00:00On the rescissions package, the president says that he's going to oppose anybody who votes against this.
00:07What do you say to him?
00:11He's free to do what he will do, say what he says.
00:17My vote is guided by the imperative coming from Alaskans.
00:26I have a vote that I am free to cast with or without the support of the president.
00:35My obligation is to my constituents and to the Constitution.
00:40So I look at the Constitution and say that it is the legislative branch that has the power of the purse.
00:48I take that charge personally.
00:53And so I'm going to execute on it.
00:55The president can say what he's going to say, but that's fine.
00:58I'm going to do what I'm going to do.
00:59What kind of impact will this bill have on Alaska if it becomes law?
01:03Well, I can tell you that there has been probably no issue, no single issue that has drawn out more interest across the state of Alaska than support for public broadcasting.
01:17I come from a state that is extraordinarily rural.
01:21I come from a state where access to other forms of information and communication may be limited.
01:28It may be everything may just come by way of your radio.
01:35Call it old school.
01:36It's what we live in in many parts of the state.
01:39And it's not just the shows that you may be familiar with back here, but it's the emergency alerts that come.
01:51We just had a landslide a few months ago in one of my hometowns.
01:57And it was how people were alerted to the fact that the only way to get from the school to town was to get in a boat and go across because the landslide was still too dangerous.
02:07It's the tsunami alerts.
02:08It is the aviation alerts when there is volcanic ash in the air.
02:16It is the flood alerts when the rivers are breaking up, whether it's the Yukon or Kuskokwim.
02:22There is a daily announcement as to what is happening with the ice jams upriver so people know whether or not they need to move their snow machine or their vehicle up to higher ground.
02:36This is how we're communicating.
02:38And so people are kind of making it appear that this is not a role of the federal government.
02:46The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is there for reason, and I think it has stood the test of time.
02:55I don't disagree that NPR over the years has tilted more partisan.
03:02That can be addressed, but you don't need to gut the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is what this rescission does.
03:12So I'm going to continue to work to ensure that that doesn't happen.
03:21We could have had the votes to keep this from being discharged yesterday.
03:27We were one shot.
03:28And so today we will have a series of amendments, and we'll see how that goes.
03:33Do you have any amendment votes?
03:35Do you plan to offer an amendment vote related to Public Broadcasting?
03:37I have a series of amendments that we have prepared.
03:42I don't know if I'm going to need to act on them, but, you know, better to be prepared.
03:48Are any of your colleagues on the fence about also voting against?
03:52You need to talk to them.
03:54Yeah, you need to talk to them.
03:55Sarah, do you have any concerns about the way the administration has handled this Jeffrey Epstein matter and whether there should be information released on that?
04:02You know, the administration is, I don't know, I guess they're muddling through it as best they can on it.
04:10I'm not going to give them any advice.
04:12No, they can.
04:13They're working that through.
04:14Do you think that passing the rescissions, your colleagues, if they pass the rescissions bill, does that make it harder to get a bipartisan funding plan before the government shutdown deadline at the end of September?
04:25Are they making it more difficult on themselves?
04:27Every time we, as the legislative branch, Duke, do the smallest thing to really cede some of our authority to the executive, that makes everything harder.
04:39That makes bipartisan appropriations bills harder.
04:45That makes legislating harder.
04:47We've got a role.
04:50It is specifically defined in the Constitution.
04:54Part of it is doing what we're going to be doing tomorrow and Friday, and that's confirming nominations.
04:58I get all that.
05:01But we have a responsibility as well.
05:04And so if we just continue to take the direction from the executive, because they've asked us to, and we kind of step back on our responsibility here, that's on us.
05:22We need to say, no, actually, we have a budget process.
05:28We have an appropriations process.
05:29We do rescissions within the appropriations bills themselves.
05:34Let us do this.
05:36Thank you for highlighting the concerned areas that you have.
05:40But we're right now in the middle of appropriations bills.
05:44Right now.
05:45We're going to have an opportunity tomorrow for markup on more bills.
05:49We did that last week.
05:51We can be doing this right now in the context of legislating.
05:55But instead, what we've done is we've taken, here's what the administration wants, and they're saying, trust us.
06:03Here's these buckets.
06:04We're not going to touch the ones that you really don't want.
06:07But we're not going to give you the clarity on that either.
06:09Trust us.
06:11We've got a job to do.
06:13Let's do our own job.
06:14Let's do the rescissions.
06:16Let's direct this within the appropriations process.
06:19Is Congress overall seeing too much power to the White House?
