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Feb. 17, 2022 - Sean Hannity Show
32:22
Senator Cotton - February 17th, Hour 3
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All right, news roundup, information overload hour, 800-941.
Sean, our number, you want to be a part of the program.
Now, remember when the Health and Human Services Secretary and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, remember they put out that they were going to spend, what was it, $30 some odd million dollars taxpayer-funded kits, as they called them.
The Washington Free Beacon story said that they had these safe smoking kits for addicts.
And then all of a sudden, people started saying, wait a minute, we're paying for crack pipes.
And then Jensaki, and I think she was lying, because I think that was the original intention, that they, no, no, it's only lip balm and things like alcohol wipes and probably needles too.
So we're aiding in abetting.
Rather than if you're going to spend that much money, an insane amount of money, why don't you at least maybe offer some type of help to get people off drugs?
If you're smoking crack, if you're smoking meth, if you're injecting heroin, you're committing suicide.
And I don't think taxpayer dollars ought to be used to aid in a bet in your suicide.
If you're going to spend any tax dollars, and honestly, there's debates on both sides of that.
If you're going to spend it, spend it to help them live, not die.
And, you know, Jensaki then comes out and says, you know, what's in the safe smoking kits?
Okay.
A safe smoking kit is not lip balm and it's not an alcohol wipe.
Listen.
HHS just put out a statement clarifying around some reports that crack pipes are not going to be part of the safe smoking kits that are funded by the administration.
But can you clarify for us, were they never a part of the kit or were they removed in response to this reporting and this pushback?
They were never a part of the kit.
It was inaccurate reporting and we wanted to put out information to make that clear.
What is in the safe smoking kit?
A safe smoking skin may contain alcohol swabs, lip balm, other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis.
That means needles.
So they call them safe smoking kits, and they have lip bomb needles and alcohol wipes.
They lied to us.
Now, our friend Senator Cotton of Arkansas, Tom Cotton, put out a statement on this, and he said, in part, I'm writing about your department's smear of the Washington Free Beacon's report about your safe smoking kits, which until last week included taxpayer-funded crack pipes and meth pipes as well.
It can be used for both.
What happened is obvious.
HHS planned to allow the safe smoking kits to include crack pipes.
You got caught.
You scrambled under pressure and then falsely accused the Free Beacon of misinformation.
Senator Cotton joins us now.
It's a total lie.
Why, if you don't have the pipe in there and you only have lip bomb and alcohol wipes and needles, how is that a safe smoking kit?
That's a good question, Sean.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, a couple weeks ago, I woke up and I read the Free Beacon, as I always do each morning, and they had this expose they had discovered on publicly available documents that they're going to hand out these safe smoking kits.
And I immediately demanded answers about this.
And Sean, the Secretary, or I should say, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed it before they could get corrected by the White House.
They confirmed that, yes, of course they were going to give out crack pipes, which they helpfully added can also be used to smoke crystal mouth or other drugs.
It was only after they realized how politically tone-deaf this was, as you say, how they were paying people to stay addicted to these poisons that could possibly kill them that the White House tried to backtrack.
And then they began to condemn the Free Beacon for simply engaging in the terrible, terrible practice of actual journalism, actually holding account people who are in power for their terrible policies and then for their lives.
So let's just suffice it to say the Fidel administration has once again not covered themselves in glory in this episode.
Let me ask you about the economy while I got you on the air.
I just read today that with Senate absences, last-minute talks over barring funding for drug power finale apparently have slowed down the funding talks.
And lawmakers now are within 48 hours of a government shutdown.
Now, Mitch McConnell has not once, but now twice, thrown Chuck Schumer and the Democrats a lifeline with a continuing resolution to fund the government.
I'm not a big fan of the Republicans helping Democrats when the Democrats have closed every door and have never once invited the Republican leadership or any Republican into the negotiations on any budget.
They were not a part of discussing Build Back Broke.
Thank God Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema stood up against that.
So they've kept Republicans out of the process.
Are Republicans again going to throw a lifeline to Chuck Schumer and the Democrats?
Because a government shutdown, there's this false image that, oh, the whole government shuts down.
That's not what happens.
Essential services continue.
Social Security checks go out.
Medicare continues.
Our armed forces stay in a state of readiness, whatever they're doing.
And only essential personnel go to work.
And some people get leave and they're put on leave.
And we always end up paying them for a free vacation in the end anyway.
So it's never as bad as they make it sound, a government shutdown, is it?
Yeah, Sean, I'm not throwing any kind of lifeline to Chuck Schumer.
This is entirely a problem of Chuck Schumer's making.
Chuck Schumer could not organize a one-car funeral.
The reason we haven't had votes on those amendments, Sean.
Wait a minute.
That caught me off guard.
I didn't know you had a good sense of humor, but that's really good.
It's true.
I mean, it happens time and time again in the Senate that we end up missing deadlines or we can't have votes.
You saw it earlier this week.
They couldn't even go to a postal reform bill because Chuck Schumer proceeded to the wrong bill that the House went over.
He truly organized a one-car funeral.
And now, like, Sean, I'll tell you, yesterday, the Democrats had agreed in principle to allow votes on these amendments that we've offered.
Amendments to bar funding for crack pipes, to repeal the mask mandates on public transportation, to block vaccine mandates.
They were fine to vote on that.
And then guess what happened, Sean?
Chuck Schumer realized he didn't have enough Democrats in attendance to vote to stop those amendments.
And now we're all just sitting around staring at each other because Chuck Schumer is over a barrel.
He doesn't have enough Democrats to defeat our amendments when he could have started this process a week ago and we would have been done already.
So Chuck Schumer has no one to blame but himself.
Okay, I got all of that.
But why do I believe that once again, Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse the jackass, that they're all going to give a lifeline again to the Democrats and give them more time to conjure up whatever socialist scheme that they're planning.
Well, there's a large segment of the senators and the congressman, Sean, who think that you shouldn't have even the kind of partial shutdown you described and that we should continue to fund the government on that short-term basis.
I tend to oppose that for the same reasons you do, Sean.
I don't like to see the Department of Defense Hamstrong unable to fund major new weapons programs.
I don't like this kind of brinksmanship either.
And I don't like the Democrats' efforts to shut down these amendments.
Now, I will say one thing.
One reason why we're here in mid-February or plus months into the fiscal year is that the Democrats have been demanding that we yield on all their crazy policies.
You know, they want the full-year funding bill, for instance, to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects your tax dollars from going for abortions.
And we've said from the very beginning that we would rather have these continuing resolutions than to allow the Democrats to enshrine in law their crazy policy preferences, sometimes overturning bipartisan consensus policies that go back 40 years, like the Hyde Amendment.
All right.
So you're actually making a lot of sense.
And so you say it might even in the end, if they can't get their act together, you might be better off with a continuing resolution so these things are not etched in law.
Is that your belief?
Yes, so that's what the Democrats have been demanding.
They want to take things like the Hyde Amendment, which have been bipartisan baseline consensus policies for 40 years and repeal them on this year's funding bills.
And we've been clear from the very beginning, from last fall.
We want to fund the government.
We want to fund our priorities.
We especially want to fund the military and law enforcement.
However, we are not going to allow the Democrats to use a fleeting minority.
And in the Senate, technically, they don't even have a minority, or they don't even have a majority.
They have 50-50 Senate.
We're not going to let them use a fleeting majority to change policies that have been enshrined in law for decades.
And the Democrats, because they're so beholden to the far left so far, have refused to give up the dream of these things.
It's kind of like what you said about build back growth, Sean.
They have these very small majorities.
They thought they were going to pass sweeping change.
They haven't yet gone through all the stages of grief to realize their policies are so unpopular, they can't produce the votes for them in the House and the Senate.
I'm looking at 40-year inflation.
I'm looking at an energy expert on Yahoo Finance predicting that a barrel of oil may go as high as $150.
We might be seeing $6.50 or $7 a gallon gasoline.
We're now paying about $1.50 more on average across the country.
Everything we buy in every store we go to costs more, costs more to fill up your tank, costs more to heat and cool your home.
And it's really hurting the poor and the middle class in this country.
There's a Penn Wharton study.
It's impacting households anywhere between $3,500 and $5,000 annually.
That's real money, and it's disproportionately hurting the people that can't afford it.
And the only way I see out of it would be to go back to Trump's energy and economic policies, and we both know that's not going to happen.
Yeah, it's devastating so many working-class families all across Arkansas and all across the country, Sean.
It's probably the number one thing I hear from when I speak to Arkansans is the struggle that working families are having at the end of each month between putting food on the table, paying the mortgage or the rent, paying the bills, filling up the tank.
It's all a direct result of Joe Biden's policies.
Now, they point to all these things like the pandemic and the China tariffs and all the rest.
Sean, we had all those things during the Trump era, but shockingly, we didn't have inflation.
We only had inflation when Biden got in office and shut down American oil and gas production and continued to spend trillions of dollars we don't have on a pandemic that was already receding and continue to wage war on working men and women across this country.
That's why we have 40-year record inflation.
And as you say, I'm afraid it's not going to change until the Biden administration changes its policies.
Quick break.
We'll come back more with Senator Tom Cotton.
Then we'll get to your calls, 800-941-Sean.
number.
You want to be a part of the program.
Senator Tom Cotton, the great state of Arkansas is with us.
You know, it's interesting when you talk about the 40-year high.
Now, I know Goldman Sachs predicted early this week that they expect, now, previously they expected four interest rate hikes by the Fed, Federal Reserve this year.
Now they're predicting there may be as many as seven rate increases.
What do you see that doing to the economy?
And to me, the simplest and best way to limit the impact of inflation, the lifeblood of our economy, is energy.
Now, Joe Biden inherited an America that was energy independent.
Joe Biden inherited a country that was a net exporter of energy.
He's now given all of that up while simultaneously giving Putin a waiver to build the Nord Stream Pipeline too, which makes no sense to me.
But the single best thing that we could do to lower the price of everything we buy in all the times we have to fill up our gas tanks and heat our homes would be to produce the energy that we were producing under Donald Trump.
Is that ever a possibility of having?
Would that ever be a possibility of happening?
So, Sean, that's a very compelling point because everything you buy or use at any day, any moment in your day has huge energy at some point, whether to make it in a factory or to grow it on a farm or to process it or to drive it to the store.
Energy is the lifeblood of all economic activity, whether it's gas or diesel for our vehicles, whether it's natural gas or nuclear power or hydropower, coal for electricity, for factories and stores and so forth.
It is one of the single biggest drivers of inflation.
Joe Biden is beholden to his far left and their hysteria about climate change, claiming the world is going to collapse in eight years or nine years or whatever we are at now.
At the same time, he recognizes, though, and he recognizes what a political headache it is for him.
So he's turning around and begging OPEC, the energy cartels to pump more oil and gas.
We've got plenty of oil and gas in our country that we could be producing.
He just doesn't want to.
I mean, that's the saddest thing.
How deeply is it impacting the people of Arkansas?
Oh, very, very deeply, Sean.
You know, we have folks who are driving long distances every day who are not even able to fill up their tank, hoping they get price of gas falls a little bit by the end of the month.
We've got farmers who are buying their steed and their fertilizer this time of year, and the price of those have gone through the roof.
So unfortunately, you're probably going to continue to see inflation in food.
It is a big impact in Arkansas, just like it is all across the country.
You know, it's sad because, you know what, a lot of this is preventable.
Securing our borders would have been preventable.
Keeping energy independents, we could have kept that.
Certainly economic policies that were working, we could have kept them in place.
It seems that I don't see a single thing that Joe Biden is doing that is having a positive impact on the country, whether it be foreign policy or domestic policy, not one.
Senator Cotton, you're one of the good guys.
We appreciate all you do and your outspokenness and you're telling the truth and fighting a good fight.
I wish there were more Republicans like you.
Unfortunately, not all of them are.
But thank you for being with us.
Thank you, Sean.
Always good to be on with you.
800-941-Sean, our number, you want to be a part of this extravaganza.
Quick break, right back.
Aldwin's favorite radio talk show host is on the air right now.
Right, Mr. Baldwin?
Here's Sean Hannity.
All right, 25 now to the top of the hour.
We'll get to your calls here in just a second.
I want to remind you, though, about the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.
Their website is the letter T, the number to the letter T.org.
And their whole premise is to do good and never forget.
And they give mortgage-free homes to those that sacrificed everything for us.
Our fallen heroes, those severely injured, Gold Star families, fallen first responder families, people with young children, our nation's most catastrophically injured first responders, vets, even homeless service members.
They need our help.
Tunnel to Towers is asking all of us to help.
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Donate $11 a month.
And it's our way of saying we are grateful for the sacrifice that you have all given to this country and your communities.
It's that simple.
Let's get to our phones.
Let's start with Joe in Ella J. Joe, how are you?
Glad to hear your voice, my friend.
You've been calling me for over 25 years, sir.
Sean, you're great.
And I'll tell you what, I love Rush Limbaugh.
He was great, but I tell you what, I think I don't guess anybody will ever replace him, but you probably come closest to it.
You remind me so much of him.
You get us all fired up and energized and keep us posted about what's going on.
And so I just want to pay tribute to Rush, but also at the same time, say that thank God for you that you're out there.
And I live here in LAJ, and you won't believe the number of people that call me from all over the country when I'm on and say how much they love you and appreciate you.
Sean, I'll always be for you.
I'll always lift up and encourage you.
And we really miss Rush, but you and people like Mark Levin, y'all will fill in and keep us fired up and energized.
And I just want you to know how much Joe McCutcheon appreciates you.
Well, Joe, you've been a great friend of this program over all these years.
Your thoughts and prayers mean a lot.
Your kind words mean a lot.
I don't think you, my opinion is you can't replace Babe Ruth.
There's only one.
And it's, you know, I can't believe it's been a year.
That voice, that booming voice of Rush, the broadcast and excellence, the articulate way that he would describe conservatism.
And so many of us learned so much from him.
And those of us that are in this business all benefited from the path that he forged.
It's really that simple.
And he deserves all the credit for that.
And I'm grateful that we had him as long as we did.
And I pretty darn well wish we had him back more.
I would love his take on all of this.
By the way, Fox Nation, Ainsley Earhart, did a special with Catherine Limbaugh.
It's on Fox Nation.
It was on Fox and Friends this morning, if you missed it.
I think it's on FoxNews.com, at least parts of it.
It's on Fox Nation if you're a subscriber.
Thank you, Joe.
Big time, AJ, Houston, Texas.
What's going on?
Baby, what's happening?
Big time, Sean Hannity.
How you doing, Big Daddy?
I'm good, man.
What's going on?
Hey, big time.
You know, nobody can replace Rush, but I tell you, I got a chance to talk to him.
I was at OA09 is the 60-year-old black man that I got a CD of him.
I'm cherishing it.
I'm cherishing it.
But he left a foundation for you, Motown Joe Pags, and all the rest to follow him in his footsteps to keep this country going, Big Daddy.
Because without y'all, people would be lost.
They'd be lost.
And with them narcissists out there in the media and them treason as rats in the Democrat Party, we need y'all more than ever for show now, Big Time Sean.
Y'all the most of the time.
All hands on deck.
You know that big time more than anybody.
Yes, sir.
I don't even know if Fox News would exist if Rush didn't show that there was this massive audience craving conservative views because the rest of the media slanted so solidly to the left, you know, a biased and abusive and a corrupt news media.
I don't know if Fox would have even evolved because Roger Ells, who put Fox on the air, he also was the producer, executive producer of the Rush Limbaugh TV show, which was highly successful.
People forget that.
And it was just run late at night into the overnight hours.
But it didn't matter because people still found it and watched it.
And he did really well on TV.
He just never loved TV.
I talked to him about it a number of times.
Well, he got, well, the thing of it is with you, the Fox Newsmax, OAN, they're y'all the only one.
And then Trump coming out with his deal.
So we got to keep y'all going to keep this thing going because we see what they're doing to the country.
Gas prices going up.
People can't pay their rent.
They claim they get creating jobs, but then they come back.
And then they won't talk about Hillary.
They won't talk about the biggest scandal since Watergate.
This is bigger than Watergate, everybody.
Come on.
It's time for everybody to wake up and smell the coffee because we got elections coming up.
And you write about them people looking at the ballots, not standing 10 feet from the ballots.
This time we're going to be on top of the ballots.
And we're looking for the Republican Party to get some Gahonis and go and make sure we're on top of these ballots this time.
This is all on the state level.
Every state has to adopt election integrity measures.
I know your state of Texas already has.
I know Georgia has.
I know they're working on it in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia just needs to add signature verification in their bill.
But if we don't have, if you have a law, the partisan observers get to watch the vote count, you don't get away with putting them 100 feet away because nobody can see the vote count.
It's just, it adds suspicion that is unnecessary, and it's not good for the country, and it's not good for the process.
It takes away its integrity and confidence in results.
And we ought to have integrity in the system and confidence in the results.
Democrats, they don't want any of that.
It's interesting.
You've got to have a vaccine card to get into a restaurant, and you've got to have a picture ID to get into the White House and into the Capitol and into the Democratic National Convention.
You need a photo ID because I've been there, but yet you don't need one to vote.
Are you kidding me?
And now they're letting illegal immigrants vote, for example, in New York City.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, that is not a nation governed by a rule of law in our Constitution.
Anyway, we love you big time.
We'll talk soon.
God bless you.
God bless Rush.
He's in our prayers today.
Let's say hi to Lonnie in Nebraska.
Hey, Lonnie, how are you?
Glad you called.
Well, thanks, Sean.
Great show.
Thanks for taking my call.
I just want to make a quick comment about Rush and how much we all miss him out here.
Miss his voice on the radio, but you know, when you have those significant events, you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.
Got to admit, I had a lot of sand in my eyes on that day.
Yeah, same here.
Same here.
It was tough today.
And I just talked to David, his brother, and he gave me a five-minute heads up and said, Listen, I know you're on after Rush.
I don't want you to get blindsided by this, but he's about to announce that he had an advanced stage four lung cancer.
And I literally was in a state of shock.
And I had a conversation with David.
I listened to it with Mark Levin on the phone.
You know, we're both tearing up, obviously, and worse.
And it was just rough.
It was hard to take.
But there's a beautiful side of Rush that came out of all of this.
David talked about how painful his chemotherapy sessions were.
And he went through it all.
He probably knew that in the end, that cancer would win because they caught it so late.
But he went through the therapy so he can get back on the air and all that pain and all that suffering that goes along with it.
And that was his bucket list.
And that means a lot to me because that means to me, a guy that had enough money, he didn't have to work.
He wanted to be with the people that made him successful, and he wanted to be with his audience.
That was his bucket list.
That to me speaks volumes about the person.
I'll give you the last word.
Yeah, my comment is: I just, you know, remember the height of the Moore probe, and many Dems are just about ready to lose their minds over the thought that Trump might fire Moeller and impede or stop the investigation.
Well, now that the shoe's on the other foot and Durham is starting to indict, and it sounds like there's more indictments to come, and considering who's implicated, you know, I just want your thoughts.
Would you be surprised if Sardi and Dems might suggest that Biden fired Durham?
Well, why would we not have those thoughts when they kicked Jim Jordan and Jim Banks off the January 6th committee and replaced them with the two biggest Republican Trump haters, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger?
Why would we think differently?
Exactly.
And it's the hypocrisy that bothers us so much, you know.
It reeks.
The only thing, Lonnie, this is key.
We now have an opportunity before us.
And that's why I'm saying if your state has not adopted integrity voting measures, you've got to organize and you got to put pressure on state legislatures to do this.
The next most important thing you got to do is you've got to get out in November.
If Republicans take back the House, I believe we will.
If Republicans take the House and Senate, the Senate's more difficult because you've got Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, you've got Ohio, you got Pennsylvania, you got Wisconsin, you got Missouri, you've got Arizona, Nevada.
All these states are bellwether states.
But if we could take back both the House and the Senate, then this country, if we can wait two more years and elect a America first, make America great again conservative.
Maybe it's Trump, maybe it's somebody else.
I don't know if Donald Trump's made up his mind.
He seems to be leaning towards running.
Then we can get this country back on track faster than anybody would expect because the policies, the conservatism, and I'm a conservative.
I'm not a Republican.
Conservative policies implemented work.
That's why we're so passionate about them.
You know, people say, well, you're just an ideologue.
Well, okay, you can call me an ideologue, but I'm supporting policies that I know work.
Energy independence is smart.
Controlling our borders and preventing illegal activity is smart.
Having standards is smart.
Believing in law and order and safety and security is smart.
Believing in capitalism, lower taxes, limited government, less bureaucracy, conservatives, constitutionalists on the bench, that is smart.
Peace through strength, free and fair trade.
That is smart.
These policies all work.
I don't support them because of an ideology.
I support what works.
If AOC ever came up with an idea that was really, really smart, I don't care who it comes from.
I'm just, I want America to prosper.
I want every American to have hope and opportunity, a ladder to success.
And I see everywhere Democrats are in charge.
Every state, you know, how's law and order working out for them?
Not well in most Democratic-run states and cities.
How are their schools doing?
Not very well either.
How are they doing with managing Social Security and Medicare?
Well, they're headed towards insolvency because the money in the lockbox has been raided and spent.
How's Obamacare working out?
It's been a disaster.
And this is fundamentally now the biggest choice election we might have in our lifetime.
And it's a pivotal moment.
It's a turning point for the country.
And I think my gut tells me, and I never ever take anything for granted, but my gut tells me this could be a huge wave election year that will change the trajectory of this country in the right direction.
And we could use it as the pivot point to get the country back on track.
Joe has made a mess of everything.
It is an unmitigated disaster.
And he's done nothing that I can name that I could say, oh, he really did a good job on this.
And if you really love your country, you don't care if policies are working and good for the American people.
You have to be happy for your country, but nothing he's doing is working.
I'll give you the last word.
Well, I agree with everything you said.
I'm just anticipating and waiting to hear on the TV where, you know, they're trying to pressure Biden or convince him to fire Durham.
It's going to happen.
I could see it happening, unfortunately.
You're probably right.
I think we saw maybe a preview of coming attractions when they kicked off Banks and Jordan off the Jan 6 committee and replaced them with Cheney and Kinzinger.
Anyway, Lonnie, God bless you, and all the people in Nebraska, great people.
Thank you.
800-941-Sean are not because They have not moved any of their troops out.
They've moved more troops in.
Number one, number two, they have reason to believe that they are engaged in a false flag operation.
They have an excuse to go in.
Every indication we have is they're prepared to go into Ukraine, attack Ukraine.
Are you going to call Putin?
I'm not calling Putin.
I have no plans to call Putin right now.
All right, that's going to wrap things up for today.
Biden saying that he expects any day Russia to invade Ukraine.
We're watching that situation.
Actually, said those words today himself.
The great one, Mark Levin, Ted Cruz tonight, Tulsi Gabbard, Newt Gingrich, Mike Pompeo, Kevin McCarthy.
News you'll never get from the media mob, Nine Eastern Hannity on the Fox News channel.
Thanks for being with us.
You make this show possible, and thank you for making the show possible.
We'll see you tonight.
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