America's Talking - Episode 35: Biden addresses nation on Ukraine, says U.S. troops will defend NATO allies

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Biden addresses nation on Ukraine, says U.S. troops will defend NATO allies. Poll: Americans do not want to play a major role in Ukraine conflict. Lawmakers call for investigation, criticize federally-funded CRT program. 'Still Waiting': Lawmakers pressure IRS amid major backlogs. Poll: Voters unhappy with Biden’s work on Russia, the economy. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

President Joe Biden is expected to announce today, Friday, that he will nominate Judge Katanji Brown Jackson, and she replaced Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. As you said, she'd be the first black woman. Welcome to American Focus. I'm Cole McNeely, General Manager of America's Talking Network. American Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. You can listen to American Focus and all of our podcast at AmericasTalking.com. That's America's Talking.com. Now here's your host, Dan McAulb. Thank you, Cole, and welcome to American Focus, the podcast where we talk about the issues from our nation's capital that matter to you. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. American Focus is brought to you by America's Talking Network, a new podcast hub where you can

find news, civil conversations, and all of the Center Square's great podcasts. Go to America's Talking.com to check out all of the available podcasts. Once again, that's Americastalking.com. joining me today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, we've got a lot to talk about today, a lot of news going on, so we're just going to jump right into it. Russia, of course, has invaded Ukraine. Things seem to be escalating there. President Biden addressed the nation yesterday. We're taping this on Friday, February 25th. President Biden addressed the nation yesterday. today on Thursday. Tell us about that and what's going on. Yeah. If you've been watching the video

that's been coming in, it's really tragic. You can see the explosions over places like Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Our thoughts and prayers go out with all those, particularly the civilians there who seems like there's already been some injuries and casualties as was kind of inevitable when this began. And that is one of many reasons that President Joe Biden condemned the invasion in his speech yesterday that you alluded to. He spoke, you know, he spoke about Ukraine after the declaration of war by Russia and the subsequent invasion. He said that, you know, there's a, quote, complete rupture in Russian-U.S. relations. And he made clear that the White House believes that Putin's ambitions go beyond Ukraine, really to establish the former Soviet Union

to expand, to recapture these kind of these countries that made up the old Soviet bloc. Biden said America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom. This is who we are. He kind of gave some details into the more of the strategic geopolitical things. He made very clear that the U.S. will defend its NATO allies. It's Article 5 commitments in its Article 5 is basically the part of NATO that says if you attack one member of NATO, you attack every member of NATO. And so, you know, there have been there are.

Are U.S. troops in these NATO countries? He made clear that we're not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine, which... Not a member of NATO yet. Yeah, they're not a member of NATO. And I think we'll talk a little bit about a poll that we covered this week at the CenterSquare.com. But poll is found that Americans really are not interested in sending U.S. troops to Ukraine. I think they're not happy about the invasion, but they're not interested in getting involved in a, you know, conventional war with Russia over Ukraine. So there's a lot going on.

You know, NATO is on high alert, obviously, because if Putin decides to expand his aggression to other NATO countries, we're going to have a big decision to make, really, with the other NATO nations and the U.S. as to whether they're going to honor the Article 5. And what that can mean, especially given Russia, is a nuclear armed nation. I think President Biden has made it clear that if Russia does attack NATO nations, that the U.S. is committed to joining the war? Is that the case? Yeah, he's, I mean, he said that. I mean, it's hard to know, is he just saying that to kind of deter Russia from doing it? Is it a, you know, if it really came down to it, would we defend Turkey, which is a NATO nation? You know, I mean, I don't know if there's any sign that. Russia wants to go into Turkey. But I'm just saying there are some NATO nations that are maybe a little more tenuously aligned than others. I mean, all NATO nations aren't created equal.

Britain, you know, I think we've more likely to defend someone like Britain than we would some of these far eastern European countries or something. So it's hard to know, but you're right. You're absolutely right that Biden has been very clear and it's messaging that if they expand into NATO, that it will be really a declaration of war on the United States. States. I think no one wants to see that. That's part of why Biden has, you know, he's unveiled some pretty strong sanctions against Russia. Russia's stock market and their currency plummeted in the wake of this invasion and the sanction announcements. It's changing, you know, constantly,

but I've seen things like anywhere 30 to 40 percent of the currency value, the stock market in Russia, just gone down. So, I mean, they're feeling that, that pinch. They had to expect that. Right now, it's just the economic consequences and nothing, nothing military from the U.S. And one of the side stories on this has to do with energy. Much of Europe depends on Russian oil and gas to power their nations and their industries and whatnot. President Biden has come under increased criticism in recent days because of what's been going on at the Russia, Ukraine. the Russia's invasion of Ukraine for his energy policies back home. The U.S., of course, when he first took office, President Biden halted new leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.

He halted the Keystone pipeline, the building of the Keystone pipeline, and other regulations on the oil and gas industry. critics say the U.S. would be in a better position to help European nations out if during this conflict, Russia does decide to cut oil and gas supplies to Europe. Any more insight into that? You're right. I mean, energy is, we talk about the economic consequences. Energy is at the very forefront of them because it takes a lot of energy, a lot of oil and gas to fight a war. Also, when energy prices go up, they're kind of the great equalizer. or everyone has to turn their stove on.

Everyone has to get in their car. So everyone feels the pain when energy prices go up, which you can make it really hard for leaders to continue, kind of keeping the morale and the broad support of any kind of war effort up. So if energy prices are going up anywhere, whether it's the U.S. or Russia or as soon as European countries, it has a political impact. But you're right that, you know,

Under former President Donald Trump, the U.S. became energy independent. There's a few reasons for that. A big part of it was regulations. There's been a big expansion in fracking and just what fracking is able to do. I know fracking is kind of controversial, but it did get us to energy independence. And now under President Biden, we've really reversed a lot of that. And we're feeling the pinch now. I mean, you know, we've heard this kind of talk.

It's kind of just been a talking point, honestly, for a long time, for many Republicans, for many in the energy industry. It's just been a talking point that it's in our national security interest to be energy independent. And it's kind of like, yeah, yeah. But now we're actually seeing it. We are feeling the pinch of when you are not, don't have a fully independent, robust energy sector that's like, you know, had some momentum behind it.

And then you come up into a very dicey international kind of crisis. I don't know. Crisis. Yeah. you put some strain on that on the energy sector and you feel it and prices are going to go up a lot more gas prices have risen a full dollar in the last 12 months. I think we can expect that to continue to go up because supply chain is going to be disrupted. The demand is going to be all out of whack. So it's going to be more expensive for Americans.

And Biden admitted that. He did admit that that the sanctions that we should pay the price. He said it was the right thing to do that we, you know, we defend freedom. We fight tyranny. Some of that messaging is a little. odd because Ukraine isn't exactly like a fully, you know, protecting their bill of rights over there. But, you know, we don't want Russian aggression. So I don't think it's quite accurate to just cast Ukraine as these great, you know, constitutional convention 1776 founding fathers

and Russia's Great Britain. It's not quite that simple. But, you know, Russia is being very aggressive. They're obviously totally unprovoked, you know, killing a lot of people right now. We want to, we want to stop that. So I'm not sure that defending freedom is the right messaging, but stopping the spread of Russia and the return of the Soviet Union is definitely something everyone should be behind. Okay. Now, you referenced earlier this poll that most Americans do not want to play a major role in Ukraine. Anything more to say about that? Can you just give us a few more details? Yeah, sure. So it was an AP, AP Norc poll that was released this week, and it found that only 26% of Americans that were surveyed want to play, quote, a major role in this situation. So about

half of Americans say they want to play a minor role, which is I would say that's what we are now, kind of leading the talking points, doing sanctions. And 20% said no role at all. So notably, you know, independents are very much not into play. 32% of independence want the U.S. to play no role. And only 20% want a major role and 44% want a minor role. So the kind of the swing voters are not interested in any kind of U.S. fighting in Ukraine. And the majority of just your average American voter does not want to fight. They want the U.S. to play some kind of minor role to help out, but they don't want us to lead in the charge of military on this at all. Got it.

So why don't we move on because there is more news to talk about this week. In fact, the Center Square investigation that you were involved in and were the primary reporter on revealed. unveiled more federal taxpayer dollars being used in grant form to pay for higher education, teaching of critical race theory. What could you tell us about this? Yeah, so I've been covering this federal funding of critical race theory for a while. You know, some of our most loyal fans, Dan, may remember last year when I broke a similar story. Yes, I do. Maybe all three or four of them.

Very good recording. Thanks. Well, this is a similar story if you just on the off chance, happen to remember that. What I found looking through Department of Education grant documents is that the DOE has awarded about $2.5 million in taxpayer dollars to a couple of Florida, you know, colleges and universities. So one of those grants was in 2017.

One was in 2021. one, they went to Florida State University and Florida agricultural and mechanical university. And so it's $2.5 million. What for you may ask? Well, it's for a program called Partners United for Research Pathways oriented to Social Justice and Education. So that's a very long name. It creates an acronym purpose. What should stand out to you is the social justice and education, which really tips its hand that this program is really a one-year

fellowship for college students studying education and a big part of what they do is they train them in critical race theory. And many of those teachers or many of those education students go on to be teachers. So it's clearly a federally funded pipeline to just ship a new batch of critical race theory trained education researchers and teachers into the education system every year. Now, it's not, and again, you know, it's not a new thing that colleges may be teaching critical race theory. I mean, I think we, a certain level, you know, there's all kinds of range of ideas that are taught at colleges, you know, some good, some bad. And we can't really police all those. But a lot of lawmakers have been really, made it really clear they want to ban federal funding for it.

And that's what it really comes down to is should there be federal funding for training, especially teachers, and something that, you know, so many Americans are vehemently opposed to. You know, I can read something from their website. So the theme, this is from the federally funded programs website. The theme of the purpose program is social justice, using research to address inequities and education, students from FSU and FAMU will have opportunities to develop their own research projects during the year-long fellowship by engaging research problems, targeting educational injustices. So a lot of this common language. One of our program outcomes is a value for participating

in the process of social justice. And it goes on to say that they're going to, they'll participate in pro seminars. They'll focus on social justice topics, including culturally relevant pedagogy and research design, tools for analyzing oppression, critical race theory, multicultural leadership, tools for social change and action. So a lot of this is kind of a confusing language, but critical race theories clearly outlined on the website. I mean, there's a lot more in this investigation, but we've got a lot of pushback or a lot of, you know, news and broken out this and lawmakers even calling for the investigation now. I was going to say after, after your reporting, after your story published, there's even

there's at least one Florida congressman who wants an investigation into it and whether it's breaking any Florida laws. Tell us about that. Sure. So Florida's state board of education under, you know, Republican governor Ron DeSantis announced last year that teaching critical race theory in the public school classroom would be banned. And so that's a new rule. It came after the beginning of this purpose program, but the purpose program grants go until 2026. So this is something that needs to be resolved.

It's like it's kind of unclear because this is a, you. know, clearly something that's happening in colleges and universities. So this federally funded program and Florida's law does not ban critical race theory in colleges and universities. It bans it in K through 12 education. But because they're training teachers, it's kind of unclear whether they might cross that line. And that's why I think there's a call for investigation. So for example, this purpose program, this federally funded critical race theory training program, has something, it works with something called Freedom Schools, which are summer camps for kids, right?

We have six-week summer camps. They bring in a lot of kids and these teachers and education researchers who have just been trained in critical race theory work with these kids. So, but hypothetically, if these new, this new batch of CRT trainees were to host a federally funded summer camp for kids, and then if they taught them some of the things they just been taught, would that be a violation of the Florida education rules? I'm not sure. I really don't know.

I'm not sure that that would, that the, you know, DeSantis and the Florida State Board of Education had something like that in mind when they banned CRT from the public school classrooms. But it's a really interesting question. So maybe there will be an investigation. We'll be covering that at thecernersquare.com. I think that's where the investigation would crux on is, are some of these other programs or some of the, it's not really the focus of this program to go into classrooms and teach elementary school students about CRT, but it could still be happening. It's not really clear whether some of their activations or extracurricular activities that purpose is doing are maybe, you know, happening to violate this new Florida regulation. I look forward to your future reporting on that, Casey. I know we'll stay on top of it. Moving on in the next story, it is tax season. We have talked about this a little bit.

The IRS is still millions of tax returns behind on last year's tax filings, and they're getting increased pressure from lawmakers about catching up because this year's rounds of tax returns are being filed now. And if there are still backlog from last year, what's that going to mean for Americans expecting returns this year? Yeah. My advice to any of our listeners would be, unless you absolutely have to, do not mail your taxes in this year, you might get lucky and get them filed pretty quickly,

but you might not get lucky as millions of other people have been and your taxes might be sitting in some IRS bureaucrats, you know, bottom desk drawer for a year. is sadly the case for a lot of, you know, quite literally millions of people in this country right now. So as you pointed out, several million IRS returns backlogged with the IRS and both Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate are really hammering the IRS. Some of them allude to how their constituents have been reaching out to them and are upset about this. And you can imagine if you had a big return that you're waiting on and you still. haven't got it. You'd be getting kind of antsy. So the national taxpayer advocate, they actually are tasked by the federal government to keep track of how the IRS is doing. And in their most

recent report, they said the IRS had 2.8 million unprocessed business returns, 6.2 million unprocessed individual returns. This is from last year, right? This is from December. Yeah, this is the most recent report. But I mean last year's returns, not this current crop. Correct. Correct. Correct. Yeah. 2.4 million unprocessed amended individual returns. And then they have 427,000 amended business returns and then almost 5 million pieces of just correspondence. You send a follow-up letter or a question. And that's just they haven't even opened that yet.

So the IRS actually issued a warning earlier this year. They called it a quote, urgent reminder, just saying that you should definitely file electronically to help speed up your refund. So they're really trying to get everyone to go electronic. Like there's been, you know, even the IRS commissioner, Charles Reddick, wrote an op-ed in Yahoo News, just warning everyone that we're facing enormous challenges. Millions of people are still waiting for their returns. File online, police. So they really lay in the groundwork to lower everyone's expectations this year, which doesn't

sound like good news for an average Americans. Right. And one of President Biden's priority initiatives was, to pay for all of his excess spending for Build Back Better and the infrastructure bill was to beef up the IRS auditing to go after what he said were tax cheats. And that was meant to pay for a lot of his new spending. But the IRS can't even keep up with the standard annual income tax process. So I don't see how that's going to work anytime soon anyway. Yeah. Well, this is largely, this backlog is largely because Biden instituted a monthly child tax credit program last year and that fell on the IRS's plate. And so they got really behind and all their other responsibilities. But I'll just say, I mean, you can mark my words on this. If we're not careful, this total failure by the IRS will be used to justify Biden's request for another $80 billion, which you referenced. Because I've been in D.C. a while now.

and one thing I know is that people are not, when people fail, they get more money because the problem could not have possibly been their own incompetence. It must be that they need more taxpayer dollars. So the IRS's failures here, I think very likely could be rewarded with a budget increase because they'll say, hey, we need more staff. You see how we're falling behind. And so that's kind of how Washington works. So I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting it after all, even though they're really, you know, struggling. All right, Casey. We just got a couple more minutes.

Time for some breaking, developing news. First, we're hearing that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, is going to update its masking guidelines. What are you hearing about that? Yeah, just kind of quickly on this. It looks like the CDC is going to pull back their recommendations that, you know, everyone has to be mandated to wear a mask indoors. This is, obviously, a big implication. you know, a lot of schools, even school children still masked up,

although the science behind that was kind of tenuous. So CDC, really the hawks when it comes to masking, looks like they're finally pulling back. And I think it's going to have ripple effect for any of these holdout states or school boards that are still requiring masks. Thank you. And we'll be paying attention to that. I think you'll be writing about that today at thecentersquare.com.

And one final story. Biden is set to nominate the first black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. What do you know? Yeah. So President Joe Biden is expected to announce today, Friday, that he will nominate, forgive me if this name is wrong, but Judge Katanji Brown Jackson. So she's in the U.S. Court of Appeals right now for the D.C. Circuit. And she replaced Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.

as you said, she'd be the first black woman. She's 51 years old. She'll be the second youngest on the court right now. Justice Amy Coney Barrett is the youngest. She just turned 50. So this is a new nominee. The interesting thing about this nominee is that just, I think, less than a year ago, she was confirmed.

And several Republicans voted to confirm her. So I think she's the one that had the most Republican support. I think Biden is trying to make this more painless. nomination. I think it's going to be hard for these Republicans who just voted to confirm her to turn around and say, oh, I changed my mind and not seem too political. So I think she has a pretty good chance, and that's a little analysis, but, you know, we'll see the Supreme Court nominees in this modern era are never safe until they're actually fully confirmed. Right. And of course, President Biden made it clear from the beginning that it was time for a black woman to serve on the

Supreme Court. So he's made it clear that he was going to nominate a black woman, and there you have it. But that is all the time we have this week, Casey. To those of you listening, you can find all of the Center Squares podcast at an Americastalking.com. Take a look. Please subscribe. There is no cost. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAaleb. We'll talk you next week.