Overtime – Episode #701: Rep. Jason Crow, James Kirchick

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

All right, he's a Democratic congressman from Colorado, Jason Crowe, and he's a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and author of Secret City, Jamie Kershik.

Okay, here are the questions from the people.

Oh, let's ask about yours.

I asked you this right when we get off.

You have a lawsuit, which we didn't get to talking about on the show.

You and 12, did you say?

Yeah, 11 others, 12 of us total.

Okay, you're suing Trump?

We are.

Why?

What did he do?

A lot of us attorney.

What did he ever do?

Leave him alone.

You don't have the cloud?

Okay,

what's yours is?

I have an ICE detention center in my district, right in the center of my district, and I've been doing oversight of this center since 2019 when I first came into office.

And he, a couple of weeks ago, denied me access to this facility.

So we, which is the first time in six years this has happened.

I visit this facility pretty frequently.

I have a Space Force base in my district.

I visit that.

I have a VA hospital and this is nothing.

Space Force?

Space Force, yes.

No, no, I know what goes on there.

So I mean,

I finished this and then I'll be able to do that.

He

denied me access in the first administration.

So we actually passed a law that says that he can't deny access to members of Congress that show up to do the oversight.

And he just violated that law a couple of weeks ago, me and 11 others.

So we are so.

Who will rule on this?

The Federal District Court of the District of D.C.

Of D.C., I see.

And who runs that?

No, I mean, is it a Trump appointee?

Is it, I mean.

Well, we haven't been assigned the judge yet.

It'll be a random assignment of the judge.

I see.

And then, you know, presumably appellate courts could be reviewed as well.

So we just filed this lawsuit a couple of days ago.

Okay.

And Space Force, what goes on there?

I'm very curious.

You can visit the Space Force place.

Yeah,

also a lot, as it turns out.

So Buckley Space Force Base in my district, actually one of the largest intelligence fusion centers in the country.

We operate a lot of the satellites around the country.

And every time anyone lobs a missile up into space, so the Iranian missiles, for example, when those are launched, it's Buckley Space Force Base that sees them and starts all the warning and starts all the activation to shoot them down.

Oh.

Phasers?

You got that thing?

You know I can't tell you.

You know, I can't tell you that, Bill.

Okay.

It does sound like a TV show in the 70s.

Space Force.

What does the panel make of a Harvard professor saying this week he believes an interstellar comet speeding through our solar system could be an alien craft?

Yeah, sure, maybe.

I don't know.

You know, yeah, well.

I don't know.

Yeah.

How worse could it get?

I mean, my views on UFOs, again, I don't really believe in the kind of UFO conspiracies.

I tend to believe that what they actually are are maybe Chinese drones or aerial vehicles, and the government would rather have us believe that they're UFOs from space and aliens than the Chinese.

I would rather believe that.

I would rather believe that than believe the Chinese have something

that moves in a way that we definitely don't have anything that moves that quickly.

I suspect it might be that.

I don't know.

I don't have evidence of this, but I suspect it may be that, as opposed to little green men coming from the - I mean, there are things that are unanswered.

I'm on the intelligence committee, the Armed Services Committee, and we released a report, and it shows, we actually declassified a report, and it shows that there are these anomalies, these objects that move faster than aircraft can, and then just stop and then move.

So, you know, I

don't think they're alien craft.

I don't know.

But I trust the aliens more than the Chinese.

I'm green.

That's fair.

You know.

And here's where the Sidney Sweeney is and Nazi woke people will be like, Bill, you racists.

No,

China does.

What have the aliens ever done to us?

Exactly.

That's my point.

I mean, China, we know, does terrible things.

Totally.

Terrible thing, terrible, anti-humanitarian things to their own people, to the Uyghurs.

I mean, let's not go into it.

We're not.

We're not applauding that.

We're not happy about that.

But the Ellians, if they have been monitoring us for a long time, they're taking a long time to size us up before they start the invasion and the extermination.

Which they should.

Right.

I just remember...

The balloon gig.

Remember when they sent the big balloon over and it was like the slowest

controversy since the Whiteboard Bronco.

Everyone's like, it's

be over Wyoming in 10 hours.

Everyone stand by.

That's right.

This is very slow.

I'm not sure I have the attention stand for this.

That's their balloon.

I just don't think it's the Chinese.

Okay.

What does the panel think of Trump's plan to bring back the presidential fitness test in public schools, which includes challenges like the mile run and pull-ups?

I never knew we got rid of it.

Of course, we should bring it back.

And here's where we make jokes about him not being in shape.

Next question.

Okay.

Too easy.

Too easy.

Trump says that woke is officially dead, capitals.

He got to cloud some of this shit.

He just.

Officially dead at Brown.

After their settlement with the administration, what do you make of the president's war on the academy?

I don't know what the academy.

I think the person means academia.

Academia.

This person should go to an academy.

War on the academy.

Yes, on academia.

I'm not totally again it.

Yeah.

Academia needed a hot poker up the ass.

I'm I'm not saying

not everything, the way he's doing it, of course, is the right way.

To defund scientific research is not the way to do it.

But, I mean, our universities have been out of control for a long time.

They became indoctrination factories.

They forgot, there's absolutely no diversity of thought.

Well, and they're continuing to racially discriminate.

And that's the law.

And that's.

The Supreme Court ruled two years ago.

I mean,

there's a lot of inefficiencies.

The overhead in higher education, why it's

so much more expensive than when I went, the overhead is very high.

But I also want to be really clear that Donald Trump is not interested in making them more efficient or getting rid of overhead or dealing with affordability.

This is his woke culture war.

This is his culture war against things that he doesn't believe in and want to see.

And it's actually extending to our service academies.

Well, you don't have to be afraid of Donald Trump to think that

there's been something rotten on campuses for quite a long time.

When you cannot speak

the other side of the coin, when conservative thought,

whatever way you think of it, is just verboten, which is basically what happened on the, and some of the ideas, I mean, why do you think they erupted, so many of them, in cheers for what happened on October 7th?

Why do you have professors coming out there and saying they were exhilarated by this mass massacre of people?

Okay, that didn't happen overnight.

Something, you know, they're ivory towers.

And also,

they're just just very anti-America.

Trump is too pro-America.

That's certainly wrong, but also what's wrong is that this week Trump had the Secretary of the Army fire the new head of the political science department at West Point because he doesn't like her political beliefs.

This is an eminently qualified woman who's been in civil service for years,

who actually led our cybersecurity agency.

Of course.

And literally did.

Oh, yeah.

Terrible.

One does not justify the other.

No

They're both horrible.

Were you surprised by Kamala Harris's announcement that she will not run for governor in California?

What does her political future look like?

Yes, I was surprised.

This was announced yesterday.

She's also said she's not going to run in 2028 for president.

Trump said that makes one of us.

I'm joking.

I think you should be very happy about that because I don't think that she would be a good candidate moving forward.

But she probably would have won the governorship of California.

California, but not but not president, I don't think.

No.

No.

What do you think?

I think I don't spend a lot of time looking at California politics as a litmus test for the rest of the country.

Good dodge.

There's my boy.

There you go.

There you go.

That's how you do it.

What does the panel make of FEMA's acting director, David Richardson, saying his agency's handling of the floods in Texas was a model for how disasters should be handled?

I did not see that.

Since a lot of people died, it can't really be a model, right?

Well, the FEMA comes in after, is my understanding, right?

Yes, that's true.

They're not there to prevent unpreventable forces of nature killing.

But they also have, I mean, they do have.

They do have proactive training programs.

They do stuff to like, you know, community resiliency.

So cutting all of that actually will have pretty significant impacts on a lot of communities.

So future look bright for the party?

What do you think of Ram Emmanuel out there?

Anybody you're handicapping who Gavin's out there?

You know, he's gone to South Carolina.

That can't just be for the grits.

You know.

He tooted, I mean,

who you got your eye on for the guy?

I like Rahm Emmanuel, but I think all the things that he's been saying over the past couple months to appeal to center-right voters, I think is really going to hurt him in a Democratic primary.

All these anti-woke things that he's been saying.

He was on Megan Kelly's show a couple weeks ago, and he said, He was asked, you know, do you believe there's only two genders?

Right.

And he said, Yes, and now I have to go into the witness protection program, which is an indication of, you know, woke is not dead, Mr.

President.

It's still here.

You know, I think I'm going to do an editorial just giving them the answers, the Democrats, because

it's not that hard.

No, it's not that hard.

Because that wouldn't even be my answer.

I mean,

if that was the question.

What would your answer be?

What was the question?

Are there two gender?

Are there two sexes?

It's a little more complicated than that.

Oh.

But there is a default setting for humans.

There's a default setting, and we don't always have it happen.

But we shouldn't have it like every time a baby is born, it's a jump ball.

This could be anything.

You know,

a penis is a pretty good indicator.

So just throw the penis out the window with the baby.

Okay, thank you, everybody.

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