Yesterday's midterm elections have left us with more questions than answers. How could Republicans have blown it so badly given the level of voter dissatisfaction across-the-board? How could Republican Congressional leadership have botched their message so badly? How did so many weak candidates emerge in key races like for the Pennsylvania Senate? How can we continue to pretend we are a first-world country with a voting system that is completely dysfunctional? Where to now?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you doing?
Good.
Were you up late last night?
I was.
It wasn't satisfying, but I was up late.
The Republic been saved.
That's the big deal.
Go hard.
I'm a little bit pessimistic about the whole thing.
You know, I was looking at the markets the other day and I said, you know, if there's going to be this grand victory for Liberty and we were really going to move away from the disaster in Washington, the stocks would be up a lot more.
So I think I had modified.
I kept being hopeful.
But I think there's a lot of people right now are very dejected, thinking that everything was going to be so much better.
But I think we've warned people that there's not a whole lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats, which is heresy when you say that, because both sides think they're a lot different.
We always been recognizing that on the big issues, they're the same.
But I think most people in the news this morning are expressing, you know, a surprise, you know, and there were some surprises.
I think, you know, there was so much propaganda out there that, boy, the whole world was going to change and we were going to get the Constitution out and everybody was going to read it and everybody in Washington was going to follow it and things would be okay.
Well, there's been some disappointment there.
I think for me personally, I used to live in Pennsylvania and after seeing what happened in Pennsylvania, I can't say that I came away from the evening or today very optimistic about what's happening with pure democracy.
But anyway, we did have one person speak out and put a bit of a positive spin on this.
And that's good, somebody we respect.
And that's Massey.
Thomas Massey made a statement, but he happens to be very positive.
But the big question is, how far can we go with our optimism?
How need it is that we be really upfront about what we're facing.
And that's one of my general beefs throughout all my career is that people ignore some of the big issues.
And that's why I frequently talked about non-interventionist foreign policy and getting rid of the Fed and the IRS.
So that was a little bit more than the average person could handle.
But those are still important issues.
So Daniel, how did you feel about last night's election?
Well, you're right.
Thomas Massey did make a statement this morning.
I think it was, and he made up, it was a positive spin.
And I think there's some validity to what he says, genuinely speaking.
He talks about, and we know about this, Dr. Paul, very well, the difference between the House and the Senate.
You know, in the House, as Thomas Massey said, if you're in the minority, you basically don't exist.
You don't control any of the committees.
You don't control any of the witnesses.
You don't have any control over the agenda.
You can't really stop things unless you can build coalitions.
And in today's hyper-politicized environment, it's unlikely to form coalitions like we did across party lines.
So in the House, you don't have, you're nothing if you're in the minority.
It's not true in the Senate because there are a lot more tricks and each individual senator has a lot more power.
So Massey points out that even a razor-thin majority of one person is a difference between Chairman Gerald Nadler and Chairman Jim Jordan on the Judiciary Committee.
And while Jordan is obviously far from perfect, having him as chair of the Judiciary Committee will enable him to pursue an agenda that might answer some of the questions we've been having, maybe about Biden's corruption, maybe about why we're not talking about his son's activities in Ukraine and how that might have driven our Ukraine policy.
So there is a chance that you can have hearings and meetings and get some of these things out in the open with the Republican majority.
But you know, when I brought this up to you, you said, yeah, Thomas has a good point.
But if you don't really have a positive governing philosophy, then it really doesn't matter if you've got a few extra seats.
So the question is, if they get the majority in the House, the Senate is looking unlikely.
If they get the majority in the House, what are they going to do with it?
And, you know, the Republicans over the years has had an image, at least they portray themselves as being, you know, fiscal conservatives, and many of them are a lot better than the Democrats.
But no matter which party's in power, they keep spending.
The deficit go up and the budgets all get passed and both parties do this.
So in that sense, that's their image.
And I think that's going to continue.
And even though I think the optimism came from that image about, you know, really accomplishing a whole lot and everybody would come the way of the Republicans and the conservatives.
But I do think the one area which might come through, and you've already mentioned it or alluded to it, and that has to do with the political oversight.
And I'm thinking there about, you know, trying to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th and also the FBI.
If nothing else, you know, we can't expect them to do the things that we want for a free society and to really follow the rules.
But I'll tell you what, if we could get to the bottom of it and really find out who was telling the truth, who's been telling the truth, and where do they fall on this?
And that is in the FBI.
Some of that stuff going on is really atrocious.
If they really did something in investigating the FBI and calming them down.
But quite frankly, you know, that is an overwhelming job because I think, you know, Trump had a desire to do that, but he never found the people to support exactly what he wanted.
And things kept getting bad.
And some of the things he complains about the most now were people that he appointed.
So the establishment, the deep state is very deep.
It's deep and it has tremendous powers.
And that's the part that's more difficult.
But anyway, that is what I'm hoping for is that they find out more.
The whole way of handling that so-called trial.
I mean, I thought the best thing that the Republicans could have done when they ever talked about January 6th is hang up a kangaroo, you know, to advertise.
Well, there it is.
But most people, you know, even the market, you know, quit looking at that thing.
So in a way, there was some, you know, they lost some steam because they were going to just do that.
And of course, it was no Republicans on there and that whole mess.
So it really was an abuse of the rule of law.
And it would be a good example to set if they could do some really good work on fact-checking the 9-6 trial and at court and all the misinformation that we got there.
So there's a little bit of more political oversight.
Suspicions Unveiled00:02:27
We go a long way because that still exists.
Although there's this collusion with spending, you know, on the big items, welfare and warfare and all these things, that's going to be there for a while.
But maybe politically speaking, the Republicans may stand their ground on trying to figure out exactly who told what laws.
But even when those things came up, they were usually dismissed by the mainstream media.
So that's one place where I'm hoping that a majority party change and Republicans in the House might do some serious investigation.
Yeah, and you know, there may be a silver lining in this after all, in a way, though, because a sweeping majority in the House and Senate for Republicans, if as you suspect and many people suspect, a big crash is on the way, you may not necessarily want that on your watch if you're not directly responsible for, although we would say they were, but you don't want that on your watch.
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And Dr. Paul, you know, we're hearing a lot now, of course, of recriminations, what happened, who messed up, what went wrong.
Executive Orders and Their Impact00:04:37
And I think you suggested earlier, and I want to get your take on this, the Pennsylvania senatorial race was really something because how can you lose?
And let's be frank to a person who's obviously got some problems.
He can't put a sentence together, yet somehow Dr. Oz happened to lose.
A lot of people, Dr. Paul, were saying these are just bad candidates.
Well, obviously, that looks like that's what the results are telling us.
But I think it's very strange that the candidate, the candidate that won, was able to do it.
It really raises the question: are the people aware of this?
Or do they have sympathy for people?
Is there a good motive somewhere buried in that?
But I'll tell you what, that should be a wake-up call for people to think that if individuals like that can be elected and we not in a Republican Party can't provide good competition there.
So that to me is a sad story.
And that's a seat the Republicans lost.
And that makes a big deal, you know, right there.
So I guess we'll wait a little while longer to get the results of a lot more races.
There are still several House races to be determined, as well as the Senate.
Nobody's declaring absolutely who controls controls the Senate, but you know, the um uh, the things though, that uh, I i'm concerned about is that, even with all this misunderstanding and noise and politicization and and everything that's going on, that the winners of this might be the military industrial complex.
The Democrats are becoming more supportive of the, of the military industrial complex.
They're not the progressives aren't as progressives of the 60s, and they're, you know, going to be very easy coalition with the warmongers and the hawks in the in the House.
That won't change.
There's not going to be more Thomas Masseys.
Come in.
Hopefully there are, and I have.
I haven't discovered them yet, but there are some that we're running.
Some of the new people might have those positions where they think that uh, you know, we shouldn't be blindly policing the world and driving ourselves into bankruptcy.
And, you know, when you look at the two major, the major lobbying groups, the military industrial complex, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, you have the wars against, you know, the foreign wars, and then the domestic wars, and the domestic wars against the people, their medical care, against civil liberties here at home, the lockdowns that have occurred.
And, unfortunately, there's a lot of guilt on both sides of his party, and I don't see him.
under today's circumstances, or even maybe with even a few more Republicans, that they really would have got to clamp down on that and come around to, to sorting this out.
The only thing that'll do that will be awakening with the people, and they are starting to do that.
But I think the I think the uh position of the Congress for for allowing presidents to go to war, you know, with an executive order, I don't think it's.
It's it's going to change and I I didn't hear anybody campaigning on it isn't it time that we quit allowing the presidents to go to war just on their own say, and all the House OF Senate.
For years and years now 50 years just roll over.
Oh, whatever you want to do, you can go where you want, we'll send you the money.
I mean that that should enrage the American people, especially when they're going broke.
When you could describe that and say yeah, you go broke and that's why your foods are, prices are high and you can't buy gasoline is because you allow the people up there.
I think one thing that uh, Daniel and I have talked about this, we should spend more time on dissecting out uh, the the principle of the executive order.
I'll tell you what I think.
The executive order uh passes more legislation.
If you add up all the regulations in the administration, uh and uh executive orders.
Now it's just flash.
They pass an executive order and the executive order, uh.
Election Cleanup Needed00:07:51
Philosophy has gone down to the state level too.
Not that the federal government can stop that, but it's the psychology of this.
You know, we have administrative official and we'll write an executive order that.
That to me, Daniel.
I hope you and I follow up on this someday and talk a lot more about the executive order.
Yeah, you made a point early on, dr Paul, that I think we should circle back to, and that is the um, the fact that yes, there are many races that we do not know the conclusion to now.
People have been conditioned now to expect, count vote uh, counting the votes takes time.
No, it doesn't, and it never has.
In the past we've only had this.
Remember when an anomaly 2000 was uh, the nation was turned upside down because we didn't know the result right away.
So just the very fact that we are still counting we don't know who won tells you the dire state of voting in America right now.
In fact, I think probably the voting is cleaner in Venezuela than it is here, and I was watching with disgust yesterday in places like Arizona Maricopa County.
You see uh, you saw some like blue collar workers showing up to vote.
They get there, 20 of the voting machines just didn't work.
They didn't.
Didn't they do a test run?
They didn't work.
So these guys, they had to get back to work.
They can't afford to take the whole day off and sit around waiting to vote.
Do we know that these are Republican voters?
We don't know.
There's a good chance they were, but regardless of who, they would have voted for the idea that on election day, 20 of the vote counting machines didn't work.
Uh also, a lot of people posted uh pictures of their ballots on twitter.
The ballots were printed in such a shoddy manner.
I saw better ballots printed in Albania than I saw there and in fact they were so badly printed that the reader couldn't read the automatic reader couldn't read uh the result.
They had to spoil it and get a new ballot.
So, and we've saw tons of problems in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
So the fact is, dr Paul Uh, that voting in the U.s is atrocious.
It's an absolute disgrace.
It's amazing that a so-called first world country cannot hold a first world type of election.
So, regardless of the result, got a real problem here with how we conduct our elections.
You know, and I think this is also a reflection of where we are on political and economic issues, because there's a lot of confusion out there and people are difficulty in understanding what is happening.
But uh, in economics, when you get things way out of kilter by spending too much money, printing too much money, having inflation, and then you have too much taxation, that whole mess that we have put up with too much uh, too too much of the government, and then you have the malinvestment and all the money going different places, and then you figure, you know uh, how much money is slushing around that there.
At the same time, there's more homeless on the street.
So it's not as a very good example for us to say, you know, America is the great place of liberty and and it was uh, it be, it's because we have a great rule of law, we have a constitution, Quite to the contrary, people know there's a mess out there.
And I think they steep down their hard sense, but they don't quite understand that you need a cleansing of a system like that.
In economics, you do.
You have to eliminate the debt.
You have to get rid of the debt and you have to get rid of the malinvestment.
And you go back to work and prosperity will come back again.
But instead of depending on more and more and more and fighting over what is remaining, and that's what they're doing.
There's this frustration.
I think they know this country's bankrupt.
I think the real problem in this country is that we have financial bankruptcy.
And all we do is print money when we want to maintain our empire.
And what does it say about maintaining an empire?
It's built on lies.
So the more fragile the empire becomes, and ours is getting more fragile than always.
There's more and more lies.
And that's what people get pretty upset with.
And yet, there's various reasons for that for political power.
That's probably the biggest motivation.
But I think it's financial and it's moral and it's invasive.
It's continuing.
But I think, and people don't quite understand that.
So they get very frustrated.
We're going to have an election and clean it up.
And all of a sudden, it doesn't happen.
Oh, yeah, we'll have a coalition.
We'll work together.
But will they deal with the war issue?
Will they deal with civil liberties?
Will they deal with a budget deficit?
Will they deal with the Federal Reserve?
Will they deal with the monstrosity in the IRS?
They didn't talk about any of that.
You know, they just march on.
So I would say that the cleansing will come.
People might not say, yes, Ron, go up there, clean up this base and do this.
We're all with you.
No, it's going to come because that's the way, that's what happens.
The economic power and the economy has the ability to force these on.
It'd be better if we hadn't made wise decisions, but no, there will be liquidation of debt and there will be liquidation.
The big thing is, are we going to gather enough people to resist and maintain our integrity so that we preserve our liberty and our prosperity?
Right now, I would say it's still up for grabs.
And you mentioned the word cleansing, and that leads to pretty much my last point I was going to make about what happened yesterday.
And that is a lot of calls for cleansing the leadership on the Republican side in the House and maybe even the Senate.
Jackie Heinrich, who is with Fox News, she put out a series of tweets this morning from her sources on the Republican side.
And she says the knives are out for Kevin McCarthy.
Expect Scalise, if he's under 225, which it looks like he will be, expect Scale to make a move quickly for Speaker.
So the question is: will there be enough support for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, looking at the disastrous result?
And someone else pointed out, Dr. Paul, that the level of dissatisfaction, according to the polls, before the election was so high that it is simply not reflected in the result of the election.
So somehow there's a disconnect.
A lot of people are saying bad candidates, weak candidates, but you also have to take a look at the quality of leadership.
And I remember, and I know you do too, very well, back in 1996 when the Republicans under Newt Gingrich, who's no hero in my view, for a lot of reasons, but they put together a very simple contract with America.
It spelled out their leadership vision where they wanted to take America what they wanted to do.
And they had an historic victory in 96.
Now, they furtered it away, and that's a different story.
But the fact is, what is, what was Kevin McCarthy's vision for Republican leadership?
I don't know if anyone can point to it.
Did you ever see anything, Dr. Paul, that you found inspiring from him?
Not quite, but I still want to be the optimist.
We'll keep working at it because when I hear the bad news, I say maybe that will create more converts that come our way and give up on all this nonsense.
But that's a big battle going on.
And we're going to have to close now, Daniel, and we'll be back, of course, tomorrow.
But I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.