Dana Milbank: Fools on the Hill
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Thanks again to Hyundai's amazing EV lineup. Learn more at HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's Wednesday, so remember, I'm also doing political hot takes over on the Next Level feed. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. But our guest today, I'm very excited about, nationally syndicated op-ed columnist for The Washington Post,

His most recent book was published yesterday, Fools on the Hill, The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House. It's Dana Milbank. I thought my subhead of my book was obnoxious, but that one is really, you just really go for it there. I just, I want to leave people guessing as to where they, where I might land on the subject. Dunces. Dunces.

Yeah, you know, I went with the Republican road to hell, which always tickles interviewers when they get to read them. We have the same subtlety, yeah. But dunces and hooligans I like. Well, thanks for coming on the pod. I want to spend most of the time

here today talking about the house gop because there's a lot there and it does sometimes fall out of the radar because of you know what's happened on the top of the ticket right there's there's so much crazy you can't even concentrate on at all exactly so i do have one donald trump item though i do have to start with before we get to the house i was reading politico this morning in my i got my dander up there's an article

about how people around Trump are concerned that he's not focused. Steve Wynn, the advisor. Now, this isn't noted in the Politico article, but for our listeners, you should know that Steve Wynn was a serial sexual assault, allegedly. He committed serial sexual assaults. People that worked for him in Las Vegas

He's still in good standing in the Trump inner circle, though. And apparently that doesn't merit mention in this article. But Steve apparently told Trump that you're off message. You're distracted. It isn't helping. And you should focus more on policy. How are we still doing this, Dana? Yeah, no, no. And I bet now Trump will hear that. It'll go take it to heart and it'll totally do the trick.

We had a piece in the Post last week saying whatever was left of Trump's discipline is completely gone, which I totally agree with. I just think it probably could have been written several months ago. Or years. Was there some golden age of discipline in this campaign? You know, it's like La Civita was going to come in there and it's going to be a tight ship, but...

of course you can run a tight ship, but the captain's constantly overboard. Many political reporters I love and hold dearly in my heart. So don't get too hurt by this. But it is kind of one of the political reporter fallacies where if you're winning in the polls,

then that means that the campaign is running well. And sometimes correlation doesn't equal causation. When Trump was vacillating between Meatball Ron and Sanctimonious and lashing out about all that, that was the golden age, I think. Because since he was winning in the polls, since Republican voters liked him, his weird behavior and conspiracy mongering and rants weren't affecting him. So that means he must be disciplined.

That has been the case for as long as I can remember. You know, yeah, there are various ideological biases in the press. The biggest bias is towards the polls. If you're up in the polls, you walk on water. And if you're down in the polls, they're going to find a causation for that in whatever reporting they can do. This is why Biden got such awful press. I don't think it was like some personal animus towards Joe Biden. Like, how could you have that? It was that he was doing poorly because he looked old and doddering.

Yeah. He's just getting crushed. And so that is, then you have to backfill that with, with reasons. I do think that's right. I just, I get frustrated. I get frustrated with the, with the stories about the fact that I'm sorry, your dander is up. I'll see if I can calm it back down. If at all possible. Yeah.

I don't think our topic today is going to call me back down, but at least you're clear-eyed about what's happening in the house. And that's like, well, if only Mike Johnson would pivot back to the issues, then things would be really... Right, if Steve Wynn would just have one little conversation with him, I think it would all be fine.

Yeah, I think that he would resolve the James Comer problem and everybody else. Okay, let's just take the biggest picture of the book, just so people understand what the conceit was. And then I want to go through several of the items. But what was the purpose here in focusing on this House GOP class of 2022?

Well, I made a gamble. It was actually even before the election. I just saw this incredible lineup of candidates. You remember the woman who said they were alien lizards controlling the government and she hit her ex-husband with an alarm clock and tried to run over the other ex-husband with an alarm clock. Then there was the guy in Ohio who painted his whole lawn with 250 gallons of paint into a big Trump banner. I said,

These guys are going to be interesting. And the ones who made it, I mean, I had high expectations. They exceeded all expectations. You know, I just had one line about some guy named George Santos back then. And, you know, it turns out he was a gift that that gave for an entire year. So I had a feeling because of the exotic characters and because we've been seeing it through the Trump era year after year, you'd get a few more exotic characters and a few more that sort of grownups characters.

would leave. And, you know, as I said, I had no idea quite how bad they would be. And now we can sort of run the numbers and they are on course and there's not a whole lot of time left. So we're pretty sure of this to be the least productive Congress since 1860 when the union was unraveling. So at least they had an excuse for being a do nothing Congress. I mean, that is,

truly historic. So yeah, I didn't know this would be the Congress that would kick out the speaker midterm for the first time in history, that would impeach a cabinet officer for the first time in 150 years on specious grounds, would shut down the House for 22 days as they defeated candidate after candidate. You know, they would have McCarthy's 15 ballots and

Just all the mayhem and madness, the fisticuffs in the caucus meetings, in the basement, the hurling of obscenities at each other, insulting each other's

private parts, and of course, the lunacy of the Biden investigation and the weaponization panel that conservative commentators were panning it, saying, come on, please give us something, guys. And they came up with nothing but like Ron Johnson's conspiracy theories with an assist from RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. There are a couple of news items this week that sort of draft well with your book. With regards to the do-nothing Congress, I was reading an article in Notice

this morning. And it quotes several members of the House GOP. And you've got Bob Good saying, you know, from Virginia there, on every significant piece of legislation, we have surrendered to the White House and to the Democrat-controlled Senate. We don't have anything to show for having to control the House for two years. So that's supporting your thesis. Then you had Chip Roy and James Comer pushing back on that, saying that simply keeping the government funded, passing GOP messaging bills, and

and exercising some oversight through committees are achievements for the party in a divided government. I love this sort of fight there. You have the wing of crazies that are like, we haven't advanced our crazy nonsense that there's no chance of advancing. And then you have the other crazies that are like, actually, doing nothing is a victory. There's nobody in the conversation that's like, you know, I don't know, maybe we should try to compromise with Democrats on some things and, you know, try to actually achieve results.

working with the other party. Like that faction doesn't seem to be existing in the conversation. No. And the fascinating thing about that, that Chip Roy quote is he's done a total flip-flop. I mean, he was the guy who stood up and said, one thing I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one that I can go campaign on and say we did. And of course, they haven't done anything since then. So now he said, okay, well, actually, I'm pretty good with this, doing nothing at all. One of my favorite parts was just this long compilation of self

loathing quotes from House Republicans about themselves. Like, you don't have to take my word for it. Like, you know, how often do you get to say, I agree totally with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Our Republican House majority has failed completely.

Maybe she believes that for different reasons. But yeah, I mean, nobody has been more savage on House Republicans and House Republicans, including the current Speaker of the House, who says he spends half his time as Speaker and half as a mental health counselor. Well, you mentioned it, though. I had a couple of favorites of the House Republicans on House Republicans.

This is Mike Lawler from New York. When you keep running lunatics, you're going to be in this position. Here's Tony Gonzalez out of Texas. Again, for listeners who are not familiar with Tony Gonzalez, this is a Republican member of the House, Tony Gonzalez. I work with some real scumbags. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they walk around with white hoods in the daytime. Yeah.

People say we have TDS at the bulwark. I mean, like that's worse than what you'll hear at the bulwark most days from a sitting Republican congressman. And you wonder why they're throwing punches, why McCarthy gives Tim Burchett the kidney punch from behind and they go after Gates on the House floor. They were, you know, in fisticuffs in the caucus room as well. You know, it's interesting because if you look at the true crazies, you know, like let's take a proxy for that as maybe the House Freedom Caucus.

There's only about 40 of them. The problem is there's the vast majority of the caucus are cowards. So, you know, two thirds of them voted to overturn the election even after the insurrection on January 6th. Did they all believe that? No, I'm sure they didn't. But at some point, it doesn't matter whether they believe it or not, because they're too afraid to stand up. So they wind up letting the cowards run the show again and again.

Well, and this is another insight on that, that that group, like the crazies versus the cowards versus the people that are like, are trying to responsibly govern, but aren't standing up to Trump to the degree that I would like them to, but you know, behind the scenes are trying to at least do some legislating that balance of power. Like the window is, has moved a couple of standard deviations towards the crazy right in the lab and this group in 2022. And, and I think that like, well, it's hard for people to understand is that, you

Even though Trump was gone in 2022, he was this overhang over all of these primaries. And so the types of people, the Mike Gallaghers of the world, the types of people that accomplished something in their lives, maybe they were in the military or they're a community leader, a business leader in the community, they weren't volunteering to run in 2022 as Republicans.

because they didn't want to do what you had to do unless you're like totally shameless like Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania. If you're like a normal business guy, you don't want to have to go down to Mar-a-Lago and suck up to Trump and pretend that Haitians are eating dogs. You don't want to have to do that. So there's no supply of those people running.

And I think that like the party is self-selected a lot of these crazy people that you, that you profile in the book. Right. And that's why you mentioned Mike Gallagher was essentially drummed out. Even a guy like Ken Buck. I mean, you don't get a lot more conservative than, than Ken Buck was drummed out for daring to say, Hey guys, you're being a little nutty here. Gone. You know, there's, there's no room for him here. And the Ken Buck is a prime example for just for me, cause I'm from Colorado. Yeah.

So in 2010, I was still working in Republican politics then. And I was always kind of like talking with Colorado people about maybe I had to go home and work on a campaign back at home. I hadn't worked on one since my very first campaign in 2002, which was a winner. I didn't have very many wins after that. So I like to mention my wins when they happen. But in 2010, that guy that I'd worked for, Bill Owens, his lieutenant governor was Jane Norton, who is this sort of just

generic Republican, you know, I kind of maybe not quite as moderate as Susan Collins, but what, you know, the kind of generic type Republican that you got during that era. Ken Buck challenged her from the right.

and was a lunatic. And everybody's like, this guy's insane. No, that's right. He was the poster child for sort of Tea Party extremism, at least, you know, from my point of view. And now he's the voice of reason. And so now he gets drummed out. You're right. That's how, you know, with each passing election, it just changes. And you lose the grownups and the lunatics gain more power. You know, I think it's a structural thing in a way, of course, you know, the primary, you

what, there are two dozen competitive seats in the House. The rest of them are strictly decided in a primary. Of course, there's a problem on the Democratic side, but there aren't enough liberals to dominate the way the right dominates within the Republican primary. So, you know, and I think Tom Massey from Kentucky said it best when he was trying to figure out what the primary voters wanted. Were they looking for the libertarian or the, you know, this ideology or that? And he said, no, they're looking for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.

And that's the problem. We may sit back and say, this is irrational, this behavior of, you know, burning down the government, but they're not appealing to the 800,000 million people who are their constituents. There's a 10, 15,000 people who they have to appeal to in the primary, you know, so they don't get primaried from the right. So this is just, it's happened over and over again and cycle after cycle, and you no longer have a

John Boehner or even a Paul Ryan, you know, somebody with even a little bit of spine to stand up to it. And the Democratic situation as a moderate myself is even better than what you're saying. Like the the only Democrats to get primaried and lose this time, they were primaried from the middle. It's Berman and Bush, right? Like there's not really an example of.

I mean, I guess Manchin retires, but it's not like Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey was like getting primaried by a DSA socialist and losing. Like, I don't know. Maybe that'll happen sometime in the future. That's not happening now. Right.

Right. It has happened a couple of times, you know, to Eliot Engel or whatever. You know, I use the squad as the equivalent of the House Freedom Caucus, but it's really not an equivalent thing. They're much smaller. They don't have the same kind of influence, but also they're not as contrarian. I mean, they said AOC generally goes along with what leadership wants.

And, you know, I don't think this is because like Democrats are savvier or smarter. It's just a fact of life that there are more moderates in their in their primary electorate. So you just don't have as much luck coming at people, you know, in certain urban districts. You can do that. But by and large, you don't win by being the craziest son of a bitch in the race.

Yeah, it's a supply and demand thing. I mean, Joe Pertico and my colleague has this yesterday, has a newsletter people can check out on theblog.com, but he interviewed Jerry Moran, who used to run the NRSC. And Jerry, you know, Jerry should probably take some more responsibility. Certainly, there have been some Republican leaders, many, many who have not acted with integrity or with the authority that they could have to try to steer the ship. But that said, his point is like,

It's not even Trump. It's not us. It's like the voters keep picking these people. And so if the voters want crazy, if you're going for a job, and in this case, it's the primary voters who are the ones that get to review the resumes. And if the best thing you can have on your resume is not like your volunteer service or your success in private business, but like the best thing on the business, it's like how crazy you are, how good you are at insulting libs and how good you are at sucking up to Trump, then you're going to get crazy people.

Right. In fact, you can fake your resume like Andy Ogles or Anna Paulina Luna or Santos. It doesn't matter what you did. Just say whatever you want. That's crazy. I should talk about that. I hadn't even really thought about that. There were three members of this class that were wildly exaggerating their resume.

Three that we know of. I mean, there may be more than that. There were also several others on the ballot in 2022 who didn't make it, like the guy who painted his lawn into a Trump banner and made up his military record. It's a Trump phenomenon that he can get away with saying whatever he wants. Well, maybe the rest of us can get away with saying whatever we want to. Now,

There are limits to this, as we're seeing, for example, in the gubernatorial race in North Carolina or the certain congressman's payroll on Long Island. But by and large, I mean, Trump has done such a brilliant job at extinguishing any sense of shame from the government.

from the electorate that I think a lot of others are following in this mold. So you had Santos with, I mean, the most brazen lies I've ever seen in my time in Washington, but he turned around and he did the same thing. You know, the party establishment is out to get me. The media is out to get me. And the party leaders, they weren't enforcers of any sort of moral or ethical standard. They needed his vote. I mean, Kevin McCarthy has said they knew something was off with this guy.

But they figured, all right. And they gave him they gave him party money. They made appearances with him. And even after it all came out, they kept him there for a year. And, you know, even on the day after a year when Santos was finally expelled, the House leadership was still fighting to keep him in the position because they needed his vote.

Thank you.

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And a big thanks to Democracy Decoded for sponsoring this show. There's some pretty concerning actual news this week with this group. Also, I think that we should talk about which we saw at Mike Johnson's press conference. There are two clips from the press conference. I want to play you. Let's listen to them back to back.

I'm not defying President Trump. I've spoken with him at great length, and he is very frustrated about the situation. His great concern is election security, and it is mine as well. It is all of ours. We are really seriously concerned about this, and we've got to do everything that we can to ensure it. Speaker, do you commit to observing regular order in the certification process of the 2024 election, even if Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump?

Well, of course, if we have a free, fair and safe election, we're going to follow the Constitution. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes.

It's kind of ominous. It's a pretty big if in there. And if we decide that it was fair. I was at that news conference yesterday. He's been saying various versions of this all along. As I think you were suggesting a moment before, in a sense, he has to do it. He is hanging by a thread. One mean tweet from Donald Trump, he's done. Maybe not done today, but his future in the speakership is over. The House Republicans...

did more than any other group to revive Donald Trump. You know, and it wasn't just McCarthy flocking down to Mar-a-Lago. You know, when he was down and out, these guys built him up. They were the first to rally behind him after each of the indictments. And the power he holds over this caucus is just extraordinary. So when people talk about

You know, Mike Johnson trying to use what the 12th Amendment to, you know, to reject the results and allow the House to decide, assuming like there was a Harris won the presidency and the Republicans kept the House. Now, the whole idea is fairly far fetched, and it almost certainly wouldn't work. But

I have no doubt that Mike Johnson would try such a thing. This is, after all, the guy who led the legal effort in the House to overturn the results, the legal argument as opposed to the actual insurrection. So there can be no doubt that he would be happy to do it again this time around. And that is ominous.

Let's unpack that because before you became a columnist and, you know, kind of big man on campus over there, you're a Hill reporter, right? And so you know how this sometimes works, right? Where some of these guys that go, they're saying what they have to say in front of the cameras, but behind the scenes, they're talking to you and, you know, the story's a little different.

Have you been able to spend enough time with Republicans to get any sense for that? Mike Johnson did end up doing the right thing on Ukraine. Took him a while. Yeah, five months. And so he has a couple of times demonstrated...

Maybe overstated to say backbone, but like a little bit of authority. Do you get any sense that some of this is like just for show? Or do you really think that they're preparing for and laying the groundwork for another challenge in the period between the election and January?

I mean, I have no doubt that they're laying the groundwork for that. I mean, certainly Trump is, you hear it, you hear it from him every day. And so they're faithfully echoing that. I mean, I, I suspect in their heart or hearts, they may hope it doesn't, it doesn't come to that, but I've, I've gotten beyond this notion of wondering what they, you know, if you gave them truth serum or woke them up in the middle of the night, because their actions are the same regardless. So it doesn't even matter what they believe or what they don't believe. I mean,

Look, Mike Johnson has voiced the great replacement, the racist conspiracy theory. There he was, what is just a week or two after he won the speakership, going to address this group of Christian nationalists with the most out there views and, of course, saying that God had made him Christian.

the Moses of the House Republican Party. I guess they're still in the, apparently still wandering in the wilderness, but maybe he'll get them there at some point. I mean, he's very much a true believer in that sense, certainly more than anybody before him. I mean, he has let there be no daylight between him and Donald Trump. I mean, think about

The current spending showdown. OK, he surrendered and punted so that they can have the fight after taking another six week vacation on top of the six week vacation they just came back from. But of course, he only did it after doing Trump's bidding and saying, all right, we'll put this election legislation on and let his own people kill it. The element of just like listening to him talk about all of that.

The whole thing is fake. It's like, oh, we're deeply concerned. They're setting the pretense for this. Well, we'll only challenge it if we don't believe it's safe and secure. That's why I put both clips together because the other clip is like this whole like, oh, Trump is deeply concerned about election security and we're deeply concerned. Nobody's deeply concerned about it.

I met with Chris Krebs last week who was working at DHS on election security in 2020 and did the right thing and spoke out about the stop the spiel records and corrected the record. And he's like, there are groups out there that are genuinely concerned

are not concerned, but are genuinely focused on, you know, making sure that the process is smooth, that the, you know, that all the machines are secure, that, you know, ballot handoff. That's not what these guys are doing. Like, they don't actually care. No, I mean, they're genuinely concerned that they might lose the election. So they're figuring out, you know, a plan B. I mean, the absurdity of this, I mean, remember, the big

complaint, and maybe there was some legitimacy to it last time, was that there were last minute changes, early voting and how the electioneering was done. Okay. Well, there were, but these same people who are complaining about that are now saying, all right, let's see if the last minute we can get Nebraska legislature to change the whole electoral college thing. Let's see if in Georgia, maybe we can switch the whole thing to a hand count and bollocks up everything for a month.

Not that there was a whole lot of integrity going into the process, but they're actually doing the exact same thing that they said was the problem last time. Yeah, Will Salatan wrote about that very thing this morning for us. The other thing about this kicking the can on the CR is now like they're setting up a situation where conceivably Harris wins narrowly, let's just say.

They are spending November and December doing stop the steal 2.0, right? And trying to undermine it in every way imaginable. And then there's a government shutdown hanging over at Christmas time, right? And having all of that stuff be happening together, uh,

At this time where, you know, we should be once again, you know, to use your words, bollocksing up like what should be a clean and peaceful transfer where, you know, preparing for a new president. I mean, like they're really setting this up for for the winter to be, you know, for them to have a lot of leverage to create trouble.

Absolutely. I mean, the odds of a shutdown, I would say, are extremely high in December. So there'll be some price that Mike Johnson will ask for. Now, what will that price be? Well, they're not going to be interested in the SAVE Act anymore. It'll be something related to whatever happened in the election. The deadline for the shutdown is what, December 20th, I think it is.

On January 3rd, he's got to get, you know, if he wins, he's got, well, I mean, if they lose the House, he's done anyway. But if he wins, he's got to get reelected as Speaker. He can't afford to do anything that pisses off Trump, win or lose, or any more than a few members of the Freedom Caucus. So basically, his only play at that point is to shut the government down with some, with some peace. I mean, I love how we always, you know, at any moment, he said, well, there are two issues before us, and they're totally two different

Different issues from whatever they were last week. But these are the most obvious things the government must do at this point. So he will say there's a very obvious thing that we must do or shut down the government. Yeah, I mean, like the prospects that we don't really have a speaker that there's not like during this whole period, as you're pointing out, like, especially depending on how close the House ends up.

I just think that they have kind of laid the table here for a very... A lot of chaos. So all you who have called, you know, made vacation plans for after the election, I would consider a postponement. Yeah, I know. I was planning on taking a week off from the podcast between Christmas and New Year's. I don't know. That seems like that's probably not going to be happening. Sorry. Sorry, Katie and Jason. No, no. You'll be in a bunker somewhere. At Catholic Charities Agencies Nationwide, we are there is more than a phrase. It's a promise.

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Join them at wearethere.us. That website again is wearethere.us. What else do we have? Diaspozito this week. I haven't mentioned that yet. I talk about this. This is one of the New York Republicans. There's this kind of group of

People call them moderate based on nothing. I guess they are not as visibly crazy as Marjorie Taylor Greene, I guess. I think the real word is nervous, you know, because they're in swing districts. So it's not that it's not they're not ideologically different, but they're always worried that they have to worry about more than a primary. They actually have to worry about actual voters.

Yeah. Their rhetoric is a little different. So you've got Lawler, you've got, uh, Lolota, who our friend John Avalon's running against. And then you've got Diaspozito here, who I guess had his fiance's kid on, on staff. What was happening there? Uh, I think it was the fiance's kid as well as the mistress in the same office. So, um, uh,

I mean, it's potentially problematic or, you know, in an earlier time that would have been a career ending sort of thing. And now it's, you know, just another another news cycle. My favorite part about this, of course, Desposito was leading the charge to get Santos expelled from the House because of his ethics problems. So here's Santos doing a victory lap.

on social media with some obscene tweet about what D'Esposito has been doing with his genitals. What has he been doing? This is an R-rated podcast. I missed that. What has he been doing with his genitals? I think Santos' tweet was, you know, I'll take, where does D'Esposito put his dick for $10,000 or something like that. Got it.

Something to that effect. Everyone, that's all Kitar Ravash, George Santos. Yeah, no, I'm going to miss him. I mean, it looks like he's going to the pokey for somewhere from two to six years. We'll find out in February. But at least, you know, if all does go to hell between the election and the inauguration, we will still have George Santos to comment on it.

I just want to kind of go through another low light reel of some of these guys that I feel like don't get enough attention. So, you know, we might as well raise their name idea a little bit. Andy Ogles, Tennessee, you mentioned him earlier. He did a GoFundMe for a children's burial garden and then just pocketed the cash.

It did go fund me in that case, and not the barely. And he also sort of made up what colleges he graduated from, suggested he was a police officer, and he hadn't been. Voters were very concerned, obviously, because...

He's coming back. Heck of a job by the Tennessee GOP there. Then we've got Anna Paulina Luna. I interviewed Whitney Foxx, who she's running against. So I think it's a little bit of an underdog. That'd be a good campaign to support for listeners that are looking at races. And Anna Paulina, she was a Turning Point USA activist that got popular on Steve Bannon's podcast. Is that right?

Right. And Mike Lindell was very key there as well. She, as my colleagues at The Post wrote about, shall we say, was quite creative in some of her resume, too. I mean, I'm very impressed by her record in Congress. At some point, she had introduced, I think, 10 pieces of legislation and like nine of them were trying to punish Adam Schiff. Right.

So she came there for one purpose. I think wasn't the other one trying to arrest Merrick Garland? She wanted to fine and expel and censure Schiff. And then, yeah, she was the one who wanted the inherent contempt of Merrick Garland. So not only would they hold him in contempt of Congress, they would actually send the sergeant at arms, you know, hustling down to find the attorney general somewhere and lock him up in a cell in the basement of the Capitol. So, yeah.

I mean, there's still time left, right? I guess. And if you're in Tampa, St. Pete, and you're like, you know, I just want to make sure we've got representatives that are focused on, you know, making sure they're responsive to the issues here. We have a hurricane potentially come in our direction here this weekend. Um,

They got to feel nice knowing that Anna Paulina Luna will be there. And it's just laser focused. Right. I mean, if you've got Merrick Garland under lock and key, I think you're going to be okay when the hurricane barrels through. This guy could actually lose. Derek Van Orden. This is a race in Wisconsin. Another one that I'd flag for people. He was at the Capitol during the insurrection. And we'll talk about the yelling at the pages.

Yeah, I mean, he's got a history of yelling at kids and librarians in his home state and that sort of thing. But he was the one, I think Punchbowl reported it at the time. These teenage pages from the Senate were down taking pictures in the rotunda and they got down on the ground, like many people do, to take pictures of the rotunda. And he comes in there late at night screaming at them to get the fuck up and other things like this, frightening children. Now, he's a rather excitable fellow.

But I mean, he's got nothing on Ronnie Jackson for excitement. I mean, Ronnie Jackson will do that to a police officer. Was Ronnie Jackson class of 22 or is he 20? Yeah, no, he goes back when I do sort of group them all together at some point. Yeah, okay. Well, you know, you have to make sure who sort of gets like when you're doing, what did you call it? The end of the year superlatives.

You know, when you're doing superlatives for each class, I want to make sure that Derek and Ronnie aren't competing. No, no, no, they shouldn't be. I mean, and I say the class of 22 is easily the craziest since the class of 20 because, of course, then you had MTG and Boebert and just that right there. The only fool in my book that got more mentions than MTG was Kevin McCarthy.

I've just spent so much time on my Kevin here that I think we're just going to give him a pass. I guess it is fun. The saddest thing, I think, that I maybe have ever seen in politics is this McCarthy getting...

you know expelled by his own members and then rather than just going to like get paid or whatever going home to california you know open an auto dealership he has decided to stay around and like unsuccessfully try to primary all the people that yes expelled him and like make fun of matt gates i mean sometimes he you know lands a punch on matt gates but like the whole thing is very pathetic and sad

It is a bit sad. Right. And he's always like looking for a chance to be a commentator on cable news. And he lost in that entire revenge tour. It's easy, I suppose, to pick on Kevin McCarthy. But I will. I'm not like an access journalist who gets a lot of scoops, but I did a very important scoop in here. And that is that he did in the dark of night soon after winning the speakership.

have a bidet wheeled into the speaker's office so he could have that. This is a man who really likes the trappings of the office. Like each time he had a news conference, he'd go to a different part of the building and you could hear him on the microphone and Steve Scalise said, hey boss, this is a really great site. And Stefanik would say, oh yeah, no, this is a perfect site. Love this one.

So it was all about I am the speaker and I enjoy the trappings of the job, even if I can't actually work in this job. And that brings me a lot more joy for his defenestration also, that he did enjoy the trappings so much that the trappings are now gone. And I think that's why he's running around trying to get himself on, you know, on television or whatever else it is. He needs that.

Yeah, he floated himself for VP also in the Wall Street Journal. I enjoyed that. The bidet is just something to really think about, just like how high of a priority that was for him. He spent a lot of time in the office, I guess. We got to finish with the impeachment effort. I do think that this has just been a...

utter failure of all of us, I guess, that the media class and the imbalance between how Democrats get treated and how Republicans get treated. Like this sham impeachment was so embarrassing.

And they literally were using sources who are Russian Intel to try to get Joe Biden with lies. They put out press releases that were like had spelling errors and were factually wrong. And like, it seemed like they were written by like Cartman from South Park. Like it was like they had no evidence. They had no, they spent hundreds, thousands of man hours and resources on this sham impeachment. And,

And I just, I don't feel like it got the attention it deserved, just like how shameful the whole process was and continues to be, actually, because it's not over. I did try to remedy that a bit in the book by devoting quite a bit to it. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned the one...

whistleblower is under indictment who apparently collaborated with russian intelligence as you mentioned the other well another whistleblower was involved with the chinese you know this this arms dealer who's still on the lamb uh as far as i know gal lift are we talking about gal lift yeah yeah yeah another one that uh gates and and green were trying to bring in well she tara reed i think she actually defected to russia in the middle of all of this

Poor Jamie Comer, who's easily excitable getting into fights with Jared Moskowitz and calling him a smurf and just sort of being outclassed. He seems to be a bear of very little brain. So it was sort of painful to watch at each step. He'd tease his next big revelation and then nothing would come out of that revelation.

And then, you know, even when they finally have the impeachment hearings and you've got Jonathan Turley saying, guys, I don't think you got anything here. Come on. If you can't get Jonathan Turley to say your your case is sound, then you've got and you're a Republican. It's.

It's really problematic. But, you know, they did get to show the nude pictures of Hunter Biden, you know, lightly blacked out, but not so much that we couldn't tell what was going on there. So, I mean, right. So they achieved something.

They have the president's son's genitals out there in a hearing room. Nudes, I guess. I mean, the Hunter nudes were kind of already out there, though. I think that anybody that wanted to see Hunter nude could have already seen it without the help of James Cumberbatch. Oh, come on. You're not even going to give him that. I won't. I can't even give him that. Those nudes have been lighting up text change across America for years now, Dana. They investigated his art dealer. I'm not sure that would have come to light. That's true. That's true. The whole thing is like,

I mean, it's a little bit repetitive of Ken Buck point, but I just think it's important to state that like as extreme as like the Gingrich Republicans were or as the Tea Party Republicans, like there is not really a pair. I mean, even like the Benghazi thing was clearly overkill and like the number of hearings based upon what actually happened. But like there was some underpinning thing that happened at Benghazi, right?

Like a bad thing happened to me. A bad thing happened. The mayor did an investigation, just not to this degree that Republicans did. I focused on it. Like this was all like it was totally based on nothing. It was a clown car. They were tools for the Russians. And just like the idea that these folks would just get put back in Congress and that it's just kind of like, oh, we'll just laugh at the silly Republicans. I mean, it's just...

It speaks pretty ill of the low bar that we have for Congress, like is not being passed here. Yeah. And it does. I mean, making it up out of whole cloth is one thing. But as you point out, this wasn't they're not the ones who made it up. In many cases, they were actually following Russian propaganda here. And this isn't the first time this happened. Obviously, during the Trump impeachment, we got a lot of that.

And the backdrop, of course, is Trump himself is coddling Putin. And these House Republicans, I think they voted, was it 111 or 102, against aid going to Ukraine. And this was even after the five-month delay that allowed Putin to seize the advantage over there. So they're using Russian propaganda, but it's not just in a vacuum. It's part of a rather disturbing change in the Republican Party from internationalist to...

Please, Vladimir, have your way with our NATO partners. Well, at least you get some laughs out of it. It's a depressing turn of events, but the book is Fools on the Hill, the Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces.

who burned, they're burning, I'm changing it, they're burning down the house, who are currently burning down the house. Thank you so much. There's still a few embers that haven't gone out yet, you're right. Exactly. Thank you so much to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Come back soon. Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow. We've got a guest with some very good words. We'll see you then. Peace. ...

The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.