The Daily Signal - China Threat Looms Large for Biden Administration, Freshman Senator Says

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Sen. Bill Hagerty, a freshman Republican from Tennessee, is a businessman who served as U.S. ambassador to Japan during the Trump administration. Hagerty joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to describe how former President Donald Trump stood up to China. He also predicts what's in store for the U.S.-China relationship under President Joe Biden. "China has made its intentions very clear," Hagerty says. "They've got their 2025 plan. One of the most nefarious things that you'll see, and we've got to continue to be very diligent [about], is China is constantly pushing to get their technology into the infrastructure of the rest of the world." We also cover these stories: Senate Democrats say they have the 51 votes needed to pass their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 bill, which Biden is expected to sign.  Vanita Gupta, Biden’s pick for associate attorney general, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Biden administration asks the Supreme Court to throw out a case involving Trump’s policy on illegal immigration.  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, March 10th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. How did former President Donald Trump stand up to China? Will China become an increasing threat not only to the United States, but also the world during the Biden administration? Freshman Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee joins me on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcast. and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Senate Democrats say they have the 51 votes needed to pass their 1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, which President Joe Biden is expected to sign. The bill cuts $1,400 stimulus checks as well as

gives $86 billion in bailouts for union pensions. Here is House caucus chairman Hakeem Dreferees, Democrat of New York, talking about the bill to media on Tuesday via the Hill. Leadership matters. Vaccinations are up, infections are down. $1,400 survival checks are on the way. And that is only the beginning. House Democrats in partnership with Senate Democrats and with great leadership from President Biden and Vice President Harris promised to respond to the COVID-19. pandemic in a transformational way. The American Rescue Plan is a transformational piece of legislation. We promised to put vaccination shots in arms for every single American mission accomplished. We promised to put money in the pockets of everyday Americans who've been struggling through the economic trauma of the pandemic.

Mission accomplished. We promised to make sure that children can go back to school safely. Mission accomplished. We promised to send people back to work by helping to revive and supercharge the economy. Mission accomplished. We promised to help small businesses. Mission accomplished. leadership matters and we're thankful for the leadership of President Biden,

his administration and partnership with House Democrats and Senate Democrats to get things done for the American people. President Joe Biden's pick for Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Gupta previously headed the Justice Department's Civil Rights Unit. under former President Barack Obama. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, questioned Gupta over her views of law enforcement

and the defund the police movement. Let's take a listen to their exchange per Cruz's Twitter account. And at the beginning of this hearing, Chairman Durbin asked you about abolishing the police, and you said, I do not support defunding the police, which is clearly the right political answer seeking to get confirmed. I would note that just a few months ago, last year in written correspondence with the Senate,

the United States, you encouraged Congress to, quote, reexamine federal spending priorities and shrink the footprint of the police and criminal legal system in this country. And you also encourage reallocating resources and stated, quote, some people call it defunding the police. Other people call it divest, invest. But whatever you call it, if you care about mass incarceration, you have to care about skewed funding priorities. These were not college writings. This was about eight months ago that you wrote this to the Senate. By any measure, that's advocating defunding the police, and yet today you're telling this committee you don't support that. Senator, respectfully, I disagree with how you're characterizing that. I don't support defunding the police. I've been

very clear about that. I have enjoyed, if I may, sorry? Were the quotes I read inaccurate? Well, let me, if I may, can I tell you what I, those statements reflect conversations that I've had with sheriffs around the country, police officers, police chiefs, civil rights activists who have, who have been talking to me for years long before, as I said, at the events of this summer, about the fact that we have placed so many of our nation's social problems at the feet of police. Some GOP lawmakers pointed out during the confirmation hearing that Gupta has been critical of Republicans in the past. Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said her Twitter feed has painted Republicans with a broad brush,

describing the Republican National Convention as three nights of racism, xenophobia, and outrageous lies. Gupta told the committee, I regret the harsh rhetoric I have used in the past at times in the last several years. I wish I could take it back. President Joe Biden's administration is asking the Supreme Court to throw out a case pertaining to former President Donald Trump's immigration rules. The case looks at whether or not Trump's public charge policy, which bans immigrants eligible for government benefits to obtain permanent residency for the Washington Examiner, is legal or not. The Supreme Court took on the case following the Trump administration's changing a 2019 role with the meaning of public charge to include the amount of those who would be rejected for residency per the Washington examiner.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is pushing back on the narrative that vaccinated, individuals still need to wear masks, telling Americans they should live free if they have been vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on Monday for those who have received the vaccine. The CDC says that vaccinated individuals can gather with other vaccinated individuals but should still wear a mask and social distance in public places like grocery stores or when spending time with those who are at high risk and who are unvaccinated. In response to the new guidelines, Paul tweeted, rather than listening to government scolds, look to the science of immunology. And once you're two weeks out from the vaccine or have recovered from the actual infection, trash your mask and live free again. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Senator Bill Haggerty of Tennessee. This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal

podcast. I don't know about you, but YouTube is certainly one of my guilty pleasures. I really enjoy watching short videos on a variety of topics, so I'm always looking for videos that are actually educational and beneficial to me in some way. And the Daily Signal YouTube channel never disappoints. There is so much binge-worthy content from policy and news explainers to documentaries. If you're not driving, go ahead and pull out your phone and subscribe to the Daily Signal YouTube channel so you can be in the know on the issues you care about most. You can also search for the channel by going to YouTube.com slash Daily Signal. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Senator Bill Haggerty of Tennessee. Senator Haggerty, it's great to have you with us on the Daily

Signal podcast. It's very good to be with you. Thank you. Well, you are a new member to the Senate. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and your life before you were a senator? Certainly. I'm a small town kid from Tennessee. I grew up without a a lot, but I had great loving parents. My mom was a career school teacher. My dad worked row construction. I started working, I guess, when I was 13 years old outside of the house. I raised cattle pigs. I was the president of my FFA chapter. I was an Eagle Scout when I was a boy, always patriotic. Very fortunate to be the first male in my family to graduate from college. And from there, I, you know, had an incredible blessing of having a job that I could have never

imagine that allowed me to work all over the world. It really gave me a lot of great exposure to business and it gave me a foundation to go start my own business, which is what I did. And I've consistently been now for the past 20 plus years investing in and building small and medium-sized companies. Some of them grown to be New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ traded companies now. So a businessman all my life. The first opportunity, though, that I had to serve in government really was when the 2010 election took place. And we had a transition from a Democrat to a Republican administration in my state. The governor reached out to several people in the business community, me included,

and asked us to come in and help him with his administration. So I came in and ran the Department of Commerce in my home state. And we went from a situation where our state was in the bottom half of economic metrics in a very short time to becoming one of the best performers in the nation. We did it at a time when we had a huge, huge budget deficit. I came into my department and went first and I cut the staff by over 40% and saved millions of dollars on a recurring basis for Tennessee taxpayers and at the same time restructured so we've got much better performance. These are conservative values. This is how you

can approach government differently by taking those sort of solid, tried, and true business principles and applying them to government. Had a lot of resistance, as you can imagine, but it worked. And when I left that position, Tennessee had become the number one state in the nation for creating jobs do foreign investment. We remain one of the best economic performers in America. After that, I went back to the private sector and then heard President Trump talking about China in his election. I thought, this is somebody that's finally seeing China for what it is. And I decided to go in and volunteer full-time for six months during the 2016 election. I was responsible. I was the victory chairman for Tennessee, but I also helped him in other parts of the country. And when the transition

occurred, I came in to run the presidential personnel component of that transition, helping the president put in place a cabinet. From there, President Trump asked me if I would go and serve as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. I mentioned earlier that I had a job when I was much younger that took me around the world. I actually lived for three years in Tokyo, Japan, as a young man. And that foundation helped me tremendously as I arrived in Japan at a time when the world in that region were significantly under threat. You remember, Kim Jong-un was launching rockets after I arrived with with my family, North Korea launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles over Japan and detonated a hydrogen bomb. The tension was amazing, but I was able to work very closely with

the Japanese to put in place three consecutively stronger economic sets of sanctions on the North Korean regime. We brought them to the table. President Trump saw the opportunity and used our economic might to our advantage. The bigger part of my job, though, was standing up to China. President Trump called them out and he continued the pressure. He put economic pressure on China. He put military pressure on China. He put diplomatic pressure on China. Think about President Trump's move to pull us out of the World Health Organization more recently when he found out that all they were doing was parroting the Chinese propaganda. That's what shocks me so much that the Biden administration would just on a knee-jerk basis

rejoin the WHO. After we've seen right before our eyes, the Chinese government handpicks the WHO investigatory team that went in to look at the Wuhan Virology lab. I mean, this is something that we need to see massive reform before American taxpayers are ever asked to fund it. Yet the Biden administration has jumped back in. Same for the Paris Climate Accord. They jumped right back into that while getting nothing. China is laughing all the way to the bank. Cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, canceling the ability to drill and frack here in America on federal lands,

China is loving this. Where do you think that oil from Canada is going to go if it can't hit the Keystone XL pipeline? It's going to be sold to China at a discount. Our oil prices are already going up. look at the prices at the bunk. And this notion that John Kerry says, well, you can leave your great job working on pipelines and go work at a solar factory or a wind turbine factory.

Do you know where the solar panels are made? Do you know where the wind turbine panels are made? They're made in China. China is loving this. We have got to be realistic in our policies. And my job in the United States Senate is going to be to stand up to this and push back and let my colleagues in the Senate know what a threat this is.

To let the United States citizens know what a threat China poses and to let the rest of the world know that's the case as well. Well, on that note, I mean, we've heard in the past Biden, now President Biden, talk a lot about China and that it really isn't a threat. And, you know, President Trump did a lot to hold China accountable, but it doesn't seem like we're going to be seeing the same thing in the Biden administration. So what are some things you foresee that could happen if China isn't held accountable? Well, China has made its intentions very clear.

They've got their 2025 plan. One of the most nefarious things that you'll see, and we've got to continue to be very diligent, is China is constantly pushing to get their technology into the infrastructure of the rest of the world. Our 5G technology needs to be clean. We can't afford the risk of having Chinese companies inside of our 5G infrastructure.

President Trump saw that and blocked them. In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party passed a law that says any Chinese company is obligated to turn over any information in their possession when the Chinese Communist Party asked for that. That should concern all of us. Our 5G grid will not only be a telecommunications infrastructure, we're going to have our energy grid tied to that.

Think about autonomous vehicles. They've got to operate off of that grid. Could we have a back door to China? Could we allow that? Absolutely not. The Japanese saw it the same way. I worked my heart out with them to get them to the same place. Now Japan's got a clean network.

They're keeping these Chinese competitors out. Australia has followed suit. New Zealand has followed suit. I'm hopeful that we'll see that happen in the UK as well. Our allies need to have clean network. works that we're ever going to be in a position to continue to share intelligence information with them. These are the types of threats that China poses. They continue to advance militarily. They've crushed coral reefs, poured millions of tons of cement into the ocean in the South China Sea to build up

these artificial military islands. They've armed them. They've positioned them right along one of the busiest sea lanes in the world. We have to be pushing back with our military, continuing to do free and open operations in the Pacific. We've got a great strategy called the Free and Free. We've got a great strategy called the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy that brings India into the fold, that brings Australia into the field, that brings Japan and our own military, that puts pressure on China from every corner.

We talked about that today in my conference, the quad. We've got to continue to keep that pressure, keep that pressure on China. We'll wrap up. You've talked a little bit about China and all of that there is to do there. What are some other issues that are top of mind for you that you want to work on now that you're in the Senate?

Well, the biggest issue that's confronting us right now is getting this pandemic in our rearview mirror. And what we're going to see next week unfold is a $1.9 trillion package that is nothing more than a wish list of socialist programs that we see the Democrat Party trying to push through. I've seen an analysis that says less than 10% of it even addresses the pandemic. What we need to be doing right now is getting shots into people's arms. We need to be getting our kids back to school,

and we need to get our parents back to work. That's what the focus needs to be, not on bailing out blue states, not on adjusting and doubling the minimum wage and making it even harder for small businesses to reopen. What we need to be focused on is getting this pandemic and our rearview mirror as quickly as we can and getting our kids in school and our parents back to work. Well, Senator Haggary, it's great to have you on the Daily Signal podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much.

And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeart Radio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. And as always, please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening, and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.

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