The Daily Signal - House to Vote on CR, Israel Prepares to Strike Lebanon, National Debt Reaches New Highs | Sept. 25

Starting point is 00:00:01 The House of Representatives is supposed to vote today on a spending package to fund the federal government. I'm Elizabeth Mitchell, and this is the Daily Signal Top News for Wednesday, September 25th. The House of Representatives is expected to vote today on a spending package to fund the federal government for the next three months. Speaker Mike Johnson will bring a clean continuing resolution for a vote. This means it will be free of any extraneous spending or policy provisions, funding the government, at the previous year's levels. The spending package needs support from Democrats to pass. If the resolution fails to pass by September 30th,

Starting point is 00:00:49 there will be a government shutdown. The Daily Signals, Bradley Devlin, is covering this continuing resolution. Bradley, what do you expect to see happen? This will get passed out of the House and then out of the Senate later this evening. It will then head to President Joe Biden's desk where he will probably kick this can down the road

Starting point is 00:01:06 until December. Speaker Mike Johnson has said that he wants no buses, No minibuses, no omnibuses come December. So chances are then, we will either go through an appropriations process or more likely we'll get another CR kicking it to the next conference. This only adds more importance to the upcoming November election because if things are kicked down the road until March of last year, as Johnson originally wanted, that means that a new Congress, a new Senate and definitely a new president. But it just depends on red or blue. they will be the ones determining spending levels for the next fiscal year. Do you expect to see resistance from either Republicans or Democrats in passing the CR today?

Starting point is 00:01:48 Well, it's going to be interesting to see how Johnson gets this CR out of the House. Obviously, Johnson's previous CR, which was not as clean, had some different conservative victories, as well as the SAVE Act, which would have stopped illegal immigrants voting in federal elections. that was attached to the previous CR. That vote failed in the House. Fourteen Republicans said no to voted present. So without the SAVE Act, which was a carrot for conservatives to vote for a continuing resolution, which they typically do not do, Johnson will probably have to rely on Democrats to get this through the House.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Now, will Johnson be able to get a majority of the majority? That means a majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives voting in favor for this CR? Maybe, maybe not. Probably he will because no one wants to be blamed for a government shutdown right before an election, especially for House members, all of them up for re-election, of course. So if he gets that majority of the majority, I think Johnson feels good about his leadership prospects heading into the next Congress, especially if Republicans keep control of the House.

Starting point is 00:02:54 If he doesn't get a majority of the majority, yet again, Johnson will be relying on a lot of Democrat votes to move spending bills through the House of Representatives. We saw this previously with the minibuses and previously with supplemental appropriations. This entire Congress, we've seen it, first under McCarthy, then under Johnson. And that was ultimately McCarthy's undoing, is he couldn't get majorities of majority. Now Johnson's facing the same hurdle. If he succeeds tonight, he'll be in a good spot. If he doesn't, he could be in a bad spot.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Could you tell us a little bit more about what it means for this continuing resolution to be clean? Yeah, that means that they're not changing any sort of appropriations levels. Now, there are some tweaks on the margins, disaster funding, you know, in case something big happened while under this current level of fiscal year funding that the government needed to responded to, they carve out a little bit for that. That has been dramatically reduced to previous conversations, previous versions of the CR, previous conversations that were had around Washington, D.C., so that's been cut down, as well as an additional $231 million for the U.S. Secret Service. Obviously, that comes after two attempts on President Donald Trump's life.

Starting point is 00:04:07 They're offering that $231 million in exchange for more transparency, more information about what the Secret Service knows about those two attempts on President Trump's life. So for it to be clean means that we're going to have no changes in the level of appropriations until the end of the continuing resolution period, which, as we discussed, in December, that means that the government is being funded on appropriations determined by those minibuses, which were obviously negotiated between top appropriators and in smoke-filled rooms with the big four, Johnson, Jeffries, Schumer, and McConnell. And by reading those four names, you know that the speaker is often in a 3V-1 scenario

Starting point is 00:04:51 like Trump during the ABC News debate recently. So, you know, Johnson doesn't have that strong of a hand to play, and right now it's holding its status quo. But if Republicans win in November, then either Republicans are going to want to kick this into the next Congress, or it's going to be another 3V1 situation because McConnell has been continuously rebuffed by his own conference in the Senate. And you could potentially head for another brinksmanship type of maneuver from Senate leadership and from Democrats that, could result in an omnibus. So we'll see if Johnson holds out of any sort of omnibus deal after the election. If the election doesn't go Republicans' way, right, if they lose the House, if they don't take the Senate, if they don't have Trump in the White House, maybe they do consider having an appropriations process determined by previous omnibus funding levels. Maybe that is better for

Starting point is 00:05:46 conservative ends than anything that Democrats could come up with in March of next year. Excellent. Thanks so much. And we'll be sure to keep following your reporting on this. Thanks. President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, is at the New York Times Climate Forward event today. The New York Times describes the event which is taking place in New York City as a day of live journalism dedicated to understanding our rapidly warming world. Roberts called out the politicized agenda of the climate movement. Here he is. Supposing that whether they're scientists or some other bureaucrat, and again, nothing against them as people and fellow Americans,

Starting point is 00:06:24 that the politicized agenda that they have used to be a cudgel against the American people, a cudgel against ordinary Americans comes to an end. We don't care whether they're Democrats or Republicans. We actually want them to be objective. Robert said scientists should welcome skepticism, not silence it. And I'll make a second point. I'm a lowly historian. I'm not a scientist.

Starting point is 00:06:46 But the research method in history is very similar to the scientific method. Since when, in the scientific method, is it unacceptable for, someone with the best of intentions to be a skeptic about the hypothesis. That's the kind of thing we're trying to bring back into government-funded scientific research. A climate alarmist organization called the Action Network started a petition to oust Roberts from the climate forward speaker lineup. The group urged the New York Times to disinvite Roberts, calling him a professional climate denier. Israel's military suggested Wednesday that it is preparing for a ground operation in Lebanon. This comes after Hezbollah, the terrorist organization which effectively controls Lebanon,

Starting point is 00:07:30 launched dozens of missiles into Israel, including one aimed at Tel Aviv. Major General Ori Gordon, the Israel Defense Force commander for the north of Israel, said, We have entered a new phase of the campaign. Israel's advanced missile defense systems were able to shoot down the majority of Hezbollah's projectiles. Israel struck Lebanon on Wednesday, killing 23 people, according to the country's Ministry of Public Health. Eugene Vindman, a Ukraine-born Democrat running to represent Virginia's 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, declined to debate his opponent. Here's a discussion of Vindman's decision on ABC 7.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Anderson, Democratic candidate Eugene Vindman declined to participate this evening despite a month of working to find a date that worked for both campaigns. We provided multiple offers for him to change his mind, but so far have received no response. Vindman is running against Republican Derek Anderson, who has served in the U.S. Army. Both men say they are combat veterans, but Anderson argues Vind is lying. Vindman said on X that he's served our country in combat, but a 2019 article from the Daily Mail explicitly says that he has not seen combat. Anderson said Vindman declined the debate because he can't defend his record of lying about his military service and lying about his opponent's positions and beliefs.

Starting point is 00:08:52 The district is one of a few swing districts that might go red or blue in November. Venman has replaced outgoing representative Abigail Spanberger, often considered a moderate on the Democratic ticket there. The House majority may come down to districts like this. The national debt is set to exceed 100% of the gross domestic product for the first time since the end of World War II. Economist at the Heritage Foundation, E.J. Antony joins the show to discuss. What's caused this increase in the national debt? Massive amounts of government spending. And the crazy thing is that if we had simply allowed all of the one-time emergency spending related to COVID in 2020,

Starting point is 00:09:34 if we had simply allowed that to expire, the budget would almost be balanced today. The problem is that we have replaced trillions of dollars in one-time emergency spending with institutionalized multi-trillion dollar deficits, largely wasted on boondoggles like these green energy ventures. And it sounds like the national debt exceeding the gross domestic product, that sounds like that's something that's going to happen in the future. What's the timeline of that? Well, it's actually already happening right now, unfortunately. And the problem is that we have this deadly combination of not only a massive amount of debt,

Starting point is 00:10:10 but also interest rates returning to what we would consider to be historically normal levels. And so since we no longer have artificially low interest rates, it's the exact same thing as a family who gets into massive amounts of credit card debt and is then paying, let's say, 20 or 30% interest on those cards. It's the cost to service the debt that is really going to kill the family budget. It's also killing the federal budget. We're spending over a trillion dollars a year right now just an interest on the debt. What should the presidential administration and the Fed do in response? Oh, cut spending. That's the biggest thing we have to do. And to be clear, that's not directly the responsibility of an administration. That's the responsibility of Congress, although the administration

Starting point is 00:10:52 does propose a budget to the Congress, whether or not that's followed or ignored is up to Congress, but they're the ones who really need to get their act together and start cutting the spending. And as far as what the Fed should do, look, the Federal Reserve should stop trying to set interest rates and should allow the market to set them. It is the manipulation of interest rates that helped get us into this mess in the first place. And it seems surprising that the debt could be as high as it was at the end of World War II. How did we kind of get to this point without two world wars to have such high national debt? It's a great question. And again, it goes back to the first question that you had, which is the runaway government spending,

Starting point is 00:11:33 the absolutely just reckless, profligate ways of this Congress and the last couple of Congress is, to be frank. And unfortunately, until you can get that under control, you're going to continue to have a lot of the economic problems we face today, you're going to continue to have inflation. You're going to continue to see a housing market that is largely frozen over and where it's impossible for young Americans to actually own a home today. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for listening to our top news edition.

Starting point is 00:12:04 If you haven't gotten the chance, be sure to check out our morning show. Tomorrow, Virginia Allen will be sitting down with the Alaska Department of Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum, as well as Alaska's state speaker of the house. house, Kathy Tilton. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you listen to podcasts. And help us reach more listeners by leaving us a five-star rating in review. Thank you so much for listening today. Have a lovely night and we'll be back with you on Thursday morning. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and

Starting point is 00:12:44 Elizabeth Mitchell. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geine, John Popp and Joseph von Spakovsky. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.

The Daily Signal - House to Vote on CR, Israel Prepares to Strike Lebanon, National Debt Reaches New Highs | Sept. 25

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