Congressman Jason Crow takes on the Democrats' Authenticity Crisis
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Speaking of keeping it real, on this show, I talk to Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado about the authenticity crisis that the Democrats are facing. I know, the fact that we're even talking about it sounds like a parody, like an episode of Veep. But this is what's keeping the Democrats up at night as they struggle to become a true opposition party, the kind of party that can channel their base's rage towards Trump.

Congressman Crowe was one of the Democrats who walked out of President Trump's address to Congress last week, and he claims that it wasn't all political theater. We also talk about how Democrats are hoping that four-letter words and sports talk might help them win back apolitical men. Plus, Congressman Crowe, a veteran, breaks down the situation in Ukraine and what doge cuts he might keep. Okay, Congressman Crowe, thanks so much for joining the show.

Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah. So you were sort of a part of the commotion last week. You walked out of Trump's first address to Congress. Let me know what you were thinking when you decided to do that. Well, I had heard enough. I mean, I showed up. I went to the address because my constituents...

expect me to show up and to represent them and be their voice. But listen, after an hour and 15 minutes of lies and political attacks, I had heard enough. There was no reason for me to sit there and listen to Donald Trump lie about, particularly about my community, right? He once again brought Aurora, Colorado up.

This is my hometown. I live there. I represent Aurora. It's my largest city. He keeps on telling these egregious lies about Aurora being taken over by transnational gangs. That's simply not true. So, you know, my time was better spent someplace else representing my constituents and pushing back on

you know, what he was saying. Was it that moment that you decided to walk out or when did you decide? Yeah, it was shortly after that. Yeah. What exactly is he lying about? I'll be honest with you. I haven't been, you know, covering the Aurora story as closely as other journalists, but like,

Is there a gang crisis there? Like, is there any truth to it? I've seen the videos that they put up. Like, is that stock footage? Is that real? Did this happen years ago? Like, can you kind of explain to me and to our listeners, like, what is real and what isn't? I mean, there has to be a kernel of truth to it. No, I'm happy to. So, you know, this, as folks might recall, this was the whole Springfield, Ohio or Warwick, Colorado thing. He kind of lumped him in on his attacks on immigrants and refugees.

And to provide some context, I represent one of the most diverse communities in the nation. Nearly 20 percent of my constituents were born outside of the United States. I have 130 languages spoken in my public school system. These are our friends. These are our neighbors. We have a long tradition in Colorado and in Aurora in particular of welcoming refugees and immigrants.

They are a big part of our economy, our workforce. They're small business owners. They're our friends. They're our neighbors, right? That is kind of who we are. And it's built into the DNA of our community. Yeah.

We, like many folks, had a massive influx of immigrants last year and the year before and had some challenges dealing with just the amount of folks we had, over 30,000 Venezuelan refugees in Colorado alone, the largest per capita in the country.

And then there was this video going around, you know, clearly of a home invasion, a criminal act. And there's no place for any crime like that in any community, right? I never defended crime regardless of the source, right? If there's a home invasion, there's gun violence, you know, go after it, enforce it. And if the folks are not

they're not citizens or have status, then deport them. I literally know nobody who says that we shouldn't police and deport violent criminals. So what Trump and others did is they took this video

And they blew it up and they said, you know, the city was overrun with violent gangs and criminal organizations and vast swaths of the city were under the control of this criminal organization, this gang. Simply not true. You know, I've talked with the FBI a lot. I deal with.

My police chiefs and sheriffs all the time. And, you know, there were isolated incidents of criminal activity, again, unacceptable and needs to be enforced. But no part of the city, city blocks or any type of, you know, the geography was ever overrun. But, you know.

The truth is not a hindrance to Donald Trump. We know that. So he's taking an isolated incident, but you're saying there are others as well. I mean, do you think he's overblowing the fears of migration? Like, how has it impacted Aurora and just cities in general? I mean, I live in Brooklyn right now, and...

I can see it. I mean, there are people in New York City who don't have homes. There's a lot of class resentment of people who have been put into housing that migrated here. It's a really difficult thing to manage. In fact, you know, the Democratic mayor, Eric

Adams, who's obviously, you know, on the ropes for other reasons. But he's, you know, taken a tact, kind of a more conservative tact almost against migrants, although at the same time, knowing that he needs resources to to house them in New York City or they'll be living on the streets. But like, what does it do to a city? I mean, I say this as a first generation American, by the way, like my mother came to this country as a child. And, you know, I'm

I believe in the American dream, but I do wonder if it's not done in a way that is appropriate for the time, the city, and the resources, what that does to a community. Yeah. Well, clearly our immigration system is badly broken in every single way, right? From border security to visas to

dealing with a pathway, creating a pathway for our dreamers and protecting our DACA recipients, of which I have thousands in my community. It's broken in every way, and that's an economic hindrance to us. Almost half of our annual economic growth, our GDP, is because of immigration. So we're not having enough babies in America. We just aren't. That's true. And we need that immigration. We absolutely need it. And it's obviously who we are as a nation.

But what Donald Trump always does is he takes something and then he might take a major problem like border security or the massive influx of migrants that we did have in the last two years, which taxed our community, attached to all your communities, as you talked about in Brooklyn and New York as well. And then what he does is he'll take one off examples of criminal criminal incidents, criminal behavior, and then he demonizes the whole group.

And this is the crux of the problem here, in my view. He'll take something that actually a lot of people might agree on, and that is we need to police violent crime.

and we need to go after violent criminals. But then he applies it to everybody else and demonizes immigrants and refugees and writes them all off as criminals and people that are endangering our family. And that is my line. I will not accept that. I won't sit down and roll over and let that go without a pass because it's dangerous. It endangers the families and the children and the people that I represent. It's

It's not true. And it actually hinders real reform, right? If we're going to have real reform, then we need to have a conversation about what that looks like and what comprehensive reform looks like. And actually, we had a comprehensive reform bill last Congress until Donald Trump picked up the phone and tanked it and called his allies to destroy the bipartisan bill.

because he would rather run on the crisis. - Yeah, I mean, it's unsafe for those migrants as well. They become targets in society. I do wonder though, has there been like a recognizable increase in crime? Because it's not necessarily that these people are evil, but when you have a crisis of poverty, that creates an environment for crime. Have you seen that yourself?

Well, I think a lot of the crime with some of these transnational gangs, most of it, the vast majority of it is migrant on migrant crime, which is, again, completely unacceptable. That's how these organizations kind of exist. Would you call it gang crime, though? Is that what it is? Some of it is and some of it is not. Right. So certainly there are, again, isolated incidents of gang crime. But listen, these same folks who are talking about transnational gangs are

don't give a damn about the almost 40,000 kids that we have die every year, or 40,000 Americans who die every year because of gun violence. They also couldn't give a damn about the fact that close to half of the kids in my school districts, my public schools, come to school hungry and don't have lunches, right? So this is about demonizing immigrants to then justify mass deportation. This is the important distinction. They want to take

going after violent offenders, of which there is support for, and they then want to use that as an excuse for a mass deportation effort that will go after families, go after children, go after business owners, go after people who own homes and are paying taxes, go after people that don't have status but might have American children, U.S. citizen children, and sweep them up in their raids as well. That is what they're trying to do, and they know they need to create an excuse to do it.

So that's what they're doing. They're demonizing using these individual incidents and they are casting a wide net. And that is what I will resist. I think that the individual, I think you're right that they're highlighting these individual incidents. I do think people can see it with their own eyes in their own cities. And I do think the images from the border are obviously concerning. And the fact that people are

Once you go through the court system, you could say you've been checked in, you request asylum, then you're basically allowed in the country, and then you are expected to come back to court, to immigration court. But like...

there's really no way of tracking you. I think that's probably what is part of it as well. But I agree that they are playing on people's fears and this has existed throughout time and it's terrifying. And there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about that. But just to get to switch to a lighter issue, which is what I started with, you know, your decision to walk out

of the State of the Union. You weren't the only one who decided to walk out of the State of the Union. There were others. And, you know, I saw this as, and then there were the signs that people held up during the State of the Union that Democrats held up. And obviously these are protests to Trump. And like, you know, the other side of the aisle, whenever,

you know, they're no longer in power. This is pretty like common, right? They don't clap when the president says something nice about children or, you know, they sit on their hands at moments when everybody should clap or, you know, there's like the you lie moment. This just probably predates everybody listening to this. But and now Al Green standing up with his cane. There's always like a moment for drama that the opposition party takes. And so yours was walking out. Do you think like it was this

Was this a moment for you to like, was this like a real protest or was this part of...

you know, addressing the fact that you're representing like the rage that your constituents feel and that there is like a genuine like crisis that the Democrats are going through in which they don't represent the the rage that their base feels? Well, I don't do rage. It's just not it's just not my thing. And nor was this some kind of protest or theatrics. Right. I walked out because

Because I had had enough of sitting there and listening to Donald Trump lie and malign my community and, you know, attack Democrats with, again, unfounded attacks. I just wasn't going to do it anymore. I wasn't trying to make some big statement. Right. I felt like my time could be better used.

exiting the chamber, talking to my local press and correcting the record and saying, listen, this is what our community actually wants. This is how we defend this. You know, the moment for, I think, theatrics or grandstanding, however you want to put it, that's not our moment, right? It's not what I think is going to address the problem and the threats that we face right now, right? And we can talk about that. I would love to talk about that.

Because, you know, going viral, getting a bunch of retweets, having some kind of theatrical moment on the floor, most people don't care.

Most people just don't care about that, right? What people care about is the fact that they can't buy a home, that they can't afford the cost of groceries, that the American dream is out of reach. They're extremely frustrated by that. They don't feel like they're being served by the system and by either party in many cases. And they want someone who understands that and will work for them, right? So our challenge is meeting that moment and showing those folks that we are that party.

And no amount of grandstanding or theatrics on the House floor is going to change any of that. Okay, but you have to admit that your party is having a bit of an authenticity crisis. Oh, yeah. I do admit that. In fact, I think that's one of the biggest challenges we face, right? Right. And I know that, Tara, because that's where I'm from.

I grew up in a working class family, a construction family. Same here. Same, yep. I started working. Electrician. My dad's an electrician. Yep. My grandfather was a bricklayer. There was contractors, my aunts and uncles. My dad grew up working construction. I worked construction to help pay my way through college, actually several years as a laborer. I worked fast food when I was 15, McDonald's and Arby's.

And most of my family are Trump supporters. So I have a built-in focus group. Same here. Well, there you go. Although my jobs were much weirder in high school. I worked at a pizzeria because I'm from Jersey. Oh, yeah, that's the Jersey thing. It's got to be a pizzeria. I grew up in a very Italian-American community.

Yeah, I don't know if Pizzeria would have me. Only Arby's would do it. You're from Colorado, right? You're from Colorado, right? No, I grew up in Wisconsin, actually. Oh, okay, got it. Yeah, I grew up in the upper Midwest and spent 10 years in a very small...

town called Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, a small Rust Belt town of about 15,000. It used to be a company town. They used to make ovens and ranges. And then that factory went out of business decades ago and shut down. And, you know, that's where I grew up. Okay. Okay. I have to ask you. So I think that Democrats are trying to like counter this

authenticity crisis, as I've dubbed it. Politico wrote about it the other day, which I think was really smart. They pretty much rounded up all the times you've heard shit or fuck from or God damn it from a Democrat in the past few months. And, you know, obviously, John Vetterman pointed out that he was the first the OG of talking smack or talking shit.

But it seems to be something that everyone's doing. Like, Jasmine Crockett seems to be kind of, like, the hot new, like, AOC resistance warrior. And she's dancing and doing her TikToks and telling Elon Musk to fuck off. And, like, Ruben Gallego is, like, flexing his whole, like, you know, shit talking. But, like, is this the way to counter Trump? Because, like—

I know that the Republicans are trying to be hyper-masculine and they always have been. It's not even like they don't have to try to. They just are. They just like kind of leaned into who they are. Maybe masculine cosplay would be the best way to put it, right? Oh yeah, sure, whatever. But like, it's where they want to be at least. They have a direction. You know what I mean? Like they have a leader, they have a direction. And it's funny because I read in the New York Times that like Wes Moore,

and Ben Shapiro, who are obviously on the short list for 2024 to be, you know, presidential candidates. They are now trying to go through sports broadcasters to get out there and to talk about their favorite sports, makes them more relatable and Michael. But I am not a big sports fan, but I always thought it was divisive to choose a team, which I'm not.

So I thought that was kind of interesting. But clearly everyone is seeing the signs that like politics is downstream of culture, the whole Joe Rogan effect on Trump. But like Trump doesn't like sports. I mean, he shows up at sports games now, but he was never like a big sports fan, really. So I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out like what are the Democrats doing? Are they just trying everything and just seeing what's next? Well, I mean, first of all, I was like, you know, when they say what are the Democrats doing as if it's this, you know, cohesive monolith, right? Mm-hmm.

Obviously, a broad swath of the country and I have different colleagues who represent different places. And I respect that. Right. We are supposed to represent our communities. It's literally the job. I have a community. It's very different from the others. And I have to represent that. But listen, how about just be a real person? How about that as a solution?

right? Like instead of us being like, oh, well I need to be, I need to be more authentic. So I'm going to put a baseball cap on. I'm going to, I'm going to drop some F I'm going to sprinkle some F bombs into my comments. I'm going to, you know, do some kind of funny video. Listen, sometimes that works, but like, I think it just comes across as inauthentic and contrived to a little corny too. A little corny. Like people know the signs were corny. I,

People know if this stuff works if you're being yourself, right? Like I always love, I mean, I grew up working in construction and like all these things. And I always love when a politician like clearly goes to, you know, Bass Pro Shops and buys a Carhartt jacket and then throws the Carhartt jacket on and they walk around. Yeah. They're, you know, just coming off a job site. Like, really? Yeah.

Clearly, that doesn't suit you, right? No amount of going in and buying our hard jackets. Oh, yeah. Politicians all have their gimmicks. I mean, even Biden with his aviators. But here's the problem, though. Maybe the Democrats, they just lean too far into the whole cancel culture thing.

and it made everyone terrified of saying anything. And so then they become frozen. And I just say this as someone, like in my past, I was in television. I was a TV correspondent, White House correspondent for ABC News. And for the first part of my job, when I first joined the network,

They spent a lot of time grooming me. Like they spent months and months and months trying to kind of take the sound of my voice and make it more neutral, more like non-regional, you could say, you know, even though I'm clearly, I have a little bit of a New York, New Jersey sound to it. The New Jersey one is hard. It's hard to get the Jersey out of somebody.

I embrace it. And I actually, it's so much better than it ever was, but I'll never let go of the way I say my name, Tara. At one point, a coach that they hired wanted me to say Tara. I was like, no, that's just not going to work for me. But the point is, like, I turned into a robot. I was so frozen because of all the direction I was getting. Do this, do that, do this. And they were like, oh, God, we...

We ruined her. We completely boxed her in. She's not comfortable with herself at all. And so I just get the feeling the party isn't comfortable with itself because it created a box.

And like not everyone fits in it. And the leaning into the cancel culture, they leaned a little too far. And now they're just like struggling to get out. Yeah, I definitely think there's a part of that. There's no doubt. I think there's a short term challenge and a long term challenge. Right. The short term challenge is we need to win elections and we need to do it quickly.

Right. Because this administration is dismantling our democracy and attacking vulnerable communities and isolating us from the world with remarkable speed. I actually am not surprised by the things they're doing because he promised to do all of those things. And they're in Project 2025. I am surprised by the speed at which they're doing things. So there is a sense of urgency for us to build political power and to win.

There's no amount of sloganeering or bumper stickers, no bumper sticker or phrase or brand that's going to fix that long-term problem, right? What we have to do is find great candidates who can run and win and

in Trump red areas, and they're going to do that on bio, they're going to do that on their background, they're going to do that because they're a retired military, maybe they're a sheriff's deputy, maybe they're a small business owner, a stay-at-home parent, etc. They're going to run local races. That's the short-term problem. The long-term problem, I think, is what you're getting at here, and that is how do we rebuild the democratic brand in vast swaths of the country with folks who don't think we see them and respect their way of life.

Right, they're not listening to what we have to say. We think we're having a policy discussion. Democrats always think this. We're like, oh. - You're losing if you're talking about policy, but we will get to that in this episode, by the way, 'cause it's important, but it's at the end. - It's at the end, yes. But we always think we're having a policy discussion and we're not, right? And I harken back to my time in construction, right? Where when you go on that construction site, you know, 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, you wanna get going early because it gets really hot.

and you shake everyone's hand, like you're feeling their hands, right? You're feeling whether or not they have calluses. It's a callus check. And more than anything else, you want to know who is this person? Are they one of us? Do they understand me and my way of life? Before you want to know anything else. And then that's where we're losing in really important ways.

Yeah, it's interesting. I actually think the fact you brought up speed, right? You said that Trump is moving so quickly and you were surprised. But in some ways, the fact that they're moving so quickly, they're like Tasmanian devils. And it's so messy that they're breaking the things that they're even trying to create. And I think in a way, it's slowing them down. Ultimately, like they're just moving so haphazardly throughout government that there's I mean, listen, it's not a perfect structure, but the courts have stopped a lot of it. And it's interesting.

We don't have a ton of time with you. I know you have to jump. So I want to get to something that's happening this week that's super important. And that is the, I guess you could say, the continuing resolution, which is basically the bill to keep the government open. The Republicans are extending the Biden budget that Biden passed in, that they passed in December, which I think is pretty interesting that they would continue to fund a bill that Joe Biden passed under

Under his leadership. Now, it's it's changed a little bit. And I think that's why Democrats are not going to to help the Republicans pass it. They're going to have to pass it along party lines, which will be difficult because they only have two or three votes to lose. I think it's two at this point, actually. That's right. It's two now. Yeah, it's two votes. And the difference is, is that some of the money is going towards border wall. They're gutting IRS taxes.

and increasing defense funding, right? But like, what is the main issue that Democrats have with this bill if it's just so similar to the one that they already passed in December? Well, it's not similar, right? It's boosted to

to defense spending, it's boosts to immigration enforcement with a method of immigration enforcement, which I think is immoral and will actually hurt our economy and hurt the families that I represent. Is that just mass deportation? Is that what you're talking about? That's right. Yep. Yep. To be able to scale their mass deportation efforts, which... What if they had just used that money to build the wall? Do you think Democrats would have voted for it? Like understanding that people do want to stop immigration? No, I wouldn't do that either because...

Building a wall is stupid, right? It actually isn't going to fix border security. I was an army ranger. I did two combat tours to Afghanistan, one to Iraq. And actually, during my time in Afghanistan, I was on the Special Operations Task Force that was along the Afghan-Pakistan border. We were doing interdiction missions, trying to stop fighters from coming across the Pakistan border. Okay, so maybe not a wall.

But I haven't. My point being, I have a note. Something like that. Yeah, I know a little bit about borders. Something to stop the flow. Like, would you, or more immigration judges or, you know, more detention centers. Like, would you support, do you think Democrats would support that? Or is it just like, hard stop? No, we won't support this budget. Yeah. And by the way, don't worry about the time. I can extend, you know, however long you want to extend. We're good. Okay. So,

Yeah, I mean, if only somebody had thought about a comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform bill that provided border security, more immigration judges, better enforcement, some pathways to citizenship. Oh, wait, we did have one. Oh, yeah, the one that Trump called up Ted Cruz and said, tank it. Yeah, so this is not...

I mean, this is not new. Plenty of Democrats, including me, would support an effort like that. And guess what? Like any compromise, there are things in it that I'm not going to like.

There are things that are missing that I would like to see, but if we're going to ultimately fix a badly broken system, there's going to have to be some compromise built, like there was. And I'd be willing to go there again and talk about it. I want to talk about this story that kind of popped up in the Washington Post. It's about this month-long freeze on government credit cards.

that Doge ordered. And the Post is reporting that government scientists who study food safety say they're running out of cleaning fluid for their labs. Federal aviation workers report cuts to travel for urgent work. Contractors who help U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their efforts. And so it seems like they need to turn this freeze back on. I mean, are you concerned? Have you been following Doge? I know that you're a veteran and you're concerned about veteran rights. Yeah.

I kind of was hoping you could explain how veterans are being impacted by this because veterans make up such a huge part of the federal workforce. But these...

credit cards in particular, like that seems pretty damaging across the board for pretty critical missions that we do. Oh, I'm following Doge closely because it has pretty significant national security implications, big implications for healthcare, for veterans. You know, at one point they had laid off a sizable amount of the suicide hotline workers for veterans. I mean,

I mean, just terrible life and death stuff. And this is the problem with Doge. First of all, Doge is responding to a real demand and a real appetite for reform.

Right? Actually, government does need reform. And there are massive streamlining things. I mean, I sit on the Armed Services Committee, and I know that the DoD wastes tens of billions of dollars a year buying systems and weapons and platforms that we don't need anymore, that we don't use, that are not relevant for the modern battlefield. So,

The question in my mind is not whether or not there needs to be reform and there aren't vast savings. The question is how you achieve that. I happen to have spent my life split between private sector and public sector. I started my career as a ranger, as an army officer. I actually enlisted first. I was a private and then I became an officer later. Then for almost a decade, I was a private sector lawyer helping small and medium-sized businesses grow and understand

federal regulations. And I get how inefficient and how challenging it can be as a business owner to understand red tape and overcome that and how, frankly, a lot of businesses can't and they end up shuttering and how bad that is for our economy. So I get that too. And now I'm back in government service. And by the way, everybody else understands it, right? You don't have to have...

worked in private sector to understand how businesses work. People driving down the road know that it takes eight years to build a damn bridge in America now. That's crazy. That's crazy, right? We can't really build infrastructure effectively anymore, and that is a problem. So it's responding to that frustration, which is real. The problem is Elon Musk is treating this like another hostile corporate takeover.

You can go into Twitter and slash the workforce and then try to rebuild it later in a different way. And you can't do that in government. That's the wrong approach because in government, you're dealing with life and death decisions. You're dealing with national security. You're dealing with people's prescription drugs. You're dealing with

their benefits that they need to actually pay rent or mortgage a day in a month that they don't, they lose their homes. This is simply not an issue of we did this the wrong way. We're just going to correct in a couple of weeks because guess what? By the time you've figured it out and corrected course, someone may have gone without their prescriptions. Someone may have lost their home. Oh, yeah.

Totally. So it's the wrong approach. Also, it's impossible in government to do anything because it is so bureaucratic that if you cut something, try putting it back in there. I don't think that's ever going to happen, right? Right. Yeah, it just doesn't work that way. It is too clunky. But also, this is a guy who, by the way, is dealing with a cybersecurity attack right now on X. I don't know if you've noticed that, but you can't use X right now. I did not notice that. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's what my friends are telling me. I'm my friend, Greta Van Susteren is about to go on TV and she was like, yeah, we're going to talk about this cyber attack. So, and also I haven't been able to post all day. Have you tweeted at all? Not today. Not today. Okay. Well, there you go. I mean, I haven't, I haven't personally posted. You can usually tell the difference between when my team posts and when I post, because when I post it's usually, usually something kind of ridiculous or crazy. But I've

My team actually on that point- So they rein you in. That's what everyone tells me. My staffer reins me in. Blame the staff. Go, you know what? Only you are to blame. Yeah.

Even for your inauthenticity. The buck stops with me. All I'm saying, I'm not shifting responsibility. All I'm saying is my team gets really nervous on Friday nights when I start drinking whiskey and they get a post notification because they're not sure exactly what it's going to be. Yeah. Well, those are the best, aren't they? Okay. So what do you think about the U.S. cutting off intelligence sharing to Ukraine and

the United Kingdom are, you know, our ally. It's awful. Beyond awful, it's exceptionally dangerous.

On the cyber front, the fact that we're cozying up to Russia and Vladimir Putin, one of our largest cyber threats. Americans know that there are threats all the time coming out of Russia and the Kremlin to our entire cybersecurity infrastructure. This administration not taking that seriously and even backing off from those cyber protections

is a real problem. And then backing off for support Ukraine, Ukraine has certainly emboldened Russia. There's no doubt about that. And listen, Ukraine is, I know what it's like to be a soldier on the front lines of a battle, to be fighting and to not have the equipment that you need to be running low on ammunition. And, you know, the interruption of any of that flow for hours or days is

will cost people lives. And it'll make us less safe because obviously Ukraine is fighting a battle for America's self-interest too, right? None of this is charity. And I always make that really clear that we're not, I have an obligation to my constituents and taxpayers. I'm not in the business of just giving out charity, nor should we be. We should always be giving foreign aid and national security support when it's in America's interest to do so, right?

Right. And that could mean democracy promotion. That can mean preventing starvation, because guess what? When people are not starving and sick and there isn't disease, we don't have extremism. We don't have instability and we don't have national security threats. So that is also in our self-interest.

We always have national security threats. But I think the dirty little secret about the Ukraine deal, especially the one that Mike Johnson signed, the Speaker of the House in the last session, the $50 billion that he said, I will fight for this because my legacy matters. And I know how important this is, is that, you know, we're basically offloading our old defense system.

I guess our old defense equipment, right? Like a lot of the stuff that we wouldn't use ourselves because it wasn't good enough anymore. And as you know, the military industrial complex is huge and defense, you know, contractors and Boeing and all the others. I mean, they have, they want to keep the sales flowing through the government, their, their biggest, their biggest client. And so,

Where are they based? They're based in a lot of red states. They use that $50 billion to produce new stock, new equipment. That's right. Totally right. It's kind of a reinvestment in some ways into the US economy and helps their constituents. Yeah, exactly right. For less than 4%,

of our annual defense budget over the last three years. Annually, we have offloaded our old stocks, bought new equipment, new technology, helped Ukraine destroy the Russian military, preserve its independence and autonomy, and have led the world. That's an investment

that is worth the make for any American. And I'm happy to support that investment, but of course it's being squandered by this administration. But you could understand too why Americans are kind of over the war at this point. And it does seem like a lot of money, especially when they're hurting and the price of everything, groceries, food, cars, just going through the roof. And they're thinking to themselves, oh, that $50 billion, I'd like a piece of that pie. Why is that going to Ukraine? You have to understand

Why? It doesn't make sense. No, I totally understand that feeling. And if you don't actually try to understand it, then I think you're missing an opportunity, right? And I understand it in a couple of fronts. Not only...

The last administration always talked about these as like, they always talk about the dollar amount. Oh, another $3 billion, another $2 billion. That was the worst possible way to talk about it. What we should have been talking about was not just these dollar amounts and tranches, but what it is we're actually doing. What is the support? What is it accomplishing?

Right. And we weren't doing that the right way and they weren't doing that the right way. So that was a missed opportunity. Number one. Number two, you're right about us having to remake the case on foreign support and military support and military spending. And that is our obligation. It's been a long war. It's been a long war. Yeah, well, it has. And we're just coming off of Iraq and Afghanistan. There's fatigue.

That's the last point. I think that's actually a key point, Tara, that we just came off of 20 years. We spent over $2 trillion, thousands of American lives. I think a lot of people are wondering, for what? Because terrorism isn't vanquished. We didn't stop extremism. We missed a lot of opportunity and lost time. People like me

from poor rural parts of the country were sent off to fight a war. And by most accounts, it wasn't successful. And there's a lot of anger about that. I get angry about that. How did we allow that to happen for 20 years?

without accountability and without a real discussion about what we're doing. And if folks in my role are not paying attention to that anger and that resentment and that willingness to learn a hard lesson, then we're not doing our job. Okay, one last question. We're going to keep it brief. I'm going to challenge you to think, is there anything that Elon Musk cut through Doge that you think, you know what, that program probably should have been on the chopping block a long time ago?

Well, it's hard to tell because they posted all these receipts and itemized lists, but it's changing all the time. They're taking things down. Things have turned out to be inaccurate. The number keeps on going down. So I don't even know.

what's real and what's not, because that is a moving target, nor has Doge and Elon Musk come to Congress to actually testify and explain it to us and actually go through the real problem. You're completely in the dark right now about what they're actually cutting. I don't know if anybody actually does know. And if they do know, please tell me the information. Will the real receipts please stand up?

Okay, I think we're going to leave it with that. We want receipts, okay? Congressman Crowe, it was great to have you on the show. We'd love to have you back. And let me know when you get those receipts because maybe we'll do a show on that, okay? All right, I'd love to come back.

If we ever get the receipts, I'll come back. All right, for sure. That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Olivia Curry, Christopher Sutton, and Connor Nevins. If you like my work, please go to Substack and subscribe to The Red Letter. You can also find my work on YouTube at Tara Palmieri. That's at T-A-R-A-P-A-L-M-E-R-I. Thank you again for supporting my independent journalism.

I'll be back again this week with a very fun guest.