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Sept. 12, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
44:52
Episode 170 LIVE: Kamalanomics (feat. Rep. Andy Biggs) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
Matt Gaetz, the biggest firebrand inside of the House of Representatives.
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 firebrands. - All the talk in Washington is about whether we'll have this flavor of a continuing resolution for government funding or that flavor of a continuing resolution.
And what that does is it presents the entire funding of the United States government as an up or down vote, an up or down proposition.
And that is precisely the reason we're nearly 38 trillion dollars in debt.
We have to break the fever dream of governing by omnibus spending bill and continuing resolution and we have to get to single subject spending bills where these agencies have to defend their budget and its programmatic review.
And the reason that doesn't happen is because the lobbyists and the special interests who run this town and who own the leaders on both sides, they want it that way.
They don't want any itemized review.
And so we have to get back to those single subject bills or we will continue this path we're on We're adding a trillion dollars in debt to the national debt every hundred days.
The American people don't want it.
Only the folks in Washington want it.
And I'm going to keep demanding a change in the way we think, breaking the fever dream, and getting back to single-subject bills.
I'll vote against these continuing resolutions.
I yield back, Mr. Speaker.
Welcome back to Firebrand.
We are live.
Hope everyone had a great August.
We were moving around the country.
And it's important, even if Firebrand isn't at the top of your podcast feed, that you are subscribed to the Gates Network.
That's where all the discussions we're having about what's going on in the world, in Washington, in Florida, available to our great constituents.
So today is Thursday, September 12, 2024.
Kamala Harris is still the worst vice president in the history of the United States.
And you can find out exactly why by taking a quick peek inside your wallet.
Not a single American citizen is doing better under this failed story of an administration, unless, in fact, you were a part of that administration or one of their preferred buddies or groups.
In the last 12 months alone, over 1.2 native-born Americans lost their jobs through Kamala-nomics.
Now, that could have something to do with the fact that 1.3 million foreign workers have gained jobs during that same period.
So you're going to hear a lot of discussion from Biden and Harris about all these jobs they've created, all the good job numbers.
The reality is Americans are losing those jobs to foreign-born workers.
And While we're at it, prices are out of control.
See, these continuing resolutions I was just talking about on the floor, they lead to the debt, they lead to the rise in interest rates, they lead to the constrained supply, the high demand that leads to inflation.
Gasoline prices have skyrocketed by nearly 50% since Kamala Harris took office.
And if you think you can avoid it by taking an Uber or a Lyft, think again because rideshare prices have gone up by almost 40% as well.
Now if you decide to drive, you better be paying attention to the road because you'll be paying about 30% more for any repairs that your vehicle may need.
And that's on top of your insurance, which has gone up by almost 55%.
So if Kamala Harris becomes president, you might as well kiss your freedoms goodbye because you'll be stuck in your house for the next four years.
If you cannot afford to leave your house, your house is a prison.
And with these prices, that's what's happening.
Inflation under Kamala Harris has risen by 20.2%.
And it's not only affecting transportation.
Eggs, up 46.8%.
Poultry, up 24.4%.
Ground beef, up 26.3%.
Bread, up 24.3%.
Flour, up 37%.
Sugar, up more than 31%.
There's really no limit on what Kamalanomics is impacting.
And she's even taking away Frosted Flakes and Cheerios.
That's right.
Breakfast cereal is up 22.3%.
This is why they've been trying to convince us all to eat the bugs.
They're cheaper.
If you just eat the grasshoppers and the crickets, all your problems will go away.
Maybe next they'll endorse chasing around cats and dogs for your meals.
More on that later.
And as I said before, there is no outcome too far-fetched when it comes to Kamala-nomics.
So joining me to talk about the interface between the very liberal tax and spend agenda of Biden-Harris and what we see in the House of Representatives, a great firebrand, former head of the House Freedom Caucus, Congressman from Arizona, Andy Biggs.
Thanks for joining me, Andy.
As we look at these rising prices, which I know you're hearing about in Arizona, I hear about in Florida, who do you blame?
Well, I blame Congress and the policies of this administration.
The reason you blame Congress is because we've done nothing to effectively stop the ridiculous spending levels that are being imposed on us even more by this administration.
And when you talk about inflation, inflation has two drivers right now.
Higher prices has two drivers.
Number one, high energy costs.
So when you pay more at the pump, everything goes up because even if it's trained in, Or boat it in, whatever.
The last mile goes to gas, brother.
And the other one is when you devalue your currency by just loading it with national debt like we do, well, you know, that's inflation.
That's the classical definition of inflation.
I'm wondering how this is going to play out specifically in Arizona.
When I'm in Arizona, there's a lot of driving.
A lot of people do have to come into the suburban centers or the urban centers that live out in more rural places.
The average drive in Arizona is probably longer for a worker than the average drive in Massachusetts or Connecticut.
And I wonder if that's going to be a voting issue.
And then also, when I've been with you in some of these areas along the border in Arizona, there's talk of, well, when there's all this increase in price on the US side, people go over to the Mexican side to get their dental services, to get auto repairs, for all types of things.
And when we see this type of inflation in the US... Does it hurt the small businesses in Arizona when they're losing customers to Mexico?
And could that cause some of them to vote Republican if maybe they weren't otherwise inclined?
Yeah, I mean, so if you're in Nogales or Douglas or if you're in Yuma or even Tucson, which is about 45 miles north of the border, it's fairly easy to go across and go shopping there.
You're a little nervous because of the cartels right now, but I mean, you can go find anything.
So I know people who go to Tijuana for big surgeries.
They don't stay in the States.
They will go to Tijuana for...
You name it.
A cosmetic surgery of some kind.
Maybe it's a lap band surgery.
They will go to Tijuana.
I cannot tell you how many people...
If someone told me they got a Tijuana lap band, I wouldn't even think it was a surgery.
I would assume it was something else.
You know what?
I knew that was coming from you.
All right.
So that impacts them.
The long drive impacts them.
And you get to what we're going to do about it here in Congress.
Now, we've been in the bowels of the Capitol, in meetings with our leadership, in meetings with our colleagues.
And what they want is a continuing resolution and just kind of share your reaction to that and what your concerns are.
Well, I'm opposed to that because as you said in your monologue, or your tape, that dates me, of the video of you on the floor, it's a monolithic vote to keep a massive bloated spend.
You're not changing any policies.
So think about it this way.
You will add, by the time they get back to correcting that, $1.5 trillion in national debt.
That's what they're proposing.
That's what you're buying.
That's what you're buying.
And do you think our colleagues get that there's a connection between green lighting, that additional trillion plus in debt, and these high prices on poultry, on eggs, on ground beef, on auto repairs, on insurance?
It's just so obvious to me, but...
I think we work with people who believe they can continue spending in Washington and that the Wizard of Oz is off somewhere else turning dials on inflation.
Maybe it's the Fed or Janet Yellen.
But in reality, we are culpable too.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So there's at least two groups in Congress that don't get it.
First of all is the Democrats who are largely modern monetary theorists.
So we'll leave that aside because they're never coming around because they don't get it.
But we have this other group, which is our team.
And many on our team, they do stuff like this.
They say...
Oh, man, we've got to cut spending.
We've got to watch the spending.
But, you know, I introduced over 500 bills last year that would have reduced a million here, a hundred million there.
We never got a look-see.
And so I did a bunch more this year.
Not one.
We actually got some of those on the floor.
And you know how many passed out?
I think it was like 40 spending cuts.
One.
One passed for like $4 million.
They don't get it, Matt.
They don't get it.
Well, the fiscal hawk has become the latest endangered species in Washington, D.C. You know, after 2010, you saw a lot of the Tea Party folks come in and say they really were going to wrestle federal spending.
And in large part, we've seen spending grow since.
And a lot of those folks have abandoned the mission and have returned to other features of life.
And here we are.
At times a small group trying to get back to single subject bills because we actually think individual review of spending is what drives it down.
But all the talk now in the digital world and in the talking headspace is about a strategy to fund the government with a requirement that the Senate take up and pass the SAVE Act and that the President sign it.
We're big supporters of the SAVE Act.
We're co-sponsors of the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would be helpful in future elections to stop illegal immigrants.
But why, like, give the answer to maybe the critic online that would say, well, Andy, government funding's going to happen anyway.
Why wouldn't you at least pick the SAVE Act as a ripe fight, a ripe battle to undertake?
For multiple reasons.
First of all, people are kind of misleading the public, like it's going to cure the problems that we have with election transparency, right, and fairness.
That's not going to happen in 2024. This bill only applies to federal ballots, and there's only one state that bifurcates exclusively like we do in Arizona.
We are it.
But you have a Democrat governor, a Democrat attorney general, and a Democrat secretary of state.
So the news you're breaking to the Firebrand audience is, upon the passage of the SAVE Act, there won't be this instant lurch toward election integrity in the state of Arizona.
That's exactly right.
Or anywhere, because what will happen is you're going to get these secretaries of state saying, well, to find this out, we're going to have to litigate this.
So there's going to be litigation.
And then following the litigation, There's going to be this long period of time saying, well, we don't have the technology to do it, so we need to up the technology.
So in the long run, which is what you alluded to, it's going to work out fine, and we need to do it.
But are you willing to spend and keep...
The Green New Deal in place for something that won't kick in for two and a half, three years.
And I'm not.
I look at it and say, okay, you're going to keep Green New Deal?
We're subsidizing these private businesses.
You're going to keep funding Planned Parenthood?
That was always a big one for you.
Yeah.
Whenever you raise the issue of Planned Parenthood funding in the continuing resolutions, and all these folks who put on their mailers that they would never support funding Planned Parenthood, they were going to defund Planned Parenthood.
I don't recall even having a vote on stripping the Planned Parenthood funding out of the continuing resolutions.
Well, they won't let you.
In the past, I've introduced an amendment here and there, and they killed the amendment in the Rules Committee.
I offered 10 amendments to actually reduce spending.
One of mine, by the way, I had actually two amendments that did this, would have defunded Jack Smith's prosecution and other prosecutions of this, I should say the former president, but our president, President Trump.
You know who killed it?
It wasn't the Democrats.
It was the Republicans on the Rules Committee.
Okay, so I think people are going to watch and wonder, why is it that the Republicans won't fight on these questions?
Present each one of them, force votes, and then hold our ground when negotiating with the Senate.
And by the way, if we picked a bunch of these things, the border, Planned Parenthood, the Green New Deal, a lot of the spending priorities that we find wasteful that are targeted in your 500-plus pieces of legislation, we wouldn't win them all.
But we also, if we were willing to fight, we wouldn't lose all of them.
And when you don't even go through the legislative process to put your cuts forward, you are certain to lose.
You're guaranteed to lose.
And there's a part about lying to the public that we will not do.
We'll tell you the truth, and the truth is ugly in the case of these high prices and the connection to federal spending.
But what I think some Republicans want to tell you is, well, we're going to act as though this is a big fight we're going to pick on the SAVE Act.
We're going to send that bill over to the Senate.
But you and I know they've already pre-choreographed their surrender.
Where even the SAVE Act, which you've said is frail in protecting the integrity of the upcoming election, even that will be thrown over the gunnels just to continue perpetuating the spending.
And you know, you are...
Probably the most knowledgeable congressman on the border.
You bring multiple members of Congress to the border.
Do you think it is going to demoralize Republicans and conservatives, and frankly just any American who cares about the border, if we go and say you must have the SAVE Act to fund the government, and then we've already pre-negotiated surrendering on the SAVE Act?
What will that do to the psychology of people who care about your central issue?
Well, if they have any exuberance left, it's going to come out like a beach ball, not just through the little nozzle, and you're a Florida dude, you're playing with a beach ball, but it's got a big knife gash through it.
That's the enthusiasm level.
It's going to go down.
And that's part of the problem, Matt.
When you start looking at this and you say, we're going to negotiate away.
So, I mean, I can't remember whether yesterday when we were meeting with leadership, you used to, whether the generals already negotiated the terms of surrender.
Right.
You know, and so we're basically just cogs in the wheel at some point because we know...
He gave away leverage when he said, we'll never shut the government down.
And you know what?
And nobody wants to advocate for that.
I actually gave him some options so he wouldn't have to.
Because I've got folks who watch this program who are pro-shutdown.
They actually think that is the landing spot.
I am not a cheerleader for shutdowns.
I actually think that a responsible governing methodology that we see play out in almost every state in the country is one that would be apropos for the Congress.
But walk through what you think would be a preferable path forward given the reality of where we are.
I know you and I would probably love to go back to June, July and hammer through these single subject bills.
But given where we are, we are in the middle of an election.
People are voting.
What would the house optimal path be?
So there's two paths that I gave to Johnson.
Number one is my least favorite, and that is, you know, if you're afraid of a shutdown, go ahead and pass legislation that would fund veterans, military, the contractors, so you can keep building your stuff, and CBP, TSA, FAA, and kind of leave it at that.
And then try to negotiate through the other 12 spending bills that were required.
Or another option would be you take the five bills we've passed.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are required by law, the 1974 Budget Control and Impound Act, to pass those 12 appropriations bills by June 30th every year.
Hasn't been done since 1976, but we did five.
We're on a roll.
We're on a roll.
Why stop it now?
We've done five spending bills, appropriations bills.
Single, you know, these are on the...
Single subject.
Yeah, what we would consider single subject specific areas.
Yeah.
And we won some fights and we lost some on those.
Yeah, but we got a whole lot of good stuff in there.
A lot of good policy.
Get rid of DI and woke stuff and stop Planned Parenthood funding and that.
You take those five and you say, okay...
The rest of the CR because there's no time because they don't want to shut down.
They've already negotiated no shutdown.
So I'm trying to help him avoid the shutdown.
So you say, we will CR the rest of the budget.
For whatever it is, 90 days, while we finish out the other seven spending bills.
How about that?
That would be more progress toward responsible budgeting than we've seen in our seven years here.
Yeah.
Probably than has existed since 1974. Yeah.
Well, I think that's an excellent option, and I also think it is appropriate in those bills we're addressing to have the focus on the border, and that's really where I want to take our discussion.
Sasha, throw up our illegal immigration kind of a trend chart there for the audience.
And here you see the impact of the Biden-Harris administration and their border policies.
And Andy, one of the arguments we've heard from Secretary Mayorkas and the administration is that, well, actually now border crossings are down.
We're encountering fewer people at the border now than we did during some of the peaks of the Trump presidency.
You and I know why.
It's because the illegals no longer have to even make the trek to the border.
We built them an app, gave it to the cartels, allowed them to scale it to the moon, and now there is a CBP1 app that has planes full of migrants flying into the heartland of the country, all over the country, and they don't even have to make an encounter at the border.
They have created a yellow brick road for illegal immigration.
That doesn't even go through the border physically.
It just lands on an aircraft somewhere in your community.
But debunk that myth that they're advancing.
Well, when they say that the numbers are down, you can screw around with statistics any way you want.
And that's what they've done.
So they've said, they're not even going to count the CBP1 app folks coming in at all.
They don't count them.
They're bypassing the border.
So we're not going to count those people.
And those people, by the way, are probably $40,000 to $50,000 a month minimum, okay?
Just think about that.
Then they're not going to count people who show up at the port of entry.
So they show up at the port of entry.
They're not counting those people.
So when the numbers you're seeing, they're really between the ports of entry.
And those remain high.
So, like, I was in San Diego at the border last week, and we just showed up, just rolled up.
We've got a big caravan.
I've told you this before.
You show up with a big caravan, nobody's going to come across the border.
Well, what happened?
Some people came across the border.
And where are you from?
I'm from India.
I'm from Guatemala.
I'm from Colombia.
Well, you know what?
Have you heard of CBP1 app?
No, we never heard of CBP1 app.
So, they're either coming in on CBP1 app, or they're coming through the cartel.
And all five of those people Had been put together in that little group of five.
By the coyote the night before.
They all paid five grand apiece.
I mean, we ask them this stuff, and they respond.
And the numbers don't lie.
It's just kind of like them saying, well, you know, we've seized more fentanyl than ever, and we get 90% of it at the port of entry.
Well, you know why?
Because you aren't able to catch the people between the ports of entry.
And that's really the problem.
It's a lying bunch of people from, you know, 1984. I think that there's real risk in that because they're asking people to believe what they're saying rather than their own lying eyes.
If you're watching this program, You look around your own community.
You look at the schools.
You look at the hospitals.
You look at the jails.
And you see the impact of illegal immigration everywhere now.
So then to tell people that it's not really happening while they observe it, it risks the government not having credibility, which even when Democrats are in charge, is actually a pretty dangerous thing for America.
because they always criticize us for being anti-institutional, but when they make the institutions so incredulous, then you get this very bizarre outcome.
I want to go to this New York Post headline, Cookie and his Monsters.
This is some of the information.
Cookie, I guess, is one of these Venezuelan gangsters.
They're invading the suburbs.
They're invading housing units.
And meet your new landlord.
The long gun-toting Venezuelan gangs roving around and extorting people and robbing people This is another matter where our colleague Jason Crow of Colorado and Governor Polis of Colorado said this is not really happening.
This is something that's just being blown up by conservative media.
How do you think the country is reacting to these scary and stark images?
They're putting the lie to the people who are lying.
And so when these guys are out there saying, I mean, we served with Polis before he became governor.
When he's out there saying, this is just all in somebody's imagination.
Well, tell that to the lady who's there and there's an AR-15 pointed at your door and people are actually using pry bars to get into your apartment to boot you out.
Explain that to this Aurora City Council that's now having to condemn those buildings because they're being run down and taken over.
How about in Chicago?
Same thing.
New York City?
Same thing.
This is going on around the country.
And again, it's like, well, you know, hey, you guys didn't vote for that bill.
The bill that would have guaranteed 7,500 people a day, Matt, could come into this country illegally.
And then on top of that, anybody above that, if you fit into one of 40 categories, they would have let you in with impunity.
And then, so explain those types of lies to the average person who's watching this.
It's a scary thing, and we've talked about migrant crime as this new category, but you just identified the category of migrant blight, where when gangs of migrants come in, throw out the Americans, extort the businesses, convert things to their uses, leave it in a state of disrepair, that we're going to have areas of the country, not just in New York City.
I mean, this is out in the burbs.
Yeah.
And you're going to see a blight and a degradation of America that Biden and Harris are willing to tolerate because they ultimately want to convert them to voters.
Isn't that the end goal for them?
That is the very end goal.
They sometimes slip it out and accidentally say it, you know, that we want to increase the voters.
But the bottom line, Matt, is...
The average American who sees this feels the inflation they give you, feel the danger and insecurity in their cities, and they watch what's happening on the border, and these guys won't stop it?
They're losing voters.
So let's go to Springfield, Ohio.
This has gotten a lot of attention.
Sasha, go ahead and throw up our Springfield, Ohio.
He looks very pleasant.
Now this post comes from the Springfield, Ohio Crime Watch Facebook group, and the gentleman there carrying the dead goose does not appear to be the head of the Springfield, Ohio Crime Watch Facebook group.
I don't think he's being elected as the new block captain of the Crime Watch, but There's the photo.
Here's what the post reads.
And again, this is from Springfield, Ohio.
We found this on Facebook.
Warning to all of our beloved pets and those around us.
My neighbor informed me that her daughter's friend had lost her cat.
She checked pages, kennels, ass around.
No one...
One day she came home from work and as soon as she stepped out of her car and looked toward her neighbor's house where Haitians live, she saw her cat hanging from a branch like you do to a deer for butchering and they were carving it up to eat.
I've been told they do this to dogs and have been doing it at Snyder Park with the ducks and geese.
I was told the last bit by the rangers and police.
Please keep a close eye on these animals.
So that is the post from Springfield, Ohio.
This is like the new defined hoax.
That guy clearly has a goose, and the goose does appear to be on the menu, I think, at the end.
Geese can be pets.
You ever known anybody who's had a goose as a pet?
We actually did, believe it or not.
You had a goose as a pet.
So the people claiming that this is not pets being killed because geese cannot be pets, you can defy that argument.
Yeah, we had...
A couple of geese.
I mean, we kept a little, you know, kids waiting pool out there.
Was it a gaggle or just a couple?
It was not a gaggle.
Three or more make a gaggle?
Yeah, I think we were two.
And one of them became infatuated with my wife and followed her around.
I mean, really, truly followed her around whenever she's in the yard.
Honey, what are you going to do about that goose?
I don't know.
I got to leave.
And the goose wouldn't let her leave.
He loved her.
You loved her.
It was the male goose?
I don't know, but whatever it was, it was a pet goose, and we had a couple of pet geese.
And apparently they can form an attachment.
Yes, they can.
They can, sure.
Zooming out from this and what it really means, when you invite the third world, you get the third world.
Honestly, I mean, I don't know that you really can blame these Haitians.
They don't know any better.
In Haiti, if you see an animal and you're starving, you capture that animal and you eat it.
It's not a good place.
And it's because they've been victimized by a lot of corruption and a lot of bad government.
And frankly, the negative impacts of globalism have played out catastrophically in Haiti.
But I blame us.
And I just worry that more of these third-world behaviors, the defecating in the farms of the Yuma farmers that we went and talked to, they talked about the ways a lot of these Haitian migrants, even using running water in some cases, or when there would be grace extended to try to create food opportunities or sanitation opportunities, the level of desperation is so deep.
These are the people who will eat the ducks out of the neighborhood pond and then will string up and gut the cat.
Yeah, you have to acknowledge that the U.S. has a rather unique culture, and we are an affluent country, a very affluent country.
You're bringing in people, literally by the millions, who have no sense of who we are, and we have no sense of who they are, really.
And so you have a culture clash going on.
And it's not just from one country.
Because we have over 170 countries where people have come in in the last year.
And since they're coming in by the millions, It really actually is going to have an impact on wherever they gather because you're just going to have a cultural impact.
And that's not to say that we can't try to understand it, but the problem is at the same time you're allowing millions of illegal aliens to come in, you have over a million legal in migration as well.
More than all other countries combined in the world And still somehow we're expected to open up when people who don't have any intention to assimilate.
I mean, there's no intention for them to assimilate.
And the Biden-Harris program specifically includes exclusion from those numbers we were talking about of Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans.
And now why is it?
They'll tell you, well, we have no compact with them to send them back.
Yeah, but you aren't just sending them back.
You're recruiting them.
Right.
And that's the problem.
And our own NGOs that are funded by our own government are doing the enticing of the very groups that we're seeing impact, those overall immigration numbers, but in a clandestine way because it's not being accurately reported.
One more thing I want you to help me set up before we go.
You are the chairman of our crime subcommittee on the House Judiciary Committee.
You held a hearing today.
about violent crime, about the way that these soft on crime policies are impacting Americans at a time of this great immigration wave.
Just give a quick update to the audience about why you held the hearing today and what your big takeaways.
Well, we held the hearing for the purpose of kind of exposing Some of these soft on crimes, it just so happened that we were talking about California, Minnesota, where you have had probably some of the worst soft on crime policies, and I will just tell you, when you listen to the victims of these crimes, and then the guy who was head of the business organization And you see it, and by the way, your questioning was brilliant.
It was wonderful stuff with the gentleman restaurateur.
And I talked to him some more after the hearing.
I said, so tell me what else is going on.
He said, he owns four or five restaurants.
I can't remember the number, but he said, all of them are thriving in the suburbs.
Where the law is enforced.
But in the area where the law is not being enforced, our sales have plummeted because it's not safe.
Nobody wants to come into a restaurant and be looking over your shoulder because he's been burgled 13 times under Governor Walz.
Geez, it's demoral.
I don't even know how you have the gumption to stay in business when you're constantly under that threat and you don't even have your own government on your side.
They're on the side of the criminals.
Andy, how can folks follow you, stay up with all of your information and social media accounts?
Well, just go to biggs.house.gov or you can find me on any social media site at RepAndyBiggs.
Well, thanks so much for joining me.
I do want to get to the audience to some of that hearing that we had, but thanks for being here.
This is Congressman Kevin Kiley.
He was really laying the lumber down on some of these soft on crime policies.
Take a listen.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Just a couple weeks ago, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, referred to California's crime policies as a national model.
And Vice President Harris, of course herself from California, has said that California is a, quote, role model for what can be done around the country.
So I think that this hearing, looking specifically at California's crime situation, is a timely opportunity to evaluate that thesis as to what kind of a national model California provides.
When it comes to its approach to crime, and that approach consists of three main elements.
The first is a systematic effort to defund police departments in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.
Second, a systematic effort to not enforce criminal laws with the election of so-called progressive prosecutors like George Gascon, Kamala Harris, and Chase Abodee in San Francisco, Gascon again in L.A., Pamela Price in Oakland.
And then thirdly is just taking a hatchet to the criminal code with laws like Prop 47, for example, which passed in 2014 and effectively legalized retail theft, spawning this crisis of retail theft and smash-and-grabs across spawning this crisis of retail theft and smash-and-grabs across California.
Prop 47 also effectively legalized drug possession, even for Class A drugs, even for fentanyl.
And what that has done is made it impossible for us to get folks who have drug addiction the help that they need, so that you have them just living on our streets and tragically all too often dying on our streets in these open-air drug markets that you have to walk through, wade through, in many of our major cities.
Two years after Prop 47 came Prop 57, which made tens of thousands of very serious, heinous criminals eligible for early release.
Now, of course, California voters would never have passed such a thing if it were properly described to them, but unfortunately, the initiative was described on the ballot as only applying to non-violent offenders.
It was described as such by the then Attorney General Kamala Harris.
In reality, it made criminals eligible for early release who had committed crimes like rape, human trafficking with minors, assault with a deadly weapon, drive-by shootings.
All of this was described as nonviolent activity by the Attorney General.
And so with the passage of these measures, Prop 47, Prop 57, the defunding of police, The so-called progressive prosecutor movement.
We have seen crime go up in California.
The results speak for themselves.
Just over the last five years, violent crime has gone up 15.1%.
Aggravated assault, 30.6%.
Homicide, 9.1%.
Aggravated assault with a firearm, 62.9%.
The violent crime rate in California is 31% higher than the rest of the country.
But those statistics don't even tell the full story.
If you look at San Francisco, for example, businesses are closing left and right in just a short span of time in the last year.
You had the closure of Nordstrom, Whole Foods, T-Mobile, Anthropologie, Saks, the iconic toy store that this movie Toy Story was based on had to close In-N-Out, had to close its first restaurant ever, citing the danger to customers and to their workers.
Or if you just walk into many of our major cities, if you want to go to the grocery store, you have to dodge needles, you have to wade through encampments.
And when you go into the store, if you want to buy basic goods like frozen foods or shampoo or conditioner, You have to go get a clerk to open up the cabinet to get it for you because everything is under lock and key.
In Los Angeles, the police has specifically told people, warned people, that you shouldn't go outside when you are wearing jewelry.
This is the reality of life in many parts of California following this dangerous decriminalization experiment.
But the good news is this, that while Gavin Newsom says this is a national model, while Kamala Harris says it's a role model for the rest of the country, the people of California are rendering a very different verdict.
Those cities that defunded their police have now refunded their police.
Several of these so-called progressive prosecutors have been recalled or are currently being recalled or being removed from office.
And there is a bipartisan initiative right now to largely reverse Prop 47 and end the Prop 47 experiment in California.
And it has received broad bipartisan support.
I was just on a bipartisan panel supporting it with our colleague Ami Barra.
The mayors of San Jose, San Diego, San Francisco are supporting this initiative.
Even though the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has continued to stand by Prop 47 and fought our reform effort every step of the way.
So, Mr. Chairman, while there are some who will point to California's crime policies as a national model, I would encourage folks across the country to listen to the people of California themselves, who are saying very clearly, this is not a model for the nation, it is a warning to the nation.
I yield back.
We are back live and we do not want America to become California.
And it was a land of great bounty and beauty, the most temperate climate in the hemisphere.
And as a consequence of these soft on crime policies and other policies, people are leaving.
And they're leaving for like the deserts of Arizona.
Glad we let Mr. Biggs go before making that derogatory reference.
But no, Arizona is beautiful as well.
I had some thoughts as well and some questioning of these witnesses in the crime hearing.
take a listen.
Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Gates.
Yeah, I had questions for Mr. Ingram, but that was a remarkable presentation from Congressman Kiley about how things have gone in California.
And when I heard that they had to close an In-N-Out and a Whole Foods, that is a broad swath of the constituency in California.
When you get both of those establishments having to close, it's remarkable.
Mr. Ingram, so we have this dynamic now that Mr. Kiley just laid out perfectly, where you're seeing more and more crimes not really being counted as crimes.
And you're seeing more and more criminals just being let out and not really deemed part of the criminal justice system for any meaningful period of time.
And so I want you to bring, like, the average American who's heard the presentation, oh, the crime rates are down, we're safer now under these policies that don't really punish people for things like theft.
What does that actually mean on the streets of America?
What would you say to an American that encountered that information but it didn't jive with how they felt?
What I would equate it to is we see it every day in our city where we sit right now.
It's mind-boggling on how we talk about crime.
For us, again, somebody that has been in Minnesota since 2012, the five years kind of we had one burglary.
Now we've had 12, 13. Every time I get a thing from our district attorney, it says we've reduced the charges to under $1,000.
Even though it may have cost me $20,000 to repair the building, a safe they rolled down three flights of stairs, ripped out walls, ripped out staircases, we reduced it down to under $1,000.
And the person is back on the streets, and he robs us again, and we reduce it down, and he robs us again, and we reduce it down.
To me, that is the madness of it.
Recently, our breakfast restaurant called Hope Somebody broke into it, busted out the garage door, went into the space, and then we get a letter saying we've reduced the crime down to under a thousand dollars, where the glass on the garage door costs more than that.
To me, it's when we have these, again, this isn't a political thing for me.
It's real life.
This is real humans.
These are real businesses.
We're having businesses closed every single day.
We're having people murdered.
We have a drug dealer.
That provided laced drugs with fentanyl to my partner's son.
He died.
He texted him.
Something is wrong.
He said, you'll be fine.
We had his address.
That drug dealer, to my knowledge, is still on the streets to this day.
Mr. Ingram, Vice President Harris filled out a questionnaire for the ACLU when she was running for president back in 2019, and she advocated for the position of decriminalizing fentanyl.
Making it where that wasn't something where people would interface with the criminal justice system but would have a different path.
Do you think that would make your streets safer?
I don't believe that will make our streets safer.
People, you must be held accountable for your actions.
Words don't really matter.
Actions matter.
We can all say, I can sit here, say whatever I want to say, any of us can say.
Actions are what matter.
What is happening every single day is what matters, and that's really what we need is common sense to take over.
If you've been arrested 50 times in three years, you shouldn't be out to do it again.
Here's what I want to get, Mr. Ingram.
I've never been a prosecutor, but why would you want to become a prosecutor to then not prosecute the criminals?
That'd be like opening restaurants and not wanting to make food.
That'd be like opening a bar and not wanting to make drinks.
Like, do you ever get to talk to some of these folks in your community and say, hey, like, I just sort of assumed that me being the restaurateur, I would run a restaurant and you being the prosecutors, you would prosecute the criminals.
Is that too much to ask?
Unfortunately, I just get to speak to our first responders that show up on site, and I see the look in their eyes, how defeated they are, because they've arrested.
They know them by name.
We show them the picture, and they tell us their name.
They know where they live.
And they're so demoralized and defeated, it's insanity.
We don't live like this in Florida.
You don't have to live like this.
Florida's ready when you are, as a matter of fact.
But I do worry that these bad ideas that we've seen emerge in some of our Democrat-run cities could spread to other parts of the country.
In our last few seconds, what would be your warning to a community thinking about adopting these policies that reduce theft thresholds and allow this type of conduct?
My biggest thing would say love people, and love is hard.
My dad had to discipline me because I made mistakes.
Discipline sucks, but it has to happen.
Love people, and that includes discipline.
That's terrific advice.
I very much appreciate you being here, and I see my time's expired.
I yield back.
We thank Mr. Ingram for his work as an entrepreneur in our country.
You should be able to do that with the law and the government on your side, not on the side of the people who are trying to victimize you.
Thank you all so much for joining us today on Firebrand.
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We'll see you soon.
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