The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, July 6

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

President Trump stops in Poland on his way to the G20 Summit in Germany, while his voter fraud commission generates controversy back home. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and White House correspondent Scott Horsley. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey y'all, Sam Sanders here. These days I feel like I can't make sense of the news until I've talked it out with my friends. So, I made a new show where we do that every week. It's called It's Been a Minute. That's my way of saying, let's catch up. Find It's Been a Minute now on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks. Hey y'all, this is Tyler Abrams. Hi, y'all. This is Tyler Abrams. Hi, this is Brittany Doyle. Hey, this is Ty Von Quinsky. Currently at a Wawa in North Down, Pennsylvania.

The Princeton Station Wawa in Princeton, New Jersey. Somewhere at a Wawa, like, between D.C. and New York City. The following podcast was recorded at... Slow clap, slow clap. Is this our thing now? The following podcast was recorded at... Slow clap, slow clap. Is this our thing now? Yeah, it's 2.09 p.m. on Thursday, July 6th. Well done, everybody.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org. The NPR app or your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. She didn't have a straight face either. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here to talk about President Trump's trip to Europe. He's meeting with several world leaders at the G20, and North Korea is certainly going to be on the agenda. And back here in the U.S., we'll talk about what's going on with Trump's voter fraud commission and check in on where the Senate Republican health care bill stands. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the

White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. All right. Well done, Wawa timestamp people. Danielle, you're over it. It's so East Coast. It is. I mean, can someone please do one of these from like a come and go or a quick trip or something? That would that would make me happy. I'm waiting for the timestamp for the Pump and Munch. Exactly. Pump and Munch, correct. All right. President Trump was in Poland earlier today.

Now he's in Hamburg, Germany. NPR's Scott Horsley is there, too. Scott, guten tag. Hello to you. And my timestamp is six hours ahead. It sounds a little noisy and clinky behind you. Are you in a beer garden or anything else? Oh, I wish. No, I'm in a hotel ballroom. All right. This is our second international podcast. Tamara joined us from Jerusalem.

Also in a hotel ballroom. Scott, so you're in Germany now getting ready for the G20, but Trump has already made headlines today with a speech and press conference in Poland. You were there. Were you at both of them? I was. All right. So let's talk about that. Let's listen to some key moments before we dig in. So Trump was speaking in a square in Warsaw. He said that in an age of terrorism, the fundamental question is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

Trump also did something critics have been begging him to do, and that's talk tough on Russian aggression. We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran, and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself. And Trump did one other thing that he did not do the last time he was in Europe, and that was directly affirm America's commitment to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. That's that basic idea that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all NATO countries.

The United States has demonstrated, not merely with words, but with its actions, that we stand firmly behind Article 5, the mutual defense commitment. So, Scott, what was the scene like out there? Well, this was in Krasinski Square, which is the scene of a famous and bloody Polish uprising against the Nazis back in 1944. And this was an opportunity for the president to sort of highlight Polish resistance to tyranny in the past and to terrorism and other threats in the present. And as you

said, he couched this in this sort of ethno-nationalist term about the preservation of Western civilization. This was a speech that had the fingerprints of Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, the sort of nationalist flame keepers within the White House. And they like to present Western civilization, the United States and Europe, as sort of under siege by certainly Islamic extremists, but other unnamed threats as well. And he did, as you say, make the point that he was missing when Tam was with him at the NATO summit earlier this year, the explicit commitment of the United States to defend its NATO allies. And then he also did something he did do at the NATO summit, which is lecture other NATO members on defense spending. And Poland was a reasonable place for him to do that because Poland is one of the handful of NATO countries that already spend more than 2% of their economy on national defense. And another thing about Poland, you mentioned the ethno-nationalist theme of the speech. That's something that might get a good reception given

Poland's current governing situation, right? That's right. Trump and President Duda had a meeting this morning and they both took their digs at the free press. So Duda and Trump in that sense are singing from the same hymnal. Yeah. And Duda is also like very nationalist. There's this strong nationalist strain in Poland that's come out and sort of resistance to refugees and other immigration? Yeah, so the attitude towards the president in Poland is, I think, quite different than what we may see from some of his other G20 leaders here in Hamburg, Germany. Just across the street from the hotel where the press is set up here, there's a cargo vessel with a banner that says, you know, preserve free trade. And traditionally, the G20 has been a voice against protectionist instincts. It certainly had that role all during the financial crisis. And the U.S. was

often imploring other G20 members not to adopt protectionist measures. Now you have German Chancellor Merkel defending trading practices, and you've got President Trump, who is at least threatening to adopt more protectionist measures. He hasn't really done so yet, but he has certainly rattled the protectionist saber, suggesting he might slap heavy tariffs on goods coming across the Mexican border or goods coming from overseas. Scott mentioned protests. They are something that comes along with most meetings like this, most G20s. So that's something we'll keep an eye on as the summit itself goes on, whether or not these protests outside become the news themselves. Just to wrap up the Poland trip first, because, Scott,

you mentioned that press conference Trump had earlier today. And what struck us watching back here was the fact that you had all this tough talk during the speech. But in the press conference, it was a much different story, especially when it came to Russia. Trump was asked about Russian interference in the election, and he said this. Mistakes have been made. I agree. I think it was Russia, but I think it was probably other people and or countries. And I see nothing wrong with that statement. Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows for sure. Nobody really knows for sure. Scott, there seems to be very bipartisan multi-agency agreement on that. Right. So in his speech, Trump kind of laid down the law about

Russian meddling in Ukraine. And he talked about their destabilizing efforts to Syria and Iran. The only place he didn't acknowledge Russian destabilizing efforts was in the U.S. presidential race. When he begins that quote saying mistakes were made, he's talking about mistakes by the intelligence community. And he specifically cited the conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Them's fighting words when you're talking about the intelligence agencies.

So this is not the first time that when you're talking about the intelligence agencies. So this is not the first time that Trump has cast doubt on the intelligence agencies whose information, you know, he really has to rely on as commander in chief. So that's a pretty serious thing to say, especially when you're on foreign soil and especially on the eve of his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Right. Well, and once again, Trump also said in, I believe in this press conference, that Obama did nothing about this meddling, which has been proven via several fact checks to be not true. Yeah. The thing that I loved about that part was when President Trump said he was like turning to blame President Obama. And he was like,

and President Obama knew about this. Yeah. If it were Russia, like not wanting to knew about this, if it were Russia. Like, not having a haw about Russia, but then Obama should have done something about it. Right. Yeah. Well, and Trump accused President Obama of not taking stronger action against the Russian meddling because he said Obama was convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. Now, it may very well be that Obama thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. That was a pretty common attitude at the time. But what Obama has also said, and his staffers have said,

is that the president was wary of taking any action sort of on national security grounds that might have appeared to be partisan. But as we remember, the president did instruct the Department of Homeland Security to get involved and try to protect at least the integrity of the voting systems, and DHS did that. And he also told Vladimir Putin one-on-one, hey, knock it off. It's not clear that Putin did do that, did knock it off. But then later in the waning days of the Obama administration, of course, he slapped new sanctions on Russia. Well, and of course, there was that October 7th statement that the intelligence community put out that said it was Russia. Russia is meddling and Russia is responsible for these hacks that are leading to emails being released.

And that it was directed at the highest levels of the Russian government, namely Vladimir Putin. And Scott, we should point out this is the very first face-to-face meeting since Trump became president, which is kind of crazy given how much Putin and Trump have been in the headlines together for months and months. They've had some phone calls, but this will be their first on-camera handshake. So they had previously, like H.R. McMaster, the national security advisor, had said that President Trump didn't have a set agenda going into this meeting. Now, of course, President Putin absolutely has an agenda going into this, and it's possible President Trump has gotten one since then. But what are you looking for, Scott? What do we expect from this? And what do we actually find out about what happened?

Right. I mean, how much of what we end up knowing is just going to be what we see from the stagecraft of how this meeting ends up looking? Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe that's a good answer. We don't know. Well, a lot of foreign policy professionals, I think, were alarmed when the National Security Advisor made that comment that the president was going in without a fixed agenda. That sounds a little bit like the person who can't identify the mark at the poker table. Well, it's not like there's much to talk about between Russia and the U.S. right now. So you can understand that. Certainly, you know, obviously the things

that would potentially be on the agenda are Syria, where there has been at one point Trump harbored the idea that Russia could be a big ally for the United States in battling ISIS in Syria. Of course, Russia's allied with the Assad regime that the United States is committed to seeing removed from power. There have been also just sort of tactical frictions in recent days with the U.S. downing a Syrian drone that was firing on allied forces. That's one obvious area where they'll have things to talk about. And we did also see Putin this week, I believe it was in an op-ed, saying that he sort of taking shots at U.S. trade policy, saying that, you know, the U.S. is too protectionist and isolationist. But aside from that, also in the U.S., which was part of the U.S. reprisal for Russian meddling in the election, he'd like them to get back into their cush compounds.

That's right. But Trump also faces some domestic political pressures here. You had the Senate voting overwhelmingly not only to stiffen sanctions on Russia, but make it more difficult for the White House to relax existing sanctions. You have a special counsel who's investigating not only Russia's election meddling, but possible ties to the Trump campaign. So you certainly have to think that in the back of Trump's mind, the domestic optics of whatever he does with Putin have to be playing a role. So Scott, you mentioned that Obama had that conversation with Putin. That was at one of these summits. There's the G7. There's all these other summits.

This one that you're getting ready for now is the G20. First of all, what's on the broad agenda for this thing? You know, the broad agenda has a lot of these sort of G20 buzzwords like sustainability and resilience. But the friction points here are likely to be, number one, trade, where, as we said, Trump administration is sort of at odds with the traditional U.S. position in favor of free trade. Just this week, we've learned of a free trade agreement now between Japan and the European Union. Of course, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was that big Asia-Pacific deal brokered by the Obama administration. And to jump in on that EU-Japan trade agreement, one thing about that is this has been written about as being a pretty sort of symbolic thing,

sort of saying, hey, by the way, U.S., we're going to trade without you. But it's more than symbolic. I mean, for example, Donald Trump has talked a lot, a big game, about protecting the U.S. auto industry. Well, the U.S. faces tariffs on automobiles when we send them over to the EU. So when two massive economic powers like the EU and Japan get into their own trade agreement, it really does hurt the U.S., even though the U.S. isn't involved, because now the U.S. has a disadvantage in competing when it sends its automobiles over to Japan or over to the EU. Well, and Japan is a major maker of automobiles.

Absolutely. So sending a Chevy to Europe versus sending a Toyota to Europe. Well, the Toyota will have fewer barriers to getting there and probably have a lower price relative to the U.S. car. But just I have a question about the logistics for Scott or you, Tam, because you've covered these things before. Like, how does this work? Is this just a bunch of world leaders milling around a conference center and they kind of

find each other and they go into an empty conference room and talk or or what is it exactly going on in these because you have main meetings then you have sidebars then they have like pull-asides or whatever they call the term and bylats yeah like what well there's a lot of stagecraft to this scott knows it better than i do well the the big meeting is being held here at a convention center, and it'll be a vast international press room, which is full of hundreds of maybe thousands of reporters all sitting there with their laptops ready to type out something if anything ever happens. And then in the big meeting room, you'll have probably a horseshoe where the 20 leaders will sit around speaking at one another or past one another and lots of translators. Around and over each other. It's like a little mini United Nations or something. And then the bilateral meetings,

the meetings which are usually described as taking place on the sidelines. There's no actual sideline. There's no chalk mark on the side. You know, the danger is that this may wind up being sort of the G19 if the U.S. winds up on the outside looking in as it did kind of the G6 against one at the G7 meeting that Tam attended. And the big reason for that is climate change and trade. That was a big sticking point at the G7 and it's likely to be again here. You mentioned that Angela Merkel has been speaking fairly critically about the U.S. That is on both the trade score and the climate change score. She

has said it's a big mistake to think you can succeed through isolationism or protectionism. That's kind of on the trade score. And she's also said that the rest of the world is not going to wait until the last person is convinced of the reality of climate change, which is a dig not only at President Trump, but also certainly people like his EPA administrator, who is kind of dialing back the climate agenda that the Obama administration had put in place. Right. And now starting the process of formally questioning climate rules. Yeah, you've had President Trump saying, look, I'm willing to renegotiate the Paris Accords.

Well, the rest of the Europeans, at least, have said, forget that. We're moving ahead. The question is going to be, does this become the G-19 against the U.S., or does the pullout of the United States lead to sort of a splintering of the international community, where you have, you know, the Saudis going a different direction and the Indians going a different direction? That's what we'll be watching for. And you can see this splintering also once again on trade with Germany. Aside from Angela Merkel, you had the German foreign minister, whose name escapes me right now, but he was saying this week that he believes that the U.S.'s isolationism and potential protectionism on trade could start a trade war with the EU, which is,

you know, one heck of a thing to, you know, to tell the press. That is a really large worry. A trade war could be massively destabilizing for the economies of the U.S. and for the EU. But it really does show the kinds of fears that these countries really have about the kind of power that the U.S. has in terms of the global trading environment. Well, the irony is, you know, the G20 always attracts anti-globalist protesters. I mean, back to the old Seattle days with the papier-mâché puppets. Oh, the puppets are still going strong. Right. So you still have these sort of anti

globalization protesters who are here at the G20. But you also now have sort of pro globalizations who are demonstrating against the position of the United States delegation. When I covered the G20 in Pittsburgh, I learned about sound cannons and what happens when they shoot a sound cannon at you. It's not a pleasant experience for your ears. That's not like the human megaphone, is it? No, it's a police thing to break up crowds. Oh, okay. Unpleasant in a different way. Pittsburgh was an interesting G20 because, as often happens, the formal business of the group was sort of overshadowed by the announcement that Iran was carrying on clandestine nuclear activity.

And just similarly at this meeting, it may be overshadowed at least to some extent by this latest missile test by the North Koreans. It's often the case that the, whatever the carefully planned and choreographed business of the G20 kind of gets hijacked by whatever momentary crisis happens to be occurring during the week that the leaders are all together. Right. And as we're taping right now, actually, Trump is meeting with the heads of Japan and South Korea to talk about that. Trump discussed North Korea and this latest missile test earlier today in Poland at that press conference. As far as North Korea is concerned, I don't know. We'll see what happens. I don't like to talk about what I have planned, but I have some pretty severe things that we're thinking about.

So this is after the latest of many missile tests. But, Tam, this missile test was a bit unlike the previous ones, right? Yeah. Why is this missile test unlike all the other missile tests? Because it was an intercontinental ballistic missile. This is a missile that if it had been aimed straight out toward Alaska instead of up into the sky, it could have hit Alaska, which is a very big deal and is seen as an advance in the technology that North Korea has and an advance beyond what a lot of experts thought that it had. Now, this missile did not have a nuclear warhead attached to it, but that's the fear is that now that they have a missile that has the range, the next step would be attaching nuclear material to it.

So it's this was a major escalation in what has been a series of tests and escalations coming from North Korea. And then the North Korean dictator, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un basically taunted the United States and said, ha, ha, ha, and did it on the 4th of July and did it on the eve of this G20 meeting when all these leaders are getting together to send a big message. And the other message that North Korea is sending is that they're not that interested in a diplomatic solution at the moment. So, Scott, Trump had tried to approach this differently than previous presidents. He had been much more tough at first and even hinting that the U.S. might not have a problem in doing a military strike. Yet, in the end, North Korea continues to make advancements just as they have with Obama and Bush and Clinton. What can a president do here? That's the real challenge.

As you say, Trump came into office saying the era of strategic patience was over. We were going to take a new tack with North Korea, and then he quickly learned what the three or four previous presidents have learned, is that there aren't really any good options when it comes to North Korea. A military strike would invite retaliation that could be very destructive for our allies in South Korea and Japan, and for the U.S. service members who were stationed there. Then Trump had that meeting in Mar-a-Lago where he thought he'd come away with a great new friendship with China's president and maybe China would do the heavy lifting here. China has made some gestures towards, say, restricting coal imports from North Korea,

which is an important source of hard currency for the North Koreans, but hasn't imposed the sort of crushing economic sanctions that Trump would like to see. He is learning what other presidents have learned before him, which is if this were an easy problem, it would have been solved by now. All right. Well, you've got a lot of stuff to file on. Is this a two-country day or a three-country day for you, Scott? Two-country day. Two-country day, yeah. Still a lot of countries for one day.

And they're on the same continent, so that's an easy trip. Okay. Okay. But either way, you've had a long day. Two country day. Still a lot of countries for one day. And it's only they're in the same continent. So that's that's an easy trip. OK. OK. But either way, you've had a long day. We appreciate you staying up to talk to us. Hey, it's great to talk with you all. All right. Guten Abend. Bye, Scott. Bye, Scott. OK, take care. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, the president's voter fraud commission and its clash with the states. Be right back. And we're back. Let's talk about the news this week that dozens of states are rejecting a request from the Trump administration to provide personal information about voters. That includes names, addresses, birthdays, party registration,

and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. This information was requested by a commission established to look into voter fraud. And Tam, could you remind us why this commission exists in the first place? The commission exists in the first place because President Trump began shortly after the election talking about how there were illegal votes cast. The idea being that, yes, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but she wouldn't have if not for all of those illegal millions of illegal votes that were cast. So he tweeted about it at one point. At various points, he brought it up to members of Congress and others who came to the White House to meet with him once he had become president.

And there was sort of a lot of pressure saying, wait, where are these illegal votes? His people were never able to produce any evidence that those illegal votes happened. Right. And so then the president said, I'm going to appoint a commission. Right. And these these voter fraud accusations tend to be based around the fact that, you know, voter fraud does happen. I mean, it happens in pretty much any election year. In like a dozen year, dozens of cases. Right. But in dozens, you know, in infinitesimally low amounts, amounts that do not sway a presidential election. Right. And there was no, as we pointed out at the time, there was no real proof for the broad claim that he was making.

Absolutely correct. Specifically the idea that millions of people all voted, all voted for Democrat and voted just enough to give Hillary Clinton her popular vote. He even picked out particular states. There was one tweet where he listed Virginia, New Hampshire and California. So anyway, he announced the commission was forming. They didn't really do anything for a long period of time, but that seems to have changed. Danielle, can you get us up to speed on what exactly this commission's mission is and why it wants this information? Right. So the reason this has been in the news the last couple of weeks, let's start there, is because the vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on

Election Integrity, Chris Kobach, also a secretary of state from Kansas, sent this letter to all 50 states saying that they wanted all of this voter information. If it's publicly available, he said, we want first names, last names, middle initials, dates of birth, political party, last four digits of social security numbers, et cetera. And the reason he said he wanted this is to, quote, fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting. So that kind of mouthful is the party line on, OK, here is what we want to do with this commission is to, you know, better safeguard our voting system, which plenty of people would say, you know, there are ways we could improve it. And I think people from both sides would say there are ways to improve our election system, no doubt.

But it sounds like what they are potentially trying to do here is find all of the people who are registered to vote in more than one state, for instance, and say, look at that. That's a problem. We need to purge the voter rolls. Right. Because one of their rationale for the whole Trump voter fraud claim in the first place was, well, there was a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts that said, you know, you have millions of people who are dead, but on the voter rolls, they are registered in more than one state because, you know, people move and they have not been purged from the rolls since they moved from their last state. So, but aside from that, I mean, one other thing to think of here is that, you know,

what one expert I talked to last fall when I was reporting on this told me was, you could easily make the argument that you don't want to too quickly purge someone from a voter roll. You want to err on the side of making sure you're not taking someone off a voter roll and making them ineligible to vote when they should be eligible to vote. Disenfranchising people because there are people who have the same name, for instance, and could get, you know, you could boot somebody that has the same name as somebody else and boot the wrong one and the dead guy is still registered and the live guy is not. Absolutely right. All right. So that's the baseline here. Why are states objecting to this information request? Because it seemed at first like you saw Democratic secretaries of state jump out and be very forceful in their response.

Absolutely. I mean, I saw not just secretaries of state, Governor Cuomo from New York saying, you know, we don't want to focus on this. We want to focus on ballot access. Like we want to make sure, because many opponents of this voter fraud commission have said, we think that this is going to be a way to suppress the vote.

That is what the fear is of what this commission might do, especially if it encourages, you know, purging voter rolls and who knows what will happen? So that's one thing. So you have that end. But then you have the other end of the spectrum, which is the federalist idea, the idea that, you know, listen, elections are not federally operated. States operate their own elections.

So you have secretaries of state from various states saying, listen, we do this on our own. This is our thing. Don't meddle in this. And that's why it quickly became bipartisan. Right. Yes. There is a great quote from the Secretary of State from Mississippi, Delbert Hoseman. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. What he said was, they can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.

He went on to say, Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state's right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes, which sort of wraps it in a bow. Yeah. So I have one question here, though, because a lot of this information is, one, publicly available or two, part of these voter files that campaigns and parties actually buy this data and put it in giant databases so that they can target voters. Right. So I know this about you already. And some states are complying with the publicly available part. Well, you know, interestingly, on that note, Chris Kobach himself from Kansas has said, you know, my state, for example, our Social Security numbers are not publicly available. So, no, we won't even be turning those numbers over to our own commission.

But he also said that the initial request was that... Publicly available. Yes, that is what they were requesting. But so on this note, there are some discrepancies in the numbers of states that are being reported that are or are not cooperating. So CNN this week reported that 44 states have refused in some way to give some sort of kind of information. The White House came out and said, no, no, no, CNN was wrong. They said 20 states have agreed to provide the publicly available information. 16 states are reviewing it. So 36 states have either agreed or are considering it. That leaves 14 states plus the District of Columbia who have said, no, we are not going to comply. And what happens next once this is all figured out?

The commission is meeting for the first time on July 19th. So I think we'll get more information then. Basically, I think what you're going to see is a massive amount of resistance coming from some corners. I think that already there's been a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire. This is not going to be a simple cut and dried process. It's going to be highly politicized. Can we just spell out the concerns a little more? I mean, there's a concern that this could be used as a pretext to, in a major way, change voter ID laws or other things that would make it harder for people to vote. And in the past, those changes have been made in a way that makes it harder for people who are minorities, who are poor, who are older, that it's that meeting in a couple of weeks. We'll follow up on that later on. One more thing to do quick update on, and that's health care.

Congress is gone this week, scattered across the country. Many members are actually in Afghanistan on a congressional trip there. But when they left town, Mitch McConnell was trying to figure out how to make two very different groups of his caucus happy. The groups we've been telling you about for months at this point, I think hardline conservatives who want to repeal as much of Obamacare as they can, and more moderate members who want to keep as much of its Medicaid expansion in place. Okay, we are most of the way through recess week. Do we have any updates? Well, we do have one major update, which is that Ted Cruz apparently is circulating on Capitol Hill a proposal to tweak the Senate's plan, tweak maybe an understatement.

But the general idea is this, is to allow insurance companies to create noncompliant plans. The idea being if you're an insurance company, you have to sell a plan that is compliant with Obamacare, that covers X, Y, Z conditions, et cetera, et cetera. And people could get subsidies to cover those. But then those companies could also provide noncompliant plans. Which would be like a catastrophic plan or a stripped down plan or a plan that says, hey, you've got a pre-existing condition, tough luck. Right. Yeah. So the fear is... But a cheaper plan is great if you don't have a pre-existing condition. Totally true. Or you're like 25 years old and you assume nothing will ever go wrong. Yeah. I mean, I think that sounds like a very appealing plan to a young, healthy

person. And it's a relatively decent bet. Like if you're 25 years old, the odds of something going wrong are not that great. Right. Yeah. But then the fear of this is that you end up creating a two-tiered health system where you have all of the healthy people who want to buy these plans over here, all the non-healthy people who want to buy these plans over here. And you're giving them more and more money. Why? Because you don't have the healthy people over here anymore. Everything just keeps rising and you're giving them more and more money to meet those premiums. So that's one proposal that's out there. I think another interesting thing I saw this week, it's more of an anecdote, but it's still interesting. But on July 4th, the only thing people wanted to talk to her about was health care. And she said the overwhelming response was people saying, we're glad you're opposing this bill. So that can't be great news for Mitch McConnell,

who's trying to carefully stitch together this coalition of 50 votes. Right. I mean, approval of this bill is phenomenally low. The NPR, PBS NewsHour, Marist poll that came out recently said that, what, 17 percent of American adults approve of this plan. Yeah. And I'm now going to channel Susan Davis, our colleague, who on any number of occasions has said all of that is true, but there is a will among some Republicans in Congress. There is a will among Mitch McConnell and his allies to make this happen. And don't assume this thing's dead. Right. Yeah. Because they want to repeal Obamacare. Because they've been promising to for years. That is a very legitimate goal if you've won an election promising to do that. One more thing to talk about that happened just as we were getting ready to tape the pod. Walter Schaub, the Office of Government Ethics Director, is no longer the Office of Government Ethics Director. He resigned today instead of finishing out the remaining six months of his term. He's now going to work for a nonpartisan organization of election law experts called the Campaign Legal Center.

Schaub explained his resignation to NPR this morning by saying, here's the quote, the current situation has made it clear that the ethics program needs to be stronger than it is. At the Campaign Legal Center, I'll have more freedom to push for reform. I'll also be broadening my focus to include ethics issues at all levels of government. The current situation. How would we best explain the current situation when it comes to Walter Schaub engaging with, dealing with, going back and forth with the White House? Here's the thing to know about the Office of Government Ethics.

They basically have to sign off on ethics plans for every single one of President Trump's nominees. And President Trump nominated a lot of people with a lot of potential conflicts of interest, a lot of people with business backgrounds and a lot of money and a lot of investments. And in previous administrations, before the people were ever named, they went through sort of a pre-screening with the Office of Government Ethics. The Trump administration didn't do that in most of these cases. And so Walter Schaub and the people over there at the Office of Government Ethics got sort of hammered by just like piles and piles of paperwork. And the Trump administration and President Trump have been very critical of Schaub taking too long and not moving his people along. Schaub has been pretty critical, sometimes openly, sometimes not so openly, of President Trump's process with his

nominees and also President Trump's decision to, unlike all previous presidents, not fully divest himself from his business interests. Right. And that was probably the most high profile early back and forth between the two when the office Twitter account basically subtweeted President Trump sarcastically about about not divesting. And then it was revealed that Schaub personally signed off on all of that. Yeah. So, you know, Schaub's term goes through January of 2018. So he would have had another six months in this job. Frankly, it's almost shocking that he lasted as long as he did. The White House tells me that the president will be moving to nominate someone soon, quickly, because, you know, the fact is that the Office of Government Ethics still needs to sign off on many, many nominees. And President Trump is way behind previous presidents on getting nominees through the system and confirmed.

But tell me on this needs to sign off thing. Does the Office of Government Ethics, it doesn't have enforcement powers, right? No, but it is there to prevent people from doing something that will get them in major legal trouble. And typically the Senate won't confirm someone until they've gotten the sort of sign off from the Office of Government Ethics for their plan. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, can't let it go. And a presidential tweet you might also love the TED Radio Hour. It's a show about what it means to be a human. We grieve. We experience joy, sadness, love, and jealousy. We can be cruel and empathetic. We have the capacity to imagine the future and the past.

And at a time when it seems we're so divided, the TED Radio Hour explores what makes us unique among all species. Find it on Apple Podcasts, the NPR One app, or however you get your podcasts. And we're back. So before we get to Can't Let It Go, let's talk, as we have talked the last few weeks, about what the president can't let go. And that is, as it often is, CNN. Of course, there was the tweet late last week, footage of the president body slamming someone in a wrestling show from years ago.

That guy had a CNN logo digitally planted on his head. Cut to today, the president was asked about this in Warsaw, standing next to the president of Poland. And here's what he said. They have been fake news for a long time. They've been covering me in a very, very dishonest way. Do you have that also, by the way, Mr. President? With CNN and others, I mean, I know there's NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made him a fortune with The Apprentice, but they forgot that.

But I will say that CNN has really taken it too seriously, and I think they've hurt themselves very badly, very, very badly. And what we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful, free, but honest press. We want to see fair press. I think it's a very important thing. We don't want fake news. And by the way, not everybody is fake news, but we don't want fake news. Bad thing. Very bad for our country. So the wrestling video was kind of fitting because all along Trump has tried very hard to make the media his heel. You know, that wrestling villain you frame yourself against as constantly fighting. Yes. And and so there you go. It has been throughout his campaign. But as President Trump became president of the United States and he ran out of other foes and villains, the media, then they will distrust facts that are put out

there that maybe don't make you look so good. Not only that, but President Trump has been very good at cherry picking things. He did this with poll numbers, for example. When poll numbers make him look good, he will point to them. When they don't, they're fake or they're somehow biased or there's something wrong with them or something to that effect. So this really lets you just sort of paint your own picture of reality quite easily. And same goes. I mean, we've talked about this before. I think the thing that's always worth pointing out is when President Trump wants to announce

the House isn't voting on a health care bill, he picks up the phone and calls the New York Times and the Washington Post. When President Trump wants to explain the reason he fired James Comey, he sits down with who? With NBC News. So, you know, he knows what he's doing. So the one other thing to hit on here is the question of how exactly videos and GIFs from the deep corners of Reddit make their way in front of the president of the United States and onto his phone and onto his Twitter feed. Yeah. So the White House insists that this video did not come from Reddit. However,

they will not. You know, I asked, OK, then where did it come from? And they just will not say and they will not respond and they will not answer. And this exact thing has happened before. Right. I mean, this isn't the first time they've put forth a meme of dubious providence, right? There was last year during the campaign, I suppose you'd call it a meme. It was a photo of Hillary Clinton superimposed over a pile of cash. It said, you know, history made in the Hillary font. But then in a red six-pointed star. Star of David.

Or a sheriff's star, depending on. But in the red star, it said most corrupt candidate ever. Yes. And that obviously raised major flags about anti-Semitism. And pretty quickly, they tweeted out a new version of it that had like a circle put over the Star of David that there was a tiny little point from the star still sticking out, but like they fixed it. And Dan Scavino, who was the campaign's director of social media, never said where he got it from or said like it came from a Twitter supporter of the president. Dan Scavino is now President Trump's head of social media in the White House. And we should just say that President Trump is he is a tweeter. He loves to tweet. He loves to put out statements on Twitter. However, it is generally believed that when there are videos in the tweet or a lot of hashtags or GIFs or sort of more complicated stuff, that it's not President Trump himself that is sending out those tweets, but instead Dan Scavino or someone else on the White House staff.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this general conversation is something we will be having again on this podcast sometime soon. You think? I feel confident. I feel very confident. So before we get to Can't Let It Go, one quick thing, just a thank you. We get a lot of mail. We read it all, even if we're not able to respond. We've gotten some really personal touching notes lately, especially from two listeners, one in Texas, one in Kentucky. Thank you. Those notes really meant a lot. Can't say enough. They're very touching. We cannot let

go. We cannot let those notes go. And now we are at the point of the show where we talk about what we can't let go from the week, either politics or otherwise. Danielle, do you want to go first? Yes. All right. So the thing that I can't let go is a story about artifacts, a story that made me think about Indiana Jones. Hobby Lobby, which we have seen in the news for health care related things, major policy arguments. There was a Supreme Court case. Absolutely. Burwell versus Hobby Lobby, if I'm correct. I think that's right.

Yeah. Well, instead, this week we had a different Hobby Lobby story. And the court case in this one has a much less of a ring to it. It's the United States of America versus approximately 450 ancient cuneiform tablets and approximately 3,000 ancient clay boule. Wait, what? The defendants are... I was reading an article by the Atlantic Semigreen today. She said the defendants are technically the objects themselves.

Okay, wait, wait, wait. So what is happening here? Let me back up. Because I actually genuinely do not know the details. All right. But I'm fascinated. This is... And what does Hobby Lobby have to do with this?

I don't want to say it's fun because, I mean, you know, so the smuggling of artifacts isn't something to be taken lightly. But what happened is this. Back in 2010, the owner of Hobby Lobby bought roughly 5,500 artifacts from some sellers for about $1.6 million. Now, according to the New York Times, someone hired by Hobby Lobby to sort of vet this told them, you know, these do not seem like they may be totally legit artifacts in the sense that they may be smuggled. But Hobby Lobby purchased them anyway. And not only that, but I guess when they came to the United States, they were labeled as tile samples. Oh, you mean like, I'm going to redo my backsplash. Let me get some tile samples. I always use millennial old tablets to redecorate my bathroom.

I don't know what you're talking about. They have that aged, weathered look about them. So the Department of Justice has told Hobby Lobby, you know, you have to forfeit these artifacts. Not only that, we're fining you $3 million. And Hobby Lobby said yes, consented to that, said yes, okay. Okay, so why does Hobby Lobby need tablets? Because the owner of Hobby Lobby is creating, or the idea seems to be that the owner of Hobby Lobby is creating this Museum of the Bible here in Washington, D.C. It's been under construction for a while now.

And he has an interest in these sorts of artifacts and collecting them. So he really cares about ancient texts, ancient sorts of things from the Middle East area where lots of biblical things happened. Well, and I guess the Middle East is sort of like a, you know, dumpster fire these days where lots of artifacts are not being well protected. Well, so this is one of the reasons I can't let this go, really, is that like there's a lot of backstory to this. Back in 2003 and 2004, in the thick of the Iraq War, I guess a lot of ancient sites had a lot of things stolen from them and then smuggled. The National Museum was looted, too. Oh, there we go. Yeah. So lots of things were smuggled out of the country and then, you know, sold illegally.

So the thing I want to add to all this is what Scott Horsley said as a joke to us before we began taping. He called it Hammurabi Lobby. I mean, this whole thing, despite being a serious topic, also, you know, spawned a fair amount of Twitter humor. One of the better ones I saw was, isn't the whole point of Hobby Lobby that you can create your own cuneiform tablets? Like there's all sorts of fun stuff out there. So anyway. Oh, like crafting. Yeah. So anyway, I can't let it go. I'm fascinated by this. It scratches my Indiana Jones itch. Wait,

in all this, did Hobby Lobby respond and say, here's why we were labeling ancient tablets as tile samples? Yes. I believe they said we're new to this. We didn't know. It was an accident. Those belong in a museum. Exactly. Exactly what I thought. All right. Tam, what can you not let go? So there's this wonderful tradition that NPR has on the 4th of July to have NPR personalities read little bits of the Declaration of Independence. They string it together. And, you know, one morning a year, Americans sitting by their radios can hear this founding document of our nation. And it's really cool. A lot of the language, you know, if you don't spend a lot of time sitting around reading the Declaration of

Independence is like kind of, I don't know, there are words that we don't use in common speech anymore. There's references to kings and, you know, anyway, this year. It's really just a lot of complaints in the end, which is something that I always forget until I hear the segment. It's like, oh, yeah, most of this is just like just like venting, angry venting. Yeah, that would be the grievance portion of the Declaration of Independence. And so this year, in conjunction with the radio portion, NPR's Twitter account, the main NPR Twitter account, decided to tweet out in 140 character bursts the entire Declaration of Independence. What happened next? You'll never guess what happened next.

Exactly. What happened next is that some people were like, NPR, cut it out. What are you doing? Are you trying to foment a revolution? Like, what the heck, NPR? So there were a lot of people who objected either to the number of tweets or objected to some of the words that were said. Well, the main concern was that when we were quoting the parts where they refer to the king as a tyrant. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. And then someone responded, please stop. This is not the right place. And then in another part, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government. And this dude responds, so NPR is calling for revolution?

Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound patriotic. Your implications are clear. That guy later went up on Twitter and said, whoops, yeah, sorry, I now realize this is the Declaration of Independence. Romp, romp. Which, actually, I totally respect that. That is, you know, like, I have screwed up on Twitter before. And it takes a big person to just say, yeah, I'm sorry. I was completely just, I misunderstood the context. So I will go now. Yeah. I'm very excited about this.

I think that all goes back to something that's like a genuinely cool morning edition tradition. Yeah. Everybody takes turns reading the Declaration of Independence. And it is July 6th, but it's close enough to July 4th, and this is our first pod since July 4th, that I think the podcast should have its own July 4th tradition. And I think that we should take a page from Morning Edition and read a founding critical document by reading a document that's just as important to Independence Day as the Declaration of Independence. What is it, Scott? Well, I don't know if I want to give it away before we start reading it, but I did read some of it last year reciting from memory, and I have parts for all of us, which I have assigned. Tam, this is yours. Danielle, this is yours. Should we explain it or should we just do it? Let me get my gravelly voice on. Okay, this is, of course, President Bill Pullman's speech at the climactic moment of Independence Day, just before they go and fight the aliens.

The movie. His president's real name is Thomas Whitmore, but we don't care. It's President Bill Pullman. Sure. Ready? All right. I'll do it first. Three, two, one.

Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world, and you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the 4th of July and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live, to exist. And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday.

But as the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We're going to live on. We're going to survive. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day. Take that, Morning Edition. And you can't see it here, but a producer in the other room just snappily saluted us. Fact check, not true.

That is a wrap for today. We'll be back next week. Make sure to catch us every weekday morning on Up First, following NPR Politics on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And you can always email the show at nprpolitics at npr.org. And you can support the pod by supporting your local public radio station. There's a link in our episode information that will help you do that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. Thank you for listening to the NPR politics podcast and a belated happy Fourth of July. I think you're still amped up, Scott. Who isn't?