April 3, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
26:55
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We released a report that shows the FTC is doing what they're doing, naming journalists by name, asking what interaction the company's having with them. | ||
| The next day, two of them testify. | ||
| Democrats ask them who their sources are. | ||
| And while they're testifying, one of those journalists, the IRS is showing up at their door. | ||
| That happened literally, again, in a 48-hour time frame, and yet the Democrats say, oh, there's no weaponization in government. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| All right, day three of three here in DC and joining me today is a U.S. | ||
| congressman representing Ohio's 4th District, Jim Jordan, and a congressman representing Florida's 19th District, Byron Donalds. | ||
| Guys, welcome back. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| So first off, I gotta ask you about the sleeve situation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| We got a nice suit here. | ||
| Your sleeves were not rolled up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You just started rolling. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I thought that was your trademark. | ||
| Well, I guess sometimes they're rolled up, sometimes not. | ||
| But it's good to be with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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And Byron's always looking good, whether he's got a jacket on or not. | |
| Listen, this is the calm gym, Jordan. | ||
| Give him time. | ||
| Don't give him time. | ||
| When it's time to get into the issue, it's just gonna happen. | ||
| I'll start asking about IRS overreach and we'll see. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| That's scary, man. | ||
| All right, we'll get into that in a sec, but I thought it was interesting what we were just talking about a second ago. | ||
| You were mentioning how Ohio and South Florida, Southwest Florida, there's a connection there because of the snowbirds and all that. | ||
| Does that leave you guys in an odd competition to keep people in your own districts? | ||
| No. | ||
| They all like Byron better. | ||
| They just come to my district. | ||
| There's no competition. | ||
| It probably is a little bit of a tougher sell for the Ohioans, right? | ||
| I mean, literally, some of our best supporters, guys who have been with me for a long time, spend a lot of their time in Byron's district. | ||
| We were just out in Naples, had breakfast with a couple of them a week ago Sunday. | ||
| So, yeah, it's a great part of the country, as you know, because you've got family down there. | ||
| All right, so let's get into some of the issues. | ||
| So yesterday, there was this hearing basically about government overreach. | ||
| What was the actual title of the hearing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Government abuse, government something? | |
| Yeah, we didn't have it in our committee, but it was probably in the oversight committee. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of government overreach. | ||
| We actually function from the basic premise, Dave, that we think so many of these agencies have been turned on the very people, the American people that they're supposed to serve. | ||
| And you can see it time and time again. | ||
| And just remember what happened three weeks ago. | ||
| Three weeks ago, Chuck Schumer goes to the floor of the United States Senate and tells Rupert Murdoch, don't let Fox, tell the major network, don't let Fox play the January 6th tapes. | ||
| The very next day, we released a report which shows the FTC is targeting a private company, asking that private company, who are the journalists you're talking to? | ||
| Twitter, who are the journalists you're talking to? | ||
| Names four journalists personally. | ||
| The following day, two of those four journalists testify in front of our committee. | ||
| And while they're testifying, the Democrats ask them, who are your sources? | ||
| That all happens in 48 hours. | ||
| Yeah, that was incredible. | ||
| I mean, when you watch some of this stuff, and you're somewhat new here, when you watch some of this stuff and you have Democrats literally trying to get sources out of journalists, not knowing the basics about technology and phones and how these tech companies operate, is it mind-blowing to you that these people are even asking some of the questions? | ||
| It is, but wait, I gotta segue for a moment. | ||
| Notice, the sleeves are not on. | ||
| The sleeves came off, so notice that happened. | ||
| Okay, now back to business. | ||
| It is mind-boggling. | ||
| Sometimes it's just flat-out insane. | ||
| And what you start to realize is the Democrats are always looking to fill their narrative. | ||
| The facts don't matter. | ||
| The issue does not matter. | ||
| It's what's going to fill the narrative. | ||
| These are the same people who were basically trying to be the defenders of the media, but now when a story doesn't come out in their favor, they want sources. | ||
| They want the press to get rid of their own journalistic integrity. | ||
| None of that matters. | ||
| Only thing that matters is either perpetuating the narrative or protecting their narrative. | ||
| And that's one of the saddest things that we see up here on Capitol Hill. | ||
| When Schumer made that statement, we played it on my show and I said that, | ||
| he basically made a mafia tactic. | ||
| That's what he did. | ||
| Cause he basically said to Rupert, hey, that's a very nice Fox news you got over there. | ||
| It would be a shame if that thing burned down. | ||
| And then the pressure's on. | ||
| And they basically hope you will destroy your own business. | ||
| We see that time and time again when big government was pressuring big tech. | ||
| They were threatening the 230 issue and other things. | ||
| Either do what we want, take down these tweets. | ||
| We think these tweets violate your terms. | ||
| I mean, think about that. | ||
| The government's telling Twitter, we think these tweets, we think these violate your terms of service. | ||
| When did the government get that busy? | ||
| And to finish that, Nehru, think about it. | ||
| So, Schumer says it, we released a report that shows the FTC is doing what they're doing, name and journalists by name, asking what interaction the company's having with them. | ||
| The next day, two of them testify. | ||
| Democrats ask them who their sources are. | ||
| And while they're testifying, One of those journalists, the IRS is showing up at their door. | ||
| That happened literally, again, in a 48-hour timeframe, and yet the Democrats say, oh, there's no weaponization in government. | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| So that was Matt Taibbi yesterday. | ||
| As you were questioning him, IRS shows up at his door. | ||
| I take it this stuff doesn't surprise anyone here at this point. | ||
| Like, is that shocking? | ||
| No, it actually doesn't surprise anybody. | ||
| And so that's when we start taking a closer look at all the different agencies and having a real scalpel. | ||
| When there are people who are saying, you know what, maybe we should reform these agencies | ||
| or maybe we need to cut workforce. | ||
| The reason is, is because you have, there are really good people in the agencies | ||
| who are doing the work that they were hired to do. | ||
| And then you have these subgroups that exists where their entire purpose is to play gotcha | ||
| with the weight of the federal government or to suppress or to dissuade | ||
| or to diminish thought process, idea, et cetera. | ||
| Look, even with COVID, we saw it with the COVID narratives, CDC going to media companies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| CDC going to social media companies. | ||
| There are doctors. | ||
| Buying all the commercials. | ||
| Marty McCary, Jay Bhattacharya. | ||
| These guys have far more experience and technical knowledge than some of the folks at the CDC, and they were suppressed. | ||
| We have the documentation. | ||
| It's all on record, and it was coming from elements of our government. | ||
| Here's what I would say to the Democrats now. | ||
| If you truly believe in protecting the soul of America, if you truly believe in saving democracy, you can't allow elements of our government to suppress speech of the American people. | ||
| It cannot be allowed. | ||
| And how does the response go on that? | ||
| They want to protect the narrative. | ||
| The response is, what are you talking about? | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| Or, that was misinformation. | ||
| We can't let misinformation out. | ||
| But who's going to be the arbiter? | ||
| Who's going to be the judge? | ||
| AOC? | ||
| Rashida Tlaib? | ||
| Maxine Waters? | ||
| Nancy Pelosi? | ||
| No. | ||
| For the record, we tried to get every single one of them in here. | ||
| We got only one response and it was a no. | ||
| That was from Rashida. | ||
| So I'll give her at least half, I'll give her half credit for responding, but nobody else even responded. | ||
| You've been fighting these fights forever. | ||
| My sense yesterday, having sat with Speaker McCarthy at the Capitol, is that Republicans are starting to wake up. | ||
| Even just the tone that you guys have right now, like there really does feel like something might be turning here. | ||
| Are you hopeful for that? | ||
| I am. | ||
| And it's interesting because Taibbi wrote a piece over the weekend where he thinks that is happening in a broader sense too, not just Republicans. | ||
| I do think Republicans get now, look, we've seen so many agencies turned on the American people. | ||
| And the fundamental issue, I do think, is what Byron and you were just talking about, Dave, is this attack on the First Amendment. | ||
| I mean, I always tell folks, one of my good friends, Dennis Kucinich, old school liberal, who truly believes in the First Amendment, he does. | ||
| He's a far righter now, right? | ||
| By their standards, yeah. | ||
| But literally a friend, because he still embraces the First Amendment, like the left used to embrace. | ||
| But today's left, as Byron was just describing, they don't. | ||
| It's like if they use it to go after their opponents, we don't care about the First Amendment, we're gonna go. | ||
| And every Democrat, this is a scary thing, almost every Democrat is an operative. | ||
| You know, Republicans, they're running their family, they're volunteering at church and their school and doing Little League and all that. | ||
| But it seems like every Democrat's an operative, including many of these Democrats who are in these agencies. | ||
| So I do think this is the fundamental issue, because if you don't have a First Amendment... | ||
| You think about it. | ||
| Your right to practice your faith, your right to petition your government, your right to assemble, freedom of press, freedom of speech. | ||
| The most important one is speech. | ||
| If you can't talk, you can't share your faith, you can't practice your faith, you can't petition your member of Congress to redress your grievances. | ||
| Speech is the most important, and that's the one they're coming after. | ||
| That's why we have to defend it. | ||
| So speaking of speech, you've had a couple of nice moments in mainstream media lately. | ||
| You had a blowout, or whatever, you could describe it in your own words, with Joy Reid. | ||
| And it was pretty indicative of, I think, everything going on here with mainstream media, where they're acting as, you know, I think she considers herself a journalist, right? | ||
| I mean, if you asked her, she'd probably say she's a journalist. | ||
| But she clearly is an activist. | ||
| Do you think she was not prepared for that moment? | ||
| I thought she did come in. | ||
| She wanted to come in hot. | ||
| and showed it on the show, and you just calmly, clearly debunked her | ||
| in real time live on MSNBC. | ||
| Well, no, actually, I thought she did come in. | ||
| She wanted to come in hot. | ||
| She wanted to come in rapid fire, try to have me stumble or sidestep | ||
| or have to restate something. | ||
| And then that's that's the clip. | ||
| So kind of going in, that was my mindset. | ||
| It's like, OK, they're going to try to do something. | ||
| Just be prepared, be calm and then just take it step by step. | ||
| I think going on her show or some of these other shows, what I think it helps my colleagues understand | ||
| is you can go into the lines then and do ideological warfare, | ||
| or maybe warfare might be too much for them. | ||
| But you can have that dialogue, you can have that back and forth | ||
| and actually come out the other side. | ||
| I've had a lot of people come to me afterwards, they were like, | ||
| man, Joy didn't look good in that interview. | ||
| And I don't even say, I don't even put it out there, like, look how I owned her. | ||
| People say it and I just watch it. | ||
| But at the core of it is that you have to be factual. | ||
| And so a lot of my guys on our side of the aisle, I tell my guys, just be solutions focused. | ||
| Just be focused on the solutions. | ||
| They're going to bring the energy and the fire to it. | ||
| And you can go back at it with some. | ||
| But if you always have in mind the end goals, the solutions, the Constitution, like Jim was talking, the basic freedoms, freedom of speech, First Amendment rights, if you do that, you can win that argument. | ||
| Because the biggest thing we're having to deal with right now is that you have conservatives, we are the ones, trying to frankly save the soul of America. | ||
| We're the ones trying to save everybody's constitutional rights and liberties. | ||
| It's not the left. | ||
| And when you go into their shows, into their wheelhouse, and you talk about that stuff, it shows. | ||
| You had more people in the middle of the road in politics who basically like, why is Joy Reid lying? | ||
| Social Security is going insolvent. | ||
| It's in nine years. | ||
| Nine. | ||
| This parental education bill that passed, thankfully. | ||
| I was watching AOC afterwards, and she's talking about how this is fascism, basically. | ||
| The idea, and simply all it was, was that parents will just know | ||
| what the kids are being taught. | ||
| Can one of you please go to AOC's office and explain to her what fascism is? | ||
| It's driving people crazy. | ||
| But there's also this, remember what Terry McAuliffe said a year and a half ago | ||
| in the gubernatorial race in Virginia? | ||
| He said, we don't think parents should be telling government what their kid's getting in school. | ||
| And you got to thank him for that because he basically turned the election. | ||
| But it's like, you step back and you just think about it for a second, like, okay, so some bureaucrat in Richmond who doesn't even know the kid's name? | ||
| Cares more about that child than a mom or dad. | ||
| Like, it's just so stupid. | ||
| It's so ridiculous. | ||
| And the good people of Virginia saw it for what it was. | ||
| And that's sort of the basic here is like, we actually believe that moms and dads know what's best. | ||
| After all, they know their kid's name, for goodness sake. | ||
| Some bureaucrat in D.C. | ||
|
unidentified
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does it. | |
| So the government, that is a- Well, the teachers are literally trying to rename the kids. | ||
| That's part of this nonsense. | ||
| It's so basic. | ||
| I actually have said this in interviews. | ||
| Don't vote for anyone who's not for school choice. | ||
| You got Republicans? | ||
| Pick the Republicans for school choice. | ||
| That is so fundamental. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's the only way in the end we ultimately solve it. | ||
| I wish we could have got more of that in the bill, but it's a good bill that embraces this fundamental idea that moms and dads care more, know more, about what's best for their son or daughter. | ||
| Well, speaking of that, we did it this week in Florida. | ||
| We did it. | ||
| Again. | ||
| Again. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm happy for the people of Florida. | ||
| something that's been up a long time coming. | ||
| Um, my former speaker, Richard Corcoran, back in the Florida legislature actually stopped me from | ||
| filing that bill. Not in a bad way. Richard understood because the Supreme Court at the time before Ron | ||
| dissenters became governor was a liberal Supreme Court. He was like, Byron, if you file that bill, | ||
| we're going to pass it. And if you pass it, the Supreme Court is going to strike it down because | ||
| they're waiting for us to strike it down. So I want to make sure I set the record straight for | ||
| Richard and his conservative bona fides. But But this has been a process, a journey for Florida for | ||
| quite some time. | ||
| And I'm just glad that my colleagues back in Florida and the governor, they just said, we're doing it. | ||
| And let's go. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, you want to have a system of education where, like Jim said, the parents are first in line. | ||
| If I get to choose where my kids play basketball, where my kids go to after school, who's the actual doctor for my child, what clothes do you wear, what shows do you watch, although today it's much harder for parents to do that. | ||
| If I get to choose all those things, I don't get to choose the school. | ||
| That's disrespectful of the position a parent has in their child's life. | ||
| Florida recognizes that. | ||
| I know Arizona recognizes that now. | ||
| I think the other state is Utah. | ||
| And there's gonna be more states- Arkansas is doing it right now. | ||
| Arkansas is gonna do it. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| And more states are gonna follow. | ||
| Do you think fundamentally the issue for the Democrats on this is they realize now if they lose the schools, I mean, that's how they won this thing for the last 40 years. | ||
| So they sort of feel like, oh, if we can't start these kids on that path when they're literally five years old, We'll be in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, it's that coupled with just public employee unions. | ||
| It's been the power base in the Democrat Party for a long time. | ||
| So I think it's those two things meshed together is why you see them so against school choice, so against empowering moms and dads to make decisions for their kids. | ||
| And this crazy line about, you know, we had a hearing last week that I thought went well, where we're talking about the parents issue and what the DOJ and things have done, but the Democrats were talking about Republicans want to ban books. | ||
| There's a big difference between book banning and age-appropriate literature. | ||
| And that is the fundamental issue. | ||
| For them to argue, it's just so stupid. | ||
| We're not for banning. | ||
| You're the ones who want to restrict speech. | ||
| But there's a difference between what a second grader should be able to see and what a twelfth grader and what someone in college should be able to see. | ||
| That's common free consent, for goodness sake. | ||
| I'm sure you saw it when Governor DeSantis was giving the press conference about it | ||
| and he took out two of the books which were clearly pornographic in nature | ||
| and the news had to cut the feed because it can't show porn basically | ||
| in the middle of the day and that's the stuff that they want there. | ||
| Yeah, look, I was there. | ||
| I was on ground zero when we pushed that bill through the legislature when Rick Scott was governor | ||
| And we pushed that through. | ||
| And at the time, the Democrats in the state legislature were losing their minds. | ||
| You can't do this. | ||
| You can't have taxpayers and parents look at material. | ||
| They don't have the expertise to do this. | ||
| And our entire statement was, if taxpayers are paying for it, And the children of these parents have to look at it. | ||
| Shouldn't they be able to just comment? | ||
| View it and comment? | ||
| Do that with your local school board. | ||
| Engage in civil discourse and an actual democratic process with your local school board. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| And it's really good to see this now has taken fire throughout the country. | ||
| Unfortunately, a lot of kids had to be subjected to material that they should not have been subjected to. | ||
| But look, if there was one silver lining of COVID, it's that parents got a chance to see what was actually going on in these classrooms and in these schools, and that's actually to the betterment of our country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you guys doing any version of this in Ohio now? | |
| We've had good school choice in Ohio for a long time, and our Senate president Great guy, good friend of mine, is the most pro-school choice guy you can have. | ||
| So they're expanding the school choice there. | ||
| But I think there's a broader thing that also came through with COVID and with this debate is, I am so sick, and this is the left's position now, the experts make the decisions. | ||
| That's not how it works in our constitutional system. | ||
| It's the people who put their name on a ballot get elected. | ||
| They make the decisions because then if you don't like it, you can throw them out in two years. | ||
| And that is a darn good thing. | ||
| Instead, it's the Fauci's and the Collins of the world who make all the decisions. | ||
| And Dr. Fauci never once put his name on a ballot, went out and shook hands, talked to the people and got elected to anything. | ||
| But frankly, he ran the country, ran our lives for three stinking years. | ||
|
unidentified
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And everything he told us, by the way, yes, everything he told us turned out to be a lie. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Are you feeling pretty good, I assume, that when you come down, or come up here from Florida, that everyone on your side is going, man, Florida. | ||
| Like, you can feel it. | ||
| Everywhere I've walked around out here, everyone's going, Florida, man, Florida, Florida, blueprint, Florida. | ||
| I mean, what can I say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, we're the leader in the nation right now. | |
| Look, honestly, Florida, the Florida story, and I say it a lot in a lot of different rooms, We're like obviously the hot thing going today for obvious reasons, great leadership, great governor, all that stuff. | ||
| This has been a trajectory. | ||
| This has been a pathway for 30 years in our state. | ||
| I think probably the last time we talked, I talked about it. | ||
| What you're seeing now is what happens when you have consistent conservative governance in an area. | ||
| You see the opposite in California. | ||
| People are leaving in droves. | ||
| Crime is rampant. | ||
| Drugs are rampant. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Their legislature has gone off the rails. | ||
| And so what happens? | ||
| Businesses flee. | ||
| Capital flees. | ||
| Families are fleeing. | ||
| Kids aren't learning. | ||
| They're being stuck between a rock and a hard place because the teacher's union is striking | ||
| because the custodial union wants more money. | ||
| That's what's happening in California, not Florida. | ||
| So if the rest of the country wants to be, you know, a place where people wanna go start businesses, | ||
| buy homes, live their dreams and do everything else, Florida is the blueprint. | ||
| And frankly, up here on Capitol Hill, Capitol Hill needs to start taking cues from Florida | ||
| so that the entire nation can thrive this way. | ||
| Yeah, and that is the whole point of the blueprint, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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That's the point. | |
| That really is it. | ||
| All right, let's just knock out a couple of the other things that you guys are working on. | ||
| This TikTok ban, I don't know if you saw this thread with some of the real specifics of what is in this bill. | ||
| This thing seems pretty dangerous to me, the bill, actually, in terms of it's basically Patriot Act, For your phone now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How concerned are you about that? | ||
| I haven't looked at the details yet. | ||
| I know Senator Hawley may make a motion sometime today or tomorrow. | ||
| And we're all concerned about the China effort and what's going on here. | ||
| But I do get concerned that when you're trying to do something good, which is what would happen here, winds up restricting liberty. | ||
| And knowing where the left has been over the last few years, what they're doing with the cancel culture mob and everything else, that does concern me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you checked into what's going on with this bill? | ||
| I mean, I know that the idea basically of going after China, spying on us, that's one thing. | ||
| But now it seems like it's a bill basically designed for every bit of our data to be used against us. | ||
| Well, I got real concerns. | ||
| We're still going through this stuff, but I got concerns initially. | ||
| When you talk about TikTok specifically, let's be very clear, the Chinese government is taking a digital picture of the decision-making process of young people in America. | ||
| And people who use that app in America, that is exactly what they're doing. | ||
| It's the same model that all social media is largely built off of, that depending on what you look at, you kind of see what's good and what's not, and you can filter and do all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I don't trust the Chinese government at all. | ||
| So that's my issues with TikTok. | ||
| What we shouldn't do is essentially redo the Patriot Act on a larger scale. | ||
| The Patriot Act, by the way, I get the premise, obviously, 9-11, | ||
| but what we've done as a result has not been good for the country. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it basically led to all of this, and now they're trying to do it on our phones. | ||
| Let's talk about the financial stuff for just a moment, the bank bailouts and everything else. | ||
| Do you put all the blame on this, on just that Biden has, in essence, caused crazy inflation, and these banks ended up doing a bunch of risky things, and this was the obvious outcome? | ||
| Well, I think that was sort of the, The main thing is the inflation, the record inflation, which impacted the treasuries and what they had in these banks, and they weren't liquid enough to meet the demand from certain depositors. | ||
| I think that's obvious. | ||
| But it's all the spending that drove the inflation. | ||
| I mean, it's like literally record spending. | ||
| And of course, his budget, the president's budget, we were at record levels of spending, and he increased it even more with his proposed budget. | ||
| So we've got to get a handle on that. | ||
| And frankly, I think we've got to get in place, and I've pushed for this, The idea that when we get to the end of the fiscal year, we can't have this shutdown scenario. | ||
| So what I want is a no shutdown act so that, okay, we want to spend less, they want to spend more. | ||
| The Democrats always, when they have the White House, oh, Republicans want to shut down the government. | ||
| I'm going to say, no, no, we won't shut down the government, but we'll spend at some current level minus something. | ||
| And then you can have a real debate, because if we don't, we'll get into the crazy stuff. | ||
| So that's what I want on the debt ceiling, that structural change. | ||
| We'll see if we can get that. | ||
| You ever think maybe a shutdown wouldn't be the worst thing? | ||
| I mean, they always frame it as this is gonna be the worst thing ever, | ||
| but I'm kind of coming around to the idea, okay, let them shut down for a week or so. | ||
| Let's see how badly- Well, we've done this several times. | ||
| No, I know, but I think- Politically, it doesn't hurt us. | ||
| But I think in some ways now, it's almost like, | ||
| I think the fear is, oh, if we shut down, | ||
| people are gonna be like, oh, we don't need these guys. | ||
| Like, I think something has actually turned psychologically in that. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, look, I remember even back, you know, the beginning of this Congress, we were having all that, all that stuff going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it all worked out. | ||
| It's actually been a very good thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The media was losing their minds. | ||
| Oh my gosh, Congress hasn't convened in day two. | ||
| What's going to happen, sir? | ||
| And I'm like, Kids are gonna go to school. | ||
| I was still able to get eggs. | ||
| People are driving on the street right now. | ||
| The country will still function. | ||
| We'll figure this out and move on. | ||
| I think even if you get into the topic of government shutdown, the reality is people still go to Disney, even though Disney's doing some silly things. | ||
| People go to the beach. | ||
| You could have said SeaWorld. | ||
| I mean, but we're talking about, what, September? | ||
| Trust me, the NFL's gonna be playing games. | ||
| Life will continue. | ||
| Washington's gotta get its house in order. | ||
| And now this is the part that is critical. | ||
| We have to get out of this, to Jim's point, this brinksmanship, shut down mentality, where as a new guy on the Hill, it is mind boggling to me why we don't have guys sitting in conference rooms all over the Hill going through spreadsheets right now saying, okay, what about that? | ||
| Well, this is that thing. | ||
| We can't really spend like that. | ||
| We got to cut this here. | ||
| You got, we have all the time in the world to do this. | ||
| Except one thing, there is no political will to do it. | ||
| Because if you have to sit down at a table and go through budgets, across from your political opponents, that's all well and good, you can actually get to a deal pretty quickly. | ||
| Is that particularly weird for you, because we're in a state, Florida, where we have a surplus, we don't have a state income tax, but everything's working, infrastructure projects, 20-year projects, the governor told me are now seven years, because we have to build faster, because so many people are coming. | ||
| Like, it's working there, then you come here and you're like, guys, Can we do math? | ||
| But also in most state legislatures, you have a mandatory budget that's constitutional. | ||
| You have to pass a budget. | ||
| It has to balance. | ||
| You don't get to deficit spend in the states. | ||
| Here? | ||
| Oh, we're short a couple hundred billion? | ||
| Okay, throw it on the credit card. | ||
| You can't do that at the state level. | ||
| States have to balance their budgets, which is why, in a lot of respects, people want to get balanced budget amendments up here in Washington. | ||
| I totally understand that. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it's the people you send. | ||
| If you send members up here to Capitol Hill who are not serious about the fiscal future of the country, you're gonna see more of this. | ||
| And that's the stuff that we want to stop. | ||
| When you're talking to Democrats about this, is it that they fundamentally just believe you actually can print money forever? | ||
| So that really is like the- The Democrat does, yeah. | ||
| No, they believe that monetary Modern monetary policy. | ||
| I'm not on the Financial Services Committee, but that's what they believe, and it's frightening because I mean, we're seeing what happens now. | ||
| The inflation is just, you know, 41-year, 42-year high inflation rate. | ||
| Let me ask you guys one more, which obviously there's some momentum with the Republicans right now. | ||
| Clearly, this Trump-DeSantis thing seems like it's heating up. | ||
| You knew I was going to have to ask one way or another. | ||
| You had a great answer for me last time on it. | ||
| You know, I keep telling people, I feel like I'm going to win either way because Either DeSantis remains my governor, which will be just fine, or potentially he's president, which would be great. | ||
| Or if Trump's president, that's great, and I still got DeSantis. | ||
| Short of Biden being president again, there's a win in it, I think, for Floridians. | ||
| But you guys might end up on slightly opposite sides of that thing, because you're obviously a Trump guy in that regard, and I know you like President Trump, of course, but you're a Floridian also. | ||
| How do you deal with that internally when it gets hot? | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm for President Trump. | ||
| I've said this many times. | ||
| I don't think we've ever had a president who did more what he said he would do. | ||
| I may have shared this story with you before, David, but Mark Meadows and I are in the White House probably, I don't know, 2017, 2018, and we're in the West Wing there. | ||
| We're in one of the rooms. | ||
| I think it might have been Jared or someone's room. | ||
| Big whiteboard. | ||
| Literally, they had every promise written that President Trump made to the American people in 2016. | ||
| Every one. | ||
| You know, cut taxes, reduce regulations, the embassy in Jerusalem, build the wall, all of them. | ||
| And they were just checking them off. | ||
| And that is, I think that's how you're supposed to govern. | ||
| So I'm 100% for President Trump. | ||
| And I want him to win because I think he's got the toughness to do it. | ||
| I like Governor DeSantis. | ||
| When we formed the Freedom Caucus, there were nine of us. | ||
| He was one of the original nine. | ||
| So he's a good man, done a good job in Florida, but I'm for Trump. | ||
| You want me to answer now? | ||
| No, I mean, look, at the end of the day, the back and forth that's going to happen is politics. | ||
| I've been through tough races. | ||
| Jim's been through tough races. | ||
| You don't come up here to Capitol Hill without going through them. | ||
| You definitely aren't going to get to the highest office in the land without going through it. | ||
| It's going to be tough. | ||
| It's going to be bare knuckles at times. | ||
| That's just what it is. | ||
| So I think for people in the conservative base, you've got to understand, we've seen this before. | ||
| We've done this dance before. | ||
| This will get worked out too. | ||
| Look, if Donald Trump is president, phenomenal. | ||
| If Ron DeSantis is president, great. | ||
| The thing we gotta do is we gotta clean house in DC. | ||
| DC's gotta get a house cleaning. | ||
| And the one thing I know about President Trump, he's committed to that work. | ||
| That work will begin. | ||
| Gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| You got work to do, I assume. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. |
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