Jenny Beth sits down with former Congressman Steve King from Iowa to talk about the history and the early days of the Tea Party movement.
Jenny Beth sits down with former Congressman Steve King from Iowa to talk about the history and the early days of the Tea Party movement.
Twitter/X: @SteveKingIA | @JennyBethM
Steve King (00:00):
The pillars of American exceptionalism and they're under assault every day by the left. Freedom of speech, religion, press and assembly, the right to keep and bear arms. And you've got these leftists down there with their verbal and keyboard jackhammers every day chiseling away at those pillars. And our job is to shoo 'em away and refurbish the pillars and get our freedom Bank.
Narrator (00:19):
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's 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 (00:52):
In celebration of 15 years of the Tea Party movement. This episode highlights another member of Congress from the beginning of the movement, hailing from the great state of Iowa. My next guest was a constant thorn in the side of the establishment house leadership. He was also one of the first and most vocal ones to shine a light on the crisis on our southern border. He spent more than 15 years fighting for freedom in the House of Representatives, and he has the scars to prove it. Please welcome my friend, the Honorable Steve King. Steve King. Thank you so much for joining me on my podcast. We've known each other now for 15 years, or almost 15 years since the Tea Party movement began, and I am so thankful for everything you taught me about how Washington DC works and how the Capitol works. Usually I'm thankful every once in a while I'm like, wow, it's horrible how it works, but I'm glad I understand it and I learned so much from you, and I want to just make sure that the audience knows who you are and how you helped teach us what was going on and how you became a congressman and what you're doing now.
Steve King (01:57):
Oh boy, that is actually an easy question with a long answer, and I'll try not to. I'll probably have some discipline on that. But one of the things is that I don't want people to think that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was not. But I was raised in a law enforcement family where my father steeped me in the supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the United States, the Code of Iowa, where he was a manager of state police radio stations. And so I was given great respect for the rule of law, and then I was sitting out on a bulldozer one day and decided that I need to take charge of our lives and mine. We had no children. And I came home and told her that day today I'm a man. And she looked at me like, well, I married a man a couple years ago, so what's new about that?
Steve King (02:39):
But what was new was I had to take charge of our lives. And so I convinced a Democrat banker to loan me a hundred percent to buy an old beaten up bulldozer that was across the river in Nebraska with the weeds growing around it. And I drug it home, welded on it for two weeks and rolled it out onto the job at seven o'clock in the morning, dropped the blade in the ground and started to move dirt at 10 o'clock sharp, just like a coffee break. The engine blew up. And so a week later, Marilyn is out there on the tracks of that old D seven with a seven foot cheater pipe, four and a half months pregnant, twerking the head bolts. And that little boy now owns that company. And so we started early in our family, yeah, very early. But the frustration of watching what government was doing, it seemed pretty simple to me.
Steve King (03:23):
All I wanted to do was just raise my family and run my business, and I started going down to Des Moines to lobby the legislators. And I had an issue before a state senator one day that was, I don't remember what the issue was, but it was a simple non-controversial issue. We call it a non-con now in the legislative business. And while I was explaining it to him, I saw his eyes glaze over kind of like a dead fish, and I thought I could snap my fingers before his eyes, bring him back to the beginning and see if I could hold his attention long enough to make my point, or I could just leave because I was wasting my time. I drove home with offenders flapping on my old rusty pickup deciding I'm going to find a state senator, represent me well, I found five or six that I thought would make good state senators, but they all decided they were my kitchen cabinet and I should be the state senator.
Steve King (04:09):
And so I challenged a 24 year incumbent Republican state senator, and they told me that there's no way you unseat someone that's entrenched like that. So I worked harder and we defeated him with a two to one margin in a Republican primary in 1996 and went on to the Iowa Senate six years there. And the public policy just drew me in. I was running my construction business, but my driving voice was on the public policy. So English is the official language is one thing that I accomplished there. Another one would be workplace drug testing, bring people out on your job in life or death situations. They've got to be clean and now they can be in Iowa. We passed that. So those were two accomplishments from the state senate. And then when the seed opened up for the congressional district for the 2002 election, I jumped into that race and came out of that after a special nominating convention, a primary election, then a special nominating convention, elected to Congress in 2002.
Steve King (05:05):
So that's kind of how I got there. But no one recruited me, and I always looked at any donations that came to my campaign as an endorsement of my judgment, not something to pay me to do something in the future. It was we endorse your judgment. So here's my check, and I never made deals with people. They would come to you, especially I noticed this early on. They would come with a bill and they would say, okay, now I want you to sign onto my bill and I'll sign onto your bill. If you'll sign on to mine, I'm not even having that conversation. We'll talk about one bill, yours or mine, and maybe the second conversation can be about the other bill, but I make no deals. If yours a good bill, I'll sign on it. You don't have to have any conditions. And so as I went through all of that, all that time, it just slowly ratcheted a place where I was always independent.
Steve King (05:52):
I was always evaluating the policy rather than the politics. And that's how I envisioned that our founding fathers thought we should be doing this business. So that's what took me through and into the congressional side of this. And boy, when the tea party lit up, all of us felt the same way. America was lit up. And I just, some of the things that we've done together that I can remember, Jenny Beth, this might be jumping the gun just a little bit, but I remember we did a great big rally in the Capitol building with something like they said, 40 to 60,000 people in it. And of course you're there triggering that Michelle Bachman's involved in that. Louis's involved in that. And about a week later, the next weekend we had to do another one. And I called you and you were just landing at the airport in Georgia, and I said, we need you back in Washington. You said, okay, there's another plane going back. I'll jump on that one. And there you were, God bless you. That's the kind of fight that you've delivered all this time for all these years, and it has to come from the head and the heart and the soul.
Jenny Beth Martin (06:47):
Well, I remember that and I was like, wow, I have to turn around and go right back to Washington DC and I did. But that experience having to turn around and go back taught me a lot. I learned so much from you and Louis and Michelle including how to figure out what the timing is going to be on Capitol Hill and when to expect bad bills to come and when you need to fight and when it makes sense to build momentum to fight. And sometimes you just have to strike while the iron is hot. You may not expect that you need to be in DC doing something, but sometimes you just have to turn around and act and be there.
Steve King (07:28):
I'd add another thing about this that I've learned now actually, I learned this from Michelle. When the people that come there, the elected members of Congress and talking about the House and Senate for that matter, they go through a similar crucible and they are high achievers and they have a good education behind them, generally speaking, very well educated, high achievers, business wise or whatever it might be. And they've got good work ethics, and they've got a good set of principles at least that they have espoused during their campaign and they arrive in Washington. Now, what separates these people? Why do a handful of them or one or two or three rise out of that and become more distinct and have more impact? And that's what I referenced, Michelle, because I analyze it under her as I watched that and I finally was able to put it into words that if you trust your instincts, that's what separates you. And you can't take the time to wait to do the poll, analyze it, put your finger into the wind. You just have to know your instincts, your gut have to tell you take action. And then when you charge that hill, you can't be looking back to see if anybody's following you. You just have to go
Jenny Beth Martin (08:26):
Right. And every once in a while you get to the top and you realize there are not many people with you at
Steve King (08:31):
All. You might even die on the way up. You
Jenny Beth Martin (08:33):
Might die on the way up, and you might be the only one standing. And I've watched that happen on some of the votes that you've taken or that Louis and Michelle have taken, or all three of you were taking the votes and there wasn't anyone else else around. Now today in Congress it's a little bit different because we have the House Freedom Caucus, and usually there's a much larger block voting the way we want them to vote.
Steve King (08:59):
Well, there are, and I was there when the Freedom Caucus was formed, and of course for 16 years, I chaired the Conservative Opportunity Society where I would host a breakfast every Wednesday morning at eight o'clock in the Capitol Hill Club, and then it was by invitation. So I wasn't all that fussy, but I wanted to make sure that they were solid conservatives and not somebody that was going to undercut our agenda. So it ended up sorting itself out to where we had as many as four dozen at the peak times, but down to two dozen or a dozen and a half was more typical for a breakfast there. So that helped drive the agenda and the discussion. And many of the members that would come to the Conservative Opportunity Breakfast also were Freedom Caucus members. And when that Freedom Caucus opened up and lit up, it was more run by, I'll say, the more pure form libertarian than I am.
Steve King (09:46):
And I didn't think they wanted to touch the social agenda, which is important. And if you get the social agenda right, the rest will take care of itself. So I didn't step into that. I got a phone call that asked me and I said, well, I'll just have to give it some thought for a while. I never really pursued it, but I'm glad they do what they do. I'm proud of what they've accomplished. Many of them, they're good friends. And if it hadn't been for the Freedom Caucus, let's see, what would we have? We would have Kevin McCarthy as the speaker today.
Jenny Beth Martin (10:13):
That's right. That's right. And I don't know that they intended back in July and August of 20 20, 23 just last year to remove Kevin McCarthy. I don't think that's where they were headed, but things happened. He introduced bad legislation. The motion to Vacate actually happened. And we have a new speaker now, Steve, you and especially Louis, I remember where I was standing when Louis was explaining to me in 2010 that and where it was, it was at the Glen Beck Restoring America, I think it was Restoring America event in front of the Lincoln Memorial. So it was in Washington DC in September, and he said, Jenny Beth, if then people, if we win, and it looked like we were going to win the house even in September, a couple of months ahead of time, all those members of Congress within the week of them winning, and even on election night, they will be approached by house leadership and fall in line right away. So you have to be ready to take action and start having orientations and make sure you keep on helping them. And we tried changing the speaker, you and Louis and Michelle and I was helping from the outside several times, and it took a while before it finally happened, and John Banner changed.
Steve King (11:41):
Well, I'm glad that you remember that distinct conversation with Louis because that fits the model here of what was happening. We had 87 freshmen Republicans that came in and big things were taking place then in 2010, not only winning the majority over and winning it back again, but we had Obamacare in the bubble and our leadership put out this message repeal and replace. And I just went at that because I knew that if you repeal and replace, the replacement package would be everybody's will and whim and everybody's excuse not to vote to repeal. And I said, get rid of the, and replace part of this thing and just do repeal, repeal, repeal. And they would say, well, we're afraid that we'll get accused for not having any policy. We had all kinds of policy out there. I could go through a list of things that we should do one at a time so the American people can see what we're doing, but instead they stuck with that repeal and replace and look what Paul Ryan did with that afterwards too.
Steve King (12:37):
It just dribbled out. But at that time, after that election, and we gabbled into the, let's see, after that election, I wrote a bill to repeal Obamacare, and Michelle wrote a bill to repeal Obamacare. We weren't talking to each other. I had the first bill and she filed the first bill. I got something like 66 co-sponsors as original co-sponsors and then filed mine. But they were almost verbatim. We were working on the same track simultaneously. And I know that I ran into her as she was going to file the bill and I'm getting signatures on mine. And we just decided, okay, let's both go ahead and do what we're going to do. It'll work out. And many times that bill came to the floor for some type of passage, but neither one of us ever got to run the bill because leadership wouldn't let us.
Steve King (13:19):
But out of the 87 freshmen in that year, the leadership went at them and as they wanted to carve them up and they want to take them over, as Louis predicted, I went to the Oun Hotel where they had them, shall I say sequestered there impounded. And that was orientation, which is actually indoctrination. And they were all together in a room, and I had it set up and I gave a speech to them and I said, you can't let leadership command these things. We need to change some rules. You need to have a voice. I had a plan and a strategy that I had put together, and I remember that there were a few that got up and walked out of the room. They didn't think anybody should be talking to them except for John Vayner and Eric Katter. And what happened was when Nancy Pelosi lost the speakership, it's like, I envisioned it this way.
Steve King (14:03):
I use this metaphor to describe it. Then it's like she had this big bowl of rice, and rice was the power of the speaker's chair, and she'd been accumulating more of that along the way. Well, when they lost the majority, she tripped and fell and spilled that. And then down there as John Banar near it, cantor raking that up to gather as much power as possible, and we should have been spreading that out to the members instead. And they fought tenaciously, not just to hold the Pelosi power, but to expand theirs. And so I was accused of giving an unauthorized speech before the freshmen class of that year, an unauthorized speech. Those are the words of Eric Cantor. Steve King gave an unauthorized speech before the freshmen, and I should have had to pay a price for that, of course. And that was also the time that they decided I would not be the chairman of the immigration subcommittee.
Steve King (14:49):
And that was by order of John. And that happened throughout all of the years. After that, it came down from the speaker's chairs. Steve King will not be the chair of the immigration subcommittee. They didn't want me to be pushing to defend the border, but out of the 87 out that I called them God's Gift to America, I kind of got over that over the years. But at the time I believe that, and to some degree they were, but they had a matrix established, and this is kind of grapevine dialogue, that in a matter of just a week or two, they had reduced the freshmen class down, only 12 that hadn't been co-opted into the system in some way or another 12 that were suspected of being reagents, independent minded people that were going to represent their constituents and their convictions.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:35):
Isn't that unbelievable? Out of 87, it wound up just being 12,
Steve King (15:38):
And maybe some of them got carved down after that. That was just the snapshot.
Jenny Beth Martin (15:43):
And they did. And they all were claiming to be a tea party that they supported the values of the Tea Party, personal freedom, economic freedom, and a debt-free future. And I think at that point, we're talking about it as fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. And we change how we talked about that over the years to make it easier to say and to make more sense to people. But they got up there and they did, they accumulated that power and they forgot about the need to balance the budget. They forgot about the need to cut spending or they just said it was too hard, or they only had one half of one third of the government, and there were many who were such complete disappointments.
Steve King (16:31):
Well, and we pushed it to a government shutdown, but John Vayner pushed against that government shutdown really hard. And I remember this, that he would say, well, we had a government shutdown in 1998 and Republicans lost, and whenever there's a shutdown, Republicans will always lose. Like this is the axiom. Now we have to accept that because John Vayner concluded in 1998 that the Republicans lost the shutdown political battle in the shutdown. And I remember Dana Roacher in conference saying, that's not what happened. We didn't lose that in the shutdown. Here's why. And he gave the reasons why. So I would say of John Vayner once he thought he got burned, and so we should never do another shutdown. And I went back and Mark Twain once said that once a cat sits on a hot stove lid, he'll never sit on a hot stove lid again. Of course, you'll never sit on a cold one either. And the shutdowns were cold stove lids, as far as I'm concerned, you have to do what's right. And so they had Obama that was shutting down the national parks. He was pulling people off of furlough to guard the World War II Memorial,
Jenny Beth Martin (17:37):
Yes. To prevent Veterans World War II veterans from going there.
Steve King (17:41):
And that wasn't federal money that built that, that was donated money that built that. And so let's see, how did this work? Louis, Steve and Michelle were involved in that? Yes, I
Jenny Beth Martin (17:50):
Remember.
Steve King (17:52):
But I remember going there in the morning and I knew that, let's see, the Mississippi veterans were going to be there at, I believe it was nine o'clock in the morning. And at 9 45, the story County Iowa people were going to be there. And so I went there. Louis was there, and there were a couple other members there and a crowd. And so Louis and I sank our discussions on how that was going to be. And we were going in, we were going to open it up for the Mississippi veterans. And so as there was a guard posted there, and I walked over to the guard and I told her, that's Congressman Gomer. I'm Congressman King. This is our jurisdiction. It's above your pay grade, and that gate's going to open. You just need to know that's going to happen. And I did that right when the veterans were pulled up there and they had some of 'em in wheelchairs with their feet up against the cattle panels that they had to block around that.
Steve King (18:47):
And so I gave the nod and stepped over to the gate, and Louis opened it up. And when that flood, oh, just as that happened, two guys in bagpipes and kilt showed up and it was like God sent 'em to help. And so they played the bagpipes and we rolled in several hundred, two or 300 people, I suppose, altogether rolled in there and around that inside of that memorial and placed a wreath there for the Mississippi Veterans. And with those bagpipes playing the whole time. And unlike Kevin McCarthy's last speech on the floor of the house in this case, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:21):
No, there wasn't. And after the three of you did that and you three went back repeatedly during that shutdown period, it was
Steve King (19:30):
A daily duty. We just, I'd bring my wire cutters and my scissors and we would go open up the board.
Jenny Beth Martin (19:35):
And then after the three of you did it, other congressmen were going and they all wanted their photos showing that they were there standing up to the big tough executive branch. And as you were talking about that and mentioning that Iowans were coming, there was also an Iowan, a young man, I don't even remember his name, but he came during that time and he wound up breaking the police shape in front of the Lincoln Memorial and went up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Do you remember that?
Steve King (20:05):
Yeah, that was me.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:06):
Were you with him?
Steve King (20:08):
Yeah. That story is really worth telling too, especially in the context of our discussion here at Jenny Beth. But it got to be a morning duty for me. I would just go open up the memorial, especially the World War ii, but then I would go out and do some of the others. No one had gone into the Lincoln Memorial. They had kept that tied down and they had cattle panels gates wired together around that. And so I was going to open 'em up, and I talked to Michelle the night before and she said, well, can I come along? I said, well, sure. That was obviously. And so we picked her up. She was in her jogging clothes, and we picked her up and I had two drivers staff people. One of 'em was a football player for SMU, and the other was a tall solid guy.
Steve King (20:45):
You'd know him, but I won't say his name now. And anyway, so they're driving us and we're in the backseat of the car, and they take us out there and they think they go to park, they let us out and they think we are going to go to the Korean memorial first in the Vietnam wall, but instead we walked over in front of the Lincoln Memorial. So all of these panels were there. And we walked along there looking at the Lincoln Memorial, Michelle and I, and we got to the other end. She said, they're all wired together. And I had the wire cutters, but I said, I saw one that wasn't. And so we walked back to that, and then it wasn't, and I saw her move, like she was going to swing that pan open, and I can't let this little woman do that while I stand here.
Steve King (21:26):
So I grabbed that panel and I swung it open. So then we started walking up the steps, and I just said, eyes front, we're going up to Reed Lincoln's second inaugural address. And we got to the tape, the police tape, I took out my scissors and I said, grab it in two places. I'll cut us a souvenir. So she held it and I cut it here and here, and we still have that. I still have mine. Anyway, and we kept walking up the steps and we got up there and there's a guard that was hiding standing behind the Lincoln's throne, and he came out to confront us. And so we had this argument going on, and pretty soon that place filled up with people, right? Five, 600 people filled it up in that temple area of Lincoln Memorial. And so we are going at it arguing with the guards, and I'm saying, it's above your pay grade.
Steve King (22:14):
And Michelle's saying, is this where you cuff us? And it happened this way because once we walked in, I didn't know this, but the guards had swung the gate closed behind us, and then they were paying attention to us. Well, my two staff people came along. They looked up there and saw us halfway up the steps and they thought, we lost our members. We got to get up there with them. So Bobby swung the gate wide open, and he's like an infantry commander. He goes, come on. And he ordered all those people to pour up into the Lincoln Memorial, and we filled it up. It was glorious.
Jenny Beth Martin (22:44):
It was just quite an amazing thing, and it needed to happen. And we saw the shutdown with Obama, and then under the Trump presidency, there was another shutdown that the Obama one was over Obamacare. The Trump one was over border security. And during that, Mick Mulvaney got up and he said, the parks are going to be open. We just may not be picking up the trash, and this is going to happen and that is going to happen. And he explained how the whole government is still going to function and what would work and what wouldn't work. So if you're going to the park, take your trash out with you if you're going to a national park. And just the contrast of it just, it always startles me. And I remember watching Mick Mulvaney in the press conference that he was giving, explaining all that and thinking that he was the right man for that job at that moment in time. And I'm very thankful for it because the shutdown with Trump, the media made a big deal about it, but people don't quite, there wasn't a lot of pain associated with it.
Steve King (23:52):
And I think hardly anybody in the street will remember that shutdown because, but Obama was seeking to extract pain. And remember they have some parking places out along the Grand Canyon that were federal, so they paid money to block those off, to put barriers in there so people couldn't park in those places. They had some parking places around in Virginia too, south of the DC that they could the same thing. Federal government had a little bit of that, so they made sure they blocked, he spent more money keeping people off. It was unnecessary. And he also had a guard before the World War II Memorial that was blind. And so I would go up there every morning just kind of right on time, and his name was Lawrence, if I remember right. But anyway, I get about oh, 50 feet from him and I'd say, Hey, I'm on my way.
Steve King (24:34):
I'll be up there to talk to you in a little bit. And I'd go chat with him a little, and I'd open the gate up right beside him, and I'd just tell him again, this is beyond your pay grade. Once I was there, two busloads rolled into the World War II Memorial and they got out. They were all Asians, and they get out with this forlorn look on their face. We wanted to go to the World War II memorial and I, where are you all from? Shanghai. Okay, fine. So we Shanghai Obama on that one, I brought 'em all down into the World War II memorial.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:06):
That was so important the way that you handled it. And the fact that we were fighting to try to repeal Obamacare and think about 87 people were elected in 2010. Nothing happened on repealing Obamacare in 2011 or 12. And then Obama was reelected. And then in 13, you guys and Mike Lee and the newly elected senator from Texas, Ted Cruz all came up with a plan. And ultimately we got to that point, but still we're stuck with Obamacare. And when the world I shut down or the world broke because of Covid, as I watched the things that were happening with Covid and the government basically saying there's one size fits all, everyone has to mask no matter what we are prioritizing who lives and who dies and who gets treatment and who can't see their doctor. And all of these different nuances related to covid. And I was like, that's what we said would happen if the government takes over healthcare. And we're just watching it play out in a very fast-paced environment. But what we saw with Covid is part of why we have to continue standing for healthcare and medical freedom because that kind of, its extreme government control. It does not benefit society.
Steve King (26:31):
Well, I said then I think it's a fact to this today that if you do a word search in the congressional record for Obamacare, I've said that into the congressional record more than anybody,
Jenny Beth Martin (26:44):
Doesn't surprise me.
Steve King (26:45):
I would do special orders sometimes every night of the week for an hour, and I would just pound away. But one of the things that I would say is that this Obamacare is the nationalization of your skin and everything inside it. And that's what's happened is just like that. And you've really illustrated that with the covid circumstances that we have in our relationship with the World Health Organization, the United Nation, the World Economic Forum. This vertical integration of globalism is just pushing down on us more and more. And to put that genie back in the bottle, I don't know anybody that has the formula to actually do that effectively short the words we don't want to utter,
Jenny Beth Martin (27:21):
Right? I don't think that we, I am not sure how we're going to fix it, but I think that it's important that we continue to stand up for what is right and show there is an alternative and argue for another alternative. And hopefully we can get legislation passed that it spans freedom again, rather than the power and control.
Steve King (27:42):
I would start with repeal Obamacare, just rip it out by the roots and let the chips fall where they may, it can't be as bad as covid, whatever it is we've gone through worse than it would be, and then we can see what we need to do to rebuild it. But not only that, but they've taken the work ethic out of America. You'll pay you not to work because they get the covid piece of that. And then that destroyed the work ethic in many of the households destroyed millions of small businesses that'll never be back again, will not be the same country. And the strength of this country was farmers and shopkeepers. And we've got fewer farmers and we've got a lot fewer shopkeepers today because of that.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:18):
That is so true. And I knew that businesses would be destroyed. And having gone through personal financial crisis because of a business failure, I know just how bad that can be, and I didn't want to see that happen. And what's so sad, Steve, is that the circumstances, so we're now in, as we're recording this, it is February of 2024 and it still took, it will still be another four and a half weeks or five weeks until we get to the point where they shut down four years ago. So we're about five weeks shy of the four year anniversary of shutting everything down. And we were kind of calm during the first 15 days to slow the spread, even though internally we were going, this is just a problem. You cannot do this. It's going to destroy the economy. And I was warning my team initially I wasn't going to stay quiet for very long at all.
Jenny Beth Martin (29:19):
And I was like, we're just going to have major problems. So then after 15 days, I just was like, we can't do this. And started talking, speaking out. I was on calls with the vice president, I was on calls with people in the White House, and Trump comes out and he says, we need to be open by Easter. And the media mocked him for that, but he was right. We needed to be open by Easter. Schools needed to be open and we needed to resume normality and we didn't. And so now here we are nearly four years later, and I just talked to someone like a week ago who has recently had to close her business because of the problems with Obamacare. And that is going to continue to happen. And people don't realize that we're still going to see business closures, I would imagine for the next five or six years related to the lockdowns. And people will lose their houses and they will lose everything. They put all their savings into saving the business and ultimately probably over-leverage themselves.
Steve King (30:23):
I know what that's like when you say over-leverage that it's one thing to be under water with your business, and then if you've got a loan you have to pay off on top of that, if your capital is disappears on you, it's awfully hard to put that back together and maintain your operations. Additionally, within the healthcare industry, we used to have general practitioners that would hang their shingle up and you could go in there and get your checkup, you get treatments sew up or whatever you needed. And I don't know that there's any of 'em left anywhere anymore that aren't affiliated with a larger healthcare system because of Obamacare and the bureaucracy and the machinery of the priorities that they have. So the industry now is kind of more or less the arm of government. And I think we've lost a lot of potential young people that would've gone into the healthcare business, surgeons, doctors of all kinds that were discouraged because of what they saw their parents go through.
Steve King (31:14):
And that's one thing that sustains our healthcare industry is the children of the healthcare providers are inspired by their parents, and then they go off and continue that path just like the police do in New York for that example. So I just think it hurt us in all kinds of ways, and it just damaged our God-given liberty. That's a thing that troubles me as much as any, is that the disrespect for individual rights and rights of liberty that we use, that the creativities that comes from out of the declaration itself, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and I'll just say they're always prioritized rights, that life is the highest priority. Humans life is sacred in all of its forms, and it begins at the moment of conception. That's a sacred right, that cannot be trampled by anybody's liberty. Liberty to not have to change diapers or whatever that might be is not a reason to take a life.
Steve King (32:08):
And then the liberty is God-given liberty too. You can exercise your liberty out to the extent of that you don't travel on someone else's life or their liberty. And the pursuit of happiness is actually comes from the Greek word eudemonia. If you go back and read some of the Greek philosophers, and I've done a little of that, but I can't quote him exactly, but it comes down to this, that eudemonia was the word that Jefferson was trying to define. And he used pursuit of happiness because in the way of understanding it, it is mind, body and soul. Each one of us have gifts from God, and it's our obligation to develop them, develop your mind intellectually by education, by constantly being curious and using all of the faculties you have that way take care of your body because it's a temple for the Lord. And it lets you do the things to glorify him and enrich yourself.
Steve King (33:00):
And I don't mean that financially, I mean that spiritually. The other piece of that is spiritually so mind, body and soul pursuit of happiness. And you can do all of that as long as you don't trample on somebody else's liberty. And anyone can do all those things with their liberty as long as they don't Dr on someone else's life. And that's the vision. But then the individualism that comes from that, the American spirit, the American entrepreneurship, the American exceptionalism, springs forth from those things that established plus the pillars of American exceptionalism. And that's how I define them. And they're under assault every day by the left. And a lot of times squishy Republicans are participating whether they're useful idiots in this or whether they actually are just leftists in sheep's clothing, I am not sure about some of them, but freedom of speech, religion, press, and the press and assembly, the right to keep in bear arms tried by a jury, your peers, no double jeopardy, those kind of things.
Steve King (33:58):
And no unreasonable search and seizure. That is the foundation of the pillars of American exceptionalism in the Bill of Rights. But I'd add to that free enterprise capitalism and the rule of law and America sits on those pillars. And when I think of Ronald Reagan shining city on a hill, I always wondered, how's that work? Isn't it actually sitting on the pillars of American exceptionalism that hold it up the way I've described? And you've got these leftists down there with their verbal and keyboard jackhammers every day chiseling away at those pillars. And our job is to shoo 'em away and refurbish the pillars and get our freedom back.
Jenny Beth Martin (34:34):
That is exactly right. And why you continue to be involved even outside of Congress, right?
Steve King (34:42):
Can't help myself. Jenny Beth,
Jenny Beth Martin (34:44):
You talk about a little bit about what you're doing right now to preserve and protect those rights.
Steve King (34:53):
Well, I started out, when I got home, I thought, I'll raise a garden and play with the grandkids. I did some of that. You
Jenny Beth Martin (34:59):
Don't know why you thought that would work for you. You're not a person who sits still.
Steve King (35:04):
No, it doesn't work that way for me. Course. And you know that. But so as I'm watching what was going on when there was the inflation reduction Act, which had within it AOCs Green New Deal that was cooked up in Davos, Switzerland 15 years ago, Larry Fink, the chairman and CO of BlackRock with $10 trillion at their disposal, he's been planting these seeds and selling the I idea across Europe that we have a global warming crisis, and the only way we can solve that crisis is to sequester O2 because CO2 is supposedly increasing the temperature on earth. And I take you all through the science argument of that thing, and those guys are wrong, but they pushed that into Europe and sold it to them politically. And then they sold it to the Democrats in this country politically. And we've got, of course, Al Gore and John Kerry and those folks that were pushing it, but George Soros and Klaus Schwab, Larry Fink, that circle of people and actually cook it up in Geneva and then roll it out for the public at their convention in Davos.
Steve King (36:06):
But that's all coming at us, and I'm seeing it come. And when it got to us, when Biden signed that, that launched big companies to come into the upper Midwest. And because we have something like the numbers of 120 ethanol plants in the corn belt in the upper Midwest, and out of them comes the largest mass of the purest form of CO2 known anywhere in the world. And so it comes out of a pipe, it's the bio generator component of that. They don't have to sort it or filter it. It's 98 plus percent pure. And so in that bill signed by Biden, there's $85 a metric ton for every ton of CO2 that you can compress and sequester it somewhere. So these handful of people decided we'll take that and we'll build a pipeline connecting all these ethanol plants together. And then we'll take the CO2, compress it to 2200 pounds a square inch, which is the same pressure that's in the hydraulic hose of my excavators and dozers, and pump it up for our 3,600 miles of pipeline, like an artery system to pull it together and pump it up to the North Dakota near the oil fields.
Steve King (37:13):
They say not in it. And in Southern Illinois, same story when I see that and they say, we're not going to use eminent domain. I know these farmers and they want to go through the best farmland in the world for 3,600 miles, and they think these farmers are going to sell them easement access just by them offering a check. And I knew that couldn't be true. And so I got on and started paying attention, and about two months after I got started, they announced they were applying for eminent domain to condemn private property for private gain. And these companies, one of them is, and now they've pulled back, but the Larry Finks BlackRock, and that's the Democrat side of it, and the blue flag, so to speak. The red flag is run by Bruce Raser and Iowa grown ethanol magnate. He's now a globalist. He's got ethanol plants in Brazil too.
Steve King (38:06):
It's kind of a global network of stuff that he's pulled together. But he is, Bruce Raett is the George Soros of the upper Midwest, and he's driving this pipeline and they want eminent domain, and they've been changing some laws along this line as far back as 2019 to prepare for this time. And so we formed an organization, this is my brainchild, but I have to say we, because we've got good volunteers and we have to have a multi-state organization so that we can coordinate and communicate with each other. So the organization is called Free Soil and Free Soil Foundation, actually. And I formed a 5 0 1 C3 on that. And then so we have North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois as affiliates and Minnesota, as soon as they show up, they're going to be in there too. And so we've been fighting that and doing events in the states that I've mentioned.
Steve King (38:59):
And then also I hired a lobbyist to be in Des Moines to fight in favor of the legislation that we are trying to move through there. That's part of the effort, but also I anticipate that this will have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It's a property rights issue. The Fifth Amendment says, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. We know that there was a kilo decision in 2005 where the government with Supreme Court made an erroneous decision and they confiscated Suzette Kilo's house in order for Pink House. Yeah, the little Pink house. And if anybody hasn't seen that movie, I highly recommend it because it personalizes a constitutional argument. Justice Scalia told me within the week of that decision, sitting just like this, it's an erroneous decision and it will be reversed one day. I remember the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, and that's something that drives me because he's not around to help with that anymore.
Steve King (39:58):
But whatever gifts I have, I need to develop a way to get this thing done and hopefully reverse kilo. That's not the real objective. It is. Let's defeat these people so that they don't condemn all this farmland. And I'm telling the people I'm working with fight every skirmish wherever it is, go find a skirmish and get into it and fight it. And if you can't find one, start one. We want to fight them everywhere in every county at every level. And I've got personal suits filed in three cases now where they've denied me my right to speak before the utilities board, even as a representative of a landowner that just had a heart surgery the three days before and couldn't ask me to do so. And every other provision allows for that. They don't want to hear my voice in there. And it's been, I could write a book about this, but instead I'm focused on getting this done.
Steve King (40:47):
And we've connected with some pretty good networks that are there. Vivek Ram Swami has made a commitment in Iowa and other places and sent me a text about maybe 10 days ago too, that he's in this fight for us with us all the way to the Supreme Court, and that's helpful. He's got some resources. He's a smart lawyer as we know, and I was on his presidential campaign and hammering this issue, stop after stop, seven, eight, sometimes 10 stops a day. So I'm going to stay with that fight until we get it done. And I don't see it being resolved anytime soon. The fight just changes. That's what keeps me going.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:22):
Sometimes when people run for president, they wind up, even if they don't win, they bring attention to an issue and can use the base that they've built to bring attention to the issue. And his base is in Iowa, so that works out really
Steve King (41:40):
Well. It does. And Jenny Beth, I should say too in this that I brief five presidential candidates on this CO2 property rights issue. And it's, by the way, it's a very dangerous gas too. It's an asphyxiant. And so we use it to euthanize hogs in our packing plants and do that to put, when chickens have to be put away, use CO2 on them. There was a lake in Cameroon in Africa, 1986 that had kind of a natural burp of CO2 that came out of it. It's heavier than air and a concentration of 10% for like two seconds, and you're dead. That's how bad it is. And it went out across that lake because that's the lowest part heavier than air. And the villages around that edge, there were 1700 to 2000 people, all of them killed, and three to 4,000 hit a cattle. And every chicken and everything else around there, when the person that came in there to see what had happened after the air had cleared, said they walked along and they saw death everywhere and whatever they were doing, they were dead there. You can't smell it. You can't see it. You just lose consciousness. And the thing that was the iest was with all that death, there wasn't a single fly buzzing kill the flies too. So this is very dangerous. If it erupts, if a pipeline breaks, which they have done and eventually will, then it fills the lowest area that's there, and if you're in it, you're dead. So that's part of what the battle is here is that,
Jenny Beth Martin (43:03):
And there's the imminent domain issue, but what do they do with the CO2 now and how is it being created from the ethanol and then they're using it obviously to help with our feed, I guess with livestock as you said?
Steve King (43:23):
Yeah. Okay. So the ethanol, the corn to ethanol picture, it's actually a fairly easy formula to explain. It's a bush lip corn weighs 56 pounds, and it's three parts, almost equal parts. It's a third starch, a third protein, and a third CO2. And so the protein goes back as an animal feed dried distillers grains, a high quality animal feed and protein is in short supply. Starch is in large supply, but starch gets turned into ethanol. And then the CO2 is today being released just out of a stack like a chimney. But there's that CO2, then it's heavier than air, so it goes down on the ground. And usually these ethanol plants are sitting like in a river bottom or something, but there's little ground around there that's corn. And the corn yields around those ethanol plants are noticeably greater than they are in the rest of the area around because the CO2 accelerates plant growth.
Steve King (44:17):
And so that's what's happening now. But if they take that CO2 off of there and the government pays them to pump it into the ground where they say it's going to stay there forever and it's never going to come out, we don't know that. That's just what they say. But we also have science now and got a plant being built in Lena, Illinois, the Atkins energy plant that's taking the CO2 from the ethanol plant there and converting it into methanol. And so this methanol, it'll add two more gallons out of that bush of corn, get three gallons of ethanol out of a bush of corn now. And if you take the CO2 and convert it to methanol, you get two gallons of methanol. And the methanol is being used to convert diesel engines from diesel to methanol. It's on the high seas. Say Maersk, for example, has 742 container ships on the high seas, and they won't be allowed.
Steve King (45:06):
They, and the rest of 'em won't be allowed to dock at the European Union ports if they don't get their carbon index down by, I think the year is 2035. So they're shifting and they can use all of the methanol that we can produce out of, let's say out of 40 ethanol plants was their number. And instead they would take the CO2 and pump it into the ground because we can borrow money from China as a deficit spending taxpayers in order to pay some of the Chinese investors, by the way, who are invested in this to bury that in the ground rather than turn it into energy. And if they get this pipeline built, then they've got monopoly control on all that CO2. And that's really what the objective is, is to get monopoly control. And the taxpayers will be paying for that.
Jenny Beth Martin (45:47):
And if they get monopoly controlled, they just want to bury it or do they want to do anything else with it?
Steve King (45:52):
That is a good question actually. And it's this, that the $85 a metric ton that they're guaranteed, if they can bury it, sink it into the ground, that's like the guaranteed floor price. They also can convert it to methanol and they know that. And so if methanol pays more than the carbon credit at $85, they'll sell it as methanol. They can also use the credit to qualify, therefore green jet fuel converting, converting ethanol into jet fuel that has a low carbon rating on it. And they'll have carbon credits that they could, if they don't sell 'em to the federal government, then they can sell 'em on the open global market, which has been created by, I'll say some of the rest of the first world. The Europeans, for example, they have a penalty phase in there. You have to pay a price if you're emitting too much CO2 here, we pay people to sequester it there.
Steve King (46:45):
You have to pay a price so they can buy those CO2 credits off of what would be open market credits. That's another thing they could do with that CO2. And so there's several different ways that they can market it. And he would have the option of all those things and he would have essentially a monopoly control. And there's another word we, Manny, and that was the word I learned in this process. And that monopsony is a business that only has one customer right now. It's only the federal government that would buy it. And a Manny is ahor to abhorrent as a monopoly is, and they've got both.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:21):
Wow. And so people, if they want more information on that, they can go to the Free Soil Foundation and learn more about you're doing,
Steve King (47:29):
In fact, it'll be Freeso Land is the website. Oh, that's
Jenny Beth Martin (47:33):
Good. Free Soil Land.
Steve King (47:35):
I spent a little time thinking about that. But actually the one which was the broader umbrella corporation is Land of the Free, and that's Marilyn's idea. I was on the phone wrestling around trying to come up with a right name, and she said, why? I said, what would you name it? Well, land of the Free. Okay. I liked it. That's
Jenny Beth Martin (47:54):
Good. That's really good. Okay, so one more thing. You've got a new book. What is the book about and where can people find it?
Steve King (48:03):
Well, okay, they can find it@steveking.com, and that's just pretty easy, steve king.com. But I knew when I left Congress, I had to write this book because as you know, they lined up everybody globally and trashed me. And there was nothing I could say or do to correct the record. They were going to do what they were going to do. And so I would go out on my deck at five 30 in the morning and my one by 12 across the arms of my chair and type until my fingers and brain didn't coordinate anymore. Then I go back again day after day. But this book is about walking through the fire, my fight for the heart and soul of America. And some of it's about my background, some of which I told you at the beginning of this discussion. But then it goes into the machinations of what takes place in the United States Congress and how Kevin McCarthy and others operated, maneuvered and engineered to get me out of the way.
Steve King (49:03):
And when I wrote this book, I wanted to make sure that there was nothing vindictive in this book and that there's nothing that says, poor me. I'm not a poor me at all. I'm a greatly blessed man and I'm happy. And I said to Maryland the other day that you get what you pay for. And I paid a very high price to get out of Washington DC of all the pounding that they did on me. But you get what you pay for. I'm surrounded by a loving family, and it's just terrific. But this tells the story and it helps you understand the things we were talking about on what some people are willing to do. And it's all factual. It's been out now for a year and a half or so altogether. And not one fact in this has been challenged. In fact, the only edit that it got was when Louis Gohmert, Michelle Bachman both read it and wrote blurbs for this book.
Steve King (49:49):
But Louis found where I had used a slang term for a subcommittee, and I corrected that to the exact term. But it is a good read, I think. And people come back to me and tell me they're awfully glad that they've had it to read it. And I had to have it out there. I could not have let, and you can go to my Wikipedia page and you can see how bad it is. There's not a true word in there that I can find. I haven't looked at it in a year or something, but it's awful. No, I
Jenny Beth Martin (50:16):
Never look at Wikipedia.
Steve King (50:18):
Give you an example on how bad they've targeted me there, though, is that, let's see, Kevin McCarthy, the last I checked, he had 19 pages. If you printed 'em all in Wikipedia. And Nancy had 42 pages. I have 41 that's crazy. And it's all trash me, and you just can't change it. But this book is all factual and hopefully it's uplifting. It's got the core of my faith in there, how that sustained me. And throughout all of that, I was the worst person in the world for probably two years. And you never know what people are saying about you, but I knew that this too shall pass, and I knew the Lord would never leave me. I knew that I had to just walk through the fire and I would not be burned. And that's in Isaiah, and that's by the way, opening the book.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:00):
Very good. Well, thank you so much for with me today, and thanks for everything that you did to help teach me how Washington works. We didn't go into a lot of details about it. We talked about some of the stories, but that's part of why I wanted to do this. We're going to be celebrating our 15th anniversary is a tea party movement, and I just want to make sure people know that we're still around and we still exist and we're still fighting, but there were people along the way who made it possible for us to still be here 15 years later. And you're one of them, and I appreciate you so much.
Steve King (51:37):
Well, Jenny Beth, your conviction has what's held this together all this time, and I know that, and I've gotten to witness it and get to count you as a good and close friend. And I hope we keep up in this battle. You're not going to let up and neither am I.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:48):
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Steve King.
Narrator (51:51):
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 (52:10):
If you like this episode, let me know by hitting the light button or leaving a comment or a five star review. And if you want to be the first to know every time we drop a new episode, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications for whichever platform you're listening on. If you do these simple things, it will help the podcast grow and I'd really appreciate it. Thank you so much.