Best of the Program | Guests: Rep. Chip Roy & Charlie Kirk | 12/20/24

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

If you want to understand what the heck is happening with Congress and why is Chip Roy, who supports Donald Trump and Donald Trump, who supports the things that Chip Roy is talking about, why are they arguing?

You'll understand.

And by the end of the podcast, things have already changed.

We had Chip Roy on the show.

We had Chris Bedford, our Washington correspondent, and Charlie Kirk.

You're going to get the news that nobody else had on today's podcast.

All right, let me talk to you about the the Berna Launcher.

Unless you've done some pretty, you know, have some pretty serious issues.

You don't own guns

because you're hoping to use one on somebody someday.

No, you do it because you hope to never use them, but they're there in case.

Well, that covers a wide range of emergency situations where violence is called for, but it doesn't cover all those situations.

Because sometimes, let's say you're in a car driving through the city and now your car is surrounded by Hamas protesters pounding on the glass.

Oh, what are you going to do?

You got to shoot them?

No.

You're going to drive over them?

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But with my Bernal Launcher, I could roll down my window just a little bit,

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You're listening to the best of the Blanbeck program.

Let me talk to you

about what Chris Bedford wrote.

He is the Blaze News senior editor for politics.

He's our Washington correspondent.

He lives,

not in the swamp, near the swamp.

He's always on the edges of the swamp, peering into the abyss and reporting what's happening in the abyss.

And he wrote a story that I read early this morning, The Doge That Caught the Car.

Christopher Bedford is with us now to go through it because I think this is great,

a great analysis on what happened yesterday.

So Chris, let's start there.

What happened yesterday?

Well, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

Yesterday,

we started to see something.

It was complicated.

The spending fights at the end of the year are always difficult.

You kind of have to break it down by what is best for the incoming administration.

What are their goals?

What are they working on?

And sometimes it's going to go against some of the maybe secondary objectives that you have.

So

the first thing it was, it's a vote of no confidence in the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.

And it's also a shot across the bow for some of the fiscal conservatives who are the fiscal hawks who I generally agree with, but it was a shot across their bow.

And it's a best case scenario, I think, for President Donald Trump, elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration.

So,

when you say it was a shot across the bow,

they want to cut the budget.

And I know Donald Trump doesn't worry about the budget because he believes he focuses on growth, but even he

knows that it's going to take unbelievable growth to just dig us out of this hole we're already in.

So, I don't, I think maybe for the first time I've seen a guy who does care about the deficit and the the debt more than he ever has, but he knows he has to not only cut the debt by cutting the spend of the government, mainly by cutting the size of the government and cleaning up all the corruption, but he also has to serve the people and get the money to the entrepreneurs and to the regular person so they have money to be able to buy.

And that, you don't want to print money like Biden did.

You've got to give it back to him in taxes.

So we're in this transition period, are we not, where,

you know,

one of them has to happen first.

They both have to happen, but you got to get the taxes down first and then start cutting the government by cutting the regulation, et cetera, et cetera.

And I believe he'll do that.

Some of the Republicans think they're playing the old game.

And if we're playing the old game where they promise stuff and then never do it, we're in deep trouble.

But I don't think Donald Trump does that.

No, I don't think he does either.

But you have to look at a little bit of

what he ran on.

And deficit hoc was not his number one priority.

It was reinvigorating the American economy, reconfiguring our trade deals, being able to actually deport a lot of the violent criminals and illegal aliens who have invaded the country, particularly over the last four years, strengthening America's borders.

And those things are all going to cost money at the outset, bringing back American manufacturing.

So it's kind of like how when Ronald Reagan was elected president, he ended up fighting with some great principled conservatives like Ron Paul back in the day, because his number one goal was defeating the Soviet Union, not always cutting budgets.

So sometimes Republicans in Congress would come up with deals that come back to the White House back in the 80s and say, look, they're going to cut $2 in domestic spending for every dollar we cut in military spending.

And the White House would reject that deal because it said, we need the number one objective here is why we were elected.

And this is what the way Trump is looking at this.

And he's looking out across 2025, which is going to have a lot of different minefields for him, a lot of different leverage points.

And principled conservatives like Chip Roy like to fight for those leverage points so they can use them in negotiations to try and extract concessions from Democrats.

The problem for a lot of them is that they're not backed up by principled leaders who are very good at this.

So you have

Donald Trump looking out and saying, I don't want to send Mike Johnson into the room.

to negotiate the debt limit six months into my administration when Democrats have now got their groove back.

And believe me, the Democratic base is enough now, but six months into deportations and Donald Trump's new agenda, they will be

screaming for blood.

And there's no way that they will not get concessions if they walk into those negotiations.

So Trump wants to clear the deck of that sort of thing.

So he was, but he was elected on, you're right, fixing the economy, curbing inflation and all of that.

By the way, I'm at America Fest, AmFest, with Charlie Kirk and his event today.

That's what you're hearing in the background.

I'm in Phoenix.

But,

you know, you said fixing the economy and deporting, you know, and stopping the illegal immigration.

But he was also,

I think these are equal things.

Fix the economy,

fix the immigration problem.

And the third one was cut the size of government, cut all of these, the deep state out.

So he is motivated to do all three.

It's not just the

defeating of communism with Reagan.

These all work together hand in hand.

It's just which one are you going to do first?

Getting the money back to the American people, not through stimulus, but through tax cuts, is his first step.

He's got to do the other two that are going to cost money.

And until the economy really starts to take off and you're getting more taxes as the government because people are making more money,

you're not going to be able to accomplish two and three.

So for this one exception, I think he should have been given the

debt ceiling so we're not fighting that as well.

I agree.

I do.

I agree with that completely.

He's got two big fights essentially already on the books coming up.

He's going to have to convince Republicans with a slim majority in the Senate, that means Susan Collins, that means Lisa Murkowski, to appropriate $100 billion to help with his border enforcement and to help actually fulfill his campaign promise on getting the gangs out of here, getting MS-13 out of your neighborhoods.

And then he's going to also try and go back.

Right now they have these as two different moves.

I think they're going to end up having to combine them to move the Senate to ask to make the Trump tax cuts permanent, something that's going to affect everyone's law pocketbook, affect their families' abilities to save, make those permanent.

And these are things that are also hard with Republicans in the House and in the Senate because these aren't corporate tax cuts.

These are family tax cuts.

You can pass any corporate tax cuts you want through Washington, D.C.

with Republicans, but it's a lot harder when it's actually something that hits you and me and your listeners and our families.

And those are two of the things he's got already difficult fights on.

He's got the nomination process, so he's got to get people like RFK and Pete Hakeseth through.

So then to add a June debt ceiling thing, even though I see where the fiscal conservatives are coming from, it just sets him up to take losses from the Democrats.

You know, Liz said earlier that Liz Wheeler is with me this weekend.

She said earlier that

the

gosh, now I forgot.

I'm sorry, I just lost my.

It is so hard to concentrate here.

Liz, when we were talking about this last hour,

You made a point on the fiscal conservatives and trying to move us and timing.

Can you make that?

Yeah, I think the word that best defines this fight when you're watching it is disruption, right?

And Chris,

you can tell me if this is what tracks with what you're seeing in Washington, D.C.

But it's not that Chip Roy is principally wrong.

He's principally correct.

It's that the process that we've seen in Washington, D.C.

by for decades now of Republicans claiming to be fiscal conservatives, they haven't effectively gotten that done.

And so what Trump is doing now is he's hired a disruptor, Elon Musk, to come in with Doge and retool this entire process, do it a different way.

And it seems like that just there hasn't quite been the marriage of those principled fiscal conservatives with this new disruptive process that I think we should give Trump credit for because it actually has already worked.

Because the first 1,500-page bill, all of the stuff that you had a problem with in that bill, has we killed it.

Yes.

yeah we had a winner

right there but now

they are they really are and the fiscal conservatives are right in principle how do we how do we train or or convince people like a very good friend he's coming on chip roy that chip this isn't

the same game because you have Elon Musk and Doge

and the entire country focused and excited about that.

You've got to give this guy breathing room and credit because he's got to spend money as he's cutting money,

but

he can't keep having battles.

He's got to get the things that we all agree on, get them done right now.

And

if it means you're going to have to extend some things you don't like, but you know they're going to cut them later, go with it.

Get it done now.

How do we convince them?

You know, that's part of the art of the compromise and the art of the possible that is politics in general.

And I've been in the swamp now.

I moved here six months before George W.

Bush's second inauguration.

So it's been 20 years.

And I don't think that I've seen anything like we saw this past week where the House of Representatives and the Senate come through.

They've got their big pork Christmas gifts.

They've got everything ready.

And then suddenly someone says no.

And those people were Chip Roy.

Those people were Elon Musk.

And then Donald Trump and J.D.

Bance over at the top, who came in and blew it up in the Senate and the House's faces.

And they were shocked to have someone say, this isn't going to go.

This isn't going to pass.

And that was a huge victory for people like Chip to get that out there.

But at that point, you have to look at the objectives that you've reached and order them properly.

So what's the number one objective for the next year of this administration?

Would Trump have been a success as president if he cut 2% off the deficit?

Or would he be a success as president if he was able to fulfill his campaign promises and make bring manufacturing back, get these gangs out of here, fix the border?

What's the real long-term difference?

So it's important to be that guy on the ramparts at some point at Don, fighting at the end of the day.

But then you have to also understand when to take a win and when to say this is a fight that's not worth

going to loggerheads the administration over.

And that's where he's got to get to.

Yeah.

Okay, Chiproy's coming up in just a second.

Chris, thank you so much.

By the way, Chris is, I mean, he nails it when it comes to Washington.

He tells the truth, and I think his analysis is right.

And you can get his newsletter

in your mailbox.

It's free.

Just sign up at Blaze TV and Blaze.com slash Bedford.

Blaze TV slash Bedford.

And you can get it three times a week, and it's really news you can use.

It's not a waste of your time.

Thank you, Chris.

I appreciate it.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.

I think we have a great opportunity today to show you how to have a tough conversation with friends friends

where you deeply disagree on something

but you know that their intent is good they know my intent is good or our intent is good and we actually have the same end goal but we disagree on the path and we're going to walk away friends.

Chip Roy is joining us today.

And Chip,

I love you and I always will and I agree with your, we've got to cut spending, we have to.

But

Liz Wheeler is with me and we've been talking about it all morning.

It's

the system of Doge and Trump.

the call out to the world and saying you got to surround the capital you know the bad guys are in and about to take all the money surround and tell them come out with your hands up and that happened and we scored a massive win in an entirely new way and then you stood on principle one we both agree with and uh

it failed and so here's here's what liz and i were talking about it here's what we want to say to you and then get your response

hi congressman hi congressman roy this is the way that i see it and i want your take on this I love you.

I think you're one of the best members of Congress.

I disagree with you on the process of what's happening.

And I think that is the difference, the process.

We elected Donald Trump to be a disruptor because Republican members of Congress for decades have been telling us they're fiscal conservatives.

They want to decrease the debt ceiling.

It hasn't happened.

It hasn't been done.

And so Donald Trump comes in with Elon Musk and uses this Doge process to first identify these pieces of garbage in the first 1,500-page bill and take those things to the people.

We took them to members of Congress.

Congress said, okay, we'll listen to you.

So that new process was very effective.

And my question to you is: once that process was proved to be effective, which I think is exciting and wonderful, how do we bridge this divide with you to say, okay, let's put some faith in this new process and trust Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the Doge process to eventually address the debt ceiling, but get this done right now?

And not blind trust, Chip.

So, appreciate you you guys.

Appreciate being on the show.

Number one, in particular order, I'm going to go through a couple of things.

Number one, it is important to remember that my job and my duty is to the Constitution, to God, and to the people I represent.

I told them when I came to Washington, I would not, I would not lift the credit card and the debt ceiling and the borrowing of the United States without the spending restraint necessary to offset it.

Right now, all we have are promises and ideas and notions.

What I know that neither of you respectfully know and that none of your listeners respectfully know are the people in the room that I was in with yesterday and the day before who are recalcitrant and do not want to do the spending cuts that we seek to do, that I believe the president and the Doge guys and Russ Vote and everybody want to do.

My job is to force that.

through the meat grinder to demand that we do our damn job.

Okay, that's number two.

Number three.

wait, wait, hold on.

No, hold on, hold on.

All right, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

Go ahead.

Number three, when we were going through the bill, I'm glad the bill dropped from 1,550 pages to 116 pages.

Three-quarters of Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it have been out there basically spreading false facts that we supported that bill and didn't like the better bill.

That's not true.

But let's be clear, the 1,400 pages that were cut out, it's not a panacea.

There was some good stuff in there.

There were some bad stuff in there.

There's There's a lot of misinformation.

There wasn't a $70,000 pay raise.

There was a $3,000 pay raise.

I didn't support any pay raise.

I didn't support a lot of the stuff in there.

But there's a lot of misinformation.

And here's the thing: the 116 pages that were left, and I opposed violently the first bill.

I was leading the charge on fighting and killing the first bill.

And I

was like,'What are 116 pages

turned off the pay-go requirements that we slashed $1.7 trillion automatically, and added a $5 trillion debt ceiling increase.

My view was I could not support that without a clear understanding of what cuts we will get in mandatory spending next year, an undoing of the Inflation Reduction Act, the undoing of the student loans, the undoing of the thrifty crap with the food stamps, and everything else.

I yield back.

Okay, I yield back.

Chip, you're not in a hostile room.

We love you,

and we agree with your end goals.

It's our end goal, too.

We didn't make that promise that you made to the people that voted for you.

So we have more wiggle room here.

But you say, I think our big difference is you say, I know the guys in the room.

You're right.

You do.

And we ceded that earlier today on the show.

You are, one of us is wrong on trust.

I don't trust any of the weasels weasels in Washington, but I think Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have earned enough trust to get a grace period here for the first, maybe the first year

or at least six months to turn the economy around and also reduce the size of the government and totally flip this thing.

And I know as somebody who has, you know,

run a company, mainly into the ground, but run a company and have to switch it in the middle and totally reshuffle.

That actually costs money while you're doing it to bridge the gap because you got to fill up holes while you're filling the gap.

You don't trust the people in the room.

Neither do we.

But we do trust the system that worked on Wednesday with Doge and Donald Trump.

Where do we disagree?

Where can you give them?

We don't disagree.

And yesterday morning, I was making that precise argument in a room full of conservatives and then a follow-up room with people who are, we'll call it less conservative, more

Republican.

Yes.

And so we were making this argument.

And then, somewhat infamously, something leaked out of the room somewhere down to Mar-a-Lago that somehow I was going, that I was being resistant.

Because I was negotiating to try to get agreement to achieve the objective you just said.

I was working to try to get, okay, in fact, yesterday morning, I made the argument to a group of conservatives.

We need to give the president runway.

We need to give him his first hundred days.

We need to appreciate and respect JD and Vivek and Elon and all the people and Russian everybody involved for the president to achieve the objective.

But to get there, we have to make sure that the guys in the room that are an obstacle to that don't have the ability to block it because information flow flow matters.

And when those guys tell the president they can't achieve X, then the president and his team may not achieve X.

Our job was to force and demand, guys, we need actual understanding of what the cuts will be.

And because otherwise, you're asking us to accept a $5 trillion limit in our credit card increase in exchange for nothing.

Literally, in exchange for nothing

but hope.

So our job was to force that change.

Unfortunately, while I was trying to make the argument that we needed something in order to get the votes, someone leaked that down to Mar-a-Lago and the president reacted.

So now I have to now manage that.

So there's the issue in trying to force change in town.

Okay, so hang on.

We got to leave this, Mike, because I'm going to run up against the clock.

I could talk to you all day about this.

You were in a meeting this morning with J.D.

Vance.

Can you tell us anything about that meeting?

That meeting happened because despite what happened yesterday, I'm trying to get this done.

Last night, talking to JD, we worked to get this meeting done.

We had some good progress this morning, but there still remain people concerned about spending that we're trying to work out what agreement we can reach on what spending cuts we will actually get next year in exchange for giving the vote on a debt ceiling increase.

So it remains fluid.

Progress was made.

but we've got to keep working on it.

And I left that meeting to come talk to you.

So I'll get an update in a minute.

Okay.

Thank you for that by the way.

I hear there is a new bill that may be coming today.

Is that the one you're talking about or is this another bill that could be another nightmare?

I despite other people leaking crap, I refuse.

So I can't say because it's not been decided by the speaker and it's just not right to talk about things we're talking about in private meetings.

I despite the currents.

It's this speaker.

I mean,

is he really the speaker anymore, Chip, really?

We need to figure out what bill we're going to get forward, and I can't talk about the private meetings.

But look, guys, I'm going to keep fighting for what I promised the people that I represent.

I'm going to fight to cut spending.

I'm going to represent Article 1.

I'm going to support the president's agenda, but we've got to do that together.

Okay, Chip, thank you.

I think we can...

I think we agree, but I wait to see what that means to you, because we may just have to agree to disagree on this.

But I love you and I still want you to replace Cornyn.

The short version is for inflation's sake, we cannot increase the debt ceiling $5 trillion without knowing what we're getting for it.

And I don't think anybody should disagree with that.

But you don't disagree that Elon Musk and Vivek and Trump are serious about gutting the system.

I believe that is their objective.

I believe there are obstacles to that objective, and I need to know the sincerity of how we deal with those obstacles, both structural in the government and human and we've got to figure that out and that's my job.

Okay, good.

Chip, thank you very much.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program and we really want to thank you for listening.

Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.

Liz, you have an update from Washington on a new bill.

We think this is going to be introduced today in response to what happened to yesterday.

So what's the new bill we think?

That's right.

Fingers crossed.

This is from Liz Elkin.

She says, House Republican leaders expected to present this plan to lawmakers per two sources.

Three separate bills, a continuing resolution, disaster relief and farm aid, and a handshake agreement on acting on the debt limit in reconciliation.

When asked about timeline, one Republican said, we'll be here all night.

I got to tell you, I think that's fine.

And I think that's what Chip Roy was.

Remember, we had that conversation again off the air.

Off the air.

We have this apart.

Yeah, off the air.

You asked me, do you think he needs it in writing?

And I said, I think he just wants assurances,

you know, a man-to-man cowboy handshake, cowboy contract, that that is going to happen.

And it looks like, yes, this is just breaking.

He said he wouldn't.

He said he knew it, but he wouldn't break it on the show because it wasn't his job to leak things.

So I think that's great.

Because Charlie Kirk is with us.

Charlie, you think that's good.

Glenn, great to see you.

It's phenomenal.

First of all, it breaks things into separate votes.

That's the first ask.

Enough of these omnibuses up there.

Yes.

It is the oldest trick in Washington, D.C.

Put things that are essential with things that are terrible.

Yes.

And then you bind these congressmen that are in tough districts.

They say, oh, I vote for this thing because I had all this veteran stuff that I like, and 90% of it was garbage.

Yes.

And so if you break it into separate bills, then you can actually say, okay, farmer aid, disaster aid, fine.

Do that separately.

You know why they don't like doing that?

They actually wanted wanted to go home this weekend for Christmas break.

It is as simple as that, is that there is a lifestyle component to our legislative process.

And when I first learned that, I said, wait a second, we have nurses, EMTs, we have people on 24-call that are working Christmas Eve and Christmas all through New Year's that are making the country run.

Our members of Congress can work through Christmas to go do 12 or 15 separate votes.

It's not that hard.

In fact, the stewardship of the country is far more important than your Christmas vacation.

Yes.

And, you know,

they're working for the people.

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

That's what they're supposed to be doing.

I gave up a day of my vacation to be here.

I'm on your way.

You're with all these wonderful patrons.

You look at all these great people.

And it's because everybody here is most likely doing the same thing,

taking some vacation time to be here because it's important.

It's really important.

Yeah, and it's just a phenomenal event here, and glory be to God.

And we always have to.

Hang on just a second.

Glory be to God, yes.

But God needs actual physical hands on earth.

And you have been, this is your thing.

Turning point is you.

It's our thing.

Yeah, I am as an organization.

It took a leader to lead it, and you deserve a lot of credit for the win and all the credit.

Well, no, not all the credit, but most of the credit for this.

Because it was your baby.

Thank you, Glenn.

That's very touching.

And you know this, and I'll throw it back at you.

You've been an instrumental piece in my worldview for me.

Okay.

He won't accept it.

So I got to get better at receiving compliments.

Yeah, no, and I've heard you give this really great, and I'm grateful that

we have a good relationship and we've helped each other out.

But

let's talk about...

what we're facing January 20th.

Because

I am for the spending cuts.

I am against raising the debt limit.

But if I were in Congress, I would have done it this time because I want to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.

I think he deserves it.

He's earned it.

And I find it credible.

He's not a debt guy, but Elon Musk is.

And Trump knows, along with Elon Musk, we've got to grow the economy, but we also have to cut it down.

And I'll give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt because if he doesn't cut the size of government government dramatically, he doesn't stand a chance.

He must shrink the size of the state.

A couple things.

Number one, on this legislative back and forth is that President Trump wants a clean slate.

What does that mean?

He does not want to inherit all of the problems of this dysfunctional Congress and he has to go clean this up and his agenda that he ran on, that people voted for, would be thwarted.

So he wants a clean slate.

He also doesn't want Schumer to have this him over a barrel with debt ceiling unnecessarily.

What President Trump has done, and this is what what will happen January 20th through Doge, is that the executive branch is going to ask a fundamental constitutional question, and it's going to go up to the Supreme Court very quickly, which is, does the executive branch have to spend all the money that Congress sends it?

This is around the idea of the Empowerment Act.

And it's a very interesting constitutional question.

It says, of course, that the Congress controls the purse, the House of Representatives, all spending those months originate in the House.

But it's not clear whether the executive branch has to spend all of that money if they can do the duties that Congress ascribes to them for less money.

So if Doge is able to say, hey, we're able to do this for half the cost, why can't they just send a wire back to Congress or say, no, we actually don't need it?

And that constitutional executive tension theoretically could result in hundreds of billions of dollars of cost savings.

And that is centered around Russ Vodis talked about this from the Office of Management and Budget, who is 10 out of 10.

He's spectacular.

Is the Empoundment Act and then also the Presidential Reorganization Act.

I think that's a really healthy debate because our founders did never, they never wanted legislative supremacy.

You know this.

They wanted co-equal branches.

And we're living under this idea that Congress can just bully the executive branch of what to do with spending.

You must spend it.

In fact, Glenn, you've covered the horror stories of cabinet officials and agency secretaries that have to spend the money.

Like right now, what's happening is they're finding things to spend money on because their money's going to run out.

And if you don't spend it, then

you lose it the next time.

There's no reward for saving it.

And they'll say, well, even if we don't spend it, it has to be sent to another agency.

No, that's not correct.

What if every agency says, you know, try to do this for 70% of the cost or half of the cost?

And you're talking about a $6 trillion beast.

The ask is very simple.

Can we go back to pre-COVID spending?

Can we go back to 2019 spending?

We do that.

We have a $500 billion surplus, just back to pre-COVID spending levels.

And so the way that we shrink the size of government and the state is going to be done in a different way, because typically it's like, well, you must immediately get congressional buy-in.

The executive branch has a co-equal role in identifying and potentially even saving money that Congress was forcing them once to.

And you know the Democrats are taking everything to court.

How long before Donald Trump just starts to shut parts of the government down?

I can't speak on his behalf, but I can say though that this Empowment Act question will probably be heard this summer or sometime soon.

And if it comes back the way it should, which is this question, again, Hamilton and Madison and Jay, who were obviously the designers of and explainers of the U.S.

Constitution, they wanted spirited tension between the branches.

They wanted collision.

They wanted the branches to kind of not to be at war with each other, but to have different opinions on how governing should this idea that the executive branch must bend a knee because Congress has appropriated the money.

And so, look, in addition to that, is if we can get, this is where the other thing is that I was pushing for, and I don't think it's going to happen, is if we can reauthorize the Presidential Reorganization Act, which has been authorized them many times, which essentially says if an agency can do the work that is duplicative of another agency, it no longer needs to exist.

So let's just take the Department of Education, which needs to end.

The Department of Education needs to be shut down.

Do you guys agree?

And the Department of Education.

So

do you believe Linda McMahon, because she's a great manager.

She's phenomenal.

Is she a managed to the close?

She shares the president's stated plan to close the Department of Education, but let's just take three examples of how that can happen before you close it.

Student loans,

that should be under the Department of Treasury.

Put that under Treasury.

There's no reason it should be there.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Why do we have it?

That was a problem.

I agree.

That's going to require Congress.

What I'm getting at, though, is at least you can break apart.

Yes.

I agree.

We should get rid of any subsidized student loans.

I'm just getting at this is the way that you can actually weaken an agency to no longer exist through duplicative type processing.

School-assisted lunch.

You can make an argument for it or against it.

But school-assisted lunch, basically that the taxpayers need to pay for lunch.

That could be under Department of Agriculture.

They do food stamps.

Much better done.

And then finally, they have this whole separate office of the Department of Education that is Senate-confirmed Tier 2 position that is the Office of Civil Rights.

Put that under the Department of Justice.

They don't need your own civil rights division in the Department of Education that goes and harasses our Christian schools and goes after conservative kids.

So you can completely close that.

That's three functions.

All of a sudden, the Department of Education inherently weakens.

And you know this, Glenn.

The Department of Education actually never existed.

It used to be called HEW: Health, Education, and Welfare.

And in fact, we could re-merge these together and then we could find duplicative type processes and better synergies.

That is even before we get more to the fundamental question of which I have and you have.

I don't think the Department of Education is constitutional.

I do not think that it's in the original intent,

as written, that the federal government has any role in the education of our children, period.

What progressives do understand, but the actual voter that votes, usually what Democrats don't understand, is,

I don't have a problem with the way you live in California.

You want to live in California and you want to

be as insane as you are.

You can do that.

Your own community can vote for that and that's fine.

I'm not going to pay for it and don't force me to live that way.

And that's unfortunately the problem.

We have San Francisco values

in small towns that do not agree with those values at all.

And it's forced upon them.

It's forced upon them because it's federal.

The Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Education.

And even worse, I mean, you guys remember, this was not a very covered issue.

The Department of Education was using school-assisted lunch funding to force transgender bathrooms.

Do you remember this?

It was a lesson.

Like they said, we are not going to give money for kids that need assistance for lunch if you don't have radical transgender policies.

So what we've done is we've created this insane leverage that the Department of Education should not have over local municipalities and school districts.

And the good news is Linda McMahon, I believe, will do two things.

I could say just believe looking on the outside, two things concurrently.

She wants to shut it down, but also fix as much as we can and reverse as much as we can.

No more CRT for schools.

We're going to not send any federal money after schools that are teaching DEI.

And day one, there needs to be a massive push to the NCAA, the NCAA itself, as an official bodying organization, that the federal government will not send another dime of taxpayer dollars if men are competing in female sports.

We will not tolerate that.

Absolutely.

It's not going to happen.

And so there's a lot that we can do in the interim to help reverse some of this nonsense we've been living through.

But to answer the question, is Trump going to just shut down agencies?

He does.

The question is, can he?

And

that's the constitutional question.

It's going to go to the Supreme Court.

And the question there is,

do the federal workers in the administration work for the president or does the president work for them?

This is the fundamental question.

Right.

I mean, and if if you are part of the administration, that is a branch of the government that is separate but equal.

And you have to have an executive that's running.

You're totally right.

And thanks to President Trump with what he did in the first term, I think Glenn, we finally have a Supreme Court that's willing to weigh in.

And look, the West Virginia VEPA case,

other constitutional cases that we've seen in recent years are getting at the fundamental question of, wait a second, the authoring, the birth of the administrative state is illegitimate.

The administrative state itself is an illegitimate experiment, that you cannot author regulation without Congress.

In fact, said differently, that the entire premise that there is a fourth branch of government that is unelected, unknown,

and unchecked is against our birth certificate.

And so I think we're finally, I think the Overton window has moved enough.

And you wrote a book called the Overton Window years ago.

It was a great book growing up.

I read it.

It's finally moved enough where I think the American people can stomach it.

And here's why I love what Doge is doing.

If they do nothing else than just live tweet the government waste that they find in real time, they will have done a great service to this country.

I mean, don't underestimate the exposure of things.

Oh,

I think we saw the Trump Doge machine on Wednesday.

You know, you can talk all you want, but when the president and Elon Musk and the rest of us have a leader that says, nope, stop this right now, the American people stood up and it stopped.

here's what's amazing: thanks to Elon Musk purchasing X and turning it into a more popular, we didn't have to go through any of the mainstream media.

We just did it.

In fact, what the media is now doing, the media networks are now just reporting what they're reading on X.

We can do that.

We don't need to watch them for that.

I know.

They're literally just reading X, and they're like, well, now breaking on X, okay, I got that.

I could do it in real time.

I don't need your intermediaries.

And so it's a decentralization and a small de-democratization of the flow of information.

I will tell you,

when

we were talking about Time magazine and the person of the year,

obvious there's no other choice than Donald Trump.

He is the guy who's going to

change the whole world.

And if he does what he said, he will be remembered as another Abraham Lincoln kind of guy, kind of figure.

I think you're right.

An anti-FDR slash Wilson.

However,

the only other choice could have been Elon Musk.

I think that's right.

He did more to save our country just by buying X than anything else.

I think you'll appreciate this.

I said it when it happened and now it's proven to be true.

It's the most important transaction since the Louisiana Purchase.

Yep.

And of scale and importance.

I believe it was the cause that was set in motion that helped us save our civilization.

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