If You Don’t Know, Now You Know: Government Edition | The Daily Social Distancing Show

[Music] let's start with the simplest explanation of the filibuster it's basically a loophole in the senate rules for blocking legislation because even though you only need 51 votes to possible you need 60 votes to stop the debate over voting on that bill in the first place which means as long as the minority party can keep debating then the bill is basically dead and if you're wondering why on earth would the founding fathers put that in the constitution well they didn't the filibuster began as a historical accident it's not some great tradition in the senate that's protected by the constitution it happened in 1805 after aaron burke suggested a rules change aaron burr as vice president in the early 1800s is going over these rules of the senate and he made a critical mistake we thought we don't really need a way to stop a debate do we i mean there's just a few of us like we will debate until we're done until everyone's had their say how slow could the senate really be nobody knew it at the time it'd be three more decades before the first filibuster was actually mounted but that was the moment the senate created the filibuster that's right the filibuster isn't in the constitution it's just a rule that was made up by that guy who shot lin-manuel miranda and it didn't even start out as a way to block legislation it was a way for the senate to keep debate open not to debate for so long that nobody could ever actually vote on a bill so its original purpose is completely different from what people decided to use it for later on it's insane it's sort of like how facebook was invented as a way to see which of your classmates were hot and then years later it became a way to organize a lynch mob for mike pence who by the way is hot and you might wonder why senators back then would want to risk having an endless debate but don't forget guys in the 1800s there wasn't anything better to do i mean it was either listen to thaddeus talk about a bill or take a bumpy carriage ride back to your plantation where a bunch of black people wanted to discuss their terms of employment you're probably going to want to hear what thaddeus has to say either way eventually senators realized that they could block legislation by debating forever and that could get pretty ridiculous because there was no rule on what counted as a debate so senators came up with all kinds of random ways to fill that time which led to moments like this louisiana democrat huey long filibustered several bills in arguing against a bill he recited recipes for salad dressing and discussed at length the best way to fry oysters his most famous filibuster was on june 12 1935. he was able to speak without stop for 15 hours and 30 minutes running out of things to say about the bill he offered to give advice on any subject someone requested yep in 1935 this white dude rambled on about nothing for over 15 hours and somehow he gets zero credit for inventing the podcast so unfair but the senate is crazy man this guy got on the floor and talked for 15 hours about oysters and salad dressing i mean they should make it a rule that you at least have to try to connect your speech to the bill that you're supposed to be debating i guarantee this salad dressing is delicious but you know what doesn't leave a good taste in my mouth letting women wear pants but still i'm not gonna lie it's impressive that he could talk for that long that is hard i can't even think of 20 seconds of stuff to talk about to a co-worker in an elevator so going to floor 9 huh yeah how's this weather we're having so much weather i think i'm just gonna get out here i will say though it makes sense that senators are so good at filibustering because most of them are grandparents don't forget that visit your grandad and see if he doesn't take three hours to tell you a story that happened in 20 minutes you're filibustering grandpa but it wasn't until the late 1950s that the filibuster started to become more common and what cause was so inspiring to senators at that time that they just had to stand up and speak for hours being racist for a few decades the filibuster is used but pretty sparingly then the senate starts to consider civil rights legislation and southern senators really hate this but they don't have the votes to actually defeat the bills so they start using the filibuster it became a tool that southern senators used to prevent the federal government from intervening in racial segregation perhaps the most famous one was when south carolina's strom thurmond took the floor against the 1957 civil rights act thurman notoriously read the phone book clocking in at more than 24 hours to try to block a 1957 civil rights bill how did you last 24 hours you never left the senate floor i had gone down to the center bath for three or four days beforehand and dried out my body in the sauna yes so i wouldn't be tempted to go to the bathroom and so and so i was able to do that oh strom you are too much and when i think about all those black people who suffered because of you yo for real man how gross was that story this guy dried out his body to help him filibuster you know someone is committed to racism when they're willing to jerky themselves for it and it really is amazing what humans can accomplish when confronted with their worst fears just as a mother will be able to lift a car off of the ground to save her child a racist senator will suddenly be able to speak for days at a time only if it will stop a black person from using his bathroom i mean the filibuster was used to block black people so many times i'm surprised they never use it at night clubs uh oh a black guy hey before i let you in have i ever told you about my salad dressing two tablespoons of lemon juice a pinch of rosemary and what you want to try and do is make sure that okay he's gone all right now eventually the senate decided that all of these talk-a-thons were slowing things down too much so in 1975 they made what they thought was a small adjustment to the rules instead of having to speak a senator could just announce that they planned to speak and unless there were 60 votes to prevent them the filibuster would be considered successful and that actually worked for a while until two things happened america elected a black president and a senate minority leader who was willing to do anything to stop him the practice became an art form for republicans under minority leader mitch mcconnell during the obama years mcconnell impeded nominees and legislation left and right he has the nickname the grim reaper for a reason today it's being used in a different way it's being used to effectively kill and measure a bill a proposal that the minority really doesn't like in fact there have been more filibusters during obama's time in office than in the 50s 60s and 70s combined over the entire history of the senate before president obama just 68 judicial and executive branch nominees were blocked and required cloture which ends a filibuster and forces an up or down vote by contrast 79 of president obama's nominees required cloture from 2009 to 2013 alone republicans used the filibuster against virtually every controversial bill and nomination and some that weren't controversial at all mitch mcconnell has the devious distinction of being the only sitting senator that filibustered his own bill god damn mitch mcconnell loves to filibuster so much he filibustered his own bill and he had to get four ribs removed to be able to do it the man is sick but yes once obama became president mcconnell began filibustering everything obama wanted to appoint a judge mcconnell blocked it obama wants it to possibly mcconnell stopped him obama wanted to watch something on netflix mcconnell hid the remote in his neck falls come on i haven't seen it anywhere maybe you should write a mark and once mcconnell decided to block obama's entire agenda that became the new precedent you know when democrats got the chance they blocked president trump's agenda just as hard to the point where now practically every piece of legislation in the senate needs 60 votes to pass and that's why there's a movement to get rid of the filibuster entirely because it's not healthy for a democracy if the losers can always block the winners from passing their agenda now the democrats don't have the votes right now to kill the filibuster completely but based on joe biden's interview it seems like they may be willing to make it more annoying again which won't stop filibusters from happening but at least we'll finally get to find out what mitch mcconnell uses in his salad dressing oh so what you want is the cheers of poor people mer and then you want to grind it up with oppression so that's the filibuster and if you don't know now you know [Music] [Applause] being president is a weird job because in a democracy the president is the leader of the country but they're also an employee so do presidents have the right to keep their health problems to themselves well throughout history presidents have answered yes eisenhower was the first president to actually open up medical records but when a bad event happened they went into a kind of cover-up mode september of 1955 he was in colorado and had a massive i mean massive heart attack and instead his personal doctor told the press it was indigestion after ronald reagan was shot in 1981 the white house released a photo showing him standing with nancy reagan cropping out a nurse holding a machine connected to a chest tube and never revealing how close he came to dying kennedy flatly denied his addison's disease a hormonal deficiency that can cause fatigue low blood pressure and weight loss but he had it while in office he at times took as many as eight medications a day just to function including painkillers stimulants antibiotics steroids hormones the man was essentially a walking pharmacy fdr was never transparent about his health never he tried to hide that he used a wheelchair for years and largely got away with it if secret service agents saw a photographer taking a picture of roosevelt say getting out of his car they would seize the camera and tear out the film damn fdr's people really went all out to make sure people didn't see him in a wheelchair which kind of makes you wonder what they told people was actually going on isn't it weird that we've never seen the president stand up or walk yeah he's lazy as okay no more questions let's move on i mean look at least back then you could tear out someone's film in their camera in 2020 the moment someone points a camera at you you're already a meme it's like give me that phone give me that phone give me that phone give me that give me give me give me that give me that give me that goal but yes throughout american history administrations did whatever it took to keep secrets about the president's health from lying about fdr's wheelchair by confiscating cameras to lying about bill clinton's asthma by hiding his inhaler in a saxophone in fact hiding health conditions goes all the way back to lincoln i mean why do you think he was wearing that top hat dude had a conjoined twin under there guys that's that's real right i saw that on facebook in fact the only american president who didn't get away with it was president taft man they spilled all the tea on that guy poor dude got stuck in a bathtub once and we're still talking about it a hundred years later and then there's grover cleveland 22nd president and world's most adorable grover yeah i said it grover you mutant smurf when it came to keeping secrets president cleveland took it to a whole new level it's hard to imagine an american president dropping out of sight for nearly a week but that's exactly what happened in 1893 when grover cleveland underwent secret cancer surgery back in 1893 grover cleveland actually had a cancerous tumor in the roof of his mouth he didn't want anybody to know so they snuck him onto a yacht he had a friend who owned a yacht so the cover story would be i'm just going on a fishing trip and while they were on that boat the operation took place six doctors were recruited they were all sworn to secrecy and in about 90 minutes they removed most of his upper left pallet five teeth and a good part of his upper left jaw as well they managed to keep the press at bay they kept them at a distance from his home on cape cod until the wound was healed well enough it took about three weeks and then he was fitted with a prosthetic device that he could pop up into his upper left jaw but by and large the secret held for 24 years yeah i know what you're thinking nobody heard from the president for three weeks what a dream but god damn that's a major cover-up grover cleveland basically invented that move that celebrities do when they get secret butt implants oh yeah i've just been away traveling for a couple weeks oh my butt yeah i guess it did get twice as big you know how vacations are and if you ask me it's hard to imagine a riskier situation for a president surgery on a boat in 1893 and don't forget they had dragons back then president cleveland was a sitting duck out there i saw that on facebook that's a real thing right honestly i don't even know why cleveland went through all this trouble if i were a president with a fake jaw i would own that baby i would use it to intimidate other foreign leaders oh what's that china you're gonna put sanctions on us well check this out and look maybe it's not a big problem if a president hides some dental work or a mild pill addiction i mean as long as they can still do the job what's the difference but there was also one case of a president who got so sick that he couldn't do the job and they still didn't tell the american people woodrow wilson had a stroke that not even his closest advisors knew about his last year and a half almost a year and a half in office he was incapacitated his wife tried to conceal how bad it was it turns out he was partially blind he was partially paralyzed he was lying upstairs in a bed in the white house growing a beard and they pretended that it was not that bad his wife and his doctor told the cabinet and told the vice president he's okay we got this you just can't see him he's in seclusion upstairs and we'll pass down his decisions they told the public their leader was suffering from exhaustion many say edith wilson effectively ran the country during that time holy you guys act like this is some fun little quirk of american history but you all had a straight up coup and also a secret woman president guys that's huge why don't people talk about this more who run the world girls but only behind the scenes while getting none of the credit girls so yes america has a proud history of its presidents misleading the public about their health so from now on when you hear trump or his doctors withholding medical information don't stress because in a way this might actually be the most presidential thing donald trump has ever done and if you don't know now you know [Music] [Applause] the first lady it's not a job that's actually in the constitution but that's just because in 1787 women hadn't been invented yet and even though first lady is not an official role they've been important figures in the country from the very beginning from the earliest days america's first ladies were referred to as lady presidentis or republican queen the term first lady didn't come into use really until dolly madison's time the fourth first lady pioneered the practice of championing social causes she helped orphan children and supported women's rights and it said that at mrs madison's funeral president zachary taylor eulogized her as the country's first lady the first time that title was ever used that's right dolly madison was the first first lady but she didn't know it because president taylor only called her that at her funeral if i were dolly madison i would be dead but also i would have been so pissed at zachary taylor because before him people were calling her lady presidentis or republican queen and those are so much cooler as names then at her funeral some dude is like no she was the first lady if i was her i'd be getting out of that casket like what you say you call me queen supreme first lady queen but while the idea of a first lady has been around from the beginning the job as we know it today didn't really kick off until the 1930s you know it's like how for years netflix was a company that sent dvds in the mail but that's not what people think of as netflix now and the first streaming on demand first lady was eleanor roosevelt eleanor roosevelt really innovated the first lady's role as a public communicator she wrote thousands of columns 27 books she participated in hundreds of radio shows she felt that her role was to really reach out to the american people and to learn from them about what they wanted in policy first lady had taken to the road and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles going right to the source of the country's pain during the depression meeting minors in appalachia challenging southern democrats to support anti-lynching legislation and during world war ii visiting internment camps where japanese americans were imprisoned simply because of their race the first lady was often alone at the wheel driving herself cross country now that is ballsy as hell eleanor roosevelt was so politically active she visited the japanese internment camps that her husband set up it's so classic for a wife to go around cleaning up her husband's mess she was probably at those internment camps like i'm sorry he just gets a little racist sometimes work has been really stressful he's not normally this way really really he isn't and she even took road trips by herself which was very gutsy in the 1930s there was no phones no gps you know although i guess it's hard to get lost when there were only like what two roads in the entire country okay young buck listen up you want to get from california to the white house pay attention you want to turn onto road while you're listening you want to turn onto road one and then you're gonna drive straight on road one and then you'll be there and once eleanor roosevelt realized that she could use her position to bring attention to the issues that were important to her every first lady who followed did the same lady bird johnson sought to beautify the nation and took an active role in the head start program for early child development barbara bush advocated for literacy as did laura bush in 1962 jackie kennedy onassis created the white house historical association betty ford was vocal about women's issues she supported the supreme court's ruling on roe v wade which made abortion legal and she supported the equal rights amendment she openly discussed her breast cancer and mastectomy when michelle obama was first lady one of her key initiatives was to push for healthier nutrition and food choices that translated into a change for public school lunches around the country in the 80s nancy reagan appeared in a popular sitcom to boost her just say no campaign i'm concerned about drug abuse especially among the others wow that is commitment nancy reagan was so determined to stop drug abuse she even went on a sitcom to speak out on it which would be impossible to do today i mean tv shows are so much more adult now i mean it's easy to tell gary coleman not to do drugs it's a lot harder to try and do that on euphoria just say no zendaya you should have been here season one but it's through that activism that first ladies get to show who they really are and how they want the world to change you know michelle obama cared about health hillary clinton cared about children and education melania cared about stopping cyber bullies and say what you want but her agenda got done and the thing about being a first lady is that they're not just expected to promote social causes they're also expected to be style influences jackie kennedy's pillbox hats nancy reagan's red dresses hillary clinton's pantsuits or pat nixon's xena cosplay but of course all this attention also means that first ladies get subjected to intense scrutiny by the press and it's not something that they've been happy about to be the first lady may be the most difficult job in washington martha washington famously said the role of first lady can sometimes feel like a state prisoner michelle obama wore a pair of shorts just regular pair of mom shorts and an uproar ensued days of video commentary and pictures and debate about whether it's okay for a first lady to wear shorts andrew jackson's wife rachel was blasted in the papers for being a pipe-smoking hillbilly from tennessee jackie kennedy called the press harpies and she hated the constant attention best truman he felt very uncomfortable very ill at ease with all the fanfare and the attention of the press there was a famous uh incident where she was doing a christening of a ship and she went to break the bottle and they forgot to score the bottle ahead of time so she's banging it and banging and it just won't break and she was humiliated she told her husband i'm not doing another public appearance ah poor best truman i honestly feel bad for her because we've all had that moment where we just can't open a jar of peanut butter but imagine if the entire country was watching you struggle with that jar almost got it everybody hold on try running hot water over it i tried that already if you ask me the person to blame is the one who started this whole tradition like who thought it was a good idea to christen a new ship by smashing it with a champagne bottle you don't christen a new car by slashing the tires with a samurai sword and honestly all the first ladies are in an unfair situation because none of them asked to be in that position martha washington was right it is sort of like a prison although it's weird to say you feel like a prisoner when you own slaves yourself sometimes i just feel like i can't leave do you know what i mean yeah mrs massa i think i do but maybe the most fascinating thing about first ladies is that even though no one votes for them and they kind of make up the job as they go just by virtue of being married to the president they can end up having a lot more power than many elected officials the first lady is the most powerful woman in the country because she has the ear first thing in the morning and last thing at night of the most powerful man in the country going back to the very first first lady martha washington and the second one abigail adams both of them were politically involved they were involved in cabinet decisions they were involved in campaigning these women were political partners nancy reagan was pulling a lot of the strings calling many of the shots from president ronald reagan's first campaign for the white house back in 1980 to his cold war ending triumph in 1987. hillary clinton became more involved obviously in policy making than any first lady before her she had an office in the west wing a bill clinton even ran on the slogan buy one get one free in 1919 edith wilson was unofficially running the country after her husband woodrow suffered a stroke that's insane man not only have first ladies influenced the president edith wilson ended up running the government and by the way that totally screwed the vice president over i mean like 90 of the vice president's job is being there in case the president goes down so that's like being tom brady's backup and then he gets hurt but then gisele comes out like no no i got this get back on the bench loser i throw for my husband so as the biden administration gets underway history suggests that jill biden will likely be a major part of it because first ladies always have been and if you don't know now you know [Applause] [Music] when you were a little kid you probably believed that people vote for president and whoever gets the most votes wins yeah simple child mind the same way you believe that your younger brother was brought by the stalk but once you got older you learned that actually your mom and dad were riding the f train to bone town because bone town is where the stalk lives and that's how they got your little brother and in the same way the system for electing a president in america is more complex than just one person one vote because you see america's founding fathers wanted to come up with something that would prevent their biggest fear the people choosing someone terrible the electoral college is a sort of glued together solution to a problem that the constitutional convention couldn't really solve they said should the congress elect the president no if they do that then congress will own the presidency another option was to have the people select their leader but at the time they thought the country was too large and the people not informed enough to make that choice and one of the odd compromises that they came up with was actually using this set of political elites to do the actual voting for president but still providing a mechanism to select those those electors they thought by creating this wise group of elites these electors could filter popular passions they were afraid of a demagogue being chosen they mistrusted direct democracy alexander hamilton wrote that the goal was to ensure that quote the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications that's right according to alexander hamilton the office of the president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an imminent degree endowed damn i should make a musical out of this you guys hear this but the point is americans don't vote for the president americans vote for a slate of electors who will then go on to vote for the president in many ways it's the same way that american high school kids don't buy the beer they give the homeless man money and then he goes to buy the beer on their behalf that way it's more responsible and it's amazing how if you read into it the founding fathers really thought that everyone in the country was super dumb because everyone talks about how they wanted to build a new perfect society when rarely they were just basically installing child proofing to keep the country safe and stop americans from eating sand now this whole idea of electors being smarter than the masses fell by the wayside pretty quickly and one of the main reasons for doing this was because they thought a lot of americans wouldn't know enough about the candidates to vote for them but you see that was hundreds of years ago when information was harder to come by like you only found out news when someone delivered it by horse but now we've got the internet people with everyone's super informed like everyone in america will know things let's look at my phone i like i know that hunter biden moved to russia and sold his laptop to rudy giuliani for drugs i know that hillary clinton is in a pedophile ring and they drink the blood of children and i know that melania has a body double who's having an affair with gary busey huh actually you know what maybe we should go back to the horse i don't know about this internet thing but the point is today it's understood that the state's electors will vote for the candidate who won their state's popular votes the only problem is that's just an understanding it's not an actual law according to the national archives there is no constitutional provision or federal law that requires electors to vote according to their results of the popular vote in their state those who don't follow the wish the will of the electorate they're called faithless electors in 2016 four of the 12 electors in washington decided not to vote for hillary clinton despite hillary clinton winning the popular vote in that state instead three voted for colin powell and one voted for the native american activist faith spotted eagle it isn't a new concept according to fair vote there have been 167 faithless electors since the electoral college was founded 43 percent changed their vote because the candidate they were supposed to vote for died before the electoral college could vote 40 percent who chose to vote for the candidate they wanted rather than matching the popular vote 17 percent either didn't vote or cast an abnormal vote in the 2004 election rather than casting their vote for john kerry the unknown elector cast their vote for carrie's vp john edwards and also misspelled edward's name as edwards wow so the founders just let electors do whatever they want they can choose someone the people didn't vote for they can vote for a third party they can even just vote for a typo i can't believe what a giant flaw in the american electoral system this is it's like finding out that they keep a key to fort knox under the doormats and just by the way i don't know if we should be holding voters accountable for the correct spelling of names i don't think that's fair especially in a country that's got a hundred different ways to spell allison how do you have four elves in your name allison now a lot of people do realize that this system is a problem in fact states were recently given the power to require electors to follow the will of the people unfortunately very few of them actually do in the past term the supreme court upheld the right of the states to insist that electors vote for the person who won the popular vote but here's the deal only 14 of the 50 states actually have that legal requirement in those 14 states if a faithless elector goes rogue the state can throw him out on the street and get somebody else in to vote according to the popular vote but in all the rest of the states if a faithful selector goes off on their own tooth there's nothing the state can do about it except find them really electors can subvert the will of the voters and undermine the foundations of democracy and their punishment is the same as parking in front of a fire hydrant in fact parking in front of a hydrant is even worse because you don't just get a fine you'll also get towed i mean charging someone a thousand dollars for giving the presidency to someone doesn't mean that they won't do it it just means the bidding starts at a thousand dollars now the good news is trump is down so many electors that it's unlikely he can convince enough of them to turn against their state's voters and vote for him but the bad news is it's easy to see how a future election could be close enough that the losing candidates could convince enough electors to make them the winning candidates and it will be totally legal [Music] you

Channel: The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Views: 214,524

Rating: 4.8827758 out of 5

Keywords: the daily show, trevor noah, daily show with trevor noah, the daily show episodes, comedy central, comedians, comedian, funny video, comedy videos, funny clips, noah trevor, trevor noah latest episode, daily show, trevor, news, politics, daily show trump, if you don't know now you know, government, filibuster, first ladies, election, democracy, trump, biden, joe biden, donald trump, 2020 election, congress, debate, kamala, kamala harris, now you know, education, learning, explainer

Id: YhT7NJPUARI

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021