WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Hart on the Hill: It's Not Over Till It's Over

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

This week, Micah Hart discusses Kamala Harris' immigration policy, the war in Ukraine, another presidential debate, and more!

Welcome back to another episode of Heart on the Hill. As always, I'm your host, Michael Hart, and I'm so excited to be here with you today. It's going to be a great show. I have a lot of great stories to talk about, a lot of politics to get into, and I know I wasn't here last week. We didn't have a show. I was out in D.C. doing some work, so I'm happy to be back in the studio talking about all things politics as we get closer and closer to election days. We get closer and closer to seeing how this will all play out, how the Senate,

will play out, how the House will play out, how the White House will go. I'm so excited. I know you are, so let's get to it. According to CNN, the Harris campaign is thinking about a trip to the southern border as polling concerns continue to grow. She will be in Arizona on Friday, and her campaign is considering a stop at the border while she is there. Trump holds a lead on this issue, and it could, according to her officials, help tighten the polling between the two, on that issue. Kamala Harris entered the question about her border policy during a town hall last week with Oprah Winfrey here. Take a listen to this. Where we are now can be traced most recently back to the fact that when the United States Congress, members of Congress,

including some of the most conservative Republicans, came up with a border security bill. And here's what that border security bill would have done. It would have put 1,500 more border, agents at the border. Let me tell you, those border agents are working around the clock. It would have just been about giving them some support and relief, which is probably why the border agents actually endorsed the bill.

It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl. And I'm looking at people from all over the country here, so I don't need to tell the folks who are watching this, what fentanyl has done to families, to kids in our country and the

need to take seriously stemming the flow. coming into our country and addressing that extraordinary and tragic issue in terms of its effect, the bill would have allowed us to have more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations. And it would have been part of the solution. And Donald Trump called up those folks

and said, don't put that bill on the floor for a vote. He blocked the bill, and you know why? Because he'd prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. Now, she discusses the bill, the proposed border security bill in this argument, in her position. So I want to point out, though, that six Democrats also voted down the bill, she talked about, in addition to the Republican who voted against it. And here is what Speaker Mike Johnson had to say about the border crisis and this bill package.

It would not resolve any of the problems, not reform in any meaningful way, the broken asylum system, the broken parole process, and all the things that have created this catastrophe. And by the way, meanwhile, it further empowers the very cabinet secretary who designed and created this mess. They don't follow federal law. Why would we do this anyway? But the bill itself would actually do more harm than good. And that's why we've said it's a non-starter over here in the house. I think this is a really interesting story to look at.

I mean, I've done a lot of work for a bit in immigration. studying that. I spent some time last summer working on that issue specifically. So it's something I have grown passionate about, care about, and know some bit about. And I think it's really interesting that we're seeing this come up now as an issue of, look, Kamala Harris, you have to respond now. Republicans have called you the borders are for a while. What are you going to say about that? And I think that people really do care about this issue. They care about it from a standpoint of people are coming into the country illegally living here, working here, doing all this stuff, and how is that fair to people who may be homeless in this country, who may not have

jobs who are struggling financially, and we're just giving handouts to other people who come here illegally and break the first law, which is becoming a citizen. They're breaking that essential law of being in our country. So that might be part of this. What is she going to say about that. I personally think Kamala Harris should go to the border. She should have gone to the border a while ago. She should have gone there right off the bat when Biden said she needs to deal with the border crisis. She should have been there. She should have been talking to officials. She should have been looking firsthand to see what is going on. How do we deal with the issues at both borders? Not just the southern, but the northern border as well. There are issues at both. Right now we're

talking about the southern border, of course, but still, she should be talking to families like in Riley's families, so many other families who've had to deal with so much loss because of the failed policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And I think this is easy for the Trump campaign to look and say, look at Kamala Harris. It's going to be a second term of Joe Biden. That's an easy point, especially on immigration. Look at the failures. It's not too difficult to go in and say, look at the failures of Joe Biden and translate it to Kamala Harris. She is a part of the Biden Harris administration. So it just goes to show, I think there's a lot of tactics to be played here, but if she does

want to gain ground and she starts moving her stance forward, we do need to take care of the border. It'd be interesting to see how polling shifts or what it does and how that responds to each party, to different voting demographics as well. So I think we'll see that as we get closer to the election. There are a lot of different things I've seen recently where Kamala Harris kind of has moved a little bit on her position. I mean, all politicians do it, especially after a primary. We see it with a lot of candidates will move their positions a little bit, try to make sure they can get as many votes as they can.

So I think it's really an interesting time, especially for her campaign, because as we remember, this campaign got off the ground just a little bit ago. It's not an old campaign because it was supposed to be Joe Biden as the nominee, but as that all collapsed, I merged Kamala Harris as the nominee. So I will say there is a lot of credit to be given to her team for what they've been able to put together this quickly. The amount of campaigning she's done, I will give her credit on that. But I think really what the American people need to see from her now is policy. And what are you going to do? Because you're vice president right now.

You have been able to deal with a lot of these issues and what have you done. President Zelensky of Ukraine and his wife sat down with ABC News. is Robin Roberts while on his trip to the United States for the UN General Assembly. He said that a lot of the issues with the Russian-Ukraine war comes down to strengthening Ukraine. And he said he believes that the war is coming to close to an end. So I think this is a really interesting interview. Read, if you read the piece on this, it's fascinating to me because I think we look at what is going on in our world and we just see chaos. and confusion.

And I think we always need to remember why we do what we do. Why are we, why should we be supporting certain countries? Why should we be against certain countries as well? I think this one is clear to me. If we look at the two sides, if we look at Putin, who is a dictator, Putin is a horrible person. And we look at Zelensky. Does he have issues?

Yes, he does. But is he better than Putin? Yes, he is. Does this mean the United States give? money and gives a ton of money to foreign countries? No, it doesn't. Does this mean the United States goes in a democracy builds? No, it doesn't. We don't do that. What we do in a sentence, we give them the weapons they need to finish this themselves. We help support them in that way. We should always be against dictators, people who in prison their political opponents, people who are

horrible to their people, people who do not stand for human rights, human equality, human values, people who don't care about these things, we should always be against them, we should always be on the side of liberty, the side of freedom, the side of opportunity, the side of equality. That's the side we should be on every time. And we need to make it known to the world that America is strong and America is not afraid to stand with our allies. This comes to a lot of foreign policy discussion, whether it be Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, these are our allies. We stand with our allies and we stand up against dictators, thugs, liars, murderers, these horrible people who do not care at all about human life and human dignity. That's what we're standing up against is these

radicals who don't care about anything but themselves and their power. And that's what we're dealing with here. We see that with Putin. We see that with President Xi in China. We see that with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. We see the current chaos and we should see American strength, not American weakness. We should not see an America where we bow down and bow out. We should see an America that stands up, stands out, and stands up for our allies. And America that knows who we are, knows our beliefs, knows our values, and is able to stand up for them here and abroad. I want people to think about this, though, too, on our interest, because a lot of should come down to, I mean, George Washington put it best when he said that it should be

America's interest guided by justice. And I think that is a great thing to follow of. We have to follow our interest. Why is this all in our interest or is it not in our interest? And I think they all are. I think Ukraine, obviously, Russia is a huge threat to us in their power and the danger that they pose. And especially if Russia was able to keep going, if they kept going after Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics could be next. That'd be a world war. Those are native. countries. We do not want a war because then we have to send our troops. We do not want that. We want to keep all Americans safe and home as long as we can. And hopefully for the extent, completely forever, because we don't want to go into wars. We should never want to go into wars.

And then let's look at Taiwan. China is a huge threat to us. We've seen that. They are consistently, economically everything, just a threat to us. And they do not like the way of life that we live. Taiwan is blocking against that. We should be supporting that. And Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East. They are holding up the front against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, all of these horrible groups. They are protecting against these organizations within these countries and in these regions. And Israel is defending liberty, freedom. All these beautiful things that democracy has, they are holding up and protecting.

And we should be supporting them coming alongside. them. It's so interesting to watch everyone on foreign policy issues because people really have their aggressive opinions. And I think we all just need to go back and look at, like, look, at the end of the day, we're all of us who are talking about in America. We're all Americans. And we should be able to say, yeah, we want America to be strong. We want America to protect herself. But also, we need to make sure we're protecting outside because if there's chaos on the outside, it can creep in. Chaos. Just because, Let's say if we went complete isolationless, and we're like, okay, we're just going to take care of ourselves.

Don't think for a second nothing's going to happen. There's still chaos in the outside world. If we're not involved at all, that can just creep in through us. It's just going to sneak in. That's not what we want either. We can't be completely involved. We can't be completely not involved. We have to have this middle ground where we stand our ground, stand up for our friends.

But we also know we obviously have to take care of ourselves at home as well. There's a balance to be found in this. And I think we're really trying to find that. I think we really do need to find that. I think a lot of it comes to coming together talking about these things, being able to work through these things as a country with both parties and as a world, a community together of where do we go from here, especially with our allies.

Like, what are we doing? We need to work together, get this done, make sure everything is done humanitarily and done to make sure that we keep democracies afloat. We help support our friends and we always have the backs of those who've had our backs. That's what really needs to be done. So according to the Hill, former president Donald Trump is being pressured to debate Vice President Kamala Harris again. This all comes after the first debate that the two had.

This was Trump's second debate. However, this is his first one against Kamala Harris. Second one in this season of this election. First was against Joe Biden, obviously. This past weekend, Harris accepted CNN's invitation for another. debate, which would be on October 23. Now, on September 12, former President Trump

true socialed this. He said, and I quote, When a prize fighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, I want a rematch. Polls clearly show that I want the debate against Conrad Kamala Harris, the Democrats radical left candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a second debate. She and Crooked Joe have destroyed our country with millions of criminals and mentally deranged people pouring into the USA, totally unchecked and unvetted and with inflation bankrupting our middle class. Everyone knows this on all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe.

It was discussed in great detail during the first debate with Joe and the second debate with Comrade Harris. She was a no-show at the Fox debate and refused to do NBC and CBS. Kamala should focus on what she should have done during the last almost four-year period. There will be no third debate. And then he had some other words also this past weekend about the debate as well. Take a listen. I've already done two.

One with Crooked Joe Biden at CNN and the other one with Kamla on ABC. CNN was very fair, I thought. Joe was driven out of the race. It was a coup, by the way, but he was driven out of the race. And they've been widely criticized by the radical left lunatics for all of the fairness. They were very fair.

In other words, they won't be fair again. And I think this is interesting, too, of strategy on when to debate, do the you debate? Where do you go from here? We have a vice presidential debate coming up, obviously. That's going to be pretty significant. And watch for that one. See that one. I think those two are very articulate in their visions for the future.

So I would watch that debate. I think it's going to be a very interesting debate. I think there's going to be a lot of jobs at each other. so I think they'll be very interesting and hopefully exciting to watch and something that you can learn a lot from. That's what we want from these debates is you can learn where the candidates stand on different issues. And I hope we get that from this vice presidential debate. But turning to presidential debates, look, Trump is right. He's done two debates.

He's already done two of them, one on CNN against Joe Biden, and then against Kamala Harris on ABC. So he's done two. Personally, okay, this is for me. I think the American people deserve more debates. I think they should always have more debates. I think we always need debates to hold politicians accountable to have these discussions, let voters hear them out. But I do think it needs to be from a place that is fair.

I don't think the ABC moderators were terribly fair. I said that before. I'll say it again. I think we need to have another debate, though. I think we need to hear Kamala Harris again. That was our first time debating Trump. Like there needs to be more. We want more policy, hear more from her.

We've heard from Trump a lot. so I'm fine with that, but we need to hear more from Harris. So I would love to see them go another debate, talk to each other. I think it would maybe help Trump, I think, if he's able to just stick to policy and show where she fails on policy. I mean, we talked about the border earlier. Bring that up. Bring up all of these facts from the past, these past four years, like he said,

bring them all up, hold her to account, show her record. And I think if you can have balanced moderators, that would help a lot with all of this. So I do not think it'd be a terrible idea for another debate. I think the American people would benefit from another debate. The only issue is now early voting starts. What do you do there? You have a lot of people already starting to vote. Is it really worth it?

That's another question I think has to be answered by the Trump and Harris campaigns of, is it really worth having another one when people already started voting when we have the election in just a little bit now? Like, what do you do? Especially at that point, I think it said October 23. Yeah, that's pretty late in the game for a debate. people will be getting ready to vote the next week or two. Like, is that worth it or what happened?

But I think I personally would love to see another debate. I love listening. I mean, I think most people have already made up their minds who they're voting for. But either way, I think the American people should still be able to hear from both candidates. Axios is reporting that a mystery super PAC has popped up for former governor of Maryland Larry Hogan, who is looking to flip the Senate seat into the Republican column and Maryland. The super PAC called Maryland's future just paid for 18.3 million dollars of ads in Maryland for Hogan. Axios is also reporting that Democrats increase their spending on this race throughout

September as compared to August. Now, I think this is a super fascinating piece. Now, not just because it's about fundraising. I think fundraising is always fascinating. talk about, but also because it's about Maryland. And I think, look, I'm from Rhode Island. I get it. It's tough out there politically if you're on one side, just like other states where it's tough on the other side. Like if you go down to the deep south, it's pretty red down there. It's tough if you're a Democrat. So in New England, Maryland, it's tough if you're Republican. And seeing Larry Hogan have a chance, it seems like, is impressive to me. I mean, I think what Republicans need to look at is do you want a Republican or do you want a Democrat?

That's what it comes down to is, okay, you may not agree with Hogan on everything, but is he better than the alternative of the Democrat? Will he vote with you more than the Democrat? I think that's what sometimes goes to be a sinking in politics is if you have somebody who's a little more to the middle, on either side, there's always like, oh, they're not this, they're not that. But are they better? That's the question.

You have two options. Do you think a third option is going to win? They're not going to. So between these two options, who's better and who do you align with more and who would vote with you more? That's the thing that needs to be figured out in politics. I don't think is yet is I don't care what type of this or that they are. Are they going to vote more with you? That's what this should all come down to is, are they on your side more times or not?

Period. Period. That's what it comes down to. It shouldn't be a game of, oh, well, they don't agree with me on this, this, this, this. But they agree me on that, but that doesn't matter because I really want this is this, this. That's ridiculous. That's childish. You're never going to agree with somebody 100% of the time.

There is no politician. I agree with 100% of the time. There should be no politician. You agree with 100% of the time. That's concerning if you do. We should have a little bit of disagreement. Be like, oh, maybe that's a little bit wrong, or they could tweak this or that. That's fine.

That should be how it is. That's how we want it to be. So I think it's really interesting that we're seeing this. going to this race. And I think also if you're a Democrat, you might be concerned because you're spending money on a race that should have been locked up for you. Maryland, and now you'd spend money on a set of race there and push money from other races you could have in other states that are closer or should be closer. And now you're focusing on a state that should be solid blue. And I think on either side of the aisle, when you see this, it's concerning because you're not having to

spend money and play the pickup game and try to win something you had locked down you thought. Now you try to win that and then you're trying to win other really close races. So it's always a toss of what's going to happen. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Heart on the Hill. As always, I'm your host, Michael Hart. And it's been an honor to have you listen to this episode today. I am so thankful every time I get to step in the studio and talk to you about everything going on in politics. It's crazy right now.

I mean, the election is coming up in just a few weeks. and it seems like the world is chaos and crazy and that there's just so much going on in politics, but we're getting through it. We're going to get through it together. I'll be here every step of the way to talk to you, but what's going on, giving you my opinion on where we're going as a country, where we're going to go from here after this election and what we have to do to do forward as a nation. This is Heart on the Hill and Radio Free Hillstale 101.7 FM.