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- [00:00]
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This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You, you'll meet on your schedule wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus Talkspace works with most major insurers and most insured members have a zero dollar copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com save $80 with code SPACE80@Talkspace.
- [01:00]
Liz Wheeler
Hey guys, Liz Wheeler here. In addition to this week's episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz, which you heard earlier this week, we wanted to bring you a bonus sneak preview of the Cloak Room, a series I co host with Senator Cruz each week over on the Verdict. Plus community on locals. Did you know we do so much more each week than just bringing you the main Verdict episode? Senator Cruz takes mailbag questions, he posts memes, he interacts with subscribers, and more. Oh, over on Verdict. In this preview of the Cloakroom, we're talking about Jon Stewart calling Senator Cruz a mother effort. And on the more intellectual side of things, we're talking about how the United States should respond in the event that China invades Taiwan. If you like what you hear, you can get more of Senator Cruz and more of the Cloakroom every week over on Verdict. Plus you can head over to Verdict with TedCruz.com plus and if you use my promo code, which intuitively is Cloakroom, you can get one month free. That's Verdict with TedCruise.com/ and promo code Cloakroom to check out all the episodes of the Cloakroom right now. We'll see you over there. In the meantime, please enjoy this preview of the Cloakroom. Hey guys, welcome. I'm Liz Wheeler. This is the Cloakroom on Verdict. We have a lot to talk about tonight. There's so much happening with Taiwan this week. But first, Senator Cruz, we have big News. A big announcement to make. Baby Knowles number two has arrived. Huge congratulations to Michael and his wife and his entire family on the arrival of their new baby boy. Obviously, Michael is out this week spending time with his family as he should be. I'm so excited for him. This is his second son.
- [02:28]
Ted Cruz
Yeah. No, it's awesome. He's got a second baby boy. And they are celebrating and enjoying. And, you know, when Michael comes back, we'll do everything we can to make him feel at home, which means we'll do lots of crying and drooling, which, frankly, is a lot of what happens in the Senate too. So there's a consistency to it. But it's great news and we're celebrating with Michael.
- [02:49]
Liz Wheeler
Yeah. Michael posted some pictures publicly on Instagram of little guy, and man, is he a doll. Michael's wife did a fabulous job. Huge congratulations to them. We're actually going to do two Cloakroom episodes this week in honor of Michael's new baby. Also, because Michael is out this week, it'll be an inside look into what you and I, Senator Cruz, do on the Cloakroom every week. Today we are going to talk about Taiwan, but before that, I want to talk with you about Jon Stewart. You seem to make Jon Stewart pretty mad this week. He actually made a video calling you a mother effer, and he was standing in front of people chanting, when senators lie, veterans die. So, Senator Cruz, maybe you can tell me today what exactly did you do to piss off Jon Stewart?
- [03:27]
Ted Cruz
Yeah, no, this was a pretty surreal week on that front. Jon Stewart kind of lost his mind and did an awful lot of demagoguing and very little, actually truth telling. So let's unpack this because what happened in the past week was confusing. And I gotta say, the corporate media did a horrible job reporting on any of it. The underlying bill that the Senate was considering is a bill called the PACT Act. And what the PACT act does is it focused on veterans healthcare and in particular, veterans who have gotten diseases from burn pits, these giant pits that were very common in both Iraq and Afghanistan where all sorts of toxic chemicals and all sorts of garbage was burned, just lit on fire. And unfortunately, it let off a lot of toxic fumes. And now we've got veterans who are coming back with all sorts of health problems, including cancers and other diseases that there's significant science tracing back to inhaling the toxic fumes from these burn pits. And I have long been an advocate of providing healthcare for those veterans who were injured from exposure to burn pits. It's something I've advocated for a long time. And this bill in particular is a bill that creates $280 billion in new funding for healthcare for our veterans, for exposure to burn pits. And I emphatically support that bill. This bill also has $400 billion in existing funding that's already in the funding stream for healthcare for veterans. So all told, that the total price tag of the bill was $679 billion. I supported that in June. I voted for it, I agreed with it, and I think it's a good idea. Now, after we voted on it on June, we subsequently last week were voting on what's called cloture, which a vote on cloture is a vote to cut off debate to disallow any amendments. This was the second time the bill had come up, and the second time it came up, Pat Toomey, my colleague from Pennsylvania, raised a very specific concern about one element that was in this bill, which is an accounting gimmick that the Democrats used within this bill. I mentioned that the bill has two components. $400 billion of preexisting funding for veterans, 279 billion in new funding for those exposed to burn pits. Well, the 400 billion in pre existing funding is currently what's called discretionary funding and discretionary funding. Discretionary spending is spending that has to be reauthorized by each Congress. And discretionary funding is subject to an overall cap in terms of how much discretionary spending is allowed. What the Democrats did with this bill is they shifted that 400 billion from discretionary spending to mandatory spending. Now, why does that matter? Well, mandatory spending, the way the federal budget works, mandatory spending is on autopilot. It goes automatically. It doesn't have to be appropriated. It doesn't have to be reauthorized. It's mandatory. And so it's just on autopilot. Why does that matter? Well, it doesn't matter in terms of ensuring that the money will be spent because, look, Congress is going to spend money for veterans health care. There's no prospect that Congress is going to fail to provide the funding for veterans health care. The reason the Democrats wanted to do that is by shifting it from discretionary to mandatory, they, as a bookkeeping matter, cut discretionary spending by $400 billion. The 400 billion they moved to mandatory. Suddenly, it created a hole on discretionary spending where our total aggregate discretionary spending is 400 billion below the cap. The reason they wanted to do so is they want to spend 400 billion more in unrelated pork. Has nothing to do with veterans, has nothing to do with this bill. But the hole they just created in discretionary spe, it was their intention to fill that hole and to fill it with whatever pork projects they wanted to spend. And so Pat Toomey had an amendment, a very simple amendment just to shift the spending back to discretionary. So to reverse the budget gimmick that they had employed last week when we voted on cloture, Pat had spent the entire week making the case to the conference at lunch that the only way we could get a vote and try to force them to shift it back to discretionary is if we stood together and at least 41 of us voted to deny cloture. And if we did that, if we blocked Schumer from going ahead on the bill, we would have the leverage to force a vote on the amendment. That happens a lot in the Senate. That's how you get leverage to get a vote, is you block cloture. Well, we did that last week and Jon Stewart lost his mind and the corporate media lost their minds. Jon Stewart proceeded to go on this profanity laced tirade, blasting me, blasting other Republicans. And basically his thesis was that apparently Republicans hate veterans. We're just, you know, when you think about Republicans, what is it that characterizes Republicans in the mind of a wild eyed leftist demagogue? It's that we don't like veterans. Mind you, that is facially absurd. But the problem was Stuart is not being a legitimate advocate. He's not being an honest broker. He's being a partisan hack. And he saw an opportunity to use this to scream and curse and attack and try to deceive. Look, people who are not paying much attention but just hear Stuart screaming, republicans hate veterans. Some of them might be deceived into believing that it was dishonest when Stewart started. It remains dishonest today. And so what happened today is we just, we voted on Pat Toomey's amendment. I voted for Pat Toomey's amendment. It narrowly failed. So unfortunately, the budget gimmick is still there. And then we voted on the bill and I voted for it. We ended up having 86 senators vote for it because we support the underlying bill. But it was an amazing illustration of how dishonest the press is because almost none of the corporate media actually covered the substance of what the dispute was about.
- [10:08]
Liz Wheeler
So this is actually interesting because the truth of the matter is, you can correct me if this is inaccurate, but the truth of the matter is it was actually the Democrats who were temporarily, I guess, holding this money hostage from veterans to pay for their healthcare because they wanted an additional $400 billion to spend on things unrelated to veterans or healthcare, just their own political pet projects.
- [10:29]
Ted Cruz
That's exactly right. And so actually, last week when we were voting on cloture, we made very clear to Schumer, if you adopt Toomey's amendment, we'll approve this instantaneously. So we could have passed this last week. And one of the things Stewart and the rest of the media were saying is it's Republicans who have delayed this and veterans are dying. We could have passed this last week, but the Democrats loved their pork so much they didn't wanna pass it last week. And by the way, one of the reasons the media went really crazy is I was skeptical we'd get 41 Republicans to stand together to try to stop yet another 400 billion in pork spending unrelated to veterans. And we did miraculously hold Republicans together. And so when that happened, Steve Daines, Republican from Montana, he and I did a fist bump on the Senate floor, which caused Stewart's pretty little head to explode and caused all of the leftists to say, Twitter is covered with Cruz is fist bumping veterans dying. Yeah, that's it, Johnny boy. That's exactly what it was about. Not Cruz is fist bumping, trying to stop Democrats from bankrupting the country. The 400 billion in unrelated pork that, by the way, is fueling inflation that is making people's lives really, really suck, including veterans lives who are having to pay seven, eight dollars per gallon for gas. It is amazing the deception that the media played in this. And so I'll tell you tonight, when I voted yes on the bill and Steve Daines voted yes on the bill, we did another fist bump in the exact same spot. We purposely did it again to illustrate the point. But I'll tell you something else I said at lunch. So we were discussing at lunch today before the vote what the next steps were. And we were able to get a vote on Toomey's amendment because we denied cloture last week. But I said, listen, it looks like we're going to lose the vote on Toomey's amendment. We knew that by lunchtime, that it looked like the way the whip was coming out, we were not going to win the vote. And I said this was still a good and worthwhile fight to have. Why? Because we've now increased the political cost of the Democrats trying to use that political gimmick to fill that $400 billion hole. That by focusing the fight on it, the Republican Conference is now much more focused on that $400 billion fake hole that they made just by moving the money to the other side of the ledger, the mandatory side. And maybe we've made it radioactive for the Democrats to come back in another bill and add that pork spending of that 400 billion in the hole. And what I also urge the conference is when Republicans take over, hopefully in January, we ought to fill the hole. In other words, we ought to lower the cap to basically eliminate this budget gimmick. And because we had this fight, I don't know if we'll succeed in lowering the cap to erase this budget gimmick. But our chances of doing so are much higher because we fought this fight and endured the dishonest demagoguery of the left over the weekend.
- [13:41]
Liz Wheeler
And by the way, I looked on Twitter right now to see if the mainstream media was giving equal coverage to your fist bumping for this healthcare for veterans. And no, it's not trending anywhere.
- [13:52]
Ted Cruz
Of course it's.
- [13:53]
Liz Wheeler
It's nowhere. So that shows you exactly what you need to know. But speaking, you know, what is trending on Twitter right now, actually, is Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. And I wanna ask you about this because in a previous episode of Verdict, you gave the CH chances of China invading Taiwan to be 50. 50. Do you. Would you change your calculation? Given Nancy Pelosi's visit and China's threat, probably an empty threat, in my opinion. Their empty threat of shooting down her plane or responding with their army, do you think that they'll use that as justification to invade Taiwan? Is there a higher likelihood?
- [14:26]
Ted Cruz
So it remains a very real risk. You know, rewind. Over a year ago, when Biden had his disastrous surrender and withdrawal in Afghan, the weakness and appeasement of this administration encouraged every one of our enemies. I said at the time, as you'll recall, the chances of Russia invading Ukraine have risen tenfold. The chances of China invading Taiwan have risen tenfold. Our enemies are emboldened because they see the commander in chief as weak and ineffective. Now, let's get to this week and Nancy Pelosi. It is astonishing how badly the Biden administration has screwed this up. It's breathtaking. I'm hard pressed to think of an analog in recent times. So Pelosi announced she was gonna go to Taiwan. We actually had a classified briefing yesterday with senior officials from State and DOD talking about this. And I chewed them out. I mean, I lit into them. I can't tell you what they said, but I can tell you what I said, because what I said isn't classified. And I chewed them out saying, it is hard to overstate how badly you guys have screwed this up. Number one, when Pelosi said she was going to Taiwan, the Biden administration leaked that the Department of Defense opposed her going. We don't know who leaked it. We don't know if it was dod, we don't know if it was State or if it was the White House. My guess is it was the White House. I think it was probably the Biden National, National Security Council that did so. But I don't know that that's inference. I have no, somebody from the administration leaked it. That was spectacularly stupid. And one of the things I pressed the administration on is do you think it was beneficial or harmful to leak that the Department of Defense is telling the speaker of the House, oh, please, please, please don't go to Taiwan and make the Chinese Communists angry? Of course it was harmful because it shows this White House is so weak and terrified that they're scared. But then it got, and you mentioned in your question, it got truly Monty Python esque level absurd because a Chinese government run newspaper publicly called on the Chinese military to shoot down Nancy Pelosi's plane when she tried to land. And then at the White House press conference, the White House press secretary was asked, what do you make? What is the administration's position on this Chinese government run newspaper calling for Chinese missiles to shoot down Nancy Pelosi's plane? And, and the White House press secretary said, oh, we have no position on that. Which I got to admit, Liz is frigging nuts. Listen, I'm no fan of Nancy Pelosi, but the only answer to that question should be anyone attacking and trying to murder the speaker of the House of the United States of America. If they shot down her plane, it would be an act of war and the result would be overwhelming and catastrophic. That is the only answer you can give, whether you like Pelosi or not. And the level of weakness that you asked the Biden White House, what's your position on China murdering the speaker of the House of the United States? Oh, we don't have a view. You know what's, what's a little murder of senior government officials between friends? Like, holy crap. That statement increased the chances of China invading Taiwan dramatically because they're taking a measure of does Joe Biden have the backbone to do anything? And if they're not even willing to say, please don't shoot down our speaker of the House, what are the chances they're gonna do much of anything? Else.
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Liz Wheeler
It's so unreal to watch this unfolding. You and I did an episode a while back on the cloakroom talking about your foreign policy philosophy, and you described it as on the spectrum of isolationists to interventionists. You said it's not somewhere in between on the spectrum. It's a third point on a triangle where you analyze what the interests of the United States are before getting involved in a foreign conflict to make sure that it's particularly within our interests and not just something that we're interested in when we get involved, and especially our military getting involved. So taking that. And by the way, anybody watching this who hasn't watched that episode, I highly recommend you go back and look at it. Very interesting. One of our best, if I do say so myself. But how would you apply that foreign policy philosophy to a scenario where China invades Taiwan? Should the United States get involved? Should we not? And if so, how much? In what way? What are our interests?
- [19:27]
Ted Cruz
So it's a highly complicated question. And should we get involved? Absolutely, yes. And actually the Taiwan Assistance act obligates us to get involved. Now, the act does not specify what get involved means, so there's a whole range of involvement. Anytime you're dealing with a superpower that is a threat on the order of Communist China or on the order during the Cold War of the Soviet Union, your best hope is to deter aggression. And you deter aggression from a position of strength and not a position of weakness. So during the Cold War, nobody in their right mind wanted to get in a shooting war with the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan did not want to get into a shooting war with the Soviet Union, but he believed in peace through strength, that if we build up our military and we create enough deterrence that we can defeat them without having to go to war with them. Likewise, look, only a lunatic wants to go to war with Communist China. That a full out war with Communist China would result in massive casualties on both sides. No one in their right mind wants to see that happen. Taiwan. Taiwan poses an enormous threat to the Chinese government for a number of reasons. One, because it demonstrates that Chinese people can live in freedom and prosperity and with human rights. Look, the people in Taiwan are ethnically Chinese. There's no difference in the nationality, the ethnicity, the history of the people on Taiwan from the people in mainland China. But what terrifies Xi and the Communist party is the 1.3 billion Chinese living under Communist tyranny and oppression look across the Taiwan Strait and say, hey, wait a second, they're Chinese just like us, but they are Free. They have elections. They have free speech. They have prosperity. Their standard of living is much, much better than ours. Wait a second. That system, that free enterprise system is a lot better than our crappy communist system. That's why the Chinese government is so terrified of Taiwan, because it emboldens their system. Now, for the same reason, we should speak out vigorously in support of Taiwan, vigorously in support of Hong Kong, because they both have demonstrated the power of freedom and free enterprise. And what's in our interest is seeing the Chinese Communist government fall, just like it was in our interest to see the Soviet Union fall. And so what I think we should be doing is, number one, vigorously speaking out for Taiwan. That I think using the bully pulpit of America is really powerful and it undermines totalitarian regimes. But number two, providing weaponry, selling weaponry to Taiwan. Look, Taiwan is an incredibly successful economy. They can afford to buy our weapons. We're not giving them stuff. It's not a case of welfare. They're incredibly successful. But we should be selling them military weaponry, sophisticated military weaponry that they can use to defend Taiwan against China and to change that cost benefit analysis. So the Chinese generals are saying, well, wait a second. If we launch an amphibious attack, these guys have sophisticated enough weapons that they can drive up the cost a lot. In particular, what you want is asymmetric weaponry. The ability to have not just a bunch of tanks that are sitting stationary and are really easy to take out, but you want things that are mobile. You want things that some of the things we're seeing in Ukraine, like Javelins and Stingers and mines that you can put in the Taiwan Strait, all of which make an amphibious assault much more difficult. I'll mention, by the way, another reason why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be enormously harmful to the United States is a very large percentage of advanced semiconductors that are made worldwide are made in Taiwan. America produces very little of it. Hopefully, we'll see more. And the Senate just passed a big bill that has tax incentives to create manufactured semiconductors here. I support the tax incentives. It also had corporate welfare for big multinationals. I don't support that. So I voted against the overall bill. But if China invaded Taiwan tomorrow, it would have a stranglehold on advanced semiconductors on a global scale. Our military is dependent on those semiconductors. Our technology industry, phones, satellites, computers, cars. The level of our economy that would be held hostage to China if China took over Taiwan would be devastating. So the right answer is not let's send in the navy to go fight the Chinese navy. That's a Very bad outcome. The response instead is let's be smart and proactive and deter the invasion in the first place by making clear that the cost to China will significantly exceed the potential benefits.
- [24:44]
Liz Wheeler
This is why it's so important to have a foreign policy philosophy because you can identify US interests and then you can moderate our response. And how to be a deterrent first based on that structure, that framework and not based on just the emotion of the moment. Okay, we have a mailbag question and some context for this question this week. The Senate is set to vote at the end of the week on the Manchin Schumer so called inflation Reduction act of 2022. We know that Manchin caved to Schumer after Manchin had torpedoed build back better. This is kind of build back better light. They claim it's addressing inflation. We know that that's not true. Craig Alexander asks, do you believe Senator Cruz, that Senator Kyrsten Sinema will vote yes for this bill?
- [25:28]
Ted Cruz
I genuinely don't know. It is the only hope of defeating it. So there are 49 Democrats who are a yes. I'm confident there are 50 Republicans who are no. So the only one who will decide it is Kyrsten Sinema. I will tell you, Sinema was playing pretty coy today. So she was on the Senate floor. She was in the cloak room today. We were all asking her, saying, you know, gosh, a no would be a really great vote. We'd love to see it. She wouldn't tell us, so we asked her. She wouldn't tell us. She is not publicly committed, so she has not said one way or another. I think it is possible she may insist on some changes to it. If I were to guess what's most likely. I think it's most likely she votes for something, but it's not this exact version. And I don't know what her conditions will be, but I think she will probably put a price on her yes vote and I hope the price makes it less bad on these issues. She has been, look, she's had real guts taking on Schumer and the crazies in her parties. And so I don't know what that'll be. But if I were to predict she will have some condition and make them change it somehow and if they do that, I think she probably gets to yes at the end of the day, but I don't know. We'll find out in the next couple of days.
- [26:51]
Liz Wheeler
Well, I think we're all gonna be sitting here waiting with bated breath to see what she decides. I hope, and I pray that she has the courage to reject this tremendously bad bill. But what do you guys think? Let me know. Post Tell me, do you think Cinema is going to vote yes? Do you think she's going to vote no? Do you think she's going to put conditions on it that will be given to her and then she will vote yes? What do you think? Post Let me know. Also, don't forget we have two episodes of the Cloak Room this week. And our next episode we're going to talk about a topic that I promised you a couple weeks we would talk about. We're finally getting to it. We're going to talk about George Soros funded progressive prosecutors around the nation. You don't want to miss this one. Senator, as always, it was good to chat with you. I'm Liz Wheeler. This is the Cloakroom on Verdict.
- [27:29]
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