Why Not Vote 'No'? — Thomas Massie on Reason's Just Asking Questions Ep. 2

Name: Why Not Vote 'No'? — Thomas Massie on Reason's Just Asking Questions Ep. 2
Uploaded: 2023-12-14
Duration: 37 min 52 s
Description: Massie's philosophy of voting: when he votes no, when he votes present, and the dozens of times he's been the only no in a 435-member chamber. The clearest articulation of how he reads the Constitution.

Dec 14, 2023 · 37:52 reason-tv constitution philosophy uniparty

Massie's philosophy of voting: when he votes no, when he votes present, and the dozens of times he's been the only no in a 435-member chamber. The clearest articulation of how he reads the Constitution.

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this is just asking questions a show for inquiring minds on reason today we're joined by Congressman
Thomas Massie house representative for ky's fourth congressional district he's a consistent opponent of government deficit spending foreign aid and
overreaching federal mandates all of which have occasionally left him as the sole no vote on bills with otherwise overwhelming support in DC which we'll
talk about today thank you for speaking with reason Congressman Massie hey thanks for having me on Zack when you first uh the first thing I
want to ask you about is uh before we get to your your kind of so descent uh that that you've uh been the the soul
denter that you've been many times before I want to talk about uh something that's really pressing that's unfolding in DC right now which is the re author
or a vote on the fisa reform and reauthorization act and as part of that the reauthorization of something called
section 702 um which uh essentially allows the government to surveil Communications
between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant um and it seems like now after some
resistance a clean preauthorization of that is unlikely to happen it they're attaching it to the National Defense
authorization act which is kind of like the the the mil the defense budget for the year um and they're they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into
that could you just tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue right so we're not trying to eliminate
the fisa 702 program it was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant in
order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant you have to be outside of the country and you have to be not an American citizen if you're inside the
country or if you're an American citizen outside of the country you can't be spied on by this program okay sounds great right but we've got 250,000 people
on that list that were collecting information on and in the process of collecting that information it if you talk to a business person in France for
instance you your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection well what they've been doing is they go
into this giant ball of you know data and they put in your name they can put in Zach's name and search it without a
warrant U without Reasonable Suspicion or probable cause there's or and or any of those sort of uh thresholds legal
thresholds not to investigate suspects but to create suspects let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and um they
developed some Nexus they say well we think these protesters were inspired by Russia okay um well we're just going to run all the protesters names through
this database now even though the Intel Community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this they've admitted that
they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they search for us persons U data in this
hstack they say well it was created legally so we don't need a warrant to go search it there are two proposals to
reauthorize this program by the way there the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire so it's important that they do expire occasionally and this one expires
in January and in the Judiciary committee which Jim Jordan chairs and on which I serve we've marked up a bill that would
require them to get a warrant it would create uh criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the
program because there's never any uh you know culpability or or blowback for anybody that's abused this program um
but this would create that so we've created this Reform Bill and then the Intel committee has Crea a bill which is less than ideal it doesn't have a
warrant requirement it doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the Judiciary bill has and in fact it expands their ability to
collect information to for instance uh if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe that that service provider would be treated
like Google or Verizon now and they would have to create a direct pipeline to the Intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that so
that you got two proposals out there and we're running out of time so what speaker Johnson has proposed and some Senators have proposed oh let's just
keep the old program in place for a little bit longer your basic Congressional kicking the can down the road exercise that's going to be uh
passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and ran Paul can stop it then it comes to the house probably tomorrow now an interesting thing here is I serve
on the rules committee and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well and we told the powers the be uh we're not going to we
can't go along with this so they couldn't um pass a rule to combine the fisa program with the ndaa that's how
they're going to try and get it through attach it to must-pass legislation the National Defense authorization act well we said nope this shall not pass the
rules committee so they're going to try and do this on suspension which and there's a house rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules
and expedite something you need a two-thirds vote of the house so this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively
290 uh people to vote for it yeah yeah it is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were
first awaken to this with the Snowden Revelations about a decade ago uh there were some sort of you know lonely
denters to just rubber stamping this stuff yourself among them some of the other people you mentioned Rand Paul Mike Lee uh some people on the
Democratic side of the aisle uh it does seem as if now there's more resistance I mean I assume some of that has to do with the way fisa was used uh against
the Trump Administration do you feel like there's the political Tides have shifted uh somewhat to the advantage of
people who care about privacy and government surveillance yeah the tides haven't just shifted the stars have aligned okay we've we've never had a
chairman of either the Intel committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities um and so with Jim Jordan
we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee and this is one of his signature uh agendas is to get this
reformed because we have seen abuses that have been used against the president um president Trump so cons a
lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them um you have liberals who
are upset about the program obviously the FBI is using this against black lives matter as well um and we we know that to be the case so you do have this
Coalition of the left and the right um it used to be a coalition of maybe a dozen people right like it was me and
Justin OS and zo Lofgren and and tulsey gabard maybe uh who were concerned about this and we used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix
this in the funding bills we would try to defund some of this stuff which is a really blunt instrument it's a lot easier to write a legislation that
affects the laws than it is to just defund something and they they would Pat us on the head and say well you know we appreciate the sentiment but this isn't
the time or place to to do what you're doing and um you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding but now is the
time in place the program is expiring we've got uh a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause and um a lot of
people a lot more people on the left and the right who are you know this reported out of the Judiciary Committee 35-2 there were only two denters and it
was on the Democrats side to the Judiciary fisa Reform Bill Congressman I want to ask about foreign aid so this week seninsky came
to Washington and made his pitch for why the United States uh in his eyes ought to be funding Ukraine's uh war against
you know a horrible Invasion by Vladimir Putin there's also obviously a you know terrible foreign policy situation in the Middle East right now between Israel and
Hamas you have called you know funding Ukraine and F funding zalinski uh I believe it was economically illiterate and morally deficient yes make the case
for why you oppose this form of funding well the economic illiteracy is in reference to a letter that the White
House sent to the House of Representatives last week and in two or three of the paragraphs of the letter they spouse the virtues of spending
money with the military-industrial complex and sending that to Ukraine as a job creation program that it would reinvigorate our military industrial
complex they instead of I guess mic is out of date it's now the dib the defense industrial bases I guess they want their
dibs they're going to get their dibs on our tax money but they they do they call it the defense industrial base in the letter and they made the economic
argument this is the broken window fallacy for um Libertarians who are watching this and so you got to be economically illiterate You Got to
Believe In The Broken Window fallacy to think this is will be economic stimulus for the United States um meanwhile the moral deficiency comes from some of the
Senators who have said that this war is a great deal for America because all we have to do is supply the weapons and Ukraine supplies the soldiers and that
we're grinding down the uh the Russian army and we're degrading their capacity to do this this elsewhere or to commit
war against us the problem with that is the numbers of people who are dying
zalinski allegedly told the Senators that he's raising the uh draft age to 40 like this the ceiling on it and that you
know admitted that they are running out of soldiers either through attrition on the battlefield or from people who've
defected and and left the country and you know you would think if this were a war about the you know existence of
Ukraine and protecting a democracy and such a fine government U that people would sign up would volunteer to fight
for the country but the reality is hundreds of thousands of them ones who had the means uh and the money got out of the country some are dying trying to
escape over mountains and Through Rivers to get out of the country and far too many have died on the battlefield we can keep supplying them with weapons we can
keep depleting our treasure but they're going to run out of fighting aged males uh pretty soon but I want to push back
on that a little bit do you take that as an indictment of Ukraine's democratic system or more of a sense of you know not that I want to advocate for military
conscription but a sense of leaving the country because they see it as a warrant which they will get creamed uh a war in which it's you know just totally
unwinable like how do you look at that situation and more broadly how should Libertarians look at parallels or lack thereof between the US's involvement in
funding Ukraine and the US funding Israel well in your to your first question I think it's both um they
they've lived in a country they know that bribery and Corruption is part of the culture and that the the current government isn't even immune to that and
so um if you're fighting for your country that's one thing but fighting for the government that's in charge of your country is another thing and so
that I believe that's part of it obviously self-preservation is going to be part of it as well you can't uh blame anybody for that um so I think it's a
little bit of both um that makes in the reason that they're leaving or not wanting to fight um and then ultimately
look at look at where this is all going to end up like when it's over there's going to have to be some negotiated peace settlement nobody I think believes
that Crimea is going to go back to Ukraine and although that was one of the stated objectives early on and probably zalinski still stating that as sort of a
fairy tale and then the Eastern regions that you know Russia had some control over before the war are probably going
to be in control of Russ Russia after this so why spend all the lives um when the lines are going to be
where they were when it started I mean I think it's just realism is a third factor in that now what was your um second question yeah let let me pick up
on Liz's second point there which is about Israel uh because you've been kind of on the lonely end certainly on the Republican side of several votes
pertaining to Israel this is but one example house resolution ution 771 which is entitled standing with Israel as it
defends itself against the barbaric War launched by Hamas and other terrorists and what I'm displaying here is a tweet from APAC which is the Israel Lobby
saying that you Thomas Massie are siding with the squad with AOC and Rashida Talib and ilon Omar and opposing
supporting Israel opposing condemning Hamas uh you also were the sole vote against kind of a symbolic uh
recognition of Israel and uh saying that anti-Semitism uh or sorry anti-zionism equates to anti-Semitism could you just
explain your stance on Israel where you're coming from and what some of these you think some of these critics might be missing about your position
sure that was the first of 19 votes today we're going to take our 19th virtue signal vote here in Congress um but I guess I got off on the wrong
foot early and have been voting consistently ever since the title of that bill is wonderful I have no disagreement with the title of that bill
but there are four or five pages that go after that title and um that well it's a resolution the the first you know uh
objection I have to it was there was inside of that an open-ended uh pledge of military support for Israel okay we've we never declare
Wars anymore the administration just kind of goes and does it and Congress keeps funding it but they find the EM moer for their activity right there in
these resolutions so the open-ended guarantee of um support for that war
that's contained in the text of that bill but not the title could have implied boots on the ground and that may be the only vote we get to take in
Congress on on whether we're going to do that or not so number one I don't support that that notion um number two
there they were in that resolution they mentioned Iran okay in the very first resolution
they're already trying to expand the war and incorporate as much of the Middle East as they can there's some people that just can't wait to attack Iran and
they want to use this as the Nexus to get there so that was in the resolution condemnation of Iran I think we should be trying to constrain the conflict not
to expand it in the first resolution of support that we pass there were also um there was a a part of that uh resolution
wanted uh Stronger sanctions on Iran and I don't support sanctions never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11
years that I've been in Congress I think it leads to war sanctions actually create crimes only for US citizens
because we're not going to go put somebody in jail in In Another Country who trades with Iran what we're proposing to do when we pass a sanction
is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a US citizen who who trades with Iran and it hurts the people who are in the country
I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of War so that and there were even more reasons to
vote against that um even even though I support Israel and I condemned Hamas I did that on my own I may I put out a statement I support Israel's right to
defend itself and I condemn these attacks but that wasn't enough one one that you took even more heat for was this one where you you were the only
vote against it and it was what I guess you would describe as a virtue signal Bill where um the essentially it's the house reaffirming the state of Israel's
right to exist and two recognizing uh that denying Israel's right to exist is a form of
anti-Semitism um where are you coming from on these sorts of bills that aren't even really directly tied to any sort of
military aid or anything like that well I I recognize Israel's right to exist okay yeah uh I have to preface all of
this stuff with that because people would imply from a vote that I don't but um when they passed that I said you're basically saying that that anti-zionism
is anti-Semitism and people argued with me that that wasn't Zionism you know that that those words weren't a
proxy for Zionism well what's interesting is the next week they passed almost the same resolution and they
replaced Israel's right to exist with Zionism so maybe I'm just giving them clues for how to write their bills more directly um because the next resolution
said that anti-zionism is anti-Semitism and there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who disagree with that statement in fact Gerald Nadler who's
the most senior member of Congress who's Jewish went to the floor and gave a five minute speech um which is a long speech in the
House of Representatives this isn't the Senate but he gave a five minute speech on why that's untrue to say that anti-zionism is anti-Semitism now there
are a lot of people who are anti-Semitic who are also U against the state of Israel but you can't equate the two and
I think these uh 19 votes after today are sort of a it's a it's part of the war effort for Israel to make it hard
for the for anybody in the United States to criticize what they're doing like you
every two or three days here in Congress you have we're taking these votes that a lot of what's in the resolution is just
obvious and doesn't need to be stated it's kind of like black lives matter okay you have to say black lives matter now they're making they're doing the
equivalent with Israel now Israel matters and so I agree that Israel matters but we don't have to take all these votes and and some of them are
going into campuses and trying to limit free speech um by withholding Federal money if you uh if if you allow anti
things that are considered anti-semitic by the way let's take a a second just to talk about that word I've been called anti-semitic for
merely not supporting the money that goes to Israel APAC ran an ad uh they spent $90,000 in my district running
ads um implying that I was anti-semitic and then in a tweet said that I was anti-Semitic for not spending not voting for The 14.3
billion to go to Israel even though I've not voted for 4 and a to go to anywhere ever do people do people buy that
talking point of Apex um the ad was not effective like when you when they run an ad in my district that said Thomas Massie was the
Lone Republican to vote against this resolution and um people are like back in my district they've I have a history
of being the only vote like that was a no vote like on the cares act and explaining why it's a bad vote and then a couple years later they you know they
find out wow why weren't why didn't everybody vote the way he did so I've developed some trust with my constituents on those loan votes I mean
Chuck Chuck Schumer has accused you of being anti-semitic on he's blasted you on Twitter I me here's the Tweet he said rep uh representative Massie you're a
sitting member of Congress uh this is anti-Semitic disgusting dangerous and exactly the type of thing I was talking about in my Senate address take this
down and what he's referring to is the uh Drake meme where he's uh saying uh you know no no to American patriotism yes to uh Zionism con Congress these
days um I mean were you what was your reaction to having you know the well someone as prominent as
Chuck Schumer uh accusing you of anti-Semitism well we ratio him on that pretty soundly um I quote tweeted him
and said if only you cared about half as much about our border as you care about my tweets and um he he's got like over
10,000 comments now on on his tweet to me um it's I mean it's just simply not true by the way in the replies to him
you'll find somebody who pointed out that of of all 535 members of Congress he rece this cycle he received more money from pro-israel Lobby according to
open secrets.org than any other member of Congress so um it just it rings Hollow when he says that and even he's
even in disagreement with Gerald Nadler for instance on equating anti-zionism to anti-Semitism and I'll admit memes are
not the the most precise way to convey um a a point but they can be effective
and there you know that Meme it doesn't imply that there there's nothing in that Meme that implies those two things are mutually exclusive and that wasn't my
intent I was just pointing out that you could you could it's okay in Congress to be patriotic for Israel but you can't be
patriotic for America that's considered nationalism which is American nationalism is a dirty word and I know
it's loaded and there are a lot of people that have attached themselves to it but if you take it in the generic sense it's you know pride in your country so I Ed the word patriotism
pride pride in America is is looked down upon right now it's out of fashion but pride in Israel is something we have to vote on two or three times a week now in
Congress it's almost like era where political memes have sort of replaced um old form of you know political satire
like we used to have staff cartoonists at every single major print publication in the United States and now it's kind of interesting because this form has
been sort of democratized like anybody can create a drake hotline bling meme uh including sitting members of Congress but I do think there's something
interesting about like you know memes are obviously not the weightiest possible form of conducting this discourse with Chuck Schumer but they are sort of how we do things nowadays I
think there's like something to be to be mold on reflected on there about like what that says about our political culture I think it's maybe a good thing yeah and listen I think most congressmen
if they got any controversy would throw their staff under the bus and say the staff created that Meme um the reality is I like just did put meme generator in
a search engine found the you know the blank meme I wanted and put those words in there and my staff you you made the meme I made the meme I didn't I didn't
tax that Meme I didn't steal it I created it myself and my staff in fact tried to talk me out of it because they value their jobs they value
their jobs more than I value mine I think but this is the re we needed yes exactly and you mentioned you know you've you've you have this reputation
now in your own district and nationally as the guy who's willing to make the meme or you know do make take the unpopular vote um and I think the one of
the Prime examples of that is back in the the depths of covid March 2020 everyone was pushing for this $2.2
trillion doll covid relief bill including the president of the United States and it was representative Thomas Massie who was saying if we're going to have a$2 million2 trillion dollar vote
here let's follow the Constitution and have everyone come back to DC and actually do it in person and for that
going back to Twitter the uh or you know now X the kind of locust of political discourse president Trump's response to
that was look like looks like a third rate grandstander named representative Thomas Massie a congressman from unfortunately a truly great state
Kentucky wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers Bill in Congress he just wants the publicity he can't stop it uh he goes on to say that uh you know
the Republicans should win the house but they should kick out uh Thomas Massie I mean what was that like having the eye of Sauron on you for insisting on an
in-person vote in March 2020 oh well I'll have to write a book someday but that those tweets happened
about 60 seconds after a phone call ended between me and president Trump where um he basically burned my ear off
screaming at me for probably three minutes and said he was coming at me he was going to take me down and um that's
a sobering proposition when you're you've got a primary election eight weeks away you've been trying to keep the president out of your race the
person running against you says you don't support the president enough and the president had 95% approval rating among the primary voters who were going
to vote in my election but um I just stood strong I said listen if if truckers and nurses and grocery store
workers are showing up for work then Congress should show up for work too and that was I think an unsalable message because ultimately I was just
trying to get people on record the reason I was trying to get people on record is I knew this was one of the worst votes in history and nobody was going to be accountable for it um and so
I'm you know here we are three years later every bad thing that I said would happen as a result of of doing that has happened and even my colleagues here in
Congress a lot of them admit to me um that they were wrong about that they won't say it too loudly lest anybody hear it and I got 81% in that primary
you know with Trump screaming at me and and tweeting at me and whatnot by the way the the reporters came up to me as I walked out of the chamber that day and
said your own president just called you a third rate grandstander what do you have to say and I said I was deeply insulted I'm at least second rate um and
they didn't have a come back to that but be careful if you ask the um the X uh chatbot or whatever you know the AI
that Elon Musk has on X if you ask it to roast me it will say that I you know like a washed up high school quarterback
I like to talk about that one event back on March 27th 2020 too much and you know it's kind of funny that it roasts me for
bringing that up so you if x is listening if grock is listening I wanted to know that you Zach brought it up not me yes how much covid policy remorse is
there among your colleagues in congress not enough not nearly enough um there should be the policy isn't just the spending the vaccine mandates the the
shutting down of our economy uh the the pulsory masking the way people were treated like cattle
there should be far more remorse U but frankly that's a reflection of the voters as well if you poll this most people have moved on even
a year ago most people have moved had moved on and it wasn't in the top five issues of what people care about in any congressional district you can't
campaign on well I tried to save you during covid I mean look at um Ron de santis that was part of his signature
issue and by being the you know different Governors responded differently but he most famously opposed
A lot of this covid nonsense after it became obvious what we were dealing with and um he rode that wave and he was polling better than Trump but I think
people have moved on and they've got other issues to think about now and um that's you know people have just moved on and so have my colleagues and I think
it's really unfortunate and I wished that I had been able to get that recorded vote that day we'd have a lot more people who wouldn't be back here in
Congress perpetrating bad ideas like fisa so I have one last question um and then we'll wrap up because I know you have other stuff to get to uh you're a
busy man but on that topic you know one of the things that the cares act and that the pandemic stimulus spending led
to um you know at least as far as I can tell is inflation right like that's something that's on American voters Minds do you see any signs and also you
were elected during sort of the era of the tea party you know reigning in government spending a sense of well we care about our fiscal health and so as a
result we can't just have the money printer constantly print money forever more we have to be prudent uh because the bill always comes du do you think
that that message has any hopes of having any sort of Revival in the coming years especially given the runaway inflation that we've seen or do you
think it's just a totally lost cause and we're all screwed let me assign a 95% probability
to that last proposition but I but I'm I'm here in the 5 percent chance that that we can save it and in the 30%
chance that if it all goes to hell in a hand basket I can still be here and have some credibility and putting it back together um I think what's starting to
curb the appetite for spending and bring some realism into the discussion is is the only thing that was ever going to
curb our appetite for spending and that is our creditors are starting to balk um the the rates at which the government
can borrow money now aren't what we want them to be when we go out to do an auction or a sale for Treasury
or or bonds what we're finding is the appetite isn't there even at 4 and a half% you know to get guaranteed 4 and a
half% return on your money you know from the government back by the US military that's not enough to to loan that money to the government they want 5% that's an
indicator that you know when the private sector and and the other countries Who The Sovereign you know funds who usually
uh have the appetite for our debt when they're losing their appetite that's a sign that things are going south and um
not not to promote it too much because grock roasts me for this too but I wear this debt clock that I built um in in Congress to remind people of it and one
side effect of me wearing this is I've noted I've noticed that because it by the way it logs on to treasury's website once a day gets the debt to the penny it
would do it more frequently but they only publish it once a day as a consequence of wearing this and looking at it every day one thing I've noticed is the rate at which the debt is
increasing is going up so that like the for the math nerds that's the second derivative and today
the debt per second is set averaged over the last year $78,000 a second it's just I don't don't think
people realize it feels like we're going over Niagara Falls right now to me the rate at these bad things happening is is
increasing now oh good we got a graph I love to see yeah this is just the debt to GDP Rao in uh historical terms so you
can see that you know it exceeded the high point of World War II uh and we're you know at after World War II they
actually cut spending so I I don't how this turns around at this point um but with that that de clock pin though is did like is that something you made like
where did you get you made that can Zach and I buy them well I'm not gonna Liz I refuse to monetize the debt um but but
um yeah that's a dad joke that only I can say in these circumstances but um there is a company I gave them the IP and they are I don't want to advertise
it here because I'm in my office but um if you look for it you can find a place to get this I gave the code away and they're making these and bringing shame
everywhere to I am I am giving them away to other members of Congress as kind of Badges of
Shame um we all need to be wearing this and looking at it the best thing for me though is when I'm in an elevator with let's say some people who vot who always
vote for every spending Bill I just I reach down and I I turn up the brightness have three levels of brightness and I've had that is the most
passive aggressive possible thing you could do but it's for such a good cause so I can't even be mad I had some people ask me if that's the number of steps I've taken and I'm like if I could run
at the speed of light I can't take I wouldn't take this many steps this week um and then somebody asked me if it was the uh the Doomsday Clock like you know
one of the liberal Democrats and I'm like well yeah it kind of is and my wife uh told me maybe I shouldn't wear this you know around the security
guards and stuff they would think it's a bomb you know and I said well it is a bomb I'm gonna wear it and let everybody know the only thing is it doesn't count down it counts up and we don't know
where the trigger is and when the bomb goes off fair enough uh on that note thank you so much for talking to reason uh
next time you see us we will absolutely be wearing these pins uh so me all around New York City wearing this awesome pin thank you so much we really appreciate your time thanks Liz thanks
Zach thank you thanks for listening to just asking questions these conversations appear on
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