Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Journalist Nathan Stone and Producer Josh Carmody invite you to sit down for deep dives on the rapid changes happening in Trump’s new America.
00:02
The United States is reeling from its latest act of political violence. The shooting of Charlie Kirk has set off a wave of anger and misinformation, much of it stemming from the president himself. In this hyper-polarized era, we're forced to ask, are political killings becoming normalized? Welcome to the politics of New America. On the show today, we discuss the rising wave of political violence, then we'll dive into the threat of government shutdown and why it's become a never-ending American crisis.
00:32
I'm Nathan Stone, with me today is producer Josh Carmody. Hell of a week. Hell of a week, everybody. Yeah, they seem to be. They seem to be. I feel like we see it every single time, but my goodness. Wow. Yeah, I had a totally different set. It's totally different topic planned, but all anyone is talking about. honestly, news wise, think Charlie Kirk has sucked up more oxygen.
01:02
this week than almost any political killing in my lifetime that I can remember. And maybe it's just because I'm so dialed into the news at this point, but it's just everywhere. All of the foreign services, it's an inescapable thing. And maybe it was just because it was done on camera. And so we've been able to see the whole thing. But this has been an absolutely disturbing week.
01:30
for American politics and yeah, I would love to have skipped this topic, but here we are. Yeah, no, we can't. Yeah, this week has been five years. like that brief period of time when they did not know who the shooter was, bananas. Like just the stuff that was coming out of people's mouths and stuff that's being posted online. uh I mean, there is just so much.
01:59
of right wing people, uh, declaring war and, you know, like, uh, we're, we're not going to stand for this. I saw one video of a guy who was like, you think you can get away with this? And then he started to go into his own rendition of the Kit Kat bar theme song. Give me a break. Yeah. But like saying it in like a gruff grumbly way, like, give me a break. Give me a break.
02:26
And the video I was watching was a compilation, so they skipped past it, so I don't know where he went with it. I can only imagine that it was slurs that rhymed, so, you know. I'm willing to make that assumption at this point. Oh, yeah. This reaction from elements of the American right, I think, is totally beyond the pale, but it does speak to...
02:54
the influence that that Kirk had amongst a certain type of Republican uh right wing person in the United States. And before we get into it, I don't really want to talk about Charlie Kirk, the guy that's not really how this show operates. But what I want to talk about is kind of what we've seen because of this and what we might see going forward. So.
03:23
To sum up, if occasionally I will provide some Charlie Kirk, the guy for context. There we go. Just so we're aware. So Charlie Kirk, for anyone who has escaped the endless media coverage of this, of course, one of the leading voices at Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk was a propagandist more than he was anything else. You'll see him being called a lot of things uh over.
03:52
you know, the past week or so. The news is really. Kind of stuck on right wing activist. I don't think that is the appropriate term for him. What he did was mainly propaganda and he was very, very good at it. A lot of his his work dealt with going to American colleges and challenging the the liberal ideas that they found there. It would not be reductive to call him a.
04:21
with right-wing views. Absolutely. But he did a lot more than just the podcast. The podcast, of course, being a huge vehicle for him. But he was involved with a lot of different things. uh As far as the man himself, I find his views to be absolutely despicable. Oh, abhorrent. What I'll say about his death is that I think it's best summed up by the man himself, in his words.
04:51
You know, he wouldn't want me to feel empathy for him because, to quote him, I think empathy is a made-up new age term that does a lot of damage. Also, I think the manner of his death, which he was shot, you know, I think that was probably the way that he would want to go considering he says gun violence deaths are the cost of keeping our Second Amendment rights. So...
05:19
Taking those two quotes together, I mean, he died doing what he loved, defending Second Amendment rights, and he would be angry with me if I were to feel empathy for him, so I won't. uh yeah, those are kind of my thoughts on Charlie through Charlie. Thanks, Charlie. Now, Josh, I know you've got some probably big thoughts on Charlie. Oh, do I?
05:50
I was getting them out of my system before I got onto a microphone, in which I am paid to be in front of. Excellent. So what I wanted to kind of cover today, and you brought this up and kind of set me up perfectly for it, is the reaction from the American right to Charlie's death and the amount of voices and
06:18
I'm sure some of them are not legitimate voices in terms, you know, I'm sure there are some bots out there, whatever. But the amount of influencers, the amount of people on social media calling for civil war in this case was more than a little sobering because I just, find it extraordinary that if my side
06:47
of political spectrum, which admittedly is basically an endangered species in the United States. But if my side of the political spectrum controlled every facet of the American federal government and had been almost without any sort of major roadblocks pushing through its policies,
07:14
for last, what, at eight, nine months now?
07:20
I don't know that I would feel the need to... uh, bay for blood and civil war if an influencer got shot. Right? like, even... No, Charlie Kirk, not a politician, but a political figure. Oh, yeah. So, I was left with this kind of strange feeling of, okay, clearly...
07:50
everything that the Trump administration has been doing isn't enough for these people. Right? And that's a much scarier prospect than just owning the libs, winning, right? And you have won, you are winning, your guys are in power.
08:14
your guys control every facet of the federal government and
08:20
You're calling for civil war. That makes me think that there for a slew of uh right-wing America, nothing is going to be enough until there is open violence, until they can settle whatever scores, real and imagined, that they have. And that puts us at a very kind of
08:50
dangerous trajectory here.
08:54
If there's not anything that your nominally democratically elected representatives can do when they're all on your team, if that's not enough, then we get to the point where this kind of conflict becomes inevitable and this kind of political violence becomes...
09:20
normalized rape. I love the really roundabout way that you quoted JFK there because I believe that he did have something to say about that when you make peaceful resolution impossible, then you make violent retribution like kind of like what people the only thing they have. uh I think the thing that is, oh I guess, not surprising to me, but something that people need to be thinking about is
09:48
Yes, they're in control of everything. Then why is it that the Democrats are still this huge problem? They're still like, they're, when, when, like they're simultaneously when the Republicans are in power, both the super weak, bleeding heart, uh, demon rats.
10:08
uh that want everyone to be trans and they can't throw a baseball and stuff like that they're all weak and they don't know what guns are and they'll lose really easily to a civil war because only right-wing people buy guns. Not true, the far left is packing. And then also they're so powerful as to pull off simultaneous conspiracies of a fake Jeffrey Epstein-like log
10:37
in which he's also potentially innocent because what was anyone arrested for and pulling off a like assassination that is meant to smear things or or or what have you like there's it's just the flooding the zone with shit you know yeah there's it's interesting because the the the enemies of of the right always have to be both
11:06
weak and pathetic, but a monumental threat to everything you've ever held dear. so it's very hard trying to square that circle. But what's even more kind of, uh I think, disturbing here is that the more we learn about this, uh the suspect in this case,
11:35
The more complicated it seems his views were politically. he doesn't had any at all. That's it. And that's really where it lands. Yeah. It's like, know. I think this dude was terminally online and crazy. Yeah. I think that might be where it lands. And then it's like, yeah, no one gets to no one gets to grab them for their side. Like this isn't this isn't the Mario to their Luigi. This isn't.
12:03
their lord and savior on the right. No, it's just a person who has zero views. This is the Joker. Some people just want to watch the world burn. And that that in itself, because the uh the the FBI has has coined it nihilistic violent extremism, which if that's not a sign of the times we're living in, I don't know. Is this a recent quote or is this
12:33
from another time. this is no, this is this is kind of current. They just said this. OK, so this is this isn't for for particularly like the Charlie Kirk shooter, but but uh a whole subset of people who are uh not motivated by traditional means and not affiliated with traditional political movements. And so, for example, uh the the man that tried to assassinate
13:03
Trump at his rally. Okay, the rally. So Thomas Matthew Crooks, that was at the Pennsylvania campaign rally. was the ear. um And when Trump's lightning flash reflexes protected him. I mean, if you look at the video, he goes into full neo bullet time, just dodging. mean, historically, he can't pin him down. He's definitely looking from left to right at all times.
13:33
Crooks, there's little record of any political stances whatsoever. And the FBI, previous to the new FBI that we have now, said that- That's new with an N-U. That is, yeah. And a hyphen. That Crooks also researched then President Joe Biden as a possible target. So this isn't-
14:00
necessarily it's not really a left right thing and it probably isn't a left right thing with with the shooter for for Kirk but. When the president of the United States comes out before anyone knows anything and blames the mythical radical left of America the the left that I would just love to ask anyone any right wing politician any any right wing influencer.
14:30
To present, present me with the radical left. Find them. Be careful, I'm gonna get blackbagged in the night and put on stage somewhere. It's definitely me, I have too many cut off versions of clothes. Okay, so it's Josh, all right. They'll dye my hair a little bit just to add something to it, but it's me. blue highlights.
14:56
When the president comes on it and he says, yeah, that this is the work of the radical left, when in fact, this is the maybe uh side effect of the rampant normalization of violence of all kinds in our society, plus the mental health crisis that we just kind of remember every now and again and then forget about uh until something tragic happens.
15:27
It's well, we remember about it every time the shooter is white. We certainly don't recall any of that of the different shade. That's a fair point. Yeah. Royal we are here. OK. So one of the one of the reasons why I kind of felt we had to address this other than the fact that it's it's very kind of forward in the news right now is that things are.
15:55
Political violence in the United States is getting more and more common, especially kind of during this this new era. Well, we had the Hortmans, uh I think, six months ago. Yeah. So they were law. was a lawmaker in Minnesota. Her husband, their dog were all killed in a singular like home invasion shooting where they pretended the shooter pretended to be a police officer.
16:22
Something that we are all too familiar with here in Nova Scotia. uh It happened several years ago that a man uh pretended to be an RCMP officer. He had repainted a car and went on a massive killing spree. And it was a huge deal here. Oh, yeah. And for years, there was committees and investigations and many things. Working at Global went through a lot of the footage of that. uh Crazy stuff.
16:52
It was hugely scarring to the community. Yeah. And and so for that to happen there and it disappears in a couple of weeks. uh Trump said that he wasn't going to call Governor Walls. Tim Walls, the man who ran for vice president, along with Kamala Harris, uh said it was a waste of time. He didn't did not go to the funeral either. And they didn't. I don't believe they put the flags at half mass. They did not. They did not. OK. Yeah. I knew there was.
17:22
Certain times where they've pushed against it and maybe did so I wasn't sure. But so yeah, that happened. So that is very recent. That's extreme. That's extreme political violence. Absolutely. uh Even even I mean, not to say that like a guy getting shot with a hunting rifle in front of a crowd of people isn't extreme, but he wasn't an elected official. Yeah. And in the past 14 months or so, not only have we seen
17:52
everything that you mentioned here. uh There's been shooting, there was a shooting at a campaign office for Kamala Harris in Arizona. The uh Pennsylvania governor's residence was firebombed while his family, while he and his family were sleeping inside. And of course there were two assassination attempts on Trump during the presidential elections.
18:19
And that's not a uh complete list, but I think those are some of the bigger ones. And these are all within a year, correct? Yeah, within about a year. But yeah. Oh, Sorry. There's there's statistics showing uh increased threats towards politicians, judges and other kind of government officers, as well as uh Capitol Police. So the police in D.C.
18:49
reported an increase in threatening incidents to about 14,000 so far this year from 9,000 for all of 2024. Now, I'm always a little suspicious of statistics released by police departments, especially when in their subjective like this, but that is a massive increase. ah So it's a pattern that we're seeing kind of start to play itself out.
19:19
in American political life. And House Speaker Mike Johnson did an interview on CNN this past Wednesday and basically told them that, uh you know, the members of Congress are feeling nervous and want more security. And he said, you know, they're exposed all the time everywhere. And now Republicans being afraid of gun violence is
19:49
Oh boy, guys, don't know how, how, how do you, how do you feel? Uh, mean, we can probably tell them how Charlie Kirk felt, uh to quote Charlie Kirk, uh, in terms of gun violence in a society that has second amendment rights. I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment.
20:19
Yeah, I guess they just didn't mean them then. Or maybe they were just talking about the kids. I don't know. Well, and that's something that I've like brought up to other people, not people that are on the side of Charlie Kirk, but just saying to people, it's like, every time there's been a school shooting. And I want to say this to all the people who watch the same video that I did of Charlie Kirk being shot on stage, because I did watch the like videos where you could see it up close. That's what happened.
20:48
to the children in those schools every single time. Sometimes more than one bullet passed through their body and that's what it looked like and they didn't care. Boy, it sure is different when it's someone that you listen to or someone that you have a parasocial relationship with through a podcast. Just a beautiful white man who now is an angel. Tiny face, but I don't hold it against him.
21:18
I'm so glad you brought up school shootings though. And that's the first time I've ever said that sentence because it makes the point for me that I think is probably the most salient of this discussion. So I looked at and there was a school shooting the day that Kirk died. I just got a little buried in the news. And so you remember Columbine you would have been
21:48
Just a little. was very young, but it was a very big event. Yeah. Similar like similar to many other things around my age at that time of 9 11 and and another thing I was around around a similar age. And I remember very much the bowling for Columbine documentary, which really brought it into light for a lot of people and how dramatic it was. Yeah. So Columbine was.
22:16
What I think it was in a lot of ways was a
22:22
a point of no return. And it didn't seem like that at the time. uh Columbine was the first time that I had ever heard of a school shooting. wasn't the first school shooting in history, but it was so violent and it was so, you know, we had the security camera footage, right? We saw the guys in trench coats walking through the halls.
22:43
It was so visceral and it was coldly calculated. Yeah, it's because Stephen King, think under Richard Bachman, had written a book about a school shooting sometime in the 80s, maybe like late 80s or something like that. And even it was considered like too much in its time because of the very, very few school shootings that had happened that had potentially inspired it. Yeah. And that's about
23:11
12 years off the mark, maybe more. And because of of Columbine and everything that happened, the huge media attention that it got, the the movie bowling for Columbine, there, the documentary, it kind of wedged itself into the psyche of a lot of people that that were.
23:37
uh alive to witness it or hear it about it on the news. And it became uh kind of this marker. Right. And so ever since then, we've kind of had Columbine as this anchor point of when did school shootings start to get out of control in the United States. And that was really the first one.
24:02
Uh, and at the time it seemed like a crazy outlier, just an incredible tragedy that, you know, how did this happen? And now we have school shootings regularly in the United States. We see them and CNN, uh, put together a poll. is back in 2018, but they, they tracked, uh, school shootings by country.
24:32
uh from January 2009 to May 2018. And so they ranked the world on a list. uh So South Africa was third with six school shootings. Mexico was second with eight school shootings. The United States was first with 288 school shootings. Can you remember more than...
25:01
three or four of those? Because this is before- If I try, but even then, naming them specifically by school, I probably couldn't get to 10. So what's happened in the decades since Columbine is not that we haven't had tragedies at that scale. It's not that we haven't had hundreds and hundreds of children lose their lives needlessly.
25:31
It's that it's become normalized, right? This is something that is absolutely heinous and in any other country in the whole world would be the cause for immediate soul searching.
25:51
And the United States is averaging uh about 87 school shootings a year. Now, people will dispute that because different criteria are used by different, you know, statisticians when they're creating these lists, Were there casualties? Were there not casualties? You know, how many casualties were there? But...
26:18
I don't it matters. I don't think it matters. Yeah. think really splitting hairs on that. mean, especially when Trump said, oh, we just got to get over it. Yeah. Just got to get over it. So this is the kind of inflection point that we might be seeing with American political violence. And American political violence has always been there in the background.
26:47
We could do a really interesting history of all the times presidents got shot. Maybe maybe we will. I was like pretty sure when Lincoln got shot people had a lot of feelings about it on both sides including the guy who did it. So. What I think people should really be worried about here isn't so much this one particular act it's that they're getting more frequent and.
27:17
The
27:20
The end result of all of this could be a violence-based breakdown in the American political order because of uh near constant...
27:40
uh violence and killings. And this isn't sustainable. What is happening here, right? These calls for civil war. That's not things you would have seen, you know, 20, 30 years ago, right? People doing it proudly and openly uh because one person got shot. Yeah, I I lived through the Bush era. And while there was
28:09
major political discourse, I'm certainly not going to sugarcoat it like it was all hunky dory and we all got along and we're like, oh, well, you you voted for Bush, but hey, you're still my neighbor. Like it wasn't that either then. But it's far it's only escalated since. And the the kind of discourse that was around that time when people spoke out against it, uh there seemed to be repercussions or at least the ability to explain yourself.
28:38
Because I remember there were people who uh had things to say about Bush, but then were getting like ratted out by like people at their gym, you know, and then guys would show up in black suits and be like, oh, I hear you talking shit about George W. Bush. And that happened. Yeah, that that did happen. That's that's equally as scary as things that are going on now. But there's it's only increased. mean, there's there's people in masks taking people off the street. Yeah. Now, like it's
29:08
It's not gotten better. It certainly wasn't better back then. So I'm not like wishing for these good times, but you it's there's you can see the threads to it. yeah, you're right. This is this has been kind of developing for for decades now. And we're getting to the point that I think. We might see political violence become just.
29:36
a part of the American experience, just like we see with school shootings now, that ah they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas to stop school shootings. And the only thing that might help with the threat of unending political violence is the fact that the political class would very much like to protect themselves and are motivated to do something about it. You know what doesn't help?
30:05
is uh Gavin Newsom being like, hey, Charlie Kirk, great guy. That does not help. You know, I'm so glad that I already said on this show, I'm not sure about that guy. And then the other shoe dropped like a tungsten rod from the upper atmosphere. I don't know how else to put it. It was like, oh, thank God. There it is. You, Kristin Chenoweth and Selma Blair-Kendall, get into a rocket and fly to whatever new colony you're intending to start.
30:36
Yeah, this is this is the thing. Gavin Newsom is is at best as a centrist liberal. And that is what he has always been. And liberalism is is far too. At times, conciliatory uh with the far right and and. Well, they don't want to hurt people's feelings. They don't want to make people feel uncomfortable.
31:06
No, and I think it would I'm fairly certain that Martin Luther King Jr. said uh the moderate white who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative piece, which is the absence of tension to a positive piece, which is the presence of justice. That's the one. And that is absolutely something we're seeing right now. So.
31:32
That's kind of, I think, where we can leave this particular one for now. We'll see how it all plays out, it's... uh We saw a lot of really concerning stuff uh and some terrible misinformation. uh Also, The Guardian uh published and retracted an article that was shared, I think, about a trillion times on the right before.
32:00
uh before it was. Oh, is that the one where the guy said that he went to school with him? Yeah, yeah. And then they were like, oh, what do you remember of him? It's like, oh, I haven't seen him in like 20, 15 years. Yeah, it was like a long, absurdly long time. Now, uh changing gears a little bit here. I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about. What in the world is going on with US government shutdowns, because it's.
32:28
It's a never ending crisis before Congress, these shutdowns. And it doesn't happen pretty much anywhere else in the world. And so I kind of thought it would be an interesting thing for us to kind of delve into. Why is that the case? And so how did all of this government shutdown nonsense start? Well, it really wasn't a problem until
32:58
the 1980s. So in 1980, uh Attorney General Benjamin Sivetti issued uh a legal opinion requiring it. So basically what happened was there were uh funding gaps in programs because Congress uh back in the 80s, much like Congress today, doesn't always get things done.
33:25
the fastest and sometimes funding would run out before uh they issued new funding and before that these these kind of uh these kind of gaps were kind of ignored a lot of the time you know they'd be made up later it was it was always kind of just a a uh norm
33:54
to say that, okay, well, we know the funding's gonna run out, but Congress is gonna get to it. We're just gonna keep things rolling and we'll make adjustments retroactively, basically. But Silvetti, when he took a look at it, he was like, actually, no, constitutionally, if Congress hasn't... uh
34:23
approved funding past this point. cannot go past this point. is unconstitutional for federal uh programs and services. even still, his opinion wasn't consistently adhered to throughout the 1980s. But by the 1990s, uh all funding gaps that lasted longer than a few hours have led to
34:51
a government shutdown. uh
34:58
as of ah
35:04
As of today, there's been 10 funding shutdowns that have led to federal employees being furloughed.
35:12
So this is something that is kind of in the Constitution, but was just interpreted in a different way before 1980. And then after 1980, because of this requirement for Congress to basically have their shit together, ah it started causing real problems. So there's kind of...
35:40
three key factors when it comes to why this happens in the United States and not elsewhere. The first one is the power of the purse, which we've talked about on the show before. uh The Constitution grants Congress the power to authorize all government spending. Please, someone tell Trump that I would, but he doesn't return my calls. We've talked about the power of the purse so much so much that we should be selling shirts. Just say the glitter power of the purse. It's a crop top. Yeah. Oh.
36:10
I would absolutely wear a crop top that said power of the person. Excellent. You're going to make it way too easy for them to spot you as one of the radical left. The Constitution grants Congress that power and it ensures that no money can be spent from the Treasury without Congress's explicit approval through appropriations bills.
36:36
Then there's the anti-deficiency act. This is a law that prohibits agencies from spending money or incurring obligations for which no appropriation has been provided by Congress. So you can see how these two things together uh cause shutdowns. And then finally, there was that legal interpretation that we mentioned in the 80s. And that was...
37:03
kind of a mandate that agencies cease operations when there was a lap in funding. And that turned those old funding gaps, which everyone kind of just ignored a little bit, into full-on shutdowns. So the reason why you don't see this in other areas or in other nations is that, for example, the parliamentary system, which is popular amongst the majority of liberal democracies in the world,
37:33
uh, the executive, so usually the prime minister has to maintain the confidence of the legislature and pass a budget bill. If that budget bill fails to pass, the government will typically, uh, face a no confidence vote leading to brand new elections rather than shut down services. So in that way it's tied in. And so, for example, here in Canada, where
38:03
uh We right now have a governing uh liberal majority. The prime minister is a member of the Liberal Party. He is chosen by the Liberal Party to serve as prime minister. uh And the liberals have a majority in the House, which means they can pass those bills uh freely. And so their budgets will not fail. And so you would never see a government shutdown. Now,
38:33
There are other kind of presidential systems, republics, um that also don't face this problem. And that's because those systems grant the executive branch the authority to continue government operations during budget impasses. This is if the United States wanted to fix this problem, this would be the easiest way to do it. What would be to ah amend the Constitution and allow the executive to just
39:02
kind of caretaker government ah without having uh Congress, without Congress having yet passed the latest round of funding. Is this the government version of like in a Looney Tunes cartoon where someone's walking along with a bag of cash and then someone comes and pokes a hole in the bottom of it and the coins start pouring into their bag and the other person just doesn't notice?
39:29
Is this my way of explaining to myself like I'm five? Is this working or do we need something simpler? oh I think you're on, you're certainly on a path. But what it really comes down to in this case is the makeup of the congressional houses, right?
39:58
So, for example, if say Republicans had a supermajority in the House, in the Senate, they have everything. uh There would be no problem passing their budget. And right now they just have a majority, not a supermajority. They do not have a supermajority. So a simple majority is good enough in Congress. As thin as that majority is for the Republicans, it is enough to pass their budget.
40:26
They don't have to talk to the Democrats. don't have, you know, they. Well, clearly they keep voting on the Epstein files and it doesn't go through, even though a couple of Republicans would be like, maybe we should this time, which hey, political hater. uh It's it's it means nothing. Yeah, it seems to always be 51 to something. Exactly. So where the Republicans are in trouble right now is in the Senate. OK, so they have a majority in the Senate.
40:55
They do control the Senate, but they don't have the majority they need to avoid the Democratic filibuster. So basically, the filibuster is a really fancy way of saying, uh I get up and speak in the Senate and I don't stop talking and I suck up all the oxygen until we run out of time. And that delays you being able to pass this bill and either Stymie's
41:23
The legislation forces you to come to the table and negotiate with me or with some legislation just simply kills it because you run out of time. So the Democrats have in this case that in their arsenal, can they can filibuster the Republican budget. Now, oh, bless those little Democrats.
41:49
They're because they can't do anything. They can't do anything without needlessly henpecking themselves about what they should be doing. And did they focus group it enough? So right now there's a split over whether to take a stand, which is utterly insane to me, because what are you doing here otherwise? What would you say you do here, Democrats? This is like committee inception.
42:18
Yeah. Like we need a committee to form a committee to tell us what to do. Yes. There's there's a faction of Democrats that want a continuing resolution. So a continuing resolution is a stopgap. Basically, it says we don't agree with the Republican budget, but we don't want to shut down the government. So together with the Republicans, we're going to make
42:48
a temporary budget for this amount of time and they can they can choose it to be whatever and we will pass this instead of passing the budget and we just give that can a big old kick down the road and then in three months or six months or nine months we're here again and we're trying to figure this out and so there there is a faction of Democrats that that want to do that because they're arguing that
43:18
ah That would give everyone more time for a comprehensive deal. And if you know how little Congress has been doing uh during this sitting, my question is, why haven't you taken the time leading up to this to do it? But, you know, I'm not in Congress, so maybe they're very busy. uh Then there are, uh there is a faction. uh
43:46
that is more aggressive and wants to fight this battle. Because right now we're headed for a September 30th deadline for this budget. So AOC, uh obviously one of the more aggressive Democrats, uh she is very much on the we need to fight this battle side.
44:11
uh She was saying, I think we need to have a high price. so that price could be saving the American Care Act. Because the Democrats, of course, being the weaker party here, what they're trying to do is limit the damage that the Republicans can do to the things they like in this budget. Right. So when AOC says this, she's saying, if the Republicans want their budget and they want Democratic support, we can hold their feet to the fire and we can get them to
44:41
uh, continue funding programs that they want to cut, but we're not going to let.
44:48
Now, the Senate majority leader, Republican John Thune, he wants, he's insisting on a clean CR and that's a continuing resolution. A clean continuing resolution basically is a, we're going to keep doing everything as it is right now. No funding increases, no decreases, nothing. So that's what they're floating. On the Republican side of things, they have a couple of options.
45:18
Firstly, they could shut down the government. They could just say, no, we're not going to be held hostage by the radical left and we're going to let government shut down. And there is some thinking that, well, this would be a pretty great way to distract from a lot of the problems that they've been having. uh However, the issue with uh government shutdowns is it's really bad for
45:47
So many people, anyone who needs federal government services, for example, it's actually really bad for the economy because a lot of businesses rely on federal government data to make very uh expensive decisions. So every time you have a government shutdown, if it lasts for more than a few hours, you start knocking uh little bits off of uh your economic growth for that quarter. Right uh now,
46:17
The other thing that they could do is work with whatever Democrats will work with them to get a continuing resolution through. Right now, the GOP controls 53 seats. They require 60 votes to pass their funding bill or, you know, continuing resolution, whatever way they go with it. So if they can get some Democrats onside, they're probably fine. All of this...
46:45
is.
46:48
going to come to a head either after continuing resolution or by the end of this month and we'll have a much better idea of what will happen here. But a lot of important programs and funding is kind of on the table to be axed. And there's various expiring grants and tax credits.
47:18
that that kind of need to be either cut or reinstated. so one of the more likely scenarios is that the Republicans kind of bend to get enough Democrats on side. They lose some Republican votes from hardliners who, you know, absolutely do not want to fund whatever programs the Democrats want funding. But if they can pick up enough Democratic votes, that doesn't matter.
47:48
So it really is a balancing act for everyone here.
47:54
This is something that has become more and more prevalent in the American political system, these shutdowns. The longest shutdown of all time was actually back in Trump one. The ah like oh of ever of ever in the American government. It was a 35 day shutdown that spanned from almost like we're living in.
48:22
Yeah, everything's so precedent. Last season was unprecedented. Everything's precedent. now you don't even know. So, that was uh that kind of spanned a little bit of 2018 and 2019, and it was caused by a dispute over expanding the barriers on the border wall.
48:47
That was that was that one. Oh, the one that they're painting black on their side to stop people from climbing over. Yes. What are you stopping people from escaping during the day? So the other two longest, the second longest happened in ninety five, ninety six during Bill Clinton's administration over uh opposition to major spending cuts. uh
49:10
And so that, I believe, was during the time when Clinton was president, but the Republicans had control of Congress. Yeah. coming up on his second win, think. Yeah. And it's important to remember, too, that the president of the United States, if he doesn't like a budget, because it is a bill, it's an appropriations bill, but it's a bill, uh can veto it. Yeah. So if the Republicans and Democrats work together on this thing, they get something through, and Trump decides that it's not good enough,
49:39
He can veto it and everything gets reset and sent back right back down to them. And so there's a Sisyphus joke in here somewhere. sure I'm too stupid to make it. And finally, there was a 16 day shutdown in 2013 during the Obama administration caused by a dispute over implementation of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. So
50:08
We've seen in kind of the last 30 years, the three longest government shutdowns in American history. Now, of course, it's only got about a 50 year history of happening, but we're again, we're starting to see this become more and more of a theme. And these shutdowns can be used as a weapon as well. Right. There's a lot of especially in the Republican Party.
50:37
There's a lot of people who campaigned on draining the swamp, on basically destroying the federal government and making it as ineffective as possible. And so if they go back to their constituents and they're like, yeah, we shut it down, that plays well to a big part of the Republican base. So it's a tactic that they can use more and more. And like everything else that the Trump administration has done,
51:07
Even when it gets reversed, right? Even when funding starts up again or when they lose in court and the judge orders them to stop doing whatever thing they're doing, they've already done the damage. They've already weakened the institution. They've already crippled whatever it was that they sought to cripple. So because the wheels work so slowly in government and especially in the federal government,
51:37
It's a really good tactic if you are trying to basically weaken the United States federal government is to let this happen. The only problem is, of course, eventually the people you do care about, the billionaires, will start breathing down your neck to get things going again because they deeply rely on federal government services.
52:06
So, yeah, if you're ever curious as to why governments, the United States government shuts down and other governments do not, this is kind of the reason. Yeah. The closest thing we got in Canada is that they do seem to get like a summer break. They get a nice, fat summer break. like, this is, I don't know. I don't know if I really, I think I'd want them working as opposed to just getting clips of them like.
52:34
finishing marathons and going water skiing. know, like, hey, like people can't live. They get a good winter break, too. It's wild. Yeah. Well, you know what, though? Could be worse. Could be worse. All right, folks. This this was a bit of uh a kind of a heavier episode, especially the first half. But I hope you've enjoyed it and.
53:03
Oh, boy, we'll see you next week with whatever exciting, whatever new possibly could. What could possibly happen in between? Just one week episode. Yeah. Feel like the last one I was we were just so like, you know, kind of burnt out, but reserved. then that happened like literally right now. Like if we want to just go other places in the in London, there was a hundred thousand person there. Sure. Wrong.
53:30
very right wing, very anti-immigration march, and my mom is there on vacation right now. I hope she doesn't take the text that I said, how's London exclamation point, like I was being facetious. uh Because I honestly didn't know what I said to Was not trying to be. So sorry. But yeah, mean, lots of crazy stuff has happened. uh People are
54:00
On edge on both sides, more one side than the other. There's a little there's a little bit more sand weighing down the Golden Idol on one side of the scale than the other. But stuff's pretty wild. Yeah. And until next week when we're maybe recording from a bomb shelter or some other some other hidey hole, I.
54:26
Yeah, we were saved from a frontline duty, I think I accused, or not accused, I said we were probably gonna end up on the front lines somewhere else. Absolutely. Well, I mean, hey, still some front lines are open there. Hey, maybe we'll be in Poland covering the war. All right. Yeah, I don't know. Until next time, folks.
54:51
Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, give us a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice, and tell all your friends. The Politics of New America is hosted by Nathan Stone and produced by Josh Carmody. You can follow us on Blue Sky at Politics New America. This episode is sponsored by Leverage Assistants. Finding the right assistant can turbocharge your career, your business, and give you back precious time every day.
55:20
Finding the right person isn't easy, and that's where Leverage Assistants comes in. They take care of every step in the process of matching you with a top performing assistant that understands you and your business. Leverage only hires the best of the best, the top 1 % of executive assistants, to pair with their clients. They also do regular feedback and productivity checks to make sure that you are completely satisfied with the match.
55:49
Find out what having elite help can do for your productivity with Leverage Assistants. Follow our referral link in the show notes of this episode to get started. This has been a Haunted Mouse Production. Cut that out.