The Daily Signal - Trump Administration Takes 3 Steps to Boost Religious Freedom

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

"There's a lot of hostility to religious beliefs," says Joe Grogan, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House. "These views are protected by the First Amendment and people who are offended by public expressions of faith need to get over it," he adds. In this exclusive interview at the White House, Grogan outlines what the Trump administration is doing to ensure Americans remain free to live in accordance with their beliefs. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, January 17th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Kate Trinko. The Trump administration is taking steps to strengthen religious liberty. Our colleague Rob Blewey interviews Joe Grogan, director of the domestic policy council at the White House. They'll talk about those steps and what they will mean for religious Americans. Don't forget.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave us a review or a five-star rating on Apple podcasts and encourage others to. subscribe. Now on to our top news. The Senate has opened its impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her seven impeachment managers, all Democrats, walked the articles from the House to the Senate Thursday morning. Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts will preside over the trial. Roberts was sworn in by Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, via ABC News. Senators, I attend the Senate in conformity with your notice. for the purpose of joining with you for the trial of the President of the United States.

I am now prepared to take the oath. Will you place your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand? Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws. So help you God. I do. God bless you. Thank you very much. Then Robert sworn all the senators in the Senate trial the Senator's Service jurors via CNN.

Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, President of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you God. The Government Accountability Office released a report Thursday, day accusing the Trump administration of acting illegally in regards to holding back approved aid to Ukraine. Thomas Armstrong, the General Counsel at the Government Accountability Office, said in a statement, Today, the Government Accountability Office issued a legal decision concluding that the Office of Management and Budget violated the law when it withheld approximately 214 million appropriated to the Defense Department for security assistance to Ukraine. The president has narrow limited authority

to withhold appropriations under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. Rachel Semmel, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget, said, we disagree with the government accountability office's opinion. The Office of Management and Budget uses its apportionment authority to ensure taxpayer dollars are properly spent, consistent with the President's priorities and with the law. The Trump administration says it isn't concerned about allegations from Love Parnas that maintains that Trump was privy to a plan for the Ukraine to start investigations into Trump's political enemies.

During an interview with Rachel Maddo that aired Wednesday night, Parnes says that Trump's actions with him and Ukraine were deliberate. What do you think is the main inaccuracy or the main lie that's being told that you feel like you can correct? That the president didn't know what was going to. on. President Trump knew exactly what was going on. He was aware of all my movements. He, I wouldn't do anything without the consent of Rudy Giuliani or the president. I have no intent, I have no reason to speak to any of these officials. I mean,

they have no reason to speak to me. Why would President Zelenskyy's inner circle or minister of Akoff or all these people or President Poroshenko meet with me? Who am I? They were told to meet with me, and that's the secret that they're trying to keep. I was on the ground doing their work. Parnas is a businessman who was born in Ukraine and who worked with Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in Ukraine. Per CNN, Parnas gave thousands of pages of documents as well as pictures and text messages to the House impeachment officials, saying that Trump's actions in Ukraine were all about 2020. Per the hill, Parnas turned over evidence to House impeachment.

investigators that detailed the pressure campaign against Ukraine. Here's what White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday about Parnas on Fox and Friends. What is the White House's view on Lev Parnas? And did the president talk to him often? The president has said he did not know him. And I've got to say, you know, just to say Rudy told me these things doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the president.

And it certainly doesn't mean that the president was directing him to do anything. You know, we stand by exactly what we've been saying. did nothing wrong. The phone calls, the transcript, say everything there is to it. This is a man who's under indictment and who's actually out on bail. This is a man who owns a company called Fraud Inc. So I think that's something that people should be thinking about. You know, we're not too concerned about it. Once again, we know that everything in the Senate's going to be fair.

It's unfortunate that he's now making a media tour out with a lot of the outlets that are, you know, against the president. I think that shows exactly what he's doing. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said Parnas isn't trustworthy. This is the same pattern I've seen before with Cohen with Avanotti. The media tries to build something into it, McCarthy said. This is the same man that said Devin Nunes was in Vienna when he was not, so he doesn't have any credibility. Ukraine is now looking into whether there was surveillance of former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine,

Marie Yovanovitch. Earlier this week, Democrats released texts sent to Lev Parnas. that included a Republican, Robert Hyde, suggesting he was monitoring Yovanovitch. Now, per CNN, Ukraine's Interior Ministry is getting involved. The ministry issued a statement saying Ukraine's position is not to interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States of America. However, the published records contain the fact of possible violation of the legislation of Ukraine and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which protects the rights. of a diplomat in the territory of another country. And Ukraine cannot ignore such illegal activities

on its territory. On Thursday, the Senate passed 89 to 10, the long-awaited, updated USMCA that will strengthen trade relationships between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Before the Senate vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the legislation will strengthen farmers, growers, cattlemen, small and big businesses, and manufacturers. This is a major step for our whole country, McConnell said. Don't send House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a friend request on Facebook. Here's what she had to say about the company in her weekly press conference via CNN. The Facebook business model is strictly to make money.

They don't care about the impact on children. They don't care about truths. They don't care about where this is all coming from. And they have said, even if they know. it's not true, they will print it. I think that they have been very abusive of the great opportunity that technology has given them. My thought about them is they don't want, all they want are their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them. And they schmooze this administration in that regard because so far that's what they have received. But I think that

what they have said very blatantly, very clearly, that they intend to be accomplices for misleading the American people with money from God knows where. They didn't even check on the money from Russia in the last election. They never even thought they should. So they have been very irresponsible. In a recent memo that was linked to the New York Times, Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth directly addressed the left's attack that Facebook contributed. to Trump's 2016 win. He wrote, so was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected?

I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn't get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser, period. Republican Senator Martha Nixali of Arizona called a reporter from CNN. Called a reporter from CNN, a liberal hack when declining to answer his question about the Senate's impeachment trial. Here's their exchange. Senator McSally, should the Senate consider new evidence as part of the impeachment trial? Man, you're a liberal hack. I'm not talking to you.

You're not going to comment? You're a liberal hack. Next up, we'll have Rob's interview with the head of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House. Tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger government, become a part of. of the Heritage Foundation. We're fighting the rising tide of homegrown socialism, while developing conservative solutions that make families more free and more prosperous. Find out more at heritage.org. The Daily Signal is on location at the White House today, just moments after President Trump's

Religious Freedom Day announcements. We're joined by Joe Grogan, director of the domestic policy council at the White House. Joe, thanks for talking to The Daily Signal. Thanks for having me. We had some big developments happening in Washington this week. President Trump signed phase one of the trade deal with China and the U.S. Congress just passed today, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which is headed to the president's desk now for his signature. But let's begin with the religious Freedom Day announcements, an issue that you've been working on. There are three of them, and let's take them one at a time. And we can start with prayer and school. Sure. So I actually just left a meeting in the Oval Office. He had a bunch of students. students and teachers and a coach in there, all of whom had been discriminated against in public schools for expressing their faith. The coach had been fired. Some of the students had been told or a group of students that were told they couldn't pray in the cafeteria for a brother of one of the

students who had been an tractor accident and they'd been told, you have to take this behind a curtain or go outside, out of sight. We can't have anybody expressing their faith. in public. And what we're doing is we're updating a guidance that was supposed to be updated every two years by law and hadn't been updated since 2003 and making it explicit that students have First Amendment rights, including religious freedoms. They have the right to express the religious beliefs openly, publicly. And if they are discriminated against or they perceive they are, the education officials in every state need to set up a procedure for them to be a able to complain, and those complaints need to be adjudicated in some way, and the education officials

need to inform the Department of Education, how they adjudicate these claims and what they're doing to make sure that religious beliefs are protected. There's a lot of hostility to religious beliefs. There's a perception that people who express religious beliefs somehow may be offending others who don't have those beliefs, but it's clearly discriminatory. These views are protected by the First Amendment, and people who are offended by public expressions of faith need to get over it. And these students and teachers need to be able to, on their own time, say that they believe in God, whether they be Jewish or Christian or Muslim or whatever faith that they ascribed to. You know, those personal stories have such an impact.

We tend to cover a lot of them at the Daily Signal. And they are often some of our most popular stories, I think, because they don't get the attention that they deserve in other media outlets. So I appreciate you sharing that with our, with our listeners. You know, the second on the list is nine proposed rules that the Trump administration is rolling out to protect religious organizations from unfair and unequal treatment by the federal government. Can you tell us what these rules entail? Yes, so this overturns an Obama era regulation, which really discriminated against faith-based

organizations and treated them as second-class grantees when receiving federal funds. And basically what it said is anytime somebody goes to a faith-based organization, for a service. They need to be presumed to be potentially offended by the religious nature of that organization. The religious organization needs to inform them that if they are offended by the religious nature of the organization, they will find a secular organization for them to get the same service. There's no presumption on the part of a secular organization that somebody going there for services may be offended by the secular nature or whatever reason that institution was set up.

It's patronizing clearly to citizens, first and foremost, that people should be presumed to be offended by people of faith. We all interact with people of different faith on a daily basis, and we're not offended by it as responsible human beings. So why the government would presume this is outrageous and why we would have this additional burden on religious organizations or people who are called to particular work to help people out of spiritual belief is beyond me. But many of these things are games of inches. You know, this took a lot of work, actually, to get nine agencies to work collaboratively to get this done. We're proud to have gotten it done, though. It certainly is. You know, the third announcement that was made involved the Supreme Court's Trinity Lutheran case, a 2017 decision.

And the Office of Management and Budget has issued some new guidance regarding grantmaking. Tell us about this change. Yeah, so the Office of Management and Budget is sending out a memo to, all federal agencies who give money to states and to remind them that it's up to these agencies to make sure that the states, when they distribute the money, don't discriminate against religious organizations. This directly comes out of the Trinity Lutheran Supreme Court decision where Trinity Lutheran applied for a grant to improve the playground. There was a program to make playground safer and they were denied the funds. This wasn't for religious

purposes, it was to make kids safer. And yet the state decided no, because they were a religious organization, they couldn't get it. The Supreme Court said, look, that's not right. This is the secular purpose, and they should be able to get access to the fund, same as any other organization. So we're making that explicit from the Office of Management and Budget and putting the agencies on notice that they need to police the states. There are 37 states, actually, that have Blaine amendments on their books, in one form or another. which came out of anti-Catholic bias, which is clear from the historical and illegal record. And we need to make it clear that those amendments or other regulations or statutes that may be on the book can't be enforced against religious organizations.

You know, we're talking about these because it is Religious Freedom Day, but this is a president who's made religious freedom a priority throughout his time in office and throughout his administration. What has it been like working with him on these issues? It's fantastic. I mean, you don't have to go in there and argue about the merits of pursuing religious freedom initiatives. You don't have to say it's important that we allow religious institutions back into the public square, people of faith, to pray openly. He does ask questions. He wants to make sure we're doing it in the right way. He wants to make sure we've thought things through. But this isn't a president who needs a lot of convincing on these issues.

he's fired up to do it and thinks that, you know, religious institutions have a central role to play in America's civic life and the private lives of Americans, too. So he's totally aligned. There's a whole group of people here across the White House and in the agencies, many people who are veterans of various fights for religious freedom who have been drawn to this administration to work on these issues. And to be frank, they're having a blast in this administration. administration to work on issues like this. Well, thanks for sharing that. Shifting gears, let's talk about trade. This week, the president signed the Phase 1 trade deal with China.

Obviously, a long initiative that this president has talked about even prior to his election campaign in 2016. I know China is an issue he's focused on a great deal. Tell our listeners what they need to know about Phase 1 and where we go from here. Yeah, I think what you're seeing in the last few weeks is really the president, you know, everything's firing on all cylinders for this president, and the entire arc of his first term is being set from going back to the first major legislative achievement, which would be tax reform, and now we had the omnibus spending deal right before the end of the year where he had a number of

significant policy wins, removing three Obamacare taxes in addition to when he had removed the individual mandate. And now we've got the China trade deal and the USMCA passing this morning. Making trade more fair for the United States, having a president who fights for American industries and American workers has been central to his belief system, his messaging, since long before he ran for president. I remember growing up in upstate New York, hearing him talk about this and attacking the way NAFTA was constructed, attacking the way that we had let China come into the World Trade Organization. and he really has achieved a tremendous win with the China trade deal. As a matter of fact, it's very interesting to watch a number of the president's critics over the last few weeks be little when this trade deal was announced to be signed. But when you see the details of it, I think that the tone has changed.

I know some people just can't get off their horse, but you see intellectual property protections. You see opening up of financial sectors, huge commitments to buy agricultural products, goods. You know, it is a huge achievement. And frankly, the work of the staff that went into it has been extraordinary. The number of meetings that the president has on this issue, he has been so focused on it. He's inexhaustible. If it was the only issue that he had worked on for the first three years, it would still be an extraordinary achievement. If it was the only trade deal, but of course, we've got USMCA done. And I think at the heart of it, you see a president who's saying, look, this is not a fate of complete that we're going to lose American jobs, that we're going to lose American industry,

and that American workers are going to be resigned from to do work that they would rather not do. And some of the contempt of the intellectual class over the last couple decades where people who are involved in manufacturing just need to learn how to code or get used to the service economy, it's nice to see a president saying, no, we can still manufacture in the United States. And if we have a president and people around him willing to fight for American workers, we can win. And you see us winning. You mentioned the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. Final question for you here. That president has talked about how that's going to really impact in a positive way,

American businesses and families, particularly in the heartland of this country. What does it mean for them, for those people who might not know the intricate details of the agreement, but want to know how it might change their lives? Well, I think first and foremost, there have been a lot of scaremongering around the fact that the president wanted to pull out of NAFTA. But if you look at the number of the numbers about the impact upon our agricultural sector, but also manufacturing, post-nafta passing, according to many metrics, it's not really a pretty picture.

What the president sought to do is to protect American industries, protect American workers and put them at the forefront of our trade agreement. And he has achieved that with the USMCA. It's a total reset of our trade rules. And there'll be more to calm on that front. The other thing to remember, too, is he signed a trade deal with Japan recently, which people forget. And that is a huge deal as well with big commitments for purchases from American companies produced in the United States. So across the board, we're alleviating and certainty here heading into the final year of his first term. And the economy is roaring. We've got record unemployment, a record number of Americans at work now. We've never had so many Americans working right now. Record unemployment among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women employment, Asian American unemployment is at record low. So everything is setting up beautifully. The president has gotten attacked for so many of these policies that he was pursuing. Remember when he was running for president, they said if he was going to,

going to win so many of the critics on the left and these brilliant economists said the economy's in the tank. And today the Dow Jones Industrial Abbot is over 29,000, I think 29,200, the last I checked. So it's a tremendous day for the president. And it's a great fun to be here right now. Joe Grogan, director of the domestic policy council at the White House. Thanks so much for talking to the Daily Signal. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify.

And please leave us a review of a rating on Apple Podcasts to give us any feedback. Rob and Rachel, we'll see you Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geine. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.