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Dec. 19, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:53
Speaker Johnson SLAMMED For Bloated Spending Bill!

After promising there would be no Christmas Continuing Resolution...Speaker Johnson put out...a Christmas Continuing Resolution. It was jammed with so much pork that he faced a GOP revolt in the House and a D.O.G.E revolt from Elon and Vivek. What's next? Also today, New House-introduced "D.O.G.E." Bill is unimpressive. We'll tell you why.

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Budget Concerns Arise 00:05:13
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing fine.
And I understand that you have been thinking about the budget and you have a plan and you can solve it in five minutes.
I'm just kidding, of course, because I know it'll take you less than 10 minutes.
We joke about that, but you know, in truth, what if we had a wand and we could wave the wand and nobody could lie in Congress and everybody would obey their oath of office?
What do you think would happen?
You know, that'd be magic, huh?
So, but we're not there.
We have to struggle, you know, as Thomas Massey predicted, and as I and you have witnessed over the years, they always wait to the last minute pressure.
Everybody wants to go home for Christmas and this sort of thing.
And sure enough, that happened.
But, you know, this CR that Johnson just introduced didn't last very long.
You know, that was here and gone.
I wonder if he was thinking of Kevin McCarthy.
He probably, I wonder what's going to happen.
So he got a little concerned that he guessed, oh, we better change this rather quickly.
But, you know, everybody wonders about it.
In the past, they've talked about, you know, if you can't find a speaker there, you know, you're allowed to use speakers outside.
They don't have to be a member of Congress.
Now, I understand there's somebody suggested that they have an idea that that's what we need.
We're going through too many.
It's so mixed up.
Of course, I see the problem as an addiction to spending and the dependency on government and all that other stuff and unsound money.
So that is one thing.
But, you know, it makes you stop and think, you know, if they can't even find anybody in the Congress that could be acting as a speaker, I wonder what they're thinking about doing.
And I understand somebody did make a suggestion exactly along those lines about picking somebody that's not in the Congress to be the speaker.
Yeah, and we do have that clip.
It'll be our mystery clip that we'll put up a little later that everyone's talking about, Dr. Paul.
It's quite an interesting development.
But, you know, since we did our show yesterday, and I don't think we should take all the credit, but maybe a little credit, but there was an explosion.
I mean, people started looking at this continuing resolution or CR or omnibus, whatever you want to call it.
As you point out, that they put out every Christmas.
It's like a big old pile of coal in your stocking.
They started taking a look at it, not only the money, which is one thing, Dr. Paul.
And I have a few clips to show you that the money was only part of it.
Now, that's bad, but the other stuff they slipped into it, and you and I know this, you know very well, Dr. Paul, when you have a 1500-page bill, everybody has a pet project that they slip into it.
I've seen it done.
I've been to some of those markups of the foreign affairs authorization and appropriations bills where people do that in the back room.
The staffers do it in the back room.
I know how it works.
I've seen it.
This is what you do writ large on a bill of this size.
But what happened was interesting, Dr. Paul.
People started getting irritated and angry.
And actually, if you can put that first clip up, this happened pretty much right after we finished our show.
Now, this is from Zero Hedge, but it's virtually everywhere.
Call their bluff, Trump advance, slam pork-filled bill.
Tell GOP to stand their ground.
So number one, you have members were upset, and then you had the president-elect and vice president-elect saying, listen, GOP House members, stand your ground.
Don't let this garbage go through.
And then something even more interesting happened, Dr. Paul.
Elon Musk got involved.
If you go to that second clip, now this is from a separate politico article.
Some Republicans believe Musk's criticisms encouraged even more House GOP members to oppose the spending plan that Johnson and his leadership rolled out Tuesday night.
So Musk came in off of the heels of Trump and Vance's irritation at the bill, and that encouraged a lot of other members to speak up.
Now, they're not necessarily cowards, but they put their fingers to the political wind.
Well, here's Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona, said, I think it's having an effect on some people when he was asked about Musk's tweets.
He said, I think it probably is.
And then what happened, one other thing, Dr. Wall, before I throw it over to you, is that then Musk got in touch with Speaker Johnson himself.
If you go to the next clip, this is from the same politico article.
I was communicating with Elon last night, Johnson said Wednesday on Fox and Friends.
Elon Vivek and I were on a text chain together, and I was explaining to them the background of it.
So he's been in touch with them and he has been discussing with them.
And the revolt, I think, was successful in the short term in that this turkey has been dropped for now.
And Johnson is talking about Dr. Paul putting together a clean CR.
But you had some thoughts about a clean CR.
Debt Deal Debacle 00:15:34
You don't think it's as great as it's being cracked up to be?
No, they haven't worked before.
It's always a gimmick.
And, you know, right now, what's introduced into this little debate up there and trying to get the government to stay open.
First off, the government never gets closed down.
So that's not a concern.
You know, the essential people have to stay.
And everybody, the non-essentials, you know, why are they here in the first place?
Anyway, nothing really happens if they don't do it.
And they could pass some rule and pass it so temporarily.
Nobody gets, you know, gets the U. Somebody comes along and throws the people out of their houses.
They don't have any Medicare or anything.
It's scare tactics is what they do.
But I thought the one thing that entered into this debate when Trump advance talked to Johnson was, you know, what's going to come up.
And I thought it was interesting that it's the big deal and the Republicans are participating in this.
Well, we don't want blame for raising the debt.
Well, you know, I think that's bipartisan.
I think this is one thing.
It's very bipartisan, Washington, is spending money and running up the debt.
But, you know, the strategy is that the Republicans coming into office, they don't want to do the first thing in order to make it look like we're not letting the government close down.
So we have to raise the national debt.
So what we want to do is we want to hurry up and raise the national debt.
You know, so they are arguing.
The Republicans are arguing.
When I first saw that, I couldn't believe it.
It says Trump Vance direct Congress to raise the debt ceiling.
I thought that's what they didn't want to do.
So they want to raise it, but it's strictly a political game they're playing and it's unnecessary.
But they're missing the point.
There's a distraction.
Well, all that money's been spent.
It's just a matter of lying and cheating on how we can deceive the people.
So I don't think that, you know, people will look at that and say, hey, and I responded that way too.
You know, politically, that's pretty shrewd because, you know, American people do look at that.
They just raised the national debt.
Why then they do it?
But for us to hurry up and do it so we can blame they can blame Biden, you know, that to me just seems to be low-level politics.
But anyway, the problem is spending and the people who spend the money have to be blamed.
But just deciding who actually raised technically the debt.
I claim there's so much off limits on spending.
I think a lot of mischief goes on with the Federal Reserve and they bail out and people don't know exactly what's going on.
We don't exactly know how all the funds are spent, you know, in the Pentagon.
And I think that's where the real problem is, is the government's out of control.
And I think this is interesting to talk about is who's going to raise the national debt.
Well, it's already been raised.
You know, we spent the monies.
That's over and done with.
It's all a sort of this whole thing is, I'm not going to take a blame for this.
He says, they say, I had some members say that had voted for every spending bill ever, but he'd always vote against it, raising the national debt.
And that is so hypocritical.
So I think that if we just had a constitutional approach to it and Jefferson wanted to do that, not to have debt, you know, and especially they didn't deal with it back then, having debt monetized.
This is an endless, endless problem.
So I see this perpetuating, but I think the debate is interesting.
I think people are getting scared.
And like you indicated, maybe people once in a while listen to our program to realize that there are ways you can approach this, but it's a big job.
So what we can do, Daniel, is just keep emphasizing the importance of limited government to deal with all our problems.
And we have a, I mean, what's interesting is that there is certainly an element of Hegelian dialectics involved in the Christmas CR, because as you know, Dr. Paul, they'll put out the biggest piece of turkey you could imagine.
And people flip out and then they say, oh, okay, well, we'll put in a clean bill and everything will be hunky-tory.
Well, actually, there's a representative that I wasn't familiar with.
I sort of lost track of some of these people, but his name is Tim Burchett from Tennessee.
And I don't know much about him other than the fact that he made a pretty good video explaining how this dialectic works with the Christmas CR.
And I don't know if we can cue that.
And let's watch a minute of this video of Representative Burchett telling us and explaining how things work in D.C.
He does a pretty good job, I think.
If we have that ready.
Hey, everybody, Tim Burchett.
Everybody's wondering what the heck is going on.
Well, I'll try to explain a little bit of it to you.
The CR, which is a big bloated monstrosity that everybody is pulling off of, and everybody cut a deal and the deal just got too big.
I told y'all from the beginning I was against it.
And so now they'll try to pass what's called a clean CR.
But you got to remember, a continued resolution, a clean CR, is just a continuation of the bad spending policies that Pelosi and Schumer put in during COVID, which we know now are just completely bloated.
People haven't even spent all the money we gave them yet.
So they'll cut all the garbage out of there, the pay raises and all this other stuff.
And then they'll pass this CR.
And all these people who claim they're big Doge people, which aren't, will go home and say, look, we stopped that horrible spending bill.
And now we've got a great, you know, we had a great thing, which is still a terrible thing.
It's like when I passed raising the speed limit in Tennessee.
Does that sound familiar, Dr. Paul?
They don't blink an eye and they know they're going to do it.
They plan to do it and both sides know about it, but they'll go right up to the last minute.
Used to be, well, they'd go and pretend they're closing the government down for a couple of minutes.
And yet that turned up into such a farce that they don't even bother doing that anymore.
But the pretense is that they're actually dealing with the real issues.
And that's why we're here.
We're trying to balance the budget.
If I wasn't cynical about the majority of a lot in both parties, they're for this spending or this wouldn't happen.
And these are things that the American people are sick and tired of.
But sometimes, you know, the political division, and that's one advantage we as libertarians have is, you know, we can actually, you know, look at the issue and say, well, is deficit spending bad?
Yes, don't do it.
And write a law that says you can't monetize debt.
Take care of it.
But that doesn't happen.
It happens and there's playing politics and they play that game and scare the people.
They do the same thing in foreign policy.
Why you have to vote, you have to vote for the military spending because it's so important or we'll have more terrorists.
And so then we get a president that just opens up the borders and they get to walk in and we treat them like special guests.
That's where the real problem is the role of government and the understanding of what it would be like to live in a free country.
Yeah.
And, you know, so we talked about some GOP members who were discouraged and unhappy about it.
And then Musk and Zimar Maswami came on board.
The president-elect and vice president-elect came on board and gave them courage.
Well, I think someone else deserves credit for giving courage.
And that, if you can put that next link up, and that's someone you may know, Dr. Paul.
His name is Senator Rand Paul.
I've heard he shares more than just a name with you.
But anyway, he announced yesterday when all of this kind of was churning around and all of this stuff was happening.
He said, look, I'm not going to deal with this.
I'm not going to do it.
Breaking, Senator Rand Paul announces he will delay the passage of the massive omnibus spending bill if it clears the house, potentially leading to a government shutdown if not passed by Friday.
And I think that was a very bold and courageous move by him.
He's saying, look, guys, I'm calling your bluff.
If you don't send this turkey home, I'm going to shut down government and I don't care what happens.
So kudos to him, right?
I mean, that's great.
Yeah, I wonder where he learned all those tricks.
He's pretty good.
Well, anyway, it's a big problem.
I guess we have to joke at times because if you really looked at it, and there are times when I'm more in a mood to say, look, you can't be joking about this.
This stuff is dangerous.
And I still think that.
And I'm not that optimistic about all of a sudden the budget's going to be balanced and all this.
And people will say, well, why do you keep doing this?
And I do it for a precise reason.
I didn't even think I was going to get elected to Congress, let alone change the monetary system.
But people have to be prepared for this and know what can happen because eventually they will be forced into the changes and we will be forced to change our foreign policy.
The whole works.
And during this operation of finding a budget, Doja offered their idea of what could be done.
And they offered a bill that would do cut a lot of spending.
It would reduce the Johnson bill to a little bit of sanity.
But when I read that, I thought, well, there's something that I need to think about.
It cuts the non-military spending by $114 billion.
We can't argue with that.
Shrinking programs.
And some of them are programs, I'm surprised because they're sensitive.
energy, climate, health, transportation, veterans benefits, education, economy, those would be cut.
Yes, that's true.
But it's not at the top of the list for me if you want to build a transition.
But the addition, the last sentence in the article written about this was the DOJ Act reduces Pentagon spending by zero dollars.
And I want that to be a big deal.
You know, we did something on the internet and on X, and we got the best result ever.
The American people hate foreign aid, especially under the conditions we have today.
Tremendous support.
But why are they blinded to say, and even bring it up now, it's so sensitive.
You can't say you're going to cut some military money.
And it has nothing to do with defense and nothing to do with security.
It has to do with the military-industrial complex.
So to me, to me, I would suggest strongly that if you really are serious about cutting, that's where the cut should be a long time before you start taking away some benefits from veterans and transportation, which should all be cut because they're not constitutional.
But I think, but it's still early in this debate because, you know, the new administration hasn't even been sworn in yet, but everybody assumes they are a president, but there's a couple of weeks to go yet.
But let's hope that we can contribute some very positive things that need to be done.
Yeah, Dr. Paul, this bill you're talking about is not at all related to the Musk and Ramaswamy effort.
This is a separate House Republican effort to try to get ahead of the curve, basically to try to glom on to all the attention that the Doge is getting from Musk and Ramaswamy.
They're basically using that acronym to put in their own bill.
And they're saying, hey, guys, hey, Doge, we want to be part of you.
We want to be your friends.
We want to be part of the cool crowd.
And so they put in this bill, as you point out, it completely ignores the massive elephant in the room, which is the trillion-dollar military budget.
And as you always say, it's not a defense budget.
It is a military budget.
So the House Republican Doge Act should be DOA Act.
Nobody should do it because it's very obvious that if you're going to cut spending, you have got to go to the military spending because most of it, by the way, goes to the military-industrial complex.
It doesn't help our defense of the United States.
It defends other countries, Taiwan, et cetera.
So I would hope that if Elon and Ramaswamy are interested in how to cut the Pentagon, Dr. Paul, they would look up people like Chuck Spinney in all the 1980s military reform movement because they had a lot to offer in how to make the military more effective, better defend us in a lot cheaper way.
So hopefully that's what they do do on this on this issue.
So House GOP back to the drawing board on this stuff.
No, and we've had some encouraging information from Trump talking about anti-war and stopping wars.
He's also going to start them.
But the big question is, and you're the one that has brought this up because you know the personnel so well, and that is the individuals that are to be his key advisors aren't exactly the advisors that we would want.
We don't look to them to get daily advice on what's really going on in that scene.
So as long as the advisors and dependency on it, because you do need to talk to somebody.
And we knew that was one problem back on the first administration for Trump.
And this one, I just hope that that can be changed because I think the instincts of the new administration are good for spending and even on the foreign policy.
But we have a long way to go because we have to realize how powerful they are.
You know, we're talking about the military-industrial complex, but just think of the power of the pharmaceutical industry weaseling their way into some of this stuff too and into the conversation about making sure that RFK doesn't have much clout in achieving what he wants to do.
So we have to give him support to try to straighten it out and let those few doctors and some of them are going to be in the administration to maybe move in the direction of getting the doctor-patient relationship back rather than living with the bureaucracy, the government and all the regulations and all the power control by the insurance company.
This is not the practice of medicine.
It's the practice of who's going to get gouged the fastest.
Major Task Ahead 00:06:57
So it's a mess.
And so there's more than, matter of fact, there's more than one major lobbying firm.
So that's a major task that Trump is undertaking.
But it has to be done.
But I still work on the fact that this thing is going to get worse before it gets better.
And people better be ready for the changes that have to be done.
They talked about biting the bullet and doing something, but right now they're not quite in the mood for that.
But eventually the market bites the bullet.
And it's not a voluntary thing because the people are addicted to the type of government we have.
And that is a real chore to undermine that.
Yeah, you know, Dr. Paul, back in the Reagan administration, when they were talking about the Soviet military threat and et cetera, this is just in reference to your discussion of some hawks around Trump that are slightly, more than slightly concerning to us.
But what Reagan did is he had a red team and a blue team, and they challenged each other's perspectives on different things.
It's sort of like a competing group.
And that would be something like if Trump has his hawkish team, his red team, it would be a good idea, in my opinion, for what it's worth to have kind of a kitchen cabinet to challenge those perspectives, have a blue team of people that we know that are more realists that are more non-interventionists and let them duke it out intellectually and see what happens.
I think that would be a good move.
But I do want to go to one other thing before we shut things down because you alluded to it and we said it would be the bonus round of what we're going to talk about today.
And I'm afraid our people in the back are going to have a heart attack.
But if we can find the Rand Paul tweet about the Speaker of the House and put that up, I think that's kind of fun.
Oh, you got it already.
That's great.
So this is Senator Paul put this out a little bit earlier this morning, 6.30 a.m.
He must be an early riser.
Here's what he said.
The Speaker of the House need not be a member of Congress.
Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk.
Think about it.
Nothing's impossible, not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka Uniparty, lose their ever-loving minds.
So he put that out first thing in the morning.
Now, if you can skip to the very next clip, it got picked up by the media immediately and on X. If you can, there we go.
Rand Paul calls for Elon Musk to replace Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.
Nothing's impossible.
Now, if you go on X and look for this, you're going to see it getting millions and millions and millions of views.
I say it's not a bad idea, Dr. Paul.
What do you think?
Cautiously, I would say you could, because, you know, the enemy is very aggressive.
No, I think even just the talking is so positive to make people think about it.
And I'm not surprised that a lot of people out there say go for it, you know, and just that might make a difference.
But I think it's fascinating.
And I think I always, nobody really thought seriously about that over a couple hundred years about using somebody else as a speaker of the house.
But the founders must have known what they were doing.
I don't think that was an accident.
Maybe they anticipated that it would get so messy and they understood a little thing about politics.
And maybe this would be the answer when it gets, you know, what we've complained a lot, at least I have, about, you know, bipartisanship.
People sincerely say, you guys need to work together and you need to be bipartisan and all this kind of stuff.
But if both parties believe in the same political and monetary policy and foreign policy, it doesn't do much good.
And maybe that is the reason they wanted to get away and offer when there's too much fighting in the Congress.
Maybe an independent getting in there and maybe this could be turned into a great suggestion and a great thing to do.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul.
And if we can put that very last clip on, please.
I'm going to close out with some good news.
This is great news.
And some people may wonder about this if we can get that very, there we go.
The good news is that, hey, we're more than halfway there.
We're at our year-end fundraising drive.
We have $100,000 in matching funds from a generous donor.
I would add a Texan, great person.
And he says, hey, I bet your supporters can't come up with this money.
Let's see if they can.
We're more than halfway there is the good news, Dr. Paul.
The bad news is we have just a little over a week to make up that difference so that we can claim that entire $100,000 in matching funds.
That'll keep our institute going for a good part of next year.
And it'll help us launch some programs.
It'll help us extend our reach.
People are listening to what you have to say.
They're listening to us a lot more, Dr. Paul.
As you know, it would be a shame if we had to go silent.
So I think we believe we have a lot of faith in our supporters, and we know that they'll come through with us.
And we appreciate each and every one of you for watching the show and doing whatever you can to keep us on the air.
Very good.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Yes.
Wonderful.
And maybe urgency in politics and fundraising is a benefit because people say, well, I'll do that next week.
I'll do this.
I want to do it.
I want to help it, but I'll do it next week.
But when it gets closer to the date when it's due, sometimes people will do that with their bills.
Every once in a while, I'll have a bill lay on my desk.
Oh, I have three weeks before I have to pay that.
Oh, now I'm down to two days.
I better pay it.
Well, now, this is all voluntary to help us out to keep getting this message out.
And the urgency is getting close for us because we sure hate to miss the promise of really giving us a nice boost.
So whatever you can do would be helpful because actually our program, we do our best to look at the news and present the truth the best we can.
But it's also something that requires time and effort.
And there are costs.
And believe me, it's beneficial to have it.
But we really depend on people to spread the message and uh and and i'm convinced ideas spread they spread on their own and once an idea's time has come you can't even be stopped so let's hope nobody can stop us on here and that we can reach our goal by the end of the year but i do want to thank everybody for tuning In today to the Liberty Report.
Please come back soon.
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