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Glenn's Show Prep

Gohmert on Bachmann: ‘Friends can disagree’

July 25, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Glenn spoke with Rep Louis Gohmert on radio today about the Amash amendment and why many Republicans including Bachmann voted against it. How does Gohmert explain so many of his colleagues siding with the NSA? Gohmert explains in the clip above.

Transcript of interview is below:

GLENN: Let's go to Louie Gohmert who is ‑‑ I would imagine, Louie, that you are as disappointed as I am to see the House reject the amendment to defund the NSA last night. Michele Bachmann surprised the heck out of me by giving a impassioned speech on the floor saying, "Well, you know, they are not actually saving any of your records. They are not saving any of your phone calls or your e‑mails." That's an out‑and‑out lie, is it not, Louie?

GOHMERT: Well, my understanding ‑‑ you know, Michele is a very dear friend of mine.

GLENN: Mine too.

GOHMERT: And I was hearing you earlier this morning. You were talking very glowingly and appropriately about Michele, but friends can disagree. And they are retaining the metadata, which is just a list of every phone number that everyone calls in the United States, calling inside or outside the United States. And when I say the leaked document from the FISA court where a judge would actually order that every single call made to every person, every phone outside the U.S. and inside the U.S., Glenn, you know, I've been a judge. I've been a chief justice. I couldn't believe that a judge would sign an order like that because there's this little problem with the Constitution. You have to specifically name a place, a person, what exactly is to be seized. And for a judge to just sign a sweeping order that says "Get everything from everybody." And we had a hearing last week and we had some people from the government there and I asked the question, you know, because they have the defense, "Look, it's just data. We don't know whose phone number is whose. And all ‑‑ we run these algorithms and look for patterns." Glenn, when they have every phone number and every phone number that's calls, I asked these guys, "Well, isn't it true that the other government, whether it's CIA, you have the right and the ability to use sources that the public can use to gather information? There's nothing wrong with you doing that, right?" "Yes." "That means you can go to the white pages for phone numbers, who has what phone number, and you can also do what anybody can do. You can go online, pay a fee and find out everybody's cell number if you want to. I mean, that data is available." And they said, "Well, you know, I guess we could." Yes, Glenn, they can get everybody's phone number. They can know who did what. And so if your government ‑‑ let's just say there was somebody that was a little paranoid and wanted to look at what they could do. Say they wanted to make a case against you after the fact of things that are completely untrue. Well, they can go back and say, "Well, you talked to this person and this." Yeah, but it had nothing to do with that. They can make a case against you. I mean, it becomes so much like a Kafka novel where you can't really fight this big spider that's just ‑‑ or octopus that's just taken over everything.

GLENN: So here are the names of some of the people that we respect, that voted on the, I think the wrong side. Michele Bachmann is one of them. Here are some of the others.

STU: Yeah, Darrell Issa.

GLENN: These are all good people.

STU: Yeah. Culberson was another one we were talking about earlier today. Paul Ryan was on the wrong side of this one, I think. Steve King on the wrong side of it.

GLENN: So how did that happen, Louie? What are they saying behind the scenes? What was their reasoning?

GOHMERT: Well, they are saying ‑‑ when you talk about people like Michele and Steve ‑‑ they are two of my best friends ‑‑ they will tell you behind the scenes what they say in front, that they were concerned that ‑‑ and I didn't realize ‑‑ actually I didn't realize Steve had voted against the Amash amendment.

GLENN: Yeah.

GOHMERT: But it is this fear that has been put in place, "Gee, we're finding out who terrorists are by this information." But Glenn, I have to go back to our debate over the law. I wasn't there when the PATRIOT Act passed and I wasn't there when FISA courts were created. They've been around for a long time. But I was there for the renewal, the extension. And I battled tooth and nail with my own Republican chairman who had put ‑‑ he had actually put Sunsets in the original PATRIOT Act so that, you know, we'd always have leverage to get information about what they were doing. And even under the Bush administration, getting information from the justice department was really tough. And that's how I ended up being able to convince a majority of the Republicans to put Sunsets on something in the PATRIOT Act extension because the chairman had bought into the Bush administration position that we don't need Sunsets anymore. And so we debated this and we got into the business about what is the purpose of having ‑‑ of their ability to surveil telephone calls and who you're calling, whether it's actually getting content or whether it's actually just getting what they call the metadata, the logs of who you called. And what we were told and the testimony all was to the effect that the only people who would have their phone information pulled were those who either made a call to a known foreign terrorist or somebody who's affiliated with a known terrorist group, or they got a call from one of those people. In fact, Glenn, I made the statement at one of our debates that, look, to my friends across the aisle that are so worried about the administration, you know, getting your phone records, under the bill it's very clear: If you don't want your phone records to be pulled, that data as to who you're calling, then when you call your foreign terrorist friends, use somebody else's phone. I thought that was pretty funny, cute, and a lot of people laughed.

GLENN: But they lied to you, did they not, Louie?

GOHMERT: Well, it turned out, no, you don't have a to call a foreign terrorist.

GLENN: Right.

GOHMERT: They are getting your phone information. And another thing that has really bothered me ‑‑

GLENN: Hang on just a second. Hold on. Hold on just a second. I want everybody coast to coast that is listening to understand that this man has so much credibility, that Louie Gohmert, a congressman who believes in many of the same things I do just went on national airwaves and said, "Look, the Bush administration lied to me. I was making the wrong case. I was told one thing and they lied to me about it, and the left was right about it and I was wrong." That's significant.

GOHMERT: Well, they weren't right about it, but the Bush administration was actually arguing that they would not do anything more than what the law provided and you had to have that Nexus with a foreign terrorist or someone associated ‑‑

GLENN: That's not true.

GOHMERT: ‑‑ with a terrorist group. And so I don't know, I haven't seen information, I don't know if the Bush administration, their NSA was gathering every single person's phone information, but ‑‑

GLENN: But it doesn't matter. I'm in a moment blaming it ‑‑

GOHMERT: ‑‑ what some of us talked about back in those debates was, gee, I remember them saying we do not have the capability to gather every single person's phone calls to everybody they call.

GLENN: And they do.

GOHMERT: But even if we did, they wouldn't do it. And this law does not authorize us to do that. And so you got Republicans to vote for it. I was just talking to John Conyers here on the floor. I'm in our cloakroom just off the House floor and we just finished voting and, you know, I was ‑‑ I gave you and Nadler and you guys so much grief over your positions and, son of a gun, you were right, except your administration that's pulling off this information that you thought the Bush administration would be doing.

GLENN: I don't think ‑‑ you know what, I don't ‑‑

PAT: Amazing.

GOHMERT: Something else, too, Glenn: I've come up with some Democrats over the last two days who voted against the Amash amendment who I was surprised voted against it because they were against giving the NSA any of this kind of power to start with. And they said, well, look ‑‑ one of them said, "Louie, let me just show you what we got from our leadership in the Democratic Party and that's why I voted no on the Amash amendment. It says right here very clearly the law does not allow us currently to gather anybody's phone information unless they have talked to some foreign terrorist or some member of a foreign terrorist group."

GLENN: So Louie ‑‑

GOHMERT: And I said, well, that is true, that is what the law says, but they are not following the law.

GLENN: Can I ask you a question? What ‑‑

GOHMERT: And so that's why some of the left who argued against, that said this kind of thing might happen voted against the Amash amendment. They were given the wrong information.

GLENN: So tell me this, Louie: Then why is it, what are they storing in the Utah data storage facility? What is it they are storing? Are they crisping lettuce in that?

GOHMERT: I don't know.

GLENN: I mean ‑‑

GOHMERT: It's huge, isn't it?

GLENN: It's ‑‑

GOHMERT: And I don't know, and probably if I did, it would be classified, but I really don't know it all, but I know apparently they are going to be gathering ‑‑

GLENN: Yes.

GOHMERT: ‑‑ every phone call that everyone has made.

GLENN: Exactly right.

GOHMERT: The logs for those things, and that is dangerous. But let me point out something else, Glenn and, you know, we talked about our open borders. And I'm telling you, for the amount of liberty we have to give up to have security is in direct proportion to how open our borders are. The more open our borders are, then the more we have to give up liberty to have security. And as you quoted Franklin, you know. He said those that give up safety for liberty don't deserve either one. That's ‑‑

GLENN: But I mean ‑‑

GOHMERT: That's where we are. We need to secure our border. We need to kick out people that overstay visas. And I still contend we should do nothing on immigration except pass a resolution. Mr. President, you secure the border as confirmed by the border states and then we'll take up a comprehensive bill, but not until then.

Now, back to Benghazi, back to the NSA spying, back to a total throw‑out of the Internal Revenue Code and revamping that system. Back to the things that are 60 to 70% popular with the American people.

GLENN: All right, Louis ‑‑ Louie Gohmert from Texas, congressman, I appreciate it and thank you so much. I'm running a little bit late but God bless you, man, and keep up the fight.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.