MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider appeared Thursday on the hot morning D.C. talk show O’Connor & Co. on WMAL-FM to discuss the potential clawback of $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds the PBS and NPR networks. It passed the House, and needs to pass the Senate soon.
Schneider reported that no Democrat would vote against PBS and NPR money, and several centrist Republicans – Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski – have already declared they won’t vote for a cut. So it’s about getting to 50 Republicans, which would allow Vice President Vance to break the tie. "I think it passes," Schneider said after witnessing the Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Talk show host Larry O’Connor kindly noted how we've been working on this issue since the MRC started in 1987:
O'CONNOR: And I just want to pause again: we cannot overstate the job that the Media Research Center has been doing—not just in the last month or so to finally bring home the defunding process for National Public Radio.
This has literally been a decades-long mission for Media Research Center. In the mid-1990s, when Newt Gingrich led the House in their first effort to defund NPR, Media Research Center was already 10 years old, my friends, and they were already doing all of the legwork to give them the reasons, the details, the data, and the reports to show them why NPR and PBS are absolute disasters and do not deserve tax dollars.
So first, Dan—and your team at MRC—I want to congratulate you on even getting us this far.
Schneider said these Senate appropriators sounded distraught that Trump's budget director Russ Vought proclaimed that it was time to rescind this funding for CPB and for foreign aid.
SCHNEIDER: I’ll just tell you—all the Democrats, and some of the Republicans—what they were really crying about, and truly—Kirsten Gillibrand of New York literally was about to cry when she said, “You are killing the bipartisanship of this committee. We carefully crafted these approps bills in a bipartisan way. We made a deal. And you're killing all of that.”
And Russ Vought simply said, “This is the law. The Impoundment Control Act. We are complying with the law. You now get to vote on this.” And there was complete silence in the room for about three or four seconds. Then Kirsten Gillibrand suddenly shrieked out, “That's an absurdity! They hate democracy so much!”
You know, the Democrats have gamed the whole appropriations process for so many years. It hasn’t been since—what, I think 2007?—since an actual stand-alone appropriations bill was signed by a president.
Our national media -- which could pressure Congress to return to its old form of passing 12 or 13 appropriations bills instead of monstrous "continuing resolutions" that nobody reads. They're not doing that.
