The Daily Signal - #436: Two House Conservatives Explain Why It's Time to Focus on Spending, Budget

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Today we feature Genevieve Wood’s interview with Rep. Mike Johnson, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, and Rep. Jim Banks. The two Republicans, who represent districts in Louisiana and Indiana respectively, talk about spending, the debt, and why it’s time to take these issues seriously.We also cover these stories:•President Trump says he's not bringing back family separations.•Attorney General William Barr testifies to Congress about the Mueller report.•Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is backing reparations.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, April 10th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Kate Trinco. Today we'll feature Genevieve Woods interview with Representative Mike Johnson, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, and Representative Jim Banks. The two Republicans who represent districts in Louisiana and Indiana, respectively, will talk about spending, the debt, and why it's time to take these issues seriously. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five

star rating on iTunes and encouraging others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday during a meeting with the president of Egypt in the Oval Office that his administration will not be reinstating the practice of separating families who have illegally crossed the border. Trump said that his administration ended a policy from President Barack Obama's administration that allowed families to be separated at the border. Obama separated the children, by the way.

Just so you understand, President Obama separated the children. Those cages that were shown, I think they were very inappropriate. They were built by President Obama's administration, not by Trump. President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it. You know it. We all know it.

I didn't have, I'm the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation. Now, I'll tell you something. Once you don't have it, that's why you see many more people coming. They're coming like it's a picnic because let's go to Disneyland. President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it.

Okay, thank you very much. We're not looking to do that now. We're not looking to do that. Testifying at a Hill hearing, Attorney General William Barr said the redacted version of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller will be out in the next week. Barr also indicated the Justice Department was investigating the origins of the investigation in response to a question from Representative Robert Aderholt, Republican of Alabama. My question is now that President Trump has been exonerated of Russia collusion, is the Justice Department investigating how it came to be that your agency used a salacious and unverified dossier as a predicate for a FISA order on a U.S. citizen? The Office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russian investigation. And I expect that that will be complete in probably in May or June, I am told.

So hopefully we'll have some answers from Inspector General Horowitz on the issue of the FISA wants. More generally, I am reviewing. the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has confirmed that Treasury Department lawyers are looking over requests from House Democrats to access President Donald Trump's tax returns. The general public, when they elected President Trump, made the decision to elect him without his tax returns being released.

Mnuchin said Tuesday, during testimony, on Capitol Hill. Manuchin also said that it is the Treasury Department's, quote, intent to follow the law, and that is in the process of being reviewed, end quote. A Texas University will no longer have race be a factor in admissions. The Wall Street Journal reported that Texas Tech University, quote, struck the deal with the Education Department in February, concluding a 14-year investigation into the university's use of affirmative action. Roger Clegg, General Council of Center for Equal Opportunity, told the journal, this shows the Trump administration is taking seriously its responsibility to enforce civil

rights in a way that protects all Americans. And the more schools that don't use racial preferences, the harder it is for the remaining schools to justify their use of it. A man living in Maryland who is a naturalized U.S. citizen has been arrested for allegedly plotting to use a stolen rental truck to run over pedestrians and national. Harbor, Maryland, a waterfront development of shops and dining options where the conservative political action conference is held each year. The suspect, Rondell Henry, is a 28-year-old computer engineer and, quote, was arrested last week in charge with interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, according to court documents filed Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal. Further charges are expected to be added in the coming weeks.

Senator Corey Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, is speaking out in favor of reparation. Here's what he told the route. Yes. Do you support reparations for black people? I support reparations. I support economically designed programs with race as a conscious part of them that balance the scales and address past ills, not just slavery, but even things that were going on until the 50s, 60s, in 70s that were specifically race-conscious programs that were designed to disadvantage African Americans. So if you have programs that were designed to create the problems by accessibility,

excluding African Americans in housing and mortgage loans and access to capital, we need to have consulate things with race and mind that are conscious to balance those scales and address those pasticles. Booker also tweeted, I am proud to introduce legislation that will finally address many of our country's policies, rooted in a history of slavery and white supremacy, that continue to erode black communities perpetuate racism and implicit bias and widen the racial wealth gap.

His legislation would lead to a committee studying the issue. Sixteen parents have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Boston for allegedly being part of the college admissions cheating scheme. Just a day after the U.S. Attorney's Office announced that 13 others who were previously charged would plead guilty. Almost all 33 parents who have so far been charged face one felony count of conspiracy to commit male fraud and honest services mail fraud, and two parents were subsequently indicted on that as well as a charge of money laundering, conspiracy. In New York City, not having a measles vaccination and living in certain very conservative Jewish areas of New York City could now result in fines of up to $1,000. As the city grapples with a measles outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio said, per the New York Times, this is the epicenter

of a measles outbreak that is very, very troubling and must be dealt with immediately. And the measles vaccine works. It is safe. It is effective. It is time tested. End quote. There have been 285 cases of measles in the area in recent months. People are still working to oppose Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the latest push of opposition come from students at George Mason University. Kavanaugh is scheduled to teach creation of the Constitution to George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School students in England over the summer, and students at GMU's campus in Fairfax, Virginia,

say they are survivors of sexual assault and are coming together. to protest Kavanaugh teaching at George Mason. As a survivor of sexual assault, this decision has really impacted me negatively. A female student said April 3rd at a board of visitors meeting according to the college fix. It has affected my mental health knowing that an abuser will be part of our faculty, end quote. Next up, we'll feature Genevieve's interview with representatives Mike Johnson and Jim Banks. Do you own an Alexa? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily flash brief.

It's easy to do. Just open up your Alexa app, go to settings, and select Flash Briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your Flash briefing so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. I am Genevieve Wood. I'm at the Heritage Foundation, The Daily Signal, and have the great pleasure of moderating a discussion today with the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Mike Johnson, of Louisiana, and also the chairman of the House of the Republican Study Committee's a task force on the budget and spending, and he is Jim Banks of Indiana. So gentlemen, it's great to be on with you for the first broadcast.

Thanks so much, Genevieve. We're excited about this. We appreciate you doing it. Well, delighted to do it. So I know you want people to be engaged, so you're going to encourage people to follow you. Well, they're obviously following you right now on Facebook, but also following you on Twitter and asking questions. How do they go about doing that?

Yeah, thanks. Our Twitter handle is hashtag at Republican Study. And the hashtag is if you do hashtag RSC elephants in the room. you can ask a question and this can be interactive. So that's what we hope we'll do with this. That's great. And we do want it to be interactive. This is our very first broadcast. We're going to be doing this on a regular basis. It's when you all are in session and we want people to be engaged. And I know that you want to bring on different leaders of the RSC. Maybe for those who aren't familiar, who is a Republican Study Committee? What's the role at place?

Yeah, thanks so much. We're excited about this. We want it to be an ongoing program to have regular broadcasts like this, to involve more people in what RSC is and what it's doing. And on each of these programs will feature a prominent leader of RSC, like we have Jim today. We'll be talking about the budget. But look, overall, the Republican Study Committee has a great history on the Hill. As you know, we were founded back in 1973 to be, as was said one time by Ed Fulner at Heritage and was the first executive director of our group, to be the intellectual arsenal of conservatism in the Congress. And so today we have over 140 members.

We're the largest caucus of conservatives in Congress. and it plays a very important role. It's a policy shop. We develop the ideas and legislative initiatives to take conservative principles and put them on paper and move them as a legislative agenda. So we message that across the country

and all of our members are deeply engaged in all these areas. We are organizing into task forces, working groups, to work on a number of important issues. And one of them, the most urgent of the day, is the RSC Budget and Spending Task Force. As you mentioned, Jim, is the task force chairman of that group and has been doing a great job. And that's really the topic of this first

program we wanted to unpack and talk about that because it's top of mind for everyone because it's so timely. That's right. Well, so the Democrats released recently, not really a budget, but they did release a proposal talking about how they would like to see spending go forward. You all are going to be coming out with one, I believe, in early May. Congress and Banks, tell us, first of all, set up where we are. Most of the viewers here probably know the country's about $22 trillion in debt. What is it that the Democrats want to do about that now that they're actually in charge in the House? Well, if it looks like there's a black cloud over the Capitol at the moment, it's because there is. As we were walking here to set up for this program, the Democrats deal,

it blew up literally. Nancy Pelosi had a budget caps deal that she was negotiating. Mike and I were supposed to go back over to the floor for another vote series today, but that's been canceled because the internal workings of the Democrat Party are so complicated between the left wing and the far left wing that they can't arrive at any deal. Because the far left wing wants Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, these left wing proposals to be accounted for in all of their budget proposals.

But the sign of the times is that Nancy Pelosi is a moderate within the Democrat Party of today. And she understands that to pass a budget-caps deal, that could get anywhere through the Senate means that there has to be some responsibility involved in the process. So today, as we speak, that deal has blown up. Now they're going to have to go back to the table

and try to hash something out within the Democrat Party to move forward. But we're not focused on that with the RSC. We're focused on doing what RSC has always done so well, and that's presenting a fiscally responsible and balanced budget proposal. And we're really close to doing that. When Mike asked me to be the chairman of this task force, I had no idea what I was signing up for.

It's been a very busy process. Every week that we've been in session since the beginning of this Congress, our task force has met to go through hundreds of proposals. We had our final task force meeting last week, and now we have a working product that cuts over $7 trillion of wasteful government spending in our budget proposal. It balances in less than 10 years, which, by the way, is becoming more increasingly difficult to do every year that we go by with all of the spinning programs and trajectory that we have currently. It's getting harder to do that, but Republican Study Committee stands at the top of the list of the groups who are producing a product like that year in and year out. Let's set the stage a little bit too. And this is I know that the debate that happens almost every time is you have those who say, well, look, we know we're going to spend a certain amount of money on defense.

And there are those who say, well, whatever you spend on defense, you've got to send the same amount on discretionary spending, social programs and the like. And so what usually ends up happening is those who want defense spending get their peace and then those who want discretionary and get their piece. And that's how we end it with $22 trillion in debt. How is it going to be different this time? Like how do you set the stage and make it different this time? Well, we've encouraged the president,

spoke with him as recently as Thursday about this, to stand strong on opposing this idea of parity. That's the term that's used around here, as you know. The Democrats demand discretionary spending increases, domestic spending, a dollar-for-dollar match for military spending. And that's really madness. The policy, they don't even necessarily need some of these dollars. They just throw it in for all these pay.

projects because they have demanded that you have to do a dollar-for-dollar raise in spending. It's not a sustainable trajectory. It's not. When we have military officials, the Pentagon officials, the top brass, come in and testify to Congress under oath, they always say, when they're asked the question, what is the number one threat to national security? They say the debt. The debt is not a sustainable trajectory for the country. We have to address it. The first way to do that is to tackle this discretionary spending, the numbers, and they want to go through the caps, as Jim is discussed. We can't allow that. We have to stand strong on it because we're simply not going to be able to sustain this for the country going forward unless we make adult, very deliberate, very difficult decisions sometimes. Congressman Banks, how do you start doing that?

I mean, I know you all you said you've got a lot of proposals you've got on the table. How do you start getting towards a balance budget? Where do you start making reductions in spending? Well, you have to go to three places to begin with, and that's the three programs that make up non-discretionary spending, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We have to find ways to reform those programs to, one, make them sustainable and allow them to survive into the future,

but also make reasonable and responsible modifications to those programs, reforms to those programs that will begin the decline of those programs, substantially adding to the national debt. Two-thirds of federal spending today are those three programs. So the Republican Study Committee dives deeply into finding ways to reform those programs to address long-term national debt. But we also focused on substantial spending cuts within the rest of the federal government, too, while increasing defense spending. The president's budget proposal that he released just a few weeks ago calls again for an increase in defense spending to $750 billion. We're at $718 billion in the fiscal year that we're in today. So that's a

continued priority by this president to rebuild the military, which is a priority that's shared by almost every member of the Republican Study Committee, too. So we share that and we arrive at $745 billion for defense. That $5 billion difference is made up in some other ways. It's not a difference. At the end of the day, we just place some of the wall. funding that's in the president's budget under defense under the Department of Homeland Security. But at the same time, we make over $7 trillion in cuts in other places in discretionary spending to make it to truly produce a balanced budget. And I just wanted to add the reason that the increases in military spending is necessary

is because we have to recognize we're in a very dangerous world, a very dangerous environment. Not only are there terrorists and tyrants around the world, rogue regimes that seek to do Americans harm and others around the world. But we also have these brand new arenas that we have to stay abreast of. We have to update continually our nuclear arsenal. We've got to work now on cyber defense. This is a brand new area. Now we're talking about defending the outer space area because other nations, China, Russia, and others are seeking to develop and take advantage of those new arenas. So it's not something that we do by choice. We do it by necessity. And that's why The President has prioritized that.

That's why conservatives in Congress believe it's so important. I think one thing we did too, Genevieve, that's unique with the Republican Study Committee Spending and Budget Task Force. When Chairman Johnson and I started to form the task force, we formed it by including a number of members who are defense hawks, like myself, who serve on the Armed Services Committee and a number of committee, a number of the committee members who are deficit hawks. So we have a unique flavor of the Republican conference who sit around the table every week. with those viewpoints that truly makes this product one of the best budget proposals

that the Republican Study Committee has ever produced. Let me ask you, well, I mean, this is a different period than it was. You know, if you go back a year ago, Republicans were in the majority. How different is this process and how does it shape the proposal and the budget you put together now that you're in the minority party in the House? Or does it? It's hard to be optimistic in this environment with Nancy Velosi in charge of the House. And when we started the process, there were a number of members who talked about the Republican Study Committee budget proposal being, quote, aspirational. And we wanted to avoid that term. We don't want this to be aspirational. This is truly the tough work of what it's going to take to produce a balanced budget. We want to show our constituents that if there's anybody on Capitol Hill who are fighting for responsible budgets and for fiscal conservativeism on Capitol Hill, it's us.

This is what a budget proposal would look like if we are going to produce something that would put us back on the right track toward that type of sentiment. But with Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House, it's hard not to be pessimistic about where we're heading. And it's not just an academic exercise. If you, and we would say this to all our constituents we do when we're back in the districts, look, if you value and appreciate Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and these. programs, you want to encourage these reforms because it's the only way for those programs to stay in existence. We're going to literally run out of money in a short number of years, and those programs simply won't be available for Americans. You won't have the support that you count on. And that's why we do these things. And from a general perspective, there's a lot of,

there's this idea on the Hill, Capitol Hill, that when your party is in the minority, you just sort of downshift a bit or you wander in the wilderness. What we're doing at the Republican Study Committee is exactly the opposite. We're rolling our sleeves up. We're doing the hard work. We're making the proposals that we think are important for the conversation in this country and to redirect where we're headed. We believe we can win the majority back in the next election cycle.

And when we do that, we'll be ready to run this playbook that we're developing in all these task forces across the board. Now, I know you all will be, when you release this in May, people will be able to get on your Facebook page. You'll be tweeting out about it, so people should be following you on social media to get all the details. But can you tell us when you talk about, okay, let's go to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the like, for those who are concerned about what are they going to do to reduce the growth in those programs, what are you going to do? How do you get these back on track and make them solvent, if you will, without people feeling like I'm going to lose my check? Because you know that's going to be what the other side says, right, that you're going to throw grandma over the cliff and the whole thing. Every single member of our task force was adamant about ensuring that all of the reforms we make to those programs won't impact anyone who relies on those programs today. But instead making reforms to those programs well into the future that will make them sustainable and allow those programs to survive well into the future.

So we had a number of very vocal voices around the table who wanted to make sure that each of those 300 ideas that we brought to the table wouldn't harm. anyone who relies on any program, others from one of those programs or not. But we'll be diving more deeply. And as we unveil the budget proposal in May, we'll be diving more deeply into how we make reforms to each of those programs and more. And there'll be a lot of discussion about it. It will happen organically because this looks to be the only budget, in addition to the administration, that will be proposed in the House of Representatives.

The Democrats won't have a budget at all from what they're saying now. So I think that's a terrible... Which is a direct contradiction of what they said. last year when they said, if you give us, if you give us the Democrat Party, the majority in the House Representatives, we will put forth a budget. And now today, they've completely flipped up. People are very concerned about the deficit and the debt and where this, what this meant for the future of the country. But once people get elected, it seems like a lot of those promises get forgotten. What happens if there is no budget? What does that mean?

You stay at status quo. There'll be continuing resolutions. The Congress will do this patchwork effort to just keep the government limping along. And all this violates, I think, the founders intent and the spirit of the Constitution and our republic. And the idea of fiscal responsibility is a really important core principle. The idea that we should work under the notion of a balanced budget, that we should not spend more than we take in. I mean, our families have to live on these principles. Small businesses and other corporate entities have to rely on those same principles, the government ought to operate on them as well. And I think we do a great disservice to the people of this country, to all of our constituents, when we don't do the

difficult work, the grown-up work that is expected of the Congress. And for too long, this has been allowed to go on like this, which is why we're in the situation we're in. The debt grows an enormous amount moment by moment, probably since we've been sitting here, what, tens of millions of dollars in additional federal debt has been added. And under both party leadership. That's exactly right. Republicans and Democrats have both this is one. They can both share a lot of responsibility. There's a lot of blame to go around. You're right. But at the end of the day, we have to stop the way we've been doing business because, as we've said, it's just simply not a sustainable trajectory for us. Got a question that came in here via Facebook, and it's from Blake on

Facebook. He says, can you go into detail on the Green New Deal and why Representative Cortez believes it is physically achievable. I have no idea how she could justify this fiscally achievable because it's not. I mean, it would literally bankrupt our country and every sense of the word. The socialist wing of the Democrat Party subscribes to a new economic theory. They call it modern monetary theory. And this is the idea that debt really doesn't matter, that deficits don't really matter, that you can spend money that you don't have in perpetuity.

And the government will just print more of it. They completely discount the idea of inflation. there that the dollar may fall someday, all of the great concerns that we have. So that's how they justify it. At the RSC, we did, if you read the Washington Times, the headline said RSC take down of the Green New Deal. We had our policy experts and some of our brightest members sit down and do a deep dive on those proposals. The whole Green New Deal was only 14 pages in length. Our takedown of it is 13 pages long. And that's on the RSC website. And Google, Washington Times, you'll see the story. It's really an eye-opener when you look at the real numbers and what it would cost the country to do this.

Somewhere between $90 and $95 trillion, as the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed, of course, they would eliminate air travel in most of our vehicles, and it would add a tremendous amount of cost and debt to every single household and every individual in the country. It's just, it's pure fantasy. But we can't laugh at off. We have to address that very directly and soberly and explain to people why this idea. of socialism is anathema to who we are as Americans. It's completely contrary to everything that we believe and stand for, but we have to explain this to each new generation of Americans

so they don't fall into that trap. Well, and what do you say to your constituents in Indiana and Louisiana, but all those around the country who say, look, we, not that they don't believe you, but they're like, this is what we keep hearing from Washington, we're going to get a balanced budget eventually, we're going to start doing things differently, and yet it really never happened.

How do you make it, what's going to be different this time? Well, we start with the Republican Study Committee. I mean, the strength of the Republican Study Committee today is a testament that there are conservative leaders on Capitol Hill who are trying to do the right thing. And whether it's the budget proposal or Chairman Johnson's task force on health care, putting forth health care proposals, there's a lot of really good work happening on Capitol Hill right now. And that's encouraging to me when I come to work every day to know that I'm joined by other principled conservatives who want to who want to get things done.

If we get the majority back, I really do think it'll be different than before. You'll have members who have now tasted what it's like to be in the minority, and have seen the damage being done to our country by this left wing of the Democrat Party that we've never seen something as radically to the left as what this Democrat Party is today. So once we've tasted a little bit of it, we'll do everything we can to make sure that we don't see much more of that for long.

And we'll have to enact some of these ideas soon. In the next Congress, we believe we'll have a chance to do that, because if you look at just the objective numbers and the estimates and congressional budget office, the CBO, as you know, is a nonpartisan group that scores all of this. And they project that inherited just shared some of these numbers in their own estimates. But if you just look at the four major expenditures of the federal government, if you look at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid interest on the debt, all of these expenditures, it eclipses gross domestic product in just about a dozen years.

It's not near as far off as it used to be. We can't kick this can down the road any further. We don't have another generation. We don't have 20 years. We don't even have 10 years. This has to start yesterday. And that's why we're urging this difficult conversation to make everyone face this. I think the polling does indicate that American people are beginning to wake up and realize what a tremendous threat the debt is to us.

And that we have to make difficult decisions to address it now because it's the responsible and right thing to do. You mentioned earlier that the president, of course, will have his own budget, that he puts forward. How does that work? How does what you do shape what he's thinking of doing? Have you talked to him about it? How do you bring those two together? I have talked to him about it. Talk to him about it on my cell phone on Thursday and told him the projected date of the release of our budgets on May 2nd and encouraged him that we've adopted many of the principles that were put forth in the administration's budget. Ours goes a little bit further to try to balance within the 10-year window because we feel that's really important. But I told the president that's a

this is not a competing vision. It's a compliment to what you've done, but to really spark this difficult conversation. And I encouraged him to be bold and to lead on that and that we will have the foot soldiers on the field, so to speak, to advance that debate. Traditionally, the president's budget proposal is where the process starts. So then the budget committees and the Senate and the House both begin the process from there. We begin our process based on the president's budget being a sort of the baseline of where we begin from. And I got to tell you that this being the third budget proposal by this president, each time right out of the gate this president has been consistent in balancing the budget

and providing a fiscally conservative vision for the budget that says a lot about this president that we haven't seen in a long time, if ever, that we have someone in the White House who cares deeply about these issues. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much. for talking with us about this. Anything else you would want people to know just generally about the Republican Study Committee before we wrap up today's episode? Well, just be encouraged. As I mentioned, we're not wandering in the wilderness and the minority. We're doing the hard work right now. Much of this happens behind the scenes. You don't hear about it on the evening

news every night. Part of that is by design. We have everybody who just had their sleeves rolled up working very hard, very consistently to develop all these policy initiatives that will be advancing. when I'm convinced when we take the majority back in 2020. So grateful for this and the opportunity to highlight that work. And as we said, in each episode, a different member who has different areas of jurisdiction and expertise that they're working on. And I think that will be an encouragement to people to tune in. So come back for the next episode and we'll be glad to share it with you.

Yeah, well, it's great that you all are making yourself accessible to the public and they can actually get their questions in from all over. Want to get up to speed about the Supreme Court? Then subscribe to Scotus 101. a podcast about everything that's happening at the Supreme Court and what the justices are up to. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud,

and be sure to leave us a review or a rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. And we'll see you again tomorrow. You've been listening to The Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.