The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome. Welcome, Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be with you again today. We’ve got a lot to cover. We’ll get an update on the immigration situation with a Numbers USA Vice President Chris Chmielinski in just a moment, and we will Also have a chance to hear from Ted Malloch. He’s got a new piece up on failed states. That’s a term that the internationalists love to use, such and such as a failed state. They mean like countries, nations that are failing, and Ted turns it on its head, takes a look at some of our failed states as in the United States. So we’ll talk with Ted Malloch, always entertaining.
Alright, so what you need to know today. I wanna tell you, I wanna describe for you. A tension that’s occurring that I’m not sure how it’s going to be resolved. It used to be that if you had a position of governmental authority and you were therefore in power, you could make news. Meaning, if you were, say, the Oversight Committee chairman and you had the opportunity as Oversight Committee chairman. Like Congressman Comer and you could make you could call witnesses and have hearings. You could make news and therefore you could drive an agenda. And I think people like me, I think I would have been consistent in saying that driving that agenda is, it can be consistent with oversight. That’s what a House member is doing when they’re, well, on the oversight committee. But also when they’re, you know in the minority otherwise, you know, the Senate is Democrat, the House, the the executive branch Democrat. This is a way to shine a light on things. I think I would be consistent, I hope I would be in saying that’s what Democrats can do too when they have only one house, one Chamber or one aspect of things. So there’s this, Congressman Comer, and he’s the head of the oversight committee. And so here’s the tension.
One, if you can’t get coverage of what you are doing, does it really matter? And it does. I think if you’re doing oversight on, say, financial services and you’re trying to find out why the regulators did not have a feel for Silicon Valley Bank, then you’re doing something substantively that’s governing, that’s good. But if you’re trying to lead with the so-called bully pulpit, and you can’t get any coverage from the media, it’s not going to matter. In a few moments, we’ll talk with Chris Chmielinski, one of the reasons I’m talking to him is because. There was a Hearing at the border of the Homeland Security Committee and the media didn’t cover it because in large part, the Democrats boycotted it didn’t show up at all. And it’s a field hearing. It’s a little different than the main hearings that happened in the US in the in the US capital. But still the point is. If you’re trying to drive the bully pulpit, if you’re trying to drive a message from the bully pulpit and you can’t get the media to cover it, can you really lead that way. And the answer may be no. And therefore it may be that the Republicans will never really be able to be the leaders in that aspect of things, and they have to fall back on so-called governing, actually looking for oversight and finding oversight, and then referring things for either legislation and winning the argument about legislation or referring it for other kinds of other kinds of investigations, or even prosecution. But comes now Jamie Raskin, who’s now in the minority and he’s on the oversight committee with Congressman James Comer and House Oversight Committee Chairman Comer. It turns out, was sending subpoenas to certain key people. Due in this case, due to the Hunter Biden investigation, at least one financial institution to say, hey, what’s going on with what we’re seeing here? Lots of money transfer to, I don’t know, Ukraine Burisma and China and others we want and even some Russian oligarchs. We want to get some sort of clarity on this. But here’s, Raskin leaked that. Raskin. He did it in a clever way. Raskin sent a letter to Comer, and he said, hey, you’ve been subpoenaing people. What about us? And then he, Raskin put the letter out into the public and the media then ran and said to Comer, you’ve been subpoenaing people because there’s no, Comer didn’t do a press release, Comer didn’t announce what his plan was, Comer didn’t signal what his investigation was. And so Raskin is playing sort of the bully pulpit defense. But he gets media coverage, he’s got a willing media. So Comer doesn’t, Comer, the Republican chair doesn’t have the aid of the over, of the media. Even though he’s got the power of the oversight chairmanship. But Raskin does, and so you end up with a set of stories about what Raskin wanted and how Raskin wanted to drive the message.
And I guess my point here is, you know, even though the even though the Republicans have come into so-called power in the House and they have thought, ah, we’ve got two ways to influence what’s going on. One is the bully pulpit that may be out the window because if you can’t get the bully pulpit covered by the media, you kind of lost that Leg, that, that, that aspect of your work.
The second one is pure oversight. That hopefully wins as I mentioned to, hopefully leads as I mentioned to legislation and filing legislation and winning the ideas, the battle of ideas. Out in the amongst your colleagues. And perhaps in the public. Again, it’s a it’s a major problem that we have seen the media degenerate into such partisan warfare and and I’m not even talking about when they take a position. The, the, the, the media seems, for example, to be for women’s right to choose. And against the pro-life position, it seems like that. I’m not sure. I’m not saying it’s 100%, but it seems like even the coverage of the framing of that issue. Some of us are for banning the killing of babies that are born nine months or just one day short of nine months, a partial birth abortion. That seems like a real killing. We wanna stop as opposed to being against women’s right to choose or women’s healthcare. But my point is how they cover things. It seems so partisan these days and what they cover is clearly so partisan. And so the agenda is driven by the media, who are accepting or are generating the talking points and the pardon me and the viewpoints. Of the Democrats. It’s a major problem and I believe that the problem is worse now than it ever was. Because in the past it may have been. That the media was largely biased, but they were more subtle about it. And so a guy like Newt Gingrich was able to actually dominate messaging in various aspects of the of his of his time as speaker in various aspects of the media. He was actually able to do that.
Now it was a different era in terms of the the, the, the, the types of media you know, Newt Gingrich was only dealing with, you know, three or four networks and and cable and talk radio. He wasn’t dealing with what we’ve got now. Which is, you know, all this action, all of this content which is being driven and and all the time. And so it’s a different world I I admit. But the biggest part of the different world, in my opinion, is how blatantly, how dramatically the media has gone over to the other, to, to, to being in favor of one side. From the coverage that they give to the positioning of it to the failure to critique things, Joe Biden had a gaffe the other day where he talked about giving the eulogy at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Jimmy Carter’s not dead. That that was like, offensively ugly, and they covered it. They barely covered it. I, if Trump had said that, it would have been like a story for a week. I’m not sure that would have been good or bad. I’m saying it was ugly. You know the the press secretary in the White House is is fully incompetent, an incompetent person. It, just incompetent in her job. And it’s not covered because she checks a lot of the boxes and she says what they want to say. And so it’s it’s hard to see. How to adjust the plan to lead.
And you know. As someone said just a few months after uh Rush Limbaugh died, you you can’t. You almost can’t know. The impact of Rush being gone because Rush had the ability to be sort of the Super communicator to I, I don’t know the the center right for sure, but large, large portions of America that were not even particularly conservative listened to Rush Limbaugh. They followed Rush Limbaugh and they followed his logic.
And so you’re watching sort of as they proceed, you’re watching in sort of real time, the adjustment of the Republicans to the power and leadership that they have. And it’s not easy, it’s not easy. And you know the Raskin, the story I told you about this letter that Raskin did, it’s not like that’s the biggest deal, right? That was not the that’s not the biggest story. It’s not the biggest anything, but it’s an example I could see right away that Raskin, by his letter, could drive the agenda and the media would participate. And the media would would participate in the direction he wanted and be framing the sets of stories for Chairman Comer. And if you, maybe you’re a watchdog and you say, oh, this is better. We don’t want the person in power. The oversight chair to have too much power, but it didn’t work the other way. When the Democrats were in charge, didn’t work the other way. It’s it’s one sided is the problem. Even if you think you know more, attention is better. So it’s a problem. It’s a problem for Republicans. I’m not sure they know how to address it yet. That’s what you need to know. The problem in messaging.
Let’s take a break. We’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report back in a moment.
