In order to avoid a government shutdown, Republicans are willing to do whatever it takes to keep the government funded, including defunding Planned Parenthood and ending funding for the border wall. Is this the new normal? Or is it something worse? And what will happen if the government runs out of money and the Democrats don't get their way on a spending bill? Ben Shapiro explains what s going on and why it s time for Republicans to do what they need to do to avoid another government shutdown. He also discusses the Democratic Party's self-immolating reaction to the Supreme Court nominee, Neil M. Garland, and why they should have been smart enough to know that they don't have the votes needed to get him on the court. Plus, he talks about why the president should have a fifth Supreme Court vote, and what they should do if they don t have a candidate who s a good fit for the job. Links From This Episode: All Previous Podcast Episodes Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on iTunes Learn more about Ben Shapiro's new book, "The Dark Side of Politics: How to Win at the White House: The Inside Story of America's Most Powerful Political Strategy." Watch the video version of his new documentary, "Inside the Swamp," out now on Amazon Prime Video, wherever you get your favorite streaming platform. Watch this video on the internet, subscribe to his new show on Apple Podcasts and other major podcasting platforms wherever you re listening to the show. Subscribe on iTunes and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, you get the most up to date political news and social media platforms. Thanks for listening and let me know what you're listening to this episode of the Ben Shapiro is listening to Ben Shapiro s latest podcast! and more! . Thank you for listening? Subscribe and review Ben Shapiro: Subscribe? Leave a review on Apple Music, subscribe on iTunes Connected by clicking here and comment on your thoughts on this podcast? and share it on your podcast on social media? , and other links to Ben's Insta-related posts on the Ben's blog post on the podcast on his Insta story on the social media site , tweet me on Insta Story? & other links on this and other places he listens to Ben s Insta account or his podcast on Instagraspodcasts & his podcasting Thanks!
00:00:00.000You remember that time Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they were a minority in Congress, so Conservatives elected them to a majority?
00:00:07.000You remember that time the Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they were a minority in the Senate, so Conservatives elected them to a majority?
00:00:13.000Do you remember that time Republicans said they couldn't stop Democratic spending if they didn't have the White House, since the President could just use the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for a government shutdown, so Conservatives elected Trump President?
00:00:25.000Republicans now have the opportunity to pass continuing funding for the federal government through the budget process.
00:00:31.000This would be an excellent time to make approval of funding contingent on defunding of various Democratic priorities.
00:00:37.000After all, if Democrats attempt to shut down the government, presumably President Trump can rail against them by publicly blaming them for harming Americans, just like Obama did to Republicans.
00:00:47.000As Daniel Horowitz writes at Conservative Review, Senate Republicans have not only guaranteed Democrats they will give them all the policies and spending levels in the budget bill, but they will also jettison the president's request for a supplemental spending bill for construction of the border wall along with spending offsets.
00:01:03.000So, what kind of garbage are Republicans funding this time in order to avoid a government shutdown fight?
00:01:07.000You remember the same kind of fight they said a minority party could never win back in 2013?
00:01:12.000When Ted Cruz tried to defund Obamacare?
00:01:14.000First, they're going to keep funding for Planned Parenthood.
00:01:17.000So five minutes ago, President Trump was tweeting about how the Freedom Caucus had maintained federal funding for Planned Parenthood by not going along with Trumpcare.
00:01:24.000Now we learn that according to The Hill, Paul Ryan, quote, sought to avoid another political landmine on Tuesday by arguing that language defunding Planned Parenthood should be kept out of the spending legislation.
00:01:34.000He now says instead he wants to defund Planned Parenthood through reconciliation.
00:01:39.000What is stopping you, aside from your own political cowardice?
00:01:41.000Second, they said that they're going to keep funding for Obamacare.
00:01:44.000So, Republicans had time after time during the Obama administration that if they kept funding continuing budget resolutions, they'd be funding Obamacare.
00:01:51.000Now the Republicans control the whole process, and they're still going to fund Obamacare.
00:02:09.000Finally, apparently they're not going to fund the Trump wall.
00:02:11.000Republicans now say they won't provide the $3 billion of funding requested by the Trump administration to build a border wall, which was, of course, Trump's top campaign promise.
00:02:19.000They won't do it because they're afraid of Democratic filibuster.
00:02:23.000So, it appears that the new standard for Republicans is that the government must never shut down under any circumstances, which doesn't actually make them very different from Democrats, does it?
00:02:39.000Okay, so I have a lot to get to today.
00:02:41.000I'm going to begin today with the meltdown in the Democratic Party, the self-immolation of the Democratic Party, but then we have to get to the self-immolation of the Republican Party, which is twice as dramatic and twice as unacceptable, considering that they're the majority party in Congress and they have the presidency.
00:02:56.000So we'll start with the Democrats, who for some reason have decided to rush headlong over the Gorsuch Cliff.
00:03:00.000So right now, polls show that two to one, Americans think,
00:03:24.000And Republicans then nuke the filibuster.
00:03:26.000Next time Trump comes back with the swing vote, let's say Anthony Kennedy resigns, and suddenly Trump has that fifth vote on the Supreme Court, Democrats will have already nuked the filibuster, so they will have no option but to basically sit there and whine.
00:03:38.000So what they would be smarter off doing is saying, look, Gorsuch is a good consensus nominee, we'll pass him through, and then next time, that's when you have the filibuster fight.
00:03:45.000You say this is the fifth vote on the Supreme Court,
00:03:47.000We can't have somebody who's so far right-wing.
00:03:49.000We need somebody who's a consensus pick.
00:03:51.000That would be the smart politics of the situation, but that's not what they're doing.
00:03:54.000And that's because everybody on the Democratic side hates Trump so much that they're not even willing to engage in smart politics in order to hurt him, which is an incredible thing.
00:04:02.000Here's Chuck Schumer opposing the nomination of Judge Gorsuch.
00:04:07.000That's why he's having trouble earning 60 votes.
00:04:10.000There was a seismic change after his hearing.
00:04:14.000There were suspicions about Judge Gorsuch when you look at his early writings and who he hung out with, and particularly that it was on a list that the Heritage Foundation, who most Republicans think is too far to the right, was.
00:04:34.000Chuck Schumer clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
00:04:38.000He kind of loses his train of thought in the middle there and starts thinking about how nice it would be to be on a beach not talking about Judge Gorsuch because this is a losing issue for Democrats.
00:04:45.000The Democrats just continue to maintain that Trump is going to fall apart of his own accord.
00:04:50.000They're not going to have to do anything to push it and so they may as well just oppose him at every turn.
00:04:53.000Maxine Waters, whose hair most definitely does not look like James Brown's hair, stopped saying that.
00:04:58.000Maxine Waters said that Trump doesn't deserve to be president.
00:05:01.000He came to the presidency with the kind of character and background that made me distrust him, not honor him, and not respect him.
00:05:11.000And, of course, he got the presidency because he was able to get those votes from those few states that made him the winner.
00:05:42.000I mean, if this is their real plan here, their real plan is just that they're going to rail against Trump for the next four years, that would give Republicans a major opportunity.
00:05:48.000And what would give Republicans even more of an opportunity is the fact that the only real scandal on the table that we actually know about at this point is the intelligence community leaking.
00:05:56.000So people have talked about this, and I've said this ad infinitum at this point.
00:05:59.000The fact is that everybody's talking about Trump-Russia, the connections between Trump and the Russian government, supposedly.
00:06:04.000There hasn't been a shred of evidence right now showing coordination between the Trump team or the Trump campaign
00:06:11.000Lots and lots and lots of evidence, however, that the Obama intelligence community was widely disseminating information attempting to essentially implicate the Trump team in Russian ties and foreign ties.
00:06:24.000So a former Obama intelligence official, this video has been around for probably three weeks, but now it's sort of being passed around again because of Trump's accusations.
00:06:32.000This former Obama intelligence official
00:06:34.000She's, I guess, a former Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense.
00:06:37.000She says that it was clear that in the last days of the Obama administration, she, along with other people, was encouraging a lot of people in the intelligence community to widely disseminate information about President Trump in order to basically make sure that the Trump team didn't come in and destroy it.
00:06:55.000It was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.
00:07:06.000And what she actually says there is she says that they raced to basically pump out information on Trump.
00:07:11.000She said, I had a fear that some of that information would disappear when senior Obama people left.
00:07:16.000So it'd be hidden away in the bureaucracy that Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their Trump staff dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.
00:07:25.000So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more.
00:07:29.000We have very good intelligence on Russia.
00:07:31.000So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were trying to also get help
00:07:59.000Even if they were caught up in a foreign wiretap, you can't just throw that information out there and then pretend like nothing bad happened.
00:09:02.000Look at Chuck Schumer stalling on Gorsuch, who's a consensus nominee, if ever there was one, got zero votes against him when he was elevated to the appeals court under George W. Bush.
00:09:13.000Here he is saying that he basically wants a consensus plan, and then just to double down on that, today Donald Trump went to war openly with the Freedom Caucus again.
00:10:12.000Now as you'll recall, five seconds ago I just told you about how the Trump administration along with Speaker Ryan are going to preserve Planned Parenthood funding in the current budget deal because they're afraid of Democrats.
00:11:06.000Right now, Republicans have 246 votes in Congress.
00:11:09.000You need 218 in order to have a majority.
00:11:12.000There are 30 members of the Freedom Caucus.
00:11:14.000Trump, in that tweet alone, says that he's going to fight Democrats and the Freedom Caucus.
00:11:18.000Democrats and the Freedom Caucus, combined, have more than 218 votes.
00:11:23.000Okay, Democrats, that means that Republicans who are not the Freedom Caucus, and this doesn't even include the establishment Republicans who voted against Trumpcare.
00:11:31.000Okay, there's another 10 to 15 people.
00:11:36.000At the upper limit, he's at 216, unless he can peel away some of these Freedom Caucus members by screaming at them on Twitter, and they apparently don't care.
00:12:05.000Where do Trump's actual sympathies really lie?
00:12:16.000Apparently, you know, we were told that they lied with the Mike Pence wing of the party, that they lied, that they lay with the Louie Gohmert wing of the party, that when Trump got into office, he'd be an anti-establishment conservative, that as my friend Dennis Prager says, he'd be a conservative dream.
00:12:28.000Here's how this administration is actually broken down.
00:12:30.000Aside from Judge Gorsuch, which he basically delegated to Mike Pence and the Heritage Foundation to pick.
00:12:36.000Everything that he delegates to his own staffers, like the EPA, Scott Pruitt at the EPA, or Attorney General Sessions at the DOJ, all that stuff is good.
00:12:43.000Everything that Trump sticks his hands into turns into a mess, because Trump is not actually conservative, and he has very anti-conservative tendencies, and that is obvious.
00:12:52.000At least he has Paul Ryan to fall back on, though.
00:12:54.000Paul Ryan came out today, and he said that
00:12:58.000It's going to be the conservatives who force Trump to work with the Democrats.
00:13:01.000Which is Ryan's way of kissing Trump's ass.
00:13:06.000This is basically saying that if Daddy Trump decides to cheat on Mommy Conservatives with Mistress Democrats, that's just because Mommy Conservatives weren't putting out enough.
00:13:13.000If mommy conservatives had only been willing to go along with all the weird things that Daddy Trump wanted to do, then he wouldn't have had to go to mistress Democrats for a little bit of pleasing outside the bonds of holy matrimony.
00:13:29.000So here's Mitch McConnell ripping the Freedom Caucus.
00:13:32.000I would hate to be a Republican whose vote prevented us from keeping the commitment we've made to the American people for almost 10 years now.
00:13:40.000And at some point we'll get down to the final vote.
00:13:47.000And so I'm optimistic that none of my members in the end want to be responsible for the status quo on Obamacare.
00:13:54.000I think the American people would be deeply disappointed that we were prevented from keeping our commitment by
00:14:03.000Republicans who in the end, in effect, voted for the status quo for no change.
00:14:09.000That's absurd and Mitch McConnell is a joke and so is Paul Ryan when they do this routine.
00:14:13.000The only people who voted for the status quo were the people pushing Trumpcare, which was Obamacare lite.
00:14:17.000The only good thing in Trumpcare, as I have said now 1,713 times at last count, the only good thing in this bill
00:14:24.000Was Ryan's proposal to change Medicaid from a need-based grant program to a block grant program, even that was subject to future change by Congress.
00:14:34.000Right now we are being told that Representative Chris Collins says the Tuesday group, which is another group of Republicans in Congress, met last night and agreed they will not meet or work with the Freedom Caucus if they call just hang up.
00:14:44.000So in other words, the Freedom Caucus wants to talk about negotiations and other Republicans are now ostracizing them because they think they're going to work with Democrats.
00:14:54.000I am so glad that you were all able to put together such a wonderful, wonderful administration working with the geniuses like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
00:15:02.000Remember when Donald Trump was anti-establishment?
00:15:04.000When exactly does he become the establishment when he's ripping on the Freedom Caucus, telling conservatives to go shove it, and talking about how he's going to work with Democrats?
00:15:11.000Switch Trump's name to Jeb Bush and y'all would be up in arms.
00:15:16.000Switch his name to Jeb Bush, pose exactly the same thing that he's doing right now at the Freedom Caucus, and you'd all be up in arms, and you would have a right to be up in arms, because this is a joke.
00:15:25.000Jim Jordan, who's on the Freedom Caucus, Representative Jordan from Indiana,
00:15:29.000He says that the American Health Care Act is not the Ten Commandments.
00:15:33.000This is coming after Ted Poe, a member of the Freedom Caucus, walked saying that the Freedom Caucus would vote against the Ten Commandments.
00:15:38.000They're now trying to do exactly the same thing Democrats did with conservatives.
00:15:42.000They're trying to say that conservatives are intransigent purists.
00:15:44.000Jim Jordan says it's not that we're intransigent purists, it's that the AHCA, Trumpcare, was crap.
00:15:49.000Well, Allison, there's a little bit of difference between the Ten Commandments and a piece of legislation that only 17% of the country approves of.
00:15:57.000So I would just say, look at the four corners of the document.
00:16:59.000Well, before we continue on here, and I want to talk about the media and how they are continuing to go crazy over just absolute silly, stupid nonsense, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
00:17:10.000So, if you are somebody who wants to invest in precious metals right now, you're looking at the economy, thinking to yourself, I'm not sure which way this thing is going to go.
00:17:18.000If you're worried about threats from abroad, if you're worried about the instability in financial markets in Europe,
00:17:56.000Okay, so I want to talk about the media's attempts to tear down Trump, not on the basis, and the Republicans, not on the basis of their obvious incompetence, which is actually what's happening, but on the basis of just absolute nonsense.
00:18:11.000But for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:18:13.000I want to talk about this Pence thing where they're trying to rip down Pence.
00:18:16.000Over the awful, awful news that he only likes to eat alone with his wife, not other women, as opposed to Bill Clinton, who only likes to eat alone with other women, not his wife.
00:18:27.000And if you want to be part of the mailbag today, then you need to subscribe.
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