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Jan. 2, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:34
Is There A Conservative Case For 'Speaker McCarthy'?

Tomorrow a (slim) Republican majority will take control of the US House of Representatives. Unknown is whether former Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will get the needed 218 votes among the 222 House Republicans. What's at stake? Also today, will admitted liar George Santos end up being the most truthful Member of the House? Finally - most Americans want the FBI investigated. Will a Republican House be up to the task?

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Time Text
Change in Caucus Attitudes 00:14:19
Excuse me.
Hello.
Happy New Year.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Dr. Paul, Happy New Year to you.
It's great to be back.
This is our first show of 2023.
We took a week off.
Did you enjoy your week off?
Were you relaxing?
I didn't take a week off very often, but at the end of the week, I said, you know, that's not a bad idea.
Easy.
And I noticed not a lot of people.
Our staff came back around the country.
A lot of people didn't come back today.
They're still out.
Yeah, we decided to come back a little bit early because there's a lot going on.
In fact, we have a race for the Speaker.
The House is going to change hands tomorrow.
Maybe not a lot of people are awfully excited about it, but there is a lot to think about.
You know, you don't have to be a member of Congress to be Speaker.
That's right.
But they called.
They called and asked me about it.
I said, I don't think it's a very good idea.
I don't like to travel back and forth.
But they have remote voting now.
You could just sit in your living room and be the speaker.
You just see the gavel.
Maybe we should do it from this table here.
This is what you should be doing.
Make the announcement right from the Liberty Report.
Send me the gavel.
Well, anyway, there's a fuss going on.
So what do we have to store?
Yeah, let's put it up now.
There's a real question as to whether McCarthy is going to get that vote.
He's got 222.
We can put up that first one.
Here we go.
He's got 222 Republican members on the House side, and he needs 218 votes on that.
So he's got a very, very small margin of people who are not happy with the fact that he has been known as a mainstream Republican.
He's been known as someone who makes a lot of deals.
He's also been known among the more conservative members as someone who they believe has Trump derangement syndrome, a very, very anti-Trump.
So there is a real mini rebellion going on, and there's a question as to whether he'll get it on the first round or whether he'll get it at all.
Obviously, no Democrat is going to vote for him.
And this gives a lot of leverage, Dr. Paul, to groups like the Freedom Caucus and other more conservative members of the House to make some demands before they make their vote tomorrow.
Well, somebody asked me, what would I be doing about this?
Probably not a whole lot because I never got excited about these elections.
Not that there wasn't some difference, but I'm looking for a different type of difference.
I'm looking, are they interventionists?
And all of these very good people are good on economic policy, but they might be lousy on foreign policy.
And some of them might be pretty good on spending, but they don't care about the Federal Reserve, this sort of thing.
So I didn't see this the place for my fight.
So I didn't strike it out, became personality fights, and you still had to do a lot of trading.
And I didn't like that.
So I generally steered away from these types of battles.
But it is something, though, that is pretty important long term.
But, you know, under the conditions up there today, where the Republicans really didn't do quite as well as they thought they were going to do, it would have been a completely different situation if it had had a few extra votes.
So, you know, McCarthy has a job on his hand.
And if it's rocky now before it gets started, it's going to stay that way.
Because if they get into issues and they're allowed to have more individuality from the floor, the Democrats get to use that too.
And I think it's going to see a lot of longer sessions.
But the big picture for me is, will they cut spending?
Will there be a less increase in the deficit?
Are we going to eliminate a regulation?
Are we going to bring one soldier home?
Or are we going to continue to send our FBI and CIA around the world?
I see the CIAs in Russia right now.
That's really what I think is a great idea.
But there's not that.
That's not what they're talking about.
So that's why I cannot get excited about it.
But the strongest argument they have for McCarthy, if they sort of lean in my direction, would be that a vote against McCarthy has to be interpreted as a vote for Biden.
Biden gets a pass on it, and the Democrats get a pass.
So there is something involved there, but I probably am always inclined to look at the big picture of what are they violating.
And then if you narrow it down and you do a test on these people, what percentage of the time all of them would be purists on the Constitution?
Thomas Massey's the only one that I can get excited about, you know, in the House.
A few others are good, but I mean, to really go to the mat and think that's going to improve things, because I can't see how everything gets patched up over there.
All this angling because it isn't there.
You know, the financial system is bankrupt.
There's a moral bankruptcy involved.
And there's a political bankruptcy in the sense that Congress is just run out of any controls at all.
So I'm rather pessimistic to think that, well, if McCarthy is capable, ends up getting his votes and wins on the first ballot, which a lot of people aren't predicting.
If that happened, I wouldn't say, wow, now we can sleep better.
It just isn't that way.
Interventionism is a very bad disease in Washington.
And no matter how hard people try to be more attuned to the Constitution, the obstacles are just horrendous.
I don't think anyone would argue that McCarthy provided a bold vision for his leadership of the House.
And for all of his faults, we've talked about this before on the show.
For all of his faults, Newt Gingrich in the mid-90s, he presented a real clear vision.
Now, they probably didn't get most of the stuff done they said, but they presented a real clear vision that people could latch on to.
And that's why they rode into the House.
And I think that inspired you to come back into the House.
So that's how good it was.
Got you out of Lake Jackson.
The other thing is, okay, you know, I think the Democrats knew that Pelosi has been weak for a while, but they rallied the wagons.
They circled the wagons and said, look, this is not a fight we need.
We've got an agenda to do.
And so the Republicans bickering about this, you can make an argument will weaken them overall.
But here are some of those that are in opposition.
And as you say, for the most part, there's some good things about these guys.
They speak out pretty well.
Let's look up this next one.
Now, here's Matt Gates from Florida, who's very outspoken and on many things quite good.
He said, I'm not voting for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker because he's just a shill of the establishment.
The reason most of my Republican colleagues are supporting him is because they benefit from the redistribution of lobbyists and special interest money from McCarthy to their campaigns.
That's a pretty strong statement.
He is not going to be getting any warm fuzzies if McCarthy is Speaker.
Let's look at the next one.
Andy Biggs from Arizona, a decent guy, makes a lot of good points.
He says, I don't see any scenario where I'd support Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.
McCarthy has a track record of cutting backdoor deals with the Democrats.
So there are two that have been very outspoken about this.
And I think McCarthy understands that he's in a difficult position.
So he started to make some concessions.
And we saw a piece this morning on Zero Hedge.
Of course, very good as usual there.
And I guess the first thing he said on a conference call is that he would be willing to lower the threshold by which rank and file members can vote to depose the Speaker.
And so that would be five members could get together and take a vote of the House, call for a vote of the House, a confidence vote.
That's a lot of leverage to members.
What if my cynicism is justified?
You know, and that the fight isn't there, not much will change, and there's too much power behind the Federal Reserve and foreign interventionism, all this nonsense.
They're not going to quit spending.
The deficit is going to explode.
They can't stop it because it's locked in place.
If that's reasonably accurate, then what good can come of this?
What about a negative could be turned into a good stalemate?
You know, is stalemate worse than the other stuff?
Or would that impede the powerful Republican caucus now to change things?
Even when they had the votes, they had the 60 new votes in 1980 or something.
And nothing changed.
And even when they had a Republican president, nothing really changed.
So slowing them up isn't too bad of an idea, but that's almost blasphemy.
Well, here are reportedly some of the concerns with the House Freedom Caucus.
Now, that's not like the old Liberty Caucus you had, but it contains some conservatives and some decent folks.
Here apparently is what they want.
Let's put this up.
These are the reforms that they want.
Among the unacknowledged demands, conservatives want a commitment that House leadership will not work to defeat them in primary, in party primaries.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the Freedom Caucus has asked for rule changes that include, and there are four of them, broader membership in the group that doles out committee assignments, allowing committee members to choose their own chairs, allowing amendments from the floor, and being given five days to review legislation before voting on it.
Those to me don't seem unreasonable.
You know, we've watched from the sidelines for a number of years, Dr. Paul, I guess about 10 years, we've watched power being so concentrated in a small group of leadership to the point where members themselves, they have no power at all.
That's why they're always mouthing off everywhere.
They don't have no work to do.
Yeah, it boiled down, and I understood it.
And getting upset didn't help that much, but I thought there was still a role to play to point out their infractions.
You know, if they are doing this and it's just a way to hide the Constitution, trying to emphasize this.
And you say, look, these guys are politicians.
You're going to go and change Pelosi on a position?
No, they're locked in on the politics of it.
But that doesn't mean all of them did, because I was always so pleased there because I don't believe in overly pressuring people thinking I'm going to have influence, you do this and that.
But very often, individuals, that always pleased me the most is when an individual would catch me sitting by myself and the vote up there was 310 to 1.
Why did you do that?
But it was a sincere question.
Why did you vote that way?
And a few of them would pay attention.
And I put that in a category of what really has to happen because nothing ever changes the big picture.
Does the foreign policy change?
Does the monetary policy change?
Does the attitude about deficits change?
It just isn't that way.
Even though the people we're hearing from right now, I believe what they're saying and they're willing to take a stand and even risk their political career by standing for something.
But the way the system works, and the more I look at what's happening, probably Congress, I'm getting to a point.
I don't know whether this is extremism or what.
I think the Congress is irrelevant.
You know, what's going on behind the scenes?
You know, I mentioned already that I'm annoyed because I think the CIA is in Russia right now and all that kind of stuff.
Do you think Congress even knows about it?
Yeah.
Or wants to know.
Yeah, that's right.
And here we are.
We've been in another war.
And we finally get to people in charge who are the PSNICs.
What do you mean, Peace Knicks?
That's what they were.
When I was in the military, in the 60s, they were the PeaceNicks.
And now they're out there starting wars faster than the Republicans can start.
So it's a whole year now that we have done that.
And what was the announcement today?
You know, the presidents of the two countries and NATO, we're not budging one inch.
That's what has to change is these attitudes.
Yeah.
One thing I was going to ask you about this interesting is one of these concessions they demand, allowing committee members to choose their own chairs.
I don't think most people, and this maybe sounds like insider baseball, I don't think most people understand how committee chairmen are chosen.
There's not a single criteria.
You know this much better than I did because you fought for a while to get a subcommittee chair, even though you were well qualified on paper in terms of terms.
But I heard a terrible rumor that the leadership sometimes uses these chairmanships as an excuse to squeeze money out of members.
Is that true?
Yes.
Don't say it too loud.
The people will become suspicious and turn against the government.
Now, I used to have a number.
To become a committee chairman of these certain committees, you know, it might be, it's probably inflated now.
Three, four, five million dollars, and then you qualify, then you're elected by the executive committee, which is, you know, a small number of people.
Jordan Exposes Liar Claims 00:13:25
So that's the way it works.
And if you don't play the game, you're not even qualified.
So qualification comes with playing by the ball.
Play ball.
The one way when they're trying to persuade, somebody I'd sit and watch how they needed two more Republican votes to get this bill going.
And they go on and on, and they work up the ladder on the people who have the political power.
And finally, they'll get the speaker to come down and sit down there, and I'd be close.
I'm going to tell them.
He says, do you want to be a team player or not?
Who is a team player?
And they all use the same term.
Because if you weren't a team player, you were Satan.
If you want leadership, you've got to follow.
Well, here's one firebrand who is marching to a different beat than the other conservatives.
Let's look this up.
We've talked a lot about Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I'm sure there's plenty of bad stuff about her, but I kind of admire her because she does think for herself up there.
Now, she is very, very out in the open in favor of Kevin McCarthy for Speaker.
She has endorsed him, and she says she will vote for him.
And a lot of people were surprised about that.
And we can go to the next one.
Here's a piece she wrote in, I think it was The Hill.
No, no, it was Daily Caller.
Yes.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, if Republicans want to get things done, there's only one choice for House Speaker.
And you might say, come on, this guy's not going to get anything done.
But I read the article, and she does make a couple good points.
I'm just going to go over them really quickly.
If we can go to this next one, she makes a good point that there really isn't anyone else running for Speaker.
She says, no, Jim Jordan is not running.
He's endorsed McCarthy.
He's preparing to lead the Judiciary Committee as chairman exactly where we need him to be.
Jim Jordan will lead the charge to rip apart the corrupt Department of Justice and FBI.
That sounds good.
She said, no, Steve Scalise is not running.
He is unanimously elected majority leader and publicly supports Pelosi.
She said, after spending the last two years in absolute disgust with the Biden Democrat agenda and the disrespectful way Nancy Pelosi runs the House, I can tell you why I'm supporting Kevin for Speaker.
It's an interesting case, and I think it's a pretty good case that she's made.
Yeah, she should be respected for this.
And I probably, you know, I've mentioned I don't want to make these my fight, and I never said publicly whom I was going to vote for, that sort of thing.
But if I did it, I would probably just not talk to anybody, and I'm just going to cast my vote.
Sometimes that is as loud as anything else.
Sometimes I always see people who mock me for voting by myself.
I said, just think about it.
How many are there?
435 people or something like that?
And I'm one.
So I'm equal to them.
Yeah, exactly.
And sometimes they got a people would come to me if I have voted by myself.
Oh, please, we have to have it unanimous.
I said, who cares?
Nobody's going to look at my vote.
But it did have a psychological effect on them because they did.
They wanted a stamp of approval.
And if a person, you know, took a disagreement, they didn't like that.
They were always looking at that one.
Well, here's someone that's coming into the House as a Republican member, the first openly homosexual Republican, I believe, is what I read, elected to the House.
But it's not going to be smooth sailing for him.
This is George Santos.
And here's the New York Times piece.
George Santos admits to lying about his college and work history.
What do you think about this, Dr. Paul?
Oh, I have a risky position on this.
So people have to think carefully about what I'm going to say.
I have a little bit, I don't know whether it's sympathy, but tolerance of him because we know he's a liar.
He admits it.
So what else do you need to know?
I mean, and let the people put him in office.
They want a liar.
But, you know, the only thing that counts, what if it turns out, I imagine during his campaign he said something that he's a constitutionalist.
What if he is?
What if he voted 100% right?
And those are the people whose lies I want to stop.
I mean, his lies are commonplace.
They're there all the time.
That's what they all do.
But if you could get the people who have lied to us about going into war and all the horrible, evil things, especially in the leadership position, how necessary it was to go to the Middle East and remake the Middle East.
How many people died?
It's not in the thousands.
He's into the millions of people who died for that 20-year war, which is still going on over there.
Matter of fact, it's just got expanded a little bit.
It goes on and on, and it's always for so many wonderful things.
It's for our Constitution.
It's for our freedom.
And they argue that case, and it's nothing but lying.
So if you're going to make him relative, his lies, in a way, are petty lies.
But don't take it that I endorse what he's doing.
But I want to make the point that big lies are the people who are condemning him the most.
And they figure, oh, no, I've condemned this guy.
Let's throw him out.
He's a liar.
I'd like to vote out everybody in there that voted, took the oath.
Just think of the people who take the oath of office and they don't follow it.
That's a lie.
That's a big lie.
Well, don't you know about Article 168?
No, I never heard of that.
Is that in the Ten Commandments or wherever?
Exactly.
Maybe they'll make him speaker, right?
An admitted liar.
Here's one thing that I did find funny about him, and a lot of people talked about this.
He's got to be some kind of character.
I tell you what.
Let's put up this next clip.
This was a big thing because he was claiming to be Jewish on the trail, and it turns out that he's not.
And he said, I'm never claiming to be Jewish, Mr. Santos told the Post.
I'm Catholic.
Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background.
I said I was Jew-ish.
This guy is.
He's a good liar.
Absolutely hilarious.
Well, we should move on to our next story because this would be in the category of, okay, Jim Jordan is going to be in there in judiciary.
He's pretty good.
And you've said many times he's very smart.
He's very dogged.
He gets things done.
He's not perfect by a long shot, especially on foreign policy.
But he is going in, apparently, with a strong agenda.
Well, let's put this up because this came out a couple of days ago.
Rasmussen reports they did a poll, a public opinion poll, and they discovered, Dr. Paul, that 63% of all the people they polled want the FBI's social media activity investigated.
63%.
They have a problem.
Yeah.
The FBI is going to do the investigation.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, that's why the Congress exists.
They are actually supposed to do it.
But, you know, when they have commissions and try to figure out who did what after these assassinations and all, and I've always said they're either to cover up mistakes or cover up their plans.
And in many ways, an investigation of the FBI, who will be checking up on the checker-ups, you know, and that's why.
But there still should be an effort made.
It took way too long for the people in the United States to get up into the 60% to realize that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy all by himself if he wasn't even involved.
And the corruption of the curb there.
And that's when we should have been talking about the FBI and the CIA back then, because those were big events that occurred.
That's where the power and the control is, is the control of the FBI and the CIA, not who's going to be Speaker next week.
I mean, that's important, but it's nothing like who the CIA works for.
And they're above the pettiness of getting elected to something.
But that's what's happening right now.
And I think it's great at 63%, but people better realize that there's going to have to be a very, very special way of exposing them.
And I think it's starting.
I mean, Jordan, I think Jordan's going to be good.
I think there's a few in there and emphasizing those individuals who are tigers at exposing.
That's what we need, exposure of what's happening.
And that is why I think it's important that we have these tigers in there because they're bright and they're not fake.
I don't think we can find them and start kidding about them lying and making a joke of it.
I think they're very serious about what they're taking, want to take care of.
Yeah.
Let's put up this next clip because this is from the article from Rasmussen.
And these are just the numbers that they come up with.
63% of likely U.S. voters believe Congress should investigate whether the FBI was involved in censoring information on social media.
Only 22% oppose such an investigation according to the survey.
Even if the numbers are remotely like this, you could say Chairman Jordan would go in there with broad American support.
And I'm thinking about this.
What would a committee or what would his judiciary committee look like in investigating this?
I would think the worst mistake would be to do what they did with the January 6th committee and make it all about politics, politics, politics.
He's got broad support for doing this.
If I were him, and thankfully I'm not, I would make a real effort to make it a bipartisan look into this.
It's a joke if they don't do that.
They ought to act a little more mature.
Because I think the committee, I think it would be good if they exposed and said, here, we have 10 things that are infractions about pretending that with a true hearing and exposing the truth.
And just a list of.
Like the opposition, the Republicans weren't involved in this.
And also, the whole thing that the evidence, you know, if you're on the defense, you're supposed to have the evidence of what the prosecution's presenting.
But they got nothing.
How about the videos?
Someday those videos will come out.
But they're still, but you know what?
It's powerful.
It's a powerful enemy.
They're still begging and pleading to get the videos out on JFK's assassination.
And Republicans and Democrats have been there and they all do the same thing.
So that is the issue that the people who are involved in the control of people I claim are involved in the coup, they run things.
The deep state, they're the ones who make this decision.
Congress, you know, came back and, oh, well, yeah, the people are waking up.
We'll have to have another hearing.
And then when they have that, 20 or 30 years after Kennedy, and then they changed the rules and said, by such and such date, you have to release the material.
The material came and went.
Whether it was a Republican or Democrat, they still won't release it because, oh, it's national security.
It's your security because you know you'd be thrown out on your ear if we find out what you really have been doing.
Exactly.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, just by thanking our viewers for coming back.
We were away for a week, and we were worried nobody would be watching us, but I'm looking here at the screen, and I see many of you are watching us, and we appreciate it.
I also want to thank everyone.
We kind of have a frenzy because we're a 501c3 educational charity, and of course, at the end of the year, it's all about raising money because you want to get that credit for your 2022 tax forms, which is understandable.
Uncle Sam doesn't get your money.
You can give it to a cause you like.
That doesn't mean you're limited to that time, but it's kind of a frenzy.
So we did spend a few days feverishly writing to a lot of you who are signed up, asking you to make that contribution.
I can say, Dr. Paul, that I'm very pleased because the response was tremendous.
The best we've had in years in terms of the number of supporters, the number of people.
And a lot of people gave $5 or $10.
A lot of people gave more.
But it was just great to see the number of people coming forward to help keep this show alive, to have our conferences in 2023, our projects like the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar, and many other things we have planned.
Epidemic Of Wokeism Still Out There 00:02:03
That's all thanks to you.
And so a lot of deep thank you for those of you who responded to our call for tax-deductible donations.
And we hope you'll continue to support us this year.
Very good.
I'm going to close out by refreshing our memory on an issue that we have covered thoroughly.
Very early on, we questioned the whole process of dealing with COVID and the lockdown.
And now a lot of people agree with the position we had and still have.
But because it's not in the news and a lot of people have been discredited, some of the doctors have recovered their reputations, but it's still an issue.
It's alive and well, more so than I want it to be and more than I really expected it to be now.
But I think wokeism is still epidemic and it's around the world.
I don't think, oh, well, that happened in New Zealand or that happened in Australia, which it is.
That whole ideology of wokeism, which is cultural Marxism, is very, very vicious.
And it involves, you know, the deep state and corporatism and all the rest, the university professors.
And they're in charge.
But wokeism now is still alive.
Well, I have two little clips here.
I just want to read the headlines on because the epidemic is still out there, but it's an epidemic of the spread of wokeism.
And unfortunately, enough people haven't awakened enough to say enough is enough.
Let's quit this nonsense.
Here's one, two of them from the Zero Hedge, which does a very good job in keeping many people up to date.
Norwegian actress faces three years in prison for saying men can't be lesbians.
Now that's important.
I wonder if that's on the speaker's agenda to try to solve that.
But I think this stuff is stuff, it's junk.
And sometimes even to debate it, you know, philosophically is not a good idea because it's so extreme, it should be mocked.
Epidemic of Wokeism 00:01:12
That's what it deserves.
And the other one isn't much better.
This is the British.
The British woman arrested for silently praying near an abortion clinic.
Now, that's really brilliant.
But we've done that stuff in this country already where they've, you know, just the cancellations.
You know, you said this, how many people on the internet get canceled.
And of course, we're hoping, our fingers crossed, that Musk is going to really, you know, introduce and reintroduce the principles of respect for freedom of speech.
Even when you say something that is controversial, this whole idea of the First Amendment, it wasn't made, you know, just for, it wasn't made just to protect weather reports.
It was made to protect you to say controversial things, especially those issues where you are criticizing the government.
That's what people can't handle because they think they can control the scenario and tell them what they're allowed to complain about.
Well, anyway, I think it's been a great year, and I appreciate all the people that have supported us.
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