00:00Senator, it's time for one more quick question.
00:08Before I ask my question, just understand the importance, at least my view of the importance of asking this question,
00:19because I've asked your office this question, and I've gotten a response, but I didn't actually get an answer.
00:25I went to your last town hall, but I only showed up an hour early, and the venue didn't have enough people.
00:33I drove two and a half hours to get there and didn't get in.
00:37And I also understand I took a day of leave that day because you don't have town halls during times when people are at home.
00:47You have them when we're at work, during the work week.
00:50And I had to take leave today in order to get the answer, or at least pose the question to you.
00:57So that, to me, is my criticism of your venues that you choose, because you choose small venues like this.
01:04And I do thank you for actually having a town hall.
01:07Don't misunderstand it.
01:09But I do criticize your venues and your choice of time.
01:14Because, to me, you have them during the day when either, A, you get people that are unemployed,
01:21or, B, people that are retired, people with day jobs, maybe people that work the night shift.
01:26But my question is in reference to this, sir, is understand I'm a U.S. Army retired officer.
01:32And I retired in 2017.
01:37And I started working at the VA.
01:39And this year, after the inauguration, thus far, I've seen our president.
01:45He's put forth executive orders.
01:47The first one being, I work, I telework.
01:50And without reason or cause, he abolished all teleworking.
01:54And that adds either a half an hour or an hour, because I work in Iowa City at the VA hospital.
02:00That hour adds an hour to my day going, because driving there takes a half an hour,
02:06because I live a half an hour away.
02:07And then another half an hour to take a bus to get to the hospital,
02:10because if you've ever been to Iowa City, I went to the University of Iowa and graduated.
02:15It takes a half an hour to get from your parking place to the location where you're either working
02:19or if you're taking classes.
02:20And that would add two hours every day for me.
02:26I would work four days every week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at home.
02:32And I would work in the hospital Friday.
02:34So now, because no reason that I know of other than your fellow Iowa senator who pushed the narrative
02:43that the people that work for the government are lazy and are sucking the tax dollars from the American people.
02:49And it pisses me off as a veteran and as an employee of the VA at the hospital there.
02:56But after that, we got an email from OPM, the Office of Professional Management, or whatever it was.
03:05We got an email very similar to the email that Musk sent Twitter, the fork in the road.
03:12And it said, you can resign now and get paid until September, or you can just keep working,
03:19but we can't guarantee your job here.
03:22And that went out to every single federal employee in the executive branch.
03:28I know it went out to some of the judicial branch people, but it didn't apply because they don't fall underneath it.
03:33And how many staffers do you have here?
03:36I'm sure they didn't get it because they're not in the executive branch.
03:39But all of us, GS and wage-grade employees that work in the federal government, we got that.
03:45So I could have resigned.
03:47I didn't see a lot of intelligence being put into that because, basically, we did have people resign
03:54because some of them were probationary employees.
03:57And the probationary employees, if you remember, were the first ones to get fired for cause.
04:02But it was done illegally.
04:05And they got fired.
04:07One of my fellow workers, she resigned so she could get paid until September, which doesn't make sense to me.
04:13How are you being efficient, you know, when you're letting all these people go home?
04:18And they don't work.
04:19They stay on the books, so we can't hire anybody to replace them.
04:23And there's a hiring freeze, so we can't hire anybody for 90 days after that.
04:29But also, after that, they did fire the probationary employees, which I found to be very troubling
04:38because, as my understanding, it's illegal because they fired them for cause.
04:42The AFGE, the American Federation of Government Employees,
04:46the union for the employees at the hospital here at the VA in Iowa City,
04:51they took them to court, and they won.
04:54But shortly after that win, they had to hire those people back, is my understanding,
05:00because even at the hospital here, they got fired.
05:03They got let go, which decreased the staffing there.
05:06And as a veteran, it pissed me off.
05:09But after that, the president put out an executive order nullifying the collective bargaining agreement,
05:18basically the contract that the federal workers have protecting them from being somehow fired for no reason whatsoever,
05:28which I find, to me, I'm like, you just dissolved my protections as a federal employee,
05:33and you're dissolving it for all the people that are working at the VA hospital there.
05:39I'm a veteran.
05:39I go there for medical service.
05:42I find it highly suspect, and I believe it's illegal,
05:46but I haven't heard anything from any of my senators, my two senators, and any of the house reps,
05:52the four that are here in Iowa, the one that works for me,
05:55because I've asked all their offices, both you, Ernst, and Miller Meeks,
06:01and heard nothing from them.
06:04I understand impeachment, but impeachment not just of the president,
06:08and power of the purse is one of the other things that Congress can do.
06:13But you don't have to impeach the president.
06:15You can impeach others.
06:17You can impeach any of the people within the cabinet, is my understanding.
06:22Maybe I haven't read the Constitution as much as you have,
06:25and maybe I don't understand it because I don't speak the old stuff.
06:29But when you have a president who puts in an executive order and somebody removes my working privileges
06:36as a labor union employee, and he does it under the auspice of national security,
06:43because when you read the executive order, it says national security.
06:46And, I mean, I'm just a retired major from the U.S. Army with a master's in homeland security.
06:51I don't think my job as a clerk in the business office of the VA constitutes something
06:58that needs to not have protections as a labor person because of national security.
07:05I used to work in a vault, but maybe I don't understand it.
07:08I'm not the president.
07:09But my question to you is what do you think?
07:16Because I see it as illegal, and I see my representatives, the people that are paid to represent all of these people.
07:23Because Iowa, as a senator, the majority of people here are not registered Democrats.
07:29The majority is not registered Republicans.
07:31The majority is not registered anything else.
07:37They're Iowans, and your job is to represent all of them.
07:41And I'm getting second power.
07:46Because, like I said, to me, I'm like, I hear coms here, as they say in the military, or nothing from any of them.
07:56They're willing to let him do it, whatever he wants, as POTUS.
08:01But some of the things he's doing are illegal.
08:04They're illegal.
08:05I try to make myself understanding of what's going on, and I engage with the politicians that are elected to represent me.
08:16I don't want the job.
08:18But I do engage with them because, to me, they need to be held accountable.
08:23And right now, I don't see them being held accountable, because they seem to represent the party, the poor, and the president.
08:31And the way our system of government, as the Constitution says, there's three branches of government.
08:38Judicial, legislative, and executive branch.
08:41And your job is not to make sure he gets everything in his agenda done, whether or not he's a Republican or he's a Democrat.
08:49Your job is to represent every Iowan in here, if they're not Iowans.
08:55I don't know about that.
08:56But, and I say that, my question was basically, what are you going to do about it?
09:04Because I find it to be illegal, an illegal executive order.
09:08And I've heard people say, well, that's for the courts to decide.
09:12The problem being, though, is that he fired people.
09:15That didn't work, so he got rid of the collective bargaining agreement that protected those people that he fired.
09:23So now, where's my course of action?
09:24If he gets rid of the union, which is the group that took him to court.
09:28I don't have a lot of money.
09:29I can't take him to court if I lose my job, because he wants to fire me for cause, even if I don't have cause.
09:34So what are you doing about it?
09:37That's my question.
09:38I know it took a long time, and we're past our time here, and I apologize.
09:41But I took the whole day off.
09:50I'm going to answer your question, and then I want to answer this criticism you gave about how I hold these meetings.
09:56I don't need an answer on that, because I've complained about it before.
10:00I've complained about it to all my representatives, and that's how they do business.
10:07The courts are the arbiter in this, and some of them have stood against the president, and some of them have stood with the president.
10:15But in one case that you brought up about the probationary, the Supreme Court made a decision that he had the power to do that under the law or under the Constitution.
10:30He has the power to do that, sir.
10:32But what the courts didn't address is the fact that he fired them for cause, which it was not untrue.
10:44For 45 years, I've been doing my town meetings, county meetings this way.
10:54Some open town meetings like this, last year there were 33 of the counties had open town meetings.
11:00I went to about 10 high schools because kids under 18 years of age never come to a meeting like this.
11:10For the people that work, I go to either businesses or factories.
11:17And in the factories, if they'll shut down their assembly line and let people gather around me on the floor, I have a Q&A with those employees.
11:26I go to two or three hospitals a year for the reason that hospital people can't come.
11:35And I've been doing it this way for 45 years, and over the course of going to high schools, open town meetings,
11:43yesterday there was a Farm Bureau County had me in for their members and hospitals and all those things.
11:51I hope I get a cross-section of the population.
11:54But if I don't get a cross-section of the population, when you add it to the e-mails I get,
12:01already in three months we got more e-mails than all of last year, as an example.
