i suspect. they would like to do if you did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioning the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy which recall for us. will. never go on i'm sorry and on this show we were the a little picture of what's actually going on we go beyond identifying a problem to try rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing him a. ready to join the movement then welcome the big. launch um harben in washington d.c. here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture just

a few hours ago the house of representatives passed a clean bill to raise the debt ceiling so this mean that the budget wars are over we'll talk about that and more tonight's big picture rubble also global climate change is causing a higher than average temperatures this year's olympic games in sochi russia this of course raises the question will we even be able to have the winter olympics and a hundred years and bonds hannah is leading the way when it comes to cracking down on corporate tax cheats like apple i'll tell you why and how in tonight's deleting . you need to know this the founding fathers would be a hall they knew what the obama administration was up to right now on monday the associated press reported that the white house is considering using a drone strike to assassinate an american citizen accused of ties to al qaeda if

the administration ends up approving that strike at this target would become the fifth american citizen killed by our governments. so-called remote assassination program is that the white house is considering killing yet another american comes less than a year after the president announced reforms to the drone program during a speech at the national defense university in that speech president obama said that while it was unconstitutional for the government to kill its citizens without due process lethal force was sometimes necessary to take out americans who wage war against their mother country. for the record i do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any u.s. citizen with a drone or with a shotgun without due process but when a u.s. citizen goes abroad to wage war against america and is actively plotting to kill u.s. citizens and when neither the united states nor our partners are in

a position to capture him before he carries out a plot his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team. so does the administration's new target meet that standard does he really pose a direct imminent threat to the united states unless the white house decides to let the public in on its internal review process will ever really know for sure that fact alone should concern anyone who believes in the founding principles of this country the framers of the constitution never intended for the president and the executive branch leads to have the power to wage war anywhere anytime against anyone let alone an instant american citizen in fact they did everything they could to restrict both the power of the military and the ability of the president the chief executive to use that military to wage war without end of honors and framers believed that a military was sometimes necessary for self defense but they did not want to become

a standing army during times of peace the type of standing army that they had seen overthrow governments in europe time and time again over the course of history and so in article one section eight of the constitution the founders gave congress the elected representatives of we the people the exclusive power to raise and support arms it reads to raise and support armies but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years this is the only place in the custom to show where the power of congress to appropriate money is time limited and that's because the founders were so concerned about the power of a standing army during times of peace at the same time they were so where are you of the dangers of military power the founders made the head of the military a civilian the president united states and made him accountable to the voting public rather than to the military. and to make sure that even that that

head of the military never became the puppet of the generals the founders gave to congress exclusively in the ability to declare war the power to declare war does not exist in article two of the constitution that's the part that refers to the powers of the president it's not a power that the president has only congress article one only congress has that power. behind all of this was to prevent a standing army that could wage war without end and collude with the executive branch to turn on we the people and snuff out our republic as james madison wrote in a letter to a friend in a war the discretionary power of the president is extending the president's influence and dealing out offices honors in a volume and has multiplied in all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. today it's obvious that james madison's worst

nightmare is of come true not only do we have a massive standing army with a multi billion dollar prize today we also have an executive branch that wages war with impunity all across the globe and what's worse most of the decisions regarding that use of force abroad are made behind closed doors without any input from the voting public or their elected representatives the fact that the white house is now considering assassinating another american citizen should concern us all but tragically in light of the expansion of the military and executive branch's war powers since the beginning of the cold war. it frankly shouldn't be all that surprising. standing armies and powerful executives will always threaten our liberty congress needs to reclaim their exclusive constitutional power to both declare and wars and soon put an end to this never ending so-called war on terror.

with me for tonight's big picture politics panel vince colonnades executive editor of the daily caller nate sweet progressive commentator and george landreth president of tears of freedom great to see you all again thank you for joining me tonight so you heard my rant anybody think that it's appropriate that the president of states assassinate an american citizen who is not actually pointing a gun at somebody on the battlefield. i do think it's appropriate that there be circumstances by which people renounce their citizenship based on their behaviors i mean we talk about the constitution obviously article three section three talks about treason there are there is a threshold by which you can cross into treasonous territory and madison as you were referencing kind of wrote about this like he didn't want the government to have too expansive a power to declare treason because that's but that's the way that tyrannies certainly come about racial to the clerk treason really high when john adams got close to that and seventeen ninety eight jefferson left town that nearly brought

down the government led to right election of eight hundred two histories about revolution and look what the courts have also with the way the definitions treats and i mean ultimately supreme court has merit to use those have two witnesses that testified or acts of treason and that's been narrowed down to two federal agency has a value but still that's not justification for the president to order yours i think there has to be some justification to attack him as somebody who was already a citizen if you're killing americans or aiding the enemy in doing so and i think all the examples you just brought up in some instances where due process is met by the courts and by the system of law we've set up and i think what's particularly disturbing about this instance with the president considering assassinating american citizen like he has before like our government has before four times already is that the justice the perp department is taking upon itself the sole responsibility to determine process i mean that to me at least that's totally contrary to the founding principles of this republic. georgia well i think if we let's let's say we go back to the day before d.-day and we find out intelligence that there's a group of americans up on that ridge above normandy beach the question who would

with the battleship have to shoot at a different spot would they have to do things differently i think not but the difference there of course is one it's a declared war and two it's you know but so is this huge deal and i'm not i'm not suggesting it's not that's like saying you know we're going to is which is why much of what you said i agree with when you refer to as a rant i just would've for it was a commentary but but but by the same time one of the things. but the same time i don't know that i want to handcuff the president so that someone like. you someone who is effectively an american is gone the other side is attacking us that he is has his hands are entirely so i think it's a difficult issue we have to find so we're going to raise the threshold of action gone the way beyond the way we would treat a criminal in a standoff situation if a person raises a gun but has no intention of pulling the trigger the cops can shoot to protect themselves there is we can't get to

a point though where we say that just because you're an american citizen if you're involved in acts of war against the united states there has to be a threshold by which i'm for it this isn't about the president making decisions to assess the absence of this veiled he's what he's doing and i don't know we should conflate this with all of his civil liberties violations but we should definitely take a hard look at why he's not being transparent think one of the one of the really important points i'd like to get all your takes on this before in the long is is last night jeremy scahill on one interview i think was on c.n.n. said you can't surrender to a drone i mean you know if on a battlefield somebody points a gun to even go ok i give up you can't do that which we need to a swat team and i think that's that's the whole issue at stake and why you can't with swat team in in some cases i mean if you're explicit enough clear way of white flag whatever i mean that's the point i was making and i think the difference between example vince just brought up which is you know somebody waging war in the streets of our country is that we have easy access to that person what's so dangerous about the situation where the president can just unilaterally decide that

this person is waging war against america and therefore he deserves to die if that's totally out of any sort of public and this is what the area with this one there with the reason why we fit why we've talked about this five times specifically is because these are unique scenarios where these people are unreachable and the loss of human capital involved in trying to get to them is often not worth the risk well you know if we're if we're running a government by a cost benefit equation that makes it so i thought we were running a government by democratic and republican principle i think considering human life is actually worth a worthy endeavor well the. then if the if the if you want to hand the president that kind of power shouldn't congress do that explicitly with a declaration of war then ben i don't have a problem with it but congress has you know we've got this authorization to use force this is this is this is not a declaration of war it basically says the entire world's a battlefield the president can be king forever there's something fundamentally wrong with this idea that's the part of this is troubling and i do think that since there's been a lack of transparency with in this administration it does kind of jade our view of

things that's why i kind of use the world war two analogy because i think it it if we had a higher degree of trust and if we had a sense that we were pretty sure how it was being done and we were in fact this very very clear george bush was doing the same stuff in fact this is a bush policy that has been granted amplified concern and in many ways actually drawn back i mean obama has said i'm not going to do this willy nilly we're putting some some due process in here but it's within the executive branch due process is supposed to be article three stuff it's supposed to be within the judiciary and outside a war within a war i understand you know there's different rules for war but authorization to use force is not a declaration of war yes especially when you're going to war against the navy will this geopolitical unarguable it going to do it since it's just this ideological force and i think that's what that's the whole door against your religion or against. people who say i would say though the it's very clear i mean. obviously following on the heels of bush the power of the executive has grown to astronomical proportions we've seen the wearily wearing away certainly of constitutional

definitions of what congress was me doing know exactly this is no executive has ever ceded power congress obama's and he's making up laws for obamacare i mean there's more of tonight's big picture politics. i've got a quote for you. that's pretty tough. stay where it's about story. let's give this guy look good smear about guns instead of working for the people most issues the beach were pretty bridegrooms vision. it's. a good read and i won't. it was terrible they are very hard to make out. once again to put them on here is a plane flight had never had sex with

a perfect hair cut. if it was what if. if . it.

walker back with me for tonight's big picture politics panel are vince colonies and eight sweet and george landreth and let's get back to it just about three hours ago john boehner brought to the floor without a majority the republicans supporting his bringing it to the floor in fact only twenty eight republican senate of voting for a clean suspension of the debt ceiling essentially you call it raising the debt ceiling but as you correctly pointed out when we were off camera this is actually a suspension of the debt ceiling and until until after the after the midterms basically running until twenty fifteen. interested a who are the twenty eight republicans b.

why is the big story not that george bush got nineteen clean debt ceiling increases and nobody raised a peep was not and this is obama raised a peep about it you know obama well railed on the very worst in bali he railed on the senate what about this he said that we shouldn't be doing that was irresponsible no serious you're right but there was no serious effort to impede us patriot act that's right there was you know it was in service of the campaign and. you know i'm not here to to say obama is sharks are water but there was a people is ok so there was a piece but basically george bush got one thousand clean debt ceiling increases and this is the first one obama is go right so why is that why is it out b. why is the story not being told that. frame i don't get it and number three you know this is more kind of inside the beltway but i'm just kind of curious is this the beginning of the end for john boehner speakership. i would suspect that john boehner speakership is limited just because i think he's probably getting tired of it anyway i don't know if this is a political sign i'm not even convinced that he's in

a stick around for the next election but who knows i've heard those rumors yeah i mean i don't think there's anybody at least in my political memory that's been so publicly humiliated in america and in american political so frequently by both sides. but i think what's interesting about this instance is you know at least from my take you seem to see these budget wars in washington using the basics of functions of government as political tactics i think those are starting to fall out of it i mean they've definitely fallen out of favor with the american public but i think now you've seen them start to fall out of favor with the republican leadership they realized they can go around the bastard rule in the boehner rule to use democrats to pass through this legislation but what's important for people to remember is the obstructionism of the republican party is not over there's only approved one judge since obama or since harry reid pushed through filibuster reform of it in the fall and the republican party has not yet ceded its right to obstruct but if you start with the is the minimum wage you know earlier that they're still

obstructing legislation just not ways with over the filibuster george is this the end of the owners i kind of doubt it i don't know i've heard the same rumors i don't know that to me that's more a function of whether he wants the job longer and i thought you were more getting the question of would he be essentially removed from or lose this there's a there's not a lot of you know the tea party just one of the big tea party groups has started russian i kind of think not i mean but but the other question was why is it not getting the take of you know this is the first clean debt increase the debt ceiling increase that obama's got and i think part of it is because. the debt got so big so fast that all the sudden the debt became a bigger issue that it used to be. but that happened and bush well it also happens it happens that it's the debt the annual deficit right now is one third of what it was when george one when obama came into office during bush's presidency was continuously going up during obama's presidency it's going to continuously going down i mean i think a lot of it has test to do with the beltway media itself i think you know the

so-called liberal media welcomes the sort of endless crises because it lets forces you know tune into c.n.n. watch endless twenty four hour coverage of the next crisis all our eyeballs forever to examine the way the press and gauges this issue i'd actually suggest that in general the frame of reference by which we view these fights in the way republicans are considered to be obstruction is not is necessarily the right way to look at it the press often accuse inaction of actually being obstructionism and in general and nobody ever says well actually there may be some value in stopping the way the government is acting i mean if the republican party's goal is to stop the obama agenda because they think it's wrong for the country shouldn't they use the mechanisms of government to try and do that and by that and by that token ted cruz has been a success mike lee has been a success and if you're measuring their responsibility to stop the obama agenda i don't just philosophically i don't i don't disagree with that politically i don't disagree with that and then it's up to the voters to decide ok does this republican agenda get their us or would the democratic presidents definitely pick sides on this question that's all i'm saying it seems to like the taking the sides but we're what i would argue though is that the the debt has gone up so rapidly and so high

that that it's because there's no ceiling associated with george. you know the interest rates are still an all time low nobody's saying i'm not going to buy treasuries our debt is a fraction it's you know it's half of as a percentage of g.d.p. it's half of what your pan's is and nobody's worried about japanese bonds only because lower than it was if you're a smaller nation than we are and they're not doing well i mean they haven't done well i'm going to say that compared to the only reading are reason our credit rating took a decent people it's because republicans are so willing to use the debt ceiling it's a political issue in the ted he said i'm sorry with the with the with the default exactly a whole different thing and you know moral mondays. this macro stuff that we've been talking about in more micro ways been played out in north carolina in a big way mark north carolina in the last few decades since the sixty's anyway has been largely considered a fairly progressive state and hew no it's been taken over by art pope you know this this multimillionaire and his republican buddies and he's now the the budget

director and in response to that a whole bunch of folks got together and they started doing these moral monday things and this last saturday eighty thousand people from thirty two states this is the largest movement the largest march in the south since one thousand nine hundred sixty five. eighty thousand tea partiers that showed up anywhere i mean you know glenn beck didn't get that many people in the national mall and it got wall to wall coverage for a week at all five networks i mean if if eighty thousand people showed up anywhere for a tea party event it would have been wall to wall i didn't see this on any of that i'd say that's not a comparison but i mean look at the march for life you had hundreds of thousands of people come to the happens every single year very little coverage schools all over the country bus all these kids here you've been here you know more protests no certainly i mean you will see people trying to enable these protests to get as big as they can they absolutely try to bus people in to support them i'm just saying that there's a very good example i mean if you're going to apples to apples march for life

happens all the time any gets very little coverage and i'd say that's kind of unacceptable for something that's right outside the window of most journalists in d.c. i actually think a lot of this has to do i think to a degree there is a sense in which the mainstream media wants to cover tea party rallies because it's sort of like watching a train wreck he never know where you're going to see next on but i also think there's a certain amount of regionalism in the mainstream media's coverage i think this is seen as a local issue to a lot of people it's seen as a north carolina issue it's not going to resonate with a lot of people obviously i disagree with that but i think i think that explains one at least part of the reason why big media outlets have been covering it to degree that they should you know george seventy eight percent of the people who successfully ran for office in the last cycle in north carolina were endorsed by this one. multi-millionaire our pope with the governor has now made the director the budget and one of the first things he did was cut his own taxes and raise taxes on working people which is one of the things that people were so upset about. is that good for democracy well i don't know i mean you know i'd like to be able to you know predict who's going to win seventy eight percent of the election this and

you know but i don't know that's bad or not i mean predict that or actually put the money in and make it happen because that has to be more of what's going in a long term i don't know that works in the short run i think he may get that in the one election cycle but i think the reality is there is a cost to getting money that is perceived as you know so if he's viewed as a bad guy and people are giving him you know i get money from him that shows up in my report the public knows that make him i think i'm bought and paid for this is going to get around this is is create dozens of others and you know it would surprise me if it happens on the up as well create dozens of these front groups i mean the supreme court is just unable stuff and the next week i think we're also we're seeing in north carolina why it's insufficient to just say oh we see that the koch brothers donate to this political candidate therefore we won't vote for them i think why that becomes such a problematic way to view the issue of money in politics is in north carolina at least the republican party is totally gerrymandered the local districts so it's basically impossible to demonstrate anyone odors to elect

a democrat to one voter to elect a republican in north carolina because of gerrymandered i do want to know that there is some irony in this march i'm sure you saw it this past week i mean there were supporting obviously trying to knock away voter i.d. laws but they all were required to bring i.d.'s to participate in the march they were actually given fliers prior to the march and said please make sure you're carrying your photo id on you because it's a real you are going to be that's because you might be arrested i mean there's some irony in that for sure nobody else was nobody checking i.d.'s at the door i mean that's that's something the one you know when there's a situation where you get people getting scared i'm just saying go back to the fact the north carolina example i think this is especially important for anyone who wants to know why. what happens in when there is that and math amount of money in politics this is what happens when you turn politics over to the billionaires and corporate interests i think anybody who's concerned with the future of the country really needs to look at what's going on in north carolina apropos that you know the koch brothers have been funding these you know creepy speculum creepy prostate ad guy you know uncle sam and all this other stuff to try and sabotage obamacare we

have twenty five states that are refusing to take medicaid money but arkansas came up with this really cute little idea hey instead of taken you know one hundred million. i don't know a big number so let's just make up some numbers instead of taking a billion dollars to give health care to one hundred thousand people will take that and just you know take the money and give it to their doctors and pay their medical bills which is how medicaid works so it's a single payer program instead we're going to take that billion dollars and we're going to give it to united health care and at blue cross blue shield and they'll get to skim twenty percent legally off the top to pay for c.e.o. salaries and dividends for the stockholders and gold plated faucets for the bathroom in the executive restroom and and and then they will supply private health insurance to not one hundred thousand not not one hundred thousand but maybe seventy thousand because now we have less money and then those private insurance companies will contribute to all of our republican campaigns and it works so well in arkansas although they may you know the they may not be able to maintain this

that utah is look pick and has already picked it up. like susan has already picked it up utah pennsylvania new hampshire all looking to do in this this bizarre i think it's actually a good case study for republicans for figuring out what solutions they want to have when they finally if they ever finally get to power and position repeal obamacare what they can replace it with everyone sort of agrees that there needs to be health solutions the following is because this is obviously and and i want to read because i want to address the medicaid part of medicaid as a program to ease year over year is now feeling increasingly because doctors are refusing to take it and the doc fixes aren't even catching up so you have all these urban areas here all these many. fixes for the medic medicare medicare fixes both medicaid and medicare the reimbursement rates are so low that doctors are turning it away so you have in these in these major cities like tons of doctors more than half who are now saying that they're inclined tell me have small quotas on taking medicare but a lot of doctors who just don't take any i'm sure it's so so having private

insurance actually puts these guys have. what i think is particularly ironic here is republicans in arkansas in order to placate them democrats have to allow them to accept a republican version of a democratic plan which in its inception was created by the heritage foundation says another issue here all of your money my general impression is that if we're going to deal with health care i think we would much better off using private insurance and then helping those who can't afford to get it rather than forcing us all into in obamacare situations we don't like while the obama because we know that with food you know if people need food we don't make everybody get together a program for food and hand out food we help feed people who need food we let people who can provide their own free will do so nobody should be sort of stuck. into it i want to in any case we'll have to wrap it up since nate church states those things will be aware that coming up right now millions of people across the globe are enjoying the sights and sounds of the sochi winter olympics

with the climate change and global warming making winter sports a thing of the past. the shans are forcing at. the. six nations and the finish line of the marathon.

might have been hearing coming up i. think. i would rather ask questions to 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 more. oversight

. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioning the constitution. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy shrek office is going. to go on i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the picture of what's actually. we going on we go beyond identifying and trying to rational debate real discussion critical issues facing america by ready to join the movement then welcome to the big picture.