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Jan. 6, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:30
Biden Heads To The Border To Lie About Stopping Illegal Immigration | Ep. 1641
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Joe Biden announces he's finally heading to the border and that he's shifting his immigration policy to stop illegal border crossings, the speakership crisis in the House hits day four, and Prince Harry's new book is filled with wine.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well folks, it is January 6th, and you know what that means.
Two year anniversary of January 6th, 2021.
The day that the media will spend talking about all day today.
All you're going to hear all day today is about January 6th, 2021.
I'm going to mention it and then that's all I'm going to say about it because it happened two years ago and that's all.
That's like the whole thing.
Meanwhile, the speakership crisis in the house continues, but I'm not going to talk about that at the top of the show either because frankly, I don't care that much.
The reason I don't care that Is because in the end, somebody is going to be elected Speaker.
That person is going to be faced with the same set of institutional problems any Speaker of the House is faced with in the Republican Party.
And that means that not all that much is going to change.
Because no matter what pledges are made, no matter who is made Speaker, that person is going to be faced with the prospect of a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President.
They're going to have to negotiate deals with those Democrats.
They're going to have to spend too much money.
In fact, Republicans will always spend too much money, whether the President is a Democrat Or a Republican.
The negotiations will be hard fought and in the end, bills will be signed.
So, there's that.
What I really want to talk about today is the fact that we have a massive crisis on our southern border.
And that massive crisis on our southern border has amounted to 5 million people illegally crossing the southern border since Joe Biden took office.
It is a massive, massive number.
And now Joe Biden is finally starting to realize that maybe he should do something about that.
When I say he's starting to realize that, what I mean is, he is using the cover of what's going on in the House To pretend that he has now formulated a working policy for our southern border.
He does not have a working policy for our southern border.
In fact, his policy is totally self-contradictory.
For example, Joe Biden's new southern border policy is going to focus rather heavily on expanding the use of Title 42.
Well, five seconds ago, the Biden administration was challenging Title 42 at the Supreme Court level, attempting to abolish Title 42.
Title 42 is a CDC regulation that allows for the quick excommunication The quick throwing out of people who arrive at the border due to COVID concerns, due to a COVID crisis, a public health crisis.
And so that's been challenged by a bunch of left-wingers, including the Biden administration, who have said, well, we don't want to enforce Title 42 anymore because the COVID crisis is effectively over.
A bunch of Republican attorney generals and governors said, we would like for Title 42 to continue to be enforced so that we don't have this continuing wave.
at the border and have that wave be exacerbated.
So again, Biden challenged that in court.
He lost.
The Supreme Court 5-4 decided that it was not time to get rid of Title 42 quite yet.
Now, they really didn't have a strong basis for that, actually.
And I'm saying this as an originalist and a conservative.
Five of the justices who voted in favor of holding Title 42 were on the right.
Only one of the dissenters was on the right.
That would be Justice Neil Gorsuch.
In any case, Joe Biden is now relying on a title that he himself wishes to end in Title 42.
The biggest thing that's happening right now is that he wants to head down to the border and he wants to stand on the border and presumably change policy a little bit.
But what he's really going to do is he's going to almost time shift illegal immigration.
So you'll still get illegal immigration.
It'll just come through sort of slightly different mechanisms.
According to Mediaite, over the past 24 hours, President Biden has solidified plans for a border visit on Thursday afternoon in a statement emailed to Mediaite.
The White House announced the visit will take place this Sunday in El Paso, Texas.
The White House says on Sunday, January 8, the president will travel to El Paso.
The president will assess border enforcement operations and meet with local elected officials and community leaders who have been important partners in managing the historic number of migrants fleeing political oppression and gang violence in Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
This trip will be pooled press additional details to follow.
So what exactly has Joe Biden's policy been up till now?
Well, it's been an absolute disaster area.
Andrew Arthur writes over at the Center for Immigration Studies late December talking about the Joe Biden policy thus far.
He goes back and he talks about what Trump's policy was.
He says, Biden is not the only president who has dealt with a migrant surge.
He's just the most recent, when faced with a much smaller crisis at the Southwest border in fiscal year 2019, a year in which the Border Patrol apprehended just over 851,500 migrants.
The Trump administration implemented numerous policies to stem the tide of illegal entries.
The most prominent and successful of those policies was the Migrant Protection Protocols, MPP, that was better known as Remain in Mexico.
Under Remain in Mexico, non-Mexican aliens apprehended at the southwest border were returned to Mexico to await their asylum hearings at the border port courts instead of just shipping them into the American interior and hoping that they would show up at court.
In an October 2019 assessment of the program, DHS determined that Remain in Mexico had been, quote, an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border.
You'll recall that Joe Biden then declared that this indispensable tool was just racism, that if you force people to wait in Mexico for their asylum requests to be granted, you're actually a giant racist.
And then once Joe Biden was in place, Then he attempted to rescind, remain in Mexico.
DHS issued an announcement on inauguration day, suspending new enrollments in that program, effective January 21st of 2021.
And they said they were going to quickly process the 25,000 migrants remaining in Mexico under the program into the United States, which prompted Texas and Missouri to push back, suing in federal court.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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Also, latest economic report is out.
Kind of mediocre.
Looks like things are slowing pretty significantly.
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Meanwhile, he has been using Title 42 while simultaneously opposing Title 42.
So he's rejecting some, he's letting in a lot more.
Again, all of the policies that have been proposed by the Biden administration have been a giant failure.
There have been huge failures of apprehension at the southern border, wild underfunding of Border Patrol, wild funding of the courts.
There are only about 500 immigration judges who are available.
Joe Biden says he wants to expand that by 100.
That is not even going to come close to processing the literally millions of cases that are now backlogged in the system.
So the policy makes very little sense right now because there is an actual internal split inside the Democratic Party over immigration.
People like to talk about the internal incoherence of the Republican Party on a wide variety of issues.
The truth is that positionally, there isn't a huge difference among Republicans on internal issues.
It's just that there are a lot of personality fights and there's a lot of sort of attitudinal anger at each other inside the Republican caucus.
Inside the Democratic Party, it is a more Heterogeneous party.
It's a party that has serious arguments over immigration, for example, in which there are still a few border hawks who are living in Texas in the Democratic Party.
And then you have the AOC contingent.
And so Joe Biden has been attempting to split the baby this entire time.
Well, according to Joe Biden, his new program is going to be to allow in 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela.
So he's going to rapidly increase the number of people who are coming in legally from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela.
He's going to order the rapid deportation of those who illegally enter the United States from those countries.
Thousands of these four nationalities will be let into America via what Biden is calling a humanitarian parole program, according to the New York Post.
But members of those groups are less likely to be admitted than other migrants who illegally cross the border.
So, bizarrely, what he's now suggesting is that he's going to broaden the capacity for legal immigration for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela for humanitarian reasons, because all four of those countries are in serious trouble in terms of the regimes that run the countries.
But at the same time, if you don't go through his program, he's going to reject you super fast.
Meanwhile, if you're just from Mexico and you cross the border illegally, Whatever.
So none of this makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.
It's, again, very incoherent.
Biden said the citizens of those four countries, which include three left-wing totalitarian states plus Haiti, will need a U.S.
sponsor and to pass a background check, unlike citizens of other nationalities who are routinely released after reaching the border.
Biden said citizens of those four countries henceforth will not only be deported, but also barred from entering via the parole program in the future if they illegally cross the border.
So he's getting harsh on a certain number of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan migrants.
But if you're from Mexico or El Salvador or Honduras, then apparently if you cross the border illegally, then he's just going to kind of ignore you?
It's a bizarre approach, at the very best.
According to the New York Post, the two-pronged approach appears designed to blunt criticism from Republicans, as record numbers of migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border, while also placating Democrats and immigration advocates who say Title 42 restrictions adopted under Trump block migrants from exercising their right to apply for asylum.
When we started expelling the Venezuelans, we saw a two-day drop in apprehension numbers, Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol Agents Union, told the Post.
Then the numbers started to climb back up.
What the cartels did was they just replaced them with another population of migrants.
So, what happens is when you say, Venezuelans, Cuban, Nicaraguans, Haitians, most of you will be rejected, some of you will be accepted, and then just hope that illegal immigration goes away because a huge bulk of people who are arriving at the southern border are not from those particular countries.
So it's just a mess.
It's a complete mess.
Now, remember, the Biden administration has been declaring there is no crisis on the southwest border at all.
Like none.
The DHS head, Alejandro Mayorkas, has been proclaiming that there's a situation on the southwest border, but no crisis.
So why exactly all of a sudden focus?
Why the shift in policy?
If there's no problem, then what exactly is the big deal?
So yesterday, Joe Biden did a presser in which he discussed the quote-unquote situation on the southwest border.
Again, it's not a crisis.
It's not a crisis.
It's a situation.
A crisis is when Ron DeSantis ships 11 illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard.
A situation is when 5 million people show up on the southern border and are summarily let into the country without any real way to track them.
Vice President, I'd like to talk to you about how my administration is dealing with our situation on the southwest border.
It's a situation, guys.
It's just a situation.
No biggie.
And as you'll recall, Joe Biden put in charge of the border situation, as he calls it, Kamala Harris, whose main job thus far has consisted of lying about traveling to the southwest border and then going to the Northern Triangle.
Do you have any plans to visit the border?
talk about how we need to make the conditions better there, doing nothing to make the conditions better there.
And then apparently speaking incoherently about how much she likes school buses.
This has been her policy thus far.
You'll recall back in June of 2021, when Kamala Harris told Lester Holt of NBC News that she had been to the border.
And then he's like, no, you haven't.
And she's like, that's true.
Do you have any plans to visit the border?
At some point, you know, we are going to the border.
We've been to the border.
So this whole thing about the border, we've been to the border.
We've been to the border.
You haven't been to the border.
And I haven't been to Europe.
I don't understand the point that you're making.
The point he's making is that you've never been to the border and you just said that you had.
That was the point.
One of the great Kamala Harris flubs of all time.
She brings a new one every day.
Well, yesterday, Joe Biden had a great flub with Kamala Harris.
He called the president Harris again.
Remember this incoherent babbling old fool?
The president of the United States is somehow having his chestnut saved from the fire by Republican incompetence.
It's just, it's an amazing thing.
Again, if you watch politics and recognize that there is no plan for anybody, that it's basically just veep, it becomes a lot more amusing.
When you realize that it's just high comedy.
I mean, I understand that there are lives at stake and literally millions of people crossing our Southwest border.
And this is the great tragedy.
Politics is a tragic comedy because it's a bunch of comedic fools who are running the country.
And meanwhile, there are serious issues that are affecting Americans.
And you have people who have applesauce for brains.
I mean, here is Joe Biden, the current president of the United States, whose neurons no longer function, talking about President Harris, his vice president.
I'm not being facetious.
Well, President Harris led this effort, led this effort to make things better in the countries from which they are leaving.
Oh, President Harris did, did she?
He also talked up her credentials.
He says that she's doing an amazing job.
No one in America knows the border better than Kamala Harris.
No one knows the border better than this person.
Uh-huh.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Failure to pass and fund this comprehensive plan has increased the challenges that we're seeing at our southward border.
No one knows this better than the vice president.
Oh, I'm glad she's the vice president again, at the very least.
And now the real problem here is, of course, that the policy that Joe Biden is proposing is utterly incoherent.
It makes no sense.
And you could see that, again, in this little presser that he did yesterday.
So he made two simultaneous points.
One, that people who are coming from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, that they are escaping human rights abuses.
And so we ought to be very Warm toward people who are escaping human rights abuses.
He then compared them to people attempting to escape the Holocaust, which is an absurdity of an extraordinarily high order.
The humanitarian situation in Venezuela is a horror show.
The same has been true in Cuba for 70 years.
There is not the systematic genocide of millions of human beings happening in these countries that happened during the Holocaust.
And by the way, if that were the case, if Joe Biden actually were making that case, wouldn't the moral impetus be for admitting all of them?
Not limiting it to 30,000.
Not actually turning them away if they arrive illegally.
Treating them with more kid gloves than people from other countries.
But Joe Biden is not doing that.
Again, it's totally incoherent.
It's nonsensical.
Mr. President, why the Democrat migration is a human right?
Activists say that it is.
What's your take?
Well, I think it is a human right if your family's being persecuted, if you're being dealt with in a way.
I mean, like, I thought it was a human right for, you know, Jews in Germany to be able to go get their escape and get help where they could.
Oh, really?
I assume that he is in disagreement with his great ideological hero, FDR, who literally turned away boatloads of Jews in the middle of World War II and sent them back to Europe, where they were summarily slaughtered in concentration camps.
In any case, putting aside the actual history of the Holocaust, Joe Biden is making a moral case.
The moral case that he is making is that when people arrive claiming asylum, you should treat them with kid gloves.
But then he simultaneously says, you shouldn't just arrive at the southern border trying to escape from bad humanitarian situations.
He says, don't show up at the border, stay home and apply, which sounds rather Trumpy to me.
Isn't he now being a racist?
Just a little.
If you say what he's about to say, but you do it with the Trump face, then all of a sudden it becomes racist.
That's the way the democratic politics works.
My message is this.
If you're trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua or Haiti, You have, or have agreed to begin a journey to America.
Do not, do not just show up at the border.
Stay where you are and apply legally from there.
Just stay where you are and apply legally from there, and then drop by and be like, But when Joe Biden says it, it's totally fine, guys, because that's how our media work.
If a Democrat says the exact same thing as a Republican, but without the Trump voice, then it is magically conciliatory and decent.
It is wonderfully anti-racist now.
Now, again, I don't know how he's holding these two ideas in his head.
One, migrants who are attempting to escape from deeply anti-humanitarian hellholes, that those people have essentially a right to come to the United States.
Also, stay in your home country and apply or we're going to turn you away.
That makes no sense.
Speaking of things that make no sense, again, he's expanding the use of Title 42 to reject people at the border, while simultaneously claiming that Title 42 makes things even worse.
None of this makes any sense.
It's an incoherent policy.
If you think any of this is going to stem illegal immigration to the southern border, get your head directly up your colon.
Here is President Biden.
People turned away under Title 42, and they're not barred from trying to come back.
They've been turned away, they go back, they try again, they try again.
Well, You know, they can and they do try to re-enter the United States again and again, which makes the problem at the border even worse.
So Title 42 makes the problem even worse by rejecting people and then they show up again.
But he's expanding the use of Title 42 to reject people, even though his administration has challenged Title 42 in court.
And then Biden actually was asked about Title 42 and what happens when Title 42 goes away, since it is completely predicated on a law, which is a COVID crisis at this point.
He says, well, at that point, we'll just use random titles.
I don't even know what he's talking about right here.
Title 42 is going to go away before the end of the year in terms of the Supreme Court, my prediction.
And then we're going to have to use Title IX, Title 8.
8, right?
Am I right?
Yeah, Title 8.
8-9.
8-9, it's the same title.
That's when we're going to use the sexual harassment law of Title IX to make sure that women's softball is fully finambonied, fully funded to stop illegal immigration.
He is a genius, is the president of the United States.
This is who it is.
He's talking about Title 8, by the way, of immigration law.
But again, this is all incoherent.
His own party knows it's incoherent.
A top Democrat, Bob Menendez, Senate Democrat.
who has been a long time advocate of Cuban immigration into the United States.
He put out a statement saying the Biden administration's decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump administration's racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border.
Additionally, their decision to create an unlawful transit ban erases the words and values etched on the Statue of Liberty.
I'm deeply disturbed that instead of working with Congress to develop a solution to the multiple humanitarian crises that are fueling mass migration in our hemisphere, The administration is circumventing immigration law, which will exacerbate chaos and confusion at the southern border.
While I'm glad the Biden administration will be increasing access to parole for an extremely limited number of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitians, This benefit will exclude migrants fleeing violence and persecution who do not have the ability or economic means to qualify for the new parole process.
Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.
Now listen, Bob Menendez is a wild left-winger.
When it comes to immigration, he essentially wants open borders, but at least he's being consistent.
He's making the case that Joe Biden was making about five seconds ago.
At least Bob Menendez is gutsier than Eric Adams, who continues as mayor of New York to simultaneously say that he's got a border crisis with people being shipped by the thousands into his city, and also that Joe Biden is doing an amazing job.
I believe what the president is putting in place is going to assist with dealing with the flow of migrants.
We're receiving a large number from the groups that he's now going to include in the Venezuelan a part of this.
He's going to increase other groups in that, which is very important.
But the reality is we have a crisis at our border.
That crisis must be addressed.
Okay, but they're not addressing the crisis.
They're trying to put a band-aid on it.
Center for Immigration Studies, again, critiques the new plan.
They say, aliens would have illegally entered will now be able to access the CBP, that's the Border Patrol, one mobile application for scheduling an appointment to present themselves for inspection and to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait.
This has been a program that's been in existence since back in November.
The administration claims this plan will allow aliens to enter the United States lawfully through ports of entry.
But in reality, entering without a visa through a port of entry is still illegal.
So now they're just telling them, use your cell phone and set an appointment as to when you illegally enter the country.
So that's essentially the shell game that is being played here.
The administration says that it's going to impose new consequences for individuals who attempt to enter unlawfully, which sounds great, unless you realize that what they mean is expedited removal, which is what Biden has already been doing, and which then results in people arriving back at the border about five seconds later.
As Center for Immigration Studies points out, of the more than 141,000 aliens apprehended by the Border Patrol at the southwest border in November, who were not expelled under Title 42, for example, fewer than 6,500, 4.6% of the total, were subject to expedited removal.
So if they already had that power and haven't used that power, then why hasn't the DHS used that power?
And what's to suggest that Joe Biden is going to use that power for very long?
The bottom line is that this administration does not know whether it wants mass migration or whether it wants to paper over the problem with mass migration.
And so they've come up with a radically incoherent policy.
So naturally, the final sort of straw here, the final move when you have no successful policy is blame the Republicans.
Adam Schiff is saying that we can't do anything.
And the representative from California, he's saying, well, it's really Republicans fault, of course.
But with more than 2.76 million migrant crossings last year alone, do you think this should have been more of a priority for the Democrats?
I think it has been a very strong priority, and what we really need is a comprehensive approach to the border that is fair and humane and enforceable.
And it's very hard to do that on a single-party basis.
We really need to work together on this.
We have come close at times, but at the moment, it seems to be, again, the third rail of American politics.
So finally, Blaine, you guys are in charge of the government.
You were in charge of the government for two years.
You did nothing except let in millions of illegal immigrants.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Hey, well, now would be a really good time for Republicans to be able to pass a bill, say, you know, funding Border Patrol and making sure that there are immigration judges on the border and mandating that the executive branch actually enforce immigration law.
Like, now would be an excellent time to do that.
Unfortunately, the House of Representatives continues to be mired down in this speakership battle, the point of which is utterly unclear at this point.
So, here is my suggestion.
Since apparently things are just going to stagnate.
The people who don't want McCarthy to be speaker, make your list of demands public.
Now, this has been something that the folks on my side of the aisle, folks on the very conservative right have said for a long time.
Why not make more negotiations publicly available so that we know whose side we are on?
If you're negotiating right now with Kevin McCarthy and you're trying to get concessions out of him, rules concessions, for example, or slots on particular committees, why can't we know those things?
If we are all sitting here watching as this speakership battle plays out, as I've said, the stakes are really low because no matter who becomes Speaker of the House, they'll be faced with the exact same set of institutional incentives.
They'll be faced with an extraordinarily fractious caucus in which several members of the House, whether they happen to be on the left wing of the Republican Party or the right wing of the Republican Party, or even in the center, Several members can basically hold hostage the rest of the caucus because the majority just ain't that big.
It's 222 seats, which means they have a majority of four, effectively speaking.
So that means that just a very small cadre of people can hold hostage the rest of the caucus.
It means that anytime a bill gets signed, they're going to be a bunch of people who shout and scream.
It also means that bills will get signed because the government will continue to be funded because there is no chance that we end up with a fulsome government shutdown for years on end.
It's just not going to happen on a realistic level.
And people like me, I've said before, I don't care when the government shuts down because I think that the vast majority of programs that are mandatory continue to operate.
And most of the rest of it, I would prefer it goes away in the first place.
But realistically speaking, is that going to happen?
Probably not.
The vast majority of the American people aren't generally on board with long lasting government shutdowns by every available poll and by election results.
So with that said, whether it's McCarthy, whether it's Jim Jordan, whether it's Steve Scalise, whether it's anybody else, same set of institutional incentives.
But put that aside.
Let's say that you are very much in favor of exacting more concessions from McCarthy.
All right, make a list of the concessions and let's see them.
Now, if the concession is that it's just McCarthy who goes away, who would you rather have?
So, as I pointed out yesterday on the program, many of the people who want McCarthy to go are not actually saying who they would like to replace McCarthy.
They've come up with a sort of bizarre list of people who they're throwing out there at this point.
Like, if that's your main demand, shouldn't you have one person you consolidate behind and just push him?
You just pressure him?
Why not just keep voting for Jim Jordan over and over and over and over until eventually Jim Jordan becomes the consensus candidate?
But they're not doing that.
They're kind of futzing around.
So Matt Gaetz from Florida, yesterday he nominated Donald Trump for Speaker of the House.
That's not a real thing, guys.
He got one vote yesterday and the only vote he got was Matt Gaetz.
Even Donald Trump supports Kevin McCarthy, by the way.
I will say that here is Gaetz nominating Trump.
We'll see Trump's response, which is actually pretty funny.
Energy was abundant, wages were rising, capital was returning from overseas to fund the dreams and ambitions of our fellow Americans, and the economy was roaring.
What a contrast to what we have seen from this administration now.
And so I rise to nominate Donald Trump for the position of Speaker of the House.
And for all of the vitriol that we hear from the media and at times the left, there were great moments of bipartisanship under the Trump presidency.
Donald Trump isn't a member of the House.
I know there's always this talk about how the Speaker doesn't have to be a member of the House.
Realistically speaking, is this a real thing?
No.
Is this a serious proposal by Matt Gaetz?
No.
It's trollery, and everybody knows it's trollery.
Who knows it's trollery more than anybody?
Donald Trump!
So Trump put out on Truth Social a picture of himself in the Speaker's seat, right?
It's like a Photoshopped picture of himself in the Speaker's seat, in Pelosi's seat, at the last State of the Union, and it's Biden speaking in the front, and then Kamala Harris sitting there, and then Trump sitting there with his tongue out, like, How am I supposed to take this shit seriously?
I just don't know.
How?
How?
We're all supposed to pretend that this is like stuff of major consequence.
Top men, very serious people doing very serious things.
That's what's happening right here.
Goodness gracious.
Meanwhile, Lauren Boebert nominated Kevin Hearn a second time as the speaker's race continues to drag on.
Here's Lauren Boebert.
Madam Clerk, I rise to nominate Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma for Speaker of the House.
The gentlewoman is recognized.
It's as simple as that, folks.
Let's start getting somewhere with this.
Realize the facts.
Kevin McCarthy does not have the votes.
Let's elect a Republican who can unify our conference, who is a true leader.
I'm casting my vote for Kevin Hearn, and I hope you will as well.
No one cast a vote for Kevin Hearn yesterday.
Again, he has no intent, as far as I'm aware, of running for Speaker of the House.
He was elected to Congress in 2018, which means he's been in Congress by, you know, congressional measures a pretty short time.
He sits on the Ways and Means Committee.
If you've never heard of him, you're not the only one, which is presumably why Boebert is nominating him.
Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is ripping into Boebert.
Again, all of this is just...
What is the...
If you're doing something really important, why don't you just tell us what the thing is that you want?
What is the thing that you want?
If you want McCarthy, go on.
Who is the person really that you want?
You want Trump?
You want Kevin Hearn?
Who are we talking about here?
What are the concessions you want?
Can we talk about those?
Do you have a list of them so we can go through those?
Because what I'm hearing is that, again, of the 20 members who are holding out against McCarthy, probably 10 to 15 of them Already agree on a deal with McCarthy to change rules and garner concessions from him.
By the way, concessions that will end up being pro-forma anyway.
And I'll tell you the reason they're pro-forma is because eventually you'll get your vote on term limits, for example, and it will go down in flaming defeat because the House ain't going to vote term limits on itself.
You'll get your vote on a balanced budget, and then it'll get murdered in the Senate.
So you can do all this stuff for show, but the actual realistic effect... I hate to be the political realist here, in which actual reality exists.
There's the goal.
The goal is that we cut spending debt.
The goal is we restructure all of the entitlements.
The goal is that we shrink government back to what it was in terms of the federal government and its purview.
We shrink it back dramatically to what it was a century and a half ago, where it had very little influence on our daily life.
That is the goal.
And we can take incremental steps toward that goal, perhaps.
But this notion that if you elect the right speaker, magically everything changes, that is wrong.
It's been true.
It's been false in politics for a very, very long time.
Thomas Sowell has pointed out that when it comes to politics or virtually anything else in life, Generally, when you see a person in a position fail, and then his successor fails, and then his successor fails, and then his successor fails, which is what you have seen from Republican speakers going all the way back to Newt Gingrich, the question isn't the person at the top.
The question is the incentive structure for the job itself.
What can you actually do with the job?
Here is, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene being a realist.
I think the American people, no matter how you vote, are sick and tired of drama, and this is nothing but drama.
We're on multiple days now with multiple candidates from this group, so I'm not sure how Lauren Boebert on one hand can demand so much out of Kevin McCarthy, but then demand nothing out of someone else and be willing to vote for them to be Speaker.
That's not serious.
I don't think that's leadership, and I really see it as more obstruction than progress.
That's Marjorie Taylor Greene, guys.
That's like the most radical member of the Republican caucus.
She's the Trumpiest person in Congress.
And she is saying something that happens to be correct here.
Yeah, that is all true.
Representative John James of Michigan, who rose to nominate McCarthy on the seventh speaker ballot.
We are now on 11, 12, 19.
By the time you hear this, I mean like, we will all be old and gray by the time this is over.
He says, you know what would be great is if we learned how to win occasionally in the Republican Party.
We want to talk about people who can win?
I'm a Lions fan and I'm well acquainted with snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Y'all, we need to learn how to win.
We need to learn how to take a victory.
And by Kevin McCarthy's leadership, he's given us victories on rules.
He's given us victories on keeping costs down.
He's given us victories with winning a majority back.
I'm so proud to be a part of majority-making class, and he's earned my trust.
Okay, so even if you don't trust Kevin McCarthy, which is fine, then why don't you just make clear what commitments you are seeking from him?
At the other night, Tucker Carlson suggested that McCarthy, with a couple of concessions, could win the speakership.
And McCarthy could, first, make transparent everything January 6th related, and second, he could give Thomas Massie, the representative from Kentucky, the power to investigate the FBI.
Fine.
Let's say McCarthy does both of those things.
My guess is McCarthy would do both of those things, were those the demands.
Would that solve the problem?
Apparently, the answer is no.
Because here is a list of the concessions that McCarthy has currently made.
One member motion threshold needed to force a vote ousting the Speaker instead of five.
So effectively, any member, Matt Gaetz at any time, can just call a motion to vacate the Speakership.
More House Freedom Caucus members on the House Rules Committee.
Two seats.
Pledges to hold votes on lawmaker term limit and border security bills.
So you wanted votes on those?
He'll give you the votes on those.
The votes won't go anywhere because, let's be real about this, you don't even have enough Republican votes to pass a lawmaker term limit bill.
And then you have a Senate.
And then you have a President.
Major changes to the appropriations process to prevent another omnibus bill by allowing floor amendments to be offered by any lawmaker.
Now, again, I happen to think that's a fine idea.
More consideration has now been given to the Speaker than was given to a $1.7 trillion omnibus package that was crammed through with 48 hours notice.
So I'm fine with a longer legislative process in which everybody gets to propose their amendments, those amendments are voted down, earmarks get put in, earmarks get taken out.
You know who else is fine with that?
Apparently McCarthy.
All that's true.
Now, I will say that the Speaker has become an extraordinarily powerless position, particularly among Republicans, when the Speaker does not have the power to actually leverage his members.
This sounds good to people who are in the Freedom Caucus right now.
It sounds good to me, too.
The Speaker has less power to leverage people on the right wing of the caucus.
This also means the Speaker has much less power to leverage people on the left wing of the caucus.
The same rules apply to everyone.
So next time you want to pass some sort of tax-cutting bill, next time you want to pass a bill that bans funding for Planned Parenthood, And you have some left-wing members of the caucus who don't want to do it.
What leverage are you going to hold over their head, exactly?
What exactly are you going to do?
In any case, he's given an extraordinary list of concessions at this point, which is why my understanding is that a huge percentage of those 20 holdouts against McCarthy are now getting ready to get on board with McCarthy.
The problem is you still have like five or six of them who aren't, which doesn't get you to the threshold you need.
So who is your alternative?
What is the point of this?
So this has been my suggestion all along.
You want the American people to take sides on this?
Fine.
Make transparent what you want.
And the thing you want can't just be, I don't like Kevin McCarthy, because you have 200 members of the caucus who are fine with Kevin McCarthy.
Probably closer to 210 members of the caucus who are fine with Kevin McCarthy after they've exacted their concessions.
So who's your alternative?
This is why I keep saying, who is the person who is the alternative who is going to gather a unanimous vote?
I mentioned yesterday, just statistically speaking, there has not been a unanimous vote for the Speaker of the House on the Republican side of the aisle since John Boehner in 2010.
The biggest problem facing Kevin McCarthy right now is not that he has defectors.
The biggest problem facing Kevin McCarthy is that the Republicans did such a garbage job in the last election cycle that instead of winning 230-35 seats, they ended up with 222.
Which means that his margin of error is essentially nil.
There has not been a Speaker of the House for the Republicans who has been elected since John Boehner in 2010.
With fewer than nine defections.
And nine defections takes you way below the threshold.
Paul Ryan had nine defectors in 2015.
John Boehner had 25 defectors earlier in 2015.
In 2013, Boehner had 12 defectors, which means that everybody is saying, well McCarthy is wildly underperforming because there's so many Republicans not on board.
But once he gets most of them on board, Even five defectors will take him down.
So the big sin here is that Republicans did crappy in the last election.
Some of that is presumably due to McCarthy.
Much of it is due to systemic failures that prevented McCarthy from intervening in primaries, frankly.
There are a lot of people who won primaries in contested seats who should not have won primaries in contested seats.
So, what exactly is the way out here?
I think the way out here is more transparency with the American public.
You want more transparency?
You want an open debate?
You want this process to last longer?
Fine.
I'm cool with that.
Make transparent what it is you want so we can decide whether the juice is worth the squeeze or whether this is just a series of self-glorifications at the expense of the interests of the American people and a conservative majority in the House of Representatives.
It's more on this in just one second.
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OK, well, all of this is occurring among the Republicans, all this internal battling again.
Still waiting to see what the outcome is or what the point is or how this radically shifts things other than just being sort of a waste of time overall.
Hopefully we get some political wins out of this concessions made to Chip Roy, for example, and then we all finish this up and we move on with our lives.
But meanwhile, Democrats are pretending that this is like the end of the world.
It is not the end of the world.
It may be foolish.
It may be a waste of time.
Maybe something good will come out of it.
It is not the end of the world.
Democrats treat it like if the government Ceases to function for a day.
The entire world will end.
They do this every time there's a government shutdown.
It has never actually impacted anyone.
The government shutdowns have been temporary.
Very, very temporary.
Back pay has been given.
This notion that we are on the verge of societal breakdown, it's getting very tiresome.
It's hysterical nonsense.
And yet, this is the line.
So, Representative Hakeem Jeffries is now suggesting it's a national security issue for there not to be a speaker for three days.
Sure.
You guys were on vacay until five seconds ago.
Was it a national security issue when Joe Biden was in St.
Croix?
Like just enjoying his life on the beach while signing bills that had to be flown to him?
Oh my gosh, these people.
All we are asking is House Republicans to get along with each other so we can get about the business of the American people.
There are national security vulnerabilities.
This is a dangerous moment for Americans and for the world.
It's one of the reasons why the Congress needs to organize.
A dangerous moment.
A dangerous moment!
Uh-huh.
Yeah, it's super dangerous.
These clowns don't do anything for 24 hours.
It's super dangerous.
Meanwhile, Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, she says this should be keeping people up at night.
Um, who?
It's basically putting everybody who watches it to sleep, except for the people who are very, very into sort of these ins and outs political games.
Is that keeping anybody up at night?
Give me a break.
Is this keeping you up at night that you may not be able to get that done because of the infighting you're seeing across the aisle?
And I think that it should be keeping everyone up at night.
The notion that we would not be able to fund the government is not as simple as not funding the government.
It is a complete shutdown of every agency that keeps us safe.
It's not a shutdown of every agency that keeps us safe.
Most of this is mandatory spending.
What are you even talking about?
But you have to, Democrats have a stake in panicking everybody.
This happens every time there's a government shutdown for five seconds.
They have a stake in panicking everybody.
If the government isn't there to wipe your ass every evening, well then this makes, you will die.
You will just die.
I mean, if the government isn't there, every time you open your closet door, you just open, you wake up in the morning, you have to get dressed, you open your closet, and there's the government there to help you.
And if you open your closet and the government wasn't there, what would you do?
What?
Is this how you live?
Really?
You live every day, wondering if the federal government is operating?
Now, does that mean that it looks good when all of this stuff happens for Republicans?
No.
Is the panic ridiculous?
Is it media-induced?
Should we all be freaking out that it's taking a couple of days to select a Speaker of the House?
No.
That's incredibly silly.
And when you combine this with the Democratic claim, I'm not sure what they want.
Do they want Republicans to select a Speaker or not to select a Speaker?
Because at the same time, they're claiming that if there is no Speaker of the House, then apparently America will die.
They're also claiming that if there's a Republican Speaker of the House, America will die.
Here's Democratic Representative Pete Aguilar saying the Republicans right now are pushing for a new Jim Crow.
So I'm confused.
Do you want Republicans to get it together and make McCarthy the Speaker so we can move on with life?
Or do you not want that because he's Hitler?
Since the beginning of 2021, 21 state legislatures have passed 42 restrictive voting laws.
Hakeem has stood up against voter suppression and the new Jim Crow era every step of the way.
And that's why I am directed by the Democratic Caucus to advance the name of Hakeem Jeffries from New York as Speaker.
Okay, so again, what do you guys want?
The truth is Democrats aren't upset about this.
Democrats are very happy about this.
And most Americans aren't all that upset about it.
Most Americans don't care about this, which is why, again, these sort of stupid political games, they may help a certain cadre of people who are attempting to raise money, or they may change rules in certain marginal ways that are helpful to conservatives.
But in the end, is this going to be the large scale change this country needs?
Not with a divided government and a 222 seat House majority and Democrats who are pretending that they are deeply concerned, so deeply concerned, it's all problematic, are just lying through their teeth about it.
Okay, meanwhile, in news that I don't care about but everybody seems to want me to cover, Prince Harry has a book out.
So let me make clear, we fought a revolution so we don't have to care about the royals.
This is, but apparently that has not stopped us from caring about the royals.
In fact, there must be something in the human heart that desires royalty, because we don't have an actual royal family in the United States.
So we just follow other people's royal families.
And then we treat our politicians like royalty.
We have a State of the Union address where we pretend that Joe Biden is actually like a decrepit king.
He's like Theoden of Rohan before he's, he's woken from his slumber by Gandalf.
Just sitting there on the throne like, Gandalf Stormcrow.
Any case.
We have to pay attention to our royalty.
Prince Harry has now written a bitter revenge memoir.
It's a tell-all.
According to the New York Post, According to the New York Post, Prince Harry's revenge on his family, the media, the horsey older woman who deflowered him in a field behind a busy pub, and anyone who has ever treated him as a spare to Prince William's heir is literary self-harm.
Every time Harry plotter, the half-wit prince, puts the knife into his brother, the fumbling assassin falls on his own blame.
Call it Harry Carey.
This is a piece by Dominic Green over at the New York Post.
Harry has already rejected his homeland and attacked his family.
He has slandered the House of Windsor as institutionally racist.
He has, as his Netflix expose showed, lost his old friends without gaining any new ones.
Now he attacks his own father, Charles III, and his brother, Prince William, the future king.
There can be no way back from this.
It's a grave matter, fighting with your own blood.
Your brother is the person most like you in the world.
William is the only person who knows what it felt like for Harry to lose his mother, Diana, to walk behind her coffin in front of the world, to go on alone without her, and to face the same barrage of flashbulbs in the line of duty.
In some things he was my mirror, Harry reflects.
In others, my polar opposite, my dear brother, my arch enemy.
This is the whiniest royal person in human history.
This is a person who lives in a palatial estate in California with his actress, harpy wife, and lectures all of us about the evils of American racism and class conflict.
He is just a joy.
Here's Prince Harry explaining why he refers to his brother as his arch nemesis.
To Michael Strahan.
Yes.
Our culture is in great shape here, guys.
The quote in this book where you refer to your brother as your beloved brother and arch nemesis.
Strong words.
What do you mean by that?
There has always been this competition between us, weirdly.
I think it really plays into, or is played by, the air spare.
Oh my gosh.
According to Dominic Green, by his own admission, William, too, struggled with grief and anger.
But William was born with one crowning advantage, and that made all the difference.
He's the firstborn, a once and future king from his first breath.
Harry was conceived and raised as a form of life insurance.
So apparently, there are a lot of jokes about this inside the family.
Wonderful!
Now you've given me an heir and a spare.
My work is done.
Harry quotes Charles' saying.
Harry concedes this was a joke, presumably.
And then he says, minutes after delivering this high bit of high comedy, Hal was said to have gone off to meet with his girlfriend.
That would, of course, be the current Queen Regent, or whatever they call her in Britain.
I don't care.
I don't care!
But apparently Harry is still whining about how mean Daddy was to him.
He's driven by resentment.
He gripes that Charles and William flew on separate private jets for reasons of safety, but no one gave a damn whom I traveled with.
He wants us to know that half of their suite at the Balmoral Castle was less luxurious than William's.
He complains that a boarding school that was confusing as hell to receive a slow and luxurious rinse from the hot matrons.
So, it's just, he's so tiresome, and all these people are so tiresome, but I guess we're going to be subjected to them until the end of time, because after all, he is very woke, and this means that he actually is a sort of quasi-hero.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
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