BILL: Hi everybody, I'm Bill Whittle here with Scott Ott
And this is bill Whittle Now featuring Scott Ott, who spent the last, O, I would say maybe,
almost 10 days
Working very hard on his Clint Eastwood impression, and I think he's got it largely down
So I'm gonna do the intros and outros for this set of shows and you'll be able to hear
Scott's impression of Mr.
Eastwood in just a moment.
This show, as you probably know by now, is a pretty simple case of ambush where Scott
has a question —
I have no idea what it's going to be — and he's going to ask it and
We're going to answer it as best we can so, Mr . Eastwood. It's all yours
So Bill by now, you're probably asking yourself. Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya...
Punk? BILL: punk
SCOTT: Okay, well biggest news this week
of course has been the
restarting of the federal government after a
three-week shutdown longest shutdown in...or partial shutdown anyway as they call it...
in the history of the government and
Right after the deal was announced
- to start up the government for three weeks after a 25 days shutdown, I should clarify
the Right immediately came down with both feet on Donald Trump and...
Including Ann Coulter who authored a book called "In Trump We Trust" a year or so ago
slamming President Trump, saying that he caved to Nancy Pelosi by not getting his wall
and by allowing the government to restart.
Today, as we record this,
President Trump has told the Wall Street Journal that he's not really confident that
— he thinks it's a less than 50 percent chance that the Democrats will be able to
make a deal that's satisfactory to him between now
and the three-week deadline, and that he may just very well have to go ahead and use some
executive action.
Bill, does this sound to you like a guy who heard the criticism
when the restart happened, and is backpedaling, or does it sound like maybe this was the plan
all along and he
basically is stripping Nancy Pelosi of her excuse.
BILL: Well that's a great question
I don't know where to begin with this. So let's just start at the beginning. It's awful
late to be talking about building a wall
We...
the wall was the central campaign promise of the Donald Trump
candidacy and
While I am enormously grateful for the fact that ISIS has been smashed and the economy
is booming and North Korea
Understands that they're not playing with kittens anymore, and all the rest of these
many gains
I simply do wonder why we are speaking about this now that we've lost control of the House
of Representatives
SCOTT: Ann Coulter is saying he demanded this for 18 months and he lied — is what she's
saying now.
Well, Anne is very smart, but Ann tends to move from one position to another pretty quickly
and I'm not saying she's wrong
I'm just saying I'm not ready to go there
But...
it was certainly, I think, the first two years of the Trump presidency...
I I was very surprised at how slowly this thing was moving when I say slowly
I mean "not at all". Now before we get too much further in this I
understand that this was the first time — when Donald Trump was elected in
2016 this was the first time that that the Republican voter
had a chance to see their representatives do what they've been promising to do since
2008 and
They didn't do that.
They didn't repeal Obamacare. All of these people who've been starting in 2010 when we
flipped the House by a big margin
"Oh, we're going to repeal Obamacare. We're gonna have a conservative Republican
House Senate and presidency."
Well, here's the house. Four years later, here's the Senate. Two years after that, here's
the presidency, and now all of this legislation that's being sent or is presumably needed
to get things like the wall done —
the Republicans won't vote on them. At least they wouldn't they've been thrown out of office
now many of them.
So this failure is not just a failure of Donald Trump. It's a failure of his supposed-Republican
majority to make this thing happen. But honestly Scott
there is a very compelling case to be made for any president — not Donald Trump — just
about any president.
I would say it's a fair thing to say that even if they do two terms
90 percent of what they are going to accomplish in terms of legacy happens in the first hundred
days of their first term.
SCOTT: So the Congressional Budget Office comes out with a statement today
as we record this on Monday that
the government shut down for those 25 days
cost some 11 billion dollars, three billion of which can never be recovered. Larry Kudlow,
coming out of the White House
, spokesman...as a White House spokesman, said it's a drop in the bucket compared to
the vast size of the federal budget.
BILL: He's right.
SCOTT: And so he kind of downplayed that.
Clearly — CBO is supposed to be a nonpartisan entity —
but clearly this number is being thrown out there at this point
to put pressure on
one side of the other to say, "Look, if you don't make a deal within the next three weeks...you
already pissed away 11 billion
dollars, you're gonna waste more." Who do you think that accusation lands on?
BILL: I think the best answer to that question is: the
responsibility for the whole thing is
rests on the shoulders of
50 or 60 years of Republican and Democratic
representatives who have gone to Washington and become so intoxicated by an endless credit
card, and
lacking any sense of moral restraint or decency,
have driven us to the point where
five billion dollars is not worth talking about. It's it's it's simply: it's a rounding
error.
You know five billion dollars is a is a a simple rounding error for a government that
spends, you know
approximately three thousand six hundred billion dollars a year.
We spend 10 billion — the federal government — spends ten billion dollars a day, rule
of thumb round numbers, ten billion dollars a day.
so if we've been arguing for this wall thing for
25 days now?
SCOTT: Yes.
BILL: Right? Okay. So there's 25 billion dollars of government spending
That happened between the beginning and the end of this.
SCOTT: Now Bill, by the way,
The three billion dollars that we're not going to get back is the loss of that government
productivity that we didn't experience
Because they weren't at work.
BILL: Yeah, that's that's yeah. Well, as you know, Scotty, here's here's the thing:
We will all, you know, be old people in our rocking chairs —
we hope, some day, maybe in 20 50 or 60 or something —
and even then as our brittle bones just force us to try and rock back and forth
underneath the surveillance drones,
we will look back on the great government shutdown of
2019
with a remembrance of the unbelievable hardship and
the cruelty that we endured in our daily lives as a result of the government shutting down.
SCOTT: I'm thinking of the wave of shutdown babies...
BILL: I can't even talk about it... SCOTT: ...that will be coming nine months
from now.
BILL: I can't even talk about it Scott. It's too it's too near and it's too raw.
SCOTT: So, politically...
BILL: You, you traveled during the government shutdown. You came out here during the government
shutdown. You went to LAX
which is infamously slow. Maybe not the slowest in the world but — or in the country — but
infamously slow. You sailed through TSA, right?
SCOTT: I just heard on NPR on the way home today that
people — if if we go back into another government shutdown — will people be willing to put
up with the long lines at the airports?
And I thought, "Well, I don't fly very often, but when I flew to Los Angeles and came out
of there... I got dropped off by the Uber guy. I was sitting at my gate in ten minutes.
[LAUGHS]
BILL: So, this is the most visible thing that the government does. And as as we've said
many times before,
when there's a government shutdown,
it's usually because a Republican is saying, either "This is spending too much."
— usually spending too much, or "We need money for this," and the Democrats oppose
it in order to keep spending.
It doesn't matter who's president and who's not doesn't matter who's shutting down and
who's not it's more spending versus slightly less
spending so that's almost always what that shutdown comes to. But...
but it it seems to me that this time as opposed to Obama's
government shutdown or the shutdown that was imposed on him, you could you could fairly
say I guess,
the first thing that happened in that shutdown was
they roped off the Lincoln Memorial.
They they put up police tape around it.
They said you cannot go to the Lincoln Memorial because the government is shut down,
and we don't have any park rangers here in this big open field of grass
with this enormous building with these wide-open stairs and no doors. So therefore you can't
come and see your monuments.
Sorry. And what that is — and and I remember stories from back in the day, Scotty.
We were talking about stories like this before where Park Rangers
were taking people out in buses and, you know, and making them wait four or five hours without
going to the toilet so they could put some pressure, you know, kind of tighten the screws
on the American people.
I think, I think as with everything that the left seems to do,
the more they do it the less effective it becomes.
SCOTT: I was going to ask you that BILL: it's certainly true for the race card.
So now
so now
O, a government shutdown. I remember the first one, thinking, "Holy cow, you know,
is it gonna be like y2k? And turns out, Yes, it was exactly as catastrophic as y2k.
SCOTT: Well, people went a month now. Do you think that that that kind of that threat has
lost its sting?
BILL: Scotty we don't have a government anymore, and we haven't had one for a long time.
How many years did Barack Obama go without without, without the Senate submitting a budget?
Was it four or five?
SCOTT: At least. BILL: Okay, so — and I'm not saying the
problem began with him, but I think it grew significantly with him.
So when the job of
the of the legislature is to produce a budge,t or approve a budget and
they don't produce a budget.
They don't do their fundamental basic job. Forget all the laws and
legislation all the posturing and all and all the parties and all the gifts and all
rest of that stuff. Their fundamenta,l bottom level, baseline job is
to execute the simple commands of running this monstrosity,
called the US government. And if they ran it without a budget for six years, is that
a constitutional violation?
I guess it's not or else we would have...well, who cares, right?
Who cares... SCOTT: Well, the House is supposed to draw
up, and the Senate and is supposed to
approve it, and the president's supposed to sign it...
BILL: Or reject it, right? SCOTT: Yeah, or reject it.
BILL: And that didn't happen did it. It just simply didn't appear, so...
SCOTT: So, I guess my question in this though is
has has the Democratic Party overplayed their hand?
to the extent that, you know, the big threat used to be: "O, the Republicans are shutting
down the government!"
Well now we've been through a month of a shutdown government
and for most people, all the impact they've really had is hearing over and over on the
news that the government was shut down.
BILL: Something that needs to be said as well: When I talk about "the government" I'm talking
about the thing. There are many fine people —
many fine people, in fact virtually all of them that I've run into who actually work
in the government —
who are hardworking people, love their country, and are doing, essentially, a very difficult
job
as as best as they possibly can. Those people have been working now for almost a month without
pay and
they should get their back pay. It's not it's not a promise
of retirement luxuries in the future. It's like, they put in the work, they need to get
their back pay and there's no question
they need to get their back pay.
So when I talk about the government
I'm not talking about the people that make up the government . Many of them are very
fine. Some of them are not,
just as in the rest of the world.
So you're right
the more the more government
shutdowns that we have, the less a
government shutdown is going to mean anything. And as I said before, we don't have a government
anymore.
I can remember very clearly. I want to say in the 80s. Was that Graham-Rudman spending
caps. Was that right? SCOTT: Yeah.
BILL: Yeah
Okay, so we can't control our spending. We had a deficit (debt) of something incredible
like almost a trillion dollars.
It's 25 now, or something like that.
And so we passed legislation that said that, "These are the limits on how much you can
spend. That's it.
This is the law. You cannot spend more than this."
And the first thing we did was
pass executive orders and amendments and so on and and just keep raising the... past Graham-Rudman,
it
kept going past it and past it and past it.
We've got to get here — and one of the reasons we had the government, one of the government
shutdowns, was because
because the spending was greater than was allowed by these these laws. And then they...
people just ignored them and they kept spending anyway.
And so the whole idea of the of the limited ...
of using the legal means — the legislature of the United States — to limit the spending
of the legislature of the United States...
Once those limits have been broken as many times as they were broken,
they became so irrelevant that we don't even hear the term anymore.
I don't think most Americans know what Graham-Rudman is,
but it was it it was legislation designed to stop spending. And they didn't stop spending,
because they can't, because they're addicts and
and and you're never ever gonna find a
cocaine addict who's going to get a whole bunch of cocaine out, and gonna say "I'll
have this now, and I'll leave the rest of
this till next week. You're never going to find that guy. It doesn't work that way.
So, the idea of this government doing its fundamental basic duty of
managing the actual
personnel of the government, doing the things that the government should be doing, plus
all of the other
thousands of things that it shouldn't be doing —
it is not a government anymore.
And when you say that... when you look at the budget and you talk... I know
we're talking about like five — three, four, five billion dollars — but you're looking
at two hundred and twenty, two hundred thirty billion dollars
Into social programs. And that's considered sacrosanct. You can't cut that.
It's non-discretionary spending. Essentially, we promised it to people.
And when you're telling me that the people who have been elected
to run this
organization called the United States government — when you're telling me that they no longer
can
control how much money this thing?
spends, that tells me that no one can control how much money this thing spends. And if no
one can control it, then you can't call
this a government. You can call yourself a train conductor if you want to sit up by the
smokestack and
wave a little flag, you know.
But if that trains going downhill and you can't stop it, or at least
attempt to stop it —
If you don't know what lever to pull you're not a train conductor.
You're just a passenger. And that's what these people in Congress are no. They're passengers
and they're, and they're passengers who are
accelerating this downward plunge as fast as they can and and,
you know, as our friend Glenn Reynolds says, you know, that which cannot... which cannot
continue, will not continue.
SCOTT: Well, Bill before you say goodbye here. I just want to say a
personal "thank you" to all the Members at BillWhittle.com, who this week have reached
out and offered
prayers and words of support for me on the Bill Whittle Facebook page and and elsewhere.
It's really been heart warming.
I apologize for being the sole reason why we have been unable to
create content for the last week. And this voice that you hear now — this is the first
day that I've been able to muster even this much.
BILL: We had a conference. I'm sorry.
SCOTT: Go ahead. No, please. BILL: We had a conference call — Scott and
I did — end of last week... and when I say "a conference call," it was a Skype call.
I would talk. Scott would nod, shake his head, and then he would type things and I get the...
I'd get the respons. He was
really really out of it.
But that was, you know... I have to tell you Scotty —
I don't know if I told you this already: But I was sick a little while ago just briefly,
you know
the flu or something — food poisoning something like that. And you put up a Facebook post
explaining that I was out for a while and you and you used language
which is perfectly good, in fact, excellent language, but it's a little bit archaic
you say "Bill Whittle has fallen ill," and all of a sudden all of the...
All of the sympathy and all of the respect and the love and the warmth that we get from
our people just started flowing.
And just as a matter of revenge, I
really seriously,
seriously, gave some thought to putting up a post that said,
"Conservatism has lost one of its most powerful voices today with Scott Ott."
SCOTT: [LAUGHS]
BILL: And then when people would have done the what they do because they're good people...
SCOTT: Yes.
BILL: No, he's he's got laryngitis. He's, you know, probably three, four days.
SCOTT: The headline that we put on BillWhittle.cpm
was that Scott Ott was struck dumb.
BILL: Struck dumb by
many things. He's speechless.
That'll do it for this edition of Bill Whittle Now,
brought to you by the paying members of BillWhittle.com. They make all of the content that comes out
of this
little workshop of ours — this little
bastion of common sense and decency. And if you think the world could use more common
sense and decency, we agree with you. And
the way to do that is to have more people with common sense of decency go
to sign up to become members over at BillWhittle.com.
So for Scott Ott, Bill Whittle, and the rest of the tiny little team here that lifts such
heavy burdens with such amazing
grace
Thank you very much for joining us and we'll see you next time.
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