every day can be extraordinary with rich, creamy, delicious fage total yogurt. if it's thursday, the cascading crisis in texas, first no power, no heat. now no safe running water. state officials are unable to say when it will get better and we just learned the entire power grid in texas was on the brink of a catastrophic failure. plus with the biden agenda on overdrive can democrats stay united? democrats on the hill unveil a sweeping immigration bill that immediately is almost pronounced unlikely on arrival, not quite dead as they eye a multitrillion dollar infrastructure overhaul as well, all of this in the sprint to pass a nearly $2 trillion covid relief bill. the white house and the cdc

have made it clear they want kids back to school. but how to do that is much less clear. especially when it comes to teachers and vaccines. we're talk to the former head of the cdc about what students and teachers need to be safe. ♪♪ welcome to thursday, it is "meet the press daily," i'm chuck todd, the crisis in texas is deepening and it's not just a power grid disaster, the outages being described as the largest forced blackout in american history are also contributing to a weather crisis, a flood crisis and of course all of it is a major leadership crisis for elected leaders in the state of texas. millions of texans are under boil-water advisories, hard to do when you don't have reliable power to generate the heat needed to boil said water. hundreds of thousands of texans are living in areas where water

systems are totally nonoperational. you can't boil water that doesn't come out of the tap either. the state's food supply infrastructure is failing in many places as well. supermarkets are simply closed. supply lines are disrupted. fruit and vegetable crops in the valley completely frozen. and the state's power grid remains in a shock. the cost of a system designed to avoid federal regulations. >> every source of power the state of texas has has been compromised, whether it be renewable power such as wind or solar, but also as i mentioned today, access to coal-generated power, access to gas-generated power. also have been compromised. whether it be with regard to systems freezing up or equipment failures as well as our nuclear power facility.

>> a look at the front pages across the state shows you the scope of this disaster and the degree of heightened anxiety. front page of the dallas morning news, problems pile up. galveston, when will this end? ercot, which is now going to be a five-letter acronym that will be a four-letter word to some texans, the private agency that operates the state's grid is also under intent scrutiny as the state's attorney general announced yesterday he opened up a full scale investigation. a few moments ago the agency revealed on sunday night they were seconds or minutes away from a catastrophic failure of the grid entirely. that could have made it where it would have been weeks before texans got power again. every angle of the story is covered. we'll take to the mayor of fort worth about the local crisis response efforts under way, a top expert on the texas energy grid but we'll start with antonia hylton on the ground in

houston. antonia, this is -- this is a multilayered now crisis for the average person living in texas. water, power, the basics. what's the situation there in houston? >> reporter: chuck, it's very chaotic here. people are angry and they are panicked. there have been some positive signs, center point energy says that 98% of their customers should be getting power back today and ercot as you just mentioned they say they made great strides overnight to restore power but now we have freezing temperatures coming back tonight and tomorrow morning that could jeopardize the progress again. residents i speak to they feel like they're lurching from one version of this crisis to another version of this crisis. even if they have power they don't have safe water to drink and use, and in many cases they don't have any water at all. i've spoken to resident after resident who's been piling their kids in their car, driving from grocery stores to gas stations

looking for any place that might have some bottled water or hot food for their children to eat. i interviewed a single mom here in houston, her name is princess tensly with her own kids and cousin's family moved into one small home together trying to share resources and today they had to resort and go out and take somebody's pool water in order to get by. take a listen to this conversation i had with her. >> we tried to go to the stores today to get water. there were no water in the store. we only have like two cases of water left. so we're trying to divide it between two families. my cousin also lost her lights and water so she had to come over to my house. so we're trying to divide it between two families. and it's really hard. you know, we don't know what the next day is going to look like. and that's the scary part. >> reporter: princess has eight people in that house sharing two cases of water, that is

dwindling down as we speak. she told me that if she's not able to find safe drinking water somewhere in houston today she does not know what she's going to do for her kids as we head into the weekend, chuck. >> antonia, i think folks don't fully realize it. she has power but no running water. correct? that's her situation. >> reporter: her lights have come on and off so when i spoke to her in that moment she had her lights on, about 30 minutes after we spoke her lights went back off. her house dropped -- the temperature dropped back down. and then her lights came back on but she has no water at all. this isn't a low water pressure situation. or just cold. she is turning on the faucet and getting nothing. >> right, yeah. that's what i think people will realize this is part two of this crisis that has been cascading for the average texan these days. antonia, on the ground for us in

houston, antonia, stay safe. and former fort worth mayor betsy price. tell me the situation in fort worth, both power and on water, and i'm curious, every locality seems to be different. i know the city of austin has their own power system that the city does run. how does fort worth work? >> our power comes through ercot, through encore our provider here locally. the good news is as of this morning we are now only to about 35,000 people without power. our high was about 335,000. so we've come a long way down. there are still a lot of people without power but it is getting better and we're being assured that most of what's left now is line breaks and transmission problems from the actual weight of the storm itself. but we -- just like everybody we're now experiencing the water issues on the other side, and likely will have some outages on our national gas people.

>> so the water situation how long is that going to take to get it resolved and do you have a handle on what are the various problems that can be resolved from your end? >> yeah, the water distribution is our issue and because we process -- we buy raw water and process it we not only furnish citizens of fort worth, a little over 900,000. but we furnish about 30 cities around us, small cities. so 300,000 to 400,000 people are under a boil water issue now. not that many are without water. the people who are without water now completely generally are pipe breaks, just as you're seeing in some of these pictures. my own house has no water because we had frozen pipes and it's broken. >> right. and that leads to, i guess, the third struggle here, which is there's only so many people around that can fix these pipes, only so many resources for that.

what are you looking at, and do you need out of state resources, what kind of asks are you making both of the state government and federal government? >> yeah, we have some asks called star requests to the state government. fema has come in and given us thousands of bottles of water that we are distributing through our fire stations and our schools, people can pick up bottled water there, and sooner than later probably they will be able to fill jugs there as well. so we're getting additional resources as they become available. we're getting them here and making them available to our citizens. >> big picture, what's the -- you've got a short-term problem here, you and every elected official in texas, got to get people warm, got to get people drinking water. >> right. >> then there's going to be, how do you prevent this from happening again? where's your head on sort of step one in figuring out how to -- of what needs to be tackled to prevent a catastrophe

like this again? >> well ultimately it's two pronged, step one we have to look at our own water plants and what went wrong here. some of it was plants went offline because the plants froze. we need to find out why. some of it was the power was out for them so we'll be looking at all the local issues but we'll also be working with our delegation in austin and in washington to see what can be done about ercot and their issues and why that happened and we certainly don't ever want this to happen again. >> do you -- how much do you put this on ercot and do you feel like they're the -- that ultimately, is this on them, or do you think this is a grand experiment that didn't work? >> well, this is a storm essentially of the century because this covers the entire state of texas. each region has had severe storms before. i mean, we did in 2011, but this covers the whole state so it

was -- i won't say it wasn't unexpected because we had the forecast, but i think it's a little bit -- ercot just wasn't as prepared as they should have been, clearly. and we're going to have to address that here in texas. >> all right, mayor price, mayor of fort worth. going to be some long nights and days and weeks ahead. stay safe and good luck. thank you, mayor. >> thank you, chuck. i'll turn to ken medlock, he's an economics fellow at rice university/baker institute. the last question i asked the mayor, making it the first question here. is this a case of ercot and -- being not well run and this, or this was inevitable and even a well-run ercot the system was always going to break under a moment like this? >> it's actually a great

question and unfortunately i don't think there's actually a simple answer. point of fact, ercot did a great job of avoiding the catastrophic failure you mentioned at the outset of the program. when you think about how they responded in the short term to the pressures placed on the grid they did an admirable job. but when you look at resource adequacy and planning when we rolled into this event there are things that could have been done much, much better. unfortunately, it's not a simple answer. there's a lot of different things that failed miserably and ultimately i think it's going to be incumbent upon not only ercot but state and elected officials to figure out really what happened and avoid, you know, the inevitable finger pointing and blame gaming that is going to go on. it's already starting to emerge. i've been sort of offline for the last four days because i've been without power.

we got our power back last night. still don't have water. it's not fun. but at the same time that means my access to information has been limited so i'm kind of getting up to speed in realtime, and in many ways some of the images that you're showing here are the first time i've seen them. >> you know, i had an energy expert down in austin say to me yesterday that the -- look, the market, the energy market in texas is remarkably efficient. in fact, incredibly efficient. but it was the equivalent of going to the grocery store and buying just one roll of toilet paper and hoping you don't get sick and it was never any way to create capacity, no way to incentivize capacity. is that a fair description? >> it's a very fair description, actually. texas is an energy-only market and basically what that means is resources are added to the grid based on their competitiveness. it's actually been a hallmark for what's driven, you know, in

addition to the resources we have available, but what's driven wind and solar to the heights that they are now at in texas. but, you know, lockstep with that, there's no incentive to develop backup capacity. and this doesn't mean an energy-only market doesn't work and there's a lot of discussion now emerging about capacity markets and the role of regulators, et cetera, et cetera. but there have been efforts to -- particularly after the 2011 event, february 2011 should have been a wake-up call. an alarm that everybody saw. it wasn't as deep in terms of reaching down into houston and south texas. houston saw 12 and 10 degree temperatures over the last couple days so 2011 was not that bad but it still should have been a wake-up call. it should have been a warning shot across the bow saying, look, you know, wind turbines are going to freeze at these incredibly low temperatures, you're going to have freeze offs amongst compressor stations, well heads, processing facilities on natural gas supplies so you'll be limited in that space as well.

what can we do if this were to be worse to avoid that kind of catastrophic event? there were some recommendations made, i think, in 2013 roughly it was a recommendation that came down to ercot about addressing concerns about limited backup capacity, you know addressing reserve margin issue. really, what it amounted to was intermittent resources being forced to purchase ancillary services on contracting supplies and it was shot down. ancillary services or backup capacities can be paid for by everybody, doesn't have to be intermittent resources and that stuff hasn't happened and there's no requirement for it to happen. we sit in a situation where under normal circumstances the grid works great. as a matter of fact, under normal circumstances -- normal winter day there wouldn't have been a problem even with the reduction in wind capacity. you wouldn't have the freeze offs and there would have been sufficient gas capacity in effect to run but that's not the

case right now because there's no spare capacity and we're not connected to the rest of the country so that does create additional problems. >> i was just going to say, considering that el paso is basically fine, and el paso is on the national grid, is that not a living, breathing example to the rest of texas that says maybe we ought to suck it up, handle federal regulation, and join the national grid? >> it should be. and, you know, i've actually made these comments in the past, you know, if we could connect -- if texas could actually connect to the rest of the grid, the wind resource in west texas would be much more profitable and it would actually promote more investment capacity in the state because we could wheel power west and east. right now we can't do it. you end up in an awkward situation, you're confined to being an island, you don't have encouraging backup resources which act like storage effectively, available at a moment's notice and when the

system goes down you can't wheel in power. and you have no backup and so uh end up in a crisis like we're in right now. >> well if i were a texas resident, i'd be like i don't know why i pay federal taxes in what the state is doing. there's a lot of that. go ahead, i've got to wrap up here. >> no worries. there will be a lot of that, there should be a lot of that, quite frankly but at the end of the day there were also things that generators in the state didn't necessarily do, winterization for example, you mentioned el paso, they took extreme steps to take care of that. in beaumont county they did the same thing and those are two counties that didn't experience any outages. you look around the state and you see that, wow, there could have been a lot done differently. >> yeah, natural disasters are mris for governance, for sure. ken medlock, appreciate your expertise, thanks for joining me. >> thank you, chuck. up ahead, democrats just unveiled a new plan to overhaul

our imabrasion system but it's probably not going very far. the latest on that plus the urgent push to reach a deal on covid relief and more. house majority whip jim clyburn joins me next. try boost® high protein with 20 grams of protein for muscle health. versus 16 grams in ensure high protein. boost® high protein also has key nutrients for immune support. boost® high protein. i am robert strickler. i've been involved in communications in the media boost® high protein also has key nutrients for 45 years. i've been taking prevagen on a regular basis for at least eight years. for me, the greatest benefit over the years has been that prevagen seems to help me recall things and also think more clearly. and i enthusiastically recommend prevagen. it has helped me an awful lot. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. ugh, there's that cute guy from 12c. -go talk to him. -yeah, no.

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for a day in which congress is technically on recess there's a lot happening on the hill, congressional democrats introduced a comprehensive immigration bill that includes a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, facing a steep uphill climb in congress and on the day it's unveiled both the white house and speaker pelosi implied that it's a steep uphill climb for it. work continues on the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill which the house hopes to pass late next week or next weekend with the minimum wage still a bit at issue and house speaker nancy pelosi provided more details about her plan to create an independent commission investigating the attack on the

capitol. the commission must have subpoena power and must be bipartisan to work effectively. joined by south carolina congressman jim clyburn. congressman, let me start with that last issue first. you're actually chair of the special covid oversight panel as it was before so you have some experience on whether these special panels can work as well. how would you like to see the independent commission on january 6th formatted? do you see it as sort of a democratic chair, but equal d's and r's, what do you think of a format that works? >> well, thank you very much for having me, chuck. first of all, i think it ought to be extra legislative -- extra political, if you please. when we talk about a 9/11 type commission, let's make it a replica of 9/11. let's have some independent studies of exactly what went on,

not just on january 6th, but what led up to that. a lot has been going on in this country a long time, talking about a divided government for a long time. we often talk about the history of the country. we talk about our motto epluribusunum. and the fact that we're so fractured. maybe if we took the stuff out of politics and get some good people involved, maybe some people who have been in politics. i can think of a lot on both sides of the aisle who are no longer politically active who could really make a tremendous contribution to help and to preserve this great democracy. we are -- on catastrophic events, not just on disasters that we have in texas but we are close to catastrophic events inside our governmental process. i want to see a committee that

would really be a commission to take a hard look at this, stay out there for a year, year and a half, come back with some strong studies, make some recommendations, and let congress then react to it politically. but not have the process politicized. >> i was going to say it sounds like you don't think any current elected officials ought to be on this. sounds like you think it ought to be sort of find another version of kane and hamilton, right, you know, i hope that exists these days considering how hard it is even for former officials to have that kind of -- to sort of have that across the aisle respect. >> yeah, i know it's hard. but just because it's hard doesn't mean we ought not try it. i really believe we could get this done. and if you took it outside of the political process i think you'd be much, much better off. look, you remember bill clinton came in, he appointed this

so-called race committee. have you ever seen the study? ever seen the results? john hoop franklin put a lot of time and effort into it. >> i remember when he did that. >> it got politicized and we never saw it anymore. the whole -- commission, did a great work, but it got politicized. let's do this in such a way, some politically astute people who are not partisan, and i don't mean -- look, a guy like john -- out there in missouri, he's a republican. but he can get above and beyond that. and i really believe we need to get people like that into this process. >> leon panetta and john danforth would be an interesting pairing, that's for sure. they have that high end respect and across -- they've worked in multiple entities, multiple branches of government. let me shift gears here, covid relief and the minimum wage.

are you basically in the house leadership waiting to find out if the senate parliamentarian would allow the minimum wage proposal in covid relief before deciding what to do with it in the house. >> i don't know that that's what we're waiting for but i think we should. you know, i like really knowing exactly what you've got to work with. if you can get a ruling from the parliament arian govern yourselves accordingly. going down to road to make a declaration what they think can be done and find out the opposite could take place. so let's know exactly what we're working with and then go out and try to do it. >> at this point do you think it's going to be easier to see -- to increase the minimum wage, in a separate bill, or do you -- do you think -- because you look at it here, and even joe manchin doesn't seem to be he's on board so if the -- it's

still derailed. >> a lot of republicans would like to see the minimum wage go up. this too should not be partisan. $7.25 an hour, those are poverty wages. i mean, we know it is. why should we require somebody to work 40 hours a week knowing full well when payday comes they are going to be paid poverty wages. that should not be in a country like this. i don't think that we will have zero republicans voting for a minimum wage raise. we know that we need a better minimum wage. and we aren't talking about doing the whole $15 tomorrow morning. we're talking about gradually escalating it up to that point and i heard my colleague, ms. jayapal talk about what happened in seattle when they went to a

$15 minimum wage. they had a big increase in business activity, and made themselves more attractive for business development. so this whole notion, every time we start talking about giving the wage or increase to low-income people, it's all about busting the budget. you give a big $1.5 trillion tax cut to wealthy people in the country and everything is fine. things will trickle on down to you. well, it never trickles down. >> you know, you're actually making a case to make it stand alone. because it would actually make the vote a lot more in the spotlight on that front. that's for sure. anyway, congressman clyburn, you've got to go, you're on a tight deadline. i appreciate you spending a few minutes with us though. thank you, sir, as always. >> thank you very much for having me. quick programming note, ayman mohyeldin and jacob soboroff talk about the immigration overhaul plan with

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covid-19 has dealt a major blow to life expect anty in the united states. down by a full year. largest drop since world war ii. hispanic-americans lost two years, and black americans lost nearly three. life expectancy for blacks is now six years less than a life expectancy for white americans. right now more than 56 million vaccine doses have been administered. but winter weather is holding up vaccinations, shipments getting delayed and patients are forced to miss, hard to get appointments at shuttered gymnasiums and schools, you get the picture. and in the push to get students back to school the cdc guidance that vaccines for teachers are encouraged but not mandated, is creating plenty of confusion. here's what dr. fauci told my colleague andrea mitchell just moments ago. >> there were five or six things that the cdc has in their guidelines that you would like

to optimize to get the children back to school where the children can feel safe and the teachers can feel safe. the issue with vaccinating teachers, obviously, we will make and want to make the prioritization of teachers vaccination very high. but i think to say that you're not going to open up schools until every single one of the teachers get vaccinated, i don't think that we can go there. >> joining me now is former cdc acting director dr. richard beszer. i want to start with the teacher and vaccination question. but dr. besser before i get to that, are we in this current situation because at the very beginning we never prioritized schools, we prioritized bars and restaurants and gyms, before schools, and now we're paying a dear price for it? >> well, chuck, i think one of the reasons we're in this predicament is that there were very thoughtful guidelines that

were put forward by cdc, the advisory committee on immunization practices laid out what they felt were the most appropriate approaches and phases to vaccinations, so starting with health care workers, and those in long-term care facilities and those who worked there. the next group that they recommend vaccinating were those 75 years and above, and essential workers. and if you look at the group of essential workers, it includes the people working in the grocery store, people driving the bus, first responders, police and fire. and it included teachers. a lot of states didn't go that way, the federal government didn't go that way. they immediately said let's make it easy and vaccinate everyone 65 and above. what that's done is it's left people who leave their house every day going to work, it's left them more vulnerable and you just shared information about the change in life expectancy over the past year. the reason we've seen such a disparate impact and profound

drop in life expectancy among black americans and latino americans, left the risk of exposure very high. if we're not protecting essential workers we're seeing the widening gap between whites and blacks and latinos in terms of the impact of this pandemic. >> that's what i was trying to get at the beginning of the question. it's how we've treated schools from the get go here on what we've prioritized, whether it's in how we, you know, we're so worried about 25% capacity in restaurants that we kept punting how to handle schools and now that we're here. but has the white house made this more confusing on schools? because i think the cdc guidance is pretty clear, until the white house interprets the guidance. >> well, you know, i think the cdc guidance is pretty clear. it's pretty clear from a public health standpoint that we've learned from the science over the past year, before there were any vaccines out there, that if

you had certain measures in place, layered levels of protection, you could open schools safely, safely for the students, safely for the staff and safely for the teachers. that's been seen in state after state across this country as well as in other countries. you need to make sure that everyone has masks, that you've got staff who can do screening and can do cleaning, that you're able to decompress the classroom so there aren't as many students in each class and that you can address ventilation and that you're working with public health, so that when there are cases you can respond. so the science showed that you can open schools quite safely without vaccines. so the two things are true, teachers should be prioritized, they should be in that essential group that are recommended for vaccines, and schools can open without that being in place. both of those things are true and it makes for some confusion because the federal government doesn't mandate what states do, each state takes all this information and determines on their own what they're going to do, you can have someone who

lives in pennsylvania who works in new jersey, where the approach is maybe totally different. >> all right. we are seven straight days under 100,000 cases. we've been here before. will this one stick? is this downhill movement, one that feels like maybe this is one that won't rise back up again? >> you know, i sure hope so. i would say that for the first time in this pandemic i'm cautiously optimistic. you know, everyone's trying to figure out why are the numbers going down, why are they going down so profoundly and it's probably a mixed bag. some is that viruses have seasonality so there is a pattern to infection regardless of what you're doing and maybe this is part of what we're seeing here. it's also true that probably close to 100 million people in america have had covid

infection. only a fraction get diagnosed, get tested. but the cdc estimates are close to 100 million have had this. you're starting to run out of people, or the number of people who have some level of protection goes up, we're vaccinating and i also think that the clarity of message, we're hearing the same message from our political leaders we hear from public health leaders about social distancing, wearing masks, washing hands, limiting travel, limiting crowded place, all of those things are factoring in here. and we're vaccinating people, you know, tens of millions of people have been vaccinated. all of those things contribute, and i think that if we don't let up, if we can keep the intensity around all of these measures, we are going to be on our way out of this. you know, the only thing, chuck, that worries me in it is these variants that could throw a wrench in the works, and that's the uncertainty. >> hey, very quickly, and i don't know how close you're following the controversies involving new york and governor cuomo but his defense -- one of

his defenses is that he was abiding by the guidance he was getting at the time when it came to the nursing homes, he was claiming it was guidance he was getting from the cdc and hhs, you think that's a fair defense? >> yeah, i don't know. you know, it's a hard situation for me to comment on. clearly, nursing homes, nursing home residents, nursing home workers are one of the groups that's been hit the hardest. i know that's true here in my home state of new jersey. but yeah, i don't have any visibility into those decisions and what took place. >> was there federal guidance that said send covid patients back to nursing homes? >> yeah, that's not something that i recall at any point, chuck? >> yeah, i don't either. anyway, dr. richard besser, former head of the cdc, appreciate you coming on. thank you. >> thank you, chuck. check out our interactive state by state guide to figure

out when and where you can receive your covid vaccine. every county is different. trust me. i went through this with my own family. so visit planyourvaccine.com to learn more. we'll be back with new reporting into the investigation into governor cuomo and what we're learning about what investigators could be looking at. customizes your home insurance, here's something you shouldn't try at home. insurance is cool. only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ age-related macular degeneration may lead to severe vision loss. so the national eye institute did 20 years of clinical studies on a formula only found in preservision. if it were my vision, i'd ask my doctor about preservision. it's the most studied eye vitamin brand. if it were my vision, i'd look into preservision. only preservision areds2 contains the exact nutrient formula recommended by the nei to help reduce the risk of moderate to advanced amd progression. i have amd. it is my vision

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on computers, mobile devices, servers and the cloud. join the world's leading companies in our mission to defend. cybereason. end cyber attacks. from endpoints to everywhere. the fbi, along with the brooklyn u.s. attorney has now opened a preliminary investigation into new york governor andrew cuomo's handling of the covid-19 pandemic, coming after a report the new york state attorney general forced cuomo and his administration to acknowledge they underreported the death toll by thousands. joining me is tom winter. tom, i'm trying to understand. i know that andrew cuomo is in a massive political crisis. >> right. >> what is the -- what is he

under -- what did he do illegally that would bring him under investigation by the fbi? >> right, so it's a great point. so from a political standpoint the issue of the nursing home deaths and what happened there has been a political hot potato in a real issue for the governor, it turned into a bipartisan issue when the attorney general, the new york attorney general came out with a report saying that these deaths may have been undercounted by half. now that's not the -- the state's death toll is not changing, were the deaths allocated to nursing homes or hospitals. this all stems from an order the governor's health department put forward last year in the heart of the coronavirus epidemic here in new york in an effort to try to cut back on the amount of people that were staying in the hospitals. so yes, a big political issue. now, the question that you've asked, why is this potentially a federal criminal issue and there's a federal criminal investigation involved. this goes back to about a week ago, chuck, when the governor's secretary was talking with state

legislators why they hadn't been updated on these numbers. and she said because we were in a position where we weren't sure if what we were going to give to the department of justice or what we give to you what we start saying was used against us when we weren't sure if there was an investigation. this goes back to last summer when the civil rights division sent a letter asking about these issues. that is believed to have gone completely away. and had gone away. but when the secretary made that statement and when republican and democratic state legislators started complaining about this issue and wondered why the real numbers hadn't just been put forward. in the governor was acting in accordance with guidelines in recommending that people who had been hospitalized, even if they still had covid-19 be returned to nursing homes, why not put out the correct stats in the

first place? that's raised questions. our understanding from current and former law enforcement officials, chuck, is that this investigation centers on a couple of different things. very early and there's no guarantee there will be any charges. but whether or not there were misrepresentations made to the department of justice or federal regulators and on top of that the reason why the numbers weren't accurate, was there any misuse of federal funds? those are a couple avenues. more to come, chuck, it's going to be a while. >> sure is, and it's fascinating there, tom winter, on top of it for us, thank you. up next, could the power grid catastrophe in texas forever reshape the politics in the lone star state? more on that after the break. ♪ plant-powered creative roots gives kids the hydration they need, with the fruit flavors they love. and one gram of sugar. find creative roots in the kids' juice aisle. and one gram of sugar. living with metastatic breast cancer means being relentless.

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welcome back. from the energy grid to the lawmakers and regulators falling out of this power meltdown could define text politics for years. this is evan smith. thank you, as always, for coming on. the decision to deregulate the energy industry and do all of this happening in the late 90s. it was done somewhat on a bipartisan basis, but it has been a low regulation mind-set, deregulation mind-set, small government, you name it. 25 years of republican

governance philosophy here. is that what is on the ballot in the next 18 months? >> there had to be consequences for this and i think you will have a lot of finger pointing. we went up and down, riding the independence from feds wave, and bragging about our own awesomeness wave and none of it looks very good right now whether or not you're in cancun or texas. we look pretty bad to ourselves and the rest of the country. there is still lots of people without power and water. it was nowing here again and

there will be hell to pay and consequences. whether or not they're at the ballot box or someone else you may see soon. >> i should, for viewers wondering about your cancun reference, ted cruz owned up to the fact that he said he informs cancun and it was part of -- he didn't try to explain it away beyond his daughter's had a break and he wanted to go there. he is not the first elected official caught in the wrong local during a natural disaster and i'm sure he won't be the last. i guess the question is who has the most to answer for here? i have to tell you evan that the idea that it is a name less face lessacronym, you mean there is

no individual? right? that is going to, i assume, be that massive fight. >> sure it is the electric reliability we are famously on our own grid. we're the only state to be on our own grid, and look they do bear some responsibility in the leadership. the board of ercot that we found out in the midst of all of this is it is five members and they all live out of state. there is so much of this that, if it was submitted to the novel they would say it is too unlikely. but you broke it, you bought it.

the governor runs the state, he has his hands on the operate, and he has to be in the position of explaining the problem and of taking responsibility o if things happened on his watch for allowing the situation to continue. there are a lot of people trying to point fingers at e.r.c.o.t., or natural gas providers, or frozen wind turbines, but at the end of the day it begins and ends with leadership, chuck, and he is under the lights. >> there will have to be a symbolic fix here, right? the easiest is join the national grid. rick perry's comments, i'm curious about them. is that -- is there a collective defiance that says yes, we would prefer no power than to be

regulated. >> i think it's an eye roll emoji over his comments, but there are a lot that believe that independence is first on our list of priorities. but there are at least two benefits to being in league with everyone else. someone that we can make money off of it by providing power to other places when they need it. and second we're insulated, in a literal sense, if we had been connected to other places we could have gotten power from them. i think the argument would be made it is time to put this to rest. it may be the beginning of the end of the texas grid. >> evan smith, thank you for

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good around. mother nature are making the humanetarian emergency in the state of texas even worse. as we're showing and telling you the power grid has collapsed. there is no heat, no water, no way out. there is few ways to easily get food and water. some hospitals are being forced to evacuate patients. to say the situation is dire is an under statement. justis