Guest: Kevin McCarthy
McCarthy Unveils GOP Roadmap in Effort to Win Back the House – Politico
Washington Crossing the Delaware – The Met Museum
Transcript:
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
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Speaker Newt Gingrich:
Hi this is Newt. Due to the virus I’m recording from home. So you may notice a difference in audio quality. On this episode of Newt’s World I am really excited to talk about something I know a lot about personally. Back when I developed the Contract with America, I knew that it was vital to have a team commitment and a team effort to have a big enough idea that you could attract people to pay attention. And that’s why this year watching Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy develop his Commitment to America. I really saw a parallel to what I had done back in 1994. Leader McCarthy’s commitment to America is a set of key promises, including restoring our way of life, rebuilding the greatest economy in history and renewing the American dream. This election is about socialism versus freedom and is the most important election I think since 1864. I am pleased to welcome Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who proudly serves California’s 23rd district and is currently the Republican leader in the US House of Representatives. Kevin was first elected to Congress in 2006 and is a native of Bakersfield and a fourth generation Kern County resident. The grandson of a cattle rancher and the son of a firefighter, Kevin grew up in a working class family and is committed to preserving and promoting the American dream for hardworking Americans.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
I am delighted to have a friend of many, many years all the way back to a brief prayer that he had in the US House, working on the House Administration Committee to the period where he was as a freshman or a leader of the Republicans in Sacramento, in the Assembly to his rise as a member of the House where he played a key role in 2010 as speaker Bainer regained the majority with a pledge to America. So I know that Kevin McCarthy knows about every aspect of the Contract with America, the pledge to American, and he’s now developed for this day and age, very powerful approach, which has been called the Commitment to America. In which he’s gotten House Republicans to sign up to. And it draws a very, very sharp contrast with where the Democrats have been and where Pelosi and the Harris-Biden ticket would take them. Let me say welcome, Kevin, why don’t you start by sharing with people, what you think the commitment means and why you think it’s really important.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
Well, thank you Speaker and I appreciate the opportunity and the years of friendship. Let me tell you a little bit about it. You need to go back two years ago. Remember what happened two years ago. Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker and she made this promise to the majority. She told the country that the majority that she would serve with the responsibility to seek common ground. Well, now we have a record. She did the opposite and I asked the country named me one problem this Democrat majority in the house has solved. Name me any of her results. And I believe no matter what you do before the American public, you need to tell them and you needed to make a commitment to them, what you would do with that majority if they would trust you. I lay it out in three big sections. The first one is we want to restore our way of life and you cannot restore our way of life until we defeat the virus and keep America healthy.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
So we make a commitment to the American public that we’re going to triple the COVID testing and develop a vaccine that is safe and effective that is available this year. Cut drug prices, we’ll make therapeutics go up and we’ll end the surprise billing, and we will protect preexisting conditions. But you can’t restore our way of life by just the defeating the virus because what we have going on in the streets of America. We need to ensure the safety and security of our communities. And this is where there’s a great contrast for a decision to be made this November. While we watch what is happening in our cities, Compton in my home state, where an individual walked up and shot two sheriffs in the head. It’s not, should we defund the police? We actually should spend more. We make a commitment that we’d spend 1.75 billion more for better police training, community policing, and to purchase 500,000 more body cameras.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
And the last part to really restore our way of life. We need to preserve those freedoms under the constitution. So we make a commitment where we’re going to uphold free speech. People have a right to be heard, but we also have a right to make sure we protect the religious liberties. We defend the unborn and we safeguard the second amendment. That’s the part that you start to restore our way of life, but how do we rebuild going through the number of jobs that we lost? We’re going to rebuild the greatest economy in our history. we’ve done it once and we know we could do it again. So we make a direct pledge to this country that we will get America working and we will add 10 million new good paying jobs. We have a plan that shows you how to do that. Through tax proposals, opportunities zones, extending the $2,000 child tax credit, but really focusing on the small businesses that have been hurt so far.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
And we’re going to do this by ending our dependency on China. We’re going to bring that supply chain back to America, which increases more U S manufacturing jobs. And then what we need to do is upgrade and modernize the American infrastructure. We’re going to bring high speed internet to every household. And we realize how important that is today. Now, especially with education, we have a five year plan to fix our roads, our airports, our bridges. We want to renew the American dream and the best way to do that, which you have really been a person that advocated for this forever, to make sure that every child in every neighborhood can attend an excellent school, allowing the students to go to the school that the parents believe is best for them. We need to honor our veterans. We expand the VA choice bill, but the other thing we do, we guarantee any veteran that wants a job will have one.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
Then we also support our citizens success by expanding career and technical education. If we do that, if we restore our way of life, if we rebuild the greatest economy in history and we renew the American dream, we will reunite this country and every election and every November, people have a decision to make and they have something to weigh to both sides. What is the agenda? If they had no results for their majority, they do say the Democrats want to defund the police. You have AOC putting it out there, dismantle America. What did they do? They wasted their majority on an impeachment because they didn’t agree with who won the election. The Democrats focused on impeachment when the Corona virus was coming to America, and then they want to destroy our way of life. On the very first day, Joe Biden said he wants to raise taxes. So you have a contrast, but you’re at a point in life and every election is important, but we know what this is much different. It’s not Republican versus Democrat anymore. It’s almost a socialism versus freedom. And I thought it’s very important for the American public to have a very clear discussion. What do you commit to do? If you are trusted with the majority.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
I want to reinforce what you just said about the importance of this election. Victor Davis Hanson. who’s a brilliant classics scholar at Stanford at the Hoover institution, gave a speech recently in which he said, this is actually between civilization and anarchy, and that he never thought that he would be telling us that Donald Trump was the key to preserving civilization. But if you look at the other side right now, and as you said in Compton, it wasn’t just that somebody walked up and shot the two Sheriff’s deputies in the head. It was the crowd that gathered at the emergency room entrance and chanted “let them die.” You know? And I think in that sense, this is an unbelievably important election. Now, when you go out and you start explaining all this while obviously Republicans like it, hardcore, left wing Democrats, don’t like it, but there’s a huge block in the middle. That really isn’t quite sure what they’re doing. One of the things they ask you about your commitment.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
The number one thing they ask, when they look at it, they want their life to go back to what they knew it was before COVID. They knew America was the strongest and economy ever before. And it didn’t matter what color of skin you were or what age you were. But then they’re sitting back and they’re watching that not only was it the COVID now, they’re concerned, whether even safe to go down their streets. They’re watching night after night, after night in these major cities where they’re wondering if the police could even come and protect them. When they really started having an in-depth discussion about it, they begin to realize that it didn’t happen just yesterday. It happened when they voted for what they thought was a nice person, but had these very socialists beliefs in a DA. That now in America, why do you question what’s right or wrong? That if somebody leads you, now that’s not wrong if they needed something. And they’re wondering where in this country did that happen? Where was that debate taking place? And then they watched these mayors and they watched the Speaker of the House. When somebody riots, they…people do what they will do. When will somebody stand up that the rule of law is equal for all. And they also talk about, and this is what we talk about in here with police reform, George Floyd should not have been treated that way. He should be alive today. That’s why we deal with every single issue in front of us. And they look to the Democrats at this moment and say, I’ve watched your two years. There’s no results. What are you promising to do next?
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
This entire effort to elect anti-police, pro criminal District Attorneys has just had a devastating effect. Because it puts back on the street the very person who you just arrested, who then is emboldened because they know you’re not gonna be able to keep them. And so they go back out. They had a guy in Portland this last week who had set a fire in the middle of all this terrible fire station. They picked you up, booked him, released him because they have a system where you normally don’t get bail. The next day, he said six different fires. I think this time actually kept him locked up, but there’s this whole rotating system now where even if the police do their job, the district attorneys very often will not support or reinforce the law, but instead let people out and you have this in Los Angeles, you have even more in San Francisco in terms of the District Attorney there who is a very hard line pro Venezuelan dictatorship, pro Castro kind of left-winger. And I think somehow we’ve got to get across to people that these policies have consequences, but a lot of what we’re seeing not work, it is a function of policies that were just wrong. And I think that’s part of why I like what you’re doing here. Is you’re laying out a plan which allows people to understand the details. I mean, when you talk about opportunities zones, for example, and the ability to really focus on growing areas that have been poor. I think people realize this is something that could work.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
You know what George Soros has done and I’ve watched it in California. Now they want to move it nationally. He’s gone into these cities where he spent millions of dollars on a District Attorney race that you’ve never seen before. You’ve only heard about these things on a national campaign. From San Diego, Contra Costa and others. And there’s two places he focused: District Attorneys and Secretaries of State. Because he wants to be determined when it comes to election law. He wants to determine, especially what you’re talking about right now. We just heard from a DA in California, who said after there was looting not to prosecute anybody because they needed it. We now have to determine when someone’s steals something. If they felt needed, it, it is no longer breaking the law. They don’t have the right to do that. We believe in the rule of law, this has been a long term program by the Democrats. And now we’re watching the ramifications of what they have done in these cities that have been just controlled by Democrats. They want to do it on a much larger scale. We have a perfect example, the Democrats for the number of years, thinking that government can own and control and send you a check, determined that we will change the outcome of your life in the poorest communities of America. Or could we give an opportunity zone where private money comes in faster, you get a piece of the pie, you get to move up in the economy and that we’re not going to hold you to a bad school. We’re going to let the parent choose. And we’re going to give the best school for you to go to.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
You’re really developing a program of individual responsibility and individual choice, and in a sense, taking power back from government and putting it back with individuals and what strikes me is that’s much closer to the original American model where people went out and pursued the American dream
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
I’m in California and California is a great example because it’s a beautiful state. It has everything you would ever want, right? But it also has what the Democrat policies have brought over after a Ronald Reagan, after George Deukmejian had made this such a promising state, right? We now pay 40% higher in electricity. We now have our electricity turned off because they can’t provide enough to the grid. But what else we have is an example of what the Democrats say, like, everybody should be equal. Well, now we find that Nancy Polosi doesn’t have the same rules. So once she got caught of going and getting her hair done, they opened up for everybody else when they kept the gyms closed. And when they finally found out that the only gyms that weren’t closed were the government gyms. So the government employees could still go there. Now they opened up the public ones. So when these socialists tell you, it’s making it equal for everybody else, it’s not always equal. We learned that from the Soviet union, the elect few still get something more. But I believe in an idea that gives you your own power. It doesn’t hold you back to what you can achieve and what they have done to the school districts, to hold people back, what they are now trying to do to the rule of law of making our streets not safe. This is a much different election than we’ve had in the last century.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
Whether it was in reaction to Trump or just because of the gradual evolution of the system, the degree of their power grab is much greater now. When you see a governor Sisolak in Nevada, who says, it’s okay to get together at a casino, but you can’t get together at a church. Well, that’s virtually a dictatorship. He’s telling you what you can and can’t do with no reference to the rule of law and no reference to individual Liberty. And it seems to me that what you’re trying to do with this kind of a commitment is get us back to a country where people have choices within a framework of law and where the workforce has the right kind of education and where there are incentives to create jobs. So people actually can work their way to a dramatically better future without having to rely on government. That’s an enormous gap between where the Democrats are and where we are.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
I’m going to tell you a personal conversation I had with my governor, Gavin Newsome. During this pandemic, Gavin Newson shuts everything down. As we begin to phase out of it, he makes a rule about restaurants opening up and he bases it upon square footage for social distancing, which I believe is fair restaurant for restaurant. How large you are is how many people you can have based upon square footage. He then later makes the decision about whether you can go to church and he makes a uniform decision, regardless of the size of your church. You can only have a hundred people in it. So I text him and say, I need to talk to you. He has his chief of staff call me and the secretary of health. And I asked him a question, how did you determine for restaurants? And they say, Oh, we based that on square footage for the science and social distance. I said, did you use that same for churches? No. They want to pick and choose. I said, last time I read the constitution. I didn’t see anything in there about restaurants, but I believe it had religious freedom in there.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
And then what’s their reaction. When you say that, cause I’ve been amazed at their willingness to run over religious Liberty.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
It’s almost internally. They don’t care. They’re going to take this moment in time. And when the protest came, there was a video, it’s shoulder to shoulder from mile long of people down in LA protesting. You will not hear one question about that coming to a spread. In New York DeBlasio told them you cannot track and trace if somebody comes in and has COVID asking if they’ve gone to a protest, you cannot ask them. They view that as different. And another discussion I had with Gavin Newsome, these churches have daycare. So during the week they could provide daycare for a number of children, but on Sunday we cannot meet. So I guess COVID only comes on Sunday. It’s almost to the point that they’re putting their own personal beliefs forward. That’s why in the Commitment to America, we put in, we will preserve our freedoms under the constitution because we’re going to uphold free speech. You can go protest, your voice needs to be hurt, pro or con, but we’re also going to protect your religious liberties. And we’re going to defend the unborn. And we’re going to safeguard the second amendment. If you go to any store that is able to sell a gun, there was a line around. And the interesting part is it is the Housewives and the young women that are wondering, do they need to buy a gun to protect themselves? Because they do not feel safe and secure in their own neighborhoods.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
What are you sensing, I know that you have been directly involved with every single Republican candidate for Congress. What are you sensing as you watch them talk around the country?
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
I am watching this grow like never before. You saw this happen before, anybody would see it in 1994, because it doesn’t happen on that November date. It happens almost a year or two before. Take for instance, who will actually put their name on the line to run. Okay. The record for women running as Republicans was 143. This cycle, we had 229 women running as Republicans. Now, you know, the challenge is you first have to win the primary to ever win the general. The record for women winning a primary was in 2004, there was 53 women won the primary. Do you know how many women we have today who won the primary? 95, 32% of the 53 most challenge races that I have are going to have women as a representative as Republican.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
I have more than 75 minority candidates, something we have not seen in the Republican party at any given time. And what’s interesting as we battle through making sure we’re a more perfect union. The country has not studied where did Jim Crow law come from? I love that how much you love history? And I know you write so many books. I want to collaborate with you. And I want to write a book. What if Lincoln was not assassinated? Think for one moment, would we have ever had Jim Crow laws? They were created because the 23 black Republicans getting elected to Congress, the Democrats in the South decided that was wrong and made it more difficult for people of color to even register. But what we’re finding today across this nation, I have more veterans, more minorities, more women that at any given time running as Republicans.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
And it’s the belief that you have in the individual rights. It’s the belief that this country is more than a country. That it’s an idea. And the challenge that they have never seen before that it’s not a Republican versus Democrat. Kennedy’s can no longer win a primary and a Democratic party. This has now become the party of an AOC and a to Tlaib, a woman who was born in Somalia, put in a refugee camp. And then what does America do? She opens her arms and her greatness and brings her in to become a citizen. And then she gets elected to the US House of representatives, less than 11,000 people have ever had the ability to be a member of Congress. Right? And what does she say? We should dismantle this nation instead of duplicate this nation. That’s the fundamental philosophy of what we’re debating today.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
You raised a really interesting idea how we’d love to someday coauthor some books with you, but I have a hunch you’re going to have a long stretch as Speaker of the House before then, and that will keep you rather busy. I’m getting all of these things done. I’m very impressed. I’ve watched this develop over the last couple of years, and I’ve watched the energy building in the House Republican party. Now, if people listen to this and decide they want to be helpful. Where do they go? And what can they do to be helpful in this quest?
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
The first thing I want everybody to do is go to commitmenttoamerica.com, read through it because this isn’t just something we’re putting on paper. We are making a commitment to you because we are committed to this nation. We will not leave if we win or lose this election, that’s not who we are. We believe in fighting for this nation and fighting for our beliefs, our freedoms, and our constitution. If you like what you are reading, I then want you to go to one more site, takethehouse.com. Join us, be a part of something bigger than yourself. And you know, Newt you love history and that’s one thing I’ve always admired about you. And you’ve been to my office in my office I have that portrait of Washington crossing the Delaware. Everybody remembers it and sees it. And they know of that. Painting the famous painting and the thing.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
People don’t quite realize that wasn’t painted by somebody who watched that event on Christmas in 1776, it was painted by a man named Emmanuel Leutze, who was an immigrant who had lived in America and went back to Germany. He wasn’t there. He painted it in 1851 and he painted it because he wanted it inspired Germany to have a revolution based upon the values of America, believing in the individual. So he gets it historically incorrect, but he puts Washington in a rowboat with 13 people, but he only shows you 12 faces. Well, Washington historians will tell us he crossed in the Durham boat. He has Washington standing up wearing a ceremonial uniform with his hand on his chest. You look at George Washington. This man has probably never lost the battle, but history tells us had never won one yet. That was our first victory when we surprised the Hessians. But go online and look at who’s in that boat.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
When you look at the second row where he’s wearing a…He’s Scottish, but look at the person directly across from him in the green jacket, he’s African American. Come down to the middle of the boat in that red rowing very feverously is a woman. And in the very back is a native American. I can’t tell you from a historical fact if they were in the boat, but this young immigrant who lived here 10 years, that’s who he believed would be in the boat. Now, the second to last person is this farmer and he has his hand across his face. And it’s the hand of the 13th person that nobody sees. You see what Emmanuel was saying? Here we are not even a nation, but an idea, an idea about Liberty and individual rights and freedom. And we’ve never won a battle before, but we’re willing to risk everything on our holiest of night.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
Here’s a hand would you get in and join us? That’s as true today as it was then, we need you in the boat together. We need to all row in the same direction. We’re going to have choppy waters. We’re going to be in fights that people are going to give the odds against us, but come November, we’re going to shock the world and we’re going to have a commitment of what we’re going to do. And we’re going to have a plan and we’re going to carry it out because we will keep our commitment to this nation. And once again, we’ll make sure the next century is ours.
Speaker Newt Gingrich:
That’s really well done my one shorter book called “To Try Men’s Souls” about that crossing. And I don’t think I could have done nearly as good a job of painting the picture you just painted, which is really not a picture about Washington. It’s a picture about America. Who we can be and why we represent everyone who believes that we can come together and that we can create a better future. I want to thank you. I want everyone who’s listened to us today, both to go to the two websites that are going to be listed on our show page. But in addition, I want them to know that these are big ideas. When we did the Contract with America changed history. When you helped John Bainer and you put together the pledge in 2010, you guys actually won 10 more seats than we won in 1994. So that was obviously a big idea. And I think now you’re back at it again. And I think that this is a very, very important moment in our history. And I think you have captured the essence of it. So I wish you Godspeed and safe travels just keep pitching from now to election day.
Rep. Kevin McCarthy:
Well, thank you Mr. Speaker
