Are You There, Congress? with Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Tom Suozzi

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Hello, everyone.

Welcome once again to the weekly show podcast.

My name is Jon Stewart.

I will be hosting the program today.

It is, I think we might be even taping a day earlier than normal.

Yeah, it's Tuesday, May 6th.

May the 6th be with you.

We've got May 4th and then Cinco de Mara.

May 6th really has got no game.

It's got nothing going on,

which is truly a shame.

The Premier of Canada, Mark Carney, visited the White House today and the president once again said incredibly rude and disrespectful things

about Canada.

But I am still hung up, quite frankly, on the interview that he did with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press,

where

he continues to float this idea that Americans just have too much.

That in this new world order that he is creating, that it is important for children to learn

gratitude and simplicity in terms of the amount of dolls.

I don't, he seems to be stuck on 30 to 37 dolls as the magic number of

what spoils a child.

I'm not sure there is a child that has received 30 dolls

in the span of a year, unless they are a Trump child, which is, it gets us really to the crux of how fucking wrongheaded his entire approach may be, because he sees

no value in moderation for himself.

There is no, he is not leading through the exemplar of a dignified and less consumerist life.

He,

as you can see, every time there is another press conference within the Oval Office, another gold cherub gets its wings, another gold cherub and another gold leaf

frame until there is no wall space left in the Oval Office.

Fuck that.

Fuck you for telling the American people, oh, you know what?

So your kids have to go without.

Why don't billionaires, why doesn't he ever say, hey, you know what?

Maybe you don't need $350 billion.

Maybe you just need $10 to $12 billion.

Maybe you don't need any of those things.

Why isn't his

scolding of excess in any way self-reflective and turned around to the people who have bought and sold this country to all the interests

that are making it more difficult for people to live better lives?

Why not say the same thing to the profits of the insurance companies?

and to the banks and the financialization.

No,

it's people who are buying pencils

for their kids who've gotten out of control.

That's what's out of control.

Those people.

Not him in his Saddam-like palace.

You know what?

What if you had 10 golden toilets instead of 20?

Or the font on the giant Trump sign was slightly smaller.

God.

And Congress just stands slackjawed

as it all goes down.

We're so upset about the tariffs we've got to do something about the tariffs let's have a vote about it yeah i don't i don't know about that why don't we you know what we'll let's let's wait let's see what happens which is why actually uh so we're going to be talking a little bit about congress today we got a couple of congress people that are coming on the show we're going to talk about the intricacies of it the ins and outs these are a couple of guys who are working with something called the problem solvers caucus It's right in the name there.

They caucus to solve problems, generally about how many dolls I'm sure people can buy.

But let's get to our guests and learn a little bit about why is Congress so passive and what are they going to be doing about the chaos and destruction that is being levied on so many American families as we move forward in this administration

from Caligula, for God's sakes.

Let's get to them now.

Ladies and gentlemen, very pleased today.

We have two elected officials of these United States of America: Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick and Congressman Tom Swazi.

Brian Fitzpatrick represents a lovely district in Pennsylvania.

Congressman Tom Swazi, areas of Nassau County and Queens, etc.

They are co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is a congressional caucus that I think we can only assume solves problems.

Gentlemen, welcome to

the weekly show.

I wanted to start by asking you guys

about

this

Congress.

Congress.

Tell me about this Congress.

It's apparently elected representatives that have the power to enact laws.

They used to be before the president took over.

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives.

There are 100 senators.

Both of them together make up the Congress.

The Senate is two senators from each state times 50 is 100.

And the 435 members of Congress each represent about 750,000 people.

Very nice.

Representative Fitzpatrick, has it been difficult?

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, he signed, I don't know, 150 executive orders.

He has done all these things.

Is he bypassing Congress?

Do you guys feel like you have as strong a voice?

You've both, well,

Representative Swazi, you've only been there for a little bit, but Representative Fitzpatrick, as a Republican, do you feel like you still have a strong voice in this administration?

For sure.

Tom and I actually came in together.

We lost him for a brief stint when he ran for governor, but Tom and I came in together the same year.

I ran for governor of New York, got my butt kicked, and then George Santos took my place.

Oh, dear Lord.

And then they kicked him out, and then I came back.

And then Swazi came back.

But to answer your question, John.

Big upgrade.

Yeah, to answer your question, I've never been a fan of executive orders, and I think

we're seeing them abused more and more,

where we're seeing presidents come in and really testing the boundaries of their Article II authority.

I think they're doing so in expectation of getting challenged by the judiciary to rein them in.

We've seen that with the AUMF, the authorized use of military force previously.

We're seeing it now with tariffs and the like, the Alien Enemies Act with immigration.

you know as far as has congress lost its ability to oversee no i mean the budget still has to go through us, right?

I mean, we're going to be voting on

multiple budgets.

We're going to be voting on appropriations.

It's all got to go through us.

The only exception to that is executive orders.

And many executive orders that President signed do exceed the boundaries of Article 2 authority, and that's when they get smacked down by the courts.

Well, we're saying that's an interesting point because we are seeing, you know, when you talk about the budget.

Well, let's start there with the budget.

So this time, you guys represent this problem solvers caucus, which is basically it is a bipartisan caucus that gets together and they try and make recommendations.

And forgive me if I'm getting the details wrong, but apparently you can't make a recommendation through the problem solvers caucus unless 70% of the members agree to it.

And it's a, is it a 50-50 coalition?

50% Democrats, 50% Republicans?

Is that the idea?

It is.

It is.

If you want to join, you have to find someone from the opposite party to join with you.

There's about 50 of us.

Yeah, we're about 25 and 25 right now.

And yes, it's actually 75%.

So for the caucus to endorse a bill,

75% of the overall group and at least 50% of the members of each party need to say yes.

Now, if 75% of the group says yes, the 25% that do not, if it comes to the floor, they still have to support it because it's been endorsed by the group.

So when you join this caucus, you are making a pledge

that if the problem solvers caucus endorses this,

then

the entire group has to endorse it.

So this is an interesting point.

Then you're in budget negotiations right now.

I'm assuming that the reconciliation process is what's going to get triggered and that Democrats will not be involved in the budget process whatsoever.

Is that an incorrect assumption?

That's a correct assumption.

Right now, it's been very much my way or the highway with the president and the Republicans trying to cobble this thing together on their own without any reaching across the aisle to the democrats and if they if they don't succeed in this or at some point when they're trying to get something else done they don't succeed then we hope that we'll be available as a group to work together to try and find compromise on things but right now you know democrats and republicans have used the reconciliation process when they're in power the main reason they do the reconciliation process is because it's a a provision that doesn't require 60 votes in the Senate.

It only requires 50 votes in the Senate.

He's suggesting it's a way for them to avoid the filibuster in the Senate that generally would require some bipartisan action.

Now, so for the problem solvers caucus, you're basically sidelined in terms of

budget.

And that is, for the most part, right now in Congress, the large majority of what you guys are doing.

There hasn't been, I think the president signed, what, five pieces of legislation?

This,

it's a small number comparatively with his executive orders.

Would that be correct?

Yeah.

So keep in mind, the only thing that's accepted from the 60-vote filibuster is reconciliation.

So literally everything else will require bipartisanship because it can't garner 60 votes in the Senate without it.

And so that's what makes it so difficult.

Now, my understanding is that the Republicans are going to attempt within reconciliation to maybe expand the powers of that through reconciliation.

So they're also going to deal with regulation and some other elements that are a little bit more controversial than just sort of your standard fare.

These are the appropriations.

Would that also be correct?

Well, I think it's important to note that in order for, so you've heard this term called the Byrd Rule, named after former Senator Byrd, that basically requires that for anything to fall under the rules of reconciliation, which is a once-a-year thing, only under certain scenarios, that it's got to be budgetary in nature.

So there's a lot of things they call it, it gets birdbathed or birded out.

So I'm not sure what you're referring to in terms of regulations.

There's going to be a lot included.

My understanding, it was about the executive's ability to pass something that the Republicans wanted, which was a change in how regulations can be struck down.

Oh, you're probably, you may be talking about,

yes, I think it's called the Reigns Act.

I think that's correct.

So basically,

what that idea suggests is that any regulation that has over a $100 million impact on the economy has to be revisited.

So the criticism is that the Code of Federal Regulations is this cumulative Bible.

It gets added to every year, but nothing ever gets taken away.

And regulations that might have been passed in the 50s or 60s that are no longer germane or relevant are still in the books.

So

it would force an automatic sunset unless affirmatively renewed by Congress.

Now,

you raise a good question, John.

It is unclear whether that would even qualify.

That's right.

And would that be the parliamentarian who would decide if that

parliamentarians?

Because the Byrd rule only applies to the Senate, not to the House.

I mean, the bottom line is that it's very hard to change the laws as part of reconciliation.

It's much more about the budget.

So, for example, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's debated about immigration right now.

And one of the things the problem solvers is working on, we have seven working groups.

One of our working groups, one of the ones that has the most energy, is behind immigration, so that we could try and make a bipartisan deal that will secure the border for the long term, that will fix the broken asylum system, and will modernize the legal immigration system so that the DREAMers and the farm workers and the healthcare workers and other people that are essential to the United States of America and who've been here for 10 or 20 or 30 years, we could figure out how to legalize them.

Now, is that different than the Lankford bill that came out before the election that there had been bipartisan support for and actually would have passed had it not been,

I guess,

the president, wasn't the president then, intervened and said, please don't pass this.

Is this a substantially different bill than that?

I don't want to say substantially different.

A lot of the elements from that are in there, but it's not that bill.

And we're using a lot of different bipartisan bills that have been worked on over the years, like on the Dreamers, for example, and on the Farm Workers, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, we're using those and trying to cobble together something that's been bipartisan for many years, but never got over the finish line.

And we're hoping that, you know, when the push comes to shove and the administration needs some help to get something done, this will be one of the things that we could make one of the first things we're trying to push through.

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

We will be right back.

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And we are back.

Let me ask you both, because you're, you know,

you're in this situation where

the president has a vision of how government should work.

And it's similar to, I guess, how you would imagine he thinks the Trump organization should work.

It's not a public company, and that he is the chairman and CEO of America.

And this idea of a kind of bipartisan is almost the antithesis

of

how he has governed.

How does that complicate?

what you would consider to be the primary driving force of this problem solvers caucus

when he doesn't seem to be receptive in any way to that type of bipartisanship or collaboration.

Yeah, I don't share that vision, obviously.

I'm the Democrat here.

Brian's the Republican.

I don't know that Brian shares that vision.

No, Brian doesn't.

Even though he's a Republican.

I'm reasonably sure that Brian doesn't share that vision either, because it's the vision of the United States competition with three branches of government that have equal power.

And, you know, the America is founded on the idea all men are created equal.

It's founded on that we all have inalienable human rights to life, liberty, and and the pursuit of

happiness.

But it's also founded on you can't trust each other, which is why we have these different branches to stop any one branch from taking over because they're always going to fight for their own self-interest.

What article of the Constitution is you can't trust each other?

It's in there somewhere.

It's how it's worked.

That's Article 1 and 2.

That's how it works.

Brian, you're in, you're caucusing with the Republicans.

And let's let the audience know.

Brian's record in Congress.

I think you've been voted the most bipartisan member of Congress for however long.

You both are in districts that voted for the candidate from the opposite party.

Representative Swazi is in a district that went for Trump, even though he's a Democrat.

Representative Fitzpatrick is in a district that went for Harris, even though he's a Republican.

So

you're really in the kind of that crucible.

And Representative Fitzpatrick, I want to start with you because.

Within navigating that sort of freedom caucus,

you know, really stringent purity testing that goes on as far as the Republican Party and what Trump wants.

How do you navigate not necessarily being on the same page about these issues like immigration or tariffs or those kinds of things?

Yeah, I don't, I mean, I think navigate, John, I honest to God, I mean, every time I've run and

I've run five times now.

I was an FBI agent before I was in Congress and I had never run for anything before.

And I've been primaried every single time I've run, I've been primaried by the far right every single time.

So I'm used to that.

You have kind of a built-up immunity then to the, you know, they always challenge members to that.

Because it's so, they're so ridiculous.

I mean, they're just ideological purists, and that's just not how life works.

You know, I ask them all the time, I just marvel.

I'll find them on the house floor, and they're rattling sabers and they're mocking, you know,

their fellow American on the other side of the aisle.

And I just ask them, is this how you function at home?

Right.

Could you imagine if we took the attitude towards our spouses or our partners that if you don't agree with me 100% of the time, you're stupid and a bad person?

That's just ridiculous.

And yet, you have a lot of adults acting like children here that conduct themselves that way.

I'm a term limits believer, John.

It's the first bill I introduce every single Congress.

I think it's so important that this not be a career, that this be a temporary public service.

And I think a lot of good things flow from that because if you're not trying to stay here and become a committee chair or build up your little political fiefdom or whatever you want to call it,

it changes the way you approach the job.

And I'm a huge term limits believer.

I think the biggest problem in Congress are the people that have been here 20, 30, 40 years.

It's not meant, it was never meant to be that.

I love that recently Dick Durbin, senator from Illinois, he announced at 80, he was not going to be, and he announced it as though it was an unusual announcement.

He's 80 years old and he announced, I don't, you know, I'm not going to.

I'm not going to run again.

I think we should set an example.

And I was like, yeah, at 80, just when he was hitting his prime for the Senate.

I don't remember who it was, Tom.

Maybe you can remind me, but there was a celebration of somebody recently who broke the record for the longest serving House Republican.

And they threw a party for him.

And I'm like, what a perverse incentive that is, right?

We're celebrating someone who's been here for 55, 60 years.

That's an embarrassment, I think.

Was the guy from Alaska?

Was it?

Was it Don Young?

Yeah, Don Young.

Don Young.

Well, Clyburn just said he's not, you know, they asked him because I think he's 82.

He's in the House, obviously.

But they asked him and he said, I'm never leaving.

This is my life.

But I do think there are perverse incentives.

So let's talk about that a little bit.

Because are there structural things within the house or within the Senate that you guys, as a bipartisan coalition, would change that could, because one of the things that I felt I learned from having lobbied Congress over these years

is it's a surprisingly insular

place.

It really really is perversely removed from the wants and needs of the people they represent.

And the people that have the access

really are industry leaders,

moneyed interests, and those kinds of things.

Well,

they hire people who are professional people, who have full-time jobs, whose job is to understand the intricacies of Congress, not only the laws and the regulations, but the people and the politics as well.

And that's their full-time job is to work on trying to have influence on particular pieces of legislation.

Now, a lot of lobbyists, you know, bring a lot of

intellect and ability to the conversations about the impacts of different laws.

But it also, you know, why have we not been able to fix a lot of big things for so many years?

Because someone's benefiting from the status quo.

In every instance, somebody benefits from the status quo.

So if you want to try and change the status quo, the people that benefit from the status quo are going to use all of their effort to do everything to make you look like a jackass and beat you for trying to change the way it is.

So like, you know, Donald Trump, when he first was elected president in 2016, before he became president, said, these pharmaceutical drug companies, they're getting away with murder, these guys.

You know, the way they charge so much more in America than they charge in other countries.

And then when it came time to do a law to negotiate prescription drug prices, that was no longer a priority for him.

I think that that'll come come back soon because people want to start saving money in Medicaid and Medicare and negotiating drug prices using the purchasing power of the U.S.

government, the largest drug purchaser in the world through Medicare and Medicaid, using our power to negotiate prices will save us a lot of money.

So it's such common sense.

We passed a bill in the Biden administration where we can negotiate the prices for like

10 drugs.

10 drugs.

I mean, we should do this with all the drugs.

Yeah,

it was insane but that gets us to the crux of the conversation which is this is the dysfunction within the Congress what leads to the opening for a more populist leader like Trump to bypass it through the executive actions in other words is the failure of Congress

to understand how to effectively deliver for the people that are outside the Beltway and not the lobbyists, is that how the ground is seeded?

And I'll ask you, Representative Fitzpatrick, for someone to come in and go, screw all this, I'm going to bypass all this complexity and deliver directly, even if it's very much on the fringes of what may be for the Constitution.

People rightly get so frustrated when they see Congress function.

Or not function.

Right.

Yeah.

John, an illuminating example is when you came and joined me and Tom and many others funding for the PACT Act and the 9-11 Heroes Fund.

And, you know, there are people dying literally every week.

And Mitch McConnell said, well, we'll get to it when we get to it, kind of thing.

And you threw up your arms in a committee hearing.

It's a moment I'll never forget because it sort of illuminated to me.

You're thinking like the average person out there, right?

Like, why can't they just fix this?

There's real people that are losing their lives.

And you have this disconnected person that's been in Congress forever saying, oh, well, we'll put it on the docket and we got to, you know, schedule floor time.

I believe regular order.

He asked me.

He said to me, uh why are you so upset about

i go well my friends are dying so that yeah that that makes it kind of an emotional issue but that that that moment really was so illuminating to the disconnect that exists between how the public thinks which is what you were reflecting and sort of this inside the beltway completely disconnected uh mentality but i will say this there are certain institutional impediments that prevent so many things from happening Number one is the construct in the house right now, John, is if you get 218 votes votes on the floor, you get everything.

If you get 217 votes, you get nothing.

You get nothing.

And yet a 218 to 217 breakdown is reflective of a very divided public, right?

Who probably want us to compromise.

So I am a huge believer in a coalition government.

I don't like this all or nothing zero sum concept because it just creates more division.

I'm also a big believer in something that myself and my Democrat colleague Jared Golden are advancing to open up primaries to allow independents to vote.

Primary used to be a noun, now it's a verb.

Now it's something you do to somebody.

And I cannot tell you how many of my colleagues go on the floor, we call them the vote, no, hope, yes crowd, where they know voting for something is the right thing to do.

For Democrats, it's border security, for Republicans, it's Ukraine.

Take your pick on issues.

And because they're worried about their primary, they vote no on a bill that they know is the right thing to do.

Because in a lot of these states, I believe over half, if you dare to register independent, you you are told in one out of two elections, you're not welcome to vote in the primary.

So

envision this scenario.

You could be a 98-year-old World War II veteran who stormed the beaches of Normandy and saved civilization, and you register independent in a country that was founded on independence, and you go to the polls and you're told in one out of every two elections, you're not welcome here.

That is insane.

And I think not only is it cure an injustice, but allowing independents to vote in primaries will allow more moderates to emerge from the primaries and not these extremists.

All these are creating problems that Tom and I see

that are jamming up the system.

Let me just follow up on one thing about the primary system.

The problem is we have 435 seats in Congress.

Of the 435 seats in Congress, 380 of those seats are safe seats.

You can't lose because they're gerrymandered.

They're drawn.

You pack all the Republicans in 190 seats over here.

Well, you can't lose if it's gerrymandered to your political party.

But you could be, to Brian's point, you could lose a current.

You could

lot of the time.

That's the only way you could lose.

Is a scandal or a vote?

That's right.

That's the threat is you'll lose your job.

And nobody votes in the primaries, as Brian just pointed out.

Less than 15% of the people vote in the primaries.

So when you hear the crazy stuff coming out of Republicans' voices or the crazy stuff coming out of Democrats' voices, they're usually pandering to that small base of people that vote in the primary because they don't have to listen to the people,

the whole population, because they're going to win the general election.

They only have to listen to this small group that can kick them out in the one way they can lose, which is in a primary.

So they pander to those extremes instead of talking to the people generally.

One of the reasons that Brian and I are the way we are is because we're constitutionally made this way, but also politically, we have to listen to both sides because we wouldn't win otherwise.

But that's why sort of, you know, there's this sort of platitude of like, well, we all have got to collaborate.

We've all got to work together.

But the system is not really incentivized for that in any way, shape, or form.

But the second part is the long view of it is if Congress is not able to address its dysfunction, it will be making itself irrelevant.

You put yourself in a position that it becomes this vestigial arm of a government because it opens the door for executive order, especially through these executive orders can oftentimes be incredibly popular.

Well, they're popular, but they're going to be proven, I think, in most cases to be illegal.

And when that process runs through the courts in the next 11 years.

Right.

In the next couple of years.

And you'll see a response from the people for the things that are not popular, because some of the things that are happening right now, as we've seen, are not popular.

People don't like to see the prices going up.

They don't like to see the stock market going down.

They want a secure border, and the border is more secure now than it was before, but they don't like people being shipped away without going through due process.

They don't like us treating our allies the same as we treat our adversaries.

So these certain things are unpopular.

So the Senate had an opportunity, just, I think it might have been last week or the week before, to address that disconnect.

They had an opportunity to retake for the Congress the power of tariffs.

And it ended up being a theatrical display in the Senate.

Three Republicans, I think, Murkowski, Collins, maybe one other, voted to have that done.

But you knew it was theater because it was just the right amount of senators that would leave it to J.D.

Vance to break the tie.

And what does that do

to the lawmakers?

And what are the conversations like that we're not privy to, not the ones that happen on the news, where people say, we know this is theater.

We know that probably Senator Thune went, okay, I've got three slots.

I have three people that can vote to retake the power of tariff from the president without us actually having to do it.

There's no way that there's only three people in the Senate on the Republican side that believe that the Senate should retake the power of tariff.

So, how do we explain that to the American people?

That's yours, Brian.

Yeah.

Swazi taps out.

He taps out.

All right, quick break, and we will be right back.

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We are back.

John, there is a lot of people in Congress, including in the Republican conference, that are very concerned about the tariff situation.

I think if you took a poll amongst the majority of the conference, the majority of people that have not taken action yet are people that want to give a limited runway

for the president to do that, which he said he was going to do, which is to recalibrate and have reciprocal tariffs on countries.

Tariffs, in many ways, are a remnant of World War II and our effort to help Europe reconstruct after World War II.

So listen,

we are all hearing it back home about the impact

of economic policies that

both

hurt and help businesses.

We heard it in the last administration with inflation.

We're hearing it now with tariffs.

And it's only a matter of time before enough of my colleagues actually step up and do something.

So I will tell you this, myself, Don Bacon have pending legislation that we were set to introduce.

It's taken a, you know, once the president put that 90-day pause, we paused the introduction of it.

But we're prepared to go on it because I sit on the Ways and Means Committee.

A tariff is a tax.

Taxes go before our committee.

Again, as I said at the outset, I think this is an example of the president testing the boundaries of Article II authority, expecting to be challenged in the courts to provide clarity about what they can and can't do, because they're going to get away with as much as they can get away with legally.

There are Republicans that are speaking up.

And I choose as a Democrat, as hard as it is because I've got people in my ear saying this is the end of the world.

You've got to fight more.

I've got other people saying, you know, you've got to crack some eggs to make an omelet.

But there are Republicans that are speaking up.

Brian speaks out all the time about the wrongheadedness of the approach to Ukraine of this administration.

There's a Freedom Caucus guy named Gary Palmer from Alabama who says the president can't get rid of the Department of Education.

Only the Congress could do that.

He has to go through Congress.

There's a guy from Florida, Mario Diaz-Belart.

He's a chairman of a subcommittee on appropriations.

Says,

the Congress has the power of the purse.

I zealously will guard the power of the purse.

What the president is doing is inappropriate.

So there are Republicans that are speaking.

Don Bacon that was just mentioned by Brian earlier, a member of the problem solvers.

There are people speaking out.

But it's not easy.

in this environment that is so toxic.

It's not easy in the environment where everybody's afraid about losing a primary And all the people that vote in the Republican primaries are really a lot of MAGA people to go against the president.

But we've got to keep on encouraging those people that are doing the right thing to speak out more forcefully.

Well, even more, you know, when Senator Murkowski says we're all afraid, and I don't think she was talking about holding on to her job.

I think she was talking about

she is physically

afraid.

And if we lack the courage to do what's right, I think the frustration as I watch it is, and you rightly say, there are people that speak out.

You know, Senator Cassidy spoke out about his concerns about RFK Jr.

and HHS.

You know, you have Senator Willis today spoke out about Ed Martin and not, you know, allowing him to become the district attorney for D.C.

and all those different things.

I think what's hard to watch on the outside is to see people speak out on principle and then vote on convenience.

Awful.

I think that's been the toughest part

to watch is you see the theater of it, but when it comes down to the voting, there's a real dearth of courage.

And I don't know, you know, Representative Swasey, obviously as a Democrat, you guys are in a different position.

You're the opposition.

But Representative Fitzpatrick,

you're probably dealing with this behind the scenes.

Oh, yeah, which is why

I think open primaries and term limits would solve 80% of the problem.

I'm convinced of it.

But that would take congressional action.

And what kind of a Congress would ever willingly cede their own power?

I just can't imagine it.

So how about this?

If we can't get enough of our colleagues to do the right thing and vote against their own self-interest, how about we grandfather in the ones that are sitting?

And that way, at least organically over time, we get back to a citizen legislature.

There's a number of ways we can do this.

I like that.

Listen, the 22nd Amendment, George Washington, amongst many of his great qualities, set the tradition for term limits.

All he wanted to do was go back home to his farm in Mount Vernon, live under the laws he helped pass, make way for a new generation of leadership.

They talked him to a second term.

He said, no more.

It's a tradition that every president honored up until FDR, who obviously served four terms and died in office, at which point Congress passed the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

But true to form, the 22nd Amendment, they applied it to the executive.

They didn't apply it to themselves.

So if we can all agree that term limits make sense for the executive, why pray tell wouldn't it make sense for the legislature or the judiciary for that matter?

If we believe that we want new blood coming in through the system, that that's an essential ingredient to democracy, why wouldn't we support that across the board?

Or blood that isn't corrupted by the incentives of the system, which I'm sure for you guys, look,

you know, how much of your job is fundraising, is trying to get money from all this.

The idea that corporations are people and money is speech has polluted.

I'll give you an example.

We talked about the PACT Act earlier.

I remember when we first came down to discuss this, Rosie Torres of Burn Pitts 360, some veterans groups, John Field.

We met with, it wasn't problem solvers, it was for country, the for country caucus.

There's got to be, how many caucuses are there in Congress?

Quite a few, but not too many that are actually like real legitimate caucuses.

With honor is great, the for country caucus.

That's a problem solvers version, but there are people that served in the military.

Tons of caucuses, mostly just resume padding.

It's for the yearbook, the congressional.

A lot of them are, yeah.

Yeah.

So we met with them.

You know, Rosie had laid out a very compelling case, the veterans that were there.

They were all incredibly supportive of

doing something for these burn pits.

And as we were leaving, we got pulled aside by two representatives and they said, this is something that needs to get done.

There's a lot of veterans that are suffering.

Could you guys write it?

Could you guys write it?

Now,

we have the best interests of what these groups are at heart, but what it said to me was, oh, shit.

If Congress is so busy that whoever has a legitimate concern that comes in is offered a seat at the writing table, hey, if I'm a bank, if I'm an insurance company, if I've hired a ton of lawyers to do all that, it means that industry and lobbyists are in charge really

of legislation.

Well, it depends on the issue, and it depends on the member of Congress.

So, you know, each member of Congress, we have like, you know, 15 people who work for us.

I've got half of them in my district office.

They deal with a lot of casework.

They deal with a lot of people calling up who have a problem with like Social Security or IRS or immigration or something like that that we help to resolve their issues.

We have a press person, we have a scheduler,

we have

people that mainly do casework.

Down in Washington, I've got a press person and three people that work on legislation.

A lot of the heavy lifting on the big issues that you hear about are done by committees and not caucuses, committees that are the formal

Senate Veteran Affairs, House Veteran Affairs, et cetera, et cetera.

Ways and means, appropriation.

And they have massive staffs.

And those staffs are the ones that often write the legislation.

So over the two people that went to you and said, can you write this, were probably not on the committees of jurisdiction that had the staff available to write the legislation.

Well, I'll tell you the difference as to why, maybe you guys can address this: is what they realized is what we were asking for

wasn't something that they would have been negotiating against themselves if they had gone to the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee or the House one, the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Veterans Affairs Committee, because they would have negotiated out things that they thought were not germane or doable.

So, to get the veterans what they needed, we actually needed independence because those committees are captured by the same interests that you guys are talking about.

It permeates the entire building, does it not,

Representative Fitzpatrick?

No doubt, John.

I mentioned before I was in Congress, I was an FBI agent, I ran the FBI's corruption unit here at headquarters in D.C.

And not only was there a correlation, there was a direct linear correlation between the length of time in office and the instances of corruption.

Because

what we found was that the most principled, well-intended, backbone people that come into this system,

when all you see all day, every day is people flaunting those lines, that becomes the new normal.

And then that becomes the normal way to conduct oneself.

So

you are absolutely right that the lobbyists are way, way too powerful.

Pharmaceutical industry is probably notoriously at the top of that list, right?

We have the most absurd laws when it comes to drug pricing, drug advertising, drug advertising on television.

I mean, it's insane.

It's nuts.

There's only two countries in the world that allow drug advertising on TV, the U.S.

and New Zealand.

We're the only places in the world that allow it.

Everywhere else, it's prohibited.

Right.

And listen, insider trading.

I mean, there's, you know, that goes on all the time there.

You just saw that just recently when the tariffs got done.

Then all of a sudden, there was a huge boon for all that.

I want to be careful, though, that, you know, I don't want to just feed into this whole thing that everybody sucks and everybody's corrupt and the whole thing blows.

Understood.

Most of the the people in Congress are trying to do the right thing.

And I think that, you know, the problem that exists is a human nature problem.

When John F.

Kennedy was the president of the United States of America, before he was president, he wrote a book called Profiles and Courage after 175 years of American history.

There was only eight people in that book.

So

it's not that easy.

to stand up to your own party or to the structure and say, I'm sick of this shit and I want to change it.

And so what you need is the people to hold you accountable.

The problem is the primary system where so few people actually participate in the primaries, the only people holding you accountable are often people on the fringes, the far right or the far left.

They're the ones with all the energy and activity holding people accountable.

So if you want to get politicians to do the people's will, you need more people to participate in these primary elections.

Brian's idea of open primaries is a great example of a way to do that.

Mandatory voting, like they have in Australia, would be a way to do that.

If everybody voted, I guarantee our politics would completely moderate because the people would, most normal people want the things you think about every day and you talk about every day.

They just don't, they're so busy with their jobs.

They're busy with their jobs.

They're busy with their families.

They don't take the time to get involved.

Most, you know, the far left is like 8% of America.

The far right is about 8% of America.

Then you you have traditional conservatives, traditional progressives.

50-some odd percent of the people are the politically disengaged and the politically disenchanted.

Ah, the whole thing sucks.

It's rigged.

It's no good.

I wonder, though, about this, you know, because, you know, we talk about that a lot, that it's, oh, it's, it's the extremes on one side or the other.

But

social media has polarized this country in a way that's far deeper and far more bad.

I think I would have agreed with that maybe 15 years ago.

I think now,

if you expand it out, these kinds of rigid clinging to dogma or ideological differences is much more pervasive in our society than it does.

And I think our understanding of government is much less.

So we have this more reptilian, reflexive understanding of it.

And I'll give you an example of how that works.

And hopefully.

this will resonate with you guys.

So, for instance, Doge,

Department of Government Efficiency, who could be against that?

You know, the idea that you can make government more efficient, but unfortunately, in the practice of it, or the idea that there's a deep state that's controlling your life and you have no control over it.

So Doge comes in.

They do that.

I'll just lay this out for the Zadroga bill.

For the 9-11 first responder community, there were 93

people that worked in NIOSH administering this bill.

It was all done to statute.

It was all done really well.

They cut 30% of those people.

They just, as they say, rift, which is RIF, which is the way that they retire

people and fire them now, another 16 of them.

And what this has meant is, and they say, oh, we're not, we're just reorganizing, but in the reorganization, there are now people sick with cancers.

that can't get certified to the program and can't get treatment.

This is the chaos and confusion of those that don't understand how these things run

are creating real damage down the line for real people.

Yeah, so now people can't sign up for the programs that they have available to them.

And so that's what I'm saying.

So the problem solvers, Brian and I talked about the problem solvers are going to work on helping to reinstate those people.

So walk us through how you guys might do that because that maybe that gives us a better sense then of what this, the idea of problem solvers and how you guys can,

you know, with

concerted action, can make that difference.

How would you guys go about this?

So, the program you were talking about is called NIOSH, right?

National Institute for Occupational Safety.

Safety.

And

they fired the guy who was the doctor that oversaw the whole thing named Howard a while ago.

That's right.

And a guy named Andrew Garberino on Long Island and some others.

And we all saw him.

Who's a Republican?

He's a Republican.

He said, hey, you can't fire this guy.

It doesn't make any sense.

And they reinstated the guy and said, oh, we're we're going to give him from now until June 2nd, and we'll make another decision on June 2nd.

So everybody's like, okay, you know, the Republicans and Democrats and the New Yorkers, especially, are standing up and they're not going to do this again.

Well, now they just did it again, like literally a couple days ago, and they fired these 16 more people again

and then said they didn't.

You know, when everything's said and done, this whole thing's been very reckless.

You know, they said we're going to cut $2 trillion.

And they said we're going to cut $1 trillion.

Now they're down to $150 trillion.

And it's going to end up costing them $150 trillion in lawsuits and rehiring people and

loss of productivity.

But forget about that.

So it's reckless.

So

I think that what we can do is Brian and I can get our colleagues, Democrats and Republicans.

This is kind of a no-brainer, I think.

Brian would agree with me.

Brian, you agree, right?

I do.

We would team up together.

We'd get our 50 members to come out and say, you know, you got to bring these people back and bring some heft to hold the administration account.

Now, the president is going to say,

I didn't mean to fire these guys.

They shouldn't have fired these guys.

We got to,

I'm sure he's saying that.

I didn't know that happened.

But unless we can bring, there's so much going on out here, flood the zone, that it's hard to bring attention to individual issues.

So, by getting the 50 of us to work together to bring attention to this, I think that we can help to reinstate it.

Hey, John, way back in 1993, there was this Bill Clinton, as soon as he got elected, he started, created what they call the Re-Embedding Government Initiative.

And they, I believe, downsized the federal workforce by 280,000.

And they did it in a normal, humane manner.

And the way, if you want to make government more efficient, a good starting point is to go to the agency head and say, hey, can you find 10, 12%

of your budget that you can trim in a responsible manner?

What we're seeing now is the Silicon Valley approach, where you walk into the library, you dump all the books off of the bookshelf onto the floor.

Interesting.

And you pick each book back up one at a time that you think is relevant.

It does not work.

I'm a huge advocate of PEPFAR, of combating HIV-AIDS in Africa.

You're talking about the programs that we had USAID, some of those programs that had like HIV

people, right?

George Bush started.

Yeah, George Bush and Bono.

This is one of their legacy items.

But we're hollowing out,

I think the downstream effects of this, guys, is that we are hollowing out any of the government's ability to exercise these kinds of programs.

They're very complicated.

The statutes are written that way.

And it's going to be hard to claw them back

in any real way.

And the brain drain, too.

I mean, the people that we're losing in Africa, you can't replace that kind of knowledge.

These are lifelong missionaries that have spent their life doing this.

Moreover, John, once you take these kids, some adults, but mostly kids, off these antivirals, the virus comes racing back.

Oftentimes, if you reapply the antiviral, it doesn't work as well.

And we have basically really contained HIV/AIDS.

We could easily find ourselves back in 1980s footing again if

we're not careful about it.

Right.

Then you end up with hunger and you end up with AIDS and you end up with other problems and these

money from food banks.

And then the terrorists come in and use that as a vehicle to come in and provide assistance to people in their desperate conditions.

And then they get a foothold in it.

The symbol of Elon Musk with a chainsaw, which they thought was so positive, he thought was so positive at the time, is really a symbol of what they did.

They came in with a chainsaw to cut stuff which required a scale.

This gets back to our original premise, though, which is how is Congress going to re we are all talking about devastating consequences of reckless behavior, of people not understanding,

and not as a bug, but as a feature of what they're trying to do.

How does Congress

regain some semblance of control so that this hollowing out of American exceptionalism, the brain drain.

Look, you may not like Harvard, but the best minds and the best research is part of what comes out of those funding grants.

If we are to turn our back on all that, I don't understand how that makes us great or how Congress can keep saying, hold on, guys, let's just give it

another five minutes, give it another 10.

At what point do we reach a tipping point?

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

We shall be right back.

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We're back.

Congressman Fitzpatrick.

So it's going to start, John, next month with the appropriations process, where there are 12 different appropriations bills that have an open amendment process where Democrats, Republicans, anyone can offer any amendment they like.

And we are going to have to write these appropriations in a much more specific way that limit executive branch discretion.

What we are experiencing now, all of that is with prior year appropriations.

We've never had a situation, John, where the executive branch is sending money back to the legislative branch saying we don't need it.

Normally, these agencies are spending every last dime they have, even if they don't need to, to sit to advocate for more money in the following budget year.

So this is unprecedented.

We've never really had this situation before.

So we're really going to have to button up the appropriations process this coming next month to write it in a way that really curtails kinds of things yes yes

so with everything said and done uh this is not popular for me to say amongst my own party it's not popular for me to say with my family even is i

i think it's going to work out i think that that i think that the american people responding and saying they are dissatisfied with the way things are going is going to be reflected in every district throughout the country where the politicians are going to have to respond to their people They're going to be more afraid of the people than they are of Donald Trump picking them out.

So

I think there are enough people of goodwill and I think there are enough people to be able to do that.

Oh, dear God.

And I think there are...

Do you realize what this is?

This is when we talked about profiles and courage.

It's profiles and fear.

So now

the basic premise is hopefully everything goes such to shit that Congress

voters than they will have Trump.

But that's the way democracy is supposed to work.

The government is supposed to be afraid of the people.

It's not that the people are supposed to be afraid of the government.

Right.

Or working in collaboration with them to just not be afraid of them, but to just listen to them and execute.

And the irony of all of this is the Trump administration is spending billions more in their first hundred days than the first hundred days from last year.

Right.

They're actually spending more.

And the tax and the tax cuts that are coming from the Republican Party is going to cause a massive, bigger deficit than we've ever had, bigger than anything else than anybody's ever seen before.

So let's just talk about what within problem solvers.

Give me a couple of successes that you guys have had that you feel really positive about and that you feel like

you can build on as

kind of a, you know, a first couple of steps to starting to get this done.

And what have you seen from your group in this new world we're in?

Yeah, I'd say the most recent one would be the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Joe Biden ironically touted that as his greatest legislative success of his presidency.

And that was a bill, John, that passed that got across the finish line because there were enough Republicans that overcame the bleed of the Democrats in the squad who voted against it.

So the Democrats.

in the squad voted no.

There were me and 12 of my colleagues that voted yes to get it across finish line, a major, major investment in our in our U.S.

infrastructure.

That was exhibit A of how our group can be effective.

What are we keying in on now?

Immigration.

The biggest failure of our country is our failure to get our immigration system right.

We have the ability to bring the best and brightest people from all over the world that want to come here.

And it's the biggest advantage we have in this country.

Nobody wants to move to our adversaries' countries.

Nobody's looking to move to China or Iran or North Korea or Russia.

Everybody wants to come here.

That's a huge demographic and economic security advantage we have.

And we can secure the border.

Tom and I want to work together on that.

Permitting reform uh we got it we got to streamline this absurd permitting process to yield the benefits of of our lot of our local uh natural energy and then lastly is debt and deficit it is not hard to figure out how to solve this we just have we don't have enough people with the courage to do what it takes to put everything on the table just like we do in our family budgets you look at revenues you look at expenses you figure out where you can button up expenses right where you can raise more revenue and solve this debt crisis although a country isn't you know if if my family had a mint

they would make money.

Or if my family could sell debt to, you know, Japan.

You still got to pay these bills back at some point.

Yeah.

There's a tremendous amount of energy around doing something on immigration.

I mean, it's just like everybody knows this has to be done.

Would the first step of that be to decide what is the level of immigration a country can safely and appropriately absorb?

And what I never hear in the immigration is to the positive, which is what does it add economically?

What is the amount of people that can be absorbed?

Right now, half the farm workers in America are probably undocumented.

So is that the first step rather than sort of viewing it as this blob, we start to really tease out what this all is?

The first step is if you want to get the Republicans to help and some Democrats, the first step is really, we have to really secure the border for real.

So now the president has done a lot of that, but that stuff's all temporary based upon executive order.

We have to have congressional action so that that it'll be permanent to secure the border for the long term.

The asylum system has to be fixed.

The asylum system is the main broad.

In 1980, we loved asylum.

Would somebody, remember when Robin Williams did the movie Moscow on the Hudson, and everybody's like, I defect.

Yes, we win.

We're the good guy.

Reagan had the greatest immigrant amnesty program passed, and that was all in the 80s.

We loved asylum, but

we have to stop the Democrats and Republicans from fighting each other, and we have to pick our common enemy.

Our common enemy are the cartels and and the organized crime and the coyotes that get paid $10,000 a person to bring people to the southern border and tell them what to say to try and game the system.

So that even though 85% of the people who claim asylum ultimately get denied, it takes six or eight years for those cases to be adjudicated.

Representative Fitzpatrick, is there, do you see energy on your side for this as well?

Or is it too

politically difficult to find themselves in sort of agreement with the Democrats on this?

Is it too hot right now for the two sides to even begin to come together on it?

I think it's only too hot when border security is not part of the conversation.

I think as long as border security is part of the conversation, you know, that

was with the Lankford bill.

That was yeah, listen, I supported I supported the Lankford bill.

I put a statement out.

I wanted it to come to the House.

I would have voted for it happily.

But I think that,

you know,

to Tom's point,

if we can start focusing, when you have groups like the Chamber of Commerce, right, typically a right-leaning group that are all in for the DREAM Act, I voted for the Dream Act, are viewing immigration as a positive, as long as it's coupled with law and order, border security, we should view that as an economic driver in this country.

All of our adversaries, John, Russia, North Korea,

China, have massive demographic problems.

They have a low birth rate, they have aging populations, and nobody wants to move there.

That's the biggest threat they have to their economy is demographics.

We have an endless labor supply in this country.

It's the biggest economic benefit we have.

And if we can get this right, Tom and I are very eager to work on this together.

So you have a unique situation.

I'm a Democrat.

I'm supporting strong border security.

Brian is a Republican.

He's supporting legalizing the Dreamers and the farm workers and trying to bring people into the country

to support it.

It's as though it's two people who are trying to make sense.

We're trying to solve problems.

We're trying to solve problems, John.

What the heck?

Here's what we need to do.

Make Congress great again.

I know it's not the greatest acronym.

It's exceptional.

We want it to be exceptional.

Exceptional again, whatever it is.

Gentlemen, I very much appreciate the conversation.

It's really helpful to get

a realistic inside view of what's going on because I think people are just so incredibly dispirited right now and frustrated by

this runaway train.

So I really appreciate you guys being here.

Representative Tom Swasey, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group in Congress trying to

get a few things done before uh elon moves us all to mars or wherever the hell we're all going uh thanks so much for joining guys thanks man thanks guys

those guys were were i have to say a little bit more they they tried to go down platitude road but i thought they they brought it down to a slightly more honest assessment of like hey

We lack we lack courage.

I love the idea that he was like, I wish we were less afraid of Trump and more more afraid of voters.

I think that would be the, but it is all fear-based.

Yeah.

Shout out to term limits.

Let's go.

I loved that detail about the primaries as well.

Yeah.

Great points.

Yeah.

I just, I just don't know how realistic.

Yeah, no, of course.

But it's like you hear politicians and they're like, there's two options.

I can either be reasonable and do nothing or be primaried by an ideologue to my right.

And it's like, what if there's this secret third thing?

Hmm.

What if you were reasonable and did something?

Hmm.

Interesting.

Something that really interested me that we didn't really get into necessarily was learning how many caucuses exist in Congress.

And I'll give you a few just to give an example.

Of the other caucuses?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know if this was the 118th Congress or the last Congress, but there's like Pickleball Caucus and there's the Cranberry Caucus.

Cranberry Caucus?

Somebody has to look out for their their interests yeah hobbies

wait i could see the cranberry caucus being like a very small subsection of new jersey because i think we have cranberry bogs but like yeah you have cranberry bogs right how is that its own we get together and just talk cranberries i mean both of our guests today were on the quiet skies caucus and it makes sense because they both have districts with airports nearby so that's how it goes but something else you brought up that i thought was really interesting was that of course you spend a third of your time let's say fundraising as a congressperson but easily representative fitzpatrick is in dozens of caucuses uh swazi is in two dozen if a few of those meet weekly or a few of those have a group chat like how do you have time for anything no cranberry caucus is all email they just hey what if what if we put cranberries in apple juice what would that be like Let's not also forget that Swazi opened the door for bipartisanship by allowing George Santos into Congress.

That is crazy.

So I guess Swazi was the representative, went off to run for governor.

Santos got the seat.

Yes.

And he flamed out.

That was so fast, though.

Sad.

Imagine how big a liar you have to be for Congress to go.

You got to get the fuck out of here.

They're like, it's a little much.

Yeah.

Look, we lie like crazy, but you,

you got to get, that's just too much.

Yeah.

What do we got for what, Brittany?

What are we, what are we dealing with questions today?

We got anybody?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

What do we got?

What do we got?

Now that we're 100 days plus out into the Trump administration, is America great again?

Oh.

Or do you think he just needs a couple more days?

It's an excellent question.

I think the tipping point's around 111 to 114.

Early days.

We're so, we're on the precipice.

of greatness like nobody's ever seen before.

My favorite part of Alan, because as far as he's concerned, we were great the day he won.

We sucked.

We were a catastrophe.

I don't know if you saw the Welker interview that he did, but she was saying, you know, hey, these are some things in the economy.

We've lost trillions of dollars in wealth.

There's a lot of uncertainty.

There's some headwinds that are going on here.

Some people are saying there's going to be a recession.

You know, what do you, when is it the Trump economy?

And he goes, well, I honestly believe the good parts of the economy are me and the bad parts are Biden.

I just thought, well, what a simple way to go through life.

Yeah.

Does he, do you think he does that with his kids?

You know, I look at the good, the kids, and I think, oh, yeah, the good part is me, and the bad part is

whichever of their moms.

And he doesn't have to be specific.

He's just like, the good thing, however, you broadly define that, is me.

I love his thing, like, we trillions of dollars in investment, like you've never seen before.

And you go, we haven't seen it yet because the last time you said the same fucking thing, and none of it happened.

Yeah.

And we have seen trillions of dollars in investment.

Exactly.

And then you're cutting that.

Fright, right.

Nonsense.

Brittany, how do they get in touch with us?

How do they continue to send in such specific questions about what day will be great again?

Twitter, we are weekly show pod.

Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, we are Weekly Show Podcast.

And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Nice.

Thank you guys very much.

We had another Fine, Fine program.

You guys,

your preparation and attention to detail is second to none.

I truly appreciate it.

Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, video editor and engineer, Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce, researcher and associate producer, Jillian Spear, and our executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Grape.

All right, kids, next week, we'll see you again.

Weekly Show Podcast.

See you next time.

Bye-bye.

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