Ted Cruz joins Glenn on The Blaze to talk impeachment, Rush Limbaugh, and the Democratic response to the SOTU. Glenn and Jake are joined by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to talk all things impeachment and Iowa.
00:02:38.500I mean, you should list your house with it.
00:02:40.360No, not going to list, I want somebody who's busting their butt because they really care, and they're really good at it, and they have the track record.
00:02:51.000Do you want your nephew to be selling your house, or do you want somebody who is selling your house who has the best record?
00:02:57.680The best record kind of real estate agent you'll find at realestateagentsitrust.com.
00:03:03.180It's a free service, it really, we're making a difference in the way America buys and sells houses because our agents are people that care, have the track record, they're the best in your area.
00:03:15.620In fact, if we don't have somebody who we have thoroughly checked out in your area, we won't recommend somebody.
00:03:21.540If you're buying or selling a house, make sure they're the ones that are going to work the hardest and give you the best bang for your buck.
00:04:16.880And, you know, I've got to say, I really feel for all of the thousands of volunteers.
00:04:21.820You know, you've got candidates who've spent a year or more crisscrossing the state.
00:04:25.940And as you know, you've got volunteers.
00:04:27.920We had people come from Texas from all over the country in 2016, basically move to Iowa, stay in dormitories, and go out in blizzards knocking on doors, making phone calls.
00:04:39.180They poured their hearts into it, and it's not too much to have at the end of the night an election result.
00:04:45.480No, I mean, you know, that's a nice benefit.
00:04:48.980I cannot imagine the frustration, the anger they're feeling.
00:04:53.260So, Ted, what is your – I mean, let me give you some of the headlines.
00:04:59.380Republicans gloat over Iowa caucus meltdown.
00:05:02.580You're actually – this is from CBS News.
00:08:45.200So they have things like superdelegates.
00:08:47.020The Republican side, we don't have superdelegates.
00:08:49.480The Democrats have, like, had a big chunk of their vote to decide who their presidential nominee is are lifelong career politicians who are called superdelegates who get to decide.
00:09:24.680You know, someone actually believes in the people said, all right, how about let's leave the people in charge of themselves and get government?
00:09:31.400You know, Jefferson referred to the Constitution as chains to bind the mischief of government.
00:09:36.480The modern Democratic Party, they don't believe there's any mischief to be bound.
00:10:27.620So, you know, I will say, as you know, I've sort of entered your world a little bit in the last couple of weeks because we've launched a podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:11:40.540Although I did have folks who were wondering if I was paying up on losing a bet for the Nationals-Astros because the Nationals did the whole baby shark thing.
00:11:52.120I was talking to Mitch McConnell, and we were talking to a couple of other senators who were there.
00:11:56.780And we were talking about State of the Union, and it wasn't clear when the vote in impeachment was going to be, and if it ended up being after State of the Union, which it is.
00:12:08.400There was some discussion about the possibility that Trump might cancel the event, cancel the State of the Union, say, I'll wait until after you vote on that.
00:12:16.020And that was being discussed a little bit.
00:12:17.840And we were saying, well, what if Pelosi won't invite him back?
00:12:20.280What if she says, okay, you canceled it.
00:14:26.900I think that contrast is playing out beautifully.
00:14:30.760And so my advice to the president for tonight, for State of the Union, is the same thing, is be positive and optimistic and lay out the future.
00:14:38.440And just don't even talk about the impeachment.
00:18:10.760So, what I have been saying from the beginning is that if we go down the road of witnesses, that we needed to respect the principle of reciprocity.
00:18:20.920In other words, we couldn't do what the House did, have a one-sided show trial where only prosecution witnesses are allowed and you block every defense witness, which is what the House Democrats did.
00:18:32.060And so, what I early on was urging my colleagues to do is if we go down the road to witnesses, and I initially just kind of kept my mind open on whether we would have them or not, but I said if we go down the road, we need to do it even handedly.
00:19:00.160But I think it also ended up playing a big part in the final decision not to go down the road of additional witnesses.
00:19:07.900And that ended up being an important vote.
00:19:11.100I spent a lot of time within the conference trying to get us to 51 votes to say enough is enough.
00:19:18.000The American people are tired of this.
00:19:20.240There were 18 witnesses who testified the House proceeding.
00:19:22.820We heard hour after hour of witness testimony of documents, the most important documents in the entire impeachment proceeding, which is the transcript of the call that's at issue here, the president declassified and released.
00:19:35.460And so, we had a ton of evidence before us.
00:19:38.220And on all the evidence, the president hadn't committed an impeachable crime.
00:19:42.420He hadn't met – the House managers didn't meet the constitutional standard of high crimes or misdemeanors.
00:19:48.000And so I, at the end of the day, agreed that we didn't need additional witnesses because they hadn't proven their case.
00:19:54.380But I think laying out reciprocity, making clear that this will go both ways, I've got to tell you one of the consequences of that.
00:20:03.340I think there were a whole bunch of Democrats who were terrified of going down the road of witnesses.
00:20:15.820Because if we'd gone down the road of witnesses, if we'd been hearing testimony from Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, I think it would have been very – Democrats are terrified of the evidence of corruption.
00:22:03.600Anyway, I say all of that to say in answer to your question, Lindsey said on the show that he wanted to see investigations into Hunter Biden and into Burisma.
00:22:12.980And he wanted to see it on foreign relations.
00:22:59.160Did you know that in ancient Persia, roses were actually weapons?
00:23:05.980Soldiers would cut thousands of them and they would make them into little darts, dip them in poison, and then use like a little type of catapult to launch them over the enemy walls.
00:23:18.300It wasn't really efficient, but most people don't know that, and mainly because none of that is true at all.
00:23:26.200But, now that I have you thinking of roses, Valentine's Day is around and they are deadly darts.
00:23:33.300If you don't bring them home on Valentine's Day, deadly poisonous darts to the heart for you.
00:23:43.600Right now, if you order early, you can get the 18-stem enchanted rose medley for $29.99, or you can double it to the 36-stem bouquet for $20 more.
00:27:55.140And we had one issue with Rick Santorum eight years ago when one rural county didn't count properly in a razor-thin election, and it went from plus 8 to plus 12 on the certification process.
00:28:07.840That was the only issue we had in 50 years.
00:28:10.800They have turned this thing in to a cluster of epic proportions because this is what Medicare for all looks like.
00:28:19.880This is what your education – this is like a John Stossel documentary on the public education.
00:28:25.140This is waiting for Superman playing out with a caucus.
00:29:30.920You obviously didn't because it doesn't take that long to look at photographs or to count numbers on a page.
00:29:40.000So are you going to be able to trust – are you going to be able to trust these numbers at all because they're clearly not telling you the truth of how bad it is?
00:29:50.860I think it's obvious that they're not – that part, they're not telling you the truth.
00:29:54.880And last time I heard that sound is when I met my wife because we met on an AOL chat room 25 years ago.
00:30:05.660And I think what you're learning is that the counting process doesn't have full confidence and accountability, that they didn't do these counts properly.
00:30:17.160Because here's the – the process is with the herding process.
00:30:21.020When your candidate's not viable and you've got to move from one candidate to another and all of that politicking is going on right there in real time.
00:30:29.660I'm sure a lot of your listeners saw this on cable news last night at caucus sites where, you know, Andrew Yang's not viable or at a lot of caucus sites.
00:30:39.620And so where are his supporters going to go?
00:30:42.340And so trying to figure that out through the process of three counts, it's pretty obvious they're not sure about their own count because if they were, we'd have had these results by now.
00:30:52.540Now, we have California saying that they have a new app too, and they're going to be voting for the first time on an app.
00:31:02.840You think that's going to change between now and the California primary?
00:31:09.620I – you know, it's funny how we think that – and this is kind of the progressive mindset, isn't it, Glenn, that anything old is bad, anything old.
00:31:20.580And, hey, you know, we don't keep doing things because that's the way we've always done them, right?
00:31:27.760But maybe the reason why your great-grandmother passed her chocolate chip cookie recipe down to your grandmother and her – your grandmother passed it down to your mom and she's passing it down to you now is because it's the best damn chocolate chip cookie recipe anybody's found.
00:31:55.320How do the people in Iowa feel today, those people who worked their butts off, who canvassed neighborhoods, who have, you know, dragged people out to make sure that they were at caucus?
00:32:11.100Their vote really almost doesn't matter now because Iowa is the first.
00:32:21.260And if I were a voter, I would be so angry that my vote – I've been disenfranchised.
00:32:28.760Even if they count it later, it doesn't – that's not what I went for.
00:32:33.700We went to set the table and to start this thing, and now my voice hasn't been heard.
00:32:40.900I think you've got two choices in how to react to this.
00:32:45.220One is you don't want to admit the entire fallacy of your statist worldview.
00:32:52.140And so you'll go to conspiracy because you don't want to admit that central planning on this level, bureaucracy on this level, simply can't be trusted and doesn't work.
00:33:03.700That the same fallibilities in human nature that beguiles all of us doesn't go away when we put on a government uniform or we belong to a central structure.
00:33:15.220We bring those same imperfections into the process with us.
00:33:20.600You can either admit that you have been a victim of your own worldview, that what you want to do to health care, what you already did to education and energy, the reason why you wrecked those industries is because it's – you don't need smarter people.
00:33:36.600You can now admit this to yourself now that you're a first-person victim of this or because you don't want to admit this to yourself.
00:33:43.440You just say these particular people implementing it are bad, and you go down the road of a conspiracy.
00:33:48.880I think that's the choice Iowa Democrats have today.
00:33:51.560Steve, would you say it's fair, just judging by the way these candidates are reacting to the potential results that are on the way, that Buttigieg seemingly did pretty well and Biden did not do well?
00:34:06.300I think if – you know, Bernie Sanders this morning put out what his canvassers had internally at about 40 percent or almost half of the precincts, and it lines up a lot with what the leaked results of the Des Moines Register poll that were never officially unveiled, have to say.
00:34:23.720And it goes with the trend line, Stu, that I tweeted out in the middle of the night last night, just following a lot of Democrats across the state reporting from their caucus sites on Twitter, pardon me, that it looked pretty close between Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren, and it looked like Klobuchar could topple Biden for fourth place.
00:34:40.300So I think what you see out of this process is Joe Biden is a mortally wounded candidate, and you're already seeing polls in South Carolina close.
00:34:48.720This whole thing about the black vote is largely overblown because I think what people don't understand, because a lot of Republicans get their view of the Democratic Party from the media and Twitter.
00:35:00.000And the reality is black folks aren't watching CNN and MSNBC.
00:35:06.960And so they're going to pay attention to the race once it gets to them, and you're going to see the candidates that have the momentum are going to close the gap, similar to how South Carolina was going to be Hillary Clinton's black firewall in 2008.
00:35:18.720And that's the place where Barack Obama essentially won the nomination after winning Iowa.
00:35:24.280So I think that you're seeing Joe Biden is a mortally wounded candidate in this race.
00:35:32.440So Sanders, I mean, it was either Sanders or Buttigieg that won last night, I think, just based on everything that we do know.
00:35:42.340Sanders has been, and Buttigieg, I mean, Buttigieg hasn't been robbed as much as Sanders has, because Sanders could have used the momentum.
00:35:54.980Buttigieg even coming in second really helps him a great deal.
00:36:01.700Sanders not getting that push and seeing a dominant win hurts him.
00:36:26.260I think Buttigieg is the candidate that got screwed more than anybody else.
00:36:29.820I think that's why you saw him out there and declare victory last night openly, trying to capture some kind of momentum, because he lost a chance to kind of be the shiny object and the new hotness.
00:36:39.560And I think what the National Democratic Party is wrestling with right now is if it's really a Bloomberg-Bernie Sanders choice for them, which is do they think Michael Bloomberg is somebody that can win enough of their base over to stop Bernie Sanders?
00:36:56.880And if not, then time to get your seat in before the music stops playing, which is the Soviet National Anthem.
00:37:05.340But you've been playing it for years anyway.
00:38:14.840That's hard to believe, but there was a time when explorers coming to this continent thought they were going to find the Fountain of Youth.
00:38:25.140Of course, even more bizarre is that they thought it was going to be in Florida.
00:38:27.820It doesn't feel like it would be in Florida if they found it.
00:38:31.020They're all those old people from New York that are there.
00:41:26.620Then, immediately following the speech, Bill O'Reilly is giving a live reaction, and that gives me time to get out of the House chambers and down to a camera where I will tell you my inside-the-room feel and take.
01:21:29.080Yeah, well, one of the big things they decided, and this has been something that's been spread around a lot of people who are experts on these things, is when they put in the digital voting systems to cure the hanging in Chad system from back in the day and spent tons and tons of money, they put in these systems but then didn't have any sort of paper backup.
01:21:48.260So they would go and they would not know if votes were being changed in the digital process.
01:21:54.880Well, there's nothing wrong with that.
01:23:55.920I mean, you know that no one is happy with any of the supporters, but it shows that it's not only that they're not happy with the candidates that are running.
01:24:10.120It shows that even the candidates that are running, they don't really have a passionate base.
01:26:54.680Coming up in just a minute, final hour of the radio broadcast, we have Nigel Farage on with
01:27:02.460us who gave this incredible speech last week in the EU saying, you know, see you later in a very nice way and was silenced, if I'm not mistaken, by the, I don't know, the speaker or whatever the hell they have is in charge.
01:27:21.540She was Irish and I thought that was part of Great Britain, but maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong.
01:28:57.700And it's because of him that English, the English now and the Great Britain is free of the EU, or at least they're on that road.
01:29:09.160And you, of course, know this because economically, the world has just gone into a giant sinkhole over the last couple of days and everyone has super gonorrhea.
01:29:18.880We'll talk to him coming up in one minute.
01:44:53.520But normally, legislation can only be tabled by the government.
01:44:58.500But he allowed just backbench members of Parliament to table legislation, all of it designed to stop Brexit from happening and to force us into having a second referendum.
01:46:29.680But I think now, now, those that now think, oh, gosh, we should rejoin the European Union will begin to look like members of the Flat Earth Society.
01:46:38.900So I think we're through the worst of it now.
01:48:43.940And I'll tell you what, the one thing Boris needs to do, if he gets back our fishing rights and gives Scotland 200 miles of the North Sea that's theirs, it'll be the end of a separatist army.
01:49:58.380I want you to call Goldline right now.
01:50:00.400They're giving away a 99.999% pure silver bullion, a coin that's three quarter ounce coin, just for calling and having a conversation about your retirement portfolio and how to protect it.
01:50:16.500Sure, you get the silver coin for free.
01:50:18.720But the reason to do it is because you're responsible.
01:50:22.440And I want you to look at what is possible if this is a global pandemic and protect yourself at least with some of your money in precious metals.
01:52:50.080They're just saying it because they think he'll—it's like convincing you.
01:52:53.680We caught him once, that must mean he's doing it all the time.
01:52:56.420Now, first of all, you didn't catch him, and if you caught him with a big enough example, you could throw him out based on that.
01:53:00.820You know what they're saying is we know this isn't a big enough example, but believe me, if we caught him with this one,
01:53:05.380he's doing five more that are worse, and we don't know what they are, but you better throw him out before we find out.
01:53:09.560You know what's really frightening is that they have proven every step of the way in the last four years that whatever they accuse him of, they're doing.
01:53:19.600And the way they've gone off on he's going to cheat in the election, he's going to cheat in the election, he's going to manipulate the election.
01:54:32.000You definitely get the sense that these candidates have a good, you get the sense these candidates do have a clear picture of what they think happened in Iowa.
01:54:44.740You notice Klobuchar was pretty happy.
01:55:09.940Because there was very much like there had been a lot of chatter that, okay, this is Bernie's.
01:55:16.620And then Pete's going to be in right behind him.
01:55:20.660But, yeah, Biden was just completely, from what we understand, completely decimated in the whole thing.
01:55:26.640Yeah, there's several reports did the thing where they went to an individual precinct and tried to line up.
01:55:36.100And just getting Biden to 15% to be a viable candidate was a huge problem.
01:55:40.860They couldn't get people over to the Biden side.
01:55:42.420So they were all distributing to Buttigieg and Klobuchar afterwards.
01:55:46.440And that's why they think, you know, this is the way this is going to turn out.
01:55:48.840I mean, it looks like this is a great help probably to Biden because I don't think the narrative coming out of Iowa is going to be all that positive for him.
01:55:58.020I spoke to some caucusers from all the candidates.
01:56:02.920But specifically the ones for Biden, they were pretty happy.
01:56:08.280They said, okay, this is a good result for us.
01:56:11.180Maybe going into New Hampshire, you know, the focus can be moving forward.
01:56:16.480And everybody will kind of forget about what happened in Iowa.
01:56:21.940So, Kevin, what was the – did anybody that was part of the caucus that was a Democrat, were any of them saying, I can't believe this, we've worked so hard and this is screwed up because of the Democratic Party here in Iowa.
01:59:09.860So tonight at 8 o'clock, we begin our live coverage, starting with me of the State of the Union.
01:59:16.520I have a couple of guests for about 15 minutes, then we throw it to Eric Bolling here in the studios here in Washington where we're broadcasting now.
01:59:26.380I'm going into the house chamber and actually watching it from the inside because you see it from a whole different angle when you're actually in the chamber.
01:59:37.780However, last year I walked out with some real insight, and quite honestly, I'm a little disappointed that the impeachment vote didn't happen before this because, oh, man, I was waiting for marching bands and whatever.
01:59:54.980Oh, I totally think he's mentioning it tonight.
02:02:13.260Do you ever remember a week in the news where the Super Bowl was so swallowed up by the other events?
02:02:20.840I mean, you know, it's all – the Super Bowl is the biggest event in the world as far as sports goes.
02:02:27.640I mean, maybe there's some stupid soccer thing you could argue, which is not even a sport.
02:02:31.220But really, I mean, you know, between Kobe happening before it, gosh, Rush Limbaugh, his announcement, all of these huge events lined up in one week.
02:02:41.240I don't think I've ever seen – which was a great game.
02:02:44.820I mean, it was basically swallowed up by everything else going on.
02:02:47.280We've come to the point where it's multiple massive news cycles per day.
02:05:01.240And in the course of a 10-minute phone call, you're going to be able to find out if there's a chance for you to save a lot of money just by refinancing.
02:05:10.260Now, that's if you've got a house and you've got a new loan in 2018.
02:05:15.920If you've got a new loan in 17, 16, 15, you really need to check this out because you're throwing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars away every single month.
02:06:30.200Without evidence, top Trump campaign officials, including sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are sowing distrust in the American democratic process, suggesting that Democratic Iowa caucuses are rigged.
02:06:45.540Wait, have you listened to yourself in the last three and a half years?
02:06:50.720That's all the Democrats have been saying about Donald Trump.
02:07:14.700Maybe we could ask the governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, whether, you know, whether that's a, because that's, they'll make the argument on that too.