WTH is the House GOP Doing on National Security? Hugh Hewitt Explains what the House Freedom Caucus Means for Defense and Ukraine

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, History, Government, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2023

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

The race for Speaker of the House underscored the 2022 midterm narrative: the Republican Party is increasingly divided, and unable to consolidate power long enough to effect positive change. Now Speaker Kevin McCarthy was held hostage by a powerful “Knucklehead Caucus” (our guest’s moniker for the Never Kevinites) until its leader Matt Gaetz simply “ran out of things to ask for.” Some of these same dissenters have now been promoted to top committees in the House, the results of McCarthy’s Faustian pact to claim the speakership. Who are the Knuckleheads? Are they all knuckleheads? And how did this isolationist group of extremist budget hawks group climb atop the GOP pile? Among the reasons -- lack of strong leadership in the party, a lack of national security leadership in the White House, an end to substantive national debate in favor of social media hot takes, and more. And all of it is worrisome for the trajectory of the GOP, and America, going forward.

Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host with the Salem Radio Network. He is the Former Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management. He has been a correspondent at Fox, and was the former president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. He is also a columnist at the Washington Post.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.0	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?
0:01.1	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:35.0	Hi, I'm Danielle Pekka.
0:36.8	And I'm Mark Thiessen. Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on. Mark,
0:43.1	what the hell is going on now? What the hell is going on is we're doing a little bit of a deep dive on what our friend Hugh Hewitt calls the knucklehead caucus in the House of Representatives,
0:55.4	the people who were holding up the Speaker's vote. And we're not so much the Speaker's Vote anymore,
1:00.5	but talking about what this means for the future of the Republican Party. And our conversation
1:05.7	was really about what this means for a future of a serious conservative Republican foreign policy going forward
1:12.1	because you've got the knucklehead caucuses, as we discussed with Chad Pergram, is not a unified
1:17.9	force. There are serious people like Chip Roy in it. And then there are not so serious people like
1:22.8	Lauren Bober and Matt Gates in it. But they're newly empowered. And there's real concern that we're going to cut
1:29.8	defense spending. We're going to cut aid to Ukraine. They profess a Taftyan isolationism that the
1:36.5	Republican Party hasn't seen in great force in a long time. And we spent some time talking
1:43.0	with our guest Hugh Hewitt today about how we can bring back a Reaganite foreign policy and keep that in the mainstream of the Republican Party.
1:50.1	What do you think, Danny?
1:51.5	Well, I'm less of an optimist.
1:53.4	I have to say, you know, one of the pleasures in talking to Hugh is he's diving down on the difference between what I call noise and substance.
2:03.6	But the truth is that what the public hears, what guides the public, what guides the voter is noise.
2:11.6	It's not serious people doing serious work. I worry so much that the party has become defined by the likes of
2:20.4	Lauren Bobert and Matt Gates. And a big part of that is the fact that the media, the what people
2:27.4	call the media democratic complex, which I think is perhaps a little bit bombastic, but is largely accurate, is amplifying the
	...

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