Judging Freedom - Our Southern Border & Sec Buttegieg unfit for office - Rep Andy Biggs (R-AZ

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, February 24, 2023. It's about 10.05 in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Congressman Andy Biggs joins us from his beautiful library in Arizona, where we find him today. Congressman, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Judge. Sure. I know this week that there was a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, a field hearing. It didn't take place in Washington. It took place in Yuma, Arizona, and there were some eye-popping statistics and testimony that came your way. Give us a quick handle on what you learned from that hearing, and then I want to run a clip

of a hospital president painting a devastating picture of health care in Yuma as a consequence of the government's, the federal government's failure to secure the border. Well, the field hearing included tours and discussions with local officials and ranchers and ag guys and women who run farms. And a lot of people don't realize this, but 90% of the leafy green vegetables you get throughout the winter for six months comes from Yuma, Arizona. Wow.

And so our food security is at risk because they have very tight protocols because of the sensitivity of these types of vegetables. So when people pour across, Judge, and they go in and they throw trash, they defecate in both the canals that provide the water and in these fields, they have to basically destroy fields. So you've got a food security risk. The local people have the medical risk that you're

talking, that you're going to play this clip of. They also are impacted because of the amount of food. The community food bank is constantly overtaxed there. And they got a kind of a bailout when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent them four truckloads, semi-truckloads of food to help them get through. And then some of these people, these illegal aliens who come to the community food bank, they get ticked off because they think they should be getting more food. It's become an entitlement culture to people who are flooding across the border. We have become a welfare state. There's no question about it. We're a national security state. We're a warfare state. We're a welfare state.

We obviously can't talk about all of this in the short time that we have today. And thanks to a horrific U.S. Supreme Court opinion called Poe versus Texas, whatever basic security net in terms of emergency rooms, schools, food, shelter that the states supply to American citizens, they have to supply to anybody that finds their way in the state, which, of course, has made us even more of a welfare state. Let's run the clip of this hospital administrator. He's the president of the Yuma Medical Regional Center. And what he's about to say, what you heard him say, is truly devastating. Every dollar in uncompensated care has a direct impact on our hospital. Migrant patients are receiving free care. They have no ability to pay. We have no ability to bill anyone. We don't know their final destination. We don't know anything about them. We cannot provide completely free care to the residents of our community. The city of Yuma has 100,000 people. We've had over 300,000 people cross the border here. That's three times the population of Yuma coming across the border. We're the only hospital within a three-hour radius,

which means they come here. What was the reaction of the Democrats on the committee when they heard this? It's a trick question. The audience will know why we're laughing in a minute. What was the reaction to the Democrats on the committee when they heard this testimony that you heard? Well, of course, they weren't there, Judge. They boycotted the hearing. They didn't want to come hear from the community of Yuma about the impacts because it would undermine their narrative. So you say, what was their reaction? Their reaction was to basically thumb their nose at the entire community of Yuma, Arizona. Is Yuma in your congressional district, Congressman Biggs? No, it is not. It has a Democrat represented for part of it named Raul Grajova, and then you have

Paul Gosar represents the other part of Yuma. So what was the congressman whose name you mentioned first, the Democrat, he was not there, even though this is his district. Yes, Representative Grijalva did not come. My understanding is he came down a few days before and lambasted the fact that we were having a hearing, but I say that. What is the Democratic game here? I mean, you and I have known the president personally. He's a decent human being. I know he's being tugged to the left, and sometimes what he says doesn't make sense, but he's not evil. But what is their game plan here? Don't they understand what's happening at the border? What's their long-term plan? Do they

want these people to become American citizens and register Democrat and vote for the Democrats? What do they hope to accomplish by this? Well, the first thing I would say, there's several things, and I've heard it from different people from the radical left all the way up to the, I guess we would, I don't know if I would call them centrists, but they're the milder left. So they would like to get rid of the Westphalian nation state, Judge. I mean, there are people that want to do that. They simply want to get rid of that. The other one is you could take Mecha, La Raza, those groups,

and they're engaged in what they call a reconquista. And what they want to do is they want to retake Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, and even parts of Oregon, and reinstitute those as part of Mexico. I know that sounds radical, but that is really what they've said. And so they want to reintegrate, and they want to do that through illegal migration. Wow. Are there actually members of Congress who took the same oath you took, which I took when I became a judge, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, who want parts of the Southwest to become part of Mexico by flooding it with Mexican immigrants who are here illegally? Members of Congress do not overtly say it, but their supporters overtly say it. If you go through literature and take a look at what is being said.

And some of this is being, by the way, taught at American universities. So you'll see that. And then I think you're right on the other part. They want amnesty for everybody, and they keep using a 10 to 11 million person number. That number, that, you know, that is gone. That was 20-year-old numbers. The numbers through polling and observation is now somewhere between 30 and 40 million illegal aliens live in the United States, and this administration continues to give them de facto amnesty through their violation of the parole statute and deliberate misinterpretation.

And that's part of the reason I have a real huge problem with Secretary Mayorkas, because he will tell you that parole is supposed to be rarely used for. And it's on a case by case, one on one basis. But they're granting it at the rate of almost twenty five to thirty thousand people a month. And there's the White House. Does the White House know all this? but they're granting it at the rate of almost 25 to 30,000 people a month. And they're giving the White House, does the White House know all this? I mean, again, Joe Biden, the Biden I knew was a moderate Irish Catholic pro-life JFK style Democrat. I get it that he's being tugged to the left, but surely he can't have sympathy for these characters that want the Southwest to become part of Mexico. Surely he's not that far to the left. He must understand, or does he not? What's happening at the border, Congressman Biggs, the president himself? I think he is deliberately aloof.

His stated policy when he campaigned, and I remember this very vividly watching that Democrat debate where everybody raised their hand that they wanted an open border. They wanted to provide health, education and full benefits to anybody who came into the country illegally. And so this I think this is what that looks like. of it when you say i want an open border and we're going to give everybody uh uh all the benefits all the welfare benefits that we have in the united states and including education benefits the whole package this is what it looks like and except for it's exacerbated it's far worse than than anybody would go but see the reason i say he's deliberately aloof is when he went down to el paso judge they deliberately sanitized that so he wouldn't see any of the realities. In Yuma two weeks ago, when the senators came down there, they deliberately sanitized that. When we went out this week,

I've never seen the border area in the Kokopah area where the most people come across. I'd never seen it so clean. There was no trash. There was nothing. Before we talk about the other, maybe there's more than two, incompetent member of President Biden's cabinet. One last question on this. Is Secretary Mayorkas going to be impeached by the House and compelled to justify this behavior in a trial in the Senate? I'm, as you know, I'm fighting for that. I think an impeachment inquiry, a formal impeachment inquiry, needs to be held in the House of Representatives. And I think then when people see this, and look, this isn't maladministration. I think Mayor Pete's probably a maladministrator, right?

I mean, that's he's just utterly incompetent, aloof, indifferent, should not probably hold any kind of public office. But but I don't see any malevolent intention on his part. I don't it's hard to categorize that as high crimes and misdemeanors. Right. But but I think with Secretary Mayorkas, you'll find that that this is what he wants. And when you start telling ICE, you can't you can't remove people who've actually had due process and been ordered removed. When you know, when he starts telling CBP, you can't enforce the law, which, by the way, if you talk to any CBP agent, they say, say if we can enforce the law we could probably bring this under control then then you have a pro a different problem than maladministration is secretary mallorca's part of the crowd that wants the southwest part of the united states to leave the country and either become a separate country or join mexico or one world government

or whatever crazy idea they have is he part of that gaggle i've never seen anything um other than some hints that he that he is an open borders uh maybe a new world order whatever you call in that crowd um so okay so i don't know maybe just a hint of that um and i'm not gonna attribute that as his motivation. Although you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're always honest and decent.

And I, one of the reasons I love and admire you aside from the fact that we agree on almost everything switching gears. And we both have alluded to him secretary Buttigieg after the disaster of Southwest airlines at Christmas time. And now this disaster at East Palestine, Ohio, and he has to be embarrassed into going there by a journalist who sees him jogging or walking in a park at night, going to a restaurant. How is this playing out in D.C.? Well, I think even the Democrats, who will be honest with you, are going to tell you they think that he's just been an embarrassment on this issue. But he has a whole litany of this. I mean, we talk about the supply chain mismanagement early in his administration. The Long Beach, LA, where you had literally

hundreds of ships stacked up, we've never really fully even recovered from the supply chain mismanagement. And then you throw in East Palestine and some of these other mismanagements. And I think the mood in DC is there are some people that are talking impeachment. I think that's probably, like I say, I think, I think this guy really is just utterly out of his league. He should be, he should be teaching in a community college somewhere, you know, government and, and, and indoctrinating our children the wrong way there instead of being in charge. Does anybody make the free market argument that government is just institutionally incapable and incompetent to manage the economy and free market forces with insurance companies and groups of commercial entities working together would far more efficiently address these problems if the government is the most inefficient way to address them,

whether it's East Palestine or the Los Angeles Seaport or the FAA for that matter. Yeah, there are people, there are probably 10 of us in Congress that make that, maybe more, 25, that make that argument on a regular basis. I mean, so when we did the supply chain management, everybody's mad at Mayor Pete. The only reason that I could appreciate that argument is that we had grown federal government so big and made it this American experiment of free enterprise, we turned it into a socialist experiment of radical Keynesian economics and control that you'd say, well, if you're going to control it, then you ought to be able to do it. But it kind of proved the point, didn't it? And it still proves the point that the free market would find a way to make this stuff work.

We'd find a way to make all of this work. And so if you had a company, let's say that, I mean, the allegations, the railroad line had failed to make sure that they had adequate braking. Guess what? The litigation alone would allow for, and this is where I think trial lawyers have their place. And having done this, I mean, they would come in and they would enforce the market condition that failed here because the railroad would basically said, we don't care what happens. We just really don't care what happens. We just really don't care what happens. We're just trying to make this profit. Well, then that point, you'd have litigation that would actually come in,

and they would hold them accountable. And that's really part of what the judicial system's for, is to redress these wrongs, as opposed to the federal government for everything. The wrong is an assault on the people of East Palestine, the air they breathe and the water they drink. And where there's a wrong, there's a remedy. This would be a far more efficient way than Buttigieg's army or PR people addressing it. We have to run. I wanted to talk to you about Ukraine and debt. We'll do it next week. But I want to tell you something. Yesterday, I haven't even said this on air yet, but I'm happy

to say it with a member of Congress who understands first principles. Yesterday, Judging Freedom broke 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, which puts us in a very, very exclusive category. We've only been around for 16 months. Congressman Biggs, you have been a part of helping us cross that very rarefied line. I'm starting to get a lot of congratulatory emails, but I want to congratulate not only the people watching us, but the guests who've been on with us, among those I admire most, is you. Thank you. Well, congratulations to you. That is a terrific milestone. And I hope that you just keep growing and spreading what I call the good word of freedom. So keep it up, Judge. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Congressman Biggs. Next week, Ukraine and the debt ceiling.

And those of us watching, you won't believe what the Democrats are trying to talk Congressman Biggs and his colleagues into doing. It's mind-boggling. Thank you, Congressman. Have a great weekend. Thank you. You too, Judge. Take care.

Judge Napolitano. Thank you. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.