Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Representative Brandon Gill, public in Texas,
the fighting twenty six congressional district. Representative Gill represents, and
he joins us for a conversation on border security, birthright citizenship,
and the swamp. That's three big things. We could take
many hours to go into this, but we have but
a few minutes time here and wanted to get to
the most important issues of the day. Representative Gil, thank
you so much for joining us on the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Matt, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Let's start with the border.
Securing the border. We have spent four years in this country,
the previous four years under the Biden regime, living without
a border. Effectively, nobody knows that better than the people
of Texas, the good people of Texas who have been
inundated the front lines of the invasion. You have joined
a number of your colleagues in the House, not only
in presenting legislation on a very important aspect of this
birthright citizenship.
Speaker 1: You're also on an amicus brief filed in the United
States District Court for the Western District of Washington and
the United States District Court in the District of Massachusetts
in support of President Trump's executive order in protecting the
meaning and value of American citizenship. This obviously is an
important battle for you.
Speaker 3: It absolutely is.
Speaker 4: You know, whenever I was running, no issue came up
more often and had people more upset about than open borders.
I mean, we had four years of absolute chaos under
the Biden administration. As you know, well over ten million
illegal aliens who poured into our country over that four years,
probably more than that. That includes murderers, rapists, criminals of
all sorts.
Speaker 3: I think there's about fourteen thousand.
Speaker 4: Illegal aliens who have come into this country who have
murdered guilty of murder. That's a serious national security problem,
and it's something that the people of Texas know very
well and are very very focused on. So you're right,
we've been very active in trying to bring back border security.
I can tell you my biggest priority in Congress right
now is taking the great executive orders that President Trump
has been signing over the past several weeks, particularly related
to border security, and codifying them into law to make
them permanent so that we cannot have another Democrat administration
who unleashes the same kind of hell on America that
Joe Biden did. We just can't do that again. So
that's my biggest priority, and we are working very hard
towards that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you said in a recent release, I think you
summed it up. The left has misused and abused birthright
citizenship for too long in this country. President Trump's executive
order must be swiftly an act. Did you said you
were proud to join the Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan
in signing the amicus brief supporting President Trump's executive order.
You mentioned the legislation which would codify the reforms that
we've seen in a very robust start to the new administration.
This is the problem that you face. It's the problem
that anybody reasonably trying to get a handle on this
invasion over the last four years, and what we're dealing
with America face is that's an accomplice media what I
like to call the prov de press. Get this from
the liberal publication Washington State Standard. They talk about the
legislation that you signed on to that would amend federal
immigration law to narrow the scope of citizenship. And this
is the part that drives me crazy. I want to
get your take on it. This is the obligatory line
in every corporate media story as although the right is
enshrined in the US Constitution, that is the marrow of
the matter, because while the left in this country assumes
that that is a right enshrined in the US Constitution,
there is a good deal of legitimate disagreement on this
fact in law. And the whole notion that this is
just automatically enshrined is what these court cases ultimately are about,
are they not.
Speaker 4: Well, that's exactly right, And let's think through the Fourteenth Amendment,
its text and a little bit of its history as well.
It is any person born or naturalized in the United
States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and that phrase
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof is key here that
means that people who are in this country and are
not subject to our laws. And there's a con and
this goes back, says deep roots in English common law,
for instance, that jurisdiction here refers to both allegiance to
this country and obedience to its laws. Neither one of
those apply to illegal aliens who are coming here, who
remain loyal to their home nations, wherever that may be,
and are clearly not operating in obedience to our laws,
or they wouldn't be here to begin with if we had.
Speaker 3: And let me give you another example.
Speaker 4: If we had a foreign army that invaded American territory,
where foreign soldiers were giving birth to children in our nation,
we would not expect those children to be citizens of
the United States.
Speaker 3: We would everybody on both sides.
Speaker 4: Of the isle, I believe, would say that that is
patently absurd, and that is consistent with the text and
the spirit of the fourteenth Amendment. You know very well
that the fourteenth Amendment was in ref reference to freed slaves.
It had nothing to do with illegal aliens who are
coming across our southern border, and it certainly had nothing
to do with facilitating one political party structurally rigging our
elections by importing a new set of voters, which is
of course exactly what is happening right now.
Speaker 3: So I think that, you know, the liberal media may
frame this as what we're.
Speaker 4: Doing as unconstitution I would simply say that that is
a not only a very poor reading of the Constitution,
but it, you know, lacks any historical precedents or any
any logical.
Speaker 3: Understanding of what the fourteenth Amendment was meant to do.
Speaker 1: And there in lies the challenge. You know, therein lies
what you are hoping for. As I understand it, Congressional
colleague of yours said, we appreciate want these challenges so
we can get it into the Supreme Court of the
United States. This thing could take up to three years
before it winds up on the High Court, and let's
see how they rules. That's really the direction here. As
you knew going in, there was going to be a
fight from the left for all the things that they
want out of you know, sustained massive the legal immigration
in this country. You knew there was going to be
a fight. Now this thing ultimately has to be decided.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right.
Speaker 4: I mean, we saw in the first Trump administration, nearly
every single thing the President tried to do.
Speaker 3: Was fought in the courts.
Speaker 4: The left has weaponized our judicial system to thwart the
constitutionally protected will of the executive and that's that's been
a serious problem in this country. But we knew that
this would go to the courts. We knew that the
left was going to have a major problem, and I'm confident,
I feel very good that ultimately this executive order will
be held and that's why we're so I'm strongly in
support of it. But you know, the left is going
to go after everything President Trump does, particularly related to
the border. As we know, they tried to stop him
from funding the border wall in his first administration. They're
going to try to stop him from deporting illegal aliens.
Just recently, there's a court order that stopped three members
of the Trende Arragua Venezuelan gang from being sent to
Guantanamo Bay. So this is just another example of a
weaponized judicial system and left wing law fare.
Speaker 3: But we're here for the fight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt in the fight couldn't be any more important.
We're talking about the integrity of our nation. You don't
have a nation without a border. That's what we have
had to learn the hard way over the last four
years in this country. Of course, I'm just curious. I
wanted to get your response to this. I know it's
a question that's been asked. I think it's a question
that should be asked repeatedly of our members of Congress,
particularly our left wing members of Congress. Why do they
seem so much more committed to the rights of a
woman to abort her unborn child than they are to
the you know, the integrity of our borders. In essence,
they're more in line with supporting illegal immigrants to give
birth than they are to women in general in this
country when it comes to the abortion issue.
Speaker 4: That's a great that's a great point that you're making.
And I really do think that the left's views on
illegal immigration, particularly over the past several decades, were solely
designed to rig our political system. And that's not a
conspiracy theory. For decades, the left has talked about very
openly about how demographics or destiny, how the changing demographics
in the United States were politically beneficial for the Democrat
Party at the expense of the Republican Party. They have
been facilitating open borders for decades, and unfortunately, for part
of that time, Republicans sort of looked the other way
and allowed it to happen because they want, you know,
Democrats wanted voters, Republicans wanted cheap labor, and that was
the sort of faustian bargain that was made. But we've
heard even Chuck Schumer a couple of years ago out
in the open saying that the goal is to provide
a pathway to citizenship for all of the illegal aliens
who came into this country under Joe Biden's administration. And
of course with a pathway to citizenship comes voting rights,
and historically the idea that illegal aliens voting would benefit Democrats, that.
Speaker 3: Has been a pretty safe bet historically.
Speaker 4: To make you know, I'm a little skeptical how long
that's going to hold. As the Left embraces some of
the particularly the more radical iterations of wokeness, you know,
the transing four year olds and the drag queens in
schools and on our military basis, and just unrestrict completely
unrestricted abortion up until birth. These are things that most Hispanics,
for instance, don't agree with, but that has been the
bet that the left has made, and I think that
that is fundamentally why they've supported open borders, and that's
why I think I truly believe that mass migration is
one of the biggest threats not only to the United
States but all of Western civilization.
Speaker 3: This is something we have got to be serious about.
Speaker 4: This was a key part of the Trump agenda, not
only twenty fifteen and sixteen, but this election cycle too.
Of course, we have got to build the wall. We've
got to fund deportations on a large, large scale. Mass
deportations were That wasn't just a talking point. That was
something that we're very serious about. The American people want
their country back. They don't want to see our election
system rigged by massive hordes of people from foreign countries
who are ultimately going to be voting in our elections.
That's a serious problem. So we're serious about it. In frankly,
we're going to take our country back.
Speaker 1: You raise a very good point. I think that the
left in this country, the Democratic Party, is still smarting
from the results of November, which showed that a significant,
relatively speaking number of Hispanic voters were behind Republicans. They
were definitely hind Donald Trump and they just feel their feelings.
Left's feelings are because they said, hey, we supporters wide
open for you, We granted asylum for whatever reason, catch
and release, it was all there for you. You owe us.
Do you get that sense from your colleagues on the.
Speaker 4: Left, You know, I do, and I think that they're
and they haven't quite come around to the fact that
not only Hispanics, but but other minority groups are moving
away from them. You know, the whole mantra of the
Democrat Party this past cycle was don't believe the evidence
of your eyes in years, and that was true on
the border, where they will try to make absurd claims
about how, you know, border security was tighter under President
Biden than it was under President Trump or underpast administrations.
Whenever they try to tell you that that boys can
become girls, or that it makes sense in any world
for boys to be playing in girls' sports, these things
are just patently absurd, and they kind of overplayed their
hand with the wokeness. And I think that there comes
a point where normal Americans look at this and they say,
you know, you've so lost touch with reality that I
can't stand with you anymore, you know, And that's why,
you know President Trump was elected, or one of the
reasons he was elected with such a massive mandate from
the American people. But I'll tell you also this, the
American people are sick of having their country taken away
from them. It's like for so many people, it's like
you went to bed one day and you woke up
the next morning and all of the sudden, everything in
America was different, all of the sudden, gender had no meaning, all.
Speaker 3: Of a sudden.
Speaker 4: You know, there were tampons in boys' bathrooms. I mean,
things that are just mind blowingly ridiculous. Because the norm
under Democrat rule for four years, open borders, inflation raging,
economic opportunity declining. You know, this isn't the America that
so many people grew up in, and they just want
their country back.
Speaker 3: You know, if you look at.
Speaker 4: What President Trump and Elon Musk and the Doge Committee,
which I serve on, have been doing over the past
few weeks. You know, remember President Trump hasn't even been
in office for a month. I mean, this stuff moves
so fast. But we're uncovering an enormous amount of waste
and showing how the federal government has been operating not
only in an unaccountable way, but in ways that are
directly opposing and against the interests of the American people.
Speaker 3: And that's what people are sick of.
Speaker 4: And that's why I think President Trump has such high
approval ratings right now.
Speaker 5: Have you been keeping track of the Trump scorecard? The
Watch Dout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day,
Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy
and how it affects your wallet. In only a few weeks,
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Panama caved, and dough is saving billions. Whether it's happening
in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 3: Be informed.
Speaker 5: Check out the watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We're going to get to the Doge. The Doge Committee,
which as you mentioned, you're a member of, coming up
in just a moment. I want to stay just one
final question for you on the border issue on national security.
On that front, our guest today is Representative Brandon gil
Republic in Texas from the twenty six Congressional District, joining
us for a conversation on border security, birthrights, citizenship, and
draining the swamp. You had mentioned earlier in our conversation.
I thought it was a great point about the perils
this Republic faces from mass migration. When you have people
not coming through the process through the system, not coming
to be Americans, their allegiance still lying with their former
countries where they're coming from. In so many cases, what
happens when the people who are here are citizens of
this country, naturalized citizens of this country, like your colleague
on the left, Representative il Han Omar, When they are
holding press conferences and big media shows to advise illegal
immigrants on how to thwart immigration and customs enforcement, but
thwart the laws of this land. You have called for
Representative oma are to be deported. There was some backlash
from the usual suspects and the accomplice media. This is
what Representative Omar had to say about your statements, and
I want to get your take on them. She said,
how stupid you have to be to be a member
of Congress and think your colleague who is a member
of Congress can be deported. She told Politico. By the way,
Politico has taken millions upon millions of dollars of your
taxpayer money. If you're scoring along at home anyway, She
goes on to say, I had to crawl my way
into Congress, and I think these idiots who buy their
seats have no idea what a privilege it is to
be a member of Congress and what it takes. How
do you respond to her comment, and let me follow
up with this, do you think that Congressman Omar and
others like her in the squad and on the far
left forget what a privilege it is to be an
American citizen?
Speaker 3: I do, And let me there's few things there. One.
Speaker 4: I do find it a bit rich that she would
talk about buying a seat, especially after we've been finding
out over the past several weeks that so much of
the left's institutional ecosystem and their influence in political life
in America is based on taxpayer subsidies. I do think
we and we can get to this whenever we're discussing Doge,
But we do have to ask the question of where
would the left's ideological movement be were it not for
the millions upon millions If not billions, if not hundreds
of billions of dollars being funneled into left wing media,
left wing NGOs, another left wing advocacy groups that are
doing everything from facilitating open borders to censoring American citizens.
So I do think that that's quite peculiar that she
would take things that route. But you know, I think
if you think about whether it's Congressman Omar or anybody
else who clearly doesn't have a sincere allegiance to this country,
it really is a damning indictment of our legal immigration
system that we would allow somebody who hates this country,
hates its heritage, hates the principles upon which it was
founded to come into this country to begin with. I
will say I didn't say that she should be deported.
I said that America would be better off were she deported,
and that is entirely correct. She is a citizen, she's
a member of Congress. She can't be deported. But I
do think that this does raise her conduct, raises serious
questions about to whom is she most loyal American citizens
and the American government in the American way of life,
or illegal alien Somalis who have no business being here.
To begin with, and her conduct and her rhetoric. You know,
she's talked about being Somali. First, she's aiding and telling
illegal aliens how to avoid our laws and our customs.
Speaker 3: That is utterly repugnant. Her behavior indicates that she is
more illegal to loyal excuse me, to illegal aliens than
she is to American citizens into this country. But you know,
we we.
Speaker 4: Have to ask ourselves also, is American citizenship the most
valuable thing in the world or is it not? And
we've allowed our in this instance, our legal immigration system
to hand out citizenship to people who really have no
business being here, who get an enormous amount of benefits
from being in America, not only from their constitutionally protected
rights here, but also an enormous oftentimes welfare.
Speaker 3: And that's a problem, and.
Speaker 4: I think in this instance it's a serious It does
raise serious questions about our immigration system, and I think
that this is something that we should tackle over the
next four years.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great transition into the Department of
Government efficiency, into what Elon Musk is doing, what the
President wants out of this, what you folks are doing
on the Doge Committee. Let's keep in mind that congres
Congresswoman Omar had recently talked about how beneficial us AID
us AID was in terms of her eventually getting here
to the United States. Say what you want about Representative Omar.
There are a number of people in the refugee camps
where she once lived that absolutely hate America. There's no
denying that we've seen that. We have lots of evidence
to show that, not just in those camps, but elsewhere
people coming to this country that were indoctrinated in their
home countries to hate the evil Empire, the Great Satan,
or however they wanted to find that. So this does
tie into what you have. What you are uncovering right
now is not only waste, massive inexcusable criminal waste of
taxpayer dollars. As you note, there's a lot of money
going against the interest of America and its national security.
Can we what have you? What have you seen so
far based on what the committee is doing, what you've
seen Musk doing, and others working on this very important project.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that you're you're exactly right there. I mean,
it's funny that the left is furious about Doge, They're
furious about Elon Musk. They talk about it at every
single committee that we have, whether it's on the Budget
Committee or I'm hearing about it being talked about on
the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Speaker 3: I mean, they are furious. It's all they'll talk about.
Speaker 4: But the left isn't furious that our tax dollars are
being wasted, that they're being abused, that they're going to
fraudulent programs.
Speaker 3: They're just furious that all of this waste is being exposed.
Speaker 4: As I mentioned earlier, I mean, you have Politico getting
over eight million dollars of American tax payer dollars, who
sent millions to the BBC. We've sent a significant amount
to the New York Times. So ask yourself, you know,
if we're funding these left wing organizations, who are they
going to back. Are they going to back the party
that is continuing the gravy train that is sustaining them
or the party who wants to end waste fraud abuse
in our federal government.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's a very clear conflict of interest.
Speaker 4: It's kind of a joke whenever these media outlets describe
themselves as independent, whenever a large portion of their funding
comes from the federal government. But that's a different issue.
But We've found things that are absolutely contrary to the
interests of American citizens, and we found the federal government
promoting values that most American citizens find utterly repugnant. Two
million dollars going towards sex change operations in Guatemala, millions
of dollars going towards DEI programs in all over Asia,
in South America, a million and a half going to
DEI and serbian workplaces. I've got a little list here.
One point one million on gender diverse people in Bangladesh.
Six million to transform digital spaces to respect feminist democratic principles.
I mean, I could, I could talk about these all day.
Lord in there, it's easy to laugh at them because
they're so ridiculous. But the American people, whenever they find
out that at the end of every year, whenever they
go and pay their taxes and even irs, that wants
you to disclose six hundred dollars transactions, and you're trying
to dot every tea, dot every eye, and cross every
t whenever you're filing your income taxes to make sure
that the federal government doesn't come after you for tax
fraud or tax evasion. You're finding out that they're spending
millions of dollars on sex changes in foreign countries. It's insulting,
it really is. We found just found out last week
that the federal government FEMA disaster relief funds to spend
over fifty nine million dollars just last week on luxury
hotels for illegal aliens. That's money that could have gone
to hurricane relief in North Carolina or a wildfire relief
in California. So we are diverting funds from American citizens,
from the people who pay for this, to find bizarre
projects and to find welfare for illegal aliens. That's a serious,
serious problem. And that's what we're going after here. That's
what Elon Musk is going after. So President Trump is
going after, and that's what we're going after with the
Doge Committee.
Speaker 1: Just all so gross. It makes you, as a taxpayer,
just want to take a shower after you. I mean,
this is important stuff, don't get me wrong, but I mean, yeah,
we laugh, but I mean this, listen, this is money.
You know, you talk, well, it's you know, for this
grant or that grand one point seven million dollars, that's
a drop in the bucket to the you know, the
national debt to the annual budget. That's obscene that kind
of argument, because one point seven million dollars is the
kind of money that a lot of Americans will never
see in their lifetimes. I mean, that's that to me.
And then when we see that, you have a left
rallying around the fact that it's it's such a travesty
in their minds that the federal government is being audited.
How many small business owners and the Americans get audited
every year? Why can't their government get audited? But I
have to ask you this, how do we get at
and sustain world peace and American presence in the world
without Guatemalan sex changes?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, that actually kind of hits it at
a key point that the problem here isn't that we're
projecting values abroad or that we are spending money. I mean,
we the United States is the global hedgemon. We are
the most powerful country in the world. Of course we're
going to have some kind of present internationally. The problem
is the values themselves that we're projecting are un American
and they're disgusting. You know, if you oftentimes hear defenses
of some of this international aid that comes in the
form of well We've got to spend money on roads
and bridges in Africa, because if we don't, China's going
to do that, and that's going to move the developing
world closer and closer to China, which is one of
our biggest threats right now. Sure, but it's very well
understood internationally that the problem with American aid is that
we're not building roads and bridges. We're going to foreign countries,
oftentimes with more traditional values than we have and lecturing
them on why you know, they're using the wrong pronouns
or why they're not transing their young kids.
Speaker 3: That's the problem.
Speaker 4: There's what USAID and so many of these programs in
the federal government doing are not actually helping America's presence abroad.
They're not actually putting us in a stronger position on
the world stage. They're undermining us.
Speaker 1: We're also sending a lot of money, and a lot
of Americans are waking up to this and have been
fully awake to this for some time. We're sending billions
of dollars every year to countries that absolutely despise US.
I want to see US, I want to see the
country no longer exist, want to see Americans no longer exist.
That's something that really has to hit home. I'll close
with this final question because I'm curious. I would really
like to see, for instance, the Biden bill that passed
with just Democrats support. The infrastructure bill supposedly, you know,
a trillion plus dollars for infrastructure. How much of that
money is going to these kinds of programs. And so
that leads me into the final question, what's next for
the Doge Committee? What do you want to be able
to accomplish in the coming weeks and months.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I would like to see the Inflation Reduction
Act completely repealed. That was a wildly unpopular piece of legislation.
It's stoked inflation in this country, and I think we
ought to get rid of it now that Republicans are
back in power. But we're going to be going after
things like this and auditing where where a lot of
that money went. That's something that you'll see over over
the coming month. It is something that we're working on.
Our next step is we've got We've got a hearing
tomorrow where we're going to be looking at fraudulent Medicare
excuse me, Medicaid payments, and we're going to be exposing
a lot of the waste in that system. We're going
to have hearings in the future that have been publicly
announced where we're going to go after the five hundred
million dollars that we spend every single year to fund
NPR in PBS. That's a problem. So we're we're not stopping,
We're not resting. We are working with the doge in
the executive branch, and we're not going to stop until
every penny is accounted for.
Speaker 1: This is critical work. I mean, what we were talking
about before securing the border, bringing a border back, making
sure that our federal government is accountable spending our taxpayer
dollars appropriately. Thanks so much for joining us today. I
appreciate your time, your perspective, and the work that you're doing.
Speaker 3: Awesome, Thanks Matt, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Absolutely thanks to my guest today, Representative Brandon Gill, Republic
in Texas. You've been listening to another edition of The
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at
the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame