Consumer prices rose more than expected in March and pushed the dollar down against the dollar. Consumer prices rose 3.5% on a year-over-year basis in March, the biggest monthly increase in nearly a year. But inflation continues to creep higher than the Federal Reserve's 2% target. What does this mean for the economy and the economy as a whole? What does it tell us about the state of the economy? And what does it say about the direction of inflation heading into 2020 and beyond? We talk all about it in this week's After Hours with Kate Ward, Senior Macro Strategist at JP Morgan Chase & Co. Kate Ward joins us to talk about the latest inflation numbers and what it means for inflation, the economy, and the potential impact it could have on the economy. Plus, we have a special guest on the show to help break down the data and explain why inflation is moving in the wrong direction and why it's not a blip. Subscribe to our new podcast, The Macro Report, wherever you get your news and financial information. Subscribe and listen to our newest episode of After Hours every Monday morning, where we discuss what s going on in the world of investing, economics, and everything else going on around the world! Subscribe, rate down, rate up, and more! Rate up! Rate Up: 0:00:00 - How high is inflation? Rate Down? - How fast is inflation going to go? - What s going up? | How fast should we rate inflation? | How high should we expect inflation to rise or fall? | What s the economy be slowing? | Is it a soft landing? | Are we in a recession? | Should we be worried about inflation hitting a recession or a soft-landing? ? | Is there a recession coming? | Can the economy really be a 'soft landing?' | Is the economy already hitting a 'hard landing?' rate cut coming soon? +1:30:30 - Is inflation slowing? 2:00-3:00 3: What s happening? 4:00, 5: What's the worst case scenario? 5: Is inflation a bubble? 6:30, what's going to happen next? 7:00? 8:30? 9:15 - Is there any slowdown coming? 11:00 | What's a softening? 12:10 - What is the worst culprit?
00:00:16.000That the economy is so amazing, but nobody actually feels like the economy is so amazing.
00:00:20.000Well, one reason is that, contrary to popular opinion, we have not yet defeated inflation.
00:00:25.000And the latest news on that front came in yesterday.
00:00:27.000According to the Wall Street Journal, stubborn inflation pressures persisted in March, derailing the case for the Federal Reserve to begin reducing interest rates in June and raising questions over whether it can deliver cuts this year without signs of an economic slowdown.
00:00:39.000The Consumer Price Index, a measure of goods and service prices across the economy, rose 3.5% in March from one year earlier, according to the Labor Department.
00:00:47.000That was a touch higher than economists had forecast, and a pickup from February's 3.2%.
00:00:51.000So-called core prices also rose more than expected on a monthly and annual basis.
00:00:56.000This, of course, drove the stock market down some 500 points.
00:00:59.000It also meant that bond yields started to go up.
00:01:02.000The bottom line here is that inflation continues to run almost twice what it is supposed to be running.
00:01:06.000Remember, that year over year, the inflation rate is supposed to be about 2%.
00:01:11.000And when you add that on to the giant inflationary bubble that we had in 2021 and 2022, you're talking about prices that are up like 20% for most Americans.
00:01:20.000Joe Biden's economy has not made up those wage losses.
00:01:26.000According to them, President Joe Biden has been presiding over a good news economy for the past year with strong growth, low unemployment, and falling inflation.
00:01:32.000But that good news is reaching its limits.
00:01:34.000The cost of living rose faster than expected in March.
00:01:36.000That likely means Biden will have to live with high interest rates well into an election year, with investor hopes fading fast for a Federal Reserve rate cut in June.
00:01:43.000Now remember, the Federal Reserve has kept those interest rates pretty high by at least the last 10 years of standards.
00:01:49.000Now what that means is that money is less easy.
00:01:59.000Typically, that presages some sort of economic slowdown.
00:02:02.000When you raise the interest rates, typically that is supposed to bring inflation down, but it's also supposed to have an impact on markets.
00:02:08.000It is supposed to drive down prices and all that.
00:02:11.000That's literally the purpose of the interest rate increases to drive down prices.
00:02:15.000And that usually comes along with an economic cooling if the economy is superheated.
00:02:20.000That's not happening because we've dumped so much money into the economy in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 and yes in 2023.
00:02:29.000That economy doesn't seem like it's going to slow down anytime soon.
00:02:31.000You can make the case that it used to be supply chain problems that had driven the prices to exorbitant highs.
00:02:37.000But the supply chain problems, even though they're still there in places like the Red Sea, are not nearly what they were during the pandemic.
00:02:43.000And yet we're still getting these inflation rates clocking in far too high.
00:02:48.000Even CNN was admitting that inflation is moving in the wrong direction.
00:03:16.000To put that in context, that is hotter than what we were expecting and certainly hotter than we saw the month prior.
00:03:21.000If you look at CPI on a monthly basis, sort of a similar trend there, right?
00:03:25.000So, coming in at 0.4% on a monthly basis, that is also hotter than we were expecting.
00:03:33.000According to Seema Shah, Chief Global Strategist of Principal Asset Management, quote, this marks the third consecutive strong reading and means that the stalled disinflationary narrative can no longer be called a blip.
00:03:41.000In fact, even if inflation were to cool next month to a more comfortable reading, there's likely sufficient caution within the Fed now to mean a July cut may also be a stretch.
00:03:49.000If Joe Biden is not able to get any sort of cut to the Fed rate, Coming up to the election, he's got a problem on his hands because it means that economy is going to start to tighten up just before the election.
00:03:59.000We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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00:04:59.000Larry Summers, who is the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, former president of Harvard University, before he was ousted for political incorrectness, he had previously predicted that there would be a massive inflationary cycle after 2020.
00:05:12.000People laughed at him because we hadn't had a massive inflationary cycle in the United States for 40 years.
00:05:17.000Here he was yesterday explaining that a rate cut in June would be a really dangerous move at this point.
00:05:23.000You have to take seriously the possibility that the next great move will be upwards rather than downwards and anything could happen.
00:05:33.000Markets could crash, the indicators could turn down, but on current facts, A rate cut in June, it seems to me, would be a dangerous and egregious error comparable to the errors the Fed was making in the summer of 2021 when it just didn't get the thread on inflation.
00:06:01.000Okay, well, that is becoming conventional wisdom, what Larry Summers is saying right there.
00:06:06.000According to CNN, Fed Governor Michelle Bowman said last week she's even willing to consider raising rates should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.
00:06:13.000For now, she doesn't think there's a high likelihood that hikes will be merited.
00:06:16.000With that said, the possibility of a soft landing seems to be disappearing.
00:06:21.000According to CNN, although the economy is booming by many measures, including last month's blowout jobs report, small business owners aren't feeling gung-ho about it.
00:06:28.000By the way, there's a reason for that.
00:06:29.000The blowout jobs report was heavily reliant on two sectors, the healthcare sector and, wait for it, wait for it, government jobs.
00:06:35.000An index produced by the National Federation of Independent Business, gauging how small business owners expect to fare in the future, dropped to its lowest level since 2012, last month.
00:06:45.000And consumers are not confident in their ability to make on-time debt payments.
00:06:49.000Because again, the interest rates are so high that if you are getting behind on your bills, it is very difficult to repay all of that.
00:06:56.000All of this is very bad for Joe Biden.
00:06:58.000When you connect a staggering economy with a completely atrocious foreign policy and a president who is no longer with us, that is a bad indicator for a re-elect effort.
00:07:10.000So Joe Biden had a particularly bad day yesterday.
00:07:12.000I don't know whether they didn't get him to bed the previous night.
00:07:16.000I don't know whether he stayed up too late watching Matlock.
00:07:18.000Whatever it was, Joe Biden was really not with us yesterday.
00:07:21.000He required notecards for pretty much everything.
00:07:24.000On his notecards, apparently it said, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, because he needs to be told to do literally everything.
00:07:30.000We saw this actually in his Unificion interview last week, when he required notecards to be interviewed.
00:07:37.000Typically, if you're interviewing someone, you might have notecards.
00:07:39.000If you're being interviewed, you typically aren't carrying around notecards.
00:07:42.000Here he was, doing like a meet and greet with the Japanese Prime Minister, and that dude needs his notecards.
00:07:49.000Well, Fumio, welcome back to the White House.
00:07:57.000We said the role being played by the United States and Japan is becoming even greater.
00:08:03.000And I couldn't agree more with your assertion back then.
00:08:08.000And what we see in our joint effort with Ukraine in the face of Russia's vicious assault is just outrageous.
00:08:19.000It's like watching him read a foreign language, but it's English from a note card.
00:08:24.000I would suggest that perhaps the Japanese Prime Minister speaks better English than Joe Biden at this point.
00:08:31.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden finished up this presser and he just kind of randomly was smiling at the walls while the press were ushered out so they wouldn't ask him any questions.
00:08:42.000There he is, smiling at the wall again.
00:11:06.000In any case, he's doing a wonderful job and his backup is doing a similarly wonderful job.
00:11:10.000If you are on a word diet, let me recommend some word salad from Kamala Harris.
00:11:16.000She really breaks out the Caesar dressing for this one.
00:11:20.000It's important to see that, you know, the nature of democracy, there's a duality to it, it has two sides to it.
00:11:28.000On the one hand, there's incredible strength, right?
00:11:31.000That when a democracy is intact, what it does for its people, in terms of the strength it gives its people and protects in terms of individual freedoms and rights, right?
00:12:24.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:12:26.000First, if you're like most Americans, you're struggling to make ends meet.
00:12:28.000Everything is more expensive these days.
00:12:30.000By the time you pay those bills and fill up the car, go grocery shopping, not a lot left.
00:12:34.000You're laying out the credit card for all non-essentials, maybe some essentials even.
00:12:39.000Last I checked, the average credit card interest rate for Americans is like 24%, which is insane.
00:12:43.000How are you supposed to dig yourself out of that debt?
00:12:45.000Well, if you own a home, I want you to call my friends at American Financing right now.
00:12:49.000Interest rates have finally dropped into the fives, which is the lowest they've been in a while.
00:12:52.000Call American Financing to talk about their refinance options.
00:12:55.000They save their customers an average of 854 bucks a month by tapping into their home equity and wiping out that high interest credit card debt.
00:13:02.000Think about it, 854 bucks a month is like 10 grand a year.
00:13:05.000What a relief that could be for you and your family.
00:13:07.000Call American Financing at 866-721-3300.
00:13:10.000And if you call today, you might not have to make next month's mortgage payment.
00:14:17.000This kind of constant ramping up to the possibility of civil war is really silly, and it's really bad when it comes from your top-level politicians.
00:14:25.000When she talks about democracy being strong but fragile, and then she immediately suggests, in the next breath, that this may be our last election, you understand that you are now presenting an actual threat to democracy that requires revolutionary action.
00:14:41.000Anyway, here's Kamala Harris saying this stuff.
00:14:44.000Treating serious language as though it's a throwaway line is really a problem in American politics, and Kamala does it as much as anybody.
00:14:50.000I don't think it's hyperbolic to say this genuinely could be the last democratic election we ever have.
00:15:04.000No, and I'm going to tell you, as vice president, I've now met with over 150 world leaders.
00:15:09.000Presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, and kings.
00:15:13.000And in the last three international trips I've taken, which are going back to the end of last year through this year, world leaders have come up to me expressing their real concern.
00:15:30.000Their real concern that there won't be another election in the United States?
00:17:16.000Because you know, with all of this comes birth control.
00:17:21.000With all of this comes everything that you need as a woman to have had put in place to make sure that we were doing better than we were before.
00:17:35.000Yes, Republicans all want to bring slavery back.
00:17:51.000Remember that planted question from George Stephanopoulos to Mitt Romney in 2012.
00:17:55.000If you have a memory bank that goes this far back, In 2012, Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate for president, believe it or not, for those who are kind of short-memoried here.
00:18:03.000And when he was candidate for president, George Stephanopoulos, a Democrat, who was the news anchor at one of the debates, proceeded to ask Mitt Romney about bans on contraception.
00:18:18.000Again, they're bringing back all the hits.
00:18:20.000The War on Women is what they're bringing back.
00:18:22.000So what are they using as the leverage point for the War on Women?
00:18:24.000They're talking about this Arizona ruling that pushes abortion law back to the 1864 protection of all life standard.
00:18:33.000As I've said before, on a practical level, Arizona has a Democratic governor.
00:18:36.000Arizona has extremely evenly split houses.
00:18:39.000They have a one-vote majority for the Republicans in the House and one-vote majority for the Republicans in the Senate.
00:18:45.000It's not going to be too hard to peel off a couple of Republicans to vote with Democrats and go to a 15-week standard on abortion by repealing the 1864 law, for example.
00:18:53.000But Democrats are trying to use this as case in point of how Republicans want to roll back time to 1864.
00:18:59.000So you're seeing all over the media today Okay, well, would it be any different if the law was from, like, 1960?
00:19:12.000And again, practically speaking, very good shot that they changed the law in Arizona, but not before they suggest that Donald Trump wants to ban abortion federally.
00:19:20.000Now, again, these issues are not related.
00:19:22.000A federal abortion ban has actual legal issues that obtain to it,
00:19:27.000including the problems of federalism and Supreme Court precedent.
00:19:30.000But Democrats are trying to do the war on women routine with Trump.
00:19:33.000The big problem they have here is that unlike Mitt Romney, who was actually significantly more pro-life
00:19:37.000than Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not all that pro-life on the federal level.
00:19:41.000Yes, he appointed judges who overruled Roe versus Wade, but he didn't overrule Roe versus Wade on a personal level.
00:19:47.000Yes, Donald Trump was in favor of the overruling of Roe versus Wade,
00:19:51.000that doesn't mean that he wanted to replace that with a giant federal abortion ban.
00:19:55.000In fact, yesterday, Donald Trump suggested precisely the opposite.
00:19:58.000So here was Donald Trump yesterday talking about the Arizona pro-life law that went into place.
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00:21:55.000So you have Mika Brzezinski saying, do we need to hit rock bottom?
00:21:57.000We're going to get the faux panic from Mika Brzezinski, who's deeply worried about abortion law or something.
00:22:03.000They wanted to have a conversation and a debate and an impetus for voters to go to the polls centered around abortion.
00:22:12.000I think obviously they would rather have the right to an abortion than have to debate it on the merits.
00:22:17.000But from a political standpoint, Willie, this is monumental development.
00:22:22.000Well, I mean, to your point, Sam, just to crystallize, I know that you believe women should have a right to access to abortion health care.
00:22:30.000And on a policy level, this is horrendous.
00:22:33.000This is absolutely horrendous what's happening.
00:22:37.000The question is, do we need to hit rock bottom to realize what's happening here?
00:22:41.000That's going to be the question in this 2024 election.
00:22:46.000Wow, rock bottom would be all the babies get to live.
00:22:49.000I can't imagine what rock bottom looks like to Democrats if rock bottom is where the babies get to live.
00:22:56.000Katie Hobbs, the governor of Arizona, she is eager to suggest that the Arizona abortion ban will motivate voters to come out to the polls in favor of Democrats.
00:23:04.000Here is the wet dish rag who is the actual governor of Arizona because she beat Carrie Lake.
00:23:10.000And I am confident that when given the opportunity, they will vote to protect abortion access.
00:23:16.000Do you think that will get on the ballot for this election?
00:23:50.000Democrats have a problem because Donald Trump actually put them in a bind on abortion.
00:23:54.000They wanted to use a club to hit him with abortion, and he is actually mirroring many of their positions on abortion.
00:24:00.000He doesn't want a federal mandate to allow abortion across the land, but he also is not in favor of a federal ban on abortion across the land.
00:24:08.000So this leaves Democrats in a bit of a bind.
00:24:10.000They send out their media members to lie and pretend that Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways, which is not true.
00:24:15.000Here is Maggie Haberman of the New York Times trying to push this untrue line.
00:24:20.000Trump said, and we at the Times broke this, that Trump was saying to people, when the likely Dobbs decision was impending, that this was going to be bad for Republicans.
00:24:30.000He has recognized that the politics of this are bad for Republicans.
00:24:33.000He has also then gone out and said that he proudly helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:24:38.000And so it's a little hard to have it both ways, but he is trying to have it all ways, and he often does.
00:24:43.000He tries to leave all options open and avoid being pinned down.
00:24:46.000This is on a significant issue that a lot of women are very, very animated by.
00:24:50.000And looking as if you are trying to avoid saying anything, I don't think is going to be a sustainable position for him.
00:24:59.000It is not, in fact, a confusing position to say that you are in favor of the overturning of Roe versus Wade, and now it gets kicked back to the states.
00:25:06.000That is literally the Federalist position.
00:25:08.000That is, by the way, the actual position of the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:25:12.000Democrats are trying to, they're trying desperately to force Trump into a strong pro-life position so they can run against it, and he's not giving them the bait.
00:25:19.000And that's a problem for them, politically speaking.
00:25:21.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden has a problem of his own.
00:25:24.000When it comes to illegal immigration, Joe Biden, of course, has done an absolutely awful job.
00:25:31.000Customs and Border Protection officers in the Tucson sector are seizing enough fentanyl and methamphetamine alone to kill billions of people.
00:25:38.000Similar to agents in other sectors finding drugs hidden in novel ways, recent seizures are of drugs hidden in microwaves, children's bouncy houses, and under watermelons.
00:25:46.000The Tucson sector, which covers most of the state of Arizona from the Yuma County line east to New Mexico, spans 262 miles on the international border.
00:25:53.000Nogales CBP agents seized more than 38,500 pounds of drugs in fiscal 2021.
00:26:01.000Drug seizures went down in fiscal 2022 and 2023 to 26,000 and 25,000 pounds respectively, but seizures of cocaine and fentanyl have increased over the same time period.
00:26:10.000Not all drugs, of course, are equally deadly.
00:26:13.000In fiscal 2023, Tucson sector agents seized a record 12,700 pounds of fentanyl.
00:26:18.000So far in fiscal 2024, through March 5th alone, they've already seized more than 4,700 pounds of fentanyl.
00:26:25.000That amount is combined enough to kill more than 3.9 billion people, because it doesn't take a lot of fentanyl to kill somebody.
00:26:31.000A fentanyl poisoning or overdose can be extraordinarily small amounts.
00:26:35.000We've covered this in the first couple of episodes of our series Divided States of Biden.
00:26:38.000You should go check that out over at Daily Wire Plus if you want like the complete background on the border crisis plus the fentanyl crisis.
00:26:44.000We actually went down to the Arizona border where they're smuggling the fentanyl over.
00:26:48.000Episode two is about the impact of the fentanyl crisis in the United States.
00:26:52.000Ahead of Easter weekend, more than 1.1 million fentanyl pills were seized at the Nogales point of entry.
00:26:58.000And its director, Michael Humphries, said that on March 26th, Nogales POE agents found and seized roughly 166,000 fentanyl pills hidden inside a microwave.
00:27:07.000On March 28th, they found and seized more than 661,000 fentanyl pills and 3.9 pounds of meth hidden inside a deflated children's bouncy house.
00:27:16.000So things are going really well at America's southern border, naturally.
00:27:20.000And the impacts are being felt all over the United States.
00:27:23.000We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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00:28:43.000He is deeply concerned that he is going to lose his election.
00:28:46.000So, he is now running an ad directly against Joe Biden as a Democrat.
00:28:50.000When Montanans see a problem, we get to work.
00:28:54.000John Tester worked with Republicans fighting to shut down the border, target fentanyl traffickers, and add hundreds of new Border Patrol agents.
00:29:03.000And he fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America instead of remain in Mexico.
00:29:10.000John Tester knows defending Montana starts with securing the border.
00:29:15.000I'm John Tester, and I approve this message to do whatever it takes to keep Montana safe.
00:29:21.000Okay, so he's running as a blue dog Democrat against Joe Biden.
00:29:23.000That shows the size and scope of the problem.
00:29:25.000In fact, Jon Tester sees the problem so clearly that he is now flipping on the possibility of impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security.
00:29:34.000According to Politico today, Senate Republicans are trying to orchestrate the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to an exact maximum political pain on their top Democratic targets in November, especially Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
00:29:46.000Democrats are signaling they will quickly shut down the Mayorkas trial once they receive impeachment articles from the House.
00:29:51.000But Tester is now in a problem because if he shuts down the impeachment of Mayorkas while claiming he's trying to shut down the border, The Republican he's running against is going to win, according to Politico.
00:30:01.000This puts Tester and Brown in an unenviable bind.
00:30:04.000Some of their Purple State colleagues will also feel the heat.
00:30:07.000The upper chamber's campaign map this year already favors Republicans tremendously.
00:30:10.000The GOP wants to exploit Democrats' vulnerabilities on the topic as migration surges to take back the chamber.
00:30:17.000Democrats are hoping to quickly move past the trial, remind voters their GOP colleagues tanked a border deal earlier this year.
00:30:23.000Senate Minority Whip Thune of South Dakota, he said not dealing with it in some way runs the risk of putting a lot of the incumbent Democrats, and for that matter, candidates in other races around the country, in a really difficult position.
00:30:33.000I wouldn't want to be them defending that vote.
00:30:36.000So there's a reason, again, that Jon Tester is abandoning Joe Biden over this issue.
00:30:41.000And no matter how many times Democrats scream that the impeachment is political, it ain't gonna work.
00:30:45.000Because everybody can see the border crisis.
00:30:47.000In fact, even Joe Biden can see the border crisis, which is why, once again, he's flirting with the idea of the executive action he should have taken all along.
00:30:54.000Or, more appropriately, the executive action he should have left in place, because it was Donald Trump who already had in place a remain-in-Mexico policy and differential interpretation of asylum law.
00:31:05.000Here is Joe Biden saying, hey, maybe I'll shut down the border.
00:31:38.000But we're trying to work through that right now.
00:31:41.000This is the first time that Joe Biden has ever said he gives a crap what a court says.
00:31:45.000He once suggested he did not have the unilateral ability to cram down a vaccine mandate on 80 million Americans, then he tried it.
00:31:51.000Then the Supreme Court told him he literally could not unilaterally relieve student loan debt, and then he tried to do it anyway.
00:31:57.000So is the real holdup here his deep and abiding respect for the Supreme Court of the United States, or is it that his left-wing base will be very angry at him if he tries to shut down immigration at America's southern border?
00:32:07.000Again, just another major issue created by a terrible president.
00:32:10.000We'll get to the Middle East situation in just one second.
00:32:12.000Yet another area of the globe that's on fire thanks to the current president.
00:32:15.000First, it's been two years of fighting the left and building the future with great products.
00:33:13.000On Eid al-Fitr, which is the end of Ramadan, saying, quote, as we near the end of the holy month of Ramadan, I wish Muslim communities everywhere Eid Mubarak and join in hopes for a safer and more peaceful world.
00:33:23.000As families and communities come together, we know they do so at a time when many Muslim communities worldwide are suffering.
00:33:28.000Our thoughts turn to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, civilians in Syria, women suffering under the Taliban in Afghanistan, Uyghurs in the People's Republic of China, Rohingya in Burma and Bangladesh, and far too many others.
00:33:39.000So he is lumping in just, Be clear, Israel with the Taliban or the Chinese Communist Party.
00:33:49.000West Bank Palestinians, by the way, are not governed directly by Israel.
00:33:52.000They're governed by the Palestinian Authority.
00:33:55.000So again, this is just another way of attempting to pay off the radicals in the Democratic Party base.
00:34:00.000Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed three adult sons of the head of Hamas's political leadership on Wednesday.
00:34:06.000That's Ismail Haniyeh, who's been enjoying his five-star accommodations in Qatar this entire time, while people have been bombed because his terrorists are hiding beneath them over in Gaza.
00:34:17.000All three were apparently terrorists, according to Israel.
00:34:19.000Hamas said seven people died in the strike.
00:34:23.000Chania's answer to this was, quote, I thank God for this honor that he bestowed upon us with the martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren.
00:34:30.000These are people who clearly value life.
00:34:32.000These are people who... Ismail Chania clearly is just a normal thinking person who wants peace.
00:34:39.000Because that's how you would respond if your kids and grandkids were hit in a drone strike because they were terrorists and or associating with terrorists.
00:34:47.000You would immediately respond by thanking God for the honor bestowed upon you with the martyrdom of your sons.
00:34:52.000That's what you would do, would you not?
00:34:58.000But we have to pretend that there is moral relativism all across the spectrum.
00:35:02.000And Hamas, they're just a rational, reasonable group.
00:35:04.000Why can't some sort of deal be cut Now, Hamas, for its part, is not compromising in any way, because after all, why would they?
00:35:12.000Joe Biden has basically given them the keys to the car.
00:35:15.000According to the Times of Israel, amid intensive U.S.
00:35:17.000efforts to achieve a deal for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since October 7th, both Israeli and Palestinian officials tempered optimism on Monday around progress in Cairo talks.
00:35:27.000The United States keeps saying optimism so Joe Biden can cater to his base.
00:35:32.000But Hamas is not caving and Israel cannot cave because they would be leaving an actual militarily operational terrorist group in charge of Gaza were they to pull out right now.
00:35:42.000They would lose the war, in other words, at the Biden administration's behest if they were to do what Joe Biden wanted.
00:35:47.000So it's the United States doing happy talk.
00:35:49.000It's Joe Biden and his secretary saying, oh, we're so close, we're so close.
00:35:52.000Meanwhile, Hamas is like, we will make no concessions.
00:35:54.000And Israel's like, well, we can't let you survive.
00:35:57.000You murdered 1,200 of our citizens and turned the entirety of the Gaza Strip into a giant terror tunnel.
00:36:04.000In separate interviews, several Hamas officials offered varying comments regarding the state of the talks, ranging from rejection of the latest U.S.-drafted, Israeli-backed terms to assertions that the terrorist group was still studying the proposal.
00:36:16.000Apparently, the deal under discussion would provide for the release of some 40 Israeli captives in return for a temporary truce and the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners, including some convicted of deadly murder.
00:36:28.000By the way, it is now unclear whether Hamas even holds 40 hostages.
00:36:31.000How many of the American hostages they're holding are dead?
00:36:36.000So clearly, the Biden administration needs to put the pressure on Israel.
00:36:40.000Clearly, Israel is the problem here, as always.
00:36:43.000Meanwhile, the right is tearing itself apart, as per our usual arrangement, because anything you can do, I can do dumber.
00:36:51.000So, Marjorie Taylor Greene is currently leading an insurrection against Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House.
00:36:55.000She doesn't have a lot of fellow travelers in this thing.
00:36:59.000She is now threatening that if Mike Johnson passes a Ukraine aid bill with Democratic votes, then she will push forward her motion to vacate and presumably garner a little bit more steam.
00:37:11.000There's a lot of talk about Ukraine in regards to the motion to vacate, but FISA is obviously also a big battle up here.
00:37:17.000Just how he handles and follows through with the FISA debate, will that influence your thought process on the motion to vacate?
00:37:22.000How he handles the FISA process and how he handles funding Ukraine is going to tell our entire conference how to handle the motion to vacate.
00:37:33.000Okay, so she's saying that she's the one in control of the boat.
00:37:36.000Speaker Johnson, he says these sorts of threats create a continuous situation of chaos, which obviously is true.
00:37:42.000No governing majority can govern if at any moment a fringe character can simply pull the trigger on a motion to vacate.
00:37:48.000That's not how this is supposed to work.
00:37:50.000It was never supposed to work this way.
00:37:51.000It is unprecedented that it's working this way.
00:37:56.000And I don't think that would be helpful to us from a political standpoint for the Republican Party to continue to govern, to maintain, keep, and then grow our majority in November.
00:38:06.000I thought that would have been a great hindrance to it.
00:38:09.000And so that wouldn't be helpful, and nor does the motion to vacate help us in that regard either.
00:38:42.000So we'll go through another 10 weeks of no speaker, and then eventually, a few purple state Republicans will chip in and make Hakeem Jeffries speaker thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and their deep and abiding desire to be on camera as much as humanly possible.
00:38:55.000Pushing that forward, yesterday, was the congressional wing in the House that tried to kill FISA Section 702.
00:39:03.000So FISA Section 702 is a section that lets the government monitor communications of foreigners overseas.
00:39:10.000That information is then stored on a database, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
00:39:14.000intelligence officials for names or keywords, which is quite useful because if Osama bin Laden is planning an attack, you want to be able to, for example, search all of these records by name or keyword.
00:39:26.000persons contacted from abroad can sometimes be caught in the data, and the FBI has misused this on occasion.
00:39:33.000The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act championed by Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner imposes new guardrails as well as criminal penalties for abuse.
00:39:39.000It also preserves the ability to surveil and act with dispatch without introducing onerous bureaucratic barriers.
00:39:44.000So basically this debate is whether you can get a FISA warrant or if you need to get a FISA warrant every time you access any request that might catch up an American or Whether you need different procedures.
00:39:54.000The bill would require FBI personnel to get a prior approval from a supervisor or staff attorney before running U.S.
00:40:00.000It would prevent political appointees from approving FBI database queries and it would require audits of U.S.
00:40:05.000person queries to be run within 180 days after the query was initiated.
00:40:10.000So this comes down to, do you have to apply for a FISA warrant beforehand?
00:40:14.000If by the way, it'll be six and one half dozen of another, because here's what's going to happen.
00:40:17.000If it ends up being that you have to get a FISA warrant before you actually go forward with a search like this, they'll just keep handing it out like they have been in the past, which is to say, like candy, you'll go for a FISA warrant because you want to make a search.
00:40:30.000The FISA courts will be getting 50 of these requests today, and they'll just greenlight all of them, which is historically what they have done.
00:40:36.000House Judiciary leaders don't think this is enough.
00:40:38.000Chairman Jim Jordan and ranking Democrat Jerry Nadler will offer an amendment to require a warrant for every search of the 702 database that includes U.S.
00:40:47.000I understand both sides of the debate, for sure.
00:40:50.000The question is, as Mike Johnson says, you're arguing over this stuff in the House, wait until they pass a clean bill in the Senate and they don't include any guidelines on how these searches are to be done.
00:40:58.000There's a whole other House of Congress, in other words.
00:41:02.000Johnson plowed ahead, according to Politico, with efforts to bring the bill to the floor despite growing angst in his right flank and former President Trump sounding off and urging Republicans to kill the larger surveillance law.
00:41:11.000Congress now has no clear path to extending a program that administrations of both parties have touted as vital to national security before its April 19th expiration.
00:41:18.000It existed during the Trump administration as well.
00:41:20.000It was not vital for Trump to kill it.
00:41:22.000It was vital for intelligence services to be able to search queries about Osama bin Laden and his friends.
00:41:29.000House conservatives are warning they not only take issue with the policy behind the wiretapping proposal, but the path Johnson took to get there.
00:41:35.000Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, one of the 19 Republicans who blocked the bill, said, quote, Well, you know what's really theatrical?
00:41:38.000convoluted process. It has been decidedly manipulated right now to make sure certain
00:41:42.000amendments can't be heard. And he characterized Washington as disappointment theater.
00:41:45.000Well, you know what's really theatrical? This idea that the House controls every aspect of
00:41:50.000all legislation as though the Senate does not exist. That's what's irritating.
00:41:55.000It's also why Johnson needs to reverse the process in how he's approaching this.
00:42:00.000Every time Johnson brings a bill to the floor, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Matt Gaetz, or whoever decides to get their name in the headlines today, is going to put a motion to vacate on the floor.
00:42:08.000Then, they will wait for somebody to sound off, President Trump to sound off, on something he doesn't know much about, like a FISA surveillance warrant issue.
00:42:15.000And then, if he sounds off, there will be 25 Republicans who will now side against the bill, and then if Johnson goes ahead with it anyway, then they'll threaten to vacate his speakership.
00:42:25.000That is not a particularly great way for running the Congress, which is why Johnson needs to seize back the power that a Speaker traditionally had.
00:42:31.000The Speaker traditionally had the power, as I mentioned before, on the Hastert Rule to move forward with a majority of the Republican caucus.
00:42:38.000Remember, there may be 20 Republicans sounding off against the bill, and 200 in favor of it.
00:42:43.000But the 20 keep outweighing the 200, specifically because of the stupidity of the procedures that have currently been put in place.
00:42:50.000Johnson needs to nuke this system and nuke it right now.