Tonight at 9pm on Blaze TV, host Glenn Beck is joined by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Krakauer to discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of the impeachment of President Donald Trump and the ongoing investigation into his administration.
00:02:22.440We have got to come together, and I don't know how to do it with people who, you know,
00:02:29.400it's easier to come together when you agree on certain principles.
00:02:34.100And I'm wondering if we agree on certain principles anymore, because we can argue about anything unless one side is trying to destroy you or others
00:02:46.400and go against everything you stand for.
00:02:48.440I can't sit down at a negotiating table with Vladimir Putin and say, hey, let's just all get along.
00:02:57.080I don't know how to do that unless I just say, you know, we'll all get along.
00:11:58.140I was listening to some music from the 80s.
00:12:05.000And remember, you know, this is when Al and Tipper Gore came out and said, we've got to put a rating on all of these albums that are coming out.
00:15:10.940He's also the senator from the state of Utah.
00:15:13.920And he has been speaking out about the corruption in Washington and especially the spending for years.
00:15:24.840He just did a tweet thread here that is remarkable.
00:15:29.760Let me just give you a couple of them.
00:15:30.940The formula has been quite consistent for years.
00:15:33.680A tiny group of leaders, which I refer to as the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, McCarthy and Jeffries, privately negotiates a draft spending bill.
00:15:42.540Some would say with more input from lobbyists than most members of Congress.
00:15:48.620That bill is kept as if it were highly classified secret until days, sometimes hours before a spending deadline.
00:15:56.600That is the moment the government will run out of money, resulting in a shutdown unless Congress passes another spending bill.
00:16:03.060It's not unusual for some power, powerful lobbyists to know more about what is in the bill prior to its release than most members of Congress.
00:16:13.340As soon as it's been released, allowing most members of Congress to see it for the first time, lawmakers in both chambers are told you've got to pass this right now without any changes in order to avoid a shutdown.
00:16:24.320Lawmakers who want time to read and amend the bill and remove excessive and inappropriate items in the bill or add new items wrongly admitted from it are told that would be nice, but there just isn't any time for that.
00:16:37.320Lawmakers are told, essentially, you've got two options here.
00:16:40.440You can vote for the bill or you can vote against it.
00:16:45.980If you oppose this bill, you're going to risk causing a shutdown and you'll be blamed if that happens.
00:16:52.140Thus, many members quickly acquiesced to these intimidation tactics, uttering as if reciting a mantra, rehearsed phrases like this bill isn't perfect and the process was totally unfair.
00:17:04.840But I voted for it anyway because I care about the troops and I hate shutdowns.
00:17:11.800Never mind that the bill spends too much money.
00:17:13.800Never mind it funds countless things like voting yes, that countless things those voting yes publicly oppose.
00:17:21.600Never mind that for all, never mind that for all, most of Congress knows the bill might fund giant monuments to Benedict Arnold, King George III, and Milli Vanilli.
00:18:24.640I'm doing it because it's destroying our country and I've done everything I can internally.
00:18:31.280Normally, the way I like to solve problems in any organization, including the United States Senate, is to work internally to persuade people.
00:18:39.180I've done this for years and the process has continued the same.
00:18:43.040And so it's important to make sure that people understand this and to make sure that the American people demand something better, something different from those.
00:18:55.420They elect to make their laws and to spend their tax dollars.
00:19:31.180They grow more powerful every time they do this.
00:19:34.940But that power is accrued at the expense of the American people, especially the hardworking, poor, middle class Americans everywhere whose tax dollars are spent recklessly and whose own dollars spend have less buying power every single year because of that excessive spending.
00:19:55.420It will continue until people no longer vote for crap like this.
00:20:00.060And so that's that's why it's so important to talk about it, because people need to reach out to their senators and their congressmen and say, do not ever, ever vote for a spending bill that you haven't read, haven't had the opportunity to understand, have the opportunity to debate under the light of day and amend to improve the bill.
00:20:16.720You know, it's it's really funny because that's what Barack Obama ran under.
00:20:21.220He said, you're going to be able to read the bill.
00:20:22.980You're going to be able to know what's in it.
00:20:26.300And he's the guy who started this kind of spending and rushing these these bills through without any debate, without any amendments and just one lump sum.
00:20:42.060I thought the House was supposed to pass like 12 different budgets or 12 different budgets for, you know, defense and one for Homeland Security, et cetera, et cetera.
00:22:11.440First of all, is there something that the House and the Senate can do to make sure that I don't care if you close down the government, you know, just make sure that people get the money, you know, the Social Security and our pay is going to our soldiers, etc., etc.
00:22:30.500But the rest of government, I don't really give a flying crap if you close it or not.
00:22:37.300Is there anything that we can do for essential spending, pay our bills?
00:22:42.320Yes, there are things that we can do on that front.
00:22:45.820And there's there are a number of legislative proposals that I've advocated for for years to deal with this kind of situation.
00:22:51.980One that I really like is a bill called the Ending Government Shutdowns Act.
00:22:55.360My friend and colleague Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, has been pushing this for a long time, and I stand with him in that it would do essentially, as you described, explaining that if we reach the end of a spending period and there isn't a new spending bill passed, that the bare essentials that you described would continue to be funded.
00:23:16.240But that you'd start to see some cuts, a gradual ratcheting down of government spending over time, such that the default is not a full shutdown, but the default is you have gradual cuts that are imposed unless or until Congress can come up with other spending.
00:23:38.500It's the combination of the spending cliff, the expiration of the spending deadline, coupled with the fear of being blamed for a shutdown that causes people to be willing to vote for things they would never otherwise vote for.
00:23:51.520And so we should pass reforms like that.
00:23:55.720But look, I mean, just look at what has happened over the last decade.
00:23:59.880We have increased our national debt substantially over the last by by 12 trillion dollars just over the last few years.
00:24:13.200And this is crippling the American people.
00:24:15.860The economic numbers out today reflect that the inflation numbers that come out on a regular basis show what happens when we have no no break on the spending, when we have no limit to what we spend because we just print more money.
00:24:28.580Milton Friedman used to describe this as the true rate of taxation, because that's the true cost of government.
00:24:34.300When you spend too much, it's just a backdoor invisible tax.
00:24:38.960Mike, maybe I'm too cynical here, but I worry that McCarthy started this impeachment inquiry as a as a as a, I don't know, carrot and a stick for those who are standing, you know,
00:24:58.400for the budget, because what he's going to say is, well, we're going to have shut down government, which will mean we're going to shut down this inquiry.
00:25:12.140The reason I worry about that is that starting about two weeks ago, I started seeing members of Republican members of Congress going on TV,
00:25:20.960saying things that sounded kind of like that, saying if we if we have a shutdown, it could shut down investigations into the Bidens and so on and so forth.
00:26:25.280If if the government tragically were to shut down.
00:26:29.140And so, look, if we can get to a good deal, we should pass that deal and avoid a shutdown.
00:26:35.200But there is absolutely no reason to use that as some kind of an excuse to not do our homework here because it simply isn't true.
00:26:45.800OK, so, Mike, you said tell your elected lawmakers in Washington to oppose any spending bill that they have in the opportunity to read, comprehend, debate and amend.
00:26:55.360Do you guys even listen to the phone calls that come in anymore?
00:27:02.940But I regularly check in with my staff to find out what people are saying.
00:27:07.780And I know I'm not alone in that in the House, not of the Senate, not among Republicans or Democrats.
00:27:13.600If we call and say, do not pass a continuation bill, do not pass any of these bills unless you've read it and you've discussed it and you've not done this in a hurried way.
00:27:53.100And that's and that's a great way of putting it.
00:27:54.860I would add to that, at least in the Senate, look, each house is a little bit different.
00:27:58.380But in the Senate, there's no excuse ever for people voting for a bill.
00:28:03.440Not only if they haven't read and had the opportunity to debate in public, but also each member needs to have had an opportunity to offer amendments and to vote on amendments to improve the bill.
00:28:14.300And there's no reason why they can't do that in the House, too, because that's the thing.
00:28:18.540And part of what's so pernicious about this going on is they write this thing in secret with the help of lobbyists, to be sure.
00:28:25.260But in secret, it's guarded as a state secret within Congress.
00:28:29.520And then they roll it out as they in this hermetically sealed case and say, you can't touch it.
00:28:44.560And if they do that to us, we should vote no.
00:28:47.000Now, keep in mind, this is not too much to ask, nor is this even asking for a specific budget amount.
00:28:51.840Hopefully, we will get to the point where we won't spend more than we have.
00:28:55.100But this is the best first step toward getting to that point.
00:28:58.500We will never get to the point where we stop spending too much unless or until members vote no without the adequate opportunity to read, understand, debate and amend each bill.
00:29:52.400People are going to jail for things that they shouldn't be necessarily going to jail while others are doing far worse, and they're just walking away.
00:29:59.700I want all the bad guys who break the law to go to jail equally, equal and blind justice.
00:30:07.960I will tell you right now, I am not a fan of impeachment.
00:30:12.300I am a fan of this impeachment with Joe Biden.
00:30:15.320I was not a fan of Donald Trump's impeachment.
00:30:42.880They're impeaching him with no evidence, and this, I believe, coming from the Bush people, but I could be wrong.
00:30:50.640Somebody who's really been following this closely is Sarah Gonzalez, and she is the host of News and Why It Matters here on Blaze TV every day.
00:31:02.320So I was shocked when I started seeing the actual trial in the Senate.
00:31:10.480Shocked at the fact that this seems like a Stalin show trial.
00:31:15.280Yeah, and it was done very quickly, rushed through in a holiday weekend.
00:31:20.420And in fact, I want to borrow a term that I heard used in this trial, which is there are no coincidences in Austin.
00:31:27.780And there are a lot of things that make you go, hmm, during this whole entire process.
00:31:33.480For starters, there was no Republican in the Texas House who called for Ken Paxton to be impeached until right after Ken Paxton called on Dade Phelan, Speaker of the House Dade Phelan, to resign after the video.
00:31:47.720You recall the video that surfaced of him allegedly seemingly being severely intoxicated on the House floor.
00:31:56.200No Republican called for Ken Paxton's impeachment until Ken Paxton called out Dade Phelan.
00:32:03.200Now, remember, this is the same Speaker of the House Republican.
00:32:07.000I use the air quotes Republican Speaker of the House who assigns Democrats to committee heads, committee chairs of very powerful committees, yet refuses to act on school choice, refuses to act on banning Chinese ownership of Texas land, refusal to act on border security.
00:32:23.380So that doesn't really sound like a conservative fighter to me.
00:33:05.920And these OAG whistleblowers are forwarding information to their attorney, Johnny Sutton.
00:33:13.780And curiously, the same day that they go to the FBI with these accusations, George P. Bush, who had let his law license expire for 10 years, renewed his law license.
00:33:26.400And now, of course, we know the rest of the story, which is months later, he went on to announce that he would be running for attorney general of the state of Texas.
00:33:35.000Now, I find this outrageous that you would infer that maybe because, I mean, they paid Sutton, right?
00:33:46.040Oh, well, it's funny that you that you mentioned that, because there is a clip that I would like to play for you of an exchange between the defense and just one of the whistleblowers explaining some of that payment plan or lack thereof.
00:34:01.260OK, from your office email, you forwarded grand jury subpoenas that were supposed to be secret to your counsel, Johnny Sutton, correct?
00:35:26.780Well, and what attorney do you know who would be happy to just do all of this hard work on a case for three whole years without some form of payment being promised or even discussed?
00:35:36.560What attorney do you know, let alone one of the top, you know, most expensive attorneys in the state of Texas?
00:36:33.640I mean, it's a bunch of accusations that basically at the end of the day, the evidence that they show is this.
00:36:39.860Ken Paxton was the boss of this office, asked his subordinates to investigate certain things that he found to be wrong that the FBI was doing.
00:36:51.460And they are they are saying, as if it's so bizarre, I can't believe that he believed that the FBI might be doing something wrong, that they somehow or another, he believes that they're not trustworthy.
00:37:40.460So Dave Phelan, he is the speaker of the Texas House.
00:37:45.000This guy should be impeached himself for this because you don't give somebody this kind of power and have them abuse it in this way without some sort of some some sort of, you know, penalty.
00:38:03.060And it should be he's either removed or the people remove him.
00:39:19.380It I can't stress how important this is to the country, because if they are successful at doing this, if they are successful, this will become the blueprint for the entire country.
00:39:29.300So that the globalists and the establishment can remove duly elected officials that we, the people, put into office because we wanted them to fight for us.
00:39:39.140And this will be the blueprint to remove them anyway.
00:39:42.260Yeah, that's what they're doing to the House caucus right now, the Freedom Caucus.