Oct. 2, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:21:20
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| The most interesting and newsworthy television show of the year is coming here to TCN. We are not bragging, that's actually true. | ||
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The president's been shot. | |
| I repeat, the president's been shot. | ||
| So our longtime producer Justin Wells and a team have been embedded, with no publicity at all, with Donald Trump on the campaign trail for months. | ||
| They're the only crew capturing what is going on on the campaign, in real time, intimately. | ||
| They're with Trump as he campaigns for the presidency across the country, and they've shot some amazing footage. | ||
| It shows you what it's really like in there. | ||
| So if you're a member, you will soon be able to get this docuseries covering the historic campaign, the fall of Joe Biden, never-before-seen footage from the assassination attempt at the Butler Township, Pennsylvania, Trump rally, and a lot more. | ||
| It's going to pull back the curtain completely. | ||
| They are embedded inside the campaign. | ||
| I can't wait to see it personally. | ||
| But to get it first, go to TuckerCarlson.com, become a member of the greatest television event of the year. | ||
| We're proud to offer it. | ||
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We're proud to offer it. | |
| So it was only a week ago that the fabled predictions markets had Tim Walls at 81% likelihood to win tonight's debate. | ||
| These are the same markets that predicted smooth sailing for the Titanic, apparently. | ||
| It was not to be. | ||
| That was one of the most unbelievable hour and 45-minute television experiences I have seen in a long time. | ||
| Of course, you're required to watch the debate. | ||
| It's usually hellish. | ||
| You're fidgeting. | ||
| That was a pure joy to watch from beginning to end. | ||
| The very obvious top-line conclusions, the future of the Republican Party is J.D. Vance. | ||
| That's what the future looks like. | ||
| That's where the party is going. | ||
| That's where its voters are. | ||
| And he is the supremely articulate spokesman for that brand of Republican politics. | ||
| He is the future. | ||
| And the second is that it is never a good idea to choose anybody for any... | ||
| Tim Walls was chosen by the Harris campaign because he's a white guy. | ||
| He is an affirmative action hire, and they're regretting that tonight, as you usually do when you hire people on the basis of irrelevant criteria. | ||
| So we're going to spend the next little while talking about what we just saw. | ||
| We'll be doing it with a politician, actually, sitting politician, because... | ||
| Really, they're the best situated to understand a debate. | ||
| The problem is that most politicians are not worth talking to, particularly members of the United States Senate. | ||
| I first interned there in 1986, and I can tell you, almost all senators get worse over time. | ||
| It is a rare, almost unique few who don't, and the one who is joining us tonight is one of the very few who has instead of becoming rotten... | ||
| Dying soul death has instead become wiser, more skeptical of government, and less controlled during his time in the United States Senate. | ||
| And so we are honored to be joined tonight by Senator Mike Lee of Utah. | ||
| Senator, thanks so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So, what did you think of that? | ||
| Well, first of all, J.D. absolutely nailed that. | ||
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Yes. | |
| He walked on, he owned the room. | ||
| He was the master of the mood of the entire discussion. | ||
| He made reason. | ||
| Sound and be reasonable. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And he was doing this against an unarmed opponent, somebody who seemed dangerously ill-equipped for the task, and I can't say enough great things about J.D. Vance's performance and enough bad things about Tim Walsh's. | ||
| Now, this is a man who was competing. | ||
| This was a three-on-one debate, just as the debate hosted by ABC a few weeks ago was three-on-one against Donald Trump. | ||
| This was similarly aligned against J.D. Vance, and yet he... | ||
| Completely dominated the entire evening. | ||
| His emotional control is what struck me most. | ||
| He's very smart. | ||
| He's a friend of mine. | ||
| I know he's very smart. | ||
| Legitimately high IQ character. | ||
| But he kept his emotions in check in a way that I could never do. | ||
| He had these shrieking liberal narcissists as the moderators. | ||
| And he had this... | ||
| This is something that I was hoping the rest of the country would get to see tonight. | ||
| This is the J.D. Vance I know as a friend and colleague in the Senate. | ||
| Tucker, I can't tell you how many times. | ||
| Is he like that in the Senate? | ||
| Exactly like that. | ||
| I can't tell you the number of times when I've seen him be accosted, questioned, challenged one way or another by colleagues. | ||
| Sometimes it's Democrats, sometimes it's fellow Republicans. | ||
| But every single time, even when he'd be well within its right to lose his temper a little bit or get frustrated or act annoyed, he doesn't. | ||
| He's cool as a cucumber and he responds with reason. | ||
| And doesn't act the least bit annoyed. | ||
| And truthfully, I don't think he is annoyed. | ||
| He's just taking the opportunity to illuminate his thoughts on the topic, and he's very rarely wrong. | ||
| I mean, how does he do that? | ||
| He acted the way my wife wants me to act. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But I can never pull it off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, practice makes perfect, of course, but this also comes from something deeper inside of J.D. This is who he is as a person. | ||
| He was raised under circumstances that have caused him to realize how deep and how profound, how important these decisions are. | ||
| And he doesn't have time to mess around. | ||
| He doesn't have any interest in allowing himself to become so emotionally involved in something that he loses his ability to explain it coherently. | ||
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Wow. | |
| I mean, I would have lost it about 15 different times, particularly, and without focusing on it, but the moderators, I really hope this is the last time in American history that CBS, which I assume will be bankrupt by the next election anyway, but that any so-called news organization like this has any role in a debate. | ||
| I mean, it's a joke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't understand how they walk away from this with any sense of journalistic self-respect or perception of their own objectivity. | ||
| What you saw tonight was an indication that they are, for all practical purposes, the media communications wing of the Democratic Party. | ||
| They came off so badly. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They didn't even do a good job of it. | ||
| No, and there are charming Democrats. | ||
| Maybe you could find one, but... | ||
| I know both of them. | ||
| I've worked with both of them, actually. | ||
| I thought they, I mean, I can't imagine their bosses can't see that. | ||
| That was not a good ad for CBS. And then, in the commercial break, they start playing some advertisement for a show that is itself an advertisement of a Kentonji Brown Jackson or whatever, however she's pronouncing her name, on the Supreme Court, that was a tongue bath. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| They administer tongue baths to the left. | ||
| And they do it very, very effectively. | ||
| But in a way that I think is causing the American people to get wise to them. | ||
| And a lot of people, frankly, to become annoyed. | ||
| Even people who historically haven't considered themselves Republicans are looking at that saying, something's not right here. | ||
| Because in the past, they at least wore a mask while doing it. | ||
| These guys have taken off the mask. | ||
| Yeah, and they're not impressive. | ||
| So let's start with what I think is going to be the headline. | ||
| Checking my iPhone, it's already the headline. | ||
| Tim Walls saying he's friends with school shooters? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Apparently he's become great friends with school shooters. | ||
| I don't know what that means, but that was perhaps the greatest presidential or vice presidential debate flop in living memory. | ||
| I mean, that's right up there with some of my best friends on NASCAR teams. | ||
| That just didn't come across as the speaker intended. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know. | ||
| Saying that some of your best friends own NASCAR teams does reveal you're in the top 1% for income, for sure. | ||
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Right. | |
| But befriending school shooters raises a lot of other questions. | ||
| There are a lot of good people who are friends with NASCAR team owners, but saying I'm good friends with mass shooters, that doesn't really have the same vibe. | ||
| And I don't want to be mean, but Tim Walls, I mean, I... And I don't think I am being mean. | ||
| I'm just being sincere. | ||
| He came across as badly as anyone could at a debate like this. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Badly, yes. | ||
| Badly in the sense that he didn't answer question after question after question. | ||
| Now, fortunately for him, CBS allowed him to get away with it. | ||
| But in some ways, they foisted him upon his own petard by doing it. | ||
| Because the viewers can see that. | ||
| And the viewers can see when they themselves are being mocked. | ||
| Look, I don't know why this keeps coming to mind, but as I watched him over and over again, I just thought, this is weird. | ||
| This guy's goofy. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| He came across as that guy in the Gary Larson Farside cartoon who, while talking to a kangaroo, says, you may be a kangaroo, but I know a few things about marsupials myself. | ||
| Everything came across as wrong, just a little bit off. | ||
| I don't know whether he had back surgery recently or what, but this was off. | ||
| Well, I mean… it... | ||
| Maybe, I always have thought, having worked in the television, the camera over time does reveal the truth about people. | ||
| Maybe not the whole truth. | ||
| Maybe not a precisely accurate truth, but some version of reality comes through on the camera, I think. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| But look, he badly mischaracterized a number of things. | ||
| Perhaps most crucially, his own record on the Minnesota law that he signed into law. | ||
| Denying that it reversed protections for babies born alive after a botched abortion. | ||
| He just completely mischaracterized it. | ||
| So, J.D. pressed him on that a couple times, and he just said, that's not what it says, that's not what it says. | ||
| Explain it as you understand it. | ||
| Look, under Minnesota law, before Tim Walz changed it with legislation he signed into law as governor, it provided protection. | ||
| Standards of medical care that had to be given to a baby born alive following a botched abortion. | ||
| And Tim Walz signed another bill into law saying that's no longer the law, just removing those protections altogether. | ||
| And it replaced them with something. | ||
| What Walz was relying on there was language providing some level of care. | ||
| I think they actually used the word care almost unmodified. | ||
| Some people have characterized that, I think, fairly by saying that means that in that circumstance they can provide the equivalent of hospice care for an unwanted baby. | ||
| That's really grim. | ||
| And that's not going to wear well, especially when people realize that he was mischaracterizing his own record. | ||
| He's either unaware of the content of a bill he signed into law, or he's lying about it. | ||
| And neither one of those things... | ||
| Well, of course he's lying about it. | ||
| I mean, you wouldn't take out the phrase life-saving. | ||
| Without knowing that you're taking out the phrase life-saving, that's not an accident, that's on purpose. | ||
| And it was hugely controversial at the time. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And so he expected to be able to go on in this friendly environment of these co-opted CBS moderators and say something that just wasn't true and expect that nobody would catch him on it, nobody would call him on it. | ||
| Well, we've got a different world today. | ||
| Sure, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC used to control the entirety, but today we've got... | ||
| The Tucker Carlson show. | ||
| And we've got X. And we've got a few other channels through which people can communicate actual information. | ||
| He's not going to get away with it. | ||
| Margaret Brennan and Nora O'Donnell, of course, are abortion worshippers. | ||
| Legal abortion is the most important issue to them. | ||
| That's obvious. | ||
| I think it's true as a fact, knowing them. | ||
| And so Walls could not have had a more sympathetic moderator for that section of the debate, but even there he seemed uncomfortable. | ||
| I mean, that's like the winning issue for them, he thinks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Even there, he seemed uncomfortable. | ||
| And even there, he was saying things that I would think would make the abortion rights advocates cringe. | ||
| He was making it sound there toward the end of his answer as if he's pro-life, as if he's not pro-abortion. | ||
| That seems to be rather the opposite of his message and that of his running mate. | ||
| And so that's why a lot of this is going to end with a thud. | ||
| Like I say, it's consistent with the overall vibe of his debate performance tonight, which is just a lot of weird stuff. | ||
| Weird stuff where he didn't answer the question and where the answer he provided had something terribly wrong with it. | ||
| I can't think of another reason that they would have picked him other than... | ||
| The Kamala Harris people are thinking, you know, they think in terms of race. | ||
| Like, that's how they think about everything. | ||
| I mean, that's why she was chosen. | ||
| That's why Jackson made the Supreme Court. | ||
| We know that because Biden said so out loud repeatedly. | ||
| And I got to think that they felt compelled to pick an older white guy because he was an older white guy. | ||
| I don't really see it. | ||
| And he said that even. | ||
| Well, and at the time he was chosen, remember, it came down to a sort of a horse race between Governor Walz. | ||
| And Governor Shapiro. | ||
| And the well-worn understanding, the well-circulated rumor around Washington was they chose Walsh because he's not Jewish. | ||
| But Josh Shapiro was too Jewish. | ||
| Now, I was relieved when they didn't choose Josh Shapiro. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| That would have made it much harder for Republicans to win. | ||
| Josh Shapiro was smart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very, very smart. | ||
| It would have made it a lot easier for Democrats to win Pennsylvania for the presidential race and for the Senate race there. | ||
| So I was relieved when they didn't. | ||
| But it was also weird because it was pretty apparent. | ||
| Yeah, we chose the other guy because he's, you know, not Jewish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, they have a huge problem with a lot of their voters on the question of Israel. | ||
| Their view of Israel is not that different from Trump's view of Israel, but a lot of their voters have a completely different view of Israel. | ||
| They're anti-Israel. | ||
| And the current administration, of which this would be the successor in interest, is itself dancing a very, very delicate dance with regard to Israel. | ||
| On the one hand, they want to be seen as... | ||
| Pro-Israel. | ||
| On the other hand, they're constantly telling Israel, cease fire. | ||
| Somebody attacks them. | ||
| Oh, cease fire. | ||
| You gotta stop defending yourself. | ||
| That's very, very strange. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| They're doing this as a reaction to a radical element within their own base that is increasingly not only anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical, but anti-Semitic. | ||
| Well, I'm glad they didn't choose Shapiro. | ||
| He's much more capable than Walls, and I think he's... | ||
| Probably a much worse person even than Walls. | ||
| That's my personal view. | ||
| But he's certainly a skillful politician. | ||
| Skillful politician. | ||
| And look, I don't know either one of them personally. | ||
| So I can't speak to any of those things. | ||
| But what I do know is that the guy they had on the stage tonight surely would have been outperformed dramatically by Josh Shapiro. | ||
| This guy was not ready for primetime, and it showed. | ||
| I was really surprised that nobody brought up... | ||
| The salient fact of Tim Walsh's career, which is that he presided over the destruction of a state in its biggest city, Minneapolis, on Memorial Day 2020. And that his wife enjoyed it. | ||
| She said she enjoyed it. | ||
| She opened the windows of their home so she could smell the burning rubber. | ||
| Opened the windows of her home so that they could marinate in the smell of burning rubber from overturned police cars and the lawlessness that was going on. | ||
| She apparently loved this. | ||
| Now, this is... | ||
| This is something you sometimes associate with leftists. | ||
| Marxists like the idea of people who consider themselves oppressed throwing off the established order of things and bringing about chaos and violence. | ||
| But rarely do they actually say it in those terms. | ||
| No, this is like Winnie Mandela necklacing. | ||
| You know, I love the smell of burning rubber as our opponents are murdered in the street. | ||
| How could that not come up? | ||
| He's the governor of Minnesota. | ||
| Oh, how did that not come up tonight? | ||
| Easy, Tucker. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| That's elementary. | ||
| That's obvious. | ||
| It didn't come up because they were too busy holding J.D. Vance to account for why Republicans are to blame because, obviously, Republicans caused climate change and climate change caused hurricanes, including the hurricane that Americans have been dealing with for the last few days, especially in states like Florida and North Carolina. | ||
| And they didn't want to have to... | ||
| Hold Democrats to account for their handling of those things, so naturally they blame it on climate change and climate change on rebuilding. | ||
| Climate is changing. | ||
| Climate has always changed. | ||
| We had the glaciers not that long ago, 10,000 years ago. | ||
| Climate is changing. | ||
| There's no proof that carbon emissions are changing climate. | ||
| Why does no one ever say that? | ||
| There's certainly no proof that what they are proposing, what they always want to do, which is tax carbon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Generally shut down carbon-based sources of energy, phase them out over the next couple of decades or so. | ||
| There's no proof at all that if we do all of that, that that will change global temperatures by even a fraction of a degree. | ||
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At all. | |
| They have no idea. | ||
| These are all based on projections. | ||
| And those projections are extremely costly. | ||
| We're talking about many, many tens of trillions of dollars that will have to be... | ||
| Pumped into the economy, out of the economy, out of otherwise productive uses into non-productive or less productive uses so that they can sort of remake the economy. | ||
| But I don't understand why Republicans more broadly don't challenge the so-called science since there is an actual science behind that. | ||
| I think you could say climate is changing. | ||
| Seems to be. | ||
| It has always changed. | ||
| It seems to be accelerating in the way that it is changing. | ||
| The solutions and even the cause of it are, you know, there's no, quote, scientific consensus on that. | ||
| Why doesn't anyone say so? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I saw a picture the other day. | ||
| It was a picture of some baths constructed during the height of the Roman Empire in a coastal city somewhere in Europe. | ||
| And it pointed out that these baths are exactly at sea level as they have been for 2,000 years. | ||
| And they have not changed, even as our... | ||
| Carbon emissions have, of course, changed significantly. | ||
| The sea level there and elsewhere has not changed. | ||
| So this is a tall order that they're asking us to carry. | ||
| They're asking us to impoverish ourselves, to rely on less efficient, less stable sources of electric power and means of powering our vehicles and things like that without any proof. | ||
| They're asking us, as it were, to accept an almost religious... | ||
| Well, it's insane. | ||
| Where we're sitting right now was covered by a mile of ice at a time when this continent had hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people living on it. | ||
| I mean, this was a heavily populated continent during the last ice age. | ||
| And there were no, that we know of, there was no... | ||
| Carbon emission? | ||
| I mean, from people? | ||
| I mean, none of this makes any... | ||
| And then it warms sufficiently that all that ice melted. | ||
| And what? | ||
| All without carbon. | ||
| But, you know, apparently the Koch brothers came along and secretly injected lots of carbon into the atmosphere. | ||
| Just wish someone would. | ||
| And, of course, they don't take into account changes in solar activity. | ||
| Sunspots, things like that, that have an obvious likelihood to impact global temperatures. | ||
| And so when you view all of this as narrowly as they view it, it becomes a little bit like they're holding a hammer. | ||
| Everything starts to look like a nail. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| And if you're telling me that bulldozing forests to build solar farms is good for the environment, cutting off the top of mountains to build windmills is green. | ||
| You know, I guess there's nothing I won't believe if I accept that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Leaving behind mountains and mountains worth of waste. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Some of which is not all that pleasant. | ||
| But why not plant trees? | ||
| If you think that carbon is the problem, then why are you bulldozing forests, which they are doing? | ||
| I mean, millions of acres. | ||
| Why wouldn't you plant trees instead? | ||
| I don't really understand. | ||
| It's the ultimate virtue signal. | ||
| Nothing signals virtue quite like bulldozing trees in order to replace them with solar farms. | ||
| Not in my world. | ||
| Bulldozing trees, there's nothing virtuous about that at all. | ||
| One of our plans when we started TCN was to run great long-form content, documentaries and topics that other people were ignoring. | ||
| We have the best so far. | ||
| It's called Wine in the Sand, and it's by James O'Keefe, one of the last brave and honest journalists in this country. | ||
| How brave? | ||
| James O'Keefe embedded with the cartels as they moved migrants engaging in human trafficking at the largest scale in modern Let me ask you specifically one of the reasons I'm so grateful that you're here. | ||
| J.D. Vance, of course, is a senator. | ||
| Tim Walls is running with a former senator. | ||
| A lot of the discussion tonight. | ||
| There was a moment when Tim Walz described the so-called border bill, the immigration bill that died in the Congress as the toughest ever. | ||
| You were there. | ||
| What was that, Bill? | ||
| Everything he said was wrong. | ||
| So here again, Tim Walsh is either lying, meaning he knows the truth and he's not stating it, or he's been deceived by somebody else and didn't bother to do his own homework and check it up. | ||
| In the first place, the reason we have a crisis along the southern border has everything to do with the fact that the current administration refuses to enforce laws as they exist on the books already. | ||
| The Biden-Harris team has done a phenomenal job at selling a lie. | ||
| The lie is that... | ||
| We really wanted to fix the border crisis. | ||
| We just couldn't. | ||
| So we had to have changes in law in order for us to enforce the border. | ||
| Republicans refused to go along with that. | ||
| So, sorry, we can't do anything. | ||
| All of that is a lie. | ||
| Existing law allows them to stop the problem. | ||
| They don't want to do it. | ||
| So they came up with this bill. | ||
| Now, this bill was negotiated by two or three people in the Senate. | ||
| Only one of whom is a Republican. | ||
| My friend and colleague, James Lankford, a great senator from Oklahoma. | ||
| I really do like James Lankford a lot. | ||
| I disagree with him on this bill. | ||
| But Mitch McConnell assigned him to negotiate that bill with Democrats. | ||
| And at the time he did that, a lot of us told him, look, the best thing you could do with this bill is find a way to negotiate something that says, we want to tie Joe Biden's hands. | ||
| The Democrats really wanted funding for Ukraine? | ||
| A lot of Republicans, like myself, didn't want to do that. | ||
| Republicans really wanted a secure border, so the idea was maybe we can force them to secure the border by tying Joe Biden's hands so he can't just continue to have the open borders immigration policy. | ||
| A couple months go by, Lankford puts a lot of time into it, but what he negotiates doesn't tie Biden's hands, and if anything, it would make it a lot worse. | ||
| Now, there are some good provisions in there, but there are a lot of provisions that, especially in the hands of of a Biden-Harris administration would have made things a lot worse. | ||
| Like the fact that they would have to under Section 244B of the bill. | ||
| There's some indication they'd have to let in about 1,400 people every single day. | ||
| Remember Jay Johnson, who served in the Obama administration in the Department of Homeland Security, had said that we reach crisis levels at 400 migrants per day. | ||
| This would have systematized it as high as $1,400 per day. | ||
| So this is one of the many examples within this bill. | ||
| $1,400 a day? | ||
| Yes, of what they would have to process. | ||
| And then we've also got this Section 3402 within the bill that would have provided billions of dollars, what was it, $2.3 billion to this global initiative to facilitate migration. | ||
| Including to the United States. | ||
| To facilitate migration? | ||
| To facilitate that. | ||
| And also to provide legal services. | ||
| I kid you not. | ||
| Legal services. | ||
| Lawyers. | ||
| Paid lawyers for illegal immigrants to have them represented in their immigration proceedings. | ||
| How about if you're not invited, you have to leave immediately? | ||
| What a thought, Tucker! | ||
| Just drop you in Tijuana and the Mexican government, which hates us. | ||
| It's what literally every other civilized country on planet Earth, and most of the non-civilized countries on planet Earth, too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Especially the non-civilized countries. | |
| But all of the countries that we are aware of have some kinds of restrictions like these. | ||
| Why would the United States abandon those? | ||
| And the truth is, our law doesn't do that. | ||
| It's just President Biden has been manipulating our system of law to find ways to refuse to enforce it. | ||
| So that was the biggest flaw in this border security bill. | ||
| Number one, it presupposed that we needed a bill, which we didn't have to have one. | ||
| It would have been nice to have one that forces hands. | ||
| But number two, it didn't do what we as Republicans were demanding. | ||
| Now, I don't know why that didn't happen, whether Mitch McConnell didn't specify that to James Lankford as the minimum negotiating standard. | ||
| I wasn't in the room when they had all those conversations. | ||
| But I do think this is a problem. | ||
| I think somehow the message got through to Senator Lankford from Mitch McConnell, don't worry about forcing Joe Biden's hands, because that's what we got out of this bill. | ||
| Something that would not have done a darn thing. | ||
| Want a bill that facilitated illegal immigration, that gave lawyers paid for by taxpayers in an increasingly poor country to illegal aliens? | ||
| Why would Mitch McConnell be for that? | ||
| Look, obviously I can't speak for him. | ||
| I can't get into his head. | ||
| I don't know what he was thinking. | ||
| Knowing Mitch McConnell, I doubt he would have thought, yeah, go and do all those things. | ||
| Maybe he didn't realize the extent to which it would have this effect. | ||
| I read Mitch McConnell's position in this circumstance as being focused much more on, let's just do whatever we've got to do to fund Ukraine, to send more money to Ukraine. | ||
| He wanted to get that done. | ||
| And so if he could find some kind of a gesture... | ||
| Who cares about our country? | ||
| We've got a Ukraine lawyer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Let the other people worry about that. | ||
| Let Lankford go ahead and negotiate something. | ||
| As long as he can come up with something, then we'll get our funding for Ukraine. | ||
| We can... | ||
| Dad's kiss, schmooze, move, carry on. | ||
| We'll all go home happy. | ||
| Look, I don't serve in the Senate, I just watch, but that sounds exactly right to me, just from watching, from the outside. | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| The focus on Ukraine, it's like a religion. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| It is almost like a religion. | ||
| Some of my colleagues will actually get a little teary-eyed when speaking of Ukraine, as if they were talking about their... | ||
| Their beloved aged sibling who's going through something awful. | ||
| Now, look, I understand. | ||
| Ukraine's gone through some horrible things. | ||
| And I'm deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Ukrainian people. | ||
| Nonetheless, I think what's motivating this is something much more sinister. | ||
| Whether people realize it or not, those who have gotten enmeshed in this have become part of the military-industrial complex. | ||
| And guaranteeing that no matter what, we can... | ||
| Pump a whole lot of money into that. | ||
| Let me explain what I mean there. | ||
| You can sometimes tell what people are thinking by what they say when they're defending something. | ||
| A lot of my colleagues, especially on the Republican side, when defending their votes to send, what is it now, close to $200 billion to Ukraine for a war that is not ours, will say things like this. | ||
| A lot of this money you see is actually going to go into the U.S. job market. | ||
| It's going to fund... | ||
| The arms companies, the people who are building the arms being purchased by Ukraine to create American jobs here. | ||
| That is really unsettling. | ||
| I find that unsatisfactory and I find it morally repugnant that we would justify prolonging both the duration and magnifying the severity of somebody else's war half a world away with a nuclear armed power. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No less. | ||
| For the simple reason that, oh, don't worry, it'll make some people here in the United States rich. | ||
| It's good for Raytheon. | ||
| That is what I would call immoral. | ||
| And there's sick bastards who think that way. | ||
| Well, I would too. | ||
| And also, I mean, everyone laments the decline of American manufacturing, but you don't want to live in a country whose only manufacturing center is weapons. | ||
| No, that's right, Tucker. | ||
| I mean, that's just gross. | ||
| No, but I would put it more strongly than that. | ||
| Obviously, we're not at or anywhere near the point where our only manufacturing sector is weapons. | ||
| I don't want to go anywhere near the point where we're funding somebody else's war, making it longer, making it more severe, against a nuclear-owned power, no less, the one that hates us, just on the basis that, well, it'll create some American jobs. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| That's not who we are. | ||
| I wonder how people like Mitch McConnell or your colleagues or anybody in the media, the whole media is this way, Get away with pretending to be the defenders of the Ukrainian people when they have abetted the slaughter of the Ukrainian people, an entire generation, hundreds of thousands of people, and then... | ||
| You know, Zelensky, their guy, has just changed the law in Ukraine so foreign entities can buy Ukrainian farmland. | ||
| So they're going to lose their population and their land. | ||
| There will be no recognizable Ukraine in 10 years thanks to these people. | ||
| How do they get to be the defenders? | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| And they have good reason to resent the American people, particularly those who have facilitated. | ||
| Who, the Ukrainians? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| For that very reason. | ||
| Oh, we screwed them. | ||
| We came on the scene. | ||
| And the minute we started... | ||
| Spending money to the tune of now close to $200 billion in just a couple of years. | ||
| We took peace off the table for them. | ||
| There really were peaceful off-ramps for this thing in the earlier months of the war, particularly during the first year of this particular war in 2022. Those were taken off the table as we started dumping all this money on them. | ||
| And so, yeah, if I were from Ukraine, I would deeply resent the U.S. government. | ||
| For what we have done there. | ||
| It has prolonged the war, it's made it more severe, and it's taken peace off the table. | ||
| And yet, they get to parade around like they're driven by compassion and love for Ukrainians. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And meanwhile, a number of government leaders in Ukraine and those who are close enough to centers of power that they can profit off of it. | ||
| I'm willing to bet, Tucker, that there are a lot of very wealthy people in Ukraine. | ||
| Well, I've been in that area. | ||
| I mean, go to Romania. | ||
| Or any of the countries that border Ukraine, and they'll tell you that all the luxury car dealerships have sold out. | ||
| I mean, there are a lot of rich people who fled Ukraine. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not even judging them. | ||
| I'm just saying that's a fact, whereas people who couldn't afford to run away and go buy a Bentley in Dubai have been killed in the war that we created. | ||
| That's why there's this old phrase. | ||
| A lot of foreign aid is about poor people in rich countries being forced to give money to rich people in poor countries. | ||
| That's certainly happening here. | ||
| And that's something that I appreciate, by the way, about J.D. Vance. | ||
| J.D. Vance, you know, it's somewhat uncommon for a new senator to come in and display as much confidence, respect for colleagues, respect for the system and the process. | ||
| And complete fearlessness, as he had from J.D. Vance. | ||
| But he did it all in a way that was unassuming, that was unoffensive, that was always respectful to members. | ||
| But talking about Ukraine makes me remember this aspect of J.D. Vance. | ||
| He came into the Senate at the beginning of 2023. Brand new senator. | ||
| He already was one of the few people who was willing to be bold in asking questions that needed to be asked about Ukraine. | ||
| He's shown that consistently through the entire thing. | ||
| And as recently as just a few months ago, he and I and a small handful of others stayed up all night on the Senate floor, pushing back on the Ukraine supplemental. | ||
| We had a lot of people, including members of our own party and the other party. | ||
| Swore at us and were unhappy with us for that. | ||
| But J.D. Vance then, as you saw tonight, was respectful back to them, didn't allow it to affect his mood, and just kept right on going. | ||
| That's the kind of vice president we're going to have. | ||
| How is he viewed in the Senate? | ||
| He's viewed as somebody who is freakishly smart, who brings receipts, and so if you argue with him, you've got to be prepared. | ||
| He's always going to be nice and respectful about how he does it. | ||
| But you will, in part because he's so nice and respectful about it, you'll look like a fool if you show up and you haven't done your homework. | ||
| That's why I was a little shocked when Lindsey Graham went out of his way to savagely attack J.D. Vance to Trump back in July, the day before Trump was making this decision. | ||
| People were very cruel about Vance. | ||
| Off the record, of course, no one in public, but I know for a fact that they did it. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| Was it personally? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To my knowledge, he has never said that publicly. | ||
| I haven't heard him speak that way of J.D. in private. | ||
| But let's assume that he or others were in fact saying those things about him. | ||
| There are those who feel so passionately about the Ukraine issue that some of them might take such great offense to someone like J.D. coming along and asking questions, saying, should we really be doing this? | ||
| And J.D. comes at this from the vantage point of somebody who speaks with a fair amount of experience. | ||
| You know, enlisted in the Marines. | ||
| He went to school on the GI Bill. | ||
| And he's got a really good head on his shoulders. | ||
| And so a lot of people probably resent him from that. | ||
| And if some of my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle were saying things like that, I suspect Ukraine had a lot to do with it. | ||
| But it sounds like he gets along with people in general. | ||
| I mean, there are ideological differences that are stark. | ||
| But, from what you're saying, he doesn't have a lot of personal enemies? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, he has people who mistreat him. | ||
| But what I love about J.D. is that even after someone publicly mistreats him, and I've seen some of our colleagues, including some of our Republican colleagues, do that. | ||
| The next day, J.D. Vance will be sitting next to them at lunch, smiling, laughing, not necessarily pretending that the whole thing didn't happen, so much as showing that... | ||
| They're not going to get under his skin. | ||
| He's not going to let them influence his own behavior. | ||
| Man, I wish I had that quality. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't we all, don't we all. | |
| I don't. | ||
| So there was a moment, I think we have the tape, where he did not allow the contemptible behavior of the moderators to infuriate him. | ||
| He just kept going. | ||
| I thought this was one of the coolest moments I've ever seen in a debate. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| I don't talk about my faith a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But Matthew 2540 talks about, to the least amongst us, you do unto me. | |
| I think that's true of most Americans. | ||
| They simply want order to it. | ||
| This bill does it. | ||
| It's funded. | ||
| It's supported by the people who do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it lets us keep our dignity about how we treat other people. | |
| Thank you, Governor. | ||
| And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. | ||
| Temporary protected status. | ||
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| We have so much to get to. | ||
| I think it's important because the rules were that you guys were going to fact check. | ||
| And since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. | ||
| So there's an application called the CBP One App, where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for 10 years. | |
| Thank you, Senator. | ||
| That is the facilitation of a legal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. | |
| We have so much to get to, Senator. | ||
| Those laws have been on the books since 1990. Thank you, gentlemen. | ||
| The CBT one app has not been on the books since 1990. It's something that Kamala Harris created, Margaret. | ||
| Gentlemen. | ||
| The audience can't hear you because your mics are cut. | ||
| We have so much we want to get to. | ||
| Thank you for explaining the legal process. | ||
| It's really kind of hard to describe how awful Margaret Brennan and Nora O'Donnell are. | ||
| I think America just saw it. | ||
| But that was masterful, I thought. | ||
| There's so much to unpack there. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| It was masterful by J.D. First of all, kudos to CBS. For allowing Governor Walz to quote Matthew 2540 without interrupting him and saying, I'm sorry, that's an attempt at bringing in foreign disinformation campaigns. | ||
| We can't accept that. | ||
| May those words burn on your tongue. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| I mean, I do think there ought to be a general rule if you're going to quote the New Testament. | ||
| Maybe you should acknowledge that some of your policies aren't exactly compatible with that, but setting that aside for a minute, I love JD's invocation of this problem with the CBP1 app. | ||
| To fix this problem. | ||
| And I've been calling this out for a long time. | ||
| JD encapsulated that much better, more concisely than I've ever been able to. | ||
| But they have developed this application that people can use on a smartphone, which all these migrants seem to have. | ||
| They can go on and just fill in their own biographical information. | ||
| That then serves as their de facto passport when they get here. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| They're admitted into the country using that app. | ||
| And it's one of many examples of how this administration has actively nurtured, fostered, cultured this environment in which migrants come up by the millions. | ||
| We're talking at least 10 million people who have entered this country illegally since January of 2021. In the meantime, what we've done is we've enriched international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. | ||
| We've also brought in enough fentanyl, potentially to kill many tens of millions of Americans. | ||
| And it's been trafficked in on the backs of women and children, many of whom are being sex trafficked. | ||
| So this is what we have to thank the Biden-Harris administration for. | ||
| And this is really how it's happening. | ||
| But hats off to J.D. for pointing out. | ||
| We've had this app, this smartphone app, since 1990. Okay. | ||
| The fact that they've had an app. | ||
| Before smartphones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's kind of curious. | ||
| What? | ||
| How did people use a smartphone app in that era before this happened? | ||
| 34 years ago. | ||
| Secondly... | ||
| We've had this app for 34 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You know, there have been computers, of course, that long. | ||
| But these were not... | ||
| Computers that were in the hands of millions of people entering the country unlawfully. | ||
| And it's been during this administration that they have used this particular... | ||
| Well, there was no meaningful internet for most people in 1990. No. | ||
| I was here. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, and the other, of course, effect is that it's completely upended American society. | ||
| So we have this... | ||
| There's a pretty amazing clip from 2022, two years ago, from Tim Walls. | ||
| We have more refugees per capita than any other state. | ||
| That's not just morally a good thing. | ||
| It's our economic and cultural future. | ||
| This beautiful diversity we see out in Worthington when I'm there, you see 50 languages spoken in the school. | ||
| So everything about that is a lie. | ||
| Actually, the state's become poorer under walls and much more chaotic and more violent. | ||
| But what struck me was we see 50 languages spoken in schools. | ||
| That's beautiful diversity. | ||
| It's the opposite of beautiful, and it's not diversity. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| It means people can't understand each other. | ||
| There's nothing that unites people. | ||
| It means a fractured society. | ||
| And if you think chaos is beautiful, then, I mean, I'm sorry, you know, you're on Satan's team at that point. | ||
| Chaos is not good. | ||
| Not being able to understand other people is not good. | ||
| How is that good? | ||
| But remember, Tucker, this is a man who lives in a home where they think it's beautiful to open the windows so they can smell the burning rubber. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so they do think this is beautiful. | ||
| Now, I've never been to Worthington, Minnesota. | ||
| But when I hear him say there are 50 languages spoken in the public schools. | ||
| I think chaos. | ||
| I think Tower of Babel. | ||
| Now, the Tower of Babel resulted the way it did, not as a blessing. | ||
| To those involved in it, but as a curse, as a punishment, because when everybody speaks different languages, they can't understand each other. | ||
| It's chaos, and people suffer as a result. | ||
| And how do the kids get educated? | ||
| I guess he doesn't care. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't. | |
| I thought he was an educator. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| And through this process of social promotion and the teachers' unions facilitating the social promotion, they paper over it and they make it look like everything's okay when we know it's not. | ||
| This is before we even get to the more dire... | ||
| Human cause of the people who have been raped, who have been murdered, who have suffered through home invasion robberies, been assaulted and battered as a result of people coming into this country who didn't belong here to begin with. | ||
| Given that there's zero support that I can detect in polls for these immigration policies, which are permanent, change the country forever, how is democracy functioning if something this central to a nation's identity, who lives in the country? | ||
| Is taking place without any input at all from the citizens who already live here? | ||
| taking place not only without their meaningful input, but also setting things up so that non-citizens can and will vote in elections. | ||
| That's why I've spent months, the last few months, trying to push the SAVE Act, trying to attach it to the spending bill. | ||
| The SAVE Act would make it so that you can't vote in a federal election without showing some type of proof that you are a U.S. citizen and therefore eligible to vote. | ||
| Who would be against that? | ||
| All Democrats. | ||
| All Democrats are against it. | ||
| Now, it passed the House, actually, with bipartisan votes. | ||
| All the Republicans plus a handful of Democrats voted for it over there. | ||
| All the Republicans in the But Senate Democrats blocked it. | ||
| Now, they blocked it by saying, first and foremost, well, non-citizens don't vote. | ||
| They can't vote. | ||
| And anybody who says otherwise, it's a misinformation campaign, which is what they say about anything they don't like. | ||
| Well, then what's wrong with banning it? | ||
| Well, that was my question to them. | ||
| If it doesn't happen, then we're banning something that doesn't happen, but it's already illegal. | ||
| Yeah, it's already illegal, but there are all sorts of things that are already illegal. | ||
| That are too easy to carry out, and that's why you need to have some penalties attached to it, which is what the SAVE Act does. | ||
| It would require the states to ask for some type of proof of immigration status and require the states to cull through their voter registration files to remove non-citizens periodically, and then it imposes a criminal penalty for anyone who knowingly gives a ballot or a voter registration to a non-citizen. | ||
| So, here again, what we've got are laws that have been easy to circumvent. | ||
| This would have fixed it, and they said it's not necessary because they don't vote because they can't vote. | ||
| Only every day, Tucker, it becomes more and more apparent that people are getting onto the voter registration files, being non-citizens, because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act, where they said the states cannot ask for proof of citizenship. | ||
| And in all 50 states now, you can apply for and get a driver's license as a non-citizen. | ||
| And when you do that, if you fill out the NVRA part of the form, you check a box and sign your name, then you are a registered voter, even though you're a non-citizen. | ||
| And so, this is troubling. | ||
| Meanwhile, you've got the American people who are being ignored. | ||
| Wait, and all 50 states issue licenses to illegals? | ||
| To non-citizens. | ||
| All 50 states do. | ||
| In roughly half of the states, a little more than half of the states, I believe, they will also issue them even to illegal aliens. | ||
| But in all states, as a non-citizen, you can apply for a driver's license. | ||
| Now, the purpose of the 1993... | ||
| National Voter Registration Act. | ||
| Motor Voter. | ||
| Motor Voter. | ||
| Was to make it easy to fill out a driver's license application and simultaneously register to vote. | ||
| The problem is it makes it way too easier. | ||
| We've now got 30 million plus non-citizens in this country. | ||
| And it's so easy to apply for a driver's license today. | ||
| You add to that the Supreme Court's bad ruling, a bad interpretation of the NVRA, saying the states can't ask for voter ID, and you've got a problem. | ||
| You add all of that to this major overhaul of immigration policy, undertaken without the consent of the American people, contrary to their will, where the administration is basically just effectively rewriting immigration law by refusing to enforce vast swaths of it. | ||
| And that's the mess we're in today. | ||
| I mean, how could a Republican ever get elected if you've got a brand new electorate brought in by the Democratic Party, All kinds of free things that American citizens don't get made dependent on that party for its life. | ||
| How could you not become a one-party state? | ||
| Well, that's the whole idea, Tucker. | ||
| Remember, the country immediately to ourself, Mexico, was ruled by one party. | ||
| The pre. | ||
| The pre. | ||
| For most of the 20th century. | ||
| Almost the entirety of it. | ||
| It was ironically called the Revolutionary Institutional Party. | ||
| My favorite name of any party ever. | ||
| It can't be both revolutionary and institutional, but they managed to do it. | ||
| I think the Democrats, whether they realize the PRA angle or not by name, I think that's what they're trying to do here. | ||
| Think about what they do. | ||
| So they brought in 10 million plus non-citizens. | ||
| they've then shipped them strategically to different parts of the country. | ||
| Many of those will end up being able to vote since the Save Act, much to my dismay, wasn't attached to this spending bill. | ||
| If that happens, they may well seize control of things they wouldn't have otherwise controlled. | ||
| I hope it won't happen, but it could. | ||
| Once they're in, if Democrats have a clean sweep, meaning they get the White House, they keep the Senate, they take back the House of Representatives. | ||
| Kamala Harris has made known her agenda to nuke the filibuster in the Senate. | ||
| And with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin out of the picture, it'll be easier for them to do that if they've got the majority. | ||
| Once that happens, they will pack the Supreme Court. | ||
| They will pass voter registration and voter reform bills that will take a lot of the discretion to draw legislative districts away from state legislatures. | ||
| They'll add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states and make a couple of other changes, including to our campaign finance laws, that together will make an indefinite, perpetual democratic majority in the United States Congress our new reality. | ||
| They'll be the pre-party, but for the United States. | ||
| You really think they would add Puerto Rico in the district? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And by so doing, they'll get four additional Democratic senator seats. | ||
| For the foreseeable future, all four of those would be predictably reliably Democrats. | ||
| And I think that's part of what they've got in mind. | ||
| But what they want is to not have a meaningful opposition party. | ||
| You can already... | ||
| But I thought they were defending democracy. | ||
| That would end democracy. | ||
| Look, their conception of democracy is not actually about citizen input. | ||
| It's about something else. | ||
| It's about achieving the size, scope, reach, and power of government in general, and the federal government in particular. | ||
| It's about enhancing their ability to carry out their radical, progressive Marxist objectives. | ||
| And that's what they want to do. | ||
| They see the rest of us as illegitimate and as obstacles to that task, and therefore people who are deserving of being canceled, of having our votes diluted and not counted. | ||
| Do you think that'll happen? | ||
| I sure hope not. | ||
| I pray daily that it won't. | ||
| But it is our duty as citizens of this great republic to sound the voice of alarm when we see a risk of that happening, and I certainly see that risk here. | ||
| Look, these really are perilous times. | ||
| And we can't afford any longer to sugarcoat what it is that they're doing. | ||
| And what they're doing is really, really dangerous. | ||
| We've just got to be strong enough to stop them. | ||
| So you've seen all kinds of indicators pop up in media outlets that exist. | ||
| Really for the people who run the Democratic Party, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, specifically, and others, have run pieces recently saying the Constitution is an impediment to progress. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You heard John Kerry say it the other day, the First Amendment is the problem. | ||
| That's not accidental, is it? | ||
| No! | ||
| No, it's not accidental, nor is it insincere. | ||
| These guys mean it. | ||
| They genuinely mean it. | ||
| Because look, first and foremost, if you view the ultimate objective as being democracy, which I don't think they do, but let's just go with me on this. | ||
| If they view the ultimate objective as just democracy, pure democracy, as pure as we can get it, then the Constitution is itself an impediment to that. | ||
| The Constitution is designed to be counter-democratic in its operation. | ||
| It's designed to be an intermediating filter of sorts between pure democracy and the rights of the people. | ||
| In fact, that's the only reason you have a Constitution, is to limit the power of government so that it doesn't become abusive of the rights of the minority. | ||
| That's the Constitution and its purpose in a nutshell. | ||
| So, if the Democrats love this idea of pure unrestrained democracy so much, I don't believe that's really accurately explaining what they want, but if that were what they want, then it would make sense for them to try to trample on it. | ||
| But of course, what they want is something much more sinister than that. | ||
| They want consolidation of the power of government, whereas the Constitution requires distribution of power. | ||
| It requires it to be... | ||
| Diffused so that no one person or group of people gets too powerful. | ||
| And so as a result of all that, you see them being doubly contemptuous of the Constitution. | ||
| The Constitution protects the rights of the minority, including heretics like you and me who dare to challenge the assumptions of the governing woke elite. | ||
| And the Constitution is also a threat to their ability to carry out their Marxist-inspired, far-left, radical progressivism. | ||
| But if you're attacking, I mean, the word treason's been thrown around quite a bit over the last eight years. | ||
| But if you're attacking the Constitution, I mean, is that treason? | ||
| Yes, I believe it is. | ||
| Look, we've all sworn an oath. | ||
| Those of us who hold public office in the United States are required under Article VI of the Constitution to take an oath to us. | ||
| And I think if you violate that oath, I do think that is treasonous. | ||
| So those who are taking this position, I think, are taking an indefensible position, one that I think could fairly be described as treasonous. | ||
| How widespread do you think in Washington is the view that the Constitution is the problem? | ||
| Well, I'm seeing some alarming trends in this regard. | ||
| Democrats are much more forceful about it, much more upfront. | ||
| Sometimes you can feel from some Republicans feeling frustrated about particular provisions, but Republicans will at least always pay lip service to it, and I think with some degrees of sincerity. | ||
| What I'm seeing now for the first time, you know, I've been in the Senate now for 13 and a half years. | ||
| When I first got to the Senate, nobody in elected office would dare to be caught dead saying something that could be interpreted as contemptuous toward the Constitution. | ||
| And yet now you routinely hear members of Congress, Democrats, referring to features of the Constitution as incredibly problematic, like, for example, the Electoral College. | ||
| They hate the Electoral College. | ||
| They absolutely despise it. | ||
| And they will refer derisively to the Senate as a non-representative, as a sort of disenfranchising form of inequality. | ||
| Because the whole point of the Senate is that the Senate has to involve equal representation among the states. | ||
| Even if you amend it to say that each state will have a different number than two senators, Article 5 of the Constitution, which governs the amendment process, says that there's one type of amendment that is presumptively, preemptively unconstitutional. | ||
| You can't change the principle of equal representation. | ||
| They hate that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because a lot of their voters are focused in a smaller handful of states. | ||
| Heavily populated urban centers, and they think it's profoundly unfair that a smaller state like Utah or Maine will get two votes, while a heavily populated state like California or New York will have only two votes in the Senate. | ||
| Is there anything they can do about that? | ||
| In my opinion, no. | ||
| I mean, they could amend the Constitution, but like I say, Article 5 makes that the one type of constitutional amendment. | ||
| That is unconstitutional. | ||
| I had this conversation with Justice Scalia once, who posited to me that maybe they could change it, but it would require two successive amendments to the Constitution. | ||
| First, you'd have to amend out the part that says that you can't change this, and then you'd have to actually change it. | ||
| Regardless, amending the Constitution to undo the Electoral College or to change equal representation in the Senate It's something that is nowhere near having the kind of support you would need right now to change it. | ||
| But I do worry, now that you've got one major political party that is openly contemptuous of at least those two provisions of the Constitution and becoming more contemptuous every day of the First Amendment, including not only the freedom of speech protections but also the freedom of religion protections, I worry that a chill wind blows in America when you've got a major political party that is still... | ||
| So, I mean, packing the Supreme Court would solve the problem. | ||
| You don't have to amend the Constitution. | ||
| You just change its meaning. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The old-fashioned way. | ||
| And what FDR figured out was that FDR could threaten to pack the court and so threaten the court that some justices would change their votes. | ||
| I write about this in a book I wrote a couple years ago called Saving Nine. | ||
| He threatened to pack the court. | ||
| It didn't work, but one of the reasons it didn't work is that it worked in a different way. | ||
| It threatened the court into adopting lock, stock, and barrel, FDR's loose interpretation of the Commerce Clause, and we've never been the same since. | ||
| That's what they want to do. | ||
| They want to either force the issue to the point where they can change the law. | ||
| Now, in the case of court packing, it doesn't actually require a constitutional amendment. | ||
| It's simple legislation, but it's the type of... | ||
| Legislation that, while not unconstitutional technically, could undo the whole constitutional structure. | ||
| And that scares me to death. | ||
| And you think it's possible? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not only possible, Tucker, but if they get the majority in the House and keep the majority in the Senate and they get the White House, they will do it. | ||
| And they will do it within the first hundred days they're in office. | ||
| That should scare every American. | ||
| If there's anyone within the sound of my voice who is thinking about voting for... | ||
| Wait, they will increase the number of seats on the court? | ||
| Without question. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| On what grounds? | ||
| Well, Tucker, democracy, of course. | ||
| I mean, they'll come up with something. | ||
| They'll say democracy because they think that answers everything. | ||
| They'll say climate change or they'll say racism. | ||
| A lot of them will say things like, well, we've got more circuit courts of appeals now, so we've got to increase it to reflect that. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| There's not a lack of human resources among the nine justices on the court. | ||
| That's not an issue. | ||
| They just want to increase the number of justices for one simple reason, because they don't like the fact that there is a court now controlled by a majority that's content with reading the Constitution based on what it says, rather than on the basis of what progressive... | ||
| Democrats wish it said. | ||
| In the first hundred days, you'll think they'll do it? | ||
| I mean, that's the most radical thing I can imagine. | ||
| Yes, but they are radicals and they're unapologetic about it. | ||
| If they have the opportunity, meaning if they run the clean sweep where they control all three levers within the two political branches, they will do it. | ||
| Well, they're not too far from that, really. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, it wouldn't be all that hard for him to do it, and that's one of the reasons why I've been so worried about this election and making sure that it's actual U.S. citizens who are voting, is because this election really is consequential, just given how different the two competing visions of these two political parties happens to be. | ||
| We saw that on display tonight in this debate in great detail. | ||
| I mean, I would ask... | ||
| You have the same question. | ||
| Do you think that we saw a contrasting vision from the two parties? | ||
| Because in my view, tonight we saw a greater contrast between these two candidates than we've seen in a long time. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Certainly in our lifetimes. | ||
| And just the level of thinking, I mean, really, it's a cliche, but it's true. | ||
| It really was three against one, and the one outshone the three with ease. | ||
| Just on something as small as that, well, it's not small, but as specifically as the housing crisis, the increase in the cost of housing in the United States. | ||
| And J.D. Vance makes this very obvious point that, you know, more people means higher costs because there's this thing called supply and demand. | ||
| If more people want something, it's price rises, right? | ||
| You have a limited supply, a growing demand. | ||
| I mean, it's just like the most, it's first grade math. | ||
| And Tim Walz goes, well, You know, can you find a study that shows that? | ||
| And then JD says, well, actually, I think the Fed just did a study the other day that shows that in great detail, but you don't need to point to a study. | ||
| Federal Reserve Bank, we'll send that to you. | ||
| Yeah, but then the moderator's like, yeah, do you have a study? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you've got to set, you know, it takes a year to build a house. | ||
| You've got 25 million new people. | ||
| Like, of course, look, it's true in every country in the world. | ||
| It's true in Canada right now. | ||
| It's true in Australia. | ||
| It's true everywhere. | ||
| Like anyone who demands a study to prove something that obvious is like an idiot. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And especially when they ask for it, and it's already been provided by the Federal Reserve Bank, which Democrats generally love, by the way. | ||
| I love that entire exchange. | ||
| I loved how J.D. handled it. | ||
| It was a great example of what we've been describing, of J.D. being the master of the mood of the debate, the master of reason. | ||
| And of dispassionate but persuasive reasoning. | ||
| I thought it was fantastic. | ||
| I also love the fact that he began his answer there by plugging a proposal that I've introduced called the Houses Act. | ||
| And the Houses Act would require, under certain circumstances, for the federal government to sell surplus federal land for the purpose of building single-family affordable housing. | ||
| Now, Tim Walsh immediately... | ||
| So, single family housing. | ||
| They don't want single family housing. | ||
| They don't want single family housing. | ||
| They want all of us to live in a big high-rise or something like that. | ||
| In your pod, yeah. | ||
| And they've been pushing this for 10 years on this horrible program called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Program, where they're trying to make the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development this sort of master planner, master zoning commission for the entire country. | ||
| And giving benefits to local government entities that embrace their high-density zoning plans and punishing those who won't. | ||
| I mean, you could actually solve these problems in a day if you just drew up a list of, and I can give you the zip codes if you want, but let's just say Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Bethesda, Maryland, Newton, Massachusetts. | ||
| High-density. | ||
| I think those are good places for high-density housing. | ||
| And all the MS-13 baby mamas get free apartments in those new places. | ||
| Don't they deserve as much, Tucker? | ||
| That's super easy to do. | ||
| We can't do any high-density housing unless Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Bethesda, and Newton get it first. | ||
| That would end it immediately. | ||
| McLean. | ||
| McLean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So those guys hate it because they hate single-family housing. | ||
| Don't like that. | ||
| Tim Walls also interjected by saying... | ||
| Wait, why do you think they hate single-family housing? | ||
| Well, I don't know exactly, but I think it has something to do with the fact that they don't really like families that much. | ||
| And human autonomy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their family policy is something rather the opposite of a pro-family policy, you might say. | ||
| Tim Walls then interjects by saying, well, but in some places there's not all that much federal land. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| But in a lot of states, there is a lot of federal land. | ||
| In fact, some of the greatest housing prices that you might find in the United States can be found in the western United States, where the federal government owns most of the land. | ||
| Federal government owns almost 70% of the land in my state. | ||
| And if you took just a tiny fraction of that, we're talking like half of 1% of the federal land in my state, and used it for the Houses Act housing plan. | ||
| You could, in a fairly short period of time, roughly double the supply of single-family affordable homes just by adopting that legislation. | ||
| So they really don't like it. | ||
| And they'll have you believe that all federal land... | ||
| Oh, and then he also threw in this quip about, oh, are you going to be building houses in the same place on the national parks where you're drilling for oil? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Putting condos in Yellowstone. | ||
| He's never been to the western United States. | ||
| These guys think that everything is delicate arch. | ||
| I can tell you, there is a whole bunch of land that is neither beautiful nor the home to some natural wonder. | ||
| It's just owned by the U.S. government, so we can't tax it, we can't have access to it. | ||
| What are they doing with 75% of your land? | ||
| They use it to bully us. | ||
| They use it to compel us to an undue obedience. | ||
| To the federal sovereign. | ||
| But what are they doing with it? | ||
| I mean, is it one big bio lab, or what is it? | ||
| Most of it sits fallow. | ||
| Most of it sits without being used for anything. | ||
| Now, there's not a property owner on planet Earth who can afford to own that much land, especially in a developed country like ours, and let it sit fallow. | ||
| But they get away with it because they don't have to pay taxes on it. | ||
| And that further impoverishes states in the West, like mine, where the federal government owns most of the land, because they don't... | ||
| Pay property taxes. | ||
| And this is not, these are not national parks. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, we don't fight the stuff on the parks. | ||
| We like our parks. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| The parks are also a tiny, tiny fragment, a tiny segment of a vast empire. | ||
| You know, the federal government owns close to 30% of the total land mass of the United States. | ||
| People east of Colorado are hardly aware of that because the federal government in most cases owns a percentage of land that can be reckoned at the low single digits in those states. | ||
| But in the West, this is a big, big deal. | ||
| And it's costly, but the folks... | ||
| Are they good stewards of it? | ||
| They're terrible. | ||
| It actually, they do it all in the name of environmental conservation. | ||
| They claim that if they didn't own all this land, it would be an environmental post-apocalyptic hellscape of sorts. | ||
| But they're terrible at managing it. | ||
| Well, the federal government has poisoned the air and water more than anybody. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Look at Camp Lejeune. | ||
| Any military base is filled with PCBs. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| That's right, but you don't even have to go to the PCBs, which you'll see something like that on a military installation, before seeing that the federal government's a poor steward. | ||
| Just look at what they do to unpopulated, unused federal land. | ||
| They mismanage it to the point that they allow fuel buildup, meaning trees, brush to become overgrown. | ||
| They refuse to allow any kind of timber harvesting or... | ||
| Or for you to cut sort of a firewall swath in the middle of it. | ||
| They refuse to allow the locals to treat for bark beetle infestation, for example. | ||
| Then forest fires happen. | ||
| The forest fire destroys the air quality. | ||
| It destroys the watershed. | ||
| And it destroys the interest of adjacent landowners. | ||
| It's also a massive carbon emission. | ||
| Huge! | ||
| Massive! | ||
| More than your suburban. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, look, if these guys cared about the environment, They would not want the federal government owning 30% of the land of the United States. | ||
| Sure as heck wouldn't want them owning 70% of Utah. | ||
| So maybe it's about power, not conservation. | ||
| It is 100% about power. | ||
| They love the idea of something as fundamental as land being managed by distant bureaucrats, not elected by the people, utterly unaccountable to the people, 2,000 miles away from the people, who then become more and more dependent. | ||
| On the federal government for that reason. | ||
| This stuff has been talked about. | ||
| It's been warned of since the time of the Constitutional Convention. | ||
| In fact, on September 3rd, 1787, it was raised at the Constitutional Convention in exchange between Elbridge Gerry and Gubernur Morris. | ||
| They talked about this risk of this power. | ||
| What if we give the federal government all this power over these federal lands? | ||
| They could use it to manipulate the states into an undue obedience to the general government. | ||
| We've been ignoring those risks for a long time. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why we need reforms like the Houses Act. | ||
| So you heard Walls make reference to something I'm embarrassed to say I was not aware of. | ||
| Kamala Harris' plan to build 3 million housing units? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think this is... | ||
| Either just before or after the unicorns arrive. | ||
| And the unicorns, you know, being possessed as they are with these magical qualities, they can print money without causing inflation. | ||
| I look forward to the unicorn plan. | ||
| I don't know anything about it, but I am dead certain this is a payoff to their developer donors. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It always is. | ||
| It's high-density housing in your neighborhood because they hate you and your neighborhood. | ||
| Their friends are getting rich from it. | ||
| I just know that that's true. | ||
| And rest assured, Tucker, that because Kamala is going to be handing out $25,000 checks for anyone who gains access to any of that housing, that the cost of housing will end up going up by exactly $25,000. | ||
| Aren't we at a trillion dollars annual debt service at this point? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A trillion dollars a year just to pay the interest on our debt. | ||
| Yeah, so where do we get the money for all this stuff? | ||
| They have not answered that question. | ||
| When does the merry-go-round stop spinning? | ||
| Well, look, in order to have more money, because we're the world's reserve currency, it's been fairly easy for them to effectively print money. | ||
| Now, there's a little more complicated than that. | ||
| They have to go through a treasury auction process. | ||
| People buy the bonds. | ||
| Then we print more money. | ||
| But the problem is, as we get more and more in debt... | ||
| And as we have to pay, you know, just a few years ago we were paying $300, $350 billion a year in interest. | ||
| It's mushroomed in the last couple of years as we've been spending so much more money. | ||
| Sooner or later you get to the point where you can't issue enough bonds to keep up with that. | ||
| Not without paying much, much higher yield rates on your bonds. | ||
| And that's where the money really is going to run out. | ||
| And that's where we could, in very short order, see the US dollar's status as the world's reserve currency dropping into the Atlantic Ocean, never to be seen again in our lifetimes. | ||
| And then what happens? | ||
| That's truly scary. | ||
| Well, then we, as a people, endure one of the single greatest upheavals that our country has ever known. | ||
| And one of the greatest economic upheavals that any group of people could go through. | ||
| Because when you've been used to the blessings, the benefits associated with having the world's reserve currency be your country's currency, all kinds of things happen. | ||
| And it becomes harder and harder for people to gain access to money they need to start a business or start a family or do whatever they need. | ||
| Do you think this is why gold is at $2,600 an ounce? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| And I suspect we're nowhere near. | ||
| Seeing the end of that trend. | ||
| Because people will be sending their money, not just into gold, but into any other asset. | ||
| Because the U.S. dollar is losing its value like crazy. | ||
| Much as they're trying to hide it. | ||
| They can't hide from the fact that housing and groceries... | ||
| And gasoline, they've all gone up by somewhere between 20 and 31, 32 percent. | ||
| That's even according to their own numbers, which are probably understating the problem. | ||
| Is there any way to avert this disaster? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We could avert it by electing government officials who are willing to say, you know, we don't draw from an unlimited well of money. | ||
| It just isn't there. | ||
| So we've got to stop pretending like we can. | ||
| That was one of the great frustrations I had with Tim Wallace throughout this entire debate. | ||
| He kept on approaching everything. | ||
| Everything as if it were a problem for government to solve. | ||
| Every government problem as if it were something that the federal government in particular could solve. | ||
| They know no limits on that. | ||
| And the problem with assuming that, it's like the principle that, you know, you heard the expression, if everyone's family, no one is. | ||
| If everything's urgent and a matter for the federal government, Then there is no urgency. | ||
| There is no importance. | ||
| It's just one big mess, and we're not able to do anything effectively. | ||
| That's where we are today. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Let me just ask you to sum up what you think this night means for the race. | ||
| We're about a month out. | ||
| I believe tonight was a big night for the Trump-Vance campaign. | ||
| I think J.D. Vance came in in a very big way for Donald Trump. | ||
| And I think J.D. Vance brought about one of the best debate performances I've ever seen from any Republican in any race ever. | ||
| That was stacked against him. | ||
| And yet he dominated every second of that debate. | ||
| So if there are any J.D. Vance naysayers out there, I point to tonight as the moment that you need to change it to. | ||
| Well, this seems like total vindication. | ||
| I mean, obviously I'm personally invested in this because I love J.D. personally, but... | ||
| It does seem like a total vindication. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And not only that, Tucker, it's not just a vindication for those within the Republican Party who are doubters. | ||
| But I think there are a lot of people who are going to be pulled onto the Trump-Vance ticket, who are going to vote for President Trump because they saw the debate tonight. | ||
| I think it was that powerful. | ||
| I think he has the ability to move people. | ||
| Look, remember his background. | ||
| And what he's been through. | ||
| He's lived through circumstances made worse by federal policies, made by people in Washington, D.C. who convinced themselves and their constituents that they were making the world a better place by making a small handful of people in Washington, D.C. more powerful. | ||
| He's experienced the pain that that can cause. | ||
| And he's a living example of somebody who has overcome those things but has overcome them without forgetting from whence he came. | ||
| Without forgetting what it is that helped him overcome some difficult circumstances in his life. | ||
| It's those people who he has in mind. | ||
| It's those people who animated him in the first instance to run for the United States Senate and then to fight like crazy once he got there for what he sincerely and correctly believes would benefit them. | ||
| And that's a government that's more accountable to its people and more accountable. | ||
| They're based on core principles embedded in our Constitution. | ||
| So I said that to be my last question, but I do have one last question, which is of deep interest to me as a lifelong resident of Washington. | ||
| You're one of the very few members of the Senate who seems less sympathetic to Washington, more skeptical after more than a dozen years there. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Look, in Washington, D.C., you see a lot of things. | ||
| That have gone wrong. | ||
| The closer you get to that, the less attractive it is. | ||
| You see everything, warts and all. | ||
| As a young man, as a teenager, I was a Republican. | ||
| I served a two-year mission from my church along the U.S.-Mexico border. | ||
| And it was during that time period, even though politics aren't relevant to missionary service, I saw and experienced things there that turned me from a Republican into a conservative. | ||
| And it's a lot of the same things that J.D. Vance has experienced and that have caused him to come out a deep skeptic of the federal government. | ||
| Because I saw federal policies that were locking families into poverty for generations. | ||
| Federal policies that were causing people to make rational decisions that were harmful to their families in order to continue in that cycle of poverty, perpetuated by that. | ||
| The longer I've served in the Senate, the more that I've seen Washington, D.C. is perpetuating the very problems that the Constitution was designed to protect us against. | ||
| They all involve the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of the few. | ||
| We've seen that power taken away from the people in two steps, from the people at the state and local level moved to Washington. | ||
| Within Washington, Washington. | ||
| From the people's elected lawmakers to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who now make most of our laws. | ||
| 100,000 pages a year, and we can't vote those people out. | ||
| J.D. Vance sees in them, sees in that corrupt system, what I see in it and what has caused me to be more skeptical of Washington, D.C. by the day, which is that the American people are great. | ||
| They are strong, and they are different than their government, and their government is different from the government. | ||
| But you haven't really answered the question. | ||
| I mean, you mean it. | ||
| Why do you mean it when so few others mean it after 13 years? | ||
| Okay, so if the question is, why do so few others see it the way I see it? | ||
| Well, they might say something similar to what you just said. | ||
| I mean, you're a legit constitutional scholar, so you make reference to the Constitution from a position of deep knowledge. | ||
| And so you're more fluent in the details than I would say most in the Senate. | ||
| I mean, you are more fluent. | ||
| But there are others who are fluent in everything that you are fluent. | ||
| I mean, there are other constitutional experts in the Senate, but they don't seem to mean it quite as much as you mean it. | ||
| That's my real question. | ||
| They mean it more on warm days than on cold ones. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| I wish there were more warm days. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting question. | ||
| I can't speak for anyone else because I can't get into their head. | ||
| But I will say this, Tucker. | ||
| I understand how a lot of people get drawn into the impetuous vortex of big government and of consolidated power. | ||
| Because we've all been raised, every American, any American who's alive today has been raised entirely in an environment in which the primary and secondary education establishment, the higher education establishment, increasingly most of corporate America. | ||
| The news media establishment and the entertainment media establishment have all bought into the progressive vision. | ||
| And the progressive vision is itself fundamentally at odds with the Constitution. | ||
| The progressive vision is all about concentration of power, giving it to so-called experts, even at the expense of democratic input from the people. | ||
| But the more they catch the vision, Of what's gone wrong. | ||
| And the fact that what's gone wrong is inexorably tied to our deviation from that founding document, a document that I tend to believe was written by wise men raised up by God to that very purpose, even the U.S. Constitution. | ||
| I think more people are seeing that every day. | ||
| And whether they know it as a constitutional doctrine or not, they know something is dangerously wrong in Washington because by their fruits you shall know them. | ||
| And the fruits of Washington, D.C. are such that the American people are... | ||
| Poorer. | ||
| They are less free than they have ever been because they're living under the oppressive yoke of a government that makes laws with impunity in a way that would make King George III blush. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| This time we don't have to have a revolutionary war to change that because our law already protects us with the things that we need. | ||
| We just need to know what those things are, what the protections are, and that the whole point of the Constitution... | ||
| It's to make the federal government less powerful and therefore less easily abused. | ||
| But they're waking up to that every single day. | ||
| Donald Trump doesn't necessarily speak in the same terms that I do. | ||
| He doesn't necessarily put it in terms of federalism, separation of powers, and structural dispersion of power. | ||
| But he gets it. | ||
| He gets it because he cares deeply about the American people and sees that they too are suffering under that oppressive yoke of government. | ||
| That's why we've got a real singular opportunity with this election. | ||
| And I hope and pray and have every expectation that the American people will do what they have to do to restore the Constitution. | ||
| And that's by voting for Trump and Vance. | ||
| Senator Mike Lee of Utah. | ||
| By the way, not words I thought you would have said. | ||
| Eight years ago. | ||
| It's been amazing to watch you with great admiration. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| By the way, we have a documentary series that starts right now tonight. | ||
| There are going to be six episodes total. | ||
| The first one is now available. | ||
| It's on TCN. It's called Art of the Surge. | ||
| We've had someone embedded with the Trump campaign, a bunch of people embedded with the Trump campaign, and they've got a ton of amazing footage that you will see nowhere else. | ||
| True. | ||
| So that's on TCN. Thanks for joining us tonight. |
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