How The Senate Can Save America From ‘The Void’ with Senator Ted Cruz
If you’re still struggling to make sense of what our “leaders” are up to in Washington DC, this is the episode for you. Charlie is joined by one of the best Senators in the nation, Ted Cruz from Texas, to help make sense of Build Back Better, the Filibuster, HR1, the Debt Ceiling debate, and much more with the signature clarity and charm that has made Ted so effective at pushing back against the swamp. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Cruz: The Best Senator00:10:03
Hey, everybody.
Our conversation with Senator Ted Cruz into the details, what's happening in the Senate, debt limit versus infrastructure bill versus build back better.
We talk about lots of different things, and I think Senator Ted Cruz is one of the best senators, if not the best senator, in Washington, D.C.
He does a wonderful job, and I think very highly of him.
He's a great friend.
And I just want to say, Ted Cruz always shows up to our events.
He always shows up to our events.
And not every politician does that.
A lot of ones say, yeah, yeah, whatever.
I'll be there later.
Senator Cruz, he's terrific.
He's special.
If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
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Senator Cruz is here.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us is probably my favorite senator.
I'm going to get in trouble for saying that.
Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.
How are you doing?
Charlie, always great to be with you.
Thanks for having me.
You're doing amazing work.
You're a true fighter for liberty and very articulate and really inspiring to us all.
But I don't envy what you have to fight right now.
And tell us about it.
Hi, look.
D.C. is a lunatic asylum.
I mean, it is, it's always been crazy, but this year has been unlike anything we've ever seen before.
That Biden, when he came in, made a conscious decision to hand control of the party over to the radicals.
And so the people setting the agenda are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC.
And it is, you know, you think back, we used to think the Obama administration was radical and extreme.
And they didn't even imagine what we're seeing now.
Now, that being said, I'm having fun.
I'm having fun because we really are fighting to save the country.
Like what they're doing is so nuts that I view my job as leading the fight to stop every dumbass idea coming from this administration, and there are a lot of them.
So why do you think that this regime is continuing in this direction despite bad poll numbers, unpopularity?
Prior administrations like the Obama administration will at least slow down a little bit.
Why do you think that is?
I don't know for sure.
You know, one question is who's driving the truck?
It's not clear how much Joe Biden is making decisions.
You know, most of the senators I've talked to haven't spoken to him.
I haven't said a word to Joe Biden since he became president.
That's weird.
That was certainly not true with Trump, but it wasn't true with Obama either.
It is strange.
I've been talking to more and more of my colleagues saying, hey, have you talked to Biden at all?
Even the more establishment side?
Lindsey Graham said he has not spoken to Biden once since he became president.
Lindsay and Joe are friends.
They've traveled all over the world together.
Why do you think that is?
I think his capacity is severely diminished.
And so I think the White House handlers are protecting him.
I also think there's a phenomenon with Democrats.
We're seeing it in the Senate too and in the House, where they're afraid of the far left, that they've made a judgment that the extreme left is where the anger is.
It's where the pitchforks are and the torches.
And they don't want to mess with them.
And I think Biden made a rational decision.
I'm going to give the radicals all the policy, and I get to be president.
I get to fly on a big fancy plane.
I get to be a bit of a fan.
Two scoops of ice cream every night.
Indeed.
And so you're right that ordinarily a president, even if you had made that decision coming in, a president would look at plummeting poll numbers, at the disasters that are unfolding, at the bloodbath in the Virginia election.
In fact, they even almost lost New Jersey.
A rational president would say, okay, tap the brakes.
Let's change direction.
This isn't working.
I don't think there's anybody home.
And the kids that are the staffers, either they're too much of zealots or they're too ideological or they're too scared, but they're not changing direction.
Yeah, I mean, there's only a couple explanations, and you basically hit it perfectly.
The other one is that they want what's happening.
They don't really care about the popularity, and it's a means to the end.
You know, Biden's president as long as he is, and we'll find somebody else to run in the future.
But when will we ever have three chambers to pass our build back better thing, which thanks to President Manchin, it's...
Look, I mean, the Build Back Broke Bill, and that's, by the way, the only thing I'll call it, was it was Bernie Sanders' socialist budget.
Bernie is an avowed and unapologetic socialist.
It used to be five years ago, Democrats pretended they weren't socialists.
Now Bernie's the chairman of the budget committee, and Biden's number one priority is passing the budget committee.
It's insane.
But, you know, so right now, I'm very glad Manchin put out a statement.
It's a great statement.
I hope he sticks to it.
But it, you know, I will say the left is so mad with Manchin.
I've tried.
A lot of us have tried to recruit Manchin over to the Republicans.
At least being an independent, right?
That would break their caucus, wouldn't it?
So we were, a couple of weeks ago, I was standing with Joe and five or six Republican senators, and we were on the Senate floor, and one of them, Dan Sullivan, said, Joe, why don't we do Cruz's idea?
Will make you the chairman of the Committee on Everything.
Senate president, basically.
And I told Joe, I said, Joe, look, at least one of the two parties actually likes you.
And Manchin howled laughing at that.
You know, people ask me all the time, is Manchin going to become a Republican?
I doubt it.
And I just think culturally, he's spent his entire life as a Democrat.
He's the godfather of Democrats in the West Virginia.
That being said, you know, you know, the one group that might make him a Republican are Bernie and AOC and Elizabeth Warren.
If they're so nasty, that they drive him away.
I mean, they could be vicious enough that, you know, on our end, we're just trying to be nice and welcoming and say, look, you know, on the Republican side, we got a diversity of views.
There are a ton of things Manchin votes for that I would never vote for in a million years.
But I don't think we would be the kind of nasty sons of bitches to him that the extreme left is right now.
Yeah, and also, I mean, Manchin gets a lot of power by being the Democrat that won't go along with it.
But there has to be a breaking point at some point, you would think.
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The Corrupt Politicians Act00:06:12
And so looking more broadly, there's now a conversation to try to bring this voting rights legislation forward.
What are your thoughts on that?
I don't think it's going to go anywhere.
Really?
I hope and pray it does not go anywhere.
Because the more watered-down John Lewis writes one.
It's still a disaster.
Okay, yeah, I think it's a total disaster.
It would require the Justice Department to approve states for changing their voting laws.
So it says something about the Democrats that of all their priorities, they embrace socialism.
They want open borders.
They want American weakness.
They want to downgrade the military.
They want the Green New Deal.
You look at all their different priorities, but their number one priority, what was the first bill they introduced in the British Committee?
HR1.
And the first bill they introduced in the 1990s?
SB1, HR1.
It is what a lot of us are calling the Corrupt Politicians Act.
Their priority is power more than anything else.
The Corrupt Politicians Act is designed to strike down every federal, every state voter integrity law across the state.
That's exactly right.
Strike down every photo ID law, strike down prohibitions on felons voting, strike down prohibitions on ballot harvesting.
It's designed to register millions of illegal aliens to vote.
It is welfare for politicians.
It's billions of dollars that goes to political campaigns.
The Democrats' purpose is simple in this bill.
It is to keep Democrats in power for the next hundred years.
Ironically, there have been a number of hearings where they inevitably label the hearing something about Jim Crow.
That's their favorite talking point.
And I've been leading the fight against the Corrupt Politicians Act, both on the Judiciary Committee and on the Rules Committee.
I'm on both, and those are the two committees that have jurisdiction over this stuff.
And one thing that I have pointed out many times is, you know, for Democrats to talk about Jim Crow with this bill is actually quite fitting.
Because Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats for the purpose of keeping incumbent Democratic politicians in office and making it impossible for the voters to vote Democrats out of office.
And today, the Corrupt Politicians Act is written by Democrats for the purpose of keeping incumbent Democrats in office and making it impossible for the voters to vote those corrupt Democrats out of office.
It's the same fundamental assault on the right to vote.
I mean, the irony is the Democrats' rhetoric is exactly opposite what they're doing.
They're trying to make it so that we, the people, so the voters, can't throw the bums out.
And their first iteration was the Corrupt Politicians Act.
Their second iteration is, as you noted, the so-called John Lewis Act.
Now, look, John Lewis was someone I knew, John.
I respected him as a civil rights leader.
And they're misusing his name, quite honestly.
The bill would require every substantive change in voting laws in every state to not be able to go into effect until unelected bureaucrats of the Department of Justice signed off on them.
Now, who are those unelected bureaucrats?
They are radical leftists, hard radical leftists.
I mean, they are Joe Biden nominated Kristen Clark to be the head of the Civil Rights Division, who she was the one who would personally have to sign off on it.
Vanita Gupta, who's the Associate Attorney General.
Those two are two of the leading advocates in the country of abolishing the police.
They are partisan zealots.
And, you know, you think about it.
The Democratic language is, we protect democracy.
What utter horse manure.
No, having one bureaucrat in Washington say to the people of Texas, we got 29 million people in Texas.
And the 29 million people in Texas want voter ID because we don't want illegal voters stealing our right to vote.
And the Democrats are saying, you know what?
One bureaucrat trumps 29 million voters.
If you believe in democracy, then let the people vote.
And these people don't believe in democracy.
They believe in power.
And that's what this is all about.
And so you think the chances of that passing are.
You don't think Manchin could come to some sort of I know you hated me about that, but I look, that's my fear that there's going to be like a fake consensus brokered.
That fear is real and it's dangerous.
So I got elected to the Senate in 2012.
When I showed up in 2013, I still remember Jim DeMitt pulled me aside.
He said, Ted, Manchin is like a purple unicorn.
He will always, always, always be with you, right until the moment you need him.
And I've served nine years with Joe.
Prior to this year, I had never once seen him stand up to Schumer on any issue that matters where he was the deciding vote.
Manchin was someone who, if we had 51 votes, he'd give you a 50-second.
He'd make it bipartisan.
That was valuable.
But he was never the deciding vote that decided.
Now, this year, so I came into this year very pessimistic that Manchin would have the courage to stand up to Schumer.
Manchin has blown me away.
I am astonished, and I'll put on top of that Kirsten Sinema.
You and I are in Arizona right now.
She's been great.
She has had real courage to stand up, and she's, that surprised all of us.
None of us saw that coming.
She's been demonized.
You know, there'd been leftist activists who chase her in the ladies' room.
Illegals illegally going into the restroom and filming her, which is many laws broke.
It is so the two of them are all the stands between America and the void and the utter darkness.
Because if you look at legislation, I'd break it in two buckets.
One is bad policy, spending trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars in debt, maybe trillions of dollars in new taxes.
They've been doing that, and they'll keep being able to do that.
Manchin and Sinima's Courage00:10:03
They can use budget reconciliation to do that with 50 votes.
The second set is structural.
It's about rigging the game.
And what falls into that, the Corrupt Politicians Act falls into that.
Packing the U.S. Supreme Court falls into that.
Granting amnesty and the right to vote to tens of millions of aliens, that falls into that.
D.C., Puerto Rico.
D.C., Puerto Rico, statehood.
All of those are not about substance.
They're about keeping Democrats in power forever.
As long as the filibuster remains the rules of the Senate, bucket two is not going to happen.
The chances of it happening are zero.
So the only way, because all 50 Republicans are a hard no on all of those, the only way they happen is if you end the filibuster.
Now, Manchin has said he's not going to end the filibuster.
Cinema said she's not going to end the filibuster.
I hope they stick to their guns.
Schumer and the Democrats are trying to create a crafted, narrow exception for the filibuster for voting rights.
I don't think they will do it, but they could easily do it.
And I will say on this, Republican leadership screwed up with the debt ceiling deal we just cut, where there was an exception to the filibuster written into the bill that a bunch of Republicans voted for.
And I look, I stood up at our Senate lunch and said, you know what?
They're going to point to this and say this is precedent for going after the filibuster on voting rights legislation.
What was the response from leadership Barasso, Thun and McConnell?
Shrug.
We got to do it.
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So can we focus on the debt ceiling for a second?
Because it's really confusing to a lot of our listeners, and I kind of get my wires crossed.
So the infrastructure package was passed, which was a garbage bill.
It was terrible.
It's not like country-ending garbage, but it's just garbage and gave way too much power to the wrong people.
But that was separate than the Buildback broke bill.
Totally separate.
They tried to tie them together.
But then also in the midst of that was a debt ceiling increase.
Now, McConnell authorized the debt ceiling increase, I think, like a month and a half ago, and just Ben Schumer basically mocked him on the Senate floor.
Is that correct?
And so then McConnell then said, if my memory serves me, because sometimes they don't want you to remember that we're never doing this again.
Right?
Like, good luck doing this in December.
But then what happened?
They did it in December.
Okay, so it's just, was there any caveat or nuance or concession?
All right, let's break down the different pieces because it's confusing.
Look, you know, I do this for a living and it's confusing to me.
So I so the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was a $1.2 trillion bill, that passed.
That is law.
I didn't support it.
I voted no.
I vocally opposed it.
That being said, that bill was not nearly as bad as Buildback Broke.
It's two different universes.
The $1.2 trillion, you know, there was a significant amount of real infrastructure spending in it.
Why do they call it infrastructure?
Because infrastructure is popular.
People like infrastructure.
People like roads and bridges.
Of the $1.2 billion, $1.2 trillion, sorry, $110 billion of it was roads and bridges.
I actually stood up and said, you know what?
Let's pass $110 billion in roads and bridges.
We all support.
You get 95 votes for let's spend money on roads and bridges.
That's an important role of government.
Everyone supports it.
But there was $1.1 trillion that wasn't roads and bridges, that they were using the roads and bridges to sell it.
It's like the old con man who offers to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
They were selling the same bridge over and over again because it's popular.
That passed.
A chunk of Republicans supported it.
You had secondly the debt ceiling.
So the debt ceiling is a limitation on the total amount the country can borrow.
And it is my view is not that we should never raise the debt ceiling.
You sometimes get politicians who say that, but frankly, they're not being serious or credible when they say that because you've got it varies at time to time, but it's roughly 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed.
So unless you're prepared to slash federal spending 40% overnight, you're going to continue to borrow some.
And by the way, there is nobody, zero members of the Congress who advocate slashing 40% of spending overnight.
So if that is the case, then you do have to continue to borrow.
My view has always been we should not raise the debt ceiling without using it as leverage to pass real, meaningful structural reform that limits spending and addresses the debt, that fixes the underlying problem.
It doesn't have to be a magic wand.
You don't have to solve all of it.
You know, we don't live in, we don't have Harry Houdini who can just magically make things go away, but we should use the tools we have to address the real problem.
I think that's the responsible way to do it.
That's the honest way to do it.
In this instance, for several months, the position of every Republican in the Senate was, we're not going to help with the debt ceiling because the Democrats can do it on their own.
They have majorities in both houses.
They can raise the debt ceiling under budget reconciliation.
So if they're going to bankrupt the country, they ought to take responsibility for it and vote for it on their own.
Mitch McConnell was very vocal and clear in making that argument repeatedly and in urging even some of the wobblier members of our conference to hold that line.
So for a couple of months, all 50 Republicans posture.
Very effective.
What happened at the end of the day was Mitch blinked.
Now, I will say this, I disagree with him.
And actually, we had some hot, hot discussions and lunches.
I've been in some really intense screaming matches in the Senate.
This approached some of us in prior years.
You mean the one back when you called him a liar on the Senate floor?
You know, we have had our disagreements.
I think it was a serious mistake what Mitch did.
Now, that being said, I'll tell you his reasoning because his reasoning is not crazy.
His reasoning was he believed if he didn't give in that Mansion and cinema were about to nuke the filibuster.
That he was convinced that they were getting ready on the debt ceiling to nuke the filibuster.
And what Mitch argued to us is he gave in and went back on what he said to preserve the filibuster.
So basically, he was afraid that cinema and mansion don't usually want to break the filibuster, but they would to raise the debt ceiling.
That they were persuaded that a default of the debt would be so calamitous that they would end the filibuster on that.
Which would then set the precedent for...
Oh, got it.
I don't agree with Mitch's assessment of the likelihood that they would do that, but I do think he genuinely believed that.
And if that's the case, what he did wasn't crazy.
I think we could have held the line.
And certainly, once a bunch of Republicans came the first time, then the Republicans said, okay, we did it once, but we're not going to do it again.
And then they did it again.
And it was just like...
How many people voted for it?
10, 15?
I think it was 14.
Yeah.
But it's all the same cast of characters, right?
You know, and it's the problem is when you demonstrate you're not credible.
That's right.
Nobody believes you.
It's.
Makes bad foreign policy, too.
So one of the reasons why I've won a lot of legislated fights in Washington is that when I say I'm going to do something, people believe me.
It's one of the reasons Trump was so effective is our enemies, you know, whether Russia or China, they're like, that dude's so crazy, we don't know what he'll do.
That's right.
And that credibility is important.
I think Republicans really hurt themselves because the next time they say, okay, this is a line we won't cross, Schumer laughs and says, yeah, you will.
We'll just give you another month and then you'll cross it.
Yeah.
We could talk for a while, but I've got to get you on stage.
We're here at AmericaFest, TPUSA.com.
Why Nobody Believes You00:01:55
The Verdict with Ted Cruz is a phenomenal podcast co-hosted with my friend Michael Knowles.
Just a short little soundbite, promote it.
So we launched Verdict two years ago, January of last year, launched it brand new.
Within a few weeks, it became the number one ranked podcast in the world.
We just did our 100th episode.
Wow.
So we do it about once a week.
We've had over 40 million downloads.
And it's typically 30, 40 minutes of the inside story on what's going on in the Senate, what's going on in the Supreme Court, all of the stuff that the news doesn't tell you.
But frankly, Charlie, you do a good job in your podcast of engaging.
But, you know, it's hard to learn what's really going on.
And what I try to do in Verdict is pull the curtain back and bring people inside.
And so, you know, everyone listening to your show, let me encourage you, come over to Verdict.
Go subscribe.
Subscribe.
Give us five stars.
We're on YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast.
Do the whole thing.
And look, we're saving the country.
And I appreciate the work you do every day to do that, Charlie.
It makes a big difference.
And I appreciate the work your listeners are doing.
I mean, it really is an army of freedom lovers.
And I'm really optimistic.
We're going to pull the country back from the brink.
Amen.
Well, I want to thank you for making the special trip out to Phoenix to our students.
It means a lot.
A lot of lawmakers say no, but you've always been there.
You speak at all of our stuff.
It really goes, it doesn't go unnoticed and it really touches us.
Thank you.
You guys are making a difference, and it's now or never.
Amen.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.