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Sept. 27, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
29:43
A Doctor in the House
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You want to listen to a podcast?
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.
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.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you with us.
Today is a special episode for me because it takes me back to being in Congress and the real specialness about Congress is you get to do a lot of interesting things, you go a lot of places, but it's the people that you meet that make the biggest difference in your life.
And our next guest here on the podcast is Dr. Michael Burgess, congressman from Texas.
We got to know each other serving on Rules Committee, we got to know each other in Congress, but we got to know each other best because we're both early risers and we both would go to the gym in the mornings to get ready for the day and we'd see each other.
And it started my day off right.
If there's one thing that I miss about Congress, there's many things I don't, but a lot of things that I do, one of those is being with Mike Burgess and having him greet me in the mornings as we travel this path together.
For those out there, he wrote a book called A Doctor in the House.
He is an expert on healthcare.
He's an expert on what has been going on.
He came into this job and provides just a steady voice of reason, serves in many capacities.
And I'm glad to have you on today, Doc.
Well, Doug, first off, it is good to see you again, even if virtually.
And it's wonderful.
Thank you for letting me be on your podcast.
Am I allowed to mention to people that you are a pastor, you're a member of the clergy?
Oh, yeah.
So you might pick my brain for medical questions early in the morning, but I certainly sought your help on the pastoral level on more than one occasion.
So we'd sort of bolster each other between the two of us.
We perhaps made up one normal individual.
We worked on it.
And also, we're probably some of the few members of Congress who still understood what a glow plug was.
That was part of our discussion in those early morning hours.
That's right.
For anyone unfamiliar with the diesel engine, Google it.
It's an interesting analogy.
Especially to D.C. And you came in, we were off camera, we were talking about the fact that, you know, the glow plug is finally lit under the Democrats who've realized now for 10, almost nine months that they had to do appropriations bills by September 30th.
And now, you know, trying to panic to do everything.
But before we get into the meteor issues, Doc, I mean, I showed your book, The Doctor in the House.
People can still get this book.
It's forwarded by Newt Gingrich.
Yeah.
It talks about you going from a physician in Texas to Congress.
Give people a little bit of an idea about how that came about.
I've listened to you talk about it.
It's fascinating to me.
And it also shows to me the purpose of why you're there.
Well, it's 20 years ago this fall.
I ran my first general election campaign for Congress.
I was sort of an unlikely candidate.
not run for re-election.
It was right after 9-11.
And I was really asking myself if I was doing what I was supposed to be doing with my life, or was there perhaps another plan for me?
And this pathway opened up.
I'll be honest with you, Doug, I had to Google, how do you run for Congress?
And even people, my kids are surprised that I even knew what Google was 20 years ago.
But it has worked out for me.
I feel like I'm making a difference.
I feel like I'm in the right place at the right time.
It's hard to give up practice medicine.
I delivered babies for 25 years in North Texas.
So there's not a day that goes by that I don't reflect on some aspect of that that I miss.
But this is incredibly important as well.
And as you know, I got to be here through some of the big fights on the Affordable Care Act.
That's what led to the writing of that book.
I'll warn people, it's like 10 chapters of complaining and two chapters of solutions.
But nevertheless...
You know, thought a physician in Congress would have been consulted frequently while they're trying to revamp the healthcare system in the country from top to bottom.
But those of us who actually had a background in delivery care were excluded from that process.
No one was interested in talking to us.
The good news is we formed the Doctors Caucus now.
We're about 15 or 16 doctors strong on the GOP side in Congress.
There are three Democrat positions.
We will occasionally do things in a bipartisan fashion because there are things that aren't just specifically Republican or Democrat.
So the good news is that it made us stronger as a doctor group in the Congress, and we try to punch above our weight against you lawyers, Doug.
Yeah, we don't have that.
Let me go back to something here.
I mean, because you came in after 9-11.
You were in, you know, with W. Bush's administration, of course, coming from Texas.
He is second.
You were there, you know, during that really the war, the ramp up, the discussions that we had, you know, was going on about that.
And then, you know, about halfway, you know, a little less than halfway into your tenure, all of a sudden you get this Affordable Care Act.
You have the perspective now of looking back 20 years, you know, a little over 20 years.
And this is sort of off before we get to the main topics of today, but because one of the things that's changed tremendously is the border, and I want to get to the border issue with you here in just a few minutes on that.
But what do you see changed the most since you first came into Congress till now?
Interestingly enough, we're sitting here in appropriations, or what should be the culmination of appropriations season.
Appropriations are not handled the same way as when I first arrived in Almost 20 years ago, and appropriations used to consume the entire summer, May, June, July.
Majority at the time, Tom DeLay, I remember my first term, said, look, I know you're used to being up here maybe three days a week, but Summer's coming.
We got appropriations.
We got to get through it.
It's going to be five work days a week.
We're going to have late night votes on the floor almost every night because appropriations were brought to the floor under an open rule.
You and I were on the rules committee.
Open rules were pretty much had gone by the wayside even when we were on the rules committee.
But an open rule means any member can go down to the House floor Take the Big Chief tablet with them and a crayon and scratch out some words and then say, I've got an amendment at the desk and bring up whatever might be related to that particular appropriations bill.
And what it does is give every member, even not just members on the...
On the Appropriations Committee, not even senior members or committee chairs, every member gets an opportunity to try to impact those appropriations bills.
So it's time consuming, and I guess that made a lot of people uncomfortable that people talked so much during that process, but gradually got squeezed down and squeezed down.
Now, all the appropriations bills at some point this year will all be packaged together.
It will either be called an omnibus bill or two minibus bills, but all 12 appropriations bills will be combined in some form or fashion.
And you get one vote.
And you don't get to amend it.
It comes up under a closed rule, entirely different from the process when I first arrived here.
And then here's the other part of the problem.
Since we don't do appropriations bills like we used to, Oh, cabinet heads don't really feel like they need to take your phone calls.
In the old days, you know what?
This guy's a pain in the neck and I hate to talk to him, but I got to take his call because I may need his vote on when it comes time to vote on the money for my cabinet department.
But those days are gone.
And so as a consequence, it leads to the administration or the executive branch, the administrative branch of government Not being as attentive to the legislative branch as they should be.
So we've given up a lot of Article I power in the Constitution.
We've given a lot of that up to the agencies.
And I tie that back to how our appropriations process really has gotten off kilter.
If there was one wish that I would have going forward, maybe there'll be a change in In the majority makeup in the House of Representatives, that we get back to some semblance of actually studying and appropriating dollars the way they are supposed to happen.
And then, of course, my other committee, Energy and Commerce, we're the authorizing committee.
We're supposed to do the work.
We're supposed to do the hard work, do the research.
Get the experts in.
People are supposed to identify where are the areas that we need to be spending money, like at the FDA or the NIH, and how is that money, how should it be spent?
The CDC has not really been responsive.
How could we improve on that through the authorization process and then give that information to the appropriators who would write the spending bills that would eventually come to the floor?
That Even be more important than just doing bills on the floor at the end of the process.
We need to stay engaged from start to finish, from authorization to appropriation, and we shouldn't have some darn many federal departments that are out there and unauthorized where the authorization work just isn't done anymore.
You're on judiciary.
That's an authorizing committee.
Energy and Commerce is an authorizing committee.
Ways and Means.
We're supposed to do the work, the deep dive, and get the data and deliver that to then the appropriators and say, this is how we would like you to spend the money.
And then the appropriators are supposed to do what we say.
Doesn't always work out, but in theory, that's how it should work.
Right.
Well, one of the things, Doc, that I've even noticed, and it's amazing, sometimes it feels like five years, sometimes it feels like five minutes, but I've been gone for now 18 months, 19 months.
And even in that last two years I was there under the Democrats, You know, they've left the appropriations altogether.
I mean, I was not ever happy with the way we were doing it the six, seven years before, but we would have those weeks, you know, starting at the end of May, we'd have four or five days in which you'd have, you know, we'd make 400 amendments in order and, you know, that's what we would do.
But it would be three or four days in which you'd have individual appropriations of the 12 debated.
Now, at the end of the day, we never did what we should have done and that's passed them and did the combination with the Senate and get them done.
But you're not even seeing that on the floor anymore.
And I think that's the one part that Americans can't understand.
They can understand fights on guns, abortion, everything else.
What they don't understand is what they have to do every month is balance a checkbook.
They do not understand why Congress spends so little time debating on how much money they spend.
And then spend so much money at the end of the process.
That's truly, I guess, yeah, that's what the biggest change had been, and I guess there is it.
We don't pay attention to the dollars we spend, and we spend a lot more than we ever did before.
I understand.
I love my Texas friends.
Texas has been out there many times, but Texas and Arizona, New Mexico, California, on the forefront of what has become what you and I would have never guessed in our morning meetings in the gym.
I mean, when we dealt with, you know, border issues, it was trying to solve problems.
It was trying to find, you know, how do we stem the tide?
How do we get more money?
I remember staying one July, they kept us an extra two days because we were finding money for migrants.
And yet they always accused us of being the ones that was terrible on the border.
Now you just have an open border.
And I don't care what any of the administration says, it is an open border as a national security threat.
You've got something to address that.
Let's turn our attention to immigration for just a little bit.
Can you imagine it has gotten this bad?
No, and I've been going down there, you know, for a long time.
It got bad after President Obama did the executive order on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which sent the message that, hey, if you can get up here, you're going to get a free pass in.
So there was a big problem going back to 2014. Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the so-called Northern Triangle countries, really were sending tons and tons of people up here that arrived on our border.
It was tough.
It was a real problem then.
We're seeing numbers that are unlike even those that were in the high point of 2014-2015.
And, you know, President Biden said during the campaign, he said, there's no reason that a country like ours couldn't take in, oh, two million people and give them citizenship.
So guess what?
That's what we're doing this year, this very year.
It is two billion people and it's overwhelmed.
I don't care what aspect of it you want to look at.
It's overwhelmed every social agency.
It's overwhelmed hospitals, schools.
And this was the, you know, sort of the uncomfortable thing when people said the quiet part out loud and sent 50 odd folks to Martha's Vineyard and they said, oh, no, wait, we're not Texas.
We don't have the infrastructure to deal with that.
I'm telling you, we don't have the infrastructure in Texas.
Nobody does.
Nobody could be prepared for what would happen if you basically signaled to the cartels and the traffickers south of the Texas border that...
And think about this, Doug.
For every one of those people, and you know this, for every one of those people that they bring in and get across the border, that's what?
$8,000?
$10,000?
$12,000?
That they charge those people.
So you multiply that, $10,000 by 2 billion, that's a lot of money that's changing hands.
That's a big economic incentive for the people who are involved in the, again, the cartels and the traffickers.
And we're not even getting into the illicit narcotics part, which is also a major public health problem in this country.
As you know, the deaths from fentanyl, it's in excess of $100,000 a year.
This is...
You can't control that because everyone is all hands on deck at Customs and Border Protection are dealing with just the people that are streaming across the river.
And that's unfortunate.
And look, just as short as maybe three years ago, the numbers were nowhere near this bad because Trump did take it seriously, and he did have policies down on the border that did require enforcement of our law at the southern border.
But they just gave up on all of that, and the consequence is what you're seeing today.
It is bad, as you said, Dr. Rogers, and I think one of the things that bothers Many of us, because being on the Judiciary Committee, we had direct oversight of immigration and looking at that, and it was just, you know, we were just seeing, you know, just so much issues, and now you just see it open up.
And what bothers me is they talk about 2 million people coming in and citizenship.
The real problem, and you know this, and this, you know, we're going back to the late 80s, you know, coming back, is we've got a...
There's a population that is not legal in this country that is probably upwards of somewhere in the 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 million range.
And we just don't even have those discussions anymore.
I mean, because now you've got an open border that's just there.
I think you're working with the Judiciary Committee on some other resolution of inquiry.
How is that looking?
So resolution of inquiry is a tool that you have when you're in the minority in Congress.
Well, you could use it in the majority as well.
Where you ask the agency involved to provide you information because you don't understand something's going on.
Now, Nancy Pelosi turned off the resolutions of inquiry for two years because of the pandemic.
She said, well, we just don't have time to deal with it.
Resolution of inquiry has to be heard in the committee, and the committee has to either dispatch it or...
That motion then can come to the floor as a privileged resolution if the committee doesn't take any action.
And so, yeah, I've got one that will be in front of the Judiciary Committee sometime this week.
And it was an effort to get information out of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Homeland Security about unaccompanied minors that are being placed in this country.
And it has been very, very difficult.
And this goes back years, but it's gotten worse in this administration to be able to understand what is the process?
How are you vetting the families where these kids are sent?
How are we ensuring that, you know, our policies and procedures are not aiding and abetting child traffickers at the southern border?
So that was my resolution of inquiry that will now be heard in front of the Judiciary Committee this week.
So I expect Chairman Nadler will swap that down.
But we need to be having these discussions.
We need to put them to the forefront because they are incredibly important issues.
And let's be honest, if we don't do our job, people get hurt.
Exactly.
One of the things, though, that is very interesting, and I think it's a correlation, and I mentioned your book early on, and you sort of mentioned this as well.
Immigration, in a smaller way, I think is this, but a very real way, has very much of a correlation to the Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare Act, and everything else, and that is that the experts and the ones who are dealing with it are the ones not And I think that is,
you know, again, it's amazing to me that the ones on the Border Patrol, I've never seen this, Mike, I've never, and I still keep in touch with a lot of folks, the actual field Border Patrol agents, ICE, others, I've never...
I haven't seen it in my time in work in federal, the disconnect between those who are trying to do the work and the connection to the secretary and the leadership in the organizations.
Are you sensing that from stuff that you're seeing in Texas and others that the Border Patrol agents have just said, look, we've been left out here to fend for ourselves?
Yeah.
I'll tell you another area where, yes, and the answer to your question is yes, and one of the things that I'm working on is a bill I introduced called the Parent Act.
Look, currently, if a child is picked up, crossing illegally, if a parent can be identified, that child can be released to their parent.
But if there's no first order relative available, anyone else has to actually go through a process.
So an aunt, uncle, grandparent.
You can't just release the child to anyone.
There is a vetting process that has to occur.
Well, Doug, I found out during one of my trips down there that Secretary Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, had just unilaterally changed the rules.
He hadn't come to Congress and sought a change in legislation.
He hadn't sought legislative relief.
He had a big problem with the numbers of kids that were in their facilities.
And just to increase the throughput, to get them down the road somewhere else, they have been releasing children to...
Aunts, uncles, grandparents.
And look, as sad as it is to contemplate, sometimes a child is trafficked by a family member.
And if you don't do the vetting of the recipient Even an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent, if you don't do the vetting of that person who's going to be taking care of the child, you'll have no earthly idea.
But Secretary Mayorkas just changed it unilaterally as an administrative function.
So the Parent Act is to actually restate current law, which those children cannot be released except to first-degree relatives.
And I don't know if you remember when you were here, there was also an effort to actually do some genetic research.
Testing and find out if the kid really was the kid of the person who said they were the parent of that child.
And as a practical matter, what happened is there were instances on the border where someone would say, uh...
No, that's really not my child.
Because they didn't want to be accused of kidnapping when the genetic test came back as a no match.
So the coyotes and cartels, they're smart about this stuff.
They don't want to run afoul of United States law.
So they would just literally give up and abandon the child at the border facility when those parental tests were undertaken.
They are not doing that anymore.
They said it took up too much time.
I don't think it really did.
But that was just one of the changes that was made to establish this open border that this administration seems to be so much in love with.
It is amazing for a group of people to be, the liberals always talk about the children and the welfare and everything else, that they're literally, probably, more than likely, putting children with sex traffickers and others who are not their parents.
And look, there was an example of a, I think it was a 20-month-old child that had been trafficked multiple times.
They'd bring them across the border with the parent, and then they'd send the child back basically and do it again.
And they were doing this, they were selling basically this child.
We found this stuff.
It's real.
People don't want to talk about it, but it's real.
And the problem I'm seeing right now is we're completing the contract.
The Coyotes are not even having to bring them across the Rio Grande.
They're just getting them to the ranch because they know once they get to the Rio Grande or just get them to within sight of the border, just let them walk because we're going to take them.
And we're fulfilling that contract right now.
We are providing the last mile of transportation for their criminal enterprise, and it's...
Oh, you know, they've got all the headlines because some migrants were sent to Washington, D.C., New York City, and Martha's Vineyard.
But truth be told, I mean, this has been going on.
You saw the stories back last, I think, last January, where plane loads of migrants in the middle of the night were being sent to Westchester, New York.
And no one was told that they were coming.
No one was sort of, I mean, we saw the mayor of Chicago saying, well, this is not fair.
No one told us they were coming.
This has been happening.
The administration has been doing this, and all we're saying is bring it out into the daylight and let people understand and answer our questions when we ask you, what are you doing to ensure that, especially in the case of children, that their placements have been vetted and that we're not turning them over to someone who's going to be abusive.
Well, and I think that's the big thing.
A lot going on.
Is there hope not that we're going to turn, you know, that conservatives will win back the House, Republicans will win back the House, and hopefully the Senate, that, you know, at least can put a damper on some of these things moving forward?
Because, I mean, we've just, we've went through an administration that frankly just doesn't seem to care.
Just your last hot take on that.
I mean, what are we, what's the feeling right now in D.C.? Well, if the election is about security, if it's about immigration, if it's about border security, if it's about cost of living that has been out of control for months and months and months, I think Republicans have a good shot.
There will be a lot of effort on the other side, a lot of time and effort spent on trying to make the election about other things.
Look, the president in his 60 Minutes interview the other day said, oh, inflation is just an inch.
I'm sorry.
It's an inch, but it's a puncture wound and it's hurting American families and they're dealing with it every day.
Sure, gas prices have come down a little bit because you exhausted the strategic petroleum reserve to artificially depress the price.
That's going to run out about the same time that we come into this fall election.
But that was the strategy to deal with inflation is let's just buy down gas prices with our strategic petroleum reserve.
But every other price, every other pocketbook issue is hitting people and is hitting them pretty hard.
Supply chain continues to be a problem.
I don't know about where you live in Georgia, but I'll tell you in North Texas.
It's not unusual for me to go into my neighborhood, Walmart, and see a lot of things that are just not available.
A lot of empty shelves that has been going on at one point.
You say, well, that's a pandemic.
President said the pandemic's over.
When are we going to start to find the goods we need on the supermarket shelves?
So these are big questions that the people who are going to the polls this fall are going to have to answer.
If you let yourself get distracted by something that it's not about, and that's what the Democrats are going to try to do, it becomes problematic.
But I'm optimistic that Yeah, the Republicans will take the majority, at least in the House, and begin to put the brakes on some of these very dreadful policies that have come through in basically an evenly divided House and Senate, and they've been able, under reconciliation rules, to enact some truly god-awful policies.
Well, it shows, actually, and maybe the Republicans, and I know you and I have been in those conference meetings before, maybe we'll take a lesson from what's happened in the last 18 months and say, look, everybody may not get everything they want, but we've got to get something as we go.
Folks, you've been listening to Dr. Michael Burgess.
He's one of our better voices up there sharing.
He has a book.
I'm showing it here at the doctor in the house.
You will want to go out and get a copy of it, look at some of the things he's doing on immigration.
You'll see it all over the news in the next little bit.
Dr. Burgess, thanks for joining me today on the podcast.
Thank you, Douglas.
Great to be with you.
We'll do it anytime.
Look forward to it.
Alright, folks, that's it.
We'll see you again on the Doug Collins Podcast.
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