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March 19, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:39
Federal Judge Seeks To Defang DOGE

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang has ruled that Elon Musk's role as DOGE enforcer may be unconstitutional, ordering that he “shall not take any action, or engage in any work, relating to the shutdown of USAID.” Is the deep state pushing back? Also today, say it aint so, Tulsi. Finally: Sports diplomacy for the win.

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Cut Effort Spending 00:09:22
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 today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing well.
Good to have you back.
Good to be back.
But, you know, you didn't clear up all the problems.
You took two days off, and you're still the same.
I talked a lot.
It just didn't seem to help.
Well, I, you know, people say, oh, no, no, no, why would I possibly be an optimist?
Because they keep spending money.
But I find my ways that I am optimistic in the philosophic sense.
But I also know that I believe strongly that things go through the ringer before you really can get clean clothes.
That's what they're doing right now.
But the big thing right now that they're talking about is the Democrats are panicking.
They're frantic.
And they're striking out.
And they're engaged in this little debate with the Republicans.
But the big point, I don't think they've quite reached the big point because they're saying the judges say in such and such and we're going to close down, we can close down Musk and not allow him to do it.
But there are other ways that they could have done it.
You know, you and I have talked about this.
They made an effort, a token effort.
They could have just cut all the money out of the budget and there'd been no argument.
Anyway, they're arguing over jurisdiction.
The Democrats go to the courts and the courts are supposed to say, yeah, it's okay.
There's nothing wrong with you guys cutting the spending.
But who's given the orders?
It seems like that.
Who's given the orders?
People that haven't been sworn in.
Excuse me.
They haven't been sworn in by the Senate.
And that's the big argument right now.
Yeah, exactly.
And let's put on that first quote.
This is something that Politico put up this morning.
And, you know, they are trying to do lawfare against a lot of Trump's agenda here.
And this is one example.
So Musk effort to dismantle USAID likely violated the Constitution.
A judge rules, U.S. District Judge Theodore Cheng, who I believe was appointed by Obama.
He's ruled that Musk is overstepping his constitutional authority.
If you go to the next one, here's what they said.
The efforts to dismantle USAID likely violated the Constitution in multiple ways.
And I will get to each of those.
He basically has two points that he's making about how it does.
I think, Dr., well, let me read this.
The ruling Tuesday from U.S. District Judge Theodore Chang appears to permit the Trump administration to ratify and maintain the draconian cuts as long as they're ordered by USAID's official leadership rather than by Musk and his allies at DOE.
So I think it's more of a procedural issue that they're trying to grab onto, which is, yeah, we can't necessarily stop this, but you can't do it.
Someone else has got to do it.
So that's, I think, what it is.
It's such a desperate effort.
My first reaction is, well, if they're going with this technicality, which is just an expression of their frustration, that they could, you know, talk to these people who have the authority or have some notes and say, these are my notes.
You can look at them if you want.
Or this is my conversation.
This is what we found.
Check it out.
These are figures.
And the other thing is the budget effort could have been made.
They didn't.
We complained about the budget.
Some of this stuff really would have had legal, much stronger legal standing if they did cut the spending.
If the Republicans have been serious, they would have held back instead of appealing that Schubert supported whatever they were doing.
I think that's so ironic that they have Trump, Schumer, and Johnson all on all in one group fighting the people.
Yeah, exactly.
So here we go to the next one.
His 68-page injunction.
I have not read it.
I will admit I relied on Politico to digest it for me.
But he said it appears to have violated the Constitution's separation of powers when they effectively eliminated USAID.
Now, that argument is essentially that the USAID there are aspects of it.
Go to the next one, actually.
There are aspects of it that's passed by Congress.
The function of USAID is in Congress.
And so the president can't effectively dismantle.
I think unlike a scholar, a law scholar, I think that's rather weak because it still remains just very much cut back.
And go to the last one, because this is the two reasons, Dr. Paul, that the Judge Chang wrote.
He said, no, this is reasonable, but not insurmountable.
He said the effort was likely illegal for two reasons.
First, it appeared to violate the Constitution's appointments clause, which says that government officials wielding significant power must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to offices established by Congress.
Now, that seems to be rather understandable.
He hasn't gone through this process.
Musk was not confirmed.
The second, the judge wrote the Doge's bid to effectively eliminate USAID appeared to violate laws passed by Congress that dictate the agency's functions.
I just happen to think, Dr. Paul, this is somewhat of a tempest in a teapot.
They're trying to find a way around it.
They're trying to paint a target on Musk again.
I think there's an easy fix.
But I think this is not the end of their efforts.
Well, at least they were recognizing that the president does have some authority on cutting.
That's the part that they didn't want to do.
It was the technical issuing of the directive that said, oh, we can't let you do that unless the Senate has approved of you.
But that's sort of conceded.
Here's the information.
This is what we found.
Let the people decide about the information.
That sort of clarified it.
But I don't know what they're going to do about this.
But I think the American people, even with all these technicalities, some people may fall on one side versus the other.
But the American people, I know where the majority, large majority will fall.
This is sort of nitpicking.
And this is trying just to stop the real cuts.
But once again, people shouldn't forget that this could have been done in a better way.
And why would they pass the budget that included all the spending?
They didn't deal with a problem.
You wouldn't have to worry about whether they were, the congressmen are, they're officials and they're illegal.
You don't have to say, well, they're not approved by the Senate and that kind of stuff.
I think, well, my belief is the bankruptcy is so confusing and so dangerous and it affects so many people that nobody wants to light the fire and let's say, you know, folks, we're really, we really are bankrupt.
You know, a lot of people are going to suffer from this.
We might even have inflation.
We might even have trade wars.
Who knows what could come?
So that's what they're doing to avoid it.
That's why you can get the coalitions coming together.
You know, the independents and all.
And yet at the same time, the American people, you know, on the surface, they say cut, cut, cut.
But we have found that you can gather up a lot of people, you know, to support not cutting.
It reminds me of the Leonard Reed quote, you know, the one where Leonard Reed said, yes, cut, cut, but everybody has a but.
And that's what we're hearing about now.
But don't cut this.
Yeah, I think getting around it is easy.
Musk just sends a memo to Rubio saying here's some recommendations, and Rubio does the does the action, says okay, these guys are fired.
That's easy.
But I think in some ways this misses the point.
I think some people are seeing what Doge is doing as the end all and you've.
You've said it now in in what, in your, in the points that you've made today.
The value of Doge is not cutting usaid's people.
The value of Doge, in my opinion, is shifting American public opinion in the majority in favor of significant cuts to the federal government.
That's, it's all about opinion.
But the thing is and we've had Massey on last week shifting opinion is the first step, but then Congress has to step up and codify it.
Now senator Paul tried to do that with the budget fight.
He put in an amendment to codify the Doge cuts into law.
It failed.
Republicans in the majority did not even vote for it.
So they want the smoking mirrors, they want all of the adulation.
We're part of Doge, but they have to step up now and make these cuts real and they're not willing to do it.
You know unfortunately, my optimism, which is that the people are waking up.
People are starting to see the handwriting on the wall and something has to be done.
But also, what we're saying now is that the um and the end is not in sight because the uh, the cutting becomes very, very difficult.
And when you have an addiction to the expansion of money and credit to tide things over and some people can benefit, and you keep uh, passing out welfare benefits, people already they what the quick.
Yemen Conflict Escalates 00:13:01
You know how many things are untouchable.
Yeah, you know a lot of the things about you can't even touch these things.
Why, why wouldn't the whole budget be touching, I would think, like two pennies off.
Everything happens there on every bill.
They wouldn't even pass it.
They don't pass, they wouldn't have, if you had every single bill, pass two or three cents on the bill.
You know after a couple years, just freezing the budget.
Yeah yeah, people have to freeze their budget.
But the people when they have trouble, they just if they freeze their budget, they lose because the the dollar goes down.
The people said, we're going to tax you, but we're not going to tell you how we tax you.
We're not going to knock on your door with the irs.
What we're going to do is get you know we're going to pay you and the people will pay you in a dollar that's worth uh, five or ten percent less every year and uh, and you're supposed to live with that until the people are tired of living with that.
Yeah, absolutely well, our second story, Dr Paul, is unfortunately not a good news story and something we're going to watch closely, but our good friends at Antiwar.com and Dave De Camp uh, as well as a lot of other people, have written about this.
If you put on that next clip uh, as we know, president Trump bombed the smithereens out of Yemen.
Yemen hadn't even started attacking ships, but he bombed them a preemptive bombing um and unfortunately, the director of National Intelligence, Tolsi Gabbert, a friend of ours, someone who we believe that we can criticize in a friendly way, not condemn uh, understanding the limitations of the position that she held she's not the decision maker.
Nevertheless, she wants other countries to join the?
U.s in attacking Yemen.
Director of National Intelligence, Tolphi Gabbert, has called for other countries to join the?
U.s in attacking the Houthis in in Yemen, a country she previously strongly opposed intervening in, and this is in response to the airstrikes that killed at least 50 people, many of them women and children.
We talked about it on today's show and, if you go to the or yesterday's show, go to the next one, and here's to.
Here's what she said to a Indian broadcaster.
She said our country and other countries should not be in a position to reroute commerce going through that area, simply because of the threat that exists.
The thing is, Dr Paul, as we mentioned with Massey's quote a couple of days ago very, very little of that trade affects us.
Number one, it's not our job to be the policeman of the Red Sea.
Number two and number three, it really is only Israeli Flagged ships that are being interdicted, and the reason that's happening the Yemen has stated it very clearly is the humanitarian blockade in Gaza.
So there is a way around it without bombing the civilians of Yemen.
A little bit disappointing, you know.
Yes, disappointing is true, I was disappointed that Uh to changed her position on this, but I also understand the system and Uh, in some ways you get a person like To See she's respected and she gets put in a place because they don't.
They don't put people like to See in place because they expect to do what she believes in.
They do it to try to get her supporters uh, to come over and then they have to work on her, where you can't rock the boat, you know this sort of thing.
But you know, the worst picture I saw on this uh uh, was a picture of Uh Trump when the bomb struck.
Oh yeah yeah yeah, there were 53 people killed, women and children.
And he is, he was glued to the tv yeah yeah, do you think it was a little in his golf outfit too, you know?
I mean like this was the most important event.
Well sure, it's almost like uh well, I don't want to, I don't want to put thoughts in his my mind about what I, but that doesn't.
I mean, even if he wanted to do it for meta, for a military reason, to know and understand and see some military picture.
But this was, this was, this was an advertisement.
Almost like a sporting woman yeah boy well, we have a powerhouse here anyway.
That's my own personal opinion about that at all.
Yeah, I mean, she didn't have to be, she didn't have to say what she said.
But obviously she can't go on tv and say oh, Trump's a dope, he shouldn't have done it.
You know she works for him, she's, her job is to carry out policies, you know, within the context of her job as a director of national intelligence.
But nevertheless, and this is going to happen a lot because, you know, Tulsi has been on record being very anti-war in the past in most areas, not all areas.
But if you skip to the one during President Trump's previous term, and this is being pointed out by Dave DeCamp, an anti-war and others have pointed it out as well.
During President Trump's previous term in office, when Gabbard was in Congress, she was a leading critic of the U.S.-backed Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
And here's a quote from Tulsi in 2018.
it's absolutely outrageous that the United States has continued its support for years now for Saudi Arabia's genocidal war in Yemen that has killed thousands and thousands of innocent Yemeni people and caused mass Starvation.
Opposed to the war then, even though it was still under Trump, but she said it wasn't authorized.
Well, these attacks were not authorized either by Congress.
So she's in a bit of a pickle.
Hopefully she'll recover her footing on this.
You know, these are times when we see this conflict.
And I sort of can empathize a bit with Tulsi, what she has gone through and she had to make this decision.
But I think that the interesting thing is that it makes me more delightful about our philosophy of foreign policy, the non-intervention.
Because, you know, when people would come up and others have used the same argument, they say, oh, you're an anti-Semitic.
You won't send money and weapons and guns to Israel.
Yeah, but I don't want to send up to anybody.
Anybody.
And all of a sudden, people quiet down with that.
You know, Thomas uses that argument.
And what is that when they attack him?
He gets more popular because I think that's where the American people are.
So I think the whole principle of non-interventionism is very popular.
I think this whole thing that they use for just political reasons that they get away with it, but it's always a political argument.
So many times they get young members of Congress and they want to be on committees and all this stuff.
They say, you mean, you would come in here and vote against this.
I've had episodes when I was after I was appointed to the committee, the Foreign Policy Committee, after many years of requests that, you know, it was still, well, we thought you would vote differently if we let you come on the committee.
Oh, boy.
Well, we will end with the good news story because we need one after that.
Now, as you know, Dr. Paul, Presidents Trump and Putin had a phone call yesterday, which is a good sign.
You should be talking, even if your adversaries, I said on yesterday's program, they had a phone call.
They had some basic agreements on the outline to end the war in Ukraine.
I think our position is that we really shouldn't be taking the lead.
We should be more of a referee.
Nevertheless, that's what happened.
Now, there was a discussion for a 30-day pause in the mutually on the attack of energy infrastructure that was agreed on.
In fact, Putin picked up the phone and called the armed forces, according to reports, and said, right now, the order stopped.
And they apparently shot down some drones that were heading for Ukrainian power plants.
Whatever the case.
So anyway, all this business they were taking care of, but they took care of something else I think that is really important.
And I know this is something near and dear to your heart.
Put that last clip on.
This is something else they discussed.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin discussed staging a series of hockey games between players from their respective countries during their lengthy call Tuesday, according to the Kremlin.
Sports diplomacy.
I know you love it.
Well, the one reason was I've had some personal experience about this.
You know, I was in the U.S. Congress, you know.
And one of the dreams I had as a kid, I could play pretty good baseball, but that was when kids put the teams together.
You didn't have uniforms.
You didn't have perennial control.
And I always thought, boy, someday I wonder if I'll ever get to play with a uniform.
I finally did when I got to the U.S. Congress.
But I noticed that one thing when we played, and it was unity because we were baseball players, you know, and you made more friendships there.
remember, I'll bet you if I bumped into anybody that was on those teams now, we would both remember, oh, yeah, you played third base.
And I thought, what a, what a, you know, excellent way to talk to people.
It's natural.
And what happens when kids are left alone?
When we were left alone, generally you had to go out and pick up a team and go find some other people to do it.
So that is what's happened.
I think it's so wonderful.
But I think one thing that came to my mind on this was in much more serious ways about what Nixon did.
Nixon wasn't our greatest president.
He probably wasn't quite as bad as people painting him to me.
But at least, you know, he and Kissinger of all people, I think breaking the ice, how did they, what was the icebreaker?
The biggest news, and I was old enough to remember, ping pong.
You mean China's coming here and we're going to play ping pong?
And it was, it was a, you know, it was a break.
And it was, it was an eye-opener and opened the door to conversation.
Now it's exactly the opposite.
Now it's blame China for everything.
And that to me is, you know, ridiculous.
Yeah, but they're buying our stuff.
I said, where do you get the money?
Where do they get the money?
Oh, I don't know.
Well, they get it because we love their stuff because we don't want to compete with them, have the best price and the best product.
So they don't want to get into an economic argument with it.
They want to bash China.
So that's sort of reversing the attitude that was introduced by Nixon, where a lot of trade has gone on, you know, and yeah, China has a lot of difficulty, but compared to what?
Do we have any difficulties?
And we're already talking about our foreign policy and the switching of positions there.
But that's been ongoing, whether it's the policies of the foreign policy or monetary policy or budgetary problem.
We have a lot of problems in this whole idea that we can do this.
And I think we need, I think I concluded in one little speech when I was leaving Congress.
What I suggested, we deleted, we needed a lot more people out of the house and over playing baseball and avoiding some of the trash that we were involved in.
Absolutely.
I mean, politicizing sports is such a terrible thing.
You know, we saw in the Olympics, we see it in tennis.
The Russian team, they're not allowed to wear their flag.
Okay, that's going to really hurt.
That'll really cause Putin to stop what he's doing.
It's terrible.
So this is a great, great opening.
And I hope there's the first of many openings like this.
I'm going to close out.
I'm going to thank everyone for tuning in.
I'm going to ask you to please hit that thumbs up or like wherever you're watching this show.
Give us a little boost.
Hope we're going to see a lot of you on Saturday at the Ron Paul Institute conference, spring conference down here in Lake Jackson.
It's going to be a blast.
My hair is on fire because there's so much to do to get ready, but it'll be fun when it's finally underway.
Over to you, Dr. Very good.
You know, I talk a lot about voluntarism and I want volunteerism for our countries in foreign policy.
And that means no force.
You can't pick up an army and go and start taking land and controlling other countries.
But the one charge that we receive from so many people because of their ignorance and that is, oh, you guys are a bunch of isolationists.
You don't want to work with the world.
But if you want the least isolationist philosophy and the more where there's more diversity and bringing people together, it has to be with liberty.
This brings people together voluntarily.
Oh, never thought of that.
You mean both sides have to agree on something before they do anything.
Just think how little money we would waste and lives that we would take if we followed those rules.
And I think we would be safer, wealthier, and happier if we followed the principle of nonviolence and voluntarism, both domestically, at home, and economics, personal relationship, and especially in foreign policy.
Thanking Listeners 00:00:03
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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