00:00:16.000And then Russ Vogt joins us to help explain why he believes that these concessions are significant, worthy of appreciation, and why it's a big, big deal.
00:00:30.000Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:35.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:52.000These are patriots that showed in the end that they were willing to negotiate in good faith.
00:02:59.000Now, these concessions led to real substantive rule changes if the rules package can indeed pass in the next day or two.
00:03:08.000We're going to talk in great detail of what that means, but we must realize that on late Friday evening, the kind of forces that were holding out, everyone from Andy Biggs to Eli Crane to Matt Rosendale to Lauren Boebert to Matt Gates to Anna Paulina Luna, they were pushing and pushing and pushing for real rules changes.
00:03:30.000But there was a rumbling that began to surface.
00:03:35.000And that rumbling was from the moderate wing, the moderate wing that consists of people like Nancy Mace and Tony Gonzalez and Dan Crenshaw and Burgess Owens, people that are very much in the establishment of the Republican Party.
00:03:53.000And they were getting, and Don Bacon, they were getting very angry at Matt Gates and Lauren Boebert and Andy Biggs and the people that were trying to strike a conservative deal that would represent voters.
00:04:06.000Now, you might say, oh, what's the difference?
00:04:08.000They should have pushed this forward further.
00:04:13.000That is an incorrect way to view this because the moderates were starting to say, well, we're going to blow up the deal.
00:04:21.000You see, the moderates consisted of 150 to 175, maybe less, let's say 100 people.
00:04:28.000And so, for example, on Friday evening, Tony Gonzalez from Texas, a very moderate Republican, came out and said, I'm not going to vote for the rules package.
00:04:40.000He said, I am not going to vote for the second vote after a speaker, the House vote.
00:04:45.000I'll vote for Kevin McCarthy for speaker, but I'm not going to vote for what they're actually negotiating on, trying to kill the actual deal of negotiation.
00:04:53.000To the credit, though, of Gates and to Boebert and to all of these people that were negotiating, they pushed it to the absolute limit and they started to see the legitimate threats of how the moderates were trying to sabotage the deal.
00:05:10.000And they sold the shares at the highest possible moment to use kind of a stock market equivalent.
00:05:38.000I don't think that's the correct way to view this.
00:05:40.000You must recognize and realize that the moderates still controlled 80% of the House.
00:05:45.000So you got serious concessions that we're about to go through for a couple days of very firm negotiation tactics, understanding that the moderates could have prepared, could have sabotaged the entire deal.
00:05:59.000Now, if you don't believe me, look at Cut 12.
00:06:02.000Cut 12 is Nancy Mace, who went on television yesterday and said, I don't know if I'm going to vote for the rules package.
00:06:09.000The rules package is the whole enchilada that the Freedom Caucus negotiated last week.
00:06:15.000So the deal that we're about to go through, the concessions we went through, if the moderates don't vote for that on the floor when it comes forward, then it effectively blows up the entire speaker's race.
00:06:26.000And we might have to start all over again.
00:06:27.000You can only push a negotiation so far until the deal blows up.
00:06:32.000And I want to give credit to Chip Roy and give credit to Ana Paulina.
00:07:49.000Well, the rules committee decides whether the house will vote on legislation at all.
00:07:54.000Usually, it is just a proxy of the speaker of the house.
00:07:57.000The speaker of the house usually puts his or her most loyal members on the rules committee, and they basically, whatever they want, the rules committee mirrors or parallels.
00:08:08.000So, the house committee has the House Committee on Rules has 13 members and always has a supermajority for the party in power, typically nine to four.
00:08:15.000For the past half century, this committee has basically been under control of the speaker.
00:08:19.000Getting Freedom Caucus votes on this committee matters a lot, though.
00:08:24.000They otherwise would have had no representation.
00:08:26.000Under Paul Ryan or John Boehner, this would have been a fantasy.
00:08:29.000This would have been a far-off dream that they would have been scoffed at and laughed at by the DC cartel.
00:08:35.000Now, if they get two members on the rules committee, it won't matter very much.
00:08:41.000If the Freedom Caucus can get three, they have a lot more power.
00:08:44.000All of that is going to be in the upcoming rules package that Nancy Mae says she might not vote for.
00:08:50.000And Tony Gonzalez says he will not vote for because the moderates, and here's the thing: before I go any further, I have on good authority some people that were texting me because I made a lot of phone calls this weekend asking around.
00:09:00.000The moderates were in Kevin McCarthy's office all weekend complaining about this deal.
00:09:10.000The moderates were in McCarthy's office pounding the table saying we gave Matt Gates too much, we gave Lauren Boebert too much, we gave Chip Roy too much, and it was McCarthy, and this is factual, that was holding the line, saying, Guys, we needed to get a deal done.
00:09:27.000That's how you know you got a good deal.
00:09:29.000The moderates are not happy with this.
00:09:31.000McCarthy is now telling the moderates to suck it up and vote for the rules package.
00:09:37.000Second concession: McCarthy has reportedly promised with the Freedom Caucus.
00:09:44.000Again, this will all be reflected in the rules package that is going to be voted on very soon, an open rule on all spending measures, meaning conservatives will get to offer amendments that would defund or reduce funding for programs that we oppose.
00:09:57.000It could allow moderates to team up with Democrats to increase spending on some things, but it does give power to the House Freedom Caucus.
00:10:04.000Now, the third concession we're going to get to in a second.
00:10:08.000But the fact that the moderates were complaining to Kevin McCarthy all weekend shows that a great deal was cut, and also that they brought this to the best possible moment to sell their shares and to cash out when the stock was the highest.
00:12:26.000Even Matt Gates said he ran out of stuff to ask for.
00:12:30.000Matt Gates said, I got nothing else to ask for.
00:12:32.000There's a fair amount of positive emails as well, but I want to keep on hearing from you, freedom at charliekirk.com, because the moderates have power too.
00:12:56.000For example, Nancy Mace went on television and said that, I don't think I'm going to vote for the rules package, or I don't know how I'm going to vote on the rules package.
00:13:04.000The rules package, by the way, is going to be an 80 to 100 page bill that will be voted out in the next day or two that crystallizes all of these concessions.
00:13:15.000So for example, many of you said, well, Charlie, how do we trust them?
00:13:44.000Once that rules package passes and it is put into ink, it doesn't matter if you trust somebody or not, it becomes the standard operating procedure.
00:13:58.000It becomes the framework that all congressional business of this Congress has to operate.
00:14:24.000But what I don't support is a small number of people trying to get a deal done or deals done for themselves in private, in secret, to get a vote or a vote present.
00:14:46.000Yeah, I don't like people cutting backdoor deals unless it's me cutting a backdoor deal.
00:14:50.000So concession number three, this is my favorite of all the concessions.
00:14:56.000The House, this will be in the rules package, is going to establish a select committee.
00:15:01.000Remember, we had the January 6th committee.
00:15:03.000This will be a new select committee on the weaponization of government.
00:15:07.000This new church-style committee that we've been talking about is now going to be put into practice.
00:15:15.000The church committee, as you remember, was a special Senate committee in the 70s.
00:15:19.000And there was the Pike equivalent in the House, which exposed all of the abusive and illegal behavior by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and so forth.
00:15:28.000Now, the new weaponization on government committee will be chaired by Jim Jordan.
00:15:35.000Now, they are going to have wide-ranging congressional authority to go where the facts lead them.
00:15:40.000We now have on good authority, Christopher Wray, the CIA, they are lobbying hard.
00:15:46.000They are lobbying aggressively to try to stop this rules package because of this new church and pike committee equivalent.
00:15:54.000With only the House, the new Congress can't necessarily pass laws with the Senate, but we can send subpoenas and compel transparency.
00:16:03.000And we have Rust vote coming on our program to explain to us the significance of what this new Jordan committee, the Church and Pike Committee, could mean.
00:16:13.000Thomas Massey, one of my favorite members of the House, one of the most ethical, honest, and real members of the House of Representatives.
00:16:44.000The only body constitutionally, the only body that can look into the abuses, the overreach, the terror, and the tyranny of the fourth branch of government is Congress.
00:16:59.000And so if this ends up happening and if this gets voted on and if the rules package passes, that is a serious and substantial takeaway from what was an underwhelming November midterm election into something that is material and real and will have ramifications positively for generations to come.
00:17:21.000To go look into the raid on Mar-a-Lago, to go look into the collusion with Twitter, to go look into all these different things.
00:17:28.000Matt Gates said on television, we were at a stage, this was him right before the final speaker vote, where I have run out of things to ask for.
00:17:37.000The end of the year is right around the corner, and it's time for you to consider a change in your investment plan.
00:17:42.000This is Charlie Kirk, and I strongly recommend you go right now and see my friends at PACS to review your investments.
00:17:49.000They are the one firm I know that focuses on biblical, responsible investing and does not force you to invest in companies that literally attack Christian values.
00:17:58.000If we want religious liberty in our country, we have to stop investing in companies that are trying to suppress our freedoms.
00:18:39.000So look, McCarthy has also promised the Club for Growth that the Conservative Leadership Fund would not get involved in primaries of open seats, meaning that if there was a safe and comfortable Republican seat, they're not going to get in.
00:18:52.000They're just going to allow it to play out, like Anthony Sabatini or Caroline Levitt's race.
00:18:57.000Discretionary spending is capped at the 2022 fiscal year level, which counterintuitively means the spending levels of Biden's first year in office.
00:19:05.000But more importantly, this means pairing back defense spending, aka Ukraine spending.
00:19:12.000McCarthy, in writing, has promised not to raise the debt limit again without major spending cuts to go with it.
00:19:19.000Concession number six, floor votes on proposals for House term limits and enhanced border security.
00:19:24.000This is where Tony Gonzalez has kind of lost his mind.
00:19:27.000And finally, McCarthy has agreed with the House Freedom Caucus, will allow a single House member to propose essentially a no-confidence motion against him.
00:19:35.000So if he tries to break any parts of the deal, they can immediately launch a revolt and pick a new speaker.
00:19:40.000I'm going to go to a piece of tape here.
00:19:41.000Matt Gates, Cut 15, saying this deal is so good, I have run out of things to ask for.
00:20:36.000I fully support the Freedom Caucus reading every word of this rules package.
00:20:41.000And if it's not what they negotiated, block it.
00:20:43.000With us is Russ Vogt from the Center for Renewing America.
00:20:48.000And Russ is the original architect, the designer of this new church committee.
00:20:53.000It might be called the Jordan Committee, which I think is a major win for liberty and oversight and for reigning in the fourth branch of government.
00:21:04.000Russ, first, let's just talk more broadly.
00:21:07.000Do you believe that the deal as it is right now, it has yet to be voted on in a rules package, is a significant win for constitutional conservatives?
00:21:17.000I think it's a historic and transformational agreement.
00:21:20.000Most of it is not going to be voted on as part of the rules package.
00:21:23.000The procedural aspects will be, but a lot of this goes to the policy commitments.
00:21:28.000But this gets to the control of the House and whether conservatives representing the American people have the tools to dismantle the cartel in Washington, D.C.
00:21:40.000And I don't think we've seen something on the procedural aspects of this since 1961.
00:21:47.000And then you get to some of the policy wins, like you just mentioned with the church committee, the agreement to balance the budget in 10 years by going after woke and weaponized government.
00:21:56.000And I really think that conservatives were able to get a significant result from this situation.
00:22:02.000So you said most of it is not part of the rules package.
00:22:44.000And so any of the policy agreements that were made are now self-enforcing because the very people controlling the floor are the conservatives that struck this agreement.
00:22:56.000And the non-things that they can't control are going to be enforced by the fact that you now have 20 members.
00:23:03.000They showed they're willing to use the motion to vacate.
00:23:06.000They will have that ability to do that.
00:23:08.000And so what I think is so powerful about this is it's the emergence of coalition government in the House, which is we knew that the Republican Party is largely made up of their establishment.
00:23:18.000Yes, in the last election, we were rooting for them.
00:23:21.000But we also knew that they're the conservatives is who we want to empower.
00:23:25.000And now 20 of them, and their numbers are bigger.
00:23:40.000And so you've got a much bigger number that's going to be able to be interested in balancing the budget in 10, or it really amplifying the work of the church committee.
00:23:52.000And so this coalition government is going to really have a lot of ability to be able to go to town for the American people.
00:24:00.000So Russ, just to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, you make a really smart point about coalition government, which about time we start to use the power of conservatives to try to make Congress more representative.
00:24:14.000The Democrats have been doing something similar for years, but they do this all behind closed doors.
00:24:17.000I mean, they would never put up with something like this publicly.
00:24:49.000How could you pass a rules package where one of the rules is that you need 72 hours to read the bill and you're going to do it with only two hours?
00:24:56.000Actually, to McCarthy's credit, he said, you guys need time to read the rules package.
00:25:03.000And I think motion to vacate the chair is the, is the, is the new Jordan committee part of that rules package, or is that just kind of a sidelined promise?
00:25:13.000It is a, it's not, the resolution is written for the Jordan.
00:25:29.000It includes the motion to vacate your vote of no confidence.
00:25:32.000It includes the 72-hour holdover for a piece of legislation.
00:25:37.000It includes this rule that allows you to go directly at the funding of a particular bureaucrat like Tony Fauci.
00:25:43.000Those are the kinds of things, the restriction against raising taxes on the floor of the House or increasing spending in the amendment process.
00:25:51.000Those are all things that will go tonight.
00:25:54.000And then there's a lot of personnel aspects.
00:25:56.000Like, for instance, when I talked about the rules committee, that's being done right now through the selections of who sits on rules.
00:26:03.000And so people think, you know, there was this argument, well, that's self-dealing and they're just trying to get themselves on committees.
00:26:08.000No, If we want to wield real power on behalf of the American people and the conservatives and break the cartel, you got to have someone that actually sits on the committee and does it.
00:26:19.000And so that process is working out right now.
00:26:22.000You saw Mark Green got the Homeland Security chairmanship over Den Cross, Dan Crenshaw.
00:26:27.000That's an example of how this is working in real time.
00:26:30.000And so there's all sorts of different aspects of this that will unfold.
00:26:36.000But tonight is very, very important as it pertains to this thing having to pass.
00:26:41.000But I think the leadership knows this has to pass.
00:27:17.000Coin, whatever, Coin Telpro and Operation Mockingbird.
00:27:22.000But some of the members that were actually part of the committee, they went mad because they kept on running up against classified excuses and documents.
00:27:33.000How much of this is going to be in a skiff or basically in the basement of Congress?
00:27:37.000And number two, how are we going to get actually something done when the intel agencies just put up their hands and say, sorry, classified?
00:27:45.000Yeah, one of the things you've done your history on this, and you know the debates that they had even within the church committee about the hawks and those that were really trying to get at this.
00:27:54.000And I was, I originally wanted it to be a committee outside of judiciary because I wanted to make sure that certain things, like judiciary only has law enforcement.
00:28:05.000jurisdiction and they don't have the same ability to declassify information that intelligence committee has.
00:28:11.000However, in the rules that they are writing for this subcommittee, this select committee, they are including the jurisdiction that's necessary to go wherever the evidence goes to subpoena wherever they need to, and they have the same ability to declassify.
00:28:27.000So the things that I was concerned about, about it being within judiciary, have been resolved.
00:28:34.000And this will be able to, if they can resist the urge to make sure that they do too much, right?
00:28:40.000Where we want to make sure that whoever chairs this has a lot of ability to focus on the task at hand and to really prosecute and make this their number one priority.
00:28:50.000They've got the tools with this committee to staff it up.
00:28:53.000Same funding levels as the January 6th committee.
00:28:56.000So that's tens of millions of dollars, if I'm not mistaken.
00:29:33.000It is, but with one little wrinkle, which is that it's intended to be able to pull in, the select portion of it is intended to pull in non-judiciary committee members.
00:29:46.000And the thing I want to ask you is also range, because sometimes if it's too narrowly written, which all these creeps are going to do, they're going to say, oh, sorry, you can't look into the CIA.
00:29:56.000You can't look into this because you were only supposed to look into this very particular thing.
00:30:01.000And so they just, they just create all these, it's a maze, basically.
00:30:04.000And the intel agencies right now are building a maze.
00:30:08.000They are building a maze that will take decades to navigate so that when Thomas Massey and Jim Jordan start to go there, there'll be like fake doors and smokes and mirrors and documents that lead to fake documents that lead to classified that lead to people that don't exist and foreign agents.
00:30:27.000Drawing up one of my favorite books that became a movie was Maze Runner.
00:30:34.000If you've never seen Maze Runner, it actually ends poorly, in my personal opinion, but it's one of those series that starts and it's so compelling and it's so well written and it's there's so much mystery.
00:30:45.000And I actually think the author didn't bring it properly to completion.
00:30:48.000But in the movie or in the book Maze Runner, essentially the premise is this.
00:30:53.000Teenage boy wakes up in an underground elevator with no memory of his identity and he's basically got a, they're part of this maze and there's all these different traps and these rules and all this.
00:31:01.000Basically, the intel agencies right now are creating a maze of their own, a labyrinth with us as Russ Vogt from the Center for Renewing America.
00:31:09.000But Russ, they can't necessarily destroy documents, even though they do that anyway.
00:31:13.000But there's too many documents probably to destroy, but they can classify them or they can create trapdoors and fake mirrors and smoke screens and delays and dead ends.
00:31:22.000How is this committee going to navigate all of that?
00:31:25.000Because I guarantee you, Christopher Ray is probably having an all-on-hands deck meeting right now, telling all of his lieutenants, create all these different ways to hide the evidence or to disclose it.
00:31:37.000Well, number one, it learns the lessons from the the Russia hoax uh investigation that Devin Nunez Uh was a hero for, and that is, it understands the degree to which the agencies will try to classify and cordon things off and say, this is law enforcement, so we're not going to ask, we're not going to allow that to be addressed.
00:31:56.000If you are the intel side or this is intel, so we're not going to allow you to have a conversation on the law enforcement side.
00:32:05.000This Church Committee itself will make the determination about what it wants to ask questions about.
00:32:11.000It has full range to go after anything with regard to ongoing investigations, so that they can't use that as a a big banner of protection from any from answering questions, uh sources and methods, so that we get a handle on not just what the information is we need, but how they came about that information, so that we can unpack it and change that structure within the agency.
00:32:34.000The final thing I would say is that, unlike the Church Committee, we've got to figure out how to use the appropriations process in comp at the same time as the Church Committee is being used to pull back money, so that the agencies are being starved at the very same time that they're having to make decisions about whether they're going to comply.
00:32:58.000What cannot be fought is the fact that the Appropriations committee is defunding you in the process and with the gains that are being made from a personnel standpoint on the Appropriate committee and the Rules committee, there's going to be a lot of opportunity to make sure that any appropriations bills are synced up with the work of the Judiciary Committee and the Church Committee and Cash.
00:33:18.000Patel and our program introduced and floated a very interesting idea of fencing in the money, which is not necessarily taking in the entire FBI budget, which I do believe should be whittled down to almost nothing but saying, what is the line item that Christopher Wray treasures the most?
00:33:35.000So let's maybe fence in his Gulf Stream, let's fence in the 80 million bucks that he has a year for counterterrorism travel so he could fly to the Adirondacks.
00:33:44.000What is fencing in the money and why is that an important strategy for this new House Republican Caucus to employ?
00:33:52.000I'm smiling Charlie, because Cash is one of our fellows at the Center and he always used the word fencing and I don't know what nobody, what he means in a budget construct.
00:34:00.000But what he means by that is exactly what I just said, which is you cannot do this effectively unless you are using the power of the purse and to pull back and defund the things that are most critical to the agency's leadership uh, not necessarily to do their job, to con to the the, the activities to keep the American people safe, but that change their eye level and their center of gravity as to whether they're going to comply.
00:34:24.000And to that extent, you really do need to fence the money in carefully and to do it through the appropriations process and finding the pressure points right.
00:34:32.000So finding the ones where the heads of the IRS or the FBI they're going to be personally disenfranchised right word but they're going to be personally upset, they're going to have a more difficult life.
00:34:44.000They're little luxury items, correct that?
00:34:47.000That, Actually, you could win a PR battle around, right?
00:34:50.000So if House Republicans say, okay, we could make a whole PR battle around the FBI, but they're probably going to win that on MSNBC and New York Times.
00:34:58.000But if we pick a fight on the private jet fund for Christopher Wray, I think that's a fight worth having.
00:35:06.000I think there's going to be a host of places that we can win fights with them.
00:35:10.000And the church committee needs to be very strategic about how they roll this out to the American people because part of this is establishing the credibility with the entirety of the country to know what these agencies have done so that in two years, when the next Republican administration or conservative administration has a chance to govern, they will have been able to run a campaign against woke and the weaponized part of the federal government.
00:35:50.000And yes, I know there's a lot of cynics and skeptics out there.
00:35:53.000I'm choosing to believe based on the evidence, based on what's already been verified, and the promises that have been made to members that I trust.
00:36:01.000If this ends up becoming a reality, which I think it will, it'll be a victory for oversight and reigning in the fourth branch of government.
00:36:10.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:36:11.000Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:36:15.000Thank you so much for listening and God bless.
00:36:19.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.