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April 9, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
45:32
Episode 163: Illegal Spying Agenda (feat. Dan Bishop & Warren Davidson) - Firebrand with 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.
Wow!
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 fire brains.
I'm sending the fire brains.
I'm sending the fire brains.
I'm sending the fire brains.
Warren, I'd love to start with you.
It's your first time with us.
What has been your assessment of people's reaction to this Republican majority as you've chatted with folks over the last two weeks as we've been out of town?
Yeah, people are very frustrated.
They definitely feel like Republicans have squandered our majority.
They're like, you know, you guys said you were going to cut spending, and you said you were going to secure the border, and you said a whole lot more, and none of that's going really well.
And, you know, the one bright spot I could hold up is say, you know, a majority of the party actually said no thanks to the big spending bill right before this break.
So you gotta look for bright spots, and at least that was something.
This is the argument that Tom Cole, a Republican member from Oklahoma, said to me.
He said, Matt, you know, you seem discouraged and you reflect the discouragement of people who think we should be doing more, but without this Republican majority, we would have gotten another American Rescue Plan, another big spending bill, and at least we stood as a ballast against that.
In North Carolina, Dan, do you sense people are appreciative of what we've stopped or unfulfilled by the lack of our diligence?
North Carolinians do not consider, you know, it could have been worse without us being here, a great argument for having delivered on our mandate.
I hear it every time.
People come up to me.
I'm campaigning across North Carolina now in a statewide campaign.
It never ends.
People comparing other members of the Republican majority who did vote in favor of that bill.
They're fed up.
No, they're not consoled in any way by Tom Cole's excuses.
So $1.2 trillion in spending, 3,000 pages of legislative text.
They waived the 72-hour rule so that we couldn't give itemized review and due consideration to the things we were considering.
And then, as Congressman Davidson points out, a majority of Republicans vote no, but we still have over 100 who vote yes alongside the Democrats.
What feedback do you think they're getting?
Because I've had people ask me, well, why did this person vote for this big spending bill?
What was their justification or reason they gave you?
Frankly, when I talk to folks, their reason for voting yes was often some niche issue that they cared about, but that allowed us to go on a suboptimal path rather than having, I think, the boldness and courage to confront our economic conditions.
What do you think, Warren?
Yeah, I mean, I think, look, obviously, everybody left of center thinks that the solution's more spending, more government, all they want is more.
And Republicans, I go back, this is kind of a hobby, I did a little bit of it over the break, and look at members' websites.
When they campaign, what do they say?
And virtually every Republican, you can research it, they all say some version of, I want a smaller, more accountable government.
And if you had one party that was for a smaller government and one party that was for a bigger government, you would think that sometimes you would get a smaller government and sometimes you would get a bigger government.
But every Congress, it grows.
So somebody's not telling the truth.
And I think the voting record outs it.
And I think that's the thing.
Go look at the voting record and send us the right reinforcements.
Indeed, and that growing government is becoming increasingly more dangerous.
And that's where I want to really drive our conversation today around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Most people had never heard of FISA before until the 2016 presidential contest when this authority was principally used to go after the Trump campaign and to spy on what would otherwise be politics.
And so, Dan, if you were just talking to a regular person out there and you were describing, like, what is FISA? Because a regular American might think, I don't do international business.
The farthest person I talk to away from is my aunt who lives in the Midwest.
How would you describe what it is and maybe how these authorities could be used against regular folks?
So what they used against the Trump campaign back in 2016 is a different part of FISA than is before us this week.
This is what they call section 702. There's a big database.
They go abroad.
And they vacuum up all of their communications.
And there's just massive database with hundreds, thousands of what they call selectors, just people abroad.
And sure, it may be Osama bin Laden or the like, but it may also be most of the people in the Western governments.
Or corporate leaders or whatever.
So if you're an American citizen who's having a business abroad, it's a big connected global community.
But that means that Americans' data is also in that database.
And so these backdoor searches, the FBI has access to, and what the study indicated in 2019, you go back and they were engaged in millions of violations in the way they searched the database.
Even in 2021, after their supposed reform efforts, 278,000 I think was the number of violations then.
And so it's just a, you know, it's an enormous backdoor opportunity to look at Americans' data that is collected by our intel state.
And it's a horrendous abuse of Americans' privacy.
And it seems to have been used against people on the right, on the left.
I mean, you had it deployed against some of the BLM rioters.
You had people who were just in Washington on January 6th.
We're kind of drawn into this FISA network.
And so, Warren, you have been a critic of a lot of these really constitutional violations that have been embedded in the Patriot Act and then emerged out of that and really gone well beyond their original intent.
That system that Dan described, it would seem like in some circumstances you would want to keep an eye on bad guys abroad who are not American citizens, but these 287,000 violations, the fact the FBI was breaking the law 38 times an hour, like you've been the thought leader on what needs to be done to fix FISA. So lay out how you fix FISA. Yeah, so you think about the Patriot Act.
It was passed right after 9-11.
It was an expansion of some—FISA goes back to the 70s, I think 78. But, you know, we support the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
We want to stop, you know, bad guys from harming American citizens, right?
There's a reason there's not a domestic surveillance act.
It's called the Fourth Amendment, right?
You're not supposed to be able to get Americans' data unless you get a warrant or subpoena with probable cause, some justification as to where you're going.
And if you try these vast, sweeping searches in a normal case, even if you're going after potentially really bad people, you have to have a probable cause and you have to present what you're going to search and why.
To get the warrant.
And in this case, they've already done the seizure.
They've collected all your stuff.
And then they'll say on the back end, well, we're not searching it.
We're querying it.
And that's what they call it.
They call it querying the database.
Now, anyone with a thesaurus handy or a reasonable grasp of the English language will know that query means search, right?
But they draw this distinction.
So they go pull everything out of the database that's already been collected.
And then they say, okay, now I've built everything that I want to get, and I know exactly where it is in the database, so let me go get a warrant for that.
And so that's a complete corruption of our system, of the Constitution.
And when you say, well, you know, it really is to keep us safe, Well, if men were angels, we wouldn't need most of the government.
Go back to the basic premise of how we even have a government.
If don't hurt people and don't take their stuff was so easy to get along with, Cain would have never killed Abel, and we wouldn't even need judges, let alone prosecutors.
But now we know that human nature is going to be corrupted, and we know that the FBI is telling on themselves.
As to, yeah, we're doing this wrong, but trust us.
We're going to fix it.
And no, we don't trust you.
We're going to do what the Constitution said, is not to trust the federal government.
The whole point of the Fourth Amendment, and it's the most infringed, in my opinion, of the Bill of Rights, It's to limit the government's ability to go after you in certain ways.
The First Amendment's got five protections in it.
The second is keeping bare arms.
The third is to give quarter to the government.
But the fourth is to protect you from unreasonable searches and seizures.
It's a right to privacy, not a right to secrecy.
So they can go after it.
Here, they don't even have to.
They've got the data and they're just gonna keep doing it.
And frankly, the debate process that we're entering into right now says they're not content with the current level of spying on Americans.
They want to expand the ways that they can spy on Americans.
Yeah, so I do want to get to some of the ways that our colleagues, even our colleagues in the Republican Party, are wanting to advance the authorities that we're worried about rub up against our constitutional mores.
But one fix, just so that we're able to bullet point this, is a warrant requirement for US citizens.
But you talked about the importance of the Fourth Amendment.
And one of the things, Dan, that we've worked on is ensuring that the Fourth Amendment is not for sale, that the government not utilize data brokers who are themselves commercially kept collecting all this information to then do an end run around the Fourth Amendment.
So maybe talk a little bit about why that's an important part of this FISA discussion.
And Warren may be even better suited to talk about it than me.
We've passed, on the Judiciary Committee where you and I serve, we've passed that bill through.
In fact, it always has very broad bipartisan support.
Some of the farther left Democrats Actually joining this, the idea that your data collected by virtue of your interactions with Google and Facebook and every social media company, all sorts of other stuff, is assembled by data brokers and they can get a handful of pieces of information.
They can tell exactly who you are, what your preferences are, and data brokers maintain these massive warehouses of this data and it can be purchased.
Well, the federal government, which couldn't get any of that data without a warrant, can go to data brokers and inquire it commercially and conduct surveillance on the entire population.
It is sick.
And Warren said, Warren, that's your bill.
Yeah, so Zoe Lofgren and I sponsored that in the House, and it's called the Fourth Amendment.
It's not for sale.
It passed Judiciary Committee 38 to 1. How many times does Jim Jordan agree with Jerry Nadler or Jerry Nadler agree with Jim Norton?
Pretty much never.
You've got me and Zoe Lofgren.
Who was the one?
Hank Johnson.
Oh, wow.
We don't even know that's how he intended to vote.
That really is extraordinary.
That means I voted the same way as Adam Schiff.
Congratulations.
Don't tell everybody that.
Please don't make that a clue.
But it's worth pausing over because everybody talks about we should have bipartisan accomplishment.
Well, that's as bipartisan as you get.
And yet there's another part of both the Democrat conference and the Republican conference, which are sort of the deep staters, the intel advocates, and the bipartisanship falls apart at that point.
It's one of the only issues left that doesn't break on normal party lines.
And, you know, there's no...
One person, I think, right now that the American public trusts on politics, that really, across the political spectrum, they would look at it, whether it's in the news or certainly in elected office, that they would say, oh, I trust this one person.
But maybe when you look at it and you've got the range spanned, you know, from me to Pramila Jayapal, from Jordan to Nadler, from Mr. Bishop to Sarah Jacobs, you know, you to Adam Schiff, you know, the range is, well, we agree.
That we should actually get a warrant.
We agree that you should stop buying data that you would otherwise need to get a warrant or a subpoena for in circumventing the Fourth Amendment.
And I think, hopefully, the country knows that this is how we protect our rights.
We might disagree on a gazillion other things, and we do, but at least here you're saying, this is being abused by our intelligence agencies.
And if it's going to be allowed to continue to exist, it should be reformed.
And so when we see that type of kind of cross-partisan collaboration to try to improve this system, it makes you think, wow, that might be a real opportunity to make that change in the bill.
So we've got the underlying base text of this FISA reform bill, and we've identified two key fixes.
One, a vote on a warrant requirement.
Two, the Fourth Amendment is not for sale act.
My reports right now from the Rules Committee are that we're going to get a vote on your amendment, Mr. Davidson, on the warrant requirement, but that we aren't going to get a vote on the Fourth Amendment is not for sale act.
If that is how our decision process is truncated, do you think that's a fair rule to proceed on?
Well, I don't like the rule, the way it's going.
So let's go back to the way we're here.
Judiciary is supposed to be the base text.
The Judiciary Committee bill that passed out a committee passed out a committee 35 to 2, overwhelmingly bipartisan again.
And it had get a warrant.
It had the Fourth Amendment's not for sale.
It had an in to a bounce collection.
So, you know, there were major reforms that were in the Judiciary Committee bill.
And the Intel Committee said, oh, well, we can't have that.
And we need to expand the surveillance.
Yeah, I want to get to the expansion first.
So that process was blown up because Intel wanted to do more.
So the speaker in December pulled the Judiciary Committee bill and did a short-term reauthorization from December to April.
And then two months ago, we were supposed to have this fight.
Mike Turner, the chairman of Intel, created an international incident to blow up the debate process.
We were in rules committee where judiciary was presenting this unified front between Jordan and Nadler, the ranking Democrat and the chairman of judiciary, saying, we agree, we should do these things.
Turner blew up the whole thing and wouldn't even come to Rules Committee to have the debate.
And part of it was to avoid answering the question on the Fourth Amendment's not for sale.
And so that process was rewarded, this blowing up the process, was rewarded by the Speaker saying, okay, fine, until we'll take out The Fourth Amendment's not for sale provision.
And he's actively working against the get a warrant pass.
And let's not forget, Mike Johnson, the current speaker, was a member of Judiciary Committee and had previously voted for a warrant requirement and for the Fourth Amendment's not for sale.
Now he's pulled the Fourth Amendment's not for sale, and he's working this week with the whip process against the warrant requirement.
So it's going to be a fake reform.
It's got a title, but it doesn't have content.
And I'm not sure there's one more fact that probably may not have gotten through, and that is that instead of being the judiciary base text, the base text for the bill on the floor is the Intel Committee's product.
Well, it's a compromise.
Okay.
So what they did is they said, the things you guys agree on, we'll put into the base text, and the things you don't agree on, you'll offer amendments on.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, that was an agreement.
That agreement's broke.
Because they said to the Judiciary Committee, well, except for that.
You can't put that thing in as an amendment, and that's the Fourth Amendment.
Fourth Amendment's not for sale.
So that was another change to the terms.
That's the change I was talking about over the last two months when Turner blew up the Rules Committee.
He was rewarded by saying, oh, we're going to cancel the deal yet again and go with a different product, a different path.
I think people are used to watching the Republicans fight against the Democrats, but here you have this unique issue where it's actually the Judiciary Committee with strong adherence to the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, fighting against the Intelligence Committee.
And Dan, maybe respond to what some might say, well, gosh, the Intelligence Committee, this is an intelligence authority.
Why should they not be given the deference on that dispute?
Well, frankly, some of their arguments are disingenuous.
So we've seen scheduled two or three times.
I've attended a couple of them.
We can't talk about details of what's done in it, but where you have these briefings, classified briefings.
You go down to the, what do you call it?
I can't even think of it.
The SCIF, Sensitive Compartmentalized Intelligence Facility, or something like that.
And then some people, some bureaucrats from the intel agencies tell you these things, and frankly, they're not very persuasive.
And yet, there's an attempt to sort of intimidate people to say, oh, things are going to be horribly, that go horribly wrong, and you're going to be blamed if you reform this and provide for people, Americans' privacy.
And one argument that is constantly made by Mike Turner, the chairman of Intel, and others, Dan Crenshaw, is they say, well, this 702 database is all lawfully collected.
And once law enforcement lawfully collects information, they routinely use it to look at other people.
Well, you have to understand in detail what we're talking about.
Intel is collecting this database under the rules that say Intel works abroad.
And there's supposed to be a firm wall.
They don't conduct domestic surveillance.
And these guys are using the usual situation where if you would search someone when you're arresting them and you find something in their pocket, Yeah, that's fine.
You don't have to have a warrant for that.
It's fine to do it.
But in this case, you've got intel information collected abroad and they're saying because that's lawful for intel purposes, they ought to be able to go through it without any limitations whatsoever or that you don't need to have a warrant requirement.
It's a totally dishonest, disingenuous argument.
Those are the kinds of things that I think look at tactics of the folks who are devoted to the intel state In how we've dealt with this, and I think it denigrates the, unfairly denigrates the rights of Americans to privacy, and they ought to be able to expect that from their government.
And we've talked about two of the antidotes, right?
The warrant requirement and the Fourth Amendment's Not For Sale Act.
We get a vote on warrant, we don't on Fourth Amendment Not For Sale.
How do you think that vote's going to go?
Do you think that we'll have a sufficient number of Democrats vote with us to put a warrant requirement on the bill?
Well, I think we would, but here's what's gone on.
They've been working for months now to whip the votes.
Look, I still remember this guy who's a legend, Walter Jones, who's a member of Congress when I first got here.
Rest his soul.
North Carolinian.
Yeah, good North Carolina guy.
You know, when I was a new guy here, there was something that passed the House like 420-something to 7. And I thought, it'll help solve a problem, be popular with the public, passes the House, isn't even partisan.
Why in the world won't the Senate take this up, Walter?
And he said, well, I hate to be cynical, but probably because it would pass.
Right.
And I think that's the fear.
They don't want to allow a vote on the Fourth Amendment that's not for sale because it could pass.
It's got support in the House and the Senate.
So that means they must not think that the warrant requirement on the Fourth Amendment will pass.
So we get a vote on something they think won't pass.
We don't get a vote on something they think will pass.
Correct.
All right, well now let's get to the dangerous expansion of these authorities that may be presented to votes for us.
And the first deals with public Wi-Fi.
I don't think most Americans believe that when they get on a McDonald's Wi-Fi or a public library Wi-Fi, that they have consented to some new level of search into all of their digital existence.
But I think as I'm hearing it now, there's going to be an amendment to essentially make The utilization of public Wi-Fi, an erosion of your constitutional protections against those unlawful searches and seizures.
Either of you, I'd love your thoughts on that provision.
Well, if you go to the McDonald's Wi-Fi in Eaton, Ohio, a little rural county with about 40,000 people in it, and you use their Wi-Fi, I'm pretty sure they're not targeting foreigners there.
I'm not saying there aren't any foreigners there, but the balance of it's not foreigners.
And when they log on to the Wi-Fi there, they're not logging on to do foreign intelligence.
I'm not saying that would never happen in Eaton, Ohio, but...
Normally, it's because people want to get better Wi-Fi than the cell service out there, and it's faster than maybe what they got at home.
They'll come in and hang out and use it.
Well, now, McDonald's, if they want to still have Wi-Fi available to the public, they have to go to, like, you're opening up a bank account.
They've got to know your customer rule where they collect all this information.
Who are you?
Why are you using the Internet?
Who are you using the internet with?
Let us know more about you.
And tell us how that's foreign intelligence.
And again, this is where the jurisdictional line crosses.
Intelligence is supposed to be on foreigners.
Our intelligence service collects on foreigners.
And American citizens, that jurisdiction is judiciary.
You're supposed to be protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Do you think that'll pass, Dan?
You know, I don't know.
I understand that they keep denying that it does that, but I can't see the language having been totally clarified.
Well, it's just hard to take their word for it when they were breaking the law 38 times an hour on their existing authority.
And yet, that's what we're doing.
That's what the entire picture is from the intel perspective in terms of the amendments they want to offer.
Take their word for it.
Why do we not need a warrant requirement?
Why should that amendment be defeated?
Well, because it might leave us open to attack in some way, and because the FBI has done all the reforms that are necessary.
Well, the evidence would suggest There's no basis in evidence to conclude that, and the evidence goes the other direction in terms of the previous tests.
And particularly on this Wi-Fi matter, I worry about someone making a foreign contact that they don't even know that they're making.
If someone is utilizing public library Wi-Fi and they go there to get Customer support for their washing machine.
And it just so happens that they're connected to some online chat center to help them with customer service.
And some other person who works at that chat center in India is connected to a dangerous organization.
There are so many opportunities for people who have no intention to even subject themselves to this spying.
Even a lot of email accounts, the servers for a lot of email services and for some of the search engines are globalized.
And so you may just be checking your email account and the server is now routed through another country and that makes every bit of collection on that email account permissible once it's expanded.
I'm also understanding that Chairman Turner will be offering an amendment to expand the scope of FISA to have anything to do with narcotics or the narcotics trade.
What's your perspective on that amendment?
Well, I think, again, it's a question of what is the purpose of the collection of this database?
And if you begin with that origin, then you turn it into a generalized surveillance tool to monitor a particular form of criminal activity domestically.
You've violated The essence of that firm wall that's described.
And I just think it can be abused right and left.
Yeah, I mean, no one is sympathetic to drug dealers.
But at the same time, if you're going to get rid of the Fourth Amendment in the digital atmosphere for drug dealers, why not just get rid of the Fourth Amendment altogether?
In narcotics cases, there's a reason we believe these things.
And I'm worried that we're bifurcating our rights from IRL to our digital existence.
A hundred percent.
You look at, look, there are all kinds of heinous crimes.
I mean, why not go after pedophiles?
I mean, why subject that to the Fourth Amendment?
That's a horrible crime.
So they're still protected by the Fourth Amendment against unlawful search and seizure.
I've got a bill to address the problem they say that they want to address, which would escalate collection on cartels to a Tier 1 threat.
So you could collect intelligence on them the same way we were collecting on Al Qaeda or ISIS or North Korea or Iran.
They would be a...
True enemy of our country.
And the cartels are.
The cartels control the black market in America, largely for the black market drugs, but also sex trafficking, human trafficking, labor trafficking, all the smuggling across the border of all kinds of things.
And a lot of the money laundering is done, facilitated by these guys.
You could already do that under existing authorities if you wanted to.
We can't get them to go after the cartels and prioritize it.
While you're not going to the top of the food chain to the cartels and using the powers you have to do that in a legitimate way, they want to open up this vast new repository of searchable data against Americans for whatever crimes they may be involved with that turn out to be narcotics.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think about just the innocent person who maybe they bought a house that had been used improperly in some time past, and all of a sudden they have no Fourth Amendment protections based on a review of all of their digital communications.
It could truly be innocent people that could be caught in this.
So, Warren, you really are one of the recognized experts on this stuff.
You have been since I got to Congress.
When I got here, I thought the FBI were the good guys.
And we've seen a lot of good there, but we've also seen a lot of bad.
If the way this shakes out is that we don't get a vote on the important Fourth Amendment protections, but there is a vote authorized on these expansions, Wi-Fi and narcotics, and assuming those were to pass, do you think that That our liberties would be more protected under the current system or under a system contemplated by the base bill as amended with these expansions of FISA authorities.
I mean, why would we be expanding something that's already abused?
And look, there are ways to do this that are different.
Like I said, you could focus on the cartels and collect against the cartels if you like.
And, you know, the idea that we would allow something that is Known to be abused, to continue to exist without real reform.
And let's face it, if it passes the way that you just stated, it's simply a placebo.
It's say, oh, I took medicine.
It's supposed to be better.
No, it has no effect.
It's worse than not taking medicine.
You're wasting your time taking something because it gives people the cover to say, oh, I did something.
No.
What you did is actually make your condition worse because you didn't even treat the underlying problem, which is the abuse by these agencies of authorities that they were trusted with.
What happened to Mike Johnson?
I mean, I never would have thought we would have gotten here, Dan.
We've been on the Judiciary Committee with Mike Johnson.
He sat next to me for seven years on that committee.
Frankly, Mike Johnson makes the arguments that we've made in this discussion probably better than we do in debate.
When he has the opportunity to question senior officials at DOJ or FBI, he often focused.
As a committee member on FISA and on FISA abuses.
And I told the speaker, my friend, that we made him speaker so that the speakership would be more like Mike Johnson.
We didn't make Mike Johnson speaker so that Mike Johnson would be more like the speakership.
And unfortunately, on this issue, we've seen the speaker make a 180 degree reversal.
And if what he has encountered from an information standpoint as speaker was so persuasive That it would cause him to make a reversal, then I would think he would be obligated to convince his colleagues from the Judiciary Committee why.
And I have not been drawn into any of that discussion.
I don't know if you have, but as we look at our friend who was our brother in arms on these things, now wearing the jersey of the other side, what do you attribute that to?
I guess the power of the D.C. cartel.
It's disheartening.
A number of us have been sympathetic to Speaker Johnson taking on that role in midstream.
A lot of things had already been decided in terms of spending bills and so forth that kind of left him with not much maneuvering room.
And so if more bad stuff on spending had to come through like the minibus, there's some sympathy there.
It's hard to have a lot of sympathy for this one.
And I fear that it really jeopardizes his support out in the country among conservatives who are counting on him as a conservative beginning to change this place.
It's disheartening to me.
I don't understand it.
I mean, I know what Mike Johnson has always thought.
And to your point, I mentioned earlier that they take us down the skiff and sort of do these dog and punishes.
They're not persuasive.
If you're a critical thinker, they are not persuasive.
In fact, as it begins sort of being clear that it's not persuasive, Mike Turner sort of takes over and keeps talking until everybody falls asleep.
So we know what those briefings have been.
If Mike Johnson has gotten some double secret briefing that has turned him around, as you say, maybe they can't give that briefing in all of its content to all members of Congress because it would risk sources or methods or the like.
But they're bound to be able to do better than the briefings that you and I have received.
They're bound to be able to do better and I'm just not seeing that.
This government can't operate predicated on secret information of eight people plus maybe the president.
That can't happen.
It's inexplicable that he's taken the position that he is under all those circumstances as I explained.
Final question on this to you, Warren.
You've talked to more members than probably anybody on the Democrat side, on the Republican side.
What arguments move people?
What arguments get folks more on our side of supporting civil liberties?
Because we've seen from Chairman Turner and the intel community, when they talk about the open border and the threat of ISIS, that seems to motivate people to, I think, abandon the position that the three of us hold.
So what's our best argument?
Well, I think the base premise is when you personalize it and you talk to people about, like, let's take a look at your browser history or your Amazon account.
You know, we all like we go, let's say most everybody's probably gone to Amazon, they bought something.
We like when we go to Amazon and they kind of know us and they say, oh, well, since you bought this or read that, you might want to look at this.
That's helpful.
But they shouldn't be able to sell that information to somebody else Without our consent, without our informed consent, not some Weasley five-point font over 400 pages.
But specifically, they could say how many of whatever book Firebrand has sold, but they can't say whether Warren and Dan bought Firebrand.
And that's where it becomes personal.
And yeah, you might need to know that for a legitimate purpose as a law enforcement agent.
And if you need to know that about a foreigner, that's probably fine.
But if you need to know it about an American citizen, there's a process.
It's well-established, and it was so important that it was made our Fourth Amendment.
And it's held up by jurisprudence.
And the disappointing thing is not just that the executive branch is abusing this authority, or that the courts, Article III, courts haven't held that it's unconstitutional, because it is, It's that our own body hasn't done our duty, which we swore to do, to support and defend this Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And I will tell you, one of the best speeches for people to look back to is Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address.
And he cautioned against two things.
One is the military-industrial complex.
And the scientific technical elite.
You think about the growth of the military police state and you think about like COVID, the technical elite.
And why did he caution against them?
Because he believed that they would potentially put their own interests and the truth at odds with the American interest.
And I think it was somewhat prophetic.
And I think the challenge for our time is to get a government that once again is small enough to fit back in the Constitution.
You know, this freedom's been surrendered.
It's rarely reclaimed.
And if we don't do it, it's not going to be.
We have to make that demand.
Great, great point to end our discussion on these spying authorities on.
Next week, I expect that we'll be facing a Ukraine bill of some kind.
And I recall one of the high watermarks for those of us who really adhere to an America First perspective was your legislation, Warren, that said before sending more money to Ukraine, we should at least see a plan.
We should at least have reduced to writing any plan from the administration that defines victory or that states our objectives.
And that has really morphed now into a uniparty desire to send funds without those things.
So what do you expect is coming on Ukraine?
How are you going to look at it through the lens of what were your demands of folks previously?
Yeah, I think there's like 10 of us that have not voted for a dime for Ukraine.
Probably 30% of us are right here.
And if you look at it, You know, rationally, until you tell me the mission, what is it you're trying to accomplish, how could I possibly tell you what resources I would support giving you?
And when you look back, like, I found that when the State Department was pushing to do this endless war in Afghanistan, they changed the mission in 2004 from going after bin Laden and the terrorists that attacked us on 9-11 to nation-building in Afghanistan.
And there was an op-ed in the Washington Post by this envoy that the State Department appointed, and he said, as much as it takes, as long as it takes.
What have we heard that for?
That is what they say the mission is in Ukraine.
Well, as much as it takes, as long as it takes to do what?
They never get around to defining it, and that was the whole point.
We did get 129 people.
We went from 10 Last summer, we got to 129, and I suspect we'll do better this time, even amongst Republicans.
And so I hope that we can expect some outcome.
But look, there's clear bipartisan support for more wars in more places.
They're more committed to funding Ukraine.
So I think the Speaker's going to move another omnibus, essentially, that funds Ukraine, funds Israel, funds the Pacific, and fails to do anything about defending America.
And what I've asked them to do is if you feel that you have to put something on the floor, give us one rule bill that requires a recorded vote, four separate recorded votes.
One to defend Ukraine, one to defend Israel, one to defend Pacific, but a fourth one to defend America.
And the sad reality of where we're at this Congress is the vote that would get the lowest total and may not even pass is the bill to defend America.
It's so reflective of a loss of focus, it seems.
You talked about what people are saying out there, and I don't know what you guys are hearing, but that's another one on which, I mean, every once in a while someone who's got an unusual perspective or a particular interest in Ukraine will come up and say they want that.
But it's overwhelmingly the other way, and it is another example of Of Mike Johnson totally reversing course on something he pledged.
He married up, a number of us were offended at the prospect that we have to trade off Ukraine funding to get a complete border protection package in the United States.
But now it's the U.S. border that's going to be apparently thrown aside in order to just do Ukraine and these other foreign aid matters unpaid for, more money borrowed from China to do that.
And, you know, what it leaves you wondering about is what is the Republican voter, how do you motivate the Republican voter to send a Republican majority back to Congress?
And I think it may be sufficient, but the only answer that I can think of at this point is that Donald Trump needs to get elected president and we can't afford for him to be bedeviled by a Hakeem Jeffries House of Representatives.
But there's not much else left.
And I think that's unforgivable.
I don't know how...
The folks where I come from and where I have the opportunity to talk about it always confront me with that you guys should shut her down until they fix the border.
I'm not a cheerleader for shutdowns, and I don't think any of us are, but we also have to understand leverage.
And I think that the great sin of our majority has been the misunderstanding of how to utilize that leverage for some of the outcomes we're seeking.
Warren, you've also been one of the leaders on War Powers.
You talked about the co-mingling of this Ukraine issue with Israel, with what's going on in the Pacific.
Reports now are that we're going to be using our United States military to build a floating barge off the coast of Gaza.
Do you worry that we're setting ourselves up for some sort of Gulf of Tonkin moment where we're creating a soft target in an environment where we can't really control the conditions to ensure people's safety?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the sad reality is this wouldn't be the first time America funded both sides of a war.
In the Middle East, actually, usually we do.
Yeah.
So, look, Joe Biden wants to have it both ways and say, I'm for Israel, but I'm also for Hamas.
Putting a port into Gaza...
I would love to see the classified briefing where there's some rational reason to do that.
It's crazy that we're going to put a port into Gaza.
They still have American hostages, let alone over 100 Israeli hostages.
So the leadership in Gaza Hamas could end the fighting by simply giving up the hostages and surrendering the people responsible for the 10-7 massacre.
And instead of uniting behind our ally Israel, or frankly, sending them more American tax dollars that the Biden administration will simply use as leverage to try to get parliamentary elections, according to Chuck Schumer, to force Bibi out.
Or, you know, to say, well, let's enter into a two-state solution and reward the attackers of 10-7.
Nothing the Biden administration is doing on foreign policy is coherent if you're going to put American interests first.
So, you know, Dan, I think you're right.
But I think you do need to force a debate so that you at least consider issues separately instead of in a giant omnibus fashion.
We are to have single-subject bills particularly related to this issue.
And for the reasons you just identified, these conflicts are so fundamentally different.
You've got great power competition in the Pacific.
You've got largely an urban war going on in Gaza.
And then in Europe, you've got a massive power up against Ukraine.
And I worry, you know, there you can see the Ukrainians run out of men before they run out of bullets.
You know, Dan, this nuance that Warren's described in terms of how we ought to proceed forward, do you think that can lead to better outcomes and better decisions, or do we sort of get to the same place of funding all of it, just in smaller bites rather than one big bill?
Well, I mean, and when you've seen the willingness of the Speaker and other Republicans to depart From, you know, views that, you know, it's almost amazing they'd be willing to go to voters with what they're already doing.
I don't know that segregating out individual votes will do anything more than perhaps create a record for the future, but I don't know that it's going to actually bring any discipline to the decision making of the Republican conference in the House.
Well, we appreciate you both joining us this evening.
We've got votes in just a few moments, and so we've got to head back to Capitol Hill.
And if you're still watching and haven't gotten out the sharp blade and the warm bath, we appreciate it.
And I hope that you'll leave us a five-star rating on your listening platform of choice.
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It's important that you know the details and the specific votes that are happening.
And even more important, it's important that you know what motivates those votes.
Why certain things come under consideration and certain things don't.
And that drives our choices.
Here will be mine.
I will vote against the rule to proceed on the FISA bill if that rule does not allow us to have a vote on the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act by Congressman Davidson and Congresswoman Lofgren.
And if instead of doing that, Creates all these votes to expand the authorities that have been violated.
Count on me to vote against proceeding onto that legislation unless we at least have the opportunity to get votes on the things that will fix the problem.
If Speaker Johnson is unwilling to fix FISA, We are left wondering what he is indeed willing to fix.
We didn't fix the budget.
We didn't fix the border.
And now the very authorities that we saw weaponized against President Trump are getting enhancements rather than the reforms that are so desperately needed.
We'll keep fighting.
I'm grateful to my friends.
Make sure that you follow them.
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