All right, thanks, Scott Shannon, and welcome to our two Sean Hannity show, Toll Free.
It is 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
All right, the debt ceiling battle is now full on.
There is a full revolt from the House Freedom Caucus.
Dan Bishop, who will join us in a moment from North Carolina, Congressman, is the first to call for a motion to vacate as it relates to Kevin McCarthy.
Speaker Newt Gingrich, I can give you the list of people.
Steve Moore, economist, author of Trump Enomics, the New York Post editorial board, conservative, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Washington Examiner, or I believe it's the Washington Times, signing on to Kevin McCarthy's bill.
Others on the Freedom Caucus sign saying, why did we negotiate so much away?
Anyway, we've not gotten the actual verbiage in terms of the bill as written.
It's going to be 99 pages, so we're told a lot of the devil, I'm sure, ends up being in the details of all of this.
But anyway, here to weigh in on both sides of this, we have Newt King Rich, former Speaker of the House, and Congressman Dan Bishop from the great state of North Carolina.
Welcome you both to the program.
Thanks, Sean.
All right, Mr. Speaker, let's start with where these negotiations started.
It started with a Joe Biden that said no, he wouldn't negotiate, a Joe Biden that met once and then disappeared for 97 days.
And, you know, we're up on this, quote, deadline, which I think economists rightly argue is not a real deadline, but they're saying June 5th is the drop dead deadline.
The deal is announced.
We have the talking points from both sides, but not the actual language from both sides.
The Republicans will have 72 hours to read this bill before they vote on it.
But you generally support this as historic and a dramatic victory.
Why do you say that?
Well, remember where we started.
You have a Senate which is still nominally Democrat.
You have a president who's Democrat.
You have a very narrow Republican majority in the House.
By the time this process was completed, Kevin McCarthy had the lead.
The Senate Republicans were backing the House Republicans.
President Biden had been forced into negotiations, something he said he would never do.
The real question in my mind, and I cover this a lot in my new book, March to the Majority, which is about how we took 16 years to get to a majority.
And for four years, we outmaneuvered Bill Clinton.
This is exactly in that model.
This is a good first step.
If this was the final step, I'd be really disappointed.
But this step, if this passes, we have strengthened the House Republicans.
We have strengthened conservatism.
We've set the stage for an appropriations fight this fall.
Remember, this bill sets a ceiling for appropriations.
It doesn't set a baseline.
And so we can come back with all the evidence that the investigating committees are producing.
We can cut a lot of things that were not cut in this deal.
And by the end of this year, we can have significantly changed the direction of government.
That's how it happened in the 1990s.
We ultimately got to four years in a row of a balanced budget, but we didn't do it the first day.
We did it one step at a time.
This is step one.
And I think for it to be defeated would be a disaster, would lead to a clean debt ceiling with no reforms, and would shift the balance of power to the Democrats decisively.
And you are the last speaker to have balanced the budget in our nation's history, just as a point to throw out there.
Dan Bishop, thanks for joining us.
Let's get your take on it.
And you're going as far as to say that you're open now to triggering the motion to vacate, which any one Republican can do in the House in terms of a no confidence vote on Speaker McCarthy.
I think the negotiation's been handled disastrously.
And with all respect, I certainly respect Speaker Gingrich.
He's got a column on FoxNews.com that lists 12 supposed benefits to us.
But as you said at the very outset, Sean, you haven't seen the text of the bill.
So one of the things Speaker Gingrich says is that, just as an example, it slashes funding for Biden's new IRS agents and eliminates the total fiscal year 2023 staffing funding requests for new agents.
Remember, the Democrats gave $80 billion to the IRS in a 10-year advance appropriation.
This bill at best cuts 20 of the 80 billion, right?
No, sir.
It cuts $1.4 billion of the $80 billion.
Is this in the actual language?
Because based on the points of both sides, but all right, go ahead.
Hang on, Sean.
Let me just hear me out for a second.
So $1.4 billion, by the way, Kevin said to us on the call the other day, he said publicly that it was $1.9 billion.
That's wrong.
It's $1.4 billion.
And it doesn't do anything to eliminate the fiscal year 2023 staffing funding request.
It just takes it out of that pot.
The IRS can spend that whenever it wants to.
And no further progress is made toward the $80 billion that is going to be eating out the substance of the American people.
They talk about regulatory PAYGO is another thing.
The Biden administration couldn't get the Reigns Act that would control the growth of regulation, costly regulation, but there's going to be something they say is almost as good.
Regulatory PAYGO.
The administration is going to have to do what the Trump administration did and say, if you're going to have a new regulation that costs money, that imposes an expensive burden, you've got to take one away.
Well, look at the language.
It says the Biden administration can unilaterally waive that.
And if there's any question about it, it's got provision in there and says, and the Biden administration's determination cannot be challenged in any court.
This is what the bill is chock full of cosmetic things like that.
Even the point that the speaker just said, former speaker said that it will cut spending year over year.
No, it's not clear that it will.
It may cut maximum $20 billion, more probably $12 billion.
That is nothing.
It locks in the post-COVID massive growth in the bureaucracy.
It doesn't put us on a path that you can argue to getting anything better.
Everything that is a get for Republicans in this bill, every single thing, if we have enough time on your program, I'll debate them all.
I'll show you all of it.
Every one of them is a fake.
And at the same time, here's the feature of the bill that dominates.
It takes the debt ceiling out to January of 2025.
In an unlimited way, you can explain.
Instead of the original House bill that would have brought us right back to this position next year, which I thought politically would have been smart.
So we could debate it before the country.
Instead, what does Biden want to do?
Take it out of the presidential campaign.
You're kneecapping the presidential candidate by taking the issue out and the amount that can be incurred in that period of time.
People are estimating $4 trillion more.
Some say it's going to be more than that.
$5, $6,000.
Nobody on Capitol Hill can tell you.
And they don't name it.
Why do they not name it like we did in our bill, Sean?
Let me get Speaker Gingrich to respond to all this.
Well, that's a lot of different assertions that are, you know, you get into he said, she said.
The fact is that this does cut domestic discretionary spending.
This does rescind all the COVID money that has not yet been spent, which is about $28 billion, which, by the way, is a larger rescission, that is a cut in existing authorization, than all previous rescissions combined, which totaled $26 billion.
This does, I think, in a very important way, increase the ability for both infrastructure and energy with a pretty dramatic change in the permitting system, which is something that the environmentalists were deeply opposed to.
And I think you can argue about the way in which they're trying to do something.
It has a work requirement for food stamps and for other welfare programs, which is frankly exactly the same that we had in 1996.
So it raises the age that people can get money without working.
It permanently rebalances the roles.
It lowers the amount of state can waiver from 12% to 8%.
So again, it's a step.
I'm not arguing that this is perfect.
I'm arguing that defeating this, in fact, weakens us and strengthens the Democrats, and that the national media will gleefully report that the House Republicans are incapable of governing.
And I don't see what you gain for that, because the outcome in the end would be a worse bill, less change, because you know what would pass.
People are not going to accept the United States government going into an inability to pay its debt.
And therefore, you suddenly have all sorts of folks decide, okay, I have no choice.
Since we tried and failed, we have to pass something.
This is significantly better than what would pass and significantly better than what Biden proposed.
And again, the fact is, if you continue down the road on spending, the 1% growth cap, which again, remember, is a ceiling.
It's not a basement.
You can go below that in the future, but you can't go above it.
The Congressional Budget Office said it's $2 trillion in savings.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
Dan Bishop, what you're saying, oh, my gosh, what?
I'm sorry.
Speaker Gingrich, there are actual enforceable caps, like the caps in the 2011 BCA that were, by the way, blown every year by agreement.
They're enforceable caps for two years at 1%.
The other four years are mere aspirational targets.
They have no force.
And you're right.
They turn that into the CBO.
The CBO comes out and says it's going to save $2.1 trillion.
Are you kidding me?
When they're not even caps that you have in the 2011 bill that the Congress agreed to blow every Dan, let me ask for clarification.
Can any Congress, current Congress, actually require future Congresses on spending?
No.
But leave aside whether it's been attempted before, but at least when you attempted it before, you put them in law and they had to be discarded by the future Congress by action.
Those four years of targets don't even have any force whatsoever.
Let me speak to a couple of the other things that Speaker Gendrick just said.
Gingrich, he said we called back tens of billions in unspent COVID dollars.
The number is $6 billion that has actually been taken back.
They took another $22 billion of it and they put it in a fund over at the Commerce Department to be able to be spent later on something else over and above the 1% caps that he was just talking about.
He talked about work requirements and said his column says it will help lift millions out of poverty by enacting work requirements for food stamps and welfare benefits.
Well, they didn't allow us to put on Medicaid, so we're talking about food stamps, SNAP, and temporary assistance to needy families, TANE.
And on those two, there already are work requirements from age 18 to 49.
It extends it up to age 55.
And it does that gradually, one year at a time, and it all goes away subsequently in a sunset.
But it adds three new categories of exceptions.
It's not even clear, as Democrats have said, it's not even clear that we'll have more, you know, that SNAP won't, that work requirements will be more comprehensive rather than less.
Mr. Speaker.
They send leadership talking points to the Speaker, and he put them in a column, but they're not true.
Mr. Speaker.
I think that'll be a very interesting debate.
Let me just say flatly: when we passed welfare reform in 1996, we didn't include Medicaid either.
So in that sense, the fact is Bill Clinton vetoed it twice.
Biden would have vetoed it now.
On the other hand, this is a significant step in the right direction.
It does reduce states' ability to waive from 12 to 8 percent.
It does extend the age to 54.
And I agree, look, this is not perfection, but I don't think I'm going to double check on the COVID callback because I'm not sure that that's an accurate interpretation of what's happening there.
I think it's legitimate to raise all those questions and then to try to find out whether or not, in fact, we think that that is, you know, I mean, who is telling factually the truth at this point?
And I have to say, I understand the passion, but I'm not at all, I'm not totally convinced.
By the way, let me give you an example.
The bill's actual language has been online since Sunday night at 7.15.
So anybody in the country who wants to can go and read the bill.
That's just an example of the confusion that's out there.
And it's just simply not accurate to say that the bill has not been available.
Congressman?
I would think you'd have read it by now, Mr. Speaker, since you're making representations about it.
You would find everything that I've said to be accurate.
And that's not all.
No, I'm going to have my staff check every single thing you've said, and I'll be glad to get back to Sean and check.
I mean, again, I think.
Let me ask a more general question because I'm looking at the clock here in this segment, and we'll carry this into the next segment.
I felt Kevin McCarthy went into these negotiations with the upper hand.
I mean, they passed the bill.
They did their job.
They raised the debt ceiling, and it was fiscally responsible, and it scored out at, what, $4.8 trillion saved in a 10-year period, Mr. Speaker.
Did he give up too much?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, look, I went through this a lot with Bill Clinton, and we negotiated a lot of different things over four years.
I listened pretty carefully as they worked their way through it.
I thought that there were certain red lines that McCarthy had that were real.
I mean, the work requirement changes may not sound like a whole lot to Congressman Bishop, but I'll tell you, to the left-wing Democrats, it's a religious matter, and they're in a state of shock that they were put in there at all.
And it sets the stage to come back.
Remember what I said.
This is the ceiling.
It's not the basement.
The Republicans, if they can get the votes, can come back this fall.
Let me, I don't like to interrupt anybody on this.
It's too important.
Speaker Gingrich, Congressman Bishop, stay there.
We'll talk to both of you on the other side, 800-941.
Sean, we'll do this for the full hour just to get you both sides of this.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, there is a massive inter-mural battle.
By the way, it's happening on the Democratic side, too.
This is not just the Republicans as it relates to the deal that Speaker McCarthy lease made with Biden.
They now have the bill out.
There's a 72-hour period where people get to read the bill.
In terms of the people that are supporting Speaker McCarthy, there's a lot of people that I talked to today and yesterday, and they're all saying, I'm not sure yet.
I want to read the bill.
I want to get into the 99 pages, okay, which, by the way, is the right decision.
But if you're looking at those people supporting it, it would be like Newt Gingrich, Stephen Moore, who wrote Trump and Omics, who's going to join us in a second.
The New York Post editorial board, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Washington, I'm trying to remember, was it the Examiner or the Times?
No, Washington Times, you know, called it a win for McCarthy.
And anyway, so we continue.
Dan Bishop is with us, who said that he's likely going to put forward a motion to vacate.
You might remember during the battle over Speaker, that was a big deal.
Any one Republican member could have that motion, and that would be a vote then that would take place in terms of whether they would remove Kevin McCarthy.
There's a lot of anger from the Freedom Caucus, more conservatives in the House that are angry about it.
Others like Steve Moore are saying, okay, he's telling us about the things that he's like, that he likes about it.
Steve Moore joins us now along with Congressman Dan Bishop.
By the way, Congressman Bishop, are you going to move forward with the motion to vacate or you have not decided?
So all I said about that, Sean, is it is clear to me this is such a disaster that it's going to have to be done.
I'm not anxious to do that.
I don't do something like that out of anger.
The other members that I'll work with, but the point is this.
And you talked about it.
They said we couldn't get 218 votes for a bill.
We did.
And I have, and it's not, and Speaker Gingrich thinks that, you know, I'm sort of a false straw man argument that we must all be upset because we didn't get our bill and Kevin went for a more incremental approach.
That's not it at all.
It is that Kevin conceded every single possible thing and then has come out with a bunch of fictional kind of cosmetic nothings and tried to suggest that their benefits.
And I can take each one apart as I was in the last segment.
So the point is, and we said this to Kevin as the negotiations began sort of getting in a weird spot.
We sent him a letter.
And the main thing that's forced substance of that was to say, Kevin, do not forfeit Republican unity.
They said we couldn't do it, but we've been unified in an amazing way.
It is the dynamic force in Washington.
He disregarded that, and they brought back this disaster that he knew would split the conference all to hell.
But what I'm having a hard time understanding is why wasn't he in touch with the caucus the whole time before any concessions were made?
100%.
If he was going to surrender this comprehensive, why not get at least representatives of the factions that we've been working throughout the whole eight, five, four months of this Congress since we had the speakers contest back to Washington and say, here's the situation has really gone badly.
What do we do?
Instead, they just bring this back and drop it in our laps and then lie about it.
Let me get Steve Moore in here.
Steve, you actually said, I believe with Kudlow, that you think McCarthy actually outmaneuvered the White House and negotiated a deal with valuable concessions that conservatives demanded, strict spending caps for 2024, green light on new energy permitting, no new student loan bailouts, but the old ones remain.
Energy permitting, no, what else?
Requirements for welfare, a rescission of some 50 billion of unspent COVID money, et cetera, and limits on Biden's job-killing regulations.
Overall, you give this a net plus in a big way.
Why?
Well, not in a big way.
Sean, good to be with you.
And by the way, Congressman Bishop is somebody I greatly respect.
And look, you're not going to find many people out here, Sean, Sean, who are more anti-big government than I am.
I mean, if I had my way, we would cut this government in half.
It is atrocious.
It's killing our country.
It's sapping us of our economic energy.
But I think the most important thing for your listeners to understand, as this whole fight demonstrates, is if you want smaller government, as you do, Sean, I do, Congressman Bishop does, and most of your listeners, you've got to get a new president, right?
This president is atrocious, and he's run a $6 trillion hole into our budget, and it is a financial catastrophe.
Do I think that the speaker did about as good a job as possible given the hand that he was dealt?
Remember, Republicans only have one half of one-third power of the government right now.
And so I would have liked to have had him hold out for a better deal.
I agree with you, Congressman Bishop, that I hate the idea that we're going to, instead of hiring 87,000 agents, they're going to hire 82,000 agents.
I don't declare that as a victory, but we'll see.
You know, I do think that the cap for next year is an important one.
And I think there were some victories here.
And I think we have to pull together.
And by the way, if the conservatives vote against this, I have no problem with that.
I think, you know, Sean, it was Nancy Pelosi and Chucky Schumer and President Biden who blew this $6 trillion hole in our budget.
They should have to walk the plank and vote for the debt ceiling increase.
Well, I don't disagree with that at all.
Dan, what's your reaction to that?
So Steve's a reasonable guy.
A number of the things that you read out of, I think, a column you wrote that I haven't had a chance to see.
Once Steve sees the language in the bill that I was referring to before, he also will see that a lot of the things he understood to be the case aren't.
Why don't you tell him specifically and let him respond to each one?
Well, again, I don't have the language before me, so I can't quote it quite as readily as I did with Speaker Ginker.
But there was something he made reference to what I referred to earlier as regulatory pay go, which is the administration is a provision in there to sort of limit destructive regulations.
Well, Steve may not know that the bill allows the Biden administration to completely waive the impact of that if they believe it's necessary for program effectiveness.
In other words, some fuzzy language doesn't mean anything.
They can do it unilaterally at their disand-class professional.
The language says that decision cannot be challenged and is not subject to judicial review.
Nobody can do anything about it.
Congressman Bishop, let me ask you this.
What was the communication like during the negotiations with the speaker?
Very, very limited.
You know, I had some calls from Garrett Graves as one of his negotiators, great guy, Patrick McHenry, a few times.
It was in the last hours, it was when we heard the possibility of a $4 trillion debt increase.
And then even later, I think that we understand that they're going to take it out of the presidential election by putting the next issue, you know, by extending it out without any specific numerical limit to January of 2025.
I mean, do you even know that was bad enough?
It takes it out of the presidential race, but it also puts a lame-duck Biden administration in position and a lame-duck Congress.
You know what happens in those situations, Sean?
That's when the spending blowouts occur.
They put that right on the opposite side of that to be the worst possible strategic moment.
Everything about this is I think stretching this out.
I would rather have come back next year, this time next year, and gone through this all over again in an election year because it would have defined where the two parties are, at least given an opportunity to define it.
Steve.
To make it as clear as I can, we would have been better off with a clean debt ceiling limit that was within a year than this disaster.
Wow.
Well, Steve.
You know, I mean, the congressman is right that there are all sorts of loopholes in here.
And, you know, the more you read about the fine print in this budget, the worse you like it.
I think that it is interesting to me, though, that a month ago, I would have thought that there was no way we could get any concessions from Biden.
Remember, he was the one who said it has to be a debt bill without any conditions on it.
And I think McCarthy did.
But, Steve, let me interrupt.
Just for clarification, I'm trying to interrupt you.
But for clarification, the Republicans in the House did their job.
They passed a bill.
They raised the debt ceiling.
It saved $4.8 trillion scored out by the CBO.
It had all of the wins in there for the Republicans.
Why did they feel a need to negotiate it all against themselves?
And, you know, we had 43, 44 senators when you had Senator Kennedy that were willing to go along with what the House ultimately came up with.
So they were supposedly holding strong.
Well, you guys both make a very strong point.
And I think that the deal may have been premature.
I think that McCarthy may have panicked a little bit.
And part of the reason was you got all of the people in the media and all the people in the Biden administration with this kind of made-up story that if we didn't pass this thing by June 5th, that we were going to have a default on the debt, which, I mean, that's total BS.
Everybody knows it that knows anything about the economy.
I have said it many times on your show that it was total BS, but this was, but a lot of people on Wall Street believed it.
And I think, you know, McCarthy may have panicked a little bit.
I think the best outcome, frankly, from here, because they're going to have, I believe the vote will be tomorrow, that I think conservatives should say, hell no, this is not good enough.
We're not going to support this.
And force, you get some moderate Republicans and then force the Democrats, who are the ones who are saying, oh, my God, you know, it's going to be Armageddon if we don't pass the debt ceiling, force them to vote for this.
And I'm not hearing that from McCarthy, but I did talk to Steve Scalise and I told him exactly that.
I said, you know, Mr. Majority Leader, you've got to get the Democrats to walk the blank.
They're the ones who ran up the debts.
But didn't they have the leverage when they had the House bill and they raised the debt ceiling and Biden had done nothing and Schumer couldn't even get a bill to the floor?
Well, I think, again, Sean, I think you make a good point.
I think that the other mistake that I think McCarthy made strategically is he should have said, we've got our bill.
The Senate is now responsible for passing a bill, and we're not negotiating until Chucky Schumer passes something out of the Senate.
But you know what?
He couldn't get anything out of the Senate.
So how can you blame that on the Republicans?
You can't.
And I mean, that's the point.
And I think you're both kind of more in agreement than I thought you would be.
What does this mean for Kevin McCarthy now, Steve?
People like Dan Bishop think this is now headed to a motion to vacate.
And I think the Democrats will love that.
The media will love that.
And, you know, on the other side of it, you have, you know, the new Green Deal climate alarmist religious cultist.
You know, they're unhappy with this deal, too.
Yeah, so that, you know, I strongly disagree with a vacate of the sheriff.
Has McCarthy played this, you know, perfectly?
No, but I think he's done given.
Remember, Sean, they only have 222 out of 200 and what is it, three or four steep majority.
So, you know, I'm a fan of what he's done here, but I do think he's made some mistakes.
I think the biggest sounds like a communication error, Dan, because it sounds like you guys weren't being kept in the loop the whole way as negotiations went forward.
You know, my recommendation, not that nobody ever listens to me, Congressman, just so you know.
My recommendation would have been to keep the caucus in the loop before any concessions are made and say, I got to go back to my caucus and ask them.
If you're going to concede everything, then that would doubly be so.
And that's really what has happened.
Totally correct.
Everything you said, Sean, is right.
But again, I'm not even clinging to the idea that, yeah, we had the package that passed with 218 that they said we could never do.
We had passed one.
We shouldn't be negotiating against ourselves.
All of that is correct.
But given that we did start negotiating against ourselves, where we've gotten to, and I look forward to some opportunity to go point for point for Steve about his enthusiasm for the bill, because there's nothing left to be enthusiastic about at the end.
Well, let me ask you, is this bill going to pass?
Is he going to get any Republicans voting for this?
Frankly, I think, Sean, it's so bad.
And other Republicans, not Freedom Caucus, not the people who contested the Speaker's election in January, are coming out.
Nancy Mace, Corey Mills, Wesley Hunt, Kat Kamack, also who I'm leaving somebody else, Mike Walsh, who are saying this is catastrophically bad.
We're not voting for it.
So here's what I would say, actually, Sean, is the first step to salvaging this disaster.
And that is that more than half of the Republican conference needs to vote against.
It needs to pass overwhelmingly.
It's going to pass with Democrat votes, but it needs to pass.
That needs to be the major voting plank.
And then there are.
What would you both say?
I don't have a lot of time.
Steve, I'll go to you first.
I'll get back to you, Dan.
What do you recommend McCarthy do from this point?
I think he's got to go to Biden right away and say, look, I've got to revolt on the right against this because of so many of the tricks and loopholes in this.
And, Mr. President, you want to avoid a quote default, and we know that's BS charged.
You've got to get, you know, the Democrats, you've got to get 100 to 150 Democrats in the House to vote for this bill.
I don't know if he could pull that off either.
Well, okay.
Well, then it's on him.
Here's what I'd say, Sean.
He ought to go quick to the White House and say, look, this isn't going to do it.
We're going to need to go back and do a short-term, very short-term 30-day, 45-day deal and go back to the table and get this fixed.
That's what he said.
Actually, that's not a bad idea.
Dan Bishop, thanks.
You've been with us for the hour.
Steve Moore, appreciate it.
Speaker Gingrich on earlier.
Thank you all.
All right, 800-941, Sean, Greg Jarrett at the top of the hour.
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