Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russ Vogt joins Lou Dobbs on The Great America Show to discuss the race for House Speaker between Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and Andy Biggs (D-Illinois).
00:03:51.740Great to have you back with us here on The Great America Show, Russ.
00:03:54.580We're all watching this great drama play out in the nation's capital.
00:03:58.880The fight for the speakership between Congressman Andy Biggs and Kevin McCarthy, at least right now.
00:04:05.220And the fight for the soul of the Republican Party.
00:04:08.060How do you think all of this plays out?
00:04:11.400Well, I do think it's a battle for the heart and soul of the party and the conservative movement,
00:04:15.240because, as you know, the America First agenda is something that, with President Trump not being in office,
00:04:23.780the establishment would very much like to move on from.
00:04:26.440And right now, Congress would like to move on from it as well.
00:04:31.740And we need a speaker that fully understands with it, accepts it, sees it as the corrective that it was,
00:04:39.660and wants to have an agenda for House Republicans that is actually over the target about where the country views the most critical issues right now.
00:04:49.420And so I view Kevin McCarthy as the definition, symbolically, of what the cartel is.
00:10:12.800who's willing to accept this on our terms and then go from there.
00:10:16.360That's my hope for where we go from here.
00:10:19.400In the meantime, a lot of work needs to be done to be able to put out the notion of what the cartel is basically going out there
00:10:27.120and saying possibilities that are not real possibilities.
00:10:31.000They're trying to scare conservatives to saying Democrats will vote for a moderate
00:10:36.100or moderates will vote for a Democrat.
00:10:39.760None of those things are going to happen.
00:10:41.720And the way that you know it is that it's the Kevin McCarthy people that are putting it out there.
00:10:46.600And right now there's too many people in conservative ink right now that are falling for it.
00:10:52.200And we've got to put those fires out there.
00:10:54.580But we're ahead of schedule in this fight.
00:10:58.120And I think we're making a lot of progress.
00:11:00.540Yeah, the Mark Levin's in media who are sitting here saying you've got to have Kevin McCarthy.
00:11:05.060It's as if they have been suddenly – and I think Mark Levin is a bright and terrific guy.
00:11:12.220But where he gets the idea that there should be a ceding of authority as the first act of having won the majority is maddening to me.
00:11:21.220And it is representative of all of the folly that has preceded by decades, as I said, the Republican Party.
00:11:28.180And it's one of the reasons the swamp not only exists and survives, but it is thriving.
00:11:33.520I would like to take up this issue of what would be an agenda for whomever is to step forward as the leader of this pluralistic Congress that you're envisioning.
00:11:52.380Yeah, I think the agenda needs to be rallied – to be centered about what I call a return to self-government.
00:12:00.320And the reason we don't have self-government in this country is that the regime is both woke and weaponized against the American people.
00:12:10.000And too many of our policymakers don't understand it's a regime.
00:12:15.120It's not just – there's a hard edge to it.
00:12:21.200It's funding gay pride events in Prague.
00:12:24.580It's funding the training of LGBT activists in Senegal.
00:12:29.340It's funding the training of Marxist education in our universities so that they then go as teacher training funds into our schools to create and recruit young Marxist revolutionaries for a true cultural revolution.
00:12:46.680It's not just the national security apparatus, although it is with the FBI, with the NSA surveillance, but it's agencies like the EPA and the Department of Interior where the Interior denies the renewal license for an oyster company so that they go out of business.
00:13:04.880Or putting a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for constructing four ponds on his ranch land.
00:13:13.120That's the tenor of what the American people are now finding.
00:13:18.180And I think the agenda needs to be, first and foremost, going at that concept with every fiber there being and building an America First agenda around that.
00:13:29.920So you're touching on the border issues, the trade issues, the issues with regard to our manufacturing, the ability to scale towards the fight with China.
00:13:41.440All of these things come out of the central recognition that our policymakers need to have about what time it is in this country.
00:13:51.320And you have a different agenda when you're answering that question versus where we were with the 1990s or where we were in the 1980s.
00:13:59.920Let me ask you, you've used the expression regime, you've used the word cabal.
00:14:05.980Do you have an adjective precedent to give us a better idea of what cabal, what regime we're speaking of here?
00:14:17.680Yeah, it is the governing authorities, and it's not just the government.
00:14:23.680It is the government, it's the non-profits that are part of the revolving door, it's the institutions, it includes the media, the cultural high ground, it is the ideas, it is the paradigms.
00:14:39.820And so it's really the governing apparatus that has put into place that which controls us as the American people.
00:14:50.800And it explains when you understand this, you understand how could the president of the United States been in office and yet not control the Department of Justice.
00:15:00.520It helps you understand why is it that Congress, congressional leaders have so much power through the administrative state and the president does not.
00:15:13.260And so we don't have just an Article I problem, we don't have just an Article II problem.
00:15:18.400We have a massive overall blending of the two, of kind of an administrative state and imperial Congress, but it's really just the imperial nature comes from the leadership and the rest is largely put on the backbench to not be able to do any kind of policy entrepreneurship.
00:15:42.040When I talk about the cartel, what I'm really getting at is the extent to which there is a bipartisan establishment that largely views the same things, same paradigm, same viewpoints.
00:15:57.180The Republican part of it doesn't want to ever accomplish the policy objectives that they communicate to their voters that they largely hate if it's going to do anything to destabilize their power and make it slightly less risky.
00:16:13.360So I think on our issues, there's a supermajority out there of Democrats, independents and Republicans, but the party that we've had, the establishment that we've had never lets it get to that point because they know that these issues are cartel busting.
00:16:26.620And so their job is to manage away from these fights instead of managing toward them, because not only what they might be successful and accomplish our policy objectives, but they will certainly have more risk.
00:16:40.480And that is something that that, you know, President Trump was always willing to have manageable risk.
00:16:45.600And as a result, he was a successful politician, a successful president.
00:16:49.400He could take a punch and he could punch back.
00:16:52.040These are politicians that have largely grown up not wanting to ever punch.
00:17:30.320But we're watching President Biden control it absolutely.
00:17:33.700So the question becomes one when we talk about control, particularly the Justice Department, it means is there, first and foremost, alignment between the Justice Department, FBI complex and the White House?
00:17:51.500Or is there absolute revolution, dissidence and resistance in the case of Trump between the deep state, the administrative state and the White House?
00:18:02.160I think that those are the I think those are the fair descriptions of what the difference was rather than some sort of template that we could lay over each one.
00:18:14.240Right. And I think that's the complexity of it.
00:18:16.520Right. Is that you had a president that really was not a part of the governing regime.
00:18:20.240He was the elected elected head of the executive branch, for sure.
00:18:25.920But in terms of those governing paradigms and set of expectations, we saw what happened.
00:18:33.400You had a Department of Justice and an FBI that essentially participated in a coup d'etat to destabilize him, get him removed from office.
00:18:42.520And that's not what we see under the Biden administration that is fully part and parcel of that governing regime.
00:18:50.320And I think that's what makes this moment so difficult is is the it's to the outside world.
00:18:58.200There is certain logic to it, but it is not the easiest thing to align on the board as to from an institutional standpoint to figure out how to fix this.
00:19:10.440And and and so our organization has been hard at work to help educate the country on where where things are.
00:19:16.880But you kind of need a very granular contextual ability and you need perspective to kind of get some height to figure out where where are we and what needs to be done.
00:19:27.640And I applaud everything you're doing.
00:19:30.600I have I have a question that I think, though, is also, again, fundamental here.
00:19:36.700Can Republicans and conservatives ignore the fact that this country is under attack by the Marxist Dems who make up the deep state, the administrative state, the Marxist Dem party?
00:19:51.540First, don't we have to attack those institutions that have been weaponized, politicized to the point of utter corruption or all else will be for not?
00:20:04.180I agree with you, Lou. I think that's the central penning that needs to be dropped with our policymakers and our elites is on the on the right, is that you can't have this notion of of just being able to kind of on a bicameral ability to work with the other side, like Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan.
00:20:26.800That's just not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with stone cold Marxists, and we've got to go after where they're being funded in the federal government.
00:20:37.840We've got to take away the benefits that they have long relied on.
00:20:41.140We need to challenge paradigms about where and how, from a public policy standpoint, we can address these issues.
00:20:50.980I'm specifically referring to big tech or or changing how much money is going to schools or universities or thinking that these are some kind of islands of free thought.
00:21:01.660When they're not, they're about Marxist training. There's a whole set of policy options that flow downstream from the fundamental recognition of the question you asked.
00:21:12.780And if we don't adopt that that kind of that that realistic view, we're going to continue to be frustrated by the policy debates and options that are given to us by our statesmen.
00:21:27.440I know you've got great ideas, great plans, and a great agenda to constrain federal spending, to reduce the budget dramatically.
00:21:38.980Can any of that be done without that beta confrontation between the, for want of a better word, the Republican Party and the Marxist Party, recognized broadly as the Democrat Party?
00:21:55.820One of the things that we're trying to do with the budget that we just put out is really meant to be a framework from an America first perspective for all of the budget battles that come is we're trying to provide the moral high ground for conservatives to fight budget battles.
00:22:12.300Previously, most of the budget debates would be about affordability.
00:22:16.620Well, you know, you can't spend this much money in a given year, but we both agree on these two programs as opposed to changing it so that we fundamentally get a sense of what do we want to spend money on and what don't we want because they're ruining our committees or our communities.
00:22:35.100That's one of the things that I think is vital from the standpoint of our country.
00:22:39.860I want to have a lot – I want to have strong and robust nuclear modernization.
00:22:45.680That's something that I think is vital.
00:22:47.300On the other hand, I don't want to spend money on HUD subsidies that ruin communities and a whole fair housing network that is designed to push the notion that single-family zoning and neighborhoods with single-family homes are a problem and we're going to then have upzoning where you have more and more apartment buildings and duplexes and things like that.
00:23:11.360That just changed the credibility of the neighborhood, changed the nature of the neighborhood.
00:23:16.300And in my neighborhood, Arlington, Virginia, very liberal, this is the most bipartisan of issues.
00:23:24.560It's an example of let's actually figure out Section 8 housing spreads crime and lower property values.
00:23:31.740And yet this is largely something that conservatives would have run away from.
00:23:35.980Our belief is that this is something you go into and you say, no, we want to cut the spending and we want to be able to fund stuff that we like, real infrastructure, real expansion in the naval fleet.
00:23:49.900So this is something that is – and our view is paradigm shifting is that we can't approach our budget battles just from the standpoint of an accounting or an austerity basis.
00:23:59.340Let's be honest with what we want to spend money on and let's defund what the left wants to spend money on based on our recognition about its impact on the country.
00:24:10.920And then the other paradigm that we're really trying to shift is stop focusing on the cul-de-sac of entitlements, Social Security and Medicare retirement.
00:24:20.740This is the notion that the only way you can be a serious fiscal reformer is to take on those two issues.
00:24:27.540When there is a lot of bureaucracy and changes to welfare that are also mandatory entitlement spending that you can go after that allows you to balance the budget and, oh, what?
00:24:40.460Be successful on something you have a vote on every year instead of these things that you don't have a vote on every year.
00:24:46.820So that's what we're trying to do by injecting some realism, some practicality, and, oh, by the way, it's consistent with the most serious and direct threats to the country that we face in the immediate moment.
00:24:59.280And one of the conflicts that needs to be rationalized, small potatoes, I suppose, given the vast expanse of your ambitions.
00:25:10.040But Democrats want to defund police departments all over the country, but they want to fund that FBI for some reason.
00:25:19.020And that's more than a curiosity, isn't it?
00:25:23.940Have you ever – the amount of shows on the mainstream media at night devoted to the FBI, it's like you've got an FBI for every particular hour during the week.
00:25:36.420I mean the regime clearly understands the degree to which the FBI is understanding of national security is to protect the regime as opposed to protecting the American people.
00:25:48.740And that's one of the reasons why in this budget we begin the process of cutting and restructuring the FBI, getting them back to actually focusing on federal crimes.
00:25:58.600We actually increased money for federal crimes while dramatically reducing where we think the rot has been, which is in the intelligence and the counterintelligence side of the House.
00:26:08.920And that is something that's a first step because we think there needs to be a church committee.
00:26:13.640Another reason we're opposed to Kevin McCarthy is he has been unwilling to adopt a church committee to deal and study and have real oversight on the national security apparatus over the next two years.
00:26:27.640And what that would show was where the detailed set of reforms that are necessary for us to ensure that this can never happen again and restore the country's respect and trust for their national security apparatus because that trust has been decimated.