Overtime: Rep. Will Hurd, Myr. Bill de Blasio, Jennifer Rubin, Jon Meacham, Peter Hamby | Real Time (HBO)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Hey, the Congressman is back.

Okay, all right, so here are the questions.

John Meacham, does the post-Civil War era offer any lessons on how to seize upon a post-Trump era to enact real, lasting political and social reform?

Oh, we're in Reconstruction times already.

Not really, unfortunately, because Reconstruction really was a a prelude to a century where we were still fighting Jim Crow.

And

U.S.

Grant got a couple of things right.

He fought against the Klan, and that was important.

It didn't come back until the 20s.

But the Justice Department was founded, actually, to fight the Klan for the first time in the 1870s.

I do think this is like Reconstruction in that the most analogous president, which is like saying you're the best restaurant in a hospital, you know, it's a small category,

is in fact Andrew Johnson.

Because Johnson

was trying to undo the verdict of the war and was doing so.

And they impeached him.

So let's

get on with the impeachment.

Okay.

Will, you voted against a resolution to request the president's tax returns.

You did?

It was.

Come on, Will.

Do you believe that?

There wasn't an actual resolution on the floor, but it was probably a motion to table.

But if it comes back on, I'm sure I know where the question's going.

I think you should see the president's.

Oh, good.

That's why it's...

That's why we bring Republicans here.

We bring them to the, you know, we bring them to the gay therapy.

We run.

That's right, exactly.

We just have words.

Right.

Okay, Jennifer, what do you make of the Senate's latest

warning against precipitous withdrawal from Syria?

Does this signal a shift in Republican pushback against Trump's foreign policies?

Listen, whatever they can do is more than they have been doing, which is exactly nothing.

So every little bit should be encouraged.

Now, perhaps they can start pushing back on things like the wall, on things like his non-existent victory over ISIS.

So if they can

start in small ways, hopefully this will become a pattern and a trend.

I think what is interesting is that they're no longer completely cowed by this guy, that they have some inkling of independence, some sense of self-survival, maybe.

So this is a good thing.

I don't think it's it's going to be enough, frankly, to save a bunch of them in 2020, someone like Corey Gardner, kaput.

But hey, if they want to start and they want to start actually taking the job seriously, that would be great.

But Jennifer, don't you think they should go the next step and actually decide and vote to authorize our military actions rather than just letting them happen?

Oh well, you're going to go back to the Constitution.

Right, I mean, this is this is the, I hope this leads to a bigger discussion with all respect to the congressman.

Where's the war powers actually when you need it?

All these wars have happened without congressional authorization, and somehow the Congress is not clamoring

to make that decision.

That was a bipartisan.

Here you go.

To give up that

the last time we declared war was in 2001.

It was not even Vietnam.

It was authorized.

Yeah, war, war 2020.

You actually don't want to declare war, right?

Because when you declare war, that means the president gets all these powers here in the United States.

That's why it's the authorized use of military force.

That's the

only rules, too.

Since we've discovered now a whole bunch of these emergency powers, which sounds like these things are still on the books.

Some of them have been on the books for 60 years.

We don't even know what they are.

So to the mayor's point, it used to be, like back when I was a member of the Republican Party in the Deep Dark Ages, that the Republican Party was against executive power.

With all respect, wasn't that like two years ago?

It was like 2012.

So that's like, you know, in dog years, it's a lifetime.

So it used to be the party that didn't like executive power.

It used to be the power.

Paul Ryan would give speeches about Congress recovering the power of the president.

That's when Obama was president.

Yeah, exactly.

It's completely different when it's theory around the world.

George W.

Bush was saying that.

No, no, no.

Some people always hate executive power until they have to.

But

both parties did this.

Let's be clear.

Both parties in the Congress have stepped away from the responsibility, left it to the president, and this is something we should be asking questions about as Americans.

Why were we in Saudi Arabia?

Why should she be in Yemen?

Why were we already backing Saudi Arabia in Yemen?

Why were we part of a humanitarian crisis?

Why were our tax dollars killing families and children?

And the Congress said nothing until very recently.

Something's wrong with that equation.

Two points here.

I think Jennifer is absolutely right that Congress in the past, and again, I've only been in Congress for four years, so I use that past tense, has given power to the executive branch.

The Congress is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government, and that's where they've given too much up, and

we're trying to claw some of that back.

There was a vote earlier this week about saying our support for NATO, because NATO has been responsible for 70 years of peace and prosperity.

We're in Yemen because the Iranians were creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

There was no vote by the Congress to authorize military support for Saudi Arabia, and we know that Saudi Arabia exacerbated a humanitarian crisis.

There was no actual debate and vote, and that's dangerous.

What did you think about Trump getting a guy to pass over 30 people to get security clearance who the experts said shouldn't have security clearance?

Kushner?

Someone who has a certain amount of current

30 people who went through the normal channels, which at the top levels is the CIA.

And they said, no, are you kidding?

These are white-collar criminals.

They can't have security clearance.

They're up to their necks with other countries.

And he found some stooge to say, oh, no, you have security clearance.

I'm pretty

confident that the distinguished gentleman from the state of Maryland, Chairman Elijah Cummings, will be investigating that process.

And he should.

You say he will.

He should.

Okay, good.

He's sounding more like heavy right every day.

Let's keep him here every day.

Let's keep him here all night, right?

Can we add another new rule?

Yes, yes.

What's always funny is when we actually agree, when one person of one party agrees with someone of the other party, we always say, be more like me, right?

But can't we just say for once, hey, we're actually in agreement?

Because making sure we have two strong parties is important to this country.

The competition of ideas is what has made this country.

Okay, but one party is enabling Donald Trump, and one party is enabling all these things that we're talking about.

The fact that he's able to get away with giving security clearances to people who don't deserve them is because the Republican Party as a whole is not standing up to him and is allowing.

The reason why he gets away with having meetings with Putin and nobody gets to take notes.

I mean, what goes on in these meetings with Putin?

It's the Republican Party.

It's not a bipartisan endeavor why he's able to get away with this.

And that's why...

many of us who were in the Republican Party said they have to lose.

They have to lose really badly so that they will

either start over or some other party will come up.

But you can't have a party that has lost its mind and lost all the time.

Okay, Mr.

Mayor, were you surprised to learn that the Trump Foundation is being forced to dissolve after allegedly engaging in a shocking pattern of illegality?

The Trump Foundation.

I mean.

Bill,

I have to say, I did not recover from that report.

It was so shocking to me.

No, this is everything.

The guy has been a con man.

What's amazing is back in the 1980s,

and he's done disgusting,

you know, he called for the execution of five young men in the Central Park V case who were proven innocent.

He took out full-page ads to call for the execution.

This guy, he has stiffed his workers every step along the way in the hotel industry.

He's a con man who got away with it for decades.

He's not going to get away with it this time.

I hope not.

Okay, we'll leave it on that.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, audience.

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