On May 15, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats passed an 1,815-page bill disguised as another stimulus package. This $3 trillion dollar bill is really the radical left’s wish list for America. It would send checks to people in the country illegally, allow mail-in ballots with no ID verification, release dangerous prisoners, and bail out blue states.
Transcript
Hi, this is Newt, due to the virus I am recording from home, so you may notice a difference in audio quality.
On this episode of Newt’s World I am so struck by what I call the Pelosi Biden effort for a radically changed America and the scale of the 1,815 page bill that Nancy Pelosi just ran through the House that I really want to take this particular podcast and talk about that and share my analysis of that bill, what it means and why it’s important.
I want to spend this conversation talking about the Pelosi Biden plan to radically change America. Now if you had any doubt about where they want to go, they sure should have erased that doubt last Friday, May 15 when they had the House vote on two disastrous policies, one procedural and the other a huge 1,815-page bill. I have a particular interest in this whole issue of proxy voting because when I served in the Congress for 20 years, six of them as the Whip for the Republican Party, four of them as Speaker. We abolished proxy voting because we realized that it gave way too much power to the committee chairman who could walk in the room with all the proxies in their pocket. But more important than proxy voting, and committees it’s impossible to have proxy voting in the Congress without a majority being physically present. The Constitution says literally that you have to have a majority of the members present to create a quorum and that was done precisely to avoid the kind of power grab that Speaker Pelosi is now trying.
So, my personal guess is that if they were to actually try to operate without a physical quorum that in fact the Supreme Court would throw it out, the Senate would never deal with it, everyone would agree that it was illegal. But this is an example of how aggressively they are trying to centralize power, and how aggressively they are trying to isolate the American people from the Congress and the government. You had two demonstrations of this on Friday May 15th. The first is you have Speaker Pelosi ramming through a radical change which had never, ever before existed. Having the U.S. House vote without having to have a quorum. Historically you had to have a quorum which ultimately was a majority plus one. And a times in the past had huge damages around whether or not the side that was going to lose would go off the floor and eliminate the quorum. Pelosi basically is now become the most powerful Speaker in American history, because she has established a system, that’s only for 45 days but they will probably renew it. But for the next 45 days she can call a vote and as long as a very small number of people actually on the floor she will be able to control the House. All of the Republicans would have to fly back in order to lose to all of the Democrats who had sent in their proxy. It is truly a remarkable change, only three Democrats voted against it and it makes Pelosi basically absolutely unaccountable which we knew was true because the second vote on May 15th, which was the vote on her gigantic bill.
Why didn’t we know that she had absolute power? Well, because nobody was there. There were no committee hearings. There were no markups, the bill didn’t exist. Nobody had read it. It wasn’t thoroughly vetted by anybody. She simply had the staff write a bill that she wanted on her terms with her chairman going along, I just went through the summary of the bill, not the bill, the summary of the bill is 90 pages long. The actual bill is 1,815 pages. Now you know that virtually nobody in the House had any idea the details of the bill and as I go through this, you’ll realize how stupid some of the provisions are and that had they really understood it, they’d never would have passed some of these things because they verge on insane. What you’ll discover in the 90 page summary is it is a shopping list for all of her allies.
That wasn’t a function of trying to deal with the current virus or trying to deal with the economic crisis. They just went through and said to all the committees, what little goodies would you like that we could drop in there that will please somebody that you have jurisdiction of. I’m going to walk you through some of these things because they’re so amazing, but let me say in advance that not only did they have the fight over the proxies, which we lost, but there was a motion to recommit and a motion to recommit means we’ll take the bill off the floor, go back and change it in some way and then bring it back. It’s a device to allow the minority to rifle shoot specific things. So, the Republicans picked a provision which says that illegal immigrants can get stimulus payments now in the previous act, the CARES Act it specifically the no stimulus payments will go either to an illegal immigrant or to a non-citizen.
So they were sending out $1,200 per person to Americans. Well, the Democrats in their passion for illegal immigration didn’t think that was good enough. And I simply ask you to think to yourself, if we start sending $1,200 checks to every illegal immigrant. Do you think that will increase the desirability of coming to the United States of being an illegal immigrant? Or do you think it will be decrease and obviously any person who has any sense at all knows that this is in fact going to increase the desirability for an illegal immigrant to get to the U S because while you may be technically illegal, you’re going to get a $1,200 check. But in addition, they modify in this bill their position, they say that illegals cannot be deported during the time of the pandemic. And if you go to the section called 191203 you will find that it says that there are temporary protections to undocumented workers and that during the period of time that the pandemic exists, there will be deferred action and they are authorized to work.
So here you have a country which has more than 38.6 million American citizens out of work, and you have the House Democrats voting to legalize illegal immigrants going to work and not being in any way deportable. If this bill was actually passed in the law as opposed to passing the House, it will protect every illegal immigrant who got what was called an essential job. If you have 38.6 million Americans out of work, do you really need to add to labor pool people who are here illegally? But if you are a liberal Democrat, the answer’s yes because the base of their ideological position is that they have to take care of illegal immigrants. And that illegal immigrants actually are more important than American citizens. The provision was offered to knock that out and it lost it lost by 208 to 199, so 208 Democrats voted specifically to allow illegal immigrants to get money from the U S government. Now because of the way they control the rules, they Republicans weren’t able to come back with a second question of exactly do you really want to make it legal for people to work who are here and legally, when you have 38 million unemployed Americans?
The bill has a number of odd things in it. There are 63 references to cannabis, which apparently just fascinates the Democrats and they have a provision in here that no bank could turn down a cannabis company depositing its money. Cause apparently a number of banks not want to take money from cannabis dealers. And as a result, their dealers are forced to keep cash. And of course that’s dangerous because other people may decide to take the cash. Well, Democrats 63 different times refer to cannabis in the bill and they only talk about jobs 42 times. So, they talk about cannabis more than they talk about people going back to work, and this is remarkable. Now, let me go a step further. This is a bill which was designed to begin moving us towards the Democratic Party’s model of the future and I think it’s very important to understand that Pelosi herself has talked about the idea of having automatic guaranteed income.
This is a concept which goes all the way back to George McGovern, who in 1972 proposed that everybody should get a thousand dollars a year from the government. This sounded very clever until people thought about it and decided it was actually a bad idea. Close to yourself. Let’s talk about the idea of creating an automatic guaranteed income and they want to extend the $600 per week addition to an employment from January 31st now, one level that sounds, it’s really wonderful. Santa Claus is coming to town. You’re going to get another $600 a week, but just as giving money to illegal immigrants will increase the number of people that want to come to the US to be an illegal immigrant. Consider the effect of giving people an extra $600 Ernie Tedeschi, who is a former US Treasury economist, estimated that in 38 states people will get more money by staying unemployed then they will get by going back to work.
So if you’re trying to get to an economic recovery and you want people to go out and get a job, the Democrats are offering you an opportunity to do nothing. And by the way, they put in a specific provision that these $600 do not count in factoring in your income for example, if you want to get food stamps or if you’re in public housing or if you have a number of other disabilities, so you get $600 a week, that’s basically just extra money for you. Now, it sounds wonderful at one level, but Noah Williams, who’s the director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, did some research and found that half the workers in Arizona over half will make more money being unemployed than if they were still working. So on the one hand you have Democrats who want to give money to illegal immigrants guaranteeing that more of them will come to the U S on the other hand, you have Democrats who want to get money to American workers so that they don’t have to go to work.
This is a program for keeping the recession going as long as possible. And I think it’s interesting that their particular provision would end on January 31st so if they did have a new President Biden, he would automatically have people going back to work because they have run out of the $600 a week. But they also guarantee then the people could not go to work all through the fall. We’re already getting reports of some states in which as they open up the restaurants and other businesses are finding it harder to hire people because people are smart and they sit there, you add up the numbers and say, wait a second, why would I get up in the morning, get dressed, pay for the gasoline to get to work, spend all day working, have to pay for the gasoline to come home when I can sit here and the US government is making me happy with an extra $600 a week, which by the way comes to about $31,200 a year.
The reason I talk about this as a Pelosi Biden plan to radically change America is very straight forward. When you have this many Democrats voting for a bill that is this far to the left, the easy question, which some reporters would ask Vice President Biden is, what do you sign the bill? Now? I believe he’s going to have to say, yes, it’s not going to VETO this bill. He is in effect now got a platform that includes massive amount of money going to people who are unemployed and making it desirable to stay unemployed substantial money going to illegal immigrants, legal protections for illegal immigrants who decide to go to work and have it not count against as being illegal. We’re beginning to see step by step here exactly how they would radically change America.
The Democrats would have a country that had vastly more illegal immigration. They would have a country in which huge numbers of people who would be relying on the government to take care of them. This is the model that the left wing of the Democratic Party, which sadly is now virtually the entire Democratic Party has come to believe in. Now there are a couple of other provisions that just show you that people were not thinking things through, but it also shows you some underlying tendencies of the Democratic Party in its modern form. They have a provision that calls for the blanket release of prisoners including murderers and rapists and they set a very, very interesting goal and let me say in advance, I helped organize and develop over 20 years who concept of right on crime. I believe that we had incarcerated too many people. I believe in work for, the prison reform program that came last year. I’m very prepared to be in favor of a more rational and a more humane approach to things, but what they’re doing is just extraordinarily dangerous.
For example, the standard they set, this is a direct quote, 50 years of age or older, a juvenile and individual has serious chronic medical conditions including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV, sickle cell anemia and neurological disease that interferes with the ability to cough, chronic lung disease, asthma or respiratory illness, a pregnant woman and individual who is immunocompromised or has a weakened immune system or an individual who has a health condition or disability that make them vulnerable to COVID 19. Well that’s a pretty big range and I want to pick for a minute on the 50 years of age or older because they then said a limitation. Here’s the limitation. Do they quote pose a risk of serious imminent injury to a reasonably identifiable person? They want you to think about the irrational logic that is behind this. So they’re sitting there looking at somebody over 50 years of age and they’re asking the question, would they pose a risk of serious imminent injury to a reasonably identifiable person?
Well, it says a person has been in prison for good while well the odds are pretty high, that you could never prove that there were risks to a specific person. Notice the phrase reasonably identifiable. They didn’t say a risk to people in general, it has to be to a reasonably identifiable person. I mean this is the kind of writing that makes you wonder exactly who the Democrats are hiring to be on their staff because it is a standard so difficult that it’s very hard to imagine how you would normally block anybody. So, who are some of the people that fit this who are over 50 and will be eligible and do this to get out of jail? Well, David Berkowitz, who was the Son of Sam, Ivan Hill, Richard Lewis Hunter, Patrick Kearney, Samuel Little, Robert Ben Rhodes, and Dennis Rader. Now the people I just read, you are all serial murders.
Now I want you to think about that. These are all people who are directly, I would argue a risk to society. If you said to me that these are now nice people, they probably feel really badly about all the people they killed. I would still say I don’t want them in my neighborhood and I don’t want them released from jail. I don’t see why we should make innocent people at risk of serial murderers so we can avoid the serial murderer being at risk of getting COVID 19 that’s just utterly, totally irrational. But what makes it fascinating is it fits a pattern that George Soros has been funding. Soros has gone around the country and put a huge amount of money into electing district attorneys who do not want to enforce the law. That’s a deliberate direct effort to create a much more pro crime environment.
If you look at a place like for example, Philadelphia, where the district attorney is perennially in conflict with the police and is for all practical purposes, inclined to believe criminals every day over the police force. You’ll see this around the country and you’ll see them adopting rules that are more and more radical. We have some district attorneys who’ve said, if you steal less than $1,500 I will not prosecute you. Well, that’s kind of a pretty good signal that why don’t you go out and steal $900 at a time and even if you do get caught, nothing ever be done to you. The poster boy, if you will, it’s Chesa Boudin is the elected District Attorney of San Francisco. Who is the son of terrorists, his parents took part in a Weather Underground attack in 1981 when an armored car was robbed and the guard and two policemen were killed as Boone was then raised by one of the founders of the Weather Underground and his wife was also an active member in the Weather Underground and having been adequately educated into the values of the left, Chesa Boudin went to Venezuela where he worked in Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship. He wrote a book describing himself as Comrade Gringo and he said the following quote, few countries can boast such remarkable gains in just a decade. Now somebody can go to Venezuela, live under the Chavez dictatorship, watching the decay of Venezuela and conclude that these were remarkable gains is a person whose concept of normalcy is probably not the same as yours or mine, but he fits San Francisco, which is in many ways I think the test case for the new Democratic Party. There’s an amazing article by Michael Gibson called America’s Havana: Thousand Say “Ciao” to San Francisco. Here are a couple of things with Gibson reports on San Francisco ranks first in the country in theft, burglary, vandalism, shoplifting, and other property crime. On average about 60 cars get broken into each day. Diseases arising from poor sanitation, typhoid, typhus, hepatitis say are reappearing at an alarming rate. Fentanyl goes for about $20 a pill on Market Street and each year the city hands out 4.5 million needles, which you can find used and tossed out like cigarette butts in parks and around bus stops. The city’s department of public works, deploys feces cleaners daily, a poop patrol to wash the filth from the sidewalks he’s describing as we move into this world where we’re going to release prisoners where we’re not going to prosecute people for crimes or we’re going to define the amount of money you can steal before we’ll pay any attention to it. Just over and over. You get into the creation of a really dangerous world and a world in which normal everyday people are increasingly likely to be victimized.
Now the Democrats offer a bill $3 trillion dollars. They have many goodies in the bill. You go through it; you will find that it’s a shopping list for the kind of coalition they want to put together in the election. The other point I would make is that this is a bill designed to appeal to a whole series of radical values and to bring people together from a variety of places, and you might say to yourself, well, how do they expect to win the election if they have these kinds of radical policies, and I think the vast majority of Americans, oppose them, if you say to people, you really think we ought to pay stimulus money to illegal immigrants, the answer would be a pretty big no. If you say to people you really think it makes sense to be more concerned with cannabis than with economic growth and hiring people, most people would say no.
Amazingly built into this bill is a huge tax break for the very, very rich because if you’re from a blue state with a big public employee union with a very expensive government in your city and government in your county, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, the state and local tax deduction that was in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which set a limit so you can deduct up to $10,000 in state and local deductions, but not more. Well, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, this is a disaster because what it means is one, that they’re not going to be able to raise as much money out of rich people in the big cities, and two, that a lot of rich people are going to start moving because if your choice is, zero taxes in Florida or the massive taxes you pay in New York city it explains a lot about what happened to the population of Florida and why Florida is now bigger than New York in population.
So in order to appease their allies in the bureaucracy and the allies in public employee unions, Democrats in the Pelosi Bill put in to repeal the limit. What’s amazing about it. If you think about all of their ideological language and their anti-rich and all that stuff, the estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is that lifting this cap will over the next few years cost over $130 billion with about half of the benefit going to households making over a million dollars a year. Now, if Republicans tried to do that and tried to pass a targeted tax cut for rich people, the Democrats would go crazy. However, with Democrats do it for their own allies to take care of their own cities, it is of course morally pure, and somebody should not be able to challenge him. So again, I think you see case after case where the Pelosi Bill puts together a coalition economically, push the other coalition of radical values and tries to lay out a very different America for the future.
And then you say, so how do they think they’re going to win an election? And what struck me watching them over the last few months is that they have figured out they don’t need to win the campaign. Republicans focus on the campaign. How much money can we raise? What’s our advertising like? How’s the President doing on social media? The Democrats actually are focusing on the election and they figured out that if they win the election, they don’t have to win the campaign. So, what you now have for example, is in this bill, this is all in the same bill. They establish a federal voting law. They require 15 days of early voting and polling places in cities have to be within easy walking distance of the Metro stop. They want to make sure that every voter can access with no excuse, so you can vote by mail, it’s not absentee balloting anymore.
They insist that there be no form of identity requirement, but you can require somebody to sign an affirmation that they are who they claim to be. As long as I walk in and tell you, I’m Tom Smith and I’m willing to sign a note claiming to be Tom Smith, I’m fine. Even though I have no proof that I’m Tom Smith, you are not allowed to require notarization or to require the signature of a witness. The voter can actually notify the government that they would like to permanently get absentee ballots and vote by mail, which means, for example, that in a number of cities where there are more registered voters than there are adults because they never purged the rolls. You start having huge numbers of extra people and in fact, in an experiment that’s underway right now in Nevada, they decided they want to mail every single registered voter, including people who have not voted in recent years with a result they’re beginning to have an apartment complexes, mounds of ballot applications. They’re just showing up because the people have moved. They don’t live there anymore.
Well, that begins to be an opportunity for a new kind of vote harvesting it’s actually vote creating. You go by, you pick up all of these extra ballots you fill them out, you send them in, or you take them in and of course you no longer have to mail them in. They can have a designated place where you can dump, ballots off and you can also designate somebody else to return. You find the ballots that are just sitting there, and you decide you’ll fill them all out. They also require that you have prepaid return postage as one lawsuit claimed requiring people to put a stamp on their ballot is the equivalent of a poll tax, which was outlawed by the Constitution, and therefore you cannot require people to pay to mail back in their own ballot.
So, if you’re going to do ballot by mail under this provision in the Pelosi Bill, you would get a prepaid envelope that you could put your ballot in and send back in. So it cost you not even the cost of first class mail. They also require registration on the same day. So you show up on this precinct and you vote. You affirm who you are, and since there’s no requirement that you be anybody and there’s no ability to check an ID, it’s really just a remarkable ability, I think, to steal the election. The result of all this is I think an effort that I see everywhere in the country.
The Democrats have decided that they need to make it as easy as possible for illegal immigrants to vote, which is why in some States you can now get a driver’s license as an illegal immigrant. And people who get driver’s licenses get ballots by mail. So, you’re sitting there, you get a ballot by mail. You think they must want me to vote. This is all very coercive. We used to be very proud that we had a secret election that nobody could pressure you into doing anything. Well, you started having balloting by mail. You have somebody come by to help you decide how to vote. You’re going to have enormous pressure to vote the way the person who wants you to vote, who standing right there. In American history in the 19th century, every time we went down this road, it was a disaster. And I think it’s something that we have to be aware of and all of this is packed into one bill. It’s important to recognize that virtually every Democrat in the House voted for it. So when they go back home and they say, Oh, I’d really not like that.
Well, the voting record really is like that and just remember if you’re represented by a Democrat, they overwhelmingly voted to allow people who are illegal immigrants to get money from the government. They overwhelmingly voted to allow illegal immigrants to work. Even though we have 38.6 million unemployed Americans, they overwhelmingly voted to release criminals with any kind of reasonable screening process. They voted for $3 trillion, much of which is just pure pork to pay off their coalition allies. I think that this bill is a remarkable moment in American history. It shows you precisely forget party platforms, forget speeches and social media. This 1,815 page bill tells you what they would do for real and so it’s not just a scare tactic. Take a look at it and decide for yourself should in fact the people who voted for this, should they be held accountable for helping pass something like this?
I think that the President and Senator McConnell are right. Senator McConnell has been clear that first of all, that this bill doesn’t exist for his purposes and whatever the Senate does will be dramatically different. I think he’s absolutely right that we have to have litigation protection. If we’re going to reopen the economy, we have to have a litigation protection, if we’re going to reopen sporting events. You know, the trial lawyers are a major obstacle to getting America back to work and I think McConnell’s exactly right, to insist that the next bill include that, I think the President’s right to insist that we have a holiday from the payroll tax, nothing would accelerate I think hiring people back and getting the economy moving more than to have a very simple, straightforward series of tax cuts, a holiday from the payroll tax. There were a hundred percent expensing so that companies can write off their investment in one year.
So we can bring manufacturing back from China and we can accelerate being the most productive country in the world. We should also I think index capital gains to the inflation rate and then we should have a real infrastructure bill that is designed to rebuild our infrastructure, which today is frankly decay in compared to Korea or Japan or China. And I think for us to once again be the leading country in the world, we have to rebuild from the ground up our infrastructure. I think the Republican Senate working with the President could produce a very positive bill. I think if there was a rational alternative that made sense and the American people liked it, you could probably get to just enough votes in the House to past, a Republican and moderate Democrat bill through the Senate. We’re actually putting the Hero’s Bill and the summary at Newt’s World.com if you find it outrageous, call your Senator at 202-204-3121 and let them know that you want them to skip past this monstrosity and write a bill that actually helps America get back to work and helps America open up and helps America get prepared to finish the fighting the virus. But I think we as a people can actually have that kind of effect.
The HEROES Act Summary – Democratic staff of the House Committee on Appropriations
The HEROES Act State and Territorial Coronavirus Relief Funds – House Committee on Appropriations
HEROES Act Proposed Amendments – Committee on Rules
Newt on HEROES Act
Is California Dreamin’ the new National Anthem? The Pelosi Democrats' new $3 Trillion bill that passed in the House yesterday has 68 references to cannabis and only 52 references to jobs. Read more in my latest newsletter article.https://t.co/P8yENSpv4W
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 16, 2020
Do Not Underestimate Speaker Pelosi: Her Crazy Bill May Have Deep Purpose
Hurting Small Businesses
The $600 Unemployment Booster Shot, State by State – New York Times
SALT Deduction
Loosening the SALT Cap is Poorly Targeted – Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Opposition to HEROES Act
Democrats’ $3 Trillion Wish List Shows Irresponsibility During National Crisis – Washington Examiner
Nancy Pelosi’s $3 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill is Purely a Political Stunt – New York Post
Pelosi’s Presidential Platform – Wall Street Journal
Democratic Congresswomen Kendra Horn Statement on Opposing HEROES Act
McConnell on COVID 19 Response: This Half of Capital is Doing Our Job
Progressive District Attorneys
Thousands Leaving San Francisco
Thousands Say Chao to San Francisco – America’s Havana – Spring 2020
Sen. McGovern’s Failed Universal Income
The Story of George McGovern’s Failure to Guarantee Every American $1,000 – Scott Santens
Sen. McGovern Proposes ‘Human Security Plan’ – The Owosso Argus-Press – Jan. 19, 1970
