The Daily Signal - Pence Compares Trump Policy to Biden’s, Rep. Jim Jordan Subpoenas Citibank, Maui Official Resigns Amid Criticism Over Handling of Wildfires | Aug. 18

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

TOP NEWS | On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down: GOP presidential candidates speak at The Gathering in Atlanta.  Florida becomes the first state to sanction Medicaid providers for covering the attempted-gender transitions of minors. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's office says there may not be support for a special session of Georgia’s legislature.  Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenas Citibank.  The head of Maui’s Emergency Management Agency administrator resigns amid the devastating wildfires that ravaged the island.  Relevant Links Listen to other podcasts from The Daily Signal: https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts/ Get daily conservative news you can trust from our Morning Bell newsletter: DailySignal.com/morningbellsubscription   Listen to more Heritage podcasts: https://www.heritage.org/podcasts Sign up for The Agenda newsletter — the lowdown on top issues conservatives need to know about each week: https://www.heritage.org/agenda Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Virginia Allen, and this is the Daily Signal Top News for Friday, August 18th. Here are today's headlines. An event called The Gathering in Atlanta, Georgia has drawn many GOP presidential candidates. Candidates such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Governor Rhonda Santis, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott are at the event today, speaking to voters from the main stage and sharing how they would lead as president. The Daily Seagull's Tyler O'Neill is at the event and says Pence criticized former President Donald Trump, even calling some of Trump's spending policies similar to those of President Joe Biden's. Pence first faulted Biden for failing to even talk about reforming entitlement programs,

and then he criticized Trump for refusing to address the issue as well. Pence called Trump's policies identical to Joe Biden's. Pence attacked Trump for suggesting that reforming government spending is somebody else's problem. According to Pence, runaway spending is driving inflation. And he pledged that if he becomes president, we're going to get this economy turned around. Senator Scott also discussed Biden's failed economic policies at the event, calling Biden's celebration of Bidenomics an illusion. According to Scott, the average American family has lost $10,000 of, spending power because of Bidonomics. DeSantis said that to the radical left, parents have become

the enemy. De Santa said, whatever parents' rights are, the left thinks parents should yield if there's a conflict between pursuing an agenda and you being a parent. DeSantis also defended the right to religious freedom, saying your right to practice your faith and not just Christians, but also Jews and others, they think that it stops the minute it impinges on their agenda. You can check out the Daily Signal website or today's show notes for Tyler's full coverage of the event. We also have a special bonus episode coming up that just you can watch this podcast feed today into the weekend for an exclusive interview with former Vice President Mike Pence. Tyler got to sit down with him for an interesting conversation regarding. how Pence would lead if given the chance to be president.

But speaking of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has just become the first state to sanction Medicaid providers for covering the attempted gender transitions of minors. The Daily Signal's Mary Margaret Olaihan has been covering this story, and she joins us now. Mary Margaret, thanks for reading with us. Thanks for having me.

So can you explain how this works? What does it mean that Florida is sanctioning Medicaid providers for covering the attempted gender transition of minors. Unpack that. Yeah, so I spoke with Jason Wieda. He's the secretary of the agency for health care administration in Florida. He told me the state is finding five Medicaid health care insurers for violating Florida's new rule from August 2022, banning taxpayer funds from going to transgender treatments like double mastectomies or puberty blockers. Now, Florida Medicaid is not supposed to cover these things, but the agency for health care administration found that actually it did. So it's initiating

legal action against these five Medicaid health plans. That is Sunshine State Health Plan, simply health care plans, Humana Medical Plan, Molina Health Care of Florida, and Children's Medical Services Health Plan. They sent cease and desist letters as well as liquidated damages for the transgender procedures that these plans had covered for providers. Okay, so these letters were sent. What does Florida's Medicaid plan management say in these letters to these providers? What are they directed to do next? What do they have to do? Well, they're informed that the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration is initiating legal action. They have also been issued the cease and desist letters. And so for now, they've been put on warning if you're doing more of these transgender surgeries,

if you're covering them, you will face consequences. And that's also what Weida told me during our interview. He said, given the notice they are on now with the rule being passed last year, and now that we have this audit and the letters and this discipline, any type of violation going forward would be deemed an intentional violation and would be subject to very severe consequences. Okay. So what happens next have any of these providers responded?

Not that we know of. This happened very recently. one thing that's really interesting is one of the letters names a doctor, a surgeon. We don't often get the names of these surgeons, but we do in this letter. Her name is Dr. Sarah Danker, and she is a plastic surgeon in Miami, who is allegedly performing transgender procedures in violation of this rule. I reached out to her for comment, and we did not hear back. The letters, of course, reminds the Medicaid health plans of the rule that went into effect in August 2022,

and they make it very clear that there needs to be no more of this activity or there will be consequences. Well, Mary Margaret, thank you for your reporting on this. We're going to be following this closely. You're welcome. In other news, Fox News is reporting that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's office says there may not be support for a special session of Georgia's legislature. Remember that Georgia state senator Colton Moore is calling for a special session in the state to review the actions of Fannie Willis. Fannie Willis is the Georgia Fulton County District Attorney who indicted former President Donald Trump earlier this week on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Moore wrote on Twitter, I'm not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically target political opponents.

Moore says that if the district attorney is found to be doing some corrupt things, then she should be impeached. But Kemp says that Moore has not produced any evidence that there is support needed to call a special session. And since it appears that Kemp himself is not willing to call the session, that would mean Moore needs three-fifths of both the Georgia House and the Senate to agree, which right now appears unlikely. Ohio Republican Representative Jim Jordan is subpoenaing Citibank. Why? Well, Politico reports that the subpoena is part of an investigation into where. what third-party information was shared with federal law enforcement after January 6th. What Jordan wants to know is, did Citibank share transaction information from customers in the

D.C. area near the Capitol on January 6th with federal law enforcement? And if so, how was that information shared? In a letter to Citibank, Jordan wrote, on June 12, 2023, we requested your voluntary cooperation with our oversight to determine the extent of which financial institutions, such as Citibank, have worked with the FBI to collect Americans' financial data. To date, Citibank has declined to comply with our request voluntarily, and Council has represented that it will only comply pursuant to a subpoena. Jordan went on to tell Citibank that he had received documents that raised new concerns regarding the extent to which financial institutions, including Citibank, may have shared customers' information with federal law enforcement

despite the customers having no individualized nexus to criminal conduct. According to Politico, Citibank did not respond to requests for comment. And we have some updates from Hawaii today, the head of Maui's Emergency Management Agency Administration has resigned amid the devastating wildfires that have ravaged the island. Herman Ndaya came under criticism in recent days for not sounding the emergency sirens during the Lahaina wildfires. Andaya defended the decision during a press conference earlier this week, saying the sirens were not initially sounded over concerns that citizens would have gone Malka, which is a Hawaiian term, which means inland or to the mountains. Take a listen.

I'm in the form of a wireless emergency alert. Had we sounded the siren that night, we're afraid that people would have gone malca. And if that was the case, then they would have gone into the fire. And so that is the reason why our protocol has been to use W-E-A and EAS. By the way, I should also note that there are no sirens, Malka, or on the mountain side. Andaya says he is resigning for health reasons. Honolulu Civil Beast reported Wednesday that Undaya was not an expert in emergency management when he was brought in in 2017 to lead the Maui Emergency Management Agency. The article claimed his educational background is in political science and the law, not disaster preparedness or response.

He also never worked a full-time job in emergency management. But Andaya pushed back, saying he has worked and assisted in emergency operations. So far, at least 111 people have died in the fires. And finally, on this Friday afternoon, we're going to take a minute to celebrate and to thank two of our Daily Signal interns who have been with us all summer. They've written countless pieces for the Daily Signal. They've helped to contribute to the podcast in multiple ways. They've helped on our social media accounts.

Really, every single aspect of the Daily Signal. They have had their hands in over the past three months. So Elise McHugh and Gigi Daylatori, thank you both. First off, for your service here at the Daily Signal. And welcome to the Daily Signal podcast. So glad to be here. Yeah, thank you for having us. Well, you all, like I said, you've been serving here at the Daily Signal,

at the Heritage Foundation for about the past three months. We're so sad to see you go. But share if you would just a little bit about the work that you all have been doing. What does a day in the life of a daily signal intern at the Heritage Foundation look like? Every Monday we go to our pitch meeting with the editors, the fellow journalists. We pitch out ideas. We just kind of, you know, talk with everybody, get to touch base, and it's a really good way to center ourselves and to see what everyone else is working on in addition to focusing on our stories for the week.

so we get our pitches approved by our editors. On Monday, we finish those stories as fast as we can in addition to picking up other stories that the editors send us, and basically it's an endless stream of writing articles on the problems of the world. I love it. Well, and Gigi, another really neat aspect of being an intern here at the Daily Signal and at Heritage

is in addition to doing all of that work that Elise just mentioned and the time crunches and the pitching stories, you're also getting lectures and briefs on some of the major issues from Heritage Foundation experts. Talk a little bit about how that side of the internship works. Yeah, so it's a really unique aspect of this internship and that we both not only get to gain actual real world experience in like a live newsroom, but we also get to like learn more about like our country's history, the foundations of American society, like the founding

principles and honestly be able to do both to put those principles and to practice then within the real world is probably one of the best and uniqueness aspects of this program. I love that. Elise, do you have a highlight from your summer here at the Heritage Foundation? I think one of my highlights was going to Florida for the Turning Point USA conference with some other daily signal writers, first off, they are just incredible at doing interviews on the spot. I don't know how they do it. You know, they see a famous person walk by. They talk to them like they're just a normal person. They ask the really hard hitting questions respectfully, and then they go and they go along their way. And I'm like, okay, you just did that very casually. So it was amazing witnessing them, getting to bond with them and other members of the Heritage Communications team.

and also just witnessing the impact that conservative media has on not just older people, but people who kind of look like me, who are my age, who are of all different demographics. So it was very eye-opening, and I was very grateful to have the opportunity to go to that. Well, thank you for being willing to go and for being multiple times thrown into the deep end and just figuring it out as you went. We really appreciate both of you and your willingness to do that. Gigi, as you think back on the internship, do you have any words of wisdom that you would share for other individuals who are graduating college or who are going into internship programs and kind of navigating that career space maybe for the first time? Yeah, I think I have like two words of advice to go with that.

One's kind of piggybacking off of Elise and her opportunity to go to the Turning Point USA conference. Like don't be afraid to try new things. So don't be afraid to go out there and push yourself, test your limits, go beyond those limits. It's the only way you're ever going to really grow as a person and within your own career field, whichever that may be. And the second of a piece of advice I'd give is as you exit college, as you take on a new part of your life, really learn to reach out and try to find that community. It's been great working here with the least. Like we've really formed a community. And like those friendships that you form from that is like invaluable.

helps the whole process of like entering into, I don't know, your career field, whichever that may be much, it makes it so much more easier. I'd like to add on to that. A piece of advice that I got from my previous internship and I've really seen in action during this summer is if you want to go into any sort of journalism or media, you have to have stamina and you have to have the stomach for it. So you really, really have to love it and be willing to work 200% all the time. And I've discovered here the Daily Signal that I absolutely love this work. We do great work here, and I'm really proud of everything. I'm so happy that I got to work alongside Gigi and alongside you and alongside everybody. So I think this is a great place to discover if you really, really love journals or not.

Well, and you should be proud of your work because you've done excellent work. You both have this semester. Share what you're doing next. What's next as you leave the Heritage Foundation? Yeah, so for me, I have one more semester at Franciscan University of Stephenville, which is located in Stephenville, Ohio. And then from there, we'll hopefully jump back into journalism in D.C. And yeah, we'll just see wherever God takes me from there. Love it. I like that answer. Yeah, I am also going back to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, go hokey's, for my last semester.

It'll be a total shift going from the completely politically saturated D.C. to jumping up and down in Lane Stadium, but I'm very excited to get back into the college atmosphere one last time. Yeah. And hopefully I can keep up some riding. And again, we'll see where God takes me. I'm really, I'm really open to anything. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we certainly hope, I selfishly hope that that journey brings you all back to Washington, D.C., because we need young people like yourselves in Washington, D.C. But thank you both for your contributions to the Daily Sunil this summer and for joining us here on the podcast. Well, thank you so much for having us as Summer Ant today. Yeah, thank you. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal's top news on this Friday. If you haven't had the chance before to check out our morning show, make sure you do so on Monday morning. Samantha Ascheris is going to be sitting down with Jerry Dunlevy and James Hassan to discuss their new book on the fall of Afghanistan. It's both

heartbreaking and incredibly insightful. Also, make sure on this Friday that you take just a moment, do subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you like to listen to podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. We hope you have an excellent weekend. We'll see you back here Monday morning. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Louis and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asharis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.