In this episode of Firebrand, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) joins Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) to discuss the massive $1.3 trillion spending bill passed by the Republican-led House of Representatives, and why it's time to send in the firebrands. Scott is a former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and has been a long-time member of the conservative wing of Congress. He's been in Congress for a long time and has seen a lot in his time in Congress, but he's never been one to shy away from a fight. In this episode, Scott and Rep. Gaetz discuss the need to push back against excessive government spending, and the need for the Freedom Caucus to speak up and speak out against excessive earmarks and earmarks. Firebrand is a production of the Center for American Progress and the Firebrand Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting for conservative priorities and fighting for the principles that matter most to the American people. Firebrand's mission is to empower, educate, and inspire Americans to take action to take their voice and speak up in favor of their priorities and fight for the things they believe are most important: the things that matter the most to them, the things people care about most. Listen in to find out what it means to be a firebrand, and what it takes to stand up for what matters most to you, the most important things in life. and your day to day life and the things you need to do to protect and protect it. Thank you for being a Firebrand! and keep fighting for freedom, liberty, equality, and justice, liberty and the pursuit of the American Dream! - Matt, Scott, and all things you can do to make a better day to live your best day to do what matters. Tweet me to let us know what you think of it! Tweet us your thoughts, your voice matters! and spread the word to your friends and share it everywhere you can be heard! Timestamps: Tweet Me! or text us your voice is important! to someone else can help us spread it everywhere! . or tweet us out there! , and we'll get it out there in the world! ! - Timedream in a message you're listening to us out here! & we'll send it out to your voice out! <3 -
00:02:31.000and send in the Firebrands. - Welcome back to Firebrand.
00:02:40.000We are broadcasting live out of Room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. We've got the Uniparty moving massive spending bills with a ton of waste.
00:02:52.000Also, out in California, if you can believe it, they're actually extending even more benefits to illegal aliens.
00:02:58.000We've got great news in the state of Florida where our friend, State Representative Joel Rudman, is advancing sound Second Amendment policy so that Gun owners have the opportunity to purchase firearms lawfully in our state without these background checks in any way delaying that lawful access of rights.
00:03:15.000And to talk about all of it, I've got my very good friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Perry, joining me.
00:03:26.000Some days it feels like a minute, some days it feels like a lifetime.
00:03:30.000Scott Perry is the former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, someone who is a mentor of mine and always Can be found ensuring that we've got less spending.
00:03:38.000He's been a true warrior to try to close the southern border and really to use leverage.
00:03:43.000And that's what we're here to talk about.
00:03:45.000Scott, you have led the Freedom Caucus.
00:03:47.000A lot of the conservative-leaning members, both in and out of the Freedom Caucus, look to you for leadership.
00:03:52.000And what we saw on the floor of the House today was an abomination.
00:03:56.000A spending bill was moved with all the Democrats, with Majority of Republicans.
00:04:48.000Because if you can't afford your meals, if you can't afford gasoline, if you can't afford your credit card bills, your house payment, if you're trying to decide between insurance payments or electricity payments, it's all caused by what we just did today.
00:05:02.000And unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of folks that will come to your town And run for office and say, if you vote for me, I'm going to end all that stuff.
00:05:11.000And a whole bunch of them just voted for it.
00:06:02.000The one in Pennsylvania that Senator Casey, And Senator Fetterman originally supported was for some building where they were having, as I understand this, I don't know, gay sex parties.
00:06:17.000And we're going to spend a million dollars on that.
00:06:19.000And then they came out afterwards and said, whoa, hold on a second.
00:06:38.000Well, it was one of their priorities until it wasn't one of their priorities.
00:06:42.000So what this was, for those of you who are watching, there is some LGBTQ community center in Pennsylvania, and these senators sought an earmark to give them extra funding for their operations.
00:07:49.000Nobody came here, not Matt Gaetz, not Scott Perry, to shut down the government.
00:07:54.000What we did come to do is save the republic.
00:07:57.000And if Democrats, and I hate to say it, some of our friends on the Republican side of the aisle, if it's worth it to them to keep on bringing in illegal foreign nationals to kill and rape our children such that we don't shut down the government and have a conversation about it, then they should defend that.
00:08:27.000I just don't understand how they're going to invest a million dollars in the Center for Environmental Justice without enhancing the carbon footprint of the Center of Environmental Justice.
00:08:36.000Well, increasing the carbon footprint in pursuit of reducing carbon is always justified.
00:09:04.000You made mention of the funding of the VA. Right.
00:09:06.000As a part of this program, and I know as a veteran, you care deeply about the VA. We actually want a veteran healthcare system that is the best in the world.
00:09:16.000Focused on veterans, and the best healthcare.
00:09:17.000It was designed originally to be the best healthcare on the planet for veterans.
00:09:24.000That have said they will sacrifice their life for their country.
00:09:27.000That's what it was designed or originally envisioned to be.
00:09:43.000Who pleads their lives ought to be able to decide.
00:09:46.000We understand if you've got to get a vaccine to go overseas to fight the enemy and make sure that the force is secure and safe in the combat zone.
00:10:04.000And then for the VA, to force people that go to the VA or work at the VA to put something like that in their body so that they continue to go to the VA or work at the VA? Is this a communist country?
00:10:18.000Yeah, but we have to fight back against that.
00:10:20.000My frustration is that when we see the VA pushing these experimental VAX mandates on people, we should demand different in order to continue their operations.
00:10:30.000And, you know, we've got people like Mike Bost who have oversight capability, chairman of the VA committee, and I haven't heard Mike Bost once.
00:10:37.000We offer a substantive and leveraged criticism of the VA such that we could actually change the context.
00:10:45.000You say we should push back and we should object to that.
00:10:48.000Matt Gaetz and Scott Perry do, but you had the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee agreeing with the VAX requirements for service members and agreeing with throwing them out if they didn't do it.
00:11:41.000The VA is not going to be banning this photo from VA facilities.
00:11:47.000I just want to be super, super clear about that.
00:11:49.000I know, as you just said, you described it as a kerfuffle.
00:11:52.000There was obviously some reporting on that.
00:11:56.000I can definitely say that the memo was not sanctioned, so it's not something that we were even aware of until you all started reporting on it.
00:12:07.000And I'm just going to be super clear about that.
00:12:10.000Any specifics about the memo and the process over there, certainly I would refer to the VA. So what she didn't say is that we had every intention of doing that until we got caught, right?
00:12:20.000And she said it was unsanctioned, which should lead you to believe the truth, which is all these people that work in the Biden administration do these things because that's what they do.
00:12:50.000These people have no clue what they're talking about or, quite honestly, the magnitude of the ending of the war with Japan on service members and the country.
00:13:01.000The axiom personnel is policy really flourishes here.
00:13:05.000Because the Biden administration, they go and find these people and promote these people that are total woketopians.
00:13:11.000And then when you get a crazy decision by one of their employees like this, they do what they can to distance themselves.
00:13:18.000Now, in my district, in Florida 1, post-deployment lust actually leads directly to family formation.
00:13:25.000So we don't discourage post-deployment lust in Florida's 1st Congressional District, but it does dovetail into these very serious discussions we have about what kind of military we have right now.
00:13:41.000And what kind of value proposition are we offering young people who made the decision you did to serve?
00:13:47.000Talk a little bit about, like, why you signed up to serve in the military and kind of how you might see a young person going through that decision-making process today.
00:13:55.000Well, for me, I didn't really have a plan coming out of high school.
00:13:59.000You know, I kind of grew up like a weed because of my family situation.
00:14:02.000I think a lot of people find themselves or you just don't know.
00:14:05.000It's time to grow up and you don't know what you're going to do.
00:14:07.000And I had an opportunity to enlist and I was always enamored by that service in uniform.
00:14:19.000And I will tell you, Matt, it was one of the seminal things in my life and my career that I did that changed the trajectory of my entire life.
00:15:02.000And they always said, well, you'll know when it's time.
00:15:04.000When I got the order from my boss, I'm a one-star general at the time, and he says, one of your jobs, one of your duty is to enforce the gender reassignment policy.
00:15:16.000It kind of took stock in my time in uniform, and I said, you know, I reflect it, and it reflects me, but it's not reflecting me anymore.
00:15:29.000um these people that accept that and uh and so when you can't take orders anymore it's time it's time to go and i look at the value proposition that young people i'm so happy that people are willing to join but i watched a service member in uniform self immolate in front of the israel embassy in washington in uniform um and then i we looked at his social media feed i don't want to serve next to a communist that hates our country And I think that
00:15:59.000young people that are smart are looking at it and they say, yeah, I'm not going to pledge my life to serve with somebody that might shoot me in the back because they didn't agree with my political position.
00:16:09.000I think that's the circumstance that we find ourselves in, and that's why recruiting and retention is very difficult right now.
00:16:15.000And of course, the Army in its infinite wisdom, when you can't find people to meet the standards, they're just lowering the standard.
00:16:22.000That's not a plan for success against a military like China, Or any of our other adversaries that are serious about defeating the United States of America.
00:16:32.000When people kind of self-deport from the military, as you're describing, and as people of good virtue and patriotic spirit make other choices in their life, does that then create a self-fulfilling prophecy in the military where it veers even harder left?
00:16:50.000I think it does because what you're left with as the pot boils down is a concentration of people where you might have different viewpoints when the pot's full, but as everybody that loves the country, that will give their life for the country and wants to serve in a merit-based system that is fighting for the ideals of America, when they all leave, What is left is those who won't, who don't believe in those.
00:17:16.000And with all due respect to my colleagues here, they say we've got to buy more airplanes and ships and so on and so forth.
00:17:21.000If we don't have the personnel that are willing to put themselves in them and go fight the enemy with their life, it doesn't matter how capable the machinery is or how many you have.
00:17:32.000An army and a military is based on its people and their beliefs.
00:17:36.000And I guarantee you there's some 15-year-old boy in China who's putting a 50-pound pack on his back and going and marching 15 miles to impress his father.
00:17:45.000That's who we're going to have to face, not people that come into our military and say, well, I've got a different standard of dress.
00:17:53.000I don't like this whole uniform thing, so I've got to be me.
00:18:00.000You're going to change who you were and now you're going to accept this.
00:18:04.000And if you don't want to, we're good with that.
00:18:06.000We need car salesmen and insurance people.
00:18:09.000But if you want to be in the military and potentially lose your life defending your country and making the other person die for their country, if you're not into that, then you don't belong here.
00:18:22.000You talk about your own life and how the military enriched it so much and I see in my own family and I see in my community so many for whom that has been true and many for whom that is still true today and we can't ever let that flip where we're going into the military But I think we're on the way to being there.
00:18:54.000I mean, you're a great defender of our military and you call the balls and strikes and some of our military leaders, like, just because they're wearing a uniform doesn't mean they're doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.
00:19:30.000That's right, and we will continue to do so.
00:19:32.000We've also got troubling reports from the border and what the state of California is doing to draw more people across the border illegally.
00:19:39.000This just in from our friends at the National Pulse.
00:19:42.000California lawmakers are now proposing expanding the state's zero down home loan program to illegal aliens.
00:19:49.000That's right, so Assembly Bill 1840 gives zero down home loans to illegal aliens.
00:19:55.000It is a slap in the face to the Californians who are already struggling with some of the highest home prices in the nation, 97% higher than the national average.
00:20:03.000Like originally the California dream for all shared appreciation loans was launched in 2023. They put $300 million into that.
00:20:11.000The intent was to help first-generation and first-time home buyers, but the California politicians could not help themselves.
00:20:18.000Their bleeding hearts and lack of brains prevailed in this case and in the filing of this bill.
00:20:23.000California has already extended its taxpayer-funded healthcare programs to illegal aliens.
00:20:28.000Right now, 40% of the people in California are on Cal Med, their Medicaid product.
00:20:33.000That means every person who has a job who's paying for their own insurance is having to pay for like 80% of someone else's insurance as well.
00:20:43.000And I would say there's not a single entitlement program now in California that somebody is not going to try to extend to illegal aliens.
00:20:50.000All of this comes at a time when housing is unaffordable, younger generations are seeing Healthcare costs rise, more bankruptcy for the working class, and for the first time in America's history, future generations expect to be worse off than their parents.
00:21:04.000Representative Perry, how do we deal with the fact that you've got states like California literally creating the pull factor across our border?
00:21:14.000Well, I think I'm a big believer in states' rights.
00:21:17.000That having been said, the federal government doesn't need to participate.
00:21:21.000And so if California wants to continue to elect leadership that disrespects and has contempt for its citizens, I guess that's their business.
00:21:32.000But the federal government should be...
00:21:36.000Quite honestly, we shouldn't be spending a dime in California to make sure that these programs can continue.
00:21:41.000If you've got enough money to give zero-down home loans to illegal aliens crowding out Americans and hardworking people, then you've got it so good, you probably don't need a single federal dollar for anything else.
00:21:54.000Well, they do use federal dollars, and if they didn't have them, they wouldn't be able to do that.
00:21:58.000But I imagine that California is trying to do whatever it can to...
00:22:03.000To make up for the loss of people that are disgorging from California.
00:22:06.000California is finally, unfortunately, losing population because citizens have had enough of being disrespected and they're leaving now in droves.
00:23:15.000But what I can do or what I can try to do as a federal guy is make sure that Pennsylvania's hard-earned tax dollars don't go out to support that.
00:23:22.000And quite honestly, neither do Florida.
00:23:23.000As a matter of fact, I don't think anybody's hard-earned tax dollars.
00:24:56.000But I want to know, and I think Americans, the people that I work for, the people that are struggling to pay their bills, they want to know what reset's going to happen that's actually going to make a difference in their ability to afford college or...
00:25:09.000Well, I guess he's kind of already done that, right?
00:25:13.000But that's going to make college more expensive.
00:25:15.000It's going to create a moral hazard where if you're just a hard-working Joe or Jill and you want to go to college, you're going to see that bureaucracy increase as a consequence of this and ultimately those costs get pushed.
00:25:29.000Everything we subsidize costs more because the people that are being subsidized say, well, we're going to get this money first to raise the prices.
00:25:37.000I don't know that octogenarians are best positioned to sell resets.
00:25:42.000Whenever someone over 80 says that something needs to be reset, they're usually going through some sort of cardiac conversion, not a series of policy changes.
00:25:52.000But I do think that Biden understands that if this election is a referendum on his policies, that he will be packing soon.
00:26:06.000So what I expect he's going to do is make it a contest between himself and people like us who he's going to characterize as destroying democracy.
00:26:16.000And he's going to go back to that hallowed ground of January 6th that they can't seem to leave behind and blame all of us for that and try and reinvigorate that and put that in the forefront of everybody's minds.
00:26:29.000I literally think he's going to invoke that in the speech and say, right now in this place, this is where it happened and these people did it.
00:26:38.000I guess there are some Republicans and some Democrats who want to make every day January 6th.
00:26:44.000I believe January 6th was a bad day for the country.
00:26:47.000I don't feel the need to relive it every day.
00:26:49.000And in your district and mine, people are more worried about their tomorrow than Joe Biden's January 6th.
00:27:37.000Of course, you have the media, which is, you know, part of Joe Biden's operation, but they act like everything's fine, too.
00:27:43.000But I know that the people I represent, and I suspect the same for you, they tell me, when I'm at the grocery store, like, ladies yell at me, I'm not paying $5 for eggs.
00:27:52.000And you shouldn't have to, but there it is.
00:27:53.000I'm not paying $7.50 for a gallon of milk, but there it is.
00:28:38.000I do want to update everyone on an important story in Florida.
00:28:41.000You'll remember we had a recent field hearing regarding the abuses of ATF, and State Representative Joel Rudman, who comes from the Florida Panhandle, pitched his legislation to stop background checks from impairing people's constitutional rights.
00:28:59.000As was stated, this bill does not prohibit background checks, nor does it do away with any waiting periods.
00:29:05.000We don't even remove the three-day waiting period that was added to long gun purchases back in 2018, although I could have.
00:29:12.000I decided against pursuing that after talking to the families at Parkland back in October.
00:29:19.000Historically, ladies and gentlemen, when the Brady Bill was passed back in 1993, the FBI was originally given five days to do background checks.
00:29:28.000And that was considered an awfully long period of time back then because every inquiry resulted in a phone call.
00:29:35.000Once the NICS national database came online, that federal policy changed to three business days, which it still remains.
00:29:44.000In fact, technology has improved so much over the years that back in 2013, it was Democratic Senator Joe Manchin Who's suggesting lowering the federal requirement to one business day for background checks?
00:30:03.000I'm not even adding a single piece of language to the statute.
00:30:08.000My bill simply removes the one sentence that's causing the issue and allows FDLE to use the current three-day background checks procedures that are already in our statute.
00:30:21.000That's right, according to existing statute, FDLE is supposed to give firearm purchases an answer, a decision in 24 working hours, three business days.
00:30:36.000My bill simply removes the one sentence that creates the ambiguity of the law.
00:30:42.000Florida Statute 790.065, which I do not touch, says that after three business days, FDLE must say one of three things.
00:30:51.000You're either approved, denied, or they have a third option.
00:30:56.000FDLE can say, we haven't found anything on you in three business days, so you can receive your firearm, but we reserve the right to take it back.
00:31:05.000And this is how the majority of states operate.
00:31:12.000Only four conditional approvals out of every 10,000 background checks nationwide ends up being reversed.
00:31:21.000And those firearms are retrieved by the ATF. Rep Eskamani asked me Friday and she mentioned today about the proper role of the ATF. Not only is it the job of the ATF to retrieve firearms from criminals who are disqualified from having them, but the ATF, in my opinion, should also do their job and prosecute them while they're at it because these individuals have committed a felony by lying on their background check.
00:31:50.000Not by persecuting my law-abiding citizens in District 3 and making them wait six months for their legal purchase, but by aggressively going after the criminals who aren't supposed to have these guns in the first place.
00:32:03.000You cannot delay the expression of someone's God-given rights when they've done nothing wrong.
00:32:49.000Congratulations to Representative Rudman for standing up for gun owners.
00:32:52.000We encourage the Florida Senate to take up Representative Rudman's good bill and pass it for the good folks in the Sunshine State.
00:32:59.000Just another thing I want to update you on.
00:33:01.000There's this great project a friend of mine, Greg Struce, runs.
00:33:04.000It's the Declaration of Independence project where people are able to recommit themselves to the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
00:33:12.000I recently signed my declaration inside the U.S. Capitol.
00:33:19.000The Declaration of Independence is central to our nation's values, our liberty, our freedoms, and I am proud to support the Declaration of Independence project.
00:33:28.000And I'm here on the Speaker of the House balcony in Washington, D.C., at our nation's capital, ready to sign my name.