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Oct. 4, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
28:07
Making the case for a Congress that works
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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 Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you with us today.
Got one of our dear friends on the podcast today.
Get a good catch up.
It's September.
It is the time to be scared if you're in Washington, D.C. Things will happen quickly.
Things will happen without hearings.
Oh wait, that's been the whole Democratic meeting for the last year and a half.
But we're in September and there's a lot going on.
Kelly Armstrong is with us today.
One of our favorites because he actually wants to get stuff done in Washington, D.C. And I appreciate his attitude so much.
Also from being in the wonderful state of North Dakota, everything is up there good.
Kelly, welcome back to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Doug.
Well, let's start off on something, and this is something I hadn't thought of until we just started talking here a little bit ago.
Everybody's talking about elections and getting people registered and voting, and I know this week we have even more electoral count stuff from Liz Cheney and Zoloft and others, but I remember you surprised me back when we were dealing with some of the Democrats wanting to nationalize elections.
When you discussed voter registration or lack of it in North Dakota, for our listeners, just for a minute, explain how that works in North Dakota.
And y'all have a great success at it.
Yeah, we have the easiest ballot access of anywhere in the country.
You get a thousand signatures sometime before the first week in September.
You can qualify for the ballot as an independent.
And we don't have voter registration.
You know, we're going to talk about an Electoral Count Act bill, Zolofgren, Liz Cheney doing all that, but Amy Klobuchar just introduced a same-day registration bill in the Senate, and I'm going to have to go talk to them about that because we have to be excluded from it.
We don't have registration.
Every time the Democrats do one of their election messaging bills, I've got to go up to the Rules Committee, and I've got to educate our friends, Jamie Raskin, and they don't believe it.
Nobody ever believes it.
I'm like, I need an exception because you guys are actually going to make it harder to vote in North Dakota.
Yeah, I mean, and that's weird because, I mean, and it's not like you don't have people, you know, wanting to vote.
I mean, you have good turnout for your elections.
Yes, we do.
And it's, you know, I was the Senate Judiciary Chair in the State Senate, but I was also the State Party Chairman for three years.
So the State Party Chairman in me always wanted voter registration, but the Senate Judiciary Chairman in me really appreciates the way North Dakota did.
So my political brain and my policy brain didn't even always agree with each other.
But it's really unique.
It's great.
It's something that we just allow people to do that.
We have done a lot of different things to both shore up our elections and make sure that everybody who wants to vote can vote and only those that should vote can vote.
Well, and that brings up the interesting question because this has been the festering deal for a couple of years now.
How do you in North Dakota assure that Doug Collins doesn't show up on election day and say, hey, I want to vote today?
Yeah.
I'll even go back.
So I got elected in 2013. The first thing was Citizens United because our state election law was unconstitutional after Citizens United came in.
So we had to go rewrite our election law.
And this is an interesting story.
The Senate Minority Leader is a guy named Max Schneider.
He was a lawyer from Fargo.
I was a DUI lawyer from Dickinson.
I walked out as soon as we did it.
I grabbed him and I said, you're coming into this room and we're going to write this and we're not going to politicize it.
He ran against me in 2018.
And now he has just recently been nominated by the Biden administration for the US Attorney.
So we've done all of this stuff on elections in a real bipartisan way.
Half our counties in North Dakota are vote-by-mail counties, but those programs developed organically at the local level.
And I think that is the key to success in doing all of this, particularly in this day and age and particularly how everybody has a lot of these different issues.
And, you know, I've taken heat for that on different areas here because the last people you want in charge of your elections in Georgia or I want in charge of my elections in North Dakota are Democrats in Washington, D.C. And I'll fight every day to make sure that doesn't happen.
But if you develop it locally, you get buy-in from your local citizens, you have good county auditors, you have good communication, then you can have faith and trust in your election cycle.
And if you do it the way the Democrats are trying to do it in D.C., particularly with a lot of other things that have gone on since you were the chair and then ranking member of judiciary, it's really hard to go back and tell North Dakotans that they have their best interests at heart.
Well, and I think that's the interesting part is there's a trust in the system.
And I think that is the key.
There's a trust in the system that, you know, people know each other.
Do you think a North Dakota model would work in a very populous state, say, you know, even a Georgia or a Texas or a California?
No.
Absolutely not.
Maybe in some rural areas in Georgia.
Maybe that's why.
But that's why you don't have a one-size-fits-all policy in D.C. When I say half of our counties are vote-by-mail, that is not even close to half of our population.
But we have really rural counties.
And the drive to the courtyard, all of these different issues, it works because they developed it locally.
They got buy-in from their own citizens.
It took them time to develop the vote.
The plans and do them in a meaningful way.
And it would never work in Washington, D.C. or Buckhead or Atlanta.
It just wouldn't, but it works for us.
Exactly.
Let's switch gears.
I mentioned this coming into the podcast today is September.
September should be the month in which you're finalizing actual appropriations, actual plans, actual stuff.
But as we've come to find out, and we experience this even when we're a majority, is we've got a very broken appropriation system.
And a lot of reasons for that, but it needs to fix.
A lot of stuff's being talked about now about adding on how far the CR continuing resolution is going to go.
Give us a little bit of an update on what that looks like and how we can fit that in.
Sure.
I think right now, I mean, this week in D.C. is what I call a filler week.
You understand what I mean?
We're voting on suspensions.
We're doing some of those things because the Democrats in the Senate are trying to negotiate whether they can get Joe Manchin's super secret, top secret vote.
Permitting bill attached to it.
And they've got 72 House progressives who said they aren't going to support it.
Bernie has already come out against it.
And at the same time, you're you're trying to negotiate whether the CR will run until December or potentially till January.
So my guess is the permitting stuff will end up off the bill.
I don't know how they get there.
They're not getting a lot of sympathy from Republicans on the Senate side.
Permitting is something I actually know a little bit about, considering North Dakota and the oil and gas and the shale boom.
I don't think any Republicans have been brought into the conversation on this.
So my guess is by the end of this week, I mean, if I had to guess, and this is just game theory, we'll find out that the permitting stuff is going to be stripped off, which is what I said when the original Build Back Mansion bill came to the floor anyway.
You know, he was promised to vote on permitting in the Senate.
And my question was always, well, how is he going to get that through Speaker Pelosi's house?
And I think that's the problem.
And also the way that they pulled off the Bill, but I like that you've adopted as well, the Bill about mansion bill, because that's all it ever was, was him being fired.
The way they pulled it off is they brought basically McConnell along, suckered him along, and then as soon as McConnell...
You know, gave him the vote on the chip bill that they wanted.
Then, you know, he pulled the fast one.
And I think there's a lot of people seeing the game that Manchin was playing there.
You know, and it's going to be interesting to see because, you know, the funny thing now is you hear him whining basically saying, This is something y'all have wanted for 10 or 12 years, and now you don't get what you want.
You're going to, well, okay, vote for Shelley Moore Capito's bill.
It's the same thing.
Let's just, you know, again, it goes back to what he wants to do and take credit for.
What are we hearing now?
It seems like, you know, I think there was an aversion, the same-sex marriage issue, what the Democrats tried to make a big deal about.
Anything else you're looking for in the CR that could be problematic, maybe for passage or at least some concern among the Democrats?
Because really, frankly, this is going to be written in the Senate, whether the House wants to believe it or not.
100 percent.
Yeah, I think one thing that I think I don't usually compliment President Biden very much.
I think his 60 minute interview made sure that we aren't going to have a covid anchor attached to this CR. So I think that's helpful.
I'm with you.
I think I voted for one really short-term, like a two-week CR that was actually clean.
It's the only one that has been here for my four years.
But this is just no way to run a rodeo.
Like, we continue to kick this can down the road.
We have unbelievable inflationary pressures.
We continue to deal with all of these different issues.
While my North Dakota citizens and then Georgia citizens are sitting around going, listen, groceries are 14% more expensive than last year.
You know, it's costing us.
In North Dakota, the inflation rate seems to be closer to 18 to 20%, which is really difficult for my constituents to swallow because it's all food and energy.
Well, guess what?
We do pretty well in North Dakota.
We do farming and ranching and energy production pretty well.
And at the same time, we're not seeing none of my producers, none of my egg producers, none of my energy producers are seeing this increase in cost that all of my consumers are seeing when they go to the polls.
So I think, listen, I'd be hard-pressed to see how you're going to get a ton of Republican support for this CR in the House.
I mean, we won't be at the negotiating table.
So the real question is, and this is why I don't think the permitted gets on, because I don't think they can get the progressives on board with it.
Exactly.
Well, one thing is I know that Republicans are trying to push right now, and it seems reasonable, but it's going to require McConnell and the Senate to actually do something that they haven't done in a while, and that's actually pushed something to the edge, and that is pushing the CR out of December and into January or February.
What's your feelings on keeping 10 Republicans off the CR in the Senate?
I don't know.
I really don't.
It'll be very interesting.
I mean, I think there's two schools of thought.
I can see the benefits to both sides, right?
I mean, we're going to win back the majority in the House, and we're going to do it, and contrary to what everybody in D.C. is saying, and we're going to have some tough votes.
That's what happens when you get the majority, and I hope we take more tough votes because I think we should actually legislate.
So, I mean, I can see the benefits to Both of those, keeping it in December and kicking it to January.
But I think the short version is what you said earlier.
This is going to be, regardless of where it starts, this is going to be a Senate negotiation.
And we're just, I mean, the Republicans in the House are just kind of waiting around to see what deal they cut.
Oh, exactly.
Rosa Deloria, the chairman of the Progress Committee, she's just waiting on a call from the Senate to say, okay, here's what we can do.
Please write this bill and send it over to us.
Or send us something fairly slimmed down, we'll get it done, and then we'll send it back to you and you just accept it.
That's the way it's, you know.
Yeah, I mean, legitimately, if it's a clean CR, there will be some Republican support for it in the House.
It's just you've been around this.
The chances of that happening, I think, are somewhere between slim and not.
Exactly.
I mean, the Democrats, I mean, knowing what they, at least in the House, feel like the elections may bring, they've got to try and get something.
You know, whether it's Ukraine money, whether it's other monies, they're going to have to try and get something as we go.
Hey, Kelly, you and I have done a lot of work together, and we still are very passionate about criminal justice reform.
And I think this is one of the things, though, that has concerned me.
I want to turn a little bit now.
Some things are actually flowing in D.C., and then I want to get to some of the general overall problems that we're seeing out there.
Number one, equal app.
Is there any possibility that we can get this tagged on to something now or in the next couple of months that could actually get that moved?
So, I'm not...
Listen, Senator Grassley's got his own bill that is a two and a half to one.
And there's some biology reason.
But one of the things he does that I don't think most people agree with is raising the cocaine sentencing.
So some of the disparity goes away.
I actually met with...
Some of the Democratic staffers that are advocates of Bill, Hakeem Jeffries, I mean, you two even, I mean, for all your differences were really like, I mean, you got through First Step, you got through music modernization.
I mean, there are things you can work with them on.
And I have just said, listen, One-to-one is what it is.
Our bill is what it is.
It's passed the House.
I am not willing to concede that.
But if I have to be the bad guy, I'm an old defense attorney.
I had to negotiate bad deals before.
I want our bill to pass, but I will fully concede if we have to do it.
Two and a half is better than 18. And you know this as well as I do.
And I'm interested in your take on some of this criminal justice stuff because, you know, Three days ago, a guy with an axe held up a McDonald's in New York, and he got released immediately.
Cashless bail.
Immediately.
Lee Zeldin got attacked on stage.
That guy got released immediately.
This makes it way more difficult to do the good stuff.
And rightfully so, right?
Not everybody in Congress has a passion for this stuff like you do and I do.
And trying to get people to buy into, listen, we're not being soft on crime, we're being smart on crime.
When you have crazy district attorneys all over the country doing really terrible things for public safety, it gets frustrating for me because it's harder for me to hold coalitions together on stuff that actually makes sense to do.
But I think we still have a shot.
It might be the lame duck.
Exactly.
And Kellan, one of the things that concerns me, and I'm looking probably, you know, I'll be more involved in this as we're going forward, and taking a different tack.
But what is concerning me more and more is that non-criminal justice reform, what I mean by that is, this is what you just said.
You know, whether it be this bail reform issue, whether it be other...
Look, true bail reform issue can be made a good thing.
And that is taking low-level offenders, you know, the truly low end, you know, that, you know, are not the violence, not the other issues, dealing with some of those on the end.
But the problem is, as you said, you've got these, quote, reformists who are not reformists.
They're prosecutors who don't do their job.
And you're putting violent criminals back out or giving them, say, $100,000 or $200,000.
They're getting right back out.
The ones that are staying in jail, and you've seen them, I've seen them both being criminal defense attorneys, are the ones who sold the dime bag on the corner because nobody going to come in and give them money.
Driving under suspension and not being able to afford $500 probably doesn't need you to sit in jail for 45 days for a crime in North Dakota, where if you got sentenced to the max, it'd only be $30,000.
But at the same time, you know, I'm simple with this.
How about we get back to likelihood of appearance at trial and safety to the community?
Like, if you just take bond to where it's supposed to be, and there are good states that have done it in bipartisan ways.
You know, Governor Christie started it in New Jersey, and they actually have a program that actually makes some sense.
But then you go to New York, you go to San Francisco, you go to these places, like...
You're making the community more dangerous.
It's just that simple.
And people have a right to be angry about that.
And I'm angry about it.
I'm angry about it because it takes work that I've done, you've done, Hakeem done even, and many others have done, and just trashes it because then you have members of Senate, members of Congress, who use every example to show that all we need to do is be locking up everybody and throwing away the key.
And we know that that is just, frankly, just not a good idea either because, number one, it doesn't work.
Number two, it costs more than we could ever have, and we're already the most incarcerated country in the world, and we're wanting to throw more at it.
How do we break through on this, though?
How do we make the...
This is the question that's bugging me.
And because I'm working on another op-ed right now talking about this, but it's bugging me in the sense of that this whole idea of making the system better is being undermined by actually groups who have fought for this for years, but it went so far extreme That is shaping the narrative and the public is picking on it.
How do we get back to a place where we can have this discussion?
Well, I mean, so I used to say this when I practiced law.
Really good lawyers became average lawyers because they didn't trust juries.
Good politicians become average politicians because they don't trust voters.
I'm on a crack parody and sentencing bill.
I spent 10 years as a public defender in North Dakota.
Do you know how many crack cases I had?
Exactly zero.
Like, zero.
I've never had one.
And I go home and talk about this all the time.
And I talk about this in rural, conservative places.
And you know what?
When I'm done talking to them, it makes sense.
I don't take a ton of heat.
But they do care about if you're letting violent criminals out.
And they do care about those types of things.
And they do it.
But I think, I mean, educating more people about it and being willing to do it, but The other answer to all of this is when really woke liberal policies pushed the pendulum so far the other way, and we attack police officers for doing their jobs, and we elect prosecutors who don't want to prosecute violent criminals, It's really difficult to go back home and say, hey, this is the time to do this.
But I will say this, and I think this is important.
Because of the fentanyl crisis and the opioid crisis that has come across this country, far more people, rural, urban...
Every socioeconomic status you can think of, every race you can think of, there's hardly anybody who hasn't been touched by this crisis, this addiction.
So it's easier to have the conversation about the things you and I care about.
We're going to hold you accountable, we're going to get you treatment, we're going to show you some grace, and we're going to give you a second chance.
And particularly for young offenders.
Oh, exactly.
And anybody just guessing about fentanyl, all you got to do is see when you had, you know, now senators and House members coming up for death penalties for fentanyl traffic.
And, you know, again, you get it because you see the just havoc that is causing in these communities.
And that's the easier answer to look at this.
And we've got to, you know, but my question is, and I'm a curious question for you, because you and I have both been on the side of it.
You know, prosecutors swear to a...
They have a different oath.
In fact, their standard for prosecuting and others, you know, most people don't realize this, is they have a higher standard for what they're supposed to be able to bring because they hold so much power in their hands.
For these DAs, like Bragan and Manhattan and others across the country, Fox, the rest, who are choosing not to prosecute crimes.
In other words, not...
Take the law of the state, apply it in a fashionable, judicial way.
Isn't there a way, I mean, shouldn't there be a way that their own prosecuting attorneys, counsels, that there should be an ethical, I mean, these are just ethical issues.
It's not a matter, you're not making policy.
You're just supposed to enforce the law and do it in a very straightforward way.
How can we get, I mean, there's got to be a way to get at some of these prosecutors.
A hundred percent.
And I think one of the things, and I think you'll agree with me on this, one of the functions of this that we have to remember, particularly when we're doing police reform and all of that, 97% of all criminal justice is delivered locally.
We elect prosecutors, we elect judges, we elect sheriffs.
So we always have to recognize that.
But this Friday, we're going to roll out, Leader McCarthy and a bunch of people are going to Pittsburgh to roll out a commitment to America.
And one of the pieces of that is a transparency, basically a transparency score for prosecutors.
So at least, this isn't about negotiating a deal because a prosecutor has a witness problem.
It's not what we're talking about.
We're not talking about that kind of thing.
We're talking about prosecutors in this country that refuse to prosecute violent crime.
And that is something that I, I mean, you can have, you know, paralysis by analysis when it comes to data.
But I think at the very least, it is comfortable to come out and tell people and say, listen, this is what goes on.
I mean, we've seen it, right?
We've had recalls of prosecutors in places that are like, listen, this isn't what I signed up for.
We have a good friend of ours who has a real shot of winning the governor's race in New York, and he has made making New York safe again a primary campaign issue.
So people care about this.
And by the way, the people who really care about it also care about smart criminal justice reform.
It's not an either-or thing, because most people who engage in this and are passionate about it understand how it works.
Well, and I think that's going to be the key is separating it out and having it on.
So I'm like you.
I've been all over this country and I'll be on the road again tomorrow.
And when I talk about criminal justice from a conservative perspective, from a smart perspective, it doesn't have to be conservative, liberal, just a smart perspective.
I've never really left a room without people saying, yeah, that makes sense.
Because once you get down to saying, it's like Matthew Charles, who was the first person released on the First Step Act, he's been on the podcast before and he said, look, criminal justice, the true reform is matching the punishment with the crime and making sure that it is punished.
This is someone who...
You know, was put back into jail longer than probably should have, but yet he understood the fact that you have an act, you have a punishment, and they should match, and they should go with that.
This idea that we're letting violent funders go, we're setting bells that are ridiculous for folks who have shown a propensity for violence.
If you take a hatchet, as you said, if you take a gun or you do something in a violent fashion, then you're showing a propensity that you're going to do it again.
And I think these are where we have to really start looking at this.
But it is at that local level.
I've talked about this before, and you just hit it, so I want to hit it again.
People have to understand how important their local DA races are and their local judge races are.
Those are two of the most important races, and they'll never make headlines unless people actually get involved in them.
100%.
And unfortunately, what usually ends up happening is when you get a really bad one, you have to go recall them, which is better than nothing.
But the front end engagement would cause a lot of people a lot less actual physical harm.
If they get involved on the front end of it.
And listen, we're going to keep having this conversation.
Some of the most conservative states in the country have been leaders in this area.
Texas has been fantastic.
I mean, I don't think people think of North Dakota like this inherent liberal utopia.
If they do, they're wrong.
We've done really good criminal justice reform, but we've always based it on, you know, Particularly young offenders, non-violent, never touch the violent stuff, don't give you an excuse for doing that, and try and create a system where you can actually get some of the help you need, because regardless of how long your sentence is, sooner or later you're going back into society.
So maybe we should fix some of that.
Yeah.
As you and I both know, 95% of all incarcerated individuals will eventually go home.
95%.
So you got to figure it out somewhere.
And I think that's the key to it is getting them young, finding alternative ways, looking at pretrial sentencing, looking at pretrial alternatives.
Those are all things that we're going to have to do.
Folks, you're listening to one of the brightest minds in Congress on some of these issues.
He's willing to actually do what Congress people are supposed to do.
And that's actually go home, go across country and talk about it and explain it.
Kelly Armstrong is one of those that just he is just to me a star.
He's going to star is going to continue to shine brightly.
He's going to be back on this podcast many more times.
A lot of going on today.
I know you're trying to finish up in D.C. Kelly.
Thanks for touching base on these things.
We'll get into it.
I know you're busy in this time frame, but we're going to spend some more time later this year, you know, fleshing out a lot of this, what we just talked about, specifically criminal justice.
Because I think it is a is a measure that's not just a conservative measure, but one that actually makes sense for our country.
Thanks for what you're doing on that.
And you and I think the same way about this.
We got to figure out a way to deliver the tools locally so they can do it.
And I appreciate all your work on it.
It can only be the first step act if guys like me can pick up the baton and get a second act.
So we're going to work hard at it.
I'm going to do it.
Folks, you've been listening to Kelly Armstrong here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Look him up.
Follow him.
You will want to because he is one of the thought leaders right now leading our conservative movement.
Glad to have him on.
Y'all take care.
We'll see you next time on the podcast.
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