What A Day - Sen. Sanders Slams The Surrender Dems

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Monday night, the Senate passed legislation to reopen the government, sending it to the House. The eight Senate Democrats who reached a deal with Republicans over the weekend defended their compromise ahead of the vote Monday. But many Democrats publicly criticized them for caving to the GOP without guaranteeing an extension to Affordable Care Act subsidies. Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders has been one of the toughest critics of the Democrats who caved. We spoke with the senator ahead of Monday night’s vote about the shutdown, healthcare, and why he thinks the fight is nowhere near over.And in headlines, the Supreme Court rejects a long-shot ask to consider overturning its landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage, President Donald Trump hands out early Thanksgiving pardons to a whole flock of 2020 election conspirators, and the shutdown continues to impact flights across the country.Show Notes: Call Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Tuesday, November 11th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is why today, the show that lives in the country where millions of people might soon lose access to health care, but according to a whistleblower complaint, convicted child sex trafficker Galane Maxwell received a puppy to play with at her minimum security prison camp in Texas. Poor puppy. On today's show, the Supreme Court rejects a long-shot ask to consider overturning its landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage. And President Donald Trump hands out early Thanksgiving pardons to Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and a whole flock of 2020 election conspirators. But let's start with health care, the government shutdown, and a lot of Democrat on Democrat fighting. On Sunday night, eight Senate Democrats agreed to vote with Republicans on a plan to end the longest government shutdown in American history, with no guarantee of.

of extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies the entire shutdown was about in the first place. But according to New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, this is a win. Or maybe the first step on the road to a win? So my Democratic colleagues and I have been ready to work on this issue on extending these tax cuts for months. With the government reopening shortly,

Senate Republicans now finally have to come to the table or make no mistake, Americans will remember who stood in the way. So I urge Speaker Johnson to finally return the House of Representatives into session and quickly reopen the government. Virginia Senator Tim Kaine also expressed optimism and relief on Monday. I got the first good night's sleep last night that I've gotten since October 1 because I wasn't worried about being able to look Capitol Police in the eye

when I walked in or what a furloughed federal worker. would say to me at church or what somebody would say to me about their SNAP benefits. None of the senators who broke ranks face re-election in 2026 and two are retiring. So, as you might be able to guess, their positivity was not shared by pretty much anyone else. Multiple Democratic members of the House, including California Representative Ro Khanna and Michigan Representative Rashida Talib, have called for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down from his leadership position. And California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom also some strong words for Senate Democrats during remarks made at the 2025 United Nations Climate Change

Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I worry now, though, it sounds like some of my colleagues and friends in the United States Senate, some of my Democratic colleagues just decided that we're playing by the old set of rules, not the new set of rules, it may have rolled over a little bit. And in case there was any doubt that the Democrats who struck a deal with Republicans will have little to show for their compromise, here's Word Smith and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson talking with CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday. So you're not committing to bringing up a bill

that deals with the Obamacare subsidies before they expire? I'm not committing to it or not committing to it. What I'm saying is that we do a deliberative process. That's the way this always works, and we have to have time to do that, and we will in a bipartisan fashion. Sure. Among the toughest in the senators,

who, one could argue, caved like Spelunkers, was Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. I spoke to Senator Sanders on Monday afternoon, ahead of a vote by the Senate to back a spending package that could end the government shutdown. Senator Sanders, welcome to what today? My pleasure. You've spoken out against the deal that eight Democratic senators reached over the weekend to possibly end the shutdown. To me, it doesn't do anything.

It doesn't include an extension on the ACA subsidies that Democrats have been demanding this whole time. What message do you think your colleagues are sending to the American public with this deal? Well, let's be clear. they are eight out of 47 people in the caucus. But what those eight people are saying is, look, we're not prepared to stand up and take on Trump and the Republican Party, which up until this point,

in an unprecedented way, has refused to negotiate anything. We think Trump is too strong, too powerful, we can't do anything, let's end the shutdown. That's the message that's getting out. I think that's a terrible message. I think as Tuesday's election showed, The American people are sick and tired of Trumpism.

We are gaining more and more support, and certainly, to your point, what passage of this bill does, it will raise ACA premiums for over 20 million people and pave the way. We don't talk about this enough, Jane, for 15 million people to be thrown off of Medicaid and studies suggest that some 50,000 of those people will die every single year because they no longer have health care. That's what's at stake here. Now, as part of this deal, Republicans will guarantee a vote on extending ACA subsidies in the Senate.

First of all, do you think that vote will happen? Here in the Senate? Yeah, I think it probably will. But it doesn't mean anything. And this is what bothers me. It's a totally bogus gesture. I trust everybody knows that we have two branches of the Congress, the Senate and the House. and what Johnson over in the House, the Speaker, has been very clear about.

Of course, he's not going to allow that vote to take place. So you can win the vote here by 100 to zero, and people can jump up and down and talk about how great it is. It doesn't mean anything. It's going no place, period. Over the weekend, Republicans, including President Trump and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, talked about alternatives to the ACA subsidies. Senator Cassidy proposed sending federal money directly to flexible spending accounts,

which sounds like nonsense to me, but that's what he said. Trump was less clear about how the money would be distributed because I don't think he knows what health insurance is. What do you make of these proposals? I'm asking you this. Would you be willing to support any version of them? No. You know, when you were speaking, you reminded me of,

you remember during the debate that Trump had with Kamala Harris during the campaign and somebody asked them about health care? And he says, well, we are contemplating. We're working on a proposal. He was president for four years, had four more years to think about it, running again. And today, they do not have any serious proposal. All right? So let's talk about health care for one second.

All right. Can we do that? Absolutely. That's what I'm here for. All right. Let's do it. The function of the current health care system is to make the insurance companies and the drug companies very rich. It is succeeding.

But for the average American, it is a total. complete failure. So where do we go from here? What we need to do, and I wish I could be more original than I am, is to learn from every other major country on earth. I live 50 miles away from the Canadian border. Okay, Jane, if you're in Canada, you're a Canadian citizen, you have a heart transplant, you have serious surgery, okay? You're in the hospital for a month. Do you know what the bill is? I believe it is zero. It is zero. Unless I gather you parked your car in the parking lot and you have a fee for parking. Other than that, it is zero.

If you go for cancer treatment, it is zero. And you know how much they spend per capita, per capita compared to us, half as much? So the next question is, okay, if the rest of the world is doing it, why aren't we doing it? Well, then you're into a corrupt campaign finance system in which the drug companies, drug companies themselves have 1,800 paid lobbyists right here in Washington, D.C., insurance companies of all kinds of lobbyists. They make huge amounts of campaign contributions. So what you're dealing with is not a health care debate, but really a political debate as to whether elected officials have the guts to stand up to the insurance company and the drug companies. Senator Sanders, you've been talking

about Medicare for all for years. And, you know, to your point, and especially because I think that something that struck me about this past election was the way in which you started to hear Republicans saying, like, it's time to take on insurance companies, it's time to take on big pharma, and then they didn't do any of it because they didn't mean any of it, but that's neither here nor there. But since Medicare for All is not likely to pass while Republicans control the White House and Congress, because of all the reasons you've pointed out, what alternatives to Medicare for All would you like to see in the meantime? Are there short-term solutions beyond extending the ACA subsidies.

Well, Jane, we have to, at this particular moment, we have to at least for a year extend the ACA subsidies or else will be a disaster for so many people. And throwing 15 million people off of Medicaid is really incredibly cruel. So you've got to do that. But what I would hope, and it's important to understand that when I talk about Medicare for all,

it's not that on, you know, next Thursday, we're going to transform the entire health care system. It is a five-year transition period. All right? You tell me, all right, will the American people support a first year which says, okay, what we're going to do is lower the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 55? What do you think? You're a good politician.

I think that they would get into it, especially if the alternative is their health care premium spiking, like, immediately. All right. So I think they would. And then we say in the first year, let's include all of the children, all people under 18. And the next year, we go from 55 down to 45, following year 45 to 35. In other words, it gives the system time to work out the problems. It's not a one-day transition. So I think that is the direction we have got to go. And that is why I am working really very hard to see that we elect candidates to the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. representatives who are strongly supportive of Medicare for all. I mean, to that point, you endorsed Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan and her state's Senate primary race. You've also endorsed Senate candidates in Michigan and Maine. How do you decide when to weigh in on these types of races and is support for Medicare for all the main factor for you?

It is for me. It's not the only factor, but it is the main, all three of those candidates support Medicare for all. And in fact, in Michigan, Abdul El-Said is a doctor. He's a medical doctor. He wrote a book. We've had him on the show. He's great. The book is called Medicare for All. So he knows a little bit about the subject.

And those are the kinds of folks that we need in the U.S. Senate. I think we have, you know, above and beyond health care, what goes on in this country is I think people feel so beaten down politically that we don't ask the simple questions. And that is we are the richest country on earth. we got a guy, Mr. Musk, who's on his way to become a trillionaire, and you've got millions of families struggling to put food on the table. Why is that?

Why is that? And people, I think, you know, just have a lot of ways have given up. And we're trying to bring those folks into the political process to say things like health care for all is not a radical idea. It exists all over the place. That's kind of what we're trying to do without political movement. Well, Senator, I think to your point, I was a, I'll tell you a little story. I was at church this past weekend. And I was hearing from people at my church who were talking about SNAP and they were talking about health care premiums. And they were talking about how this very issue is so direct to so many people. And, you know, it seems small ball to even ask you this. But do you think the millions of Americans whose health care premiums, like the people I go to church with, the people I'm around every day, they're about to spike? Can they realistically expect any help from Congress for the,

the coming year? Yesterday's vote was a real step backwards. I can't say, I mean, it depends on how effective we are in rallying the American people, but that's what yesterday's vote was about. So we're not given up by any means. The worst thing in the world is that I want to see is people in your church and all over this country saying, you know what, nothing we can do. Trump and his billionaire friends are just too powerful.

We're just after going to get by. I want to, from the bottom of my heart, I want us to regain the hope in the belief that we can do great things. We can. You know, we're smart people. We are, God knows, are hardworking people. But we've got to begin to understand and work to make sure that we just don't have a political system and an economy that works for Elon Musk and his friends rather than ones that work for all of us. Now, some Democrats have called on Senator Chuck Schumer to step down as my president. minority leader over this vote, over the defection from moderate Democrats to end the shutdown,

do you still support him as minority leader? Well, it's not a question of supporting him. I'm a little bit at a disadvantage. I'm not even a Democrat. I'm an independent caucusing within the Democratic Party. But the question is fine. If Schumer would resign, who would take his place? The issue is not the personality of Chuck Schumer.

The issue is, you know, Chuck is part of the Democratic establishment. That's no secret. And so are, you know, that is what most of, or many of my caucus members are as well. So to replace Chuck with somebody else whose views are not different, it doesn't make a lot of difference. What I am trying to do is to change the nature of the Democratic caucus so that we have leadership, which is progressive. We're not there yet by any means. That's why I'm working so hard on trying to win Senate races and in the House as well. Senator Sanders, thank you so much for your time.

Well, thank you very much, Jane. Take care. That was my conversation with Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders. We'll get to more of the news in the moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review and up a podcast, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day? It's brought to you by Green Chef. There's something about fall that makes it the perfect time to reset and bring healthy habits back into focus.

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Head to greenchef.com slash 50Wod and use Code 50Wod to get 50% off your first month, then 20% off for two months with free shipping. That's code 50Wad at greenchef.com slash 50Wad. Here's what else we're following today. Head of lines. I like them. I get along with him, the president. The new president is here. and we'll do everything we can to make Syria successful

because that's part of the Middle East. We have peace now in the Middle East first time that anyone can remember that ever happening. No, we don't. But President Trump declared it so after hosting Syrian President Ahmad al-Shara on Monday, the first ever visit by a Syrian president to the White House. It's a significant 180 for the former militant

who Trump appeared to welcome with open arms. U.S. officials said Monday that Syria has joined the U.S.-led global coalition to fight the Islamic State Group, according to the Wall Street Journal. Al-Sharab was named the country's interim leader in January after rebel forces toppled Bashar al-Assad's brutal government last December. But Al-Shara once had ties to al-Qaeda as well as a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. Nonetheless, Trump told reporters after their meeting Monday that he has confidence in the new Syrian president. We want to see Syria become a country that's very successful. And I think this leader can do it. I really do. I think this leader can do it. And people said he's had a rough

past. We all had rough pasts. But he has had a rough past. And I think, frankly, if you didn't have a rough, you wouldn't have a chance. Some pass are like Al-Qaeda rough, but I digress. Trump and Al-Shara's Oval Office meeting was close to the press, but we know it was on the Syrian leader's agenda, a permanent repeal of sanctions known as a Caesar Act imposed on Syria during Assad's rule. Trump waived sanctions in May, and on Monday, the Treasury Department suspended them for another 180 days. A permanent repeal would require an act of Congress.

The Supreme Court has rejected a call to consider overturning its landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Without comment, the justices turned away the appeal on Monday. That appeal was brought by Kim Davis, a former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. after the high court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right to gay marriage. Davis had been fighting a lower court order that she pay $360,000 in damages

and attorney's fees to a couple she denied a marriage license. Time to get a hobby, Kim. Pack it up. Legal experts had noted the appeal by Davis was a long shot, but nonetheless, it still caused anxiety among many Americans. Davis's lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling. Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito

are the other dissenters who are still in the court today. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned. Sure. Well, Donald Trump, in terms of the exercise of his pardon power and commutations, is completely and totally out of control. Exactly my sentiment. to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Convicted felon, Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, his one-time chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and a slew of others accused of backing Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Can he do that? Yes, but it only applies to federal crimes. And none of the dozens of allies named in the proclamation were ever charged federally. The pardons underscore Trump's continued efforts to promote the idea that former President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election.

He did. Courts around the country and Trump's own Attorney General at the time found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome. Among those pardoned were Sidney Powell, an attorney who promoted baseless conspiracy theories

about a stolen election, John Eastman, another lawyer who pushed a plan to keep Trump in power, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who championed Trump's efforts to challenge his loss. Ed Martin,

the Department of Justice's point man on pardons, linked its announcement of the pardon Sunday night to a post on Twitter that read, quote, no MAGA left behind. Because no one is above the law, unless they're a MAGA Republican. The shutdown continues to impact the skies, as the Federal Aviation Administration

pushes ahead with deeper cuts to flights at dozens of major U.S. airports. Airlines canceled nearly 5,500 flights since Friday, with one in ten flights nationwide scrapped on Sunday alone. Staffing is collapsing as unpaid air traffic controllers near their second missed paycheck and more retire or quit by the day. Some controllers can't afford child care, while others are moonlighting as delivery drivers or even selling plasma

to pay their bills. Ever the motivator in a time of selling bodily fluids, President Trump hopped on true social to demand that controllers, quote, get back to work now, and floated a $10,000 bonus for those who stayed on the job without taking leave, while threatening to dock the pay of those who did. And the cuts are only accelerating. The FAA ordered flight reductions jump from 4% to 6% today and to 10% by week's end. At a time when flyers are understandably anxious, Delta pilot captain Christopher Pennington took to the intercom to deliver a reassuring pre-flight speech to passengers on a flight to Raleigh, North Carolina on Thursday. I know we probably have quite a few nervous flyers today. It is perfectly understandable. I want to emphasize

this aircraft does not move a single inch unless both my co-captain Michael and myself are absolutely certain and safe to do so. Top that off, before I left the house on this trip, my little one has learned the word ice cream, and she made me make sure I promised her to get her ice cream when I get back home from the trip. That being said, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing unsafe comes in between me, that little girl in her ice cream. Good for Captain Pennington, and that's the news. Before we go, in today's attention economy, the only thing worse than being hated is being boring, and reality TV news it.

In Bravo America, John Levitt dives into the genre with icons of reality television. On the latest episode, Real Housewives of New York cast member Durinda Medley joins to recall the Wild West of Bravo, before social media, and glam squads. She talks about how reality TV helped her become the star of her own life, and she and John commiserate about being eliminated first from their competition shows,

though Durenda's traitors ouster was far less justified. Catch new episodes every Tuesday on the Love It or Leave It Feed and YouTube. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the many mysteries of our universe

as seen through the eyes of Donald Trump and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, I'm not just about how... Nobody knows what magnets are. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And would you be surprised to know that this is not the first time Trump has displayed

an impressive lack of knowledge about how magnets work? Here he is in January, 2024. Now, all I know about magnets is this. Give me a glass of water. Let me drop it on the magnets. That's the end of the magnets. Magnets do. In fact, work underwater.

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