Summary
The Republican Party repeats history of voter suppression while attacking instruction of that history. Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) is interviewed about the Democratic Party`s agenda. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick`s longtime partner is interviewed about her push for the January 6 Commission. The pandemic has cost a shortage of everyday items.
Transcript
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: That`s the show. Go watch Chris Hayes. Bye.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice over): Tonight on ALL IN.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): There`s no threat to the Voting Rights Law. It`s against the law to discriminate voting on the basis of race already.
HAYES: How the Republican Party is dusting off a 150-year-old playbook to keep American history buried and maintain power.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, we have no rate -- no voting qualifications based on race.
HAYES: Then, Montana Senator Jon Tester on the filibuster, Joe Manchin and the Biden agend, plus, Sandra Garza, the partner of fallen Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on her push for Republican senators to investigate January 6 and why she blames Donald Trump.
And from coffee to cars to chlorine, have you noticed that everywhere is out of almost everything?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The worst chlorine shortage the country has ever seen is set to rock the summer postseason.
HAYES: New reporting on the global shortage of everything when ALL IN starts right now.
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HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. For the last 24 hours, I`ve been thinking about something that Senator -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday. You may have seen, he came out to announce that he is not just against the ambitious voting rights bill known as the For the People Act, but also the much more limited John Lewis Voting Rights Act which would simply reestablish provisions of the Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
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MCCONNELL: There`s no threat to the Voting Rights Law. It`s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already. And so, I think it`s unnecessary.
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HAYES: Unnecessary. It`s already against the law to discriminate based on race. Now, there`s a bunch of stuff to unpack here. First, back in 2006, Mitch McConnell not only voted for reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act, but as Majority Whip, he was responsible for getting his Republican colleagues to vote for it too. He even took to the Senate floor to give a speech about it.
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MCCONNELL: We have, of course, renewed the Voting Rights Act periodically, since that time, overwhelmingly and on a bipartisan basis, year after year after year, because members of Congress realized that this is a piece of legislation that has worked. And one of my favorite sayings that many of us use from time to time, if it isn`t broken, don`t fix it.
And this is a good piece of legislation that has served an important purpose over many, many years. This landmark piece of legislation will continue to make a difference, not only in the south, but for all of America. And for all of us whether we`re African Americans or not.
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HAYES: 15 years ago, if it isn`t broke, don`t fix it. So, you got to wonder when Mitch McConnell thinks it`s broke. For Mitch McConnell to come out yesterday and say, well, you see, it`s already illegal to discriminate on the basis of race for voting and not be the source of just universal ridicule and condemnation, speaks to just how absent the historical context of race and democracy is in all of our discussions today.
McConnell says it`s already against the law to discriminate from voting on the basis of race. And so, he thinks a law policing that right is unnecessary. Now, there is a very obvious problem here. Those who have studied the history of voting rights in America and the thwarted efforts to achieve a multiracial democracy in this country. No, it has been against the law to discriminate on the basis of race in voting since 1870 when the 15th amendment was ratified, saying, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
It says it right there in black and white in the U.S. Constitution. It says that you cannot racially discriminate in voting. And so, you can imagine a version of Mitch McConnell and oh, I don`t know, 1920 Kentucky saying literally the exact same statement. Oh, well, why would we need a law to enforced voting rights? It`s already illegal. Or say, avowed segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond in the middle of filibustering the 1957 Civil Rights Act, saying, "There are mainly three reasons why I feel the bill should not be passed. The first is that it is unnecessary. Every state has enacted some legislation making it unlawful to intimidate a voter or to hinder him in the exercise of his voting rights. Penalties have been provided for such violation. We don`t need new laws protect the right to vote, certainly not to protect against discrimination or race. Those already exists. It`s in the Constitution."
Those were the type of arguments segregationists made, Jim Crow authoritarians decade after decade after decade after decade in this country as they flogged multiracial democracy to death underneath the table as they gave those speeches. We`re not discriminating The law says we can`t. Anyone can vote.
This is how Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, notorious segregationist, the voice of the White South put it to Mike Wallace.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you suggesting that your people down on the state of Mississippi encouraged Negros to register and vote?
JAMES EASTLAND, FORMER UNITED STATES SENATOR: Well, we have no rate -- no voting qualifications based on race.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, under those circumstances --
EASTLAND: We have not -- and anybody who`s qualified can vote.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Mississippi Senator, 1957, we have no voting qualifications based on race. Of course, why would we? It`s in the Constitution. The constitution ratified in 1870 when Mississippi was on federal occupation. They`re all saying the same thing. Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, and well, Mitch McConnell 64 years later.
And McConnell says he is -- he says this as he has threatened to filibuster the whole set of legislation meant to affirm the franchise, leading to a situation one critic described as a Senate that is a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting.
And so, even though it has been the law since 1870, as Mitch McConnell says, that did not matter to the vast swathes of millions of extensively free Black Americans who watched their right to vote, the right to participate in self-govern enshrined in the U.S. Constitution at the cost of the blood of hundreds of thousands. They watched that destroyed, eroded, and gutted by all kinds of means, extra legal terrorism, the form of the KKK and lynch mobs and arm coups that literally took governments away from them, which were multiracial in nature. That happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, white people just storming the town hall and taking it over.
And which I imagine you probably have not heard a lot about, because it`s not really taught in schools. In fact, arm coups taking power away from legitimately elected multiracial governments happened all over the South. Then, of course, there were the Jim Crow laws which very studiously explicitly avoided mentioning race because again, the 15th Amendment said you cannot. And that`s why we had these faux race-neutral restrictions, things like literary tests -- literacy tests, and grandfather clause and name how many jelly beans are in the jar. Laws that made it almost impossible functionally for Black people to vote despite the right being enshrined in the 15th Amendment.
That is the whole story, the whole struggle for making real the promise of multiracial democracy and universal enfranchisement of all adults. So, to come out in 2021 and say, well, the law prescribes it just shows you know nothing about the history or you`re wildly cynical or both. You cannot understand the efforts of voter suppression. You can`t understand what you`re seeing today unless you understand the history, because it was precisely methods of sensibly race-neutral voter suppression. For instance, changing hours when the registrar was opened on they can only open once a month.
Those were the methods used to enforce a successful, violent, reactionary movement in this country that took what was a nascent multiracial democracy in the years of reconstruction, and turned it back into apartheid state.
I`ve come to believe that story, the story of that fact that in the wake of the Civil War, we began to put in place the foundations of multiracial democracy, and it was destroyed by successful op for white supremacy. It`s the most important story about America and the least told.
When it is not told, it is in the absence of its telling that someone like Mitch McConnell or Republican legislators in Georgia or Texas or Florida, can attempt to get away with their nothing to see here attempt to suppress the vote, targeting Black and Brown people specifically so they can win elections, as has been the case for over a century.
And of course, we see these methods all the way up to federal government. The same goes to the filibuster. Central tool that McConnell is employing at the federal level to block things like the For the People Act or now, he opposes the Voting Rights Act, right, it may sound like just a weird vestige of history. Oh, there`s a 50-vote threshold. That`s weird. The history of the filibuster is also inextricably bound up with a history of race and southern extraction -- obstruction of Black enfranchisement.
The person who first figured out what would become the modern filibuster as Adam Jentleson writes in this great book on the subject was John Calhoun. John Calhoun, the intellectual father of the Confederacy, the man who once famously said slavery was not a necessary evil but "A positive good." And yes, the filibuster was used for lots of different things, lots of places. But one of its core central uses is by Southern White senators to block anti-lynching bills in the 20s and 30s, and bills targeting employment and housing discrimination in the 40s and 50s, and to block civil rights bill after civil rights bill after civil rights bill.
Earlier, I read a quote condemning the use of the filibuster to block voting rights. You know who said that? Martin Luther King Jr. Here he is decrying the filibuster as essentially a tool of white supremacy in 1963.
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MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., ACTIVIST: The tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won`t let the majority of senators vote. And certainly, they wouldn`t want the majority of people to vote because they know they do not represent the majority of the American people.
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HAYES: It`s wild to hear that, right? His statement is just as true now as it was 58 years ago. Everything old is new again. If you do not have this historical context, it is hard to truly appreciate what we are seeing in front of our faces. But that history is largely not taught in schools. People don`t hear about reconstruction and all that it represented. People don`t know the state of South Carolina had a majority Black lower house of Congress -- lower house of state legislature in 1868. That Mississippi had a black senator in 1970.
I mean, I heard about it. I was lucky enough to have great teachers. Thank you, Mr. Kagan. But even that, not a ton. And that brings us to the assault on history that Republicans are now pairing with their assault on voting rights. It`s a kind of pincer movement, right? So, they`re digging in the archives for methods of voter suppression and targeted attacks on franchise men of black and brown folks, an attempt to rollback multiracial democracy to stop it from becoming real, while also attacking the teaching of the history that would illuminate to people why that effort is so dangerous, why it happened before and why it won last time and y have put us where we are now.
And so, state after state, Fox News, and Republicans, Conservatives have whipped up a moral panic about so-called critical race theory. More than 20 states have either introduced legislation to ban critical race theory or banded it altogether. Now, critical race theory is an actual doctrine, academic method. It started by a bunch of scholars of color in the 70s and 80s. It attempts to question some of the race-neutral assumptions about law and power and how they function particularly in the U.S.
I will tell you, I`m not an expert. I`ve read some of it. Like any school thought there are critics in the field and between scholars within the field, I don`t think it`s the definitive word on race in the law or American history. But it`s a very different thing than how the term has been applied by conservative activists.
A few months ago, Chris Rufo, one of the conservative activists who`s pursuing this moral panic, whipping it up, gave the game away, tweeting, "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
Just pure cynicism. If you don`t like it, then it`s critical race theory. That`s what he`s saying. If you don`t like it, if you don`t want your white children being taught that say, white terrorists murdered black people throughout the south in a successful campaign to end the experiment of multiracial democracy and replace it with authoritarian apartheid, well, then that`s critical race theory.
You see how that works? So, now the Republicans are railing about free speech to basically make it impossible or even criminal to teach certain things in schools. But it`s all part of the same story, right? They`re running back to the old tactics in the past while making it harder at the same time for people to learn the truth about that past. These are two fronts in the same war. It`s the oldest battle in this country. Are we going to be a democracy for everyone or not?
Carol Anderson has devoted her life`s work to this topic. She`s the chair of African American Studies at Emory University where she focuses on public policy issues of race, justice, equality in the United States. She`s also the author of several award-winning books, including One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. Her latest is just out this month titled The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. And she joins me now.
Professor, some of this history, I think, I learned from your book on voting rights or it was recalled to me. Do you think -- what do you see as a scholar of this when you hear Mitch McConnell say that phrase, well, it`s already illegal against the law to discriminate voting on the basis of race?
CAROL ANDERSON, PROFESSOR, EMORY UNIVERSITY: What I hear is the folks at the Mississippi convention of 1890 where they combined all of the different disenfranchising mechanisms into one, and did so knowing that it was designed to remove black people from the roles, but in a race neutral way, so that they could stay under the radar of the 15th amendment and get judicial approval for disenfranchising large swaths of Black people, but do so legally.
HAYES: That history which is that because of the precedent of the 15th amendment, the effort to rollback democracy in the south between 1870 and 1964, let`s say, had to be undertaken with this bad faith, this excuse, to me is part -- one of the most toxic, you know, sort of legacies we have in that period, and also something that it`s very hard to not see in a lot of places you look these days.
ANDERSON: Absolutely. Because one of the things that -- to justify these new regulations, these new laws, these new constitutions, was to say, we`re going after election integrity, we`re cleaning up corruption at the ballot box. So, it was to use the excuse of massive rampant voter fraud in order to remove Black people from the rolls, and to do so in a way that seemed legitimate.
Who could be against anybody wanting election integrity? Who could be against anybody wanting to end corruption at the ballot box? And so, to swaddle the killing of American democracy in the flag of democracy is what they did in 1890 and it`s what we`re seeing.
HAYES: That point, the killing of American democracy, to me, this is the thing I can never escape. And as someone who spends a lot of time reading about reconstruction and then it`s no redemption is that I don`t think Americans learned that we actually tried to start doing this after the war. And it was controversial, it was fought tooth and nail. But when you look at the South Carolina of Lower House, the legislature being majority black, that hasn`t been achieved anywhere in this country since. And it`s what -- was the target of white supremacy in its aftermath. And that history that we tried it in was defeated, that we move backwards, that`s the history I feel like Americans don`t get taught.
ANDERSON: Oh, absolutely. Instead, what they get taught is that horrible film Birth of a Nation that defines the south as being absolutely wild and unruly during Reconstruction, and that it took the Klan to come in and bring order. So, it took violent white supremacists, violent white domestic terrorists, in order to bring Black folks under control, in order that the South should be a peaceful bucolic land.
And that becomes the narrative of Negro domination, Negro rule. And it is insidious, and it is inaccurate.
HAYES: It`s also everywhere. I mean, even -- you know, modern tech books when they read about Andrew Johnson, you know, or the Radical Republicans, I mean, even modern textbooks. And this brings us to this big fight now, right? So, look, history is always going to be contested in every place in the world, right? It`s not some fixed thing. It`s always going to be contested, it`s always going to be a subtext for political battles in the present.
And debate is good. I don`t think there`s some final word on any of this and I want to be clear about that. But I saw this picture, this is Loudon County, Virginia. This is people packed -- parents packed into a very packed, you know, parent meeting about whether they`re teaching critical race theory in the school and whether it should be banned.
And when you see these fights happening in state after state, what goes through your mind is both an educator and a scholar this history.
ANDERSON: Is that what we`re seeing is a battle to control the narrative in a way that allows bad policy to be based on bad history. So, it is to ignore the role of slavery and Jim Crow in American history. It is to ignore what the removal, the genocidal removal of indigenous people is meant to American history.
When you remove that history, and then you have these cardboard cutouts of the founding fathers that don`t treat them like human beings who are making decisions, good decisions and bad decisions, but instead are simply heroic, then that does not -- then what you have is that you`re not able to explain how we got here, what we`re dealing with.
And it`s what allows Mitch McConnell to say, you know, we don`t have -- we don`t need a voting rights act because there`s -- we can`t discriminate on the basis of race. That is to ignore that it is on the basis of race that you get race neutral language targeted at African Americans using the vestiges of slavery, using poverty, using wealthlessness with the literacy test that was using the systematic denial of education.
HAYES: Donald Trump --
ANDERSON: And what we -- sorry.
HAYES: No, I`m just saying --
ANDERSON: What we -- yes, what we ended up with in 1940 as the U.S. is getting ready to start the second world war is that only three percent of African Americans, age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote in the United States. Three percent using these race-neutral laws.
HAYES: Wow. Carol Anderson who scholarship on this has informed my own thinking about it so much. Thank you so much for making time for us.
ANDERSON: Well, thank you so much, Chris. Thank you for this.
HAYES: He`s the only Democratic senator in a state that Donald Trump won by double digits. And even though he`s a strong advocate of bipartisanship, he`s apparently open to modifying the Senate rules to actually get something done. So, how is Senator Jon Tester willing to go where Joe Manchin fears to tread? I will ask him next.
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HAYES: Think about Senator Joe Manchin in West Virginia is that he does not appear to have some overarching ideology. He`s a guy who at his word, if you take them out, really believes in bipartisanship sort of in and of itself. And he brags about it on his Web site, most by partisan senator for third year in a row.
And in a lot of ways, I get it. He`s a Democratic senator in a state that Donald Trump won by nearly 40 points last November. But at the same time, he`s not the only Democratic member of the Senate trying to balance the demands of a conservative state with those of his own party.
Senator Jon Tester of Montana has been a reliable supporter of Democratic agenda in a red state that Trump won by more than 16 points in 2020. As of January, he`s the only member of the Democratic Party to hold statewide office in Montana. Like Senator Manchin, Senator Tester is also a big fan of bipartisan legislation. He just has his own way of going about achieving it.
In the Wall Street Journal this week, "Everybody has got their different style, Mr. Tester says. He had a roast beef and turkey sandwich in his beaut office. My style is I want to get crapped on, OK. And you think, you know, being on TV and then having a gang of reporters around you is just fine, but it doesn`t help me get things done."
And Senator Jon Tester, Democrat from the great state of Montana joins me now. I don`t know how good of a tester I did in that quote reading, Senator. But I guess first, tell me about -- where are you at right now? There`s a lot of frustration in the Democratic Caucus and I understand it. Legislating is frustrating. But you`ve got the announcement yesterday that these infrastructure talks with Shelley Moore Capito broken down. There`s another gang maybe being assembled. How do you see this?
SEN. JON TESTER (D-MT): Well, look, I think there`s some critical things that need to get done. I think if they`re -- if they`re able to get done in a bipartisan way, I think we`re much better off because I think they`ll stand the test of time much, much better.
But I will tell you something, the January 6 Commission that went down a couple of weeks ago to -- in a partisan vote is very upsetting to me, because quite frankly, we need to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6. We had a bunch of domestic terrorists that over on the Capitol, and broke out windows, and caused damage. It`s never been done in over 150 years.
And so we ought to figure out how to get the bottom of that. That is not a partisan issue. We should get folks on both sides of the aisle to be able to take that up to get to the truth. And then we can adjust what we`re doing to make sure this never happens again.
The same thing on voting rights. I don`t know anybody that I represent, that wants to suppress people from voting. And yet we`ve seen it happen in state legislators, legislatures all around this country on a very partisan basis, by the way, which frankly, frankly, I don`t get. But in the end, we need to get some things done, we need to make it so people can vote that have the -- that are legally able to vote.
We ought to make it so that we know who`s funding these dark money campaigns that spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat people like me, or potentially people on the other side of the aisle as far as that goes.
So, I really think that that there are things we need to do. The infrastructure bill is another one, of course. But the bottom line is that it didn`t used to be this way. Folks have weaponized the filibuster. And I`m still for getting folks on both sides together and try to make the filibuster work. But at some point in time, this country needs Congress to act and get things done.
HAYES: Was the January 6 Commission surprising for you? Did you -- do you think there might be 10 Republican votes there?
TESTER: I did because I didn`t think it was a partisan issue at all. I think getting to the bottom of what happened on January 6 is no different than a 9/11 commission, finding out what happened there. And I think for us to do nothing on this issue, except for a study that comes out of Rules Committee in the Homeland Security Committee is very minimal in nature. And I don`t think it`s going to prevent us from another attack.
HAYES: There`s a number of senators I`ve talked to, Democratic senators specifically who I think they`re thinking about the filibuster and Senate rules have evolved over time. I think Amy Klobuchar is one of them. Senator Bernie Sanders was not super psyched about changing the filibuster, you know, as recently as three or four years ago. Has your own thinking on that changed?
TESTER: Well, look, Chris, I didn`t come to Washington D.C. to get nothing done. I came to try to work for the betterment of this country and for the state of Montana. And if the filibuster continues to be weaponized and it ends up in gridlock, then it doesn`t leave a lot of choices. There`s a bipartisan group that`s meeting and will continue to meet to try to get things done, whether it`s on infrastructure or something else.
I think, maybe if we get some success, it might break the door down and we can get some more bipartisan stuff done. But I will tell you that if we can`t do that, then it`s going to force me into a situation that I don`t want to be in and undoing the filibuster. I don`t think we`re there yet. But we`re certainly not moving in the right direction.
HAYES: I know that this sort of increasing concentration of agribusiness has been a concern to you and to folks, all throughout rural America. And that`s an issue -- I bring that up because it`s an issue where there should be some -- that seems like that kind of thing where there should be some possibility for bipartisan working together. I saw Senator Chuck Grassley actually complaining about it the other day, the way that farmers in his state are threatened by big agribusiness concerns. But I wonder if like, you know, that in the abstract is very different from actually getting bipartisan legislation. Is there any progress there?
TESTER: I think there can be. And I think Chuck Grassley and myself have a number of bills that I think can get across the finish line. I think that there are other folks too that feel strongly on this issue. But let me tell you something. I come from rural America. I`ve watched rural America dry up for all 64 years of my life. I`ve watched consolidation in the ag sector, take away markets, take away opportunity, take away competition. And then you add in the hack on JBS here a week or 10 days ago, which was -- screws up our food chain for consumers too.
I think it really is time to take a look and see what we can do to make sure that folks are operating appropriately and be able to incentivize the small processors to be able to get in the game and being competitive, add more markets and move the ball forward. While, by the way, on the other side of the equation, with cyber, we start expecting companies if not requiring companies to report these cyberattacks in a timely basis to our Intel Community, to our cybercom so that we can -- we can find who these folks are and hold them accountable.
HAYES: Yes. I think the head of JBS, if I`m not mistaken, just crossed -- a few minutes ago said they did pay a ransom, I think, of $11 million. So, we`re seeing -- I mean, there you go. JBS says it paid an $11 million ransom to its attackers. I mean, that`s -- it`s unnerving to watch this catch fire a little bit and to consider what it can do to these basic forms of American supply chains.
TESTER: Chris, you`re right on. And if it can happen to the media industry through GPS -- JBS or some of the other big packers, it can happen in the grain industry, it can happen in water infrastructure. Look, we`ve got to really buckle down and get after this as a congress. And I will tell you, I think that Chuck Grassley and myself and there are others, will step up the plate and do exactly that.
HAYES: All right, Senator Jon Tester, thank you for making time tonight. I appreciate it.
Still ahead, as Senate Republicans continue to block the January 6 Commission, the partner of Officer Brian Sicknick joins me next.
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HAYES: Before Brian Sicknick became a capital police officer, he was a kid from New Jersey, the youngest of three brothers. He would eventually joined the New Jersey Air National Guard in 1997 where he served to overseas tours. Sicknick would then join the U.S. Capitol Police Force in 2008. On January 6, he was among more than 100 officers assaulted as they confronted the violent mob that took over the Capitol.
At one point, rioters appeared to spray an unknown substance at Sicknick, forcing him to retreat. You could see him in a video catching his breath and bent over. The 42-year-old officer would go on to suffer two strokes and die of natural causes according to the medical examiner. The Capitol Police said in a statement, the ruling does not change the fact Officer Brian Sicknick died in the line of duty courageously defending Congress in the Capitol.
Last month, of course, the House passed a bipartisan bill to create a January 6 Commission to investigate the insurrection. The bill faced the difficult task of getting Republican support needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Realizing this, Sicknick`s family went to Capitol Hill to lobby senators personally to pass this bill.
Their pleas were ignored. The Washington Post reports that at least 20 senators didn`t even meet with them. And Senate Republicans at least for now have successfully blocked any chance of an independent investigation into the January 6 insurrection that led to the death of Officer Brian Sicknick and four others.
Sandra Garza, Brian Sicknick`s longtime partner who is on the Hill last month along with Officer Sicknick`s mother trying to persuade Republicans to vote for the January 6 bill joins me now. Thank you so much for coming on the program. I want to start and just offer my condolences on your loss. And I hope you`re doing OK. How are you?
SANDRA GARZA, LONGTIME PARTNER OF OFFICER BRIAN SICKNICK: First, thank you so much, Chris, for having me. And, you know, I`m doing as best as I can. It`s hard but I`m surviving.
HAYES: Can you tell us a little about Brian, what he was like, what kind of things he liked to do, what kind of person he was?
GARZA: Sure. Brian was a very, very kind, humble person. One of the reasons that I love Brian so much was because he was very unassuming. He made me feel very safe. He was very warm and gentle. You know, a lot of his fellow officers will tell you, no one ever disliked Brian. Brian had a lot of friends. He was very personable and easy to get along with. But he also was kind of quiet. And he was kind of an introvert, kind of like me in some ways. He loves to watch movies. That was something that we love to do. And sometimes I would drag him out shopping, which he hated, but he was a good sport and did it with me anyways.
HAYES: Can you -- can you tell us a little bit about how you in real-time understood what had transpired to Brian? I think there`s a lot of confusion. I have to say, as a reporter who`s covered this in the first day, I still feel like I don`t really know the story of what happened. I wonder just what your experience of those few days were like.
GARZA: Yes. So, sadly, for me -- actually, on the sixth, due to my job, I was working and I was doing assessments all day. And right now, I`m working from home, so I was meeting with patients virtually. And these assessments are pretty lengthy and I had them back to back. So, I virtually had no time to check the news or listen to the news or anything like that.
So, I really had no idea of what was unfolding at the Capitol. It was actually only when Brian`s mother Gladys had been texting me and eventually called me when I had a quick break and had a chance to quickly look at my phone, and she was desperate saying, hey, there`s something going on at the Capitol. Can you please get ahold of Brian?
And you know, so I immediately, you know, texted him and, you know, asked him to get in touch with me right away. It took a while. He eventually did. Once I found out he was OK, I immediately realized. Now, this was not uncommon for, you know, Brian with the nature of his job and the 11 years we were together for protests to happen at the Capitol or things to happen at the Capitol, you know, and he would be OK.
Of course, I had no idea of what was unfolding, but Gladys did. And so, I just said, hey, you know, get in touch with your mother. She`s concerned about you, which he did. And then, I went on back to work. So, I actually did not get to see any of the footage of that day until a month later, after Brian died.
And of course, after I learned that he had passed away, I didn`t want to see any of it because I was so devastated.
HAYES: Of course.
GARZA: And it was actually right before his memorial, I got the courage to say, you know what, I want to know exactly what he experienced, what all the officers experienced that day. And I watched it and I was horrified.
HAYES: I read a note that Brian was -- had voted for Donald Trump, a supporter of his, and that -- I think -- I don`t know what your politics were or are but I guess my final question for you is having gone to Capitol Hill, tried to make this plea to Republican men of the Senate to go forward with this investigation, what are your messages for the people in that party that chose not to and the man, Donald Trump, that invited people to the Capitol that day?
GARZA: Yes. So, Brian was the Republican. He did support Donald Trump. And I actually stated earlier that, you know, I supported Donald Trump myself. And so, it was very disappointing to know that Donald Trump did not reach out to me or to Brian`s family to offer his condolences after Brian passed away. He never sent a letter. He never uttered a peep.
And then when Gladys and I went to Capitol Hill to meet with these senators, some of them were very polite, you know, and they respectfully disagreed. Others were downright rude. One actually gently pushed me out the door as I was leaving, and that`s not an exaggeration. So, that`s why Gladys had shared in an earlier interview that, you know, she could tell they weren`t sincere. I could tell as well. You know, I think they were just doing it to check off a box.
The ones who refuse to meet with us, I mean, speaks volumes about them as people and their character. But, you know -- so it`s very disappointing, especially Brian being not only a Republican supporting Donald Trump, but also having been a Capitol Police officer and they would be that callous and dismissive. It`s really unbelievable, unbelievable.
HAYES: Sandra Garza, I want to thank you for making time to talking to us and I really, really appreciate it.
GARZA: Thank you so much for having me.
HAYES: Be well. Coming up, the ongoing shortage of everything from lumber to microchips to chicken to rental cars. What can be done about it, next.
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HAYES: It all started with toilet paper. Last spring, in the early weeks of the pandemic, it was nearly impossible to find any. Remember that? People panic, bought toilet paper, leaving store shelves all over the country bear.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I showed up today and it`s just chaos. There`s a huge line to get toilet paper.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What`s the hardest thing to find right now?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I mean, you got everybody going buying all the toilet paper.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: We reported on this at the time. We learned there was more to that story than just panic buying and hoarding. You see, toilet paper supply chain is split in two for commercial use and consumer use. And with everyone staying at home, demand shifted to the consumer market and was just overwhelmed it.
Now, more than a year later, this is one of the crazy side effects of the pandemic that continues. Supply chains are all out of whack and it`s leading all kinds of shortages. First, it was you know toilet paper, hand sanitizer, disinfectant, wipes. All that stuff is back now. You can get that. But now, it`s everything from microchips to oat milk at Starbucks.
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Starbucks is the latest company to fall victim to supply shortages. The coffee giant says that they`re going to vary by location. But according to social media, the shortages ranged from pastries to iced coffee.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The worst chlorine shortage the country has ever seen is set to rock the summer pool season. Chlorine prices are set to soar 70 percent this summer. In some parts of the country, prices have already doubled.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The chicken wars continue to rage. Restaurants are feeling the heat from higher prices and tighter supplies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tyson Foods, the nation`s largest chicken producer says roosters not breeding and the winter storms in Texas this year have led to a shortage of chicken. That shortage made worse by the lasting effects of the pandemic.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you have looked for a new used car lately, you`ve probably experienced some sticker shock. On average, used car prices have risen an unparalleled 17 percent since last year, due to a microchip shortage.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Rental car companies are facing shortages nationwide just as many people are gearing up for summer travel. The shortage fueled in part by decisions made last year when business plummeted at the start of the pandemic. Many cash-strapped rental companies sold off much of their inventories.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: OK, so why is this happening to so many industries and products? That`s ahead.
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HAYES: President Biden is launching a new task force this week to tackle the supply chain disruptions we`re seeing across all sorts of industries including home building, construction, semiconductors, transportation, agriculture and food. As we emerge in the worst the pandemic and headed to this newly open summer, those supply shortages are impacting Americans everywhere from the grocery store to the car lot.
Earlier this month, New York Times global economic correspondent Peter Goodman wrote a great piece about how the world ran out of everything. And he joins me now. Peter, first let`s start with just the scope of these shortages and disruptions which I`ve heard anecdotal just from people, you know, trying to rent a car, to go drive and see their parents for the weekend. It seems like it`s across all different kinds of sectors.
PETER GOODMAN, GLOBAL ECONOMIC CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, that`s right. I mean, it`s really incredible. You will talk to people who build houses, they can`t get hold of sealants. You can`t buy tapioca. So, for a while, you know, bubble tea shops don`t have tapioca to put in milk tea. We run out of Grape Nuts cereal. And of course, we`ve got computer chips in short supply. So, if you`re trying to buy a car, you have no bargaining power whatsoever. You just got to take whatever they`ve got on the lot because you`ve got assembly lines that have been shut down around the planet.
HAYES: All right, so you`ve got two -- it seems to me, there`s two factors here. There`s the kind of specific factor to the pandemic. And then there`s the structural nature of how the supply chains operated before the pandemic. Maybe first talk about what the -- how the pandemic has done this, and then the sort of deeper question of how the supply chains got so tenuous.
GOODMAN: Sure, I mean, the pandemic, obviously, is a huge disrupting force. So you`ve got people confined in their homes, as you were noting in the intro, when suddenly you have lots of people stuck at home. You have demand for the toilet paper that we buy at home and less demand for the toilet paper in offices because nobody`s going to offices.
So, that happens, you know, times 1000 across all sorts of different product lines. But at the same time, you know, we`ve come to rely on these global supply chains for just about everything that we buy. And consumer patterns have been completely reshaped by the pandemic. When people were stuck at home in the first wave of the pandemic, they started to buy, you know, everything from office furniture for their -- for their basements, in their bedrooms, to printers, to exercise equipment because they couldn`t go to the gym. A lot of this stuff is made in China. Things like workout clothes, sneakers.
And suddenly, we had a surge of factory orders from China so much so that global shipping was disrupted. So we ran out of shipping containers. Well, not so much ran out of them, but they were in the wrong places. There weren`t enough shipping containers to put the latest shipment of factory goods in China on a ship. And at the same time, you`ve got extra ships showing up all at once in places like the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
And then you`ve got a truck driver sick with COVID. You`ve got people who unload ships sick. So, you don`t have enough people to unload a surplus of goods. And suddenly, you know, stores don`t have Nike-branded sneakers. Under Armour announces that they can`t get their workout clothes to shopping malls because of the way consumer patterns have been remade.
So, these are all the pandemic factors. But then, you know, as you note, there are structural factors, long-term structural factors that encourage companies to go lean. I mean, for decades, companies have been governed by this just in time mentality of don`t waste money, putting extras into warehouses. That`s money that you could enrich shareholders with or dividends and share buybacks to stay nice and lean. There are other reasons besides just the enrichment of shareholders for that, but that`s a major factor.
HAYES: Yes. So, you have this just -- this sort of just in time, which is kind of Toyota innovation, which is basically says, look, if stuff is sitting in inventory, it`s not making you money. You want to move things as quickly from production to consumer without sitting around. And then you`ve got these sort of consolidation that happening.
And one of the things that I took away from your pieces that look, there`s a trade-off between efficiency and resiliency. I mean, the more efficient a supply chain gets, the less resilient it is. Butif it were a little less efficient, more redundant maybe, there was more stuff sitting around, then that might be a more resilient supply chain.
GOODMAN: Right. And, you know, this is not something that we`re learning for the first time. I mean, you know, I`m old enough to have written a story back, I think, in 1999 when there was big earthquake in Taiwan where even ordinary people woke up and said, I can`t buy electronics because there`s a shortage of computer chips because Taiwan, even back in 1999, was a major supplier of computer chips.
Well, in the 20 years since then, computer chips have become even more vital. So, you know, we now learn that if you don`t have a computer chip and your Ford or GM, you can`t build a car. There was -- you know, there was, of course, the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011. That, you know -- that disrupted not only global shipping, but computer plants, auto parts, and so all of these sorts of things were in short supply.
And a lot of people who actually worry about stuff -- I mean, let`s face it, most consumers don`t walk around thinking about global supply chains. It`s something that we think about once there`s a problem. But experts for 20 years have said, we`re going to lean and we simply don`t have a reserve of stuff parked in warehouses against trouble.
And every time there isn`t a problem, people say, well, you know, we`ve got to fix this. We need more resilience in the supply chain, and then life gets back to normal, and so do most companies. And most companies, publicly traded companies are run with the mindset of you do what`s right by stock prices. And that`s, you know, not spending extra money to put extra computer chips in an assembly line in a warehouse somewhere.
HAYES: Peter Goodman, you should check out his article on this in the New York Times. Thank you so much.
GOODMAN: Thank you.
HAYES: That is ALL IN on this Wednesday night. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel.