UPDATE Friday morning: Sen. Tim Kaine writes, “[Thursday], I confronted Jeremy Carl, Trump’s nominee to a top State Department role, about his history of racist remarks, including ridiculous claims that white people are experiencing a “cultural genocide.” He is clearly unqualified to represent us abroad.” For more information on Jeremy Carl, see here, including that he: 1) “expressed sympathy for the January 6th rioters, describing them as ‘political prisoners’ and saying they had it worse than Black Americans in the Jim Crow South”; 2) “downplayed The Holocaust and called for the ‘Jewish question’ to be addressed.”; 3) “has been accused of being a white supremacist because of his racist views”; etc.
See below for video of/highlights from today’s press availability by Sen. Tim Kaine. Lots of interesting stuff; bolding added by me for emphasis!
- “First there was a an announcement by the Trump administration this week about a proposal, Trump RX, the president doesn’t do things without putting his own name on them. But just as a kind of a consumer safety tip, it’s been promoted by the White House as something that is going to, you know, enable people to buy prescription drugs cheaper. It’s sort of hollow, there’s not really much to it. And if folks want to find prescription drugs cheaper, probably much better to deal with programs like Good RX or Ask Your Pharmacist. There’s a 340B program that enables low-income people to access medications at lower costs already. The president has basically got more of a web page than a product or service. And that web page is somewhat incomplete. Doesn’t give information about generic drugs that could be cheaper than name-brand drugs that are being discussed. And if the White House really wanted to bring prescription drug costs down, they would be pursuing power that we gave to HHS as part of the American Rescue Plan to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies and bring drug prices down. President Biden took that power that we put in the American Rescue Plan and negotiated pharmaceutical prices down on a number of the most commonly used pharmaceuticals affecting Americans. And that power still exists for the Trump administration, but for some odd reason, they’ve chosen not to enter into these challenging negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to bring these prices down. So if they really want to bring prices down, they have a way to do it. And this is just another example of President Trump, frankly, focusing on issues other than pricing issues. Drug prices are going up. Valentine’s Day costs are going up for roses and chocolate and the meal that you might go out to have with your loved one. And we’re seeing this energy, housing, food, everything is going up and that’s unfortunate. This latest effort is sort of a fake effort.”
- “As many of you know, I started to lead the effort against President Trump’s chaotic tariff taxes almost a year ago, challenging the president’s imposition of tariffs on Canada, on Brazil, on the global liberation day tariffs. This is a very chaotic strategy that is nothing more than attacks on Americans, increasing prices for everyday items and making it harder because of retaliatory tariffs for American businesses to sell their products overseas. In all my travels around Virginia this year, I’ve heard again and again and again how much this chaotic tariff policy is hurting people’s pocketbooks and hurting the bottom lines of Virginia companies, especially small businesses. The challenge I’ve had is while I’ve been able to successfully challenge President Trump’s tariffs in the Senate, getting Republicans to join Democrats in rejecting his tariff policies, the House has used a procedural trick to avoid taking up these bills, either the Senate bills that pass over to the House or House members’ own bills trying to challenge President Trump’s tariffs. It’s a complicated procedural trick to explain, but the bottom line is Speaker Johnson wants to kind of have a gag rule where you can’t have votes on these tariff issues on the floor, because he knows that if a vote is allowed, people will express displeasure with Donald Trump’s policies. And the last thing Speaker Johnson wants to do is get on Donald Trump’s bad side. Last night, the House anger at this gimmick finally boiled over and there was a vote on a procedural matter. But the the underlying question is whether these tariff items can be taken up on the House floor for vote. Speaker Johnson and the White House worked really really hard as they have all year to block any House votes on tariffs, but the White House and the Speaker failed. And Democrats together with Republicans said, ‘Look, we’re in Congress for a reason; we’re hearing from our constituents about how bad these tariffs are, we want to be able to debate and vote about them on the floor of the Senate.’ And so they they essentially ended the procedural gimmick that had been used to silence critics of tariffs in the House for the last year. That means the Senate bills that we passed over to the House now can be taken up. And it also means House bills that are being filed to challenge these tariffs can be taken up as well. I want to thank my colleagues – Senator Widen, Senator Schumer, Senator Ran Paul, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis on the Republican side, Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar on the Democratic side. We’ve had a good coalition going after these tariffs. And we’re now working in tandem with our House colleagues, particularly the lead Democrat on House Foreign Relations, Representative Meeks, to strategize about how we can move together. We just think again and again and again we need to put these tariff votes before the body to reject President Trump’s chaos. He gave an interview recently where he just, you know, kind of casually let slip in the interview that he decided that the Swiss should pay a 39% tariff because he had a conversation with the Swiss prime minister – actually, Switzerland doesn’t have a prime minister, it’s a president, he misspoke about that – but he didn’t like the fact that the woman who was president of Switzerland was not polite to him on the phone. And so that was the reason that the tariff got set at 39% on Swiss products. I mean, talk about chaotic, idiotic, and it is near Valentine’s Day where Swiss chocolates are kind of desired. Eventually, the Swiss tariff was adjusted downward. But the kind of chaotic president that would set a 39% tariff because I didn’t like your tone on a phone call. This is not a power that should be exercised by the president without congressional oversight.”
- “Last thing I’ll say before I open it up is yesterday there was a moment in the courts in DC that should not go unnoticed. President Trump is weaponizing the federal judiciary against political opponents. And we know this in Virginia because the president has tried to bring politically motivated prosecutions against James Comey, against New York attorney general Letitia James, tried to bring those in Virginia and Republican US attorneys Eric Siebert and Todd Gilbert for refusing to advance these politically motivated prosecutions have been forced out of their jobs by President Trump. That’s bad enough to try to muscle the federal prosecutors in Virginia for not bringing politically motivated prosecutions. And I applaud both Eric Seibert and Todd Gilbert for standing up for the rule of law against a lawless president.”
- “But yesterday was something even more extreme in my view. The president through his Department of Justice, US attorney in DC Jeanine Pirro, tried to indict six members of Congress, Democrats, for making a public claim that members of the military and National Guard and other federal employees for that matter should honor their oath, follow the Constitution, and were well within their rights to refuse to follow any order given that was unlawful or unconstitutional. This is basic law. It’s the oath that we take that we’ll uphold the constitution, but we’ll also defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. And telling someone that they needn’t follow an unconstitutional order is hardly newsmaking. But President Trump decided to take an unprecedented step and use his Department of Justice to attempt to indict six sitting members of Congress for making that lawful and unremarkable claim. The effort failed yesterday. The six who were indicted, who were attempted to be indicted, including two senators, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of [Michigan], the grand jury refused to return an indictment. This is virtually unheard of. Prosecutors go to the grand jury with evidence that’s very one-sided. The defense doesn’t get to present anything. They’re not even often aware of what the evidence is that’s being presented to the grand jury. The grand jury’s threshold for an indictment is not guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a very low threshold to indict. It’s extremely rare that federal grand juries choose not to follow a prosecutor’s lead and issue an indictment. But yesterday, the grand jury in DC demonstrated great common sense by looking at what the administration was doing and saying, ‘this just stinks, and there’s no way we’re going to go along with it.’ Just as grand juries in Virginia have also acted in a similar way. And the courts in Virginia have acted in a similar way, and the US attorneys in Virginia have acted in a similar way to shortcircuit political prosecutions in Virginia. When the administration, in this case the Trump administration, decides it has to use the criminal law to go after sitting members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives for doing their jobs and repeating what the law is and what our oaths are, this is tyranny pure and simple. Just as it was when ICE agents grabbed and tackled and handcuffed another Senate colleague of mine, Alex Padilla, for going to a press conference in his home community of Los Angeles, and trying to ask a question about abusive immigration practices that were affecting his constituents. We all remember those videos of a United States senator being rushed out of a room, tackled and handcuffed. This is what dictatorships do. I lived in a dictatorship in Honduras in 1980 and 81. And when critics are arrested or indicted or tackled or handcuffed, and especially when people’s elected representatives are handcuffed or tackled or threatened with indictment, it is clearly an administration that’s losing its grip, that is aware its positions are unpopular, that lacks confidence that it can win the support of the American public in pursuing policies. And so they start to go after critics because they’re so insecure in themselves. We’re not going to let this stand. The grand jury did the right thing yesterday. All of us expect that Donald Trump isn’t done with this, but we’re not going to be silent. We’re going to continue to raise criticisms, for example, to the abuses of ICE and CBP that are very much of the moment as we’re debating the budgets for those agencies now. And if Donald Trump thinks he or anyone in this administration can make me or any other senator shut up by bogus criminal charges or threatened prosecutions, they don’t know what they’re dealing with. I’m really proud of my colleagues for standing strong. I’m very very proud of the anonymous members of the grand jury in DC that stared down an unqualified federal prosecutor and said there’s no way we’re going to let you use us to carry out your illegitimate political retribution campaign.”
- “It’s pathetic that the president is devoting federal resources to try to relitigate an election that happened six years ago and not focusing his attention on bringing down food, energy, health care, housing costs, or creating a better life for everyday Americans. Why focus on the 2020 election at this late date? It’s again, the president is so insecure about everything that he can’t admit what numerous courts have found, what Georgia Republican election officials have proclaimed again and again, that he lost that election. He’s trying to prove that he won Georgia in 2020 even though the governor at the time was a Republican. The lieutenant governor was Republican. The officials running the elections were Republican. There was a famous phone call where the president tried to strongarm Georgia officials and say, ‘I need you to find me another 13,000 votes so I can that I won.’ President Trump and his cronies should have been convicted for those actions. They’re now trying to, in my view, fabricate evidence. when they go into the Fulton County election board and seize evidence about 2020, I am completely confident that they’ll cook up some story likely with fabricated evidence to assuage the president’s ego and suggest that he won. We need a president who’s focused on making life better for Americans, not on, you know, salving his own insecurities by relitigating an election that happened six years ago.”
- “Look, [Virginia redistricting] is only happening because of Donald Trump. Let’s be really clear about this. If Donald Trump had not announced that we need to do mid-decade redistricting to jerry rig politics and artificially inflate the Republican majority in the House, Virginia would not be doing this. The president started this last year by pressuring the North Carolina legislature to redistrict, eliminating three Democratic seats. And that’s the margin right now. Democrats would have a majority in the House right now except for President Trump doing it. And it’s clear that North Carolina wasn’t alone. They’re doing the same thing in Texas and they’re trying to do the same thing in other states. President Trump cannot expect to jerry rig American elections and have democracy-loving people sit back and do nothing. And so it’s unfortunate that it’s come to this and I think it’s unfortunate and all Democrats in the General Assembly would agree. They wish they wouldn’t be pressed to this, but they’re not going to let pro- tyranny Trump acolytes rig the election without a response. The other thing I’ll say, Charlie, that is really notable about the Virginia effort, contrary to Texas, contrary to North Carolina, is it’s going to go before the voters. The Texas and North Carolina redistricting mid decade that Donald Trump inspired was done in a back room. It didn’t go for voters for approval. It was done by Republican majorities and they just jammed it and they did it in a way to try to steal Democratic seats. In Virginia, we’re going to put this before the voters and they’re going to have a chance to express their opinion likely in April…and I think that’s the right thing. It should go before the voters.”
- “…cartels have used drones at the border, for example, to essentially operate as aerial cameras to like look and see where CBP agents are. So if they’re trying to help people cross the border, they want to see where the CBP agents are. And so that that is a fairly common thing that’s been going on for years, but it’s never caused the American airspace to shut down before. It it is a known phenomenon. It is annoying. the CBP and others at the border have ways of dealing with it, but it’s never led to this shutdown of American airspace. And so I’m very puzzled by this particular incident. And I think the thing that should puzzle all of us is the complete lack of communication between the Department of Defense and the FAA. We know that that lack of communication can be fatal. I mean, the accident that occurred a little bit over a year ago at DCA Reagan here was partly due to inadequate communication between the DoD helicopters that are frequent flyers in this congested airspace and the FAA and air traffic controllers who are managing the commercial um aircraft into and out of DCA Reagan. That lack of communication was one of the factors that led to 67 people being killed in this horrible air accident. And so the fact that there was a closure based upon some DoD information and then the FAA lifted it right away, it needs to be examined. I’m glad that the airspace closure was lifted so quickly, but how the DoD and FAA were not on the same page, it should trouble all of us – and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”