Clay Travis (3:27)

Senator Scott, get you to, can we get you to call back on? We got to try the cell connection here again in a second because I, Clay, I don't, I can't pick up about half of what he's saying there.

Ryan Seacrest (3:36)

Yeah, he's breaking it out. Let's get him, let's get him back. But what he's talking about is he says he was with President Trump for the announcement of the cease fire yesterday. And when he get, we get him back in, we will ask him about the decision on, and the timeframe of the so called big beautiful bill, which is the crown jewel of the Trump legislative plan.

Clay Travis (3:57)

I do think a point here, Clay, is that the fact that Trump is in a position, knowing what he knows, and a lot of conversations clearly with our allies in Israel about how things are going, that Israel was able to degrade Iranian nuclear and conventional military capacity so much is just indicative of how fast these operations were able to achieve the success that they needed. Senator Scott, thanks for calling back. What is next, do you think, though? So if the ceasefire holds, what are the administration's hope for next steps and what are the priorities so we can get to a more peaceful and stable Middle East?

Podcast Host (4:35)

Well, I think we've got to continue to do what President Trump did his first term is just continue to build relationships with all the countries to say, look, let's all get along. Let's all figure out how do we all build our economies, let's make sure that we all respect the sovereignty of Israel and let's build our economies which helps all of our citizens. And so the Abraham Accords were a big deal and that we need to expand them. But look, I think all of us hope for peace. All of us hope, you know, you know, we, we want, we Want peace in Iran and everywhere we don't. Who wants to go to war? I mean, I've got, you know, I served in military. I didn't, you know, I didn't. I had zero interest in going to war. I know I wanted to defend the freedom of this country. So hopefully that's what's going to happen. It's up to Iran, though. If you look around the world. Around the world, who are the destabilizing groups? Well, in Latin America, it's Cuba. In the Middle east, it's Iran. In Asia, it's China and North Korea. And then in the Europe area, it's Russia. I mean, I don't know why they want to cause havoc and people dying. We all have children or grandchildren and why do they want the people's lives at risk? I just don't get it. But they do.

Ryan Seacrest (5:57)

Let's go into the decision being made on the big beautiful bill. So Trump, and you just said you were with him yesterday. I'm sure you got the absolute latest as, as this process plays itself out, wants this to be done by July 4th. Senator John Thune, I believe, has said that he's not going to allow anybody to leave and go on their July 4th break until this is passed. What's the timeframe? Are you optimistic the Senate is going to deliver a bill before we get to the July 4th holiday?

Podcast Host (6:27)

I'm very optimistic that we'll get there. Now, we're not there yet. The, you know, we have, we have to do and we should, and I believe in the Trump agenda. So we ought to be doing those things. The other thing President Trump wants is he wants a balanced budget. We just passed $37 trillion for the debt, $37 trillion. So we've got to figure out how to get our spending under control. We've had a 53% increase in spending since COVID started, and the House bill cut less than 2% of it. So we still have a lot of work to do in the Senate. So that's what we're working on. We're working hard to find other ways to save money because ultimately every American taxpayer is going to pay for this fiscal insanity. Let me give you something to think about. So if we were, we're running around $2 trillion deficits, right? So if we said everybody's just going to pay their, you know, everybody, all the taxpayers, you pay your share to cover that deficit just for this year, not the debt, 37 trillion, how much of a tax increase would the American public see? What's your guess?

Ryan Seacrest (7:35)

Oh, I mean, in order to pay our share, I mean, if it's $37 trillion and we have roughly 300.

Podcast Host (7:42)

No, just the deficit.

Ryan Seacrest (7:43)

Oh, just the deficit.

Podcast Host (7:44)

Just. Just this. Just not the 37 trillion.

Ryan Seacrest (7:47)

25% more.

Clay Travis (7:49)

Yeah.

Podcast Host (7:50)

80.

May Melman (7:52)

What?

Podcast Host (7:52)

80% more. 80.

Clay Travis (7:54)

Yikes. Okay, that's not good.

Podcast Host (7:56)

Another number. You know how they always say, how they say, oh, just tax the rich. You know, just tax the rich. Okay, so what if we took. It took the income of the rich and we said, at what level could we stop. We take 100% of their income? Could we stop at 10 people make $10 billion a year or $10 million a year or $1 million a year? Where would, where would we stop it?

Ryan Seacrest (8:20)

Have to be like 95%, take all their income.

Podcast Host (8:22)

What's your guess?

Ryan Seacrest (8:23)

Yeah, it had to be like 95%. It's a crazy stat because the top 1% pay something like 40% of taxes already. I mean, it's crazy.

Podcast Host (8:32)

It's a hundred thousand.

Ryan Seacrest (8:34)

Yeah.

Podcast Host (8:34)

It would take 100% of the income of individual filers that make 100,000. Our joint filers make 180,000, 100% our corporations. And they say change, charge our corporations more. Our corporations don't make $2 trillion a year.

Clay Travis (8:52)

This is, this is where I'm reminded, Senator Scott, that. And this is true, this is a New York Post and New York Times figure that I've seen before. The average New York City public school janitor makes over $100,000 a year. Yeah, it's about 105, 110 grand. So for anyone who thinks that tax the rich is good to actually deal with that, as you're pointing out, it's just people who work. And you have to take all of their money, all of the money of people who work.

Podcast Host (9:17)

All of their income.

Clay Travis (9:18)

All of their income. But then what do we do? I start to get a little frustrated here, Senator Scott, because everyone gets all, we've got to do something about the spending, but then we can't do anything about the spending now, and we really can't do anything about the spending that's automatic in the future either, because people get upset. So then we don't want to do anything about the spending. It feels like we just go in this circle all the time. You ran a big business. You're a very successful guy in the private sector. How do we fit? How do we actually fix it?

Podcast Host (9:45)

I'm probably the only guy in the sense done this. I was. I became a governor in a budget deficit. And guess what? We Reduced spending, and we balanced the budget. We did it every year. You know how you do it exactly the way you did it? You look at, say, how much is my income? I'm not going to spend more than that. I will never vote for a tax increase. I cut taxes over 100 times, and guess what happened? I built the economy that allowed us have record spending for the things we care about. So what we've got to do is say to ourselves, step one, we've got to get back to normal spending. You know, we're past Covid. I mean, we've increased it 53% in five years.

Clay Travis (10:28)

But where is all that money going, Senator? Like, this is what I keep looking at this saying, hold on. You know, here's a stat that I think is jaw dropping to give a sense of just how much waste there can be. New York City Senator, because we're gonna be talking about the mayor's race in a second, in the last 10 years, has increased its budget, its spending 35%. And my family lives there, and I was living there until a couple years ago. My point is that all services have gotten worse. Every quality of life metric has gotten worse. But the budget's 30% more. So the federal government. Where is all this money going that we were spending on, Covid? Is it all just going to like Medicaid programs, which are just massive welfare?

Podcast Host (11:11)

It's everything. And so everybody says, oh, it's Medicare and Social Security. No, it's not. If you took Clinton's budget, his last budget was balanced, and you raised it based on population, raised the base on inflation, okay? And then we said, that's what we're gonna spend. We'd have a balanced budget. It's everything. Everything has increased. And there's no accountability. There's no accountability. So this is all fixable. But guess what? When I was governor of Florida, there's 4,000 lines of the budget. I could read every line in the budget if I asked for it. Here. We don't do budgets. We do spending bills. So I could look at spending bills. So I said, if I wanted to say, give me all, you know, 6,000 lines of the federal budget budget, it's impossible. So how do you ever do it? And then the other thing that people say, well, I don't. I don't want to do it. So what they're telling you, when people say they don't want to balance a budget, the other thing they're saying to you is, I don't care that your taxes go up. They're saying, they don't care that inflation's going to get worse. They don't care that interest rates are going to go up. Senator, that's what they're saying to you.

Ryan Seacrest (12:22)

Yeah, look, all of this is true and you know better than anybody, I mean, you actually have, you know, basic economic common sense, which, which is something you can't say for most senators and congressmen and women, unfortunately. But it's also, look, the difference between a two and a half percent interest rate on a mortgage and a 7. It's completely flummoxed to the entire housing market, frozen it so many different ways. But to build on what you were saying when you were governor of Florida, I imagine Florida has a balanced budget requirement, as basically every state does. That is the state can't go into debt like the federal government can.

Podcast Host (12:59)

They do, they do. Here's the. So here's Florida had added it to its debt every year for 20 years, over a billion dollars. So these states that have a balanced budget amendment, they just borrow. There's very few states, I paid off a third of state debt, all right, when I was governor, but very few states have no debt. They borrow money. So when they say they balance the budget, they borrow money and then they, then, you know, their pension plans underfunded and blah, blah, blah. So we have spent at every level of government, local government, state government, federal government. And the numbers are staggering, the increases in the last 10 years. And so this is going to come home to hurt us. I mean, look, we have a president that's trying to build the best economy in the world. I mean, we got a hot country from a place somebody wants to invest. But if we don't get our fiscal house in order, then what's going to happen? Interest rate. What's going to happen? Inflation. And what's gonna be left of the revenues we do collect? When we're paying now over a trillion dollars in interest out of. We're gonna collect without the tariff money, we're gonna collect probably five and a half trillion dollars. We're spending over a trillion dollars now just in interest expense. And that's like a problem. I believe we're gonna get a bill done, but we've got a lot of work to do to get our fiscal house in order. I know the president's committed to it. I'm committed to doing everything I can to help this president.

Clay Travis (14:30)

When, when is this bill going to get done? In your mind, when are we actually going to have a big beautiful bill to celebrate?

Podcast Host (14:35)

It'll be sometime before the 4th I mean, people are going to get okay. You know, we, the, the anticipated anticipation was that we were going to finish and go on a weak recess over the 4th on Thursday. So every day we're here past Thursday, it's going to put a lot of pressure on people to finally make a decision of what we're going to do. But there's a lot of work left to do. They've got to go through this process to see if we can even put in the bill, which called bird bath. So we're still having some of that stuff today. So. But I'm optimistic. Well, you know, I don't know what day will get done. I'm, of course, I'm staying here to get it done.

Clay Travis (15:06)

All right. Senator Rick Scott, thank you so much. Appreciate you being with us.

Podcast Host (15:09)

All right, take care. Have a good day. Bye. Bye.

J.R. Martinez (15:11)

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Ryan Seacrest (16:16)

This is team 47 with Clay and Buck. We are joined now by May Melman, Deputy Assistant to the President, Senior Policy Strategist. That's a heck of a title. But what we want to have you on is to talk about the evisceration of left wing arguments that came out from the Supreme Court today. And I want to start with this. I kind of broke down the legal background here of why these cases were important. But a lot of people out there are going to focus sometimes on the interrelationships between the justices. Amy Coney Barrett, you've read a lot of Supreme Court opinions in law school. I did, too. Amy Coney Barrett, Absolutely. Destroying Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the district court judge ruling case really kind of made me go, wow, you don't see this go this hard a lot. Did it stand out to you too, as this looked like Amy Coney Barrett's just kind of fed up with Katan G. Brown Jackson as a judge. More so than in. Even in just this case.

May Melman (17:26)

Yes. This was incredible. I think the legal term is a bench slap, but that is exactly what happened. So, you know, the three liberal justices did dissent and said that they think that universal slash nationwide injunctions are perfectly legal, but two of the justices, so Sotomayor and Kagan basically gave legal reasons saying, here is why I think judges have this legal authority. And then Justice Jackson wrote a dissent that was completely unhinged from any law and just said that she thinks that it's a good thing that judges basically follow Trump around and tell him what he's doing is wrong, that that's like a net good for society. And Amy Coney Barrett, who is, as, you know, like, if the conservatives in the world have a complaint with her, it's that she's not bold, she's not brave. She kind of goes with the flow a little bit too much. That was not the case today. She wrecked Justice Jackson and said, basically, you are acting unconstitutionally. What you want has no basis in the Constitution. You want a roving like King judge to decide whatever you think is the law. And that's crazy. And so it was beautiful to see.

Clay Travis (18:47)

Now, also. Go ahead, Clay. Oh, I thought Clay was jumping in. May. There are some other decisions that came down as well. What are your take from the White House perspective on, for example, parents being allowed to opt out for religious objection reasons from reading material that has a LGBTQIA agenda?

May Melman (19:11)

Yeah. So this was a huge one. Also, it's not enough. I will say schools should not have this crap in them to begin with. The fact that it exists means we have a lot of work to do. But at the bare minimum, if a parent says that they have a religious objection to schools indoctrinating their kids, then schools have to accept that. And the fact that this Maryland school didn't, I'm frankly shocked it wasn't 90 because it is that egregious of a violation of religious liberty. And Justice Alito, you know, he's. He's a funny guy. I guess he put. He copied and pasted some of the pages from this book. And this is not about celebrating that different people have different viewpoints. This was indoctrinating kids to say that trans identification is wonderful and Beautiful. And that entire nations, they phrase this as princes and princesses, entire nations that celebrate gay marriage. That obviously flies in the direct face of all major religions.

Ryan Seacrest (20:20)

This is an incredible series of wins. President Trump has been stacking a lot of series of wins. Are you impressed that the court has been willing to apply the law as consistently as they have and actually give him all these wins and not get involved? Because what's so important about this, and I said it off the top, one day, the precedent of presidential power is going to apply to a Democrat president in a significant way. The same thing is going to apply here. When it comes to nationwide injunctions. There will be a Democrat president who also benefits from this precedent. These are the right decisions. But I guess maybe I've just gotten so used to the court playing politics and trying to be cutesy that I didn't think they were actually going to be as willing to uphold the law and issue these clear precedents as they have been. Does it surprise you or are you also skeptical in some way?

May Melman (21:18)

I am surprised. Nationwide injunctions is something that the justices have all hinted at, that they need to address for such a long time. It's obviously such a big problem. If you ask district court judges, circuit court judges. There's been books written on it, law review articles. It's been such a big problem, and yet there's never been this. They haven't stepped up and stopped it. There are a lot of illegal things happen all the time that the Supreme Court has just kind of said, whatever, we're not going to deal with it. And I think conservatives, maybe it was during Obamacare, you know, maybe thereafter, where just if the decision was hard, if it was going to be hard, then you kind of figured they weren't going to do it. But I think actually Justice Roberts, even though that's what he cares about the most, is like preserving the court's legacy, preserving his legacy and not beclowning the court. And I think he's concerned that too many conservatives rulings would be clown it. I think there is, you know, when, when a good ruling comes out, my hope would be that all those times we've been disappointed, all those times we hope that they do something that they wouldn't, that it would lend credibility here. And I think that's what Justice, Chief Justice Roberts would hope, too. And of course that's not the case. Justice Roberts might as well go for it every single freaking time, because the left is not going to be more appreciative now than otherwise. But, you know, in his Mind, I think that's what he hopes is like that people are gonna respect this because of all the times that they've held back in the past.

Clay Travis (23:00)

Speaking of Mae Melman from the White House and tell us about where the big beautiful bill stands right now. I'm hearing some complaints from a number of different quarters about the Senate parliamentarian getting to weigh in here. And this is something to do with traditional, not actually something that is a. Has the force of law or the Constitution and things are being stripped out by the Senate parliamentarian. What the heck is going on with that? Specifically some, some NFA National Firearms act provisions that would allow people to buy suppressors like myself who like to go shooting and not blow out their eardrums. What's going on here May.

May Melman (23:40)

Yeah, this is the swampiest of the swamp thing to understand and it's very frustrating, but it's going to come down to a pretty big political question. So reconciliation is a process that deals with mandatory spending. So it's not, it doesn't create, hey, here's $50 billion for this, here's $50 billion for that. But rather various programs. What are different levers that you can change? We're not messing with this, but something like it would be the retirement age. If you change that, you're not actually creating a new program. You're basically amending an existing program for budgetary reasons. So you can only do those sorts of things. And yet that's a pretty big leash because basically there's a lot of levers that you can touch for budgetary reasons. But we had a few things that we really cared about that if you're going to spend Medicaid money, that you're not going to spend it on transgender surgeries for minors, that if you're. That there's a fund for companies to help make energy more litigation proof, basically a lot of different fixes. And the Senate parliamentarian basically said all of those things are too much in policy and not much in affecting the levers of funding. Now, the Senate parliamentarian who elected this person, who is this person? Who cares about this person? Nobody. This is not a real. This is, this is purely, as you said, tradition to take that person's ruling and treat it as the word of God. And yet Senate Republicans love doing that. Oh man, they love tradition so much. So I think the real question is, do they uphold tradition? Do they say the Senate parliamentarians ruling, saying these things are too policy wise, like you said on everything from the Second Amendment to transgender surgeries all the way down to energy policies all the way down. Or do you say, you know what? No, I know how to read. I know what is budgetary versus policy. And we the Senate, we're going to make our own independent decision. So that that's why all at the end of the day, does bo down to a policy choice.

Ryan Seacrest (25:44)

May Melman, Deputy Assistant to the President, Senior Policy Strategist okay, big decision as it came to federal district court judges and whether they can enjoin the president from being able to act. That's a huge win. It also implicates in some way the decision about birthright citizenship, which at some point will likely reach the Supreme Court. Now, I know I'm asking you to read tea leaves here because it is not directly addressable, but I said on the show a little bit earlier that it made me think the Supreme Court may be more open to the president's interpretation of the birthright citizenship amendment analysis than I thought. Is that a crazy take or would you sign on potentially with that take with the understanding that we're trying to predict something that hasn't yet happened?

May Melman (26:36)

So I don't think it's a crazy take. I think on one hand, we knew that the Supreme Court was going to be skittish to address this issue because it is such a big issue. And so that made it a really good vehicle to focus on nationwide injunctions. Right? This is something that the Supreme Court is going to move heaven and earth to just focus on that procedural vehicle and not just say, oh, you know what, let's just dive into the substance instead and forget about. So this is something that they would love to avoid thinking about for a little bit now. It's a, it's difficult because even though birthright citizenship is terrible policy and the United States is unique in the globe in offering it, other countries don't say, oh, you were here to visit, you know, a Disney World equivalent, like, now your child's a citizen. That's not a thing anywhere else. But at the end of the day, there are some bad court rulings in the past that have interpreted the 14th Amendment to basically give that. Now past court rulings that are bad are overturned when, when they need to be. But it's a big decision, it's a weighty decision. So I think you're right, actually, maybe if they knew for sure they hated this, they would have just said so. But they seem to want to avoid it. And that avoidance, I think, either indicates willingness or it indicates true openness, and they're just trying to bide their time to make such a big ruling.

Ryan Seacrest (28:01)

Mae, we appreciate it. I got a hot take here. I'm actually pretty pleased with the Supreme Court. I don't know that that ever gets said very often. I bet a lot of people in the Trump team are as well. Have a Good weekend. Good July 4th. We appreciate the time.

May Melman (28:13)

Hey, thanks for having me.

Ryan Seacrest (28:15)

Thanks for listening to Team 47 with Clay and Buck.

Podcast Host (28:19)

This is an iHeart podcast.