You're the one who said that broccoli is good. I believe it.
Even George H. W. Bush, I'm a real squash. Even George H. W. Bush hated bly right for the left of him.
Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Gorbachoff, tear down this wall.
It's the Ricochet Podcast with Charles C. W. Cook and Steven Hayward and myself James Lillas. Today we talked to our old friend Anny McCarthy about the cabinet nominations and more so, let's have ourselves a podcast.
It comes to the selection of Representative Gates. I just think it's silly. I believe that the President is probably rewarding him for being such a loyal soldier to the president. But the President is smart enough and his team is smart enough to know that mister Gates will never get confirmed by the Center.
We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.
Believe me.
Welcome, It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and seventeen. I'm James Lilacs on a beautiful crisp fall day in November in Minnesota, and I'm joined by Charles C. W.
Cook.
I presume in Florida, and Stephen Hayward, Lord knows where you are. Where have events taken you today?
I'm in Washington, D C. At the Annual Conference of the Federal Society.
Ah, you were in the thick of it. You are in the belly, yes, Brant, or you're in coreus Gant. Great, Well, we'll get to what the capital is doing and how you are. I assume you've taken a cab driver a cab and have some wisdom to impart from the cab driver, since that's every columnists cliche.
But not really.
You know, the cab driving population here, as I think you know, is overwhelmingly foreign.
They do tend to listen to NPR a lot.
I noticed when I ride around Washington with the cabs, and so I generally shy away from trying to play Tom Friedman in the cab.
Right when I lived there, it was an influx of Afghan doctors for some reason. Every single cab driver I had was a neurosurgeon from cow. All right, gentlemen, here's my theory. I'm going to toss it out. Hear me out. Trump has been playing a long game, and the reason that he ran for the presidency in the first place was not because he got to pickle up his posterior when they needled him at the correspondence. Genner no as
a devote of McDonald's food. This is all about using his power to bring back frying French fries in beef tallow. And that's why the RFK appointment is in there. RFK is going to say that what we've done to our food is an abomination, and at a minimum, we should go back to frying our French fries in beef tallow because they're better.
So we have all these.
Cabinet denominations, some of which landed a little bit better than others. Is there anyone particular that you guys find out, I mean, RFK, we want to have a talk about floridation. Okay, we can have a talk about floridation after all these years. But going back on the idea of vaccines being a useful tool to prevent disease in children and otherwise seems a conversation that we could maybe not have for a while. Take up seed oils if you want, take up high fruit toast corn syrup.
If you like.
But let's let's not do the vaccine thing.
Or you should go first on this.
One, on Rfkjunior or in general.
In general, you pick a nomination, Who do you like, who do you not? I mean, we're going to talk We got Anny McCarthy coming up, and we're going to talk about Matt in a bit, so take that one off the table for a well.
I think that the good nominations have been very very good, and the bad nominations have been very very bad. If I can't talk about Matt Gates, I'll talk about RFK Jr.
Who's a crank.
And the argument for him is based on the logical fallacy that because HHS is a disaster and the public health establishment has disgraced itself, both of which are true, we therefore should are obliged to put in someone awful into a department of the federal government, the controls I think twenty percent of the entire budget. I don't think it's a secret that I am one of URFK Junior's
biggest critics. I think there is very little redeeming about him, and what is redeeming doesn't particularly intersect with HHS, that being his.
Desire to make.
America healthy, which is fine. Broccoli is good, root loops are bad for you. But I don't need to hand over twenty percent of the federal government to Kennedy to make those reforms. And I'll finish by saying, I think that even those people who wish to see wholesale changes in that area I'm not opposed to that would be better served by choosing somebody better. Not that he's available, but someone like a Ron DeSantis really could go in
there and shake things up. I think RFK Junior, if he gets through the nomination, will not.
Charles, I would have disagree with you about this because I don't think that broccoli is good. As a matter of fact.
I think it's yeah, and I think loops are awesome. But that's me, Stephen.
What do you like and what are you not?
Well?
I think well, I agree with Charles that RFK is a dubious appointment at best. If he were, you know, supposedly he was on the list of possible EPA directors under Obama back in two thousand and nine, and if he or Biden Obama Biden had put RFK in the cabinet, I think our team would be appalled, opposed, up in arms, and this is partly tribal politics. On the other hand, you know, I think why this is happening, Why Matt Gates, why Pete Hegseth, And I don't lump all three of
them together, by the way, I think hegscith is. I think I agree with Charlie and this is a worthy of appointment.
They there's two things.
Trump wants loyalty, and he's appointed people who he thinks will be much more loyal to him than this first term. I'm doubtful about RFK by the way. He could easily go off the reservation very fast, depending on a variety of things. And he wants disruptors, and in you know, Gates, I think hakesa two and certainly a RFK. You see people who want to go in and you know, smash up the joint, disrupt the places that might create chaos.
I have to say, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I read, as I did in the paper this morning that something like forty percent of the staff of the Centers for Disease Control say they'll quit if RFK has made a Secretary of Health and Human Services. It was like Boster making Elon Musk job of reducts reducing federal employees. Easy.
We hear about this, we hear about this, Justice, we hear about this at FBI. Everyone's heading for the exits, and you get the picture almost of a silent movie comedy skit where you have, you know, a variety of corpulent people attempting to fit the door at the same time. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's the government. It's downsizing version
of self deportation. Yes. One of the ones that I found interesting because I had no idea who he was was John Jay Ray, which I like, you know, a comedian from the you can call me John j Ray.
The third who.
Is being floated for Secretary of Education, And I thought that was interesting because we've had the statement that the Department of Education should be eliminated, which causes hair to erupt spontaneously all over in certain quarters, because how can you say that with the appalling educational results that we already have in the country. How can you because they
don't have any students. Because the very idea of dismantling this top down apparatus and taking the money and giving the responsibility back to the states seems like a capital idea because It's not as if we've had an efflorescence of brilliance in our public school system. Since the Department of Education was established, We've had a series of mandates and ideas and acronyms and the rest of it, all of which have distorted and contorted and led to appalling results.
The only chart that you have to show people, really is the chart that shows the amount of money that I'm going to students and the amount of money that's been going to administrators.
That's all you need to do.
And if you say that you know we're going to take that money, we're going to give it back to the states along with control and have people will have the well again, they're terrified of that because they think then that the people who show up and complain at the school board meetings about books in the schools are going to be the ones who dominate the local politics. It's just not a necessary department. Ray I knew nothing about him, was the guy who was put in charge
of FTX, the crypto Buddy after it fell apart. And the reason that I trust him if he takes his job because according to the Wikipedia page, he's paid a two hundred thousand dollars annual retreat retainer and makes one three hundred dollars an hour as the CEO of FTX
by his appointment. So if he's willing to give up that kind of capital in order to do this, I'm thinking he might be coming in to dismantle and help take apart the Department of Education or are we all just hoffened the paint fumes and it is never going to happen, because when is an never win? Is a cabinet position ever gone away?
Well, yeah, it looks like an odd appointment.
I mean, usually you want someone who has some background in education and you know, from our point of view, a sensible reformer like you know, William Bennett in the eighties or Betsy Davos and Trump's first term.
And yeah, this guy looks like someone who is not a.
Special a specialist in receiverships and bankruptcies.
But that's kind of what he's looking at here.
He wants to go through and dismantle the assets of the Department of Education. Some functions I think you have
to keep that predated the department when Jimmy Carter created it. Uh, you know, I made a suggestion online, but two three weeks ago that one of the things that Trump Education Department should do on day one is copy what the Obama and Biden administrations did, namely, send a Dear Colleague letter like they did with Title nine, to every university and say it is the legal opinion of the Trump administration that every de ie office of the university is
a presumptive violation of Title six of the Civil Rights Act. And unless you abolish them, not rename them, not shuffle deck chairs, but abolish them and dismiss their employees and get rid of all the rules and guidelines, we are cutting off your federal funding today.
And Trump this morning said something very close to that.
He said my first week in office, I'm going to tell universities through the Department of Education, if they don't and their tolerance of anti Semitism on campus, We're going to review their accreditation and cut off their federal funding. You know, if the Department of Education and this secretary does things like that, then Democrats will want to abolish the department. So again, I like a very aggressive strategy possibly that we're seeing shape up so far.
Charles, how do you think that's going to play out? Because people are also saying in addition to the dear colleague letter to the universities telling them to knock it off with tolerating the anti semitism, there's been floated, as ever again, the idea of taxing the endowments, taxing the endowments and using the money to fund a free online university which would be accredited that people could use that people who do not have access to the IVS, shall we say, would be able to use?
What do you think of that idea?
No?
I just want to text them anyway.
Yes, you know why because President Biden illegally and willfully spent I think the most recent number is one hundred and forty billion dollars. The aim was to spend five hundred billion dollars on transferring the liability for student loans from the people who took them out, spent them, and
benefited from them to people who didn't. That money is going to come from somewhere taxes or debt, which eventually becomes taxes, and I would like to see that money paid back so that no funds are taken away from the people who did not benefit from those college educations. There are a bunch of things raised that I would just say on the Department of Education, I'm entirely in favor of its abolition. It shouldn't exist. There's no federal
role for education. It shouldn't be. The likelihood of Congress using its political capital to do this, given the hyperbole and demagoguery that that would yield.
From the left, I think is relatively small.
Perhaps you might get something in reconciliation to reduce its budget, although I won't hold my breath. The problem with and I know he was half joking, The problem with expecting Stephen's excellent idea of the Dear Colleague letter to sell Democrats on the case for getting rid of the Department of Education is what you are doing with that, and what Trump should do with that is reaffirming its power. And Democrats are just going to want to take it
over again and do the opposite. We're just going to see cesawing back and forth letters on due process, on college campuses, on DII.
And so forth.
But I'm one hundred percent with you on the details. I think that the best thing and I know a lot of people on the right were squishy about this, I wasn't The best thing Trump did in this area was right toward the end of his first administration where he sent a letter to was it Princeton after Princeton announced that it was racist in that glorious Summer of Nonsense twenty twenty, Princeton said, we are a racist institution.
Could have been yeah, I can't remember, but one of.
These big ivs said we are a racist institution. And Trump's doj I think, said oh, well, if you're a racist institution, then we're obliged under the law to investigate you.
Yeah.
That's absolutely, quite seriously, that is absolutely what the federal government should be doing. The DEI push is obviously in violation of the Civil Rights Act, and if you believe that the Affirmative Action decision was correct, arguably of the Fourteenth Amendment acid has been construed by the Supreme Court as well. And while conservatives are in charge of these organizations, if they're not going to abolish them, which they should, they should be directing them precisely this way.
I'm with you on that.
The problem, of course, is that if you have an online university only, then you don't have toga parties. And if you don't have toga parties, then you don't have those rituals of college, where, of course, the next day you drag yourself off to class. The problem is, of course, is that you know when you do that and you over indulge, you feel bad. But let me tell you there's a sure fire away to wake up feeling fresh the next day after a night of toga party. And
that's with pre alcohol pre alcohol. That's right, zbiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle those rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut, and it's this byproduct, not dehydration that's to blame for your rough next day. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this by product down. Just remember to make zbiotics
your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Now, you know me, I've been talking about this for a long time and I don't like to do anything and tell you about it that I haven't done. And I've done this and it was sort of like a you know, some assignments are oh boy, do I have to. But the other is try this and have yourself a scotch and I did and I felt great.
So this is it.
Though with their GMO technology, z biotics is continuing to invent probiotics. It will help enjoy odd everyday challenges of modern life. And you can get started at zbiotics dot com slash ricochet to learn more and to get fifteen percent off your first order. That's if you use the Ricochet coupon code at the checkout. Zbiotics is back with the one hundred percent money back guarantee, so if you are unsatisfied for any reason, they will refund your money,
no questions asked. You got nothing to lose, so remember head to zbiotics dot com slash ricochet and use the code to Ricochet at the checkout for fifteen percent off. And we thanks the Biotics sponsoring this the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast a brand new guest. We've never talked to you before and we're eager to pick his brain on a variety of I'm kidding it's
one of our faves. Andy McCarthy Anna McCarthy, Senior Fellow with the National Review Institute and our contributing editor and the author of Ball of Collusion, the plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency. Well, that presidency is back, and so is Andy. How are you doing today.
I'm doing great, guys. How are you good?
Capital All right?
You know we've been talking Trump appointments. We wanted to save one for you, so we know you probably have some thoughts about it. So if you could just tell us where do you stand on Telsea Gambert?
No, I'm kidding.
You know who I'm talking about.
Yeah, Look, Gates is an appalling appointment. But it's funny that you mentioned gab because I think there's a logic to those two appointments together. I think Trump believes, and he's got colorable reasons for this, that the main insiders in the government that went after him were in the
Justice Department and the intelligence community. And I think if you think of Gabbard and Gates as being sent into those agencies to kind of clean house and either get rid of or marginalize the people that Trump believes not only gun for him, but in general politicize their authority, which is a big problem in the government and in particular in the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus. Then those
appointments make sense. I don't have to like them, but I think that that's the logic of the appointments.
It's Steve Hayward in Washington. I'm actually at the annual Federal Society Conference, where I know you've been president in the years past.
And no one has taken a poll.
But everyone you talk to is similarly appalled at the Gates nomination and think there is zero chance he will be confirmed. I mean, I have my theories about this that are congruent with yours. Trump wants disruptors, he wants people who he thinks will be loyal to him when he thinks he couldn't count on I think incorrectly he couldn't count on his first attorney generals from Trump one. But boy, I don't know. I'm sort of a loss to say, how could you have thought this is a
good idea. I mean, I get the other people, even RFK Junior, I get to a certain extent, even though I think that's a dubious idea. I kind of get that one, but this one's a real head scratcher.
Well, during the I've kind of made a resolution, Steve, that I'm not going to get myself old whipped up about the second Trump administration, because I was actually talking a Rich Lowry before on our podcast about this. If you look like month to month in the last Trump administration, there would be NonStop drama. I used to call the Twitter feed all in, all the time, right, right. And then there were the people who provided guardrails for him, the Bill Boarrs and Mike Pompeo's and those guys of
the world. Right. So if you rode this thing like a daily rollercoaster, it would drive you nuts. But if you looked at where the country was on the first of the month and the thirtieth of the month, it was pretty much the same place. And it was there was a lot of There was a lot of good I think more good than bad certainly during those four years. So I'm going to try not to get whipped up
about the ups and downs. I think this is an extraordinary one because the Framers put the Senate vetting of high government officials into the Constitution precisely to protect liberty and because they didn't want too much power to be accumulated in any one person's hands. So the president gets to fire anyone that he wants in the Justice Department.
But you can't appoint somebody who can't get past the Senate, which is supposed to be looking for whether they have the characters, the scruples, and the capabilities to do the
job on some sort of minimally acceptable level. And I have to say, if you don't have a filibuster on confirmations, and you got a fifty three forty seven Republican majority in the Senate, and you think you have to do a Kakamami recess appointment scheme to get somebody appointed, then that should say, even to Trump, this is someone who you should not appoint. And I just with respect to Trump on the all in, all the time sort of theory, I don't buy into four dimensional chess theories of Trump.
I am totally even though I would find this hard to believe in other circumstances. I'm totally open to the idea that you know, Susie Wiles left the room and left him together with Boris Epstein and Gates for five minutes, and then the next thing that you know, Gates was the attorney general.
Right.
I totally believe that. I don't think that there's a great scheme behind this. But the fact that you, the fact that you would have to do a scheme to get him confirmed because he's unconfirmable, should say to anybody sensible, don't do this.
Well, I've been tempted to try and advance the joke that Susie has left her wiles at the door sometimes, right, you know, we'll see about this, because I'm inclined to think well over from what I've heard, I've never met her, don't know that much.
But well, that's the related question.
Was the recess appointment business, and of course that preceded the Gates appointment. He's Trump talked about that starting sometime last week, and you know, he's being very demanding and and I think Charlie.
And I may have a slight difference.
I think Charlie, I think you were harshly critical of Trump's pushing the recess appointment to a loophole, so to speak. I you know, I kind of think Trump is using his old real estate business tactics in politics, which people I think still haven't quite figured out. Right, you asked for the moon and the stars, and maybe you get something what you want, and so Andy, I know you're familiar with the problem that now goes back to the Watergate era.
You know, after Watergate we have the new.
Ethics Acts, the FBI background checks where everybody takes so long, more delays and hearings and getting not just cabinets usually get those through fairly quickly. But you know, the Trump administration went two three, almost through all four years with certain senior sub cabinet offices not confirmed because of controversies and delays and background checks.
And people have talked for twenty thirty years.
Now that this is a problem that has gotten out of hand, and you know, all the good reform talk is just not going to change that. So here comes Trump, blustering as usual, saying, you give me resource appointments and all appoint five.
Hundred people and get things up and running.
And it is an offense to the constitutional principle of advice and consent to the Senate. On the other hand, maybe this is going to shake things up and make the Senate and the FBI and all the other processes maybe behave themselves with a little more dispatch. Is that plausible or hope is the reason to think that might be an outcome from this.
I think that Trump doesn't have the same presumption of illegitimacy in some quarters this time than he had the last time. There have been reforms of the process. I don't remember, Steve, if it's like what year they did it, but they lowered Charlie may remember exactly when this was, but they lowered the number of hours that the Senate can hold up any one nominee from like thirty down to two.
I was in twenty nineteen, and it was the brainchild and stewarded by that rhino squish Mitch McConnell, who were all supposed to hate but was one of the most effective conservative figures in the last half century and once again has improved things here.
Yeah. So I think the other thing Steve is is he's naming these people early in the hope of getting the benefit that I think Obama got. You know, no one complains that these hurdles that you just described had any impact on Obama. Right. He started to name people within days after being elected, and by the time he got in they rat tet tet confirmed his guys. In fact, I remember this very well because I was ballistic over the Holder nomination. I had a personal reason to be
ballistic over it. I was in the Southern District of New York as a prosecutor not only during the Mark Rich debacle, but Susan Rosenberg, the former Weather underground terrorist, was my defendant. I spent about a year and a half in a litigation to stop the trial judge in that case from releasing her from her was it sixty
year prison sentence. This was my one of my favorite litigations ever because she was represented by Williams and Connolly, which is like the sort of quasi white shoe criminal firm in Washington who representing Clinton, and their defense was that Susan wasn't a terrorist, and the explanation for that was that their firm didn't represent terrorists and they were representing her airgo she wasn't a terrorist. So it took me a year and a half, but I did manage
to talk the judge added that one. But as as soon as we finally got them to rule in our favor, Clinton pardoned her on his way at the door and used he used the same offline pardon system that that holder had designed for Mark Rich, so that that didn't go through the pardon office, and in a real schevy way, they got that out the door. So anyway, I was ballistic over that, but the Mark Rich thing ended up
not mattering. I think Holder got like he was confirmed something like eighty seven to thirteen or something along those lines. So you know, I expect that most of Trump's nominees are going to get that treatment, and I don't think he needs I just don't believe that he picked Gates because like he's obviously not going to make it, but that'll make it easier for you know, for Todd Blanche
or whoever else oh right behind him. I do think Todd Blanche is likely to end up being the AG, but I don't think it's I don't think it was a scheme that Gates would implode and that would make it easier for the next I think Trump actually wants Gates, and we'll probably fight for them a little bit.
Yeah, I know, I thought there's maybe a game through angle. But I want to back up a step because you prompted a big point of mind that maybe I'm a little out there on the edge, but you pot that you said that Obama managed to get a lot of people through FARREI quickly, here's the thing about appointments in the federal bureaucracy is that there's an asymmetry between the two parties. By that, I mean, and here's where I'm very direct and blunt. The federal bureaucracy is the partisan
instrument of the Democratic Party, yep. And that's been their intention for years, and I'm always frustrated that Republican candidates don't ever say that directly. We talked about the deep state and the swamp and all the rest of that, and you kind of know what they mean. But the point is obvious here, which is the permanent bureaucracy. They don't actually need a Democratic appointees to know what they want to do. They'll just keep doing it, right. I mean,
I actually think it's almost literally true. Credit president wouldn't need to appoint anybody for the bureaucracy to do what Democrats want the bureaucracy to do. So, but for Republican administrations, it's crucial to have your appoint easy and if you're going to have any point of wrestling on the bureaucracy and changing policy. And that's why you know, this delay in appointments is I think so crucial and as I say,
has an asymmetric effect on Republican mystery. That's my point, and that's just the response, and healed your point.
Look, I I you know, from another angle of looking at exactly the same thing. You know, I felt like I had to rationalize why I decided to vote for Trump after saying that I think you should have been impeached, removed, and disqualified, which is something of a you know, a conundrum, and I'm you know, the the answer, the short answer is I think, well, I think it's a binary choice.
I respect people who don't think that, but like I come from a background where you know, we put twelve people in the box and sometimes the government's case is really crappy, but the defendant is a really bad guy, and we make the jury decide. You know, there's no choice. See, it's guilty or not guilty. So I didn't. I don't feel comfortable, not like making the choice that's in front of us. But this was like the worst choice in
the history of choices. But my best argument for it, and it may not be an argument that carries the day, but it carried the day for me, is that I think the system, and in particular the system that you just described, keeps Republican presidents on the straight and narrow. That is, those guardrails are real when a Republican is in power, whereas they're not when a Democrat is in power.
And for that reason I was a lot more worried about a Harris administration, which would be you know, basically the administrative state would not keep them within the guardrails. In fact, they think it's like rock and roll. When those guys are in right, they can push through every single policy piety they want to push through. Whereas I think one of Republicans in the deep state does its
job in a very aggressive way. So do the courts tend to congress certainly does the media, business leaders, the whole array of what we think of when we talk about, you know, the deep state, which is not a term I love, but I think it's we all at least know what we're talking about when we refer to it.
So Andy my question, I want to jump off what Steve said. I agree with your characterization of the federal bureaucracy.
Steve.
I agree with your description of what is different when a Republican is in power than when a Democrat is in power, which is why I think Matt Gates is a disastrous choice.
In my way of looking at.
This, this has the potential to be bad for Republicans and in particular Trump, on both ends. And this is why I want Andy's feedback on this, because you know so much more about this than I do. If you take Kavanagh for example, I thought the way he was treated was disgraceful, dishonest. I was vehemently in favor of his nomination and fought back against all of the lies. But I also understood that for certain Republican senators it
was a difficult vote. But that difficult vote was created purely because the nomination process had been turned into a circus and allegations had been made that had to be dispensed with. Once Kavanagh was on, unless you're Susan Collins and you made a show of being pro choice. He was basically all upside for the Republican Party because they could go back to their constituents and say, look, we got an originalist adjacent judge on.
The court with Gates.
I see both sides of this process being potentially deleterious for the Right in that he is going to have, whether they're all true or not, all manner of personal Peccadillos brought up during his hearings sleeping with seventeen year olds, partying, taking drugs, all of the boasting about having sex and using drugs while he was doing it and filming it and showing it to people in Congress and.
So forth, that's all going to come up.
So if you are a Republican senator, you have to get past that if you want to get to yes. But also he's then Attorney general. This is the bit that I think is irritating me. And I will ask my question in a second, but I keep being told, well, are you more in favor of the deep state than of Matt Gates. No, it's because I am bothered by the bureaucracy that I'm bothered by Matt Gates. And another one is that look at the last guy, look at Merrick Island and everything he did. I agree, but let's
not do it again. So Andy, my question.
Is, isn't there.
A huge risk here? And maybe I'm just wrong, but isn't there a huge risk here that Matt Gates being Attorney General as he was self aggrandizing and ill discipline.
Frankly, not that.
Experience or good is going to by being Attorney general caused Trump problems for two years while he's president, and he really only has two years until the Democrats are likely to take back the House. Much more than someone who was really good at that job wanted to take on the bureaucracy and wasn't Matt Gates would.
Be Yeah, I think surely the perfect comparison is the last attorney general that Trump actually had, Bill Barr and Gates. Barr could see the curveballs coming when they got out of the pitcher's hand before they exploded. Right, Gates is not that guy. Gates practiced law for about five minutes and then he dove into electoral politics in Florida. He's been running for either state legislature or Congress since twenty ten. There's no reason to believe he knows anything about the
Justice Department. He knows some stuff about, like, for example, the Trump investigations, because he was on committees that looked at those, but he doesn't know the structure of the Justice Department. And look, here's a guy. There's a guy who was in the law for his whole career, Alberto Gonzalez. The Justice Department ate him alive when he got in there.
And Alberto Gonzalez was about ten times more prepared for what the Justice Department bureaucracy can do to somebody who's a novice and who doesn't know where all the levers are compared to Matt Gates, And what do we know
about Matt Gates's legal acumen. The two most notorious positions he's ever taken were he joined the Kakamami brief in the Texas case, where the state of Texas was taking the position that other states state certified electoral votes shouldn't be counted, which was such an absurd argum amid that the Supreme Court virtually didn't even entertain it. And that's with three judges on the bench whom Trump had put
on the Supreme Court. And then he took the position that Vice President Pence had the authority to invalidate or at least remand state certified electoral votes, which if he was correct about that, Kamala Harris could stop Trump from
taking office on January sixth. So we have a guy who's never practiced law, who doesn't know anything that we can detect about how the Justice Department in the FBI is structured, who doesn't to my knowledge have a vision of what reform or to happen at the Justice Department in the FBI, which is important because those two agencies. I think Charlie and I on his podcast have done at least two long discussions about the reform things that need to be done in connection with those two institutions.
What's Gates's vision of that and how would you accomplish that. There's no reason to think he knows that. And the Justice Department, and I say, this is somebody who was in it for a very long time. It's a very arrogant institution, but it has its ways and its history, and it has its ways of destroying people who come in and try to upset the apple cart. And that's
just a fact. You need someone like I think that it badly needs reform, but you need someone like Barr who knows where all the bodies are buried and where all the buttons are and knows how they're going to
come at him and how to undermine them. Gates is going to be in there, and he's going to go into, for example, the Civil Rights Division, which is the thing that most badly needs reform in the Justice Department, and he's going to face, like lawyers who've been at the Justice Department for between ten and twenty years and have done nothing but civil rights law, which we have no reason to think Gates even knows anything about. And he's going to have to go toe to toe with those people.
And there's about a million ways they can undermine on.
Yeah, And this is to me is just a perfect example of how many people in Trump's orbit they mistake drama for resolve. You want someone with resolve who doesn't cause drama, because the press will cause drama. They're going to go after anyone who tries to reform the bureaucracy. You want somebody who is able to ignore that, somebody who is more like Rondes Santis in the way that they operate, where they attract all the heat, but they
put ice on it. So my follow up question is, leave aside who you think would be or you know would be good, Bill Barb being an example of it. Who who would you appoint if you were president of the United States to lead this project?
I mean, if you had carte blanche, and who would you pick?
Well, I would want a Mukzy or a bar I don't know if they would at this point in their lives disposed to do something like that with respect to the people who were on the table now, you know, for example, I think our own from National Review ed Whalen would be an excellent person at the Justice Department. Another guy who knows the Justice Department through and through and would have very developed ideas about things that were wrong, things that could be reformed, and people who could come
in and help him to do that. I think George to Williger would be a perfect attorney general. Of the people who were on the table now, I don't put anybody in that category who I've heard Trump at least considered. I think Todd Blanche will be much better than Gates obviously would have been. Todd was a federal prosecutor for about ten years before he became a defense lawyer, and I think he's a solid criminal practitioner. I don't think he's necessarily a a star in like the bar or
Mukzy league, but he'll be He'd be fine. He's I thought watching the New York trial that he took a couple of dumb positions in the defense, which only can be explained by the fact that he did what Trump wanted rather than what was good for the defense. So you'll have to deal with that dynamic. You know, he's obviously going to serve the master. But I think he'd
be fine. Let's remember, like ninety nine points something percent of what the Attorney general does is not stuff that he needs day to day input from the President about.
You know, there's a lot of a lot of stuff that I don't think Trump would have any interfering any interest in interfering in, and some of the things I think Trump would want to interfere in would be helpful, like you know, for example, to the extent that he wants to leverage federal prosecutorial authority in blue blue states, especially the big cities where these progressive prosecutors aren't enforcing
the law. I think Rudy's career in New York shows that that actually can be very helpful and can make a big difference in law enforcement. That's the kind of thing I expect that Trump would want the Justice Department to do, and it would be beneficial if it were done. I think Matt Whittaker would probably be fine. Truly. Of all the people that I've heard mentioned in Trump's orbit, I think Whittaker is a former US attorney. He was
a chief of staff to an attorney general. He knows how federal prosecution works, he knows how the Justice Department works. And I think he'd be fine. And I also think he'd sail to confirmation. So I'm kind of puzzled other than other than knowing Trump as we know Trump, why you wouldn't you know that would be a layup of a confirmation.
Right, Andy, let me introduce so one last topic that and involved Trump directly.
Uh.
Start with a news item a few days ago that a CIA operative was arrested for having leaked Israeli battle plans overseas. There's been other examples of whether there's that guy the State Department they suspended whose name escapes me right now, but evidence of Iranian penetration inside our government. We know the Chinese spylight crazy at our universities and elsewhere.
I think we should bring back the House and Senate committees on internal security that we abolished in the seventies and our fit of guilt and in the post Watergate period.
Uh.
And of course the left.
Will scream and the media will scream McCarthyism, and I'll tell them no, no, Andy, McCarthyism.
I like McCarthy.
Anyway, if they're going to if they're going to scream, let's just call them the House Committee on American Activities.
Away, right, I agree, yes, right right?
Any what do you think, Andy, I think we got to do something here, and I don't I don't trust the standing committees or the CIA to investigate themselves.
See I think Steve that when you had Gallagher in the House and Barr at the Justice Department, you effectively had that without it being called that because remember, Barr had a China initiative. Actually I think it predated Barr. I think it started with Sessions, but but Barr took it on. You know, when Barr started his career in the government, he was a CIA guy in China was his concentration. So that's one of those things that he
is rivetted to. But I think between what Gallagher's committee was doing, which was like the only committee on Capitol Hill that was actually efficient and seemed to work in the way it's supposed to work, we had something like that, And I don't care so much how they label it is that as that they do it, but I think it needs to be done. I also think with the respect of that CIA case, I'm really concerned. I mean, I'm sure they have the goods on this guy, that's
why they charged him. I worry that that guy's escapegoat in the sense that I think the Biden Harris administration beginning with I think you're talking about Mali the envoy and his protege to bat to Buy, who even though she was involved in this Iran initiative, those scholars who wrote apologetic pieces for the Iranian regime, somehow she not only is in the government, but she has like the highest security clearance that you could have, and she was
the chief of staff to the Undersecretariat the Defense Department who handles special operations, which is counter terrorism. So to have her in a job like that, I just think it underscores that these guys, they're running rampant, you know, these Iranian maybe calling the mass sets over states it,
but sympathizers. They thread Obama and Biden's administration to the point that one of the co authors of Tibat to Buy in the things that she wrote on behalf of the Iranian regime, was this guy Phil Gordon is lesson, but he was Kamala Harris's National Security Advisor, and it was predicted that if she got in, he would have a major position there. So I'm glad they got the CIA guy, if they got him, but I mean, he's only the He's like the tip of the iceberg of what we're dealing with.
It has to get it has to get better. It really does, because I mean we've been seeing things like Iranian penetration confirmed as this particular State Department employee has been giving details to the government and then the response seems to be, yeah, that's bad, but nothing we can do about that.
There's plenty of we can.
Do about that, and I'm going to see it in the next couple of years. Any we know, you got to go. You're looking I mean, you're looking good. You're looking spiffy, and I've been informed that that's because you're going on Fox soon. But to us know, you're this is how you always look, with a good tie and the good shirt and the good you clean up well, So.
Have fun thoughts.
I wish it, Andrew, I wish it was going to be fun. Apparently they're they're covering this awful Lake and Riley case, which I just had to read up on in order to know what the hell I was talking about. It's like awful.
Just tell them, Okay, well there's a there's a day writener. May may it get better for you, and may you have a fine weekend, and we'll talk to you again, and.
Guys, thank you.
Before we go, and we've got some time. I want to do one thing here, and that.
Is mentioned because you're wondering, Gosh.
I love Ricochet, I love reading it, love reading all the comments, but it's only there was a way to meet these people in person. Now, if you're expecting Rob Long to appear all of a sudden and do a meet up announcement, no, he's probably in a in a cell somewhere in a robe where it is nodded with a rough rope, doing what he's doing. So I will do what Robbie has to do and tell you what the meetups to come.
Now.
The thing is about Ricoget. It's not just people typing anonymously behind a keyboard. There are people who get together in real life, and if you would like to meet them, for heaven's sakes, we'll just join ricoget and then put up a Rickchet meet up in your town and people will flock to you now, those of you who have social anxiety, of course, it sounds like an absolute nightmare those of you who maybe of an extroverted sort and wish in these cold months to get together and hoist
a few and talk about things. Because that's the great thing about Rickaget is how little when we get together in person we talk about politics, culture, society, all the rest of it. The member feed come.
To the life.
But it's not boring people who have no life and can do only things but talk about politics anyway. Dave Carter, our old friend, is hosting a meet up in Panama City. That's in Florida. Of course, Yes, there's an airport nearby. Then can you can get there from anywhere? December sixth
to the eighth, twenty twenty four. I assume when he says from the December sixth to the eighth, that there are moments where you can step aside and you know, use the restroom perhaps, or call home or something like that. Otherwise it sounds like a forty eight hour convocation, which.
Could be fun.
And Randy, our old friend, Randy's having a meetup in Chook chattanoogu j Chattanooga Chattanooga, chatt and ugu uh, that's probably a Chattanooga somewhere else in the country in Tennessee, Chattanooga, Tennessee, January nineteenth, twenty twenty five. So check Ricochet, check the meet up pain, start your own meet people. It's always fun or a great bunch. I wish there was one closer to me at a date that I could go to,
But if there is, I'll be there now. Gentlemen, one of the things that I love most about the administration that's going to unfold before us is the fact that what once was a meme of a sheba u looking quizzically at the camera now is the acronym for a government agency that supposed our initiative that is going to reduce waste, fraud, waste and all the rest of those things.
Doge, You loved.
It as a coin, You love it as a meme, and now, well, are you going to love it as a as a enterprise? Do you think it will do anything? Or is this going to be more like Proxmiers Golden Fleece. You know proxmid always come up with something, you know, like ridiculous amount of money we're spending on having shrimp run on treadmills underwater.
There's hours.
Somebody would come out later, you know, come six months later and say, well, actually that study led to the creation of a vaccine that reduced death by right by by spotted elephant fever by six hundred percent. You know, there's so many things that we can get rid of.
But you know, you figure, you cut the you cut.
The spending for this, You're not doing anything but the organization that that that commissioned the spending in the first place. And that seems to be maybe what what musk at all are after? Or is this just going to be another initiative at the end of which we are faced with a government as big as it was before.
I'm just pretty skeptical.
It's not that I have a problem with the program, which is a couple of smart guys looking through spending reports.
It's just that the issue.
Here is a total lack of desire on the part of the American people or Congress to do anything about what's actually driving our deficits and therefore our death. Is a very funny Australian TV commercial for I Think Castle Maine FORX beer from the eighties where this guy shows up in the outback with a pickup truck and they load one crate of Castle main FORX after another until
they're comically stacked. And eventually the guy comes out of the store and he says, you want to sherry for the missus, And he puts up to sherry and he puts the sherry on top these, you know, seven thousand beers, and the pickup truck collapses and he says, I guess it was the sherry that did it. And I love this as a kid, but this, to me is what we're doing here with the federal budget. I would love to get rid of all of those stupid spending initiatives
that you hear about, but the problem is entitlements. And on top of that, it's big organizations that would take political capital to abolish the Department of Education agricultural subsidies. If there were the will to use the power that the Republicans have been given to make substantive changes to the federal budget, then we wouldn't need this doage organization.
We might want to have it anyway, but we wouldn't.
Need it as part of some effort to streamline and fix our fiscal problem. We know where our fiscal problems. Lie, I understand the political imperatives here. I understand that the public is not interesting did in making a change here, and that therefore it's somewhat futile for Republicans to lose elections by promising to make changes the public doesn't want.
But we know what the issue is. It's not like this is a secret.
And the last thing I'll say before I shut up is, I think I'm right in saying that, you know, ninety percent of the waste that was identified in this initial report is.
Interest on the debt.
Now, that's fine to point out that we're paying huge amounts of interest on the debt, but you can't stop paying that because your default. If you want to stop interest on the debt being the big problem that it is, you have to stop the spending that has caused the borrowing that has caused the interest on the debt. So after a point, we're really just looking at things that are marginal instead of having an honest conversation about the core issue.
Yeah.
So I share a lot of Charlie's cynicism about this, And yeah, although I do think that I think the figure you might have reported this, Charlie is that over one hundred billion dollars a year now and fraudulent or improper pay.
See that starts to look like real money.
But how you get at that, I don't know if it's enforcement or changing the rules, because that whole business is very opaque. My mind runs back to a previous effort to do this in the eighties, and I'm sure you'll remember, James, it was the Grace Commission under Reagan, which identified three hundred billion dollars in inefficiencies and savings.
And of course that was real money back in the nineteen eighties, and almost none of that came about in part because and here I guess maybe the best guide is the old Yes Minister series with bureaucracy will bamboozle you That the one famous episode of a hospital with four hundred administrators and no doctors and no patients, right, you know that was You know that show was written
by real economists who understood public choice theory. But you know, one of the things that Musk and this team will find is that some of the things you think are waste that actually I agree is a trivial amount, as Charlie says, but he went back in the eighties and some people who looked hard at the Grace Commission pointed out, and actually this was a liberal man, there really weren't any six hundred dollars hammers at the Pentagon or two thousand dollars coffee pots.
That was a.
Function of the peculiar accounting methods of the government. So vastly simplify this. You order a hammer from one contract a defense contractor, and you order a jet plane from them, they'll a portion overhead and equal.
Amounts to both units.
So you know, what's a trivial amount of overhead for a fighter plane ends up being, you know, five hundred and ninety dollars of overhead assigned to the cost of a ten dollars hammer. So there aren't been any real savings there if you just change the accounting around.
Right before, they had to devise a particular kind of hammer for a particular kind of job, and that refuge that you know, the R and D costs were built into that cod But on the other hand, so you may not have many six thousand dollars hammers, but what we do have and everybody's familiar with, is a forty
seven dollars aspirin. Because the government got into the business of healthcare and all of a sudden and accountability was removed, so that we don't pay out of our own pocket, but we pay to somebody who pays to somebody who pays to somebody depending on what the code is. Right, that is something that we'd like to take a look at too.
But you're right.
When the Grace Commission came out, I remember we were all talking about waste, fraud and abuse for years and until the last two words became one German term to me, fraud and abuse waste proud abuse. So when I when I hear it, I reach for my well, yeah, I'm I'll wait to see what they come up with. But Johnny's right, it's entitlements. And as somebody who owns agricultural land, of course, I'm I don't believe that you should change
the subsidies for that at all. And retirement age, I you know, you'd better keep your hands off my social security. But as somebody who cares much about the country, I would love to see them do something about social security that keeps it there for the people who are going to need it and phases it out for the people who won't. And that may be some kind of privatization. That may be some sort of four oh one k thing where the government does a little investive.
I don't know.
I'm open to anything, but right now, the idea of twenty somethings thirty somethings don't think they're going to get anything out of it, and to make them pay for the people who are getting something out of it is a generational transfer that seems to be not right, not moral. So we got to figure out a way about that, or it is going to consume us and the doges are you know, will go the way of the nation ones and that's them. Hey guys, let's get out of here,
let's go have some lunch. Thank you for joining, Thank you for going to Apple, iTunes or music or whatever they call it right now, or any place that you get your podcasts with that matter, and giving us high rankings, high votes, high positive comments. Because then people say, hey, what is this thing. I've heard about the Ricochet podcast for seven hundred and sixteen episodes, but this is the one that finally makes me go. Check could be join.
It's cheap and you'll have access to the Center Civil Right, the Civil Rights Center, the Center Civil right in Chattanooga community that you've been looking for on the internet all of your days. Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. Stephen Charlie. We'll see everybody in the comment, said Ricochet. For Point Oh next.
Week, Ricochet join the conversation.