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Feb. 5, 2020 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:16
Washington's Lonely Mr. No - With Rep. Thomas Massie

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie walks the walk. He built his home with his own hands - totally off the grid. In today's program we get his thoughts on the coronavirus, his colleagues on Capitol Hill, impeachment, his surprise Republican primary opponent...and much more.

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Time Text
Less Intervention, More Liberty 00:03:59
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you this morning.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Good.
It's a good day today because we have a special guest.
And the one thing neat about our guest, Thomas Massey, he's well known for being, you know, a real believer in liberty, but he's also believed in being a little bit upbeat.
You know, sometimes people get too downbeat over this because it deserves to be downbeat.
But Thomas, welcome to our program today.
Hey, thank you, Ron.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, wonderful.
You know, I want to start off with, you know, our history.
Of course, I knew you before you were elected to Congress, and we served together for two months.
Yes.
Like seven weeks.
I was so excited to sit next to you and try to absorb some liberty before I had to do it on my own.
Yeah.
But, you know, there's one thing that I want to caution you about.
You know, before you came, it didn't happen because that was such a short time when both of us were there.
But people would come up to me and say, Ron, you are the best congressman there is.
And I'd always say, well, you have to consider the competition.
So that's what I'm going to tell you.
You are the best congressman, but you have to think, what about my competition?
Right.
They say when you get elected to Congress, you pinch yourself and wonder how you got there.
And after a couple of months and you meet your colleagues, you start wondering how they got there.
Well, I'll tell you one thing that you really would wonder if you ever, or when you become a candidate for president, you go and you run into a six, eight, ten, fifteen candidate, or look at the Democratic group right now, and you say, and you get to know them a little bit when you're on debates with them and talk to them a lot.
You say, what are these people are going to be president of the United States?
I used to think that there's no way that an individual like me or somebody else could be president.
But when I looked at them, I said, boy, what a difference.
People shouldn't be reassured once they know some of them personally.
But of course.
That's a good argument for smaller, less intrusive government because these folks aren't angels.
They're not savants.
There's nothing remarkable about them.
They have the same weaknesses that everybody else has.
And that's why we shouldn't let them run our lives.
But you know what it does?
It invites the enthusiasm for something you deal with and I deal with, and that is the message because you're still on the road and you helped so many people.
You've helped us out in conferences.
So that is, you know, where the real issue is, it's changing people's attitudes and minds.
You know, it isn't those members of Congress that we run into.
It's the people in the universities, the people in the media, and all the people who have learned economics badly, and the people for academic reasons and propaganda reasons endorse the type of foreign policy and, of course, the monetary policy.
So the action is, I've always thought the action is outside of the politicians, but I use that as a forum, and you do that so well, too, because people know your beliefs and they know that you have conviction and know which direction you want to go.
And obviously, that is clearly for less government.
Yeah, and you know, even though the whole thing is rigged at times, they won't yield you even 30 seconds to join the debate sometimes.
There is a democratic feature of the House of Representatives whereby anybody can go to the floor of the House for one minute and speak at noon, right?
And most of these other congressmen use that one minute to congratulate a sports team or something back in the district, and that's fine.
But I like to use those one minutes to advocate for sane foreign policy, for less intervention, for smaller government, and those sorts of things.
At least we can still go to the floor as members of Congress and give a speech and get that out there and be the voice that some people don't hear in these presidential debates or don't hear from their own congressmen.
Kentucky's Impeachment Vote 00:15:51
Right.
Daniel.
Those one minutes are great, Mr. Massey.
They're, you know, and they're something for the permanent record, as they say.
I mean, I'm tempted.
I was thinking about, you know, we're so happy to have you on the show and all the things we could talk about.
And I hate to start with something that's neither political nor dealing with policy, but I can't resist.
You know, one of my favorite documentaries of all time is the one that Matt Kibbe did about you in the Off the Grid with Thomas Massey.
And I've recommended it to so many dozens of people.
And I've watched it probably 20 times.
It's the best half hour you'll spend, I think.
But I can't resist asking you now, a couple of years on after the film's been made, you know, you refer to the house that you built by hand, literally, you know, mining your own rocks as the Shire.
And I was just going to ask you how things are at the Shire these days a couple of years after Matt's documentary.
The Shire is running fine today.
I just came from my house off the grid.
I have to drive four miles to get on the grid and join you in the studio.
But the sun was shining yesterday, so we're excited about that.
We're using our wood gasifying boiler.
It basically takes wood, turns it into a gas, and then burns it in a very clean process.
That's heating our house.
Since we made the documentary, I've made some upgrades.
For instance, I added some solar panels that are vertical so that when it snows here in Kentucky, you don't get much of that in Texas, but when it snows here in Kentucky, the snow doesn't accumulate on those new panels.
And I upgraded our battery.
I had this bunch of clunky lead-acid batteries in my basement.
Instead, I've now found a battery from a wrecked Model S Tesla.
I took it apart and rewired it for 48 volts, reprogrammed it, and it's running our house today.
That's amazing.
Walking the walk and talking the talk both.
That's something.
Well, I have a question on what's going on in the public right now.
And we'd like to keep up with all the events.
And the biggest event right now is coronavirus.
And it's significant because there's a lot of strong feelings in both directions.
You know, it's the end of the world, and the other is it's a bad cold.
And by now, you probably have been asked about that.
Have you been asked about the coronavirus and what one must do and whether or not there should be quarantines?
Or has that subject not come up with any of your media?
Well, it's not come up within my media.
I think people are trying to gauge how seriously to take it.
You know, we had the Ebola scare and the swine flu and the bird flu and all these other plagues that were going to decimate the population, so to speak.
I think it's good to be cautious, but I think also at the same time, you can have more casualties from overreacting.
So I'm paying close attention to the reports that we're getting.
And, you know, we need to understand how the virus spreads before we start trying to figure out how to keep it from spreading.
And it's a new virus, and it behaves in new ways.
And I think that's what's bothering people the most.
Well, I think what I sense from your statement is a medical statement: first, do no harm.
So, and politically.
You're the doctor.
You're the doctor.
I'll listen to you.
Yeah, but the politicians don't follow up much.
First, do no harm.
They wouldn't have anything to do.
Actually, the political equivalent of that is never let a good crisis go to waste.
Yeah, which is what Washington is probably saying.
But, you know, Mr. Massey, you've been very vocal about this whole impeachment business.
And I've seen a couple of great floor speeches, and I've seen some great statements.
In fact, I think one of the best tweets I've ever seen, which captures the whole thing in just a couple of words, if withholding foreign aid is an impeachable offense, why did Joe Biden threaten to do it?
You know, it's so simple.
Why is no one talking about it?
Brag about it.
Yeah, brag about it.
What's your take on it, Thomas?
Well, that's just a simple question that I get from my constituents.
And after the 10th one asked me that, I decided, you know, I should tweet that.
The other thing they asked me is: if they're accusing the president of using his official capacity to harm one of his opponents in the next election, why are these Democratic senators who are running for president using their official capacity to damage his reputation?
I do have to congratulate Tulsi Gabbard for at least voting present and not voting yes or no on the impeachment sham when it was in the House, because she is running for president.
And I think it really is hypocritical for them to try to damage the president.
By the way, even Nancy Pelosi said this should be bipartisan, but the only thing that's bipartisan about this impeachment is the opposition to it.
Every Republican and some Democrats voted against the impeachment in the House.
And I think you're going to see the same thing in the Senate.
It'll be great when we get this behind us.
But, you know, I was on the oversight committee, so I was down in the skiff with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows when Adam Schiff was having what we call the witness tryouts.
He would bring them in there, and if they performed in a way that damaged the president, he would call them above ground, you know, outside of the skiff for the other hearings.
But while I was sitting down there, I realized that the liberals had lost their momentum in terms of things like universal background checks and red flag laws, gun control that they were pushing.
I was thankful that they've lost their momentum on that.
So if there is one small silver lining in this whole impeachment sham, it's what I think Nancy Pelosi knew in her heart.
Number one, it stopped their momentum and their agenda.
But number two, it's going to hurt them at the ballot box because the American people see through it.
You know, Kentucky is a state that sometimes statewide will elect Democrats for various reasons.
It's a little bit more complicated than just saying Republican, Democrat.
But how does Kentucky come down now on impeachment?
If somebody like you, do you suffer or do you benefit by taking your position?
You know, on impeachment, my constituents have tuned out.
They tuned out a long time ago.
Most of them turned off the TV on impeachment when the president released the call transcript of his call with the president of the Ukraine.
So here in Kentucky, it's a bit like the Mueller report.
It's a big nothing burger for the most part.
Of course, there are some Democrats who are excited by impeachment and the prospect of overturning the last election.
But even most of the Democrats and nearly all of the Republicans in Kentucky are against impeachment.
Good.
Well, speaking of politics, let's turn a little bit to politics if you don't mind.
We were a little surprised to see that you picked up a Republican challenger.
And I don't know how much, if any, you want to talk about it, but it is kind of interesting.
What happened?
What's going on down there?
Well, you know, I've been blessed to go eight years without a serious primary challenger since I won my first election.
But that hasn't kept the establishment from trying to recruit somebody.
And every year they've nearly recruited somebody, but the person backs out on them in the last second.
Well, this year they got somebody to actually put his name on the ballot.
And ironically, he started out by his campaign started out by saying that I wasn't supporting the president enough.
Now, you know, I'm going to be a delegate most likely for the president in the upcoming reelection.
I was a delegate at the RNC for him in the last election.
I'm a co-chair of his re-elect in Kentucky.
So I found it somewhat ironic.
But there is a website.
It's run by ABC News called 538 that tries to gauge based on your votes whether you're for the president or against the president.
And they give you some kind of score.
And I went and looked at that.
And every omnibus bill, every debt limit and every CR, if you didn't vote for them, they said you were against the president because he ultimately signed it.
Every time you send arms to Saudi Arabia, if you vote against that, if you voted against the FISA court, I found 17 votes where they said I wasn't with the president because I wouldn't vote to reauthorize the court that spied on him, because I wouldn't vote to send arms to Saudi Arabia, and because I wouldn't vote for all of this, all the debt limits and the horrible omnibuses that he was basically strong-armed into signing.
So those are things even the president didn't support.
So I think their metrics are off.
But here's what's interesting.
We went and looked at the Facebook page of my opponent, and it turns out he's a never-Trumper.
And he's trying to say, I don't support the president.
He called for a coup, a military coup against this president after he was elected.
Oops.
Yeah, among other things.
So I think that's going to hurt his chances a little bit.
He always planned on running, I think, an AstroTurf campaign.
He's not been out talking to people.
I've been talking to them for eight years.
I will stand proudly by my voting record.
You know, I tell people that when I came to Congress, I don't give my card because it belongs to 750,000 people in Kentucky.
I don't give the voting card to the Republican Party.
I never gave it to John Boehner.
I sure as heck didn't give it to Paul Ryan.
I was the only Republican who wouldn't vote for Paul Ryan to be Speaker because I knew he was going to throw the president under the bus eventually like he had already done during the election.
But I just don't give my voting card to anybody because the people of Kentucky want somebody who's independent and they want somebody who will vote for the Constitution.
And frankly, Congress needs to do a better job of sending the president bills that he can happily sign.
And we need to quit sending him an omnibus bill that's got 12 bills in one.
You know, the president would love to have a line item veto, but that's been declared unconstitutional.
But the next best thing would be to send him 12 separate appropriations bills instead of sending him one big giant bill that's got all 12 bills in it.
And if he doesn't sign it, the government shuts down and the part of the government that people want has to shut down.
So Congress needs to do a better job.
I'm fighting for the president here in Congress to make sure we get better bills on his desk.
You know, Thomas, I take a position which at times is a little bit controversial.
I want to get your opinion about it because I state that there's not good challenges between the two parties.
It's very bipartisan.
How can this be?
They hate each other's guts and all you hear is impeachment, impeachment.
But my argument here is that on the big stuff, whether it's the Federal Reserve, war spending, suspend the impeachments, go past the budget money, and that it has nothing to do with the really big stuff.
You know, they never really cut back, whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
But people say, no, they're fighting.
My sort of understanding is people fight between the two parties because it's power and personalities involved.
Do you think that's unfair to the Republicans to say there's too much bipartisanship?
No, that's not unfair at all.
Even when Obama was president, the Republicans in the majority would gleefully send him spending bills that spent way too much money.
The bipartisanship should be in favor of returning to sane fiscal policy and sane foreign policy.
But what you see is there's a bipartisan coalition that's always ready to vote for another war if they even had the courage to vote on it.
But they'll definitely spend the money that it takes to have another war.
And they get together and they agree to spend more money.
And a lot of these fights that you see between Republicans and Democrats in the media, they're kind of fake because at the end of the day, the Republican leadership is whipping with the Democratic leadership to get everybody in the House to vote for these horrible omnibus bills.
Well, there is a good bipartisanship, too.
You know, you reached across the aisle, for example, with Barbara Lee to repeal this horrible 2002 authorization for military force on Iraq.
And that's the kind of good bipartisanship, the real bipartisanship.
But I would like to turn to another topic, Thomas.
And I know that you're very active in this, and so I wanted to get your take.
You've been very active on Second Amendment rights.
You've been to so many rallies lately.
And I'm wondering what is your take on what's happening in Virginia.
It's amazing to see, first of all, the SWIFT turnaround, the SWIFT attacks on the Second Amendment, but then also the people's responses, which to this point have been ignored.
So I'd love to hear your take on Virginia and the Second Amendment.
Well, I think the Sanctuary County movement for Second Amendment, I support that.
Some people wrongly liken it to the amnesty for illegal aliens, you know, Sanctuary City movement there.
But that's more of an elitist movement, the illegal alien amnesty, whereas this is a popular movement that's supported by the voters, the Second Amendment sanctuary movement.
And basically, what they're doing is saying, we're going to push back.
You're violating the Constitution.
That's the other thing here is, you know, I'm a conservative.
I believe in the rule of law.
I think it's bad to have a rule of men or a rule of kings.
I believe in a rule of law, but the supreme rule of the law, of law, the law of the land, is the Constitution.
So what these sanctuary, Second Amendment, Sanctuary County movements are about is saying, you know what, we're not going to violate the Constitution.
Even if you have some intermediate law between the Constitution and us, that's not valid.
And so I support it 100%.
I went to the Second Amendment Sanctuary County movement in my own county.
They had the biggest turnout they've ever had in that courtroom in just a small town.
And then this past weekend, I was in Frankfurt at the rally.
And I'll tell you what, these are the most peaceful, polite rallies you've ever been to when everybody's carrying a gun.
It's the opposite of what the news tries to portray.
And of course, there are all stripes of life there, all ethnicities, but the cameras only, you know, try to film the Caucasians and put that on TV and try to make this about some privilege movement or something.
That is ridiculous.
You know, God made man and Samuel Colt made all men equal.
So that's, you know, and he also made men and women equal.
We have some great legislators in Kentucky who are women who were actually instrumental, Savannah Maddox was, in pushing the constitutional carry bill that we got last legislature in Kentucky.
So I think it's a good movement.
I support it.
There are sheriffs who are willing to go to jail.
They say, we won't enforce the law.
And it's not as a staunch.
They're willing to go to jail because they realize there needs to be a court battle.
Instead of locking up one of their constituents, they're ready to be locked up in order to fight for their constituents.
Thank You for Peace and Prosperity 00:01:16
Very good.
And we're going to have to wind this down, Thomas.
But I want to thank you very much for being with us.
But I do want to mention to you that you've been very interested and helpful with our Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And we will be having a conference in the Washington area, Alexandria, near the airport in September.
So that's just a hint that we'd love to have you there.
That sounds great.
That's after my May 19th primary.
Oh, okay.
We can help you celebrate.
Yes.
Because we're predicting you're going to win.
So we'll take a lot of risky votes here.
Well, you know, I appreciate your endorsement, Ron, but it's Carol Paul's endorsement that I sought out and value the most.
You know, you've learned, I'll tell you.
The people that have her telephone number know how to operate, I'll tell you.
But anyway, we were delighted when you came to town here and visited us at our home.
We had a meeting there and all that.
So thank you very much, and let's get together as soon as we can and pursue the cause of peace and prosperity.
Thank you.
I'll keep the flame alive that you lit and kept burning for us, Ron, in Congress.
Wonderful.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in today.
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