All Hell Breaks Loose in Senate Hearing as GOP Gets Exposed

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2:29Ben Meiselas:These hearings in the United States Senate during the government shutdown this week have been absolutely explosive. You had one hearing where Democratic senators were exposing that in the demolition of the White House East Wing, the construction workers may have been exposed to deadly asbestos. We'll talk about that. Then there was another hearing in what It should have been a sleepy Senate commerce hearing on transportation nominees, as Dan Diamond refers to it as. But then it was uncovered that a MAGA Republican Senator Bernie Moreno was secretly spying on a Democratic Senator, Jackie Rosen.

3:11Ben Meiselas:He was sneaking like right outside her car to get her VIN number. And Democratic Senator Jackie Rosen was like, were you spying on me? You were looking at my VIN number. You went to my dashboard. Like, what the hell are you doing? And then there was even more than that. You had a hearing where a courageous officer, a Capitol Police officer, testified before the United States Senate. And then you had these MAGA Republican witnesses all say that the individual who beat and almost killed this Capitol Police officer deserve to be pardoned. And there's even more explosive data than that and details that.

3:52Ben Meiselas:So let me go through with you what went down. The first thing I want to show you is where you have a Democratic Senator Markey. He's questioning some of these witnesses at this hearing about apprenticeship programs that are offered by unions that the Trump regime is gutting. And Senator Markey uses his time to ask these apprenticeship union leaders who help with these apprenticeship programs, are you aware if there was any asbestos controls or steps taken at the East Wing when they demolished it at the White House? Because they use non-union workers. So as a result, I mean, we saw these smoke clouds outside of the East Wing that look like what we normally see in very deadly and fatal asbestos exposures in the past.

4:47Ben Meiselas:And we know asbestos was used in the East Wing. And in Donald Trump's rush to tear down the East Wing, what we may uncover in the future is that he exposed those workers who did not go through the steps that the safety precautions that take place in unions, because Trump went around the unions, that Trump may have expose those workers to very deadly asbestos exposure where those people may die early in the future. Watch this questioning. And again, you haven't seen this in many other places. And hat tip to Dan Diamond for flagging it. Here play this clip. LIUNA runs a world-class apprenticeship program that includes training on asbestos abatement.

5:28Many old buildings were constructed and renovated when asbestos-laden products were industry standard, including the White House. Are you aware of any permits or other indications that the White House, that President Trump took any of the appropriate safety steps when Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House to protect against asbestos exposure? I'm not aware of anything that they would have done to protect. So the White House could have exposed workers and passes by to deadly asbestos. Is that your view? They could have. And I can tell you, had it been a union workforce, we would have access to that.

6:08This administration chose to use a non-union workforce to go do that on a union project. One of the first things we teach in our apprenticeship is to have your brother or your sister's back. And if you see something, you say something. If something's unsafe, you can stop that work. This isn't a union job site, so we have no access to it. So I don't know what's going on out there. No, thank you. And those safety standards, they exist for a reason. It's to protect workers. It's to protect innocent people who may be nearby, even working in the White House, from exposure to asbestos. And those standards just don't disappear on the whim of President Trump.

6:43They're there because of all the lessons we learned, especially because of asbestos workers who died at unbelievably high levels before we actually put protections in place. And that's why I wrote to the contractor who tore down the East Wing to demand answers on whether and why workers were put at risk for Trump's big donor ballroom. It's just another example of how Trump is the most anti-union president, anti-safety president in history. And that is something that absolutely we have to get to the bottom of. I've received no answers yet in terms of any asbestos protections, any other safety protections that were put in in order to ensure that workers were not unnecessarily exposed to health endangering situations.

7:33So I thank both of you for your work on these issues. Thank you, Mr. President. For the record, every merit shop that I've visited emphasizes and takes great pride upon their safety record. And they are subject to the same OSHA regulations as regarding maintaining safety and exposure to asbestos or anything else. So just for the record. No, I agree with you. The question is, does the president think he can waive all regulations because it's the White House and not any other property in the United States? And if that was the case, then these workers were exposed.

8:02Ben Meiselas:Next, we'll show you this sleepy Senate commerce hearing on transportation nominees. And it quickly devolves into a heated fight, as Dan Diamond puts it, between Jackie Rosen, Democrat, and Senator Bernie Moreno when Moreno admits that he was tracking her team's cars and her automobiles. The numbers here play this clip. As somebody who's been here 10 months, I think what we just saw was exactly classic Washington, D.C. In other words, the car that I drive should be safe. The car that my staff drives, who cares about them? I get a paycheck. I object to you stalking my car and my staff to find the VIN numbers to present to this committee.

8:47What are you doing there? What are you going to do with them? It's an invasion of our privacy. If you came and asked me for my VIN, I will tell you what I have in my car. It's visible from the outside of the car. So you went and followed me. Is this my time? You went and followed me to see who drives me. Can I reclaim my time? And write down their VIN number. You interrupted me. You're attacking me. You watched me go to see who drives me, writing down their VIN number so you could find out what they have. That seems a little creepy. Just expose the hypocrisy. Much like, for example, the fact that you get paid.

9:21You haven't asked me about my car. You get a paycheck, but you walk by. You get a paycheck. I'm donating my paycheck, sir. And I would happily be on legislation not to give back. What do you say to the staff? What do you say to the TSA workers? What do you say to the air traffic controllers? What do you say to the military? What I am saying to you is it's a Republican shutdown, my friend. You are in control of the White House. You are in control of the House. And you are in control of the Senate. And if you went home to a food bank instead of going to Mar-a-Lago to eat at a gold-plated dinner while people are starving, you might see and hear your constituents, sir.

9:54You are blind to the suffering of your people. Does it take 60 votes? It takes you listening and coming to the table to have a discussion. So it does take 60 votes. You want to have this, come talk to me in private, sir. So it does take 60 votes for the record, just so that we're clear on the reporting, so there's no misinformation. It does take 60.

10:14Ben Meiselas:Back to you, Mr. Edwards, question about airports. How bizarre is that? As Arthur Delaney writes, earlier in this hearing, Bernie Moreno said he looked up all of his colleagues' VIN numbers to expose them for not buying newer vehicles with expensive safety features. Maybe a weird way of making the point is Jamie Tupri writes, to get a car's VIN number, you have to physically walk up to the car and look into the windshield. So Marino was personally going up to his colleagues' cars? How many cars? Staff cars, senator cars? He was spying on their vehicles? What the hell is going on here? Then in the Senate Judiciary Committee, here you have Democratic Senator Dick Durbin cross-examining one of Trump's federal judicial nominees about the kind of anti-abortion, anti-women, anti-reproductive right stance.

11:11Ben Meiselas:Here play this clip. Do you believe that female patients are less likely or less able to understand medical advice than male patients? Senator, I'm sorry. I'm not sure I understand your question. Could you? Well, you said not every patient understands the consequences, and we certainly know that we're talking primarily of women of childbearing status. And you went on to say there are a number patients who don't understand the nature of the fetus. Do you believe that female patients are less likely to understand this? Now, Senator, what we were saying in those arguments is we were summarizing the evidence in the record for the court.

11:48There were several witnesses who testified by a sworn declaration that they wished, my recollection is they said they wished they had had that information because they didn't quite understand the nature and the consequences of that issue. Didn't understand the nature of the fetus, women? My recollection is that the testimony in the record in those sworn declarations said that that would have been helpful information that they would have liked to have had. And I believe that also was kind of hearkening back to statements in the Supreme Court's Casey opinion, as well as perhaps Gonzalez v. Carhartt.

12:28I'm going to tell you, I don't understand what you're saying based on this quote here. And if you wish, it's your decision. If you want to clarify what you've just said in light of what I quoted, please do so. Because at this point, I believe there's really a serious question as to what you were trying to say. Senator, we were just simply making an argument based on the evidence in the record. And it was the commonwealth. Your decision as to whether you want to clarify it. But at this point, I think it's going to be a problem for some of us.

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13:31Ben Meiselas:No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Want to know right away how many qualified candidates are in your area? Look no further than ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Midas. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash Midas, M-E-I-D-A-S. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Now going back to this health committee hearing on the apprenticeships, more questioning from Marky right here. Let's play it. Donald Trump has waged an all out assault on union clean energy jobs.

14:14In Massachusetts alone, 17 projects,$8.6 billion of investment, and almost 17 ,000 clean energy jobs have been axed or stalled in just nine months. And because of Donald Trump's attacks from canceling permits to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, union workers are seeing job offers evaporate and work sites shutter. A port development project in Salem with hundreds of union jobs under a project labor agreement axed. A cable manufacturing plant in Somerset that would have created hundreds of union jobs axed. 3 ,000 good jobs from the Solar for All program that Trump cut axed. The offshore wind projects up and down the Massachusetts coast, which were going to have thousands of union workers putting those workers out there in a new industry, they're all in the crosshairs to be axed.

15:24So, so far, we have lost nationwide 158 ,000 clean energy jobs in just nine months. That is an economic record. Look at that destruction. That's the most destruction that anyone's ever taken to one industry in such a brief period of time. That's Trump's record. Union building trades workers are starting to see the unemployment rolls for the first time in over a decade. And it's a shameful situation and Trump's attacks will have a chilling effect on new projects for years to come. Union apprenticeships actually require high quality education programming, but they also required mentored on the job experience.

16:07And with Trump and Republicans shuttering these work sites, apprentices cannot train. So, General President Booker, how are President Trump's attacks on clean energy sector affecting your workers, including your apprentices? It's, you know, it's the chaos. It's the uncertainty. It's the inability to recruit new members into it. It's the inability to have our current members who are in the system not be able to graduate the system because they don't have a job to go to. They're going to finish their current job. They're not going to have their next job. So it's just this chaos and uncertainty. It's creating an environment where it's going to be very hard to bring people back into the construction industry at a time where we should be bringing people into registered apprenticeship and in the construction industry.

16:51General President Donnelly, could you add your perspective to this situation as it's unfolding? No, I would echo the same sentiments from President Booker. The one other piece I guess I would add would be that we put a lot of time, energy, effort and resources into training to do this offshore wind work. And that all just came to a screeching halt. And so now we have a bunch of members with a bunch of credentialing that we don't know if we're going to be able to put back to work in the future.

17:19Ben Meiselas:Next, we see Senator Adam Schiff from California asking critical questions during this week's Senate Agriculture Confirmation hearing about why is the Department of Agriculture stealing people's personal private data? And are they selling it to AI companies? Are they selling it to government contractors? Are they spying on people? Why are they getting and gathering all of this data on people and creating a database and a list? Is this part of the further plan to put Americans and migrants into concentration camps that ICE and Border Patrol is doing here? Play this clip right here. Mr. Wolk, can you tell us what the legal authority is that USDA is relying on to collect, store, and share the personal data of tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, home addresses, simply because they received or applied for SNAP benefits?

18:19Senator, I appreciate that question. My understanding is there were four requests for state data, for state recipient data. One of the requests was made in May, and so I was at FNCS. But as I recall, I had no involvement in drafting or issuing that particular request. But I was aware of what was going on. And I would say I know that there is a lawsuit brought by numerous attorneys generals. and I hesitate to give my opinion in terms of what that authority might be because that may be an issue in the case. Mr. Walk, if confirmed, are you committed to reviewing this policy independently, objectively, to ensure that it does not violate federal privacy laws which protect Americans' personal data and identities?

19:25Sir, I appreciate that question. And I will say that I think the collection of data itself is something that we need to look at in general. As a 24-year federal employee, I certainly understand the privacy implications and that we have laws that protect data throughout the information life cycle from collection to transmission to storage to disposal. and I want to make sure that as we use the data technologies, which carries promise, that we also make sure that we deploy them in a way that applies by the law.

20:09Ben Meiselas:Now, here was a moment, a very somber moment for me to even watch this, to see what even took place. You're going to see all of the Republican witnesses at this Senate hearing. there. So the MAGA Republicans wanted to do this like performative hearing on political violence. All the violence takes place with Democrats. It's all Democrats fault. But Democrats were pushing back at this hearing. And here you have Democratic Senator Welch examining the witnesses. Most of them, all of the Republican witnesses who were there raised their hands when they're asked, do you support the pardons of the violent January 6th extremists by Donald Trump, the ones who killed police officers, almost killed police officers?

20:55Ben Meiselas:Do you support the pardons of them? Every Republican witness raised their hand. Here, play this clip. Everybody who was involved and convicted was pardoned. Raise your hand if you believe that those pardons were appropriate. All right. So that includes pardons for folks who were involved in attacking Officer Hodges.

21:24It does.

21:25Ben Meiselas:And that means that included, like, literally on that panel, the Democrats called Daniel Hodges, the D.C. police officer who courageously defended the Capitol and who was almost killed by the January 6th insurrectionists. He's sitting next to them. He almost died, this guy. And all the Republican witnesses were like, yeah, the people who attempted murder on you, that makes sense to pardon them a year after they went to jail. We support Donald Trump pardoning the people who wanted to kill you. I just want you to think about that. But he persevered. Daniel Hodges gave this incredible speech. I want to share it with you during that same hearing.

22:12Ben Meiselas:Here, play this clip. I'm speaking in my personal capacity. However, I draw upon my experiences as one of the few police officers in this country who has policed both the protests and riots of 2020, as well as the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. I am intimately familiar with political violence, as when I fought to defend the United States Capitol and many of your very lives. I was beaten, bloodied, crushed with my eye gouged, and my skull smashed with my own baton. Political violence is a worthy topic for discussion. However, the press release I saw from the subcommittee chair made it clear this was not going to be an honest consideration of various causes and effects, but rather a ham-fisted attempt to propagate the unsupported notion that liberal ideology is the greatest origin of modern political violence.

22:57This is particularly galling to me since every single member of the majority on the subcommittee has either contributed to one of the most infamous examples of conservative political violence of our age or the protection of its perpetrators. Every majority member who could do so voted to acquit Donald Trump during a second impeachment, and now we find ourselves in a new horrific age of political violence, when word is carried out by the state itself. A permanent resident was arrested without a warrant and is being threatened with deportation simply for his politics. A Tennessee man was arrested and is being held on$2 million bail for sharing a Trump meme on social media.

23:32Members of Congress have been denied access to ICE facilities, despite the law granting them unannounced oversight rights. These detentions and prohibitions are all grounded in the threat of deadly force and violence, are absurd or outright illegal, and politically motivated by right-wing ideology. The fact that these actions are carried out by agents of the state doesn't make them acceptable. It makes them far worse. the current administration is doing whatever it can to downplay the threat that right-wing violence presents to the united states including literally erasing data between september 12th and the 13th of this year the department of justice deleted their own study from their website which came to the conclusion that right-wing extremism poses a much greater threat than left-wing extremism i quote now the opening paragraph of this national institute of justice report published just last year.

24:19Quote, militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violence extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives. A recent threat assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat and highlighted a probability that COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, long-standing ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions.

25:13There will always be those who seek to further their own political agenda through extra-legal violence, and that is what law enforcement is for. But to reduce the risk of the population at large from falling into radicalization, the solution is simple. It's unfettered democracy. One of democracy's greatest assets is how, when unsullied, it provides a mechanism for everyone to have their voice heard. And when people believe their government speaks for them in some manner, they're less apt to seek violent means to accomplish their political agendas. So make voting easier, not harder. Stop gerrymandering people into oblivion.

25:48Stand on the strength of your ideals, not the depth of your donors' pockets. Stop shopping for judges and start seeking ideas that withstand scrutiny from any political ideology. When you tell the people that an election was stolen from them, they will take up arms against their neighbors without a shred of evidence, I know. But if you tell them brilliant political rhetoric is their birthright and civic engagement is their privilege, they'll instead take up the book and the pen and we'll all be richer for it. And when you just so you know that this is the helmet that U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick wore on January 6, 2021.

26:24And he died the following day. The family member just got back that just got back that today. Thank you.