Are Civility and Discourse still possible in Congress?
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By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Alright folks, Doug Collins here.
It's great to have you back, Dave.
The great thing about Washington, D.C. is, and I know some of you are going to say this is the crazy part, but it's the people that you meet, and I believe that there are people who are sent to Washington, D.C. by their constituents who really go up to want to make a difference in their world and their community, not just for their state, but for the nation.
And our next guest today provides a just amazing, he's a great friend of mine, and I enjoy talking with him every time we get to talk and do the things that we did in Congress, but also even after I've left Congress and talking to him.
Mike Johnson from Louisiana is a leader.
He's one who people listen to in the conference.
He's went from our Republican Study Committee into leadership, but came from a background in Louisiana.
Really, it's interesting today.
Anybody that feels like I've noticed that has a pocket constitution calls them a constitutional expert.
Well, today on the show, we actually have a constitutional expert.
Mike is with us.
He's done a lot in the area of constitutional law and Mike, short introduction there, but just to bring us up, because we were talking offline before we got started about getting ready, but how are things in the lovely world of Pelosi world in the House right now?
Well, it's not a lot of fun, Doug.
We miss you, by the way.
I'm glad you're having a lot more fun than we are right now.
It's really a tough time on Capitol Hill.
For one, it's a ghost town.
We've been effectively shut down since COVID began, almost two years ago.
And I had a constituent meeting here in my office, Doug, about an hour ago.
It was one of the, I think the third time I've actually seen people from my district in person in the House office building since COVID began.
And that's because Speaker Pelosi with her tyrannical draconian rules has shut everything down.
You know, I was on the House floor a couple of hours ago, Doug, and you didn't have this innovation when you were here, but there are magnetometers that we walk through as if you're going to the airport.
Just to walk on the floor and to vote.
And so the message that sends does not do a lot for esprit de corps around here, right?
I mean, the idea that you would have to walk through a magnetometer to go onto the House floor and vote when it's just your colleagues there is the message it sends is, we can't trust one another.
You're going to hurt someone.
morning.
You're going to bring a firearm on the house floor or whatever.
That's the kind of thing that we're having to deal with.
And so it's a hyper-polarized, hyper-politicized environment here.
It is very difficult to do anything on a bipartisan basis, much less have a, you know, a thoughtful conversation with colleagues like we used to do in the good old days, which is just a few years ago.
But all that said, Doug, I'm very hopeful.
I do believe we're going to have a A big, important election this fall.
I think there's going to be a red tsunami, not a red wave.
I think it's going to be a red tsunami.
And I think we'll be able to return some sanity to Capitol Hill after all of this madness that we've endured for the last couple of years.
Well, that would be great news to hear.
I've been in and out up there a little bit, just enough to see that it's just not where it was, and talking to a lot of our colleagues and friends together is just not.
But you know, it just hit me as something here, Mike, because we're just going to spend some time talking about something, and I think this is a rabbit worth chasing, and it hit me as I was talking to you just now.
The magnetometers are symbolic to me of democratic style before substance.
And because if you think about this, a magnetometer, and you talk about airports, well, you put the magnetometers or the x-ray machines going in because we had people who would actually take weapons onto planes to do nefarious things, okay?
At the most heated times that I was in Washington, D.C., and you were there, I was there in the impeachment of a president, you were there twice, but really that first one, when we're on judiciary and going at it, that one was about as toxic of a time as I could ever remember on the House floor.
I never once feared my Democratic colleagues.
I never once feared one of my Republican colleagues.
What gave Pelosi, because I think this, and you said it right, it sets a tone for a workplace, because really those magnetometers, what it's saying to the world is, is virtue signaling.
Oh, well we're going to make sure that we don't have guns or anything else.
But yet, show me a time Except when Nancy Pelosi chased down our former colleague Tom Marino, chased him down the aisle because she was mad at what he said, that we ever had anything like that.
This is not the 1860s when there came beating everybody up there.
Yeah, that's right.
Look, we have some very vocal Second Amendment advocates, fierce defenders of our Second Amendment rights.
I'm one of them, right?
We have people who believe in self-defense and all of that.
And so Pelosi takes that advocacy.
She marries it with their narrative about January 6th, which they will never, ever let go so long as they're able.
And it is about optics, as you said.
They're trying to project.
This is part of the narrative.
The reason we had...
Fences around the perimeter of the Capitol for six months into the year, last year.
The reason that we have all these protocols and that, you know, part of our constitutional function here as duly elected representatives of the people is that the people are able to have easy access to the people's house, to the members that represent them, so they can have their grievances addressed, right, as all our tradition allows.
But none of that's happening right now because constituents and the people are not able to access the people's house to the facility here.
All of it is to project this narrative, to continue the narrative, to project these optics that somehow our democracy is in peril, right?
You hear that opener, our democracy is in peril.
All of this is completely fabricated by Pelosi and team and they'll continue To do that, I think, until they lose the gavel and lose their control of the house.
Now, when we take it back, we have vowed already, we are going back to the good old days of regular order, real process.
We're getting rid of the magnetometers.
We're opening the people's house to the people again.
It'll be like a jubilee year.
It'll be glorious.
But we've got to survive between now to next January when we take control again.
And it's just not a lot of fun in the meantime.
I can understand that.
You're seeing it get more and more.
And again, you're in the middle right now of a budget battle.
I've had people talk to me or call in on the show and they talk about the CR and everything.
I said, look, understand something.
Any appropriations, especially if you control the House, you control the Senate, and you control the White House, For you not to be able to pass an appropriations bill and find ten Republicans, and this is sort of an inside House member joke, ten Republicans who will vote for a spending bill in the Senate, you got a problem, okay?
It's your problem, not the Republicans.
Well, that's part of the broken process is that they have not done their job.
I mean, for example, Nancy Pelosi hasn't presented a budget since she's been in charge.
You know, that's a function, a requirement of the House is to produce a budget each year.
And they've just completely abdicated the responsibility.
And that's why we wind up in these CR situation, continuing resolution situations and all the rest.
It's no way to run a railroad.
And right now, in particular, Doug, as you know, as well as anybody as a former member, we are putting our military in peril by doing continuing resolutions.
They can't appropriately plan.
They cannot prepare for armed conflict.
We can't compete with Russia and China on hypersonics because we don't have the budget for it because we're just extending an old budget that did not anticipate The current situation.
So it's a dangerous thing.
And we're putting the Pentagon and our many women in uniform that are out serving on the front lines in a literal sense.
We're putting them in jeopardy because the politics are getting in the way of it.
And it is a shame.
And I cannot wait until we can bring order back to this house.
Well, I think that's going to be one thing that I'm looking forward to as well.
But again, I think the spending issue, as still being in the military myself, it does have a direct effect.
And look, we can argue about what we're actually spending in the military, but when it goes to long-term planning, you can't do it.
Mike, one of the things, and I've talked about this before on the show, is a lot of people know us because they see us on, you know, when we're in a membership or doing things, they see us on TV, they see us on You know, maybe a clip here and there.
They don't really know what we bring, and I think what I've tried to do a little bit with this podcast, especially with my members and friends that are coming on, is, you know, you didn't just all of a sudden, you know, birth, high school, college, come to Congress.
Okay, now, we're starting to see some people that are doing that, and I think it can be problematic a little bit in that way.
But you had an interesting career.
What I'd like for you to do, just for a few minutes, tell us about your background, where you came from, you know, school, and then let's start talking a little bit about what you were doing before you came to Congress, because it's really important to know the expertise, I think, that you bring to some of these issues that we're going to talk about later, whether it be choice.
Whether it be abortion, whether it be gun rights, whether it be the issues of the day from a constitutional perspective of where we're going.
So give the listener a little bit of taste of Mike Johnson.
Yeah, thanks.
This is an unlikely path for me to get to Congress.
I'm the oldest of four children.
My father I was a firefighter in Shreveport, Louisiana, my hometown where I was born, in northwest Louisiana, north top of the boot as we say, Louisiana shaped like a boot.
My mom was a stay-at-home mother.
Actually, one of the reasons I'm so adamantly pro-life, Doug, is that I was the product of teen pregnancy.
My parents are boyfriend and girlfriend from seventh grade and I was conceived their junior year in high school and so thankfully they were raised, they both had Catholic backgrounds and They knew that abortion wasn't right, and so they dropped out, got married, had me, started a family, and so I wound up becoming the first college graduate in my family.
My father was a hero.
He became ultimately an assistant fire chief in our city, and in 1984, when I was 12 years of age, he was blown up in an explosion.
He got burned 80% of his body, third-degree burns in a terrible fire, and he was permanently disabled after that point.
I wanted to be a firefighter.
That was myself and my younger brothers.
We all wanted to be firemen because we grew up around the training academy, and to us, that was the end-all, be-all, and it still is in my mind.
But when Dad got hurt in the explosion, they steered us a different direction, wouldn't let us go that route.
So I went to school, graduated from LSU. I was just drinking.
I just noticed I have the cup there for the imagery.
Yeah, the podcast, folks.
It knows behind me, though, I do have the G. Yes, yes, yes.
Don't make me get my national championship.
Congratulations, by the way, as well learned.
But as long as Alabama didn't win, Doug, that's all we care about.
So I went to LSU, and then from the time I was a little guy, people said, oh, you know, you should be a lawyer one day.
And I wound up going to law school at LSU. I didn't even know a lawyer, and I did not know an attorney when I enrolled in law school.
And, you know, God just intervened in our lives along the way.
I married Kelly, my bride.
I met her literally two weeks before I graduated from law school.
She missed all the misery of that period.
And we started a family.
And a very, very long story short, I was just in private practice for a very short time.
And I wound up representing a young lady in an abortion malpractice case because she was maimed by a clinic in Baton Rouge where we were living and working.
Terrible situation.
The case became a high-profile national case.
It led to my ability to help steer and draft for our state legislature some abortion clinic regulations laws that were terribly needed.
They became a model for the rest of the country.
I came up on the radar of a group called the Alliance Defense Fund.
Now it's called Alliance Defending Freedom.
And ultimately became a staff attorney for them, one of the early ones.
And that became the largest alliance of Christian attorneys in the country.
So I did that.
I was a religious liberty defense lawyer most of my career.
I defended sanctity of life cases in the courts and religious freedom.
And it was a great background to dig in, defend the Constitution on a daily basis, battle the radical left and the ACLU and the radical abortion groups.
You know, radical pornographers and all that kind of stuff in the courts.
It was a lot of fun and very, very important work, you know, in the culture war, so to speak.
And then, I'm giving you a very short version.
We moved back from South Louisiana.
We were living in Baton Rouge.
We moved back home to Northwest Louisiana.
And I was not there.
I was under six months.
And the neighborhood where we moved in, the fellow who was a state representative decided he was going to run for judge.
And they called me and said, Mike Johnson, you need to run for the state house.
And I said, well, I'm kind of doing this law practice thing.
I don't know.
Well, it's a part-time thing.
You can do it.
Okay.
So I ran and got elected.
Did that for about two years.
And then my congressman called and said, Mike, I'm going to run for Senate.
I think you need to run for Congress.
This was in early 2016. And I said, well, we'll pray about it.
And we did and ran.
And so we got here.
So I came in.
Doug, as you know, as a freshman, I came in under you.
And you were the leader and the chair, ultimately, of our Judiciary Committee where I served.
And Got to use my nerdy constitutional law skills there.
But I came in with Donald Trump in that 115th Congress in 2017, January 2017, and it has been a wild route ever since.
It definitely has been that.
Let's go back for a little bit, because I think people forget the battles that we have fought, because now we're on the verge of, at minimum, A very much drawing back of the Roe v Wade bad, awful decision from the 70s.
Left and right, neither side can point to the legal backing for that decision.
But we're going to see it either restricted or done away with altogether.
You've been working in this for a long time.
What's your feelings right now?
Look, I'm very optimistic, and I've said this in public forums and in interviews.
I genuinely believe that we have at least five of the nine justices who are ready to do away with Roe.
Its legal analysis has been flawed from the very beginning.
And you noticed that those who followed the oral arguments in the Dobbs case out of Mississippi, which has brought this now to the forefront, and have followed, you know, comments and questions that were asked during the hearing, etc., I think that there's at least five justices who are ready to acknowledge that it's an unworkable, you know, arbitrary rule.
Analysis that Roe was built upon, this so-called trimester rubric and the viability standard.
Medical technology has advanced dramatically, of course, since January of 1973 when Roe was enacted.
We have 4D ultrasounds now.
We know that this is not a blob of tissue.
It's not a lump of cells.
This is a tiny human being, a person, from the moment of conception.
And we can track, we have the science now to back up what we've all known intuitively and what scripture has taught us from the time we have been believers that each person is made in the image of God and every single person has inestimable dignity and value and your value is not related in any way to the color of your skin or what neighborhood you live in or what, you know, your talents, your value is inherent.
Because it's given to you by your Creator.
And what's important about that for us as Americans is that this is the truth that is articulated very clearly in our nation's birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, that we hold these truths to be self-evident.
This is a self-evident truth.
It's something you cannot not know.
That all men are created equal.
It didn't say...
Jefferson didn't write born equal.
It said created equal, right?
And it's our creator that gives us our rights.
And among the inalienable rights is the right to life, listed first for the obvious reason.
So our country is built upon that premise.
It is a self-evident truth.
And in 1973, unelected judges on the highest court in the land reversed that premise of our country.
And they said, well, life's expendable.
You should be able to get rid of it.
At least in those later stages of pregnancy.
And the justices now, the current composition of the court, I think we get six justices out of nine, but at least five, I think, are ready to return this decision to the states where it belongs.
There is no right to abortion in the federal constitution.
Full stop, right?
In our constitutional order, in our republic, if it's not stated in the Constitution, then it is a matter that is decided by the people.
And it is decided by the people through their duly elected representatives in the states, not by unelected judges at the federal level.
Period.
In layman's terms, that's what this is about.
And so I believe that the Dobbs case may very well be the linchpin to overturn Roe and return that decision at long last.
Back to the states, and it could not happen a moment too soon.
Doug, we've lost over 63 million unborn children since Roe was handed down, and it's an unspeakable tragedy.
The amazing thing is most people, as they've grown more and more aware of what actually the baby being the baby, as you said, and the science showed this, which we knew intuitively, we're seeing more and more the radical left side turning to...
You know, sex selection, you know, doing away with children with disabilities and things like that.
I mean, I'm hopeful for five, I think you're right about five.
Six, I think, I just don't see, I'll be very blunt, I don't think Roberts will go there.
I think he might do a restriction, but I'm not sure he'll go all the way.
But this is...
Well, I think he's reluctant, but let me tell you why I think Roberts may go along with the majority.
I don't think he wants to be a five to four opinion, because he's an institutionalist, as we all know.
He's deeply concerned about the court being seen as overly political, and so a razor-thin margin of 5 to 4, in his mind, might be a greater harm than having a 6 to 3, a more decisive victory.
But then there's also his line of questioning in the oral arguments, which I thought was interesting.
He openly acknowledged The viability standard is arbitrary, right?
And he has a great problem with that because he does think of himself as a strict constructionist, right?
He likes to think of himself as a constitutional conservative, that he calls it, as he famously said in his confirmation hearings, as an umpire.
He calls it like the Constitution says, like he sees it.
And he knows the language of the Constitution as well as anyone, and he knows that there's no right to abortion there.
And so you read between the tea leaves a little bit during the oral argument, but he acknowledged that the whole framework upon which Roe v.
Wade stands is flawed.
And so here's the thing.
If you're Roberts and you want to have some sort of compromise case, and you've already acknowledged that Roe has an unconstitutional premise, You have to create a new legal fiction to justify abortion.
If it's not a viability standard, if it's not 22 weeks, what are you going to say?
You're going to go along with Mississippi and say, okay, well, after 15 weeks, you can prescribe it.
Pick a number, right?
I mean, that's effectively what Chief Justice Roberts would have to do to object to not side with the majority here.
And I think it's an intellectual stretch and a moral stretch, obviously, that I think he is very reluctant to take.
So we'll see.
It's going to be interesting.
I want to continue down this path for a minute because it's your background, it's my passion as well as far as dealing with this issue.
You and I fought vehemently against the abortion expansionists in Congress, but don't you think it is a beautiful I think it's an interesting, maybe not beautiful as a word, but I think it's very proper that the architect of the strategy going back to Griswold, then Roe, and others was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
and the seat that Ruth Bader Ginsburg held, which was a pro-abortion seat because of her views, was taken by Amy Comey Barrett, who we know fully understand is not in favor of right.
It's sort of a cosmic karma about that, don't you believe?
I think God's smiling there.
Well, I think he is.
And I spent a lot of time with President Trump on Air Force One.
During his term, he went to Louisiana nine times as a sitting president.
I think I went on most or all of the trips, but a lot of the conversations I had with the president was about the Supreme Court, because as a former constitutional law litigator, I understand the greatest, longest lasting legacy of any president is who that individual puts on the Supreme Court, because they sit for life, right?
All their federal judges' appointments, but particularly the Supreme Court.
And he had already had Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, but we anticipated, because Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in Frail Health, that there was a chance that there might be another opening before the end of his first term.
And so each time that we were with him, I would try to pivot back to that point, and I would always bring up Amy Coney Barrett, because I've known Amy since we grew up together in Louisiana.
I've known her since high school.
She's from the New Orleans area, Metairie, down in South Louisiana.
I'm from Shreveport, North Louisiana.
But we would meet up at these nerd student leadership camps around the state and became past friends.
And so when she was on the short list, I was very excited because I've known her...
We turned 50 this year.
I've known her for almost a half century, 40 years or more, and I've known that she has always been intellectually consistent.
She's always been a person of...
Of deep moral character, genuine faith in God, and very settled principles.
She was a law clerk to Justice Scalia, and as I told President Trump, she'll be the female Scalia, sir.
So when she finally did get the nomination, we were overjoyed, and I assured my colleagues that she, certainly on the issue of life, that she will be a tried-and-true conservative.
And I told the president at one point, I said, you know, How poetic would it be to replace Justice Ginsburg, the old icon of radical leftist and feminist movement and all that, with a young conservative female jurist who could sit on the court potentially for four or five decades because we're young, right?
And he liked the idea, and I think she's going to be an exceptional jurist.
She's going to have a fantastic career.
If it's God's will, she'll stay there.
Until the Lord returns.
And I think this could be a big one for her.
I think if Amy Coney Barrett was...
I've not spoken with her about this because we don't want to get compromised and all that.
We're very careful about conversations.
But I would say that if she was given the opportunity to write this opinion, I think she would relish that.
And she would write it from a strict constructionist, originalist perspective.
And that would mean on its face...
That Roe must be overturned in the decision to return to the individual states.
I think Amy would proudly rate that opinion.
Well, let's get this, you know, because we've got, I want to cover a little bit, and I know we've got, you know, our time is a little bit shorter, but let's let this down.
Because I have a lot of folks and friends, as you do as well in the pro-life community, praying for Roe v.
Wade to be gone and saying, oh, abortion will be gone.
That's not true.
And I think this is something that I want, and I'll let you explain it as well, because you've said it a couple of times.
It goes back to the states.
So, Mike, for the pro-life community out there who says, you know, who've been sort of sold on this, Roe v.
Wade goes away, then abortion is banned in the country.
No, it's not.
And explain that process for what you would envision.
I'll let you do it, because we've talked about it.
But I want you to say, what is the next fight, if you would, in this battle?
Yeah, the battle's not over.
The battle line shifts.
It goes to the more local state level.
And the reason for that is that if Roe v.
Wade is overturned, we revert back to what the law was prior to January 22nd of 1973. And that is that the states, as the incubators of democracy in our republic...
So, Louisiana, I think, is one of about a dozen states who have a trigger law of that kind already decided.
And so, when Roe v.
Wade's overturned, you'll have a number of states, a little over a dozen, that will be abortion-free jurisdictions.
On the other hand...
You have an equal number of states or more.
There may be as many as 20 or so states.
I've got to go and check.
I've been meaning to do this.
But there's probably almost two dozen states that will go completely the other direction.
You know, the blue states like California, New Jersey, New York, you know, kind of the places you can anticipate.
But they will be full abortion on demand states.
And they will, some of them will allow for abortion, late term abortion, all the way up to the moment of birth.
So you're going to have a deep division in the country.
It will be a very important legal development and a great day for, you know, half the country.
Now some of the states don't have this decided yet.
And so when we talk about the battle line shifting, the cultural battle line shifting, that's what we mean.
There will be a lot of hard work to do in the state legislatures where this decision is not yet determined.
And then, of course, we would hope that in those blue states that have already had these trigger laws to go the other direction, That we would be able to make headway and gradually convince the electorate, through their elected representatives, that we have to stand for the sanctity of every human life.
Again, this is so fundamental to who we are as Americans, but more fundamental than that is who we are as human beings.
Won't we protect and defend the most defenseless?
That is the ultimate sign of the health of a culture, right?
And the stability of a culture.
And we're one of the only nations in the world that allows for abortions as we have.
I mean, we're with barbaric nations like China and North Korea, you know?
This is not who we are as a people, and we've got to get back to that.
Obviously, I believe God will bless it when we get our moral house in order.
And that's an interesting point.
You said something here that I want to chase because one of the things I've always enjoyed, Mike, about talking with you is we can take topics and we can expound on them.
Back like I believe that the founders always envisioned that the elected representatives were to do, and that is to really grapple, struggle.
I think there's even a biblical reference where it says, you know, take pains with these things, Paul tells Timothy.
Take pains is striving.
And I think we've missed the striving in Congress now.
I don't think we like to...
To dig on these.
And you made a comment just now, though, that I think is really interesting.
That you would have the division, in which we knew.
You have the blue and the red, and you've got the mixed states.
Do you feel like, and this is more of an interesting question, not only from a political, ideological point of view, that the pandemic has caused a deepening of the divisions that are based in ideological roots.
The fear of the left with the pandemic and everything going on.
How much does something like that concern you with what you're seeing in Congress right now from members who are openly spouting that we just don't like the other side?
Yeah, yeah.
I was just explaining this.
We had a breakfast this morning with someone you probably know well, Oz Guinness, the great Oz Guinness, who's a great Christian apologist and author.
And he was here for Faith and Law.
We have these quarterly breakfasts used to attend, I know, but he was here for the one this morning.
And we were talking about this very issue and about the, you know, deep division that exists on Capitol Hill.
And this, of course, is a microcosm of the whole country.
As we say all the time, politics is downstream from culture.
And so what's happening here is a symptom of what's happening around the country.
The coronavirus shutdowns and all the chaos that came out of that did not help it.
But this is something that really has developed and declined pretty rapidly over the last several years.
There are probably lots of factors and reasons behind that.
But as I was summarizing for the group this morning, just at breakfast this morning, when I came in as a freshman in 2017, We began the Honor and Civility Caucus.
Doug, you were always a great model when you were on Capitol Hill.
We stand with great conviction and clarity, and we're unshakable in our core principles, but we don't hate people on the other side.
That's not who we are.
As believers, as Christians, you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, and your colleague certainly is a fellow American.
They're not your enemy, right?
Nancy Pelosi is not my enemy.
I don't agree with anything she does.
I think her agenda is crazy, right?
And I will beat those ideas into the ground every day.
But it's not, our battle's not against flesh and blood, as Scripture says, right?
And so we had this Honor and Civility Caucus effort.
My freshman Congress and my whole class signed on to this document I drafted called the Commitment to Civility.
And we had leaders and luminaries from both sides sign on to be a part of that.
After Steve Scalise got shot, remember the It was a tragic event at the baseball practice.
Paul Ryan came to me.
He was the speaker at the time, and he said, that civility effort, you ought to bring that to the whole Congress.
And so we had all these people sign on to this thing, and we were having bipartisan events together.
I mean, we had an event.
Nancy Pelosi came, and Jim Jordan was there.
I mean, it was like everybody was...
We were completely opposed on policy, but we were still together.
And the reason we were trying to advance that, Doug, is just what you were getting at there.
In a constitutional republic, okay, We're still an experiment on the world stage.
We don't know how long a constitutional republic like ours can last.
We're only 245 years into this thing, right?
And the founders, when they put it together, there had never been anything like this.
But they said, we believe that we're to set it up this way, you know, bathed in prayer as it was, based upon these old, you know, our Judeo-Christian principles and the ideas of republics and the experiences of other republic experiments in the past.
The founders put it together and they said, look, but here's the thing.
If you're going to have government of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln later said, there is a presupposition, there are several, but one of the most important ones is that the elected representatives of those people will be able to have a dialogue together, right?
They've got to be able to come together.
Yes, they're going to wrestle over the public policy.
They're going to have vehement debates, passionate disagreements, but at the end of the day, they're going to be able to arm wrestle over this thing and come to some sort of consensus to move the country forward together.
If the duly representatives on both sides are unable to even have a dialogue, we got big trouble, okay, in our republic.
It doesn't function, right?
So we can have vehement disagreements, but we still have to respect one another.
Anyway, we had a good run at that for two years, 2017, 2018. And then that 2018 congressional cycle, Doug, you remember what happened?
Leading into impeachment and all that.
The squad got elected and some sort of firebrands on the far left and they came in with a different agenda.
They just wanted to tear the place up, you know, metaphorically speaking.
And then the 2020 cycle brought in more firebrands really on both sides, frankly.
And so now, just the divisions have grown.
The chasm between the two sides is wider and wider.
Now you're penalized if you go and have a meaningful dialogue with somebody on the other side because, you know, there are people around that will use it against you and say that you're not a purist or whatever.
And so that scares a lot of members away.
And I fear, Doug, to summarize all this, We're coming to a moment where consensus politics may not even be possible right now.
Not in this environment.
And so it's like a winner-take-all scenario.
And look, we're coming into a...
This is going to be in our favor this time because we're coming into a big election cycle where we're anticipating Republicans to have a big majority and really be able to govern and do a lot of things that are consistent with our principles.
But man, the objective surely must still be to bring in members from the other party to try to Do the right thing for the country together, and not just fight people and hate people because they're wearing the wrong letter on their chest.
Does that make sense?
I mean, that's where we are, and it's not a good development for a republic.
I want to get this in before we get gone here in a minute.
You know, you brought up something.
There was a dramatic shift in Congress in 2018, 2019 basically, that 2019 time.
We got big stuff done, even under the Trump administration, which was bipartisan.
We got criminal justice reform done.
We got the Music Modernization Act done.
Those were bills that I did that were very bipartisan.
We worked on six years.
We did stuff on trade.
We did a lot of stuff that was bipartisan.
And almost in 2019, it shut down.
You and I experienced it firsthand.
Even anti-Semitic bills, we could no longer get the same Democrat co-sponsors to co-sponsor again.
They had a view coming in that they disliked the current president at the time, Donald Trump.
They did not want to work with Republicans.
They were frustrated with the direction because they were still bitter from the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Republicans, in my opinion, I've talked to a lot of them.
Mike, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this before you have to get gone.
I don't want to see a repeat of 2019 in 2023. Is there enough conversations going on right now that when we'll have the oversight of the Obama-Biden administration, which is the third term of Obama, but Biden, oversight of Biden, oversight of Afghanistan, things that we're not seeing now, but yet have an agenda that, as you said, has some bipartisan take to it?
Yeah, look, there is a lot of oversight to do, and we're going to be very focused and principled in that approach, but we owe the American people some accountability for some of the atrocities that have taken place here, okay?
But at the same time, we have to advance a very deliberate, important, positive agenda for the country because there are so many things that we must fix on an urgent, We've got to be able to do both.
I think that we can.
I think the balance will be right, but we're developing the playbook, the agenda right now that we will run.
We're going to do something similar to the Contract with America that they did in the 90s that Newt Gingrich and Company led so ably.
We're kind of taking the blueprint for that, and at least the method that they use to do it.
We'll have a first 100 days agenda of that Congress.
We're in the majority, and then we're going to deliver for the American people.
But, you know, there is a mindset in some sectors that we just need to steamroll the other side, leave them in the wake, because frankly, Doug, that's what they've been doing here in recent days.
They don't even consult us.
We don't have the ability to participate in the development of legislation.
There's no regular process, no amendment process.
It's a joke.
And that hurts the cause.
It hurts the American people.
It hurts the country.
And so while we are proceeding courageously with our conservative agenda, the purpose will not be to just beat up the other side, even though that's what some people want us to do.
What we're going to try to do is forge consensus for the people.
Look, I will defend our conservative principles all day long, every day, and on Sunday as well, because I know that our principles are right, they're what's best for the country, they're what's best for us collectively as individuals, for everybody.
And that was the record of the Trump administration for all of the unorthodox things that happened, right?
No one can refute the objective truth of what we accomplished in that four years, particularly in that first two years when we had the Republican majority In both houses, because we implemented the conservative policies and the core principles that we all believe in, and it did well for the country and everyone.
All boats rose.
We've got to get back to that, and I look forward to being a happy warrior, as Reagan used to say in presenting that message.
Reagan said in his farewell address, Doug, he said, you know, they call me the great communicator.
I really wasn't.
He said, "I was just communicating great things, and the same great things that have guided our nation since its founding." That's my paraphrase of Reagan's famous farewell admonition to us, and it echoes down even today.
Well, one of the things that I like to do on this podcast as well, and I think what you're saying fits very well with the We've got to be passionate about who we live.
I believe conservatives We've seemingly taken the back seat many times.
We have that message, that great thing, that positive message, but we fail to communicate it to people because sometimes we stay up here.
You know, the old saying, we're so heavenly minded, we're no earthly good.
And conservatives this year have got to really get back.
I think we saw it in Virginia.
We saw it in New Jersey, even, although we didn't win every seat.
We saw that people are begging to be heard more than anything and say, because this is dividing.
If you could see into the future a little bit.
Things that deal with conservative and constitutional kind of issues, are we going to find some consensus that begins to bring us back together?
Is it going to be on these overreaching of mandates?
Is it going to be on bureaucracy?
Is it going to be on computer and the big tech issues?
Where do you see, just briefly, where do you see the next bigger breakthroughs coming that we can get back to a government that can actually pass something larger than a spending bill?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I do think that because the left went so far, they went too far, right, that the pendulum does now begin to swing back a little bit.
Now some of the crazy avowed progressives, they're never going to come back into the fold.
They're, you know, they're working on a totally different anti-American kind of platform and agenda.
We're never going to get them back.
But the American people, the polling shows that people saw the results Of all that leftist ideology, that pre-socialism kind of agenda, and they don't like it, right?
And so we have an opportunity to be able to speak truth into that vacuum and to explain to everyone why our principles are what's best.
They're American principles.
That's what's guided us since the founding.
That's when it's going to bring us back to our greatness again.
And I think that gives us an opportunity.
The strength of our ideas gives us an opportunity to build a new kind of consensus.
Now, the question is, what will we use that consensus for?
You know, I left just a couple hours ago.
We had a task force meeting within the House Republican conference, the House Republicans conference.
I mean, this is a bipartisan concern.
I mean, Republicans and Democrats are concerned about big tech and their oligopolies that are running it and censoring private speech and viewpoint discrimination, all that kind of stuff.
It begs for a solution.
It's an unprecedented issue.
And it must have buy-in from both sides to be able to fix it correctly.
And so we're going to work on that.
I mean, in our blessed Judiciary Committee, Doug, that you left us to go on to a better life, right?
Just like you did with the music modernization, just like you were able to do with criminal justice reform, we've got to tackle this big new problem, big tech and the crisis it's created in the culture.
But the only way we'll do that successfully, I think, is if we involve people on both sides.
And there are thoughtful members on both sides, and I look forward to that dialogue.
Well, I think we're also going to be very careful that there's no easy solution to big tech.
And I think that's the concern that we don't want to abandon our free market principles at the same point.
And I've been very concerned that this saying big is bad and we stop there.
No, there's a lot of things you've got to look at.
I think we're at an important time.
I'm glad to have you there.
I know that you're in Washington today.
We're talking.
You've got votes coming up.
We'll do this again at another time because I want to take four or five issues that we've been dealing with and dig a little bit further.
But I think people will get an idea that there is hope in D.C. right now.
It's a lot of dysfunction.
But we're going to have to find the principles to put us back together.
Thanks for fighting that fight.
Your civility, honor, those are key.
Because if we don't have that, what do we have?
And that applies to Republicans and Democrats.
We cannot...
We've got to stand for who we are and not back down, but have a smile on our face and say, look, I disagree with you, but as you said earlier, you're not the enemy.
Your ideas are wrong, and we're going to fight about those ideas.
I hope that's where we can go to, Mike.
Absolutely.
Never give up on America.
I'm very bullish on the future of our country.
We're the last best hope of man on the earth, as Reagan also said.
So we better fix this, Doug.
There's no other alternative.
I agree.
We miss you.
Everybody needs to know.
We miss Doug Collins on Capitol Hill.
Well, we miss you guys as well.
Please give your best to family and tell everybody I said hello, okay?
We'll do it, brother.
Same to you.
Talk to you later.
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