tv Face the Nation CBS July 7, 2019 8:30am-9:29am PDT
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>> brennan: it's sunday july 7th. i'm margaret brennan and this is "face the nation." dangerous overcrowding and unsanitary conditions at the border. that's how a new government report describes facilities used to detain migrants. but on friday, the president dismissed it. >> i've seen some of those places, and they are run beautifully. they are clean. they are good. >> brennan: and renewed his vow to start mass deportation rates fairly soon. >> well, i don't call them raids. i say they came in illegally, and we're bringing them out legally. >> brennan: our guest, acting a director of citizenship and immigration services ken cuccinelli and delaware democrat senator chris coons. plus joe biden apologizes.
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>> was i wrong a few weeks ago? yes. i was. >> brennan: telling voters he regrets recent comments about past work with segregationist senators. >> i'm sorry if any of the pain or misconception that may have caused anybody. >> brennan: that after post-debate polls showed the former vice president losing support while california senator kamala harris gained ground. >> join me as we right what is wrong. >> brennan: we'll talk with one candidate hoping to beat them both. former maryland congressman john delaney. all that and political analysis of the week up next on "face the nation." good morning. welcome to "face the nation." we begin with the acting director of u.s. citizenship services, ken cuccinelli. his agency manages the
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processing of applications for refugees, those seeking asylum or citizenship. thank you for being here. >> my pleasure. >> brennan: president trump said he would delay the round-up of migrants for two weeks until congress overhauled asylum laws. it's been two weeks. this has not happened. what does the administration do? >> well, essentially at this point, it'sñr been put in the acting director at ice's hands. he's a career ice officer. he came up through ranks. they're ready to perform the mission, which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. they've been all the way through the due process, and they have final removal orders. who among those will be targeted for this particular effort or not is really just information kept within ice at this point? >> brennan: so there had been reports this would be in the thousands? you're saying the round-ups will be far larger scale?
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>> no, new york i'm just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous. and you know, it's important to note, here we are talking about ice doing its job as if it's special, and really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ice. they have been interfered with effectively and held up by the politics of washington to a certain extent. >> brennan: well, the trump administration -- >> they're looking forward to getting back to doing their job. >> brennan: congress has not changedñ!ó asylum law. >> they have notxdñi toyrq" >> brennan: do you expect anything? >> i saw the house calendar put out by the speaker's office.?ñx3 i waskjf disappointed to see nothing on that calendar to address this subject before they all go on vacation in august. so there is -- >> brennan: can you act would congress? >> there are things we're doing. there are regulatory changes. they take a long time. they are not the equivalent of a legal change by congress. we really need congress, for
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instance toshes fix the trafficking loophole that allows children from the northern triangle, for instance, and other countries around the world, to not be repatriated quickly and return to their families. we need help with the flores fix, the flores settlement that even the obama administration fought the judgeçkn that case in 2015 -- >> brennan: this puts a 20-day limit on -- >> it was understood for almost 20 years that was to deal with unaccompanied children. a judge in 2015, opposed by the obama administration, expanded that to families. and that has tied our facilities up in knots. it's made it very difficult to manage that population, to keep the families together in detention while they go through the due process. >> brennan: i understand you're new to the job, but you just pointed out the democratic controlled houseñi hasn't actedn asylum laws. why didn't the trump administration do anything on this when republicans were in control of two houses?móñi why didn't trump and leader
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mcconnell do it? >> i think the effort was made and congress wasn't responsive. >> brennan: leader mcconnell wasn't able to get this done? >> right now you see the only effort arising out of senator durbin is the discussion i observe. i see it from the same perspective you do, meaning outside, to try to work on asylum loophole fixes. that's the only place we see any effort going on right now. >> brennan: tell me about some of the regulatory changes you think you can make without congressional approval. >> right. well, there are some coming over the next few months like the public charge rule. we're lookingwhat we can do in the flores environment without short of legislation to ease the pressure on our agesi mean the three immigration agencies are more agency, u.s.c.i.s., which handles asylum and refugees, as you noted, and, of course, ice, detention and removal, and interior enforcement, and the border
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patrol, c.b.p., doing what their name describes as border protection. so all working together. and we also have some adjustments in the asylum space coming we hope they're working on but part of what we have to analyze is does congress have to do this. and how much cançóxd we do. so those are things that i'm just diving in in my first month to determine how father we can go without congress, because until they're willing to act, we're not going to see a significant change. >> brennan: you have not been formally nominated and appointed by the president. >> correct. >> brennan: congress has not confirmed you. >> correct. i'm a deputy. i serve as acting director. >> brennan: how much authority do you think you have to make cheese changes? it seems like, and critics will certainly say you continue to try to bypass congress the make changes in a way that is not how their oversight role is supposed to function. >> look, you're hearing from me. you'll hear from the acting secretary.
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you've heard from the president. we want the see congress act. it's a congressional solution that's going to be required for long-term lasting change that doesn't get tied up in court in the way that every regulation does. >> brennan: well, on those regulatory changes, can you change the definition of who is allowed to immigrate and claim asylum, and how do you do that in a way that doesn't keep people who areñi legitimately fleeing violence and persecution from seeking safe haven? >> it's important for people the realize that we continue to effectuate people who are here for legitimate purposes. >> brennan: the administration tried and failed to change that. theyt( tried to block those fleeing domestic violence. they tried to block those fleeing gang violence. the courts said no. >> well, the courts... the president has attempted to undertake several action,
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including cutting off asylum between poshts of entry. that was enjoined by courts. that's being litigated. the level of judicial activism to stop this administration is historically unprecedented. we have never seen anything like it before. >> brennan: i want to get on to the border detention facility. you don't have oversight of those in your current role. but this i.g. report that came out this week just confirmed what we have been hearing from homeland security since back in march about the horrific conditions in many of these facilities, overcrowding, thousands more detainees being held for longer, including children, than they should have been. >> right. >> brennan: you now have billions from congress. when does this change? >> well, it's already changed. most of the money in the supplemental, which is what i assume you're referencing, went to address children in the process. and, in fact, over the course of the last month, since that supplemental, we have gone from about 2,500 children in facilities not designed for them down to a fraction of that.
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>> brennan: so those images that we saw this week, a government investigator released. >> right. >> brennan: is that still happening at u.s. facilities? >> that is not happening with respected to children in particular. we do have overcrowding in some places, but that's matter of the rush at the border and what our system has been designed to absorb. and while the same people come down to the border from congress and complain about it, they don't actually go back to washington and do anything to fix it. >> brennan: lastly, on this census, there seems to be consensus that you do need to know the number of people in the country, but when it comes to the question of citizenship, which is where we have seen this back and forth with the supreme court saying the administration can't move forward with its legal justification at this time, the president says he still wants to, the concern here is that it could also caused by including it a skewing of the results, inaccurate figures. >> well, it's been collected many, many times in the past.
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>> brennan: not including this question since the '06s. >> in the 1950s it's been included. and it's also been included in a more detailed example. i don't know what the commerce department calls it that doesn't count every single -- >> brennan: but immigration officials like yourself will not see ultimately the details of this census. >> answers are not tied to -- it's aggregated data. so that's correct. >> brennan: so are you concerned this is being used for political purposes? that's why i'm asking you this question. >> well, the census is intended to gather an awful lot of information. however, if your question is will my agency or other agencies see a person who says, no, i'm in the a citizen, their name and address is taken on an aggregated basis, that's not individualized day that comes to us. >> brennan: so no? >> correct. >> brennan: we turn now to democrat chris coons who is part
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of a bipartisan group of senators who continue to work on immigration reform. he joins us from wilmington, delaware. welcome, senator. you just heard from mr. cuccinelli that the administration will try to change asylum or the ability to claim asylum because congress isn't doing anything. is there going to be any proposal put forward by congress? >>xd well, margaret, the challei that those of us in congress who want to make progress on addressing our broken immigration system have faced is the ways in which president trump initially embraces and then abruptly reverses himself and opposes those bipartisan proposals that have been brought to him. ken cuccinelli just referenced correctly that senatorsk and durbin, a seasoned republican and democrat, have tried repeatedly to get a proposal moving that could win both bipartisan support in the senate and ultimately be embraced by president trump. several times many of us who have worked across the aisle on this issue have been deeply frustrated by the ways ináñt)(rt
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saying he would welcomec proposal, gets) for a day or two by the right wing and then reverses himself andçó campaigns against it or threatens to veto it. so frbñ we're going to make progress unless president trump is willingxd to take a fixed point and say,ly accept these changes, and frankly, margaret, the ways in which ken just referred to loopholes as things that are legal protections for children and their parents in detention, i think misreads the core issue. theseñoñçq these are core featuresc american law that protect children in american custody. >> brennan: so specifically, on the things that cuccinelli referenced that was about being able to -- the duration in which children and family members can be held and about trafficking. what part of that, since you've worked on trafficking, do you think was false? >> well, my concern here is that we've got an administration that has intentionally used cruelty
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to children as a tool of immigration policy. i'll remind you that there -- their zero-tolerance policy that forcibly separated children and their families was a disaster that faced a bipartisan outcry from boat republicans and democrats. they don't have a lot of moral authority to stand on in arguing that they would like congress to give them an unlimited ability to detain children and their parents at the border. the bipartisan bill that just made it out of congress to provide funding increases the number of immigration judges and increases support for more humane conditions at the border. that's the right direction for us to go. >> brennan: é>sz you just referenced the border conditions. in that i.g. report, the inspector general report that came out this week, people seem to be horrified rightfully so at some of the images. but these are things that the administration had been warning about going back -- as far back as march during congressional hearings. why hasn't there been more swift
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action to try to improve the conditions for people being held in u.s. detention and don't democrats deserve some criticism on that front? >> well, margaret, we have been trying on a bipartisan basis to avoid this inevitable humanitarian catastrophe at the border. but i'll remind you, it because lawyer representing this administration who argued in court just two weeks ago that safe and sanitary conditions for children doesn't include a requirem soap or toothpaste @fxd or toothbrushes or beds. there are ways in which theñr administration has demonstrably failed in its moral responsibility to provide minimallyq children in their custody. i think all of us as parents, as americans, were horrified by the picture of oscar ramirez martinez and his daughter veleria who drowned trying to cross the rio grande.
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we have to find a bipartisan solution, margaret. as a democrat i have votedñi repeatedly for bills that would dramatically increase investment in border security and makel8(p( immigration system. the president just needs to be clear about what he is willing to embrace, and it has to get a majority of his own party.xdçkio his proposal last february was the only one thatñi@ 6 majority senate. >> brennan: more to talk about on immigration, there always is, but i have to ask you about your friend, who you are supporting, the former vice president, joe biden. after more than three weeks since he first made the comments, biden apologized yesterday for his remark on past work with segregationists. listen. >> folks, now was i wrong a few weeksw impression to people they was praising those men who i successfully opposed time and again? yes, i was.
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i regret it. i'm sorry for any of the pain or misconception that may have caused anybody. [applause] >> brennan: why did it take nearly three weeks to say those words?ñiçó why weren't they say on the debate stage or in prior interviews? >> one of the challenges of the debate stage that we saw in miami last week is that everybody has 60 seconds to address very complex issues. i know joe biden. i know his heart. i know his record. i think the american people -- >> brennan: i'm sorry doesn't take very long. >> i'm sorry? >> brennan: saying i'm sorry doesn't take 30 seconds. >> well, i think it's important that he gave a speech in which he recognized that the ways in which he talked about working across the aisle in theñi contet of the senate of decades ago may have caused some concern or heartbreak, but the reality is his actual record, his lifelong record of= fighting for civil rights is what he should be junged on. >> brennan: senator, always good to speak with you. we'll be back in one mi
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democratic presidential candidate and former maryland congressman john delaney. he's been seeking his party's nomination now for almost two years. you have been on that trail. i think you declared six months after president trump was inaugurated. why do you want to be president? >> well, i think the central issue facing this country is how terribly divided we are and how our government doesn't work anymore, meaning we don't get anything done. i'm running for president to get america working again so that we can actually fix health care, build infrastructure, improve public education, make sure there are jobs in every community in this country. those are the reasons i'm running for president. to do any of those things, we have to start coming together. we have to find common ground. we can't act like bipartisan
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solutions areñi dirty words that we canwti say in wa+ú$mgtdz anymore. >> brennan: iso'rgñó people would agree wce it's a lot harder to get thi done, particularly on issues like immigration. >> yes. >> so what would you do? two questions here. would you decriminalize border crossings, and what would you do with the thousands of migrants currently in u.s. custody? >> i wouldn't decriminalize border crossings, but i would make it illegal to separate children from their families. >> brennan: would you change the flores agreement in terms of limitation on the amount of time children can be held? >> yes. i would. we have to -- >> brennan: wow would allow them to be detained for longer? >> new york i don't want children to be detained longer at all. i want to go the other way. we have the treat people who cross our borders with dignity. it has to reflect our values, but we need comprehensive immigration reform. it should have passed in 2013. i think with the right president do, margaret, is we need to fix
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what's going on in those central mesh countries. my wife and i were down at the border at the beginning of the year. we took 14 law students and two law professors for a week and went into the daringest detention facility in this country. what we were doing is helping asylum seekers make their case. when you listen to the stories from these people, you realize that everyone is leaving for the right reasons. they feel threatened. their children are threatened. and unless we do things to rebuild civil society in the three central american countries, we're going to continue to have this refugee crisis. so i called for something called planned central america, which is very similar to something called planned colombia, that we did a few decades ago, where wes around the table, ngos that can operate in these countries, and we fix the problem. we have to focus on that or we will continue to see a migration kind of refugee crisis at our southern border. >> brennan: what would you do with the migrants already in cust u.s.dy? >> well, we're putting more money there based on the bill that passed this week, which i
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totally agree. with we need to make our asylum laws more efficient in terms of how these things are processed. we need more asylum judges. we need to enforce our laws. we need more facilities. we have a crisis at the southern border. it's caused by what's happening in those countries. we have to stabilize what's going on in those countries. we have to make sure we have sufficient capacity at the border to handle these individuals. they have to be kind of treated with a measure of dignity. we have to make sure children aren't separated from their parents. we have to apply our laws. we can't apply our laws unless they have the judge, et cetera, to do it. this is an example of how broken washington stl. are solutions here. there are bipartisan compromises. we actually just saw one this past week, which was a good step forward. we can fix this immigration system that we have in this country. it's broken. we can do ngn in central america. but then we can also get to work on the other issues that really matter to the american people, like fixing our health care
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system, lowering pharmaceutical price, building infrastructure, doing things to improve public affordable, expanding pre-k to make it universal. we also have to focus on these issues. >> brennan: health care is your signature issue, as i know. in the last debate you said medicare for all is not good policy or politics. but more than eight of the candidates out of the 24 or 25 now support this. are voters just being misled by your fellow democratic candidates? >> i think they're wrong. so many of the candidates, senator warren, so many of these people have outsourced their health care plan to bernie sanders. this is bernie sanders' plan. and it will take private insurance away from more than half of the country. and they will reject that if we run on that. it will also reduce quality and access in our health care system, because medicare doesn't reimburse sufficiently to keep all the hospitals and providers -- >> brennan: you were booed on the debate stage when you raised that. >> i understand that. >> brennan: it does seem
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imaries. >> medicare's me has been hijacked. they have applied it to the-to-a law that would cause upheaval. i was first person to talk about. this now we see the debate change as people start to realize. my plan, which is called better care, is a universal health care plan. every single american gets health care as a basic right of citizenship for free. but i preserve options if people want to opt out and keep their private insurance, they can. if they want to buy supplemental plans, they can. it's a much better way to create a universal health care system. >> brennan: and non-citizens? >> non-citizens are not covered by my medicare plan, but under my immigration reform, they will have legal status while they wait on a path to citizenship, which would allow them to then be covered. if you take immigration and health care together, you kind of see how we can start solving this. >> brennan: i want to very quickry ask you on foreign policy, you criticized the obama-era nuclear deal. iran has said it is now going to break through yet another limit
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that was set by that deal on the deal. i thought it was imperfect, but i thought it was the right way forward. i would want to get us back in a deal. >> brennan: you think you can get back in the deal that's already starting to unravel? >> i absolutely can and i absolute i can can make it better. that's the problem you have to fix. i think i can get us back in the deal and extend those sunset policies. foreign policy needs to be discussed more. things like trade, i was one of the few democrats to support president obama with his trans-pacific partnership. i don't think you can run against president trump unless you supported the trans-pacific partnership, because rejecting that deal is effectively trumpian view of the world. >> brennan: and we're going to have to leave it there because i have to take a quick break. thank you very much. >> thank you, margaret. >> brennan: you're watching "face the nation." we'll be back in a moment.
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>> brennan: welcome back the "face the nation." it's time now for some political analysis from our panel. susan page is the washington bureau chief of "usa today." david nakamura covers the white house for the "washington post." michael gerson is also at the "washington post." he's a nationally syndicated columnist. and jamelle bouie is a come imnys for "the new york times" and a cbs news political analyst. welcome. happy delayed fourth of july. >> tha>>an: yo know, there was a lot that continued to happen despite the holiday, particularly on the campaign trail. one of them, of course, being what joe biden said yesterday. susan, i want to start with you on that. you heard senator chrisoo the v president, say that the delay wasn't an issue, that taking three weeks to issue this
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apology is something that was a matter of timing and nothing significant. can the vice president brush this off? >> you know, i think it's good for his campaign that he did some clean-up on, that but it is alarming i think to his supporters that it took nearly three weeks for him to do that. you really got to laugh when you know that it wouldn't have taken very long to say, i made a mistake or i'm sorry during the debate itself. so it's going to be a listening campaign. people are going to have missteps and recoveries. maybe that's just what this is with senator biden. with vice president biden. but it certainly underscores some of the is questions about poxes that he's taken in the past out of step with today's democratic party. and his nimbleness in trying to respond to them. >> brennan: jamelle, did he need to do this? >> i think he did. i think the question of his nimbleness is a good one. biden's campaign is premised that he's the most likable. that he's most ready to take on
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trump. so when you stumble like that in a debate and take three weeks to actually issue an apology and really respond to the concerns. the cigna that sends is that the core issue of your campaign, the core claim of your campaign that you are most prepared to run in a general election is undermined. i think other candidates will have their missteps and stumbles. but for biden in particular, his missteps can't be like this. >> brennan: was it a nimbleness issue or the vice president initially had said he there wasn't anything to apologize for. it seemed to change in his own understanding. >> i think it just highlights that he's an institutional itself. this is the way the senate worked. the senate is his home, his emotional home. it was the people that took him in when he had tragedy in his own family. you look at his history. i work. can you elect an institutionalist in a time of ideology. that's what rules iat's what he.
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>> what was the lesson of eight years for president obama. he said he would galvanize the country and cross over partisan lines and get beloved the day-to-day fray. if anything we saw obama and his administration face more obstruction and outright sort of declaration from mitch mcconnell that he would try to stop obama's agenda at all costs. biden does not seem to have learned the lesson that that was the lesson of the obama years. if anything washington has gotten more partisan since then. biden is parkning back to his time 30 years ago. crossing over is not a message ordinary voters,democric sides. they might want to hear it. i don't think it strikes the core reality. >> brennan: the former vice president has sort of recoiled through some of the activists in his party and presented himself as someone who is able to find compromise or moderate. attracte disaffected republicans? i know you have been vocal about your criticism of the president,
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this particular president. is it enough to win over republicans? >> it's possible. i think there are a group of trump voters who voted for obama, for example, who might well be open to a different kind of democrat. and i do think it's a requirement that whoever the democratic nominee is, that they can go to philadelphia and go to a fire station and talk to people. that's i think a requirement in this case. so i think that biden does have a case to make, but so far he's just defending himself and explaining himself rather than making a real positive case for his electability. >> and he got good news today in the "washington post"/abc poll. he's the only one of the democratic candidates who decisively defeated donald trump. what democrats worry about is the idea that president trump has a winnable race ahead of him, that it is entirely possible with an economy that is as strong as this economy has proved to be that president trump could win a second term
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despite the fact that most americans, two-thirds of americans, say he doesn't act in a presidential way, have problems with the way he behaves. >> brennan: david, that "washington post" poll that susan just referenced, it shows president trump's approval rating at its highest level among registered voters since he took office. >> well, you have seen good news on the economy and it's continued to be something that the president trump is going to continue to boast about. and the president is also coming off a time where he certainly seems to be doing things, and whether some of those are controversial, but i was on the trip, of course to, japan, where the president was right in the mix with a number of foreign leaders. of course, a big sort of showy meeting with kim jong-un on the dmz, a lot of experts say that's something that is not going to make any breakthrough on the question of the nuclear question with north korea, but it is certainly something the president seems to be demonstrateing to his o showingn the world stage. i think certainly that can lead
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to him looking more presidential in that regard. >> brennan: jamelle, somebody else has had a good week or past few. senator kamala harris. those latest polls that have come out post-debate show that joe biden's loss of a few points, though he's still a front-runner, seem to be her gain. is there more she can follow through to this next round of debate, or are the targets going to be set on her? >> i think her clear current strategy with regard to biden is basically to puncture the aura of electability he seems to have, the sense that he's the most capable to take on trump. if she continues to do that, she may continue to pull for biden. if you look at the democratic race, there is a very obvious top tier. it's biden and sanders, it's booker, and castro, as well and buttigieg. in the same way that warren and sanders are kind of competing so ang a hris can debate stage where she did quite
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well in this first debate that she is sharp and can rattle the other candidates and seems ready the take on trump, i think she will do quite well going forward. >> i do think harris has an interesting challenge. she has to attack biden from the left but then also occupy the center left because i think that's her place, her winning position in the party. and that i think is a difficult challenge for her. >> brennan: i'm going to take a quick break. there's more to talk to you about patriotism in this country, the celebrations we saw this week, and much more on the international front. we will be right back.
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>> brennan: we're back now with more analysis from our political panel. this was the week of fourth of july. quite the celebration that we saw here in washington. and it brings me, michael, to the result of this poll that we saw out this week. on the question of how competent and proud americans are feeling these day, and the number of democrats polled said they were extremely proud, but it was at the leest level ever recorded, just 22%. republicans for the most part have remained extremely proud over the past 20 years
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generally. but you saw this real feeling of malaise or lack of patriotism. what is going on in terms of faith in the democratic system? >> well, i think that the president has staked out extreme nationalism as his trademark, and i think that there is a revolt against that in a highly polarized environment. i think that people view that extreme nationalism as trump's rimentory, particularly on theoi diurbing heants to placet i thasereedembers comingt think is causing a backlash in this country. >> brennan: but that poll 45 some different results when you broke it down by parts of the
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american institution and democracy in terms of pride. on this question of immigration and nationalism, jamelle, you know, there is an interesting "washington post" story that said there needs to be more straight talk. he hit at some katic candidates. he didn't name them, but he said basically, decriminalizing crossing the borders or not deporting people who continue to flout american law when they're here is basically, you know, i'm paraphrasing, but amounting to an open-border policy that's just not realistic or enforcable. so you are seeing some sort of friendly fire among democrats disagreeing about how to carry out these policies right now. is there not enough straight talk as he says? >> i see the willingness to put forth more lenient border policies as being a discussion
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opened among some candidates about what they want to see in the country. i think what's happening, and what i'm not sure internal democratic party politics knows how to respond to, is liberals, left wingers, concerned moderates looking at the boarder with child detention, with family separation work the border crisis, and deciding that the kinds of policies we have in place now have a long province. it's not just trump. they stem back decades. they want to decisively repudiate that and looking for ways to decisively repudiate that with both rhetoric and policy. so something like julian castro's proposal to decriminalize border crossings is very much i think a reflection of what he sincerely wants, a response to conditions, an attempt to build a new paradigm in how we think about immigration. whether that's politically wise or popular, i don't know, but there does seem to be a kind
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of -- i'm not sure i call it a moral awakening, but a moral fervor among the american left and liberals about what to do about immigration,ing about how to affirm this is a diverse country, about how to affirm a civic cosmopolitanism that trump is rejecting. >> brennan: what you hear from johnson in this op-ed is him saying this is going to exacerbate the problem because you're going to have even more of an influx of people coming across the southern border. >> i understand the moral debate and the practical effect, but let's talk about the political one, which is a big gift to president trump. because for one thing, it allows him toore- portray democrats as supporting open borders. it allows them to change the conversation from horrific conditions we see that children being held in at some of these border crossing detention facilities. what we see with jeh johnson's interesting op-ed this morning is moderates are -- center
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lefters pushing back against the most progressive elements of the democratic party on immigration and the question of julian castro's proposal. also on the issue of health care, where we're seeing more push back on the idea of medicare for all, which amounts to abandoning the affordable care act, something that nancy pelosi and joe biden, to name two, very much want to support. >> we saw the obama administration really struggle with the same issueed at the border honestly. we remember images from 2014 when we had the initial border crisis. there were crowded jail cells. border patrol was buying baby formula and video games to entertain the kids in these overcrowded conditions. we also saw the administration and jeh johnson himself in the op-ed make some sorted of effort to give a holistic response and address the dynamics in central america, but what we saw from 2014 was a slight dip in 2015 and the numbers went back up in the final levels. they had not solved the problem. obama took a lot of heat for not pursuing more liberal policies
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on administration. jeh johnson and the president were frustrated by criticism from the left, and jeh johnson is sort of referring to his time, there but it was a change for his administration as well. >> there are high-level people at the white house who think the next ship should be a new show of cruelty. going after immigrant families all over the country up to a million. who knows what the actual number will be. the president has undermined that in the past through his tweets, but they're preparing to take some action. >> brennan: i also want to ask about maureen dowd's column, susan, this interview she had with speaker pelosi, in which the speaker made clear she was frustrated that at least four democrats did not vote to provide this border supplemental funding to help alleviate some of the conditions. hey wanted to see more restriction put on the money. this was almost a twitter fight i think with alexandria ocasio-cortez and the speaker that resulted.
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>> without naming names, right? because nancy pelosi didn't name aoc but said these people with their public whatever and twitter following, aoc responded with a tweet that did not name nancy pelosi but was a response to a retweet of a tweet that didn't refer to her saying, we call that public sentiment, neighbor a separate tweet, she said that they shouldn't be campaigning as those it's 2008. so this is -- there's long been -- since the midterm election, there has been tension between the most progressive elements of the house democrats and nancy pelosi trying to hold everyone together, but this was definitely i thought a new stage and a new sign of concern among democrats about whether they can hang together as some of these very difficult issues come up. >> brennan: final word here. we saw one house republican say he doesn't want to be part of the party any longer. justin amash becoming an independent. what do you make of that? is it a one-off? >> well, libertarians tend to be
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very principled people. they're in politics for a reason. and that i think is the case in this case. but i think the party as a whole has really come under the president's influence nearly totally. >> brennan: all right. thanks to all of you. always good to have a conversation. we'll be back in a moment.
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>> brennan: we're back now with glen johnson, a political reporter turned deputy assistant secretary of state who traveled the world with former secretary of state john kerry. his new book, "window seat on the world," is a look at some of the historic moments he witnessed. glen, good to have you here. >> thank you for having me on, margaret. >> brennan: i'm used to seeing you in the back of the plane when i was a reporting covering the secretary. i want to ask you why you felt it was important to write thisy personal story of a foreign service officer who was killed in afghanistan, and you make the point that americans kind of don't really understatplomdo. >> yeah. i just approached it from my own perspective. i was somebody that covered government for a number of years, almost 30 years, but i did not know that much about the
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state department. here it is our first and oldest cabinet agency, it's the most forward deployed element of our government. we have over 70,000 people working for the department, many of them here, but numerous people, 285 posts around the world, and they represent our interests all throughout the globe, and so every time that i came back from one of these trips, i was always asked questions that made me realize, there was an interest in learning more about this essential function of our government. >> brennan: you say unless people lost their passport, they don't often think what the state department actually does. and you had in your particular role an extraordinary amount of ss insid the 100,000 photos, many of them that we have here, trying to set up a photo archive of what the helped to illuminate? >> well, several fold. i think the book, one of the things that the book tries to do
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is just explain the fundamentals of diplomacy, what a bilateral meeting is like, what a multilateral meeting is like. the challenge of dealing with authoritarian regimes like the chinese and russians in particular, and then some case studies of how the try and apply these diplomatic principles to things like the middle east peace talks, the iran nuclear talks, things that were in the past and several years ago but are still very much a concern today. we see this with iran and their increasing enrichment. we see this with the ongoing situation, the settlement building and other work in the middle east and the administration trying to improve the economy between the palestinians and the israelis. and so i hope it's instructive that people will have a chance to see how one diplomat approached these issues and understand the context for them because they carry on today. >> brennan: you mentioned iran. we were showing some of those pictures there. secretary kerry was the american -- the only person
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official who had spent that much time with an iranian official in american history. >> right. >> brennan: that deal, as we know, appears to be unraveling. the trump administration has pulled out of it. what was that like watching it? i know what it was like covering it, but being on the inside and seeing what those teams were trying to do? >> yeah, a couple things. i knew john kerry as a political reporter and sort of the public caricature almost of him, but to see him in those meetings, the patience and the creativity and the stick-to-itiveness that he dispolice department all the way through, and then also -- that he displayed all the way through, and then as a driving force behind that, he was hurding cats all the time, the world powers, to try to get the e.u. on board to then actually leading most of the technical and back-and-forth negotiations with the iranians. so he had multiple
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constituencies that he was trying to handle at one time. so it gave me a real appreciation both for him as a diplomat in this way, but also for the challenge of creating something. that's why i think when you cast that aside, this was not the u.s. and iran making a nuclear deal. this was the u.s. working with unanimously all the members of the u.n. security council and a 28-member european union. when is the last time they agreed on anything. they all unanimously agreed to this. now we have walked away from that. so that unraveling i think has come at some expense to our credibility and to the future stability of that area. >> brennan: and you write a bit about john kerry the man and sort of the personal journey that you saw him take, particularly when he went back as america's top diplomat to vietnam. >> right. >> brennan: tell me about pers eearticularly i think meeting a forr viet cong.ig r. mour t there, and this was something that i always
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knew about is the myth of jearg. kerry and vietnam almost then be an anti-war activist, but then we went become there and culminating in his final visit went back up the river where he had his most famous battle while he was a soldier, and where he engaged in this firefight that drew a lot of derision, accusations of him being a war criminal, fuel for the swift bolt veterans for truth. when we came back to the dock, there was a viet cong soldier there that told john kerry that the person he had killed was an actual combatant, was not a child, was not shot in the back, and it put a lie to a lot of the myths that had been around him, and so to stand there and see this person give him this truth at this time was amazing experience to witness, and i think, you know, it pute o pub service that began whe h navy lieutenant and then
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finished all the way as a secretary of state. >> brennan: you were a journalist. anen worked with journalists in communications when you were working for the secretary. when you see the loss of press access, the fewer press briefings that are carried out under this administration, what do you think the impact is. >> i think it's a real loss, especially for the administration itself. when you're a diplomat and you go into a diplomatic engagement. you have to constituencies. you're obviously dealing face to face with somebody, and trying to negotiate in your best interests, but you're also trying to sell what you are doing and let the public know about what it is and why you're doing it. all the trips that we went over with the secretary, 109, one of my jobs was to help plan the events that we did for him while we were overseas. th.it wasn't just so thatsee and it s that p couldderstat he wast what wasf interest to him. >> brennan: glen, thank you so much. the book is "window seat on the world." we'll be right back.
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>> brennan: that's it for us. thank you for watches. we want to congratulate the u.s. women's national soccer team on making it to the world cup final. good luck this morning. for "face the nation," i'm margaret brennan. captioning sponsored by cbs captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org (whimsical music)
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- welcome to our program, i'm tony noakes. - and i'm dr. wendy walsh. - our topics on today's program will be of special interest to anyone who has suffered injury due to a medical product, medical device or in this segment, a dangerous consumer product. this segment of our program is about roundup weed and grass killer. so, dr. wendy, can you tell us about the problems our viewers should be aware of if they have been exposed to this product? - sure, tony, now roundup weed and grass killer is manufactured by monsanto company and it's a company recently acquired by bayer for over 60 billion dollars. it was introduced in 1974 as a way to kill weeds while leaving crops and plants in tact.
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