March 31, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
20:39
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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They knew that this bill didn't ban books, okay? | |
| Because we had already discussed that the day before in the Rules Committee, before the debate came to the whole house. | ||
| They knew it didn't ban books, but they went down there and said it anyways because they knew a lot of their constituents wouldn't do the due diligence to find that. | ||
| Yeah, and stated a little bit differently, the bill does nothing to do that. | ||
| What it does do is empower parents, and they come in and go, well, you're just going to empower this mob to go after it. | ||
| Well, hold on a second. | ||
| There are books that I don't want to be in the school library. | ||
| Let me be perfectly clear. | ||
| The question is, which library? | ||
| Elementary, high school. | ||
| And then parents should be able to have the say there. | ||
| That's literally all this bill did, was say parents should be able to know. | ||
| Dave Rubin, Thomas Massey, Chip Roy. | ||
| How was that for an intro? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sounds good to me. | |
| Nailed it. | ||
| Solid. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is the end of my little DC tour. | ||
| I'm finishing up with you guys. | ||
| Something about this giant table. | ||
| I feel like this could end both of your careers right now. | ||
| You saved the best for last. | ||
| You guys are on trial right now. | ||
| All right, Thomas, I got to start with you because everyone's going to be wondering about that thing right there. | ||
| You have the debt clock on your lapel. | ||
| You probably want to wait. | ||
| Yeah, where's yours? | ||
| You know, some people have a pacemaker up here, a lot of these old senators. | ||
| I've got an anxiety maker. | ||
| I'm trying to make their hearts skip beats and become concerned by looking at the debt increasing each day. | ||
| It goes, I wrote the software in here, I made the case, I've got some 3D printed ones I'm working on so Chip Roy can have a copy. | ||
| But it goes to the Treasury's website once a day, gets the actual debt to the penny, and then makes its best guess based on the average debt per second over the last year about what the debt is at this very moment. | ||
| I'm going to guess that when you're back home in Kentucky, or I should say Kentucky and Texas, of course, when you're back home in Kentucky, people probably dig it. | ||
| You come here and everyone's like, could you put that thing away? | ||
| A little bit of that. | ||
| The Democrats, I had one in an elevator look at it and say, is that a doomsday clock? | ||
| And I said, yes ma'am, idiot. | ||
| Well, they're always escalating that situation. | ||
| So you guys are on the freedom side of things, I would say. | ||
| You're on what I would generally call the more libertarian side, freedom side of things. | ||
| I sense, after three days here, that that really is the direction that the Republican Party is going in. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Or am I just being Pollyannish? | ||
| I mean, I'll say that I think that is certainly, there's more of an appetite for that among a larger block of the Republican Party. | ||
| That doesn't necessarily mean that's the overall direction. | ||
| We still have a lot of people we've got to get there, right? | ||
| There's still an enormous dominance of what I would call the War Caucus in this town. | ||
| And I say that as someone, a child of the 80s, and very much believe in a very strong military. | ||
| Used sparingly, but forcefully. | ||
| But we've got a kind of stranglehold on this place of the way we've always done things. | ||
| And part of the issue here with freedom is reminding people why we have a limited government of diffused powers and why that's important for preserving and protecting our rights. | ||
| Nothing illuminated that more than COVID. | ||
| Nothing illuminated the dangers with centralizing power and giving power to a handful of cronies like Anthony Fauci than what we just witnessed. | ||
| Thomas has been one of the leaders on that along with Rand Paul. | ||
| I've tried to help and others. | ||
| Let's be honest. | ||
| Let's be honest, though. | ||
| to elevate that. There is an increased appetite for it, but in part because | ||
| these people in Washington respond to their constituents, there's a lot of | ||
| Americans who want us to preserve and protect liberty. | ||
| Let's be honest. Let's be honest though. The fight that happened the first | ||
| week of January over who would be the next speaker was very consequential. | ||
| And a lot of people say, oh, that looked so bad. | ||
| You know, the Republican Party was in disarray. | ||
| No, that is how it's supposed to work. | ||
| We're not supposed to, like, have all these backroom deals and everything's baked. | ||
| And what came out of that is actually Chip Roy and I ended up on the rules committee. | ||
| Along with Ralph Norman. | ||
| So conservatives, the people who are most likely to advocate for freedom through legislation, have a blocking position on every bill that comes to the floor now. | ||
| And also, for the first time since I've been in Congress, we're actually imposing time to read the bills. | ||
| Like, here we are three months into this session, and every bill that's come to the floor, you've had 72 hours to read. | ||
| Now, 72 hours, I know people back home are like, there's not time to read a bill in 72 hours. | ||
| But it's better than 72 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, 72 minutes was the norm. | |
| Right, right. | ||
| And the other thing is, 72 hours gives people back home time to read about it in the news, and then call the other congressman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's a heads up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, you could give our colleagues a year to read a bill and some of them are not going to read it. | |
| Or they could read it, know what's in it, know it's bad, and still vote for it. | ||
| What's important is the American people have a chance in the news cycle to find out what's going on up here, call their congressman, and influence it. | ||
| So to that point, I sat down with Speaker McCarthy at the Capitol yesterday and I sensed actually now, maybe it wasn't when you guys were in the fight, that he kind of is happy with the results. | ||
| I think he does feel like maybe it empowered him a little bit by you guys pushing. | ||
| Do you think that's fair? | ||
| Look, I think that's fair. | ||
| I mean, of course, he's happy with the results because he got to be Speaker. | ||
| He did get the gig. | ||
| It was a messy couple of days. | ||
| But in fairness to Kevin, right? | ||
| I mean, yesterday he sent a letter to the President of the United States detailing some spending restraint that a lot of us have been pushing for. | ||
| He did uphold his end of the bargain in ensuring that several of us got on the Rules Committee, that we have more conservatives on the Appropriations Committee and other committees. | ||
| that we've been adhering to a number of the rules that we'd asked for back in December. | ||
| So all of that's good and I think when that happens, there's a unity that builds around | ||
| that. | ||
| Now, getting to 218 on anything is hard and you can only lose four, five, six guys or | ||
| gals and it's difficult. | ||
| But I think what we saw coming out of January was a renewed spirit that when some people | ||
| stand up on what they believe, you can prove that the sky's not going to fall. | ||
| You can have 435 people in the chamber debating stuff and actually move the needle rather than just kind of retreating to your corners doing press conferences and walking away. | ||
| And I think we showed that and I think Kevin's a beneficiary of that. | ||
| Yeah, let me give an example of how the new system actually works out for Kevin. | ||
| So he, to get the majority, he went out and did a lot of campaigning and one of his signature issues that a lot of people care about is reclaiming our schools. | ||
| Basically letting parents know what their kids are learning. | ||
| And so there was a bill that was coming to the floor, H.R. | ||
| 5, that would impose a requirement on every school system in the United States that you publish your curriculum and the books and the list of the books that are in your library. | ||
| So parents, real fascist stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, believe it or not, Chip Roy and I had a small issue with that bill, which a lot of members of our conference did. | ||
| We were like, well, you know, we prefer the Department of Education doesn't even exist. | ||
| So the question, like, if by reforming it or directing it, are we violating our principle of federalism and leaving things up to the states? | ||
| And so they asked me, is there any way you can vote for this bill? | ||
| And I said, yeah, if we have an amendment on the bill that eliminates the Department of Education. | ||
| Like, if I can show a preference legislatively through my votes on the floor, not just say something on a website, that my preference is to get rid of this department rather than reform it, I could vote for the final bill in regards to how it turns out. | ||
| And Chip was the same way. | ||
| I was able to offer some amendments that would require dollars to be block-granted to the states, which would be sort of the next step. | ||
| Like, I favor abolishing it. | ||
| But if you can't do that, can we at least just give it to the states and let them decide? | ||
| And if you can't do that, can we at least let the dollars eventually get to the parents to be able to just use themselves? | ||
| So we've got to vote on all three of those amendments. | ||
| And what surprised me is Kevin voted to remove all the power from the federal Department of Education. | ||
| Yeah, to micromanage elementary and secondary education. | ||
| So for the first time since Jimmy Carter set up this Department of Education as a re-election ploy that failed, we had a referendum in the House of Representatives on whether they should exist or not in our schools back home. | ||
| And Kevin joined us on saying no, they shouldn't give it back to the schools. | ||
| So this might sound sort of Amateur hour, but so the department obviously is still going to exist, but it just won't have authorization when it comes to these types of issues That's and let me be clear before everybody gets really excited Our amendments didn't pass and but we still voted for the final bill Because we got a chance to put everybody on record and now people back home can say would I rather have a congressman? | ||
| That wants to take the federal government out of my kids education or congressman who wants the federal government Well, and one finer point on that, to your point. | ||
| So what did we pass? | ||
| We passed legislation, as Thomas described, that empowers parents to know what their kids are being taught. | ||
| We put out on the record a whole bunch of garbage books with all sorts of total smut and ridiculous things that were in libraries and in curriculum, and we were demonstrating that. | ||
| That's the underlying bill. | ||
| And that's the underlying bill. | ||
| But for me to get comfortable with federal power being used to go tell a local school district, you're going to require parents to be able to see this stuff, I need to demonstrate that my personal preference is to get the feds out of it altogether. | ||
| But in the absence of that, then yeah, a parent ought to have a right to at least know how these dollars are being used and what's being taught to their kids. | ||
| And so I think getting that series of votes, restoring the way things work, which is a part of that agreement, empowered Kevin and empowered us to come together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, just to cap all that, that bill probably would have failed. | |
| Correct. | ||
| And Kevin, one of his major initiatives that he campaigned on, wouldn't have been able to pass in a majority if we didn't help him put into the process an ability for conservatives to express their preference. | ||
| So was the calculation by you guys that yes, you would prefer that the federal government not do anything, but not every state is going to do what perhaps Texas and Kentucky and certainly Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, a couple other states are doing right now. | ||
| So it was sort of your only way in essence, right? | ||
| Because Cali is never going to do this sort of thing, New York, et cetera. | ||
| Well, I mean, again, and going back to preferences, right? | ||
| I would rather, even though I think what California doing is it does is insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would rather just get the feds out of it and say, if you want to be insane in California, go ahead, but don't mess with my kids in Texas. | ||
| Don't mess with the kids in Kentucky. | ||
| But in the absence of that, if we're going to, as we do currently, have federal dollars flow, I think it is within reason of me being able to say I would prefer this other outcome to be able to go in and say that, yeah, Parents have a right. | ||
| And frankly, even in Texas and Kentucky, it's not like every parent in Texas knows exactly what's going on. | ||
| So where those federal dollars are flowing, now they'll have a little bit more ability to push for that. | ||
| So when you guys see AOC afterwards talk about how this bill was basically passed by fascists, and it's like, man, she needs some better education because you don't know what it means. | ||
| Or Hakeem Jeffries, they don't want to teach about the Holocaust. | ||
| I mean, these were the responses you got out of these guys. | ||
| I've asked this to every Republican I've sat down with for the last three days. | ||
| Are you talking to these guys in the back rooms going, what the hell are you talking about? | ||
| You know that's not legit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, in the Rules Committee, we debated this, and Chip was right to point out, they knew that this bill didn't ban books, okay? | |
| Because we had already discussed that the day before in the Rules Committee, before the debate came to the whole house. | ||
| They knew it didn't ban books, but they went down there and said it anyways because they knew a lot of their constituents wouldn't do the due diligence to find that. | ||
| Yeah, and stated a little bit differently, the bill does nothing to do that. | ||
| What it does do is empower parents, and they come in and go, well, you're just going to empower this mob to go after it. | ||
| Well, hold on a second. | ||
| There are books that I don't want to be in the school library. | ||
| Let me be perfectly clear. | ||
| The question is, which library? | ||
| Elementary, high school, and then parents should be able to have the say there. | ||
| That's literally all this bill did, was say parents should be able to know. | ||
| Did you guys see the, on TV, was it about a week ago, DeSantis is going through the books that they've removed. | ||
| It's basically two books that were pretty much pornographic and the media, the mainstream media, had to cut away because they can't show pornography on ABC. | ||
| Those books in the committee that I was sitting on where we had some witnesses and I was starting to show and I had to stop. | ||
| Like I showed the cover and then I opened it and I was like, I can't show this. | ||
| I literally couldn't put it on C-SPAN. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that Governor Sanders was going to fix. | ||
| But they wanted to say that they were removing Clemente and Rosa Parks. | ||
| All false. | ||
| Those books were left on the shelves or they were reviewed as part of a process and then put back on the shelves and that's the truth. | ||
| By the way, they don't read the bills we vote on. | ||
| I've read a few of their bills. | ||
| I've read the Green New Deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's only 14 pages. | ||
| And when I got done with it, I realized why it's only 14 pages. | ||
| There's only 64 crayons in that big box. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I saw it coming. | ||
| I saw it coming. | ||
| Is the difference between Republicans and Democrats right now sort of as wide as you've ever seen in your how many years now in Congress? | ||
| Ten and a half for me. | ||
| How many for you? | ||
| Yeah, I'm in my third term, so four and change. | ||
| Yeah, so is that difference wider than ever right now? | ||
| It's gotten wider. | ||
| There were some moderate Democrats when I first got here. | ||
| They kind of just finally all got washed out here. | ||
| Through attrition, they were going down. | ||
| But, you know, I don't blame AOC for her positions. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I blame the people that voted for her. | ||
| What you see here, the division you see, it truly is, and people may not like when I say this, it's a reflection of the American voters' preferences. | ||
| And I think the country's become more polarized, and that's why you see Congress more polarized. | ||
| Yeah, if you look at right now, right, and there are places in the Northeast or in certain sectors of this country where the people are still masked. | ||
| I mean, you flip on, like, the NBC control room, right? | ||
| The control room, they're all sitting there in masks. | ||
| Good grief, man. | ||
| Like, four years ago, we weren't wearing masks in Texas. | ||
| I went out to Lakey, Texas, which I represent, which is, you know, about two and a half hours from my house. | ||
| They were doing goat roping and it was a Labor Day weekend in 2020. | ||
| Of course, the Northeast elites and all that stuff, many of them are cowering in their corners and hiding and masked up. | ||
| These guys were all out, you know, the kids and everybody were out in the rodeo and they're roping goats and we were all getting together and having food and dinner. | ||
| It was totally different worlds, two different worlds, truly. | ||
| And that still exists today, like that divide, that difference, that different view about how you do these things. | ||
| And I think that is reflected in the representatives in Washington. | ||
| Which is why we need more solutions that are state-based rather than federal. | ||
| You have to be able to agree to disagree, right? | ||
| The reason I believe in federalism and the reason I hedged a bit on the parents' rights bill and wanted to go well, because all things being equal, the only way this republic survives is if we can literally agree to disagree under our federal system. | ||
| If we're going to tell each other what to do, it's going to break us apart. | ||
| And that's what we've got to figure out. | ||
| Is that really the fight more than anything else? | ||
| Because it seems to me that the red states, and you guys know I lived in Cali and now I'm in Florida, I feel like I live in a different country. | ||
| But it seems to me that the blue states will never stop coming for the red states. | ||
| The red states, I think, could for the most part be like, hey, we're just going to take care of our business and that's it. | ||
| But the blue states are not going to leave well enough alone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I sense that's what Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that's been the direction things have been going for a while. | |
| I mean, certainly, you know, whether it's the kind of DEI type stuff or whether it's, for example, climate change, right? | ||
| They're going to say, well, no, you don't have a right to be over there doing that. | ||
| And they're going to try to shut down our way of life and kind of export, frankly, their misery to the rest of us. | ||
| I left that misery. | ||
| I don't want that imported. | ||
| You know, look, one thing I do believe in though, right, is that there's an ebb and flow to things. | ||
| I do believe in the power of ideas. | ||
| I believe in the power of freedom. | ||
| I believe in the power of the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded and that leaders of this country have an obligation to project confidence in those principles and go fight for them. | ||
| You know, I was talking to a group this morning. | ||
| And, you know, all these folks that get, you know, June 6th and D-Day, and they talk about their dads and granddads and their family that were, you know, storming the beaches of Normandy to wallow bullets. | ||
| They talk about Washington crossing the Delaware and Texas, the guys on the Alamo. | ||
| And, you know, I said, oh, you're talking about all that pride. | ||
| And then they go, man, you were real courageous in that speaker's fight, because they were tweeting mean things about you. | ||
| Look, come on guys. | ||
| If you want to fight for freedom, just get out there and say what you believe. | ||
| Stand up like I did at a Chamber of Commerce event today and said DEI is garbage. | ||
| Stop promoting it. | ||
| It's hurting our recruiting at the Department of Defense. | ||
| We've just got to start being honest because I think people want it. | ||
| I think DeSantis shows that in Florida. | ||
| He wins by a million and a half votes, 62% of Hispanics, 50% of single women. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because he led. | ||
| He wasn't afraid of Disney. | ||
| He isn't afraid of the universities. | ||
| He isn't afraid to take on the establishment and take on all this woke stuff. | ||
| He wasn't afraid to send a shipment of folks to Martha's Vineyard. | ||
| And then he won 62% of Hispanics. | ||
| People are tired of people who are trying to buy their votes. | ||
| They want him to lead. | ||
| People always forget the guy only won by 30,000 votes over a meth addict before, so this is a big change. | ||
| You know, I do wish the blue states would leave the red states well enough alone. | ||
| And I hear the mean things they say on Twitter, right? | ||
| But one of the things they get back to is, oh, Kentucky's a welfare state. | ||
| Well, the Democrats are the ones who are voting, number one, to send the money to Kentucky, and their war on poverty has hollowed out Appalachia. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You're on your fourth generation of destroying our culture, so I prefer you just take your welfare or whatever. | ||
| I don't vote for it. | ||
| And I also remind them, we just printed five trillion dollars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The government is spending money that the states didn't send it. | |
| that the people didn't send it. | ||
| We've got 50 welfare states at the moment. | ||
| Like let's end the welfare state for everybody. | ||
| All right, unfortunately we only got about three minutes left and I'd definitely love to have both of you | ||
| on for a proper sit down when we have more time. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| But you mentioned DeSantis. | ||
| I saw you guys a couple weeks ago at this Blueprint event that he's trying to really give the states, this is the plan to fix everything. | ||
| It seems like this Trump-DeSantis fight is coming. | ||
| You jumped in early. | ||
| DeSantis has not even said he's running for president, unless something happened in the last 20 minutes or so, but you endorsed him already. | ||
| What was your calculation on that? | ||
| Yeah, look, I think primaries are healthy. | ||
| I was Senator Cruz's chief of staff. | ||
| It was healthy in 2016. | ||
| But nobody gets anointed in this country. | ||
| I don't care if you're Ted Cruz who came in second or if you're President Trump who was president. | ||
| Ron DeSantis, just because you're strong in Florida. | ||
| Nobody gets anointed. | ||
| You gotta run. | ||
| So, I support Governor DeSantis. | ||
| I'm not afraid of that. | ||
| He's a good man. | ||
| I've known him for a decade. | ||
| He's done amazing things in Florida. | ||
| We've already talked about it. | ||
| I think we need to have a robust debate about where we want to carry this country forward. | ||
| I would like to have someone who can serve for eight years. | ||
| I'd like to have somebody who's not a baby boomer. | ||
| I'd like to have somebody who has a proven track record of conservatism. | ||
| So, that's where I am. | ||
| You might get some mean tweets, you know. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| So, you know, I like both candidates. | ||
| But let's be honest, Ron DeSantis was at the tip of the spear on fighting back against COVID tyranny. | ||
| If we'd had somebody like that in the White House who would fire Fauci and Birx instead of giving them commendations for their great jobs. | ||
| You tweeted out a heck of a video. | ||
| Yes, Trump kind of bungling things related to Fauci. | ||
| Well, I mean, there was a lot of fear. | ||
| People understand that the former President Trump hired a lot of people that should have been fired, and we thought he would have fired them, but he didn't. | ||
| And so I haven't waded into the race yet, but I will say Governor Ron DeSantis, the best governor in the United States, there's no close second. | ||
| And I had the privilege of serving with him for six years in the House of Representatives. | ||
| And people can go back and look at those votes if they want to know where he stands on federal issues. | ||
| He's a very strong conservative. | ||
| I'm going to pull a Joe Biden here. | ||
| It was a pleasure, guys. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Dave. | |
| Thanks, Dave Jordan. |
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