Plain Talk With Rob Port

When former Congressman Earl Pomeroy looks at the protests today against the Trump administration and the so-called "big, beautiful bill" in Congress, he sees echoes of the 2009 protests that ended his tenure in elected office. "There's going to be an election day reckoning," Pomeroy, a Democrat who represented North Dakota in the U.S. House from 1993 to 2010, said on this episode of Plain Talk. What was interesting about this discussion is that many of the 2009-era "tea party" protests in North Dakota were organized, in part, by me. Pomeroy said that in 2009, there were times when voters would be "mad as hell out there" but Democratic leaders in Washington D.C. were dismissive. "The leadership would say to the nervous members not to worry. They'll get over it. Or, as has been said with the more recent demonstrations, or the passionate town halls, oh, these are paid agitators." He says he still thinks the 2009 protesters were operating on bad information, but that they should have been taken seriously. "What