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Senator Bill Hagerty on Christmas Eve Breaking News

CLAY: We bring in now Senator Bill Hagerty. We got a lot to talk about with you, Senator, but have you heard anything about this potential power shortage or the rotating power outages that might be necessary in the state of Tennessee, the TVA authority?

SEN. HAGERTY: Yes, I certainly have, Clay. Two generators are down. They’re working on it right now. They’re trying to reduce — the TVA is trying to reduce — its power load by about 5%. But these incredibly low temperatures… Right now, it’s 5 degrees where I am here in Nashville.

CLAY: Yeah.

SEN. HAGERTY: These incredibly low temperatures are putting, I think, a big strain. They’ve asked people to lower their temperatures to 68 degrees to avoid using major appliances right now so they can get this problem resolved and get us back online. But I think this is sort of a precursor to what we may expect all over the country. We’ve got a reliance now on a variety of fuel sources. Some of them are reliable. Some of them are not. And if you think about wind, solar, that sort of thing, that only work when the when the sun is shining…

If you think about the fact that we’ve got coal-fired plants that are shuttered right now, and what we’re doing is placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability that we should never be in. America has the ability, the capability to be fully energy independent. And that capability is being frittered away as we make ourselves more and more dependent on countries like China. And we continue to shift. And look, I’m not against any power source, don’t get me wrong, but I think we need to make certain that we have a very robust and reliable power source throughout America. And it’s this sort of thing that makes us really, really — and we all should be — deeply concerned.

CLAY: No doubt. And I mean, it really is just kind of a window. And I’m using my particular location to tell this story right now. But there are many parts of the country that are going to be dealing with this as we deal with it right now in the Nashville area, for instance, where you and I both are — 26-year record lows. It was minus 2 this morning when I woke up.

SEN. HAGERTY: Yeah.

CLAY: — in the area of Nashville I live, in Franklin, Tennessee, Williamson County. Okay. So, you and I were texting during all this craziness going on with the $1.7 trillion bill that passed the Senate yesterday, this omnibus bill. So I want to start with this question. You voted against it, and thank you for that vote. Eighteen Republican senators voted for it. What were they thinking? Why did they support this instead of forcing Democrats to pass this as they could have — 50-50, I believe; you can let me know on the mechanics whether that would have been possible. But instead, 18 Republican senators voted yes on this $1.7 trillion. Why did they vote yes? Why were you a no? What’s the story there?

SEN. HAGERTY: First, just from a procedural standpoint, this required 60 votes. So, ten Republican senators were necessary. (crosstalk)

CLAY: So, they couldn’t have passed this.

SEN. HAGERTY: Yes.

CLAY: This is important because, you know, again, a lot of people don’t understand the procedures of the Senate. If there had not been ten Republicans vote yes, this bill could not have been passed. In other words, this wasn’t a majority only-necessary bill in order to make it pass.

SEN. HAGERTY: That is correct. That is correct. Now, much of the spending — most of this crazy spending — has been done precisely the way you describe it. Go back to March of 2021 when they passed what they called the American Rescue Plan. Massive… You know, massive subsidies flowed into the marketplace at a time that our economy is recovering. That was really setting… That’s what really set off this massive inflation that we’re rolling with, that in the energy policy that Biden has adopted. And then the laughably titled Inflation Reduction Act, which is really just the green new deal with lipstick put on it.

They passed that with just 50 votes as well. But this vote — the vote that took place yesterday — was basically for the normal budget going forward next year. But it had a lot of things in it that I was not comfortable with. As you say, there were Republicans that voted for it. There were things that they wanted in that bill, that they were willing to go ahead and vote to pass it at this point in time. Everybody’s got to, you know, vote their conscience. But it did split our conference. I would have certainly preferred to move this on a short-term basis into next year and let our Republican House of Representatives have a shot at dealing with it and undoing some of the damage that the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate that they’ve done these past two years to begin to undo that.

That will not be an option for us for the next year, because this bill was passed yesterday. And, again, Chuck Schumer knew that he had the votes and that’s why he brought it to the floor in this manner. We almost had it stopped, though, and, Clay, you’ll remember on Wednesday night, everything came to a screeching halt because Chuck Schumer found out something that he didn’t realize. And that is there’s actually bipartisan support for addressing Title 42. You know, a district judge recently lifted that. Title 42 is the health-related rationale for stopping people at the border and turning them back.

It’s also a procedure that’s much simpler for Customs and Border Patrol agents to use, you know, in terms of the paperwork that’s required to get somebody, you know, processed and returned back to their home country. That is that is no longer going to be in place. The district court judge said that, look, there’s no longer a pandemic. I actually agree with that. So that rationale can no longer be used. I’ve tried three times now — as recently as Wednesday on the Senate floor — to fix Title 42 and actually put in place a much more dreadful health concern, and that is drug overdoses from fentanyl and giving Title 42 authority to our Customs and Border Patrol agents when they suspect drug smuggling may be in place.

That is a great reason to turn people back. It’s frankly one of the deadliest or the deadliest byproducts of this collapsed southern border.  It would have fixed this problem. And Democrats voted me down, bought me three times now that we had this Title 42 amendment that that Schumer found out that he had Democrat support for it, he had to completely bring everything to a stop to it — to a screeching halt — on this omnibus bill. They used the night to come up with a procedural trick that allows Democrats to vote as if they support Title 42, to actually vote for putting funding in for the wall and supporting many of the Trump-era policies that were actually securing the border. They created this procedural gimmick that they designed to fail, and they pushed that through and brought us back to the floor yesterday morning and finished the process of voting in this $1.7 trillion mega-spending bill that had so many bad things in it, I can’t even tell you.

CLAY: So, Senator, you have worked in business before, and I think this is important because you made a good amount of money. You didn’t have to do this. You care about the country; so, you’ve come back. There are a lot of people that are professional politicians. Some of them are great. A lot of them aren’t. You well know. Do they understand basic economics? Like, when you walk around and talk to people in Congress, you’ve had to make a business budget. Every person listening to us out there has had to do it too. We started the Tea Party at $10 trillion in debt. We’re now well over $30 trillion in debt in the last 12 years.

SEN. HAGERTY: Yes.

CLAY: We’re seeing the consequences of failed economic policy, as you mentioned, with inflation, with the energy policy that’s out there. This is frustrating because there’s a lot of Republicans listening to me right now — a lot of independent voters, a lot of Democrats, frankly, who listen to this show — and they’re saying, “Man, what is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat if both of them are agreeing to spend $1.7 trillion and not even fighting to try to balance our budget in any meaningful way?” I know that’s frustrating to you, but can you take us into the window of what it’s like to be a businessperson who could never run a for-profit business like our country is being run?

SEN. HAGERTY: You’re certainly right. You can’t even run a state this way because most states have a balanced budget requirement. So, it’s unique to Washington the ability to print money and it gets down to priorities, I think in many cases. I know a number of my colleagues were very focused on the situation in Ukraine. They wanted the Ukraine funding in there. That’s why Chuck Schumer put it there to bring them across the line. I understand that. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. So, you know, some folks will put issues like that in front of the economic — the very basic economic — concerns that I have. But if you step back and look at what’s happened these past two years, and that’s been you know, I’ve only served in this Congress and I’ve only run for office once.

In fact, I was talking with Coach Tommy Tuberville. I think he and I are the only people, certainly in our conference, who have not been in some sort of elective office before. And we were both scratching our heads wondering, ‘How in the world do you operate, operate like this in Washington?” But since we’ve both been there, what we’ve seen is Democrats use this reconciliation process and without a single Republican vote, you know, just shove through massive spending that is more theology than any sort of economic economically grounded philosophy. And they’re pursuing this Green New Deal.

Again, the, quote, Inflation Reduction Act. That’s all this is, is Green New Deal. They go in and they bail out these blue states that have actually operated recklessly. That was that was all jammed into that initial $1.7 trillion package that they shoved through back in March of 2021. You know, bailing out blue states, putting that burden on run red states like our own who actually do balance our budget. It really has just been an amazing exercise in political theology and philosophy without any sort of reckoning from an economic standpoint.

And we’re paying the price. As you mentioned, over $30 trillion in debt every time the Federal Reserve has to raise interest rates one point — 100 basis points, 1% — that 1% translates into over $300 billion. But the additional interest that we have to pay, $300 billion, Clay, that’s almost ten times the size of Tennessee’s budget. This is it’s just grotesque what is taking place right now. We’ve got to push back on this. We can push back on it. We just need to make certain that we’ve got Republican control, and that’s why I hope that this spending package would have just been continued over into the early part of next year. We would have had Republicans in the House and begin to push back on some of this damage. That’s just not where we are right now.

CLAY: Last question for you, and I think this is important, too. We’re finishing the year. I want some optimism. You and I have been texting about looking at the 2022 data, talking about what we saw there, too. You’re also a tech guy. How much of the plan that was in place for 2020 to — get out the vote, let’s win in tight elections — has to be completely remade by Republicans in 2024, and are you optimistic we can learn from what Democrats are doing and start to replicate a lot of their get-out-the-vote aspect? Because otherwise we’re going to lose Pennsylvania, we’re going to lose Arizona, we’re going to lose potentially Georgia, many of these states that we have to win to take back the White House.

SEN. HAGERTY: Well, Clay, you and I were together on election night. You know how sad I was, how exhausted I was.

CLAY: Yeah.

SEN. HAGERTY: I mean, I’ve been in seven states in ten days campaigning. And I can tell you on the ground we were winning, the polls showed we were winning and the public sentiment leading into Election Day. But we lost those races well before Election Day because of the changes that Democrats brought about in terms of voting rules. You know, some of these states had been voting since August, Nevada as a great example. They mailed out ballots to everyone on the voting rolls.

And, you know, they don’t do a great job of cleaning up these voting rolls. So in places like Las Vegas, some homes were getting four and five ballots. Then it’s legal now in Nevada to go out and ballot harvest. You can have paid ballot harvesters go door to door and collect those ballots. Now, do you know whether the ballot is going to get there or not? Well, if it’s a Democrat household or they like what’s on it, it probably does make its way into the, quote “dump” that happened. And they’re allowed to continue to do that all the way up to Saturday after Election Day on Tuesday. So I watched Nevada happen and day after day, ballots —

CLAY: In Nevada, by the way, Laxalt lost by, what, 8000 votes or something of that magnitude?

SEN. HAGERTY: Minuscule.

CLAY: Yeah.

SEN. HAGERTY: They just they kept going until Friday, until they got the number of Democrat votes that they needed. And they kept doing this down around Las Vegas and Clark County and eventually got to the point that they had what they needed to win. And I’m not saying what they did is illegal, but we did not have the ground game to match that. So you and I have been talking about this, Clay. We absolutely have to revamp the way we do this. First, we have to have a legal team to go in and fight back as hard as the Democrats have to get sanity back into state-by-state voting laws. I mean, this whole notion of mailing out ballots to — you know, five and six ballots going to — a house?

That is ridiculous, and then ballot harvesting like they’ve done. When Secretary of State James Baker, former President Jimmy Carter sat on a bipartisan commission to look at the dangers of election integrity, the two things they decided were the most ripe for fraud were mail-out ballots and ballot harvesting. And that’s exactly what the Democrats are focused on doing. So we need to go back state by state, push back on these rules. But whatever the rules happen to be when the time comes to just start voting, we’ve got to be locked and loaded. We’ve got to have people on the ground.

We’ve got to have, you know, our folks working on mail-out ballots and we’ve got to stay on this. We’ve got to match the Democrats head-to-head on what they’re doing on the ground. It was the ground game, I think, that killed us. If you look at the map going into 2024, you know that’s a source of optimism, and I’m with you. I want to end this conversation in an optimistic way. The Democrats have to defend 23 seats going into 2024. Republicans only have to defend ten, and three of those seats are states that are basically Republican states. So we definitely ought to be able to do this. But we have to… Just as you say, we have to be able to match the Democrats at their own game and not lose this on an operational basis.

CLAY: Merry Christmas to you and your family, Senator Hagerty. I appreciate the time, as always, and look forward to crossing paths again sometime soon.

SEN. HAGERTY: Thank you, Clay. Merry Christmas to you and yours as well.

CLAY: Thank you. Let me tell you guys: He’s sharp. Senator Hagerty is sharp. Smart guy. We need to be letting him lead some of these charges to figure out how to get our voters out — and I’m working on it, too, behind the scenes. But he’s a sharp guy. I’m impressed.

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