All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 12, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
26:09
Behind the Scenes of the greatest tragedy in Congress
| 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 back.
Today I want to just talk to you a little bit about what we're hearing and all this is going on about the spending and the appropriations and everything in Congress.
Today's going to be one of those days where I'm going to sort of try if I can to get, I'm just going to take the curtain and feel it back.
I'm going to show you, as a member of Congress, what this is happening right now, why it's happening, and just sort of give you some terms that you may or may not know, and try to give some semblance of perspective when it comes to the appropriations bills.
And spending in general.
I believe, personally, this is one of the reasons that Congress is so unliked, okay, by many, many people.
There's a lot of reasons, and you can find your own pet peeve, but I believe that while I was there and even talking to people that the inability to appropriate money, the inability to put a budget out there, the inability to do that basic item That frankly, if you break it all down, it's probably the only thing Congress has to do every year, okay, in a bigger sense, is appropriate and spend the nation's money.
And if you can't do that, then people are going to have problems with you, okay?
And there's a simple reason for that.
You get into the esoteric discussions of trade policies and, you know, the criminal code, the civil liabilities.
You go into natural gas and energy productions and all that goes along.
People can get lost in the shuffle, okay?
They may not have a base of reference for that.
They don't know how to engage in it because it's not something they ever done.
However, every family, every single person, everybody in this country of an adult age who is on their own has to understand how to spend their money and how to balance that and how to budget that.
Now, some people do it badly.
That's why they end up in bankruptcy.
Some of it don't do, you know, they struggle.
They go paycheck to paycheck.
They're always struggling to make ends meet.
They're not putting anything away for savings and that's how they end up in trouble.
They're not putting anything for retirement and they retire without anything.
Look, but here's the bottom line.
Everybody has to address it.
You either may address it in a positive way or you may address it in a negative way, but you've got to address it.
Here's the problem that people understand.
They turn and look at their elected officials in Congress who have one job, you know, the old one job, man, and that is to do this budget and to do it in a way in which spends money and not shut the government out.
And for all of you out there, let me just be honest, especially mainly from conservatives, you say shut the government down, shut the government down, it gives you leverage.
Not in most of the Congresses, and we've shown that to be true.
In many of the shutdowns over the past decade, Either it ended the same or worse for Republicans in many of these battles, okay?
Going all the way back to ones that I was a part of in 2013, because really you can't just go in with this assumption that we'll shut it down and everybody else is just gonna blame the other party.
There's a place for a shutdown, there's a place for leverage, but most of the time, let's just be very frank, The status quo, and I'm going to call it the status quo caucus, and that's the Republicans and Democrats and all of the bureaucracy in most of America, are just not going to deal with the drama of the federal government being shut down.
So, you've got to figure out a way.
We've got to get back to a way in which this is understood.
What happens?
Okay, you're hearing a lot of things right now.
First, let's define some terms.
And I'm going to do these not necessarily, and for those, you know, perfectionists out there, you know, you want to go to the DougCollinsPodcast.com and hit email and email me about it.
Well, you missed it.
Look, I'm giving you broad references here.
First off, let's talk about what we're hearing a lot of, continuing resolution.
A continuing resolution is exactly what you think it sounds like.
It continues the current spending at the current levels into the specific timeframe designated.
So in essence, if you had, and by the way, most of you may not realize this because nobody cares anymore.
September 30th is actually the fiscal year end of the federal government.
October 1st is the beginning of the fiscal year.
So right now, technically, we should be in the 2023 fiscal year, but the Congress is...
And look, I'm not casting stones in the sense of I wasn't a part.
Been there before.
We should already be operating three months into a new budget, 2023, And we don't have it.
We're on a continuing resolution from 2022. You want to know how bad this gets?
Go back about 10 years ago.
We were operating off continuing resolutions for, I believe it was three years almost.
You still had the first Obama election.
Some of the early Obama budgets were still in place, and Democrat budgets, they were still in place, you know, two to three years into the Republicans taking back over because they never could get to a place of getting what is called a regular budgetary process or an omnibus, however you want to look at it.
So continuing resolution is simply taking every spending item and just simply moving them at the general levels.
There's some adjustments that can be made for some cost, some inflation issues, some others that can be made generally in that continuing resolution.
But for the most part, it is a status quo.
Policies stay the same.
You can't change policy.
You can't change a lot of funding items.
It just has to be moved over.
So that's continuing resolution.
The other terminology here is omnibus, and you're hearing this from a lot of people.
What is an omnibus?
Well, I'm gonna tell you what an omnibus typically is.
It's just like a CR. They're both failures.
A failure in the sense of doing it the way it's supposed to be done.
Some of you may be on your treadmill right now or in your car saying, well, Doug, how is it supposed to be done?
I'm so glad you asked.
The federal government, the appropriations process, is put up into 12 different bills.
12 different bills that cover everything from the legislature to Homeland Security, to our military, through everything.
Different divided up into 12 different bills.
The funding for those bills goes through the Appropriations Committee and different subcommittees in which you have a, whoever's in the majority has a subcommittee leader or vice chair of the appropriations, one of the appropriations of the 12 appropriations bill.
They're typically called cardinals.
That's become the terminology used in the House for the leader or the chairman of these subcommittees.
And then you have a chairman of the Appropriations Committee as a whole.
They're supposed to, every year, get together with a budget document that sets the number or the top line number on how much we'll spend on the defense and how much we spend on non-defense related items.
These are both called the discretionary budget.
I'm trying to go slow here because I want you to understand this is where most people get messed up.
The discretionary budget under what we spend right now is only about 10 to 15% of the total spending of our government.
Well, if you take it back, maybe 16% if you include defense into that.
Take defense out of that, and you're closer to 8% to 10% of the entire spending of the federal government.
So in other words, you could do away with the entire federal government except for defense, and you're still barely going to be taking in enough money to cover those debts because of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, some debt payments, and others.
And if its interest rates continues to go up, that's going to affect it even more.
You got to understand that.
So all of you out there saying, you know, lop off these departments and the budget will get balanced.
No, there's other things has to be done to get it balanced.
So just if you did away with energy and education and, you know, commerce, those departments, you may just say, just do away with them altogether.
You know, there's still going to be some deficit spending going on because we're not addressing the big drivers, which is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
Until those are addressed, forget it.
There is no hope of getting some of this under control.
You cannot do it simply by what we call discretionary spending.
Discretionary spending is spending Congress has a say in.
Non-discretionary is stuff like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, which they don't have a year-to-year say in unless you actually change the programs themselves.
Now, if this is giving you a headache, just imagine what it is for reporters trying to write about this because they have no clue either, it seems like.
And they keep conflating these ideas, conflating these issues as we go forward.
And lobbyists, others, and members of Congress will want to keep some of this out of the view because this is where the money gets spent and how these programs and things continue.
So, you have the CR, which I've talked about.
You have an omnibus, which I think is another mistake, because the omnibus takes these 12 appropriations bills and combines them into one big, gigantic ball of crap.
Nobody really knows what's in it.
I'm saying this as someone who's been a part of it, but...
I have voted for these bills, even though there's some things in there I didn't like, as long as they didn't have true moral convictions for me in there.
Again, then I say, okay, because they would have things that affected my state, my district, or the country that are spending for military that needed to be done.
They met a lot of things in there I didn't like, just as some of the Democrats would vote for it because it had some things that they needed, but not everybody got what they wanted.
The onbus itself is just taking those 12 bills and showing that the Congress is a failure.
Why do I say that?
Remember the 12 bills I talked about.
After they got the two top-line numbers, the two top-line numbers actually show how much they can spend, and then they do the budgets, the 12 individual committees that I spoke of, the subcommittees.
What should happen is each of those bills should be brought to the floor and then amended by the other members of the House of Representatives and passed as a stand-alone bill sent to the Senate in which they would then, in their appropriations committee, do the same thing.
And then if they, let's just say they do the defense bill, the defense appropriations bill, they get it out of the House, They determine what we're going to spend money on down to, you know, personnel, bullets, guns, tanks, whatever.
Send it over to the Senate.
Senate says, okay, we agree with most of this.
We don't agree with all of it.
They put their bill together.
Then what you do is you come together in a conference committee, which means you've got members of the House, members of the Senate, who come together in appropriations and then hammer out what the solution is.
When they hammer out the solution, then the conference committee comes back to the House and to the Senate.
You vote it up or down.
No amendments, just up or down.
That's what's supposed to happen.
It should happen.
That's the way regular order, which I hear a lot of my Republican colleagues talk about all the time.
We need to get back to a regular order.
Well, that is regular order.
It doesn't mean you're going to get everything you want.
It doesn't mean that the House is going to get everything they want.
It doesn't mean the Senate's going to get everything they want.
But in the end, the American people get a budget, get an appropriations bill that funds a specific set of the government that has been vetted, that has been went through, and been voted on by the people sent there to do it.
That's not happening.
Hasn't happened.
We have not passed 12 appropriation bills since this new process came in, you know, approximately 50 plus years ago.
We've done it like three or four times since the 70s, folks.
Even by Washington standards, this is broken.
What will typically happen or possibly happen is if you have the continuing resolution, you have the omnibus, then you get this hybrid animal called the cromnibus.
The Cromney bus is a CR and an omnibus put together.
In other words, if you can get agreement on five or six, seven, eight, even of the appropriations packages from these different committees, but you're having trouble getting agreement on If you had eight, you had four more, then what you do is you can put a new bill together, which has new numbers, new priorities, new policies, new everything, and the omnibus part of that, and you attach a CR for the other four departments.
In other words, those other four departments will simply go through the next year or the next short timeframe, however long they put it.
In being under the old numbers.
Now, if it's an omnibus part of that, it would go to the next September.
So the new budget year or the budget year will be fulfilled and that would have to be redone then and by September 30th.
The CR could go, you could have those departments and hold those out individually for a week at a time until the next time you try to pass it again.
So I'm trying to let you understand all this talking going on, the hand-wringing, the dread and everything that's going on about what's going on in appropriations, because it is such a complex issue, but it's very much easy in the fact that it's just mainly a failure that I want you to understand it.
The CR, the omnibus, the cronibus, these are your main vehicles.
Now, the way it should be is 12 bills passed, 12 bills go to the Senate, 12 bills probably go to conference, and then 12 bills come back to the House and the Senate, and then 12 bills get sent to the President, in which he can veto them or not.
Okay, that's fairyland.
At this point in time, my producer James should be, you know, putting into the background music, the music from Cinderella Walking Through the Woods.
It just doesn't happen that way.
Because we, through politics, Through what the base of our parties, both Republican and Democrats, think about it, we have trouble getting these done.
We just don't get it done.
Now, there are times in recent memory where the House has passed five, six, seven, or more of these individual appropriations bills, sent them to the Senate, and the Senate doesn't pass them.
Or we don't get them enough to where we can get them to conference.
I mean, there's a lot of issues with this, folks, because everybody's wanting a little piece of the pie that they've got.
Now, what happens if you go into a CR is basically the administration gets to determine the continued determination of how that money is spent, because it's the same money from previous years, the same money on how it goes, and the administration, whoever, regardless of Democrat, Republican, they continue to carry that out.
If you go to a shutdown situation, what we have found out many times on the conservative side is, and we found this out in the shutdown back in 2013, in which...
The President has a way to determine the spending which is considered priority spending or essential spending.
Our military doesn't shut down, by the way, under a CR. I mean, under a shutdown.
We still put the military out there.
A lot of their contractors won't get paid or a lot of their civilian staff doesn't get paid.
There may be some delay if it goes long enough in the military pay, but the military still stays on duty.
Other things out there that continue to get done if the administration chooses to.
The Obama administration chose to make it painful for everybody during that time, and so they shut down national parks, they shut down the Mosher monuments, they did all of this throughout the country.
A lot of things just to make it very, very difficult.
16 days into this, it finally broke, mainly because an interesting issue, you'll probably hear only here, in my opinion, here on the Doug Collins podcast, The reason in 2013, after 16 days, the shutdown was done away with is that House staff gets paid once a month, Senate staffers get paid twice a month, and once you got past the 15th, Senate staffers weren't getting paid.
That's some of the funny backstory here on why some of this stuff gets done.
And there was an omnibus put forward, the omnibus put forward, it got passed, it didn't pass by many Republicans voting for it, but it went to the president, President Simon.
Why does this matter?
There are some definite downturns to using anything other than the way that it's supposed to be.
If you're supposed to use the 12 bills, that's what should happen.
Really, there's no other way around it.
There's nobody on either side that has enough votes to just impart their will On every issue, mainly.
And you say, well, Doug, you've told us that the House is a majority-run body.
Whoever's in the majority should be able to do it.
Well, the answer is they should be able to.
But just as we've talked about in this podcast, Kevin McCarthy trying to get 218 out of 222 Republicans to commit to voting for Speaker.
I mean, there are just some people who've never voted for an appropriations bill.
They're never going to vote for an appropriations bill.
This is the one thing that would be bipartisan and has to be bipartisan in nature to actually get anything done, because the different members are sent there to represent their states and their constituencies and the nation as a whole, and we need to think better about this.
The continuing resolution is harmful in that it just continues the same number, it continues the same policies, it just doesn't You know, and that may be good.
Some of you say, well, that means we're not spending any more money, but you're still spending the excess that you had last year.
Where it really affects though is the military.
The military cannot run long-term under a CR. It just can't.
Because most of its products and most of its projects are long-term in commitment and they can't commit to multi-year contracts or to make multi-year commitments under a CR because you're bound by whatever the CR was from the previous year.
You have no chance to buy new under a CR. So the Defense Department is the one that really takes the beating on this and you need to understand that.
If you think a CR is a good thing and you like our military and you like the fact they keep us safe, then really understand that that's not a good idea for a CR. In the agencies, again, you know, a CR, they just learn to deal with it as they go through.
They'll just take the same number from last year, put it back in, and that's what they'll do.
The Cromney omnibus, the Cromney bus as you would, same thing.
It depends on which budget gets, which appropriations bills get passed under which.
If you're in defense and you get passed under the omnibus, then you'll have new priorities.
You'll have new money for the spend.
You'll have new money to purchase the planes and equipment, ships, and others.
If for some reason the DOD was CR, you wouldn't be able to do that.
This is where it really gets into a problem, folks, and you've got to understand this.
The answer out there is just not shut the government down.
The answer is not just simply pass a continuing resolution that's being discussed now that if we can't come together on a discussion, we'll just pass a CR until next September 30th, which frankly doesn't do anybody any good.
What do we have to have here?
We've got to have a situation in which the budget is put together.
We haven't even discussed the budget process, which is the setting of numbers for the appropriations process.
We've not set the authorizing, which comes from other committees, to authorize then what is seen as appropriated or paid for in the appropriations budget.
These are sometimes so disconnected, it's not funny.
And if you don't follow, you realize that some things can be authorized but never funded.
The committee work in other committees, such as judiciary or natural resources or others, they could fund programs that are never funded actually with dollars in the appropriations bill.
This is why this has got to be fixed.
And this is why I believe personally that Americans do not trust, do not like, whatever you want to put it, the Congress, because they have to do a budget.
They have to do the appropriations.
They have to see how much they have coming in, how much they're going to have going out.
And if they're going to spend money, they're going to borrow money, whatever.
They have to do that every single month.
Congress can't even seem to do it for once a year.
And I was a part of this.
I complained about this.
We went through it.
But again, you got members who are refusing to compromise.
You got members who will not only vote for things that they were scared of politically.
This is why we get into the situation we're in.
So I just wanted to give you, you know, without going into the specifics of this year's budget, this year's appropriations package, You need to understand, if you're listening, one of the things we did on a previous podcast is give you stuff to talk about around the water cooler.
So when you hear one of the, you know, uncle so-and-so say, well, just shut the government down.
That's what we need.
We'll save all that money.
No, you really don't.
Because you know what?
As many of the government is open back up, and it will be open back up, you're going to typically end up, what happens is they put in a clause that says, we'll give back pay to those who are out of work.
Which means all the money that would have been spent is going to be spent.
So if you say, well, we'll shut it down and we'll use the leverage to get what we want.
In all fairness, with an objective eye, go back and look at what the shutdowns have done for either party in the last 10 years.
They've not accomplished the big things.
They've not accomplished the, quote, mandatory sweeping cuts.
In fact, if anything, we went back to 2012 when you had the sequestration from out of that failed committee, in which actually began for about a four-year process to absolutely devastate our military.
Folks, this has real-world consequences.
Back in 2016, 2017, we literally had most of the F-18 fleet could not fly.
Because sequestration, although we were cutting our spending, although we were cutting it down, it was done so in a very ham-handed way in which you were cutting the meat in some areas, the fat in some areas, but you were cutting meat and bone in other areas.
I hear people all the time say, well, let's just go ahead and cut 20% off the top of the budget, 20% of what we had last year, cut it all off.
That's a terrible idea.
Because you've got some programs like defense and others that are taking up a lot more part of the bill.
If they're having to take 20% off and then you take the other part of the discretionary, which is everything else, and they take 20%, well, they can divide it over multiple departments and agencies, whereas defense has to take it all from their own self.
This is why sequestration didn't work.
This is why some of these programs in which you just take a bottom line top off the top and do it.
May need the funding they're getting.
Some may need to be cut.
I think there's a big downsizing that could occur, but it has to happen in a proper way.
So, during this holiday season, and even after the first year, and you start to keep hearing these names, CR, and Omnibus, and Cromnibus, all this thrown around, I wanted you to have the information to know what this looks like.
I wanted to peel it back as a former member to let you know what happens here.
This is not the way it should be happening.
This is a failure on both parties' perspective to get anything done.
Now, does it play well for partisan politics?
You know, I guess you can make your points.
But at the end of the day, are you making a point or are you getting anything done?
And I think this is the problem that we're facing right now in this country, in which there's too many people wanting to get their point across instead of getting anything done.
And you don't see that anywhere else any better than in our appropriations process, deciding how we spend the country's money to protect ourselves and do the functions that government is supposed to do.
So there's just some information.
I hope it helps at your next time around the water cooler or maybe at the family get-togethers or the friends down the street.
You'll have something and you'll be knowledgeable on how you talk about it.
Doug Collins, we'll see you next time on the 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, 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