The Charlie Kirk Show - The House Got What it Wanted, Which Was… With Russ Vought
Aired: 2023-01-09
Duration: 36:24


=== Turning Point USA Freedom (02:03) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today's Charlie Kirk show.
[00:00:01]  What exactly are the concessions that the 20 holdouts, the 20 Freedom Caucus members received?
[00:00:11]  What exactly did they get in exchange and return?
[00:00:15]  We explore that.
[00:00:16]  And then Russ Vogt joins us to help explain why he believes that these concessions are significant, worthy of appreciation, and why it's a big, big deal.
[00:00:30]  Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:35]  That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:39]  Get involved with Turning PointUSA today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:45]  Start a high school chapter or a college chapter.
[00:00:48]  Turning point USA needs to be your starting point to take back America.
[00:00:54]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:57]  Check it out right now at tpusa.com.
[00:01:01]  Check it out.
[00:01:02]  Turning point USA is the battleship to reclaim the country, to educate your children, to pass down American values.
[00:01:13]  tpusa.com.
[00:01:15]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:01:19]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:01:20]  Here we go.
[00:01:21]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:01:23]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:01:25]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:28]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:31]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:32]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:33]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:01:35]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:01:42]  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.
[00:01:51]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:53]  Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.

=== Skeptical of the Deal (06:57) ===

[00:02:03]  Late Friday evening, going into Saturday morning, a deal was struck for Speaker of the House.
[00:02:09]  The 20 holdouts negotiated a fabulous deal.
[00:02:13]  And I will be very honest with you, as many of you who watch and listen to this program with regularity, I was skeptical.
[00:02:19]  And I was skeptical for a good reason.
[00:02:21]  And I'm going to prove that my skepticism was rooted in a real threat.
[00:02:25]  But these holdouts got us a terrific deal.
[00:02:29]  They pushed it just far enough with real demands, serious asks of what success looks like.
[00:02:38]  And these are patriots.
[00:02:39]  They're not terrorists, as some people on television called them.
[00:02:43]  Dan Crenshaw called them narcissistic insurgents, sociopathic enemies.
[00:02:51]  This is all nonsense.
[00:02:52]  These are patriots that showed in the end that they were willing to negotiate in good faith.
[00:02:59]  Now, these concessions led to real substantive rule changes if the rules package can indeed pass in the next day or two.
[00:03:08]  We're going to talk in great detail of what that means, but we must realize that on late Friday evening, the kind of forces that were holding out, everyone from Andy Biggs to Eli Crane to Matt Rosendale to Lauren Boebert to Matt Gates to Anna Paulina Luna, they were pushing and pushing and pushing for real rules changes.
[00:03:30]  But there was a rumbling that began to surface.
[00:03:35]  And that rumbling was from the moderate wing, the moderate wing that consists of people like Nancy Mace and Tony Gonzalez and Dan Crenshaw and Burgess Owens, people that are very much in the establishment of the Republican Party.
[00:03:53]  And they were getting, and Don Bacon, they were getting very angry at Matt Gates and Lauren Boebert and Andy Biggs and the people that were trying to strike a conservative deal that would represent voters.
[00:04:06]  Now, you might say, oh, what's the difference?
[00:04:08]  They should have pushed this forward further.
[00:04:10]  They never should have caved in.
[00:04:11]  Like, hold on a second.
[00:04:12]  They did not cave in.
[00:04:13]  That is an incorrect way to view this because the moderates were starting to say, well, we're going to blow up the deal.
[00:04:21]  You see, the moderates consisted of 150 to 175, maybe less, let's say 100 people.
[00:04:28]  And so, for example, on Friday evening, Tony Gonzalez from Texas, a very moderate Republican, came out and said, I'm not going to vote for the rules package.
[00:04:40]  He said, I am not going to vote for the second vote after a speaker, the House vote.
[00:04:45]  I'll vote for Kevin McCarthy for speaker, but I'm not going to vote for what they're actually negotiating on, trying to kill the actual deal of negotiation.
[00:04:53]  To the credit, though, of Gates and to Boebert and to all of these people that were negotiating, they pushed it to the absolute limit and they started to see the legitimate threats of how the moderates were trying to sabotage the deal.
[00:05:10]  And they sold the shares at the highest possible moment to use kind of a stock market equivalent.
[00:05:16]  In fact, they took the concessions.
[00:05:19]  Those that were not comfortable voting for Kevin McCarthy, they said, all right, I will vote present.
[00:05:24]  And they got a very good deal.
[00:05:26]  Now, I know some of you are probably upset.
[00:05:29]  Some of you are probably emailing me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:05:31]  Charlie, they sell out.
[00:05:33]  They sold us out to Kevin McCarthy.
[00:05:36]  And I'm not okay with that.
[00:05:38]  I don't think that's the correct way to view this.
[00:05:40]  You must recognize and realize that the moderates still controlled 80% of the House.
[00:05:45]  So you got serious concessions that we're about to go through for a couple days of very firm negotiation tactics, understanding that the moderates could have prepared, could have sabotaged the entire deal.
[00:05:59]  Now, if you don't believe me, look at Cut 12.
[00:06:02]  Cut 12 is Nancy Mace, who went on television yesterday and said, I don't know if I'm going to vote for the rules package.
[00:06:09]  The rules package is the whole enchilada that the Freedom Caucus negotiated last week.
[00:06:15]  So the deal that we're about to go through, the concessions we went through, if the moderates don't vote for that on the floor when it comes forward, then it effectively blows up the entire speaker's race.
[00:06:26]  And we might have to start all over again.
[00:06:27]  You can only push a negotiation so far until the deal blows up.
[00:06:32]  And I want to give credit to Chip Roy and give credit to Ana Paulina.
[00:06:35]  Give credit to Gosar.
[00:06:36]  Give credit to all of them.
[00:06:38]  This is Nancy Mace, the moderates, play Cut 12.
[00:06:41]  How are you going to work with these folks to get anything done for the American people?
[00:06:48]  It's going to be very difficult.
[00:06:49]  Matt Gates is a fraud.
[00:06:50]  Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week, he sent out a fundraising email.
[00:06:55]  What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions.
[00:07:01]  I don't support that kind of behavior.
[00:07:04]  Yeah, you just support obedience to the regime.
[00:07:06]  We got that, Nancy.
[00:07:07]  Thanks for shopping.
[00:07:08]  There's another piece of tape, though, where she says she might not even vote for the rules package.
[00:07:12]  Now, you might say, oh, who cares?
[00:07:14]  That could obliterate very serious concessions that were brokered thanks to these courageous holdouts.
[00:07:21]  Again, I was skeptical of the strategy.
[00:07:23]  I was skeptical because I thought the moderates were going to blow this up.
[00:07:26]  I thought Don Bacon and Tony Gonzalez and Nancy Mace were going to blow this up a lot earlier.
[00:07:30]  They were starting to threaten that finally on Friday.
[00:07:33]  Now, what are these concessions?
[00:07:35]  First and foremost, concession number one, adding conservative freedom caucus members to the House Rules Committee.
[00:07:41]  Now, you don't hear very much about the House Rules Committee.
[00:07:44]  It's the machinery of Congress.
[00:07:46]  It's kind of where the sausage is made.
[00:07:47]  It's the behind the scenes type work.
[00:07:49]  Well, the rules committee decides whether the house will vote on legislation at all.
[00:07:54]  Usually, it is just a proxy of the speaker of the house.
[00:07:57]  The speaker of the house usually puts his or her most loyal members on the rules committee, and they basically, whatever they want, the rules committee mirrors or parallels.
[00:08:08]  So, the house committee has the House Committee on Rules has 13 members and always has a supermajority for the party in power, typically nine to four.
[00:08:15]  For the past half century, this committee has basically been under control of the speaker.
[00:08:19]  Getting Freedom Caucus votes on this committee matters a lot, though.
[00:08:24]  They otherwise would have had no representation.
[00:08:26]  Under Paul Ryan or John Boehner, this would have been a fantasy.
[00:08:29]  This would have been a far-off dream that they would have been scoffed at and laughed at by the DC cartel.
[00:08:35]  Now, if they get two members on the rules committee, it won't matter very much.
[00:08:41]  If the Freedom Caucus can get three, they have a lot more power.
[00:08:44]  All of that is going to be in the upcoming rules package that Nancy Mae says she might not vote for.
[00:08:50]  And Tony Gonzalez says he will not vote for because the moderates, and here's the thing: before I go any further, I have on good authority some people that were texting me because I made a lot of phone calls this weekend asking around.

=== Good Ranchers Meat Promo (03:15) ===

[00:09:00]  The moderates were in Kevin McCarthy's office all weekend complaining about this deal.
[00:09:10]  The moderates were in McCarthy's office pounding the table saying we gave Matt Gates too much, we gave Lauren Boebert too much, we gave Chip Roy too much, and it was McCarthy, and this is factual, that was holding the line, saying, Guys, we needed to get a deal done.
[00:09:26]  We needed to get a deal done.
[00:09:27]  That's how you know you got a good deal.
[00:09:29]  The moderates are not happy with this.
[00:09:31]  McCarthy is now telling the moderates to suck it up and vote for the rules package.
[00:09:37]  Second concession: McCarthy has reportedly promised with the Freedom Caucus.
[00:09:44]  Again, this will all be reflected in the rules package that is going to be voted on very soon, an open rule on all spending measures, meaning conservatives will get to offer amendments that would defund or reduce funding for programs that we oppose.
[00:09:56]  Of course, this could be risky.
[00:09:57]  It could allow moderates to team up with Democrats to increase spending on some things, but it does give power to the House Freedom Caucus.
[00:10:04]  Now, the third concession we're going to get to in a second.
[00:10:08]  But the fact that the moderates were complaining to Kevin McCarthy all weekend shows that a great deal was cut, and also that they brought this to the best possible moment to sell their shares and to cash out when the stock was the highest.
[00:10:22]  It was very wise negotiating.
[00:10:24]  A tactic that goes on too long becomes a drag, in the words of Saul Linsky.
[00:10:29]  And they brought the tactic to a perfect pitch, pitch-perfect moment and said, We got what we wanted.
[00:10:34]  We might not have wanted Kevin McCarthy, what a lot of them says, but we are willing now to strike a deal.
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=== Fair Congressional Rules Package (04:20) ===

[00:12:16]  Based on our emails, people are pretty upset.
[00:12:19]  They say never, a deal should not have been struck.
[00:12:21]  You know, this was, it's a total fraud.
[00:12:23]  I disagree.
[00:12:24]  I trust the negotiation.
[00:12:26]  Even Matt Gates said he ran out of stuff to ask for.
[00:12:30]  Matt Gates said, I got nothing else to ask for.
[00:12:32]  There's a fair amount of positive emails as well, but I want to keep on hearing from you, freedom at charliekirk.com, because the moderates have power too.
[00:12:39]  You have to remember that.
[00:12:40]  It's not just the 20 holdouts that had power for a limited time.
[00:12:44]  The moderates were preparing to strike back.
[00:12:46]  Someone said, Charlie, stop calling the moderates, call them Democrats.
[00:12:49]  Okay, they could be rhinos.
[00:12:50]  They could be Biden Republicans.
[00:12:52]  They could be whatever you want to call them.
[00:12:53]  They were preparing to strike back.
[00:12:56]  For example, Nancy Mace went on television and said that, I don't think I'm going to vote for the rules package, or I don't know how I'm going to vote on the rules package.
[00:13:04]  The rules package, by the way, is going to be an 80 to 100 page bill that will be voted out in the next day or two that crystallizes all of these concessions.
[00:13:15]  So for example, many of you said, well, Charlie, how do we trust them?
[00:13:19]  How do we trust them?
[00:13:20]  There is no trusting.
[00:13:22]  If McCarthy is going to be good for his word, then all of this will be summarized in that 80 to 100 page rules package.
[00:13:31]  If not, they're not going to vote for it and the deal will be dead.
[00:13:35]  And since there's now a one person, there's now a one threshold to vacate the chair, we will restart.
[00:13:40]  So McCarthy is going to be forced to be good for his word.
[00:13:43]  It's not a matter of trust.
[00:13:44]  Once that rules package passes and it is put into ink, it doesn't matter if you trust somebody or not, it becomes the standard operating procedure.
[00:13:58]  It becomes the framework that all congressional business of this Congress has to operate.
[00:14:02]  Play cut 14.
[00:14:05]  This is Nancy Mace saying she might not vote for it.
[00:14:08]  Play cut 14.
[00:14:10]  Are you saying that you're going to withhold your vote on those published agreements?
[00:14:15]  I am considering that as an option right now.
[00:14:18]  I like the rules package.
[00:14:19]  It is the most open, fair, and fiscally conservative package we've had in 30 years.
[00:14:23]  I support it.
[00:14:24]  But what I don't support is a small number of people trying to get a deal done or deals done for themselves in private, in secret, to get a vote or a vote present.
[00:14:36]  I don't support that.
[00:14:37]  That is just what Nancy Pelosi does, and that's not what they should be doing.
[00:14:40]  And so I am on the fence right now about the rules package vote tomorrow for that reason.
[00:14:44]  Nancy Mace is such a fraud.
[00:14:46]  Yeah, I don't like people cutting backdoor deals unless it's me cutting a backdoor deal.
[00:14:50]  So concession number three, this is my favorite of all the concessions.
[00:14:56]  The House, this will be in the rules package, is going to establish a select committee.
[00:15:01]  Remember, we had the January 6th committee.
[00:15:03]  This will be a new select committee on the weaponization of government.
[00:15:07]  This new church-style committee that we've been talking about is now going to be put into practice.
[00:15:15]  The church committee, as you remember, was a special Senate committee in the 70s.
[00:15:19]  And there was the Pike equivalent in the House, which exposed all of the abusive and illegal behavior by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and so forth.
[00:15:28]  Now, the new weaponization on government committee will be chaired by Jim Jordan.
[00:15:35]  Now, they are going to have wide-ranging congressional authority to go where the facts lead them.
[00:15:40]  We now have on good authority, Christopher Wray, the CIA, they are lobbying hard.
[00:15:46]  They are lobbying aggressively to try to stop this rules package because of this new church and pike committee equivalent.
[00:15:54]  With only the House, the new Congress can't necessarily pass laws with the Senate, but we can send subpoenas and compel transparency.
[00:16:03]  And we have Rust vote coming on our program to explain to us the significance of what this new Jordan committee, the Church and Pike Committee, could mean.
[00:16:13]  Thomas Massey, one of my favorite members of the House, one of the most ethical, honest, and real members of the House of Representatives.
[00:16:24]  Thomas Massey says this is a dream.
[00:16:26]  He could not have imagined getting a select committee to go look into the FBI, to go look into the NSA, to go look into the CIA.

=== New Select Committee Power (14:36) ===

[00:16:36]  Only Congress can do this.
[00:16:39]  Now, some of you are skeptics and cynics, and I see your emails.
[00:16:41]  Charlie won't matter anything.
[00:16:42]  The swamp will win and all this.
[00:16:44]  The only body constitutionally, the only body that can look into the abuses, the overreach, the terror, and the tyranny of the fourth branch of government is Congress.
[00:16:56]  It is the only body.
[00:16:59]  And so if this ends up happening and if this gets voted on and if the rules package passes, that is a serious and substantial takeaway from what was an underwhelming November midterm election into something that is material and real and will have ramifications positively for generations to come.
[00:17:21]  To go look into the raid on Mar-a-Lago, to go look into the collusion with Twitter, to go look into all these different things.
[00:17:28]  Matt Gates said on television, we were at a stage, this was him right before the final speaker vote, where I have run out of things to ask for.
[00:17:37]  The end of the year is right around the corner, and it's time for you to consider a change in your investment plan.
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[00:18:39]  So look, McCarthy has also promised the Club for Growth that the Conservative Leadership Fund would not get involved in primaries of open seats, meaning that if there was a safe and comfortable Republican seat, they're not going to get in.
[00:18:52]  They're just going to allow it to play out, like Anthony Sabatini or Caroline Levitt's race.
[00:18:57]  Discretionary spending is capped at the 2022 fiscal year level, which counterintuitively means the spending levels of Biden's first year in office.
[00:19:05]  But more importantly, this means pairing back defense spending, aka Ukraine spending.
[00:19:12]  McCarthy, in writing, has promised not to raise the debt limit again without major spending cuts to go with it.
[00:19:19]  Concession number six, floor votes on proposals for House term limits and enhanced border security.
[00:19:24]  This is where Tony Gonzalez has kind of lost his mind.
[00:19:27]  And finally, McCarthy has agreed with the House Freedom Caucus, will allow a single House member to propose essentially a no-confidence motion against him.
[00:19:35]  So if he tries to break any parts of the deal, they can immediately launch a revolt and pick a new speaker.
[00:19:40]  I'm going to go to a piece of tape here.
[00:19:41]  Matt Gates, Cut 15, saying this deal is so good, I have run out of things to ask for.
[00:19:46]  Play cut 15.
[00:19:47]  I am grateful that Speaker designate McCarthy has been so receptive to each and every change that we have demanded.
[00:19:54]  And Sean, we're at the stage right now where I'm running out of stuff to ask for.
[00:19:58]  I mean, read the bills, have a balanced budget, have a border plan.
[00:20:02]  Kevin McCarthy is agreeing to all these things.
[00:20:05]  And again, it's never been about him.
[00:20:06]  It's been about draining the swamp, making this a more honest, transparent, open place.
[00:20:11]  Now, many of you are emailing me, Charlie.
[00:20:13]  This will never go into effect.
[00:20:14]  This will never happen.
[00:20:16]  We'll see what happens with the rules package and the vote.
[00:20:20]  If that happens, then every single one of the Freedom Caucus members should move to block the rules package.
[00:20:27]  And the Democrats won't vote for the rules package because the rules package will say that they're in the minority in every committee.
[00:20:32]  And so let's see.
[00:20:34]  Trust, but verify.
[00:20:36]  I fully support the Freedom Caucus reading every word of this rules package.
[00:20:41]  And if it's not what they negotiated, block it.
[00:20:43]  With us is Russ Vogt from the Center for Renewing America.
[00:20:48]  And Russ is the original architect, the designer of this new church committee.
[00:20:53]  It might be called the Jordan Committee, which I think is a major win for liberty and oversight and for reigning in the fourth branch of government.
[00:21:00]  Russ, welcome back to the program.
[00:21:02]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:21:03]  Appreciate you having me on.
[00:21:04]  Russ, first, let's just talk more broadly.
[00:21:07]  Do you believe that the deal as it is right now, it has yet to be voted on in a rules package, is a significant win for constitutional conservatives?
[00:21:16]  I do.
[00:21:17]  I think it's a historic and transformational agreement.
[00:21:20]  Most of it is not going to be voted on as part of the rules package.
[00:21:23]  The procedural aspects will be, but a lot of this goes to the policy commitments.
[00:21:28]  But this gets to the control of the House and whether conservatives representing the American people have the tools to dismantle the cartel in Washington, D.C.
[00:21:40]  And I don't think we've seen something on the procedural aspects of this since 1961.
[00:21:45]  So I think it's very substantial.
[00:21:47]  And then you get to some of the policy wins, like you just mentioned with the church committee, the agreement to balance the budget in 10 years by going after woke and weaponized government.
[00:21:56]  And I really think that conservatives were able to get a significant result from this situation.
[00:22:02]  So you said most of it is not part of the rules package.
[00:22:06]  How will we put this into writing?
[00:22:08]  How will we make the ink manifested into reality so it's not just words or bloviating from House leadership?
[00:22:17]  So one of the key aspects is in rules, and that's the motion to vacate.
[00:22:21]  And most of your audience would think of that in a legislative body as a vote of no confidence.
[00:22:26]  That was very, very critical.
[00:22:28]  That is in the rules committee that needs to pass.
[00:22:31]  But the rules committee controls procedurally what comes to the floor in the House of Representatives.
[00:22:36]  Since 1961, the speaker says, the rules committee, this is what I want.
[00:22:40]  You're going to put it on the floor.
[00:22:42]  Now it's going to be independent.
[00:22:44]  And so any of the policy agreements that were made are now self-enforcing because the very people controlling the floor are the conservatives that struck this agreement.
[00:22:56]  And the non-things that they can't control are going to be enforced by the fact that you now have 20 members.
[00:23:03]  They showed they're willing to use the motion to vacate.
[00:23:06]  They will have that ability to do that.
[00:23:08]  And so what I think is so powerful about this is it's the emergence of coalition government in the House, which is we knew that the Republican Party is largely made up of their establishment.
[00:23:18]  Yes, in the last election, we were rooting for them.
[00:23:21]  But we also knew that they're the conservatives is who we want to empower.
[00:23:25]  And now 20 of them, and their numbers are bigger.
[00:23:28]  There's conservative.
[00:23:29]  There's Ken Buck.
[00:23:30]  There's Thomas Massey.
[00:23:32]  It just so happens those 20 were, let's just say, convicted enough to speak.
[00:23:40]  Exactly.
[00:23:40]  And so you've got a much bigger number that's going to be able to be interested in balancing the budget in 10, or it really amplifying the work of the church committee.
[00:23:52]  And so this coalition government is going to really have a lot of ability to be able to go to town for the American people.
[00:24:00]  So Russ, just to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, you make a really smart point about coalition government, which about time we start to use the power of conservatives to try to make Congress more representative.
[00:24:14]  The Democrats have been doing something similar for years, but they do this all behind closed doors.
[00:24:17]  I mean, they would never put up with something like this publicly.
[00:24:21]  The machine would not put up with it.
[00:24:23]  The board would not be happy.
[00:24:25]  But so you say that some of this is part of the rules package.
[00:24:29]  So when are they voting on that?
[00:24:30]  I think it's the next day or two.
[00:24:31]  It might be today, right?
[00:24:32]  So they're putting an 80 to 100 page rules package together.
[00:24:36]  I was laughing when I was watching some of the coverage very early on Saturday morning.
[00:24:40]  It was like 2 a.m. Eastern, where they said, now we're not sure if we're going to get a rules package vote tonight.
[00:24:45]  Involved in the rules package is 72 hours to read a bill.
[00:24:48]  And I said, hold on a second.
[00:24:49]  How could you pass a rules package where one of the rules is that you need 72 hours to read the bill and you're going to do it with only two hours?
[00:24:56]  Actually, to McCarthy's credit, he said, you guys need time to read the rules package.
[00:25:02]  When is that vote going to come?
[00:25:03]  And I think motion to vacate the chair is the, is the, is the new Jordan committee part of that rules package, or is that just kind of a sidelined promise?
[00:25:13]  It is a, it's not, the resolution is written for the Jordan.
[00:25:17]  It could be Jordan.
[00:25:18]  The select committee is ready to yeah, it's written it's written.
[00:25:22]  It'll be voted on soon.
[00:25:24]  I don't expect, it's not part of the rules committee package itself.
[00:25:27]  That's that vote is tonight.
[00:25:29]  It includes the motion to vacate your vote of no confidence.
[00:25:32]  It includes the 72-hour holdover for a piece of legislation.
[00:25:37]  It includes this rule that allows you to go directly at the funding of a particular bureaucrat like Tony Fauci.
[00:25:43]  Those are the kinds of things, the restriction against raising taxes on the floor of the House or increasing spending in the amendment process.
[00:25:51]  Those are all things that will go tonight.
[00:25:54]  And then there's a lot of personnel aspects.
[00:25:56]  Like, for instance, when I talked about the rules committee, that's being done right now through the selections of who sits on rules.
[00:26:03]  And so people think, you know, there was this argument, well, that's self-dealing and they're just trying to get themselves on committees.
[00:26:08]  No, If we want to wield real power on behalf of the American people and the conservatives and break the cartel, you got to have someone that actually sits on the committee and does it.
[00:26:19]  And so that process is working out right now.
[00:26:22]  You saw Mark Green got the Homeland Security chairmanship over Den Cross, Dan Crenshaw.
[00:26:27]  That's an example of how this is working in real time.
[00:26:30]  And so there's all sorts of different aspects of this that will unfold.
[00:26:36]  But tonight is very, very important as it pertains to this thing having to pass.
[00:26:41]  But I think the leadership knows this has to pass.
[00:26:45]  They can't not have a rules package.
[00:26:47]  And it's one and the same in the commitment that they agreed to.
[00:26:51]  And I think they'll be able to get the votes that's necessary to do that.
[00:26:54]  So let me ask you, Russ, let's zero in on this committee.
[00:26:57]  You kind of designed what this church committee would be.
[00:27:00]  A lot of it would be done in the SCIF.
[00:27:02]  Is that correct?
[00:27:03]  I mean, this is the Church and Pike Committee was actually more public than I could imagine.
[00:27:09]  Go back and watch the tapes of it.
[00:27:10]  It's fascinating.
[00:27:11]  I mean, they have this, the heart attack gun, and they're talking about, you know, I think it's Cointelpro.
[00:27:16]  I always mispronounce it.
[00:27:17]  Coin, whatever, Coin Telpro and Operation Mockingbird.
[00:27:22]  But some of the members that were actually part of the committee, they went mad because they kept on running up against classified excuses and documents.
[00:27:31]  Two questions.
[00:27:32]  What is this going to look like?
[00:27:33]  How much of this is going to be in a skiff or basically in the basement of Congress?
[00:27:37]  And number two, how are we going to get actually something done when the intel agencies just put up their hands and say, sorry, classified?
[00:27:45]  Yeah, one of the things you've done your history on this, and you know the debates that they had even within the church committee about the hawks and those that were really trying to get at this.
[00:27:54]  And I was, I originally wanted it to be a committee outside of judiciary because I wanted to make sure that certain things, like judiciary only has law enforcement.
[00:28:05]  jurisdiction and they don't have the same ability to declassify information that intelligence committee has.
[00:28:11]  However, in the rules that they are writing for this subcommittee, this select committee, they are including the jurisdiction that's necessary to go wherever the evidence goes to subpoena wherever they need to, and they have the same ability to declassify.
[00:28:27]  So the things that I was concerned about, about it being within judiciary, have been resolved.
[00:28:34]  And this will be able to, if they can resist the urge to make sure that they do too much, right?
[00:28:40]  Where we want to make sure that whoever chairs this has a lot of ability to focus on the task at hand and to really prosecute and make this their number one priority.
[00:28:50]  They've got the tools with this committee to staff it up.
[00:28:53]  Same funding levels as the January 6th committee.
[00:28:56]  So that's tens of millions of dollars, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:28:59]  Exactly.
[00:28:59]  So, you know, church committee was about 135, 140 staffers.
[00:29:03]  This could have that similar level and it would be fairly significant.
[00:29:08]  So is this going to be under judiciary or is it TBD?
[00:29:12]  No, it's within judiciary.
[00:29:13]  The question at this point is who chairs it right now.
[00:29:16]  And they're working through that right now.
[00:29:17]  So was this January 6th select committee, was that under a certain committee or was that its own kind of floating thing?
[00:29:25]  It was its own floating thing.
[00:29:27]  Okay, so this is not a select committee then.
[00:29:30]  It is a subcommittee under judiciary.
[00:29:32]  I'm just making sure.
[00:29:33]  It is, but with one little wrinkle, which is that it's intended to be able to pull in, the select portion of it is intended to pull in non-judiciary committee members.
[00:29:42]  Got it.
[00:29:42]  Good.
[00:29:42]  And so there will be elements of it.
[00:29:44]  That's why we're talking about in terms of select.
[00:29:46]  Yeah.
[00:29:46]  And the thing I want to ask you is also range, because sometimes if it's too narrowly written, which all these creeps are going to do, they're going to say, oh, sorry, you can't look into the CIA.
[00:29:56]  You can't look into this because you were only supposed to look into this very particular thing.
[00:30:01]  And so they just, they just create all these, it's a maze, basically.
[00:30:04]  And the intel agencies right now are building a maze.
[00:30:08]  They are building a maze that will take decades to navigate so that when Thomas Massey and Jim Jordan start to go there, there'll be like fake doors and smokes and mirrors and documents that lead to fake documents that lead to classified that lead to people that don't exist and foreign agents.
[00:30:27]  Drawing up one of my favorite books that became a movie was Maze Runner.
[00:30:32]  You guys remember Maze Runner?
[00:30:34]  If you've never seen Maze Runner, it actually ends poorly, in my personal opinion, but it's one of those series that starts and it's so compelling and it's so well written and it's there's so much mystery.
[00:30:45]  And I actually think the author didn't bring it properly to completion.
[00:30:48]  But in the movie or in the book Maze Runner, essentially the premise is this.
[00:30:53]  Teenage boy wakes up in an underground elevator with no memory of his identity and he's basically got a, they're part of this maze and there's all these different traps and these rules and all this.
[00:31:01]  Basically, the intel agencies right now are creating a maze of their own, a labyrinth with us as Russ Vogt from the Center for Renewing America.
[00:31:09]  But Russ, they can't necessarily destroy documents, even though they do that anyway.

=== Fencing Appropriations Money (05:10) ===

[00:31:13]  But there's too many documents probably to destroy, but they can classify them or they can create trapdoors and fake mirrors and smoke screens and delays and dead ends.
[00:31:22]  How is this committee going to navigate all of that?
[00:31:25]  Because I guarantee you, Christopher Ray is probably having an all-on-hands deck meeting right now, telling all of his lieutenants, create all these different ways to hide the evidence or to disclose it.
[00:31:36]  Us through that.
[00:31:37]  Well, number one, it learns the lessons from the the Russia hoax uh investigation that Devin Nunez Uh was a hero for, and that is, it understands the degree to which the agencies will try to classify and cordon things off and say, this is law enforcement, so we're not going to ask, we're not going to allow that to be addressed.
[00:31:56]  If you are the intel side or this is intel, so we're not going to allow you to have a conversation on the law enforcement side.
[00:32:04]  No no no, no.
[00:32:05]  This Church Committee itself will make the determination about what it wants to ask questions about.
[00:32:11]  It has full range to go after anything with regard to ongoing investigations, so that they can't use that as a a big banner of protection from any from answering questions, uh sources and methods, so that we get a handle on not just what the information is we need, but how they came about that information, so that we can unpack it and change that structure within the agency.
[00:32:34]  The final thing I would say is that, unlike the Church Committee, we've got to figure out how to use the appropriations process in comp at the same time as the Church Committee is being used to pull back money, so that the agencies are being starved at the very same time that they're having to make decisions about whether they're going to comply.
[00:32:55]  So yes, subpoenas can be fought.
[00:32:58]  What cannot be fought is the fact that the Appropriations committee is defunding you in the process and with the gains that are being made from a personnel standpoint on the Appropriate committee and the Rules committee, there's going to be a lot of opportunity to make sure that any appropriations bills are synced up with the work of the Judiciary Committee and the Church Committee and Cash.
[00:33:18]  Patel and our program introduced and floated a very interesting idea of fencing in the money, which is not necessarily taking in the entire FBI budget, which I do believe should be whittled down to almost nothing but saying, what is the line item that Christopher Wray treasures the most?
[00:33:35]  So let's maybe fence in his Gulf Stream, let's fence in the 80 million bucks that he has a year for counterterrorism travel so he could fly to the Adirondacks.
[00:33:44]  What is fencing in the money and why is that an important strategy for this new House Republican Caucus to employ?
[00:33:52]  I'm smiling Charlie, because Cash is one of our fellows at the Center and he always used the word fencing and I don't know what nobody, what he means in a budget construct.
[00:34:00]  But what he means by that is exactly what I just said, which is you cannot do this effectively unless you are using the power of the purse and to pull back and defund the things that are most critical to the agency's leadership uh, not necessarily to do their job, to con to the the, the activities to keep the American people safe, but that change their eye level and their center of gravity as to whether they're going to comply.
[00:34:24]  And to that extent, you really do need to fence the money in carefully and to do it through the appropriations process and finding the pressure points right.
[00:34:32]  So finding the ones where the heads of the IRS or the FBI they're going to be personally disenfranchised right word but they're going to be personally upset, they're going to have a more difficult life.
[00:34:44]  They're little luxury items, correct that?
[00:34:47]  That, Actually, you could win a PR battle around, right?
[00:34:50]  So if House Republicans say, okay, we could make a whole PR battle around the FBI, but they're probably going to win that on MSNBC and New York Times.
[00:34:58]  But if we pick a fight on the private jet fund for Christopher Wray, I think that's a fight worth having.
[00:35:06]  I think there's going to be a host of places that we can win fights with them.
[00:35:10]  And the church committee needs to be very strategic about how they roll this out to the American people because part of this is establishing the credibility with the entirety of the country to know what these agencies have done so that in two years, when the next Republican administration or conservative administration has a chance to govern, they will have been able to run a campaign against woke and the weaponized part of the federal government.
[00:35:35]  Got to go.
[00:35:36]  What's the website that people can support you, Russ?
[00:35:39]  Americarenewing.com, and they can get me at Russvode on Twitter and all the social media channels.
[00:35:44]  Very good.
[00:35:44]  Russ, keep up the great work.
[00:35:45]  Great commentary.
[00:35:46]  Thank you.
[00:35:47]  Thank you.
[00:35:48]  This committee could make history.
[00:35:50]  And yes, I know there's a lot of cynics and skeptics out there.
[00:35:53]  I'm choosing to believe based on the evidence, based on what's already been verified, and the promises that have been made to members that I trust.
[00:36:01]  If this ends up becoming a reality, which I think it will, it'll be a victory for oversight and reigning in the fourth branch of government.
[00:36:10]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:36:11]  Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:36:15]  Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
[00:36:19]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.