things, you can t get away with that on our show. many things we will look at. laura: that is not a number. that is one of them, one know if the defense hawks in the representatives that will put up a fight for that, but we have to have a budget that balances and that s what to laura: congressman gaetz on that, that is the hawks and the republican party and some of the democrat party are saying no, no, no, you can t touch it. i heard the defense, you are being responsible irresponsible with national security, the wall street journal with a powerful piece, national security is at risk with what you did. i represent the district of highest attribute in military in the country, we can defend the country and project power more efficiently and more proactively than we do. donald trump was the first president to demand an audit of the pentagon. laura: he did not cut defense. we got an audit so we showed where they failed to deliver on authorities and when we start with uk
there is less involvement that s needed abroad and i think just the amounts that have been talked about about pairing back defense is really going to is already really upsetting those defense hawks and i think that s why at least for now kevin mccarthy didn t want to put it in writing and perhaps to solve that problem down the line. literally aspirational. [ laughter ] right. so let s talk about the new problem that president biden finds himself with that they found these ten documents, classified in his private office and they apparently discovered this in november right before the election. immediately turned it over to the national archives as far as we ve been told. we only found about it yesterday. how big a deal is this and do you think it more of a political problem or national security/legal problem? we re still peeling back the layers of the onion. we don t know what transpired here. at the moment for sure it s a political problem. i don t know yet if there are
it s about chairmanship. it s about balanced budgetary concerns. what i would just suggest is that chip roy who, you know, you can think of him maybe as the ted cruz of the house. he was ted cruz s chief of staff. he is a principled fiscal conservative freedom caucus guy. but he was able to deliver 14 votes that actually caused this break. and it took this to get kevin mccarthy to pay attention to these substantive policy concerns. could they have had these conversations a month ago? but they didn t. one of the details that i m looking for tonight because there is a lot of chatter about this is what agreements were made as it relates to defense spending? there was a massive increase in defense spending. there have been some rumors about whether there is going to be mandated cuts in defense spending or a freeze. i m not sure what the truth of it is here. but there are a lot of defense hawks in this republican conference who like to see more defense again, common wisdom is that
mccarthy speaker designate an hour ago so i think that s a hint where he s going to go so the ones who made a deal will be in a much better position to make deals for their constituents the next few years than those who simply refersed to deal. laura: great point, good faith all the way around that way. raymond, i have to touch back on the issue we briefly mentioned earlier which is the defense budget. you have all these defense hawks that say you can t touch at this time, you can t touch it, you can t touch it. but is that really realistic given the fact we have $33 trillion in debt and exploding costs of government continuing to increase year after year. is that realistic? well, whether it s realistic or not, this republican ma josh at this time, slim majority has agreed to sideline, you know, the defense budget. it s all the discretionary spending they ll take a look at. but laura i m still puzzled why this wasn t all hammered out in the days after they secured the
there is a desire among the freedom caucus folks and the rebels to have a church-style committee looking at the fbi and the department of justice. the big fear among establishment republicans is that this is not going to be the church committee. this is going to be an effort by individuals who have defied congressional subpoenas during the january 6th investigation, to actually obstruct justice from the, you know, with a gavel in their hands, from a committee. i mean, there are real fears here. let s talk about one of them. scott perry whose phone was taken by the fbi, we have a number of people by the way, including kevin mccarthy, who it appears is about to become speaker, who defied the subpoena. the other group that i hear about is, there are supposedly still republican defense hawks, republicans who care about national security, they may have