00:00:40.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:19.000You know, I'd love to see the Senate pick up these funding bills and really get to work.
00:01:25.000I know there's been some stuff happening on the committee side of things, and I know you have been advocating for the Senate to really have an honest budget.
00:01:32.000You know, you've been in the Senate for over a decade now.
00:01:36.000Can you explain to our audience actually how budgeting is done?
00:01:38.000It seems just one continuing resolution tied to the other.
00:01:42.000Well, the way it should be done is a budget should be passed early in the fiscal year, and then that budget should guide an appropriation process, and we should be bringing these appropriation bills to the floor April, May, June, July, well before the end of the fiscal year, which closes out on September 30th.
00:01:59.000So as grotesquely dysfunctional as Washington, D.C. is, you have to understand there's a very well-honed process for plundering and mortgaging our children's future, and we're seeing it play out right now.
00:02:10.000You don't bring up appropriation bills.
00:02:12.000You wait till right before the end of the fiscal year.
00:02:14.000Then you start claiming there's going to be a crisis of a government shutdown.
00:02:49.000But again, that's quite honestly what I think conservatives in the House are trying to do as well.
00:02:54.000Yeah, so what is your take on the Speaker of the House, you know, Ray?
00:02:57.000I know you're not going to weigh in necessarily on personnel selection, but it would be helpful to Senate Republicans if the House said we're not just going to do business as usual.
00:03:05.000And Senator, you know, this people Wisconsin re-elected you decisively because they don't want that multi-trillion dollar deficits to continue.
00:03:13.000We're going to post a $2 trillion deficit minimum, and most members of D.C. are just perfectly okay with business as usual.
00:03:21.000What support could you receive then from the House to make your job easier in the Senate?
00:03:26.000Well, first of all, as a big supporter, I'm a big supporter of Jim Jordan.
00:03:29.000I think it's really unfortunate that he's not Speaker.
00:03:32.000He would have been a true fiscal conservative and a very practical one.
00:03:35.000Both Jim and I under the debt ceiling fight said we'll increase the debt ceiling if we just pass Preventing Government Shutdown Act so we can get rid of these shutdowns for all time.
00:03:44.000So as very practical individuals, unfortunately, the House didn't elect him Speaker.
00:03:48.000Hopefully they can come up with some consensus candidate.
00:03:50.000But what the House should have been doing, and quite honestly, Republican leadership in the Senate should have been working with the Speaker to urge the House to pass appropriation bills starting in April, May, June, and July.
00:04:01.000And then once they passed an appropriation bill, and I would always start with defense, you know, send that over to the Senate, and then Senate Republicans ought to just be badgering Chuck Schumer.
00:04:14.000That's why we're in this well-honed process of probably going to have to pass some kind of omnibus.
00:04:20.000But next year, at a minimum, let's start that process a lot earlier, and we'll need a Republican House to lead the way because appropriation bills have to be initiated in the House.
00:04:31.000There really is nothing the Senate can do until the House passes its first appropriation bill.
00:04:35.000Senator, when you came and spoke at our Turning Point USA event nearly 10 years ago at UW-Madison, you had a PowerPoint presentation I'll never forget.
00:04:42.000And we were thinking about as a nation to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars, and it was a real big concern, right?
00:04:48.000Can you just kind of go through just some of the back of the napkin math of how unbelievable a $2 trillion deficit is, different than a $33 trillion structural deficit?
00:05:01.000Just walk our audience through what do these numbers mean, not to mention the interest payments alone.
00:05:06.000Well, just a quick history: 2002 was the first year we passed the $2 trillion total government spending Rubicon.
00:05:14.00017 years later, the FY 2019, before the pandemic, we spent $4.4 trillion.
00:05:21.000Then, of course, during the pandemic, that was an emergency, right?
00:05:26.000So then we spent 6.3, I think 6.5, 6.8.
00:05:30.000We pretty well now settled on a baseline spending of $6.4 trillion, which is $2 trillion more than we just spent four years ago.
00:05:38.000Had we just taken 2002 spending and grew that spending by a reasonable amount, let's say population growth plus inflation, last year we would have spent just under $4 trillion and we'd have more than a balanced budget.
00:05:51.000We'd have a surplus, but that's not Washington did.
00:05:54.000Again, we've got a problem with the Unit Party.
00:05:56.000We have enough Republicans who love spending money as well, and we just don't have fiscal restraints.
00:06:03.000It's, I think, $700 billion this year.
00:06:05.000A couple of years, it'll probably be more.
00:06:07.000We'll spend more on interest than we spend on Social Security.
00:06:11.000That's not too far away in the future.
00:06:12.000And of course, if you want to save Social Security, you've got to get our deficit spending under control, or we will not have the financial wherewithal to plus up benefits to honor those promises we made when the trust fund expires.
00:06:25.000Isn't that the great irony of the whole thing, which is that if we don't actually make tough fiscal decisions, the thing that the other side is always fear-mongering over actually might not be financed or funded, the stuff that government should actually do.
00:06:37.000So, Senator, shifting gears for a second here, RFK Jr. is now running as an independent.
00:06:42.000Let's just talk about your state of Wisconsin.
00:06:44.000Do you think that that would help or hurt the Republican cause?
00:06:47.000Knowing the voters of Wisconsin, knowing that there's a lot of people that do care about medical freedom, and you were the best senator alongside Senator Rand Paul to hold Fauci accountable and talk about vaccine adverse events and side effects.
00:07:01.000Do you think RFK Jr. will help Republicans, help Democrats, or maybe just a little bit of both?
00:07:17.000The mainstream media, the leftist media, is completely ignoring him.
00:07:21.000So most Democrats probably don't even know he's running for president.
00:07:24.000Or Republicans do because we have different podcasts that are open to both sides and they're willing to listen to his viewpoint.
00:07:33.000And there's an awful lot of things that RFK Jr. is talking about that conservatives agree with.
00:07:37.000I think there's things that we probably disagree with.
00:07:40.000But at least he's being able to, he's being given a forum on conservative ballots.
00:07:45.000We don't have the cancel culture like the left does.
00:07:47.000Yeah, no, and my fear, Senator, is that RFK Jr. will peel off some of the people that are otherwise would vote Republican that still have some anger post-COVID.
00:08:01.000And they feel as if Republicans had enough to address it.
00:08:05.000Obviously, not with yourself included, who's been terrific on it.
00:10:24.000Even with that, I'd want to scrutinize it to make sure this is exactly what Israel needs and we don't have to spend billions more that they don't need right off the bat.
00:10:31.000But if you combine with Ukraine, and whether you agree or disagree, Ukrainian funding is more controversial.
00:10:37.000And the other part of the problem with these supplementals is the Biden administration will throw a wish list.
00:10:43.000So their border security isn't for border security.
00:10:46.000What it'll do is it'll pay for more processing, more dispersion of illegal immigrants.
00:10:51.000It will fund sanctuary cities, which is another incentive, another draw for more illegal immigration.
00:10:57.000So whatever the Democrats suppose will be awful.
00:11:00.000And so it's better to strip all these different elements out, debate them separately, and pass them separately.
00:11:06.000There's no reason we couldn't do that.
00:11:08.000And so, Senator, have you been receiving briefing or intelligence that is satisfying you regarding the Israeli conflict?
00:11:17.000And do you believe that Iran was behind the massacre of Jews that happened two and a half weeks ago?
00:11:25.000Well, whether they were directly behind it, directing it, I'll believe that we really don't have solid intelligence on that, but it's obvious that Iran is the largest state sponsor.
00:11:35.000Terror, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Shiite groups in Iraq.
00:11:40.000These are all being basically funded by, supported by Iran, and they encourage their activity and then they celebrate the massacres.
00:11:48.000I mean, so no, in the end, it's Iran that is the main king player here, and they're the ones largely responsible.
00:11:57.000There's this very powerful article that came out yesterday, Senator, that says that the massacre in Israel is waking up the eyes of some of the woke in America.
00:12:06.000They're questioning their previous opinions.
00:12:08.000You're seeing a lot of mega donors pull money from Harvard and Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, which I'm pleased to see given the hotped of anti-Semitism.
00:12:15.000My question is: are you seeing any change among Senate colleagues privately, any attitude change where all of a sudden they're saying, huh, maybe we shouldn't have an open border.
00:12:24.000Maybe there are sleeper cells in America.
00:12:26.000Because we're seeing the elite money circles all of a sudden have a little bit of a tone shift of on immigration, foreign policy, even kind of funding of colleges.
00:12:35.000Has that tone shift also occurred in the U.S. Senate from just on the last two and a half weeks being there?
00:12:51.000They support President Biden's open border policy.
00:12:53.000And these are even senators that voted for the 2006 Secure Fence Act.
00:12:57.000So, again, they are completely in lockstep behind President Biden.
00:13:01.000If they nod at all toward the direction of border security, it's only because it's under extreme political pressure and the fear that a terrorist attack will occur here in America and it'll be undertaken by somebody who came through the Southwest border.
00:13:32.000Charlie, there are probably around 6 million people since the start of the Biden administration that have come to this country either encountered, processed, and dispersed or as a known gotaway.
00:13:45.000We have no idea where most of them are going.
00:13:47.000Obviously, where some of the governors are shipping them up to New York and Chicago, where they're concentrating, it's a real problem for there.
00:13:53.000But I think illegal immigrants are filtering all over the country.
00:13:57.000There's certainly pockets where they have previous migrants that provide some support group, but I think they're all over America.
00:14:05.000We just had a recent report that the Biden administration is bringing in a bunch of Somalians to the Eau Claire area.
00:15:58.000Senator, I don't know if you ever had a chance to stay at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, but right now it is overrun with illegals that have been transported from the southern part of the United States to the interior of the United States, happening all over the country.
00:16:14.000I know we talked about spending previously, but is there any not advice, but how can we, the grassroots, help tactically to help us get any sort of border security done in this next measure?
00:16:25.000One idea was like, hey, if you want your Ukraine funding, we have to tie it to border funding.
00:16:30.000You said, hey, the Israel thing shouldn't be a problem to get approval in the Senate, but the border thing is a problem to get approval.
00:16:36.000That's really weird, Senator, that the U.S. Senate would be super okay with, and they should to send money to Israel, but not to secure our own nation.
00:17:46.000So we actually need to change the law so that even in an administration that's trying to enforce the law, that credible fear standard is way too low.
00:17:57.000It's got to be something like more likely than not that they actually have a credible fear of being persecuted by their government and that their story is more likely than not true.
00:18:07.000We've got to do those types of things.
00:18:09.000We've got to return people that don't meet the standards like the return to Mexico policy that actually worked.
00:18:13.000There has to be consequences for coming to this country illegally without a valid asylum claim.
00:18:17.000And the vast majority coming, as sympathetic as we may be with so many of them, they're not valid asylum claims and we shouldn't be letting them in.
00:18:26.000Senator, in closing here, Weiss is supposed to testify behind closed doors.
00:18:30.000I don't know if he already has to some people in the House.
00:18:33.000You have been a leader to really root out Biden corruption with the Marco Polo report and many different things.
00:18:39.000It seems as if that has not been primary front page news.
00:18:44.000In your personal opinion, what is the status of these investigations?
00:18:47.000Both you and Senator Grassley have been leading the charge on this, and then also the subsequent FBI and DOJ cover-ups of the Biden corruption.
00:18:56.000Well, again, I think Chairman Jordan and Comer are doing a great job of filling in the piece of the puzzle in terms of the corruption of the Biden crime family.
00:19:06.000And certainly Chairman Jordan, you know, looking at potential abuses within the FBI.
00:19:11.000Charlie, I tell you, it's like pulling teeth, though.
00:19:13.000The deep state does not give up its secrets very easily, and the FBI just basically stonewalls.
00:19:18.000So, I mean, it's probably a good sign that Attorney Weiss is coming in to testify, you know, and this will be transcribed.
00:19:42.000I mean, my guess is Chairman Jordan will be there, but they've got some good, good staff members that know how to ask questions, good investigators.