All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 9, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
30:54
And now the rest of the story: What current headlines mean
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, I don't know about you, but as you've watched out over the world, the war in Russia and Ukraine is not just isolated to Eastern Europe.
It's spread all over the world and you can see it in market instabilities.
You can see it here.
People who do not think that that war is affecting you, all you gotta do is look at gas prices.
You look at your food prices.
You see the global change that has happened.
But you know something that's also affected investments as well, and I've said all along, Legacy Precious Metals is your navigator.
They're the ones that see you through to get to the next level.
The good news about this is, even with market volatility, market instability, you've got options.
Gold prices are rising as investors turn to gold, and gold presents a hedge against this inflation and protects you against the weakening dollar, which we are seeing.
Legacy Precious Metals is the only company I trust to deal with gold and silver and the other precious metals.
You need this investment.
You need this as part of your portfolio to keep you buffered from what we're seeing in the world.
War and volatility in the market.
This is where you need to be.
Call Legacy Precious Metals today.
Be proactive about this.
Get on board with it.
Call them at 866-528-1903. 866-528-1903.
Or you can download their free investor's guide at LegacyPMInvestments.com. LegacyPMInvestments.com.
Your navigator in a volatile world of investments.
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, welcome to Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad that you are here today.
We've got a lot of things we want to go over.
There's been a lot going on, and sometimes you just need to take a pause and go back through and maybe explain some things that have been going on.
You ever been to a party, or now the holiday season, you're going to parties, and everybody seems to know what's going on, or at least they appear to know what's going on, or they say just enough to keep a surface level of some of the issues that are happening out there.
Well, that happens to us all.
And it's okay, because we're focused on our families, our time, our work, things that are going on.
So today, there's a few things out there that I've just went back in.
And as we went through this election cycle, as we're into Congress now, and the fight for the control is switched from Democrats to Republicans in the House.
You've got the Democrats going to maintain control of the Senate.
But coming down to the race here in Georgia, and this is still up in the air.
I'm recording this.
You're going to hear this afterwards.
But again, what we're going to talk about actually is applicable to why this race in Georgia mattered and matters as we go forward in terms of the control of Senate.
We're going to overlook that a little bit.
And then actually look at the...
This issue of Georgia, you know, in its state now among the national publications and being a purple state.
I want to address that today a little bit.
And then also we're going to just as we come out in the last week, we've had the Twitter file.
And at any moment, I'm sure that there could be more coming out of this.
I want to just address that.
So let's just dig in.
So when you go to your Christmas parties, you go to your workplace parties, your holiday parties, whatever you got to go to, or just in general around the water cooler, let's get a little bit deeper into some of these issues.
First off, let's deal with what's going on in the House of Representatives right now.
The House of Representatives has flipped to the Republicans.
This is something we thought was going to happen.
But in all fairness, it was not flipped in the way that many of us thought in a 15-, 20-, 25-seat advantage.
It's going to be a 4-seat advantage.
At best, and that's what it looks like.
It's going to be a 222 to 213 breakdown in the House.
And we've already seen a member of the Democrat Party passed away from Virginia.
He had been sick with cancer.
He passed away, so leaving an open seat.
So the Congress will start not with its full contingent of 435, but it's going to start with 434. Those kind of things happen all the time.
You have members who resign.
You have members who have unfortunately passed away.
I mean, this happens.
So when you're looking at a margin of four, frankly, we don't have to guess how that works.
We can just simply look at the past two years because the past two years, that's the number that Nancy Pelosi, a speaker, has had to work with.
I've made this statement many times on the podcast.
I make it again today.
I disagree with, you know, most every policy decision that Nancy Pelosi has ever come up with.
I mean, we just have two completely different visions of government, two different visions of how the government is to operate.
And we didn't see eye to eye when I was in Congress, and we still don't see eye to eye.
But I will say this.
From a Speaker perspective with a limited majority, she is able to get a lot of things done that, frankly, we've not been able to do on the Republican side with larger majorities.
And I think that's going to become a key element in what we're seeing play out in the House right now.
And we're going to start off right at the very top, and that's the Speaker's race.
Kevin McCarthy.
I've known Kevin for...
I've known Kevin, you know, in working with him.
I knew him as I was running for this seat over 10 years ago, 11 years ago now.
And, you know, Kevin is the consummate caucus Republican Conference leader.
He is always out raising money.
He gives the motivational speeches.
He's the fire.
He tries to make friends in the conference.
He tries to make sure everybody's happy, which in leadership is a very difficult role and it many times can backfire on you.
Kevin also is from California, and his own district is not as conservative as many of the districts across the country of the Republicans in the House in which he is called upon to lead, which means that there are times that his views and his votes have differed greatly from some very conservative members in other parts of the country.
This is where the situation gets interesting.
As I said when we started the podcast, one of the things I wanted to do is sort of give you the behind the scenes of what's happening here.
So let's discuss what's happening because now many of you have probably heard, well, Kevin's going to be Speaker.
The votes will be there.
He's already been elected in the conference.
Why isn't he going to be Speaker?
And why is there this controversy?
Will he be Speaker?
All of this, okay?
At this point in time, I'm going to be very frank with you.
The...
It is very much up in the air if Kevin McCarthy will actually become Speaker.
I think there's an overwhelming thought by many in Washington that somehow he will overcome the opposition at this point and become Speaker.
But I'm one who is taking a cautious approach to that because there's anywhere from 10 to 15 members who have said they, under no circumstances, would they vote for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.
Why does that matter?
Again, I've always wanted this podcast to be one of sort of teaching.
So let's let's dig into this.
Why it matters is this to become the Speaker of the United States House.
It requires a four vote in a majority of 218 to become Speaker.
That means that you the both parties typically put someone up for Speaker.
The majority party, of course, is going to win because the majority party is the majority party.
That's the way it's always been done.
The minority party puts up their leader and that leader is defeated, but that's the way the speaker vote works.
And also, interestingly enough, and this is something that's the only time that is typically ever done.
Now, can it be done in other times?
Yes, but it's a whole different parliamentary procedure.
But this is the only time that on the first day after you're sworn in, your first vote It's basically for the speaker and it's done differently.
You don't get to use your card.
You don't get to punch a yes or a no.
You have to have your name called out by the clerk.
You have to stand up where you are and basically shout out the name of who you're voting for for speaker.
So if this case, if you're, and I'll just use this in time, if McCarthy is the nominee and you're a Republican who's going to vote for McCarthy, they would call your name and you would stand up and say Kevin McCarthy for speaker.
And that's the way this goes.
So it takes on a different role than just a vote on a board in which you see a number or a yes or a no, and then you can answer questions about it later or not answer questions about it later.
No, the full world will be there watching on that day, C-SPAN and everybody else, and they'll know exactly, your constituents back home will know very quickly how you voted for speaker.
Used to, this was never really an issue.
It became an issue Really in the last 15 years in the sense of outside pressure.
Now, the Speaker's position is the leader of the House, but it comes from the majority party who controls the votes.
In the last number of years, especially on the Republican side, the speaker position has been held as to keeping the Republican majority or pushing the Republican agenda.
And because of the fact that the speaker on that day has to have 218 votes, it is give leverage to those who don't want to see a certain speaker elected because of a plethora of ideas.
I go back to my very first vote was John Boehner was reelected by the conference to be Speaker of the House, to be put forward Speaker of the House.
This was 2013. And immediately there was some who did not like what had happened in the previous two years after retaking the House and wanted Boehner not to be Speaker.
So we went through this big issue that started off there was going to be 30 people vote against him.
I think he ended up being five or six.
Again, it's a lot to be said when you have to stand up on the floor of the House and actually call out the name of who you want to vote for.
This has happened with Boehner a couple of times.
He finally, he did resign.
Kevin McCarthy was going to take that step up from Majority Leader after Eric Cantor had left.
He was going to take the step up from Majority Leader to Speaker then, and a group of Members said they wouldn't vote for him.
Some other issues developed and he stepped back.
That's how Paul Ryan became Speaker.
And then Paul Ryan, until he resigned, left Congress in 2018 and we lost the majority.
Nancy Pelosi became Speaker.
Now, don't think this is simply a Republican issue.
Nancy Pelosi had her own deals that she had to cut with the more liberal part of her base, which if you can imagine that someone is to the left of Nancy Pelosi, that's what had to happen.
So I want to lay this foundation for you, but I also want to tell you how it's going to be very difficult For any speaker, as Nancy Pelosi found out to a degree these past two years, I think it could be even more so for Republicans.
Republicans are not get in line members.
Democrats are get in line.
They know one or two people who can't vote.
They typically will protect them because they understand that the majority is the most important thing.
So they'll allow them a no vote on certain issues while the rest of them, whether they liked it or not, will vote yes.
It's not the way it plays in the Republican conference and has not for years.
It's one thing to have a 30-seat advantage and have 25 people who are upset because you can still pass a bill if it was a strictly partisan vote.
But when you've only got four and you've got a number of people who are not willing, who have already said, I won't vote for an appropriations bill.
I won't vote for an NDAA, a National Defense Authorization Act.
I won't vote.
I won't vote.
If you hear that long enough, you're going to realize that those votes have to go to the floor without The majority of the majority sometimes or they're going to go to the floor and Democrats are going to provide the majority to pass it.
These are the kind of things that will happen.
Kevin McCarthy right now is stuck in a problem in which he has 10 to 15 members who there was 30 something members I believe was who did not vote for him in conference.
The number seems to have whittled down now to those who will vote for him on the floor or won't vote for him on the floor somewhere between 10, 15. I've heard a high end of 20. I just don't believe that to be true.
But I think even 10 to 15 is far more than he can afford to lose.
And there's no amount of parliamentary tricks that can help you unless you got Democrat help in which Democrats voted for McCarthy.
And there's only so many ways you can, you know, have people vote present, you know, whatever it is to lower the majority number, but that's where McCarthy is right now.
The question will be, can he cut deals with many of these conservative members?
Freedom Caucus is the main leading Group here, and make deals with him to where he gets enough to get the speakership, while at the same time not making deals that would isolate him from the more moderate Republicans in the conference, or frankly just the middle of the road who are conservative, but believe that this is not the right fight to have at this time.
So, what I'm hopefully laying out for you is why this is a difficulty.
Now, what does it mean?
It means right now that you cannot, from a practical standpoint, it means that you're not going to have committees set up to go on day one.
Now, you're going to have members who are already part of committees.
You're going to have, you could possibly, and this is a possibly, have committee chairs already voted on by the conference, brought to the floor.
But that may not happen either.
It depends on, again, how contentious this speaker issue becomes.
And if Kevin prevails, then I'm sure he'll have a plan to put the chairs in order very quickly, then put the freshmen onto the committees, take the other members and move them around wherever they need to be, and start it up.
But it will be a difficult few weeks to get that process started.
They will not be able to just simply, as in maybe a time in which it was no doubt, Who the speaker would be, then they could already have been putting together committee assignments.
They could already be putting together their chairmanships.
They could already be putting together a lot of different things.
So that right now is not happening.
That means that the Congress, when it comes in, is going to be much slower at getting organized.
And some of the committees are going to be slower than others.
That also plays into the effect of what's happening right now on the last month, this lame duck session.
In other words, the members who have been voted out or left are still able to vote, and that's because they're part of Congress.
And you're still dealing with a spending bill.
You're still dealing with the National Defense Authorization Act.
There are several things that are being dealt with, all of which are tending to be in flux right now because...
There are many who look ahead and say that if you don't get a spending bill done now, we may not get a spending bill done.
If it's a continuing resolution, they might as well do it all the way till the end of September, because right now, the Republicans, there's a lot of discomfort that the Republicans could actually get a bill passed out of the House.
So this is why this all matters.
I know that sounds archaic to many of you, but remember, in the conference, all Kevin McCarthy had to have was a majority of the conference, which at 222, you go to 116. At 117, you've got...
Well, actually that's an app.
But you take that and you take the half of it and you get it.
Math has never been a strong suit.
But anyway, take a half and you get it.
But that's on the floor.
That number has to go up to the majority of the house, which is 218 because the speaker is technically the speaker of the house.
Not just the Speaker of the Republican Party.
This is going to be played out here the next few weeks.
Watch it closely.
The question will become is if Kevin gets to the point where he feels like he cannot get the requisite number of votes, then who steps up?
Some of the Freedom Caucus and some of the others who are deposing McCarthy have said that they have some names in mind that are maybe not even members of the House.
And some of you may ask, is that possible?
The answer is yes.
The Speaker of the House does not have to be a member of Congress.
That should hit you there for a second.
It could be someone else outside a member of Congress.
They still have 435 members of Congress, but the Speaker would be one who wouldn't vote.
They would be the Speaker of the House.
So this is a...
Something that has been floated, the idea of it actually happening is slim to none.
More than likely, if Kevin McCarthy cannot become speaker, then I would just say look at Steve Scalise.
Look at maybe even an Elise Stefani.
And then maybe someone you have never even heard of that could say, okay, we're going to let this person become speaker.
Now, whoever...
Become Speaker.
And right now, you know, I would say the decision and discussions are that Kevin McCarthy will become Speaker, if that be true.
That margin of four votes is going to come very large in trying to get things passed.
So all I can do is say is whoever gets to be Speaker, it's almost like, you know, the dog chasing the car.
Once you caught it, what do you do with it?
And this is going to be difficult.
And hopefully, that'll mean that the conservatives will realize and the moderates in the Republican Congress, the whole conference itself, the 222 of them, will come together and realize that if they can't get majority votes, 218 votes, and a full Congress, then they can't get anything done and they're simply making speeches.
That's what's got to happen, and we'll see how it goes from there.
So I hope that gives you some background into why this is really playing out like it is, why it matters.
One of the biggest things that nobody is talking about is what I said a few minutes ago.
This will hold up the beginning of the next Congress in the month of January.
It could be taken up in simply trying to get the committee set, getting the staffs hired, because if you have a committee in which there is an issue with who the chairman is going to be, until that chairman is named, they can't hire staff.
A lot of the committees have ranking members who are staying on.
You'll see Jim Jordan, you'll see James Comer, Oversight, Judiciary, some of the others.
They're already ready to go better than others.
But then you've got some larger committees like Ways and Means, which is the Tax Writing Committee, that will not have a chairman anytime soon unless they decide to go ahead and do this.
So again, you've got to be careful in how you see the start of this new Congress working.
Alright, let's take to another step real quickly.
I want to touch on this one.
We'll probably have much more about this one in a later podcast.
That is what we'll call the Twitter files that have been dropped by Elon Musk and what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop and why it was censored, basically, out of Twitter and other In all fairness, other platforms, social media platforms right before the 2020 election.
To me, this is showing something that we've just known for years here in this process, since 2020. Elon Musk trying to build back faith and trust among all parties.
And again, it's not working because the left thinks that this is a horrendous thing to show what was actually happening when they were saying that it was nothing to be, you know, discussed about.
Conservatives are saying, you know, this is a different issue.
And the big thing about it is, is that polling has shown that if people had known about what is on and supposedly on, again, much of it has already been leaked out on that laptop, It could have affected the 2020 election.
In other words, Joe Biden could have lost in some of these key states in which he won by a smaller margin.
This is important.
This is something that does need to be investigated.
It's something that needs to be looked at for sinister motives, for outright animus from the Twitter employees, the higher management in doing this.
Where does it go?
But then again, it also looks to the power of social media And how it can affect elections and how it can affect national moods and how it can affect a lot of other things.
So just the releasing of this, and I'm sure there's going to be more, so that's why we're going to sort of hold off here.
I just wanted to bring it out.
For those of us who are looking at the Russia collusion hoax, the way it was being banned out of a lot of social media, mainstream news people not reporting it, this is simply, we told you so, this was going on, and now Elon Musk is sort of putting it behind.
So far, there's not been the direct correlation between, I think, some in the Democratic Party and the Twitter executives that others are wanting to see.
I think that might be coming later, but this is a big topic.
It's one that people need to be concerned about because these social media platforms have become the main source of information and news for so many people.
That when you're taking information off simply because you don't like who it could affect or what it could affect somebody that you like, then that's a problem, especially when it comes into elections.
And so we'll just keep a watch on this because there's going to be more to come.
Elon Musk is in some difficult situations right here because the left has went completely wrong.
Unhinged with their reaction to anything that was reported to their, what they viewed as their own personal platform of Twitter in which they could get rid of people that they didn't like.
Again, this is going to play out as we go forward.
It is definitely worth watching.
I did think it was very interesting though, is so far there's been almost zero mainstream media coverage of the Twitter files.
That should at least tell you something right there as we go.
So that's the second thing.
The third thing I wanted to discuss, and again, for those who like to discuss politics, we've already had the political and the presidential look.
Donald Trump's already announced.
You got Ron DeSantis is waiting to announce, according to most everybody.
You got Chris Christie.
You got Mike Pence.
Look, a lot's still going on in that realm.
But when it comes back to, without discussing the presidential race of the who's going, let's discuss the 2024 presidential race in the states that it matters.
You're still gonna have swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina to an extent.
The interesting one that I wanna talk about here for a few minutes is Georgia.
Georgia's my home state.
Georgia, I know Georgia politics very well, have watched it all my life.
The interesting part here is that the mainstream media is dying to say that Georgia is purple, that Georgia is turning blue.
There's just one problem with that.
It's a great narrative if you take and cherry-pick two races.
Now, again, the Walker-Warnock race at the time of this taping is not decided.
If Warnock wins, the Senate becomes 51, they finally get an outright majority, which they've not had for two years, and are able to do things a little more easily in the Senate, especially when it comes to nominations and other things.
If Walker wins this, then it stays the power-sharing agreement and we move forward.
I just want to take that race off the table for a minute because it's bigger than that race.
This idea that Georgia is becoming a purple state Frankly, does a disservice to the statistics from Georgia.
Now, were the 2020 elections close in Georgia?
Did we see two Democrats elected to the United States Senate in Georgia?
Yes.
But here's the interesting issue.
Did Democrats do better than they had done in the past?
Yes, they did.
Did they have a good ground game in 2020?
Yes.
Did Republicans have a, ended up a huge headwind against them because it was a presidential year?
You had the coming out of COVID, you had all kinds of things.
In that with Donald Trump, you had Joe Biden.
Was there a lot of different things going on?
Yes.
I will posit to you this, that the Senate would not, the Senators won at least from Georgia would have won if Republicans had simply showed up at the polls on January 5th, 2021. I know people don't want to hear that, but it's just true.
You look at the most conservative districts in the state of Georgia, the 14th, the 9th, the 10th, the 8th, and you had a considerable drop-off of Republicans going back to the polls.
Some were being told not to go back because they believed the election was cheated, they was done wrong, the election machines didn't work.
There was a very concerted effort by some to say, don't go back and vote.
And it worked.
People did not go back and vote, and that cost us both Senate seats.
Now, a little piece of information that some of you may not know, there was a third race on that ticket that day, and the Republican won it.
So think about this for a second.
So not only did you have the Republican turnout not be what it should, and a Republican win, you had some concern about the Republican, undoubtedly, the Republican candidates at the top of the ticket.
Biggest issue, though, is you didn't have Republicans show back up.
Does that mean that the state has turned purple?
No, it does not.
It means that it's just like a poll, and we've talked about here on the podcast, a poll is simply a snapshot in time.
This is where we're dealing with this election.
I believe the 2020 election was a snapshot in time.
There were books written about it.
There was a book down here by one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Political reporters, Blake Blustein, talked about flipped and how the state flipped to blue.
What was not discussed there, like I said, is that during that cycle, there was a lot going on that, frankly, I think was an anomaly.
How do I know that?
Well, let's go two years to the future.
And just a few weeks ago, in Georgia, we had our elections, and the only Republican who did not win on that night statewide was Herschel Walker.
And there had been a lot of discussion about that race going into a runoff before the election.
There was a libertarian candidate.
There was some discomfort with both Walker and Warnock on this race.
But if you look at the rest of the slate, everybody won and trounced by several hundred thousand votes.
The Republicans beat the Democrats, starting with Governor Kemp, on down.
Wasn't even close.
I mean, it was over.
So it's hard for me to dive into this very mainstream liberal narrative that Georgia is all of a sudden a purple state.
Explain that to me.
When you go back to the elections that we've seen, And especially now, when you come out of 2018, 2020, if you want to take those and say that was the turning point, well, go back to 2014 and the governor's race here in Georgia and the Senate races, in which now we're seeing basically the same percentage.
Ryan Kemp won 52%, 53%.
That's a healthy margin in Georgia.
Everybody believes that Georgia is this predominantly Republican state.
There's this perception out there that Georgia is a 60% Republican state.
It's not.
It never has been.
The most that a Republican statewide candidate was Governor Sonny Perdue, and I believe it was 57% back in 2007. So again, is there things that Republicans need to get right in Georgia?
Yes, we've got to do better in the ground game.
We've got to do better in not taking this stuff for granted.
Because by the way, we did not lose the House and we did not lose the Senate in Georgia.
We maintained margins in both the Georgia House and the Georgia Senate.
We won all the statewide races.
Again, it just doesn't show.
The anomaly, of course, was the Walker-Warnock race.
We could do volumes on that race and may do that later on, on why that is like it is.
But I just wanted to say, especially for some of you who are looking ahead to presidential races and saying, okay, well, Georgia is a possibility for a Democrat.
I just don't see it right now.
Could it be in the future as our demographics are changing?
Yes.
But right now it's not there and it doesn't seem to be there in coming up because if you were thinking Georgia was turning, as everybody said it was, you would have seen that a lot more in this cycle.
You didn't see it.
In fact, you saw Republicans coming out ahead in races that many thought that they were going to win.
Remember that Stacey Abrams was going to take over everything.
Stacey Abrams got beat soundly.
She can't run from this one.
She got beat.
So, as you do your holiday parties, as you do your water cooler talks, as you listen to these talking heads on TV and everywhere else, I wanted just to give you the background on several of these stories from the Congress, what's happening in the Speaker's race, behind the scenes, why it matters, what they've been doing to get there, the Twitter files, more to come on that, and then Georgia is still a center-right state.
Has been, will continue to be.
We'll see how this goes.
Leave two Senate seats.
Again, one could turn Republican by the time you and I talk again.
We'll talk about that.
But either way, the narrative that Georgia has turned into this purple state is just simply not true.
Well, there's your talking points.
Hope everybody has a great day.
See you next time on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Hey folks, MyPillow is excited to bring to you their biggest bedding sale ever and just in time for Christmas.
For a limited time, you're going to get the Giza Dream bed sheets for as low as $29.98, a set of pillowcases for only $9.98, and rejuvenate your bed with a MyPillow mattress topper for as low as $99.99.
$99.99 to get a mattress pillow topper.
Look, they come in all sizes.
They've got all kinds of stuff.
Blankets.
They've got duvets.
They've got quilts.
They've got comforts.
They've got body pillows.
They've got bolster pillows.
They've got all that big, big discounts.
And also, they're extending their money-back guarantee for Christmas until March 1, 2023, making them the perfect gift for your friends, your family, and for everyone you know.
Folks, and just from a personal note here, I have the Giza Dream Sheets.
They're on my bed right now.
I slept on them last night.
Some of the best sheets that we and Lisa and I have ever owned.
They are worth, I mean, at this price, they're a steal.
My wife and I have bought bed sheets, linens, at much higher cost.
It's supposedly much higher quality.
These from MyPillar are at the highest of quality, and at a price like this, you can't beat it.
So go now to MyPillar.com, use promo code Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S, or call 1-800-986-3994, and you'll get huge discounts On all the MyPillow bedding products, including the Giza Dream bed sheets for as low as $29.98 and get all your shopping done while qualities last.
▲
Export Selection