The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Rep. Kevin Hern Slams 'Monstrous' Spending Bill as Deadline Approaches

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

As the clock ticks toward the new year, Congress is racing to pass funding for the government for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1  "Well, I was a no vote last week. I think we need to be doing our work. It's amazing to me that the Democrats have been in control of the White House, the House, and the Senate," Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla., says about the "omnibus" spending package.  The Senate and the House last week advanced a "stopgap bill" last week that continues to fund existing programs and would give Congress until Friday at midnight to finalize a spending bill. The measure passed 71-19 in the Senate; it passed 224-201 in the House. "Since January of last year, they've not passed a budget," Hern says. "They've not done appropriations in regular order. They have no one to blame but themselves for the almost $5 trillion in spending added to our debt in the last 23 months.: "Here we are at the very end of the funding, which was supposed to be done by Sept. 30, [and we] keep kicking the can down the road," says Hern, who was unanimously elected last month as chairman of the Republican Study Committee.  Hern joins this episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the gigantic omnibus spending bill, some of the Republican Party's top priorities for 2023, and how conservatives can navigate with slim control of only one chamber of Congress.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get the yes you've been waiting for at Capital One.ca.ca. slash yes. Terms and conditions apply. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, December 20th. I'm Samantha O'Sheris. As the clock ticks closer to the new year, Congress is racing to pass funding for the next year. Joining today's show is Representative Kevin Hearn to discuss the omnibus spending package and what he believes Republicans should focus on in the new Congress. We'll get to my conversation with Representative Hearn right after this. Today, news you can trust, feels like a rarity. That's why the Daily Signal podcast releases a top news edition every weekday at 5 p.m. Whether driving home from work, fixing dinner, or picking the kids up from soccer practice,

you can stay informed on the headlines you care about. Every show is quick and succinct, designed to keep you up to speed on the issues that actually matter. Catch our top news edition right here in your Daily Signal podcast feed every evening. Or listen first, thing in the morning before catching the day's interview. And be sure to subscribe on the Daily Signal podcast so you never miss an episode. Representative Kevin Hearn is joining the podcast today. He represents Oklahoma's first congressional district, is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, and was recently elected to chair the Republican Study Committee. Congressman, thanks so much for joining us. It is so good to be with you today. Well, let's dive right

in to what's going on right now in Congress. Last week, the House and the Senate advanced a stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown. And Congress has until this Friday to pass funding for next year. First and foremost, what do you think of the spending package? Well, that was a no vote last week. I think we need to be doing our work. It's amazing to me that the Democrats have been in control of the White House, the House, and the Senate. Since January of last year, they've not passed a budget. They've not done appropriations in regular order. They have no one to blame but themselves for the almost $5 trillion in spending added to our debt in the last 23 months. And here we are at the very end of the funding, which was supposed to be done by September 30th, keep kicking the

can down the road. And here we are now looking at this monstrous bill, otherwise known as an omnibus bill, that most are expecting to add another $500 billion to the national debt. Our citizens across America are sick of this. They want us to get back to doing what we're supposed to do, which is fund the government in regular order. And can you speak a little bit more about what's actually in the package? Do you have any concerns about it? Well, certainly a lot of the, you know,

we've got to fund the 12 appropriations which fund the government, you know, certainly things like military, but all of our social welfare. programs as well, our National Institute Health and CDC and all the programs there, our national, our federal government funding people, making sure people have their payroll to keep the government moving. But also there are all this pet projects, all the earmarks that are in there, whether it's with our senator friends, Republican senator friends, or Republican House friends who are wanting to spend money to take back to their districts, all of these are going to be lumped in.

that's what they do and they put these bills together is to try to entice people to vote for them by giving them special deals, earmarks, port projects to take back to their home. Some are putting their names on buildings, projects. Others are, you know, millions and millions of dollars to go to, you know, different arts centers in their districts and things like that. And again, the federal taxpayers, the American taxpayers who fund the government are sick and tired of this, just out of control spending. Now, we are just a few weeks away from Republicans taking back control in the House. Why aren't Republicans just saying no to this package?

Why not push for a continuing resolution to get to the next Congress? Well, certainly the three options that we had on the table to look at were an ominous bill, which would go all the way and fund until the end of the next fiscal year, which is September 30th, 2023. and the thoughts there are from the Democrat Party and from the, you know, the 12 or so Republicans that are going to vote for this in the Senate, was to get out so that the president have to deal with a debt limit with the Republican House. To your point, we're taking the majority here in just about two weeks. And then also there was the longer term continuing resolution, which meant we would fund at the regular level that we're currently at until the end of September 30th. What we were pushing for in order to keep the government open was a shorter-term

continuing resolution that would get us say till March 1st. And that way the House would get back in the opportunity to pass appropriations bill, first pass a budget appropriation bills and send them to the Senate to get us move back in the right direction. You know, if you look across the country over the last two years, inflation has gone rampant, the highest in 40 years. It's been Democrat economists that have said it was because of spending. And even my Republican colleagues out there who love to spend are just not listening to what the American people are saying. Yeah, it's been really interesting to see the last couple of weeks leading up to this Omnibus bill.

And now, of course, we're down to the final crunch before the House flips. I want to talk, you know, just longer term with Republicans as we've been talking about taking back the House. How can you, as the, you know, with the Republican Party, avoid landing in a similar situation next year when you're negotiating the spending package for 2024? Yeah. So looking at what's happened in the past and future speaker McCarthy has spoken to this is that Republicans in the House have kind of worked back and forth with the Senate and actually missed deadlines because they're trying to put together a package on the House side that the Senate. or Republican senators will support only to find out when they send a bill over there that it gets changed so much and it comes back to the House and there's just been total disgust with what we've seen. So what Kevin McCarthy has said and I totally agree is we're going to pass a budget out of the House that cuts discretionary spending that looks at our, you know, the opportunities we have out there to get our budgets balanced and put a balanced budget on the floor and then send that in the appropriations bills to the senators and let us. them deal with it and let them tell the American people, which will be a Democrat control,

let them tell the American people why they don't want to balance the budget, just like our citizens do, our states do. And then also it'll be upon the White House to say that they don't want a balanced budget. But the House representatives will push out a balanced budget. You mentioned in your opening that I'm the chair of the Republican Study Committee for the next two years. For the past two years, I've been the budget chairman, and we've created two balanced budgets. By the way, the only two budgets have been done in Congress were done by the Republican Study Committee last year and this year.

And just along the lines of budgets, can you talk a little bit about how Congress is budgeting, given that we're already in $31 trillion worth of debt and rising? Well, it's really no different other than the numbers are just huge. It's no different than what you have to do in your own household. You have to neutralize spending more than you earn first before you can actually start paying back your debt. That's no different than in the federal government. And that's why we have to have a balanced budget. And it needs to balance sooner rather than later because what that means is at balance point,

the House, the Republican State Committee's last year was about six years. This was about seven years, meaning it would take that long of trimming cost, cutting expenses, growing revenues to get a start. to a point where our outputs every year match what we were taking in. At that point, as those crossed, we would have excess dollars to start paying down our debt. Most Americans would say that's impossible. As a matter of fact, that's happened in all of our lifetimes back in 97 through 2001. We actually had budget surpluses under President Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Trent Lott. So when people come together, Republicans, Democrats, House Senate, House Senate, and the White House, all come together.

We can actually do the work. We just have to sit down at the table and make it happen. And Congressman, we've heard in the news a lot that, you know, this budget for the next year, if it does pass, would be, you know, the Pelosi Schumer Biden agenda. How do you feel about locking in, you know, a Biden Pelosi Schumer agenda for the next year, even though Americans, as we've talked about, voted for Republicans to control the House? Well, I'll be voting against it. I think it's wrong. I think the Democrats have lost the House.

They should have funded the government back in September. At this point in time, forcing this late year-end spending at Christmas time is absolutely ridiculous. We will go ahead and do our work underneath this. We will pass a budget on the House floor. We will work on the appropriations bills. We will do the work that we're supposed to be doing on the House side. It'll be yet to see of what the Democrats-led Senate does or what the Democrat-led White House does.

But we will, coming through this year, we will have a budget starting on October 1, 2023, going forward, that represents conservative ideas, which means not spending more than we earn and start getting us back to a fiscal responsible nation. Now, as we've been talking about in just about two weeks, start of the new Congress with the GOP having the majority in the House, as we've also been talking about, as I mentioned at the top, and you also talked about you being the new chairman of the Republican Study Committee. What are some of your top priorities for the next Congress? Yeah, I think it's one of them is certainly economic security. If you look at national security that every American talks about every day, we know about our military and what it does around the world. But on the domestic side, when you look at national security, it really boils down to sort of a three-legged stool. It's border security. We see what's happening right now,

with lifting of Title 42, or Title 42, rather, what's going on there in the next couple of days. Massive amounts of people coming across the southern border. You've got Democrat mayors really up in arms, screaming at the White House. We need to do something. When you look at what's happening with energy security, this president, this White House, these Democrats have worked over time to destroy our fossil fuel industry in our country, only now to go beg Iran and Venezuela to start up their oil production and for us to send literally billions of, American taxpayer dollar to these rogue nations when we could be doing that work here. And then finally, going back to this economic security, we've got $31.5 trillion in debt and

growing. There's no end in sight with the current spending of the Democrats. We've got to fix that. We've got to do it now. So we'll be working on those three areas, economic security, energy security, border security, looking at how we fix our national security stance in those posture in those areas, and holding the Republican leadership as well in the House to the most conservative bills that can be brought out of the House in these particular areas, especially when it comes to spending. And just along the same lines, what is a policy area that maybe Republicans haven't focused on as much in the past that you would like to see them focus on next year? Well, not just focus on.

I think as Republicans, we need to come together on the House side and really fix our immigration issue in America once. for all. It's not difficult. It's going to take hard work. It's going to take people sitting down at the table to get this done. But it is, you know, the folks on the border are correct in saying that it is a constitutional requirement job of Congress to fix it and for the White House to come alongside and make sure that it gets done as well. It's not the responsibility of the states, unfortunately, and sadly, they've had to take on a federal role in protecting their borders from a foreign nation. You know, that's, that sounds like back in the 1800s doing that, not now in the modern age.

And Congress has really certain responsibilities of not fixing our border security issues, and we have to do that once and for all. So I think we've kind of put that to the side. We're going to be talking about health care as we go forward, how we make it more affordable for the American people. You know, the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was supposed to be about lowering health care cost. It didn't lower health care cost. It removed your ability to keep your doctor. Pharmaceutical costs are going through the roof. And so we've got a lot of work to do,

and we've got a short time to do it. So we need to get our speaker elected on January 3rd, and we need to move forward. And just one final question for you. As we head into the new year, can conservatives get any wins, in your opinion, in the new Congress, when the GOP doesn't control the Senate? And if so, how? Well, I think the way you get the wins is that you demonstrate and that we can actually get our stuff together in the House and we can elect a leader and we can start on the policies that need to be pushed forward, like again, economic policy. But also, I think, bring, we have a Congress, not just Republican Congress, all Congress has a responsibility of oversight on the executive branch of government. just because the Democrats didn't do it in the last two years doesn't mean that it didn't need to be done. So you're going to see the oversight action, the accountability action of Congress move forward and bring highlights to stuff that maybe it happened in Department of Justice with the FBI, even with the White House.

And when that takes place, you're going to start having people look at, you know, lack of confidence in the leadership. What you're also going to find, I think, is the Democrats have gone so. far less, so far progressive, so far toward the socialist Democrat factions of their party, that the American people that are moderate Democrats are going to start pulling the party back toward the center, which is what happened in the days of Bill Clinton. They had moved to the left, and they realized in the modern day new Democrats, they had to move back to the center, and Bill Clinton picked out some areas where he needed to work with Republicans to save the nation. And that's when we've got the welfare to work to get people moved off of the social

safety nets back into jobs. And I think you're going to see the White House have to do some of that if they have any hopes for a Democrat to be in the White House starting in 2025. Well, Representative Kevin Hearn, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. We really appreciate your insight and we'll have to have you back on for any updates. Thank you so much. Thank you and Merry Christmas. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to my interview. We will definitely keep you posted as we get closer to this deadline for the the omnibus spending package. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get

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