In this episode of Firebrand, we discuss the Democratic response to the continuing resolution that passed Congress today, and how Joe Biden's new press secretary, Corrine Jean-Pierre, is obsessed with me. We also discuss the impact of the shutdown on the economy, the border crisis, and inflation.
00:00:30.000You ever watch this guy on television? It's like a machine. Matt Gaetz.
00:00:38.060I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet. Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
00:00:45.980They aren't really coming for me. They're coming for you. I'm just in the way.
00:00:51.020Welcome back to Firebrand. We are live in room 1721 of the Longworth Office Building here in the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C.
00:01:02.980I've got very important information that you need regarding a government funding bill that Nancy Pelosi was able to pass with a lot of Republican support.
00:01:14.080Shameful, really bad for the country, going to exacerbate the border crisis, the inflation crisis,
00:01:20.180and it's even going to allow Nancy Pelosi to rule with a dead hand after she's no longer likely to be Speaker of the House.
00:01:29.240My Legislative Director, Mike Robertson, will be joining us in just a moment to go over that
00:01:33.660and to go into some of the real bad funding decisions that are reflected in the continuing resolution that was passed in the Congress today.
00:01:41.140We're also going to talk about some of the anti-big tech legislation that we also were able to pass.
00:01:47.240I voted for that. I think these large technology platforms have too much power,
00:01:52.220should not be able to engage in some of the mergers and acquisitions that give them the ability to stifle thought and speech.
00:06:28.360If you ever look up secondhand embarrassment, I think that's probably what you would get.
00:06:36.980It is painful to watch Corrine Jean-Pierre have to explain that when Joe Biden was asking whether or not someone who had tragically and very publicly passed away months earlier when he was calling that person's name and asking if they were there,
00:06:52.540she is now trying to spin that as to some sort of recognition as to what's on the top of Joe Biden's mind.
00:06:59.300I mean, is it a mind left at all, one has to ask at this point, with Joe Biden often not knowing where he is, where he's going, who he's talking to,
00:07:10.760or even who is dead or alive in the United States Congress.
00:07:16.780And then it just should have been acknowledged.
00:07:19.360Like, you know, everybody can make an embarrassing mistake behind a microphone a time or two.
00:07:24.320But when you do that, you should just say, oh, look, that was a really embarrassing mistake.
00:07:54.180Today in Congress, we reflect on the passage of critical legislation regarding big tech.
00:07:59.240That's right, we passed a bill that was sponsored by Ken Buck and David Cicilline that gives us the chance to raise filing fees on mergers over a billion dollars.
00:08:09.380Doing that will limit the ability of big tech to engage in the anti-competitive practices where if there is a potential competitor,
00:08:17.120if there is another technology, if there is another vector or plug-in, they just go and gobble them up and acquire them.
00:08:25.560In the House Judiciary Committee, we conducted a two-year bipartisan investigation into big tech.
00:08:32.200And we saw the emails and the messages and the strategy slides where Mark Zuckerberg himself is directing these acquisitions explicitly to harm the marketplace and to limit consumer choice.
00:08:44.640And when that power concentrates in big tech, we see the results, censorship, shadow banning conservatives,
00:08:52.160getting to a world in which the terms of service on Twitter feel like they're more important than the values that undergird the United States Constitution.
00:08:59.680So we need more enforcement of our antitrust laws.
00:09:03.640And to engage in that enforcement, we are going to raise filing fees on the 13% of mergers and acquisitions that occur over a billion dollars each and every year.
00:09:13.700So this is not companies with an acquisition, a merger, valued at less than a billion dollars.
00:09:34.800But the reality is big tech descended their lobbyists on Capitol Hill like a swarm of locusts to try to kill these bills.
00:09:44.540And the reality is we got them passed anyway.
00:09:46.600We also passed legislation that will allow every attorney general in America to be a part of the infrastructure legally to hold big tech accountable.
00:09:57.200Used to be big tech could always get home venue in California where they're likely to get friendly judges, friendly juries.
00:10:06.380Now with the venue bills that we passed, big tech operating everywhere can be sued everywhere.
00:10:12.400And I hope that we get some really bright, aggressive attorneys general who are able to assemble the human talent to build the cases that these companies are committing fraud in some circumstances, violating their own terms of service.
00:10:26.480They may be involved in RICO in some events with predicate criminal acts.
00:10:32.540So I'm glad that that power is now being vested in the states where it should be.
00:10:36.820One thing that did happen in Congress today was also the passage of legislation that harms our federalist system, deprives states of the ability to innovate, and it continues the failures of the federal government on a continuing resolution into December.
00:11:30.120Well, first with the December 16th, this is a symptom of what are our legislators on the right side of the aisle actually here for?
00:11:36.580We can't meet today, by the way, you know, 930, September 30th is the end of the fiscal quarter, end of the fiscal year.
00:11:43.360And by kicking the can down the road, we are not really making any progress as a party or as a country because we're allowing the same exact appropriators that couldn't meet a deadline on September 30th to get another strike at this.
00:11:55.820And a lot of these members are retiring.
00:11:57.720They've got their coffers lined up for some earmarks, and they've got everything lined up on this.
00:12:02.640Another thing to look at, let's begin, this was conducted on a shell bill for a price control on insulin.
00:12:09.940And that's just a symptom of some people on the right and a lot of people on the left are of this doctrine of price controls and evading the traditional budget process in this country.
00:12:19.220We're supposed to have 12 separate appropriations bills.
00:12:59.800Everybody always says in a $100 billion European war, it's always the last $12 billion that wins it for you.
00:13:05.220Yeah, it really kicks in the door is what I heard.
00:13:07.120So, well, again, CR, in the minority, it's really not a bad idea to keep stringing along to stop all this excessive spending.
00:13:15.520But conservatives and Democrats alike have polluted this process by upping the spending in the billions of dollars.
00:13:22.080And then on top of the $12 billion for another country, we've got $1.8 billion to keep the borders, the refugee assistance open in this country.
00:13:37.820When your members of Congress, when your senators vote for this continuing resolution, they are voting to fund the infrastructure that is turning our border into a turnstile.
00:13:48.680It is not just releasing people in our country, but quite literally drawing them from across our border to the United States and then giving them transportation, education, health care, cell phone, you name it, all at the expense of the American taxpayer.
00:14:04.160So, I really think, for me, the continuing failure at the border would be reason alone to vote against this $1.8 billion.
00:14:15.020So, $12 billion for Ukraine, $1.8 billion to continue the Biden administration's failures on the border.
00:14:21.220What else is in here that we don't like?
00:14:21.780Yeah, and that's just scratching the surface.
00:14:23.280So, those are the main moving items in terms of dollars and cents.
00:14:26.100But I just have to keep going back to this is a continuing resolution.
00:14:29.780We're supposed to, in an emergency situation, we didn't have a full year to pass a budget.
00:14:34.740We're going to keep spending where it is, resume in December 16th.
00:14:38.020We've got a half-a-billion-dollar increase on the cap for Social Security spending because the Democrats and some Republicans don't really want to fix that problem that's continually just keep kicking the can down the road, let the economy worsen, and they're just pointing on having some solution I haven't heard from leadership myself.
00:14:53.860And one thing that really we must take note of is there are not a lot of people calling for balanced budgets anymore.
00:15:01.320I mean, we used to at least have, you know, the stalwarts who would beat the table and demand balanced budgets.
00:15:08.500Now, it is just about how far out you want to kick the can down the road, not even toward a resolution of these critical entitlement funds.
00:15:19.000That's right, and I noticed that this extension kicking down the can happens to extend past election season before November, and, you know, everybody's out of pocket for November because it's really a symptom that a lot of politicians care more about getting reelected than a balanced budget in this country where we can be sustainable.
00:15:37.460Well, and they love to have the budget run out in December because members of Congress always have their Christmas travel plans, their Christmas family plans, and the lobbyists and the swamp monsters in this town can get anything they want out of Congress when Congress is backed up against a Christmas break.
00:15:56.380And, I mean, you know, it's shameful, really, because you think about George Washington crossing the Delaware River, you know, at a time when the German Hessians were celebrating holiday and having festivity, and it was that, like, raw patriotism that carved our country out of wilderness and won our freedoms.
00:16:14.700And now you have a Congress that can't be bothered to actually go through appropriations, but that just sets up this cliff around Christmas that we all know will result in more of the same, more failure and more empowering the Biden administration.
00:16:29.020Right, and in my heart, I don't think that George Washington would be very proud to say we're spending our December doubling the allocations for agriculture and FDA, suicide hotlines, and other things that may sound great in principle, and we do rely on those things, but this is not to be tucked away in an extension deadline bill.
00:16:48.000That's for the budget, which we don't have yet.
00:16:51.600You have to understand what Mike said.
00:16:53.840This was a piece of legislation regarding insulin prices, and they attached the entire funding of our government and Ukraine's to that bill so that these programs and these policy choices would not be subject to committee review and to hearings and to markups and amendments, because they don't want you to be able to amend what's part of their deal that enriches them at the expense of the people in this country.
00:17:23.320We as Republicans have to be willing to grind this corrupt place to a halt if necessary to deliver wins for our people.
00:17:31.080And here's one that I've been discussing with some of my colleagues, Mike.
00:17:34.420Shutting it down over work requirements.
00:17:36.660You want to talk about something that unites Republican, Democrat, independent business owners, people out in the workforce?
00:17:43.620It's the notion that we shouldn't be paying people not to work if you've got a bunch of able-bodied, childless adults getting a whole lot of welfare programs.
00:17:50.840So I actually think that we could unify a Republican caucus around the theory that we don't fund these entitlement programs anymore without work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults.