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Dec. 11, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
29:01
The Woes of The Biden Administration
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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 podcast.
They've got a great show discussion today with a friend of mine, Senator Ron Johnson.
Ron has been at the forefront of a lot of battles in DC over the past few years.
He's actually one who asks questions.
He doesn't mind the political retribution for asking the hard questions and making the tough statements.
Which makes him a little bit of, especially to the mainstream media, a pariah because they don't like to deal with the truth that he's giving.
But today on the podcast, we're going to talk after the break, we're going to get into this, dive right into it.
We hit everything.
We hit Ukraine.
We hit the Biden administration.
We hit the border.
We hit the differences in what we can get done and what we can't get done in the United States House and Senate.
And really going back to the real issue of why Congress is having trouble We're investigating a lot of the stuff that we see going on right now.
Congress has abdicated in many ways its absolute right to oversee the federal government.
And this is something we've talked about here on the podcast many, many times before, that when you get out of balance between executive, judicial, and legislative branches, then you have just a world of problems.
And we're seeing that right now.
And the Democrats are taking advantage of every power that the executive branch gives them because really they have no pushback meaningful from the Congress, especially among Democrats in Congress.
And we're seeing that in the United States Senate.
But Senator Ron Johnson here with us today to talk about it as we get forward.
So right after the break, we'll pick up our conversation with Senator Ron Johnson.
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Hey, good morning here with Senator Ron Johnson.
Ron, it's good to see you again, my friend.
I hope all is well.
Good morning, Doug.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you as well.
Hey, I just left D.C. yesterday.
My gosh.
I mean, you and I have both been up here a long time and you've been seeing it.
Has it gotten any more confusing, especially what we're seeing in the last little bit with both the House and Senate and everything else?
Well, it's pretty dysfunctional, but I think the main reason for that is we have a Biden administration, and I've said this repeatedly, if you were asked to develop a strategy to destroy this country, you'd be real hard-pressed to come up with a better game plan than what is being implemented by Biden.
The open borders, the 40-year high inflation, the war on fossil fuels, the embarrassing and dangerous surrender to Afghanistan that has emboldened our enemies and really set the world afire.
So we are...
We're in the midst of a real decline in this country caused by Democrat governance.
It is.
Well, you just mentioned something that I've talked about a lot, and I think history is going to be more of a judge on this right now because, as you well know, the mainstream media right now just doesn't cover it.
I trace a lot of, especially the dysfunction overseas.
We're seeing Ukraine, Israel, everywhere else.
Back to what you just said a minute ago, and that was the basic collapse in Afghanistan.
I know y'all have done a lot of, you know, looking into that, seeing it.
Expound on that a little bit more because I think people just really don't get how bad that was.
Well, first of all, if you go all the way back, probably the best book I read in Afghanistan was written by a special ops personnel who said we really had done what we needed to do in Afghanistan before Tommy Frank ever said a boot in the ground.
So I think you have to first go back to that decision.
We didn't learn the lesson of history.
Nobody's ever been able to conquer Afghanistan.
Nobody ever will be able to.
So, I mean, that was unfortunate, but we were there.
We made real progress.
I mean, there were positive things.
Open society for women.
Girls could go to school.
I mean, we were doing all those things.
And we had an Air Force Base, Bagram Air Force Base.
It was a key Air Force Base at a minimum.
After all of the, you know, the sacrifice of the finest among us with their lives and, you know, being wounded and not only that, but our national treasure, at a minimum, we should have maintained that Air Base to provide the Afghan security forces the backup so they could continue to hold the Taliban back.
But we didn't do that.
We just utterly surrendered.
There was no game plan.
We left behind close to $80 billion worth of very sophisticated weaponry that is probably being flooded throughout the world now.
Getting into the hands of other potential terrorists.
So it was an unmitigated disaster, and it signaled to people like Putin, to Xi, to Kim Jong-un, to the ayatolls in Iran, the weakness of America, particularly under President Biden and the idiots that advised him.
Yeah, that's another thing that you're dealing with.
I mean, when you get with Jake Sullivan, you're dealing with Blinken, you're dealing with, we're not dealing, and I'm just be blunt, we're not dealing with an A-team here.
We're not dealing with a team that's even respected around the world.
How has that affected, because the Senate's always been a counterbalance in many ways to any administration, because especially with the influence of the foreign relations, the influence of the senators, how has that actually hurt senatorial relationships on foreign affairs with having such a weak foreign affairs team at the White House?
Well, understand, even the Obama administration didn't respect Biden and his team.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that Joe Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy Issue in 40 years, and he was being advised by the same people.
So it's not just lack of respect by the Ayatollahs and Putin and Xi.
It's from members of his own party.
And so, yeah, that's not helpful when, you know, they come before Senate.
They really don't answer our questions, certainly not to my satisfaction.
We were just recently briefed on, you know, the fact that Ukraine funding is running out according to the administration.
I asked the administration, how does this end?
We're into this now bloody stalemate for 22 months.
Every day that goes by, more Ukrainians die, more Russian conscripts die.
I take no pleasure in that.
More of Ukraine gets destroyed.
I think there's a point in time where we could have deterred Putin from ever invading.
I don't think he would have under Trump.
But even under Biden, we could have deterred it.
We didn't.
He was back on his heels for a brief moment in time.
But now we have to recognize the reality of the situation, and the tactics for Ukraine should have shifted a long time ago.
Not offenses trying to—Putin will not lose this war.
He has nuclear weapons.
He's got a much larger economy.
He's got a military industrial base himself.
Losing it is existential to Putin.
He's not going to lose this war.
It's going to have to be settled at some point in time, so I think the military tactics for Ukraine have to transition more to a guerrilla type of war, which will encourage Putin to actually sit down and try and negotiate in good faith.
Did it surprise you as it did me and others that in the spring, if we go back almost seven months, I remember being interviewed and talking to people who had been on the ground in Ukraine.
And they were saying, okay, we're going to have this big spring offensive.
It's going to work this time.
We're going to get it done.
And it just fell apart.
A lot of what you just said about the infrastructure, just the rush of throwing bodies and equipment at it, But, I mean, it seemed like they were using the same kind of a strategic, as somebody who's been in the military for 23 years, they were using a strategic playbook from the 60s, instead of what you just said, attacking the weaknesses, going after, you know, making it even more unpopular in Russia.
Did that, on the Hill, especially among senators, did that surprise a lot of senators that there actually was really seemingly no game plan for this year?
I'm not sure.
We just don't really talk too much about it.
The only time we ever talk about Ukraine is when the administration wants more funding, and unfortunately, the unit party here, there's a majority of people who are just willing to throw money at any problem.
But let's face it, Ukraine cannot win this war.
In order to win this war, you'd have to start, as you talked about, how popular is this war in Russia?
Right now, it's still pretty popular because Russian people aren't suffering because of it.
Now, the conscripts are, their families are, but they're yanking those from the rural cities.
In order to really degrade Russian support, you have to start bombing cities in Russia.
That will never happen.
It shouldn't happen.
It would, you know, bring down a nuclear holocaust on Ukraine.
So you have to recognize the reality of the situation.
Ukraine cannot do what would be necessary for them to win the war.
They need peace.
You know, I was the only member of Congress to attend Zelensky's inauguration.
Went back two months later.
At that point in time, Zelensky absolutely wanted to do a peace deal with Putin.
This is when Putin was in charge of the next Crimea and firmly in control of eastern Ukraine.
And Zelensky wanted a peace agreement because he understood the reality.
I can't explain what happened between then and now.
Obviously, the impeachment did not improve Zelensky and Ukraine's position.
So again, I think there are multiple errors dating back many, many years in terms of how we've ended up in this calamity, but now we need to recognize the reality.
The only way this ends is with a negotiated settlement.
I think it's actually a good thing that Zelensky is understanding that he does not have an open checkbook, that the American people do not support an endless war in Ukraine, and he needs to do everything he can to bring this to a negotiated settlement.
Exactly.
Look, Senator, I'm so glad you just brought up something.
You opened the door.
I'm going to walk through it because you and I both dealt with this when I was dealing with impeachment, dealing with all the problems with DOJ, the Mueller investigation, all the Russia hoax, the Zelensky letter.
I mean, I still go back and it still amazes me living through that time having to deal with that.
But you just brought up something that's important, and I think it's a great historical context.
During the impeachment part, basically the Democrats, the same Democrats now who are wanting to completely fund him, basically called, and I remember in our impeachment hearings in the House, we had several, and I think Swalwell was one, several others, who basically called Zelensky a battered wife because he said that there was no pressure, there was none of this.
I mean, he was degraded by foreign powers such as ourselves and others, and now we're coming in on this proposition that we're supposed to help him.
We're still seeing the fallout from all of that hoax and all of that sham impeachment and everything else.
How is that affecting the working of Congress right now?
Well, again, I want to, you know, go back and just talk about how Democrats have used Ukraine as a pawn.
You know, with the revolution of dignity, you know, to what extent the U.S. helped foment that.
And listen, I'm always in favor and on the side of people who want their freedom.
But take a look at what the result has been of that revolution of dignity.
It's been a disaster for Ukraine.
It was obviously highly profitable for Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.
So, again, they've used Ukraine as a pawn.
They certainly used Ukraine as a pawn during the Trump impeachment.
And now they continue to use Ukraine as a pawn.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have died as a result of what Democrats have done to the country, as well as Russian conscripts.
Again, this needs to end.
We have to recognize this has been a horrible, horrible, historic blunder from everybody's viewpoint, and it needs to end.
Yeah, and you said you asked the question, and I know you discussed it.
I'm assuming the administration had no answer to your question on how it ends.
Well, it's kind of more almost build-up.
We need to make more gains on the battlefield before we can bring Putin to his knees.
Again, I think the way you do that is you shift more to a guerrilla-style type of warfare, not like a World War I trench warfare, which is To a certain extent, what we've got right now, just show Russia, there's no way that you're going to be able to come in here, take all of Ukraine.
It is going to be a bloody, bloody mess.
It's going to be an ongoing bloody mess, even the territories you occupy right now.
I think we ought to be supplying them things with, again, asymmetric weapons, drones, those types of things that could do some real harm to Russia if they continue to press any kind of offensive.
Again, you have to fight this smart, but you have to fight this for a draw, not for a win.
Ukraine cannot win this war.
They can fight it to a draw, and the sooner they do that, the better.
Speaking of which, Ukrainian money now, and I know y'all had the meeting with Zelensky, the second-in-command, and it all came over.
They're still begging for money.
We got Israel needing assistance as well.
But dealing with one of the things that was also that you mentioned early on is now the money is dealing with a real-world problem here in the United States.
And you being, from the chairmanship perspective and others, talking about our southern border and now tying money and trying to get this Give us an update on where that is.
I know it's been sort of all over the map, even this week and going into the final holidays.
Why is it the Democrats can't seem to see, besides the effects of saying we want to change the nation, we have a different immigration policy, what is the real issue there that they can't see the national security implications of our border?
They want an open border.
They want millions of people flooding in that are going to be loyal to them, vote for them sometime in the future.
That's their top priority.
Our top priority is recognizing the fact that the Democrat and the Biden administration's open border policy is a clear and present danger to America.
It should be our top national and homeland security priority.
And Republicans need to use any leverage we can to actually secure the border.
Not just getting the right language in place.
I'm all for that.
We need to do that as well.
But we have to recognize President Trump, using current law, just sheer willpower, using Remain in Mexico, third safe country agreements with Central American countries, pretty well secured the border.
We went from 144,000 encounters a month to 17 over a 12-month time period.
What I've been proposing, and I'm getting growing support within the Republican Senate Conference, is that our bottom line needs to be any funding for Ukraine must be contingent upon actually securing the border.
Not just border language, but actually...
You know, setting benchmarks, the metric should be the number of migrants that are dispersed in America each month, and that has to start declining dramatically over the next 12 months, and will allow, you know, $5 billion a month to flow if they hit those benchmarks.
But again, you cannot Count on President Biden to faithfully execute the law.
This is a lawless administration.
The Supreme Court rules that eviction moratorium is unconstitutional.
He extended it anyway.
They ruled that forgiving student loans is unconstitutional.
He continues to forgive them.
So this is a lawless administration.
A president that you cannot trust to faithfully execute the law, so we must put in place that type of incentive where funding is contingent on actually securing the border.
You mentioned the lawlessness, and there's no better example of that than Alejandro Marocas at Homeland.
And this idea, just the blatant lies that he tells every time he comes before the Senate or the House in discussing the border.
And this idea that he has provided a legal pathway, as he likes to call it, using the parole system.
All they're doing is just sending them through the main border.
That's not closing the border.
In fact, again, it's a lawless act.
Again, their idea of addressing the border challenge, they don't call it a problem, they don't call it a crisis a challenge.
is to more efficiently and effectively process and disperse a larger number of migrants every month.
In this supplemental package, President Biden asked for something like $14 billion not to secure the border, but for more agents to encounter, process, and disperse.
And again, Mayor Adams in New York, 100,000 immigrants, that's less than 2% of the total flow during the Biden administration of about 6 million.
He said that's going to destroy a city, but this is impacting every city throughout America, large and small.
And small cities are really bearing a huge brunt on this.
It's under the radar.
You know, the human depredations, the human trafficking, the sex trafficking, the drug trafficking by and large occur in the shadows.
They're not being reported on, honestly, in the media.
Again, if this were occurring on a Republican administration, you'd have a daily count You know, over every newscaster's shoulder showing exactly how many migrants are entering on an hourly basis and calling it a crisis, but they're just coming up for the Biden administration, which again is one of the big problems we have in America is we have a completely biased, complicit media, they're a bunch of radical leftists themselves, and they're, you know, for whatever reason, intent on destroying this country as well.
Yeah, look, I agree with you.
When we were sitting, I mean, I was judiciary.
I mean, we was at the border.
We discussed it all the time.
And it seemed like every time I was asked a question, every time we went on, the media was like setting up shop down there.
If this, as you said, was under a public administration, all the main big three or four would have their editorial, their nightly news desk sitting at the border right now.
And that's all they would be talking about, the rapes and the pillages of plenty.
They just don't do it.
Switching back, one of the things I wanted to touch with you, because you and I were deeply involved in this, along with Devin and Nunez and also Grassley and others, and it's still there.
You made mention to it, alluded to it, as far as the lawlessness of the Biden administration.
We're still seeing this out of DOJ. We're still seeing this out of FBI. We're still seeing the same things that we investigate on the House side, you investigate on the Senate side.
With another election coming up, is it not enough that Republicans have to talk about this, but we have to show the examples of not only at the border, but also in investigations, the politicization at DOJ and our intelligence agencies is a real threat to normal Americans.
We do and we are, but the problem is what we say, what we're exposing, what we're uncovering, is by and large only covered by conservative news outlets.
So we're preaching to quiet.
And unfortunately, our choir expects us to put these people in jail.
We don't have the power to do that.
All we have is the power to investigate.
And we have quite weak powers of investigation as well, as you're seeing with the House.
I think Chairman Comer and Chairman Jordan do an excellent job, but they don't have the investigatory power of the FBI. And so they are exposing, and we are exposing, the corruption within federal law enforcement.
We're showing the corrupt and complicit media.
We're certainly showing the total corruption of the Biden administration and the Biden family.
But the mainstream media is, by and large, ignoring it.
CNN now is showing some reports.
It's getting so obvious.
Questions are propping up in news conferences with the few that he gives, that President Biden gives.
And he just walks out and says, they're all lies.
And by and large, the mainstream media just drops the subject then.
So we've got a huge problem when we have such a biased media.
I hate to keep going back to that point.
But it is a tremendous problem.
We can uncover all the truth.
We can lay out all the evidence.
But if the mainstream media, the big tech social media giants don't lay it out for the public to see, it's kind of like a tree falling in the forest.
Nobody around to hear it didn't really happen.
Well, you just hit something I think needs to be foot stomped.
And I speak to Republican groups all over the country.
I deal with this a lot on media, just like you do.
And here's what we've got to be honest about as Republicans.
We've got to be honest with what you just said, is here's what we can do and here's what we can't do.
And I think too many times we have some of our members say, here's what we're definitely going to do.
And no, we are not going to be able to do that.
The prime example is subpoena and contempt of Congress.
It was amazing that the DOJ picked up contempt of Congress on people from the J6 committee in the House, but have never prosecuted a Republican in the last number of years, a contempt of Congress charge from a Republican House.
They never have.
They just have not done it.
I think it's going to actually take a committee at some point in time when these people are in contempt of Congress not to rely on Department of Justice to prosecute the case, but literally go send our sergeant in arms and arrest those individuals.
I think that's what it's going to take.
It's gotten so far out of hand.
It's unfortunate.
But, you know, the prior administrations have noticed how weak Congress's investigatory and enforcement powers are, or how we don't exercise our full constitutional authority, and they take advantage of it.
They just thumb their nose at the congressional investigations.
It's unbelievably frustrating to me that we send letters.
We have five members of the Homeland Security Committee.
If we sign a letter requesting information, the law says that agency shall turn the Material overdose.
They don't.
What happens is somebody goes to court with a FOIA request.
They get the same documents that we have demanded, that we are legally entitled to.
They get them redacted.
Then we are left with just requesting those same documents unredacted.
We have to go into a reading room.
We don't get the documents.
We get to read them unredacted, take notes.
I mean, it's a very sad joke that Congressional oversight and congressional investigatory authority has atrophied over the decades.
We need to restore that authority.
I agree.
Well, if not, we've become an executive country.
And out of a three-fold look from judiciary, legislative, and executive, we've...
And again, I'll actually say from both sides, over the past 40 years, we've sort of just allowed that shift to happen.
And then, frankly, Democrats took it seriously, and they use it as an attack on all.
So, Doug, I have to make this one point.
I wish I was chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee Investigation, but now I'm ranking member.
It is the most powerful investigatory committee of We have the strongest subpoena power.
You know how many staff members I have?
I have five.
When I was chairman of the full committee, I gave the chairman of the permanent subcommittee of investigation a million dollars in budget.
That same chairman, when he became a ranking member, with the same dollar budget that I had, cut my budget back to about three quarters of a million dollars.
And that budget has not been restored.
That's a Republican senator doing that to a Republican senator.
But in general, the Senate is not serious about oversight.
It is not serious about investigation.
We've got a federal government to investigate that has a couple million people, right?
A couple million employees.
We've got five Investigatory staff members of the permanent subcommittee investigations that actually wants to investigate the government.
The Democrats just want to investigate the private sector.
We have more than enough investigators in federal and state and local law enforcement to do that.
We need the federal government to be investigated.
And again, I've got five staff members to do that.
We need a much larger budget in the permanent subcommittee investigations.
I agree.
When I was in the House, we saw this, especially when the numbers flipped from Democrat to Republican, from Republican to Democrat back in 2018 into 2019, going into all that we had.
The Nadler cut my budget.
He cut back.
He wouldn't let us have.
I mean, again, they know how to use this.
And again, it's sad that Republicans on Republicans do this.
This is an even more problem when you look at Looking ahead real quickly, we'll finish up with this.
I know the House has been in turmoil a great deal, and it looks like it's heading there again.
How do you see that playing out for, like, National Defense Authorization Act and the now-laddered step of the appropriations bills at the early part of the year?
Well, I have to say this, because I find it pretty outrageous that former Speaker McCarthy would just resign and leave the new Speaker with even a more slender majority.
I'm sorry.
I just...
I think that is, quite honestly, outrageous.
I mean, I didn't want to run for a third term.
I'd rather just go home.
But I knew that I probably had the best chance of securing this and keeping this Wisconsin Senate seat.
At some point in time, you have to have your country's interests rise above everything.
So I think it's really quite outrageous for the former speaker to just cut out of here.
It's going to make it more difficult.
But I think the new speaker is just a really good person.
I think really smart, definitely conservative.
He's got an enormous challenge with a broad spectrum of opinion in his own conference.
And quite honestly, a Republican Senate leadership that's not particularly supportive of his efforts.
So there's conservatives in the Senate that are meeting with him on a regular basis, talking to him, doing everything we can to support his efforts.
And quite honestly, if you really look at this, it's the conservatives in the House and the Senate that are really leading the charge here.
It's conservatives in the House that actually got us by the debt ceiling moment, right?
Now, unfortunately, Speaker McCarthy frittered the leverage they gave him in passing, you know, The bill that they passed to increase the debt ceiling.
And then he didn't increase it by $1.5 trillion.
He suspended it to the tune of about $4 trillion.
So again, we've got problems in our own conference.
But I do encourage people who support conservative causes to recognize that the true opponent here, the party that is destroying this country, are Democrats.
And let's focus our energy on defeating Democrats, not engaging in a circular firing squad here amongst Republicans and conservatives.
Yeah, I make this point all the time, Senator.
In D.C., it's pretty much math.
218, 60, and 1. You have 218 in the House, 60 in the Senate, and one person signed it, that's how a bill becomes a law.
Other than that, you're basically a YouTube video.
And we've got to understand that on our own side.
When we have the majority, we've got to use that majority.
We do, and we need to use it intelligently.
I'm saying, what are achievable goals?
Again, they're frustrating to me, they're not satisfying to me, but I'd rather, you know, I'm a manufacturer from my background, so continuous improvement.
Senator, it's always good to be with you, my friend.
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