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April 11, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:07
Inflation Comes In HOT
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We've been told by pretty much every major media outlet that we are now in a soft landing.
This means that inflation has started to decline, the economy continues to sail along, yet strangely nobody is feeling like that.
And this has been the big perplexing question for Democrats.
Why is it?
That the economy is so amazing, but nobody actually feels like the economy is so amazing.
Well, one reason is that, contrary to popular opinion, we have not yet defeated inflation.
And the latest news on that front came in yesterday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, stubborn inflation pressures persisted in March, derailing the case for the Federal Reserve to begin reducing interest rates in June and raising questions over whether it can deliver cuts this year without signs of an economic slowdown.
The Consumer Price Index, a measure of goods and service prices across the economy, rose 3.5% in March from one year earlier, according to the Labor Department.
That was a touch higher than economists had forecast, and a pickup from February's 3.2%.
So-called core prices also rose more than expected on a monthly and annual basis.
This, of course, drove the stock market down some 500 points.
It also meant that bond yields started to go up.
The bottom line here is that inflation continues to run almost twice what it is supposed to be running.
Remember, that year over year, the inflation rate is supposed to be about 2%.
It is currently running at 3.5%.
And when you add that on to the giant inflationary bubble that we had in 2021 and 2022, you're talking about prices that are up like 20% for most Americans.
Joe Biden's economy has not made up those wage losses.
Politico is sounding the alarm.
According to them, President Joe Biden has been presiding over a good news economy for the past year with strong growth, low unemployment, and falling inflation.
But that good news is reaching its limits.
The cost of living rose faster than expected in March.
That likely means Biden will have to live with high interest rates well into an election year, with investor hopes fading fast for a Federal Reserve rate cut in June.
Now remember, the Federal Reserve has kept those interest rates pretty high by at least the last 10 years of standards.
Now what that means is that money is less easy.
That means that IPOs aren't as easy.
It means that finding money to actually fund your startup isn't that easy.
Loans are not as easy to come by.
Typically, that presages some sort of economic slowdown.
When you raise the interest rates, typically that is supposed to bring inflation down, but it's also supposed to have an impact on markets.
It is supposed to drive down prices and all that.
That's literally the purpose of the interest rate increases to drive down prices.
And that usually comes along with an economic cooling if the economy is superheated.
That's not happening because we've dumped so much money into the economy in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 and yes in 2023.
That economy doesn't seem like it's going to slow down anytime soon.
You can make the case that it used to be supply chain problems that had driven the prices to exorbitant highs.
But the supply chain problems, even though they're still there in places like the Red Sea, are not nearly what they were during the pandemic.
And yet we're still getting these inflation rates clocking in far too high.
Even CNN was admitting that inflation is moving in the wrong direction.
Here they were yesterday.
This just in, inflation is headed in the wrong direction right now.
The latest consumer price report just out shows prices up 3.5% this over same time last year.
CNN's Rahel Solomon just looking through it all, just running into the studio to help us out.
What are you seeing in this?
Hey Kate, so yeah, you put it pretty well there that this is moving in the wrong direction.
So, 3.5% on an annual basis.
To put that in context, that is hotter than what we were expecting and certainly hotter than we saw the month prior.
If you look at CPI on a monthly basis, sort of a similar trend there, right?
So, coming in at 0.4% on a monthly basis, that is also hotter than we were expecting.
According to Seema Shah, Chief Global Strategist of Principal Asset Management, quote, this marks the third consecutive strong reading and means that the stalled disinflationary narrative can no longer be called a blip.
In fact, even if inflation were to cool next month to a more comfortable reading, there's likely sufficient caution within the Fed now to mean a July cut may also be a stretch.
If Joe Biden is not able to get any sort of cut to the Fed rate, Coming up to the election, he's got a problem on his hands because it means that economy is going to start to tighten up just before the election.
We'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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Larry Summers, who is the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, former president of Harvard University, before he was ousted for political incorrectness, he had previously predicted that there would be a massive inflationary cycle after 2020.
People laughed at him because we hadn't had a massive inflationary cycle in the United States for 40 years.
He was right.
Here he was yesterday explaining that a rate cut in June would be a really dangerous move at this point.
You have to take seriously the possibility that the next great move will be upwards rather than downwards and anything could happen.
Markets could crash, the indicators could turn down, but on current facts, A rate cut in June, it seems to me, would be a dangerous and egregious error comparable to the errors the Fed was making in the summer of 2021 when it just didn't get the thread on inflation.
Okay, well, that is becoming conventional wisdom, what Larry Summers is saying right there.
According to CNN, Fed Governor Michelle Bowman said last week she's even willing to consider raising rates should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.
For now, she doesn't think there's a high likelihood that hikes will be merited.
With that said, the possibility of a soft landing seems to be disappearing.
According to CNN, although the economy is booming by many measures, including last month's blowout jobs report, small business owners aren't feeling gung-ho about it.
By the way, there's a reason for that.
The blowout jobs report was heavily reliant on two sectors, the healthcare sector and, wait for it, wait for it, government jobs.
An index produced by the National Federation of Independent Business, gauging how small business owners expect to fare in the future, dropped to its lowest level since 2012, last month.
Everybody is feeling it.
And consumers are not confident in their ability to make on-time debt payments.
Because again, the interest rates are so high that if you are getting behind on your bills, it is very difficult to repay all of that.
All of this is very bad for Joe Biden.
When you connect a staggering economy with a completely atrocious foreign policy and a president who is no longer with us, that is a bad indicator for a re-elect effort.
So Joe Biden had a particularly bad day yesterday.
I don't know whether they didn't get him to bed the previous night.
I don't know whether he stayed up too late watching Matlock.
Whatever it was, Joe Biden was really not with us yesterday.
He required notecards for pretty much everything.
On his notecards, apparently it said, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, because he needs to be told to do literally everything.
We saw this actually in his Unificion interview last week, when he required notecards to be interviewed.
Typically, if you're interviewing someone, you might have notecards.
If you're being interviewed, you typically aren't carrying around notecards.
Here he was, doing like a meet and greet with the Japanese Prime Minister, and that dude needs his notecards.
Well, Fumio, welcome back to the White House.
Welcome back to the Oval Office.
It's good to have you here.
Good to see you again.
You were here last year.
We said the role being played by the United States and Japan is becoming even greater.
And I couldn't agree more with your assertion back then.
And what we see in our joint effort with Ukraine in the face of Russia's vicious assault is just outrageous.
It's like watching him read a foreign language, but it's English from a note card.
I would suggest that perhaps the Japanese Prime Minister speaks better English than Joe Biden at this point.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden finished up this presser and he just kind of randomly was smiling at the walls while the press were ushered out so they wouldn't ask him any questions.
There he is, smiling at the wall again.
What was that?
It was like a weird face, like a weird Joker face, and then you get the weird smirk.
It's Joaquin Phoenix in the new preview for Joker 2 happening there with the President of the United States.
Again, yesterday was a bad day for him.
He also suggested in a speech that he needed to be re-elected because he was in the 20th century.
That one I can believe.
Here we go.
Elect me.
I'm in the 20th century.
It's the 20th century. 21st century.
I mean, to be fair, he was born in the 16th century, apparently.
So, exciting stuff there from the President of the United States.
And so, Democrats are left with a narrative.
They don't have a great economy, as we'll talk about in a little bit.
They got a real immigration problem on their hands.
So, they have to say, basically, that Republicans, as always, are the font head of all evil.
They are the root of all sin.
And so, Joe Biden on the campaign trail yesterday, he suggested that Republicans want to kill millions of people by repealing Obamacare.
This stuff has been tiresome since Democrats were running ads about Paul Ryan pushing little old ladies off cliffs in wheelchairs.
But they're still playing this hit.
Again, this is just going to be a play-the-hits campaign.
It's the rockin' oldies with Joe Biden over here.
My predecessor and his MAGA friends want to, I love the phrase, the language they use, they want to terminate the Affordable Care Act.
Terminate.
Well, guess what?
Killing millions of Americans, take them off of health care, insurance, and stripping others of services like home care.
Folks, by the way, you know how many times they've tried to take out Obamacare, Affordable Health Care Act?
49 times.
That's a very long word, what he's saying right now.
They can keep trying, but they're not going to get it done.
So the longest word in the English language is pneumo-ultra-microscopic-silico-volcano-cloniosis and or whatever he just said just now.
Which was all one long mashed potato word, Joe Biden.
But he did suggest, of course, that Republicans are killing people en masse.
I do love that he's very upset by the language of terminating Obamacare.
What does he think that is?
In any case, he's doing a wonderful job and his backup is doing a similarly wonderful job.
If you are on a word diet, let me recommend some word salad from Kamala Harris.
She really breaks out the Caesar dressing for this one.
It's important to see that, you know, the nature of democracy, there's a duality to it, it has two sides to it.
On the one hand, there's incredible strength, right?
That when a democracy is intact, what it does for its people, in terms of the strength it gives its people and protects in terms of individual freedoms and rights, right?
And liberties.
There's an incredible strength in that, what it does for its people when it is intact.
On the other hand, democracy?
Extraordinarily fragile.
It's only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.
That's by nature what a democracy is.
It is about the people.
Oh, that's what a democracy is.
It's like a woman.
Strong, but fragile.
Delicate, but wonderful.
Oh!
Everyone is going to vote for Joe Biden.
You understand he's probably going to die in office, right?
Y'all get this, right?
That dude on his last legs.
I'm sorry to break it to you.
I don't mean to shatter your bubble about Joe Biden's longevity.
That dude is not looking great.
And his backup is this.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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KamalaHarris also, again, they're going to go to crisis mode.
Crisis mode dictates that Democrats have to really up the game.
They keep saying stuff like, this could be our last election ever.
Now, let me be clear on this.
I hate when both parties say this stuff.
It's crap.
When people say, this may be the last, we may never have another election.
You don't believe that.
If you actually believe that, then you go shoot somebody, probably.
The idea that this is the last election ever, that Donald Trump is so scary that he's just like Hitler.
Okay, well then, I don't believe you'd think that.
If you did think that, you probably would have focused more effort on taking him down during the Republican primaries, actually.
As opposed to in the general election, where you think that he's beatable.
Whenever Republicans say it's going to be the last election ever, I notice that you're not preparing to sell your house.
And Democrats, you too.
This kind of constant ramping up to the possibility of civil war is really silly, and it's really bad when it comes from your top-level politicians.
When she talks about democracy being strong but fragile, and then she immediately suggests, in the next breath, that this may be our last election, you understand that you are now presenting an actual threat to democracy that requires revolutionary action.
Anyway, here's Kamala Harris saying this stuff.
Treating serious language as though it's a throwaway line is really a problem in American politics, and Kamala does it as much as anybody.
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say this genuinely could be the last democratic election we ever have.
You're right.
Listen to what he says.
He's telling you.
No, you're not!
Dictators aren't a dictator for one day.
No.
Let the people decide.
No, and I'm going to tell you, as vice president, I've now met with over 150 world leaders.
Presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, and kings.
And in the last three international trips I've taken, which are going back to the end of last year through this year, world leaders have come up to me expressing their real concern.
Their real concern that there won't be another election in the United States?
Sure.
This may be the last election.
I love the co-host there who is asking Kamala Harris about that, where she says, This might be the last election.
Donald Trump has said, on the one hand, he'll be a dictator for only one day.
And then he has said, let the people decide.
I noticed neither of those statements is actually a threat to the upcoming election or the one after.
I noticed that.
Usually when you say, let the people decide, that means not the end of elections.
Just the thing I noticed.
So Democrats are going to their backup plan.
If Donald Trump isn't a threat to democracy, then Donald Trump is a threat to you personally.
Again, they're going to drag up.
It's play the hits.
It's play the hits time 2024 for Democrats.
They're getting in early, which means they're a little bit scared.
Whoopi Goldberg was playing the old hits.
One of those big old Democratic hits.
We've already seen one, which is Republicans are going to kill you with their health care plans.
Now, here we have Whoopi Goldberg basically paraphrasing Joe Biden about Mitt Romney back in 2012.
They're going to put you all back in chains.
Here's Whoopi Goldberg saying that Donald Trump wants to enslave black people or something.
Take a look at the things that they're rolling back.
Remember I said ages ago, you know, in their minds they want to bring slavery back.
They're okay with it because, you see, things change.
You know, one of the good things about the Supreme Court is you can fight to make sure you make stuff better.
You don't generally fight to make stuff worse.
Or to roll back.
Or to roll back.
And to me, if you're okay rolling that back, When things were not even a state, when we had no say, so how's that going to roll?
How's that going to roll?
What's the next thing?
Because you know, with all of this comes birth control.
With all of this comes everything that you need as a woman to have had put in place to make sure that we were doing better than we were before.
Yes, Republicans all want to bring slavery back.
That's where they are going.
And they're going to bring slavery back via restrictions on your ability to kill a baby.
That's really where they're going here.
And so the Democrats are going to try to make the entire 2024 election about abortion.
They did this in 2012 also.
Remember that planted question from George Stephanopoulos to Mitt Romney in 2012.
If you have a memory bank that goes this far back, In 2012, Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate for president, believe it or not, for those who are kind of short-memoried here.
And when he was candidate for president, George Stephanopoulos, a Democrat, who was the news anchor at one of the debates, proceeded to ask Mitt Romney about bans on contraception.
And then this became a meme.
The War on Women.
Again, they're bringing back all the hits.
The War on Women is what they're bringing back.
So what are they using as the leverage point for the War on Women?
They're talking about this Arizona ruling that pushes abortion law back to the 1864 protection of all life standard.
As I've said before, on a practical level, Arizona has a Democratic governor.
Arizona has extremely evenly split houses.
They have a one-vote majority for the Republicans in the House and one-vote majority for the Republicans in the Senate.
It's not going to be too hard to peel off a couple of Republicans to vote with Democrats and go to a 15-week standard on abortion by repealing the 1864 law, for example.
But Democrats are trying to use this as case in point of how Republicans want to roll back time to 1864.
So you're seeing all over the media today Okay, well, would it be any different if the law was from, like, 1960?
I don't really think so.
I mean, the law is what the law is.
And again, practically speaking, very good shot that they changed the law in Arizona, but not before they suggest that Donald Trump wants to ban abortion federally.
Now, again, these issues are not related.
A federal abortion ban has actual legal issues that obtain to it,
including the problems of federalism and Supreme Court precedent.
But Democrats are trying to do the war on women routine with Trump.
The big problem they have here is that unlike Mitt Romney, who was actually significantly more pro-life
than Donald Trump, Donald Trump is not all that pro-life on the federal level.
Yes, he appointed judges who overruled Roe versus Wade, but he didn't overrule Roe versus Wade on a personal level.
Yes, Donald Trump was in favor of the overruling of Roe versus Wade,
that doesn't mean that he wanted to replace that with a giant federal abortion ban.
In fact, yesterday, Donald Trump suggested precisely the opposite.
So here was Donald Trump yesterday talking about the Arizona pro-life law that went into place.
Did Arizona go through court?
Yeah, they did, and that'll be straightened out.
And, you know, it's all about state rights.
That'll be straightened out.
And I'm sure that the governor and everybody else, they're going to bring it back into reason, and that'll be taken care of.
Okay, so, he actually said that he thinks the law, quote, goes too far.
And he said, I think it'll be straightened out.
And as you know, it's all about states' rights, and it'll be straightened out.
I'm sure the governor and everybody else have got to bring it back into reason, and that it'll be taken care of.
I think.
Okay, so, in other words, Donald Trump is taking the most moderate position that it is possible to take on abortion.
Which is, no federal legislation, leave it to the states.
That is a more moderate position than pro-lifers want, including me.
I prefer that he's had a 15-week abortion, bad like Mike Pence did.
But Democrats have to whip this into a frenzy in order to try and defeat Trump.
Because Joe Biden is a bad candidate.
There's more on this in just a moment.
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So you have Mika Brzezinski saying, do we need to hit rock bottom?
We're going to get the faux panic from Mika Brzezinski, who's deeply worried about abortion law or something.
They wanted to have a conversation and a debate and an impetus for voters to go to the polls centered around abortion.
I think obviously they would rather have the right to an abortion than have to debate it on the merits.
But from a political standpoint, Willie, this is monumental development.
Well, I mean, to your point, Sam, just to crystallize, I know that you believe women should have a right to access to abortion health care.
And on a policy level, this is horrendous.
This is absolutely horrendous what's happening.
The question is, do we need to hit rock bottom to realize what's happening here?
That's going to be the question in this 2024 election.
Wow, rock bottom would be all the babies get to live.
I can't imagine what rock bottom looks like to Democrats if rock bottom is where the babies get to live.
Katie Hobbs, the governor of Arizona, she is eager to suggest that the Arizona abortion ban will motivate voters to come out to the polls in favor of Democrats.
Here is the wet dish rag who is the actual governor of Arizona because she beat Carrie Lake.
And I am confident that when given the opportunity, they will vote to protect abortion access.
Do you think that will get on the ballot for this election?
They are well on their way there.
They have surpassed the number of signatures needed and they still have months to continue collecting.
And this is a common sense measure that is supported by the vast majority of Arizonans in terms of protecting access.
And, you know, certainly it's going to motivate voters in November.
Okay, but here's the thing.
If you cure it now in Arizona the way that Katie Hobbs wants to, it won't be an issue in November.
So what are they going to do?
Hold it up until November?
Here's the reality.
Democrats have a problem because Donald Trump actually put them in a bind on abortion.
They wanted to use a club to hit him with abortion, and he is actually mirroring many of their positions on abortion.
He doesn't want a federal mandate to allow abortion across the land, but he also is not in favor of a federal ban on abortion across the land.
So this leaves Democrats in a bit of a bind.
So what do they do?
They send out their media members to lie and pretend that Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways, which is not true.
Here is Maggie Haberman of the New York Times trying to push this untrue line.
Trump said, and we at the Times broke this, that Trump was saying to people, when the likely Dobbs decision was impending, that this was going to be bad for Republicans.
He has recognized that the politics of this are bad for Republicans.
He has also then gone out and said that he proudly helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
And so it's a little hard to have it both ways, but he is trying to have it all ways, and he often does.
He tries to leave all options open and avoid being pinned down.
This is on a significant issue that a lot of women are very, very animated by.
And looking as if you are trying to avoid saying anything, I don't think is going to be a sustainable position for him.
This is so confusing to me.
It is not, in fact, a confusing position to say that you are in favor of the overturning of Roe versus Wade, and now it gets kicked back to the states.
That is literally the Federalist position.
That is, by the way, the actual position of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Democrats are trying to, they're trying desperately to force Trump into a strong pro-life position so they can run against it, and he's not giving them the bait.
And that's a problem for them, politically speaking.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden has a problem of his own.
When it comes to illegal immigration, Joe Biden, of course, has done an absolutely awful job.
According to the Herald Review, U.S.
Customs and Border Protection officers in the Tucson sector are seizing enough fentanyl and methamphetamine alone to kill billions of people.
Similar to agents in other sectors finding drugs hidden in novel ways, recent seizures are of drugs hidden in microwaves, children's bouncy houses, and under watermelons.
The Tucson sector, which covers most of the state of Arizona from the Yuma County line east to New Mexico, spans 262 miles on the international border.
Nogales CBP agents seized more than 38,500 pounds of drugs in fiscal 2021.
Drug seizures went down in fiscal 2022 and 2023 to 26,000 and 25,000 pounds respectively, but seizures of cocaine and fentanyl have increased over the same time period.
Not all drugs, of course, are equally deadly.
In fiscal 2023, Tucson sector agents seized a record 12,700 pounds of fentanyl.
So far in fiscal 2024, through March 5th alone, they've already seized more than 4,700 pounds of fentanyl.
That amount is combined enough to kill more than 3.9 billion people, because it doesn't take a lot of fentanyl to kill somebody.
A fentanyl poisoning or overdose can be extraordinarily small amounts.
We've covered this in the first couple of episodes of our series Divided States of Biden.
You should go check that out over at Daily Wire Plus if you want like the complete background on the border crisis plus the fentanyl crisis.
Episode one is the border crisis.
We actually went down to the Arizona border where they're smuggling the fentanyl over.
Episode two is about the impact of the fentanyl crisis in the United States.
Ahead of Easter weekend, more than 1.1 million fentanyl pills were seized at the Nogales point of entry.
And its director, Michael Humphries, said that on March 26th, Nogales POE agents found and seized roughly 166,000 fentanyl pills hidden inside a microwave.
On March 28th, they found and seized more than 661,000 fentanyl pills and 3.9 pounds of meth hidden inside a deflated children's bouncy house.
So things are going really well at America's southern border, naturally.
And the impacts are being felt all over the United States.
We'll get to more on this in a moment.
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Yesterday, the New York Police Department Commissioner, Edward Caban, called migrants ghost criminals.
He said that we have illegal immigrants who are running around in our cities with no actual documentation.
We have no idea who they are or exactly what to do about it.
When there was that high-profile crime in Times Square when the officer was beat by the migrants, you called them ghost criminals.
What did you mean by that?
Right now, most of them had no IDs.
There's no way we could tell where they live, where they come from.
They're pretty much ghost criminals.
I gotta think that makes your job tougher.
To try to combat crime, and you're trying to look for people you don't even know what their names are.
Yeah, absolutely it does.
Of course that's true.
In fact, Joe Biden's border crisis and fentanyl crisis are so bad that even Democrats in contested states are running against Joe Biden.
Jon Tester is the senator from Montana.
Montana is a blood-red state.
He is deeply concerned that he is going to lose his election.
So, he is now running an ad directly against Joe Biden as a Democrat.
When Montanans see a problem, we get to work.
John Tester worked with Republicans fighting to shut down the border, target fentanyl traffickers, and add hundreds of new Border Patrol agents.
And he fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America instead of remain in Mexico.
John Tester knows defending Montana starts with securing the border.
I'm John Tester, and I approve this message to do whatever it takes to keep Montana safe.
Okay, so he's running as a blue dog Democrat against Joe Biden.
That shows the size and scope of the problem.
In fact, Jon Tester sees the problem so clearly that he is now flipping on the possibility of impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security.
According to Politico today, Senate Republicans are trying to orchestrate the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to an exact maximum political pain on their top Democratic targets in November, especially Tester and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Democrats are signaling they will quickly shut down the Mayorkas trial once they receive impeachment articles from the House.
But Tester is now in a problem because if he shuts down the impeachment of Mayorkas while claiming he's trying to shut down the border, The Republican he's running against is going to win, according to Politico.
This puts Tester and Brown in an unenviable bind.
Some of their Purple State colleagues will also feel the heat.
The upper chamber's campaign map this year already favors Republicans tremendously.
The GOP wants to exploit Democrats' vulnerabilities on the topic as migration surges to take back the chamber.
Democrats are hoping to quickly move past the trial, remind voters their GOP colleagues tanked a border deal earlier this year.
That ain't gonna work.
Senate Minority Whip Thune of South Dakota, he said not dealing with it in some way runs the risk of putting a lot of the incumbent Democrats, and for that matter, candidates in other races around the country, in a really difficult position.
I wouldn't want to be them defending that vote.
So there's a reason, again, that Jon Tester is abandoning Joe Biden over this issue.
And no matter how many times Democrats scream that the impeachment is political, it ain't gonna work.
Because everybody can see the border crisis.
In fact, even Joe Biden can see the border crisis, which is why, once again, he's flirting with the idea of the executive action he should have taken all along.
Or, more appropriately, the executive action he should have left in place, because it was Donald Trump who already had in place a remain-in-Mexico policy and differential interpretation of asylum law.
Here is Joe Biden saying, hey, maybe I'll shut down the border.
Well, it suggested that.
We're examining whether or not I have that power.
I would have that power under the legislation when the border has over 500,000 people,
5,000 people a day trying to cross the border because you can't manage it, slow it up.
There's no guarantee that I have that power all by myself without legislation.
And some have suggested I should just go ahead and try it, and if I get shut down by the
court, I get shut down by the court.
But we're trying to work through that right now.
This is the first time that Joe Biden has ever said he gives a crap what a court says.
He once suggested he did not have the unilateral ability to cram down a vaccine mandate on 80 million Americans, then he tried it.
Then the Supreme Court told him he literally could not unilaterally relieve student loan debt, and then he tried to do it anyway.
So is the real holdup here his deep and abiding respect for the Supreme Court of the United States, or is it that his left-wing base will be very angry at him if he tries to shut down immigration at America's southern border?
Again, just another major issue created by a terrible president.
We'll get to the Middle East situation in just one second.
Yet another area of the globe that's on fire thanks to the current president.
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Okay, meanwhile... The situation over in the Middle East continues to percolate.
Tony Blinken continues to try to cater to the pro-Communist voters in Gilbert.
It's just not going to stop.
It's not going to stop.
He put out a statement yesterday.
On Eid al-Fitr, which is the end of Ramadan, saying, quote, as we near the end of the holy month of Ramadan, I wish Muslim communities everywhere Eid Mubarak and join in hopes for a safer and more peaceful world.
As families and communities come together, we know they do so at a time when many Muslim communities worldwide are suffering.
Our thoughts turn to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, civilians in Syria, women suffering under the Taliban in Afghanistan, Uyghurs in the People's Republic of China, Rohingya in Burma and Bangladesh, and far too many others.
So he is lumping in just, Be clear, Israel with the Taliban or the Chinese Communist Party.
That is ridiculous.
West Bank Palestinians, by the way, are not governed directly by Israel.
They're governed by the Palestinian Authority.
So again, this is just another way of attempting to pay off the radicals in the Democratic Party base.
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed three adult sons of the head of Hamas's political leadership on Wednesday.
That's Ismail Haniyeh, who's been enjoying his five-star accommodations in Qatar this entire time, while people have been bombed because his terrorists are hiding beneath them over in Gaza.
All three were apparently terrorists, according to Israel.
Hamas said seven people died in the strike.
Chania's answer to this was, quote, I thank God for this honor that he bestowed upon us with the martyrdom of my three sons and some grandchildren.
These are people who clearly value life.
These are people who... Ismail Chania clearly is just a normal thinking person who wants peace.
Because that's how you would respond if your kids and grandkids were hit in a drone strike because they were terrorists and or associating with terrorists.
You would immediately respond by thanking God for the honor bestowed upon you with the martyrdom of your sons.
That's what you would do, would you not?
Oh, you wouldn't?
Because you're not a terrorist?
And they don't think like you?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
But we have to pretend that there is moral relativism all across the spectrum.
And Hamas, they're just a rational, reasonable group.
Why can't some sort of deal be cut Now, Hamas, for its part, is not compromising in any way, because after all, why would they?
Joe Biden has basically given them the keys to the car.
According to the Times of Israel, amid intensive U.S.
efforts to achieve a deal for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza since October 7th, both Israeli and Palestinian officials tempered optimism on Monday around progress in Cairo talks.
By the way, there is no optimism.
The United States keeps saying optimism so Joe Biden can cater to his base.
But Hamas is not caving and Israel cannot cave because they would be leaving an actual militarily operational terrorist group in charge of Gaza were they to pull out right now.
They would lose the war, in other words, at the Biden administration's behest if they were to do what Joe Biden wanted.
So it's the United States doing happy talk.
It's Joe Biden and his secretary saying, oh, we're so close, we're so close.
Meanwhile, Hamas is like, we will make no concessions.
And Israel's like, well, we can't let you survive.
You murdered 1,200 of our citizens and turned the entirety of the Gaza Strip into a giant terror tunnel.
In separate interviews, several Hamas officials offered varying comments regarding the state of the talks, ranging from rejection of the latest U.S.-drafted, Israeli-backed terms to assertions that the terrorist group was still studying the proposal.
Apparently, the deal under discussion would provide for the release of some 40 Israeli captives in return for a temporary truce and the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners, including some convicted of deadly murder.
By the way, it is now unclear whether Hamas even holds 40 hostages.
How many of the American hostages they're holding are dead?
We have no idea.
Hamas refuses to say.
So clearly, the Biden administration needs to put the pressure on Israel.
Clearly, Israel is the problem here, as always.
Meanwhile, the right is tearing itself apart, as per our usual arrangement, because anything you can do, I can do dumber.
So, Marjorie Taylor Greene is currently leading an insurrection against Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House.
She doesn't have a lot of fellow travelers in this thing.
She is now threatening that if Mike Johnson passes a Ukraine aid bill with Democratic votes, then she will push forward her motion to vacate and presumably garner a little bit more steam.
Here she was yesterday.
There's a lot of talk about Ukraine in regards to the motion to vacate, but FISA is obviously also a big battle up here.
Just how he handles and follows through with the FISA debate, will that influence your thought process on the motion to vacate?
How he handles the FISA process and how he handles funding Ukraine is going to tell our entire conference how to handle the motion to vacate.
Okay, so she's saying that she's the one in control of the boat.
Speaker Johnson, he says these sorts of threats create a continuous situation of chaos, which obviously is true.
No governing majority can govern if at any moment a fringe character can simply pull the trigger on a motion to vacate.
That's not how this is supposed to work.
It was never supposed to work this way.
It is unprecedented that it's working this way.
And reality, it ain't working at all.
And I don't think that would be helpful to us from a political standpoint for the Republican Party to continue to govern, to maintain, keep, and then grow our majority in November.
I thought that would have been a great hindrance to it.
And so that wouldn't be helpful, and nor does the motion to vacate help us in that regard either.
It would be chaos in the House.
So Marjorie and I are going to visit later today and look forward to the conversation.
And I'm not going to discuss it anymore.
I'm not going to discuss it with you all.
I'll discuss it with her.
Okay, well, here is what Speaker Johnson should do, as I've been saying.
He should nuke this nonsense.
This nonsense needs to stop.
It is stupid.
It is preventing the business of the House.
And if he is ousted, there's nobody else ready to take the place.
Marjorie Taylor Greene knows this.
She was asked about it.
And she was like, nope.
Ain't got another name.
So we'll go through another 10 weeks of no speaker, and then eventually, a few purple state Republicans will chip in and make Hakeem Jeffries speaker thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and their deep and abiding desire to be on camera as much as humanly possible.
Pushing that forward, yesterday, was the congressional wing in the House that tried to kill FISA Section 702.
So FISA Section 702 is a section that lets the government monitor communications of foreigners overseas.
That information is then stored on a database, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
It can be searched by U.S.
intelligence officials for names or keywords, which is quite useful because if Osama bin Laden is planning an attack, you want to be able to, for example, search all of these records by name or keyword.
The problem is, U.S.
persons contacted from abroad can sometimes be caught in the data, and the FBI has misused this on occasion.
The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act championed by Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner imposes new guardrails as well as criminal penalties for abuse.
It also preserves the ability to surveil and act with dispatch without introducing onerous bureaucratic barriers.
So basically this debate is whether you can get a FISA warrant or if you need to get a FISA warrant every time you access any request that might catch up an American or Whether you need different procedures.
The bill would require FBI personnel to get a prior approval from a supervisor or staff attorney before running U.S.
person queries.
It would prevent political appointees from approving FBI database queries and it would require audits of U.S.
person queries to be run within 180 days after the query was initiated.
So this comes down to, do you have to apply for a FISA warrant beforehand?
If by the way, it'll be six and one half dozen of another, because here's what's going to happen.
If it ends up being that you have to get a FISA warrant before you actually go forward with a search like this, they'll just keep handing it out like they have been in the past, which is to say, like candy, you'll go for a FISA warrant because you want to make a search.
The FISA courts will be getting 50 of these requests today, and they'll just greenlight all of them, which is historically what they have done.
House Judiciary leaders don't think this is enough.
Chairman Jim Jordan and ranking Democrat Jerry Nadler will offer an amendment to require a warrant for every search of the 702 database that includes U.S.
persons.
I understand both sides of the debate, for sure.
The question is, as Mike Johnson says, you're arguing over this stuff in the House, wait until they pass a clean bill in the Senate and they don't include any guidelines on how these searches are to be done.
There's a whole other House of Congress, in other words.
Johnson plowed ahead, according to Politico, with efforts to bring the bill to the floor despite growing angst in his right flank and former President Trump sounding off and urging Republicans to kill the larger surveillance law.
Congress now has no clear path to extending a program that administrations of both parties have touted as vital to national security before its April 19th expiration.
It existed during the Trump administration as well.
It was not vital for Trump to kill it.
It was vital for intelligence services to be able to search queries about Osama bin Laden and his friends.
House conservatives are warning they not only take issue with the policy behind the wiretapping proposal, but the path Johnson took to get there.
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, one of the 19 Republicans who blocked the bill, said, quote, Well, you know what's really theatrical?
convoluted process. It has been decidedly manipulated right now to make sure certain
amendments can't be heard. And he characterized Washington as disappointment theater.
Well, you know what's really theatrical? This idea that the House controls every aspect of
all legislation as though the Senate does not exist. That's what's irritating.
It's also why Johnson needs to reverse the process in how he's approaching this.
Because, here's the math.
Every time Johnson brings a bill to the floor, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Matt Gaetz, or whoever decides to get their name in the headlines today, is going to put a motion to vacate on the floor.
Then, they will wait for somebody to sound off, President Trump to sound off, on something he doesn't know much about, like a FISA surveillance warrant issue.
And then, if he sounds off, there will be 25 Republicans who will now side against the bill, and then if Johnson goes ahead with it anyway, then they'll threaten to vacate his speakership.
That is not a particularly great way for running the Congress, which is why Johnson needs to seize back the power that a Speaker traditionally had.
The Speaker traditionally had the power, as I mentioned before, on the Hastert Rule to move forward with a majority of the Republican caucus.
Remember, there may be 20 Republicans sounding off against the bill, and 200 in favor of it.
But the 20 keep outweighing the 200, specifically because of the stupidity of the procedures that have currently been put in place.
Johnson needs to nuke this system and nuke it right now.
Alrighty, guys.
The rest of the show continues right now.
We need to get into the bizarre spate of celebrities who are having trans kids.
It must be a genetic bottleneck or something in Hollywood.
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