The MeidasTouch Podcast - Congressman Jake Auchincloss on GOP Blunders

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas speaks with Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss about Republicans screwing themselves and screwing the country at the same time. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario the MAGA republicans are pushing forward what may be the most devastating budget in the history of the United States of America. We're talking about $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid. We're talking about adding $19 trillion to the deficit over the course of 10 years. We're talking about gutting infrastructure. We're talking about gutting infrastructure. We're talking about gutting important resources to farmers. And so what are they doing, though? I mean, they are just outrageously glazing Elon Musk and Doge in like the weirdest way possible. I mean, you got this MAGA Republican Senator

Roger Marshall out there saying, go, Elon, go, go here. Watch whatever the hell this is playing. If I was Elon, I'm asking him to double down, not go slower, double down. And we're going to correct the pieces as we go along as well. Think about what Elon did with Twitter. He fired 80% of the people when he took over Twitter. He changed the name of it. And it's still, and now today it's worth twice as much as it was before. Yeah, it's not worth twice as much. It's, I think, worth a fraction of it. He ran it into the ground, essentially. Then you've got MAGA Republican Congress member Andy Barr on the Medicaid cuts.

They're like, yeah, we need these Medicaid cuts. People are lazy. You know, lazy people. You don't deserve your Medicaid. This is what the MAGA Republicans are going with. Play this clip. Coming up with the offsets. So when you look at mandatory spending, and this is a point that I've been making recently,

is some of this quote unquote mandatory spending not mandatory at all? No, look, I mean, Medicaid is a big mandatory spending program. But what we need in this country is for the American people to get back to work. Work capable adults need to get off of the taxpayer roles and they need to get into private health insurance in private employment. This is what Secretary Besson and President Trump are talking about when they say reprivatize the economy. This is good for people who are currently on Medicaid in Kentucky and around the country. It's good for you. We're taking away your Medicaid. You want this. It's good for people in Kentucky.

But while the MAGA Republican Congress members do things like this, Republican Congress member Joe Wilson has announced a proposal for a new $250 bill featuring Donald Trump's face on it. I'm drafting legislation to direct the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a $250 bill featuring Donald J. Trump, the most valuable bill for the most valuable president. This is cartoonishly clownish. I got to get the take of Congress member Jake Alkencloss, who's been very outspoken about how disastrous Doge has been and these cuts are in this horrific budget.

Congress member, what do you make of this all? 30% of Kentuckians are on Medicaid, and I'm sure they're going to be thrilled with Andy Barr's viewpoint that what they really need is to be kicked off the rolls. Those new moms who are just so darn lazy they don't want to go back to work during that 12 weeks of maternity leave, or those families raising children with intellectual or developmental disabilities who rely on Medicaid as a lifeline, those seniors who are at home getting care that only Medicaid provides, $60 out of every $100 spent in this country on at-home care comes from Medicaid. They're not lazy.

They're not shirking responsibilities. They're individuals who need access to primary care and preventative care and at-home care, and Medicaid provides it. These Republicans are touching a hot stove in slow motion, and they are going to get burned. The Congress member, I mean, you're telling me that people in red states are not rooting for things like this, like Trump Gaza. They're not focused on whatever this image is of, I don't even know what I'm looking at that Donald Trump is posing. You're telling me that they're not focused on Elon Musk at a beach throwing money

in the air and seeing Donald Trump posts that you're telling me that the American people are getting pissed, that their Medicaid is getting taken away, that essential services are being gutted, that they're waking up feeling less safe. Ben, I'm glad you raised the chaos, the corruption of Doge and the attempts by the president to play fetch with our attention span, because Doge is a magic trick. It's not saving money, as you know. It's misdirection. It's trying to direct Americans' attention spans towards what one hand is doing so that they're not going to be paying attention to what congressional Republicans are doing, which is taking an ax to Medicaid. Donald Trump doesn't have to face the voters again. So I understand what he's doing. He's trying to hook up all these tech billionaires who invested in his campaign and who probably bought all of his

meme coins that he issued. He owes them tax cuts. But for the life of me, I can't understand why congressional Republicans are allowing Donald Trump to frog march them off the gangplank. Because when they go home to their town halls and they have to explain to new mothers and to kids and to seniors that they cut off their lifeline to healthcare in exchange for Elon Musk firing some federal aviation administration staff or FDA staff, they're going to get thrown out of town. You know, Donald Trump is, he was saying today, he was blaming the egg prices on the administration, but he was acting like he wasn't in charge. He was just saying, you know, these egg prices are going up. I got to go speak to the head of the Department of Agriculture and just see what's going on here. I'm pissed about this.

But wasn't he the one who promised that on day one he was going to bring down prices? Housing was going to be more affordable. There was going to be all of these. There's so many jobs. You weren't going to know what to do with all of the jobs. And, you know, I think what we're seeing in the kind of consumer sentiment and as Donald Trump's approval is plummeting, that despite Donald Trump's efforts to try to distract and corporate media kind of buying into the distraction framework. I think it's hitting people hard and they're going, wait a minute, I can't even find eggs. My grocery price up. What are you seeing across the country in town halls in your district?

Is this a Democrats, Republicans, independent? What are you seeing? I want everyone who's listening right now to go and take a picture of their most recent home insurance bill and their most recent car insurance bill. Save that in your photo library. And then a year from now, I want you to look at the bill that you get. I will sit here and virtually guarantee you that those bills will go up by double digit percentages. Why? Well, homes and cars are basically bundles of steel, aluminum, semiconductors, and lumber. And President Trump wants to add taxes to all those things indiscriminately. And then he's going to harass or deport the workforce, particularly for housing, that constructs them. And our home and our car insurance,

what they are is they're messages from the future. They are messages saying, here's what it will cost to rebuild or repair your home or your car in the future. And that's why Americans' insurance bills are gonna go up now for the actions that Donald Trump is taking that will affect the economy later.

We're gonna see not just inflation and insurance costs for home and auto, but also insurance costs for healthcare. Because when he kicks millions of Americans off the rolls of Medicaid, those Americans don't stop getting sick. They just go to emergency rooms. And those hospitals have to cross-subsidize the cost of those ER visits by raising the rates they charge commercial insurers. So individuals who are getting their health insurance through their employers will be paying more higher prices on health insurance along with car and home insurance. This economy under Donald Trump's current direction will see inflation. Congressman, I got to push back on you because one of the things that Trump is saying, in addition to Trump Gaza with giant golden statues of him and him and Benjamin Netanyahu with their shirts off, hanging on the beach and whatever the heck, again, those photos were that he's been posting. He's got gold cards.

He's going to change the immigration system. He's going to replace what we have. And he says he's going to sell immigration. It's 5 million a pop. People have a black card because a lot of Americans can relate to having an American Express black card. He's like, I'm going to give you a gold card. So he said this word for word, Russian oligarchs, for example, you Chinese oligarchs, you buy in five mil, you get your visa, you become an American citizen and bang, $50 trillion. 50 trillion is what he's saying. But Ben, he missed a clear business

opportunity because what he should have done is he should have required these gold card applicants to buy his meme coin. That is the key, is you got to buy Trump coin. And when you show him the crypto wallet with Trump coin in it, then you can come into this country because monetizing citizenship goes hand in hand with monetizing the presidency, which he's already done on day one in office. No, in seriousness, this gold card idea, it's typical Trump in that he takes this kernel of legitimate bipartisan policy, whether it's the NIH and saying, hey, we need more research efficiency, or it's the DOD and saying we need more procurement efficiency, or it's immigration and saying we need to figure out a way to fix our high-talent

immigration system. And he takes it to this weird and cruel and unproductive place. We absolutely do want to attract people who create jobs, who are entrepreneurs or engineers or scientists. We have a system for that. It's called the H-1B visa system. We should expand it. We should improve it. There's bipartisan support to do that. What we shouldn't do is have people spend $5 million so that they can go play golf with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and, you know, commiserate with Vladimir Putin. You know, one of the areas where we're seeing a lot of cuts in as well is health, NIH, CDC. And, you know, the same way I feel like Republicans try to normalize and like school shootings and just be like, it's the Second Amendment. So, you know, that's just what happens.

I saw the Secretary of Transportation, Secretary Duffy, also doing this with the plane crashes and a lot of the things. Like, you know, planes crash. That's just, you know, get used to it. Like, that's what happens. And I saw you had RFK Jr. today basically trying to say, you know, there was that death caused by measles in Texas. That doesn't happen. Measles outbreaks like this because of low vaccination. That's not normal.

But you have the secretary of HHS going up there and saying, this is normal. Measles outbreaks, this is what we're used to here. Just play this clip if we have it, because it was a shocking moment. Bobby, do you want to speak on that? We are following the measles epidemic every day. I think there's 124 people who have contracted measles at this point, mainly in Case County, Texas. Mainly, we're told, in the Mennonite community, there are two people who have died.

But we're watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine. We're watching it. We put out a post on it yesterday, and we're going to continue to follow it. Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year, there were 16.

So it's not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year. You sound a little under the weather yourself right now. I have a permanently bad throat. What do you make of all of it? There are measles outbreaks right now in Texas and Georgia. I'm on the Committee of Jurisdiction for Health and Human Services. And just yesterday, we were in a hearing about our oversight responsibilities for the next two years. And Ben, congressional Democrats had this outlandish idea that one of the things that we should be overseeing was Secretary Kennedy's viewpoints on vaccines,

given the fact that for the first time in 20 years, a child in the United States has just died of measles, that we have measles in at least two states and outbreaks elsewhere, and that the top public health official in this country believes that chicken soup is more effective than the MMR vaccine for preventing and treating measles. And in RFK's own words, when he got measles as a kid, he took vitamin A and had chicken soup, and that is the preferred approach for dealing with these outbreaks. He refuses to tell parents to get their kids vaccinated, even now that the outbreak is spreading. So congressional Democrats just said to congressional Republicans,

hey, should we bring RFK to Congress to explain to us what exactly he plans to do about a measles outbreak? Congressional Republicans did two things. First, they laughed. And second, they voted down the proposal. They are just as accountable as Donald Trump and RFK is for any more children who die of measles. I think we'll leave it on that note. We'll bring you back as well and keep checking in with you. Your leadership on the Hill has been a great thing for us to watch. And I just like that you're bringing the facts. You're going on Republican territory also. And you're speaking to their voters and their turf also. And you're doing a great job. So thanks, Congressmember. Thank you, Ben. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas? Check out the Midas Plus sub stack for ad-free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, and more.

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