NEWT:
Well, I think Mark Halperin in his newsletter this morning had it about right. He has Jordan and Scalise basically tied in terms of who’s likely to be speaker, he then suggests that either Congressman McHenry, who’s the current pro-temp speaker or Speaker McCarthy, are in kind of third and fourth place. And I think that’s probably accurate. I think there could also be a dark horse, somebody like Tom Cole, the chairman of the Rules Committee. The the key problem is really simple. Who can get 217 votes, with vacancies 217 is the majority. If you haven’t got 217, you haven’t got anything. And the House Republicans have to confront the reality that as long as they have seven or eight people who are willing to be Benedict Arnolds and side with the Democrats, they have a big problem. And it’s not clear to me yet how they’re going to talk their way through it. I think they will. This is the nature of a free society. And I think a lot of people members are now awake and thinking and talking about this, who two weeks ago would have thought this was all unthinkable. In addition, frankly, the war in Israel, I think, increases the pressure to recognize that there are real things going on in the world and the House Republicans have to get their act together. And I think that will add pressure to try to find those 217 votes.
NEWT:
Well, first of all, the job of speaker pro-temp was invented after 911. It’s not really carefully defined. And I would argue that the speaker pro-temp can do anything which the House will support. So if the House comes together and says, look, we have got to get help to Israel at a point where Hamas has been unbelievably barbaric and savage, then I suspect that Democrats and Republicans alike would vote for that package and that McHenry could could be in charge of it. The challenge is for all the other Republican contenders. The longer McHenry Speaker Pro-Temp, the more comfortable people get with him, the more likely it is that he’ll become a serious candidate for speaker.
NEWT:
Well, Callista and I watched him live yesterday morning on Fox when he gave his speech on Israel and Hamas. And I thought it was remarkably statesmanlike. I don’t know many people in either the House or the Senate who could have delivered it. I thought it was very, very well done. And I think right now that that helped. Mark Halperin probably has it right. You’d have to list him in the second tier after Jordan and Scalise. But he clearly is. But it’s clearly possible that the conference will, in the end decide that, remember, he got 96% of the vote. So he has a natural base. That’s pretty huge. If they decide that they can’t elect either Scalise or Jordan. But in all fairness, you have to give Scalise and Jordan a chance to see if they can pull it off, if they can get to 217 before you can talk about anybody else. Well, clearly, a majority of the conference now wants to change that rule. They’ve seen how one bitter person could use that to cause total chaos. And I would not be at all surprised to see that rule change. Nancy Pelosi didn’t have it at all when she was speaker. You couldn’t move to vacate the chair unless you were the opposition leader. So I think you’re likely to see a tightening up of that. I think what was done by the eight people who betrayed their conference was totally unthinkable and unacceptable. And I think we ought to be honest about that’s what they did. They sided with the Democrats to cause chaos and they’re basically anarchists, as Mark Levin said, they’re not conservatives. They’re for anarchy. We have to have an ability to govern ourselves. The world is very dangerous and getting more dangerous. And we need a functioning, effective constitutional government.
NEWT:
Well, I thought I think and I don’t know that the Israelis are prepared to do this, but I think what they should do is occupy Gaza, root out just as we did with Nazi Germany, we arrested 400,000 Germans in the year after World War II. Every single one of them was vetted. The ones who we found to be active Nazis were in fact locked up. And I think they’ve got to go through, destroy Hamas, find a way to build a replacement government and make clear to the people of Gaza that they have two futures. They have a future of pretty good prosperity if they are willing to live in peace with their neighbor and they have a future of absolute total misery, no electricity, no jobs, no opportunities and continuous fighting if they are going to support Hamas, but Hamas has proven you can’t live next to a neighbor who says not a single Jew will remain. I mean, this is not a negotiating position. This is what Hamas is about. And I think, therefore, it has to be destroyed as an organization.
NEWT:
Well, look, I think there are three things we could do immediately. First, Biden could seize the $6 billion that he has given to Iran, which is sitting in a bank and they should seize that. I personally wish they would seize it and turn it over to Israel so that Iran could actually pay for rebuilding the damage which Iranian proxies have done. But this morning they should seize that $6 billion. Second, they ought to put B-2s over southern Lebanon. They should send a clear signal to Hezbollah that if Hezbollah attacks Israel, the United States will take out Hezbollah targets and we have the capability to do it. And we all and I think that would be a very important step in protecting Israel from a second front. Third, we should be looking through our inventory. The Israelis have got to have the same ability to fight inside urban areas that they have with the Iron Dome. We have not invested in the kind of technologies we should. For example, to have robots that are capable of fighting inside the tunnels. And the Israelis are very worried both about the hostages, but also about the kind of casualties that in traditional World War II style urban warfare are inevitable. We’ve got to find ways to be able to use artificial intelligence, robotics and other things to be able to grind them down. But I can’t say this too strongly. Hamas has proven to the world that they are barbarians, that they are vicious, that they violate every rule of law. When you seize a woman who was a survivor of the Holocaust and now as a grandmother, she’s now been captured by Hamas. Can you imagine a life as a child surviving the Nazis only to end your life with Hamas? These people are barbarians. They should be treated as barbarians. Hamas has to be destroyed. The people of Gaza have to be liberated and given an opportunity to have a government willing to live in peace and prosperity.
NEWT:
Look, there may be a scandal exploding that is as big as the Alger Hiss scandal during the communist era in the late 1940s. The FBI is apparently investigating the top Biden Obama negotiator for basically being an agent of Iran. Now, if that turns out to be true and that was certainly articles this morning that their top negotiator may have basically been in collusion with the Iranian dictatorship. I mean, you can’t imagine how bad this administration is in dealing with the real world. They’ve lost in Afghanistan. They’ve mishandled Ukraine. They sat idly by. They’ve now admitted they gave money to the Palestinians that probably went to Hamas. There’s an estimate that the Iranians may have gained $150 billion from a variety of things the Biden administration has done. This is madness. And this is an administration which I think is totally out of touch with reality.
NEWT:
Right. And so so you have an Iranian dictatorship dedicated to the destruction of both Israel and the United States, which has penetrated the American government. You have a Biden administration so unwilling to be honest about reality that they’re sitting around prattling about things that are nonsense. And you have them refusing to take active steps. I just outlined several clear steps they could take now if they were to seize the $6 billion, which they could today that’s sitting there that would be a real signal that would cause Iran real pain if they would have put B-2s over southern Lebanon and indicate clearly in an open message to Hezbollah that if Hezbollah tries to launch a second front, that front will be bombed by the Americans with very sophisticated weapons. And we have a capacity in our strategic bombing capabilities and with the Tomahawk missiles that are now offshore, I think there are an estimated 800 Tomahawk cruise missiles available to hit them if we had to. We just need to, we want to say, we’re going to sanitize the northern border, make sure there’s no threat to Israel from the north. And then we want to frankly give the Israelis every sophisticated capability we have to fight in an urban environment to minimize Israeli casualties and to maximize our ability to find the hostages and rescue them.
NEWT:
Sure. I mean, in the long run, yes, The Congress should next week pass by overwhelming majorities a series of of laws and be prepared to override Biden’s veto. They should cut off all aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. They should they should cut off all activities with Iran. They should reseize the $6 billion. They should move to provide Israel with every advanced technology.
NEWT:
We have a lot of things that are in development at places like Garpa. And we should we need to focus as much on defeating the urban enemy as we focus on defeating satellites and missiles. And I think if we did that, we would very rapidly have an amazing dominance in places like Gaza. But until we’re prepared to say Hamas must be defeated and then destroyed and a new post Hamas government has to be created. Until we’re prepared to do that, we don’t have a strategy for victory.
NEWT:
I’ve just described it. Joe Biden can say we’re totally committed to the survival of Israel. We’re totally committed to the destruction of Hamas. We recognize now that Iran is a terror state. We are seizing the $6 billion during my speech and we are launching B-2s to go over Hezbollah. I mean, these are very you know, it’s not complicated. It’s just hard.
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