Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 10/4/23: McCarthy Refuses To Run For Speaker, Hannity Floats Trump For Speaker, Largest Healthcare Strike In History, Hunter Pleads Not Guilty, SCOTUS Decides Fate Of CFPB, NC GOP Public Records Scandal, Nina Turner Launches New Pro Union Org And MORE!

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss the aftermath of McCarthy's ouster as Speaker with his confirmation of not seeking to run again, Sean Hannity claims Trump is weighing a run for speaker, the largest strike in American history launching this week, Hunter Biden pleads not guilty in gun case, SCOTUS hears case that could decide the fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, iPhone security protections threatened by dark money backed groups, NC Republicans push for ability to destroy public records, McConnell outmaneuvered on Ukraine, and Nina Turner joins the show to discuss her new union supporting organization.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's All right, good morning and welcome to counterpoints today is the kind of show that presenters live to be a part of we got Theater we got spectacle and nobody's really getting hurt. We, of course, about all the drama over in the house yesterday. But first, if you want to see this show an hour early, how do we do that? We become a premium subscriber. You can see it on YouTube.

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you let us come in and hopefully fill a gap that the corporate press is not filling. And there's just so much, so much news. We say that every week. But yesterday, Ryan was on Capitol Hill. We were both working the phones all day. Legitimately one of the craziest, craziest days in Washington, D.C., at least that I've ever

experienced. We're also going to be talking about a 75,000 worker walkout at Kaiser Permanente hospitals, clinics, and other health care facilities around the country. It's a three-day strike pressuring management to come to the table and make a decent contract. So this is an expansion of the class war that we've been seeing raging across the country. Hunter Biden pleading not guilty to a thing that he did do. See how that goes for him? CFPB was in court, was in the Supreme Court yesterday, basically arguing for its life. It seems like the justices are going to toss out an argument made by payday lenders that they ought

not to be regulated by the CFPB and that the CFPB ought not to be able to regulate anybody. We'll talk about that in a more. What else we got? Well, we're going to be talking about North Carolina and your block. I'll be talking about how Mitch McConnell sort of got quietly outmaneuvered by conservatives and his sort of weakened state. And then Nina Turner will be with us to talk about a new project. Yes, we're going to have exclusive reporting. A lot of people have been wondering what is Nina Turner's next thing going to be. We will answer that question for you at the end of the show. Stay tuned for that. First, let's start on Capitol Hill yesterday. We have a whole lot of video because basically the cameras were trained on every member of Congress who was essential in this negotiation process yesterday. And I'm going

to tease right now that actually we have some video potentially that suggests Donald Trump might be interested in taking the speakership. That's not a joke. We'll get into that in just a moment. But let's start with Kevin McCarthy. After he was voted, if you were following along yesterday, there was a vote on what is called the motion to vacate. The motion to vacate is what Kevin McCarthy agreed to bring back. Nancy Pelosi got away, did away with it. It had always been there. But Nancy Pelosi did away with it after watching actually what then Congressman Mark Meadows tried to do to John Boehner. Boehner steps down.

Boehner just quit. Right. This goes to 2015. I'm not dealing with this. I'm out of here. Right. And so Nancy Pelosi sees that, gets rid of it when she takes over again in 2019. And Kevin McCarthy agreed to bring it back in order to secure the support of people like

Matt Gaetz in January. He would not have been the speaker. This is the catch-22. He would not have been the speaker without bringing back the motion of vacate. He never would have been the speaker. And now he is the first speaker to ever be ousted, ever. This is a first in American history. A lot of times we think things are unprecedented and they actually aren't. This is really unprecedented. It only happened once in 1910 that there was an attempt, but never successfully. Joe Cannon survived that attempt. And he got an office building.

That's right, he did. I don't think there's gonna be a McCarthy office building because, well, for a number of reasons that we'll get into. But let's play this first clip of Kevin McCarthy talking after the vote. My goals have not changed. My ability to fight is just in a different form. You need two eight teams. Unfortunately, four percent of our conference can join all the Democrats and dictate who can be the Republican speaker in

this house. I don't think that rule is good for the institution, but apparently I'm the only one. I believe I can continue to fight, maybe in a different manner. I will not run for Speaker again. I'll have the conference pick somebody else. I think today was a political decision by the Democrats. And I think the things they have done in the past hurt the institution. They just started removing people from committee. They just started doing the other things. My fear is the institution fell today.

Because you can't do the job if eight people, you have 94% or 96% of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side. How do you govern? And when you look back, is there anything you could have done differently to what those eight members did? Yeah, a lot of them I helped get elected, so I probably should have picked somebody else.

He was trying to put on a brave face. Yeah, and he took a lot of questions, basically, until there were almost no more questions. If we can put up A1, we can run through the list of people who bailed on Kevin McCarthy. Some of these are the obvious ones, but then let's talk about a few of these. Anyway, for people who are not watching this, it's Biggs, Bucks, Birchett, Crane, Gates, Good, Mace, Rosendale. Birchett said, do you know the backstory on this? That Burchett

told McCarthy that he was going to prey on how he was going to vote, and McCarthy made fun of him for that. And he was like, I don't have to prey on it anymore. There you go. There's your answer. I'm a yes, you're out. Nancy Mace told him that she had been misled by McCarthy on how House Republicans were going to deal with the abortion rights issue. In other words, she thought that there was some way she could drag Republicans back from the brink or out of the wilderness on abortion. McCarthy, in that press conference that we just played later in it, he was asked about this. And he said, I spoke to Mesa's chief of staff and he assured me that I never misled them on anything. And if I get, if he gets fired for me revealing that he told me this, I'll find him a job. Kind of a freewheeling weird press conference. Yes. And there was a lot of that

yesterday. Did you notice that it was, you know, it was such, it was so chaotic that all kinds of things seem to be getting revealed and dripped out left and right. And that's one of the interesting things about McCarthy's press conference. He didn't lead with this, but he actually revealed in the press conference that he has, quote, seen the text. This is a quote from him. I have seen the texts. And for Matt Gaetz, it's all personal. So Matt Gaetz leads this charge, which ends up in a 216 to 210 vote, getting people like Nancy Mace. And to this point about Nancy Mace, it looks a lot like she was looking for a reason to vote against Kevin McCarthy, which is very surprising because she's not a Freedom Caucus member.

She's not hardcore at all. I don't know how the heck this is going to play in her district, but it sounds like she came up with a reason that she voted against Kevin McCarthy, not that that reason was genuinely weighing on her, but that she decided she had to vote against Kevin McCarthy and this was going to be the reason. Yeah, she represents Charleston and Democrats have thought that they had a shot at taking her out in the past. She's won fairly comfortably, but she's kind of on the radar, whereas the Freedom Caucus folks in general, they're nowhere near Democrats' radar. They're like, we're not touching you guys. Tell us a little bit more about that, what he means by, I've seen the texts. So McCarthy basically saying this is somewhat related to an ethics complaint against Gates and that Gates is trying to take out the Speaker to block that investigation or something like what what is what is McCarthy alleging there or

the other theory that I have heard is that Gates has his vendetta against McCarthy because McCarthy didn't do enough to stop the ethics investigation into Matt Gates As it has been transpiring and so it's interesting because everyone is being very Cagy about the potential contents of that ethics investigation, about where it stands. And the ethics committee is always like that. It's pretty closed up in your experience, right? Yeah, it's impenetrable. And so we don't totally understand what's going on here. So the one clue there, I've seen the texts. Are these allegedly incriminating text messages that Gates is involved in? Is that what we're supposed to

be led to believe by this cryptic allegation that the ousted speaker dropped in his press conference? I'm assuming what he's saying is that Gaetz was texting other people, other members, to suggest that his personal problem with Kevin McCarthy is the reason he led this ouster. Now, the ostensible reason, of course, is that McCarthy went along with the stopgap continuing resolution over the weekend. He came to a deal to prevent a government shutdown only for the next 45 days, by the way. It's very likely that the government would still at least be on the brink of a shutdown around Christmas time, if not totally shut down around Christmas time. And Matt Gaetz, Matt Rosendale, Bob Good, those other folks were saying he should have shut the government down. And from the perspective of

conservatives, and especially if you think of this from the perspective of like grassroots conservatives, you're just being asked to pick your poison, right? And Matt Stoller had a great tweet where he was like, good for Republicans, like Congress deserves to go up in flames. I'm paraphrasing here, but like, and I don't mean that literally, I don't think Stoller even said that, but like Congress deserves to, you know, be turned into this chaotic scene, good for Republicans for doing it. And I completely understand that sentiment. I think it's absolutely true. And that's what people have been saying on the right since the Tea Party. But that's what they already did to Kevin McCarthy. They went through 15 ballots in January. They went just about as far

as they felt they could with the debt ceiling back in May. That is where Kevin McCarthy lost their trust. They thought he should have pushed further on the debt ceiling. So after that, summer comes and goes. They feel like he doesn't push far enough right now. They thought he should have pushed it to a shutdown instead of going with that CR. So again, it's pick your poison. Do you want these sort of little victories with Kevin McCarthy where you're reforming the House and you're getting the House back into a situation where you have the motion to vacate, where you have these appropriations bills on single subjects, which is one of the things that they're still fighting over.

Do you want that? Or do you want to shut down the government and sort of take a shot across the bow and send a message to sort of the Republican establishment? Either way, there's nothing happening to spending. Spending is going to continue to, neither of those options actually seriously impacts what they want to deal with, which is Ukraine aid money, which is the size of the federal budget. None of this is going to deal with that. Let's play a little Gates color, and then I have a question about Gates' strategy for you that I think probably a lot of viewers have as well.

So here's a little flavor of Gates' speechmaking on the floor right before the vote. The opening line of my colleague's speech was that Speaker McCarthy always overperforms expectations. But after tweeting, bring it, and after engaging in profane lace tirades at House conference, he just lost a motion to table. So I wouldn't necessarily consider that overperforming expectations. And time and again, I've heard my colleagues say that, well, he deserves it because he went through a tough speaker contest. Let me let everyone know he prevailed in that speaker contest because he made an agreement to fulfill certain commitments to make this an open and honest process. And he has failed to meet those commitments. And that's why we are here.

I reserve to whose benefit people have called you a narcissist. People say there is to your benefit alone. Is it to the benefit of you and to Donald Trump? It's the benefit of this country that we have a better speaker of the House than Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy couldn't keep his word. He made an agreement in January regarding the way Washington would work, and he violated that agreement. We are $33 trillion in debt. We are facing $2.2 trillion annual deficits.

We face a de-dollarization globally that will crush Americans, working class Americans. Kevin McCarthy is a feature of the swamp. He has risen to power by collecting special interest money and redistributing that money in exchange for favors. We are breaking the fever now, and we should elect a speaker who's better. McCarthy then said, look, this is personal. This wasn't political. This is, Matt Gaetz just doesn't like me. Right. Nothing I did wrong. He just doesn't like me. Gaetz later said that if Scalise became speaker, that would be a wonderful thing. He likes Scalise. Scalise is McCarthy's deputy, basically. Yeah. And not a whole lot,

you know, the Republican conference better. Not a ton of daylight between McCarthy and Scalise. And everything that McCarthy did over the past eight months, nine months, was done with his deputy at his side, Scalise, who's also a swamp preacher. So how are people who are loving what Gates is doing, and hey, who doesn't love good spectacle, supposed to feel about what happens if you just rotate in Steve Scalise at the end of this? Which we're going to get to who is going to be rotated in, but let's say it's him. But that's, yeah, so you have the same question as Newt Gingrich, and maybe this is the first time that's happened. But he was on Hannity last night, and his quote was basically, you know, why did they think this was better?

And that's what's so frustrating. We'll play in just a minute Jim Jordan and Thomas Massey essentially saying the same thing. You are not going to get a better Speaker of the House for Freedom Caucus goals than Kevin McCarthy. And that's not because Kevin McCarthy is a Freedom Caucus Light member. It's simply because he was so transactional that he gave them a lot of wins knowing that he could do that over and over again. So that's where this frustration is bubbling over to the surface. And that's where we can roll a five. This is Jim Jordan and Thomas Massey on the floor of the House. After the motion to table the motion to vacate failed, they all got to come in

and give speeches on the motion to vacate itself. Matt Gaetz had to use the Democrats' microphone because the Republicans weren't giving him the microphone. There was so much petty nonsense and squabbling going back and forth yesterday. But here's Jim Jordan and Thomas Bassie. I thank the gentleman for yielding. On January 3rd, we said the 118th Congress is about three things. Pass the bills that need passed, do the oversight work that needs to be done, and stop the inevitable omnibus that comes from the United States Senate right before the holidays. Kevin McCarthy has been rock solid on all three. Mr. Speaker, as the only still serving co-author and co-sponsor of the motion to vacate

Speaker Boehner, I can tell you this motion to vacate is a terrible idea. As the only member who's serving here who took every chance to vote against Speaker Boehner and to vote against Speaker Ryan, I can tell you that this chamber has run has been run better, more conservatively, and more transparently under Mr. McCarthy than any other speaker that I have served under. As a member of the Rules Committee, one of three, one of three conservatives who were placed there out of trust, the speaker gave us a blocking position by putting three of us on there to keep an eye on the Rules Committee to make sure the process was fair and even.

I can tell you it's been fair and even. None of us are voting against the speaker today. Regular order is at odds with predetermined outcomes. Yet the speaker is being accused of not holding to regular order and predetermined outcomes at the same time. And maybe we should chase that with our last clip, which is Chip Roy reacting after the vote. Let's play A6. Come at me and call me a rhino. You can kiss my ass. Look, I've spent a lifetime fighting for limited government conservatism. I have laid it all on the line. I have not seen my family for two days in the last 30 days. You go around talking your big game and you thumping your chest on Twitter. Yeah. Come to my office. Come out and debate, mother. You know why? Because

I'm standing up for this country every single day. Right. But let's peel back. I love that. You can't beat this. But let's peel back Massey's substance that he was laying out there because he makes an interesting point. I think if you don't follow Congress, it would be easy to miss what he was saying. So he's saying Matt Gaetz wants regular order in the House, which means all of these bills go through all of these different committees. Everybody gets involved. And whatever the final product is, you put that on the floor and then you move that over to the Senate. He wants individual spending bills. That was his mantra on the floor yesterday. That's been the thing that he's been calling for. Massey also says that Gates wants a predetermined outcome, which is cutting spending to this specific level or whatever level you can. And Massey rightly

points out those are not the same thing. And to demand both of them is just completely incoherent. And in fact, if I were going to be an advisor to the right, say, look, you want to cut a lot of spending, CRs are your way to do it. Yeah. Because it takes a hatchet all across the top. You just say, this is the number, figure it out. Interesting. If you go in with every committee and let everybody sort it out, every one of those people is interested in their own kind of spending projects. And so it goes to the question of whether or not this was a coherent political project

or whether it was like a personality thing or just a kind of long term power building for a far right faction. I think the CR, and you know this, I think the CR thing is for people like Massey, who's a hardcore libertarian, it's to sort of weed out those de facto earmarks that people will pack into a big bill. If you do single subjects, then it's harder to do poison pills. It's harder to add kind of quasi earmarks into these things and stuff them with random stuff. We got rid of earmarks for 15 years and government spending's going up. So. I think it's a totally fair point. That's their, but that's, that would be their argument. And it

is really interesting that you have people like Jim Jordan and Thomas Massey. So you can think that Jim Jordan and Thomas Massey have been sucked into the swamp and are now totally co-opted by special interests and the Republican elite. Or you can think that, you know, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan are at odds for a legitimate reason and that Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy are at odds for a legitimate reason. Some people have issues with Jim Jordan because he's been close to Kevin McCarthy for years. And I mean, some people in the conservative movement, they've seen that as sort of suspect because Kevin McCarthy intentionally reached out to Jim Jordan. He was talking to me about this last year. He was actually almost bragging about how clever he had been at reaching out to Jim Jordan years ago after he stepped into the

minority leadership post. He was really intentional about reaching out to Jim Jordan. People feel like he's done the same with Thomas Massey. People have sort of been annoyed by Thomas Massey for being so defensive of Kevin McCarthy. Either way, these are guys who led the charge against Boehner. They're not going to, and Chip Roy is somebody who is basically like untouchable from a conservative perspective, as you can see his frustration boil over. He knows that. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that's the point. They worked really, really hard to have a transactional relationship with Kevin McCarthy that worked for them. And they got a lot of leverage.

They extracted a lot of concessions out of Kevin McCarthy. And that relationship was just completely blown up. Again, I get the Stoller sentiment in there too. Like either way, the Uniparty is winning. Matt Gaetz is wrong that they just broke the fever. That didn't happen. But it is a shot across the bio for sure. And every single revolution that you read about, you find Massey and Roy characters who were on the leading edge at the beginning of the revolution and stay kind of where they are

politically throughout the revolution, but the revolution drives It eats its children as the phrase that came from the French Revolution but it also pushes people to more extreme positions that just the nature of it and then People like Roy and Massey find themselves out flanked to the right by by new people who've come in who weren't part of the original Revolution and so people like Roy and Massey like where were you when we were storming the Bastille get out of town to the right by new people who've come in who weren't part of the original revolution. And so people like Roy and Matt are like, where were you when we were storming the Bastille? Get out of town. Like, don't tell.

And the new people are like, the Bastille, there was nothing even in there. Right. So what's amazing to watch is that now there's a Speaker Pro Tem, but we need a new speaker. And so who might become our new Speaker? Well, Sean Hannity has some news on that. McCarthy will not seek the Speakership again. Now, sources telling me at this hour, some House Republicans have been in contact with and have started an effort to draft former President Donald Trump to be the next speaker. And I have been told that President Trump might be open to helping the Republican Party,

at least in the short term, if necessary, if it's needed. OK, so Hannity, we know, is in touch with Trump. Yeah. We know that from lawsuits. And so if this was untrue, Hannity had a way to check with Trump and find out that this wasn't true. So clearly Trump is at minimum interested in having us talk about that. So always happy to do Trump's bidding. Let's do it. Let's talk about it. And he knows Donald Trump is watching, by the way.

Oh, absolutely. That hour on Fox News, he knows Donald Trump is watching. And Hannity was actually asked by somebody, by Jim Jordan. He was talking to Jim Jordan. And Jim Jordan was, he was repeatedly trying to get Jim Jordan to say whether or not he was interested in being speaker. Jordan kept saying, he kept punting and saying, that's a decision for the conference to make, et cetera, et cetera. Hannity then floated what he had heard about Trump. And Jordan asked, well, I want him to be president of the United States. He basically was like, that's where I think he should be. And Hannity said, well, it would just be temporary. So that tells you what's circulating right now is this suggestion or this idea that Donald Trump step in as Speaker of the House temporarily while he's

running for president, but not stay in the position that long. And we actually have, let's put this next element up on the screen, Marjorie Taylor Greene coming out and again this tells you what's happening behind closed doors. This is not that long after the Speaker was, the chair was vacated. The only candidate for Speaker I am currently supporting is President Donald J. Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. He will end the war in Ukraine. He will secure the border, blah, blah, blah.

She said we can make him speaker and then elect him president. He will make America great again. Ryan, pretty clear sign right here that Donald Trump is in the running for speaker of the House. I don't know how much support he would have. There are a lot of members who are now jockeying for the position, and we'll get into that in just a second. But clearly, his name is in the running. I mean, Trump loves the story, and clearly, he was watching television yesterday, and he's like, oh, wait, the House of Representatives can be on TV. And that means I could be on TV running the House of Representatives.

The C-SPAN thing seems fun. And now Mike Kevin is gone. So somebody's got to run it. Whether or not that actually happens, we'll see because there are a bunch of other people who are jockeying for it. And so, as you said, Jim Jordan was on Hannity last night, not knocking down the idea that he was interested. So basically basically if the conference, if he can round up support, he'll want to go for it. Steve Scalise, it's been reported, was making some calls. Matt Gaetz had said, hey, if Scalise gets it, that's wonderful. You got Tom Emmer. Is there a difference between these people that viewers should care about, like Emmer, Scalise, Jordan? Yeah, I think the biggest difference is between Emmer and Scalise and Jim Jordan.

Because Jim Jordan is, we talked about this earlier, absolutely a hardcore conservative. He's somebody who went after John Boehner. He's very focused on oversight now. But I think it was a really big deal. He usually says no when people are asking if he wants to be Speaker, and it's happened before. It actually happened when he decided not to run against Kevin McCarthy for the Speakership after Paul Ryan, or for the leadership position after Paul Ryan left. And so he doesn't really want it. And interestingly, Matt Gaetz said yesterday

that they need somebody for Speaker who doesn't want to be Speaker. And Steve Scalise then starts making calls. And Steve Scalise, by the way, is battling blood cancer. So physically, there's a question of whether he's able to do this insane job of Speaker of the House where there's a lot of fundraising involved, there's a lot of travel, and it's a lot of long hours. It's just, it's a ton of work. It's a lot of stress, obviously. Now Axios, or I'm sorry, Politico is saying that, yes, Tom Emmer, Steve Scalise, and even Elise Stefanik are in the running.

I have not heard Stefanik's name. Emmer is somebody that I've been told by sources to look at, that that's, the Emmer space is potentially somewhere that Freedom Caucus members might be interested in moving towards because Emmer has sort of quietly, in the background, he's not always had a good relationship with conservatives. He's very much like a transactional Kevin McCarthy type figure. He's from Minnesota. Emmer has been quietly negotiating in the background to help the Freedom Caucus score substantive wins in all of these negotiations. Speaker battle, debt limit, shutdown. Emmer has sort of took them

under his wing. Maybe that's a little bit too sort of condescending or patronizing. He's helped them sort of negotiate with the establishment in ways that people will feel good about. So you need, you obviously need support of the Freedom Caucus. And that's where this gets crazy in that you have these eight members voting against Kevin McCarthy, who was good to the Freedom Caucus. So who are you possibly all going to agree on that's moderate enough to keep the support of the moderate members, and then also hardcore enough to get the people who McCarthy wasn't hardcore enough for. Good luck. Yeah, because you've introduced a new way of electing a speaker basically for the entire history of Congress. You would have a vote within your caucus or your conference.

Right. Long story, Democrats call themselves a caucus. Republicans call themselves a conference. You don't want to know why. And so you'd have a closed-door vote, and let's say Pelosi wins or, you know, Gebhardt wins, and it's a close race. Then you go to the floor, and every single Democrat votes for whoever won. Like that was how it was always on the Republicans the same way Boehner wins a close race or whoever

When you get to the floor Republicans back the person that won The race behind closed doors, right? Because if you don't do that it allows the minority party to come in and side with the people who refuse to go along with the party and kick them out. And so what Gates discovered here and what Democrats could have done in the past is if you team up with the other party, you can block your party from appointing somebody. But your question is an excellent one. Then what? Right.

If they can do it, then other people can do it as well. Right. So how do you get a speaker? And you remember this, Jim Jordan's problem has long been that he's not, you know, the moderates, the centrists in the Republican conference will have a hard time getting behind Jim Jordan. Now that may not be the case. I suspect it wouldn't be the case anymore because Jordan has proven himself a capable leader of various committees, and he's proven that you can work with Jim Jordan. And that's in some ways why people in the conservative movement are like, huh, what's going on with Jim Jordan? But I think basically everybody would get behind Jim Jordan.

He's a pretty, to the extent there's a consensus candidate, I think it's probably Jim Jordan. I'm surprised, but I'm surprised that Gates has been so willing to float Scalise and Emmer's names. And he has floated both of those names. Honestly, because they're so obviously at least the same as McCarthy, if not worse. And I think that really gives Gates' critics some serious ammo. And it puts weight on their side of the argument that this was personal. Because if you're suggesting you get rid of Kevin McCarthy and go to Steve Scalise or Tom Emmer, it looks like maybe your problem was just with McCarthy and not McCarthy's

ideology. Matt Gaetz was out yesterday tub thumping about special interests and people wanting to be speaker and spending their whole careers building up to that. Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise embody the problems that he was raging against yesterday. So it's quite amusing that he would float their names. And we got to move on pretty quickly, but curious for your take on this. McCarthy suggested that the reason that Democrats didn't back Kevin McCarthy, like didn't bail him out. And Democrats have publicly said that it was because McCarthy lied about, you know, he hurt their feelings over the weekend by saying that they wanted a government shutdown. That's just like transparently not a credible claim to make. Like you don't make major decisions based on whether your feelings are hurt, what

somebody says on a Sunday show. So the question, well, Emily does. But the question remains open then. So why didn't Democrats help? McCarthy's theory was that he's a very good fundraiser. Democrats want to take back the House. If you take tens of millions of dollars off the table, that hobbles them a little bit. And if Scalise, like like you said replaces him and can't travel Mm-hmm because he's getting chemotherapy for blood cancer I mean this cynical gross stuff, but that's tens of millions of more potentially off the table because rich people Often don't just hand over money like they ought to if they care about the project But they have to be wined and dined and it takes work to extract that money from their their bank account

It's just not wiring it over. So does this help Democrats take over the house? That's a really good point. And this is another one of the things that Kevin McCarthy just dripped out yesterday We were talking earlier about how it was so chaotic yesterday that these you know What would be like huge pieces of information, revelatory information. He said he got this from sources inside the Democratic caucus. He told a story about when he took over, he was talking to Nancy Pelosi or when he was going through these 15 ballots and she was like, well, what do they want? What's wrong? And he said, they want the motion of a Kate. And she was like, just give it to them. This is Kevin McCarthy saying this yesterday at a press conference after he lost the vote, where he is just like, the sour grapes are

exploding. I mean, he's bitter, but he's also trying to convince people that he's totally fine. It's like after- I'm not mad. Do not print in the newspapers that I'm mad. He's like, you know me, I'm an optimist, but screw this place, everything is going to burn down. He was doing both of them at the same time. But he said Nancy Pelosi basically promised the Democrats would back him up if Republicans had a motion to vacate. Hakeem Jeffries, you made this point yesterday. Maybe Kevin McCarthy should have made his deal with Hakeem Jeffries and not Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi missed the vote. She's in California for Dianne Feinstein's funeral. And acting speaker Patrick McHenry from California, who is now the interim speaker because of a post 9-11 law for the

security of government and all of that, took away her hideaway, which is another crazy, like it's one of the first things he did. A little tiny office in Capitol Hill. Yeah. So there's stuff is getting crazy. But basically Kevin McCarthy revealed that yesterday. He should have made a deal with Jeffries. Should have made a deal with Jeffries. Yeah. Like having a deal with your old landlord. Good as that. Yeah, it's not super helpful. The last guy said. But you know, it's funny because Pelosi still holds a lot of power over on the Dem side in their caucus. And, you know, she's obviously was very close with Diane feinstein and i imagine is is not involved in the drama as much as she would be if she were here in dc and not um mourning diane feinstein but

it's quite interesting that she didn't step in and tell jeffries not to whip that vote because clearly he was whipping that vote yeah oh yeah it was it was a it was a disciplined party yeah amazing in contrast to the republican party it's's weird. Sure is. Totally bizarre. Well, and there was just my last thought would be, there's a Jake Sherman tweet yesterday from Punchbowl saying, you know, it's amazing. You look back and you see that House Republicans have been at war with their leadership for like the last 15 years. And my response to that was like, the Senate is slouching. And we'll talk about that later in the show, but it's, you know, my, my boss, Molly Hemingway, turned it around. She was like, actually, it's really, you're seeing this wrong.

It's really, or my boss, Sean Davis, said it's really that the leadership has been at war with the Republican voters for 15 years. And what you're seeing are these occasional sort of breaking points, to use a phrase, with the base. Because the base wants it. Good time. All right. Let's move on to another huge story. 75,000 nurses, medical professionals now striking over Kaiser. Contract negotiations failed on Saturday, so the contract ran out. They've been negotiating. And until this morning, we didn't know if the walkout would happen, but it did. Tens of thousands of workers on the line here, nursing, staffing shortages, one of the sort of quietly one of the biggest problems in labor right now.

It hit the just absolutely hit the forefront of the discourse in this huge labor conversation that has been roiling the country for at least the last year. 75,000 jobs, Ryan. If we can put up a one here. Yeah. So if you are a patient with Kaiser, I used to be. Kaiser is actually a pretty cool kind of vertically integrated. You know much about Kaiser Permanente? It's this like vertically integrated healthcare system where, you know much about Kaiser Permanente, it's this like vertically integrated health care system where you know, when you're in they've got everything for you, like they've got, that's where the specialists are, that's where your GP is and it's all owned by, it's all the same company basically trying to be not just single-payer but also kind of nationalized health care, but private, privatized. It's the vision that a lot of people

on the left have. They say except it shouldn't be profit-oriented. The healthcare professionals are demanding a minimum wage of at least $25 to start along with increases of 6% to 7%. Kaiser currently pays, I think, $21 to start and is offering 4% year-over-year increases. But the major demand and the thing that I think everyone across the board supports is that they want more staff. Yeah. Because anybody who's been to a hospital or any clinic in the last couple of years or almost a decade knows that they're short-staffed. And what you're seeing is that leading to burnout, which leads to mistakes. Mistakes cost tens of thousands of deaths every year.

And then the more burnout, the more people leave and the more short-staffed you are. And so we've got to do something to turn that around. That is the big The big question that is hanging over this again. This is the largest health care strike in the history of the country so that 75,000 only scheduled for three days, but still if you're involved in that that's Life or death. That's exactly. Yeah, right. And that's a very big deal. And the problem is Kaiser itself is between a rock and a hard place because they can't just create more nurses. They

can't just create more radiology and x-ray techs or ultrasound techs. This is a big problem for healthcare in general. And what nurses particularly want is more scheduling flexibility. In fact, that's why a lot of people pursue the nursing career, especially women. It allows you to have a really meaningful career and then also to have this flexible schedule where you can take care of your kids and you can sort of do both if you want to. It's actually why a lot of people pursue that line of work. And COVID, the COVID burnout just exacerbated existing trends. There was already, because baby boomers are aging to this point where we knew this was coming for a long time, you have this explosion in the need for care and this explosion in the

need for medical professionals. A lot of boomers are needing more and more doctors as they get older and older. And so we knew this was coming. COVID exacerbates everything. And now you have, it puts Kaiser honestly in a tough spot. It's not a, I wouldn't want to be in Kaiser's spot because if the problem is wages, it's to the point you made, which obviously they are asking for higher wages. That's one thing. You can, you know, maybe do some math, figure out how to make that work. You can't fabricate new x-ray technicians. You can't just create new nurses out of thin air. Right. What this country needs, it's interesting, is we need more housing and we need more workers.

And one potential. And at the same time, we're faced with what is being described as a migration crisis. Like there's got to be some way that on a hemispheric basis, you could solve this problem. Whether it's building more nursing schools here in the United States or in Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, like what we're doing isn't working. And we have serious needs that everyone needs met. So just from a selfish perspective, like if we do have a staffing problem when it comes to constructing new housing and when it comes to kind of nursing and medical care,

there are people that want work, that need jobs. And people that need housing, like we could actually do this, but it would require us to kind of be a little bit more kind of, we'd have to get out of the cages that we've built around what we're able to think about when it comes to constructing a society. Another really big part of this is higher education. Now, a lot of nurses have four-year degrees, not all of them do. And there are a lot of people with four-year degrees right now who are underpaid. And I'm not just talking about nurses, I'm talking about people who have liberal arts degrees and went to work in what was a tech bubble, what was a social media bubble that we are now seeing contract in ways that have been

very disruptive for people who have these degrees, were making really comfortable livings, or in some cases weren't, but had the hopes of making really comfortable livings, or in some cases weren't, but had the hopes of making really comfortable livings, who are now out of a job or potentially out of a job, feel very insecure about their job status, who, had they not, you know, our system pushes you down the four-year degree path so incessantly that, you know, you get all of the student loan debt, you're not making enough money, or you make some money and then you get fired and you can't find another job or you get laid off. You're not going to find another job

where you make that much money and have such a relaxed profession. And you know what? Honestly, a lot of people could have been making more money with less debt going down the nursing path too. We just have these weird gaps in our workforce because of the four-year degree push over and over again.

This is your ticket to the middle class. And then people get it. They have $80,000 in debt and aren't making nearly enough to pay that off for 20 years. These are good paying jobs. And so, I mean, good for the medical professionals, not just nurses, but the techs for pushing for higher wages and for pushing for more flexibility. Hopefully they get it and it makes it more attractive to other people who could just, they could have better lives.

Exactly. Yes, that's a great point. The more attractive you can make it to get into either teaching or nursing, to me, the better. My brother's a nurse and it's a brutal profession. It's so hard, also so rewarding and heroic. So thank you to him and thank you to everybody. He's coming to visit this weekend. So shout out to him and also to everybody else in the nursing and healthcare field. And I hope that they get what they want so that you get more support from people coming in. It does appear like the country is supportive of not just these workers, but workers across the country. We can put up B2 here. This is a poll from

Navigator Research finding a couple of interesting things. Key takeaways here, UAW and Writers Guild, even after these long strikes, are viewed more favorably rather than unfavorably. For people who are kind of new to labor conflict, and that's basically everyone in this country because we haven't had serious labor conflicts for a long time, that's kind of new. The American public generally supports striking workers in theory, but the second they actually strike, support for them collapses. So the fact that even amid the strikes, you're seeing support for them is unusual and is hopeful. Now, partly that's because union density is so low that it doesn't affect a whole lot of people. So, you know, once it gets, if you could get to 30 or 40 percent, then you start to see people complaining again.

So it says four in five Americans support right to bargain collectively. That's like kind of reaching record levels. More than three and four support the employees who are on strike in both of these cases. And then interesting, their final takeaway on the two parties here, half of Americans say Democratic Party and Joe Biden are more supportive of labor unions than Republicans. And three in five say that Trump has always looked out for big corporations and rich people like himself instead of American workers. Is that a surprising finding? You know, it's probably worth mentioning, this is a left-leaning poll. I actually think the firm has some ties to the UAW. And that question,

I would have to see how it's written. It seems kind of loaded, but it's really— Rich people like himself. That loads it up a little bit. Yeah, it's a little bit of a leading question. But no, I don't think that's particularly— Also, if you ask the American public, does Trump care about only himself, you would think 100 percent. Yeah, like we're not dumb. We all know.

But, you know, that's a great- Put yourself first. Maybe Republican candidates should be looking at polling like this. I've seen other polling to this extent too. We talked about a recent American Compass poll. You know, Republicans in a recent, I think it was Gallup poll, it may have been Pew, said that they trust Republicans in the economy more than Democrats. Now, labor issues, how they factor into that is a fascinating question. But Republican candidates who have no chance against Donald Trump at this point, maybe a tiny chance, and we could have egg on our face six months from now, but their odds of beating Donald Trump are slim to none. Even though they're still out there trying

really hard, they should pay attention to the public sentiment on labor. If they're going to be those types of politicians that sort of just go wherever the wind blows, they probably will want to weigh in on one side of this. It might hurt them with their donors, but it doesn't make any sense to keep talking about unions in the way some of those candidates have talked about unions because of this. Moving on to our man, Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, we can put this up here, pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges, to basically his gun charge. And for people who haven't followed this, Hunter Biden was charged with buying a gun and checking on a form that he was not currently using drugs. Right. Which you have to do in order to get the gun.

And it would be, so it's a federal, it's a felony, I guess. Yeah. It would be amazing if he tried to say, well, I wasn't on drugs that second when I checked that form. Right. And the last time I'd gotten high, I swore it was going to be the last time I ever got high. And then I got high later that day and that was a relapse, but relapse is part of recovery. And so you cannot prove that I was high the second that I checked that form. That would be an amazing thing to put in front of a jury. Now he has written in his memoir and there's been plenty of reporting that he was kind of in the middle of a long time bender. Right. But it's, it's the, the,

the question is actually worded in a funny way. On the form that you have to check? On the form, yeah. Like, are you on drugs? At the moment. It doesn't say at the moment, but it suggests present tense. Right, right.

As opposed to, are you battling a long-term drug addiction? And he probably was at the time, a high, but do we know beyond a reasonable doubt that he was? Right. So here he is heading into court. So this, of course, also is the fallout of that plea deal fall that collapsed. Yes, in July. In Delaware, right.

Right. So the plea deal collapsed in just spectacular fashion in July where a Trump-appointed judge looked at the plea deal that Hunter Biden, that actually the prosecutors, so the government, were bringing to Hunter Biden and said, wait one second, what on earth is this? And basically made them go back to the drawing board. It was a crazy plea deal, to be fair. She was not wrong in that case because they were letting him just plead guilty to tax charges. And then he wouldn't get prosecuted on the gun charge or they'd let him off the hook on

the gun charge. So obviously he's violated numerous tax laws because he was going to plead guilty on those counts. And we know it. I mean, we have enough records at this point to see that he at least was engaged in some tax evasion. The gun thing, though, is really interesting because this Jonathan Turley had a blog post on this. If you move back the timeline on Hunter Biden's sobriety to the point where he can plausibly claim he's pleading not guilty. So the point where he can plausibly claim he was sober at this point in his history. So in 2018, it takes away that excuse for a lot of the influence peddling that the Biden family has used about how, listen, my son was battling a drug addiction. He was battling his demons.

During this influence peddling scheme, 2019, 2020, you can't really have that excuse if you're claiming you got sober in 2018. So that's a legitimate question for the Biden defense sort of more broadly. Couldn't greed just be enough of an explanation for why you're cashing in on your last name? Greed. And I mean, honestly, Hunter Biden's best defense is that this is normal. This is literally how business gets done. This is how foreign policy is made. And I mean, honestly, Hunter Biden's best defense is that this is normal. This is normal. This is literally how business gets done. This is how foreign policy is made. And I didn't know anything else. It's all I've ever known.

One of my favorite clips ever is Donald Trump Jr. getting on TV and saying, it's so shocking that somebody would use their last name to profit. Can you imagine? Wow. Can you imagine Donald Trump Jr. if somebody ever did that? That would be outrageous. And if they did it while on drugs, wow. Can you imagine Donald Trump Jr. if somebody ever did that? That would be outrageous. And if they did it while on drugs, wow. He earned his spot on Celebrity Apprentice. He did. He fought for that. Celebrity Apprentice Jr. Yeah, he fought for that spot. Celebrity Apprentice was a great show. But anyway,

this is the end of the Reuters article on the Hunter Biden thing. They say, some legal experts have said that any firearms related charges against Hunter Biden could be vulnerable to a constitutional challenge after the U.S. Supreme Court last year in a landmark ruling expanded gun rights under the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms. This is another story that can scramble all the existing ideological fault lines. Hunter Biden, Second Amendment champion. It's a serious problem for Joe Biden if Hunter is fighting for really the rights of gun owners. And if I were a constitutional lawyer, which obviously I am not, I'd be like, look, how can you have a well-regulated militia if everybody's high?

You got to be able to regulate the drug intake of your militia. But somehow they've just like scratched that part of the Second Amendment out, the well-regulated militia. If this goes to the Supreme Court, I mean, I don't even. Yeah, of course, they just they would toss this out. Absolutely. So, yes, you could walk in completely blasted. Yeah. And just walk out with whatever, with an RPG. The single best litigation of the Second Amendment remains the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where they sort of respectively

test their positions on the Second Amendment. Dennis and Dee try to prove that it's really easy to buy a gun. Charlie and Frank and Mac, or I think maybe just Charlie and Mac, try to prove that it's really hard to buy a gun, and everything just gets thrown up in the air. It's really amazing. So check that out if you haven't. But Hunter Biden's attorney has said that he's going to file a motion to dismiss the case. He still thinks the July agreement is in effect. He believed the statute was unconstitutional. Man, this is obviously a serious case for Hunter Biden because it could actually potentially involve prison time. Obviously, we're talking about a felony. There are many other charges against Hunter Biden that could be pending. He still has not been charged with a FARA violation, which partially sent Paul Manafort to jail.

That's the foreign lobbying, right? Right, yeah, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He clearly is in violation of, it is just like the most obvious Farrah violation, like multiple Farrah violations that you can imagine. But he hasn't been charged with it, and that's a big looming problem for him. Nobody had really gone to prison. I think there was like one case of somebody who went to prison for a Farrah violation, which is a felony, before Paul Manafort ended up going to prison for it. But Paul Manafort went to prison for it and Tony Podesta didn't. So that's, I think, also a really big problem for the FBI, for the DOJ in general, when he's still not charged with that. So let's move on to the Supreme Court yesterday. So in the Supreme Court, payday lenders took the CFPB in and said the way that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is structured is unconstitutional.

And we can put up D1 here. And ought to be ruled as such, basically invalidating not just the CFPB, but actually also the Federal Reserve, which is not funded through the regular appropriations process. The payday lenders had come up with this kind of arcane and novel legal theory that Congress is only able to fund things certain ways. And so the way that Congress funds the CFPB is it says the CFPB gets $600 million plus cost of living increases. And it is funded through the Federal Reserve. So you can't come in through the regular appropriations process and cut that off. But what you could do if Republicans had control of Congress and the White House,

they could say it's 400 million from the Federal Reserve. Congress still maintains some control over it. We've got Elena... Well, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, I think that was because there already was a challenge. I think Mick Mulvaney mounted a challenge when he was the head of the CFPB. And so I think it actually changed. The funding mechanism had some congressional oversight after the change. I don't know that it originally did. I think it actually changed. The funding mechanism had some congressional oversight after the change. I don't know that it originally did. I think it was originally all derived from the Fed. It was.

But what I mean by congressional oversight is that they can change the laws. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So here's Elena Kagan going back and forth at the court yesterday. I'm sorry. Can we just sort of, I mean, this is $600 million, and this is a rounding error in the federal budget, honestly. $600 million, and it says up to $600 million.

I mean, you say, oh, it's impossible to meet it. I mean, if the CFPB, it's a pretty new agency, and presumably its regulatory programs are going to develop over time. Congress thought $600 million was a pretty good number. Maybe that will prove to be too high and Congress will cut it back. Maybe over time the CFPB actually will hit $600 million because they'll create new programs. But anyway, $600 million, $400 million. The CFPB, there was a statement that

the chief justice made, one of his year-end reports, talked about how great it was that we returned monies to the federal treasury, because that meant that we weren't wasteful. So the CFPB is not being wasteful, and it's using what it should be using in its view and generously, you know, basically saying not the rest. What is so constitutionally? So a couple of things, Your Honor. First of all, respectively, I probably push back on the premise that the CFPB is being parsimonious. I think what they are doing is asking for large amounts and rolling over a good chunk of that into their endowment, but I'll put that to the side. When you look at the caps, I think you have to look at it both from the back end and the front end. On the back end,

I think most of us seem to agree, and I think sort of the government agrees, that there has to be some kind of upper limit. And if there is an upper limit, it's got to be meaningful. The fact that they've never actually hit that upper limit is pretty good evidence that it's not that meaningful a limit. But I think the other thing you have to look at is, is it from the front end? Maybe it's good evidence that the CFPB should be doing more. Sexy stuff, we know. This is juicy, but it actually is incredibly consequential. And I'm going to ask Ryan in a second to give us some

sort of flesh out why this is so important and what the CFPB does and a little bit of its history. But Vox had a write-up. This is from Ian Millhiser. I think we already put it up on the screen, so you can check out that article if you want. But Ian Millhiser points out, having listened to these oral arguments while chaos was enveloping the Capitol just a few blocks away, that Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett both, quote, showed little patience for Francisco. So that is the Trump solicitor general who's going after this case, his attacks on the CFPB. So little patience. Now my favorite quote here is actually from Clarence Thomas, who asked Francisco to complete

the sentence, quote, funding of the CFPB violates the appropriations clause because, and it did not go well. So you are getting basically piled on. They said, and Millhiser said basically after listening that it seemed like only Alito was strongly in the anti-CFPB camp in this case. But basically all the Trump-appointed justices and then Clarence Thomas, who A, doesn't speak that much in these questions back and forth, much more now than he used to. But B is obviously a staunch conservative going back and forth and losing their patience with Francisco, who's litigating this case and basically tearing apart the substance of the argument in front of him to the point where Clarence Thomas comes in, says funding of the CFPB violates the Appropriations Clause because Francisco didn't come back with a clean answer.

That's a really brutal situation. Can you tell us a little bit about the quick history of the CFPB and why all of this matters so much? Right. This was Elizabeth Warren's baby. She wrote about it in a law review article and then came to Congress before she was in Congress and was kind of like the lead champion of it. She was running the bailout oversight committee that got her a bunch of viral moments. She was on Jon Stewart, so she became this big consumer advocate

in the wake of the financial crisis. And then she used that political capital to push for the creation of what was originally called the CFPA, changed it to the CFPB. And one of the things that they fought for was this, was this Fed funding stream that would then make it harder for kind of future Congresses to come in and cut funding. Because often what, what Republicans or Wall Street backed Democrats would do is they would say, you know, you can't use any funding

for X thing. So circumvent that. Right. So it doesn't completely circumvent it because, like I said, Congress can still come in and change that law, but it's harder for them to do it. And if you make Congress work a little harder, then they do fewer things because then they have to do it in public. And that requires more public support. And so that was the thing. What Warren wanted was a public fight over this question because she knew she didn't have Wall Street on her side. They were going to lose if it was money. It was a moneyed inside baseball fight. She wanted it to be fought in public. She had this famous quote where she said, if they try to weaken it, I'd rather have a bunch of blood and teeth on the Senate floor and get nothing at all. Because she

felt like in a battle between people swinging clubs on the Senate floor with the public watching that they were going to win. And so they ended up winning this particular provision, which gives it a streaming amount of money from the Federal Reserve every year that they can then count on. And the Federal Reserve is also kind of itself funded that way. So it would create this weird situation where you wouldn't have a Fed either, which some people would be like, oh, that's a great idea. But, okay, well, go look up what things were like before the Fed. The Fed was actually a creation of the populist movement, which people forget.

And it's so interesting that 100 years later the populist movement hates the Fed. But here we are. Well, that's an important point. One of the reasons I think especially some of the libertarian wings of the broader conservative movement or people in the libertarian wing of the broader conservative movement want to use some muscle to go after the CFPB is precisely because you could be going after the Fed in and of itself. And that's why this is important, that if this had been a really strong oral argument for Francisco, you then actually do have to start questioning how the Fed is funded constitutionally. If it looked like Trump's justices were going to go in one direction, like Thomas was going to go in one direction, like Alito was all going to go

in that direction, then yeah. And the case that's on the table right now is Chevron that can absolutely uproot the way the government functions. And so there's still some room for that to happen the Supreme Court. Now, conservatives argue that the CFPB makes decisions for consumers in some cases, not all, but in some cases that consumers are better off making than the federal government. That's the broad conservative argument against the CFPB. But there is also this existential question of whether the funding mechanism just invalidates the existence of the CFPB and whether the constitutionality of that arrangement would then cause question things like the Fed. And it turns out, even according to Clarence Thomas, it doesn't.

This is an appeal of a Fifth Circuit ruling, which went for the payday lenders, which means we ought to shut down the Fifth Circuit until we can figure out what is going on. Like how they could possibly come up with a ruling that would be this wild that even Clarence Thomas loses patience with it suggests that we need a reform of the circuit court that we could just skip the Fifth. Like the Fifth, and people, like plaintiffs go shopping

to get into the Fifth because it's filled with so many nut jobs that are going to produce rulings like this that if like they shopping to get into the Fifth because it's filled with so many nutjobs that are going to produce rulings like this that if, like, they try to get into there and it just wastes everybody's time. Because then even Clarence Thomas is like, guys, are you serious with this? Good free speech rulings out of the Fifth Circuit recently. There you go. point that Ian Milhiser brought up is that it shows that there's daylight between the Trump justices and Clarence Thomas and Alito and the Fifth Circuit, maybe not Alito, on some questions, which is actually, again, like I know this sounds weedy stuff. That is a big deal. We should let Alito go serve on the Fifth Circuit.

Just swap him out. Yeah. And take some beleaguered Democrat from the Fifth Circuit who's just like down there shaking her head at all of these rulings. Let her come to the Supreme Court and then Alito can Go down there. You see what happens? That'd be fun experiment free bill All right. Let's move on to an intercept story actually about Apple about privacy Ryan that was published this week Tell us a little bit about the reporting that you guys published. You know, we put this element up here So this is a really wild investigation from Sam Biddle. New group attacking iPhone encryption backed by U.S. political dark money network.

And so to give a little bit of the backstory here, this is about an organization called the HEAT Initiative, which calls itself a nonprofit child safety advocacy group. people might remember that back in 2021, Apple announced that it had developed a way to kind of crawl through all of its users' photos. And it was going to look for child pornography content. Yes. And then it was going to then alert the feds that it had found this. And there were one you can kind of have an algorithm that tries to figure out, OK, is is this. The other is you can match it against a database of known kind of child pornographic content. That is we probably won't even put this video up on YouTube. It'll just get nuked by the algorithm. Speaking of which. And so they announced that they were going to do this as a way of fighting kind of child sex trafficking.

People immediately pointed out, like, hey, wait a minute. If you are going to be having Apple crawling through everybody's photos, even for a cause that everybody supports in principle. Who else can crawl through Apple's photos? That means any hacker who can get inside this tool that you're using would then have access. So you're creating a new window for people to crawl in. It means any foreign government or domestic government that wanted to get access to your iCloud storage data could get in there as well. And then if you're going to do that for child sex trafficking, why wouldn't you do it for other things? Let's check if you're a fentanyl dealer.

Let's check to see if you're a tax dodger. Let's check to see if you're spreading disinformation. Let's see if you have guns fentanyl dealer. Yeah. Let's check to see if you're a tax dodger. Let's check to see if you're spreading disinformation. Let's just see if you have guns that are not registered. Right. Well, I mean, what if you had memes that spread disinformation? There's a guy who's like getting locked up for a meme that did legitimately spread disinformation, but he's like in prison. Looks like an election thing. Yeah. Yeah. So what if they start scraping your phone for memes? Yeah. So Apple, to its great credit, said, you know what, actually, we're not going to do this anymore. So that's the, that's the backstory to this Biddle investigation. What's wild is that, so this organization, the Heat Initiative, has been pushing since then to push Apple

to return to that. What he discovered is that this heat initiative is linked to a democratic billionaire-backed dark money operation that is the biggest basically democratic operation in the country. They spent like a billion dollars on the election. And so then you're like, wait a minute, what does a democratic billionaire have to do with this question? Like, now it turns out there's some Google connections. So maybe you've got some kind of intra-corporate warfare going on where, you know, Google wants to hurt Apple or something weird like that. Isn't it fun when that happens? Yeah, that's that's always fun. But What what is going on here? Why like why and so it then goes back to the question of encryption Mm-hmm, and one of the everything's falling apart in this world

but one of the few things that's going well has been the ad the the successful kind of proliferation of encryption technology and the inability in some cases of governments to crack it. We were talking about Signal last week. Yes. Everybody should be using Signal if they're not. Just because privacy is a value doesn't mean that you're committing crimes. But the journalism that I do, for instance, that involves whistleblowers and sources who are taking risks is basically impossible to do without encryption technology. The FBI and our government and foreign governments have been deeply hostile to encryption since its advent.

James Comey in 2014, 2015 was saying it's going to take us into a very very dark place in the world. The old argument used to be that terrorists are going to use this. That was the thing that law enforcement was using to say you need to give us a key, you need to give us a backdoor into this encryption. They've now shifted to sex trafficking, child sex trafficking. You need to give us a key into the encryption because of child sex trafficking and So far Apple and other encryption organizations have have pushed back against this but Biddle's reporting that there that there's that there are links to a

Democratic dark money operation should be deeply frightening To everybody who cares about their privacy? Yeah, and I was actually just gonna say so Douglas Mackey is who I was referring to. He faces 10 years in prison. I don't think he's in prison. I don't know. He hasn't been sentenced yet, to my knowledge. It was set for August 16th,

but I don't know if that's actually happened. But the point remains that this has actually, this software, here's a New York Times headline. A dad took photos of his naked toddler for the doctor. Google flagged him as a criminal. This is, we have real life examples of the abuse of these systems happening already. And so on the one hand, this. This is an insane story.

The one that you're talking about, people can find this. But yeah, like, especially during COVID, people were, you know, doing telemedicine. And if you're doing telemedicine with a child, like how else are you going to say like, hey, doc, can you take a look at this? Right. And tell us like, is this, does this infection need to be treated immediately? Right. Is this an infection? Can it wait? Like what should we do? Right. And the robot just flagged that. Yeah. And like ruined this guy's life. Well, of course it did. Like, what should we do? Right. And the robot just flagged that. Yeah. And like ruined this guy's life.

Well, of course it did. Like, there's no way for a robot to differentiate between child, doctor, parent, and whatever else. And so it's like this huge, you are transferring this responsibility, again, to a robot and to massive tech conglomerates. So it's really fascinating that there's billionaire support for this to be brought back. I imagine you're right that there's some sort of like cronyism and watch what happens legally on this, because if there's cronyism involved in that, where you have billionaires lobbying to force companies to do things like this, that's going to be interesting too. I mean, and this is a huge problem. Like, we've talked on the show many times

about pornography laws and about pornography, internet pornography in general and the proliferation of it. I'm one of the people that thinks you can walk and chew gum at the same time and you can have tighter controls over pornography with like creative laws that target children. But at the

same time, the, the concerns about those laws are extremely valid. The privacy concerns about those laws are extremely valid. It has to be done in a way, uh, that doesn't invade people's privacy to the nth degree. And this is a really similar, I mean, it's, they're, they're different issues, but it's a really similar thing. Like, can we use digital tools to monitor potential child pornographers while also allowing for people's privacy? Obviously, yes. But at the same time, when you give the government these tools, when you put your life in the hands of a company, the cloud, whether it's Apple or Google, you're giving so much up and you're giving the government something that it's almost impossible for them to resist using that tool once it exists. And to wrap this up, let's tie it into one other viral story recently. Biddle writes, with Palantir and efforts to provide police with advanced facial recognition software and other sophisticated surveillance tools. Critics say these technologies aren't just uncovering trafficked

children, but ensnaring adults engaged in consensual sex work and more than that. Like there's a lot more going on here than just concern for the children. All right, Ryan, what are you looking at today? Well, so the North Carolina legislature recently passed a new law that would exempt from the public, public information. Basically, they rewrote their transparency laws to allow the government to sell public information to private entities and even potentially to foreign governments, but to also destroy that information and keep it from the public. Rather scandalous new law that kind of slipped through in the dark of night. Journalists D.L. Anderson and Sarah Sloan of D.L. Anderson Productions

produced this report for us. I mean, I can read you the provision later. When I saw the word sell, I just could not believe it. The custodian of any General Assembly record shall determine in the custodian's discretion. So that's saying if I'm the person, I have it in my record, it's my discretion, whether a record is a public record and whether to turn over to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, so it's my choice, is it public or not, do I turn it over to the state archives, is essentially what that's saying, or to retain, destroy, sell, loan, or otherwise dispose of such records. We are being given explicit permission to destroy or sell public records in law. So it came from

the coroner offices, it came from Senator Burger and Representative Moore, and they are giving themselves permission to cover their tracks on the heels of the failure of a major piece of legislation that they both actively pushed to legalize casinos in the state about which there have been rampant rumors of public corruption. I don't know if those rumors are true, but if they can cover up their tracks by destroying or selling their previously public records about what happened there, then the public will never know.

So I think the check and balance basically is that we work within the General Assembly by majorities and if there are suggested changes that folks would like to see or think are appropriate, I'd like to hear what they are. We'll look at them. I should not be able to sell the public records for personal profit from my public service. And then who do you sell them to? To people who want to cover up wrongdoing? To economic interests who want to be able to have a competitive advantage? To foreign governments that want to be able to know what's happening for their own advantage, whatever that is? I don't think there's any other state in the country that has had this level of power grab.

So this is a pretty incredible response to a scandal bubbling around a casino, around, you know, casino and gambling that, how about we just destroy all the public records that are involved here? And if you caught the reasoning from the assembly member there for why there actually are checks and balances here. He basically said, we operate here by majorities in the general assembly. And his point to the public is, hey, you don't like it? Then you win. You win a majority here in the general assembly, and you rewrite the laws. Of course, they're using their majorities there to redraw districts so that it's almost impossible. Republicans have a luck.

Despite North Carolina being a swing state, they really have a lot of these legislative districts locked in. So the check and balance, according to them, is the public. But the public is then also systematically drawn out of an ability to kind of elect a new majority. So wild story. It is a wild story and I always think it's wild. What's your point today? Well, I want to read from a Federalist report this week that actually sheds light on something that went largely unnoticed by the legacy media, which is that Mitch McConnell, so the Republican leader in the Senate for a very, very long time,

years and years and years, who's obviously faced some health problems, has faced mounting skepticism actually of his sort of ability to do the job both on a level of competence, of sort of ideological commitment to the conservative project in general, and then also in terms of like this health conversation, kind of got rolled over the weekend when Senate Republicans forced him to take a different look at Ukraine aid in the deal that averted a government shutdown. So we can put this element up on the screen. My colleague Jordan Boyd,

has this reporting. She writes, one source familiar with the situation told The Federalist that even McConnell quietly acknowledged to his colleagues that any spending bill, including the Ukraine funding, was not a winning issue for the party. Jordan writes, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suffered a stunning blow this weekend when Republicans in the upper chamber disregarded his repeated calls for prioritizing Ukraine funding by passing the House GOP's short-term spending bill, which included no provisions for Zelensky. Publicly, McConnell pretended his move to finance the war in Ukraine was temporarily tabled for the convenience of avoiding an imminent government shutdown behind closed doors. He had a different story. Now, another source told Jordan, when I came in on Saturday morning,

I was convinced we were not going to win. The headwinds were totally opposed to us. And then by one o'clock, we had decisively defeated McConnell. You didn't hear this story in the legacy press because the legacy press's sources among Republican senators are friendly to McConnell. That's why you didn't hear this story. But when you are able to sort of broaden and talk to different people and you don't rely on the same sources over and over again, you get a different story. And I think that's really important because we saw, for instance, Rick Scott unsuccessfully try to challenge Mitch McConnell just last year. And, you know, he had more than 10 conservative Republican senators voting for him. Now, maybe they would

have voted differently if they thought actually Mitch McConnell was in jeopardy. Nobody thought Mitch McConnell was in jeopardy. That was an anonymous vote. We actually don't fully know all of the people who voted against McConnell and voted for Rick Scott. Rick Scott is not seen as like a serious contender to take the leadership position if something happens to McConnell. And by the way, it seems like the only way McConnell steps down from his leadership post is if something happens to him at this point. Because despite all of these different health challenges, despite freezing up and glitching in front of reporters and the public, however many times now, in ways that are so obvious that he is no longer able to function in the way that Republicans should want their leader of their

group in the Senate to function. He's obviously not able to do that anymore. He still hasn't stepped down. So the only thing that would cause him to step down, I mean, I don't know, he might be trying to wait it out so that there's an easy Republican. If Kentucky has a Republican governor, then you're more easily able to appoint a Republican, et cetera, et cetera. To replace McConnell, maybe he wants to make sure that he has a good backup in place that, you know, either one of his kind of deputies, either John Thune or John Cornyn, all of the Johns, Barrasso, are able to step in and that the vacuum doesn't get

filled by what did, this was John McCain called Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the loony birds, something like that, all the way back in 2014. Maybe Mitch McConnell wants to make sure that Rick Scott doesn't step into the power vacuum or, you know, someone like Ted Cruz doesn't step into the power vacuum. Right now, it doesn't seem like there's any way for one of those people. There's no real path for one of those people to become a leader if something were to happen to Mitch McConnell. But the guy got rolled. Nothing is more important to him than Ukraine funding. He's basically said as much in public. He's not really trying to hide that. But even in private, let me read this quote one more time. A source

familiar with the situation said that he quietly acknowledged to his colleagues that any spending bill, including the Ukraine funding, was not a winning issue for the party. So he knows that. He's still publicly saying it's one of the most, if not the most, important things for Republicans to be dedicating their spending to right now. And what this highlights is the war between McConnell and voters. We talked about this earlier in the show when it comes to Kevin McCarthy. My boss, Sean Davis, tweeted when Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said, it's remarkable to think about how Republicans in the House have been at war with their leadership for the last 15 years. Well, actually, it's Republican leadership that has been at war with its voters for the last 15

years because voters don't want these massive continuing resolutions. They're against the expansion of spending. They're largely against this kind of unchecked money going to Ukraine. You can go on down the line. The Republican leadership in the House is at odds with sort of the Republican voter base. And that goes back, you know, 15 years. You go back to the Tea Party. Of course, there's only so much that Republican leaders in the House can do, but there's also only so much that they're willing to do. And the same is absolutely true of Mitch McConnell, who was able to survive the Obama era and the Trump era because of, well, one word, judges. We all know that. But now that Donald Trump is out of office, the judges have all been confirmed. Mitch McConnell's record on other

things downstream are all coming to the surface, bubbling to the surface. His war with Trump, their sort of ongoing feud, doesn't help him. That's obviously true, although it does endear him further to the establishment and to elites in Washington DC. The bottom line though is that Mitch McConnell is in real trouble because this is a great example, and you're not hearing it in the legacy press, of how the guy in backroom negotiations is just getting rolled. And if you've talked to people that have been involved in those negotiations,

one of the more interesting things that you hear is that when McConnell has had his medical leaves of absence, people feel like the Senate has been working better. Conservatives feel like they've been able to negotiate, even with McConnell's deputies, better in his absence. That's a really big problem for Mitch McConnell. It's a really big problem for his ability to hold on when he has health problems. It becomes an untenable arrangement. Now, he is doggedly clinging to power. And so it does seem like nothing is actually going to unseat him. But what you can end up having is sort of shadow leadership, where conservatives are not negotiating with McConnell so much as his deputies,

and those things start to go sideways. We'll see where it lands. But certainly when you have Matt Gates talking about breaking the fever, the establishment, the swamp fever, by taking, yanking Kevin McCarthy from the chair, you know, whatever you think of that. These leadership positions are consequential. And for conservatives, Mitch McConnell has the highest unfavorables of basically any politician in the country in certain polls. He's really unliked by Republican voters. So it would be a big deal if something were to happen to Mitch McConnell in terms of actual legislative maneuvers or procedural maneuvers, or someone else steps into that void. Ryan, have you heard any of this

from Democrats about McConnell? Former state Senator Nina Turner is launching a new organization called We Are Somebody that will be supporting striking workers around the world. She joins us just in a moment. I wanted to play a little clip from her launch video first. Everybody is somebody. Most people want the ability to afford housing, health care, provide for their family, and be able to take a vacation every now and then. While most corporations are seeing record profits, they aren't leading to record wages.

Imagine that. CEO pay has skyrocketed over 1,000% since 1978. CEOs are paid 399 times as much as a typical worker. Workers deserve better. From the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, to Fannie Lou Hamer's work for black farmers in the South, to Asa Philip Randolph's work organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and organizing the March on Washington, the fight for liberation has always been a fight for workers' rights.

It is in this robust tradition that I am launching We Are Somebody, a capacity building organization for the working class. Well, Senator Gern, thanks so much for joining us. A pleasure to be here. So can you tell us a little bit about We Are Somebody and what gap you think this new organization fills? Well, there's nothing quite like it, Ryan,

where you have a nonprofit out there to complement what workers are doing. It is indeed a capacity building organization for all workers, not just unionized workers, because we do understand that most workers in this country are not unionized. But to the extent that we can bring unionized and non-unionized workers together, we create a type of synergy that cannot be stopped. There is a need for this organization to both be a bridge for union and non-union workers, but also to be out there on the front lines to amplify, to help to fund and support these workers to educate and to provide technical support where necessary. And what comes to mind for me is our first big venture, which is going to be with the one and only Christian Smalls,

the president of the Amazon Labor Union. As you know, they are a new labor union, and so they don't have robust strike funds, and they could benefit from that kind of help, all the way to helping organizations like One Fair Wage, which is trying to do away with the sub-minimum wage. So there is a gap there, and we are somebody who aims to fill it. So interesting. And can you tell us a little bit more about the funding? Obviously, you have a nonprofit structure. So are you mostly looking for small dollar donors, that kind of crowdfunding thing,

or looking to just get funds from people who want to support workers? Yeah, thanks for that, Emily. It will be a multitude of those options. It will be grassroots donations, which I certainly have become a pro at doing in my two runs for Congress. It will be foundational support. We will seek grants from foundations that care very much about economic and social equality. And institutional donors are well. There are some wealthy people out there,

ultra-wealthy people, I should say, out there who understand that there is an imbalance in the economy and that the pendulum has swung too far over, that we are really engaged in the second version of the Gilded Age, and that must be corrected. So I'm also going to help ultra-wealthy people who want to do the right thing do the right thing and make investments in trying to help workers level the playing field. So later today you were telling us before we started taping that you're

going to be heading to a parts plant where UAW workers are striking as you also know you know 75,000 Kaiser workers walked off the job this morning. So walk us through if the organization were up and running and fully funded at this point, and I guess there is no such thing as fully funded because of the depth of the need here, but let's say funded in a greater capacity, what would we or somebody be doing either for, say, the Kaiser workers or for the UAW? Well, first of all, reaching out to those workers and the leaders of those workers to find out exactly what they need. But on the foundational point, it would be to organize, to fund, and to amplify their messages, to get that message out deep and wide. One of the concerns that I have,

Ryan and Emily, as I talk to workers all across the country, and let me be more pointed, I went to Streetsboro here in Ohio where there was a park plant that has about 122 workers there when they walked off the job about two weeks ago. And one of the things that the president of Local 573, when I asked him,

what do you want the American people to know? He said, we want them to know that we're doing this for them. And talking to other workers, they were explaining that some people think that the UAW, for example, workers may be asking for too much, and they're not asking for too much. So this is as much about organizing the workers who are on the front lines and also educating the people who may be out there and have some misnomers about why workers are asking for a living wage. It's not too much to ask.

And I think that we are navigating a society in American culture in particular where folks think it's okay for corporations to dominate and that working class people don't deserve to live a good life. They do deserve to live a good life. And so we are somebody who's going to be a bridge. We're going to amplify. They do deserve to live a good life. And so we are somebody is going to be a bridge. We're going to amplify. We are going to lift. We're going to help workers get their message out. And hopefully all workers will unite based on what they have in common. And the fact of the matter is, is that this economy is immoral and it is not working for everyday people in this nation. It's always odd to kind of be living through history because it's a hard time to, you have

a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. So I wanted to ask, you know, the clip that we just rolled is so full of history. You talk about the robust tradition of organizing. Where do you see this current moment where, you know, just today you have the largest health care strike in American history. Where do you see this current moment fitting into that robust tradition? Yeah, thanks for that question. I mean, there is a synergy that is palpable. And the more things change, the more that they stay the same.

And we saw those historic images that you made reference to. That was really about moments when people are being treated unfairly in their places of work. And we find ourselves repeating that same sad song again in the 21st century. And what we can do is draw on the past to animate us right now in the present and to help to build a better future. Workers are crying out and that's why you have what's happening at Kaiser, UAW, the Teamsters, Amazon, Starbucks, nurses, teachers, you name it. There are multitudes of workers all over this country from different backgrounds who are stepping up and stepping out and saying, we're not going to take it anymore. It is absolutely untenable to have CEOs make 399 times the average worker. The scales are inbound. They are not balanced.

And we aim to try to bring some more balance. So I am very much touched and was very much motivated from that past, from that history. And then also the coal miners for present day reference who went on strike for almost 200, excuse me, two years, about 600 days. And they went back to work without a contract. Over a thousand of them went out and they went back because the corporate interests of BlackRock was able to wait them out. They lost the motivation for workers and they spent almost $35 million. They had a strike fund. They spent almost $35 million in trying to supplement salary wages wages, and also healthcare. And that shouldn't be, a corporation should not be able to wait workers out when all

they're asking for is for better wages, better work conditions, and better benefits. That is not too much to ask. And just so people understand how these fights unfold, a union uses some of its dues to build up a strike fund. They hope that they'll build a big enough strike fund so that they can, you know, inflict enough damage on the corporation before the corporation inflicts more damage on them. You know, it becomes a game of chicken. It becomes a waiting game. As you said, with those miners, BlackRock was able to wait them out and eventually, you know, was able to break the strike that's one of the kind of the the extreme versions for how long those striking workers fought and so the the strike fund becomes the flashpoint and

so you know companies are always trying to figure out what is the size of the strike fund how long will it will it last unions are trying to make it last longer the UAW is doing these kind of strategic timed and targeted strikes. It's only hitting particular plants so that other workers can stay on the job and continue to get paid by the company, which then stretches out their strike fund. Because they say if they all struck at once, their strike fund would be done in like three months. And the big three are like, oh, three months?

OK, fine. We'll wait that out. And then you'll starve. And then you'll come back to work and so i'm curious are you going to be trying to supplement uh in a targeted way some of these strike funds in other words if people are like you know what i really support these kaiser workers and i want to give 27 that i want to go directly to a nurse to try to you know keep him or her on the picket line against the company that's trying to wait them out? Or are you going to be doing more kind of political work to support them in a political fashion rather than the direct aid? No, it's both, Ryan, because really what I want

people to know is that, I mean, the question you asked me earlier, if we are somebody who's fully, you know, fully up, we're at the genesis, what would we be doing? That is one of the things that we would be doing, providing direct money to these workers in real time to help supplement any strike funds that they may have. And for some, like Amazon Labor Union, they have nothing. But yes, that money needs to go straight to them so that they can stay one day longer, another day stronger, as they say, in the House of Labor to be able to push back. And the point that you gave about the UAW, they have a strike fund that is over $700 million, and that is a lot of money. When you say it, it sounds like a lot of money. But as you laid out,

if they have 145,000 workers too, it would not last. And so we, the people, need to come out and help to supplement those workers so that if they're paying for medical benefits, for example, and that's exactly what they're doing with that money, and then paying $500 a week to the workers who are already striking, we can help to supplement so that maybe that money could last longer or they can aim it somewhere else to do something else. It is vitally important that all workers see themselves in these strikes. And that's why another important point that I want to make, Ryan and Emily, is that this we are somebody is here for all workers, whether they're unionized or not, because I believe, I firmly believe that all workers deserve that support.

But we do know that workers who are in unions help to amplify and lift workers who are not. Look at what is happening with Tesla, for example. They got a raise. One of the reasons why they probably got a raise is the fear that they would try to unionize. That is compliments to their sisters and brothers and family and friends at the UAW. So there's an indelible linkage

between all workers, unionized or not, and We Are Somebody is going to be, is in place to help those workers, no matter who they are and no matter where they hail from. So both political and direct support from We Are Somebody. I could see it driving press coverage too. And so in some ways that direct aid would also then be political support in the sense that, let's say you're up and grassroots donors kick in $5 million to We Are Somebody for Kaiser workers.

That's something that makes the news. And then the CEOs on the other side of the negotiating table will see, oh, they have the entire country kicking in money to them. So that's going to be, A, harder for us to wait out. B, makes us look bad. And so much of these strikes is about perception. Absolutely. That's right. It's leverage. That's what we're talking about. B, makes us look bad. And so much of these strikes is about perception. Absolutely.

That's right. It's leverage. That's what we're talking about. The miners in Alabama had more leverage for the gallant fight, and they fought gallantly. If they had more leverage, they would have been able to go back to that table with a signed contract. So this is definitely trying to balance the scale and give the workers the leverage that they need to keep on fighting. And people are looking for ways that they can fight. I know that like that's one of the things I think that has people so kind of torn up in this time that, you know, for several years, there was a sense of like, okay, this is the direction that we're going and these are the

things that we're fighting for. And, you know, in the Biden era, that's kind of been cast to the wind. And so this does, I think, kind of reorient people around a North Star of a pro worker agenda. So really looking forward to seeing how, you know, We Are Somebody takes off. I think wearesomebody.org, anything else people should know? Yeah, that's right. Wearesomebody.org. And certainly they can follow my social media, Nina Turner on Twitter, Nina Turner Ohio on the gram. So just follow. And on Facebook, too. So just follow my social media platforms.

And also, yes, they can go directly to WeAreSomebody.org. Well, Senator Turner, thanks so much for joining us. That will do it for us today. Really appreciate it. Best of luck out there. Any closing thoughts? Just make sure to subscribe to the premium version. After you give to We Are Somebody, then you're getting it.

Yes. But there is synergy so that we can do interviews like this. Exactly, that's right. And keep bringing you the news that you need. We're leveraging so that she can leverage. Yes, and so that workers can leverage. There you go. That's right.

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