The Daily Signal - #470: Lawmaker Doubles as a Podcast Host to 'Take Our Message to the American People'

Episode Date: May 27, 2019

On today's Daily Signal podcast, we talk to Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia who is the host of the Freedom Caucus Podcast and a leading voice on Capitol Hill for conservatism.And we feature an interview with J. Christian Adams, a Department of Justice whistleblower who helped expose the Obama administration’s agenda. He is an election lawyer with the Public Interest Legal Foundation.We also share our favorite letters to the editor. Your letter could be featured on our show; write us at [e-mail] or call 202-608-6205.The Daily Signal podcast is available on the Ricochet Audio Network. You also can listen on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts.If you like what you hear, please leave a review or give us feedback. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Nothing else is Rees. This is the Daily Seinole podcast for Tuesday, May 28th. I'm Rob Blewey. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Today we are featuring Rachel's interview with Congressman Jody Heise of Georgia. He is the host of the Freedom Caucus podcast and a leading voice on Capitol Hill for conservatism. Rob recently spoke to Jay Christian Adams, a Department of Justice whistleblower who helped expose the Obama administration's agenda. Today, he is an election lawyer with the Public Interest Legal Foundation. And we will close out today's show with Yule.

letters to the editor. Before we begin, we'd like to ask you to help us spread the word about the Daily Signal podcast. Please give us a five-star review on iTunes and share this episode with your family and friends. That will help us make sure we are continuing to grow and reach more listeners. Stay tuned for today's show coming up next. We're joined on the Daily Signal podcast today by Congressman Jody Heist from the great state of Georgia. Congressman, thank you so much for being with us today. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm deeply grateful for what all you do and glad to be on the program with you. Well, thanks for being here. I want to talk about your new podcast. The House, Strunun Caucus, has a new podcast that just debuted about. I think it's been about two months on March 6th, I think, was the first day. Can you tell us a little bit about the podcast and why you saw the need for it? Yeah, we've actually just finished, I believe, our ninth episode, so we've been going a little over two months now. And, you know, this really came out of, well, my background is largely in radio.

I was in radio for about 12 years and recently have been elected the chairman of communications for the House Freedom Caucus. And part of that is to try to take our message to the American people. And I think the Freedom Caucus right now has a tremendous brand. Most people are familiar with who the Freedom Caucus is and what we stand for. And there's a group of warriors there. And so this is an attempt to try to reach out to the American people in some regard, re-educate the American people on some of the real issues.

that we're facing here in Washington, the distinctions between a socialist, radical, Democratic Party at this point versus where we need to be going as constitutional republic, and that's the type of things we're fighting for in the Freedom Caucus. So it's kind of an inside baseball look at what's happening in Washington with a lot of movers and shakers who are actually in the front lines of that battle. And so it's an interesting program,

and we've gotten really great feedback with it. So you have had colleagues in the House as well as the Senate on shows that you've had recently since you've just started. What has the response been like to the new podcast on the Hill as well as some listeners, maybe constituents back home? What are you hearing? Yeah, I mean, we're hearing people deeply appreciative. They're excited about it. You know, because we're able to bring real-life issues that are in the front pages of the newspapers that are being read and the television programs people watch, things like what's happening on the border. Well, we have some of the greatest experts right here in the Freedom Caucus, and I think that's one thing that really has come to light.

People have been made aware of the – there's just great intellect, great strategy, great experts that comprise the Freedom Caucus. And I've not been anywhere on Capitol Hill that has the in-depth kind of conversations and debate and strategy thought processes involved in meetings like the meetings we have in the Freedom Caucus. So that type of thing has been brought to light in the podcast. So whatever the topic has been, we've really been able to bring some of the greatest experts that we have in our Republican conference to the table. And many of them happen to be members of the Freedom Caucus. So we've been able to take some pretty important issues that are on the front line of the news and have some incredible discussion about those issues.

You're so right. I actually was just at the border with Congressman Andy Biggssey. took a delegation of members down. I spent a day with him. So you're right that the members in the House of the Congress, they are watching these issues up close and personal. They care about them. And to have that, you know, front-hand experience actually being at the border and then being able to come back and tell folks it's really going on, that's very important to have. It is incredibly important. Andy has been on the program with us. Chip Roy has been on the program. Those are two incredibly intelligent people on the front line of what's happening on their borders and also multiple other fronts. I mean, those guys are, they're sharp

knives in the drawers, and I'm honored to be working with them. So along with your role as the host of the House Freedom of Caucus podcast, you also mentioned you're the HFC's communications director. How do you think this show has helped address some misconceptions out there in the media and others about the Freedom of Caucus? You talked about this with Congressman Meadows on the first episode. So I really enjoyed listening to it. And I saw some amazing comments online, too, on the SoundCloud account. So how do you think that's also helped kind of like show a new face or maybe a face just people haven't seen?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And we really have seen some tremendous results. You know, one of the things that I think a lot of people have misconceptions about the Freedom Caucus, what they hear is a lot of a negative that comes from the news. And a lot of people just tend to believe that. So this podcast has been very helpful in instrumental. in bringing real life people who are on the Freedom Caucus into the lives of our listeners. And, you know, so we get into some personal stuff along the way, personal interest and who these individuals are in their daily and family life.

But then who they are up here is a bunch of warriors here fighting it out in Washington. So it's been really helpful, I think, to eradicate some of the misconceptions that some people have and help people really begin understanding that this is a group of people who really have some great ideas and strategies to bring to the table. So the hell very recently they published a piece that's announcing that former president Bill Clinton and actually his daughter, Chelsea, are going to be hosting their new podcast starting very soon. It's going to be called, Why Am I Telling You This? And so as a podcast host, you started before they have any advice or pointers to them, what have? advice for pointers do have for them? I would not be very ready to jump out there giving them advice, but I think why are they telling us this is a pretty good question mark. And I'll leave the

answer to that decision into the minds of the imaginations of people who are listening to us right now. But why? I think that's a good question for them to ask. It's a great question. I agree. As the podcast hosts, you've been having a lot of different shows, talking to members, talking to constituents, and this is a big communications role for you. In your experience, how do you think conservatives in general can communicate better? Well, this is part of the reason that we saw the need to have a communications director. I think one of the great missing elements that we have as a conference and conservatives as a whole is trying to communicate to our people. We live in a society that is dominated by left-wing national media who rarely won't.

to give a fair shake at the conservative side of things. Their tendency is to spin it all in their direction. And, you know, we do have some conservatives primarily on radio and that type of thing, which is incredibly helpful and some on television as well. But this is kind of our attempt to communicate our message to people in the United States and let them know firsthand without any cuts, without any edits. This is who we are and what we believe. we're fighting for, what we're standing for. And that in itself gives us a degree of control,

if you will, from the edits and the spin that we typically get when our message is attempted to go down the avenue of national media. So this allows us to take our message direct to the American people. Yeah. And speaking of communicating better, reaching more people and even younger audiences, how do you think in regards to youth conservatives can communicate better and reach the younger generation the next generation. Well, you know, I find that young people are getting more and more engaged. And, of course, there are some fantastic podcasts and people out there doing some incredible things reaching out to young people, I think of Ben Shapiro and people like that.

You've got Dennis Prager and a host of others that are doing a fantastic job reaching millennials. And, you know, there's, I think we've got to use kind of an all-of-the-above strategy in reaching every segment of our society and every age of our society. These podcasts are a part of that as well. Many young people in particular utilize a podcast format. And so this is a great way for us to start. But we have plans to utilize other methods and mediums as well, be it television radio and different avenues as we continue to go down our overall strategy to communicate with America. So on the show, you've already hit on a number of hot topics, including the Green New Deal that's being debated in the House right now, as well as the district. petition that would force a vote on the born alive bill to protect babies that survive an abortion. Can you talk a little bit about an update us on where the discharge petition stands and

what's going on there? Yeah, right now, as you mentioned, we have two discharge petitions. One of them I filed personally this week dealing with the Green New Deal. This is a radical socialist piece of legislation that is absolutely horrendous in every way, a $93 trillion price tag, but then the socialism that is attached to it is transformational as terms of what it would do to our country. And I believe every citizen in the country needs to know where their representative stands on this issue. There were 92 Democrats that have co-sponsored the Green New Deal, but they don't want to vote on it. And one of the tools that we have as a minority is a discharge petition to try to force a vote on something that the majority leadership does not want to vote on.

So I filed a discharge on that. we've got to get 218 signatures, and if we are able to accomplish that, then we will have a vote on the Green New Deal. So that is in process. The Born Alive Bill similar, in a similar way, whipped Steve Scalise, put forth a discharge for born alive. And listen, this is one of those things that should not be partisan at all. We are talking a baby that is born alive on the table right before us here. That baby needs to be protected. And the polls show, and certainly my experience, shows whether you're pro-life or pro-choice,

whether you're Democrat or Republican, people understand by the vast majority that when a baby is born alive, it needs to be protected. And yet the majority does not want to have a vote on that. So WIP, Scalise has put forth a discharge on that as well, is going extremely well. And with both of these, I think we have a decent chance of accomplishing 218 signatures, enforcing a vote on both the Green Deal and Born Alive. So you just hit on the Green New Deal in the Born Alives bill. The discharge petitions there.

Looking at those two pieces of legislation or maybe, is there something else that you consider either the most important piece of legislation that you're really watching and want to pass or maybe the most dangerous that you are telling colleagues, we really need to take a second look at this? Yeah, you know, we've got both. The Democrats have put forward their agenda, the first 10 bills of HR 1, HR 2, HR 3, all the way through 10, of every Congress identifies the agenda for whichever party is in control.

And we just voted today on H.R. 9. The Democrats have been very clear on what their agenda is by the first 10 bills of this session. And it's all filled with socialism. It's filled with government takeover. It is absolutely horrifying. changing our election laws to ensure that Democrats really will be in control for the rest of our lifetime. That was HR1. And so we're seeing a lot of bills that, fortunately, because we still have the Senate and the White House, those bills are not going to go anywhere at this time. But the fact that the Democrats are playing their hands, showing who they are, what they really believe, should be extremely alarming. And I would encourage listeners to check out those first 10 bills to get a better understanding of what the agenda of the Democrats are at this point. So that being said,

you know, the House operates off a mob rule. Whoever's in the majority does whatever they want to do and the minority cannot stop them ultimately. And so, you know, there's a lot of bills that we would like to pass. Obviously, we're trying to work around them through a couple of discharge petitions, which we've talked about. But at the end of the day, the majority party is going to rule and do whatever they want to do. So our biggest challenge at this point is pulling the reins, trying to stop, trying to slow down, and in some ways trying to destroy the agenda that we believe would be extremely destructive for our country. Congressman Heist, thank you so much for joining us today and taking time. We appreciate it. Well, it's my pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me. Up next, we will hear from Jay Christian Adams about the threats to election integrity in America. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts.

Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. We're joined at The Daily Signal with Christian Adams. Christian, thanks so much for your contributions to the Daily Signal and the work that you've been doing on election integrity and also really, I think, holding people responsible and accountable when they need to be. Thank you. We appreciate that. You know, I want to begin with the issue of election integrity. We find ourselves in a situation where almost on a daily basis, it seems like there's something in the news related to this issue. What do you see as some of the biggest challenges or threats to election integrity in our country right now? Oh, there's a number of them. One of the biggest is the failure of the motor voter system to keep non-citizens off the voter rolls. It's an honor system. People are surprised to hear that nobody is checking to see if they're actually eligible to vote when they register. The other big threat, I think, is just the vulnerabilities that have been cranked in by virtue of statute. It's not even voter fraud all the time.

You know, for example, New Hampshire had a very lax rule on who lives and who doesn't live in New Hampshire, and that's why you had all these people from out of state voting there. It's not always voter fraud when you make it legal. You bring up the issue of immigration there. A couple of follow-up questions on that. Number one, we have a case before the U.S. Supreme Court involving a question that would appear on the U.S. census that the Trump administration wants to ask, but some of the liberal activists don't want to be asked.

What kind of an implication do you think this decision could have going forward? Well, huge. First of all, if it was 30 years ago, I don't even think this would be a divisive issue. That shows you how far we sunk that asking whether or not you're a citizen is even controversial. Putting that aside, what this will do is illustrate to the American people how many people are here illegally. We don't have a firm number of that. We don't know what it is. We also know the people who are here illegally and people who are not citizens are getting political representation in the status quo. In other words, they're drawing congressional seats, school board seats, based on people who are not Americans. And that's a real problem to most Americans.

The census question will help us figure out how big of a problem it is. How big of a threat is illegal immigrant voting to today's elections? Well, it's both illegal immigrant and green card holder. It's aliens generally. As a matter of fact, the green card holder is more likely to get on the voter rolls than the illegal alien because they can go get a driver's license. and that's where the problem's happening at DMV. Because they're going to get their driver's license, which you're allowed to do because they're here.

You want them to be licensed. But they're showing a green card to get it, and then they're getting on the voter rolls. So it's a huge problem, tens of thousands at a minimum, probably making a difference in some place. Well, I would imagine, I mean, our country as closely divided as it is in some races, I mean, we're talking about elections being decided by hundreds of votes.

So if you have people who aren't supposed to be voting, voting, it's probably certainly having an impact. And it's easy to fix, but there are all these groups on the left that are preventing a fix from happening. They're bringing cases in court. We're litigating in the District of Columbia, Federal Court over citizenship verification rules in Georgia, Kansas, and Alabama. You would think that everybody agrees that non-citizens shouldn't be on the rolls, but unfortunately, the organized left is spending millions of dollars to preserve the broken status quo. In places like Orange County, California, and other localities throughout the country, we've heard about vote harvesting.

Can you explain to our listeners what that is and why it poses a challenge? I did a case of the Justice Department called USAI Brown where this was in elections there, where all of a sudden the ballot would show up in someone's mailbox, and following the mailman was vote harvester. She would take the ballot out of the mailbox, go knock on the door, ask the person to vote, and then fill out the ballot for the person. That's what vote harvesting is. And then she'd go to the next house where the mailman was delivering the next.

absentee ballot. And it's a way to collect huge numbers of votes to make a difference. It happens in the Rio Grande Valley, another very common place where vote harvesting occurs. Do you think that it had, looking back at the 28-term midterm elections in a place like Orange County where you had Republicans, you know, really in the dominant positions for decades, all of a sudden lose all their seats? I mean, was vote harvesting a factor in the outcome of those elections. Well, right, but don't forget, vote harvesting is not necessarily voter fraud unless you're not representing the will of the voter, right? And this gets back to what I've been saying, what Hans von Skokovsky-Herj has been saying, is process matters. When a state makes it legal to do this,

that's not voter fraud. And that's the more dangerous thing you're seeing than actual voter fraud is redefining what is legal. And that's what's occurring. It's a definitional war going on to change things that are normally illegal or people think should be illegal to making them legal. Now, the key question on vote harvesting is, did the voter get to vote for whom they wanted? And if that happened, then it's not illegal. Thank you for explaining that. Right. I want to ask about a topic that has come up recently, and that is felons while serving in

prison being able to vote. There are some out there leading politicians who would like to see this happen, perhaps not just at a state level, but expanding. beyond Vermont and other places where it's currently legal. What are your thoughts on having felons, well-serving time in prisons, being able to vote? Well, there's a long tradition in Anglo-American law that if you don't respect the law,

if you break the law, you shouldn't have a voice in saying what the law is, that you originally don't even respect in the first place. And so normally, felons in prison would not be voting. Of course, in Maine and Vermont, they roll the machines right into the prison. And in places like Kentucky and recently, recently,

you lost your right to vote forever when you're a felon. That's what's great about our system, the states get to decide what they want. And if Vermont wants to have felons voting on burglary laws and on criminal provisions by electing state legislatures, have fun Vermont. And that's why we have the federal system we do. What are your thoughts on moves like the Florida voters enacted in the last election

to restore voting rights after they've served their time in prison? Right, and that's complicated, because the legislature is still trying to sort out the details, but essentially in Florida, once you paid your fines and once you have paid your restitution and you get out of jail, you can vote. Now, the big fight is what does paying your fines and restitution means? We don't know yet.

Looking ahead to the 2020 election, what are some of the big challenges that you see on the horizon when it comes to election integrity? What should our listeners be mindful of that you're concerned about today? States still haven't fixed the problem. We are suing Pennsylvania right now, to get the entire record database of all the non-citizens who've been on the rolls there for 20 years. We're in federal court. They're fighting us in Pennsylvania.

Same within Harris County, which is Houston. We have a federal lawsuit against Harris County to try to get the records of all these non-citizens who have been voting. So not only are they not fixing the problem, they're hiding the extent of it. So that's how bad the system is right now, is there's a problem with non-citizens on the rolls and the people who let it happen are hiding the extent of the problem. You, of course, had the courage to come out as somebody who, was exposing some of the things that were happening at the Department of Justice.

Almost a decade ago. Almost a decade ago, yes, during the Obama administration. What do you see happening there today? Are you, have you, is your faith restored in terms of the way things are happening? Or do you still want to see, you know, further changes being made? Right. Well, look, there's a really good assistant attorney general for civil rights. Eric Drybin, the problem is all of the radical career ranks that Hans von Svokovikovsky and

I've written about over the years, the hardcore left-wing lawyers are still there. Yeah. And so all that the Trump administration has been able to do is throw water on that radical fire. And so they've put it out, but once the embers, you know, have dried out, and Eric Drybin and Donald Trump are no longer there will probably see the same problem emerge. Well, Christian Adams, thanks for doing the work that you do, bringing attention to these important issues and also contributing to the Daily Signal. We appreciate it. I love the Daily Signal.

Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at Letters at Daily Signal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each week we feature our favorites on this show and in our Morning Bell email newsletter. Rachel, who's up first? Marian Daniels Price writes in response to Leslie Dean's piece.

I've had two abortions. Here's why I support Alabama's pro-life law. Thank you, Mrs. Dean, for being so forthright with your story. You and Abby Johnson are pulling the curtain aside on the lies that are being told to women about abortion. Adoption would be a much more viable option for women instead of abortion if adoption was less expensive. There are thousands of people who would love to adopt but are unable to do so because of the expense. Also, the pro-life movement needs to better inform women of the services that are available to them so they know that adoption or keeping their child are viable options. And Scott J. Whitney of Colorado Springs, Colorado, writes, Dear Daily Signal,

having read Kelsey Bowler's story on Selena Soul, I am appalled at the callousness of the left. I personally have no harsh feelings for transgender individuals. Putting it plainly, they have no right to compete with natural-born females because biology doesn't lie. Not only is it unfair, it also opens the door to a great deal of corruption. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. Send an email to letters at dailysignal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. We're going to leave it there for today. The Daily Signal podcast comes to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. You can find it on the Rick

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