think. i would like to go and you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy schreck. them you know i'm sorry and on this show we would be a little picture of what's actually going on and we go beyond identifying the problem with. rational debate and real discussion critical issues facing america are you ready to join the movement and welcome in the big picture. launch on arbonne in denver colorado and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture the far right has a new pet project repealing the seventeenth amendment the amendment that gave we

the people the right to elect their own senators so what's the next tea party plan to do it away with elections all together we'll talk about that and more in tonight's big picture rubble also when republicans are denying the existence of global warming they're saying that the solutions to climate change are do expensive to work for could fight in the fossil fuel industry actually be good for our economy and the assassination of john f. kennedy shocked the country and for ever change the way a generation saw the world at fifty years later how much do we really know about what happened that november day in dallas texas. joining me for tonight's big picture rubble mad political system managing editor of the american spectator christie seltzer excuse me progressive strategist president c.e.o. of new heights communications and chris allman. conservative commentator and activist

thank you all for joining me tonight great to see you all great to be here thank you on friday vermont senator bernie sanders on my radio program said that if there wasn't a candidate in the in the election who was speaking about the real issues facing america the stuff that he talks about on has for on my radio show every friday for i think eight years maybe nine years now that he would consider running for president here's the clip. so what i have gotten in response to this question about running for president is somebody has got to get out there and start raising those issues fodder organizing people and start educating i think there are number of people who have the capability of doing that it is three years since until the presidential election i think somebody will come forward but you know will i give some consideration to doing that of all the people don't come forward the answer is i will because somebody has got to raise these issues we can't go through a presidential election where the the needs of the working families of this country

on not being discussed so. and so that's senator sanders and you know spot on to him you know strengthen and expand social security let's strengthen the social safety net let's raise the wage let's change our nation's insane trade policies. thoughts on this. i heartily endorse him to be the democratic nominee i think it's a fantastic idea not a democrat by the way. bertie's not a democrat and i know as an independent yeah and one of the reasons why i endorsed him so wholeheartedly is that he's identified as a democratic socialist and i would love for the you know the democratic party to kind of have its card hits to that label i think that's fantastic and also frankly i mean bernie's an honest guy he's somebody who's not afraid to say what he believes he's somebody who you know if you're going to put it like up against a more focused group candidate like hillary clinton frankly kind of a more boring candidate like hillary clinton i think you could add some needed

color and honesty to the race i don't agree with him on very much but it certainly he would provide a debate that would be worth having on the left i think. christie bernie he has referred to himself as a democratic socialist in the context of the northern european countries you know that he's that. those are those are models if you poll the american people on virtually every one of those issues you find that sixty seventy eighty in some cases even ninety percent of americans agree with him on those positions what impact would burning in your opinion what impact would bernie participating in the presidential election process have. and is it possible that he could be moving the democratic party away from the kind of corporate base and the can this continual steady move that we've seen since the really since the reagan years to the right and back to their their old j.f.k. or even f.d.r. foundational roots well i don't pour cold water on the apparent presidential

dreams of bernie sanders but no i don't actually think there's a there's a bernie sanders caucus among the american electorate or you know among his members of congress i think of are looking for somebody who is going to be to the left of hillary clinton if you already have that person her name is elizabeth warren so i don't think that he's very good going to add very much i also don't think he's all that serious about actually getting in i think he said in the same interview that there is a ninety nine percent chance that he wasn't going to do it but you know it's certainly fun to talk about. yeah you know i think that if if a little bit warren jumps in i mean he was very clear in that clip that if nobody else is raising these issues he would but if somebody else does and there's a number of qualified people to do so the they would do that chris your thoughts on you know and any of the issues i'm curious actually specifically matt so there's a lot he disagrees with bernie about chris i'm curious what you disagree with

bernie about well i think when you look at the issues of saving social security and medicare addressing wages for american workers we all agree that these are problems it's how we go about finding the solutions and what the long term solutions are that i think matt and i disagree with how bernie sanders would get there ok well yes ross was dig into that bernie bernie suggesting that the way to save social security is simply to eliminate the cap so the bill gates pays the same percentage of his income as social security as you and i do in other words a flat tax the flat tax the republican so long it'll make the program not only solvent but it will allow you to lower the rate the the age at which people can retire by a couple of years and you can increase benefits by about ten percent if you just did that what's wrong with it well i think what it that's not what the system was set up for what's your alternative all our turn to have as well this private accounts there is raising the retirement age because as we've discussed before

social security was never meant to be something that you live on for decades and decades it was supposed to be a social safety net and you pay into the system and then you get back now if bill gates is paying into the system on every dollar he earns does he then get back that amount or is it redistributed because again we're look i think what bernie sanders is talking about is a sort of a reach redistribute the wealth spread the wealth and when the american people look at you know bill gates has enough. time well that's not the point of social security i think is what we're trying to say here social security was. set up rather brilliantly you pay in it accrues and then you get it back out at the end of the time politicians of since raided the trelawney set up that way map to only a third of social security goes to people who are not retired it goes to literally widows orphans and and disabled people a third of social security social a twenty year old has a million dollars social security policy that i think most twenty year olds don't even know that they have if they get seriously injured they can't work for the rest

of their lives they're going to be they're going to be protected and you're right social theory or its abilities as an insurance program and it's not an investment perhaps a little but my my point is it's a relatively simple insurance program and i think once you start getting into you know income redistribution once you turn it into what's kind of just another welfare approach social security is you'd come on both the left in the right are advocating well that's that's why is that that's why progressives don't want to means test social security because any minute that you do that you've turned it into a well i'm not saying that's a bad idea on the right and i'm opposed to that i you know i think one of the things so what's your solution i think we keep social security as much like the original program as we as we did and one of those things is raising the retirement age i mean people are living longer these days they're not there and that's wrong that you people are not living longer these days if you take the top five percent of americans out of the equation the average lifespan of americans right now is the same as it was in one hundred thirty five take the top five percent out the average life but you're still taking the top five percent out i mean i have i haven't seen

that figure i'm not sure if that's true you're still taking out a huge chunk of the of the people there the people who pay a lot into social have bottom of the bottom line is that you know wealthy people are living longer we've got massive poverty now in the united states in fact it's in many cases as bad or worse but it was in some parts of the country in one nine hundred thirty five and there you've got much shorter life spans so the lifespan argument i you know i am by and i'm sorry just just being on that and how obamacare the g.o.p. has a new book the map obamacare navigators these are the people who there was money put into the obamacare plan to help help people. people sign up for insurance we've had people like this around forever we call them insurance agents you go to your insurance agent and say ok you know i want to buy insurance to you know about the plans you know which ones are the best which are the worst you know a little bit about my life help me pick pick out the best plan your insurance agent does that they you know they get a little piece off the top of the rescue for as long as they're your insurance agent with obamacare you're not going to do it through insurance agents and they're

not going to get paid forever like insurance agents are you know they get paid by the day or by the hour but now the republicans are all hysterical because once again kathleen sebelius said no the law does not have written into it that felons cannot apply to be navigators and she did however add that a this job has been largely outsourced there are companies that are doing this and b. that those companies are very very very careful in who they're hiring but you know i see this as just this incredible red herring i mean if you call your credit card company tonight after we get off the air any of you call your credit card company the odds are really high that you're going to be talking to somebody who's in prison speaking of felons in prison who is going to be handling your credit card information or somebody in the philippines where at least six months ago i don't know if they fixed it they had no log ins or excuse me in india they had no law against identity theft and so it's like what's the big deal with sure if they have

a gator's what this is is this not just another republican his steria point kristie of course it is look i think it's a given that when it comes to anything related to the health care law that republicans are going to be both manipulative of the facts and a little bit loose with the truth but in this i will say that there is one thing that democrats have been clear about from the get go which is that that's the limit different from just your standard insurance agents that certainly limit different from you know random felon off the street it's actually going to be implemented in large part not implemented but at the navigators are a large part. going to be organizations that are actually very well respected like the united way like planned parenthood which again i know is a bit of a bogeyman sometimes on the right but still enjoys something like an eighty percent approval rating in most parts of the america of america. could you really if you just met. if you would just have a minute left i want matt and chris to just. chris you know you're one of the great there's a dick and the big difference here is that the government is running this and with

the credit card company if you're not going to paying for it well yeah but they're running the whole obamacare program yes they're paying for it is now are they all major it's companies are running you know you don't you have to get health insurance this way and what we're talking about iran therefore i probably don't but private private sector and you're not happy with a credit card company you go somewhere else you're not happy with your insurance agent versus the government running anywhere are they going to be liable if one of these navigator out is matter you're going to take this position to that somehow even though you know the navigators are helping you pick which private insurance corporation you're going to buy your insurance from that somehow this is a good socialist conspiracy no it's not a socialist conspiracy it's actually happening i mean there have been more than a thousand complaints filed by the f.t.c. since this law was passed of people who have been fraudulent con artists going door to door saying they're with the obamacare program trying to get people's medical information personal information it's a very simple check you that's not the navigators that's value the conduct of

around checking all these people it's know we've always had con artists ok matt we've got it we've got to bail out here we got to take a break we will be right back more of today's rubble in just about. i would rather as questions to be. people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v.

question for. it's a. pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure. go back to marvin here with the this is the big picture rumble we're broadcasting

live from denver tonight where tomorrow night by the way i'll be signing the crash of twenty sixteen at the tattered cover tattered cover bookstore in yet and pour in downtown for in downtown denver. purple christie setser and chris allman are with us for the rumble and let's get back to it this this kind of plays off this whole thing with mary and liz cheney you got to lose cheney running for running you know as the republican candidate from wyoming for the senate against mike enzi and she's basically trashing her sister mary or it's turned into this family feud she's certainly you know clearly opposed to gay marriage and her sister is married and gay or lesbian and tom cole weighed in on this republican contest congressman tom cole he told the washington post and i quote republicans need to understand that their political problems are neither tactical nor transitory they are structural and demographic the hard truth is the g.o.p.

coalition constitutes a shrinking portion of the electorate to change that daunting reality republicans must appeal to groups that are currently outside their ranks or else. the republican party risks becoming a permanent minority so isn't cole right and when mary cheney says that her sister loses not just wrong but on the wrong side of history isn't there something to that chris well i would say about what tom cole said i think it is vitally important for the republican party to talk about different issues and to expand our base and what we need to be talking about is the freedom agenda giving people more power over their lives in terms of the money then later going to marry the person they love well i think it's the freedom to follow the constitution and to say that you know staged marriage is a state issue and i think that is what liz cheney said that she would leave it up to the states but are we going to allow people not to disagree if they have deeply

held religious beliefs i mean this is really a religious liberty issue and if i feel that those two things are not equal but i'm not going to stop somebody marriages the marriage is a legal institution it's a religious institution if you do it in a church but a lot of people don't do it in churches it has been for many people it has nothing to do with religion it has to do with contracts it has to do with with survivorship it has to do with taxes and you know it has to do with visiting each other in the hospital the bottom line is that it was religion what what americans really care about is more freedom in terms of keeping more of their money having better jobs the jobs agenda is not something that this problem this president is even talking about in fact he passed a health care bill that is actually detrimental to our economy not so it's needs as bill is dead in john boehner house look this president has done nothing but hurt this economy you even said yourself there's more poor people today than there has

been almost since the one nine hundred thirty s. if you're chris that christie i can hear you biting at the champing at the bit here go for it but i don't i mean it's been so fun about this story is not just that it's a story about the cheney family. which is just obviously fine in the face of it but that it really is exactly what christians sort of illustrating here it's a proxy battle for the heart and soul of the republican party so of course there are people in the republican party who believe that as mary cheney said that people who go against gay marriage are going to be on the wrong side of history and more importantly on the wrong side of electoral wins and then there are others who just you know double down and i think they're going to find you after all mathematics is just a little more small issue in light of what americans today are facing but the liberals want to talk about gay marriage because it does divide religious people and ok. you know we really have goals here we really want to talk about getting this economy back on track versus would much rather talk about jobs and i wrote down a five and

a half years of republican obstruction you know and laying off eight hundred thousand government workers and yet and i will of those years they had the house and. the minimum wage destroyed the economy. up in here please a little bit let me go to tom cole said because i really have no interest in reaction to cheney psychodramas i kind of wish that all family would just go away but as for top goal fortunately there's no shotguns involved in this one you know oh i see where you go into that ok as for what tom cole said i he does have somewhat of a point you know i think that republicans we do need to obviously reach out to hispanics we need to reach out to african-americans but when we do we need to reach out to gays but when we do that we do it in a way where we kind of try to divide and conquer we try to crack off you know one particular group of demographic and then pander it and pander to it until you know presumably they'll come out and vote for us and they never do and i think really you know i think the christie strategy is the one that applies best here he won

half the hispanic vote in new jersey during his recent reelection i think if you go out and you just speak honestly and you know forthrightly but you christie didn't speak honestly what do you do and then you don't suck up to them chris think that's the this. he was opposed to immigration reform he just he didn't talk about his policies he talked about what a nice guy you know the christie strategy was the reagan strategy don't talk about how extreme you are just get elected as a nice guy i don't think that's true at all you're saying is the future of the republican party i don't think that's you know i think chris christie very publicly went after teachers unions very publicly went after other state interests he got in i did tenure reform i mean he got an awful lot done he vetoed a millionaire's tax over and over again and he did this all in deep blue new jersey and he got reelected by a massive margin and part of that is really there for the admitted from then on i think you just i think it goes up and i agree with you i think that i think i think i think at that level the tragic thing about american politics is so much of it is ok the american legislative exchange council one of the things that came out of the paul memo which i read about my book the question twenty sixteen which i'll be

talking about tomorrow night at the tattered cover here in denver any of the american legislative exchange council is working on a campaign to weaken the seventeenth amendment the seventeenth amendment came back came about when when this copper baron in montana whose name escapes me literally stood it used to be that the states the state legislatures picked who who was going to be their senator right then they picked the senator and something off to washington d.c. and this guy who made millions in the copper mines of montana stood outside the state legislature and this is right around the turn of the nineteenth the twentieth century like the late one thousand nine hundred surly one thousand nine hundred. with a with a pocket full of envelopes with thousand dollar bills in them and said anybody who votes for me as senator as they walk out the door i'll hand you an envelope and they voted for and he handed out the envelopes and it got reported in the press when he got to washington d.c. the other senators were so offended by this naked bribery that they refused to seat

the guy it was a huge scandal and this led to the seventeenth amendment and now alec you know wants to bring it wants to do. where was the moments as the people of the state get to elect their senator rather than the politicians i don't get it what is what is you know what is let me let me small you are republican about this in in terms that i hope you can understand the purpose for having something on my desk plate carers say and senator to washington with so that states and states rights would have a seat at the table we have to react elections of the house of representatives those were the people you have the whole nation coming together electing the president and then you have the states who have very vital interests in our constitutional democracy having a seat at the table passing the seventeenth amendment to punish the corruption in

montana has not eliminated corruption in u.s. elections so therefore under your logic the seventeenth amendment is no good anyway because it has it's own let me get this right chris well let me let me just rephrase this and tell me if i if i if i'm capturing correctly what you're saying that by having instead of having the politician instead of having the government the big government in the state the big state government pick who they're going to send to the united states senate the elected to do in having the people all who have stayed exclusively of that state pick who's going to be the person that they send to the senate in the united states that's always somehow a violation of the rights of the people in that state of the state right the idea that the state legislatures would send someone who would advocate on behalf of that state for example stopping cars passing laws that have a negative impact on the state for example the medicaid expansion which will

bankrupt states not this year not next summer so basically you're saying that the message of the politicians in the state in the state legislature. is more important than that of the voter was not meant for now now i'd like to get your take on this that's why we this seems to me well i hate to tell you but i understand what chris is trying to say here and that is that there is a certain place in the constitutional order for the states and i think also to this now that i have no desire to talk about ninth amendment precedes the tenth amendment and the ninth amendment says all powers not delegated are delegated to the people and the tenth amendment says those that are not delegated to the people or delegated to the states this argument that this is a tenth amendment issue is absurd on its face because of the ninth amendment i didn't say it was a tenth amendment issue all i'm saying is this was originally the reason why the senate was chosen by the state legislatures originally was to preserve the role of the states in the constitutional order and also the senate was always a slave

a senate was always supposed to be different from the house it was supposed to be less democratic i'm saying that's the way it was originally intended i think the irony in a certain way today is that this is coming from the right you know we need to kind of modify the seventeenth amendment when really a lot of the energy on the right has come from senators like rand paul ted cruz mike lee who are not establishment picks and who were not the pick of the state and certainly would have been the pick of the state legislature so there is a certain is as a tension in a populist movement calling for something like this yeah and that's what i don't get is why a populist movement would say we no longer want the populists the populist the the voters to be able to vote we're going to turn this over to professional politicians and big government kristie is that any of this making any sense to you i guess i'll be fickle and say that they're not liking the way that the latest elections have been turning out when you look at people like you know richard mourdock who ran against more establishment candidates like dick lugar and louis eventually to the democrat so i guess they're saying that you know we don't think the voters are

doing it right maybe the state legislatures can do it better it's pretty cynical i don't think taking us back to one thousand nine hundred fifty usually a good way to go but that's the only motivation i can think of. however it's obvious. incredibly it's an incredibly unpopular idea to the extent there's been polled at all for me like seventy percent of people think it's a terrible idea it's obviously going nowhere it's just. popular because people don't understand it and i'm not advocating for changing it let me just say that i'm just trying to explain the historical framework in which we did have state legislatures electing senators and it was so that the state's interests which the state's interests have been ignored for the last hundred years and were chris go back to the rigors genuine ratifying convention debates read patrick henry's speech his whole shtick was we have to do this to preserve slavery oh please tom there were that it's not the only reason a lot of the states issues are you know that big government now you want those

other states were afraid of their own if you didn't go back to reagan and putting in the mandatory fifty five mile an hour speed limit which i completely disagree with as an issue of the federal government encroaching on states' rights it has happened again and again i guess that's a little different thing really but chris that is we're out of time ok i think i'm beginning to understand your point chris christie thank you so much for being with us thank you and to bear good night. up next. the debate is over climate change is real and it's getting worse but how do we stop runaway global warming and jump start the economy all at the same time i'll ask author thomas stone after the break.

technology innovations all the developments from around. the future. live. live. live live. talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want.

plus time has a new alert and patients scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. alexander's family cry tears of the wife and great things out there that have been rendered in a court of law. there's a story made sort of movies playing out in real life. thanks for. the reply. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy shrek i'll just. go on. but i'm

going to go on i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the picture of what's actually going on and we go beyond identifying the problem to try rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing america ready to join the movement then welcome to the big picture. welcome back to the big picture marvin coming up in this half hour the fossil fuel industry says that a carbon tax and hurt consumers and hurt business because putting a price on carbon be just what we need to jumpstart the economy also sixty one percent of americans believe that other people besides lee harvey oswald were involved in the one nine hundred sixty three killing of president john kennedy fifty years after the fact how much evidence is there for a bigger assassination conspiracy.