Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) warns that only 31% approve of Trump’s economy, blaming tariffs for inflation and weak Nebraska farm sales, despite a drop from Biden’s 9% peak to 3%. He demands congressional votes on Venezuela strikes, citing potential war crimes like the September 4th "double-tap" attack, and criticizes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for "Signalgate" mishandling and anti-NATO rhetoric. On healthcare, Bacon defends GOP reforms—capping ACA subsidies at $200K income, addressing phantom accounts—to prevent $2,000/month premium spikes post-December 31st. His immigration stance mirrors Reagan’s: high-skilled, seasonal workers, but no illegal entry, while opposing federal overreach. Republicans risk House losses unless they pivot on affordability and transparency, reshaping narratives amid economic and geopolitical skepticism. [Automatically generated summary]
Joining us this morning is Congressman Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska.
He's a member of the Armed Services Subcommittee and also sits on the Agriculture Committee.
Congressman, I want to begin with the economy.
The Associated Press out with a new poll that found only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how President Trump is handling the economy.
Paired with that is the front page of USA Today with the headline, Poll finds inflation taking a heavy toll.
President Downplays Affordability Concerns.
We also saw Newt Gingrich telling the Hill newspaper that if the economy doesn't turn around, it's not going to be good for Republicans in the midterm elections.
What role should Congress play in the strikes that we're seeing from this administration in the Caribbean and Latin America against alleged drug runners on these boats?
You know, I've been in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we took out people trying to run away from a strike that were terrorists.
I don't think this is the same case, but I would love to have people that are very smart on this legally and give us the pros and cons.
I think we're in a gray zone.
It looks to me like these two people were trying to survive.
That does not look good for the rules of war.
Now, they're trying to make the case back there was still cocaine on the remnants of this boat, and that other folks are coming in to rescue them, and they're going to get the cocaine back.
We should dig into it.
And I think it would be wise to get the retired or the four-star general or admiral that was at Southern Command.
The opposition leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the opposition leader in Venezuela, the headline in Wall Street Journal this morning is that she hails the U.S. help, saying that the moves like seizing the oil tanker are key in fight for democracy in Venezuela.
I am very reluctant to be supportive of an invasion of Venezuela.
I think it's right to pressure Maduro and maybe compel a regime change internally with our pressure on sanctions and cutting off the funding from, you know, by taking these boats, taking off the funding that Maduro is relying on.
But again, we don't know what the president's doing because they've said very little.
But when he got confirmed, I said we should give him a chance and prove himself because at that point, we want him to be successful.
But I thought he failed during Signalgate.
All he had to do was say, I made a mistake.
I was wrong.
And he refused to do it.
He blamed the journalist.
Now I said he was totally exonerating the report.
I read the report.
He was not.
He put sensitive information before a strike on an unclassified application that Russia and China very likely monitor.
And two hours before the strike said, this is when the aircraft are taken off.
This is two hours before we're going to hit the targets.
That could have gotten to Yemen and could have undermined the mission and put our folks at risk.
But there's other things that concern me as well.
His rules of engagement with the media, I think, are wrong.
We have bases in our districts.
They're not allowed to talk to congressmen right now unless we get the questions that we want to ask pre-approved through the Pentagon.
We also know the rules of engagement with the media, right?
So you've got media rules, congressional rules.
I think they're both amateurish.
But what concerns me the most is his positions on NATO, Ukraine, him and his Undersecretary for Policy, again by Mr. Colby, they come off as being very anti-NATO, and they have, I think, been undermining our support of Ukraine at every step.
And this is going to damage us for way beyond their tenure in power.
You know, the NATO countries have been, we've had great relations with them for 75 years.
It's been our foremost alliance to hold the peace.
And I see this administration and Secretary of Defense Hexaf with the lead undermining that alliance.
And it's a shame because it's going to hurt us for many years to come.
We'll go to our first call here from Missouri City, Texas Independent Caller, Malik.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi, you know, this morning.
I have three points I'd like to make.
First of all, the House of Representatives, along with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, have not passed, introduced, or even spoken about any bills to address affordability.
In fact, their strategy is to just repeat lies over and over again, hoping their supporters will start to regurgitate those lies, such as gas is $1.97 a gallon.
There's nowhere in the country where gas is $1.97 a gallon.
In fact, the year-to-year average is only $0.06 lower than last year.
Also, secondly, this so-called war on drugs and striking these boats in Venezuela is just completely false.
We have no evidence that these people are carrying drugs.
And in fact, if this were a true war on drugs, wouldn't we revert back to the draconian syndicate measures that black people suffered under the Rockefeller drug laws when three grams of crack cocaine got you 10 years of minimum mandatory sentencing in federal prison?
This is not a war on drugs.
This is the prelude to an invasion of Venezuela because they have oil.
This is Iraq 2.0, and we're being walked into it slowly by a band of buffoons such as Donald Trump, Pete Heckseth, Pam Bondi, and the rest of the cabinet who have done nothing for the American people but spread propaganda and nonsense.
Here's another headline to share with all of you from theson.com.
Seething tyrant raging Maduro vows to break America's teeth after U.S. seizes the Venezuelan ship as Trump shrugs.
I assume we keep the oil.
Let's go to Tyrone in New York.
Democratic caller.
unidentified
My call.
And thanks for coming on and answering questions.
My question is, part of the Republican Party, I call it the Confederate Party, that has been calling for the destruction of our government from when they said they want to make it small enough to drown in the bathtub to the other gentleman, Bannon, talking about deconstructing the administrative state.
These people have been working progressively to make our government, as they said, small enough to drown in the bathtub.
And if you want to drown something in the bathroom, that means you want to kill it.
They complain about the Affordable Care Act when they have worked, done nothing but work against TRIDA, make sure this thing don't operate the way that it's supposed to.
Now, I know you are a Republican, and I know you see this stuff that goes on inside your own party.
And I'm wondering, how is it when you see Donald Trump come out and say, you know, we want people from Norway, and they're actively trying to stop legal immigration.
They're grabbing people when they're trying to get legal status in this country.
They break the immigration laws.
They try to make sure that they don't work.
If I'm a thief, a robber, or a criminal, I'm going to try to make sure the legal system don't work the way that it's supposed to.
I'm a Reagan Republican, and Reagan Republicans believe in legal immigration.
We don't want illegal immigration.
We want to know who's coming here.
But when we have legal immigration and we bring in people that are nurses, high-skilled, and we need some low-skill or seasonal workers on our agriculture, it works for America.
Without legal immigration, our population would be decreasing.
We'd have a birth rate of like 1.8.
Optimally, you want about 2.1.
And it would take legal immigration to make that possible.
And I hear from every major employer, they can't find enough workers.
So we should find, we should try to have a legal immigration that works for our economy and works for our country.
So I would give the caller that.
Also, a Republican principle, if you come from the Reagan side of the party, we do believe in federalism.
We believe in keeping power at the city, the state level, as much as we can.
Congress should be within Article 1, Section 8, with the authorities that are in the Constitution there.
But we've gone way beyond that.
And so if you're a Republican of the Reagan vintage, you want to bring us back down and do what the Constitution has asked us to do.
Now, I do think there's been some maybe over exaggeration from some of the folks in the administration, like Color said, we're drowning in the bathtub.
The Homeland Security Secretary, Christine Noam, faced criticism from Democrats yesterday at an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill about global threats, many of them saying she should resign.
Well, I wouldn't ask her to resign, but I would push her on a couple of areas.
One is CISA.
So right now, we've been downgraded in our cyber defenses by people who have evaluated how we're doing.
So you look at Cyber Command, that's our military arm of cyber.
We've not had a commander there for nine months, roughly, because the administration fired the most, I would say, the most effective, the most knowledgeable man we had on cyber because some crazy lady come into the White House and wanted him fired.
He was the right person to be leading Cyber Command.
They fired him eight and a half months ago.
They have not been able to find a replacement.
This is a command that we're fighting every day in cyberspace.
Russia and China are attacking us every day.
So we have this inertia right now going on in this four-star headquarters that runs our cyber.
At top of that, the Homeland Security, they run CISA, which is the organization that helps our private businesses, our infrastructure, our energy grid defend against cyber attacks.
And they have cut it significantly, and it's also rudderless.
And so you take these two things combined, and folks who study cyber have downgraded our, you know, they said that our abilities have been diminished over the last year.
Let's get to ACA and these enhanced tax subsidies.
Where are you on the two discharge petitions offered by moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats to extend the enhanced tax credits for a certain amount of time, but also with some reforms and maybe income limits?
Well, then that sounds like these ACA subsidies are going to expire on December 31st because the Senate just voted yesterday and they couldn't get to 60 votes.
I just wanted to make a comment about the debate over the health care subsidies and just health care in general.
That debate seems to me, I'm looking at it from a Republican perspective, but I think it happens on both sides where the plan for improving or changing health care, let's say on the Republican side, seems very discredited by Democrats in a way that doesn't look at what the advantages would be, but vilifies Republicans as if they're heartless, they're cruel, they want to take away health care from people.
I don't think that's the point.
I think the point is they have a better plan for how to make it work better.
And unfortunately, the problem in our country today is that both sides reduce the other side's point of view to a dehumanizing perspective.
We have a shirts versus skins mentality all over our country right now, but we surely do have it in Congress and politically.
If you're on the shirts side, you're supposed to support everything your team does, and you condemn the other team no matter what.
I don't think it works.
Sometimes our team is doing things that need to be called out.
That's why it's good to have some independent Republicans and Democrats.
Also, every once in a while, your opponent could come up with a good idea.
You may want to look at it.
I think we should have that mindset.
And our system of government, written by James Madison and, you know, we had James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and the Federalist Papers, they've built a system of government that forces consensus.
And if you hate each other, it's very hard to get that consensus.
So I would agree with the caller.
I do think we have some proposals on how to make health care better, expansion of health savings accounts.
You imagine, say, you're working for C-SPAN, and they say for every dollar you put in, Greta, we'll put in two or three dollars.
You can go out and buy the insurance you want.
That's one proposal.
We have another proposal putting high-risk people in a separate pool and then subsidize their premiums down to normal.
And then the healthy pool, their rates would automatically just go down significantly.
That's another proposal.
So we have some ideas out there that we can look at, but we're not going to get this done before December 31st.
Therefore, we need these tax credits extended for a short one year or two years that's negotiable.
Whistle reforms.
And I just think we're going to get there because I don't see any other way out.
So I've been hearing a lot, and I just have to say that I think the real problem or the real issue is kind of the neglect on the behalf of our political leaders, whether it's in the House and the Senate or it's our president.
And just to give you a case in point, when COVID happened, toward the end, I think his final year, Donald Trump gave the American taxpayer an additional seven, maybe five to seven months to complete their taxes due to the epidemic.
The epidemic, as you know, lasted for years.
The following year, through the Ways and Means Committee, two congressmen, both bipartisan, Republican and Democrats, after consulting with accountants, asked the IRS to give American taxpayers two additional months.
Well, what I'm saying, I know it takes a minute to explain, but the following year, and You would think after all the deaths and all the horrible things that happened with COVID that we would have congressmen and women that truly cared about the American people knowing how lives were disrupted.
Well, we should be very thoughtful, and that's why I go back to the district every weekend.
I mean, I've been doing this for nine years, going on 10 years.
You try to go back every weekend, and I try to go to as many local events where you hear from people's concerns, and you try to reflect that in Congress.
And one of the things that we did do during COVID is we put these tax credits on, and they were supposed to be temporary, but in a sense, now they're becoming permanent.
And so that concerns the Republican side, and the costs keep going up.
And so it gets back a little bit, just playing off what the caller said.
We've got to find something better.
We've got to find a little more deeper reforms in the long run here to lower these costs because they are unsustainable.
But I would tell my Republican colleagues, if we do nothing, and some of them say we're not going to do these tax credits, they're going to expire.
Well, that means the average person's premiums are going up about $2,000 a month.
That's unacceptable.
It's not their fault, right?
And it may not be our plan that we put in place.
It's largely done by Democrats, but we're in charge.
So we've got to find a way to at least temporary help and then find a deeper solution.