Senate GOP Leaders Debate Ditching Border Deal; Interview With Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY); Trump's PACs Spent Roughly $50 Million On Legal Expenses In 2023; Pres. Biden Says He Has Decided How To Respond To Drone Strike That Killed 3 U.S. Service Members In Jordan; Powerful Iran-Backed Militia Kataib Hezbollah Says It Will Suspend Military Ops Against U.S. Forces In Region; Israel: Special Forces Disguised As Civilians & Medical Staff Killed 3 Suspected Terrorists In West Bank Hospital; Elon Musk Says His Neuralink Startup Has Implanted A Chip In Its First Human Brain; U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan Meets With Families Of Americans Held In Gaza And Qatari PM. Aired 8- 9p ET

Interview

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"Anderson, let's make no mistake about it. If the Senate Republicans now ditch this bipartisan deal that they have reached with the president and with Senate Democrats, it is solely because Donald Trump has directed Republicans not to give Joe Biden a policy win in an election year because he wants to run on the chaos at the border. That is the only reason this has been derailed is because Donald Trump does not want Republicans to solve our problems, he wants the problems to persist so that he can use it for his election campaign.

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Absolutely, and that's an incredibly important point. Now that Republicans realize that they look bad trying to politicize this issue and undermine a comprehensive bipartisan solution. They are moving to their next talking point, which is, oh, we don't need legislation to do this.

Well, that is certainly very different than everything that they have been saying for this entire Congress, and that is different than the reality on the ground.

The executive branch, Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden only have so many authorities and so much funding to secure our border and we are facing unprecedented migration patterns.

So they need more authority, they need more funding in order to address the asylum backlog, in order to secure a border, in order to address the fentanyl trade in order to interdict with the Mexican drug cartels, in order to do their job and that funding can only come from Congress.

So it is false to say that President Biden has the necessary authority to secure the border or to address this the situation at the border. It is required for legislation to pass which is what the Senate has been doing while the House has been trying to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is working with the Senate to address those problems.

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Anderson, we are operating in divided government. The Republicans control the majority in the House, the Democrats control the majority in the Senate, and a Democrat is in the White House.

For House Republicans to declare that we will not budge at all on our draconian extreme legislative proposal completely flies in the face of our system of government, which requires bipartisan negotiations and bipartisan compromise.

We, Democrats are ready to do it. The president has shown a willingness to go further than any Democrat ever has before, but it is not enough for the Republicans because they want to use this as a political cudgel in this upcoming election.

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Well, this is a gross abuse and misuse of the impeachment clause. There is no misdemeanor or crime much less a high crime and misdemeanor as it has ever been defined by the framers or any subsequent impeachment.

They have fabricated out of whole cloth two Articles of Impeachment, that have no basis in law, nor have they even tried to substantiate the articles with any legal brief or citation. And instead, they are turning this political issue a policy dispute that's being hashed out in the Senate into grounds for the second ever impeachment of a Cabinet secretary.

They are undermining and debasing the Constitution, and they need to be careful, Anderson, because the precedent that they are setting is that if a secretary of -- a Cabinet secretary in any way does something that the opposing party in the House does not like, then that secretary will be impeached. It goes both ways, Anderson and this is a new Democratic Party. We are not going to take this lying down."

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