Doug Collins Knows What’s Wrong With Congress
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Well, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I'm Jason Chaffetz. Thanks for sharing part of your day with us. I think you're going to enjoy this. We've got a couple of thoughts on some polls that are out. Interesting polls, insightful polls. Not a huge poll fan, but you know what? I think they do give a glimpse as to what the psyche is within the

Within America, and certainly during, I think, the last election, certainly the primaries, they've actually been much more accurate. Hopefully, they got their act together. We're going to highlight the stupid because there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And then we're going to get together with Doug Collins. Doug Collins, former congressman from the great state of Georgia. I served with him in the Congress. He was the ranking member on...

the House Judiciary Committee, a really pivotal role. I was on that committee. I've done a podcast previously with Doug about kind of his life and growing up and his experiences. Fascinating one. So there's another Doug Collins one you can look at. But we wanted to talk about kind of the state of America and what's happening. But we also wanted to talk about Congress and what you can do to fix it, what's wrong, what's working, what doesn't work.

So this is a little bit different twist on it, but I think if you want to get a glimpse as to...

how things really go down in Congress and get a really solid perspective and have some fun along the way. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation with Doug Collins. All right, we're going to start with some things in the news. And this is not a shocker. We continue to talk about immigration, the problems that it brings when you allow millions, literally millions of people to come into this country illegally.

So remember, legally, lawfully, the United States brings in more people than every other country combined. You could take all the immigration of every country combined. The United States brings more legally and lawfully. We're not talking about the people that are

uh, going between the ports of entry. We're not talking about the, the, you know, we're talking about the people who come legally and lawfully. They do it the right way. They apply for a visa. They apply for a green card. They, they do what they, uh, need to do in order to pursue citizenship and do it legally and lawfully. I mean, we all have history, right? You always hear this from everybody. Oh, we're a nation of immigrants. Yeah. Uh, legal lawful immigrants. Um,

Not this surge, an unbelievable surge of illegal immigration that's gone on in this country. But what's interesting here is once you allow those millions of people to come in, guess what? They want food, shelter, health care, education. They want to pursue jobs and everything else. And so when you do that by the millions, guess what?

It costs money. And a lot of these people don't have money. They don't have skills. Some of the people being released, a small percentage of them, but are from mental institutions or from prisons. Those are the reports that we're hearing.

Some are just decent people trying to improve their life, but again, doing it the wrong way, working with drug cartels or the Chinese or whatnot, and the human trafficking, the drug trafficking. We don't need to go through all that again, but my point is once they get here, then what do you do with them? Well, they've surged to some of these big cities where that's where they have friends or they might have relatives somewhere.

One of those big cities that is getting kind of run over by stuff is a sanctuary city. Now, keep in mind, a sanctuary city, sanctuary county, sanctuary state. What does that mean, sanctuary? It means that they won't cooperate with the federal government. It means that they won't get reported. It means that, let's say, you commit a crime and you're detained. They won't call ICE or Homeland Security either.

or the border patrol, but most the case, ICE, Immigration Customs Enforcement, and say, hey, we have somebody here who raped a girl, let's say, for instance, raped a 17-year-old girl in a sanctuary city. They'll just let him go. They literally will just let him go.

Whereas in a non-sanctuary city or state or county, they will call ICE and say, hey, we have this alleged perpetrator. What would you like us to do with them? And then they've got to make a decision about whether or not they're going to charge, who's going to charge, are they going to get deported, not deported. And the stunning number of people that don't get deported

is just unbelievable to me. These are people that committed crimes. Keep in mind, under Obama, President Obama, we had more than 60,000 people who were here illegally, got caught committing a crime, and instead of being deported, they were released out into the homeland. These are criminals, the criminal element. So what's infuriating about this is these illegal criminals

they understand where these sanctuary cities and states are. That's why they gravitate to them. Again, might be family reasons, might be other reasons, but a lot of them go there because they know that they won't get potentially deported if they commit a crime. So one of the sanctuaries out there is Denver, Colorado. Now, I happen to live in the Intermountain West, the Rocky Mountains, one state away. I actually graduated high school out in Colorado.

And there was a news item here. Nine News in Denver caught this. No, this is the allegation. Andres Carrera, supposedly, has a great title. The title is Denver's Newcomer Communications Liaison.

You know what that means. That means we're welcoming in. We got the welcome wagon out for people that are here illegally. That's what that means. That's not, hey, you're moving from, well, nobody moves from Boise to Denver, but hey, you're moving from Wisconsin down to Denver, huh? Welcome. Let me give you a little welcome packet and make sure you know where the Chamber of Commerce is and your local grocery. That's not what this person does. Denver's newcomer communications liaison is there to help welcome people.

They're essentially illegal immigrants. And he was caught on camera, evidently. I haven't seen the video, but I'm reading the article about how they were telling people

He was telling people, supposedly, look, you're going to suffer here. You're not going to get the same sort of benefits because they're maxed out. They're like, we don't have any more. You really want to go to Chicago or New York because they got more bennies. They got more benefits. Now, we'll see how this story plays out. Got to find out if it's 100% true. But I think that's probably the reality of what's happening. These cities are so overwhelmed. And you hear it from Mayor Adams in New York. You hear it from Chicago, you know.

Gavin Newsom wants to be a sanctuary state for everybody. Anybody who's there illegally, anybody who wants a specific surgery. It's crazy what California has become, and there's a reason why its metrics are so down. All right, let's move on, because you know what? There's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. All right, I put this in the stupid category, but I think it's just the reflection of reality. The Daily Mail reporting that

38% of people polled in their poll, and they're not quite, honestly, they're not necessarily known for the polling prowess, but nevertheless, 38% believe Biden would not be alive if he served his second term. Not that he would get assassinated or something nefarious, just the fact that he's old and that another five years from now, he probably won't be alive. That's what that, that's poll saying. Another poll, uh,

shows what a rock and a hard place the Democrats and specifically Biden and Harris are in. 40% can't name, this is not for the Daily Mail, by the way, 40% can't name a single achievement that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have done. Can you? Can you name a single achievement? Quick,

Yeah, probably can. And roughly 50% of Americans, more than 50% of Americans, believe they're worse off since Joe Biden took office than we are right now here today. And I don't know what, if anything, they could point to or will be able to point to in the coming months. So look for scorched earth. They just want to make it a referendum about Trump, Trump, Trump, no matter what they're going to say, what they're going to do. That is going to be dumbing down America, and they're doing it all for power, and it's wrong. But that's the direction we're going.

All right, so let's get on to something a little bit more positive, something else.

Joining us is Doug Collins. So good to see you in person. Jason, it's good to see you. I mean, we've been communicating for almost a few years now. It's almost every time we see each other on screens or something. You know, it's kind of funny because when you go to Congress, you don't really know anybody. And then you do know. And then you see him like every day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild, especially in committees. You're on the same committees. Well, it's just funny. I was just down doing a show here at Fox and looked on the TV screen. There was McCarthy was downstairs.

So I texted him and said, where are you going? And he was gone by the time I got here. So it's pretty wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, you know, it's funny. You see somebody like every day. You did a great job on judiciary and being the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I think I was the token on the committee because I was not an attorney. Yeah. Yeah.

It was different. It's changed a lot. But I learned my – I go back to the things I ended up doing with all the stuff in impeachment, especially in judiciary, was my first year, my first term, when you and Trey and I said – I cut my chops watching you guys on oversight. Yeah. Because we had Benghazi. We had everything going on. And it was like, wow, this is like master's course first year. Well, it was kind of crazy who he had on that committee because –

between us and Gowdy and Mark Meadows and Ron DeSantis. And, you know, I mean, it was kind of a, it was quite a crew. It was a crew. I mean, I sat next to the status for six years, you know, so in judiciary and, and also in oversight. So yeah. Yeah. And, um,

So part of what I wanted to talk about is, you know, you came on the podcast before and I would encourage people to go back and listen to that about your bio and growing up, what life's like, family life, the whole thing, how you got to Congress. But...

But I hear a lot of people who question, oh, you know, Congress is broken. Congress is this and Congress doesn't do that. And look, it's kind of been the American way for 200 years to blame Congress for its ineptitude. But I also kind of believe that our founders set it up.

Such that there was supposed to be contention. There was supposed to be discontent. There was not, it was not a glide path to moving legislation swiftly. You know, my personal theory is that the founders were actually fairly conservative and they wanted it to be slow and methodical. Otherwise, you know, you can do a monarchy, you can do some, you know, a dictatorship and guess what? You can move a lot of legislation real quick. But

But that's not the way it's set up. There's supposed to be vigorous debate and discussion. But what's your view of it? Well, I think you're exactly right. I think that's definitely the way if you go back to your old school thought of looking at it. I remember I'm reminded of the line out of that movie, Charlie Wilson's War. Yeah. So he said, what do you do as well? Tradition mainly. We don't we don't do anything. It's tradition. But the sad part about it is, is what I have seen and I think you saw as well, especially toward your time in my time as well.

is we've moved away from it being deliberative and productive to

to no longer productive and much more contentious. And I think here I was just talking to someone just a matter just a little bit ago. And I said, when you have offices that are hiring more comm staff and social media staff than they are policy people, then you're going to have a problem. Here's what I say right now is the problem and that it should be delivered. The Senate should always been, you know, it's always that saucer, you know, come out of the hot house and go to the Senate and we work this out. We're not doing that anymore.

The idea of a conference committee is unheard of. The idea of bills getting set aside and worked on in committees like we had. My problem is I think that we divorce reality and politics.

Because we've now made promises in the last 10 to 15 years on both sides of the political spectrum that says, I'm going to cut Washington and I'm going to do this and I won't accept anything less. And that's not reality. And so now it has become inherently a system that Mike Johnson, the current speaker now, is facing with.

He has an unworkable majority. We have a technical majority in the house, but unworkable majority. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely right. Yeah. I think it was Ronald Reagan, right? Said, look, if I agree with you 80% of the time, then you're, you're my political friend. I should be, I should be hugging you closer than that's not his exact quote, but that was the whole premise of the thing is of course, you know, you're going to know one person is going to get everything they want. And, and that's the way the system set up. And so, um,

Note that you don't have to sacrifice your principles. There's certain things you just can't do and that you can't vote for because you represent 800,000 people and that's the way it is. But share your perspective. I've certainly got one about social media and how that really has changed that dynamic. You touched on it a moment ago, but...

Social media has not necessarily made the world a better place, certainly in terms of Congress. Well, number one, it's not reality. Let's just get that out there for those of you who are wondering if Twitter is reality. It's not. And neither is Instagram. I think three things have changed politics in the last 30 years.

And one of them started with the Republican, started with Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich came to power and John Boehner, many folks that you and I have known for years, they came in saying, we're going to be different. We're going to have the majority in the 90s and we're going to get rid of Potomac fever. So what we're going to do is we're going to send you home on the weekends. You're only going to be up here for three or four days, two or three days at most. You're going to do committee work, vote, and then we're sending you back. Right.

Now, inherently what that did was, and they don't like to admit this, it put power in the hands of leadership far more than they ever let on it did. Because without us in town, the leadership decided what was going on. The committee chairs took away a power of committee chairs. That was the first thing. And also what that did was I no longer, like you and I just made a comment before, we hadn't seen each other in a while. We've seen each other over the phone.

You didn't get to know other members, and especially across the aisle. So you began a breakdown of the comedy between members, you know, willingly saying you're an idiot or willingly say that you're terrible. It's harder to say that with somebody that your kids play ball together. Number two, 24-hour news cycles. We all see it. They've got to feel it. It's become a fact of life now. But it makes you report things that would have never gotten reported in the 80s. The last is social media. Here's my example of that. I had a guy call our office one time.

I knew him. He was a political watchdog of whatever you want to call him from my district. And he and I agreed probably maybe 50-50. It was time. He called up and just shooed out my office saying, why is Congressman not signed on to this bill? I don't understand. This is terrible. He said he was a conservative, da-da-da-da-da.

Okay. And my usual rhino, whatever. And so I had my office because I knew him and I, and I, and I looked, I said, what is he calling about? And he, they said, was this some bill? So I called him up and I said, what are you talking about? He said, and he named the member. They're going to introduce a, they got, they've introduced a bill and you're not on it. So we call their office. The bill was mentioned in an interview had not been dropped yet, had not even been circulated yet.

For signatures. I called him back and I said, would you just shut up? I said, well, this bill's not even dropped. Get off of internet and get back on to actual real life. But that's how it's changed. The internet spreads things far quicker than member-to-member contact. Yeah, and there's some benefit of that too, right? I mean, people can explain themselves and respond and people can voice their views. I mean, that's the First Amendment. That's good stuff. Right, but...

You're right. You know, what often happens, what I saw change in the eight plus years that I was there is, and this didn't start this way. People would give an opening statement. They'd make a comment. There would be an amendment in committee.

So the way it works is when there's a bill that's being considered in a committee, that's called a markup. And members can offer amendments. They can make statements. There's all these procedural things. Sometimes these things will go for two or three days. Sometimes they'll go for two hours. It just depends. What I saw morph into, and I know you saw this too because we had the same seats, right? Is when somebody went to go speak, all of a sudden, guess what?

Their comms person would jump in front of them, get their camera, their Instagram, get their video going, and then they would make their comments. And it was all playing to that staffer with an iPhone as opposed to, hey, let me make a case to my colleagues and try to persuade the other side. Exactly. Here's a great point that you made of that. I remember my first couple years I had, I was assigned judiciary oversight and

and foreign affairs. So all I was doing every minute of the day was going to subcommittee hearings and hearings because that was back in Benghazi. It was during the Obama administration, the Obamacare stuff. And I was getting tired. You do. And I don't sympathize with people who work on the manual labor jobs. But you do get tired doing this. And I would say – and I look at the questions my staff would help me with to prepare for – and I'm saying, well, number one, I'm so far down on the dice. These are going to be asked far more.

And then I had a comms person look at me and tell me one day they said, Congressman, we understand that and they will be. But when we put this out on social media, nobody will know that it had been asked five times. They only know that you ask it and they will get the response that you had. There's your statement right there. Yeah, that's how social media is changing. Yeah. And that's.

There's a place for it. I don't think we found the right balance to it. And it has changed the dynamic, even when you go on the floor of the house. So, I mean, you and I were just talking about committees, right? Yeah.

There comes a time, you know, I did a podcast with Rob Bishop, our old colleague, a congressman from Utah. And he wrote a book that he's got out now, you know, what they didn't teach him in school about Congress that he really should have. And Rob's whole premise here is that Congress is in large part broken because they started this process of rolling votes. And that is there's a debate on the floor.

And then there's a question as to, you know, are you going to vote if there's an amendment? Do you is there a motion to proceed? Right.

The problem is when they roll the votes, what happens is in the afternoon, maybe three, four o'clock in the afternoon, suddenly you go to the floor and there's 12 votes. And you got to pay it. Your staff's really got to be organized. You got to be paying attention. But what most members haven't seen is any of the debate that preceded it. And some of the debates short. Some of it's just 10 minutes per side. Some of it's 30 minutes or an hour each side.

But what happens is if you look on C-SPAN, right, they're out there debating and there's like four members. If you're lucky. If you're lucky. Yeah. And they're all passionate and they're flailing their arms and all that. And when you look around, there's like four members out there. Yeah. And Rob's contention is.

That that really harms the body. If you are going to take it seriously enough that you're going to bring something to the floor for consideration by the whole body, you should make everybody sit there and listen to the debate. Yeah. I'm going to take it a step further. And I was on rules committee for four years and rules. Explain that to people because.

That's not – not everybody knows what the rules committee is. Rules committee has been called everything from the speaker's committee to the gatekeeper committee. It's the committee that you go to. It's overwhelmingly for the majority. So they determine what gets on the floor. So if you have a bill coming up, will it have amendments on the floor? Does it have amendments in committee? Are you going to vote? How long are you going to be? How long are you going to get to talk? Everything else.

And I got tired. One, it was a long working committee because those days we were working. We get there and you do an eight-hour night. We get in at 11, 12 in the morning. And the problem was is we have amendments, especially with bigger bills.

I made a conversation, a discussion one day and I said, look, I said, I am not, I'm not going to really want to be in favor of any more amendments being added unless the sponsor of the amendment came up here and actually told us why they wanted this amendment. Yeah. And you would have thought that I was a heretic.

Why do you want them up here? Because, okay, I'm going to share the dirty little secret nobody talks about. You know this as well. There are members who put bills onto the – introduce bills with their name who could not no more tell you what that bill did beyond the talking point of their comms person than you and I. They don't have to talk about it at committee. They don't have to talk about it on the floor. They just read their statement. They have no idea. So where is that idea coming from?

So I think you're right. We've got to get members who are bored. Members are bored because they go through the motions every day, but they don't find things are passionate. Well, and they don't actually achieve anything. I kind of joked with people and I still do said it's exhausting doing nothing. Now, and what I mean by that is members are busy. They're working hard. They're trying to help their constituents. I mean, it is. These are long, hard days. Okay. But.

When you actually go through the whole process and there's no conclusion and it just ends up being a continuing resolution or an omnibus and there's one vote on... I remember there was one vote. I don't know if you were...

We overlapped, but not the entire time. But there was and again, I'm getting these are very rough numbers. It was like a seven hundred and fifty billion dollar bill. Nancy Pelosi was the speaker and it came up on like December 22nd or something. Yeah. I mean, I believe that they extended this because they knew everybody was itching to go home for Christmas. But it was the culmination of a lot of work.

But the problem was we didn't get much exposure to it except for a day or two. And then it was yay or nay. Oh, yeah. On $750 billion. I mean, this bill was like hundreds if not thousands of pages. And this is a bit in the rearview mirror. So I'm sorry I don't have the exact specs on it. But that was the frustration is yay or nay. Now, I think I voted no on that. But...

To say that every member read every bill and every – there's no way. No. And really with some of the way they're written is probably not even – if you did read it, this is the reason why debate is needed. Well, it refers to another part of the code. And then you got to go look up that part of the code and like it amends –

section something and you're like, wait, what does that section do? A former colleague of both of ours from Lynn Westmoreland from Georgia said that the quickest cure to get a bill passed is to have jet fumes in the air. Yeah.

Lynn Westmoreland had this southern drawl. Y'all, hey, dog. He was always – He was great. I remember one time my first year coming in, and it was a controversial kind of amendment bill coming up. And I came in. I said, well, Lynn, what are we going to do about it? And he looked at me. He's just sitting on that front stow. He said, well, son, I'm just going to tell you. It's about time to get your asbestos britches on. Yeah.

With that thick of an accent. Because the fire's getting hot. Yeah.

And what most people didn't realize about Lynn, though, Lynn was the fourth member of the Young Guns. Most people don't remember that. Really? It was, you know, Kevin, Eric, and Paul. But behind the scenes, Lynn was running the candidate recruitment. He was running across the country doing NRCC stuff. And if you ever went to the Young Guns dinners, Lynn was always there and always introduced by Eric and Kevin. But because he wasn't a Young Gun, they put him out there.

That's so funny. I remember just a little side note about so the young guns was sort of this effort to recruit and bring in young guns and all that. And it was really funny because I I took on a 12 year incumbent Republican and I beat him. And then so now I got the nomination. And so I went out to Washington, D.C. for my first trip. Right.

And I was introduced as a to the young guns. And I was invited to this dinner. Yeah. Usually at Bobby. What was that? Bobby Vans. Bobby Vans restaurant in D.C. Nice, fancy dinner. Go in, sit down. And so we're sitting there.

And I got introduced as one of the new young guns as if Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor and others and Lynn had recruited me. And it's like, no, I beat one of the Republicans to get here. But I was suddenly a young gun because it's not like anybody made a donation, showed up in the district and helped me. But a little side note. But it was a good idea. It was a very solid idea to do.

to freshen up. And it did help us, I think, get to the majority. All right, let's go back to the function of the House, because I think a lot of people, when they just, it's so easy to just say, oh, Congress just, it just doesn't work, you know?

The people that are listening to this podcast, I think they want to better understand it and they also want to best solve it. Now, one of the solutions on my list, and I don't know, you may totally disagree with that. And if you do, we'll just cut it from the podcast. It's a great thing about a podcast. He said what? No, just teasing. You may totally disagree with this. But the more I step away from it, and it was true when I was there, but the more I step away from it, the more I really believe that

If I could wave my magic wand, I would get rid of the appropriators. I would get rid of the appropriations committee. And here's why I argue that. There are, I think, 18 authorizing committees. An authorizing committee has jurisdiction over certain pieces of legislation, right? Right.

Natural Resources, for instance, has Public Lands and Bureau of Indian Affairs and all those kind of stuff. Energy and Commerce, I think, has too big of a portfolio, right? They got all the health care, plus they have all of energy. I mean, it's one of the most powerful committees out there. So what's frustrating, though, I'll take the Natural Resources one because I was on it for a term. Rob Bishop was chairman of it.

There would be programs that would not be, quote unquote, authorized. Either they had expired because they had they had run through the seven year authorization and they weren't renewed, but only to have the appropriators go over there and say, but we're going to fund it anyway. And so we have I don't know how many.

hundreds of programs that are not quote unquote authorized but are still funded and so it's very frustrated what the the power of the purse is supposed to be the thing in the constitution that congress particularly the house has the ability to control and manipulate such that they can use the power of the purse to hold for instance on judiciary how do you get the fbi right

To get in to get in line and be accountable, you have to do the appropriations part of the process. When you have a separate appropriator, they're not listening to the authorizing committee. And that's what's so frustrating. You know, you've hit on I don't disagree with you. I think the problem is if you had a House rule, but both Democrats and Republicans agreed to that, if it wasn't authorized expenditure, it doesn't get spent. Yeah, but but.

And I'll say this, but there's also constitutionally sort of, if you would, understood departments, Department of Justice, Department of State, these things that are named that have never been authorized in 200 years. They've never been reauthorized. Parts of them have been, but not the programs as a whole. But don't you think that would force?

Congress to actually step up and say, OK, let's come up with something reasonable because we're not going to shut down the Department of Justice for two months and have no DOJ. Here's the problem. And if you don't mind me, I'm going to tie it to some things for the Supreme Court right now. And it could make a big difference in how Congress operates. And this is going to be called the Chevron Doctrine.

Which basically Chevron is before the Supreme Court right now. You and I dealt with this when we were there. We're trying to get rid of it. Explain it to people. I'm on it. Basically, in real simple terms is the Chevron doctrine says that administrative agencies are favored, so to speak, before the courts in interpreting the laws passed by Congress. The reality is, is that courts have lately said, I trust the Department of Energy more than I trust the legislators who wrote the bill.

The Chevron doctrine has been around for a long time now. And maybe early on there was some validity to at least giving some deference to the committee, but to the departments because of experts and stuff like that. Well, with the way society's changed now, Congress knows what they're doing. Here's my concern. Supposed to. Here's my concern, Jason. And I mean this with all due sincerity.

Congress doesn't want to work that hard in the sense of what it would take. Amen. Okay. They don't. Because if we go over the Chevron doctrine, so if you pass the Clean Water Act, if you pass a bill on, name it, water, pollution, DOJ, anything else, then Congress has to spell forth what they want that program to be.

We have members, and you remember this because of everything else. They would gripe. Do I have to stay here for the whole hearing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when are we going to have amendment votes? We're talking about rolling votes. Would you roll those amendment votes until later in the afternoon? I've got a fundraiser this afternoon, or I've got another meeting this afternoon. Are there donuts back there? Yeah, the donuts back there. We laugh, but that's one of the most true things. Did you bring food today? But think about it. It's true. We're up –

Most members are up there. We'll say if they fly in on Monday, they're flying out on Thursday, which means they're really only there Tuesday and Wednesday for all intents and purposes.

You can't do this work in Tuesday and Wednesday. This is a work, and this goes back to that Newt Gingrich assessment of Potomac fever. If you really wanted Congress to pass legislation to do the stuff that needs to be done, and I'm not even going to get into the extremists on both sides who are willing to hold up a bill because they don't like one piece, but really do this, then you're going to have to have members in D.C. three to four weeks out of the year, a month, in committee hearings the majority of the time

Of those weeks actually banging out this kind of work. And they don't want to. And it's because, number one, they don't see a solution to it. Because they've been told by staff, we'll handle it. That's another issue we can talk about. Right, right. But they've also been told, they also know that this is not going to get done because we're not bringing any of those kind of bills forward. And that's this whole problem. And there's your boredom. It's this circle, but all this time and effort into it.

And I believe the stat is since the 1972 Budget Act, only one time had they ever gone through all 12 appropriations bills in the right order, in the right way. Newt Gingrich was the speaker. Bill Clinton was the president. And guess what? The budget balanced that year. And so it can be done. The other thing I think, and Rob Bishop made this point very well,

is the 10th Amendment. We forget about that. The Congress says too much. You know this. We're seven miles wide and about a half inch deep on legislation. It's just...

Rather than doing fewer things and doing them well, try to do all things. I mean, what is the federal government not touching in people's lives? That's the problem. The problem is no longer – and I'm going to go back to – this is a trite kind of statement for many, but I'm going to go back to the founders' intent that you brought up earlier. The founders would have – and again, you're saying, well, Doug, it's 250 years ago. I get it. But the founders' intent, they could see other governments of their time.

OK, they knew that the legislative body was the actual voice of the people. It was that place where they needed. They understood departments and agencies and stuff. I mean, it was a different kind of setup, but they would have never envisioned a time in which the Congress was basically inept.

in which they only do a budget, they only do a CR, they only do the NDAA. I mean, it's amazing, we take such great pride and honor. Here's the thing, I'm going to go back to your point. NDAA is authorized every year. They've had 60 years of the National Defense Authorization Act, and they take such great pride in it. But yet there's things that they authorize and deauthorize in the National Defense Act that the appropriators fund or don't fund. Exactly. Sometimes they approve it in the NDAA, but it doesn't get funded in the authorization process.

And the appropriators process. So when you look at this, there's it's just such a disconnect in what Congress can do. And I saw a statistic just the other day that I think we're on track this Congress since January of last year, that if this track continues, there's going to be less than

And I want to see the number, but it's around 50. Now think about this. 50 rule bills that literally become law. Think about that for a second. Yeah. And 50 is one of the – they were talking about the do-nothing congresses of the early 19th century or 20th century. We're making them look active at this point. And they weren't even in session all the time. And they weren't even in session half the time. Yeah. Ours come in there, but here it leads into something that nobody wants to talk about.

And that is we've divorced politics in reality. We're to the point now to where and we see it right now. All you do is look on the headlines today. You see members saying we're not doing anything. I'm not going to vote for this if it doesn't have this. And it becomes a point into which, you know, you're not going to be able to do anything. I had a member one time come in and they said they had campaigned on. I'll never vote for a budget again.

that has spending. Then you'll never vote for a budget. You're basically, you've already sold your voting card to whatever group that said not to do this. And you said, I'm not going to be anywhere of helpful to the process because I'll always vote against it. Yeah. One of the things I learned is, um,

I'm now making a pledge to make no more pledges. Exactly. Vote for me or don't vote for me, but I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. Because you have to deal with everything one at a time. Again, don't...

Don't sacrifice your principles. Stand tall for the fiscal discipline, limited government accountability, strong national defense. Those are the things I put out there. Yeah. But let me jump in. Look, abortion is a dial. I'm not going to approve abortion. Right, right. But not every hill is a hill to dial. We've lost that concept in politics. Not every hill is a hill to dial.

You know, and you can go back and say, you know, there's no moral code of how to run the Department of Energy. OK, there's no moral overreach to how the FAA gets reauthorized. It becomes whose interest is balanced here. And we don't understand that we're out there battling over molehills and American people are saying, what about us?

And I think this has become the more problem. And then when you actually on both sides tell them that you're going to do stuff that you can't do. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Doug Collins right after this. Precise, personal, powerful. It's America's weather team in the palm of your hands. Get Fox weather updates throughout your busy day every day. Subscribe and listen now at Fox News Podcasts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.

OK, I say this all the time and you came in a little before this generation and I was in a little bit after. But there was a big cry in the 2010 election. We're going to you elect us in the House and we'll do away with Obamacare. That was a lie from minute one because they couldn't. You had a Senate that was a Democrat and you had Obama as president. They weren't going to do it. But yet during our time there, we we gutted it eight times in which Obama actually signed.

But you never have Republicans running on that. Why? Because we sold them that we're going to get rid of it. And then they say everybody's not living up to our – Well, part of my beef with that is when there was an opportunity, they didn't ever bring that bill up to vote. They never put it up for a vote. Term limits. You in favor of term limits? No. Look, I get it politically. But I think – look, you served a little over eight years. Yeah. I served eight years.

You and I are both without a term limit. The vast majority of Congress, the average term in the United States House is less than eight years. The average term is less than eight years. That's well before any term limits. So tell me why more things aren't getting done. Well, I wish there were term limits. I've morphed. I've actually become in favor of term limits because –

Get in, serve and get out. But it doesn't work unless you also have term limits for the bureaucracy. We just talked about this. Marie actually talked about this morning. And the problem is you came to it. It's just on the bureaucracy, but it's also staff on the Hill. Exactly. How many of how many of your former staff are still on the Hill?

You can name several of them. There's a few of them. They just go to different staff. Not that they're bad people. I'm not saying that. But it's an institutional. You talked about appropriators. Their staff's been there 30 years. A lot of those appropriators have been there so long. They know how to hide that. But I've never seen anybody – and look, I've signed a pledge before. I've done the same. But it's like –

I was in the Senate race because I was on with the gentleman who I respect greatly who does that. He said, Doug, you've changed. You signed it when you ran for Senate. I said, yeah, it was 12 years. I'm going to be 68 years old. I had no desire to surpass 68 years old. I got no problem. It's going to be where I was at. Let's think about this. But the reality, you cannot show me an example

Because I can go to state legislatures which have term limits. You go to the Florida State Legislature right now, the lobbyist will tell you they don't go to members, they go to staff. Because the members are interchangeable.

I had a member when I was on the Georgia legislature, I had a committee. I had a department head come to me one day. We're in the middle of a discussion on an issue. And he finally said, wait, how much, how many more days y'all have in session? And it didn't strike me at the time he was waiting for. I got out of Atlanta, so he didn't have to deal with me anymore.

Yeah. So I think the issue is and I'll use an example of a member that that I respect greatly. And because I got him as a friend, he's a and I thought he was getting he was catching his stride because he didn't come from politics. It was Ted Yoho, who's a friend of both of ours. Yeah. Ted was hitting his stride in foreign affairs when he had a self-imposed term limit of four of eight years.

He was just, he was a subcommittee chair. He was doing good work and he still does some good work. He still actually comes to my part of the district. But yet we lose him and that eight years of learning because of his own, and I respect greatly what he did, but wouldn't it have been better to have had the people decide if Ted could have stayed two more years or four more years and use the experience that he gained?

But now our problem is we use the examples. We use the 40-year members and the 30-year members and the 28-year members, and we fail to see that the vast majority are not there. Well, I've morphed. Like I said, I've kind of come over to like, yeah, yeah, you know, I think –

I think it's time for a change, but you've got to change the bureaucracy. Yeah, just changing the members is irrelevant in that because then they'll obviously come in and I think you could actually see possibly more gridlock than you see now, which is almost impossible. Because I'm only going to be here four years. I'm just going to stand here and vote no. Doug Collins. Yeah.

Really appreciate serving with you. Thanks for your service in the military, but also to your country and serving in the Congress. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Serving in Congress, I enjoyed it with you. Like I said, I learned from some of y'all as we grow up through this. And military now, I'm in my final few years in the Air Force. So it's just like a lot of transition, but it's all good. Well, thank you. Thank you. And thanks for joining us on the Jason House podcast. Appreciate it.

All right. I hope at the conclusion of this podcast that you can rate it. Please rate it. We would really appreciate it. Subscribe to it so you don't miss one. We've got one coming out once a week. Good, insightful. I hope you enjoy conversations about what's happening in the world and how people got to where they got to. And I can't thank Doug Collins enough. Good guy. I want to remind people you can listen to ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts.

And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Again, thanks for listening. Check out foxnewspodcast.com. A lot of good stuff out there. Will Cain's got a good one. Trey Gowdy. There's a lot of good stuff out there. Shannon Bream put stuff out. Brett Baer. A lot of good stuff. And again, rate it, review it, subscribe to it, and join us again next week when we'll be back. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

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