The Daily Signal - Calls for Sotomayor to Step Down, March Job Numbers, Total Solar Eclipse | April 5

Starting point is 00:00:01 I'm Virginia Allen, and this is the Daily Signal Top News for Friday, April 5th. Here are today's headlines. Calls for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down are increasing. The justice will turn 70 in June. She's one of the courts' three liberal justices, along with justices Elena Kagan and Katanji Brown Jackson. Some Democrats have begun calling for her to resign while a Democrat president is still in office and Democrats control the Senate. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal

Starting point is 00:00:48 told NBC this week that he has great admiration for Justice Sotomayor, but added, I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson, and it's not like

Starting point is 00:01:02 there's any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying, Graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included. The lesson that Blumenthal appears to be referring to here is the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg ignored calls to step down and passed away in 2020 when then President Donald Trump appointed the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett to take her place.

Starting point is 00:01:32 The public is not aware of any major health issues that Sotomayor may be having, but the Washington examiner did report in February that Sotomayor was accompanied by a medic during a February 2018 trip that she made to South Florida, and that's according to her records obtained by the liberal court watchdog, fix the court. At least for now, there are no indicators that Sotomayor plans to step down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported big job gains in the month of March. The U.S. economy added 71,000 jobs in March. That's an all-time record high. But Heritage Foundation economist E.J. and Tony says that there are some important facts that Americans should know about these numbers. E.J. joins us now. E.J., thanks for being here. Virginia, thank you for having me.

Starting point is 00:02:23 You posted a very interesting graphic on X this morning, and you wrote with that graphic that in the last year, 651,000 Native-Born Americans have lost jobs, while 1.3 million foreign-born workers have gained jobs. Explain this. What do we know about what's going on here? Well, one of the things that's really troubling with these jobs numbers, we keep here a month after month, how we're setting all these records and how we're adding all these jobs. Who's actually getting the jobs? It's not Native-born Americans. And so that's troubling for a couple of reasons, one of which is the fact that those foreign-born workers, there's an unknown percentage of those who are actually illegal aliens. And we can only surmise that with the combination of the huge flood of illegal aliens coming across the border and the massive jump in this particular statistic, that there has to be an increasing

Starting point is 00:03:20 number of illegal aliens who are working in the United States. And unfortunately, that's displacing certain American workers. We saw this, for example, with Tyson Foods, where they They were literally firing Americans so that they could hire foreigners. But that's just a recent development. This is a trend if we look at the data that goes back for four whole years. Okay. So in other words, it's not just that there's maybe a downsizing of big tech jobs and that we have an increase in maybe service jobs, but we're seeing that it is Americans are losing similar jobs to the jobs that are being added.

Starting point is 00:03:59 Right. That's exactly right. No, obviously it's not true in all cases, but it is true in a disproportionate number of cases, right? This is not anywhere near the patterns, for example, that we saw before the pandemic. And so, again, you increasingly have Americans out of work, whether they're on disability or on some other kind of government assistance, and they're being replaced by foreign workers, again, an unknown number of whom are illegal aliens. In those job numbers, when we see numbers about the number of Americans that have lost jobs, how is that counting? Does that also account for people that have just retired or is that going a different bucket?

Starting point is 00:04:40 So this is just for this particular group of statistics, this is just the number of people employed. So if you switch from that to being unemployed, it could be for a whole host of different reasons. You could retire, which is true for a lot of Americans today as we have an aging population. you could be fired, you know, a whole host of different ways that you can switch from being employed to no longer being employed. So that is a very large bucket that we're looking at there. And do we know what the root causes of this are? Why are so many Americans getting kicked out of the job market or leaving the job market? It's a great question. It actually looks increasingly like injuries related to either the vaccine or what they call long COVID symptoms.

Starting point is 00:05:24 are playing into the disability roles because there's been an explosion by several million additional people above trend who are now classified as disabled in the workforce and therefore not working. And that's part of the reason why, basically no matter what metric you use, we're about 5 million people missing from the labor force compared to our pre-pandemic trend. And so that is a huge gap, which is really playing havoc with a lot of these numbers, including the unemployment rate, for example, you know, once you add those people back in to not to the category of people no longer working, you don't have an unemployment rate in the 3% range. It's in the 6% or 7% range now. So we've seen a lot of celebration around these March jobs numbers. Is that a correct response? Should we be celebrating these numbers? Well, we should certainly be celebrating in the sense of more work and more production and a broader economy. But as soon as you start getting into the,

Starting point is 00:06:22 details at all, right? You peel back the layers of the onion and it's just get stinkier and stinkier as you go and you want to cry more and more. I mean, essentially what's happening is a smaller and smaller number of people are actually employed. They're just working more and more jobs, right? If we're not making ends meet and we have to go out and get a second job or maybe even a third job, we do a gig on the weekends, whatever the case may be, every time we get another part-time job, it adds to the number of monthly payrolls. That's the monthly jobs number that we keep hearing about. So that's been a huge problem. We are hemorrhaging full-time jobs. We've lost full-time jobs, not just the last month, but over the last year. The only jobs we're adding are these part-time jobs. And again, who has the

Starting point is 00:07:04 jobs? It's not native-born Americans. It's foreign-born workers. And there's only about 15% of the metropolitan areas in the entire country that are actually adding jobs today. The other 85% either aren't adding any or are losing jobs. So this is not by any means broad growth in the labor market. It is becoming increasingly narrow. E.J., I so appreciate the fact that every time we get new jobs numbers out, you're posting about it, you're explaining what it all means on your social media. Tell us how listeners can follow your work. Best place to follow me is going to be on X, and the handle there is at Real E.J. Antony. Great. E.J., thanks for your time. Thank you for having me, Virginia.

Starting point is 00:07:44 The Israeli military says it has fired two officers over the drone strike in Gaza that killed seven aid workers earlier this week. The military said that has reprimanded three others involved with that strike. Israeli's military says that the officers were in serious violation of military procedures when they launched the attack that killed workers with the organization World Central Kitchen. A retired Israeli Defense Force General led that. that investigation into the tragic incident, and the IDF said in a statement summarizing the findings of the report that the incident should not have happened. They said that those who approved the strike were convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives and not WCK employees. The strike on the aid vehicle is a grave mistake stemming from serious failure due to a mistaken

Starting point is 00:08:38 identification, heirs in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the standard operating procedures, according to the IDF. In response to the investigation findings, World Central Kitchen issued a statement of their own, saying the root cause of the unjustified rocket fire on our convoy is the severe lack of food in Gaza. Israel needs to dramatically increase the volume of food and medicine traveling by land. If it is seriously, serious about supporting humanitarian aid. A part of the U.S. that does not usually have earthquakes experienced a 4.8 magnitude quake this morning. CNN reports that the epicenter of that earthquake was just northeast of Lebanon,

Starting point is 00:09:26 New Jersey, which is less than 50 miles west of New York City. People in New York and New Jersey reported feeling shaking, vibrating, and some said that they thought a large truck was driving by their house. Fortunately, no major damage was. reported. Well, mark your calendars for Monday. On April 8th, there is a total solar eclipse. This means that the sun, moon, and Earth will all align. The moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, which will temporary block the sun's light and cast a shadow on the Earth. The visible path of the total eclipse will travel diagonally from Mexico through Texas, Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, before going into Canada.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Depending upon where you live in the U.S., the eclipse will be visible early to mid-afternoon on Monday, and the event is going to be a nice economic boost to vacation rentals. The Hill reports that Airbnbs and other similar short-term rentals are solidly booked in the lead-up to this solar eclipse for those properties that are within view of that eclipse. So if you are planning on viewing the eclipse, maybe you've rented an Airbnb to see it in one of those states, make sure, though, that you have the proper gear in order to see it. You want solar eclipse sunglasses. These are special glasses that can be purchased.

Starting point is 00:10:48 And sunglasses, according to officials, they don't do the trick. They're not powerful enough. So we're going to leave a link in today's show notes for NASA's Total Solar Eclipse safety information guide so you can learn more. But with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for being with us here on the Daily Signal podcast this Friday. We hope you have a great weekend and join us here on the show on Monday morning for our regular interview edition. In the meantime, if you have a moment, make sure that you hit that subscribe button.

Starting point is 00:11:18 And also, if you have a little time over the weekend, leave the Daily Signal of five-star reading and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you like to listen. We're across all platforms. Thanks again for being with us today. Have a great weekend. And we will see you right back here on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because, because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret O'Lehann, and Tyler O'Neill. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.

The Daily Signal - Calls for Sotomayor to Step Down, March Job Numbers, Total Solar Eclipse | April 5

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