Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
tim burchett
rep/r19:28
Appearances
p
pedro echevarria
cspan04:09
Clips
suhas subramanyam
rep/d00:16
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Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
Hard Questions Asked00:05:50
unidentified
government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access.
That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree.
Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective.
it's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard where hard questions are asked and what people have to answer to them this is tim birchett he He is a Republican from Tennessee, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, also a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee.
As a Foreign Affairs Committee member, what questions are going through your mind these days and your colleagues in the committee when it comes to the events in Iran?
Well, I can't speak for any of the members but myself.
I'm curious about the containment of the nuclear waste.
If there is any, I worry about our friends like in Bahrain who have been faithful to us and been a good ally, making sure that there is not any nuclear cloud or anything that gets into the sea right there that could flow right down to them.
They're 90 miles from one of those nuclear installations.
So I guess my questions were just a little different than everybody else's.
To what degree do you think there's disagreement within the Republican Party itself, even members on Capitol Hill, whether that action should take place or not?
There's just one or two maybe that disagree with that.
Again, you're not going to, you're trying to do something honorable with the dishonorable people.
And Iran is definitely dishonorable.
Their leadership.
And the fight is not with the people, it's with their leadership.
And they've continuously sponsored terrorism around the world.
We know when we pulled out of Iraq, I mean, excuse me, out of Afghanistan that they were being armed, and they've armed terrorist organizations around the world.
And they've taken quite a few shots at this country over the past decade or so.
And this, I think, settles that score, but it also shows American superiority in our military and our intelligence.
And also, the Israeli intelligence, you know, when they started their initial bombing, they took out their top three people.
And, you know, and I'm cautioned folks about regime change in the Second World War.
At the beginning of that war, everybody wanted to take out Hitler, but towards the end of the war, intelligence realized that Hitler was a pretty pitiful leader, militarily speaking, that is.
And they didn't want to take him out because we were winning the war and they were afraid the number two could have been much worse.
Now we've got to worry about the number four or if we depose the Ayatollah or if he's taken out at some point, who is the number two and could that be worse for the world?
And so those are the kind of things I think we need to be contemplating.
Speaker Johnson talked about this effort to pass a war powers act that would limit the president's ability to declare or participate in military actions.
I think we're completely compromised by the Communist Chinese.
If you look at the lobbyist and America, what we're doing, turn over any article of clothing you have and look at where it's made.
Look at where our computer chips are made that are on some of our military apparatus, which we've been told that the communist Chinese could have the possibility of turning some of these aircraft literally off mid-air.
So I think, and also we have communist Chinese merchants that actually run commissaries in our military installations.
We have communist Chinese buying farm property, which controls our commodities.
We have communist Chinese buying property near our military installations.
And this body, either party, will not stop them.
And the reason they don't is because the lobbyists are in our pockets.
We talk about all the horrors going on in Ukraine and all that.
Well, what about China?
The reason we don't do anything to China is because the money.
Follow the money, folks.
And we are in bed with the Communist Chinese.
And the lobbyists on K-Street know it, and they laugh about it.
And they're just getting fat.
And we're going to sell our country down the road if we're not careful because they are in our, as I stated, our military institutions, but they're also in our colleges and universities of higher learning, our research institutes.
They've completely infiltrated those.
And all we're doing is chasing money.
We have communist Chinese students in our country because they pay a higher rate.
And every one of those that's in our country that's going to school is taking the place of an American.
And Chinese goods are flooding our markets continuously because we are gutless and don't have the willpower to do anything.
If you remember recent history, when Harley Davidson was about to go out of business, they're about to do it again, unfortunately.
But they, before, because the Japanese were dumping thousand CC motorcycles and above, and Ronald Reagan put a tariff on them.
And Trump, that's why Trump put a tariff, started talking about putting a tariff on the Chinese, because he knows Congress, they'll write a tough letter or something and they'll bow up and put a letter out to their chambers of commerce about all they're doing.
But that's a joke because we are totally in bed with the Chinese and we need to clean up our act.
And that's because we're in such a small majority.
We have a three-person majority.
I think the Republicans do.
We're, as I like to say, one flu season away from not being in the majority anymore.
And so the president, if you look under Joe Biden the last four years, he was every 100 days we added a trillion dollars.
And now the Democrats are pitching a fit about over the next 10 years, we're going to raise the deficit $3 trillion.
Well, if you look at that, we've incredibly slowed the rate of growth down.
If you look at just the math of that, and you know, we have this train of debt running at us.
We're at 36, almost, we're about at 37 trillion dollars right now.
And you've got to stop it at some point, and then you've got to turn it in the other direction.
And this budget and this big beautiful bill, if you will, is going a long ways towards that.
Does it do enough?
Heck no.
I would cut the Pentagon.
I would cut a lot of these other programs, U.S.A.I.I., all this stuff, get it out of there.
But the will is not there in either party.
Again, because members of both parties are compromised, let's just be honest.
They've got a wife and or a girlfriend that works for some of these agencies, and they don't have the guts to do it or the political wherewithal to make those tough votes.
And that makes me very unpopular up here when I say that.
I would hope that we'd look at Medicaid and the fraud, waste abuse there.
I think that if you're an able-bodied American and can work, and I'm not talking about a single mom who's got a couple of kids at home, that's off the table, but we all know it.
We've seen it.
We've been in line at the grocery store and seen folks get in line and load up on the food stamps or whatever you want to call it, and the ability to do that.
Things like buying soft drinks with food stamps.
I'd like to see those stuff like that eliminated.
Just common sense stuff that shows America that we're serious about this and that we're just not a total fraud.
You are one of my favorite congressmen because I believe you're honest and ethical and moral man and who's trying to really do the right thing for the country.
Thank you.
Prior to the last election, President Trump and Republicans were talking constantly about ending chain migration and making E-Verify permanently.
I know you guys in the House last year passed a bill addressing that issue, but ever since the election, I haven't heard a word on that.
And I don't know where they're going with that because we all know that by the time the term ends for President Trump, if the Democrat is elected, we could go right back to where we were before.
And so hopefully something is in the works, but I haven't heard a word about it.
And I don't know if it was possible to put any of that legislation in the reconciliation bill.
I just wish we'd have single-issue spending bills and single-issue, that's what we do in Tennessee.
It's called a caption bill.
You can't have a dog catcher's bill and give you a pay raise.
I actually had a long conversation with my friend, Senator Marcia Blackman from Tennessee, who has been a stalwart fighter in the trenches on that very issue.
She knows she's forgotten more about that issue than probably most of us will ever know.
And she agrees with everything you're saying that we do need to get that forward.
And we need to pass that because that is that chain migration thing.
We have these tourists that come over here and have kids and then they fly back to their home countries.
And then when they're 18, they come back and then all of a sudden they're getting all these benefits.
And that is just wrong.
They are gaming the system.
That is not what the founders intended.
And we've got to straighten that thing up.
And I wish we could just put a single issue bill on that and put it on the floor and make people vote.
I'm sick of the studies.
I'm sick of the committee meetings.
I'm sick of us writing strong letters to somebody, which is gutless.
And the lobbyists just laugh because they get paid to get up here and get us to write these strong letters on these issues just like that.
And then everybody goes home thinking they've done something.
They haven't done a dadgum thing.
And it's pretty worthless to me.
And I'm getting kind of sick of it myself.
And I know America is.
So I hope we have the guts to do something about that in the future because America is tired of that stuff.
Representative Birchip, being a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, there's a debate going on today as far as the impact, the extent of the damage done in Iran, the leak of this defense report.
Has anybody, including yourself on the committee, seen any information about the level of destruction that was done in Iran due to the bombings?
Yeah, we've seen some, but we'll have a confidential briefing on Friday.
And I'm sure five minutes afterwards, it'll be leaked to the press what was in that meeting.
I caution folks sometimes about going to these confidential briefings because you're not allowed to speak on what they talked about, even if you already knew what they were talking about.
So we're going to get some answers, and there'll never be all the answers, and people will be angry, and they will immediately come out and tell exactly what was told in that confidential briefing, which is unfortunate.
But we'll know by the end of the week, pretty much.
But I think we realize that this is what's bringing Iran to the table, and we need Israel to back off a little bit, like President Trump said, and let peace work a little bit.
I have a question about the Chinese industrial accident in Wuhan that has been covered up by the echo chambers.
There's a Ukrainian Brit-American Israeli scientist, Peter Desek, who lied to Congress, and Congresspeople said they would hold him accountable, and they never had.
He is the one who contracted with the bat lady in China.
And Fauci wasn't the middleman.
It was Dezek.
So why do they keep talking about Fauci and they don't talk about Peter Dasek from Echo Health Alliance?
Please tell me when people are going to be held accountable.
Even the James Vaughn movie, they changed the thing in the they changed it from a computer virus, they changed it to a computer virus from a genetic virus because they're afraid of pissing off China.
All I can say is, though, that we are, once again, compromised by China, and you're not going to see a lot of people do a lot of strong things against China because of their, we want their economic dollars, and we've sold our, we've sold the working men and women out in this country because of that.
After the Wuhan incident, we should have shut everything down with China, and America should have bit the bullet.
And then when Trump immediately, when he took office, wanted to put tariffs on China, you saw people from both sides of the aisle pitching a fit.
And all he's trying to do is preserve American jobs and it's going to cause a little bit of pain.
But again, we need to start making that stuff here and quit relying on an enemy, especially.
I had some medicine the other day and I looked at the label and it said made in China.
Those are the kind of things we should be very scared of as Americans, that China is controlling major components of our pharmaceutical industry and it needs to be made here and it needs to be done right now.
Representative, you serve on the House Oversight Committee yesterday, a closed-door hearing, and you heard from Near Attendant who worked for the president the larger issues of President Biden's mental acuity.
What's the purpose of this hearing and how much do you support it?
I think they saw a president that was mentally, his mental capabilities were lacking and you saw a complete cover-up by a lot of the national media to the point some now are even writing books about it, even in the media.
So I think that America is really just demanding it.
And it's an unfortunate chapter in our history, but it's the truth.
And the Democrat Party needed to clean their act up.
I mean, they're imploding.
You saw the boat yesterday, couldn't get 70 votes to impeach Trump.
And now you're seeing what's happened in New York City where you're electing literally a communist is going to be the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City.
And that's a, to me, that's a scary proposition because all those folks are going to leave there.
They're going to lose their tax base and you're going to see New York fall into further decay.
Yeah, I just wanted to make a couple of suggestions that I think will help improve things.
Number one, build that wall, get it done, build it from one side to the other.
No excuses.
You could find $25 billion.
I mean, when you spend $8.7 trillion and you don't find $25 billion for the wall, when you promise it over and over again, that's pretty sad.
Number two, defund Obamacare.
It's not working.
Most of the people on it are getting Medicaid anyway.
Just defund it and get it out of here.
It's been a failure.
And the $800 billion that was taken out of Medicare to help hold up Obamacare, see if you could put that back in.
Number three, I don't know what it is.
I go to the store.
All I see is food stamps, SNAP program, all this stuff, which causes inflation.
It allows the grocery stores to charge the people that are paying for it more money.
And the same thing with this rental.
If the government would just stay out of it and let people do their own thing, and if they can't survive, they'll find ways to survive, maybe have less children, maybe less illegal aliens will want to come to the country because the benefits aren't there.
I think those would be three things that would really help this country.
And another thing, too, is I felt we really missed the boat.
I really thought DeSantis would have been a great president.
And Representative, to the caller's second point, when it comes to Obamacare, the Washington Post this morning, their editorial says the one big beautiful bill would make significant changes to the ACA, one of them about enrollment, one of them about eligibility.
What do you think about those potential changes overall, what it would do for the Affordable Care Act?
I think if we make sure that people that are on there are legitimately in need, that's a great thing.
I think that takes care of the least amongst us, which is what those programs are supposed to be done.
We've seen them gained.
All sides have seen it.
People are abusing those systems.
We see it every time we go to the store, we go to the doctor's office, you talk to doctors, you talk to merchants, you see it all the time.
And the systems being gained and anything we can do to tighten up that thing and make sure that these, because what's going to happen is it's going to implode.
And the poor people that are in our inner cities that are really hurting are going to lose everything, going to lose every bit of coverage they have if we're not careful.
So I don't see the reason for defending people that are fraudulently getting these programs.
Hey, Congressman, I was just wondering what you thought of the president's really reckless decision to bomb Iran.
There's been inconclusive reports as to if it was successful or not.
We don't even know.
It really could have been, he's really gambling at that.
It could have been the start of another endless war in Iran.
I don't know what the end benefit there for the United States was.
Our own DNI has said that we were nowhere near close to Iran having a nuclear weapon.
And then I also just wanted to ask you what you thought of the War Powers Act, which I think some Democratic senators, representatives were trying to get passed.
And I just wanted to know what you thought of that, of Congress being able to further check the president's ability to start a war or strike a foreign country.
Well, I myself put 24 or 25 of those Doge recommendations forward, some of them because of Senate rules.
Senate rules are kind of a crazy thing.
It's kind of voodoo, I think.
You kind of look at it from one way, it says one thing.
You look at it from another, it says another.
So the Senate, they're going to have to do their thing.
There's going to be several that are in the big beautiful bill, but we need to push forward.
America needs to get rid of waste, abuse, and fraud.
I mean, we're spending $10 million on circumcisions in other countries.
And the reality, I mean, just constantly down the line, LGBTQ parades, Sesame Street for other countries that we're pretty sure aren't even, a lot of these things aren't even going there.
And the reality is the money is coming right back to this country.
This country is, these politicians, some of them are crooked as a dog's leg.
The money's coming back in the form of dark money and campaigns, and some of it's coming right back to their pockets.
And I would be very happy to see somebody in either party walked out of this building in handcuffs if they could catch them doing that because they're stealing money.
This is money.
Remember, every dollar we send to Ukraine is borrowed.
We are borrowing money from our great-grandchildren, folks.
We are broke.
We've got to stop this.
And these paid protesters that are out picketing all these things, it's nonsense.
Americans are paying too much taxes.
We're paying too much for this nonsense overseas.
And all we're doing is feathering the pockets of politicians and wealthy elites.
Representative Suhas Subramanian joins us from Capitol Hill, Democrat from Virginia, a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, and also a member of the Space Science and Technology Committee.
Representative, thank you for your time.
Thank you.
What has been your reaction to not only what occurred in Iran over the weekend by the United States, but what happens after that?
One, I think Congress should be a part of the decision-making process, and we should be consulting with Congress when it comes to declaring war and bombing nations like Iran.
Second, you know, we still haven't gotten a full intelligence briefing.