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Jan. 11, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:14
The Deal of the Century with Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
The Century Deal 00:01:44
Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show.
Matt Gates and Chip Roy walk us through the deal of a century.
They got it done.
I admit, I was skeptical, but they pulled it off.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and support our program at charliekirk.com slash support and get involved with Turning Point USA today at tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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I will admit, I was a skeptic, but I kept an open mind and definitely an open line.
And one of the people that deserves a ton of credit, an overwhelming amount of credit, was one of the lead negotiators that helped bring the House rules, the, let's just say, demands is probably too strong a term, the requests to completion and to now passage.
And that is Chip Roy, who joins us now.
Congressman Roy, thank you so much.
You and I were chatting late some of those nights, and I said, What is the plan?
Rules Over Concessions 00:07:29
What is the plan?
And you walked me through it and you said, Hey, we're not making this about Kevin.
We're making this about rules.
We're making this about concessions.
And it seems as if the rules package passed yesterday.
Just walk us through your take from last week and some of the victories that are now no longer abstract, but are now realities.
Well, Charlie, thanks and thanks for trying to walk through this.
I think objectively, you know, highlighting some of the concerns and like, hey, hey, how are you guys going to get this done?
But also not taking a two by four to us and saying that, you know, hey, you guys are clowns.
You're crazy.
Or terrorists, as some people called you, which is just.
Yeah, and some of the conservative movement, you know, use those kinds of terms.
And you were pretty objective about it.
I appreciate that.
Look, go back to the election.
It was a narrow margin, narrow victory.
There were a handful of members that are fairly public now.
There were at least five.
There were a few more than that, I would tell you, who basically said, well, we can't get behind Kevin.
And so then we started having conversations about what he needed to do.
And I'm not going to give the whole TikTok because we don't have enough time.
But at the end of the day, we put forward on December 8th a list of requests, to use your words, what we believe were central to anyone who would be speaker.
If you go back and look at that document from December 8th, it's public.
It's widely out there.
Everybody talking about secret deals, you know, secret deals.
We put all this out there for the public to see.
And we made specific requests about restoring Jefferson's single person motion to vacate for accountability, about making sure that you could have 72 hours to read the bills, to have single subject bills, to have germaneness rules, to be able to have open debate and offer amendments on the floor on us, particularly appropriations bills.
We had specific language in there about needing to have a plan for securing the border and policy choices.
And then importantly, limits on spending.
We talked about the need to have conservatives on important A committees, the Appropriations Committee, the Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Financial Services, the powerful, you know, number one committees, if you will.
And in particular, the Powerful Rules Committee, which is how stuff gets to the floor.
Now, that's all in the weed stock.
Yes.
For the average American, here's what we got.
We got the power for your representatives to be your voice.
We opened the house up.
We tried to give more ideological diversity among the committees so that Republicans never repeat the absolute debacle, the failure that was 2017 and 2018 when we had control of all three president, Senate, and White and House.
Correct.
And we failed.
We failed.
Yes, we did.
We're trying to pump the brakes on that and make sure that we've got the structures in place now to avoid that cataclysmic failure.
We need to stand up and limit spending.
We need to stand up against the weaponization of government against the American people and stand up in defense of civil liberties.
We need to stand up for a strong military, sparingly used, forcefully used, non-woke military, and make sure we stand up to secure the board of the United States.
And importantly, we need to restore federalism so we can agree to disagree, stop trying to solve every problem in this godforsaken town.
We can do that with these tools.
I agree with all that.
And now some of the specifics are, let's just take one that I was just chuckling at, which was a concession for 72 hours to read a bill.
And one of my favorite kind of parts on C-SPAN or whatever I was watching at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning was they said, now I wonder if they're going to have a rules package passed tonight.
And one of them said, well, they do have a provision in the rules package saying you need 72 hours to read it.
And the person said, yeah, that would probably not make a lot of sense to have a rules package that says you need 72 hours to read a bill.
And it turns out it looks like it was 72 hours before you guys voted on it.
Just about.
I mean, and I think.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I think certainly certainly within the spirit of it.
I didn't add up the hours.
And we were trying to get through it and get it passed on Monday night, but certainly it was widely available then for basically the three days.
And that's important.
It's not to say, look, in the wake of 9-11, in the wake of Pearl Harbor or whatever, should we act immediately if you need to without waiting 72 hours?
Of course, the body can come and waive a rule like that.
But on average, the way the swamp works is they purposely, just like that stupid $1.7 trillion monstrosity that those 18 Republicans adopted, they purposely use Christmas.
They drive up to the last minute.
They force the tension saying you're going to shut down government on Christmas Eve in order to pass a big spending bill.
That's what the appropriators do.
That's their playbook.
That's exactly right.
Everyone, the members want to go home.
They're exhausted.
Many are retiring.
They want special favors, special deals.
They put it all together and our country gets further into debt and our actual critical problems don't get addressed.
Correct.
And we think we've set us on a glide path to avoid those things.
Now, here's something that's come out of this that I was just at a meeting with a conservative movement group, you know, the Conservative Action Project.
And we had a bunch of us meeting.
And my colleague Dan Bishop made the point that I would like to highlight.
We're sitting here right now.
It's 1.15.
So one week ago, right now, we were starting our vote in which 19 of us voted for someone other than Kevin.
Then we went through what we went through last week.
Remember what happened a week ago in the morning?
There was almost like a mob-like Republican conference meeting because people were so frustrated.
And it wasn't good.
And Mike Rogers threatened some people to lose committee chairs.
And look, and by the way, Matt Gates and Mike Rogers spoke this weekend.
They tweeted out, hey, we're all going to work together.
I pulled Mike aside today, shook his hand.
I'm talking to everybody and saying, look, let's move forward.
No retaliation.
Don't care any side of this whole fight.
Let's all unite.
And this morning in the Republican conference meeting, there was energy and enthusiasm and unity because what we did last week, not just the rules, everybody's focused on that.
I want you to understand we did not have a commitment in the commitment to America to limit spending, cap it, cut it, and set us on a path to a 10-year balance budget.
We got that in part of this discussion as a group.
And the leader, the speaker, I should say, this morning laid that out to the entire Republican Conference.
And we've got broad unity on that.
Now, there are disagreements.
How do we handle the debt ceiling fight?
How do we handle military spending?
We're going to work through that.
But we've set the tone to change the place, and it's really important.
And it also, in some ways, kind of was a helpful exercise of which I was afraid it was going to go the other direction, where you guys kind of got any of the grievances out of your system.
You guys figured out how to work with one another.
In a strange way, it almost drew you guys closer to one another.
And look, that's not something that should surprise anyone about how human beings interact.
You know, we came together, we had to sit across the table, figure things out, and you force people to the table.
It's one of the reasons why I've said that our biggest problem with deficit spending and just writing checks and then going to our corners and giving press conferences is you never have to do what a business does or a family does: sit around the table, roll up your sleeves, and make tough choices.
If you're a family budget, you say, look, I'm capping my budget to the 2022 level that we spent.
My wife and I can't not pay our mortgage, right?
For the federal government, we can't not pay our interest and we can't not defend the country.
But we better damn well then have a debate about all the other things.
Gold As A Safe Haven 00:02:24
And just like my family, I'm not going to cut our mortgage.
I'm not going to take food off the table.
I'm not going to not pay for electricity, but I might cut my vacation.
I might change the car I have.
And that's what we have to do as a country.
We're not doing it.
We just sat down this week.
We rolled our sleeves up.
That's a model.
Let's do it.
Listen what I was saying right before Christmas when the Senate was like, oh, we got to blow out of town.
Why?
Why?
The boys at the Battle of the Bulge, you know, sitting in the trenches, they didn't walk away at Christmas.
Neither did the guys crossing the Delaware.
So our job is to get this done right for the American people, and we should do it.
Chip, congratulations.
You deserve a lot of credit.
And you brought it to, I think, the top moment of a crescendo.
And we now have the most conservative structure, an actual structure, a framework to get stuff done for the American people.
Congrats, Chip.
Talk to you soon.
I know you got to get to votes.
God bless, Charlie.
Take care.
Thank you.
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Boy, I want to know exactly what was said between Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gates.
And no better person to tell us than Matt Gates himself.
Matt, I will say on air what I texted you, and I said this to Chip Roy.
I was skeptical last week.
However, you guys were able to negotiate a fabulous deal.
Negotiating With Leverage 00:15:59
Congratulations.
In fact, you said on air, I am running out of stuff to ask for.
Joining us now is Matt Gates.
Matt, welcome to the program.
Oh, thanks for having me, Charlie.
And sometimes you got to drive a hard bargain to change an institution as intractable as the House of Representatives.
But I think we're in a better place.
And we actually have more teamwork and unity forged by fire.
I've never been more optimistic about the ability of the House to work together.
We got our rules passed.
The moderates didn't jump out of the bucket.
And that's going to be a good thing, not just for this Congress, but beyond.
I mean, members of Congress, we stay here for a few terms, and speakers usually last an average of about five years.
But rules, once baked in, are frequently enduring.
And we hope that these are.
So tell us about what some of those kind of rule changes were.
So you voted president for Kevin McCarthy, but you enthusiastically voted for the rules, which I totally appreciate.
And because it really, the structure of Congress is so in need of change.
So walk us through it.
I mean, feel free to get as wonky as you're comfortable doing because our audience is kind of, some are convinced.
Some are saying, Charlie, I don't even know what congressional rules are.
What do you mean rules?
Is it in the Constitution?
No, every Congress, they got to kind of redo the pamphlet, if you will, the standard operating procedure of how Congress operates.
Well, the worst thing we've seen in our recent memory here in the Congress was the passage of the omnibus spending legislation.
And so our goal was to ensure that something like that could never happen again.
Some, you know, multi-thousand-page bill thrown on our desk at the last minute, dealing with every subject under the sun, every earmark, every pork barrel project.
And you're either thumbs up on the whole thing or thumbs down on the whole thing.
So to make that happen, there are really three legs at the stool.
There's better policy, better procedure, and better personnel.
As recently as Monday, we did not have concessions from Speaker McCarthy on some policy votes that we absolutely wanted to have this year.
We want to vote on the fare tax.
We want to vote on congressional term limits.
We want to vote on a balanced budget.
We want to vote on ending the COVID mandates.
And we want to vote on the border plan and the immigration enforcement plan that the Texas delegation stitched together.
And that's not just at the southern border.
That includes internal enforcement of our immigration laws.
Kevin McCarthy, to his great credit, agreed to all of those things.
And he agreed to different ones at different stages along the way and different vote sequences.
So that's the policy concession we got.
Then you go into the procedure.
It is maddening to not be able to offer amendments to cut spending.
Now, if there is any bill on the floor, if you offer an amendment to reduce the spending in that bill, it must be made in order.
That allows us to tweeze through some of the worst parts of pork barrel projects, of earmarks that get baked in in one form or another.
And it allows us to actually evaluate whether or not these programs are working.
We also are going to have individual appropriations bills.
This gives us leverage against the Senate.
See, the Senate loves to put everything together in one giant bucket, send that over to the House and say, take it or leave it.
Well, now our rules won't permit us to take up that legislation.
We have to have 12 individual votes on the 12 different jurisdictional areas for appropriations.
That is huge, huge.
And then finally, to enforce it, Charlie, personnel.
We are frustrated that too often conservatives get sidelined on committees where the action isn't really happening on the legislative front.
Sure, we get an opportunity to make great points in the oversight committee and the judiciary committee, but often it's the appropriations committee stitching together these deals.
Often it is the rules committee determining what amendments will be made in order.
Now, you are not going to be able to get a bill to the Florida floor without having the members of the rules committee that are Freedom Caucus or Freedom Caucus aligned approving of that.
And our one Freedom Caucus member who's on the Appropriations Committee now, Andy Harris, we're going to see him likely elevated to a major position within the appropriations process.
So it's not any one of those three things.
You got to have all three of them together.
And it took us until pretty late on Friday to get all the assurances we needed.
But we are as secure as we can be in our belief that Kevin McCarthy wants to keep these commitments for the good of the country, the good of the institution, and the good of his speakership.
I have several questions, but the rules package that passed yesterday, was it a carbon copy of what was agreed to in the negotiations so far?
So there are two major differences from where we were at the beginning of the week to where we also ended up on the rules package.
First, the motion to vacate reduced from a five-member threshold to a one-member threshold, critical accountability tool.
Second feature of that, the church commission, so that we can really focus on the rules.
Is that in the rules?
Is that in the rules?
Wow.
Okay.
We had a guest yesterday that was not in the rules package.
Okay.
So, Matt, is it fair to say that if these rules were in place, the $1.7 trillion omnimus bill would not have passed as it was designed?
Absolutely.
It would have violated the single subject rule that exists in over 45 of our state legislatures, but not in the United States Congress.
And many of the amendments that pulled that terrible piece of legislation together would have failed on Germany grounds.
Now, your amendment actually has to be relevant to the underlying bill to be considered.
I know that sounds wonky, but just this last Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act wasn't even a standalone bill at the end.
It was an amendment to a water infrastructure bill.
Earlier in my career in Congress, we had to take one vote that was the farm bill and related to war powers in Yemen.
And these things ought to be considered separately.
A serious country would not pair things that are not germane together and would not consider this to a single subject.
This is huge.
This is also going to prevent the Senate from doing this because then if the Senate sends you guys something, which is not typical, but sometimes certain bills can originate in the Senate and then go back to the House.
If it doesn't apply to House rules, then it's dead on arrival.
Is that correct?
Absolutely.
See, this is what the mainstream media is missing, Charlie, because they're like, oh, Gates and his band of rebels have weakened McCarthy.
To the contrary, we've given Kevin McCarthy as our speaker far more tools in negotiating with the Senate to be able to out the bad policies and to be able to consider them individually.
And then if we get into a situation where they're trying to force us into voting for bad stuff or enduring a shutdown, no, we can send them the appropriations bills for our military, for our veterans, for our national parks.
But then maybe we don't want to fund the Department of Labor or a weaponized Department of Justice or CDC.
And so I think that the ability to draw those distinctions allows Kevin McCarthy to go back to the senators and say, guys, there's no convincing here.
There's no arms to twist.
The House rules do not allow us to do these things.
And the other thing, Charlie, is that there were actually populist Democrats who agreed with me and who supported these changes in the rules.
I saw AOC out on Alex Wagner's program saying, look, what these Freedom Caucus folks are fighting for is actually good for the institution.
Get that clip.
I haven't seen it.
It's not going to get rolled by the establishment.
You know, the establishment always wants to package everything together.
That's what the Uniparty wants.
And one thing I'll give the squad credit on, they're at least willing to take those tough votes.
Now, the counter to my argument is: well, you know, Gates, we've got some frontliners, some people who want in Biden districts, and maybe they don't want to have to take some of these tough votes.
Maybe they need protections from the rules where individual members can't file amendments.
Well, I'm sorry.
You got to put on your big girl pants and your big boy pants.
This is the United States Congress.
If you don't want to take tough votes, you shouldn't have run for the job.
And I'm glad that everyone realized, everyone except one of our Republican members voted for the rules, and that's a credit to our Congress.
Yeah, so Tony Gonzalez voted against the rules because he's deeply worried that he might have to be put on the record about whether or not there should be a border wall.
He's like really worried about that, even though he, if I'm not mistaken, represents a border district or a border adjacent district in Texas, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the kind of general vicinity or general region.
And so, Matt, this is really important.
So now it's single subject.
So what ends up happening, for example, I was texting with senators that voted for the omnibus bill, and I was pretty aggressive, honestly, and I was really upset.
And their response is always the same.
I think they just copy-paste the same thing, which is, of course, there was a lot of garbage, but come on, we want to fund our military and we want to fund this.
And they are able to hide behind widely popular measures in our government outside of the military being a woke college campus and saying, come on, Charlie, I don't want to have to defund the Marines.
But yes, we are going to get the Michelle Obama jogging trail and we're going to get the gay museums in New York and we're going to get the BLM stuff and that border security for Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia.
And so they wrap it all together.
What you've done is you say, no, no, no, no.
You're now going to have to have 15 separate bills.
Is that correct?
That's absolutely right.
And I think we're going to get better policy as a result because people will be too embarrassed to actually have their terrible legislation and their terrible pork barrel projects when you're voting on the interior funding bill and the defense funding bill and the funding bill for health and human services and will actually be more engaged in the legislative process.
And speaking of engaged, didn't you like the cameras on the floor?
I got to interrupt you, Matt.
Have you seen, you've seen the lip reading video, I'm sure, right?
I have.
We played it in conference this morning.
It was actually a nice, lighthearted moment.
We could replay it.
We played it yesterday.
What did Kevin say to you?
My theory is this, Matt, and I haven't talked to a single member.
Actually, we talked to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
She said, I was over the target.
My theory is that you and Biggs and Crane had math that you thought was going to work on the 14th as far as like, I'm going to vote present.
And Kevin thought that he was going to get it.
Is that correct?
Was the 14th supposed to be it?
What kind of inside baseball can you give us?
That wasn't quite it.
Right before the 14th ballot, I started to get word that some of the moderates were intending to announce their opposition to the rules that McCarthy tool that we were excited about passing.
And so when I saw Tony Gonzalez issue a tweet that he was a no on the rules, I wanted to ensure before we let the ink dry on Kevin McCarthy's speakership that I had his assurance, that I had assurance from key leaders of some of the moderate groups that Tony would be an outlier.
Of course, he has every right to vote his conscience, but that he wasn't going to be bringing two, three, four, five, 10 other members with him in that endeavor.
And so there were some final assurances I needed to make sure that we weren't going to fall for a pig and a poke.
McCarthy delivered those assurances to his credit, and we got the deal done.
And you know what?
If like everyone acts like it was this terrible, chaotic moment that it took us four days to select the person who's second in line to the presidency.
I mean, there are entire days where all we vote on is the renaming of a post office.
Every year, we take six weeks off and do absolutely nothing during the summer.
So it didn't strike me as harmful to the institution to take four days to go through this, to utilize leverage, and ultimately to end up with a work product that everyone is proud of.
Yeah, and it was fascinating.
And Mike Rogers took a lunge at you, which was something.
It just, it seemed to be a dramatic moment.
What can you fill us in there?
What was Rogers saying or doing?
Well, I agree with Mike Rogers that that was sort of a nothing burger.
When you have late night tense moments, when we've been in very thorough negotiations for an extended period of time, of course, people can get a little bit animated.
Of course, people can get their Irish up for lack of a better term.
And if you had cameras on the floor, you would actually see more moments of disagreement.
You would see more moments of agreement.
I mean, Mike Rogers is a guy I have worked with for six years on the Armed Services Committee.
I have tremendous respect for him.
I probably wouldn't even be on the Armed Services Committee if it wasn't for Mike Rogers.
And so you don't let one moment of expression of emotion get in the way of six years of a working relationship.
So that was actually a way bigger deal to the media and to other people in the country than it was to me or Mike.
We've been great partners in the past and we're going to work together very well going forward.
Yeah, so you want to bring so the cameras are going away, but you want to bring them back.
What's the latest on cameras?
I mean, come on, Matt, the meme content that we could have at TPUSA.
I mean, you would fill our content appetite immediately.
What's going on here with the cameras?
Who decided to get rid of them?
Well, it is the traditional, I would say, kind of boomer rule of the Congress that C-SPAN is only able to take certain angles and point the camera right at the rostrum.
And I think the reason is because members of Congress want you to think that when they're giving these boisterous speeches on the floor, that the chamber is full.
And oftentimes, attendance is pretty low during debate, even on significant bills.
But isn't the gig kind of up on that already?
Do we have to continue to pretend about that?
I think what's far more interesting is that you're able to see me have a conversation with Permilla Jiles.
I agree.
I think that's a good idea.
And ask, hey, was that about breaking up big tech?
You're able to see me have a conversation with Ilhan O'Mar, and we were actually talking about war powers issues and whether or not we could work on changing the authorizations to use military force.
And you always get to see like the tense moments of conflict when we have a big debate in committee or a big hearing.
But sometimes the warmer moments, the kinder moments, the moments of coordination and cooperation get totally missed.
And if we had the cameras there, like people could say, like, what were you and Jayapal talking about?
What we were talking about was bringing up the bills to break up big tech.
And, you know, with AOC, we were strategizing about how many people were going to be in attendance for every vote so that I could calculate how many votes I needed in order to get the most out of these negotiations.
So transparency is a good thing.
And I think that if we had more dynamic camera angles in the floor of the House, we would actually know a lot more about what's coming in the legislative process and how our leaders are dealing with each other.
So another one of the agreements, so you did say in the rules package was the new church committee, which could be the Jordan committee, and it's going to be underjudiciary, I believe.
Walk us through the significance of that.
Well, someone like a Chip Roy with a tenacity and an intellect could lead a subcommittee within the Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by my friend and colleague Jim Jordan, to specifically focus on the weaponization of the government against the American people.
And the news I can break to you is the specifics of that agreement demand that that select subcommittee be staffed and resourced no less than the January 6th committee.
It was a big number then.
Big number, big project.
But look, it's not just the FBI and the DOJ.
I mean, even at the post office, they have a covert internet surveillance program to monitor what people post about politics.
So throughout the enterprise of the federal government, we've seen the bureaucrats really turn against the people.
And I think we need that type of a wide scope.
We need someone like a Chip Roy leading it.
And it's my hope that within the Judiciary Committee, we will actually be able to receive recommendations on reforms that might not just be supported by Republicans.
MyPillow Towel Promo 00:02:16
I would love to get Democrats on board with actual individual liberty and classic liberalism, right?
The notion of your rights and your freedom not coming directly from some edict from government.
And if we're able to do that, maybe we won't have these types of lockdowns.
Maybe we won't have an FBI and a DOJ that are hyper-politicized.
And maybe we won't have every agency trying to figure out how to cleave away a little bit more power from the body politic.
Yeah.
And the other thing is, Matt, you no longer can vote remotely.
That's another thing that would and I think that's good.
I really do.
I think it's good that we're going to force people to actually go to Washington, D.C. and do your job, not just vote remotely.
And so it's another big change.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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How significant, if at all, because there's mixed opinions on this, is getting the Congressional Leadership Fund to stay out of comfortable Republican primaries.
Your thoughts, Matt?
Well, we've had a number of conservatives blocked in their path to Congress because lobbyists and special interests utilize the, well, we got a good one in Corey Mills, so I'm not going to be critical of him.
But, you know, we had the Conservative Leadership Fund play in a lot of primaries.
I would note the Caroline Levitt race as a principal example.
Entitlement Program Reforms 00:06:20
And we don't want to see that anymore.
And so now we're actually going to have more teamwork across the Republican enterprise.
And there's going to be a war council that includes some of McCarthy's folks, some of our folks, and these decisions will be made in unison.
So we're not blowing millions of dollars attacking each other and making our candidates less electable in the general election.
I mean, Caroline Levitt should be in Congress.
The only reason she's not is because she was opposed by our leadership.
And she had such a late primary in September, there wasn't the opportunity for her to reconstitute the Republican base and get in a position to win.
So we don't want to lose seats because of infighting.
And I think setting up a war council to go through these things on the front end would actually be so productive to our politics and to our electoral success and the growth of our majority in future elections.
Matt, how is the debt ceiling fight now going to unfold with these recent rule changes?
And when is that vote going to be up?
Well, I mean, we're going to have that vote in a few months, but we're working on it right now within our conference.
We actually had a very robust debate this morning about the types of spending reforms we should demand as a part of the debt ceiling negotiations.
And what we have gotten as a commitment from leader or from Speaker McCarthy is that he's going to revert to 2022 spending levels.
So think back to when we did cut, cap, and balance.
We're going to use a similar paradigm.
We're going to go back to the 2022 spending levels that's going to require across the board cuts.
And I don't love defense cuts, but given all the money that we've sent to Ukraine and the NDAA, it seems like a pretty obvious place where we could reduce spending and meet some of those budget requirements.
It's also going to mean reforms to our entitlement programs.
And that means tough conversations about work requirements, about able-bodied people not being on some of these social safety net programs forever if they have the opportunity to make a more meaningful contribution through actual work.
I think that's important, not just for our spending problems, but also for the workforce challenges that many of our employers face.
So it's going to be policy, it's going to be entitlement reforms, and it's going to be cuts to funding the defense of other nations in faraway lands.
One of our listeners says, Matt, first they say, Matt, you're a total patriot.
God bless you for your fight and for your whimsy throughout the entire process.
Anyone call you whimsical this last week, Matt?
Well, attorney.
This is the first time, but it's heartwarming.
That's a good word.
I like that word.
They say, basically, it's a long email.
Can we get answers on J6?
Can we get answers on this?
Can we get answers on that?
One of my favorite members of Congress is Thomas Massey, and the fact that he's going to be on this new committee really gives me hope.
Matt, do you anticipate allowing the dogs to be released, if you will, against this fourth branch of government?
Yeah, Kevin McCarthy told us he's going to get the evidence out in front of the American people, and that means releasing the 14,000 hours of tapes that have been hidden that I think would give more full context to that day rather than the cherry-picked moments that the January 6th committee tried to use to inflame and further divide our country.
So, yes, I do believe that part of this deal is a concession that we are going to get the truth out in front of the American people.
And you know what?
Kevin McCarthy could have in his victory speech just said, well, the government is weaponized, but he was very specific in his language.
He talked about the weaponization of the FBI specifically.
His willingness to do that with particularity, I think, shows that he's ready to lower his shoulder and to get into this fight that so many Americans expect us to be in on behalf of the civil rights that we hold dear.
And contrast that to Paul Ryan or Boehner, who never would have done that.
And you deserve a lot of credit, Matt, for steering that direction because Kevin wanted to be speaker really badly.
He said, wow, I'm not going to be speaker if I don't listen to these members and cut a deal.
Is that a fair way to depict it or summarize it?
Well, I think it is fair to say that we would not be in the position today had we had a smooth Tuesday.
But I would rather have a turbulent four days and then come up with a process that we all believe in and commitments that we can rely on than have a really smooth takeoff and then two years of turbulence and not really knowing what's coming next.
So I think this is a far preferable system.
I think we've got our cards on the table right now.
The American people know what to expect from a fighting Republican majority.
The Senate knows to what they can expect from us regarding how we are going to comport ourselves and handle the legislative process professionally like adults.
And I thought it was interesting to hear people give speeches about the institution, about what drives decisions here in Washington, D.C.
And we want to make this a better place.
I mean, the last time we had all appropriations bills go through regular order, the youngest member of Congress wasn't even born yet.
And so it's been broken for a long time.
And I think we actually needed the shock to the system that the last week provided to try to get us back on track.
And boy, in our Republican team meeting this morning, there was a sense of unity and purpose and forward-looking.
And I'm so excited to be a part of it.
Matt, congratulations and look forward to see results after result.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
The emails we are responding are overwhelmingly positive for Matt Gates.
It really goes to show me that the base, if you will, really they wanted to see some structural changes.
And that's a big a week ago, the emails were split and torn and all over the place.
And it seems as if finally there is a win, not just winning an election, but actually getting substantively done.
And I just hope all of you take a moment today to say, wow, things are getting a little bit better.
I know it might not feel that way, but that is a real direct result of showing up, of canvassing, of giving money, of knocking on doors.
That's a big deal.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.
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