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Jan. 4, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
22:51
Chaos on Capitol Hill: The Real Life House of Cards
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By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
I've seen it.
And believe me, I thought my time in the Georgia legislature in the United States Congress right here is that I have seen speaker issues and personnel issues, member on member issues.
I mean, just all.
And then yesterday happened.
Now, let me give a little background.
For those of you who are just waking up, catching the podcast this morning, we're waking up on January the 4th without a Speaker of the House.
We're waking up right now without a House of Representatives in its truest form.
We only have members elect.
We do not have actual members of Congress in the House of Representatives.
Now think about that for a second.
We're waking up today in a situation in which the clerk of the House is in control of the House.
By the way, this is the same clerk that Nancy Pelosi put into place.
The appointees of Nancy Pelosi are still running the different departments and stuff around the workings of the Capitol and others, even though the Republicans have the majority.
And all of this comes from the fact that today, you know, it goes back and reminds me of that one job.
Today there was one job, man.
One job!
Elect a speaker!
And you've had since the middle of November to figure this out.
Now, the Republicans, in fairness, Kevin McCarthy won over 85% of the votes in the caucus that was the Republican caucus about a month and a half ago.
He lost about 30 votes in that race.
And, you know, what you do between then and the actual vote on the floor, because remember, it's not just a majority in your conference.
You got to get 218 on the floor of the House, which means you have Democrat votes, you have everybody has to vote, which means that the individual votes matter much more than simply getting 50 plus one.
Kevin McCarthy started that process with the group, some of the Freedom Caucus, not all of the Freedom Caucus, that's been very much brought out.
You have members like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, I mean, Morgan Griffiths, others who, very much Freedom Caucus folks who are voting for Kevin McCarthy.
And then you have the Andy Biggs and Scott Perrys and the Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boeberts and others of the world who are voting for anybody but Kevin McCarthy.
So at this point in time, after both sides claiming that there was not a fair negotiation, that there was not an open and honest trade of ideas, and coming to a conclusion of how you could get the 218 needed to elect a Republican Speaker of the House, we ended up with what happened yesterday.
We ended up with watching on the floor of the House for almost five and a half hours.
Republicans go through ballot after ballot after ballot.
In the end, McCarthy did receive over 200 votes for Speaker.
Hakeem Jeffries, by the way, received all of his party's votes every time.
And for the first two ballots, by the way, there was three ballots yesterday.
Two ballots.
19 people voted against Kevin McCarthy.
And on the third ballot, 20 voted against Kevin McCarthy.
Now, I believe I understand Byron Donalds is voting against Kevin McCarthy on the last one because he is like most of us who are reading the tea leaves here and say, hey, Mr. Leader, you don't have the votes to get Speaker right now.
We got to go back and figure this out.
You need to make some changes, drastic changes, but you're not going to get the votes as it is.
And we need to get this further.
And I think his vote actually pushed them toward the adjournment, which now leaves us in the position in which we are now.
Until 12 o'clock on Wednesday when they re-adjourn to reassemble to elect a speaker again.
Remember, these members are not sworn in yet.
They're representatives-elect, and if you watch the proceedings on the floor, you'll hear them say, you know, Representative-elect Kevin McCarthy, Representative-elect Jim Jordan.
That's because they've not been sworn in yet.
The 118th Congress is not constituted yet, which means, by the way, for all of you out there Republicans who wanted to see investigations and bills and, you know, letters and subpoenas and all this kind of stuff sent out, You're going to have to wait.
Now, let me explain it.
I've done this a little bit on a previous broadcast, but I'd actually hope that this broadcast probably wouldn't happen.
Now, do I agree with Kevin McCarthy on everything Kevin McCarthy does?
No.
Do I believe that Kevin McCarthy wants to be Speaker?
Yes.
Is he willing to do most anything to become Speaker?
And when I say that, I'm not necessarily saying, is he willing to do things that are wrong?
Kevin McCarthy has been working since really 2009, 2008, To raise money, build a majority, and in turn, he becomes Speaker.
I mean, that's just been the way it is.
Over the past two cycles, the House, we lost the House in 2018, they regained seats in 2020, and they regained the majority in 2022. This is in 30 years, that's what's happened two times in 30 years.
Republicans have held the House for 22 years, Democrats have held it for eight, and they did it back to back two year cycles.
In which Republicans would then take over.
Now, in those two-year cycles, the Democrats did a lot of damage.
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, a lot of other things that are very hard to get over.
But what our problem is becoming now is that we're fighting each other More than we're fighting against Democrats.
We're fighting more about procedures and Robert's Rules of Order than we are about an immigration policy that has left us an open border, about an epidemic of drugs that are coming across our border, about an inflation rate that is still double If not triple, depending on the number for this month, where it was when Joe Biden took office.
We're talking about a country and we're not debating policies on energy independence in which we have been made energy dependent.
And we have Joe Biden going all across the world, begging to dictators, begging to countries that have no human rights ideas, that treat people terribly and are just totalitarian states and begging them for oil.
Why?
Because we chose not to drill here.
Again, I've yet to hear a reporter ask Joe Biden, how does it feel to let Americans not have work while you go beg from Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia for oil?
Now, I digress here greatly because we're not having those arguments right now in Congress.
I mean, this is pure house of cards stuff at this point.
If you ever watch that show, you know, as Underwood would say, it's about the numbers.
And if you have the numbers, you can do something.
Right now, as it stands right now, Kevin McCarthy does not have the numbers.
And what became more and more apparent as the day drove on yesterday was that the people voting against Kevin McCarthy, it had moved beyond what they would be given or what they could have.
It had moved into the realm of, Kevin, we just don't trust you.
Chip Roy actually just said it.
When one of his nominating speeches, again, for Jim Jordan, who, by the way, has said he doesn't want to be Speaker.
Again, that's how desperate.
And you actually have some of the members saying, well, this is what George Washington didn't want to be President either.
We're going to make Jim Jordan do it.
Folks, you don't want to do this.
I mean, again, Paul Ryan did not want to be Speaker.
It was thrust upon him.
He tried his best early on.
He saw the frustrations, and he finally got out.
And again, remember, this was after they kept Kevin McCarthy becoming Speaker last time.
And they thrust Paul Ryan into the spotlight, and everybody, including the detractors of McCarthy, voted for Paul Ryan instead of Kevin McCarthy.
So for those of you who are riling up about Paul Ryan and John Boehner and others, just let me remind you.
That this is what happens when you don't have seemingly a plan.
That's what's becoming more and more concerning.
Now remember, there's a historical lesson here too.
Republicans, we seem to have a problem with speaker elections.
We seem to have problems with electing one person.
We seem to have problems that individual members, 200 to 235, depending on where they are, is having the understanding that the leader has to represent all of those members, not just a few of those members.
Now, before some of you get up in arms and saying, well, Doug, they're fighting for transparency and values, and look, I'm not going to fight you, and I agree with you.
We should, I have been, when I was in Congress, I was one of the ones frustrated with our budget process.
I talked about it all the time.
We, you know, Didn't have amendments on the floor.
We bulked amendments.
We only did amendments on appropriations.
And then when we didn't like it, we would put no amendments or only limited amendments on the floor.
You know, we don't have an open amendment process where somebody could just walk down to the floor and offer an amendment at any time on any bill.
Now, some may think that's a better way to do it.
In some ways, I would not disagree, but if you go back to 2011, if you ever want to see stories, look up stories of the open process for the first budget bill that Boehner and Cantor and McCarthy at the time, they all three, let on the floor when they had promised that open process, anybody could bring amendments, and it was like a five-day vote process for one bill!
You know, here's the thing that you gotta understand.
There needs to be transparency, but done in ways that is actually transparent.
Offering an amendment in which your amendment gets shot down 410 to 5 is not our open and transparent process.
It makes you feel good.
You may think you're doing something.
You may put a five minute video out on how good your amendment was, But if you can't convince 218 people that your idea is a good idea, then mainly you're doing it for show, mainly you're doing it for promotional purposes, because you're not doing it to legislate.
So how does that fit back to the speaker race?
Because right now, this is not helpful to anyone.
And I am sympathetic to the arguments of Chip Roy and Matt Gaetz and these others who I know very well and am friends with.
But My concern is, is it simply coming back, and what has happened, and you've heard many members talk about this since yesterday, that the first set of demands were negotiated, and then the goalposts were moved, that Roy and others, Andy Biggs and others moved the goalposts.
Now, history will tell if that's actually true, if there's actually good faith negotiation going on.
We'll find out as that rumbles around.
But right now, what is happening, and what I'm very concerned about, We're fighting over things the American people don't understand.
And they're not doing a good job of articulating why some of these would matter.
And I'm going to also say, go back, after they voted that way, that bill, the budget bill, Back in 2011, and it took so many days that members were going back saying, we don't need to do this anymore.
Okay?
Because there's tactically good amendments, there's tactically good ideas that should be discussed, should be devoted on.
And even if they're not going to win, they bring the process better.
Those are good things.
But I'm going to take it a step further.
If you want to know the problem right now, frankly, in my opinion, With the speaker's race, it's playing out in its disastrous way right now, publicity-wise.
Now, hopefully we'll get it all together and we'll get on with it.
But I think it goes back to members who are bored.
Now, this may sound strange to some of the members in Congress because they say they're pulled 500 drafts, but in reality, most of them Don't have purpose.
Most of them, the committees are not functioning like committees.
You've had this happen even under Republican rule.
You've had it under Democrat rule.
The committees will only do sort of what leadership is looking for or what the chairmanship's looking for or messaging bills that really don't require a lot of digging in.
If you watch a lot of committee processes, there's rarely bills that get marked up, which means add amendments are infixed into a perfected form to go to the floor.
That actually truly have Republicans and Democrats not yelling at each other about how bad their ideas are.
What we don't see is enough of members taking issues that they wanted to.
Like I did when I worked with Criminal Justice Forum, with music modernization, with the issues of trade secrets and global trade secrets.
You know, that was what my staff and I, we worked on.
We worked on all the other stuff, the budgets and all the big things you see on TV. But we were actually engaged in something that kept us busy, kept us engaged, kept us learning.
Antitrust issues, those kind of things.
Big tech, those were the things that kept us busy.
But too many members right now simply have committees that are not functioning.
Because they rarely meet, or when they do meet, they don't have a lot going on.
They go to the floor, they don't have any amendments they can take to the floor.
So what they end up doing is either having to run, raise money, talk to each other, or go on YouTube or social media.
Now, we've got to get back.
The Speaker has to give the leadership of that.
I would pray that Kevin McCarthy, if he became Speaker, which right now, frankly, folks, is very doubtful.
But if he would, he would put back into not just lip service to regular order, but true regular order.
He would hold his chairman accountable to having regular meetings each week, subcommittee meetings each week, when you're not just at the main committee level, but subcommittees.
If you say you have a committee of 30, you have a subcommittee that has eight on it or nine on it, where they can actually dig into the issues, have a hearing, learn, and then put together the best piece of legislation.
I've got an idea that none of them are talking about.
If you put forward a bill, you ought to be the one to carry it.
All the way from subcommittee to committee to the floor of the House, you ought to go give testimony about your bill.
Do you realize, folks, that members of Congress, many of them have put in bills and they ain't got a real clue to what they do?
Because either their staff thought it was a good idea, maybe it was one of their interest groups from back home thought it was a good idea, or maybe leadership thought it was a good idea, and they just put their name on it.
It goes through the system, conceivably could go all the way from the Senate and all the way to the President's desk, and that member has barely spoke on the merits of that bill.
If you want to have true transparency, then I want to hear a discussion about that, instead of members being able to just throw amendments at the Rules Committee without coming and testifying about their amendments and saying what this amendment does.
Or working to get a majority of people on your amendments and not just be an amendment that one of the groups who score congressmen on, are they voting like they should or not, so that they'll score the vote even if it's never going to become part of the law.
Washington has a lot of brokenness to it.
And I'm sure that there are many who don't like what I'm saying right now.
But that's fine.
If we're going to peel the scab off this wound right now, then let's get it pulled off completely.
Let's talk about these issues so that what the ones who are detracting from Kevin and not voting for Kevin are talking about, about transparency and all this, then we need to.
You know, not spending more money.
Well, that starts with an appropriations process that actually is not controlled by the staff on the appropriations committee, but it's actually controlled by the appropriations members working together to understand that we're not going to start off at X number.
We're going to start off at some of these places.
We're going to go back to zero and say, does this department need to really exist?
Now, before you actually get into the appropriation process, you've got to also go back to committees who are over some of these agencies who have never reauthorized those agencies, who have never gone and did an in-depth look at what this agency does.
Judiciary Committee could spend three months just on the Department of Justice, reauthorizing the Department of Justice, going through everything in their programs to say, are we going to authorize you to do this?
Because here's the sad part that nobody actually understands.
The Congress controls what the executive branch does.
If you wanted a Department of Agriculture, where did it start?
In the Congress.
You know, if you have a Department of Justice, where does it start?
Where does it get its authorization?
From Congress, from the law.
But again, I know this is complicated.
It's not as fun as running out there saying, you know, let's impeach Biden.
Let's do all these things.
No, you know, those things are on a different level.
You can have those discussions the other day.
But we've got to have honest discussion about immigration, inflation, our military, and our readiness factors, and these things.
And we've got to also deal with businesses and our entitlement processes.
And we have to do that simply through good old-fashioned legislation.
I agree with those who are saying, get our house in order.
But folks, let me ask you right now, who and what is your plan?
That's the concern I have.
Look, I've been frustrated by Kevin McCarthy before.
I consider Kevin a great friend.
And there were times I wish he would have went further.
But I have to also remember, as a leader, you have 200-plus people that you're trying to conform to.
And remember, folks, the reason we're in the majority in the Republican Party right now is because we won districts in which Joe Biden won.
That means that they're not going to vote like some of these members right now today who are out there Trying to stop Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker where they have no worries in a general election.
All they have to do is move to a right base in their primaries and they don't ever have to worry about being accountable in a general election.
And yet the very ones that give them the gavels of chairmanships and subcommittee gavels in the committees is the members from New York in places where they have 50-50 districts in which they can't Be as hard right, so to speak, or as conservative or cut as many programs.
You've got to do that in processes.
Here's my hope, and I just want to give you a good hot take this morning.
12 o'clock tomorrow and today, 12 o'clock today, they're going to reconvene.
Either Kevin is going to find the votes tonight and overnight and this morning and get the votes or he's not.
And if they don't, then who's going to be the next one?
And my question is for the next one, are you going to vote for them if they don't agree with everything you say?
In a certain point in time, as I've said on this podcast before, somewhere we divorce politics from reality.
This is a kind case of where we've got to get back to reality.
We may not like everything that one of these candidates do, but we've got to start the process forward.
Because for all of you who went out there and voted in November to stop the Biden agenda, guess what?
Nobody's stopping them right now.
Mayorkas at Homeland Security is still doing everything he wants and not worried about Espina.
You know why?
Because there is no Congress.
There is no real Republican majority right now.
And until they're sworn in, this is what you get.
So chaos on Capitol Hill.
For those who think this is good, maybe you need to think about it a little bit longer.
Are there good things that can come from it?
Yes.
But at the end of the day, if we can't find a way to elect a speaker, if we can't find permanent goalposts on strategy and then tactics to use going forward against the Democrats, then God help us when we get to the tough stuff, like appropriations bills, immigration bills, the debt ceiling.
Because if we think it's hard now, wait till you get to those votes, and then we'll see where this House majority is going in this cycle.
We'll see you again on the Go College Podcast.
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