Beyond the Border; Inside Dem Infrastructure Plan; GOP States Reject Fed Bailout | The Nation Speaks

[Music] today on the nation speaks chaos at the southern border who's coming how and where are they going and president biden unveils his infrastructure plan why are the republicans calling it a trojan horse and how one little clause in the latest stimulus package could cause a whole lot of problems and of course we have america q a where we hear directly from you this week we ask people what they think about criminal cartels profiting from smuggling people across the southern border and we ask their opinion on vaccine passports hello and welcome to the nation speaks i'm your host cindy drew care the crisis at the southern border is getting more intense by the day in march u.s border patrol caught at least 150 000 people crossing illegally that's about fifty thousand more than in february and that doesn't include an estimated twenty six thousand who got away according to epic times reporting border patrol facilities are overcrowded and border patrol agents are overwhelmed reports this week from just one facility in donna texas show that there were 4 100 people packed into a site that was designed to hold just 250. some border regions are seeing a spike in particular in families and unaccompanied children who are crossing illegally for example in the lower rio grande valley in texas last october 1 300 family units arrived in march it was over 40 000 and while these incredible numbers are getting most of the attention there's a lot more to the story like how exactly are so many people making it across the u.s border and what happens to them next our first guest is todd benzemann todd thank you for joining us i think it's worth explaining a bit of your background since it's so interesting you've been both an investigative journalist covering national security issues at the border and also in the middle east and you spent almost a decade leading the intelligence encounter and counter-terrorism division for the state of texas and now you're with the center for immigration studies where you've been spending a lot of time not just at the border but across the border on the mexican side and you've done some really great reporting down there in one article this week and this is what i want to start with you describe i guess a new practice and maybe you coined this phrase called catch and bust instead of catch and release so can you start by just explaining to us what that is sure well most people and who are paying attention to news right now about the border really just know about the fact that they're coming over and there's a turnstile that they're just going through into and being released into the interior of the country especially family units and miners or people who claim that they're minors and that's about it uh but the other half of the story is you know what becomes of them and the answer to that is we are uh as a nation the policy is that we're releasing them on their own recognizance with uh documents that allow them to be inside the country and were waving them right into greyhound buses and charter buses from california to the southern tip of texas and so there is this non-stop conveyor belt of buses moving into the interior to states like florida and new jersey and indiana and michigan uh texas is uh one of them and uh really states all over the country all points of the nation and they're being resettled by you know family and friends and non-governmental institutions and so what we're seeing so far is maybe uh by my count and this is an early count about 30 000 uh illegal aliens who crossed illegally who are part of family units have been bust so far in a very quiet uh way that you know outside of the media limelight that's what's happening that's the other side of the um the final leg of the smuggling journey if you will so who gets to stay and be bussed and who's getting turned back so family units and minors all get in uh almost all get in uh a majority of them get in probably in the high 70 percentile range and miners get in the miners don't always get released right away because they have to hhs health and human services has to find a legal guardian or a legal foster family or a parent to take them that takes a little bit of time who's not getting in are single adults men and women who cross in and get turned back under title 42 which is the emergency pandemic expulsion rule under that trump put in place and is still being applied to those folks right now so when you're on the mexican side like i was last week you'll meet a lot of single people who are runners what we call runners uh they they are uh while the family units are turning themselves into the first available border patrol agent that they can find the other ones are running and they're the runners are really hopeful that the border patrol agents are very busy with the you know processing in the family units and they are so that they can get through and are these families do they have to be claiming asylum or is it just any family units and unaccompanied minors that all get in or it's a 70 percentish yeah at this point there are so many there is such a d-day invasion going on down there that there's no time for anybody to process an asylum claim right now so they're waving them through on personal recognizance documents that require them supposedly to check in and let's say they're going to gearing indiana or something gary indiana they'll have to find a local immigration judge and and check in at us at a particular date and then start the process uh so uh it's just too overwhelming right now for anybody to do asylum but the majority of these folks will be claiming asylum because it's really their only way to kind of get a hook to stay inside the united states and win lose or jaw make no mistake they're all staying nobody's going home whether whether they lose or not the majority of them are uh you know haitians and central americans who are economic migrants who don't qualify for asylum so they're not going to get asylum but they're still going to stay and work illegally for as long as they possibly can that's the game that's the end game so i know you've been interviewing and talking to a lot of them on the mexican side and on this side so when you ask them why you're coming what answers are you getting almost all of them give me a couple answers it's about jobs money economics the central americans complain about poverty and hurricanes and things like that and the haitians you know haiti of course so um it's an economic uh push factor but the reason that they are coming now as opposed to a year ago or two years ago or three years ago when donald trump was in office is because they understand that joe biden is going to let them in they text each other and take photos of each other on the buses and you know send that back home and when those photos get through uh of course everybody packs their bags and heads for the border because everybody's getting in uh and they'll tell you that i interviewed six or seven central american migrants just the other day and i said hey how many of you raise your hands how many of you decided to come now at this time because of joe biden's policies and all seven of them immediately just raised their hands wow so i mean you know the officially they're saying don't come now the administration is saying don't come now but but on the ground people are telling their friends their families they're getting through so that's the message that's getting through from the sounds of it yeah listen the other day president biden held a internationally televised press conference where he said quite a few times no mexican child will be left on the mexican side we're taking them all and so you know that kind of messaging is what they hear and the the more potent messaging is from the ones that got in and are on the buses heading to florida those people are taking selfies on the bus and sending those back in with their papers and documents uh and when they resettle words don't matter actions matter to these uh immigrants they're going to be paying attention to what's actually happening and what's actually happening is that if you're in a family unit uh you are being waived right through with legal documents and you're never leaving so one of the interesting things that you reported on was that one of the trump era policies that is still in place and that the biden administration is trying to keep in place is having the mexican government keep their their troops down at the their southern border with guatemala to prevent more people from coming through but clearly people are coming through since you said these aren't all mexicans so what have you found out about how they're coming through right well remember that donald trump told the mexican government that we are going to apply trade tariffs on all of your exports into the united states if you don't sew up your southern border so the mexican put 8 000 troops down there national guard troops and roadblocks layered defensive roadblocks throughout chiapas and tabasco and jalisco and some of those southern states down there and pretty much shut that down but it only shut down because trump also had uh pushback policies remain in mexico and the pandemic 42 and uh deportations of thousands to guatemala so in combination all of those things worked really well but it shut down the caravans but biden came in and immediately got rid of the first three legs of that stool and only left the national guard down there and then begged the mexicans to keep the national guard down there so obviously all of these migrants who are rushing our border right now went right through them how did they get through them i interviewed them and they told me five different ways i don't know if i have time to go through all of them but i'll give you a couple of the ways that they told me that they got through one way is that the mexican government also is giving anybody who applies a humanitarian visa and they can drive up to a national guard roadblock and flash the visa and they get waved through and um i had quite a few of those guys actually show me their visas and they talked about how they waved through uh so the the mexican government is letting uh giving people who they want to stop from the with the roadblocks the documents they need to get through the roadblocks so that's one way another way is that they're bribing the guard so i had probably four or five different migrants explain me i had to pay a thousand pesos on the bus to the national guard guy i had to pay a thousand pesos four different times at four different roadblocks and others paid less 250 or 200 pesos uh and those 1 000 pesos that's about 50. it's like 50 bucks yeah interesting uh so it's a small price to pay and uh there are a number of other ways that they're getting through like flying over them uh into mexico city and then taking a bus from there and it goes on like that so the national guard uh road uh block system that uh biden is putting all his chips in on is a joke i mean nobody others are taking trains around them and you know it's not happening without the other policies that the biden people got rid of and how are they actually getting through the border when they come here are they i mean there's still pieces of wall in place other ones were stopped but what are the most common ways that they're coming across sure well i mean the most common way is you know you especially in south texas and in arizona is you have to hire a coyote a smuggler the drug cartels control the access to the united states plazas in a large chunk of texas and they pay anywhere from 25 the price is really high right now because of the demand uh they're massing uh in south texas thousands and thousands are just pouring over that border children boats and rafts filled with infants and children and they all have to pay and the way we know that is uh that the cartels have systematized their inventory so to speak and everybody has to have a wristband so if you you got to pay and then you get a wristband that says who you paid and it has a number on it for your identification for to make sure that you finish paying uh and then those wristbands are being discarded on the texas side and there are just thousands of them all over the place they take them off as soon as they come over in other parts of the border they're crossing themselves they're the cartels haven't quite caught up with demand yet in those areas like in del rio and they can just pick a point on the river and cross in and turn themselves in and the border patrol will take them through the turnstile to a bus there just like anywhere else remarkable so um there's something else i wanted to ask you about because this is a bit of your area of specialty is not just south and central americans who are coming through necessarily um i know you've looked at the broader security implications and i guess that's probably worse if the border is overwhelmed can you speak to that right well i have a book out right now that's called america's covert border war and this is about the jihadist threat to the border which is uh encompassed by a uh smuggling routes through the uh from south america where they fly into from the middle east and iran and afghanistan and somalia and muslim majority countries and then they make their way through the darien gap jungle of colombia and panama all the way to the border and it's not just central americans there are people from all over the world who are just crowding through that gap right now they are coming in huge numbers uh to reach the biden border they've all heard about how it's open uh they're gonna get while the getting is good and the problem is that when you have people from places like libya and somalia and yemen we just had three yemenis reported crossing the border who were on the terror watch list a couple months ago there were 11 iranians that reached the border so there are people from all over the place that are showing up without any identification so they're complete strangers they're showing up at a time when the border systems are collapsing and they say my name is mickey mouse i want asylum and uh you know good luck uh so um we just have to hope that um uh as the systems crash that the vetting programs that i describe in america's covert boarding border war are actually working uh and doing their job and i really worry that when we have this level of just unbelievable mass migration uh that that they are not going to somehow slip in right alongside everybody else and maybe do something a little bit later so we've got to wrap up but i just want to ask you where where do you see this going i mean this has been happening for last you know not that many months but what do you see happening here i mean i'm judging from the messaging that's coming out of the biden administration uh i see a historic event that will last for years uh with a trajectory that goes straight up of millions and millions of people coursing in crossing through the border uh probably we'll look at we're looking at about a million and a half people a sizable city population coming in just the first year 2021 uh and if something's not done and it doesn't look like they're going to do anything it'll be like that even more and more until uh you know the electorate finally picks somebody else to stop it all right todd thank you so much i hope i'm wrong really i do well there may be yeah i would imagine possibly some crisis point will hit before that it must be terribly trying on the you know the border towns and obviously border patrol the facilities are all overwhelmed so something could give before that remember they're all headed to american cities on the on the buses catch and bus right well thank you so much for joining us today todd and i hope you'll come back and update us on the situation thanks for having me unfortunately many of the people coming into the united states sometimes legally and sometimes illegally are actual victims of human trafficking making a bad situation even worse joining us now to explain how that works is anita tika she's the senior director of the anti-trafficking program at safe horizon anita thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me of course with so many people coming across the border looking for a way to stay in the united states it's very easy for smugglers and cartels to take advantage of those people we hear about human trafficking and sex trafficking and we know it's a big problem but i think very few people understand what really happens at the southern border i think as is pretty clear from news reports there's a lot of chaos and uncertainty right now at the southern border and so what we've actually been seeing in our client work over the last few years is that a lot of individuals who are coming or trying to enter through the u.s mexico border are actually trying to escape future or potential or ongoing human trafficking situations and so it's not just the act of crossing the border that might place them into a trafficking situation but they could actively be recruited for trafficking and that's what they're trying to proactively escape by crossing the border and most of our clients are actually labor trafficked and so i think when we hear about human trafficking there's so much awareness and conversation around sex trafficking but labor trafficking is hardly ever touched upon and that's what the majority of our clients experience and so what kind of labor are they being trafficked into unfortunately there is no limit to the type of industry that somebody can be labor trafficked into and so we have worked with individuals who've been smuggled over or have crossed the border and they have been trafficked into domestic work either for private families or for their own families or friends um individuals who have been trafficked into working on working in country clubs or resorts or spas working in restaurants and hospitality including small and large-scale hotels car washes mechanics garages uh dry cleaners gas stations i mean any area of industry of work you know unfortunately we have clients who've been exploited and trafficked um including construction and agriculture so it's a really wide spectrum of types of employment so how does it actually work is it a one-time payment to sell them is it indentured servitude how does it actually work it depends on each client's particular individual situation and so a lot of our labor traffic clients they may have paid a one-time fee to a labor recruit recruiter agent in their home country for connection to a potential job opportunity usually in the united states and certain promises are made regarding the type of employment the rates of pay the benefits and so on and so based on those promises which also often turn out to be false the individual pays the recruitment fee which is usually thousands of dollars which they can't typically afford and they take out heavy loans to cover the cost and then they are brought to the united states on usually a valid visa but sometimes it's a fraudulent visa that's been procured by the traffickers and so that in that situation we refer to that as debt bondage because by the time the individual has come over to the united states they're so deeply sunk into debt and the debt continues to exponentially rise as a result of the traffickers telling them you know we know that we told you housing and food would be included but you have to pay for that or we know you paid five thousand dollars for the recruitment fee you actually owe seven thousand dollars compounded with not being paid the wages that they were promised or potentially doing the kind of work that they were promised and so when you add in ever increasing debt with little to no wage payment it's impossible for the workers to ever work their way out of this step onto a situation and what if they don't pay so we have clients um and we've heard many client stories of individuals trying to escape i think um the the theory is that you work off the debt by working for the trafficker but as we just talked about you'll never work off the debt because the debt keeps increasing and if your labor is not valued relevant to the amount of debt that you owe you're never going to be able to financially work it off in a way that's going to satisfy the trafficker and so when clients try to leave the situation this is where the trafficker brings in threats of force or harm to either the direct worker or their family in the home country threats of deportation confiscating documents including passports and visas and so we find that our clients really hit the breaking point of trying to escape when they're no longer being paid anything and so you're subjected to physical sexual psychological abuse you're not being paid anything and you're in a situation that essentially has no end until you've outlived your usefulness for working in that particular field and so that's the point where we see a lot of our clients try to escape and then if they aren't people who escape what happens to them next if they've outlived their usefulness in that field it depends most of our clients have escaped a couple of our clients were ransomed off um or clients were forced to recruit other clients so if we have individuals who were sex trafficked they were forced then by their traffickers to recruit other individuals into the trafficked ring and so that becomes very complicated from a legal perspective of how do we define victim and recruiter and trafficker and so on but most of our clients have escaped there are individuals who have died during the course of their trafficking or they've sustained serious injuries um and so it really depends on each individual situation and and ultimately where they wind up in the united states if they're able to come into contact with law enforcement or service provider or what other resources they might have available to them do you have any sense of the scope of the problem the kind of numbers that we're talking about that is the million dollar question or rather the 150 billion dollar question because it's it's right now estimated to be a 150 150 billion dollar industry per year and so the the main thing that we run into as service providers is that in the united states we don't have any prevalence methodology that indicates how pervasive and how extensive this problem is we have numbers of clients that we serve and when we put those numbers together with numbers from other service providers and law enforcement we start to get a sense of the picture but i always look at it as similar to sexual assault or domestic violence or child abuse we know that those crimes are so much more well known and they've been talked about for such a longer period of time in the social consciousness and yet we also know that those numbers are severely under-reported and so imagine a crime like human trafficking which has only been a federal crime for 21 years how underreported those numbers must be because so many people don't identify as being a victim of human trafficking they don't know what human trafficking is there's not a lot of coverage or research about it and so the most recent numbers we have from the international labor organization from 2016 are there are an estimated 40.1 million people who are in various forms of human trafficking around the world but i think that's not even close to the real number wow and so when people are trafficked here and things don't end up as they anticipated are they able to communicate back home and let people know what's happening or is that blocked as well are they threatened a number of our clients who were trafficked as domestic workers either were never given a cell phone or their cell phone that they traveled here with them from the home country was confiscated we had some clients who were allowed to make monitored monthly calls to their families in the home country and anything that happens in between those monthly calls there's no communication between the the person who's being trafficked in the family and it's really tragic but we've had clients whose family members parents have passed away during the course of the client's trafficking the clients were not allowed to leave to go home for the funeral they weren't allowed to communicate with family members to get updates on their loved ones conditions and we have clients who you know based on friendships they were able to form under you know extraordinary circumstances they were able to be connected to communication devices so they could call their families but the communication tends to be very restricted and so families in the home country oftentimes have no idea what their family members are going through once they arrive in the united states wow it's tragic and so what is it that services like yours like safe horizon can do for them so we really work with the client you know in a partnership to determine what does the client need at this time and so it depends on the age of the client it depends on if the client is a us citizen or a foreign national the client is a foreign national a lot of temporary non-immigrant worker visas are tied to that employer so once you leave that employer because you're in an abusive working situation now you're out of status and you're undocumented and so you're in an even more precarious situation and so at that point we might be able to offer immigration assistance on the basis of being a human trafficking survivor we offer case management um trauma-focused therapy we so any number of things that a survivor would need in order to begin the very difficult long-term process of piecing their life back together and trying to stabilize and and grow towards self-empowerment but we focus a lot on housing and medical dental mental health referrals support with financial assistance including paying for phones because they often don't have phones when they come to us and helping with transportation and some limited rental costs and food but a lot of the clients really do opt for therapy wow that's a tragic story you're painting well thank you very much for joining us today and sharing that with us i really appreciate it sure thank you coming up after the break what's inside the biden administration's two and a half trillion dollar infrastructure plan but first here's america q a where we find out today what regular americans think about the fact that criminal networks profit from bringing illegal migrants into the united states [Music] almost like extortion i don't think that's right but there should be some other implements in place for immigrants trying to get over to where they don't feel like they need to utilize paying drug cartels i think that's wrong i mean if there's a way to get here legally then why not why would you want to break the law to do it that's been going on probably forever and i don't think we can do anything about that i wouldn't know enough about it to comment i believe in borders i believe we should have immigrants here they just need to go about the right way again it comes basic to politics all the politicians are corrupt filthy we have a president that is a traitor to the united states of america some of them i guess they try to help my reality selling drugs and getting people addicted and stuff like that becomes a serious issue they shouldn't make a profit off anything illegal you know but what can you really do you know hopefully you know one day they will all be brought to justice everyone you know that that does things like that especially something like human trafficking because that's like the lowest of the low that's a human life cartel shouldn't profit from it if somebody wants to come here for a better life than they should be allowed to my uncle came here legally through channels from morocco and he came through it all the right ways and lined up a job and everything before he even got here i don't think the cartel should make any money from it well we have about uh this problem for a long time now it's getting worse i don't think so i don't believe so i'm not very well versed on the fact that they are even making a profit off of people coming into the u.s fleeing asylum or parolee status or things of that nature i didn't even know that was uh issue i think that is against the constitution against people of usa from my understanding the mexican government is also very much uh involved with the cartel high-ranking officials i don't believe that the cartel is separate from the government the immigration process needs to be added again because a lot of people are coming into the united states are just sitting on benefits i do not agree with the coyotes but they're the ones that are getting rich i actually had never heard of that i've never read about it and i call myself pretty well read in what's going on i've not seen any of that information it's not good yeah we're empowering the drug cartels and letting people in that are obviously going to commit crimes so they can repay their debt president joe biden unveiled his much-discussed two and a half trillion dollar infrastructure plan in pittsburgh on wednesday he says the core of it is to modernize transportation infrastructure but that's not how the republicans are seeing it senate minority leader mitch mcconnell said in a tweet he called it a non-infrastructure infrastructure bill and said it looks more like a trojan horse for far left demands with us today to look under the hood of this bill is sarah anderson she's a director of policy at freedom works thank you for joining us sarah hey thank you so much for having me on so i want to start by saying actually that there's absolutely bipartisan consensus that america's infrastructure is in bad shape each year the us army corps of engineers issues a report card and america gets about a c minus which obviously isn't good so why is mitch mcconnell calling this a trojan horse yeah this is a pattern we've been seeing over the past couple of months in politics right things that tend to ordinarily be bipartisan have been made hyper-partisan so we saw this with the coveted relief bill that went through about two or three weeks ago now the american rescue plan act in congress the democrats passed through on a partisan basis with reconciliation which is a hyper partisan process with no republican votes for this this comes after nearly four or five or six different packages last year that passed on broad bipartisan votes so this is a continuation of what we've been seeing which is things again that are typically bipartisan like infrastructure like the need to invest in our country invest in the future of and invest in our infrastructure instead democrats have chosen to take this opportunity to put a list of lust leftist items in there just like minority leader mcconnell is saying so expanding medicaid um incentives for green energy and green new deal type of policies as well as throwing money at schools um not for reopening not for safety but instead for green energy policies wow so what are some of the most uh egregious things in this trojan horse bill that you think yeah absolutely so they're they're doing a couple of different things here 100 billion dollars to further the federal government's intrusion into local public schools 174 billion dollars in subsidies for electric vehicles which by the way is a regressive policy as it exists nearly 80 percent of those who currently benefit from the existing electric vehicle tax credit are from households that have incomes over a hundred thousand dollars so this is not aimed at the little guy this is aimed at a corporate subsidy additionally 400 billion dollars of this 2.5 trillion dollar package goes to increase the number of health care workers paying union dues and expanding medicaid i don't know what that has to do with infrastructure but mitch mcconnell is certainly right to call this a trojan horse for leftist items and additionally they encourage the passage of the pro act which would devastate millions of jobs across our country the gig economy uber lyft think about anybody who's an independent contractor they can kiss their job goodbye so explain that last act what would that do exactly sure the pro act is called the protecting the right to organize act and it's a big ticket item of the left of labor unions who are trying to push for not private sector jobs but only jobs that are tied to unions so what this bill would do so it would make it much much more difficult for companies to hire people as independent contractors requiring them to have full-time employees through what's called an abc test if you google california ab5 you will find a number of devastating stories about freelancers who have lost their jobs because of policies like this and furthermore just makes it easier for unions to unionize workers and undo the 27 states that have right to work laws that have increased employment across the country because of that the pro act would undo that and president biden has called for the passage of that bill as part of his infrastructure plan so what actually is in there in terms of shoring up america's infrastructure not very much we talked about the covid package a little bit earlier of course only nine percent of that bill went to covid relief they called it a covert relief bill but of the 1.9 trillion only nine percent went to covid for this bill it's about 2.5 trillion dollars top line is what we have seen um but according to studies of it nearly 600 billion is what goes to infrastructure in this package leaving you can do the math about 1.9 trillion completely unrelated to infrastructure so again a trojan horse for left is agenda items that have nothing to do with infrastructure and by the way the way they're going to try to pay for this is over 15 years by raising the corporate tax rate back up from 21 as it was lowered under the tax cuts and jobs act back to 28 which contrary to the title of the plan the american jobs plan it does the exact opposite sends our jobs back overseas and makes america less competitive on the global stage so what's been the reaction um from the business world to this plan yeah i think definitely disappointed in terms of you know this is not the package to do the types of policies that they're trying to put into place right we've talked about the idea of infrastructure being bipartisan the idea of investing in infrastructure instead democrats have chosen to just use this as another spending spree and also raising taxes on corporations raising taxes again of course ultimately as it trickles down to people in the cost of their goods and the cost of their services um so i think it will make it far far more difficult for the small businesses in our country to survive that have already been devastated by covet and the shutdowns we've seen across our country this is not the way to unleash prosperity in our country it's not the way to get americans back on their feet and it's certainly not pro-business and can you explain the reconciliation process how that gets things through sure so reconciliation is a budgetary process that each congress has the opportunity to use in terms of reconciling the budget with what they're going to spend versus what they're going to tax and an allowable deficit as a result so what you can do in reconciliation is change things that have a budgetary impact and do not change policy on their face so we saw democrats use this proposal use this method to push through the covid relief bill which is why they weren't unable to include a minimum wage hike because it was ruled by the senate parliamentarian that that was a policy change that had budgetary implications not a budgetary change with a policy implication so it sort of limits what they're able to pass in a bill like this but what's most important about reconciliation is it allows a bill to pass in the senate with only 50 votes if you have a tie break like the democrats have with kamala harris as vice president um so that means they can ignore the other party ignore the minority party and bypass the filibuster which of course is what requires the senate to reach some form of consensus to close the debate before they're able to pass something so it's a hyper partisan process democrats now have two more bites at that apple in this congress we don't know exactly what they're going to use it for but infrastructure might be rolled into it as part so are you expecting this bill to go through as is i know there's some talk about breaking into two pieces or what's the situation there yeah it's more likely that it'll go through in separate pieces like you mentioned potentially two pieces one under reconciliation and one not under reconciliation um but we heard reports from my majority uh speaker of the house nancy pelosi who has said it remains to be seen what the top line of the bill that congress will attempt to pass will be which seems to be an evergreen statement they're never quite sure how many trillions of your dollars they are going to spend this time around um but we expect that the plan will be significantly altered when it goes through congress of course everything it's like the president's agenda right when it gets released this is all of the stuff that they want to have included in the bill of course political reality is quite different than maybe the dreams of a president so we'll see how the package changes as it goes through but as speaker pelosi has said yet to be seen what the actual top line number will shake out to be i see so that two and a half trillion could go up or down presumably absolutely and what are you expecting the timeline for all of this to be so they have had talk of trying to do this in the next couple of months of course their priorities are constantly changing um it's very very difficult to get a grasp on what exactly democrats top priorities are going to be we know that they're having a difficult time in summonses holding their confidence together and that's we saw it happen with immigration they wanted to put biden's plan on the floor of the house were unable to secure the votes for that with their slim five vote majority and so they switched back over to passing um a farm agriculture immigration related bill and the dream act um instead of putting that larger package on the floor just a couple of weeks ago so we'll see how long it takes them to get consensus on a bill like this of course also with hr1 and s1 which is the for the people act that would be an unconstitutional power grab for elections they're also facing potential difficulties with even keeping the senate conference together on the democratic side for that bill so it depends how that goes we know that the senate wants to bring hr one to the floor that is chuck schumer's priority in the senate when they return from their recess the week of april 12th so it remains to be seen of course how the negotiations go but we do know that there is agreement in the democratic party to move something on infrastructure to follow some of uh biden's plan here and so we'll be tracking that closely in the coming months and just to remind our viewers hr one is the um you know voter reform bill that has a whole lot of very far-reaching provisions in there that would dramatically change our electoral process which uh the republicans are vehemently against um is there anything else we've got to wrap up is there anything else that's important for people to know about this bill yeah i mean them absolutely i mean the main thing is just look at the hypocrisy of this right it's called the american jobs plan but really what it would do is take away jobs from people who are freelancers who work in the gig economy for contractors and people who are struggling to get by in covid anyway plus it would trickle down higher prices across the board for people in our country as the corporate tax rate gets raised and by the way they're spending money on things that are completely unrelated to infrastructure like you said at the outset of this of course everyone wants investment in our infrastructure but this is simply spending that has very very little to do with infrastructure and it should be called out for that most of the mainstream media is not going to be doing that for us so we're thankful to you all here for for spreading that message um and and let your legislators know that you want actual investment not just spending all right thank you so much for joining us today sarah thank you cindy coming up after the break 85 words in the latest stimulus package could cause big problems but first here's america q a where americans tell us what they think about vaccine passports i think that's a good idea if kobe is not going to go away i think that would be good um just to help cut down on the spread of the coronavirus with people that travel is that going to give us id cards i don't see why we wouldn't show that no that's too much it sounds good but that's a lot i'll drive wherever i need to go if it's that bad i mean i think certainly with international travel it would help you know the risky activities that we haven't allowed you know large group settings indoors you know i could understand you know having a passport no i just think it should be more of a personal choice and that would be taking it a little too far for my opinion i think it's right to ask people if they've had the vaccine to take precautions but it's it's a lot to ask people to give up their privacy they're constantly being tracked government control again my thoughts is it's everything it's about control no they don't take it they should still be able to do whatever they want i don't think that that would solve the problem i guess that's up to the individual i'm not necessarily against the passport for like travel but like to be able to go to the gym or the grocery store that's that's too much i say yeah because i don't i wouldn't want other people to get sick you know those who don't want to have it then they don't have to but then they have to suffer the consequences of not not having it no no way this is a free country it's your choice if you want to take a vaccine or not you know that's up to you my thoughts is a good idea because i have a card for that purpose from when i got my vaccine that i could fly yes i think it they should i do not agree with the the vaccines are fairly new and it would be a lot of energy a lot of money um put into something that is still unsure no i don't agree with the vaccine passports it's about pretty much a little bit of communism that goes on with it people getting segregated yeah i'm for that because look at the craziness going on in like south beach miami and the young people that are just getting together in masses and i actually would agree with that you know so you know everyone can know that you know you have been vaccinated it's a little safer for everybody i believe that it should be voluntary that it's okay for people to produce passports um but as soon as anyone starts talking about making a passport mandatory or required then i am totally against it the latest stimulus package known as the american rescue plan comes with a 1.9 trillion dollar price tag and it passed without a single republican vote it's over 600 pages and chalk full of implications most americans will never hear about though the impacts could be far-reaching here to tell us about one provision that is definitely below the radar is chris jacobs he's the founder and ceo of the dc based juniper research group hi chris thanks for coming here i know that one of juniper's goals is to help put complicated policy in plain language so we invited you here to talk about one little paragraph in this large legislation that caught your attention and it's about the strings that are attached to states when they accept bailout money from the federal government and i just want to put that paragraph up on the screen so our viewers can see it it's about 80 words long and it says that a state or territory shall not use the funds provided in this section to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue of such state or territory resulting from a change in law regulation or administrative interpretation during the covered period okay chris can you tell us what does all this mean in lay terms what it means in late terms essentially is that chuck schumer and nancy pelosi want to run 50 state governments from washington and they want to dictate terms and basically require states any state accepting bailout funds they cannot reduce taxes at all they cannot provide small tax relief to small businesses suffering from the pandemic they cannot provide school choice options through the tax code which many states have in place they cannot provide any tax reductions to their their citizens because chuck schumer nancy pelosi said no so it doesn't have to have anything to do with stimulus or or covert relief or anything like that just any tax change or break at all would uh not be allowed well that's that's correct and and and that's the concern some states actually already have tax reductions in place that were set to go into effect prior to covid as you know tax laws change from time to time some legislatures were in session in january february may have passed legislation to already take effect and this was slipped in at the last minute in the senate by chuck schumer and up ends all of these plans that states may already have in place prior to the stimulus or even prior to the pandemic so how long would this apply how long would they be under this restriction so this would apply essentially for the the rest of the biden presidency through the end of december 2024 so this is not just something that well when the public health emergency ends we get back to normal the fall early next year this goes away no this is a four-year requirement that you cannot cut taxes potentially in any way shape or form so what kind of funds are the states receiving uh in exchange for this deal this there are hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds this was something that republicans uh opposed last year uh and prevented from going through during the trump administration because this is essentially bailing out blue states that mismanage their their budgets prior to the pandemic and have massive obligations to unions in the form of retirement and pension obligations that they can't afford to pay for so this is essentially washington trying to bail out states ostensibly because of kovid but really it's bailing out these these blue states that have mismanaged their their budgets over many many years and what kind of pushback are we seeing from the states 21 state attorneys general wrote a letter to the treasury department asking for an interpretation of this this statutory language um questioning whether or not they it is constitutional and asking the treasury department to interpret it in a manner that is potentially not as invasive or doesn't impose as many restrictions on states um that are that are seeking the bailout funds one state ohio has already filed a lawsuit saying that this provision is unduly coercive and unconstitutional relying on the supreme court's uh decision in 2012 in the obamacare case that said requiring states to expand their medicaid programs to the able-bodied adults was unconstitutional it was a massive uh coercive expansion of government that the federal government could not force states to do we'll see how the treasury department how quickly they put out guidance how broadly or narrowly they define directly or indirectly in the language you would put up on the screen whether they provide relief valves for states that already had tax provisions in place um and that we're going to take effect regard prior to this bill um you're going to see this k in these cases when their way through the court the ohio case and potentially other cases i think the real simple answer though most states revenues have recovered from since the coronavirus pandemic that most state revenues were down marginally or even up slightly in 2020. states don't necessarily need this money well-managed conservative states don't necessarily need this money so the easy way is say thanks but no thanks you know wash your hands of it and say we will keep our control and our sovereignty and not have the federal government trying to micromanage from washington so are there some states that you feel couldn't afford to make that call it varies based on the states some states were that are very tourism dependent obviously tourism is is still lagging uh some states that are dependent on natural resources that when oil prices cratered and commodity prices cratered they took a bigger hit to their budgets but overall it was only a fractional um a few tenths of a percent reduction in revenues 2020 compared to 2019 uh and those revenues will continue to go up later this year as the recovery accelerates uh even states that are dependent on tourism you know places like florida people are going to want to go back to the beach they're going to want to take their kids to disney world florida's going to get tons and tons of sales tax revenue when all those tourists come flocking back and is it just red states that have opposed this red states opposed the restriction on on the tax relief yes the blue states were the ones that were calling for the bailout because they're the ones that have mismanaged new york had a four to six billion dollar budget deficit even before the coronavirus pandemic hit back in january february of 2020 they were already talking about how having to um reduce spending because of their their mismanagement of course the other thing with blue states is blue state suffered greater revenue losses by and large because most blue state governors kept things locked down for much longer than than red states so do you think the blue states are just looking short term we need the bailout money or do you think philosophically they don't mind because i mean there is a federal state kind of power issue going on here i i think it's both i think they need the money and they don't mind because they have no intention of lowering taxes anyway andrew cuomo in in new york wants to raise taxes i believe phil murphy the governor of new jersey he wants to raise taxes so blue states are looking to raise taxes to cover these obligations they're not looking to cut taxes they don't they think all that money is the government's money and that it's not individual citizens money so finally we're going to have to wrap up but do you think um do the republican states or the states that are posted is it a legitimate option to just not take the bailout money i think in many cases it is a legitimate option it's a significant amount of money that that the states would be turning down but if your state really didn't incur much of a revenue loss from the pandemic then then you're no better or worse off than then when you were before the bill passed and meanwhile you're retaining your sovereignty and you're retaining your state say that your lawmakers will actually be able to control your own state's budget which is a novel concept interesting all right well thank you so much today uh for joining us today chris and explaining all of that to us thanks very much and that's all for today's show thank you so much for watching the nation speaks be sure to join us every saturday 11 a.m to noon eastern and from all of us here have a great week you