Pod Save America - “Dems in disarray!”

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

Trump looks for a new rationale to rig the Census, Nancy Pelosi triggers an intraparty skirmish, Joe Biden goes for a campaign reset, and Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren shake up the primary. Then attorney Warren Binford talks to Tommy about her interviews with migrant children at the detention center in Clint, Texas.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, Tommy's conversation with Warren Binford, one of the attorneys who's blown the whistle on the appalling conditions in the detention centers holding migrant children near the border. Before that, we'll talk about the latest in the census rigging scandal, Nancy Pelosi versus AOC, and some concerning new 2020 polling. Lovett, how did your 4th of July spectacular go? We had a great time, it was me and Love It or Leave It all star Emily Heller for the full hour, talking about why we're patriotic

talking about big little lies talking about some of the all time best debate moments it was a truly fun episode that you won't want to miss Check it out Also a new episode of This Land Is Out this week's episode is titled The Postponement.

It's going to discuss the Supreme Court's punt on a decision on Carpenter v. Murphy to the next term and what this means for the tribes. Mixed bag with this term, Supreme Court. Yeah, pretty mixed. Not a ton in the bag that's great. Yep, real trick-or-treat situation. A couple of raisinets in there, too. Too many sweethearts.

And a reminder that we have our big live show at the Greek Theater on August 17th. It will be guest co-hosted by Jamel Hill and will feature performances by Amanda Seals, Best Coast, and Jim James. We'll be donating the proceeds to Vote.org, Election Protection, the National Redistricting Foundation,

and Think Social Impact. Tickets are going fast, so make sure to head to crooked.com slash the Greek to secure your seats. Come see us. It's for four good causes. Come on.

The Greek is a great theater here. It's outdoors. We're going to have a good time. What are you going to do? Nothing. If you don't do it, you're going to do nothing. You're going to waste

another fucking night of your life. Waste it. Just piss it away. Wow, is there another dystopian movie on Netflix made just for you? Look at those out-of-control teens on HBO. Let's check back in with them. I missed it last night. I've only seen the first one.

I nearly got a vasectomy after, but here we are. Okay, let's get to the news. Last week, after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's reason for wanting to add a citizenship question to the census was a complete lie, Justice Department lawyers said the decision was made to eliminate the question once and for all. So we thought that was that. Thought there was a little victory. That was until Trump tweeted fake news and said he intends to add the question anyway, potentially through an executive order that may come as soon as this week. And on Sunday night, the Justice Department announced that a new

team of attorneys would be taking over the matter. Guys, what's going on here? Why isn't the Supreme Court decision the final say on the matter here, Tommy? I think that the big picture answer is because when Republicans used to put forward blatantly racist and political efforts, they would dress them up with a phony pretext to mask how craving it was. Like if Ted Cruz were doing this and he probably would have, he would have said that it was patriotic to declare that you're a citizen on the census. Right. And called it like the Liberty, you know, promotion act or some bullshit. Trump has dropped the pretense. They say the quiet part out loud. The racism is part of the political strategy and identity. So their long-term goal by getting this question on the census is to help states redistrict based on counts of only citizens

in their states. So they're going to go as hard as they possibly can. They're going to ignore the Supreme Court because this is a craven power grab. Well, the reason the Supreme Court's not the final say in the matter is because the Supreme Court left them out here. Well, if you wanted a technical answer, that's also one you could say. Well, so the decision was pretty complicated, but it seems that there's five justices that ruled, which is unfortunate and scary now. Five justices basically ruled, five conservative justices, including John Roberts, that the administration has very wide latitude to add whatever the fuck question they want. But in another opinion, Roberts sided with the liberals on the court and said,

yes, you can add a question, but the rationale needs to be real and it can't be a complete lie. He called it a pretext. And what you did is you lied. But what that leaves open is Roberts basically said, if you can come back to us with a real rationale for this, an honest rationale, and prove that it's an honest rationale, then perhaps it could go forward. Well, that's the other thing about it, too, is it's it's first of all, look at it. You're like,

wait, I'm sorry. What's your what are you suggesting? You need to come up with a rationale that is the real rationale. Exactly. Funny, funny situation they're in, because, of course, we know what the real rationale is. The real rationale is what we found from, you know, it's from Chris Kobach and Steve Bannon and that dead guy's hard drive that basically said, this helps you, first of all, to Tommy's point, move toward that long term goal of counting not people, but citizens to, you know, redistrict in a way that once again tilts the favor towards rural areas, towards white areas, against urban areas, against diverse areas, against Democratic areas toward Republican areas,

but also will help you undercount and make sure the census favors Republican areas and white areas. That is their actual rationale. Of course, they can't say that. So the directive from the Supreme Court is come up with a more believable fake reason. And what I think is so chilling about what's happening is this isn't Trump. This is intellectuals and bonies around Trump coming in and trying to smooth over what he did and give him a better basis. This is Hugh Hewitt with the legal argument. This is people like former federal prosecutors, former judges coming in and saying, you really fuck this up.

Here's the way you get this over on the Supreme Court. over on the Supreme Court. Here's the smart argument that John Roberts would accept so that we can do what we need to do, which is undercount people of color and undercount Democrats and cement our minority rule status in this country. This is my point. I mean, they did this with the travel ban. They asked for a do-over. They're getting a do-over here. And they did it with the travel ban where they said, ignore all the previous statements where we called this a Muslim ban. No, it's not. It's about these other things. They're asking for a do-over in this case. They want the courts to ignore all the previous statements and lies about how the citizen question somehow had something to do with enforcing the Voting Rights Act, which is a clear like as if that had been a priority in anything else his administration had done.

Roberts basically struck down the relevant parts anyway. But and they want a newly constructed legal argument. Now, no human being in an argument would accept this happening, right? But in a legal proceeding, they might be able to make it fly. We don't know. But, like, this is my point. They are craven enough that they don't care about how it looks. They're just going to proceed. Yeah.

Well, so what's going to happen next? You know, a lot of all the legal experts, like, no one really knows. I guess there's a couple possibilities here, right? Like some people, you can make the argument that, okay, it's going to be hard, like you just said, Lovett, to come up with a rationale that is true, that is not just, you know, inherently like we want an undercount of the census, right? Which is not a rationale that they would accept because, you know. But I'm a little worried that they might go with something that is close to the truth, which is we want to do this because we want data on who's a citizen and who's not.

Because, by the way, we want to district and draw the maps based on who's citizen and not based on the population, which is what Republicans have been trying to do for a while. And that is a rationale that is somewhat true. And yet, as we just saw in the gerrymandering case that was handed down, Republicans basically, I mean, the Supreme Court, the conservative majority basically said that it is OK to draw maps based on partisan lines. Well, that's also and I guess in I think it's in Al's, in one of Alito's footnotes, it says basically you could say you're doing this because you need to know about immigration policy. You need to know about various rules. Alito gave them the rationale.

The big picture is that basically the Trump administration got a little bit cocky and didn't understand that they needed to do a little bit better. And all the sophisticated conservatives around this administration, and I think this is part of the reason it's now the case has been fucking reassigned inside the Department of Justice, we were saying, like, you fucking morons. You fucking halfwits. Here's how you fucking do it. Here's how you make a sleazy goddamn argument. Well, that's the other thing is that, you know,

obviously that Sunday night announcement that they're going to have a new team of lawyers, there's two reasons why they'd have a new team of lawyers, right? The first reason is that some of these career attorneys, which was mostly in the first team, decided we're not going to lie and come up with this awful rationale. Further humiliate ourselves. But the second is that they've, that the first team of attorneys has already lied and humiliated themselves in front of the court. And so if you're going to say, oh yeah, we gave you a rationale that was pretext that wasn't right. But we actually meant this original rationale. When we said Voting Rights Act, that was like a slip of the tongue. What we actually meant was immigration policy,

potential redistricting, and a bunch of issues about entitlements. Yeah, so you need a new team for that. Just the other thing for people to know about the sort of attempt at a good faith argument that John was making, that maybe there is a rational reason why you want to know how many citizens or non-citizens there are in the country. Okay, the census is actually a very bad way to count people. It turns out that statistical modeling and mathematics is advanced since the Constitution was written, and you can, you know, use regression analysis and other, like, advanced ways to figure this shit out other data sets right they they are only doing this because they know it will lead to undercounting of minorities which will lead to uh an advantage for white republicans yeah they know their their rationale is clear what's the

concerning part is that supreme court decision i mean the real story here is that five justices, including Roberts, said to the administration, look, people have added partial citizenship questions to the census in the past, even though those citizenship questions were directed at certain demographic groups like long, long time ago. And the administration has wide latitude to add questions if they want. And literally the only problem was this rationale. Now, Roberts also might have been thinking, well, this is going to be, you know, if I say you need a better rationale,

they're not going to come up with one because also the government lied to the court and said this has to be taken care of by July 1st at the latest or we can't print the forms. And now the government's saying, oh, no, no, no. We'll print the forms anyway and we'll add an addendum if we win. Yeah, I mean, the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross,

perjured himself in furtherance of this argument. So you would think that that would have some political fallout, but don't hold your breath. Yeah, so I guess what happens next is, you know, they could have an executive, they could issue, Trump could issue an executive order this week. It will probably, we'll see what the new rationale is. It will end up back at the Supreme Court, and we'll see.

The one thing that the Supreme Court has not decided, and they didn't decide in the last case, is they haven't decided anything on whether the question was added with the intent to discriminate on the basis of race. One of the cases right now against the census question is in the Fourth Circuit, I believe, and that's basically saying that this would violate the 14th Amendment by discriminating on the basis of race. If that, the Supreme Court has not decided either way on that. So that is, and we know at least on gerrymandering, they decided favorably on, okay, you can't

gerrymander, you can gerrymander on a partisan basis, but you can't gerrymander on a racial basis. So there is some hope that maybe they could rule on that. And again, this does go back to the fact that there really is like a smoking gun piece of evidence from one of the architects of these policies that basically says, this is

a way to favor white people in the outcome of the census. So there is, I don't think anybody, there's a lot of reasons to be cynical about what's going to happen next, but I do think it is premature to claim you know how this is all going to turn out. No, and nor would either of you

dare. And there's another smoking gun, which was Trump at the press avail the other day saying that you need this to figure out congressional districts. I mean, he's too stupid to hide the ball even. Right. Well, but that, it was when he said that that made me think, oh, like they've done this in the past where it's like that is sort of an odious thing

that he just said and admitted, but I'm like maybe that's just going to be their rationale. It might be, but their solicitor general previously called it a conspiracy theory, nonsensical even in its own terms. It's so bad. No, but what i was saying love it is forget about us predicting like i i was reading about all this last night there's very few people

who are even trying to predict how this is gonna end because we're in such a weird territory it's also like this sounds so in the weeds and there's so much minutiae i mean the census controls i believe 880 billion in federal funding and where it will go. And the process of the census is like, it's a massive undertaking. They have to print 1.5 billion distinct pieces of material to conduct the census. No small thing to start it late. No, we used to be at a place where we were debating whether or how or by what path we offer the 11 million people who are here who are undocumented citizenship in this country. This is yet another example. The Trump administration wants to move towards not literally just erasing the idea of these 11 million undocumented people from this country.

Right. Like if you don't count them as citizens, if you don't draw districts based on where they are, if you don't give political representation to the communities where undocumented immigrants are, if you don't give federal funding to communities where these undocumented immigrants are, but you know all of their information, you are eventually getting to a point where they're figuring we don't count them in the country and we're trying to do whatever we can to deport them. I mean, that's what they, that's what they're doing. They want to have a... Think about what this would mean for them politically. Forget even... You don't have to get that far. This is so that Republican members of Congress can wave a piece of paper and say, there are 30,000 undocumented people right here in our district,

and they're not paying taxes, and we're giving them health care. This is about giving every single Republican member of Congress a cudgel for them to use in their re-elections before you get even to the major policy shifts they'd want to use based on it. This is party over country, too. I mean, it would hurt states like Texas and Florida, but Republicans in those states see that there would be a greater good for the national Republican Party, and they're cool with screwing over their own states in the short term. It's very bad. And it's especially dangerous because this is not a two-year problem,

a four-year problem. As we know, the census is every 10 years. So we will be stuck with this until 2030 and some of the effects could be permanent. So very bad.

All right. Let's move on to the latest episode of Dems in Disarray. Love that movie. Can you just say it again and then we will in post add something blowing up.

Cool. The latest episode of Dems in Disarray. I'm glad you made the noise so they knew where to put it. Everything is high-tech here at Pod Save America. So for reasons that I cannot fathom, Nancy Pelosi thought that a lunch with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was a good opportunity to get some things off her chest. I want to make, before we get into the substance, there is one fact in this article that delighted me, which is midway through the lunch, while they were talking, Nancy Pelosi reaches across the table and forks some of Maureen Dowd's potatoes. Her home fries.

Just stole them. Just reached across and ate off of Maureen Dowd's plate. And I love that so much. It is so intimate. It is a power move. It is so aggressive. It is so personal. Yeah.

It's also something that the second she did it, she should have known that Maureen Dowd is going to write about that. Because that is the detail that Maureen Dowd lives for. And if you're telling me that Nancy Pelosi did it knowing it would go in the story, I like it even more. So, more important than that. Yeah, what? What could be more important than that? When asked about the criticism... Because you know Nancy Pelosi didn't order potatoes.

She's not going to have fucking potatoes on her plate. She is going to have fruit or maybe sliced tomato, but she wants one potato. Fucking respect the hell out of it. Sorry, last time I interrupted. I hope you all drag him on Twitter for this. Some comments sur la table from Mr. Levin here. Just thinking it through. So when Pelosi was asked by Dowd about the criticism that followed a recent vote on a border funding bill

that failed to satisfy House members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar because it didn't include enough protections for migrant children, Pelosi said the following, quote, All these people have their public whatever in their Twitter world, but they didn't have any following. They're for people and that's how many votes they got. AOC responded by tweeting, quote, that public whatever is called public sentiment and wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country. So before we talk about the wisdom of the Dowd interview itself and doing such an interview, let's start at the beginning over the fight over the border funding bill that led to this whole controversy in the first place.

What do Democrats like AOC want in the bill and why couldn't they get it? They wanted language that would have done a few things. They wanted to ensure the release of unaccompanied migrant kids from these temporary facilities after three months. They wanted lawmakers to be able to visit without having to give notice, which is ridiculous that these, you know, unelected officials can bar them from entering a

facility. I don't understand how that's possible. And then they just wanted basic standards for humanitarian treatment for these kids. Like, two square meters of space to sleep. It not being freezing cold in a facility where there's no blankets. The lights go off at night so you can sleep. So they wanted basic accountability to be tied with, I think everyone would argue,

some pretty desperately needed funding to expand services or facilities or access for these kids. But they rightly don't trust what Stephen Miller is going to do with that cash. I wouldn't either. Yeah, I mean, I thought Rashida Tlaib made a good point in some piece where she said, you can't tell me that the administration doesn't have the money, that the reason there's no toothbrushes, the reason there's not enough beds is because the administration just doesn't have the cash, you know? And so they wanted to include these standards in there. Why couldn't they get these standards included in there? Here's the rub, John.

That's where the debate begins. Yeah, I mean, so I don't think anyone argues with them on policy, right? I don't think anyone's disagreeing with the fact that Democrats have a better policy position and wanted better treatment for these kids and wanted a bill that did more. The question is, did they have the power to achieve that in these negotiations? Some have laid this at the feet of Nancy Pelosi, but others have said, well, hold on a second. This is what came out of the Senate, out of Mitch McConnell's Senate. It is not clear how Nancy Pelosi could have gotten to a better outcome in the House based on what had already taken place in the Senate. So, yeah, I mean, so you read all these stories

about the back and forth of what transpired over these few weeks in these negotiations. Right. And I do think it's important. Like, number one, the reason that we don't have these protections in the bill is because of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. Like that. We should all keep that in mind. The question then is, could Pelosi and Schumer have fought harder to try to get some of this stuff in there to negotiate? And, you know, and who's to blame, right? Lovett, you just said it passed the Senate, but it passed the Senate with, by a wide bipartisan margin. So the Senate Democrats do bear some responsibility here.

Absolutely. And Chuck Schumer does bear, like a lot of this is focused on nancy pelosi like nancy pelosi had to turn to her caucus after chuck schumer decided to go along with the senate bill and and a ton of senate democrats went along with it as well that's my point that's my point that it it i'm saying it's not just mcconnell no of course not but what it's what came out of the senate and was handed to nancy pelosi and it's hard to look at this and view it as a problem that took place in the house when so many democrats went along with what happened. Now, where it gets to Pelosi is the Senate sends over the bill. And the original plan was for Pelosi to attach all those protections onto the Senate bill,

and then you send it back and then you negotiate before it goes to the White House. She intended to do this. She wanted to do this. And then a bunch of blue dog Democrats in the Problem Solvers Caucus said, no, we're nearing the break. We are not going to get this and then a bunch of blue dog democrats and the problem solvers caucus said no we're nearing the break we are not going to get this stuff in any way because mcconnell's never going to allow it and trump's never going to allow it so let's just vote on the clean senate and reportedly they were worried about being seen as cutting ice funding so that's surprising this is super important because love it you said i don't think anyone disagrees on policy grounds. On the protections that Tommy mentions, that's true. But there's a bunch of moderates in the House that said, okay, some of the liberals want to include a provision that literally cuts ICE funding by, I don't know, tens of billions of dollars. And we are not going to sign on to cutting ICE funding because we think that could be used as a cudgel against us in our elections.

to sign on to cutting ICE funding because we think that could be used as a cudgel against us in our elections. So while everyone was for the protections in bond policy, there was this policy disagreement over ICE funding. Well, they didn't want the fight. Part of the House didn't want the fight over the parts where Democrats don't agree. Democrats agree on the treatment along the border where the attention has been drawn, where Democrats didn't want the fight is on the issues ancillary to them. Yeah. And there's a suggestion that moderate Democrats in both the House and the Senate wanted to do something before the July 4th recess where they go home and they see tons of constituents and might get asked about this, et cetera. I don't know if that's true. I haven't talked to them, but you hear that often. Here's what I think about

this. Like, I agree that it's very unlikely that Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump would have allowed even some of these protections into the bill. But you don't know if you don't try. Yeah. And I think, you know, we always used to have a saying in the White House, get caught trying. Right. Like they could have. I know the July 4th break was coming. But imagine a scenario where the house democrats and the senate democrats stood together and said we are not going to leave here until there are the most basic protections in this bill the things that tommy just talked about right health and safety standards making sure that these

kids are actually with that we follow the law and that these kids are transferred after a certain amount of time making sure they have enough beds, making sure they have toothbrushes, making sure that members of Congress can visit these things. Those are very popular. I guarantee you those are not swing district issues. Those are very popular. Those are not complicated message events either. No.

You know what I mean? You can explain to someone that a kid needs a toothbrush. And maybe you lose anyway. And I have to say there's a good likelihood they would have lost. But imagine if there were scenes of these House Democrats and Senate Democrats staying in Washington over the break, holding these events, making a big deal out of this. I don't know. I think it's. Yeah, I wonder.

I mean, the thing that I find hard to parse is I think it's similar sometimes to critiques on the media. The thing that I find hard to parse is I think it's similar sometimes to critiques on the media. Sometimes Nancy Pelosi takes the criticism not for the positions she holds, but for understanding the positions of her members. And so I don't know exactly what happens if Democrats pick that fight when the bill has passed the Senate with so many Democratic votes and she doesn't have unity inside of the caucus? Well, this is an important point in that there's so much focus on Nancy Pelosi. Is she, you know, I saw a piece, it's not just enough to oppose Trump. You have to oppose Pelosi too now because she's fighting against the interests of the party. Like it's a little over, it's a lot overdone. Okay. Because it's not just Nancy Pelosi. It's Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, a bunch of Senate Democrats. And they're not just like blue dog Democrats in the House.

There's a lot of Democrats in the House that we all know and love who we just voted for in 18 who were new young members. It's not just the old one. You know, like I was looking at the list of the people who ended up voting in favor of the bill. You know, Lauren Underwood, Antonio Delgado, Katie Porter. Like some of these people that we really like. Like they're all involved in this. And I sort of think that's the point Pelosi was trying to make to Maureen Dowd. Yes. Maybe we get to that.

I mean, I haven't read a transcript of the Maureen Dowd interview. But I have staffed some of them. I have been the victim of some of her columns. She is a master of doing this. She can find ways to get you to speak a little more loosely. I have been the victim of some of her columns. She is a master of doing this. She can find ways to get you to speak a little more loosely, ways to set up a question, way to excerpt a quote, and then a controversy is born. That said, the phrasing from Pelosi seemed very condescending and dismissive. And it's not the first time that she's talked about some of these freshman lawmakers in this way.

And it would have pissed me off. I mean, you know, she talked about the green dream when she met the Green New Deal, right? She's a little too eager to kind of brush them off. But I do think that Nancy Pelosi's worldview is entirely through the lens of how many votes you got, right? You telling me you got a bunch of tweets and four votes? Get the fuck out of here. Like, that's kind of her point. And so I'm not defending that. I'm not saying that's the right way to view the world, but it's like brass knuckle politics. And it's kind of why we also love Pelosi at times, because she kicked the shit out of President Trump on some fights on these same grounds. There was a very legitimate, easy answer for Nancy Pelosi to give Maureen Dowd, as Maureen Dowd was egging her on to cause trouble.

Which was, I'm out of town that morning. Yeah, right. No, that's number one. You're right. She should have never sat down with Maureen Dowd in the first place. This is not to say anything against Maureen Dowd. She's too good. Maureen Dowd's job is to get you to say something controversial, so she writes a column that's controversial. That's her job. She's very good

at it. Nancy Pelosi's job is to not give her that stuff. Is to not do that. Nancy Pelosi, when asked about this, could have very easily said, you know, we disagreed on this one. They had their views. They didn't persuade enough people to go along with them. So they didn't have the vote. So we had to move in another direction. But I respect them and I respect their views. That's it. And you have the disagreement. And some people would have still been annoyed with her. But I don't think she would have gotten all this shit.

And she shouldn't have gotten all, you know, and she wouldn't have deserved to get all this shit. Like, we are in a environment right now where every word, every one of these Democrats, whether you're running for president, whether you're in Congress, everything they say could, like, screw up another fucking news cycle on the way until, from now until 2020. Like, we have to exhibit some message discipline as a party from now until the election because every fucking day counts. And Nancy Pelosi is just too smart to, you know, let herself slip like that.

I do think it's a weird pattern of her being dismissive of these new members. Yeah, that's it. And it would be much smarter of her to recognize the fact that she's got some rock stars in this caucus and bring them into leadership, bring them into the tent, try to find a better way to work with them and harness the tools that they built. Like, don't mock getting retweets. It's a primary way that we communicate. The president of the United States communicates primarily through social media.

So we should do that. Well, and I think what's important to realize here is Pelosi was the one who screwed up by making it personal in that column. And the person who handled it in a much more adult way was AOC in her responses, because she made it about the fight and the substance, and she did not take a personal shot at Nancy Pelosi in response, which I think says a lot about her. It also wasn't the only weird thing in the column.

The term self-impeachment, that was well considered. And then... I know Brian Boiler was, it drove him completely nuts. Yeah. Well, you know, David Enns and why. Impeachment. And then the response to the Eugene Carroll rape allegation against the president. I just thought it was an odd, tonally off way to deal with the fact the president of the United States was accused of rape.

That's not a thing we blow past. There's a fact, which is we Democrats do not have the power to impeach and convict the president. We do not have the power to force better standards at these facilities right now. We control the House. We do not control the Senate. We do not control the presidency. That is a fact, right? And so the question is, when you know that you don't have the power to do these things, what does the fight look like and how hard should you fight? And my argument on impeachment

has been it's more of a media play and a message war play than it is about, you know, doing the morally right thing or convicting him, right? It's about grabbing the megaphone away from Donald Trump. And similarly, I think if they had fought over this border bill, it's not about will they get the bill that they want. It's about Democrats who voted, who put these people in power saying, you know what, they fought really hard. They lost the fight because McConnell and Trump are still there. but these people are fighting for me and they are fighting for this country. And I feel pretty good about that. And, you know, it doesn't matter as much as having power, but it matters because that might be how you get power. And it's also, I think going back to the

E. Jean Carroll point too, I think what some of the new members have been pushing against is a kind of learned helplessness. There's choosing your battles, and then it's deciding that, well, you know, because he'll get away with this, best not to fight. But of course, because you're not fighting, you make it easier to get away with it. You guarantee it. You guarantee it. You guarantee it. It's frustrating.

It's frustrating. And none of these are easy questions, because ultimately, you know, you can't fight every fight all the way to the end. And you, you know, Donald Trump has been accused of a serious. I mean, look at what we're talking about at once. We were talking about the president of the United States being accused of a rape and we were talking about human rights abuses against children at the border of our country. country and we need to fight on all fronts. But, and it's, and it's hard and it's hard and it's hard to know where you'll, where you'll strike a blow and win and where you'll have wasted time that you could have used to fight on some other, on some other front. These are incredibly difficult questions at a time in which what we have is one branch of the, one half of one branch of the government. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's what we said with impeachment. You either believe that we are in a national emergency

and you act like it, or you don't say things like that. Yeah. All right, let's talk about 2020. According to a new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News, President Trump is currently receiving the highest approval ratings of his entire presidency. Among registered voters, 47 percent say they approve of Trump, while 50 percent disapprove. In April, his approval was at 42 percent, with a disapproval of 54 percent. Again, this is registered voters.

Trump is basically running even when matched up against Warren, Harris, Sanders, and Buttigieg while he trails Joe Biden 53 to 43. Biden's lead over Trump is due to a seven-point edge among independents while the other Democrats are even or trailing with this group. He also has a 28-point edge with moderates and the other Democrats have a much smaller advantage among moderates. The poll was taken in the days following the first two Democratic primary debates. So with all the usual polling caveats in place, snapshot in time, just one poll, blah, blah, blah, how alarmed are you by these numbers? Tommy, you want to start? I'm alarmed. I'm alarmed every day because i think that we all just need to

realize that despite the news cycle the latest poll or what's going to happen that most presidents are re-elected and there's actually a lot of structural advantages for donald trump that we don't talk about every day like fundraising right he just raised what 105 million dollars yeah so regardless of what this poll says regardless of what a poll says in two months uh after he had a bad news cycle, we have to realize that we have to get our shit together as a party. We have to have a nominee that's not too banged up

that comes out strong, and that we have to work twice as hard as we did in 2016 if we want to beat him. There's no guarantee. We think he's the worst president in the world. Half the country doesn't. It's a fight for the middle. It's a fight for turnout. I don't know. That's going to be a rinse repeat for me. It's a fight for the middle. It's a fight for turnout. I don't know. That's going to be a rinse repeat for me. Yeah, it's one poll and it's terrifying.

It's a terrifying poll. It's a poll that says Donald Trump is very much in sight of being reelected president despite how much energy we have, despite how terrible a president he is, that he can be reelected and we should be terrified of that. And one thing I would look at this poll and think about is what has the news been like? What have we been talking about? What have our debates been over the last several weeks and months that would lead for him to see an uptick in his approval? Right. And to me, what I see is a kind of twilight, endless conversation amongst Democrats about whether or not to impeach him, this kind of semi-process, semi-impeach situation in which we're not talking about health care very much. We're not talking about policy very much. We're talking about Trump and we're talking about whether or not it's the right thing to do to impeach Donald Trump. And when I look at that,

I think we got to find a way out of this kind of a conversation. And I think that now there's a debate, I think, to be had as to whether or not it's through impeachment or just putting impeachment aside. My argument would be we've got to do the impeachment thing or this will be hanging over us till the end of the election. And we have to make our case and put it out there because what the kind of stalemate we're in right now is one in which we're not talking about anything at all I slightly disagree only because that this poll was in the field immediately following the Democratic debate so what we were talking about we actually haven't been talking about impeachment a couple weeks now well we've been really what we were talking about when that this poll was in the

field was what happened in democratic debate the positions the Democrats took like that was all news we saw this we saw this in 2016 we saw this in 2018 when the news cycle is about donald trump and donald trump being awful and donald trump doing something awful he actually does do a little worse when it's about the democratic party democratic infighting his opponent whether it was about hillary clinton then he tends to do a little better if he recedes into the background a little bit he tends to do a little better. If he recedes into the background a little bit, he tends to do a little bit better. In this poll, an interesting— When people are just left with the daily experience where, how bad could he be?

My life is pretty normal. Well, and so that's a key stat in this poll. 65% say that Trump has acted unpresidential, unfit for office, all that kind of stuff. But majority gives him credit for the economy. So the question is, if you have a bunch of people who are like, yeah, we're used to his awful behavior, we feel like the economy is okay, then what are you left with? I mean, the other thing I think we really have to dig into in this poll is Joe Biden leading by 10 points among registered voters when

matched up against Donald Trump. And both of them have very high name ID. So it's you know, that's that's a pretty that's a number you can really take to the bank or at least one that's real because it's been repeated in multiple polls over time now. And you can look at the other candidates and for sure on some you can say, OK, their name ID is a little lower than Joe Biden. So give him more time to get known. And that number could close. Bernie Sanders, you can't say as much because his name ID is nearly universally known, but he trails Biden in that matchup. And so then the question is, who are these people out there who, when it's Joe Biden, say they're going to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat,

when it's not, say they're going to vote for Donald Trump or say that they're undecided. That's not to say it's it's you know, these people have a certain ideology that it's they're more moderate, that they're more this and that. We don't know any of this yet. But there's something there's something about that that should at least give us pause and make us think. I do think, though, that Joe Biden has more than just name ID. And if he and Bernie had 100 percent name ID, he still has been able to tell a story about himself for the past eight years. It is far bigger than it is about his values and vision and an association with Barack Obama that is going to be hard to wear off. Whoever we nominate is going to get the shit kicked out of them by the Republicans and the RNC, and they'll try to define them as the worst thing they can think of. But that person will also have a convention and TV ads and more debates

and a chance to tell a story about him or herself that hopefully will counteract the kind of thing you're talking about. It is undeniable that as of today, before any votes have been cast or caucus goers caucused, that Biden has an advantage. Yeah, and I would just say there is a consensus among opinion havers on Twitter and some on the left that Democrats do not need to win moderate voters, go after moderate voters, go after independent voters. Independent is tough because you could be independent for reasons that aren't ideological.

But that we don't need those voters at all. We need to do is there's a whole bunch of voters, 4 million Obama voters who stayed home in 2016, and they're younger, and they're more likely to be people of color, and they're more likely to have more liberal values and if we just you know are progressive enough we can bring all these non-voters in and we can win that way and we don't know that that's definitely true like we've been saying it's not either or it's both and you have a democratic nominee has to be able to appeal to moderate voters to independent voters to swing voters and they have to be able to excite the base of the Democratic Party at the same time.

You have to be able to do both. And I think to completely dismiss this idea that we don't have to worry about folks in the middle at all is just, it flies in the face of a whole bunch of evidence. Yeah, and I would also say, put aside candidates that you want. Right, exactly. Put aside candidates you want. Just think about the argument. Use this as a way to come to kind of to think about what argument is playing out for a lot of people. All right, we're going to debate if you just should get new voters versus

independent voters or moderate voters, suburban voters, whatever you want to call them. Let's think about what it means that there are these people out there that are willing to vote for Trump, but who might be more likely right now based on being asked to vote for Biden, whether it lasts, whether or not. And to me, what I hear when I think that is that Biden is safe. You know what you get with Joe Biden, right? You get a kind of, you get something you're quite comfortable with, familiar with the years that we had before Donald Trump was president. I've said this before, but I always think it's worth coming back. Like we talk about, you're listening to this. You are, you are in the fight. You know why Donald Trump is unfit. You are fully aware every day of the machinations and malevolence and incompetence

and chaos and cruelty and racism of his administration. But there's an implicit promise Donald Trump is offering to a lot of people who aren't paying attention as closely, which is, yeah, I'm a dick and I'm'm a liar, and I'm kind of racist, and I say some shit you hate, some stuff that makes you uncomfortable, maybe some stuff you secretly agree with but you know is maybe not totally on the level, but how bad am I really? How bad could things be when the economy's doing fine, you have a job, your community looks the same, I'm not chaos, I'm not crazy, everything is fine. Or, I am pretty bad, but what do you care?

Yeah, what do you, but like... It's not hurting your life. It's not hurting you. All right? And, you know, all this crazy talk about how evil I am, corrupt I am, Russia, all the rest. It's all a big show for the cameras. It's all a big DC thing that doesn't really affect you. Think about your day-to-day experience. How bad am I really?

Do you really want to mess with what's going on? With the economy doing well? You really want to fuck things up? I don't think so. Don't take a chance on these crazy people. Yeah. Don't listen to them when they say how terrible I am. It's all a big show. I'm fine. You're fine. Stay with what's working. There's two and there's two ways to handle that. One is to have a greater focus on just how bad and dangerous and unstable Donald Trump is and what he might do if he is elected another four years,

which is another argument for, you know, having a bunch of impeachment hearings that focus on his crimes and misdeeds. It's also a focus on just, you know, every time a foreign policy disaster happens, I think to myself, that's an opportunity for people to say, Donald Trump's elected for another four years, really awful things could happen. So there's upping the stakes in the election. And then there's doing what Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are doing, which is make a larger structural argument about, yeah, maybe the economy's fine on the surface, the numbers, but below that, people are having a really hard time in this country. And the news is not paying attention to all the people who are really struggling. And I think that doing both of those things is really important for Democrats.

I do think the third piece of that too, though, is a policy argument, I think probably around healthcare, some other issues that say, look at what he's going to do if he wins re-election. If you give him the mandate, he's going to come for your healthcare. He's going to continue to tilt the tax code against you.

He's going to fuck with the things that you rely on in your day-to-day life. I think that has to be a big part of this because I think that works for both the kind of people who don't want to rock the boat, who are afraid of losing their health care and are afraid of Donald Trump's policies on health care. And for those who are part of the Democratic base. All right. Let's talk about some of these candidates. Joe Biden spent his Fourth of July trying to right the ship after a tough debate in a speech in South Carolina this weekend. Biden apologized for fondly recalling his work with segregationist senators. Quote, was I wrong a few weeks ago to

somehow give the impression to people that I was praising those men who I successfully opposed time and again? Yes, I was. I regret it. I'm sorry for any of the pain and misconception I may have caused anybody. Biden also said, quote, I'm not the same person I was as a 29-year-old elected to the Senate. America has changed and I have too. And then pre-butted other potential attacks on his past votes for the Iraq war, the bankruptcy bill and the crime bill. Tommy, what do you think Biden was trying to do here? And do you think it was effective? The speech was interesting.

I mean, I think like on its face, he was trying to set the record straight in his opinion about his record on civil rights and race. And I don't I can't judge from here whether it worked or not. We'll see. But I think what was odd about the speech is he goes on to try to defend a bunch of other policies that he was criticized for. For example, he talked about his Iraq war vote again and said, yeah, I voted for the Iraq war, but then Obama told me to be the guy to manage the process to wind it down. And I thought that it was strange to hear these other unrelated issues in the speech. And then I still don't think that Iraq answer is particularly effective. I think the challenge for Biden is that what hurt him in that moment was not necessarily a debate about busing policy or a

debate about race. It was that he looked like he got his clock cleaned on the debate stage. And I think that's why you've seen Kamala Harris jump up in the polls is because she looked poised and smart and effective and like a prosecutor that could take down Donald Trump. Right. So like a lot of this is performance art as much as we all wish it were not. We will see if Biden's numbers with African-American voters continue to go down or go down at all. I don't know yet. But, you know, I think, look, big picture, I'm glad he seems to have internalized the criticism and knows that it wasn't just bad faith political attacks, that there were some people who over many years have been genuinely hurt by a weird relationship with Strom Thurmond or conversations about segregationists about as if they were just

kind of okay guys you had to work with that that bothered a lot of people and that night wasn't the first time we had heard this having worked with Biden yeah and look and I totally agree with that and it showed me that he has a team around him that knows what the right message is that knows when you should apologize that knows what you should say and what you shouldn't say, and that this is about him internalizing it. Because if he had said some of these things on the debate stage, he would not have had the couple of weeks that he had. And I, again, knowing his team, knowing people like Ron Klain and Anita Dunn who prepped him, I am sure they had a lot of these exact lines from the speech in debate prep ready to go. And he couldn't execute.

And there's been sort of a slowness from the Biden campaign in general to sort of like correct these things as they go wrong. And you have to be unbelievably nimble and quick in this environment, especially when we get to a general election against Donald Trump. You have to be able, it's not just about performance. It's about like reacting on stage in a debate or having your team be able to put out a response to some controversy within, you know, a couple minutes and not having it go through a committee of 50 people and all that bullshit. Like you have to be fast. Yeah.

It's, um, I think, I think that what to me happened over the weekend is Joe Biden entered the primary. But, you know, there was a quality of a little bit like, you know, he's got these he's got his he's got this great team about him. But he's like, you know, he's sitting on the couch and he's eating Cheetos and he got to train. This is going to be like a pretty big fight. All right. We got to like lace up and like put the gloves on and do some sparring and get ready for the fight. He's like, I'm fine. Like I've been doing this a really long time. And these guys can't they're going to land a punch on me. I'm good. I'm Joe Biden. I'm going to be fine.

He moves over to the pork rinds, relaxes, puts on a little bit of weight, puts the gloves on, goes out for the debate, gets ready to throw some punches, thinks it's going to be a great time. And just by the end of it, it's just fucking crawling off the debate stage, bloodied and battered, gets down to South Carolina and can barely get on his feet.

So I think what we have now is somebody who's like, okay, this is a real fight. I got to train. I got to get up. I got to say the things I'm supposed to say. I take this seriously. I'm not going to be handed this thing. It's going to be, it's going to require genuine learning

and being live and not just trying to kind of eke out a victory here, but actually do the work and try to win. Yeah, he's basically got a two-pronged strategy here now, which is one, he wants to make every debate about the future because he doesn't want to talk about all the past weird stuff. And if people do want to talk about the past, he had a line in the speech, it's as if my opponents want you to believe I served from 1972 until 2008

and then took a hiatus for the next eight years. They don't want to talk about my time as Vice President of the United States. And then he said of Obama, quote, he selected me. I'll take his judgment about my record, my character, my ability to handle the job over anyone else's, which is a pretty powerful line and one that I imagine a lot of people who, you know, Barack Obama has a 96% approval rating among Democrats will think to themselves, yeah, Obama did pick him. It's certainly less complicated than understanding de jure versus local bus.

Like it is high level and can be used rinse repeat. We'll see if he'll be able to shield himself from other attacks with it. But I thought in the speech it was an effective line. Now, there's also we should point out that it's not a guarantee that even in a debate about the future, he can avoid stepping in he was asked about would you consider appointing Merrick Garland again as a Supreme Court Justice and he said

sure I'd consider it the headlines made it to be like he proposed Merrick Garland but he did say sure I'd consider it and you have to think to yourself okay in the political environment where the next Democratic President comes around is he going to appoint a 66 year old moderate merrick garland no if if she or he has a supreme court appointment no you say i'm gonna put aoc through law school and get that 31 year old on the fucking court doesn't even have to be

good go through law school yeah we don't need law school. As Dan Pfeiffer said, yeah, you run the Harvard Law 10K, see who wins and name that person. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, Joe Biden has to do what every candidate does when they want to kind of make a moment for themselves, attack Beto O'Rourke. Well, it's funny, but next debate, but like the lesson that these candidates learn from the first debate,

and more so than the Beto Castro thing, the Kamala Biden thing is just go after someone. Yeah. No, it's you got to walk into that. And that's a moment. I don't know is the it's a good short term incentive in the primary. It worries me longer term about the party mixing it up. I wonder. But it's funny. It is an interesting question, right? Because Biden can't go on the stage now and be like, hey, Kamala Harris, I'm back, you know, and I've learned some new moves. Jerk store call.

But he's got to go after somebody. And, you know, it just depends on that draw, you know? Who could it be? Maybe it'll be Dom Steyer. Well, it's good that CNN's holding a live drawing, like it's the fucking draft in July for the next two debates. They're going to do a live drawing. I did not know that. That's ridiculous.

It's classic. It's transparent. Yeah. So finally, the New York Times published a piece on Sunday about how Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have challenged the frontrunner status of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders

and about how Harris and Warren's campaigns are viewing each other. I thought that was the interesting part of this piece. It notes that Warren's camp wonders whether Harris can, quote, sustain the energy she has generated with set-piece piece moments like her takedown of Mr. Biden and Harris's advisers are, quote, convinced that Ms. Warren will ultimately suffer for her fixation on her policy agenda and relative lack of interest in going after Mr.

Trump directly. And it also says, well, they have distinct political bases. Ms. Warren and Ms. Harris are both relying on the support of women and educated liberals to propel their candidacies. That strategy also means they are dividing up powerful constituencies that could, in theory, make one of them a dominant figure. One's messy, one's neat. Terrible. But yet, as roommates, they make it work. They complement each other. What do you make of the assessments of each camp of the other camp?

I mean, eye-rolling spin. Like, whatever gets you through the call with Jonathan Martin or whoever wrote the piece. Here's what I'd say. I'd say our strengths are our strengths, and her strengths are her weaknesses. Yeah, exactly. That's so weird. I mean, look, here's some relevant data that we do know. Warren just raised $19 million this quarter, which is pretty astounding given the limitations she's put on herself in terms of fundraising. Kamala Harris raised 12. We'll see if that number gets a continued boost from the afterglow of the debates. Look, I don't know. We don't know anything yet. I mean, they're shadowboxing each other. I do think that Warren has really built an amazing operation in Iowa and is invested fully in the state early on. Kamala

seems to be piling in a little bit later, knowing that you will need to do well there probably to keep going in the process. So I wonder if that wouldn't give Warren a bit of a political advantage, but we'll see. I think there is some truth to the assessments of the other campaign, just from what I've seen before I read that, which is that, just from what I've seen before I read that, which is that, again, Kamala Harris has done particularly well during these set-piece moments. Her announcement every time she's in Congress questioning someone at a debate,

and we have said many times here that what has been missing is more of a cogent rationale for a candidacy that wraps it all up, which is something that Elizabeth Warren has in spades. And on the Warren front, I do think fixation on a policy agenda is ridiculous. It's like, oh, no, she just cares about her policies and plans too much. That's going to really trip her up. But I do think the reluctance to go directly after Trump.

You know, Warren had this moment, I think in 2017, where she was, and sort of during the Clinton campaign, the 2016 race, where she was going toe-to-toe with Trump all the time and sort of sucked into the vortex. And I don't think that worked for her very well.

She may have now overcorrected to the point where, I mean, we all had this reaction watching the debate with Kamala and Biden. It wasn't necessarily the substance of what Kamala was taking on. It was, oh, I'm watching Kamala Harris on stage and I could see her go after Trump like that because she's not afraid to mix it up and she's a fighter and stuff like that. And Warren, her message and the way she is could be a message for 2016, for 2012, like it's this larger structural debate about the economy, but you might have to bring

Trump into it a little bit, I think, to sort of round it out and to show people I can go after this asshole and I can do this. That's exactly right. You know, the background, the quotes directed at each other gives each of them a set of marching orders to try to flesh out their candidacy.

Elizabeth Warren, people, they know they trust her on policy, right? They know she's really smart. They want to know if she can win. Yeah. And that's going to take set-piece moments where you pick fights, throw punches in the debate, what have you, that shows that she's tough, she'll fight, and she can win the fight. Well, look, a good, healthy primary makes the ultimate nominee better

because that nominee sees the other strengths of the other candidates and starts, you know, improving. I mean, so it could work, you know. Well, I guess as Warren is seeing a bunch of data in early states that says voters want to hear what you're going to do for them. They don't want to hear about Trump all the time. They're sick of that. And so I think that her strategy is smart and right. And I don't think she needs to focus on Trump necessarily. And I still think you can conduct that kind of strategy while mixing it up at debates with your opponents and looking tough, because we all think

Kamala Harris could kick Trump's ass now because she was really tough on Biden. Right. She turned Biden into an avatar for Trump. Warren can do that on the debate stage. She can do that in another fight. She can do that with a banker at a congressional committee. Yeah, right. Doesn't have to be Trump. Doesn't have to be Trump, but that's what we learn from that Kamala fight. Yeah. Okay, when we come back, we will have Tommy's interview with Warren Binford.

On the line is Warren Binford. She's a law professor from Wilmette University and the director of the school's clinical law program. She was among the attorneys who recently inspected the detention center in Clint, Texas that you've been hearing a lot about. Professor Binford, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you so much for having me. So as I sensed in the intro, you were with a group of attorneys, you inspected the facility

in Clint, Texas to make sure it was compliant with the Flores settlement. For those who haven't read the reporting based on what you found, can you share what you saw and a little bit about the Flores settlement and what you saw was in compliance with the law? Well, basically what we saw is that there were literally hundreds of children who were being kept in inhumane conditions for an extended period of time at a Border Patrol facility outside of El Paso, Texas. These children ranged in age from just a few months old to 18 years of age. And what was shocking about this was that we had no idea that this facility was even holding children, let alone so many children and for such a long period of time, and that so many of the children who were there were so young.

This facility was a fairly new facility. It's a smaller facility that's only intended for 104 adult males. And basically, our first day there, they told us that they had recently expanded the facility and now had capacity for 600. But it wasn't really clear to us where they would be keeping that many children or adults. be keeping that many children or adults. And they handed us a roster that showed that there were 351 children then on site as of that day. We later found out that they had as many as 700 children on that site. And basically, we asked for a tour of the facility. They refused to give it to us. And so we asked them to start bringing to us the youngest children. We saw that there were a number of child mothers who were also on the roster,

and so we asked them to bring the child mothers and their infants, and then we also asked them to bring us the children who had been at this facility the longest, and when they walked in the conference room about 20 minutes later, our breath was taken away. These children were filthy dirty. They were extremely just traumatized by what they had been experiencing. They were very hungry. They were sleep deprived. We had never seen anything like it. We've been to a number of facilities around the country. A number of people from our group have been to many Border Patrol facilities. We've also been to the Walmart and the Tenth City and such.

And so we've seen a lot, but this particular group of children was so concerning that we actually went to the press for the first time in over 20 years of doing these visits. You asked me about the Flores settlement, and basically what happened under Flores is that in the 1980s, there were these two attorneys, Alice Boussier from the Youth Law Center, who was a mentor of mine, and also Carlos Holquin from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, who found out that at the time, the INS, which is the precursor to ICE, was keeping children in places where they were basically holding them as bait and trying to get the parents to come and claim their children so that they then could arrest both the parents and the children and deport them, the entire family.

And the children who were in these facilities were basically being locked up behind razor wire. Girls were being subject to both body searches and vaginal searches. They were not being given sufficient amounts of food. They were not being given access to education. access to education. They also were being housed, you know, in old dilapidated hotels and such with unrelated adults. And so based upon what Carlos and Alice found, they brought a class action suit on behalf of the children who were in government custody. That suit was active for the next 10 years approximately. It went up and down again.

Sometimes the courts would side with the children. Sometimes they would side with the government until finally in the late 1990s, the government and the florist attorneys on behalf of the children came together and said, okay, let's agree that we will feed the children in our care, that we will provide them with the appropriate levels of care and custody, that children should be provided, and this was interpreted as feeding them, providing them with education, providing them with toothbrushes and toothpaste. These are some of the details that have come out over time, that the children should be given access to soap. There's nothing really shocking about what the government has promised to do.

What's really shocking is that here we are 20 years later after that Florida settlement, and the current administration is saying things such as that we're not convinced that we have an obligation to provide children with soap. And as a result of those policies, we've had at least six children die in the last few months of Border Patrol custody. And children who are in Border Patrol custody have died. And a lot of those deaths appear to be related to the poor hygiene and conditions that these children are being subjected to. They're dying from deaths that you would expect to see in a developing country, not among children who are in a government facility in the United States of America. Yeah. I mean, under the terms of the Flores settlement, I mean, they should be, these kids should be held in places that are safe and

sanitary. They're supposed to be moved into different longer term custody for after a short period of time. I mean, it sounds like what you witnessed was illegal. But yeah, is that accurate? I mean, are they breaking the law? Oh, yeah. Oh, they are breaking so many laws. And I think that this is one of my greatest frustrations with what I've witnessed is that, you know, we currently have an administration who all the time is talking about, we're just trying to enforce the law, and we just want everybody to follow the law. And yet, you know, in what I've witnessed, they're breaking the law more than anybody I know. And you have to remember that first and foremost, that the studies that have been done of this population of children

suggest that somewhere approximately 70% or higher, the children have valid legal claims to asylum in the United States of America. And so when you have a credible fear of persecution in your home country, you are legally allowed to enter into another country without documentation for the purpose of claiming asylum. And that's what the overwhelming majority of children here are trying to do. And so they are here lawfully, many of them. And so to suggest that they're breaking the law and that because they're breaking the law, that there's a lot to be abused and neglected and that the government is allowed to flout laws and break those laws and its care and custody of the children, you know, is quite

absurd. There's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy to the point of it, you know, being lethal for these children, that children are literally dying because this administration is breaking the law. And I want to push back on something that you said, where you talked about the children are supposed to be moved into longer-term care facilities. They are actually not. They are supposed to be placed with their families in the United States. That's right. Yeah, the way that Flores is set up, the children are supposed to be placed with the parents in the United States. If the parents aren't in the United States, then they're supposed to be placed with another family member in the United States.

If there's no other family member living in the United States, the child is supposed to be placed with another adult authorized by the parents, not by the government, but by the parents to care for that child. And only if there's no parent, other family member, or other adult living in the United States who can care for the child, only then is the child supposed to be moved into a long-term care placement, and that's supposed to be in the least restrictive environment possible, which in American child welfare speak means foster care. So 89% of the children currently in custody don't need to be put into long-term care, you know, such as foster care. They can go to one of these other three categories that the government's supposed to place them in, which is, you know, with their family or their potential guardians. And the fact is that the current government appears to be holding thousands of children hostage on a regular basis in order to achieve certain political objectives.

Yeah, that's an important correction. I just meant that they're supposed to be moved out of these god-awful temporary facilities as quickly as possible. Question for you. That's right. Yeah. In 72 hours maximum. Right. So a bunch of members of Congress just went down to visit some different facilities in the region,

including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and they said that they were treated incredibly disrespectfully by officials on site. There was jeering. It seemed like they were mocking both the people being held there and members of Congress seeking access. How was your group treated? And what was your sense of the individuals who are working in these facilities, who are seeing the things you are seeing on a daily basis, seeing things that reasonably, that horrified you and seemingly any other reasonable person, but this is their workplace.

What is the staff's response? Yeah, so it's mixed. I tend to have a positive view of people overall, that I do believe in the inherent goodness of people. I do think that sometimes good people can do bad things, and I also think that there are bad actors, and there is no doubt in my mind that in this facility, as well as every other facility where I have conducted, you know, a site visit, that there are bad actors, but I'm deeply concerned about several of the bad actors at this facility. You know, that being said, we were blocked access

to the facility. You know, we were not given a tour, and they have given a lot of tours since then, including to pastors who have nothing to do with Flores and, you know, nothing to do with our team and nothing to do with Congress, and they seem to have been placed there by Fox News. It's the only connection I can find. But in any event, you know, so they would not give us a tour of the facility, and we later found out why, and I'll tell you about that in a moment. They also would not give us access to the significant number of children who were being held in isolation at this facility. We repeatedly asked to meet with certain children and were told that they weren't available to meet with us, either they've been transferred out or that

they were in isolation and they would not give us access. Also, there were several children that we were deeply concerned about that were severely neglected at this facility. And as we tried to do follow-up visits with these children to make sure that they were being given the care that they needed, we were told that those children were no longer available to meet with because they had been transferred, which hopefully they were transferred to a different place. But there comes a point when you start to worry about what's really going on.

You know, it sometimes happens that when we try and meet with children, they're no longer there the next day or, you know, whatever. You know, they're supposed to be transferring the kids to ORR facilities. You know, they're supposed to be transferring the kids to ORR facilities. But there were so many children that we asked for who were on the roster that we were provided at 8 a.m. who were not available to meet with us at 9 a.m. or 9.30 a.m. that it seemed pretty suspicious. You know, at the same time that the process raised lots of questions, same time that the process raised lots of questions. I do try and talk to employees in the hallways, and I try and talk to them, you know, starting our day and leaving at the end of the day, and I try and give people the benefit of it out. And in those conversations, I'll share with

you that they expressed deep concern about the children being there, that they did not think that children belonged there, that they expressly told me that they were children being there, that they did not think that the children belonged there, that they expressly told me that they were on our side, that they wanted us to be successful, that they wanted the children transferred out of these facilities. You've got to remember that these facilities literally have cells. The roster that we were given on Thursday included the children's cell assignments, and that's how they're referred to. They are referred to as being in cell 304. Children were literally being warehoused, and this is what I told you that I'd get back to.

You know, we asked the, although the agent in charge would not give us a tour of the facility, we did talk to some of the Border Patrol agents, and they did confirm, and other employees, and they did confirm that there were children being kept in a warehouse there. And it was only, we discovered that warehouse only ourselves after hours on Monday when we were trying to figure out where they were keeping these hundreds of children because they clearly weren't keeping them in the main building. That building only had capacity for about 100 detainees. And when we drove around the outside of the facility, we saw this metal warehouse that was just flimsy and cheap and didn't really have any windows or anything. And we couldn't find any other place that they possibly could be keeping the children.

And we then drove around a side road, and we saw that there was a line of porta-potties next to this warehouse. And it all of a sudden dawned on us that, my God, they are warehousing children. The United States government is literally warehousing children. And if that's the only expansion that they had referred to that morning, then that meant that they had to be keeping hundreds of kids in that warehouse. And in fact, we talked to a child later on who said that there were currently 100 children there, but that when he first arrived, there were 300 children in that warehouse. And we talked to some of the agents the next day, and they confirmed that there were children being kept in that warehouse. And although it was initially denied, when we met the media, it's since been confirmed that, you know, there have been hundreds of children who have been kept in a windowless warehouse in

the middle of the Texas desert. Oh, my God. I mean, so if we had a normal president, he or she would hear your story, read about these conditions, presumably be just offended and mortified on a human level and then take action because of fear of potential political fallout. But that feedback loop seems to be broken in this White House because they view cruelty as part of their policy objective. So for people listening, I mean, what tools are available to us as citizens to push for changes, knowing that this administration so far has refused to listen? Well, you have to remember that this administration hasn't always refused to listen. What gives me hope is that when the American public found out about the separated child policy last spring, that they literally marched in the streets, that they contacted the White House, they contacted their members of Congress, that they, you know, met outside these facilities, that the people, the contractors who were being hired to do this work, such as the Baptist Child and Family Services, which was running the Torneo Tenth City, they refused to renew the contract when they found out that their services were being used to, you know, to carry out a policy that was immoral and hurtful.

And I think that all of those things are available to us now, that when the public responded so passionately and so resolutely and said, no, we are not tearing babies from their parents' arms, that the president for the first and only time that I can recall during his presidency, went to the public and announced that he was going to end the child separation policy. And I do think that we have the ability to persuade him that these policies are a mistake and that we need to change them. But I think that we have to be resolute in standing up for these children, and not just for these children, but, you know, if you want to look at it from a self-interested way, standing up for our own humanity as a nation. Any country that is willing to tolerate what is essentially the abuse, the neglect, the torture of innocent children cannot survive. You have lost your spiritual integrity at that point, and we will fall as a nation unless we reject these practices, you know, through how we vote,

through, you know, the assemblies that we undertake, the speech that we speak out. I mean, I think that every person in this country should be trying to amplify these children's voices. We have dozens of declarations from these kids publicly available that people can quote from. There should be artwork. People should be renting billboards and putting these children's quotes about being hit by guards, being grabbed by guards, having, you know, being, you know, they had to put a diaper on a six-year-old. An older brother had to put a diaper on a six-year-old, an older brother had to put a diaper on a six-year-old brother because they won't let the children go to the bathroom at night. You know, I think that people should be looking at the declarations and creating plays about them, you know, theatrical performances that, you know, celebrities should be reading

from these declarations and going on social media, reading what these kids describe as the way that they're being treated. They're not being fed adequately. They're being sleep deprived. They're being made to sleep on concrete floors, cement blocks. They're sometimes sleeping six kids to a mat. I mean, it's just absolutely insane, the Lord of the Flies scenario that's being created. So I think the public needs to organize and I think they need to speak out, and I think they need to put a lot of pressure on both Congress and the White House to end these practices. Thank you so much for the work you're doing to support these kids, to bring these stories to light and for talking to me today. It is truly one of the worst things I have ever read about or heard about in all the Trump era.

But thank you for everything you're doing. Well, thank you for letting me tell the American public what's happening to these children. Well, I hope we'll check back in when there's better news about progress that's been made. I hope so, too. You take care. Thanks to Warren Binford for joining us today. And we will talk to you later this week. Bye. Bye. Thank you.