Rep. Tom Suozzi Calls Bluff of GOP after Tax Scam

0:00Ben Meiselas:Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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1:00Ben Meiselas:Spotify Advertising connects you with an audience that's engaged and ready to discover your brand. Launch a campaign with Spotify Ads Manager. At Farmers, our honesty is contagious. Wait, am I going to catch honesty? Well, when you're with Farmers, it's kind of inevitable. Well, how long does it take to... I lied to you when you asked if I knew what a deductible was. I don't know my dad's birthday. I thought umbrella policies were for rainstorms. Actual rainstorms. I have it, don't I? You don't just have honesty. You have farmers. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Learn more at Farmers.com. Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affiliate.

1:38Ben Meiselas:Products not available in every state. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. So the Trump regime is rolling out their new talking points regarding this disastrous budget bill. And they're saying that the 34 million able bodied Americans on Medicaid will now be working the farms as the Trump regime deport the migrant farm workers.

2:25Ben Meiselas:This is you're going to work the farms for your health care right now or else. This is what Trump's Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, said on Tuesday. Here play this. But I can't underscore enough. There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation, which, again, with 34 million people, able bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly. Thank you.

2:57Ben Meiselas:Then you had MAGA Republican Congress member Stubbe or Stube speaking on Fox about how lots of people are working 80 hours a week and we should be cutting way more with government services. Here's what they were talking about on Fox. Let's play it. But within Medicaid, and I think this is where the messaging has been interesting, it's 80 hours a month that you have to show that you work 80 hours a month. A lot of people, congressmen, work 80 hours a week. Things like that, that were in those Medicaid decisions, those cuts. At the same time, you've got reconciliation coming. You've got rescissions coming.

3:35Ben Meiselas:So aren't there more places that we can cut? And where would you be willing to make cuts in spending so that we don't completely blow out the debt in this country, which is already sitting at$37 trillion? Yeah, I support massive cuts to a whole entirety of government programs that we have. But unfortunately, we have we're not unfortunately, but we have moderates in our party that obviously can't support the type of cuts that somebody like me would support. 80 hours a week, by the way, I said eight hours a day, eight hours a week. Also, they're saying we ran up the debt in this disastrous budget bill.

4:10Ben Meiselas:Now we got to do something about y 'all. Y 'all did it. But if you listen to MAGA Republican Jim Jordan, he's basically saying, you know how you know this was a good budget bill? He says the left hates it. We own the libs, everybody. We're kicking people off of Medicaid, tens of millions of people, but we own the libs. So that's all we care about as MAGA Republicans here play the split. If there's an able-bodied adult out there now who is in our welfare system, guess what? That person is going to have to work. That is fair to taxpayers. That's good for our economy. Maybe most importantly, that's actually good for that recipient, for that individual, gets them on a better path to to attaining work and skills and everything else to get to a better position in life.

4:48Ben Meiselas:That is far from immoral. But we I always say, David, we know this is a good bill because the left hates it and the left hates it because it does not impact. We know it's good because the left hates it. By the way, if you want to see what Donald Trump's Homeland Security Secretary has been posting on her Instagram during these very serious times, it's photos of herself on horses and asking what should be her official governor portrait right now, which that's what she's posting on her Instagram. Anyway, I digress. Let's bring in Democratic Congress member Tom Swasey. New York's third congressional district is where you represent.

5:25Ben Meiselas:It was a district that voted for you as the Democrat, but split. They voted for Trump in the general election in 2024. What are you hearing right now in your district about the disastrous budget? You know, not everybody knows about this budget yet. A lot of the calls that I get are from people that are from organizations, from hospitals, from not-for-profits, people that are freaking out about these Medicaid cuts, about the cut to the food program that are happening. Very, very concerned about how it's going to affect the hospitals and the not-for-profits that service some of the most needy people in our country.

6:03You know, this whole thing doesn't really add up. You know, it's not just the liberals like Jim Jordan saying they don't like this budget. There were Republicans that actually voted for it that said awful things about it, that it was immoral and it was wrong. And, you know, it's bad for the rest of the country. Look at Lisa Murkowski. Look at Senator Josh Hawley. Think of the different members of the Freedom Caucus that were talking about how awful the deficit is. Elon Musk talking about the deficit. This is going to be the biggest single deficit of any year ever in the history of the country because of this bill.

6:38So we're having these massive deficits. We're cutting some of the most needy people off of their insurance. Remember, the two thirds of the people on Medicaid, two thirds of the people in nursing homes are paid for with Medicaid. One tenth of all the veterans in America are paid for with Medicaid. Most 92 percent of people who are able bodied are working with Medicaid right now. Now, the people that aren't, it's usually a single parent who's got a disabled kid at home. In circumstances, you can't possibly imagine. So your massive deficit, you're knocking these people off of their health care. You're going to cause health insurance prices to go up for all Americans.

7:17And why are you doing it? To provide the biggest tax cut ever for some of the wealthiest people in our country. It really just doesn't add up.

7:24Ben Meiselas:You know, they used to pretend that, you know, hey, if we do all of this stuff, it's going to trickle down. and you're going to do well. Now they're just kind of lying about things. I mean, this whole premise from the MAGA Republicans that there are these 35-year-old able-bodied men who are like making it rain and getting rich off of Medicaid in their mother's basement when Medicaid reimburses for medical procedures. I'm trying to think of this 35-year-old who's playing video games, who's like, you know how I'm going to get rich? I've got a L5 S1 tear. I'm going to go and get a procedure, a micro dissection.

7:58Ben Meiselas:I'm going to get where it's unfathomable. Even those, the talking points, then they start posting. We've done it. We're protecting all of our seniors. We've guaranteed you no tax on social security. And they've repeated that one. No, and it's not, and it's not in the bill. It's you've been in politics for a long time. And look, you, you, you know, that politics can be a rough and tumble place, but like These people, this is like one of Trump's scams from back in the day with Trump University. Counting on the fractured media environment that people aren't going to actually know what's going on.

8:32And Trump is the master of distraction. You know, when we were debating this, you know, 24 hour debates through the middle of the night about this, you know, as much as three weeks or a month ago when this thing really kicked off. What were we hearing about? We were hearing about the plane from Qatar. The next week we're doing more debates. We're having more votes on this. We're doing more hearings, more markups. What do we hear about? We hear about the Chinese tariffs. What happens next? We hear about the bombings in Israel. We hear about Iran. We hear about other things. Trump will bring up any other topic.

9:08He'll go down to Alligator Alley, down to the Everglades, where he's going to do the Alligator Alcatraz. I mean, he'll do whatever he can to not actually talk about this bill publicly in a broad way. Why? It's a loser. People do not like the idea that we're cutting taxes for some of the wealthiest Americans unnecessarily so. They don't need it in this economy. They're doing great. They're making a lot of money from their stock portfolio. They haven't needed it for years. So they're cutting taxes for some of the wealthiest Americans. They're hurting some of the people in the most desperate circumstances.

9:44You hear these stories of people on Medicaid, of these parents with their disabled kids and people that have been through these awful, tragic experiences with their health that are dependent on this as a lifeline. You're going to see people's health insurance go up dramatically. For 10 years, we've been hearing about them trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. This is a backdoor way to get rid of some of the Obamacare stuff as well. And it's going to cost people's health care costs to go up. So big tax cuts, most votable people, and the biggest deficit ever in the history of the country, where even Elon Musk is saying this is awful and irresponsible.

10:25The Freedom Caucus, this is awful and irresponsible. They voted for it anyway. So the whole thing is a ruse, a sham, a pickpocket. What happens? One person comes in and bumps into you, and when they bump into you and you're distracted, the other person picks your pocket. Well, they're getting us all excited about, you know, the alligator Alcatraz, the National Guard being activated in L.A., the bombings in Iran, the plane from Qatar, whatever it is, just something else not to talk about how awful this bill actually is.

11:02Ben Meiselas:Let's talk about the bipartisan immigration plan that you have. I remember James Langford from Oklahoma, MAGA Republican senator back a year and a half ago at this point, was pushing a bipartisan immigration bill, very strong borders, giving lots of money to law enforcement to deal with criminals, and then treating people who have been here for a long time, contributing and paying their taxes. with dignity and creating pathways for people who have worked here their whole lives or a long period of time to be able to not have to hide in the shadows and to be able to work and recognizing their accomplishments.

11:46Ben Meiselas:Democrats worked with Langford to come up with ways to soften some of the harsh things when it comes to asylum. And there was a deal, if you want to actually call a bill a beautiful bill, actually one that could have made a major difference, helped the economy. But Donald Trump said kill it. And so Donald Trump killed it. So this is a great example of what I was talking about, the pickpockets and him distracting, okay? Let's remember, there was a bipartisan deal that would have secured the border and solved a lot of problems related to immigration that was negotiated by Democrats and Republicans, Lankford and Murphy, Republican and Democrat, and Trump killed it.

12:26And when they asked him during the debate, they said, Mr. President, you're very concerned about the border and you want to secure the border. There's a bipartisan deal in the Senate right now. The president, President Biden, says he'll sign it. Kamala Harris says she supports it. Other Democrats in the House say they'll support it. Why did you kill that bill? And you know what his answer was? They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the pets. And we fell for it. For six weeks, we did funny memes and, you know, dogs talking to cats and ha, ha, ha, very funny. But we never talked about the fact that Trump killed the bill, saying he wanted border security.

13:02There was a bill for border security. He killed the bill. And so he distracted everybody. So right now, the president has said something over the past couple of weeks. The clip you had from the agricultural secretary is very disconcerting. Trump came out and said, you know what? We have all these people in agriculture and in hospitality that are good people. They've been working hard for, you know, more than 10 years, and they've been here a long time, and the farmers need them, and maybe I have the right documentation. Let's figure out a way to use common sense and to legalize these folks. And then Stephen Miller came in, crashed in, and said, you know, forget that.

13:43We're going after everybody. We're going to deport everybody. And then the president came out again and said, no, we've got to help the farmers. I love the farmers. I love the border. I want to secure the border. But I love the farmers. I want to help the farmers. So I wrote a letter to the president. I said, Mr. President, we have these folks in my district that have just been picked up by ICE. The guy's been working in the community for years. It's the same thing. They've been here for years. They don't have all the proper documentation, but they've been here for more than 10 years. No criminal activity.

14:10Nobody should disagree with the idea of deporting violent criminals. That's a reasonable thing. to do, and we should do that. But now we're getting all these innocent folks getting caught up in this whole thing, and people are living in fear. People are afraid to report things to the police because they're afraid of getting entrapped in the process. So I wrote a letter to the president. I said, Mr. President, I've been listening to you very carefully. Let's make a deal. Let's make a deal to permanently secure the border, not just from executive orders, but have Congress do bipartisan support so that we really can secure the border for the future.

14:43Let's fix the broken asylum system that's being abused by the cartels and the coyotes that are collecting $10 ,000 a person and telling people how to game the system. And most importantly, let's build this coalition of business badges in the Bible and put the community behind the idea of legalizing people that have been here for more than 10 years that have otherwise been playing by the rules. They go to work six days a week. They go to church on Sunday. Let's let them live a life. They don't about a pathway to citizenship. Just give them legalization so they can go to work, they can pay their taxes, they can take care of their families, they can stop looking over their shoulder that some jackboot thug is going to come in and try and pick them up.

15:24So there's a deal to be made here. The question is whether the president really wants to secure his legacy and has the guts to stand up to the extremists that really want to try and get rid of everybody and make everybody's miserable.

15:35Ben Meiselas:If you look at his life, though, it seems that it's always been filled with chaos that ultimately leads to bankruptcies. And then he blames somebody for the problem and then moves on to the next one. He's personally enriched and his life has been hopping to the next and next and next one. And then he said, look, this Republican Party is ripe for it with the greed, with everything. You know, they'll fall for the shtick. He found his mark, took him over, you know, is running it. And now, you know, it's just weird stuff that you see. I mean, some of the strangest stuff, we'll leave it with this. I just want to get your take on it because, again, you've been in politics for a while.

16:18Ben Meiselas:I mean, just seeing some of your colleagues out there, oh, we need to give him a Nobel Peace Prize. Oh, he's so wise. He's the smartest guy ever. It's like just it's just some strange behavior, some strange stuff that's going on. I want to make a deal with the president on immigration. I'd love to. but it was killing me during the whole big, beautiful bill debate, during the whole thing that was in the middle of the whole thing. He did something on truth social to advertise his new Trump fragrance. I was like, Oh my gosh, what has happened to our country? So it's just, I have to imagine though you're look, I grew up in New York's third, which was once New York second, you know, they don't like that weirdo stuff.

16:57Ben Meiselas:Like they don't like, like, like they look at that and I know how, you know, I know how they, I understand, even though I strongly disagree with it, how they could fall for some of this stuff. And now it's being exposed as a lie. But I just can see the people waking up and it's gone. Like people's families getting separated and, you know, ice guys wearing masks and picking up otherwise innocent people. You know, go after the criminals, you know, get them out of here. I'm with you. Let's do that. But the stuff that they're doing now is just over the top. And we're concerned because there's so much money being put into ICE and into the border security stuff.

17:37We have to marry that with actually legalizing a bunch of people. And I'm hoping we can break through to the president because it's it could be very scary, quite frankly. And, you know, I have I have all these different people in my district. I have people who voted for Trump. He won by 19000 votes in my district. People voted for me. I won by 11000 votes. So I've got Democrats in one ear, you know, more of the base people saying, you know, this is the end of the world. He's destroying democracy. We have to stop this guy. This is awful. I got other people in the other ear saying, well, you got to break some eggs to make an omelet.

18:09You know, we got to we got to try and, you know, change some stuff. The government's not working. We got to fix some stuff. And then we've got most of the people in the middle saying, what are you guys doing? Can't you like just work things out? What about me? What about my life? What are you doing to help make my life better? Can't you work together and actually solve some problems? And the natural inclination is, you know, punch, counterpunch. That's the normal behavior of anybody. And Trump is a real puncher. He's always knocking people, always hitting people, always trying to pick a fight.

18:38And the natural reaction of most of us, most human beings, is to punch back. But if we keep this punch, counterpunch thing eye for an eye, we're all going to end up blind. So we got to figure out how to rise above this and figure out, okay, let's find places to actually solve some problems. Now, that's hard to do, especially in this environment with some of the crazy stuff that we see happening. But that's our obligation. That's why I'm in politics. That's why I've been doing this off and on for 30 years. It's not worth it to win a race or to get your name in the newspaper or to make a speech.

19:15It's only if you actually get stuff done to make people's lives better that makes this worthwhile. And you talk about Trump, you know, going from this thing, from that thing to the next thing. Well, this is, you know, he's 80 years old or whatever he is, 79 years old. This is it. He's not running again in 2028, even with all the rumors and conspiracy. He's not running again. So he ought to be thinking about what's his legacy going to be. He's obviously one of the most important figures in, you know, the modern generation. What's his reputation going to be when this is all said and done? The only way he's going to have a positive legacy is if he actually makes some bipartisan deals that will be long lasting, that will actually make things better for people.

19:57This idea of he's got to win every fight and knock everybody down in the process will not last. And people will not end up ultimately going for some of the more dramatic stuff, especially, you know, selling the fragrances.

20:11Ben Meiselas:Congressman Tom Swasey, no one would ever accuse you of using the Trump clone. So let's get to 6 million.

20:40Ben Meiselas:Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out, that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot.

21:16Ben Meiselas:The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. at farmers our honesty is contagious wait am i gonna catch honesty well when you're with farmers it's kind of inevitable well how long does it take to i lied to you when you asked if i knew what a deductible was i don't know my dad's birthday and i thought umbrella policies were for rainstorms actual rainstorms i have it don't i you don't just have honesty you have farmers Learn more at Farmers.com.

22:04Ben Meiselas:Underwritten by Farmers Truck or Fire Insurance Exchanges or Affiliate. Products not available in every state. Still wearing those old cargo shorts? If your wardrobe's due for an upgrade, but you don't know where to start, you need Stitch Fix. Your stylist learns your size, your style, and your budget, then sends a box pick just for you. They always nail the fit. No store, no hassle, no subscription required. Get started today at stitchfix.com. That's stitchfix.com. Spotify Advertising connects you with an audience that's engaged and ready to discover your brand. Launch a campaign with Spotify Ads Manager.