at 4:00 p.m. on book tv on c-span2, a discussion on race in america. >> voter suppression. voter suppression is real. let's just am a couple of states. dakota --exas, north north dakota, just. we are still, dealing with this issue on dr. king's birthday. >> on american history tv on c-span3, at 8:00 p.m. eastern the 1957 film "a time for freedom" documents the civil rights rally at the lincoln memorial. >> give us the ballot and we to the longer plea federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law. we will buy the power of our --write a lotaw in the statute books of the south. >> large c-span's the tv and

american history tv this monday, martin luther king jr. day. susan: our guest on "newsmakers" this week is tim chapman. he took over the lead role of action for america, the advocacy arm of the think tank heritage foundation. we are pleased to welcome him. questions are scott wong for the hill and al weaver from the washington examiner. mr. chapman, i want to ask you to describe to people watching around the country what it is like in this town and how you would characterize the state of affairs in our national government. tim: it is discombobulating, it's a little bit tense. everything is high-stakes. i think the great frustration for myself and many people in the kind of conservative policy world is the politics are

overwhelming the conversation about policy. we certainly are engaged in politics. we live here and are part of this and a sense, but with five to find a way to appeal back those political layers and get to the bottom of what the policy issue should be. scott: there has been a ton of news this week. buzzfeed had a bombshell report recently that president trump directed his former attorney and fixer michael cohen to lie to congress regarding a trump tower project being plant in moscow. democrats say this is a clear case of obstruction of justice. some even calling for resignation. how serious do you think this latest report is? tim: we will have to wait and see. it is a buzzfeed report. i saw it this morning, like everybody else did.

i think there is some question -- one of the author's reports have had some misstatements in the past and questions about sourcing, but if it is accurate, it will be significant. i would rather wait to see and verify that it is accurate. scott: in talking to your sources at the white house and the administration and members of congress on a regular basis where do you think the mueller , case is headed right now? do you think it is about to wrap up? do you have any indication it is about to wrap up? tim: we have no indication it is about to wrap up. i think there is an exceedingly higher level of frustration amongst republicans because of that specific issue. at what point is there an and eight -- an end date on this thing? they have a lot of people they have been able to pin down on certain charges, but the frustration for republicans is the original purpose of the

mueller investigation seems to be secondary to the direction it is going now. if it heads back towards the original purpose, that would make more sense to people. al: i want to touch on the other big news in d.c. these days. the longest shutdown d.c. has ever experienced. the country has ever experienced. where do you see this heading? how does heritage -- where you fall on the president's strategy on this? he really wants that $5.7 billion in border security. is he making the right play here? tim: i will leave the strategy to the president. i think what he is trying to achieve is completely a worthy objective. what i referenced at the beginning is the problem. mereve got a fight over a

$5 billion, and we all know why this is a fight in my view the site will given. at this point, we know this is symbolic. it has become a political fight not a policy fight. , that is not a great thing for the country. right now the country is in a stalemate because neither side will blink. even if you are predisposed to think building $5 billion of the wall is not good policy, it is such a small thing. i think the president feels like he has to at some point get a political win on this issue, and the never credits for their part feel like they are ascended on the issue. that there is no political incentive for them, so i don't know when this thing breaks. i think to the extent that it is getting harder, it is impacting the economy, people are missing paychecks. i think there is more pressure now to end it than two weeks ago, and that pressure will

only build. i completely -- i really wish they could find some way to kind of kid everybody in the room and settle on some number for wall funding or whatever it is, however they want to characterize it the touring with the president wants and the democrats want. al: i am curious, back in 2013, the heritage action was instrumental in supporting the government shutdown. ted cruz conservatives were in support of that. given that, what do you make of where we are at and all that stuff? tim: the 13th shutdown was interesting. we were, at that time, we felt strongly because the obamacare exchanges for about to come online that there was one moment if you could divert funding from those exchanges coming online, you could stop the law from metastasizing. the argument we were making was

this was probably your best chance to stop obamacare. if and when the exchanges come online, it can be hard to repeal it. it turns out we were right. we weren't able to repeal it, as hard as we tried at the beginning of this congress. that was a clear policy fight. we were engaged to strategically put democrats on the defensive. there are reasons it didn't work out as well as we wanted. al: is this a worthwhile policy fight? tim: i think the border security issue is worthwhile. but like i said earlier it is , now symbolic. i think that the president has to get the democratic party to a position where they feel like it is a political loser for them to oppose a small part of border security. i think that is important. scott: it seems right now we are at this stage in this shutdown where it is just posturing, political games are being

played. you described it as a political fight right now. this week we sought nancy pelosi sort of resend her invitation to president trump to do the state of the union on the 29th. president trump in kind canceled her cardella brought to del toistan -- co afghanistan and other countries. how do you see -- is it going to take some external event, a catastrophe, a disaster of some sort or long lines at the airports, tsa agents walking off the job to end the shutdown? from our vantage point we now see how this ends. tim: i hope and pray it doesn't take that kind of event. but i certainly see your point. agents, if they walked off the job tomorrow the shutdown will be done in two days. the fact that so many tsa agents are showing up and really being

patriotic and doing their job is a credit to them. but in an external event like that, it would put a lot of pressure on it. there is no doubt. to the point earlier about what the president did in terms of l, i thinkthe code that merits some applause. i think it's important for everyone to not just go about business as usual when we are one month into a shutdown. i think the business as usual should stop and people should be trying as hard as they can to find some sort of compromise here. the tough thing is the left does not feel like they need politically to compromise and so that is the problem. right now they feel like they have seen polling numbers that are not threatening to them and could be threatening to the president and his coalition, and so that emboldens them to not come to the table and do business as usual.

but what you need is some later on the left to come out and say ok, let's end this thing. , i'm pretty certain the president would agree to some sort of compromise. i don't know that as a fact, but i think you would agree to some sort of compromise south of what he has asked for. it could be over tomorrow if that were to happen. al: i want to ask about heritage action right now and the role in government affairs right now. the republicans lost the majority in november. it takes a lot of power away from republicans. what type of impact does that have on heritage action? your main vehicle being the house freedom caucus? 30 members of 190 is not a lot of power. how do you see carving out your niche as far as being a minority , being in the situation we are

in right now? tim: i think the most important work for the next two years for republicans in general is to figure out how to rebuild the governing coalition that arrived in our laps in 2016. for whatever he may feel about the president, he showed the republican party what a potential future governing coalition could look like. states like wisconsin, ohio, pennsylvania, michigan came on line for the party because the president was not necessarily running an orthodox, conservative republican campaign. that allowed the party to bring working-class voters in. the base of the party was still excited. suburban republicans were on board. that coalition fell apart in 2018. we saw some strain on that. to my mind, the most critically important thing we do in the

minority is to start taking very seriously the question of what specific policies would be needed to be the glue that holds a coalition like that together going into 2020. i think the president, when he was a candidate tapped into the anxieties of the various parts of the coalition. i don't think he fleshed them -- fleshed out a clear government agenda. i think some of it was there. it is not holistic. our role in the minority is to help him and the administration figure out what that governing agenda could look like. so what we want to do at heritage action is going into a lot of these districts that were lost in 2018, and a lot of the districts that were lost have a combination of suburban republican voters who did not want to vote for the president's party because they were disaffected, and working-class voters we lost in these midterms.

go into those districts and figure out how our policies can work in those districts, and then highlight in those districts what the policies are. for example, you would find the president's idea of a middle class tax cut he floated before the midterm election, you would find a straight tax cut to middle-class and working-class americans would be popular in dave brat's all-district. -- old is strict. -- dave brat's old district. if you find that is indeed the case and work hard in the house to begin to put a lot of energy behind that -- say you introduce a petition in the house and say, if we get 218 votes on this discharge petition, a parliamentary tool, you get 218 signatures on that, then we could have a vote on that. you can put enormous amount of pressure on moderates who ran as moderates and ran saying they were not vote for nancy pelosi and ran saying they would be

amenable to moderate policies. you could put enormous about the pressure on those moderates to sign the discharge petition. many will not, and it is because that is a kind of party disloyalty. it would anger the speaker of the house, nancy pelosi, and put them in a tough spot with their party. but that shows in the district what is happening there, so that is the work we need to do at heritage action and with our friends in the hill. figure out what policies are drivers like that in those districts and begin to formulate strategies on capitol hill to either make this bipartisan, if representative spanberger wants to sign on to it, great, we have made a bipartisan these of legislation going in a conservative direction. but if not, we talk to her constituents and say she is behaving this way. scott: what did you think of the

criticism from the republican from new york that criticize the leadership of the nrcc for not recruiting women aggressively enough and not playing in primaries to help women candidates who could succeed in some of the more suburban districts you are talking about? tim: i think if she can bring more women into the party, that is all the better for us. 100% support that effort and hope she is successful. we are a policy organization, so our focus would be let's get women in the party and pushing the conservative solutions we care most about. i think it is an interesting time to be thinking about this stuff. there is a whole the debate on the right right now. the tucker carlson monologue heard round the world last week, lots of debates about economic

policy and what is happening to families. and a lot of these issues are issues that would be very valuable issues to bringing women into the party. marco rubio is talking about a paid family leave program. those are the kinds of issues we need to take seriously as a party. susan: 10 minutes left. scott: and then looking towards 2020, how do see heritage action playing in that election? you guys mainly focused on the house this past cycle with mixed results. some of your candidates lost. some won. any plan to get involved in senate race this time around? tim: we are formulating those plans right now, trying to figure it out. -- in working as a team the last cycle we spent $2.5 million on 13 candidates. we had a split.

six losses one to be , decided. we felt good given that all those races were pulling in the democrats favor when we got in those races. being able to win at places like kentucky, with representative barr, that was a hard race, we felt good about that. i think what we are trying to figure out is how much should we be doing leading up to the election and how much in the election. i think right now my focus in the very near term -- our team is focused on figuring out how to till the soil in these districts on the policies we care about. we desperately want an election where we can look back on it and not just say the republican party won and flip to the house back, but they won because of this. you have to have members coming into congress saying this issue played a huge role in my

campaign, and that is the only way groups like us can build consensus around a policy agenda. that is our whole goal. to have a referendum election, and then to have a mandate coming out of it. because it is not good enough just to have the majority. that is one of the things we saw. we had the majority for two years and probably could have done more than we did if we had a lot of time going into 2016 being explicit about what specific policy issues we were running on were. al: i want to follow up on scott's question. do you anticipate going for more than 13 candidates this time around? is that the goal? tim: i would like to. i'm not saying exactly because we are in the planning stages, but i would like to do more. al: january, 2019. tim: i think you need to do more. like i said, it is repetitive, but the conservative movement has got to play in enough places

and make their policies matter in enough places to come out of elections saying they have a mandate for policy. it is not good enough to just eek by and get a majority. you have to have the majority with the will to do something. this is what gives members of congress the confidence to be leaders on an issue. if the issue mattered in the election. al: one policy question, you guys the last couple of years, a lot made about the fiscal situation in the country. the tax bill that has added to the deficit, spending agreements, something conservatives have been critical of republicans for, they don't care about the debt, the deficit. was that a missed opportunity for the party the last two years in that regard? tim: yes. it is disappointing to us, but to be completely candid, the country is not there.

country is not there. there is not a consensus across the country for fiscal sanity right now. especially when you start to say, you can say in general, do you think the government should be bigger or smaller? you get some consensus there. you can say in general, do you think the government should spend less money? but when you specifically way thatecifically weigh against specific programs, you run into serious headwinds. you can say it was a missed opportunity, but it means the conservative groups in washington and conservative leaders in congress have to do a better job of persuading the american people this is indeed an issue. it is something we are giving a lot of thought now two. -- giving a lot of thought to right now. how can you do something that captures peoples attention on the spending issue that begins to put them in your camp? right now it is a tremendous challenge. al: you mentioned it is a

challenge. is that they lost cause at this point? tim: at some point it will become such a threat for the country economically. we will not have any choice, right? i don't want to throw in the towel on it. i want to be part of a group of people saying this is something that is important. if you give up on it, we give up on it as a conservative movement, then at that point when crisis hits we don't have a lot of credibility to say what to do. so it is important we don't give up on it. this is something we have pushed our friends in the administration on too. to be fair to the administration, they present budgets that are very fiscally responsible. we have got to present a budget and we have to rally the country around it. i think that second part is what

we are lacking. susan: just a few minutes left. scott: someone else in the headlines this week was steve king, the hardliner from iowa. he received a stern rebuke from leadership. he has been an ally of heritage for a number of years come up that he was reviewed by his own leadership team. kevin mccarthy stripped him of assignments for remarks about white supremacy and white nationalism. do you think that was an appropriate step for the leadership to remove him from all of his committee assignments? tim: i would say the remarks were very serious and it was very appropriate they were addressed inside the conference. from what i know, they were addressed in a very holistic way, so that is good. i think that is good. representative king has been a leader on conservative issues. remarks like that are serious and you have to address them. i would leave it up to the

internal politics of the conference to figure out if they did the exact right thing. scott: i think liz cheney went so far as to suggest he should find another line of work, effectively saying he should resign and leave congress. do you think that is appropriate? tim: i think that is between steve king and his constituents. i think it is perfectly appropriate for liz cheney to have a strong opinion about that. i support her right to have a strong opinion about that. it is something represented king has to talk to his constituents about. susan: what do you think of the early days of kevin mccarthy's leadership? tim: it is really early. here is what i would say about leader mccarthy. leader mccarthy, in my interactions with him and his interactions with our organization, he is always good at telling you where he is at. he doesn't pretend to be a kind of heritage conservative,

and i don't pretend he is a heritage conservative, but he is a pretty straight shooter. i appreciate that about him. i feel that i can go and tell him where we are going to be, and he will be straight about where he is going to be on something. honestly, i think that is the kind of leadership you need at times, because the problem, and especially it is a great frustration for grassroots conservatives. grassroots conservatives have seen the republican party over the last few years have the house and the senate and the presidency and there is this , feeling that conservatives were now in power, but it is not really true. this is a coalition government at best. when you look at the house of representatives. you have different republicans in the party. you have your freedom caucus republicans.

we see the work closely to them. you have your republican study committee type republicans leadership republicans, , your appropriators, your tuesday groups. so this is not a conservative majority or minority at this point. i do think it takes the leadership of the conference and they need to recognize they are putting together a coalition government, and that means you have to be a straight shooter with the different parts of your coalition. that is what i hope we see under leader mccarthy, that he recognizes he has a significant group of his conference that are conservative republicans and they should be represented fairly and listened to, but he also has to do with all the different factions. susan: we have two minutes. final question from either? scott: any doubt in your mind the president will not run for president in 2020? tim: i have no ability to predict what the president will or will not do.

if i had to bet, i will bet he is running and would be shocked if he didn't. scott: will he have challengers in the primary? tim: that is a good question. i think there are a couple of people that are thinking about challenging him in the primary. i think those challenges would be unsuccessful and would largely be to prove a point or have a message heard, but i would not be surprised to see one or two people do that. scott: and which candidate on the democratic side keeps republicans up late at night? tim: there is a fair amount. look, in terms of winning, if they nominate somebody who is actually a moderate or is more moderate but can also -- like a biden keeps me up at night. the reason is because he is perceived as moderate come up -- moderate but he has credibility with working-class voters. i think the entire game in 2020

is whether republicans can re-create that coalition of 2016 or not. and losing the working-class voters in a 2020 election would make it hard for republicans to win. susan: al, we can end with a quick question. you are fine. that is it for our time. thank you for being our guest on "newsmakers." susan: "newsmakers" is back with i reporters with the head of heritage action for america, the policy group for the heritage foundation. his name is tim chapman. the ideological soulmates of the heritage foundation are the freedom caucus members. they are the minority of the minority. what kind of power will they have from a policy perspective and a new congress? al: you're talking about mark meadows, jim jordan, the most ultraconservative members of the house republican caucus. they have a very small

percentage at this point of the entire house of representatives. they don't wield as much power in the minority because they can't block their party anymore from passing spending bills and things like that, just simple legislation, but where they do wield power is they have the ear of the president. jim jordan and mark meadows are very close to the president. speak almost on a daily basis, if not definitely a weekly basis. they are the ones who have orchestrated this shutdown by convincing the president to stand firm on his border wall. that is the predicament we are currently in. in some sense, they are still very influential in the congress. susan: tim chapman talked about in the new congress with the democrats in power looking for a way to involve the moderates in

the coalition building. nancy pelosi has demonstrated herself to wield a heavy gavel. she has taken away assignments from people who opposed her speakership, for example. won't that be a disincentive for moderates to sign on any initiatives from the republican side? al: i would tend to agree. at this nancy pelosi holds a lot point of power in this town come -- and especially over house democrats. you saw what happened in the fight. only a handful bucked her on that. given that we thought was going to happen early on she skated , pretty well through that speaker fight. she holds considerable power, especially over these young, new, energetic house democrats , even though they still think they have a lot of power. nancy pelosi has a lot of control, so i don't see these folks bucking her on many issues. i don't see it happening very often. susan: a new majority would want to come in with the big agenda

and get up to a rousing start. what happens to the dynamics on capitol hill with the shutdown going on? scott: normally in a divided government you would see more i -- bipartisan negotiations, more bipartisan talk. last year before the election we heard a lot about a big infrastructure bill, some kind of bipartisan deal on lowering prescription drug prices. right now in this shutdown with the partisanship and the acrimony, it doesn't seem like those bipartisan conversations are happening, so the expectations are low that we will see any big legislation moving through this congress. as the day goes on in the shutdown continues, we are now at that one month mark, the window is quickly closing. susan: for people who are watching c-span and watch this stuff every closely, is there anything you can tell them about what is happening behind the

scenes that isn't being reported? al: everything being reported is happening at this point. we are in an intractable impasse at this point. no one sees any tunneling out of this at this point. the leaders will have to come together and figure something out. democrats don't feel they have a reliable negotiator in the president, and the president has not exactly made himself the most reliable negotiator. meanwhile nancy pelosi has democrats in an intractable position, basically going down from the $1.6 billion they initially had to not offering anything at this right now there point. is a major gulf between the two sides. there is no way out of it right now unless someone comes to the table. susan: last question. we were all talking about your first question about the latest story involving the president of the lawyer michael cohen.

-- president's lawyer michael cohen. how much is this town consumed with the stories around come out of, and about the white house, which puts everything else off the table? scott: in the backdrop of this government shutdown right now is the fact that democrats are ramping up an investigation. newly empowered democrats in the house have all the committee gavels. they have subpoena powers. they are ramping up the investigations. that is also creating additional partisanship as these two sides are trying to come together. i think that in part is why this shutdown is lasting so long. susan: don't know what to say to close it because it has been an amazing month. we will keep going. thank you for being here and for your questions for our guests. scott: thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] >> the government now in its

30th day of the shutdown. the president yesterday offered to extend dr. protections three years for current recipients in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. nancy pelosi said in a statement it was unlikely any of the provisions would pass the house. assistant senate democratic leader dick durbin stated he does not support the offer. senate majority leader mitch mcconnell also issued a statement after the speech, saying the president's plan is a path forward and he will try to bring up a bill next week that would need 60 votes to advance. the house and senate return for the martin luther king holiday on tuesday with the house expected to vote wednesday to extend government funding. follow this on c-span networks, c-span.org and the c-span radio app. >> monday, martin luther king jr. day. race relations,

in the u.s. with american history university press are leonard steinhorn and commentator armstrong williams. live on c-span's washington journal. at 4:00 p.m. on c-span2, discussion on race in america. >> voter suppression. voter suppression is real. let's just name a couple of states. georgia, texas, north dakota. north dakota -- yes. today in 2019 we are still dealing with this issue on dr. king's birthday. >> on american history tv on c-span3 at 8:00 p.m. eastern, the 1957 film "a time for freedom" documents the civil rights rally at the lincoln memorial. >> give us the ballot and we will no longer plea to the government for passage of an anti-lynching law.

we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the south and bring an end to the dastardly actions of the perpetrators of violence. >> this monday, martin luther king jr. day. live, february 3, super bowl sunday at noon eastern, sports writer is our guest on "in-depth." , "gameof many books over: how politics has turned the sports world upside down," and "jim brown, last man standing." >> i love sports and that's why we need to fight for sports. we need to take sports back. what we need is to know our history. that is our greatest ammunition in this fight. we need to know our history of the athletes, the sportswriters,

and the fans who stood up to the machine. if for no other reason than knowing this history i think allows us to look at the world and see that struggle can affect every aspect of life in this system, even the ivory tower known as sports. >> join our conversation with your calls, emails, tweaks and faced -- tweets and facebook questions on c-span2. >> attorney general nominee william barr told lawmakers at his confirmation hearing this week that the special counsel investigation but by robert mueller would continue under his supervision. the russia pro was a frequent topic at tuesday's hearing as members of the senate judiciary committee questioned mr. barr about a memo to the justice department he wrote last year that was critical of the investigation. he was also asked how much of robert mueller's final report

would be made public when it was released. mr. barr is a lawyer who previously served as attorney general and the george h.w. bush administration. he is introduced by former senator orrin hatch, a longtime member of the judiciary committee.