Here we go again. The hyped-up threat of a government shutdown looms as a way to get the House and Senate to again agree to government spending increases. Does anyone think the outcome is not already pre-ordained? Campaign for Liberty's Norm Singleton joins the Liberty Report for an insider's look.
Here we go again. The hyped-up threat of a government shutdown looms as a way to get the House and Senate to again agree to government spending increases. Does anyone think the outcome is not already pre-ordained? Campaign for Liberty's Norm Singleton joins the Liberty Report for an insider's look.
Here we go again. The hyped-up threat of a government shutdown looms as a way to get the House and Senate to again agree to government spending increases. Does anyone think the outcome is not already pre-ordained? Campaign for Liberty's Norm Singleton joins the Liberty Report for an insider's look.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is the co-host Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Dr. Paul, good to see you.
Good you.
Daniel, we have a special guest today and he's somebody that has worked with me for about 20 years now and he was the legislative director in the congressional office and you know him well and he's also the vice president of Campaign for Liberty.
But he's the expert on legislation and what's happening in Washington and we might ask him why he hasn't changed everything up there since he's an expert, but he can explain the mess.
I don't know if anybody has the answer to explain how we're going to get at it.
But let's welcome Norm Singleton today.
Norm, it's good to have you with us.
Thank you, Dr. Paul and Daniel.
It's great to be back on the show.
Good.
Good news is today D.C. is pretty much shut down because of the Pope's visit.
So I guess that could qualify as a miracle that we have one day where they're not going to be taking our liberties.
Well, you know, I used to believe that, but I've become reluctant because government's on autopilot when you think of the courts and the bureaucracy and all the evil things that go on and how they fight wars without congressional approval.
But it's a nice saying.
It would be nice if you had a reprieve a day or two, but I'd like a reprieve for about five years or so and just never allow any more expenditures.
But today there's a couple issues that we'd like to have you catch us up on.
One is an issue that Campaign for Liberty really has worked on for a long time and they have been instrumental in getting a lot of good work done.
This was especially the case when we, the three of us, were in the congressional office and we got some votes on the House floor and we always won these votes.
But right now I understand with the work of Campaign for Liberty and with the help of Rand Paul that there's a possibility we can get a clean vote in the Senate.
Tell us a little bit about what's going on there.
Well we have a possibility of finally getting an up or down vote in the Senate this fall at some time, hopefully in October.
Senator McConnell did promise that he would have a vote on Audit the Fed and he is a co-sponsor of the legislation.
Campaign for Liberty is gearing up a program to A, make sure that Senator McConnell keeps his promise and B, make sure that we have the votes to pass it in the Senate.
We're currently actually running a matching grant program.
If anyone wants information on that, you can go to our website at campaignforliberty.com.
And what we want to do is try to get to at least 50 votes, hopefully 60, because we're not sure.
You know, McConnell could bring it to the floor, but he may under Senate rules use that to set the 60-vote threshold.
But at least having a clean up and down vote and letting people know what senators are for it, what senators are against it, and in the case that it's subject to the 60-vote limitation filibuster, what senators don't even want to discuss Federal Reserve Transparency will be a major step forward.
And then we can, if it passes in the Senate, we'll pass it in the House and we'll send it to Obama's desk.
And honestly, I don't think he's ever said one way or another how he stands on the bill.
I suspect that he would veto it, but again, you never know where he stands on it.
And in the Democratic primary, of course, Bernie Sanders has in the past co-sponsored it and supported it, but then he's also worked with Chris Dodd during the Dodd-Frank debate and watered it down.
And so how it plays out in the Democratic primary is anybody's guess.
In the Republican primary, obviously Senator Rand is the co-sponsor and it's a signature issue for him.
The other two Republican senators who are frontrunners are also on the bill.
The only Republican senator, the other senator who's running from South Carolina, whose name escapes me at the moment, his position on it is undefined.
So Norm, you kind of answered my question, actually, but I was hoping on the best case scenario, you'd walk us through the process.
A lot of people are not as familiar with the arcane legislative tunnels on Capitol Hill, but so you're saying best case scenario would be a vote in the fall in the House followed up very quickly by, or in the Senate, followed up quickly by a vote in the House, or what kind of a timeline are you hoping for?
We would hope that there would be a vote in the Senate in October and that it would be a 50-vote threshold because we think we can pass it with 50 votes.
If not, we'll work really hard to get 60 votes.
If we don't get 60 votes, we might be able to go back to Boehner and McCarthy and have them pass it in the House and send it back to the Senate, in which case I think that some senator, Rand or even McConnell, could put it back up on the House bill, back up on the Senate calendar, and maybe even do it that way with a 50-vote threshold and get it to Obama's desk that way.
Yeah, and Norm, you know, you sort of alluded to a little bit of, you know, the practicality of it.
We don't expect victory tomorrow or the next day and the president signs a bill and all of a sudden we're going to know what we need to know about the Fed.
But from my perspective, of having worked on this for a good many years, and even back when I first went to Congress in the 70s, there was talk of auditing the Fed and Gonzalez from Texas and Wright Patman.
They talked about this for a long time.
But it seems to me like we've made tremendous progress here in the recent decade or at least seven or eight years.
The recession, depression that we got involved in with the collapse in 07 and 08 also helped.
But also, I think it's getting so where people now are very much aware of the failure of the Fed.
So I see this as great PR.
It's important.
It's legislatively important.
But also, we have to talk to a lot of people in order to get the support.
And I think both of you realize that when we did get ability to get that vote to the floor, it wasn't my ability to talk to my colleagues, you know, and twist arms and trade votes.
And that's how I got to the vote.
It came from the grassroots.
And I think that's where we're making great progress.
And certainly you ought to have been observing this tremendously since you are so close to the activities at the Campaign for Liberty.
That's very true.
It is the grassroots people.
It's that grassroots revolution that was ignited by your 2008 presidential campaign and everything that's Campaign for Liberty, the 2012 campaign have done since then to keep this alive.
And also, you know, it was seven years ago this last week that the housing bubble imploded, the stock market crashed.
And you remember, that really put a lot of attention and focused a lot of that revolutionary movement on the Fed, on the Treasury, on the bailout culture, crony capitalism.
And it was really a sort of fortuitous that, I mean, it was bad that the market crashed, but it was fortuitous that it happened when it did because it gave the anti-Fed movement that you had started in 08 a really the next big boost was to point the finger and say,
see, this is why Ron Paul was right to warn about the Fed.
In fact, if you remember, you were very busy those two weeks doing a lot of media.
A lot of the tenor of it was, you said several months ago that we were due for a drastic correction, that our prosperity was a phony one built on fiat currency, that we don't know what the Fed is doing, but it's very dangerous.
We laughed at you at the time, but now you're right, so tell us what to do.
And unfortunately, you told them again, and they didn't listen.
And that's why now there's a movement designed that Campaign for Liberty is leading, designed to force Congress to do the right thing and take that first step by exposing the Fed to sunshine.
And then once we get the audit, we'll just see where we go from there.
But my prediction, and I think yours and Daniel's is too, is that when the audit comes out, you're going to see an explosion of public concern and criticism and demands that Congress do something to change monetary policy.
And I think if that weren't the case, then the Fed wouldn't be fighting this audit tooth and nail down to the point of actually lying about what the bill does.
Right.
Government Funding Crisis00:04:42
And Daniel?
Norm, I was going to switch gears here just a little bit.
And in the words of the sadly now late Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again with the federal government.
They're talking about a shutdown.
They've got the newspapers are giving us all kinds of scares about, oh my goodness, what are we going to do?
The government is shutting down.
Can you give us a little bit of your insider view as to what's going on with this?
Doesn't it feel so 2013 all over again?
It does.
And it's unfortunate.
And 2011 and 2011 before that.
Sadly, they always promise to shut down, but they never deliver.
And when they do, it's what, like 20% of the government, and it's always national parks and the national zoos panda cam that goes out.
You never go to the airport and there's a sign saying, I'm sorry, but you can't be nuked or groped today because TSA is closed.
But what's going on is the government fiscal year ends on September 30th.
And as always, there's no advance planning for this, even though they knew the deadline months in advance.
And they're rushing to pass a continuing resolution.
And the big argument is a lot of conservative members have said after the videos of Planned Parenthood release, they're not going to vote for anything that funds Planned Parenthood.
And that's the public issue.
Nor, let me ask you about that about the Planned Parenthood.
Same of these individuals who want to cut the funding from there.
Are they interested in making sure that they don't repeal sequestration and that we can nibble away at a few weapon positions that we have in spending?
Or are they strictly thinking they're going to be fiscal conservatives by dealing with Planned Parenthood?
As much as I'd like to see Planned Parenthood lose its funding, I mean, realistically, that's not even a percentage of the federal budget.
And you're right, Dr. Paul, that what is really going on behind the scenes is there is an effort led by the defense hawks to cut a deal with the, I guess you call them the welfare hawks of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration to say, you know, we don't like the phony cuts in defense.
You don't like the phony cuts in domestic spending.
Let's make a deal to just increase spending across the board in real terms.
Right.
That's called compromise in Washington.
Right.
It's an awful deal.
And again, as important as I think the Planned Parenthood debate is, the sad fact is, is that the really major thing that is going to happen in the fall, no matter what happens with Planned Parenthood, is you are going to see a growth of government.
And you're likely to see continued funding of abortion in some form or another because remember, Planned Parenthood is just one institution that performs abortion that is federally funded.
That doesn't count all the hospitals, and it certainly isn't going to stop all the overseas organizations, all the UN programs that are funded by the United States that perform abortion overseas, which may be one reason why some people overseas resent the United States government.
Right.
You know, the budget, I understand, this year is a little bit under $4 trillion, and they're excited because the deficit is the least it's been in seven years, and they want to celebrate because it's less than a half a trillion dollars.
But, you know, this sort of positive attitude, and they think this is positive, and with the politics of what's going on there, and I think all of us agree that there's not a chance that anything is going to get cut.
But the other thing that they don't realize is the projections, say, in 07 and 2008 about what would happen to the deficits.
There was nothing like what happened.
So tomorrow, the next day, there's going to be an event.
You know, there will be more military expenditures when you listen to some of these clowns that are running for the presidency now wanting to massively increase the military that's been severely slashed by Obama.
And I want to thank the audience for tuning in today.