The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 279 - Both Parties Are Preparing To Commit Suicide

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!

00:00:00.000 You 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?

00:00:07.000 You 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?

00:00:13.000 Do 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?

00:00:24.000 Yeah, Republicans were lying.

00:00:25.000 Republicans now have the opportunity to pass continuing funding for the federal government through the budget process.

00:00:31.000 This would be an excellent time to make approval of funding contingent on defunding of various Democratic priorities.

00:00:37.000 After 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.

00:00:46.000 But that's not what's happening.

00:00:47.000 As 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.

00:01:03.000 So, what kind of garbage are Republicans funding this time in order to avoid a government shutdown fight?

00:01:07.000 You remember the same kind of fight they said a minority party could never win back in 2013? 0.98

00:01:12.000 When Ted Cruz tried to defund Obamacare?

00:01:14.000 First, they're going to keep funding for Planned Parenthood.

00:01:17.000 So 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.

00:01:24.000 Now 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.

00:01:34.000 He now says instead he wants to defund Planned Parenthood through reconciliation.

00:01:37.000 So do it, Speaker Ryan.

00:01:39.000 What is stopping you, aside from your own political cowardice?

00:01:41.000 Second, they said that they're going to keep funding for Obamacare.

00:01:44.000 So, Republicans had time after time during the Obama administration that if they kept funding continuing budget resolutions, they'd be funding Obamacare.

00:01:51.000 Now the Republicans control the whole process, and they're still going to fund Obamacare.

00:01:55.000 Why?

00:01:56.000 Because the Democrats might shut down the government.

00:01:58.000 Senator Dick Durbin said that Republicans would be blamed for a shutdown because they control all the branches of the government.

00:02:02.000 But we were told by Republicans that minority parties shutting down the government damages minority parties.

00:02:07.000 So what the hell?

00:02:09.000 Finally, apparently they're not going to fund the Trump wall.

00:02:11.000 Republicans 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.

00:02:19.000 They won't do it because they're afraid of Democratic filibuster.

00:02:22.000 Of course.

00:02:23.000 So, 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?

00:02:32.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:02:33.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:02:39.000 Okay, so I have a lot to get to today.

00:02:41.000 I'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.

00:02:56.000 So we'll start with the Democrats, who for some reason have decided to rush headlong over the Gorsuch Cliff.

00:03:00.000 So right now, polls show that two to one, Americans think,

00:03:03.000 We're good to go.

00:03:24.000 And Republicans then nuke the filibuster.

00:03:26.000 Next 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.

00:03:38.000 So 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.

00:03:45.000 You say this is the fifth vote on the Supreme Court,

00:03:47.000 We can't have somebody who's so far right-wing.

00:03:49.000 We need somebody who's a consensus pick.

00:03:51.000 That would be the smart politics of the situation, but that's not what they're doing.

00:03:54.000 And 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.

00:04:02.000 Here's Chuck Schumer opposing the nomination of Judge Gorsuch.

00:04:07.000 That's why he's having trouble earning 60 votes.

00:04:10.000 There was a seismic change after his hearing.

00:04:14.000 There 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.

00:04:32.000 Chosen from that list.

00:04:33.000 He was chosen from that list.

00:04:34.000 Chuck Schumer clearly has no idea what he's talking about.

00:04:38.000 He 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.

00:04:45.000 The Democrats just continue to maintain that Trump is going to fall apart of his own accord.

00:04:50.000 They're not going to have to do anything to push it and so they may as well just oppose him at every turn.

00:04:53.000 Maxine Waters, whose hair most definitely does not look like James Brown's hair, stopped saying that.

00:04:58.000 Maxine Waters said that Trump doesn't deserve to be president.

00:05:01.000 He came to the presidency with the kind of character and background that made me distrust him, not honor him, and not respect him.

00:05:11.000 And, of course, he got the presidency because he was able to get those votes from those few states that made him the winner.

00:05:20.000 Okay, good luck with this, gang.

00:05:42.000 I 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.

00:05:48.000 And 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.

00:05:56.000 So people have talked about this, and I've said this ad infinitum at this point.

00:05:59.000 The fact is that everybody's talking about Trump-Russia, the connections between Trump and the Russian government, supposedly.

00:06:04.000 There hasn't been a shred of evidence right now showing coordination between the Trump team or the Trump campaign

00:06:09.000 And the Russian government.

00:06:10.000 Zero shreds of evidence.

00:06:11.000 Lots 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.

00:06:24.000 So 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.

00:06:32.000 This former Obama intelligence official

00:06:34.000 She's, I guess, a former Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense.

00:06:37.000 She 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.

00:06:52.000 So here's what she had to say.

00:06:53.000 It's clip 16.

00:06:55.000 It 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.

00:07:06.000 And what she actually says there is she says that they raced to basically pump out information on Trump.

00:07:11.000 She said, I had a fear that some of that information would disappear when senior Obama people left.

00:07:16.000 So 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.

00:07:25.000 So I became very worried because not enough was coming out into the open and I knew that there was more.

00:07:29.000 We have very good intelligence on Russia.

00:07:31.000 So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues and I knew that they were trying to also get help

00:07:35.000 We're good to go.

00:07:59.000 Even 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.

00:08:05.000 That is legal violation.

00:08:07.000 Democrats are ignoring a scandal that obviously is real in favor of a scandal that may very well be fake, the Trump-Russia scandal.

00:08:13.000 The Trump administration continues to deny it.

00:08:15.000 So the Democrats really have nothing here.

00:08:17.000 They're basically just hoping that the Republicans set themselves on fire.

00:08:20.000 Fortunately! 0.73

00:08:22.000 That's a pretty good bet. 0.95

00:08:22.000 So the Republicans have decided that it will be totally worthwhile to set themselves on fire. 0.95

00:08:26.000 President Trump, yesterday, he was speaking at the White House with some people.

00:08:30.000 He said, don't worry, healthcare is going to be easy.

00:08:32.000 I love that he's continuing to say this after the failure of Trumpcare.

00:08:35.000 It demonstrates a little bit of a disconnect.

00:08:36.000 Here's President Trump.

00:08:37.000 And I know that we're all going to make a deal on healthcare.

00:08:39.000 That's such an easy one.

00:08:41.000 So I have no doubt that that's going to happen very quickly.

00:08:43.000 I think it will actually.

00:08:44.000 I think it's going to happen.

00:08:46.000 Because we've all been promising, Democrat, Republican, we've all been promising that to the American people.

00:08:51.000 So I think a lot of good things are going to happen there.

00:08:55.000 Okay, what does Trump actually want to do here?

00:08:57.000 What he actually wants to do here is he wants to come up with some sort of bipartisan plan.

00:09:00.000 So that's not going to happen.

00:09:02.000 Look 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.

00:09:13.000 Here 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.

00:09:21.000 So here's what he tweeted.

00:09:22.000 He tweeted, We must fight them?

00:09:32.000 In 2018, the Freedom Caucus, you mean the conservatives, you mean the Tea Party people who are a large constituency in your base?

00:09:37.000 You mean people like Louie Gohmert who openly campaigned for you and Mark Meadows who openly campaigned for you?

00:09:41.000 Those are the people you have to fight because they voted against Trumpcare?

00:09:45.000 Donald Trump is now trying to triangulate.

00:09:46.000 He's trying to do a Bill Clinton, except that he owns the Congress.

00:09:49.000 Okay, Clinton waited until Republicans ran the Congress to triangulate. 0.99

00:09:53.000 Trump is preemptively trying to triangulate.

00:09:55.000 The problem is Democrats are not interested in working with President Trump.

00:09:58.000 This follows hard, by the way, on last week's tweetstorm targeting the Freedom Caucus over the failure of his Trumpcare plan.

00:10:04.000 You recall, we talked about it at length.

00:10:05.000 He said,

00:10:12.000 Now 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.

00:10:21.000 So who's preserving Planned Parenthood funding?

00:10:23.000 Oh that's right, it's the establishment and President Trump.

00:10:25.000 But now it's clear that Trump is trying to go to war with these conservatives and he's figuring one of two things.

00:10:30.000 One, he can peel off enough conservatives from the Freedom Caucus to vote with him on future bills by threatening them.

00:10:35.000 That didn't work out well last time. 0.99

00:10:37.000 Or two, he's figuring that by yelling at the Freedom Caucus, suddenly Democrats will be warmer to him, which is idiocy. 0.99

00:10:43.000 The Democrats are not going to work with President Trump. 0.98

00:10:45.000 They think that he's vulnerable, they have their boot on his throat, and they figure that he's a 35% approval rating right now.

00:10:50.000 If they just keep demonstrating that he's ineffective and unable to get anything done, he'll be down in the 20s. 0.99

00:10:55.000 For Trump, Bannon, Reince, Ryan, for all these people to be advising Trump to walk across the aisle to Democrats is just puerile idiocy. 1.00

00:11:03.000 It is so stupid. 1.00

00:11:04.000 Just mathematically, it's idiotic. 1.00

00:11:06.000 Right now, Republicans have 246 votes in Congress. 0.99

00:11:09.000 You need 218 in order to have a majority.

00:11:12.000 There are 30 members of the Freedom Caucus.

00:11:14.000 Trump, in that tweet alone, says that he's going to fight Democrats and the Freedom Caucus.

00:11:18.000 Democrats and the Freedom Caucus, combined, have more than 218 votes.

00:11:23.000 Okay, Democrats, that means that Republicans who are not the Freedom Caucus, and this doesn't even include the establishment Republicans who voted against Trumpcare.

00:11:31.000 Okay, there's another 10 to 15 people.

00:11:34.000 Right now, Trump is at like 216.

00:11:36.000 At 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.

00:11:43.000 I mean, if you take a look,

00:11:45.000 It's a swamp, not a hot tub.

00:11:46.000 We both came here to drain it.

00:12:01.000 Justin Amash from Michigan, he says, And that's basically right.

00:12:03.000 That's basically right.

00:12:04.000 So here's the question.

00:12:05.000 Where do Trump's actual sympathies really lie?

00:12:16.000 Apparently, 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.

00:12:28.000 Here's how this administration is actually broken down.

00:12:30.000 Aside from Judge Gorsuch, which he basically delegated to Mike Pence and the Heritage Foundation to pick.

00:12:34.000 Aside from those people.

00:12:36.000 Everything 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.

00:12:43.000 Everything 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.

00:12:52.000 At least he has Paul Ryan to fall back on, though.

00:12:54.000 Paul Ryan came out today, and he said that

00:12:58.000 It's going to be the conservatives who force Trump to work with the Democrats. 1.00

00:13:01.000 Which is Ryan's way of kissing Trump's ass. 1.00

00:13:03.000 I hate this sort of nonsense. 1.00

00:13:05.000 This is a joke, okay? 0.79

00:13:06.000 This 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.

00:13:13.000 If 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. 1.00

00:13:24.000 This is just stupid. 1.00

00:13:26.000 It's just stupid. 1.00

00:13:27.000 And guess who's happy about all of this? 1.00

00:13:28.000 Of course, it's Mitch McConnell.

00:13:29.000 So here's Mitch McConnell ripping the Freedom Caucus.

00:13:32.000 I 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.

00:13:40.000 And at some point we'll get down to the final vote.

00:13:43.000 You know, the one that really counts.

00:13:47.000 And so I'm optimistic that none of my members in the end want to be responsible for the status quo on Obamacare.

00:13:54.000 I think the American people would be deeply disappointed that we were prevented from keeping our commitment by

00:14:03.000 Republicans who in the end, in effect, voted for the status quo for no change.

00:14:09.000 That's absurd and Mitch McConnell is a joke and so is Paul Ryan when they do this routine.

00:14:13.000 The only people who voted for the status quo were the people pushing Trumpcare, which was Obamacare lite.

00:14:17.000 The only good thing in Trumpcare, as I have said now 1,713 times at last count, the only good thing in this bill

00:14:24.000 Was 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.

00:14:34.000 Right 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.

00:14:44.000 So 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.

00:14:50.000 Well done, guys.

00:14:52.000 Just well done.

00:14:53.000 This is just genius.

00:14:54.000 I 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.

00:15:02.000 Remember when Donald Trump was anti-establishment?

00:15:04.000 When 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?

00:15:11.000 Switch Trump's name to Jeb Bush and y'all would be up in arms.

00:15:14.000 You would.

00:15:15.000 Even your Trump supporters.

00:15:16.000 Switch 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.

00:15:24.000 It is a joke.

00:15:25.000 Jim Jordan, who's on the Freedom Caucus, Representative Jordan from Indiana,

00:15:29.000 He says that the American Health Care Act is not the Ten Commandments.

00:15:33.000 This is coming after Ted Poe, a member of the Freedom Caucus, walked saying that the Freedom Caucus would vote against the Ten Commandments.

00:15:38.000 They're now trying to do exactly the same thing Democrats did with conservatives.

00:15:42.000 They're trying to say that conservatives are intransigent purists. 0.99

00:15:44.000 Jim Jordan says it's not that we're intransigent purists, it's that the AHCA, Trumpcare, was crap. 0.96

00:15:49.000 Well, 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. 0.86

00:15:57.000 So I would just say, look at the four corners of the document.

00:16:00.000 Look at the legislation itself.

00:16:02.000 What did it do?

00:16:03.000 What didn't it do?

00:16:04.000 It didn't repeal Obamacare fully.

00:16:06.000 It didn't lower premiums.

00:16:08.000 It wasn't supported by the Republican Party.

00:16:10.000 Every major conservative organization in the country opposed it, and only 17% of the country liked it.

00:16:15.000 So there is, frankly, a big difference between the Ten Commandments and a piece of legislation that only 17% of the country approves of.

00:16:22.000 Let's fix that legislation. 0.99

00:16:24.000 Let's do what the President said.

00:16:26.000 Let's get a deal put together, but one that accomplishes what we were sent here to accomplish.

00:16:30.000 That's always been our focus, that continues to be our focus, and we're going to be hard at work making sure we accomplish that.

00:16:36.000 So how's all this working across the aisle working out for Trump?

00:16:39.000 As I said at the top of the show, Republicans are now caving on his Trump wall.

00:16:42.000 They're not even funding his Trump wall in order to get through a budget resolution.

00:16:46.000 You think the Freedom Caucus would have gone along with that?

00:16:48.000 Of course they wouldn't have.

00:16:49.000 The Freedom Caucus would have been people calling for the wall funding.

00:16:52.000 But those people are being excised by President Trump in favor of Democrats Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

00:16:57.000 Just disgusting. 0.99

00:16:59.000 Well, 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. 0.99

00:17:10.000 So, 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. 0.94

00:17:18.000 If you're worried about threats from abroad, if you're worried about the instability in financial markets in Europe,

00:17:22.000 We're good to go!

00:17:39.000 We're good.

00:17:56.000 Okay, 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.

00:18:11.000 But for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.

00:18:13.000 I want to talk about this Pence thing where they're trying to rip down Pence.

00:18:16.000 Over 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.

00:18:25.000 We'll talk about that.

00:18:25.000 We'll also get to the mailbag.

00:18:27.000 And if you want to be part of the mailbag today, then you need to subscribe.

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00:18:40.000 Sure, it's blank, but it's the best gag gift that you'll ever give anyone.

00:18:42.000 It has sold tens of thousands of copies.

00:18:44.000 My quote is on the front.

00:18:45.000 It says, thorough.

00:18:46.000 You can get a free signed copy of Knowles' book when you go over to dailywire.com right now.

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00:18:52.000 The Shapiro store should be coming within the next month.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - March 31, 2017

Ep. 279 - Both Parties Are Preparing To Commit Suicide

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