Congressman Tim Burchett exposes D.C. corruption as a staff-driven system where lobbyists fund trips to kill bills via useless "study bills," comparing the outcome to artifacts rotting in a warehouse like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He attributes his viral "Game Boy and Hot Pockets" joke success to a Democrat-paid tracker, contrasts Tennessee's debt-free status with other states, and critiques the far-left agenda led by figures like AOC. Burchett supports Trump's executive actions due to congressional paralysis and urges conservatives to resist public institution indoctrination, drawing strength from his parents' military and patriotic values. Ultimately, this analysis frames Washington's dysfunction as a structural failure exploited by partisan interests, necessitating bold conservative intervention to restore governance integrity. [Automatically generated summary]
I spent 16 years in the Tennessee General Assembly, four years in the House and 12 in the Senate.
And, you know, we don't have an income tax.
One of the lowest tax states, we do have a sales tax, but we, you know, the inheritance tax, we've done away with a lot of those things.
And we run a balanced budget.
You know, if you go into a state and they're dropping asphalt, they probably bonded that, which means your grandkids will pay it off.
In Tennessee, we have zero debt.
It's just a debt-free state.
And it's funny how people run us down.
But you see the U-Haul trucks.
I used to have a U-Haul business, and it was tough to get the big trucks.
Now you can't give the big trucks away all y'all, if we call y'all refugees.
And the funny thing is, the misnomer or whatever miscalculation by folks is it's all these Yankees coming in here with all their crazy left-wing values.
And I find that's not the case.
I have a little area, the North City, Loudoun, and they have a, it's called the Conservative Club.
And I'll speak and there'll be 150, 160 people come to this, and they're just packed in there to hear me speak.
And they're all Yankees.
And they're either as conservative as I am or more conservative.
I always am afraid when somebody asks a question that I'm being set up by the Secret Service or NSA because it's usually some really conservative question.
And they'll say the same thing more or less with a funny accent.
And I like to say East Tennessee is the only place in America where people don't speak with an accent.
But it's always the same thing.
It's, you know, we came here to get away from that.
And we want to warn you all, do not embrace that lifestyle or any of that because it destroyed where we came from.
And we came here because of what you have right now.
I think President Trump, the trouble with Congress is, when I first got to Congress, I remembered I was sitting on the, used to sit on the second row.
Now I sit second row to the back.
I call it Senator's Row.
Everybody gets in trouble.
They come sit beside me.
But I was sitting down there and one of the old timers leaned over and said, Tim, how long have you been here?
I said, Mr. Chairman, about six months.
He goes, really?
And he sat back and I leaned over and I looked back and I said, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
And he said, oh, it's a good thing.
He said, because all these kids up here, they think they're, you know, getting into something else.
And when you get to Congress, I think everybody thinks that you're going to be asked by the president to negotiate a trade deal with North Korea or something.
And it's just, if Congress was the NFL, Peyton Manning would still be way to get in because the corruption is that you have to raise so much money and you have to kiss a lot of butt.
And I do a terrible job at both of those, obviously.
Number one, my number one goal is constituent service, always constituent service.
And that's what keeps me in office.
And we get a lot of media and that helps name ID.
But the reality is when you help somebody with their disability or VA, it also gives you a good feeling, but it also lets you know why you're actually there.
Unfortunately, we're having to take care of problems that we created.
I mean, we created this bureaucracy, Congress did, and then we have to fix it by helping our constituents.
But I just think that getting back to Congress, Trump won with an overwhelmingly large amount.
His percentage was Congress has got a three-person majority.
And brother, we're literally one flu season away.
Reagan said from losing, you know, you're a generation from losing everything.
Brother, we're one vote series away from losing everything.
And we better start addressing what Trump ran on, you know, the strong border, strong economy, locking up bad people, things like, you know, traditional things.
And it seems we just can't get out of our own way a lot of times.
And honestly, the committee system is made that way by design.
It's, you know, we have both parties will have 50 or 60 people working in staff positions.
And those staff members get really cozy with the lobbyist.
And you come in there and you want a great bill.
And you look at a lot of legislation we pass.
It's really just study bills.
And I'll refuse to vote for them.
It costs a couple million bucks.
And then the studies, I told somebody, it's like that ending scene in Raiders of the Lost Art.
It goes to that warehouse.
And brother, I've never seen one of those dad young studies.
Oh, it's all these people moving in from California, Chicago, New York.
As it turned out, no.
It's homegrown socialists.
We have, you know, these legislators, state legislators, they get invited to a ball game.
They sit in the skybox and they just let the stuff ride.
The Charlie Kirk stuff, where we started kicking out professors and administrators that said awful things.
Great.
Let's do that.
But they're like cuds who we cut them off and then five more pop up.
What we got to do is get to the people that are hiring and firing these people.
These presidents of these universities are far left.
Their hiring practices are far left.
They're human resources, far left.
And then we wonder, and then they tell us, you know, we don't celebrate diversity, you right-wingers.
Well, ask them how many dad gum Republicans they have in their sociology department or in their philosophy department or any of these other departments.
And you'll find that it's far left, and that's who they go after.
They go after people like themselves.
And it's just a cluster of groupthink.
And, you know, they just surround themselves with people that think like they do.
And so there is no real diversity.
And it just goes farther and farther to the left.
And we've allowed that.
And this is public institutions that we're getting this homegrown Marxists, as I call them.
And we've turned our back on that because we're afraid to stand up.
I always say, when I'm conservative and I'm a Christian, and I've talked to a lot of Christian folks, and I say, you know, we need to tell preachers, they got to start preaching the gospel.
They got to start telling the truth.
And you, when you're at work and somebody says something that you don't agree with, don't walk away.
Disagree.
Don't have to jump in their face dude, you can disagree on facebook, all the in your little, in your flower group or whatever.
At work, stand up for what's right, because the left sure as heck is.
And too many times we just let them walk over us and and our kids do the same thing, and then our kids are indoctrinated, and then we just let it go and Dad Gummet, we can't just let it go anymore.
We better realize that we didn't get here overnight, we didn't get in this spot, and the Democrats and the left had a far left agenda.
I mean, it's been going on for quite some time.
I think we better start taking it back, piece by piece, and we better not give up.
We better not give up.
I see that flag behind you there and I think about my Mama would um, every time they'd play the national anthem she would cry because she'd think about her brother Roy, who died fighting the Nazis.
I think about my dad, who was a dean at the University OF Tennessee probably one of the most conservative forces on that campus for 40 years actually and he um, he fought the Japanese in the Pacific in the Marine Corps and every, if I ever had to wake him up I don't care if we were at the beach or before he died in the nursing home i'd always have to wake him up by his big toe because he might wake up on one of those Dad Gum islands.
You know 18, 19 year old Marine fighting vicious, vicious Japanese, and um, and and then I I go back to the Daddy was saying the blessing.
One day we were, it was an election night and I had won, I was in the legislature, but it was a.
There was a national election going on at the same time and Daddy said um buddy, let me say the prayer, the blessing, and he did.
And he said lord, please don't, let us lose our country.
I thought wow, you know a combat veteran, the guy I respected most of anybody in my life and my best friend it was.
It was breaking his heart what was happening to our country and I just that's why people say Burch, why don't you just give up if you don't like it so much?
That government that makes me fight that much harder.