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March 14, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:13
Man Of The House - With Special Guest Rep.Thomas Massie!

When the entirety of the Republican-led House voted last week to continue the Biden-Schumer-Johnson spending spree to continue, one Member said "NO!" That Member is Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Slimed by Trump for standing up to principles, Massie joins today's Liberty Report to explain what it's like to be today's "Dr. No."

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Time Text
Schumer's Budget Battle 00:09:15
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host, and a very special guest.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
I'm excited about today.
Yeah.
Some of us are just lucky to get the top guy.
He's the most important person in Washington.
I don't know whether we should say important.
He's the most mentioned one.
And I thought Trump had a libertarian leaning.
That's what I always hope.
And every once in a while, that happened.
But maybe our guest, our very special guest, Thomas Massey.
Thomas, glad to have you on today.
Welcome to the program.
Hey, it's great to be on here coming to you from Kentucky.
I think Trump is a populist, and that overlaps quite frequently with libertarianism, but not always.
Yeah.
And well, our position here is, you know, working very hard in the age of non-journalism to, you know, just give our honest opinion.
And some days that reflects Trump being with us and sometimes against us.
And yet it's difficult to try to put this all together.
But, you know, before the show started, I mentioned to you, you think this is a rather run-on-the-mill type of problem.
You put up with it, you know, on a routine basis, and I know what you're talking about.
But sometimes I like to look at the big picture.
And my big picture on all this mess that's gone on, where Schumer becomes an ally of Trump.
Now that was the one that really got my attention.
But I think the big picture for me is the systematic destruction of liberty, undermining of the Constitution, and screwing up the monetary system.
So I have three dates that I emphasize this are.
One is 1913, of course, with the Federal Reserve System, 1933, when FDR took in the gold.
And then 1971, when the last link to gold existed, and that ushered in the age of perpetual bankruptcy.
And they will talk about everything else except, you know, this is serious business, this bankruptcy.
So why don't you give us an assessment?
Because you have a lot of information.
Tell us what's going on and what to expect tomorrow and the next day.
Yeah.
Are you referring to my nickname as Nostra Thomas, where I have accurately predicted pretty much everything that's happened for the last five years?
No, you know, there was nothing good that happened in 1913.
You had the 16th Amendment, which was, and the 17th Amendment.
One of those is direct election to senators.
That was the 17th Amendment.
And the 16th Amendment was the federal income tax.
And then you had, of course, the Federal Reserve.
But there is one good thing that happened in 1971.
I was born that year.
So in any case, you know, let's talk about how we got here, Dr. Paul.
And I won't go back too far.
Although when people say, well, what's your solution, Thomas?
You're just complaining.
You don't have any ideas.
All I got to go back do is go find my tweets from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.
Like every year, I say that we should be doing 12 separate appropriations bills and that we should do a budget.
And that if you did 12 separate bills and you sent, let's say, 12 of those to the Senate and they didn't like two of them, well, 10 of them could still make to the president's desk.
And if he didn't like one of them, he could veto it.
you'd still have nine twelfths of the government funded.
And that's the incremental piecewise way to fund government.
It's not a total complete line item, but it also would give Trump more power to veto entire swaths of spending.
Now, he couldn't veto at the line item, but if he didn't want to, if he didn't like the DOJ bill that funded the DOJ, he could veto that and we'd go without a DOJ for a few days.
But that's the responsible way to do it.
Instead, we're governing by omnibus bills and continuing resolutions.
And in this particular case, it's a continuing resolution.
But let's talk about the last six months and how we got to this continuing resolution.
So on September 30th of 2024, the prior Biden-Schumer-Johnson omnibus ran out.
It expired.
And so they needed to fund government.
And the argument in the House that I heard from Speaker Johnson was, well, you know, let's don't fight now.
We would just screw things up for the election.
So let's wait until after November.
So they did a continuing resolution in September of last year that got us to December.
And I said, you know, when we get to December, they're going to do, they're going to kick this again down the road.
Well, we got to December.
And guess what?
We won the whole shooting match.
We got the Senate.
We kept the House.
We won the White House.
Now it sounds like it's time to fight.
These are just a bunch of lame duck Democrats.
Let's punch them, you know, in the budget.
And so, but no, there was an excuse in December.
They said, now, hold on, Thomas.
We need to fight in January because that's when the president will be installed and the Senate will have a Senate majority leader who's Republican.
And then there was some debate and said, you know what?
January is a little too soon.
We need the new president to get his legs underneath of him.
So let's do it in March.
So in December, there was a CR that went to March.
Actually, it went to today, which is the day.
And this was the day we were going to fight.
But guess what?
They said that we didn't have enough time to prepare for this day.
But you know what?
Congress being surprised by this date is like a florist being surprised by Valentine's Day.
It's been on the calendar.
We knew it was coming.
And wouldn't you, why would you want to lock in?
So here's what it does.
This CR, it's called a continuing resolution because it continues what we did last year.
Well, who was in charge last year?
Schumer and Biden?
And then Mike Johnson.
But he had to concede pretty much all of the fights in that budget.
So it's the Schumer-Biden budget that we're continuing into the first nine months of Trump's administration.
And you say, oh, we'll let Trump have his agenda.
This agenda is the Biden agenda.
So that's where we are.
That's what they passed in the House.
And that's what they'll pass in the Senate today.
Daniel, do you have a comment or a question?
Well, for our guests, I know you know David Stockman, who, like you, is on the board of the Rom Paul Institute and a good friend of ours.
He has a great article that we put up on our site today called Three Cheers for Thomas Messi.
And in his article, he makes a good point.
He said, this CR provides spending authority $1.65 trillion.
And he points out this is 47% more than Obama's last budget, big spending Obama.
So it's just incredible to see this.
Yeah, these are, you know, at least can't we go back to pre-COVID spending?
Maybe let's go back to one of Trump's years, right?
Let's go back to Trump spending levels in 2019.
That would be great.
But instead, this is even more than that spent in those years.
Oh, and by the way, while we're talking about pre-COVID, let's talk about COVID.
Dr. Paul asked me before it came on the air.
He said, is, you know, is this just a regular day for you, a regular week?
Was it a little more exciting?
Well, it's very reminiscent of March 27th, 2020, which is when they rolled out this big COVID package.
And it was actually written by the White House and Nancy Pelosi.
People told me that I needed to cool my jets, that we needed $2 trillion of stimulus.
And by the way, all the other countries were doing stimulus.
There was nobody to borrow this money off of.
So they just printed it and they were going to print $2 trillion and inject it into the economy.
They had the $1,200 cheese in the trap.
Those are the STEMI checks, which only constituted less than 10% of that bill.
Most of that money was going to bail out Wall Street, frankly, and bankers and businesses.
And I drove to Congress and I drew the ire of the president and he called me a third rate grandstander.
That's right.
By the way, this week, he just called me a grandstander.
So I have been promoted.
There's no longer the qualifier that I'm third rate.
You're moving up.
Have you ever had a one-to-one conversation with him?
Oh, yeah.
I've had lots of conversations with President Trump.
In the last nine months, I've had three conversations on the phone with him.
And they were all good conversations.
Voting for Change 00:15:22
We talked about his cabinet secretary picks.
I talked about endorsing him.
We talked about freeing Ross Ulbric.
He offered condolences for my wife, the passing of my wife.
He's been very cordial to me on the phone.
And it just kind of, I think this week something snapped.
And I got, you know, maybe Stockman's article is called three cheers for Massey, but I got three tweets from Trump this week.
Oh, I said, by the way, there was one day where he was doing nothing but tweeting about me in Canada.
And he said that he was going to basically take over Canada and make the mistake.
And I said, you know, and tariffs and some other things.
I think he was being a little exaggerating about the state part of it, but he was picking on Canada.
So I said, you know, Trump's picking on Canada and me today.
The difference is Canada will eventually cave.
You know, the description by politicians, generally speaking, and you are excluded from this, is always it's a wonderful scenario.
We are going to be bringing you peace and prosperity, a chicken in every pot.
Everything is just going to be fine.
And you've got to, and there's some truth to this.
Politicians who are only negative, I think Reagan was an example of coming across very positive and very diplomatic and he was successful.
And I think, but generally speaking, I believe politicians always have a very, very favorable scenario if they just, if the people would just listen to them and do what they say.
But I think there's only one group that, you know, is honest philosophically and are winning this fight, at least temporarily, and that is the Marxists.
Marxism, cultural Marxism, the whole works, their goal, they admit their goal.
It's in writing.
We want to create chaos in the streets and we want to create a mess and then we will get rid of this, all this nonsense that is related to liberty.
And of course, they won't call it liberty.
They want to do that.
And then they could institute this wonderful thing called socialism.
So I think right now, the possibility of them being in a high ground right now is they're getting their chaos.
When I look at this, I know you see it all the time.
It gets, you get, you see it too often.
But I think it's really bad.
And that's that's the reason that I think if you want to pick a group, if we're not on our toes, if we don't get more Thomas Massey's in there and a few others and philosophically have support for our ideas, this is going to be a mess because I'm afraid that Marxists just might win, even in this country that prides themselves in liberty.
Yeah, I mean, at least they're consistent.
They're doing what they say they're going to do and they're marching toward their objectives.
You know, people can't, my colleagues can't be too mad at me.
Like when I talk to them on the floor, they're not like Trump.
They're not mad at me because I'm just doing what they campaigned on.
And so if they go against me, then it's like, wait, I thought you campaigned on that.
Now, let me offer a tepid devil's advocate argument for why my colleagues wanted to do what they did this week.
And then I'll take it apart limb by limb.
They said that we needed time.
Okay.
And that one of the arguments was, well, we'll fight in September because this just goes to September 30th.
And when we get to September 30th, we'll fight.
Well, here's the problem.
Some people said we couldn't fight this time because we don't have any 60 votes in the Senate.
Well, guess what?
There's no election between now and September that's going to give us more votes in the Senate.
So if you think the reason to wait nine months is because we don't have 60 votes in the Senate, there's a problem.
We're not going to have 60 votes in the Senate.
Now, there are two bites at the apple.
They don't look too promising.
There's reconciliation and there's rescissions.
Now, there's also the other path which Trump has tried and Doge has tried, which is just don't spend the money.
Okay, Congress has sent you the checks.
Don't cash them.
Okay.
Well, the courts are tying them up there.
I don't know why every Friday, you know, every Monday we name a post office.
Okay.
Why not every Friday pass a rescission?
Like take something that Doge did, put it on the floor of the House and pass it and send it to the Senate because it only requires 51 votes to take the money back.
And there can be no argument from the courts about who has the power of the purse if Congress is the one exerting the power of the purse.
So we should be doing rescissions every week.
There's some hope there.
Although I think you're going to find when you get to things like USAID, you're going to find Republicans who don't want to vote to cut that.
They're going to be in a real bond.
And I think that's why we're not voting on these rescions yet.
Is you got these big spending Republicans who like foreign intervention who are saying, no, no, no, no, just let that play out in the courts.
See if Trump can do it on his own because I don't want to cut that.
And the other chance we have is reconciliation.
And that's where you're supposed to attack.
You're supposed to deal with the mandatory spending.
You know, take heart, Dr. Paul.
This week we only re-upped 30% of the Biden agenda.
That's the discretionary spending.
70% of this stuff's on autopilot and going to happen on its own unless we do something in reconciliation.
But there's not much appetite for that among Republicans either.
Right.
That's a great point you make about rescission, about Republicans being on board.
Because if you look, especially when it comes to USCID and all the foreign meddling, because people like Senator Lindsey Graham and others, they're on the boards of all these National Dominant for Democracy, all these foreign meddling.
They love it as much as the Democrats.
They want to make it look like they're doing that, but they're not.
I mean, I find having spent 11 or so years with Dr. Paul on Capitol Hill, I find it astonishing that they are running by CR that they're not doing regular order.
I mean, that was one of the chances that we had to actually, as a regular member, to make a difference is to deal with the appropriations bills, to offer amendments, to get those five minutes to talk about them.
I think it's absolutely astonishing.
You've pointed out that a CR is a great way for them to sneak in more spending.
And that's probably the real purpose of it.
But I wanted to ask you, what happened?
And I think when they did the one in December, if I'm not mistaken, there was an if we have to do this again, there's an automatic 1% cross-the-board reduction.
What happened to that?
That seems to have disappeared.
Now, someone pointed out that if they had just done that, they would have cut two times as much as all of the Doge-identified cuts that have been made thus far.
Twice as much if they had just done what they promised last time, Lucy teed up the football to be kicked.
Yeah, and by the way, I need to see a spreadsheet somewhere that shows me where those Doge cuts went.
Did it go back to the Treasury?
Is it coming back to Congress?
I mean, they're saying it's cut, but is it cut?
Particularly after the courts have their say in this.
Okay, so let's go to that 1% cut you're talking about.
So I tried to dance with the devil two years ago.
They said, we're going to raise the debt limit.
We need your vote in the rules committee just to get this thing to the floor.
By the way, they would have, it's like a rubber band.
If I had opposed them in the rules committee, they would have got Democrats to vote for it in the rules committee, which they ultimately did under Speaker Johnson later when I wouldn't go along.
But I thought, well, okay, if they're going to roll over me anyway, why don't I get something for it?
So I said, if you put into law, into this bill, not a promise, I want you to write it into the law and a sequester that says if we go past April, actually, I said January, but the way they implemented the language meant it comes out to April.
If you go past April 30th, there's a 1% cut to everything if you're still doing a continuing resolution and not funding the 12 separate bills.
Well, guess what?
And that's in law.
And that applied last year.
Mike Johnson did an omnibus and said, well, we get out of this because we did the 12 bills, but we did them all together.
But this year, they were so bold as to do a continuing resolution that goes past April 30th and doesn't do the 1% cut that's written into law.
And they're trying to say, because they're going to September 30th, for the purposes of that trigger, they've funded the government for a whole year, and this is not a CR.
So and so they don't have to cut it 1%.
I think it's interesting that when they argue about whether the president can hold back and not spend the money, and you can find parts of the Constitution that would defend the position.
Well, we like the Congress to settle a lot of these disputes and that they can tell the executive branch what to do and they can also monitor the executive branch.
But I think I would clarify that because I think the president should have more leeway and I'm not interested in giving more presidential powers.
I don't like that.
But what if Congress is the dictator, the dictatorship of the majority, and they pass a bill and they say, well, I think it's a good idea if we bomb San Francisco.
Here's the money and you have to do it.
Well, that would be insane.
So the president is coming back.
But the president should say, well, that's the most unconstitutional idiot I think I've ever heard.
I'm not going to do it.
But I've never hear the president's refusing to spend money because technically this is unconstitutional.
It's always some political thing that they're arguing about.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Executive branch obviously has to have some discretion.
I guess the question would be, If the executive branch thinks it's unconstitutional, then they, you know, the president's sworn an oath to the constitution, he can't spend that money.
So they're, you know, they don't have to spend everything.
So we'll, I don't know, we'll see.
You know, the president could set up some kind of collision course here and just not do it.
And we'll see what the courts try to do.
But you can solve this question just by putting it in front of Congress.
Like, this is an interesting discussion to have if the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate.
But the fact of the matter is, we control the House and the Senate.
And this possibly unconstitutional impoundment act thing that and rescissions that were set was set up in 1974 or whenever it was in response to Nixon, it's there and it only requires 51 votes.
So if the thing that constrains the president also allows you to have 51 votes and get this done, guess what?
We've got like 53 votes.
If it's a tie, JD Vance can come break the tie if you have a few defectors.
We should be having rescissions every week.
That's right.
Decision parties across the country.
I'm running short.
So I want to do one last thing, sir, if you don't mind.
I want to read something.
Now, we try to praise President Trump when we can.
There's a lot of things we've praised.
But when he does some knuckle-headed things, we have to mention it too.
Well, here's what he said.
Here's what he said about you.
And I'm sure that you've read it.
Congressman Thomas Massey, a beautiful Kentucky.
Now, that's part is okay.
Is an automatic no on just about everything, despite the fact that he's always voted for continuing resolutions in the past.
Okay, he should be primary.
Exactly.
And I will lead the charge against him.
He's just another grandstander who's too much trouble and not worth the fight.
He reminds me of Liz Cheney before her historic record-breaking fall.
Dude, the people of Kentucky won't stand for it.
Just watch.
Do I have any takers?
So he's threatening to get you out of your seats or what are you saying?
He's actually helping you.
The latest numbers since he tweeted that $320,000 has been sent to my campaign from over 4,000 donors.
Wow.
So the median donation is probably about 30 bucks, and the average donation is like 80 bucks.
And that's grassroots support.
And the election's like a year away.
We got that in three days.
So if you got any takers, you know, bring them on.
Everybody should be primaried, every Congress, right?
This is a republic works.
I stand accountable every two years and we'll see what the people say.
But that's happened three cycles in a row.
And none of those challengers who ran to the Trump of me can't run to the right of me.
There's no room there.
So they run to the Trump of me.
They say, I'm not Trump enough.
It's been tried three times.
And each time those candidates get less than 20% of the vote.
And some of them have been well-funded candidates.
So, okay, bring that on.
Now, as to the point about Liz Cheney, ironically, on March 27th, 2020, it was Donald Trump and Liz Cheney who teamed up to try and take me out in a primary.
And that backfired splendidly.
I think it was the beginning of her downfall is when she came after me because she endorsed a real stinker of a candidate and later retracted her endorsement when she found out what she had endorsed.
But it was so, you know, we got that.
Also, that's in that statement.
Again, I want to reiterate: last time he called me a third-rate grandstander, I've been promoted to just grandstander.
He says that I voted for always voted for CRs.
No, I've been there 12 years.
I've never voted for a CR that became law because the only CRs I vote for are the ones that got spending.
So for instance, The last almost the very last bill Kevin McCarthy put on the floor was a CR that cut spending 8% across the board.
And I'm like, I'll take that.
And of course, I voted for it.
And of course, it didn't become law.
So, you know, what's ironic is Trump's going after, he's saying, oh, I'm bad because I voted for CRs.
But all the, like Mike Johnson voted.
I didn't vote for those CRs, but Mike Johnson did.
And so the ones that became law, why is he not going after Mike Johnson for voting for all those?
I just, well, while we're on this particular topic, I just want to make sure that you can let our viewers know if they want to support you, where they can go to.
So I know that Dr. Paul probably will say it, but I just want to make sure we don't forget it.
So if you can let that out.
I would love to tell you it's thomasmassey.com, Thomas liked the train and then, or the Jefferson.
So Thomas and then Massey, M-A-S-S-I-E.com.
It doesn't go through WinRED.
So you won't go on some list that the other Republicans get to call and raise money for the, you know, the National Republican Party.
People are always concerned about that.
It does go through a credit card vendor.
ThomasMassey.com Support 00:04:07
Okay.
And it will be reported to the FEC and people can go look there.
But we don't give your stuff ourselves.
We don't give it to WinRED if you go straight to that site, thomasmassey.com.
And there's, it's like slash donate.
You'll find it right there.
Again, I'm going to need that money.
Like people are like, oh, you don't, if you just keep voting right, you'll have nothing to worry about.
Like, excuse me?
Like, there will be lots of lies said.
The way these campaigns work is they distort your, you know, your record.
They'll use that quote from Trump that says, I always vote for CRs, but I don't.
And I have to have money to refute that.
You know, when he came at me last time between myself and a couple or three PACs that helped me out, we spent $2 million winning that primary.
These are not cheap races.
So, and also with the $320,000 that's been donated, I think I have about $1.2 million in the bank.
That sounds like a lot, but these primaries are more expensive than that.
You know, that's about half of what I need to be in the game.
Yeah.
You know, Thomas, I want to finish up with, I'm going to make an observation and get you a chance to make a comment about it.
And that has to do with the transition from pro and anti-tariff.
My memory and my understanding was that when I first even thought about politics, it seemed like, you know, being against tariffs was pretty bipartisan and there was a good reasoning for it.
And it was messy.
But all of now, it just seems like everybody's rolled over, even some of the free market people.
So I'm astounded of how much support Trump has been able to gain from this.
But my thought is that maybe things are so desperate, they're stretching for anything to compensate for the ridiculous economic conditions of destruction of a currency.
If you have just a comment about how that is operating in Washington and why you think people switch their position on tariffs so often.
A lot of them have switched.
But look, if we were talking about going back before 1913 and funding most of the government with tariffs and getting rid of the income tax, boy, that's something I would love to consider.
You know, let's repeal the 16th Amendment.
And we don't need an internal revenue service if you got an external revenue service.
But that's not what's being discussed here.
In fact, a broad-based tariff is not even, you know, what you consider a sales tax on foreign goods.
That's not even what's being discussed here.
The second bad thing about the tariffs, other than taking money out of your pocket, is that they're trying to influence behavior.
If it's not a broad-based tariff.
The president wants to go in individually and do central planning and basically affect behavior with these tariffs.
And here's what it does.
It creates a whole uh industry of lobbyists who come to Congress looking for exemptions for their company from these tariffs.
And so now you get these uh earmarks for relief from the tariffs that they start sticking into bills and it just becomes it becomes a big nightmare.
It does make a lot of jobs for more lobbyists when they come and try and get their relief from the tariffs.
But uh yeah we'll, we'll see how this goes.
I mean, i've been trying to, i've tried to be pretty nice about this.
I could have been out there in the forefront just like ragging and railing on these tariffs.
But you know, I kind of all right, we'll see what happens but um, all I try to do is vote on the stuff that comes in front of me.
This, by the way.
Here's the other.
Let me give you the other problem with tariffs.
Congress, through four different uh bills, has given broad authority to the president to do these things like.
If you're wondering, is it legal?
I went back and used the Congressional Research Service and it turns out there are four different, you know statutory authorities that he's relying on to do these things, and Congress never should have passed those bills and given so much power to the president.
Six Weeks Of Delight 00:01:19
Right, so well, this is wonderful.
We're going to close up but Thomas, I want to sincerely thank you for coming on and I want to remind you, because you probably have forgotten.
You know, we served in Congress together.
How many days was that?
How many weeks?
Six weeks, all right, yeah.
So when I, when you came, I said huh, somebody's going to sort of make an effort to keep up with what I was trying to do.
But but that that's a different story, because it had to do with you getting in ahead of the other guys.
So yeah, it was a special election and and I i'm, i'm just, I was blessed to spend six weeks there.
I remember talking to you, my hero, on the floor there of the House OF Representatives and uh, I wish it had been a lot more than six weeks.
And I also want to tell you something, I couldn't wait for that six weeks to be up because, as soon as you left, I did some r d, I ripped off and duplicated Your bills and started introducing them.
Wonderful.
Well, I'm delighted that you're there, and numbers are very important.
And I talk about prevailing attitudes by the people, and this is philosophic, and that's very important.
And yet, it's the quality that we want to present leadership.
And sometimes we don't get much out of Washington.
So, we are all delighted to have you there looking after things.
And I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today.
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