Dana Milbank: Fools on the Hill

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Speaker 5 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's Wednesday, so remember, I'm also doing political hot takes over on the next level feed.

Speaker 5 Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 5 But our guest today, I'm very excited about, nationally syndicated op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

Speaker 5 His most recent book was published yesterday, Fools on the Hill, The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House. It's Dana Milbank.

Speaker 5 I thought my subhead of my book was obnoxious, but that one is really, you just really go for it there.

Speaker 4 I just, I want to leave people guessing as to where I might land on the subject.

Speaker 5 Dunces.

Speaker 5 Yeah. You know, I went with the Republican Road to Hell, which always

Speaker 5 tickles interviewers when they get to read it.

Speaker 4 Same subtlety.

Speaker 5 But Dunces and hooligans, I like. Well, thanks for coming on the pod.

Speaker 5 I want to spend most of the time here today talking about the House GOP because there's a lot there, and it does sometimes fall out of the radar because of

Speaker 5 what's happened on the top of the ticket. Right.

Speaker 4 There's so much crazy you can't even concentrate on at all.

Speaker 5 Exactly. So, I do have one Donald Trump item, though, I do have to start with before we get to the House.
I was reading Politico this morning, and I got my dander up.

Speaker 5 There was an article about how people around Trump are concerned concerned that he's not focused. Steve Wynn, the advisor.

Speaker 5 Now, this isn't noted in the political article, but for our listeners, you should know that Steve Wynn was a serial sexual assault, allegedly, committed serial sexual assaults, people that worked for him in Las Vegas.

Speaker 5 He's still in good standing in the Trump inner circle, though. And apparently, that doesn't merit mention in this article.

Speaker 5 But Steve apparently told Trump that you're off message, you're distracted, it isn't helping, and you should focus more on policy.

Speaker 5 How are we still doing this, Dana?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, no. And I bet now Trump will hear that.
It'll go take it to heart, and it'll totally do the trick.

Speaker 4 We had a piece in the Post last week saying whatever was left of Trump's discipline is completely gone, which I totally agree with. I just think it probably could have been written several months ago.

Speaker 5 For years,

Speaker 4 was there some golden age of discipline in this campaign? You know, it's like La Cevita was going to come in there and it's going to be a tight ship.

Speaker 4 But of course, you can run a tight ship, but the captain's

Speaker 4 constantly overboard.

Speaker 5 So many political reporters I love and hold dearly in my heart. So

Speaker 5 don't get too hurt by this. But it is kind of one of the political reporter fallacies where

Speaker 5 if you're winning in the polls,

Speaker 5 then that means things are, you know, that the campaign is running well. Right.
And sometimes correlation doesn't equal causation.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, when Trump was calling him, was vacillating between meatball Ron and desanctimonious and lashing out about all that. That was the golden age, I think.
But

Speaker 5 because since he was winning in the polls, since Republican voters liked him, his weird behavior and conspiracy mongering and rants

Speaker 5 weren't affecting him. So that means he must be disciplined.

Speaker 4 That has been the case for as long as I can remember.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there are various ideological biases in the press. The biggest bias is towards the polls.
If you're up in the polls, you walk on water.

Speaker 4 And if you're down in the polls, they're going to find a causation for that in whatever reporting they can do. This is why Biden got such awful press.

Speaker 4 I don't think it was like some personal animus towards Joe Biden. Like, how could you have that? It was that he was doing poorly because he looked old and doddering.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he's just getting crushed. And so that is,

Speaker 5 then you have to backfill that with reasons. I do think that's right.
I just, I get frustrated. I get frustrated with the stories about the fact that...

Speaker 4 Well, I'm sorry your dander is up. I'll see if I can calm it back down, if at all possible.

Speaker 5 I don't think our topic today is going to calm me back down, but at least you're clear-eyed about what's happening in the House and not saying, well, if only Mike Johnson would pivot back to the issues, then things would be really right.

Speaker 4 If Steve Wynn would just have one little conversation with him, I think it would all be fine.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think that he would resolve the James Comer problem and everybody else. Okay, let's just take the biggest picture of the book, just so people understand what the conceit was.

Speaker 5 And then I want to go through several of the items. But what was the purpose here in focusing on this House GOP class of 2022?

Speaker 4 Well, I made a gamble. It was actually even before the election.
I just saw this incredible lineup of candidates.

Speaker 4 You remember the woman who said they were alien lizards controlling the government, and she hit her ex-husband with an alarm clock and tried to run over the other ex-husband with an alarm clock.

Speaker 4 Then there was the guy in Ohio who painted his whole lawn with 250 gallons of paint into a big Trump banner. I said, these guys are going to be interesting.

Speaker 4 And the ones who made it, I mean, I had high expectations. They exceeded all expectations.
You know, I just had one line about some guy named George Santos back then.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it turns out he was a gift that gave for an entire year.

Speaker 4 So I had a feeling because of the exotic characters, and because we've been seeing it, you know, through the Trump era, year after year, you'd get a few more exotic characters and a few more that sort of grown-ups would leave.

Speaker 4 And, you know, as I said, I had no idea quite how bad they would be. And now we can sort of run the numbers.
And they are on course, and there's not a whole lot of time left.

Speaker 4 So we're pretty sure of this, to be the least productive Congress since 1860 when the Union was unraveling. So at least they had an excuse for being a do-nothing Congress.

Speaker 4 I mean, that is truly historic.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I didn't know this would be the Congress that would kick out the Speaker midterm for the first time in history, that would impeach a cabinet officer for the first time in 150 years on specious grounds, would shut down the House for 22 days as they defeated candidate after candidate.

Speaker 4 You know, they would have McCarthy's 15 ballots and just all the mayhem and madness, the fisticuffs in the caucus meetings in the basement, the hurling of obscenities at each other, insulting each other's private parts.

Speaker 4 And of course, the lunacy of

Speaker 4 the Biden investigation and the weaponization panel that conservative commentators were panning at saying, come on, please give us something, guys.

Speaker 4 And they, you know, they came up with nothing but Ron Johnson's conspiracy theories with an assist from RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 5 There are a couple of news items this week that sort of draft well with your book.

Speaker 5 With regards to the Do Nothing Congress, I was reading an article in Notice this morning, and it quotes several members of the House GOP.

Speaker 5 And you've got Bob Good saying, you know, from Virginia, there, on every significant piece of legislation, we have surrendered to the White House and to the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Speaker 5 We don't have anything to show for having control of the House for two years. So that's supporting your thesis.

Speaker 5 Then you had Chip Roy and James Comer pushing back on that, saying that simply keeping the government funded, passing GOP messaging bills, and exercising some oversight through committees are achievements for the party in a divided government.

Speaker 5 I love this sort of fight there. You have the wing of crazies that are like, we haven't advanced our crazy nonsense,

Speaker 5 there's no chance of advancing. And then you have the other crazies that are like, actually, doing nothing is a victory.

Speaker 5 There's nobody in the conversation that's like, you know, I don't know, maybe we should try to compromise with Democrats on some things and try to actually achieve results working with the other party.

Speaker 5 That faction doesn't seem to be existing in the conversation.

Speaker 4 No, and the fascinating thing about that, that Chip Roy quote is he's done a total flip-flop.

Speaker 4 I mean, he was the guy who stood up and said, one thing, I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one that I can go campaign on and say we did.

Speaker 4 And of course, they haven't done anything since then. So now he said, okay, well, actually, I'm pretty good with this doing nothing at all.

Speaker 4 One of my favorite parts was just this long compilation of self-loathing quotes from House Republicans about themselves. Like, you know, you don't have to take my word for it.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, how often do you get to say, I agree totally with Marjorie Taylor Greene? Our Republican House majority has failed completely. Maybe she believes that for different reasons.

Speaker 4 But yeah, I mean, nobody has been more savage on House Republicans than House Republicans, including the current Speaker of the House, who says he spends half his time as Speaker and half as a mental health counselor.

Speaker 5 I want to let you mention it, though. I had a couple of favorites of the House Republicans on House Republicans.
This is Mike Lawler Lawler from New York.

Speaker 5 When you keep running lunatics, you're going to be in this position. Here's Tony Gonzalez out of Texas.

Speaker 5 Again, for listeners who are not familiar with Tony Gonzalez, this is a Republican member of the House, Tony Gonzalez. I work with some real scumbags.

Speaker 5 These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they walk around with white hoods in the daytime.
People say we have TDS at the bulwark.

Speaker 5 I mean, like, that's worse than what you'll hear at the bulwark most days from a sitting Republican congressman.

Speaker 4 And you wonder why they're throwing punches, why McCarthy gives Tim Burchett the kidney punch from behind, and they go after Gates on the House floor. They were, you know, in fisticuffs

Speaker 4 in the caucus room as well.

Speaker 4 You know, it's interesting because if you look at the true crazies, you know, like let's take that a proxy for that is maybe that the House Freedom Caucus, there's only about 40 of them.

Speaker 4 The problem is there's the vast majority of the caucus are cowards. So, you know, two-thirds of them voted to overturn the election even after the insurrection on January 6th.

Speaker 4 Did they all believe that? No, I'm sure they didn't. But at some point, it doesn't matter whether they believe it or not because they're too afraid to stand up.

Speaker 4 So they wind up letting the cowards run the show again and again.

Speaker 5 Well, and this is another insight on that, that that group, like the crazies versus the cowards versus the people that like are trying to responsibly govern, but aren't standing up to Trump to the degree that I would like them to, but, you know, behind the scenes are trying to at least do some legislating.

Speaker 5 That balance of power, like the window has moved a couple of standard deviations towards the crazy, right, in the last, in this group in 2022.

Speaker 5 And, and I think that, like, what's hard for people to understand is that, you know, even though Trump was gone in 2022, like he, you know, was this overhang over all of these primaries.

Speaker 5 And so like the types of people, the Mike Gallagher's of the world, like the types of people that, you know, accomplished something in their lives, maybe they were in the military or they're a community leader or a business leader in the community.

Speaker 5 They weren't volunteering to run in 2022 as Republicans because they didn't want to do what you had to do unless you're like totally shameless, like Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 5 If you're like a normal business guy, you don't want to have to go down to Mar-a-Lago and suck up to Trump and pretend that Haitians are eating dogs. Like you don't want to have to do that.

Speaker 5 So you don't, so there's no supply of those people running. And I think that like the party is self-selected, a lot of these crazy people that you, that you profile in the book.

Speaker 4 Right. And that's why you mentioned Mike Gallagher was essentially drummed out.

Speaker 4 Even a guy like Ken Buck, I mean, you don't get a lot more conservative than Ken Buck was drummed out for daring to say, hey, guys, you're being a little nutty here.

Speaker 4 Gone.

Speaker 4 You know, there's no room for him here.

Speaker 5 I mean, Ken Buck is a prime example just for me, because I'm from Colorado. So in 2010, I was still working in Republican politics then.

Speaker 5 And I was always kind of like talking with Colorado people about maybe I'd go home and work on a campaign back at home. I hadn't worked on one since my very first campaign in 02, which was a winner.

Speaker 5 I didn't have very wins after that, so I like to mention my wins when they happen.

Speaker 5 But in 2010, that guy that I'd worked for, Bill Owens, his lieutenant governor was Jane Norton, who is this sort of just generic Republican, you know, a kind of maybe not quite as moderate as Susan Collins, but what, you know, the kind of generic type Republican that you got during that era.

Speaker 5 Ken Buck challenged her from the right and was a lunatic. And everybody's like, this guy is insane.

Speaker 4 No, that's right. He was the poster child for sort of Tea Party extremism, at least, you know, from my point of view.
And now he's the voice of reason.

Speaker 5 And so now he gets drummed down.

Speaker 4 You're right. That's how, you know, with each passing election, it just changes, and you lose the grown-ups, and the lunatics gain more power.
You know, I think it's a structural thing in a way.

Speaker 4 Of course, you know, the primary...

Speaker 4 There are two dozen competitive seats in the House. The rest of them are strictly decided in a primary.

Speaker 4 Of course, there's a problem on the Democratic side, but there aren't enough liberals to dominate the way the right dominates within the Republican primary.

Speaker 4 So, you know, and I think Tom Massey from Kentucky said it best when he was trying to figure out what the primary voters wanted. Were they looking for the libertarian or this ideology or that?

Speaker 4 And he said, no, they're looking for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And that's the problem.
We may sit back and say, this is irrational, this behavior of

Speaker 4 burning down the government. But they're not appealing to the 800,000 million people who are their constituents.

Speaker 4 There's the 10,000, 15,000 people who they have to appeal to in the primary, you know, so they don't get primaried from the right.

Speaker 4 So this is just, it's happened over and over again in cycle after cycle. And you no longer have a John Boehner or even a Paul Ryan, you know, somebody with even a little bit of

Speaker 4 spine to stand up to it.

Speaker 5 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And the Democratic situation as a moderate myself is even better than what you're saying.

Speaker 5 The only Democrats to get primaried and lose this time, they were primaried from the middle. It's Browdman and Bush, right?

Speaker 5 Like there's not really an example of, I mean, I guess Manchin retires, but it's not like Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey was like getting primaried by a DSA socialist and losing.

Speaker 5 Like, I don't know, maybe that'll happen sometime in the future. That's not happening now.

Speaker 4 Right. It has happened a couple of times, you know, to Elliot Engel or whatever.
You know, I use the squad as the equivalent of the House Freedom Caucus, but it's really not an equivalent thing.

Speaker 4 They're much smaller. They don't have the same kind of influence, but also they're not as contrarian.
I mean,

Speaker 4 AOC generally goes along with what leadership wants. And, you know, I don't think this is because like Democrats are savvier or smarter.

Speaker 4 It's just a fact of life that there are more moderates in their, in their primary electorate. So you just don't have as much luck coming at people.

Speaker 4 You know, in certain urban districts, you can do that. But by and large, you don't win by being the craziest son of a bitch in the race.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's a supply and demand thing. I mean, Joe Perticone, my colleague, has this yesterday as a newsletter.

Speaker 5 People can check out on thebullwork.com, but he interviewed Jerry Moran, who used to run the NRSC. And Jerry, you know, Jerry should probably take some more responsibility.

Speaker 5 Certainly, there have been some Republican leaders, many, many, who have not acted with integrity or with the authority that they could have to try to, you know, steer the ship.

Speaker 5 But that said, his point is like, it's not even Trump. It's not us.
It's like the voters keep picking these people.

Speaker 5 And so if the voters want crazy, if you're going for a job, and in this case, it's the primary voters who are the ones that get to review the resumes.

Speaker 5 And if the best thing you can have on your resume is not like your volunteer service or your success in private business, but like the best thing on the business, it's like how crazy you are, how good you are at insulting Libs and

Speaker 5 how good you are at sucking up to Trump. Then you're going to get crazy people.

Speaker 4 Right. In fact, you can fake your resume like Andy Ogles or Anna Paulina Luna or Santos.

Speaker 4 It doesn't matter what you did.

Speaker 5 Just say whatever you want. That's crazy.
I should talk about that. I hadn't even really thought about that.
There were three members of this class that were wildly exaggerating their resume.

Speaker 4 Three that we know of. I mean,

Speaker 4 there may be more than that. There were also several others on the ballot in 2022 who didn't make it, like the guy who painted his lawn into a Trump banner and made up his military record.

Speaker 4 It's a Trump phenomenon that, you know, he can get away with saying whatever he wants. Well, maybe the rest of us can get away with saying whatever we want too.

Speaker 4 Now, there are limits to this, as we're seeing, for example, in the gubernatorial race in North Carolina or the certain congressmen's payroll on Long Island.

Speaker 4 But by and large, I mean, Trump has done such a brilliant job at extinguishing any sense of shame from the electorate that I think a lot of others are following in this mold.

Speaker 4 So you had Santos, I mean, the most brazen lies I've ever seen in my time in Washington. But he turned it around and he did the same thing.
thing. You know, the party establishment is out to get me.

Speaker 4 The media is out to get me. And the party leaders, they weren't enforcers of any sort of moral or ethical standard.
They needed his vote.

Speaker 4 I mean, Kevin McCarthy has said they knew something was off with this guy, but they figured, all right, and they gave him party money. They made appearances with him.

Speaker 4 And even after it all came out, they kept him there for a year.

Speaker 4 And, you know, even on the day after a year when Santos was finally expelled, the House leadership was still fighting to keep him in the position because they needed his vote.

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Speaker 5 There's some pretty concerning actual news this week with this group also that I think that we should talk about, which we saw at Mike Johnson's press conference.

Speaker 4 There are two clips from the press conference.

Speaker 5 I want to play you. Let's listen to them back to back.

Speaker 12 I'm not defying President Trump. I've spoken with him at great length, and he is very frustrated about the situation.
His great concern is election security, and it is mine as well. It is all of ours.

Speaker 12 We are really

Speaker 12 seriously concerned about this. And we've got to do everything that we can to ensure it.

Speaker 12 Speaker, do you commit to observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election, even if Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump?

Speaker 12 Well, of course. If we have a free, fair, and safe election, we're going to follow the Constitution.
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 5 It's kind of ominous.

Speaker 4 But it's a pretty big if in there. And

Speaker 4 if we decide that it was fair. I was at that news conference yesterday.
He's been saying various versions of this all along.

Speaker 4 As I think you were suggesting a moment before. In a sense, he has to do it.

Speaker 4 He is hanging by a thread. One mean tweet from Donald Trump, he's done.
Maybe not done today, but his future in the speakership is over.

Speaker 4 The House Republicans did more than any other other group to revive Donald Trump. And it wasn't just McCarthy flocking down to Mar-a-Lago.
When he was down and out, these guys built him up.

Speaker 4 They were the first to rally behind him after each of the indictments. And the power he holds over this caucus is just extraordinary.

Speaker 4 So when people talk about you know, Mike Johnson trying to use what the 12th amendment to, you know, to reject the results and allow the House to decide, assuming

Speaker 4 Harris won the presidency and the Republicans kept the House.

Speaker 4 Now, the whole idea is fairly far-fetched, and it almost certainly wouldn't work, but I have no doubt that Mike Johnson would try such a thing.

Speaker 4 This is, after all, the guy who led the legal effort in the House to overturn the results,

Speaker 4 the legal argument as opposed to the actual insurrection. So there can be no doubt that he would be happy to do it again this time around, and that is ominous.

Speaker 5 Let's unpack that because before you became a columnist and kind of big man on campus over there, you were a Hill reporter, right?

Speaker 5 and so you know how this sometimes works right where some of these guys are going they're saying what they have to say in front of the cameras or behind the scenes they're talking to you and you know they're the story's a little different have you been able to spend enough time with republicans to get any sense for that like and mike johnson did end up kind of doing the right thing on ukraine took him a while yeah five months but yeah and so he's he has a couple of times demonstrated

Speaker 5 maybe be overstated to say backbone but like a little bit of authority do you get any sense that some of this is like just for show?

Speaker 5 Or do you really think that they're preparing for and laying the groundwork for another challenge in the period between the election and January?

Speaker 4 I mean, I have no doubt that they're laying the groundwork for that. I mean, certainly Trump is.

Speaker 4 You hear it from him every day. And so they're faithfully echoing that.
I mean, I suspect in their heart of hearts, they may hope it

Speaker 4 doesn't come to that.

Speaker 4 But I've gotten beyond this notion of wondering what they, you know, if you gave them truth serum or woke them up in the middle of the night, because their actions are the same regardless.

Speaker 4 So it doesn't even matter what they believe or what they don't believe. I mean, you know, look, Mike Johnson has voiced the great replacement, you know, the racist conspiracy theory.

Speaker 4 There he was, you know, what is just a week or two after he won the speakership, going to address this group of Christian nationalists with the most out there views.

Speaker 4 And of course, saying that God had made him the Moses of the House Republican Party.

Speaker 4 I guess they're still in the, apparently still wandering in the wilderness, but maybe he'll get them there at some point.

Speaker 4 I mean, he's very much a true believer in that sense, certainly more than anybody before him. I mean, he has let there be no daylight between him and Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 I mean, think about the current spending showdown.

Speaker 4 Okay, he surrendered and punted so that they can have the fight, you know, after taking another six-week vacation on top of the six-week vacation they just came back from.

Speaker 4 But of course, he only did it after doing Trump's bidding and saying, all right, we'll put this election legislation on and let his own people kill it.

Speaker 5 The element of just like listening to him talking about all of that, you know, like the whole thing is fake.

Speaker 5 Like this whole like, oh, we're deeply concerned about the, you know, so like they're setting the pretense for this. Well, we'll only challenge it if we don't believe it's safe and secure.

Speaker 5 That's why I played both clips together because the other clip is like this whole like, oh, we're Trump is deeply concerned about election security and we're deeply concerned.

Speaker 5 Nobody's deeply concerned about it.

Speaker 5 You know, like I met with Chris Krebs last week, who was working at DHS on election security in 2020 and did the right thing and spoke out about the stop the SPL records and corrected the record.

Speaker 5 And he's like, there are groups out there that are genuinely concerned, or not concerned, but are genuinely focused on making sure that the process is smooth, that

Speaker 5 all the machines are secure, that ballot handoff. That's not what these guys are doing.

Speaker 5 They don't actually care.

Speaker 4 No, I mean, they're genuinely concerned that they might lose the election. So they're figuring out a plan B.

Speaker 4 I mean, the absurdity of this, I mean, remember, the big complaint, and maybe there was some legitimacy to it last time, was that there were last-minute changes,

Speaker 4 early voting and how the electioneering was done. Okay, well, there were.

Speaker 4 But these same people who are complaining about that are now saying, all right, let's see if the last minute we can get Nebraska legislature to change the whole electoral college thing.

Speaker 4 Let's see if in Georgia, maybe we can switch the whole thing to a hand count and, you know, bollocks up everything for a month.

Speaker 4 Not that there was a whole lot of integrity going into the process, but they're actually doing the exact same thing that they said was the problem last time.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Will Salatan wrote about that very thing this morning for us.
Like, the other thing about this kicking the can on the CR is now they're setting up a situation where conceivably

Speaker 5 Harris wins

Speaker 5 narrowly, let's just say.

Speaker 5 They are spending November and December doing Stop the Steel 2.0, right? And trying to undermine it in every way imaginable.

Speaker 5 And then there's a government shutdown hanging over at Christmas time, right? And having all of that stuff be happening together at this time where we should be, once again,

Speaker 5 to use your words, bollocksing up like what should be a clean and peaceful transfer where, you know, preparing for a new president.

Speaker 5 I mean, like, they're really setting this up for the winter to be, you know, for them to have a lot of leverage to create trouble.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. I mean, the odds of a shutdown, I would say, are extremely high in December.
So there will be some price that Mike Johnson will ask for. Now, what will that price be?

Speaker 4 Well, they're not going to be interested in the SAVE Act anymore. It'll be something related to whatever happened in the election.
The deadline for the shutdown is, what, December 20th, I think it is.

Speaker 4 On January 3rd, he's got to get, you know, if he wins, he's got, well, if I mean, if they, if they lose the House, he's done anyway. But if he wins, he's got to get re-elected as Speaker.

Speaker 4 He can't afford to do anything that pisses off Trump, win or lose, any more than a few members of the Freedom Caucus.

Speaker 4 So basically, his only play at that point is to shut the government down with some with some peace.

Speaker 4 I mean, I love how we always, you know, at any moment, he said, well, there are two issues before us, and they're totally two. different issues from whatever they were were last week.

Speaker 4 But these are the most obvious things the government must do at this point. So he will say there's a very obvious thing that we must do or shut down the government.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I don't. I mean, like the prospect that we don't really have a speaker, that there's not like during this whole period,

Speaker 5 as you're pointing out, like,

Speaker 5 especially depending on how close the house ends up, I just think that they have kind of laid the table here for a very

Speaker 4 lot of chaos. So all you who have called, you know, made vacation plans for after the election, I would consider a postponement.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I know. I was planning on taking the week off from the podcast between Christmas and New Year's.
I don't don't know. That seems like that's probably not going to be happening.
Sorry.

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Speaker 5 What else do we have? Diaz Bosito this week. I haven't mentioned that yet.
I talked about this. This is one of the New York Republicans.

Speaker 5 There's this kind of group of people call them moderate based on nothing, I guess. They are not as visibly crazy as Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guess.

Speaker 4 I think the real word is nervous, you know, because they're in swing districts.

Speaker 4 So it's not that it's not, they're not ideologically different, but they're always worried that they have to worry about more than a primary. They actually have to worry about actual voters.

Speaker 5 Yeah, their rhetoric is a little different.

Speaker 5 So you've got Lawler, you've got Laloda, who our friend John Avalon's running against, and then you've got Diaz Bosito here, who I guess had his fiancé's kid on

Speaker 5 staff. What was happening there?

Speaker 4 I think it was the fiancé's kid as well as the mistress

Speaker 4 in the same office. So

Speaker 4 I mean, it's potentially problematic, or, you know in an earlier time that would have been a career-ending sort of thing. And now it's just another another news cycle.

Speaker 4 My favorite part about this, of course, Desposito was leading the charge to get Santos expelled from the house because of his ethics problems.

Speaker 4 So here's Santos doing a victory lap on social media with some obscene tweet about what Desposito has been doing with his genitals.

Speaker 5 What has he been doing? This is an R-rated podcast. I missed that.
What has he been doing with his genitals?

Speaker 4 I think Santos's tweet was, you know, I'll take where does Desposito put his dick for $10,000 or something like that.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 something to that effect. Everyone, that's all Kitara Ravash, George Santos.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I know, I'm going to miss him. I mean, it looks like he's going to the pokey for somewhere from two to six years.
We'll find out in February.

Speaker 4 But at least, you know, if all does go to hell between the election and the inauguration, we will still have George Santos to comment on it.

Speaker 5 I just want to kind of go through another low-light reel of some of these guys that I feel like don't get enough attention. So, you know, we might as well raise their name idea a little bit.

Speaker 5 Andy Ogles, Tennessee, you mentioned him earlier. He did a GoFundMe for a children's burial garden and then just pocketed the cash.

Speaker 4 It did go fund me in that case, and

Speaker 4 not the barely. And he also sort of made up what colleges he graduated from, suggested he was a police officer and he hadn't been.
Voters are very concerned, obviously, because he's coming back.

Speaker 5 Heck of a job by the Tennessee GOP there. Then we've got Anna Paulina Luna.

Speaker 5 I interviewed Whitney Fox, who she's running against, who I think is a little bit of an underdog, but that'd be a good campaign to support for listeners that are looking at races.

Speaker 5 And Anna Paulina, she was a turning point USA activist that got popular on Steve Bannon's podcast. Is that right?

Speaker 4 Right. And Mike Lindell was very key there as well.
She, as my colleagues at the Post wrote about, shall we say, was quite creative in some of her resume, too.

Speaker 4 I'm very impressed by her record in Congress. At some point, she had introduced, I think, 10 pieces of legislation, and like nine of them were trying to punish Adam Schiff.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 she came there for one purpose.

Speaker 5 I think, wasn't the other one trying to arrest Merrick Garland?

Speaker 4 She wanted to fine and expel and censure Schiff. And then, yeah, she was the one who wanted the inherent contempt of Merrick Garland.

Speaker 4 So not only would they hold him in contempt of Congress, they would actually send the sergeant-at-arms, you know, hustling down to find the attorney general somewhere and lock him up in a cell in the basement of the Capitol.

Speaker 4 So, I mean, there's still time left, right?

Speaker 5 I guess. I mean, if you're in Tampa, St.

Speaker 5 Pete's and you're like, you know, I just want to make sure we've got representatives that are focused on, you know, making sure they're responsive to the issues here.

Speaker 5 We have a hurricane potentially coming our direction here this weekend. They got to feel nice knowing that Anna Paulina Luna will be there and it's just laser focused.

Speaker 4 Right. I mean, if you've got Merrick Garland under lock and key, I think think you're going to be okay when Hurricane Barrel's through.
This guy could actually lose.

Speaker 5 Derek Van Orden. This is a race in Wisconsin, another one that I'd flag for people.
He was at the Capitol during the insurrection. And we'll talk about the yelling at the pages.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, he's got a history of yelling at kids and librarians

Speaker 4 in his home state and that sort of thing. But he was the one, I think Punch Bowl reported it at the time.

Speaker 4 These teenage pages from the Senate were down taking pictures in the rotunda, and they got down on the ground, like many people do, to take pictures of the rotunda and he he comes in there late at night screaming at them to get the fuck up and other things like this frightening children now he's a rather excitable fellow but i mean he's got nothing on ronnie jackson for excitement i mean ronnie jackson will do that to a police officer was ronnie jackson class of 22 or is he 20?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no,

Speaker 4 he goes back when I do sort of group them all together at some point. You got it.

Speaker 5 Okay. Well, you know, you have to make sure who, you know, sort of gets, like when you're doing, what did you call it, the end of the year, superlatives?

Speaker 5 You know, when you're doing superlatives for each class, I just want to, you know, I want to make sure that Derek and Ronnie aren't competing.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, they shouldn't be. I mean, and I say the class of 22 is easily the craziest since the class of 20, because, of course, then you had MTG and Bobert and just that right there.

Speaker 4 The only fool in my book that got more mentions than MTG was

Speaker 4 Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 5 I've just spent so much much time on my Kevin here that I think

Speaker 5 we're just going to give him a pass. I guess it is fun.
The saddest thing I think that maybe I've ever seen in politics is this McCarthy

Speaker 5 getting

Speaker 5 expelled by his own members. And then rather than just going to get paid or whatever, going home to California,

Speaker 5 open an auto dealership,

Speaker 5 he has decided to stay around and unsuccessfully try to primary all the people that expelled him and make fun of Matt Gaetz.

Speaker 5 I mean, sometimes he lands a punch on Matt Gaetz, but the whole thing is very pathetic and sad.

Speaker 4 It is a bit sad. Right.
And he's always looking for

Speaker 4 a chance to be a commentator on cable news. And he lost in that entire revenge tour.
It's easy, I suppose, to pick on Kevin McCarthy, but I will.

Speaker 4 I'm not like an access journalist who gets a lot of scoops, but I did a very important scoop in here.

Speaker 4 And that is that he did in the dark of night, soon after winning the speakership, have a bidet wheeled into the speaker's office so he could have that.

Speaker 4 This is a man who really likes the trappings of the office. Like each time he had a news conference, he'd go to a different part of the building, and you could hear him on the microphone.

Speaker 4 And Steve Scales said, Hey, boss, this is a really great site. And Stefanik would say, Oh, yeah, no, this is a perfect site.
Love this one.

Speaker 4 So it was all about, I am the speaker, and I enjoy the trappings of the job, even if I can't actually work in this job.

Speaker 5 And that brings me a lot more joy for his defenestration also.

Speaker 5 He did enjoy the trappings so much that the trappings are now gone.

Speaker 4 And I think that's why he's running around trying to get himself on, you know, on television or whatever else it is.

Speaker 4 He needs that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he floated himself for VP also in the Wall Street Journal. I enjoyed that.
The midday is just something to really think about, just like that, how high of a priority that was for him.

Speaker 5 He spent a lot of time in the office, I guess. We got to finish with the impeachment effort.

Speaker 5 I do think that this has just been a utter failure of all of us, I guess, that the media class and the imbalance between how Democrats get treated and how Republicans get treated.

Speaker 5 Like this sham impeachment was so embarrassing. And they literally were using sources who were Russian intel to try to get Joe Biden with lies.

Speaker 5 They put out press releases that were like had spelling errors and were factually wrong and like it it seemed like they were written by like cartman from south park like it was this like they had no evidence they had no they spent hundreds thousands of man hours and resources on this sham impeachment and i just i don't feel like it got the attention it deserved just like how shameful the whole process was and continues to be actually because it's not it's not over i did try to remedy that a bit in the book by devoting quite a bit to it but yeah i mean you mentioned the one whistleblower is under indictment, who apparently collaborated with Russian intelligence, as you mentioned.

Speaker 4 The other, well, another whistleblower was involved with the Chinese, you know, this arms dealer who's still on the lamb, as far as I know.

Speaker 5 Gal Luft. Are we talking about Gal Luft? Yeah.
Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 4 Another one that Gates and Green were trying to bring in. Well, she, Tara Reed, I think, she actually defected to Russia in the middle of all of this.

Speaker 4 Poor Jamie Comer, you know, who's easily excitable, getting into fights with Jared Mosquitz and calling him a smurf and just sort of, you know, being outclassed, you know, he seems to be a bear of very little brain.

Speaker 4 So it was sort of painful to watch at each step, you know, he'd tease his next big revelation and then nothing would come out of that revelation.

Speaker 4 And then, you know, even when they, you know, they finally have the impeachment hearings, you've got Jonathan Turley saying, guys, I don't think you got anything here.

Speaker 4 Come on, if you can't get Jonathan Turley to say your case is sound, then you've got, and you're a Republican. It's really problematic.

Speaker 4 But, you know, they did get to show the nude pictures of Hunter Biden, you know, lightly blacked out, but not so much that we couldn't tell what was going on there. So, I mean, right?

Speaker 4 So they achieved something.

Speaker 4 They have the president's son's genitals out there in a hearing room.

Speaker 5 Nudes, I guess. I mean, the Hunter nudes were kind of already out there, though.
I think that anybody that wanted wanted to see Hunter nude could have already seen it without the help of James.

Speaker 4 Oh, come on. You're not even going to give him that.

Speaker 5 I won't. I can't even give him that.

Speaker 5 Those nudes have been lighting up text change across America for years now.

Speaker 4 They investigated his art dealer. I'm not sure that would have come to light.

Speaker 5 That's true. That's true.
The whole thing is like...

Speaker 5 I mean, it's a little bit repetitive of Ken Buck point, but I just think it's important to state that like as extreme as like the Gingrich Republicans were or as the Tea Party Republicans, like there is not really a parallel.

Speaker 5 I mean, even like the Benghazi thing was clearly overkill and the number of hearings based upon what actually happened. But there was some underpinning thing that happened at Benghazi, right?

Speaker 5 Like a bad thing, a bad thing that merited investigation, just not to this degree that Republicans did, like focused on it. Like this was all, it was totally based on nothing.
It was a clown car.

Speaker 5 They were tools for the Russians. And just like the idea that these folks would just get put back in Congress and that it's just kind of like, oh, well, we'll just laugh at the silly Republicans.

Speaker 5 I mean, it just, it speaks pretty ill of

Speaker 5 the low bar that we have for Congress is not being passed here.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And it does.
I mean, making it up out of whole cloth is one thing. But as you point out, this wasn't, they're not the ones who made it up.

Speaker 4 In many cases, they were actually following Russian propaganda here. And this isn't the first time this happened.
Obviously, during the Trump impeachment, we got a lot of that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, and the backdrop, of course, is Trump himself is coddling Putin. And these House Republicans, I think they voted, was it 111 or 102 against aid going to Ukraine?

Speaker 4 And this was even after the five-month delay that allowed Putin to seize the advantage over there. So they're using Russian propaganda, but it's not just in a vacuum.

Speaker 4 It's part of a rather disturbing change in the Republican Party from internationalists to

Speaker 4 please Vladimir,

Speaker 4 have your way with our NATO partners.

Speaker 5 Woof. Well, at least you get some laughs out of it.
It's a depressing turn of events, but the book is Fools on the Hill, the hooligans, saboteurs, conspiracy theorists, and dunces

Speaker 5 who burned. They're burning.
I'm changing it. They're burning down the house, who are currently burning down the house.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 There's still a few embers that haven't gone out yet. You're right.
Exactly.

Speaker 5 Thank you so much to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Come back soon.
Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. We've got a guest with some very good words.
We'll see you then. Peace.

Speaker 5 Hold tight.

Speaker 5 Wait till the party's over.

Speaker 5 Hold tight.

Speaker 5 We're in for nasty weather.

Speaker 5 That's not to be away.

Speaker 5 We should take it back on that. It's not what you're better.

Speaker 5 That's what they should be.

Speaker 5 Closing up with not too far. They let you know where you are.

Speaker 5 Fire in fire, walk fire.

Speaker 5 Baby, you

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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