of every second they continue to control the Senate. And in the weird circumstances we're in right now, that could mean telling the FBI to hand over their file on the federal criminal investigation into Matt Gaetz.

00:16:20 Speaker_01
Hand that over to the Senate. It could mean trying to subpoena the Ethics Committee report from the House if they refuse to release it.

00:16:27 Speaker_01
It could mean that the Senate gets testimony themselves from the witnesses who testified about Matt Gaetz to the House Ethics Committee. None of these things are normal to happen in a transition, but I say this.

00:16:39 Speaker_01
I mean, under normal circumstances, all those things I just described, those would all happen while confirmation hearings were underway for Trump's appointees, right?

00:16:49 Speaker_01
Or there are things that you could be assured would happen when the FBI did background checks on people for the confirmation process or for security clearances or whatever, right?

00:16:59 Speaker_01
With this new administration coming in, though, they don't wanna do background checks. They reportedly are not doing background checks for their potential nominees. And of course, they don't want confirmation hearings of any kind either.

00:17:11 Speaker_01
The president-elect, Donald Trump, is demanding that the Senate should go into recess so he can install anyone he wants in any job with no vetting by anyone, no confirmation process, no hearings, no vote.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
So Democrats are in a really interesting position, right? With that demand by Trump on the table, demanding that there just be recess appointments only, no confirmations.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
With that demand on the table, there's no reason for Democrats in the Senate to wait, right? It's possible no confirmation hearings are ever coming for any of these nominees.

00:17:45 Speaker_01
So if there is something the American people should know about any of these people who Trump says are gonna be his nominees running the government, well now might be the only chance to do it.

00:17:55 Speaker_01
While Senate Democrats still have the gavel and can still use that power, including subpoena power, to do what might be the only vetting any of these nominees will ever get.

00:18:06 Speaker_01
Senator Blumenthal today saying that for the Senate Armed Services Committee, that might include holding a hearing to get testimony from witnesses who say they have information about the rape allegation against Donald Trump's choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

00:18:22 Speaker_01
Fox News host Pete Hegseth denies that he sexually assaulted or raped anybody, but he now admits paying a woman to stay silent about her rape allegation against him.

00:18:35 Speaker_01
We should note that California authorities never brought charges against him when they investigated that matter, but we're gonna be speaking with a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee about that possibility, about that nomination and more coming up here live in just a moment.

00:18:50 Speaker_01
I do think it's worth being very clear-eyed, very realistic about what's going on here and what options people have right now in this moment.

00:19:00 Speaker_01
Obviously, I think it seems clear to the Democrats that they ought to spend this time, while they are still in control of the Senate, confirming as many federal judges as possible. They are working on that.

00:19:09 Speaker_01
They confirmed another federal appeals court judge just tonight, so that's something.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
But there are literally dozens of Biden judicial nominees still pending, and there's no reason the Democrats in the Senate cannot work around the clock and through every second of the time they've got left to confirm every one of those pending Biden judicial nominations.

00:19:28 Speaker_01
That seems like a very obvious point and a good way to spend their time. What is maybe the less obvious point, though? is that the Congress, the whole U.S.

00:19:40 Speaker_01
Capitol, right, both houses of Congress, they're really in a fight for their existence at this moment.

00:19:45 Speaker_01
Whether they know it or not, whichever party they're in, whatever lovely relationship they think they have on a personal level with Donald Trump, the project of someone who is authoritarian-minded when they get into power is to consolidate all power in themselves, which means taking it away from everyone else.

00:20:05 Speaker_01
And there's been a lot of talk about how Trump is doing that within the executive branch, taking away the independence of any agency, any department, anything that we think of as the federal government, including law enforcement.

00:20:17 Speaker_01
That's been discussed a lot, Trump consolidating power within the executive branch.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
There has been less talk about how Trump is also trying to consolidate all the other power of the government as well, namely, and especially, the power that Congress has.

00:20:32 Speaker_01
Under the Constitution, the Senate has the right and responsibility to confirm nominees to important jobs in the government. Not just the Cabinet, it's more than 1,000 positions that are supposed to be Senate-confirmed.

00:20:44 Speaker_01
Trump has publicly told the Senate that, for his next term, he demands that they stop doing that.

00:20:51 Speaker_01
He has told them explicitly that they must recess, shut themselves down, because he wants them to have no say in who he puts in office, no matter what the Constitution says.

00:21:02 Speaker_01
That's why the Democrats who are in control in the Senate right now, they may have the only opportunity there's gonna be. They may have the only chance the public's gonna have.

00:21:14 Speaker_01
to hold hearings on and investigate and vet and tell the public what the public needs to know about these nominees.

00:21:20 Speaker_01
It is weird to try to do this in the transition before the nominations are formally made by the newly sworn in president, but honestly, that'll be too late.

00:21:28 Speaker_01
Trump is the one who made it weird by making this demand that the Senate not confirm any of his appointees. Democrats should take him at his word and do the hearings now. But it's not just the Senate.

00:21:42 Speaker_01
The Washington Post was first to report that these guys are also planning to try to kibosh the other major role that Congress has in governing the United States, which is the power of the purse, right?

00:21:53 Speaker_01
The money, appropriating the funds that the government spends.

00:21:57 Speaker_01
Washington Post reports that part of the plan for Trump's radical austerity program that he has outsourced to eccentric right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, part of the plan is that they're not going to have Musk and his commission, whatever it is, they're not going to have them make a proposal to Congress.

00:22:15 Speaker_01
as to what Elon Musk thinks ought to be cut out of the government.

00:22:19 Speaker_01
They're just planning on cutting it all directly, having Musk just tell Trump what to do, and then having Trump just make the cuts himself, leaving Congress out of it, getting rid of, in other words, the power of the purse.

00:22:33 Speaker_01
So it's just decided between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this isn't small stuff, right?

00:22:39 Speaker_01
This is putting the accused child sex trafficking guy who says he wants to abolish the FBI and maybe the whole Justice Department in charge of the Justice Department without any vetting or confirmation hearing or background check or vote.

00:22:51 Speaker_01
This is, according to the guy who is heading up the austerity program with Elon Musk, a plan to, quote, delete the government. which is the exact same language used by the influential radical blogger who J.D.

00:23:04 Speaker_01
Vance cites as a major influence on his thinking. This guy Curtis Yarvin is the one who started this thing on the far right that the government needs to be, quote, deleted.

00:23:13 Speaker_01
He says the government needs to be deleted and then we need to replace it with something new, something for which he says we will, quote, need to get over our dictator phobia. We need to delete the government and then get over our dictator phobia.

00:23:30 Speaker_01
They're not trying to abolish the fundamental functions of Congress. They're not trying to get rid of Article I of the Constitution to do small stuff. They're trying to get rid of Article I of the Constitution.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
They're trying to marginalize and disempower the whole Congress in order to do the most radical things imaginable. And you know what? Nobody loves Congress. But you'll love it a lot compared to the alternative when it's gone.

00:24:04 Speaker_01
Because I for one have plenty of dictator phobia. I think that's a healthy phobia to have and I have no plans to get over it my whole life.

00:24:14 Speaker_01
Nobody knows if the Republicans in Congress will fight to keep our structure of government, whether they will roll over and let Trump, say, for a start, get rid of the Senate's role in voting on nominations, whether they will just roll over and let Trump take over the power of the purse and start directly controlling all spending.

00:24:31 Speaker_01
But that's what Trump is trying to do. And right now, for these next few weeks before he's in power, it's actually in Democrats' power.

00:24:38 Speaker_01
It is in Democrats' hands in the Senate to show what the Congress can do, to show what it's for, to do the job, and to make it as hard as possible for them to get away with the worst things they are trying to do, even before they take over.

00:24:53 Speaker_01
That's doable, and that is something that is doable right now. Senator Elizabeth Warren joins us next. The Senate Armed Services Committee has an important job. They oversee the whole Defense Department.

00:25:09 Speaker_01
The Trump transition team has reportedly received detailed information about an allegation that Trump's announced choice for Defense Secretary, Fox News Weekend host Pete Hegseth, raped a woman in 2017 at a conference in Monterey, California.

00:25:26 Speaker_01
The woman reportedly went to a hospital and received a rape kit examination afterwards. California police investigated this alleged incident in 2017. They did not file charges against Hegseth at the time. Hegseth has denied the allegations.

00:25:42 Speaker_01
The memo detailing the incident that was given to the Trump transition team reportedly came from a woman who said she was a friend of the accuser. The accuser herself,

00:25:50 Speaker_01
entered into a legal settlement with Hegseth that paid her an undisclosed amount of money in exchange for her staying quiet about her allegation.

00:25:59 Speaker_01
Hegseth now admits that he paid her to stay quiet, but again he still disputes her claims about the alleged rape. So if you're a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee in charge of overseeing the Pentagon,

00:26:15 Speaker_01
One of the things you could do right now, no need to wait, is demand detailed answers about that allegation and about what appears to be a hush money payment to a woman who made the allegation.

00:26:27 Speaker_01
And there's no shortage of things to be aired out about various Trump potential nominees for various important posts. It's not just Hegseth. I mean, Bobby Kennedy Jr.

00:26:35 Speaker_01
for health secretary, who among other things has said that COVID was bioengineered so Jews wouldn't get it. who maintains that it's entirely possible that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, who says that Wi-Fi causes something called leaky brain. Leaky brain.

00:26:53 Speaker_01
He's going to be in charge of health care for the United States of America. Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary. Kristi Noem who shot her puppy Cricket to death, who right this minute is banned from all tribal lands in her own state.

00:27:08 Speaker_01
who appears to have paid for dental work by doing infomercials for the relevant dentist while she was still the sitting governor of a state. She also appears to have made up a fantasy meeting with Kim Jong-un that never happened.

00:27:21 Speaker_01
I mean, I could go on.

00:27:24 Speaker_01
But even just back to the Armed Services Committee, I mean, if you're on the Armed Services Committee, do you wanna have someone overseeing the Defense Intelligence Agency and all the other intelligence agencies who is more famous

00:27:37 Speaker_01
than she is for anything else, for promoting verbatim Russian propaganda. Here was Senator Elizabeth Warren, member of the Armed Services Committee, on that Tulsi Gabbard intelligence nomination just last week.

00:27:53 Speaker_02
You really want her to have all of the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin's pocket?

00:28:04 Speaker_01
That just has to be a hard no. That just has to be a hard no. Joining us now, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. She's on the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the Senate Banking Committee as well.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
Senator Warren, it's a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for making time.

00:28:20 Speaker_02
Thank you. It's good to be with you always.

00:28:23 Speaker_01
I feel like Senate Democrats have the weight of the world on your shoulders right now, because right now you have the gavel, you have power in the Senate, and you can give the Democratic Party's first response with the power of the Senate to what this president-elect is saying he wants for his next term.

00:28:42 Speaker_01
I want to know if you see it that way too, or if there's something about this moment that I'm missing.

00:28:49 Speaker_02
So you have the moment right, but can we make sure that we don't skip over a moment that comes before that moment? And that's the moment we have right now. I'm here in what's called a hideaway, a little office underneath the Capitol right now because

00:29:08 Speaker_02
Senate Democrats are holding the floor, trying to push through our judicial nominations. Remember, we still have 28 people who've been nominated to be federal judges who are somewhere in this process.

00:29:24 Speaker_02
And that can be 28 lifetime appointments that we get through. And look, I know everyone will remind me the United States Supreme Court has become an extremist court that doesn't abide by the rule of law. And that is true.

00:29:40 Speaker_02
But remember, the overwhelming number of decisions that get made by the courts get made at the district court level, and we can be filling more of those in.

00:29:51 Speaker_02
And of those that take an appeal, most of those get resolved at the circuit court level, and we just did one more of those today. So right now, we're in a battle with the Republicans. They're upstairs trying

00:30:06 Speaker_02
every dilatory tactic to try to delay and hope we'll all get tired and go home.

00:30:13 Speaker_02
And at this moment, the Republicans, the Democrats are actually showing some mettle and standing up to the Republicans and saying, no, if you're going to raise all these procedural objections, we'll just stay here and we'll vote on them and we'll vote on them and we'll vote on them until we get our judges through.

00:30:32 Speaker_02
And the reason I want to focus on that, Rachel, This is our moment to do that. That window is closing, and we absolutely, positively need to get every one of those judges confirmed that we can do.

00:30:45 Speaker_02
And so that's why we are here today, and that's why I'm on a 12-minute clock for how long I can stay here and run back upstairs and vote.

00:30:54 Speaker_01
I gotcha. Well, let me ask you about that. Do you think that Democrats are capable of getting through that whole pipeline of 28 nominees?

00:31:03 Speaker_01
When you say Democrats are sort of holding together and pushing through, do you feel like you're on track to get through the entire list of nominees that are possible?

00:31:13 Speaker_02
Look, if we don't, it's on nobody but us, because right now we have the power. Now look, we all have to rely on each other, and that has always been the challenge with this particular Congress. We gotta have everybody here.

00:31:29 Speaker_02
Nobody gets to say, oh, but I had other plans, and oh, this other thing came up. We've all gotta be here, and we've all got to be willing to get behind these judges and vote them on through. But if we do,

00:31:43 Speaker_02
We can beat back every one of the Republican objections, every one of their delaying tactics. And what I want them to hear right now on this Monday night, right now in November, we are willing to stay until we get our judges confirmed.

00:32:01 Speaker_02
Advise and consent, this is our job to confirm these judges, and that's what we're gonna do.

00:32:09 Speaker_01
Senator, I won't keep you long because I know you have to go, but let me just ask you, if you think there is room on that calendar, on that, with everything that you just said about what you need to do with judges, is there room to do some oversight over the Trump-announced nominees?

00:32:25 Speaker_01
Obviously, he won't be able to formally nominate anybody until he's president-elect. By that point, Democrats won't have the gavel.

00:32:30 Speaker_01
There's the possibility of no confirmation hearings at all if he gets this recess appointment scheme through the Congress.

00:32:38 Speaker_02
So I think you're doing exactly the right thing, and that is pointing out who these people are and how much we need to be collecting the evidence about them and getting it out to the public.

00:32:53 Speaker_02
You can't have a formal hearing about a nominee who isn't a nominee yet. But there are certainly things we can start doing as a matter of oversight. And I think that's exactly what we should be doing.

00:33:06 Speaker_02
Part of it is just, right now, is just pushing on who these people are. And I want to underline a point here for everybody who listens on this.

00:33:18 Speaker_02
There is value in raising these objections and raising them publicly, because even if the Republicans are going to have the votes, or even if Donald Trump says no voting, what's most important of all is for the American people to understand

00:33:38 Speaker_02
who these people are that he has picked to be on his team to carry out the policies of his administration. That it's important to know that he picked someone for intelligence who's in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. Who, really?

00:33:56 Speaker_02
We want her to have the secrets? I don't think so. That he is picking someone to be our chief law enforcement person, the Attorney General of the United States.

00:34:07 Speaker_02
who has been under investigation for bringing an underage female across state lines for purposes of sexual activities, who's been investigated for drugs, for other possible criminal violations, on and on through the system.

00:34:28 Speaker_02
We're not just talking about people who have different philosophies or different approaches to government. We're not talking about people who, instead of being well qualified, are thinly qualified.

00:34:39 Speaker_02
We are talking about people who are aggressively, affirmatively disqualified. And we need for everybody in the United States, regardless of who they voted for, Democrat, Republican, voted for one of the third parties.

00:34:53 Speaker_02
We need for all of them to know the details about these people, because ultimately, the only check on Trump as he goes out there is either going to be that the Republicans in Congress are going to be willing to stand up and push back, or the American people are going to be willing to stand up and push back.

00:35:15 Speaker_01
Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, hard at work late at night as judicial nominations continue to be coursing through the Senate. Senator Warren, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. See you later. All right. See you.

00:35:29 Speaker_01
More ahead here tonight. Stay with us.

00:35:35 Speaker_01
So Donald Trump has been adamant that his plan to put millions of people in camps and start deporting whole families, start raiding workplaces, he says that will all start on day one at noon, as he's being sworn in on inauguration day, January 20th.

00:35:50 Speaker_01
If they're really trying to make that happen, you'd have to start preparing well in advance of the inauguration, right? But that means so does the work to stop him from doing that.

00:35:59 Speaker_01
Today in federal court, the ACLU filed their first lawsuit seeking more information about Trump's plans to deport millions of people from this country once he takes office. As far as the ACLU is concerned, now is the time to sue.

00:36:11 Speaker_01
Now is the time to try to expose those plans in order to try to stop them from being carried out. Go time, in other words, is not the moment Trump becomes president. Go time is now.

00:36:24 Speaker_01
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special session of that state's legislature, asking them to appropriate more funding for California's state legal challenges to federal policies in the next Trump term.

00:36:37 Speaker_01
The Democratic governors of Colorado and Illinois, Jared Polis and J.B. Pritzker, they're leading another group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.

00:36:45 Speaker_01
Essentially, it's a network of governors who are agreeing to pool resources and work together to try to oppose the policies of Trump's White House. The group's top staffer is Julia Spiegel.

00:36:58 Speaker_01
She says that when governors of different states come together, they can become, quote, essential force multipliers and firewalls against threats to our democracy. Joining us now is Julia Spiegel.

00:37:09 Speaker_01
She's the founder and CEO of GovAct, which oversees this new Governors Safeguarding Democracy initiative. Ms. Spiegel, it's nice to meet you. Thanks very much for being here.

00:37:18 Speaker_00
Great to meet you. Thanks for having me.

00:37:21 Speaker_01
Can you help me and our audience understand some of the practical ideas behind how this would work? The idea is governors safeguarding democracy, but what does the group actually plan to do?

00:37:32 Speaker_00
As you noted, Rachel, Governor Safeguarding Democracy was launched by Governors Pritzker and Polis last week. But also to your earlier point, the work has been ongoing for several weeks.

00:37:41 Speaker_00
What the governors are doing in coordination with governors across the country is working together to pool their resources, the best expertise out there, the best staff, to make sure that they are prepared for all the possible contingencies, whatever may come, but also to make sure that the state institutions of democracy are delivering for the people in the states.

00:38:01 Speaker_00
And that's really the central premise of what Governor Safeguarding Democracy is doing. And just to note, this isn't a novel or new method.

00:38:08 Speaker_00
It was actually pioneered by Governor Newsom in the aftermath of Dobbs, when Roe was revoked by the Supreme Court.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
And Governor Newsom rallied other governors together, and a whole host of them have worked collectively for two years now to work across state lines to protect reproductive health care, including doing novel things like stockpiling abortion medication that hadn't been done previously.

00:38:28 Speaker_00
So we've taken that model and are really building it out now around safeguarding various contours of democracy.

00:38:35 Speaker_01
Julia, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you tonight is because even before this initiative came about, you have talked about the fact that governors have power when they come together.

00:38:44 Speaker_01
And we think of ourselves as either atomized 50 different states or the United States as one big thing. But you've talked about this idea that governors in smaller groups can be, as you say, both a firewall and a force multiplier. Can you talk

00:38:58 Speaker_01
Talk more about that, about how a dynamic between a small group of governors or maybe a medium-sized group of governors can be more effective than any of these governors could be on their own.

00:39:08 Speaker_00
Governors have these extraordinary powers, some of which are very public, like the bully pulpit, but they also have these other suite of tools, like the budget, signing legislation, executive authority, agencies that they oversee and run.

00:39:21 Speaker_00
That in and of itself is this wealth of authorities, but it's so much more powerful and impactful when those authorities are paired with each other across state lines. There are lessons learned, practices that can be adopted from one state to another,

00:39:34 Speaker_00
and coordinated strategy that can be undertaken to make the whole so much greater than just the sum of its parts.

00:39:39 Speaker_00
So that's really the premise of this work, and that governors Polis and Pritzker are leading now in the democracy context, but across a range of offices, and are eager to work with anyone who is engaged in the work of safeguarding democracy.

00:39:52 Speaker_00
And I do want to note, Rachel, this work is critical no matter who sits in the White House. It's really about nurturing, supporting, and protecting the institutions of democracy.

00:40:00 Speaker_00
Either way, that work was undergoing years ago, and it should be undergoing years from now.

00:40:05 Speaker_01
Julia Spiegel, founder and CEO of GovAct, here to talk about the new Governor's Safeguarding Democracy Initiative. We're going to be watching this closely.

00:40:13 Speaker_01
I'd love to talk with you again as things start to come together, especially before the end of the transition, Julia. Thanks for being here tonight. It's a deal, Rachel. Thank you. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us. So here's something.

00:40:27 Speaker_01
Last week, right here on the show, you might remember we talked about a bill that was coming up for a vote in Congress.

00:40:32 Speaker_01
This was a bill that would give a future President Trump the ability to essentially shut down any nonprofit organization in the country by simply declaring that organization to be a supporter of terrorism.

00:40:46 Speaker_01
In general, if you're trying to protect a democracy from a would-be authoritarian takeover, this is the sort of thing that's like a big red flag, right?

00:40:53 Speaker_01
A leader giving himself big, wide, vague powers to shut down any organization in civil society, including media outlets.

00:41:03 Speaker_01
Well, this bill that would give the White House this new power, it first came up for a vote several months ago, and it passed really easily. Only 11 members of Congress in the House voted against it back in April when it first came up.

00:41:17 Speaker_01
Since then, the ACLU and more than 150 other groups have been urging members of Congress to oppose the bill. It has started to get some press attention.

00:41:25 Speaker_01
Regular people started calling their members of Congress, telling them they don't want this kind of power in the hands of a President Trump. So we reported on that on our show a week ago tonight, last Monday.

00:41:37 Speaker_01
Then the next day, Tuesday last week, this bill came up again in the House, and this time the number of votes against it went from 11 votes against it, which is what happened before, to 145 votes against it. which was enough to block it from passing.

00:41:54 Speaker_01
And so the bill failed when it was brought up last week. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said afterwards, quote, the activism did work and persuaded members. Quote, the attention and organizing played a role.

00:42:09 Speaker_01
If you can thank your member of Congress for voting no, please do so, it matters. In other words, pressure works, but pressure is also not a one-time event. Because as of tonight, Republicans are trying to revive the bill yet again.

00:42:23 Speaker_01
It's expected to come to the floor again later this week under different rules that will actually make it much easier for Republicans to pass it.

00:42:32 Speaker_01
Tonight, the opposition group Indivisible is once again calling on regular people, calling on regular voters to contact their lawmaker in the House to urge even more Democrats and all Republicans to vote no.

00:42:45 Speaker_01
They're saying, quote, this bill is a litmus test for Democrats as we prepare for the incoming Trump administration. Are Democrats going to make it easier for Trump to pursue his authoritarian agenda or are they going to fight back?

00:42:58 Speaker_01
Again, they're bringing this bill up again later this week. It will need fewer votes to pass, which makes the pressure to try to stop it all the more potentially determinative. Watch this space. All right, that's gonna do it for me tonight.