think. they would like to do if you did you know the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution which says that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy shrek help us. little. bit like you know i'm sorry and i'm this show we were revealed a picture of what's actually going on and we go beyond identifying. rational debate and real discussion critical issues facing america i'm ready to join the movement then welcome they. belong to our washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. just when you thought the war on voting was dying down it's not how republicans in florida trying to prevent

floridians from having a voice in our democracy now we'll talk about that and more with the nation's john nichols and according to a new report up to six million americans might be without health insurance thanks to republicans putting politics ahead of people's why how many americans need to die before republicans put politics aside and do what's right for our country that are more into nights alone liberal rumble. you need to know this the war on voting is alive and well and surprise surprise florida is leading the charge joining me now for more on that is john nichols washing correspondent of the nation magazine john great to have you in the studio a pleasure by thanks for joining us so yes the manatee county florida's republican controlled board of county commissioners. were known in those think in moaning boom

boom one third of our polling places which represents a lot of minority districts. actually before i even ask you the question. the fellow who was the co-founder of alec the american legislative exchange council and one of the co-founders of the heritage foundation another why you must know talking about the hall why rick my father i am indeed and this is what he had to say when he was running ronald reagan's direct mail campaign and a big part you have this kurt yeah it is what he was when he was running riot at ronald reagan's from the direct mail campaign in one nine hundred eighty about voting. how many of our christians have what i call but goo goo syndrome good government they want everybody to vote. i don't want everybody to vote elections are not won by a majority of people they never have been from the beginning of our country and

they are not now i don't matter of fact our leverage in the election is quite candid like go drop out of the voting populace go down. so you know isn't this i mean that was one nine hundred eighty this is today that it was arranged very little has changed and i think that we have to be a little fair to our friend paul there and say that that historically both parties have understood this they've understood that that if you can figure out ways to make it easy for your people to vote hard for your opponents to vote they will get better that is a structurally sound of a private party was the party of racism in the south that is where the they were the party that was pushing poll taxes and and but here's what it is the show something big has changed the we have brought in computers money also to structural realities that did not exist in the past and even existed nine hundred eighty there and so now when they do redistricting for instance you draw these lines with such precision to exclude to diminish when you start to tinker with the laws. what they're doing this isn't just florida ohio it's got all sorts of

questions about how many polling places you will have we have huge examples from around the country of different machinery from district to district the quality of machines the end result is we are essentially the only major democracy in the world that doesn't have a set of universal standards for how we vote and how we make sure that everybody's vote is equal and this is a big big problem because we throw it to the states some states try really hard some do really well but other states don't and within those states i wrote a book on the florida recount in two thousand and what fascinated me us from county to county you had you know in some counties over ten percent of ballots being roughly ten percent being discarded in other counties only one percent you know this is when you don't have universal standards you have incredible fluidity and a lot of americans are denied the franchise. there's a probably apocryphal quote that says to perturb you joe stalin although peter king said something very much like this for nancy pelosi is daughter's little

documentary he said you know basically it doesn't matter who votes it matters or counts the votes and. and when congressman king said it was you know well before the two thousand and four election as i recall two things and. you know don't worry about bases it's all about the career all over but the counting and and will take care of that. is. with this gerrymandering and even right down to the point of saying ok in this in this place we're going to install these machines which are easier to use and in this place we're going to use paper which is slow or we're going to you know whatever it may be. are we engineering our elections pre in advance of the resistance longer a matter i saw that yesterday in fact on this program we're talking about how in north carolina this has been so finally done that it takes three voters to elect a democrat to one voter to elect a republican it's not a one to one race it's not you know if. you got one and

a half million more people voted for democrats for the u.s. house of representatives than voted for republicans if the republicans control the house of representatives you could see more interest in that if you get out of the state level there are a number of state legislatures which would have flipped control in the two thousand and twelve election cycle very democratic race card if you had just had you know fairly drawn districts which were competitive and and here's what happens that's the most troubling thing it isn't that the draw is bad it is that because the draw is so bad you really do tell people it doesn't matter to vote and so you get a double impact first you create an unfair district and then you basically say to people look you know your vote isn't going to matter that much and we begin to train people away from expecting contests to be competitive and it is very damaging to democracy we have we've got a serious democracy problem in america other countries would be aghast they would be it would be a national crisis if their voter turnout fell to the levels that are goes down to

and yet even our moe's many of our most progressive democrats don't talk about this in a serious way this ought to be front and. it's an issue similarly with the integrity of the systems voting machines all these kind of things and i've brought this up with democratic strategists and members of congress they've said we don't want to talk about that we don't want people to be afraid that their vote on count and so they don't show up to vote and i'm like no we should be talking about the you know national standards good systems that you know open open source software whatever biggest problem is it's this when democrats get in charge of a place they're like oh now we've got it and so we're going to draw the lines in a way it's favorable to us and you know and and then they they have a reform deficit as a party or republicans may be in there aggressively trying to draw the lines in the most extreme ways but the democrats have not been passionate enough about reform and it has redounded on them in very negative ways will figure this john nichols

great pleasure with. redistricting seems like a nonpartisan issue right everyone on all sides of the political spectrum it seems should be against undemocratic unconstitutional tactics right i mean we want elections to be fair honest straightforward. it's wednesday are you ready to rumble join a for guys long liberal rubble are under cluster legal fellow with the heritage foundation and cameron seward program manager of the heritage foundation gentlemen good to see you both so you heard my conversation with john nichols we were redistricting ourselves to the point now where democrats just can't win elections even when they win elections isn't there something you know fundamentally dysfunctional about this the historically both parties have done this this isn't

the but the you know right now i'm picking on republicans for good but shouldn't we isn't there a point where we should do something like california. it's done where you have nonpartisan commissions that draw districts and they're more or less polygonum they're you know let's let's just try for equal sides no more this jury manner instead of just let me just start off by saying that nonpartisan commission rarely means partisan to measure if you look at the missouri plan in for example judicial state elections these types of commissions have been captured by special interest groups across the country and usually you get judges you know i mean if i recall correctly we had the a.b.a. rating certain high qualified extremely influential federal judges as unqualified and vice versa so i'm always very skeptical of handing control innings if i don't trust one of us and since we're talking about congressional districts here was an electoral districts why not just come up with a rule we have computers now we can do this you know kind of fancy math really

really fast why not just say patrick. cameron want to just say. they have to be as close to a poly gun as close to you know a square or a circle it can to you know even the sides as possible the districts no longer can be looking like this. well i think that's kind of an arbitrary way to group them in dictating kind of the shapes or whatever i think you know it's the opposite of our. whoa i think you need to leave this up to the just states to decide like you said if they want to do all to consider constitutions of the function of fundamental finding the money in the constitution of what's in the constitution we'll find that it's a bit on the institution you know we've done that you know twenty eight times well that's the key let it go through the proper legislative process is whether it be at the state of the congressional level of amending the constitution but is ok then but i'm guessing you're thinking that that's not a good idea it's not something that you would want to have happen right yes i don't

think it would be a day in day to day think it's again done legislatively than and staring at her as a problem but not necessarily a problem that has a federal solution as. you know i respectfully disagree i think that we need to have national stay with the debt ceiling yet bob ney was telling me today a former member republican member of the of the house of representatives he's got friends still in the house and he said in the in the big meeting that they had with the house the day before yesterday i guess it was yesterday john john boehner got up and they were they were all talking all the republicans in this close secret meeting were talking about fund raising and he got up and said i'm going to bring a clean bill to the floor for the to raise the debt ceiling and he said you could just hear a pin drop there is just absolute dead silence and as boehner steps down he whacks one of the tea party guys on the shoulder and says you know i just i just took the monkey off your back you guys should be applauding me. should they did he know you

know i think absolutely nothing like that in the senate the bright and it was sent to the sent to the president this afternoon actually ted cruz was all set to filibuster and then mitch mcconnell and you know and i think what's interesting here tom is that is is it wasn't just the kind of tea party that. abandoned the speaker it is now his center right allies its traditional allies we had twenty eight. republicans from his caucus voting affirmatively for this clean debt ceiling limit he in fact said i'm going to rely on the democrats to do this once the last. ability with his party really was then they could simply call for a lot of who's speak well i think everyone knows he's going to step down anyway so no one wants to bother with that they really want to focus on the problems that are facing the country. one would hope. more liberal rubble after the break.

i marinate join me. in that in part and. commentary contribute and much much. only on bombast and.

welcome back to mobile all joining me are andrew kloster and cameron seward and let's get back to israel hilton a fella from texas has terminal brain cancer last year he was having seizures and headaches show up in the are in fact and they said we can't figure out what it is you know come back when it gets worse and he did it got worse. but

a year later i guess it was and he came back and at that point it was brain cancer that are progressed so far that even after the surgery there was they're going to meet he must live and saying sorry buddy here's the problem it's going to thirteen thousand three hundred dollars a year he works full time he has his entire life he's forty nine years old and he's worked full time his entire life this is no slacker this is a guy who's done the best he can by himself and his family but he because rick perry said no i'm not going to allow the tax dollars that texans paid to the federal government come back from the federal government to texas in the form of of medicaid expansion i'm not going to allow my own people have their own tax dollars seems to me nuts and absolutely not even republican most conservative israel making thirteen thousand three hundred thirty four dollars doesn't make enough to qualify for obamacare because there is a minimum a law you have to make which was predicated on the assumption that everybody would be filled in with medicaid below that and he makes too much for the medicaid which

in texas i think is a row three or four thousand dollars cap in that neighborhood so this guy falls into the red state don't all the republican don't at all what are going to do about that. well i i feel for israel night. it's a shame that he's got to rely on such a lackluster program like medicaid for his health insurance he is relying on he's got nothing he's really he is a lie nice old fashioned obamacare america system which is you know. the strategy you know if you're going to if you get sick don't get or don't get sick and if you do get sick it look i mean i think the big issue here is that real reform of medicaid not obamacare would allow states and congress should in fact encourage states to subsidize private insurance for those medicare recipients that would be talking about the arkansas well i think that would allow these people access eleven really just let me just many why it came to me like a good cards are are known as hunting hunting licenses because you literally have

to hunt for doctors that will that will service you will seize a variety of ways that could be fixed but what you're suggesting if i understand this correctly would be arkansas model and feel free to hop in here and there is you know medicaid is basically a single payer system the federal government gives the money to the states the states then distribute that money to the doctors you've got no health insurance company in the middle you know multimillionaire you know stephen j. hemsley is the c.e.o. of united healthcare has taken over a billion dollars out of his company you know from say no you can't have a liver transplant oh all takes more money no gold plated faucets in the washroom for the executives no corporate jet no meals with a corporate in-house chef none of this stuff and what you guys want to do is say you know we're going to bring those these leeches from wall street to call themselves health insurance companies we're going to bring them back and put them back into the middle between the patients and and and the payers and you know it's

why why would you want these guys to legally skim twenty percent off the top which is what obamacare allows them to off when we could do it much more efficiently without that they're making a killing. they lobbied for this law they're making a killing the insurance companies a lot of them are making a killing i would just say why does this guy do away with why is there this donut hole the reason there are this donut hole is because when obamacare was passed it was jammed through folks didn't take seriously the constitutional implications and people don't remember that when the supreme court upheld the law the one part that they struck down was the part that told the states that they had to accept these medical or the owners didn't like it or not without a convoy national report of reality here they the obamacare did not say you have to take medicaid it said if you don't take it was conditional on a gun to the head in the words that you just don't take the medicaid expansion or you lose all your medicaid right right exactly what's you know i disagree with chief justice roberts and you know so i mean i do too the whole lot probably

should've been struck down with what. you just did to my question of why is it that you don't want to take the insurance for the working poor that could cover say a million one point five million texans better access to care and route if you're one hundred percent or as you go to where it's only going to cover one point two million you're going to throw three hundred thousand people out of the cold so that stephen j. hemsley can make and can build their house you know i assume that you have a pretty robust health insurance and would you not want someone to have access to the same sort of robust health insurance in the private market as you do that's in fact i know the reality in america as long as you're medicaid is not allow the minimum wage to be raised the reality in america is that you've got a lot of workers in this country maybe thirty forty percent of people working in this country who can afford health insurance they can barely so that you are saying let's provide subsidies instead of expanding medicaid so then i only want to measure well i don't x. dollars why do you want to use federal dollars to get profits to insurance

companies. if we want to have a debate about fixing the problems with obamacare or about amending it about viable alternatives to a system that's already breaking down as you're showing but i'm. everybody we can have that debate but he hasn't said he doesn't want the law that did the senate democrats don't want the law amended so why doesn't rick perry just take the damn money why is he saying why he's only one citizen so they can do not as bad or bad no no it's the citizens of texas get it can be scary right there we are an advocate oh that's got nothing do with care now i'm talking about taxes the citizens of texas are taxed enough already right big cities think all this money they send off the federal government form federal income taxes federal government now saying to texas will give you back billions of dollars in federal money it just has to be used as health care for poor people of the word yes i agree and i think he read where he says we don't want our own money back no i believe that you do it california i think if you put that to the people of texas they would say yes we

want those people that are better down on their luck that really do need this money we hope they get the best care possible so yes let's settle the dice or i've been sure going over this they're going to vote riparian out of office because they would say if we have it to the legislature let's talk about tax loopholes. this this i find fascinating in the one nine hundred fifty s. . actually i don't have the numbers i thought i had oh yeah here it is the total federal revenue but a third of federal revenue nine hundred fifty s. came from the corporate income tax now it's less than a tenth so corporations painless and less and less and in income taxes making more and more and more in profits and we the people paying more and more in taxes. isn't there something funny fundamentally wrong about this u.s. per public interest research group found that twenty one states and d.c. had just closed one loophole the so-called water's edge lupul then you know where

a company is making money in that state they should be paying taxes in that state but they route that money through some bank offshore and they say we don't have to meet that x. isn't it we have a we have a irish sub city or something you know this is what this is a game that apple has been playing that those twenty one states would have brought in additional billion dollars and two thousand and twelve. isn't time for us to seriously start looking at corporate tax loopholes. i think we need to look at the repatriation rate and that's what we're really getting at here and i think it's entirely too high i'm not mistaken i think it's the highest in the world of any developed country so i think that needs to come down i don't understand and i think we have the highest so when we have we have went on to a trillion dollars that's offshore right now that's been the british sitting offshore for between corporations and billionaire because people because absolutely because who knows we're drilling i did not know it was so you know i'm sure because because these loopholes got written into the tax code by bought and paid for members of congress we both know people call all sorts of things things loopholes

they call the mortgage interest rate deduction loophole but that's i mean it's not a loophole it's a very conscious subsidy to homeowners for example so so this is a very conscious subsidy to billionaires and multinational corporations call it a lose that i would like it's an algorithm i mean let me rephrase the question is it time for us to stop subsidizing billionaires multinational corporations at the expense of average working i think we need to get smarter better corporate tax system so would you join me in in calling for a drop of the top corporate tax rate from thirty five percent to twenty five percent you know because we have got to interact with us throughout the world and meanwhile closing these. subsidies. so you know exxon mobil doesn't have another year where they pay no income taxes at all and g.e. doesn't go years and years without paying taxes and apple can't keep a you know billions. simplifying the tax code is a great woodley important thing if you want to have a discussion where part of that package includes closing you know these so these so-called loopholes i think a lot of many people in the business community would welcome that on the other hand

i would just want to point out that the tax code is a very very complicated document as it is it has to be careful the skewed toward it you don't that you don't discourage repatriation or american innovation a lot of people karate a new one in work i mean you know really really want to people who are making their money this is not are it's really really rich people in america who are making their money off you know with capital gains and so-called carried interest maximum tax rate is twenty percent i mean we have this so-called progressive tax code and so taxes go up until you make to three hundred thousand dollars and then they actually you know once people start peaking out over a million dollars they start going down really really rapidly you've got you've got people make a billions of dollars paying less in taxes than guys working at mcdonald's there's something fundamentally wrong with that will they put a lot of that money back in the market but of course you don't really would i don't agree with that but if you want to stop writing about it just really you know it is offshore i mean well a little bit closer to the country they put back in the market all right well this is speaking of taxes heroin is its is is. issue

in maine about heroin yes the taxes the taxes on heroin it seems like a perfect segue there is a drug that if you give somebody who's overdosed like see philip seymour hoffman if you give it to him you know within a few minutes of the overdose it literally reverses the overdose it's called elex own and it's something that is carried by in many states. regularly it's carried by paramedics it's carried by hospitals you know with a what he called ambulances. governor republican governor paul le page of maine is going to veto a bill that would increase access to knowledge so. what kind of insanity is standing up to big pharma i don't know if you and i know he's not i mean you know what's he's saying that if you if you give people an antidote to an overdose what you're what's going to happen is people are going to more like be more likely to shoot up and you know there's absolutely no science behind that in fact the science

demonstrates the opposite that if you give people access to knowledge so on and in fact the swiss in the u.k. experience if you give them actual pharmaceutical heroin in a controlled barmen you reduce aids you reduce habsi you reduce all these problems and eventually people quit and then and you and you radically reduce overdoses is this is he like playing to some kind of weird base i don't get it i don't think so i think. he relied on whatever he did not commit any body there is in that state to to make the decision that no this doesn't fact increase heroin use or the dangers that there's no evidence of that ever he did not cite any of that just to be that's certainly up to him as the governor to make that decision so easy about voters why it may be a bad decision i'm you know no locks on is approved by the f.d.a. it's not like he's banning some unapproved drug so i guess to be determined i think

there's a lot more studies old about illness and up to the voters and i sort of over that you know and are cameron thanks for being with us thanks for coming up the american media has focused a lot on the sochi winter games and scrutinize every little detail from the quality hotels to the conditions of the pavement in the streets you see american media being fair or is it distorting russia in associates of the games. i know c.n.n. the m s m b c news. some not slightly but the fact is i admire their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be accurate. that was funny but it's close enough for the truth from the might think.

it's because one whole attention and the mainstream media work side by side the joke is actually on here. and our teenagers we have a different brain. because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not laughing dammit i'm not how. you guys talk to the jokes well handled in a sec. chance our force. looks in the finish line of the boston marathon.

bombing hearing. the suspect. they would like to do is show that 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 schreck all books. go on. to make you know i'm sorry and on this show we were revealed the picture of what's actually going point on we go beyond identifying the problem to try to rational debate and a real discussion critical issues facing america are ready to join the movement then welcome to the big picture. welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour the sochi olympics have put russia in the spotlight of the american media once again

but are we really getting an accurate picture of what's going on inside the biggest country in the world more on that in just a moment also if you believe it's on fox news than you probably think the business leaders are totally against the idea of raising the minimum wage is that really the case and the u.s. fracking industry has one man and one man alone to thank for its recent success i'll tell you who that man is in tonight's debate we take. in screw news have you paid any attention at all. the american media's coverage of this year's winter olympics in sochi russia you might have noticed something very interesting very little of the early coverage had to do with the olympic games themselves instead it's been about internal russian politics so tell door knobs rumors about killing street dogs vague terror threats some coverage on the other hand like a report on hacking threats has even been flat out.