of mississippi, independent senator angus king of maine, and democratic senator john hickenlooper of colorado all announced today they have tested positive. all three of these men were fully vaccinated, which just puts aat spotlight on how very, very contagious the delta variant of this virus is. the delta variant basically makes up the exclusive variant in our country now. it also underscores the administration's decision that fully vaccinated americans should get the booster shot. all three are likely to be okay because they were vaccinated. the good news on covid today is that withinov the last 24 hours

the united states is back up over 1 million vaccine doses administered per day. we've been below a million doses per day for the last seven weeks or so, but now apparently the message is sinking in enough that the pace of vaccination is picking back up. americans are deciding to get the shot. over a million doses administered in the past 24 hours. that's true for the first time in nearly seven weeks. i think in general the covid news is dire enough to change minds in many southern states in particular right now. we're going to be talking about new covid developments throughout the country, but in particular an alarm bell that was just rung by the university of alabama. i'm not sure how that state or anybody is supposed to respond to it. we've got that story ahead tonight. we'll also be talking about the utterly bizarre but also totally predictable story out of

washington today in which a man in a pickup truck pulled up onto the sidewalk in front of the library of congress, thus startinges an hours-long bomb threat standoff. this is a man with many, many incoherent but oddly self-assured thoughts about politicsed including his hope a expectation that president biden will leave office and former president donald trump will soon be reinstated and all the democrats will be in jail. this man did not blow anything up. heot is in custody tonight. we'll have more on that story coming up as well. but look at these images today. these are a.p. images shot by an a.p. videographer in kabul. i did not expect to see anything necessarily t like this, at lea not now. this is a huge unfurled flag, the flag of the afghan government, the flag that was taken down all over the country this week and replaced with the taliban itflag.

seen other protests against taliban rule in support of the now deposed afghan government in other afghan city this week, especially in eastern afghanistan and southeastern afghanistan. we have seen them met with a violent response and gunfire from the taliban as you see here in jalalabad. these protests against taliban rule today, relatively large ones, and they were in kabul, in the capital city. there was a taliban response and gunfire at the end of this protest in kabul today, too, but the number of people there, the participation of women alongside men, frankly the level of organization it took to get that gigantic blocks-long afghan flag out there into the street, it's interesting to see s and it suggests however easy it may have beents for the taliban too take over, whatever deals they cut with the military and government officials so they could basically walk in to power

all over the i country, however easy it was to take over, their ruling the country is not going to bego frictionless for them.e this is a clear sign they're going to face various kinds of resistance in varying degrees from the afghan people. so tonight i have to tell you i'm not sure this is going to work. i'm putting a lot of faith in a lot of sketchy technology to try this, but i would like to if we could go t live to the airport kabul where an nbc producer has taking his family. his family is leaving kabul. they're leaving afghanistan. he's decided he's going to stay behind after he puts them on the plane. he's a journalist who has worked with nbc and other western news outlets for nearly 20 years. hely told us he's not affray of theno taliban coming to look fo him now. he told us, he's going to look for them, and, indeed, he's been

looking for taliban fighters all week. he's captured these shots including at the airport. he's at the airport right now, but he says he's going stay in kabul. i'm so grateful for you finding a way to join us tonight. thank you for joining us. >> it's my pleasure. thanks for having me. >> can you tell us what it's like at the airport? i know it's 5:30 in the morning afghan time. is it still as chaotic and crowded as it has been the past few days? is it getting any better? >> i can'tan say that it's gettg better. the sun is rising in kabul at the moment. as you say, it's 5:30 a.m. and still i can see people in view, u.s. forces trying to keep things going and get them in queue, in line where they can be

checked with their documentations and everything. women, children, young men are all standing on the queues waiting toe get inside. it wasn't easy to get here. i came like 1:00 p.m. today at one of the gates. i just drove down in a local car with my family today, one of the gates i was called to be. when i got there, i saw there was a bit of a crowd. i didn't think it would be this difficult to get into the airport. so as soon as we started approaching to the gate, you know, the crowd got, you know, extended and extended. at one stage i realized like i'm

really having a hard time keeping my kids safe and also my wife because, you know, there's a lot of young men who's more powerful's than a woman and kid and they've been pushing them around at the airport. i luckily managed to get them all in. you know, we're supposed to meet the turkish forces here who have been very helpful to get the kids out of the crowd of people, you know, pulling out them from a wall basically. couldn't get them through a gate.he we showed them the passport and identification and everything, and, you know, i agreed to fill them out. it's nothing like i ever

experienced in my life before. >> can you tell us about the decision for your family to leave and for you to stay in kabul? i have to tell you everybody's worried about you. it seems like you have the option to leave with your family if you -- as you're getting them out, but you've decided to stay. can you just tell us about making that decision? >> well, as i said, i have the rights to leave. i mean as soon as the airplane came, i onboard them. i decided to stay. afghanistan has been in conflict for a very long time. we have seen so much in this country. one thing that i want to know is like how it is going to be after this, like are we going to have the taliban currently who are in the streets of kabul, or is that going to change? so in case it's changing and challenging us to stay and do

work here, it's going to be easier for me to move myself anywhere rather than with my family. so for that purpose, i'm, you know, sending them out. i'm going to stay. i'm going to approach taliban. i've already approached them. i've talked to them in the streets, i've photographed them. there's nothing major i can say. you know, it is risky, but we'll see how it's going to treat us in the future. >> ahmed, let me ask you as we're looking at these scenes from around the world and respectful of you move forward without your family so you don't endanger them, i absolutely understand. you want to keep working. what should we understand about the importance of how things are going to develop. as americans, we're so focused

on the evacuation right now. can the military expand the area around the airport so you can get through the gauntlet you went through. we're so focused what the u.s. forces can do in a very short term to get people out. what else do you think we should be t looking at beyond that ver short-term focus we have right now as a country? >> you know, the forces are operating inside the base or the airport. they're not going out of the gate. outside the gate, it was taliban when we arrived during the day. but later on, some special forces of afghanistan, that i wasn'tan thinking of them being there,be here, somewhere, showdn up and started trying to help the u.s. forces or the turkish. i have seen spanish forces, norwegians, multinational groups who are taking their citizens

into the airport or people who work with them on their mission in afghanistan. so outside is like totally controlled by taliban, so they're inside andn, they're trying to help those people, you know, in the airport. >> ahmed mengli, longtime nbc producer with his family. thank you for your work. god bless your family on the travels they're about to start. be safe. >> thank you. all right. again, ahmed mengli joining us live from the kabul airport. we have heard today from the pentagon that they were still able to fly out, i guess, yesterday, they were able to fly out. they could fly out between 5,000 and 9,000 people. they have not reached that capacity. cnn reported today, based on the account of a senior administration official, that president biden has advised

senior militaryn commanders th there should not be empty seats on flights leaving from the kabul airport, that they need to increase the flow-through, u.s., organizations, ngos. people need to be flowing through greater b numbers and filling every seat on those planes.g certainly note happening yet, t that ist certainly the president's order. nearly ten years ago president barack obama decided to put a man named john sopko as ao special inspector general f afghanistan reconstruction, which means in laymen's terms, he would be charged with independently investigating what we're spending all our money on and whatng we're doing in afghanistan, and to my mind, john sopko was the right man for the job, provided you department want anybody to give you any happy talk about this particular

situation. he hadrt spent years as a senio congressional staffer, but the kind of congressional staffer who worked mostly on investigations, specifically hard core investigations of things likeve organized crime a weapons of mass destruction and the foreign union and the international anti-narcotics efforts. all of the hardest stuff john sopko worked onff that. for years. forn years before that, he was state and federal prosecute e including years as a trial lawyer. he was the lead attorney in the first successful federal rico prosecution of the entire leadership structure of a crime family, which he proudly notes in his biography. john sopko is not a pushover. he's not going to tell you things you want to hear unless you deserve it. but in the decade-ish as being

the man in charge, his assessments have often been brutal. at least they've been brutally blunt. here, for example, is how propublica wrote up one of his more well-known findings. quote n 2008, the u.s. bought 12 cargo plains. but just about everything you can think of was wrong. there were no spare parts for the planes, for example. the planes were also, according to the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction, quote, a death trap. so $486 million was spent on worthless planes that no one could fly. we did recoup some of the investment though. 16 of the 20 planes ended up being sold for scrap for the grand sum of $32,000. that's six cents a pound. how many hundreds of millions of dollars did those coast? john sopko also reported without fear or favor on, for example, the $43 million that we spent on

a proof of concept gas station in afghanistan. it was a gas station that did not work as a gas station. it also proved no concept other than the concept that it is possible to spend $43 million building a single gas station that then does not work. it has been ten years of this kind of brutally blunt documentation from john sopko in this important inspector general post. but now as u.s. forces have left and then gone back to deal with the evacuation and as we are living day by day and hour by houry through the chaos of the evacuation or lack thereof. sopko has just released his report on how the first 20 years offi our war went overall, broay speaking. i have to tell you, it is not a cynical document. it is not a defeatist document. but it is also as unblinking as you might expect from him given

what he'spe been through. it's titled "what we need to learn -- not what we have to learn. what we h need to learn: lesson from 20 years of afghanistan reconstruction. 20 years late est much has improved and much has not. if the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that could sustain itself and pose little threat to u.s. national security interests, the overall picture in afghanistan is bleak. if that was the goal, the overall picture was bleak. but look at key point number two. henu says, there is no doubt millions of lives of afghans have improved including gains in life ex-peck tansey, children under y,five, literacy rates ar among otherra factors. the key question is whether theseke gains were commensurate with u.s. investment or sustainable after a u.s. drawdown. in the annalysis, they were

neither. speaking toer the "military times" last month, sopko warned the reason we need to learn these lessons -- note it's not lessons learned from 20 years. it's lessons we need to learn. sopko warned the reason we need to learn these lessons is because we haven't yet and because wee are going to do th again. he said, quote, don't believe what you're told by the generals or ambassadors or people in the administrationth saying we're never goingti to do this again. that's exactly what we said at vietnam. lo andat behold we did. iraq. and we did, afghanistan. he said, we will do this again. joining us now is john sopko. he has served in the distinguished and unique role as general inspector for afghanistan spreconstruction. thank you for joining us tonight. appreciate the time. >> it's a pleasure to be here and see you again, rachel. >> you too. you too. first of all, and i hope this is

not impertinent of me. knowing what i know of you, i would like to give you a chance to sound off a little bit with all the things you know in studying the project. i have found myself wondering if you are frustrated now by the public finally paying attention now, by f the news coverage of e departure and its konsz kwenss, by hows we're talking about th now as a contry. do you feel there are fundamental things that be're missing or getting wrong? >> well, rachel, you can't have spent as much time as i did and met as many afghans and americans who served over there and americans who got hurt and who died and not feel something about it. and it's not a positive feeling. i'm crushed by seeing the events. i've spent a lot of time over the last number of weeks, and my

staff has, trying to get our american employees out and now we're still trying to get our afghan colleagues who helped us out. it's been very frustrating, and it'sru also very disturbing. but, you know, the job of an i.g. is not to make friends. it's to make truth to power, and that's what we've done. i'm a bit frustrated that after all these reports we've written that people are now saying they're surprised at the outcome of the afghan security forces. we've been identifying serious, serious problems with their capability, and we have been warning our government and congress andgo anyone who would listen that they were not able to function by themselves. now, we didn't predict when they

were going to collapse. i think we were all a bit surprised by that. but nori one should be surprise by this. now, now's not the time, really, for finger pointing. i think now's the time to obviously get all the americans out and get out any afghan who wants to get out geout, but i think at some point, we need to look atpo these lessons learned report that we've created, particularly this last one, and try to make things better. the bottom line of our report as you highlighted so succinctly, more succinct than i can, is we were totally unprepared for this, and we haven't learned the lessons of vietnam. ifle anything, after vietnam, w said we're never going to do it, and we cut all of the capabilities to do these types of reconstruction events or

activities in a war zone, and lo and behold, we said we're nerve going to do it again. we did it in iraq. we've done itin in afghanistan. we've done it three times in the last 50 years, and all three times, it's been pretty poorly handled. and we're doing something similar to this but on a smaller scale, but as our report says, it's a slippery slope that it's at' small scale before it becom as big scale. i've heard people talking about sendingeo troops and massive ai similarly to a war-torn or not safe country of haiti that may deserve it, but if we do it in haiti or these other countries without learning the lessons, we're going to repeat the same mistakes. and that's what this report is all about. it's trying to look forward to improve how we do things like this. >> and when you step back from this -- from your work, from

what you have seen and all these quarterly reports -- i feel like i've read a dozen of them. i read them every time they come out. when you step back from that, for americans with a short attention span,er for americans who want easy answers to things, that the conclusion ought to be the easy conclusion, which is that reconstruction never works, it never can work, and we should never try w it, or is the lesso that we need to learn that we need to scope it more carefully, we need to monitor it in more specific ways, and that there are lessons to be learned about how tole do it in a way that wos and meets our objectives that doesn't leave us with calamity at the end and so disheartened about the sacrifice? >> it's the latter, rachel. and the problem is if we ignore it -- it ignores the fact that at someac time in the future, w

will confront a country where it's for our national security, we're going to have to do something like we did in afghanistan, iraq, and vietnam, so we should face that and we should prepare for it. i'm not saying spend billions of dollars and create a new entity. i'm saying learn the lessons, train for it, understand, collect names, get peopleready. we have a whole series of recommendations in thates area. the uk has done something like that to some extent, a smaller extent, but that's what we should do, rather than say, we're never going to do it again. we've had too much happy talk over the last 20 years and too much spinning, you know. i don't know how many generals have said we're turning the corner. you know, it's like turning -- we went 360. it's like a top spinning. we have to stop lying and guilt

american people and congress and stop gilding the a lily. let's face the last 20 years, the reality on the ground. >> john sopko. sir, thank you. thank you for being here tonight. thank you forfo your unique and uncompromising service in this job.lonely i am l sorry to hear you are stl having difficulty getting out your afghan staffers, people who worked with ciger office there. i wish you luck. i urge them to take your freaking call because you have earned it, sir. thank you. >> thank you. all right. we've got a lot more news to get to here tonight. stay with us. to here tonight. stay with us i got you. ♪ all by yourself. ♪ go with us and get millions of flexible booking options. expedia. it matters who you travel with.

military medical team arrives at

ochsner lafayette general. we have footage of navy personnel showing up at the hospital yesterday afternoon, ready to work and pitch in, help the doctors and nurses there who have been inundated by covid patients for weeks. as you can hear, they greeted the navy team with a loud standing ovation. the defense department sent this team to lafayette, louisiana, because the hospital asked fema for federal help and the resource that was deployed here was a military resource. they have four more active duty military medical teams like this one staffed up and ready for deployment at overrun u.s. hospitals. we don't know exactly where the other four teams like this will be going after this team went to louisiana, but we do know there's plenty of american hospitals that could use emergency help right now because the huge numbers of covid patients that have swamped them and have seriously deleterious

effects. for example, in alabama, this is the front page of "the montgomery advertiser." e.r. has patient traffic jam. frustrated, overwhelmed, exhausted, they say a dangerous covid state filling the beds has turned a cascade of issues in the state. patients at the east alabama medical center are being held on ambulance stretchers while staff look for open beds, resulting in huge problems. quote, ambulances lined the e.r. bay in what one hospital spokesperson john hopkins called an e.r. traffic jam and they're unable to respond to other emergencies in their own communities. alabama reported a negative number of available staffed icu beds yesterday. negative, which means they have no room and there are patients waiting to get into the beds

that are already filled. there are more patients than beds right now. and here's the thing i find most unsettling about this. this involves some very, very, very easy math. the situation that alabama's in is happening with the state having about 2,700 patients in the hospital. that is the level of hospitalization in alabama that has led to this big crisis, 2,700. today the university of alabama at birmingham predicted the state's current surge in covid is going to peak this time next month and at that point there will be more than 5,000 people in the hospital and alabama. that's almost double where they are now. right now the state is in gridlock, in crisis, no room for -- not an icu bed in the state. that's with 2,700 people in the hospital. alabama expects it will be at 5,000 people in the hospital this time next month. this is not a normal story about

covid exhausting local nurses. a doctor at the university of alabama is calling that scenario, that prediction, quote, potentially apocalyptic. alabama, like a number of other states, is overwhelmed right now. they're now asking fema for federal help. federal staff, federal resources to help treat the unending overflow of patients that gets worse every day. but at this point, yes, one hopes to see more federal resources deployed. but at this point i have a hard time understanding how facilities, how hospitals, how states like this are going to cope. joining us now is dr. david kimberlin. he's with the university of alabama. doctor, i appreciate you being here. i know what a tense time this is. >> appreciate the time to be

with you torchlts, rachel. thank you. >> i'm looking at this from the outside. i'm a layman, and i'm appreciative of the strain on health care workers and facilities right now. that math scares me in terms of how strained alabama hospitals are right now and the prospect that numbers of hospitalized patients, people who need to be hospitalized might double in ament's type. let me ask you if that looks different to you close up than it does to me from here? >> from the inside it looks even worse. i use this word carefully. i think we may be looking at a collapse of our health care system throughout the state of alabama. as you pointed out, we had negative icu beds yesterday. that's adult and pediatric. today alabama surpassed florida in terms of rates of pediatric hospitalizations with covid. this is not just the surge with the delta variant of covid. that's what's putting obvious strain on the system. but in addition to that is correct we still have people

having heart attacks and strokes and major trauma from automobile accidents, and they have to have a place to go. in mobile, was told there were no ambulances to go out and pick up people. are really at a teetering kind of break point here, and i'm very scared that we might not be able to get through this without catastrophic kinds of consequences. >> i don't mean to push you on that because i think you're speaking very bluntly. but it sounds like if there's no ambulances in mobile and no icu beds to move people into them when they need intensive care and there aren't hospital beds to move people into from the emergency room who already need them, that already feels like it's starting to be a collapse, but you're expecting that as more patients crush the system, as more very sick people crush the system, there's something on the other side of this that is even more bleak in terms of what people's lived experience is.

>> none of us have a crystal ball and i'd love to be wrong on this, but that's the real possibility t barrel of the gun we're looking down right now. i think you're exactly right in the way you've phrased that. >> tell me about resources being brought to bear. we've seen hhs with a field hospital in the parking garage at the mississippi medical center. we saw a small navy team dispatched to a small hospital in lafayette. they're going to be able to staff 16, 18, 20 beds maybe. tell us about the match between the magnitude of the problem that you're living through and what kind of external resources might make a dent, might help. >> well, i think right now we do need help from outside, no doubt about that. and we have a phenomenal leader of our alabama department of public health, scott harris, who was in meetings all day today with a white house representative, a vaccine

coordinator fleerd the white house, who's here in alabama, and this was one of the lead issues they were discussing throughout the day today. he's going to be here tomorrow as well. we welcome the input if there the white house and from the national level to be able to try to get us the resources that we need. and in addition to that, i will say this in a somewhat hopeful kind of way. we have seen this play out, maybe not to this extent in our part of the country, but we've seen it play out over and over again across the last 18 months in other regions of the united states and to some extent here as well back in january. and so we have an idea of what to do. we know how to take care of patients better who have covid. we have adequate ppe supplies for the most part. we're not struggling with some of the same really dire challenges we were facing last year. we just now have too many patients in this hypertransmissible delta variant is -- it's not giving us any breaks here. and until people put masks on

when they go inside and get more vaccines into arms with sleeves rolled up, i think we're just going to be looking at this event over and over again even after we get through this crisis. we will get through it, but it's what it's going to look like in the meantime. >> dr. david kimberlin with the university of alabama, birmingham, which is an excellent research institution. thank you for speaking so bluntly tonight, sir. good luck to you and your colleagues as you go through this. keep coming back and keep us apprised. we'll try to bring whatever national attention we can to try and help. >> we really appreciate that. thank you. >> more to come here tonight. stay with us. >> more to come here tonight stay with us . and our customers rated us #1 for network quality in america according to j.d. power. number one in reliability, 16 times in a row. most awarded for network quality, 27 times in a row.

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parked a pickup truck outside -- just outside the library of congress in d.c., which sets directly adjacent to the u.s. capitol building. the man said he had a bomb on his lap and he threatened to blow up himself and his truck and the 2 1/2 surrounding blocks of washington, d.c., unless he was allowed to talk to president biden. he said he had more explosives, tons of explosives hidden in his truck's toolbach. naturally he livestreamed the entire thing on facebook because why else do we have facebook. he called for democrats and the u.s. government to step down and then they'd be jailed and then president trump would be put back in office and don't worry president trump would pardon everybody who participated in the revolution, which was starting right there with him. said, quote, patriots joined him in the effort and they, too, had bombs in other vehicles

scattered around d.c. there's no sign that was true. in the end, after five maddening and exhausting hours the man surrendered and was taken into police custody. there's no evidence he had any accomplices at all, nor did he have an explosive device. the police say he did have bomb-making materials in his truck. maybe he was trying to be a mad bomber. he was just a bad bomber. even though he had the stuff, he couldn't figure out how to make real bombs. again, nobody was hurt. but this was an active threat, another one in the united states capitol, and it comes just two weeks after the department of homeland security sent an alert to law enforcement agencies all over the country warning of an increased threat of politically motivated violence this month, specifically tied to rampant pro-trump conspiracy theories around the election and this fantasy among pro-trump extremists that president trump will somehow be reinstated as president this month.

that is part of what this guy was ranting and raving about when he threatened he could blow up 2 1/2 blocks surrounding washington, d.c. is this the kind of violence we've been warned about, and should we see this as linked to broader events or should we see these things as random sad lunatics who should be treated as individuals and not as part of some larger ideologically motivated thing? joining us now is ben collins. he's a senior reporter for nbc news. covers extremism, which means ben's daily beat is pretty dark. thanks for being here tonight. >> thank you. >> i specifically wanted to talk to you tonight because when we started -- you know, when this ended today, when we knew it wasn't going to be a bomb story but a bomb threat story, and we started to learn more about what this guy was apparently motivated by, i found myself wanting to ask you is it a good idea to report on what motivated

this guy, whether we should report what was in his livestream, what he thought he was doing, or does that have the potential to make this worse? >> you know, it's a double-edged sword. i think, you know, posting all five or six facebook live videos that he streamed that were just ramblings for a lot of time, i think that's kind of useless and doesn't help anybody, but i do think there's something here. this guy was complaining -- the one through line was that, you know, his life was in shambles because he didn't have health care and that his wife needed a surgery and could not get it, and then by the time she got it, it seemed to have disfigured her in some way. and he was still paying for it. and then, you know, at the end of that, you would think like, hey, this guy should care about health care. he cares about health care, but that's not what happened. in the very next sentence, he says, now we see all these afghan immigrants, we call them

illegal immigrants from mexico and afghanistan, and they're going to get free stuff we don't have, free health care. what i realized is this is just going to keep happening. you know, there is this sort of fascist authoritarian element that pinpoints immigrants as the cause of all these problems. it ice not a new concept, but the idea that as things get worse and worse in a road through the pandemic or climate challenge, this is going to keep happening. the problems are not going to get solves, but they're going to be pinned on people who are not from this country. >> do you think that this was -- was this a modern event in the sense that do you think that this is -- like you say, these are not new tropes, these ideas of scapegoating immigrants and blaming the other, particularly the other of another color, for what is definitely a homegrown problem and putting the anxiety of the external rather than on the internal.

those aren't new ideas burke the way that he's -- the way that he was talking about his grievances, i'm thinking about the dhs threat -- or alert to law enforcement agencies a couple of weeks ago, the theory behind that is there's something more virulent and more potentially motivating to people who are inclined to commit political violence, to have stuff like this channeled through disinformation channels, through social media who validate and encourages people to think this way. >> yeah. i will say that the forums that were there for january 6th that were posting all this stuff, they're still around. they're still posting crazy stuff. i would say there was a five- or six-month cooling off period where people didn't know if they were being watched by the feds. they didn't know how to talk about stuff. in the last couple of weeks, these people in the forums realized donald trump is not going to be president again any

time soon, and, second of all, all of these audits are not a cut and dry-case of the election trial as they thought it was. it's a sham as they realized. people have to take up arms. that's what they keep saying in their space. when are you going to do something? that's what they keep saying in these spaces. the difference is there's no date. on january 6th, it was like wrestlemania. everybody was waiting to be told where to go. i want to say quickly, there were two qanon incidents. a man killed his kids and there was the largest mass shooting in the u.k. in decades, and that guy was in trump's corner who believed himself to be an american at heart and he viewed that to be gun toting and believing in qanon and the pentagon is a ped fire. lone wolf terror is something to

be worried about here, in part because there's no organizing event that these people can meet up, and maybe those things would defuse these things, but if they're the lone wolf, they can do it themselves. one of the things we're watching for is we may finally get some sort of report, conclusion, announcement from the cyber ninjas who have been doing the b.s. audit in arizona. i'm warning you right now here on tv, when that happens, we're going to bring you back to talk about potential implications in terms of what to be watching for and how people are going to be reacting to that. >> i'm excited -- that's not the word. i'm something, rachel. thank you. >> this is the time for mad libs. i know what you mean. ben collins, thank you. invaluable to have you here tonight. thank you. we'll be right back. stay with us. ay with us rain.

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all members will please register. the clerk will ring the bell. [ ringing bell ] >> a quorum is present. >> a quorum is present. that bang of the comically enormous gavel in the texas state house this evening marked the sudden end of the texas democrats' effort to stop the republican-controlled legislature in texas from passing a bill that will make it much harder for people to vote in upcoming elections. their tactic to try to stop republicans from doing this is they left the capital so there couldn't be a quorum. most were still holding out and

still trying to work that strategy as of tonight, but a handful of them had decided to return over the last few days, and today three more house democrats all from houston broke ranks and went back, and that was apparently enough to restore the quorum. once they got the quorum back after gaveling in, they voted. the democrats as we've been reporting, they tried to stop the anti-voting rights bill in the texas senate with a 15-hour talking filibuster, but after she made it through that, republicans still passed it moments after her filibuster ended. they tried to stop it without all the democrats going to washington, d.c. that did work for weeks to slow things down, but as of tonight, that's over. the bill has already been scheduled for a hearing in the

house this saturday, 8:00 a.m. local time. as for the three houston house democrats whose decision to return was determinative here, they issued a statement saying they felt they had to come back to address the covid surge. they're proud of what texas democrats accomplished by breaking quorum in the first place. they say, quote, now we continue the fight on the house floor. on the house floor they are outnumbered, but they have proved very resourceful over these past few weeks and months. watch this space. age before beauty? why not both? visibly diminish wrinkled skin in... crepe corrector lotion... only from gold bond. it's the biggest sale of the year, on the new sleep number 360 smart bed. it's the most comfortable, dually-adjustable, foot-warming, temperature-balancing proven quality night sleep we've ever made. save 50% on the new sleep number 360 limited edition smart bed. plus, 0% interest for 24 months. only for a limited time.

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that is going to do it for us tonight on this fine friday eve. we'll see you again tomorrow when undoubtedly the news will be better. won't it? won't it? "way too early" is up next. this morning chaos persists in kabul as the u.s. military struggles to pick up the pace of evacuations. the pentagon says about 7,000 people have been evacuated so far, but many more are still waiting. the question is how long will it take to get everyone to safety? plus, a growing number of senators testing positive for coronavirus despite being vaccinated. the question is will covid keep breaking through? and tropical storm henri is strengthening over the atlantic. the question is does new england need to brace for a hurricane? it is "way too early" for this. ♪♪