GOP plots revenge as Trump conviction hits Congress | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Republican lawmakers are plotting revenge after former President Donald Trump's hush money conviction. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise breaks down Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony on Capitol Hill over the COVID-19 pandemic response. The 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals blocked Fearless Fund from awarding grants to businesses owned by Black women. A San Francisco program gives homeless alcoholics booze. Paste BN National Correspondent Deborah Barfield Berry talks about her experience as an election poll worker. You may get another chance to see the northern lights.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. And today is Tuesday, June 4th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.
Today, GOP lawmakers are looking for revenge after Trump's conviction. Plus, Dr. Fauci was grilled on Capitol Hill and one of our reporters relays her experience as a poll worker.
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Republican lawmakers are seeking revenge for the historic conviction of former President Donald Trump in his hush money case, which some are calling a miscarriage of justice and a political maneuver. In the Senate, a group of conservative lawmakers are pledging to stop all democratic priorities and block Biden administration nominees from approval. And in the GOP-led House, lawmakers plan to interrogate the Manhattan prosecutors that sought the conviction strip federal funding from the state of New York and to fund the efforts of special counsel Jack Smith, who's overseeing Trump's classified documents case. Their efforts may not be successful. The House's pushes will face a dead end in the democratically controlled Senate, but it shows the party's continued loyalty to Trump and the political opportunity they see to rally support for his reelection bid. On the campaign trail, they're using the conviction to their advantage. The GOP's donor platform, WinRed, was overwhelmed with traffic following the ruling. And both the Senate and House GOP campaign arms have reported a surge in fundraising. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci faced questions yesterday during a hearing from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability over the COVID-19 pandemic response. Things got heated at times, including when representative Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to Fauci as Mister instead of Dr. Fauci and said he deserves to be in prison. For his part, Fauci talked of threats to his family, faced questions on China and others. I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Elizabeth Weise to learn more. Beth, thanks for hopping on.
Elizabeth Weise:
Always happy to be here.
Taylor Wilson:
Why was this hearing held?
Elizabeth Weise:
Well, it depends on who you ask. So this was the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which has been looking into a variety of issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic for the last 15 months. The Republicans on the committee have tended to focus more on mistakes that were made and specifically what many of them feel were impositions on the rights of Americans. The Democrats on the committee have tended to support the CDC and the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci. And it was Dr. Fauci who testified for more than three hours.
Taylor Wilson:
So Beth, I want to walk through a few of the hearing's main focus points. Let's start with what Dr. Fauci said about threats that he and his family have faced in recent years.
Elizabeth Weise:
Fauci especially has been the recipient, not just him, but his wife and his three daughters have been the recipient of multiple threats that have come in via email, regular mail, texts. There have been at least two people who were arrested for making credible death threats for him, which during his testimony he said, "That means someone who was clearly on their way to kill me." So these are not just people letting off steam.
One of the interesting things he said about that was, "If you are in medicine, it is not the road to fame or fortune. Public health workers and especially public health doctors do not make a lot of money, but they do it for the greater good." And he said, "We are losing some of the best talent we've got because young people who might have gone into public health aren't doing it because they're just reluctant to put themselves in their families through what they've seen public health officials like Dr. Fauci and like many state public health officials go through during and after Covid."
Taylor Wilson:
So one focus, Beth, was China. What did lawmakers bring up when it comes to China and the Covid pandemic?
Elizabeth Weise:
Covid started in China around Wuhan. Nobody knows for certain how it started. There are those who believe that it was created in a lab probably at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And then there are those who believe that it naturally occurred out amongst animals and then moved into humans. One of the focuses here was, and this has long been known, that the NIH gave the Wuhan Institute of Virology $120,000 grant because they were looking into viruses and some of the representatives were saying, "Didn't that money go to create Covid?" What Fauci testified is that the money that the NIH provided was for much more general work on viruses and that the virus that that grant from the NIH was working on was phylogenetically so different from the Covid 2 virus that eventually evolved that they can't have evolved from one another.
Taylor Wilson:
Of course, Dr. Fauci was at the center of lots of decision making around guidelines around Covid-19 in the U.S especially in 2020 when concerns about the virus were at their peak. Beth, how did the committee approach this during yesterday's hearing?
Elizabeth Weise:
Yeah, that was very contentious and we heard multiple, multiple representatives questioning Dr. Fauci about this during the hearing. The question is the 6-foot social distancing guidelines that were put in place early on in the pandemic. And what the committee was saying was, "You, Dr. Fauci, have said that that distance just appeared and it wasn't scientifically vetted." And they were saying, "So you just made it up and destroyed schools and destroyed a lot of America with this 6-foot requirement when there was nothing behind it."
And what Dr. Fauci said is he said, "First off," he said, "I didn't come up with it. It wasn't the NIH. It was the CDC." That's their purview, not his. But the other thing he said is when he said that in the testimony in January, he wasn't saying that social distancing had no science behind it. He was saying that 6-feet, nobody had time during Covid to go out and do a test of it should it be 3-feet or 6-feet or 9-feet? What is the best distance? We were going off of what we knew. And at the time, what scientists knew was viruses that are spread via droplets, 6-feet is a good distance for social distancing to protect people from not getting infected.
Later on, it emerged that the Covid virus could also aerosolize. And so the question was, was 6-feet the right call later on? But their focus in this hearing was you said there was no science. And he said this a lot. He's like, "That's not what I said. Let me clarify." And then he kind of sounded like a professor lecturing people.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with you Paste BN. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Always happy to be here.
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Taylor Wilson:
In a closely watched civil rights case, a panel on the Eleventh Circuit U.S Court of Appeals has blocked Fearless Fund from awarding $20,000 grants to businesses owned by Black women while the case is litigated. The panel cited with conservative activist Edward Bloom that the grant program is likely discriminatory. The Appeals Court disagreed with a federal judge who ruled in September that the lawsuit was unlikely to win on First Amendment grounds. And the defeat for the Atlanta firm working to boost scarce venture capital funding for Black women could have major implications for race-based initiatives in the private sector. The Fearless Fund case is part of a growing pushback from conservative activists like Bloom who set his sights on the private sector after last year's landmark affirmative action victory over race conscious college admissions.
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A program in San Francisco gives homeless alcoholics booze. Under the city's Managed Alcohol Program, up to 20 homeless people with severe alcohol use disorder are housed in a former hotel and given predetermined doses of liquor at specific intervals. The drinks dispensed by nurses as a form of medication are meant to prevent the clients from becoming overly intoxicated while avoiding the worst effects of withdrawal, which may lead to seizures and can be fatal for those physically dependent on alcohol. The issue also goes well beyond San Francisco. The CDC says about 178,000 Americans die every year of excessive alcohol use. Supporters argue a program like San Francisco's reduces harm among a vulnerable population. Critics say it enables addiction at taxpayers expense.
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Poll workers help make elections happen. I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Deborah Barfield Berry about her experience as a poll worker and what goes into the critical role. Deborah, thanks for making the time.
Deborah Barfield Berry:
Thank you for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
So Deborah, you worked a stint as a poll worker. I'm just curious, what made you decide to do this?
Deborah Barfield Berry:
Well tell, I've been writing stories for years about poll workers, voting issues, election issues, et cetera. And along the way, a commissioner at the federal election assistance commissioner had mentioned fairly recently, his name is Tom Hicks, that, "One day maybe you should write a first person piece about what it's like to be a poll worker." I thought, "Okay, that sounds interesting." But of course we could go on with other stories. But then this opportunity came up in the last few months to say, "Well, maybe we should take a look at what it's like to be a poll worker." And DC election officials welcomed me in.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, it was a great piece. So before even working as a poll worker, Deborah, you learned about some of the ways that technicians verify the accuracy of voting machines. I'm curious, what's this process like?
Deborah Barfield Berry:
We went to the operations center in DC. There were rows and rows and rows of the electronic voting machines and technicians who stood at each machine, spent 30 minutes, sometimes even longer depending on the ballot that's going to be used for that particular machine, and went through it step by step. They went through testing both the accessibility issue, things like the audios for people who have hearing challenges and/or visual challenges. And they checked all of this, checked that the ballots were coming up correctly, all this stuff. And then once they were finished, then they kind of sealed the machine. They put it away and wait until it's delivered to a polling center is when they take the tape off and open it up to the public.
Taylor Wilson:
So you then moved to training.
Deborah Barfield Berry:
Yes.
Taylor Wilson:
What was this like and what did you learn?
Deborah Barfield Berry:
It was four hours straight in the classroom. They were maybe a dozen of us or so who are participating. Based on what your assignment is, you're assigned to a different class. I was assigned to be a ballot clerk, which meant for the most part that I helped voters who come in go through the process, whether it is to use the electronic voting machine or to write it out, whichever way, if they have special challenges to their ballot or they just want to do it the simple old-fashioned way. So that was our task. We spent four hours in the class watching videos about cybersecurity, videos about making sure that the access to the polls and polling sites and equipment were accessible to people with special needs and/or disabilities.
We also learned what you're allowed to say or you are not allowed to say, how can you help voters, what are you not allowed to do. Number one, don't stand behind them. Give them room, give them space, give them privacy. And then we also did some simulations. We teamed with some of our classmates and walked through how we would help a voter. That was a real great hands-on learning experience because it's one thing to sit in a classroom and learn ABC, and D. It's another to have to actually have to do it. And that was really, really helpful before we left.
And then to top it off, Taylor, at the end of the four hours, we were given a quiz. And luckily, I aced it, but it had me a little bit nervous to remember how to make sure I passed my quiz, but I did.
Taylor Wilson:
In terms of the actual shift, what did this work consist of and what stood out to you?
Deborah Barfield Berry:
For the most part, most of us were assigned a location. It's a six-hour shift. Once you're in it, you're in it. I have been to do one morning and one evening. I did two shifts, by the way. They're two different sites. And it started off checking in, finding your place, your particular table, because there are several different positions. Find your spot, get yourself set up, get to know your teammate. And my case, because I have not as a veteran as some of my other colleagues, they actually gave me a little refresher course because I didn't remember everything about the last test. So we did that, and then you wait for voters to come in.
And as they come in, you help them out, steers them after they voted, tell them where to go to turn in their ballot. You greet them. And it was long six hours because they weren't as many coming through, especially for the early voting period. But it was kind of cool because the ones who did come through, the voters, they clearly wanted to be there and they were excited about voting. And that made the time feel more valuable because you got to see folks who really wanted to be there. You got to meet poll workers who really wanted to help, and that made it a pretty invaluable experience.
Taylor Wilson:
And Deborah, as you mentioned, you've covered poll workers before. What's your biggest takeaway here after going through this experience?
Deborah Barfield Berry:
I've talked to many over the years and about different things, everything from recruitment of poll workers, talking to some young ones about why they do it, why they don't. But it was very different to be in the room and see how it works. And then the time and the commitment they put into doing the work, that I have a whole new appreciation for what they do because these elections won't run smoothly without workers in the field, workers on the frontline.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Deborah Barfield Berry is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you, Deborah.
Deborah Barfield Berry:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
If you missed last month's thrilling Northern Lights display, you may get another chance. Last month's showing of the Aurora seen as far south as Florida was highly unusual, but experts say the next several years could see even bigger displays as the sun enters the height of its typical 11-year sunspot cycle. Forecasters with the Federal Space Weather Prediction Center gave stargazers in parts of the Midwest hope for a show in the sky on Friday night into Saturday morning, but then widespread sightings didn't happen. Now they're looking at the possibility of another event over the next week, including possibly this weekend. You can stay with usatoday.com for the latest Aurora forecasts.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.