Howell says the three drug-related gun charges against the younger Biden “are the smallest things that Hunter Biden should be facing in any fair and impartial investigation. It would be like charging the Unabomber with mail fraud or stamp fraud or something.”

“I mean, there are serious things like running an international pay-to-play, influencing-peddling scheme involving Chinese intelligence officers in some of the most corrupt corners of the world in Ukraine, and having your father fire a prosecutor over it,” says Howell, who is also an investigative columnist for The Daily Signal, adding:

So, those are the big things that should be focused on, but instead, they’re trying to get him on the small stuff here to give some appearance of the law actually being enforced.

Howell joins today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the three charges, what’s next for the younger Biden’s indictment, and some of the other work the Oversight Project is doing.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:

Samantha Aschieris: Joining today’s episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” is Mike Howell, director of the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation. Mike, thanks so much for joining us.

Mike Howell: Hey, thanks for having me.

Aschieris: Now, before we get into today’s topics, can you tell us a little bit more about the Oversight Project?

Howell: Right. So, we launched this about a year and a half ago. It is a recognition that we’re living in perhaps the most corrupt time in American history. And so the institutional Right and the American people deserve entities that are able to go out there and investigate and litigate on their behalf. And so, traditionally, The Heritage Foundation has been a real policy engine for the Right, but we wanted to add a new tool to our toolkit.

And so recognizing also that Congress hasn’t been able to get much in the way out of information, the executive branch or any accountability, by the way, we’re stepping in and filling that void through an all-star team of investigators and litigators.

So we go out—and all these major issues, you hear Congressman X, Y, Z sends a letter, they get nothing back. Well, we sue for that same stuff and we get stuff back because we’re in federal court.

And then you pair that up with some real exciting investigative tools and you’re really cooking with gas, applying this to the major policy issues of the day, I think really giving the American people what they’ve been missing for a long time, especially with the media just being completely co-opted, and that’s the straight, honest truth and the documents to back it up.

Aschieris: That’s great. You have all been doing such great work. And I want to talk more about what kind of work you’ve been doing, but first let’s talk about Hunter Biden.

Just last week on Sept. 14 the president’s son was indicted. As Fred Lucas reports, “The three-count indictment accuses Hunter Biden of lying on a form to purchase a Colt Cobra revolver by not revealing his addiction to crack cocaine. Conviction on the three charges could bring Biden up to 25 years in prison.”

First and foremost, can you tell us a little bit more about these three charges?

Howell: Yeah, absolutely. But at the outset, let me just say that these are the smallest things that Hunter Biden should be facing in any fair and impartial investigation. It would be like charging the Unabomber with mail fraud or stamp fraud or something.

I mean, there are serious things, like running an international pay-to-play, influencing-peddling scheme involving Chinese intelligence officers in some of the most corrupt corners of the world in Ukraine and having your father fire a prosecutor over it. So those are the big things that should be focused on, but instead, they’re trying to get him on the small stuff here to give some appearance of the law actually being enforced.

So on this gun thing, it’s important to recognize what actually happened. So, after Hunter’s brother Beau Biden unfortunately passed away, Hunter began a romantic relationship with his brother’s widow. And it was his brother’s widow who discovered a gun in Hunter Biden’s car when he was openly and notoriously addicted to drugs and all sorts of trouble. She then took that gun and threw it away in a grocery store dumpster.

When Hunter found out the gun was missing and she did that, he asked her to go get it. She went to go get it and it was missing. She alerted the grocery store manager who then reviewed the tapes and saw that a man who dug through trash found it. The police were called, there was concern because the dumpster was across the street from a high school.

So this is a horrendous fact pattern, absolutely just disgusting behavior all the way around. And so that’s what he was charged with, is lying on his form about being a drug user. So he was illegally in possession of a gun, that in addition to some tax crimes are what’s at play here.

Initially what [the Justice Department], after five years of investigating that crime—which that fact pattern has been known for a long time, so what took five years? I think you can answer that. It was political interference into the case.

Attorney [David] Weiss, who’s out of Delaware, cooked up a plea deal between Hunter and the government, which basically said, “OK, we are going to forgive you for every crime under the sun, including this international business peddling, but we’re going to give you pretrial diversion for the gun charge.”

And so that’s when we got involved with the Heritage Oversight Project. We were already suing DOJ on a lot of matters related to this, but we basically wrote a monster of a brief, and we were the first ones to do so, and I think only one of two at the end of the day that walked through all these issues with the judge overseeing it, saying, “There is a sweetheart giveaway, ‘get out of jail free’ card hidden in this plea deal.”

And that’s what blew up the plea deal, this recognition that this is not the way you absolve someone. It was essentially a pardon from [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and President [Joe] Biden to the first son over this diversionary deal.

So then that got scrapped and Weiss became special counsel—which is an abomination because he’s the one who should be under investigation himself—and actually took it to a grand jury who then decided to charge him. And so that’s where it’s at now.

Obviously, you went over the range of punishment that could be dolled out. We’ll see what ends up happening. The Bidens are going to fight this. We obviously know how weaponized the Department of Justice is. I would encourage the listeners not to buy into the appearance that they’re trying to sell that this is justice working, it’s not. It’s a big distraction.

Aschieris: And just speaking of our listeners, my next question was, what is the most important takeaway that our audience, our listeners, need to know about the indictment?

Howell: It’s not the indictment itself, they should need to know the indictment is a smokescreen. That unfortunately we are living in a highly, highly corrupt time in American history.

Never in the course of this nation’s history have we had a president that’s so clearly implicated in wrongdoing. We’re talking, over the course of a decade, a lot of money, well over $20 million that’s been identified going into tons of Biden family members who set up all sorts of different LLCs, which certainly appears to be for the purposes of money laundering.

You have official actions that have been tied to this in the firing of the Ukraine prosecutor that was investigating Hunter. You have Joe being intricately involved in the business, whether that’s in meetings, whether it’s on emails using his pseudonym, whether it’s Hunter’s business partner basically testifying that Joe was the product and the entire brand.

And so I think It’s really sad and unfortunate, but we need to be really clear-eyed about the fact that this is unacceptable. We cannot have this.

Our country lived through variations of this in the Clintons when they were running the Clinton Global Foundation and obviously, a lot of corruption there. [Former President Barack] Obama didn’t have to work too hard to make his money because big corporations like Netflix and company basically backed up the Brink’s trucks for him.

But this is a really, really poorly structured corruption scheme that we’re looking at and we just can’t tolerate it and it’s unacceptable.

Aschieris: What are the next steps for the indictment? What happens next?

Howell: It depends. If Weiss is actually investigating this—which, if you were a betting person, I would bet no—are they going to proceed with the real charges? And that’s the international pay-to-play scheme that’s apparent to everybody with any activity between their ears.

So that’s what I’m looking for.

As it relates to the gun charge, we’ll see. The Hunter Biden team has taken the offensive against the House. So last week they announced an impeachment inquiry. The first two major pieces of legal action were from the Biden team.

So the Biden team is suing the IRS whistleblowers, they’re saying they didn’t comply with the law. It’s outrageous because they certainly did. They went through this long process with the Ways and Means Committee to release information and that’s exactly what they did legally and ethically. And they’re also suing Marco Polo, which is the entity that put out the report on the Hunter Biden laptop.

And so they’re basically tying up, the Biden team is tying up the key sources of information for the House in federal court and the House hasn’t taken any steps in furtherance of their impeachment inquiry. So the table’s been flipped a bit.

It’s very frustrating, especially as someone who believes that whistleblowers deserve every last protection regardless of policies or politics, and I would like to see them protected more.

Aschieris: Now, in addition to Hunter Biden’s indictment, I also wanted to ask you more about the work that Oversight has been doing. Just recently you issued a memo on the investigation and trial of Dr. Patrick Ho. First and foremost, who is Dr. Patrick Ho?

Howell: So, Patrick Ho is currently in federal jail. He was a business partner of Hunter and by extension Joe. He was referred to by Hunter as “The bleeping spy chief of China.” OK, this is somebody with connections to [Chinese Communist Party] intelligence.

He was operating a group called CEFC, which was a Chinese energy conglomerate that was in business with Hunter. He got tied up in a, guess what, international bribery scheme—that’s kind of the pattern we’re seeing here—actually related to things in Africa. And so he went to jail for that.

To make matters more interesting, guess who his lawyer was? His lawyer was Hunter Biden for his case. He paid Hunter Biden a million dollars for “legal services,” which clearly, to me, appears to be a way to just get some political help by giving the president’s son a million dollars or tie things up with this fake attorney-client privilege for someone who’s probably not even doing any real legal work.

All sorts of questions about the DOJ’s handling of this case. Patrick Ho, I think, was subject to some surveillance, there’s tons of emails and communications to which the DOJ would’ve had awareness of Hunter Biden’s involvement in this. Obviously, no investigations or prosecutions emanated from that. So you have to wonder why DOJ, faced with what looks like a mound of evidence, did nothing.

Also, in the court filings you see this redaction of Hunter Biden and the Bidens from the records. And so that certainly appears as they’re trying to protect the Bidens from political fallout.

So these are the people that, if the House was doing a thorough, thorough job, would be center in the public campaign to let people know about how this corruption actually worked. So to that end, we stepped into the void and we put out about a 20-page memo that lays this all out. Check us out at Oversight PR, @OversightPR, on, I guess we call it X now, and we’ll walk you through every last part of this.

Aschieris: I will definitely make sure to include a link to the memo in the show notes so people can easily access it. In addition to this memo that you put out, what other work is the Oversight Project doing?

Howell: We’re all over the board. All the major issues of the day, we’re there. We are very aggressive in that we have, I think, about 35 active lawsuits right now for every topic under the sun.

Some of the recent high-profile successes on the pro-life front; what’s happening with the Supreme Court justices where basically the Biden administration and Merrick Garland made it a policy to allow the breaking of the law to intimidate them by protest over their house—that’s a retaliation for overturning Roe v. Wade and it’s completely lawless that the president is indirectly allowing intimidation of the Supreme Court he doesn’t like.

So we have been putting out document after document that basically shows how that has been working in practice.

We saw that the U.S. Marshals were directed not to arrest anybody who is engaged in this illegal activity under USC 1507 and instead gets to do this, take notes. Their job is to document it. And this is happening around the context and the time of an assassination attempt on [Justice] Brett Kavanaugh. And you have the U.S. Marshals saying, “Hey, we have seen no threats, no credible threats.” And so putting out a lot of information to further that.

On the border—and I’m a little biased here because I’m a former [Department of Homeland Security] guy from the Trump administration—we’ve been all over them.

One of the big things that we uncovered was [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas, after this fake whipping incident at the border where a bunch of liberals saw a horse and then just assumed that it was a whipping incident, we found out that Mayorkas knew there was no whipping. He was told by a staff.

And then he went to the White House podium and basically said it was a very racist thing he saw at the border and they just drug these guys through the mud and they tried to refer them for criminal prosecution. They wanted to lock up Border Patrol agents for securing the border.

And then guess what? When they figured out they couldn’t prosecute them, out of everybody in the world, the first person they wanted to break the bad news to was none other than Al Sharpton. This is how the libs work. It’s often these caricatures you see out there, they’re accurate. The DOJ’s like, “We got bad news, somebody call Uncle Al.” It is just outrageous.

But we could pick any different policy area that’s top of mind and we got a case there and documents that we’re putting out.

Aschieris: Any final thoughts on any of the topics that we discussed today?

Howell: Stay vigilant. I think one of the biggest problems with us on the Right is we let these things go. It’s a news cycle-type environment, it’s a social media-type environment. We need to see the connective thread between all of this and that’s one of corruption and that’s corruption in its classic sense of financial corruption, we’re certainly seeing that at the highest levels.

We’re also seeing that via policy with the veneer of legitimacy, whether it’s this COVID money or this transportation money that didn’t really go to transportation and infrastructure or if it’s the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was just another boondoggle.

We’re getting ripped off. There is power that is being illegitimately weaponized against us and it has legitimately awful consequences.

And so don’t take it one bite at a time, realize it’s the whole thing and our mission, not only as conservatives, but this is across party lines and political persuasions. We just need to get some legitimacy back in government. And we don’t have that now and it’s OK to say we don’t have that now because that’s the only way we get it back.

Aschieris: Well, Mike Howell, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Howell: Hey, thanks for having me.

“There’s no question about it now: The labor market is weakening,” Alfredo Ortiz, chief executive officer and president of the Job Creators Network, said in a statement.

“August marks the third consecutive month with fewer than 200,000 jobs created,” he added.

“Prior months’ job creation numbers were also massively revised down by 110,000 in a trend that is becoming commonplace. And real wages grew slower than core inflation, continuing the nation’s decline in living standards,” Ortiz also said.

The U.S. economy added 187,000 jobs and the unemployment rate increased to 3.8% in August, the bureau reported.

Payroll employment increases by 187,000 in August; unemployment rate rises to 3.8% https://t.co/ZwrVfLviqL #JobsReport #BLSdata

— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) September 1, 2023

“Given the challenges facing American small businesses, which create two-thirds of new jobs, this labor market weakness is no surprise. Small businesses are facing a one-two punch of high inflation and high interest rates due to Bidenomics,” Ortiz said.

He blamed President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress:

President Biden and Congressional Democrats are directly responsible for this difficult economic environment due to their reckless spending and anti-energy industrial policy.

To overcome these challenges and allow small businesses to broadly hire and raise real wages again, Congress should advance legislation that implements the American Small Business Prosperity Plan, a pro-growth policy playbook that reduces inflation, increases access to credit, and improves the American small business environment.

EJ Antoni, a research fellow for regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, also weighed in on Friday’s report. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

“Not only is the labor market slowing down, as expected, but previous data was overly rosy in their estimation. Every single month this year has seen its payroll numbers revised down,” Antoni told The Daily Signal in a statement. “It’s difficult to stress how unusual this is as it’s so statistically unlikely. There is clearly something wrong with the estimations being done by President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor.”

Terrible numbers in Aug #JobsReport and it gets worse with the increasingly suspicious "revisions"…
Here's a deep-dive, plain English with what you need to know… pic.twitter.com/3Pdba7u1gb

— E.J. Antoni, Ph.D. (@RealEJAntoni) September 1, 2023

“While 187,000 jobs were added in August, 59 percent of those were jobs we thought we already had because the previous two months were revised so heavily downward,” Antoni added.

The September jobs report will be released on Oct. 6 at 8:30 a.m., according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

“It’s great news for the consumer that inflation has slowed dramatically from 40-year highs, but we’re still in terrible shape,” EJ Antoni, a research fellow for regional economics in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in a written statement. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)

“Real weekly earnings are down 4.6% since January 2021 and prices are up 16% over that same time. Annual inflation has outpaced earnings gains for 26 of the last 30 months,” Antoni added. “Even more worrisome is the fact that inflation has settled at 3%, which is about 50% higher than either the two percent target or the 1.8% average we saw from 2009 until the Biden administration.”

CPI for all items rises 0.2% in June; shelter up https://t.co/dJyJeKlXDJ #CPI #BLSdata

— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) July 12, 2023

The food index increased 0.1%, the energy index increased 0.6%, the gasoline (all types) index increased 1%, and the shelter index increased 0.4%, while the fuel oil index decreased 0.4%, the utility (piped) gas service index decreased 1.7%, and the used cars and trucks index decreased 0.5%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Alfredo Ortiz, chief executive officer and president of the Job Creators Network, also reacted to the inflation report.

“The price of goods and services has risen by more than 16% over the course of President Biden’s term. This destruction in the dollar’s value has reduced Americans’ real wages and living standards,” Ortiz said in a written statement. “For some goods and services, such as food, prices are up more than 20%.”

“While inflation is finally coming back down, it remains far higher than the Federal Reserve’s target rate, and it’s important to remember today’s price increases are compounding off a much higher base,” Ortiz said. “Core inflation over the last year continues to outpace average wage growth, meaning Americans are still experiencing real wage destruction related to core goods and services.”

Inflation rose 0.1% in May and a year-over-year rate of 4%, CNBC reported.

The May report, released on June 13, showed that the food index increased 0.2%, the used cars and trucks index rose 4.4%, the apparel index rose 0.3%, and the transportation services index rose 0.8%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Meanwhile, the energy index decreased 3.6%, the fuel oil index decreased 7.7%, the medical care services index decreased 0.1%, and the gasoline (all types) index decreased 5.6%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last month.

The July consumer price index report will be released on Aug. 10 at 8:30 am.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

“Millions of Americans across the country trust their investments will be used to make a profit and hopefully one that they can live on comfortably in retirement because what we’re really after here, what we’re all investing in the long term, is financial security,” Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, said at a hearing. “But these days it’s not crazy for many Americans to wonder: Will I even be able to afford retirement?”

“This administration has driven inflation through the roof, it’s at a 40-year high, and pushed the economy to the brink of a major recession, which we all pray won’t happen, but it very well could in the next year,” Fallon, chairman of the economic growth, energy policy, and regulatory affairs subcommittee, said. “Now, due to Democrats’ ESG push, asset managers are prioritizing ESG goals over profit and risking Americans’ hard-earned money.”

ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance, is a business framework that elevates environmental and social causes over profit and shareholder value creation and has been popularized by some businesses and financial investors.

House Oversight and Accountability subcommittees on economic growth, energy policy, and regulatory affairs and health care and financial services held a hearing Tuesday titled “ESG Part II: The Cascading Impacts of ESG Compliance.”

The full committee previously held a hearing in May titled “ESG Part I: An Examination of Environmental, Social, and Governance Practices” with attorneys general.

“This administration has driven inflation through the roof and pushed the economy to the brink of a major recession.

Now, due to Democrats’ ESG push, asset managers are prioritizing ESG goals over profit and risking Americans’ hard-earned money.”@RepPatFallon opens ESG… pic.twitter.com/HMQX0z12Lk

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) June 6, 2023

“With ESG investing, businesses are now tasked with accounting not only for their own carbon footprints, but maybe the footprint of their contractors and suppliers, the race and gender of their corporate boards instead of the merit and performance of those same corporate board members,” Fallon said.

ESG flips financial management on its head and puts politics over your hard-earned money.

It's a sickening display of leftist nonsense that has no place in your investments. https://t.co/31V15i2ZyW

— Representative Lisa McClain (@RepLisaMcClain) June 6, 2023

“I am for the freedom to invest your own money into the causes you the client actually believes in. But that’s not what’s happening here. Managers are investing your money in causes they believe in and we are seeing real consequences for Americans’ retirements,” Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., said at the hearing. “Americans’ retirement assets were down nearly 15% last year. Fifteen percent.”

“This includes state pension funds. State pension funds support teachers, librarians, firefighters, and other public sector employees,” McClain, chairwoman of the health care and financial services subcommittee, said.

McClain also said, “Some states, such as Texas and Kansas, are actually getting in front of this by advancing laws that restrict investments that consider non-financial factors, remember they’re in the financial sector, they should be focusing on financial factors, like ESG for state pension funds.”

"While branded as an investment strategy for good, ESG manipulates markets as well as access to markets in order to advance a leftist political agenda," @MississippiMG says. pic.twitter.com/arlWTrXJwY

— Samantha Aschieris (@samantharenck) June 6, 2023

Mandy Gunasekara, director of the Independent Women’s Forum Center for Energy & Conservation; Jason Isaac, director of of Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; and Stephen Moore, distinguished fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation, testified on Tuesday. Shivaram Rajgopal, Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes professor of accounting and auditing at Columbia Business School, was the Democrats’ witness.

“The ‘E’ standards result in higher cost energy, unreliable electricity grids, and stand to undermine environmental progress,” Gunasekara said. “The ‘E’ standards also enrich high-end asset managers at BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard at the expense of retirees and pensioners.”

“‘S’ standards force companies to engage in controversial political issues, such as campaigns to defund the police or promoting ‘gender transitions’ in children, cultivating division in the workplace and the marketplace,” Gunasekara, who is also a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said. “‘G’ standards give the appearance of diversity while restricting freedom of thought and competing viewpoints in the workforce.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“Now, ESG standards are purposefully complex and convoluted in the hopes that the everyday man and woman will not catch on,” Gunasekara said.

Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, the grassroots arm of The Heritage Foundation, weighed in on Tuesday’s hearing.

“Today’s hearing is another crucial step in investigating and exposing the true cost of progressive ESG policies,” Anderson told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. “The coercion caused by harmful ESG compliance distorts business risk assessments and upends the freedom of private market decisions.”

“Lawmakers at both the state and federal level should continue evaluating the threat of ESG and its impact on American industries,” Anderson said.

WATCH:

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

“The Treasury Department has hit the federal borrowing limit at $31.4 trillion, and they’re going to be able to use cash-management techniques to be able to extend what we call the ‘X date’ of when they’re going to ask for the debt limit to actually be raised, somewhere until later in the summer,” says Matthew Dickerson, senior adviser on budget policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“So, the negotiations are starting between Congress and the White House to figure out what are the spending reforms, what are the pro-growth policies that we’re going to implement and pair that with the debt limit increase so that we can put the country on a path to a more prosperous future,” he said.

Dickerson joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to further discuss the latest on the debt ceiling debate, whether the U.S. has ever defaulted on its debt before, and a bill recently introduced by 43 House Democrats to eliminate the debt limit entirely.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:

Samantha Aschieris: Matthew Dickerson is joining today’s show. He is a senior policy adviser of budget policy in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget here at The Heritage Foundation. Matt, thanks so much for joining us.

Matt Dickerson: Thanks for having me on.

Aschieris: Yeah, of course. Now, here in Washington, the debt ceiling fight continues. America has already reached its debt limit of $31.4 trillion, and that was on Jan. 19. So, Matt, first and foremost, what’s the latest on this?

Dickerson: That’s right. The Treasury Department has hit the federal borrowing limit at $31.4 trillion. And they’re going to be able to use cash-management techniques to be able to extend what we call the “X date” of when they’re going to ask for the debt limit to actually be raised, somewhere until later in the summer.

So the negotiations are starting between Congress and the White House to figure out what are the spending reforms, what are the pro-growth policies that we’re going to implement and pair that with the debt limit increase so that we can put the country on a path to a more prosperous future.

Aschieris: And just speaking of the White House, my colleague, Virginia Allen, reports that they have said that President Joe Biden won’t negotiate over conditions for raising the national debt ceiling. On Wednesday, though, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the president absolutely will negotiate. So what are your thoughts on this? What’s at play here?

Dickerson: Absolutely. Just like everything in politics, this is a negotiation. An increase in the debt limit has to go through the House, the Senate, and get signed into law by the president. A bill is not going to be able to get passed unless it’s paired with some sort of spending reforms, as it has been going back for four decades on negotiations about the debt limit. So there will be a negotiation.

Vice President Biden, when he was in the White House, engaged in very significant negotiations with Speaker [John] Boehner in 2011, and I think a similar path is going to follow now.

Aschieris: We have some audio also from Virginia of remarks from Sen. Ted Cruz at a Wednesday press conference with five other GOP senators, and we’re going to go ahead and play that for you now.

Sen. Ted Cruz: There is one principle person in this town that is talking about a default in the debt, and that is Joe Biden. Joe Biden wants to threaten the default in the debt. He wants to scare the markets. And frankly, he’s counting on y’all.

He’s counting on the press corps just to repeat his talking points. He’s counting on the press corps just to say, “Those crazy Republicans want to default on the debt.” That is false. And if you write that in your stories, you are simply repeating partisan talking points from the White House. Historically, the debt ceiling has proven incredibly effective.

Aschieris: So two things from this I want to discuss. First, when Sen. Cruz talks about defaulting on the debt, what does that exactly mean? And what would the consequences be if this were to happen?

Dickerson: Yeah, so, what the senator is talking about is, if the Treasury doesn’t pay back the principle and interest on loans on Treasury bonds and bills—and frankly, that’s not going to happen. The Treasury is going to be collecting record revenues this year, and the Treasury has the ability to prioritize and pay its obligations for debt and the principle and interest on our debt payments. So there’s not going to be a default on our debt.

The Treasury may have to get to a situation, if the debt limit isn’t raised, where we’re simply not spending more than we take in. And at that point, other spending would not go out the door on time as it’s been promised, but we’re not going to default on our debt obligations.

Aschieris: Yeah. Has that ever happened before?

Dickerson: Not in a significant way. Actually, one time back in the ’70s, there was a computer error and some of it didn’t get paid. And there wasn’t a big, big market meltdown. It has happened before, but it’s not something that we want to have happen.

The global financial markets are built on Treasury debt. It’s a very safe asset because the United States is going to pay its obligations. But what we need to do is get to a situation where our federal budget is sustainable and so we’re not issuing debt that we’re not going to be able to meet our promises to pay it back.

Aschieris: Yeah. And the second thing that Sen. Cruz talks about that I want to get your thoughts on is the role of the media and the reporters who are covering the debt ceiling debate. What are your thoughts on what Sen. Cruz had to say about that?

Dickerson: I think it’s interesting, right? A lot of reporters may have not been around in the negotiations that were taking place in 2011 where both sides were talking.

President [Barack] Obama, Vice President Biden was negotiating with congressional Republicans, and they got to a deal that put us on a more sustainable fiscal path. And that happened in the ’90s. That happened in the ’80s on a bipartisan basis. And so there’s always been a negotiation about the debt limit. It’s served as a tool to put the country on a more sustainable fiscal path for decades, and that’s what we need to do this year.

Aschieris: Now, Matt, I also want to get your thoughts on something that we saw from House Democrats recently. They introduced a bill that would essentially do away with the debt ceiling entirely and allow Congress to borrow the money it needed to pay its bills. So first and foremost, what’s this all about?

Dickerson: Yeah, I think that just goes to show how radical the Left is, right? The debt limit is an indispensable tool that protects taxpayers. That’s why it was implemented in the first place. The Left, on the other hand, when we reached the $31.4 trillion debt limit, which should be a crazy wake-up call of how much we’re spending and how much is going out the door, their solution is to get rid of the spending cap and then continue spending, continue borrowing, continue the Federal Reserve’s money printing. That’s only going to push up inflationary pressures and hurt American families. And I think that’s just a crazy, crazy thing that we should be pointing out and doing the opposite.

Aschieris: Yeah, I mean, do Democrats really believe the government can just permanently borrow more money when everyday Americans can’t?

Dickerson: That seems to be their viewpoint, right? If you’ve seen their crazy economic theories of Modern Monetary Theory, which the government has been putting into practice over the last couple of years, and that’s resulted in inflation that we haven’t seen in this country in four decades. And so it’s totally a debunked economic theory.

And what we have seen is when government spending is controlled, when we have regulations that are restricted in a smart tax code, we have economic prosperity that’s broadly felt in this country. And that’s what we need to go back to.

Aschieris: Well, Matt, thanks so much for joining the show today. I always appreciate your insight. We’ll definitely have you back on as this debt ceiling debate continues. Thanks so much.

Dickerson: Great. Thank you.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., along with 16 other congressmen, sent a letter to Biden, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan on Monday regarding the administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for U.S. Coast Guard members.

“Service members that have not obtained a COVID-19 vaccine risk an involuntary administrative separation. This policy has resulted in hundreds of service members from all branches getting involuntarily discharged,” the letter said.

The letter also noted Biden’s phone call with Aviation Survival Technician Second Class Zach Loesch last month and commended Loesch’s efforts during Hurricane Ian. Lt. Cmdr. Christopher Hooper was also on the call.

Loesch, who reportedly saved a 94-year-old wheelchair-bound woman and her husband by kicking through a wall and then hoisting them into a helicopter, is set to be discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard because he did not get the COVID-19 vaccine. He had sought and was denied a religious exemption.

“Petty Officer Second Class Zach Loesch is an American hero, and he deserves to be treated as such. Due to the vaccine mandate, his rescue mission responding to Hurricane Ian may be his last, as he is set to be involuntary discharged in 30 to 60 days,” Boebert told The Daily Signal in a statement.

“The federal government’s failure to respect religious freedom and allow these exemptions is causing the military to lose talented individuals like Petty Officer Loesch,” Boebert added. “It’s time to end these mandates and support our troops’ religious freedom!”

The U.S. Coast Guard has received more than 1,200 religious exemption requests but has approved only 12, the letter said. Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas; Dan Bishop, R-N.C.; Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.; and Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., among others, also signed the letter.

Loesch has also spoken out about the vaccine mandate and its impact on his job, which he said he feels he was “born to do.”

“If I had asked any of the people I saved yesterday if they wanted to come with me even though I am unvaccinated, every single one of them would have said ‘yes,’” Loesch said.

“It just sucks that [Biden] thanked me yet the vaccine mandate is what’s kicking me out. I just love my job, and I’m really good at it. It sucks. I feel like this is the job that I was born to do,” he added.

Nearly 20,000 service members are set to be discharged over the next few months due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, Fox News reported. Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over during an interview with CBS last month.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Boebert-Letter

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.