Senator Josh Hawley, reigniting his push for the Pelosi Act, which would ban members of Congress from trading and holding stocks. What do you think the chances are that this gets passed, and what kind of support do you feel like you have, and what kind of support do you think you still need? Well, the support is bipartisan. [00:00:15] And listen, in terms of support, you can't have better support than the president of the United States and the president has endorsed. Now a stock trading ban for members of Congress. - That's a huge boost. - I don't think so. Not so fast, Senator Hawley, because it doesn't appear that President [00:00:31] Donald Trump is supportive of this effort. We're going to get back to him in just a minute. But, you know, despite originally having the support of Trump for his proposal to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, Josh Hawley is now facing quite a bit of heat from the white House. [00:00:49] And that's because the ban was expanded to also include the president and the vice president. Yeah. Oops. So amazing how corrupt our government is. So let me just summarize here because this shows you exactly what American politics is about. [00:01:05] So when the Democrats were in charge, Nancy Pelosi was completely against, banning insider stock trading in the capital. And Donald Trump was totally in favor. Republicans were in favor. Oh, golly gee, we'd love to do it if we were in charge. But we just can't. Right? [00:01:20] And the Democrats were like, no, no, no, we can't. It's not right. Now the Republicans are in charge. And all of a sudden, as you're going to see in the story, Pelosi, Pelosi is in favor. Come on. Yeah, she's pretending to be in favor. Now Trump has flipped against it. You see what they're doing, right? [00:01:36] What we've been telling you all along. Good cop, bad cop. It's so pathetic. They're all corrupt. They're all embarrassing, and they should all be shamed. Okay, now, in this case, Holly proposed something good and voted in favor of something good. So I'll give him credit. [00:01:51] Even though I think this bill is going to be doomed when it comes to a floor vote. We'll get to that in just a minute. But let me just fill you in on the details as we have them in the moment. So the so-called Pelosi Act would prevent lawmakers from buying or trading securities, commodities, futures, options, trusts and other comparable holdings. [00:02:11] It would also, you know, essentially ban, the blind trust, which is a common tactic that you'll get from, you know, either the president who has business interests, and wants to continue being vested in those business interests. [00:02:28] And so he'll say, oh, I've got a blind trust now. Don't worry about it. Now, this legislation, if it passes, would ban that. Now, in order to move the bill forward by getting Democrats on board, Hawley included the president and vice president, in addition to congressional members [00:02:46] in his ban on certain investments. The White House's Office of Legislative Affairs caught wind and started pushing back, sources tell Axios. A white House official said the concern is over the change that would impact the executive branch. [00:03:02] Not necessarily over the congressional stock trading ban. This was a last minute deal struck to include the executive branch. By the way, it should include the executive branch. Okay. Anyone who's serving as a public servant, who gets these closed door briefings [00:03:19] and has information that the rest of us are not privy to, should be banned from trading individual stocks. Okay. Why should Congress be banned but members of the executive branch not be banned? That doesn't make any sense. But let me read the rest of that for you. [00:03:34] So it would include the executive branch equities without touching base with the white House. I'm sorry. Touching base without touching base with the white House to discuss potential article two concerns. Any pause comes purely from potential article two infringement, [00:03:54] not the congressional ban. So in other words, they said, we're fine with Congress people being subject to the ban. We just don't want it to affect us. Okay. Meaning that's what the white House is saying now. Article two of the Constitution establishes the executive branch [00:04:09] of the federal government. So to appease the white House, Hawley added in a carve out for Donald Trump. And so the change would make it so that the full force of the law would only apply to future administrations, not the Trump administration. [00:04:26] Now, Trump and Vance would be able to maintain their current holdings. But like Congress people, they wouldn't be able to buy or sell stocks. Okay. So basically, you keep what you have, but you're not going to be able to engage in additional trading. [00:04:42] So earlier today sparks absolutely flew as the Pelosi act as they've named it was debated by Republicans and Democrats in the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Here is Hawley making his case. [00:04:58] We have an opportunity here today to do something that the public has wanted us to do for decades, and that is to ban members of Congress from profiting on information that, frankly, only members of Congress have in the buying and selling of stock. 86% of Americans say that members of Congress should not be able to buy [00:05:18] and sell shares of stock, individual stock while they are members of this body, and they are absolutely correct. And the reason is you can see it. There was just another ethics referral in the House last week. We've seen the former speaker of the House make millions of dollars in profits. We've seen members of both parties. [00:05:35] I'm sad to say, be investigated for their stock trades. And the reason for all of this is, is that, quite frankly, members of this body are privy to information that the normal person just is not. Nobody really believes that the information that we get isn't valuable. It is quite valuable. [00:05:51] Which is why back during Covid, you saw members of Congress, of both parties engaged in a flurry of stock trading right after they were getting Covid briefings, where members of the public getting those briefings, they were not. I practice what I preach. I don't have individual stocks. I don't trade in stocks. [00:06:07] I'm not a billionaire, unlike others on this committee. Well, that might be the reason why others on the committee, namely the Republicans, disagreed with what Hawley was trying to do here. In fact, Ron Johnson made this ridiculous argument against the legislation. [00:06:22] Take a look. One of the big problems we have here in Washington, DC is there's so very few bureaucrats, staff members, members of Congress who have any experience in which means very little knowledge of and I would say very little sympathy for the private sector, [00:06:39] how difficult it is to run a business, how how much more difficult our laws. And we passed a bunch from here again today, you know, make it to build a business to to produce products, to create great paying jobs. [00:06:54] It's a hard thing to do and we make it very unattractive for people to step up to the plate and run for office or potentially serve in office. So this piece of legislation, really, it's legislative demagoguery. You know, we do have insider trading laws. We have financial disclosure. [00:07:14] Trust me, we have financial disclosure. The press pays attention to it. So I don't see the necessity of this. I can imagine all kinds of unintended consequences. You could relabel this law quite honestly, the Career Politician Protection Act. [00:07:33] What are the unintended consequences, Ronnie boy, that you can't do insider trading anymore and get rich off of insider information that the rest of us don't know anything about? Which, by the way, if we engage in the same behavior, we'd go to prison for a long, long time. What was that? [00:07:48] But you know what? He did make a fair argument. There was a fair argument in there. You might have missed it. I did miss it. You know, America really is a little rough on private business. Oh, yeah. You know. - Poor corporations can't catch a break. - They really can't. They really can't. And so we need to allow our lawmakers to engage in insider trading. [00:08:07] So businesses. Wait, how does that help businesses again? Yeah, that seems to just help you when you invest in businesses with insider information. Doesn't really help the business too much. And, I mean, the idea that the average man in this country has too much power [00:08:25] and you're abusing poor corporations. - I know poor. - Corporations. And it's a good thing you sent Ron Johnson to the Senate. Wisconsin to protect corporations from the average American because, you know, God forbid we overuse our power to fight back against corporate rule. I watched Ron Johnson's interview on Tucker Carlson's podcast, [00:08:42] where he tried to fashion himself as like a warrior for working class Americans. He's scum. He's a liar. He's a scumbag liar. Know that? Yeah, he's he's as big a corporatist as it gets. So. All right, look, it's just shell games, guys. [00:08:59] You know shell games. So now Trump is going to turn around and say, oh no, golly gee, now that it applies to me, I don't want it. And Pelosi want it applied to her. Didn't want it. So look, I want you to stop giving credit. I'm certainly going to do it for talking. Okay. [00:09:14] So from time to time, it makes a difference. Like if you were going, hey, are we going to call it a genocide or are you going to make excuses for it? So there's some limited times when language makes a difference okay. But when you're a politician, 99% of the time I need you to vote the right way. [00:09:30] And I'm not interested in your BS, especially when you're out of power. So do I believe that Nancy Pelosi is really now going to turn around, turning around? If she was the last critical vote, there's no way she would vote for it. The Democrats are so enormously full of crap. [00:09:47] But again, so are the Republicans. Oh, I want the files released. Oh, we're in charge. No, I don't want to release it. All right. Every time, every issue. Good cop, bad cop, shell game. I mean, aren't we exhausted by it now? I'm sorry. One last thing. That you guys are probably exhausted by it, but. [00:10:02] Yes. And who covers for them every time? Mainstream media. Oh, look at that. They just had a change of heart. Oh come on. So look, I'm. Spoiler spoiler alert. Every Republican on the committee, Committee on Homeland Security and [00:10:17] Governmental Affairs voted against this. But I got to give you a little more of their pathetic statements, because Rick Scott went as far as to call this proposal disgusting. Take a look. I've got a business background, but what I was just accused of [00:10:36] is making money, and somehow I can't do. I can't be fair and do things the right way. So I think it's disgusting what this is. What is going on here? I completely agree with you. We've got to stop people from trading stocks. [00:10:51] But this goes is way different. This is an attack against the president. Attack against the vice president. That's all. That's what this is. So I think it's wrong. You know, cheating and scamming is really part and parcel when it comes to Ron Johnson and his history. [00:11:08] I'm sorry, that was Rick Scott. Ron Johnson was earlier. Rick Scott committed the largest Medicaid fraud scam in the in the country in American history. So, his statement really isn't that surprising, but it is amazing that he manages to say things like that with a straight face. [00:11:26] - Jake, did you want to say. - Yeah, I do. So, he, took over so much money out of taxpayers pockets. Okay. Over $1 billion. So he's one of the biggest, like his company was convicted [00:11:42] of one of the largest frauds in American history when he was the CEO. What makes me sick is that he was not even tried. They said the company admitted guilt. They did it. They had two sets of books. So they were the CEO made a very active decision to defraud the American people. [00:12:02] Okay. And since they didn't try him and since they did this nonsense thing of, oh, the company is guilty, but since the company is not a person, there are almost no consequences. You have to return some portion of the money you stole. Wow. So you know what they did? As Rick Scott was leaving, they gave him a $300 million exit package, [00:12:22] a golden parachute for a robbery. Well done against the American people. So then this guy you just saw him say, like, I can't believe that anyone would accuse us of having inappropriate business transactions. [00:12:37] Dude, you're known as one of the biggest frauds in American history. Are you kidding me? And by the way, the people of Florida. How big a suckers are you? How many times are you going to elect this guy? He literally made his fortune robbing you. These are criminals that are in our Congress. [00:12:54] Oh, yeah. Full to the brim with criminals. There's no question about that. Now, look, they did amend the legislation again to provide that limited carve out for Trump. And ultimately, the committee did vote to advance the bill, which applies to Congress members and their spouses and future presidents and vice presidents. [00:13:13] So the vote was 8 to 7, meaning it passed. All Republicans voted against it. Holly was the only Republican who voted in favor of it. You know, in recent stories, we've been kind of harsh toward Holly, because I can't really figure out if he's serious about fighting for average Americans. [00:13:29] In this case, he voted the right way. He didn't just talk about it. He put action behind his words. So I'll give him credit for that. But it seems almost guaranteed that the bill will fail on the Senate floor unless there's a major turnaround from Republicans, of course. Now, asked about the bill earlier today, Trump told reporters that he [00:13:46] liked Hawley's bill conceptually, but would have to look at it more closely. And then shortly after that, he lashed out at Josh Hawley on Truth Social despite being given an exemption. Right. Like so. Here's what he wrote. [00:14:03] Why would one Republican senator, Josh Hawley, from the great state of Missouri, joined with all of the Democrats to block a review sponsored by Senator Rick Scott and with the support of almost all other Republicans of Nancy Pelosi's stock trading over the last 25 years. [00:14:21] The information was inappropriately released just minutes before the vote. Very much like sabotage. The Democrats, because of our tremendous achievements and success, have been trying to target me for a long period of time. And they're using Josh Hawley, who I got elected twice as a pawn to help them. [00:14:40] I wonder why Hawley would pass a bill that Nancy Pelosi is in absolute love with. He is. Okay, look, I get it. You guys all want to do insider trading. I get it, and you're going to do insider trading. You're going to continue doing it. You're going to manipulate the markets. [00:14:55] You're going to vote on legislation, by the way, in Congress, depending on which companies you're invested in and how that legislation is going to impact the companies you're invested in. That's that's what's happening right now as we speak. Trump is in favor of it. The vast majority of members of Congress are in favor of it. [00:15:13] There's a select few who see a problem with it and want to do something about it. But make no mistake about it, we as American voters need to do better. Okay. Because we have scum full to the brim in the halls of Congress. Yeah. And I got to say, I think we're going to do better. [00:15:29] And I think that the reason why the American people are going to, quote unquote, do better is because media is changing. So before you didn't know about Rick Scott, like, do you think the people of Florida know that he stole $1.7 billion from the American people? I mean, look, I ran for Congress back in 2020. [00:15:46] You know why? Because I wanted to be in a position where I could use my mic and my power to say, hey, Senator Scott, where's our $1.7 billion until you give back $1.7 billion. Tall glass of shut up juice. You don't get to talk about anything, you criminal. [00:16:02] You're a crook. How come Democrats don't say that? Why is that so hard? Oh my God. Oh, Republicans fighting. Republicans fighting anyone in Congress so hard. And you know, here's what I guarantee you about the Democrats. Same thing for the Republicans. So now when the Democrats, if they get back into power and it's [00:16:18] corporate Democrats that are in charge. Nothing will change. They'll everyone in both parties will flip instantly on this issue. The Republicans will say, oh, we got to stop insider trading. And the Democrats. Well, it's complicated, it's nuanced, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just nonstop lying. [00:16:34] And before mainstream media would be like, they're not lying. They all had a change of heart. Oh, look at that. They had another change of heart. And then they did it again after the election. But we're morons. We can't figure out the news at all, right? That. But since that was the only media you had, you couldn't tell. Now, you know, a lot of people know. [00:16:51] Word is getting out that all the politicians are crooks. And all the mainstream media guys are liars, so now they can't contain things. They're like, no, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. Insider trading should be allowed in Congress. Shut up, shut up. Well, you can't contain it. [00:17:07] It's too many moles that have now popped up here in online media. So they're getting overwhelmed now. Republicans are pissed at Trump for this. So Holly has told reporters that he would never cooperate with Democrats to hurt Trump. [00:17:23] He said he hopes to speak with Trump soon. - Oh, what a coward. - Quote. I want to see the bill passed and signed. So if there's further changes he wants to make, I'm happy to make them. Oh, yeah. Okay, then why then why'd you bother? Why did you pretend to do this? [00:17:38] Because it's for PR, right? Okay, but hold on. Just pause for a second. I do want this bill passed. I think that there's a very, very slim to impossible chance that it is going to pass. But whatever. If you have to cut the executive branch out of it and only have this bill applied [00:17:56] to members of Congress. He should try to pass it that way anyway. And by the way, for the Democrats who are like, no, we're going to vote no unless it includes Trump. - No, you should vote yes. - No, that's what I'm saying. It's a total mask off moment. If you're pretending like you're going to vote against the bill [00:18:13] because it doesn't include Trump. Okay, so if I was the Democratic leader, what I would do there is, oh, you want to ban insider trading in Congress? Great. I wanted it from day one. Now we finally got 1 or 2 honest Republicans happy to take the vote. We ban it. Okay. [00:18:29] Now the next day, I introduce a bill doing the same thing for the white House. Now watch these crooks vote against it. Okay, so now you didn't get the white House because they'll vote against it. But number one, you did the right thing and you get credit for it. Number two, you show the hypocrisy of the Republicans. And number three, you seem like you're the one honest party [00:18:47] because you actually got a bill passed. And the Republicans refuse to hold themselves accountable when they control the white House. That's obviously the right strategy. You think they don't know that? They actually do know that. But here's what I predict will happen when he takes the white House out. [00:19:02] Forget the next time Democrats are in power. Democrats will flip. Now they'll go, oh no, you're not including the white House. Golly gee. We decided not to look into Pelosi's trades. We decided not to look into all the Democratic candidates, trades and legislators. So look, when I say Republican or Democrat on this show, it's annoying. [00:19:20] But I should clarify every time, okay, there's all the difference in the world between the politicians and the voters. So when I said a second ago, hey, some Republicans are beginning to hold Trump to account on this. It's beginning. And I mean the voters. - I don't mean the politicians. - Exactly. Right. [00:19:35] And the politicians are like, Holly, oh, daddy called and I'm a populist, but I have to ask daddy what he wants, and I need to pamper his ass and go, oh, you. None of you guys are allowed to do it. But daddy is daddy. You can cheat all you want. Daddy, that's not a populist. That's a bitch. [00:19:53] So, look, I appreciate the effort. And if he gets a pass and it's fair and honest, we're going to give credit where credit is due, right? But right now all I've seen from Holly is a lot of this. Oh, I like Medicaid. Oh, I'll vote to cut it, but I didn't want to cut it, blah. [00:20:08] Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Oh, I want to do this act, but. Oh, but daddy says no. Look, if Holly is real about wanting to get these bills passed, he needs to understand your power doesn't come from Daddy Trump. Your power comes from the people. It comes from your constituents. [00:20:26] And your constituents want this? I know that for a fact, because Democratic voters and Republican voters want Congress to work for them. They don't want self-interested, greedy, grubby little creeps who do insider trading and have no interest in serving the people. [00:20:45] So how about you serve the people and worry less about Daddy Trump doing you favors? Okay. Because look at Thomas Massie. Thomas Massie has values that guide him. I might not agree with him politically on a whole host of issues, but I value the [00:21:01] fact that he is guided by his principles. So, Holly, who are you? What do you want to actually accomplish? What do you want your legacy to be? I know who Holly is. I'll just say real quick. Holly's a guy who figured out a new angle. He figured out. Oh, populism, I got it. [00:21:16] That's how Trump won. And by the way, do you know how stupid the rest of the senators are? They didn't figure that out. Like the Democrats are still searching for. Which word should we use? And you know, and which consultants and. Right. And the Republicans don't. [00:21:32] At least he figured out, oh, right. I'm supposed to pretend to be a populist, but if daddy ever checks me, then I'll go back to doing whatever he wants. I mean, I'll cut the living crap out of Medicaid and take your health care away. But I'll say nice words about it because I'm supposed to pretend to be a populist. [00:21:47] And that's the situation we're in right now. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.