Ben (Host) (2:14)

Republicans are absolutely losing it right now as the American people are livid. Can you extend these Affordable Care act subsidies And MAGA Republican is. You know what this, what they're saying. You know what everyone's complaining about? It's not the extension of the Affordable Care act subsidies. They're wondering why we don't have talking lizards selling you health care on tv. Am I right? Isn't that what the American people are asking for? I kid you not, that is what the MAGA Republicans are saying is part of their plan. Here. Watch what Steve Scalise, MAGA Republican said in the morning. Let's play it.

Republican Representative (2:49)

And still lower costs the Choice act, which, you know, while everybody complains, they say, why when I watch TV commercials, I see this gecko lizard and I see the emu and I see all these other animals out there selling health, they're selling car insurance, they're selling homeowners insurance. Why aren't they selling health insurance?

Ben (Host) (3:09)

It's exactly the question on everybody's mind right now. Why aren't they selling health insurance? Then let me show you what Mike Lawler, a Republican, had to say that it was political malpractice to not allow a vote on the Affordable Care act subsidy. Let's play it.

Republican Representative (3:23)

Well. Mike Lawler is a very dear friend and close colleague of mine. Ironically, weekend before last, I was in New York in his district on Long island and we were campaigning together, ensuring that he gets reelected. Mike Lawler fights hard for New York as every Republican in this conference does for their districts. The districts are different. They have different priorities and ideas. But we do have, there's about a dozen members in the conference that are in these swing districts who are fighting hard to make sure that they reduce cost for all of their constituents. Many of them did want to vote on this Obamacare Covid era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve and it just was not to be. We worked on it all the way through the weekend, in fact, and in the end there was not an agreement wasn't made. Now everybody was at the table in good faith.

Ben (Host) (4:14)

Now, pressure release valve, it was not meant to be. What about that pressure release valve? That's how the American people are thinking about. I really want to release that pressure valve. And then finally you have Magam Mike being asked, so Donald Trump said that his legislative agenda is done. So if this is it, if it's done, why should people be voting for Republicans if this, this is it? Here, play this clip.

Republican Representative (4:42)

Well, I don't, I don't know which comment you're referring to and in what context, but I'll tell you. I talked to the president sometimes multiple times each day. He, he and I and his team and our teams work around the clock. Literally. The president and I will talk sometimes at midnight and then again at, you know, 6:00am I mean, he, you know, this president doesn't sleep. He's working all the time. The agenda is aggressive. There is much more to do. I think what he's sometimes when, when he's, I think he's taken out of context on.

Ben (Host) (5:10)

It's always taken out of context. He never sleeps. They talk in the middle of the night. Let's bring in Democratic Congressmember Jared Moskowitz. Congressman Moskowitz, I just give you these layups sometimes at the beginning, sometimes we're like, what should we talk about? I'll let you respond to those clips. Although it's some deeply serious stuff that they're kind of making light of. Huh?

Jared Moskowitz (5:32)

There was a lot there, Ben. I don't even know where to begin. We go back to the characters from the insurance companies like the gecko and the duck. And I like Scalise talking about, you know, all those, the zoo animals. I sometimes think that's reminiscence of what the house is like. It's probably why he felt comfortable. He's actually not making a terrible point, by the way. It's a something that we've discussed in Florida in the legislature for a long period of time, which is allowing health insurance, allowing insurance companies to sell specific lines of insurance that they make money on, and allowing insurance companies to not sell certain lines of insurance that they don't make money on. In Florida, it's a home insurance issue where we let them sell auto insurance but not home insurance. They always threaten to pull out of the market if we make them sell home insurance. Here's a similar thing, right? I mean, everyone should be selling all lines of insurance. Some of them will make a lot of money. Some will be lost leaders. So he's not making a terrible point there. But I do like that he's using all of the lovely characters that we often think about, which sometimes reminds us of Mike Johnson, who gets to cosplay as speakers. I love every time he's asked about the president. I mean, obviously we know Speaker Johnson doesn't have any health issues that have been reported, but I mean, he is, he's got memory problems. I haven't seen that. I haven't Heard about it. You're telling me about it for the first time. You know, the president, he likes words and all caps and commas and, you know, he says things that are sometimes funny, you know, but I mean, man, Speaker Johnson just can't get away from having to figure out how to defend the president without making it look like he has completely no idea what's going on at any point in time in the Capitol. As far as Lawler and the group of Republicans, look, they're trying to win their reelection. They know there's a tsunami coming. And the Republicans say they wanna keep the House, but they're exposing their center members or supposed center moderate members who want to take a health care vote. Lawler's literally trying to save them from themselves, and they're not willing to listen. And so, look, that is what it is. You know, I believe where we're at now is they're not going to extend the health care subsidies. I have 160,000 people in my district who receive those subsidies. People are going to immediately lose their health insurance. Others health insurance is going to double the double or triple every month, and they won't be able to renew it because they won't be able to afford it. And Republicans are gonna own this healthcare crisis. Ben, remember, 15 years they've had to develop a healthcare plan. That's how old Obamacare is right now. Fifteen years they have had to try to develop a healthcare plan. Repeal and replace. Remember that? They never did repeal and they never came up with replace. Right. We have a concept of a plan. In the first Trump administration, he said he was releasing it like every two weeks. That two weeks went on for three years. Right? Then we're back in a Trump administration and they still have a concept of a plan. It's clearly in their Twitter drafts folder. It's still in the drafts. They've not released it. I mean, 15 years seems like a long time. Not only that, they had 45 days when Mike Johnson furloughed us for the first time in American history, didn't let us come and do our congressional job. They had 45 days to come up with ideas, didn't do it. So we're going to go off this cliff. They own it. It's really unfortunate. They're going to hurt a lot of Americans in the process.

Ben (Host) (9:00)

And we're going off this health care cliff where especially a lot of unemployed people or people transitioning to new jobs are on Affordable Care act plans, a lot of individual business people on these Affordable Care act plans at a Time where we just got the job numbers and the job numbers aren't good. Up to 4.6% unemployment. If you look at job losses over the past year, up 54%, over 1.2 million jobs lost in the past year with Donald Trump. So there should never be a time where you're ripping away people's health care, but when you also have people becoming unemployed, this is a recipe for disaster. And it's a, I don't know if.

Jared Moskowitz (9:45)

You know this, but the affordability thing's a hoax.

Ben (Host) (9:48)

That's what Donald Trump says. And he says, but let's go to your district because you have an interesting district in Florida. It was Trump almost won that district in the last election. DeSantis won that district by like a point. So I'm curious, though, if you've seen changes in your district on their outlook right now of the political dynamic with these very close races in 2024. And we're seeing plus 12, plus 14 Democratic over performances. We saw what happened in Miami recently with the Democratic mayor winning there. What are you seeing in your district in Florida?

Jared Moskowitz (10:26)

Well, let's go backwards for a second. So, you know, Florida had had more Democrats, more registered Democrats. Even when we were electing Republican governors, we still had more registered Democrats in the state of Florida. But since COVID that's dramatically changed. We've seen re registrations in Florida, and we've seen obviously a lot of people moving to Florida from California, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut since COVID Now Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state of Florida by 1.4 million registered voters when we outnumbered them by about 300,000 registered voters pre Covid. So there's been a dramatic change in registrations to Florida clearly being a red state. You know, my district is a moderate district. They, they redistricted it just four years ago, tried to make it as Republican as possible. You know, this was a district that, you know, Ted Deutsch won by 13 points. Then they redistricted when I first came in, and I won it by five in a year that Ron DeSantis won his reelection by two. So I overperformed with Ron DeSantis winning the state by 19 points, winning my district by two, and me winning me winning by five. The district has become even more Republican since then, almost four years ago now when I since I first got three years ago, since I first got reelected. And they're talking about, you know, even more redistricting. But, you know, you're hearing a lot of things. Some of my Republican colleagues are very Worried that they don't want their districts to be touched because if their districts become less Republican with the wave that is coming, you know, they, they could lose their election. We also have a constitutional amendment in Florida that the voters put in the Constitution that bars political gerrymandering. So all of the folks out there are talking about how they, they're gonna politically gerrymander. You know, that'll be used obviously in the coming depositions and the lawsuits. So we'll have to see. I mean, it's a very. This is not working out as they intended. Cuz they were using Trump numbers when Trump was on the ballot, when they were drawing these districts. And we're seeing now with Trump not on the ballot, they're having a turnout issue. We're clearly seeing a Democratic wave coming. There's 150 years of history that shows when one party has all three branches of government, they lose either the House or the Senate coming up. And so look, you could have a circumstance where, you know, Democrats are going to dramatically overperform in 26, mainly because we're the alternative and mainly because a lot of their voters won't turn out in Dade county specifically. Right. Obviously, you know, they told the Venezuelans they wouldn't touch tps, they told the Haitians they wouldn't touch tps. That turned out not to be true. The temporary protective status. The Trump administration did come after those two communities and the Cubans are obviously watching what's happening unfolding on television, seeing some of the cruelty that's going on, seeing some of the insensitivity with families and wondering, you know, what could happen in their neck of the woods. So Florida, still a Republican state, still dramatic Republican registration, but the trends are clearly not in Republican favor in 2026.

Ben (Host) (13:20)

Let's talk FEMA. You led emergency management in Florida, notably under the Desantis administration, and you widely credited for running that very successfully. And you're seeing right now the way FEMA is being run into the ground or has been run into the ground. I know there was supposed to be now, infamously, because Kristi Noem said that's where she had to go to when she left that hearing early last week. But they were supposed to do this FEMA review council where they were going to be, I guess, recommending basically the, in theory, this is what the purpose of this council when it was set up by executive order to destroy FEMA and Donald Trump's words and transfer it to the states, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. And that executive order Happened in January. I think it was supposed to be 120 days where that council was going to meet to make these recommendations about basically destroying fema. And then it never met then. And then it keeps getting canceled. And then Kristi Noem said that's why she had to leave the hearing last week when she was being asked about deporting veterans and rounding them up. What's the latest that you're hearing there and in general, what's the latest you can tell us on fema? Because I don't even know who's running it. They brought in another conspiracy theorist guy to be the number two. Like, what's happening there?

Jared Moskowitz (14:38)

Yeah, I mean, you did a pretty good rundown there. By the way, that hearing with Kristi Noem was interesting. I loved when, you know, my colleague Seth was like, have you deported any veterans? And she was like, absolutely not. And he was like, here's the veteran you deported. It reminded me of like a Maury Povich show. And you know when you're like, do you have any children? They're like, no. They're like, here, come meet your boys. You know, it was very funny. And everyone knew she was going to walk right into that because she has no idea what's going on in her department. But here's what I would say about fema. It's actually not a laughing matter anymore. But the FEMA council, believe it or not, then actually FEMA council was created to reform FEMA and save it. That was created as an effort, as an off ramp from this let's get rid of FEMA completely, which there are some in the administration that want to do. Christi Noem, Corey Lewandowski want to get rid of it completely. That's clear. I think there are others, especially the Republican governors, who understand that that's just not possible. You get rid of fema, states like Louisiana, Mississippi go bankrupt. If they have a hurricane, you have places that are in tornado alley go bankrupt. These are red states. In fact, FEMA helps red states more than they help blue states. Florida and Texas obviously have bigger budgets, but if they got. If we had another season of Irma, Harvey, Maria, same time, if we had a Cat 5 coming to South Florida without FEMA, you'd blow up the Florida budget. You'd have to blow up dot, blow up the healthcare budget in order to pay for the cleanup. So without spreading out the risk, which is what FEMA does statewide when they come in using federal dollars, states budgets are going to be disastrous. You'd have to raise taxes. And so I actually think they're trying to reform fema. And look, FEMA needs reform. I think there's nothing wrong with that. That's a fair criticism. But that reform is getting FEMA out of Homeland Security. And believe it or not, that was actually in the original report. In the original report done by this, it was like 100 and something pages long. They were going to move FEMA out of Homeland. Kristi Noem actually stopped that. She pulled that out of the report and sent a shorter report to the White House, not the full report that the entire council did. She then created her own summary of the report. Sentenced to the White House. Okay, I don't know where this is, obviously, because obviously I don't get information. But something tells me there's a disconnect between what Kristi Noema is trying to accomplish and what the White House wants to try to accomplish. And I think they're the ones who canceled that meeting. And I think they're the ones who have paused this whole thing because they're hearing from Republican governors who can't get their reimbursement money out of fema, can't get it out of Kristi Noem. You're talking billions of dollars for previous storms, things that were already declared under federal declaration, under presidential declaration, money that was spent at the local level, blowing up city, county budgets. Okay. That they can't get their federally declared statutory money out of Kristi Noem. And so right now, FEMA is in a very perilous situation. Thank goodness for the American people and for the administration, quite frankly. We didn't have a hurricane this summer that would have just destroyed the agency. We got a little taste of it at that horrific flooding in Texas where FEMA couldn't even get its swift water rescue crews going because Kristi Noem wouldn't put them out there. You then had the director of that department resign and protest over that. And so FEMA's not in a good place, I would say of all the agencies that have been destroyed, USAID and female USAID being gone, FEMA still being there. FEMA has been just completely obliterated, doesn't have a core mission, probably couldn't respond. We need to focus on response. We can do block grants. We can block, grant some of this money down to the states. I think states can handle that. Not all the money has to be done up here. I agree with that. That's something the Republicans have put up. I can support that. But I think we got to get FEMA out of Homeland. Homeland is slowing it down. It's a giant bureaucratic mess and we just got to get it out of there if we want FEMA to really serve the American people in their greatest time of need. And these disasters are not partisan. They hit Americans left, right, center, doesn't matter. We got to go back to treating disaster management that way.

Ben (Host) (18:42)

Finally, before we go, just wanted to ask your thoughts about Susie Wiles. Vanity Fair interview White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. She comes out of Florida politics and so what Vanity Fair says over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of Trump and his team. Mr. Trump has an alcoholics personality. J.D. vance has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle, but sort of political because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is an avowed ketamine user and an odd, odd duck whose actions were not always rational and left her aghast. Russ Vogt, the budget director, is a right wing, absolute zealot. And Attorney General Pam Bondi completely whiffed in handling the Epstein files. Seems about spot on.

Jared Moskowitz (19:30)

Well, she's definitely right on the last two. I mean, Pam Bondi with the binders, you know, and the list is on my desk. Then there is no list. I mean, everyone knows that was a whiff. Let's stop pretend like that's not the case. And everyone knows Russ Vaught wrote Project 2025 and is a right wing zealot so that none of those, none of those are breaking news. Listen, I know Susie obviously from Florida. I consider Susie to be one of the most capable people I've ever met. That doesn't mean we agree politically, but from a capability standpoint and running a logistical operation, I mean, Susie, Susie knows what she's, what she's doing. I don't know what to make of the article. There's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff going back and forth with what was said, what was not said, what was, you know, what was published, what was not published. But obviously this is something that people are going to discuss. I did send a little note to James Comer this morning who you know, wants to see schedule these depositions for Hillary and Bill in that article specifically said there is no evidence in any of the files dealing with Bill Clinton that they were just wrong about that. So sorry, James, another thing that you touch dies. But as your friend, I'm always praying for you.

Ben (Host) (20:32)

Congressman Jaron Moskowitz, thanks for joining us everybody. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers want to stay plugged in, Become a subscriber to our substack@midasplus.com you'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski ad free episodes of our podcast and more exclusive content only available@midasplus.com.

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