Judging Freedom - U.S. Representative Thomas Massie: Do We Still Have a Constitution?

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

U.S. Representative Thomas Massie: Do We Still Have a Constitution?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, February 26, 2025. My guest is the newly bearded Congressman Thomas Massey, who is my longtime friend, but more importantly, the foremost defender of constitutional values in the Congress today, perhaps in all the land today. Congressman Massey, I know how busy you are. Thank you very much for taking the time to join us. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to chat with you. Well, we are busy, but don't confuse activity with progress. Understood. Understood. I will ask you about those votes last night in a few minutes. Congressman, do we still have a constitution today?

We've got one written down. I don't have very many colleagues who will follow it. That's the problem we have. Why do members of Congress, each of them have taken the same oath you did and I did when I became a judge to uphold the Constitution. Why do they thrive on either ignoring it or finding sophisticated ways around it? Yeah, they're supposed to defend it from enemies, foreign and domestic. To them, it's an obstacle. It's a roadblock. It's something they are always trying to get around. And it's pesky to them. It's a nuisance. And we've had so many court rulings that have allowed them to get around it. I mean, one of the things that I dislike that my colleagues routinely disobey is the origination clause. All spending bills are supposed to originate in the house because we are up for election every two years. But they commonly will

take a bill, maybe it's a bill to help homeless veterans that the house has passed, the Senate will pick it up and they'll take out every word and piece of punctuation in that bill and replace it with the spending bill and pass it and call it an amendment to a House spending bill and send it back. And they'll do entire omnibus bills that way. And then, you know, we could push back on that, but the leadership in the House, if you don't jealously guard the power you have, either the congressional offices against the executive or the House against the Senate, then you give them up. And so we basically, the origination clause, it was violated to get Obamacare done, for instance. But you can't have a court contest on that because we're still doing it today. Right. This is yet another example. Frequently, Congress will give of its power to the president. There's so many examples of that.

But this is an example of the House of Representatives giving away its constitutional authority to the Senate just so it can engage in this political chicanery. I don't even know who would have standing to bring an action to get a federal court involved. And I don't even know if the federal court would get involved because of the theory that each house does its own thing and writes its own rules. Yeah, the federal courts are loathe to get involved in disputes between members of Congress or between U.S. representatives and the Senate. They almost just won't ever do it, even when there are cases of clear violations of the Constitution. Now, that's a double-edged sword, though. I like the Constitution because it has the speech or debate clause in it, which says that I can't be dragged in front of a king or the president for

something I say or do on the floor of the House. I could call you a low down miscreant and every name in the book from the floor of the house, I could lie about you and you can't do anything about it. And people might think that's wrong, but the founders knew that was important to put into our constitution because they'd seen the King violate that by harassing parliament or by private lawsuits against members of Congress. That's part of the constitution that I really like. And so sometimes when the court won't get involved in these intra-congressional arguments, I'm torn on that. I kind of respect that they won't. Yeah. What happened last night? What are the Republicans trying to do, claiming that they're spending less money when they're spending more?

Oh, it's all the same tricks. It's the baseline budgeting and whatnot. But the specific thing that you are talking about, about 30% of government, federal government is funded through annual appropriations bills and 70% of it's on autopilot. Well, there's a way, a parliamentary procedure to deal with the 70% that's on autopilot and also with the taxes and pass it through the Senate with 51 votes. It's called reconciliation. And so we're starting that process of trying to use that parliamentary tool. But before you can do a reconciliation bill, you have to do a budget bill. And this is something Congress hates to do, but they have to do this budget bill to do reconciliation. Then they have to write the numbers down and they have to make 10-year projections. Well, the GOP budget bill that we voted on last night, according to our GOP

leadership, under the rosiest assumptions of 2.5% GDP growth every year for the next 10 years, and that we're going to cap spending on the discretionary side, even under their most rosy and false assumptions, it's going to add $20 trillion to the debt. So we'll go from $36 trillion to $56 trillion under the GOP plan. Okay. Now, if you take away their rosy assumptions, it's most likely that they're going to double the debt over the next 10 years. Why do Republicans vote for this, Congressman Massey? Why don't they just stand fast like you do? What do they tell you in the hallways and the cloakroom when they say, hey, Thomas, come along? They can't give you a good argument, can they? Well, they can't persuade me, but they can persuade just about everybody else. And they did last night. They'll say, you're going to get a call from the president because this is that big,

wonderful bill that has the other things that he campaigned on it. This budget bill also has the tax cuts in it. Now, I hate high taxes. And five years ago, we passed a tax cut, although I'm going to call it a tax holiday because it wasn't permanent. It was a five-year tax holiday. And back then we thought, well, if you cut taxes, you should also cut spending. So you had to go find the spending cuts to match the tax cuts. Well, that tax holiday is expiring this year, at the end of this year, and they want to renew it and they want to add some more tax cuts to it. But this time they're saying, you know what? We don't need to cut spending. We'll we'll cut spending one and a half trillion over 10 years.

But we're going to give you four and a half trillion dollars of tax cuts. You know, to the American people, all they hear is this is the tax cut bill and that this is the bill that will fund border security. And so that's what they're going to do. They're also going to move part of the military funding into mandatory spending and put it on autopilot. This should concern you. This is like a new innovation in congressional spending that I don't know that we've done this in 200 plus years, but we're making part of the military mandatory so that it won't be subject to the annual appropriations process. Oh, man. This is going to crush us. Why are we still sending arms to Ukraine if the president and his folks are negotiating with the Russians and he's a man of peace? I think it's going to stop. I mean, I have some hope that it will stop.

Why are we still doing it? There's probably so much of this stuff in the pipeline. Those military contractors want to get paid. There's probably contracts that extend for several years that need to be canceled. Doge has found a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in programs like USAID and other things. Hopefully that's a warm up exercise so they can gain the credibility to go after the big offender, which is going to be waste, fraud and abuse in these military contracts. Absolutely. Who controls U.S. foreign policy? Well, I think you're right. I think I know where we're going with this one.

This is one of those things that the courts actually have ruled on and Congress has ceded this authority to the president. We should, I mean, we're almost virtually barred from having any say so in it. And I think that's a bad thing to give the president as much power as we have. When I say we, I mean Congresses that precede me. They've done things that may not be constitutional, but they passed bills in the 60s and 70s to keep giving the president more authority. Right, right. We're to the point where the Supreme Court has said the president and the president alone speaks on foreign policy. Well, here's the thing, though. He needs money. If he's going to send the money overseas,

that part to me is not in question. We know the president can't spend money without us, so he can have the policies he wants, but he's still going to have to, if he's going to do a treaty, we already know that the constitution requires him to come to the Senate to approve that. So one of the things they do, Judge, is 95% of the things that you think are treaties have never been brought to the Senate to vote on as a treaty. If we're lucky, they'll bring them in front of Congress and let the House and the Senate vote on them. So they only need 60 votes in the Senate to get it through instead of 67 votes. But instead, they've got this big, giant, it's a thick book of treaties that have never really grown up to be treaties,

but we still treat them like treaties. I've been through that book before. It's a long list of things that need to be ended. What influence does AIPAC have on members of Congress? Well, I just sent out a tweet about an hour ago, peeling back another layer of the onion here. And here, let me give you an example. In 2013, there was a coup underway. There was a military overthrow of the Egyptian government. And we've been sending them $1.3 billion a year for as long as I can remember, and ever since I've been in Congress. Back in 2013, I thought, if we're not sure who's in charge of the Egyptian government, maybe we could hold off a year on that 1.3 billion until things sort themselves out. And we see who's got the name on the checks when it goes into their checking account

over there in Egypt. So I offered an amendment and I had a floor staffer come to me who was in charge of like the foreign affairs committee. And he said, we're under a lot of pressure not to let your amendment get a vote. And I said, well, who's pressuring you? And he said, the State Department and AIPAC. And I said, well, why don't they want to vote? And he said, well, they don't want to look like there's any lack of support for this money going to Egypt. Like they don't want members of Congress on record. That's what they told me. And I said, well, what's the deal here?

And he said, well, if you'll just allow it to pass on a voice vote, then we will let it pass. And I'm like, but there's the Democrats over there. How do you know what they're going to do if I don't demand a recorded vote? And he said, oh, well, we've already worked out a deal with the Democrats. They'll let it go by voice vote too. Well, I was green. I had not even been here a full year. It sounded like a pretty good deal to me. Let it go by voice vote and it's unanimous. So it passed unanimously in the House. And guess what though? They stripped it out of the final bill, the actual spending bill. It got taken out. And that's when I realized I had been played that if I had demanded a recorded

vote, I would have some residue of something. But instead I let it go by a voice vote. Nobody's on record. And the spending still went to Egypt that year. And it was because AIPAC and the State Department, this is back when our GOP leadership would tell me what was actually going on. Since then, I've figured it out. But they said it was AIPAC. And they have so much influence up here on foreign aid. You wouldn't think that AIPAC, that's the

American Israel Public Affairs Committee, you wouldn't think they would want $1.3 billion going to somebody who's ostensibly not their friend in the Middle East, but they do because they're trying to bribe them into a friendship, but they're using our money for it. Is it true that AIPAC has a minder, a representative, a contact, whoever you want to describe this person, with nearly every member of the House of Representatives? Yes, that is my opinion. They've tried to establish some with me. Now, these aren't professional lobbyists. I don't even know that any of them are paid in any other way other than getting free trips, let's say,

maybe to Israel or to Washington, D.C., but they're not paid. They're constituents, and most people think it's pretty reasonable to meet with the constituent. I do. In fact, I'll meet with people from my district who might be in APAC. I just tell them, you got to take your badge off before you come into my office. I'll meet with you as a constituent, but I'm not going to meet with you as a representative of a lobby for a foreign country. And most of them don't want to take me up on that deal when I say I'm not going to accept foreign lobbying in this office. Why is the Foreign Activities Registration Act

not enforced against AIPAC? It's the biggest representative of foreign government in Washington, D.C. Well, it absolutely should be. I mean, and recently, I think they've tried to convict people for not being registered lobbyists of foreign countries. Now, the first explanation you will hear somebody say is, well, everybody in AIPAC is an American citizen, but that doesn't exempt you from the Foreign Agent Registration Act. If you're representing a foreign country, then there you go. It doesn't matter what country you're a citizen of. So I think people misunderstand the act, and I think they should absolutely be subjected to that. It's registration, it's transparency, and then you could know

who's the person who is on the buddy system with each member of Congress. Can the President of the United States constitutionally undo legislation that Congress has enacted? I am speaking, of course, of some of the executive orders of President Trump, the end result of which I think you and I agree with, but the process, in my view, is constitutionally dubious and ultimately dangerous. How do you stand on this? Well, for the listeners, parse the judge's words carefully. He said, can they do it constitutionally, not can they do it legally? And they like to throw those different terms around here. The law might allow it, but constitutionally, you really can't. And the courts may disagree with my opinion on

that. That's okay. Look, I was elected by people. I was sworn to the constitution. I read it and I study it and I don't have to agree with the courts. When I vote on a bill, it's my decision whether it's constitutional or not. And so we had one of these issues come up where I actually agreed with the president's policy. He wanted to build a wall, but after he had signed at least a dozen spending bills that didn't have any money for a wall in it, he decided there was an emergency. The emergency being that he signed spending bills that didn't have a wall in it. He should have vetoed those bills. So he reappropriated money that we were going to spend on the military and reappropriated that for a wall. I think that's unconstitutional.

Some of it, I think, held up in court. Some of it didn't. I don't care if it held up in court. I still think it's unconstitutional. I get to be a judge of that as a member of Congress. When I vote on bills, I wish more of my colleagues would try to judge that. But more importantly, it's an erosion of the balance of power. And if you give up our power of the purse, you've basically given up the linchpin of every that underlies or supports every power that we have here in Congress. The oversight ability, everything. If you can't cut off their funding, then they'll just thumb their nose at you. So, Congressman Massey, should the Justice Department be scrutinizing the speech of those who support a Palestinian state? Should it be scrutinizing the speech of anybody in America? No, it should not be.

And again, I presume they're trying to use some law, hopefully, to apply that scrutiny. We've done a fairly poor job of defending the First Amendment here in Congress. There was even a bill last year that made passages of the Bible, of the New Testament, would have made it illegal on campuses because they said some of the things were anti-Semitic. To define anti-Semitism, they used the legislation, instead of defining it in the bill, they pointed to a website in the bill that's not even hosted in the United States that gave examples of anti-Semitism. I've never seen such a poor piece of legislation come to the floor. In that instance, even several of my conservative colleagues who are very pro-Israel

said, I'm sorry, this is too much. We can't vote for this. We can't make it illegal. We can't make it a crime for people to say certain things. Right, right. Congressman, are you giving any thought to seeking the Senate seat being vacated by Senator McConnell of the Commonwealth of Kentucky? Well, I have to think about it every day because people like you are asking me. Otherwise, I could ignore it. One interesting thing is a person who says he's in first place in that race already. By the way, you can't register to run for another eight months or nine months. But people are stepping on themselves to run for that seat. But one of the guys who's, who's says he's in first and he probably is in first released his poll and it shows I'm in second and I'm not even in that race. So I'm happy with the results so

far without entering the race. Um, the question though, really, I do think about this some, and the question that comes to my mind is, where could you have the most effect? I feel like I'm driving the narrative here in the House of Representatives and representing my constituents fairly well. But if I were going to move to another office, could you do more as a senator or as a governor? feel like we're sort of overrun right now at the federal level. The enemy, other than our recent win here in the House and the Senate and the White House, I feel even with that win, even with Republicans in majority, I feel like the uniparty is dominant here. And the next line of defense is really at the state level and with the governors and the state senators and the state legislature. So I don't know. Maybe my next step would be for state Senate.

Congressman, whatever you do, you'll have the support of the huge judging freedom audience, not the and the least of whom is your humble correspondent. Thank you very much for your time. Always a pleasure. I look forward to hearing you with our dear friend, Brian Thomas, the next time you're on on a Wednesday morning, and I'm on right after you. All the best to you, Congressman. Thanks.

I look forward to being with you on Cincinnati Radio again. Thank you. Thank you so much. Coming up later today at 4 o'clock from midnight in Moscow, Pepe Escobar. And at 430, the always worth waiting for Colonel Douglas McGregor. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm out.