Nancy Pelosi, Chief Mask Officer

legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt. An absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost exclusively ad men, even where they exercise influence and not authority. Still more, when you super add the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority as president, those words were true in eighteen eighty seven, and they're true today. If you want to understand how power corrupts, an absolute power corrupts absolutely, look no further

than the other chamber. In the United States Capital Speaker Nancy Pelosi is drunk on power. The orders that Speaker Pelosi is issuing are abusive and unprecedented. Speaker Pelosi has decreed the members of the House of Representatives elected by the people that if you dare walk onto the floor of the House of Representatives without a mask. I, Speaker Pelosi shall find you. Who the hell is she to be finding members of the House. But you know what,

she's not done with that. She's not done with disrespecting our constitution, disrespecting our democratic system that elects leaders. She goes further to the good men and women who work here in the United States Capital. We are surrounded by men and women who have chosen to come and work for the public good. And here's what Speaker Pelosi has decreed. If you dare walk in the hallway without a mask, I, Speaker Pelosi will arrest you. I will put you in jail.

I will find you. That is an absolute and complete abuse of power. She has no authority to disrespect the men and women who work here, to threaten you with physical harm, to threaten you with imprisonment. And why does she do so. She does so for one reason, political theater. Welcome to hurdict with Ted Cruz. I'm Michael Knowles, Senator. I have to compliment you. You have now very famously read and quoted Doctor Seuss and Lord Acton on the

floor of the Senate. That is a very broad spectrum of reading, and I think the Lord Acton quote was absolutely apt. We have now passed the five hundredth day of fifteen days to slow the spread, and we are seeing the reinstitution of mask mandates, even for the vaccinated. We are seeing the threat of lockdowns around the country. Is it just deja vu all over again? Is there any way to break out of this cycle? Well? I do not like green eggs and ham, but I do

not like absolute power being abused even less. This has been a bad week for liberty. This has been a bad week for science. It's been a bad week for common sense. And it is frightening because we're seeing, you know, two decisions i'd highlight, both of which came this week. Number one, as you know, the CDC revised its guidance. So a couple of months ago, the CDC acknowledged what people knew already, which is vaccines work, that actually science operates.

If you're vaccinated, the vaccine has a very high likelihood of being successful. And so the CDC acknowledging that reality, said people who are vaccinated don't need to wear masks. That was right then, it's right now. But as of this week, the CDC magically changed its guidance and now said even if you're vaccinated, you need to wear a mask.

That wasn't science, that was politics, and it was cynical politics at that And I think people are frustrated with the hypocrisy from the CDC, and they're frustrated with how Democrats are behaving. We're seeing now democratic jurisdictions imposing new mandates and posing new mask mandates. The CDC decreed that when school starts this fall, that every person in a school must wear a mask, regardless of whether you're vaccinated

or not. That's not remotely based on science. That's based on the politics of the fact that the teachers' unions demanded that, and the CDC is basically acting like it's it's part of the DNCS. It is a political arm in the Biden administration. And then also this week, Nancy Pelosi issued a decree that anyone in the House must wear a mask, even if you're vaccinated. She said that if you're a member of the House and you walk onto the floor without a mask, that she will find you.

And even worse, she said, if you're a hill staffer and you are caught without a mask, that you will be arrested, that you will be potentially put in jails, sentenced to jail and find if you dare not wear a mask. And I gotta say that's just nuts. I mean, that is an abusive power that has no link to

anything resembling medical science. You know, even a CNN anchor pointed out the other day that the CDC has a big credibility problem, and there's no question we've covered it on this show that the public health officials have flip flopped on everything. Doctor Fauci told us the masks don't work, then he told us we all need to wear the masks. We were told the vaccines are absolutely wonderful and they

work very very well to stop infection and transmission. Now we're being told, well maybe they don't, so the vaccinated need to wear the mask anyway we were We've been told so much conflicting information. There is no question. I think the right and the left, if they can agree on anything, it's that the CDC has some issues. But the question is what is the political end game here? I suspect that you're right that this is not about science and it is about politics, But what's the politics?

You know, it's hard to understand the politics other than that Democrats, particularly now, they like power, They like arbitrary power, they like controlling your life. You know, listen when it comes to masks. I've never been one that's a zealot on either side. I've never really understood some of the folks who say, never wear a mask, no matter what. I certainly didn't fall into that can't. Particularly in the

height of the pandemic, I wore a mask. I thought we should do reasonable steps to slow the spread of a disease. It's a dangerous disease. But I also never understood the purist who would ostentatiously where a mask is a symbol of their nobility and purity and virtue. Yet, you know, let me take folks inside the Senate for a minute to understand the dynamic in real time. So early this year January, they made vaccines available to members of Congress. Number of members of Congress got the vaccines

in early January. I didn't get the vaccine then. And the reason I didn't get it then is at that point it was not widely available. Most Americans hadn't gotten it, and I'm a relatively young and healthy person. I didn't think it was right that just because I was elected to represent Texas in the Senate, that I should cut in line, that I should get a vaccine before seniors did, before people with serious immuno compromised issues did, before frontline

responders did. And so I didn't get the vaccine in January. I waited a couple of months, and then after tens of millions of vaccines had been distributed in the people with the highest need had gotten it, then I got the vaccine. I said, Okay, enough time has passed that I think it is fair and reasonable. I'd like to get the vaccine. I'd like to be protected against the disease. So I did get the vaccine, and I waited a couple of weeks so till the vaccines fully effective. So

I had both. I got the Fizer shot, and I got both of them, and I gave the requisite time that they said you had to wait before it's effective. And then I decided to stop wearing my mask on the Senate floor because vaccines work like that's the whole science of it. The whole point of getting the damn shot is to give you protection against catching the disease, and so on. The Senate. It was kind of interesting.

The first person not to wear a mask was Rand Paul and Ran never wore a mask, and look, I love Rand, but he just said, to hell with it, I'm not wearing a mask. And Ran had COVID and he'd never wore a mask, and so okay, that was his choice. For a long time, it was just Ran with no mask, skin ninety nine senators with masks. The second Senator not to wear a mask was me, And after I'd gotten the vaccine, after a couple of weeks had passed, I said, all right, I'm gonna stop wearing

the mask. The same time I did that, Roger Marshall, who's a Republican senator from Kansas, is also a medical doctor. He made the same decision. So Roger and I both right about the same time stop wearing wearing our mask. We were numbers two and three in the Senate, and for several weeks the three of us were the only ones not wearing a mask. And I gotta tell you,

the peer pressure is interesting. Like when you stood on the Senate floor and everyone's wearing a mask, I mean, you felt like you were like a rebel on the fringe and it was interesting. Then the fourth person to stop wearing a mask was Jim Rish from Idaho, and he said, all right, I'm joining the no mask caucus because he'd been vaccinated. Now, what was Bizarres. We'd gone a couple of months with everybody wearing masks, even though

they all are virtually all were vaccinated. If you remember Joe Biden's pseudo State of the Union address where everyone was wearing a mask and almost every person in that chamber was already vaccinated, it was it was political theater then. But then what happened is the CDC issued it's it's ruling and said if you have a if you're vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask. And it was the funniest thing. Within about two days, everybody took their

mask off. One hundred percent of the senators. Chuck Schumer took his mask off, Bernie Sanders took his mask off, Mazie Herono took it to her mask off. Look, I joked for some of the Democrats, I'd be much happier if they kept their masks on. And and you know, really my criticism was their mask needed to be tighter. You know, we could still hear them talk so clearly

their masks were not attached sufficiently firmly. But listen, the fact that everybody took off their mask indicates what we all knew, which is, if you're vaccinating, wearing a mask is stupid. Everyone knew that. All the Democrats immediately knew. Now, when that was happening in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi was still finding House members who didn't wear a mask on

the House floor. And so I know a number of House Republicans who were fined five bucks apiece even though they were vaccinated because they didn't wear a mask, literally on the very same day that Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders and every Democrat has no mask on. So people understood the difference between reality and performance theater. All right, let's fast forward to this week. This week Monday, we started out this week one hundred percent of Senators had

no mask on. Every Republican had no mask, every Democrat had no mask. Then the CDC issues their magical new rulings. Suddenly vaccines don't work. Suddenly if you're vaccinated doesn't matter. You got to put a mask on? Why? Because we decree it to be so? And it was a very

funny thing. They issue the order and the Democratic Party, I don't know, they're like docile sheep that they want to follow the orders of whoever the dictator is and they want to demonstrate self righteously how pious they are. And so a day after the CDC acted, you had oh, I don't know, maybe a third of the Democrats wearing masks. You had people like Brian Shots from Hawaii who was wearing a mask. You had people like Corey Booker wearing masks.

But still at least half the Democrats weren't wearying. This was a day or two after the CDC, but the sort of peer pressure of elected Democrats kicked in, and by today, virtually every Democrat is wearing a mask. Kirsten Cinema wasn't wearing a mask. She may have been the only Democrat not wearing a mask. But what's funny is even those Democrats wearing them, they know it's a croc look. Yesterday, the day before, I was in an elevator in the

Russell Senate office building. I walked under the elevator. There was a senator. He was there with two of his staff. Two of his staff had masks on the senator didn't have his mask on, so he's standing in an elevator with no mask. He sees me and like who reaches in his pocket and quickly puts on the mask. It's not like he suddenly became contagious. The guy's vaccinated that the mask does nothing. But he had to put it on because he had to show I am obedient to

the government decree. And it's really stupid and it I think it diminishes Number One, the CDC is letting itself be politicized. It's behaving like a political institution. I mean, Michael, let me ask you. Has there been an institution that has done more to damage their credibility in the last year and a half than the CDC has a year and a half ago, they were one of the most respected medical and scientific organizations on the face of the planet.

And now we've seen Fauci do nineteen backflips beyond every side of every issue. We understand he's a political player. He's not a scientist in terms of what he says. He says what's politically convenient at the moment, and the damage to the credibility of the CDC and to the scientific pontificators, I think has been really enormous to the CDC's credibility I think is in tatters well, as you see,

just even on this issue of the vaccines. Either way, either the vaccines do work and the decision is political and the CDC loses credibility, or the vaccines don't work and what we've been told is not true and so everyone needs to wear the masks again and the CDC

loses credibility. But it seems that as the credibility collapses the liberal establishment, you know, and that includes not just the elected people, but the bureaucrats and the technocrats and the other institutions, they seem to be getting more aggressive. And I think this is what a lot of people are worried about, speaking of pure pressure, is You've got the White House now saying that they may move into

another lockdown. They're looking at potential teral vaccine mandates for goodness sake, Yes, even as we're being told that the vaccines allegedly are not working as well as we were told they were. So anyway, there's obviously a lot of confusion here. But but if Nancy Pelosi is going to throw staffers in jail, they seem to mean the threats that they're making. Yeah, I mean, you think about that.

Nancy Pelosi is saying to someone who's a twenty something, thirty something Hill staffer is working on Capitol Hill that if you dare not wear a mask, even if you're vaccinated, she's going to put you in jail. I mean, that is a level of dictatorial I don't give a damn that. That's really frightening. And you're right. You combine it with Joe Biden who's saying he wants to mandate federal employees all get vaccines. He wants to mandate the military all

get vaccines. Listen my view number one, I think vaccines are good. I'm a supporter of vaccines. I'm a supporter of science. I've been vaccinated. Heid He's been vaccinated, My parents have been vaccinated. At Heidi's parents have been vaccinated. I was quite glad to get vaccinated. I want to get the damn mask off. I wanted to be able to go out in crowds of people and interact again without being concerned about catching or spreading a dangerous disease.

But I also believe in individual liberty. I believe in individual choice. The fact that I chose to get a vaccine doesn't mean you need to make that choice. You're an adult. You can make your own choice. You should talk to your doctor, you should educate yourself, you should think about the pros and cons. And I believe in that individual responsibility. And it's amazing the Democrats. They don't want to give you that choice. They don't want you to be able to make your own choices about medical

treatment that you're receiving. They want the government. But you know, Senator, the argument that they're making, the argument that they're making is that when it comes to a pandemic, and I guess you know the term is being redefined. It is a little bit loose right now, but when it comes to a pandemic, you lose your individual rights because your decision, I mean not your decision, but someone else's decision not to be vaccinated is a direct threat to me because

you could spread the virus to whomever. And so what is the conservative answer to that? There's a logical flaw in that argument, and it's really important to break it down because you're right, the left is making it by the way, the press is making this argument like crazy it's very funny. On Capitol Hill, the press reporters, almost all of them have dutifully put their masks on. There was one one poor guy running around with two masks because that, hey, if you've got virtue, I can have

twice as much virtue and have two masks on. Yeah, and it just there were only a couple of reporters who dared take their mask off. And again they were almost like, you know, Mel Gibson and Braveheart or something. But let's go to this argument about the unvaccinated or endangering others. And this week I think the person who said it most offensively was Haraldo. So Haraldo was on on Fox and Erldo went on this this rant on the five where he said, he said, if you're unvaccinated,

I'm going to paraphrase, but this is basically right. He said, if you're unvaccinated, then you're arrogant, you're rude, and you're inconsiderate, and you're jeopardizing everybody. And he was quite bombastic. I know that's hard to believe Eraldo being bombastic, but you just can't go imagine on this. Here's the logical flaw. Eraldo presumably is vaccinated if not, he's a remarkable hypocrite. So I assume he's vaccinated. If he's vaccinated, the risk

to him of getting COVID is extremely small. Depending on which vaccine you got, if you got Fiser or MODERNA, the risks are somewhere in the neighborhood of three percent or maybe five percent. But if they're very small, and if you do catch COVID, there's some percentage, some small percentage of people who are vaccinated can catch COVID. If you do catch COVID, the risks of it being serious, of you being hospitalized or dying are very very small.

That's why people get the vaccine. They want to dramatically reduce the risk of getting getting the disease, and even more so, reduce the risk of getting it seriously. That means for anyone who's vaccinated, the risk of people who are unvaccinated is negligible. It's very small. Now, is there some possibility that someone who's unvaccinated will pass the disease onto someone else who's unvaccinated. Yes, but you know what that someone else who's unvaccinated, they made their damn choice

like that, you're assuming that risk. If you say I'm not going to get the vaccine. Okay, you're a big boy, you can adult. You're an adult, you can make that risk. But at the same time, the left jumps up and down and says, those evil unvaccinated people are jeopardizing me. No, if you're vaccinated, they're not. They're jeopardizing each other potentially. And you know what, the same thing is true of smokers. If you smoke, you may die of lung cancer. Look,

you and I are both cigar smokers. You know what might happen. Our lips and tongues might all off. That would suck. I really don't want my lips and tongue to fall off. But I believe adults have the ability to make choices and bear the consequences of your choices. And the left doesn't agree with any of that. They want you to be subjects and obey their decrees. Yes, so I mean we can certainly assess risk, make prudential judgments. We as conservatives think that the left seems less inclined

in that direction. But this gets back to that absolute power point. Ye, the point that we opened up with in the Lord Acton quote, which is just as a practical matter, here we're past day five hundred of this. This should have been over by now. We were all told it was going to be over by now. They've moved the goalposts. Every single time that we hit one of them. It was slow the spread, then it flattened the curve, then it was find a cure, then it

was and it just keeps moving. So how does this end? I mean, how do we make sure that we don't go from five hundred days to slow the spread two thousand days, that we're not that we're not here again in another year and a half. Look, if it's up to the Democrats, I don't know that this ever does end, because it's an excuse for power. It's an excuse for trillions of dollars a new spending, it's excuse for trillions of dollars of new taxes. It's an excuse for everything

they want to do anyway they want power. You know, you look at these Democratic politicians, for example, who shut down churches, who declared it was illegal to go to church during the pandemic. They are just statists and authoritarians. They don't like people who go to church. They were

quite happy to strip your religious liberty. And by the way, anyone with a triple digit IQ or even a double digit IQ could see the rank hypocrisy that that you would have the media, you'd have democratic politicians, you would have these these self declared scientific experts who would opine that thousands of people crammed into the public streets protesting black lives matter, zero risk of COVID transmission, that there's no chance of it. But if you go to church

and sing hallelujah, everyone's going to die. And look, that was on its face absurd. Everyone knew this is crap. You have a political preference, and you're claiming that the virus and the infection just happens to perfectly match your political preference. We make a couple of other points. Many people, certainly the CDC, certainly Democrats, certainly the press, but a lot of people out of Republicans too rightly say we should be encouraging people to get vaccinated. I agree with that.

I'm encouraging people to get vaccinated. Ironically enough, with the CDC did this week maybe the single biggest disincentive to get vaccinated we have seen since the vaccine was introduced. So when the CDC initially issued its common sense ruling that once you're vaccinated and it's effective, you can take your mask off. That was a really good incentive to get vaccinated. It encouraged people to get vaccinated because they wanted the freedom. Said, by the way, this is not

hypothetical in my family. So Heidi and I were both eager to get the vaccine. My mom got or her parents got up. But my dad didn't want to get the vaccine. I mean, you know my father, he's eighty two years old, he's a pastor. He is stubborn as all get out. And I spent probably a month arguing with my dad about getting the vaccine. He's like, I don't trust it. It was developed too quickly. There might be side effects, and you know what, there may be risk.

It was developed very quickly, and often with medical innovation you don't anticipate all of the effects of it. And I went round around with my dad. I really wanted him to get it, and it probably took me about a month and eventually he agreed to get it. And what was really compelling for him, so he's a pastor, he been hold up at home for a lot of this pandemic. It's really hard on him to be alone. And I said, listen, you want to get out. You want to be preaching again. You want to be in crowd.

Do you want to be talking to people? And at eighty two you want to do so safely where where you know we've seen with this virus that for people who are your age, the risks are pretty significant. And I'll actually take you inside and argument with my dad. He said, well, I don't trust trust the vaccine. It might it might be bad. And I said, well, look here's the vaccine everyone in Congress is taking. Why don't you take that vaccine. He's like, no, no, no no, no,

I don't trust Pelosi and Red and Schumer. I said, look, I don't trust Pelosie and Schumer either, but do you think they're like trying to poison themselves? Like like it is what they're taking. He finally did it, but it was his choice. No one had to make him. He finally did it because he wanted to get out again. And now my dad is back preaching in churches, he's back giving speeches, he's traveling. He's very happy because getting

the vaccine gave him freedom that he cared about. When the CDC gave that guidance, you get the vaccine, no mask. It incentivized people, Hey, I want that freedom. What the CDC did this weekend is implicitly said vaccines don't work. Said even if you get the vaccine doesn't matter. Do everything. Have all of your liberties curtailed, just like you did before you got the vaccine. That's terrible, it's stupid. And by the way, they relied on no science or no

data to basis what they said. It was really quite ironic. They said, well, we have scientific studies that back this up. We're just not going to tell you what they are. We have data, but it's double supersecret and no one actually gets to see the data. But trust us because we've shown we're such a political credible scientist that we just say whatever is politically convenient and then change it tomorrow. And it's listen, here's what I think, Michael. I think

we should have no government mandates on COVID period. That means no vaccine mandates, That means no mask mandates, that means no vaccine passports, that means no shutdowns, that means schools being open. What does the left think? What do the Democrats think they want to see all those things mandated? And what people I think are most concerned about is they're going to drive us off the cliff again of

shutdowns and shutting schools, and that did massive damage. I think it is now abundantly clear that the politicians who ordered shutdowns committed a catastrophic mistake, a mistake that I hope people study for decades never to make again, because they destroyed lives, they destroyed businesses, they hurt children profoundly. And the problem is Joe Biden the Democrats are eager

to do it again. I mean, just even the economic effects were so catastrophic, which does bring to another another issue here, which is while Nancy Pelosi is busy throwing staffers into jail, the other topic that the legislators are taking up on Capitol Hill is this infrastructure bill that you know, it's not quite as sexy as the coronavirus lockdowns and the mandates, and it's it's not pulling at people's interest quite as much. But this is a major

piece of legislation, yea. And it's very unclear, at least from my read on the reporting, how this is being built and where it's going to go. So this get gets complicated. But let me let me try to explain some of what's going on. So Joe Biden and Pelosi and Schumer want to spend a crap ton of money that that, by the way, is a technical term. That they're looking to spend somewhere six seven trillion dollars, which even in federal government terms is is a staggering, terrifying sum.

They've already spent one point nine trillion in their first bill that they called the COVID Relief Bill, of which you'll recall, only nine percent of that was healthcare spending on COVID and that was a long left wing special interest spending list. So the next bill they're trying to take up is what they call an infrastructure bill, and the Democrats have proposed three and a half trillion dollars. Now the COVID Relief bill, only nine percent of it

was healthcare spending on COVID. They decided, okay, that was too much, so they're three point five trillion dollars infrastructure bill. Only five percent of it is roads and bridges. Like the reason they call it infrastructure because infrastructure is popular. People like roads and bridges. People think we ought to spend some money to have highways that don't have potholes in them, that have bridges that don't fall down. We ought to have airports that work. We ought to have

ports that we can have commerce. So infrastructure spending is popular. It is popular with Democrats, popular with Republicans. But what you're saying is the infrastructure bill is not an infrastructure bill. Correct. It is purely a label because it pulls well, and it's a whole series of things, of childcare subsidies, of senior care subsidies, of expanding medicaid. Now, listen, expanding medicaid. You might think that's a good policy. We can debate

about whether that's a good policy or not. But the one thing you ought agree it ain't infrastructure, Like it's not a frigging road. But Senator, this brings up what one of the most prominent talking points right now among the Democratic Party, which is that everything is infrastructure. And they've actually said this. I don't think I'm misrepresenting them. They'll say healthcare is infrastructure. You know, weightlifting is infrastructure.

That might be a little hyperbolic, but they say basically, anything that they want they now reclassify as infrastructure because infrastructure polls well, and they know the media will not drill into anything they say and will just repeat their talking points, and so the media are their propagandists. So there, and by the way, this three point five trillion dollar infrastructure bill is paid for by trillions and new taxes.

They want to have massive new tax So it's a terrible bill if and when it's taken up and voted on, it'll get zero Republican votes. No Republicans, even the squishiest Republican is not going to vote for trillions and new taxes and just out of control spending. So what did we do this week? Well, unfortunately, there was a group of ten or twelve Republicans who really, really really want to cut a deal, like desperately want to cut a deal.

And so they've been negotiating with Democrats. What's what they're calling the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. And listen, on the face of it, the bill that they're negotiating, it's it's not a terrible bill. On the face of it. It's about one point two trillion dollars, so it's a lot of money, but it is directed much of it is directed at at real infrastructure. Much of it is directed at things like roads and bridges and airports and ports, not all

of it. There's some garbage in it, but it is there's a much higher percentage of the bill that is actually infrastructure, and it doesn't have the massive tax increases that the Democrat proposal did. And so these Republicans they met on and on and on and on, and we're

dancing the hokey pokey with the Democrats. And we've spent the last several weeks, if not the last month, in our Republican lunches with these these self declared bipartisan negotiators reporting to us on a regular basis about what's happening now. My view on it is, if they could actually negotiate a bipartisan deal, which was let's do the one point two trillion dollar bipartisan deal instead of the three point five trillion dollar monstrosity, that might be a good deal.

Look like, if they did the one instead of the other, I think it would get a lot of Republicans. I might even support it. We actually haven't seen the details of the so called bipartisan bill, so I would want to actually see the details before I decided if I would support it. But if it were that instead of the other one that could make some sense. What are

the Democrats doing. They're saying, hey, let's pass this one point two trillion, and then we're going to do the three point five trillion on top of it, so it's four point seven trillion minimum, and we're just going to do everything we want, massively blow out the budget, massively increased taxes, and we'll get a whole bunch of Republicans to get their fingerprints on at least part of this, so Joe Biden can go around the country and say, hey, look,

this was bipartist and these Republicans are part of it. And by the way, among other things, we're seeing inflation going up in a very troubling way. We're seeing the price of gas going up, We're seeing the price of food going up. We're seeing the price of lumber going up a lot, We're seeing the price of homes going up a lot. And that inflation is being fueled in very significant part by this massive spending in debt spree that the Democrats are doing right now. It's one hundred

percent the Democrats. It's all Biden and Schumer and Pelosi. They've done one hundred percent of it. Not a single Republican supported it with this bipartisan bill. Suddenly Republicans have their fingerprints on this inflation bomb that is exploding. And so I got to tell you, Michael, at our lunches we have had, you know, the term of art in

Washington is candid discussions. The sort of way of putting it is, we've been yelling at each other, and there have been Republican senators yelling at these these the bipartisan negotiators. Why are you giving the Democrats everything they want? Like, like, what do we get in this deal if you sign on to part of their package and they get every other terrible part of the package and tax increases and

trillions in debt, Like, what are we getting out of this? Unfortunately, we have anywhere from a third or more of the Republican conference that's so eager to cut a deal that they're willing to embrace at least part of the Democrats spending agenda. I think, I think that's really unfortunate and a bad mistake. Well, I think this is a very important tie ind that has not really been publicized I think, which is, yes, Democrats are going to spend a ton

of money. Yes, Republicans don't have very much power right now. Yes, some moderate to liberal Republicans are going to want to cut a deal on anything. But it's not just pie in the sky. This is not just a well, we're spending money, but so what the debts a little higher now. This is directly tied to inflation, which is a major threat. It's not just a threat, it's actually happening right now, and it is affecting people's bottom lines on gas, on food, and it's about to affect us on a lot of

other things too, that's right. And an inflation is a automatic tax that hurts. It hurts working families, it hurts seniors, you know, seniors who have saved their whole lives for retirement, but maybe on a fixed income. And when inflation kicks in and prices go up, it really hurts low income and moderate income people and seniors on fixed incomes. And look this is where Michael, you're and my age differential kicks in a little bit. You don't remember, Jimmy Carter,

I do so. I was born in nineteen seventy My first political memory was the election in nineteen seventy six, and in particular, it was the fight that my parents had because my mother voted for Jimmy Carter. No, you're oh my gosh, I would never have guessed. Well, she just thought Ford was an idiot. She's like the guy as a bumbling moron. I don't like him. And Jimmy Carter seems like such a nice guy. And my dad,

my dad at the time wasn't a US citizen. He was a Canadian citizen at the time, and so he didn't have a vote, and so my father viewed my mom's vote as like the family vote. And I remember my dad just apoplectic. How could you vote for Jimmy Carter. And when I tell this story now, my mom gets upset and she's like, I'm sorry I was wrong, like like she is not a Jimmy Carter family. Yeah, but look, with Jimmy Carter, we saw the same failed policies we're

seeing right now, and we saw something called stagflation. What a stagflation. Stagflation is when the economy is stagnant, so there's not growth, plus you have super high inflation and it's a vicious like it was ugly under Jimmy Carter and inflation got so high. I mean, you were seeing home mortgages that were going up fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen nineteen percent on home mortgages. You know, we just refinanced our home mortgage. I think we pay two point

six five percent. People have gotten used to insanely low interest rates. Imagine your home mortgage at let's not even say eighteen nineteen percent. Imagine your home mortgage at ten percent. You know what it means. It means you can buy basically a third as big a house as you can right now. It triples the cost of your mortgage just going from three percent to ten percent. That is a

massive cost. And for seniors, it destroys their savings. I think Biden and Schumer and Pelosi they're repeating those same mistakes. And it's really hard to get out of when you've got inflation roaring. And by the way, one of the big problems with inflation also a huge part of our federal budget is interest on the debt. Now we are living in sort of the magical time that the land that time forgot because interest is so low that the cost of interest on the debt it is still massive

in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But if interest rates go up a lot. Interest on the debt will become the single biggest element on the federal budget, and so it becomes this spiral where it keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And I think it's crazy that Republicans are complicit in any way. And that's certainly what I'm arguing to my colleagues, and most of my colleagues agree,

but a significant chunk of them do not. Well. This is an important point because even forgetting the merits of the bill or the infrastructure spending or what have you, just the political ramifications here. It seems that a number of centrist Republicans think that they're going to get political pats on the back for looking as though they're compromising and conciliatory. But this could be a huge liability. Forget that it's a bad idea in the first place, this

could be a huge, huge political liability. Before we go, Senator, I do have to get to the mail bag. There are some great mail back questions. Her first one is very simple from Michael, not me. Do you intend to wear a mask in the capital? Hell? No, I had a feeling I knew the answer to that question. Simple questions, simple answer, and absolutely a correct one. Matthew asks a tougher question, but it does get to what we're talking about. And by the way, let me throw a caveat on that.

So I do still wear masks on airplanes because they make you. They'll throw you off the plane if you don't. And and I filed legislation to end that stupid policy. It's it makes no sense to require mask on air planes. And and it is it is the Biden administration being unreasonable that is putting that requirement in. And by the way, all right, so, just a couple of weeks ago, in the Commerce Committee, we had a vote on an amendment to end the requirement that you wear masks on airplanes.

And there was an argument back and forth tween Republicans and Democrats, and every Democrat on the Commerce Committee voted no. Now at the time, one of those Democrats, Brian Shots, is a Democrat from from Hawaii. It's a nice guy. He and I get along well. Um, we played hoops together. I mean, he's nice enough fellow. Um he said at the hearing, he said, you know, if it didn't mandate that they changed the policy, but if the bill was simply a sense of the Senate that the FAA should

change the policy and not require masks on airplanes. He said, then I would support it, and I stopped and said, okay, if we did a sense of the Senate, it has less teeth, but you'd support it. I'd be like, look, if we can actually get this done and get rid of the ridiculous mask requirement on planes, that'd be a good thing. He said yes, and unfortunately so it was

Rick Scott's amendment. And I asked Rick at the hearing, I said, would you be willing to change your amendment to do what Shots wants to do, because that would get Democrats and it would pass. Rick said no, he didn't want to do that. He wanted to vote on the one with full force. I said okay. So we voted on it and it failed. Afterwards, Shots approached me and said, hey, let's do a bill that is the sense of the Senate that we should end masks on airplanes.

I said great, So I said, I'll have my staff draft it, we'll get it to you tomorrow. Let's do it. This could be a big deal, you and me together, bipartisan. Let's end this ridiculous requirement. And by the way. The poor guy had just gotten off an airplane from Hawaii, which he would fly every week, and that's a long way to fly with a mask when you've already been vaccinated.

So we drafted it. I showed it to him. Long and short of it is, he declined to sign on because when he talked to Democratic leadership, basically they cracked the whip and said you must obey, and we don't want you to do this. So he bailed. I filed it anyway, but I filed it with just Republicans. Now, by the way, I had even like Susan Collins as a co sponsor. There are not a lot of things that had me and Susan Collins together, but it was supposed to have Democrats, and none of the Democrats would

do it. So fast forward to this week. One of the very first Democrats to be docily wearing his mask was Brian Shots and I just kind of had the laugh at weight. Two weeks ago, you knew this was ridicus. You still know it's ridiculous, But now the Democratic Party is such that you must obey, and so you you uniquely do so and gotta get in line. Well, so these tactical issues I think motivate this next question from Matthew.

Trying to talk facts and logic with the left doesn't seem to be working, and being a jerk doesn't help either. What's another approach we can use to get along and have useful discourse? Or is the era of bipartisanship and common ground deader than disco? The only way to move forward is to beat them, is to beat them of the ballot box. And and you know, let me answer that by making a reference to a series of books that I read as a kid. So, when I was a kid, I was a big fan of It's a

seven book series that's called The Great Brain. Or did you ever read The Great Brain? No? No, I didn't, Okay, So it's so it's it's by a guy named John John D. Fitzgerald, and it is about a family in Utah on the late eighteen hundreds, so at the turn of the century. And they're three brothers, John D. Fitzgerald, who's the youngest brother, Tom D. Fitzgerald, who's the middle of brother, and swend Fitzgerald, who is the oldest brother.

And the middle brother, Tom D is the Great Brain, and he's a little con man he's basically a swindler, and you know, it's sort of like Tom Sawyer, but it's it's sort of clever cons And I read these when I was I think in junior high. I read them. They're great kids books I have. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get either of my daughters to read them.

But they're great kids books. But the opening chapter to the first book is John d the little brother, is the author of all of them, and he's telling the stories about his conman middle brother, Tom d And he said, he said, you know, we're growing up in Utah the late eighteen hundreds, and he said, virtually everyone in the town where we live as Mormon. And he said, we're not Mormon. And he said, but but they're very tolerant

and it's okay. And he said, it was simply a matter of me learning to whip every boy my age, and Tom Dee learning to whip every boy his age, and Swende learning to whip every boy his age. And he said, they're very tolerant of us. Now, it's amazing how tolerant someone can be when you can whip them. And and that statement there's enormous wisdom in it. It's it's always I've always thought of that statement when I

think about Israel's foreign policy. It's amazing how tolerant Israel's neighbors are when the fact is Israel can beat them militarily. In terms of dealing with the Democrats, we're not going to persuade Nancy Pelosi. What we will do, and I believe we will do it in twenty twenty two, is we can persuade the American people and we can beat them at the bottot box and retire Nancy Pelosi by taking the House back. And we can retire Chuck Schumer's

majority leader by taking the Senate back. And we can retire Joe Biden, although not sure he would know it by winning in twenty four. But the only way they will not stop. The angry socialist, crazy left will not stop until they get trounced at the ballot box. And if and when they get trounced, then I think there's some realistic prospect that at least some reasonable Democrats will say, well, gosh, maybe we shouldn't have gone so crazy far left, maybe

we should recalibrate. But that takes some time to have happened, and they ain't gonna do it until they lose. If they haven't lost, the chances of them shifting away from this radical agenda I think or zero. The only way they shift is after they lose, and hopefully lose resoundingly. Right. And it's not just because they're no good, awful, rotten, terrible democrats. I mean, we could talk about that at great length, but it's it's because they've got all the power.

They've got all the power, and so it actually doesn't even make sense for them to try to give in on these thing. Didn't Lord Acton say something like that? You know, there's this strange coincidence here reminds me of a quote from Lord Acton. And absolutely, I am with your senator. The only way that we are going to reconcile and come back together is if we pull some of that power back from the people who have taken all of it. We've got to end it there. I'm

Michael Knowls. This is verdict with Ted Cruz. We are going to be taking verdict on the road. We are partnering with the Young America's Foundation. We're going to multiple school I think we're going to six schools and universities with YAF. You can go to yaf dot org slash verdict right now to request that we come to your cool.

The deadline is August eighteenth, Senator. Should we go to the really nice, wonderful conservative schools with the Young America's Foundation, or should we go to the crazy leftist, insane schools that are going to run us out of town on the rail. Well, it seems to me that should be up to the listeners of Verdict to decide. And so so you tell us if you're a student right now, you might be at one of the few havens of sanity and you say, hey, come, come cheer us on

and and and reach out to us. On the other hand, you might be behind enemy lines, surrounded by Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and and and and looking for a Berlin airlift. You know, my guess is we're open to do it a little of both. But but it's really the incredible listeners a Verdict who are going to make that decision. We want to free the students on campus, We want to free all of us here in this country. So make sure you get those names in yaft dot org

slash verdict. August eighteenth is the deadline. We're sitting here right now. It is too forty two in the morning. You've come here straight from the hill. Senator Ted Cruz was a nightly podcast called Verdict. AOC says I'm happy to work with Republicans, just not Ted Cruz, and then she called your murderer. Apparently I will continue my murderous rampage down in Miami. Can you just take us through this process a little bit. Those rules are designed so

you don't have senators screaming at each other. The house has a lot of that. I still remember when they pulled up porn on the screen. Justice O'Connor just went, oh my, you're saying Ukraine and not Russia that logical construct x and not why they're engaging in lawyerly sleight of hand. The fact checkers declared it a lot if you said Biden was in fact that a band fractic. Right boom, what happens? He gets elected and now the fact checkers are saying it's a lot that he ever

said he wasn't good a band fractic. The US government was funding the Chinese research at the hun Institute of Rologe. The Senate acquitted President Trump about four thirty in the afternoon. That's right, they're not done. This is released the hound that what can the hell are you frigging nuts on? As the casino, Joe Biden was saying, I'm not against fracking, I'm not against cole. Literally, what Biden is doing and what Kerry is doing is screwing the environment. You guys

are not frigging overlord, get off your power trip. It still doesn't matter if there is a quid pro quo. Okay, you showed off your Latin into the episodes. There's been a real cynicism in this whole issue of the protests. Just a week ago we were told if you go outside to do anything, you're killing grandma. You're endangering people because of the coronavirus, and then this week we're told everybody should go out to protest. The world's number one

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