Face the Nation: Gottlieb, Lieu, Soeripto

OK. Dr. Gottlieb, we're going to have to leave it there. I want to have you back to talk about vaping one of these days. But I'm going to have to leave it there due to time constraints. Thank you so much for your analysis. We'll be back in a moment. Virginia Democrats suffered a major setback on Friday when the state Supreme court struck down a congressional map recently approved by voters that could have created four Democratic House districts. The court's majority found that the timing of the referendum process had violated the state's Constitution. Virginia Democrats say they plan to challenge that decision. Meanwhile, furious Democratic protesters charge state capitals in Louisiana--

Let us speak!

--Alabama-- [CHANTING] --and Tennessee--

No to redraw!

--when legislators there took steps to redraw current district maps that would be favorable to Republicans. Congressional maps in at least five other states have also been changed for partisan reasons ahead of the midterm elections. CBS estimates that Republicans are now approximately nine seats closer to keeping control of the House. We go now to California Congressman Ted Lieu. He is the vice chair of the Democratic caucus and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He joins us this morning from Los Angeles. Good morning to you. Good morning Margaret. So you are in Democratic leadership. You just heard us lay out what's going on with redistricting. How concerned are you that Republicans now hold the advantage, given the recent court decisions Thank you, Margaret, for that question. Let me just first say Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers across America. Regarding your question, I would disagree that Republicans may have a nine-seat advantage, because that's based on data from last term. And the Trump coalition has completely collapsed because of skyrocketing gas prices, surging inflation. And if you look at the polling data and the results we've had in special elections this year as well as last year, we think the Republicans may have an advantage of anywhere between three to five additional seats. That is not enough for them to stop a Democratic blue wave coming this November. And the best thing to do when a court does something outlandish, like the Virginia Supreme Court, is to get back up and fight and make sure we win in the midterms. But that Virginia push by Democrats, you spent more than $60 million on that redistricting effort. Wouldn't those funds have been better spent on those frontline candidates and arguing on the issues? So what the Virginia Supreme Court did was not only wrong, it was disgraceful. They basically said, hey, Virginia, spend all this taxpayer's money holding an election, do all this stuff, and oh, by the way, just kidding. That election didn't count. The court could have stopped this by not having the election in the first place. They suckered the people of Virginia. It was a complete disgrace. Now, most of the money that Democrats spent in the race is called C4 money. So that's not direct hard money that we're going to need for races in the midterms. But it was taxpayers' money that was wasted because of the disgraceful opinion by the Supreme Court. You think it was worth the financial cost? I mean, are Democrats going to somehow continue to fight this in court? We're going to look at all available options. We're definitely going to try to keep fighting this battle. And I just want to note, the best way, again, if someone shoves you down is to get right back up and fight back. And that's what we're going to do. And of these four seats in Virginia, we believe we're going to win two of them in the midterms. And that's what we're doing. We're fighting back. So you still believe that Democrats can retake the House? What is your main message? We will take the House.

On what message? The American people voted on Donald Trump because they wanted lower costs, and he lied to them. We have surging inflation, skyrocketing gas prices. The Trump tariffs have raised costs across many products across America. People are drowning in debt and in bills, and Democrats are going to reduce health care costs, lower costs across the board, reduce your energy costs. That's the message we're running on.

How are you going to do that? Democrats shut down the government to have an argument over health care, and they didn't get any policy concessions. And premiums went up. You lost that fight. Well, actually, we passed through the House an extension of ACA tax credits for three years. We urged the Senate to pass that legislation as well. Democrats, when we get control, we're going to reverse the massive Medicaid cuts, the Medicare cuts, and the cuts of ACA that Trump and Republicans put in last year. Let me ask you about your position on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Secretary Rubio said Taiwan will likely be discussed during President Trump's visit to China this week to meet with Xi Jinping. This is a hugely consequential summit. On Friday, Taiwan's parliament approved $25 billion in funds to buy more American weapons. Are you largely supportive at this point of the Trump administration's willingness to strengthen Taiwan's defense? Both Democratic and Republican administrations have had the exact same policy, which is to preserve the current status quo. And we're trying to keep China from doing anything stupid in Indo-Pacific, including a military conflict. And I just want to emphasize that the Iran war has shown that we need a brand-new strategy in the Indo-Pacific, because in any prolonged conflict with China or Russia, the US will run out of defensive munitions. We already started running out of defensive munitions in a war that lasted less than 60 days. And even against a second-rate military like Iran, they struck multiple US bases. So in any overseas conflict, our overseas bases will be obliterated by Russia and China. We need a new defense strategy, and I call on the Pentagon to deliver that to Congress. Well, President Trump has made these record-large promises of arms sales to Taiwan. Are you saying that America actually can't deliver on them because the stockpiles are so depleted and the industrial base can't deliver? That's absolutely correct. We don't have enough defensive munitions in any prolonged conflict with Russia and China that will sustain what we need to do. We could even do this in Iran of a war of less than 60 days. We started to run low on defensive munitions. And part of the problem is some of these missiles, for example, take a long time to make. We basically make 96 of some of these defensive missiles a year. That's just not enough. I want to ask you about AI. New York Timesreported that President Trump is considering an executive order that would implement some government oversight over new AI models. I know you have legislation on [AUDIO OUT]. I just want to first say, as a recovering computer science major, I think it is horrible for their AI industry to run wild. We need to have reasonable guardrails.

OK, sorry. I think we're having-- Can you hear me? Yeah, I think we're both having audio issues there, Congressman. But I'm going to go to commercial break here. Thank you. We turn now to Janti Soeripto. She is the president and CEO of Save the Children US, which works to provide humanitarian aid and health resources to children worldwide. Good to have you here on this Mother's Day. Thank you, Margaret, and Happy Mother's Day. You're just back from Sudan, which is one of the hardest places in the world to be a parent, certainly to be a mother. Pope Leo called it an inhumane tragedy. The UN says 34 million people need urgent assistance. I know the US is trying to work on humanitarian ceasefire, but tell me what you saw there on the ground. Well, Margaret, it is truly the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with millions of people in need, and probably also the one that gets the least attention relative to the need. It literally took me four days to actually get from here to see the first school that we are supporting there. So the level of logistical and operational impediments to actually get support to children and mothers where they are is unbelievably difficult. You have to cross multiple lines of various militant groups. It is truly, truly the last mile. And the scale of the need is really astonishing. I see a lot of emergency situations across the world. I see a lot of fragile states, but this was really right up there.

I know the US has said this is essentially a proxy fight now. But when you look at the humanitarian need, some of the statistics that were flooring to me here was the degree of sexual violence. It is systematically used as a tactic of war, according to the UN. 13 million people, mostly women and girls, require support, according to the UN, related to that kind of violence. That's four times higher than before the conflict. Doctors Without Borders said the war is being fought on the backs and bodies of women and girls, but they fault aid groups for not doing enough. Do you think aid groups are? We're doing what we can, but I would certainly agree that it is not enough. We simply do not have the resources. And I would agree with what I heard there. And that is just a tiny tip of the iceberg was completely unbelievable. Our colleagues there, we have about 150 colleagues in Darfur, which is the area where I was. All of those have lost their homes. They are displaced themselves. They have lost their homes. Most of them came from El Fasher, where a lot of the violence occurred last October. I spoke to a colleague of mine who had to walk with her 16-year-old daughter. The daughter was threatened. She fought. I mean, I saw the scars on her face. She fought to help her daughter, to keep her daughter alive and safe. And then she did get out and was essentially rescued by somebody. So this one had a somewhat happy ending. But so, so many don't have that. And you see it in the eyes of the women that I spoke to. They walked for days without sleep, just trying to keep themselves and their families alive. Most of the households in the north of Darfur, where I was, where there are 700,000 displaced people in one stretch of desert, the vast majority of those households are women-led households. The men have either been killed or have disappeared or have joined the fighting groups. So these women are literally doing everything they can to keep their families and themselves alive. There's a lot of humanitarian aid that's stuck in that Strait of Hormuz right now because of the war in Iran.

That's right. How significant is the impact on the ability to give goods to those who need it? Yeah, it is truly what we say. This is another element of the example of the cost of war. There is a human cost, and then there's the financial cost, which also lead to human costs. We have currently about a half a million stocks still stuck in Dubai that we can't get out, medicine, drugs. Cost of transport have gone up, as you hear everywhere. So the Plumpy'Nut treatment for malnutrition for young infants and children who are malnourished is now-- what is it? 12% to 15% more expensive than it was before the war. And it takes longer to get there because we have to find alternative routes versus the direct route we had. So yes, it makes it harder. And our supply chain teams have are already-- who have to be incredibly creative and adaptive all the time, because the logistics in the country are also incredibly difficult to get authorization to-- I mean, the tarmac road ended an hour after from the border in western Darfur. So from then on in, it is essentially a very, very rocky road. So to get stuff there, even physically, it takes days and sometimes weeks. Let me ask you about the Middle East. The White House says there is tremendous progress on implementing President Trump's 20-point peace plan in Gaza. I know you and a number of other organizations said six months into the Gaza ceasefire, the plan is failing. Those are two incredibly different accounts of what's happening on the ground. What is happening on the ground? So we've taken a 20-point plan, and we literally looked at, OK, so what are we seeing on the ground? So we took the data, our own staff accounts of what they were witnessing, publicly available data from the UN and others to say, OK, so is there less violence? Is there unfettered access for supplies and for staff? And we scored them accordingly. We've published the methodology, and we stand by those facts as we see them. I mean, we have 200 staff in Gaza doing heroic work every day. It is incredibly difficult for us to get supplies in. We cannot get staff in and rotate it. So no, that plan as it stands is not working. Janti Soeripto, thank you for the work you are doing. We'll be right back.

Thank you. That's it for us today. Thank you all for watching and Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, until next week. For Face the Nation, I'm Margaret Brennan. [THEME MUSIC]