Joe Biden says the border wall will not be built. Will it be finished? Will it even be built? Is it even a thing at all? And will it ever be funded? All of these questions and more are answered in this episode of the podcast by Alex Blumberg and his co-host, Elyssa Miller. They discuss the Biden administration s recent waiver of 26 federal laws that allowed him to build a border wall in South Texas, and what that means for the future of the project. They also discuss the growing number of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border, and the growing opposition to the project from Democratic Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathleen Pritzker, and other blue-cities like New York, Chicago, and New Jersey. And they talk about why it s still not going to be built, and why it might not even be a good idea at all. This episode is brought to you by La Croix, a conservative podcast produced in partnership with Native Creative Podcasts. New episodes every Monday morning in the United States. Subscribe, Like and Share on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast, The Caff Monster Mashup! We post polls, questions and thoughts on all things social media including the latest viral posts, and we'll be giving out our thoughts on them in next week's episode of The Nodcast! on Whose Rights Are Which is Best? Subscribe to Whose Fault Is It Anyway? and more! Subscribe? Rate/subscribe in iTunes Subscribe on Podchaser? Leave us a review on iTunes Review your thoughts on our podcast? or comment on iTunes or Podchore? Send us your thoughts and comments? We'll be listening to our podcast recommendations! Thanks for listening and reviewing our podcast on iTunes! If you have a question or suggestion for our next episode? Please leave us a rating and review on a podcast episode or review it! or a review? in a podcast suggestion? ? and a review or review on your thoughts or thoughts on another post it's a review on social media post it helps us out there! and other things we can be reached out to someone else can we post it on Insta: we'll get a shoutout on Instafeed?
00:00:00.000Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday waived 26 different federal laws that actually allowed him to build border wall in South Texas.
00:00:09.000Apparently, among the 26 laws the DHS waived, according to National Review, that includes the Clean Air Act, Drinking Water Act, and Endangered Species Act.
00:00:17.000The projects will be funded by a congressional appropriations package from fiscal year 2019.
00:00:20.000It's not going to be tons of wall, but it is some wall.
00:00:23.000It's like 20 miles of wall along the border in Starr County, Texas.
00:00:26.000That's an area experiencing high illegal entry.
00:00:29.000The Biden administration has acknowledged that this was necessary.
00:00:32.000They put forward a statement saying as much, suggesting that this is the way that this was going to go, that basically we need the wall.
00:00:38.000If we don't have the wall, it's going to be very difficult for us to secure the border.
00:00:41.000This, of course, creates a major conundrum.
00:00:42.000Because Joe Biden suggested during the 2020 race that walls are bad.
00:00:51.000This is why you had Alexander Ocasio-Cortez during the Trump administration jetting on down to the southern border to hang around empty parking lots and fake cry into the camera over offense.
00:01:03.000This is why you had the entire media Shrieking and crying about the idea of Donald Trump building more border wall.
00:01:09.000This is why just a few weeks ago, you had judges who were stepping in to prevent the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, from putting buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande to prevent people from illegally attempting to cross that border.
00:02:11.000Well, it turns out millions of people have crossed the southern border under Joe Biden, and they are all going up to northern cities, blue cities, New York, Chicago.
00:02:20.000And it turns out that people in those blue cities don't like it very much.
00:02:23.000You've got governors like Kathy Hochul in New York calling out the Biden administration.
00:02:25.000You have the governor of Illinois, J.B.
00:02:27.000Pritzker, and the mayor, Brandon Johnson of Chicago, calling for Joe Biden to fix this thing.
00:02:31.000Here they were just a couple of days ago.
00:02:34.000We have to have better coordination with every single level of government, and that includes the state of Texas.
00:02:40.000There are other things the federal government can do other than sending us money that they haven't yet done.
00:02:45.000In a letter to President Biden asking for more help, Governor Pritzker says the crisis is overwhelming the state and the city's ability to provide aid.
00:02:56.000Well, all of this has driven the Biden administration into some dose of reality, or at least it did briefly.
00:03:01.000There was a brief moment in time, just a couple of days ago, when it appeared that the Biden administration might be shocked into reality, maybe even to stop the overwhelming flow of illegal immigrants at the border.
00:03:09.000Mayorca said in an official filing in the Federal Register, this is just a couple of days ago, quote, There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas.
00:03:22.000In order to ensure the expeditious construction of the barriers and roads in the project areas, I have determined that it is necessary to exercise the authority vested in me by Section 102C of the IIRIRA."
00:03:33.000Hey, so, he waived regulations in order to make this sort of thing happen.
00:03:37.000But then, Wokenist snapped back into place like a mousetrap.
00:03:41.000There was no way the Biden administration was going to be able to flip this dramatically after claiming that Donald Trump was an evil human rights violator for attempting to build border wall.
00:03:49.000And so yesterday, Joe Biden, the defunct president of the United States, suggested that actually the border wall won't work, which raises the question as to why then they are building it.
00:04:00.000But he says, guys, guys, it's still not going to work.
00:04:45.000And then people yell at you for backtracking.
00:04:47.000And this is what Joe Biden doesn't want.
00:04:48.000So what exactly is Joe Biden's excuse for having spent the money to, you know, actually build wall?
00:04:53.000He says the money was appropriated, so he has to spend it.
00:04:56.000Which, again, is weird from a president of the United States who has unilaterally declared himself the ability to relieve student loan debt to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, for example.
00:05:06.000But when it comes to money allocated for border wall funding, suddenly, like right now, he discovered that he actually has to spend money that was appropriated in 2019.
00:05:40.000Secretary Mayorkas easily could have made the case.
00:05:42.000Guys, I want to spend the money, but the regulations prevent me from spending the money because obviously I'd be in violation of law if I did spend the money.
00:05:50.000So they want to have it both ways again.
00:05:51.000They want to build the wall, claim the wall does nothing.
00:05:53.000So they can simultaneously claim they're doing something to stop the border flow and also claim to all of their left-wing buddies that actually they still agree with themselves when they took the moronic position that walls do nothing, which of course is silly.
00:09:51.000So much legal compliance from this administration.
00:09:53.000I mean, if there's one thing we know about this administration, they love complying with the separation of powers in which Congress passes a law and the president signs it and the president abides by that legislation.
00:10:03.000That is something this administration absolutely adores.
00:10:06.000They would never do anything unilaterally, like say, I don't know, tell OSHA To cram down a VAX mandate on 80 million Americans.
00:10:12.000They would never do anything like that.
00:10:14.000After all, the power of the legislature controls what OSHA can and cannot do.
00:10:18.000And that's not in the enabling legislation.
00:10:19.000So obviously they would follow the law.
00:10:21.000I mean, they would never try to twist the law to relieve hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt.
00:10:43.000When you take positions that are counter logic and decency, and then the effects of those policies come to fruition, you have to somehow mitigate against your own policies.
00:10:54.000The reason this is happening is very obvious.
00:10:56.000You've got people in New York, and people in Chicago, and people in California, and people all over the left wing, the big cities, big blue cities, who are complaining about Joe Biden's illegal immigration problem.
00:11:04.000And there is a reason, by the way, that Joe Biden is doing this, and that is because his poll numbers absolutely stink.
00:11:10.000His poll numbers on immigration, they're not just underwater, they're wildly underwater.
00:11:38.000It's not black people in America's major cities who are overwhelmingly in favor of less illegal migration.
00:11:43.000It's not even Latinos in America who are overwhelmingly in favor of less illegal migration.
00:11:47.000It is woke white liberals living in upper class suburbs who never have to deal with the consequences and the minute you ship them to Martha's Vineyards, then all of a sudden they're starting to freak out and complain.
00:11:57.000But, until then, they're very happy to put up their lawn signs, their virtue signaling lawn signs.
00:12:02.000Man, the Democratic Party policy is a disaster area.
00:12:05.000And Republicans could point that out if they weren't in the middle of a speakership battle,
00:12:50.000It is firm but breathable, which is precisely what I need.
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00:13:26.000Okay, so meanwhile, while Democrats are declaring war on themselves over whether to build a border wall or not, the Republicans are declaring war on themselves with regard to this speakership battle in a fascinating new twist to the speakership battle.
00:13:39.000Apparently, the Republicans are now going to hold a speakership debate, apparently televised, which... Okay.
00:13:51.000My only objection, I'm all for transparency, but who Republicans elect in a closed caucus to lead their caucus really should not be a matter of public scrutiny nearly as much as, you know, you voting for your local congressperson.
00:14:03.000The reason I say this is because how the sausage gets made is very different than how people tell you the sausage gets made On talk radio.
00:14:11.000On talk radio, what I do for a living, I'm going to give you the purest, most conservative perspective.
00:14:41.000Earmarks are the system whereby there's a bill, it's coming through, and I attach a rider for my district.
00:14:45.000And I say, I'm only going to vote in favor of this bill if you build the Ben Shapiro post office in my district.
00:14:50.000It's really bad because if everybody does that, you end up spending a lot of money.
00:14:53.000The problem is if nobody does that, you don't pass any bills and you end up with a giant omnibus package that only gets support because it's a giant crap sandwich anyway.
00:15:01.000Usually a larger crap sandwich than would have been attained with a few simple earmarks.
00:15:06.000So again, the sausage making process is really ugly.
00:15:09.000Televising all of that And that's a great way of prolonging the speaker chaos, I suppose, because you're going to end up with a segment that is very pro-Jim Jordan.
00:15:18.000You're going to end up with a segment that is very pro-Kevin Hearn, for example.
00:15:23.000Because it's not as though any one of these candidates is completely dominant.
00:15:26.000So, the three big candidates who have been mentioned at this point are Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma.
00:15:33.000Apparently, according to Punchbowl News, Fox News' Brett Baier is going to host a closed debate and discussion between the GOP candidates for Speaker on Monday night, according to a source involved with the planning.
00:15:42.000And then later, it came out, apparently, that they're going to televise that, which, I mean, it's going to be very...
00:15:49.000If you are running for Speaker of the House, now you're basically kind of running for President, right?
00:15:52.000Not formally, but you're getting in front of the American people and the Republican base and showing who has most fealty to conservative principles.
00:15:59.000The problem is that you can show that fealty, but the system constrains you from actually achieving those goals.
00:16:06.000You can promise everything to everybody.
00:16:07.000Two minutes from now, everybody's gonna be real disappointed when we hit the end of the continuing resolution and somebody cuts a deal, which is exactly what's going to happen, as we all know.
00:16:15.000Anyway, Republicans are going to host that candidate forum Tuesday night and the closed party election on Wednesday.
00:16:20.000There is no timeline for electing a speaker on the House floor.
00:16:24.000This thing is probably going to continue for a number of days.
00:16:27.000Donald Trump, for his part, after originally recommending Kevin McCarthy for the post, McCarthy was very pro-Trump, and then doing nothing to stop Kevin McCarthy from falling.
00:16:37.000Donald Trump is now endorsing Jim Jordan for Speaker, which is fine.
00:16:55.000The head of the House Oversight Committee.
00:16:56.000Again, I don't know why anyone wants this job.
00:16:58.000It's a terrible job, but Jim Jordan is an excellent candidate.
00:17:01.000He's one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus.
00:17:02.000He's extremely conservative across the board.
00:17:04.000And as far as Trump goes, he's a big Trump backer.
00:17:06.000Now, the problem is, of course, we're also in the middle of an open primary inside the Republican Party.
00:17:10.000While Trump is way in front in that primary, he still represents about half of the Republican Party, and the other half of the Republican Party is split among a myriad of candidates.
00:17:18.000So Trump's endorsement is not sure to guarantee that somehow Jordan becomes the guy.
00:17:24.000Especially because there's a whole wing of moderates in the party who may not be in love with Jim Jordan.
00:17:32.000People ripped him for not having centralizing principles.
00:17:35.000And to a certain extent, there's some truth to that because he's a consummate politician.
00:17:38.000And you kind of have to be in order to be Speaker of the House and broker some sort of agreement between all these disparate groups.
00:17:43.000You can't really be a guy who has sort of hard and fast principles unless you're going to be a dictator like Newt Gingrich was very early on when he was Speaker of the House.
00:17:50.000And then he ended up being defenestrated anyway after a certain point.
00:17:54.000Being an idealist and being Speaker of the House are usually not things that go together.
00:17:57.000This is why Mitch McConnell is a very effective Senate Majority Leader, but not the most ideological politician.
00:18:03.000Usually, these two things are in conflict.
00:18:05.000If you want to be particularly effective as a legislature, as a legislator, usually that means not being a purist.
00:18:09.000In any case, Jim Jordan is more of a purist than a lot of people in moderate districts in New York, maybe, who might not love Jim Jordan.
00:18:15.000Steve Scalise is considered, again, sort of the party favorite in the sense that he's not coming in from the outside.
00:18:21.000He was a second-in-command to Kevin McCarthy.
00:18:24.000There are health concerns about Steve Scalise.
00:18:27.000There's now been some talk, believe it or not, about Patrick McHenry, possibly.
00:18:32.000Not because Patrick McHenry actually has a lot of backing, but because he's the speaker pro tem, so he's sort of just sitting there already.
00:18:37.000In order for any sort of speakership vote to happen, the big thing that's going to have to happen is they're going to have to change the motion to vacate rule.
00:18:47.000The motion to vacate rule, which is a concession made by Kevin McCarthy to the Matt Gaetz wing of the party, was that he would allow anyone, like a single person, to bring a motion to vacate the chair if they didn't like what he was doing.
00:18:57.000And that basically set the stage For him being ousted at any point because he has a very, very narrow House majority.
00:19:01.000All it took was basically five Republicans voting against him and he would lose his speakership even if the other 97% of the caucus was in favor of Kevin McCarthy.
00:19:11.000So in order for any new speaker to be elected and then have any power at all, that motion to vacate is going to have to be changed.
00:19:16.000And according to Punchbowl, that's exactly what's happening.
00:19:19.00045 House Republicans, including several power players, have written a letter to the conference effectively demanding changes to the motion to vacate rule that cost McCarthy his job.
00:19:27.000A few members who signed this letter said they're not willing to endorse anybody for Speaker until the motion to vacate is overhauled.
00:19:31.000Those names include Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Garrett Graves of Louisiana, Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul of Texas, and Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith of Missouri.
00:19:58.000He's raised about $170 million to support various Republicans over the last decade.
00:20:02.000Scalise raised more in the last cycle, 53 million, than Jordan raised over the last decade, 38 million.
00:20:07.000So that's going to be a major concern.
00:20:08.000Again, being Speaker of the House is not the same as being most ideologically pure.
00:20:11.000Usually it's the guy who can cut deals and get people elected.
00:20:14.000But this is a pretty significant mess.
00:20:17.000We'll get into more of that mess in just one second.
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00:21:24.000As we've been saying, in order for any speaker to be able to run the house, he's going to have to have some level of authority over the members of his own caucus.
00:21:30.000This is what Representative Johnson was saying, Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, he's saying, you know, we've got a bunch of foundational problems here, and if we don't fix those before a new speaker is named, they're just going to continue.
00:21:47.000I think that we've got a lot of questions we need these candidates to answer.
00:21:52.000In part because if we don't change the foundational problems within our conference, it's just going to be the same stupid clown car with a different driver.
00:22:04.000If these rules happen to not grant the speaker enough power to actually keep his caucus in line, they're not getting anything done.
00:22:11.000Obviously, there have to be consequences for stepping out of line.
00:22:14.000It's very funny to me that a lot of people are very happy about Kevin McCarthy getting ousted are a lot of the same people who are very upset at rogues like John McCain in the United States Senate.
00:22:22.000I agree with them about John McCain, but the whole point is you can't actually pass anything unless you keep your majority in line.
00:22:28.000And so if you remove all the consequences that are available to keep people in line, they will not stay in line.
00:22:33.000You'll have a collective action problem.
00:22:35.000Representative Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, he says, listen, if we keep fighting each other here, I'm not hopeful we're even going to be able to keep the majority.
00:22:43.000I'm going to stand here and tell you by the actions that have taken place this week, I'm not hopeful to keep the majority.
00:22:48.000I'm not hopeful to win back the Senate.
00:22:49.000You know, I spoke to President Trump three times yesterday, and I explained to him that there could be a coalition government that would happen.
00:22:57.000And throughout that process, you know what we would lose in the House of Representatives?
00:23:00.000What did Trump say when you told him all this stuff?
00:23:04.000This is where I'd love to get to my point, Manu, about Matt Gaetz using the MAGA cloak to go ahead and to post content on Twitter with no context To make it seem as if he has President Trump's support.
00:23:15.000And he paints it in the most broad strokes possible.
00:23:18.000That's why he's so good at what he does, is because he's a BS artist.
00:23:22.000Okay, so Matt Gaetz is trying to fight back against that perception by doing something that I will say is clever.
00:23:28.000So he is saying, okay, I'm going to negotiate on the motion to vacate.
00:23:31.000He says, my GOP colleagues want to raise the threshold on the motion to vacate.
00:23:35.000If we enact the reforms laid out by Representative Ro Khanna, who's a Democrat from California, nice guy, I've interviewed Ro before, how high would you like the MTV threshold to be?
00:23:43.000I'll basically give you whatever you want for this stuff.
00:23:55.00012-year term limit for Congress and a ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs.
00:24:00.000Now, we know that this is going nowhere.
00:24:02.000Okay, like those last two things are going nowhere.
00:24:04.000And the reason those are going nowhere is because there are a bunch of people sitting in Congress right now who are beyond the 12-year term limit.
00:24:08.000You're going to open up a bunch of safe districts for Republicans to challenge.
00:24:12.000As far as the ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs, Um, I'm just wondering, if Republicans enact that and Democrats do not, how is that going to work out?
00:24:21.000So he's saying he's going to change the motion to vacate rules.
00:24:24.000If there's a ban on political donations from lobbyists or PACs, for whom?
00:24:29.000Because that seems like shooting yourself directly in the face.
00:24:32.000Again, I'm perfectly willing to hear Matt Gaetz's list of demands, but if the idea is that all lobbyists and PAC donations go away.
00:24:39.000By the way, all a PAC donation is, that is like a group of people who get together and they put together a political actions committee, and then they spend money on behalf of a candidate.
00:24:47.000If Republicans take that off the table, and then they let Democrats do it, how exactly is that advantageous for Republicans attempting to win?
00:24:54.000I just like lobbyists as much as the next guy, but the notion that Democrats are going to continue doing this and Republicans are going to stop doing this, it puts you at an inherent disadvantage electorally.
00:25:04.000Like, are Democrats going to vote to do this overall?
00:25:08.000And how exactly would that tie into Republican attempts to get a speaker to push that?
00:25:12.000Like, what Matt Gaetz has already shown is that Republicans can push stuff, and if Democrats don't go along with it, Matt Gaetz blames the Republicans anyway.
00:25:19.000He did this with regard to border security.
00:25:21.000He literally got up the other day and he's like, you guys say that you passed a harsh border security regimen, why didn't you see that become law?
00:25:27.000Right, because there's a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president.
00:25:29.000And both those institutions continue to maintain that walls don't do things, so I don't understand.
00:25:36.000So if Matt Gaetz wants to put forward a list...
00:25:39.000The actual achievable things that don't actively damage the Republican Party's ability to beat Democrats.
00:25:53.000But if these concessions are non doable concessions, the Democrats take advantage of, I'm not sure how that exactly is a big win and how it's not exactly posturing.
00:26:01.000Again, all of this puts whoever is running for speaker in a pretty major jam here.
00:26:06.000Because, for example, Jim Jordan, he has come forward and he says, we're not going to go to a vote without 218, right?
00:26:11.000We're going to need 218 in order to go forward with a vote.
00:26:13.000We're not even going to have a vote on the Speaker until we've already decided behind closed doors who's the Speaker.
00:26:29.000I think I can bring our team together to accomplish that.
00:26:32.000And more importantly, once we get that done, to do the work that needs to be done on the border, on crime, on inflation, on all these issues we have to address, I think I can do that.
00:26:56.000Everybody scrambles and they end up coming with some sort of agreement.
00:26:58.000If that's the case, then credit to Gates.
00:27:01.000But if it doesn't end up that way, if it's just sheer chaos, or if we end up back in the same situation with an incredibly weak speaker unable to keep his own people in line, then Democrats are going to win.
00:27:10.000Because again, if you look as though you're running a clown car, people will vote for Democrats even if their policies are absolute sheer garbage.
00:27:17.000The one good piece of news here is that Donald Trump, who was speculating just a few moments ago about possibly running for Speaker himself, at least he has stopped that nonsense.
00:29:16.000Whatever deal gets cut, the Republican Party is going to have to now actually reestablish itself as a party.
00:29:22.000We've spent the last 15 years in the Republican Party ripping power away from the people at the top of the Republican Party.
00:29:27.000That has come with a couple of benefits and some pretty significant costs.
00:29:30.000The benefits are that the Republican Party has gotten more right-wing, or at least it did briefly when it came to, for example, spending.
00:29:36.000The Tea Party movement, which I thought was terrific, I was a part of it, called on Congress to actually push back on spending.
00:29:42.000The problem is that when you take away the leadership of the institutions and you simply destroy them and you say that pretty much every you create a roiling boiling pot inside, for example, the Republican Party and the Republican Party infrastructure has no power to actually dictate Well, at that point, what you end up with is endless chaos.
00:30:02.000Republicans will look at Nancy Pelosi, on the one hand, with deep and abiding hatred for her policies, and on the other hand, with a bit of admiration for the fact that she's kept her caucus together.
00:30:36.000Either you want to fight Nancy Pelosi, which requires a national consolidation of power around institutions with leadership, or you want to argue amongst yourselves in the name of principle and then lose to people like Nancy Pelosi.
00:30:46.000Which is why there are going to have to be some sort of tools that are put in the hands of the House leadership that are going to allow punishment for the members.
00:30:55.000Now, right now, I understand everybody's running for Speaker.
00:30:57.000And so, at the moment, it's going to be all of them basically appealing to the better angels of nature, right?
00:31:02.000So, you have Jim Jordan, for example, defending Matt Gaetz from the calls for expulsion.
00:31:06.000There have been some members of the Republican caucus who have said that what he did here is ridiculous.
00:31:09.000They should expel him from the caucus.
00:31:11.000I don't think you expel him from the caucus when you have a four-seat majority.
00:31:14.000But the basic notion here, that going forward, the leadership will not have the tools to punish people.
00:31:21.000How exactly are you going to operate it, then?
00:31:23.000How exactly are you going to operate it?
00:31:25.000So right now, one of the people who's coming under even greater fire than Matt Gaetz in some ways is Nancy Mays.
00:31:30.000She joined for no reason anyone can explain seven hardliners in ousting McCarthy.
00:31:35.000She is, at best, a moderate Republican, particularly on abortion.
00:31:40.000It shocked everybody when she joined to oust McCarthy.
00:31:43.000According to Politico, McCarthy and Mace didn't always see eye-to-eye, but the California Republican had helped Mace secure her seat in Congress by pumping millions of dollars into her once-struggling campaign.
00:31:51.000Mace has moved to aggressively fundraise off of her vote to balance McCarthy as only intensifying her colleagues' anger towards her.
00:31:58.000For Mace, the anti-McCarthy vote may prove a purposeful step in a chameleonic career that's already seen her swing repeatedly between Trump-centric conservative and establishment-bucking centrism.
00:32:06.000Mace is making clear her vote for Speaker is up for the taking by either Steve Scalise or Representative Jim Jordan.
00:32:12.000Elsewhere in the GOP, revenge is on the menu.
00:32:13.000House Republicans are now weighing to expel Mace from at least two centrist-leaning groups she belonged to in the first place.
00:32:19.000That follows hard on a very awkward appearance for Nancy Mace on CNN, where she was sending out fundraising emails in the middle of the Astro McCarthy and she was asked on CNN, uh, you ripped Matt Gaetz for doing exactly the same thing earlier this year.
00:32:32.000I'm asking people to go to my website at nancymace.org to help me to show their support because there are folks that are coming after me tonight.
00:32:42.000I'm glad you brought that up because back in January when there were the marathon votes for Kevin McCarthy to get this job, he was fighting to take the gavel, this is something that you said.
00:33:26.000I made the decision to fundraise over the last 24 hours because of the threats that I have received over fundraising and money drying up, which is why I need help.
00:33:38.000Republicans, whoever takes over, is going to have to have some tools at their disposal.
00:33:42.000By the way, a government shutdown is still a possibility about 40 days from now.
00:33:46.000They have to figure this thing out really quick.
00:33:48.000They have to figure out a new speaker.
00:33:49.000They have to figure out what their approach is going to be on this government shutdown.
00:33:51.000They need to do all of that, like, forthwith.
00:33:55.000Brian Reidel, a former aide to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who's now at the Manhattan Institute, said it becomes substantially harder to do a government spending deal because the message has been sent that Republicans should not rely on Democrats to pass any bills.
00:34:06.000The no-compromise fringe has been strongly empowered and essentially has a veto over House Republican policy, which can't be squared with what Democrats in the White House want.
00:34:13.000So if we end up with a government shutdown in the middle of bad economic news, I'll bring you some of that news in just a moment, and it's because Republicans are smacking each other in the back of the head, how are voters going to take that in the next congressional election?
00:34:23.000Again, we ought to have a little bit of vision beyond the next five minutes.
00:34:27.000We'll get to that in just one second first.
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00:35:49.000Okay, meanwhile, the Biden economy here is on very thin footing.
00:35:54.000Mohamed El-Erian, who I really trust as an analyst on this sort of stuff, he says that the possibility of avoiding a hard landing here is really, really decreasing pretty significantly.
00:36:04.000He has a piece over the Financial Times pointing this out.
00:36:06.000He says the economy is likely to weaken as markets internalize the significant likelihood that rates will stay higher for longer.
00:36:12.000He says an intense period of rising interest rates, high oil prices, and a stronger dollar is pushing the financial market consensus on U.S.
00:36:17.000economic growth away from the comforting notion of a soft landing.
00:36:20.000By my count, this will be the sixth time in the past 15 months that conventional wisdom shifts for the world's most influential economy.
00:36:25.000It's a pivot that unfortunately is likely to stick for longer this time around, threatening what has been an impressively strong U.S.
00:36:30.000economy, undermining genuine financial stability and exporting volatility to the rest of the world.
00:36:35.000In just the last two weeks, the yield on the benchmark U.S.
00:36:37.00010-year bond has risen by some 0.5 percentage points to around 4.8% as part of a comprehensive shift in the entire interest rate structure.
00:36:44.000The move brought the change in yields to an eye-popping one percentage point since the end of June, leading to higher borrowing rates for companies, more burdensome car loans for households, more pronounced and uneven deposit outflows from the banking system as investors shift cash into money market accounts.
00:36:56.000Notably, the cost of a 30-year mortgage is up to 8%, making already expensive home purchases even less affordable.
00:37:03.000Pushing yields up in an increasingly disorderly manner is a combination of markets recognizing that the higher policy rates set by the Fed will be here for a while and the need to absorb a significant supply of treasury bonds due to large budgetary deficit.
00:37:18.000They increase the threat of stagflation.
00:37:20.000And that continues to be a serious threat.
00:37:22.000There's a jobs report that at first glance looks really, really nice.
00:37:24.000A jobs report in September that showed 336,000 jobs added, but If the idea was that the economy is overheated and that we've spent too much money and that the economy needs to be cooled, then adding 336,000 jobs, that's a very high rate, and doing that without really increasing the labor force participation rate in any serious way, which just means that, you know, basically the same percentage of people are in the labor force who were in the labor force before,
00:37:51.000Continuing that sort of thing is not going to lead the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
00:37:56.000They're going to increase interest rates again.
00:37:59.000According to ABC News being a little optimistic, it's possible the cooling of pay growth may help reassure the Fed's inflation fighters who are scrutinizing every scrap of data to determine whether to raise their key rate again this year still.
00:38:08.000The outside's job growth may stoke worries the economy will expand too fast for inflation to cool.
00:38:12.000If they think, if people think, by the way, that the rates are going to go up on bonds, for example, what does that do?
00:38:18.000The price on the bonds that we have already released into the market is going to go down.
00:38:22.000As those bond yields increase, that means eventually people are going to shift their money out of stocks and into these very high yield bonds.
00:38:28.000When they do that, the stock market is going to stagnate.
00:38:32.000So again, we are in A really tenterhook situation on the economy.
00:38:38.000What Joe Biden, I think, might be waiting for here, frankly, is for Republicans to shut down the government.
00:38:42.000If they shut down the government, at least he can blame his failing economy on somebody who is not him.
00:38:46.000This is just another reason why Republicans need to be smart and strategic about this sort of stuff, as opposed to grandstanding and creating a new speaker who has no power to actually cudgel his own members into line.
00:38:56.000Because, let's be real about this, the idea that you're going to pass a party-line budget without any ability to cudgel your own members into line, that's going to be a very difficult thing to do, particularly in the face of a Democratic Senate.
00:39:06.000And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, she just comes out of the woodwork every so often to really wreck American politics further.
00:39:14.000I don't know why she's still on the TVs, but she is.
00:39:17.000She has now called for the formal deprogramming of MAGA members.
00:39:22.000If you're a Democrat, and you cultishly and slavishly worship Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or now an elderly dotard who has the inability to speak from his facehole, then that's because you're normal.
00:39:32.000But if you're a Trump fan, or even if you're not a Trump fan, but you voted for him, this means that you are a MAGA member who must be deprogrammed.
00:39:39.000I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past.
00:39:44.000And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things, gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes.
00:39:51.000But there wasn't this little tale of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today.
00:40:01.000And sadly, so many of those extremists, those mega extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who Has no credibility left by any measure.
00:40:21.000You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.
00:40:31.000What does that mean, a formal deprogramming of the cult members?
00:40:46.000It should be particularly frightening given the fact that according to Newsweek, the federal government believes the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S.
00:40:53.000presidential election is so great, it has quietly created a new category of extremists it seeks to track and counter, Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
00:41:01.000The FBI, apparently, is going to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations, but the vast majority of its current anti-government investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.
00:41:16.000A current FBI official says the FBI is in an almost impossible situation.
00:41:20.000The FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism in any repeat of January 6th, but they're focusing on former President Trump and his MAGA supporters.
00:41:27.000This is what they are doing right now.
00:41:28.000Newsweek spoke to over a dozen current or former government officials specializing in terrorism in a three-month investigation to understand the current domestic security landscape and to evaluate what Biden is doing about what he calls domestic terrorism.
00:41:40.000And they've been looking at secret FBI and DHS data, tracking incidents, threats, investigations, and cases.
00:41:47.000It seems as though they are cracking down on MAGA members.
00:41:51.000Presumably at the behest of President Biden, who tweeted out last September, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.
00:41:59.000So that means the people who oppose Joe Biden need deprogramming.
00:42:29.000Other than that he has heterodox political opinions.
00:42:32.000The SEC said Thursday it is seeking another court order that would compel Elon Musk to testify as part of an investigation into his purchase of Twitter, now called X. The SEC said in a filing in a San Francisco federal court, Musk failed to appear for testimony on September 15th, despite an investigative subpoena served by the SEC and having raised no objections at the time it was served.
00:42:49.000But two days before scheduled testimony, Musk abruptly notified the SEC staff he would not appear.
00:42:54.000The SEC said it has been conducting a fact-finding investigation involving the period before Musk's takeover last year when Twitter was still publicly traded.
00:43:01.000The agency said it has not concluded that anyone violated federal securities laws.
00:43:04.000They're just investigating, you know, for the fun of it and for the hell of it.
00:43:07.000By the way, why would you investigate Elon Musk for buying Twitter and turning it into X?
00:43:12.000By pretty much every available account, he has lost tens of billions of dollars in that transaction.
00:43:16.000So what exactly is the horrible thing that he did when he took the hit?
00:43:21.000The answer, of course, is that put pressure on Musk and hope to shut him up is the basic idea.
00:43:25.000Hillary Clinton, of course, spells that one out once again.
00:43:27.000She says, you know, we need these big platforms to do what Hillary Clinton wants them to do.
00:43:31.000People from all walks of life are mounting a massive resistance to autocracy, to the oppression of women and girls, to irresponsible big tech companies whose platforms are absolutely rife with misogyny and sexism and viral attacks on women in the public sphere.
00:43:54.000So we're trying to tell a different story, a different narrative for the future by not only standing up for democracy, human rights and progress, but highlighting women who are doing it in their lives every single day.
00:44:11.000So it's the big platforms that are to blame, obviously, says Hillary Clinton.
00:44:14.000And we all know which platforms she's talking about right there.
00:44:17.000So, Elon Musk tweeted out, He says the probability of it happening is 100%.
00:44:20.000Well, we can only hope and pray that that is true, because the threats against Musk have been pretty extraordinary.
00:44:22.000against those individuals who have abused their regulatory power for personal and political gain
00:44:26.000can't wait for this to happen. He says the probability of it happening is 100%. Well,
00:44:30.000we can only hope and pray that that is true because the threats against Musk have been
00:44:34.000pretty extraordinary. Okay, meanwhile, it's time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
00:44:40.000So, let's begin with a quick thing that I like from my colleague Candace Owen.
00:44:44.000So, Candace recently spoke at a campus, I'm not sure which campus this was, and she was hit with the usual question, which is some activist got up, a trans LGBTQ plus divided by sign activist, and said, why are you hurting my feelings?
00:44:56.000And hats off to Candace for this excellent response.
00:45:29.000So obviously, I was on a very long plane ride over the course of the evening, and I got a chance to watch a movie that I had not seen when it came out in about 2010, but it's excellent.
00:45:38.000Good weekend watch if you happen to be able to get access to it.
00:45:42.000The entire movie is about a woman who is Known as one of the great advocates for people who are autistic.
00:45:50.000She was diagnosed with autism when she was very, very young.
00:45:52.000And the movie is essentially what it's like to be autistic.
00:45:55.000It's an excellent depiction of what autism is like.
00:45:58.000How autistic people see things in visual terms, but can't really communicate with people in the same way that everyone else can, but have different abilities.
00:46:05.000And it's really quite a beautiful movie.
00:47:39.000I wonder why they would do such a thing.
00:47:40.000Probably for the same exact reason that every time you read a crime story, if it's a white person who commits a crime against a person of minority status, their race is mentioned in every single story.
00:47:47.000And if it's a black person who, for example, punches an Asian person, the race is never mentioned because the media would rather obscure for you the actual data involved in the story than allow you the possibility of maybe thinking the wrong thing.
00:48:00.000Meanwhile, people who don't want you to think the wrong thing, that would include Ryan Carson's friends.
00:48:05.000So remember, Ryan Carson was murdered And now, people have started to GoFundMe for his death, and they are using the money, I kid you not, to, this is his friends, to give themselves time off from work.
00:48:18.000Quote, Hi everyone, we are a collective of Ryan's close friends, reeling from a brutal loss.
00:48:22.000We are asking for your help on behalf of his partner in easing the burden and stress of this horrifying situation so that we can have space and time to grieve and remember Ryan.
00:48:29.000Immediate needs are to offset the cost of working class people taking time off of work to properly mourn.
00:48:34.000So they are paying themselves, in other words, not family members.
00:48:38.000Not his girlfriend themselves, which is, I suppose, a unique grift.
00:48:44.000That's pretty astonishing sort of stuff right there.