He is a republican from arizona on the judiciary and oversight and accountability committees, as well as a Freedom Caucus member. Representative biggs, welcome to the program. Guest good to be with you. Host can you give us an update on what is happening in the house . You put out a posting on x yesterday with the words shut it down. Guest [laughs] this is what i am observing happening. Myself and a bunch of other people met across the spectrum of our conference yesterday. What you are seeing now is the rules committee has been meeting. They are talking about doing what we call combined rule. I will not get into the weeds but they are going to do combined rule on four appropriations bills. They are then going to approve or authorize the amendment process on those four bills. They will vote on that sometime this weekend and we will begin debating the amendments proposed for those four bills, and at some point, i anticipate next week i do not know if we will pass out but we will vote on those four bills. The problem is we are supposed to do 12 appropriation bills. That means two have not even been through committee so that means you are looking at three possible scenarios. I am going to provide a prediction to you and i have provided it to other media. I think what is going to happen is some point before the end of next week you will have there will be a procedure that several republicans are going to support with the democrats and actually provide their own version of a continuing resolution. In the meantime, everybody else will be working on those 12 appropriation bills. Host do you support a stopgap measure . A continuing resolution . Guest i do not and let me explain why. There is multiple reasons why but first of all is that people typically continue spending at current levels. You add that with over half 1 trillion in interest. What a continuing resolution does is basically something that congress has done for years to avoid actually doing the 12 appropriations bills. The result has been massive structural deficits, continued growth in the national debt, and that problem is part of the reason you are seeing the Inflationary Pressure you see today. My solution has been you should be doing Something Like pass if you are going to do a shortterm measure, continue funding military personnel, ice, and the vast majority of the rest of the government is already funded through other mechanisms that have been passed to ease the pain of potential government pauses over time. Medicare, medicaid, Social Security keeps getting paid. That would then provide you a little stopgap and still provide incentive for members of congress to do their job for a change. Host and you are calling it a pause as opposed to a shut down. You wrote in an oped here for the hill, because federal spending to save our nation. What kind of impact do you think that will have not only on federal workers, people that rely on federal services, and also the u. S. Economy . Guest the vast majority of federal services are covered and paid for an ongoing. We have taken care of that through passed legislation. Medicare, medicaid, Social Security keeps going. There are other necessary employees that keep going. But everybody lets say, you are a nonessential worker or deemed nonessential. Everything you get at the end of that shut down, you get paid back everything. You do not actually forgo anything. The problem you want to ease as much as you can that difficulty upfront. But we are talking about that, but lets talk about the negative consequences if you continue with a continuing resolution. That is the way this congress has chosen to govern for many years. The last time they passed a balanced budget was 1994. What you are doing is keeping the high spending of government in place instead of actually addressing waste duplication and areas where you might otherwise try to bring your budget back into balance. You perpetuate this generational theft because you are borrowing more and more money and a few years from now if we keep going on this path, interest is going to be higher than we spend on military spending. Host what are the areas of cooperation, compromise you would be willing to see . Where would you compromise with other republicans and other democrats . Guest well, right now we are trying to do the 12 bills the way the law requires us to do and go forward. Host but if there is no time for all 12, where would you compromise . Guest there is no time for all 12. I am telling you now. [laughs] it should have happened months ago. Where i am willing to go is say, the essential people like the military, like Border Patrol which is being overrun right now you make sure they get funded for their salary, and then you have to basically take the bitter pill that we are going to have to shut down temporarily. That is why it is a pause. It is not a shut down because the vast majority of government keeps going. You basically say we are going to have to pause. Everybody is going to get their money back. It is not a shut down. It is not a reduction spending because everybody gets paid ultimately. But if you go full on and say we are going to have a clean cr, you do not affect policy, you do not affect any spending, and everything keeps going on in the current way it is. I would say from the left and right there is disapprobation in the way things are being run and spent. Host we will start taking calls from viewers, but before that, i want to ask about this article in the hill that says, senate gop critics mccarthy will go to democrats for a vote. It says that Senate Republicans are predicting the speaker will reach out to House Democrats to get the votes to prevent a shut down at the end of next week. What do you think about that . Guest i dont know who the Senate Gopers are who said that. But i think it is a number of people in our conference that will reach out and that is what i was saying earlier. There is a mechanism they can use. It is too late to do a discharge petition, but under certain procedural moves they can still delete and replace on a bill and do a cr. Who knows for how long . Who knows what that would look like . But i dont think Speaker Mccarthy would necessarily do it but we do have some that would. Host what is the likelihood or possibility of a motion to vacate the chair on Speaker Mccarthys speakership . Guest i dont really know. I know there has been a couple of people who have been adamant and outspoken about it. As you know, a lot of people indicate they are going to do something in congress and maybe they change their mind. I really dont know. Host is there anything that would lead you to do that . Guest i have heard people talking about it. Sorry . Host is there anything that would lead you to do that . Guest no, i am not going to make a motion to vacate. I might vote for one but i will not make the motion. I view the speakers tenure that is for somebody else to try to make their case to see if that individual can get enough people to vote for or against. Host lets talk to viewers. Joe is first, a republican in Point Pleasant beach, new jersey. Caller how are you doing, mr. Biggs . Big fan. I grew up in new york city, republican which is not easy but i was watching the hearings the other day. I am upset with the republicans. They were talking to him like he was an old grandfather. You are the only guy, you and the guy from wisconsin, you are tough on him. Nobody was asking him questions. I feel like it is 1938 germany and this guy is looking for conservatives. He is going after the guy i like, President Trump, and nobody stood up to the guy. This guy is in the Freedom Caucus, right . Guest he is. Caller why isnt he removed but you have the girl from georgia, Marjorie Taylor greene, who has more guts than half the guys up there, they kicked her out. I think i am done. I like you but President Trump is not getting support from the guise of their. Host lets get a response. Guest i appreciate your response. I dont know what mr. Bucks theory of the case is but my theory is he has taken the department of justice and put more fuel on the fire for weaponization and politicize asian of government. An example is i had a constituent i should not say constituent. Someone from arizona. This guy should not have been there. No allegation of violence, no allegation of vandalism. He turned his cameras over to the fbi so they could prosecute others based on his video. They are asking for this guy to go 21 years in prison and it is so disproportionate. That is what i was trying to get at when i was asking Merrick Garland questions. You have got a guy that has set quotas on what he is going to do, the number of people he wants to prosecute, or believes he is going to prosecute, and it is disparate. If we are content with that in the United States of america, than i dont know how we ever recover what we believed were freedoms and reliance on due process for everyone. As both a prosecutor and defense lawyer, you cannot have judges that imply to jurors that some but he is guilty. A judge is supposed to make it very clear, for instance, that there is no evidence of guilt or innocence. It is merely what the state is asserting and the burden of proof never shifts. From my observation of some of these cases that have gone on, i am not sure we are adhering to those longstanding impartiality notions that go into due process. Which is why i was attacking the attorney general who never really gave me a straight answer. Host moses is next in greenville, mississippi, democrat. Caller good morning. How are you doing . I sit back and i watched this political mess unfolding and i view it as endangerment and indoctrination. Everybody else is supposed to be working for the people and the country but it is apparent people have ulterior motives. If we keep going down this road, we are going to be in a world of trouble. They shipped all the jobs overseas. They reduced the taxes on the corporations but the Republican Party sit there and want to cut these programs. Where are we headed . That is all i want to know, but remember, this is dangerous indoctrination that is manifesting itself in the current political environment. Thank you. Guest thanks, moses, for the question. I want to tell you that i agree with you on multiple parts of your question. I might disagree on a couple of parts but let me try to address them. You did what i used to call a compound question. Lets talk about shifting jobs overseas. Yes, we have got to incentivize jobs to come back to the United States. We have to because when that happens, we create more economic activity, we create more jobs, and we become less reliant on the whims of other nations political leaders, such as china and its ability to control critical minerals. Whether you are an environmentalist or not im not seeing a lot of my colleagues willing to make reductions right now. In what i said earlier on, thats this, every year heres a way to think of it. This is roughly, this is roughly, im not going to give you exact numbers, but right about now, we will bring in revenue in the federal government 35 trillion 5 trillion. Thats just an incredible amount of money. 5 trillion. But every year the federal government spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 trillion. Including interest. Right around there. Interest probably takes a little bit above 2 trillion. That hole right there requires us to borrow more money and that is a bad cycle and it causes us to keep spending further and further down and that causes us to have inflation and it causes massive squeezing of people in the economy. So ill tell you two things that really, i think, need to happen. And i would hope that you would agree, i mean, we wont find out because youre off. But i would say, number one, we have to become Energy Independence again Energy Independent again. We have to stop importing and trying to import energy from people who dont even that alleviates a massive amount of cost relieving pressures in our economy so youd feel a reduction in prices actually fairly swiftly if we did that. The second thing is, when we get involved overseas because i take it you want us to take care of home first, by your question. I agree with you. We need to take care of home first. This notion that youre going to send billions and billions of dollars to ukraine really is a bit of a problem for me because were now involved in a conflict that has the potential to become a wider regional war and there is no plan to get out of it there. Is no plan, no exit ramp, nothing that is for the United States of america. All these things are wrapped up into what youre saying, moses. But i hope i answered your question. Host lets talk to david in virginia. Independent. Hi, david. Caller good morning. Thank you, cspan for washington journal and ive got a couple of questions or comments for representative biggs. Number one, in terms of having a balanced budget, you mentioned that spending out paces revenue by about 2 trillion a year. And so one thing i think you could do is, theres 640 million acres of federal land, mostly in nevada, california, and alaska. You could take 1 of that, which was 6. 4 million acres, and lease it out to companies that provide energy and i think that would be, you know, for that area of the country, solar panels, maybe wind, possibly modular, nuclear plant, and generate electricity in those areas, california is going to need more energy as they go more electric vehicles. This would raise a lot of revenue, it would create job, you wouldnt have to raise taxes, you wouldnt cut any programs, but it would be a way for the federal government to take unused assets and then generate something positive with it. Host what do you think, congressman . Guest thank you for that. I have advocated for a listening time for the federal government in my own state of arizona, the fifth largest state geotbraskly in this nation, and its huge. Its a huge state. Land is only about 18 to 20 of that land is in private ownership. Including swaths of land where people are just holding onto land, theres nothing productive going on on that land. You have 0 taken off the books. Its worse in nevada. Its worse in alaska. Its not the same in california. California has far more far greater percentage of private land because of when it came into the union. So. Do i think you should actually do what youre saying . You know, you sound like youre supporting conservation easements which i dont support. But if youre talking about actually leasing the land to individuals or businesses that could do something productive on that land without causing damage to that land, then yeah. I would support Something Like that. In fact, ive advocated that, im part of something called the western caucus where we advocate for those types of things. But i support foz ill fuels. I totally support fossil fuels. They are essentially boundless in some ways and they are more easily distributable