2-18-25 - 7am - The Spending of Gov Money and Follow the Money

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I know it's a new hour, but what did you
say to the last two minutes of that last hour?

Speaker 2 (00:07):
I have no idea. I've moved on. I love you.
I could listen to that.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Rule of engagement over and over. Just that voice. He's
such a smart ass, the voice, the laugh.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm just curious too, because he says, you know favorite
your two shows, Ice Road Truckers and is it Paw Patrol.
I think he's saying Paw Patrol or is it on Patrol?
Because because is it like a cops thing?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
That's it may be that I just I just you know,
some of those things, you hear it the first time
and you think Paw Patrol, and that's all I hear.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Is popa patrol is fine. I mean you got little ones.
I mean that they enjoy that.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Show, just to give the contrast Ice Road Truckers and
Paw Patrol.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
And you know, well, I do remember when I was
talking about the last two minutes, Yes, someth's about tax reform.
It's tax reform.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
But I we also had I know a text message,
nothing's going to change. We have all these lawsuits going on,
everybody's attacking Trump. Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. Yes,
and all of that is unsurprising. It's fully expected. And

(01:27):
if you've been paying attention, you would notice that the
same judge Chupkin, the judge overseeing the Donald Trump January
sixth trial, who was in my humble opinion, uh, clearly
acting like a h a referee for the Kansas City Chiefs,

(01:50):
was doing everything she could to throw things toward Jack Smith,
who was prosecuting that case. That same judge Chuckkin ruled
in fame of Donald Trump with respect to his ability
to get rid of some of these employees. So it's
not all bad news, and this is to be expected.

(02:12):
So don't be down in the dumps, or don't be
you know, thrown off by the fact that somebody, I
mean really, in the United States of America, you're surprised
that somebody ran to a courthouse and sued to stop
the president from doing something. It will eventually get to
the US Supreme Court, and I think in this case,

(02:34):
which leads me to the next point I want to make,
I think it will get to the Supreme Court, and
the Supreme Court will look at Article two, which says,
in section one, the executive power shall be vested in
a president in a President of the United States of America,

(02:54):
who shall hold his office during the term of four years,
and together with the vice President chosen for the same term,
be elected as follows. And then it describes the electoral
college process. That is, that is pretty much the entire
description of presidential authority that the framers of the Constitution
offered in Article two. Now, a couple sections down from that,

(03:17):
there is a little more specificity about being the commander
in chief, treaties and recess appointments. But for the most part,
the first sentence captures everything, and if you're just an
impartial observer, seems to give the president an awful lot
of leeway. Now, how can I say it gives him leeway? Well,

(03:41):
let's go to Article one. This is the day's constitutional election.
Lesson the section one. Article one, all legislative powers herein granted.
Wait a minute, Oh, so it doesn't say all legislative
powers shall be vested in a Congress. It says all

(04:04):
legislative powers herein granted, shall be vested in a Congress
of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate
and a House of Representatives.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
So Article one Section three.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
No no, no, no, let me, Yeah, I'm the wrong
Section eight. Article one spends most of its time in
Section eight describing a long list of what Congress can do.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Now, why do I point that out?

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Because that suggests that the framers intended to circumscribe, to
limit the legislative branch to a greater degree than it
did the executive branch.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
The relevant part of.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Article one, for the purpose of what I'm trying to
point out here, states, for example, no money shall be
drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made
by law. That seems clear enough, no one can spend
money that has not been appropriated by Congress. Now, the

(05:16):
Constitution is silent on whether the president is required to
spend all the money that has been appropriated, or, in
other words, whether appropriations create a ceiling unspending or a
floor unspending. The Article two language certainly sounds like a

(05:36):
ceiling and not a floor to me, and there's nothing
in the Constitution that would suggest otherwise. And I say
this because we seem to be getting ready to choose
upsides over whether the president can decide not to spend
all the cash that Congress may have appropriated for a
particular function, or a particular officer, a particular programmer, a

(05:58):
particular service.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Now, some people are.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
Going to argue that the Empowerment Control Act signed into
law during during during the Nixon heyday. They will argue
that it makes it clear that the president has to
go to Congress if he wants to withhold appropriated funds. Now,
to be sure, that might be the intention of the Act,
but whether that is consistent with Article two of the

(06:23):
Constitution is another question altogether that nobody's really ever answered.
So where are we I think where we are constitutionally
is that all executive authority, meaning the ability to spend,
rests in the president. The president can only spend up

(06:48):
to what Congress has appropriated. It doesn't mean he has
to spend, but that's the limit on his expenditures. He
can't go out and borrow money. That's a power that
is expressly reserved in Section eight of Article one to
the Congress. So the Congress is the one, which is

(07:11):
why we get to the debt limit and the debt ceiling,
which is why we get to the issues of treasuries.
All of that that is done by Congress. But the
executive power to spend that money rest with the executive
in Article two. Now, the reality that we're at is

(07:38):
that the actual amounts withheld by the current administration is
really just pocket change in the vast I mean vast
I can't think of a better word, spending machine. That is,
the federal government. As entertaining as Elon Musk and the

(07:58):
twenty somethings have been, their efforts are not going to
make any real dent in our spending unless they significantly
increase their ambition. And the President knows that, and he
knows that the current contests over the freezing of appropriated funds,
which will almost certainly be resolved by the Supreme Court,

(08:21):
is actually about precluding those on the left, all of
the USAID, the NIH grantees, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
All of these.

Speaker 1 (08:33):
The real question that is going to be resolved is
really about precluding all of those I just mentioned from
being funded by the taxpayers. And that is a worthy
goal for Trump to be pursuing. Now, when I listen
to people complain about the freezing of money and the
expansion of the imperial presidency, presidency and all that nonsense,

(08:55):
it might be useful to reflect that last week the
United States, at the order of the president attack people
in Somalia, presumably iss not a single soul anywhere in
Congress Clint complained about that violating the Constitution or even

(09:17):
the War Powers Act, because where is the authority to
conduct war? Oh, that's an Article one, that's the legislative branch.
But again, not one person said a word about it.
And similarly, the previous president or whoever was doing things

(09:40):
for him, presided over the largest land invasion in the
history of the world, and nobody, nobody in the left
said a word about it. In short, we let what
the constitution allows. If you prefert look at it that way,
it allows the presidents to do all kinds of things
that are at best, at best marginally listen, drawing the

(10:02):
line and holding back a few billion dollars from fellow
travelers kind of seems ridiculous and petulant, doesn't it. At
the at the top of their tenure, team Trump froze
federal grants, which apparently does such to a bunch of
things that the current magine likes as well, there's a

(10:24):
bunch of things that it doesn't like. But does it
really matter, because at least two separate courts have ordered
that the cash to keep flowing, Yet apparently, in some circumstances,
guess what, the cash still remains frozen. The United States
Agency of International Development USAID has either folded or it
hasn't folded, and that depends on which administration officialists actually talking.

(10:49):
We may but probably aren't going to launch a trade
war against Canada and Mexico. We may or may not
be taking on Gauza as a redevelopment project as a
real estate project. The OPM, the Office of Personnel Management,
may or may not have legally offered more than two
million workers of buyout, or it may have been an
early retirement, not as I keep saying, may or may

(11:12):
not have. Because we've got some judges. This goes back
to my explanation on the Weekend program about jurisdiction. I
think that these judges that are and I've since learned
that some legal luminaries like Jonathan Turley Mark Levin, if

(11:37):
you consider Mark Levin to be a legal luminary, which
most people do and should agree with me on this,
that their jurisdiction is limited to their jurisdiction. What do
I mean a federal judge in Colorado has jurisdiction over
the geographic region that encompasses his jurisdiction, and in Colorado,

(11:59):
it just happens to be the state of Colorado. In
other states, their jurisdiction is limited to certain geographical sections
of a state. I use Oklahoma as the example. You've
got the Western District of Oklahoma, which sits in Oklahoma City,
and those judges have jurisdiction over the Western District of

(12:21):
Oklahoma pretty much just take generally speaking, just take I
thirty five west. That's their jurisdiction. So if they enter
an injunction against the government from and stop the government
from doing something that applies to that geographical area generally
west of Interstate thirty five, then you have the Northern

(12:42):
District of Oklahoma, which generally encompasses eastern Oklahoma, the Tulsa area.
And if a judge in Tulsa enters an order that
says you can or you cannot spend money, my argument
is that injunction, that temporary restraining order applies to that jurisdiction.
I do not think it is within the power of

(13:03):
a federal district judge sitting in Denver or Oklahoma City
or Tulsa or Albuquerque, which again is just the entire
state of New Mexico, has the ability to enter an
order that affects outside their jurisdiction. How can a federal
district judge in New Mexico enter a restraining order that

(13:25):
has an effect in the state of Colorado for everything else,
you would say, well, it doesn't. Well, then why do
we just accept that a federal judge sitting in Albuquerque
can tell the taxpayers or an agency. Well, for example,
there is sitting in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, I'm not
sure where it is. There is some federal government agency

(13:48):
in the Department of Labor. They've got an office in
Albuquerque somewhere, and they happen to have an office somewhere
in Denver maybe or in Lakewood at the Federal Center.
So how can a judge in Albuquerque, exercising their jurisdiction,
enter a temporary restraining order saying to the Department of

(14:08):
Labor outside their jurisdiction. Sitting in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City,
sitting in Topeka, sitting in Denver, sitting in Cheyenne, how
can they enter an injunction saying that you outside my
jurisdiction can or cannot do anything. I think it's beyond
their authority. Their jurisdiction is their jurisdiction, to put it

(14:29):
as simply as I can. But none of that has
been tested, None of that has been addressed by the
US Supreme Court. It eventually will be. Now, take the
courts of appeals now, once these cases in Albuquerque, Denver,
Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Wichita, wherever else a federal district court

(14:52):
might be sitting. Once those get to their respective courts
of appeal in New Orleans or in Denver. For the
ten Circuit, which just happens to be in Denver, which
is a bad example because it kind of encompasses also Oklahoma,
they may look at different decisions around the different jurisdictions
that encompasses the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and they

(15:14):
may say, you can do this, or you can do it,
But the Ninth Circuit sitting out in California may say
the opposite of what the Tenth Circuit says. All of
this will eventually get to the US Supreme Court. In
the meantime, though, you cannot, and I cannot, say that
some spending has actually been stopped I can or cannot

(15:39):
say for certain that some spending has been stopped because
it's so gigantic, it's so unmanageable, that you don't really know.
And then you get the bull crap stories from the
media that is paid by USAID in some instances through

(15:59):
different non government organizations, that say, oh, a woman died
in Thailand because she couldn't get oxygen because they froze money. Now,
let me just say, if you accept that a face value,
and you say, oh, dear, a little old lady died
in Thailand who was a refugee from me MR because

(16:22):
she couldn't get oxygen because Donald Trump stopped USAID from
funding an NGO. That I got to say, you're some
kind of stupid, You're some kind of naive. Do I
believe that a woman died? I actually do believe that
a woman died. But you know what else, I believe
they let her die because the NGO that that woman

(16:46):
was getting her oxygen from happens to have an investment
portfolio worth ninety eight million dollars. You couldn't have sold
one share of applestock at whatever it's trading today or
that day. You couldn't have sold one share of Nvidia.
You couldn't have sold one share of Walmart. You couldn't
have sold one share of whatever and gone out somewhere

(17:10):
or just said, hey, can we take up a collection
from the staff in Bangkok and find enough money to
go buy a tank of oxygen to save this woman's life.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
It's all bull crap.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
I guess the point I'm kind of making is stop
believing everything that you hear. I think some money has
been frozen. I think that some money has been stopped.
But if if you got the bathtub running and you've
got the drain closed, the bathtubs filling up with water,

(17:50):
isn't it Well, that's how government spends money. There is
a constant flow of money. Now, when you turn off
the faucets to the bathtub and you don't open the drain,
there's still money there. But even if you open the drain,
once you turn off the faucet and then open the drain,

(18:14):
the water doesn't instantly disappear. The water has to take
time to go down through the drain, just as the
money that they've allocated and they have takes time to spm.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Mike, as I was passing through Wyoming over the weekend,
there was a lot of Trump enthusiasm. One gentleman jokingly
offered me a couple of Trump bumper stickers. In Casper
and in Sheridan there was a big Dodge truck. The
whole thing red, white and blue with stars and stripes
and giant letters that said, let's maga.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
I've never heard maga as a verb.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
I heard it as a verb either. Let's mega part
of what? Part of what has me continuing with this tirade?
I guess you could call it. It is a text
from Gouber number sixty six to twenty one.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
And I don't get me wrong, I'm not.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
I respect what you say, but I think I understand
why you say it, which is why I'm pointing out
trying to point out what I'm pointing out. Uh sixty
six to twenty one wrote Mike, here's the reality. Nothing
is going to change everything Trump has done so far
as being reversed and blocked by judges. Well, one, that's
not true, not everything that has been reversed or blocked

(19:41):
by judges, And in fact, in a shocking move to me,
Judge Chupkin, who is clearly anti Trump, looked at the
situation looked at the case before her, the request for
a restraining order, and said no. Now that's not to
say that she won't eventually rule against Trump, but it
didn't meet threshold for a restraining order, for a tro

(20:02):
or an injunction. So Judge Chuckkin, of all people, said no,
you can proceed with doing what you're doing. Then the
next sentence, the media is an overdrive against him as well, Yes,
what's new. That's always been the case. And insofar as

(20:23):
being an overdrive against him, that's because he's right over
the target. I'm not prepared to do it today, but
I'm putting notes together about how incestuous, and I mean
that pejoratively, how incestuous the relationship is between USAID and

(20:49):
their funding of certain NGOs that then in turn fund
local national news, television, radio newspapers, all getting money from
taxpayers to fund so called investigations that are obviously pushed

(21:15):
by the CIA or whomever it might be, so that
they can propagandize and try to put people in jail.
It's the corruption is deep, absolutely deep. And whether or not,

(21:40):
and I think we will win, but whether or not
we win, it's now been exposed and it's guild saying,
once seen, you can't you can't unsee it. It's like
it's like, you know, I don't want to see dragon
Naket because once seen, it'll never be unseen. So this,

(22:06):
and I guess I would point out too, I understand
the pessimism. I mean, after all, you're talking to the king.
I mean, you're listening to the King of Cynicism right now.
And I'm actually quite optimistic about things. It doesn't mean
that if we're going to fight a hundred battles, that

(22:26):
we're gonna win all hundred battles, but I'm exciting to
think that we might be in the position of where
we would never win a battle, that we might be
start winning some battles. As as long as I've been
on air, I have been talking about whenever we can
start turning the ship of state around, it's going to

(22:49):
take as it just took since Woodrow Wilson to get
us to the point where we are today. It I
don't think it'll take us that long to get everything
turned back around the other way, but it is to
take time. And that's the point that I'm just trying
to make, is that there's a lot of stuff going
on in our favor right now, and we ought to

(23:10):
pay attention to it because it's really to our advantage.
And to the talk back point about the enthusiasm, we're
in the middle of this storm right now, so we
don't realize because we're not flying above the storm looking
at it. We're actually in the middle of the storm.
It's raining down on us. We got hail, wind, tornadoes, floods. Well,

(23:34):
I mean, the apocalypse is upon us right now, and
we don't really realize it. And we don't realize it
because everything's coming at us so fast and so furious,
and there's so many conflicting things, and we're beginning to
learn not that I ever trusted the media, as someone

(23:55):
who has had his life attempted to be destroyed by
the media, you'll never find me going, oh yeah, I
absolutely trust whatever they say. No, I don't believe a
damn thing they say. But what's happening is we're now
beginning to see this cobweb, this absolute spongy like coexistence

(24:16):
between the media and the government that is going to
take time, energy, and resources to kind of pull all
of that apart. And that's what's happening right now, and
of course they're of course they're calling back. Of course
they're fighting back. Did you expect them to roll over

(24:37):
and say, oh god, we give up. No, this is
their lifeline.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
You know what.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
I don't know that Bobby Kenny would do this, and
I and I have mixed emotions about it. But and
I noticed this because I was watching, you know, my
mom had the news on, and I had to news
on when I got back, and then I was watching
some we're going to talk about sixty minutes later in

(25:07):
the program. And in fact, I should just let it run,
but sixty minutes every online I couldn't see it live yesterday,
or because we've been Sunday, I couldn't see it live Sunday.
So I'm watching it online. Every commercial block is Cream

(25:28):
Abdul Jabbar, the real one, not the old spokesperson, the
real Cream Abdul Jabbar, who apparently has aphib his atrial
fibrillation or whatever you call it, aphib and Pfiser, Pfiser
sponsoring some drug that helps you control your A FIB
And that was every single spot sixty minutes is funded

(25:52):
by Pfizer. Pfiser is funded by the federal government. We're
now finding out that actually CBS News and say sixty
Minutes are in part funded by USAID, and if not
funded by the USAID, they're at least doing stuff on
behalf of the CIA. All of this is coming to light,
and you expect them just to go, oh, well, shazzamne
he caught us, So I guess we'll just give up

(26:13):
and stop that. No, of course they're going to fight it,
because think about if Bobby Kennedy decided that one of
the things he thought would help America is to is
to outlaw Now, obviously he can't do it, and you
know what, he might be able to do it, but
let's just say, let's assume for a moment he has
the authority to do it, to prohibit. But it's like

(26:35):
we prohibit advertising of cigarettes because it's harmful to our health,
the outlawing of pharmaceuticals advertising on highly regulated FCC television
stations or for that matter, highly regulated radio stations. Now,
my first reaction to that is that kind of goes

(26:56):
against my free speech, except oh, wait a minute, it's
a highly regulated industry, where on the other either a
television broadcast or a radio broadcast, I am prohibitive from
saying certain words, one of which is one of my favorite,
which is bull.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
You know what.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
There's so much that I talk about that is bull crap,
But I can't use that word. That's a violation my
free speech right. Well, no, because it's a highly regulated industry,
and so they government has the right to say to
tell me what what words I can use or not use,
you know, based on community standards. Which is kind of
funny because when I think about community standards, I think

(27:35):
me using the word bull, you know what, would absolutely
fit with this community standards. There's very few of you.
I'm sure there's a couple of you. There's very few
of you that will be offended if I use the
word bull, you know what. So yeah, if it's community standards,
is going to be our value that we determine whether

(27:56):
we can use that word or not. I imagine we
took a pull at all be in favor of it.
So imagine if you will, that HHS or the Trump
administration rent large says no more advertising, no more direct
retailing of drugs that you can't get except through a prescription,

(28:20):
and some of those have to be reported because they're
a Class one or whatever it is. A controlled substance
that you you you know, you can't even get an
emergency refill because you're going on vacation for thirty days.
Well it's all you just have to be do. Without
your controlled substance, you can no longer advertise, you can

(28:41):
no longer direct sell those drugs on television. How would
how would sixty minutes survive? How would CBSNBC and ABC
survive without all the pharmaceutical advertising revenue. It be like
taking my pillow off Fox News. Suddenly Fox News is

(29:04):
gonna lose, you know, tens of millions of dollars about
in advertising revenue. This is the season that we're now
living in. This This is kind of what's happening around us.
That we're so busy and in the midst of this
that we don't recognize just how dramatic things are changing,

(29:26):
could change and are going to change.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
So come on.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
For for someone who's as negative and cynical as I am. Yeah,
I'm telling you cut it out. Come along, Come along
for the ride with me, because this ride's gonna be
better than anything you can get it Disneyland, disney World,
or six Flags or anywhere else.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
It's gonna be fun.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
What was it that Rush used to say, follow the money?

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Boy? Are we following the money?

Speaker 2 (30:01):
This is glorious.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
It is glorious, And there're gonna be mistakes and bumps
in this road. This is not a perfect process, you know.
There there are people that will point to, for example, uh,
some of the people at the National uh Nuclear Security Administration,

(30:26):
the n s s s A, by the way, which
which I had a clearance to, so I know exactly.
You know, I remember the guy that ran it. While
I was there. We became we actually became good friends,
and some people that worked there were inadvertently terminated. Well

(30:50):
that's going to happen when you think about there. There
was there was a tweet that one of my followers
was reacting to and was describe me how I've described
to you how it took me six months or more
to find to fire a guy that had been watching
porn five days a week, eight hours a day. And

(31:12):
even though I had a completely legitimate reason to fire him,
because of the unions and because of the civil service
process and all of his appeal rights, it took me
approximately six months to get rid of this guy.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well, just the opposite is going to happen too.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Some people are going to be terminated that you're going
to go, oh, whoops, we swept a little too far
in this room. There were twenty of you in the room,
and twelve of you should have stayed with the other eight.
You're still God, we got to get the other twelve
of you of you back, that's just going to happen.

(31:48):
You can't have a monstrosity where you have just in
the executive branch. What is a two plus million in
the executive branch. And as you go through this and
you start trying to get rid of people, well, yeah,
some mistakes will be will occur. Well be fd I
know for those individuals it's probably you know, like, oh

(32:08):
my god, I got fired today. Yeah, well you're you're
being brought back too. And we understand the trauma that
that caused. But I would also say welcome to the
real world, because this is what happens in the private sector.
So sometimes even as I look around, uh, it's happened

(32:34):
right here, and it's like, yel we think we think
we've made a mistake. Uh, in fact, come back and
we'll put you in an even better place than you
were before. Okay, what am I supposed to do. Uh No, Well,
I knew they had made a mistake, and they pretty

(32:56):
much admitted they had made a mistake, and it just
took time to get it all corrected.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Fine with me. You were paying me in the meantime anyway.
So there.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
I guess the point I want to make is, deep breath.
You asked for this, you voted for this. Now for
those of you who did not vote for it, well
sucks to be you. But this is what a majority
of us have been wanting for decades, and now we're
getting it. And to have an expectation that it's going

(33:30):
to be pure and clean and no mistakes are going
to be made is really naive.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
So when you hear the stories.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
About those at the SSA that inadvertently get terminated, don't
let somebody else tell you that, oh, this shows that
you know that DOGE isn't working and that you know
they're they're moving too fast. I find it fascinating that
somebody would bitch about it moving too fast when you're

(34:01):
going after something that has been building and building and
building for decades, for one hundred years, and now a
mistake is made and you want to bitch about it.
Seems to me that you're just bitching to be bitching

(34:21):
about it. The last point that I would make before
we move, because I do want to move on to
sixty minutes. We'll do sixty minutes next is that, well,
we're witnessing the and when I don't want to now

(34:47):
that I guess I would say we should allow for er.
Allow for error, is the way I would put it.
What's important here is that all of these actions that
we're taking is exactly what we've been asking for. You've

(35:10):
got to move as rapidly as you can. You've got
to do some shock and all. And when you do
shock and all, some innocence innocent civilians will perish or
be injured.