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Dec. 12, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
46:14
Episode 78 LIVE: Congress Is Broken (feat. Rep. Andy Biggs) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
So we're going to keep running those stories to get hurt again.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
We have the great one, Mark Levin.
Let's go ahead and play this for a second.
I would like to have your observations on this.
Congressman Gates.
Andy Biggs is part of the Freedom Caucus.
Andy Biggs is on TV all the time promoting himself as a conservative.
But a guy like that today parading around as Mr. Conservative Mr. Conservative with the Freedom Caucus, that he's going to bring conservatism to the House of Representatives is a joke.
He doesn't even fundamentally understand the Constitution.
I've called out Andy Biggs and four others in the House of Representatives who are trying to sabotage the election of a speaker in a what will be a Republican House where the Republicans have maybe a four or five vote majority.
Now what does that mean?
That means that these individuals can block the Republicans from choosing their speaker.
Which means it could go to the floor of the House, and there's already talk about this in the press, where liberal Republicans, moderate Republicans, could join with Democrats and wind up choosing a speaker who's quite liberal.
They talk about Fred Upton.
Fred Upton is a rhino.
Okay.
Hang on, the vitriol got a little worse after that.
The great one, Mark Levin.
And we understand Mark's got a lot of problems with us populist nationalists, but Mark's a good guy, super guy, and he knows the Constitution.
Why is he wrong there, Matt Gaetz?
Well, it's interesting to see Mark Levin follow the...
Flashy lures that are strung out by the mainstream press, like this notion that Fred Upton was going to be speaker.
Oh, yeah, everybody wrote articles about that and got all worked up about it.
And then they went and asked Fred Upton, are you a candidate for speaker?
And he said, no, I'm taking my wife skiing that weekend.
So it just shows you kind of how harebrained some of those red herrings are.
Keep in mind about Mark Levin.
Mark Levin was against Kevin McCarthy before he was for Kevin McCarthy, just like Mark Levin was against Donald Trump before he was for Donald Trump.
So who knows?
Being against Andy Biggs might be just like the first Mark Levin step to being Andy Biggs's campaign manager in the next election cycle.
Mark Levin said that Kevin McCarthy was a creature of the establishment and thus could never be speaker.
Those were his own words.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are live broadcasting out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building on the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. We have a lot of breaking news on the Hill this Monday.
We're going to get a key update regarding the growing effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.
I've got just the guy here.
To chat about that.
Our reaction to the latest dump of the Twitter files.
We've just got breaking news regarding the Democrats being unable to get the votes together for their government funding bill.
So we'll talk about what that means for the country and potentially an omnibus that would steal Republicans coming into control of the House of the opportunity to have a big spending fight.
But what everyone's talking about right now is the speaker's race because Kevin McCarthy does not have 218 votes to be speaker.
My colleague Andy Biggs, who has just been reelected to his fourth term, has announced that he is still a candidate for Speaker of the House.
I intend to vote for him and he joins us again on Firebrand now.
Andy, thanks so much for being here.
When we hear these scenarios like, oh no, we could have a Democrat speaker if Andy Biggs continues his candidacy, do you think that's something that ought to concern folks?
No, I don't.
I think that is a red herring.
I think that is a threat.
I think that's the McCarthy machine and the establishment machine working to try to scare the crap out of people.
And the reality is that would require a bunch of Republicans to say, you know what, we're really not Republicans.
We're going to vote for Democrat.
And it also is pregnant with this thought.
There is nobody in the Republican conference who can be the speaker other than Kevin McCarthy.
He's the only guy.
I find that to be absolutely ludicrous and actually condescending.
You wrote a recent piece where you talked about your candidacy functioning as a mechanism to break up the establishment, to bust up this DC cartel.
Talk to people in the country about the power centers that really exist in Washington.
You know, folks back home that want to be really engaged or informed, they may look at the roll call votes and see, were you on one side or the other?
And that certainly does matter.
It's why you've called for a number of those votes to be taken publicly.
But in terms of who really decides the agenda and the focus and the impact of this place, where do you see that playing out and why is that wrong?
So where the power is centered is there's four people in Congress, two in the Senate, two in the House, that really kind of control everything.
In fact, they call it, they have the audacity to call it a four-corners bill.
That means that the minority leader in the House, and the Speaker, and the majority leader and minority leader in the Senate, they've agreed to it, and they expect everybody else to respond.
So that's one power center.
So let me just pause you right there.
So when they talk about a four-corners agreement, I mean, it used to be in the Congress, I guess, we're currently in, That you could get two of those corners without even leaving the state of California.
Because you had Pelosi and McCarthy representing the House of Representatives, but really, I think, coming from a place with a particular worldview.
So this notion of top-down leadership, that's one power center.
What else?
Yeah, so then you also have two other power centers that that four corners place to.
It's the lobbyists, the K Street, the big moneyed interests, the special interests that are out there, and a lot of them like big tech, you know, you just name it, any big major interest, big pharma, those types of things.
They're going to respond to that because it's big money because if you're in the Four Corners group, you've got to raise a bunch of money.
So you're delivering on that.
The other one is, a lot of people don't talk about this, but it's big bureaucracy.
So you've got big government married to big money married to tight controlled power.
And we used to call that type of thing fascism.
Well, and those big moneyed interests want the bureaucratic system to be as complicated as possible because if you've got the armies of lawyers and lobbyists and accountants and consultants, you can attack that bureaucratic system and you can actually bend it to your will.
And so that's not free market.
That's not giving everybody an opportunity to get ahead.
That is a system in Washington that is weaponized against the American people, Often, no matter which party is in charge.
But the McCarthy team has been out there pushing hard.
This doomsday scenario where a Democrat might be elected speaker.
And there was a great piece in Politico.
Rachel Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.
Politico playbook.
Busting the unity speaker bubble.
And it goes through a list of reasons why this will never happen.
The first of which, the most obvious...
Any strategy that would have a more moderate Republican elected would require every Democrat to vote for a Republican.
Now, you've got Democrats that don't even want to vote for other Democrats someday, but Andy, how likely is it that every single Democrat, all 212 of them, would vote for any Republican?
It's impossible.
They just elected Hakeem Jeffries.
Hakeem Jeffries is the Congressional Black Caucus' leader.
He is the guy that, for decades, that CBC has been trying to get someone in leadership.
Now they have this guy.
And CBC is basically going to say, if you're going to take away our guy, And to vote for a Republican, we're going to burn the place down.
And if you think what the squad did was bad, or if you think holding out and trying to leverage what votes we have on this is bad, you watch what happens if the Democrats reject Hakeem Jeffries for a Republican.
Yeah, hear us now.
You know, Andy Biggs is telling you, I'm telling you, there is no way that Hakeem Jeffries does not have every vote of every Democrat on every ballot.
And it's not us just saying this.
It's listed as the number one reason why some notion of a moderate Republican would never be accepted.
The second reason that this piece identifies is that there is no negotiation or back channel even happening right now Between moderate Republicans and Democrats.
Now, we heard Don Bacon go out and say, well, we could reach across the aisle.
Have you seen any evidence that that's happened?
No, no evidence.
If there was evidence there'd be somebody besides Don Bacon saying how mad he is at us, there would be people from the Democrats saying, oh, yeah, maybe so.
But just yesterday, even on CNN, you had a Democrat saying that, oh, well, it's not going to happen.
Because it's not going to happen.
The Republicans, and they're not the moderate, they're the kind of more liberal Republicans, they're on the other side of the spectrum of you and I, but they would have to basically manipulate a whole host, literally dozens and dozens of Democrats and Republicans in order to make that happen.
There are no secrets in Washington, D.C. None at all.
And so if there was some actual coalition of multiple members working together, everyone in this town would know about it.
And by the way, every reporter would be dying to get the scoop on the next one.
And here you have Politico saying, we've searched everywhere and there's no real evidence this is happening.
And you know what that proves?
That Don Bacon's statements are nothing more than a McCarthy op.
And I know Don Bacon.
I like Don Bacon.
We sit next to each other on the Armed Services Committee, care a lot about national defense together.
But what Don Bacon is saying is not sincere.
It is just an operation being run on behalf of the McCarthy coalition to try to scare those of us who are trying to actually change Congress Into accepting just kind of the next iteration of swamp-controlled decision-making.
Am I too aggressive to call the bacon thing just a McCarthy op?
No, that's exactly what it is.
You know, Matt, everything we're talking about, what you're going to bring up next, they all point to one thing.
The establishment is in control.
The establishment doesn't matter what party it is.
Its purpose is to maintain control and power.
And so you're going to see these rather macabre ops that are coming out there like, oh, we're going to come together.
Hillary might be Speaker.
Liz Cheney's the Speaker.
This is crazy talk.
Yeah, and the next reason that Politico outlines is that in any sort of hypothetical deal, Democrats would want something in return, and if Republicans were to surrender that, that would be the death of those candidacies in any upcoming primary.
They say that it is a surefire recipe for a primary challenge to any centrist Republican.
Now, if you're a frontline Republican, a centrist Republican, you don't want to be challenged in the primary because you We likely already have a general election that is very costly and requires a lot of effort.
And so the notion that centrist Republicans are going to go surrender away the powers of the House of Representatives to Democrats and then have to explain that to primary voters down the road defies every feature of political physics.
Yeah, exactly.
And the final one...
Is that Democrats frankly don't mind watching the GOP squirm.
And look, I wish that making the demands that we are making for a better Congress, a more honest institution, a more transparent institution, I wish that didn't require discomfort in our caucus.
I wish that every single person held the views that you and I frequently hold about the need To transform Congress.
But sometimes you have to make even members of your own team a little uncomfortable.
And real leadership is not just always giving the rah-rah speech at halftime, right?
You know, we underperformed.
In the lead up to this election.
And sometimes we have to have that discomfort to say, you know what, maybe if we like embrace better policies and have better leaders, more inspirational figures guiding our decision making, maybe we won't need 12 to 15 million dollars, you know, for every frontline seat that we have to go raise from lobbyists and special interests.
Maybe we'll just do what we said we would do for the people.
Yeah, I mean, amen to that.
And, you know, I want to add one other thing here that I think is just important to say.
We were told when we were in the minority, oh, you can't have a change in leadership.
By the way, Kevin's been in leadership for 12 years.
So we were told you can't have a change in leadership because we're in the minority.
That would be bad.
And then we were told that we were going to get 20 to 40 seats and we'd have this massive majority.
And we couldn't change the trajectory of Congress because Kevin would have deserved it.
And now we're being told, It's just too doggone close.
In other words, what they're saying is, you can never change The direction of this Congress, this congressional body, because, well, it'd be uncomfortable, it'd be awful, it'd be awkward, it'd be...
And the reality is, it's because they never want to lose the establishment.
They never want to lose the control and power.
And I'm grateful for you because that's what we're trying to do here, is break down that power structure so that people can actually, members of Congress can actually represent their districts.
And we...
We can't even go down and amend the bills on the floor.
You have a $2 trillion bill, and you can't go down and have a meaningful debate or offer amendments.
It's out of control, except for those four people.
Several of our colleagues, seven of them, in fact, have prepared a memorandum regarding the important requirements of leadership of anyone who would want to be Speaker of the House.
Those in the press have really categorized it as a sort of, you know, Message to McCarthy that he doesn't have their vote in the absence of these things, but let's go over the goals of this movement.
What are the goals of the people who are trying to maybe shake up the leadership race and not have everything be a coronation?
And one of the first ones is to have 72 hours to read the bill text That is unwaivable.
Now, that just seems like something both parties should support, that every American would support, and sometimes you're dealing with bills that are thousands of pages, so really 72 hours isn't enough for these complex bills, but what kind of pushback have you gotten as we've presented this to even our Republican colleagues?
I've been told that there's just no way that we're going to have to go.
And as a prime example, the bill that we just did, 4,408 pages with a 36-hour window to look at it.
A complex bill filled with all kinds of interesting things.
But I've been told that if that happens, we will stultify, we will stop this.
Stop the process of Congress.
And I'm like, stop the process.
Why can't we just at least read the bill?
Why can't we have debate?
But you know the real reason.
Yes.
The real reason is that they don't want us to have the chance to really see what the operative effects are of the legislation because then we would have stronger critique of bills that don't always serve the interests of the folks who send us here to work for them.
I had a very powerful committee chairman tell me once, Well, Gates, the reason we don't give you guys the bills in advance is legislation's a lot like roadkill.
It gets picked after too much after about 48 hours in the sun.
And, you know, that is supposed to be the deliberative process that our fellow Americans deserve.
So know this, as Andy and I are fighting with the seven certainly who've signed this memo and many others to try to open that up, there are people in this town who think that the only way this town can work is if we don't really know the operative effects of the legislation when we're required to vote on it.
Another demand in this memorandum is single subject.
The requirement that every bill address a single subject and that the appropriations bills be considered separately, not just as one up or down votes.
So you've got to vote for the troops and keeping our military funded right alongside funding some of these woke agencies.
Walk through your vision on single subject.
So single subject would, I mean, even that's probably too broad because you can just kind of morph a bunch of things into subject.
But what that would do, ostensibly, that would be the first step to letting us actually have control.
So where you don't see, you know, this is the first thing that comes to mind is like, let's say like a DACA amnesty bill in a National Defense Authorization Act.
It's where you wouldn't see something like a safe banking act, which is the marijuana banking act, whether you're for it or against it, in the National Defense Authorization Act because it has nothing to do with that.
You would actually silo some of these votes So the American people could see what we're voting on, members would see what we're voting on, and you would not have the leverage that the leadership uses, because they use this as leverage.
I mean, that's what it's all about.
Yeah, I mean, if you want to know the nitty-gritty, if you're watching and wondering, well, why would you ever have to vote on water infrastructure at the same time as the defense authorization?
Why would you have to vote on an issue regarding the war powers...
In Yemen and the Farm Bill.
The reason is that as the leadership is trying to construct a way to 218 votes on something, they realize that some of these ideas cannot get the votes on their own merit.
And so they have to hang ornaments onto the tree, hoping that that will become a payoff to get two or three votes here, or an incentive to get four or five votes there.
And so it's not...
Worthy of the greatest country on the planet Earth to sit there and legislate like you're building a Mr. Potato Head doll, right?
And that's ultimately what a lot of these bills look like and it's one of the principal demands being made.
Conservative representation on committees is another demand in the memo.
Explain to people why this need is not currently being met.
It's not currently being met because, like on the Appropriations Committee, leadership does not want to have people in there that are going to say, we're going to vote no on this because it's going to bust our spending and increase our deficit, which will in turn increase the national debt.
They want to have control of the committees.
So most conservatives are kind of funneled into two or three committees.
We're on natural resources, we're on judiciary, and we're on oversight.
But you're not going to find us on appropriations.
You're not going to find too many of us on house armed services.
You're not going to find us on anything That the leadership wants to have control of, and you're definitely not going to find this on rules committee in any kind of significant ratio.
The appropriate ratio would mean that the chairman or chairwoman is going to have to deal with It's almost like if you want to be on the War Committee, you've got to be for the wars.
If you want to be on the Appropriations Committee, you have to be for all of the appropriations.
If you want to be on the Foreign Affairs Committee, you have to be for more foreign affairs.
You know, if you want to be on the Committees that oversee banking and insurance, you have to be captive to those lobbying interests.
And what we're saying is that, look, we've got a cross-section of ideologies in this conference, and I don't purport to say that every committee should just have folks that are in the Freedom Caucus or Freedom Caucus-aligned.
I think that every committee needs to reflect the ideological sort of bandwidth of our conference.
That way, if there are issues with bills where maybe, you know, there's something that the moderates will not vote for that you and I want, I'd rather sort that out in committee working on those matters rather than have it come to the floor and say, well, we don't have the votes for it, so we have to bootstrap some other crazy legislation to try to force it over the finish line.
Well, that's what a committee's for.
The committee is for the hot debate, the push-me-pull-you that's supposed to come in legislating.
And then everybody else should say, well, we trust it because it's come out of this committee.
We know that they've fought hard over this thing, but that isn't the way it happens today.
The only thing I trust when a bill comes out of committee in Congress now is that the lobbyists who lobby that committee are okay with the bill.
Not that it's actually good for my constituents.
And so you have to think about the committees now as totally captive creatures to the interests that lobby those committees.
That's how you get on those committees.
That's how you fundraise off those committees.
And what we're saying is if you had ideological diversity And not just Freedom Caucus and Freedom Caucus-aligned people, also folks from the more centrist groups, then it would be about something more and something meaningful.
Fran on Rumble says you also have her vote for speaker, so I don't know which congressional district she represents, but a lot of folks saying we need to fight hard, that these are valuable, and Star on Instagram saying that the power needs to be with the people.
And that's really what this drives at.
The people do feel like the government has been weaponized against them.
And there is an organizational demand about the House of Representatives in this memo our colleagues have signed for a church commission.
And you and I are on the Judiciary Committee.
We're going to be focused a lot there on the FBI and the national security apparatus being weaponized against people.
But then on the Armed Services Committee, I'm going to be looking at DOD and its weaponization against troops.
And then on oversight, you're going to be looking at these foreign entanglements of the Biden family and how that's shaped China policy.
And the argument in this memo is that...
All of those committees need to do that work, but at the end of the day, this has to crystallize in a church commission-style report.
Do you agree with that analysis?
Yeah, I do, and I'll tell you why, because I do think the committees have the bandwidth to handle certain things, but the church-style commission would basically say things like, okay, what we have found is this interlocking weaponization of the federal government.
And what we're going to do is we need to stop that.
And they can provide prescriptions.
They can subpoena people.
And they can give due process, unlike the phony January 6th committee.
You're actually trying to get to the root of the problem.
You're trying to find out what has happened.
You're trying to find it out in a proper, due process way.
And it'll take a long time.
But when you get to the bottom of it, you have to do that to clear out the underbrush that's been going on.
And we're finding out more and more with these Twitter dumps that are coming out that Elon Musk is providing.
You're going to find that most of what we thought, what we were saying, and everybody said, oh, you bunch of conspiracy theorists.
It turns out that there really was a conspiracy.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, for those of you watching the speaker's race closely, there were 36 votes that Kevin McCarthy did not capture when Republicans got together to make a speaker designation choice.
Of those 36, zero have come out publicly saying their mind has been changed and now all of a sudden they intend to vote for Kevin McCarthy.
Zero of them.
Five of us have come out to say that we really can't envision a circumstance voting for Kevin McCarthy given his recalcitrant to some of these goals we have for the House of Representatives to be more transparent, open, and just available for lawmakers to be able to serve the needs of our constituents.
And now an additional seven Including Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Representative-elect Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Chip Roy of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Representative-elect Eli Crane of Arizona.
These additional seven are coming out and saying...
This isn't about a person to us.
This is about a series of policy goals.
And the number one thing that was listed is the motion to vacate.
And the motion to vacate being really the enforcement mechanism for these other goals.
And I know this sounds like inside baseball, but I mean, this is how power and who wields it is going to get crafted in Washington, D.C. So it's very important for people to understand that for 200-ish years, A single member of the body could call for a no-confidence vote, essentially, on the presiding officer.
And it was rarely, if ever, used.
I think you could count on one hand the number of times it was used in over 100 years.
And really, the goal is to never use the motion to vacate, to never have to use the motion to vacate.
And you know what?
If the Democrats want to do it every single day, we can do the prayer, the pledge, and vote.
To keep our speaker intact.
But what it ensures is that when we agree to these rules, that there will be accountability.
Is that your vision for the motion to vacate?
Yeah, I mean, the key word is accountability, as you say.
I mean, I think I know where you are.
I know where I am.
You know, when I look at Mr. McCarthy, I have a certain reticence because I think he needs I think he'd be willing to say, yeah, I'll give you everything, but I'm not going to give you the motion to vacate.
Now, why is the motion to vacate important?
Because when he violates these rules or attempts to waive these rules, which we haven't even talked about the waiver, that happens on every bill, they waive the rules of the House, then We can go to him and say, wait a second, you just waived these rules that you negotiated to put in there, and we're going to hold you accountable.
But if you can't hold him accountable, I'm going to just predict right now.
He's going to waive these rules as often as the conference lets him, and by the way, the conference is going to probably let him do it a lot.
Our goal is to ensure that principled conservatives do not trade the cow for the magic beans.
And this entire negotiation, this entire process, will be wholly fruitless if rules changes to the institution are not undergirded with a motion to vacate that any one member can execute.
It is the principle enforcement mechanism It is a total deal breaker, it seems, not only for my seven colleagues who spoke through their own words in the memo, but for many others who I've chatted with inside conversations these last several weeks.
And, I mean, isn't the reason we need the motion to vacate because we don't trust Kevin McCarthy To deliver on any changes to the rules that he promises.
Yeah, no, that is exactly right.
And by the way, you had for literally 150 plus years a motion to vacate, actually since the early 1800s.
You know who changed it was Nancy Pelosi.
And we're not asking for anything that's historically outrageous.
We're actually asking for what has been the norm in the United States Congress.
And there is an amazing red line reticence on the part of Kevin because he doesn't want to be held accountable.
He wants to be able to make these promises and say, yeah, I'll do anything, anything you want.
And then that's betting on the come.
That's betting against yourself, in my opinion.
What I want to know is, is there a mechanism to hold you accountable?
I'm glad you mentioned that because you watch some of the coverage of all of this and folks are like, well, the right-wing conservatives are making crazy demands.
And like, what?
The crazy demand that seems to be hanging up McCarthy the most is to return to something that we've had for, you know...
More than a century.
And then he prefers to defend something more akin to the Pelosi rule.
I don't think that that makes us outrageous in our demands.
But my plan is to vote for Andy Biggs.
Andy has been a presiding officer in the Arizona Senate where he led a majority that was how many seats?
Two seats.
Two-seat majority in the Senate and still got a lot of stuff done for conservatives.
And I think that the size of this majority dictates the type of leader we need.
We need a leader with broad trust and confidence across the various groups within the Republican majority.
And just the fact that we have to enforce these rules Based on something other than trust shows you, I think, all you need to know about the McCarthy candidacy and its ultimate destiny.
Andy, there is breaking news in the Congress now I want to get to.
But first, you have a great podcast.
What's the Biggs Idea?
How can folks find your podcast?
And how can folks follow you on social media before we go to the government funding?
You can find me on Twitter at RepAndyBiggsAZ.
You can go to What's the Biggs Idea on Apple and...
Every other good, your neighborhood podcasting distribution center.
You had a good conversation with Bob Good regarding a lot of these issues.
Yes.
That if you want to get deeper into some of the rationale and some of the currents that are running through this leadership race, I strongly recommend that episode.
So, breaking today.
Democrats were supposed to release their funding package.
And we get this from Bloomberg government.
Democrats put off plan to release funding package.
They are abandoning the release of this bill.
They are extending us to the 23rd of December.
They don't have Republican support for this omnibus spending legislation.
Your thoughts?
Yeah, so I saw Leahy was giving it a different spin this morning when I was watching him.
He was like, well, you know, I'm so confident we're going to put it off.
Well, that's exactly not what happens when you are confident you've got the votes.
So they don't have the votes.
And this is a very good thing for us because we need the Senate to kill the omnibus bill, which is this big, massive spending package we've been talking about.
Because if that passes, Matt, it's going to fund the government all the way through next September.
And what that does is that takes away 95% of the leverage that we will have against the Biden administration.
And what most people forget is we will be moving into the fall of 2023, which is the kickoff of the presidential cycle and this place will basically shut down.
I hate to tell you American people, but this place kind of shuts down for the presidential campaign.
We'll just do one or two things along the way to make it look like we're doing.
That's performance art, but the reality is We have got to stop the omnibus.
And quite frankly, this is where Kevin McCarthy could show he has leadership chops.
He's not doing so.
He needs to be out there talking about killing the omnibus bill, do a short-term spending bill so that the Republicans can be in control of the budget come January.
This is the swamp's play to keep control of spending for as long as possible before Republicans have even the opportunity or the platform or the vote to deliver on the promises we made on the campaign trail to rein in the spending.
The principal mandate that Republicans have after the midterm election in the House of Representatives is to curtail inflation.
And we won the argument that the driving factor of inflation wasn't Vladimir Putin.
It wasn't some global economic condition.
It was government spending.
And so here we are trying to present that fight to even have the opportunity to battle on it.
And the cards are being dealt from under the deck just away from us with Republicans in the Senate who are retiring and just want their earmarks and pork to bring them to their district, and Republicans in the House who might prefer to not have the fight and might be all too willing to allow the lobbyists in the swamp to win.
So we are fighting against this omnibus spending legislation for that reason.
Democrats don't seem to have the vote.
How does it end, Andy?
It's going to end.
We're going to do a short-term spending, and then they're going to come through with the omnibus.
I have bad news.
I think that the senators will cave, Republican senators will cave, and give it away.
Our people elected us to fight, and if the first opportunity we have to kill a massive spending bill, we don't take that opportunity, then...
It will be demoralizing to the people that were expecting more of us.
Exactly.
Exactly right.
And I just want to just comment on that.
The fight is in the Senate, but a lot of people forget we have a voice in the House even though the fight's in the Senate.
That is what leadership chops would do.
There should be a letter that we've all signed to Mitch McConnell.
There should be a press conference on the steps of the House.
There should be a meeting called between the appropriate chairs in the House and in the Senate.
There should be continuing pressure put on the Senators by the House leadership team.
But they're MIA right now.
Very disappointing and hopefully not a sign of things to come.
You are leading the fight on this effort to impeach Ali Mayorkas, and I want to get to that because you've got big news coming later in the week.
The movement is growing.
You are assembling more and more Republicans.
What are people seeing in the Congress now that are bringing more and more folks to this impeach Mayorkas effort?
Well, we still have an uphill climb with some of our colleagues, but the reality is you just look at the border.
Just look at the sheer numbers and then we can talk about the more granular effects.
So on the border, 73,000 plus known gotaways in November.
205,000 roughly encounters.
Unknown Godaway is estimated to be somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000.
Think about that.
Roughly 300,000 to 350,000 people illegally entered our country.
Title 42 is going away.
That will jump it up to about 18,000 people a day coming into this country.
The violence that is erupting.
We had a CBP agent killed last week.
The drugs that are coming, record amounts, but we still get the same percentage.
So you might be interdicting more, but you're still only getting 7% of what we estimate totally coming in.
The fentanyl deaths, the opioid crisis, the human and sex trafficking is permeating the country.
And right now, if you could get CBP intelligence to go on the record, they would tell you, There is not a community in this country that does not have a Mexican cartel presence in this country.
And all the time, you've got Alejandro Mayorkas saying, we're not going to remove people, the 1.25 million people who've been ordered to leave the country.
We're not going to remove them.
There's no plan to remove them.
There's no plan to remove them.
Instead, in fact, what they're talking about is amnesty.
To grant amnesty.
And every time they ring that amnesty bell, it just churns up those caravans.
Exactly right.
So when is the press conference that you're leading on the Impeach Mayorkas effort?
How can folks follow?
The press conference...
Oh, Matt, you asked me these specific questions.
The press conference is this week.
I want to say it's tomorrow afternoon.
Okay.
It'll be...
Are you streaming?
How can folks follow?
Yes, it will be live streamed.
You can go to my website, bigs.house.gov, and see the live stream there.
It will be live streamed by one of the networks.
I can't tell you which one because I can't recall.
I'm just leading it.
That's all, Matt.
Very well.
Well, I'm glad you're leading the effort because I do believe that impeachment is the proper tool when people are violating their duty on purpose.
I'm not for political impeachment.
I'm not for reflexive impeachment.
I'm not for impeachment because people use bad judgment.
But this is not an issue of bad judgment.
They're doing this on purpose.
Everybody is talking about the shakeup in the Senate, driven by the Arizona delegation.
I heard on one of the Sunday shows someone say, well, you know, Kyrsten Sinema for a long time says she's friendly with Andy Biggs, that they actually have a working relationship.
So, I mean, this evolution of Kyrsten Sinema from, you know, almost Green Party activist to now not associating with the Democratic Party is quite the evolution.
And it seems you've had a front row seat to it.
Well, you know, she and I served together for a long time in the Arizona Legislature.
I will just say this about Kirsten.
I was sitting next to her on the plane going home, man.
So the flight was actually 520. So about six hours we're sitting there.
We're just talking back and forth periodically, you know, about life and everything else because we're friends.
She didn't tell me this was going to happen.
I get off the plane and I'm walking to my car and I'm like, what?
But the reality is she's going to vote with the Democrats most likely, but she's not going to caucus with them.
She is an independent-minded person.
Her mantra, and we have the same mantra, quite frankly, it's just we're on the other side.
It goes like this.
If you've got a good idea and a good policy that I think works for the country that's constitutional, I'll get on it.
And she's kind of that way, but she leans to the left far more than you may.
I wonder whether or not this was an act of true disassociation or whether she just looked at polling that showed she was going to lose a Democratic primary to Ruben Gallego.
And by her declaring that she's an independent now, the Democrats are Presented with this choice of whether or not to field a candidate against her.
And if she punches through to a general election, she's obviously a stronger general election candidate than she is a primary candidate, right?
Yeah, no, that's right.
So the Democrats in Arizona censured her.
They're ticked off at her because of the filibuster issue.
And by the way, she's held that for 20 years.
We've known each other 20 years.
She's had the same position.
So that wasn't a political expedience.
That was a deeply held belief.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So the next thing happens is if...
So Rubin will probably be the Democrat candidate.
He's licking his chops because now he doesn't have a primary, probably.
Yeah, but good luck for him getting through a general if Sinema's in there.
Yeah, so Sinema will be in there because all she has to do in Arizona is you have to just get signatures.
So you don't have an election at all.
And then you're going to have a Republican.
Maybe it's Blake Masters again.
I don't know who it'll be.
So it's going to be a real...
Hobbs and Choice there in some ways because for Republicans, we like Kyrsten Sinema because she's open, she's transparent, she votes a lot of ways, and certainly the Chamber of Commerce.
Loves Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona.
So how does that shake out?
I don't know.
Everything weird in politics has some association with Arizona these days.
You guys were like a sleepy western state for so long where people went to escape the army from chasing them down.
But now, everything going on in Arizona is at the top of the political headline.
Andy, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for running for speaker.
Thanks for being in the fight.
Thank you.
I'm grateful for this discussion because as we have reporters hound us all week, we can point to the goals of this movement, the objectives that are not rooted in any personality conflict, but that are truly rooted in an opportunity, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, To change the way the House of Representatives works.
And if we accomplish that, it probably won't even matter who the speaker is because we'll have an open, honest place to serve and our constituents will be all the better for it.
What's the Biggs Ideas?
The podcast.
Follow him at RepAndyBiggs, right?
RepAndyBiggsAZ.
RepAndyBiggsAZ.
Thanks for joining me.
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