Bulwark Takes - Tim Miller: Congress Is DEAD—Trump Killed It, Republicans Let Him

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Tim Miller joins Katy Tur to take on the pitiful state of Congress. Why are Republican senators too scared of Trump to use their own power? And how did Laura Loomer — a fringe conspiracy troll — manage to cancel a classified intelligence meeting? Watch Katy Tur Reports on MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-live-katy-tur

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here. Just got off with Katie Tur and Jake Sherman. And we just finished talking about this ludicrous Senate hearing featuring RFK. And just how shameful it is that these Republicans have allowed us to get to this place where, like, this one man who can barely talk and is on a very heavy steroid schedule can be like making rules for the whole country that is going to lead to potentially long. past resolved diseases reemerging in our children because he has fucking quack thoughts about vaccines. It's just crazy that we've gotten here. And it's totally the Republican senator's fault. And there's one point that Jake makes in the conversation about how we're coming up in this spending bill. And all these fucking Republican senators who are concerned about

RFK and you know as I mentioned earlier with John Kennedy who who who were worried about lack of police presence in the streets like we have a budget coming up these guys are legislators they have a chance in the next three to four weeks if they believe in something and if they want something to be funded like vaccine research or cops in blue cities they should fucking fund it in the budget bill that is coming up they shouldn't go on TV and talk about how they wish we had this. They shouldn't tell reporters on the Capitol Hill, oh, they have concerns.

They shouldn't tell Donald Trump to do it by Fiat. It's like, thank God Daddy Trump. You're a legislator. You have a job. You have an opportunity to exercise your power. Do it. Bill Cassidy, John Barrasso, Tom Tillis.

Anyway, you can see I'm a little hot of the collar on this one. But we talk about that a lot more. And then there's another segment want to talk about Laura Lumer and just the absurdity of her being able to get a meeting between the Senate Democrat Intelligence Committee Chair and officials at the CIA canceled. This is a story in the Times earlier this week. So stick around for both of us.

Subscribe to our feed right here because we've got so much shit coming. We've got so much stuff coming. So stick around. All right. We'll see you soon. Writer at Large, host of the Bullwark podcast and MSNBC political analyst, Tim Miller. was a riveting hearing. It was riveting because I was not, I was surprised to see Senator Barrasso be skeptical of RFK Jr. I was surprised to see, maybe not so surprised to see Tillis,

but still surprised. How pervasive is the concern? Is it just Democrats and those three Republicans, or are there others? Well, we got here. It gets kind of boring to say this, Katie, but we got here because the Republicans in the Senate confirmed somebody that was absolutely an absurd choice for this job. It was true also at the DOD and elsewhere. I mean, this is, we act as if, you know, that this is just kind of business as usual. It's just accepted. You know, if they're going to be a Republican, they're going to confirm Republican nominees. But that's, like, not really true historically, even in recent history.

I know there have been plenty of times during the Biden administration where Mansion and Cinema stopped some of his agenda. you go back to the Bush years. Jake can tell you about the Tea Party Republicans who went after Republican leadership. He covered them extensively in the House. You can go back to the old days of civil rights era, right? Like, when presidents do things that are out of step with the legislative branch,

the legislative branch has power and can push back. And in this case in particular, Bobby Kennedy was a radical leftist up until two seconds ago, right? It's not as if he has a lot in common and ideologically on a whole host of other issues with these Republicans in the Senate. If they had cover to block anyone,

it would have been this person who has no qualifications for this job, who's a conspiracy theorist. There are multiple doctors. As we mentioned, Cassidy, they're in the Senate, or people that have medical experience with Rand and others. Mitch McConnell had personal experience with polio with these diseases.

Like, there were enough votes to block this guy, and they didn't do it. And so now, here we are. my question why why why what is it about the republican party why have they decided that yeah that their authority doesn't matter i mean what what why is don't trump so powerful what is it about him are they just scared of him yeah they're politically more scared of trump look all these guys live in fear of ending up like liz cheney or whoever jeff flake you know If they banded together, if they all did it at the same time, there's power numbers.

Because also Katie, they still could, though, Kate, they still could right now. And I know they couldn't impeach him, as Jake said. But look, I watched John Kennedy yesterday talk about how we need to send troops into my city in New Orleans because we don't have enough the local government isn't funding police enough. These guys are in the Senate. They're legislators. They could fund police. They could fund the vaccine funding and force the administration to do it.

They could do it. They have a variety of different legislative options. They could block other things from going through other priorities. So they could still do it now. They're choosing that. In what could be a first, the ranking member of Senate Intel, Mark Warner, was denied a visit to a defense agency, and now Laura Lumer is taking credit for it. Warner was supposed to meet in his oversight capacity with the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

A meeting that itself was confidential, according to Warren. office. So how did Laura Lumer, who has no security clearance and does not work in the government, know about it? Tim, how does something like this happen? Well, it's happening all over the government. This is how you get in power in the Trump administration, which is demonstrate your loyal ostentatiously, demonstrate your loyalty ostentatiously by going after his foes. You're saying this with Bill Pulte, is it like the mortgage agency or whatever it's called, you know, trying to get fired the, you know, a member of the Fed Board of Governors and going after Adam Schiff and going after Tish James. So Bill Pulte is going straight out of the Laura Lumer playbook.

He sees how it works. And it works internally because there's a real culture of fear internally right now in this administration, fear of being purged if you seem like you are going against the grain. And you see this especially in the intelligence community under Tulsi Gabbard. A couple of people who put out the memo about Venezuela that rebutted the president's claim that Venezuela is invading us. They got purged. The chief of staff of the airport force simply said he disagreed with the priorities. There was too much focus on China. Something, a matter of fact.

He got purged. The head of DNI got purged for saying that we didn't obliterate the Iranian nuclear sites, like the president said. So if you're inside these agencies and you see it Laura Lumer coming for you, Because you're having a meeting with Mark Warner. Well, it's not illogical for you to say, okay, well, maybe I should just back off from this or else I'm going to be the next one to get the ax. Let me read what Senator Warner said about this. He spoke to the New York Times.

He said, is congressional oversight dead? He said this with a meeting in a meeting with reporters broadly on Wednesday. This is a dangerous time, he said, if we're not doing oversight, if the intelligence is potentially being cooked or being bent to meet the administration's needs. and we end up in a conflict, the American people have the right to say, how the hell did this happen? Donald Trump campaigned, and you could argue, gained quite a bit of support of running off the idea that we were lied to after 9-11.

We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to to get into Iraq and into Afghanistan. Tim, I'm glad they put you up on the screen because that's where I was going. I mean, you worked for a guy with the last name Bush. you had trouble with this. That makes what Warner is saying super interesting. Sure. And just to answer Warner's question at the beginning there first, now I'll get to your question, Katie, is Congressional Oversight Dead? It's in a coma right now, at least for two years. We got into this in the last segment with RFK. There's not any meaningful oversight happening

from this Congress. And I understand that's frustrating for him, but that's where we're at. He should take that up with John Thune, I think. As far as the Trump, you know, praying on people's legitimate distrust with things that happened in the past. Look, I agreed with what you're saying in the last segment about how people were frustrated with some of the COVID rules. I was frustrated with my three-year-old being in a mask in daycare, like long after it was necessary, right? Like, I get that.

I understand people being frustrated with the decisions about the Iraq War following 9-11. There was plenty to be frustrated with about that. Plenty of bad mistakes were made. The problem is, like, the next logical step here. Trump prays on that and says, okay, now you can't trust anybody, you can only trust me. And it's like, well, okay, well, if my doctor gives me bad advice one time, I'm not going to get rid of that doctor and go to a reality show clown, right? I'm just going to go to a different doctor. And I think that's like the jump here that is the, you know, that people have struggled to a bike process.

And Trump has, I think, taken advantage of that to great effect. I think that's such a good point. You're not going to go to a reality show clown if your doctor gives you bad. advice. I like that. Everybody, thank you so much.