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March 10, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:56
Will Speaker Johnson Kill DOGE?

House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing Republicans to pass yet another "continuing resolution" to keep funding government AT CURRENT LEVELS until September. That means that all the "cuts" by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are just smoke and mirrors, as the Trump Administration will be spending at the levels of the Biden and even Obama Administrations!

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Congress's Failed Spending Cuts 00:14:53
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
I'm doing well.
Pretty and rare to go.
Let's do it.
But we want to look at the success or failure or where are we on cutting spending.
I think we have a message to follow from the last election.
I think the American people are sick and tired of the spending and the lying and the cheating.
And right now, though, they're finding out what an embedded bureaucracy is to cheat and lie and steal the people's money and do it in the name of goodness and democracy and taking care of people and being humanitarians.
That's their excuse for this.
But I see what's happening right now as a climactic ending to a point in our history that we were fortunate to have an opportunity to live beyond our means, you know, power, minerals, military, the whole works, and live beyond our means.
The currency, having the reserve currency in the world, gives you license to steal by just printing money.
In other countries, as long as they get their little fair share, they go along with it.
But I think this is not an ordinary downturn.
I think this is highlighting a significant turn and a forced admission that our country is bankrupt.
And I used to say, oh, they're bankrupt morally.
They're bankrupt financially.
I've decided that the moral bankruptcy is the worst because the moral bankruptcy leads to doing whatever they want when they have political power.
But right now, the Congress, you know, we have some people there with Musk and Trump.
And I think they're very sincere to what cut back.
But when you look between the lines, you wonder, why are they doing some of these things?
You know, what do you do in this place?
You know, you're supposed to be cutting, and there's some loopholes.
And if you want to read somebody that I've read and knew and worked with in the Congress, David Stockman, he knows where the loopholes are.
And he reveals this.
And he talks, he has an article about rescission as Congress by the Constitution said that you can use rescission and cancel out and cancel out what you can do.
The Congress has to do it regardless of how much resistance there is.
And I don't particularly like that interpretation.
But anyway, they're going through the motion of trying to cut.
And I think, I mean, I just wonder what their deep down feeling is because they had a desire.
Obviously, Musk had strong desires, and he's converted a lot of the wishy-washy conservatives to his side.
And I just wonder what they're thinking now.
I wonder if they think, boy, I didn't know what we were getting into.
This is almost like an impossible task.
And I've always leaned toward that point that this correction would come.
There is going to be a liquidation of the malinvestment and all the debt because it cannot be sustained.
And the liquidation will come not in the form of sanity and getting the right people.
Not that I'm against that.
People not need to know what's going on, but that eventually the people will refuse to accept the biting the bullet and cutting back.
And it will lead to what the market demands, and that's the correction.
And I think we're seeing that and people's standard of living is going down.
When's the recession going to start?
I bet you could find a fair number of people in this country right now who are suffering from the recession depression.
And I think it's unfortunately going to get a lot worse.
But an opportunity to present our case for saying maybe this could have been preventable.
I happen to believe it could be, but with a great deal of difficulty and a change in moral stature of the people of this country.
Yeah, Dr. Paul, on the one hand, people are excited to see the rot that's been exposed by Doge and Musk's efforts.
They're shocked to see the spending.
They're shocked to see the foreign aid.
They're shocked to see the places that this money is going, the things that it's doing.
They're shocked to see 300-year-old people getting social security checks, right?
But the reality is, unless you cut spending, a lot of this is just, it's just showmanship.
It's just smoke and mirrors.
So the real issue is the money that's been appropriated.
How can you not spend it?
Because when Congress appropriates it, according to the 1974 law, and we'll talk about it in a minute, it has to be spent.
And so now we have Congress.
I'll put on this first one.
We have Congress now that has not done its job.
It's not passing appropriations bills.
And so we have Speaker Johnson and President Trump, we have to say, pushing for a continuing resolution.
Here's the headline of the article that we're talking about.
No dissent.
Trump asks all Republicans to give us a few months and approve the GOP continuing resolution.
So Trump on Saturday implored all Republicans to vote on a 99-page spending bill.
And here's the key part, Dr. Paul, that would keep government funded through September as a March deadline approaches.
It's like basically we've been through this so many times, Dr. Paul.
Oh, government's going to shut down.
We've got to pass this.
And it's going to go to the 11th hour, 59-minute, you know, 59-second, and they're going to pass it.
So here's the part about it that belies the thought that we're going to cut spending.
Go to the next one because this is the bill largely maintains current spending levels, current spending levels, which are from the Biden administration, with an additional $8 billion for military spending.
So they're actually increasing military spending in this bill.
Johnson is setting up the bill for a vote on Tuesday tomorrow, despite a lack of buy-in from Democrats, essentially daring them to vote against it and risk a shutdown.
Now, who better than Thomas Massey to explain to us the charade of this?
Now, there's a bonus clip.
I was barely able to get it up because X has been down all morning, but here's Massey.
He put this out this morning.
The argument for a CR.
Now, CR is a continuing resolution.
That's the bill that they're going to pass to keep spending.
The argument for a CR in September of 24 was to fight in December of 24 after the election.
The argument for a CR in December 24 was to fight in March 25 after the inauguration.
The argument for a CR in March 25 is to fight in September 25 because, dot, dot, dot, we're not ready yet.
It makes a very good point.
They're always trying to kick this can down the road, Dr. Paul.
They're not cutting spending.
That makes a charade of all the efforts of Doge.
You know, there's so many things that puts pressure on politicians to spend the money and spend money that they don't really have.
And they have to look like they're taking care of everybody.
But there was a new one in this one, and that is they had leftover money and they were making laws.
I don't know whether this was with COVID or some welfare state.
So they say, well, we're running out of people to give money to.
So we're going to loan all this money to 11-year-olds.
So they're just out there passing out money.
So the whole system, it is so massive and so abused and so immoral.
That's why I've been a pessimist about saying that I expect, you know, in six months, this thing's going to be straightened out.
But in six months, you know, the recession depression will be here.
And Trump, unfortunately, you know, he has his problems, but he cannot be blamed for 50 years of malinvestment that's been going on on a monetary system going on.
So we're in for some big trouble.
So this one effort of Congress trying to, you know, send these bills back and the president just not spend the money and hold off.
People don't like that.
We tell you, spend the money, spend the money, which I'd like to, you know, challenge that because I think that's pretty stupid.
But the Constitution does give the Congress a lot of authority over spending.
Unfortunately, they haven't been good protectors of that principle because they have yielded to the giveaways and all the lobbyists coming in that we've talked about so much.
So they get together and all of a sudden it's a political game.
How do I stay in office?
The very beginning.
The first day a new member comes in, they say, well, this is how you stay in.
You need to be on this committee and you have to do this.
You have to raise money.
It's a money's game.
And it must be so seductive that there's so few Thomas Masseys out there that can resist the temptation to join a gang like that.
And in many ways, though, it reflects the people's attitude.
When they get upset, they will wake up.
And that's what's happening.
I hope we can just keep this awakening going for a while, where they get a grasp of what the alternative is to the system we've been living with.
And we've highlighted on this show the fact that Doge is popular.
People are happy with cutting government.
They want it to happen.
Unfortunately, Trump is obviously he's not convinced.
Now, here's the next one.
This is the Trump part.
And, you know, we have to criticize him when he deserves it.
And on this, he does in a way.
Trump asked the GOP to come together.
The House and Senate have put together under the circumstances a very good funding bill.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, asking all Republicans to please vote yes on it.
I'm asking you to give us a few months to get us through to September so we continue to put the country's financial house in order.
Dr. Paul, you often use the analogy of a drug addict.
That almost sounds like someone who needs a fix.
We need to just till September, just till September, just give us another hit.
Now, here's the real problem.
Go to the next one.
As Bloomberg notes, unlike previous shutdowns, this one would impact all discretionary spending.
And I've highlighted this since none of the 12 appropriations bills have been signed into law.
Congress has not done its job.
It has not followed regular order.
The only thing it's responsible for doing is passing these appropriations bills and funding government.
It hasn't done that.
It's funded unlimited spending on Ukraine, 8 million bills praising Israel, everything except their actual job to do.
And so while Trump deserves some blame for wanting this to go through, the blame really should squarely rest on Congress's shoulders.
Speaker Johnson is doing a terrible job, in my opinion, in doing the only thing that he's really supposed to do, which is funding the government in an appropriate level.
Don't you think they use the word discretionary overly?
Because, you know, if it's discretionary, non-discretionary, you can't touch it.
But why?
Well, I know why they do it, but it's such a shame that they divide it up.
Like, oh, if we have ABC that takes, gives out freebies to 80% of the population.
Oh, that's non-discretionary.
We can't touch that.
And politically speaking, it's generally true.
You know, it works so well.
And one party does it much more than the other party.
They just say, oh, they're going to take it away.
And neither party is going to say, well, we have to do it.
But I would like to see them just get into the discussion of, you know, the question is, if we didn't have Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps, maybe we wouldn't have food stamps for the wealthy in the military industrial complex and that everybody would suffer.
But there's no proof to that.
The proof of it is, is when you overspend and the people like it, that you finally destroy the system.
And the results and the recovery is much worse than biting the bull and saying, you know, you know, we have to live within.
People do it all the time.
You know, there's still probably a very large number of American people who have jobs that never can keep up with the cost of living.
And they have to cut, cut the spinning off, but not in government.
You know, you go and you can't have any money left over.
That's a crime.
You know, that's a crime.
They certainly wouldn't save it.
And they don't pay down debt either.
Have you noticed that?
The debt never shrinks.
No.
And now you mentioned our friend David Stockman, who's on the board of our Institute, by the way.
Now, he's writing in the Brownstone Institute today, an excellent article.
And we've talked about Senator Paul, who had lunch with Elon Musk last week and told him about here's how we can fix the problem.
Very important.
Now skip ahead to its rescission time.
This is an article that came out this morning from the Brownstone Institute.
We reprinted it at Ron Paul Institute.
David Stockman is saying the politicians who run the GOP on Capitol Hill are about to rug pool Elon Musk and his patron in the Oval Office big time.
That is the so-called, quote, clean CR that Speaker Johnson is apparently cooking up.
And I highlighted this, to ratify the entirety of the runaway spending in the last Biden budget, thereby canceling every single dime that Doge has saved.
Go to the next one.
This will explain the rescission problem.
For example, the appropriations authority for every one of the hundreds, if not thousands of idiotic foreign aid contracts that Doge has exposed and canceled must by law be recycled and respent on another contract.
That's what's so important, as David Stockman writes, and therefore spent on projects perhaps only slightly less stupid.
Now, here's the law.
Go to the next one.
We have talked about it, but it's worth bringing up again.
We are referring to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the pastel of uniparty appointed federal district judges waiting to pounce in favor of lawsuits claiming the funds are being illegally withheld by the executive.
Congressional Rescission Tool 00:04:18
Now, here is what Stockman is proposing, and it's in line with what Senator Paul has pointed out.
To wit, as Elon Musk apparently discovered earlier this week, the congressional rescission tool is a pretty good workaround to unspend the money that's already been appropriated.
This method of cutting existing spending authority does not require congressional, does require, sorry, congressional approval within 45 days, but rescissions are subject to an up or down vote and no filibuster in the Senate.
And this is what Stockman proposes.
So, what the Doge team needs to do right now is bundle up a massive pile of rescissions, send them to Capitol Hill to be voted on as a precondition to consideration of the next CR.
And he's saying, hold that CR hostage, pass these rescissions, get rid of this previous spending before we even start talking about the CR.
I think that's a great proposal, Dr. Paul.
Yeah, I do too.
And let's hope he goes through and it does some good.
But you know, Rubio now slashes 83% of U.S. AID money, and he's pleased with what's happening.
But we don't know whether that's going to go through.
I mean, there's going to be so many lawsuits made in this, and then there's going to be all types of calamities that are going to occur.
Then there's going to be the tear, you know, the heartbreaking stories of one individual that suffer.
They didn't get something given to them by the government.
And the people will be motivated to say, why are they doing this?
Why are they doing that?
Why are they doing it?
Well, why did they start it is the bigger question because it's a free lunch.
You know, the first time I got involved in saying anything political was in the early 70s.
That was when the Libertarian Party was started.
And they popularized a slogan that says, Tanstoffel, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I keep thinking of that.
And yet, that's what we've worked on for all these years, that there is a free lunch out there and people still believe it.
And that you don't have to give it up.
You just have to get in front of the line.
And that's why, well, what do we do?
One of the biggest businesses that used to be your neighbors of some of these people up in Washington, the lobbyists they go on, they make a couple of bucks.
So that is what runs it.
And that means it's flexible.
So there's nothing very rigid about the Constitution, you know, holding the feet to the fire and say, you can't do this.
And yet now they're barely holding on to say that we want to change our mind and they're meeting great resistance.
So that's how they're successful in saying that they can have rescission and cancel out the preposterous spending because why can't they use the argument?
How can you force us to spend money?
We have no money in the bank.
Exactly.
Well, run the printing presses.
It's so absurd.
Yeah, it is.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, and I would encourage people, we don't do it very often, but contact your representative or your senator and tell them we don't want the CR to pass without the rescission, without cutting the money.
We've already identified, as Dr. Paul points out, we've already identified 85% of the AID programs are garbage.
But even if they cancel all the programs, they're going to have to spend the money for them unless this recision goes through, cut all this spending out.
And then let's look for an actual clean CR that doesn't spend to the Obama levels.
I want to thank everyone for watching.
And I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Paul to close out the show.
Very good.
And, you know, in spite of the reality of what we're facing and the difficulty in coming back, it's very, very important to get out on the table.
And Daniel mentioned his opening statement that who would have ever imagined the corruption and some of the things they're spending on it.
Well, a lot of us could imagine it, but it's still astounding on what some of these appropriations are.
You think the American people would be for it.
And I think this is why this last election was significant in a chance they did vote to try to get their house in order.
Setting Principles for Wealth Redistribution 00:01:31
But when it comes to getting hitting at home, there has to be exemption.
Anything they get, you can't cut that.
So that opens up the door.
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, on Don.
But when you do that, if you want to preserve on principle, taking care of the children and the indigent and give them something to eat and where to live, what you do is you set the principle of taking from one group and give it to another.
And guess who does it?
Really knows how to do that, and that's these big lobbyists like the Military Industrial Complex and the pharmaceutical industry.
All these people know that principle, but it's the same principle.
That's why the principle that the transfer of wealth by a government force from one group to another, no matter how humanitarian it sounds, shouldn't be permitted.
And the constitution wasn't meant to be set up as a guideline to how you, how you distribute wealth in a country.
What the what?
The main purpose of the constitution was to protect liberty and allow the people to take care of themselves, and that's what this fight is all about, and it's just starting and it has to be resolved because it won't continue, and I think that's why we're going to see a lot of fireworks in the future.
Let's just hope there are this 4th of July fireworks, not the other kind of fireworks that happen.
But I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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