Nov. 19, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
21:19
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Our country was rocking along. | ||
| We were minding our own business. | ||
| Our budget was about to run out. | ||
| We were negotiating with the Democrats. | ||
| And at the last minute, we said, look, let's just extend the status quo. | ||
| We're not asking you for anything else. | ||
| And at the last minute, Senator Schumer came forward and said, I'm going to shut it down if you don't give me $1.5 trillion and extend the Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| And I'll tell you how to spend the $1.5 trillion. | ||
| Well, I remember thinking at the time, look, I'm not Bambi's baby brother here. | ||
| And Schumer knows I'm not. | ||
| And my Senate colleagues in the Republican side felt the same way. | ||
| It was an unserious offer. | ||
| So we just shut it down and we never budged. | ||
| Well, about halfway through, Schumer said, huh, I'm out on a limb here. | ||
| The Republicans aren't going to budge. | ||
| I can't get in to see President Trump. | ||
| So he started looking for a way out. | ||
| And I think the way out, the eight Democrats that supposedly broke from their party, I think it was much more carefully orchestrated than they're letting on. | ||
| Senator Schumer could have, he could have punished, gone to these eight Democrats and said, look, if you do this, I'm going to punish you the rest of your natural life. | ||
| He didn't do that. | ||
| I think he was relieved to allow it to happen. | ||
| All right, guys, this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| And joining me today is Louisiana Senator and author of the new book, How to Test Negative for Stupid. | ||
| Senator John Kennedy, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I love you so. | ||
| Oh, thank you very much. | ||
| Well, can I leave all the wit to you today? | ||
| Because we play clips of you probably two or three times a week, usually on Fox News, sometimes on some of the other channels, just coming up with these one-liners. | ||
| And that's really where I want to start today. | ||
| Where do these one-liners come from? | ||
| Are they pre-packaged? | ||
| Are they ready to go? | ||
| Or are they just coming out of your brain as you're live on air? | ||
| Well, first, if people don't like what I said in the clips, I deny everything. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Number two, I don't know, Dave. | ||
| You know, I read a lot, and God blessed me with a good memory. | ||
| And I grew up in a small town. | ||
| A lot of my approaches, my perspectives are a result of that. | ||
| You know, God, I probably sometimes talk too much, but God gave me the right to remain silent, but not the ability. | ||
| I do bite my tongue. | ||
| I don't get nearly enough credit for the stuff I don't say. | ||
| But, you know, I was sent to Washington not to necessarily make friends. | ||
| I don't try to make enemies, but not to make friends, but to do what I think my people want me to do. | ||
| And that's what I try to do. | ||
| I also think that when I've got a few minutes to talk to the American people, I want to speak plainly and frankly because most Americans, they don't read Aristotle every day. | ||
| They don't have time. | ||
| They're earning a living. | ||
| They get up every day. | ||
| They go to work. | ||
| They obey the law. | ||
| They pay their taxes. | ||
| They try to do the right thing by their kids. | ||
| So when they've got a few minutes to listen to the news, I want to give them the straight scoot. | ||
| And that's what I try to do. | ||
| And some like it and some don't. | ||
| People, my friends ask me all the time, they say, you know, how do you sleep at night knowing that some people don't like you? | ||
| And I tell them the truth with the fan on. | ||
| You know, you can't make everybody happy in this business. | ||
| Indeed, indeed. | ||
| I also, one of the things that I like about you a lot, not only the sense of humor and that, yeah, you just have sort of an everyman quality about you, is that your political journey. | ||
| I mean, you were a Democrat also. | ||
| I was obviously a Democrat. | ||
| You defected a little bit earlier than me. | ||
| What was it about the Democrat Party back then? | ||
| And this is sort of early-ish 2000s that you saw happening that forced you to leave and become a Republican. | ||
| Well, everybody in Louisiana was a Democrat, mostly a conservative Democrat until 2004, 2005, something like that. | ||
| My first job in government was in state government, and I worked for a Republican governor. | ||
| So party wasn't that big a deal. | ||
| But gradually, the foolishness from the National Party seeped in to the Louisiana Democratic Party. | ||
| And it just, the Louisiana Democratic Party, like the National Party, took a hard lift and kept driving. | ||
| And I just reached the point where I was the state treasurer. | ||
| All of my legislation was being handled by Republicans, even though I was a Democrat. | ||
| And my Democratic colleagues didn't like me because I wouldn't toe the line. | ||
| So I said, okay, no moss. | ||
| I quit. | ||
| So when people hear you say conservative Democrat, those things come off these days as completely antithetical. | ||
| But what you're talking about, in essence, is sort of what we used to call blue dog Democrats, I guess. | ||
| So what do you think happened to the party itself? | ||
| Because now it clearly has, now there's just virtually no moderate Democrat. | ||
| Left, I always point to John Fetterman as kind of the last man standing. | ||
| But what do you think really happened there? | ||
| Well, the parties changed constantly. | ||
| And over a period of time, the loon wing, the Bolshevik wing, the socialist wing, whatever you want to call it, of the Democratic Party gradually became ascendant and took power. | ||
| Now, all Democrats are not members of the socialist wing, but more and more are each day. | ||
| And those who are more traditional Democrats, a number of them in the Senate, are scared to say anything. | ||
| A best example is probably Senator Schumer. | ||
| The leader of the Democratic Party is Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. | ||
| She's backed up by Senator Sanders. | ||
| But Congresswoman Ocesio-Cortez is, in my opinion, is running for one of three things. | ||
| She's either running for Speaker of the House, she's running against Chuck Shimmer for the United States Senate, or she's going to run for president. | ||
| And her wing of the party is clearly in control. | ||
| I think it's bad for the Democratic Party, but they've got to make that determination for themselves. | ||
| I don't think most Americans, I don't think most Democrats, at least a lot of Democrats, you know, hate George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Zeus or Mr. Potato Head. | ||
| They don't think they're racist. | ||
| I don't think most Americans, and frankly, most Democrats think that our kids ought to be able to change genders at recess. | ||
| I don't think most Americans or most Democrats hyperventilate on their yoga mats if you use the wrong pronoun. | ||
| But the loon wing of the Democratic Party does, and they're running the show, and everybody else is scared to death of them. | ||
| That's why we had a shutdown. | ||
| So I want to get to the shutdown in a second, but interestingly, you made a point that I've brought up a couple of times over the last few months, which is I have huge political disagreements with Schumer, but I don't think he hates the country. | ||
| And I think if this was 20 years ago, he would have just been a moderate Dem, but he's sort of afraid of his own shadow. | ||
| The ones that you call moderate, the Democrats that you now call moderate, do they privately acknowledge what's going on with the party to you and they just are afraid when it comes to the public battles because they see they've lost the base? | ||
| Well, yes, some and not in so many words. | ||
| But number two, you learn pretty quickly, you know this, Dave, in politics. | ||
| What you do is what you believe, not what you say. | ||
| What you do is what you believe. | ||
| Everything else is just cottage cheese, man. | ||
| And I watched what my non-loon wing Democratic colleagues in the Senate do, and not what they say. | ||
| And they go along, and they have been. | ||
| It started under President, well, it really started under President Obama, but it really accelerated under President Biden. | ||
| A lot of Democrats in the Senate understood that President Biden was making a huge mistake by opening the border. | ||
| And President Biden was told to say, these are my words, not his, that vetting people at the border is racist. | ||
| Now, I happen to think it's prudent, and most Americans do. | ||
| But the more moderate Democrats in the U.S. Senate never said a word, not a peep, until the end when they realized that they were in political trouble. | ||
| And even then, they were very tepid in their criticism. | ||
| So let's talk about the shutdown for a minute, because over the last couple of weeks, we played a couple of videos of yours, and you basically laid out exactly what was going to happen and how it was going to wrap up. | ||
| And you pretty much got it all right. | ||
| So is that just from you've been through these fights before and you sort of saw an election coming in New York and Virginia, the Dems needed a little bit of juice for it, and that you just knew what the landscape was going to be because you've been in the game? | ||
| I think, look, Stevie Wonder could have seen this one coming. | ||
| You know, our country, seven weeks ago, our country was rocking along. | ||
| We were minding our own business. | ||
| Our budget was about to run out. | ||
| We were negotiating with the Democrats. | ||
| And at the last minute, we said, look, let's just extend the status quo. | ||
| We're not asking you for anything else. | ||
| And at the last minute, Senator Schumer came forward and said, I'm going to shut it down if you don't give me $1.5 trillion and extend the Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| And I'll tell you how to spend the $1.5 trillion. | ||
| Well, I remember thinking at the time, look, I'm not Bambi's baby brother here. | ||
| And Schumer knows I'm not. | ||
| And my Senate colleagues in the Republican side felt the same way. | ||
| It was an unserious offer. | ||
| So we just shut it down and we never budged. | ||
| Well, about halfway through, Schumer said, huh, I'm out on a limb here. | ||
| The Republicans aren't going to budge. | ||
| I can't get in to see President Trump. | ||
| So he started looking for a way out. | ||
| And I think the way out, the eight Democrats that supposedly broke from their party, I think it was much more carefully orchestrated than they're letting on. | ||
| Senator Schumer could have punished, gone to these eight Democrats and said, look, if you do this, I'm going to punish you the rest of your natural life. | ||
| He didn't do that. | ||
| I think he was relieved to allow it to happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, I fully credit you because we played a video a few days before it happened where that's exactly what you said was going to happen and that he would vote no and then they would jump over. | ||
| It would kind of have him safe face, not that it's gotten him any credit with the far lefts on his side. | ||
| Let me ask you about a couple of the issues of the day because one of the big things that's popping up right now in light of the radicalism of the Democratic Party is that Trump is calling for an end to the filibuster. | ||
| I know that there's a philosophical argument here and then a sort of real politic argument. | ||
| And I'm caught between those two arguments. | ||
| I don't want to take power when we have it just because we have it. | ||
| And on the other hand, I know they would do it and I know they would pack the courts and do all those other things. | ||
| So where do you fall on this? | ||
| I like the filibuster and I've told the president that. | ||
| I've explained to the president that in my judgment, the role of U.S. senator is twofold. | ||
| Yes, it's to advance good ideas, but it's also to kill bad ideas. | ||
| And that's what the filibuster allows you to do. | ||
| Had we not had the filibuster when Joe Biden was president, God help us all. | ||
| I mean, we killed a lot of bad ideas and a lot of bad nominees. | ||
| Now, the president makes a very salient point. | ||
| He says, Kennedy, but when the Democrats get back in control, they're going to do it. | ||
| He may be right. | ||
| But my response to him was, well, let's don't let them back in control. | ||
| You know, let's don't let them back in control. | ||
| And I said, let's get together and win the midterms. | ||
| One of the things we can do to do that is to pass another reconciliation bill. | ||
| We passed the one big, beautiful bill, David, without a single Democratic vote. | ||
| We can do two more reconciliation bills. | ||
| But for seven, eight, 10 weeks, maybe longer, we've just, the Senate Republicans, we've just been sitting around, you know, pondering our navels. | ||
| We haven't done anything. | ||
| And we need to get up off our ice cold lazy butt, start on another reconciliation bill, welcome the Democrats' support, but we don't need it. | ||
| And we need to address the cost of living in America, that cost of housing, the costs that are added to goods and services through regulation. | ||
| We need to address taxes. | ||
| We need to address other issues that people worry about when they lie down to sleep at night and can't. | ||
| And if we get some things passed, once again, we don't need any Democratic votes, then I think the president will feel better and American people will feel better. | ||
| What do you make of what I would say is a certain impatience by some people on the right, a little bit out of the base, that they want everything to happen quicker? | ||
| I mean, you know, on my show every day, it's very easy for me to talk about the administration wins because there are so many. | ||
| But I'm sensing a certain portion of the right just wants more done quicker, particularly on the economic side. | ||
| You just mentioned getting young people into the economy. | ||
| I mean, do you think that's legit? | ||
| And what can be done really quickly? | ||
| I mean, if you were president right now, what would you be doing? | ||
| I don't blame folks for being impatient. | ||
| I'm impatient myself. | ||
| But you've got to worry about the short term. | ||
| But remember, the long term is important too. | ||
| And I think about what would happen if the Democrats ever did get back in charge. | ||
| And that's the day I prepare for. | ||
| If I were king for a day, what would I do? | ||
| I would, in terms of housing costs, we've got a supply problem. | ||
| I would turn to every major Democratic city and Republican city, but there are not many left in the country and say, look, if you don't increase housing starts by 5% every year, I'm going to cut your federal funds. | ||
| If you do increase them over 5%, I will give you a little extra money that I will take from the states and the cities that refuse to increase their housing starts. | ||
| The message, that will help housing immensely. | ||
| It will help housing immensely. | ||
| I would talk more if I were the president. | ||
| He's doing a lot. | ||
| He's just not talking about it. | ||
| I would talk more about the massive undertaking that the Trump administration is doing to cut the cost of rules or to cut rules and regulations. | ||
| That's one of the things that's making the American goods and services cost so much because all the cost of regulation gets added on. | ||
| I would take a hard, hard look at another reform of the tax code that stimulates, in particular, small business people. | ||
| We passed a rule that said to help small businesses, you don't have to pay, if you're a sub-es or an LLC, you don't have to pay taxes on 20% of your income if you leave it in the company. | ||
| I would double that. | ||
| And we can do that in a reconciliation bill without any Democratic votes. | ||
| And I'm frustrated, as you can tell, that we don't have that bill ready to go. | ||
| But I've argued with our Democrat, our Republican leadership in the Senate. | ||
| I'm not putting anybody down, but I argue repeatedly with Senator Thune and others and say, we need to do this. | ||
| I don't think I've convinced them yet, but I'm going to chase them like they stole Thanksgiving, man, until I get them to agree with me. | ||
| Let me just spend the last couple of minutes on the book because I really did think that the title is just fantastic. | ||
| How to test negative for stupid. | ||
| And I think people that know you understand where that title kind of comes from. | ||
| But one of the bullet points is that it's a field manual for understanding Washington. | ||
| What do you think if there was one thing that the average person that kind of pays attention to politics, but not the way you might or that I might, but that just kind of is paying attention, what is the one thing that they don't understand about how it all works or doesn't work that they should understand? | ||
| Well, this explains a lot. | ||
| I would explain to them that in Washington, D.C., normal is a setting on the clothes dryer. | ||
| In Washington, D.C., common sense is illegal. | ||
| It doesn't have to be. | ||
| If we had a return to common sense, you'd have better government. | ||
| And that's why I've said repeatedly in the book, the water in Washington, D.C. is not going to clear up until you get the pigs out of the creek. | ||
| It's just that simple. | ||
| I try to make that point in the book. | ||
| It's not a policy book per se. | ||
| It's a storybook. | ||
| I talk about policy through stories. | ||
| Some of the stories will make you laugh. | ||
| Some are deeply bizarre. | ||
| They're all true. | ||
| And I think the book will, I hope it'll make folks think, understand how we can fix it. | ||
| You know, might make people laugh a little bit, might make them day drink. | ||
| But everything in the book is true. | ||
| And I do it through actual stories and experiences that I've had. | ||
| You know it's a good book if someone starts day drinking while reading it. | ||
| That kind of. | ||
| Well, it's unvarnished, man. | ||
| I mean, it is unvarnished. | ||
| I talk about President Trump, President Biden, Chuck Grassley, Xi Jinping. | ||
| I met with him in China. | ||
| I talk about Chuck Schumer. | ||
| Everything in there is true. | ||
| Well, we'll end with this then because my team gave me, you know, I told you, we're always playing all of your fun quips on TV all the time, but my guys gave me a whole bunch of your quotes. | ||
| And I want to see if we can work through this one because it's related to what I had for lunch today. | ||
| You said, Democrats are the well-intended arugula and tofu crowd. | ||
| I'm big on arugula. | ||
| I don't like tofu. | ||
| I had a steak, but I like arugula. | ||
| What lettuce should I be switching to? | ||
| Well, don't switch to kale. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Kale would be worse. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Kale to me faces like I'd rather be fat. | ||
| You know the way, Dave, here's how you cook kale: you cook it with olive oil because it slides more easily out of the pan into the garbage can. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Look, I use that obviously to make a point. | ||
| The other night, I said something about people who have blue hair and like organic broccoli. | ||
| And I got all kinds of text messages. | ||
| I like broccoli. | ||
| Okay, eat broccoli. | ||
| You get the point. | ||
| But don't carry an NPR tote bag. | ||
| That's a hard and fast rule, man. | ||
| And that seems like the appropriate way to end an all-too-brief interview. | ||
| Senator, I hope we can do this again in person. | ||
| Maybe I'll come to the swamp and we'll see if we can get it. | ||
| I'd love to have you come, man. | ||
| You're a total banger. | ||
| I love your show, Dave. | ||
| Thanks so much, Senator. | ||
| Enjoyed it. | ||
| And the book, the link is right down below. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |
Export Selection