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Nov. 14, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
26:22
Can Congress do its most basic function?
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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.
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.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you with us.
A lot going on.
Let's get you started here on this Monday.
Right after the break, we're going to dig in a little bit to the proposals that are out there.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the financials in the House, the appropriations bills, the continuing resolutions, where they're at, where they're not at, the funding for different aspects.
I want you to have a good aspect going into this week.
The media is trying to paint this as the speaker's first big test, and in many ways it probably is.
But it's also a continuation of issues that we've been seeing in the House for a while.
So right after the break, let's jump into this and get you caught up on Monday here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
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All right.
Back in today, as the House comes back into session, we're going to be experiencing sort of a multi-tiered front.
And one of the things I'm going to talk about, and probably in an episode pretty soon, is a lot of what's driving the issues around money and the issues around the campaigns and the issues.
And when I say campaigns, I mean presidential campaigns.
And where we are in Washington right now is that, frankly, the posturing and the discussions are more suited for single-unit government.
In other words, the Democrats or Republicans controlling all three levels of government.
The president, not levels, but branches, maybe the better way to put that.
The president, the House, and the Senate.
And right now we don't have that.
We have the president and the Senate controlled by Democrats.
You have the House controlled by Republicans.
Both the House and the Senate are very slim margins.
But as we've talked about before, typically Democrats, especially in the House, can stick together to pull all their votes to gain this advantage that they can have.
And that's where you're going to see this play out.
So first of all, let's start off with...
A discussion, which we seem to have on here a lot, but I want to continue to really emphasize where we are with the negotiations.
Let's start off with the basic premise of the Doug Collins show that I've talked to you about forever, and that is whoever is the majority in the House owns the votes in the House.
And that means that if you're in the majority, you cannot blame the minority for your problems.
You can complain about them.
You can talk about them.
You can tell them they're out of touch.
You can tell them whatever you want to tell them.
But the reality is, is that these in the House in particular, there is no such thing as blaming the minority for not passing your legislation.
Because if you cannot pass the legislation that you're putting forward, it means that your majority cannot pass it.
Because if you could, the minority is irrelevant.
They don't, you know, frankly, you don't need them to pass legislation in the House.
Now, that's different in the Senate where they have the cloture vote and the filibuster.
You know, it's not even a filibuster anymore.
It's just simply members who won't vote for 60 in the cloture to move on to a...
I'd like to see it, frankly, go back to where you actually had to sit there and filibuster and say why instead of these, you know, sort of holds that you see, you know, put on legislation.
I think it'd make people more adept at saying what they're against and what they're for, but actually put them on record, which most of them, you know, is a very difficult thing because you're in election mode all the time and everything that you say will be used against you.
Now, where does this put us with spending bills?
Remember, on Friday, the Speaker of the House and the House and the Senate have to come to an agreement along with the White House on a continuing resolution to fund the government or the government will shut down this Friday.
You would say, well, didn't we go through this just a little bit ago?
Yes, we did.
Except right after the continuing resolution was passed in the House, the House decided to get rid of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker through eight people who voted to get rid of the Speaker.
And then they went three plus weeks without a speaker and now they've had two weeks in which trying to get the new speaker up to speed and trying to staff his office and Mike Johnson is doing I think the best he can with the actual you know Situation that he has.
So that brings us to the point of where are we?
Every year, as a reminder, the House and the Senate are supposed to pass 12 individual appropriations bills through each body and then come together on a conference committee to agree on each individual 12 bills that encompass multiple agencies within the government.
So let's just, you know, frankly, you hear a lot out there saying, and I'm just, you know, I'm I understand what they're trying to say, but they're not being exactly forthright in saying that they want the single subject appropriation bills.
Well, they're not single subject because you have military and construction and VA, which are two, frankly, distinct groups of spending that are not the same single subject.
You have criminal justice and Interior and others that are that are not all the same.
You have labor and labor health, which are again dealing in different segments of the of the government.
So in reality, we group them together by similar In some ways, nature.
T-HUD is an interesting example.
Animal transportation, housing, and urban development.
Okay?
Not exactly two that you would normally put together if you're thinking about this.
Now, the one that probably is the closest is your agricultural spending bill and your defense spending bill because they deal in single issues as best you can, but they all fall under either agriculture or the defense department.
Defense much more so than agriculture in the sense that they also have the Social programs such as, you know, food stamps and other things attached to it.
Now, I tell you all that not, you know, for some of you that may not know because I see a lot of stuff on social media out there that say, oh, just, you know, just pass this or don't pass that, you know, or single subject bills.
Well, this is the 12 appropriation bills that are supposed to be passed.
If they're not passed, then the government has to go to several different routes, one of which being That they would pass a continuing resolution, which means that you take the spending that is currently in place and you push it out for a certain amount of days at either the same level,
lower level, conceivably I guess you could put in some stuff that could get some of it higher, but mostly like it's either at or below, and you can sometimes wrangle in policy elements to that as well.
That is where we begin to run into the problem.
A continuing resolution, again from the perspective of the Republicans in the House, continue the spending bills that was passed by Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats last December.
This, again, accomplishes nothing that the Republicans ran on, and they have basically not been able to pass their own spending bills.
They've passed seven.
Let me rephrase that.
So far, they have passed seven, none of which have been I'll tell you all that to get to the other part.
You could have an omnibus bill.
You set and determine a spending limit, you know, spending number on each of the bills.
You put those in.
You put policies in.
You do whatever.
It's one big number.
You vote on it as one big package.
And this is what members of both parties have gripped about for years because things get thrown in there that's, you know, a 1,700, 1,800-page bill that, you know, frankly, nobody knows what it says when they vote on it.
The other part is that you could fund, and this is a big possibility because we've done this in the past, even when I was there, you pass some of the appropriations bills, get them signed into law, which means they are funded through 2024, the end of September.
But the others are not, which means that you could have a partial shutdown of the government of certain agencies that did not get their bills passed completely.
Typically, when you see this, it's defense that always gets passed because defense is the one that hurts the most under a continuing resolution because they can't do long-term purses.
They have trouble scheduling out, you know, the...
Other issues that come up within the military that is just harder for them to deal with under continuing resolution.
Someone who serves still, I can tell you, I've been in meetings even recently, that this is a very real issue that could affect even war planning and Protection of the country because we deal with civilians and we deal with others who will not be covered under what is designated essential personnel.
Now, the discussion always goes to what they're not essential to be kept.
Should they be essential at all times?
The answer is probably yes.
But again, when you go back to just bare essentials of turning on the lights and keeping the doors open, you know, the planning purposes and the training purposes, some of those are going to step to the side while you deal with the rest of this.
All right, so where we are now.
We are at the point of the House and the Senate having to pass something before Friday.
The Speaker of the House is new.
Mike Johnson just came into the speakership just a couple of weeks ago.
He, as the press love to point out, has not been in leadership.
He's not even head of a committee.
He's not been in these negotiations before, and they're making that out to be a bad thing.
I'm not going to say it's a bad thing.
I'm just going to say it's different.
And the question is, how will he handle this to get this out?
If he can come up with a continuing resolution or process that gets us to a more regular order of business where we actually negotiate these issues, get these spending bills appropriately as far as the House and the Senate and the President sign it, then hey, I'm okay.
If you want to do it outside under the trees and vote that way, I don't care how you do this.
Just get it done.
What the speaker has proposed, though, is really interesting, because a quick brief of history, almost six weeks ago, Kevin McCarthy was relieved of his speakership because he put forth, with Democrat help, a clean CR that kept the government open without a shutdown, and he was removed from power from that.
Here's the interesting thing.
What Mike Johnson is proposing is another clean CR that is different in this respect.
He's looking at what is called a laddered CR. I don't know really where they came up with a term laddered CR, but what it basically says is, okay, we're gonna take several of these bills, ones that we have more agreement on, such as transportation, agriculture, water, military construction, things that the House, except for Ag, has already passed, And they're going to say, we're going to deal with those at an earlier date in January.
In other words, we're going to fund them through January.
And between now and January, we're going to hope to get them fully funded in a long-term spending package.
And then we're going to take everything else and put it in February and fund them all up to February and then try to put together a long-term spending package.
Okay?
Sounds...
Interestingly enough, in a way, it actually sort of keeps you away from the bigger CR, the bigger omnibus bill, because you're actually still breaking this down and dealing with it in parts.
But here's where the interesting part came in that will be very frustrating for many conservatives and for also people around the country who believe, many times wrongly, that they're gonna make massive cuts to the federal budget.
And again, I've talked about this before, I'll say it again.
Do I agree that Korean Jean-Pierre is not the best press secretary in the world?
Yes.
But while we're spending valuable 20 minutes of debate time on the floor of the House determining that we need to draw her salary down to $1, again, this isn't performance theater.
Okay, I get it.
Make your YouTube video.
Tell her that she needs to be elected.
But then get people out to vote next November and don't elect her boss again.
Now, I get it.
It makes good show.
It makes good PR. But at a certain point in time, it doesn't help you when you go back to the very first thought I said on this podcast today was the majority has to control the process and can't blame the Democrats, in this case, in the House, for not getting anything passed.
Then we go through another.
We have defunding of Secretary Alston, which was in the defense bill, and all these other things.
Again, great PR. Never will actually occur.
Never will actually get into place.
Under no circumstances.
But yet we spend time doing it.
Now, again, I believe there is time for, quote, fighting.
There's a time for us to point out the differences.
But this in a spending bill is frankly not going to happen, not going to come into play, and never going to come into law.
It's just simply a political theater that is happening.
Now, look, I agree with the points.
I don't like...
You know, some of the administration officials, and I definitely don't like Maorkas and many of these others, but at a certain point in time, wouldn't it be better to craft a spending bill that actually puts funding toward, you know, pushes the Senate to actually enact immigration control, that pushes the administration to actually have to cut spending in certain departments that actually can get passed and signed into law?
I personally think that's a better way to go about it, but we right now have a House that is seemingly doing its own thing.
So what the speaker has proposed is saying, let's break these up a little bit.
Let's put these in different baskets and still fund everything.
The whole government is funded through January and February, but we'll work on them in between.
Now, here's where it gets interesting for the conservatives, maybe listening to this podcast, listening across the country.
And it's something that the Democrats have picked on and the Democrat press has picked up on, which, by the way, is everything in Washington for the most part.
It's surprised in two ways.
Number one is no spending cuts in the bill or poison pill riders in the current Johnson CR, the Speaker CR. In other words, they're going to keep spending as it is, no cuts, and they're not putting any policy riders in there.
Policy riders being we're not going to allow funding for abortion travel for military members.
That's just not in there.
The other one is he put the defense part into the second...
That's typically a problem for Democrats in particular because Democrats want to hold defense over the heads of Republicans in the discretionary spending.
Remember, discretionary spending is only what the Congress votes on, which is only about 15% of the entire federal budget.
Please remember, Those of you out there think that we vote on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security every year, you're wrong.
It doesn't happen.
It's an automatic spend, and money just gets added to it.
The only thing we actually vote on, Congress actually votes on, is the process of discretionary spending, which is defense, and then everything else.
So defense is like, the Democrats like to keep defense out because if defense is passed early and the military is funded, then Republicans are more likely to enter into shutdowns over departments that they don't like to start with.
So it was surprising to many Democrats and many conservatives that you would include defense not in the January CR, but in the February CR. This is where now it's going to be interesting.
Normally, Democrats would not go along with something the Speaker's looking at, but however, by doing this and not having spending cuts, not having policy writers, just simply doing the political posturing of saying, okay, we're going to put this into January and February, two different bills, two different time frames to allow the budgeting process or the appropriation process to go along is something that is new.
And again, before we all take the collective Politico punch bowl, you know, all of them's leap into this is, oh my God, this has never been done before and Johnson's an idiot and he's not an experience.
Why don't we give it a try?
Well, really, what is the problem here?
And don't hand me, well, you're going to have two different things.
No, no, no.
Just deal with what he said.
And I'm not trying to be an apologist for the Speaker.
I think the Speaker's, you know, taking a gamble here.
I think it's an interesting gamble.
We'll see if it works, but it will only work if, number one, Democrats don't all ban to vote against it and Republicans will ban together to put enough votes in the majority to pass it.
And the concern lies there.
Chip Roy has already come out and said he's against it.
Marguerite Taylor Greene has already said she's against it.
That's two out of, I think, four that they need.
And the rule is up.
They'll do the rule discussion tonight in committee.
If it passes out of committee, then it'll go to the floor.
And then the first step of this will be, will it get past a rules vote?
Now, remember, Republicans had a bad week last week.
They could not pass any of the appropriations bills that they brought forth, financial services and the transportation and housing government, T-HUD. Couldn't pass either one when it got to the floor.
Many of them, because their amendment either didn't pass, some of these amendments really Again, about pay for employees in the executive department.
Why don't we, you know, from a Republican perspective here, why don't we worry about getting rid of the Democrats in the White House more than we get worried about taking pot shots at the Democrats currently in the White House?
I know that sounds simple, but maybe it ought to happen.
Then you actually make progress in this process.
So, again, as we look ahead here, the White House has no real interest in negotiating on this.
They don't have to.
They can veto it, blame the Republicans for not getting it together, and the press are going to line up typically on their side.
Schumer has an interest in getting it done for some of his more vulnerable members.
And you have Republicans in the Senate who are much more willing to go along with just a frayed up clean CR that ends before Christmas because they want to push everybody into doing something before Christmas and being happy with that.
So this is a new tack by the Speaker.
Now if it works, congratulations Speaker.
If it doesn't work, then what's the next step?
And now the speakers also gave indication that if he can't get this passed, he's willing to put a year-long CR on the floor.
Now think about this one for a second.
I think this would have a lot of problems in the house.
It would have not as much problems with the Democrats, so the Democrats conceivably pass it out of the House.
Senate could probably come together and possibly pass it.
But that means that you're under a CR until September 30th of next year at the current levels.
With no other changes from what was passed by the Democrats last December, which means all of the things that were promised by, and some of the members falsely said that they defunded all the IRS agents.
No, they haven't done that yet.
It's not been passed and signed into law, so all the votes in the House do not equal laws that become effective.
You know, it puts into account all the other programs, transportation monies, everything else that was put into the bill last December actually would maintain.
So, again, interesting that the Speaker Johnson would actually come up with that this early in the process and say, look, if you can't pass this, this is what we're putting on the floor next.
All of this in light of the fact that a little over six weeks ago, The House take out a Speaker for this very issue.
Do I think they're going to do it again?
No, I do not.
I think that they'll have fights.
I think it'll be a struggle.
I think you could possibly see a shutdown out of this, which I think the Speaker is adamantly fighting against.
But I think there's still enough in the House that says we can't look like we just did again taking out a Speaker because we don't get what we want.
So I just wanted to hit this for a second.
And many of you out there are still screaming that Republicans didn't do what they say they're going to do.
From impeachments to everything else.
And we'll talk about this.
For Wednesday, I'm going to have a podcast.
We're going to talk about some of these issues.
As someone who's sat through the faux impeachment of Donald Trump and what it actually accomplished and other things, there's a political and a reality.
And this is, frankly, the realities that we're looking at.
So as you look ahead to this week, those are the basics of the format here.
And it means that it's got to pass out of the House, got to pass out of the Senate, and there's got to be a presidential signature by Friday at midnight.
Otherwise, the government shuts down.
That's just reality.
And for all of you out there saying, let it shut down.
Okay, number one, you don't save a dime in a shutdown.
Number one.
Number two, everybody who's quote getting not paid, which again is interesting because the government, typical government payroll is either in bimonthly instruments or a monthly instrument, which means that everybody If it shuts down now, have gotten paid.
If they're paid bi-monthly, they got paid on the 15th.
If they're paid monthly, they've already gotten paid for in October, they'll get paid again at the end of the month.
So again, this idea that they're working for free is technically not a true statement in the sense that there's been never really an instance in the last 15 years in which government shut down.
That they were not a provision put into the continuing resolution or the omnibus or the appropriations packet that said that they would not get their money.
So you're not saving money.
You're not making a point except that the government is shut down.
And then if you get to the point of where you're trying to end up not getting anything more than what you could have got beforehand, then the question is, what real will and have you had politically?
So all of this is in account.
Need us out here on Monday.
This is our Monday presentation.
Wake up call for you.
Get out there.
Look at it.
Be able to engage in this.
Look, at the bottom line, whether it's a laddered CR, having two different dates for the CR to be done, or how we get through this, you know, putting some money in there, tying Israel money to it, whatever it is, the reality is, come Friday at midnight, either it shuts down or there's an agreement between the House, Senate, and the President.
That's just reality.
That's just Monday here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
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