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The Senate is debating whether or not they should stay in town through August to pass the SAVE Act. And Abdul Al Said is in hot water for another crazy thing he said. All of that and so much more today on 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up. The story of America is the story of an adventure. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It is a busy week in Washington. First off today, there will be memorials held for the late Senator Lindsey Graham around Washington coming into town for that memorial and for other meetings. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who will be meeting with President Trump. Also Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will be here for meetings with President Trump about the ongoing situation with Iran. As we talked about yesterday, there has been a posture shift with Iran. We are once again giving peace a chance. But yesterday, CNN highlighted two polls that again highlighted the fact that even though Iran is raising a lot of questions, voters still narrowly believe Republicans have a better idea for what to do about it.
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Trust Dems or Republicans on Iran? According to CNBC earlier this month, you'd think, okay, that's one poll the Republicans trust by two points. But then CBS News comes out yesterday and what do you see? You see the exact same same thing. The Democratic Party and the minds of the American public are weak, weak, weak, to quote the great Tony Blair.
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And as I said, the Senate has a very busy week. Here's a few things on their calendar. On Tuesday, there will be a procedural vote for Jay Clayton, who will be taking over the office of the Director of National Intelligence. There's also going to be consideration of the Russia sanctions bill on Tuesday with potential for Iran sanctions added into that. That's one thing that President Zelensky from Ukraine hopes to meet with Republican senators and even the president to discuss. There's to be a committee vote on Thursday for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanch, a nominations package. Potentially as many as 74 key Trump nominees would get passed in a nominations package that happens right before recess. Those packages are very important because that's how the president's task administration when Democrats slow down the process for every single individual one of them. And then there's also hope that the Senate can pass a bipartisan continuing resolution this week to fund the government and avoid a government shutdown. Now, one major misconception that people have about recess is a vacation. It's not really a vacation for most members who simply go to work in their home state or district they usually will have lots of meetings, lots of in state activity and it's the time where they meet with the people they're actually representing. Now some of them do maybe go on vacation, some of them go on codells. But the two senators that I've worked for did not treat recess as any kind of vacation. If anything, recess periods were even harder work because we were traveling around the entire state trying to meet everybody, make sure they knew what we were doing for them and making sure we were hearing from them. But President Trump is calling on the Senate to cancel their recess to focus on the SAVE Act. John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to leave town until it passes the Save America act or far better still, terminates the filibuster. Where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated Save America act, the budget and the ever looming debt ceiling disaster. 1929. The Democrats will do it day one. And can't believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings losing and death. Yowza. That is quite a post. Now, a number of things we're gonna get there. We're going to talk about the filibuster in just a second, but I wanted to take just a minute and talk about the SAVE act and what's going on here. And I want to start from the understanding that we all believe that voter ID is incredibly important. We all believe that proof of citizenship is incredibly important to vote. One of the challenges for the SAVE act and the Save America act is the original SAVE act that was introduced in 2024 had a simpler approach to requiring voter ID and requiring a proof of citizenship that advanced over the next two years into a much larger bill that included new rules, things like mail in voting. And it's important to understand one reason that Republicans have been so eager to try and simplify the voting process and add in these kind of safeguards, we call them election integrity safeguards, is during the pandemic, states opened the floodgates to all kinds of crazy things. Just a couple of those things they did. Sending out thousands of ballots unchecked. Expanding ballot harvesting, which allowed party operatives to collect and return ballots with very little oversight. Automatic voter registration systems, dropboxes without oversight. A number of policies were passed during the pandemic to try and make it easier for people to vote. Despite the sort of challenges that came with, you know, six feet to slow the spread, all the things that came along with that. Democrats used that window to open up the voting systems in states and make it impossible to sort of control who was voting to have safety measures like voter id. They even changed things, like making it difficult, if not impossible, to remove dead people from voter rolls. And so Republicans have spent the last few years trying to find ways to make it easier to vote, but also much harder to che. And that's where we get today. And one of the reasons for this push is things like the story that just happened last week in New Jersey. New Jersey's Governor Mikey Sherro says that a software error in the state's motor vehicle system led to about 6,600 people who are not citizens being registered as garden state voters. 6,600 non citizens were mistakenly registered to vote, something that we're told never happens. And some of them mistakenly cast a ballot. So again, you can understand why Republicans are so concerned about this and believe that if we are sort of the ultimate democracy, and if voting is critical to that democracy, we would make it easier to vote, harder to cheat, and we would have basic safeguards to prevent people like non citizens from voting, which is why there's been so much discussion about the SAVE Act. However, again, there are challenges that have come with that. And part of the reason that a lot of the Senate Republican leadership is avoiding doing things like, you know, ending the filibuster to try and pass the SAVE act is not all Republicans agree with it. Even if you didn't have the filibuster now, the filibuster is what requires you to get 60 votes to pass any kind of substantive policy and legislation, even if you were to get rid of that, as President Trump is calling for. Right now, there aren't 50 votes for this version of the Save America act for a number of reasons. One of them is people like Thom Tillis have said there is not enough time to pass new voter ID regulations in every state and city and jurisdiction. One thing Republicans have always fought for is locally controlled elections. You might remember right after 2020, when Democrats took control of the House and Senate, one thing they tried to is federalize all election laws and do things like ban voter ID at the federal level. If Congress were to pass a federal rule on election oversight like this, it would be very difficult to do, especially between now and November when the election happens. But another challenge is states have reliably used mail in voting for a lot of years now, including a number of Republican states. Right now I'm in Utah. Utah's leaned on mail in ballots for a very long time. They have a safe way to do it, and there are safeguards on it. Other states like Alaska, states that have spread out rural populations, may concerns about new restrictions on mail in ballots. So while we can agree that mail in voting has been abused and expanded probably beyond what is safe from the COVID years, there are states that have done it very effectively and Republicans have won elections with it. And one thing I would just point out also is for example, in the state of Georgia in 2020, there was 30,000 people who voted in the Republican primary for Senate who sat out the general election because they had been told in that window of time that mail in ballots weren't safe. And if we had 30,000 of those voters stay through the general and vote by mail, most of them were seniors in senior centers, we would have won at least David Perdue's Senate seat and we would never have had a Senator Jon Ossoff. So again, it's so important that we focus on making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, but not so doubt in the systems that we actually rely on to win elections. And again, I think we all can agree that voter ID is critical, proof of citizenship is critical. We see reasons for it every single day. But the Save America act right now Republicans are raising concerns about it about totally different issues. And it's not as simple as yes, more than 80% of people in this country support voter ID. The bill has a little bit more than that that some Republicans have raised concerns about. I also think it's worth noting that there's a real risk of hurting our own enthusiasm if we continue to put all focus on this issue that we know doesn't have the votes to pass right before the midterms and potentially dilute our own enthusiasm because either one, people are going to think that it's not safe to vote, their votes aren't going to count, there's going to be fraud or two, they're going to think Republicans can't unite together on anything. And so they're going to home and just feel no enthusiasm about reelecting these Republican majorities in the House and Senate, which would be a huge problem for our entire country. On that issue of the filibuster, it's important to note that as President Trump said, Democrats might get rid of the filibuster the minute they have the majority and the power to do it so they can pass all sorts of crazy things they want to do. John Fetterman wrote an op ed in the Washington Post today countering that from John Fetterman. Now I see the truth about the filibuster the 60 vote Senate rule forces compromise. Democrats were wrong to attack it. History's vindicated. Former Senators Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona and Joe Manchin from West Virginia, two people who were vilified by the Democratic Party for their support of the filibuster. Now, what he's talking about there is the fact that former Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema and former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin were the two Democrat holdouts that prevented Democrats from being able to get rid of the filibuster. The last time they had a majority, their leadership wanted to do it. Every fake moderate in the Democrat Senate caucus wanted to do it. Those two held out. And with Fetterman there right now, Democrats would need to have a slightly larger majority to be able to get rid of the filibuster. And so I do think that there's no guarantee that Democrats would do that. And one thing that Senate Republican leadership has said is they may do that down the road, but we're not gonna be the ones to help them do that and to sort of pour the fuel on that fire that destroys the Senate as the most deliberative body. Policy is not meant to happen quickly. It's not meant to be. You flip a switch and pass a bill and then as soon as you lose the majority, snip, snap, snip, snap. That's not how policy is meant to be. So for one, I'm a huge advocate of the filibust because I want people to slow down in making new laws. I don't think it should be so easy to change our entire legal code, pass laws that might favor certain groups and hurt others. That's one thing that the filibuster has prevented us from seeing in the past. Last week, the Senate HELP Committee, the Senate Health, Education, labor and Pensions Committee, passed an incredibly important bill on an issue we've been Talking about at 10 minute drill for quite some time. And it deals with the issue of price transparency. First, here's Republican Senator Roger Marshall.
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Patients deserve price tags, not surprise billing. It's going to force health care providers to show you the price tag up front. Not an estimate. It's going to show you the price up front.
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This is the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act. It's one of those things that is so simple that you almost can't believe that we don't already have it. And this is a bill that would require hospitals to provide prices up front for care so that if you're going in to get something done, you know what it's going to cost beforehand. It's not this sort of weird Russian roulette of let's see what my surprise medical bill says when I get home. This has been pulled a ton, and it's like a 95.5 issue because everybody thinks we should have access to prices before we get anything, whether it's shopping at a store or whether it's, you know, anything you might spend money on. You want to know what you're paying for before you get locked in. Because otherwise you see people get crippling medical debt all around the country because they got care and had no idea what they were going to get charged for it afterwards. So this bill is a huge victory, and it passed in the Senate help committee last week. And as Senator Marshall said, this can be a major money saver for families at a time when they're focused on things like health care affordability.
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$1,000 a month. That's what we think, that this bill can save an American family. You have an average Kansas family, they're making $70,000 a year, and you give them $1,000 a month savings. That's real money.
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$1,000 a month is a huge deal. And that's Senator Marshall's prediction there. And the fact that this has such an overwhelming bipartisan bit of momentum behind it is incredibly positive
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for our you
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can't make it up segment today, we have Abdul Al said, once again putting his foot in his mouth, but in a rather grotesque way. One challenge for Abdul has been the more he talks, the less people like him, the more people realize he kind of hates women. He hates everyone who's working against him, and he says kind of terrible things. This one was a real head turner reported in Playbook. You put one ogre on a pike and then everyone else gets the message and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different. First off, comparing Haley Stevens to an ogre is pret grotesque. But putting on a pike is essentially a way of talking about beheading or killing somebody, which isn't something you want to do if you've been tied to a lot of terror, sympathy from people like Hasan Piker, or if you got a ton of criticism, for example, after an attempted terror attack when somebody tried to kill preschoolers at a Jewish synagogue and your first reaction was hurt people do hurt people. Again, the more Abdul talks, the less people like him. And I think polling is showing us that in these last few weeks there's been a turn. I don't want Haley Stevens to win. I would much rather Republicans get to run against this lunatic. Abdullah said But I also think it's terrifying for somebody this insane, both on policy and in temperament, to be that close to a Senate seat. I think Mike Rogers will likely beat either of them. But again, Abdul Al said the longer this primary goes and it's going to end in just over a week and a half, the worse it seems to be for Abdul. And it's no surprise as to why that is all the time we have today. Thank you for joining us on 10 minute drop drill. Please leave us a review. Leave us a rating. Tell your friends, have a great rest of your day.