margaret chase smith. first woman to serve both house and congress and i can do a whole series of lectures on senator margaret chase smith. shirley chisholm. first african-american woman in congress. nancy pelosi of course. i wanted to recognize representative luis first female chair of the powerful house rules committee. she passed away last week while she was telling member of congress and i believe her funeral is tomorrow. she has inspired many people in her own rights. so in conclusion to paraphrase that montana editor in 1941. now when encouraged -- celebrated in this country the name of jeanette rankin is written in monumental prongs -- bronze. not for what she did, but the way she did it. she could not vote for war, but she could and did stand up for the democratic press. thank you and if you have any questions i am happy to try and answer them. yes. >> did rankin encounter any retaliation for her participation in the suffrage movement? so many other suffragists who participated were arrested and jai

members of the senate are going to have to ask themselves down the years is, why weren't they margaret chase smith, the republican senator from maine, who stood up in 1950 and said that this, as president bush would say in a different context, this will not stand. giving a speech called the declaration of conscience. she got -- only got six senators to join her in that, in 1950, by 1954, the senate would central mccarthy. but it took four years. and mccarthy understood the media of the age. he understood how to manipulate wire service reporters to get headlines. he would announce things right before deadlines so they couldn't check them. there were huge debates in the newsrooms of america about, do you simply report something that a united states senator says, even if it is self-evidently not true? so, yeah, as mark twain is repulted to have said, mystery may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. >> six senators -- we don't have five, four, three, two -- we have one standing up to trumpism, one or two, jeff flake, john mccain, i can't think of anymore. we have worse off in the fight against trumpi

have you no decency, sir, at long last, prescott bush and others finally followed the lead of margaret chase smith. it was a republican woman, senator from maine, who first laid out the case against mccarthy in 1950, declaration of conscience. she only got six co-signers in 1950 against mccarthy. mccarthy dismissed them as snow white and the six dwarves. sounds like a tweet, doesn't it? [laughter] keep that in mind. mccarthy rode a wave of new media. five million television sets in 1950, 31.5 million in 1954. he rode it up and then it turn thed around and got him. turned around and got him. there's a lesson there. roy cohn wrote a very good book, or at least published -- i don't know if he wrote it -- on mccarthy in '68 in which he said, quite honestly, that he thought mccarthy's fall was a result of the american audiences' inability to sustain interest in hyperbole. that, ultimately, the audience got tired of the show. and i think, i firmly believe that president trump does not think of us as a country or a nation in the sense that august stipjanuary sense i mentioned. i think he thinks of us as

fast next couple of days or getting through a fund-raiser is important but you want to be margaret chase smith, four years before the men caught up, gave the first anti-mccarthy speech. you don't want to be at the end of the game here. >> meacham talked about that montage of republicans just not able to answer the question as to whether or not the president lies. that was republican senator roy blunt adding his names to the list of senators that would rather not acknowledge the president has a penchant for lying. by the "washington post's" account, the president has lied or misled the public more than 3,000 times. >> that's more than a penchant, that's more like a pathology. >> it's a pathological problem. >> can i just say? >> please. >> we're talking about vanquishing enemies by the president of the united states. the enemies are his fellow americans which he swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the united states and americans aren't just connected to each other in this time. we're connected to each other through the generations and we have an obligation to the

could i ask quickly, you mentioned in the book somebody who i admire a great deal, margaret chase smithlast of the old time -- not one of the last at that time, but she was a liberal republican from the northeast who knew what she thought and why. >> she's incredible. i knew a little bit about her but not until i did the research for this book, and she is incredible. going to the floor of the senate and giving her declaration of conscience speech. i revere edward r. murrow but he didn't take a scapepel to mccharactm mccarthy until 1954. what she did, a republican, while also running for re-election, it wasn't like she's retiring and all of a sudden here's my courage. she did it while pursuing a career in washington. history recognizes her for that. >> only woman in the senate. >> that raises the question about what's happening right now. as you have republicans, we ask almost every morning on this show, what is the cost of stepping up to the bank of microphones and just saying out loud and explicitly that what the president said or did today is wrong and we shouldn't stand for it. why d