Mackenzie Eaglen on Military Readiness and Justin Heap Battles Stripped Election Powers in Maricopa County
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of studio. So as often happens in that case, we have our friend Sean Noble, the host of his own podcast, Light Beer, Dark Money, in studio with us today. And our first guest up, Mackenzie Eaglin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness. Thank you so much, Mackenzie, for joining us and welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me. Pleasure. You've had a busy couple of weeks with all the news that's flying around the world fast and furious right now, but you've had some very important pieces that I think folks need to be aware of. I want to talk a little bit about some work you've done behind NATO's 2%, measuring the true scope of alliance defense investments and NATO defense deficit. Because right now, NATO outside of the U.S. is kind of a paper tiger, isn't it?

That seems to be the case. If you look at not just the numbers and how each country calculates their own investments, which is different among everyone, but really what matters is the output of those investments, right? Like how much combat credible power can these militaries field forward? And that to me is the true deficit.

And how are those measurements different? I mean, for instance, how does that differ from the U.S.'s measurement of our GDP spending on military equipment?

So right now the NATO alliance, you know, this is important since this administration, but really going back to the Obama administration and Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense at the time, this has really been a four administration long theme to get NATO members to increase their defense budgets to 2% of their economy, essentially. And then within that 2%, at least a 20%, you know, focus on military modernization, basically combat power, hardware and equipment.

And while the numbers have been steadily, very slowly, but steadily moving in the right direction, the truth is behind the 2% figure is that there's a broad latitude for how alliance numbers count, what consequences.

constitutes 2% of their economy on defense spending. And when you look at it, it's really across the alliance, you know, it's apples, oranges, and bananas that we end up comparing. There's no standardization for what counts as military spending. So one country might say Coast Guard counts, whereas we consider our Coast Guard primarily a domestic law enforcement agency and do not count it as military spending, for example, just to give you a sense.

Interesting. So how much, given Ukraine, given the issues potentially around China and Taiwan and all these others, the world keeps getting more dangerous. Europe is making noises about stepping up in their own defense. But how much are they actually doing it and how capable are they of it?

Well, that's one of the reasons to dig deeper behind the numbers and maybe even call for some standardization, you know, where the U.S. helps sort of vet what can be counted as military spending. You know, I don't want to pick on Germany, but, you know, some cost of the autobahn paving because tanks will travel on it. I get it. I guess it's a stretch, but I'm not going to count that in my military budget. So, you know, I think there is some...

room here for a more honest assessment across the alliance and then demanding, you know, a look at what

is yielded from those investments and where it best offsets, where it's complimentary to the US, right? Because in some cases we want our allies to do what is unique to their specialty and what we can't or won't do in the United States. And so to offset our lack of capability in some cases. And in other cases, we might want redundancy and duplicity. We might just want combat power and mass in certain things like munitions and ammunition and rockets and bombs and missiles.

And in those cases, we might want everyone to jump in where possible. And then lastly, if you take my analysis and you kind of reassess the numbers and offer this more standardized look, then what you have is this dramatic defense deficit

spending the last two decades. And so in theory, you also want to make up for the lack of spending, even as countries have been moving closer towards this 2% because the 2% was squishy to begin with.

How much have they been able to modernize their military and how much have these countries looked at what's going on in Ukraine where the battlefield has changed dramatically from any recent conflicts and said, we need to rebuild our industrial base. We need to build the capacity to develop those military capabilities. How much focus is there on that? Well, there is an awakening. I mean, we are in year three of this.

this terrible war in Ukraine. So the awakening really kind of should have happened, I think, a little faster and a little sooner. But it is underway. And what you see in the European industrial base, defense and aerospace and shipbuilding, is largely what you see in the American industrial base, which is really vast fragility, major outsourcing, fragile sources of supply, mostly from enemies, basically, China and Russia and Iran for critical things that you need to

power weapons and combat forces today, just-in-time production, low cost above all else, including surge capacity in the industrial base. We're all confronting in the sort of free-loving world, the West, these challenges in the industrial base. And so that's also kind of frightening that we all need to rebuild at the same time. And again, if you look at just specifically munitions,

that power a lot of our weapons, everybody's behind. And while the U.S. has been dramatically ramping up, particularly in certain types, the mass and production is not yet there for any NATO country. And so the collective West needs to

turn on the spigot quickly. But beyond revitalizing our industrial bases that are traditional defense companies, it needs to be broadened, right, to include non-traditional defense companies with largely commercial, you know, customer bases with a small military tweak.

because most of what our military is using right now, again, it's sort of a lesson learned from Ukraine. The European commander testified before Congress this week, and he talked a lot about what are some of the lessons learned and lessons adapted. And one of them really is that really commercial products are widely available and can be modified in relatively short order to a military application. And we're going to need to do more of that, too. Specifically drones, right?

Absolutely. What as you as you look at what we're spending and one of the things that's been interesting as as this Ukraine Russia war has played out is I think a lot of people are surprised at how weak relatively Ukraine.

Russia has been. I mean, we it's like, wow, they they really aren't like the superpower that we might have thought of in the 80s and 90s. They seem to be, you know, old equipment, not super, you know, it's really just throwing as much as many bodies as they can at the problem rather than any kind of strategy. Does that

awakening give us i mean one of the things that makes me worried is that okay russia is not as as advanced as we thought they were is china more advanced than we're giving them credit for so right so again the european commander testifying before congress this week said everything you just alluded to you know basically that there are pockets of you know highly skilled russian troops but

But overall, the quality of their ground forces has been decreasing the longer the war has went on because the war has ground on because they're just really throwing bodies at it and not skilled forces. And Ukraine, it's the opposite trend, which is great. But, you know, it's highly dependent upon American intelligence and firepower, of course. And the real question about China is we don't fully know.

But I, for one, am not willing to take that gamble because I did a much deeper dive than sort of a

taking a conservative but more realistic methodology of China's real defense spending, and it's similar to my NATO work, and did that last year. So a U.S. senator went to the floor of Congress and gave a speech, and he said, claiming it was allowed to be said, that America's spy community, our intelligence agencies, all got together and agreed that China's defense budget was $700 billion. This was a couple years ago.

And I said, hey, whoa, that's interesting, because the Chinese Communist Party only issues its defense budget number once per year through state media. And that number that year for 2022 was something like $239 billion. That's a pretty big gap. So I said, maybe we should, maybe I should try to, through public sources only, of course, recreate, you know,

my own estimate and again highly conservative meaning you know no not counting everything that i actually thought could quantifiably and justifiably be counted so i wouldn't be accused of you know some warmonger and aei's analysis shows that china's defense budget really is as large as the united states but the difference the key difference well there's several but the key is they

they concentrate it in the Indo-Pacific and we have to play an away game across three theaters, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. And so collectively, the impact, they get far more bang for their buck. And so while they may or may not be combat tested, they're

Their troops are trying to kill Filipino sailors every day in Sabina Shoal and elsewhere by rendering their vessels inoperable. Those are acts of war. So they seem to be jonesing for something. And I'm not sure I want to risk finding out how good they are or not, but they definitely have what we lack, which is mass. Yeah. The one thing you just referred to in terms of the industrial base, too, is where they have an enormous advantage. We only have about a minute and a half left, but...

Like in World War II, the U.S. was able to redirect a huge civilian industrial base in a very short period of time. China has that capability right now, and we do not, correct? Yeah.

That's right. Just the China shipbuilding, industrial-based, commercial and military. The Navy Intel office had a slide that leaked a couple years ago that says it's 232 times larger than America's ability to build ships of any scale. So what does that really mean? It means if something happens by accident or because we choose it to defend Taiwan or any ally or partner in Asia,

China's ability to rapidly repair and resupply their troops forward and sustain war is significantly outpaced by ours. And of course, ours, we have to sail them back to places of safety and far away. And that takes a long time. And we just don't have the warehouses, the know-how, the people, the machinery. We're basically behind before the firing starts.

Unbelievable. We're going to be coming back with more after the break from Mackenzie Eaglin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can check them out, AEI.org. They always do brilliant work. We love Mackenzie's work here. We're also going to be talking a little bit later, people who are concerned with our elections. Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap, obviously Maricopa has been a center of attention.

issues in recent years. So we're going to be talking to him about what's going on there. And as always, make sure you're downloading the podcast because you don't want to miss Kylie's corner and all the murder and mayhem updates there. Stay tuned. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your Sam Stone guest host in studio today, Sean Noble. And on the line with us, Mackenzie Eaglin, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. When we went into the break, we were talking a little bit about China and about the industrial advantage that they have right now over the U.S. That ties to a couple of pieces she's done recently that I want to get into. One of them was less paperwork, more firepower, fixing the Pentagon's H.R. overload issue.

It sounds like HR and just managerial bloat in general is one of the things that's really eating up the U.S.'s ability to maintain a nimble economy.

base and nimble Pentagon that's able to react and change to circumstances around the world. So tell us a little bit more about what's going on there. Yeah. So, you know, really from the 1940s through the 1980s, the United States military through the Defense Department was the lead research and development arm for the federal government and by extension the country, really the inventor of research

many of the things we're using right now, like global positioning, GPS satellites, stealth, pantyhose and plastic bags, the internet, the computer mouse, email, all of these things, Siri and the iPhone, all of these things came from the Pentagon. And then there was a flip, right? And ever since then, the Pentagon's really had to tinker with what's available out there as opposed to being the core inventor. They're now an innovator at best.

But the defense budget and because of the products the Defense Department launched, which changed the global economy, you could argue, and it's definitely the American economy where it's an information digital space and then became a services based economy. The defense budget followed most of the contract of money that goes back out the door is for services.

not cool weapon systems or equipment as I think it should be. And now we have a defense budget that is extremely inefficient. It mostly pays manpower, whether that's in uniform or out of uniform for those services I talked about.

And everything's sort of calcified. You can't get at any pot of money without taking on a union, a retiree or a veteran. And those are obviously tricky and complicated. And nobody wants to do that. And so the money never really moves year over year. It's not flexible. It's not adaptive. It can't meet rapidly changing threats on the ground. And that's obviously a huge problem.

How different is that from China's situation? So China's government subsidizes a fair amount of its military investments. So it's a further backstop, right? They have what's called military civil fusion. You don't know where their version of a dollar ends for civilian purposes and military purposes begins. So it's kind of dual use, which further strengthens not only how much they can build, but, you know, their surge capacity if needed for war. Yeah.

They have a market stabilization account for all their military investments. They have paramilitary organizations that buffer their military but aren't counted on the books as military forces, even though they sail alongside or fly alongside military forces. It just keeps going and going. They don't count their space forces and research and development as even core defense spending. So their defense budget seems to be

It's not even just that it's flexible, it's that it's significantly additive. So China averages an 8% budget growth year over year. And if you look over the last 20 years, our military investments are flat or declining with inflation.

Yeah, that makes it quite concerning. Yeah, that's a terrifying situation for the world because China continues to become more aggressive throughout the Indo-Pacific, right? I mean, they are openly posturing and flexing at how they can defeat the U.S. military. And while we've been spending –

Yeah, I think the F-35 is finally coming into the point where it's been – they've figured out ways to make it very effective on the battlefield. But that program has had a lot of waste in it. The littoral combat ships that the Navy purchased have been an utter failure. There have been a lot of sort of big-time, big-program failures in U.S. military procurement that we keep sticking with. How do we get away from that and start building a force –

based on things that actually work and perhaps not necessarily lower tech solution, but a lower cost, more flexible solution. Absolutely. I mean, that really is the only way out of this box. So, yeah,

There has to be a whole lot smaller bets more frequently. You know, you get, depending on gets backed into this corner of buying these huge programs, like you mentioned, the Joint Strike Fighter, for example, because they don't buy enough to move markets anymore. They used to, but now there's just so few major mega programs because we haven't modernized the force since Reagan. We don't buy a one-for-one replacement. So then everything becomes make or break for the companies betting on it. That's not a long-term strategy.

solution for redundancy and health of the industrial base. What we need are, you know, basically to buy at mass and scale with a whole lot of smaller bets and smaller companies, you know, may the best person win, fast fail, right? And picking winners and losers. What you've seen over,

The last 15 years, depending on purchasing, is this reluctance by any political party to basically pick the winners and losers and move on. You know, whittle down, you know, we're going to buy this and then compete programs after you buy something, not committing for the lifetime. You know, only 20 to 30 percent of a weapons system cost is it.

getting it fielded. The rest is its sustainment over time, right? The flying hours on the plane and the maintenance of the wings and the engine and the fuselage and all that. And so if you compete after buying the weapon of who can help maintain it, well, then again, you've strengthened and broadened the industrial base. You need a whole lot more Andurils and Palantirs and other companies, SpaceX is coming in to disrupt.

But it's an all hands on deck. You know, we need our big companies to do what they do uniquely military and they do it pretty well.

But the last ingredient is really the intangible. It's that sense of urgency. And you've referenced programs that took too long and haven't yielded enough weapons as a result on the back end. But everybody's the Pentagon's not on a war footing, even though we're supporting Ukraine and Israel into existential wars. The Defense Department itself is pretty business as usual.

What do you sense from the direction that Secretary Hegseth is going as far as are these problems going to be addressed? Is he telegraphing that he understands this issue and what's happening that you see as its actual tangible results?

So far, all of the senior named appointees to the Defense Department by this administration, so Senate, you know, presidentially appointed, Senate confirmed, I would characterize almost every one of them as a disruptor, an outsider, a non-traditionalist, not Washington, not swampy.

And so almost universally, if you listen to their hearings, which I, of course, do, they all want to come in and throw out the old system and or shake it up pretty substantially, which is all of the things that we're talking about going faster, more private equity, more venture capital, more fast bail, more.

strategic capital invested into the department with companies that traditionally don't work with the Pentagon because they're a terrible customer. Who would want this one? And they don't buy anything, right? So these people all agree that the system as it is is broken. The question is, will they blow it up Doge style or will they try to tweak and work within it? They don't have a lot of time.

And so I don't know. I'll have to come back on in nine months and give you a report card. We will definitely do that. Yeah, absolutely. We will be looking forward to that. Mackenzie Eaglin, thank you so much for joining us today. Folks, follow her work at AEI.org. They just are doing brilliant work right now covering everything going on with

the military situation here and across the globe. And we always appreciate their input. Mackenzie Egelin, again, thank you so much for joining us. And folks, stay tuned. We have lots more great content coming up here. And if you're not already a podcast subscriber, I do not know why you're not. You're missing out on great bonus content every single week.

Kylie is sitting here nodding her head. You don't want to miss it. She even has her own theme song these days, folks. So get that wherever you get your favorite podcast. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back. Support American jobs while standing up for your values. OldGloryDepot.com brings you conservative pride on premium made in USA gear. Don't settle. Wear your patriotism proudly. Visit OldGloryDepot.com today. All right. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your Sam Stone guest hosting with me today, Sean Noble and our next guest up.

Well, I got to admit to it. He's my boss, Justin Heap, Maricopa County recorder. For folks who haven't been paying enough attention, Maricopa County has been at the center of a lot of elections issues in recent years. There have been a bunch of problems.

People have repeatedly removed the recorder now and removed a good portion of the board. And so it seems like there is never enough drama for this one little office in Arizona. So welcome to the program, Justin Heap. We hope we give you a better welcome than the county's been doing. All right, Sam. Sean, thanks for having me. You bet.

So tell folks a little bit for folks who don't know about some of the background issues that brought you to run for this office. Well, I mean, look, it's clear that the voters have been unhappy for a very long time with the state of our elections here in Maricopa County. We have had systemic problems with long count delays. Obviously, everybody remembers 2022 where nearly half of our voting was

went down due to various technical difficulties. And I think for me, the biggest frustration was the way that our elected officials actually

with the public when people would come forward with honest concerns. Those concerns were largely dismissed. They were accused of believing misinformation or conspiracy theories. And it became clear to me that this really was more serious of a problem. I think our elected officials had taken on

an assumption that, uh, that the real cause of voters irritation really came down to just misinformation to, you know, people staying things on, you know, uh, on, on social media or to pull, you know, specific political candidates. And, uh, and to me, I, I, I looked at this and said, look, it,

it in the end of the most important thing is the trust and confidence that the voters have if if a large portion of our voters don't have confidence in the election that itself is an existential crisis that needs to be dealt with and the the problem that i i think we have had with our elected officials is we don't reassure anyone

by continuing to lecture them that their concerns are unjustified, that there's no truth to it, and that a clearly broken system is actually working well. The people are only going to trust the system if they have trustworthy officials who are demonstrating how they are working to fix the system.

Well, Justin, I appreciate the way you frame that up because I think one of the challenges that voters have had is that they don't feel like there's been transparency. When they raise an issue, they get lectured rather than

explained, hey, this is why this is the way it is, or this is why you think this, because so many times people will go to vote and there will be an issue. They will face some issue, whether it's they aren't on the roll or the election worker turns them away for whatever reason, or their ballot doesn't count. Machine fails. I mean, there's lots of things. And then when they're basically gaslit by the election officials saying,

Well, no, there's no problems. This is perfectly fine. You can't, you know, they're saying I have lived this. I'm, you know, my eyes are not deceiving me. And it's not there's not been a recognition that people do have challenges when they go vote that happens. We have to admit that not everything is going to be 100% smooth and perfect. And so let's just cop to that and explain what we're doing about it to make sure that these are secure.

Yeah, I totally agree, Sean. And I think really that's the reason that I chose to run. I think you hit it right on the head. Gaslighting, I think, is the right term. Look, the one thing that there's been an obvious problem with is, look, everyone around the country knows

Maricopa is now nationally famous. People look at Arizona as a as a somewhere that cannot get its act together and run its elections. And it has been for quite a while. I was very surprised when I started campaigning to hear it was talked

people all over and I'd say, "Well, I'm running for Maricopa County Recorder," to someone from the other side of the country and they'd go, "Oh man, Maricopa? Yeah, that place is broken." So we are definitely recognized for this. Everyone outside of it can see it. The only people who seemed unable to grasp the scope of the problem are our own election officials who were running the system.

Well, it seems to me that one of the – I guess we're – actually, I'll ask this question on the other side because this is going to take a longer answer. But what – a shorter question is have you been enjoying the job? This seems like a big task. That's a loaded question too. We have about 30 seconds here before we go to break. So I want to come back with that and some of this other stuff because –

I can tell you from working with Justin, it has been an interesting transition. There is a lot of suspicion that's been left behind by all the previous situations. It's been applied to him in a way that I would say is very unfair. So we'll get into all of that coming up here soon. We've got a much longer segment coming up with Maricopa County recorder Justin Heap in just a moment. And again, I'm going to pitch the podcast again because...

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with Sam Stone. Guest hosting with me in studio today, Sean Noble, host of his own podcast, Light Beer, Dark Money. And on the line with us, Maricopa County recorder Justin Heap, who I work for as his chief of staff now. So a little day job down at the county that's turned into quite an adventure. I'm going to go with Sean's question. Reroll that one, Sean. The first one is, are you enjoying the job, Justin, now that you're there for a few months?

Well, you know, surprisingly, look, I actually do enjoy the job. I like the people that I work with. I love Sam and my team. And I think the office is moving in a very positive direction. I think, you know, my opponents predicted it would somehow be chaos when I took over the office, but it's not.

It's actually been a really positive experience. I think that we can do some great things. What I'm sure we're going to get into, though, is that we found ourselves in an unnecessary conflict with the board that has meant a lot of stress for about three months as we try to resolve this issue. Well, so I'm going to back up a little bit, and then you guys can give me some context, because I haven't been paying attention to what's going on with the issues between the recorder's office and the board. But I think people need to understand that

Back in the day, because I've been involved in politics, my first big race was 1994. It's when I ran John Shattuck's campaign. And for decades prior to that and at that point and then for a good 20 years after that, things went pretty well in Maricopa County. The counts were relatively fast. And the advent of no-excuse early voting –

And mail-in voting, you know, Arizona was a leader on that starting in 1994. But after Adrian Fontes was elected recorder following his defeat of Helen Purcell, who had been the recorder for a long, long time. Yeah, the Board of Supervisors took over some of the responsibilities for elections from the recorder's office. And

And then so now you have this bifurcated system, which probably isn't very efficient. And then when Stephen Richer was defeated Adrian Fontes and you had a Republican back in the recorder's office, for whatever reason, the board did not give that power back to the recorder. Is that is that part of the problem that you have this separated system and shouldn't it all go back to the recorder's office?

Well, I think whether the board knows it or not, it would probably be in their best interest to give that authority back over. Though the real root of this comes from the way Arizona law is structured. So elections in Arizona are a cooperation between the county and the recorder, excuse me, the board of supervisors and the recorder in each county.

And there's a few functions that each side is responsible for that the other can't touch. So voter registration, for example, is only the recorder. Vote tabulation is only the direction of the board. So both of us are separate. But for the vast majority of election functions under Title 16 of the Arizona Code, almost every section begins.

begins with the words, the recorder or other officer in charge of elections, which means for most election things, it could be the board or it could be the recorder. And that vagueness in the law was actually intentional. They wanted to leave it vague so that each county, the board and the recorder could negotiate out and figure out what was the best way to run elections in their county, given their needs. And

And so the way that we resolve that issue and decide who's responsible for what function and how we're going to cooperate is done through a contract called an SSA or a shared services agreement. And every county enters into their own between their own services.

board and recorder to divvy up these functions. Now, as you said, the board could give all of the functions over to the recorder, except for the ones that are specific to them. And theoretically, the recorder could give over all of the functions, except

or the one specific to them to the board if they so chose. So like you said, when Adrian Fontes took over, the board was uncomfortable with some of the actions Adrian Fontes was taking. And so the board decided, all right, we're going to

enter into a new agreement and we're going to split and bifurcate. So the split since Adrian Fontes through Stephen Richer was essentially that the recorder was responsible for early voting and mail-in voting and the board is responsible for the day of voting and tabulation. And that is the division we had. And that's actually fairly consistent. Most of the counties in Arizona still do that passively.

Pinal still has the recorder in charge of both, but most of the counties sort of have that division. And that is what I expected to be the

division and the agreement. That is what I campaigned on with the assumption we were going to maintain that. That changed when I won the primary against Stephen Richer. And Stephen Richer and the prior board immediately entered in and quickly wrote a new SSA agreement that transferred essentially $5 million of my budget

my entire IT staff, that's 33 people from the recorder over to the county IT board, and transferred most of my election duties all over to the board. And so they signed that agreement and then set it to execute about 20 days before we took office.

So I came into office all of a sudden with most of my powers and abilities and budget transferred already over to the board. To be clear for folks out there, that was a chairman of the board and a board majority that had just lost and that were on their way to losing. Everyone knew they were done.

That was a recorder who had already lost. In a primary, right. Four of the six people who signed that agreement are no longer with us. Three board members and the recorder were not there. So a majority. Well, and to do that, I mean, my thing from day one has been that is – here's my thing.

Here we have a Republican recorder. He's a former state legislator. He's gone into this office, pulled a very professional staff together, gone into this office with the intention to address the concerns of the community. They chose him to address those concerns. And before he could do that, people who no longer had any stake in the office said, no, you don't get to do any of that. And then right now it's being held to.

That's insane. It's being held to. That's the thing that's the most disappointing is that the new board should immediately say, hey, this was done without us being involved. We need to reset the parameters. Well, and I agree. Well, the update of where we are on is I certainly thought we would come in and meet with the old board and that this would be quickly resolved. But when that didn't happen and we couldn't get

meeting with the chairman and get any movement on it, I had to send a letter to the board where I informed the board, look, an agreement signed by the old board and the old recorder is

is no longer enforceable now against the new board or the new recorder. Therefore, that SSA agreement is terminated. And I look forward to working with the board on a new reasonable SSA. And so that was over two months ago that happened. And since this time, we have been in a stalemate where essentially the board will not

you know, will not meet with me. They will not discuss this. A month ago, I sent them my proposal for the for an SSA. I drafted my own and said, hey, look, this would restore us, which was basically just the SSA that was in place when Stephen Richer was was in office.

I'm not asking to take back over or, you know, take back all of Helen Purcell's power. I'm willing and happy to work with the board. But we need to restore this. And I need my powers and abilities back. Because you made campaign promises that tie to that. It's hard to clean your voter rolls without an IT team. Yeah.

Right. Well, all three of the divisions of our office are completely dependent on IT staff. And now all of that staff works for the board. So we sent that proposal. And after after a month of waiting just last week, we received the board's counter proposal. And what the board sent me was essentially the same, the identical idea.

SSA agreement that Stephen Richer and the old board had signed. They would keep my budget, keep my staff. The only concession they really made in there was to say, well, we'll sign an agreement that says our IT staff will do work with the recorder when he requests it.

And so to say that that was kind of a slap in the face after a month of trying to resolve this. Three months of trying to resolve it, but a month of legal back and forth, yeah. Right. And so last week, I, no, this Wednesday, I sent the board another SSA. I made a few concessions more to the board and sent that to them. But I said, listen, this is my final proposal.

I'm not going to keep negotiating against myself when the board is not coming in good faith to, to work with me. So, and you know, about, because now we are in a crisis situation, we have ongoing elections and no SSA in,

in place to guide us on how we're supposed to do this. And it can't be delayed any longer. And so about three weeks ago, I gave the board the deadline. I said, if this is not resolved by the 7th,

of April, that's next Wednesday, then I will file a lawsuit against the board and we will let the courts resolve this issue. So I hope it didn't come to that. I'm actually quite stunned that we have gotten to this point because again, these are my fellow Republicans. These are people that I would expect would take a meeting with me and sit down and let's hammer this thing out. I think it could have been resolved in a 20 minute discussion.

And here we are now three months and in a crisis situation. So that has been unnecessary and stressful for for both Sam and I. Yeah. Yeah. I can only imagine. Well, it'll be I mean, I guess that's why we have courts. Yeah. I mean, kind of sad. I'm going to throw this point out there because I I obviously supported Justin in his election campaign.

I think we all recognize there were problems. Stephen Richard was either going to be replaced by another Republican in the primary or he was going to lose to the Democrat in November. Those were the only two choices out there. I hadn't had much experience working with him. But everything I've seen, Justin, he's doing everything he possibly can to –

And the opposite side of this is he's right. We could have sat down and done this in a 20-minute thing. And the interesting thing – so we're in elections right now, which, Justin, you just alluded to. We have –

some local elections in Glendale and Goodyear right now. And then we're going to have a special election to replace Congressman Raul Grijalva, who just passed away right after that. And then we have a November full of school bond issues and things like that. So we are literally in the middle of an election cycle. We have worked out an agreement with the board's election director that literally mirrors for the CD7 special election for Congress, that literally mirrors the proposal that

that Recorder Heap has made. And no one has a problem with that, and yet they won't accept that in an SSA. I am really at this point just stunned. That's bizarre. Well, Justin, I appreciate what you're trying to do, and what I hope is that more and more people can understand what is actually going on so that

They get a sense of – because if the board doesn't relent on this and the news coverage is going to be nasty because news – the mainstream media is going to love the Republicans. The board has literally been lecturing us not to talk about this in public, which obviously we're not listening to them right now.

But they also keep running to the press every time they say that. Yeah, exactly. So the press loves nothing more than the Republican on Republican fights. This is an unnecessary. Well, but the thing is, I don't I mean, I look, I've done I think I've done everything I can. You know, the.

I think the board, well, some members of the board have the perception that somehow I'm, I'm being aggressive and litigious here. Um, you know, I, I don't have any, I don't think this fight is necessary. I don't want to conflict with the board. We need to work together no matter what our arrangement is. So, uh, you know, we've been kind of forced, but,

I think if it comes when push comes to shove, if this comes into an actual necessary fight, look, I think one thing is actually quite clear, and that is the voters have a great deal more confidence in the recorder to do what is necessary to fix our elections than they do in the board. The board, the trust that people have in the board to run elections well is

you know, is bare minimum, you know, they're hopeful with the new board, but it's clearly, I think that, you know, people can see that. You were elected to, to fix those problems and to address those concerns that people talked about. All right, folks, breaking battle rounds coming back next week.

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Welcome to the podcast portion of Breaking Battlegrounds with your Sam Stone. If you've been tuning in for the first portion, and if you got here, I assume you did, you know that Sean Noble, the host of Light Beer Dark Money, is sitting in for Chuck today, who's on the road. And we're going to get to the thing everybody's waiting for, which is Kylie's Corner. She's got a grin on since we came in, so I assume there's some good stuff coming up. I have some good things, yeah. She's always got good stuff. I have more people now come up to us and they're like, so...

About Kylie's Corner. I always have the updates. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. She's been on all the cases from the start and guessed or figured out, you know, where it was going to head before the police did. At least a couple of these cases. Things are suspicious. Yeah. That whole thing with the recorder. And obviously I work there. I'm biased. I'm not even going to pretend.

But it is bizarre. If I was that bored, I couldn't get the elections out of my hand fast enough. Why wouldn't you say, you know, this is where all the consternation is. Let's wash our hands and give it to somebody else.

The really funny thing about it, Maricopa County, historically, like a seat on that board was a sinecure. You were there until you died. I mean, you know, it was people who were there 20, 30 plus years. There was never any controversy because the county maintains its budget just fine. And, you know, services are OK and nobody really had any complaints until they got into the election stuff. And now you basically have, you know.

Three members of the board get swept out. You've had recorders get swept out in successive elections. And I look at that and I'm like, if I was a member of that board, I couldn't hand the recorder the entire thing fast enough. Just get rid of it. It makes no sense. And let someone who's elected to deal with elections –

have that responsibility where then voters can say, you screwed up, we're going to replace you, or you did a good job, we're keeping you. Exactly. And get that out of their hands. But what the heck. So going to more national news, for those of you who are bored about Arizona local politics here, boy, it has been an interesting week in D.C. with the tariffs, Democrats throwing an amazing fit over it for over a president who's

Saying the same things they've said for 30 years or longer. I mean, that's the thing that's the cognitive dissonance of seeing a Republican president with a chart going through, you know, this huge chart going through the tariffs that are going to be imposed on all these countries.

Historically, that would be a Democrat president. Yeah. And it would be the Democrats in the audience cheering and the mainstream media talking about how important this was for the American economy. And yet Trump has created an upside-down world where you have Democrats who have been lifelong tariff supporters claiming that this is going to destroy America. Yeah. It's mind-blowing. I mean, they're trying to memory hole Trump.

One of the core tenets of their whole entire governing philosophy. Yeah. You can go back and find big, long speeches by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, every long, you know, longstanding Democrat railing to do exactly what Trump is doing. Right. That was a steady position of theirs that Republicans opposed for some for decades. Yeah.

And they are throwing an absolute fit over this. And it does. I mean, as a as an older Republican, I'm in my 50s. Did you know being a Reagan baby, being just steeped in the whole concept of free markets and a global economy? There is some discomfort that I have when I'm thinking about the whole idea of tariffs. And what I've realized is that, one, I've been so ingrained in the free market industry.

talking points for all of my life that I've never really given any thought to what tariffs actually mean, you know, and not thought about the historical context of tariffs, which it was all tariffs. There's no income tax until, you know, late 19th century.

Which then got shot down and then they had to do the constitutional amendment. So tariffs have been a key part of the American experience from the very beginning. But because I've been such a free market guy, I haven't really thought about that. So I'm in this process right now of trying to educate myself on, okay, well, are tariffs always bad? No, they're not. Can they go too far? Absolutely. But-

my hope, I'm currently in the position of I'm totally fine with what Trump's doing with tariffs if two things happen. We extend the tax cuts and make sure that we've got that base covered. Which is critical. Yeah. Extend the tax cuts and reduce regulation. Those are the two pieces that make me more comfortable with what the tariff situation is. I'd add in cut government spending so that we reduce the drag. So those three, the doge stuff, the government spending, the tariff

the cut regulation, cut taxes. And then the next goal, if we're really going to keep these tariffs in place in the long run, is to eventually either flatten or eliminate the income tax. Because if that's, you know, that's what funded government for more than 100 years was tariffs. If we're going to go back to that, then let's take, let's start, you know, let's get the government out of people's pocketbooks.

I'm just because what I said on my podcast was I have to what I had to basically balance was do I hate tariffs more than I hate the income tax. No, I hate the income tax more because that is the more oppressive role of government in people's individual lives.

Basically saying, we want to know exactly how much you earned so we know how much we can take from you. It would be very nice to turn the IRS, Internal Revenue Service, into the ERS, External Revenue Service, where you don't even have to file a tax return. Right.

And their whole concern is collecting the monies from tariffs coming into the country. I would throw an alternative route to this to some degree and say if they're reciprocal, accurately reciprocal, and countries like Israel has done and said we're just going to cut them to zero, then you could actually have free trade where everyone has zero barriers. I do have one little caveat here.

I think every country should be allowed one, not like giant economic, but like one little thing, like Canada's tariff on maple syrup. I understand. I get it. It's like 2,500% tariff on maple syrup. Look, point of pride. They do not want any of that dirty Vermont maple syrup making its way into Canada. Okay. I get it. Right? Like if the French want to have a tariff on wine. Right. Go.

Go right ahead. If champagne is going to have a 25, whatever, that's their prerogative. But everything else, no, should either cut it to zero or go with what you're saying and cut the income tax to zero. I might throw out – I'm going to throw out one other thing, two other things. One, where you're talking about balancing, I would be okay with a national luxury sales tax, say items over $100,000. Yeah.

Because consumption of the high end, I don't think you're hurting people to throw a few percentage points on that. And I think that's fair. Right. In exchange for no income tax? Absolutely. Right. In exchange for no income tax. Because there is something oppressive about a government who can say we're going to tax your labor. Right.

And it's significantly more fair to say if you're going to – because you have a choice of whether you buy something. Right. You have to work to live. You have to have an income to live. And so to put that –

burden on the consumption side, I think it makes a lot more sense and is much more fair because you can have exclusions on all kinds of basics or a price cap. So yeah, I totally, totally am more for it. The other point, and this has been floated out there, and I'm not sure if I buy into this theory or not, and I'm kind of asking your opinions here.

So Trump was put into a corner by Janet Yellen, who refinanced all our treasuries on a three month rolling basis. That makes them cheaper because you pay a lower rate for the shorter term. However, it makes it very difficult because you're constantly having to resell them. It's volatile. Volatile. And it's dangerous because if you get into a point where people don't want to buy them, you have no room. Right. I mean, you're up against the wall.

There's a theory out there that what he's doing right now is causing chaos to collapse the market enough to put the Fed in a position where they're very comfortable cutting the federal interest rate, which would then make all those treasuries much cheaper to refinance long term than they are now even short term. And that would be a huge play on the government.

And let's be – people freak out about market ups and downs. I've been an investor for a number of years. I don't panic about market ups and downs unless you're nearing retirement. That's really not the biggest concern. Eighty percent of equities are owned by five percent of the population. So the harm from a dropping market is limited to people who write it off and just wait for next year. Exactly.

They write it off. They buy the dip. They make it all back. Yeah, and more. Yeah. But the theory on the interest rate, that could be significant because I don't think people understand how much of our budget is going to just interest payments. It's like $1.5 trillion a year. So if you can drop that a bit,

That's a huge, huge savings for everybody. I mean, that's – I mean, because we're talking about just massive, massive numbers. Well, and one percentage point doesn't sound like a lot, but the base rate right now is what, about five, I think, right? So if you drop that to four, that's a 20% cut in the interest service. So you're talking about going from $1.5 trillion down to like $1.1, $1.1, $1.2 trillion.

$300 billion, $400 billion is a big deal. It's a big deal. It is a big deal. I think it's going to be interesting. 26 is going to be interesting because I'm not sure there's time to correct everything that's going on right now before we get to 26. Well, that really is the marker, right? Is there enough – do things settle enough to get into a norm –

That in 2026, it's either I don't know. I feel like where voters are like, hey, let's give him leave him with control of Congress in the Senate for two more years and see what happens. Yeah, because I think we'd be all right by 28. I think things will have settled by then. Right. But how much you can actually hold on to depends a lot on who has those House and Senate majorities. And, you know, the good news for Republicans, there's almost no way we can lose the Senate. Right.

Uh, the bad news is that the house is very, very fragile. And it became more fragile with the election in Wisconsin and a potential gerrymandering of, of the state Supreme court in Wisconsin will redraw the congressional lines. That's going to happen. And they're going to probably kill either one or two Republican seats. So it could be problematic in that regard. Um,

And what's interesting is, as I look at, you know, I've looked at the demographics and I think some people, particularly you hear some Democrats really freaking out about this. When we get to the next census in 2030, and that's not that far away. I mean, it's crazy to think that we're halfway through the decade already. You're going to have a situation where it will be.

If the census is done right and all the apportionment is done correctly, like it wasn't in 2020. They admitted that. The census admitted that red states have fewer congressional seats right now than we should have. They should. If it gets corrected, and it will, because of the outflow of people from the blue states, you're going to have a situation in which it will make it almost impossible for Democrats to have a majority in the House and to ever win the Electoral College.

Unless there's major shifts in the way that people vote. And they have a problem because they're bleeding young people and young men. Right. I mean, which has never been the case in my lifetime. I mean, it's astounding. It's astounding that that Biden did better with or Harris did better with people over the age of 75 than Trump. And Trump did better with people 18 to 29. I mean, it's just that that is that is taking the world and turning it upside down.

It's like everything right now almost is upside down. I mean, if you look at the policy shift, it's really been dramatic. And I get the part of that is just Democrats opposing everything Trump does. I think in part, and I said this his first term, what makes them really mad is that he goes out and delivers on things they promised for decades. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it is – I'm glad you raised that because one of the things that – there have been a lot of people who –

who talked about Cory Booker and the filibuster. So this all happened. He was done talking before I even knew he was talking. Yeah, me too. So I wasn't paying attention. But he broke the record. He talked for 25 hours. He filibustered. And his theme was just basically...

Trump's not the guy. But he had some very interesting point. I mean, the way he was framing it, I thought was constructive. And so, you know, I view him as someone that Democrats should be paying attention to. The thing that I appreciated the most about it, though, had nothing to do with what he was saying. It's the fact that he was that you had a black man.

Break the record that was held by the racist Strom Thurmond who had made the record filibustering the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. What a beautiful juxtaposition. That is great. Right? Yeah. I love it. That is absolutely brilliant. I don't agree with Cory Booker, but I love the fact that we now have him holding the record over the racist Strom Thurmond filibustering. Democrat Strom Thurmond? Yeah. That guy? That guy. Yeah. All right. All right.

I think it's time for some music. I think it's time. So come and take a spin and listen in.

Welcome. No, I'm just kidding. Is that your first time hearing my song? I love that song.

That's fantastic. When I started playing, I was like, I think this is Sean's first time hearing it. Every time that goes on, I'm sitting here nodding my head along with it. I can't even help myself. It's a very catchy tune. And it's, I mean, wow, I've never had a song for me. I know. Isn't that cool? We can get you one. But I have two stories today. This first one is strange and sad, but it's happening in Harris County, Texas Police Department. So it began on February 6th when a retired sheriff's deputy was found by apparent suicide.

Then on March 6th, a 37-year-old deputy who was currently working went missing for a week and then was found on March 13th by apparent suicide. Three days later, another sheriff deputy, 42 years old, was found by apparent suicide. And then another three days later, a fourth member, this person was retired, so similar to the first person, but they were found by an apparent suicide. Okay.

Whoa. Yes. All between the span of essentially one and a half months. That's unbelievable. From February to March. Wow. And in 2020, the police department launched a mental health division because of these instances happening before. But I'm not sure what's happening. That's obviously not reaching their members of...

The department? It's interesting. I actually just recently was having a conversation with Sheriff Lamb, who had been the longtime Pinal County sheriff. And he is someone who has been acutely aware of the mental health issues and the stressors that face cops. And one of the things that he pointed out was

We pay a lot of attention to veterans who have seen combat. They get a lot of treatment. And yet these guys who are veterans take nothing away from them, but what they go through is usually typically four or five years of service, a handful of conflicts or trauma-inducing instances. The average cop in the course of a 20-year career

uh, sees somewhere between 300 and 400 traumatic experiences. Man. Yes. I have a stat here in comparison to the general population. We see two to four in our lifetime. Yeah. I have, it says, um,

Law enforcement officers deal with a suicide-related incident 2.17 times a year. Oh, wow. So every single time, which increases their risk of suicidal ideations. Some other facts I found, which was interesting about EMTs, there was a survey and 37% complimented...

contemplated suicide while 6.6 actually attempted it. And that was EMTs, not even police. We had my friend Travis North on the program some time ago, fire captain and EMT in Tucson. He was talking about this, that there's been a better focus on it recently, but that, you know, especially until very recently, it was like, well, just, you know, knuckle up. And the stuff you're dealing with,

It's just horrific. Yeah. Well, and here in Arizona, actually, one of the things that a program that was put together, this was actually piloted in Pinal County with Sheriff Lamb, was a program from a company here in Arizona called Vitania. They worked with a nonprofit. They were able to get a grant to do a pilot. The success rate was so high that the governor's office said,

granted funds to do this for first responders across the state. And to Governor Hobbs' credit, she kept the program going when she took over. And so there are still opportunities for law enforcement and fire department and EMTs to participate in this program. But in this case you're talking about, like, there's no question about

Whether there's something else going on here, because that's an awful lot of officers dead in a very short period of time. Yeah, it very much is. Yeah. And I haven't been able to find anything linking, you know, maybe if they're on the same cases or anything of that. The spokespeople just say it's very tragic. They did not see this coming. And they're working on, you know. Yeah. Wow. Offering services to the survivors. Do you know how big the department is? I don't know. I should look that up.

Harris County is going to be pretty big. I mean, Texas has a lot of counties. So a lot of them are very small. But that one's probably a pretty good size. Not Maricopa County size. Maricopa is, I think, second largest county in the country. After L.A.? Yeah. Wow. It's amazing. I mean, it's really astounding how big it is. I used to laugh about the city of Phoenix being bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Right.

Or like when Mayor Pete was running for president. I was like, so he's mayor of a city.

That's half the size of a Phoenix council district. Right. Like, yeah, this, I mean, he's South Bend is smaller than I think any of the suburbs of Phoenix. Oh, much, much. Yeah. Queen Creek. I don't know. It's probably Queen Creek is probably close to a hundred thousand now, which put it about the same size. Yeah.

I mean, you're talking about a fairly remote suburb. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's amazing. All right. What else? I got one more story. Well, so that department has about 5100 personnel. I just looked it up. It's a big department. Yeah. Yeah. So first responders are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. So hug a first responder today. Wow. I did find my second story is about Valerie, the wiener dog.

So she's missing. On November 13th in 20... And anytime you have Valerie the wiener dog go missing, that is a tragedy. Absolutely. It is really sad. So on November 13th, 2023, her owners took her camping on Kangaroo Island in Australia. And they were there for about two days when they took her for a swim on the beach. And then they put her in her pen, which is about two football fields away from them. And they went fishing.

Well, she has like separation anxiety. So she jumped out of her pen and then couldn't find her parents. So went back to the camp spot and was hiding under, you know, I don't know who had that story. Valerie's not here to tell it, but she went back under the car and was hiding under the car.

So then some campers were walking by, saw a dog under the car and they didn't want her to get run over in case like the owners didn't know she was under the car. So they tried to get her out. She ran into the woods. So one person chased her into the woods while another person went to go find the owners of the dog. The two...

you know, spent the next five days looking for Valerie in and out of the woods. Couldn't find her anywhere. They had to return back to work. So they went home. They posted about a face in the Facebook group. There's, you know, one for kangaroo Island. And it's like, I lost my wiener dog on this Island. It can't go that far. So if you catch it, please let me know. So,

So over the past couple of years, there's been a couple of sightings, but no, like nothing, no real leads. Well, in February, February 28th, someone posted a photo of a wiener dog on kangaroo Island being like, is this someone's wiener dog? And it's the same coloring as Valerie. And so the Kangala wildlife rescue actually got involved and they started setting up cameras and they have it narrowed down to a specific spot of the Island. But since February 28th,

It's April 4th. They still have not been able to capture Valerie the wiener dog, but she's alive and she's very healthy, they're saying. The owners are very surprised because they said she's very much a princess and not, you know, able. Not an outdoors dog. Yeah, not an outdoorsy person. But they think she's just surviving on roadkill and living her best life out there in Kangaroo Island. Wow. And surviving. Wow.

Yeah. That's a great story of adaption. Well, here's my thing. We are talking about Australia, correct? Yes. Yes.

I can't imagine a wiener dog surviving in any part of Australian wilderness area for a year. Like everything there eats you. Yeah. I mean, snake. They've got the most venomous snakes and spiders. Apparently Valerie is fast. Tasmanian devils. Yeah. There are Tasmanian devils in Australia. It's not just Tasmania, right? I think so.

Are koalas dangerous for dogs? I think they're mean. I think koalas are mean. Koalas, but kangaroos. Yeah. Kangaroos will kill dogs any chance they get. Wow. I'm assuming there's some kangaroos on Kangaroo Island. It would be odd if there wasn't. I mean. Maybe it's just ironic. Yeah. Well, granted, given how the British settled Australia, that could be the island they killed all the kangaroos on. Right, right.

Yeah, it is literally an ironic movie. Those kangaroos could all have been eaten. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Van Diemen's Land, right? Right. Good grief. All right, folks. Well, thank you so much for tuning in once again. For Kylie Kipper, thank you again, as always. Never disappoints. No, no, she does not. Sean Noble, always appreciate you taking the time to sit in here. Where do people find your podcasts? Light Beer Dark Money. You can go to lightbeerdarkmoney.com or anywhere you listen to a podcast. Just Light Beer Dark Money.

It's good stuff. All right, folks. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back next week. Thank you, as always, for tuning in.