Larry Bernstein
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein.
What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, finance, politics, and sports. I give the speaker just six minutes to make his opening argument.
The Topic today is Why did it take 15 Votes to Elect Speaker McCarthy?
Our speaker is Gisela Sin who is a Political Science Professor at the University of Illinois. and the author of the book entitled Separation of Powers and Legislative Organization: The President, the Senate, and Political Parties in the Making of House Rules. Gisela will explain what rule changes that McCarthy had to agree to get the necessary votes, and we will find out what the implications are for the legislative agenda and the House’s power in negotiating with the President.
We will also hear from Tennessee Republican Congressman Mark Green who will describe the internal squabbles that he witnessed during this historic 4-day saga on the House floor to pick the Speaker, and I plan to ask Mark about what this means for the Republicans going forward during this term.
There is much to cover so buckle up.
I make this podcast to learn, and I offer it free of charge. If you enjoy today’s podcast, please subscribe from our website for weekly emails so that you can continue to enjoy this content.
Let’s begin with Gisela’s opening six-minute remarks.
Gisela Sin
Topic: What happened with Dobbs, and what should we expect from the Supreme Court?
Bio: Political Science Professor at the University of Illinois
Reading: Separation of Powers and Legislative Organization: The President, the Senate, and Political Parties in the Making of House Rules is here
Transcript:
I'm Gisela Sin, I'm associate professor at the University of Illinois here at Urbana-Champaign, where I do research on how institutions influence behavior and outcomes in the United States and Latin America. What happened at the beginning of this Congress in January 2023? For the first time since 1859, it took 15 ballots and a four-day marathon to elect the Speaker of the House. McCarthy won the election by getting at 216 vote majority with six Republicans voting present after negotiations in which the so-called rebels got promises in policy and some committee appointments and a few procedural rule changes. I want to name one specific rule change, which I think is important, which is the elimination of the Gephardt rule, by which the House now has to vote on an increase in the debt ceiling.
The election of the House Speaker is normally a formality. The majority party unites behind his nominee who is chosen in advance by the caucus. The session was unique as it took Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican, 15 votes to get elected. Was the situation the debacle that threatened the country as journalists portrayed it? I don't think so. What we publicly saw was something that happens a lot in congresses in the United States, but also around the world, that legislators use leverage to increase their ability to influence policy in the future. There are a few elements we need to think about to understand the situation. So first, the sequence of events: There's a chamber in the House that votes on the Speaker, and immediately after that, he votes on the power that it will give to this person.
And power is qualified in what is publicly known as the rules of the House. This rules package determines the powers the Speaker will have and the power that simple rank and file or even committee members or committee chairs will be able to use. The Speaker’s selection and the House rules adoption control nearly everything that will happen over the next two years. It's a pretty important decision. What these legislators were doing was something legislators have done for about 150 years, which is use the rules to achieve their goals. In my book, The Separation of Power and Legislative Organization, I make a strong argument that who has power is not static but something that matters depending on the context.
These decisions about House rules are not made in isolation. We know the House cannot make laws by itself. It needs to negotiate with the Senate and with the president. In this case, the Republican majority needs to negotiate with a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democratic president.
Long before they start legislating, House members have a strong incentive to anticipate the dynamics of the impending congressional session. The success of the House is highly contingent on the actions of the Senate and the President and by constitutional design House members must anticipate those actions at the very time they revise their rules.
The preferences of the Senate and the President will affect the dynamics of policymaking. The whole Speaker rule fight was all about how to distribute power between factions given the preferences of the Senate and the President. This is key to understanding what happened. The new rules gave outlier members within the GOP the power to block any attempt to increase the debt ceiling. The requirement of a separate public vote on the debt ceiling will help Republicans condition their vote on policy concessions from the White House. What we are seeing is McCarthy signaling and saying explicitly that their price for supporting a debt ceiling increase is broad spending cuts. So in my view, the 15 votes during four days strengthen the position of the House in these negotiations.
Empowering these extremes and in their circumstances might be beneficial for McCarthy and Republicans. When McCarthy's sitting with Schumer and Biden, he will be able to say, I would accept this, but I can't go back to with this offer to my party. The Freedom Caucus would never accept these conditions, and they have to vote on increasing the debt ceiling. And he's really credible because it took him 15 votes to get elected.
Will these changes last? I don't think so. If Republicans win the presidency, if Republicans win the Senate majority in two years, they will change the rules.
Larry Bernstein:
The press and the Biden Administration mocked McCarthy and the 15 votes it took to win the Speaker position. They said it was a sign of weakness and disorganization in the Republican Party. The argument was that these Republicans cannot even choose a Speaker; they are totally inept and incapable of governing. Why do you disagree with that? And how will the House rule changes influence the Speaker’s power?
Gisela Sin:
The concessions do not weaken McCarthy at all.
Probably the change that was the most consequential for McCarthy was naming three members of the Freedom Caucus in the Rules Committee. One of the changes that the press talked a lot about was the motion to vacate the Speaker position. That motion is not that important and has been in place since 1790. The motion does not mean that the Speaker is less powerful or more constrained. In fact, the only time that it has been used was in 1910 in which that was not even successful.
Larry Bernstein:
What seemed strange to me was that the Republicans made these 15 votes in public. Why didn’t the caucus fight behind closed doors?
Why didn't they say, we're empowering the most conservative members of the House through these rule changes? Let's just all vote for McCarthy and support our new Republican leadership. Why give the Democrats the joy of seeing this infighting?
Gisela Sin:
Party brand is very important. Part of that brand is being united, showing one position on policies showing what they call a united front. For the Speaker, it is a balance between giving power away to outliers, but on the other hand, keeping a party together in a way that he will benefit their brand and will allow them to gain votes and to win in the next election.
McCarthy, none of the changes weaken him. He has the power to recognize whoever is going to speak in the House. There are no challenges to McCarthy being able to name whoever he wants for each committee. Nothing removes the power that he has to determine the agenda of the House.
Larry Bernstein:
After Watergate in 1974, the Democrats won a landslide in the House with a huge class of liberal freshman congressman. And their first act was to undermine the seniority system for committee chairs that reduced the power of the more conservative Southern Democratic delegation. How important were these decisions to the power structure in the House?
Gisela Sin::
That was an important change. It came from this influx of young and progressive Democrats coming into a House that had these very conservative Democratic chairs from the South. These chairs have basically run the show since the 1930s. I think that was about balancing power.
In order not to break its own party, they needed to give power to this faction, which were the Southern conservatives. This starts to break down in the seventies when they can vote on the committee chairs anonymously. Three of these committee chairs at that point get removed from their position. That's a big change that removes power from committee chairs and put it in the hands of the Speaker. And what we have seen since then is more centralization of power in the Speaker.
Larry Bernstein:
How does the centralized power in the House control the amendments and the timing of passing legislation?
Gisela Sin:
It's not only the Speaker, but also mostly the rules committee. What the rules committee does is set a rule under which a bill will be discussed on the floor. They can decide whether there will be amendments at all. It might be nobody can make amendments. They may decide that only legislator X and Y can make amendments, or that anybody can make amendments. That is an open rule. They also make decisions about how much time people are going to have to discuss. In fact, the real fight in any bill is about the rule. So, Obamacare, when it passed the house, it's all these legislators coming and making a one-minute speech.
The real discussion was before on the rules. I think it's the nastiest debate I've seen in the United States, people being very aggressive. This is mainly because once the rule is approved, the fate of the bill is done because it's a completely closed package. You know who's going to offer an amendment, how people are going to vote on that.
Even though the Speaker is not on the Rules Committee, the Speaker has the power to appoint people in the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee can waive the need to have 72 hours to read a bill before it's voted on. This is something that the Rules Committee waives all the time. They can bring the bill in an hour, even though the bill has a thousand pages, you have to go and vote.
Larry Bernstein:
There’s a famous Pelosi quote, which is you need to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. How is it possible for Congress to do its job if no one knows what’s in the bill? And why did the Freedom Caucus, find this to be such an important rule change?
Gisela Sin:
A lot of these bills, people don't have enough time to read them. There's a book called Legislating in the Dark precisely about this. What it shows is that this is not just one occurrence, but increasingly these bills are in a room and there are no copies. You have to go inside the room, read the bill, and get out if you want to read it beforehand. And sometimes you don't even have the time. Because the more time you have for people to read the bill, there's more possibilities of people organizing, making coalitions, not voting or wanting to change some parts of the bill that has been negotiated among the leadership.
I want to make it clear, it's not about political parties, it's more about the power dynamics. The Freedom Caucus got a commitment that the Rules Committee will not waive this requirement. They will enforce the 72-hour rule. But they will not want everybody to be able to read a bill that they like. They want it approved before it goes on the news and before it can get debated in the public sphere. It's just a promise that they will not waive this rule. It's not set in stone.
Larry Bernstein:
The biggest fight between the Republicans and its Speaker was in 1910 with Joe Cannon. Why did Cannon face a revolt from his own party and is it comparable to what just happened with McCarthy?
Gisela Sin:
Joe Cannon was the Speaker of the House from 1903 until the Republicans lost the majority in 1912. He was a very powerful speaker. He was the chair of the Rules Committee. He had the power to appoint members of all the other committee chairs. He had the power to control the flow of legislation. In 1910, there was a revolt carried out by their Progressives in the House.
Larry Bernstein:
Just to clarify it was the Progressives in the Republican party who led the revolt who got the cooperation from the Democrats.
Gisela Sin:
Exactly. The progressives within the Republican party, there are these two main factions within the Republican party at that point. The conservatives, which Cannon was part of, and the progressives of which we have Theodore Roosevelt, the president. Many others, especially from the Midwest, were part of this progressive faction. The general story has always said that Cannon became so dictatorial that in 1910, the progressives couldn't stand it anymore.
The only thing that Speaker Cannon lost was his power to be chair of the Rules Committee.
When I went back to read the literature, what I found out is that Cannon was not more tyrannical in 1910, that he had been in 1903, 1904, etc. What happened was that in 1910, there was a presidential change. We go from Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive champion, to William Howard Taft.
Taft is a very conservative member of the Republican party. The progressive faction in the House was fine having a tyrannical speaker that pushed things through the House.
Larry Bernstein:
So, the Progressives were happy to have an aggressive Speaker when Teddy Roosevelt was President because they knew Roosevelt would push progressive legislation. But when the Conservative Taft became President, they lost a guard rail to protect their favorite progressive legislation. Can you give us some examples?
Gisela Sin:
The FDA, the 1906 food bill, the antitrust. All of these bills that are extremely progressive, they were all passed under Cannon. But when William Howard Taft took the presidency, we see a very strong reversal in policies. It is at that moment when the progressives embark on this revolt, and just like this time, they don't remove a lot of power from Cannon. It's like saying, “Hey, if you keep moving policy to the conservative side, we can do this again, and we could unite with Democrats.”
After that these bills become way more progressive.
Larry Bernstein:
Previously on What Happens Next, Henry Olsen spoke on a podcast entitled No Red Wave. I asked him about the upcoming McCarthy Speaker vote and the likelihood of a revolt. Olsen said the revolt would be loud but not particularly meaningful because there was no other real alternative for Speaker. And without a real alternative, what are we really talking about? Were the conservative members of the House merely playing to their home constituencies?
Gisela Sin:
I think you are right in that one of the things that they did is show their constituency that they have the guts, that they're credible. Yes, they don't trust McCarthy and they want commitments. But they really did not seek to limit those powers by changing the House rules or the party rules in any meaningful way.
Larry Bernstein:
The Republicans won a very narrow House majority in the last election. If the Republicans had won more seats would McCarthy had won on the first vote and the Freedom Caucus been tossed to the side?
Gisela Sin:
The House Freedom Caucus gets about 40, 45 members. So, the House Freedom Caucus knew that this was an opportunity to get national attention, to communicate to their constituency their position and how strong they feel about it. I think this will have consequences in terms of fundraising for them.
But I think if the Republicans had the gains they got in Obama midterm elections, probably it wouldn't have happened. But that was a big change. I don't think we can have those type of changes in majority anymore.
Larry Bernstein:
Immediately after the 15 votes to determine the Speaker, there was a discussion in the press that the Progressives in the Democratic House coalition learned a lesson about how they can increase their power when the Democrats win their next majority. Why didn’t the Democratic Progressives make a similar push for power when Pelosi was Speaker?
Gisela Sin:
In my view, progressives never took on a revolt because Nancy Pelosi comes from the progressive faction of the House. Pelosi has to take positions that are for the whole Democratic caucus. But progressives know that she's not going to go very centrist in any policy that passes the House.
Many leftist policies were able to pass because of her strength in the House and her power to set the agenda. She was extremely instrumental with healthcare during Obama. So, I don't think the progressives have a real reason to revolt.
Larry Bernstein:
I asked you to speak on this podcast because I was baffled by the infighting among Republican congressmen. We have a Democratic President and Democratic Senate. Nothing is going to pass for the next two years of any real substance. Why was there a fight when nothing is expected to happen?
Gisela Sin:
Because there are some things that need to get done, for example, increasing the debt ceiling, they have to do it no matter what.
And that's where the Freedom Caucus says, “we need to vote on this and this is where we're going to have a lot to say.” It's the same thing that happened in 2011. They got huge budget cuts because they had to vote on the debt ceiling.
Larry Bernstein
New topic: Why did Kyrsten Sinema the Senator from Arizona decide to declare that she is no longer a Democrat and that she is now an independent?
Gisela Sin:
It is because of the primary elections. I think she was going to get challenged by a more progressive candidate. The electorate in primaries is very different from the electorate in a general election. Who goes to vote in primaries is people that identify strongly with the party? This tends to be people more on the left, more on the right. So, in a primary she was going to lose, and then it would be very hard for her to try to run as an independent.
Right now, she still has the position in the party, she's independent and she has all this time to build her brand and to be able to fundraise for a general election later on.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think Sinema has a chance in the general election if she faces both a Democratic and a Republican challenger? Do you think her behavior is in the party’s best interest or is it in her best interest?
Gisela Sin:
I think this mostly makes sense in her own interest and she might be able to pull it off because she has a big-name recognition in Arizona. I really don't know how that's going to play it out. She may split the Democratic vote, but she may also get some Republican votes on the center.
Larry Bernstein:
Joe Manchin played hard to get with the Biden administration in the negotiations for major pieces of legislation. Was Manchin successful?
Gisela Sin:
I do think he got a lot. The infrastructure bill was completely changed because of what he wanted.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s move away from political theory to the human side of policymaking. Senator Sinema was heading to the bathroom and some progressives followed her in and were berating her while she was in the bathroom stall. Manchin made similar complaints that he was being harassed by the staff in the Biden administration who were making statements to the press that he was not keeping his word. How do the human elements come into play in politics?
Gisela Sin:
People study voting and people vote because of identity issues, emotions, feelings. But I study institutions. Give me the same exact preferences, you get a different outcome if I change the institutions.
Larry Bernstein:
When I was a kid watching the Saturday morning cartoons, there was a public service commercial series entitled Schoolhouse Rock. And my favorite of the group was one called I am only a bill. I am going to play the chorus section for you now.
Do you agree with the cartoon explaining the legislative process to becoming a bill, or do you think it has misled by generation about how congress works?
Gisela Sin
<Laugh> Yes, I totally agree. <Laugh>, I think it has. I show it to my students, and I say it's way more complicated than that. There are all these institutional veto points that can kill a bill at so many points. Only 10% of the bills that get to a committee get out of the committee. And then out of those only, and with luck, only 1% get to be voted on the House floor. So, it's really, really hard to make laws. The institution can kill it at any point. And one of the things that really surprised me is that there's so much emphasis put on every representative represents so many votes and that we are all equal. And these representatives arrive in Congress and in the House especially, it's the most unequal institution ever. I think I have more power in my department than they do in the House.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each episode on a note of optimism, what are you optimistic about?
Gisela Sin:
I am very optimistic about the institutions in the United States. I think they're extremely resilient. This is not true in many countries. You can have this battle for the Speaker, and it's okay. We can have a January 6th that the institutions survive. They are strong. They have support from citizens. Even though everybody hates Congress, and Congress only has 10, 15% support from the public, I don't think people would want anything but a Congress. You cannot imagine a coup or anything like that succeeding.
Mark Green
Topic: Squabbles in Congress during the Speaker of the House election
Bio: Tennessee Republican Congressman
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Mark, what was it like to be a member of the Republican caucus during those marathon sessions to elect the next Speaker of the House?
Rep. Mark Green:
I think our emotions went up and down. Some of it was satisfaction. We, as a party, are not this robotic thing that falls in line with the speaker. If you look at the way Nancy Pelosi ran her conference, it was 100% robotic, what she said happened. That is not how the people of America expected Congress to work. Certainly, people who are Republicans don't expect the Republican party to function that way. On our side, we had negotiations, and those negotiations were evolving.
A majority of the Freedom Caucus was actually with Speaker McCarthy from the beginning, based on the changes that were announced the Sunday before the votes started. We went into several votes, and then the emotions were just, are we there yet? No. Okay. One more. Are we there yet? No, but we finally negotiated, we got it. McCarthy walked up and banged the gavel. I think it reflects a real commitment to democracy and the rules package. I think it's very beneficial to America.
Larry Bernstein:
Give me some examples of the House rule changes?
Rep. Mark Green:
One of the most frustrating things to me as a member of Congress, now in my third term, is this idea that you can just tack anything onto a bill. It does not have to be in the concept of that bill. 8,000-page bills that wind up adding billions of dollars to the budget. That is very frustrating because you will start with something that you definitely want to vote for and you want to support, and they tack on all this other stuff, and you need. I cannot support the whole bill. They have done away with that. A bill has to be on one single subject, and all the amendments to that bill have to be in line with that subject. That is going to save the country billions of dollars.
The second thing is they would hand that 6,000-page bill to you and tell you we are voting on it. They would hand it to you at 11 o'clock at night and vote three calendar days. So, it is physically impossible to read the entire bill before they expect you to vote on it. It is offensive because it basically says leadership gets to write bills and we just must vote on them, keeping in line with the way the Democrats have done business. Now it is a full 72 hours. If you drop the bill at 11:00 PM we cannot vote until three days later, 11:00 PM and since the bills are going to be shorter because we are not tacking all this other stuff on, we will be able to get through them. I think that is two examples of two rules that are A, going to make Congress work more efficiently and B, protect the pocketbooks of taxpayers.
Larry Bernstein:
Does it matter that the Freedom Caucus received three seats on the House Rules Committee?
Rep. Mark Green:
The rules committee can create exceptions to rules, so they can vote to override rules. Now the Freedom Caucus has three votes in that committee and can help control whether or not ridiculous exceptions happen to violate the rules. That was an important piece. If you are going to have rules that the Freedom Caucus and other conservative members of the Congress have asked for, you got to have a mechanism to keep them from being undone. Putting three members on the rules committee, that's the safety net, if you will.
Larry Bernstein:
Do the 15 floor votes that elected Speaker McCarthy increase his power because he now has a stronger hand in his negotiations with President Biden and the Senate Majority Leader Schumer because he can assert that he cannot control his conservative flank?
Rep. Mark Green:
I think it does. Absolutely. Especially when we're contending against the Senate on budget issues. This really empowers McCarthy, it empowers the House, because McCarthy can be removed now with one person on our side making a recommendation. So, it really empowers the Republican caucus to contend against some crazy thing coming out of the Senate.
Larry Bernstein:
What was it like to be in the middle of the Speaker election negotiations?
Rep. Mark Green:
It was tense. Kevin's perspective, particularly as it relates to giving people positions on committees, he thought that was a little bit unfair. The problem was there was also some need to make that steering committee a little more representative of the conference as a whole. Another one of the things that got negotiated, that's Freedom Caucus membership on the steering committee. It was tense at times because that philosophical difference. If you look at a Republican sitting in a 70-30 Republican district, that Republican is different than a Republican who sits in a Biden 13. And we have a Republican who actually sits in a Biden 13. So, I'd rather have that guy in there who will vote 60% of the time with us than a Democrat who will vote 10% of the time with us.
Larry Bernstein:
Why didn't any of the Democrat vote for McCarthy to be the Speaker to minimize the power of the Freedom Caucus?
Rep. Mark Green:
I think they loved watching us struggle through the process, and we would not have allowed it because they'd have made demands and their demands would've been significantly different than the Freedom Caucus or the Conservative Caucus' demand. Kevin said he never entertained a negotiation with the left to get his speakership. I commend him for that. It cost him an agonizing week, but it was the best thing for the country in the end.
Larry Bernstein:
You mentioned that the Democrats enjoyed watching the internal strife among the Republicans. Why didn't the Republicans debate this offline like in a convention hall away from the Democrats?
Rep. Mark Green:
I think making it go to the floor forced the process for both sides to come to an agreement. It would've lasted a lot longer had we not been voting.
Larry Bernstein:
How will the combative Speaker election effect the workings of the Republican caucus?
Rep. Mark Green:
I had an old mentor of mine say that the road to maturity must cross the bridge of disillusionment. Meaning you must go through some conflict to get to a point where a relationship is matured and meaningful and deep. You can either go two ways with conflict, you either become greater enemies or you become closer friends if you work it out. I would submit to you that we've gotten closer, and I'll give you an example. Literally the next week, one of the bills we wanted to pass was this protection of the strategic petroleum reserve. Guess who came to the rescue and saved that effort with an amendment, Matt Gaetz. One of the biggest holdouts against McCarthy came to the rescue and saved our first piece of legislation.
So we went through this process, we fought like cats and dogs and came to an agreement, and then that body started working super well together. If you look at the legislation that's happened since then, whether it's kicking Ilhan Omar, the anti-Semite, off of the Foreign Affairs Committee, or the protection of the strategic petroleum reserve, or voting against socialism and getting a hundred Democrats to support that. Those are wins for our side. And I think it is all a product of going through and birthing through those challenges.
Larry Bernstein:
How did the negotiation with the Freedom Caucus change the House Committee selections? And specifically, did it have any influence in your getting to be the chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security?
Rep. Mark Green:
I would submit to you that it probably did not change the committee chairmanships. By changing the steering committee slightly, you got a little more conservative memberships in the committees. There have been some assertions that I got this chairmanship because of a deal that was cut. One, McCarthy says that is not true, and so does the Freedom Caucus, or the folks who were in the room. But I have a breadth and depth leadership that my competition just simply did not have. I had been working that steering committee for a year going and meeting with them individually, doing desktop PowerPoints, expressing my experience and as a physician, as a business leader with a Master's in Information Systems. But I know from articles that have come out recently, that is not necessarily the perspective of everyone.
Larry Bernstein:
Mark, you were a member of the Republican minority in your first two terms as a member of the House. And you complained to me when you sat in the minority that you had little to do because the House did not engage with the minority party.
Is the Republican plan to engage with the Democratic minority with the hope that when the shoe is on the other foot that the Democrats will treat Republicans in a similar manner?
Rep. Mark Green:
The answer to that is yes. I can tell you, at least on my behalf as a committee chairman, I have made a commitment to the ranking member that we're going to advance some bipartisan stuff. I think America wants to see the needle move, they want to see Congress function.
I started the Reagan - O'Neill Club where we bring Democrats and Republicans together after hours to have an adult beverage and just get to know one another. The parties have diverged so much in the country. The trick is not necessarily to agree, we are not going to agree, but we don't have to hate one another for disagreeing. Mending relationships that is one thing. Then finding those areas where the Venn diagram still overlaps and executing effective legislation and oversight in those areas is critical. I think the American people expect it, and we must deliver on that stuff.
Larry Bernstein:
One House rule change is the elimination of the Gephardt rule thus forcing a vote on an increase in the debt ceiling. McCarthy is already using that debt ceiling as leverage in his negotiation to limit future government spending. Biden has said publicly that he will not play that game. But Speaker McCarthy is having ongoing conversations with Biden on this topic. How important was the elimination of the Gephardt Rule?
Rep. Mark Green:
It's a good thing. We've got to be able to negotiate on discretionary spending. When Republicans had the majority the last time, we decreased discretionary spending by $10 billion. Now $10 billion is not a lot, but normally it goes up. And in the last Congress, it went up trillions.
We cannot continue to spend like we are currently doing. We're going to bankrupt the country. What Biden's saying is essentially we just must accept this without a discussion. That is like a husband or wife running up the credit cards and then refusing to talk to the other spouse. There's no spouse in America that would put up with that. So, we are not going to put up with it. We are going to sit down and negotiate.
Larry Bernstein:
What are you optimistic about?
Rep. Mark Green:
I am optimistic that this budget stuff will result in some savings for our country. I am optimistic that the Republican-controlled House will be able to insert some transparency into our foreign policy. The issues that fall in my realm, like cybersecurity, Southern border security, we are going to make some inroads there. Will it be exactly what we want? No, we will not get that until we have the Senate and the White House. I have a positive outlook. There's still work to be done. We will move the needle a little bit this Congress, and then when we get control in 24 of the Senate and the White House we won't fail.
Larry Bernstein:
I suspect that with a divided Congress, a Republican House and a Democratic Senate, that no major legislation is going to pass this session. So, why was there such a big fight in the Republican caucus when so little was at stake?
Rep. Mark Green:
We're the roadblock to crazy spending and crazy liberal ideas. We had to get it right. And the rules were the starting point for getting that right. I think the discussions we had that that brought the middle of the party, and the right of the party together was very valuable.
Larry Bernstein:
The Republican House can use its power to investigate the Biden Administration. What do you think will be the focus of these investigations?
Rep. Mark Green:
I will be oversighting Alejandro Mayorkas, he just left my office. I think we will get some transparency. We will shine a camera and a light where the last Congress refused to oversight the administration. That is going to be good for the American people when they realize what is happening at the southern border, because we are going to make them aware of it. I think America will put pressure on that side of the political aisle, and some change can happen. That's the hope anyway. I recognize hope is not a method, but we will be aggressive and forceful in that oversight.
Larry Bernstein:
What did you think of Biden’s State of the Union address, and did you appreciate having Speaker McCarthy on the dais behind the President and next to the Vice President?
Rep. Mark Green:
It was great to see Kevin up there and very satisfying. Look, there were things the President said that I agreed with, but I got to tell you, it's really hard to go sit down with President Biden after he basically says you're going to steal food from the mouths of babes and senior citizens, that was a lie. It was a boldface lie. There is no Republican who wants to cut Medicare or social security benefits. It's a political talking point for them, they basically are lying to gain power. That was very offensive to nearly all of us. It makes working with Biden extremely hard now.
I am not so sure a lot of bipartisanship is going to happen with a guy like that. With a guy who shines red lights and looks like he's in the Death Star with Marines behind him talking about how people like me are a threat to democracy. It's absurd. I was prepared to give my life for this country, and on a couple of occasions, almost had to, when bullets were ripping through the helicopter that I was in. I was offended by that part of it. But he's also the President of the United States, and having served in the military, I respect the rank instead of the officer. I will always be respectful of the President of the United States. Where we can work together, I will as best as I possibly can.
The Speaker Saga