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When Trump Says Jump, Texas Republicans Say, How High? Right? Well, maybe not all of them. Welcome to the Texas Take. The number one political podcast in the great state. I'm Scott Brattick. He's Jeremy Wallace. His work of course appears at Houston Chronicle.com and you can find the inside story on Texas politics at Corm report.
Jeremy, the election is done. We talked a lot about that last week. I got a little bit of feedback from some folks. As you know, I do not take requests about what we talk about here, but that doesn't mean that I'm not responsive to feedback. Somebody said, Scott, you said it was only one election. Everybody's been talking for a year about how this is the most important election of our lifetimes.
And I said, welcome to politics. Everyone says that every time that it's the most important election of our lives and everything is on the line and everything. And of course, when you have two candidates at the top of the ticket who are both, you know, portraying it to people that the other is an existential threat to the country. People are going to think that even more in a more magnified way, right? And so I get that. And as I said on the last show, we'll get into all the things that were litigated in the campaign, immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights, all of that stuff. We'll get to that end more coming up here in the show.
I did have a few people ask me during a speech I gave in Dallas last week about casino gambling. It's interesting. There is a real, I think effective PR push on that. And the reason I say that is because the lobby effort hasn't been successful, but the PR must be because everywhere I go, I get asked about it.
Is are we going to get casinos in the state. So we'll get to that coming up here on the show. And this will be our last show of this month. We're going to take a little bit of a break here next week. We have some travel and we have some various speaking engagements. Jeremy and I are both going to be around the state talking to different folks and you can watch our social media feeds for all that stuff.
And then of course the week after that, Jeremy, it's like the year is getting away from us. It'll be Thanksgiving week by that following week. And of course, I'll be visiting my mother in Arkansas. I'm sure you'll be with family and all of that. And it'll just be time to take a little bit of a break from all this. Are you ready for that?
Oh, yeah, I feel like, you know, I'm almost going to get like world tour t-shirts made up of this tour. I've been on around the state. It's like it's like a little waco here, a little Bronfels here. Some Houston there. It's like, you know, as I said before, the tires on my car are completely worn down to nubs. I think all my money now going to be trying to restore myself so I can get ready for this legislative session.
You know, when they did those tax rebates, the checks from Trump that were a thousand dollars or 1100 or whatever, I called the tires that I put on my truck that you're I called them my trump tires because they came from from that from that tax deal that they did under Trump. And guess what? Those tires have been worn bald now as we have covered politics in the state from Beaumont, til Paso and from the panhandle to the Rio Grande. This is what we do. So let's go through it.
This is the question that I got a lot over the last week. Want Texas Republicans just been this is way this is the way a few people put it. In fact, I had a Republican ask it this way. They said, won't Texas Republicans just be bitches for Trump? I heard that over and over again. And I said, well, maybe some of them. And in fact, maybe all of them, if you want to phrase it that way. Let's let's take a a top example. Congressman Troy nails Fort Bend County, former sheriff.
He sums up what is likely to be an answer that you would get from most Republicans around here. About whether they agree with Trump, not just 98% of the time, not just 99% of the time, but 100% of the time. There's no question he's a leader of our party. So now he's got a mission state, his mission and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it all of it.
Every single word if Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch your heads. That's it. That's it from him and others now in his district. I know that that makes sense. It's a very Trumpi district, if you will. It's a little different different district than what he had before.
We pointed that out here on the show. But for other Republicans, including some of us, you know, some of our Republicans in Texas, they're already finding places to say no to Trump. And it was on display in this fight that we talked about last week for the US Senate leadership, right, for the Republican leadership. Of course, Republicans will be in the majority.
And our senior Senator John Cornyn was in the running to be the majority leader, which as you pointed out, Jeremy would be the first time that we would have had a majority leader from Texas since LBJ did that over 60 years ago. And of course, we talked about all the benefits that the state might have seen if that had happened. But guess what? It didn't. So why didn't it happen? You saw this big push by Maga World for who? For somebody you covered in Florida. Rick Scott, tell us about him.
Yeah, it's like I've covered Rick Scott from his first day on the campaign. And I'm not actually joking literally his first day on the campaign. I heard his first speech as he was trying to win his long shot campaign for governor. And he didn't worked out, you know, but the biggest appeal to Rick Scott is he has $172 million of his personal money burning a hole in his pocket.
That's how he won the race for governor. That's how he ended up in the Senate. And that's kind of how he makes his friends with lost and lost some money. But what's interesting, you know, he does have like because of his association with Florida, he's built relationships with the people you need to, right? Namely Donald Trump. Now he was Donald Trump's governor when Trump decided to move to Florida.
Initially, so there's a lot of pieces there that you can see why that relationship with the would be there. Trump himself was not saying he wanted Rick Scott, but you can see Trump world wanted Rick Scott, but look at the limitations of that. The first round of voting in the Senate vote. Rick Scott got 13 votes. Right. That's the key. He was eliminated in the first round of voting. Right. He didn't even make the runoff.
That means 40 other Republican senators elected, you know, 40 senators said, no, thank you. And we're not taking that guy. Look at the problem for Rick Scott is that he was the chairman of the National Republican Senate,
the editorial committee in 2022. And back in those olden days, you'll remember, you know, who the heck was putting all that money behind Herschel Walker, you know, it's like it was that guy. Who was, you know, who was picking all these loser candidates, like, you know, the doctor,
and that was Rick Scott, and most of the other Republican senators are like, how did you blow this is like in the midterm cycle with a Democratic president, Republicans almost always pick up a seat in the history of this country, but Rick Scott made sure it didn't happen.
Yeah. Well, our listeners wrote that what you'll remember that the year was said to be going to be a red wave for Republicans, and that didn't happen at all. In fact, under Scott, it was pointed out, and this was in our coverage of quorum report.com, and I know you talked about it as well, when Scott was in that position at the NRSC, am I getting the letters right?
So many letters right. At the NRSC, when he was the chairman, Republicans lost net one seat, right, in the US Senate, which might not sound like a lot, but when you haven't even divided government, it is a lot. It means the difference between the majority and the minority.
And when John Corning, the senior senator from Texas, was the chairman of the NRSC, how many seats did they win? Oh, it was plus six, right? So he had a winning record. And as we have talked about here, he raised a ton of money for other Republicans.
I mean, over the course of the last two decades, something like 400,000, 415 million, something like that. Just this time around something more than 30 million for this effort to take the majority in which they, you know, they were successful as Republicans.
But despite how well Corning did in helping them build the majority, which is usually the way these things work, right? I mean, the other members would say, hey, by the way, you helped us win. This isn't that hard. You helped us win. And so you're the one who's going to, you know, be in charge. But despite all that, Maga world decided that they hated Corning. That that Corning is a liberal, as they said, which makes me laugh. Give me a break. He's an aggressive liberal.
And they were saying, you might as well have a Democrat if it's going to be Corning. I know our Democratic listeners hearing this thing. Wow. This is ridiculous. If Corning is not conservative, then the word has no meaning, right? But listen to this. This is, this is, you know, what's actually influencing some of the folks there in Washington, not all. I mean, you heard Troy Nells right here at the beginning of the show.
I mean, he would be right there with Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy. They would be calling Corning liberal. And this was on the Tucker Carlson show. Those two guys were talking about this fight over who the Senate leader ought to be. Let's say we have three all three branches. Let's say we've got judicial branch. We have a great judicial branch right now at the top of the Supreme Court. The best we've had, certainly in our lifetime.
But you combine that with the strong electoral mandate for the presidency, a strong decisive majority in the Senate. Hopefully get a good Senate majority leader picked. And then, and I think we've got to be great for that. But that's a, it's a lot of.
It can't be John Corning. Yeah. I think Corning is an aggressive liberal. And if Donald Trump wins the popular vote in John Corning of Texas, who is way more liberal than a lot of Democrats, I know, winds up Senate majority leader. I mean, that's just, it's crazy.
So that's not what's crazy. You're crazy. Corning is one of the most conservative Republicans I have ever covered. Now everything and going back 25 years and longer. Of course, he was Texas attorney general before he was in the Senate first elected back in what 2002 to the US Senate.
In some ways, it doesn't seem like that long ago, but in other ways, it seems like forever ago, as far as the politics of everything are concerned. I remember him running against who was at Dallas mayor, Ron Kirk, when he won that seat. I remember all the, all the coverage of that was fun to kind of go back through this week, Jeremy, but, but, you know, whether somebody's conservative or not, that doesn't matter.
What matters is for these folks is, are they loyal to Trump? Would they just do whatever Trump said? Right now, I want to point this out. When you go back to the 9th and you love this history stuff, Jeremy, when you go back to the 90s, you think about who was the sort of founding father of the modern conservative movement as an elected office holder.
I think of the speaker at the time, Newt Gingrich, when they, when they led, you know, the big revolution for Republicans. What was that back in 1995? 1994. Yeah. Right. Clinton's midterm. Right. So Clinton comes from 19 or two. There you go. Are there you were there. You were there for the big. That was an actual red wave. Right. For Republicans. Absolutely.
So Clinton comes in in 92. And then in 94, you have Gingrich come in as the guy who's the speaker. And remember, he had started out as just kind of a nothing in the house and then made his way up as one of the, you know, pre-eminent voices for conservatism. Well, what he said this week, I thought was really interesting about all this stuff with, you know, who's going to be the US Senate majority leader and is it just going to be the person who's the most loyal to Trump?
And speaker Gingrich said, you don't have to take it from me. Speaker Gingrich said that Trump needs to understand this. No one in the American systems all powerful. The system is designed to ensure that no one is all powerful. They can be pretty powerful. Roosevelt discovered this when he tried to pack the court at the peak of his popularity and just got killed by the Senate turning him down brutally.
So, you know, the president's got to think this through. He's certainly far away the most influential Republican in the country. But he's also got to think through how many people does he bruise who decided to get even later. Yeah. And there lots of guys. John McCain proved on the final vote on Obamacare.
The independent elected people have abilities to hit you in ways you never dreamed of. He remember. Trump had gone after John McCain mercilessly, right, and he even made fun of his military service, which so many people found defensive and then, you know, previously in election cycles doing that kind of thing. making fun of a guy who was a POW, that would have ended your campaign that day or the next day,
right? You'd have to drop out of the race. But to the point that Gingrich is making, those folks who are in elected office have the ability to exact revenge on you. And it might be over an issue that you're not thinking about, right? It could be something that's really important to you,
or it might be something that's maybe a little less important to you. But I do think that Trump must understand it on some level because even though all the mega world seemed to be getting involved in this US Senate majority leader race, Trump kind of stayed out of it personally, right? He said what he would want the majority leader to do, but he didn't put his thumb on the scale right about who it ought to be. Yeah, and an important piece to it is like, he almost got what he,
going back to what Troy Nail said, he almost got what he wanted anyhow, right? Ultimately, because he ended up with people like John Corning and John Thune who have both at times said things were very anti-Trump, right? They both have said at times he shouldn't be the nominee. At one point, John Thune said he should drop out of the 2016 presidential election because of those, the Axis Hollywood tapes. So, it's a revelation. But look what happened in this time around.
Both of those men went to Marilago, both of them, genuinely, and tried to win Trump's support. And when Trump started kind of floating ideas of what he wants the next Senate majority leader to do, both of them said, yes, we'll do that. They were quick to kind of get on board to show the rest of the Republicans that they did have Trump's ear and they were trying to build a relationship. Corning at one point reminded me in one of our interviews, you do remember that I was in Nevada
with Trump. We're Trump shouted out my name, right? And so it just shows you how much everybody, like, you know, what, you know, Toy Nells is right on the mark that Trump has remade politics, where everybody thinks that they need to appease his ego at the very minimum, even if they don't give him what he wants, right? Like, yeah, there's a way to appease him and not give him his wall that he wanted to build. There's a way to appease him and not give him
mass deportations in every American city. There's there's a way that that's going to go, that's going to play out. And like you said, there's a lot of independence within senators, particularly. They have pretty darn big egos. Most people who have been elected to Senate have prepared for the day that they, too, will one day be present in the United States, you know, that's assume they're all practicing their acceptance speech, you know, in their mirror somewhere
at home at some point. Well, and as long as American politics and the system, the system of government that we have holds, there are also senators who are insulated from the next Trump election cycle, right? So they have six year terms, right? Now, that's not true for a cornon. Cornon is up for reelection in this midterm that would be coming up in 2026, right? And to this whole point about independence of the senators, you've seen these appointments that are planned by
Trump that the Senate will have to grapple with. And in a lot of ways, it's a very early test of the independence of Senate Republicans, right? Guys like Pete headseth who we're going to talk about this Fox News host, people like Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic Congresswoman, the former Congressman from Florida, Matt Gates, he's former now, right? Cause he just he turned in his resignation. They just read it on the house floor. Yeah. So that was lightning speed, right?
Yeah exactly. And so so here comes cornon, right? Fresh off his loss in this race for the, you know, majority leaders slot. And he was asked this morning about all the investigations about Matt Gates. Remember the House Ethics Committee was looking into gates over different ethical, you know, supposed violations and, you know, there's there's accusations about sex trafficking with this guy and it all sorts of problems with this dude from Florida. And he was and cornon
was asked this. And by the way, Gates is resignation from the House. That means the ethics investigation by the House Ethics Committee. That's kind of that's over with they, you know, they investigate the members. So so cornon was asked this morning by a reporter on Capitol Hill, this question, when the senators can, you know, consider the nomination of Matt Gates for attorney general of the United States should the senators have access to what House investigators were looking at.
How critical is it to have access to what the House Ethics Committee has found in their investigation? I think there should not be any limitations on the Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation including whatever the House Ethics Committee is generating. So you want to see it? Absolutely. Now he may end up voting for Gates. We'll see how this plays out. But Jeremy,
to the point that we're talking about, that is part of the independence of the senators. He's not just saying, like Troy Nail said, he's not saying how high he's saying, actually, let's take a look at this guy. Yeah, and looking, he is far from alone. The comments I saw from Susan Collins of Maine, from Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all, you know, Cassidy in Louisiana, like all of them have been coming out and making clear that there's going to be a lot of trouble here. Like, you know,
I'm already putting all my money on Gates never getting close to me and confirmed. It's not there's clearly, it's because even within the Republican Party of Florida, it's like, there's a lot of hate for Matt Gates, you know, it's like, you know, as a guy who spent a lot of my career in Florida, I can tell you, it's not like they're going to circle around him like they would for Trump or
Rick Scott or even, you know, Mark Rubio, I'm saying to us, Matt Gates is not on that level. He has pissed off a lot of people throughout the process of his climb in the form of politics and that's going to continue on as he runs into the US Senate. Well, I'm saying that's true, but in a way, Trump has helped to elevate him to that level because he nominated him for one of the most
important jobs in the government, right? And so they have to take a serious look at this. And I it will, I think in a lot of ways, and maybe solely rely on whether Trump really goes to bat for this guy, you know, as they get into the confirmation hearings and as ugly as those hearings
might be, it is Trump going to say to Corning and these and Ted Cruz and all the people who are on the judiciary committee as they look at at Gates as the A.G. nominee, when they get into that, does Trump really lean on them or does he kind of get sit back and see what the Republican senators do? I think that's the big key, right? Well, and let's kind of like add one more little, you know,
crazy twist to all this. Like I just kind of wanted to hit on the fact that, you know, like, you know, a little bit of, you know, Corning ends up losing this bid to become the Senate Majority Leader. But look what happened in the run up to it, you know, it's like, you know, I'll just point out when when John Thune was writing, he's from one of those Dakotas. Does it really matter which one, right? They're all the same thing. But you know, all of the, all of the other senators in the Dakotas
got behind John Thune, right? Because they knew it was going to be good for the Dakotas. In Florida, Marco Rubia, who has had many big battles with Rick Scott, still got behind him, because it was going to be good for Florida. But if you saw the reporting in, in Texas, when John Cornham is running, Ted Cruz came out and said he wouldn't support him and is going to
go vote for Rick Scott. That's a really important piece, right? You know, to, to think that Ted Cruz was willing to give the Senate Majority Leader spot to somebody else instead of a Texan. You can tell there's clearly still some personal divide between these two guys that's never been on the same page. They do things together every now and then, but there's clearly a divide
between these two men. And it probably had a pretty big role. If Ted Cruz had gone out and can't paint for John Cornham, like aggressively, like the other senators were doing for their, although cohorts, it might have been a little bit different. Let me, let me, let me throw a wrinkle into that though. It's a, it's a vote of the senators, right? I don't know any senator who, you know, loves Ted Cruz. In other words, it might have actually helped Cornham for Cruz to not
be for him, because the other senators can't stand Cruz. You see what I mean? But here's something else I would throw in. By the way, you mentioned the Dakotas. I just want to throw in one of my pet peeves, you know, South Dakota and North Dakota. He said, it doesn't matter, which one is, did you know that they don't have even a combined population of two million people? There are fewer people in the Dakota territories than there are in Harris County.
It doesn't example, but there are fewer, let me say that's because Houston is huge and Harris County is huge. There are fewer people in the Dakota territories than in Austin in the metro area. Right? And, and they have four senators. We have 31 million people in Texas, so we get two. I think people ought to be more upset about that. Honestly. Well, and I kind of hammered that same point as almost as if you knew what I wrote in
the Texas take, you know, newsletters. I already know what you're interested in. I wrote about how Fort Worth Texas, the mayor of Fort Worth Texas has more constituents than John Thune has in all of South Dakota. So when you run for mayor of Fort Worth, you have the same amount of peepee over presenting, but you don't have a vote in the United States Senate. That just drives me crazy.
Now, all of this anger directed at Corning by Maga World, a lot of it was egg-don by not just potentially Donald Trump, but also the supporters of Attorney General Ken Paxton here in Texas. And you saw this really ugly message from the Terrent County Republican Party and the Dallas County Republican Party. They were campaigning for Rick Scott for majority leader. And they were saying that get this, the chairman of the Terrent County GOP, a guy named Beau French. I think he
ran for the Texas House twice and that didn't work out. So then he ran for the Republican Party chairman. He's the guy who brought Tucker Carlson to Fort Worth and all of that. He brings Tucker Carlson to Fort Worth to trash Greg Abbott and say that he's not tough enough on the border. I'm just giving you that for some perspective here. He's the one who said to Senator Cruz, he said, I'm calling on Cruz quote to show respect for what Texans just did in re-electing him
Cruz to the Senate. Do not support the two people Corning and Thun who have been explicitly anti-Trump America wants to expedite Trump's agenda. Neither Thun or Corning. It should be Norcorning, but he wrote Corcorning. Neither Thun or Corning will do that. He said, please stand with Texans as he asked Cruz to vote against the Texan and the race. Now, why are these people doing this? Why are they really doing it? I think it's to bloody up Corning ahead of a potential primary
challenge from Paxton coming up in two years. Paxton has also clashed with Corning. Corning has said that Paxton might as well be in jail. That's pretty close to a direct quote because of all the accusations of corruption around him. I do remember that back in April, Ryan Chandler, our friend over at KXAN television here in Austin, one of the reporters there. He had asked Corning about whether the senior senator is worried about Attorney General Paxton running against him in the
primary two years from now. Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is the job you used to have, has not so subtly implied that he may like to challenge you in a primary if you run again. Are you worried about a threat from a Paxton primary? I sleep very well at night, so I'm not too worried about it. My last election I had a primary. I had several primary
opponents. I got 76% of the vote. I realized I'm not going to get 100% of the vote and contested primaries actually make you a better candidate in the general election in my experience. So no, I'm not too worried about it and that's still quite a ways off and I guess a lot of it is speculative. It's not really yet. Again, that was back in April. I think it's a little more real now after they were attacking him so just aggressively as as you heard Tucker Carlson say,
who has been an ally of Paxton. They were saying that Corning is an aggressive liberal. You might have also seen this Jeremy that you had a conspiracy theory floated and they were doing this through you know, there's a Paxton supporters. Have you seen the reporting about how some of those Paxton supporters were being people were being paid per tweet to put out stuff during the impeachment last year that was first reported over at current revolt.com by Tony Ortiz.
There was this conspiracy theory floated that Trump wants to appoint Paxton as the attorney general which didn't happen. We just talked about gates, but the Paxton would be appointed by the by the president elect as the attorney general and the Corning would block it. The Corning hates Paxton. This is how the theory goes. Corning would block it that he hates Paxton. He doesn't want him to be a G. And so it was another reason to not elect him as the majority leader in the Senate.
This is the way the theory went. But to me that doesn't even make any sense. If big John, as he's known, if big John is playing political chess, which he's always doing, why wouldn't he want Paxton to be the US attorney general because then he would be at a position to challenge Corning two years from now, right? I know all the speculation about how Paxton's going to write. Now, technically, I guess he could leave the DOJ to come run for the Senate, but who would do that? That's
not, you know, that's not going to happen. And then I did hear from some Texas Republican lawmakers, some elected Republicans who were telling me this on Monday night. They were saying that if Paxton was nominated to the AG slot nationally, that that would get really, ugly, really fast. I mean, it's going to be ugly enough with gates. It may be even uglier. We'll watch it. Put a pin in
that for now. But these Republicans, Jeremy, were saying, you know, a bunch of questions from the impeachment last year would probably come up again because of course all that was litigated in a political proceeding in the Texas Senate and not in, you know, a different political proceeding in the United States Senate, which of course there are Democrats on the committee. They
get to ask questions of the people who are up for confirmation. And wouldn't it be interesting, these Republicans said, if Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's name came up during those confirmation hearings and what if there were questions asked about the $3 million that Patrick received from wealthy Paxton supporters right before he was going to preside over the trial of Ken Paxton. This was the quote from one of those Republican lawmakers. They said that would get
really messy. And I think that it would, but going forward, Jeremy, I think there will be a political calculation on the part of Corning because he's now seen what these people can bring to bear when they're attacking him in a sustained campaign. And this was only for a week. Imagine what would happen if they had a full Senate campaign to go after him, which they would have in the next uh, on the next 24 months. Yeah. Corning will have to get in line with all the other people that
Ken Paxton's trying to settle scores with though, right? Obviously we got a lot more going on and you know, he's already tried to go after uh, uh, uh, day feeling of course. Uh, he's, you know, he's going to be fighting the Texas House, you know, throughout this next session. You can almost sure be assured of that as they fight over his budget and what he should have when he shouldn't have. Who knows if Trump wants him in some role that he doesn't have to go through a confirmation process,
right? That's possible. And so, and one of the ideas that haven't flowed around, I've been talking to a lot of my old Florida people, uh, this, you know, these last 48 hours. And one of the things they were talking about, like maybe Trump knows Gates can't get confirmed in the Senate. Uh, and this is part of the game. And what their thought was was that you put Gates out there so he can get out of the house so he doesn't have to be there anymore. He can avoid the investigation report that was
coming out. Uh, he gets out of there, doesn't get confirmed. Then Trump goes, okay, I'll go my, my plan B. And then you could have put a plan B up there that'll seem so much more palatable, right? No matter who it is. So it's like maybe Ken Paxson says fall guy, you know, his, his second, you know, command. So then you put him up there and you'd have a better shot then. I still think he really wants Whitaker, the guy who had previously, you know, been to the previous administration.
I think he wants Whitaker back eventually. And I would not be surprised at ultimately, he becomes the replacement when Gates does not get confirmed. Because I just, I can't see how Gates is going to get through this process, nor if he's going to want to get through it. I, you know, I've talked about this before, but you know, the Gates family name in, uh, in the panhandle of Florida. You mentioned it pretty good until Matt Gates came around and Matt Gates has kind of turned it into
something entirely fresh. He's a political, um, to probably both, uh, in, uh, probably in, both business and in politics is, uh, kind of a trust fund, baby. Well, you know, the family, the family was well, well known. And this guy didn't do anything to earn it and he just kind of comes in and, you know, it causes a problem and he'd be the one. I'm not saying the specific to him, but, you know, he's the, he's the problem child who, you know, is always having, he's, uh,
Hunter Biden. He's always having a party and there's, you know, hookers and coke in the bathroom and all that sort of stuff. And then with this guy, you have accusations of child, you know, sex trafficking and all this other stuff. And it's really hard to see how the US Senate takes the guy seriously. And I do think that Trump, in a lot of ways, maybe to your point, maybe if Gates doesn't, you know, get confirmed, maybe Trump is really with this nomination and with the Pete
Hegseth nomination and with the Tulsi Gabbard nomination. Yep. He's really testing how far he can push these Senate Republicans. What will they do? What I ask? And, and this is the, the first test of that. And, you know, we'll see, we'll, you know, we'll see. I mean, you're saying that you don't think he'll be confirmed. I'd like to believe that's right. But I think if Trump goes to
war for him, the calculation gets a little different. Yeah. I think two degrees, again, I'm just convinced that, you know, look, I'm not saying Trump's a rocket scientist and he certainly doesn't understand every ounce of politics. But like, even he has, he has smart people around him. He has Susie Wiles, who I've known, you know, since his early days and working on campaigns in Florida. That's his chief of staff. You know, she has his ear as I, and there's no doubt she's, you know,
she's let him know like what the political situation is going to be for gates, you know. It's like, so I don't know what the ultimate end game is. You know, I don't know how, you know, sometimes being appointed not getting a job is fine. It's kind of like, you know, we've talked about before, the people who try to run for president and don't make it. It's okay. They end up with careers otherwise, you know, like they were usually rich people. President so he could sell books. You know,
he knew he wasn't going to win. He actually told me that one day when I asked him, you know, if you, you know, why he was running, he said, have you noticed I pick up, you know, whether I will run for president often when I'm putting out a new book, I want, you know, it helps sell books, you know. Of course. Mike Huckabee, another great example. Her maintain, got a radio show out of losing his campaign for the presidency. And so there, and it's the same thing with these cabinet people.
Matt Gates is only going to build up his name identification. So even if he doesn't get it, he's going to have other options to go into whatever conservative corner. Right. We'll take a following. We'll take bets on whether he ends up on Newsmax or OANN or I mean, he could be, I, he might be one of those who is maybe a little too much even for Fox News Channel. I, I don't know, I, I, we'll just, you know, we'll watch that closely. On the question of mass deportations,
this has been promised by Trump. He has, he and his advisors have promised the biggest deportations in the history of the world. Millions and millions of people. And it reminds me of, I don't want to minimize it at all because this really affects a lot of communities in Texas. A lot of people really worried about this. And I've heard about it for the last week. People who are really freaked out. Um, in some ways, the rhetoric reminds me of the way he would talk about the wall. And they were
going to build this giant wall. And Mexico was going to pay for it. That of course didn't work out. Now Texas building its own wall, you know, with Governor Abbott leading the charge on that and tweeting nonstop about it. Um, so if Trump does what he said he was going to do, this would have terrible cultural implications and huge economic implications. I mean, where people are already pissed off about inflation and where the economy is is, you know, what gave Trump the victory.
You know, if you're just kind of pulling back and looking at things in a, you know, 30,000-foot level kind of way, um, Stephen Dyle, a reporter at Fox 4, filed this report from Dallas-Fort Worth. If he holds to his campaign promise, President-elect Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration begins in two and a half months. Trump said that he would deport millions who are in the country illegally. I spoke to Houston immigration lawyer Charles Foster, an immigration
advisor for two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It's easy to say, mass deportation from a political point of view, difficult to achieve and the economic consequences would be devastating. Governor Abbott was asked in Tyler on Wednesday to explain how a mass deportation plan would work. His party list that you begin with are the criminals and he said, after he gets done with that, he'll look elsewhere. Expiditing the deportation of criminals is not new as something
the Biden administration is already doing. According to the Migration Policy Institute from March 2023 to March 2024, the Biden administration processed 316,000 expedited removals. That's actually what President Obama and President Biden did. They both said we cannot deport everyone and we're going to prioritize and put our emphasis on deporting certain classes of individuals, including those with
prior serious criminal convictions. My friend Charles Foster there in Houston who, as Stephen pointed out, was an advisor to both Republican and Democratic presidents on the issue of immigration and he said basically what Abbott said there, which is that they need to start with and some of them are just making this up Jeremy because it's not what Trump actually said.
You do have what his borders are, which was what was that Tom Homan? It was working on this and he was saying they were going to get started with the criminal element first and then figure out where to go from there. That's kind of how they're framing this right now. Yeah, absolutely. What this is going to look like, like you said, is such a big question. Everybody's kind of worried about this right now in Texas and how this will play out. We talked about this during
the live event we had earlier this week with the Houston Chronicle Express News. I want to thank anybody who listened to that program. We had a lot of Bob Aterana on with us and with Viva politics and one thing she talked about with this was that, look, what Trump really wants out of this is the image. They're going to want to get those pictures of the people they're deporting as an image to send out to the world as kind of this intimidation and this kind of look at everybody
else. That's what she was kind of worried about from that standpoint. I was kind of balancing that a little bit with what Tom Homan to set. Tom Homan is going to be the borders are as what he's being called. He's a long time, a border patrol guy who Trump just loves and Greg Abbott likes to have a love into. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Homan told 60 minutes just before the election is like, look, this is not going to be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. This is not going to be building
concentration camps. He called out that ridiculous. We're not going to do that. But of course, he's saying that, but at the same time, you know, it maybe just didn't like how you phrase a sentence, right? Because they're not going to be concentration camps, but the Trump administration is already looking for land to build detention facilities. Yeah, how would get people out of here? It's like,
you know, they'd be detained there, but it's not a detention camp. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's kind of like, you know, the tent city with all those kids, you know, when we're doing the family separations, it's like, yeah, you could say that's not a concentration camp, but some people say it looks like a concentration camp, you know, it's like it all in the wording of it. And so I think
there's legitimate concern, you know, it's like, you know, you spend some time. It's not just in the East end in South Side of San Antonio, but it's like, you know, all of these communities, like, you think of what does this mean if you're in a place like Laredo, where, you know, 95% of the people
do have brown skin. It's like, who's being asked questions? And it fits into something you really kind of hammered home back during the legislative session when we were talking about how much we've tried, you know, the Republicans have tried to empower police in Texas to start doing deportations. These things kind of work together. It's like, we got to be kind of like, remember, we've empowered, you know, little local sheriffs that like aid and deportations at a time when Trump is now saying
he wants to do mass roundups too. And so look at all the danger we've kind of created for people who's, you know, just because their skin are going to get questions, maybe that other Texans aren't going to get. And I think that's the part that kind of freaks me out, you know, to think like, you know, you could have been in that you could be a nine generation Texan, but you could get that question from some, you know, 25 year old sheriff's deputies somewhere along the border going. I'm
trying to use them. Are you a US citizen? Yeah. Well, and, you know, look, I mean, to your point about the cops having, you know, being told to enforce immigration law at the local level and the, you know, the law that stuck in the courts right now is a model for other states. In fact, I think,
where did I hear it? There was another, there's another state that basically passed the same thing that says that the local cops can enforce immigration law and in their statute in the bill that they passed your army that there's language that says the enforcement of this law is contingent on whether the Texas law is found to be constitutional. So all of that is kind of working its way through
the courts right now. But, but to this whole point about discrimination, you will, the pushback, you will get from the supporters of this stuff is they'll say, Oh, well, you're acting as if the cops are racist. You're acting as if the cops are going to round people up based on the color of their skin and whether they have broken English. No, you don't have to ask us. You don't have to ask the critics. You have to ask the cops. The cops said they're not for enforcing immigration law locally.
And it's because it puts them in this position. If you as a cop witness somebody who's doing roofing work, this was a debate that was had in the in the Texas Senate. If you see somebody doing roofing work in Dallas and the people are brown and they speak mostly Spanish or broken English, would the police officer be then put in the position of having to ask that person about their
immigration status? And instead of just saying yes or no, the person pushing the legislation and one of those people is Charles Perry as a Republican senator in the Senate, he said, Oh, well, you're, you know, you're denigrating law enforcement. No, why don't you just answer it? Why don't you just say that the cops would have some magic way to know whether the people ought to be questioned about their immigration status? You know, it's not anything that the critics of the law are trying
to do to try to denigrate cops. It's the other way around. It's that when it comes to, and this happens all the time, we've talked about it before, when the police are used as political ponds and that happens way too often, when they are, when you have the arguments about defunding the police, Republicans will say, we are always going to be in the corner of the police. We're always
going to back them up and back to thin blue line and all of that. But then when the police disagree with the policies, these guys push, they put their fingers in their ears and they say, we don't care about that. And that comes to gun policy, that comes to immigration policy, and other things that I've watched these guys do over the last decade at the Texas Capitol. Now, yeah, and this is not theoretical, right? This is like, you're going to watch this real stuff.
Real stuff. In San Antonio, where Bear County Sheriff Salazar lives in Harris County, where Gonzalez is the sheriff, it's like, we're going to have, you know, these sheriffs have
this pressure put on them by the Trump administration. Of course. What's going to happen when the Trump administration, you know, if they do go into San Antonio to try to start picking up people that they've deemed could be deported, is like, what is that relationship with police in these communities that have taken a very different approach and don't want to be part of the border enforcement, right? We're going to see this play out, you know, in Texas probably more so than a lot of other
places. But, you know, watch those two cities and those sheriffs in these, you know, pretty blue areas who both can't, you know, say what you will about, you know, Trump's victory in Texas, he's still lost Bear County and Harris County dramatically, you know, he lost them pretty solidly. So he's like, he has no ally there and proceeding with this. But the question is, how much can they push back
and how much of it will end up in the courts someday at a courtroom near you? Now, the leaders in Texas are saying all kinds of things about this, about immigration and what Trump's victory means. The little governor, Dan Patrick, who I mentioned, says the state of Texas is not going to have to spend nearly as much money anymore on border security because Trump is going to ride to the rescue in January. And of course, Patrick could not wait to go on television and praise
the mighty leader. He might as well start by saying, hail Trump. I can't wait until we get there in January. You know, Jason, we've spent $4 billion, $4 billion in our budget the last three sessions now to secure the border since Joe Biden has been president because we had to do everything we
could to protect our citizens. Well, we're going to be able to take a lot of that money now and put it back to our taxpayers for roads, for water, for education, for health care, for all the things that we need that the Joe Biden forced us to spend because he was letting millions of people cross the border, criminals and terrorists. I mean, we know it. This is everybody knows it. So that's why he won. That's why he won. So it's a mandate for Republicans and State of Texas
to continue our conservative path. All right. So he says that they shouldn't spend as much money, but there's a mandate to continue on the same path. He's really really good at this, just saying, he's put out a blizzard of words and it's left to you to figure out what it means. Jeremy, the State of Texas started ramping up border security spending in earnest in 2014 when Trump,
you know, term hadn't started yet until 16. And then in the 2015 legislative session, they started to put a lot of money into this and they continued to ramp that up through 2019 during the first Trump administration. Then in, you know, 2020, 2021, the same level of spending continued. And what I'm telling you is that when Trump was in office before, during his first term,
Texas was spending billions of your dollars. Now, why did they need to do that? If what Patrick is saying is true now, is that what's different is this goes right to this and you may think I'm
being cute about this. This goes right to the discussion we were just having. Does is it that Patrick will just say anything, which the answer to that is sometimes yes, is that he'll just say anything or is it that Patrick believes that the Trump administration really is going to engage in this giant mass deportation, that they're going to, they're going to handle all that, that they're
really going to build their own wall and governor Abbott's wall isn't necessary anymore. Does Trump, does Trump have what it takes according to Dan Patrick such that Texas can stop spending billions of dollars on this and spend it on other things? Can Texas now spend the four or five, six, eight
billion, whatever they would put into the budget? Can we spend it on other things? Can we spend it on public education, water infrastructure, roads, hardening the electricity grid, all that sort of stuff that we actually do need instead of this border cosplay that the DPS is engaged in. Or is Patrick just saying this because he's trying to find more money in the budget? I can believe both actually.
Yeah, I think the problem for this issue for Republicans going forward is that you can't start bringing that money back without opening a line of attack for the next primary cycle. We've learned a long time ago that guess what, you know, mailers in a primary aren't always necessarily truthful, right? It's like all you have to do is say, hey, this guy, you know, voted to slash the budget
to protect the country and the border. It's like, it's like you just take, you know, even if you knocked it down from eight billion dollars to seven billion dollars, you've opened yourself up to a line attack from somebody who's going to be able to make the case that you're soft on the border. I wouldn't have let that happen. And then you put everybody in the
Texas legislature, everybody in office, you know, kind of in a tough spot. So I think as much as they want to get that number down, you know, they might want to now that Trump's in going like, hey, y'all take care of this. We need this money for our schools and our teachers or whatever. You know, it's like as much as you might want to do that, that's going to be a hard play politically when everybody's kind of worried about the next primary. Alan West and Don Huffine showed that
you could use anything on the border against Greg Abbott and create some stirr. And granted, Abbott was able to defeat both of them, but it cost him money to do it, right? You know, it's like, and there was concern at one point, could these guys catch on? And so there is another Alan West and Don Huffine's up there somewhere out there who's ready to take any sort of reduction in border funding and take it to them. So that's the danger Dan Patrick worked with if he starts
moving that number down. I think what he's doing here is he's kind of sort of floating a trod balloon, right? I think he's he's floating this out in this interview and saying, oh, maybe we don't have to spend so much on border security and more because you know, now we have Trump coming in and he's going to save the day and all of that and see how that goes. Because to your point, if they do cut border security funding at all, they will be mercilessly just mercilessly attacked
for that. And Jeremy's not exaggerating at all. I remember, I think it was in the 20, the 2013 or 2015 session, there was an amendment offered to the Texas budget on the Texas House floor by then estate representative Tony Dale. You get a Tony Dale shot out here. So representative Dale offered this amendment. What it would have done, I'm this is from memory. So this is pretty close to right. I can't remember the exact amount, but it was a smaller amount in the grand scheme.
It was going to take money from a sensitivity training program they have with the Texas Department of Public Safety and it was going to buy either one or two planes, the airplanes just to you know, fly over the Rio Grande to fly over the border for border security. And of course, the amendment failed because it was stupid. And you know, the members were going to vote for this and I should say, it was extra stupid because they were already spending billions of dollars on border security.
The vote on that amendment ended up on male pieces against Republicans and their primaries, not just during one campaign cycle, but two campaign cycles. It was in, I think it was in the 14 and 16 campaign cycles that Republicans saw that male piece showing up in their districts from their opponents and from third party groups and the attack on them, it said, so and so representative voted to support sensitivity training programs instead of, you know, border security,
which of course was ludicrous, but this is the kind of thing they face. So Patrick, saying this now, that oh, they can just cut back on border security, I think the politics of that might blow back on him pretty quick. Well, and that I love that trial balloon idea. The trial balloon is specifically for Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck, right? What will they say if they hear this, right? You know, can you hear Tucker Carlson's, you know, you know, you know, laugh, they're gonna cut border security.
No, they'll do that. We're cut down the border. He'll do that weird laugh that he does. What do you think that they're going to cut the border? That, oh, that means that the illegal is won't come in anymore. He does this laugh that he's completely insane. It's it's not even whatever what just got said is not funny. And he's doing this high pitched laugh and people look at this guy as some
example of masculinity. It's bizarre to me, but go ahead and given the amount of time that, you know, both Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson spent on just beating the daylights at a Greg Abbott for being soft on the border, right? Again, he sucked. Yeah, it's like, we're talking about Greg Abbott, right? You know, and they turned him into the weakest border guy America has ever seen. Like, some of the language that was used was just absolutely insane. So now if like, if you give Abbott a
budget that has less funding for border security, what do you think Abbott's going to do? It's like, I don't want to go through that garbage again. There's no way he's going to let them cut that budget. He's going to demand more money in that budget. You know, and then he's going to use his platform on Fox News going, I won't stand for that. It's like, there's no way they're going to reduce that money for border security, even if they have the ability to know that Trump's in office.
I just be interesting. It would be interesting if they cut back on the amount for that and he was upset about it. And of course, we would have to remind the governor that he'd have to go on Fox News or somewhere to really pound his fist because the governor does have the line out of veto. But that can only reduce spending. It can't increase it, right? That's so he kind of be, he kind of be caught there. So one other thing about Dan Patrick, he was on WFA in Dallas talking to our
friend Jason Whiteley there. And I mentioned Casinos at the beginning of the show. And Patrick, in the last couple of campaign cycles and the last couple of legislative sessions, has found a different way to talk about casino gambling. At one time, someone like Patrick, who is seen as an evangelical Republican leader, I mean, he says the famous quote from him that he would say just about every campaign event or at the Republican Party of Texas convention. I think he used to
say this on his radio show as well. If I remember that far back 20 years ago, he would say, I'm a Christian first conservative second and a Republican third. Right? So listen closely to what he's saying here about Casinos with that in mind. When he was asked whether we might see a casino gaming bill passed by the Texas Senate next year, Patrick said that there aren't enough votes in the Senate for it to pass.
They've never worked the vote. They've just came, they've come in and spent millions and millions and millions of dollars. And they just think, well, magically it happens. It doesn't. So he's saying that the casino interests that have hired, let me look at this. I've got the number right here somewhere. They've hired something like 80 lobbyists at the Texas Capitol over the last couple of sessions
that they have never quote worked the vote. Now that might become as a surprise to the 80 lobbyists who have been working on this and trying to get lawmakers to vote for it because this is what the lobby does. They either try to get them to vote for it or to vote against something depending on who they're representing. Sans being the biggest player here at Las Vegas and the Adelson family. They've hired quite a few folks to work on this issue at the Capitol. They have spent millions
of dollars in campaigns and they're not the only ones. There are some other interests that are working on this. But again, as a Christian evangelical leader, listen to how Patrick is talking about this. He says, you know, that they haven't worked the vote. There's not the votes there for it. Then he said that if it ever got real traction as in if they're worth the votes for it or it looked like it was moving in the direction of passage of a casino gaming bill, he said the opposition
would come out of the woodwork. If a bill ever started to get close and moving, you're going to hear from the other side. You're going to hear from the pastor. You're going to hear from the business community. You're going to hear from the citizens who oppose it. Right now you haven't even heard from them because they know what I know. The votes aren't there. So I know there are people who want it. We're not trying to tell people what they should do in their lifestyle.
Well, yes, they are. The way that he's talking, do you remember? Not really an answer. He's not saying where he's at on it. I'm here to tell you that if Dan Patrick wanted there to be a casino gaming bill that could pass the Senate, the votes would be there for it. This is a guy who can put the pressure on the Republican senators. If he wanted something
that could easily happen. But the way that he's talking about it, it'd fly. Can you remember the movie, the best little whorehouse in Texas and the governor character in that? When they were asking him, and if you're not aware of the moon, this is such a throwback that, of course, Evan, young Evan, as he's known, he didn't even know what movie I was talking about. The best little whorehouse in Texas. And it's based on the real story, right? There was a brothel
forever in Lagrange. That's the same establishment that the ZZ Top Song is about, about the song of Lagrange. And the governor character in the movie is asked. And this is, you know, it's, let's think of it this way. This is the kind of business that Republicans don't necessarily want to be seen supporting. But a lot of those businesses support them. Right? Okay. So they call it sin city for a reason out in Las Vegas. So this is why I'm bringing
this up. The governor character in the best little whorehouse in Texas is repeatedly asked, what's he going to do about shutting down this brothel in Lagrange? And he just won't answer the question. Felatexans. I am proudly standing here to humbly see. I show you. And I mean it. Now says I don't speak out as plain as day and felatexans. I'm for progress. And the flag. Now me it flies. I'm a poor boy. Come to greatness. So it's flawless that I cannot tell a lie.
What the hell did he say? The same as usual, not the same thing. So the reporters there say that. They say, what did he say? What was that? They are standing there, Jeremy, with their notepads and trying to write down any quote from that that would help them answer the question. And they're saying, well, he's not saying anything. So when it comes to Dan Patrick on casinos, you know what he's doing? He is dancing a little side step.
Now why is Patrick doing the same thing as the governor in the best little whorehouse in Texas, Jeremy? I sort of started to answer this. It's because all of this money that's coming in from the casino interest, right? In any other instance, in any other issue, can you imagine that Dan Patrick wouldn't just say, I'm with the pastors. I'm with the churches. I'm, you know, this is an evangelical leader. He's somebody who would be with the Christian opposition to this. They're the
ones who argue that it brings all this extra crime to your state. That it's something that's going to break the backs of poor people and then having a casino in your town is basically attacks on the working poor. And all of that opposition you would get from those folks who would say that they are right-wing evangelicals, I can't think of another issue where Patrick wouldn't just say he's with them. But instead, he's doing this side step because you've had that money coming in for him.
You've had some coming in a lot coming in for Abbott. You've had a lot of it coming in for who? For Donald Trump. And who did it go, who did it come from to go to Trump? Adelson, right? And Adelson, not only is making this huge investment in Texas, you know, as far as trying to get this bill passed, but also made a huge investment in Dallas, buying the Mavericks from Mark Cuban, right? I mean, they are really trying to move into this market. And Patrick's trying to act as if, well, you know,
there's not much I can do all shucks, not much I can do about it. The votes aren't there for it in the Senate. And so I guess it's just not going to happen. Well, an interesting point on all that because like those destiny, they call them destination casino, you know, lobbying group, whatever. Whatever that group's name is, they've had a presence at both a Democratic and Republican conventions in Texas. They've set up shop in those things trying to, you know, be more open out
there. They've done advertisement advertisements. If you remember, you know, from that last election cycle, they were actually running ads in Austin, you know, quite frequently about how it's time to do, you know, casino gambling in Texas. So there's like, they're clearly putting that financial investment. And I think you're dead on about Patrick knows that like he doesn't necessarily want to
turn off that spigot of, you know, casino money coming to Texas. But remember, you know, we're unlike a lot of states, you know, back in the day, they put in our constitution that we cannot expand gaming. It's so hard. It's literally in our state constitution, you know, it's like, and so it's not just a simple vote in the legislature, you're going to have to get a, you know, super majority and you're going to have to rewrite the constitution for Las Vegas Sands if you
want to give them what they want. And that is, I think that gets a little bit more difficult when you start putting in that context. When everybody wanted a $100,000 homestead exemption, it wasn't hard. They had to do it the same way, right? Two thirds in the House and Senate, send it to the people for a vote. Yeah, every, and, you know, I get this, you know, feedback from people every time this comes up,
they'll say, well, why don't they just put it to a vote? Everybody, you know, wants this in Texas, all the polling shows that everybody would vote for this. And it goes right to what you're saying. These guys continue to make off like bandits when it's not passing as long as they can kind of flirt with the casino interests to keep that money flowing into their campaign coffers and into
the lobby efforts. They'll just keep working on this forever. And I can imagine that I mean, there might become a, there might come a tipping point for, for Patrick, where he would go along with it. But I'm more and more convinced that until he's out of office, this is never going to pass. Well, and it's also in the Republican Party of Texas, you know, platform that you can't
expand gaming to. Granted, that's not the scariest thing in the world, you know, because like the Republican Party of Texas is the actual organization is much smaller than the Republican Party that you know of. But nonetheless, they do have the ability to make noise and cause trouble for you in your you know, state house district. If you vote to go against their platform and against the Constitution, you're just asking for trouble. It goes, you know, I steal this from you every time, but like,
you know, Texas is still a primary state. And the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out in Longview, Texas, trying to tell people why you violate the Republican platform and the state Constitution because somebody sent you a campaign check. You don't want to be in that spot, you know, it's like, so you're going to try to avoid it at all cost.
Fortunately, in the race for Texas House Speaker, they do have a challenger who supported expansion of gambling, representative David Cout, who is now the guy who's preferred by all these people who say that they're the true conservatives and the reformers and everything. And as soon as, and I told you at the time when he emerged as a candidate, no personal issue with the guy or
anything, some people might be surprised by this. Almost all of the Republican members of the legislature are people that I either, I'm either their friend or have a good working relationship with. And when Cook emerged as a speaker candidate, some of the very conservative activists in the state started calling me and saying, this is really our guy, heat to your point, Jeremy. This is really our guy, a guy who supports casino gaming, he voted for it on the floor of the house.
We shouldn't that complicate his effort to try to unseat the speaker, Dave Fielin. Now, we're going to talk about this a lot as we move forward. As I mentioned, the race for speaker, we'll get into it. But we're going to be basically off the air here on the show for two weeks. So you want to watch quorum report.com, Houston Chronicle.com. We're going to be covering this stuff. When it comes to the race for the speaker, I think it's kind of still simmering out there.
So just, but I'm done talking, saying a whole lot about it because at this moment, because I'm not, I'm not one of these lesser podcast hosts in the state who's just trying to influence the whole thing. And talks about nothing else for 35 minutes every week about it. We don't do that. We talk about it when there's something new to say about it. So we'll get to that stuff. quorum report.com, Houston Chronicle.com. It's kind of reached a point of simmering right now. There's stuff going
on with it. And we'll get into it. Go ahead, Jeremy. You're going to say something. Yeah, I was just going to say on that same vein, you know, again, could we be off for a while.
You got to check the Texas Take News letter for as much as you can over the next couple of weeks, because all these, you know, Texans who are in line for things in Washington, you know, under this new Trump administration, you know, the impact that's going to have on stuff, and you kind of maybe some head at the beginning of the show, you mentioned Pete, you know, Hegseth of Fox and Friends is now going to be the defense secretary, which is kind of crazy
in of its own right. But like one of the things that he has done, he started talking about making leadership changes in the military. And that could cost general Brown from San Antonio, who is the joint chiefs right now. It could cost him his job, because one of the things that Hegseth has said, you know, in his books is that he almost made it suggest, you know, a suggestion that somehow CQ Brown got the job because of his race, which is really kind of a sad testament to kind of
the attacks that are going to come on him. And remember CQ Brown, he is a San Antonio guy, he was an Air Force general, he went to Texas Tech, he's a Texan man. And you could see, not only are we getting passed over for spots, no Texans are getting appointments right now, but we could actually lose cloud. There's a federal government. There's only one Texan. There was some people who were surprised by it. There was only one Texan so far who's been
appointed for anything by Trump. And that was John Rack, left the former congressman, but also was in the first Trump administration as well. But other than that, people were asking me this week, why isn't Pax, we talked about, you know, potentially maybe Paxson being appointed to something, at Patrick being appointed to something, but Patrick immediately said, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'll be supporting Trump from my lofty perch in Austin, Texas as the Lieutenant Governor, but
nobody asked me about Sid Miller, which I thought, what, I mean, he's the one. Isn't Sid the one that Trump would immediately turn to? I mean, his guy in Texas. So anyway, there'll be stuff to report. We're not going to be here on the show, but of course, point being, you still want to watch the newsletters, sign up for Jeremy's newsletter. It's on his on his x-page at the pin post there. quorumreport.com. You need that for the inside story on Texas politics. I mentioned the speakers
race. If anything new comes up about that, it'll be there at quorumreport.com. Of course, thank you to Evan Scherer, our producer, who makes everything sounds so perfect here on this show. And over on Jeff Berg is litigious, the show where I am the executive producer. And if you're into this show, you might like that one as well. I've got a lot of great feedback from Texas take fans who have checked it out. I saw some of the social media posts just today. People saying thanks for
introducing us to that. You can check it out a new show about the intersection of politics, pop culture, and the law. Just go to burglpc.com slash podcast to check it out. B-E-R-G-P-C.com slash podcast. And you can check that out. So this latest show about crypto, Evan, and the crypt, you know, trying to get money back for people who have been caught up in these crypto scams. You won't believe some of the stuff that these, it's basically organized crime.
You won't believe it is organized crime. You won't believe what these people are doing, Jeremy, to catch people up in these scams. So check that out burglpc.com slash podcast. As we mentioned, you should be a subscriber at quorumreport.com. You're using chronicle.com. And we'll see you here on the show in December. Right now on Jeff Berge's litigious, Jeff is pulling back the curtain on the slavery operations run
by organized crime behind these crypto scams. The stuff is disgusting. It's got to be exposed. If you're into the intersection of politics, pop culture, and the law, this is a show for you. Check it out by searching burglpc is litigious on your favorite podcast staff and subscribe today or just go to burglpc.com slash podcast.