That thread is one vote in a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice John Robertson, joined by the Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three justices appointed by

Democratic presidents.

The Supreme Court supported an order by a district court judge that forces the Trump administration to pay $2 billion to contractors of the United States Agency for International

Development for work that they have already completed.

Joining us now is Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

He's a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Finance Committee, and Senate Budget

Committee, and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Senator, what did we learn today?

A one-vote majority for preserving the government we thought we had feels rather narrow.

Yeah, I think it looks even narrower when you understand how obvious this decision was.

There was a contract between the government and these parties.

There had been performance by the parties of what they had been contracted to do.

There was no allegation that the contract had been violated, and then the government held back the payment for the contract for the work that was done.

That should have been a simple 9-0.

But how does it get to be 5-4?

You get these four dissenters who are violating really basic principles of contract law.

And I don't want to get too weird and conspiratorial, but when you look at what they're doing is they're opening up the Project 2025 general destruction of government.

And they're the judges, most of them, who got put onto the court by the court capture scheme by Leonard Leo and his minions.

Well, the billionaire-funded court capture scheme had as one of its architects a guy named Mark Paoletta, a little sidekick of Leonard Leo's.

Where is Mark Paoletta right now?

He's over at OMB implementing Project 25 as the council to Russell Vote.

So this whole thing gets tied in pretty closely to the whole billionaire funding scheme.

And clearly for those four justices, their loyalty lies to the billionaire-funded Project 2025 scheme and not to the basic principles that if you perform on a contract, you should get paid the money you are due by the government.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, thank you very much for clarifying it.

Now I'm even more uncomfortable with the one-vote margin.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for joining us, Senator.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Coming up, there are 160,000 federal workers in Maryland who could be impacted by Donald

Trump and Elon Musk's dramatic cuts.

Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks will join us next.

Trump's choice for Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Can you commit to abide by all terms and conditions of the department's collective bargaining agreement?

And do you understand the collective bargaining process?

I am not a traditional labor lawyer.

But I know we have a lot of experts at the Department of Labor career staff in the solicitor's office that are experts in dealing with federal government unions and collective bargaining.

Now, sir, you are a labor and employment attorney, and you were a leader at the department for years, correct?

And you don't know about collective bargaining agreements?

I know about them, but I would trust the experts who have done this their entire career to help guide us.

Thank you.

Joining us now is Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland.

Senator, it's such a strange answer because he's saying, I don't know, I'm a Trump appointee,

I don't know anything.

But the career staff at the department, they're going to help me.

The same people who the Trump administration is trying to fire.

Yeah, well, you know what, I mean, I think that what we know is that he was either unqualified or untruthful or both.

I tend to think that both, but it was outrageous to have a person who's worked already in the

Labor Department.

He's been a part of the transition team there for President Trump.

He's a labor lawyer, for crying out loud, for seven or eight years, and said he knows nothing really about collective bargaining agreements.

Maybe he'd ask someone else in the building.

And believe it or not, we received pretty much the same response from Mrs. Chavez-DeRemer, who said that she wasn't sure that collective bargaining agreements were enforceable by law.

So this is just a whole cadre of unqualified individuals, which is what makes it so outrageous.

This administration has attacked this huge witch hunt against civil servants, the federal employees who are actually qualified to do their jobs.

It's just outrageous.

And by the way, what he said was actually the truth of the way a lot of the Senate confirmation process used to work, which is the nominee is there.

They are qualified to whatever degree.

But what you always knew is they're going into a department with career staff who do have the answer to everything.

And so if this nominee doesn't know everything, the career staff will help that nominee get through the actual job.

But those, as I said, are exactly the people they're trying to fire.

Yeah.

But you know what?

And it is disqualifying to apply for a job, to leave the Department of Labor, and to not know basics such as collective bargaining agreements.

But this is what we're facing.

You know, we saw the same with RFK Jr., who couldn't tell us the difference between Medicare and Medicaid.

These folks are unqualified.

Yeah.

And if you were looking at a government saying, if we are going to get rid of some people, who should we get rid of?

Well, you'd start with the people who don't know how to do it at all, which is all it's all of the Trump nominees.

You wouldn't even have to look at them individually, just every one of them.

Well, the basic qualification for the nominees who have come forward so far have generally been that they would vow loyalty to Donald Trump.

That's the qualification, it appears, that he's looked for, which, again, makes it not only outrageous that he has really accused the true professionals of being unqualified, but also his idea about efficiency, we know, is also not true.

When you fill the government with people who are unqualified, and when you are telling the people who actually can do the job that maybe they should go home for eight months and receive pay for it, this is why you know that none of this is to be trusted.

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, thank you very much for joining us tonight.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And coming up, some of the wisest commentary I heard after Donald Trump's speech last night was from our next guest, Michelle Norris, MSNBC senior contributing editor, who will join us after this break.

One thing Donald Trump doesn't understand is that some people in this country actually have very positive relationships with the parts of the government they depend on.

And the agriculture department, where Donald Trump is trying to cut jobs, is one of the most popular government departments by the people who actually use it, farmers.

Our new trade policy will also be great for the American farmer.

I love the farmer.

Our farmers are going to have a field day right now.

So to our farmers, have a lot of fun.

I love you, too.

I love you, too.

Joining us now, MSNBC senior contributing editor, Michelle Norris.

Michelle, one of the groups out there who already know from the first Trump presidency how bad his ideas can be are the farmers, because they are so conversant on how tariffs affect them, how government policy affects them.

And I feel like they're the leading edge for many others in the coming year, the rest of this year, autoworkers, others, who are going to discover what farmers already know.

Yeah, a lot of people will see latent effects from some of the things that we see laid out last night, particularly the tariffs.

The farmers already understand.

They got hit by the trade war against China.

They got hit hard.

They never fully recovered.

But last night, what you saw was a president who laid out, explained the sweeping changes that he had made, but didn't really give us a cohesive understanding or explanation for why he was doing things.

There were litany of things that he said that were not true, that he had inherited a catastrophic economy.

That's not true.

There are billions of dollars.

There are millions and millions of dollars of Social Security fraud.

No receipts to prove that.

So it seemed like what he was trying to do was to control the narrative, to show that

America is strong, to show mainly that he is strong.

And for someone who is so almost obsessed with branding, it's surprising that — and maybe it shouldn't be surprising.

Maybe we should know this.

But it is sad that he doesn't understand what he has done, what these changes have done to all the things that America has traditionally stood for.

But he just pretends that that doesn't happen.

And then when he gets, basically, orders from the stock market, like he did today, he caves and then tries to present it as, you know, no, Justin Trudeau didn't just win that round.

I'm still the tough guy.

Well, that's what happens when you move with speed instead of deliberation.

And they're moving very quickly.

I mean, it's six weeks, and it feels like it's been six years, you know, to make all of these changes.

And so they — but the overall goal is to — they say is to reduce government.

Some would say it is to remake government.

It feels like they're trying to crush government as we know it, and without really understanding the key elements that we depend on and when we're talking about the things that America has traditionally stood for — reliability, competence.

These are things that our allies look to us for.

When you don't think about government in an abstract way, but when you call the Social

Security Department, when you want to visit a national park, you expect that things are going to — that the trains are going to run on time.

And they're making indiscriminate cuts that seem to undermine the very things that government stand for.

He's concerned with one thing, and that's power.

Maybe two things — power and strength.

And that's a projection as opposed to actually — you know, if we truly were strong, we would be moving in a different way.

If we truly were concerned about projecting strength, we — you don't have to, like, walk in with a chainsaw.

You pick up a scalpel.

I think most people agree that there probably are areas in the government that could use a haircut, you know, that you could pull back a little bit.

But you don't walk around with a chainsaw and just — those are raggedy cuts.

Raggedy is not a word that you want associated, you know, with government.

Most people in business would not conduct themselves in this manner.

And yet, someone who's known — you know, that's how he entered the world stage as someone who is a businessman, has taken a rather strange approach to conducting business when he's making decisions about people's livelihoods, about the direction of the country, about the people that we align ourselves with on the world stage.

And I think one indication of how wobbly this all is, is generally — and you know this,

Lawrence.

When people deliver — when presidents deliver a State of the Union address, there's usually a rollout afterwards, where they go out and they travel the country and they talk about their initiatives.

And they didn't do that because they don't think that they could probably walk into that space.

Yeah.

Michelle Norris, please come by whenever you possibly can.

The seat's always here for you.

Thank you very much for joining us tonight.

We'll be right back.

Trump backed down today.

It doesn't happen every day.

But because Donald Trump is actually, by far, the most cowardly president we have ever had, who's pretending to be a tough guy, he has backed down in his first presidency, and now in this one, more than any other president has done it.

He backs down within a day of making decisions, pulls them back.

Donald Trump backed down today, and no one was surprised.

There are people who have to make their living based on knowing when Donald Trump is going to back down.

They include the richest people in America and their day-to-day investment practitioners on Wall Street.

Wall Street knows that Donald Trump is a pathological liar, which everyone knows.

And Wall Street knows that Donald Trump doesn't understand anything about economics.

Nothing.

Wall Street has been listening to Donald Trump very carefully for years, and they've never once heard Donald Trump accurately describe what a tariff is.

The truth of tariffs forced Donald Trump to back down today.

Wall Street knows that Donald Trump lies every time he talks about tariffs.

Everyone on Wall Street knows that no foreign country has ever paid an American tariff and never will.

And Wall Street knows the only people who pay Trump tariffs are people in the United

States who pay for imported goods, like, say, coffee.

Unless you're one of the lucky ones who has tasted the very small batch and very expensive coffee grown in Hawaii, not one drop of coffee you have swallowed in your life came from an American coffee bean.

Every ounce of coffee you have swallowed came from another country.

According to Donald Trump, the United States of America should be buying nothing from other countries.

Tell that to the 211,000 people working in Starbucks just in the United States and the 361,000 people working in Starbucks worldwide.

The coffee economy in the United States employs literally millions of people, all based on a product imported from other countries, imported from Africa, imported from South

America.

And this country could not survive a day without coffee, and we all know it.

I could go on and on listing examples of why international trade is a good and necessary thing.

That is a fact that has been known since before the American colonies were settled, but Donald

Trump doesn't know it.

And so Wall Street knows that their job is to teach their slowest student, Donald Trump, whenever he goes dangerously too far on his illegal Trump tariff crusade.

And the Trump tariffs are illegal because the Constitution puts Congress exclusively in charge of tariffs, just as Congress is exclusively in charge of income tax rates.

But a provision that entered federal law during the Cold War provided the president with the authority to change individual tariffs only for national security reasons.

The intention at the time was to allow the president to personally change tariffs in the event of war.