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June 10, 2025 17 mins
Justin Haskins, Heartland Institute, writer & commentator, and co-author of Glenn Beck books, joined Preston to discuss the BBB, who actually ran the White House during the Biden years, and more. 
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the third hour of the Morning show with Preston
Scotch and one of friends. I'm Preston. He is Jose.
It's great to be with you back on the air
after just a little extra day off yesterday. I've got
my brother in law and sister in law and their
kids in town and we were just having some fun
yesterday hanging out, and so it's good to be back
with you. And we are joined by a dear friend

(00:24):
of the show. He is a prolific writer, commentator. He's
a fellow at the Heartland Institute. He's authored books with
Glenn Beck and he is justin Hapskin's How are you, sir?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I'm doing very well. How are you?

Speaker 1 (00:37):
We were just talking about the Karreein Jean Pierre book
Independent to Look Inside a Broken White House Outside the
Party Lines. Clearly you're going to be buying this book, right.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
This is the first I'm hearing that it exists. To
be totally honest with you, I can't believe that anybody
is going to buy this book except for maybe her
maybe her mom. That's probably an.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I mean, could there be a more blatant marketing ploy
to try to get people in the middle and the
right to buy a book than to say independent to
cause us to think that she's somehow now just seen
the light.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
I don't even know if you could call it that,
to be totally honest, A desperate cash strab might be
a better description. I mean, it's these people who were
involved in the Biden administration are going to go down
in history as not only being part of one of
the worst administrations this country has ever had in its

(01:36):
entire history, but also people who unethically, immorally, possibly illegally
hid the fact that the President of the United States
was essentially out of his mind for at least the
last year of his presidency, probably a couple of years,
and that they didn't tell anyone, and that they not

(01:59):
only not totally one, but I mean, they were actively
running this guy for president again for four more years.
So they're trying to clean up their their image here.
They're trying to make it seem like they're actually good guys,
they didn't know anything, and that they were trying really
hard to, you know, be just servants for the country

(02:21):
and all that crap. But I don't think anybody is
buying it. I think anyone who was involved in that
administration is going to be tarnished forever, and I think
that that's perfectly fair and reasonable.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Justin is it a waste of time for Congress, I e.
The Republicans in Congress to try to find out who was,
in fact calling the shots. I believed that when Barack
Obama announced he was staying in Washington, that he was
gonna that he was authoring the undermining of the Trump administration.
The first time around, I believe it was the Obiden administration.

(02:55):
I think Obama was running things. But ultimately, is it
important for us to know?

Speaker 2 (03:03):
I think it is important for us to know. I
think it is important to know who the president of
the United States really is in any given period of time.
So I think politically it's not helpful at all. I
don't think it will buy you any votes. I don't
think it's going to be something that we should spend
massive amounts of resources on or anything like that. But

(03:25):
do I think that there should be you know, a
small handful of people in Congress that take this on
and say, we're going to find out what happened here,
what people knew, if there was lying, if there was fraud.
We're executive orders being signed without the president even knowing
what he was doing. You know, they're crimes committed, where
they're felonies committed. I mean, these are things that we

(03:47):
really do need to know. And frankly, this is sort
of the thing that Congress is the best at. In
a way, they're not very good at actually passing laws,
but they are good at investigating things and drumming them
up and making it into a big issue. So I
think this is something that they should pursue.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Last week on the program, I shared that I had
a interaction little chat with my sister via text. My
sister leans well left, and she said, what do you
think of this Musk Trump battle? And I said, they're
both right and they're both wrong. Justin Haskins with me
from the Heartland Institute. Justin, I've kind of distilled it

(04:29):
to this that this is really a battle between what
is principled and then coming against what is political reality.
What is your take on the big beautiful bill and
where it falls short and where we are in the process.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
I think you're one hundred percent right about that. I mean,
after the twenty twenty four election results came in, one
of the big takeaways from it really that didn't get
enough attention was that Republicans really didn't win all that
many seats in the House, and they won the Senate,

(05:07):
but you know, not overwhelmingly, not like you know, Barack
Obama in two thousand and eight or something like that.
And so when you have these tight margins in the
House and in the Senate, and you don't have sixty
votes in the Senate, which is extremely rare these days,
it's really really hard to get anything through Congress without

(05:31):
loading it up with all kinds of stuff that you
really don't want to put in it if you're a principal.
So from a practical standpoint, it's almost impossible to get
anything like this past without out watering it down in
some ways or whatever. What the Big Beautiful Bill does
very well is it has certain key issues, key priorities

(05:54):
that are in there for sure, like border funding for example, know,
like making sure that we have border security. Finally, they're there,
and you know, they're a variety of other things as
well that I think are good in it. And those
things come at the expense of a lot of bad things.
But the idea that you could actually pass a bill

(06:16):
through Congress that meaningfully cuts government spending over the long
run and fixes our national debt crisis, which I think
is a huge catastrophe. I'm really I'm not one of
these people that thinks, oh that death doesn't matter. No,
it really matters, I think. But and so Elon Musk
is right, but they're not going to But but they

(06:37):
were never going to fix it, and I think that
was the mistake Elon Musk made was believing that they
actually would do that when they they never had the
votes in the past, when Republicans have had the vote,
they didn't do it. So it's just it's just, uh yeah,
I think Elon Musk on principle is one hundred percent right.
We are heading for a catastrophe because of our debt

(06:59):
and what it's going to do to our currency and
what it already is doing to our currency. But they
were never going to be able to fix it. And
so Trump has two choices. Either he puts his full
weight in support behind the things he can get done,
or nothing gets done and he stands on principle and
nothing happens. So I think Trump, being who he is,

(07:20):
is always going to take the path of let's get
something done, even if it isn't perfect, and I think
Elon Musk should should try to understand that.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Do we take anything positive out of I read some
comments by US Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who, by
the way, I'm growing an affection for him because he's
just so much fun to listen to. But he said, look,
there are things that we've got to make better, and
we've got to make some cuts and adjustments to this

(07:52):
and we're going to hopefully, I think he put it
this way, hopefully everyone takes their meds and we get
it done. Do you take any from that?

Speaker 2 (08:02):
I think there's going to be well. I mean, I
do think there are people who are trying to make
it better, and I think that through the process of
negotiating in the Senate especially, I think it will get better.
But ultimately there's going to be a lot of bad
stuff in it. That's just the reality of the situation.
There's going to be some crony isn't in it. There's

(08:22):
going to be way too much government spending in it,
and that's just not something that can be totally fixed, unfortunately.
And our choice is either we get none of the
priorities of you know that we want done or that
we you know, at least get something done. And it

(08:43):
isn't going to be perfect, and we're going to have
this spending issue. That spending issue is going to be
there probably no matter what. So I feel like we've
got to at least accomplish something big here and then
we try to go back to the table at some
point and deal with the spending issue. But this was
never going to be the way that that was going
to happen.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
Because I love to make sure that even if I
have ruined your outlook on a number of things, that
I leave you all feeling at least a little bit better.
For example, I might say your breath stinks, but I
bet the garlic pasta was really good, you know, I
mean something like that. And so, justin we've just talked

(09:32):
about the horrible things that are buried inside the big
beautiful bill, let's remind everybody the things that are in fact,
vitally important that have to get across the finish line.
What matters most.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, I think the biggest well, there are a lot
of really important things. I mentioned the border security in
a previous segment. I think that's absolutely massive, huge part
of this bill. There are some really good things related
to welfare reform and sort of entitlement reform not in
TITLEM over a welfare reform that require work requirements and

(10:11):
things like that that have been stripped out of there before,
and I think that's really important stuff for the long
run health of those programs. I think economically, probably the
most important thing in it is that it makes permanent
the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for individual tax cuts,
those are all set to expire at the end of

(10:32):
the year, which means everybody in this country just about
is going to get a tax increase. We're going to
get a tax hike, one of the largest tax hikes
in the history of this country for personal income tact is.
If they don't pass this law, they're set to expire,
so they have to get that done. That's a huge, huge,
huge issue because if they don't accomplish that, then we

(10:54):
are going to see, you know, an economic crashed potentially
over something like that. People's lives are going to be ruined.
So I think those for me are the biggest things.
Those are the most important things. There are a million
other smaller things in there, adding more ice agents, which

(11:16):
I think we can all agree now is probably important
border patrol and ice agents. Yeah, you know, it helping
you know, get rid of the sort of the Green
New Deal crap that was in there. Are those ridiculous
tax credits and things that were put in there by
Joe Biden and the Democrats, massive waste of money, helping

(11:39):
to increase domestic energy production, which is going to lead
to all kinds of economic growth in this country. That's
a huge win for people. Lots of jobs are going
to be creative for that. I think that's massive. So
all sorts of great things in it, no question about
that at all. But it's going to come at a cost.

(11:59):
And we all just have to accept that. That's the
way things work in Congress. And frankly, we shouldn't need
bills like this in Congress. Decisions ultimately should be made
at the state level for most things, and I would
love for this country to get to a point in
time where that's how we deal with public policy. We
don't have big, beautiful bills. We have states making the

(12:20):
vast majority of the decisions, and the federal government basically
stays out of the way. And until we get to
that period of time, I think we're always going to
have huge problems anytime we try to get something good
past in Congress.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
How important is the posturing that we should begin seeing
in about six months or so for who Donald Trump's
successor could be.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Oh, I think, honestly, this is a this is a
question for after the midterm elections, because what's going to
happen is the midterms are going to be I think
very bad for the Republicans. Do you and I do yes?
And the reason I believe that is because it's not
because of anything the Republicans are doing necessarily, It's because

(13:12):
the history of midterm elections following a presidential election victory
for a particular party, when that person's party, the president
is in power in Congress, almost always that person loses
the next midterm election the party does.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
But if I were to, if I were to make
the argument to you, the reason for that, at least
on the Republican side, is they don't effectively message right now.
They should be saying, here's where we are, but here's
what we could do. If we had sixty seats in
the Senate and a control of the House beyond a
few seats, we could get this done and just go

(13:53):
right back through the agenda that Donald Trump ran on.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
I think that's probably true, but they won't do that.
So I think, like I've given up on that's that's
not going to happen. And really, when you think about it,
I mean, this is a problem for both Republicans and Democrats.
If you go back to the nineteen seventies, go back
to the nineteen seventies, there's only been two times when

(14:17):
a president was in office and his party was running
Congress and then they had a midterm election and that
party maintained control of Congress. One time was Jimmy Carter,
believe it or not, and that was back during a
stretch when Democrats always won Congress they were in charge
for like fifty years. And then the other time was

(14:37):
in two thousand and two, right after nine to eleven,
and the Republicans maintained control of Congress. Then every other
time Republican or Democrat, they lose in the midterm election,
and I think that I think it would be really
really hard to break that trend, especially in a situation
like we have right now where you have a really

(14:58):
tight margin in the House. So Republicans, I think are
really good shape for the Senate, but I think almost
certainly they're going to lose the house. No and so no, no,
it's gonna happen. But it is just I'm sorry. I
know you said you wanted to leave everybody on a
good note, and I did the opposite of that.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
Now, I'm a realist. I want people to hear what
people think about these things, and you are a very
respected mind on this show, sir.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
This is why we need to get everything done that
we possibly can now and not hope that it will
have an opportunity to do that in the future. We
may not. We probably won't. History says it's not likely.
So we got to get something good done right now
or the opportunities are going to disappear soon and we'll
have accomplished nothing.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
I agree with that. I just want to keep prodding
the Grand Old Party to learn how to message, and
they might win enough hearts and minds to get another
swing at this. But you're probably right, but I won't
admit it.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
But you know what, sometime remind me and I will
bring up this incredible letter that was sent around privately,
I think in the Nixon administration, where basically they were
saying the same thing that you were just saying back
then that Republicans have a messaging problem and we can't
We're really struggling to fix it. If we can just

(16:24):
fix it, we'll keep we'll win more elections. And they
still haven't done it.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Sweet lord, now I'm really depressed, all right, justin thank you, sir.
I appreciate your.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Time as always, Thanks Preston, take care.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Justin Haskins with US Nixon, the Nixon administration, they were right,
So am I so is justin twenty eight past the
hour
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