Episode 143 – Suitcases Stuffed With Ballots in Georgia？ I’m Voting for the MORE Act. Negotiations for Coronavirus Aid. Austin Mayor Urges Citizens to Stay Home While Vacationing in Mexico...
A deal on Coronavirus legislation appears to be on the cards, but will it be enough to pass the House and Senate? Plus, Georgia election officials are caught on camera counting absentee ballots without any oversight. Hot Takes is a weekly podcast hosted by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GA).
00:00:32.360A good chunk of that money, about $300 million, going to small businesses.
00:00:37.420The Paycheck Protection Program, seeing some enhancements as a consequence.
00:00:42.800No stimulus directly to Americans, but an additional $300 in unemployment benefits provided in the bill.
00:00:51.340Also funding for frontline workers and hospitals.
00:00:54.420This has the features of a deal that could get done.
00:00:59.160Now in the swamp of Washington, D.C., there are always extra ornaments that they hang on the tree.
00:01:05.160We want to make sure there's not funding for illegal immigration.
00:01:08.580That there's not a way that the federal treasury is used as a backstop to poor decisions in states or cities that have nothing to do with coronavirus.
00:01:18.720But I do believe that there's going to be a vote.
00:01:22.980Not sure how I would vote because I don't make those decisions until we see the final legislative text.
00:01:29.040But support for our frontline workers, additional assistance for our small businesses, ensuring that we have a robust health care system.
00:01:36.960Those all seem to be goals that the Trump administration is pursuing, and they are finding some bipartisan agreement.
00:01:43.160If I had to handicap it, I'd say we're back in Washington next week with a vote on major coronavirus legislation.
00:01:51.740We'll see if that's something that our office can support.
00:01:54.900Suitcases full of ballots counted in the absence of legally required oversight in the state of Georgia.
00:02:06.860Now the legislative hearings there are uncovering what is very strange behavior in an election.
00:02:13.400And footage does appear to show these suitcases with ballots coming out from underneath a table after supervisors told poll workers to leave the room and then four people stayed behind to keep counting votes.
00:02:49.480So the same person who's staying behind now, the same person who cleared the place out under the pretense that we're going to stop counting,
00:02:55.360is the person who put the table there at 8.22 in the morning.
00:03:00.900Yeah, I saw four suitcases come out from underneath the table.
00:03:04.480So what are these ballots doing there separate from all the other ballots?
00:03:09.180And why are they only counting them whenever the place is cleared out with no witnesses?
00:03:30.140How many ballots went through those machines in those two hours when there was no one there to supervise,
00:03:35.600to be present, consistent with your statutes and rules, to supervise the tabulation?
00:03:41.380We believe that could easily be and probably is certainly beyond the margin of victory in this race.
00:03:47.220Will Section 230 get repealed in the National Defense Authorization Act?
00:03:56.700And if it isn't, will the National Defense Authorization Act be vetoed by President Trump as he's threatened?
00:04:03.100Now, Section 230, as we've covered in other podcasts, allows tech platforms to get to a size and scale with liability protections
00:04:12.280that gives them license to both produce content and curate content in a way that disadvantages those that they don't agree with,
00:04:23.100whether that's from a market perspective or a political perspective or otherwise.
00:04:27.960So President Trump has said he'll veto the NDAA if a repeal of Section 230 is not included.
00:04:34.480And this isn't the first time that we've seen policy areas melded with the NDAA that might not have an immediate nexus to the military itself.
00:04:44.800In fact, it was the NDAA that was the legislative vehicle for paid family leave, which was a major priority of Ivanka Trump.
00:04:53.120And so I'm here on Capitol Hill. I've had a few meetings on this issue this morning.
00:04:58.880And what I can tell you is that the vote on whether or not to override a potential veto will be very different than the initial vote on the NDAA.
00:05:08.820The NDAA passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.
00:05:13.800I didn't vote for it because I thought it put too many barriers in front of the Trump administration for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.
00:05:22.300And if you can believe it, even Germany, the armed services committees in the House and Senate think that we haven't progressed to the point to be able to draw down to 25,000 troops in Germany, for goodness sakes.
00:05:34.920I mean, World War Two has been over for a while.
00:05:37.540So President Trump, I think, seeing that the NDAA took a few positions that were adverse to his administration, has no problem threatening to veto that bill, flexing some legislative muscle, wanting to see a repeal of Section 230.
00:05:53.280Now, the Senate Armed Services Chairman, Jim Imhoff, is a key player here.
00:05:58.280He recently indicated that he will not work in the conference committee to include the 230 repeal.
00:06:05.020President Trump tweeting at Imhoff that he was disappointed in that and that he may, in fact, veto the bill anyway.
00:06:13.340So I think that the vote on a veto override proposition before the House of Representatives in the Senate would go very different than the initial vote on the NDAA.
00:06:23.240And it's my hope that we use this opportunity to create online fairness.
00:06:29.520How people interact with online platforms is so central to how we live our lives.
00:06:35.300And we ought to have the ability to communicate freely.
00:06:38.700We ought to have a dynamic and creative and innovative marketplace of ideas online.
00:06:45.300And I'm glad that the president is fighting for the people of our country against these tech oligarchs.
00:06:52.200And it's interesting to see who in Congress is on the side of the president, who's on the side of the people, and who is just doing the bidding of their Silicon Valley donors.
00:07:04.040Should a private business be allowed to force their employees to wear gay pride shirts?
00:07:14.040That's the question being ripened in a lawsuit brought by a Christian woman against Starbucks.
00:07:19.600We get the story from LifeSiteNews.com.
00:07:23.680And in this particular circumstance, Starbucks had a pride shirt and the employee asked whether or not she would be required to wear that shirt,
00:07:33.160arguing that it would be tantamount to forced speech by the company since her Christian faith recognizes that marriage can only be between one man and one woman.
00:07:43.180Her manager told her that she wouldn't have to wear the t-shirt at work,
00:07:47.120but then she was informed by the district manager subsequently that she had been terminated.
00:07:52.240So in these types of employment cases, you get to all the different causalities,
00:07:57.460whether or not truly the reason this woman was fired was because she would not wear the gay pride shirt.
00:08:02.960And I don't believe that any company should be able to force their employees into any sort of political statement or religious statement.
00:08:12.400I think we all ought to be able to go to work and do our jobs.
00:08:15.060And you ought to be fired from your job for doing a bad job, not because someone thinks you have bad politics or bad religion.
00:08:23.380We'll follow the story and the litigation.
00:08:25.580And it may say a lot about the way in which corporate America is bending to the woke-topia
00:08:32.020and the tools that they might or might not have at their disposal in their relationships with their employees.
00:08:45.040On the agenda, up for a vote today in the House of Representatives.
00:08:48.760I go into great deal on the substance of this bill in episode 80 of the podcast,
00:08:53.200but I want to give you a flavor of the debate we had on the floor prior to the bill's passage today.
00:08:59.500Here's Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee describing the legislation.
00:09:03.140To summarize the provisions of the Moore Act, they fall into three categories.
00:09:07.440First, simply, it would remove marijuana or cannabis from the list or the schedule of federally controlled substances.
00:09:14.340This means that going forward, individuals could no longer be prosecuted federally for marijuana offenses.
00:09:20.980This does not mean that marijuana would now be legal in the entire United States, as some have tried to argue.
00:09:27.000It would simply remove the federal government from interfering with state laws and state structures from the business of prosecuting marijuana cases
00:09:37.480and would leave the question of legality to the individual states.
00:09:41.840Those states choosing to decriminalize can do so without ongoing interference from the federal government.
00:09:48.420And those states that choose to continue to make marijuana illegal can continue to do so as well.
00:09:54.740Second, the bill would establish a taxation structure to collect a sales tax on marijuana,
00:10:01.360which over the course of five years could increase from five to eight percent.
00:10:05.840Finally, the bill would expunge and seal federal marijuana arrest and convictions and resentence offenders as appropriate.
00:10:12.760I also offered debate on this imperfect bill, but a bill that I think would help the country take a listen.
00:10:22.760It uses cannabis policy to do a great deal of social engineering, to create new taxes and new programs and redistribution of assets.
00:10:33.360But I am here as the only Republican co-sponsor of the Moore Act, and I'm voting for it.
00:10:38.720Because the federal government has lied to the people of this country about marijuana for a generation.
00:10:44.520We have seen a generation, particularly of black and brown youth, locked up for offenses that should have not resulted in any incarceration whatsoever.
00:10:55.520I'm also deeply troubled that the current policy of the federal government inhibits research into cannabis.
00:11:01.940Research that could unlock cures and help people live better lives.
00:11:06.320My Republican colleagues today will make a number of arguments against this bill, but those arguments are overwhelmingly losing with the American people.
00:11:16.780In every state where cannabis reform was on the ballot in this country, it passed.
00:11:24.960Matter of fact, the only thing that I know that's more popular than getting out of the war on drugs is getting out of the war in Afghanistan.
00:11:32.160But if we were measuring the success in the war on drugs, it would be hard to conclude anything other than the fact that drugs have won.
00:11:41.680Because the American people do not support the policies of incarceration, limited research, limited choice, and particularly constraining medical application.
00:11:53.140We are here in a time where many people in our country are suffering.
00:11:56.140They are in pain, and it is documented that states with medical cannabis programs see a reduction in the prescribing of opioids and the number of opioid abuses and deaths.
00:12:09.280We've held hearings in the House Judiciary Committee where people in our government must confess that this is in fact true.
00:12:15.600That the more we give people access to medical cannabis programs, the more we see a blunting of this horrible scourge of opioid addiction and opioid abuse.
00:12:28.060We talk all the time on the right about the need to empower people and empower states.
00:12:34.040Right now, the federal policy on cannabis constrains our people.
00:12:38.380It limits our states, and I would only hope that in the 117th Congress, after this bill invariably dies in the Senate, that we'll actually come back and pass the States Act.
00:12:48.060Because the States Act acknowledges that we have screwed this up in the federal government.
00:12:54.560And while we've screwed it up, states have taken action, they've designed programs in the way that our great federalist system promises.
00:13:00.800And if we were to pass the States Act, then best practices would emerge, states that developed applicable programs for their people would be replicable, and we would see better policies.
00:13:24.980Of course, we get our share of weird stories that come out of the state of Florida, but it seems lately California has been more than pulling their weight.
00:13:37.460We get the story that in the San Diego School District, teachers are now being forced to attend white privilege training.
00:13:49.240They're told that there is inherent racism in all of them, and that this is now somehow an essential requirement of being able to provide instruction to young people.
00:14:07.700We want our schools to be places where everyone is accepted and given the opportunity to advance themselves and contribute to a growing skill library within their own lives.
00:14:22.340And so the notion that we've got to take time that could be spent giving teachers more digital instruction, more assistance in the unique complexities of teaching in the era of COVID.
00:14:35.000Instead of doing all that, we have to sit down teachers and tell them they're racist and that their work is the subject of privilege.
00:16:54.240And Singapore appears to be first to give this option to their people.
00:16:59.420We'll see how many folks taking advantage of it.
00:17:02.260I prefer my chicken to have had feathers at some point and been clucking and then to end up on a barbecue grill.
00:17:10.200The American people do not like it when their leaders tell them that they have to change their living activities and their lives as a result of coronavirus.
00:17:25.620But then those very same leaders go out and enjoy the full compliments of life.
00:17:31.880Austin's mayor is sort of the latest to get tagged with this hypocrisy as a consequence of a video he made urging residents to stay home while the video was shot from Cabo.
00:18:04.600We're going to be looking really closely.
00:18:06.460And it's just quite something that he delivered this from Mexico and thought that somehow he wasn't going to get busted for it.
00:18:14.560I don't begrudge people in office who want to get their hair done or have dinner or go on vacation.
00:18:21.100Matter of fact, I want to do all those things, too.
00:18:23.040I just think it's troubling when they feel as though their reaction to the coronavirus must be some lockdown or edict that they clearly themselves don't believe.
00:18:34.500Right. And what it does is it undermines people's confidence in any edict from government when the very leaders don't seem to treat it seriously themselves.
00:18:44.420And I think during covid, we've really seen a dynamic where local leaders want to appear to be doing something.
00:18:51.680They they want to appear to be empathetic to the pain and loss that people are enduring.
00:18:57.240And so they go and take these lockdown steps without really understanding the nexus to the science.
00:19:04.080And then when they don't understand the nexus to the science, they, of course, don't adhere to that themselves.
00:19:25.400You can give us a big hand by offering a five star rating on iTunes or your listening platform of choice and write in the comments section if there are stories or questions you have about the inner workings of the United States Congress.
00:19:38.560We hope you subscribe and join us next week for more Hot Takes.