Joe Biden announces he s finally heading to the border, and that he s shifting his immigration policy to stop illegal border crossings, the speakership crisis in the House hits day four, and Prince Harry s new book is filled with wine. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and you know what that means? It s the two year anniversary of January 6th, 2021. The day that the media will spend all day today talking about all day. All you're going to hear all day is about January 6, 2021, and I'm going to mention it and then that's all I'll say about it because it happened two years ago and that's the whole thing. That's what I really want to talk about today: the fact that we have a massive crisis on our southern border since Joe Biden took office. And now Joe Biden is finally starting to realize that maybe he should do something about that, and now he s going to go down to the southern border and try to solve the problem. But what he s really going to do is do exactly the opposite of what the media have been speculating about for the past two years: he s actually going to stand on the border and make a major announcement about what's going to happen in El Paso, Texas on January 8th, 2020. That s right, that s what I m talking about today. According to Mediaite, over the past 24 hours, President Joe Biden has solid plans to visit the border this Sunday. The White House announced the visit will take place this Sunday, and it will be this Sunday in the White House on Jan. 8th. Well, well, it s an absolute disaster up to now! Well, let's see what I mean by that, shall we? And I don t care that, because frankly, because I m not going to care that much, because the reason I don't care that is because I care that that s not enough, right? And I ll tell you what I do care that I do that, I ll talk about it on the show on the top of the show today, right here, on the podcast, on this episode of the Ben Shapiro show, on Monday morning, on The FiveThirtyEight podcast. And I'll tell you why I think that s a good thing, and why you should listen to it, too, on Tuesday morning in the morning, not on Wednesday morning in San Francisco, on Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles, California, on Saturday morning in New York City.
00:00:00.000Joe Biden announces he's finally heading to the border and that he's shifting his immigration policy to stop illegal border crossings, the speakership crisis in the House hits day four, and Prince Harry's new book is filled with wine.
00:00:36.000Meanwhile, the speakership crisis in the house continues, but I'm not going to talk about that at the top of the show either because frankly, I don't care that much.
00:00:42.000The reason I don't care that Is because in the end, somebody is going to be elected Speaker.
00:00:47.000That person is going to be faced with the same set of institutional problems any Speaker of the House is faced with in the Republican Party.
00:00:53.000And that means that not all that much is going to change.
00:00:55.000Because no matter what pledges are made, no matter who is made Speaker, that person is going to be faced with the prospect of a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President.
00:01:02.000They're going to have to negotiate deals with those Democrats.
00:01:04.000They're going to have to spend too much money.
00:01:06.000In fact, Republicans will always spend too much money, whether the President is a Democrat Or a Republican.
00:01:10.000The negotiations will be hard fought and in the end, bills will be signed.
00:01:15.000What I really want to talk about today is the fact that we have a massive crisis on our southern border.
00:01:19.000And that massive crisis on our southern border has amounted to 5 million people illegally crossing the southern border since Joe Biden took office.
00:01:26.000And now Joe Biden is finally starting to realize that maybe he should do something about that.
00:01:31.000When I say he's starting to realize that, what I mean is, he is using the cover of what's going on in the House To pretend that he has now formulated a working policy for our southern border.
00:01:40.000He does not have a working policy for our southern border.
00:01:42.000In fact, his policy is totally self-contradictory.
00:01:44.000For example, Joe Biden's new southern border policy is going to focus rather heavily on expanding the use of Title 42.
00:01:50.000Well, five seconds ago, the Biden administration was challenging Title 42 at the Supreme Court level, attempting to abolish Title 42.
00:01:57.000Title 42 is a CDC regulation that allows for the quick excommunication The quick throwing out of people who arrive at the border due to COVID concerns, due to a COVID crisis, a public health crisis.
00:02:13.000And so that's been challenged by a bunch of left-wingers, including the Biden administration, who have said, well, we don't want to enforce Title 42 anymore because the COVID crisis is effectively over.
00:02:21.000A bunch of Republican attorney generals and governors said, we would like for Title 42 to continue to be enforced so that we don't have this continuing wave.
00:02:28.000at the border and have that wave be exacerbated.
00:02:30.000So again, Biden challenged that in court.
00:02:52.000In any case, Joe Biden is now relying on a title that he himself wishes to end in Title 42.
00:02:57.000The biggest thing that's happening right now is that he wants to head down to the border and he wants to stand on the border and presumably change policy a little bit.
00:03:06.000But what he's really going to do is he's going to almost time shift illegal immigration.
00:03:12.000So you'll still get illegal immigration.
00:03:13.000It'll just come through sort of slightly different mechanisms.
00:03:17.000According to Mediaite, over the past 24 hours, President Biden has solidified plans for a border visit on Thursday afternoon in a statement emailed to Mediaite.
00:03:22.000The White House announced the visit will take place this Sunday in El Paso, Texas.
00:03:27.000The White House says on Sunday, January 8, the president will travel to El Paso.
00:03:30.000The president will assess border enforcement operations and meet with local elected officials and community leaders who have been important partners in managing the historic number of migrants fleeing political oppression and gang violence in Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
00:03:42.000This trip will be pooled press additional details to follow.
00:03:45.000So what exactly has Joe Biden's policy been up till now?
00:03:48.000Well, it's been an absolute disaster area.
00:03:51.000Andrew Arthur writes over at the Center for Immigration Studies late December talking about the Joe Biden policy thus far.
00:03:59.000He goes back and he talks about what Trump's policy was.
00:04:00.000He says, Biden is not the only president who has dealt with a migrant surge.
00:04:03.000He's just the most recent, when faced with a much smaller crisis at the Southwest border in fiscal year 2019, a year in which the Border Patrol apprehended just over 851,500 migrants.
00:04:12.000The Trump administration implemented numerous policies to stem the tide of illegal entries.
00:04:16.000The most prominent and successful of those policies was the Migrant Protection Protocols, MPP, that was better known as Remain in Mexico.
00:04:23.000Under Remain in Mexico, non-Mexican aliens apprehended at the southwest border were returned to Mexico to await their asylum hearings at the border port courts instead of just shipping them into the American interior and hoping that they would show up at court.
00:04:33.000In an October 2019 assessment of the program, DHS determined that Remain in Mexico had been, quote, an indispensable tool in addressing the ongoing crisis at the southern border.
00:04:41.000You'll recall that Joe Biden then declared that this indispensable tool was just racism, that if you force people to wait in Mexico for their asylum requests to be granted, you're actually a giant racist.
00:04:51.000And then once Joe Biden was in place, Then he attempted to rescind, remain in Mexico.
00:04:56.000DHS issued an announcement on inauguration day, suspending new enrollments in that program, effective January 21st of 2021.
00:05:03.000And they said they were going to quickly process the 25,000 migrants remaining in Mexico under the program into the United States, which prompted Texas and Missouri to push back, suing in federal court.
00:05:12.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:06:20.000Looks like things are slowing pretty significantly.
00:06:22.000Well, if you're a small business and you've spent way too much money on your taxes, which you probably did over the course of the last couple of years, if you could claw that back, why wouldn't you?
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00:07:18.000Meanwhile, he has been using Title 42 while simultaneously opposing Title 42.
00:07:22.000So he's rejecting some, he's letting in a lot more.
00:07:27.000Again, all of the policies that have been proposed by the Biden administration have been a giant failure.
00:07:32.000There have been huge failures of apprehension at the southern border, wild underfunding of Border Patrol, wild funding of the courts.
00:07:39.000There are only about 500 immigration judges who are available.
00:07:41.000Joe Biden says he wants to expand that by 100.
00:07:43.000That is not even going to come close to processing the literally millions of cases that are now backlogged in the system.
00:07:49.000So the policy makes very little sense right now because there is an actual internal split inside the Democratic Party over immigration.
00:07:57.000People like to talk about the internal incoherence of the Republican Party on a wide variety of issues.
00:08:02.000The truth is that positionally, there isn't a huge difference among Republicans on internal issues.
00:08:07.000It's just that there are a lot of personality fights and there's a lot of sort of attitudinal anger at each other inside the Republican caucus.
00:08:14.000Inside the Democratic Party, it is a more Heterogeneous party.
00:08:18.000It's a party that has serious arguments over immigration, for example, in which there are still a few border hawks who are living in Texas in the Democratic Party.
00:08:26.000And so Joe Biden has been attempting to split the baby this entire time.
00:08:30.000Well, according to Joe Biden, his new program is going to be to allow in 30,000 migrants a month from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela.
00:08:39.000So he's going to rapidly increase the number of people who are coming in legally from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela.
00:08:44.000He's going to order the rapid deportation of those who illegally enter the United States from those countries.
00:08:49.000Thousands of these four nationalities will be let into America via what Biden is calling a humanitarian parole program, according to the New York Post.
00:08:55.000But members of those groups are less likely to be admitted than other migrants who illegally cross the border.
00:08:59.000So, bizarrely, what he's now suggesting is that he's going to broaden the capacity for legal immigration for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Venezuela for humanitarian reasons, because all four of those countries are in serious trouble in terms of the regimes that run the countries.
00:09:12.000But at the same time, if you don't go through his program, he's going to reject you super fast.
00:09:15.000Meanwhile, if you're just from Mexico and you cross the border illegally, Whatever.
00:09:21.000So none of this makes a whole hell of a lot of sense.
00:09:25.000Biden said the citizens of those four countries, which include three left-wing totalitarian states plus Haiti, will need a U.S.
00:09:30.000sponsor and to pass a background check, unlike citizens of other nationalities who are routinely released after reaching the border.
00:09:36.000Biden said citizens of those four countries henceforth will not only be deported, but also barred from entering via the parole program in the future if they illegally cross the border.
00:09:43.000So he's getting harsh on a certain number of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan migrants.
00:09:50.000But if you're from Mexico or El Salvador or Honduras, then apparently if you cross the border illegally, then he's just going to kind of ignore you?
00:09:59.000It's a bizarre approach, at the very best.
00:10:01.000According to the New York Post, the two-pronged approach appears designed to blunt criticism from Republicans, as record numbers of migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border, while also placating Democrats and immigration advocates who say Title 42 restrictions adopted under Trump block migrants from exercising their right to apply for asylum.
00:10:16.000When we started expelling the Venezuelans, we saw a two-day drop in apprehension numbers, Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol Agents Union, told the Post.
00:10:22.000Then the numbers started to climb back up.
00:10:23.000What the cartels did was they just replaced them with another population of migrants.
00:10:27.000So, what happens is when you say, Venezuelans, Cuban, Nicaraguans, Haitians, most of you will be rejected, some of you will be accepted, and then just hope that illegal immigration goes away because a huge bulk of people who are arriving at the southern border are not from those particular countries.
00:11:12.000A crisis is when Ron DeSantis ships 11 illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard.
00:11:16.000A situation is when 5 million people show up on the southern border and are summarily let into the country without any real way to track them.
00:11:24.000Vice President, I'd like to talk to you about how my administration is dealing with our situation on the southwest border.
00:11:36.000And as you'll recall, Joe Biden put in charge of the border situation, as he calls it, Kamala Harris, whose main job thus far has consisted of lying about traveling to the southwest border and then going to the Northern Triangle.
00:11:47.000Do you have any plans to visit the border?
00:11:49.000talk about how we need to make the conditions better there, doing nothing to make the conditions better there.
00:11:53.000And then apparently speaking incoherently about how much she likes school buses.
00:12:55.000Again, if you watch politics and recognize that there is no plan for anybody, that it's basically just veep, it becomes a lot more amusing.
00:13:01.000When you realize that it's just high comedy.
00:13:03.000I mean, I understand that there are lives at stake and literally millions of people crossing our Southwest border.
00:13:09.000Politics is a tragic comedy because it's a bunch of comedic fools who are running the country.
00:13:13.000And meanwhile, there are serious issues that are affecting Americans.
00:13:16.000And you have people who have applesauce for brains.
00:13:19.000I mean, here is Joe Biden, the current president of the United States, whose neurons no longer function, talking about President Harris, his vice president.
00:14:19.000One, that people who are coming from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, that they are escaping human rights abuses.
00:14:23.000And so we ought to be very Warm toward people who are escaping human rights abuses.
00:14:28.000He then compared them to people attempting to escape the Holocaust, which is an absurdity of an extraordinarily high order.
00:14:33.000The humanitarian situation in Venezuela is a horror show.
00:14:36.000The same has been true in Cuba for 70 years.
00:14:40.000There is not the systematic genocide of millions of human beings happening in these countries that happened during the Holocaust.
00:14:49.000And by the way, if that were the case, if Joe Biden actually were making that case, wouldn't the moral impetus be for admitting all of them?
00:15:16.000Well, I think it is a human right if your family's being persecuted, if you're being dealt with in a way.
00:15:22.000I mean, like, I thought it was a human right for, you know, Jews in Germany to be able to go get their escape and get help where they could.
00:15:34.000I assume that he is in disagreement with his great ideological hero, FDR, who literally turned away boatloads of Jews in the middle of World War II and sent them back to Europe, where they were summarily slaughtered in concentration camps.
00:16:21.000If you're trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua or Haiti, You have, or have agreed to begin a journey to America.
00:16:29.000Do not, do not just show up at the border.
00:16:33.000Stay where you are and apply legally from there.
00:16:37.000Just stay where you are and apply legally from there, and then drop by and be like, But when Joe Biden says it, it's totally fine, guys, because that's how our media work.
00:16:46.000If a Democrat says the exact same thing as a Republican, but without the Trump voice, then it is magically conciliatory and decent.
00:16:55.000Now, again, I don't know how he's holding these two ideas in his head.
00:16:59.000One, migrants who are attempting to escape from deeply anti-humanitarian hellholes, that those people have essentially a right to come to the United States.
00:17:07.000Also, stay in your home country and apply or we're going to turn you away.
00:17:12.000Speaking of things that make no sense, again, he's expanding the use of Title 42 to reject people at the border, while simultaneously claiming that Title 42 makes things even worse.
00:17:30.000People turned away under Title 42, and they're not barred from trying to come back.
00:17:36.000They've been turned away, they go back, they try again, they try again.
00:17:40.000Well, You know, they can and they do try to re-enter the United States again and again, which makes the problem at the border even worse.
00:17:51.000So Title 42 makes the problem even worse by rejecting people and then they show up again.
00:17:55.000But he's expanding the use of Title 42 to reject people, even though his administration has challenged Title 42 in court.
00:18:02.000And then Biden actually was asked about Title 42 and what happens when Title 42 goes away, since it is completely predicated on a law, which is a COVID crisis at this point.
00:18:10.000He says, well, at that point, we'll just use random titles.
00:18:13.000I don't even know what he's talking about right here.
00:18:16.000Title 42 is going to go away before the end of the year in terms of the Supreme Court, my prediction.
00:18:20.000And then we're going to have to use Title IX, Title 8.
00:18:34.000That's when we're going to use the sexual harassment law of Title IX to make sure that women's softball is fully finambonied, fully funded to stop illegal immigration.
00:18:46.000He is a genius, is the president of the United States.
00:19:00.000A top Democrat, Bob Menendez, Senate Democrat.
00:19:03.000who has been a long time advocate of Cuban immigration into the United States.
00:19:08.000He put out a statement saying the Biden administration's decision to expand Title 42, a disastrous and inhumane relic of the Trump administration's racist immigration agenda, is an affront to restoring rule of law at the border.
00:19:17.000Additionally, their decision to create an unlawful transit ban erases the words and values etched on the Statue of Liberty.
00:19:22.000I'm deeply disturbed that instead of working with Congress to develop a solution to the multiple humanitarian crises that are fueling mass migration in our hemisphere, The administration is circumventing immigration law, which will exacerbate chaos and confusion at the southern border.
00:19:33.000While I'm glad the Biden administration will be increasing access to parole for an extremely limited number of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Haitians, This benefit will exclude migrants fleeing violence and persecution who do not have the ability or economic means to qualify for the new parole process.
00:19:47.000Ultimately, this use of the parole authority is merely an attempt to replace our asylum laws, and thousands of asylum seekers waiting to present their cases will be hurt as a result.
00:19:54.000Now listen, Bob Menendez is a wild left-winger.
00:19:56.000When it comes to immigration, he essentially wants open borders, but at least he's being consistent.
00:20:00.000He's making the case that Joe Biden was making about five seconds ago.
00:20:04.000At least Bob Menendez is gutsier than Eric Adams, who continues as mayor of New York to simultaneously say that he's got a border crisis with people being shipped by the thousands into his city, and also that Joe Biden is doing an amazing job.
00:20:16.000I believe what the president is putting in place is going to assist with dealing with the flow of migrants.
00:20:23.000We're receiving a large number from the groups that he's now going to include in the Venezuelan a part of this.
00:20:31.000He's going to increase other groups in that, which is very important.
00:20:36.000But the reality is we have a crisis at our border.
00:20:43.000Okay, but they're not addressing the crisis.
00:20:45.000They're trying to put a band-aid on it.
00:20:46.000Center for Immigration Studies, again, critiques the new plan.
00:20:49.000They say, aliens would have illegally entered will now be able to access the CBP, that's the Border Patrol, one mobile application for scheduling an appointment to present themselves for inspection and to initiate a protection claim instead of coming directly to a port of entry to wait.
00:21:04.000This has been a program that's been in existence since back in November.
00:21:07.000The administration claims this plan will allow aliens to enter the United States lawfully through ports of entry.
00:21:11.000But in reality, entering without a visa through a port of entry is still illegal.
00:21:14.000So now they're just telling them, use your cell phone and set an appointment as to when you illegally enter the country.
00:21:19.000So that's essentially the shell game that is being played here.
00:21:23.000The administration says that it's going to impose new consequences for individuals who attempt to enter unlawfully, which sounds great, unless you realize that what they mean is expedited removal, which is what Biden has already been doing, and which then results in people arriving back at the border about five seconds later.
00:21:38.000As Center for Immigration Studies points out, of the more than 141,000 aliens apprehended by the Border Patrol at the southwest border in November, who were not expelled under Title 42, for example, fewer than 6,500, 4.6% of the total, were subject to expedited removal.
00:21:51.000So if they already had that power and haven't used that power, then why hasn't the DHS used that power?
00:21:56.000And what's to suggest that Joe Biden is going to use that power for very long?
00:21:59.000The bottom line is that this administration does not know whether it wants mass migration or whether it wants to paper over the problem with mass migration.
00:22:05.000And so they've come up with a radically incoherent policy.
00:22:08.000So naturally, the final sort of straw here, the final move when you have no successful policy is blame the Republicans.
00:22:14.000Adam Schiff is saying that we can't do anything.
00:22:17.000And the representative from California, he's saying, well, it's really Republicans fault, of course.
00:22:22.000But with more than 2.76 million migrant crossings last year alone, do you think this should have been more of a priority for the Democrats?
00:22:31.000I think it has been a very strong priority, and what we really need is a comprehensive approach to the border that is fair and humane and enforceable.
00:22:40.000And it's very hard to do that on a single-party basis.
00:22:44.000We really need to work together on this.
00:22:46.000We have come close at times, but at the moment, it seems to be, again, the third rail of American politics.
00:22:55.000So finally, Blaine, you guys are in charge of the government.
00:22:58.000You were in charge of the government for two years.
00:23:00.000You did nothing except let in millions of illegal immigrants.
00:23:02.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:23:04.000First, the situation in Ukraine continues to be really, really terrible.
00:23:07.000Whatever your opinions on the Ukraine conflict, there's a lot of suffering on the ground right now, which is why I'm glad the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is hard at work in the country.
00:23:14.000They've been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.
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00:23:57.000Head online to benforthefellowship.org or techshapiro to 41444.
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00:25:09.000Hey, well, now would be a really good time for Republicans to be able to pass a bill, say, you know, funding Border Patrol and making sure that there are immigration judges on the border and mandating that the executive branch actually enforce immigration law.
00:25:19.000Like, now would be an excellent time to do that.
00:25:21.000Unfortunately, the House of Representatives continues to be mired down in this speakership battle, the point of which is utterly unclear at this point.
00:25:29.000Since apparently things are just going to stagnate.
00:25:31.000The people who don't want McCarthy to be speaker, make your list of demands public.
00:25:36.000Now, this has been something that the folks on my side of the aisle, folks on the very conservative right have said for a long time.
00:25:43.000Why not make more negotiations publicly available so that we know whose side we are on?
00:25:48.000If you're negotiating right now with Kevin McCarthy and you're trying to get concessions out of him, rules concessions, for example, or slots on particular committees, why can't we know those things?
00:25:57.000If we are all sitting here watching as this speakership battle plays out, as I've said, the stakes are really low because no matter who becomes Speaker of the House, they'll be faced with the exact same set of institutional incentives.
00:26:08.000They'll be faced with an extraordinarily fractious caucus in which several members of the House, whether they happen to be on the left wing of the Republican Party or the right wing of the Republican Party, or even in the center, Several members can basically hold hostage the rest of the caucus because the majority just ain't that big.
00:26:22.000It's 222 seats, which means they have a majority of four, effectively speaking.
00:26:26.000So that means that just a very small cadre of people can hold hostage the rest of the caucus.
00:26:31.000It means that anytime a bill gets signed, they're going to be a bunch of people who shout and scream.
00:26:35.000It also means that bills will get signed because the government will continue to be funded because there is no chance that we end up with a fulsome government shutdown for years on end.
00:26:43.000It's just not going to happen on a realistic level.
00:26:45.000And people like me, I've said before, I don't care when the government shuts down because I think that the vast majority of programs that are mandatory continue to operate.
00:26:52.000And most of the rest of it, I would prefer it goes away in the first place.
00:26:55.000But realistically speaking, is that going to happen?
00:26:58.000The vast majority of the American people aren't generally on board with long lasting government shutdowns by every available poll and by election results.
00:27:06.000So with that said, whether it's McCarthy, whether it's Jim Jordan, whether it's Steve Scalise, whether it's anybody else, same set of institutional incentives.
00:27:17.000Let's say that you are very much in favor of exacting more concessions from McCarthy.
00:27:21.000All right, make a list of the concessions and let's see them.
00:27:23.000Now, if the concession is that it's just McCarthy who goes away, who would you rather have?
00:27:27.000So, as I pointed out yesterday on the program, many of the people who want McCarthy to go are not actually saying who they would like to replace McCarthy.
00:27:36.000They've come up with a sort of bizarre list of people who they're throwing out there at this point.
00:27:40.000Like, if that's your main demand, shouldn't you have one person you consolidate behind and just push him?
00:27:59.000He got one vote yesterday and the only vote he got was Matt Gaetz.
00:28:02.000Even Donald Trump supports Kevin McCarthy, by the way.
00:28:05.000I will say that here is Gaetz nominating Trump.
00:28:08.000We'll see Trump's response, which is actually pretty funny.
00:28:11.000Energy was abundant, wages were rising, capital was returning from overseas to fund the dreams and ambitions of our fellow Americans, and the economy was roaring.
00:28:24.000What a contrast to what we have seen from this administration now.
00:28:29.000And so I rise to nominate Donald Trump for the position of Speaker of the House.
00:28:33.000And for all of the vitriol that we hear from the media and at times the left, there were great moments of bipartisanship under the Trump presidency.
00:28:45.000Donald Trump isn't a member of the House.
00:28:47.000I know there's always this talk about how the Speaker doesn't have to be a member of the House.
00:28:50.000Realistically speaking, is this a real thing?
00:28:53.000Is this a serious proposal by Matt Gaetz?
00:28:59.000So Trump put out on Truth Social a picture of himself in the Speaker's seat, right?
00:29:05.000It's like a Photoshopped picture of himself in the Speaker's seat, in Pelosi's seat, at the last State of the Union, and it's Biden speaking in the front, and then Kamala Harris sitting there, and then Trump sitting there with his tongue out, like, How am I supposed to take this shit seriously?
00:30:48.000Do you have a list of them so we can go through those?
00:30:50.000Because what I'm hearing is that, again, of the 20 members who are holding out against McCarthy, probably 10 to 15 of them Already agree on a deal with McCarthy to change rules and garner concessions from him.
00:31:02.000By the way, concessions that will end up being pro-forma anyway.
00:31:05.000And I'll tell you the reason they're pro-forma is because eventually you'll get your vote on term limits, for example, and it will go down in flaming defeat because the House ain't going to vote term limits on itself.
00:31:14.000You'll get your vote on a balanced budget, and then it'll get murdered in the Senate.
00:31:19.000So you can do all this stuff for show, but the actual realistic effect... I hate to be the political realist here, in which actual reality exists.
00:31:50.000It's been false in politics for a very, very long time.
00:31:52.000Thomas Sowell has pointed out that when it comes to politics or virtually anything else in life, Generally, when you see a person in a position fail, and then his successor fails, and then his successor fails, and then his successor fails, which is what you have seen from Republican speakers going all the way back to Newt Gingrich, the question isn't the person at the top.
00:32:07.000The question is the incentive structure for the job itself.
00:32:11.000What can you actually do with the job?
00:32:13.000Here is, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene being a realist.
00:32:17.000I think the American people, no matter how you vote, are sick and tired of drama, and this is nothing but drama.
00:32:23.000We're on multiple days now with multiple candidates from this group, so I'm not sure how Lauren Boebert on one hand can demand so much out of Kevin McCarthy, but then demand nothing out of someone else and be willing to vote for them to be Speaker.
00:33:33.000We need to learn how to take a victory.
00:33:35.000And by Kevin McCarthy's leadership, he's given us victories on rules.
00:33:39.000He's given us victories on keeping costs down.
00:33:41.000He's given us victories with winning a majority back.
00:33:44.000I'm so proud to be a part of majority-making class, and he's earned my trust.
00:33:51.000Okay, so even if you don't trust Kevin McCarthy, which is fine, then why don't you just make clear what commitments you are seeking from him?
00:33:58.000At the other night, Tucker Carlson suggested that McCarthy, with a couple of concessions, could win the speakership.
00:34:03.000And McCarthy could, first, make transparent everything January 6th related, and second, he could give Thomas Massie, the representative from Kentucky, the power to investigate the FBI.
00:34:41.000The votes won't go anywhere because, let's be real about this, you don't even have enough Republican votes to pass a lawmaker term limit bill.
00:34:50.000Major changes to the appropriations process to prevent another omnibus bill by allowing floor amendments to be offered by any lawmaker.
00:34:56.000Now, again, I happen to think that's a fine idea.
00:34:59.000More consideration has now been given to the Speaker than was given to a $1.7 trillion omnibus package that was crammed through with 48 hours notice.
00:35:06.000So I'm fine with a longer legislative process in which everybody gets to propose their amendments, those amendments are voted down, earmarks get put in, earmarks get taken out.
00:35:16.000Now, I will say that the Speaker has become an extraordinarily powerless position, particularly among Republicans, when the Speaker does not have the power to actually leverage his members.
00:35:37.000So next time you want to pass some sort of tax-cutting bill, next time you want to pass a bill that bans funding for Planned Parenthood, And you have some left-wing members of the caucus who don't want to do it.
00:35:47.000What leverage are you going to hold over their head, exactly?
00:35:53.000In any case, he's given an extraordinary list of concessions at this point, which is why my understanding is that a huge percentage of those 20 holdouts against McCarthy are now getting ready to get on board with McCarthy.
00:36:04.000The problem is you still have like five or six of them who aren't, which doesn't get you to the threshold you need.
00:36:19.000And the thing you want can't just be, I don't like Kevin McCarthy, because you have 200 members of the caucus who are fine with Kevin McCarthy.
00:36:25.000Probably closer to 210 members of the caucus who are fine with Kevin McCarthy after they've exacted their concessions.
00:36:33.000This is why I keep saying, who is the person who is the alternative who is going to gather a unanimous vote?
00:36:39.000I mentioned yesterday, just statistically speaking, there has not been a unanimous vote for the Speaker of the House on the Republican side of the aisle since John Boehner in 2010.
00:36:47.000The biggest problem facing Kevin McCarthy right now is not that he has defectors.
00:36:50.000The biggest problem facing Kevin McCarthy is that the Republicans did such a garbage job in the last election cycle that instead of winning 230-35 seats, they ended up with 222.
00:36:59.000Which means that his margin of error is essentially nil.
00:37:02.000There has not been a Speaker of the House for the Republicans who has been elected since John Boehner in 2010.
00:37:16.000John Boehner had 25 defectors earlier in 2015.
00:37:20.000In 2013, Boehner had 12 defectors, which means that everybody is saying, well McCarthy is wildly underperforming because there's so many Republicans not on board.
00:37:28.000But once he gets most of them on board, Even five defectors will take him down.
00:37:31.000So the big sin here is that Republicans did crappy in the last election.
00:37:34.000Some of that is presumably due to McCarthy.
00:37:36.000Much of it is due to systemic failures that prevented McCarthy from intervening in primaries, frankly.
00:37:41.000There are a lot of people who won primaries in contested seats who should not have won primaries in contested seats.
00:37:58.000Make transparent what it is you want so we can decide whether the juice is worth the squeeze or whether this is just a series of self-glorifications at the expense of the interests of the American people and a conservative majority in the House of Representatives.
00:38:14.000Well, folks, last year, Jordan Peterson joined Daily Wire Plus, and he's been creating great content ever since, like logos and literacy on marriage.
00:38:21.000And now another brand new episode of Jordan's biblical series, Exodus.
00:38:25.000Jordan Peterson is just he's a wonderful person.
00:38:46.000OK, well, all of this is occurring among the Republicans, all this internal battling again.
00:38:51.000Still waiting to see what the outcome is or what the point is or how this radically shifts things other than just being sort of a waste of time overall.
00:38:59.000Hopefully we get some political wins out of this concessions made to Chip Roy, for example, and then we all finish this up and we move on with our lives.
00:39:07.000But meanwhile, Democrats are pretending that this is like the end of the world.
00:40:40.000It's basically putting everybody who watches it to sleep, except for the people who are very, very into sort of these ins and outs political games.
00:41:28.000I mean, if the government isn't there, every time you open your closet door, you just open, you wake up in the morning, you have to get dressed, you open your closet, and there's the government there to help you.
00:41:35.000And if you open your closet and the government wasn't there, what would you do?
00:42:59.000And most Americans aren't all that upset about it.
00:43:01.000Most Americans don't care about this, which is why, again, these sort of stupid political games, they may help a certain cadre of people who are attempting to raise money, or they may change rules in certain marginal ways that are helpful to conservatives.
00:43:13.000But in the end, is this going to be the large scale change this country needs?
00:43:16.000Not with a divided government and a 222 seat House majority and Democrats who are pretending that they are deeply concerned, so deeply concerned, it's all problematic, are just lying through their teeth about it.
00:43:26.000Okay, meanwhile, in news that I don't care about but everybody seems to want me to cover, Prince Harry has a book out.
00:43:32.000So let me make clear, we fought a revolution so we don't have to care about the royals.
00:43:35.000This is, but apparently that has not stopped us from caring about the royals.
00:43:38.000In fact, there must be something in the human heart that desires royalty, because we don't have an actual royal family in the United States.
00:43:45.000So we just follow other people's royal families.
00:43:48.000And then we treat our politicians like royalty.
00:43:49.000We have a State of the Union address where we pretend that Joe Biden is actually like a decrepit king.
00:43:54.000He's like Theoden of Rohan before he's, he's woken from his slumber by Gandalf.
00:44:00.000Just sitting there on the throne like, Gandalf Stormcrow.
00:44:10.000According to the New York Post, According to the New York Post, Prince Harry's revenge on his family, the media, the horsey older woman who deflowered him in a field behind a busy pub, and anyone who has ever treated him as a spare to Prince William's heir is literary self-harm.
00:44:26.000Every time Harry plotter, the half-wit prince, puts the knife into his brother, the fumbling assassin falls on his own blame.
00:44:50.000It's a grave matter, fighting with your own blood.
00:44:52.000Your brother is the person most like you in the world.
00:44:54.000William is the only person who knows what it felt like for Harry to lose his mother, Diana, to walk behind her coffin in front of the world, to go on alone without her, and to face the same barrage of flashbulbs in the line of duty.
00:45:03.000In some things he was my mirror, Harry reflects.
00:45:04.000In others, my polar opposite, my dear brother, my arch enemy.
00:45:10.000This is the whiniest royal person in human history.
00:45:14.000This is a person who lives in a palatial estate in California with his actress, harpy wife, and lectures all of us about the evils of American racism and class conflict.
00:46:44.000He gripes that Charles and William flew on separate private jets for reasons of safety, but no one gave a damn whom I traveled with.
00:46:49.000He wants us to know that half of their suite at the Balmoral Castle was less luxurious than William's.
00:46:54.000He complains that a boarding school that was confusing as hell to receive a slow and luxurious rinse from the hot matrons.
00:47:00.000So, it's just, he's so tiresome, and all these people are so tiresome, but I guess we're going to be subjected to them until the end of time, because after all, he is very woke, and this means that he actually is a sort of quasi-hero.
00:47:15.000Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.