Congressman David Schweikert on the Real Problem with Federal Spending 52:27

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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. We're kicking things off fast and furious here as always in the studio with us. And thank you so much for joining us. We have Congressman David Schweiker. You mean I had a choice. Well, you know.

We only kidnap and drag our guests into the studio on rare occasions. The real world doesn't understand. You get elected to Congress or city council or something of that nature, and you lose control of your life. There's these things called schedulers that just tell you where the hell to go. Well, see, then what we do is we get a tranquilizer gun.

Oh, you see, I'm much more into tasers. They're a local product. Good point. Good point. Let me ask you this question. How often, when you get your schedule and you go to a meeting, you're surprised what it's about? Every single day. Some days you just show up like, why am I here? Well, and what happens is...

People, would you believe, lie? All the time. David, we need to meet him for this. We're going to talk about a real issue in his district. And you show up and we need a federal grant on this. That isn't what you told the scheduler. You told the scheduler this was about, you know, wild horses issue in, you know, northeast Scottsdale. But I show up and you're actually trying to get me to give you a Department of Energy grant. Right.

And you just accept it. It's just how often does that happen? Once at least once a week. So let's you be shocked. I'm never shocked anymore. But my I know we're way off where we want to be. No, no, no. This is important. People need to understand. Remember, I have a nine month old. I've been up since really early this morning sucking down coffee and and.

Everything's about the money. I've become more and more convinced that Washington, D.C. is money power vanity, but most of the time it's about the money. And that's okay. Just be honest about it. Do you feel like sometimes that people just view Washington as the hard money lenders in the New York mafia, like bada bing, bada bing, I need some money? Oh, no, no, no, no. I think they view Washington as the senile great grandmother that has unlimited money that's never going to ask for it back.

That is it right there. Now, that makes – look, people are running around doing the same thing here in the state of Arizona. They're trying to treat our state governments that way despite the fact that we don't have a prison process. They just think it's unlimited, which brings us to a very important point, which we can do a good segue here. So they had a poll this week.

You know, two-thirds express dismay and that we need to take care of the budget deficit. Then they listed items for us to cut. And they didn't want any of them cut. Welcome to my life. So it's, you know, and the one thing I wanted to talk about here is let's talk, for example, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

It's half the entire federal budget. Oh, no, it's much more than that. So what we want you to do is explain that. And then I want you to explain the following. I think everybody here wants to make sure that grandma, grandpa, mom and dad are taken care of it. Right. But in some ways, that's the morality point. You can't fix something if you're not allowed to actually work on it and talk about it. And the president got up in the State of the Union. And there's a little out of sequence, but this is important to understand.

For the previous year, I was the senior Republican in the House of Representatives on Social Security. We had spent almost 400 grand with actuaries. We'd been working with a team in the Senate. We had Democrat senators working with us.

trying to put together a package, and it was a complex sucker. We were going to try to set up a sidecar sovereign wealth fund and this and that. But it was a way where you could make it work and not screw up economic growth. Remember the Bernie Sanders type plans. They don't just tax income. These people say, well, just raise the cap. Raising the cap and then keeping the benefit formula only takes care of 17% of the shortfall.

Wow. So, so, so, okay. And this is why folks, we have David Schweikert on this program and he is a friend of this program. So eliminating the cap will only take 17%. Let me get first through my, my moment of just being really annoyed. President gets up in the state of the union. We had been meeting with the white house.

Some of their team over there saying, let's all come together. We got only nine years left and the Social Security Trust Fund is gone. And grandma and grandpa take a 23 percent cut. And then it gets worse every year. We will double senior poverty in nine years. That's immoral. White House. We already have Democrats in Congress working together on this. President gets up on the State of the Union and knifes us, say, promise you won't talk about Social Security and Medicare. And so now it's toxic.

a year's worth of work where we were actually doing something bipartisan and the White House knifed us. And that still didn't fix anything. The numbers from today to 30 years from now, today through 30 years from now, United States will take on about $128 trillion of borrowing. 100% of that new borrowing, 75% is Medicare, 25% is Social Security if we backfill it. The rest of the budget actually has a $1.9 trillion positive balance.

We got old. It's demographics. It's not Republican or Democrat. And the political class, we have lied to our voters for so long. Republicans, we get up saying, get rid of foreign aid and waste and fraud. OK, we probably should. So it's a percent and a half. Every dime of foreign aid last budget year, I think, would pay about 12 days of borrowing.

And that might well be worth it. But on the left side, they're even more duplicitous saying, well, if we just tax rich people more, you can take every dime, every dime of people, 400,000 or 500,000 up, just take everything. And it doesn't even get you close, close to balancing the budget. Folks have no understanding the scale.

But there's a way. And so instead of us just complaining constantly, I do these floor speeches every week. And I'm just trying to get someone to listen. If I can have, if you and I as a society, we can have a revolution in the cost of health care. I can make the math work. Now, you've got to do a bunch of things to grow. But it's a thought experiment. Then we'll go back to where you were. What's the single most powerful thing

we as a society could do for being moral, helping labor force participation, income inequality, all those things, and balance the budget. Or at least you're not going to actually balance the budget, but actually flatten out because what you want is you don't want the debt growing faster than the economy. Flatten the top line. So it's referred to as your debt to GDP ratio where we could fix that and start to dive it down because in nine years –

Congressional Budget Office says we will be at 118% of publicly, publicly sold debt to the size of the economy. So the debt will be bigger than the economy. What's the number one thing you could do? Diabetes. If you could stabilize or cure diabetes, it's the single most impactful thing you can do on the U.S. debt. And you get people that look at you and go, huh? Remember, 70% of all health care comes through government now. Right. Correct. 33% of all health care spending is associated with diabetes.

Remember, remember, for our brothers and sisters out there, 5% of the population that have multiple chronic conditions are 50%, actually a little over 50% of all the spend. And I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers, but you don't need to memorize the numbers, just the concept. In Medicare, so our 65 and up population, 31% of the spend is associated with diabetes.

What would happen if you cut diabetes in half? What would happen if these new GLP-1, forgive me if I get the term wrong, appetite inhibitors, or the new over-the-skin blood glucose monitor, or we got the farm bill to stop subsidizing crap food that we give to help people with nutrition support and actually help people be healthy. What happens if two weeks ago the FDA just approved the Phase 1

on a stem cell trial that doesn't require anti-rejection drugs that looks like it cures diabetes oh it gets your body producing islet cells again right and we've already as you know we've already had a a small number who were cured with their first phase of this and then they found worked with crisper to tag it so you don't have to take anti-rejection drugs and that's what they're moving on to now that might be 10 years from now build a damn 10-year plan

We're going to fix the farm bill. We're going to start making like apples talking about a blood glucose and maybe not the next watch, but the watch after that. Helping people. And look, I'm a bit of a healthy lifestyle freak and those things. But it's but it turns out we're killing our own people.

by a lot of our own nutrition, agriculture, subsidy policies. It's immoral what we're doing. We're subsidizing diabetes with some of the things that we support in the Farm Bill. And if you, you know, okay, I'm going to probably regret what I'm about to say. Okay, fine. I'm a pasty white college-educated Republican from Scottsdale. Fine. I care passionately about a society that's moral and growing, but I also believe growth is moral.

We actually have been working on a project of what's the real cause of income inequality. And the data, if you really, really mine it, it's not racism. It is a bit of education. Health may be the number one. Take my urban poor, my rural poor, my tribal communities. I mean, we have a couple of our wealthiest tribes in the country right here. Number one, number two, highest percentage with diabetes. So where I'm coming back is instead of the

very narrow cast saying, let's cut these programs. Okay, fine. There's lots of things I want. I think government is dramatically too big, but our demographics are so screwed up and we waited so long. It's not big enough. It's just, and here's the punchline. And then I will shut up and let's talk for anyone listening. And one thing I love about podcasts, there's some guy right now listening to this, hiking up a mountain going, huh? Um, in nine budget years, if I came to you and said,

What can we cut to actually just not have debt that year? Not pay off the debt, just not have debt. Well, you got to get rid of all the defense. Well, it turns out nine years from now, that's still not enough. You got to get rid of the EPA. You got to get rid of the FDA. You got to get rid of Congress and the White House. Matter of fact, you got to get rid of every dime of discretionary. So there is no government. All government is gone.

And you still have to borrow a couple hundred billion dollars. And then in the 10 years from now, it goes up dramatically because the trust funds are all gone. Social Security, trust fund, Medicare, the highway are all gone. Well, and to amplify your earlier point, all the tax proposals that Democrats are talking about, which they say are targeted at the rich, but we know are far more extensive than that. Those are still a drop in the bucket against this level of... My rage and...

And you're trying not to be completely a jerk because I have a moral obligation to try to find solutions here. Dems have been running around saying, we're going to fix Medicare. No. The $660 billion in new taxes over the 10 years is partial, partial shoring up of the Medicare Part A trust fund. Guess what? 60% of Medicare comes out of the general fund.

Oh, geez. Wow. So the 30 year number for when you add in interest and then the shortfall for just just Medicare is 80.5 trillion. Turns out I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop right there because we got to go to break. We will be coming back with more in just a moment from Breaking Battlegrounds. We're in studio with Congressman David Schweikert of Arizona's first congressional district. Back in a moment.

Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren and Sam Stone in studio with us. And continuing on now, Congressman David Schweikart. You are just talking, I mean, break. What are the two times in life you think you know everything? And then let's segue get into what members of Congress understand and so forth. All right. Okay. So it's both meant as a running joke, but it has a shocking reality. You know, we all think, what are the two times in life we think we know everything?

You know, when we were 13 years old and the day after you get elected to Congress. And part of that is you get love bombed. You get elected. All of a sudden you became taller, better looking. The bald spot has filled back in. Full head of hair. You're ready to go. You're ready to take it on. And remember our first theory, it's always about the money. And you have all these people who make their living off of having you do things. But also the sin of that is I probably read five hours a night.

and it's partially because I have no friends, so no one wants to hang out with me. Why do you laugh at my pain? Hey, there's a benefit to loneliness. You know the numbers. But the point I'm heading towards is you have a lot of actually very, very smart people in Congress, but finances, numbers where there's 14 zeros isn't their world. We have one guy that's like an expert in bugs.

But agriculture. Well, which is great and valuable in Congress. If he's on the agricultural list. Yeah. But if I have a guy who is an expert on automobile financing, he owns car dealerships, we all show up with our specialties. Very few people, though, show up with, oh, God, I'm an expert on taxation and economics of

Of debt and financing. So you're saying it's hard to get CPAs elected to Congress? No, no. Remember, this stuff is almost its own weird, especially when you have to understand how the debt markets work, how fragile we've become as a society. If we ever had an undersubscribed debt auction, it's a technical economic term. Screwed we are. So, but...

The thing, this greatest difficulty I have with my brothers and sisters in Congress, particularly even on my own side, you know, particularly even my more conservative friends, is understanding its demographics. In 19 years, our country has more deaths than births. You've got to put that in context. It's not sustainable.

We're not a dying society, but we're not a healthy one. Static. And nobody predicted that leading into this period, although maybe they should have. We predicted, but it wasn't supposed to happen for another decade. Everything, whether it be the pandemic, whether it be the fact that Democrats have been charged the previous four years in Congress, a lot of the numbers got pulled forward and became ugly.

And then we're now dealing with where Congressional Budget Office are saying, hey, the economic growth we model is getting less. And that's just devastating. But you can't get up in front of your neighborhood Kiwanis Club.

With a deck of slides and say, let me explain to you the demographic curve we're walking into and why it's so incredibly important. We have a disruption in the price of health care. And they just stare at you saying, no, you're supposed to come talk about happy things for us. Talk about how much we love veterans. We love veterans, but we've increased veteran spending by 191 percent in the last 10 years. And I will get groups that still come in and demanding more money. Yeah. And.

And they don't understand just how fragile. So back. So that's why I always try to say in nine years, I can wipe out everything you think of as government. And I still have to borrow money to cover Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits. And the next year is the year the Social Security trust fund is empty and everyone gets that 23 percent cut. This is not some time off in the future. It's it's it's upon us now. Yeah.

There's ways to make it work. So let me ask you this. It's upon us. Do other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle understand this point? Or are they in la-la land and think this can just continue unabated for decades? This is the moment where I probably end my ability to be reelected. It's both the people I work with because these numbers are so uncomfortable. And if you go home and tell them

to your little town hall or on your, you get booed. But let me finish this thought. The elected officials are often a reflection of their community. 100%. Right. I'm incredibly blessed. I represent one of the smartest, best, I mean, truly it's one of the best educated districts in America. You know, if you're in the Scottsdale, North Phoenix, you know, North Central Phoenix, I represent. Now, what percent are college educated in your district? Um,

We actually were doing some math in like my primary, almost half had a bachelor's degree or higher. It's off the charts. That's two to one. That's two to one in most districts at minimum. In the general, I would have assumed about 60% in your district. It's possible. We know from a status that I'm in like the top 20 and I don't have a university in my district. Right. But with that, it doesn't mean they are...

where I am ideologically they're conservative, but I'm able to talk to them like adults. And that's actually made a real difference. - So I wrote an opinion piece that we posted on our social media and got a lot of thousand replies or something about Social Security. And I had a lot of people come to me and say, "I've paid into the money's mine." So I decided to test it with a half a dozen people. And I said, "You're gonna get more out of it "than what you put in. "These are the numbers."

And we went back and forth. And about the fifth phase of the conversation, they had all switched like,

What do we do? It's like it finally dawned on him. And so but the reality is, but I had 10 minutes with each of them in a conversation with God bless you. But look, one of the most if you ever get bored, go on Forbes, breaking news, YouTube. They put up and I have some of my floor speeches. I have one that has like one point four million views now. So there's something happening in society when people are willing to watch some idiot stand up and do an economics show.

But even, what was it, Wednesday or Thursday night on the floor of the house, I did a presentation and I basically showed those numbers saying for the average American, average couple, you put in this much, you get about a $72,000 spiff on Social Security. You would have made a hell of a lot more money if you could have taken part of it and put it in markets, those things. But people protested against that 25 years ago when we tried. Right.

The crux of this, we have about a minute 45 before we go back to break here. But the crux of this, you can see it in France right now. You need a huge level of political courage. I'm not a huge I'm not a big fan of Macron, but in raising the retirement age by two years, doing something they only did two years. Yeah. And I need to come back and say we can talk about when we have a larger segment. You and I can fix Medicare and without anyone taking a cut.

I have to build some incentives. I have to do all sorts of things. But it's complex. And Congress and the way the media works, those things, we can't have a complex conversation. Medicare is my most difficult issue. And if we get a slot, I'd actually like to walk through ideas that would make our lives easier. But you've got to legalize technology. And there's armies of lobbyists who

who do not want their business model disrupted by you having more conveniences. Well, we're going to bring you back for, I think, the next segment here. Let's talk about it. We have a short segment. It's only six minutes. I got to get in a sponsor read, but then we'll give the rest of it to you. And let's hear those things, because I think people need to know this stuff. Yeah.

Folks, make sure you go to BreakingBattlegrounds.vote and download, subscribe to our podcast, help us grow this program so we can bring you more fantastic content like this show. We will be right back here in just a moment with more from Congressman David Schweiker.

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You know, I'm 60. I just turned 61 and I have a nine month old. I'm pathologically optimistic. We're adopting another little a little boy. And there's a whole story to it. So but I have a moral obligation to protect everyone's heading into retirement and also protect his and his sister's future. We're Americans. We have done crazily stupid things and then fixed it.

And there's a reason you didn't go to Blockbuster Video last weekend. Correct. You now go home and hit a button. And that was horrible. It was a huge disruption. And yet we're all happy. It's easier. It's faster. It's cheaper. So what if I came to you and said, we need, first let's just do health care. But it's all up and down the stack of everything government does. Much of Congress, much of Washington, D.C. is a protection racket.

It's a protection of when I say incumbency, I mean incumbent bureaucracies. You hear people say the deep state. It's not deep. It's right in your face all the time. Incumbent bureaucracies and businesses. Oh, and I'm getting there. Businesses.

And sometimes it's not even business. You might think it's charities at this and that. I've had charities who are like upset that we want to put the money in the cure side instead of the public education side. It turns out they make their salaries on the public education side. A cure puts them out of business. I mean, we have these perverse incentives and that is we actually care about ourselves and having a paycheck and having a retirement. Right.

But that's not actually way a dynamic economy works. So a quick thought experiment, because this actually does exist. If I came to you tomorrow and said, hey, there's this thing, it looks like a big kazoo. You can have it in your home medicine cabinet. You blow into it. And a couple of moments later, it says, hey, Chuck.

Guess what? You got the flu of this category and we just banged off your phone and we know your medical records. You're not allergic to this category of antiviral. And we just ordered it for you. And Lyft is dropping it off in two hours. Would that make your life easier? Would you have more time to take the kids to school? Would you have more time, a shorter, faster time to be healthy? That sort of technology exists. There's about a half a dozen steps there that are functioning illegally.

You have the algorithm writing a prescription. You have this and that. You have all these things. And much of this is going to also have to happen at the state level. But if you want to disrupt the price of health care, the fact of the matter that very soon chat GPT and the thing you wear on your wrist, the thing you wear on your, you know, you can tape to your body that pulls data off your body, whether it be your blood glucose, your heart rate, your temperature, everything else.

You'll have a 24-hour-a-day walking medical lab with you. Things you used to go to a lab to get now is going to be at home in a biopsy. If we embrace the technology and then the other side move as fast as we can with the fact we're about to cure COVID,

so much misery, you know, cystic fibrosis, you know, we're on the cusp of, we just came out with a cure for hemophilia. I'm hopeful by the end of the decade, we're almost there in diabetes. If you do those things combined...

I can make the math work where the future actually is pretty darn awesome. Do you feel, let me ask you this question. Those are all things the public would love. But this is sort of red meat, though. Here's the problem with that. I agree with you on that. I think the problem, that probably got set back a decade at least just by the way the federal government and the press handled COVID. So now we got, now you know these people. They're all paranoid, right? It's more complex than...

That's my arrogance theory. Right. But we've got a bunch of paranoid people now. Yeah, because you've got politicians and bureaucrats that are afraid to come to the microphone the next day and say, hey, everything I knew yesterday is wrong. Right. We've got new data sets. But how many of you, like, you know, when you're running a campaign and you have your message and you're marching along and then you get new polling and you find out, no, my voters actually don't care.

What do you do? You change. You turn and you say, hey, we had. And I don't know what it was with so much of the federal bureaucracy is they were afraid to say everything we knew yesterday was wrong.

Guess what? We're going to change. Yeah, but they did. Welcome to life. But they just did damage. Yes. People don't. They did damage. They absolutely did. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in. Breaking Battlegrounds is going to be back here in just a moment with more. We thank Congressman David Schweikert for joining us this morning. Really appreciate having you in the studio. And for information you're just not going to find in many other places. Breaking Battlegrounds back in just a moment.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone and Chuck Warren. Giant thank you to Congressman David Schweikert. Our next guest involved in what may be a landmark lawsuit and an enormous victory for the citizens of Phoenix against the city of Phoenix,

Welcome to the program, Arizona State University Law Professor Elon Worman. He joined forces with a couple of other local attorneys to bring a lawsuit related to The Zone, which is the homeless encampment area here in Phoenix. It's been in the news nationwide a little bit. Elon, is your family happy that you're involved with a landmark case? I mean, let's talk about it first of all. Is the parents really proud and say, boy, he's in charge of a landmark legal case?

And they they are. It turns out they they approve. They approve. You know, I don't seek my parents approval for really anything, but it's always great when the interests of justice, the interests of my clients and the approval of my parents align. And in this case, they do. So talk about what this is all about. Give our audience a little Reader's Digest USA Today version of how this came about, what it's about and what the ruling means. And then talk about how this conflicts with the federal rulings as well.

So I'm hoping it doesn't conflict with the federal ruling. I'll get to that in a second, because that would cause us a little more trouble than I was hoping to get into with the court's order. But in a nutshell, for those who live in Phoenix anyway, and this, of course, is replicated in many cities, especially on the West Coast, and I'll get to that because that's related to the federal rulings you're talking about. There is several city blocks in downtown Phoenix. For those of you who are familiar, it's roughly between 7th and 15th Avenues and

Van Buren, Jefferson Street, something like that, south to the train tracks there, where it's basically a tent city. It is lined with tents that spill over onto the streets often. Every single inch of the sidewalk is covered with tents, so several square blocks. There are about 1,000 people, 1,200 at maximum, usually, who live there at any given time. And there are business owners and property owners.

Those are the business owners and property owners and homeowners that I represent. And I joined forces with Steve Tully and Mike Bailey, two very accomplished lawyers who have a firm, Tully Bailey. And so we brought this lawsuit based on a public nuisance theory. Why is this a public nuisance, by the way? Well, because you have

A thousand people defecating in public, urinating in public, defecating in buckets and throwing it over the walls of our property owner's property, throwing trash and human waste into the storm drains, which enter the waters of the state, by the way, which violates environmental laws. Those are illegal environmental discharges.

And of course, violence, crime, drug use, public indecency, all obstruction of sidewalks, violations of multiple city laws, Arizona laws, public nuisance laws. And so we brought this lawsuit saying, look, this is this is a public nuisance and the city has to do something about it. The city is responsible because the city is allowing this public nuisance to exist on its public property. Well, and I'm going to stop you for one second to throw in a little bit more history there, because the folks who hired you and

kicked off this lawsuit. They had been working in good faith with the city of Phoenix for at least the previous five years when I was there. So they had done everything they could. The city had made multiple agreements with them that they had not held up. The city had not held up its end of. So these folks really were turning to these attorneys as a last resort.

That's right. We the the lead plaintiffs in this case brought a whole proposal in coordination, I believe, with Cass Central Arizona Shelter Services and another one of the nonprofit groups down there. I can't remember which one a Phoenix rescue mission, I think, but I could be wrong about that, which proposed things like structured campgrounds, sprung structures. We'll talk about that. Andre Andre House was the other partner in that one.

It could be. I'm not sure they were on this document, but they have been working with us a lot. Nobody wants a situation to persist as it is. The reason that this occurs downtown, by the way, in that area, is because the unsheltered population is attracted to that because there are services there. No one denies that there are services there. The Human Services Campus, Andre House, there's St. Vincent de Paul, there's CASC, but that doesn't give the city...

a right to allow encampments on public property, thereby creating a public nuisance, the brunt of which is borne by a single neighborhood, right? A single neighborhood in Phoenix. And so that's what this case is about. And there's always been some amount of homelessness down there because of the services that are there.

Cass, I think, has been around since the 1980s, Human Services Campus since 2005. Why did we not sue 20 years ago, 40 years ago? Why did we sue in 2022? What has changed? And the answer goes to Chuck's allusion to federal court rulings, and in particular, a Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. City of Boise.

In Martin v. City of Boise, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has historically been a liberal court of appeals – it's more balanced now, though it's still a bit liberal –

held that it is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment to criminalize homelessness. In other words, to send someone to jail for sleeping in public if there are insufficient shelter beds available in the city, in the jurisdiction. And of course, Phoenix is 1,000, 1,500 beds short, something like that. And cities across the West Coast, but especially Phoenix,

had used this ruling as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the homelessness crisis. So in 2018, when this ruling came down, it was almost like an overnight change, almost overnight.

Advocates came with buses and handed out tents, handed out tents because now they said, hey, Martin City of Boise, a federal U.S. Court of Appeals, U.S. Court of Appeals says you cannot kick people out of their tents. You cannot kick people out of private public property, sleeping in public because there are insufficient shelter beds for them. Now, this is a gross misinterpretation.

of the city of Boise decision. The city of Boise decision specifically says this does not mean that the city must allow unsheltered persons to shelter in public and open spaces at all times.

at any public place with under any conditions. It doesn't say that. It doesn't say that. And so our argument in this lawsuit was, wait a minute, you are violating the public nuisance laws. The city is violating the public nuisance law. There's no. By the way, the city never once questioned that legal theory.

Never once did they question that this was a public nuisance. They had all sorts of procedural arguments, political question, non-justiciable. The city is at the cost. Never once did they question the conditions. OK, and what we're saying is, look,

The city of Boise decision doesn't allow you, let alone compel you, to maintain public encampments in a way that amounts to a public nuisance. So what we argued is there are ways to comply both with the Ninth Circuit decision and with Arizona public nuisance laws. And we proposed a whole host of solutions to accomplish that. And the judge agreed with us this week. One of the things that the judge said in his ruling that I thought was most significant is,

Specifically, he said a service-resistant individual could not be said to lack access to adequate temporary shelter if he or she is refusing the service.

That was a particular sentence that I thought had a ton of – has or has a ton of potential import for how cities are addressing homelessness going forward because that alone changes the dynamic. You have two very different homeless populations. You have one population that is circumstantially homeless that wants to be off the streets. You have another that is choosing this as a lifestyle, whether –

you know, out of drug addiction or mental illness or whatever, or simply as a choice. And we have in the past been told via this fallacious interpretation of Boise v. Martin or Martin v. Boise that those were the same population. That one line gives cities, in my view at least, and I'd love to get your opinion, the ability to differentiate between those two populations is

and start focusing our resources on the people we actually can get off the streets. That's exactly right. In other words, one interpretation of the city of Boise decision, which is effectively the city's interpretation, Phoenix's interpretation is, oh, look, we have a thousand, you know, three thousand unsheltered persons on the streets in Phoenix, and we only have fifteen hundred beds or a thousand beds or we don't have enough beds for all of them. Therefore, we can't enforce the camping prohibition. But that's not what city of Boise says.

City of Boise allows the city of Phoenix to go to every single individual and say, OK, yeah, we know we don't have enough beds for everybody, but we have a bed for you. Will you take it?

And if they say, no, I would rather be on the street because I would rather not go into a shelter where I have to give up my drug paraphernalia, where I can't use drugs, where I can't come in with a partner, where I can't come in with property or whatever, for whatever reason. And there are restrictions. There's no doubt about that. I would rather live. No one wants to live in a tent. OK, right. But some people do want to would prefer to live in a tent with their possessions, with, you know, being able to use drugs without these restrictions. They prefer that over going into a shelter where they have to give those things up.

Nothing prevents the city of Phoenix under this Boise decision from going person to person and saying, we have a bed for you. And you can quickly clean up 500 people that way, even if you can't do everybody, because some of them will want the bed and then some of them will not want the bed. And if they say we don't want the bed, nothing prevents you from then cleaning.

you know, arresting that person, whether for violating public nuisance laws, for public camping, for opening illegal drug use, right? So there are all sorts of things they can do. And look, we presented evidence that, well, so this is also a new story. The city of Phoenix opened a hotel dedicated, they said, to the people in the zone, to get people off the streets. A month after that hotel opened, it was 75% unoccupied.

It was 75% unoccupied. Why is it 75% unoccupied? Because the people would rather live in an open air, low barrier shelter, which is effectively what the city has created, than to go in a physical location, have a roof over their head where they can't do the things that they would rather be able to do. And the one restriction in that case, because I remember this very clearly, we then ended up turning this hotel over to a veteran shelter, which is now filled. But-

The one restriction was not doing drugs other than marijuana in your room.

I did not even realize that the marijuana exception was in there. That's interesting. But the other thing, by the way, to keep in mind about this opinion, all of this might change now because the city of Boise is almost certainly going to be challenged in a case that will likely go up to the Supreme Court. There's a case out of Oregon that has a good chance of being granted a city of grants passed. And there are other really weird things in the city of Boise decision, other restrictions that the current crop of Supreme Court justices are not going to like.

For example, in the shelter bed counts, the city is not allowed to include religious shelters. In other words, there could be and there are, I actually got a report this morning, 250 available beds in a religious shelter in Phoenix.

doesn't matter you can't i mean i suppose you could tell somebody about it but the mere fact that it's a religious shelter means it doesn't count for city of boise purposes for the count because you know oh we don't want to give them you know this hobson's choice of you know living in a tent or being oppressed by christianity right i mean that's the kind of crazy thinking and so i'm

Pretty convinced that that will be overturned too if this case goes up. So lots of ridiculous restrictions in Boise, but the point is also that there are lots of things the city can do. And the city has just invented additional restrictions. Probably because the progressive advocates have, and when I say progressive advocates, I just mean like a small sliver

of advocates who believe that people should be allowed to shelter wherever they want, whenever they want, do whatever they want, that the ideal solution would be to get everyone in a hotel room with clean needles, and that any amount of police presence is no better than prison. Elon, we have- That was actually, yeah.

We have just about a minute left, but I want to get you to touch on one other point. The judge very clearly said that despite their claims otherwise, the city of Phoenix had basically stopped enforcing almost all laws within the zone on that population. And the other part of his ruling that I thought was most significant was he came out and said not only can they enforce those laws, they have an obligation to do so.

That's right. I mean, there are a number of things that they could actually do, again, to solve this problem that we've proposed without conflicting with the city of Boise decision. One of which is, hey, they're already outside in tents. Why don't you open up a city lot and create a structured campground that's clean, that's orderly, that has security like cities in Denver have done and Santa Rosa have done? This is a possibility. This is a possibility. And the judge specifically talked about it. The city refused to do that, by the way.

When we asked them at trial, they said, well, it doesn't solve homelessness because it doesn't get them into a permanent shelter. It doesn't get them into permanent housing. You can solve homelessness however you want, even though I think your solutions are terrible. OK, we're here to solve this humanitarian crisis, which requires temporary solutions like structured campgrounds. But another solution is exactly what you meant. Nothing in Boise prevents the city of Phoenix from arresting people for defecating on private property, for defecating in public, for open and illegal drug use.

and all sorts of other crimes that they do. So if those crimes were enforced, which the city is allowed to enforce, that would also solve a lot of the problem. And look, nobody wants these people to go to jail. They need help. Exactly. Maybe a drug treatment program is what they need. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ilan Worman, law professor at the University of Arizona, also one of the attorneys on this landmark legal case in the city of Phoenix that may change how we deal with homelessness across this country.

Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week, but make sure you tune in to download our podcast segment. You can go to BreakingBattlegrounds.vote and get all the good stuff there, folks. For Chuck, I'm Sam. We'll see you next week.

All right, welcome to the podcast-only segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, if you are already a subscriber, make sure you send our link to some of your friends and get them downloading this podcast because they need to be informed just like you are. And frankly, Chuck, I end up listening to an awful lot of radio these days, and I've

I'm just going to tout our guest. I think we have the best guests on the air. No, and Jamie, thank you for bird-dogging a lot of those. Kylie. Kylie, I mean Asia. Sorry, and Asia Conner sells, but Kylie does a fantastic job. We want to talk about the Trump indictment, but there's a couple things I want to discuss that we didn't get with Congressman Schweikert. First of all, the House passed this week the Lower Energy Cost Act by a margins of 225 to 204, and basically what it does is

Is it, you know, it's trying to make us more independent. It's trying to push back on some of what Biden has been doing in terms of limiting American energy. You know, and Speaker McCarthy had a great quote. Every time we need a pipeline, a road.

a dam. It gets held up five to seven years and adds millions of dollars of costs for a project to comply with Washington's permitting process, which you dealt with in Phoenix. I mean, the permitting process, you know, and folks, just so you know, it took New York one year, 45 days to build the Empire State Building. You could not do that today. But Sam, if you were doing it, they literally just spent over 20 years and like 10 times over budget building. So for example, in Phoenix now,

How many years would it take to build just a 60-story building, the Empire State Building, 60-story building? To get to the point where you can put a shovel in the ground is going to take two years. Okay. So the thing that really stood out to me about this is the first paragraph on the CBS News website,

website about this bill. It said the following, the House on Thursday approved a sprawling energy package that seeks to undo virtually all of President Biden's agenda to address climate change, with four Democrats joining Republicans and voting for the passage. My note is following. If this was reversed, let's say it's a climate package bill, and you had every

voting for it and four Republicans joining them, what would it be called? Bipartisan. Bipartisan. They never threw that in. If it had just been one Republican, that energy bill would have been, that climate bill would have been bipartisan. But for this, with four Democrats, it's not it. All day long. Yes. Folks, what you need to understand is this is what the press does. So become a language expert. Practice your semantics. And here's the truth.

There were 30 or 40 Democrats who, if they weren't afraid of their own base, would have voted for that bill in a heartbeat. Exactly. Oh, exactly. I mean, you know it. Well, it goes what Schweiker is saying about they all know the crisis we're in with Medicaid, Medicare. This happens on both sides of the aisle. I'm not singling Democrats out with that. But this is where being driven by the Twitter sphere is terrible for this country. One other item I want to discuss, then we want to talk about the Trump indictment here briefly before we turn out for the week, guys. So.

House lawmakers want to have a special inspector general to oversee more than $113 billion in Ukraine aid. Now, as you know, folks, I am supportive of kicking Russia's butt out of there. I don't think this is a bad idea. I think it's absolutely necessary. Again, you can support the effort because what Russia is doing is criminal. Yeah, it's evil.

But when you send $113 million. Billion. Billions, yeah, sorry. Billion. $113 billion to a country that has been known a time or two to be a little corrupt. Right? I love the understatement. Again, folks, look, we can all agree that Ukraine has had corruption problems, but we can also agree that we can't let Russia do this. Ukraine's a mess, but it shouldn't be taken over by Russia. So this is something, call your congresspersons and

and tell them to support this. Your Congress critters. Congress critters. Tell them to support this, the lawmakers, to appoint a special inspector general to oversee the money. That's all. If we're going to send money, it needs to go to the right hands. It needs to, as we were talking to David, you know, you have these charity things. And so Navigator tells you how much charities spend per dollar.

If 95% of this isn't going to what's supposed to be going, then something's wrong. No, look, here's the thing. We have been paying, sending money to Ukraine long enough now that their finance minister had the allocation on his...

His Bentley fulfilled and delivered for his new half million dollar car. That shouldn't happen. Exactly. That should not happen. And, you know, and you do need an inspector on the inspector general on the case and that whoever that is, that office or organization and future monies to Ukraine should be entirely contingent on 100 percent access for that person and their team in Ukraine. 100 percent.

Look, let's make sure these monies go to what they're actually needed for, which is to support the civilian population and to arm Ukraine to be able to fight Russia and nothing else.

Final note here for the podcast segment. So Trump was indicted yesterday. I find it strange as we're doing the show. We are getting these news updates that Trump was surprised by this. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I mean, he was surprised by what? I mean, he's the one that announced it. Yeah. I mean, he's not surprised by this. Right. But just so you folks know, he's being charged with the unless hush money payments, which

They're trying to make it a campaign finance violation. My greatest tweet on this is by Greta Van Susteren, who wrote, a morning question to ponder. How many New York corporations pay off women, hypothesis, hush money, in NDAs, nondisclosure agreements, and hide...

in parentheses, lie about in financial documents, SEC filings, and from shareholders whose real money it is, and don't get charged with the crime. Are we talking, look, I don't know exactly how many major businesses there are in New York, but by percentage, I'd say like 90. Well, this is selective prosecution. And I think that's the point I understand. I don't think any of us could walk out of here and talk to anybody who does not believe

Donald Trump did not do this. Well, and you and I were talking this morning. We have a little bit of a disagreement in and of itself. I think this indictment helps Donald Trump, because if you are of the of the persuasion that you do not believe his elections conspiracy theory, that's why he lost. Then his other argument that he has to make to to justify I'm, you know, should be president again is I am not president now because the government.

colluded to undermine and undercut me and force me out that this is a deep state operation. This feeds that narrative because these are bogus charges. The issue to me is that there are two other potential lawsuits or cases in other states. Those are more substantial.

Yes. Yes. So, you know, both of those are going to jump on right now. And there I believe it's hard for him that he is hurt by this because when when Biden can get up there and say he's been indicted in three states, that's a different thing. Well, and.

To bring up the point last week as we ended a segment with Lanny Davis's comment, an indictment does not mean you're guilty, no matter what Nancy Pelosi thinks. Right. Right? This is the opportunity for defense to go and counter. When you have a grand jury, it's very one-sided. There's no one there saying, no, no, no, this didn't happen. Just remember that. Nancy Pelosi may not understand our criminal justice system and the Constitution of this country, but you are innocent until proven guilty. Right.

Period. As an aside, having to sit and watch Adam Schiff's giddy little press conference yesterday over this. A, he's an idiot. B, he's a schmuck. He's not a good guy. Anyway, folks, we hope you have a great weekend. We hope you'll tune in and share the podcast. Visit us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote or all our social media. Have a great week.

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