Jan. 11, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
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| Thank you. | |
| You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay? | |
| Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero. | |
| We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight. | |
| I want to thank you, Matt Gaetz, for holding the line. | |
| Matt Gaetz is a courageous man. | |
| If we had hundreds of Matt Gaetz in D.C., the country turns around. | |
| It's that simple. | |
| He's so tough, he's so strong, he's smart, and he loves this country. | |
| Matt Gaetz. | |
| It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you. | |
| We will save America! | |
| It's choose your fighter time! | |
| I'm sending the Firebrand. | |
| Welcome back to Firebrand. | |
| It's 2024. We're here broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. And I see already from the comments, several of you have missed me. | |
| Haven't gone anywhere but... | |
| Over the holidays, we give our team a little bit of a break, but there have been a lot of negotiations. | |
| We've been down to the border to continue to observe the disaster there, and so really this is a catch-up episode for everybody regarding what's going on at the border, these budget and... | |
| Government spending negotiations, the investigations into the Bidens and hunters showing up in the circus-like atmosphere, and also what we see going on around the world and with our Defense Department. | |
| So glad to have you back. | |
| Looking forward to a productive 2024. And frankly, it needs to be better than 2023. 2023, we saw the nation go in the wrong direction. | |
| Prices continue to rise. | |
| And we saw a level of, I think, departure from the policies Even more so during that year, the Biden administration. | |
| The only lever of power that Republicans have is the House of Representatives, so we have to use it. | |
| We just have to. | |
| We have to use the power of the purse, the power of the subpoena, and we've got to have the will to endure a little bit of political pain to deliver on what is... | |
| Necessary at this stage of the game to reverse the decline of the country, and there's no disputing that. | |
| So now let's go to the border. | |
| I went to Eagle Pass, Texas recently, a place that's been overrun by migrants, migrants, illegal aliens, migrants, what they call them, but really they're illegal aliens coming into our country. | |
| And here in this video you're seeing right now, you're actually watching Customs and Border Patrol cut the fencing and We're good to go. | |
| And to have these defensive barriers. | |
| And we should not have your federal tax dollars going to remove those barriers established by the state of Texas. | |
| So what you're seeing was given to me. | |
| It was video taken by someone who is a federal official. | |
| And they shared it with me when I was down there to see. | |
| There it is. | |
| Just real time. | |
| How the wires are being cut. | |
| The people are being brought in. | |
| And you're funding your own invasion in a lot of ways. | |
| But not enough. | |
| According to one Democrat congresswoman, the situation in New York has gotten very dire. | |
| You see their facilities being overrun, their social services being strained, and it is beyond the pale that this is Democrat congresswoman Representative Clark of New York saying what we really need are more illegal aliens. | |
| She's calling for more illegal aliens from New York. | |
| Representative Clark, take a listen. | |
| I'm from Brooklyn, New York. | |
| We have a diaspora that can absorb a significant number of these migrants. | |
| And when I hear colleagues talk about the doors of the inn being closed, no room in the inn, I'm saying, I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes. | |
| And those members could clearly fit here. | |
| Don't you see the tell in that? | |
| All that matters to some of these people in Congress is what's going to preserve my political power. | |
| She's talking about needing illegal immigrants in her district for the purpose of redistricting, because if you're able to demonstrate larger people, then you get more congressional districts. | |
| That's what this is about. | |
| And throughout America's history, there's always been a time where people have tried to create some mass suffrage or deprive mass suffrage in order to keep or limit political power of others. | |
| Great debates in the Congress over these questions in the time that America was grappling with the offals of slavery and how to count various slaves for the purpose of apportioning congressional districts. | |
| And here you have these people who oftentimes are in the slave trade because they're part of a human trafficking pipeline that ends up in a place like Chicago or Detroit or New York or Miami. | |
| And here you have Congresswoman Clark saying, we can absorb them. | |
| We can absorb them. | |
| How is that going? | |
| We've got a report from James Madison High School where children are no longer allowed to attend class in person because the very process of absorbing illegal immigrants that you just heard from Representative Clark isn't really going so well. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Students at a Brooklyn High School had to learn remotely today after thousands of migrants were relocated to their high school because of the storm. | |
| CBS2's Natalie Dudridge live in Midwood, Brooklyn at James Madison High School with more. | |
| Natalie? | |
| Outraged parents and some Midwood community members argued students' classes at James Madison High School should never have been moved online to make room for migrants to temporarily shelter in their gym and auditorium during Tuesday night's storm. | |
| What I'm talking about, the human issue here. | |
| It's inexcusable to do this to the students of New York City high schools, especially after all they've been through with COVID. They have to come up with another solution. | |
| They cannot do this to the school kids. | |
| Tuesday, city officials announced nearly 2,000 migrants would be bussed from their tent shelters at Floyd Bennett Field to James Madison High School due to concerns over the tent's ability to stand up to severe weather. | |
| We are doing this out of an abundance of caution because of the high winds. | |
| Officials said migrant families were bussed back to Floyd Bennett Field at 4.15 Wednesday morning. | |
| A timing decision New York State Assemblymember Michael Novikov also questions, along with the costs, staffing and planning required to move hundreds of people. | |
| I'm sympathetic for migrants too. | |
| I mean, I have no idea why they were moved during the night. | |
| You know, those people have kids. | |
| Why 4.15 in the morning? | |
| The school is closed anyway, so they could have stayed here until 6 or 7 a.m. | |
| Elected officials and community leaders say they can give the city a list of empty buildings much better suited to house migrants during the next storm than a high school would be. | |
| Meanwhile, we are told this high school is being cleaned and sports practices, they're still canceled today. | |
| We are back live. | |
| Mike on Facebook says this all really began when Ronald Reagan engaged in a mass amnesty and there's certainly a fair critique of the Reagan amnesty to be had and levied. | |
| And Alan on Getter with a critique of me saying, Matt, why didn't you grow a spine and become Speaker of the House? | |
| The answer to that question is that I would not have been able to even garner double-digit votes for such an endeavor. | |
| On this podcast, we have laid out extensively that I'm not a particularly popular person among House Republicans. | |
| It's not because I'm not conservative. | |
| It's because I think that we have to change this system in order to save the country and They just want to run the system. | |
| That's all that matters to a lot of my colleagues, just being in the majority so that it can be our hand on the wheel. | |
| But if our hand is on the wheel as we're driving over the cliff, that isn't exactly the win that some of them think it is. | |
| But appreciate, hey, maybe Alan will run for Congress and vote for me for Speaker one day. | |
| Then I'd have one vote. | |
| Maybe two. | |
| Let's see. | |
| I want to go now to some of the bravery that I saw on the border. | |
| Sasha, go ahead and put up some of these images we have of... | |
| This is Florida Fish and Wildlife. | |
| I was meeting with an Eagle Pass, also met with... | |
| Florida Highway Patrol, Texas State Police, Texas Guard, Florida Guard. | |
| And I gotta tell you, we have got some real patriotic Americans who are on that border who want the tools to secure us. | |
| And they know how to do it. | |
| You have highly effective water teams there that could establish a deterrent. | |
| You have guardsmen who have volunteered for the opportunity to go there. | |
| I met one Florida Highway Patrolman from South Florida. | |
| He said, when I heard that there was a chance To go to the border and to try to help defend my country, I signed up right then and there. | |
| And this was a young man of Hispanic descent who really viewed it as part of his obligation for safety and security to volunteer for this mission. | |
| And I didn't want to end my report on the border without giving great tribute to those from all over the country who have the patriotism in their heart to do this job if we will simply allow them to do it. | |
| And that's what ought to happen and it's what Biden's blocking. | |
| Now we go to a segment we like to call Around the World. | |
| Around the World. | |
| Today we address the evolving circumstances in Ecuador... | |
| And while there is all kind of media attention regarding the conflicts that are oceans away and continents away, right here in the sphere of influence that we considered the American sphere of influence in the Marshall Plan, we have a destabilized government, armed gunmen, taking over a national communications asset, their television station. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Tonight, this is the chilling moment armed men storm the set of a public TV channel in Ecuador, firing off guns and waving apparent explosives during a live broadcast. | |
| The studio crew taken hostage for at least 15 minutes on air as the country watched. | |
| Police later surrounding the station, arresting several suspects. | |
| And across Ecuador, fiery blasts rocking multiple cities, this one engulfing a police car. | |
| The wave of violence beginning just hours after Ecuador's president declared a state of emergency following a prison escape by notorious Los Choneros gang leader Adolfo Macias. | |
| The government battling with what they say are at least 22 different criminal groups angered by that state of emergency. | |
| Tonight, authorities say at least seven police officers have been kidnapped. | |
| Ecuador, once known as one of South America's most peaceful countries, seeing an explosion in recent years of organized crime-related violence linked to Mexican drug cartels. | |
| We are back live and I want to talk about how to think about this destabilization in Ecuador. | |
| There's one theory of the case that it's a dangerous country and gangs rise up, a little bit of violence, but ultimately this is something where the government will prevail. | |
| There's another line of thinking that we are now entering an era where the drug cartels have been given such a permissive environment. | |
| In Mexico, that they are now able to export their malign influence and destabilizing assets. | |
| So the cartels, having been given that home base in the Sinaloa Mountains throughout Mexico, now they're able to say, all right, our most permissive environment to operate is where you have weak nation states, weak borders, and then as people or drugs or weapons are moving around, there aren't a lot of barriers to that illicit movement. | |
| And when you have those strong nation states, it's problematic and they try to go topple them. | |
| In a way, it's the most devious iteration of the Banana Republic corporatization of governments in Latin America that we saw in the 70s and 80s. | |
| Bananas is a great book. | |
| I read about it. | |
| It kind of goes over how these companies like United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company that are now Chiquita and Dole, they would... | |
| Do everything they could to get a captive government to allow them to do whatever they wanted with banana plantations, to drive people off their land, to be able to access various growing contracts and growing rights. | |
| And so you'd have these fruit companies warring with each other over who got to install their puppet government. | |
| Well, take away the fruit companies and insert Mexican cartels. | |
| Because that seems to be pretty obviously what's going on right here. | |
| The cartels want access to the thoroughfares and the infrastructure. | |
| And they don't want a legitimate government to stand in their way. | |
| And when one does and has a state of emergency to try to counteract that malign influence, this is the reaction to retaliation you see. | |
| I've also got experts on my team who've briefed me that this could also be part of what you see with exporting more and more malign influence from Venezuela. | |
| You've seen Maduro make the argument about why Venezuela has a claim to like two-thirds of the country of Guyana and the Esequibo region. | |
| We covered that last year on Firebrand. | |
| So this could be another outgrowth of that effort at Venezuelan, South American hegemony. | |
| These things should concern us more than which guy in a sweatsuit is running Crimea. | |
| Because whether or not we have stable, legitimate governments in our neighborhood affects quality of life here. | |
| The connection is far more tenuous in places where we seem to be a lot more interested. | |
| One thing that... | |
| I want to talk about is this latest scandal with Secretary Lloyd Austin and Breitbart picks up our call for a hearing to determine how the Defense Department, after losing billions of dollars worth of assets in Afghanistan, after failing every financial audit that they've been put through, can literally lose the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was incapacitated. | |
| The reports are that he has prostate cancer. | |
| He had a procedure associated with that prostate cancer. | |
| We, of course, want the best for him in his short and long-term health. | |
| But he was incapacitated for five days. | |
| He was totally out. | |
| And his deputy, Kathleen Hicks, didn't think enough of being the acting Secretary of Defense for those days to terminate her vacation in Puerto Rico. | |
| I'm not making this up. | |
| Like, our military was being run by a lady on vacation in Puerto Rico and they didn't even tell the White House. | |
| Is Joe Biden so out of it and himself incapacitated that when other people are incapacitated, they don't even feel the need to, I don't know, let somebody know that somebody else should be running the military? | |
| Who was in charge of the force protection posture in Iraq where we're getting these one-directional drone strikes coming from Iranian-backed proxies? | |
| The Red Sea is like on fire right now with Houthis engaged in naval exercises against energy shipments. | |
| This is the time to not tell your boss you're going to be out for five days? | |
| There could be something else going on here. | |
| There could be a total breakdown in communication between the Pentagon and the White House, and this could just be one iteration of it. | |
| We have to explore this, and it's why I've called for hearings, and I'll be giving you updates regarding how the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee plans to proceed. | |
| I can tell you that there has been a joint expression of concern from Chairman Rogers and from the lead Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who we've had on the program, Adam Smith. | |
| Also, the Pentagon Inspector General will probe the Lloyd Austin hospitalization. | |
| This is news just coming in from a Bloomberg government And that, I think, is certainly an appropriate next action, but we shouldn't outsource that to the Inspector General. | |
| We've got to have the hearings in the United States Congress as well. | |
| We've also got a report regarding some of these really... | |
| Nasty and negative efforts from the January 6th committee to go and goose criminal prosecutions of President Trump. | |
| The goal of a congressional committee is not to try to create a yellow brick road for a prosecution. | |
| Of anybody. | |
| And that may upset some of you. | |
| Some of you might think all we ought to be doing is setting up to get handcuffs on people and anything short of that is insufficient oversight. | |
| It's not really our job. | |
| Our job is to use the power of the purse to make sure the law is being executed in accordance with our commands. | |
| And if it's not, don't appropriate money to those programs or those agencies anymore. | |
| We don't do that. | |
| That's what we should be doing. | |
| That would be nice. | |
| But in this particular case, we've got a report from Politico, and I'll read from it. | |
| In the spring of 2022, the committee staff, and remember, this is the committee staff handpicked by Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, They didn't just run through the typical Capitol Hill types. | |
| They went and got people out of CIA, FBI, state attorneys, attorneys general. | |
| They really assembled a legal dream team. | |
| They helped Fulton County prosecutors prepare for interviews with key witnesses. | |
| Georgia prosecutors probing Donald Trump's effort to subvert the 2020 election Got an early boost in the spring of 2022. It came from another set of investigators who were way ahead of them, the House January 6th Select Committee. | |
| Committee staff met quietly with lawyers and agents working for Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis in mid-April 2022 just as she prepared to convene a special grand jury investigation. | |
| This is an improper use of This is a corrupt collusion between Benny Thompson and Liz Cheney and Fannie Willis. | |
| This reporting is something that we could have gotten to a lot quicker if former Speaker McCarthy would have done as many of us demanded and as many of you on the live stream supported. | |
| And that is, use the January 6th committee for our purposes. | |
| Don't disband it. | |
| Put me on there. | |
| Put Jordan on there. | |
| Put MTG on there. | |
| Find the truth out about this stuff, and we would have gotten to this a lot faster, but it took some smart reporters at Politico to get the job done, and thus we now know, and we have to take action as a result of this to shut down the corrupt, illegitimately produced, and invigorated prosecution of Trump from Fannie Willis emanating from the January 6th committee. | |
| Now let's talk about Hunter Biden a little bit. | |
| He was on the Hill. | |
| There was the contempt hearing. | |
| Both the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, upon which I serve, have passed resolutions of contempt against Hunter Biden for not agreeing to answer our questions. | |
| This was Hunter Biden on the Hill getting a question I don't think he was expecting. | |
| Would you please, I'll answer your question if you'd be quiet and let me make a statement, okay? | |
| How of crack do you normally smoke, Mr. Biden? | |
| Hunter, what's your favorite type of crack? | |
| Are you on crack today? | |
| Mr. Biden, why did you put your dad on speakerphone with your business workers if you had no involvement in your business? | |
| Hunter Biden was not expecting those questions. | |
| Sasha, I think you got to give me a little... | |
| There we go. | |
| There we go. | |
| All right. | |
| So he wasn't expecting those questions. | |
| And certainly it's concerning the way he's treated the Congress and the subpoenas that finally we got out the door directed to him and his interests and his records. | |
| And here's what I would have done. | |
| If Hunter Biden would have shown up To a committee I was chairing to clown me, I'd have told him to step behind that microphone, I'd have waved the rules, sworn him in, and I'd have asked him this question first. | |
| Did you facilitate bribes to your father? | |
| He's either going to admit that he did, he's either going to deny it, which will function as a complete and total waiver of any executive privilege he would have, or any Fifth Amendment privilege he would have, or any other privilege he could conjure up, Because he would have denied it. | |
| So then he's opened the door to every follow-up question. | |
| Or he would have taken the fifth. | |
| Which is entirely his right. | |
| And just because someone takes the fifth, it does not mean they're guilty. | |
| But then he would have had to take the fifth in front of God and everyone. | |
| Instead, we get more of this stuff. | |
| And I wonder if the accountability is ever going to catch these guys. | |
| I really do. | |
| It should. | |
| But here we are. | |
| A year into the Republican control, and so far, the closest we've gotten Hunter Biden to the witness chair is sitting in the first row of the audience. | |
| It's not good enough. | |
| Nancy Mace was en fuego during that hearing. | |
| Take a listen and enjoy. | |
| First of all, my first question is, who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today? | |
| That's my first question. | |
| Second question, you are the epitome of white privilege. | |
| Coming into the oversight committee, spitting in our face, ignoring a congressional subpoena to be deposed. | |
| What are you afraid of? | |
| You have no balls to come up here and... | |
| Mr. Chairman, point of inquiry. | |
| Chair recognizes Ms. Mays. | |
| It does not matter who you are, where you come from, or... | |
| Who your father is or your last name? | |
| Yes, I'm looking at you, Hunter Biden, as I'm speaking to you. | |
| You are not above the law at all. | |
| The facts in this case are crystal clear. | |
| This committee used and issued a lawful subpoena to Hunter Biden, a critical witness in this committee's investigation into Biden family corruption. | |
| Hunter Biden and his lawyers did not claim privilege of any kind because clearly he has none. | |
| They didn't contest the legitimacy of our reasons for issuing the subpoena, no reasons, because they clearly are legitimate. | |
| And yet he refused to comply. | |
| Trump's family members, Don Trump Jr., He did not defy a congressional subpoena. | |
| He showed up multiple times for multiple depositions for several hours. | |
| In doing so, you know, Hunter Biden broke the law. | |
| He did so deliberately. | |
| You did so flagrantly. | |
| You showed up on the Hill on the Senate side the day of that congressional subpoena to defy it and spit in the face of this committee. | |
| That's what you did. | |
| I believe that Hunter Biden should be held completely in contempt. | |
| I think he should be hauled off to jail right now. | |
| Because it wasn't long ago, too, my friends on the other side of the aisle, that you also believed in the power of a congressional subpoena. | |
| Not long ago at all. | |
| You believed in holding those who refuse to comply with congressional subpoena accountable. | |
| Let me be clear. | |
| This should not be a partisan issue. | |
| If Congress issues a subpoena, you show up. | |
| Period. | |
| This is not a responsibility we take lightly. | |
| It brings no joy for us to do this, but the president's son broke the law and must be held accountable in the same way anybody else would. | |
| I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do so. | |
| And my last message to you, Hunter Biden, you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. | |
| I think we can call Congresswoman Mace a firebrand after that. | |
| She read the Riot Act right to Hunter Biden, explaining what questions she would want to ask him if he were willing to step forward. | |
| And it was no nonsense. | |
| And not to be outdone, Congresswoman Greene was up next. | |
| She was going to give a presentation that wasn't even going to result in Hunter Biden being able to stay in the room. | |
| As MTG got recognized, Hunter just literally got up and scurried away. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Excuse me, Hunter. | |
| Apparently you're afraid of my words. | |
| I'd like to reclaim my time, Mr. Chairman. | |
| Wow, that's too bad. | |
| I think it's clear and obvious for everyone watching this hearing today that Hunter Biden is terrified of strong conservative Republican women because he can't even face my words as I was about to speak to him. | |
| What a coward. | |
| A coward indeed, certainly proud of the efforts of Congresswoman Green and Congresswoman Mace. | |
| I do think we've got to turn up the heat, and I don't think we can allow these guys to walk out of the room. | |
| If we've got to send the House Sergeant-at-Arms to go and enforce congressional contempt with imprisonment, well then that's what we should do, because we've got questions that are central to whether or not our government's been sold out, and we should get answers to those questions. | |
| I want to now talk about where we are with budget negotiations and with the spending talks going on with Speaker Johnson, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, all the rest of us. | |
| But we have to set the stage here for why this matters. | |
| The inflation, the increasing price for almost everything that you are seeing is a direct consequence of government deficit spending. | |
| We are about to run $2.5 trillion annual deficits. | |
| We are at a $34 trillion debt. | |
| That is causing interest rates to rise, prices to rise, cost of cars, cost of homes, cost of debt, all of it. | |
| And you pay it. | |
| And so we don't fight against these spending programs because we're mean-spirited or we want to take people down. | |
| We do it because we don't think you should have to feel the pain of the gutlessness in this town. | |
| And that pain is real. | |
| Let's go to this Breitbart report. | |
| Inflation reignites. | |
| Consumer prices rose at an even faster pace in December. | |
| Inflation accelerated more in December, marking the 33rd consecutive month with annual prices rising significantly faster than the 2% target set as healthy by the Federal Reserve. | |
| The Consumer Price Index rose 3.4 in December from a year earlier. | |
| So we're looking for the 2%. | |
| We're still at 3.4. | |
| 33rd consecutive month with prices rising above that goal. | |
| And let me just give you an example of a few. | |
| Motor vehicle insurance, up over 20%. | |
| Food from vending machines, up over 13%. | |
| Uncooked beef steaks, up 11%. | |
| Transportation services up close to 7%. | |
| These are the things that Americans buy. | |
| These are the things that we need. | |
| And it's not because you've done anything wrong. | |
| It's that we won't subject the budget of the government of the United States to itemized review. | |
| And so where we stand right now, you've got Schumer and Johnson who have agreed to a top-line spending number that is too high. | |
| Here's how you think about it, okay? | |
| McCarthy made the deal with Biden and Schumer called the Fiscal Responsibility Act. | |
| I'll just call that the FRA because we can't even call it fiscally responsible. | |
| So they agree to an FRA number. | |
| Then, on top of the FRA spending number, McCarthy does $50 billion in secret side deals that he doesn't tell us, that he doesn't tell you, that he doesn't even tell other members of the House leadership team. | |
| So Johnson gets in, sits down. | |
| Schumer and Biden say, well, this is the freaking deal. | |
| It's what McCarthy agreed to. | |
| It's what we're going to hold you to. | |
| And Johnson successfully takes $20 billion-ish out of the $50 billion-plus in side deals and claws that back. | |
| It takes another fairly big bite out of the IRS. So you've got conservative economists like Stephen Moore, who we have a very high opinion of in this office and on this program. | |
| Stephen Moore says this is savvy. | |
| This is this big win for Johnson that he clawed back this $20 billion of the McCarthy side deals. | |
| He's proving better than McCarthy and shrewd in that regard. | |
| And then the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who hate me, Who totally disagree with the removal of McCarthy. | |
| Even they say, sheepishly, that Mike Johnson cut a better deal than McCarthy. | |
| All of it, bottom line, for you... | |
| It's not enough. | |
| It is not good enough. | |
| It is not even close to good enough. | |
| Okay, if we'd have gone to Kevin McCarthy and said, it's $20 billion and your side deals are your head, he'd have probably done the same thing. | |
| We need transformational change about how we think about the budget and continuing to trip along, continuing resolution to omnibus with exploding caps and supplementals that fund Ukraine or other foreign nations. | |
| That is what has put us in this position where you're paying 10% more for beef or 20% more for auto insurance. | |
| It's linked back to the devaluation of the American currency that is driven out of Washington, D.C. That's why we're trying to change it. | |
| So here's what a few of us said to the Speaker, and we had a relatively large group of members. | |
| Folks, you know, Byron Donalds, Cat Kamek, Scott Perry, Bob Good, Chip Roy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, we all went and met with Speaker Johnson. | |
| And I felt the consensus coming out of that discussion is that House conservatives are not going to tolerate a government funding bill while the border is open. | |
| You have to shut down the border or we will shut down the government. | |
| And I don't say that with any twinkle in my eye or any joy or any celebration for a shutdown. | |
| I know some of you on the live stream want to shut down. | |
| But I live in a district with a whole lot of troops, a whole lot of government contractors who are not at fault for this. | |
| The Customs and Border Patrol... | |
| Who are actually following the law, who care and love our nation, they did not do this, but they will have to disproportionately shoulder the burden of a shutdown. | |
| And I don't think some airman abroad or some sailor on the high seas should have to disproportionately shoulder that. | |
| I really don't. | |
| But we have no choice right now. | |
| There are no easy choices in front of us, okay? | |
| It is just hard choices. | |
| And if we do not get this budget under control, if we do not get this border under control, we are not going to have a country to defend. | |
| And so it's not joyful, it's not a pleasurable experience to go through this, but we have to. | |
| We have to shut down the border or shut down the government. | |
| And all these little games about modest, little minor adjustments... | |
| They function often to virtue signal, not to alter the shape of this corrupt system. | |
| So we will have more meetings later today with the speaker, more discussions with cross-section of our conference. | |
| We've had moderates and some of the big spending Republicans say, we don't want the border fight in the appropriations. | |
| As a matter of fact, one told me that just a couple hours ago. | |
| He said, I just want no chaos and no drama. | |
| I don't want the border fight to be included in how we think about government funding. | |
| It's just unrealistic. | |
| It's going to lead us to being overrun. | |
| And so we've got to build a reservoir of courage with House Republicans to fight on the border and to cut spending and to go after the Bidens and to go after the bureaucrats. | |
| If we do these things, victory is in sight. | |
| But if we do this Schumer deal, I won't be speaking to you next Congress from the position of a member of the House majority. | |
| If we do this deal that Chuck Schumer is applauding, we will be out of the majority because our own voters will look at us and say, what have the House Republicans done for me? | |
| What did you fight for? | |
| And we may fight and lose. | |
| We may fight and get rolled anyway. | |
| That happens a lot here. | |
| It's happened a lot to me over the last seven years. | |
| But if no one is making these arguments and deploying this leverage to fix the border, Then what is going to be left to fight over? | |
| Or preside over? | |
| Anyway, appreciate your help. | |
| Appreciate you guys being in the battle. | |
| Here's my ask. | |
| Here's your homework assignment. | |
| Reach out to your members of Congress. | |
| Let them know that you want to shut down the border or shut down the government. | |
| And if you do that, just maybe, we'll build enough courage among House Republicans to be able to go to battle for you and to win. | |
| Because that is what you deserve. | |
| Thanks so much for listening. | |
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| We hope we'll have another Firebrand before week's end and many more in 2024. Roll the credits. |
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