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The Situation Room
Examining Beta-Blockers; Interview With Sen. Chuck Schumer (D- NY); New Video of Tiger Woods Arrest Released. Aired 11:30a-12p ET
Aired April 02, 2026 - 11:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[11:30:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (OFF-MIKE)
TIGER WOODS, PROFESSIONAL GOLFER: (OFF-MIKE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (OFF-MIKE) And you're going to take my car. And place your hands behind your back. Place them behind your back. There you go.
So, at this time, I do believe your normal faculties are impaired, OK, and you're under the unknown substance, OK? So, at this time, you are under arrest for DUI, yes, sir.
OK. Do you have anything on you that's going to poke, stick or press?
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nothing on you (OFF-MIKE) poke, stick or stab me?
WOODS: No. No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Can you spread your legs for me?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (OFF-MIKE)
WOODS: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (OFF-MIKE) He had a bag?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. (OFF-MIKE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (OFF-MIKE)
WOODS: It's a Narco (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a Narco?
WOODS: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. He says it's Narco.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) 325.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Realize, if you do have something else, please tell us now, because...
(CROSSTALK)
WOODS: I have nothing else.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. I just -- just one of the disclaimers we got to give.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ISABEL ROSALES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And you might be wondering why that field sobriety test didn't look like normal body camera footage that you have seen of field sobriety tests, where they're stepping, one foot in front of the other.
Well, that was because deputies noticed Woods stumbling and limping, and he told them: "I have physical limitations. I had seven back surgeries and over 20 operations on my leg."
So they allowed him to do that field sobriety test sitting down on the bumper of that sheriff's deputy's vehicle. And we saw in that video Woods telling that deputy that he had not consumed any alcohol, but had taken a few prescription medications earlier in the day.
And, of course, we saw, a few of the -- of the tests, one of which was the hand coordination test. We do have the arrest affidavit, which fills in the blank of what they were doing there.
And we noticed here that the deputy put: "He began the exercise prior to my instructions. He did not count the steps correctly, but counted to four. Based on my observations, how he performed the exercise, I believe that Woods' normal faculties were impaired, and he was unable to safely operate the motor vehicle."
And we did hear that deputy in fact say that: Yes, I believe you're under an unknown substance. At this time, you are under arrest for a DUI.
No alcohol in the system, but we do know that they found on his body in the front pocket two prescription hydrocodone pills. And Woods, through his attorney and a statement that he published on social media, saying that he has entered a plea of not guilty, he's demanding a jury trial and saying that he is committed to his healing -- Pam.
PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Yes, and he's also not going to be in the Masters.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Right.
(CROSSTALK)
ROSALES: Or the Ryder Cup.
BROWN: Or the Ryder Cup.
All right, Isabel Rosales, thank you so much.
[11:35:00]
We're going to have more when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: New this morning, President Trump posted on social media that Republicans are -- quote -- "unified" and that he will order all Department of Homeland Security employees be paid.
The Senate earlier today announced -- advanced the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, except for ICE and Border Patrol, for a second time. But now it seems to have House Speaker Mike Johnson's actual support. Johnson and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, announced a two-part plan yesterday to end the partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown.
It includes passing a Trump-backed megabill to secure extra immigration money through a process known as reconciliation without Democrats.
[11:40:04]
BROWN: And joining us now to further discuss is Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
Thanks for coming on the show, Senator.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): Hi. Good to be here.
BROWN: So, this plan that just passed in the Senate does not include the reforms to immigration enforcement operations that Democrats had not only demanded, but even used as reasons to withhold their votes for DHS funding when all of this began more than a month ago.
What did your party actually accomplish with this shutdown?
SCHUMER: Well, first, let me say that the Republicans are hardly unified.
Johnson, for the second time, rejected a proposal made this morning by John Thune with unanimous consent support of all the Republicans to fund the DHS agencies like the Coast Guard, like FEMA, like CISA, which we need. This is now clearly the Johnson shutdown. It's a Republican shutdown.
All he had to do was put that bill on the floor and it would have passed overwhelmingly. So the Republicans are hardly unified. They're squirming about.
Democrats for three months -- or three weeks, rather, have been trying to fund all of the other agencies. We're not going to fund a lawless ICE or CBP, but we have been trying to fund TSA. We have been trying to fund Coast Guard. And the Republicans have blocked it repeatedly.
So this shutdown is on their back. And the failure, their failure to want to reform DHS -- sorry -- to reform ICE and C -- and Border Patrol, which are now doing things that we -- all we want them to do is what every police department does. Use warrants, OK? Don't mask. Cooperate with local authorities. American people want that. Everyone wants that.
But a group of right-wing Republicans who just like ICE and CBP as it is, as much as we all abhor it, and it's on them.
BROWN: Well, you have heard the new DHS secretary say that there will be reforms, particularly to warrants and in other areas.
But just to follow up on my original question, look, ICE and CBP, they are funded, I mean, with billions of dollars from last year's budget bill for the next few years. So what did Democrats actually accomplish with this shutdown, where you saw many government employees really struggle?
SCHUMER: Well, as, again, we were ready to fund the rest of DHS. It was the Republicans who blocked it over and over again. So that's on them.
But, second, the bottom line is, what we have shown the American people is, we want obvious commonsense reforms to DH -- to ICE and CBP, and the Republicans don't. If they want to fund it with the same kind of chaos, the horror we have seen in Minneapolis, in Portland, and in other cities with a D -- an ICE and CBP that are lawless, it's on their back.
BLITZER: President Trump's new order, as you know, to pay all Department of Homeland Security employees will provide welcome relief for these workers, especially the TSA workers.
Do you give him any credit for that, Senator?
SCHUMER: No, we have been trying to do it for three weeks, and Trump has opposed it. We proposed funding all of those other agencies, not ICE and CBP until they reform, but all the other agencies, and they said no.
And so the best way to get them paid was for Johnson to put the bill that the Senate passed this morning with Thune's leadership on the floor, and we passed it.
BLITZER: What do you say to those critics who argue that both ICE and Border Patrol are already set with funding, millions and millions of dollars, because of President Trump's so-called Big Beautiful Bill that passed months ago?
So Democrats just held up this legislation for what, for political posturing, is that right? SCHUMER: Well, that's not fair at all. We held it up because we
wanted, as I mentioned before, to reform ICE and CBP, which are lawless.
The American people are totally on our side, I think by 2-1 or close to that. They want it reformed. And that's what we're pushing for. We're not going to fund a lawless ICE and a lawless CBP, and the American people are overwhelmingly on our side on that.
BLITZER: But they're already funded, right?
SCHUMER: Well, if they put funding in from their other bills and want to keep funding a lawless ICE, a lawless CBP that creates chaos in our cities, it's on their back. We're not going to participate in that.
BROWN: The bottom line is, Democrats are in the minority. You mentioned what the American people want.
Overall, the American people are not happy with the Democratic Party. CNN's recent polling shows that a broad 74 percent of the public says Democrats in Congress have the wrong priorities. How do you respond to that as the Democratic leader in the Senate?
SCHUMER: Look at just about all the elections, whether they were the elections in New Jersey and in Virginia, throughout the country. The American people are choosing Democrats over Republicans. And why?
[11:45:00]
Because they know that the Republicans are the party of costs, high costs, people's costs are going way up, of chaos, not only chaos in the cities, but chaos in Iran. What we're seeing in Iran is one of the worst foreign policy fiascoes, disasters in American history.
When Trump started in Iran, he didn't have any goals. No one knew what the goals are. After the speech last night, no one knows them again. No one is any clearer on what those goals are. And our main fo -- main -- the two main things we need to do, clear the Straits of Hormuz and get rid of the -- find the nuclear materials that Iran could use, we are -- we know nothing more about that after this ridiculous, rambling speech.
So the American people are on our side on the major issues, on costs, on Iran, and on reforming this government and getting rid of the chaos and the corruption.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHUMER: So we're doing -- we're united, we're strong, and we're doing very well. And the best way to test that is election results.
BROWN: Right.
SCHUMER: In just about all of the election results, we have dominated. BROWN: And that is true in the recent elections. And it is true that
the Iran war is unpopular broadly among the American people. And President Trump is unpopular broadly.
But, overall, when you look at the polling about priorities, the American people are unhappy with what Democrats have been doing. And they indicate, these polls, that you have historically low performance ratings. What specifically can you be doing to bring these numbers up and reestablish trust within both your own party and with your constituents?
SCHUMER: The bottom line is, our caucus and our party is strong and united. And we are fighting very hard. We're fighting to lower the costs.
Today is tariff day. Democrats, we have come out with a proposal of how to get rid of these tariffs and reduce the costs to the American people. We have talked about how to reduce the health care costs, the electricity costs, the cost of housing. We're on the American people's side.
And we're going to keep talking about this, talking about this, talking about this. And it's going to help us, you will see, take back the House and the Senate in 2026. The American people much prefer us over Trump and the Republicans.
BLITZER: Those midterm elections coming up in November. We will see what happens.
The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, as usual, thanks so much for joining us.
BROWN: Thank you very much.
SCHUMER: Great to be here. Thank you. Take care.
BLITZER: And we will have more news right after a quick break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:51:36]
BLITZER: Happening now, scientists are watching a new COVID-19 variant called the Cicada variant. They say it appears mostly to be affecting children, but is not causing more severe disease in kids or adults.
Current vaccines are believed to offer at least some protection. Right now, it appears to be circulating in the U.S. at low levels.
BROWN: Well, my son just had it. So...
BLITZER: Yes.
BROWN: All right, well, doctors are taking a new look at beta- blockers. They have been prescribed to heart attack survivors for decades, and many patients end up taking them for the rest of their lives.
BLITZER: Every case is certainly unique, but doctors are now asking if beta-blockers are always necessary long term.
CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Pamela and Wolf, let me just give you some context first.
These are widely prescribed medications. And, by that, I mean that about 10 percent of all U.S. adults take beta-blockers. So this is obviously getting a lot of attention in the cardiology community, but the medical community as a whole.
The thinking behind beta-blockers is this. Someone has had a heart attack. Certain heart muscle has died. The rest of the heart is under strain. At that time, you want to decrease blood pressure. You want to slow down the heart rate to sort of take the stress off the heart. That's the basic gist of it.
And, for more than 40 years, that's why cardiologists and doctors have been prescribing beta-blockers. Again, they have become sort of a standard of care. But over the last 40 years, a few things have changed. First of all, we have gotten much better at treating heart attacks.
We have got much faster at treating heart attacks, opening up blood vessels, restoring blood flow to the heart, using blood thinners, using medications like statins, all that to say that people do better after heart attacks nowadays than they used to before. So that's the big thing.
Then they decided to test this, to basically say, OK, let's look at populations of people who stayed on beta-blockers after a heart attack and those who discontinued that. And you find that there wasn't much of a difference between the two, as you can see there.
And I think that's what sort of has started this entire movement here to say, look, let's reevaluate beta-blockers. Now, it's not going to mean that everybody who's had a heart attack is not going to need a beta-blocker. There will certainly be people who still do.
And after -- right after a heart attack, patients will probably still be prescribed beta-blockers. But here's the big difference. In those patients who have had a heart attack and their heart function has remained pretty good as a result of all the things I just talked about, the angioplasties and blood thinners and things like that, they probably will no longer need to be on blood thinners -- beta-blockers long term.
They won't need these medications long term because they don't seem to make much of a difference. Heart function, incidentally, is sort of measured by how much, what percentage of blood is pushed out of the heart with every contraction.
Once it gets 50, 60 percent, that's considered normal. And if someone's not changing and decreasing their heart function, they will probably be able to get off the beta-blockers. About half the population, they estimate, will sort of fall into that pattern.
So that could dramatically bring down the number of people who need beta-blockers in this country. Look, there are side effects with all medications. Beta-blockers are no different. Think about it. You're decreasing blood flow as a result of lowering blood pressure, decreasing heart rate, so cold hands and feet. People get very tired.
[11:55:05]
Sometimes, they have weight gain, dizziness, lightheadedness. There can be problems with these medications. They're not necessarily that expensive, about $20 a month. But, again, keep in mind, for a lot of these people, they take these medications for the rest of their life.
And I think, as a result of these new studies, Pamela and Wolf, that's likely to change.
BROWN: All right, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thanks so much.
BLITZER: Always gives us very, very good advice.
And, to our viewers, thanks very much for joining us this morning. And, to our Jewish viewers, we want to wish you a very happy and safe Passover.
BROWN: We will see you back here tomorrow morning and every weekday morning at 10:00 a.m. Eastern.
"INSIDE POLITICS" with our friend and colleague Dana Bash starts after a quick break.
