What Happened to Cocaine Mitch?

Hi guys. Welcome to The Liz Wheeler Show. I’m Liz Wheeler. If you haven’t already subscribed to this show, what are you doing? Pick up your phone, hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Or if you prefer watching the video form, go to YouTube and Rumble. Hit subscribe. Also on YouTube, hit the bell so I can notify you every time we have a new episode, a new interview, a new video on Rumble. They have this new button. It’s a red button right next to the subscribe button. And if you click that, then you can join the Liz Wheeler Show Community on Locals, directly from Rumble. I invite you to join us over there. It’s great. And thank you to everybody who is subscribing every day, every time I ask. I really appreciate it. So what are we going to talk about on the show today?

Well, the United States Senate, as we speak, is about ready to pass a $1.7 trillion spending bill that is trillion with a T. And I know it’s hard to care about the words omnibus spending bill, because snoozefest boring, blah, blah, blah, but waits until you hear what Mitch McConnell is doing with your votes. And what I mean by this is all, to put this in context, Mitch McConnell was a large part of, or bear’s large part of the blame for what happened in the midterm elections just last month. Much of it was because of the electioneering, but some of it was because what Mitch McConnell did, whether it’s not giving money to candidates in close races, especially in in races where early voting is key, whether it’s criticizing candidate quality at a time when you need to encourage voter enthusiasm to encourage voter turnout.

Mitch McConnell, probably more than any other single person was responsible for sabotaging Republicans’ chances to have a majority in the Senate. Let’s just say it that way. But what he’s doing now is perhaps even worse than that. And that’s what I wanna talk about today. I also wanna talk about what this spending bill means for the next two years, because it’s not just about money, it’s not just about politics in Washington, D.C. We as a group of Republicans right now, we’re, we’re essentially in this process of regrouping. We are trying to figure out how to structure our party, our platform, our election strategy, our publicity, our candidates, and our elected officials in a way so that we have a chance of winning some of these elections. This is a big step for Republicans to take after we lost in 2020.

And then 2022, Mitch McConnell is, seems like he’s playing for the opposite team here as good-faith Republicans try to regroup. Mitch McConnell is siding with the Democrats. All of this, by the way, the context of all of this is that on Friday we have the possibility of a government shutdown. This is sort of looming, and this is being painted by the mainstream media and by the Democrats, and even by many, if not most Republicans, as a bad thing. It’s, it’s a, it’s a, a threat in a way. It’s being used to create a sense of urgency for this omnibus spending bill to pass. And today, I want to address that because I reject this entire premise. In fact, I would argue that a government shutdown, for the proper reasons, is actually a good thing. So let’s get to it.

Okay, before we get into what happened, what happened to Cocaine Mitch, this is a story that actually made me laugh today. Con Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. Apparently she’s a producer on a documentary. I didn’t know that she was making this until I saw that it, not only was she a producer, and not only does she star in this documentary, but it actually has been launched. It’s in theaters across the country. And the reason that I saw headlines about that is because apparently it bombed. Apparently this film, it’s called To the End. So everybody’s dream idea of a fun movie to go see. It’s about the so-called climate crisis and how the impending end of the world, or how the end of the world is impending if we don’t pass the Green New Deal.

And it stars Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but it has been an absolute wild failure. So it debuted on December 9th in 120 theaters around the country. So not like every theater, right? This is a specialty film. But get this. The total amount that it has made is $9,667. Less than $10,000. Less than $10,000. So that means, let’s see how many people actually decided, you know what, I wanna go to a movie. I wanna pay for a movie ticket at a movie theater, which is kind of expensive. And I think I’ll, I’ll see the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez film on climate change. The documentary. If movie tickets are, what, like $15 or $16, $17 maybe, depending on where you live, if that’s the average of how much movie ticket it costs, this is like 500 or 600 people who saw this movie across the entire country in the space of a week.

That’s all. That’s the extent of it. Less than a thousand people, probably not half of that. Maybe 500 people saw this in theaters. And it’s profited less than $10,000. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to laugh at someone else’s hardship. I’m not trying to laugh at someone else’s failure, but I kind of am because the reason that she made this film, was to highlight herself, to highlight her own work, her own fight for the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal, which wants us to eat bugs, eat insects, wants us to take a train to Hawaii because it wants to ban, she wants to ban airplanes. The Green New Deal basically would cause us all to freeze to death because AOC would mandate the end of fossil fuel. So what are you gonna eat your home with? This imaginary technology that she said will yet to be developed?

That’s how she presented this bill ban. What’s here to rely on what we don’t have yet? We would all freeze to death and probably overheat in the summer, freeze to death in the winter, and burn to death in the summer. She wants to tax cow toots, cow flatulence because she thinks that contributes to this crisis. And of course, the ultimate goal of this is socialism, redistribute the wealth. Marxism. So this is what this film is about. And you gotta love it. You gotta love the poetic justice that maybe 500 people across the whole country went to see this and she made $10,000. Although, you know that $10,000, you gotta wonder what she’s gonna do with it since she’s so avidly against capitalism. That seems to be tainted money since she made it in the marketplace. Just a little tangent before we get to what happened to cocaine, Mitch, because it was something that amused me today.

Cocaine Mitch, however, did not amuse me today. I don’t know what happened to this guy. There was a time that Mitch McConnell was not particularly conservative, but he was such a skilled politician that you had to have some respect for him. He’s never been like the most stalwart, conservative principally, but the stuff that he did stand for, you knew he was going to win because he knew how to win. And for that reason, when the past couple years when other conservatives have criticized him a lot, I’ve been like, you know what? Cocaine Mitch has a purpose to serve and he serves his purpose well. And all of these other criticisms like, okay, well not everyone can be like the most stalwart conservative. That take is now in my rear view mirror. That was my opinion a year or two ago. And now I think cocaine, Mitch, essentially, I mean, he should pull the reverse cinema. He might as well just become a Democrat at this point because he’s playing for their team. He is playing against, not just against other Republicans in the Senate. He’s playing against you and against me. We saw this example in the 2022 midterm elections, which by the way, McConnell had the audacity to address again, and he still blames candidate quality and Donald Trump for the fact that Republicans did not win the Senate. Take a look.

Looking at each race separately, I wasn’t making that up. We had a bunch of close races. We ended up having a candidate quality time. Anybody remember who mentioned that back in August? Look at Arizona, look at New Hampshire. And a challenging situation in Georgia as well. We did, by we, I mean the Senate Leadership Fund did intervene in two primaries in Alabama and in Missouri. And I do think we had an opportunity to relearn one more time. You have to have quality candidates to win competitive Senate races. We went through this in 2010, 2012, Christina O’Donnell, Sharon Engel, Todd Aiken, Richard Murdoch, and unfortunately revisited that situation in 2022. Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in 22 because of the support of the former President. Proved to be very decisive in these primaries. So my view was, do the best you can with the courage you’re dealt. Hopefully in the next cycle, we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome,

I’m this close to sending about 20,000 bumper stickers to McConnell’s office just to flood his office bumper stickers that say, if you don’t acknowledge the reality of the political enemy that we face, say it with me guys, then we won’t fight. Well, if you don’t fight, well then we will lose. I don’t want to lose. Mitch McConnell helped lose Republicans in the Senate, and now he is essentially trying to take power away from the newly elected majority in the House of Representatives, too. And he’s doing this through this spending bill. So you look at this spending bill through the lens of the capacity that the Republican Party has to fight against the cultural Marxism that’s coming from the Left, and suddenly the omnibus spending bill is a whole heck of a lot more interesting than just la la la numbers on a line. So McConnell said, yeah, on Tuesday to the Republican conference launch, he said, quote, I think we’re very close to getting an omnibus appropriations bill.

This comes at the same time that the appropriations chair, this is Patrick Lehigh of Vermont, said that they have reached a bipartisan, bicameral framework that should allow us to finish an omnibus appropriations bill that can pass the House and the Senate and be signed into law by the president. So what is, what are they talking about? What is this thing? This $1.7 trillion spending bill is what the Democrats want. I don’t know why they’re calling this bipartisan, because no conservative who is a principled conservative could in good conscience vote for this. This is a situation that I’m not sure has any, if any, precedent. If it does, it’s not much any precedent in the modern United States because what we’re in right now is we’re in the lame duck session of Congress. That is the small period of time, the short period of time between the election before the new Congress has been sworn in.

So the people who won their races in November haven’t yet come to Congress. They don’t have their voting power yet. That will happen in January when they’re sworn in a lame duck Congress. There is an element of tradition in a lame duck Congress where if, for example, the House of Representative, the outgoing speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is no longer going to be the Speaker of the House because the Democrats lost the House of Representatives, typically in that lame duck Congress, there’s a little bit of respect given a little deference to the fact that, okay, the people have spoken and they no longer want you in charge. So you don’t have a mandate to do anything very radical. You don’t have a mandate to do things that are on what I would consider the edge of the fringe of the Democratic agenda, right?

So we are in a lame duck session of Congress right now. This is when the outgoing Democrat majority in the House is outgoing. We are about to have an incoming Republican majority, and yet what’s happening here is McConnell is taking, it’s McConnell. That’s what’s so mind blowing to me about this, is I would expect this from Democrats. I would expect Democrats to be like, listen, tradition be damned. We don’t care anymore. We don’t care about norms. We just wanna win by hook or by crook, and that they would maybe violate a norm That’s not technically a violation of the rules. But this is McConnell. This is a Republican that is taking advantage of this lame duck session of Congress and trying to pass something that would essentially neuter the incoming Republican. So it’s Mitch McConnell, in this case, who is, in a sense, violating a norm and taking advantage of the fact that the outgoing, or that the incoming majority of Republicans haven’t, haven’t come yet, that they haven’t been sworn in yet, that existing right now in the House of Representatives is still that democratic majority.

So what he is trying to do is he’s trying to pass this spending bill, but this spending bill would fund the government from now until the end of next September, the end of the following fiscal year. So it would be the end of December through September 30th of 2023. And this makes no sense because when does the house g o p take the majority? Will they take the majority in January of 2023? So what would happen is one of the primary ways that the House GOP would be able to be a, be an influential minority. And when I say an influential minority, not minority within the house, but when the presidency is held by Joe Biden, a Democrat and the Senate is held by majority Democrats, well, the House can’t do a lot. They can, even with a Republican majority, they can investigate, they can have some accountability. And the other thing that they can do, the other way that they have power is they have power of the purse. They can stop funding things that they don’t want funded. They have some negotiating power here. But what McConnell is doing by trying to pass this omnibus spending bill that would fund the government between now and September 30th, is he is taking away the power of the purse. He is depriving the incoming house GOP majority of any power over money and funding and appropriations for the first year that they are in office.

Why would he do this? Why would he do this? That we’re gonna talk about in a couple minutes, we’re gonna get to that because in order to get to that, we have to understand the context of what is in this particular bill. So we say 1.7 trillion. It sounds like a horrible, huge number. It is. But for context here, $16 billion. Try to fathom that. Try to picture 16 billion. $16 billion are just earmarks in this bill. There are 7,509 separate earmarks in this bill. And Bloomberg, actually, I wanna show this on the screen. Bloomberg had a fantastic, and I don’t know, chilling graphic showing which committee members are reaping the most earmarks. Check this out. The appropriations committee members are, far and away, the ones benefiting the most from this bill. This is the, this is corruption. This is Washington DC swamp like behavior.

They’re appropriating money for themselves, for their states, not in a, not in a good faith way, but because they have the power to do it, they have the power to do it. So included, aside from the $16 billion, if you can just put that mountain of money aside for a second. Aside from that, this also includes the $858 billion defense bill that actually passed the House already last week. This defense bill is not a good bill. What the House did is they, the House Republicans actually did this. They tried to throw us a bone by ending the military, the COVID-19 vax mandate for US military members in this defense bill. And that’s a good thing to end it, because the mandate is a bad thing. So that’s fine that they ended it, but they’re using that to obscure everything else that’s in this defense bill.

And what I mean by that is there’s more Ukraine funding. There’s more money, just bleed us dry, why don’t you? Just, it feels like we are just being tapped out for money. And Zelensky is the one profiting from this. There’s nothing about an audit. Where did all the money that we’ve already sent to Ukraine, what are they doing with that? What’s it been funding like? Are we gonna track that money or are we just gonna continue hemorrhaging all this cash, give it to Zelensky and then never ask to see what he’s doing with it? You really trust the guy? Because I don’t. What is Zelensky doing right now? He’s shutting down churches in his country. This is after he’s banned political parties that oppose him and banned political opposition candidates to him. Now he’s targeting religion churches, okay? It seems like we’ve seen that before in that area, in in world history, and it hasn’t gone well, but let’s just give him more money. And maybe the voter won’t notice because we’ve also banned the COVID vaccine mandate for military members. This is not okay with me. This is not okay. So that’s what’s in the bill. Guess not in the bill. What’s not in the bill is any demand for a secure border. There are caravans of illegal aliens who have been trafficked by coyotes and cartels who are pouring across the border of the United States. They’re bringing with them drugs, they’re bringing with them crime. They are trafficking other human beings.

And McConnell doesn’t care about this apparently, because there’s no demand for border funding in this bill. The hundred thousand people who died of overdoses in the United States every year apparently just doesn’t matter because this is not part of it. The Republicans, you know, have negotiating power here. They could just say, we demand that you put this in here and we’re not going to cave on this, and you can try to blame us, but we will out-maneuver you in public relations by showing exactly what a fraud you are. Republicans, if they wanted, could do this. McConnell, if he wanted, could do this. This is what’s so odd to me, right? This is what’s so frustrating to me about McConnell, is McConnell is a very skilled politician. McConnell’s not some doofus bumbling around McConnell isn’t outsmarted by the mainstream media. No. McConnell is really, really good at being a sharky politician.

It’s one of the reasons previously that I had respect for him, because he knew how to play the game of politics. And sometimes Republicans, even principled Republicans who are properly principled, are not that good at the game of politics, or their principles end up falling by the wayside, not because they’ve sacrificed their principles, but just because they don’t know how to outmaneuver the left. Well, McConnell did. I don’t know why he’s not doing that now, or maybe I do know why he’s doing that now, which we’ll get to in a moment. But the urgency that has been placed on this $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill is the idea that if we don’t do something, then we will face this government shutdown by Friday. We must avert this government shutdown. Well, this is not true. It’s actually a classic negotiation tactic. If you place urgency on something, the person on the other side of the negotiating table is more likely to acquiesce to your demands because that urgency creates adrenaline and they just wanna avoid this deadline.

It’s, it’s an artificial deadline tactic. And it’s funny to see politicians using this, but if you take a step back, you can see that this premise is a faulty premise. There is no, there is no urgency to avoid the government shutdown with this bill for a couple of reasons. First of all, the plan is actually for Congress to pass a week long continuing resolution. So just fund the government for an additional seven days, or 10 days because McConnell has said he actually just wants this bill, this $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill to be passed by December 22nd, because he wants to be on the road going home for Christmas on the 23rd. So the urgency to pass this, to avoid the government shutdown on Friday, McConnell himself has demonstrated this is false. Congress can choose how any kind of continuing resolution that they want for any length of time. There’s no urgency to have this omnibus bill go all the way until September 30th.

That’s the first thing they could, they could, and what they should do here is they should pass a short-term continuing resolution just until early January, 2023, right after the new Congress takes their oath and is sworn in and has voting power, until the GOP takes the house majority, and then they should pass an appropriations bill for the rest of the year. That adequately takes under consideration the fact that the people, you and I have spoken, we elected a GOP majority to the house, and we want that representation to actually be representation in the Congress. That’s the first thing. So this urgency is false urgency. It’s a false choice. It’s not a binary choice between a shutdown and this $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill. There are plenty of other options in between, including the option of what should happen, a month long continuing resolution until the new House majority takes their seat.

The second part of this is the idea of a government shutdown has been vilified. And I completely disagree with this. Why would this be a bad thing? Why are we wanting to avoid, why are we wanting to avert this government shutdown? Just because the Republicans think that they will lose the PR war over whose fault it is? Now, this has happened in the past when governments have forced, or when Republicans have forced government shutdowns or actually negotiated and allowed Democrats to maneuver them into this position. Democrats have just won on the airwaves. They’ve gone on cable news, they’ve gone on the radio, they’ve written up eds, they’ve talked to their constituents, and they have won the media war. So in the minds of the public, the public blamed Republicans because Democrats told them to blame Republicans. But this is Republican’s fault, just like what we saw this summer when the Democrats were falsely portraying the Supreme Court overturning Roe v.

Wade, instead of making it about abortion, they were using the word abortion, but they were actually making it about ectopic pregnancy care and contraception and rape and incest. And Republicans just sat back and allowed that false narrative to take root. And so all of these polls after the midterms that showed, oh, well, Roe v Wade and abortion actually were a deciding factor for some voters, especially, you know, upper middle class white women, single women. And I’m like, but it wasn’t abortion. They weren’t voting on abortion. They were voting on being afraid of losing their birth control. They were voting because their friend has been sexually assaulted and they were fearing what kind of healthcare she’d be able to get afterward. Everyone knows someone who’s had an ectopic pregnancy and there was so much fear mongering about, oh, are you actually gonna be able to get healthcare?

Or are you as the mother going to die? Like, that’s not what Roe v Wade is about. That’s not what outlawing abortion is. Abortion factors into those three scenarios, not at all, except how the Democrats want to force abortion on women in so many circumstances. But this is the same with a government shutdown. A government shutdown blamed on Republicans is only blamed on Republicans if Republicans allow that. But Republicans don’t have to, don’t have to allow that. And this gets back to Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is an extremely skilled politician, right? He could handle the PR effectively, and I don’t say this because I have some confidence just in him for any other sake except his track record. Like, look at his track record. Look at what he did branding himself as Cocaine Mitch, for example. That was brilliant marketing. That was brilliant PR that elevated him, made him more likable, more relatable, gave him more political capital in Congress. The fact that he co-opted an insult to make it a cool name, that is brilliant politics, that is purely pr because that had nothing to do with policy. That was just politics.

And then the policy part of it, look at all those federal judges he confirmed when Trump was President, just dozens and dozens and dozens of them. He didn’t back down. He didn’t cave. He didn’t bend a knee. He won, he won over and over and over again, which means that he could win now if he wants to. And if he doesn’t win, then he’s choosing not to. Why, Mitch? Why are you choosing not to win here? I want a government shutdown if it’s done correctly. I want the federal government to be subject to what Elon Musk has done to Twitter, which is firing the majority of employees at Twitter and demonstrating that all of those employees were deadweight. All of those employees were actually, it is not just deadweight, not just losers who didn’t do their jobs right, but people that were actively seeking to harm Republicans.

That’s exactly the same thing that’s happening in the federal government. You could shut down the federal government and nothing too bad would happen. The Democrats would be like, oh, we’re shutting down the national parks, and they’ll highlight one or two sad stories here and there, and Republicans just let them. But no, no, we do not need the federal government to be operating with as many people and as many programs as it currently is. And it would be great if the American people could see, well, wait a second, the federal government has grounded to a halt and nothing really bad is happening here. Huh? Will you look at that? But Mitch McConnell is choosing not to win that PR battle, choosing not to win that PR battle. Why? Why is he choosing not to win that PR battle? Well, let’s answer this question first. All of this money, this 1.7 trillion, where is this coming from? Should we expect an enormous tax bill? Are we gonna see tax increases? The answer to that is actually probably not. This is not, this is not a tax hike. Let me just give you a little context of how much money we’re talking about. In October and November of this year, the US spent over 100 billion on interest alone on the national debt. In the space of two months, over a hundred billion dollars. Just on interest on how much debt we have. That is a bananas, insane amount of money.

And so where is this 1.7 trillion coming from if we have so much debt right now that we’re facing interest payments to this magnitude? Well, the answer to this is something that we talked about a couple months ago. The answer to this is modern monetary theory, which is sort of a neo-Marxist type of anti-capitalism, monetary theory that’s being embraced by the Biden Administration. The philosophy behind modern monetary theory is that debts and deficits don’t matter at all. That if the government that is, is a currency issuer, then they should just print money when they need it, that they shouldn’t have to have Congress appropriate appropriated and levy taxes on citizens to raise that money. That if the government needs the money and they’re the issuer of the currency, they should just print it. Now, you and I know that, that that increases debt, that sparks insane inflation.

But this is the theory that the Biden administration has embraced modern monetary theory and what it’s intended to do has become a tool of control for the administration. That is, the Biden Administration in this case, that is the one enacting this theory because taxes then become not a tool of funding the programs of the administration. It becomes a tool of control over the people, and it allows the Administration to bypass Congress, essentially. It allows them to bypass Congress in two ways, bypass the appropriations because congress members won’t really feel any responsibility to go home and justify to their constituents, oh, this is why we spent this much of your money. No, because if it’s not coming from taxes, people won’t really care. This is really important because it allows all of the pet projects of the Left to be paid for by this quote unquote phantom money that Congress members never have to justify their constituents.

That’s the heart of modern monetary theory. That’s what we’re seeing at play here. This is why I have zero problem with a government shutdown. I only care about how the Republican Party fights the narrative about the shutdown in public. Mitch McConnell knows how to fight this fight. Mitch McConnell can win this fight if he chooses to do so. But he’s clearly choosing not to do so. Even McCarthy in the house, by the way, said that he is a hell no on this omnibus spending bill. So that’s something. The house did pass the defense authorization last week with all the Ukraine funding. So maybe McCarthy’s hell no is for show because so much of his caucus right now doesn’t want him to be speaker. So maybe it’s not really anything, but maybe it is. We’ll have to wait and see. I would argue that we need this government shutdown.

The reason Mitch McConnell is choosing not to fight this fight is because he doesn’t want to fight the culture wars. He wants to neuter the incoming House majority, incoming House, GOP majority, so that he in the Senate doesn’t have to fight back. He doesn’t have to align himself with the more conservative Republicans who’ve been elected to the House. He’d rather completely take away the power of the purse from the House Republicans until the end of September of next year, then fight for what you and I care about because Mitch McConnell does not care about what you and I care about. Mitch McConnell hates Donald Trump. Mitch McConnell believes that the 2020 election was perfectly secure. Mitch McConnell thinks the answer is centrism. He’s not based. He’s an establishment squish. So your votes, your voice that you made heard through the ballot box electing Republicans in the House, Mitch McConnell is trying to take that away. First, he played a part in preventing Republicans from having the majority in the Senate, and now he’s trying to neuter the GOP majority that’s incoming in the house because he doesn’t want to fight the culture wars. He doesn’t want to look you in the eyes and have these conversations. He wants to avoid you. What happened to Cocaine Mitch, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.