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Dec. 28, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:16
Senator Ron Johnson: How a Huge Federal Government Corrupts Everything
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As I'm meeting with them, we're talking about, you know, what's going to be our strategy.
Now, I've said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint.
We're nominated as the Secretary of Information Extraction.
As I'm talking to these people, if I have one concern is they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of Provide this information.
As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I'm sitting down with Ron Johnson, Republican senator for Wisconsin.
In the next Congress, Johnson will again become chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond.
Johnson has been a strong proponent of MAHA, What you need at the top of these agencies are people who have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do.
You've got to win the political argument.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
You've been a You're a supporter, proponent of a number of the prominent Trump nominations for the incoming administration.
What do you see as the real promise of this administration?
First of all, I think the primary thing that President Trump promised in the campaign In a macro-sensus, he was going to focus on the working men and women of this country.
What do they need to support their efforts?
How can he limit the damage that government does to those individuals?
Obviously, secure the border, make America great again, make America healthy again.
Those are all, from my standpoint, Let's talk about a few of the candidates.
You've been a big supporter of the Make America Healthy Again idea, and that's a great slogan.
Bobby Kennedy Jr., he used to be the Health and Human Services Secretary.
What actually needs to happen there?
So we'll talk about this repeatedly as we go through this process, but I come from a manufacturing background where you're solving problems all the time.
And there's just a very well-defined process you go through in solving a problem.
It starts with admitting you have one, which is oftentimes a very big step.
The next crucial step is properly defining it.
You know, once you've done that, now you need to start looking at the root cause.
What happens in Washington, D.C., is we generally start with somebody's solution.
It's a completely flawed solution, or it exacerbates the problem.
And, you know, we look at scores, we look at, you know, the political realities, can you get this passed, who's going to vote for it, as opposed to, no, let's go back to the basics.
So when it comes to make America healthy again, I think you have to understand, we have a problem.
And I think the American people understand we do.
You have this explosion in chronic illness.
And again, all you have to do is look back in history and take a look at the stats, whether you're talking about all the autoimmune, obesity, autism.
These things have exploded.
I'm almost 70 now.
You look back to when I was a child.
I'd never heard of things like lupus or autoimmune disease or autism.
I'd never heard of any of these things.
So, the American people are asking the question, well, what has caused this?
Now, people like Bobby Kennedy who have asked that question, positive theories, Ruthlessly attacked because we held that, and I think you were there, you were certainly aware of the public event I held the end of September with Bobby Kennedy and Casey and Callie Means and a number of nutritionists that have social media platforms.
Of all the excellent testimony, I thought the best snippet came from Dr. Chris Palmer.
He's a psychiatrist, does a lot of work on nutrition, impact on mental health.
And his statement was, to paraphrase, you know, they, whoever they is, they don't want to discover the root cause.
That's a profound statement, but it's 100% true.
Because if we discover...
That something causes autism or something causes obesity or something is causing all this thing.
That's going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models.
So those people who are engaged in those multi-billion dollar business models, they don't want to discover it.
They don't want their ingredient or their activity to be implicated or proven to cause All these ailments, you know, driving up our cost of health care.
So what they figured out, so that's kind of the basic definition of the problem.
You have science that's been corrupted, and you also have these federal agencies who are tasked with protecting public health thoroughly captured by the companies that they're regulating.
I cover the private sector.
I have no problem with big business.
I mean, big business has done all kinds of wonderful things.
Big ag culture has fed the world, okay?
But they've also, because government grows, okay, government regulates, government probably over-regulates, and so these businesses naturally figure out, well, how can we survive in this environment of over-taxation, over-regulation?
Well, they go beyond that.
I mean, they get smart enough to realize, oh, not only can we survive in this, but we can turn that regulatory direction.
We're going to turn our agency to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our competitors, and when you're turning it to the disadvantage of your competitors, you're crushing competition, and all of a sudden, the consumer gets crushed.
So, to me, the problem is government.
Government is power.
Power corrupts.
And so that power has been corrupted.
We need to uncorrupt it.
And, you know, Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address.
I mean, the primary warning, the famous one, was against the military-industrial complex, which we have not taken seriously.
And it has led us in all kinds of foreign policy debacles.
But the second warning was government funding of science and research.
He said it would produce a scientific and technological elite that would drive public policy.
Anthony Fauci.
You know, Francis Collins.
You know, what we saw during COVID. But I would go beyond that and say it corrupts science.
When you pay for research, you're going to get the result you want.
And so Fauci got the results he wanted.
And he doled out billions of dollars for research.
Big Pharma.
They're the ones funding the studies.
They're the ones that hold the data.
Now, they've so corrupted the process, for example, in the Pfizer injection.
They've so corrupted the agencies that it was the FDA that went to court To delay the public revelation of the trial data for 75 years.
Now, I'm sure Pfizer would have gone to court as well, but they didn't have to.
The FDA did it for them.
The FDA should have been all about transparency.
They should have been releasing that trial data as they were receiving it, so that not only their experts could look at it, which I doubt they did, and that's why they're covering it up, but The medical community could have looked at it and they would have said, whoa, hang on here.
There are more deaths in the trial group than there are in the placebo group.
These deaths aren't being reported on time.
We now have evidence of myocarditis a few months into the general administration of these injections.
But all that was hidden, and they continued to try and hide it.
So again, it's the corruption of science, and I think that's Bobby Kennedy's first task, is to bring integrity back to scientific research across the board, and then we need to end the corporate capture of these federal agencies.
And that corruption as well.
And that's a big task because we're up against, as we all know from COVID, those of us who are fighting that same battle, we're up against powerful forces.
They are going to be relentless.
And the people that are captured by them in the media, whether they realize it or not, they're doing their job as well.
So that's, I think, going to be one of the more challenging ones.
But in the end, I think Bobby Kennedy will prevail because the American people, in a completely non-partisan way, supports what he's trying to do here.
And we're back with Senator Ron Johnson, U.S. Senator for Wisconsin.
The thought that came to my mind as you're describing what needs to happen, is it even like make the agencies great again or make government great again?
No, please, no.
Make government small again.
The genius of our founding fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies, totalitarian regimes.
But they realize, you know, men and women, we're not angels.
If we don't want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some governing authority.
But they realize that governing authority would be, by and large, something to fear.
It had to be limited.
It had to be contained, which is, again, they're genius.
They've developed this system of government.
We have three branches that were supposed to jealously guard their own constitutional authority and power.
So that the other two branches wouldn't eclipse their branch in terms of ruling the nation.
And they also created a constitution that enumerated what the federal government could do.
Unfortunately, particularly during the FDR's New Deal, the federal government You know, busted out of the constraints of enumerated powers.
And now the federal government is massive.
Congress, because a bunch of wimps that don't want to be held accountable, they've willingly, over the decades, given their constitutional authority over the executive branch.
So we don't pass prescriptive laws anymore.
We pass these frameworks with a really nice name, like Patient Protection Affordable Care Act.
Didn't either.
It's like, here, administration, give us 20,000 pages.
You fill in the blanks.
You protect patients.
You make health care affordable.
Of course, they didn't do it.
So, from my standpoint, Congress has willingly given up a lot of its constitutional authority.
We don't have three co-equal branches of government anymore.
The executive is probably the most powerful Combined with the courts.
Congress is just a shadow of itself.
We've let our oversight authority atrophy.
We didn't enforce it.
I intend to, if I have support of my conference.
Well, okay, so that's actually very interesting.
Let's talk about that, because this is something that, frankly, isn't discussed as much prominently as we're looking at these various cabinet appointments and so forth.
You know, what is it that Congress needs to do to play its role as you're describing, really?
Well, we need to really understand that our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility.
Yeah, we've got to fund government, but then once we've funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded.
Did what we passed, did it actually work?
So again, I'd be a big proponent of splitting the appropriation process in half or maybe even thirds and appropriate either six or four accounts a year and then spend the next two or three years Or, you know, the next year, the following year, doing oversight over what we appropriated.
I mean, that would be a rational system here, okay?
But, you know, we absolutely have to do far more investigations.
We have to take that oversight capability seriously.
But evidence that we don't, I mean, I will become chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee Investigations, okay?
It is the premier investigatory committee, subcommittee of Congress.
We have the strongest subpoena authority.
Of any committee or subcommittee in Congress.
I mean, the House has theoretically the same, but they generally have to go through the Speaker's office.
I don't.
If I decide to issue a subpoena, I notify the chairman of the full committee, which I used to chair, and then I just issue the subpoena.
But that premier investigatory body has a huge budget, so I have five staff.
I have five investigators.
Now, they're good.
They do a lot of really good work, but five to do oversight investigations on a federal government that spends almost $7 trillion and employs a couple million people?
I mean, it's literally a joke.
Can that be changed?
I hope so.
But, again, as you well know, my areas of concentration have not really been all that particularly popular with my colleagues.
I mean, for example, I couldn't get the support of all the Republicans on my committee when I chaired the full committee because I had to get a vote to get a subpoena to subpoena the Bidens.
It was viewed as too political.
I was accused of, in public hearings, of misusing committee funds with my investigation of the corrupt Biden crime family.
Now, had we been able to pursue that, had I gotten those subpoenas, had we gotten the documents we needed, history might have been changed dramatically.
We probably wouldn't have the open border.
Joe Biden probably would not have won the election.
We would have obtained the Hunter Biden laptop well into 2020. Remember, McIsaac, when he turned that over to the FBI, the FBI on the way out the door said, you know, it's our experience that people who don't talk about these things don't get hurt, don't get in trouble, whatever.
I'm paraphrasing.
Even though they had that laptop, they had authenticated it, they wouldn't tell Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson, they wouldn't tell us, we've got it.
We took possession of it in December.
It's authentic.
There's no problem in you accepting that.
That's what they should have told us the day we contacted them.
They didn't.
So, the guy that got impatient gave it to Rudy Giuliani's attorney and he turned over the New York Post and the rest of his history.
You would like to see proper oversight over the FBI going forward.
So tell me what you think about the confirmation process for Kash Patel.
So I had this conversation with Cash, and obviously we worked with him when he was working in the Director of National Intelligence Office, and he helped us get documents, but we couldn't get all of them.
But I think Cash, very intelligent, says he wants to concentrate on fulfilling the agenda, fighting crime, restoring integrity to the FBI, which means probably decentralizing it again.
What has led to this corruption is they took all these Decisions that used to be run at the branches, independent of political influence here in Washington, D.C., they move people and the decision-making process to the political leaders of the FBI in Washington, D.C. So that corrupted the process.
So what Cash wants to do is, again, go back to an FBI that has greater integrity, a single system of justice, not a dual system, and from a standpoint of looking back, which we have to do, just open up The information.
Provide congressional committees with the information we need for our oversight attempts, and as we do that oversight, if we see criminal behavior, we can refer that criminal behavior for potential prosecution to the Attorney General.
I think that's a very common sense approach.
Certainly delivers on President Trump's promise when he said, you know, our retribution will be success.
He's not looking back.
Look what he did when he won first one in 2016, 2017. He announced, listen, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, although I think he could have successfully.
So, anyway, that's the approach.
And I think that's just going to be true for Bobby.
I think P. Hexner, they're looking forward.
They've got a big mess to clean up.
They're going to clean it up.
when it comes to looking back and holding people accountable, I think they're going to pretty well rely on providing us documents, opening up their agencies, making them transparent, which is what the American people should expect, and then have Congress do our oversight work.
And I just need resources.
So write your senator.
Provide Johnson the resources he needs.
You know, something just strikes me as I'm listening to you speak.
It would be interesting for, you know, I'm wondering to myself if these agencies, you know, you were talking about how power is inherently corrupting, right?
Could it be possible that these agencies will actually ask for oversight?
Because it doesn't seem like something that would normally happen, right?
Oh, no.
That's one of the reasons I'm very enthusiastic about these nominees.
They are asking.
As I'm meeting with them, we're talking about, you know, what's going to be our strategy?
Now, I've said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint or nominate is the Secretary of Information Extraction.
As I'm talking to these people, if I have one concern, they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of providing this information.
I went down to Mar-a-Lago a couple of springs ago, this is before President Trump was our nominee, really trying to determine, did he have a full grasp?
Of how his first term was sabotaged, undermined from within.
I think he does, and I think you're seeing that being reflected now in these appointments.
Of course, the establishment here hates, because these people are articulate fighters.
That's what they don't want to see in these agencies.
Trump needs people who can articulate What they want to do in these agencies, that are willing to fight for it, that aren't going to be tender flowers and wilt when they start getting criticized by the establishment, which is the legacy of corporate media.
You know, something struck me when I was interviewing Seb Gorka the other day, which was that it seems to be like the president is picking Almost across the board, strong communicators for these roles.
Do you agree with that?
Yes, yes.
And he needs them.
I think people will, again, the establishment are going to look at, well, he doesn't have a background in X, Y, or Z. He can hire the expertise in X, Y, and Z. What you need at the top of these agencies are people who, again, have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do.
You've got to win the political argument.
Something I was thinking about earlier is I became familiar over the past few years with the concept of subsidiarity and governance, basically the idea that you give the governance of any issue to the smallest possible unit that can handle it.
I haven't heard this discussed.
I have heard discussed by Trump, 10 regulations must be removed for any new regulation to be added.
That's kind of up the ante.
Yeah, we had the 1-2 rule.
He exceeded that.
I think at one point, his chief of arrival achieved something like 1-22 gone for every one.
I can't remember the exact figure, but it was massive.
And to my mind, it was that deregulatory effort.
That doesn't mean remove all regulations.
I mean, there are things the federal government should do.
But because they do all these other things, they do what they should do very poorly, or they don't do them at all.
But no, I mean, the vision of our founding fathers was a federated republic of sovereign states, government close to governed, where it's more accountable, it's more efficient, more effective.
So, I mean, schools, I mean, the education for our children ought to be occurring at the local level, as much as possible funded at the local level.
And from my standpoint, the only role the state ought to play in that is making sure that, you know, the funding is equally distributed so all child has an equal opportunity in terms of good education.
What rules does the federal government have in that?
I suppose there could be some disparity in states, rich states versus poor states.
Maybe there could be some leveling there.
But otherwise, there should not be a Department of Education.
I hope that is one promise that President Trump delivers on, ending the Department of Education.
But again, our form of government was supposed to be Most governing occurring in the states and the federal government doing only very few things that are enumerating the Constitution.
That's why I have in my office stenciled on the wall the Tenth Amendment, which is impossible to memorize because it's written in 17th or 18th century prose, but it basically says the Constitution grants governing authority primarily to the states, To the federal government, only as enumerating the Constitution, very limited.
The rest of the governing authority should occur in the states, but the power resides in the people.
So in the end, subsidiary, we are the sovereign, each individual citizen.
And federal government has formed primarily to ensure our freedom, protect our freedom, and protect us.
Safety, security, secure borders, defense of the nation.
And local government, state government, I mean, they're there to actually protect our persons in terms of law enforcement.
I mean, most laws, most criminal penalties should be state penalties.
We've criminalized way too many things at a federal level.
Shouldn't be involved that way.
Leave it up to the states.
Well, Senator Ron Johnson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
Thanks for having me on.
Thank you all for joining Senator Ron Johnson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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