00:01:11.220Well, I will say when we talked about this on Wednesday morning's pod, what you and I predicted together,
00:01:19.040I said that I thought the most likely outcome was that Kevin McCarthy would cut a deal with the holdouts.
00:01:25.860And in particular, that he would cut a deal with Chip Roy.
00:01:28.200That Chip Roy really was the leader of the 20.
00:01:30.600And the reason I thought that is because Chip was focused, I think quite rightly, on changes to the rules, changes to how the House conducts business, on substance.
00:01:41.840Some of the people involved in this leadership battle, I think, had real personal animosity to Kevin McCarthy.
00:01:50.500I think Chip, to his credit, was not motivated by that.
00:01:53.280He was motivated by changing the broken way that Washington operates.
00:01:58.220And what you and I talked about Wednesday morning on this podcast is I thought the most likely outcome was Kevin and Chip would reach a deal.
00:02:06.780He would make some significant concessions.
00:02:09.820And those concessions would be enough and McCarthy would be elected.
00:02:14.220Ultimately, at about one in the morning, late last night, that's exactly what happened.
00:02:19.620It took a few more hours than we had predicted, but not much.
00:02:25.540And I will say what Chip and the other dissenters accomplished was a really big deal.
00:02:35.720There was a lot of drama because there was a vote at 11 p.m.
00:02:41.440Where I think McCarthy and leadership thought they had the votes and they ended up falling just short because many of the dissenters dropped off.
00:02:50.900But there remained a handful who didn't.
00:02:53.240And it led to it led to some interesting drama.
00:02:57.500It led to and in particular, you also had during the day two votes that were missing.
00:03:06.840One, Wesley Hunt, a new congressman from Houston, actually my congressman, who had to fly back to Houston because his wife had just delivered a baby.
00:03:14.720His son, who was born prematurely and they were having to care for his son.
00:03:20.260He flew back to Houston to be with them and then turned around and was there for the late night vote.
00:03:24.160His vote was needed at the end and he was there for the late night vote.
00:03:28.020But it it it got a little wild and woolly, including at one point, Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama.
00:03:38.920Yeah. Had to be physically restrained from from taking a swing and and and coming after Matt Gaetz.
00:03:45.820That that was I'm not sure I've seen the beginnings of an actual bar fight on the floor of the House, but it it it came pretty close.
00:03:56.600I was wondering if that was a new covid certified mask for Congress.
00:04:01.260Right. The hand over the face and restraining.
00:04:03.300I'm like, maybe that'll count as a new covid mask.
00:04:05.940But at the end of the day. All of the histrionics about, oh, this is terrible, this is the end of the republic.
00:04:14.300Now, the Democrats were, of course, crowing. You would expect them to crow.
00:04:17.900That's what they're going to do regardless. The media went on and on.
00:04:21.720But but I've got to say the agreements that they ended up getting were significant.
00:04:28.080And let me throw a caveat that the rules package has not yet been voted on that.
00:04:32.340The plan is to vote on that on Monday. And so the devil is always in the details.
00:04:36.840And it it could you know, this is at this point what's been publicly reported.
00:04:42.560But among other things that have publicly been reported here, elements of the deal that that have been reported in the press.
00:04:47.760Number one, that the rules package ends proxy voting, which means members of the House actually have to show up and do their damn jobs.
00:04:55.500One of the bizarre things Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats did in the name of covid is allowed House members to be sitting on the beach thousands of miles away and cast votes by proxy.
00:05:08.240That was always nuts. I believe it's unconstitutional.
00:05:11.940I tell you, the Senate never did it. Schumer in the Senate never did it.
00:05:14.500If you're not in the Senate, you don't vote. You have to be on the floor of the Senate.
00:05:18.880In fact, the way the Senate votes is so old school.
00:05:21.680You literally are standing on the floor of the Senate and the clerk calls out your name, Mr. Ferguson.
00:08:05.300The House for a long time, one real source of mischief is cramming a gazillion things into a rule into a rule rather than just have it focus on a single purpose.
00:08:49.860Another element is the 72-hour rule that delays anything from moving forward 72 hours so that you have time to actually read the damn bill before you vote on it.
00:09:03.100There is an agreement to have a church-style committee to investigate weaponization of organizations like the FBI and the DOJ.
00:09:12.500And, Ben, you and I have been calling for that for a long time.
00:09:15.160As you know, my last book, Justice Corrupted, How the Left Has Weaponized Our Legal System, is entirely about the abuse of power at the DOJ and the FBI and the CIA.
00:09:24.700I think we very much need a serious church-style committee investigating it, and that's part of the agreement.
00:09:31.440And then the two that were the biggest deals, that were the biggest, the most hotly contested, were having a motion to vacate the chair that one member could bring.
00:09:43.580And that means any individual member at any time can go down and move to vacate the chair, and you have to have 218 people vote for McCarthy to stay speaker.
00:09:54.280And then the final one that is apparently in there is seats for conservatives on the Rules Committee on other committees, and that's in order to give real fiscal conservatives leverage to fight against another bad omnibus bill, another $1.7 trillion monstrosity that just got rammed through, putting people in positions on committees that they can prevent that from happening.
00:10:19.340All of those are a huge, huge deal. At the outset, the naysayers said conservatives couldn't get any of these.
00:10:27.940And I've got to say, look, it's a testament to my friend Chip Roy.
00:10:33.620It's a testament to the other conservatives who are standing up and behaving in a principled manner.
00:10:37.640And at the end of the day, it's a testament to Kevin McCarthy for reaching an agreement that I think is a reasonable, a positive agreement, agreement that's good for the House and is going to give more power to Republicans, more power to conservatives, more leverage to the House to stand up to Chuck Schumer and to stand up to Joe Biden.
00:10:58.480There was a question that was asked of me, and it was one that I wanted to ask to you.
00:11:04.220Somebody said, was this worth it? And I said, yes. And they said, why?
00:11:07.400And I said, just the transparency will save the American taxpayers countless dollars.
00:11:13.880How much money do you think the American people are we in the billions of dollars that can be saved just because of the way these rules changes and the transparency of not being able to cram so much into a bill with all of this different pork?
00:11:27.020You know, I'm sorry to tell you, you're off by an order of magnitude.
00:11:31.980We're in the billions of dollars before Monday morning.
00:11:35.840We are likely in the trillions of dollars.
00:12:01.520And in the last couple of years, the federal government has spent more time than in the entire history of the universe.
00:12:09.340And the only way it's going to stop is if Republicans have a backbone to stand and fight to make it stop.
00:12:18.320This battle this week significantly enhanced the tools for fiscal conservatives to be able to stop the radical abuses of the last two years.
00:12:31.560Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them.
00:12:38.880And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:13:20.000And there's different fractions within the Democratic Party.
00:13:23.280The squad, for example, AOC and kind of her group.
00:13:25.920You have the Freedom Caucus, and you've had the Tea Party groups, and you've had so many different fractions.
00:13:32.320I actually think one of the biggest blessings in disguise that's going to come out of this week and these 15 votes is there were a lot of walls and maybe misconceptions about individuals who had conversations they would have never had, interactions they would have never had.
00:13:48.820And now moving forward, there may be a much better line of communication between people.
00:13:55.220Because, I mean, you were watching it like I was.
00:13:58.000It was really interesting to see people that you would assume would never be speaking to each other, that were talking to each other intently, vote after vote after vote.
00:14:26.120But there certainly have been speakers in the past who were autocratic, who were dictators, who just laid out, this is what we're going to do, shut up and obey.
00:14:39.860It was one of the things that caused him to be driven from the speakership, is his members got tired of being mistreated and him viewing it as essentially his reign rather than reflecting the views of the conference.
00:14:56.640I think this process is likely to have made Speaker McCarthy significantly more responsive to the views and concerns of the conference.
00:15:41.320I mean, you 49 people, you build relationships and senators stay there sometimes longer than, you know, granite monuments in Washington.
00:15:50.520So when you've been working with people for years and then for decades and it's a small group, those interpersonal relationships can be one of the real keys to getting things accomplished.
00:16:04.920One of the reasons why I win a lot of the battles that I'm fighting in the Senate is at this point, my colleagues know that I don't bluff, that I don't engage in fights based on personalities.
00:16:19.480I don't make it personal, but I focus on substance.
00:17:46.280People were really ratcheted up and pissed off.
00:17:49.980And so I'm not being Pollyannish and suggesting it'll all be loves and kisses.
00:17:56.200But I do think this process, it was transparent, it was democratic, and at the end of the day, it substantially increased the tools to stop the reckless spending that has fueled the record inflation and that has bankrupted the country.
00:18:17.780So grabbing agenda items that can bring the Republican Party together early on, I think it's going to be key to Kevin McCarthy's success.
00:18:26.500He announced last night at 1.20 a.m. Eastern that the first piece of business the House is going to bring up is going to be something that's very important, I know, to you.
00:19:22.160As you know, it's something that I've been calling on the House to do as their first bill.
00:19:27.620I said it on the trail, campaigning for a lot of these guys, standing next to you in a number of instances,
00:19:33.560saying when we win a majority in the House, the very first bill the House should take up is repealing the funding for the 87,000 new IRS agents.
00:19:42.500I'm glad Kevin agreed with what I and others have called for.
00:21:26.060I actually put Dr. King in a whole different class.
00:21:28.740But Barack Obama is a very talented communicator, and it led to eight years in the White House as a result of it.
00:21:39.480There were more than a few Democrats in the Democratic presidential field who watched that speech last night and said, oh, crap.
00:21:51.100That speech last night reminded me of Obama's speech at the Democratic National Committee where he talked about there are not red states and blue states.
00:23:19.560I don't know how many people listen to it.
00:23:21.200But there were millions of people across the country that looked at this guy and said, this guy is a force to be reckoned with.
00:23:30.680When you look at moving forward now next week, what advice do you have for these new members as they try to, you know, get their rhythm, get their feet under them?
00:23:44.020I mean, the way that they got baptism by fire in this last week.
00:23:48.440Yeah, they're going to take a lot from that.
00:23:50.360But now we're going to the regular order and kind of a normal cycle and feel here.
00:23:56.280What advice do you have to new members of Congress?
00:23:59.580What do you wish somebody would have said to you when you were first elected, if you could go back and do it all over again?
00:24:06.420Well, the advice that I consistently give to new members, either in the House or the Senate, is really simple.
00:26:22.120When you look at the amount of money that McCarthy's super PAC could come in and spend in a primary.
00:26:28.080In multiple primaries, McCarthy's super PAC spent millions of dollars supporting one Republican,
00:26:36.820attacking another Republican in almost every circumstance when given a choice between a moderate and a conservative.
00:26:42.380McCarthy's super PAC would put the money behind the moderate and would attack the conservative.
00:26:46.380And that was nationally tens of millions of dollars were spent doing that.
00:26:51.520At least publicly, they've made a commitment they're not going to do that again.
00:26:54.920That that will matter for this next cycle because we'll have contested primaries.
00:26:59.860And if if McCarthy's PAC is not trying to put a thumb on the scale, that means conservatives are going to be have a better chance of prevailing on the merits in the primaries.
00:27:09.960When you look at this overall fight, what is your biggest takeaway as we move forward into this new Congress from this?
00:27:20.180When you say, all right, this is the best thing.
00:29:01.920I hope Kevin McCarthy's speakership is the most successful speakership in history.
00:29:06.600And that these rule changes firm up his resolve to fight smart, principled, consequential battles.
00:29:16.900If we do that in the House, we'll be doing our job.
00:29:20.620And that, by the way, not only helps save the Republic right now, but fighting smart, principled, consequential battles will also help Republicans dramatically to win in 2024,
00:29:32.360to have a much bigger majority in the House, to win the Senate, and to win the White House.
00:29:37.280If we stand and fight and deliver, the voters reward that by showing up and voting.
00:29:45.880And so I think this week was a big step in the right direction.
00:29:50.220It's going to be a lot of fun to watch what this House is able to do now and how much money that we're going to save the American people just by these rules changes that were worth fighting over.