I had the pleasure on Wednesday of guest-hosting our friend Guy Benson’s show on Fox News Radio. The program is on Guy’s website, but his team has put together some highlights.
These include my conversation with the fabulous Martha MacCallum, first about the looney Georgia grand-jury forewoman (about whom Jim, Jeff, and your humble correspondent have weighed in today), and then about the need for a reckoning on the Covid precautions that were of dubious benefit but have done incalculable damage to America’s children. Martha was especially pointed about some appalling news on the failures of schools in Illinois, especially Chicago. I also spoke with some guy called Charlie Cooke about the trenchant NR piece he penned about the a-woke-ning of the late Roald Dahl’s oeuvre.
The clip also includes a conversation with my longtime friend, Representative Chip Roy (R., Texas), who is understandably fired up about the catastrophic border non-enforcement policies of the Biden administration. (A topic about which I got to speak earlier in the program with Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, who for my money is nonpareil on this subject.) Chip was particularly exercised about the lethal influx of fentanyl and the development of a narco-state on the border as a result of Biden’s refusal to execute the laws. We also discussed the potential that the House could impeach the president and his Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas (alluding to my prior columns here and here).
What may have been most newsworthy, though, were Congressman Roy’s comments about the imperative of using Congress’s power of the purse to combat the administration’s abuses of power. On that score, I raised with him a suggestion I made earlier this week. We all know the debt ceiling is going to be raised, and that Republicans lack the political heft to achieve big structural changes in the budget (having only narrow control of one congressional chamber, and with a Democrat in the White House). Ergo, shouldn’t congressional Republicans use their leverage in the debt-ceiling fight to target Biden’s most unpopular policies? That is, how about refusing to increase the debt limit unless there is a defunding of, for example, Biden’s unlawful parole program for illegal aliens and his woke decree to embed “equity” into government processes across the board?
Roy was emphatic that this was exactly his point in stressing that Congress’s power of the purse remains our system’s most important check on presidential abuses of power. Our discussion about how Republicans should and hopefully will use their debt-ceiling leverage starts a bit after the 50-minute mark in the above-linked clip.