With Speaker of the House Mike Johnson re-elected, Congress moves on to certifying President Trump’s historic win; the New Orleans terrorist attack reminds Americans of the threat of radical Islam; and Joe Biden honors pretty much every terrible person in America with the Medal of Freedom. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2110 - - - DailyWire+: Kick off 2025 with 25% off your new DailyWire+ annual membership. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today! Matt Walsh’s hit documentary “Am I Racist?” is NOW AVAILABLE on DailyWire+! Head to https://amiracist.com to become a member today! Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: PureTalk - Exclusive discount for our listeners at: https://www.PureTalk.com/Shapiro ZipRecruiter - Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE: https://ZipRecruiter.com/DAILYWIRE Blinds - Exclusive Discount for my Listeners! Tell them The Ben Shapiro Show sent you! https://www.blinds.com/ Fitbod - Get 25% off your subscription or try the app FREE for seven days at https://Fitbod.me/SHAPIRO - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3cXUn53 Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3QtuibJ Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3TTirqd Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPyBiB
Chapter 1: What major political event is discussed in this episode?
Well, folks, we are back. It is a brand new year. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and a wonderful New Year's. And now it all begins. So this is going to be a very big year. President Trump is slated to be certified as the president of the United States today. The normal certification process will go through as planned in the Congress.
of the United States, and he will also have his Speaker of the House. So President Trump had endorsed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for re-election. There were, as usual, a coterie of people who were very concerned about Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. As I have been saying for... I don't know, years at this point. It turns out the Speaker of the House has a very hard job.
You have to cobble together a coalition of people across various party lines, and then you have to somehow materialize a majority to do things. So the job of the Speaker of the House is not, in fact, to be, quote-unquote, an ideological thought leader. There are plenty of people whose job that is. It is the job of the Speaker of the House to actually get done what can be done.
It is to get as much of the pie as humanly possible. And the problem with many of the ideologues, particularly in Congress, but also in the commentariat, is that when they suggest that the Speaker of the House has the magical Nietzschean ability to simply impose his will on Congress and get everything that you could possibly want, they are lying. It is simply not true.
So this all came to fruition over the break. So on Friday, despite the attempts of people like Thomas Massey, the representative from Kentucky, to prevent Speaker Johnson from being reelected. Johnson was reelected. Here was Massey looking rather disillusioned, actually, in this particular clip, trying to make the case against Speaker Johnson in the most colorful possible terms.
You can pull all my fingernails out. You can shove bamboo up in them. You can start cutting off my fingers. I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow. And you can take that to the bank.
Well, he didn't, but everybody else did because President Trump signaled his support for Mike Johnson. And the reason that he did that is because Johnson is as good as it's going to get. Johnson is, in fact, a very conservative speaker of the House. He is faced with an extraordinarily slim majority.
And there are always going to be people in Congress who have decided that the best thing that they can do is go on television and spout rather than actually, you know, doing the job of being in Congress. But the job of being in Congress, is very different from the job of saying what it is that you think about politics. The job of being in Congress, again, is to get as much of the pie as possible.
And that changes pretty radically depending on whether you are in the minority or whether you are in the majority, whether there's a Democrat in the White House or whether there is a Republican in the White House.
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Chapter 2: What challenges does the Speaker of the House face?
That's the number one priority. Yes.
And again, the thing that Republicans want more than anything is get the priorities that Trump wants done. Well, this has betokened some interesting conversations about the strategy going forward for House Republicans. So there are basically two strategies on the table. There are two big issues that are going to come up this year in the Congress of the United States.
Basically, because Republicans do not actually have a supermajority in the Senate, that means they have to use a process that is called reconciliation. Reconciliation can only be used on budgetary bills, on budgetary matters. which means typically it can only be used once or possibly at the most twice inside of a year.
The big question for Republicans in the House and in the Senate was whether they were going to separate out two separate bills and vote on them separately over the course of the year.
One was going to be a border bill that's going to attempt to maintain border security, increase border security, complete the building of the wall, for example, change the law where necessary in order to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants. That was possibility of bill number one. Possibility of bill number two was the making permanent of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
And there are basically two possible strategies here. Again, one strategy would be to separate those two bills. In some ways, that might be better. And in some ways, it might be worse. The other strategy was to wrap them up into one giant bill.
The problem with wrapping them up into one giant bill is more compromises are going to get cut in that giant bill than might be cut if you separated them out into two separate bills. Why? Well, because if you pile everything into one bill and you give that giant one bill on border matters and tax matters an up or down vote, there will be more crap in the crap sandwich. There just will be.
It's like an omnibus package that includes tax matters and border matters. And this is something that many conservatives are concerned about. For example, the House Freedom Caucus is upset about all of that because it will take additional spending on the border in order to secure the border. The Trump tax cuts may have short-term lowering of federal revenue into the tax coffers.
So how are you going to offset that in terms of the spending? And meanwhile, Republicans also would like to increase the defense budget in the face of a vastly aggressive China.
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Chapter 3: How did President Trump influence the Speaker election?
There should be such investigations. The reality is that there are 340 million people living in the United States. You can't keep track of everybody. What you can do is keep track of the organizations that seem to be at least somewhat friendly toward radical Islamic terror groups. Representative Mike Turner of Ohio, he was on with Margaret Brennan on Sunday.
He says, listen, there are definitely people who are friendly to radical Islamic terror living in the United States.
Are there individuals that are affiliated with ISIS and terrorist groups and organizations that have crossed the border that are inside the United States? Director Ray, FBI director, has said so. We certainly have intelligence that says so. I agree with his assessment. Jim has also seen it. He's testified before our committee publicly of that fact.
Those individuals are working in conjunction with ISIS with the intention of harming Americans. The director has said it directly.
They are known to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.
And we are working diligently to try to take them down to prevent them from doing so. And that's why the director is publicly saying such. And that's what the new administration is going to be handed. The fact that these individuals are here, that we need to locate them, we need to remove them, we need to bring them to justice and prevent them from doing harm to Americans.
Okay, this also means no more political correctness when it comes to counterintelligence, when it comes to things like investigating the possibility of terror connections inside the United States. No more political correctness. Well, it's time to stop blinding ourselves, unless you need to buy blinds. Now, here's the thing. If you need to buy blinds, you need to head on over to blinds.com.
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