All Episodes
Previous Next
March 31, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:08
Ep. 279 - Both Parties Are Preparing To Commit Suicide
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
You remember that time Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they were a minority in Congress, so Conservatives elected them to a majority?
You remember that time the Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they were a minority in the Senate, so Conservatives elected them to a majority?
Do you remember that time Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they didn't have the White House, since the President could just use the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for a government shutdown, so Conservatives elected Trump President?
Yeah, Republicans were lying.
Republicans now have the opportunity to pass continuing funding for the federal government through the budget process.
This would be an excellent time to make approval of funding contingent on defunding of various Democratic priorities.
After all, if Democrats attempt to shut down the government, presumably President Trump can rail against them by publicly blaming them for harming Americans, just like Obama did to Republicans.
But that's not what's happening.
As Daniel Horowitz writes at Conservative Review, Senate Republicans have not only guaranteed Democrats they will give them all the policies and spending levels in the budget bill, but they will also jettison the president's request for a supplemental spending bill for construction of the border wall along with spending offsets.
So, what kind of garbage are Republicans funding this time in order to avoid a government shutdown fight?
You remember the same kind of fight they said a minority party could never win back in 2013?
When Ted Cruz tried to defund Obamacare?
First, they're going to keep funding for Planned Parenthood.
So five minutes ago, President Trump was tweeting about how the Freedom Caucus had maintained federal funding for Planned Parenthood by not going along with Trumpcare.
Now we learn that according to The Hill, Paul Ryan, quote, sought to avoid another political landmine on Tuesday by arguing that language defunding Planned Parenthood should be kept out of the spending legislation.
He now says instead he wants to defund Planned Parenthood through reconciliation.
So do it, Speaker Ryan.
What is stopping you, aside from your own political cowardice?
Second, they said that they're going to keep funding for Obamacare.
So, Republicans had time after time during the Obama administration that if they kept funding continuing budget resolutions, they'd be funding Obamacare.
Now the Republicans control the whole process, and they're still going to fund Obamacare.
Why?
Because the Democrats might shut down the government.
Senator Dick Durbin said that Republicans would be blamed for a shutdown because they control all the branches of the government.
But we were told by Republicans that minority parties shutting down the government damages minority parties.
So what the hell?
Finally, apparently they're not going to fund the Trump wall.
Republicans now say they won't provide the $3 billion of funding requested by the Trump administration to build a border wall, which was, of course, Trump's top campaign promise.
They won't do it because they're afraid of Democratic filibuster.
Of course.
So, it appears that the new standard for Republicans is that the government must never shut down under any circumstances, which doesn't actually make them very different from Democrats, does it?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so I have a lot to get to today.
I'm going to begin today with the meltdown in the Democratic Party, the self-immolation of the Democratic Party, but then we have to get to the self-immolation of the Republican Party, which is twice as dramatic and twice as unacceptable, considering that they're the majority party in Congress and they have the presidency.
So we'll start with the Democrats, who for some reason have decided to rush headlong over the Gorsuch Cliff.
So right now, polls show that two to one Americans think that Judge Gorsuch ought to get an up or down vote on the Supreme Court.
Now, to be fair, polls showed that people thought that Merrick Garland should get an up or down vote on the Supreme Court, but Republicans weren't damaged by that because nobody really cares all that much.
I don't think people care all that much about the Gorsuch thing.
The real problem here is not the public opinion polls.
The real problem for Democrats is that if they use the filibuster on Gorsuch and Republicans then nuked the filibuster...
Next time Trump comes back with the swing vote, let's say Anthony Kennedy resigns, and suddenly Trump has that fifth vote on the Supreme Court, Democrats will have already nuked the filibuster, so they will have no option but to basically sit there and whine.
So what they would be smarter off doing is saying, look, Gorsuch is a good consensus nominee, we'll pass him through, and then next time, that's when you have the filibuster fight.
You say this is the fifth vote on the Supreme Court, We can't have somebody who's so far right-wing.
We need somebody who's a consensus pick.
That would be the smart politics of the situation, but that's not what they're doing.
And that's because everybody on the Democratic side hates Trump so much that they're not even willing to engage in smart politics in order to hurt him, which is an incredible thing.
Here's Chuck Schumer opposing the nomination of Judge Gorsuch.
That's why he's having trouble earning 60 votes.
There was a seismic change after his hearing.
There were suspicions about Judge Gorsuch when you look at his early writings and who he hung out with, and particularly that it was on a list that the Heritage Foundation, who most Republicans think is too far to the right, was.
Chosen from that list.
He was chosen from that list.
Chuck Schumer clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
He kind of loses his train of thought in the middle there and starts thinking about how nice it would be to be on a beach not talking about Judge Gorsuch because this is a losing issue for Democrats.
The Democrats just continue to maintain that Trump is going to fall apart of his own accord.
They're not going to have to do anything to push it and so they may as well just oppose him at every turn.
Maxine Waters, whose hair most definitely does not look like James Brown's hair, stopped saying that.
Maxine Waters said that Trump doesn't deserve to be president.
He came to the presidency with the kind of character and background that made me distrust him, not honor him, and not respect him.
And, of course, he got the presidency because he was able to get those votes from those few states that made him the winner.
And so he's the president of the United States.
People are still talking about he's going to change.
He's going to become presidential.
He has not changed.
He is not presidential.
As a matter of fact, he's worse now than even he was in the campaign.
And I think that he does not deserve to represent us in the world.
We are being disrespectful.
Okay, good luck with this, gang.
I mean, if this is their real plan here, their real plan is just that they're going to rail against Trump for the next four years, that would give Republicans a major opportunity, especially.
And what would give Republicans even more of an opportunity is the fact that the only real scandal on the table that we actually know about at this point is the intelligence community leaking.
So people have talked about this, and I've said this ad infinitum at this point.
The fact is that everybody's talking about Trump-Russia, the connections between Trump and the Russian government, supposedly.
There hasn't been a shred of evidence right now showing coordination between the Trump team or the Trump campaign And the Russian government.
Zero shreds of evidence.
Lots and lots and lots of evidence, however, that the Obama intelligence community was widely disseminating information attempting to essentially implicate the Trump team in Russian ties and foreign ties.
So a former Obama intelligence official, this video has been around for probably three weeks, but now it's sort of being passed around again because of Trump's accusations.
This former Obama intelligence official She's, I guess, a former Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense.
She says that it was clear that in the last days of the Obama administration, she, along with other people, was encouraging a lot of people in the intelligence community to widely disseminate information about President Trump in order to basically make sure that the Trump team didn't come in and destroy it.
So here's what she had to say.
It's clip 16.
It was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.
And what she actually says there is she says that they raced to basically pump out information on Trump.
She said, I had a fear that some of that information would disappear when senior Obama people left.
So it'd be hidden away in the bureaucracy that Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.
So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more.
We have very good intelligence on Russia.
So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew that they were trying to also get help to get information to the Hill.
Her name is Evelyn Farkas, and she was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Obama.
So she's basically saying that there was information there, and we were widely trying to disseminate it, specifically with the goal that it would become public.
Okay, it would be illegal for all of this unmasking, the unmasking of Mike Flynn, for example, the National Security Advisor.
That's actually illegal.
You can't just throw out wiretapping information on American citizens, even if they were caught up in a foreign wiretap.
You can't just throw that information out there and then pretend like nothing bad happened.
That is legal violation.
Democrats are ignoring a scandal that obviously is real in favor of a scandal that may very well be fake, the Trump-Russia scandal.
The Trump administration continues to deny it.
So the Democrats really have nothing here.
They're basically just hoping that the Republicans set themselves on fire.
Fortunately!
That's a pretty good bet.
So the Republicans have decided that it will be totally worthwhile to set themselves on fire.
President Trump, yesterday, he was speaking at the White House with some people.
He said, don't worry, healthcare is going to be easy.
I love that he's continuing to say this after the failure of Trumpcare.
It demonstrates a little bit of a disconnect.
Here's President Trump.
And I know that we're all going to make a deal on healthcare.
That's such an easy one.
So I have no doubt that that's going to happen very quickly.
I think it will actually.
I think it's going to happen.
Because we've all been promising, Democrat, Republican, we've all been promising that to the American people.
So I think a lot of good things are going to happen there.
Okay, what does Trump actually want to do here?
What he actually wants to do here is he wants to come up with some sort of bipartisan plan.
So that's not going to happen.
Look at Chuck Schumer stalling on Gorsuch, who's a consensus nominee, if ever there was one, got zero votes against him when he was elevated to the appeals court under George W. Bush.
Here he is saying that he basically wants a consensus plan, and then just to double down on that, today Donald Trump went to war openly with the Freedom Caucus again.
So here's what he tweeted.
He tweeted, the Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team and fast.
We must fight them and Dems in 2018.
We must fight them?
The Freedom Caucus, you mean the conservatives?
You mean the Tea Party people who are a large constituency in your base?
You mean people like Louie Gohmert who openly campaigned for you and Mark Meadows who openly campaigned for you?
Those are the people you have to fight because they voted against Trumpcare?
Donald Trump is now trying to triangulate.
He's trying to do a Bill Clinton, except that he owns the Congress.
Okay, Clinton waited until Republicans ran the Congress to triangulate.
Trump is preemptively trying to triangulate.
The problem is Democrats are not interested in working with President Trump.
This follows hard, by the way, on last week's tweetstorm targeting the Freedom Caucus over the failure of his Trumpcare plan.
You recall, we talked about it at length.
He said Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club for Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood and Ocare.
Now, as you'll recall, five seconds ago, I just told you about how the Trump administration, along with Speaker Ryan, are going to preserve Planned Parenthood funding in the current budget deal because they're afraid of Democrats.
So who's preserving Planned Parenthood funding?
Oh that's right, it's the establishment and President Trump.
But now it's clear that Trump is trying to go to war with these conservatives and he's figuring one of two things.
One, he can peel off enough conservatives from the Freedom Caucus to vote with him on future bills by threatening them.
That didn't work out well last time.
Or two, he's figuring that by yelling at the Freedom Caucus, suddenly Democrats will be warmer to him, which is idiocy.
The Democrats are not going to work with President Trump.
They think that he's vulnerable, they have their boot on his throat, and they figure that he's a 35% approval rating right now.
If they just keep demonstrating that he's ineffective and unable to get anything done, he'll be down in the 20s.
For Trump, Bannon, Reince, Ryan, for all these people to be advising Trump to walk across the aisle to Democrats is just puerile idiocy.
It is so stupid.
Just mathematically, it's idiotic.
Right now, Republicans have 246 votes in Congress.
You need 218 in order to have a majority.
There are 30 members of the Freedom Caucus.
Trump, in that tweet alone, says that he's going to fight Democrats and the Freedom Caucus.
Democrats and the Freedom Caucus, combined, have more than 218 votes.
Okay, Democrats, that means that Republicans who are not the Freedom Caucus, and this doesn't even include the establishment Republicans who voted against Trumpcare.
Okay, there's another 10 to 15 people.
Right now, Trump is at like 216.
At the upper limit, he's at 216, unless he can peel away some of these Freedom Caucus members by screaming at them on Twitter, and they apparently don't care.
I mean, if you take a look, It's a swamp, not a hot tub.
A lot of these conservatives are responding.
Thomas Massey, a representative from Massachusetts, not technically a member of the Freedom Caucus, but is a very conservative member of Congress.
He said, it's a swamp, not a hot tub.
We both came here to drain it.
Swamp care pulls it 17%.
Sad.
Justin Amash from Michigan.
That's basically right.
So here's the question.
No shame, Mr. President.
Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. establishment.
And that's basically right.
That's basically right.
So here's the question.
Where do Trump's actual sympathies really lie?
Apparently, you know, we were told that they lied with the Mike Pence wing of the party, that they lied, that they lay with the Louie Gohmert wing of the party, that when Trump got into office, he'd be an anti-establishment conservative, that as my friend Dennis Prager says, he'd be a conservative dream.
Here's how this administration is actually broken down.
Aside from Judge Gorsuch, which he basically delegated to Mike Pence and the Heritage Foundation to pick.
Aside from those people.
Everything that he delegates to his own staffers, like the EPA, Scott Pruitt at the EPA, or Attorney General Sessions at the DOJ, all that stuff is good.
Everything that Trump sticks his hands into turns into a mess, because Trump is not actually conservative, and he has very anti-conservative tendencies, and that is obvious.
At least he has Paul Ryan to fall back on, though.
Paul Ryan came out today, and he said that It's going to be the conservatives who force Trump to work with the Democrats.
Which is Ryan's way of kissing Trump's ass.
I hate this sort of nonsense.
This is a joke, okay?
This is basically saying that if Daddy Trump decides to cheat on Mommy Conservatives with Mistress Democrats, that's just because Mommy Conservatives weren't putting out enough.
If mommy conservatives had only been willing to go along with all the weird things that Daddy Trump wanted to do, then he wouldn't have had to go to mistress Democrats for a little bit of pleasing outside the bonds of holy matrimony.
This is just stupid.
It's just stupid.
And guess who's happy about all of this?
Of course, it's Mitch McConnell.
So here's Mitch McConnell ripping the Freedom Caucus.
I would hate to be a Republican whose vote prevented us from keeping the commitment we've made to the American people for almost 10 years now.
And at some point we'll get down to the final vote.
You know, the one that really counts.
And so I'm optimistic that none of my members in the end want to be responsible for the status quo on Obamacare.
I think the American people would be deeply disappointed that we were prevented from keeping our commitment by Republicans who in the end, in effect, voted for the status quo for no change.
That's absurd and Mitch McConnell is a joke and so is Paul Ryan when they do this routine.
The only people who voted for the status quo were the people pushing Trumpcare, which was Obamacare lite.
The only good thing in Trumpcare, as I have said now 1,713 times at last count, the only good thing in this bill Was Ryan's proposal to change Medicaid from a need-based grant program to a block grant program, even that was subject to future change by Congress.
Right now we are being told that Representative Chris Collins says the Tuesday group, which is another group of Republicans in Congress, met last night and agreed they will not meet or work with the Freedom Caucus if they call just hang up.
So in other words, the Freedom Caucus wants to talk about negotiations and other Republicans are now ostracizing them because they think they're going to work with Democrats.
Well done, guys.
Just well done.
This is just genius.
I am so glad that you were all able to put together such a wonderful, wonderful administration working with the geniuses like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Remember when Donald Trump was anti-establishment?
When exactly does he become the establishment when he's ripping on the Freedom Caucus, telling conservatives to go shove it, and talking about how he's going to work with Democrats?
Switch Trump's name to Jeb Bush and y'all would be up in arms.
You would.
Even your Trump supporters.
Switch his name to Jeb Bush, pose exactly the same thing that he's doing right now at the Freedom Caucus, and you'd all be up in arms, and you would have a right to be up in arms, because this is a joke.
It is a joke.
Jim Jordan, who's on the Freedom Caucus, Representative Jordan from Indiana, He says that the American Health Care Act is not the Ten Commandments.
This is coming after Ted Poe, a member of the Freedom Caucus, walked saying that the Freedom Caucus would vote against the Ten Commandments.
They're now trying to do exactly the same thing Democrats did with conservatives.
They're trying to say that conservatives are intransigent purists.
Jim Jordan says it's not that we're intransigent purists, it's that the AHCA, Trumpcare, was crap.
Well, Allison, there's a little bit of difference between the Ten Commandments and a piece of legislation that only 17% of the country approves of.
So I would just say, look at the four corners of the document.
Look at the legislation itself.
What did it do?
What didn't it do?
It didn't repeal Obamacare fully.
It didn't lower premiums.
It wasn't supported by the Republican Party.
Every major conservative organization in the country opposed it, and only 17% of the country liked it.
So there is, frankly, a big difference between the Ten Commandments and a piece of legislation that only 17% of the country approves of.
Let's fix that legislation.
Let's do what the President said.
Let's get a deal put together, but one that accomplishes what we were sent here to accomplish.
That's always been our focus, that continues to be our focus, and we're going to be hard at work making sure we accomplish that.
So how's all this working across the aisle working out for Trump?
As I said at the top of the show, Republicans are now caving on his Trump wall.
They're not even funding his Trump wall in order to get through a budget resolution.
You think the Freedom Caucus would have gone along with that?
Of course they wouldn't have.
The Freedom Caucus would have been people calling for the wall funding.
But those people are being excised by President Trump in favor of Democrats Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Just disgusting.
Well, before we continue on here, and I want to talk about the media and how they are continuing to go crazy over just absolute silly, stupid nonsense, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
So, if you are somebody who wants to invest in precious metals right now, you're looking at the economy, thinking to yourself, I'm not sure which way this thing is going to go.
if you're worried about threats from abroad, if you're worried about the instability in financial markets in Europe, then now would be a good time to put some of your money in gold.
And the way to do that is to call my friends up at birchgold.com slash ben.
You go to birchgold.com slash ben.
You can get a comprehensive 16-page free kit that tells you how gold and silver can protect your assets and your savings, how you can move your IRA or 401k into precious metals.
You should always have part of your portfolio in precious metals.
I certainly do.
Ask all your questions, get all your answers, and then when you're ready to invest in precious metals, talk to my friends over at Birch Gold Group.
Again, they have lots of five-star ratings.
They have an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau.
They are the people you're going to trust with your gold investment, birchgold.com slash ben.
Okay, so I want to talk about the media's attempts to tear down Trump, not on the basis, and the Republicans, not on the basis of their obvious incompetence, which is actually what's happening, but on the basis of just absolute nonsense But for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.
I want to talk about this Pence thing where they're trying to rip down Pence.
Over the awful, awful news that he only likes to eat alone with his wife, not other women, as opposed to Bill Clinton, who only likes to eat alone with other women, not his wife.
We'll talk about that.
We'll also get to the mailbag.
And if you want to be part of the mailbag today, then you need to subscribe.
Go to dailywire.com right now and check it out.
$8 a month gets you a subscription, annual subscription, gets you a free signed copy of Michael Muell's bestselling book, Reasons to Vote Democrat, a comprehensive guide.
Sure, it's blank, but it's the best gag gift that you'll ever give anyone.
It has sold tens of thousands of copies.
My quote is on the front.
It says, thorough.
You can get a free signed copy of Knowles' book when you go over to dailywire.com right now.
Get an annual subscription.
The Shapiro store should be coming within the next month.
I know I keep saying that, but don't worry.
My promises are good.
Unlike politicians, it will happen.
So we will make sure that that happens.
Dailywire.com to become a subscriber.
Or if you just want to listen to the show later, go to iTunes or SoundCloud.
Make sure you leave a rating over at iTunes.
We always appreciate it.
▲
Export Selection