The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome. Welcome, welcome! Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. And we have a great show again today.
We will talk with John Zadrozny, John Zadrozny, who is over at America First Legal about the affidavit, the famous Mar-a-Lago affidavit. I was interested in his perspective on that.
We’ll also visit with Ron Kessler, Ronald Kessler, who is an author. I saw him on Jesse Watters last week. And he’s not exactly pro Trump anymore. He was, he knows Trump from Palm Beach where they were neighbors years ago. And so Ron Kessler, though, has a great perspective, well, has a great history writing about the CIA, the FBI, as well as the White House, I think, under W. Bush and also has a lot of contacts in the Secret Service who told him about Biden being not very pleasant when he was vice president for some of the female Secret Service agents. So we’ll hear what Ron Kessler has to say in a few moments.
All right, what you need to know today. This is an important one. I’m going to try to flesh this out for us. What you need to know.
If you go over to ProAmericaReport.com, you can sign up for that email right there at the top of the page. It comes every day, every morning. 08:00, a.m. East coast, 05:00 a.m. Pacific, goes out to almost 50,000 people and the WYNK. What you need to know, an email that gives you a few key topical issues as well as some links to articles and often this segment, What you need to Know segment from this radio program.
Today What you need to know is not that it’s a simplification is probably, it’s not that it’s a simplification,
I’m trying to simplify it down so that we have an understanding. You start to understand the pieces. Okay?
So there is a lot of conversation going on right now about oversight. People will say, oh, wouldn’t it be great if there’s Republicans that get, in the House or Senate, they’ll get oversight over the FBI, oversight over the Department of Justice.
Here’s what I want to tell you. The oversight committees are generally places for grandstanding. And here’s what I mean by this. Any of the oversight committees, the one in the House or the Senate, they’re places where people bang on the table and they say, we’re going to ask you what went on and you’re going to have to tell us, and you’re going to sit there, but nothing happens. There’s no real role for changing behavior. There could be legislation filed, I suppose, or developed, but it doesn’t happen. It’s a little bit like the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House is a place where lots of sound bites happen, lots of television bites, but not much action.
So here’s what I want to tell you. Going forward, the change that has to take place is, the best oversight is grab them by the wallet. Grab them by the wallet. What do I mean?
The best oversight is to take the budget of people who are either doing something wrong or doing something we don’t understand and hold it and don’t pass it, don’t allow it to go. I learned this in the time that I was Chief of Staff to the Governor of Missouri, that the governor, one of his greatest powers to make recalcitrant bureaucrats operate was he could hold the budget, he could cut the budget. He could decide that his priorities changed within what’s happening and you could move it around. That’s what got the attention of the bureaucrats the most.
So what I’m calling for and what I think needs to happen is going forward in 2023, we need serious oversight and action. Oversight plus action. The only way to get oversight plus action, instead of just oversight and talk, oversight with action is grab them by the budget. And there are appropriation committees, sometimes narrowly tailored, that a certain subcommittee will be the Appropriations Committee of the Health Committee or I guess what it’s, Education and Workforce is one, Education Committee, another one is Health Committee, health and Human Services. I suppose there will be a housing committee. Appropriations committee. So under these big committees, there’ll be Appropriations Subcommittees. That is where we must demand that their leadership in the new House and Senate, frankly, whatever party, if you get the Democrats to do it, I’d be fine with it.
They won’t, but they need to get appropriators in those committees. That will do oversight plus action.
Oversight plus action is grab them by the wallet.
Grab them by the wallet. Grab them by the budget.
Grab them by the budget is the best way to get the attention of the bureaucrats. It’s the best way to get the attention of the opposition party that has control of the executive branch.
Because, by the way, it’s constitutional. That’s actually what you’re supposed to do. If you’re the House of Representatives, you can pass laws, and the laws you pass may get signed by the President, and then they have an effect.
But you control the budget.
There will be no budget without the House initiating, that’s the Constitution says that. The founders planned on that because they knew the power of the purse would be a big balance of power. If you talk about what balances the power in the country, what you need to know is the balance of power.
It goes to the House, not even the Senate for appropriation, although the Senate can do it too, because the Senate gets every House bill, right. And there are Senate appropriation committees, subcommittees on appropriation. So when you’re talking about billions and billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, really, the appropriators can demand the bureaucrats take action, respond, and they can say no, but then you can cut their budget.
They can say, I don’t want to, and then you cut their budget and you say to them, look, I’m not going to debate you. I don’t care. You can either produce the documents that reveal what’s going on, or we’ll just hold your budget. And you could say, well, it’s hardball. It’s this. That’s the way the system was set up, our founders envisioned it.
One of the problems with the states and the way our state sovereignty was granted to the federal government, all of the sovereignty that we grant to the federal government comes from we the people. It comes to the federal government from the states.
That’s one of the reasons why state attorney generals have powerful positions and should be even more powerful. But one of the reasons why the constitutional amendment that granted a federal income tax the change was such a problem is it took away that check. We all pay federal income tax. We all pay federal tax. Not everyone. But you get my point. Most people are. And once the money is gone, let’s say average 30% tax, federal income tax. You know, most states have 5% tax income tax. Virginia has six. I think Missouri has less than that. Tennessee has zero. Some states have zero. Florida has zero. But a lot of states, New Jersey has, I think, 10%.
But most of the money that’s generated in this country goes right into the federal treasury. And so we can’t get state sovereignty of the federal income tax, by definition. This is one of the reasons why we shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. It’s why it’s so problematic. But we are where we are, and therefore we need some heroes.
We need some heroic leaders who will take over the appropriation committees in the House and Senate, and they will have power in their subcommittee on appropriations for the Department of Justice. The power will not get past them. They can’t be rolled. If they get that spot, they can be a transformative leader.
We can grab these bureaucrats by the budget, and once you have them, you can get either information or a change in behavior. And hopefully what you get is, instead of grandstanding for sound bites on Fox News or CNN, we will get significant changes and transparency.
Do you know how much money the federal government passed out of our treasury during Covid to all sorts of places? And we have no idea what happened. Look, we sent $40 billion to Ukraine, and everybody admits now that the money, they don’t know where everything went. There was no way. This is what Rand Paul, senator Rand Paul said at the time, hold on, aren’t we going to have some kind of mechanism to track this? Everyone said, don’t be silly. They need the money now. And now it’s all gone. And everybody admits it was wasted, it was corrupt, whatever. Not all of it. Some of it got there. Probably some of it bought military stuff, but we don’t know. Same thing with COVID. Hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars was sent to the states, and to local municipalities, into schools, etc, etc. But we don’t know where it went. We don’t know where the money went. Can you imagine? Think about that.
So forget as you’re thinking about the new Congress and you’re thinking, how can we get control of the Biden administration that has inflation through the roof, gas prices through the roof, the stock market tanking regulations on everything, preference for windmills over the American family, all that stuff.
Well, one thing we can do is get some fearless leaders.
Be honest. I’ll be very honest. I don’t want to see oversight showmanship like, say, the Benghazi hearings or any of the other ones. We don’t have time for that in this country. We need leaders who will actually change what’s going on, change the dynamic significantly. And the best way to do that is through appropriation.
So I’m putting a marker down now.
It’s what, two or two and a half months before the elections in the fall and another two and a half months from January when they take power. We need to start talking about it now. Forget the oversight grandstanding and let’s get oversight plus action by grabbing them by the wallet through appropriations, grab them by the budget. That will change the dynamic and that will change the country and we’ll have a chance.
So that’s my tip for that. That’s what you need to know, take that to the bank. No more oversight grandstanding. I mean, they could do it, I don’t care. Some of it’s entertaining and if it’s educational or something, fine. But as to changing and saving the country, we need to go and we need to figure out who the leaders are, who will be heroic leaders on Appropriation and grab them by the budget. That will change and save America. That’s what you need to know.
Coming up in a few moments, we’ll talk with John Zadrozny of America First Legal as well as Ronald Kessler. Be right back. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. We’ll be back in a moment. Don’t forget to visit ProAmericaReport.com. Back in a moment.
