Congressman Warren Davidson joins the show this morning

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Seven oh six. If you about Garrison de talk Station
Abby Thursday, Brian Thomas always looking forward to talking with
Congressman Warren Davidson, So we get to do that right now.
Welcome back, Congressman Davidson. I certainly appreciate your willingness to
come on the fifty five Casey Morning Show and address
the listeners and me and answer the question is the
GOP going to give up on this whole shutdown thing?
Welcome back Congressman Davidson. It's great to have you on as.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Always, it's always an honor, Brian. And is the GOP
going to give up on it? I mean, look, that's
been my frustration a lot of the gops fighting like
the CRS. What we're fighting for, You're like, nothing preserves
the status quo, like a continuing resolution. It's just yeah,
what you were doing, just keep doing that. So it
is meant to be a peace offering, a truce to say, well,

(00:47):
let's at least keep the government open while we continue
our negotiations. Democrats have rejected that, I don't know fourteen
fifteen times. However, many times the Senate Democrats won't get
to sixty votes to even have the real vote, So
this is a cloture thing. The real binding vote could
be later, so you could say, well, go ahead and
have your vote and vote for that. But if you're

(01:07):
opposed to the measure, you could simply say I'm opposed.
But they won't do that in the Senate yet. There
are signs that they might be willing to start talking
about doing it, maybe over this weekend. I think there's
a fairly decent chance by the middle of the next
week and the next week we'll get it done. You know.

(01:28):
Once they did shut the government down, I felt like,
you know, there's a decent chance that this goes past
the election, but it's certainly, almost certainly going to be
over before Thanksgiving. So that puts us in the window right.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Now because they all have to use an airplane to
fly someplace, and the air traffic is getting shut down.
That was the announcement yesterday. The sting is starting to
be felt beyond those who just been placed on leave.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, and look, you know it's felt because everyone has
at some point somebody they know well that's affected, I mean,
and members of Congress do because you know, you're sitting
there looking at your staff and they're looking at you like,
we're going to get this dumb boss because they're not
getting paid. So you know, you look at some of
these kinds of things where in our area right Patterson

(02:16):
Air Force Base is probably the biggest area that's affected,
the largest employer in the state. And you know, people
always say, well, why do we even have non essential employees?
And that's not necessarily a relative importance, it's just a
sense of urgency. Like obviously you can't furlow the federal
prison guards or the prison wouldn't work. But you know,
the procurement wing of the Air Force is important. Generally

(02:37):
they're working on longer range stuff than buying stuff to
keep the Air Force open today. So the people that
are working on say a project for future fighter plan
or something like that, they're furloughed right now. The military
people are at work. It's important that we continue to
do these kinds of developments. I'd say we could be
a little more focused and effective at it, but nevertheless,
some of those people are very essential and they're not

(03:00):
at work right now because of the timing and the urgency.
So you know, some of these kinds of things will
be felt in the long run, but for a lot
of people in their personal household. They're like, things are fine.
Can we keep this going? So we'll see where we are. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
At listener lunch yesterday, I met the first person that
I had encountered that was directly impacted. He's a guy
that was placed on furlough, and so I had a
good conversation with him. He didn't seem really too angry
about the whole thing. He's like, have you met anybody
who's been directly impacted yet? He's like, no, welcome to
the first person. So, yeah, it hasn't reached its tentacles,
hasn't reached that far. But when it does start interrupting
things like people's holiday travel, then you're going to hear

(03:39):
more and more angry voices like, wait a minute, it
does impact me. So if you say it's going to
be resolved by Thanksgiving and I think I'm in agreement
with you on that for a variety of different reasons,
does that mean the Senate Democrats are finally just going
to say, Okay, we'll accept the clean resolution and keep
spending at Biden levels and then go back to work
on the twelve appropriations bills, which is what the whole
setup was for but doesn't the CR as it currently

(04:01):
exists keep the government open until some date in the
short term near future.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
Yeah, I mean the CURRENCYR expires November twenty first, So
the version that passed the House, the version that they've
been voting on, expires November twenty first, So it's not
really rational to pass that with that date. So I
think the minimal change that the Senate will do is
change the date. We were really close to being done
with three of the appropriations bills in the House and Senate.

(04:29):
They're generally bundled in twelve. There's no magic reason it's
twelve bills. Like you normally have military construction and VA
funding in one bill. You normally have transportation and hood
in one bill. I mean, so it's not like a
magic combination. These things are clustered. But we had three
of the twelve bills done in the House and Senate,

(04:50):
and there are differences between them, and there were conferencing
those and some of those meetings have gone on and
they're not necessarily fully resolved. But there are a lot
of people fighting to say, let's put those three bills
on with the CR and show momentum towards you know,
the parts of funding that are bipartisan, So there might
be some kind of face saving compromise like that, But

(05:11):
those kinds of things were already pretty close. And you know,
there might be out of the one and a half
trillion dollar list of demands, some things that were bipartisan.
I can't find anything in that list that I want
to vote for as a single line item, as a
standalone provision. But some of those things might be so
not toxic that they could be added to a bill

(05:32):
and wouldn't necessarily lose votes. Some of them, if you
add them to the bill, well you're going to lose
a lot of Republican votes, but maybe you pick up
a lot of Democrat votes. So we'll see. They may
finally get to that point. But for the longest time
that was the Democrats like, here's our list of one
and a half trained dollar demands, and they didn't want
to talk about anything but that whole one and a
half trillion. They might highlight one or two things, but

(05:52):
their goal was to get to some point. Maybe this
is the point they wanted to get.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Well, I really truly believe part of the strategy. I
suppose you can keep the government shut down that is
a strategy of some sort was to impact the election
on Tuesday. Do you think that had some measure of success?
Can give given the the outcome that was not good
for the Republicans side of the ledger anyway.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah. I mean you look at Republicans that are saying, well,
without Trump on the ballot, we have a hard time
motivating our voters. Well, Democrats are the same way. Trump
wasn't on the ballot. So how do you motivate your voters? Well,
they got caught fighting. It's clear they're fighting for something
other than the status quo. And the status quo isn't
popular with anybody. Nobody likes it because it didn't freaking
work it. So we're supposed to be changing it. And

(06:37):
that's where my frustration with the Republicans has been. Yeah,
we're playing decent defense. I'm glad the Speaker in a
lot of ways has kept us out because it's prevented
the Surrender Caucus from forming and saying, oh, let's compromise
even further. It's like, no, the cr was the compromise quit?
You know?

Speaker 1 (06:53):
So if more people understood exactly how it got to
this point in time, there would be no argument that
who's to blame if blame is this key critical element
for this shutdown. I mean, you set the whole thing
up to take all the wind out of the Democrats
sales by passing the Continuing Resolution to keep funding levels
at Biden era spending. I mean that should have been
the end of the discussion right there. Or the CR passes,

(07:15):
you work on the appropriations bills, and we're all done
and moving on with our lives.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
Yeah, I mean that was the way I was designing.
I mean you look at it, the shutdown, it's like
normally shutdowns over like, well, we put some really aggressive
provision in this bill, and you know, okay, it's partisan,
so we can't get the votes or something like that.
There's nothing in this bill. I mean, now, granted we
passed some other things earlier in the year, and that's
what they're you know, upset about. I mean, whether medicaid

(07:42):
they want to keep giving it to illegals in some states,
food stamps for example, they're talking about that today. But
you know, those kinds of programs. We said, look, if
you're able bodied work at age adult, you don't have
dependent kids at home, I mean, you get to go
to work. Eventually, go to work, go to school, volunteer,
do something productive, just like you would expect a friend
or family member if you're going to help them out.

(08:03):
You know, you'd help them out in a time of need,
but you wouldn't help them out forever. And you know,
we've got millions of Americans that way. And the crazy
thing is we get millions of non Americans. There's tons
of tons of non citizens on this list of forty
two million people. You think of that forty two million people,
that's bigger than the population of Canada.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's amazing. And you know, I saw
an article and I hope I get the facts roughly correct,
but I think it was during the Biden administration of
the asylum applications globally people trying to leave their country
seeking asylum in another country. In terms of the global
population seeking to do that, fifty percent of those requests
came to the United States. I mean, the only reason

(08:43):
I bring that up illustrates that, yeah, we are the
destination land. People want to leave their ridiculously govern authoritarian
regime or communist regime or socialist regime because it's a
terrible life and they want to come to America. And
the problem with that is conceptually it may be okay
because as we get the benefit of all these people
and jobs and everything, but in the final analysis, they're

(09:04):
automatically entitled forever reason to hook themselves up to our
social welfare safety net, which isn't even funded well enough
to serve the American people who expect it.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah, and look, a lot of people on immigration they say, oh,
let's just go back to the days of statue of liberty.
Give us you're tired, you're poor. Yeah, let's go back
to that where like to come here, part of the
condition was you get nothing. There is no welfare state
to begin with at that point. But even if there were,
you can't be a ward of the state. You can't
be a burden on the population. You come here, and yeah,

(09:38):
you get to be here. It's a lant of opportunity,
but you don't get your neighbor's money.

Speaker 1 (09:43):
Exactly right. And there were no social welfare safety programs
when Ellis Island was running. We're overflowing with people. Pause,
we're being Congressman Davidson back on to ask you about
yesterday's a teriff debate for the Supreme Court of the
oral arguments there, and it does not look good for
Donald Trump if you can read the justice's tea leaves.
What are we going to do about that? Let's he
your boybouck about that. From Congressman Warren Davidson the talk

(10:05):
station seven fifty five KRCD talk station Brian timeus here
with Congressomme Warren Davidson talking shut down and for we
real quick here Congress from Davidson before we leave that topic,
and I got to ask you about the tariff situation
to the extent you've got an opinion or thought on it.
But is it possible that, assuming the government reopens under
whatever circumstances, that they are going to move toward the

(10:26):
omnibus thing? Or are we pass that option? Because that's
the kind of scary stuff the sausage making goes on.
With omnibus, you end up with a whole lot of
individuals getting what they want for their state and usually
cost the American tax bar a whole lot of money.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Congressman Davidson, Yeah, we're definitely not ready for an omnibus.
You know, we still don't even have all the details
worked out on like defense appropriations. That's usually one of
the big ones that gets a lot of detail added
to it. And we have a Defense Authorization Act that
needs to pass before we do the defense approbes. So
we've got the three bills that's sometimes called a minibus
because it's instead of twelve bills, it's essentially a twenty

(11:02):
five percent bus, you know. So it's but those bills
have all passed the floor of the House. So these
aren't like things that haven't passed. These are these have
passed the House and they've passed the Senate and uh.
And so combining those in a conference thing really isn't
the same kind of thing as what you see in
an omnibus, because we did have the debate on those

(11:23):
bills in the House. We did offer amendments, and you know,
we know what's in them, and you know the realities
they are all big enough to go, Well, there's some
things in there I really don't like. And you know,
to be honest, one of the biggest things that I
want but we can't get the votes for is I
don't think the federal government should send money to any
political subdivision except states. Uh. And you know, it's a

(11:44):
vital lifeline. We don't really have an easy way to
operate today, like, for example, fire departments need direct funding
from the federal government to really hit break even if
you've got to. There's just so many programs that are
for fire for example, these are essential and they're they're
not part of and we want them to go there.
If you look at how this is broken, just you
put lots of tentacles to every political subdivision, and it

(12:08):
grows the power of the federal government. They're dependent on
the money and they're dependent on the policies. And if
you sent the same money to the state, the state
would then send it differently and it would increase the
power of the states and decrease the role of the
federal government. But we don't have the votes for that
kind of structural shift right now.

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Okay, Well, judgmenth Paul Atono predicted it yesterday said these
tariffs that Donald Trump engage in our taxes, he does
not have the power to levy taxes. Just boiling down
his general points. That appears to be the way the
Supreme Court perceived this as well. That the Emergency and
Economic Powers Act in nineteen seventy seven, you can declare
an emergency. Yeah, but we're not in an emergency. This
wasn't a sudden and out of nowhere that this trade

(12:47):
problem has been building and has existed for well for
one hundred years plus, So you can't declare an emergency
for something that's been out in the open. If that's
the direction they go and they declare these tariffs unlawful,
what's going to happen? I mean, I guess I'm wondering
what are the options? Is Congress retroactively ratifying them. But
since we're in the middle of a shutdown, I can't

(13:08):
really see the Democrats actually giving into Donald Trump on
literally anything, So that's unlikely to happen. How do you
see this unfolding being unpackaged?

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yeah, I don't see any way the Democrats give the
votes to give President Trump the discretion to do a
thing like one of the no brainers that the Senate
Democrats rejected. We didn't get a vote on it in
the House yet, but it was if people are essential
enough to be at work, like air traffic controllers or military,
you know, prison guards, whatever, then the payroll clerk is

(13:38):
essential to so at least be the people that are
working right now. And so they're like, no, no, that
gives discretion. As the president, Trump has to see who's working,
and so he can just leave people not at work,
and so we can't do that. And so I don't
see on tariff's Democrats giving the votes for that because
it would allow President Trump to make a decision. But

(13:59):
that's what he was elected to do, is make decisions.
And look, we didn't have free trade before Donald Trump
was president. We still don't have free trade, but we
moved in that direction and the tariffs were leveraged to
do that. And look, I won't say it's not unanticipated
that this would happen. I introduced a bill called the
Global Trade Accountability Act if this eventuality should get here

(14:19):
or whatever. The President is kind of reached a point saying, yeah,
we're pretty content with our trade negotiations. And it allows
the president to change terms with anybody for up to
ninety days at a time, and it doesn't say you
have to change them up or down, but you just
have to change them within ninety days, and then Congress
votes on them. And the goal would be country by
country or group of countries by group of countries. Then

(14:41):
once you've got some sort of deal locked in, then
Congress votes and you lock them in and now you've
got some level of certainty. But any future president, they
could come in and change tariffs or up to ninety
days at a time, and you could say, hey, we're
going to put a ten percent tariff and ninety days
is coming. The goal would be to use that as
leveraged say, look, we can either go up or down,

(15:01):
but we can't stay at ten percent.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Well, I guess I have to ask the fundamental question
the trade agreements that he was able to successfully negotiate.
Had he gone out into the world SAMs a power
to impose tariffs, but under his power over foreign policy
negotiated trade agreements with say some the Chinese or the Japanese,
whoever it happens to be, he could do that on
his own. The power that gave him to negotiate the

(15:25):
trade agreements he's locked in so far came from the tariffs.
So is the original sin of his tariff wielding increases
that led to a trade agreement? Does that negate the
trade agreement? I suppose that's a legitimate question to ask.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, I think this would just be the dumbest self
inflicted moment. Yeah, that the Supreme Court could deal to
our country. You know, could we do this a little differently? Sure, maybe,
but that's for Congress and the president to decide. If
Congress wanted to claim that power, we could pass a bill,
but we haven't. And Okay, you could say, well, there's
a standoff between Congress and the president and the court

(16:00):
needs to decide. Okay, maybe that would be the case,
but the Congress hasn't said we're going to reclaim this
power from the president. You know, there's people that have
said we should, but generally that's Democrats. It's party party
line fight, with the exception of you know, three or
four people in the Senate. Beyond that, it's like, yeah,

(16:21):
we want the president to have the power to do
this negotiation. And I forget which justice it was. I
think it's either Kavanaugh or Roberts who said, look, so
let me get this straight. Under the law, as you stated,
the president could completely cut off trade, can do a
full embargo for every country in the world. Right, Isn't

(16:41):
it seemed crazy that he he could do that extreme
of a measure, but he couldn't put a one percent
tarify And that was the that was the question. And
I think as they contemplate this that might resonate. And
the other part is just if you look at the
effect of what the work has been done in this administration,
frankly the last it would completely gut you know, this

(17:05):
administration's work in foreign policy, which is very clearly the president's.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
Round that clearly is well. I suppose Congress is still
in recess. You guys, have Kevin been called back to
work yet?

Speaker 2 (17:17):
Have you? Yeah, I mean not for a formal session,
so most of us, I don't know about everybody, but
you know, I've been back, you know, not every week,
but most weeks I end up going back for a
few days. Yeah, I was there.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, I'm not suggesting for a minute you're not doing
work or that work is not getting done. But since
you haven't been formally called back, you can't vote on say, oh,
I don't know released in the Epstein files. People seem
to think that that's the basis for the closure right now,
and I just want to get that out in the air.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah. No, Look, you know, my good friend and Kylie
Thomas Massey's get a discharged edition. It will be ripe.
And I think, look at they're going to get the signatures.
It'll come to the House for the votes. It'll have
the votes. But the real problem is isn't whether we
get another report or another set of files, or another
hearing or whatever. The real question is when is somebody

(18:04):
going to jail? And that's the question I want. And
one of the hearings that didn't happen because we weren't
in session is Pam Bondi coming before the Congress and saying, okay,
explain yourself. You hand out binders to the press, You
say there's lots of there there. You imply that there's
going to be these trials. And then next thing you

(18:26):
and President Trump are saying there's nothing there, and you're like, well,
please show us the nothing, because you with the binders
full of blank pages. I mean, the public needs to
know that. And I think at some level that's a
valid thing. Well, okay, since you're not explaining, we're going
to call the question. Show us the stuff.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
It invites conspiracy theories and invites thoughts and comments, and
you know, you can clear the air, release the dam files,
and let's move on with our lives. You know, maybe
there is nothing there and we can all say, oops,
I guess I shouldn't drawn conclusions but all those conclusions
are being drawn because of the craziness surrounding the fact
that we haven't seen him yet. Congressman Warren Davidson, appreciate
what you're doing for the American people, and I know

(19:05):
you're hard at work and spy to the recess, but
I'll let you go to go back to the hard
work you're doing. And I invite you here on the
fifty five Cares Morning Sha anytime you want to talk.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Always an honor of brain. God bless you and your listeners.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Take care of my friend seven point thirty right now,
but you have care