"Fox Knews."

RUPERT Biden admits that he knew Fox News hosts were lying about the 2020 election. Strict Scrutiny's Melissa Murray joins to break down the Supreme Court challenge to the President's student debt relief plan. And later, we bring you the lowest lowlights from a big week of congressional hearings in a segment. We're calling the self-owned zone, the self-owned zone. Here we go, that one.

The self-owned zone, I don't know. But first, politics doesn't just happen in even numbered years. Vote Save America's No Off Years program is here to help you stay engaged throughout 2023's elections, starting with a must-win Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Visit VotesaveAmerica..com right now to donate to help get out the vote in Wisconsin ahead of their April 4th election. And sign up to join our No Off Years program. So you can stay in the loop about what's happening, how you can get involved via remote and in-person volunteer opportunities, targeted donations, and more.

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COM All right, let's get to the news. President Biden still hasn't officially announced that he'll be running for a second term, but he sure seemed like a candidate. This week during a health care event in Virginia Beach and a speech at the House Democratic Retreat in Baltimore. We'll talk about what he said in a bit. But just in case anyone still has doubts about whether Biden intends to run again, here's what the first lady had to say during a CNN interview this week.

You're all for it, I'm all for it, of course.

Trying so hard because it was like these people who say, well, you know, he did take a long time in other decisions and he hasn't announced yet. But then, of course, he never was really planning to announce on this timeframe, and no president had really announced on this timeframe. But there are some people who think he may not run. These other Democrats who were thinking of running if Biden didn't run haven't killed themselves, so maybe they'll still run.

What do you think of Mark's argument?

Yeah, I mean, sure, could someone run against Biden who's not named? Marianne Williamson? Yeah, that is very possible. Do voters deserve a choice? probably.

But the problem with the argument is that we know from history, and frankly.

If a Democrat were to run against Biden, a serious Democrat were to run against Biden, it would likely damage Biden and would almost certainly devastate the political future of that person. Because if there was anyone, and this is why it's not going to happen, or is highly unlikely to happen, someone may run against Biden, crooked media says.

Their career on fire to do this. And so we keep ending up in the same place where we were.

He uses the example of Gretchen Whitmer again. I know Gretchen Whitmer has already said she's not going to run against Joe Biden, but I think it's worth just using that as an example. Gretchen Whitmer runs. She doesn't attack Joe Biden other than to say something like he told us he'd be a bridge to a new generation. I'm taking him up on that.

I'm giving voters a choice. I think he's been a great president, I like Joe Biden, I respect him. I'm not going to talk about him in this campaign.

I'm just going to talk about what I've achieved.

And why? We need a new generation of leadership, which I know the president has agreed upon. Before. Then, she runs her race. Mark makes the point that Biden would probably greet that candidacy in the White House. They wouldn't be too happy, but publicly be like, Oh yeah, the more, the merrier, whatever.

A lot of people thought that Barack Obama and those of us who worked for him would never again get a job in politics. If we pissed off the Clintons, we're all still here. We won you, Yahoo. Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders ran against her, lost in 2016, did better in 2020. Yeah, because she didn't win.

He's still fine, Bernie's fine. All the people that are challenged, the Clintons won or lost, or ended up being okay. Look, I just think there's no doubt that a challenger would have to weigh the fact that most of the Democratic Party machinery, including the people who can end up running, being in the White House for a second term. Joe Biden and all of his staff would be very unhappy if that person ran, I do not know. That would foreclose political opportunities for that candidate for the rest of their career.

If they ran a campaign, that was.

Very respectful, didn't go after. Biden didn't try to tear the party apart with some huge ideological battle. I think this is all very, very unlikely, let me be clear about that, but I'm just saying as a scenario, I think it's possible.

The gentleman from Boston.

I think, yes, I think theoretically, that all works, and I do think that if that, the people who worked on that campaign would get jobs in the White House. There are a lot of people who work in this White House, who worked for people who opposed Joe Biden in the primary, who actively tried to defeat him. There are a lot of people who worked for Barack Obama in the White House. In fact, the woman who tried to defeat Barack Obama was the secretary of state for four years.

So, like that can happen, there are two challenges. This one is it kind of presumes that there are no other actors looking to make mischief in such a primary. Which is what the Republicans, the MAGA media and others would be doing to seek to highlight those differences, to try to exploit those tensions. It's also, I'm not sure that it that is really good, I don't think just saying hi, I love this guy.

He's a great president, I'm just younger than this. Great president is really giving people the choice that Biden wants. These campaigns always find differences, even if those differences are miniscule. And there's a lot of agreement, so there will have to be, in that situation, conflict. I don't. This is not to say that no one shouldn't run.

The Democrats definitely shouldn't run. It's just that there is a risk profile to this. That is, I think, much higher than what Mark is accounting for in his piece. Which is why I think it's unlikely to happen. And what happens to Gretchen Whitmer, who did not ask to be part of this conversation?

Where that becomes a problem is if Biden loses. And then she were to take some share of the blame for that, right? That's where it gets tremendous. That is the risk I think that Gretchen Whitmer, who once again does not want to be part of this, would face there. And so, like, it's a theoretical exercise.

I just think that ultimately, this is why we keep ending up in the same place. Yes, voters could have a choice. yes, a choice could be good, primaries are good, as you say, but the stakes are such. And Biden has, to his credit, not given people a lot of great arguments to use against him. Because he has both been more substantially successful, more progressive than people imagine, and more politically successful than I think anyone thought possible.

And therefore just the room in which you could run such a campaign.

And I do think this is where my devil's advocacy goes away. Like, you have to feel really confident that you could do better than Biden against Donald Trump and or Ron DESantis, right? Like you have to. Because the risk is, if you or Biden lose, then, you know, were you contributing to that loss by waging the primary? Which again, I think primaries are good, but it's a risk.

And it's not just a risk to your own political career, it's a risk to like the party and democracy, right? Because we can't. Like you said, the stakes are quite high, so you have to be pretty sure.

Mr. Favreau, welcome, welcome to meet the press. First question for you, Do you think Joe Biden is too old to be president?

I'm running.

Let me just, it's just we'd, and no, like we had. Also Washington thinking we were a little tougher against her style of politics than I imagine this imaginary Gretchen Whitmer-esque campaign would be against Joe Biden. But again, the person wouldn't just be young in a new generation, they probably wouldn't be someone in D.C.

So it would be a D.C. outsider, and that would probably be part of the message as well.

We got a preview of what the campaign might look like this week, when the president once again hammered Republicans in Congress on Medicare and Social Security during an event in Virginia. But this time, he also accused them of wanting to raise the price of people's health insurance premiums and prescription drugs so they can cut taxes for the rich. Let's listen. And if they say they want to cut the deficit, but their plans actually would explode the deficit, how are they going to make the numbers add up? what are they going to cut?

That's the big question. For millions of Americans, healthcare hangs in the balance. Will they continue to fight to cut the Affordable Care Act and make health insurance more expensive for millions of Americans? If mega Republicans try to take away people's healthcare by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, I will stop them. I will say that Tommy Vitor has now done so many fake Biden AI clips that I almost started laughing during that clip because I couldn't tell if it was real Joe Biden or Tommy Joe Biden.

That's where we are right now, that's where Tommy is right now.

He's now going beyond just accusing Republicans of wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security.

He is an incredibly nice, very compassionate, empathetic person. If you ever thought he wasn't tough enough to come after these people, the last few weeks have proven that wrong. It's not just that he's hammering them, he's doing it somewhat ruthlessly, in a way that I love. He has found the soft underbelly of Kevin McCarthy as they head into this debt ceiling thing.

Biden knows that Kevin McCarthy is too weak and too stupid to bring his party around a coherent set of demands for a debt ceiling negotiation that should never happen. He can just go out and say, Oh, you want to cut Social Security, you want to cut Medicare, now, you want to cut healthcare.

Next, you're going to try to ban puppies. Then McCarthy says, That's not our plan, then Biden goes, What's your plan? He just melts into the ground because he can't come up with one. He is continually adding up the political pressure on the Republicans to do this.

The Affordable Care Act and Medicaid is helpful. Because there is some idea that Republicans would never, in this very particular instance, put Social Security and Medicare on the table, which McCarthy has said many times. But Medicaid is a pot of money that they could and are likely go after. He has now added that in to try to fence that off as well.

I kind of think it's perfect because it basically takes the debate back to the Barack Obama-Mitt Romney fight in 2012. And a fight that's worked for Democrats many times in other places, in other elections. Which is, Republicans are on the side of fighting for the rich and the biggest corporations, and Democrats are on the side of fighting for working people in this country and the middle class. And if that's and you sort of that, you know that. The culture war debate fades into the background. And Joe Biden can talk about all of the things he's accomplished, not just in terms of like, isn't life great now that I've accomplished these things? But here's what I've done. Which is lowering health care costs and energy costs, and prescription drug costs for people. And what they want to do is raise those costs for people so they can pay for a tax cut for the wealthy. Yeah, I.

Big parts of that campaign, most of the Senate candidates, that in tough races, one ran most of the rights on Social security. Medicare, right? It just didn't get as much attention. And so a presidential campaign. Messages are larger narratives, they extend beyond one specific issue or a couple specific programs. But this, this will be a huge underlying data point. Particularly if Biden ends up running against Ron DeSantis, who has a long history of wanting to cut these programs. And and.

Medicare cut Social Security even though he's pretending to be the great defender of Social Security and Medicare. Now that he's running against Ron DeSantis, most likely, no. Yeah, I totally think that. I mean the Inflation Reduction Act on the prescription drug thing, it, so it capped the price of insulin at $35 a month for people on Medicare.

Yesterday, the drug manufacturer, Eli Lilly, announced it would do the same for insulin across the board, so it would only sell insulin for. The cap would be $35 a month for everyone. How important is it for the White House to sell this accomplishment? I feel like I haven't looked at any polling on this, but I feel like it's probably pretty popular if I.

You have to show things done in this environment while Republicans are doing nothing. And so it's. It's a great win, it's gonna matter to a lot of people. All of us should shout from the rooftops about it because this is not the sort of thing that's gonna get enough attention to break through to people who do not mainline.

A lot of them are still now proposing to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. So you cap the price of insulin for everyone at $35 and probably saying, no, no, we want to go back to the days where it was more expensive. That's just, I mean, you mentioned extremism as the overall message, and I totally agree. I think it is extremism that affects your life and your community and your country. Right? Like it, because people, they care, that people say crazy shit.

The Republicans say crazy shit all the time, they care more that they do crazy shit that actually negatively impacts their lives. And I think where Biden is right now, on Social Security, on Medicare, on the ACA, on prescription drugs and all this health care stuff is. He's really laying out the choice between what he's doing, which is fighting to make people's lives better, and what they're doing is fighting to be make people's lives worse. And he's really drawing that connection really well. All right, before we bring on Melissa to talk about the Supreme Court, we got to talk about the latest developments in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. We now have Rupert Murdoch's deposition, in which he acknowledges that he could have stopped Fox hosts from spreading Trump's election conspiracies, but didn't quote from the deposition.

Some of our commentators were endorsing it, the big lie. I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight. oh, when hindsight isn't that nice. The latest filing also reveals that Fox Corporation board member and Dan Pfeiffer bestie Paul Ryan told Murdoch, to quote, Move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies. But did absolutely nothing when neither of those things happened. Dominion lawyers also wrote in the filing that during the 2020 campaign, Murdoch provided Jared Kushner with advanced copies of Joe Biden's television ads before they ran on Fox.

Wow, so it certainly seems like Fox should be in a bunch of trouble here. Legal, financial, reputational. You're not a lawyer, but you podcast from time to time. What do you make of the latest filing? It's pretty.

One this could actually go to court and were to go to court. Not only could Fox lose the 1.

7 billion, or whatever it is. All of the people talked about here are going to have to testify under oath at open court. Sean Hannity, Tucker, Carlson, Suzanne, Scott. People. That would be honestly, we should podcast three times a day, every day during that trial. Like it would be amazing, but because that would be so amazing. That's probably not what's gonna happen. And they're probably gonna end up settling in some way, shape, shape or form, which Fox tends to do.

They talk a tough whole bunch of money to make problems go away. Also, Fox is in a whole host of trouble because, based on the filings and Rupert Marks testimony is that the Fox Board knew misconduct was happening and did nothing about it. So there was an interview on CNN that Oliver Darcy did with this guy named Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who's a sort of world-renowned business school professor and legal and scholar.

Like, that's a problem. But it's worth remembering that Lou Dobbs lost his job because he was at the center of a defamation lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer over a conspiracy theory. And so it's gonna be interesting how this plays out. But Fox is in a ton of trouble in every way, shape or form. And I would have to say it's quite enjoyable now. Murdoch's.

Did not, which doesn't really line up with all the rest of the evidence that we've seen. Because, like they, if they knew they were lies, why did they continue to book Sidney Powell? why did they continue to book Rudy Giuliani? Why did they continue to have hosts? Not challenge them about those lies? Even if they supposedly knew, as Rupert Murdoch admitted that they did that, they were election conspiracies. CNN media analyst Sarah Fisher was on and said that.

Um, her sources in the C-suite level at Fox think that it is likely they will lose this case. So, and there is some thinking that perhaps Murdoch knows this. Maybe that's why he was so forthcoming in his deposition. Also the Fox when asked, Do you think Fox had a responsibility to tell the truth here?

Fox's chief legal officer said Yes, so there they just these depositions. They really got him. I mean, I don't know for sure they'll win, but it does. It does seem like that you where they settle this. And there's also rumors now, I think. Semaphore reported that Murdoch will make CEO Suzanne Scott take the fall here, which I think is kind of cool, kind of cool.

That's kind of cool. Were you surprised that Murdoch was even able to show Jared advanced copies of Biden ads like, How does that work you?

I was writing about Chris Christie in the paper and I was going to write in there. I refer to him as Trump's, McDonald's Gopher. But I thought I'd google to make sure I remember the story correctly and.

I will not, I'm.

That turned out not to be accurate. That there was a swath of Trump voters that you could persuade to come over to Biden or not vote or whatever else. Or proceed to walk away from Trump. I guess a bit better way to say that. And so they. There were plenty of Biden ads that were sitting at Fox headquarters that Murdoch could have shown Kushner. And the way that you this generally works is you try to run ads that start over the weekend and so you will turn.

You will submit them on by a deadline on Friday, and they'll start running on the weekend. Which means that the other campaign cannot get their ads up until it opens again on Monday. Why TV stations generally operate on bank hours is an open question. So you could get a several day. If Murdoch were to show them the ads in advance, there could theoretically change their ad traffic to match that. Or we can. I sort of doubt that the Brad Parscale run Trump campaign was operating at that sort of level of speed. Or that Jerry Kushner really even know what to do with any of that information. But it is an unprecedented breach.

That is not a thing that ever happens, and so if this is actually the case, it's a pretty it. It's a pretty big deal. And will cause some real trouble at Fox, with their ability to be seen as a even somewhat fair broker for running ads, speaking of fair.

Right, I was, I was going to.

Paul Ryan sat down with Charlie Sykes, who was a Wisconsin conservative radio host and has a long history with Ryan and has become a bulwark. Never Trump or very anti Trump guy. And I don't think Paul Ryan knew what he was getting into when he sat down. Because what? One of the things Charlie Sykes has pushed Paul Ryan on publicly in the past is that he should resign his board membership at the Fox Corporation. And so Charlie Sykes, in his very polite, genial way, pushed Paul Ryan on. The question of why he's on that board, what he's done on that board, should he resign the board?

And Paul Ryan's answers included words that have meaning and definition, but when added together mean nothing. It is just cowardly verbal applesauce. He's just he's like he is melting on stage into a pool of cowardly weakness. And what it comes down to in the end here, as it relates to Paul Ryan, is he has been running around since he decided to resign from Congress. Talking about?

We're gonna reform the Republican Party and we have to defeat the MAGA movement. And I'm on the Fox Board because Fox is this important part of the conservative movement. The fact of the matter is, even if he has expressed these concerns to anyone, no one has done anything about them. Did he whisper them? did he would speak them in a language no one understood?

Were they in pig Latin? No one had. No one cares what he says. His basically, I think his kink is having no.

Like, the thing that gets the MAGA voters up in the morning is not cutting Medicare and Social Security, that's also not getting Democrats up in the morning. Basically, there's like a few rich people who, I guess like that and and fucking Ayn Rand fans like like Paul Ryan, that's about it. It is a tiny constituency, he.

What did you just abbreviate? Hell is?

Rupert Murdoch said something in his deposition that I think explains why Paul Ryan is doing. It's not because he's trying to have some sort of quiet, apparently silent.

What the reason he's doing what? Rupert Murdoch said when asked why they put some of these conspiracy theorists on. As he said, It's not red or blue, it's green, and that's what Paul Ryan is doing. He's just getting fucking paid, and he and he Charlie Sykes called him out on that. This deposition reveals that it, it's all this was just.

This is such a flashback to the Trump era, where Trump would do something terrible. And then there would be some report leaked by people. We know about how Paul Ryan quietly advised Trump did not do that, and Trump told him, Fuck off, it's just what a loser, just what a historic loser. I get some ASMR.

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about whether President Biden's student debt relief plan is constitutional. The general consensus is that the Conservative majority seems ready to strike it down, which would have major implications for millions of people. So lots to talk about. But we figured it'd be better to bring on a real legal expert than forcing you to listen to two guys who got their degrees on Twitter. Melissa, welcome back to the pod.

Thanks for having me. So, when you first heard about Biden's student debt relief plan, what did you think about the constitutionality of that?

But the states are arguing that Mojila is essentially an arm of Missouri. That is something that is under debate in this case, and so when Mojila is injured, the states themselves are injured. But again, it's a very dicey question of standing and whether or not they should even be here. It's also a similar kind of standing issue for the litigants in the other case, Department of Education versus Brown.

There it's two borrowers who don't qualify under the program or don't qualify for the maximum amount of aid that is being offered. One individual doesn't qualify at all because her loans are serviced by a commercial lender, not by the government. The other litigant is someone for whom the maximum amount of loan forgiveness isn't available because he doesn't have Pell grants. They argue that the because the administration sort of fast-tracked this through the Department of Education, there wasn't an appropriate period for notice and comment. And therefore, they didn't have a chance to register their own views about what this program should have looked like. And they've been injured because the program doesn't look the way that they wanted to.

In most cases, that sort of injury wouldn't be understood as an injury at all. Be understood as a kind of generalized grievance and would be insufficient to allow someone to proceed in federal court. And I think the court was pretty much on the same page as the challengers on that, but with regard to.

Majority really did seem amenable to granting, standing in that circumstance and getting to the merits. Whether or not the Biden administration has the.

ALITO I mean, just really revved up here and he raised a lot of really interesting questions. He often conflated the standing question, the procedural question, from the substantive question of whether the president has the authority to do this. And he seemed really eager to get to the substantive question, and it was sort of his eagerness was kind of underlaid, with some sense of grievance. Like, you know, there were all of these people like the who had not gone to college, but who would be shut out of this program because he didn't go to college. Why should the government's resources be given over to individuals who made choices to attend higher education? Like, they should all sort of deal with the choices and the consequences of their choices themselves. And so it was sort of underlaid with this kind of weird working-class grievance that I think we expect in sort of MAGA circles. But we haven't necessarily seen in full flower. Certainly from the Chief Justice of the United States.

It was a really interesting argument. And you know, Justice Alito was back there, you know, giving him a spot, and Justice Thomas was also there. Justice Gorsuch, who has always been very skeptical of the administrative state, you know, he was right there. The real question is whether Justice Kavanaugh is going to go along with this. He seemed to be of the view that the statute here, the Heroes Act, that the government says gives them the in emergency circumstances. To waive or modify student loan provisions is a really broad statute, and waive or modify could mean canceling student loans. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Roberts argue that if Congress wanted you to cancel student loan debt, they would have explicitly said cancel student loan debt.

They wouldn't have talked about waiving or modifying. And indeed, they point to other statutory provisions where Congress explicitly gives the Department of Education the authority to cancel student loan debts or other kinds of debts, rather than just simply saying waiver or modification. So it was a really interesting argument, an argument that was really full of sort of textualist energy. This is this idea that you read statutes according to their texts, and that's how you understand their meaning. But both sides had their own vision of what textual healing would look like in this circumstance. And the conservatives were like, if it's going to be canceled, it has to say canceled, and that hobbled minority were like, This is a broad statute.

Congress doesn't have to say everything with exact specificity. Waiver or modification encompasses this.

This was a situation where it could not be the case that a law could be entirely shielded from federal litigation because of some wacko novel enforcement scheme that someone dreamed up. But then, when push came to shove and it was time to write the opinion, she was right there at the.

I recognize that that is going to be cold comfort to a lot of people who are gonna get bills because of this. But the other thing is, in a previous era of American politics, a Supreme Court ruling was an imprimatur of legitimacy that put the president on their back heels. That is no longer the case the Supreme Court is on, is as unpopular as it's ever been, in its least trusted has ever been in its history. And I think that there is a larger argument to make here against a extreme, radical court that is out of step of the American people. The row ruling this ruling, Shelby County is, could be part of this. But a whole set of things where the corporation is cited against the broad wishes of the American people, and that's the large argument.

I think that's gonna be a very important argument in an upcoming presidential campaign. There's all. This is just one of many cases where the court is making decisions that are not just against this president, but they're against the broad. Will the American people? And so, be prepared on the substance, be prepared on the messaging and come out, don't pull your punches.

Forget you were ever the Judiciary committee chair for many years and aggressively take on this court so.

Very, very explicit. So in West Virginia versus EPA, which was the first opinion just last year, to actually articulate this in a really clear way and call it the major questions doctrine. The court essentially stripped the Clean Air Act of the authority and power for the agency to actually address climate change. Like, unless Congress specifically envisioned in 1977, the need to do this exact thing, clean power in order to deal with climate change or clean air, then agency can't do it. And so it's a kind of hobbling doctrine that basically says, unless Congress. Whenever they wrote the statute, and again Congress is writing statutes are meant to have a long life and address a wide expanse of problems. If Congress does not specifically hone in on the problem that this agency is addressing right now, then they don't have the authority to do it. So, I mean, it is a doctrine that is purposely created to kneecap an administration and the.

Problems in real time. And so, if this is a major question, I imagine any kind of relief for student loans would similarly fall into the major questions. Doctrine. Because it is a matter, according to this court, of serious financial or economic.

And for those of us who pay close attention to the news, we know it's the fault of the Supreme Court. But for a lot of people, they might just say like, Hey, why did Joe Biden take?

And there is one element I thought was really important in what Melissa said, which is that this court is captured by dark money. A lot of us are big proponents of court expansion, we know the president is not, we know a lot of Senate Democrats are not, but there is something short court reform does not have to include court expansion.

It could also include, as a step to that is a code of conduct and ethics code. Right now, all of the sort of conflicts of interest provisions that hamper, like low-level government employees, do not apply to the Supreme Court right. Disclosure requirements that apply to political appointees in the White House do not apply to the Supreme Court. Putting for, you know, calling for, and putting forth, whether it's the president or Senate Democrats, or someone else, aggressively for a code of conduct. The Supreme Court is a way to highlight the extreme and potentially corrupt nature of this court. Which gives you an argument on all of these questions that are gonna matter this one student loan. You know, you have, you know, polluters, big oil companies, all these interests, who do and who do, and will continue to incredibly well in the Roberts Court. And so having that sort of argument there, I think, is very helpful, and the court is laying the foundation.

Some in service of a concerted campaign of influence at the court, others about sort of trying to put the right people on the court, in the lower court. So there's the political story that came out just this week by Heidi Presbilla about how much money Leonard Leo has amassed for himself in just the last couple of years. As he has also been incredibly successful being the Trump administration's outsource for all of the various judicial appointments that the Trump administration has managed to install in just four years. And that's a really important story that I don't know, that a lot of mainstream outlets are picking up and really delving into. But again, it sort of reiterates that there is some kind of undue relationship between some of these oligopolistic.

Entities and conservative entities with just lots of money, and it all feeds into the court and the lower federal courts. Certainly seems like an argument that.

What do I think?

But the other thing that I thought was really, really fascinating and troubling. And again not picked up in a really clear way by most mainstream media, was how much. Fox and the Republican Party are inextricably intertwined. And there were various parts in that deposition testimony where Murdoch was like, You know, I called my friend Jared Kushner and asked him about this. And then I reached out to Mitch McConnell to say X. And I was like, this is basically like Pravda for Republicans. Like, they are literally in bed with each other, and that is surprising. And, you know, maybe it's good that there is some differentiation and the conservative news diet now that Newsmax and OAN are there. But the way in which Fox has been and was clearly functioning as a mouthpiece for the GOP has to be really.

Before we go, it's been a busy week for Republicans in Congress. Not because they passed any laws still waiting on that, but because they held hearings on everything from lab leaks to border security. That gave each aspiring MAGApolitician the chance to achieve what they came to Congress to do. Generate viral clips for Fox News Sadly, even that simple task proved too difficult for many of the GOP's best and brightest, who could only manage to generate viral clips for Pod. Save America. In a segment, we're calling the self-owned zone all right. First up, we have the crossfit enthusiast, whom Speaker McCarthy said he will never leave and always take care of.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Marge tried to take the Biden administration to task on everything from school closures to fentanyl. Let's see how it went.

That is a direct result of Biden administration failure policies. You know, at least the kids who.

So what you're saying is that the Biden administration was able to seize more illegal drugs than the Trump. That's the point you're making. That's the failed actions of the Biden administration that were able to were able to seize more drugs. It is, I mean.

It's just it's so bizarre. Look at all the people they apprehended, look at all the fentanyl they stopped.

I mean, look, in fairness, time stop having meeting and early 2020. Yeah, no, maybe she's just still dealing with that alright. Next up, we have the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee. Who one of them could yell the loudest at Merrick Garland?

Let's hear it, and you are the Attorney general of the United States, you are in charge of the Justice Department, and yes, sir, you are responsible. So give me an answer, the F.BI.

The photograph The photograph was a filing in court in response to a motion filed by Mr Trump. It was not a leak. You the attorney general make a determination, and you spent 20 years as a judge. And you're perfectly content with justices being afraid for their children's lives. And you did nothing to prosecute it. Let's shift to another area.

Can I answer the?

This is my clip that is going on. Hannity. That was insurrectionist fanboy Josh Hawley, who clearly just watched a little too much few. A few good men before before his big appearance in Congress. And then Ted Cruz being like, Were you aware of the leak that showed that picture of the classified? It's like, No idiot, fucking Donald Trump.

The reason that picture of the folders came out is because Donald Trump filed in court. I think one of the.

It's a it's a loop, all right? And finally, our winner today is Matt Gaetz, who gifted us an exchange that has now been seen more than two million times on Twitter. It's Matt trying to grill Undersecretary Defense Colin Call about a conspiracy that a right-wing Ukrainian militia group got.

Thank you Dan, thank you for joining us. have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week. Bye everyone.

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