As far as the first week is going on, I'm told that from Republicans, not only on Trump's team but also on Capitol Hill, promises made, promises kept, they're very thrilled with how this first week went.
From terminating federal diversity programs to deporting immigrants on military aircraft. President Trump aggressively begins his first week back in office with a blitz of executive action.
Oh my god, that's scary music. Thing with Martha radd It's.
From terminating doing away with diversity in America.
Yeah, ending DEI. Yeah, a lot of people are in favor of that. Military airplanes and up blitz.
Okay, yeah, yes, yes, practically everybody is in favor of booting out the illegal criminals.
So why are you using your scary music. Indeed, let's talk about that in other matters with Kevin Kylee, who serves California's third district in the House of Representatives. Kevin's bio points out that he is dedicated to using his position to promote fiscally sound policies to our inflation, increased choice in education, responsibly manage our public LANs, to preserve our beautiful for us, and prevent catastrophic wildfires, and we will get to that. Talking indeed, Kevin, how are you, sir?
Doing well?
Thank you very much. Good to be with you.
Excellent, and likewise it's good to talk to you. So your take on the first week the Trump administration and specifically the scary, scary deportations that Martha Raddott seemed so concerned.
About, Well, I mean, you know, he is fulfilling his promises and I don't think anyone should be at all surprised. It's not like he was ambiguous about the change that he thought the country needed. And you know, when you look at the situation at the border, the absolute disaster of the last four years, the president was very clear that we need a clean break, we need a reset, we need to prioritize you know, border security once again.
And that's a big reason why he was elected. And so he, you know, has not wasted any time and fulfilling that promise and bringing some sanity back to US immigration policy.
And sanity is a great word for it, because it's as if we've been in some sort of dream or a fond because it's not like the immigration policy was I don't know, the corporate tax rate ought to be changed by two percent because that would yield a better curve indicator of blah blah blah. No, we were permitting illegal aliens who'd committed crimes to stay here for reasons nobody can explain. It was crazy, that's right.
I mean, the numbers are just so far beyond anything we had ever seen before in terms of the millions and millions of people that are allowed to just walk right in without any understanding on our part of who they even were. Folks were on the terrorists watch list we know got in. And California, of course, is that it made things even worse by saying, come on here, you get free health care. We're a sanctuary state, so we'll do everything we possibly can to interfere with federal
immigration enforcement. So, you know, the Trump administration has come in and I think with an understanding of how much damage there was to undo, and that's why I think they've been acting with this sense of urgency and have not been at all hesitant to, you know, restore some common sense to our policies.
So you're a California congressman. California's had the worst disaster in its state's history. We were making a lot out of the drama on Friday before Trump got here, that Gavin Newsom had been reaching out to Trump, not hearing from Trump. Trump was going to Land, there was no scheduled meeting, then Gavin was going to show up there and try to meet. How do you think that whole thing played out, and what's your take on all that?
Well, I think that the President was incredibly gracious. You know, Gavin Newsom. Since the moment that Trump was first elected, I mean probably even before that, Newsom has you know, basically spent you know, the majority of his time or a good amount of his time taunting President Trump, trying to you know, build his own national profile by going
after President Trump. It's been one stunt after another, and so you know, the President has every reason to not have particularly warm feelings towards Gavin Newsom, not to mention the fact that Gavin Newsom has been absolutely destroying so many things in California, the largest state in the country, and that's caused a lot of problems for the federal
government as well. So, you know, when you saw Newsom there kind of standing awkwardly on the tarmac waiting for the president, you know, you wouldn't have been surprised, maybe if the President had been a little cold towards him, but he wasn't. He said, I want to work with you. This is important for us to work together to fix this, fix this, to get help to folks who need it.
And so I thought he was very gracious. But the important thing is that we need to make sure that we enact the sort of policy changes for California that are going to be necessary to make sure that these things don't keep happening again.
Read my mind. I was just going to say, you know, us, we're more than willing to make an ideological point and try to pitch it to the good people, but we also just try to understand what's actually going on, you know, in that spirit, how could policy have yielded a different outcome in the disastrous LA fires? What went wrong that? I mean, mother nature is going to do what mother nature does. But what did human beings get wrong? Well, what didn't they get wrong?
I mean, it is probably the better question when you look at the way California has managed its forests and managed its water supply, it is just the exact opposite of what both science and common sense stay that we ought to do. And so you know, our forests are just staggeringly overgrown, millions of acres with so much fuel
out there that turned them into tinderboxes. And the big reason for that is not only Di Gavin Newsom actually cut the fire prevention budget, but we have these just crazy laws that stop us from removing trees, from removing vegetation, from clearing out areas around power lines and everything else.
And you know, they even had one project in the Tabanga Canyon where they're trying to update these one hundred year old wooden power lines and with fire resistant material, and the California Coastal Commission came in and said, no, stop that there's a rare.
Plant around here. You're not about to do it.
And so then when it comes to water, you know, we haven't built new water in this state in decades, really the State water storage that is, since the State Water Project, as the President has talked about. We have these just absolutely mind boggling laws and regulations that will require water to be diverted and sent to the ocean.
I mean, we have more than enough water that comes to us by the grace of God, but we just wasted and so those are the two sort of key policy areas that we saw play out in the LA fires, when we saw obviously the conflagrations themselves, and then the ability inability to respond to them with the immediacy that was required because of water not coming out of fire
hydrant reservoirs that were empty. So, you know, a lot of us have been talking about these things for a long time, and in fact, my distript has suffered several truly catastrophic wildfires as well. But now that just the sheer, shock and scale of these fires has really captured the world's attention. Hopefully this can be a turning point where we start doing things in a more sensible way.
We really enjoyed last week.
I was trying to find the actual tweet, but I can't find it from Gavin Newsom where he talked.
About we're getting rid of regular the regulatory red tape and the bureaucratic mess so that you can hello, why only now California finishes fiftieth out of fifty every single year and all kinds of business friendliness?
Why is it okay now? Why wouldn't it have been okay before? That's such a.
Great point, you know, why hasn't he made it a priority for actual prevention. It's great that, you know, we can maybe we'll see what he's actually doing, but it'd be nice if he had bought ahead a little bit and said, maybe we should do these things in order to prevent fires from actually happening. And you know what's worse is that he actually had been going around in the first early years of his governorship saying, oh, yeah, I'm doing all this forest prevention work. We're doing all
this fire mitigation work. And then someone looked at it was actually a Capital Public Radio, the MPR affiliate. They did an investigation and found that he was completely making this up, that he was exaggerating the work they were doing by a factor of seven. They said it was a staggering six and ninety percent that he exaggerated the work that was being done. And again, this isn't shouldn't have come as a surprise that this.
Is a major risk.
Because we've even we've had fires, catastrophic fires, again and again and again in this state, and unfortunately it's cost us so much in terms of loss of life, of property, in terms of the insurance crisis that has absolutely spun out of Hey, I.
Hate I hate but I found his tweet, and I just know you you'd like it so much.
His actual tweet, goodbye red tape, good Bye bureaucratic nonsense.
What my god, wid nonsense? Are you kidding me? This is his own bureaucracy, right, You've been.
In charge, your party has been in charge of the state forever. Goodbye bureaucratic nonsense. Oh my god, I have the balls to say that.
Unbelievable, not to mention she's been governor for but over six years now, And by the way, it's not I don't know what he's actually doing. I've seen he's suspended a few walls, but these are only temporary suspensions.
But they're not going goodbye.
If you wanted to go goodbye, then that would require him to actually be proactive, have legislation and work with the legislature.
Humankind has never seen a politician run against their own record like Kevin C. Newsom would have to. Kamala Harris was a good warm up act.
Yeah, because everyone now recognizes how terrible the record was, so he has no choice and it's on every issue, by the way, as you mentioned, California's lawns and so many things like at homelessness Newsom. I think we recently hit the twenty year anniversary of Newsom's tenure planned and homelessness in California. So every year he gets tells it's homelessess in California. It's such a disgrace.
It's the pro Bowl.
No one is more responsible for the homeless crisis we have in California than the way you put it is exactly right. It's like he has this habit of continually running against his own record because that's really the only option he has available.
We need to talk more about that sometime downe road. We know you're pressed for time, but just real quickly, the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives a fairly narrow majority. What are the top priorities we ought to be looking for?
Well, I mean there's there's a lot. We actually are meeting of the conference today and President Trump is joining us, and we're sort of laying out what the next few months are going to look like. And so we have this opportunity with what's called the budget reconciliation process where you can actually get a lot of big ticket items done at once. And so I'd say the big three
right now are Number one is the border. We will obviously the President taking an executive action, but we want to put those changes into statute as well, so a future Joe Biden or Majorcus or whoever couldn't come in and put our country through again what we just went through. Second thing is the economy is getting common sense regulatory reform and promoting energy and dependence and other tools we can use to drive down costs and revitalize the economy.
And then three is probably the tax pots that we need to extend from twenty seventeen and do so in a way I'm working on to see that actually California gets so much needed tax really.
Finally, Kevin Kylie represents the California's third district. Kevin, always a pleasure to keep fighting, a good fight. We'll talk again soon.
Well do, thank you very much.
You know, there are a couple of things that may have gone by so quickly people didn't catch them or didn't fully comprehend them. First of all, the utility company said, hey, these old antiquated wooden poles are going to snap in a high wind, and if they do, the power lines are going to ignite all the brush and it's going to burn all these people out of our homes, out
of their homes. And the California Coastal Commission, which is as close to a monarchy as exists in the United States, that they said, no, you cannot, for there is the bisotted milkweed that grows in abundance. There your poles, and we will not have you stepping up on them. And so they could not replace the poles. That's insanity.
Second, is it really is crazy? The environmental wackos are wackos. Yeah, it's the same thing with why the Santa Cruz Pier got washed away because for years and years and years they've been they've been knowing they got to shore up that really old historic landmark. But there's some sort of special clam or something that was on there, barnacle and it's just nuts.
Wow. Yeah. And then the controlled burns. I've seen the statistics. If the forestry experts came in and said, hey, this forest, the undergrowth is way too thick. This is a tinder box. It's gonna go kurk blue. We need to do a
controlled burn to make sure it doesn't. If there is no dispute, it takes you something like four years, three and a half four years to get an approval for that, if the experts say it, If the environmental wackadoos come along and say, put the tough to dead mouse, it'll take nine years in California to do what the forestry experts say.
Must be goodbye red tape, goodbye bureaucratic nonsense.
And finally, how do you have the nerve to say that he's got balls like coconuts like you just said. Sorry for the frank talk, folks. You gotta do something about all these homeless wait whoa wait wait, just crazy? And then finally, we need to do this. This must be archie hot. Make mayorcus, a term that is used for generations to describe a useless piece of garbage. There you go. Is that boss here still giving you a hell? Oh? Yeah, my god? What a mayork is he is? Yeah? Make
it a slur? Gotta be Come on, folks, join with us,