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Is Rand Paul Running for President in 2028? · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reed.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's an honor to have Senator Rand Paul from the Commonwealth of Kentucky on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Paul serves as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and he's recognized as one of the nation's leading advocates for liberty and a fierce advocate against government overreach.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Before becoming a senator, Rand Paul ran a successful ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green, Kentucky for 17 years.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: He also founded the Southern Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic, an organization that provides eye exams and surgery as a pro bono for patients across the state.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he has performed eye surgery in Guatemala and Haiti as part of medical mission trips.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: In addition to his congressional service and his medical practice, Dr.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Paul is the author of six books, the most recent titles being Deception, The Great COVID Cover-Up, and The Case Against Socialism.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Office of Center Rand Paul partners with TFES annually to host the Capitol Hill Lecture Series sponsored by the Einhorn Family Foundation.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Paul, thank you for joining me today.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Paul, we've known each other, I think, for more than 40 years.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I worked for your father when he was in the U.S.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: House of Representatives, and you spent a summer, I think, as an unpaid intern there.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: I happened to have a clip of a cable TV show I hosted for your father called A Conversation with Ron Paul.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: You remember that program, I'm sure.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I remember several of the interviews.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I remember meeting several of the speakers, the same intern program that you and I are involved with now in Washington.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he had one similar to that.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as you and I have discussed, one of the speakers he had, we were able to have.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Walter Williams was one of his speakers, and one of our first speakers we had in the early years was Walter Williams, while he was still with us.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what a great provocative speaker he was.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Roger Reim.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining us for this conversation with Congressman Ron Paul.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: Congressman Paul, you're an advocate of the free market and the free market economy, therefore I assume you uh believe competition is important.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Can isn't it there a role for government to ensure that we have competition in the marketplace?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I think so.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_03: And um I think as long as you enforce the law equally, and that is protect freedom for everybody across the board, then you're gonna have competition.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there you go with the great Dominic Armentano, who was the best when it came to antitrust and monopoly policy.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yeah, I just quoted Dominique Armentano on the floor this week.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about college sports, and now Congress is gonna regulate college sports, and I said, well, you know, Congress created this problem with the antitrust laws.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: They went after the NCAA, said they were a monopoly, and then forbid them enforcing rules about what it means to be an amateur.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So really the fix of this isn't to have Congress take over and micromanaged sports, the fix would be to exempt the NCAA from antitrust law and let them enforce their laws.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Their laws would be negotiated between them and the schools that participate and the athletes.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody would get together and they'd have to figure out a compromise, but then the NCAA would set rules, but the courts have forbidden them that by calling them a monopoly.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if anybody, uh Dominique Armentano, would understand the foolishness of applying antitrust to college sports.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me ask you a few questions about the COVID pandemic.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: You've led the investigations into government policy at the time.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: You brought Dr.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Anthony Fauci before your committee this summer, and rather than be honest with the American people, he claimed the Fifth Amendment, I think, 111 times, refused to answer questions.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: How would you summarize the official response by Fauci and other government officials to the pandemic?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Initially, we wanted them just to admit that they funded the research and that there was a possibility that the lab leak led to the pandemic.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fauci from the beginning adamantly denied both.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: He said he didn't fund anything.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said with certainty, I have never ever funded gain of function research in China, but it's just not true.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: We've presented the facts, we've shown the experiments, they took two different coronaviruses, combined them, and the combined coronavirus was more lethal.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even the head of the NIH said, well, the mice got sicker, the mice died.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's a virus that is more potent than the previous virus.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now they argue that, well, we didn't intend for it to gain function.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they say it's not gain of function unless you intend to do gain of function.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're experimenting by combining viruses, you will, on occasion, gain function.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what they did is created a virus that was very, very transmissible.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was one of the reasons we knew that this came from the lab early on, because there was a coronavirus epidemic in 2002.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: It only infected 8,000 people because you told people to stay home, you quarantined, and it actually worked.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It had a 10% mortality, but only 8,000 people got it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: This one, probably several billion people got this in the matter of about a year.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it was incredibly contagious, and that's unusual for an animal virus, because typically animal viruses don't go to humans easily, but then also don't go human to human very easily.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that was true in 2002, but not with COVID.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the signs that we believed that it was manipulated was that it was so transmissible.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then another key sign was that when you look at the genetic structure of COVID, it had a special little cleavage site that allows it to enter the cells, and that cleavage site isn't found in nature.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there were just a lot of things adding up.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact that Anthony Fauci wouldn't admit that he funded it, wouldn't admit that it was dangerous, and wouldn't admit that the Chinese record on safety isn't very good.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was in a lab that didn't have a good safety record that really was not a schedule of labs that was where you do this kind of research.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was a BSL-2 instead of a BSL-4.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I think at every turn he resisted was mostly about covering his reputation and escaping culpability because if he paid to let this research happen and then this accident happened, he at least, you know, has some culpability in the pandemic.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: You've uncovered what seemed to be conflicts of interest and even financial incentives that might have motivated Dr.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Fauci to fund the research, to orchestrate the cover-up, and then even a block effective treatments.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Could you speak to that?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell We've been looking at whether government scientists should have to reveal if they take royalties.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I asked him in committee about royalties, not just for him, but for any scientist at NIH, whether they reveal their royalties, he said we don't have to.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The law protects us and we don't have to list our royalties.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And my response to him is I will do everything in my power to change that law.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been trying for three, four years now to do it.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's one way of passing bills, and with something like this, it's just a reporting requirement on a forum.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's usually such a small thing you can get it done unanimously.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I've asked every senator.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've met with tons of them.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've got 99 who say yes and one Democrat who resists, Tammy Baldwin.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're having trouble getting it passed.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are still trying to put that on legislation to make them reveal that would help with conflict of interest, because if you work for Pfizer, there's nothing evil about getting royalties.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all for capitalism, I'm all for intellectual property.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But if Pfizer is then lobbying the government to make their vaccine mandatory, there's a conflict of interest if you're on the committee voting to make it mandatory, if you also receive money from them.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: To me, it's essentially the same as if you're on the school board and you're voting on giving a contract for books and you own the book company, but you don't tell anybody you own the book company.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you would go to jail for that.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody would accept that.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think nobody should accept vaccine mandates from people who get money from the vaccine makers.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we're close to getting this passed.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to keep trying.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The other piece of legislation I have on this is to set up a presidential council to review all research to ensure that dangerous research, dangerous gain of function research is not funded.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're attempting to compel testimony from Dr.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Fauci's longtime assistant and even offered a grant of immunity, but having some trouble there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: What are you hoping to learn from that testimony?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we have emails from her to him saying, hey, Dr.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fauci, over the weekend I destroyed 10 tons of your emails.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the executive branch isn't allowed to destroy communications.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: There's a federal records law that says those are federal records and they have to be preserved.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually against the law and a felony to destroy those records.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd like to ask her who directed you to destroy the records?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Approximately how many did you destroy?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Over what period of time did you destroy these records?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: What were the subjects of the things that you typically destroyed records over?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Just general questions about that.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: We really have no intention of trying to put her in jail or have her arrested.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: We want the person who gave the orders.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: She, I believe, was someone taking orders, and you can argue that she should have known better, but at the very least, we'd like her just to tell the truth about her boss.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, she worked with him for twenty some odd years, so I don't think she wants to tell the truth.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: She's pled the fifth also now.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I tried to get the committee to vote to give her immunity, but it takes a two-thirds vote.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I got all eight Republicans and all seven Democrats opposed it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we're still working and talking with her attorneys and trying to convince her that this is better than us continuing to investigate her because if she doesn't cooperate, I'm going to look at all her current emails and see if she's still deleting records.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: If she still is doing it, then she will be within the statute of limitations and she may well be liable for prosecution.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it isn't just her.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of Fauci's other longtime assistants, David Morens, I referred him to the Department of Justice.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: They did prosecute him and he took a plea deal.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: He pled guilty.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if he'll serve time, but I keep hoping that his guilty plea will involve testimony about Anthony Fauci also.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd be willing to offer him less time in jail if he would tell the truth about what Anthony Fauci was doing with gain of function research.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not over, but we've learned a lot of things.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what we mainly learned about Anthony Fauci is that most of the things he said in public were lies.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And privately he was telling people completely the opposite.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And some of it was significant.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: For example, he would tell people, yeah, it looks like the data shows there may be an increase in miscarriages for people taking the vaccine in their first trimester.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then to the public, he's like going around everybody's neighborhood saying everybody should be vaccinated regardless of whether you're pregnant or not.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes against long-standing medical advice.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, long-standing medical advice is in the first trimester you avoid taking medications or new injections if you don't have to.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And pregnant mothers, frankly, weren't at risk, neither were their babies.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was a terrible uh thing for him to do it.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: But he also did it while knowing one thing privately, he told us the opposite publicly.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: You recently launched the reading room to make documents from your investigation publicly available.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: What one document or discovery do you think Americans should pay particular attention to?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell There's a lot.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Fauci's diary or log that he kept on a government computer is important because it reveals his private musings, his private conclusions, and how they contrasted with the public.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that will be recorded and will taint his memory or the recollection of him in history.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that is important.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Recently we discovered from that log that as far ago as 2016, they were working to aerosolize Ebola.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: So the Ebola virus has about a 50% mortality.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's only located in Africa.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: We've had one person come here on a plane with it who infected two nurses a few years ago, but it's for the most part just in Africa, 50% mortality, but it's not spread through the air, maybe over a very short distance, but not over long distances.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so to change Ebola or to give it the game the function of spreading through the air and floating in the air is a significant experiment, and I think should worry us.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: But there's no oversight by Congress on this.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when you see Anthony Fauci's exchange with his assistant, the conclusion isn't that we shouldn't do this because it was dangerous.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: The conclusion is who was the idiot to not classify this so the American people could find out about this?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about secrecy.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a man that is more like J.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Edgar Hoover at having his own secret sort of list of people that he could take down as opposed to a government scientist interested in public health.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do you worry that the failure of the government's response to COVID and the damage it did to the American people will mean that if there's a real threat in the future that the American people ignore guidance they get from government officials?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I have a nuanced view, particularly on the COVID vaccine, but because of people's doubts about the government telling the truth on the COVID vaccine, people are beginning to doubt all vaccines.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, one of my favorite books is actually called The Speckled Monster, which talks about smallpox and the it was actually a direct live injection of smallpox that treated people for over a hundred years and was a miracle in preventing smallpox.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not against vaccines.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not against trying to prevent disease.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: But when you get to the vaccine, it shouldn't be a theology that all vaccines are good.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: With COVID in particular, I'm 63 years old, not in a prime category for this disease, but I probably would have gotten vaccinated, but I had the disease.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so common sense would say if you've just had the disease, you don't need to be vaccinated.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: But when they told me I had to be vaccinated and everybody was clamoring because I wouldn't get vaccinated, I was like, well, I just had the disease.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, well, you just don't know.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, well, we've known about immunity since the Athenian plague in 400 BC.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we have known about it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they continue, when they do, they destroy trust.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so really the nuance of the COVID vaccine is those who are at risk probably in 2020, 2021, better part of Valor was take the vaccine.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: But those who weren't at risk, the vaccine has some risk.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're not huge.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: But for example, if you're a male 10 to 25, there's about six to eight chances in 10,000 that you could get an inflammation of the heart that could be very, very serious.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the chance of dying from COVID vaccine, if you, I mean from the disease, is zero.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Your risk is zero and your benefits are essentially zero, but your risk of the vaccine is actually greater than the risk of the disease.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: But we don't have these debates because the Democrats and all the Fauci lovers, they pray to a God that is the God of vaccines, and they don't question.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Their minds are simply closed.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't like all vaccines, somehow you're anti-science instead of thinking this thing through.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I think they have destroyed trust.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not the right wing who have have destroyed the trust, it's the supporters of this mistaken propaganda that came out on vaccines that destroyed trust.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, speaking of the loss of trust in government, you recently had a hearing in the Senate with independent journalist Nick Shirley and investigator James O'Keefe talking about fraud, the massive fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare programs and voter fraud.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: Could you summarize kind of what you learned from that hearing?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I learned that a 23-year-old kid with a camera on his iPhone is more effective than all the federal government in looking for fraud and waste.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I do compliment Nick Shirley.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Also, James O'Keefe has gone out and looked at some of this stuff in California as well.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I applaud both of them and anybody else who's brave enough to get out in the field.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Nick Shirley, when we asked him, how'd you get started?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, I just looked to see who was the biggest recipient of money in Minneapolis, and it was a couple different autism centers and learning centers, and said I just showed up and decided to film who came in and out all day, and I never saw anybody go in in the building or out of it.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that was day after day, and I finally knocked on the door, and it was people basically just ripping the system off to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it has to be fixed.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm for any reforms.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: We've introduced some reforms to make money that we hand out dependent on audits and uh confirming that it's going to the right people.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: But more than that, the reason this happens is that the federal government and the states share these programs.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: The way they're designed is you sign up for Medicaid, the State's in charge of that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: You sign up for food stamps, they're in charge of that.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: The policing is happening by the states, but the payment comes from the federal government.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's led to the problem of overspending, because people say, well, we'll just put more people on Medicaid because the State's not paying for it.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the state puts too many people on it because they're not having to pay for it, the federal government does, and then they don't police it well because they're also not paying for it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: So part of the answer is not just going after fraud, it's connecting the federal government and the state government.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the state government that's administering all this, they need to pay for it.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd be for uh either a block granting it back with very, very limited increases to control the cost of it, or sending it back and just saying you're gonna have to pay more.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, all the Medicaid expansion money, the people who are at higher income that Obama added through Obamacare, the federal government pays 90% of the tab and the state pays 10 percent.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: So why would they care about how many people they add or what the fraud is because they're only paying 10 percent?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the traditional formula has the states paying much more.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would go back to the traditional formula for all Medicaid recipients, and the states would balk at this, but then they would have to police their roles for fraud.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: They would also have to police their roles for able-bodied people that should be working or may well be working, and for people that even don't exist that are using these programs through fake names.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is a disgrace, but I do compliment Nick Shirley, James O'Keefe, and others that have been going after this.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell You're often a very lonely defender of the Constitution up there on Capitol Hill.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Some members of Congress who have traditionally been allies on so many things seem to have gotten weak in the spine.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Why do you think it is, even among Republicans, that so few are standing true to bedrock constitutional principles in your institution up there?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I think fear is the big motivating factor.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say that if you really want to judge someone on whether or not they are principled or they are for a limited constitutional government, it's really how well they behave when the ruling power or the ruling president's in their party.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because so many people are pretty good when the opposite party is in power.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like under Biden, we had dozens of congressmen and senators who thought that the president had too much power to declare emergencies, and that we wanted to take the emergency power back and say that emergencies declared by a president would expire after 30 days unless affirmatively voted on by the Congress.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right now it's the opposite.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: A president declares an emergency, and the only way we can stop a presidential emergency is with a two-thirds vote to overturn his veto or her veto.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had a great deal of uh understanding that this was too much centralization of power by Republicans when Biden was president, but now it's all dropped off.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: I still reintroduce those bills and have virtually no support.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that taxes should originate in the House is a pretty simple one.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Almost everybody that's ever read anything about the Constitution knows that taxes originate in the House of Representatives, and yet tariffs, which are specifically mentioned in the Constitution, duties and fees and taxes are to originate in the House, are originating by the President.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Supreme Court struck it down to their credit, but they didn't really, I think, strongly say it was a constitutional problem.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: They said it was a statutory problem that the IEPA, this emergency statute, didn't authorize it.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: But this is where really Republicans, I think, need to be stronger in defending the Constitution on taxes.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: If if we don't believe that taxes have to originate in the House, we've lost our way.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then we used to be the party of trade, that international trade made us richer, and now we're the party of uh protectionism, and every day they're banning something.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Today I'll go to the floor because they're trying to ban Mercedes-Benz from selling cars in our country.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: But they're not just a German manufacturer.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: They have 7,500 Americans work for them here.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's like Toyota in my state.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have 20,000 working.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: If we're gonna ban foreign manufacturers from even making cars in our country that employ Americans, what a foolish notion.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I think I'm gonna have a success because I was the only person to stand up against this bill.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten them to change the bill.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll go to the floor later today, and instead of going after Mercedes-Benz, which the Union was demanding, they're gonna drop that.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: But only because I stood in the breach.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody else stood up to oppose this bill because, oh, it's popular to ban Chinese cars.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe, but why the heck are you banning American cars made in America at the same time?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Are you confident there'll be a candidate running for president in 2028 who supports free trade, limited government, and the Constitution?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: That depends on what my decision is on whether I run or not.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there's anybody else.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the other thing is is think of the potential candidates.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Did any of them oppose increasing the debt ceiling by$5 trillion?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: There really are few fiscal conservatives that have a record of fiscal conservatism.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I think fiscal conservatism, there aren't many other representatives other than myself.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: On trade, there are no representatives in the Republican Party that are vocal and have supported trade.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think also on things like medical freedom, I've been a leading voice on the idea of that you make your medical choices with your doctor with informed consent and against the mandates that come from the vaccine bureaucracy.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think all those things combined, I think there actually is a potential coalition in the sense that, you know, the earliest primaries for the presidency are in Iowa, and farming communities big, and the farming community in the farming almanac that they put out is uh opposed to tariffs.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right now in Iowa, I think we're gonna suffer uh losses in Iowa because of the tariffs and the war on trade with Canada.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm hoping that if it's not me, there will be somebody that will be arguing against the trade war with Canada, will be arguing that the Iran war was not successful in bringing about those goals, and that inflation is the real culprit.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the affordability problem is inflation, which comes from deficit spending, and that we need to have people who are actually for cutting spending.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been the leader of something called the Penny Plan for a decade now, and that's to shave off a few pennies across the board and gradually balance the budget.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't know, I'd stack my record up against any of the others, but we won't make a decision probably till after the current election.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: We'll await that decision eagerly.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining me on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: You're truly one of the smartest, most well-read, and most dedicated to the Constitution members we have in the U.S.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Congress.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for joining me.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure to collaborate with you on our intern lecture series every summer.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, Senator Paul.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Roger.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at TFAS.org.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.