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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 2nd,
2023. It's about 1230 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Congressman
Andy Biggs, who happily is becoming a regular on the
show, joins us from beautiful Arizona. Congressman Biggs, always a pleasure. I want to talk to you
about two subjects today that we didn't get a chance to talk about the last time, debt and
Ukraine. Let's start with debt. We're talking about the federal debt where you have taken a lead in exposing its dangers, even to the point of calling it a problem for national security.
Just give us a feel for how big the debt is, how much interest we pay on it, and how ignorant Congress has been about its dangers? Well, Judge, the amount of money we pay just
on debt service alone is going to quickly surpass the amount of money we spend on defense spending.
And that'll probably be within the next three to five years, maybe faster if we keep spending the way
we do. The other way to think of it is our structural deficit goes anywhere from right
around $100 billion to $120 billion a month. In order to pay those bills, that structural deficit,
we borrow money. And so you begin looking at how much we are adding to the
national debt. The Biden administration is seeking more than $3.5 trillion to raise the debt ceiling
for two years. We're at $31.5 trillion. That would take us to $35 trillion over the next two years. And, Judge, what that does is that crowds out what government –
well, we do far more than we should at the federal level.
I think we both would agree with that.
But it certainly crowds out things that perhaps we should do.
And it also means that as – so you take it –
you flood in the Ukraine issue and the scenario, Judge, where we are actually rapidly depleting our own military supplies and stockpile.
So now we are actually importing ammunition, some kinds of ammunition to send to Ukraine.
Then you begin to see that if we are called upon for a defense purpose, this might seem extraordinary. I'm not sure it is.
If we're called upon to defend ourselves, we're not going to have the resources necessary to
actually build up the manufacturing capacity that we'll need to do that. And that's just,
justice is the tip of the iceberg on the security side. Okay. I'm just going to stick with the
security side for just a moment. And I appreciate your raising it in the context in which you did. the American government works with respect to defense and military aspects, has pointed out
just what you have said, which is the physical equipment that we're giving to Ukraine is not
coming from our surplus. It's coming from our substance, meaning, God forbid, we ever need it
for a real attack or an attack coming on the United States, we don't have it. And Secretary General Stoltenberg
of NATO has said several times that the Ukrainians are using more ammunition than NATO. And I was
talking about 33 countries as well, European countries as well as the United States,
is using it up many times more quickly than we can even manufacture it.
Does the president, the answer is probably no, do your colleagues in the House, Republicans
and Democrats, perceive the danger of that? I'm not sure they do. You know, the war hawks, the neocons, whatever you want to call them on our side of the aisle, they continue to want to give a blank check, Judge.
And that's part of why it's a national security threat to have such a massive debt.
They want to continue to write a blank check. And they're saying as long as it takes, as much as it takes.
And, Judge, now they're not wanting to simply provide
ostensibly defensive weaponry. They're wanting to provide tanks. They're wanting to provide
F-16s. Those are aggressive weapons. Those are offensive weapons. And that is going to
exacerbate the situation as well, both on the spending front, which we've been talking about, the national debt issue, as well as on our own protective defensive front.
And then it's going to do a third thing, Judge, and it's going to exacerbate the problem over there.
And you start walking into this scenario where you can easily expand into a more general regional war involving far more countries than Russia and Ukraine.
Do the members of Congress who've given the president this hundred plus billion dollar
blank check, some of which was ceremoniously delivered by Treasury Secretary Yellen,
I thought that was a little odd, but she did it the other day. Do members of
Congress understand that some of the military equipment we've sent there is being operated by
American troops? So there truly are American troops on the ground. They may be out of uniform.
They may not be shooting directly at Russians, but they're there. They're operating this equipment.
They're physically located in Ukraine. Some of this is being done remotely by American troops in uniform from Poland. And Russian intelligence knows this.
Does the Congress know this? Because they have never authorized the use of military force in
Ukraine. They just authorized the use of American cash. God only knows where that ends up, because
there's no inspector general and American hardware.
I don't know if they know that, Judge.
I mean, you know, you've been saying it.
I've been saying it and trying to, you know, people have literally told me that's not so.
And yet so earlier today, I was just going back many months where we actually acknowledged,
the federal government, the Biden administration actually acknowledged
that we had people on the ground, troops on the ground in Ukraine.
But what they try to, those who recognize it, they try to finesse it.
What they will tell me, they'll say, Andy, most of the,
they don't even say all of them, they'll say, most of those people are contractors. I mean, think about that, Jeff.
Most of them are contractors. And I said, oh, you mean agents of the U.S. government on the ground,
as if there's a legal distinction. There really is no legal distinction between having your agents
there that you're funding and you're supporting and having your troops on the ground.
It is the same legal significance.
And it is dubious for them to say, well, no, we have some agents on the ground that are actually training the Ukraine troops.
And this is why I say this is nice.
This reminds me, if you look at the Vietnam War era, that's exactly how we got sucked into the Vietnam War.
You just read my mind.
That's exactly how it happened.
And before you knew it, there were so many of us there.
LBJ made up the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The Congress went along with it.
500,000 troops rotated through.
10% of whom came home in body bags.
I just can't see the American public tolerating this,
and Congress needs to know it. Switching to debt, what will the Republicans do? What will
Speaker McCarthy do with President Biden's request to raise the debt ceiling, that is to allow him
to borrow another $3 trillion, and with Secretary Yellen saying, we're going to run
out of money, we're going to run out of money, we're going to lose our credit rating.
How will the Republicans react?
You're one of the, I'm not saying this because we're friends, I'm saying because it's true,
more courageous Republicans who has never voted to raise the debt ceiling.
Unfortunately, there's only a handful of you.
Yeah, there's 16 of us that have never voted to raise the debt ceiling unfortunately there's only a handful of you yeah there's 16 of us that have never voted to raise a debt ceiling judge if that just tells you what the
the the sisyphean attacks we have of rolling that rock up the hill right 16 republicans who've never
voted to raise the debt ceiling out of what 228 republicans in Yeah, yeah. I mean, so the question you asked me was,
what will Speaker McCarthy do? I don't know, but I will say this. I'm going to give him the
benefit of the doubt, at least at the front end of this, because he is actually listening to members
like myself from the Freedom Caucus, those of us who never have voted for a debt ceiling lift. And don't
forget, you've got freshmen that have never been around to deal with this who we have to include
there that have never voted as well. So we are doing things and working, trying to get them to
understand that you can recover money. There is money out there that needs to be recovered, recisions and
clawbacks and get that back. I mean, why are we building a new, for instance, a new FBI facility
that doesn't need to be built? Why are we giving $500 billion in green New Deal subsidies?
That doesn't need to occur. And so we're trying to-
Something like a new FBI facility, which is probably half a billion dollars. Did
Congress expressly authorize that? Or is this another thing where they just gave the administration,
this may even go back to the Trump years, I don't know. They just gave the administration X dollars
in the DOJ budget and said, spend it however you need it. Which is it? This was an express appropriation
in the omnibus bill, $1.7 trillion omnibus package that Joe Biden did. And so the idea is,
quite frankly, a lot of that money in that omni, it's just there was so much money,
you can't spend it all fast enough. So,
so my, my, my demand has actually been, let's claw back. I've written letters to many agencies asking them, how much money do you have in your bank account? How much of it is obligated?
And none, nobody will respond. So the next step has got to be subpoenas. We have got to subpoena
these agencies in and say, we want a line item. I've also asked appropriators in our conference, how can I get a
line item budget? Judge, they don't even know how many agencies are in the federal budget.
And I'm like, okay, you got to first know how many agencies, and then you need to get the line
items for those agencies. So you can go through and say, we don't authorize this. More than 1200 unauthorized programs, agencies, and departments
in the federal government that are eating up over $500 billion annually, Judge.
Last question, because I know you have another commitment in a few moments. How do you see this
ending? The Speaker is a debt guy. He has never failed. This is before he was the speaker, of course. He has never failed to vote to increase the debt ceiling. So you know the bias that he has. He's an institutionalist. He's not a constitutionalist. How does this end?
The optimistic myself says,
you guys in Arizona are more optimistic than we are out here in the East Coast.
I'll give you the pessimistic view in a second. But the optimistic view says,
hey, if we can get enough votes in the Republicans, because I do believe Republicans get it, that they understand how precarious our financial situation is.
That tells me that we can claw back money.
We can do cuts.
We can cap spending at 2019 levels for non-defense, non-discretionary.
You got the defense hawks.
We're never going to be able to rein them in.
But we have an agreement that you can't go above the 2022 level.
It should be the 2019 level because that was pre-COVID, right? But you added $2 trillion a
year during COVID, but not to go above that. The optimistic me says you can actually push off
having to raise the debt ceiling by reducing the structural deficit every month and go forward.
I actually asked this question, Judge. I said, what happens if we don't raise it?
And the economist that was sitting there talking to us said, nothing. And I said, why? And he said,
because the Federal Reserve will continue to pay these bills as they come due no matter what. The more pessimistic side
of me says you're going to see some Republicans who want to spend money form a coalition with
Democrats and spend it. And that's, you get the optimistic and pessimistic, maybe somewhere in
between, but it's a fight, Judge. It is real, and it's a
security threat to the United States of America. Keep up the fight, Congressman Biggs. Thank you
for taking the time to join us today. Much appreciated, my dear friend. Absolutely. Thank
you. Thank you. More as we get it, Congressman Biggs, whenever he wants to come, as well as his
colleagues in that small band of Republicans in the House of Representatives who truly
believe that the Constitution means what it says. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.