Georgia Senator David Perdue joined me this morning. We discussed my new Washington Post column:

Audio:

08-05hhs-perdue

Transcript:

HH: Why this bump music? Because Joe Biden was just asked by a CBS News journalist who’s African-American this question and gave this answer.

EB: Have you taken a cognitive test?

JB: No, I haven’t taken a test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That’s like saying you, before you got on this program, did you take a case where you’re taking cocaine or not? What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?

HH: “Are you a junkie?” to Errol Barnett. I don’t know about the Vice President, but something’s wrong. I am joined by Georgia Senator David Perdue. Senator Perdue, that just happened. I don’t like to surprise my guests, but what do you make of that?

DP: Oh, I’ve stopped being surprised by what comes out of Sleepy Joe’s mouth. But imagine this, Hugh. What would we be doing right now if President Trump has uttered those disgusting words? What would we be doing right now? I mean, it’s amazing the hypocrisy in our media today, national media.

HH: Are you a junkie.

DP: Unbelievable. Amazing.

HH: It’s amazing. Senator, I want to begin by letting you know we have the second highest rated show in Atlanta, and I think that’s because my friend, Glenn Viers, took me to the Varsity, and my friend, Sanders Hickey, taught me about Georgia football. I was unaware that Georgia was actually in a real league, because I’m a Big 10 fan. But I’ve got all these people in Atlanta and throughout the state of Georgia listening to me. They want to know succinctly, I’ve got my questions, but succinctly why ought they to vote to put you back in the Senate for six more years.

DP: Well, we have to continue this agenda. This is the best economic turnaround in U.S. history. Two and a half million people have been pulled out of poverty because we proved what we believe in works. The second thing is if we lose this election, what Schumer is going to do to our representative democracy is amazing. He will destroy it. You have an op-ed that I think was just in the Washington Post about hack, pack, pack, tax, slash, and grab. I mean, this is the best, succinct, most succinct description. Schumer will absolutely change the face of American government. And he has promised to do that.

HH: Let me walk through those if I can, Senator, and thanks for the plug for the Washington Post piece, because it’s got 3,000 nuts yelling at me. But when I say hack, I mean they will hack the filibuster to pieces. That is a part, that is the tentpole of the Senate. And I have always supported, I’ve never supported the filibuster for nominees, because the Senate is called as a body in the Constitution to advise and consent on nominees, but it is not called to have a majority on everything. And the legislative filibuster has operated to require care, just care. We do not do things suddenly in the Senate. Do you think the Senate Democrats will remove the filibuster if they get a majority?

DP: 100%. Absolutely. They’re going to line up behind Chuck Schumer. Many of them have already said that. You heard President Obama in his speech last week talk about it. This is something they will do. And then they’ll add Puerto Rico and D.C. as new states. They’ll stack the Supreme Court with four or maybe six new members. These will be political activists. You know, and then they really want to get rid of the Electoral College eventually. Now they can’t do that in the Senate alone, but they’ll start that effort as well.

HH: Now they’ll also, and this is probably of greater concern. They will raise taxes. No one even disputes this in the comments to the Washington Post column. No one disputes. They just talk about which ones they’ll raise. How many and how high will they raise?

DP: Well, they can’t raise it high enough to pay for what they’re talking about doing, Hugh. Just the Green New Deal, and this is not just a pipe dream. This is not a piece of paper. They actually want to implement that. And here’s the problem. Once they implement things like that, it’s hard for us to ever come back and get them taken out. Look at the CFPB. But the Green New Deal is $9 trillion dollars a year. Hugh, that’s equal to the entire adjusted gross income of everybody that works in America.

HH: Now when I say slash, that’s Defense spending. I know that Georgia is a pro-military state. The Democrats under Obama-Biden, they will go back to starvation diet when it comes to budget for Department of Defense. Do Georgians know that?

DP: Well, we’re making sure they know that. A military, you know, Georgia’s very important to our military and our national defense. It’s important to the economy as well. But here’s the bottom line. You only have to look at history. The last two American Democratic presidents reduced spending in the military by 25%. We saw what Biden and Obama did in eight years there. They decimated our readiness. In 2017, Hugh, you know this. Only three of our Army brigades could go to fight that night out of 59. We see how far behind our Navy is now. We are trying to rebuild that, but it’s going to take so much time because of the hole that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Joe Biden gave us. So we know, we can predict what they’re going to do. In fact, Joe Biden has said that. How else are they going to pay for the Green New Deal and some of these other things they’re talking about doing?

HH: Now and finally, grab, that’s grabbing guns. I quoted in my column, so I mean, the Washington Post fact checks opinion columns. Joe Biden said Beto’s to be the gun czar. Beto wants to go and get guns. Do Georgians know they want to go get guns?

DP: Well, we’re learning. Stacey Abrams absolutely wants to get our guns, too. And she slipped through a governor’s race and almost, she got within half a percent of becoming governor because we were not able to educate everybody in the state about that. But yeah, I think people are beginning to be aware in Georgia that not only Beto, but Schumer and all the mainstream Democrats, they see this as their opportunity. If they do away with the filibuster, they can roll or steamroll this over us. And once it’s in, again, it’s very difficult to get that back. Can you imagine having to register and then turn in weapons that they don’t like?

HH: Well, I think now people know the different agendas. Let’s talk about PerdueSenate.com. Act Blue is funding the left in a way I’ve never seen before. What is the money race like in Georgia?

DP: Well, it’s very difficult. We’ve cancelled about 142 fundraising events because of COVID and respect for safety, and just not wanting to put people in other people’s homes and things like that. So we’ve gone to Zooms and that sort of thing. People are responding. But going up against Act Blue, I mean, Lindsey Graham’s candidate, and I can’t even tell you his name, in the last question raised almost $14 million dollars on Act Blue. Susan Collins’ opponent raised $14 million dollars in one quarter. This is an unbelievable asset that they have. Our problem is that Republican fundraising comes from personal interactions with donors. We do it one by one. We do it in small groups, and it takes a lot of time. And we’re not able to do that right now because of the virus, but we’re going to make sure this message gets out. We’ve got a lot of volunteers. We’ve got people on the ground. We have a much better ground game than we’ve ever had in Georgia because we know what the Democrats have done. In the governor’s race in ’18, Hugh, they had 800 paid employees on the ground, did the same thing in Ted Cruz’ race in Texas.

HH: I think that the Perdue record is also your biggest asset. You have been a great asset for Georgia. Let me turn to whether or not there’s going to be a bill. I want there to be a Phase 4, because I want liability protection not just for Georgia small businesses, but everyone across the country will have a trial lawyer at their door if we do not have liability protection. I also like part of Schumer’s Heroes Act. I like the local broadcasting act. It will help not just Salem, I mean, every radio, every radio station in America, every local newspaper in America needs that. But I don’t know that Schumer wants a bill. I think he wants deadlock.

DP: Well, we were told yesterday that they’re not negotiating in good faith, and that’s different than the first time we went through CARES. We had some political activism in that first round, in the big round, $2.2 trillion tranche of CARES. But it was all in a very short weekend, and you know, we got to common ground very quickly. Here, we’ve been doing this for weeks. I mean, Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of Treasury, and Mark Meadows, the chief of staff at the White House, have been over in their offices every day for the last two weeks. We’re not getting any progress. Look, it’s a trillion dollar bailout that they want in the Heroes Act. It’s $3.4 trillion, but a trillion dollars of that goes to bailing out California, Illinois, New York. They want me to tell my people in Georgia, oh, by the way, we’re going to tax you so we can bail out these intransigent, irresponsible people in California, Illinois and New York. You know, there’s another $550 billion dollar direct payment that we are, you know, in the act that the Republicans are supporting, there’s a direct payment, but about half of that. Unemployment, they want this premium, $600 dollar premium, all the way through the end of the year. And that is an incentive to encourage people not to go back to work, which is what the Democrats would love, politically.

HH: Now in terms of the outlook for the virus, the President is rightly talking up vaccines. I’ve got a family member who is a PhD toxicologist. He’s amazed where we are. The therapeutics are coming online. But I am concerned about schools, Senator, because I know this isn’t a Senate issue. But if you let an age cohort of elementary kids miss a year and a half of reading, that cohort will never catch up. It’s the elementary schools that have me the most concerned. What are they doing in Georgia? What do you think the government can do to help them in Georgia?

DP: Well, the Democratically-run counties, by and large, are going virtually. But you know, that’s not, as you said, it’s not a Senate issue. I would not disagree with what anybody’s doing at the local level. I think that’s where it ought to be done. My mom and dad were schoolteachers. But they’re being very careful about this. But I agree with Dr. Fauci. I think all over, I mean, all in, I think that the kids are better off in school. I won’t second guess the local administrators who have decided to do it virtually. What we are doing, though, I have a school act, and there are others in here. We’ve got $100 billion dollars in the Republican proposal more than the Democrats. The Democrats are only proposing something like $60 or $70 to help bring PPP, I’m sorry, PPE and other things that can help protect teachers and students while they’re in school. It also, you know, provides a best practices, gives data for them, and really connects the health community with the education community. Let me say one thing about what you just mentioned, though. This is a critical time. If we lose a year and a half for some of these children in the third and fourth grade who are not reading at grade level, many of those people will not graduate from high school. We know that. It’s predictable, particularly African-American boys. I just have an op-ed that I wrote about Morehouse University. And we call out in there what happens particularly with young, black boys who are not reading at grade level. We ought to have an all hands on deck to help those young boys get to reading on level, because we’re losing generations of black men right now who can really help us turn the country around and be the leaders of the next century, or the next 50 years anyway.

HH: This is the cohort within the cohort that I’m most alarmed about. And I think people have to focus on protecting the elderly and people in care homes, and they have to focus on these young kids who have not yet mastered reading. Senator, I want to close by a very focused issue. You are on the subcommittee on Cybersecurity. The National Solarium Committee came through with a bunch of recommendations. Admiral Montgomery was the executive director of that. I hope they made it into the NDAA. I hope we are doing something about cybersecurity. It’s not just TikTok. It’s everywhere that the Chinese Communist Party is. We have a problem. Were we successful in getting some of the Solarium stuff into the NDAA?

DP: Yes, sir. We got some heavy lifts in there as well as trying to rebuild our Navy. I know that’s a sweet spot for you as well.

HH: Yeah.

DP: But this NDAA does more than anything else, support the national defense strategy of standing up to China. The number one thing, there are two, three things, really. One is you’ve got to build a space strategy. We’re doing that. President Trump has now created the Space Force. The second thing is this cyber that you call out. We’re woefully inadequate right now of integrating our commercial vulnerabilities – our networks, our banking, our energy networks. We’ve got to get that integrated, and that’s one of the things that the Solarium talks about. And then the third and the biggest, and the most expensive, I think, over the long period of time, is rebuilding our Navy. We’re going to be, even if we hit our goal of 355 by 2034, we’ll still be 75 ships short of what China has. We’re already 50 today, as we sit here today, China has 50 more ships than we have, and it’s more draconian than that, Hugh. As you know, they outstick us, because they were not part of INF. Their ranges of their missiles and all their firepower is longer than ours. So they can stand off an equivalent ship because the range advantage that they have. So we’re moving to correct all that, but these are three big priorities of the current NDAA.

HH: Well, Georgia needs to keep you on that committee, needs to keep you on that subcommittee. And Senator David Perdue, keep coming back to the Hugh Hewitt Show. We’ll keep telling Atlanta and Macon and all of Georgia they’ve got a great senator in David Perdue. Thank you, Senator. www.perduesenate.com if you want to help him out.

End of interview.