Former Congressman Jason Lewis on the GOP

CLAY: We’re going to have Jason Lewis and Todd Herman hanging out with you guys next week, and Jason is a former congressman from Minnesota’s 2nd District, also was a member of the House Budget Committee, and he’s been a guest host for Rush and he’s going to be having a good time with Todd. The book Party Animal: The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press. And, Jason, appreciate you joining us right now. And I want to hit you with this. Representative Dan Bishop, who’s done a great job —

LEWIS: Yes.

CLAY: — letting it be known what all is in the omnibus bill, said this new $1.7 trillion omnibus bill spends — and this is crazy, $6 billion per day, $250 million per hour and $4 million per minute every day — until September 30th, when the process will start all over again.

LEWIS: It sounds like a Hunter Biden party.

CLAY: (laughs) Yeah. I mean, the Hunter Biden stimulus package for strippers would definitely be helped here.

LEWIS: Yeah. (laughs)

CLAY: You’ve been through this process before, but the rush job, everything associated with it, did anything surprise you about the way this all went down?

LEWIS: Well, when you get to Congress, Clay — and great to be with you — you know, you look around the room at first at that first caucus meeting and you say, “All these famous people here in Washington, I’m not certain I belong here,” and after about six months, you look around the room and say, “I’m not certain they belong here.” It doesn’t take long to realize what the swamp really is. And that’s why when we had controlled the budget process and did three budget reconciliation resolutions… You know, Mitt Romney said the other day, “Oh, we got to do this entire fiscal year spending blowout because we just can’t trust Republicans in the House to fashion a budget.”

We did it in the 115th Congress. Obama left us a six-month budget. We had to do that one then we did ‘18 and ‘19. And you know what the total discretionary spending was then — $1.132 trillion. You know what it is now with this one? It’s $1.7 trillion. So, over a half a trillion dollars in spending in the matter of a couple of years since the Trump administration, since I served in Congress. This is a total betrayal by Senate Republicans. It is a total betrayal by Senate leadership. And I’ll tell you, it’s nothing new, Clay. Remember when we repealed Obamacare in 2017, we had it done. Two tough votes. People like Dan Bishop stood up there, stuck their neck out, got it over to the Senate, is going to go to conference committee — until John McCain and Lisa Murkowski say, “Uh, thumbs down, we kill that.” The Senate is where all good things go to die in Republican politics and it’s got to change or they’re not going to have any support left, the party is not going to have any support left. So, this year —

CLAY: I hear that from a lot of people and I’m glad you brought that up, but the number-one thing that I am hearing in the wake of this 1.7 trillion being spent is not people angry at Democrats —

LEWIS: Right.

CLAY: — because, look, I mean, they’re doing what they promised their constituents they would do — spend money.

LEWIS: They were put on Earth to bankrupt the country.

CLAY: (laughs) That’s right. But 18 Republican senators went along with this. And as Bill Hagerty just told us, if they hadn’t gotten to 60 — in other words, if only nine Republicans had gone along with it —

LEWIS: Right.

CLAY: — they couldn’t have rammed through this 1.7 trillion. And we would have been able to allow that Republican House to at least have a go at it in the beginning of the year.

LEWIS: In a couple of weeks, yeah. You know, you do a C.R. for a couple of weeks, and then the House Budget Committee has to do three budget reconciliations like we did in 2017 and 2018. It’s not that difficult unless you really want to spend the money, unless you like what the Democrats are doing in the Senate. And it wasn’t just this omnibus spending bill. The Respect for Marriage Act, which basically codified the Hodges decision nationwide, amnesty, voter ID federalizing elections. You had the Dirty Dozen that expanded — led by Thom Tillis of North Carolina; so, Dan Bishop knows a lot of what he speaks.

But you had the Dirty Dozen on the Respect for Marriage bill that expanded into 18 on the omnibus bill. And you know, I think the Republican Party needs to go back and look at Ike’s farewell speech when he said the military-industrial complex and now it’s the national security state. They upped the FBI appropriation Republicans after what we know the bureau has done! These guys like this stuff and they’ve got sort of this national security state apparatus, which is telling them, “Oh, we got to have increases there. We got to have increases in the Pentagon, no audit,” a bill I sponsored. So in order to get that, Schumer says, “Okay that will double social spending too,” and so they come to an agreement that basically puts the next generation of kids on the hook for it, and they’re not going to be able to pay off the debt. We’re going to have a sovereign debt crisis soon.

CLAY: Where does all this go? I mean, because I started the show talking about was the Tea Party began its protest against wild government spending when we had a $10 trillion deficit. That was the number that set off alarm bells.

LEWIS: A $10 trillion debt. Yeah. Right.

CLAY: Yeah. Maybe we have a budget at some point. The way things are going. But now we’re over $30 trillion. And if you look at that in the space of 12 years, we basically added $20 trillion in debt. That’s a roughly, you know, $1.5 trillion a year or so. That means in 20 years we might be sitting at a 60 or $70 trillion debt if we continue at the same pace.

LEWIS: That’s right.

CLAY: God knows what’s going to happen with inflation and overall borrowing costs going up. That just eats up more and more of the federal budget on a year-to-year basis. How does this change? Now what happens?

LEWIS: Well, the vigilantes… We used to call them the Bond vigilantes, you know, and the government would have a blowout. Interest rates would rise because they weren’t printing money and that would rein in the spending somewhat. Well, now, since really Bill Clinton, the glue that’s held this together, has been artificially low interest rates by the Fed. What that did essentially was monetize all this spending you’re talking about. When you have all that fiat money and the Fed is just putting a credit on the Treasury’s checkbook, then soon you’ll have massive inflation and then you’ll get interest rates rising no matter what the Fed does, because they’ll be out of tools. So this is the problem with printing money. It takes off the guardrails of spending, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah.

LEWIS: I mean, if you didn’t print the money, interest rates would either skyrocket or taxes would skyrocket and there would be a revolt. But if you’re printing the money, it’s the worst way to debauch a currency. It’s the worst way to raise taxes on the next generation, and I think the bill is going to come due soon because as rates rise, just interest on servicing the debt a year will be $1 trillion in the federal budget.

CLAY: Yep.

LEWIS: And so it is unsustainable. You’re quite right.

CLAY: Yeah, and it’s terrifying because I don’t think a lot of people understand that. But, you know, when you have a low interest rate environment, the cost of borrowing is effectively limited to a substantial degree, right?

LEWIS: Subsidized. It’s subsidized. Right.

CLAY: Yeah, subsidized, and now you’re dealing with what’s going to have to be, you know, 5% and 6% interest rate. And we just had Bill Hagerty on talking about just what the cost of that interest is, and it’s frankly unsustainable. So I don’t know how it blows up and I don’t know how bad it’s going to get.

LEWIS: We’ll become a Third World banana republic that keeps devaluing its currency. So if you saved up $500,000 to retire, it’ll be worth $200,000. They’ll just devalue it. And it will make everyone poorer. And then if you get, you know, if the Chinese get their way and their currency becomes the international currency, then you’re really going to have a run on the dollar. We are flirting with disaster. We really are. And I don’t think — and that’s why, to your earlier point, Clay, people are so upset with those Republicans. They’re supposed to be the green eyeshade, you know, bookkeepers that keep this thing in check. And they just went over to the dark side.

CLAY: Well, I know you’re going to have a lot of opportunity to talk to our audience next week. We cannot wait for you guys to sit in. We thank you for being willing to sit and talk to our audience. I know they’re going to love hearing from you, and hopefully you can help to continue to bring sanity.

LEWIS: Clay, it’ll be just like a Vikings game in the fourth quarter. You have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

CLAY: Hey, at least your field goal kickers in the playoffs are always reliable.

LEWIS: (laughing)

CLAY: I hope that wasn’t too low of a blow for all the Viking fans out there.

LEWIS: Yeah, right, right. It’s good thing we’ve got low taxes up here. That’s all I got to say.

CLAY: Hey, I live in Tennessee. We got no state income tax. I’m happy with that. We’ll talk. We’ve may be out of power at some point. If that happens, you’ll be back. But, in the meantime, you’ll definitely be back on Monday. And thanks for everything you’re doing for the show. And I know our audience is going to love hearing from you.

LEWIS: Clay, thanks to you. Appreciate it.

CLAY: No doubt. That is Jason Lewis, formerly Minnesota congressperson. I believe you guys are going to have a fantastic time hearing from him because he represents a wing of the House Republicans — and the Republican Party in general — that used to be made up with adults, and there used to be people who made rational decisions, and they used to be men who actually had testosterone.