Jenny Beth sits down with Richard Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, to discuss his efforts to shrink the size and scope of government.
Jenny Beth sits down with Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, to discuss his efforts to shrink the size and scope of government.
Website: www.getliberty.org
Twitter: @LimitGovt | @rmanning957| @JennyBethM
Rick Manning (00:00):
We're focused on draining the swamp for Americans for limited government. We're not Americans for perpetually growing government, and that's what happens right now and it's a disease that affects Washington DC, both Republican and Democrat. And we're going to change that.
Narrator (00:15):
Keeping our republic is on the line and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she is most proud of is Mom to Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:47):
Rick Manning has worked in public affairs and public policy for decades, including stints with the United States Department of Labor under President George W. Bush and nearly a decade with the National Rifle Association. Rick is passionate about reducing the size and scope of government, and as president of Americans for limited government, he gets to dedicate 100% of his time to this very worthy cause. Rick, thank you so much for joining me today. You are the head of Americans for limited government and you really like to fight for policy changes that make a difference and help limit the size and scope of government.
Rick Manning (01:25):
Yeah, it's great. It really is a great opportunity to be able to kind of do what my life's led up to 40 years of being in politics and being able to spend the last 12 really focusing on limiting government, identifying where there are problems and using whatever skills I have to try to create a systems where we win a few and things like we took down the Obama administrations attempt to take over local zoning. It wasn't an issue, but a lot of people were paying attention to. But we fought the naacp, we fought a lot of people and in the end of the day we got congress defunded and then after four years of fighting in the Trump administration, we got the Trump administration to rip it out by the roots. So it's a seven year fight and it continues because Biden's resurrected it, but its fact is sometimes you just get to fight battles that matter and every once in a while God blesses you with a win.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:23):
That's very good. So when you're fighting, what are the kind of things that you do? What are the tactics that you use to fight?
Rick Manning (02:30):
Well, first of all, we try to figure out where the leverage points are because every battle's different. For instance, in the A FFH fight, the zoning fight, we had a guy who was the Westchester County executive director who was fighting it up in Westchester County, a guy named Bob Astorino. And so we worked with Bob Astorino and some of his challenges in terms of the local fight, we applied them and we took his expert witness of what happens to county executive when they impose this on you and made sure it got in front of a whole bunch of members of Congress. Representative Paul Gosar picked it up and said, we want to defund this. And he ran the ball with, did a great job, and I spent a lot of time sitting in Mitch McConnell's office with his staff explaining to it when we're going through preparations processes to what it did and why it mattered. And quite honestly, we did probably 25,000 different radio shows around the country over five years talking about it and making people aware of it. And ultimately we had some local support that generated out of it and you kind of roll it up into a big ball and the Republicans eventually said, we have to get rid of this, we're going to stop it, and we succeeded. That's
Jenny Beth Martin (03:50):
Great. That's very good. As you're looking to 2024 and after the presidential election in 2025, what are the kind of things you're looking at doing?
Rick Manning (04:02):
Yeah, we're going to have to really walk and chew gum in 2024 because obviously the election matters without the election. If we aren't electing a president who is limited government oriented, if we're not electing that president in 2025, a lot of things you can plan to do in 2024 don't happen. If we don't have a house in the Senate that are limited government oriented, it's much more harder to get those things done as well. So we have to, obviously that's a big part of the puzzle, but from a, so what we've tried to do and there's a lot of issues that matter, Joe Biden's, impeachment matters, getting to the root of the corruption, the Jordan Weaponization Government Committee matters, trying to deal with CISA and the censorship of conservative groups and censorship as a whole matters standing up for Israel matters. There's a lot of things that really matter that are going to be really localized fights.
(04:58):
What I'm trying to do is beyond just the localized fight is pick some things that aren't sexy, like the local zoning issue that don't have a lot of bells and whistles and shiny objects that we all chase around here so much and set them up. So should we be successful in the electoral process, we have substantive things that can be done immediately that are already laid up and Congress is ready to go and we have a capacity then to actually use that first a hundred days to substantively change the way government does business and to drain the swamp. And so that's the kind of the three word thing that we're going to do. We're focused on draining the swamp. We're Americans for limited government, we're not Americans for perpetually growing government. And that's what happens right now, and it's a disease that affects Washington, both Republican and Democrat, and we're going to change that.
(06:01):
And it's really not that hard and because a lot of the things have been done for Supreme Court has really done yeoman's work in defining redefining regulations and whether or not regulations have to be tied to actual legislation. And the dramatic expansion of the regulatory state is not largely based upon the congressional language that passed stuff that passed by elected officials. And so the Supreme Court through a court case, West Virginia, VEPA, opened the door for a complete examination of the overreach of government and those regulations. And one of the things we're going to be doing is we're going to be pressing members of Congress to engage in identifying regulations that go beyond congressional intent, identify how much money is being spent on those regulations and using the appropriations process to put those regulations under fire in terms of being defunded and that getting article one back in the game in terms of doing what they're supposed to do. That plays a huge role in this and it sets the stage for a more conservative, limited government administration than to take actions to end those regulations and do so with constitutional basis and congressional support that's cutting the arms off the tentacles of government.
Jenny Beth Martin (07:36):
Okay. When you say Article one, what do you explain? Article one is Congress and explain.
Rick Manning (07:42):
Yeah. Article one is Congress, that's a legislative branch. The legislative branch was actually devised as the most powerful branch of government. The Supreme Court was kind of wimpy. They were afraid of a king. So consequently, the executive branch was given really limited powers, a lot of power on the foreign end of things because you had to be able to negotiate treaties and stuff, but very limited powers in terms of legislation. The problem is Congress over the past a hundred since FDR anyway, has turned over their legislative capacities or legislative responsibilities to the executive branch, to the administrative state. They said, oh, this is too complicated for us, port little dumb congressional mines. Let's let the experts who are working in government figure it out and they can just make regulations. Well, when you do that, you take government away from the people, the people who are voting because congressman says, oh, it's a regulation.
(08:40):
There's nothing we can do. And we have Congressional Review Act, which allows 'em to strike down some regulations and the like on occasion. But the fact of the matter is the Supreme Court has opened the doors, changed that entire system by saying if a regulation extends beyond the intent of Congress, beyond the language of the law that was passed, it's no longer constitutional. And so limited government conservatives in Congress have a, not just a right, but a duty to evaluate the regulations that been imposed on us over the last 20, 30 years and say these no longer meet the test that the Supreme Court put forward, identify them and force accountability in terms of how much money they're costing and cut them. Say, we're going to defund these. And by knowing how much they cost, knowing how many full-time employees are going to be involved.
(09:37):
So you get rid of them, you're able to put a dollar amount on it. And then in this world, in a budget world where they're trying to, at least they say they're trying to balance budget, it's called a pay for. It allows you, if you want to spend money on Israel to say, well, if we get rid of these three regulations, we've got the money for Israel. You're not going to get that much money. But that's really the idea here. Let's create a real accountability on the regulations. Let's make our legislators actually have real oversight over the regulatory process and let's bring America back to the American voters. So we get to say what gets to happen in our country and not a bunch of bureaucrats who their main objective is to be able to retire with a big pension and to grow their own power inside the government and look down on the very people who elect elect the Congress. It is we have a responsibility to do that and that's something we can get done right now and we're going to do it.
Jenny Beth Martin (10:42):
And what all will it take for you to get it done right now?
Rick Manning (10:46):
Well, it's going to take members of Congress agreeing that they want to do it, which we are meeting with members of Congress every day on that. It's going to take a effort to get some people in the legal world, attorney Generals and others to identify some of these regulations and start using their prerogatives as state attorney generals to go after them. And so we have to do a multi-pronged fight on it and truthfully, it's going to take a capacity to bring, to make it an agenda item for whoever ends up being the nominee, make it an agenda item inside the Republican platform. It's going to be one of those things that in some respects, the biggest challenge of draining the swamp is the Republicans are as much part of the swamp as the Democrats. So true.
(11:42):
And so you sit there, it is a really good slogan, but you don't always get the support where you think you're going to get it. And the point is, if you play, you have to play an inside game to identify the problems and the outside game to get the people to come in and fix the problems. And so once again, I said we have to walk and chew gum. Big project. It's going to require, I'm going to have to raise the money to fund it obviously, but it is, but it's something that's doable. It is actually doable. It's something that is, and we sit there and we do pie in the sky things and say we're going to do massive civil service reform that isn't happening. Okay. I mean, you can do a press release and do stand out and in front of cameras and say, you're doing it, but you're not going to do it. There's too many institutional blockers with this and doing some things on the civil service side. You can in fact change the entire way this place works, and if you didn't get anything else done in the next presidency, then that you would go down as the most meaningful president in the last 40 years.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:55):
That's amazing. Do you have this written up like a plan for people to read it or?
Rick Manning (13:00):
Well, you can read the civil service side. If you go to the daily torch.com, you can read the civil service side. It's four easy steps, four easy and not so easy steps can be taken to drain the swamp. An article that I put out a couple weeks ago where I lay out some of the steps on the civil service side
Jenny Beth Martin (13:16):
And what are the steps for the civil service
Rick Manning (13:18):
Side, it's relatively simple. First thing is what people don't know is the Health and human services under Donald Trump in December of 2020, this is the agency that was appointed of the spear for the entire Covid thing, said, wait a second, we don't have very many civil servants actually working. Let's find out how many have actually logged into the computer. 25% of the civil servants in health and human services never once logged into a computer from March of 2020 to December of 20 20, 20 5%, not once. Well, it's a So first step, let's find out with all the telework that's supposedly going on and all that, let's find out how many people actually working. That's something that the Office of Personnel Management at White House should know, and every department has a personnel department that should know that it's an easy thing to find out. So all Congress has to do is ask.
(14:19):
So that's something the first easy step. Let's see the scope of the people who are just collecting money and not doing work. Pretty basic. Second thing, there's something called the Merit Act. It's really simple. Barry Louder Merri cows that represent Barry Ook from Georgia has it and the house it is, all it does is it allows for a faster firing process for civil servants who are lazy, don't show up to work, recalcitrant are incompetent. So you can, they have it in the VA right now. People might remember in 20 16, 20 17, the Obama administration was essentially their VA was letting people die in the streets. Veterans die on the streets. And in 2017, a bipartisan vote and Senate and a Congress passed legislation that reformed the va. Part of it was an expedited firing process. I want to apply that expedited firing process across the board. You won't get tens of thousands of people fired.
(15:27):
This is about having the people who are the managers, being able to get the people who are managed to actually do their job. It's that simple. Elaborate on that. Well, when I was with the labor department as chief of Staff public affairs, I could name a number of individual cases where you had to make a decision, am I going to go through a year long process of trying to get this person fired or am I just going to put 'em in a corner? And you don't go in there with a short timeframe and things to get done and say, well, I'm going to spend all my time trying to get a GSS seven fired. What is the GS seven? A low level government employee, fairly low paid, probably paid 30, 40, $50,000. I dunno now, but that was a long time ago. The point is, you're not going to spend that.
(16:28):
What you're going to do is you're going to say even relatively highly paid. If they aren't doing the job and won't do the job, are you going to spend a year trying to get them fired or are you going to just put 'em in a corner, ignore them, let them collect their paycheck so you can get your job, which you have to get done, your priorities. Truthfully, nobody in the White House is going to call the labor department and say, Hey, did you get that GSS 14 fired? No, they ain't care. Did you get the stuff done the White House wanted to get done? So that's what you have to focus on. The expedited firing process allows you to do just that, and it sends a message to all the other careers that you don't want to have to fire anybody that they need to do their job. They at least need to go through the motions of doing their job. And it changes the, you
Jenny Beth Martin (17:13):
At least need to show up or log in.
Rick Manning (17:16):
Yeah, log in. There's lots of programs you could buy to make it look like your cursor's moving around, which I'm sure many people are using. But yeah, that's,
Jenny Beth Martin (17:26):
You just made people that it's so bad. It's just that's terrible.
Rick Manning (17:31):
It is, but we have to fix it. That's the key. We don't know how many of those people still aren't showing up to work or only occasionally we have to identify the problem. So that's the first step. Second step, we have an opportunity through the Merit Act to go and do something that allows us to fire non-performing employees. You can't drain the swamp unless you can fire the swamp. And that's something that's very simple. It is exactly what was done in the Veterans Administration when Barack Obama allowed in 2016, in 2015 veterans to be dying on the streets, not being able to get appointments. And so in 2017, legislation reform legislation was done. Donald Trump signed it where they made a pathway to be able to fire veterans administration employees and weren't doing their job in an expedited fashion. This is not about being able to fire a whole bunch of employees.
(18:29):
This is about being able to manage the employees there. In a world where the Washington Post ran in January 20th, 2017 when Donald Trump was inaugurated, ran a full page article about resistance and urging the federal bureaucracy to resist the duly elected president of the United States. What that means when you're the federal bureaucracy is that you are, in fact, you're not doing your job because you're supposed to facilitate the politicals, you're the lever pullers. You know how to pull levers power. You don't get to choose which levers to pull. What you get to do is you get to pull the levers and the whole civil service system is set up to be supposedly nonpartisan. Yet now we have a civil service system that's about 80 20, 80% Democrat, 80% growing government. And think about it, it's in their interest to grow government because bigger government means more power for them.
(19:30):
What's more Congress? Article one, the branch of Congress, which is Congress has the constitutional responsibility, not just the right, it's a responsibility to do the legislation and keep an eye on and to reign in the bureaucratic state. So Congress can do that. One thing they need to do is change the civil service laws. So an employee who won't do their job can be fired. It's that simple. It's not political. There's a process. It still protects the employee rights, but it's just faster. And truthfully, somebody who's in as a political appointee isn't going to spend all their time trying to fire a low level employee who doesn't do their job. Those people, because under the current system, it's a waste of time. And the one thing you don't have as a political appointee is time. You have a clock. It's a four year clock is running and the left knows that their job is to run the clock out on you.
(20:40):
And the resistors are trying to do that with the Merit Act. You can deal with the resistors and you can get them out of the way and put people in place who want to do their job as set forth constitutionally and through the Hatch Act. So that's the merit Act. The other two are relatively or bigger picture things, but they matter. Most people don't realize about 7,500 career SES. It's senior executive service employees who really run things. They are the professional managers. They get paid a lot of money. They are able to, they're supposed to, since Carter changed the rules, they're supposed to be able to manage any department. They're managed professional managers. The reality is they embed themselves into specific departments. They have programs and grants that they're overseeing that are going out to people they want and they resist every time when you're trying to get anything changed in the department, first person you have to overcome is your S scss.
(21:45):
Well, here's the truth. They're also your older employees. They've been there for a long time. They're heading towards retirement. And you sit there. And so if you did a simple thing by saying, we're going to do early out for all the federal employees allowing them, we're going to say, okay, you currently have 38 years and we're going to give you credit for 40 years in your retirement. It costs money to do that. But those people will take that two years because essentially they don't want to work the next two years for free from a pension perspective. So they'll take that, move those people out of the way and replace 'em with people who A, are going to do their job, but B might even be somewhat supportive of what you're trying to do. So remaking the senior executive service, remaking the makeup of the people who are the resistors that matter, the real lever pullers.
(22:40):
By remaking that through this kind of system, you create an opportunity to get your agenda done. So that's the third thing. And the fourth thing is do a reduction in force is shorthand, is riff. And I think people hear a lot of this word in the next 12 months. We go back to the first thing. If we've got 20% of the people who aren't signing in, aren't logging in on a daily basis when they work on a computer, well, you know what? They don't need to have a job. So you do a reduction in force. The reduction in force is simple. You just say, okay, well let's say it was 10%. I can tell you when I managed it in the labor department public affairs department, that we had 42 employees, I could have gotten rid of 10%, never missed them. Okay? So it's not going to change the whole makeup of government. So you do it in a riff. Let's say it's 10%. 10% is 200,000 people. That's a significant reduction in government. It's getting rid of waste. It would save about 40 billion a year, which I know in today's world is $6 trillion. And we spend money on everything. And Joe Biden says, wave a pen. I want to spend 400 billion to not make people pay their student loans. That 40 billion may not sound like a lot, but it's a lot of money. It is
Jenny Beth Martin (24:12):
To the average American. That's a lot of money. Well,
Rick Manning (24:13):
And you go to an appropriator and you say to appropriators, Hey, we need to slash 40 billion. Amazingly, it becomes very, very hard for them to figure out how to do that. That would be a $40 billion savings and you wouldn't miss it is the point. You would not miss it. So that's essentially the four piece plan. There's another thing that's rolling around that President Trump tried to do an executive order and didn't ever really wasn't able to get it done. And that is to be able to move attorneys who work on policy and move them out if they're not able to, if they're resistors. And it's, I'm not focused on that. There's a lot of other people are. The fact of the matter is anytime you get in a fight with attorneys, you know you're going to be in a lawsuit and your lawsuits can be three years in a federal court that's been stacked by Barack Obama to be against us.
(25:12):
So I don't know that you win the lawsuit. And as a result, I prefer to spend things that can be done in the first a hundred days of a new administration rather than things that may not ever happen because you're going to be tied up in court for the rest of your life. So those are things that can happen combined with the regulatory piece, Jenny Beth, it fundamentally transforms the way this place works. You cut the brains out, which at least transform the brains on the civil service side, and you cut the tentacles off the octopus by taking the overreached regulations. They're strangling America's capacity to live, capacity to compete. You do those two things. It would be the most fundamental transformation in this country that we've seen in at least 40 years
Jenny Beth Martin (26:00):
That is truly amazing in such it's mundane items. It's kind of in the weeds and you have to understand how the bureaucracy works to understand what you're talking about. And yet, if we don't as activists around the country understand how the bureaucracy works, we can't fight it.
Rick Manning (26:25):
Yeah. Donald Trump was right. He touched on something. We talking about draining the swamp. The challenge is it's really easy to say that it's really hard to do it, and it's not a shiny object right now that you can sit and point to, but the fact is, this is the hard work. This is why I like getting to do what I do. The fights
Jenny Beth Martin (26:51):
You like to
Rick Manning (26:51):
Get in fights because ultimately if you're going to be in a fight and if you're in politics, you're going to be in a fight. You might as be able to be in a fight that when you come out the other end and you win, it mattered.
(27:05):
And the truth is, my group's small. There's a lot of groups that can be in the big overall fight, and I help on those. I do what I can. And we do a lot of media on those things. But the bottom line is if you pick something that is somewhat mundane but is fundamental to restoring America to being run by the people, not the bureaucrats, not the politicians by the people, if you want to restore that, you have to go out and find a field that hasn't been tilled and go out and do what you got to do to cut the brush. And that's what this does. And I will know that we're successful on it when suddenly it's being talked about by a whole bunch of people who end up on Fox News and the like, and they'll be really excited and they're all excited about it. And I'll sit back and I'll say, okay, we won.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:08):
That would be amazing, Rick. I hope that happens. Now you worked in the labor department? Yes ma'am. Have you worked in other parts of government as well?
Rick Manning (28:16):
No. I was in a house Republican conference when I was a kid, but by and large I've been on the outside. I spent nine years state lobbyist, national Rifle Association. I worked my way through college running political campaigns. And my nine years at NRA taught me a very simple thing. If you follow the rules of the people who don't want you to be successful, you will never be successful. So don't follow 'em. Find other pathways. Do you have to stay within guidelines? But the fact of the matter is in South Carolina, I passed a piece of legislation that never passed a committee. It didn't do any of the things it's supposed to do. It's being blocked by the chairman of the judiciary committee. And I passed this legislation because I decided I was going to pass the legislation and I attached it to a bill that somebody wanted.
(29:21):
And we did all this stuff outside the rules. And you know what? On the last day of session, I had somebody come and threaten me and say, you need to get your bill off my bill. And I said, no. I showed him why it made sense to be there. And he got mad because somebody lied to him and when he passed it. And so we had this big fight. I didn't play by their rules. And 30 years later, there's an article about how City of Columbia and South Carolina was trying to pass gun control regulations, gun control laws. And the city attorney said, you can't do that. There's this obscure law that was passed 30 years before that's on the books that say you can't do it. Well, that's how that law got passed.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:13):
And it made a difference. It made a
Rick Manning (30:14):
Difference 30 years, 30 years later, the gun controllers came in and said, we want to ban semi-automatic firearms. And they weren't able to because we didn't play by the rules. We played fair. Those were all rules, but they were
Jenny Beth Martin (30:30):
Legally you couldn't played
Rick Manning (30:31):
Legally. But it wasn't the rules that they wanted us to play by because nobody ever wants eggs broken. They've all got their own neat little deal and nobody wants their apple cart overturned. And if you're going to change things, you have to overturn apple carts. And that's why Donald Trump, and this is way off base, but that's why I went down. Donald Trump gets in front of a judge and basically doesn't answer the questions the way the judge wants answered. He's saying, you've got a rig system. I'm not playing by rules. I'm delivering my message and too bad. And he's exactly right.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:10):
Yes, exactly. And they're saying you can't talk outside of the court. So you might as well talk
Rick Manning (31:15):
Inside the court. I'm going to say, this is the only place I can talk. Well, you set the rules up, buddy. That is a, and so it's one of the things that when we look at politicians, we look at people who we might want to elect, find people who find ways to get things done, not people who just sit there and are going to be glad to be there.
Jenny Beth Martin (31:43):
Okay, now one thing that I think is important that I want to go back to for just a second, and when you talked about President Trump, I think everyone who loves President Trump and people who don't like him certainly like to say, well, he's supposed to know so much about people. He was an expert on hiring people and he couldn't get it. The swamp drained. Well, listening to what you were describing about how it works inside of the federal government, that is not the way a normal business works. If somebody doesn't log in or show up to work or isn't doing their job in a satisfactory manner in the real world, you lose your job. You don't get to stay there. But what you're saying is basically it isn't even worth the manager's time to try to fire the person so they can just skate by for years, maybe decades, undermine and resist and not work. And it's almost impossible to fire them. So when he comes in as a businessman into the government, he's trying to apply the rules of business to how you operate the government, which would make it way more efficient and way more competitive and get a lot of things out of the way. But the government has created all these rules to protect people from actually operating like
Rick Manning (33:06):
A business. Correct. The government isn't a business. Right. Okay. Just understand it's not a business. And I think, believe it or not, as strange as it may seem, Donald Trump when he came in as president, thought that because he was president, he said to do something that people would do it. And even a lot of his own appointees weren't doing it. So let's just be clear. It wasn't just civil service. He made some mistakes in terms of the people he put in certain positions. But he made the assumption that I'm president, I say this, you're going to go do it. Because that's what happens in business. The fact is politics is manipulation. It isn't dictating things. Politics is getting people to, is manipulating people into doing what you want them to do. And people look the word manipulate and they look at, oh, that's a bad word.
(33:56):
Well, it's not a bad word because when you want your kid to go to bed, you manipulate them to go to bed. Okay? If you want somebody to do something, you have to find out to make it in their interest to do it. And that is a manipulation. So people have to understand that is what politics is. It's the art of manipulation, it's the art of, and by manipulation, it's making it so a politician believes that it's in their interest to do something. And that is how we got, going back to the beginning, how we got the affirmatively furthering fair housing done. Because the Republican politicians said, we cannot have local zoning being done by bureaucrats and looking at census tracks. That's not in our interests. We are going to get fired if we allow that to occur because people are going to get mad.
(34:56):
They're going to find out two years, three years later, and they're going to be mad at us. So we better stop it now. So how do you manipulate people When Jenny Beth goes and or we, we've got a hundred thousand people who have subscribed to our thing. I've got half a million people who are on our Facebook page and the like when I put stuff out and I say, Hey, we need to get on this. Part of that manipulation is people getting involved. It's people saying, this matters to me in contacting the member of Congress multiple times.
(35:24):
It's part of that manipulation, but it's also part of how our government's supposed to work because it's the consent of the governed. And if the people in DC only believe that the governed they only to the people who live around them and they live in dc, let's just be clear, they live in dc. When you have a government shutdown and you go to your church and the pastor at the church says there's a government shutdown and we're opening up the food banks to all the federal employees, which happened at my church way out 30 miles from dc. Everybody sits there and goes, oh, the government shutdowns hurting people. Those are the people who are in government. Those are the people who are your staff people. Those are the people who are actually your congressmen. In many cases. That's their input. Their circle of influence is inside the beltway and their staff circle of influence is inside the beltway.
Jenny Beth Martin (36:17):
It's an echo chamber.
Rick Manning (36:18):
It's an echo chamber. And I think everybody knows this. The reason they didn't like people actually telling 'em who they think should be speaker was because it was breaking down their system was following their rules.
Jenny Beth Martin (36:33):
Overturn the apple cart,
Rick Manning (36:34):
Overturn the apple cart. And you know what the reason we ended up with Mike Johnson as speaker and not a much more liberal member of the House of Representatives is because they remembered all those people called for Jim Jordan. If we don't get a conservative speaker, we're going to get creamed in primaries. And that was the value. And I was involved in, as you know, you were way out front on that in terms of supporting Jim Jordan. And rightfully so. We got a speaker who was a conservative speaker because of the people calling for Jim Jordan and the effect that had
Jenny Beth Martin (37:14):
Well, and calling and calling and calling over and over and over. And it was in the self-interest of all of the politicians to listen to those people. And it was in the self-interest of the employees to make sure their bosses were doing what the constituency wanted, if they wanted the calls to end
Rick Manning (37:31):
Well and if they wanted to keep their job. Because ultimately that's true. Every one of those employees picks up the phone is an at-will employee and the next congressman isn't necessarily going to keep 'em, probably won't keep them
Jenny Beth Martin (37:41):
Unlike the rest of the federal government,
Rick Manning (37:44):
Unlike the rest of the federal government. So people understand if you don't take anything else out of this, your voice does matter. It may not always seem that way, but the Jim Jordan speaker race is an exact example of how the effect the wave. You have a big wave and then you have the after waves. The after wave of the Jim Jordan not getting the speakership was the House Republicans said, we have to have a conservative speaker. That's why Tom Emerett, when he gets the nomination last four hours, it's because he wasn't Republican speaker. And what's more with Mike Johnson, they also said something different. They said, we want a new generation of leadership. And that is probably the most significant thing that happened out of that speaker's race. And it's because the people broke the system and changed the way the votes happened. So people, if you were one of those people called God bless you, if you emailed God bless you, you were heard, you just weren't necessarily heard the way you thought you might be. Well,
Jenny Beth Martin (38:56):
They were calling for what Jim Jordan represents, which is not what we were getting from McCarthy. It is not what we were getting from Paul Ryan and John Banner before McCarthy. It was a change in how they wanted to see Washington work. So they were calling for Jim Jordan, but they truly were calling for new leadership and at the end they got what they were asking for, which is new leadership and it isn't conservative leadership and someone who cares about the values we've been advocating for and is going to do more than give occasional lip service to it.
Rick Manning (39:32):
And what we also got was we saw have Jim Jordan going after the weaponization of government in the way he can head of judiciary committee and in some respects the swamp fears Jim Jordan far more as chairman of judiciary committee with a speaker who will back him than they do than they ever would where his speaker, he is having to make deals with everybody to live in this puzzle palace. Right. So in a lot of respects, it truly was a win-win.
Jenny Beth Martin (40:02):
Yes, absolutely. Well Rick, I appreciate your time today. You've given people a lot of things to think about. We have to attack the regulatory state. The Supreme Court decision allows a unique opportunity to really go back in and go, wait. These regulations don't line up with what Congress originally passed the law to say, and we have to attack the civil servants. I use the word servant in air quotes, but we've got to go through and make sure that they're actually doing the work they're supposed to do and doing the work of the president who the people elect, not just what they want to do. We didn't elect them, we elected the president. They're supposed to be doing what the president says, which is who the people elect.
Rick Manning (40:51):
That's exactly right. And I think we can get that done. These are not pie in the sky tests. These are things that can get done and if we have a concerted focus on them, they will get done and it will fundamentally transform the federal government to its rightful place as being not the dominant thing that just kind of absorbs everything in this Country America strength is that it is of the people. It's the people. It's not the government, it's the people, and we have to rebalance that relationship and we're to do it.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:34):
Where can people go to get more information about your work?
Rick Manning (41:37):
Go to get liberty.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:38):
Get liberty.org. It's a great website. Get
Rick Manning (41:40):
Liberty. Get Liberty. You can just sign. And I would encourage anybody to just subscribe for a free newsletter. We send something out every day with different things are going on. There's a lot of polling and I've got cartoons, I've got all sorts of fun stuff in there, but it's on issues. We try to focus on issues that are being ignored, that are kind of falling out by the wayside. We write about stuff that you can read a lot of people are talking about. But fact of the matter is, my goal is to find places that are lynchpins of big government and pull them out and make it so government becomes a government of the people by the people and for the people and not a government. That's advers, that's an adversary to the individual freedoms that we enjoy and we're endowed by our creator to enjoy.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:35):
Rick Manning, thank you so much for joining us today. My
Rick Manning (42:37):
Pleasure. Thank you.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:38):
That is Rick Manning with Americans for Limited Government. You can get more information about his organization@getliberty.org. I'm Jenny Beth Martin and this is a Jenny Beth show.
Narrator (42:49):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (43:09):
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